tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60575542851551608372024-03-14T09:05:19.136+00:00Charlotte Du CannWriting in TransitionCharlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.comBlogger348125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-2101863419691538382023-02-22T09:08:00.013+00:002023-02-25T13:50:17.482+00:00On the move!<p><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8oJcLShYQusq3CArC6y_ue7_51_rqcDlZnXBQ2vXKVpcM5uE5PZNylQIhaTDG3ODhfYGv5s4gPpn2b3deimYGxx9dK3jq4pmR7TgYyifdl6mcncATk_-bGK0h6sougDfEceOAhTk2xlAWN4OZ3uay9-RK5nh8-fJo927v5zkkq_z6YuBXYEGZZ6L7xA/s320/IMG_5002.JPG" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="240" data-original-width="320" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8oJcLShYQusq3CArC6y_ue7_51_rqcDlZnXBQ2vXKVpcM5uE5PZNylQIhaTDG3ODhfYGv5s4gPpn2b3deimYGxx9dK3jq4pmR7TgYyifdl6mcncATk_-bGK0h6sougDfEceOAhTk2xlAWN4OZ3uay9-RK5nh8-fJo927v5zkkq_z6YuBXYEGZZ6L7xA/w200-h150/IMG_5002.JPG" width="200" /></a></span></div><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: large;">H</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: medium;">ello dear readers - I am presently shifting my online work to another location. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This trusty blog will be kept as an archive, so do have a look around! Otherwise you will be able to find my latest pieces, news, events and teachings on the new website:</span></span><div><div><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b><a href="http://charlotteducann.net">charlotteducann.net</a></b></span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: medium;">Hope to see you there!</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #45818e; font-size: medium;">Thanks and all best wishes, Charlotte </span></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-72394208335629804072022-10-04T10:30:00.003+01:002022-10-04T10:32:35.761+01:00VIGIL<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMhWRnhq85YDo_fVuVRAD9RP0whbJwUR0amcbO0ZDSklhFbyzncdGlE4VihbXMEmRFmo23LU7_spl2WZpoSD4SzFmU-EQszbdGgWdBhfy3f3MLhgwivXBpphIIG60IlF5kUuPMPPhw3q4VI4EGPtpHjTkUvEhnViyrVy6txTccK22hT7ZdKu7waoCu9w/s1448/37417997.jpg" style="clear: left; display: inline; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1448" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMhWRnhq85YDo_fVuVRAD9RP0whbJwUR0amcbO0ZDSklhFbyzncdGlE4VihbXMEmRFmo23LU7_spl2WZpoSD4SzFmU-EQszbdGgWdBhfy3f3MLhgwivXBpphIIG60IlF5kUuPMPPhw3q4VI4EGPtpHjTkUvEhnViyrVy6txTccK22hT7ZdKu7waoCu9w/w265-h400/37417997.jpg" width="265" /></a></p>'We’re all of us living on borrowed time: the brevity of our personal span of existence now mirrored by a biosphere under intolerable pressure, its every life system beginning to fray and unravel under civilisation’s weight. We witness its collapse every day now, in new stories of cataclysmic weather events, of lives lost, of flora and fauna weirded, disrupted, gone. However incipiently or unconsciously, we live at a time of collective grieving – no life exempt from the consequences of this relentless devastation and what it has set loose'. <div>– <i>Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change,</i> ed Richard Povall and Mat Osmond (art.earth) <div><br /><div><p>Last November I took part in a series of events on death, dying and change called <a href="https://vimeo.com/showcase/borrowed-time">Borrowed Time.</a> It was hosted by the Devon-based organisation art.earth who also collaborated with <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/">Dark Mountain's 'requiem' Issue 19.</a> Following three lockdowns, and a year later than scheduled, the main gathering eventually took place online. And even though its subject was vast and unfathomable and usually observed with silence, deference, bound tight by tradition and form, the intimacy of the screen discussions brought us into a sudden and startling kinship. Each of us touched by our own and others' mortality in a way that felt both ancestral and entirely modern.</p><p>In response I wrote the following text to capture of some of their mood and existential attention, accompanied by artwork from the Dark Mountain edition. The book is a gathering and celebration of the voices, images and creative practice made m in the wake of the symposium by organisers Richard Povall and Mat Osmond.</p><p> </p><h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">MORTUARY </span></h3><p>Somewhere a vigil through the long dark night is being held, while most of us are sleeping. </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-MODaZXjm7ZnvddPmel4kSFdNPmewETcUgB29ShwjbLQls4iaKxiDSYnpjxVHpouIcfz1tTxzbp8xY8jOOzrr3bYwRHZ3TpJAUYumBmZeQ5tbSlBYTW02XlIDSoif0tx17_bic6CqUXqF4mjozrnPqZoLI1orS3GnSnft2F18e_TRxC0zHWwb26pHw/s4096/2%20Kathryn_Poole-Death_Throes_I%20-%20Kathryn%20Poole%20(1).jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4096" data-original-width="2851" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF-MODaZXjm7ZnvddPmel4kSFdNPmewETcUgB29ShwjbLQls4iaKxiDSYnpjxVHpouIcfz1tTxzbp8xY8jOOzrr3bYwRHZ3TpJAUYumBmZeQ5tbSlBYTW02XlIDSoif0tx17_bic6CqUXqF4mjozrnPqZoLI1orS3GnSnft2F18e_TRxC0zHWwb26pHw/w223-h320/2%20Kathryn_Poole-Death_Throes_I%20-%20Kathryn%20Poole%20(1).jpg" title="Death Throes I by Kathryn Poole[/" width="223" /></a></div>While most of us have our eyes on the road, Kathryn Poole alights from the bus to Stockport, her eye caught by the flapping of a dead owl’s wing in the tailwind, as if it were still alive. She will render the speckled feathers in pen and ink as a memorial. While most of us neglect the cost of toil on human bodies, Tom Baskeyfield enters a mortuary on the side of a Welsh mountain, and puts his hand on the cold slate slab. He will render the stone on paper with graphite, stippled with the lives of the men who died while mining this slate, and once were laid here. <p></p><p>While most of us avert our gaze, forests are disappearing, the animals are leaving, the seas are emptying, our hearts are yearning without knowing why. No canvas seems large enough to hold it.</p><p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz1rcpfqkRoegvqGgIi8Rw6G80ix1b0Mv-PzZJaTrrSlRO3xKIqUXRMS7mqRYLeZC79_759ISVvmi0cjkO4Tsxm_6Wv9BP0fZ0bwKwnF3g7t9a5iYk1qMUNpXyNPTVBVY1lMoWRsKQvHjwt44I_JT4Fy6SgDSrJsryYHk4KRPiCxd9h4Q-wC_3MpLyfw/s4032/XTRA%20Caroline%20Ross_Grave%20Goods%20(detail)%2005.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhz1rcpfqkRoegvqGgIi8Rw6G80ix1b0Mv-PzZJaTrrSlRO3xKIqUXRMS7mqRYLeZC79_759ISVvmi0cjkO4Tsxm_6Wv9BP0fZ0bwKwnF3g7t9a5iYk1qMUNpXyNPTVBVY1lMoWRsKQvHjwt44I_JT4Fy6SgDSrJsryYHk4KRPiCxd9h4Q-wC_3MpLyfw/w240-h320/XTRA%20Caroline%20Ross_Grave%20Goods%20(detail)%2005.jpg" title="Grave Goods (detail) by Caroline Ross" width="240" /></a></div>SHROUD </span></h3><p>On an island in the Baltic that is the last matriarchal community in Europe, women in flowering dresses gather around a casket in the dead woman’s kitchen, to pray and sing and mourn. In Armenia, the academic told us, where the villagers also once gathered in each others’ rooms to bid farewell, there are now specially built funeral houses. Grief is no longer a shared thing among the community, but an individual concern. A quiet has prevailed, where once there were tears and sorrowing. </p><p>We gathered as if in these old kitchens, learning over tables, looking into each other’s faces. sharing prayers and blessings, in the spirit of the vigil. We spoke of the dead. We found that there are still women in our own land who stitch their own grave goods boots from deerskin, decorated with oak gall, who provide felt blankets to swaddle the dead before they go back into the cold ground. </p><p>Who will wrap us, who will sing for us? Who will remember our passing through? The warmth we once held?</p><p>Who will keep vigil for us in the dark night as it approaches, keep the fire of the world alight? </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7-_5WmXPwA3fMOGPNT4GzENe_y3HTmteFpDnaBH77-G9Q7hmC0zicNyOod3tRT61iW2wuhQj5-znDRYDlm3ef0r5zLbgWu4Lc4Pfvu_Y5nIqMb4mmkkTqKhD96xrjWfTi_5K5OQK2mup801jpDrrJDrK6sXGnF8F9vkVvUnMttn9JNKueqastZU0KhQ/s1772/PussMoths(CerulaVinula).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1721" data-original-width="1772" height="311" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7-_5WmXPwA3fMOGPNT4GzENe_y3HTmteFpDnaBH77-G9Q7hmC0zicNyOod3tRT61iW2wuhQj5-znDRYDlm3ef0r5zLbgWu4Lc4Pfvu_Y5nIqMb4mmkkTqKhD96xrjWfTi_5K5OQK2mup801jpDrrJDrK6sXGnF8F9vkVvUnMttn9JNKueqastZU0KhQ/w320-h311/PussMoths(CerulaVinula).jpg" title="Puss Moths (Cerula Vinula) by Sarah Gillespie" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><h3><span style="font-weight: 400;">MEMOIR</span></h3><p>I am writing this from memory, long after the gathering that was the Borrowed Time symposium last November. I am remembering, because time doesn’t go in a straight line, like history. To bring renewal to the world it needs us to loop and feed back, in gardens and culture.</p><p>In her memoir about grief and mourning <i>A Year of Magical Thinking </i>Joan Didion realises her cataloguing everything about her relationship with her dead husband was an attempt to reverse time, to stop the forty years of living closely from disappearing into a black hole. Her fearless remembering of the minutes and years, are a writer's capacity for finding moments that are like keys to a closed door: significant because they reveal the life that counts, our presence here together. What remains when you take away the issues, the opinions, the thoughts and numbers, that whirl about in our heads. What really matters.</p><p>I lit a fire, she said, I closed the curtains. He praised my work. We swam with the tide into the cave at Portuguese Bend, <i>You had to feel the swell change. You had to go with the change</i>, he said.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVFc5FPwiO-lnJ_ZoOndikeeP_KBt-ORPXIscP34AE7yk1BL2kj5qWlMC5-MORqZ-8MMWOEUwSqgLSmz79kCVWxitZO_kqF8FV18WTLIhpfhQySl3lhImMuY_GovyjEqFCEtcdZzTaAU6R802jsEtcCK8H7uZfATatEm1n0E__Cy2JPfltr-MwIMtDAQ/s1959/PLATES%20B%204%20he%20gathered%20the%20wind%20in%20his%20fist.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1959" data-original-width="1959" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVFc5FPwiO-lnJ_ZoOndikeeP_KBt-ORPXIscP34AE7yk1BL2kj5qWlMC5-MORqZ-8MMWOEUwSqgLSmz79kCVWxitZO_kqF8FV18WTLIhpfhQySl3lhImMuY_GovyjEqFCEtcdZzTaAU6R802jsEtcCK8H7uZfATatEm1n0E__Cy2JPfltr-MwIMtDAQ/w320-h320/PLATES%20B%204%20he%20gathered%20the%20wind%20in%20his%20fist.jpg" title="The hours in between. He Gathered Wind into his Fist by Jim Carter[" width="320" /></a></div><br /><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">TUMULUS</span></h3><p>Sometimes I go to sit on the tumulus down towards the Blyth river. Crowned by silver birch and rowan trees, it houses the dead from hundreds of years ago. Why is it that these archaic places feel like a solace, an anchor in rocky times? Not my kith lie buried here, but my kin. People who lived close to the land, and these ancestor trees, the deer, the lichen on the rocks. My body, my blood. Once we waited here at winter solstice for the light of the new sun to fall into the chamber, holding our breath, the breath of the year. </p><p>How can I value my life, if I do not have the dead close to me? Who else can take us back down into the <em>kiva</em> and <em>kur</em>, where all life and regeneration begins, to remind us of our obligation to give back. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ck3Ahhyg75V0f_nJa9BRymrd7heEg7gTUXlSqvvUqiUGCJrQvYIm3N7y7TlcVYglzzcmcSVXpIS6hCuFkV7hJJyIhOyZciXcIsT2EnDU_wiAqdoaRexQa5G5Apj035POrRn63fbFaNjy/s1252/small+version+new+book+2.png" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1252" data-original-width="940" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2ck3Ahhyg75V0f_nJa9BRymrd7heEg7gTUXlSqvvUqiUGCJrQvYIm3N7y7TlcVYglzzcmcSVXpIS6hCuFkV7hJJyIhOyZciXcIsT2EnDU_wiAqdoaRexQa5G5Apj035POrRn63fbFaNjy/w240-h320/small+version+new+book+2.png" title="It’s OK to Look (cover of Dark Mountain: Issue 19) by Graeme Walker" width="240" /></a></div><p></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">WAKE</span></h3><p>I made a book of the dead with fellow writers, wrapped in a winding sheet. In it we placed the keening of birds and people, these staffs with hands that clasp the wind, the flowers that light the way to the Underworld </p><p>Everything I write, my body, my intelligence is compost for the future, said the poets. We are a nurse log for the new, happy to sit in the dark with you, doing this work, not knowing what comes after.</p><p>It is a mood and an attention that is held in these encounters, because the dead, our kin are in the room, because with this relinquishment, the fierce joy of remembering the presence of living beings comes to us. The memory you keep treasured in the heart’s locker for others to stumble upon. </p><p>What does the mind remember? A grinding sound, keeping the machinery of an illusionary world in place, an ancient hostility, distracted by a fast-flickering screen.</p><p>What does the writer remember? The shape and colour embedded in stone, leaf, skin, lichen, the sound of water, the curlew calling from the river, your voice. This library of Earth, sunlight held in matter.</p><p>The great mystery of Earth is time, said the blind writer, holding a book in his hand. </p><p>We borrowed it, and forgot to bring it back. </p><p>Our return is overdue.</p><p> <strong style="clear: left; display: inline !important; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;">Borrowed Time: on death, dying & change, ed Richard Povall and Mat Osmond is published this month by art.earth: <a href="https://art-earth.org.uk/product/borrowed-time/">https://art-earth.org.uk/product/borrowed-time/</a> </strong></p><p></p></div></div></div>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-83866740890751546402022-05-28T07:48:00.001+01:002022-05-28T09:22:49.941+01:00After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkNPDepsfhBotNYFtDTH3c9ir8lgmn6neQJcl6SAEolkocqTWyIfavKqddKqtsGokjXmJQmk6GUuPCzEKbmAofVU65-9wFMgSFro0kR_WRR_T6xLax5xPvBCxjk3NsgN8HdVKI13d0oy8tSi5X2oxo74cz7wuCIAAy6n1kbbfl3fbP3NCUq33Uje4ilQ/s2765/CDC_After_Ithaca.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2765" data-original-width="1843" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkNPDepsfhBotNYFtDTH3c9ir8lgmn6neQJcl6SAEolkocqTWyIfavKqddKqtsGokjXmJQmk6GUuPCzEKbmAofVU65-9wFMgSFro0kR_WRR_T6xLax5xPvBCxjk3NsgN8HdVKI13d0oy8tSi5X2oxo74cz7wuCIAAy6n1kbbfl3fbP3NCUq33Uje4ilQ/w266-h400/CDC_After_Ithaca.jpg" width="266" /></a><div><i>My latest book <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/after-ithaca-journeys-in-deep-time/">After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time</a> has just been launched into the world. Here is an excerpt from the title essay published by the Dark Mountain Project, with an short introduction about how it was sparked alight.</i></div><div><br /></div>'Sometimes you need an encounter with the dark to crack your old way of seeing apart.' In 2011 I am sitting by a fire under the stars in the Hampshire woods, when a man in a bear mask emerges from behind the trees, ringing a bell. I jump and laugh. Not because his appearance is any way comic but because something ancient and mysterious has jumped out from nowhere and shaken me awake. It was the second Dark Mountain Uncivilisation Festival, and my life was about to take a radical new turn.<p></p><p align="left">Many of the pieces in this book were first published by the creative project I stumbled upon that August night. I had been documenting grassroots changemaking in the face of ecological and social crisis, but as I sat round the festival fire listening to a Siberian tale. I realised that no one had been talking about the role of art and writing or the Earth in this seismic shift.</p><p align="left">Most calls for responding to planetary breakdown are based on climate science, or behaviour studies. They are all tidy outer affairs, discussed in airless rooms. But the kind of shift needed to navigate times of collapse is a difficult inner change of form, requiring us to have our feet on the earth and hold fast as a conventionally-shaped world falls about our ears.</p><p align="left">Now I know myths as a techne, as bridges that take us across chasms of time and place, that give us the reasons, steadfastness, language, helpers, clues about the kind of inner changes we need to make. For the last decade since that first encounter, I have been unearthing myths to see what they can tell us about our obligations to the Earth that succours us. Not the aspiring hero myths that bring glory to civilisations but the downward ones that connect us with the non-linear forces of the planet: Kairos who brings the intervention that cracks open our small worlds of time; Inanna who takes us down through the seven gates of the Underworld; the hamstrung <span lang="zxx">Wayland</span> who waits, slowly crafting his swan wings that will allow him to escape captivity; Ariadne who shows us the labyrinth is not a prison but a dancing floor.</p><p>But as the world falters, one myth emerged that spoke eloquently of the descent we needed to undergo: an upside down Cinderella story of a human girl and her struggle with the alchemical forces of love, beauty and justice. Her name is Psyche which means soul or butterfly, the creature that transforms itself from caterpillar to imago in the hermetic space of a cocoon. This book is shaped around the tasks she is set by the goddess Venus, which also became my own: an Underworld journey about leaving one way of life and forging another.</p><p> </p><h3>After Ithaca</h3><p>(excerpt from the title essay)</p><p>I am standing in front of a wall covered with small yellow notes. There are connections between the names of people and places and myths on those pieces of paper that I keep moving around – like suspects in a crime drama. Only I am not sure if I am the detective or the murdered girl here. Or maybe I am both.<br /></p><p>The window is open and a fresh breeze blows in. Here I am, living in a damp cottage on the edge of the kingdom, having travelled for a decade and stopped, having worked for a further decade and neglected this case. The sea bounces like a silver mirror on the horizon beyond the marsh. Why even look for links between these names? Because they tug at me. Something is missing and I know if I don't solve these connections, I won't be able to sleep.</p><p>Underneath every case you can find a buried woman. I don't know if we need another story about how she got there with her throat slit, abandoned in a city skip, buried with her face down, her skull adorned with mammoth teeth and hemp seeds.</p><p>Maybe I'm looking for myself, or part of myself, hidden from view no story from my empire world, or psychology can reveal to me.</p><p>What is clear is that there needs to be a search, a kind of archaeology, for the pieces that lie missing beneath the storyline, like the sherds of a pot.</p><p>In the cities that lie beyond this house, there is a clamour for a new story to make sense of a world that is falling apart. But maybe what we need is not a new story with a beginning, middle and happy-ever-after end, but an ancient curvy one hidden beneath our feet. One that can give us instruction at a time of calamity. That can show us how to make moves in a culture that has become rigid and stuck.</p><p><br /></p><h3>Psyche and Venus</h3><p>This is not a love story, nor a family story, the stories that underpin most Western literature, but a story about undergoing change. It’s about the tasks given to a girl who knows nothing, so she encounters the deal you make with life, and how you earn love if you pass the test. It is about a relationship between two female beings: one an ingenue who knows nothing and one who knows everything. The instructor is not the wise La Que Sabe, the bone-collector of fairytales whose territory is the desert, nor the wild demanding Baba Yuga of the northern forests but an alchemical goddess, the goddess of love and beauty whose husband is the smith Vulcan, though she sleeps with other gods. Eros her son, was fathered, it is said, by Mars, the god of war. But others say his roseate fast-spinning wings were bequeathed to him by Venus’ other lover, her fellow alchemist, Mercury.</p><p>The territory of change is a geography never taught us by our teachers and families, who follow the roadmaps of obedience and tradition (and their counter actions, rebellion). The alchemical territory is where the base of yourself and your relationship with life is radically altered because you have agreed to become a different kind of human being. To suffer, as the wily magus Gurdjieff once said, <em>consciously</em>. To change in this way you have to recognise you are working with materials that need refining – to undergo an inner process, symbolised by the transformation of lead to gold. To start you have to agree you cannot evolve unless you do the work. Human beings have to agree to evolve themselves, either because they belong to a culture that recognises the necessity, or because their individual soul pushes them towards such an undertaking. The latter, which is the normal route for people living in industrialised, individualistic societies, is a rocky road.</p><p>The purpose of the myth is to complete the tasks, or to go through the seven doors of the kur, or to bring back the fire in the skull to your dark sisters. Whatever tale you follow, work is required.</p><p>Eros' wings touch you when you are young and romantic, full of lightness and possibility, then as age sours you and brings your feet into land, that fleeting moment goes and he departs. Alchemy brings the boy back into your life but not in the way you might imagine. To become a butterfly, to return to that lightness, you have, like Psyche, to undertake the tasks that demand courage and fortitude and openness to instruction, to learn from your heartbreak and small failures. The myth acts as a crucible for that kind of soul change in a time when such transformations are not admitted.</p><p>All archaic and Indigenous peoples have these forms of change embedded in their cultures, to break childish ties with family, to break open a fixed sense of self, to reveal the cosmic nature of life on this Earth, and what it demands in return. Their myths and prophecies remind them that there are consequences to not honouring life. And in these years, when I have been recording the cases on yellow paper on that wall, a litany of catastrophic consequences now surrounds them: climate change and deforestation. fires and floods, extinctions and a host of biblical plagues and locusts that currently beleaguer us.</p><p><br /></p><h3>The deal</h3><p>The seeds Venus asks Psyche to sort before sundown are the ones that can be found inside the ruined larders of every civilisation, in the Fertile Crescent, across Europe, and now stored in vast silos across the world. Civilisations are dependent on these cultivated seeds. But when we sit down to eat bread or drink beer, hummus and dal, we do not see the arable fields that fostered them that now lie under flood water, drenched with fossil-fuelled pesticides and fertiliser. We have forgotten our original deal with the plants and the soil in which they are grown. We do not even recognise their green and golden forms, staggering under the summer heat, as our cars from the city speed by.</p><p>As agriculture advanced out of the Neolithic age, we knew we would lose sight of our contract with the Earth, unless we made reparation and rituals that still honoured the wild nonlinear planet. And for a long time, up to the time <em>Metamorphoses</em> was written, the mystery schools ran alongside the empires of the ancient world to remind its citizens of those obligations. Unlike the democracies on which Western governments are founded, they were open to everyone: to foreigners, to slaves, to women. Their initiations were not for the benefit of the state but to tend to the business of being alive and to the meaning of our brief human lives together on this Earth.</p><p>Ah, you might say, but these schools are all gone now. We have forgotten. Listen, you don’t need a mystery school to go into the Underworld, or to converse with chthonic gods. The stories are still here, like a map we trace with a nervous index finger, and then feel impelled to follow. And the writers are still here, reminding us, sometimes annoyingly, of our contract with the wild world. It is the writers who know you need the structure of a story in your hands, as you advance to the gates of Hades and face the threshing of the Underworld - a grinding process in which you lose or die to your tough conditioned husk and discover the germ within. The germination of the seed is the core of every spiritual practice and encounter. It is a metaphor for soul work, and it is also the physical seed itself: without these seeds, embedded in grain-based civilisations as we are, we perish. A deep relationship with these seeds remembers us: who we are as a people, and our place on the planet as a species.</p><p>These stories delve into deep time and put us back in touch with the shapes of the world when we were still kin to its breathing, with its cave paintings and kiva, longhouse and tumulus, the spirals on stones across the world. They lie hidden at our feet, in myths that break up our linear moment and stretch it outwards in all directions.</p><p>But mostly take us down into the dark.</p><p>Our 200-year-old industrial civilisation wants to keep the lights on, but millennia-old cultures don’t think like that. Because they know that dark matter is the primordial stuff of the universe, and this world of appearances is a brief moment in time. The dark is where everything is born, animal and human, where seeds burst their casings before they emerge in spring. This is what the seed mysteries tell us - the corn and the beans of the Hopi mesas, the barley of the Eleusinian mysteries, the wheat stalk in the solar chamber in NewGrange in Ireland.</p><p>Underneath the patriarchy, another body of knowledge remains that we sometimes unearth, like the Gaelic female poets buried face down, or women buried with hemp seeds and horses, swords and coloured skirts, on the far steppes of the North. We find it hidden, sometimes like this story, the kernel of the Roman writer’s novel, disguised as a fairy tale.</p><p>Apuleius depicts the goddess as a hussy and her son a naughty rosy-cheeked boy, but we know that this is a clever device: Apuleius, an initiate of many schools, is hiding a phial of quicksilver inside a ribald tale. Venus is a planetary force and Eros is the primal creator,, sprung from a silver egg at the beginning of time, who sets the universe in order. So she is not the shrewish mother-in-law, but the matrix of a dynamic between these stellar forces and the human Psyche.</p><p>Venus knows being beautiful is not enough, being high-born and a daddy’s darling is not enough, there is no beauty of soul unless it is transformed. You need to open the kist and find the ledgers on which are written what you need to look at, your lineage, your nation, the legacy of being human in an industrial empire and learn how to-put a crooked thing straight.</p><p>Can we break out of our individualism and listen to instruction about how to sort the seeds, how to honour the animals and the spring, how to enter and return from the Underworld? Can we resist the plaintive pleas of the souls of the Underworld, and steer our own passage? Can we take the coins into our mouths to pay Charon and the barley cakes for the three-headed hound of Hades? And can we then, finally do what every female being does in their infinite curiosity, disobey the order from our elders and betters, and open the box?</p><p>You need a strong memory and imagination to undertake these tasks, neither of which are ever encouraged by the village, city neighbourhood or nation state you find yourself in. We live in superficial times. The tasks ahead are all about depth and return. The older and more fixed you are the harder it is to fulfil them, but the richer and more rewarding also. When you are younger you feel you have more to lose, but when you are older, you lack desire and feel you have lived your life already. Either way it is tough. Either way, it's not just about you. You don't do the work for just you. That is what gives you strength, what stops you from despairing, staring down from cliffs into the foaming sea, or into the obsidian waters of the Styx.</p><p>You engage in these tasks to cohere the fragmentation of the collective you see and feel all around <span lang="en">–</span> its broken heart, its confused mind, its twisted and enraged will. You do it to remember what was once called Original Instruction, the right way to engage with earthly life. You do it for the luminous planet that hosts you.</p><p>The work is exacting and challenging and can give you every shred of meaning you might have longed for in a world that has lost its way, but it comes at a high cost: the loss of a self you and everyone you know once knew.</p><p>My own search took me to many places on Earth, into inner and mythic landscapes, far away from everything I had once known and loved. But as I found out, this journey is not about going out or away. It is all about coming back.</p><p> </p><p><strong><em>After Ithaca</em> is published by Greenbank Books, an imprint of Sumeru Books, in association with the Dark Mountain Project. To order worldwide, please visit the <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/after-ithaca-journeys-in-deep-time/">Dark Mountain online shop</a> </strong></p><p><strong><em>After Ithaca</em> will be launched with<em> Loss Soup and Other Stories</em> by Nick Hunt this Thursday 19th May at Schumacher College, Devon and online on Thursday 26th May. All details and booking </strong><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/when-the-mountain-speaks-with-us-3/"><strong>here.</strong></a></p><p><strong>Cover image: Immense as the Sky by Meryl McMaster. More about her work here: <a href="http://merylmcmaster.com/">merylmcmaster.com</a></strong></p>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-72975044290066778382022-04-25T09:10:00.004+01:002022-04-25T09:28:53.251+01:00My Body, The Ancestor<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueiZTVxlN6mqo8xd9iXwqig83hBG2WJsxYtgH3p16anWh4hgrrcG8jns3gBF6KQVp2kYs9JqFk-LVAatxrlL6xcaGvMB4KG75G2zuJP5ABcXWAIXkcuA8-9gLHNm0VEqOtwgEYEPcjGWKs83iPi66zoeckDUcO7QB4xJfhm0c8wv6jcRDkopfYKr7_A/s1024/Graeme-Walker-Mycelial-Threads-178mm-x-110mm-633x1024%20(1).jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="633" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhueiZTVxlN6mqo8xd9iXwqig83hBG2WJsxYtgH3p16anWh4hgrrcG8jns3gBF6KQVp2kYs9JqFk-LVAatxrlL6xcaGvMB4KG75G2zuJP5ABcXWAIXkcuA8-9gLHNm0VEqOtwgEYEPcjGWKs83iPi66zoeckDUcO7QB4xJfhm0c8wv6jcRDkopfYKr7_A/w248-h400/Graeme-Walker-Mycelial-Threads-178mm-x-110mm-633x1024%20(1).jpg" width="248" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mycelial Threads by Graeme Walker</td></tr></tbody></table><i>Excerpt from a mycelial conversation with the poet and ecological storyteller, Sophie Strand for the spring issue of<a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-21/"> Dark Mountain 21</a>, shaped around the theme of confluence.</i><br /> <p></p><p><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E81">Her words caught my eye: a lament for a robin, its wing like a sundial on the road for Dark Mountain</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E82">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E83">s </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E84">‘</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E85">requiem</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E86">’ </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E87">issue. She startled me: speaking about becoming compost for the future at the Borrowed Time summit on death, dying and change. And yet her stories are all vibrantly entangled with life: the nectar-seeking of hummingbirds, the anarchy of the vegative god Dionysus, the fortitude of the hermit crab who waits on the strand for others to appear, so they might simultaneously exchange shells they have outgrown: that moment of vulnerability, of exposure, we need to inhabit a different form. How life happens in between states, a collective dance we don</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E88">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E89">t always see yet is everywhere all about and inside us.</span>[/drop-cap]</p><p class="qowt-stl-Body x-scope qowt-word-para-1" id="E80"><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E89"></span></p><p class="qowt-stl-Body x-scope qowt-word-para-1" id="E90"><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E91">Poet and writer Sophie Strand lives in a liminal world, at the confluence of a river and a creek in the Hudson Valley. Her </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E92">‘</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E93">ecological storytelling</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E94">’ </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E95">taps into the interstitial web of life, where metaphors act as bridges to other </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E98">dimensions, criss-crossing like the hyphae of fungi, and delve into the </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E101">microbial underworld. Some of her acute sensitivity to the natural world has been catalysed by trauma and an incurable condition that sends her body into meltdown at unpredictable times.</span></p><p class="qowt-stl-Body x-scope qowt-word-para-1" id="E102"><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E103">I wanted to talk with Sophie because she speaks of opening out and </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E106">connecting in a culture of closing down and control, of merging with </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E109">others in a time of individualism and constriction. In a series of luminous short essays she writes of a practice of </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E110">‘</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E111">deep life</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E112">’ </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E113">whereby we can </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E114">‘</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E115">stitch ourselves back</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E116">’ </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E117">into our local territories and feel and think as ecosystems. We spoke across the continents and waterlands one winter</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E118">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E119">s day.</span></p><p> </p><p><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E124">CDC </span>–<span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular">Your writing and Dark Mountain both focus on weather</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E126">ing collapse when the current responses to planetary crisis are to try to save and fix. How do you use this as a metaphor in your writing?</span></p><p>SS – <span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E129">Collapse can be the most generative experience. We can'</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E131">t </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E133">manage</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E134"> an ecosystem! What hubris to think human beings can enter into millions of interconnected, complicated, refluxing, pricking, stinging, </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E137">collaborating relationships, and manage it. Just as we can'</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E139">t organise an </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E142">ecosystem, we can'</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E144">t plan collapse. We can't</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E146"> narcissistically techno-fix a way through this. We have to enter into it.</span></p><p><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E148">I</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E149">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E150">m in a body that does collapse sometimes. I can take all the right </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E153">medicines, take care of myself and it will still melt. Contracting around that inability to control myself limits my improvisational ability to dance with uncertainty. Collapse is when things that shouldn</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E154">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E155">t be connected merge. When the river overflows its banks and inundates the soil and washes things away is the moment when materials and elements that would never meet each other, touch. I think there is something inherently haptic (in the sense of meaning touch and also fasten) in this. It</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E156">’</span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E157">s what hyphae do in the soil when they connect plants and trees: that mycelial interrogative intelligence that fastens things together by touching. For me the intelligence of collapse is in the unruly, funny, uncanny connections that happen by the nature of emergent systems.</span></p><p>CDC – <span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E164">Mycelial intelligence emerges strongly in your writing. How did you </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E167">stumble into this teeming world underneath the surface of things and </span><span class="qowt-font6-SabonNextLTProRegular" id="E170">engage in those life systems?</span></p><p>SS – I grew up in the woods and I loved decay and rootlets and mushrooms. I connected them with fairytales and to the magic which isn’t necessarily ‘good’ but chaotic, in the trickier sense of fairies being capricious and unpredictable. But then I became mysteriously ill at the age of 16 and couldn’t be diagnosed. At the same time I became interested in mycorrhizal networks and rhizomatic thinking as a philosophical lens. Then, at the point that these concepts became a key part of my poetic, ecological inspiration, I finally got diagnosed with my condition which was connective tissue disease (EDS). It felt as if I had been seeded genetically with this passion because fungi are the connective tissue of the soil, holding it together, creating highways for bacteria, breaking down dead matter and providing nourishment for other beings. And what I needed was healthier connective tissue.</p><p>So for me it’s become a frame: how can we wed our personal wounds with the wounds of something more-than-human? How we look at our physical ailments, our psychological anguish not as something that teaches us about ourselves but that reorients us to something else outward.[/interview]</p><p>CDC – Did your practice to explore ‘deep life’ arise out of your condition also?</p><p>SS – My life goes through bottlenecks, and the practice emerged out of an oscillation with going in and out of restricted mobility and illness. The pandemic has been a megaphone for this experience. There is too much information, we can’t hold it all in our minds, and there’s a problematic idea that we feel we need to know everything to be environmentally active. But it is impossible and it paralyses people. What is more interesting to me is to ask: what is happening within a five mile radius of my home, what are the invasive species that live here? What is the Indigenous history, can I go out and walk every single day? Can I find a sit spot? Can I begin to gather a council, a world of witnesses that constitute me relationally?</p><p>The air I am breathing is infused with the microbiome: with pheromones, with smells, with pollen, the spores of a very specific place. It is easy to be focused on charismatic causes, old growth forests that are whole continents away, or animals that are very attractive, but the truth is the thing that holds you and metabolically constitutes you is your home, so how can you go deep with a home?</p><p>I was inspired by adrienne maree brown and their work on how movements are often very superficial, a mile wide but an inch thick, so the connections are not resilient. Resilient ecosystems have that tight-knit connectivity that make a landscape or environment able to shift and adapt intelligently to ecological pressure, to anthropogenic activity. So I am much more interested in the inch-wide, mile deep movement, where the connectivity is so intense and intimate it actually helps people and other beings survive.</p><p>CDC – A lot of our approach to the ecological crisis uses the lens of science. In the sense your writing is an exercise in imagination, what role do you feel imagination plays to help penetrate these deeper levels?</p><p>SS – I gained my main inspiration for deep life from the philosopher Gaston Bachelard, who used scientific facts in his work but infused them with a healthy dose of miracle mind and imaginative poetic sensibility. Bachelard believed that poetry was the closest way to get to the truth, not facts, and this is also how I function. Science is a useful tool, a way of asking questions. But we can also invite more people into these interrogative relationships with their ecosystems, landscapes and local issues, not by creating a sterile language but by infusing this interrogative tool with sensuality, by embodying it. I’m interested in enfleshing ideas rather than shaving them down. Can we use science to root us back into the landscape?</p><p>CDC – If writing and art can create a culture that faces crisis, rather than distracting from it, do you feel this poetic imagination helps us navigate what is happening in the world?</p><p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4FFT9oa8EaUK1B3kzQcvd_GNcTgjXtr4FOyAMp1E9M6rJvHte2ViRhMD1aFJ7ySWfty463NWyMsJH4tMJ9RPrKOyFDLIMcBajCfWgBEibvdeTxm4-CKFFxOuTZSDuqAz0LdTksEozxiYGRXMoVrSNsfB4nw9rsRLGHPInTjnSazrU40O-7rqJ-3hNsA/s1496/sophie-strand-portrait.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="998" data-original-width="1496" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4FFT9oa8EaUK1B3kzQcvd_GNcTgjXtr4FOyAMp1E9M6rJvHte2ViRhMD1aFJ7ySWfty463NWyMsJH4tMJ9RPrKOyFDLIMcBajCfWgBEibvdeTxm4-CKFFxOuTZSDuqAz0LdTksEozxiYGRXMoVrSNsfB4nw9rsRLGHPInTjnSazrU40O-7rqJ-3hNsA/w400-h266/sophie-strand-portrait.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">(Photo Harper Cowan)</td></tr></tbody></table><br />SS – We have a problematic cultural aversion to beauty being useful. Poetry is connected to my ideas about beauty. Not an objectified artificial glamour but beauty as being the thing we are attracted to, in the way a bee moves towards a flower and incidentally pollinates it. As you pay attention to what you love and what you are attracted to, it will guide you into your ecological niche, where you are most useful.<p></p><p>So if we pay attention to the poetry in our lives, it shows us where we belong. Acting like an acupuncture needle in a landscape, we will find the beings, the issues, the stories, we need to provide a mouth for.</p><p>CDC –You speak about being a mouthpiece for the expression of the more-than-human world and that sometimes the knocks and difficulties we undergo are actually an invitation to open, and allow a wound to be a doorway, and allow other forms to speak through us, to be an expression in words and song and image for the planet. What has been your experience of that process?</p><p>SS – I think the dominant cultural paradigm is we must be constantly progressing, integrating, healing, so that we can get back to work, and that for survivors of violence and sexual trauma, and illnesses that don’t have a cure, those narratives don’t work, they don’t map on to our lived experience.</p><p>So instead of thinking we are always failing, narratively and physically, what would it mean to recontextualise these wounds as portals? As connective tissue. Although we are more porous how does that porousness allow us to understand microbial life, ‘smalls’, beings that don’t necessarily get our attention? I’ve done a lot of healing and therapy, but I’ve never been fixed, so instead of problematising that incompleteness, that liminality, I’ve tried to think of it in terms of process philosophy, so I am a doorway which matter flows through, and my experiences have opened that door wider. Instead of trying to close it all the time and enter back into a legibility culturally, what if I open that ‘door’ wider and open it so that I can be in service to the general aliveness and not to my particular aliveness?</p><p>CDC – You also speak about your work as creating compost or soil for other beings later on. This is a whole different attitude to writing and requires a different kind of generosity.</p><p>SS – ]If we look at the history of storytelling, it was not about individual authorship. Homer is actually a practice, people stepped into the role of Homer; in the same way as when composing Orphic hymns, people became Orpheus. You embodied Orpheus. This is important because of my condition. I have stories I want to tell, things I care about, but I also know that my individual life may not be long enough or hardy enough to complete this work. So what if I reframed authorship and took it out of modernity and said: what if I am making good soil, what if I am beginning the composting process of these ideas, so my particular life is not the only vehicle of its completion? What if someone else can come plant in this soil and sprout something else? So when I make art these days it is about creating space which other people can enter into, it’s not about me as an individual charismatic author. </p><p>CDC –You write in one of your essays of perceiving your body as an ancestor, an assemblage of ecosystems, how do you tap into that kind of awareness?</p><p>SS – This porousness that was caused by trauma and illness gave me a big sense of myself as an instrument being played – by microbes, by yeasts, by fungi, by other people. So sometimes the music that comes through me is not my own. And then when I read more about the science of the gut-brain axis, and about deep time and the history of our cells, I was given a comforting lens that I am a collaboration. When we focus on an individual sense of ourselves, it can act and feel like a weight. We always have to be an author, to know what the next best step is, and be in control of our lives. But if we think of ourselves as being a kind of ecosystem, we can understand that we are sometimes acting intuitively, in relationship with something else that is authoring us. </p><p>So in the essay, ‘Your Body is an Ancestor’, what I was thinking about is that we don't need to create rituals. Our body is a ritual, our cells are a product of anarchic queer lovemaking whereby mitochondria and ancient prokaryotes fused to create the cells that build our bodies today. We are the product of these fusions.</p><p>In relation to confluence, there is a neo-Darwinian idea that evolution is an arrow of time that it is always pulsing forward, but the truth is that just as evolution is about forking, it is also been about fusing: these transversal intimacies, whereby beings and species suddenly and chaotically, unpredictably exchange information and fuse. Lichen is a good example, as it is an algae, sometimes a yeast, sometimes other bacteria, and a fungus, collaborating to create a new being. It is one of the dominant refrains in evolution that life is not just about forking. And I get this from fungi and <i>anastomosis,</i> which is a term from mycology and ecology when hyphae come back and fuse together, that moment of confluence, that anastomosis which means to provide a mouth for. Those moments of fusing, or collaboration and confluence, are about providing a mouthpiece for something else. </p><p>Then it is less that we are individual species and more that we are relational. All thinking, all beings are interstitial. Thinking happens between mythic gradients, between beings, between conversations, between those ideas, those relational units where our roles are played out.[/interview]</p><p>CDC – How does this affect us as storytellers and writers in a culture where everything is about the stars shining in the sky rather than the dark spaces in between, the invisible relationships that happen? Do you ever see your writing as acting like a mushroom in the sense of breaking things down, so that another form might happen?</p><p>SS – I think the most important aspect of my writing is that it doesn’t happen in solitude. I share my work publicly on social media, and I open it up to critique and conversation, so my writing happens not in me or in my readers but in the spaces in between. It is always being moulded and adapted according to the conversation. There’s an idea that you have to write in secret, come up with your own ideas and publish them in this sterile, finished product. But this is a very alphabetical, textual approach and it is also a recent idea. Stories and myths and scripture were originally oral and adaptive to changing social and ecological conditions and political climate. So I think the main thing about this interstitial space is always inviting my readers in to change me, to risk being changed by our conversation.</p><p><strong>You can read the full version of this conversation in <em><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-21/">Dark Mountain: Issue 21.</a> </em></strong><strong>If you <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/subscriptions/">take out an annual subscription</a> to Dark Mountain you can buy this issue for a reduced price. </strong></p><p> </p><p>IMAGE: 'Mycelial Threads' by Graeme Walker<br /><em>Acrylic on board<br /></em>I made this artwork for my anorexic friend to explore the complex, mycelium-like interconnections of her personal history – rather than addressing the symptoms alone, which are like poisonous fungi, popped up in the forest. They may be what everyone can see, and what they immediately want to treat, but it is in exploring the giant, hidden, underground web, out of which these toxic bodies fruit, that will give her true understanding.<em><br /></em></p><p><b>Graeme Walker</b> is an artist who makes contemplative objects, paintings, poetry, stories; philosophical prompts; paradoxes on our relationship between life, mortality and nature; questions around the cultural inhibition and release of agency. His work calls humanity into potency, into meaningfulness, as a way of resisting nihilism. <a href="https://graemewalker.art/">graemewalker.art</a></p><p><b>Sophie Strand</b> is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling and ecology. Her first book of essays <i>The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine</i> is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco-feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels <i>The Madonna Secret </i>will also be published by Inner Traditions. You can follow her work on Instagram: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/cosmogyny/?hl=en">@cosmogyny</a> and at <a href="http://sophiestrand.com/">sophiestrand.com</a>.</p><p> </p>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-53689526671409220422022-04-03T15:25:00.002+01:002022-04-03T15:33:58.725+01:00Plant Dialogues<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX-Yi0i5E7uXtj9mr_oSL6x1XM9kJmAX47LWMpbR08dFpfPXSNmNppsGnu4RzieZD-hZ060qnWK0DNXuAW6CPiCis7gLxetl8jm2Y51olrDU5xSqKWvIte1Ew4nui85yI7sTjNEmDTUTAiqhXu93-3GaIs18tAvZk_oeyqFKjgp8Bk6fbVh0KK_I0m8g/s1024/KS-image-1024x1024.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="1024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgX-Yi0i5E7uXtj9mr_oSL6x1XM9kJmAX47LWMpbR08dFpfPXSNmNppsGnu4RzieZD-hZ060qnWK0DNXuAW6CPiCis7gLxetl8jm2Y51olrDU5xSqKWvIte1Ew4nui85yI7sTjNEmDTUTAiqhXu93-3GaIs18tAvZk_oeyqFKjgp8Bk6fbVh0KK_I0m8g/w400-h400/KS-image-1024x1024.jpg" title="'Fernman' by Kahn & Selesnick" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div class="row" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-left: -15px; margin-right: -15px;"><article class="col-md-9" id="post-28301" style="box-sizing: border-box; float: left; max-width: 100%; min-height: 1px; padding-left: 15px; padding-right: 15px; position: relative; width: 701.458px;"><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><i style="text-align: left;">This year I have been co-producing a series of <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/how-we-walk-through-the-fire-1-halycon-days/">Dark Mountain creative workshops</a> centred around the. eight fires of the ancestral, solar year. Called How We Walk Through the Fire, this ensemble practice has so far placed attention on <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/kinship-with-the-beasts/">Kinship with Beasts,</a> and <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/walking-into-the-wind/">Walking into the Wind.</a> This month I'm sharing the fire-keeping with my fellow 'radical botanical' Mark Watson. Here is our call out. Do come and join us!</i><span style="text-align: left;"> </span></div><p></p></div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><br />Our fourth workshop will focus on connecting with the plant kingdom in times of ecological crisis. We will be joined by Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson to explore how we might re-entangle ourselves with the intelligence and beauty of wild plants, working with the key leaves, flowers and trees of May.<br /><br />Plants give human beings everything they need to sustain their place on Earth: the air we breathe, the food and medicine to nourish us, fabric to shelter us. But their diverse and colourful forms also entwine themselves into art, into poetry, into cultures and ceremony throughout the world, as they provide a bridge into the mythos and the sentience of the planet.<br /><br />How can we honour these relationships in difficult times? How can plants help root us in place and time, help us remember the role imagination plays in communication with the more-than-human world –from the smallest daisy on the roadside to the forest’s mightiest oak?<br /><br />For this fire gathering, set around May Day on 1st May, we will tune into the plants of our local territories. We will be creating work to celebrate what we encounter, and share our stories of what it means to become kin with the world.</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;">Do join us in this hands-on ensemble investigation into the art and practice of plant dialogues as we welcome the greening of the growing year.</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><br /><b>About the Eight Fires series </b>How We Walk Through the Fire aims to forge a collective practice amongst writers, artists, and creative practitioners; and to host a culture that can both weather the storm and lay the tracks for a more ‘biospheric’ relationship with ourselves and the more-than-human world. </div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;">Each of the fires will explore different themes and approaches to this practice, from storytelling to plant medicine to performance – but all aim to foster resilience and radical kinship, and to strengthen our creative voices within an ensemble. Together we’ll ‘walk through the fire’, letting go of what no longer serves, and discovering what might bring repair and regeneration to a world, and a culture, in crisis.</div></article></div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;">How We Walk Through the Fire workshops are hosted by Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang who have created many immersive, dramaturgical events and teachings for Dark Mountain, based on reconnection with deep time and the mythology of place.</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0zspKWbczg8qCdQZUAyfvSzEn0abL_hfF6RXT77kyKHg1mkqmcT66YaznHtsap5Fuh5tUH5nducwA527AsxuC4pd_vJq3Y4J6b9lw95MdqT__OWIqdqsBkHKSrXkGNxNy_hkMWqc_K3rMuWgL0CQ1oGDfwA91l2Qx7O5ZBN-Dj7m3dhcC1v1xpMtJg/s4209/DM21%20workshop%20fire.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2330" data-original-width="4209" height="177" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm0zspKWbczg8qCdQZUAyfvSzEn0abL_hfF6RXT77kyKHg1mkqmcT66YaznHtsap5Fuh5tUH5nducwA527AsxuC4pd_vJq3Y4J6b9lw95MdqT__OWIqdqsBkHKSrXkGNxNy_hkMWqc_K3rMuWgL0CQ1oGDfwA91l2Qx7O5ZBN-Dj7m3dhcC1v1xpMtJg/s320/DM21%20workshop%20fire.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Practical information<br /></span><br />The course comprises two x 2 hour group Zoom sessions, with time for a solo walk/encounter and a creative task during the week in between. It will include exercises and discussion and provide opportunities for:</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;">- Working within a Dark Mountain frame<br />- In-depth conversation with fellow writers and artists<br /> - Deepening your practice<br /> - Exploring relationship with the living world<br /><br />When: Saturday 30th April and Saturday 7th May, 4-6pm BST<br /><br />Note all time zones are welcome to participate.<br /><br />Group size: 16 people maximum<br /><br />Price: £55<br /><br />How to apply: As the course has limited space and we are looking for a diverse group of participants, please could you let us know a bit about yourself: where you are writing from, your current practice and why you would like to take part in the course. A few sentences are fine! Send your email to info@dark-mountain.net and we will be in touch.<br /><br /> Deadline for applications: Monday 18th April 2022</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;">D</div><div class="entry-content text-block" style="box-sizing: border-box; clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /><br /> </div>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-25256207747492924452022-03-02T16:48:00.001+00:002022-03-02T17:02:43.923+00:00After Ithaca - Voyages in Deep Time to be published this May!<div class="separator" style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh188rQY9TBxOskJ7t1WoXyl5qT0vm1gDXveBtRladQ1UWelDcOAJoeAaApBog-WuI8R7IkG0PiYGsfI7qDXuEWqMayTIQqZMtIRzsolOGsYL3a_GpiLBEhurZeAbOHgLW91hoPGA8zs4y9U8GriP4UfbW1FusmfeaSTw8DXwgXf44VAinO8TSRuPoqFA=s2761" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2761" data-original-width="1849" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh188rQY9TBxOskJ7t1WoXyl5qT0vm1gDXveBtRladQ1UWelDcOAJoeAaApBog-WuI8R7IkG0PiYGsfI7qDXuEWqMayTIQqZMtIRzsolOGsYL3a_GpiLBEhurZeAbOHgLW91hoPGA8zs4y9U8GriP4UfbW1FusmfeaSTw8DXwgXf44VAinO8TSRuPoqFA=w268-h400" title="'Immense as the Sky' by Meryl McMaster" width="268" /></a></div><b><div><b><br /></b></div>A pile of seeds, a tuft of wool,
