Category: Writings

  • The View From the Kitchen Table

    When it got to the end of the year, we took two weeks offline, to rest and be with family and take long walks, and to talk over the beginnings of this thing we call a school. Often, when you make time to reflect like this, there’ll be a moment, a particular memory that surfaces, a story with something to tell you. This time around, it wasn’t anything from the week in June when we held our first course, but a conversation a month or so earlier. And if I’m going to tell you where we’ve got to, what we’ve come to see about the work that lies ahead, then — like Janus, the old god of the threshold — I need to start off looking back as well as forward.

     *   *   *

    The first Saturday in May, seven in the evening and the door to the back garden is still open. A month earlier we had snow on the ground; this weekend will turn out to be the prelude to a strange hot summer, a season of droughts and wildfires. For now, though, we are here, seven of us around the table, serving each other from a huge dish of spaghetti. There’s red wine and a lit candle. Some of us only met this afternoon, but we are in the company of friends.

    It’s Karim who turns the conversation to our plans for HOME. He’s caught an echo of his own project, the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences: a pocket-sized community of scholarship and conviviality, born in the shadow of a failed revolution, dedicated to ‘reassembling the social’ on a human scale. Anna used to live in Egypt, running a children’s literature project, and it doesn’t take long to find mutual connections, but Karim is here in Sweden as the guest of another of the friends around the table. This is Isak, deputy director of the Centre for Environment and Development Studies at Uppsala, a student-led centre inside the otherwise conventional structures of Sweden’s oldest university. He’s also organising Climate Existence, the conference where Karim and I are to hold a session in a few days’ time. Besides Alfie — who’s nearly three and up past his bedtime — the final members of the company are Shelagh and Peter, old friends from London; they both have long histories working on the boundaries of arts, education and policymaking, and they are two of the kindest and most generous people I met in the years when I moved in those borderlands.

    ‘So I want to hear about this school you’re starting!’ Karim says. ‘What is it going to be like?’

    ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I hope it will be like this, only a little bigger. An extension of the conversations that come together around this table.’

    It’s this answer that hooks me back, at the end of the year — after the intensity of that first course; after the fairground mirror weirdness of reading about ourselves in a glossy magazine; after the decision to slow down, to go deeper into why we’re doing this, to wait for a while — and its simplicity brings the sense of direction we’ve been waiting for.

    *   *   *

    Anna was ahead of me, as usual. It’s there in the name — and the name was her idea, something she said years ago, when we started to talk about creating a hospitable place for bringing together these conversations: ‘It’s not a centre. We’re not starting a community. It’s our home, and everything else is going to start from there.’

    If HOME is a school that starts from the conversations that happen around our kitchen table, then it doesn’t just exist on those weeks when we hold a public course: it happens the rest of the time, as well, in all the work that goes on in between, all the people who pass through this household, all the living and learning together. This is obvious, but it’s not the way we’ve been telling the story — and the way we tell stories has consequences.

    For a start, if I look at things this way, it gives a different picture of the work we did in 2018. Those five days in June become part of a patchwork of activity that wasn’t all building up to or coming down from the course itself.

    Among the other pieces in the patchwork, there are shared meals, like that evening in early May — and guests like Shelagh and Peter who come to stay for a while, to take a step back from the busy-ness of their work, to talk and think together, to make connections which go forward into what they do next.

    There’s the theatre-maker Luca Rutherford who came in August, funded by the Arts Council, to spend a week with us working on the script for her show about escaping from political paralysis.

    There’s Vanessa Andreotti, Professor of Race, Inequalities and Global Change at UBC, who I met at Climate Existence in May, whose ideas became a touchstone for the June course — and who came to stay with us in December and do some writing together.

    Here’s what I see now: this network of kitchen table conversations and collaborations is the heart of what we are up to at HOME. And recognising this, we get to go about it more deliberately.

    *   *   *

    So what does this mean for those weeks when we open up and make a public invitation to this school? Here’s where we’ve got to: the invitation we can make isn’t to a one-off course, it isn’t to a retreat that we are leading, and — despite what you may have read — we’re not in the business of offering group therapy.

    What we can offer is a chance to come and spend time around the ongoing work of the school; to hear from and talk with some of the artists, thinkers and doers who are part of this network; and to take part in the everyday home-making, the practice of hospitality and conviviality, without which the wild ideas we sometimes throw around would have no hope of coming to life.

    What worked best last June were the parts of the week that had this quality: the space that Anna and I can hold when we work together, the fellowship of the friends who were there to help us. Meanwhile, the places where things didn’t work, or where it got needlessly difficult, were the ones where we came adrift from this way of being.

    I think of the pressure it puts on a group of people who have only just met, to tell them: ‘By coming here, you’ve made this school a reality.’ I think of the pressure it puts on a friend and fellow teacher who finds himself playing the role of a workshop leader, trying to summon an experience intense enough to live up to the powerful language with which we’ve called this group together. I think of some wise words from Anthony McCann, years ago: the greater the emotional intensity of a situation, the wider the gap will tend to be between the experiences that the people present are having.

    So my hunch is that an invitation which doesn’t place the weight of being the school on those who turn up will give us all more breathing space, the chance to make some fresh mistakes, to take ourselves more lightly and take care of each other.

    *   *   *

    We could have scheduled six courses in 2019 and filled them — given the amount of interest in that first course, given the number of those who came who tell us they are keen to come back, and given the flow of enquiries we are getting.

    Instead, right now, we’re not sure whether there will be any public courses at HOME this year. It depends on practical considerations — which I’ll come to — but it’s also a question of the order in which to do things.

    If we’re going to make a public invitation to spend time around the ongoing work of the school, then we need to ground that work: to make more time and space for it, to share more of what’s going on, to tell the story of what we are doing here and why.

    In that spirit, here’s an outline of what we see ahead of us in 2019 — assuming we are spared that long…

    1. Focusing on the heart of what we do and doing it more deliberately. This means convening conversations and collaborations around the kitchen table where I’m sitting as I write this: bringing together particular combinations of people for a few days, gathered around a theme, often with the intention of publishing something together afterwards. It will include strengthening our immediate network of close collaborators, as well as making new connections — and developing a rhythm for this way of working, leisurely and fruitful. And some of this work will need to be fundable, without us going off-track in pursuit of funding.
    2. Framing the conversations we intend to bring together and the themes we are working on. Since the autumn, we’ve arrived at a new clarity and urgency about a kind of work that is called for around climate change. In the next few posts, I’ll set out what we’re seeing, the implications as we understand them, and the role that a kitchen-table operation like this might play. (This is also a chance to be clear about the difference between the work I’ve done over the past decade as co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project and the work that Anna and I are setting out on here.)
    3. Publishing and co-publishing to share the work we’re doing. Ideas arrive in conversation: glimmers of possibility, new ways of seeing a familiar landscape. Where it’s useful, we want to get these written up and out there swiftly — on our school blog and through other routes. I won’t always be the one doing the writing, but writing is a thing I do, and just now most of what I write is an expression of the themes around which this next phase of HOME is taking shape. This includes writing together with others around our network — I’m currently working on texts with Vanessa AndreottiDavid Abram and Duncan McLaren — as well as finding new places to publish. And publishing won’t always mean writing: in November, I had a go at making a HOME video, talking about Extinction Rebellion, and there will be more of these.
    4. Experimenting with ways to connect over distance. One reason we were hesitant about running six courses this year is the distances from which people want to come to connect with this work — and the implications this has for who gets to be involved, as well as the resulting carbon footprint. There’s a conviviality that requires being around the table together, breathing the same air, sharing the season and the hour of the day. But we need ways of connecting up the many tables around which people gather, without hopping on and off planes as if there’s no tomorrow. So we’ve been kicking around some ideas with friends: slow travel networks, corresponding societies, a monthly online Assembly that would offer another way of connecting with this school. Watch out for news about these experiments as 2019 goes on.
    5. Going on tour. Between now and April, we’ll be at home in Västerås, moving on into some of the above — and then we’re taking this on the road for three months, or rather on the rails. Anna, Alfie and I will be making the trip to the UK, with some stops along the way. It will be the longest visit I’ve made since I left England in 2012 — and along with a couple of gatherings to mark the end of my ten years at Dark Mountain, we’re planning various events at which we open out the work we’re doing at HOME. So far, it looks like we’ll be coming to Brussels, The Hague, London, Glasgow, South Yorkshire, Devon and Cornwall — and we’ll put together a detailed announcement soon — but if you’re interested in doing something with us, please get in touch. (Also, while we don’t have any public courses at HOME scheduled right now, I will be teaching one final Dark Mountain course at Schumacher College in early May, together with Charlotte Du Cann.)
    6. Finding a place to call HOME. Yesterday we sold our house, the place that has been home to us for the past three years in Västerås. We’d known all along that it was home for the time being, not home for good — and the first decision we took in 2019 was to put it on the market. Where we’ll end up next, we don’t know yet, although our assumption is that it will be on this side of Sweden. We’re looking for a place that we can call HOME, that’s got a little bit of land and enough space to host smaller and larger gatherings.

    How soon we find the right place and how long it takes to make it ready will determine when we’re in a position to host further public courses — though, as you’ve gathered, we’ve plenty to be getting on with in the meantime.

    *   *   *

    For that first course, we hired a hostel in a village that’s 45 minutes from here by train — and this turned out to be the hardest part of what we’d taken on, to recreate something of our home in a set of borrowed buildings. Those buildings looked idyllic in photographs, but it was a while since anyone had shown them any love. (When my fellow teacher Andrew arrived on the Sunday, his first task was to help me do a deep clean of the hostel fridge.)

    If you’ve read the GARAGE article, you might guess that there are parts of it we’d quarrel with — but life’s too short and there’s enough vanity in the world already, right?

    There was one bit that properly pissed me off, though — and that’s when their reporter writes about Anna being ‘relegated’ to the kitchen and how we ‘glamorized… a gendered division of labour’. He did three months of interviews for that piece — before, during and after the course — and he knew that Anna was a full partner in the school, but he never spoke to her. Unless you count the one time he directed a question to her over email — he wanted to know how the two of us met and what her first impression of me had been.

    Now, let me fess up: when it comes to gender, there was stuff we did that week that deserved calling out. In fact, Anna and I talked about this with the group on the final morning. Partly, it came down to having a course that was fronted by two guys — and partly, having a set of buildings where the kitchen was shut off, behind a door and up a set of stairs from the room where the eating took place.

