The Red Thread

 A piece written for the new Dark Mountain Issue 10 on Uncivilised Poetics about Ariadne and her Labyrinth and how poetry can lead us out of history into deep time.

‘Women are imprisoned in the image masculine society has imposed on them; therefore if they attempt a free choice it must be a kind of gaolbreak.’ 

– Octavio Paz (Labyrinth of Solitude) 

1962, London, England. Give me my scallop-shell of quiet, / My staff of faith to walk upon, / My scrip of joy   

‘Tell us about Raleigh!’ we plead. We are in a history class, heathens all, in a dancing school in Knightsbridge. Lady Lisle takes off her pale blue glasses and flicks them in an agitated manner. She takes us to the Tower where the poet and New World adventurer is imprisoned for treason and recites the poem he writes before his execution. A tear falls down her wrinkled cheek. 

Tell me the line of poetry you first remember and I will tell you about destiny. 

THE THEME 

The story of the Minotaur you know. Probably. Half-man, half-beast, he is kept in the centre of the Cretan Labyrinth, a prison system so complex it has even trapped its architect, Daedalus. No one who is sent into his Labyrinth gets out. The beast feeds on the flesh of young Athenians sent to him every seven years. Except for the hero Theseus, who has encountered the King of Crete’s daughter, Ariadne. She has given him a thread, so that once he has vanquished the bull-man, he can find his way out again.  

Ariadne will flee with Theseus to the island of Naxos and there the story ends. Usually. But in other versions it continues: Ariadne is abandoned by her lover on the shore, or her husband the half-god Dionysus reclaims her, or she hangs herself from a tree, or is killed by Artemis or Perseus, or is rescued from Hades by Dionysus, along with his mother Semele, or there are in fact two Ariadnes, one who dies and one who is immortal, and so on.  However you tell the story, Ariadne is a secondary player. She only knows the way out because she is the king’s daughter. The red thread was bequeathed to her by Daedalus. She waits for the hero to do his heroic task and then disappears from view, leaving confusion in her wake.

But this is not the original version, where Ariadne commands the Labyrinth which is not a prison, but a map, named after her butterfly-shaped axe the labrys. To find that map, you would have to ask a poet. Because Ariadne’s ur-story is not a story at all.  

This is a short piece about poetry and its ‘true function’, which the poet Robert Graves famously described as religious invocation of the Muse, and a warning to man 

‘ … that he must keep in harmony with the family of living creatures among which he was born, by obedience to the wishes of the lady of the house.’ 

It is about the function of modern human beings, caught in the web of time, who try to find their way back home on Earth, out of the labyrinthine mind of civilisation, and what this has most urgently to do with the work and lives of poets. It’s an instruction of sorts – though you might not read it that way. 

THE MISTRESS OF THE LABYRINTH 

She holds two snakes in her raised hands and wears a cat on her head like a bonnet. Discovered amongst the rubble at Knossos in 1904, the faience figurine was found in several pieces, and it was not clear whether the cat really belonged on her head. Still the Edwardian archaeologist placed it there instinctively, perhaps associating cats and female deities, as the well-catalogued civilisations along the Nile had shown him. He called this civilisation he unearthed ‘Minoan’ after Ariadne’s father, King Minos.

Alongside the murals of dancing women and acrobatic men, red bulls and blue dolphins, she displays an elegance and fluidity unlike any found in later classical times. Sir Arthur Watts called her the Snake Priestess and sometimes Snake Goddess, though the highly organised culture she embodied left no evidence of temples, male hierarchy or stamp of war. It remains mysterious, its system of writing undeciphered to this day.  

There is a fragment of a later script however that gives a clue: 

To the Mistress of the Labyrinth, honey 

This is a piece made of fragments. Of lines that pull you in different directions, flashes of memory and warning, threads poets leave behind to remind us that this world is not as it is made to appear. 

THE FALL 

When the world fell, the yoginis in the meditation chambers spoke to me in lines by Rilke and Rumi.

We shall not cease from exploration, they said.

When the world fell, the intellectuals in the libraries quoted lines to me by Blake and Brecht.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, they said.

When the world fell, I fell with it. I was without lines for a long time. And then out of nowhere I began to remember: 

My mother laughs. She comes bearing branches of hips and haws and a whiff of turpentine; parties follow in her wake, music and bright dresses

There was once a path through the woods, she says. 

My father sighs. He is writing into the night, stacking reams of legal papers, bound by pink ribbon, on his study floor: 

I never saw a man who looked 

 With such a wistful eye 

Upon that little tent of blue 

 Which prisoners call the sky 

‘Every time I pass through that prison gate, I shudder,’ he tells me.

My teacher weeps. She laments the death of the Elizabethan poet, even more than the death of Jesus.

I don’t trust those tears. I do not write Tread softly for you tread on my dreams on my rough book like my fellow pupils. I scorn romantics who worship queen and god and country, and love all dissenters and metaphysicians. The first poem I print with my own hands is in the shape of a butterfly:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

When you fall you don’t find a new story or drama to live by. There are no tales when you are already at the ending. You grasp the thread because the line glints in that moment of darkness, like a coil of copper wire. It cuts you but still you take hold of it. Because it is the only thing that makes sense, as the world cracks you open. The line was written from the place of cracking – from the mad house and the gulag, from the dying rooms.

Eyeless in Gaza.

Only poetry speaks from this metaphysical realm. Novels with their worldly characters and clever entertaining plots, plays with their tragic and comedic turns: none of these serve you. In times of falling you won’t remember those masterly passages that once gripped your attention. You can only a grab a line, and that line is no longer the literature that you once studied. It is not a comfort in a moment of self-pity or remorse.

It is something else. 

THE CROSSING PLACE 

1987, London, England. Tonight I can write the saddest lines. I am in your attic room under a mosquito net and the storm is rocking the capital. You are visiting a glamorous place, dressed in your black armour and war paint by Chanel. 

