Liverpool opinions
Liverpool Maze - Rainy days and Mondays
By John Williams
Have you ever had the feeling that the postman has been squirreling away your first class mail, leaving you only those letters from Reader's digest informing you that you've won another car or another million pounds? I have, without, I might add, the slightest justification. That said, I still have visions of my postman poring over heaps of my correspondence, cackling maliciously as he re-reads my orphaned post. I know intuitively that these letters contain, amongst other things, an invitation to dine, au naturel, with Claudia Schiffer. There is also a request from Buckingham Palace, begging me to deny rumours that I have spurned yet another offer of a knighthood and a positive acceptance of my application to act as a body double for George Clooney.
My paranoid fantasy is indicative, however, of a real feeling. I suppose I am actually talking about the sense of feeling powerless in the face of events, a feeling that so many people nowadays feel more and more. You see, if we as individuals have no effect on the world it then feels like a negation of our existence. We grow to feel less significant than the biro wielded by the average traffic warden. Oh yes, we adults vote every few years, but making one cross on a piece of paper is hardly satisfactory, especially when we know that a single vote gives another person the power to implement a hundred laws, most of which we neither know anything about nor even agree with.
I was walking through Liverpool recently when I saw a recently painted wall defaced by a spray painted slogan,
" gibbo is a nobed!"
For the life of me I couldn't imagine why somebody would want to jeer at the homeless, until I inserted the missing letters.
"A knob head! You cretin! As if graffiti isn't bad enough, most of it is the work of illiterates!" I railed to myself in impotent fury.
It was then it occurred to me. The graffiti was someone's response to feeling insignificant and devoid of influence. Spraying paint onto a pristine wall creates an immediate effect. With the touch of a button we can, like Zen monks who re-arrange rocks or rake sand into intriguing patterns, alter the physical shape of the universe in an instant. There is a similar godlike power in the hands of the graffiti artist, because with the slightest movement of a forefinger he or she can, when faced with a blank space, put form into the void. Now, whether we like it or not that is having an effect!
Similarly, a young kid, feeling impotent and ignored gets immediate feedback from the sight of a newly shattered window. I seem to remember David Bowie singing about broken glass in the late 70's. Perhaps he'd seen the writing on the wall. Today many children ignore traditional pastimes in favour of the Playstation which provides them with instant feedback and a sense of having a discernible effect on some kind of environment. They prefer to act out the role of someone blazing away with an Uzi sub-machine gun than engage the slow and intricate operations involved in the building of a Lego fort. Underestimate the power of a Playstation at your peril!
This, by the way, is not a plea to licence vandalism. You see, I believe the real vandal is a society that places so much power in so few hands while simultaneously eroding the power of ordinary people. I want to see people in general, and youth in particular, regain some of their natural right to create effect and difference in their world, instead of feeling cut adrift from the mainstream of creativity and choice, feeling that they are simply flotsam and jetsam riding a tide of indifference.
What ways then can we give young a people a sense of having created an effect, of having some power of the decisions they take? I say put them into mazes. No, I don't mean treat them like laboratory rats! I mean build mazes of such ingenuity that just by dint of navigating their way through it will make kids, or even adults, feel that have achieved something, that they have had some effect.
Mazes could be designed that would change on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Thus the challenge, the desire to have instant feedback of one's input, would never be sated. Accreditation or even small prizes could be offered for the fastest individual or team to traverse the maze on a particular day. Ordinary people could contribute to the design of the mazes, which could incorporate obstacle courses, cryptic clues to direction and even music etcetera.
If the mazes were made challenging enough to create a kind of prestige for whomsoever successfully navigates them, youngsters might seek them out, rather than look for missiles to throw at windows.
" There must be someway out of here, said the joker to the thief. There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief." Bob Dylan
Miles from nowhere
Two year after writing this tale I came across a staggering statistic. In London alone the cost of cleaning graffiti is £100 million! Logically, given the cost of paint sprays, it is the children of the better off who are, according to the courts, the most persistent culprits. We appear to have got lost in a maze of false values. How many mazes would a hundred million fund I wonder?