    On the other hand, if the GARAGE guy had actually talked to Anna, he might have learned that her CV includes professional kitchen experience, cooking for everyone from anorexic women to kindergarten classes to weddings — so if she takes the lead in the kitchen when there are thirty people to feed, it’s because she has the skills and the experience for the task. (He might also have learned that she was about to take on the role of gender equality strategist for Sweden’s fifth largest city — and that she’d had a hellish year in the job she was just leaving, which is why she’d opted for a backstage role that week.)

    This seems worth saying, because I’ll often be the more visible half of this partnership — for the time being, because Anna is holding down a full-time job, while I work day-to-day on developing HOME — and probably beyond that, since I’m the one who has spent twenty years talking into microphones and in front of audiences, writing essays and manifestoes, and generally wrangling words in public.

    As a straight-ish white dude, I’m not wholly oblivious to the structural reasons why people-who-resemble-me are disproportionately represented among the public wranglers of words. I’m still on a path of wising up to my personal blind-spots and the habits acquired from growing up in a world that’s structured this way — and when it comes to me and Anna, you can bet that this shit trips me up, more often that I want to tell you, in the everyday undertaking of making a life together.

    But anyone who spends time around us is going to see Anna’s strength and single-mindedness, the deep mutuality of this partnership, and the way we come together to shoulder the work that needs to be done.

    *   *   *

    What got me about the layout of that hostel last June is that it was so totally the antithesis of the way of being together that I’ve learned from living with Anna — and to wrap up these kitchen table reflections, I want to tell you one last story about that.

    Two weeks before we met, Anna had bought a flat. Forty square metres on the south side of Stockholm — one room, a bathroom and a kitchen — it wasn’t a whole lot of space, especially when I gave up my rented room in London and moved in with her. It was the first place she’d ever owned and her first move was to knock through the kitchen wall, so that the space where the food was made opened onto the space where we ate and lived and slept. That also meant that you could get twelve people round the table for dinner, no small thing in a flat that size.

    Four years on, we’d moved to Västerås with Anna’s new job, I was commuting back to Stockholm three days a week to work at the national theatre — and we bought our first house, a suburban row-house built in 1957. The old guy we bought it from had lived there since it was built and to say it needed work would be an understatement.

    Well, I don’t look at a physical space and see how it could be remade — that’s not how my mind works — but Anna has the gift of seeing such things. Once again, her first decision was about the kitchen: when the house was built, they’d stuck it in a room at the front, shut off from the living quarters, but with a view out over the street, presumably so the housewife could see her husband coming home from work and get his coffee on. That became Alfie’s bedroom and the kitchen moved to the back of the house, opening straight onto the living room and sharing the view out over our neighbours’ gardens, where the sunlight streams in over the treetops for a few hours, even in the darkest days of winter.

    I don’t mean to go all House & Garden on you — believe me, I don’t take this middle class idyll of home ownership for granted. It’s not what I grew up with and not something I just assumed would happen in my life. I’m wearing this privilege, sharing these renovation stories, because the only reason Anna or I have for living in anything larger than a cell is to have a place that we can share, a place where we can welcome people. (Though if we did live in cells, hers would definitely be more stylish than mine.)

    Before I met Anna, I held hospitality and conviviality high among the things worth living for — but in making a life with her, I’ve learned vastly more about how to embody this, how to ground it in practical decisions and in how you use the privileges life throws your way.

    When we got back from the estate agents last night, I could feel the house gently slipping away from being our home, readying itself to welcome the excited young couple with whom we’d just been signing papers. On the last day of April, we’ll hand over the keys, then leave to catch the night train south.

    Whatever is coming after that, whichever kitchen this table lands in next, the experience of these past seven years allows me to trust in our ability to make a home together that’s capable of being HOME.

    Meanwhile, the January work is done, the new and the old are joined, the threshold of the year is safely crossed — and that will do for tonight.


    To find out about our current activities, visit the HOME website. You can sign up for future issues of Crossed Lines here.

  • Endangered Knowledge: A Report on the Dark Mountain Project

    The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

    Closing lines of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (2009)

    Almost a decade ago, Paul Kingsnorth and I published a twenty-page manifesto. Out of that manifesto grew a cultural movement: a rooted and branching network of creative activity, centred on the Dark Mountain journal, which has been variously described as ‘the world’s slowest, most thoughtful think tank’ (Geographical), ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe’ (The New York Times), a case study in clinical ‘catastrophism’ (Paul Hoggett, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, Vol.16,3, 261-275) and ‘a form of psychosis [likely to] create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber’ (Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman). The diversity of these responses gives some indication of the difficulty of summarising the Dark Mountain Project and the ‘charged’ nature of the cultural terrain in which the project has been operating. 

    Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto was written in the autumn of 2008, as the financial system shook to its foundations, and it grew out of a sense that our whole way of living – ‘life as we know it’ – was endangered. While the rolling news that autumn gave an immediate edge to that sense of endangerment, our concern was not only with the self-wrought destabilisation of the project of economic globalisation, but the fraying of the ecological foundations of this way of living by the consequences of industrial exploitation. Against such a background, the manifesto calls for a questioning of the stories our societies like to tell about the world and our place within it: the myth of progress, the myth of human separation from nature, the myth of civilisation. And it claims a particular role for storytellers and culturemakers in a time when the stories we live by have become untenable. 

    Ten years on, I would locate the cultural and intellectual project set out in the manifesto as bordering onto the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (the abandonment of the ‘dreams of modernization and progress’ and the multispecies storytelling of The Mushroom at the End of the World), Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement), Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (The Ends of the World) and the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures collective, as well as James C. Scott (Against the Grain), who having assembled the archaeological evidence against the myth of civilisation, writes despairingly:

    ‘Dislodging this narrative from the world’s imagination is well nigh impossible; the twelve-step recovery program required to accomplish that beggars the imagination.’

    Meanwhile, among those working directly with climate change, there is an increasing willingness to voice the question at the heart of the manifesto: if this way of living cannot be made ‘sustainable’ and a great deal of loss is already written into the story, what kinds of action continue to make sense? See, for example, Jem Bendell’s work on ‘The Deep Adaptation Agenda’, or the recent Guardian interview with Mayer Hillman (‘“We’re doomed”: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality no one else will dare mention’).

    As discussed in that article, there is a lag between the willingness of artists and writers to contemplate the possibility that we are already living through an event that might well be described as ‘the end of our civilisation’ and the willingness of scientists to suggest that this is the case. Perhaps there is a parallel here to what has happened over the past decade with the Anthropocene, a concept which is still following the slow process of authentication at the International Commission on Stratigraphy, but which has already been the subject of vast amounts of artistic and intellectual output.

    Even more than with the Anthropocene, there is a clash between attempting to write about this subject in reasonable prose and the content of what is being written about. Much of the early criticism of Dark Mountain seems to waver between a moral objection (‘you are giving up and if people listen to you, the consequences will be terrible’) and an existential recoil (‘this is unbearable to think about’). In relation to the second of these, the artistic nature of the project is important: as I have argued elsewhere, one of the roles of art under the shadow of climate change can be to create spaces in which we are able to stay with unbearable knowledge, without falling into denial or desensitization.

    Concerning the charge of ‘giving up’, as Paul Kingsnorth wrote in the early days of the project, there is something missing here: ‘giving up’ on what? There are those who move from giving up on the project of sustaining our current way of living to embracing the imminence of human extinction (see Guy McPherson). From the manifesto onwards, however, Dark Mountain has sought to open up the considerable territory which lies between these two outcomes. ‘That civilisations fall, sooner or later, is as much a law of history as gravity is a law of physics,’ we write in the manifesto.

    John Michael Greer, a regular contributor Dark Mountain, offers the helpful distinction between a ‘problem’ and a ‘predicament’. A problem is a thing that has a solution: it can be fixed and made to go away, leaving the overall situation essentially unchanged. A predicament is a thing that has no solution:

    ‘Faced with a predicament, people come up with responses. Those responses may succeed, they may fail, or they may fall somewhere in between, but none of them “solves” the predicament, in the sense that none of them makes it go away.’

    The claim which Dark Mountain makes is that our situation cannot be reduced to a set of problems in need of technical or political solutions. Rather, it is best conceived as a predicament. In the face of a predicament, it is not that there are no actions worth taking, but the actions available belong to a different category to those one would take when faced with a problem. 

    If I were to propose a list of the kinds of action worth taking in the face of our current predicament, it would include:

    1. taking responsibility for kinds of knowledge which might not survive the likely turbulence of the coming decades and doing what you can to better their chances of survival;
    2. making sure that the losses (of species, landscapes and languages) which already form the background to our way of living are mourned rather than forgotten, not least by telling stories of loss which themselves become a form of knowledge that can be carried with us;
    3. creating circumstances under which we have a chance of ‘knowing what we know’, encountering the knowledge of a thing like climate change not as arms-length facts, but as the experience of knowing by which my sense of who I am is changed.

    In each of these three cases, the work of writers and artists, storytellers and culturemakers has a role to play – and these roles have been explored over the past ten years in the work that has taken place around Dark Mountain. So far, the project has been responsible for thirteen book-length collections of writing and art, while inspiring manifestations as various as a number one album in the Norwegian music charts, an enormous mural on the side of a disused art college in Doncaster, and a year-long workshop at Sweden’s national theatre. To the best of my knowledge, it has not been responsible for any corpses.

    First published in KULA: Knowledge Creation, Dissemination, and Preservation Studies as part of a special issue on ‘Endangered Knowledge’

  • Ten Years on a Mountain: A Farewell

    There’s an old mythic way of thinking about the journey of a life which says that there are three times you will pass through, each with its own colour. You set out in the red time of youth, its raw energy not yet tempered by experience – and with luck, you are headed for the white time of wisdom. But whichever route you find yourself taking, the road that leads from red to white will pass through the black time, when that early raw energy starts to run low, when you are brought up hard against the knowledge of limits and you learn the humbling lessons of failure.

    They say there have been times and places in which this was recognised and accounted for in the expectations your community would put upon you. On entering the black time, your other duties were taken away and you would join the cinder-biters, whose only task was to lay down by the fire and make sure it did not go out.

    Who has such a community now? Hardly anyone. And most of us have grown up in a culture which prizes the red time of youth, and may look fondly on the occasional white-haired elder, but would rather not acknowledge the black times. So we struggle through, as best we can – or perhaps we find ourselves in a doctor’s office, being offered pills that promise to take the edge off the darkness. What we’re rarely offered is a story that might help us make sense of the time in which we find ourselves.

    * * *

    Ten years ago, when Paul and I were kicking around the draft of what became the Dark Mountain manifesto, neither of us had the tools to think in terms like these. The first I heard of cinder-biters or the three colours of initiation was from the storyteller Martin Shaw, one of the host of friends and teachers and collaborators who came into our lives as a consequence of having written that manifesto.

