Like the fox, I am running to earth,

Like the Phoenix, I may rise again.

I went hungry in the 1980s. I won't go into the details but unemployment also affected me at the time. I was never famished mind but there were a few times when I went without food for a day or so, towards the end of my dole, and when I did eat on those penultimate, eked-out days, it was sometimes basic and only once a day - a tin of beans and some bread, or a can of sardines. Man cannot indeed live on bread alone, but it helps. As even one Bishop said in my hearing not so long ago: "Nobody chooses to be poor." We all want the means to make ends meet.

We again now have one of the worst periods of economic downturn and unemployment in 30 years, and once again, as I also experienced it, the state via the government of the day is determined to do whatever it can to get people back into gainful employ, ostensibly because working is a morally good thing to do but mainly (and no, I have not become more mellow with age) to improve its own war- and recession-blasted balance sheet as well as make it easier for companies to continue to make profits in straightened times. Hence the whole question now of "Workfare", instead of "Welfare", the latter being one of the chief pillars of the social contract in this country since 1945. My first substantial experience of being an unwaged worker, which leads me to write this, was through volunteering, although it was not entirely of my own volition that I signed up - I would have preferred a paid job. All the same, I was faced with ever increasing interrogation as to why I could not find work (hint: in 1983, there were over 3.2 million unemployed), the implication being that I was refusing to. At home, I had a draw full of application letters, to which I often did not even receive a reply. But this did not seem to matter to my benefits officer. I had no job, ergo, it was my fault.

So, I decided to get out of Room 101, and volunteering was my escape route. I would be housed, fed and given a weekly allowance but I was not waged. However, this gave me the wherewithal to bank on signing off and shipping out. in August, 1994, I headed south, Wiltshire way. I've never looked back. I was ensconced in a small room, sharing a house with the three older men who had been shunted into community care, *my* care. I came indeed from a family of social workers but this responsibility was enormous. Anyone looking in might have been outraged - in some sense, I, a raw recruit with no training, was taking over the direction and guidance of the lives of three people who up to now had been looked after by professional nursing staff. I had a mentor, it's true but still: it was me, my wits and three pensioner-aged men with learning and mental health challenges, who had been incarcerated for a collective period of the best part of 100 human years.

When I say I have never looked back, I mean I was able to develop the resilience, the confidence and the skills to get on and do things, and not fall into the despondency or creeping self-loathing that can often come with being unemployed. I had a new internalised concept of self-worth. I concretely understood that I was capable of working very effectively indeed. I had become self-reliant, which contains positively more than selfishness. I learned, not to make my own way regardless but to recognise the worth in other people because, having now a firmer personal foundation, I could look beyond the walls of my own self.

So, when the concept of workfare is being bandied about in today's debate on employment, I am in two minds: a part of me thinks that if the experience that I had were to be even minutely replicated for someone else, I might say Workfare may be a very imperfect statist means to a wholesome individual end. On the other hand, major companies are seemingly being handed 1000s of effectively free person hours, and the output of this effort is bled out of the community from which it came, in the form of profits and dividends.

Part of the answer to this conundrum depends on what definition of "work" is being used. I am not an economist, and I certainly don't have a minute grasp of Marxist theory but some of the past research I have done points towards some alternative meanings. For me, the handiest and most succinct distinction between the human value of working and the perils of drudgery was made by William Morris in his Useful work versus useless toil. In his mind, useful work would give:

    "...hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all for us to be conscious of it while we are at work; not a mere habit...Thus worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill...All other work but this is worthless; it is slaves' work - mere toiling to live, that we may live to toil."

Morris is very particular about the origin of the latter kind of work, the hierarchical structure of society based on the extent to which, or not, each class was usefully productive. Manufacturing, the selling of manufactures for more than they cost to produce, and the need for there to be a mass of 'slaves' to maintain this system, created for Morris a situation whereby:

    "States are composed of three classes - a class which does not even pretend to work, a class which pretends to work but which produces nothing, and a class which works, but is compelled by the other two classes to do work which is often unproductive. Civilization therefore wastes its own resources, and will do so as long as the present system lasts."

The solution to this nefarious system was to make no person rely on another for productive work:

    "The first step to be taken then is to abolish a class of men privileged to shirk their duties as men, thus forcing others to do the work which they refuse to do. All must work according to their ability, and so produce what they consume - that is, each man should work as well as he can for his own livelihood, and his livelihood should be assured to him; that is to say, all the advantages which society would provide for each and all of its members.Thus, at last, would true Society be founded. It would rest on equality of condition. No man would be tormented for the benefit of another - nay, no one man would be tormented for the benefit of Society. Nor, indeed, can that order be called Society which is not upheld for the benefit of every one of its members."

There are faint echoes here of a certain 'productivist community' view of the world which was harnessed by both National Socialism and Soviet Communism as an end in itself and as a means to realise the perfect fascist or socialist state, neither of which in the final analysis put either humans or nature at the centre of their ideology but rather new and very destructive abstractions. Morris himself also worringly in the first part of his essay talks about winning the struggle with nature through our labour power:

    "Thus then have the fruits of our victory over Nature been stolen from us, thus has compulsion by Nature to labour in hope of rest, gain, and pleasure been turned into compulsion by man to labour in hope - of living to labour!"

However, such a struggle between people, and between them and nature, implicitly disappears once a reformed view of work is introduced, for it would no longer be rare

    "...for any of us to feel ourselves a part of Nature, and unhurriedly, thoughtfully, and happily to note the course of our lives amidst all the little links of events which connect them with the lives of others, and build up the great whole of humanity."

The skill of Morris's argument is that it undermines the moral case for work per se, and the view which upholds the current rather panicked assessment that we should have to continue producing as we do, or civilization should fail, no matter the new means or novel social configuration. The first is often used, as we have recently seen, in relation to Workfare, but Morris helps to make clear the reasons given by the factions supporting the political crusade that the poor can only be redeemed by labouring, that poverty only be resolved through the growth of the market for ever more goods. The second stance is that, perhaps, of the techno-greens (and this is my extrapolation), who want grand engineering and science to solve the problems that in the end devolve on the way relationships arise, exist and are conducted between people, for in those relationships lies the creative energy to find both the means of existence and their adornment in living:

   "And yet if there be any work which cannot be made other than repulsive, either by the shortness of its duration or the intermittency of its recurrence, or by the sense of special and peculiar usefulness (and therefore honour) in the mind of the man who performs it freely - if there be any work which cannot be but a torment to the worker, what then? Well, then, let us see if the heavens will fall on us if we leave it undone, for it were better that they should. The produce of such work cannot be worth the price of it. Now we have seen that the semi-theological dogma that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer, is hypocritical and false; that, on the other hand, labour is good when due hope of rest and pleasure accompanies it. We have weighed the work of civilization in the balance and found it wanting, since hope is mostly lacking to it, and therefore we see that civilization has bred a dire curse for men. But we have seen also that the work of the world might be carried on in hope and with pleasure if it were not wasted by folly and tyranny, by the perpetual strife of opposing classes."

So, when you hear of Workfare, ask yourself, where is the hope, pleasure and rest in it; ask yourself why it is found to be necessary to devise it? This is not a plea for either idleness or indolence - neither will grace the human frame, and each should resist the atrophy of body and soul that comes from being ostracized from our ability to use our human skills, simply because it does not pay dividends. The opposite, Welfare, faring well, is more than a bureaucratic framework, or a logistical means of provision in times of need. That idea as such is in danger of being swallowed up just as much as we run the risk of dismantling the social contract, bad enough as that is, through an emphasis on toiling at any cost (or often, at none), through Workfare.