a vessel of water, a closed box </b><div><br /></div><div>What happens when the heroes disappear, when the
battle for the city is over, when you return to the
island and find a box in your hands? There was an
instruction once that told us why the box should
never be opened. But you don't believe those stories
anymore. You always open the box. </div><div><br /></div><div><i>After Ithaca </i>is a non-fiction work – part
memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that
follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the
tip of crisis. It is set in the Peruvian rainforest, in the
backrooms of Suffolk towns, in Japan, in France, Australia, in the desert borderlands, in borrowed houses
and Occupy tents, in kitchens and burial chambers, underneath a lemon tree on an abandoned terrace… </div><div><br /></div><div>The book revolves around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, set by Venus, the goddess of love and
justice: four territories that map this search for meaning and coherence in a time of fall. Each chapter
starts with a memory of place as a clue to the investigation: the recovery of a relationship with wild
nature, with being human, a kind of archaeology for the pieces of self that lie missing beneath a broken
storyline, like the sherds of a pot. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is a personal story and also a social story, about the relinquishment of a certain world, that looks at
writing as an existential practice: showing how myth can be a techê for finding our lost voice, our medicine
of how to put a crooked thing straight. </div><div><br /></div><div>How to pull ourselves out of the wreckage, and start again</div><div><br /></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><i>After Ithaca with Loss Soup and Other Stories by Nick Hunt are Dark Mountain's first fiction and non-fiction single author titles. Published by Greenbank Books on 15th May 2022 and available in UK, US, Canada and Australia.</i></div>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-44773145312652454302021-11-04T09:29:00.002+00:002021-12-22T12:23:08.706+00:0052 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth (reissued): 1 - Epazote<p><i></i></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWZS-0GJ8IdnhwhKv1ZFYdNaxy34ccj9WT6mQ8LSEO1tqnOK7TP7eP-dPu5IbwveDKWC4HGpZZh76TCVKXb-mwvMSu4YuO447I-xBexMeb25lJxGX82_knmru8ejJ63l2zXkNIu-ElzGMS/s1600/7A+BIO+Ocotillo.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="High Desert, Arizona on the border with Mexico, where some of the book takes place" border="0" data-original-height="1037" data-original-width="1600" height="259" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWZS-0GJ8IdnhwhKv1ZFYdNaxy34ccj9WT6mQ8LSEO1tqnOK7TP7eP-dPu5IbwveDKWC4HGpZZh76TCVKXb-mwvMSu4YuO447I-xBexMeb25lJxGX82_knmru8ejJ63l2zXkNIu-ElzGMS/w400-h259/7A+BIO+Ocotillo.JPG" title="High Desert, Arizona on the border with Mexico, where some of the book takes place" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">High Desert, Arizona on the border with Mexico, one of the book's main territories</td></tr></tbody></table><i><br />Twenty years ago I had a dream that changed the course of my life utterly. It was about a weed that grows along the waysides in Mexico, a plant I had never met. Ten years later I wrote a book called </i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/charlotte-du-cann-52-flowers-that-shook-my-world-pdf/">52 Flowers That Shook My World</a><i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/charlotte-du-cann-52-flowers-that-shook-my-world-pdf/"> </a>where it heralds the encounters and medicine stories behind a radical departure from everything I had once known</i>.<i> Today, in celebration of the the book becoming available in PDF format, here is its first flower.</i><p></p><p><i><br /></i></p><p><i>Notting Hill, London 1990</i> </p><p>That night I had a dream. I was walking through a green land and an
Indian woman came up to me and put some herbs in my hand. I have
been having dreams about plants since I returned from Mexico. Men
and women are appearing silently from nowhere and giving me sage
tea to drink, or instructing me to plant bulbs, or I find myself walking
through fields of wheat and maize and seeing how their growing
patterns have been disturbed. This dream was unusual, however, in
that this native woman spoke the names out loud: one was liquorice
root and the other had a name I did not recognise, epazote. </p><p>In the dreams I know about the cornfields but I do not know
about the herbs. I particularly do not know about this herb called
epazote. That night I got up and sat at my writing table and looked at
my hands. I have the familiar corn in my right, but in my left, I hold
a plant I do not know. It is a stranger. </p><p>I am in my flat alone in the middle of the night, holding this
strange herb from a dream. I am surrounded by everything I know:
shelves of books, thousands of them, line the walls of this kitchen
study. In the adjacent living room the treasures of a thirty-something
life sit in the darkness: pottery bowls from markets, pearwood chairs
from auctions, a long handcrafted table where people meet, an Indian
mattress where people sometimes sleep. I could pick up every object
in this room and tell you its story: who was there when I found it,
what it means, how it defines me; how this jacket came from Paris,
the paella pan from Madrid, the blue meshed larder from Athens, this
stone from a certain beach in Wales, these cow bones from the New
Mexican desert. I could tell you all the recipes that I cook in these
earthenware dishes, with my junkstore utensils that lie in a drawer,
in my alchemical workplace of words and cooking pots, my rooms
with a certain atmosphere many people love to come to, even more
than being with me. Charlotte’s for supper, with its table and familiar
objects, with its rough panelling, its windows without curtains, where
you can hear the occasional sound of a bus passing, or a drunk reeling
down the road. With its inspirational physical style. </p><p>In this moment I feel all the attention that I and others have placed on these objects dwelling in these rooms. I feel the way I move about
them, write about them, handle them is becoming more important
than my own living being, and something in me shudders. </p><p>I realise that my being is about something else that is not dependent on these objects. Life is not about things that others or I can
handle. These objects are a replacement for a relationship with life.
But nothing replaces that relationship, not really. It is a comfort, as
a child is comforted in the night by a toy. But it is not the real thing.
This plant I do not know yet is telling me this. It is having a certain
effect as I sit and contemplate it. Everything I am surrounded by has
become imbued with a different feeling, has become less secure in
this moment. It as if these objects no longer have anything to do with
me. They are losing their hold, unhooking themselves, as I hold this
strange herb in my left hand. </p><p>The entrance of the stranger on the solar path is the pivotal point,
the point when it begins. The stranger is something about which you
know nothing, that you allow into your life. Sometimes this is a person
and sometimes a new idea. But whatever form the stranger takes, it
comes like a strange attractor and breaks the limit cycle of our lives,
like a philosopher’s stone that begins the strange alchemy of our souls.
Our worlds are normally so circumscribed that we automatically do
everything to keep this stranger out. We are programmed to defend
ourselves, like genetically modified plants, to deport any visiting outsider as an undesirable alien, in order that we continue to conduct
our affairs in the same small way, without questioning their validity. </p><p>But sometimes we let the stranger in anyway. Sometimes by
accident, and sometimes fired up by an ancient curiosity, our native
love of secrets and mysteries, our desire for keys and clues and signs.
Our souls lie in wait for such a moment, the moment when our
consciousness starts to ask questions and rouses us out of bed to
look at our hands. </p><p>What has awoken me this night from my sleep is the memory of
Mexico. This first germinating seed is a wild plant known as Mexican
wormseed. Epazote is not a grand plant; in fact it is a common weed
that flourishes by any highway, ditch or vacant lot from Sonora to
Chiapas. Its name derives from the Nahuatl word for skunk, due to its
unmistakable pungent aroma. It is a member of the goosefoot family,
a whole tribe of flourishing weeds like tumbleweed and fat hen, all
with small flowers and nourishing rich green leaves (beetroot, good
king henry, spinach are all goosefoots). However, epazote’s power lies
not in its leaves but in its rank and bitter seeds, which are a formidable
anti-parasitic and vermifuge. It was once cultivated throughout the
world as a cure against the ravages of hookworm. It has been used for
centuries in Mexican cooking to flavour and act as a digestive aid in
beans. In fact, once you have tasted its strange and musty scent, you
can’t cook beans without it. </p><p>Once I had tasted Mexico, I could not do without Mexico either.
Its strange and bitter flavours. When I had travelled there with Mark
that spring I had gone without any references. It was unexpected,
something I had not calculated for. ‘No one I knew knew Mexico,’
as I would write later in a book about this journey. Mexico did not
exist in my library or my internal world, so its presence could act on
my being absolutely. And absolutely it did. This did not just mean
the unusual physical senses of the place: the scent of tuberose, the
colours of the painted walls, the long bus rides through valleys of
glow-worms, a hot turquoise sea – but also things of a deeper, more
cosmic level. It meant taking hallucinogenic mushrooms that tore
my consciousness open in the Mayan rainforest, and now, as I am
looking at my hands, it means Carlos Castaneda and the warrior’s
path, a path of heart that goes through the desert. A certain desert
of thorns and cactus. </p><p>When you start the solar journey, you hunt for ways to begin. If
you are a writer, you start with books, and of all the many books I
was reading at this time, it was Castaneda’s account of his apprenticeship with the Yacqui seer don Juan in Mexico that spoke most
urgently to me. While others I knew were fascinated by the book’s
description of power and the control of dreams, I was absorbed by
its meticulous description of the energetic acts of the warrior, those
strategic steps of the will that enabled one to live with fluidity in the
world: the assuming of responsibility, the letting go of self-pity and
self-importance, encountering the mysterious presence of twilight
and the concept of impeccability. </p><p>The other ‘new-age’ works I looked at during this time had very
little to do with impeccability. They concerned themselves with
important gods and goddesses, family psychology and wounded
healers, archetypes and temples. They belonged to the bourgeois city parlours I recognised from my novel-reading days. But Castaneda’s
books were talking about something that did not originate in the city.
The writer-anthropologist had left the city of Los Angeles in the early
sixties in search of a plant called peyote that grew out in the desert
chaparral that lay between Arizona and Mexico. There was something
clear and autonomous and mysterious in his quest that resonated
with my own being. His journey reminded me of the deliberate life
I had come across in the works of Sartre when I was young. Don
Juan’s teachings spoke of a rigorous and affectionate relationship
between man and earth that was both sparing and tender, that lived
quite beyond this indulgent, acquisitive, objectifying world I lived
and worked in. Because everything he spoke of worked within the
framework of death. </p><p>Most of all Mexico meant death. Death is your advisor, don Juan
advises Carlos Castaneda. We are all beings who are going to die.
Every act you make as a warrior is your last act on earth, so you don’t
have time for petty moods or failures. You don’t waste your time. </p><p>I had not considered death before, my death. Death is something
you don’t think about in the eternal shopping world of London or
Los Angeles, but in Mexico death looks at you directly in the eye,
rattling its smiling skeleton in the face of your artificial parasitic life,
whose currency is inflated ten times its actual value. At a certain
point, if you care about life, you turn to face death. You let go of the
world you have been involved in constructing and start to work for
the spirit of things. You realise you are not going to be on this earth
forever and certain strategic moves need to be made if you want to
experience this mysterious place while you are here. </p><p>In Palenque that spring I had realised my life in the world meant
nothing. It wasn’t worth a handful of beans. In the annihilating force
of the mushrooms, I could hold on to nothing of this existence, not
even my name. So I let them go. And what was left in its place was a
relationship to life that now demanded my full attention, linked both
with my own heart and with the mysterious man whose destiny now
appeared inextricably bound up with my own. Mark. </p><p>One day shortly after this epazote dream, I picked up the telephone.
‘Mark, Let’s go to Mexico for six months,’ I said. ‘We can write
a book together.’ </p><p>‘Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘But what about your flat?’ </p><p>There was a pause. </p><p>‘I’m going to sell it,’ I said. ‘I’m going to sell everything I own.’ </p><p>When I left London I was thirty-five. The age when you let go
of the corn you have been sowing in your right hand, and take up
what destiny has given you in your left. When Death appears at your
door, when the mysterious woman with her wand of wormseed comes
to you and suggests you face another direction entirely. When you
let go of everything you know and walk toward the sun, towards an unknown horizon.</p><p><br /></p><p><b>You can order <i>52 Flowers That Shook My World </i>from The Dark Mountain Project online shop <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/charlotte-du-cann-52-flowers-that-shook-my-world-pdf/">here</a>. Unpublished chapters are also posted on this site. You can read them<a href="https://charlotteducann.blogspot.com/search/label/52%20Flowers"> here.</a></b></p>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-41631144753338479082021-09-25T13:57:00.000+01:002021-09-25T13:57:11.698+01:00When the Bones of our Ancestors Speak to Us: A Fugitive Conversation with Bayo Akomolafe<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNbFOB-P8xWRSbNUtaNWkOa7YTdwzTSEFdytCI6QOdbjDWwtoZx2wjNbFiqqEUFNkJT3eW8ghbGwEUe3geipi2vP6vithpJdH_DgrlS6QzCyywo4F7KMi3Pf6K0Pjfwe7OaOHpHAjTUhMg/s1365/Bayo+Akomolofe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1365" data-original-width="768" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNbFOB-P8xWRSbNUtaNWkOa7YTdwzTSEFdytCI6QOdbjDWwtoZx2wjNbFiqqEUFNkJT3eW8ghbGwEUe3geipi2vP6vithpJdH_DgrlS6QzCyywo4F7KMi3Pf6K0Pjfwe7OaOHpHAjTUhMg/w225-h400/Bayo+Akomolofe.jpg" width="225" /></span></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Earlier this year I interviewed the postactivist philosopher Bayo Akomolafe for </i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/">Dark Mountain: Issue 19,</a><i> our spring collection of art and writing on death, loss and renewal. I had just completed his innovative online course <a href="https://course.bayoakomolafe.net/">We Will Dance with Mountains </a>which has just begun again this month. </i><br /></span><p><br /></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-7bf7f74a-7fff-2f89-e2dc-8660cc112185"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am preparing to leave a house I have lived in for 18 years. A gathering of starlings loop </span><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">and swerve overhead in the falling light, and in the distance you can hear the grind and thump of the sugar beet harvesters in the winter-flooded fields. For the last two months, as we pack up, I have been focused on a task with four strangers from different places and ports of origin (Manchester, Holland, Nigeria, Germany, Jamaica and London): to consider the fate and future inscribed in the bones of an unknown slave woman, unearthed from a burial site in the Port of Rio de Janeiro in 1996. </span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The archaeologists named her Bakhita (</span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">after the Sudanese slave turned Catholic saint</span><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and all we know of her life is that she did not survive the Atlantic crossing to work in the sugar cane fields of Brazil alongside an estimated five million of her compatriots from West Africa. Our task is to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rebuild the slave ship,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> set by the philosopher, writer and ‘recovering psychologist’, Bayo Akomolafe, as part of an online course he has been spearheading called We Will Dance With Mountains.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I wanted to speak with Bayo because this issue’s contemplation of death and dying also revolves around change; how, in times of fall, we allow a known world to collapse and reform from within. In no other modern thinker have I come across such a dynamic approach to undertaking that radical act of consciousness, embedded as it is in the startling imagery of the transatlantic slave trade.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bayo works in intense metaphor, using metaphysical infrastructure to enable us to perceive how we are kept trapped by civilisation and how we might liberate ourselves from its invisible manacles. The building blocks of his lexicon include </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the slave ship</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (with three decks of colonisers, slaves, and Earth resources); the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">plantation</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, where we are set to work; and the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">fugitive</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> who escapes the capture of both. </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Sanctuary</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a gathering place where fugitives might flock and find other ways of being together.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Charlotte Du Cann: In the Bakhita Project, we have been meeting in the transformative space of</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">sanctuary to consider the ancestral consequences of the colonial slave trade. Do you feel our legacies can ever be resolved?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bayo Akomolafe: The legacies of the slave ship are </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">yet-to-come</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Modernity captures the slave ship in the same way it captures black bodies, white bodies, all kinds of bodies, and allots them prescribed ways of behaving and responding to crisis events, like the idea of racial injustice and climate chaos. It looks at the white body and says you are the enemy, and to black and brown bodies it says you are the victim here. Sanctuary is this emergent space which might be tethered to a post-modernist escape from modernity. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The slave ship was an instrument of oppression and capture, an instrument of horror, but when I lean into my traditions, when I listen to the tale of the trickster </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Èṣù</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and the tricksters of other cultures, such as Pan or Loki, the boundaries of what is supposedly horrific and evil, it is also shape-shifting. It is moving, productive, generative, and escapes our modern gaze. Our elders are asking us to look at the slave ship, not as a thing that is gone and done with but as a thing that is energetically present, right now.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We are all in a slave ship: </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">capitalism is a form of slave-shipping and we are captured here, ontologically incarcerated – master and slave. The very architecture of the slave ship is hinted at in the ways we perform hierarchy and order bodies on a scale of worthiness – with the other-than-human world being below black bodies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, you might say that the invitation to </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">rebuild the slave ship </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is to revisit the conditions of our incarceration, to look around us, to look again, and to see that these boundaries are never still, always movable. So I don’t want to make the legacies of the slave ship OK. I want to make it sensuous, inviting, I want the wall to be porous, olfactory, membranous, I want it to be exposed and open, experimental, diffracting one thing into another. This is how new things are born. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I refuse to categorise artifacts of history as evil or good, because we do away with a lot of resources when we stabilise these things in those ways. When we name their colours too soon. So, to step into a space that is as troublesome as the slave ship is the trickster’s way, to play with trouble, and that might help us to transform.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC This book’s theme is centered on death, dying and change. Is that collective space of sanctuary also where things can die and provide energy, or compost, for transformation?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA We think of death too strictly I think, as this absolute terminal point. I am interested in spaces in culture, for gatherings, where we touch the traces of our unbecoming and notice where we are falling apart. Where we reimagine death not as something down the line, but a paradigm, a thick now, an immanent field of loss and creativity that is entangled with what we rudely tease out as ‘life’. Modernity is about putting things together neatly, proliferating still images, being coherent, noble, independent. Consider what might be produced if, instead of thinking of death strictly as a firm line or an isolated event, we find ways to experiment with how we are already falling away, and how, for example, your identity is dying, how you are nomadic, diasporic, constantly moving, even when the habits of my perceiving you compel me to see you as a white woman. If we had practices to notice the ways where our names, our bodies are changing and giving way to something else. How we are actually </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ghosts</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="vertical-align: super;">1</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think dying well is about</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> becoming with </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">our traces and learning to touch the traces of our falling away. In a literal sense, I am leaving my cells here and there, I am less or more than I was a few minutes ago. Maybe a practice like this is the urgency of the hour. This is what I mean by fugitive exile, about leaving the plantation</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">which reproduces images and instead helping us to see we are beyond static images. We are not as photographic as we think we are. We are </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">abroad</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in ways that escape the ‘Man’, the head of the pyramid, of the capitalist structure. And that is the invitation of a constellation, of processional relational ontologies.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC Your teaching of ways of being and becoming in many ways echoes one of the principles of Dark Mountain’s </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Uncivilisation</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: taking that Man out of the centre and letting life be in the centre. You have called it ‘a constellation of fugitive technologies that allows us to meet the world differently’. Could you name a few of those that most urgently need paying attention to?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA By fugitive technologies, I refer to sites of encounter where we might be met by the world in return, where we might learn to listen and cultivate humility in the face of a world that exceeds us, a world that never receded to the background of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">human ascension,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> even when we pretend that it did. And it is very difficult to talk out of context about what this constellation of practices might mean for different communities, which is why I have hesitated to frame making sanctuary as a universal, ahistorical process that I can plant anywhere I want. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Someone told me that poetry doesn't appeal to this moment and that we need facts. And I countered by saying: poetry is the spirituality of fact. Facts vibrate at the speed of mystery and poets are attuned to that, that facts are not as stable as you think. When people hear about fugitive technologies, they say: well, here is a practice that if I do, I might be saved. Here is a product, let’s call it ‘racial healing system’, here is an app for emancipation, here is an idea, a concept that is already neatly packaged. The very presence of the word fugitive dismantles that. The fugitive is a figure that is constantly moving, so I am not talking about the arrival state, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the Coca-Cola at the end of the factory line</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. I am talking about the methods of </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">dis/inquiry;</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> I call it dis/inquiry to remove ourselves from the centre of the inquiry. The inquiry is how to get lost. The question of the fugitive is </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">how do I lose my way?</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> How do I lose this plantation? How do we get as far away as possible? So, these technologies I speak of are not fixed products one can scale up; they are cartographies of lostness, rehearsals in losing one’s way in order to meet the world anew.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.655; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Making sanctuary</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is a gathering place, a village of these technologies. The Bakhita Project is premised on post-qualitative/post-anthropocentric research, decentring the anthropological figure as the central researcher and storyteller and learning to listen to the world. What might that do to us? The idea of becoming lost is to become otherwise by virtue of encounters with the more-than-human world. This is not research that is intended for us to be better, or to get back to business, to our shiny ivory towers.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.655; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I might ask, right now, for the purposes of our conversation: how is Charlotte learning to trace her ghostliness, the legacies made in her name? What are the recipes for your undoing? How are you noticing the extraordinary that is packed within the ordinary? How are you sharing these recipes of your undoing around you so that we form a politics of mutual undoing?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, my sister, it has to do with dis/inquiry, the methodologies of exile.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC You talk about a state of betweenness, finding the cracks, a state that is neither inclusive nor exclusive. Is this engaged with by oneself or with others or both?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA I am very wary of individual journeys of salvation or emancipation, of personal enlightenment workshops. I am not sure what the ‘individual’ is anyway anymore, when we find microbial communities living in our guts, and viruses living within bacteria. Post-humanist processes are always involved. Even if you deem it fit to focus on yourself as a separate entity, you would need physical resources to do that. Thought is not always as internal as cognitive scientists would have us believe. I feel it is environmental and ecological and that you are pulling on outside resources, even as you turn to your navel.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.655; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The basis of a fugitive politics-to-come always involves an irreducible collective of bodies, humans and more-than-humans, even when a single ‘individual’ is in focus. I am interested in framing a project that does not privilege humans as the starting point, how bodies are forced to think by the environment, by happenings in the world. So for me the instigator of thought isn’t human. A virus has forced India to rethink education. Because of the pandemic we are forced to go in a different direction. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">making sanctuary </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">is gathering those who have been disarticulated by </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">cracks</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in the environment to work with those cracks, rather than patching them up and returning to normal. Are things awkward for you? You don’t know how to proceed with work? You have existential questions with politics? If you feel that despair, you are not alone. Let’s gather here and instead of trying to run away and fix the problem, let’s move away from those solutionisms and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">stay with the trouble </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">with our dis/inquiry. Let’s do research which might be ecologically framed and culturally framed as katabasis. Going under and finding ways to go deep into the ground and honour ancestors, to listen beyond ourselves. We can call it individual or collective work, or human and non-human. But I just feel nothing is as isolated as we think it is. Sanctuary is making space for the world to exist.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC I feel civilisation has held us in a fixed grip for thousands of years, beyond even those centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and when you consider this and the fact that slavery still exists widely in the world, you ask yourself the bigger question: why have human beings been slaves, or commanded them, for so long?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA I’m very shy about responding to why questions! The standard official explanation for what happened over 400 years to black bodies is that it was due to (human) evil or wickedness. I understand the legacies of such responses, but it does not feel generative for me. It’s a conversation-stopper and doesn’t do anything except label people, and might perpetuate the dynamics of the slave ship that feels so horrific to the imagination. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But if we consider that things are</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> assemblages</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, acting upon other assemblages, suddenly there’s somewhere to go that does not necessarily terminate prematurely at a moral judgment. When I touch the assemblage of the transatlantic slave trade that features heavily in my work, if you look at the ingredients that made it possible – the Catholic enterprise of rationality that emerged from the Enlightenment, its ideologies and philosophies; sugar cane and its metabolism within human white European bodies; the climate that drove people away from chilly Europe to the sunny Caribbean – and how assembling the pieces together and noticing how those ingredients interacted together became the conditions for slavery, it might free us and liberate us in ways that go beyond just answering why.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It helps to ask: if sugar was an active non-human agent in the proliferation of that economy, that arrangement of master and slave, then what kind of moves can we make today to make sure that doesn’t happen? Then we talk beyond just active legislation, or healing people of their evil. We talk about meeting sugar cane, the idea that we are framed in unmasterable fields and forces that go beyond the liberal humanist project. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We need to create rituals of humility to know we are not masters of ourselves. Just framing it as something beyond us, without belittling accountability. Framing it as something that is more than human. That is what I am interested in as ‘postactivism’.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC It could be said that Dark Mountain was founded as a postactivist project, in that the art and writing it hosts is created by sitting with the trouble rather than fighting it. How do you define postactivism and how do you see it as a force within culture?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA It’s a pervasive myth that we are independent thinkers, that I think my thoughts, Charlotte thinks her thoughts, and that there are as many thoughts as there are people on the planet and that we all have our separate thoughts, that we act from some volitional force or agency that comes from within. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What escapes that analysis is that we are connected in very sticky ways. We actually think territorially, ecologically, we run, we hide, we look at people like us and we congregate together. And patterns and sticky formulas are at work that are occluded when we think of ourselves as individual activists. I bring that up because when we talk about activism today, it seems activism is colluding conspiratorially with the world it is trying to change. The way we tend to see it in the ‘developing world’, in the Global South, is that the very solutions passed down to us only deepen the problem we want to get rid of, so we tend to be stuck in a cycle of repeatability. The IMF comes down and says here is a structural readjustment programme, here is austerity, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">something to help your people,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> let’s buy laptops for African children, so they can learn. And the laptops come and introduce new problems of their own. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I read somewhere that the ‘West’ exports psychological and pathological categories. As a clinical psychologist I have gone into villages in Nigeria and been told: you are the expert, tell me what’s wrong with me. What they were in fact saying was that since I was trained in Western psychology, I was superior to them, and their own indigenous experiments with being and becoming were discardable. The solution of my discipline and my expertise was supposed to cancel out the problem. It was just an allopathic response that compressed the problems and left the sickness intact. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think activism is as materially complicit in the problems we are trying to solve, and as entangled as anything else. Postactivism is not a superior, spiritual way of responding. It is not saying </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">here is a stream of thinking and acting, a way of behaving that will guarantee you utopia or a place of arrival</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Postactivism is a democratising of responsivity. It’s saying we have been stuck on a highway of responding but there are other ways that are not tethered to this highway, where we can investigate and which might lead to another kind of transformation. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So postactivism is in alliance with a different theory of change. We have thought change is what humans do. We are burdened with the idea of change, and feel we need to change the world. Posthumanism comes into the picture and tells us humans are not central to the world, we have never been central to the world, we did not create the world. We are always immersed in a field of differential becomings, what Deleuze would call ‘transcendental materialism’. We are not stable things. We are diffracted, porous and transcorporeal. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Postactivism is based on posthumanism. It is my way of saying that change is not human, it is not our work. We can only ally and build stronger coalitions for change with the world around us (and not just with humans). Postactivism is the opening to this. It is about cracks and faultlines and fissures. It is like a hungry teenager, who asks: what can we do with this crack? How might this help us to build a partnership with this alien over there, in order to ask complex and new questions about the world we are in? It is not about solutions, though solutions are welcome. It is about wonder, building new alliances for becoming different. Touching the material body of activism and allowing it to shudder.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC You said at the beginning of your course you deliberately pivoted its enquiry not within the United States, but in Africa. What was the reasoning behind this?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA Empires colonise conversations about change. They capture conversations that might redeem it from what you call the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">holding station</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and then take these conversations and put them in the family way. Soon the ways we speak about decolonisation and racial justice, which might otherwise ring true for other people and cultures and lead to new sites of shared power, become about how do we appeal to the powers that be, or use certain languages or phrases to signal </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am woke</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, or </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">woke enough.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Soon, the nuances and complexities of navigating a difficult world are reduced to a few codes, a few linguistic choices, which Empire selects, and which others must adhere to in order to be righteous. So it becomes very territorial. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I am looking for conversations that are fugitive, that </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">escape</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, that grant themselves permission to do what they want to do, and do not look towards the plantation, saying can you allow me to be seen? The fugitive does not want to be seen. And America is the most visible trope. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As such, I did this decentring for me, and to let our brothers and sisters in America know that they are not central to the world. You are not carrying the burden of change, you don’t have to change us. The boundaries of America are not the boundaries of the world, you are just a small aspect of what is happening. That should be liberating. So I think I am being hospitable when I say it is not about you.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC What often happens regarding any conversation about race, or slavery or emancipation, is that it centres on the United States and thus limits our imagination and allows people to say in Europe, for example, well it didn’t happen here, it happened in the colonies. As a result we don’t get to look at this properly. So having the pivot of inquiry in Africa allows other kinds of knowing and awareness to happen. Which wouldn’t have happened within a North American frame – it would have become stuck in what you call the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ethical monoculture</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, a Christian duality of right and wrong.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA I don’t think the pivot is even in Africa. It’s off the coast of Africa, maybe somewhere off the Bight of Benin, in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s definitely in the waters, where things are rippling and diffracting. That’s the site of the course, where there is no land yet.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The kings in Africa also sold the slaves; we also sold our brothers and sisters into slavery. That is one part of the conversation we need to have – not that I am trying to create an equal culpability situation here. We are entangled in this as well.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC I sometimes find writers shy away from metaphysics or the work of transformation while those who are focused on consciousness work resist putting it into a creative or physical form, holding their knowing in a kind of abstract cloud. I feel everything needs to be spoken out loud, or danced, or cooked, earthed in some kind of way to be effective, to let these approaches become entangled as you say. Do you ever feel hemmed into a role of spiritual teacher?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA I think people use me, as you use the future or food or a pen. The people that I sometimes work with use me as a magical Negro (laughs) because of the way I appear and because of my experiences as a black person. There is often a sense of ‘just listen to what Bayo says’ which could be patronising. I don’t want to be trapped there, into being a spiritual guru. I like to have a conversation, pose questions of my own. This is not a transmission from some ancestor, or angel, or alien, but a diffracted meeting of each other in the middle. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We are all on this slave ship. You might be on the upper deck but we are all in this holding station that pegs our bodies in place. The gift of this paradigm of diffraction, or this idea that things lose their edges, this relational ontology, is that it allows us to meet each other. As I said earlier, activism can become very industrial. The way we think about transformation is very categorical. You are an artist, you do artist stuff; you are a dancer, you dance into oblivion; you write about this and that, and it becomes an industry in itself, and modernity is quite happy with that. It’s not scandalised about you doing your work.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC Mostly, it doesn't take any notice of it, Bayo!</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA It doesn’t care, so long as you stay in your place. What scandalises modernity is when things </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">spill</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. And facilitating spillage is good work. Diffraction allows me to read myth, through quantum dynamics, through performativity. When we see things through each other, that is when the new has a chance to emerge. So that is what we need to learn today, to become citizens of diffraction, to become fugitives.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">CDC One aspect of the sanctuary which really grabbed me is that the site of transformation is where the real power is, where the change can happen, rather than dominating forces of civilisation which activism is always trying to defuse or stop or take over from. It explained to me why writers have always had a very bad deal, because they bring that to the fore, that change is always possible in any moment, the fact you can change, or that you are porous, or that something can come out of nothing, or that the immanent god you spoke of is always becoming, is always creating within us. Which is why writers are silenced and flung into gaol, because they are trying to stop that change from disrupting the fixed control of Empire.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">BA In this quest to be seen, to be noticed, which in the Deleuzio-Guattarian literature might be indexed as the politics of recognition, can be found a different power that isn’t tethered to being seen. There is historical precedent for this. When the slaves were crammed into a tight space, they tried to escape. There are accounts of their efforts to take over the ship and wrest power away from the captain, but the ships themselves were designed to keep them at bay; certain structures would demarcate where the non-citizens were, and those who needed rehabilitation and those who were embodiments of purity. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The slave ship worked against them. It’s almost as if their efforts to escape only enforced the trade, it made it stronger, because the slavers could get together and say, ‘why don’t we make the space smaller, dehumanise them further?’ To keep their property busy and sellable, they even invented practices like ‘dancing the slave’. The slavers did this both for entertainment and to keep these appropriated bodies economically viable.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The beautiful tradition of</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> capoeira</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, the dance encoded with martial arts, which is famous in Brazil, could not have happened without the boot of the oppressor on the necks of the slave. The limbo dance is the slave trying to navigate the structure of the slave ship. And I can give many more examples of how oppression became the alchemy for transformation. How disarticulated bodies became portals for other ways of being: in dance, music, rituals, ways of interacting with the world, religions, spiritual systems. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is why the elders said </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Èṣù</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the trickster, travelled with them. The trickster works in places you do not expect generativity. You expect death and dismal silence, but there life springs. So to go back to our original conversation about death and dying, modernity has framed death and dying as eternal silence. But through the eyes of the glitch, the eyes of the trickster, death is an invitation, a lively vocation to recreate, reformulate and use our porous skins, our disarticulated bodies, to become different.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXqyKIftjLuW8pnKadRjV124QpfZVB3dfnKsv5mlTIsgdyqkfiEntLOlafJltBWFTS7qA20GDso1Io5yePx4VVIly5stKbQPWMcUuUIJ3LmZ_nduBG_uttJZKUzfR5Fru0s-CN5GlcwrE/s1024/DM19_front_cover-669x1024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><b><img border="0" data-original-height="1024" data-original-width="669" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaXqyKIftjLuW8pnKadRjV124QpfZVB3dfnKsv5mlTIsgdyqkfiEntLOlafJltBWFTS7qA20GDso1Io5yePx4VVIly5stKbQPWMcUuUIJ3LmZ_nduBG_uttJZKUzfR5Fru0s-CN5GlcwrE/w131-h200/DM19_front_cover-669x1024.jpg" width="131" /></b></a></div><b>Bayo Akomolafe is one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming <a href="https://borrowed-time.info/keynote-bayo-akomolafe/">Borrowed Time summit</a> on death, dying and change, hosted by art.earth on 31st October 2021</b><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"></p><div style="text-align: left;"><b style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Dark Mountain: Issue 19 </i>is available from the online shop<a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/"> here</a></b></div><p></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></span></p><div><br /></div></span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-69117000095384875732021-06-27T11:46:00.004+01:002021-06-27T11:50:14.886+01:00Relearning the Language of a Lost World<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEovW17jIqjXqy0IbyeCbmmKJOgk7vhJ8zFTaXZAr5BfzTXClH7b4Sr4ApFHffT4rAtpRDMXQOgnfyv0IwjO2xCGW4iptX8bhX5dtUq1t2AHhq4QTxcsoQVNqoE4Lo9bf4hDNlxe27dxlX/s1000/MM_Sentience_2010.jpg" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><img alt="" border="0" data-original-height="1000" data-original-width="1000" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEovW17jIqjXqy0IbyeCbmmKJOgk7vhJ8zFTaXZAr5BfzTXClH7b4Sr4ApFHffT4rAtpRDMXQOgnfyv0IwjO2xCGW4iptX8bhX5dtUq1t2AHhq4QTxcsoQVNqoE4Lo9bf4hDNlxe27dxlX/s400/MM_Sentience_2010.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Sentience' by Meryl McMaster (from Issue 16 - REFUGE)<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><i>