    But when I look back now at the beginnings of Dark Mountain, I see two men who stood on either side of a threshold. There’s only five years between us, but we met when I was in the last rush of the red years, having stumbled at last on something I was good at doing, while Paul was already deep in the black.

    I’m not spilling secrets here; it’s written across those essays of his which led so many readers to this project. The loss of faith in journalism and environmentalism, but also the way ambition turns to ashes: ‘I used to long to be on Newsnight every week, offering up my Very Important Opinions to the world,’ Paul writes, in Issue 2, grimacing at the memory of his younger self.

    Part of my role in those early years was to serve as a counterweight. I remember a mutual friend suggesting that Dark Mountain had been born out of Paul’s loss of faith and my finding a faith. In what, though? There are traces of it in the manifesto: that insistence on ‘the hope beyond hope’, ‘the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us’, and ‘the power of stories in making the world’.

    ‘It is time to look for new paths and new stories,’ we declare in the manifesto’s closing chapter, announcing our intention to create a journal that will be a home for this work. But as others joined the conversation, they led us to a recognition that the work is as much about recovering old stories, stories from the margins – and, in a phrase I remember hearing in those early conversations, holding ‘the space between stories’: the place where you can slow down, wait a while in the ashes of a story that failed, rather than rush headlong into ‘the new story’ and repeat the same mistakes.

    In Issue 4, I published a conversation with the Mexican intellectual and activist Gustavo Esteva, the only person Paul and I had known in common when we first met to share ideas for what became Dark Mountain. At one point, I talk about:

    the willingness to walk away, even though you have no answers to give when people ask what you would do instead, to walk away with only your uncertainty, rather than to stay with certainties in which you no longer believe.

    It’s a description of a pattern I saw in Gustavo’s life, but also of a pattern I’d begun to recognise around Dark Mountain. It’s Paul declaring, at the end of his essay in Issue 1: ‘I withdraw … I am leaving. I am going out walking.’ It’s what I understood from those words about ‘the space between stories’. It’s a journey I’ve seen others make over the past ten years: taking leave of hollowed-out stories and certainties in which they could no longer believe, resisting the rush to answers and to action, laying in the ashes for a while.

    ‘It’s a good name, you know, Dark Mountain.’ This was Martin Shaw, in the garden of a Devon pub, the first time we actually met. ‘It’s good because you’ve got an image there.’

    The sun moves across the sky, the seasons change and the face of a mountain shifts; features emerge or pass into shadow. The same thing will happen with an image, different sides of it catch the light in different moods, at different times of life.

    Long after Paul had introduced me to Robinson Jeffers’ ‘Rearmament’, the poem where he found the image that gave us a name, another aspect began to come into focus. More and more, I found myself drawn to the role that mountains have played as places of retreat, in both the spiritual and the tactical senses of that word. It caught something about the role Dark Mountain seemed to play for many of those to whom it mattered.

    You come here because it’s a good way back from the frontline. You come here when you’re no longer sure where the lines are drawn, when the maps are shaken and old identities scattered. You come here when it’s time to reflect, to ground yourself again, or to catch the whispering of realities that get drowned out in the street-noise of the everyday world. Maybe you build a shelter for a while, sit around a campfire with strangers who feel like friends, and look back at the orange lights of civilisation: just now, they seem a long way away. But you are not made of granite, peat or heather.

    There may not be much talk of ashes in the culture I grew up in, but we still know what it means to get ‘burned out’ – and by the time I left England in 2012, three years into the life of this project, I was burning out.

    I’d spent those red years running around London, bringing together conversations, watching ideas spark, learning to breathe projects into life. I was good with words, but I wasn’t a writer exactly – or not the way that Paul was. My role models were never the solitary romantic figure, the lone truth-teller set against the world; they were collaborators whose work took many forms, John Berger or Ivan Illich, thinkers and storytellers whose words were tangled up with webs of friendship and mutual inspiration. Following the threads I found there, I’d discovered that I could use words to create a space of possibility, a story others would want to step inside.

    There’s an energy that comes with learning to use your own abilities and finding that you have an effect in the world. Fuelled by self-discovery, you burn brightly – but then one day you realise you’re falling, you have been falling for a while, and only the forward momentum kept you from crashing already.

    I was lucky. Just as I entered freefall, I met someone who was willing to catch me. I moved countries, shucked off what I could of the responsibilities I’d been carrying, in the name of self-preservation – and over the next eighteen months, my involvement with Dark Mountain was limited to a few weeks of editing and a couple of pieces published in the books

    ‘Everyone I meet at Uncivilisation is an individual with a collective story to tell.’ This was Charlotte Du Cann, writing in 2011, about her first visit to the annual festival we used to run back then. ‘A poet from Scotland, a professional forager, the captain of a Greenpeace ship, a designer of hydrogen cars, a researcher into Luddite history.’

    I still occasionally encounter people who think Dark Mountain is a campaign to persuade everyone to give up – on climate activism, on saving the world, on the possibility that there is anything worth doing. Given the picture they seem to have of our project, I always wonder what they imagine could fill the soon-to-be fourteen volumes of that journal we proposed in the manifesto, what could have sustained the love and work of all the editors who have brought those books into being.

    I don’t remember meeting anyone at Uncivilisation who was seduced into despair by Dark Mountain – although there were those who had been deep in despair when they stumbled on the project, and who found relief in a setting where it was possible to give voice to a loss of faith without feeling judged or isolated. But like the contributors to our books, the temporary community of the festival was disproportionately made up of people who are active in one way or another, whether or not they would identify as activists.

    Yet here’s the twist: Dark Mountain itself has never been the place from which to act. You come here for something else, something harder to pin down. Something you’ve been missing.

    Charlotte came across one way of naming this in a conversation with a Transition Towns activist she met that summer at Uncivilisation: ‘If Transition is the village,’ he told her, ‘Dark Mountain is the shaman.’ In her report on the festival, she ran with this personification, Dark Mountain as the outlandish figure, walking the boundary between the human world and what lies beyond:

    to transmit a sense of deep time, of our rough lineage, of wild trees, of the ease and intimacy of talking about Big Subjects, without being heartless, idealistic, or controlling the outcome.

    This is a picture of the project that I recognise – and in hindsight, there seems to be a line running from that festival report to the role that Charlotte would come to play at the heart of Dark Mountain in the years that followed, bringing a new degree of beauty to the books and shouldering the heavy-lifting of a growing project, as it matured beyond its beginnings.

    Paul’s head may not actually have been in his hands, but that’s the way I remember it. And I remember the thoughts that ran through my head: Paul couldn’t go on carrying this much weight, and it wasn’t time for this thing to come to an end, and no one was going to magically ride to our rescue, so I was going to have to step back in.

    They say what changes, on the far side of the black time, is that you put your life in service of something larger. I may be greyer around the edges than I was ten years ago, but I’m not laying claim to any white-haired wisdom. All I’m saying is, that morning in Ulverston was the first time I chose to put this project ahead of my own interests, and probably the first time I really had to make that kind of choice about anything.

    I’d given a lot to Dark Mountain before that, but now I was in service to it. This meant teaching myself how to do whatever was needed: replacing the book-by-book crowdfunding with an annual subscription, setting up a cash flow model so we knew that there would be money in the bank to print the books, mediating the tensions that built up between members of a growing team, setting up regular calls so we actually started to function as a team. In an ordinary week, there were others who put more hours into the running of the project, but when a crisis hit – and in those days, it seemed like that was every other month – I was the one who’d interrupt a family holiday, turn down paid work and generally drive those I loved to distraction, as I threw myself into keeping the show on the road.

    ‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ wrote Yeats. To leave room for making a living, I gave up my role as an editor on the books, and the tasks I was doing now for Dark Mountain were not the things I enjoyed most or was even that good at. But I was here, and it wasn’t time for this to come to an end, and there’s a certain satisfaction that comes with taking responsibility.

    In my memory of the festivals, there was always a moment – around the Sunday morning – when people’s thoughts began to turn for home, and someone would start a big conversation with the question: ‘So, what are we going to do?’

    My answer was no: we weren’t going to do anything, and we certainly weren’t going to sit down now and arrive at a consensus, make a plan of action, organise ourselves into a movement.

    Probably this scene played itself out in my head, more than anywhere else, but the dynamic was real enough. Over those days together, many of us had felt a quickening, a sense of coming alive – and it was tempting to try to turn this into action. But pledges made in that liminal space are a prescription for disappointment.

    What was called for wasn’t, couldn’t be, a collective decision forged in a festival tent. Rather, the challenge now was for each of us to take whatever we had found here back to the everyday world, back to the frontlines or backyards or office cubicles that were waiting for us, and see which parts of it survived the journey. However inspired we felt right now, there was no shortcut, and no guarantee which parts of what we were feeling would still make sense on a Monday morning in October.

    Retreat is not defeat. Retreat is not surrender. A mountain can be a pretty picture on a postcard, or a place you sit alone for days and nights as the layers of your life so far get burned away and you get claimed by something larger. If that should happen to you, then you’ll come back changed. You’ll have lost some of what you thought you were, certain paths will no longer hold the attraction they once did, and you may catch sight of possibilities you couldn’t see before. If you sit for long enough, your eyes adjust.

    But none of us can spend our whole lives on a mountain. At the practical level, where dreams give way to responsibilities, none of us makes a full-time living from our work with Dark Mountain. It’s probably healthy that we fit our roles in around other freelance projects, creative commitments and part-time jobs that pay the bills and take us into other worlds.

    Still, if you take on a role where you’re seen as speaking for the project, where you get written about periodically in the press with varying degrees of accuracy, then inevitably you become identified with it, and it with you.

    For the best part of ten years, I’ve been one of the Dark Mountain guys. (‘The one you haven’t heard of,’ as I remember Chris T-T described me during his set at the manifesto launch.) And for a while now, I’ve known that my time in this role is coming to an end. I’ve served this project and been blessed by it in more ways than there’s room to tell and I’m ready to move on.

    I’m ready to head back down the mountain, to take my place again somewhere along ‘the long front’, as Doug Tompkins called it in Issue 3. Here in Sweden, Anna and I are starting a school called HOME, ‘a gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture’. This is a different task to the one Dark Mountain serves, and there’s a need to be clear about the difference, which is one of the reasons why it’s time to be moving on.

