"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/]