This is an <a href="https://www.noemamag.com/relearning-the-language-of-a-lost-world/">article I wrote for Noema magazine </a>in the spring. It forms the basis of <a href="https://www.dartington.org/event/when-the-mountain-speaks-with-us/">a new online course</a> I am running with fellow Dark Mountaineers this September, to explore how we may reweave our place back into the fabric of a sentient Earth. Do join us!</i><div><br /></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-f63f8a53-7fff-66df-9a7d-240eabd3a9bf"><h3 style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Lexicon</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Last May, as the first lockdown came, I found myself taking part in an </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=536021320606694&ref=watch_permalink" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">online discussion</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> about a theatre production called </span><a href="http://www.complicite.org/productions/TheEncounter" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Encounter</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Simon McBurney and the Complicit</span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: IvarText-Regular;">é</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> company. Inspired by the book </span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Amazon Beaming</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> by Petru Popescu, the one-man performance follows the real-life track of Loren McIntyre, a National Geographic photographer, who becomes </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">lost in the Brazilian rainforest while searching for the Mayoruna people.</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The encounter plunges him into another world, in which he has to navigate with a different consciousness, as the tribe retreat deep into the forest to escape its destruction.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On the panel the indigenous filmmaker </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5i0tHR6EFU" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Takumã Kuikuro</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of having</span><span style="color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> to adopt ‘two minds’, a double consciousness, to both maintain his own culture, and deal with the modern world that was encroaching on his people’s way of life. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 12pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We need to do this the other way round, I responded. We need to develop a consciousness to re-entangle ourselves in the sentient Earth, as McIntyre was challenged to do in the forest. Because it feels the only way we can deal with the devastation our civilisation continues to wreak is to radically change how we perceive the natural world and our place within it.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But how do we go about this? Is it even possible? Can we like the Mayoruna find a ritual that enables us to start again?</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the 1990s, I went on a journey, like thousands of other seekers, in search of another language. I went to South America, whose culture was still threaded with hawks and flowers and wild rivers, unlike the urban, alienated tongue of my native Britain. It was there I realised I was not in another country to find a more Earth-based story to live by but to deconstruct one I had unknowingly inherited. And it wasn’t a journey that took me to a place of clarity and understanding I could carry home in a suitcase. It took me off track entirely. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I never went back to my fashionable city life. The travelling was the beginning of another kind of return altogether.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">* </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In his ground-breaking work, </span><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/iain_mcgilchrist_the_divided_brain" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Master and His Emissary’</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist explores the very different kinds of perception orchestrated by the two hemispheres of the brain. The attention of the left focuses on detail, the right perceives the whole picture. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The left hemisphere deals with the abstract and prefers mechanisms to living things, where the right hemisphere has a more flexible and immediate relationship with the physical world. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To see the complexity of the Earth, to make complex, consensus decisions means you need to use the focus of the left hemisphere in tandem with the wide-ranging implications perceived by the right.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Without this working relationship, the untempered unconscious forces within ourselves and our societies run amok. We think we make rational fair decisions, even though it has been proved, particularly in the case of governance, that we are swayed by our unconscious feelings, embedded in and frequently manipulated by the dominating belief system.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">McGilchrist argues that, despite its inferior grasp of reality, the left hemisphere is increasingly taking precedence in the modern world, with perilous consequences. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, to become entangled in the world, to regain kinship, our place on the planet, requires a deliberate engagement with the consciousness of the right hemisphere.</span></span></p><h3 style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <br /></span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The map is not the territory</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It is commonly assumed that our connection to the wild world, as Takum</span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #030303; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ã</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and his people have kept theirs, has been lost and is not possible to regain. However, this is not true. It has just been forgotten and lies deep buried within us. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Every person is born with archaic intelligence embedded in their bones. Though our minds are distracted by numbers, algorithms, facts and data, still our physical beings, stepping into a rainforest, or a mountain path, recognise instinctively these patterns of fur and feather, stone and leaf. We see the moving shapes of clouds and rivers, but we just don’t remember how to communicate with each other about what we experience. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I went to the deserts of the Americas to remember the ancestral language of belonging and obligation my own culture had tried to erase centuries ago. I investigated the lexicon of plants and the territories of dreams in practices that followed those travels. The encounters with the physical planet and investigation into its language was the key that opened the door.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The main challenge in learning the lexicon of the right hemisphere is ironically the words themselves. The word is god in our left-hemisphere dominated world: treaties, laws, religions of the book, are all constructed of words. If we say something, or write it down, we think it is as good as done in reality, even though our actions and feelings do not match what has been said. The left hemisphere loves to capture and control the world in linear and grandiose language, naming and categorising everything it sees and putting it to use. So even approaching the nonhuman world, by labelling it ‘nonhuman’, you put it into a category of things you can own, like placing a shamanic drum in the glass case of a museum, rather than playing it and travelling to the Otherworlds.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">To re engage with the world as kin requires an entirely different approach. It is no good shouting English (or Latin) words at the nonhuman world if you want to hold a dialogue. You have to learn a whole set of skills that have nothing to do with your education. You have to use your whole body and slow down to the pace of your heart. Most of all you have to learn to stop talking in your head, and </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">listen</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Let that being in a dream, that flower, come to you and reveal its nature. Humbleness is required, not knowing is required, a shift of attention is required. You are no longer commandeering the world like Alexander, describing, analysing, and putting everything into a spreadsheet. Quite often, you are not going to like what you feel. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Corporations now ransack the Amazon in search of cures for cancer and other diseases of the modern world, individuals travel seeking heal the traumas behind their addiction and depression, but the </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">vegetalistas</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, those who work with plants, go to the forest to remain in harmony and communication with it. It is an ongoing relationship they maintain with ritual and story and song. If you ask them: where do you get your knowledge from? They will tell you the plants told them, the animals came, a spirit arrived in a dream.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So, from your own dreams you learn, slowly, that animals speak by their presence, the way they move within a landscape, in relationship. You learn you have affinity with some more than others - birds, whales, snakes - how you feel when you are with them. You learn that plants reveal their intelligence in elegantly framed storyboards and koans. Some are more ‘talkative’ than others. After the practice, you do what human beings have done for aeons in response to this conversation: you sing, dance, paint, find words. You forge a lexicon to remember and share with the world,</span><span style="color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a bridge that spans between the dimensions of the human, animal and plant kingdoms.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="color: #222222; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But you also go to meet something else.</span></span></p><h3 style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <br /></span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Here Be Dragons</span></span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In 1969, an anthropology student called Michael Harner began to work with the Conibo tribe in the Peruvian Amazon. To understand us, he was told, you have to take the plant hallucinogen</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> ayahuasca. </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In the </span><a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-way-of-the-shaman-michael-harner?variant=32123113472034&country=Fiji" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">book that was to remind the modern world</span></a><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> of the pan-global practice of shamanism, he writes of his first encounter with the ‘vine of death’ where giant reptilian creatures spoke with him from the depths of the back of his brain. The creatures showed him the planet before there was any life and how they came to Earth from the sky to escape their enemy.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘The creatures then showed me how they had created life on the planet in order to hide within the multitudinous forms and thus disguise their presence. Before me, the magnificence of plant and animal creation and speciation - hundreds of millions of years of activity - took place on a scale and with a vividness impossible to describe. I learned that the dragon-like creatures were thus inside all forms of life, including man. They were the true masters of humanity and the entire planet, they told me. We humans were but the receptacles and servants of these creatures. For this reason they could speak to me from within myself.’ </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘We are in charge’, they told him, at which Harner relates, everything that was human inside of him rebelled. Afterwards, he tells a wise elder about his experience: ‘They always say that,’ the shaman said.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In a time of colonial reckoning, where movements such as #MeToo and Black Lives Matter challenge the exploitation of human bodies, the urge to re-indigenise ourselves and reconnect with the natural world becomes stronger.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In many ways, the geography we find ourselves in dictates what we have to deal with in order to find this re-entanglement. Each country brings its own challenges. In the New World, indigenous cultures still exist but a reconnection to the land by its settlers brings a heavy historical karma to bear. The Native American myths embedded in the land are not easily understood, and to engage with the mythos of their own motherlands means facing the conditions that forced their or their ancestors’ original emigration.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Europe, the links to a land-connected indigenous culture are buried in deep time, their myths turned into children’s tales, or a fanciful spirituality. The wild places are severely compromised by industrialisation and feudal property laws. A kind of amnesia prevails.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Either way the gate that bars most modern industrialised people from access to the nonhuman realms, has to be broken open: whether by encounter, by plant medicine, or </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatromantis" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">iatromantic</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> practice. Our ordinary night dreams can be allies in this rediscovery, but only so long as we understand they are communications from the right hemisphere, part of the world’s dreaming, and not a psychological problem to be sorted by modern medicine.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you embark on a journey of return, you realise that individual work is only relevant if it takes place within the collective realm. No matter how revolutionary or forward thinking a social movement can be, it will always be at the mercy of the unconscious forces of the collective within which it operates unless it develops a protocol for dealing with them. The dragons are always in the room. The modern group practice of </span><a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/27/Staying-with-the-TroubleMaking-Kin-in-the" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">‘staying with the trouble’</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> gives the right hemisphere time and attention to voice what is left out of any left-hemisphere conversation, but only if the individuals taking part have undertaken their own inquiry. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">When you work with dreams, you realise no one cares about your righteous thoughts and opinions. Immersed in a kind of violent detective drama, you are always fugitive. To withstand and not be at the mercy of a dream’s force fields you need to learn fast that the ‘language’ these places speak is physical and energetic. What matters is not what you </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">think</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> but how you</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> act</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">: how you move out of stuck places, how you refuse to take an inferior position, how you stand up to the monsters advancing towards you. The act of opening your mouth and voicing out loud your feelings is what liberates you from their dominion. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the dualist narrative in which most of our lives are held, one side has always to be the victor and the other defeated. But in the world of consciousness, where nothing is black and white, the monster, the dragon, is also the seat of your energetic power and all of your creativity. A treasure they famously guard with fire and claw.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Trapped in a hostile story of civilisation, we are always conquering monsters when we need to be standing up to them and learning at the entrance of their caves. The ancient myths tell us about the travails of the Underworld, the fairy stories of initiations in the deep forest. All these tales bequeath ‘technologies’ for dealing with these challenging encounters on an individual basis, in order we return and hold that knowledge and experience within the wider world.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this is not an easy task. The terror that most people feel when opening up to let the ‘nonhuman’ in - the wild world, the mythos, the microbial universes within their own bodies - is the terror constructed by the left hemisphere, so it can maintain control. The dragons rule absolutely in patriarchal monotheistic civilisations, where the human heart and creaturehood exist only to acquiesce to their command. Any step out of line is met with playground bullying and humiliation. You only have to see how the right-wing press and politicians howl with derision at any mention of ‘woke’ culture, so we do not look at the cruelty and extortions of empires, to know how any shift towards a recognition of interdependence is met, both within the self and outside it.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But this does not mean that people are not waking up to the historical injustices meted out to the ‘savages’ of civilisation. This does not mean that people are not defending the creatures or the forests. It does not mean that the more-than-human world is not an ally in any kind of move by human beings towards regeneration.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But at some point, you realise that when you </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">say</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> human beings are not central to life, it means you have to radically reconfigure your position within it beyond words. Not by taking the human out of the picture, but by becoming the kind of human being who is kin with nature, who can speak both the language of a falling Empire and the language of the wild, mythic world it is forever trying to keep in bondage. We have, like Harner over a half a century ago, to stand up to the authoritarian rulers inside us. Loosen our shackles and declare our emancipation.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Entering the sanctuary</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">At the end of 2020, as countries continued to be ravaged by a pandemic, 800 people tuned into a broadcast by the philosopher and teacher, Bayo Akomolafe.</span><a href="https://course.bayoakomolafe.net/" style="text-decoration-line: none;"><span style="color: black; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="color: #1155cc; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; text-decoration-line: underline; text-decoration-skip-ink: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The online course held over three months was</span></a><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in order to ‘make sanctuary together.’ Sanctuary is defined in this context as a space people escape to from the ‘plantation’ of civilisation, where we can discover the ‘technologies of fugitivity.’ A place where we can meet the world differently and re-entangle our bodies and imaginations within a shifting biome.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Akomolafe uses the story of the transatlantic slave trade, as well as the Yoruba mythic trickster Èṣù, to help us navigate this territory. In doing so, he brings us face to face with our own colonial past and takes us beyond the modern tale of confusion and fragmentation. In a sense, to find out why we are so lost is to understand that the time of fall is also the journey into a collective shadow, and that the myths of indigenous people – those of our own native lands and those of the countries once held under colonial rule - are the ships we need to cross what seems like an unnavigable ocean.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; padding: 12pt 0pt 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Encounter </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: #111111; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">the protagonist crucially loses both his watch and his way. This vulnerability and loss of control over time and space allowed him to meet the forest tribe and witness their ritual return, the burning of their material possessions, everything they have known and loved, in order to start again.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like Takum</span><span style="background-color: #f9f9f9; color: #030303; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">ã</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">’s people who have had to learn the ways of the modernist world in order to survive it, we too have to learn another language in order to negotiate our hollowed world and remake a place for ourselves within the living web of Earth. But this way means we have, like the tribe, to begin again and let go of what we have held on to. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.656; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Becoming fugitive means losing the story of our place in the plantation, losing our form in a world of hierarchy where form is what counts. This we do not want to do, because we lose what we have worked hard for, we lose status and comfort. But we gain in another way: we gain our own agency and meaning for being here. We gain kinship with the beasts. We gain the ‘kingdom’ of the fairy stories and bring back treasure from the Underworld. And we advance towards the unknown, come what may, because somewhere deep inside us we know, that no amount of worldly prestige or riches can ever match the experience of knowing our true worth as a creature among our fellows on this all-communicating Earth. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><div><span face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size: 13pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span></div>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-20049376860220930022021-04-20T08:00:00.009+01:002021-04-28T14:40:34.917+01:00Temescal<span id="docs-internal-guid-901dadaf-7fff-7d57-0cbd-817d6e6823c0"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt1cr3egucmtXyUtsKz6eXFPMXK_jgztoqsHVwWjXkXT8w-hOv6ecfMi2zms-oEfArvWSvNd9u0VECPgLax0OHsDwG2R54EST-XF5IYLm4AhANb6pDQzhXDu4jV82DZTUiwiteIhOQQk8Q/s1859/ILLY_Dan_Porter_Barrow.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1859" data-original-width="1328" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgt1cr3egucmtXyUtsKz6eXFPMXK_jgztoqsHVwWjXkXT8w-hOv6ecfMi2zms-oEfArvWSvNd9u0VECPgLax0OHsDwG2R54EST-XF5IYLm4AhANb6pDQzhXDu4jV82DZTUiwiteIhOQQk8Q/w286-h400/ILLY_Dan_Porter_Barrow.jpg" title="Barrow by Dan Porter" width="286" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Barrow by Dan Porter (Dark Mountain: Issue 19<br /><br /></td></tr></tbody></table><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>For the last six months I've been working as art editor and producer of the just-published<a href="https://dark-mountain.net/announcing-our-new-spring-journal-dark-mountain-issue-19/"> </a></i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/announcing-our-new-spring-journal-dark-mountain-issue-19/">Dark Mountain: Issue 19</a>. <i>I also contributed two pieces: an interview with philosopher and teacher Bayo Akomolafe and this extract from my new book </i>After Ithaca<i>, a collection of essays and memoir about mythos and cultural change that revolves around the four Underworld tasks of Psyche. </i></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></p></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">‘Only bitter fare here, my dear,’ said Mimi, handing us cups of creosote tea, as we climbed up the mud steps from the temescal. It was 11th November, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">la luna de los muertos</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">, and we are in the borderlands between Arizona and Mexico. Francisco Ozuna, </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;">curandero,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline;"> has built a temescal in the back of Mimi’s ranch, and today will lead a vigil through the night. We will make an invisible bridge between the dead and the living, he tells us, and bring ‘the powers of wisdom hidden in the dust’ to the surface.</span></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Francisco had worked for several days on creating the small underground sweat lodge, shovelling red earth and constructing a roof and steps from mud and stones. That afternoon we had gone to the creek and gathered </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">palos muertos,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> wind-dried stalks of hackberry, black walnut and agave, and curly mesquite wood from the desert for the fire. On the two flanking earth mounds were set huge bunches of marigolds Francisco found abandoned on the highway – the fire-coloured flowers offered on the Day of the Dead that grow abundantly in Mexico after the late monsoon rains. Then we drew a circle of ash and amaranth seeds around the temescal and the central fire. When evening came and the people gathered the ceremony began: the flat river stones were heated in the fire, then hauled out, brushed with juniper branches and carried into the chamber on a big spade. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">Inside, the small space is exciting. The desert night is cold but under the earth where we've taken the hot stones, naked under moon- and starlight, the heat embraces you. The tea is bitter in your mouth, the osha root is sweet. We are silent and then sing and howl and chant until our bones shake. Afterwards we throw buckets of cold rainwater over each other and dance round the fire. Francisco chants all night. Mark sings beside him.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">Modern people don't observe the dead: we shunt them aside with awkward funerals, and this ancestral doorway of the year, once observed throughout the archaic world, has become a children's party game. But indigenous people (Francisco is part-Apache, part-Yaqui) know the dead are part of the Earth. Once mourned properly they can assist the living, rather than hinder them as forgotten shades.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Mexico, across the border, there is a tradition of honouring the dead. People go to visit the cemeteries with candles and cakes and sing songs and write the dead messages at this time. But on the American side of the border things are very different. In the town there are very silent groups who come to collect the dead from the mortuary where the ravens gather and cackle on the roof. From our apartment opposite, we sometimes see coffins being delivered from the trucks. There doesn’t seem to be much singing and dancing going on. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The marigolds’ name in Nauhatl is</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> cempoalxochitl,</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and their vibrant colour represents the sun, which guides the dead on their way to the Underworld. The strong scent of the flowers attracts the spirits when they return to visit their families, helping them to find their way. Osha or bear root is traditionally used in Native American sweat lodges to purify the air as well the body. A bear medicine from the mountains, the root assists a shift into dreaming and connection with the ancestors.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I will remember this night, long after the story of why I was in this high desert fades. Rituals can burn into the memory like fire, open up a portal, so that your ears keep the sounds of a man digging the red soil with a shovel, the sensation in your feet as you climb down the oozy steps and change places with a tarantula, the feel of the fresh night air when you emerge. There had been hard invisible difficulties between us all leading up to the ceremony but when evening came what remains is Francisco laughing as I led everyone in a dance around the fire when things got a bit grim, how our car sloshed through vast rain puddles as we brought breakfast for those who had made the night-time vigil, and that we buried the ashes of a friend of Mimi’s who had been sitting on her bookshelf for a very long time.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t remember it as a bitter time.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Crow lineage</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘There is a crow who sits on my shoulder,’ said my lawyer father. ‘It is my conscience.’ And then he stared at his shoes in despair. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When he died, the crow came to me. You have to tell me everything, I said. About conscience.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The crow sat in the corner of my room in the travelling years when I lived on the edge of small towns in Europe and America. Silently, he observed me write my notebooks. And sometimes I would ask him a question. And he would put his head on one side and peer into the mysterious darkness of the void and declare what great law of conscience he located there.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You have to deal with the files with your name on, he said, and leave the rest.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we embarked on the dreaming practice in Australia, it was as if all those files had blown open and everything that had been buried from our dark houses and histories came to be redressed: animals faced me in the slaughterhouses, children with metal teeth attacked me, friends and lovers lurched out of the shadows, seeking reparation. It would have been good to sit around a table and come to an understanding, but we soon found dreaming doesn’t work like that. Words and good intentions mean nothing, moves are all that matter.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">After our long dialogues, Mark and I would go out into the backcountry, or down by the sea and watch the dolphins leap in the waves. Here now in the desert, we sit on the roof and watch the sun come up over black mountains, walk the creeks and arroyos, go with Mimi into the canyons, into the wild scrub as the day’s heat fades. We are learning the names and the meaning of the flowers in these dry lands, the tough, the spiny and beautiful, the bitter leaves and sweet-tasting roots of ceremony that help us face the journey. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The ritual of the temescal is there to burn out the dross you hold and cede it to the fire as fuel and then as ash to the ground. Ghosts can cling to you, the dead that have not been mourned. Some of these phantoms are yours and some are not. Some are parts of you and your lineage that need to die in order for the new to flourish. To mourn and bury the dead, so that they can feed the living and not haunt the Earth. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Only the elements of this Earth can transform these invisible bonds; only if you are connected to this Earth can you undergo that process and walk that path. Most would rather do the ritual without the suffering and endurance that it demands. For a long time, I did not realise why we were so assailed by ghosts and dreams of the past; then I realised I was in the place the ancient world knew as the Underworld, and it was not the stories or rituals of native America that would help me navigate it, but a memory of that book with a pink and green cover: </span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Legends of Greece and Rome. </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I needed a different lexicon to</span><span style="font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">see and map its mythic territory.</span></span></p><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Door of Hades</span></span></h3><span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">You go into the Underworld because the god in you lives in the darkness. To fulfil what some call destiny, the deliberate journey you make on this Earth, you have to go where no one wants to go.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Once it was understood that human beings were incomplete unless they took a transformative journey in this place. It was a pact you made with time, with the gods, with the Earth, with the ancestors. In Europe these soul journeys once had collective maps but these were burned, the names of the territories were erased, the entrances to the initiatory caves filled with stones. And yet the people still had the desire to go deep and abilities within them to do this work. We were still being born.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The way into the Underworld is the path we are most loath to take. Because it demands you go backwards, into the past, against the flow, widdershins, into faery, into the moon, into the Other, into denial, into terror, into the void. Into yourself. And not the self you know, the one you don’t, the one you don’t want to know and have always pushed away, tried to hide and not invite to the Upperworld party.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As we sat with the dreaming practice, we were faced with the refuse heaps of our own lives, our families’ lives, our tribal lives, humanity’s lives, thousands of them, heaped like so many piles of ashes and broken cars, rooted by red-necked vultures and savage dogs, through corridors of forgotten files, managed by a clerk who has never seen the light of day and a concierge who bears you a grudge you do not understand. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Transformation of consciousness is the hard work of the Underworld. What you transform is the dark stuff, what is known as the shadow: everything civilisations keep throwing outside the city gates, hoping time will help it decay and disappear. Except it never does. Its poison seeps into the sewers of every settlement, into the minds of the powerful, into the terrors of the night.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Releasing the shadow means going through this rubbish heap, through the files the crow brings to your attention – not all of them but those with your name on – remembering what happened, making sense of it all, seeing the pattern, crying the tears of the forgotten, holding the hand of the terrified, of the lonely, the lost, it means shouting at zombies, at ghosts, being raped by Hades, mourned by Demeter. It means feeling the nightmares that woke you as a child and to keep feeling them until you stop shaking, until the dawn comes, until you are no longer afraid. It means finding a way in and out of the Underworld, because no amount of evangelising or prayer or good intention will wipe our human shadow away. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The shadow exists because no one has been a human being yet; not you, not me, not the man in the rainforest nor the priestess at Delphi. We have all been kind for a day. But living fully as human beings alive together with all our relations, the trees, the fish, the barbarians, the dead? </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We have not done that yet. </span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Psyche and the map of stones</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The love story of Psyche and Eros lies at the heart of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Golden Ass. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And inside the metamorphic tale, like the final Russian doll inside its layers, you find the four initiatory tasks that Psyche is set by Eros’s mother, the goddess Venus.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> For her final challenge, Venus hands Psyche a box and instructs her to humbly ask Persephone Queen of the Dead for some beauty ointment, and to bring it back to her. Whatever you do, she is told, do not open the box. Psyche, as always, despairs, thinking that her own death is the only way to enter Hades. She climbs a hill intending to throw herself from the summit but a tower of stones speaks to her. He gives her specific instructions for entering and returning from the realm of the dead.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On your return you will be faced with three distractions, he tells her: an old man with a limp, another who clings to the boat, a woman who sits spinning by the shore. They all want your help. Keep silent and do not give it to them. And the tower then tells her where to find the entrance to Hades at the cape of </span><span style="color: #202122; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Taenarum in Mani.</span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The territory of the underworld is well mapped by the ancient world, its rivers and lakes and fields. Poets have famously described it and what they saw on their guided journeys. But the Underworld is not a fictional place you can play with in your mind, it is a geography that exists alongside the waking one and you have to approach it with steely caution and a cartographic eye. You can fall into katabasis by accident, your mouth full of ashes instead of obols. Shades cling to your boat as you cross. You have already forgotten the stones’ instruction. Or you don’t know where to start. For aeons seekers have sought knowing in the place of unknowing, a place where you spend half your life in darkness, your dreams. So I began looking for the entrance to Hades in my dreams. It did not take me long.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Charon</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we returned to Britain from Australia, my dreams had shifted their focus, some of them sparked by visits I made as we were searching for places to live in Oxford: woods, public talks, old buildings. One night in a hotel room, I dreamed that Britain was covered in a greenish glow that was called the seal light. It was like a collective miasma that hung around the edges of the islands. Then a dark ancestral being who was in charge of the burial mounds of England told me about ‘proper burial’. Things need to be buried at the proper depth, he told me, to be returned to the earth. Proper burial requires returning everything to its natural place and not keeping anything or anyone stuck in some personal memory locker. This keeping of essences stuck in a place or time was creating ghosts. This included our own. The seal light was making the whole land sicken. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometimes it felt, as we walked out in search of a home, as if the country itself, obsessed by its own history, was some kind of burial ground in need of a ritual return.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">One winter’s night in Oxford I dreamed I was at a suburban railway station. The conductor is a black man who says, ‘I don’t care whether you come on this train horizontally or vertically, this train is only going to NIMROD.’ The train is like the ‘A’ train to Brooklyn. I see people returning from Nimrod. All the seats in the carriages are ripped up, very few people have come back. They are all tattered and bashed up, fragments of people. I realise the train had gone beyond Nimrod into someplace else.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I am trying to cross the border and get to Mexico but am waylaid on the platform by a host of gay men. One is carrying a woman’s dress. He winks at me and says, ‘I’ve been to Nimrod and been a woman’. I have lost my passport and am late for my connection. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the second part of the dream I am running with a band of people, following a shallow watercourse that flows down a corridor. At the end of the corridor is a little room and the sea lying beyond a window. The room is full of sand and I can’t get to the sea. It is in a 1930s building with a slightly abandoned feeling.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I have this dream after going to a lecture given by a Native American from the Ojibwe nation from the eastern seaboard of the United States. It’s a strange meeting, held in the Quaker House in the middle of Oxford. Like many Native Americans the speaker has a look of supreme endurance on his face, as he surveys the timid English crowd in anoraks. One drop of pure water can clean a whole swimming pool of darkness, he declares, and holds up some plants – white sage and osha root which would assist us in overcoming the world of suffering. Someone asks in a small voice about reincarnation.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">His stern face relaxes at the point and he laughs: ‘We call it recycling,’ he says. ‘We’re not going to be recycled, we’re going home.’ And then he throws his head back and sings a chant that shakes the foundations of the well-behaved church rooms.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘What am I doing here?’ I say irritably to Mark in the practice. I feel I am wasting my time with these corridor and train people. I would rather be going to Mexico and meeting the ancestors. ‘You can only recycle paper so many times before it turns into fragments,’ I say. ‘Before it falls apart’.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">And we stared at each other in horror.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nimrod is the mythical emperor who built the Tower of Babel. His astrological tower was destroyed by the sky god Jehovah, along with his people’s ability to communicate with each other. Up until then everyone on Earth spoke the same language. All Nimrod’s people dispersed across the globe because they no longer spoke the same language and could no longer collaborate with one another. Everything fragmented. The Babylonian mystery tradition that begins with this mythical figure, half man, half dragon, underpins many of the dualist religions that concern themselves with punishment in an afterlife hell.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At first in these dreaming practice years, I thought I needed to save people who were stuck in the Underworld until I realised that my actions never saved anyone. I just became waylaid, trapped in the small locked rooms of abandoned houses. I was stuck in other people’s stories about their past, other people’s secrets, other people’s houses, other people’s hells, when I needed to move out of these places. I had many dreams of rescuing soldiers stuck in time, caught on the wire, visiting hospitals, going into prisons, all sorts of grim places in history. I met people who were stuck at eternally repeating dinner parties because of their shame. Dead mentors would come and tell me to instruct the living to let them go. Dead children would ask their mothers not to weep for them anymore. And sometimes I would tell the living these things. But no one listened.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the Underworld years, I saw dead mothers who were trapped in photographs. I met men who wore dead men’s coats to borrow their power. I saw people hang on to their dead because they wanted the pity of others, because they could not stop raging, because they were full of guilt. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">But like everything else in the Underworld this was about learning discrimination. You cannot be a go-between at the behest of the dead if you want to go home. At some point you realise that no one, dead or alive, is helping you leave. You have to get out yourself. Where everyone goes after life is a mystery. But one thing was clear, where you did not want to be heading was Nimrod and the great recycling depot. </span></span></p></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Realm of ashes</span></span></h3><span><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sleeping in my mother's old studio in London under the eaves in an attic room years before the practice, I dreamed about crossing the line of death. Mark and I covered our faces in ashes and tricked the border guards. As we crossed I fell into the ocean and the great crab mother embraced me in her giant claws, a huge embrace of love, and then she let me go. As I flew into the air I saw a line of people floating towards a spiralling tunnel of light and then elsewhere a blue square surrounded by gold high in the sky. I knew that was where I was going. So I went.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I found myself in a place where everyone understood each other without speaking. We worked together in small groups of four creating extraordinary things. It was a place of beauty and abundance; we lived in straw houses on a flowering hillside that reminded me of a valley we used to visit in Ecuador in our travelling days. The difference was that unlike my earthly life there was great joy and harmony between the other beings and myself. We were in complete telepathic communication with each other. Why did I leave? I left because I went to an interdimensional place like a silvery lake and met a Mexican seer on its pale sandy shore, who told me about time and about the place of time called Earth. I was so excited you could measure yourself in terms of time, I said: I want to go there. And so I did.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You come because of your great desire. You come because you are curious. You come because of the challenges, because of the experience and the exchanges and the beings you will meet here. You come for all sorts of reasons that only in your soul’s language you will understand. Some of these reasons are to be found in dreams. But you only find these clues if you don’t get stuck in the realms of suffering. The dimension of the Earth is not difficult because it is physical but because of a human limbo realm, the world of shades, that seals it in a greenish glow and makes it hard for us to leave. There are myriad stuck places, astral realms, underground stations, full of beings who have spent their lives conducting the big bands of the Underworld, impresarios of side-shows, the sweepers of the corridors. Hordes of people that are kept in limbo in these underworld cities that enmesh you in their intrigues. But if you want to get out of the wheel of karma, out of the zone of fragments, you have to be smart and not get waylaid.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">If you start helping in the Underworld it means you are not doing your own proper burial. Proper burial means you have to bury your mother with honour, you have to atone for your father’s sins. You have to bury your former life at the proper depth, give up the illusions held by your righteous ego. You have to shed your snakeskins, and collect all the fragments of yourself jettisoned in the realms of time. And then when you have finished your tasks, you have to dance, be light, merry, be in life. You can never really talk to the dead in these places because the dead do not listen. They do not care for you. What I wanted to do was speak with the ancestors who know how to be whole, I didn’t want to live like a ghost, a fragment, a zombie with a seal light around me. I wanted to go home.</span></span></p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt; text-align: left;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-weight: 700; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The kist</span></span></h3><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the town we wait in the hot afternoons in our apartment, naked, watching the muslin curtain billow in and out in the desert wind. Everything grows quiet at these times. In these intense temperatures, you grow to love the water, climb long distances over rocks to find hidden waterfalls, swim in the mountain pools with little garter snakes, wake early at sunrise to visit the cool canyons full of morning glory and cardinal flowers. It is a state of expectancy you savour, never knowing what might demand your sudden attention, except that when it does, you recognise the moment.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the desert hotel the Queen of the Night lived in a pot and grew long arms that spread over the painted floorboards of Carmen’s room. On the night of her blooming Greta, Mark and I met and lit small candles there, beneath her six great flower heads, and held three of them in our laps, inhaling the immense fragrance. We talked about flowers. Greta was a herbalist and sometimes stayed downstairs in Peter’s studio where we had met her one day as she was hacking up ocotillo roots. Mostly however we sat in silence. The windows of the hotel room were covered in wire, so no moths could come and visit the plant. But the Queen had other visitors: her fragrance wafted all the way down the dark corridor and entered into the kitchen where there was a party going on for a poetry reading that was happening in town. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">People came and went out of the room. Mark licked the nectar that dripped from a milkweed flower that hung above the Queen of the Night. Look, he said, it tastes just like honey. Come and try. Nobody did. Some people fled the room, some stood awkwardly and asked awkward questions: Why were we holding a vigil? Why does the plant only flower for one night? But when the poet came into the room, she took up position by the open window and, laughing, told us a story about the Mayan goddess who held a competition to see who had the most beautiful vagina in the universe (it was won by a human woman, helped by a hummingbird who gave her some feathers). ‘I’m going to paint the goddess in the underpass one day,’ she said. ‘This town needs her.’</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">For a whole evening we sat in the room with the flowers. The poet entered the room and visited the Queen of the Night. She was a lovely poet and the world needs her. It needs the goddess’s beautiful vagina. It needs the fragrance of an insignificant plant that puts everything into something beautiful, even though it only lasts one night. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Under the stars of a beautiful night in America the poets came to the pomegranate town, the dreamers and the visionaries. Some of them still lived here: they were quieter than they used to be but they still lived here. They came for the dark blue dreaming stone that lives in the hills among the veins of gold and copper. They came for a different sound that sang out on the edge of the Roman Empire. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Mayan people sometimes call the United States the Land of the Dead but it’s not just the dead that live here. There is life everywhere if you look, and beauty and kindness. These small things do not count in the world that only counts money, but they count for everything in the Underworld. I know this because when I have been down on my luck, it is the small acts of beauty and kindness that have made everything worthwhile.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is what stops the world being destroyed.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The poets store up the best of these things. It’s not just the words they are doing this with. It’s their lives, as they move through this world, through time, a transformative force they carry having been into the Underworld and back. It’s the spirit in which they do things, the way that the poet entered that room like a moth and pollinated the flower. It was the dance we all did holding the huge flowers in our laps. In the room this vibration glowed and filled us with an encounter that would last the whole of our lives.</span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">At midnight we left the room. We found the kitchen deserted. There were bowls of chips and empty glasses and a desolate feeling that parties have when they are ended. The night wind blew through the screen door. We kissed each other goodbye and went out, going our separate ways. And when the sun rose the Queen of the Night closed her petals quietly in the desert hotel. </span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 10pt; margin-top: 12pt;"><br /></p></span>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-53327524565172508032020-09-17T10:45:00.005+01:002020-09-17T10:53:16.212+01:00Tufton Street: Fiery Words Under a Police Helicopter<p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> <i>On 2nd September I joined 19 other rebel writers to call to account the lobbyists and climate deniers who direct government policy outside their Westminster office. Here is a piece about that event and the role of writers-as-challengers to their conjuring of dangerous fictions. </i></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLdSlS3Hq5Shfel6d5tksezrFRN5tXdzUAQbS8WaCRn5f_D2BtDyHvRXEPPGpkGF6bdnLV_KbO_N2Gp7lRAJooJRBuHtMxPyXyD7QjbZduvdYz0e2gJ4dr9YOZCHJbkQWy-dumCcK7KaHy/s1344/EiGr9IaXcAU1u9m.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="998" data-original-width="1344" height="297" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLdSlS3Hq5Shfel6d5tksezrFRN5tXdzUAQbS8WaCRn5f_D2BtDyHvRXEPPGpkGF6bdnLV_KbO_N2Gp7lRAJooJRBuHtMxPyXyD7QjbZduvdYz0e2gJ4dr9YOZCHJbkQWy-dumCcK7KaHy/w400-h297/EiGr9IaXcAU1u9m.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><p></p><blockquote><blockquote style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin: 0px 0px 1rem;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The next revolution – World War III – will be waged inside your head. It will be a guerrilla information war fought not in the sky or on the streets, not in the forests or even around scarce resources of the earth, but in newspapers and magazines, on the radio, on TV and in ‘cyberspace’. It will be a dirty, no-holds-barred propaganda war of competing world-views and alternative visions of the future.</span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Marshall McLuhan – <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Culture is Our Business</em>, 1970</span></p></blockquote><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is raining softly in Tufton Street and I am sitting in a doorway, at the feet of five police officers, listening to voices calling to account the neo-liberal lobbyists who convene at number 55. Long ago I came to this street to play with my childhood friend Gaye. Her father was a Conservative MP, as was my uncle who also lived here, beside these steps that by the end of this evening will be covered in fake blood.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This is not a story of nostalgia.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Times</em> columnist David Aaronovitch once asserted that no one in the privileged classes ever descends the social scale willingly. Except writers. Writers are by the nature of their trade rebels – rebelling against the past and its hostilities that hold us all ransom, breaking convention, the rigidity of the status quo, so that entropy does not set in and life can flourish. Their loyalty is not to their upbringing, but to their art.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writing is how a velvet-collared turncoat came to be standing on this ensemble platform, decades later, with a quote by Marshall McLuhan up her sleeve about the future that now feels like the present.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t know exactly what I am going to say in these few minutes but I do want to say why it matters that writers rebel, not only as individuals, but together – as we are here on this night in post-lockdown London: 20 of us holding scripts and books in our hands, reading poetry and fiery statements out loud with a police helicopter whirling above our heads. Who else can challenge the dangerous fiction, constructed behind these doors, and change the plot mid-sentence?</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It’s an old story, the story of Empire, and thousands of writers have deconstructed its twisted plots through history, even in the trenches and the gulags, even, as Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria wrote, in the face of certain execution. We know what we see: a story of domination repeated through centuries and continents. The question now is: how do we unstory it?</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Writers – those true to their archaic function to hold people within the wild psyche of the Earth, true to what John Berger called the fraternal future – step outside conformity as a strategic act. Because they know the story of their time is not just theirs and they do not tell it just for themselves. This ‘powerdown’ enables them to listen and speak out on behalf of those without voices, for the creatures and the trees and all those who maintain and suffer the charade of civilisation in silence.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">‘If you know yourself and do not know the enemy, for every victory gained you will suffer defeat’, quoted Paul Hilder from Sun Tzu’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">The Art of War</em>. A key reason the climate deniers and Brexit propagandists of Tufton Street broadcast a violent and hostile narrative is so they won’t suffer defeat. They have been trained in their dark nurseries to quash all feeling and fuel their will to victory – and they will sow every kind of confusion, blame and division among the ‘ruled’ in order to maintain the upper hand.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">What can writers demonstrate in the face of this, in the face of a world falling apart?</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are keeping our eyes open and do not swerve our gaze. We are not distracted by fake news, or intimidated by the bullish rhetoric of a comms-directed government. We know the difference between the myths that underpin life on Earth, and the fantasies that manipulate it. Words are our business after all.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We have long memories. We remember what it means to be human, beyond our economic function as a consumer or voter. We have the wild world as our ally and our ancestors stand behind us.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">We can bring space and time into the small panic rooms the powerful command, and open the door. Like a warrior band outwitting the invader, we know this geography of heartbreak. We know the mountains and the forests and all the hiding places. Imagination is our finest tool and our attention is fearless. We have already travelled to the Underworld and back. We are in the long game and will prevail. In a fragmented time, we can cohere; in a culture of covering up, we will reveal. Our task is to remind people that they are not alone in their struggle.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">When we speak of power, we mean the capacity to undergo change, to transform dark materials into beauty. The powerful cling to their bastions and buildings, their loyalty to form, and refuse to change their dragonish behaviours. But in a time of upheaval, no amount of authoritarian rule will prevent the consequences of destroying the vast and complex dimensions of Earth, anymore than it can control a tiny anarchic virus.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Their storyline is simple: we are the conquerors and we are in charge. We are more powerful than you and deserve your sacrifice. Our lust for power and riches has no end and we will defend the right to rule you with all the might and violence we can muster. You can find this ‘law’ inscribed in stone in ancient Assyria and Babylon, rejected by the Gnostics in the early Christian era, challenged by every slave uprising, peasant revolt and citizen rebellion through time. We can hear this voice in our own heads, inflamed by the headlines and opinions of media, and have learned when to hold our tongues. ‘If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.’</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sometimes barbarians who do not worship the city gods surprise us. In 1947, a poet writes the line, ‘I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK’, observing the decline of Empire, sensing the fleetness of reindeer hooves on the Northern rim. (W.H.Auden, ‘The Fall of Rome’.) In 2020 the unimportant clerks of flu-infected cities say: we don’t want to come back to work, and the story of civilisation falters irrevocably. Tonight in Westminster the tourists have stayed away, the posters of the theatres have disappeared.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The show is coming to an end. We’re writing the final act.</span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You can watch the Writers Rebel Tufton event <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=2851090234990506&ref=watch_permalink" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="background-color: transparent; border-bottom: 4px solid rgb(0, 153, 221); box-sizing: border-box; color: #0099dd; text-decoration-line: none;">here.</a></span></p><p style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #212529; margin-bottom: 1rem; margin-top: 0px;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-4069148822468806592020-06-10T14:39:00.002+01:002020-06-18T12:35:55.160+01:00Sitting with the Trouble<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZHvd0Lb9p1c8cKItjkjqj7rfLDdztP2Wm8E8mx5kGynys7KTZE_oNGMNNiw5AcCgMB_QwrSLHaf4cSusJpXggygz9OfIsphcMo5iSMsIs683ddvjktFMwa0iKvFVz37VotJ-8RV_Fl7Ep/s1600/the-saint-and-the-oystercatcher-Oak-gall-ink-24-x-16-cm-Kate-Walters-2016-648x1024.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZHvd0Lb9p1c8cKItjkjqj7rfLDdztP2Wm8E8mx5kGynys7KTZE_oNGMNNiw5AcCgMB_QwrSLHaf4cSusJpXggygz9OfIsphcMo5iSMsIs683ddvjktFMwa0iKvFVz37VotJ-8RV_Fl7Ep/s400/the-saint-and-the-oystercatcher-Oak-gall-ink-24-x-16-cm-Kate-Walters-2016-648x1024.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Saint and the Oystercatcher by Kate Walters</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Sit with me: I am in a circle in the back room of a small pub in North Oxford, under the shelter of a giant copper beech. Spring is unfurling its leaves. A man is talking. His name is Edward and he is the oldest person in the room, the unofficial guardian of the ancient common land of Port Meadow. Edward is describing how at ‘rainbow gatherings’ people sit in council to come to a unified conclusion about how to proceed, how it differs from our combative democratic process.<br />