    I won’t be leaving overnight – there’s still work to finish up, helping the rest of the team to fulfil the promise of this new online home, editing some wonderful pieces that have already been sitting on my desk too long, and getting the business side of running Dark Mountain into as tidy a shape as I can before I go. But next July, I plan to walk the Thames from London to Oxford with my family, to arrive on the tenth anniversary of the manifesto’s publication at the riverside pub where it was launched, to celebrate the occasion with a party to which all friends of this project are invited – and then to wander off to join those friends and collaborators who are already a part of the past of Dark Mountain.

    For years, I struggled to articulate the asymmetry between my relationship to Dark Mountain and Paul’s. He was always generous in naming me as his co-founder, but he was the one with whom it started.

    One time, I tried to explain it to a journalist by talking about the idea of ‘the first follower’, from this little video about ‘how a movement starts’: that the critical moment isn’t the guy dancing like a wild thing on the hillside, but the first person who gets up and starts dancing with him. When I read it in print, it came out like I’d proclaimed myself his number one disciple.

    Then this summer, I realised what it is: for me, Dark Mountain was always a collaboration. Each of us brought years of our thoughts and doubts and inspirations to the beginnings of the project – but for Paul, there had been a time when Dark Mountain only existed in his head, a thing that was brewing, that he knew he would need help to bring about.

    As I look to the end of my time with this project, then, I find myself thinking about its future as a collaboration. It’s no longer a start-up that hits a potentially terminal crisis every other month. And for a long time now, it’s been sustained by the collective creativity and strength of a team who have taken it further than I’d have believed possible in those early years.

    At the heart of that team are Charlotte and her partner Mark Watson, both as much in service to this project as I’ve ever been, along with Nick Hunt and Ava Osbiston, and a growing gang of experienced editors, readers and steerers around them. There’s plenty of strength there to carry things forwards – but just as they joined me and Paul and lifted the weight from our shoulders, so others will be needed to join them along the road.

    The seasons will change, the sun will move across the sky and other features of the mountain come into focus. The image will be read in other ways. There is never only one map you can draw of a given landscape, never only one path that leads across it. I look forward to lifting my eyes from time to time and catching sight of you, all you mountaineers, tracing paths that I would never have thought of taking, until one day you find that it is time for this thing to come to an end – and when that day comes, know that ending is fulfilment and not failure.

    First published in the online edition of Dark Mountain in October 2018 to accompany the announcement of my departure from the project.

  • From the Dead Centre of the Present

    From the Dead Centre of the Present

    It seems that we were following similar hunches, for years, before we were introduced. The crisis of 2008 had set us on these tracks – or rather, it meant that the tracks we were following anyway seemed suddenly relevant to people who hadn’t noticed them before, so that we found ourselves needing to reformulate, to express what it was we thought we had caught sight of.

    In my case, this took the form of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto, written with Paul Kingsnorth and published in 2009. The hunch that we tried to put into words was that the crisis went deeper than almost anyone wanted to admit, that it went culture deep, that it was a crisis of the stories by which our culture has been living. And if this is true, we thought, then might it not follow that the work of telling stories and making culture becomes central to the task we face, the task of living through dark times and finding possibilities among the ruins.

    The tumbling weeks of crisis turn into months, years, and a new normal establishes itself, but it is never the promised return to normal. Eight years on, Dark Mountain has become a gathering point for people trying to work out what still makes sense, in the face of all we know about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    A mountain is not exactly an urban thing, though! Sometimes I tell people, it’s not a place you live the whole time: it’s a place you go to look back and get a longer perspective, maybe even to receive some kind of revelation, but you still have an everyday life to return to, back in the city or the village. That’s what I enjoy about this friendship and collaboration with STEALTH – and joy is a word that should be mentioned here, you know! I still remember the night we were first brought together for dinner by a mutual friend and we laughed so much all night we said, we have to do this again tomorrow, and we did. That’s how we got tangled up with each other.

    Now, tracing our tangled trajectories across these past eight years – you bouncing between cities, me wandering up and down a mountain of words – I see two stories that we seem to have in common. The first is spatial, the second temporal.

    The spatial story concerns a negotiation between the edges and the centre. I need to be careful how I say this, because we have all been told about the way that whatever is edgy, new, avant-garde gets metabolised, made palatable, made marketable and becomes the next iteration of the centre. That’s the story of selling out, or buying in: the great morality tale of counterculture.

    The story I’m trying to tell, here – the one I say we have in common – starts with the claim that the centre as we know it is already ruined beyond saving. This is what I see in that image of the burnt-out architecture faculty in Delft in ARCHIPHOENIX. In the manifesto that Paul and I wrote, we speak about this: “None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists…” And then we ask, “What would happen if we looked down?” What if we admit that the centre is already a burnt-out ruin? Might we need to ask ourselves what it is, exactly, that is doomed: what version of ourselves, what set of things (structures, institutions, customs) with which we have identified?

    If this is the kind of mess we’re in, then the challenge for those of us at the edges is neither to retain our countercultural purity, nor to negotiate good terms on which to cash in with a centre that is already collapsing – nor even to try to shore that centre up and prevent its collapse (too late!) – but to offer something that could take its place.

    “Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of the things,” writes Paul Kingsnorth, my co-founder in Dark Mountain, in late 2016. “Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it. In the old stories, people from the edges of things brought ideas and understandings from the forest back in the kingdom which the kingdom could not generate by itself.”

    The arrival at the centre of a figure from the edges is the opening move in many an old story. But the negotiation cannot set anything in motion, so long as the pretence is maintained that business can go on as usual, that a return to normal is on the cards.

    So when STEALTH asks how those practices which already showcase possible directions could be “made to work… on a scale that answers the challenges ahead?”, what is in question is not ‘scaling up’ for the sake of profitability, but what might take the place where the centre used to be. How do we find ways of going on making things work when – as in The Report – the all-powerful operating system breaks down. Like Anna Tsing, we are looking for the possibilities of life within capitalist ruins.

    “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world, full stop,” we write, on the last page of the manifesto. The ruins are not the end of the story. Ecologically, the species present (our species included) go on improvising ways of living together, even with all the damage. There are things to be done: salvage work, grief work, the work of remembering and picking up the dropped threads.

    This is where we slip from the spatial to the temporal. What is at stake in the temporal story is how we find leverage on the dead centre of the present. Not so long ago, the future served as a point of leverage: a place from which to open up a gap between how things happen to be just now and how they might be. That gap was charged with possibility.

    Here I think of the work of Tor Lindstrand, to whom you introduced me in that project in Tensta, ‘Haunted by the Shadows of the Future’. He tells the story of the disappearance of the future in urban planning: the evaporation of any vision or belief in the possibility that things could be different, as the development of cities is subsumed into the operation of the market and marketed with bland identikit images and words. The role of financialisation in this reminds me of William Davies’ description of the consequences of monetary policy under
    neoliberalism:

    The problem with viewing the future as territory to be plundered is that eventually we all have to live there. And if, once there, finding it already plundered, we do the same thing again, we enter a vicious circle. We decline to treat the future as a time when things might be different, with yet to be imagined technologies, institutions and opportunities. The control freaks in finance aren’t content to sit and wait for the future to arrive on its own terms, but intend to profit from it and parcel it out, well before the rest of us have got there.

    If the future is already plundered – and if, as Dark Mountain points out, the consequences of related kinds of plundering for the ecological fabric stand in the way of any revival of the confident future of modernity – how else can we open up that gap in which the possibility of change, the non-inevitability of present conditions, can be located?

    The great improvisation teacher Keith Johnstone says that, when telling a story, you shouldn’t worry about what’s coming next: you should be like a person walking backwards, looking out for the chance to weave back in one of the threads from earlier in the story. We move through time backwards, like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’: we cannot go back and fix the mistakes of the past, but at least it is there for us to see, in a way that was never true of the future. Ivan Illich writes of ‘the mirror of the past’: if we look carefully into it, without falling into romanticism and without dismissing it as simply a poorer version of the present, then the past too can serve as a source for a sense of possibility. In a time of endings, one of the forms of possibility it offers is the dropped threads of earlier endings – the way of life which is now falling into ruin was built among the ruins of earlier ways of life.

    I see this as central to the method by which you seek to build possible futures, in Bordeaux and Vienna, in Rotterdam and Belgrade, and elsewhere. I remember sitting in a seminar room in Gothenburg as you showed us images of that mutual aid society in the Netherlands in the 1860s, created by workers to build their own homes. A trajectory can be traced from this initiative to the grander state projects for welfare of the mid-20th century, to the hollowing out of those projects under the neoliberal period of marketisation, to the crisis of 2008 in which they are revealed as ruins. Even as you go about improvising practical strategies to bring these ruins to life, you are always looking back to the beginnings of the story and asking what has been lost or written out, in the way that it has been told.

    In THE REPORT, you reveal the pattern by which the role of bottom-up initiatives in the building of the city have been written out of Vienna’s story. What emerges from these researches and the future narratives which they inform is the realisation that, in many parts of Europe, the achievements of social democracy were born out of movements which looked far more like anarcho-syndicalism than those who later consolidated these achievements into top-down state systems would be willing to admit.

    Those movements were born out of necessity, operating within the ruins of the commons, devastated by the early phases of industrial capitalism; now, after 40 years of neoliberalism, as we look for ways to operate within the ruins of the welfare societies of the 20th century, their histories can help us open the gap between how things are and how they might be.

    We meet in the conviction that telling stories is not just a way of passing the time, but the way that we find our bearings in the world. A story opens a space of possibility into which we can invite others and when the work of building new projects among the ruins is at its hardest, when we wonder if it is worth going on, it is by retelling the stories that we connect ourselves to the past and the future, place ourselves within time. The right story, told from the heart, can be the difference between going on and giving up.

    First published in Upscaling, Training, Commoning (Jovis, 2018), a book by the Dutch-Serbian architecture duo STEALTH.unlimited.

  • The Consequences of Unacknowledged Loss

    The village is full of memories, scenes that loop in the minds of these four characters, setting in motion the events of Mayfly. In lots of other ways, the village is empty: there are no kids anymore, the pub is closing down, the pigs on the farm were sold off years ago.

    As I start to list these losses, I hear another voice, a memory from somewhere else: ‘Surely you agree that it’s a good thing that we don’t all have to work on the land anymore?’

    It was New Year’s Eve, a long way to go till midnight, and the conversation had taken a wrong turning. I’d made the mistake of trying to explain the book that I was writing. It made no sense to him: how could I not see that history was headed in the right direction? He had a PhD in political science and a job in a government ministry. From where we were sitting, in a desirable neighbourhood of a European capital city, the arc of progress looked obvious and undeniable.