[Image: Nathan Sherman, Work with care, Pennsylvania : Federal Art Project, 1936: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/6629875181/]

Bright Ancestors

It was indeed a homecoming of sorts as I headed into Wiltshire last weekend, in anticipation of continuing the thought trail regarding Dark Mountain, not least through a deepening of my friendships with people I had met at the movement's festival in August. More than 20 years ago, my first job had been in Melksham, not far from where our retreat was taking place. I saw signposts to Calne, where my supervisor, Barbara (all names have been changed, of course), used to live, and the high street in Marlborough reminded me in a surprisingly vivid way of the day I took the people I was helping to care for out to afternoon tea (the alarmed looks of the well-to-do, the excitement of my own party at being able to choose food, and buy it themselves). In August, 1984, I had 'sped' (it wasn't really capable of the verb) south on my 100 cc 'Yammy' down from the hive mind of the West Midlands, through the Vale of Evesham and familiar environs, to unknown places that were soon to loom mythically as personal history in my mind, and which were waymarks of progressively greater antiquity in their own right: the White Horse at Westbury, Salisbury Cathedral, Stonehenge, Avebury, and Silbury Hill.

I was young, a vegan, a Buddhist and ever so slightly full of myself. I was also clueless about the world, about people, about intimacy. I was virginal in every respect. Inwardly I felt like some bodhisattva, outwardly I looked like a cheap clone of Elvis Costello. I arrived at a small house in the grounds of what is now Melksham Community Hospital after a four-hour battle with fog and nerves (I had only bought the motorbike about six weeks before the journey, and it scared the bejesus out of me), and effectively started my life. I encountered Angie, who was the Community Service Volunteer I was taking over from, and James, Simon, and Andrew, the elderly men whose lives along with mine were to share a slice of the space-time continuum for a mere but for me profoundly influential six months. James, Simon and Andrew had all been living in a large Victorian-era establishment for those with learning difficulties and mental health issues, and this was an early form of 'care in the community'. It wasn't easy. I had come by choice to make a difference, to find my way in the world - they had been given their freedom (whether it was wanted, or no), in effect forcibly removed from a life that had at least been rhythmical, predictable and therefore easily negotiated, after many years of having got used to their forcible incarceration in the first place. All these thoughts burst into my mind now as we traversed the rather posh and horsey country of Savernake Forest. After many decades, I was still a working-class oik in foreign parts, I discovered. But I was also coming home.

I won't go into too many details of what we were about, that will come as it emerges but we were as a group trying to understand how to create ever more conducive conditions for co-working available to the Dark Mountain Project, to address questions of voice and authorship within it, to see where powering down might not just be about switching off lights and reverting to analogue but as a means of taking the Project at its word, and finding new ways of imagining ourselves as being together that did not rely on the old tropes: for us, notions of inner and outer circles, those who define, and those who fall in. Having reached the top of the ascetic, aesthetic Mountain the only place we could look was down; away from the trial of ourselves in the anticipated collapse, to the gathering of many in the valley below, who were already actively, prosaically linking arms where we had perhaps begun to believe that to clasp the hand of another would be to give up ourselves to the mob, the "dream-led masses", the rabble whose blindness and ignorance had prompted the Movement's avowed inspiration, the poet Robinson Jeffers, to castigate man and revere not-man, who had therefore engendered the very name of the Movement we were a part of, not as followers, we were beginning to understand, but as operative members of one body.

Drawn in, we talked, shared food and shelter; we ventured out, still talking and observing: the ancient woodlands, the sarsen-strewn fields where our human forebears had begun to prepare stones for megaliths, in which the traces of prehistoric palm-tree roots could still be discerned, composed of further antecedents - millions of calciferous lives. We sensed Avebury, the circle standing for all, over time, hardly a stone's throw from where we perambulated. We collected late fruit from the leafless trees, we invented lines of new songs. The cold air passed between us and brought us together back indoors over fire. We were open and honest with each other - braving perceived looming storms to find the ravines that led back into the valley of bright lights, of home, hearth and habitation, of rebuilding after the collapse. Pythia longs in the end to come down from the mountain; the supplicant, the homesteader wishes for the pure, divine airs of the heights. They beat the same track, up and down the mountain, for they are the same person.

The day of departure was sore; I did not want to leave but I knew we had worked conscientiously with each other, and this was the balm. I was not really in the mood for chitchat with my taxi driver in the after-time but he was an affable chap, and I soon relented. On the way back to the station therefore, I heard this countryman's tales: of a white stag seen like a spirit on the edges of twilight, of a massive hollow oak that was the den of local children and was now these days also festooned with yellow ribbons, in grief, in remembrance of those who had passed on, who had become ancestors. Our hostess I recalled had had many pictures of her family, going back hundreds of years, which is a marvellous and precious thing. I wondered then who were my ancestors? Who came before me? Who has passed down knowledge to me? Formally, ostensibly I already indeed knew the answer - priests and peasants from Herefordshire who through the process of industrial alchemy had become metal bashers in Birmingham. But my ancestors were also James, Simon, and Andrew, lost men who had, unbeknownst to themselves, taught me compassion in the same landscape as the megalith builders, had taught me to listen, that their voices also counted.

The circle remains.

My first post about Uncivilisation was positive but here I will get into some questions that the event raised in my mind but which were neither really touched on significantly nor therefore resolved for me during the meeting. I hope though that they may cause some reflection when it comes to framing Uncivilisation 2012. I am going to make mention of what I think is the last taboo: class. First some background. I sometimes rather pretentiously describe myself as a "Morloi", the weird hybrid progeny of both Morlock and Eloi parentage, of a working-class background on the one hand, and of a life largely spent in (vain) pursuit of middle-class status, on the other. The result is that, in nine situations out of ten, I feel like a red herring going against the flow.

Consequently, for example, I am the sort of person who will weep uncontrollably at "Billy Elliot", and get smugly sentimental at Orwell's references, more than ambivalent as they are, to the ordinary worker in 1984:

"It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but who were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world. If there was hope, it lay in the proles!"

Yet I also despair at the lack of confidence and defensiveness of my own class, whose overall identification of fundamental intellectual curiosity with the graces of the social stratum it yields itself to inevitably creates a bar to liberation stronger than the ingrained arrogance of those who feel entitled to be superior. However, I have also overheard too many facile, misinformed and complacent opinions on the "lower orders" that have issued from the mouths of academics (the denizens of cosy and abstracted senior common rooms, who indeed have the benefit of a good education, and yet delight to find a million devious ways to squander it) to be overly enamoured of the unadulterated middle-class station in life. After all, of the two groups, the latter has the least refuge in ignorance as an excuse for the meanness of its thought.

But I digress. 28 years ago, I joined the Green Party at a time when, still unmoved by the Continental success of similar groupings, it was happy to be known as the Ecology Party. Located next to one of the largest conurbations in the UK, my local branch was made up exclusively of solidly middle-class types, of people who had as much sense as money, it's true, but also many more rooms in their homes than they could usefully employ. Move forward nearly three decades and, upon opening the latest plastic shrink-wrapped edition of Green News, coming just days after Uncivilisation and my first Green Party publication for three decades, there was a piece on what might need to be done by the Party to attract more working-class members.