Outside the wind is lashing the plane trees and the floor is covered in their leaves. My face is wet with rain. I don’t know at this point that I will leave you and this city behind and never return. I don’t know that years from now you will walk into the sea and not come back.  

I have picked up a book by your bed but there is something hollow about these lines we used to read to each other. The poet will also put them away. I don’t know that yet.  

‘My poetry stopped dead like a ghost in the streets of human anguish and a rush of roots and blood surged up through it,’ he will write from war-torn Spain. ‘From then on, my road meets everyman’s road.’ 

1990, Palenque, Mexico. Bid farewell to her, to Alexandria who is leaving. / Above all, do not delude yourself, do not say that it was a dream  

One bright morning, I followed the path through the woods that led away from the temple, and a man emerged naked from a pool. He said: a queen swam here once and gave me a jar of honey. 

That night the forest came to our door and a jaguar lay down beside me. He watched an ancient civilisation rise and fall on the ceiling of our hotel room. I flew out on his eagle wings. I had to let everything go. There was nothing in the howling darkness that could take away the pain, or the poison that racked my body. I am going, he said, but I am always here. Remember that. I felt every bar that had shut down tight, pressed hard against my body, separating us. I realised I was trapped. Even my own name trapped me. 

You realise everything up to that point was a rehearsal. That the real task was not finding the path you longed for, but the way out of the prison, where the gaoler lives inside you, and everyone else you meet. 

1991, Antigua, Guatemala. Pero yo ya no soy yo / Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. 

I am in another white room, only this time the storm is crashing through me.  This time I am calling on it to do its ferocious work. Outside the world is coloured parrot green and pink. The volcanoes are snowy. The women laugh as they wash their clothes in the fountain. 

There is a crisis point. You could call it 'the Theseus moment'. You were on your way to the Minotaur with your companions, brave Athenians all. You meet someone unexpected who hands you a red thread. When you stumble, you realise that thread you now hold to steady you does not come from any story you know. 

There are no words to describe the feeling, as the forgotten files your education hid away, your culture hid away, stack up upon the cement floor. You cry out as you encounter this sunless place where your spirit has been locked up for aeons, where you have been kept in a small drawer, taken out occasionally to shine like a genie in a lamp. Where you pace like a creature in a trap, trying to find a way out. 

The crossing lasts for days in the bare room, as you name every unkind thing that binds you. You are not the same person when you emerge finally into the sunlight. Your history is broken. The people who kept you captive are no longer with you.  

You imagine that this is the end, when it is only the beginning. 

Love is not servitude. This is what I learned in these encounters. It is neither obeisance to a moon goddess, nor enthrallment to a cruel queen. I knew that at eight years old. And yet to fall under your spell and break it was the way I could escape my own sacrifice. You were terrifying and captivating. You made everyone matter. You exuded the archetypal power of the Muse that Graves once wrote about: magnetic, intoxicated, sea-foamed, desirous of worship by poets and the hip bones of kings. But this power devoured you. In the end you wrote you were defeated by the struggle to stay alive. I looked back across time and saw you. You were like a lioness in a cage, maddened by captivity. The sea was your only escape. 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines. But I am not going to. This is an instruction. This is not all there is. 

THE RETURN 

For a long time now I have wanted to write about the Nostoi, those who return to their homelands after the Trojan War. Return is not what you think it is, a glorious heroic odyssey full of wondrous islands, but the time when you know that we have all had our finest hour and we can no longer do to each other what spring does to the cherry trees. When the question becomes how to endure our fall as a people, how to keep our dignity, our sense of beauty, our capacity for intelligence and the strength and grace of our bodies, as the world crashes and the story we once believed in no longer makes sense. 

What everyone avoids is feeling how that endless siege crippled us and trapped us in these thoughts. The terror comes when you sense the bars and know you no longer carry a sword. When you face the beast you will have nothing, except the very thing he wishes to devour. 

If you hold fast this is the moment she appears in his blazing eye. Here she is with her laughter and her companions. Here they are in the alder grove, dancing in their beehive-shaped skirts, panels overlapping, with their bare feet on the earth. 

Welcome, she says, to my dancing floor. The hard walls of the Labyrinth vanish and in its place are lines that loop around in an intricate pattern. They are of all colours and intersect in ways you can feel but cannot articulate. There is a hum you cannot tell whether is on the inside of you or the outside of you, it burns like a slow fire through your chest, and the scent of a thousand small flowers… 

‘Focus,’ she says, ‘for this time is limited.’ 

‘Oh, you are a bee!’ I exclaim, ‘And the bull is a star...’ 

‘This is your task,’ she says. ‘Find your way back.’ 

Because I am with you in Rockland 

Because Beloved be the one who sits down 

Because Some people know what it is like to be called a cunt in front of their children 

Because You took away all the oceans and all the room 

Because Girls you are valuable, and you, Panther, you are valuable 

Because The darkness around us is deep 

THE MINOTAUR 

You think the Labyrinth is something you get free from, so you can live in the bright spaces. But that’s not how it works. The volcano of Thera erupted and a tidal wave destroyed Europe’s first civilisation, and it disappeared from view. Or so the archaeologists have told us. The Greek hero myths turned the great triple goddess of the matriarchal age into a foolish princess and started to straighten her looping songs and dances into linear, rational storylines. 

The Labyrinth hid Ariadne’s intricate dancing floor and her once-beloved bull became a child-eating monster. The patriarchal maze clung like a varroa mite on the back of a honeybee and infected the colonies of the Western world. Born configured still to dance and give honey, to love light and space and sea, we were confused by the dark place we now found ourselves in. Few of us remembered our way home. 

And yet some of us cannot but attempt otherwise. The thread was put into our hands at the start. 

The Minotaur waits in the Labyrinth, like Moloch, greedy for the flesh of young men and woman, sucking the minds and hearts of all who sacrifice their youth, their brilliance, their sacred groves, their own offspring. This place is powered by his appetite. 