    I thought of an afternoon, ten years earlier, when I’d sat at the kitchen table of a farmhouse in South Yorkshire. The press release that brought me there was cheerily worded, sent out by an organisation that gave out grants to support rural entrepreneurship. The producer thought it would make a piece for the Saturday breakfast show: ‘Meet the farmer who’s swapped cows for cats!’ His wife showed me round the new cattery, a holiday home for the pets of nearby townies, but as we arrived in the kitchen, I was faced with a man in deep grief. When the dairy herd had gone, the silence nearly killed him. The farm that had been his life was an empty shell. For a month, he said, he couldn’t sleep indoors: the only thing that worked was to go out and lie on the grass.

    History is an accumulation of changes, playing out through lifetimes and across generations. Among them, there are changes which no sane person would wish away: who wants to forego antibiotics or anaesthetic dentistry? We could each add to that list. History is made up of gains as well as losses. Sometimes it is easy to say which is which. Sometimes it depends on where you’re sitting.

    There is a dream of a standpoint from which it would be possible to settle the accounts of history, to weigh all these gains and losses against each other, to say whether we are up or down from year to year. No such standpoint exists. Even where we agree on the gains and losses, they do not balance like numbers in a table. For the purposes of national population statistics, the death of your father and the birth of your son may cancel each other out, but this statistical fact bears no relation to the reality which you or anyone will experience.

    Just now, we seem to be dealing with the consequences of a great deal of unacknowledged loss. For years, the number of people whose experience bore little relation to the stories of progress told by politicians had been growing. When surveys showed rising fears for the future, these were reported with barely concealed scorn, for the long-term trends in GDP showed the slow miracle of economic growth to be unstoppable. When loss goes ungrieved, it doesn’t go away, it festers. Out of this may come dark eruptions, events declared impossible by people with PhDs in political science, sitting in the desirable neighbourhoods of capital cities.

    That New Year’s conversation took place on the last evening of 2015. Twelve months later, maybe it would have had a different flavour. We have seen the rise of political movements which appeal to an imagined past, promising to recover a lost greatness. Against this, there are those who want to double down on progress. Public intellectuals publish books the size of bricks which prove with statistics that things have never been better. Others acknowledge that something has gone badly wrong and ask how we can recover the kind of collective faith in the future which took men to the moon and built the welfare state.

    Well, perhaps another attitude is called for. Perhaps we need room to do the work of grieving. Not to write off the losses of the past, nor to romanticise them. Not to pretend that they can be recovered. Grief changes us, calls our stories into question. It can sharpen our sense of what matters. The journey it leads us on is seldom pretty, but it cannot be headed off with calls to optimism, or cost-benefit analyses proving our losses are outweighed within the greater scheme of things.

    There is plenty of loss in the village where we find ourselves. It can take people to the edge of humiliation, or self-destruction, or mistaken identity. But none of this need be the end of the story.


    First published in the programme for the Orange Tree Theatre production of Joe White’s Mayfly.

  • It’s Time to Start a School

    An hour’s drive northwest from here, you take a turning off the two-lane highway, near the bottom of a steep hill. After that, you’re on an unpaved road, heading into the woods. At first, there are red wooden houses dotted to either side, but then the scattered township thins out and for the last couple of miles, there’s just you and the trees, a glimpse of lake somewhere off to the left, and this single-track road.

    I’m doing my best, but it’s hard to reproduce the unexpectedness of what comes next. When I bring people here, however much I’ve told them, there’s always an audible expression of amazement as we round the last corner and this huge white Bauhaus structure comes inexplicably into view. It gets better, because as we park and climb out, the newcomers peer through the glass in disbelief, starting to make out a building within a building: the old red wooden schoolhouse, two storeys high, which served as the first home for the gang of theatremakers who dreamed this madness into being, still stands where it always did, inside one wing of the new structure.

    Back in November, the day after I turned forty, this is where we came. Eight grownups and two small kids, cars slithering down the icy road: a little gang of friends and collaborators who had taken up my invitation to spend a weekend at the impossible theatre in the woods, thinking about the years ahead and what we might do together.

    The idea didn’t arrive while we were out there – they keep their own time, ideas like this, and mostly they show up sometime after you let go of your expectations, really let them go, with no promise that anything will come along to take their place. You have to give up. And then, if you’re lucky, something shows up, and it doesn’t look like what you were expecting, but maybe it is the thing you didn’t know you were looking for.

    So yeah, something showed up. In the days afterwards, nurtured in conversations around our kitchen table, an idea took shape. And here it is – it’s time to start a school.

    This year, Anna and I are starting a school together. It’s a school called HOME, a school for culturemakers. Over the past few months, we’ve been figuring out how to talk about it, starting to tackle the practicalities – and today it’s time to share where we’ve got to and make an invitation.

    Here’s one way that we talk about it:

    HOME is a school where we study the mess the world is in, not as a set of discrete problems to be solved, but as a tangled and humbling predicament.

    We follow the roots of this predicament deep into history, uncovering the buried assumptions which have shaped our ways of seeing and being in the world, catching sight of the possibilities those assumptions hid from view.

    We learn from artists, philosophers, community builders, improvisors, historians and poets. Looking for a term to bridge these worlds, we call ourselves a school for culturemakers. We cultivate the art of invitation, hospitality and friendship, finding here the seeds of other ways of being human together.

    It starts quite simply with a one-week course this summer. The course will run from 4-8 June in the village of Ängelsberg, a couple of hours train ride west of Stockholm. I’ll be teaching alongside my friend Andrew Taggart, a practical philosopher who weaves webs of conversation, enquiring into the gaps within our present ways of life. We’re calling the course Finding Our Way Home and it starts with a question: ‘What if the culture you grew up in was broken in ways that you didn’t even have words for?’

    We’ve already taken a few bookings before we got as far as launching a website, but today the site is launched and open for enquiries. You can read the rest of the invitation that we’ve made – and, given that the last residential course I taught sold out with two months to go, should you find that the invitation speaks to you, then I’d encourage you to send us an enquiry without delay.

    Meanwhile, in the spirit of these letters, I want to head a little deeper into the woods, to think aloud about what it means to start a school, where this has come from and where it might be heading – and, for those with long memories, to say a word or two about that time when I was going to start a university.

    There are books that matter to you immensely at a certain moment in your life and a few years later you can hardly remember why – and then there are pieces of writing, often no more than a few lines, that you know you’d carry with you to the ends of the world. One of mine is a passage from The Cultivation of Conspiracy, an address given by Ivan Illich in Bremen in 1998. He is looking back on the places of convivial learning that he had created with his friends over the previous forty years – from a ‘thinkery’ in a one-room shack on a Puerto Rican hillside, to the Centre for Intercultural Documentation at Cuernavaca, Mexico, to the hospitable household at Kreftingstraße, where on Fridays after Illich’s lectures the spaghetti bowl would feed two dozen guests around the table, with sometimes more spilling out to sit on the Mexican rugs in the next room. In all of these places, he says, they have sought to foster a particular atmosphere:

    Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.

    I’ve carried those lines for years, like a navigational instrument, looking for the places which have that atmosphere, seeking to cultivate it in the spaces where I’ve worked. So when I think about what it means to start a school, it doesn’t start with a course or a curriculum or a building, but with the way of being together that Illich is talking about.

    There are people whose work you discover at the right moment. The year I discovered Illich, I was twenty-five and I’d just walked out on what looked like the beginnings of a successful career at the BBC. I’ve heard stories like this often enough now to know the pattern: sometimes you have to give up, to turn down the offer no sensible person would refuse, to walk away without any explanations that will satisfy your friends’ parents or your parents’ friends, because that’s the price of entry to a different kind of life. At the time, all I knew was that I’d exchanged a staff job in the newsroom for temping in warehouses and call centres, a new sense of freedom, and the realisation that the university careers service didn’t have any lives my shape. If I wasn’t going to contort myself into one of the careers on offer, I would have to make a life of my own. 

    Books were my friends that year and I read with a focus that surpassed anything I’d had as a student at Oxford. I was reading for my life and the writers I discovered became my companions.

    Four years down the road, I would travel to Cuernavaca, to a gathering of Illich’s friends and collaborators, where the atmosphere he spoke about in Bremen still lingered in the late night conversations. I remember sharing a taxi through the city with one of them, Carl Mitcham, and telling him that I was working on an internet startup inspired by Deschooling Society. At this, he burst out laughing. ‘I remember Ivan telling me, “People are saying I invented this internet!” The thought was enough to make him throw up his hands in horror!’

    School of Everything – the startup I co-founded in 2006 – took its inspiration from Illich and the ‘free universities’ of the late 1960s, but the path it went down was summed up by Cory Doctorow, who wrote that we were building ‘the eBay for learning’. What’s strange is that we knew better. The five of us who started it had met in a room where learning was understood as a matter of relations, not transactions. It was one of a series of such rooms, spaces with names like the University of Openness, the Temporary School of Thought and the Really Free School. On a good day, they too had that atmosphere, and they were spaces in which people seemed to come alive.

    Out of those experiences came a desire for something more-than-temporary. And I had been learning the art of talking projects into reality: after School of Everything, I started Spacemakers, and the same year, Paul and I launched Dark Mountain. I’d grasped something about how to tell a big story and invite people to step inside that story and make it real together. I was just past thirty, and making up for lost time, running off the raw red energy that comes with discovering your own abilities. I didn’t know much yet about limits, or about failure.

    So in the early spring of 2011, I threw out my biggest story yet. First on the internet, and then in talks at places like the Royal Society of Arts and TEDx London, I asked for help to start a new kind of university. I’d pulled off enough wild schemes by then that people gave me a hearing, and all kinds of conversations and connections came about as a result – but as summer turned to autumn, the plan unravelled, while the pace at which I’d been living finally caught up with me. Within a year, I would leave London.

    It was a humbling time. Soon after I arrived in Sweden, I remember my old friend Charlie Davies – he was the one who had brought together the temporary school where the founders of School of Everything first met – handing me a small coin, looking me in the eye, and saying, ‘I give you failure.’ There are journeys for which no other currency is taken.

    The luckiest stroke I ever had was that, just as my London life fell to pieces, I met someone who could see past the mess I was in and who chose to make a life with me. Anna and I had been travelling different routes, but steering by the same stars. In her case, the route had led from connecting cultural foundations around Europe, to setting up children’s libraries in the Middle East and supporting women’s organisations in Israel and Palestine. At the heart of it was a commitment to conviviality: her tiny flat in Stockholm was dominated by a table large enough to seat fourteen; the wall between the kitchen and the bedroom had been taken down to make room for it.