Some things obviously do not change.

Now, I know the Green Party and the people behind Unicivilisation are after quite different things (or have very different notions about methods) and that the latter to a very large extent denies the efficacy or even the benignness of the (technocratic) Green Movement as a whole. But their followers are drawn from the same demographic, largely. This is not scientific, of course, I don't have a systematic analysis of the background, upbringing, education, and current occupation of each person who attended Uncivilisation to hand. Perhaps I did not speak to enough people but as a linguist I have a pretty good ear for the timbre of voices. I heard no-one from, say, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham (apart from myself!), or London (outside those same metropolitan circles that the founders deride in their manifesto). The only exception was someone from the country about the Tyne. I did catch the voices of Scotland and Ireland but I don't have enough exposure to either of those places to be able to hazard a link between accent and social class (perhaps people would be willing to identify themselves in the comments section, below?). I could only say the same of those who hailed from the United States or Australia.

Now this is an an impression, not a litmus test but the high levels of self-consciousness as the squeezed middle were confirmed for me by both a self-referential joke and overheard mutterings by others. Interestingly, both were in the context of basic bodily functions. The first example of this, which constitutes the ostensible gag, was a comment about the apparent lack of toilet paper at the festival; the audience at the first session was reassured that there was enough on its way to forestall a riot, a middle-class riot, no less - "The worst kind" rejoined a wag from the floor. I found this commentary on necessities curious, coming as it did soon after some of the worst urban disturbances for some thirty years. The implicaton for me was that the poor would not riot because of the need to avoid soiling themselves (although we do know, don't we, that they target Armani as well as Chinese mass-produced clothing, and electronic goods of all descriptions, the excrescences of the militantly industrial complex), but we, the Middle Class, just might, because we know what civilised life consists of, and oppositely, of savagery, in spite of the formal naming of ourselves there as uncivilised. The second confirmation for me came while I was visiting the latrines, amongst the general detritus and happenstance of festival life - litter, the splashed results of drink-induced carelessness, and unflushed water closets: behind the toilet block a mini-revolution was brewing, and through the open window I could hear its first dark words: "There are too many middle-class types here, still in their comfort zone", "Yeah", uttered a co-conspirator in response (I could visualise the pronounced nod in the faint pause between still well-enunciated words) "You're right".

A lot was made of this trope by the founders, that we needed to get out of that particular zone, and want to speak to those we normally didn't want to speak to. But this is just a well-honed sentiment, it seems to me: prior to the event, prompted by the riots, I gave voice to these issues via Twitter - would Uncivilisation have anything meaningful to say about what we had just witnessed in some of our major cities, would there be any working-class, urban-based attendees? The answer I received from one of the founders was highly indicative of the atmosphere I would experience just days later; no, the "riot demographic" was unlikely to be present "but let's see what we can unravel". I wasn't able to tell myself that anything about the riots which was expressed there might help to explain them, or help understand how to improve the lot of those who participated in them. Only at the tail-end, the after-festival, was there any comment, made by individuals responding to the first sight of a newspaper in some days, and these views related mainly to the question of the judicial and police responses.

Back home, wanting to get to the bottom of this, I re-read the Dark Mountain Manifesto, with its attempt carefully to tread through the minefield of what comprises the human. Perhaps I am ignorant of these things but the signature text of the movement unfortunately set off the first explosion:

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future ... I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

The mass appears to be the problem, and their disastrous rhythm - they don't even have the decency, it seems, to scan well. For Uncivilisation is a literary movement, and which of the uneducated, the unschooled, is going to get it? The poet lauded by the founders, Robinson Jeffers, reportedly ridiculed the vanity of those who conformed to the prevailing direction of politics, that is, those who believed that out of the mass you might discern the participative citizen. In other words, broadly put, there is in my view an aristocratic element to the Dark Mountain Project, that sees, in my view of it, no merit in the individuation of the mass of people, since this very individuation, rather than lead them to understanding the refinements of thought, the muse-induced arts, that the adherents of the Dark Mountain have somehow attained, would have them clamouring for more goods, thus perpetuating the ecocide they, the initiated, the illuminated, rail against.

On the way home, I sojourned briefly with my family on the South Coast. It had the look of many of our seaside regions - "suburban-encrusted" and "jerry-built" I named it to myself. On the one hand, such vistas represent a lot of things that I personally find hard about the state of the nation; the scarring of nature for 'entertainment', the evidence of the induced lust for the garish and the tawdry. I watched a pensioner return from bathing in the sea. Hardly a Venus, she was cold but invigorated, the banter with her friend emphasising this enjoyment of the elements, despite the wind almost rendering her body blue. I looked around at all the other people there, playing naturally together at the water's edge, with neither poetry, nor ritual, nor ideology, recalled the friendliness and politeness of everyone we had spoken to in that place: for directions, for fish and chips, for accommodation. I viewed this uncomplicated rest in nature, and this straighforward decency, and struggled to see where such examples of the mass of the population would fit into the Dark Mountain vision. I could see that they might not count for much. The Dark Mountain lives according to the clock of geological time, the measures of nature, whereas the 'square-limbed Roman letters' in Jeffers words, of man-made laws will merely 'scale in the thaws, wear in the rain'.

Between the stanzas wrought by elemental forces, how can the slight incidental lines of easily abraded human time figure at all?

Envoi
The above was written in the period of necessary deflation that comes after any quickening experience. Its bleakness is admittedly coloured more by my past than illuminated by future hopes. Since then, and in ruminating about some of the other less than "Kumbaya" moments of the event (such as the insistent question of gender, which I may yet summon the courage to write about), I have begun to think that the personal concept of class as an interpretative tool will have to be abandoned as much as the debilitating relative affluence that I was haphazardly born into, know I am addicted to, and want to be rid of. All the same, perhaps the Dark Mountain movement might consider more closely the (de-satirised) question of whether its hope lies rather in the proles, than totally beyond them. If the answer is no, how it acknowledges itself will be an interesting development.

[Image: Shopping for Saint Nicholas, Nationaal Archief, http://www.flickr.com/photos/nationaalarchief/5221079442/]

"To north, south, east or west, turning at will, it was not long before his landmarks fled him". This was the serendipitous first line of Mervyn Peake's 'Titus Alone' that I read in the immediate after-time of the Dark Mountain festival, as conversely, I stayed and all others were sporadically leaving "the outline of [the] mountainous home". I went to find new standing stones, new monuments to point the way but I still feel disoriented. I have since wandered meanderingly before returning home, steadily working back through the narrow channels of the labyrinth I had entered by; from riot-ridden conurbation through fields of agricultural green concrete and then an encampment in the wilds, and the return via a suburban-encrusted island, with a jerry-built seafront, to Mother London, and, after the woodland jaunt, the increasingly surreal facts of tarmac, brick and railway junctions. Many of the impressions I had during the festival feel decomposed to me now, or overly refracted by the process of this wayfaring, as did Titus, between the poles of ancient tradition half-remembered for the future, and consciousness-brimming technology mercurially weighting the now into a fixed, almost inescapable netherworld. I would be very grateful therefore for any comments on the below from others who attended, who might have better compass bearings than I. Since there's likely to be a series of posts about the event, I will concentrate for the first one on what was good, if not superlative. But first, a qualification.