How do I know this? I am my Mother’s daughter, a child of space and air, who loved to dance, to go for a picnic on a summer’s day. Who still goes for a picnic on a summer’s day, with the sound of the sea in the distance. But I am my Father’s daughter first, indentured, duty-bound, to live another kind of life. While my playmates listened to children’s stories, he instructed me: on how the Bastille was liberated, how to decipher a brief, how to look for the detail in everything and outwit everyone in the court, cleverly with words. 

At night I would hear him tap-tap-tapping into the small hours, fighting to keep a man or woman out of the prison he feared. Only writers know this kind of deal: you get to glimpse the paradise in everything and you get to feel the hell of everything. You work to bring back Ariadne’s dancing floor by deconstructing the Labyrinth. It is the deal that drives poets crazy on the top of mountains, and sometimes costs them their lives, their sanity and their liberty. 

For prose writers ‘poetic’ is an insult word. It means you are foolish and flowery and none of your arguments stand up in the witness box. But it is hard not to write about the beauty of the house. Even now I am trying to find a way to not get beautiful, not tell you about the colours of the garden; these roses that will become my mother’s hips in September, and the bees that cluster about the clover leys, the sound of the wren singing, the way the wind moves through the barley and wild grasses in late June. 

The poet loves beauty but is condemned to write about the Labyrinth and shake all who read his lines. Here he comes with his window of blue sky, with his words that break down the door, between the city and the forest, between politeness and reality. Here she is tapping a code that you work hard to decipher in your solitary cell, scraping a tunnel underneath your feet, leaving graffiti in her wake on the stony wall. 

Here they are with their access to realms you cannot see but sometimes sense, swinging between history and myth, between life and death, only listened to, like gods, in moments of fall and destruction. 

I am not a poet. I am condemned to write prose, urgent pleas to reverse your sentence. 

A Daedalus daughter, unwinged. 

2004, Aldeburgh, Suffolk. Times are bad. I take an oath of loyalty to the table / coated with white Formica. 

‘No one wants to know about the Wall, Charlotte,’ said Aharon Shabtai, as we stood balancing glasses of wine and plates of salad at the festival reception. That afternoon the Israeli poet had thrown down his poems mid-sentence, smashing the wall that separated him from the audience. He spoke about the wall that is being built to separate the Arabs and the Jews of his country. ‘You have to hear this!’ he cried. 

Everyone clapped politely: ‘How dreadful!’ they agreed, as they sat in their neatly pressed clothes, as the wind screamed past the church hall and over the bay, where 200 years ago one of the most anguished figures of English poetry pointed his fishing boat towards the horizon. 

I live in George Crabbe country now, a flat, salty place where I have learned to wear a shabby coat and live among the lowly and dispossessed, the small weeds crushed underfoot he once catalogued in his unfashionable heroic style. I know we can’t afford to be romantic anymore. To get out of the Labyrinth is our most urgent task. 

2016, Ipswich, Suffolk. Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; / Only an avenue, dark, nameless, without end 

There are soldiers everywhere on the platform, dressed in wool khaki. ‘What are you doing here?’ I ask one of them. The boy gazes into my eyes and something like terror and grief jolts through me. He hands me a card that reads: Rifleman R.G. Cole. London Regiment (Queen Victoria’s Rifles). 

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘you cannot speak!’ I don’t know it yet but this is a performance being acted out in railway stations all over Britain to mark the Battle of the Somme. It is a show, except it does not feel like it. 

In the carriage the ghost riflemen sit silently among the passengers. Opposite me the poet Luke Wright, famous for his rollicking political satire, looks up from his computer screen and watches them. 

A hundred years ago on this day 19,240 young men died in a war that is remembered as much for its poetry as for its bloody sacrifice. Thousands from the small villages of Suffolk boarded the trains to France and did not return. You can still feel their absence in the fields when you go walking. Loss is not a personal matter anymore. I have learned that too in these sandy waterlands, where time becomes unmoored. 

I look at the card in my hands and shudder: we are here, it says. 

This is an instruction. The way back is hard. It is populated by the dead, the ones you know and the ones you don’t, and you cannot be afraid of them. You cannot be afraid of the unconscious that craves to devour the heart and the light that lives inside you. Your journey liberates them, as much as it liberates you. 

Return does not mean back in time as you understand it, along the linear lines of story. It means we return to a place of feeling and spirit, untrammelled by war and hierarchy, even if it takes us aeons to get there. Poets hold the fragments of that place inside them, as they have always held the line, a long line that stretches back to a time where there were no fortresses or prisons, when the bull was not a beast. 

The Labyrinth traps us in history, and keeps us from the dancing floor. We have to remember that as Western people, as people born in captivity. We have to know we were not abandoned. 

Her threads are everywhere. 

With thanks: Sir Walter Raleigh, Robert Graves, Pablo Neruda, Federico García Lorca, C.P. Cavafy, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, George Herbert, John Milton, Allen Ginsberg, César Vallejo, Rita Ann Higgins, Osip Mandlestam, Stevie Smith, William Stafford, Aharon Shabtai, George Crabbe, Edward Thomas.

All images from Dark Mountain Issue 10:  Uncivilised Poetics cover by Nick Hayes; Mantle by Caroline Dear; Inside The Green Backyard (Opportunity Area) by Jessie Brennan; Limatour 1, Point Reyes Beach by Katie Eberle; Creatures Carrying Humans by Kate Wallters; Home by Lucy Rose Kerr. The mantle, made from dandelion stems and bog cotton, was inspired by the archeological site, High Pasture Cave or Uamh An Ard Achaidh on Skye. This site has a record of human use since the mesolithic, 5000BC, and it is where the body of an Iron Age woman was ceremonially buried. She was laid on a bier with a mass of willow flowers and small amounts of red campion, white lily and holly flowers.

Flight Path - On Reading David Fleming's 'Surviving the Future'

 Every civilisation has had its irrational but reassuring myth. Previous civilisations have used their culture to sing about it and tell stories about it. Ours has used its mathematics to prove it.

