Martin Wroe

Good morning. There was a time in the early 2000’s when you could not open a paper without seeing a photo of Tracey Emin at a party, glass in hand, staring at the camera. A moving interview with her in The Guardian in connection with her major new show at Tate Modern which starts next week reveals a very different Tracey Emin. She talks about the terrible cancer she has suffered, with many of her body parts being removed, so that life now is lived with great difficulty. At the time she thought she was going to die and then ‘Whoever they are’, she said to Charlotte Higgins the interviewer, glancing heavenwards, ‘they said “I don’t think she is all bad. Let’s give her another go, see what she can do”’ So she gave up alcohol and her 50 cigarettes a day and has since then thrown herself into her art - not only her own art but helping young artists and others in her home town of Margate. As she said ‘I have spent a lot of my life being sad, nihilistic and punishing myself mentally-and drinking and smoking. And then I realised: I could have my time back again.’ No wonder her new exhibition is called ‘Tracey Emin: A Second Life.’ Lent, which began yesterday is a reminder that we do not have to wait until death stares us in the face to have a second life. Notwithstanding regrets and failures every day is a new gift, a new beginning, a time to focus on what really matters to us. Tracey Emin says about those earlier years in the 2000’s ‘God, was that the shallowest level of myself that I could ever be?’ There is a shallow side and a deeper side to all of us. That deeper side brings into focus what we really want to do with our life, what kind of person we really want to be. If you visit Liverpool’s Anglican Cathedral, the largest religious building in the country, built between 1904 and 1978, it is difficult not to be overwhelmed by its immense space and monumentality. But as you enter, just above the West End Doors, there is a total contrast-a permanent pink neon installation with the words ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me’ written in Tracey Emin’s own hand. Tracey Emin burst on the scene in 1988 with a work of art consisting of her unmade bed surrounded by condoms, blood and general detritus and people still associate her with this. But I like to think of her devoting herself to making new art and helping others in Margate, and that simple, pink neon installation in Liverpool Cathedral with its words ‘I felt you and I knew you loved me.’

19 FEB 26

18 FEB 26

Good morning. The worse the news gets, the closer we come to some underlying questions. Epstein, Ukraine, climate change, geopolitics – you name it. What should we do? How can we not feel powerless in the face of so many problems? One answer, which people often associate with Buddhists, is to withdraw. The world just keeps spinning – Buddhists call it samsara. So, perhaps the best we can do is to cultivate an alternative, at least within ourselves, and hope it has some kind of effect. If that seems weak, think how people across the US responded to Buddhist monks walking for peace across the country. Twenty-four monks set out from their meditation centre in Texas last October and walked over two thousand miles to Washington DC. Crowds gathered along the way, millions followed their progress on Facebook and Instagram, and thousands greeted them at the Lincoln Memorial when they arrived in Washington last week. Why did the monks stir such a powerful reaction? For one thing, they were walking through a divided country. Up north in Minnesota, violence was spiralling, the outward sign of much deeper divisions. The monks were different. They exuded peace. That’s powerful in itself, but they also had a message. The particular tradition these monks follow emphasises mindfulness, which these days is often regarded as an innocuous soothing exercise, especially helpful for getting to sleep at night. For serious practitioners, like these monks with their steady gait and bloodied feet, it means being present and giving things one’s full attention. In that way, you experience your mind’s tendency to busyness and agitation. You see the reactive patterns of your thoughts and that lets you recognise the sources of suffering right there in the mind, and maybe break the circuit. The Buddha long ago taught that we’re driven by forces we barely recognise. He named them as craving, aversion and delusion. The world – samsara - he said, is simply those forces writ large; and the news, which we can find so overwhelming, reflects them. The monks’ simple message was that it’s possible to be different, and their choice to step out of their monastic retreat into the world was just as significant. By embodying mindfulness and peace so publicly, without being overtly political, they symbolised an alternative to the challenges facing American society. I think the response showed how deeply people yearn for that alternative, and that’s another source of hope in these difficult times.

Good morning. How do you feel about mind control? New research from a laboratory in Zurich suggests it may be possible to make people less selfish – by sending electrical currents through their brains. Forty-four volunteers were asked to divide money between themselves and an anonymous partner. Remarkably, when certain neural pathways at the front and back of the head were stimulated, participants gave more away. It sounds like science fiction. But other forms of bio-hacking are, of course, already common: weight-loss drugs, metabolic trackers, sleep technology. Medicines are routinely used to lift mood, sharpen attention, steady anxiety. So why not use science to make us kinder as well? That way, we might all become more beautiful people inside, as well as out. Just imagine it. Wellness centres offering holistic packages, body and soul: Botox top-ups in the morning, altruistic boosting in the afternoon. More seriously, researchers claim this new technology could be used for the treatment of certain brain disorders and prove invaluable for people who struggle with social behaviour. It could be just the nudge they need to become better citizens. It’s a wholesome idea. Yet as I read the academic article on this impressive experiment in brain-hacking – forecasting gains in “cooperation, productivity, and cohesion” – I became increasingly uneasy. I was put in mind of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World, published almost a century ago, which describes a civilisation held together not by conscience but by chemistry and conditioning. A terrifying vision. Once virtue is treated as something that can be engineered, the line between encouragement and enforcement grows thin. A society might become more efficient, more compliant, even more outwardly generous, and still lose its soul. Huxley warns that people who allow themselves to be controlled may eventually come to “love their servitude”. Even if such dystopian fears never come to pass, the ambition to control our moral impulses through technology raises questions about the nature of morality. Christian thought has long distinguished between shaping behaviour from the outside and forming the person from within. Charity — what theologians call caritas — is not simply a matter of generous action. Intention matters too: affection that is freely given is what lends acts of generosity their meaning; without it, they risk becoming little more than reflexes. It’s fascinating to learn that science can influence our moral behaviour, but it is fatal to confuse this fact with morality itself. The Christian vision insists that a person is more than a set of automatic responses. Morality only makes sense if it is chosen. As a society, we have already surrendered ourselves to our smartphones, our computers, and our digital habits; let’s at least fight, while we can, to love one another freely.