'Did you enjoy it?'
I was asked this question a number of times and I did struggle to find a ready answer. I was glad I went, but does an axe enjoy being whetted, a pony being shoed? I was in the process I hoped of becoming more useful, both to an ideally projected sense of future self, and to the movement whose festival it was. I was entranced and moved by certain things, made thoughtful by occurences that I would have ordinarily dismissed, disappointed by particular sessions, moved to tears on at least one occasion. Aspects of the festival, or rather its tone at times and apparent demographic, did get under my skin. I write the below now therefore with a cacophony of viewpoints in mind, conscious also of my own perennial propensity to be enthused and then disillusioned by almost anything, a tendency to kick against the pricks, and, concomitantly, an equally dangerous blindness as a guilty need to be emollient sets in. Now you know what you are getting yourself into.

Words or voices?
I wasn't at the inception of the Dark Mountain Project, wasn't part of the first festival last year, and when the history of the movement (as Uncivilisation was acknowledged to be by its founders at the outset) is written, I will be no more than a bystander. But I do know that the literary was at its core, so-called 'wild writing', that it was founded by two poets who are ex-journalists, wordsmiths both. They have wanted to create a new narrative, one to replace the myths of progress, human centrality and our isolation from nature, "the story of civilisation". More importantly, they have wanted to undermine that aspect of the current scientific view which is plainly adamant that our stories have no essential or necessary part in the shaping of the world we inhabit.

In the Dark Mountain manifesto, mystery is lauded and the cult of rationality deplored. But do we really need more words to resolve this? Can we argue ourselves into a cognitive shift? That very danger is also recognised: the manifesto talks of the founders having 'things to do' as much as to say, and it was clear from the first session of the second morning that the pioneers of the movement didn't want things to descend into a talking shop. All the same, the thought kept nagging at the back of my mind (and it got louder as the festival progressed) - do we rather not need a pre-literary movement? It could easily be countered that the problem of civilisation became evident before the first primitive calendar marks became pictograms, became runes, became alphabets; naming nature as different happened very probably before we depicted it externally. But still, though not all tales are lies (unless they are told badly, as Tom Hirons put it) there might be a further counterpoint that writing itself, and particularly authorship, are intertwined with the complex that has brought us to this ecocidal path. Luckily, mystery, rather than explication (though there were many essays at that point of view)  was allowed to abound in its most unadulterated communal form on two occasions, through Tom Hirons' recounting of the traditional exploits of Ivashko Medvedko and Baba-Yaga, and 'Liminal', a collective work led by Douglas Strang. For me, they came the nearest to what I have felt from the beginning for me to be the reasons why I went to the festival, and why, despite its flaws (yes, we must all look down), the Dark Mountain Project contains within it a core of persuasive feasibility.

'Give me more food!'
We arrived later than planned, having spent all day packing and preparing things that should have been seen to by the day of departure. By the time things had been squirrelled away into our accommodation, dinner done and minds aligned to where we were, we had missed the beginning of the initial festivities; we stumbled down into the main space through darkening woods, following sounds, feeling excitement and uncertainty. We very luckily had arrived in plenty of time to gather around the fire for Tom Hirons' retelling of Ivashko Medvedko.

The feat of the performance itself was to be marvelled at, the one long pristine outpouring of thought, the sharply honed skill of memory that makes the latent knowledge of cinematographic outtakes transform the seeming fluency of film into nothing more than stitched together stutterings. To me, now that I have seen a version of this tale I am not able to fathom how Tom Hirons did this so well: even theatre-luvvies have their prompters, but we, ignorant for the most part anyway of the script, could only encourage with our felt responses, not verbatim hints.

And that was part of the performance, the bit that separates Stratford from sitting cross-legged at the feet of a storyteller - my own imbibing of the tale was accompanied by the smiles, laughter, ejaculations of wonder and amusement of the audience; if I looked up at the flamel-flickered features of the performer, I also cast my eyes on those around me, and looks and grins were shared with the hearing of the story itself. As the episodes of Ivashko Medvedko's adventures were recounted, we all therefore authored the setting, caused minor perturbations in the rhythm of the story, making its tides ebb over us uniquely but naturally on this one night.

Added to this was the charm, the glamour, of the primitiveness, for all its contrivance in our too-modern minds, of the setting; voice, silence, fire, woods, and themes that could have been adorned with words for the first time, but older at their centre than, perhaps, the collective age of all those present; the masked man warding off spirits with clanging iron, the stoop in pausing of the storyteller to stoke the fire, the sway of the mind with the rising moon as music accented the interludes.

Stag in the thicket
The following day was a round of moving from session to session, trying to make sure that nothing had been missed which you had promised yourself; the opening slot was stark in may ways but also toughening - I especially have only praise for Eleanor Saitta, who helped transmute the dross of ordinary paranoia into the gold of watchfulness and warding. But by the end of the day, I was stupefied, my mind a mass not of conflicting but too many converging ideas, the torquing pull of which left me exhausted and depleted.

Thankfully, the day ended with Liminal, orchestrated catharsis from Douglas Strang. I couldn't guess his intention at the time and so had no means of measuring the 'success' or otherwise of this, for want of a better word, piece of  performance art especially when the organiser himself got up and declared he refused to explain anything. But to my mind Liminal embodied Dark Mountain, and there was no closer expression of it the entire weekend.

Douglas came crashing practically out of the woods, like a stag himself, to answer the somewhat concerned question whether all was ready, and, after a very brief plea for direct rather than smartphone- or camera-mediated observation of the event, we were asked to go in procession, in silence.

The first part. the prelude, was enacted before us by the fire, two likely lads leaped up and duelled, with the chorus chanting repeatedly the folk conundrum:

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight,
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other

The chorus then gathered itself into a line, and headed up into the woods; we followed, led also by the sound of a flute ahead, and by lanterns framing the path at our feet. We were met, somewhat incongruously, by illuminated, neon-like depictions of some well-known artworks: Picasso's Guernica; the Gundestrup cauldron's supposed depicted of the horned god of the Celts, Cernunnos; the medieval vision, The Unicorn is in Captivity and No Longer Dead, part of a cycle of seven tapestries, and the Minoan Bull Leaping fresco. There was also on the left-hand side a mumming of a stag, caught in the thicket, with very life-like sounding snorts and paddings, and on the right, a woman holding forth a cup, taken from a well, with a rhyme playing in the background, to this gift of all that she could muster, this sweet water. On the right also on a small tree stump an offering of fruit and bread, and finally a basin of sorts, containing the concocted skeletal remains of a small horned animal, illuminated a bright ochre red from beneath.

The path wound about, and we moved with it, until we came over a slight rise, to see before us an incredible vista of small lambent flames, the night sky come down, marking the way to a natural clearing, where on approaching we could begin to make out the figures of the chorus. We made our way, and being near to the front of the snake of people behind us, knelt as previously instructed. The flute had continued to play, and now no longer obfuscated by foliage and imagined distance, played low but clear, rising and settling. A voice joined it, elementary, without words, hardly an incantation but keeping us bound to that place.

Silence eventually came over everyone there, which in itself was quite an achievement. We were gathered around, as with Tom Hirons story, our faces very gently basked in slight light, as much radiance with and on us as shone upon the players holding their own sources of illumination. At the time, several things came into my head, that this must be like the experience of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries, that the night was made habitable again, and I imagined that this was the province of Pan: the smell of the earth, the still faces, it felt like some initiation: the darkness had never felt so natural or comfortable. The voice continued for a period, whether long or short, again stealing a refrain from Tom Hirons, I could not have told you - time had collapsed for the second time this year, though through different means - the players formed a line in front of us, and after repeating a further rhyme which I unfortunately cannot recall, blew out their lights.