The man you might not know. And yet if you know anything about the Green Party, Trade Energy Quotas, the Transition Movement, New Economics Foundation or the Soil Association you would have met his ideas and his vision many times. His name is David Fleming and for thirty years he carried a large manuscript around with him, amending, adding, editing and re-editing, as each year progressed. This September, six years after his sudden death, it sees the light of day in the form of two books.

Shaun Chamberlin, a rigorous Boswell to this Dr Johnson of the future, has not only skilfuly shaped his immense dictionary into a finished form, but also forged a narrative introduction to it. Daunted by the prospect of reviewing the rather unlean Lean Logic, I took the slimmer companion volume, Surviving the Future - Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy on a train trip and then into my summer garden. This is a short response to this multi-layered, beautifully constructed treatise.

The future is a fraught place for those of us who have realised over the last decade we are boarded on the Titanic and heading for a mighty reality check. Some of us have thrown up our hands in horror and despair, some of us have heroically dug gardens, some of us have analysed fossil fuel graphs and turned off our central heating. Most of of us have looked at this wicked problem and tried to work out what on earth is needed now, not as individuals but as a people. One thing is for sure, at some point this all-powerful ship will founder and David Fleming's clear proposals for an alternative social organisation are welcome reading for all those whose eyes are trained on the lifeboats, rather than the dancing girls in the bar.

Slack and elegance

Surviving the Future is a linear pathway through Lean Logic's diverse and visionary eco-system. Where you might – and indeed are encouraged to – explore the larger work's interconnected range of entries, the small volume keeps you on the main track. Here I am on the 16:00 from Liverpool Street coming home, surrounded by shopping bags and folk staring at their mobile phones, listening to music, eating fast food, wrapped up in their own worlds, and it is hard to imagine that all this might shift into the scenarios David is describing in these pages. And yet it is compelling in ways you do not expect. Even though there are fascinating insights on the more familiar subjects of religion, myth and culture-making, the chapters that grab the attention are undoubtedly those on lean economics, specifically the seven points of protocol which pull in an entirely different direction to the conditions in which the globalised market economy flourishes; the latter which is driven by competition and price and the former which works in an entirely different paradigm.

Economics is not a subject that most of us care about. However, the market economy is a system and creed we live by and has put us on this collision course. We are all embedded within it as we sit in this train carraige rocking through the East Anglian barley fields. Clear thinking about this behomoth and how it might be replaced are paramount – and you could have no more inspired or radical guide than David Fleming in this uncertain territory.

For Fleming a viable future means being rooted in the small-scale local economy and cultivating the resilience of the community you live in. It means creating a thriving culture that will enable people to use their native intelligence and good will to work out how to proceed when the chips are down and the social and technological infrastuctures we take for granted are no longer in place. His premise is that through time localised, interdependant communities have been the norm and that our hyper-individualised hyper-urbanised lives are an anomoly and only made possible because of a destructive oil-based growth economy.

The book looks at key areas, such as food, growth, ethics, employment and waste, through the lens of lean times, and proposes that intead of living in a mono-culture where the price is the measure of everything, we live in a community, where our presence, our loyalty to its shape and interactions matter.

It is a better book to read in the garden, where there is space to breathe. Because, above all things, the book brings space and intelligence and wit to areas that are normally written about in lumbering opinionated prose. In a genre weighted down by tribalism, righteousness, political rhetoric and scientific data, his words come like a fresh breeze. Where other books would feature graphs, he has woodcuts of the English countryside.Where others might beat you over the head, his light and precise use of language effortlessly guides you from high altitude systems thinking to the utterly miserable times endured by the workers of the ancient 'hydraulic' cultures.

At some points his references to art and philosophy may appear old-fashioned, his fondness for the feast-days of the Middle Ages romantic, but the main theme is utterly modern, thought-provoking and often surprising. At the suggestion we might employ Christanity's rich liturgy and architecture as a cultural holding place, I find myself exposulating to the runner beans. Hang on a minute, David, when the Church of England is on a all-time attendance low in the UK? Are you suggesting we go backwards and have to worship gods again?

I put the book down and dive into some shade between the buddleia and the rasp- berry canes. Above me the scarlet admiral and peacock butterflies drink the nectar from the flowers, the light shining through their jewelled wings, above them on a southerly breeze the seeds of a black poplar drift by in search of new territory and above them a marsh harrier circles in the updrift, soaring higher and higher.

OK, so how do you organise society in the absence of competitive pricing? I laugh. This book is subtle! I have no idea: but it is a very good question. One that revolves around loving the earth and sky, that's for sure. It has to start here. It has to start with this moment.

I reach out to pick several large raspberries and realise that it was Fleming's ideas about community resilience that had entirely forged my own. These canes from Rita and Nick and Jeannie, the apple trees from Gemma and my fellow writers on Playing for Time, all these vegetables from seed swaps, my clothes from Give and Take Days, my involvement with Dark Mountain via the Transition movement. Everything in my house and larder and woodpile, in my relationships with neighbours and local shopkeepers, with this sandy, salty, wild territory, has come here through the informal economy. In all these small ways I am already living in the future he describes. And in that I know I am not alone.

This shift is not just personal, about me and my downshift style: it is social, about nurturing communities of 'reciprocity and freedom'. And this is where this book acts as a decisive catalyst. We need deep blue sky thinking, to ask ourselves questions we have never thought about with rigour, to look around us at what we have now between us, a bird's eye perspective, because if we can't we will be surely engulfed by the struggle on the ground:

The task is to recognise that the seeds of a community ethic – and indeed benevolence – still exist. It is to join up the remnants of local culture that survive and give it the chance to get its confidence back. We now need to move from a precious interest in culture as entertainment, often passive and solitary, to culture in its original, earthy sense of the story and celebration, the guardianship and dance that tell you where you are, and who is there with you...