14 FEB 26

13 FEB 26

12 FEB 26

Good Morning, In the rushed attempt to reckon with the Epstein files and what they mean, it’s become hard to hear from and easy to forget the women who were actually the victims of his crimes. But if we are serious about understanding the forces that lie behind a network in which women and girls were trafficked for sex, we’d surely do well to start with the witness of their victims. Whenever these women have spoken, it is striking how eloquent they are, not just about what has happened to them, but also about the huge challenge of bringing the perpetrators of these crimes to justice. Many of them point to the heroism of Virginia Giuffre who, against massive intimidation and, according to other survivors, the cost of her life, helped to start the process that brought these crimes to light. In her memoir - Nobody’s Girl – she wrote, ‘I hope for a world in which predators are punished, not protected, victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as anyone else.’ I read her book whilst researching a story for an opera about modern slavery. As part of my research, I interviewed a woman who had been trafficked for sex alongside the policewoman who had rescued her from the trafficking gang. ‘Not once in 30 years of law enforcement,’ the policewoman said, ‘did I meet a pimp or sex trafficker who expressed remorse. They see women as product in a business transaction.’ Her words chimed with Giuffre’s insight that we live in a culture that ‘tells girls their primary worth is to appeal to men,’ mere objects to discard once used. Their humanity redacted. This thinking infects the Epstein files where women and girls, some reportedly as young as nine, are offered as though they were meat on a menu. They do this without shame and an entitled belief that the rules don’t apply to them. The Psalmist describes this: ‘In their own eyes they flatter themselves too much to detect their sin. Even on their beds they plot evil; commit themselves to a sinful course and do not reject what is wrong.’ Virginia Giuffre wanted to live in a world where victims were treated with compassion; not compassion as sympathy, but as a radical form of criticism, that says, ‘this hurt is to be taken seriously; it’s not normal; and we have to act.’ In his ministry Jesus sided and stood with the abused and the used. His compassion for the victim was an implicit critique of the system, forces and ideologies that produces victims. At his execution, he entered into that hurt and even came to embody it. On the cross his silence is eloquence. He redacts himself and becomes the Victim God; a witness to, and reckoning with, corrupt and controlling power. One common theme is the total lack of remorse and sense of entitlement.

Good Morning. ‘Speak about hope:’ I hear those words everywhere in these frightening times At synagogue, we’ve just read the Ten Commandments, beginning with ‘I am your God.’ Two rabbis whose teachings I admire experienced those words very differently. The struggle for hope lies in the tension between their explanations. Hugo Gryn, whose warm voice, often heard on radio, I hugely miss, survived Auschwitz. He wrote: Auschwitz-Birkenau was the … perversion of all the Ten Commandments… God was replaced by a Fuehrer and his minions who claimed for themselves the power of life and death… Murder was at the heart of that culture and killers were promoted and honoured… That’s what ‘I am your God’ reminded him of. Nazism is gone, but tyranny, killing and contempt are at large in our world, threatening our freedoms and future. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, who died last century, intuited a very different voice in the Commandments. He wrote: When God said, ‘I am,’ the world fell silent; every living being listened. They heard the words not from Heaven, but within themselves. They felt: “This is about who I truly am. The life-force which flows through everything is speaking to me.” In that moment, a deep awareness connected all existence, humans, animals, every breathing being, and cruelty and hatred vanished. I believe that may be what we feel when humbled by some act of kindness; when touched by closeness to another person; when silenced by listening to the birds; when we sense in woodlands: ‘These trees – some hidden life-force connects us.’ A consciousness infinitely greater than ‘Me, me, me,’ flows through us then. It’s what Wordsworth called: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.Here lies a quiet, but powerful, antidote to the horror Rabbi Gryn was forced to experience, when tyrants replaced god, dictating who must live or die. Here is an understanding that motivates us to love and give. I think of my Israeli friend, who despite the violence afflicting both peoples, supported her Palestinian colleague who bravely made soup in Gaza for hungry children. I’m mindful of the Ukrainian grandma, since killed, who refused to leave her front-line home in Kherson and, despite the bombing, sent me a gift of honey. What makes people do that? I believe it’s the deeper voice that calls us, beyond all differences and hatreds, to care for each other and our world. In that voice lies our hope.