<br />
‘What happens if they don’t all agree?’ I ask, rather defensively.<br />
There was a pause.<br />
‘They wait until they do,’ he smiled. ‘Sometimes it takes days.’<br />
<br />
I am not in my usual territory. Yesterday I found a notice on a lamppost that invited people to meet and discuss ways to prevent the building of hundreds of new houses alongside the leafy canal and its wastelands. <i>Join in! </i>declared the notice and my curiosity got the better of me. I don’t know this yet but I am about to shift position, from being an individual seeker on the road to being a community activist, rooted in place, a move that will define my life for the next fifteen years.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div>
Sitting with the trouble and waiting for a solution to emerge however is something I do know. I know it from being a writer, and from working with medicine plants and dreams. I have been sitting with this essay, this subject, since the goat willows went into bloom and now the elder and dog roses are at their height. I wanted to write something useful in these times of lockdown and uncertainty, to share practices from those years that might help others navigate this unknown territory. I’ve been sitting with this title, staring at the blank screen, or the pages of a blue notebook, as the cherry blossom drifts around this Suffolk garden. I used to be able to write as soon as my fingers touched a keyboard. Sentences would tumble beautifully out of nowhere. Now they don’t. Sometimes in my life, when words stopped coming, it signalled a move of position. So, even though I don’t like to admit it, I know something inside me is trying to shift. I can only wait and watch the spring.<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
There is a scene in Jean-Paul Sartre’s play <i>Kean </i>where the famous 19th century actor faces an existential crisis but he cannot find the right way to deal with it. As he stomps around the stage, he strikes different poses and each time finds himself in another Shakespearean character: Hamlet, Lear, Richard III. All of them from plays in which he starred. He can’t get to the man because the actor is in the way.<br />
<br />
When things shift you throw off the costumes, nervous that perhaps there is nothing beside the roles you have identified with all your life. You start new paragraphs but they all sound dead and disjointed. You wince at the sound of your own voice. In the absence of the script you know by heart, questions come in you don’t want to face: who are you, what is your value, what are you doing here? Do people care what you think? Are you even a writer at all?<br />
<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: orange;">
The dreaming practice</span></h2>
Before I joined that circle in Oxford and began to campaign for the neighbourhood’s wild and feral spaces, I worked with dreams, exploring them using a method called the five levels. The practice is simple. You tell the dream to your dreaming partner, asking the questions: what does this say about my daily life, my biographical life, my self on the social level, on the mythological level and from the perspective of the Earth? You tell the dream out loud. The visitor to the dream listens and can ask questions but only to prompt the dreamer to go deeper into the dream. Not as an inquirer, but as a fellow explorer. As you do the territory opens out between you; you discover its language, its topography, its mood. Something catches your eye, you both look at it and it opens up like a flower. It could be an object, a detail, or a feeling. Mostly though it is a position. Mostly it is a position where you are stuck or held against your will.<br />
<br />
The visitor keeps asking: why are you stuck in the jaws of that alligator? I can’t move, you reply. Except that now you can, now you are outside the dream, as well as in it. You are no longer six years old. You can open your mouth, where in the dream you could not. Dreams, you have learned, flee from analysis. Given time however, as you weather their difficulty and speak what you feel out loud, they reveal everything. Agency is returned. <br />
<br />
Even though we were stuck in the ‘nightmare of history’, we realised if you placed attention on the underlying darkness of our collective lives, we could learn to free ourselves and the world. Each dream is carefully shaped to fit everyone’s personal legacies, and yet all of them at some point reveal a small child, the heart, stuck in the jaws of an alligator, needing your liberating gaze. Our lives are pivoted around these events and replayed over time. You want to know why you are trapped, what the alligator means, but you learn to quieten the mind’s inquiry. You’re waiting for another kind of intelligence to kick in. What matters is making the move from a stuck place into a fluid open one. Sitting within the dream means waiting until that move is clear, and then making it. The feeling is what invites the dream to reveal itself.<br />
<br />
There was a point in dreaming practice with others where the dialogue often became stuck: the moment when your perception needed to shift from the biographical level to the collective level. People could explore the mythological and the Earth level, but when they were invited to see themselves as a social being, as one of the collective, they closed down. When I became a community activist, I realised that even though people were talking about community, they were talking from an individual position, from a small me, rather than a collective we. The circles we held were not about coming to a conclusion in a group but about listening to a series of individuals being paid attention to by others, sometimes for the first time. Invisibly, we were surrounded by alligators and terrified children. We were set on changing the world, the food systems, the energy systems, our governance, but no one was dealing with those snapping jaws. They were not even seen.<br />
<br />
To come to a conclusion means you need time and commitment. If there is intention that you are doing something together, you can weather the storm that comes when people who sit in a circle in council decide to do something that is contrary to the status quo. This is not difficult in the sense of organisation, of making actions, even of getting on with several prickly strangers who think they have a better idea than you. What is difficult is negotiating with the invisible forces our culture has no ways of naming. Even though these threats of violence are felt palpably in the room, even though we know in our minds about the nightmare - our long history of servitude, the rulers who hold our hearts in their claws - we find it difficult to admit their influence on our human lives. We lack the language and the techne to deal with their dragonish behaviors, especially when they come out of our mouths in argument. When terror stalks the room and the children who might tell us what is happening fall silent.<br />
<br />
Even when we sought advice on how to deal with the fall outs and ‘storming’ that befall all grassroots groups when the start-up honeymoon period ends, we were told to go to psychologists or conflict resolution experts, as if these divisions were a personal defect, rather than an encounter with the shadow forces of civilisation. But from the practice I knew that to withstand the push back from the conventional world, the feudal hierarchies that still rule the world within and without us, another kind of contract was needed.<br />
<br />
Then one day I stumbled upon two books I had loved as a child: one of English fairy tales and another of Greek and Roman myths. In these old familiar texts, I found the lexicon I was looking for. And, as if my life were a dreaming practice itself, I found myself moving from the social to the mythological level.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
<h2>
<span style="color: orange;">
The boy with the strange haircut</span></h2>
The boy is not a god but a daemon. But when he enters the room, the winds of heaven blow through your house, throwing your desk papers into the air. Startled, you look outside the window and feel the enclosing walls around you. You find yourself in time’s prison. He crosses your path at strategic points, a young man with a lock of hair over his forehead, interrupting a line made by the old timelord Chronos with his relentless ticking clock and calendars. You stop, and time opens up, revealing past, present and future all at once. Suddenly you realise you can take a different direction. <br />
<br />
Like all daemons, embodiments of the human condition, Kairos, the force of destiny arrives in a moment of crisis, unexpected. His moment of appearance is quick and you have to seize him by the forelock. If you hesitate, the time for that split-second all-moments-now encounter will be gone. You will lunge to grab him from behind, but your hands will slide down the back of his smooth shaven neck. You will fall back into linear time. <br />
<br />
Afterwards you have to make time to realise what has happened and integrate that all-at-once time into everyday life. When the pandemic interrupted our Chronos-ruled civilisation, the official story of progress, by which we have measured our worth, was revealed to bear false promise, and although the forces of empire rally to continue to broadcast its all-powerful narrative, although these mortgaged walls still hold us, we now know there is a place outside this house of history and a road that leads to nowhere we have gone before, yet feels like home.<br />
<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: orange;">
When the merry-go-round stops</span></h2>
Last summer behind the pier in Southwold one rainy afternoon, I heard a familiar tune and found myself following it. It was the sound of a merry-go-round, the old fashioned kind with gaily-painted horses and curly Victorian lettering. Two children in anoraks were riding the coloured wooden creatures, as they went up and down, as their parents called out to them and waved. The fairground hand scowled bitterly at the rain and his lack of customers. <br />
<br />
I watched entranced for a moment, pretending it was merrier than it was. The song had pulled me somewhere wistful. A sadness washed over me. It sounded like an old Nina Rota film score, or the kind of plangent accordion music you used to hear in Paris, and maybe still can. Loss. Times I had and wouldn’t find again. A tear fell down my cheek.<br />
<br />
Why are you crying, for no reason? I asked myself sharply. As if a force pushed me away, I turned and headed swiftly home. Something inside me had shuddered. The song was taking me into a dead end, into a timeless realm where everything keeps going round in a circle. <br />
<br />
When Childe Roland goes widdershins into Elfland to rescue his sister, Burd Helen, he is given his father’s sword and instructions not to eat or drink anything there. If you speak to anyone you need to cut off their heads. When the boy asks the way to the Dark Tower from two herdsmen and a henwife, he cuts their head off – and in some versions, Burd Helen’s as well – and breaks the elven spell. In the old Scottish tales if you were lured by music under the fairyhill you were warned not to tarry, for you would never return to Earth. You had to leave a nail in the door of the hillside, so you might break out of the dancing ring and find your way back again.<br />
<br />
The lockdown was that nail in the door, it was the quick boy at the crossroads, the sword that can cut us away from the enchantments we are trapped in: the nostalgias of nations, of lost times of Blitz spirit and suburban post-war paradises, when victory was assured, when our status as superior human beings shone with an Olympian light. You could dismiss the merry-go-round as a mere glamour or entertainment, but that would be to ignore the power of the music’s spell, the desire to be somewhere apart from this present moment, away from the tedium and threats of an industrialised life. It would be to forget the manufacturers of fairground rides and their scowling mechanics. Those who warp time and take it out of the realm of the heart.<br />
<br />
In this pause, alongside the death and suffering the pandemic brought, there was also the possibility that Kairos awakens. For months the borders to our neverlands of celebrities and stars, of parties and festivals, theatres and concerts, of cruises and holidays in the sun, were closed. Instead, partners and families spent time together and had to make their own amusement, while the pressure to be somewhere else at all times disappeared. The time of the heart, where all things can be considered, replaced the rush of 24/7 culture where nothing can be. Our fellow workers became the people we cared about, we heard birdsong as if for the first time. Goats and deer and sheep roamed through the empty streets. On laptops and phones, we realised we were all ordinary people in ordinary rooms, sharing the same crisis. As politicians still strove to divide and conquer us, to push their nation’s illustrious story ahead of everyone else’s, we still felt for the people we did not know on the other side of the world. We still longed for mountains when we could not climb them, enjoyed the quietness of a spring without traffic, and the blue untrammelled sky. <br />
<br />
As everything is rushed to return to ‘normal’, you feel pushed to get back on schedule again but something in you hesitates. Something in you has stopped. Once where there had been a great noise now there is a kind of silence.<br />
<br />
In my community activism years, I was part of a small theatre group in Norwich. One day, rehearsing for an Earth Day performance, we picked different futures out of a hat and improvised who we were and what had happened between 2010 and 2110. Some of the futures were already mapped -- the dystopian, the techno-fixed - but some were not. Mine was Unknown Quantity. When I took the stage I found myself saying: one day people just stopped and started to do something completely different.<br />
<br />
For thousands of years the merry-go-round of civilisation has whirled ceaselessly - the wheel of fortune, the wheel of karma, the wheels of commerce and capitalism. It whirls generations round in a frenzy of speed, music and colour. It seems like everything happens at that funfair: everything fashionable, interesting, important. Relinquish the wheel, advises the Buddha. Don’t linger in fairyland, warn the ancestors. It’s all an illusion. But no one takes any notice. The pace of our lives is tempered by that glittering speed. We are compelled to go faster, bigger, buy more houses, more clothes, more holidays, more movies, more machines, more cake. If we step off the ledge for one moment we can’t wait for our next turn on that great production line.<br />
<br />
The world is made of that speed and that drive. The drive of the will to succeed, to overcome, to conquer. The force runs rampage over the globe, through all our lives like Alexander. We drink to keep up with it, always late, on a perpetual deadline. 24/7. We cut corners, skip facts, betray our friends, forget the green world outside the window. We are restless, never satisfied, never sure what we want, looking over our shoulder for the powerful people, to be invited to the right party, to wear the perfect suit, to walk with the gods. We fight time and nature with that drive, with our passionate intensity, our desire to escape into all the fun and fantasy of the fair.<br />
<br />
We are holding that drive, that inhuman artificial energy, in our bodies and sometimes those bodies, those minds, break down.<br />
<br />
Sometimes Kairos crosses our path and we real human beings break through. A moment when we align ourselves with everything else on Earth and powerdown. The drive stops suddenly, the way going to night-clubs once stopped when you were young. You wake up and you can’t do it anymore. It’s not that you decided to. It just happened: it happens because something else has begun to go on in your house, in the neighbourhood, something our unkind minds and ruthless wills had not considered. A harmonious way of doing things, of engaging in the world, that affects our inner and outer lives in ways we never imagined. Focusing on the small things of daily life and the kindness that can exist between people. Remembering what really matters about being alive on the planet.<br />
<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: orange;">
The uneasy chair</span></h2>
There is a writing class I teach called The Uneasy Chair. The Uneasy Chair is not about becoming a professional writer, but about writing as an existential practice, as a way of perceiving the world and your place in it, about putting your feet on the Earth and a crooked thing straight, involving collaboration and time and imagination. You could say my whole life has been about sitting, or avoiding sitting, in this chair, which is the paradox position all writers have to put themselves in in order to find their true material. You don't want to sit there of course, but you don't get the story if you don't. This is the dual position where you sit in the chair and experience everything going down in the room, and also stand behind the chair, directing and making sense of what you-in-the-chair are experiencing. All chair, and you lose the plot, all observer, and you lose the reader. <br />
<br />
The lockdown interrupted our lives like a koan and discombobulated time. We still hold its hermetic effects within us, even as the doors open, as children run out to play around the deserted fountains and broad walks of European cities. It has begun a process past seekers might recognise as alchemy, not of the individual soul, but of the collective. We live in small spaces, like battery hens, but feel more connected to the people and planet outside than ever before, to the birds and the mountains showing their snowy faces for the first time in decades. The more we are held tight in our crucibles, the more our imagination reaches out, the more we remember, the more we reach out to touch others in our longing. The paradox of the hermitage and monk’s cell. Of not moving and yet moving.<br />
<br />
The old gods and governments of course, do not want us to sit with the trouble, to consider this paradox, to reach out to our fellows in what Jeremy Rifkin calls the shift towards an empathic civilisation, where we become biospheric, in tune with the planet and all its denizens. When the individualist ‘psychological’ dynamic of the 20th century cedes to the ‘dramaturgical’ age of the 21st, and we are able to step into another's shoes and feel their joy and suffering because we have not denied our own.<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Even if these controllers of our destinies, push us back towards the factory lines and depots and the merry-go-round cranks up for its summer season, we have stepped into those pivotal roles already, seeing ourselves as players within a global plague tragedy, whose small scenes are enacted each day on screen in our kitchen-sink theatres. The chorus and spear carriers, all who have been standing in the wings, have taken the stage. We cheered them from the balconies. <br />
<br />
Once you have seen, you cannot unsee. Once you have sat with the trouble and withstood the drive that forces you out of your heart, out of that uneasy chair, you do not rush to ride the carousel again. You can see what lies outside the door. You remember how it feels not to be alone, even when you were alone. <br />
<br />
<h2>
<span style="color: orange;">One fine day</span></h2>
I have sat with this essay since the lockdown began, as if trapped in its very title. It wouldn’t move, the door would not open and the sentences did not tie up. Then I remembered how it is when you visit a plant or a place and try to discern its dreaming, You can’t do that until the visit is over, when you look back with what the writer about history and myth, Roberto Calasso calls, the <i>douceur </i>of time. I was still in the chair, experiencing what it felt like to undergo the uncertainty I had been writing about from behind it for a decade. Then today a scene came back to me and I realised that the door was already ajar. Because there is a third position in the uneasy chair teaching that can make writing protean, which is to say, connected to life beyond your self. I call it the eagle’s position, where you fly up and perceive those small moves you make in your practice and see how they affect the fabric of the world. <br />
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Follow me: I am cycling one early May morning across the harbour bridge, over the river flowing seawards, towards the sleeping village of Walberswick. Along the ridge path towards the marshes, barley fields either side of me, and the sea dark blue in the distance, listening out for nightingales in their thorny gorse fastness, singing up the dawn. I am walking towards the sea, through the wavy reeds, toward the sun rising and the light glancing off the water like a mirror. I am running into the bone-cold salty waves, into the light. There is space all around and singing, immense blue sky, horizon. I open my arms and breathe deep.<br />
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I am imagining the people I know in lockdown in London, dreaming of the wide spaces of Montana, of swimming places they cannot go, the lidos and lakes, of the artist who stood in the crematorium alone with her dead husband, without mourners or celebration, of the sick women who struggle to recover, of all the people I don’t know in places where I once loved to go - in Venice, in New York, in the city of Guayaquil by the Pacific ocean. I am remembering how it has been down at the harbour for the past months without visitors, with only the local people walking along the river, towards the bluebell woods in the evenings, the fishermen and boatmen working in a landscape you have only seen in an 18th century painting, standing in the deserted town streets, like a 1970’s sci-fi novel by John Wyndham. How everyone has been greeting each other and waving in the lanes, how a part of us doesn’t want this present moment to end.<br />
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I wish I had learned when I was in those gnarly grassroots meetings that what really matters is not how we deal with power or find reparation (which we never could) but how to be able bring this space of light and air into those constricted spaces. Because exposed to this sunlight and fresh air, in this sense of expanded time and connection, the invisible forms that have governed our every move for aeons have no power over us. We thought for years our enthusiasm, our well-meaning natures, would be able to bring a different future into play but we forgot the will that drives the ancient machinery forward, that fuels the whirligig culture: our unconscious snarling dragonish selves. Our hearts were not strong enough on their own. We needed our free wills to make that move.<br />
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There is a deal you make with life. We made it a long time ago with the beasts and the plants, only our civilisations buried it in sand to further their own interests. For a long time I was not sure how we could remember this deal together. I was waiting for the perfect group, the right time, the right place. And then I realised it didn’t matter. Because I was already in contact with the people. They were just not on the beach standing beside me.<br />
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What I wanted to say in those classes and councils and never could, was that we endure the uneasy chair, the exigencies of the crucible, to remember this deal. How this remembering can cohere the fragmentation of the collective we see and feel all around us - its broken heart, its confused mind, its twisted and enraged will. We do it to remember what was embedded in those ancient stories, once called Original Instruction, the right way to engage with earthly life. We do it to liberate our fellows, trapped in the small places. We do it for the luminous planet that hosts us. So we can finally all find our way home. <br />
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<span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="background-color: #f5f8fa; border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-size: 15px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b><br /></b></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; color: #14171a; display: inline; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><b>I'll be teaching a second round of <a href="https://www.schoolofthewild.com/coming-back-to-earth.html">Coming Back to Earth</a>, an online/outside 'compass' course with Nigel Bearman of </b></span></span><b>School of the Wild</b><b style="color: #14171a; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;"> <span class="css-901oao css-16my406 r-1qd0xha r-ad9z0x r-bcqeeo r-qvutc0" style="border: 0px solid black; box-sizing: border-box; display: inline; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-numeric: inherit; line-height: 1.3125; margin: 0px; min-width: 0px; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px;">at the end of the month. Do join us in a shared exploration of the lockdown times and the keys they can give for life in the future. Mapping, discussion and encounter. Booking and details <a href="https://www.schoolofthewild.com/coming-back-to-earth.html">here. </a></span></b></span></span><br />
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<i>IMAGE: The Saint and the Oystercatcher by Kate Walters Book page and pen </i><i>This work was made during one of three artist residencies I had on the Isle of Iona. I was </i><i>researching St. Brigid and the oystercatcher which came to protect her. I was also beginning </i><i>to practise a process of tuning into my body in a deep way, and using it to help me </i><i>sense things around me, in the great beauty and clarity of Iona. Originally published in <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-16-refuge/">Dark Mountain: Issue 16 - REFUGE</a></i><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><b style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;">Kate Walters</b></span><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> is based in Trewarveneth Studios, Cornwall and published by Guillemot </span><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Press. Time spent in wild places – Shetland, Orkney, Italian national parks and the Hebrides – inform her painting and her writing. Most recently she has been working on a poetry pamphlet with Mat Osmond in response to a dream of an ancient sacred feminine force, </span><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;">The Black Madonna’s Song</span></span><span style="background-color: white; border: 0px; font-stretch: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">. katewalters.co.uk</span></i></span><br />
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Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-57379979969609111232020-03-20T13:25:00.003+00:002020-05-12T08:09:55.466+01:00Outbreak<i>As human societies find themselves gripped in the claws of a pandemic, we encounter a cultural crisis which the Dark Mountain Project has been documenting for over a decade. This long form essay written for the online publication explores a myth of regeneration that might make sense of our predicament.</i><br />
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Unendowed with wealth or pity,<br />
Little birds with scarlet legs,<br />
Sitting on their speckled eggs,<br />
Eye each flu-infected city.<br />
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– W.H Auden The Fall of Rome<br />
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'Where is the fracture point?’ asked the interviewer. We are in the black ‘Rebel’ tent at the Byline Festival on the edge of the Ashdown Forest on the hottest day of last year. The subject under discussion is, ‘Where Does It Fall Apart? How Our Civilisation Will Disintegrate’, and the panellists are Rupert Read (political spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion), Nafeez Ahmed (writer of the documentary <i>The Crisis of Civilization</i>) and David Wallace-Wells (author of <i>The Uninhabitable Earth</i>).<br />
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Anita McNaught, ex-Middle East correspondent and no stranger to the collapse of nations, leans forward and keeps pressing the question. Will it be oil, or water? Will it be political, agricultural, financial, biospheric, spiritual? In systemic collapse the break can occur anywhere and affect everything at once. No one is able to predict where or when it will come. Except that one day, it will.</div>
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In a year where biblical calamities have rained down upon the world – as floods, bush fires and locust storms– this fracture has not emerged in the highly stressed natural world but from within a globalised human society. After ignoring the cries of Cassandra for decades, the horse has finally entered the gates of the cities, releasing billions of tiny invisible lifeforms that are no respecters of age, gender, wealth, position or race.<br />
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The fracture point is what many of us have been searching for in these last years. Because, as every storyteller knows, the crack reveals everything that needs to be told: the flaw in the character that can bring down whole kingdoms, the chink in the prison wall that speaks of liberty, the wake up call to a cruel fairytale that has enthralled you and generations before you. And maybe the crack is, as Buckminster Fuller once described, the moment the chick, struggling for space as its food runs out, catches a glimpse of blue sky beyond the shell – and not apocalypse at all.<br />
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The crack comes when you least expect it and turns your safe world upside down: the moment when, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found a copy of the psychologist Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child and my host yelled at me for not sharing her chocolate ice cream and neglecting her needs. I had just seen a documentary about the AIM activist Leonard Peltier and the Wounded Knee siege of 1973, and looking back now these three things appear synonymous: the bulemic woman whose family had escaped Auschwitz, a disputed murder on an indigenous massacre site, the children whose lives were torn apart by inherited violence. <br />
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It was late at 36 to have found out that our true selves are not related to the role we have played within our family or culture. It is late to find out that human beings are not meant to live in denial of the barbarism that underpins every civilisation. Most of all it is late to learn how to weather these encounters with reality and replenish the Earth we have so long taken for granted. To find out, as fear now grips the world, how to hold the line and not fall apart.<br />
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In a time when the story falters, the golden story of human promise and progress, the myth reveals itself, like broken bones in a midden. For the last decade I have been unearthing these remains to see what they can tell us about our ancestral obligations. Not the aspiring hero myths that bring glory to civilisations but the downward ones that connect us with the non-linear forces of the planet: <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/under-volcano/"> Kairos</a> who brings the intervention that cracks open our small linear worlds;<a href="http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com/2017/07/divesting-for-beginners.html"> Inanna</a> who takes us down through the seven gates of the kur or Underworld; <a href="http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com/2016/01/wayland-and-futuremakers.html">Wayland</a> who waits, hamstrung, slowly crafting swan wings that will allow him to escape captivity;<a href="https://dark-mountain.net/in-search-of-a-lexicon-for-the-deep-core/"> Ariadne</a> who shows us the labyrinth is not a prison for a beast but a dancing floor.<br />
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But as the world falters, one myth stands steadily and quietly in the wings. Not an epic tale of gods but the story of a human girl and her struggle with the alchemical forces of love, beauty and justice. Her name is Psyche which means soul or butterfly, the creature that transforms itself from caterpillar to imago in the hermetic space of a cocoon. Having resisted every warning and admonishment to transform and change our ways, we are now, as a collective, being forced into a cocoon ourselves, in lockdowns and self-isolation, to do the work we should have done generations ago.<br />
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<h3>
KITCHEN</h3>
Psyche has to undergo change to earn the love of the winged boy she has lost. This love is not given freely, even to the most beautiful girl in the world. The mystery of metamorphosis lives underground, in the dark, and to learn the deal we have with life, to be symbiotic with the Earth, rather than a parasite on its bounty, we have to undertake that journey into the place some call the Underworld. <br />
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The love story of Psyche and Eros lies at the heart of The Golden Ass, a novel written by Apuleius in 2AD at the end of the Roman Empire, and inside this metamorphic tale, like the final Russian doll inside its layers, you find the four tasks the girl is set by Eros’ mother, the goddess Venus<br />
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Tasks are the stuff of a female initiatory process, sometimes called kitchen work, because the changes they demand take place amongst the ashes and pots and pans. Male initiatory quests depart on shining horses that head into the forest; female initiations bow our heads, cut off our hands, put a cape of rushes or moss around our shoulders. We are forced to take off our princess dresses and challenged to sweep the floor before sundown. Either way, everyone goes downstairs.<br />
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The first task Psyche is set is to sort a vast pile of grains and pulses. These are the seeds that have sustained civilisations for millennia: chickpea, lentil, poppy. Psyche is a foolish girl. She is beautiful but she knows nothing. We are the most technologically advanced culture in history but we know nothing about obligation or relationship with anything apart from ourselves. I have been a food editor in one of the most sophisticated cities in the world but known nothing about industrial farming or the seeds that now grow outside my window: wheat, barley, field bean.<br />
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These myths from the ancient world ran alongside civilisations for thousands of years. Like the ancient pueblo culture of the South West, they housed a spiritual relationship with the corn and pulses that sustained them. And with a tiny flower seed that reminds us how we must go underground, and die to the husks of our former lives, before we discover the kernel of life inside.<br />
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In 2009 panic has derailed the Transition conference at the Seale Hayne Agricultural College in Devon. We are used to reading peak oil and carbon emission graphs, we know we are embedded in a fragile agricultural and supply system that is entirely dependent on fossil fuel, that most of the crops grown in the subsidised, soil-wrecked fields are for biofuel or livestock feed. But Nicole Foss has just introduced the spectre of ‘losing your property’ and the monstrous consequences of debt in a heartless market economy. Vinny the Kneecapper will be at your door!<br />
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The first fracture point will most likely be breadbasket failure, declares Jem Bendell eight years later, as his paper on Deep Adaptation has a similar seismic effect within the academic world. We can no longer turn our fossil-fuelled Titanic civilisation around and fend off ecological and social catastrophe but need to adapt. We have to learn ‘how to best prepare for the inevitable and navigate our climate tragedy’.<br />
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Resilience is the first of the first three R’s of Bendell’s curriculum – the ability of communities and ecosystems to bounce back after drastic events, such as floods, fire, war, or pestilence. In Transition we have given up flying, supermarkets, palm oil, fish, chocolate. I have written 400 blogs on the culture of downshift and my kitchen hosts a row of fermenting jars and oddly shaped loaves. But I am not sure that these small measures alone will help any of us thrive when the reality of collapse knocks on our doors.<br />
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In each of the four tasks Psyche is helped by a small voice that speaks to her as she despairs of completing them. My sisters can help you, a kindly ant whispers in her ear, and the colony sort the seeds. A swaying reed offers her advice, an eagle battles dragons on her behalf. When Venus gives her a box to take to Persephone, Queen of the Dead and bring it back unopened, a stone tower tells her how to undertake the perilous journey.<br />
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We are not going to break out of our collective dilemma if we cannot hear the voices of non-human creatures outside the door, and humbly accept their help. If, as it is assumed, this pandemic is a result of the woeful treatment of wild animals (60% of new human diseases are zoonotic), we have a lot of reckoning to face. It is hard for human beings, who have for generations never learned to say thank you to the planet that has hosted us all our lives, where it has never crossed our minds we had to honour life and give back, nor that we had soul work to do, legacies and tasks that we hold like a small kist in our hands, when we are born. <br />
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It would be easy in this moment to say ‘we told you so’ (for indeed many writers, activists, visionaries, scientists have done so for decades, not least Dark Mountain’s prophetic <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/">manifesto</a>), but hindsight is not useful here. What matters is not a hostile response but a clarity of mind and heart that recognises what may or may not happen at this time. The powerdown years have taught us how to put our feet on the ground and hold fast when the rage and grief and terror of aeons rocks the room. Most of all they have put the myths of regeneration into our hands, to give a purpose and nobility to our flawed endeavours.<br />
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In 2011 there was a story about the butterfly that went around the Occupy tents in the cities. When it first enters its cocoon and begins to dissolve everything it knows about its consuming life, the old caterpillar forms rise up to defeat the imago that is beginning to shape itself, its wings and new colours. So it falls back into the soup. but then it begins to rise again and this time the imaginal cells that hold the blueprint of the butterfly link up and hold the line: the butterfly becomes stronger and eventually breaks out to become a pollinator of the world.<br />
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This is a process people are born to make, as every archaic and indigenous people will tell you. Our caterpillar civilisations do not want us to transform in this way and lose their dominion over our labours, but sometimes the future is more powerful than the old world. Sometimes those old death-into-life myths break into our carefully constructed lives. Clearly most of us will not die from this pandemic, but inside ourselves, in a place that has been locked away for aeons, our souls have quickened. What matters, we realise, is not what we have been told matters. The man with the scythe stands in everyone’s living room. And his presence changes everything.<br />
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<h3>
KUR</h3>
No one likes to go down. No one wants to be humble, or to have to ask their neighbour to borrow a ladder. We desire nicely pressed shirts and room service, but instead we get a sharp lesson in foraging for firewood, now the central heating has been turned off. When I endure my own downturn, I have to learn to love the dun colours of East Anglia and no longer yearn for the turquoise cenotes of the Yucatan, or the roar of the Pacific Ocean. This is the world, this is life at the end of Empire, the thing we thought could not happen. I would no longer be a person who could be smart and clever at parties. I will wear a second-hand coat, and work very hard to make myself at home in a country where I no longer have any value. When I speak of the realities of energy descent, people will tell me ‘we will be ascended and powerful in other ways’. No, I reply, we all have to go down.<br />
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Dale Pendell, the great plant metaphysician, once wrote that the opium poppy affected the brain in such a way that it enlarged the imagination and brought visions of palaces and cities of splendour. Without the poppy, you were bereft of access to these glittering places and felt their absence keenly. I am bereft of access to places and people I once loved. But I know this loss is part of the payback, the great sobriety, what Bendell has termed the second R of Relinquishment, ‘what we need to let go of that is making the crisis worse’. <br />
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The underworld is where you come up against the consequences of your actions, not only as an individual but as a citizen. The decision to give up the attributes of civilisation is a hard, hard task. Not only in the physical world, but in terms of our perceived greatness, our reputation, our sense of agency, our immense privilege that can only come at the cost of violence to the Earth, its creatures and to populations of people we never have to care about. <br />
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We hesitate at the banks of the great Styx, where the sterile willow trees lay down their branches, avoiding the baleful eye of Charon. But we hold a box in our hands, two coins in our mouth, and barley cakes to deceive the three-headed hound of Hades.<br />
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<i>How much does it cost to know the love of the Earth? </i><br />
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When Psyche opens the box and dies, Eros, the primordial creator of the universe, raises her up. When the year turns, the sun returns, the seeds burst open their casing. The women rise up out of the Underworld. The world starts again.<br />
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One answer I have searched for in these years: anyone can fall into the Underworld but who can tell us how to return?<br />
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<h3>
KIVA</h3>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You tell us you are looking for a new story for this time of endings – a story with a beginning, a middle and a happy ever after. That goes in a line from A to B. But what if that narrative that gives us direction is not a new but an old one hidden beneath our feet, seemingly broken?’</blockquote>
I am rehearsing for a performance I will give tonight in Frankfurt, Germany, and Julian is rehearsing the pyrotechnics that will close this physical theatre festival. As I walk the steps of an ancient myth from Crete, he is pouring molten fire from a scaffolding tower to the courtyard below. In the kitchen inside this old industrial warehouse, the performers, dancers and acrobats laugh and talk in a dozen languages: a circus troupe at the end of the world.<br />
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I chose these myths of rise and fall because they provide a technê – tools and method and instruction manual – to go beyond the story told by our patriarchal civilisation. They give us a thread so we can find our way out of the labyrinth of our minds and remember the deal we made with the wild oceans and forests of a non-linear planet. These female myths are about tasks, about rigour and courage, and calling for help in times of crisis. The four R’s of Deep Adaptation are tasks, and the third, Restoration, calls for us to repair the fabric of the world. <br />
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Beneath our grassroots meeting circles, we began to glimpse the shapes of kivas and longhouses, those archaic circles and spirals left on rocks and barrows. When we held feasts in community halls, sat around the fire in the woods singing together, dug earth together, gathered honey and berries, it felt we were in touch with something deeper and more meaningful than the facts and figures behind climate change. Sometimes a joy ripped through us, as if it were possible to start again.<br />
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After the tent universities of the Occupy movement, we spoke differently about finance and hierarchy; after the Extinction Rebellions mainstream political debate included the phrases ‘biodiversity loss’ and ‘climate emergency’. However the challenge of the Underworld means we have to become different human beings and speak a language that connects us with a vast network of beings and our own creative imaginations, that goes beyond the concerns of human settlement.<br />
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In 2011 I find myself sitting around an Uncivilisation festival fire under the stars: a man is telling a Russian folktale in a bear mask, a trail of small lights leads us into the woods where a man wearing stag antlers is crashing around the undergrowth and women are speaking in riddles. It is as if all the fairytales I had read as a child have come alive. A crack opens in my heart to let them in.<br />
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In the years following this encounter, I find myself standing in front of a circle of river stones, teaching the rhythms of a clock that has been in use for thousands of years. I lead groups of people into the South Downs, into the Cheshire Hills, into a silent forest in Sweden, appear as a heron by the River Thames, as Mistress of the Deer in a Highland moor, at the turns and twists of the solar year. Afterwards we sit around a fire, in the dark, and speak of our dialogues with the Earth. Here in Germany, at the end of winter, we talk of what happens when we bring the creatures and mountains, rivers and valleys into this yurt in the middle of a city. As if they stand behind us. It’s a different conversation.<br />
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<h3>
KITH</h3>
‘There is a crow who sits on my shoulder,’ said my lawyer father. ‘It is my conscience.’ And then he stared at his shoes in despair. When he died, the crow came to me. You have to tell me everything I said. About conscience. <br />
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The crow sat in the corner of my room in the travelling years when I lived on the edge of small towns in Europe and America. Silently, he observed me write my notebooks. And sometimes I would ask him a question. And he would put his head on one side and peer into the mysterious darkness of the void and declare what great law of conscience he located there. <br />
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You have, he said, to deal with the files with your name on and leave the rest. <br />
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When we embarked on a dreaming practice in Australia at the turn of the millennium, it was as if all those files had blown open and everything that had been buried from our dark houses and histories came to be redressed: animals faced me in the slaughterhouses, children with metal teeth attacked me, friends and lovers lurched out of the shadows, seeking reparation. It would have been good to sit around a table and come to an understanding, but the Underworld doesn’t work like that. Words and good intentions mean nothing, moves are all that matter. <br />
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Something else however began to appear at the edge of our nightmares: giant rays and whales, emus and kangaroos, rocky landscapes of colour and light. An Aboriginal man put his hand through a window and shook mine: We are the action, he said. After our long dialogues, Mark and I would go out into the backcountry, or by the sea and watch the dolphins leap in the waves. One afternoon, by a rainforest pool, a boy fell from a cliff, and I sat on a rock beside him, waiting for the shock to subside. A turtle swam by us and a wind shivered through the gum trees. When I looked up I saw a group of men, women and children standing naked in the water, in harmony with everything around them, and there was a peace and a silence between us that seemed to stretch to infinity. I realised I was looking at the future. The practice was freeing up my mind, so I could see it. <br />
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I have a book open on my lap. It weighs almost four pounds and is 1000 pages long, a testament to the iniquities of Empire: from the genocides of Africa and Tasmania to the famine in Ireland, from the British slave trade to the European Holocaust. On the left hand page there is a list of the nine Ogoni tribesmen hanged on 10th November 1995. On the right are the names of the Shell executives who allowed the executions of the activists to take place, so they could continue their company’s devastation of the Niger Delta for fossil fuel. All their names have been redacted. Among the nine is the writer Ken Saro-Wiwa, who wrote:<br />
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… the stories I tell must have a different sort of purpose from the artist in the Western world. And it’s not now an ego trip, it is serious, it is politics, it is economics, it’s everything, and art in that instance becomes so meaningful, both to the artist and to the consumers of that art.</blockquote>
This morning, as the world disappears inside its cocoon, it feels impossible to say anything that could count as a message, or speak for the people or a country in the way Saro-Wiwa was able to. But if a writer has an obligation, it is to keep that door to the Underworld open, so the living systems, in which civilisations embed themselves like parasitic worms, do not shut down. And sometimes the way we can do that is to document our own passage through those fracture points, to reveal what powers the world we live in, whether this is George Orwell going into the Yorkshire mines, or Dan Gretton walking to the site of Buchenwald; my own small slide into the kur in times of climate catastrophe. <br />
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I thought there were three R’s we needed to learn about for Deep Adaptation. But in 2019 there appeared a fourth, Reconciliation, which inconveniently brings the rest of humanity into our individual restorations, and the thorny territory of social justice. <br />
<br />
Reconciliation, writes Bendell, is not only with your death or anger or regret, but<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
reconciliation between peoples, genders, classes, generations, countries, religions and political persuasions. Because it is time to make our peace. Otherwise, without this inner deep adaptation to climate collapse we risk tearing each other apart and dying hellishly.</blockquote>
The real crisis we face is existential: who we are as human beings, and what our presence means on this planet at this time. Ancestral myths address that crisis, not as a tragedy, but as material, as a moral imperative to put a crooked thing straight. Shifting a paradigm is not an abstract phrase you can wield in a lecture hall or workshop, but something that happens concretely, in the depths of yourself, in your relationships in the real world. How to configure that change is encoded in the ancient myths and fairytales, in our encounters with wildness, in the tracking of dreams, the way the Earth can still speak to us through the jangled frequencies of our minds. <br />
<br />
The real crisis we face is existential: who we are as human beings, and what our presence means on this planet at this time. Ancestral myths address that crisis, not as a tragedy, but as material, as a moral imperative to put a crooked thing straight<br />
<br />
I thought I would never be reconciled to the dark forces that were revealed in my own life. How could I remedy anything I had witnessed, or read about? ‘Who is it who can walk down these little roads of grief?’ my friend Carmen once asked of the tracks the Apache nation had left behind in their exile. And yet we do, willingly, for this is the task ahead of us. I don’t know if we will make it to any kind of liveable future, but I know it exists on the edge of time. And on a good day, I can see it and I wish it could stay forever.<br />
<br />
<div>
I wish for so many things as the skies darken. I wish the girls we once were had not had to shoulder that hard legacy from their fathers. I wish that the creatures in Australia had not been burned. I wish that the massacres I am reading about in this book had never happened. I wish my country had not divorced itself from the mainland of Europe, and this plague and decades of hostility had not driven everyone into hiding. I wish I could have reconciled the people who came into my dreams in those years, that we could have sat around that table and found a happy ending. But I have to know that it was enough to speak out their names in the clear morning, under the peeling eucalypt, under the mesquite, under the oak by the curve of the Suffolk barley field. <br />
<br />
I did not want to lose my beautiful life but I did. I let it go. I did it to make the world lighter and kinder, to leave a track the way the people have always left tracks for us to follow, in the rocks, in their dialogues with creatures and plants and planets, in their art, in their beauty.<br />
<br />
At equinox I will light a fire with the branches of the elm that fell in the winter storm, as the year shifts from the time of the underworld to the light-filled upperworld of spring, as my ancestors have done in these islands, across the world, since we can remember. I will jump over the fire as I did on leap day with Lucy and Mark, in a ceremony we held in a courtyard in Brick Lane, and a hundred people followed in our footsteps, banging drums and saucepans, shouting these words in Persian, in fellowship, with our kith in the East End, in Tehran, in city streets across the world:<br />
<br />
<i>Zardi-ye man az to</i></div>
<div>
<i>Sorkhi-ye to az</i><br />
<br />
O fire, I will give you my sickly yellow and I will take your fiery red! <br />
<br />
May you have the courage to jump the fire. May you disobey your forefathers and open the box. May all your helpers come in time. May we all sing before the storm as it advances, as Eros approaches us with his great wings. May we have loved this Earth and each other enough for this not to be the end. <br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div>
<i><span style="font-size: x-small;">IMAGE: The Oil Slick at the BP or Not BP action against BP sponsorship of the Troy exhibition at the British Museum in February ‘Oil is everything that died. Ever. We are the atoms of everything melted and dissolved. We have no compassion. We have no feeling. We take everything in our path. There’s no right. No wrong. But we are also the beating heart. The sap. The visceral body fluid of the earth. They should have left us in the ground… but they didn’t. We are here’. (Photo: Guy Reece from striking faces @strikingfaces)</span></i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>References</b><br /><br /> Miller, A. The Drama of the Gifted Child, 1978, Revised and republished by Virago in 1995 as The Drama of Being a Child<br />Bendell, Professor J. Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, 2018<br /><a href="https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions/">https://jembendell.com/2019/05/15/deep-adaptation-versions</a> <br />Pendell, D. Pharmako/Poeia: Plants, Powers, Poisons and Herbcraft, North Atlantic Books, 1995<br />Gretton D. I You We Them: Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killer in History and Today, Heinemann, 2019</span><br />