Just prior to starting, Douglas Strang, as well as saying he would not explain anything, also promised enlightenment. But my impression rather was that a sense of mystery had been deepened, had been allowed to coalesce, not in favour of supersition or flummery, but to make tangible the hardly expressible but fully comprehended nature of ourselves, knowing that we know we are alive, and helpless to understand what is right to do, for all our intelligence, for our wisdom; the sadness that isssues from admitting that flaw, combining with the exhilaration of expectation, the irreducible notch we have carved in our own hearts, ending all our inconclusive observations with an act not consequential but cathartic.

Merely mummery?
This may not have been uncivilised writing but Liminal for me was a kind of poetry: hieratic, suggestive, mesocosmic, striving for a place in which both cognitive and visionary powers cohabit. In this play, this arena of the imagination, one sees the real precisely because it is viewed as possible. This realm might be peopled by things that might be taken as real manifestations, it's the geopsychic space above the tree scaled by the shaman for his or her tribe: is the imagination so powerful that what is dreamt up feels real, or is the imagination actually breaking through to a different reality? But most of all, how is that energy grounded, or the signposts for it made?

Coming back to earth now, days after the event, I am reminding myself of something in this vein, touching on the themes of Uncivilisation, from Edward Carpenter's 'The art of Creation':

"But as the evolution of the idea of self goes on, there comes at last a kind of fatal split between it and the objective side of things. The kindly beliefs of early peoples in beings similar to themselves moving behind and inspiring natural phenomena, and the consequent sense of community of life with Nature, fade away. The subject and object of knowledge drift farther and farther apart. The self is left face to face with a dead and senseless world. Its own importance seems to increase out of all reason; and with the growth of this illusion (for it is an illusion) the knowledge itself becomes dislocated from its proper bearings, becomes cracked and impotent, and loses its former unity with Nature. Objects are soon looked upon as important only in so far as they minister to the (illusive) self; and there sets in the stage of Civilisation, when self-consciousness becomes almost a disease; when the desire of acquiring and grasping objects, or of enslaving men and animals, in order to minister to the self, becomes one of the main motives of life; and when, owing to this deep fundamental division in human nature and consciousness, men's minds are tormented with the sense of sin, and their bodies with myriad forms of disease."

I interpret this, in the wish to define the place and role of the Imagination, so: if we were to consider the manifested, artistic realities, the new narratives and stories, as completely autonomous, separate from us, then we detach them from nature, and we go down the route of fracture that Carpenter describes (intense objectification). There is a way, though, for both to be true, a sense of will and volition in the new manifestation, the art, the story, and its profound connection to us without being a mere human-centred projection, a phantasm. This way would consist for me of the extension of the fullest confidence of the artist, the magician, the sorceress: we only lose our way if we create these new powers, as Carpenter says, to 'minister to our (illusive) self'. Ultimately, they are related to us, not through an umbilical cord to ourselves but through their identification, and ours, with a cosmological unity: we have our own foundation in that overall reality, and so do the new manifestations. The artist and the creation are, however, once the latter is embodied, free of each other in a necessary way, and this liberty gives them, the manifested, a true semblance of acting for their own part. We must bless them as being aspects of the same nature, but not command them, as though we had that right, since they were made of some spare rib, taken from our own flesh by God (or the gods) - for that flesh was never wholly our own in the first place.

Given my experiences of delight and ecstasy not so much through words as voices, in singing and recounting, and the communal enjoyment and co-creation, in a sense, of both, I pray, as in the words of the final festval song, that there will be a time of healing, through this imagination of ours.

I hope we can talk ourselves into doing it.

[Image: Pavlova and Novikoff, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA, http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/4195203152/]

"We have become very conscious of the individual being, apparently neatly enclosed by its covering of skin, recognizable as 'me', a being to be disliked or desired but certainly a distinct and particular entity. It is the natural tendency of our mode of perception. Even a fire we contrive to see as a separate thing rather than as a chemical process affecting a wide area round the visible flames and smoke. A human being is hardly more cut off from its surroundings than is a naked fire. It is continuously exuding gas and moisture and consuming other gas; a variety of waves can pass through a wall, through air and the human body almost without interruption. It seems that the mind itself can issue waves, or something akin to them, that can penetrate and be received by other minds. Every being is united both inwardly and outwardly with the beginning of life in time and with the simplest forms of contemporary life. 'Me' is a fiction, though a convenient fiction and one of significance to the consciousness of which I am the temporary home.

I think that we are returning to an awareness of our unity with our surroundings, but an awareness of a much more exalted kind than anything that has existed before. The primitive tribesman, to go no further back than the early days of our own species, was still so deeply sunk in nature that he hardly distinguished himself from his environment or from his fellows. This sense of oneness shows itself in totemism and in many forms of magic. In the identification of the name or image with the living person; in summoning rain by spitting water, or in the belief that a man by leaping into the air can make the corn grow tall. In this, just as in the foetal gills, the child repeats the development of the species, he does not distinguish – 'Tis the eye of childhood that fears a painted devil'.

It is in this natural unity that the savage may truly be said to be happy. Certainly civilization must destroy it. In urban, literate surroundings self-consciousness becomes a sharp knife cutting man away from his matrix. It was early sharpened among the Greeks, but the collapse of the classical world before Christianity and tribal barbarism brought a respite. For another thousand years the mind of an agricultural society was rocked by the comforting seasonal rhythm.

If the East threw the knife away, the West retrieved it. After the Renaissance its possession became the mark of Western civilization – la volonté de conscience et la volonté de la découverte. It was not hard to bear, indeed it could be exhilarating, for man to feel isolated if he also felt important in his isolation. But, needlessly perhaps, man allowed himself to be dwarfed by his own discoveries, by his recollection of evolutionary processes and of the humble place of the earth in the material universe. He was not left merely naked and lonely, but apparently insignificant. Perhaps this condition reached its most terrible pitch of sensitivity in the present century with those who, like Proust, accepted it, and those who, like D. H. Lawrence, tried ton retreat. Even for the mass of people for whom the knife was not so finely sharpened, the god who died and was resurrected in the spring had deserted them.

Yet I believe that those who have had the courage to suffer la volonté de conscience et la volonté de la découverte are now already half assuaged. Mind, which at first denied men their instinctive sense of wholeness, is at last returning such a sense, but on its own mental level. Consciousness is melting us all down together again – earth, air, fire and water, past and future, lobsters, butterflies, meteors and men. As for me, what other force has driven me to attempt this book?"

Jacquetta Hawkes, A Land, The Cresset Press, London, 1951.

 

 

Not too long after I started this blog, I learned of the UK Government's wish to sell off the public forest estate, or at least. I became indignant, and cast about for a suitable countervailing icon that would emanate a positive power of its own against the removal of common rights to nature in this country. One figure sprang immediately to mind, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers. A quick Google later and a suitably pumiceous quote from this forthright man was unearthed from Wikipedia :

"True freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth"

Very laudable, I thought to myself, content. I then, ashamed by this trumpet blast from the tin instrument of too-ready knowledge, decided to sound more deeply. I soon came running up against the root of Puritanism, of which Winstanley was a fellow traveller, the Long Parliament that banned Christmas for being Catholic and heathen, and a common cause that smacked not of defiance of convention but of conformity, a setting out and enforcement of individual constraints so that the many might enjoy a less than libidinous liberty.