But given this is the one alternative that resonates, that makes sense, it is worth giving it our every last creative shot. If you are prepared mentally, physically, emotionally, for a different world and have deintensified  your way of life, you are resilient and fluid in a way folk that have never thought about these things are not. That makes you a valuable presence in any kind of climacteric, a flexible open agent within a close, rigid system. I realise this late summer day, the lean localised future so astutely and elegantly mapped out in these pages was the future I chose a long time ago, and the task Fleming sets all writers and artists takes us resolutely out of the sidelines and puts us right where the action is – and where else, given the choice, would we want to be?

Carnival

 At the upcoming Dark Mountain gathering this week we are delighted to welcome Shaun Chamberlin, David Fleming's close friend and associate, who will be holding a workshop exploring some of his core ideas, and also to be able to sell both books, hot off the press, at our book stall (£30 and £10 respectively, or £35 for the two ).

I like to think David Fleming would have enjoyed Base Camp, at seeing a future-thinking culture being created by people aware of the impending social and economic crises. He might have recognised the lean thinking amongst its strands of myth-making, food growing, knowledge-sharing, music and conviviality. Celebrations and convergences are the bedrock for a society he envisioned could survive and thrive in a rocky future, and it is in this spirit that we publish a short extract from his chapter on Carnival, edited by Shaun and originally published in Dark Mountain Issue 5.


Extract from the late Dr. David Fleming's Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (2016). Extensive references are given in the dictionary itself, but are omitted here.
* points to another entry in the dictionary.

Carnival. Celebrations of music, dance, torchlight, mime, games, feast and folly have been central to the life of *community for all times other than those when the pretensions of large-scale civilisation descended like a frost on public joy.

The decline of carnival in the West began in earnest alongside the transition from a rural-centred culture to a city-centred one. There were many reasons. The early stirrings of capitalism encouraged habits of soberness, and it has this fixation about people turning up for work on Monday morning. Some carnivals were getting out of control, becoming the starting-point for rebellion and riot: Robin Hood’s career began as a carnival king; Ben Kett’s rebellion in 1549 started in Wymondham at a festival for St.Thomas à Becket. And the invention of fire-arms had its effect: it meant, of course, that a reckless crowd could also be dangerous, but – more important than that – it introduced a need for discipline, especially in armies. The loading and firing of a musket is complicated; it requires a sequence of steps – forty-three of them, according to Prince Maurice of Orange’s “drill” – each of which must be done exactly, at speed, and (on occasion) under fire. Discipline becomes critical: sober *citizenship, which is good for armies, and good for trade, calls for self-awareness and self-control, and it gets lost in the spontaneous exuberance of carnival.

Carnival has been subdued, and its loss is serious. The modern market economy suffers from play-deprivation. It does exist to a weakened extent in sport, but even there the aim of winning is increasingly taken as the literal purpose of the event rather than the enabling *myth. When such critical cultural assets as *trust, *social capital and the *humour which blunts insult are in decline, *play is in trouble. Insult and rough-and-tumble are now largely forbidden; if an invitation to play is rejected or misconstrued, if a joke goes wrong, there is shame or worse.

It invites the bleak question: 'What is the point?' The consequences are various, no doubt, but among them may be loneliness, boredom, anxiety and depression; if society is less fun, its inequalities are more resented. There is no constant reminder of the teeming vitality beneath the surface of other people; there is a loss of authority by the local community, which becomes less audible, less visible, less alive, less fertile as a source of laughter. Barbara Ehrenreich wonders whether the waning of carnival might have had something to do with the awareness of depression which, in the early seventeenth century, seems to have developed almost on the scale of a pandemic. Before then there was, of course, pain, and grief – all the dark emotions – but loneliness and anxiety...? *Tactile deprivation (the sadness of not being touched)...? The sense of the party being over...?

… Homer tells us how the art of the ancient dream world lay in wait to seduce Odysseus and his crew as they were about to encounter the Sirens, whose bewitching song lures everyone who hears it to their death, their bodies added to the pile of mouldering skeletons in the meadow where the Sirens sat. On the advice of his mistress, Circe, the goddess who lives on the island of Aeaea, Odysseus stopped up the ears of his crew with wax, so that, unable to hear the song, they were not distracted from the real work of rowing. He himself, being securely strapped to the mast, could now listen to the Sirens' voices 'with enjoyment', as Circe puts it, and without being drawn irresistibly into their power. This has various interpretations, but one of them makes it a decisive detachment from art: the sound of ancient myth which once drew its hearers in, without means of escape, is rendered sensible and civilised, reduced to a concert, a sort of Hellenic musical evening with female chorus and a professor of Greek to tell us something about the local legend that lies behind it.

On this view we see the breaking of the link between art (music, in this case) and politics: now you only need to buy your ticket, be a spectator of the arts for an hour or so, and then home for herb tea and bed.'
--
Images: David Fleming on Hampstead Heath by Henrik Dahle. All woodcuts from Lean Logic - A Dictionory for the Future and How to Survive It edited by Shaun Chamberlin and published by Chelsea Green on 8th September.

Originally published on Dark Mountain blog www.dark-mountain.net

Suffocated Clover

I've just finished a story about poetry and mythology for the upcoming Dark Mountain issue on Uncvilised Poetics. Called The Red Thread it looks at the myth of Ariadne and the Labyrinth and how poetry can fast-track you into the urgent realms of the metaphysical. 

The threads are lines from certain poems that have pulled me into different directions in my life, including the local poet George Crabbe. So I thought I would repost a piece I wrote originally for 52 Flowers That Shook My World, which is based around the flowers (and people) he catalogued in the fenny, marshy lands of the Suffolk coast.

marsh samphire - walberswick

southwold, suffolk 04

When I first came to live in Suffolk I was shocked by many things. I was shocked by the tameness and emptiness of the agricultural land, the restraint of villages but most of all I was shocked by the conventional human world in which I found myself and its relationship with plants. I was no longer living amongst the alternative earth warriors of Oxford, nor with the radical medicine people of the American desert. This was small-town England where flowers lived under tight control in gardens, or in nature reserves for their scientific and educational interest. Of course the wild strip of shifting coastline was exciting, its birch copses, mudflats, and gorse-scattered heath. I had loved these waterlands for many years and was happy to return. But becoming part of its human community was something I had not bargained for.