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Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-85394392582046608442019-10-29T10:54:00.002+00:002019-11-03T08:43:30.808+00:00The Earth Does Not Speak in Prose<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcL_v4PzUD1graXdKLxlUCC5-6ACBj435nlaUFYrxgpA5hdLn5EwHG1Y_lmaHD3y4jmzk9MP37QdQq0VQcspzh7fAT-U-nICsrcFUJcqnbeINVh8hCFMrJmi0DyyUpA9JHhFnlTAEei67v/s1600/kit+boyd+reading+dark+mountain+v2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1057" data-original-width="1600" height="263" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcL_v4PzUD1graXdKLxlUCC5-6ACBj435nlaUFYrxgpA5hdLn5EwHG1Y_lmaHD3y4jmzk9MP37QdQq0VQcspzh7fAT-U-nICsrcFUJcqnbeINVh8hCFMrJmi0DyyUpA9JHhFnlTAEei67v/s400/kit+boyd+reading+dark+mountain+v2.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Reading Dark Mountain by Kit Boyd</td></tr>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{9042e6bb-9f0a-4d6b-a6fb-e69f2723b98c}{181}" paraid="7" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><i>A conversation with Paul Kingsnorth for the just published<a href="https://dark-mountain.net/introducing-dark-mountain-issue-16-refuge/"> tenth anniversary edition of Dark Mountain</a> about writing in times of catastrophe, decolonising language and how you build a culture that can speak with the land.</i></span><br />
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><br /></span>
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">In 2008, Paul Kingsnorth was working on two seismic texts. One was a small red pamphlet, engineered with</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> fellow ex-journalist </span><span class="SpellingError BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; background-image: url("data:image/gif; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">Dougald</span><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> Hine</span></span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">, that laid down the tracks for what would become The Dark Mountain Project; the other was a post-apocalyptic novel written in a ‘shadow tongue’, </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">the first in a trilogy of books that follows the fate of a man on the brink of collapse in</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> different millennia. Both make strong demands on the reader.</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> </span><span class="SpellingError BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; background-image: url("data:image/gif; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">Uncivilisation</span></span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> challenges a world view conventionally shaped by progress, technology and human exceptionalism;</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> The Wake, </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">our linguistic skills and capacity to step into the mindset of someone whose land, culture and sense of being in control is taken away by a </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">force outside their known boundaries. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{9042e6bb-9f0a-4d6b-a6fb-e69f2723b98c}{209}" paraid="9" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">In 2019, I am sitting opposite the writer who has for the last decade wrestled with these crises in essays, fiction and poetry; who has shaped </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">anthologies, directed festivals and writing courses and brought together a collection of writers and artists to pay attention to the ecological and social collapse we all inevitably face. </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">I </span><span class="SpellingError BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; background-image: url("data:image/gif; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">realise</span><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> that despite having worked alongside each other during these years, we have never spoken about our mutual craft, and that now is the moment. We are in a coffee shop in the bookish town of Hay-on-Wye. It’s midsummer, a golden day in the Golden Valley. In his just-published non-fiction work,</span></span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> Savage Gods, </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">he challenges himself: on his quest to find a place to belong on the Earth, and on </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">his true worth as a wielder of words</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">. Finally he is thrown the gauntlet by</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> the mischievous god Loki, who, swiping a beer from his fridge, tells him to ‘shut up’ entirely. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{9042e6bb-9f0a-4d6b-a6fb-e69f2723b98c}{247}" paraid="14" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CHARLOTTE DU CANN</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> Looking back at the decade, from the time of the manifesto to now, what strikes you as most significant in terms of the zeitgeist?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559738":240,"335559740":240}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{4}" paraid="16" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 16px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PAUL KINGSNORTH </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> Perhaps the most significant fact about the last decade is how much was said in the manifesto that has become pretty much widely accepted. In terms of the culture, it was quite a wild thing to be saying: that it is not possible to stop the collapse and that we need to write about the situation for real.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559738":240,"335559740":240}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 19px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{16}" paraid="18" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Now the kind of things we were publishing in the first books <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/28/opinion/extinction-rebellion-london.html">you can find in the New York Times</a> and the Guardian; in the fact that Extinction Rebellion are called Extinction Rebellion. Most people are saying: we are in the catastrophe now, ecologically speaking. Which is a shame because it would have been nice if we had been entirely wrong. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{22}" paraid="19" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{26}" paraid="20" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC The manifesto threw down a gauntlet for writers and artists to respond to this catastrophe. How successful do you think that has been?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{32}" paraid="21" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{36}" paraid="22" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">PK Funnily enough, I think that might be the least successful part of Dark Mountain. I had this idea originally that I could found a writer's group like C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, sitting around in the pub talking about orcs, and we would have a little journal. It was </span><span class="SpellingError BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; background-image: url("data:image/gif; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">Dougald’s</span><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> idea to publish a manifesto so people would know what we were talking about, and he knew all about crowdfunding, which was new at the time. </span></span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{42}" paraid="23" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{46}" paraid="24" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">For me it was a literary project partly because I wanted to get away from being an activist. I largely failed to do that, because I couldn't stop writing about the failure of activism and detach myself from the political conversation. Like George Orwell, I was being constantly pulled between: 'I want to be a literary writer’ and ‘I've got to get involved in the world I'm in’.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{52}" paraid="25" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{56}" paraid="26" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC In these ten years, the responses to the manifesto have attracted a certain kind of writing that you wouldn’t necessarily call literary...</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{62}" paraid="27" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{66}" paraid="28" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK The difference between </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="SpellingError BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; background-image: url("data:image/gif; background-position: left bottom; background-repeat: repeat-x; border-bottom: 1px solid transparent; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">Uncivilisation</span></span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> and, say, the modernist manifestos which partly inspired it, is that we weren't suggesting people should write in a certain way. We were talking about tackling a certain set of themes, particularly demolishing the myth of progress and stepping outside our humanness, taking the crisis seriously and understanding where we are. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{76}" paraid="29" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{80}" paraid="30" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">The most significant thing turned out to be the non-fiction and maybe the events, and the creation of a group of people who share that perspective. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{86}" paraid="31" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{90}" paraid="32" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC Maybe the function of writing now is that it can address a territory that activism never really looks at, which is the existential crisis that we're in. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{96}" paraid="33" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{100}" paraid="34" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK In some ways it's not a time for literature. What we call literature is completely inadequate, particularly metropolitan, middle-class British literature that is utterly unconcerned with the great existential issues of our time. That's one of the things that motivated me to write </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Savage Gods</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">: what kind of writing would you produce in this time if you took this seriously? It's not just a question about subject matter, it's a question about form. And it's also a question about why you would even write anything. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{114}" paraid="36" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC So where does that leave the role of the writer, do you suppose?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{120}" paraid="37" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{124}" paraid="38" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK When we wrote the manifesto, I believed very strongly in the writer as an agent of change. And I’m not sure I do anymore. That’s part of the crisis that led me to </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Savage Gods:</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> writing about losing faith in the written word. And that’s because for me, direct experience is becoming more and more important than experience filtered through writing. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{138}" paraid="40" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">I don’t have the same belief that I had ten years ago in the idea that a literary movement of people could produce world-changing stuff. Partly because society is so big and so complex, and when I look back at the manifesto now, I was approaching literature from quite an activist-y mindset. You know, </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">We will use writing to change the future!</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{146}" paraid="41" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{150}" paraid="42" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC I really enjoyed the references in </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Savage Gods</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> to people who would definitely be considered writers of literature, such as Yeats or Kavanagh or DH Lawrence. Those writers appear like touchstones, like a lineage. Would you describe it like that?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{160}" paraid="43" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{164}" paraid="44" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK I didn’t really consciously think about that when I was younger, but I do now. Who would be in my lineage? Yeats would be in my lineage, and Ted Hughes, Jeffers and DH Lawrence, Emily Bronte, Wordsworth, and basically all the great dark Romantics. But also others like Orwell, Chesterton, Huxley. There’s a certain strain of English radicalism that appeals to me which is quite particular. Now that I’ve said that, I’ll contradict it by talking about lots of American writers…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{170}" paraid="45" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{174}" paraid="46" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC Robinson Jeffers is not very English…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{180}" paraid="47" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{184}" paraid="48" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Yes, there’s that great American wilderness tradition: Jeffers, but also Thoreau, Edward Abbey. And other writers like Wendell Berry… There’s something about American writing about nature and place which appeals to me much more than the kind of polite, middle-class, Oxbridge-y English nature writing which I find tiresome. I would much rather read someone with this great eagle’s perspective on the world.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{190}" paraid="49" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{194}" paraid="50" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC That is dictated by the land itself, I think.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{200}" paraid="51" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{204}" paraid="52" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK I think it is. Because</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> it’s a very small, very old part of the </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">country</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> here</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> in Britain. Whereas in America you can still stride out, and maybe get killed by a bear, and have a non-human experience at scale.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{218}" paraid="53" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{222}" paraid="54" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">So if I had a lineage, there’s a certain English radical Romantic tradition and there’s an American wild landscape tradition. And then also politically, I think of someone like, say, Subcomandante </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Marcos </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">of the Zapatistas, who was a massive influence on me. Someone who came out of the city and decided to learn about what it meant to be indigenous, to belong to a place and become a revolutionary leader of a very different kind. Firstly, one who’s directed by the people themselves. And secondly, one who’s coming from a sense of place and culture, which is not a kind of unchanging, reactionary sort of everything-was-viable-in-the-old-days-and-we’ll-keep-it-like-that notion. Quite the opposite: the Zapatistas want change. But it’s entirely untheoretical. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{232}" paraid="55" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{236}" paraid="56" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC There seems to be a thread throughout all these writers from Marcos to Wendell Berry: that their work comes out of knowing places, it doesn’t come out of the mind.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{242}" paraid="57" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{246}" paraid="58" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Yes, this something I come back to again and again in all of my writing. The fact that the global machine which is destroying the Earth flourishes by destroying all cultures, all peoples, all places -- like grubbing up an orchard. As it ploughs through the world everybody is pulled into the engine to feed the growth machine. And so the process of rooting becomes a radical act but also a difficult one. </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Because what does that mean when everyone is moving around, if I don’t belong anywhere?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{e9cac890-4845-4208-825b-032258d990ed}{254}" paraid="59" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{3}" paraid="60" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">The best places I’ve been in the world in my view have been the most rooted places, where cultures are very old and people have a strong kind of solidity to them, like old trees. And they know their land, and they know it’s where their ancestors are buried and where they’re going to be buried. Compare that to the kind of weird rootlessness of the modern West, of which I’m a part, and there’s no comparison, in terms of the way that people live well.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{9}" paraid="61" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{13}" paraid="62" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Most of us aren’t living like that. I’m not living like that. And there are more and more people moving around all the time, and migrating and being displaced, some of them voluntarily and some of them not. That’s what we’re all doing all the time, internally and externally. How do you get from here to there is the question.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{19}" paraid="63" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{23}" paraid="64" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC And it’s not just a matter of finding your place. It’s a matter of having a relationship with that place, whether you ‘own’ it or not.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{29}" paraid="65" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{33}" paraid="66" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK The reality is that people need to belong across space and time. We need to have a sense of who we are as a people, whatever that means to us, and who our ancestors are. Otherwise we’re just individualists. We need a sense of being part of something across time. And we also need a sense of being able to say ‘This is my home.’ It doesn’t have to be where you’ve come from, but it’s the place you are, where you’ve said, ‘This is where I’ve put my feet down.’</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{39}" paraid="67" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{43}" paraid="68" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">If you look at that from a non-human perspective, it starts to make a lot more sense. Because you’re not just saying, ‘Where is my human culture? Who are my people?’, arguing about all that endless identity stuff that everybody kills each other about all day. You’re saying, ‘I don’t even necessarily need to be from the place I’m in, but I can pay attention’, to what Aldo Leopold called the biotic community of the place you’re in.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{49}" paraid="69" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{53}" paraid="70" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">So I don’t come from where I live at the moment, but as a family we have managed to find a couple of acres to put down roots in and paid lots of attention to everything that lives there. And the community is not just the people</span><span class="TextRun Highlight BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; outline: transparent solid 1px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;">.</span></span><span class="TextRun Highlight BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="background-color: yellow; font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; outline: transparent solid 1px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> </span></span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{63}" paraid="71" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{67}" paraid="72" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">As </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">you say, you put your feet down in a place, and then you look around and you see what lives here and find out what it needs. You can do that anywhere. It seems to me that if there’s an imperative for writers, it is to ask: ‘What does it mean to be human, in a landscape, at this time? And what can you do to serve the wider community of everything that lives in it?’</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{75}" paraid="73" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{79}" paraid="74" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC And that’s a task as well.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{85}" paraid="75" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{89}" paraid="76" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK There’s always an enormous pulling inside you as a writer. </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">In a pre-modern culture, creators would create as part of a tradition bigger than themselves.</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="none" lang="EN" style="color: red; font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"><span class="NormalTextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; user-select: text;"> </span></span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">So a storyteller will tell a story that’s part of their culture; or if you’re a religious teacher, you’ve got a big tradition that you’re working in. We’re people with no tradition, because that’s what modernity has done. It’s made us all into little individuals. So the story we tell, we have to come up with ourselves. And then we’re endlessly in pain, because we’re always driven to try and work everything out. Because we’re not supported by ancestry, we’re not supported by a culture. The bargain of modernity is we have no tradition to hold us back, but we also have no tradition to support us. So all the storytellers have to come up with their own vision which is why writers end up shooting themselves, or drinking themselves to death…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{101}" paraid="77" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{105}" paraid="78" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC Or rediscovering old myths, old texts…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{111}" paraid="79" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{115}" paraid="80" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Yes. And what Dark Mountain ended up doing quite a lot of: talking about myths, folk tales and religious stories. Almost unconsciously, Dark Mountain ended up as a place where you could start looking for old stories. One of the things we got wrong in the manifesto was this notion that we need a new story, when we needed to rediscover the old ones. Martin Shaw was one of the people who really made me focus on that, because he said, ‘Look, the stories are already here, it’s just that we don’t know them anymore.’</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{121}" paraid="81" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{125}" paraid="82" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC There’s something else contained in these old stories which no new narrative would probably say, which is that you have to go through a process of transformation or on an underworld journey in order to be properly human. So where do you feel that those stories have a place now? </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{131}" paraid="83" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{135}" paraid="84" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK The underworld journey and the alchemical transformation is the story at the heart of every religion I’ve ever come across. An individual has to be broken open in some way, has to go through the fire and come out the other side. That’s what our culture is doing at the moment. And all of the official stories that we tell ourselves don’t involve undergoing the underworld journey. The green narrative that we can fix everything and it will be alright, is now actually giving way to a more traditional structure in which we all have to go through the fire, and then we’ll come out completely transformed into something else.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{141}" paraid="85" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{145}" paraid="86" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">But we don’t like that as a culture. We don’t like transformation.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{151}" paraid="87" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{155}" paraid="88" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC It hurts and you end up in a state of crisis.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{161}" paraid="89" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{165}" paraid="90" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK And you have to go through that… The other thing that religions teach is that you get wisdom through suffering. It isn’t popular but life is suffering and how you manage it and what you learn from it must be the lesson of life. We have created a culture which tells us that progress will prevent us from suffering. We like that story because no-one wants to suffer but it's not working, it’s just delayed lots of suffering that we’re going to have to go through now.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{171}" paraid="91" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{175}" paraid="92" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">So the heart of the story that interests me now is what it means to go to the Underworld and come back marked, but with some wisdom. You know, Odin has to be hung on the tree for nine nights, and then he has to lose his eye, before he gets the vision that’s given to him in the runes. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{181}" paraid="93" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{185}" paraid="94" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC There’s a story cited by Derrida via Plato about the invention of writing. Thoth, the Egyptian god of medicine and magic, tells the king he has created a method that will help the people remember and be wise. But the king tells him: the people will put all their wisdom in the writing and forget to hold it themselves. Eventually he agrees, with the warning that henceforth writing will be both a poison and a remedy. He calls it the </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">pharmakon. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{197}" paraid="96" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">It seems to me that writers often embody the medicine of the pharmakon themselves and that your journey as a writer, and in </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Savage Gods</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> in particular, relates to the holding of these contradictory forces.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{207}" paraid="97" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{211}" paraid="98" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Yes, the question at the heart of that book is: </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">how much </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">in these words is so divorced from the thing they’re pointing at that they are useless or damaging? </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{225}" paraid="100" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">In the book I talk about being torn between this notion of sitting around a campfire with my tribe and wanting to be part of that long lineage tradition. And then wanting to sit up on the mountain and look down at the campfire and go, ‘Look at all those idiots just being comfortable around their fire instead of coming out here and exploring what might be possible.’</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{235}" paraid="102" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">That’s the human condition. We’re all around the campfire and on the mountain. As a writer, you’re never going to be content with either. And that’s OK, so long as you can hold that as your work. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{241}" paraid="103" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{245}" paraid="104" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">I’m very content in my personal life. But existentially and culturally and ecologically, no. If you do the kind of writing that happens in Dark Mountain, if you don’t think the world is going in the right direction, or the culture has got it right, or the stuff that surrounds us is the stuff that we should be surrounded by, you have to carry that contradiction all the time. And I’m better at carrying contradictions now than I was ten years ago. You just have to carry it and not be eaten by it.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{251}" paraid="105" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{74ddb4e9-f021-4be0-baff-f28a3db08c60}{255}" paraid="106" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC The writer, within the frame of the story, is also a rememberer of a certain kind of wisdom, whether it’s remembering how to be with the land or remembering the old stories, bringing them back into the field of attention or acting as a bridge to the non-human world.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{6}" paraid="107" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{10}" paraid="108" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK That’s the big story for me now. How can you possibly tell the story of the world that isn’t human? How do you build a culture which sees the world as a living, sacred community of which you are part? Because you can either do that, or burn. And out of the ashes of this whole machine will have to come a re-attending. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{16}" paraid="109" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{20}" paraid="110" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC And do you think words are part of that?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{26}" paraid="111" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{30}" paraid="112" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK I had a conversation with the writer Charles Foster recently at the launch of </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Savage Gods,</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> and the conclusion we both came to is that if words have a value that’s the value they have. Can words come out of a bigger tradition that carries them, that is not just about you as a person, torn between your various desires, but as part of a grand, living tradition?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{40}" paraid="113" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{44}" paraid="114" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">What happens if you go to a place and try and write it? In a way that carries the stories of that place, that sees that place as a living, functional network that’s watching you at the same time as you watch it. How would you write if you were trying to write that? And the answer is: entirely differently. And I don’t know whether you can do it in prose. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{54}" paraid="116" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC A lot of poets get close to it.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{60}" paraid="117" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{64}" paraid="118" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK I wonder if it’s still something that poetry does that prose almost can’t do. I did an event in New York in 2017 with Amitav Ghosh, who wrote </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">The Great Derangement</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">. And we had a conversation about what would it look like if you were trying to write the non-human world. And he said in some of the old Indian stories it’s totally natural to have the land speaking. It’s true of the old fairy tales of Europe as well: you get speaking trees, you get magical things happening in woods. And it’s all completely standard. It’s just assumed that if you go into the forest, everything’s alive and weird things are going to happen. So, it’s not magical realism, it’s just realism.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{78}" paraid="120" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC One of the things that’s so difficult is that the planet doesn’t speak rationally, so you have to learn another language.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{84}" paraid="121" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{88}" paraid="122" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK I think it probably doesn’t speak in modern English prose, if it speaks any human language. It certainly doesn’t speak in the kind of literary prose that I thought I had to write. The act of paying attention somehow creates a different kind of writing – analytically, intellectually. It’s all experiential.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{94}" paraid="123" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{98}" paraid="124" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Most humans throughout history have not spoken or communicated in literary, analytical prose with each other. Or rational, modern conceptual language… Every language is obviously very particular, and we’re talking a slightly bleached version of English that’s become the language of the global machine. You talk to Irish people, and they say that the words that you would use to represent a certain feeling or a sense of place or time, are very different from those the English came and imposed upon the people. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{104}" paraid="125" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{108}" paraid="126" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">And that’s why empires, including the British Empire, want to wipe out indigenous languages: you people speak English, because that’s the rational, modern language of industry, the language of the civilised people. You get rid of all of the words that allow you to relate to your places and your culture and your ancestors, because that’s the way we destroy a people. We take their language away. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{114}" paraid="127" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{118}" paraid="128" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC So how do we decolonise, to use a very modern term, our own words? </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{124}" paraid="129" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{128}" paraid="130" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK For those of us who are English, or who speak English, it’s almost a harder task, because, you know, if you’re Irish you can at least relearn your original language, whereas what’s our original language?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{134}" paraid="131" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{138}" paraid="132" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC In some ways with </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">The Wake</span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN"> you went back to something like this…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{148}" paraid="133" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{152}" paraid="134" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Well, one of the things I was trying to do was to explore one version of the original language of the people of that place. Regional languages might be another answer, all the dialects that have been wiped out all across England, by this southeast BBC English that I was brought up to think was the way you were supposed to speak if you wanted to get on. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{158}" paraid="135" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{162}" paraid="136" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC But when we are stuck in this imperial language, we also fail to see that other, particularly indigenous, people outside Europe have a different way of looking at reality.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{172}" paraid="138" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Absolutely. Because that’s what language is. It’s a way of looking at reality. So if everybody speaks the same language, they all look at reality in the same way. That’s the purpose of it, that’s why it’s an imperial language. You eliminate all of those different ways of seeing and relating and you say everyone should speak this one, which happens to be the language of mechanism and progress and machine-thinking and individuality… </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{182}" paraid="140" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">It’s very Orwellian: if you can create a language which you can impose upon people, it will be literally impossible for them to think incorrect thoughts because the words aren’t there. That’s the theory behind newspeak. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{194}" paraid="142" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">The minute there’s an orthodoxy of language and an orthodoxy of thought, which we all feel we have to stay within otherwise we’re going to get punished, or cancelled, then that’s the end of expression, that’s the end of any attempt to explore outside the boundaries. It’s what every orthodoxy from fascism to communism to theocracy tries to impose on the people to purify the culture, by forcing out anyone who thinks or speaks incorrectly.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{200}" paraid="143" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{204}" paraid="144" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC You’ve just completed the final book of the trilogy, and then you’re going to take some time off…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{210}" paraid="145" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{214}" paraid="146" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Until the end of the year, I’m not writing anything, not one word. I’ve just written this novel set a thousand years in the future called </span><span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">Alexandria...</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{222}" paraid="147" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{226}" paraid="148" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC After the library?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{232}" paraid="149" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{236}" paraid="150" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK Yes. At least partly… the great repository of all human knowledge. And the project of that book, at least part of which is also written in another language, is exactly this question of what does language look like when it comes from a non-human place, and how does the Earth speak when it’s sentient? So it is ambitious and possibly insane, and disastrous, but it was fun to write and to push yourself forward a thousand years to what the world could be like…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{242}" paraid="151" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{246}" paraid="152" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC There still is a world?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{72fab558-394e-43d3-957c-454c12fa181e}{252}" paraid="153" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{1}" paraid="154" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK There’s still a world. I was really taken with that question about landscape that speaks, sentient landscape, how people have relationships with and communicate with things that aren’t human, that’s really central to the book. The narrative of the human body and how it relates to the body of the Earth. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{7}" paraid="155" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{11}" paraid="156" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">If you were looking to the next ten years of Dark Mountain I would say that’s the big question. If the Earth doesn’t speak in prose, what does it speak in? How can you hear it? And how can you possibly represent it in words. How do you get this burden of machine English off your shoulders and start to plunge into something messier? Almost like taking the language back a thousand years, or forward a thousand years…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{17}" paraid="157" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{21}" paraid="158" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC Which is what you’ve done…</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{31}" paraid="160" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK So, if you want to see things differently, you have to have different words to see them through, or different words to express. This language, as it’s currently spoken, certainly written in prose, is not remotely adequate to represent what you can actually see and feel when you go into a forest – it’s the opposite of indigeneity.</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{41}" paraid="162" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">CDC The roots must be there though. Orwell advised writers to use Anglo-Saxon words, and avoid the abstract Roman or Greek ones, because they are based on things that you can touch. </span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<div class="OutlineElement Ltr BCX0 SCXW109549426" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: white; clear: both; cursor: text; direction: ltr; font-family: "Segoe UI", "Segoe UI Web", Arial, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; overflow: visible; padding: 0px; position: relative; user-select: text;">
<div class="Paragraph BCX0 SCXW109549426" paraeid="{3ea91389-15fc-49fc-84fd-a8d30eb6aee6}{51}" paraid="164" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: transparent; -webkit-user-drag: none; background-color: transparent; color: windowtext; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; user-select: text; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span class="TextRun BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-contrast="auto" lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" xml:lang="EN">PK They have to be there, yes. All the languages must have been earthy and indigenous and rooted once. This culture was just as indigenous and rooted as any other one before it became modern. So the question is: how do you get through to it, how do you get through to the root of things?</span><span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> </span><br />
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<span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span class="EOP BCX0 SCXW109549426" data-ccp-props="{"201341983":0,"335559740":276}" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "times new roman_msfontservice" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 21.85px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><b>This interview was originally published in Dark Mountain: Issue 16 - REFUGE. <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-16-refuge/">Copies are now available from the Dark Mountain online shop.</a></b></span></div>
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Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-66118474731560233792019-08-16T15:10:00.002+01:002020-10-02T15:56:21.522+01:00Sea Change<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small; text-align: start;">In the Calm / In the Surge / Somewhere between Paradise and Desolation' by Leya Tess,</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-weight: 400;"><i>After a lull in posting, this a piece I wrote recently for the new series I'm editing over at <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/">Dark Mountain's online edition</a>. The </i></span>se<i>ries looks at the changing fate of the world's oceans and how we can respond as artists, writers and feeling human beings. During the last month we've been exploring the beauty and the crises of the sea through fiction, art, photography, poetry and memoir. Here is my introduction from the edge of the North Sea.</i><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><span style="font-weight: 400;">‘But we love the sea!’ the woman in the back row cried. We are in the Museum of East Anglian Life at a Transition event called, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">What if … the sea keeps rising?</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I want to put my hand up and ask about the rivers. Why did the government withdraw its funds for the river defences of the Ore, the Deben, the Alde, the Blyth? But the question does not happen. There are a lot of official words going on. The woman from the Environment Agency in London is staring into her computer and talking about plans and scenarios and how some moves are less controversial than others, as we all gaze at the aerial shot of the sinuous and green waterlands of coastal Suffolk that we call home. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">We love the sea. But here is climate change at our backs, warming the oceans, spoiling all our plans. Here is the tide coming in, erasing our castles in the sand. The houses that are falling down the cliffs at Easton Bavents, the disappearing cod we always took for granted with their stomachs full of microbeads, their livers full of mercury. I know, like everyone else, that something wasn’t quite right about this seaside holiday, this get-what-you-want, go-where-you-please, eat-cake-every-day holiday that lasted for a hundred years. It wasn’t all fun. It rained, you got bored and read too many books. The family quarrelled. The show on the pier was a shabby affair. And sometimes as you stood looking at the horizon, blueness all around, you felt something vital was missing. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Now in 2012, the holiday is over. I am no longer eating fish down at the harbour; I no longer cook </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">raie au beurre noir</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in my frying pan, or lay wild fennel fronds underneath the flatfish from the sandbars of Sole Bay. I know too much about the boats that scour the coastlines of the world. I know why oil tankers string across the horizon like a neon necklace at night. I’ve stood with protesting communities on Walberswick beach after the floods and the threat of nuclear expansion at Sizewell. I know a lot of facts but I don't know what to do with them.</span>
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<h3>
Dragnet</h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">In 2019, as the cruise and container ships of the pleasuredome steam ever homeward, that missing information rises like a tsunami and overwhelms us: ocean acidification, ocean current disruption, melting ice, dead zones, increasing oil spills. The bleaching of 90% of the world’s coral reefs, the disappearance of 90% of large fish, the poisoning of mangroves by shrimp farms, the destruction of sea beds for shellfish; jellyfish blooms, algae blooms, mussels cooking in their shells in California, orcas starving in Canada, seabird populations crashing in the Hebrides, whales washing up in their hundreds in New Zealand: mutilated sharks, massacred dolphins, diseased wild salmon, the last vaquita caught in a illegal net in the Bay of Cortez, bycatch of Chinese medicine makers in search of the swimbladder of the endangered totoaba. A delicacy and cure, they say, for depleted sexual potency in men.</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The facts pile up as the consequences of our voracious appetites are thrown up like rotten seaweed on the shore. The bones of drowned migrants gather on the Mediterranean seabed. The lost forms of albatross chicks litter the beach in a remote island in the Pacific. People peer under the surface through television goggles, watch starfish bloom on Arctic seabeds and sharks hunt among the kelp forests of Africa. We gasp. The rainbow watery world is beautiful, savage and remote. The presence of plastic in the deep blue shocks us momentarily – but everything we touch in our terrestrial lives is covered in it. Every action in our houses, each machine we use, each product we buy from sandwich to shoe, each child that is produced, pours more toxins, more refuse, more sewage into the blue. </span>We are tangled up in this predatory culture, like a turtle in a dragnet. Inside we flail hopelessly.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Where do we go from here? </span>
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<h3>
Dark ocean</h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">At night when the wind is in the east I can hear the North Sea heaving and sighing on the shingle, and sometimes there is a tang of salt that drifts across the marshes. It's not a clear brochure-blue sea, it's mostly a gunmetal grey, whose silvery shine can take you by surprise on a winter’s day. But it holds mysteries beneath its workaday exterior. The sanderlings at its edge are not a fixed territory like the country of limestone, chalk or clay. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">In 1992 the writer, W.G. Sebald famously walked along this shoreline from Lowestoft to Dunwich. I sometimes sit in the Sailor's Reading room where he once wrote, in the cold months, watched over by long-gone fishermen in sepia photographs, the model boats they crafted preserved behind glass, the clock ticking behind me. We are in a sandy place, where time shifts and unmoors you, and you can glimpse the past and future of things. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sebald was reminded of the horrors of history as he walked along the crumbling cliffs and heathland of coastal Suffolk, the </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Yazidi</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> circle we are all stuck in, doomed to repeat the cruelty of Empires. He gazed out across the German Ocean (as he called it) from Gun Hill and watched the warships of Britain and Spain battle for Sole Bay. He was always looking backwards; we are always looking forwards, equally in horror.</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">A fret creeps over the fields and covers the land, a lone curlew calls. Undersea, a country called Doggerland is tugging at our dreams. The men look at you with seaglass eyes out of the photographs, the men singing in the back room at the Eel’s Foot, mending the nets down at Blackshore. Without realising it, you forget which century you are in.</span> <br />
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<h3>
Long shore drift</h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Maybe the sea is a mood, in the way mountains are an attitude of mind, or the forest an encounter. You climb towards the summit, you slip among the trees and disappear; by the sea you let go, expand yourself to the horizon. You enter the waves and the feeling of everything changes. You emerge a different person, no longer invisible. </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">The sea’s mood pulls you, body and soul, into times of happiness. You can see it the way the women lie like elephant seals on the shingle, in giant nests of windbreak and thermos. In the breaking waves, the children play like sea otters. Out beyond the groynes, an old man trawls the choppy water, and emerges shaggy and dripping, invisible trident in hand. Inside we are all happy, in a way it is hard to define. Here in the great salty commons, in our half-naked creaturehood, we find ourselves level. In the streets behind the promenade, our heads are bowed, we are on a mission with shopping lists in our hands, each of us tightly defined by class and property. Here we are a colony of seals, a pod of dolphins on a hot day, calling to each other in a delight.</span><br />
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<img alt="" class="wp-image-11503 size-full" height="303" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/crab003_web.jpg" width="400" /><br />
from 'Triptych for Whalebone & Crabshell' by Sharon Chin<br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Once I dreamed that I crossed the line of death. I covered my face in ashes to fool the border guards. I saw a blue star surrounded by gold and wanted to go there – but before I left I felt myself pulled back into the deep, deep blue of the ocean and a giant crab embraced me, and it was the most powerful experience of love I have ever felt. And then she opened her claws and let me go. It was the Earth saying goodbye.</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Sometimes in these summer mornings when I swim out, when I feel I cannot face the people in the streets, or any of these facts that you and I know, I let old Mother Carey embrace me, I float like a starfish on the edge of this island of rock and sand and wave. I feel the sound of the shore, the birds wheeling and clouds above me, breeze on my face. The world opens, and suddenly I am in all oceans, in all time…</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">So maybe this is a praise song, a shanty prose, to lull us back into a place we can share, in all oceans, in all time. We love the sea, and on a good day, a hot blue day like today, the sea loves us swimming in her, with our finny legs and our laughter.</span>
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<h3>
Ultramarine</h3>
<span style="font-weight: 400;">We’re always in search of a new story, of moving forward, of getting there. But what if the story we need is one we have always known but just need to remember? Not a linear narrative but a state of being, where we can hold the dark ocean as well as the light that plays on its surface, where we can weather the tsunami and still love the elements that give us life? What if what the world needs is not more facts but people with their salty bodies and souls intact, their eyes and imaginations wide open?</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">When you face the future there needs to be space for what the great plant metaphysician, Dale Pendell, calls</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">a</span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Ground State Calibration.</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> You need to find the existential basis for all your actions that lie deep inside your being. If we don't want a future dominated by the same feudal forces, catalogued in </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Rings of Saturn,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> there have to be different coordinates in our ordinary lives. We have to locate another star by which to navigate, and find real kinship with this blue planet. We have to know what kind of creatures we are and what is being asked from us in return.</span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">What if we started again here, by the sea, where the memory of our physical happiness comes to us on a summer’s day? I always thought ground state meant you needed to have your feet planted on terra firma – but what if it means being at home in another state entirely? Something more shifting and fluid. A state where we can remember our creaturehood, our place in the pod, the feeling we are beloved by the life that surrounds and holds us, its beauty and complexity? </span><br />