I was still, naturally, searching all this out on the Internet (or doing desk research, as academics put it, these days). My next question was: to what extent did Winstanley concur with the putting down of the Twelve Days of Christmas? Was he a rebel amongst rebels rather, sticking up for the ordinary pleasures of the foot soldiers of the English revolution against the grim outlook of Cromwell's purged House of Commons? I have not been able to find any evidence implicating Winstanley in either cause actively,  for the dull strictures of the religionists or for the right to celebrate some part of the traditional festivals, the prevailing mood against such notwithstanding. By virtue of these further investigations however I discovered another Winstanley, one unrelated but who, despite censure and the threat of punishment, kept up an antiquarian and merciful adherence to the festive season. His name was William Winstanley, and he has been credited with single-handedly reintroducing Yuletide after 18 years of dearth, once the Restoration had been seen in.

According to some records, this Winstanley had both a folkloric attachment to the older ways of England and an active concern for the poor at this bleak time of year. He kept up carol-singing, wreathed his halls with Holly and Ivy, prescribed good fare and ale, fostered jollity, and was minded that people should be free to thank their Saviour. In these qualities, we have the former shade I think (coincidentally, 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' was one of Winstanley's favourite carols) of Dickens’s yuletide Fezziwig, who holds his festivities in a similar way to Bill Winstanley; there is full board, rest from toil, music, singing, decoration, old games, and, especially in the former's case, dancing:

"There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley."  Then old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times—old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without a stagger.”

All of this is underpinned by an active concern for the people Fezziwig has contact with and responsibility for, which is recalled wistfully by Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Past, and had the power:

"To render us happy or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."

Gerrard Winstanley's view of divvying out the material, and of the metaphysical framework under which that that might best be accomplished, wass quite different. His egalitarianism was systematic, bureaucratic, and he was ready to apply punishment if community norms were transgressed. Although enlightened in regard to corporal punishment (at least in the case of Diggers), the effort to maintain 'the commons' often meant that transgressors we put into internal exile, and made to work the land, and gain their sustenance, alone:

'"All punishments which are to be inflicted among creatures called men," says Winstanley, "are only such as to make the offender know his maker and live in the community of the righteous law of love, one with another". If a person engages in any act that violates their covenant, even the most serious, "whereby he begins to bring the curse again upon creation, he shall not be imprisoned, hanged, or killed." Rather, he shall be made to work the earth … and none shall help him; he shall have a mark set upon him all the time so that everyone's eye may be upon him. He shall be a servant until such time as the spirit in him makes him know himself to be equal to others in creation." He shall he made a servant, since he is already a slave to covetousness; "none shall have communion with him" because he already has broken the bond of mutual preservation. The punishment of solitary labor perhaps is meant to make explicit the fact that the offender has repudiated life with others by treating himself as an exception, acting like Cain, as if he were alone  in the world. ' (Radicalism and Reverence: The Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley, George M. Shulman p.126)

Gerrard Winstanley's thought was distinctive and in many senses progressive given his time, and he does not stand or fall in worth on the basis of this single extract. All the same, the concepts of community and the fruits of the earth to be shared, and the manner and conditions of their sharing, are very different between the two Winstanleys: one subverts the normal hierarchical course of things and speaks in terms of God's abundant table, where all are welcome, and should be joyous; the other seeks to enforce (through mutual guilt and devolved shame, backed by being cut off from the common life) a constant subversion, even reserving death for those beyond the self-selected community who are deemed to speak to money and power. The one seeks individual redemption and forgiveness in an ephemeral convocation of disparate lives bound ultimately by universal laws of grace, the other seeks to uphold a particularist commonality apart from other men, who are seen in a puritanical way as either rapists of the earth or as hedonists and idlers. The one marks the cycle of the year, acknowledges its rhythms and respects those traditional cultural goods that have no other author than the common folk, the other is contrived, an artifice, and desperate for authority for that very reason. The one encourages the individual for the sake of all, the other condemns the sinner to a solitary life to save the rest. The one sees the earth as a metaphor, the other nature as something to be realised through toil, almost a political expedient for the creation of a new society. One gives permission, the other judges.

In trying now, these days, to understand where I should locate humanity as a collective effort of mutuality, conceived to tend and care for the metaphysical lives of fellow creatures as well as the maintaining or the replenishing of the physical integrity of the earth, this is not an academic historical debate. I am no expert in this period, and my views may give me false evidence for this or that take on where to go next. But perhaps, as twee as it sounds, I'd like to think that a common garlanded dance around the fire at the felt turning points of the year might get us further together than schemed utterances of righteousness and apartness, whether on social, spiritual, economic or political life.

[Photograph: Winter Food by Zruda http://www.flickr.com/photos/zruda/2217216242/]

During the second day of my short-lived Life in the Woods experience, I headed off into a bluebell-strewn copse for an hour, to reflect on the encounters I was having, with people, ideas and place. Woods have always been a refuge for me, a setting that would always create an instant sense of rightness and happiness, from the time as a child when I was lucky enough to have as my play area some woodland that stood at the back of my house. For a boy growing up in an artificially developed English new town, full of the calculated destruction of local buildings, the relaying of roads, the bleakness of pre-patterned estates, this was grace indeed. The sense of sanctuary was however created as an exercise in seclusion; I was at one with nature, but never with anyone else. I could happily keep myself company. Others in the woods were felt to be intruders. My own consciousness opened up rather to the elements, the teeming biology around me.

It is hard to look at this pre-adolescent viewpoint without embarrassment now - yet something of wanting to commune with non-human nature has remained with me; as stubborn as the inclination still to acknowledge certain books from childhood, even though you know that the choices would be disdained by your peers. Always though this rather rigid dichotomy has presented itself in my mind: the world of humankind and the realm of nature.

This changed, or a change was initiated here, through the experience of LITW. I have mentioned before that although we were in possession of some rather modern technology (mobile phones, recording equipment, cameras), it did not distract us since we received a sense of fulfilment through direct activity with each other. During my solitary sojourn amongst the bluebells, I immediately felt that addictive impulse to reach for my phone, to connect with people, and to write reflexively and directly in two short memails:

"I fled to the woods to get away from civilisation yet alone I required more mediation through the machine world; to reduce reliance on technology, one should not return to nature but to man or at least, the return needs to be collective"

and

"When we are in the city, the signs are made beyond us, are arbitrary creations, and the ways between us, being mutable, are therefore pathless; when we return to nature, we become our own signs to each other, and the ways to each other are direct and unmistakable"

I have already covered the positive sense of directness between participants elsewhere within this series of blogs on LITW. Here I linked it for myself to the, for me, age-old conundrum of people and place. Do my thoughts then indicate that we could return even cities to a 'natural state' if we were radically to change how we behaved to one another, viewed and communicated with each other, regardless of their other deleterious effects, which are visited on the non-human world in order to keep them going? Is urban greening not so much about how much food you might grow within a city environment, or how much decorative greenery is planned for in a rationalist manner but to what extent we apprehended each other directly as persons beyond role and functionality? I am hardly the first person to consider these lines of thought. Sharing the rightfully abundant fruits and produce of nature with the homeless has been the direct action response to system-induced poverty and the despoliation of both human and natural environments by the Food not Bombs movement, for example. But for me, does this mean I now have to see the trees and landscapes I love creep back into metaphorical significance only, ceasing to be things-in-themselves? Do I have to say good-bye to the woods?