    As I said goodbye to London, having given up on the idea of starting some kind of university, I remember an unfamiliar sensation of patience. Whatever mattered about that idea would come back in a different form when the time was right.

    If the time seems right now, that’s firstly because I’m not doing it alone. Over the past six years, Anna and I have made a home together that is a place of friendship, hospitality and intercultural encounter. We knew from the start that we wanted to make a wider invitation and create a shared foundation for our work. In the idea of a school called HOME, that intention has found its form.

    Then it’s because I have things to teach. Looking back, those earlier free universities and temporary schools were a source of fellowship, a meeting point for an invisible college in which I found my contemporaries – and bringing people together like that still feels vital. But in the past couple of years, I’ve found that the teaching I do is moving to the heart of my work. Walking into a room, sharing stories and ways of thinking that I’ve found helpful, letting the questions that follow lead us deeper. (As I write this, I remember a recent visit to the Kaospilots school in Aarhus, Denmark: for a month afterwards, most days my phone would ping with mails and messages from students who had been in that room, still resonating with the ideas we’d talked about.) So I want to create the conditions where I can do that well.

    Finally, the time seems right because I’ve come to see another way of making projects happen. Sometimes telling the biggest story you can and getting hundreds or thousands of people to step inside it is the way to go – but the best work often happens more quietly. I’m prouder of the West Norwood Feast, the community-owned streetmarket that Spacemakers helped start in south London, than the project that we did at Brixton Village, which is the one that got all the attention.

    For several years now, I’ve been teaching residential courses at places like Schumacher College, so the first step in starting this school is to take that kind of course and organise it on our own terms.

    Beyond that, Anna and I are inspired by the example of small schools that offer longer programmes – places like the Westcountry School of Myth and Story, run by our friend Martin Shaw, or Stephen Jenkinson’s School of Orphan Wisdom. So before long, we want to create something along those lines, making an invitation to be part of a learning community that comes together several times a year.

    In the longer-term, our intention is to find a permanent location, a place we can call home in all senses of the word, with the further possibilities that would offer. A few years from now, I’d love to be holding a yearly summer school, a little like what I’ve heard tell of the summers in Cuernavaca, half a century ago. 

    In the meantime, we’ve found a beautiful setting in which to get started, working with a family-run hostel in Ängelsberg. It’s a village of 150 people with its own railway station, there’s a lakeside sauna and all the other things you’d want in Sweden with midsummer around the corner. And going by the first few people who are on board, it will be quite a special gang that gathers there this June.

    There was a time when I was launching projects left, right and centre – throwing out ideas, some of which took on a life of their own, while others left no trace. Writing this, I realise that it’s been a while since I launched something new, and rarely have I put as much of my heart into a project as with this little idea for a school.

    It won’t be a school of everything, and it doesn’t promise to reinvent the university. We’re not out to build a grand highway to the future. This is a little road heading into the woods. Maybe you will join us on that road. I hope so.


    Published as Issue 16 of Crossed Lines, my occasional email newsletter, to mark the launch of a school called HOME.

  • Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    Seeing in the Dark: A Tribute to John Berger

    The news came last thing at night. Next morning, the loss lay quietly over everything, like a fall of snow. John Berger, who once wrote that all storytellers are Death’s secretaries, had died.

    Storyteller was what he liked to be called, a term that could stretch to take in the many roles he played. Among them, the role of thinker. He thought through stories. He was a thinker who wrote from the heart, who refused the separation between heart and head that runs deep in the dominant culture against which he fought with every sentence. One of his last books takes the form of a dialogue with the 17th century philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, to whose work he had been drawn as a young man on account of ‘his rejection of the Cartesian division between the physical and the spiritual, between body and soul.

    With words he made spaces into which the reader could enter. All writers do this, but he was more aware of it than most, because he started as a painter. Handled with skill, paint opens out beyond the two dimensions of the canvas. In his hands, the linearity of the written word deepened into a space to be inhabited, a space in which you could find shelter. Like many others, I found shelter in his words.

    After his death, his friend Anthony Barnett wrote: ‘He ended a form of isolation in many he never met.’ Strictly speaking, this is true; at least, it was my experience. I was twenty-five. I’d just walked away from the beginnings of a career at the BBC. When The Shape of a Pocket landed in my hands one lunchtime in a bookshop in south London, it read like a letter from the wiser friend I badly needed. Yet we did meet — and not only that one time, years later, at the British Library, but many times, and I know I am not alone in this experience: his books were places where we met. They were shaped by the commitment to hospitality which was central to his way of being in the world. This is why the grief feels so personal: we have lost someone we knew and felt known by, someone whose generosity touched our lives.

    Writing this, I catch myself hesitating between ‘we’ and ‘I’. There are writers you meet at the right time in your life, books that you find at a crossroads.(‘This is a book about keeping rendezvous,’ Berger wrote. ‘The ones I failed to keep are another story.’) I know that I do not speak for myself alone, but also that my experience is not everyone’s. In particular, I wonder how differently those who know Berger only or mainly through his most famous work — the TV series and the book of Ways of Seeing, the Booker-winning G.— encounter him? Watching him on camera in that famous shirt, or in the scene where he has invited a group of women to discuss the female figure in art, for all that he may have grasped the insights of feminism, there is something of the playboy to him, an echo of the seducer at the centre of that novel. Soon afterwards, this was gone.

    Both the novel and the series were made in 1972. A year later, he came to settle in the village of Quincy in the Haute Savoie. His neighbours were among the last generation of peasants in western Europe. For the next forty years, he lived and worked alongside them, bearing witness to their way of living. He did so with an unmistakeable respect, as unable to romanticise the hardships of their lives as he was unwilling to accept the categories through which the world at large would see them. Much changed in his work from that point. The nature of this change was not a turning away — ‘Yes, I’m still amongst other things a Marxist,’ he could write in 2005, still true to the pledge made in the title of his first collection, Permanent Red — but a deepening, hinted at in those ‘other things’.

    He belonged to that generation of European intellectuals who were in their late thirties or early forties in 1968. Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Lyotard: all of them were born between 1924 and 1930. As much as any of them, Berger’s work was shaped by the events with which that year became synonymous:

    In 1968, hopes, nurtured more or less underground for years, were born in several places in the world and given their names: and in the same year, these hopes were categorically defeated. This became clearer in retrospect. At the time many of us tried to shield ourselves from the harshness of this truth. — Ernst Fischer: A Philosopher and Death (1974)

    The work of coming to terms with that historical disappointment was the context within which what we think of as postmodernism took shape. Struggling with the esoteric idiolects of its major theorists, the uninitiated reader may suspect that she is swimming through clouds of intellectual squid ink, thrown up as they made their retreat from the streets to the seminar room. If this is not entirely fair, still the contrast to the hospitable quality of Berger’s prose is striking. He wrote with a desire to be understood.

    He did his thinking through stories. It would never have occurred to him to construct an explicit architecture of theory, though he referred with appreciation to the work of others who did just that. Still, among the many ways of seeing Berger, I find it helpful to see him as a postmodernist, albeit of a different type. Running through his later work is a careful attempt to disentangle the ethical commitments of his Marxism from the logic of progress and the historical optimism of modernity, and to re-entangle it with a vernacular metaphysics, tested against the hard experience of life on the wrong side of the walls that divide the world. There is a universality to this writing, but it is arrived at through a grounding in place, the particular soil of Quincy, which he called ‘my university’. He did his thinking around the kitchen table or in the cowshed, rather than the seminar room, and this is why his work seems to belong within the category which Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash proposed in the title of their 1998 book, Grassroots Postmodernism: the search for routes out of the dead end of modernity, not as a theoretical exercise, but a matter of life and death, among the billions of people whose ways of living are subject to ongoing processes of so-called modernisation.

    When I arrived in Mexico in 2011, I found that his book on migrant workers in Europe — written in the mid-1970s — had just been translated and published there in Spanish; its account of the migrant experience spoke directly to those away in the North and to the families they had left behind. The morning after we heard the news of his death, my partner’s Facebook feed was full of tributes from friends in Palestine. Few European thinkers of our time have mattered more to people on the wrong side of history’s walls.

    His death comes at a time when the world seems to be darkening. There is much in his work that can help us learn to see in the dark. I think of the speech he gave to fellow members of the Transnational Institute in the early 1980s:

    Suppose… that we are not living in a world in which it is possible to construct something approaching heaven-on-earth, but, on the contrary are living in a world whose nature is far closer to that of hell. What difference would this make to any single one of our political or moral choices? All that would have changed would be the enormity of our hopes and finally the bitterness of our disappointments. — Leopardi (1983)

    At a time when many on the left seem to insist that there can be no sense of belonging or commitment to place which does not darken into blood-and-soil fascism, his example shows that this is false — though his insistence on hospitality challenges those who are trying to articulate the importance of place and belonging to do so without sliding into the mentality of the wall-builders. Meanwhile, the kindness which everyone who knew him remembers, and which shines through his writing, challenges us to find less destructive modes of expression than the culture of performative indignation that pervades the space of political conversation in the age of Twitter. And when despair closes in, when the struggle to make sense of the world seems lost, I will find myself going back to his words, to passages like the one that closes his essay on Leopardi:

    The production of reality has never been finished, its outcome has never been made decisive. Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.


    That afternoon, it began to snow. I sat down to write to a friend who had been working closely with him over the last few years. I wrote of the sense of a great debt, one that could never be repaid — and then the realisation that what we received from him had never been meant as a loan, but as a gift. What a lifetime of generosity. How lucky we were.


    Published in Contemporary Theatre Review: Volume 27, Issue 3.

  • Where the Words Run Out

    There is no such thing as standing, there is only being held up.

    – Franz Rosenzweig

    A small audience sits scattered across a large auditorium at Chalmers University. The first thing we do is to invite them to move to the front, so that we can be closer to each other.

    ‘Thank you,’ I tell them. ‘You didn’t have to do that – and you did it.’

    Where the Words Run Out is an experiment, a performance for two dancers and a writer running out of words, an improvisation that leads into a conversation.

    It came about thanks to a chain of serendipitous encounters which became friendships. First, with the historian of ideas, Per Johansson (responsible for this Swedish-language podcast), who I met five years earlier in another auditorium in Gothenburg, the first time I went to speak at FSCONS, the annual Nordic hacker convention. He tells the story of our meeting here.

    It was Per who introduced the dancer and choreographer Emelie Enlund to the Dark Mountain manifesto – and she took that text and ran with it, developing a whole practice of ‘uncivilised dance’. The most recent manifestation of that was the show We Love Holocene IV at Dansens Hus, Stockholm, back in April.