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<span style="font-weight: 400;">Over the next few weeks we will be looking at our relationship with the sea and its capacity to change us, through the lens of storytellers, artists, poets and a marine biologist. We will travel from the Atlantic to the Pacific, stand on the deck of a boat, on the rocky shoreline, glide over coral and eelgrass meadows. But first, a song by Antony and the Johnsons, made for the film </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Chasing Extinction,</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and a glimpse into the lives of plankton, the miraculous lifeform that is the basis for all life in the sea and sky.</span>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MAIN IMAGE: 'In the Calm / In the Surge / Somewhere between Paradise and Desolation' by Leya Tess, </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ink on Nautical Chart, </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">from the exhibition 'We Built a Home Out of the Things We Gathered' OR Gallery, Vancouver (Photo by Dennis Ha). Colonial place names on a nautical chart are not always very accurate. Calm Channel is anything but calm in a northwesterly. Surge Narrows can be as still as a mirror at slack tide. Published as one of the maps in Dark Mountain: Issue 14.</span> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> <b>Leya Tess </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">works as an artist and sea kayak expedition guide on the islands off the coast of British Columbia. Her drawing practice considers the assumed power of colonial perspectives and the fluidity of ecological cycles.</span><a href="http://www.leyatess.com/"> <span style="font-weight: 400;">leyatess.com</span></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"> SECOND IMAGE: from 'Triptych for Whalebone and Crabshell' by Sharon Chin <em>Watercolour and ink on paper. </em>Illustration for a story by Zedeck Siew prompted by the plight of Rohingya people fleeing from Burma in boats in 2015. In Malay myth, the Pusat Tasek, a massive hole at the bottom of the ocean inhabited by a giant crab. When it leaves it home, it causes the rise and fall of tides. (from Dark Mountain: Issue 9). </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><strong>Sharon Chin</strong> is a writer and artist working living in Port Dickson, Malaysia, She is working on a series of illustrated journalism pieces about water issues in Malaysia. <a href="http://sharonchin.com/">sharonchin.com</a> </span>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-83472092650274637782019-02-20T11:27:00.001+00:002019-04-25T15:29:19.778+01:00In Search of a Lexicon for the Deep Core<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkmMjSIydo4_B97z2sVooJ2NbjU48fm3vTlHirB_AhfH8-vj6BmjB2eYcldtiRAW4byALC-_VXCs1ulQSgwCXnmEIFgEH3YIQIqv2eQNohFk7x1QCaW7f4jkbmfYZRYlDd72tfBarhHwph/s1600/over-your-cities-grass-will-grow-01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkmMjSIydo4_B97z2sVooJ2NbjU48fm3vTlHirB_AhfH8-vj6BmjB2eYcldtiRAW4byALC-_VXCs1ulQSgwCXnmEIFgEH3YIQIqv2eQNohFk7x1QCaW7f4jkbmfYZRYlDd72tfBarhHwph/s400/over-your-cities-grass-will-grow-01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from 'Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow', documentary about Anselm Kiefer by Sophie Fiennes</td></tr>
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<br />
the words<br />
the bread<br />
the child who reaches for the truths beyond the door<br />
the yearning to begin again together<br />
animals keen inside the parliament of the world<br />
the people in the room the people in the street the people<br />
hold everything dear<br />
–Gareth Evans ( title poem for <em>Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance</em> by John Berger)<br />
<br />
<br />
'There are two ways to grow a movement,' said Sophy. ' You push outwards and expand the number of people involved. Or you go inward and deepen the core.'<br />
<br />
It's December and from Sophy's kitchen table I can watch the sun as it appears above the dark curve of the Devon hills. It's Day Three of a convergence known as Deep Dive, an exploration into <a href="https://jembendell.wordpress.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/">'Deep Adaptation'</a> sparked by the emergence of Extinction Rebellion. Sophy is one of the organisers and I'm asking her about the intent for gathering.<br />
<br />
It's a beautiful morning, just before the winter solstice, and tonight I will face my death, looking into the face of an eagle. I don't know this yet. You might say not knowing is the MO for all explorations – except that having an intent gives you a thread to guide you there and back. You can go into a territory to see what is there, or you can go into the territory to find something you and the world cannot live without.<br />
<br />
That's a different journey.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Encounter</h3>
This winter I took a break from editing to write about the role of mythos in times of collapse, a book based on the four tasks of Psyche, and a performance based on a piece called <a href="http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-red-thread.html">The Red Thread. </a> It's a reworking of the myth of the Labyrinth at Knossos, where the labyrinth is not a prison but a dancing floor. Where the young men and women from the city are not sacrificed to feed the Minotaur incarcerated at its centre, but instead encounter an initiatory force that will reveal the mystery of life and death in the darkness of an underground chamber.<br />
<br />
Two things I know about entering the core: intent is what keeps you from being blown apart at a solstice moment, as the seeds burst their jackets underground, as life quickens amongst the dead, and the dead parts of you fall away into the earth. The second is that artists and writers are the ones who can hand you the thread.<br />
<br />
In progressive circles there has been an urgent call-out for a new story, now that climate change and species extinction have taken all the happy endings away and the wicked stepmothers and magicians have taken over the castle.<strong> </strong>'Creatives' have been challenged to come up with a positive narrative that will break the spell of neo-liberal economics and get us out of the maze. Writers however are reluctant evangelists and propaganda-makers: they flourish in the territory of the existential, where their ancient skills of travelling into other dimensions are highly prized.<br />
<br />
Because it's not the storyline, the <em>fabula, </em> we should be looking at here. Writers – those who guide us in the non-linear worlds of the imagination – are more interested in the <em>sujet,</em> (the plot in<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabula_and_syuzhet"> Russian formalism</a>) which is to say the way of telling the story. Although it looks like the story - this and that happened in linear time - is the point of everything, its real function is to be a container for a structural non-linear refit, once known as metamorphosis. The story is the sugar that holds our attention and the sujet is the medicine. The difficulty is for us as modern people is to look at what the sujet is demanding of us <em>as a people</em>, without everyone splitting off into their own personal narratives.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Threshing floor</h3>
There were words spilling everywhere around the room; on giant pieces of paper and small blackboards, altars and tables, we tabled our Deep Adaptation R words (Resilience, Relinquishment, Restoration), shared our thoughts on breakdown and extinction, our imagined stories about the future. We looked at how to swerve past blocks of denial, how to wail and rage inside a 'grief mandala', exchanged experiences in 'open space' and mapping sessions, hosted an open 'mic' and a ritual in the dark at the brink of the year. When it felt like everything was going horribly wrong, we held a constellation and danced to Le Freak by Chic. Occasionally I filled up the tea urns and trundled a wheelbarrow full of tealights around the winter garden and breathed in the wet winter air.<br />
<br />
In a council meeting we spoke for the beings who were not in the room. Choosing from a collection of photographs and objects each person stepped into places and situations we did not know: we spoke from the deserts of Africa, the cotton fields of India, the streets of the East End of London, as ancient women and small children, as refugees facing floods and forest fires and war, as sharks and rocks and maize plants that have fed a whole continent of people for millennia. The walls of the hall buckled open.<br />
<br />
The Encounter demands we let the outside in. We want to run away to the hills, back to the safety of our small room, our meditation chamber. But the threshing breaks you open to liberate the seed you hold inside you for the future. and throws the chaff of your life into the wind. If you are from an urbanised, industrial culture, this process winnows pretty much everything you have been told matters. At the same time everything that has been left out – which is the living breathing earth, the sun and all the cosmos, all the invisible people and skeletons hidden in your family's and culture's closets – rushes in. Afterwards you are assailed by dreams, by memories, by bodily dysfunctions, you feel you are losing your grip, your friends look at you askance. For some this is a moment from which they reel, for others months, or years.<br />
<br />
However the Encounter comes, one thing is clear: change is not something you tell governments or other people to do; you have to undergo change to make space for the world to enter. The 40 or so cultural activists gathered in these school rooms have all been through the wringer one way or another: some have built practices, some have created art or taught, others live in the forest, or at the edges – all of us have accepted that collapse is underway and have a capacity to 'stay with the trouble'. We've been in this room before; when the frequency has gone pear-shaped, when the men talk too loudly or the women cry too much. We know the feedback loop is a key component of all non-linear systems and there are consequences to the actions taken by ourselves, our relations, our nation which we now have an obligation to rectify.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-9872 size-full" height="225" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/over-your-cities-grass-will-grow-02.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Still from 'Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>
<br />Ariadne</h3>
Here is the story we know. The hero kills the bull-headed monster with the help of the princess. She is abandoned, she kills herself, she becomes a constellation. The hero goes round the world killing more monsters, abducting more women, founding cities. We live in the wake of his black-sailed ship.<br />
<br />
Here is the story we don't know and perhaps can find hidden underneath this one. There is no hero or princess or monster. There is a woman who can guide you down into the labyrinth which is not a maze or a prison, but a map. There is a kind of death at its centre, but also a revelation. She wear a skirt like a beehive. She is a dancing mistress (of sorts). Her name is Ariadne.<br />
<br />
The bull we have always known – he was the first we painted on the cave wall<strong> </strong>and fashioned in stone: as auroch, bison, buffalo. When we stand beside him we can feel him in the dark, his warm breath, his creaturehood, his presence. We don't want to be anywhere else, even though we are mostly mute, enthralled and also terrified.<br />
<br />
After you have been trampled by his hooves and the chaff blown away, you emerge and dance around the circle of the threshing floor, holding the arms of your companions. This was a dance once called <em>geranos,</em> the Dance of the Cranes, that took place each spring on the sacred island of Delos. The hero Theseus had taken the Minoan mysteries and transferred them to the Greek god Apollo, who henceforth would be in charge of prophecy and all female snake-charmers in the ancient Aegean. It is said that the first languages were written using the shape of the birds' feet: crane, ibis, heron.<br />
<br />
The Cretan hieroglyphs however, unlike the Egyptian, were never deciphered. Maybe our fate would have been different if our cultures had not been shaped around the glory-seeking of Athens and funereal gloom of Memphis, but instead we had lavished our attention on young men springing on the back of bulls, on blue and gold dolphins leaping, and a dance that imitates a foraging honeybee communicating with her sisters.<br />
<br />
There is a deal you make with life and this underworld encounter can tell you what that is. It's a deal we made a long time ago with the beasts and with the plants, only our civilisations buried it in sand to power their own interests.<br />
<br />
I'm not sure how we can remember this deal together. The links between us, like many grassroots relationships, are fragile: few people here are dependant on each other in their ordinary lives: we are not related, or beholden in any way. We may rally around a cause but we find it hard to meet on a stage that goes beyond the material and political. We might say 'ancestors' shyly in the circle – but we don't name them. Our metaphysical knowledge is mostly something we have found individually in books, or in moments of deep reflection. And we will need, god knows, more than a poem by Mary Oliver or Rumi to hold the centre and not fragment when push comes to shove, not<strong> </strong>lose our hard-won coherence and fly off into some small panic room, prowled by monsters.<br />
<br />
We need our dancing feet on the ground.<br />
<br />
<h3>
Rehearsal</h3>
There is nothing wrong with the conviviality and feasting, with the meetings and demonstrations, or even loving the story and wanting to know how it ends. But only if we know that the feelings these gatherings engender is the sugar, not the medicine, and that the medicine, sour, bitter as it tastes on our tongues, has to be taken and assimilated, or the world will not come into right balance. On a windy corner on the South Bank, after giving a lecture on the gift economy, Charles Eisenstein exhales deeply as we talk, a group of UK Transitioners, eager to share our goodwill stories about powerdown and community:<br />
<br />
'We are playing,' he says, interrupting our optimistic dialogue. 'Because we still have a choice. We can still walk away. Nothing will happen until it becomes real.'<br />
<br />
The year is 2012 and the Occupy tents at St Paul's have been evacuated. London is preparing for the great corporate show of the Olympics. The reality we know from a hundred documentaries about ecological crisis is still hard to see, surrounded as we are by the city's lavish restaurants and glass towers, African fusion bands and pleasure boats. The Wave demonstration has flowed over the capital's bridges, to be followed by a decade of climate marches, anti-austerity and student protests, to be held by Extinction Rebellion with their rainbow-coloured flags as it comes to a close. Though it feels like nothing has happened, the allure that has distracted us for aeons is lessening, the maze is losing its hold. As our position becomes more stark, the language that deepens the core begins to appear at the edges. It does not reveal itself in data or statistics, or political rhetoric, or Freudian analysis. It speaks in a language that once crossed every boundary on Earth, that artists and writers remember and still speak, or sing, or move, or show, or paint, if only in fragments.<br />
<br />
It's up to us to recognise them.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-9795 size-full" height="307" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/A2-ilyse-krivel_darkmountain1.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photograph taken at solar eclipse at Serpent Mound, Ohio by Ilyse Krivel[/caption]</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<h3>
Mythos</h3>
Something happens as we sit by a fire and chant for an hour, or we decide to take a step into the darkness of the <em>kur</em> or kiva, when<strong> </strong>our dancing feet take up the shapes of spirals and lemniscates: something deep and ancient stirs our bone-memory of being here, the ancestors begin to listen, the animals come nearer in our dreams, we are no longer alone. A door opens to the future we did not even know was there. The words vanish. Words are for looking at what happened afterwards and telling. The encounter with life is a full-body immersion and exchange.<br />
<br />
And maybe that is why after all the words we wrote on the walls, on blackboards in the classrooms, on flip chart paper, on coloured labels hung on trees, the excitement of all the talking over lunch or tea, what I remember most is stepping into the Land of the Dead with Deepak close behind me. We stood there in the stony alcove, with its boughs and bones, as the night wind blew through the apple orchard, and the small candles guttered. And we looked over to the people by the fire, who seemed to be a long way off, even though you could hear them singing and the fire crackling. Some part of me didn't want to go back. And then I realised: the ancestors could hear us when we gathered in that spirit.<br />
<br />
I chose these myths (or perhaps they chose themselves) in times of increasing restriction because they provide a technê – tools and method and instruction manual – for how to negotiate our place and relationship with the Earth, beyond the story told by our civilisation's power-possessors and priests. They can help us uncivilise ourselves: break out of the labyrinth of our rational minds and navigate the wild oceans and forests of a non-linear planet. The female myths are about tasks, about rigour and courage, and about calling and receiving help in times of crisis. The three R's of Deep Adaptation are tasks, they demand we leave a lot of our identity and cleverness behind, our comfort zones, our egoic insults, the traumas we cling to like antiquated gas masks, long after the war is over.<br />
<br />
These ancestral steps help us move dramaturgically into different positions: to realise that our insistence on woundedness is a way of avoiding responsibility and breaking out of our separateness. We are not going to make it on our own. We feel stuck, faced with the impossible, and need to find a way out: a pile of jumbled seeds, a labyrinth of dead ends and false passageways. With the myth in hand, you can make a move: you step into others' shoes, you alter the role, you go through the door, get yourself off the hook and then the world. The artist teaches the steps, holds the space, takes up the chant, asks the questions. This is the moment when a kindly ant appears, or someone hands you a ball of thread, or a jar of honey, or two beings fashioned from the dirt under the fingernails of a god slip through the keyholes of the Underworld undetected.<br />
<br />
Our task is to recognise them.<br />
<br />
<br />
<strong><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/a-dance-down-the-dark-mountain/">A Dance Down the Dark Mountain</a> and A Conversation at the End of the World (As We Know It) with Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang takes place at Winterwerft Theatre Festival, Frankfurt am Main on 16th/17th February and at <a href="http://unfixfestival.com/unfix-2019/">Unfix Festival i</a>n Glasgow on 28th/31st March. </strong><br />
<strong><br /></strong>
<strong><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/course-coming-down-the-mountain/">Coming Down the Mountain: Resilience, Relinquishment and Restoration in a Time of Endings</a> - a five day course with Charlotte Du Cann and Dougald Hine is hosted by Schumacher College, Devon on 6th–10th May.</strong><br />
<strong><i><br /></i></strong>
<i>Essay originally published by Dark Mountain online</i>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-86747439371577280902018-12-10T10:58:00.000+00:002019-04-25T15:29:02.573+01:00Disappearing Acts<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>We are living in an age of loss: the sixth mass extinction. Following this year's shocking report that <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/publications/living-planet-report-2018">the planet has lost half its wildlife in the past 40 years</a>, and the 2018 <a href="https://www.lostspeciesday.org/?page_id=14">Remembrance Day for Lost Species</a>, I wrote this piece on art and disappearance for Dark Mountain's 'The Vanishing' section. Here we look not only to extinction – the deaths of entire species – but to the quieter extirpations and losses that are steadily stripping our world of its complexity and beauty. How do we, as writers and artists, stay human during such times? .</i><br />
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What does it mean to disappear? It's a cold night and I am shivering outside the Café de Paris in London. I'm standing behind Trevor, hoping that his TV producer status will get me in, when Karen Binns, doorkeeper to this hippest of '90s dance nights, lets me through. It's over for you, she laughs, which in her Brooklyn back-to-front street talk, means it's happening for me. As it turns out it was prophetic both ways. Because the last time I saw her was at a family gathering a year later, as I was about to leave the city.</div>
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She's out of here, she announced to the chattering table. Everyone just carried on talking.<br />
It's two minutes to twelve, she said.<br />
<br />
What does any of this have to do with extinction you might ask? Bear with me. To know how to deal with disappearance, you have to know about your own. To know that when you go, there is a world of difference between being ignored and being seen.<br />
<br />
<br />
For a few weeks now. I've been wondering what to write about extinction. Does the world need another elegant essay on nature in peril, another rant about palm oil deforestation? Is there a way to look at the disappearance of species without descending into melancholy and apocalyptic data? Could I get that annoying wistfulness out of my voice, avoid the righteous tragic tone of the activist, or repeat the litany of scientific facts about ecological catastrophe which you and I already know?<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-8885" height="200" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/thewitchofstkilda2017katietume-246x300.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="163" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Witch of St Kilda by Kaite Tume, <br />
embroidery on linen from 'Extinct Icons <br />
and Ritual Burials' (Issue 13)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
I am not a biologist, or a conservationist, an undercover agent on the front line of wildlife destruction, but I have witnessed The Vanishing in my own way: I have stood by my window overlooking a ragged Suffolk garden and marshland for over a decade now and seen the insects disappear, the old hawthorns and ashes cut down, how the thrush and little owl no longer call from the hedge, how the green woodpecker no longer comes to forage for ants, the hedgehog to sleep in the woodpile, or the hares and lapwings appear in the fields. Each departure has registered in my body, in a place it is hard to name, like listening to an orchestra with the wind section missing.<br />
<br />
Loss of species is one of the key strands within the work of Dark Mountain: from Nick Hunt's story <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/loss-soup/">Loss Soup</a> (in Issue 1) to Michael Cipra's <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/dark-mountain-issue-13-who-cries-for-the-archduke/">Who Cries for the Archduke?</a> (in Issue 13), from Feral Theatre's performance about the Tasmanian tiger to Andreas Kornwall's 'Life Cairn for Lost Species'. But perhaps its most significant act has been the curation of a space in which writers and artists, readers and participants can communicate this collapse without fighting their corner: we all know something is going down. That the clock stands before midnight.<br />
<br />
That if a vanishing is required it is our civilisation's story of human centrality.<br />
<h3>
</h3>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-9093 size-medium" height="200" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Charlotte-ducann3-300x300.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Extinction Cabinet' by Nicholas Kahn <br />
& Richard Selesnick. From ‘Truppe Fledermaus: <br />
100 Stories of the Drowning World' (Issue 9)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<h3>
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE CRYING STOPS?</h3>
You are supposed to feel grief, but grief is not what I feel when I hear a chainsaw outside, or read about Icelandic fishermen killing a blue whale. I do not mourn non-violently when I hear about the Chinese trading jaguar teeth, rhino horns and pangolin scales, or the British slaughtering mountain hares and golden eagles (in order to slaughter more grouse), or Maltese and Cypriot hunters killing millions of migrating songbirds - all those men with knives and guns and axes proving their 'masculinity' (and the women who stand by them and beget their children). In spite of knowing better, I find myself shouting, It's over for you! - and not in the way Karen Binns once meant it.<br />
<br />
When the fury subsides, or I return home having argued with the tree cutters, what is left is a retraction, a lessening in the core of my self, countered by a refusal to feel dispirited, or to fuel the darkness of our civilisation, to let the Empire take my heart. But I do not grieve. Grief takes you inward to your own bereavement, to project the loss of small edens or family upon a beleaguered Earth. There is a power in grief, as all writers, particularly those who write about nature, know (where would Helen Macdonald's <em>H is for Hawk</em> have been without her dead father, or Robert Macfarlane's<em> Wild Places</em> without Roger Deakin?). Absence has as strong a pull as presence. Your capacity to see straight and communicate directly with the non-human world however is impaired. Our great sorrow is not what the Earth wants from us, any more than a dying person ever wants our tears. They want you to show it mattered they were here. It's not about us after all. Human beings are not becoming extinct.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-8891 size-medium" height="142" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/5-Birds-768x549-300x214.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Remembrance Day for Lost Species; Memorial to <br />
the Passenger Pigeon by Emily Laurens, <br />
Photo Keely Clark: (Issue 7)</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Once the fury subsides, I stand in front of the window with a conflicted heart. You have to temper that anger into words and keep beholding the beauty of the world that is still here. You know it's not the whole story. You know that for each terrible action against life, for all the numbness and indifference of millions, there are thousands who are standing up for the wild things, defying hunts, investigating the trade of shark fins and elephant tusks, defending the redwoods and the common lands, restoring the Californian condor and the African deserts.<br />
<br />
I see I am left with a nervousness, a nervousness that senses the decline in some part of the web, a weakening in the links between insect and bird, plankton and fish, between plant and the human imagination. And so I act in whatever way I can to bridge the gap: I put my hand on the severed trunk of the tree; I carry the dead otter from the road and bury her in the marsh; I write in defence of the feeding grounds for the red-listed curlew on neighbouring AONB farmland now threatened with extraction. But most of all I try to find out how to shift our logger-headed perception, our ways of seeing and imagining the world from where we all stand, seemingly stuck in a parasitic culture that refuses to become symbiotic.<br />
<br />
In many ways artists fulfil the function of the old medicine people and storytellers: they keep the bridge open to the living Earth and show how we can give back to a planet that has given us everything we know. Their act is to see and not falter, to reflect what is happening and speak to those inchoate places inside us. It is not an easy position to hold, because destruction is not easy to watch. But through their work we can look without turning away, because they themselves faced the disappearance and did not escape in their minds, or give in to rage or powerlessness. They bore witness and let the walls that separate us from the fate of the planet fall down inside them.<br />
<br />
We follow their track.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIxyNMLP-RD9P51l_FIqF5JeCTSag8n44s9jFS7f8kOh6EZeRxDn8eZmI8iGllh2AaPHJoeXjf9CEFCRsUkU1isX0DKRwofvpb3zbZqU-2qhELZazB1e3tmMklZ8f7IhDh9PswwXmxY83T/s1600/SHOW+O+Nick+_+DavidEllingsen-AtTheEdgeOfTheAnswer2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="1600" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIxyNMLP-RD9P51l_FIqF5JeCTSag8n44s9jFS7f8kOh6EZeRxDn8eZmI8iGllh2AaPHJoeXjf9CEFCRsUkU1isX0DKRwofvpb3zbZqU-2qhELZazB1e3tmMklZ8f7IhDh9PswwXmxY83T/s320/SHOW+O+Nick+_+DavidEllingsen-AtTheEdgeOfTheAnswer2.jpg" width="320" /></a></h3>
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HOLDING THE BASE LINE</h3>
When the world shifts and we don't notice, something happens: we move away from what is known as the ancestral or original instruction, our way of keeping the Earth intact. We don't notice that hills that were once forested become bare scrubland, or that it's become normal to see a handful of butterflies when only a decade ago there were hundreds. The writer, George Monbiot's response to this 'shifting baseline syndrome' in his book <em>Feral</em> was to imagine a reinvigorated Earth and foster a culture of rewilding, the restoration of territories in which wild animals and plants could thrive again and flourish.<br />
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So what if, instead of drifting with the tide, we resist it? What happens if we remember how it was at one time and refuse to forget? That we hold what is and was dear in our neighbourhoods in connection with the forests and oceans everywhere?<br />
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David Ellingsen is a Canadian artist whose photographic work centres on the loss of the natural world and the reintegration of the 'intricate relationships between land, ocean, flora, fauna and atmosphere ... back into our technological, urbanised culture'. His sharp graphic eye ranges from observing the changing sky over a year, to the body of an orca cut up on the British Columbian shore. to a juxtapostion of a<a href="http://a%20human%20skull%20filled%20with%20the%20skulls%20of%20other%20craetures%20birds/"> human skull filled with the skulls of other creatures</a>. 'At The Edge of the Answer No 2' (see above) was the opening image in our latest issue <em>TERRA,</em> from his series Solastagia.<br />
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The Last Stand by David Ellingsen</h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-8888 size-full" height="266" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/David-Ellingsen-Last-Stand-2.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Installation 3, Lance-tooth Crosscut Saw by David Ellingsen. <br />
Western Red Cedar, Pigment ink on cotton rag</td></tr>
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'This project<em>, The Last Stand</em>, was photographed on my family’s land here in Canada – in fact it was my great grandfather and great uncle who cut down these very trees over 80 years ago. The vast old growth forests of British Columbia have mostly vanished, with only 1% remaining, a situation reflected in the great forests around the globe. Disappearance and loss are a consistent theme running through my work and I remain compelled by an unrelenting, creative urgency as the ecological crisis deepens. In fact, after decades of warning from our civilisations’ brightest minds, I feel it my duty to do so.<br />
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It is my hope that creative work which encourages emotional connection with the issues and engagement with the grieving process (that rightfully accompanies this diminishment of life) will help us move through the seemingly ‘frozen’ state our civilisation is in and into a period of rapid acceptance and mobilisation to repair what we still can.' <strong>DE</strong></div>
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SEEING THOUGH THE DARK GLASS</h3>
There is a point at which you get 'woke'. It is a terrifying moment, as the cocooned world you knew cracks open. But it is also a moment of kinship - not only with our fellow creatures, but with our ancestors who left depictions of this relationship on the walls of Neolithic caves, or shards of ancient Pueblo pottery.<br />
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The current intellectual discussion about ecosystems and carbon emissions speaks to our rational minds but does not connect with our physical, kinetic intelligence, our creaturehood, the places where we feel kin with the rest of life. For that we need physical encounter in order to engage and act.<br />
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The sculptor<a href="http://www.stephenmelton.co.uk/"> Stephen Melton</a> brings a visceral attention to the fate of the natural world at our hands: to native sharks mutilated for their fins (see above in 'Thanet Fish') to the illegal pet trade to the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest, with carved and often entwined and adorned figures of animals, birds and fish.<br />
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Dreamland by Stephen Melton</h3>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="" class="wp-image-9106 size-large" height="400" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/unnamed-768x1024.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="300" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dreamland by Stephen Melton. Work in progress that contains the forms of lost or disappeared creatures including orangutans, hedgehog, killer whale, rhino, cane toad, polar bear, sperm whale, tiger, sea turtles, coral, giant anteater, orange bellied parrot, carrier pigeon, pangolin and moths, Below: detail with bat.<br />
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<img alt="" class="alignnone wp-image-8889 size-full" height="400" src="https://dark-mountain.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/40969393_540316223092826_8596359378775362191_n.jpg" width="400" /><br />
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'We live in such a visual world today; a world in which we are bombarded by images through digital and social media. Often, if the image hasn’t been constructed using the "click-bait" brief, it is often overlooked.</div>
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Sometimes I choose to work with an aesthetic that is beautiful, familiar and fun, which can be seen in my current work in progress ‘Dreamland’ – an intricately cast carousel in bronze. However, I then subvert the aesthetic by presenting my concerns about social behaviour and our attitudes towards our natural world.</div>
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I hope that using beauty to attract the audience will then engage them in the visual paradox the work presents. Using global fonts, the headlines of our most prominent socio-ecological problems today adorn the whole structure, in a similar manner of the carousels of the past. Hand-carved and subsequently cast skeletons of animals weave around the attraction, in an ominous manner. Each species has been chosen because of their current fragile existence due to humanity's impact on the world.<br />
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<span lang="EN-US">Like sheep, many of us follow unquestionably patterns of human behaviour without any understanding of the consequences, repeating mistakes of our past. A decaying ride that we are unable to alight.' <strong>SM</strong></span></div>
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HONOURING</h3>
In 2001, the UK filmmaker Nick Brandt went to Kenya and began a photographic odyssey: to capture on film the disappearing great fauna of southern Kenya. The elephants stand as giant billboards in a broken landscape, under a flyover in the 2014 series <em>Inherit The Dust</em>; in<em> <a href="https://www.thisemptyworld.com/">This Empty World</a> </em>– his latest book to be released next February – they are juxtaposed amongst the industrial infrastructure, machines and human presence that threaten them on all sides.<br />
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Elephants (killed at a rate of 100 a day for their ivory), lions, giraffes and hyenas, are all photographed with a medium lens camera, as black and white portraits, closeup, still, without drama, or special effects.<br />
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'What I am interested in is showing the animals simply in the state of Being,' he writes in the first of his trilogy of books,<em> On This Earth</em>. 'In the state of Being before they are no longer are. Before, in the wild at least, they cease to exist. This world is under terrible threat, all of it caused by us. To me, every creature, human or non-human, has an equal right to live, and this feeling, this belief that every animal and I are equal, affects me every time I frame an animal in my camera. The photos are my elegy to these beautiful creatures, to this wrenchingly beautiful world that is steadily, tragically vanishing before our eyes.'<br />
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Ranger with Tusks of Elephant Killed at the Hands of Man by Nick Brandt</h3>
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Ranger with Tusks of Elephant Killed at the Hands of Man, Ambrosselli, 2011 by Nick Brandt</td></tr>
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'I find it hard to imagine the living elephant that possessed these tusks. I’ve never seen elephants with tusks anything like this size, and now, I never will. They are all gone, dead, mostly killed by man. Even with one part of each tusk embedded in his skull, this elephant would still surely have had to lift his monumental head to prevent them from dragging like excavators through the earth.<br />
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The elephant was killed by poachers in Tsavo in southern Kenya in 2004. His tusks were stored in Kenya Wildlife Service’s ivory strongroom. In July 2011, they permitted me to borrow these and many other tusks of killed elephants for the ranger series.<br />
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This photo features one of 200 rangers employed by Big Life Foundation, the nonprofit organisation that I co-founded with conservationist Richard Bonham in 2010 to help protect and preserve the wild animals of a critically important 1.6m acre area of East Africa.<br />
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Photographed on medium format black and white film, I waited several days for the normal clear blue skies to disappear, waiting for the right sombre cloud cover to take the photos.' <strong>NB</strong><br />
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ALLEGIANCE</h3>
One of the main reasons people don't want to see, to wake up, is to feel the emptiness that the violence of civilisation leaves behind. We live in a world that promises freedom from suffering with its tinsel politics and cheap distractions. But you never get a relationship with the living Earth that way, the feeling that you are connected. The relationship with the Earth - whichever way you learn to love it - through a land, creature, plant, or ocean - is a relationship that never falters and will never, unlike civilisation, let you down.<br />
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However, there is a bargain you make when you forge that relationship, an ancient bargain human beings have made over millennia. Our allegiance goes both ways.<br />
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Dark Mountain Issue 7 featured <em>Silent Spring</em> by Chris Jordan and Rebecca Clark (detail above, see <a href="http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/rtn/#silent-spring"><strong>full picture here</strong>)</a> which <span class="m_-8104402453930296458im">depicts 183,000 birds, the estimated number of birds that die in the United States every day from exposure to agricultural </span>pesticides. It forms part of his series <i>Running the Numbers: An </i><i>American Self-Portrait </i>which looks at consumer culture through the <span class="m_-8104402453930296458im">austere lens of statistics</span>. However, the photographer is most well known for his close-up portraits of dead albatross chicks on the remote island of Midway in the Pacific Ocean, their stomachs full of discarded plastic.<br />
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The recent documentary about his experiences is a searing gaze at the extraordinary beauty of a bird and its fate as it encounters the debris of our fossil-fuelled world.<br />
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Albatross by Chris Jordan</h3>
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/218502282">Chris Jordan's ALBATROSS film trailer</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user48596137">chris jordan photographic arts</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.<br />
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'The biologists here are finding that the birds all have plastic inside them. Each time I opened one up was like a gallery of horrors. But I believe in facing the dark realities of our time, summoning the courage to not turn away. Not as an exercise in pain, or punishment, or to make us feel bad about ourselves, but because in this act of witnessing a door opens.<br />
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'The most difficult thing to bear, for me, was what I knew but they couldn't know about why they were dying. In this experience, the true nature of grief revealed itself. I saw that grief is not the same as sadness or despair. Grief is the same as love. Grief is a felt experience of love for something we're losing, or have lost. When we surrender to grief it carries us down to our deepest connection with life.<br />
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I didn't know I could care about an albatross.' <strong>CJ</strong><br />
<br />Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-52050918501131972182018-11-01T11:49:00.001+00:002018-11-28T16:11:36.341+00:00Varanasi<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Last month in a rainswept and flooded Cumbria we launched Dark Mountain: Issue 14 - TERRA into the world, a co-production between three editors - Nick Hunt, Nancy Campbell and myself - three 'scouts' from different regions and over 60 writers and artists. It's a travel edition collection that looks at journeys, place and belonging in times of diaspora and descent. You can <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/dark-mountain-issue-14-terra/">read the introduction </a>and several extracts from TERRA over on the Dark Mountain website, meanwhile here is a piece I wrote for the book on giving up flying and a life on the road, and a return to my 'native' land.</i><br />
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It is hard to know that this magic carpet exists and that one will no longer fly on it.
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– Jean Cocteau<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(</span><span class=" h-lparen"><i>Opium)</i></span></div>
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‘The way these people are living is not what I had in mind’</div>
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– Sun Father, Zuni creation myth</div>
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I’m sitting under the peepal tree in the deer park in Sarnath. Dark-tuniced Tibetan students, white-clad nuns, orange-robed monks, many-coloured tourists move around the tree, and contemplate the statues of the Buddha and his five disciples with their piled-up Aryan locks. It was here the Buddha delivered his first teaching. His words are carved in slabs of stone in different gold-scripted languages. The inscription reads that after declaring the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, the <i>devas</i> in all the invisible circles above the Earth shook with fear.</div>
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<i>Nirvana </i>is sometimes translated as a<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘return</span> to the shining void’ or<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘extinction’,</span> in the sense of blowing out a flame, no longer fuelling the fire. By ending the anguish and desires of the ego, the Buddha’s path to extinction introduced death into the eternal world of the devas. It meant their realms would cease to exist, because human beings would not be clothing and feeding them any more. If people could liberate themselves from the wheel of karma, the devas’ shows would come to an end. They would lose all their hiding places.</div>
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Afterwards I go to Varanasi, leaving the calm of Sarnath for the crowded streets of India’s oldest city. Rachel told me:<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘If</span> you don’t go now, you will never go.’ It is 2006 and I have just received the last of the inheritance from my dead father. I don’t know it yet but a whole way of life is about to come to an end.</div>
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In Varanasi I get out of the tuk-tuk and walk towards the river. Suddenly the narrow street opens out to the vast opal-coloured stretch of the Ganges – the pitted ochre buildings of the teeming ghats and the emptiness of the shore on the further side. It is shining in the morning light and the light suffuses everything.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Here</span> I am!’ I say, half to myself, half to the river and feel, in that moment, complete.</div>
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‘You are thinking too much,’ says a tall young man behind me.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘A</span> man will approach,’ Rachel instructed.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Go</span> with him.’ I smile and agree to follow his guided path, down the steps, towards the burning ghats, to his friend the astrologer, up to the towers where he points out the view down the river with its steps full of devotees, boats, bullocks, monkeys and the morning.</div>
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At the ashram of Kali, we sit in the shade of a mango tree and smoke hemp flowers.</div>
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‘When I saw you, I was dazzled! How beautiful,’ he whispers, and runs his hand up my back, as if I were a horse.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘You</span> are tired and I am a young man. You need some of my Shiva power.’</div>
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‘No, I don’t,’ I said, and laughed.</div>
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I might have gone with him in another time, for the adventure, to have lain in Kali’s rose garden in Shiva’s city. But something is coming to an end. The boy said, I will take you out onto the Ganges and sing to you. We took the boat into the middle of the river, and as he rowed towards the empty shore, his face grew suddenly sulky and dark, like all men who do not get what they desire. The City of Light hovered before me. The most beautiful city in the world. The shining hub of the wheel where all things began, and where all things come to an end.</div>
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<i>Here I am, </i>I thought. A great humming arose from the ancient city, three thousand years of human karma coming to an end, as the boat drifted past the shore on the further side. For years I had wanted to come to Varanasi. And here it was. Everything I had ever dreamed of. And then it was time to go home.</div>
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You will dream of me, the boy said, as we parted company on the bank. I smiled and wished him well, because I knew I would not. I would not even remember his name.</div>
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When we fly over London, the buildings below the plane appear grey and oppressive. No one smiles at the train station. It is silent, cold, hostile. My head fills with antagonistic thoughts. But wheeling our suitcases down the lane, the night wind stirs the ash and oak trees above us, I can smell the spring, the feel of the ground beneath my feet, a force pulling me towards the earth.</div>
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‘Almost there Charlie,’ says Mark.</div>
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SELVA</div>
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How did this begin? Lying in a hot leafy hut, frogs croaking in the Peruvian rainforest, a certain line comes to me: <i>My circus life unclawed me.</i></div>
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I am<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘on</span> location’ with a fashion team and the two models have gone on strike because they feel<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(as</span> African-Americans) they are being exploited by the<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘indigenous</span> is hip this season’ story. The German photographer is arguing with them. He is not pleased with our abundant backdrop. <i>Selva</i> is too green, he says. Tonight we drank a strange alluring brew the lodge owner had made and swam naked in the Amazon, heedless of piranha, crocodile and electric eel, and watched a slim boat go out and point its prows to the full moon. I am writing another line in my notebook that is not a caption:</div>
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<i>Tonight there are no dreams because there are no dreamers.</i></div>
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I went to South America by mistake: Eric Newby was supposed to cover the story but he had fallen ill and so I went to Lima as the replacement travel writer. After that I was sent to New Mexico with the team and wrote a story about beans and adobe and Georgia O’Keefe – and somehow, between the forest and desert and mountains, those big spaces got inside me. Afterwards I could not fit back into my box-shaped London life.</div>
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When I left the city I found out how plants can open up your imagination in a way no book can ever do, how mountains can speak to you in your dreams. I encountered people I would never have met in the bars and offices of my own country. People who were learning about the indigenous spirit of things, who tussled with their nation’s karma, who walked an ancestral path in their own way.</div>
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Though we longed to be the people who could love the Earth with song and dance, with feather and prayer, we were not born those people. We had work to do in the places we least wanted to go. Turtle Island, Madre Tierra, Pachamama, pushed us all out like birds from the nest, into an unmapped territory that felt like a kind of Antarctica. Go back to where you came from, they said, and deal with your shit.</div>
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What I hadn’t realised was that the people in the canoe in the rainforest that night were on their way to an ayahuasca ceremony, and that when the planet makes contact with you and shows you its inner splendour it demands something in return that you are not sure you know how to give. That when Georgia O’Keefe said<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘New</span> Mexico will itch you for the rest of your life’, she wasn’t talking about holidays.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
TERRA</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
How did it stop?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
‘Your carbon debt is massive,’ said Josiah. I am writing about a low-carbon group that has decided to cut its personal emissions by half the national average, which in 2008 is eight tonnes. Last night we gathered around the kitchen table with our transport bills. I can just about make the target if I use the car for short journeys but taking a plane anywhere blows it completely. We are eight people who have read the data, we know the facts about climate change. We know we are among the five per cent of the world who have stepped on a plane and that one return flight to New York would take up one of those four tonnes and then some. Across the sky, contrails from 100,000 planes leach out carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulphur oxides, lead and black carbon into the atmosphere each day and we know that no amount of creative accounting can reverse the planetary feedback loops that say what goes around comes around.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And yet in spite of this the dissonance is palpable in the room, as the prospect of NO HOLIDAYS ANYWHERE INTERESTING OR SUNNY is veering into view. When you realise that even travelling to that small island in the inky Aegean would take four days by train and boat. Even if you did have the money which, this being the <i>kali yuga</i>, you no longer do.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
My carbon debt is massive. I have touched down in La Paz and New York, in Tokyo, Kingston, Santiago de Chile, Kauai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney, Delhi – but now in a small town in East Anglia I am learning to love the patterns of neighbourhood, of reed bed and market square, to build a culture of sharing and humble return. We meet to unpick our fossil-fuelled lives and find ourselves at the place that stops all our endeavours – a realm that hovers on every magazine page and screen, luring us into its world of turquoise seas and swimming pools, of white tablecloths and limousines. Come, fly here, a voice whispers in our ear.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I don’t know about Buddhism but I know all about devas. I am someone who used to drag huge Globe-trotter suitcases full of fairy frocks across the planet, I know what devas like to eat and what sparkly places they like to go, and exactly what it takes to blow out that flame. I know that illusions are the last thing you give up when you are up against it: your special moment, your little winter break, that romantic destination. What would life be without these treats?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It is the flying and not just the flying. It is the technology of flight, the ease, the speed, that fits the pace and dominion of the capitalist pleasuredome. But it is also the ancient illusion that we can treat the world like a plaything, as if we have a right to reward ourselves for our slavery to GDP with a visit to the market at Marrakesh, or a trek in Nepal, a quick trip to Iceland, or Bali, or Florida. A never-never land culture without ethical or spiritual constraint.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Industrialisation has made us restless and dissatisfied. We live in terror of missing out and finding ourselves in the wrong hotel. We want all our journeys to be outer ones, full of leisure and luxury; none of us wants to go inside, unlock the Pandora’s box of our small histories and suffer. We would rather sacrifice any number of wild creatures or trees than extinct our adolescent selves, let whole kingdoms of fish and people fall, so long as we can keep holding that boarding pass in our hands, our sense of entitlement, our five per cent exceptionalism, our trophy holiday.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The reality is we don’t want to land.</div>