I am not sure, and the debate in my mind goes on - but I have become, I think, far more sure that the way ahead is lined with many more friendships. The wood has an end, but that boundary can be crossed many times, back and forth, and each time there will be new visitors with me.

The following is really in the state of being a musing, based on and launching from some current reading at tangents -  Eliade's 'The Two and The One', and Hagar Kotef's 'Ba'it (Home/Household'). It's unfinished but I want to get it out so that others can refine and draw from its rudimentary connecting and thinking. However, while pondering these two texts I was recently quite struck by one of Stephen Louv's 'Seven reasons for a new nature movement':

"Sustainability alone is not sustainable. Though we don’t have a better word to replace it, the word sustain suggests stasis. Fairly or not, much of the public views energy conservation and the development of alternative energy sources as essential but ultimately technical goals. We need more than stasis; we need to produce human energy (health, intelligence, creativity, joy) through nature." [http://richardlouv.com/blog/seven-reasons-for-a-new-nature-movement/]

Although this might appear to be a bit of a leap, this understanding of the common view of environmentalism as static and maintaining a fixed sense of things, seems to sit alongside much criticism of Green thinking as anti-Liberal, as anti-Western, anti-progress, and therefore anti-rational. This for me ultimately rests on arguments about how time is considered and given value within the Western frame of cultural comprehension, as well on the proper place of governance.

Mosse, in his 'The Crisis of German Ideology' sets out how, in the context of industrialisation and urbanism, atomizing aspects both, people sought their individual identity in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries beyond the social, and beyond politics, both situated within the human-made city. Instead of the fragmentation of ever-changing, increasingly urban life, unity was craved. Nature stood for this unity, in the form of Cosmos, but this was qualified further: not general nature, but only particular locality, the immediate landscape, could offer men and women a place to be rooted, and the way that the attachment between individuals and landscape could be effected was through the notion of Volk. Mosse here reflects on the situated meanings of terms such as 'culture' and 'civilization': the former inhabited a role of 'essence', 'life force', 'mythos', Volk, and, as said, 'Cosmos'. 'Civilization' instead had the connotations of, in for example Spengler's conception, "...the most external and artificial state of which humanity is capable." Mosse goes on to identify for us the external in this interpretation of history with the material, with the economic.

Amidst these apparently straightfoward dichotomies, where is time placed? Time here is unique, since it can straddle them: time can be of the factory clock, or it can stretch into the eternity of the ever-present spiritual now. Time is a Janus-faced entity, and can provide the beat to civilization and well as the rhythm to culture. On the whole, exterior change is associated with the former mask, and unmarked inner perfection with the latter mien. The Green movement rides on a chariot pulled by horses from both stables. One set is trained in the track of technical accomplishment, in progress (solar energy), the other schooled in ceremonial dressage (inner, ritual illumination). Louv's appeal is based on the curious upshot of setting free all steeds to run together: technological solutions lead to a sense of preserving only what we have, of stasis, of an eternal now: civilization only gets as far as culture.

The question might be asked rather, to overcome this strange bind, can culture go paradoxically further than civilization? Can we go beyond these recent historical dualities and be fully Humanist exactly because we modify what we mean by progress, and deeply qualify the rational? What would happen if a creative narrative stood at the head of the argument? To return to Louv's conundrum, how could we imagine energy in the form of movement rather than stasis, change without linearity?

Many non-Western modes of thought have already encompassed this conceptual infolding of opposites. In such cultures (and we have dim reflections still of them in our own), New Year is the mark, not of the old (and disregarded) from the new (and to-be-superseded), but rather stands as the place of the ever-reborn, the same but different cosmos that can only experience resurgence through human effort, human action, human interaction with the unity of being in special settings and shelters that are commonly known as 'Our World' in their languages. There is no fatalism here, no submission to the dial, but hope - for better crops, more health, and given their historical backdrop, sometimes liberation from colonial rule. Through the creative play between the human imagination and the universe comes the energy to renew. It's a subtle difference but renewal to my mind is more than preservation, more than mere maintenance. To preserve is not to allow change, to maintain is to keep something going until its more efficient superior appears. Nothing changes (there is only this time, this nature, this fellowship, this Earth) but our view of it does. It is not kept pristine but viewed at each cycle with unblemished eyes, as if for the first time.

Would adopting such an uncivilized perspective mean we became political irrationalists? I should hope so, and in this precise sense: Politics and social reform take place, have always taken place, within the palace, parliament or parlour, in a world abstracted from that of the people, and viewing them as malleable material in the art of ruling. Their forerunner, the ancient Polis, was built upon a separation from life in the oikos, the domestic, the domain of slaves and women, the place of fecundity and generation, human and vegetative, the natural. The Liberal abhorrence of politics beyond the Polis is everywhere evident, is a strident tyranny. Its material and economic survival matrix depends just the same on the exploitation of the unacknowledged oikos, as the latter is shaped and moulded ever more into a simple conduit for the consumption of nature.

In the spirit of renewal, we need to mark out our own sense of reborn time on the lintel and the threshold of the home as different from that striking the hour in the bunker, and the HQ, those darker edifices of Liberalism. Liberalism is now stasis, not Mosse's hydra-headed beast of novelty, at best, and at worst a devourer of the energy and imagination that only we ourselves can generate, not the things that are made for us, as natural universal beings, and should wield to recreate the cosmos on our own doorstep. Techne for Greens needs to be reclaimed as the craft of ordinary life rather than the art of rule, of dominion and technical mastery.

(For the reference to Techne, my many thanks go to Hester Reeve, who put me onto this notion, and also to the situating of the proper human dwelling place between Polis and Oikos, for the first time).

[Image: "YOUR VICTORY GARDEN COUNTS MORE THAN EVER!",National Archives and Records Administration http://www.flickr.com/photos/usnationalarchives/4546092598/]

Last night I went to the public opening of the new British Library exhibition, 'Out of this World', on science fiction. The overarching blurb about the series of events and display of original manuscript material runs: "Explore a range of imaginings that have provoked hopes and dreams, exhilaration and fear - and see how science fiction has influenced scientific discovery." The opening evening yesterday had the particular topic of assessing the current state of science fiction as it relates to allowing "Our imaginations to create other worlds as expressions of our wildest dreams, hopes and fears, and so better to understand our own." Kicking us of in this endeavour we had on the panel Erik Davis, China Miéville, Adam Roberts, and Tricia Sullivan, chaired by Sam Leith. Strictly speaking, I was there as a bit of a China Miéville fanboy, whose The City and The City has to rank for me as one of the most non-Euclidian of narrative frameworks, carried off with unassuming yet daring assuredness.

It was a lively night; the panellists were on very good form (after Miéville, I especially liked Adam Roberts), the audience was supportive, and all were good humoured, despite some of the rather imponderable and perhaps more juvenile (to my ears) questions (such as: "What about science fiction and God!"). Each of the practitioners (stretching the definition for Erik Davis) was asked to give a 5-minute view on where science fiction was now, and I will try to reflect some of what they said in the below, and add a few obervations and questions of my own.