 In your twenties, in the bohemian city, friendships come easily. You dance together, you sleep together, you get drunk together, you give each other work, live in each other’s houses; everything is shared. But as you get older life can calcify and become static - a fixed house, job, family - and these easy-going social relationships end. If you go travelling this open exchange continues because everyone’s lives are still fluid; people come and go, in and out of your life, and it doesn’t matter what age you are.

But in Southwold it really does.

When I walk into a local lecture given by the Suffolk Wildlife Trust, practically everyone has white hair. It is given by a warden of a nearby area called the Breckland. Once known as the desert of England, with sand-dunes and strange forest pools, it is  a particular territory with its own distinct flora and fauna. The keeper explains the measures they take to keep this flora and fauna in abundance. Whenever he shows a slide of something good happening (Breckland thyme is increasing) everyone in the audience goes ooooh, and when there is a depressing statistic (the numbers of sand larks are down this year) aaahh goes the audience,  as if we are in some kind of old timer’s music hall. At the interval I ask the speaker about the particulars of a certain rare wormwood that grows there, and he gives me a queer look. Artemisia campestris, he says. Field wormwood. And I realise it is a look of horror, of a man trapped in a net. I do not go back.

sea lavender - river blyth

However I don’t give up on my human and plant communications. On May day I go to the blessing of the nearby bluebell wood by a band of local vicars. In the summer I take part in the Suffolk Hedgerow project, detailing all the trees in the neighbourhood hedges. I go to plant sales, flower festivals, garden openings and Greenpeace fairs, but there is something about joining in with these ventures I can’t quite do. There is something in the women’s faces, the ones who serve the tea and cake, the volunteers who seem to organise everything. They are my age or older. There is something in their eyes, in the way they are nervous and jittery with each other, sometimes making mistakes with the money, or silly comments - something repressed, inverted, as if their natural intelligence and creativity will never be allowed to burst out of them whilst they are serving in these places.

One warm August evening a small old lady approaches me at a garden party. She has overheard me talking animatedly about sheep’s bit scabious. Her name is Pam Ellis and for the last twenty five years she has run a botanical show at the local museum. “You are going to take over from me,” she said. “Do you know the Latin names.?”“Yes,” I replied, “Good,” she said. And carried on talking to the others.

Of course I had no intention of taking over. I had a horror of becoming one of those Women Who Did the Flowers I had seen at the church jumble sales. But I had not counted on Pam’s persuasive powers. She was a formidable botanist and mycologist, as was her husband who had begun the flower display originally, when the museum was also a natural history collection. Botanists, like writers, rarely give up their passion. In fact, this passion usually increases with age. When the curator rang asking me to visit them at the museum, I found myself saying I would do it on one condition, that I was allowed to write a paper each week to go with the exhibition.

“I’m radical!” I warned them.

The curator smiled. He had found my weak spot. “You can write what you like,” he said. “Now these are the jars and this is where you fetch the water.”

southwold museum

I loved doing the flowers. I loved getting up with the hares and the foxes, moving through the dawn, roaming the woods and riverbanks in search of plants. I loved cycling into Southwold with a basket full of wild flowers flying behind me, and diving into the sea after the setting up was finished. I loved putting all that life and colour amongst all those dry fossils and facts, locking up the ancient door leaving behind a beautiful show for others to enjoy.

But most of all I liked sitting down at my desk and deciding what I was going to write for the wild flower collective, as I called it. It was like having a column again, something I had not had enjoyed for years. I was unashamedly enthusiastic. I wrote about politics and poetry, railed against agricultural pesticides and the council’s slaying of roundabout orchids, the radical apothecary Nicholas Culpeper; I  interviewed ecologists and ornithologists and the guardians of the local woods and reedbeds;  I  walked for miles over the heathlands, sat in preserved meadows and hidden wastelands, wrote about vibes of places and gave the medicinal properties of all the plants, their countryside lore and their Latin names (as promised to Pam). By the end of the summer 180 different wild plants had appeared on the museum’s sunny windowsill.

But I never met any people. Occasionally the curator or one of the volunteers when I went in to refresh the flowers would praise the display. Everyone loves it, they told me. And you are so knowledgeable! But something in me rankled. I didn’t like to think about it, but I knew nobody took any notice of what I was writing. I had a feeling that I was being humoured. Just so long as the flowers were done.

I went to interview the creator of the Hedgerow Project and asked him about the community and the countryside. He had spent a good deal of his time travelling to villages all over Suffolk and I thought he might give me a clue about belonging. He looked at me

“There is very little enterprise,” he said mildly. “It’s mostly newcomers who get involved.”

One week  I decided to write about the 18th century poet and part-time botanist, George Crabbe. George Crabbe is an unusual poet. He is well known as the poet of this coastline, but although his lines are suffused with the nature of these marshes and shores there is nothing romantic or poetic about them. His poem The Borough is famous for inspiring Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, however the classical music festival founded on this opera, bears little trace of the nature of the poet, let alone the damned heroes and heroines of his epic tales. Crabbe hated Aldeburgh, and yet it transfixed his imagination for his whole life. His passion lay in the waterlands that surrounded the town. For in his heart, he was a lover of wild plants.

People speak with raptures of fine prospects, clear skies, lawns, parks and the blended beauties of art and nature,” he wrote to his friend Edmund Cartwright in 1792, “but give me a wild wide fen in a foggy day with quaking boggy ground and trembling hillocks in a putrid soil; shut in by the closeness of the atmosphere, all about is like a new creation and every botanist an Adam who explores and names the creatures he meets with.”