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<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
KARMA</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In the backrooms of England some of us despair: we have become no-fly-zone outcasts, enemies of promise. The initiative that had once cut its teeth on radical energy descent has settled into a cosy community haven, where you can hold conversations about carbon reduction and still fly to Copenhagen for the day to go swimming.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The taboo-breaking marks us as<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘the</span> difficult people’ in the room, the people who ask awkward questions. Sometimes we are unable even to ask the question, an invisible force preventing us from opening our mouths.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Silently we face our friends who justify<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘love</span> miles’<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(he</span> was dying, she was getting married); artists who justify exhibitions<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(I</span> have to share my work); climate scientists who justify conferences<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(I</span> have to exchange ideas); yoga princesses who justify retreats<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(I</span> have to be with my guru) in a civilisation where governments can hold conversations about emissions targets and still keep building runways and not taxing aviation fuel<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(we</span> have to serve the economy). We did the offsetting, the flyers chorus, absolving themselves in the way medieval sinners once paid for indulgences. We’re not good like you.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Sometimes I want to say very loudly: YOU ARE ASLEEP AND YOU NEED SOME OF MY KALI POWERDOWN, and stick out my very long red tongue.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
SELVA 2</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Rachel no longer stays in the room on Dr Jain’s roof terrace that overlooks the deer park in Sarnath, among the drying sheets and pots of holy basil. She lives in a small wood on the edge of the neighbouring market town and runs her own guesthouse. I remembered the story she once told us about her friends who lived on an ancient pilgrimage route in India. The path ran by a river she said and it was the most beautiful setting you could imagine, full of trees and flowers and birds. One year however her friends moved to an ugly industrial city.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘How</span> could you leave?’ she asked them.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Our</span> work is here,’ they replied simply.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘This</span> place needs us.’</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Last summer our paths crossed after many years, and the three of us had an intense conversation in the way we used to when we could all afford to travel the world. She told me in India there are five ages, that begin with our youth and end with the time of<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Going</span> into the Forest’.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘What</span> happens before old age?’ I asked her.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Preparing</span> to Go into the Forest,’ she said and we laughed.</div>
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<div>
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<div>
CASA</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I lived out of a suitcase for ten years. I gave up many things to be on that road – a house, a family, a career, some kind of reputation – and I regret none of it. I got to see the Earth in all of her loveliness. I went to break out of a restricted city life that hemmed in my real self like a Victorian dress. After I broke the stays I became like a lover who could never have enough of wide open spaces, of the pepper trees leaning towards the red sand of the Elqui valley<span class=" s-lparen"> </span><span class=" h-lparen">(the</span> boys riding horseback down the street), or the roar of the Pacific at Mazatlán, bus stations on a tropical morning, the volcano rising above the hot spring, hummingbird and cactus. It was in these places, those borrowed houses, I could empty myself, bring a silence and a space that had been full of ghosts and other people’s words.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But at some point you have to be in relationship, you have to settle down and give up your interesting freewheeling life. You don’t want to, but it is time, your time and the times you live in, the payback time, when all our small karmas come to roost and that joystick is no longer in our hands. To love a country that is Not-Home with all its breathtaking geography and sweet fruit costs nothing; to love this polluted, crowded island with all the responsibility of descent on your shoulders costs everything.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So you go home. And home is not a place you want to go, or that you like even. Here I am on the east coast of a country I spent a lifetime getting away from and have not moved for 16 years. In the seatown there are 1400 houses and only 500 of them are lived in: the rest serve wealthy weekenders who pay nothing for the roads or cash-strapped libraries, or the feudal history of place that weighs down invisibly on those who inhabit the region. The visitors are having a<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘Southwold’</span> experience with local beer and fish and chips, and £100,000 beach huts. A perfect backdrop. No strings attached. A hideaway where you can step out of the door and feel free.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Except you learn, when you come home and live in a place, that nothing is free. Some person, some bird, some plant, some insect is paying for that weekend, that fortnight, with their lives, and now that person is you. Yes you, renter, with your second-hand coat and low-income lifestyle, who cares for you anyway?</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Nothing has ever said you belong here, or anywhere you have found yourself. You were always the wrong class, the wrong gender, too white, too privileged. You went to the wrong university, didn’t write enough books, wrote too many of the wrong sort. Never knew the right people, or maybe you did once, but then you missed the party and it was the wrong time. It’s always the wrong time. At some point you realise it’s not about belonging, it’s about being at home in your own skin, on this Earth, wherever you land, and deciding to pay the debt, your family’s debt, your culture’s debt, stretching back through the centuries. The buck stops here, you say. I’m not going anywhere.</div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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NIRVANA</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
‘We could go to la Casa de los Azulejos,’ said Mark, as we both in that moment find ourselves in a dark-panelled dining room surrounded by businessmen in suits and chattering families. It was where we liked to go for breakfast in Mexico City in our travelling years. There are white tablecloths and waitresses with paper wings the colour of sugared almonds flying past with trays of<i> huevos rancheros</i> and <i>pan dulce.</i> A glass of <i>maracuyá</i> juice sits on the table in front of me and for one moment time stands still. Outside the blue sky arches above the Alameda, above the the megalopolis, stretching out towards the Sierra Madre, backbone of America, towards the forests of glowworms and jaguars, towards the ever-moving oceans of the world.</div>
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<br /></div>
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‘Ah, yes,’ I say.<span class=" s-lsquo"> </span><span class=" h-lsquo">‘But</span> after breakfast, what would we do?’<br />
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<i>Images: above 'Shrine at Varanasi' by Juhi Saklani from her story </i>Rooted<i> about defending the street trees of India. Left: A pocketbook for troubled times: Dark Mountain Issue 14 - TERRA is </i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-14-terra/" style="font-style: italic;">available from the online shop for £19.99</a><i>; the London launch will take place at </i><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/events/dark-mountain-issue-14-launch-in-london/" style="font-style: italic;">The Baldwin Gallery on 22nd November.</a><i> Do come!</i></div>
Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-32970986215837746842018-08-12T12:12:00.000+01:002018-11-04T09:42:02.181+00:00Letter to Mr. Gurdjieff<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i>Last week the upcoming Dark Mountain: Issue 14 on place and belonging went to Bracketpress to be typeset and designed. After months of forging its pages and the new sparkly website, I am finally posting an essay I wrote for the <a href="https://dark-mountain.net/product/issue-13/">spring journal,</a> set in the Wyre Forest in the depths of the winter solstice (in very different weather!).</i><br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
‘I teach that when it rains the pavements get wet.’</blockquote>
Dear Mr. Gurdjieff – I don’t know why exactly I am writing to you today in the stillness of midwinter, except the sound of your name came, like a train whistle, pulling me into the kitchen where I first heard it:<br />
<br />
<i>Gurrr-djieeeeff!</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
I am standing on a Navajo rug looking at one of Peter’s paintings, tens of thousands of coloured dots on a long vertical canvas, and behind me, Carmen is lighting a Mexican votive candle as she did each evening on her return from Cochise County Library.<br />
<br />
‘Gurdjieff taught we were bombarded by the influences of the planets, pulled in all directions by cosmic forces inside ourselves, and we needed to be able to handle them.’<br />
<br />
And now, here in this darkness in an English forest, years later, watching the sparks of a midwinter fire fly up into the canopy, dressed in a black overcoat and a hat covered in oak leaves, I felt an urgent desire to recall everything I knew about you.<br />
<br />
I wasn’t interested in your complex cosmic system then, but I liked Carmen’s stories about you: how you would send your students into restaurants and instruct them to leave without paying, how you gleefully went about <i>stepping on everyone’s corns.</i> I liked that you drank and made everyone else drink and cook and dance. ‘Everything in the Universe is material!’ you said about your worldly practice, a method of self-transformation in ordinary life, made famous by the mathematician and thinker, P.D. Ouspensky, as The Fourth Way. Carmen was part of a Gurdjieff group that had been running in the hills above Tucson for years: she played your compositions on her grand piano in the old miner’s hotel, and tried to dance your sacred steps, until she twisted her knee and had to stop.<br />
<br />
‘I am too rigid!’ she would wail and didn’t sound too pleased about the metaphor. On the Day of the Dead she would bake three small cakes, pan de los muertos, for her Three Gs: you, George her old mentor, and God. She wasn’t pleased with any of you either and battled with all of your pronouncements and demands for a spiritual life. Sometimes I would find her pushing a broom with an intense look in her eyes. ‘I am focused on the task,’ she would say. I raised my eyebrows. I was not into gurus, and still am not into gurus, or temples, or being a follower of anything or anyone. Sometimes I’ve avoided the transmission – or thought I have – in my own annoyance with humans grovelling at the feet of great holy masters and their emissaries.<br />
<br />
When we returned from America at the turn of the millennium, we found ourselves without direction in a place where we knew no-one, and during that first winter we stoked up the fire each evening with elm and birch wood and read the whole of <i>Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson</i>. It was a long book, over a thousand pages. Mark read out loud, I listened, the fire roared in the grate.<br />
<br />
‘We have to make ourselves at home’, I said. ‘We have to start again.’<br />
<br />
<i>Being Effort</i> is required.<br />
<br />
You see, even though that was 15 years ago and I no longer have your books, I can remember the language, its strange and yet familiar terms, how they helped us do what seemed impossible at the time. Here by another fire, in the dead of winter, I felt I needed to make an account.Only this time it’s not personal. Perhaps it never was – I just didn’t see it at the time, wrapped up in my own seeming exile and grief. It had felt like the end of the world.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><br /></i><i><b>Bobbin-kandelnost</b> – the force that exists in the three centres of</i><i>thinking, feeling and moving within the self; that acts like a coiled</i><i>spring and can lose momentum and run out by overuse (see also</i><i>‘Die like Dog’).</i></blockquote>
You wrote that <i>three-brained beings</i> don’t want to wake up to the terror of the situation, the realisation we are all asleep and stuck in automatic behaviours, our minds and personalities all over the place, reacting to outside events and never coming from within. The book, the ‘First Series’ of your All and Everything trilogy, opens with a description of a bellringer in a town, who curses the populace each morning as he climbs out of bed, so that their curses would deflect away from his work in the belltower. No one wants to wake up, get out of bed, do the thing they are supposed to do, to be a live conscious being in a difficult time. Fewer still want to ring that bell.<br />
<br />
You wrote your masterpiece in the twenties, as the world rocked towards the Depression. You had arrived in Paris with the<i> mass psychosis</i> of the Russian revolution at your heels. People may say, with the clarity and dispassion of historians: well, it wasn’t so hard then to be awake, there was less to consider planetarily speaking. But it is always hard, the <i>burning issues </i>of the day are always the burning issues of the day, whether the spectre of another war in Europe or a climate catastrophe. You can be awake to that moment in the way poets in the trenches and gulags were awake, you can sacrifice yourself nobly to a cause to change the destiny of people, or you can be awake and not comply with the orders to stay asleep. You can embody an intrinsic inner move that can break the machine.<br />
<br />
There is a moment in the Tales that struck me: you are sitting in the Paris cafe, where you are writing in several notebooks, dressed in a vanilla-coloured overcoat and a red fez. There is a bottle of brandy on the table and you are surrounded by the clatter of cups and knives and forks to hone your <i> mentation</i>, your absolute focus on the matter at hand, as you turn your Saturnian face, with its drooping moustache, towards a woman greeting a group of friends. You suddenly see this scene at the table played over and over through time, through every civilisation and city, and still here the same petty relationships, the rivalries, the posturings of society, the things that take up the minds and hearts of people and no progress made at all, in spite of everything that has been said over and over again by poets, by mystics, by philosophers, by you.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Bored Secretary – <i>the challenge of thwarting the associative mind that goes into the mental filing cabinets for facts or trivia; the pursuit of busyness out of superficiality and lack of rigour.</i></blockquote>
Most people remember the dramas and the gossip: whether you were or were not the last magus of Europe, or a carpet dealer and charlatan who slept with your students, whether your teaching really did come from the ancient Sarmoung Brotherhood in the Hindukush; or they mention your famous quarrel with Ouspensky, or how Katherine Mansfield died in your care at Le Prieuré, and a string of anecdotes and quotes and photographs of people in white tunics in elegant dance salons.<br />
<br />
I am not a storyteller, I told Lucy and the women as they melted into the darkness tonight. I come from a line of engineers and lawyers, I have a forensic mind and love of structure. We have come here to initiate a network that will connect the women and the trees of these islands. It is a bold project. I know what needs to happen won’t take the shape of a narrative that we might already know, that to change really, truly, deeply, we have to let go of all those happy-ever-after stories of romantic love, of reconciliation and redemption. We need a rigorous practice that will break us open. A shock that will push us in another direction.<br />
<br />
Your esoteric teachings were all about the musical scale and though I know now how your name should be pronounced (Gurrr-jeff, gruffly like a Russian bear), I cannot pretend to know their intricate meanings, any more than I understood how all those dots related in Peter’s painting. Yet the impression of a cosmic map remained, and one point shone outward like a star you might recognise in the night sky: there is a stage as you increase your knowledge and practice and ascend the scale, where something has to come in from the outside to boost your inner transformation.<br />
<br />
These encounters come but we are not ready for them, or they knock us over, or we forget to make the move. I thought I would never get over my exile from that desert place, from Carmen’s kitchen, from my life on the road – so I put a hand out and found a book and that’s when you came in with your convoluted metaphors, with your rants about tinned food, with your strange vocabulary, part-Armenian, part-English, part-Russian, for a transmission that I was open to without even knowing I was open to it.<br />
<br />
I was born six years after you were buried in the Île-de-France, and the circumstances of my arising and my own nature would mean, even if I had been of your time, I would never have come to one of your packed lectures in New York, or danced a sacred dance in a white tunic, even with Carmen playing the piano. But here I am, having worked on self-pity and inner-considering and contending with everyone else’s. We still live in times of <i>mass psychosis</i>. The experts continue to <i>wiseacre</i>. The world is still asleep.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Being-Partkdolg-duty – <i>twin methods of soul-making and waking up: conscious labours (also known as being effort) and intentional-suffering, the greatest of which is the ability to endure the ‘displeasing-manifestations-of-others-towards-yourselves’.</i></blockquote>
This wood is made up mostly of coppiced oak trees. An industrial forest in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Wyre sits between the green hills of Wales and the manufacturing sprawl of the Midlands. Sooty-faced charcoal burners once built great pyres in the clearings and made the charcoal that fuelled the iron forges of Birmingham, the smelters of a revolution that would rock the world. Until the discovery of coal, only the high temperatures of charcoal could melt the metal, and even now it is the favoured fuel of blacksmiths and sword makers.<br />
<br />
Now the wood has become a neglected monoculture of oak trees, some streaked black with disease, with no space for them to branch out or for other trees to grow. They are sleeping, the curator said when I arrived, and told me his plans for restoration. Except for the yews. The yews stand there like red-armed sentinels from another time, some of them over 800 years old. When the snows came this winter, herds of deer sheltered underneath the white roof oftheir branches. This morning I stood in their hoofprints and listened to the rain fall quietly around me, listening out for an ancestral tale I might tell around this fire that might spark another kind of revolution.<br />
<br />
Charcoal makers lived in the woods in shacks, feared and despised as ‘the devil’s men’. The work was hard and long and dangerous. They built up a pile of logs and covered it with soil and turf. The process took days and sometimes weeks. The gases produced were highly toxic and still are where Charcoal is now made, mostly illegally, for modern barbeques, in the forests of Africa and South America. The work for the women in the forest was also hard, as they stripped the bark from the coppiced trees for the tanning of leather.<br />
<br />
The sparks in the fire come from old spruce fence posts and some birch, but mostly felled oak, where they are making space for other things to flourish here. ‘Who are we doing it for?’ asked the curator. For the nature lover who values butterflies, for the runner who likes to run along a straight path, for the forester who likes good long planks for carpenters to work with, for the charities who own it to make it pay its way when the subsidies run out, which they will surely do someday soon?<br />
<br />
When you don’t know what to do or what you are doing life for, you build a fire, and you wait for something to spark you alight again. We are in the time of the winter solstice, the day that breaks the circle of the year, between its last outward breath and the first inward pull of air: the place of no breath.<br />
<br />
After your first car crash, at the point when Le Prieuré, your school in Fontainebleau, was faltering, you pushed everyone aside and went into the forest and made up a great fire, and for days you sat in front of it. The fire remade you.<br />
<br />
How heated do things have to become until we can reforge ourselves,to work the iron in our soul? If we fed the fire all our stories, everything we needed to die to, could we reforge the world into a different shape?<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Inner Considering – <i>the act of chewing over incidents which you feel guilty about or wish had been otherwise; to be replaced by outward expression (see also ‘Remorse of Conscience’).</i></blockquote>
What you need, above all, is the courage to face the terror that feels like annihilation. There are almost no words to describe that feeling because it is happening in a place that no one has working words for: as if you are being crushed by air or engulfed by flames that devour your memory; as if you are being dragged downwards into a pit and a force is sucking all the awareness and sweetness out of you.<br />
<br />
When I returned I needed a techne to restore myself. I fed the fire my travelling story: I fed it my capacity to love a certain place on Earth that felt like home, my capacity to love certain people, my companions. These things wouldn’t happen again in my lifetime. Afterwards I found myself in another position, holding the reins of a carriage in my hands.<br />
<br />
To get our horse and carriage into shape was core to your teaching. In order to behave like a human being, rather than a machine, we had to gather our wits about us and become fully conscious. The horse was our emotional body, the driver our mind, and the carriage our physical body. Only when these three parts of ourselves were working together could the passenger alight. Not to hail us occasionally like a hackney cab, but to be fully on board.<br />
<br />
The techne of consciousness is hard, on-the-edge work. You have to persuade the horse not to bolt at every turn, you have to instruct the driver to have a feel for the horse and the bumpy road ahead. The<br />
carriage needs to be roadworthy, kept in good nick. These three parts of ourselves need to work together. Otherwise we are not able to carry the passenger.<br />
<br />
Who is the passenger? It is our conscious awake self, our spirit, our intelligence. The ‘being-I’ who knows what is going on and what we are doing together in this English forest, as the longest night holds us in its embrace and the owls call to each other from the canopy.<br />
<br />
In those desert years I had climbed down and worked with the horse. I had become a whisperer of my own feeling being. We are held hostage by our feelings and, like the nervous, imaginative creature who has borne us loyally all these years, remember every blow received, so that when we see a shape we associate it with a dark presence we once knew, we rear up, or we refuse to move. Somehow, we have to unlearn all that fear and trust the driver. The driver has to walk beside the horse, repair her will which has been broken over thousands of years.<br />
<br />
I let the horse lead me to regions that were not on the map: to reclaim my heart lost in childhood nightmares, into the forgotten kingdoms of trees and birds and sea to recover my place on Earth. Most seekers focus on the driver and become too controlling, hampering the horse with bridle and whip; others work on the carriage, becoming obsessed with paint and cogs and springs. But I knew we go nowhere in the land of fire without the horse.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mr. Self-Love and Mrs. Vanity – <i>self-importance; twin attributes of self-obsession which lock human beings inside themselves and prevent influences both bad and good from entering (to be distinguished from the Self Love of essence which brings freedom–</i> <i>see</i> Life is Only Real Then When I Am).</blockquote>
The moment of solstice is exact. The pause between the expiration of the year and its great inhalation. There are ancient stories I can tell about this moment, how the oak changes place with the holly tree, the robin with the wren, how in my country in the east, the men with blackened faces come over the marsh holding firebrands, and the women with hats draped with ivy, who back them playing the music of fife and drum. The dance is slow and heavy, their boots stamping the earth awake, the sticks clash and click like antlers, like flint against flint.<br />
<br />
But most of all this is a techne for showing that life can begin again, so long as we relinquish everything we know in this moment of no breath, so long as we can admit none of us know what is going to happen or how. The techne comes through the mouths of people you don’t even respect, or a book that falls into your hands in a second-hand store that you open without knowing why.<br />
<br />
Or now, as I find myself clicking two sticks of rainforest wood Aurelia gave me that spring night in Oaxaca for a performance we called the Earth Medicine Show. As she drummed and Mark sang, I danced and Julianne told us her heart that had frozen over in the Minneapolis winter had suddenly melted, and afterwards the five of us went out to dinner arm-in-arm to the square. That rooftop performance was our first and our last, and even though we rehearsed and talked about it for years, only now do I understand that it wasn’t the right time for shows. My carriage was robust but the horse was too nervy, the driver prone to flights of fancy. My eye was not on the road.<br />
<br />
I don’t like to think that every radical move I’ve made in these years has been caused by outer shocks’. To be <i>inwardly free</i> – the ultimate goal of Gurjieffian thinking – you have to transform the world’s hostilities and not submit to them. Because I was thrown out of America, because I underwent my own financial katabasis and had to face the reality of the job centre, because I had to suffer, more-or-less consciously, the ‘nullities emitting atmospheres of unendurable vibrations’ telling me I was worthless, knew nothing, or ignoring me entirely, I am here now dancing by the fire.<br />
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Self-calming – <i>an act of deception we practice to pretend everything is all right when it is not; false assurances that prevent reality from being perceived.</i></blockquote>
When I think of you now I see your flat in Paris, where you spent your last years with the curtains drawn. For some reason I imagine it is one of those ateliers, with a crammed larder of jars and sausages swinging from hooks, though it was probably grander than that. You have given up on the world you say and now only teach a small band of women, mostly lesbians, called The Rope. When the Occupation is over you host great dinners and toast the idiots with glasses of vodka. You insist that everyone has to read your work at least three times to understand it.<br />
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I don’t know the 17 kinds of idiot you need to be totally awake (what is a round idiot, a square idiot?). It took me a long time to realise that an idiot was not an idiot, but that in different moments of awakening you appear like an idiot to everyone else in the status quo, to your family, to your best friend, to your culture and nation and history, that to be ready for the passenger to hail you is a great and noble task because you are doing it for the forest and the deer, and all who flourish under their branches. That is no small thing.<br />
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I have been a compassion idiot, a seeker idiot, a relinquishment idiot, a community activist idiot, a real democracy idiot. At each turn I imagined that if everyone woke up, got conscious, the world would turn around. Even though when I go to the city (which is not often) it looks as though we have become more like automatons than ever, our attention captured by small lit-up screens. And then I remember that this Earth is a chance to start again and, every year, time gives us that possibility, this moment.<br />
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In many ways I too have closed my curtains on the world and stocked up my larder. I have spent too much time chasing <i>Mrs. Serious Problem </i>(as you called the demands on you to secure funds) and the book I wanted to write is unfinished. But one thing you learn from being a writer: you are good at waiting, you are good at holding out, you can weather the moment of no breath, knowing that one day the spark will happen, the sentences will tumble out, and that they are only good if the form of their creator is newly-smelted. You wait for a long time, until the fire is hot enough to burn you without consuming you, to suck the moisture and then the oxygen out of you.<br />
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You wait for the opportunity, and when it arrives you toast all the idiots you have met whose common presences have helped shaped you, put the reins back into your hands. You look at them across the table, on the other side of the fire, and you raise your glass:<br />
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Salut Carmen, salut Peter, salut Aurelia, salut Lucy, salut Mark, salut George Ivanovich!<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Kundabuffer – <i>invisible organ that controls perception and turns any encounter with a disturbing reality upside down; a force that prevents you from seeing the truth when the truth would cause you to lose hope; a filter that requires dismantling.</i></blockquote>
In 1918, women in Britain finally won the right to vote (though only if you were a householder over the age of 30). In 1918, the young men of Britain did not return to the Forest from the trenches of Flanders. Those who survived went instead to work in the factories of the Black Country. In 1918, your father was shot amongst the throng in the Armenian genocide in your home city of Alexandrapol, and, posing as a scientist, you left Essentuki with a band of family members, companions and pupils and walked through the Caucasus Mountains. It was the beginning of a long journey west that went through Georgia to Istanbul to Paris.<br />
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You wrote that humanity was at a standstill and that ‘from a standstill there is a straight path to downfall and degeneration’, that nothing pointed to our evolution. And 100 years later it seems women are no more emancipated than human beings are more evolved. We have the vote, some of us are kinder to animals and some of us realise the effect of our actions on the living planet – but as a species we appear to be as stupid, cruel and greedy as ever. Our technology has evolved but we are<br />
less vigorous, less alive, more timid, more pursued by ghosts and the trauma of history through generations, at a standstill where we feel responsible for everything and nothing at all; where our key fault is still our passivity and suggestibility – our lack of ability to think for ourselves and to handle those forces that battle for supremacy inside and outside ourselves.<br />
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Our buffers allow us to say one thing and do another: we lament deforestation while sitting on teak chairs, lament the state of the ocean whilst eating its disappearing fish, we think we are enlightened because we have read books, and pretend the slave trade is over when it is worse than ever. We’re still stuck in patriarchy, in a dualist Babylonian mindset – the cause, you once said, of all wickedness in the world – and we continue to nurture the ‘artificial, the unreal, and what is foreign, at the cost of the natural, the real, and what is one’s own.’<br />
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But maybe a standstill is a place to start from. Maybe if we just stopped here together, sat with the disturbing reality of that fact, something else would kick in. Maybe if we shifted out of our predilection for stories, away from our desire to grovel at the feet of shiny saviours and patriarchs, our obeisance to the genetic mummy-daddy-baby machine,our longing for the community to love us, to succeed, to be a star, to be left alone – maybe some awakening would happen.<br />
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We would need to go against nature and against god as you once said – not against the <i>Great Nature </i>of the glacier and the tiger but our own propensity for passivity and suggestibility; not the solar and cosmic forces but the violent gods we worship and pray to in blind faith, instead of engaging in The Work that would make us function at higher vibratory levels, and thus the world, that would break us out of the prisons of our mind and from all our gaolers. That could allow us to be grander and kinder and more intelligent than these small rooms allow us.<br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Solioonensius – <i>a time of solar or planetary tension which energises the Earth so people strive for freedom – then turn that striving for freedom into war or revolution, into destruction; a time when old ideas can no longer move the world and new ideas have not yet gained momentum; when certain new directions can be implanted into general culture.</i></blockquote>
Sometimes I remember what lay outside Carmen’s kitchen and I can feel the blue sky arching forever, and the empty roads that go on forever, the way in late March the flowers of the ocotillo lick the air like the flames of epiphany, and the scent of chaparral permeating the world after the rain. How I used to feel with the women in Mexico, as we sat beside the water, our colours and laughter and fluidity. I remember the space and that feeling of freedom I can never sense in my own country. How this lightness, this liberation, is what we all look for and yet here we are on this crowded island, in this sleeping forest, my muddy lane with its <i>power possessor</i> driveways and toxic runoff from barley fields, threats of development on all sides. Dispossessed, precarious, unnecessary. This is the territory I have to wrestle and contend with after the <i>hope-for-something </i>died in the high deserts of America.<br />
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You have to make yourself matter, become an active agent in the fabric of the world. If you are versed in myth and story, in the beauty of the bird and the flower, it is easy to feel at home on the Earth, but being at home amongst your fellow human beings is a task once you forgo the lullabies and cradle songs of Empire, and awake to find a bell rope in your hands.<br />
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We wield great terms above our heads like axes – social justice, transformation, shift of consciousness, power of community – ready to split enemy heads apart with their force. But still we are asleep, reacting, neglecting The Work down among the people in the petty shops and tearooms, enduring the unbearable vibrations of the office bully, the<i> personages</i> that control the boardrooms and parliaments.<br />
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A network is not a community, I told the women. We stand on miles upon miles of mycelium networks, connecting the forest, nourishing the roots of all beings underground. The community gathers the people together round the fire, it looks inward. The further you are inside it the warmer and more connected you feel. Outside a cold wind blows and you push and jostle to be in the throng.<br />
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A network is not concerned with belonging. It is self-directed and interested in the connections it makes. It works outwardly, focused on the matter at hand. The more the network is resonant and alive, the stronger it feels. Living networks depend on living breathing plants and creatures and microbes that are everywhere around us. We are an industrialised, neglected wood – asleep – but there are networks communicating beneath our feet and ancient yews amongst us, and men who make space for other things to happen. And here a band of women unafraid of the dark, standing with the forests, with our sisters of the world, and one of us, remembering you, in the flicker of a fire.<br />
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And if time is the great mystery of these islands, of this Earth, we are surely not alone in this moment, in this time of destruction, because if we step into this ancestral moment, in the presence of all beings, all creatures, all trees though time, then this is the moment that things can turn around.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-rm0Fo4c8UmA7lPnBayhc4An_iH7-Ib_-CUw7RkW6BHJXm8xM7EXed8Ie1vtGDCDTpEyBVspEHqn1KeD_X4Dn4NanV0cGIiMThC64IX2YqZPGyQ86cLBfgPMJvTrv_o-7_ZSEkMUKP4ja/s1600/DSC_9423+copy+copy.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-rm0Fo4c8UmA7lPnBayhc4An_iH7-Ib_-CUw7RkW6BHJXm8xM7EXed8Ie1vtGDCDTpEyBVspEHqn1KeD_X4Dn4NanV0cGIiMThC64IX2YqZPGyQ86cLBfgPMJvTrv_o-7_ZSEkMUKP4ja/s1600/DSC_9423+copy+copy.jpeg" /></a>Outside, the Earth waits in the stillness, as glaciers crack and tigers move across the snowline, as the roots of everything are ready to stir in the cycle of the year. Of itself, Great Nature can do nothing to effect our change, except we awaken, open to the spark of the sun inside ourselves. Of itself, the sun can effect nothing, except that we allow it into our physical forms, let it mould our selves anew.<br />
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After the fire, I will follow the women back up the track to the barn, as we feel our way with our feet in the dark. Tomorrow we’ll get up at dawn, light the stove and move out into the orchard in silence. We will stand under dripping hazel trees at the edge of the Forest, with the apple trees in front of us and the oaks standing behind us, and pay attention to the moment. Somewhere deep in the forest a deer will wait underneath a yew tree, as she has waited since the Ice Age in these borderlands. The sun will rise, even though we will not see it through the cloud.<br />
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The light shifts imperceptibly and a hawk flashes past, its scimitar wings cut the air. We hold our breath.<br />
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All images from Dark Mountain: Issue 13: Rock art for cover by Caroline Ross; <i>Stepping Out</i> by Bruce Hooke; <i>The Night You were Reborn into the Eternal Home</i> by Ilyse Krivel.<br />
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<b>Dark Mountain: Issue 13 is on sale <a href="http://here./">here.</a> </b><br />
<b><a href="https://dark-mountain.net/dark-mountain-issue-13/">Editorial for the issue</a> (and other extracts can be found on on the Dark Mountain website) <a href="http://dark-mountain.net./">dark-mountain.net.</a></b><br />
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<b><br /></b>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-8718867706171009682018-04-19T09:01:00.001+01:002018-11-04T09:43:12.757+00:00Everything That Rises Must Converge<div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">T</span>he writer keeps the door open, so the world doesn’t close down ...When you stand on the edge of the society you have been taught is everything, and plunge into an unknown territory, you feel you know everything in parts of your self you did not know existed. (from <a href="http://dark-mountain.net/blog/the-snake-in-the-box/">Snake in the Box</a>)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">'In the future the real function of the artist will to act like a host and to gather the people'. On the leafy woodland stage at the last Uncvilisation Festival, <span style="background-color: white;">Fern Smith is playing Rachel Dutton, </span></span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">the artist who walked out into the American wilderness with her husband and collaborator, Rob Olds in 1993. They left their art and city life behind and had only their tracking skills to hand. The critic Suzi Gablik (who interviewed them) stepped away from the conventional art word, arguing for a </span><i style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Reenchantment of Art</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">. In this reenactment of their seminal interview, </span><a href="http://www.emergence-uk.org/" style="background-color: white; border: 0px; color: #627e9f; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; transition: 0.5s; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Doin’ Dirt Time</a>,<span style="font-family: inherit;"> the trio discuss a</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;"> return to the roots of creativity, how writers and artists lead the collective in the direction they need to go.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Fern has just left the theatre she founded 25 years ago and is also stepping into the unknown. In 1991 I left a conventional bohemian life as a journalist in London and never went back. Sometimes it feels as if you cannot go anywhere new unless you relinquish everything and swim heroically against the collective current. And yet the challenge to host and gather, raised by the play, has found me in this last decade working in communities, curating events, editing collaborative books and online platforms, showing people how to write and edit as a team, and most of all finding ways to discuss, outside among the trees or in a teaching circle, w</span>hat happens when our loyalties are not to the work we have been doing all our lives, or to the social classes we have or we have not been brought up in.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What happens to us as writers when we relinquish our inchoate desire to wage war on a childhood or imperial past, circumstances over which we had no control? Will we find other shards of ourselves buried beneath the drifting sands, tracks we can follow into the uncivilised wilderness?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In a time of fall and fragmentation , if you are wise, you do not look for the powerful Ones with their faraway promises and angry rhetoric. What you find yourself searching for is something real, something coherent, something you can count on – your relationship with the fabric of things, a certain meaning that comes from the natural world, held instinctively in the forms of creatures and plants. And also in a deeper part of ourselves, if we could but find them and give them voice.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">What does coherence look and feel like? One thing I have learned, coherence does not emanate from the me-only writer in their cell of solitude. It comes from the writer-within-a-group, in symbiosis with everything around them. The writer who speaks on behalf of others in the human and non-human world. It comes from asking questions on the edge of things and having the courage to wait for the answer. It comes as an invitation to take part that you proffer, even when your conditioning pulls you to hide in your small room, hunched over the keys, playing with sentences like an emperor of a lost kingdom.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Here is the paradox, so clearly outlined in that small play: i<span style="background-color: white;">f we don’t ask key questions of each other, we won’t find any answers.</span></span></div>
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<h2>
Writing in a Moment of Fall</h2>
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This summer I am co-hosting two gatherings around non-fiction writing and editing in times of radical change. At the end of May, a group of us will investigate how we might learn from the honeybee hive, not just about the challenges bee colonies (and we) face, but also about their innate gifts of harmony and co-operation, in order that we might bring those shapes and skills and stores of sweetness into our own creative lives. We will be converging around the apiaries of the Natural Beekeeping Trust in Sussex, guided by their visionary 'curator' Heidi Hermann, and tuning into the world of the honeybee on both practical and inspirational levels.</div>
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<b><a href="https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/42a31e_f2a1f96508ab46209e1da1f30d4f3273.pdf">Flights of Imagination: Writing with the Bees </a> will be taking place in Forest Hill, Sussex on 25-27 May 2018. </b>This will be the first of such writing courses that explore working with the natural world in different places around Britain (see also <a href="https://carrying-the-fire.org/">Carrying the Fire</a> weekend set in the heart of the Cairngorms this November).</div>
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In mid-June I will be teaming up with my friend and colleague, theatremaker Lucy Neal (whose book <i>Playing for Time - Marking Art as if the World Mattered </i>I helped edit in collaboration with 60+ artists). It will be our third course for Arvon teaching the craft of collective and dramaturgical writing. And this year we are delighted to welcome the novelist, editor and columnist,<a href="http://www.nikesh-shukla.com/"> Nikesh Shukla </a>as our midweek guest. Nikesh is the compiler of the groundbreaking book, <i>The Good Immigrant</i> - a collection of voices not often heard in mainstream circles and has just published his third novel,<i> The One Who Wrote Destiny.</i></div>
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<b><a href="https://www.arvon.org/course/writing-make-change-happen/">Writing to Make Change Happen</a> will be held at Totleigh Barton, Devon on 11th–16th June 2018.</b></div>
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<b>If either of these courses/gatherings sound as if they are for you, please do register your interest by the end of the month and we look forward to meeting and voyaging with you soon!</b></div>
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<i>Image: Still from </i>MAHAPRALAYA: The Great Dissolution<i> by Gustaf Broms; </i>Horse Island Woman<i> by Kate Walters. Both images are from the recently published Dark Mountain Issue 13, a collaboratively edited book of over 60+ writers and artists, looking at 'Being Human in an age of social and ecological collapse'. You can find <a href="http://shop.dark-mountain.net/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=96">all details about the book on the Dark Mountain online shop.</a></i></div>
Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-16776391110017601742018-02-06T15:05:00.001+00:002018-11-04T09:44:21.782+00:00Dark Kitchen: Uncivilising the Table<div style="color: #333333;">
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><em>This week I introduced a new Dark Mountain series that explores</em><em> food and eating in times of collapse. Follow us during this Lenten month as we travel through different kingdoms and terrains, sharpening our appetites and cooking knives, in the company of artists, filmmakers, writers and activists.</em></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We are looking at a plate. Tiny translucent slices of fish are artfully arranged around its rim. It is 1990 and we are in a Japanese restaurant in downtown Manhattan. 'Who is going first?' we wonder and laugh nervously. I am with Hamilton and Steve. We'll all go at once we decide and put the poisonous raw <em>fugu</em> in our mouths, declaring that a tingling was <em>definitely</em> happening. The dish costs $50.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">We are looking at a plate. On it piled in chunky layers are home-baked sourdough bread, crispy seaweed and a poached egg. It is 2017 and we are outside in the lee of the Dorset cliffs, cooking on a camping stove. Everyone wants to go first. I am with Caroline, Jack and Mark and yesterday we cut the bright green fronds from the rocks, as the aquamarine sea swirled about our feet. We declare this is possibly the best breakfast we have ever had and laugh.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a story about food and powerdown. It could seem like a personal story except that it is not: it is a social story about how everything changes when you break the illusions your civilisation is wrapped in. In 1990 I am staying in the Algonquin Hotel, covering the US fashion collections, and I know nothing about the industrial food system; in 2017 I am staying in a hut on a beach, talking about Dark Mountain, and I know all its dark secrets. Decades later the Spring collections will still send beige raincoats down the catwalk and the forests of kelp will continue to wave their ancestral arms in the currents of the English channel - but the world I am documenting, like the food I now cook, is radically different.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is a series called Dark Kitchen: a set of pieces that will look at and question the culture of food in times of fall. It's not a subject Dark Mountain has focused on before, even though writing and cooking share a creative <em>terroir</em>, not least in their ability to bring things to the table, to alchemise raw material into food for the mind, heart and body. Up to now any focus on food has been practical: the Uncivilisation festivals hosted foraging walks, we've published pieces on mead making, <a data-mce-href="http://dark-mountain.net/blog/an-extended-recipe-for-bread/" href="http://dark-mountain.net/blog/an-extended-recipe-for-bread/">bread baking in Australia</a> and a recipe for a very rooty, roadkill pheasant stew; this series aims to bring a writer's and artist's particular attention to food from a Dark Mountain perspective.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Our focus will not be on the labyrinth, the whirlygig of distribution centres and trucks that thunder along our roads, all the data and polemic, but on finding the dancing floor beneath it. Around all our sentences lie the deforested lands, the denuded and poisoned oceans, the lost soil, the vast herds of creatures living and dying invisibly in dark sheds. We know what is going down. Our core question is, once you have railed at the machine that holds us in its palm-oiled maw, what do you do as an artist, as a storytelling human being, knowing that every time you venture out with a shopping basket, you return with blood on your hands?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Dark Kitchen aims to gather some of the stories about food that go untold at the edge of our civilisation. All civilisations flourish and flounder according to their ability to feed themselves. All of us, as human animals, no matter where we exist, on what social and political map, need to eat to live. Like death, this is a fact of our existence here. How we can we do that sustainably, with kindness, with fairness, is a question many grassroots organisations and activists ask themselves.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One they do not necessarily ask however is: how do we change the story of our lives, built as it is on millions of years of living in hunter/gatherer bodies, thousands of years living in wheat and barley-fed civilisations, in nomadic milk-herding geographies? Food is not a matter of intellectual debate: it is physical and feeling memory, deep time memory, cultural and personal history. It is people and relationships with domestic and wild creatures, conviviality, tradition, hunger, belonging, snobbery. Roast dinners, fish and chips by the sea. It is hunting deer and keeping chickens, curry on a Friday night when you were a student. It is visiting the markets of Morocco, or France, or your gran who cooked the best lemon meringue pie <em>ever</em>.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">How do you come up with a new way of interacting with the world that means all that culture stored inside of you and everyone you know, constantly reflected from shiny magazine pages, on TV screens, on your best friend's Instagram, has to go?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Roland Barthes observed in his seminal work <em>Mythologies </em>how the modern left faltered before the sheer power and sexiness of the capitalist advertising industry. How can you match the pull it has on your most basic desire: to eat delicious food, tasting of fat and salt and sweet, ready made without effort, without thinking of where it has come from, a food without consequence, untainted by guilt. Every day feast food, seeped in the lure of luxury, convenience, pleasure, control - the defining signature of a corporate lifestyle.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">A humble recipe for vegan nut roast is not going to cut the mustard, any more than modern socialism has been able to counter market fundamentalism. The glamour and snobbery of high culture, and the physical desires and habits of most people, are too strong. Something else has to pull you more powerfully in another direction: something that has its roots in the land, in a deeper culture that also looks prophetically to the future, that has intelligence, meaning and ethics and still tastes good.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One thing corporate dining, for all its cheffy fancies and huge glasses of wine, does not have and never will: the relationship with the non-human, with the earth, with the plants and creatures who stand to go down with us if we don't dismantle the labyrinth. This relationship is above all things a matter of the heart. Dark Kitchen is about remembering one of the oldest and simplest stories ever told: a love affair with the fabric of life.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">Powerdown</span></strong></h2>