    Sara Rousta and Alexander Dam were two of the dancers in that show. Back home in Gothenburg, where she is completing her final year of high school, Sara had got involved in organising the AHA! festival of science and art.

    ‘I’ve got a couple of ideas,’ Sara said on the phone. ‘We could get you here to do a keynote – or maybe you could collaborate with me and Alex on some kind of performance?’

    That’s how we got here, on the stage. I’m talking about what I’ve learned, working with writers and artists, about the role that culture might yet play under the shadow of climate change. I’m used to talking without notes, I can always pull in a line or a story that will keep things going, but this afternoon is different – when I feel the thread slipping, that I’m starting to use the words to hold a distance between myself and what I’m talking about, then I let myself come to a halt. Hold the silence, long enough that it moves beyond any discomfort. At some point, I can feel movement starting up behind me, as Alex and Sara pick up the thread.

    The theme of this year’s festival is ‘autonomy’ and that sent me back to those words of Franz Rosenzweig, from a letter to Ilse Hahn:

    You know, you needn’t feel bad because you lack the power to ‘tell yourself the whole truth’, for once, for your own good. Believe me, no man has this power; no man can help himself.

    As a writer, there is a temptation to take on the role of the lone truth-teller. The actual work of writing takes place, after all, in solitude. And one thing I’ve come to see through working with hundreds of writers, artists and performers is that the artistic duty – in so much as such a word makes sense at all – is a duty to whatever is missing from the ‘social truth’, whatever is obscured by the ways of seeing the world which are currently dominant (or simply taken for granted) in the neighbourhood in which you find yourself working. This is what makes art such an unreliable tool for all the socially-useful tasks it gets called upon to perform. There is something marginal – and potentially isolating – about such an artistic calling. Yet I find myself uneasy with the way that this is stretched by the romantic idea of the artist or the writer which still haunts us. It puts too more weight on the individual than any of us can bear.

    This is where Rosenzweig’s words come back to me, gently mocking our tendency to claim the mantle of the lone truth-teller. The world is full of people who ‘try to make themselves believe’ that they can tell themselves the whole truth, he goes on, but ‘they succeed no better than Münchausen did when he tried to pull himself out of the mire by the scruff of his neck.’

    In the moment when I sit at my desk, writing these words, I may be the only bodily presence in the room; yet I find it a relief to be reminded that ‘you never think alone’. As Sara Wolcott put it the other day, describing a conversation in her kitchen in New York:

    While only two of us physically sat at the table as the sky turned from dark purple to a luminescent, turquoise blue, we were and we are […] surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, spirits and living memories. Let none of us make the mistake to think that when we think, we only think alone. For we are informed in so many ways by so many people. We are shaped today by communities of disparate time and space.

    What I love about working with people like Alex and (the other) Sara, who work with such different skills and practices, is the possibility of seeing in each other’s blindspots. Dancers are, in my experience, less prone to the lone truth-teller fantasy than writers. And Rosenzweig’s images are splendidly physical and embodied, making a good starting point for a collaboration such as ours.

    The hour that the three of spend on stage together seems to pass before we have noticed. By the end, we are sitting with the audience, moving in and out of silence, as they bring their own words to what has become a conversation.

    AHA! festival gave us the chance to try out this work – and based on the warmth of the response it received and how much we enjoyed working together, we’ll be looking for the opportunity to develop it further in 2018.

  • Believing in Holidays: A Conversation with Elizabeth Slade

    Believing in Holidays: A Conversation with Elizabeth Slade

    An extract from ‘The God-Shaped Hole’ by Elizabeth Slade

    We sit on cushions in a circle, about 25 of us surrounding one lit candle. Each of us is invited to place a personal object in the middle. Some put jewellery, a hat, a piece of quartz. I stay still, very conscious of being in a minority: not wearing yoga pants, not barefoot, no piercings or tattoos. I’m wearing a top from Whistles, for fuck’s sake.

    I feel the stiffening in my shoulders as a wave of discomfort passes over me. My cheeks flush with embarrassment – what would the me of just a few years ago have made of this situation?

    Now, I’m able to notice the discomfort, let it go (mostly), or just be OK with noticing it. I know that through the discomfort the good stuff lies. I notice my desire to stay in a safe, practical, intellectual, rigid, mask-wearing state, and I gently try to put these elements down.

    The work involves sharing meaningful personal stories with each other. Gazing into the eyes of strangers. Exploring political issues that we care deeply about and retelling them from different personal angles. We’re firmly in the emotional and out of the intellectual.

    This is London, days after the Grenfell Tower fire. Everyone has a lot of pain.

    And when the workshop is over, back in the circle around the candle and altar of objects, we all feel connected. It’s like our hearts are bigger than they were at the start. There is an undeniable connection between all people, all life. Afterwards, it occurs to me that this is the third role of the sacred: between the sky of possibility and the ground of being held, to encourage the felt knowledge of connection.

    When big events come, a hunger for connection breaks the surface of our current way of living. I remember the 7/7 bombings in London back in 2005, long before I had any interest in the sacred. That sunny day, after news of what happened spread, everyone left work early to slowly make their way home and it was inarguably apparent that we’d all go to the pub. I look at something I wrote back then: ‘In earlier days (or in America), people would have gathered their families together and prayed. In London, we got our mates together and drank.’ It was a kind of communion, I guess.

    Last November, on the day we learnt that Donald Trump was going to be president, my minister opened the church for the evening. About fifteen of us sat in candlelight and shared how we felt, and a violinist played exactly the right music, and we wept. Brits, Americans, people in their twenties and their eighties, all feeling the need to be together.

    On days like that, people recognise the need to be close to others, to gather together while they’re hurting or scared, for their emotions to be held in the right way, whether oiled by beer, or by candlelight and violin and the work of an experienced minister. It feels like a very basic human thing, so I assume we had the words for it long before the language of church.

    A conversation

    DH – What you’re saying in the piece is that, until the last fifty or sixty years, in our part of the world, it was very normal that lots of people were part of a local church. That was part of the fabric of society, and it went away pretty quickly. And maybe we haven’t got the measure of some of what was lost, things that aren’t necessarily to do with your big cosmic beliefs about the Universe, but about some basic human needs. You draw on your own experiences with new kinds of non-religious gathering spaces like Sunday Assembly, as well as your local Unitarian church, where the minister is an atheist who used to be a scientist at MIT – but you’re also looking at it from the perspective of the work you’ve done with public health?

    ES – Absolutely. So some of the work that I’ve done has been around the limitations of the health care system. You know, if you’ve broken a leg or something, it’s really well geared-up to treat you. But doctors have known for a long time that so much of what makes us healthy happens outside of biomedical health. It’s more to do with how we live – and that’s so much more than just, take more exercise, stop smoking, don’t eat as many doughnuts! We can live in ways that create health and that has a lot to do with how we live in our communities and the sense of purpose that we have in our lives. All those things that are not well provided for either by the state or the market. And right now, we can’t see what we’re missing, because there’s been this sort of generational gap there. There’s not a lot of common language to talk about these aspects of our lives.

    DH – You’ve been thinking about the role of serving a community that might have been played once upon a time by somebody who wore a strange collar and stood up in front of a building full of people on a Sunday morning. And it’s not necessarily a desire to herd everybody back into churches that you’re talking about, but a sense that there is a role there that we need in other ways and haven’t necessarily got good at recovering?

    ES – Yeah, definitely. And the language does get in the way and I’m really conscious that I use a lot of church-based language which to a lot of people is either alien or meaningless. But yes, there is a kind of role of ministry. I don’t think there’s an appetite in our culture to have someone who stands up in front and has all the answers – I think there’s something a bit repulsive about that idea – but we can be equipped to support each other, to be each other’s ministers and spiritual guides and help each other through life. And people are doing that, but it’s not yet a role that’s really valued in our culture. It’s not really something that’s seen. So you know, back when I went into the church for the first time, I didn’t feel: oh, I really need some kind of counsel from a minister. I didn’t really know what it was I wanted, I just had a sense of a gap, but it feels like it would be a hugely valuable thing if it was like, oh, I need a bit of guidance – I need to go and speak to someone who is in one of these community leadership roles with certain skills and knowledge. It would be good if we had some understanding, some way of talking about this, as a culture.

    DH – It strikes me there are skills that in other times and places would have been regarded as something that you spent twenty years of your life learning how to do, before you were let loose as somebody could practice, where now we think you can go on a few weekend courses and get a certificate that allows you to sell your services – and that’s true whether we’re talking about some of the things that go under the name of ‘hosting’ and ‘facilitation’ these days, or whether we talk about some of the more New Age spiritual services that are on offer. So I wonder, without simply copying and pasting from the way things have been done in the past or in other cultures, how do we home in on a less flimsy way of dealing with these parts of being human?

    ES – Thinking about the health care example, there’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years, reminding nurses and doctors alike, ‘Oh, we should be caring and compassionate.’ And you know a lot of people go into those roles because they are caring and compassionate – but actually, if the culture of the organisation loses its way and focuses on the hard clinical outcomes and the costs and all of that stuff and forgets ‘Oh, we’re here to be caring and compassionate’, then you have to remind people to do it. And so, in this sort of new, post-church spiritual world, there’s a sense of there not being much of an appetite for dogma. You don’t really want to say, ‘Oh yes, we all believe this, we all believe the same thing and these are the rules.’ But there is a danger of exploitation, people using powerful tools and techniques from the world of the sacred for their own gain, or just using them clumsily.

    DH – We’ve been talking about how removed our culture has become from the experience of what you’re saying the church, at its best, used to provide. But there’s also a rediscovery going on in lots of places of what you might call the technology of the sacred – ritual, the mountaintop experience, the things that take you to those wild beautiful moments of meaning – which is often drawing on knowledge and practice that has existed within religious or spiritual cultural traditions. Maybe it’s tempting for us, as these things are being rediscovered, to focus on these ecstatic experiences?

    ES – Yeah and you can see why, because it feels like that’s where the action’s happening. It’s exciting to be part of a ritual where you enter a different world for a little while and you know that the people around you are also entering that different world, that different mind-set, for a little while. And all of that stuff is hugely valuable – and still I think it’s a very tiny slice of the whole picture and actually the value is much more in the slow, gentle, day-to-day engagement with the sacred. Which can’t be these euphoric experiences, you know. You can’t have Christmas every day.

    DH – You can’t live on a mountaintop. You go there to spend four days in retreat and have a powerful experience, but you still come back, hopefully to somewhere more sheltered.