I set myself the task of reading the works of Crabbe, to find all the plants that appeared in his poems for the next exhibition and to find appropriate quotations for the cards.  I spoke with Neil Powell, a local poet and writer who had just published a new biography of Crabbe to ask about the flowers. You have to read about suffocated clover, he told me. It’s key. He had spent hours on the beach between Thorpeness and Aldeburgh looking for this tiny plant.

“Did you find it.?” I asked.
“I think I did,” he said. “But then I am not sure.”

viper's bugloss - cambridgeshire

Suffocated clover is not an easy plant to find, even for a botanist, and Crabbe is not an easy poet to read, even for somebody who has spent a good deal of her life studying and reading all kinds of literature. Classical in construction, most take the form of moral tales which are inordinately long. However something about the tone of them was compelling and familiar. He was writing about a Suffolk that I recognised, in spite of the difference in centuries. Trained as an apothecary and surgeon, a man who worked as a reluctant curate all his life, his eye is not on the poetic and the lyrical landscape.  It bores into the minutiae of life, of the oppressive and shifting moods of the collective, into the spiritual despair, and mostly into the betrayals and indignities that the community heaps on individuals who dare to step out of line. Be different. Or like himself, creative.

 Meadow clovers are easy to see. They appear profusely in midsummer, beloved by bees, honey-bringers, nitrogen-fixers. They appear in their different colours in the jars on the windowsill:  crimson and white, sometimes a pale tufted yellow, or in the shape of strawberries. But to distinguish the smaller clovers you have, like Crabbe to get down on your knees and have a good look. On the bare ground, on the heathland track, you find them, squashed and tiny amongst the rabbit-bitten dune grass, burrowing, reversing, clustering, suffocating, hiding themselves away from human tread. As you peer among the other pea-flowers, trefoils and fenugreek, miniscule sparks of yellow and white, you find yourself in a different world. The startling pink veins of the birdsfoot show you all the beauty of the small things, of myriad other worlds within this one. You feel the enormity of being alive, of so many possibilities, as if you could begin again, yet the human world is so old, so repressive, how can you shine in your own right? How can the future begin?

You might not want to look closely like this, but somehow you have to. You have to think of Crabbe as he stands exhuberant in the primordial fen, downtrodden and despised in his various curacies. You have to consider yourself, squashing your  knowledge and breadth of vision for a new world into these small cards on a windowsill. You want like all writers to share this knowledge, your love of the natural world, have an intelligent and lively conversation with your peers, but the old forms will not let you. Hemmed in by taxonomy, by a restricted imagination, by minds trained to dismiss the wild and the beautiful, you can get no further than a smile. You are clever to know the Latin names, the women will say down at the museum and look away. Nature table, says the guide to the local museums of England.

sandwort - southwold

Community is a feel-good word in the modern world, but there are good historical reasons to be wary of them, for their unconscious collective intent can stifle one’s very life-force. People from the outside, visitors, city people, often imagine country communities to be well-meaning friendly village things. They do not recognise them, as agencies of constriction and conformity. No one who has paid close attention to the testimonies in Akenfield recorded by Ronald Blyth in the late sixties however could be romantic about community in Suffolk. Everyone yearns to get out of Akenfield; no one would want to live in The Borough. Enjoying a country retreat is one thing, becoming part of the local collective is another. No creative individual really wants to belong to a community. Not if they are smart. It provides you with roles that you have no business playing.

 

ii

When you read poetry you need to crack the poem’s linguistic code, and find out what the poet is really saying, beyond history, beyond literature, underneath all that difficult style. The flowers cracked the code of Crabbe’s writing for me, as I struggled through pages of rhyming couplets. Bitter and repressed plants are everywhere in his work. Especially the end-of-the world wormwoods. Artemisia campestris is one of the plants he requests for his botanical garden in Mumford. “Wholesome wormwood” is spied by Orlando in The Lover’s Journey as he speeds through the green lanes. Southernwood appears outside Ellen Orford’s door in The Borough.

Like the clovers and grasses he loved to seek out, Crabbe’s human subjects are the undistinguished worth paying attention to,” I write for the exhibition in late July. “And he presents their lives with all the accuracy of a botanist, rather than the idealisation of the romantic or classical artist. Where he can be as florid and as mannered as anyone of his time, writing to the aristocracy for patronage for example, when speaking of plants and the land his language is modern and direct. It blows like a breath of fresh air through the formal gardens and hierarchical houses and universities which as a saltmaster’s son from Aldeburgh he was not heir to.

emerging sea kale - aldeburgh beach

 I walked around Crabbe’s Aldeburgh in search of the “unsightly weeds” his son wrote were so precious to his father. I walked around the fens and waterlands, finding the “soft slimy mallow of the marsh”, creeping dwarf sallows, wiry-stemmed salt lavender, bull-rush, sea cotton and sea asters that appear in his poetry, and the atriplex he loved to grow in his botanical garden. I walked through the blighted agricultural fields, finding painted viper’s bugloss and field poppy, sea poppy and sea-pea along the Aldeburgh shoreline. I thought I found suffocated clover. But I am not a botanist and tiny introverted clovers are not easy to distinguish. 

Suffocated clover is the “new species” of plant that Crabbe was delighted to come across and name. However it was also identified by another botanist in Norfolk, and the plant’s “discovery” was formally given to him.  It was a disappointment to Crabbe. Disappointment was a great part of his repertoire. Disappointment, despair, derangement, and most of all claustrophobia. It was this emotional tone I recognised from my own experience of rural Suffolk, a dark undertow that you can hear in Britten’s music also – a certain gloom and oppression, a feeling tone linked with the spirits of the oppressed:

He knows the plants as he knows the difficulties of the villagers. He writes as an insider with an outsider’s eye, unencumbered by the classical allusions of eighteenth century poetry, or the reforming zeal of the nineteeth century novel. It is the ‘what is’ of his writing that is startling and original. This makes him however a difficult and unfashionable poet to read: for the suffering of Keats or Shelley can still speak to every youth with a strong imagination and desire. And there is none of this sensitive poet in Crabbe. The suffering is of a deeper, maturer sort. It comes from experience: not only an awareness of his own difficult childhood, his awkward position in society (he burned his botanical treatise for example when told by a Cambridge don it was worthless because not written in educated Latin) but also from his first hand observations as an apothecary, surgeon and curate at the beginning of the industrial era.