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<img alt="Bread b7w" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5487" data-mce-src="http://dark-mountain.net/content/uploads/2018/02/Bread-b7w.jpg" src="http://dark-mountain.net/content/uploads/2018/02/Bread-b7w.jpg" height="255" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="400" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Where did the shift away from that plate of fugu begin? I read a cookbook by Colin Spencer with a no-holds-barred description of slaughterhouses. I gave up eating meat. I read <em>End of the Line</em> by Charles Clover. I gave up eating fish. I read <em>Eat Your Heart Out,</em> Felicity Lawrence's document about corporate control and the fate of African workers in the glasshouses of Spain and Italy. I gave up buying out-of-season tomatoes. I stopped going to supermarkets. Then I went to a documentary hosted by a local Transition initiative where Derrick Jensen spoke about the agricultural revolution and how it had decimated the wild world. Somewhere a restaurant door slammed shut and an allotment gate clicked open.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In Transition I bumped into everything that the advertising and supermarkets keep in the dark: land grabs, slavery, GM, pesticides decimating insect and bird populations, slurry from pig farms killing the rivers and oceans. I started to look at the barley and beet fields outside my window in a new light and shudder.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">In those grassroots community activism years, food growing connected us all: we knew that growing radishes would not change the world but it would radically change our relationships with the earth and with each other. I became a serial food blogger charting the downshifting moves within food production: growing co-ops, box schemes, gleaning networks, apple-pressing weekends, potato days, community bakers, seed swaps, the plight of the honey bees, and the ex-Agriculture minister John Gummer telling us at a farmers' conference on Climate Change and Food Security:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">This is the biggest issue agriculture has faced, and unlike the Depression in the 1930s and the Black Death we are not facing this in ignorance. And because we know we are responsible. People don't want to know of course, because once you know it changes you and you are ashamed.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">It was a time where people on panels said these kinds of things and prophesied that bio-tech loaves and fishes would feed the 9 billion. It was a time of bringing potatoes to Occupy camps and wild weed salads to low-carbon meetings, of rescuing a whole side of salmon and punnets of strawberries from the Latitude festival recycling bins, cooking Mexican and raw food feasts for community diners. It was a time where The Monitor in the kitchen told me <em>exactly</em> how much power was eking out of the fridge and the kettle. When some women wept and struggled with their Tesco habit, and others implored me not to tell them <em>exactly</em> what their shrimp habit was doing to the seabed or the coastal mangroves of South East Asia.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But something was missing. Everything I wrote had this <em>evangelical</em> tone. We need to reduce our energy use! Get in season! Make your store cupboard resilient! Wake up to the real price of consumerism! I realised neither knowledge nor social justice gives enough heft for people to change tracks. To be in synch with the living systems, to restore the land, to eat beautifully with conscience, to find meaning in an everyday humble meal, an imaginative relationship with the physical world had to be created. Our hearts had to be rekindled by something stronger, more alluring, than any feel-bad information. Something you never thought of before <strong><em>–</em></strong> like seaweed for breakfast on a limestone beach in September.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span><strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">A short story about beans</span></strong></h2>
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<img alt="Beans 2" class="alignright size-full wp-image-5491" data-mce-src="http://dark-mountain.net/content/uploads/2018/02/Beans-2.jpg" src="http://dark-mountain.net/content/uploads/2018/02/Beans-2.jpg" height="320" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="240" /></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">I am standing on Dark Mountain's <a data-mce-href="http://basecamp.dark-mountain.net/" href="http://basecamp.dark-mountain.net/">Base Camp</a> stage, holding a handful of field beans. These beans are what this weekend is all about, I am telling the gathering. Field beans have been grown here in Britain since the Iron Age and embody one of the uncivilised principles of the manifesto <strong><em>–</em></strong> being rooted in time and place.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">The beans are produced by my friend Josiah, who started a small business in a nearby Suffolk market town with Nick and William five years ago. The beans were all about shortening the supply chain, encouraging farmers to grow a crop that was either given to cattle or sold to the Middle East, and that was nutritious not only for an eat-less-meat-and-dairy-cook-from-scratch culture, but also for the soil that is being rapidly depleted by fossil-fuelled farming.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">But most of all <a data-mce-href="https://www.robhopkins.net/2017/12/04/545/" href="https://www.robhopkins.net/2017/12/04/545/">the beans were about telling a different story.</a> A Jack in the Beanstalk story about a boy who sells his mother's cow for a handful of beans that totally changes their luck. The beans were followed by peas of many colours, and then quinoa (grown not in Bolivia but in Essex), and now lentils, naked barley and oats, and a host of other grains and pulses, grown with the same kind of attention to place and provenance that has made local craft beers rocket in popularity in the face of corporate brewing. In short, a whole shelf of basic goods that would normally be imported, in fields that would normally host monocultural commodity crops grown for the global market. Last year Hodmedods won BBC Producer of the Year and had to move warehouses, as everyone else began to agree those beans just took you to places that Mr Heinz never could.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">One of the successes of the fava bean is that it is a beloved ingredient in the fragrant and spicy cuisines of the Middle East and other countries. To end each of our Dark Kitchen posts we'll be cooking up a recipe that will capture the flavour of some of the story we're telling, that shows though we may live in more austere restricted times, there need be no limit to our imaginations and flair and generosity. This is a classic North African dish made with fava beans instead of chickpeas and served with quinoa instead of couscous. It can serve two to four people <strong><em>–</em></strong> just add less or more veg.</span></div>
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<strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">Seven vegetable tagine</span></strong></h3>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Soak a big handful of fava beans overnight and then cook until soft (approx 40 minutes). Keep to one side. Whole beans keep their shape but split fava is OK too if you don't mind a bit of collapse in your cooking (no need to soak).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Chop one onion and fry gently in olive oil in a largish saucepan. When softened add 2 cloves of garlic, a teaspoon of <em>ras el hanout</em> spice (or a mix of cumin, coriander, mixed spice and chilli pepper) and fresh green chilli if you like it hot. Stir and then add your roughly chopped seven veg which will depend on season: swede, leeks and parsnips in winter for example, courgettes, green pepper and turnips in the summer. You're looking for a strong taste and a chunky texture, so celery and carrots are good. Cabbage however is key and can be added half way through the main cooking so it keeps its form.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Stir in the spicy oil for a minute or two then add 2 tomatoes and a squeeze of tomato puree, or the equivalent in tinned tomatoes, and water to just below the level of the veg. Throw in a handful of sultanas and half a preserved lemon (or a couple of slices and the juice of half a fresh squeezed lemon). Stir, pop on the lid and cook until the veg starts to soften (about 15 minutes). Add the beans for a further five.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Before serving add salt and black pepper to taste, plus a big handful of chopped coriander and/or parsley. Served with quinoa, flavoured with orange zest, cinnamon and toasted sunflower seeds, a bowl of slaw or salad, and some feisty harissa.</span></div>
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<em><strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">Next course:</span></strong></em></div>
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<em><strong><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Dark Kitchen series will run throughout February, but will continue as an occasional series when the new-look Dark Mountain website is launched in April. If you would like to contribute in the future, do get in touch with a short description of your piece to charlotte@dark-mountain.net. Thanks all and bon appetit!</span></strong></em></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">--</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><em>Images: Medlars in a Sieve by Food/ Still life photography: Sue Atkinson </em><em>www.sueatkinson.co.uk; loaves from a co-operative oven, Can Piella, Catalonia by Phillip Evans ; a handful of (field) beans by Mark Watson</em></span></div>
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Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-75408592551003319812017-11-21T13:00:00.001+00:002017-11-30T16:39:49.006+00:00Life and death on the Sussex Downs<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwgbB1cONWIwfaAJNYkanKfETHYMW5EF8Gxdp6IEXiu8U3colERez2-3PNHZHx93_ZlW0tAU5mKUjVSKIODbHC7GYjiopm4_-3ng2uj2QZhtoP9rnemLf3tu7rBMZ4HLVfJuyRGWOdZRhu/s1600/P1018084.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1197" data-original-width="1600" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwgbB1cONWIwfaAJNYkanKfETHYMW5EF8Gxdp6IEXiu8U3colERez2-3PNHZHx93_ZlW0tAU5mKUjVSKIODbHC7GYjiopm4_-3ng2uj2QZhtoP9rnemLf3tu7rBMZ4HLVfJuyRGWOdZRhu/s400/P1018084.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<i>Last month I travelled to Brighton to discuss the new Dark Mountain website and afterwards went with fellow ed Nick Hunt to meet some of our Brighton subscribers for a drink in The Foundry pub. It was a lively evening that brought its own return invitations: </i><i>Nigel Berman, founder of the School of the Wild,</i><i> asked me to run an Earth Dialogue event at the beginning of next year and</i><i> Clare Whistler </i><i>to create a burial installation (above in action!) for an art show she is co-curating at ONCA gallery </i><i><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> both of these acting as collaborative markers in the compass of the turning year.</i><br />
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<i>As I tackle the material for The Book (my winter task!) one thing has become clear: to answer the question DM's Issue 13 sets</i><i><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> –</span> 'What an Earth are we doing here? </i><i><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></i><i><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> we need to locate ourselves in time and space. We need to remember who we really are, where we really are.</i><br />
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<i>And sometimes, as this darkling decade advances, it seems only art and encounter can point the way.</i><br />
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SAMHAIN: Ancestors </h2>
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Proper Burial</h3>
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<i>Temescal, Chihuahua High Desert, Arizona</i></div>
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<i>Luna de los Muertos, November 2000</i></div>
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This is a memory of a ritual I took part in years ago. It took place on my friend Mimi's land on the borderlands between Arizona and Mexico. Her partner, the curandero Fransico Ozuna, built a temescal in the back of the garden, so we could hold a vigil through the night of the Moon of the Dead (the full moon that occurs around the Day of the Dead). One of its intents was to bury the ashes of a dead friend.</div>
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A temescal is an underground sweat lodge and Fransisco spent days creating the small chamber, shovelling red earth and constructing a roof and steps. That afternoon we had gathered different kinds of branches (palos muertos) from the nearby creek bed: hackberry, black walnut and agave stalks, as well as mesquite wood from the desert. Huge bunches of wild marigold he found on the way to the ranch were placed on top of the earth mounds <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> flor de muerto, traditionally offered on the Day of the Dead and which grows abundantly in Mexico after the late monsoon rains.</div>
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As modern people we don't observe the dead: we shunt them aside with awkward funerals, and this ancestral doorway of the year that was once celebrated in our own islands, has become a commercial children's party. But indigenous people (Fransisco was part-Apache, part-Yacqui ) know the dead are part of the Earth. Once mourned properly they can assist the living, rather than hinder them as forgotten shades.</div>
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Ingredients: </div>
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Shovel (for earth and stones)</div>
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Wood for fire (mesquite and other dead branches)</div>
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River stones (these are flat and smooth) </div>
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Branch of juniper (for brushing off sparks and ash from the stones <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> juniper is used world-wide as a banisher of negative energies)</div>
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Ash (to delineate the fire circle)</div>
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Osha root (for endurance). Other ceremonial herbs include sage, sweetgrass and copal</div>
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Creosote tea</div>
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Inside the small space is exciting. The desert night is cold but under the earth where we've taken the heated stones. naked under moon and starlight, the heat embraces you. The tea is bitter in your mouth, the osha root is sweet. We are silent and then sing and howl and chant until our bones shake. Afterwards we throw buckets of cold rainwater over each other and dance round the fire. Fransisco chants all night.</div>
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The ritual is there to burn out the dross you hold and cede it to the fire as fuel and then as ash to the ground. Ghosts can cling to you, the dead that have not been mourned. Some of these phantoms are yours and some are not. Some are parts of you and your lineage that need to die in order for the new to flourish. Proper burial means burying something at the correct depth, so that it can feed the living and not haunt the earth. That is a work. </div>
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Only the elements of the Earth can transform these invisible bonds in this way; only your self that is connected to this Earth can undergo that process and walk that path. Most would rather do the ritual without the suffering and endurance that it demands <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> which is worse than doing nothing. Because you feel you have done something meaningful, when you have not.</div>
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Seventeen years later in England we still grow those marigolds that burn like bright orange suns until the frosts come. Their name in Nauhatl is <i>cempoalxochitl</i>, and their vibrant colour represents the sun, which guides the dead on their way to the Underworld. The strong scent of the flowers attracts the spirits when they return to visit their families on this day, helping them to find their way. </div>
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The roots in this circle are from the angelica plant which is a substitute for osha or bear root, traditionally used in Native American sweat lodges to purify the air as well the body. A bear medicine from the mountains, the root assists dreaming and connection with the ancestors. </div>
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I remember this ceremony as if it were yesterday.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbsN6LhIJxhuY31Tn5QWZBuf5lNEgvL7uFnPMHMX-DgyhNb1-s7qLFrY8PusdenDHsRpaL5-lcP9jEciCVS9vDxp6uf5wj8zE-zmAZ4bgkgIkY3rlC9EcEh66h5PfDUbYADI3tAKqOcAh/s1600/thewitchofstkilda2017katietume.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1171" data-original-width="960" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjbsN6LhIJxhuY31Tn5QWZBuf5lNEgvL7uFnPMHMX-DgyhNb1-s7qLFrY8PusdenDHsRpaL5-lcP9jEciCVS9vDxp6uf5wj8zE-zmAZ4bgkgIkY3rlC9EcEh66h5PfDUbYADI3tAKqOcAh/s200/thewitchofstkilda2017katietume.jpg" width="163" /></a><b>Clare Whistler's installation is part of the exhibition <a href="https://onca.org.uk/whats-on/now/extinct-icons-ritual-burials/">Extinct Icons and Ritual Burials</a> that runs alongside the Rememberance of Lost Species Day at ONCA gallery, Brighton, 22nd Nov-10th Dec. </b><br />
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<b>Image: <i>The Witch of St Kilda</i> by Mother Eagle.</b><br />
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Imbolc: Emergence</h2>
<h3>
<b>Earth Dialogue</b></h3>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></b>
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">How can we connect and communicate with the non-human world, how can we feel at home in the wild places, on Earth? </span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></b>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglr4HfQkLhOsc52QNjhVzAuchtgX-tg4cRH8clLtb1n-IP8gERhbeW-IKhMCX0gQAP4aV-LK3rcVgLij7CJca-sJztzSyn40WrZl-jUYK6TVYEvBE_lWsjtNdgU_YFunc8N_Ndv3M_h7ha/s1600/P2210008.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEglr4HfQkLhOsc52QNjhVzAuchtgX-tg4cRH8clLtb1n-IP8gERhbeW-IKhMCX0gQAP4aV-LK3rcVgLij7CJca-sJztzSyn40WrZl-jUYK6TVYEvBE_lWsjtNdgU_YFunc8N_Ndv3M_h7ha/s400/P2210008.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Earth Dialogues are essentially communications between the natural world and your own physical intelligence.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />Part discussion, part encounter, part perception exercise, an Earth Dialogue is an opportunity to engage, individually and as a group, with a wild place - the Downs, at a certain time of year, the time of emergence, sometimes known as Imbolc</span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;"> –</span> as well as the challenging times we are living in. It enables you to shift your attention away from a busy mindset and sense of isolation, and instead behold the planet as a key participant.<br /><br />An Earth Dialogue is a way of experiencing the Earth not as ‘landscape’ or ‘the environment’ but as a meeting place of many elements, in which human beings form one particular strand. Its core act is learning how to swiftly tune into and physically connect with a place and all its inhabitants </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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</xml><![endif]--></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> plants, creatures, wind, stones. It involves sharing your experience afterwards, using the tools of listening, speaking, holding space, keeping time and remembering; and finally, turning those insights into images or words and creating a collaborative 'dreaming map' of the day.<br /><br />The day will start inside by the fire with introductions and instructions for making contact with the land, followed by an hour of solo time outside. You will then return to the fireside to discuss your encounters and together we'll create a shared map. Working as a group allows us to makes more sense of the land we live in together and strengthens our connections, as well as our presence, within it.<br /><br />The Earth Dialogue is one of a set of practices developed over a decade that explore the territory of dreams, myths, places and plants. It has been shared with people in many locations: up a mountain in California, around a loch on Rannoch Moor, in the Calder Valley in England, in the depths of a winter forest in Sweden.<br /><br />Once learned it can be practised anywhere with anyone. All you need is time.<br /><br />Part of this session will be outside, so bring warm clothes and something to sit on in case of wet ground. And a winter picnic lunch to share afterwards!</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA5vF2gHGTQchM_At9EhqwaN7rJADkHb47M5DgGrerHIekVY4UqgwnYuE_GKjFJ9F41UXDDflBtMFqJ_kO1Plyr5qDmSpWUBQQvsUhiRa1ffilgXrEVhv-YBwGcUOq9mRJfwNS2vQ9gnHw/s1600/Charlotte+portrait+%255Bapples%255D+2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1208" data-original-width="1206" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiA5vF2gHGTQchM_At9EhqwaN7rJADkHb47M5DgGrerHIekVY4UqgwnYuE_GKjFJ9F41UXDDflBtMFqJ_kO1Plyr5qDmSpWUBQQvsUhiRa1ffilgXrEVhv-YBwGcUOq9mRJfwNS2vQ9gnHw/s200/Charlotte+portrait+%255Bapples%255D+2.jpg" width="199" /></a></div>
<b>The School of the Wild runs outdoor classes in the woods and wild spaces of Brighton and Sussex, 'to pull you out of the city and reconnect with the land'. </b><b> Earth Dialogue will be taking place at Saddlescombe Farm on Sunday 4th February 2018, 10am to 2pm. All details can be found on<a href="http://www.schoolofthewild.com/earth-dialogue.html"> School of the Wild website.</a></b><br />
<br />
<i>Images: snowdrop woods, Dunwich cliffs, Suffolk,; by feral apple tree, Thorpeness dunes, Suffolk (see last chapter in Roger Deakin's </i>Wild Wood<i>). Photos: Mark Watson</i></div>
</div>
Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-1777782941673285822017-09-15T13:23:00.002+01:002018-11-04T09:46:37.474+00:00Under the Volcano<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizAgmzJVfztYXsyLA_4rFBKNzG6z4TpLXwXPW2HzjVkHA0s_dvqssDfy5M20g63jxaLw1Eu7rTiyByRrQV1yoojTCJTAn7clUigHAFJBVn4jZaDDR3eX9PC71wXDpZlsDXo5yfy75RKwYQ/s1600/WOL+1+-Dougald+COVER+.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1067" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizAgmzJVfztYXsyLA_4rFBKNzG6z4TpLXwXPW2HzjVkHA0s_dvqssDfy5M20g63jxaLw1Eu7rTiyByRrQV1yoojTCJTAn7clUigHAFJBVn4jZaDDR3eX9PC71wXDpZlsDXo5yfy75RKwYQ/s320/WOL+1+-Dougald+COVER+.jpg" width="213" /></a><i>Last week the new Dark Mountain collection</i>, <span style="color: black;">Walking on Lava - Selected Works for Uncivilised Times</span><i><span style="color: black;"> was published. We held a great launch at Juju's Bar at the Old Truman's Brewery, Brick Lane where I put on my not-quite-famous red coat and read from </span></i><span style="color: black;">The Seven Coats,</span><i><span style="color: black;"> alongside five contributors and fellow editors, Nick and Dougald. This is <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/charlotte-du-cann/under-volcano">a piece I wrote for openDemocracy</a> to introduce the book and the project.</span></i>
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<span style="font-size: small;">
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">On a mountain in Wales in the teeming rain, we sit
in a yurt packed with people, the five of us, on hay bales, dressed in black
suits and bowler hats. One of us has a pack of cards up his sleeve, another an
African folktale, another a guitar and a song by Nick Drake from the 1970s. I
have oak leaves in my hatband to signify an instruction circa 600 BC from the
Sibyl who once guarded the door to the Underworld in the Campi Flegrei
outside Naples. A link to the pre-patriarchal ‘uncivilised’ world, she guides a
lineage of poets to the territory under the volcano where all deep
transformations take place: Virgil, Dante, T.S, Eliot, Mary Shelley, Sylvia
Plath. Denied immortal youth by the autocratic god Apollo, her desiccated body kept
in a jar, only her voice is still left for us to follow.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Dougie stands up and invites the audience to take
part in a demonstration of two figures from the ancient world: one is Chronos,
the inexorable march of linear time; the other a young man with a lock of hair
over his forehead, who intervenes and interrupts him. His name is Kairos, and
sometimes ‘Possibility’.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">We’re giving a performance called ‘Testaments of
Deep Time’ to introduce the work of The Dark Mountain Project - itself an
intervention into the linear narrative of ecological and social calamity
As the rational world attempts to control the dominant narrative against
its Hadean consequences, cracks have begun to appear. Through those cracks,
archaic, indigenous knowledge, hidden for safekeeping against Roman and other
empires, slips through; fleeting glimpses of another future reveals itself.
Some of this is stored in the literary project we have all stumbled upon in
similar ways, in tents on mountains, around fires, in the inner <i>caldera</i> of
ourselves.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">This encounter, we know, is what changes
everything.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">----</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><i><span style="color: black;">Walking on Lava</span></i><span style="color: black;"> takes its title from<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><a href="http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/"><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif";">the manifesto</span></a></span></span></span><span style="color: black;"> which spearheaded the Dark Mountain Project in 2009. Written to
challenge the contemporary lack of response by culture makers to ecological
overshoot in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it was called simply <i>Uncivilisation.</i> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Many people picked up this gauntlet recognising it,
not as a challenge to a duel, but an invitation to explore a territory yet
unmapped. It has led to collaborations with writers, musicians and artists,
which, alongside the books and weekly blogs, has generated five festivals, a
year-long theatre workshop in Sweden, teaching encounters in the mountains of
Spain and moors of the West Country, performances built around the celebrations
of the solar year by the river Thames and the ancestral wilderness of Scotland,
as well as this kind of curated space in Wales, where the 24/7 broadcast of
progress can be switched off and other voices apart from the mainstream can be
heard.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Of course, grassroots Earth-defending organisations
and progressive movements can claim these alternative platforms also, but what
singles out Dark Mountain, what can grab people’s attention in a rain-soaked
yurt, is that it is 1) a <i>creative</i> response to prevailing crises and 2)
lacks an evangelical agenda to fix them. The maniesto can act as a frame, but
there is no drive to act in the space that frame creates. There is no pressure
to shut down power stations or convince your neighbour to stop flying, or your
community to reduce its carbon emissions. In other words, it provides a space
that has space and time in it, the opportunity to look at things differently,
and for other slower realisations to occur - for interactions, connections,
deep thought, as reader, listener or contributor.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">‘Are you against environmental activism?’ I was
asked recently by a television researcher. ‘No,’ I said ‘We’re not against
anything. It’s a conversation not an argument. We’re a creative network.’</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span><span style="color: black;">If this manifesto has travelled further than we
imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in
a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make
sense of our own experience it seems that we put words to a feeling that others
shared... a feeling that there is no way through the mess we find ourselves
that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, and being honest about the scale of
the unravelling that is under way, and the uncertainty as to where it will end.
A feeling that it is time to look down. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"></span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">(Dougald Hine from the Introduction to the 2014
edition of <i>Uncivilisation</i>).</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">This rallying point, the agreement to look down, to
acknowledge we sit on a crater’s edge rather than a firm foundation, creates
not only a different literature, but a very different feeling towards that
literature and those who write it. If there is one shared response to the
contacts made by people towards the Project it is the sense of relief and
comradeship in a world where a possible eruption to the status quo is
manifestly denied.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">However there is no mantra or belief system to take
refuge in here. Dark Mountain is a collective work-in-progress, initiated by
‘recovering journalists’, disillusioned by the green movement and its mice-like
approaches toward change. It doesn’t offer a road map for a sustainable future.
It can offer you a place by the fire, an opportunity to dig beneath the
distracting surface of industrial late capitalism, to produce work that asks
the question: how can we reclaim the voice and body of ourselves, suppressed by civilisation for millennia? The deadline is never far away.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">The fact is we have all taken the red pill, we all
know the boat is leaking and the captain lied. We know the stats about climate
change and acidified oceans and decapitated mountains. The news that the
numbers of kittiwakes on St Kilda have plummeted or the ancient trees of
Sheffield have been felled pains us. We don’t numb out that pain, nor do we
indulge it, in the see-saw of hope and despair.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">We know the Earth is not an
abstract concept of environment or ‘nature’ and requires a very different
relationship, one that wrests the material of life out of the hands of the
‘quants’ and economists and gives it due respect. The question we face is
always: what do you do when you know, when you allow yourself to see and feel
what is shut out by that broadcast? Because you can’t keep writing conventional
love stories and detective novels, or hoping Hollywood will get in touch once
you know.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">What kind of literature and art does this awareness
produce? A diverse body of work that does not fit neatly into a
monocultural, corporate bookshelf or gallery wall. Inspired by the inhumanist
poetry of Robinson Jeffers, its voices do not come out of a narcissistic and
alienated highbrow culture, discussed by the chattering classes of Boston or
London, but from a library of stones, from the desert and forest hermitage,
from conversations around convivial fires.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">The space is existentialist, ringed
as it is by urgent questions about what kind of human being can be so numb, so
dumb in the face of catastrophe; its tone elegiac, rather than trimphant. In
many ways it returns the artist and writer to their original function, as the
people who push the edge and keep the door of possibility open. People who
embody and stand by their words, for whom those fiery brimstone fields are
home.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">It's in this spirit that we have created </span><span style="color: black;">this collection is drawn from the first ten
hardback journal as a showcase introduction to the Project. Following their shape it is
made of work of contrasting voices and genres – poetry, flash fiction, essays,
artworks, photography, interviews – and structured around the manifesto’s,</span><span style="color: black;">‘<a href="http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/">Eight Principles of
Uncivilisation</a>.’</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Here in these pages is Robert Leaver walking along
Broadway in New York on his hands and knees; here is Christos Galanis shooting
a thrift store copy of the <i>Iliad </i>in the New Mexico desert; here is Emily
Laurens sweeping the brown sands of the Welsh peninsula in honour of the
disappeared passenger pigeon and the millions of species now going extinct.
Testimony, encounter, protest art and praise song of a different kind.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">I imagine the people I have seen on Broadway, and
maybe the world over, feeling a weight on their backs, in their hearts and
souls. Maybe this weight is the burden on modern life, the burden on being
conscious in a world gone mad. Crawling seemed to be a way to maybe show
compassion or solidarity, to make a metaphor of this collective burden we all
share. Instead of crawling I could have curled up in a foetal position in
perfectly chosen locations. But this crawl was never about surrendering. I went
down and kept moving, kept pressing on as so many humans are doing every day.
The idea has always been to keep on, to get through this journey, to make it
home safe and sound. </span></span></div>
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<blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;"><i>(</i>Robert Leaver<i> – Crawling Home)</i>.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"> </span></span></div>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">What happens when you get bitten by a squirrel, or
when you return to your homeland now crawling with bulldozers and fracking
trucks? When the story you were told by your teachers and parents is broken,
when the Earth makes contact with you, you may stumble upon art with a
different kind of attention: a feral stew of roots and road killed pheasant in
the highlands of Scotland, a dreaming woman carrying a horse in her womb in
Cornwall, a meditation on graphite in the winter-wet Cumbrian hills.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">In this collection, we invite you to a few
places the Project has visited in these last eight years, to encounter some of
the material that has fleshed out the principles on which the book is based: to
whisk you in your imaginations to the mountains of Bolivia, to the tribal areas
of India, to the coast of Greenland, to walk you through the<i> Mahabharata</i>,
through a history of the future, to 18<sup>th</sup> century England, to
medieval Florence to the Younger Dryas.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black;">Kairos, daemon of opportunity, had a shaved head,
meaning that you had to grasp the opportunity that faced you, for once the light-footed
one had disappeared the chance to see in all-at-once-time had gone also. In the
long count of civilisations, stretching from the early city-states of Sumer
towards the modern global metropolises, there are only so many opportunities to
sense the volcano that rumbles beneath us. Rarely do we find the way to the
cave where the Sibyl sits, or pay heed to those who struggle to return from the
darkness of the Stygian lake.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";">We live, as Marshall McLuhan once noted, in a
third world war of narratives, of competing controlled ways of perceiving the
world – all of them hostile to people and planet. In the quiet, in the depths,
in the wild places, in the struggle of our hearts, those who always kept a true
link to the wider, wilder world, writers and artists, are forging another
story. It is our hope and our intention in these pages to show how some of that
new collective tale unfolds itself.<b><i><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif";"> </span></i></b></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif";"><a href="http://shop.dark-mountain.net/"><b><i><span style="color: #1155cc; font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif";">Walking
on Lava – Selected Works for Uncivilised Times</span></i></b></a></span></span></span><b><i><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></b><b><span style="color: black;">(Chelsea Green)<i> </i>has been edited by Charlotte Du Cann, Dougald
Hine, Nick Hunt and Paul Kingsnorth. www.dark-mountain.net</span></b></span></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span><br />
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="font-size: small;">Images: C</span>over of </i>Walking on Lava<i>. ‘Where from? Where to?’ Mount Patterson from
the Wakupit Range, Alberta, Canada by Garrett Hupe; <span style="font-size: small;">Extinction
Cabinet’ by Richard Kahn and Nicholas Selesnick from ‘Truppe Fledermaus: 100
Stories from a Drowned World’; </span><span style="font-size: small;">writer and artist
Robert Leaver in his performance ‘Crawling Home’ in New York. Photo by Larrey
Fessenden. </span></i></div>
<span style="font-size: small;">
</span>Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-77198400037889329212017-07-19T14:58:00.006+01:002021-03-24T09:53:09.513+00:00Divesting for Beginners<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This summer I have taken some time 'off' to focus on two writing projects. One is a book about the mythos of return in times of collapse. The other is a performance/ presentation called 'Divesting for Beginners'. Based on a story I wrote for Dark Mountain called <a href="http://charlotteducann.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-seven-coats.html">The Seven Coats</a>, it is having its first showing at the <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seven-coats-divesting-for-beginners-tickets-36864153676"><b>Festival of the Dark in Reading on 7th September.</b></a><br />
<br />
<i> </i>The Festival is set
around the solar stations of the annual growing cycle during 2017. At the Spring Equinox, I took part in an ensemble performance called <a href="http://dark-mountain.net/blog/a-part-of-its-breathing/">The Night Breathes Us In</a> as the Cailleach-as-Heron in among the reeds of the river Thames. As we head up to the Autumn Equinox, I'll be in a different guise: among the mythical reeds of the Tigris and the Euphrates, celebrating a key moment in the ancient world, as the year goes
into 'fall' and tips towards the dark.<br />
<br />
Here's the central question of the piece:<i> what connects a 4000-year-old myth and the modern fossil fuel industry?</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
One answer would be <i>place</i>: the country now known as Iraq, once ancient Sumer, birthplace of the world's first Fertile Crescent civilisation. Another would be<i> dimension</i>: both these stories happen underground. The myth follows the descent of Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth, as she steps into the <i>kur</i>, the Underworld, in search of her sister Erishkigel; the fossil fuel is crude oil, that bubbles up from beneath the desert floor and now runs in (mostly invisible) pipelines across the world; the power that fuels every aspect of modern life and is a principle driver of climate change and all the Hadean crises it brings in its wake. <br />
<br />
The piece follows Inanna as she goes through the seven gates of the 'Great Below'; and also the track as I begin my own 'divestment', the shedding of a high consumerist culture. At each gate we have to leave an aspect of our upperworld power behind. It's a fairytale turned upside down, a widdershins Cinderella story.<br />
<br />
But it is also a physical and imaginative encounter with the planet and the transformative forces that Inanna forgoes her Upperworld privilege and authority to secure. I forgo my place in a city-based world to discover a relationship with the Earth, and with a self that has been suffocated for years, and is now waiting in the dark with the clock ticking. From this position the only way open is to follow Inanna's path and divest from those destructive powers. How do we do that as ordinary people, in our everyday lives, in our actions, in our hearts, as individuals and together? <br />
<i><br /></i>
Here's another question:<i> how do we get off the hook? What kind of people do we need to become for the future to happen?</i><br />
<br />
<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
Powerdown</h2>
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<br />
For a long time now I've been trying to find a creative form that could encapsulate the urgent, extraordinary task of powerdown. When I joined the Transition movement with my fellow performer Mark Watson in 2008, our key wake up moment happened watching a film about climate change; when we realised - along with everyone else in the room - that everything that powers our culture is normally kept hidden from sight. Known as the 'End of Suburbia moment' (after the documentary), it was a consciousness-breaking second in which you saw that oil was in everything: from your toothbrush to the clothes you wore, from the food you ate to every trip you took in the car, the train, the plane. <br />
<br />
For many of us however the task of enabling our communities to engage in 'Energy Descent' proved overwhelming. Not only did we lack the heft required to relocalise our local economies, but also the ability to dismantle the belief systems that prevent people perceiving the 'wicked problem' we are in, let alone doing anything about it.<br />
<br />
What endured was held in the singular idea of <i>powerdown</i> - the reliquishment of our energy-dependant lifestyle. Divestment is usually understood in the shape of <a href="http://charlotteducann.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/danielle-paffard-on-radicalistion.html">climate activist</a> campaigns that pressure institutions - trades
unions, universities, local councils - to take their financial
investments out of Big Oil and put them into alternative ventures. But this is not the only kind of divestment that can change the culture we live in. In the winter of 2009/10 Mark and I were part of a group in Norwich who cut their annual carbon footprint by half (to four tonnes) and logged the radical effects on every aspect of our lives. It changed everything we did. We did not look back.<br />
<br />
When Mika Minio-Paluello, who co-wrote <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1502-the-oil-road">The Oil Road</a>, began the 11-year odyssey along the trans-European pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the city of London, she said she knew was in the long game. People in the divestment business don't give up easily. It's because they see something is awry and won't stop until it gets back into alignment. Innna doesn't stop until she goes through the seventh gate. Even though our original Transition initiatives fell apart, the movers and shakers within them carried on: protesting against the old, building the new. I never turned the central heating back on or went to supermarkets again. We weren't going to unsee what we had seen.<br />
<br />
If you look at the nature of indigenous dissent around oil, from the forest lawyers of Ecuador to the 'water protectors' of North Dakota, you see people who have been in the long game for a very long time. They live on the wrecking edge of our civilisation, and do not benefit from its riches. Yet, because their allegiance is to the Earth, rather than a conquistador Empire, their actions are backed not only by their culture but also by the planet itself. These kinds of connection, these roots, are something we, as modern city people, have had to forge for ourselves.<br />
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<h2>
</h2>
<h2>
Entering the kur</h2>
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<i>The Seven Coats</i> starts on the day when I stop being a community activist and find myself unable to write the Transition story anymore. When I realise we cannot 'reset' our civilisation because its shiny stories of ascent are holding us in their spell. No matter how many articles I might write about the new narrative, how I might pile them up with scary data or joyful community projects, something was trapping us in an unkind grip. Something wasn't getting through. <br />
<br />
<i>Divesting for Beginners</i> takes the form of a performance, or set of instructions, as the actions of powerdown are more a series of moves, of changes of heart and direction, than a linear story. The piece is a voyage through practices that Mark and I developed in order to communicate with the Earth, ourselves and with others. It follows our tracks from the New Mexico desert to the East Anglian waterlands, engaging in what Jeremy Rifkin in <i>The Empathic Civilisation</i> called the <i>dramaturgical</i>, changing roles and positions in order to fully understand life. It's a short performance with interventions (and tea!) to spark a discussion with the listeners of this tale about how we can collectively curb our appetites and transform an extractive culture.<br />
<br />
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<br />
Because one thing is clear: something has to happen inside at a deep inner level to make any kind of effective change on the outside. These existential wake up moments once came at the mysteries or initiations, which provided a core encounter with the forces of life. They happened in caves and kivas, in the dark, at key times of the year, like the Eleusinian Mysteries at this equinox, and often at adolescence.<br />
<br />
This descent however is for the grown-ups. Inanna is no ingenue: she is both lover and mother, who in her youth outwitted the god of Wisdom and procured the <i>Me</i> (attributes of civilisation) she wears at the outset of the tale. She knows however that some part of her essence is missing, some depth, some meaning without which she is not whole within herself, or for her people. Inanna goes to find that part buried beneath the walls of the new civilisation of Sumer. She can hear her dark sister bellowing, and knows somehow she is responsible for her wrath and suffering. When Inanna finds her, Erishkigel puts her bright sister's naked body on a hook.<br />
<br />
One of the reasons we find it hard to face the facts about collapse and climate change is because there are so few imaginary or real life stories about powerdown. There are plenty of success-through-adversity stories, hero stories, princess stories. You could say there is success in the Inanna story, as she is rescued by her back-up team and is restored to the Upperworld. But it is her downward path that grabs us now as we hear sounds of lamentation all around us for which we are accountable. Because here is a figure who deliberately divests herself of power, not knowing either the territory she enters, or the outcome of her passage. And somewhere in the bones of ourselves we know this is a key to our future: we don't know the outcome of the play. Or whether back up will arrive. We go in anyway. Something is pulling us. It's time.<br />
<i><b><br /></b>
</i><b><i>Divesting for Beginners, a powerdown story</i> will take place on 7th September at St Bart's Theatre, Reading as part of<a href="http://dazzle.absence-presence.co.uk/"> Dazzle, </a>an immersive micro-festival exploring community, imagination and ideas. Tickets available<a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/seven-coats-divesting-for-beginners-tickets-36864153676"> here.</a></b><br />
<br />
<i>Images: Wearing the red coat in the blackthorn tunnel (photo: Mark Watson); construction of the Central European Oil pipeline from Genoa to Ingolstadt, 1961; Bearers from </i>The Night Breathes Us In<i> at Reading station, Spring Equinox (photo: </i><i><i>Georgia Wingfield-Hayes)</i>; Mark shaking up the elements in 'Raw and Wild' demonstation, Bungay (photo: Josiah Meldrum).</i><b><br /></b><br />
<br />Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6057554285155160837.post-71382060952591093582017-05-19T11:06:00.001+01:002018-11-04T09:47:51.986+00:00The Uneasy Chair<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<![endif]--><span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> Annie Dillard <i>The Writing Life</i> </blockquote>
<br />
The sea glitters like a mirror, the hedgerows are bursting into flower, the garden is running wild and it's time to get out there... but first a dispatch from the Lane!<br />
<br />
Lately I've had my head down devising new creative works (book and performance) and working at the Dark Mountain depot, with a brief appearance as a heron and deep time instructor in Reading alongside my friend and co-curator Dougie Strang and his Spring Equinox ensemble. Somewhere along the way, probably with a notebook on the island of Portland (see above) I got the idea about a new teaching practice called The Uneasy Chair. Well, I say it's new but in fact I've been talking about it for a long time now. It's underpinned two Arvon courses I've run with Lucy Neal on writing collaboratively in difficult times, as well as grassroots media skill-share. You could say my whole life has been about sitting, or avoiding sitting, on this chair <span style="font-family: "calibri" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 11.0pt;">–</span> which is the paradox position all writers have to put themselves in in order to file good copy. You don't want to sit there of course, but you don't get the story if you don't.<br />
<br />
Mostly you are so busy negotiating the chair you forget the deal you made when you fist made that move. Writers don't learn to write at school or university. They teach themselves from the words of dead writers who went before them. Writers devour books when they are young, and learn their trade 'on the job'. I learned to write as a young journalist with the clock ticking behind me. I realised a deadline and a word count are the best guidelines you can hope for in a topsy-turvy life and that sometimes the most unlikely people will pass you an unforgettable tip out of the blue.<br />
<br />
And then one day you find yourself doing the same, editing pencil in hand, recommending rigour as the way to go. Or you find yourself, as I do now, with a lot of editorial experience and tricks up your sleeve, but you're no longer in that features dept. You haven't been for decades in fact, and the culture of blogging has left you metaphorically marooned in a submarine from a Tarkovsky movie, cut off from real time encounters and exchange which are the stuff of all good non-fiction work, your own voiceover echoing off the metal walls.<br />
<br />
The Uneasy Chair is not really about teaching people to be professional writers, which god knows can be a tough and soulless way to earn your living in these days of spin and self-marketing. It is about writing as an existential practice, as a way of perceiving the world and your place in it, about putting your feet on the Earth and a crooked thing straight, about collaboration and time and imagination, and many other things besides.<br />
<br />
Oh, and not forgetting the deal you make as a creator, which has everything to do with giving back and not much to do with having a quiet life. <br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5wBprtgjoFPWZZst2YiVrKkAvDOyrp1ffyT5ffa9_EKSeXFsKPsfDwxLfXMOVrdw9KG0K7wY1QaZrmVx0D0pN53p2Swq2I1eeOX000MLBM4dVxr2zUAOHZtjCDH67hoHT-bU3OwS_qSIL/s1600/P3240022.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg5wBprtgjoFPWZZst2YiVrKkAvDOyrp1ffyT5ffa9_EKSeXFsKPsfDwxLfXMOVrdw9KG0K7wY1QaZrmVx0D0pN53p2Swq2I1eeOX000MLBM4dVxr2zUAOHZtjCDH67hoHT-bU3OwS_qSIL/s400/P3240022.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Bearers rehearsing The Night Breathes Us In, Reading, Spring Equinox</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Now as the summer advances I'm keeping this practice in mind as I head out to a couple of events you might like to know about. The first one is at <a href="http://www.fireinthemountain.co.uk/">The Fire in the Mountain festival</a> in Wales with fellow Mountaineers (Dougie, Steve, Nick and Ava) where we are holding two experimental sessions within the Dark Mountain frame: 'Cafe Apocalypse - The Conversation at the End of the World' where we will discuss the latest anthology and what<span style="font-size: small;"> happens when we stop pretending everything is fine and 'Testements of Deep Time<span class="x_x_gmail-m_6241121435564051147gmail-im"><span class="x_x_gmail-im">', a</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="x_x_gmail-m_6241121435564051147gmail-im"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> collaborative workshop exploring the ‘deep time’ underlying our moment-to-moment existence in industrial civilisation (with performance, song, storytelling and more).</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
The second is a<a href="http://thegrangenorfolk.org.uk/index.php/courses-and-retreats/events/39-reimagining-the-future-a-writing-for-life-exploration"> weekend class in writing (creative non-fiction) and editing</a>, organised by my old friend from Transition days, the musician and permaculturist Carol Hunter. She was keen to set up a practical intensive that was affordable and based in our heartland of East Anglia. So here is the low-down.<br />
<br />
<h3>
<b>Reimagining the Future: A Writing-for-Life exploration</b></h3>
<br />
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxxo4Glmb1EvTt3UoYcWtafDk8UckECwl5L2grfFyp8fbNKPad5AqEJL3OXAIWIamQNpCtQDD52lmv5XG9tThEUSlMTHMs50Yc2qFeeSNNeYMAzmECBJM7Q7J_4HoEsimRdpPEJxm3GjS/s1600/P1040897+square.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbxxo4Glmb1EvTt3UoYcWtafDk8UckECwl5L2grfFyp8fbNKPad5AqEJL3OXAIWIamQNpCtQDD52lmv5XG9tThEUSlMTHMs50Yc2qFeeSNNeYMAzmECBJM7Q7J_4HoEsimRdpPEJxm3GjS/s200/P1040897+square.jpg" width="200" /></a>Do our words matter? Can the act of writing redirect the course of our
lives? By activating our imaginations and speaking out, can we change
the cultural stories and myths by which we live, individually and
collectively?<br />
<br />
<div class="x_event_summary_row">
This creative non-fiction weekend
course is for all those looking to discover some key tools for
navigating rocky times, from making meaning and broadening our<span style="color: black;"></span><span style="color: red;"><span style="color: black;"></span><span style="color: black;"></span></span><span style="color: black;"> </span>collaboration skills, to laying down some tracks to restore the world and co-create a different kind of future. </div>
<br />
During the course of the weekend we will explore how to listen to
different voices (human and non-human), how to work with real life material, how to find our own 'medicine story', and how to sustain a
writing practice in times of urgency. The weekend will include writing 'tech share' and exercises, myth telling and story-sharing, and combine
group work around the fire, by the river and under trees and stars, with
time for individual contemplation and writing.<br />
<br />
Suitable for all writers who want to develop their craft,
changemakers, artists, activists, designers and community workers. Bring
your brilliance and your swimming costume!<br />
<div>
<br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Venue: <a href="http://thegrangenorfolk.org.uk/index.php/courses-and-retreats/events/39-reimagining-the-future-a-writing-for-life-exploration">The Grange, Gt Cressingham, Norfolk IP25 6NL </a></b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Time: Friday 21st July 5pm to Sunday 23rd July 4pm</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cost: £150, including organic vegetarian food and
accommodation. </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Booking: to register email </b></span><b><span id="cloak63376" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="mailto:ben@thegrangenorfolk.org.uk">ben@thegrangenorfolk.org.uk</a></span></b><br />
<b><span style="font-size: x-small;">Further info: Carol Hunter <span id="cloak13011"><a href="mailto:unpavingparadise@outlook.com">unpavingparadise@outlook.com</a></span>. </span></b> <br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>
</b></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8W-P4qvgIjMbCsSAwDMbl9qua43Uq53LDJHbd6ueIkmBffkIamVLuCJT4kOFM_fNuLt5EyyCYzs9Sym8X8bud4Q7XgzJkaca0Kb1mYj_Nn-xugzOXqdzV5WLPmKWwoI-KUL7FXvfr7to3/s1600/WalkingonLava_frontcover%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8W-P4qvgIjMbCsSAwDMbl9qua43Uq53LDJHbd6ueIkmBffkIamVLuCJT4kOFM_fNuLt5EyyCYzs9Sym8X8bud4Q7XgzJkaca0Kb1mYj_Nn-xugzOXqdzV5WLPmKWwoI-KUL7FXvfr7to3/s320/WalkingonLava_frontcover%25281%2529.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
<i>Meanwhile here is the front cover of a paperback anthology I've been co-editing for US publishers Chelsea Green with the Dark Mountain editorial crew (Nick, Dougald and Paul). </i><a href="https://www.chelseagreen.com/transition-homesteading-community-resilience/walking-on-lava">Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times </a><i> is a potent mix of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artworks from ten of the Dark Mountain issues,</i><i> The collection will be available from mid-August.</i><br />
<br />Charlotte Du Cannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07216522431894543642noreply@blogger.com1