    ES – If the thing that you’re looking for is the euphoric experience and you’re looking to find it in a way that fits your everyday life in a sustainable way, I don’t believe that’s possible. So it’s more about accepting the slow and gentle, day-to-day, and having the things in your life that make that sustainable. Rather than just like, oh, if I can just get through to Christmas, then I can get through all of this difficult stuff that I know I’ve got on, but you know, just around the next corner, I’ll be OK. A lot of our culture at the moment is – oh, get through to your next holiday, get through to the weekend. You know, wait till you get home and you can have a glass of wine. And yeah, I guess I was totally in that pattern of living, pre-church, and I’m not entirely not within that pattern of living now, I guess! But I totally see that those bits of cultural infrastructure that you can bring into your day-to-day, just help us cope with this brilliance of being human so much better. Because it feels like we’re missing a lot of the sort of struts and supports that would really help us, I guess, stay level.

    DH – Where I’m sitting, it’s also about coping with – or just not cutting ourselves off from – some of the darkness of what it means to be living at this moment. Living with the paradox that our ways of life are tangled up with processes that we’ve set in motion that are making it hard to imagine that we’ll be able to go on living like this – you know, it’s hard to imagine that this is going to be made sustainable. And at the same time, as you describe it, there’s a lot within even the privileged, successful version of that way of life which is not worthy of being sustained. Because living for the weekend, living for the next holiday, that doesn’t seem much like making a good job of being a culture.

    ES – Exactly, it’s just deferring, isn’t it? It’s like, we don’t believe in heaven anymore, but we do believe in holidays.


    Published on Dark Mountain’s Online Edition to accompany the release of SANCTUM, a special issue on ‘the sacred’.

  • Three Seasons With CEMUS

    Three Seasons With CEMUS

    It’s early spring. I’m taking a language course for immigrants with a higher education. Eight years is the average time it takes before an immigrant to Sweden gets to work in a job that matches their professional qualifications: this course was created to shorten that time. I am not the person the course is aimed at, but I graduated from the basic Swedish for Immigrants programme two months ago and my classmate Sepi told me about this, so here we are.

    Here we are in Uppsala – because, as part of the course, we’re on a half-day outing by bus from Västerås to sit in one of the lecture theatres in Blåsenhus and be taught about Swedish history and culture. At the break, the lecturer is having an animated discussion with some of the other students. It seems they are arguing about climate change. I don’t know how it started, but as I wander over, I hear him explaining insistently that climate change is not a catastrophic threat and anyone who tells you it is – whether they are a scientist or anything else – is saying this because they are making money out of it. 

    Even if I wasn’t angry, I’d have struggled to hold my end of an argument in Swedish, and I am angry. This guy isn’t actually Uppsala faculty, he’s a freelancer with a PhD who’s been drafted in for the occasion, but to hear someone stand up in the role of lecturer in a place like this and tell students that climate science is driven by ulterior motives strikes at some deep faith I have in the university as an institution. (Not to mention that half my classmates are here having made unimaginable journeys to flee the civil war in Syria, a war which was preceded by five years of drought; like any single event, that drought can’t just be pinned on climate change, but it is the kind of event which climate change makes more likely and it is a catastrophe.)

    So I try to argue with him – and he says, ‘Ah, I guess you’re planning to make money out of this stuff’ – and I say, ‘I’m a writer and if you think I’m motivated by making money, you should tell my bank manager, because he could use the laugh.’ I don’t say this, obviously, because I’m trying to make myself understood in broken Swedish while angry and upset. But whatever I actually say, his comeback is, ‘Well, there are other kinds of currency than money.’

    Half an hour later, I’m in a cafe on a side street in the centre of the city, meeting Isak Stoddard and Ingrid Momrisr from CEMUS for the first time. We’ve been in touch by email for a few weeks, though when we arranged to meet, I couldn’t have guessed how raw I would be feeling. My writing has been tangled up with climate change for years, going back to before Paul Kingsnorth and I wrote the Dark Mountain manifesto. It was that manifesto which put me on the radar at CEMUS, Isak tells me. After writing about this stuff for years, you get inured to the various flavours of denial – until one day you’re caught off-guard by an encounter like the one I just had, and suddenly you’re peeled right open.

    And if you have luck, at that moment, you walk into a cafe where you’re welcomed by people you’ve never met before, but who listen while you tell them what just happened, and you know they understand.

    *   *   *

    It’s summer now. The sun is hanging over the lake behind me, a group of young people sit on the grassy slope running down to the shore and I am perched on a rock by the water’s edge. It’s one of those endless hot June evenings and if there is anything closer to paradise than a Swedish lakeside on an evening like that, then I’ve yet to meet it. To sit here talking about darkness seems a little absurd – but still, everyone is listening.

    The group are all staff from CEMUS who have come away together for a night before the summer. I’ve been invited to give a talk, so I’m telling the story of how Paul and I came to start Dark Mountain. How it grew out of a loss of faith in the stories we had been telling within the environmental movement. You’d hear leading figures in this movement give the same speech they had given five years earlier – the same calls to action, the same insistence that we can do this – and then if you talked with that person quietly over a drink later in the evening, you’d find they were in fact pessimistic to the point of despair. That gap disturbed us.

    Now, as I write this, it strikes me – how different was the claim we were making about the environmental movement from what that lecturer who so incensed me in Uppsala had been saying? Aren’t we both doing something rather similar: calling into question the honesty of those who stand up and speak about climate change? ‘The environmental movement needs to stop pretending’ ran the headline on an early article that Paul and I wrote for The Guardian. It reminds me that, in our first attempts to articulate these thoughts and get them heard, we seemed to position ourselves as the lone truth-tellers, which is a dangerous way of behaving.

    But that headline started with a slightly different phrase, a question which I used to frame the first Dark Mountain festival: ‘What do we do, after we stop pretending?’ This is not an allegation about some other group on whom one is passing judgement, it is a confession – and anyone who recognises their own experience here can step within the circle of that undefined ‘we’. In the days when we started Dark Mountain, I wasn’t used to standing on stages in front of rooms full of people – that came later – but in the gap between the uplifting speech and the quiet conversation at the end of the night, I recognised something I had struggled with myself.

    A common reaction to Dark Mountain in those early days was to say, ‘You guys have burned out, it happens to us all – but you shouldn’t be making such a noise about it, you’ll put other people off.’ That reaction was sincere, but it didn’t feel adequate. The idea that a movement uses people as fuel – that the experience of uncertainty, fear and despair should be swept away like the ashes from last night’s fire, while we stack up a new row of fresh green optimists in the hearth – is widespread, but not wise. Dark Mountain was born out of the desire to create a space where we could talk to each other about uncertainty, fear and despair, without a rush to action or to answers. It was born out of our own need for such a space.

    And we had a feeling that art had an important role to play in this. Not as a communications tool to deliver a message or raise awareness, but as a way of holding such a space, making it possible to face the darkness without shutting down or running away. A large part of my work in the years since we started the project has been learning more about these roles that art can play.

    So yes, in a sense, we started by questioning the honesty of the way climate change is presented – but not the motives of the people doing the presenting, nor the integrity of the scientific work that produces knowledge about a thing like climate change. Rather, it was a question about the struggle to tell true stories about what these facts mean, about the way they collide with our idea of how the world ought to be, the shape of history and our place within it. The gap towards which we were pointing has to do with the question of despair. If despair is a thing to be avoided at all costs, then it is right to hold onto whatever straws of optimism one can find, so you end up emphasising these, however feeble they feel to you. But something I’ve learned through this work is how much energy can get tied up in avoiding despair at all costs, so that letting go of our attempts to cling to optimism can release a surprising sense of relief and even hope. Something else I’ve learned is that despair does not have to be an end in itself. For a lot of people, Dark Mountain has been a journey to the far side of despair, though none of us emerges from such a journey unchanged.

    So these are the things we are talking about, in the endless sunshine of a June evening, by a lake, at a time of year when it is hard to take the idea of winter seriously. And later, we grill corn cobs over a barbecue in the woods and share cans of beer, and I start to understand a little more about the community that gathers around CEMUS, the atmosphere which brings the centre to life.

    *   *   *

    The next time I arrive in Uppsala, the sun is shining, but there’s an edge to the air. It’s the first of September. Autumn is coming.

    We are in the same lecture theatre where I’d had that argument, six months earlier. A cavern of a room with no windows, it could be any season, any time of day or night. But this time I am standing at the front. I’ve been asked to give the opening lecture of the year.

    ‘What can we say about the future?’ I ask. ‘This talk won’t involve any charts or projections. I don’t have one of those scenario planning models with four different ways the world might look in 2035. I’m not going to wrap things up with a list of ten things we can do that will make everything turn out OK. I only have one prediction for you, and I don’t think there’s anything we can do about it, and it’s this…’

    Click to the next slide, huge letters filling the screen behind me:

    WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE.

    A ripple of laughter passes around the room – and I go on to talk about the need to come to terms with the undramatic reality of personal extinction that waits for all of us, somewhere down the road, if we’re going to see clearly when we try to talk about the larger kinds of loss which frame the time in which we’re living. This seems like a good place to start, for a room full of people who will spend the year ahead thinking hard and learning from many different disciplines about the mess the world is in.

    And for me, these three seasons mark the starting point of a relationship with CEMUS and the people who make up the centre which has been unique in my experience. I have been a guest lecturer at many institutions across Europe, but nowhere has come to feel more like home. Through formal and informal collaborations with CEMUS, I have been able to bring people I admire greatly to Sweden – Keri Facer, professor of social and educational futures at the University of Bristol, or the mythographer Martin Shaw who created the Oral Tradition course at Stanford. Over a day or two in Uppsala, they will lecture to students, take part in a research seminar and a public event, and they go away speaking warmly of this particular corner of Swedish academia. Under the auspices of CEMUS, I’ve sat on stage at Sigtuna Stiftelsen, holding a conversation with the philosopher and animist David Abram and the Archbishop of Uppsala, Antje Jackelén – and I’ve met within the same walls, when Kevin Anderson brought together twenty of us for three days to go deep into the role of arts, humanities and social sciences in the quest for rapid decarbonisation. And every time I’ve walked into the offices on Villavägen, I’ve been received with the same warmth that Isak and Ingrid showed me that first day we met, and caught a sniff of that atmosphere which Ivan Illich once wrote of:

    ‘Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.’

    Thank you, my friends, for inviting me to be a part of CEMUS in the past few years – and may you continue to thrive in the next twenty-five.


    First published in The CEMUS Diaries, a series to mark the 25th anniversary of the Centre for Environment & Development Studies at Uppsala University.