Crabbe's (hidden) opium addiction connected him to the dark mental and emotional residue that English society does not wish to account for: uneasy moods, fickleness of perception, lack of compassion, blighted lives, cursed outsiders, the nightmare visions of his tales for which the marsh and fen and sea are perfect mirrors. The ‘wild amphibious race’ he writes of are the same as the boggy ground and sterile soil of Suffolk. These are not metaphors.

This is why E.M. Forster says ‘to speak of Crabbe is to speak of England’. He is saying what exists, not what should or could be. For these things he is the poet of our thistles and tares. Those plants, like himself, which struggle out of the inhospitable soils. Not for him the dancing daffodils of Wordsworth or the mystic rose of Blake or the imaginal globed peonies of Keats. His poetry is full of real human weeds rejected and scorned by the land-owning society. No one is going to come to Crabbe country in the way they can go to Hardy country or the poetic Lake District. Who would want to identity with the sadistic Peter Grimes or the religious maniac Jachin, the Parish Clerk? And yet to this day, the characters he describes are still here amongst us, within ourselves. Just as the Cambridge botanical garden he collected seeds from still exists. Just as the tiny suffocated clover still grows on Aldeburgh beach and the thistles in the fields spread their prickly arms, threatening war.

opium poppy - aldeburgh dunes

I finished the shows on the Autumn Equinox as the last of the year’s flowers were departing. Shortly afterwards I was invited by the curator to a drinks party to celebrate the museum’s year with all the trustees and volunteers. So many people enjoyed the show, he said. But I couldn’t somehow enjoy myself as I made an attempt to mingle.  I felt constrained and inarticulate in a way that was totally unnatural to me. I stood awkwardly with a glass of sticky wine, whilst an old man ran down the arts centre where I had just begun work.

These creative places never last of course, he said dismissively.

I could not answer him. As I struggled to find the words to defend myself, I felt a sudden immense pressure bearing down on me. I could hardly breathe. Then I noticed a certain agitation around me. My eyes glanced nervously around the room, as a sea of grey-haired people wearing red poppies began to merge together. Then I realised: it was November 11, and almost eleven o’clock. I looked at the crowd and they all suddenly seemed like dead people drinking a toast to war and more war. May it never end!  I though I was going to pass out. The atmosphere was suffocating.

Before I knew it, I was rushing out of the Red Cross hut into the wild fresh autumnal air. Running, half-crying, half-laughing, as far away from death, from grey-haired community, from the ooh and the ahh and the ghosts of the thousands of women who did the flowers.  The relief was extraordinary, as if I had been let out of a prison. I was bursting out of hundreds of years of  church fetes and bell ringing and jam cakes and politeness and charity cases and men who crushed the spirit of any creative enterprise before it had a chance. We are free, I called to all the poppy women constrained all these years, to all the plants, to all the writers, as I ran and I ran across the green, the sea shining in the distance, with the gorse-scented wind in my hair.

common wormwood - thorpeness

The Shape of Things to Come

We are now fully booked for Base Camp, the Dark Mountain gathering to be held at Embercombe this September. Although we have both organised other events - Carrying the Fire festivals and recent book launches - this is the first full-on UK gathering my fellow curator, Dougie Strang and I have put togther and we are really excited about the programme and the people who will be taking part, Full details can be found on our website.

Welcome to Dark Mountain Base Camp 2016

At the heart of our gathering you can find a question: if we no longer believe the stories civilisation tells us, what are the ones that might bring meaning and joy for the future? Since The Dark Mountain Project began it has looked at collapse and ecocide, felt grief and despair, found its roots in place and time, brought together fellow artists, writers and thinkers. So what do we need to know and speak to each other about now?

This is the territory we will be exploring during a weekend of talks, workshops, performance, encounter and conversation.

Like all good stories, our programme will have a beginning, middle and an end - a welcome, a celebration and a farewell.

Here is the outline plot:
  

Different Paths to the Mountain 

Base camp is the transition point in any expedition. It's a pause, a taking stock and a honing of intent. It's the place where things get real, where we see the track before us begin to rise more steeply, leave behind what is no longer necessary and gather what really matters to move ahead. In this introductory session, hosts Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang will invite everyone to take stock, share where we have come from and what has brought us to the Dark Mountain. 

Gathering at the Fire   

After a full day of listening, discussion and part- icipation, Saturday evening will be about singing and dancing - a grand ceilidh in the main hall. And then, in the dark, a procession to the woods to gather at the hearth, to sit between the shadows and the flames and to sing and tell stories into the night. Expect surprises!   

Redrawing the Maps - The Return 

Base camp is about what we take with us for the rocky road ahead. What can we take from the experiences of our gathering at Embercombe to make sense of a world that is falling apart? We set out to ascend an unknown and difficult path and at the same time find ourselves descending into a forgotten valley that feels like home.

This session will invite everyone to create the road maps that will sustain us on that paradoxical return journey – in language, in culture, in myth, dreaming and action - maps that cohere and connect and convene, and lead us towards the future.

Looking forward to seeing you in September!


Images: Base Camp signiture - Crow Wing for Manon by Rebecca Clarke (Issue 9); Where To? Where From? by Garrett Hupe (Issue 7), Fireside celebration, Uncivilisation Festival, 2013 (Photo: Andy Letchworth), Detail from Map of the Journey, Dark Mountain Workshop, curated by Dougald Hine with artist Monique Besten in February 2016, Stockholm, Sweden