I GUESS IT'S TIME TO COME BACK

I had thought I was done with Substack - not because it isn’t a great platform. It is.

Not because no-one read my stuff. They did. And you do.

I didn’t feel comfortable inside the endlessness of it. I am the kind of writer who believes in taking the time I need to come up with something worth saying. I work quickly but I don’t always work - and that’s because the thoughts are in my slow cooker and the timer hasn’t gone off. Once the timer goes off, I know exactly what I will serve on the plate. I am ready.

But yesterday, I watched that brave Bishop, Mariann Edgar Budd, confront Trump from her pulpit, and I watched the mean and angry faces of the Trump entourage. Those people do not show mercy, unless it is to their followers and lackeys.

Trump’s comment that religion shouldn’t be in politics was astonishing from a man who has wooed the evangelical church, begged his kind of Christians to vote, and allowed the religious views of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe V Wade.

And I think about Jesus protecting the woman taken in adultery. The Pharisees want to stone her. The Pharisees called it justice. Jesus said to them ‘Let you who is without sin, cast the first stone.’

Mercy is one of the higher values. Like forgiveness and compassion and love, mercy depends on much more than the letter of the law. It is imaginative. It imagines the situation of the one who is in need of mercy - even if that person doesn’t know it.

So for me, when I look at the mean angry faces of the Trump Lumps, I see the thing I fear most. Failure of imagination.

I have always believed that I could change the story because I am the story. It’s easy to read that as a neo-liberal me-first survival of the fittest. But it’s not. It’s the insight that the story is not the same as an algorithm . The steps don’t have to be followed in the order programmed by someone else. The story has agency. Movement. Surprises.

Any writer will find that the story answers back. It’s not obedient. It might want to go somewhere else. And those stories that end in tragedy? Maybe one of your favourite novels? What happens to you when you read it? As you read it, you see the alternatives, the missed chances, what might have happened, even when the people in the story are heading step by step to their doom. The outrage and sadness we feel prompts us towards different solutions, different outcomes, in our own lives, or in the lives of others.

Above all we see that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are other stories locked inside that story.

Imagination sees other outcomes.

And when I read about the people waiting on the border who have had their legal appointments for immigration cancelled by Trump. Because He Can. That’s not mercy, but it’s not justice either. Small man. Small heart.

There’s going to be so much more of this.

So, I am back because I want to talk about what I believe in. And sure,I believe in social justice and fair opportunity. We have to work for practical change wherever we can. There’s more though, and it matters.

If we can’t keep our imagination alive we will die.

Imagination sees past the hard boundary and into a different place. Imagination says why not? Imagination doesn’t destroy. Imagination creates

If we are nothing but life on the outside, then we are nothing. The world right now is all about the outside - money, power, data, control. As yet, till the BCI chip flows down the line, there is no CCTV inside your head. Your imagination isn’t data. Don’t hand it over. It is your secret supply of unquenchable life.

When we read, look at pictures, go to the theatre, listen to real music, take a walk for no purpose, look at the sunset and love it, drift a bit and dream a bit, we are claiming back the right to exist free of the cynical values of Self=Data.

You are not Data. You are a human being and you have an inner life.

Own it. Protect it. Don’t apologise for it.

I will be writing about what matters to me. That’s all I can do. Every Sunday.

Anyway, I’m back