For Adam Roberts, there had been a monumental shift in the science fiction paradigm since Star Wars. His reasoning for this was that prior to this film, SF had been a genre of ideas, and thereafter, the focus had shifted from the content to the form: the literary had been superseded by the visual, and visual culture now accounted for almost the entire appeal science fiction has in the general culture - Roberts compared the sheer amount of Sci-Fi, fantasy and slipstream films amongst the top 50 all-time highest grossing ones (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_films), with the fact that, on the whole, the sale of science fiction books was still a niche business. With this emphasis on visuality, Roberts implied that there was now a much greater emotional content to science fiction in general, compared to its once almost exclusively higher-brow, literature-driven form.

China Miéville talked about the effect of the marketing machine on literary science fiction, how its need to create and channel readers was solidifying tropes, so that the job of the author to overcome growing audience expectations was getting harder; with a rash of, say, steampunk, vampire and werewolf fiction, ensuring success in authorial terms was becoming a greater challenge - in order to stand above the crowd within the branded bounds of one of these sub-genres, a work would have to be exceptional. Despite the potential attractions and eminent histories of these Sci-Fi variations, an author might question using them as a suitable vehicle for this reason. Implicitly, not to be placeable within a recognised field would make the prospective writer obscure, according to the logic of the market.

Secondly, Miéville spoke about the mainstreaming, and the metanarration of science fiction: it's not only the fact that science fiction is referenced in the general culture now, but that even the fact of the saturation of the culture in science fiction mores was being remarked upon, so that there's increasingly a 'sciencefictionisation' of the media, a very recent development that signalled how deep the knowledge about the form goes. Finally, he alluded to the changing demographic of science fiction writing: in his words, women and people of colour were engaging more and more in producing literature here, which could only be healthy, and might significantly shift the content of Sci-Fi in years to come.

Erik Davis' main topic was how science fiction helps the individual become her own navigator in the post-Modern sensibility, comparing this favourably against the backdrop of Modernity with its appointed scientists and experts, who propounded reality, rather than offering the tools with which profoundly to question it, which he saw as an intrinsic function of science fiction. In this way, even the cheesiest, most pulpy, if you like, Sci-Fi contained elements and allusions to a world of reflection and doubt, inversions and subtle signs that might prompt and lead the individual to take up a line of investigation that would enable him or her to go 'beyond the appearances'. This view contained within it the idea that SF leads to a species of both personal gnosis and philosophical activism.

For her part, Tricia Sullivan examined the oxymoronic paradox of the term 'science fiction' itself: science, on the one hand, was reductionist; fiction, on the other, was speculative. The tension created between these two opposites needed constantly to be resolved by way of metaphor, which would allow the genre to escape its current ghetto-like status. Speaking to the media effect on Sci-Fi, the mantra for it to remain dichotomous, and hence constrained, Sullivan pointed to the remix culture of the Internet, where in practice there were no more binary clusters, as millions of creative individuals blended classical music with pop, etc., and thereby mashed artistic boundaries. These countless examples of blurring via the Interwebs was both the product of and prompt to Sci-Fi to strengthen its ability to overcome opposites with story. Each act of re-casting, recreation was a single degree of subversion of the 'yes' or 'no', 'in' or 'out' culture of media and marketing, and with enough degrees, you might obtain a revolution.

As stated, the Q&A session was fun and good-natured, and I became too engrossed in the interplay to take adequate further notes. What struck me though were two things that might have been added to the mix, one of which I did get to ask about after the session. The first is about the seemingly unstoppable nature of what I would term individuation in science fiction, in an age that is witnessing on the political level a surprising amount of post-Communist collectivism and direct action by communities. The second has to do with another channel through which science fiction is increasingly reaching people, thanks again to the Internet, and that is not the textual or visual, but the aural, as podcasting picks up where 'old-time' radio of the 1930s and 1940s left off - quite an oversight of a science fiction tradition if you consider the enormous power of Orson Welles' rendition of The War of the Worlds in 1938. Especially in the Zombie sub-genre, there has been almost a home-brew assault on the consciousness using the Zombie Apocalypse scenario as a jumping off point for a small rash of productions: my favourite, 'We're Alive' is not alone; there's for example 'The Undead End', 'On the Edge of Darkness', 'Cheating Death', and 'World War Z' (see http://dontgetbit.wordpress.com/zombie-podcasts/ for links to these and other Zombie resources). What significance does this form have now in how Sci-Fi is perceived, and might it have something to say in regard to Roberts assertion we have gone from ideas to emotionality, when the 'soundscapes and scripts' combination of such podcast productions might deftly combine both elements?

But it's the implication from some of the panel at least that we have in the current school and outputs of Sci-Fi the potential for actual subversion that I would like to reflect on. For me, Sci-Fi is riddled still with the Hero/Anti-Hero meme: we have Anakin or Obi-Wan, Neo and Agent Smith, Frodo and Sauron; we have also the sense in which there is only individual awakening, and a continuing uncertainty about acting in common cause. Take The Matrix, for example - there is always lots to say about this film but I will pull out a few things that I feel illustrate my contention. Ultimately, the film is about the conditions for enlightenment and the conditions of love. Prior to being lured out of his plugged-in slumber, Mr Anderson is in reality just one single example amongst a faceless, countless battery of humans powering the machines. With his casting off the dream-reality, he enters authentic reality yet with a concoted, performed personality, an avatar-like guise, Neo. His interpretive, gnostic, ability to find that intellectual route to go beyond appearances, to emerge from the mass, has been instantly transformed into the exercise of control over his own 'physical' projection of individuated self in The Construct, and on his return to The Matrix.

This is not even a revolution of the vanguard, but of the saviour, as Neo becomes actually not entirely himself, but The One (noting that this ironic twist may represent the sole hackable glitch in this programme of individuation). By contrast, the crew of The Nebuchadnezzar, while seeming at first to be a resolute band of brother and sisters, falls apart, is riven by an internal power struggle. Even in Zion, the last human refuge, sedition and control vie with each other: even in the most necessary of circumstances, that of pure survival, collective interpretation and collective action cannot be taken for granted, depicted as an impossibility. Conversely, the enemy, ultimately represented by the powerful agents, are almost clones - in the mock reality of the Matrix literally interchangeable with the human populace. The glorious inversion of Morpheus' disparaging remark to Agent Smith: "You all look the same to me" presses home the point that individuation trumps commonality; the enemy is in fact essentially undifferentiated, which is given a further accent later in the series as Agent Smith hacks other agents, replicating himself entirely across the Matrix.

So, for all that SF offers us the prospect of subversion, a process of personal enlightened interpretation of the world, can it really act as a manifesto for common action in the world? Is it not stuck rather in the personal, with its expression in fandom, game-avatars, the sense of re-invention of virtual self, and perhaps its allied conception of unlimited personal possibilities, of choice, indeed so much wedded to this narrative, both within its production and reception, that it will never make it into the political sphere, overcoming the current ever-marketed, consumerist Zeitgeist? Is not the aspiration that with a number of individual degrees of insight, we might amount to an uprising against the current reality, the current dichotomies, a rather passive, self-satisfied, even smug, hope?

I asked this question (much abbreviated!) of China Miéville while getting my copy of 'Embassytown' signed. The gracious and insightful answer I received in the end does offer a glimmer of hope, and may even run alongside Roberts' view about the need to focus on form rather than content: narrative itself may offer us the means of getting a collective answer, a collective response, to the mundane.

[Image: "Sci-Fi Museum - Klaatu Barada Nikto, Bitches!" by Jesse Means http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeckcrow/4407422983/]