DOUGALD HINE

Tag: art

  • The role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change

    In 2015-16, I had the opportunity to spend two years working with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre, as leader of artistic and audience development. Part of my brief was to bring together practitioners from within and beyond the world of the performance arts to explore the role(s) of art under the shadow of climate change.

    My starting point was to reject the basis on which artists are generally invited to collaborate in projects about climate change: however this is worded, it tends to come down to helping ‘deliver the message’. The result almost always fails – both as art and as political communication – because art isn’t a sophisticated extension of the public relations department or a cheap alternative to an advertising agency.

    One of the fruits of this work was a list of the roles that art might sometimes play. I wrote this up in the context of a longer essay for Dark Mountain, ‘You Want It Darker’, but during this week’s Transformative Imagination workshop with the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, I realised that it might be useful to present this unfinished list on its own terms, as a contribution to conversations that seek to get beyond the old binary of ‘instrumentalisation’ vs ‘art for art’s sake’. So here it is:

    1. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us.
    2. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down.
    3. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone.
    4. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’.
    5. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control.
    6. Art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    (Thanks to Måns Lagerlöf for making the unlikely decision to bring me to work at Riksteatern – and to all the members of the Dark Mountain Workshop which I ran there and the guests who joined us in those conversations.)

  • Childish Things

    Childish Things

    It was September and I hadn’t seen Ruben all summer, but there he was, the same as ever, gangly and lounging, his hair cropped almost to the bone, his eyes alert; a kid from the wrong side of town who turns the skills his childhood taught him into art. That summer, I’d become a father. The weeks of July and August tightened into the small world of our new family, living by old rhythms of bodily need. (I must have said something about this – about the way it shatters whatever illusions you had of your own centrality, how it locks you into the chain of generations and releases you from any compulsion to make your one life a story in itself.) And I asked him, ‘So, how was your summer? What have you been up to?’

    ‘I gave my sermon on the mount,’ he said, like it was a matter of fact, and it turned out that it was.

    One Friday night, 150 mostly young people had followed him up a rocky hill on the edge of town (the town where he grew up, an hour south of Stockholm) to where the birch trees clear, and they sat on the ground and listened as he spoke. There were no flowing robes; he wore an Adidas tracksuit top and carried a binder with his notes. He wasn’t playing the messiah, trying to start a cult; nor was he playing the artist, making a point by appropriating the forms of religion. As the sun went down over the pines, he talked about life as a journey through the woods at dusk, each of us carrying a pocket-light of reason: its beam cuts a bright tunnel, but throws everything outside this tunnel into darkness; if we use it thoughtlessly, we forget that we have other senses with which to find our way.

    When the sermon and the discussion that followed were at an end, the congregation made their way quietly down among the trees, the twilight deepening around them.

    * * *

    A few years before, I had made a book with the video artists Robert and Geska Brečević, who operate as Performing Pictures. Around the time we met, their work took an unexpected turn as they began collaborating with craftworkers in Oaxaca and Croatia, building roadside chapels and producing video shrines that set the saints in motion. Our book was a document of this work but also an enquiry into how it came about, what had drawn them to the folk Catholicism of the villages where they were now working, and the reactions this had provoked among their art-world contemporaries. About these reactions, I wrote:

    We are used to art that employs the symbols of religion in ways seemingly intended to unsettle or provoke many of those to whom these symbols matter. Yet to the consumers of contemporary art, those who actually visit galleries, it is more uncomfortable to be confronted with work in which such symbols are used without the frame of provocation.

    That may still be the case, yet these days I am struck by how many of the artists, writers and performers I meet find themselves drawn to the forms and practices of religion.

    I think of Ben who went off to Italy to start an ‘unMonastery’, a working community of artists in service to its neighbours. The name suggested a desire to distance themselves from the example of the religious community, even as they found inspiration there. A couple of years facing the difficult realities of holding a community together, however, deepened their appreciation for the achievement of those who had maintained monasteries for generations, and this was reflected in a series of conversations which Ben went on to publish with abbots of established religious orders.

    For some, it’s a question of taking on the roles religion used to play, using the tools of ritual to address the ultimate. When I run into Emelie, a choreographer friend, she’s just back from a small town in the middle of Sweden where a group of artists has taken over the old mine buildings. It’s the kind of place that lost its purpose with the passing of the industry which called it into being. The project started with two brothers who grew up there – and this weekend, they have been celebrating the younger brother’s birthday. The way I hear it, the celebration was a three-day ritual which saw participants building their own coffins only to be lowered into them, emerging after several hours to be greeted with music and lights and a restorative draught of vodka.

    In another mining town a thousand miles away, Rachel Horne made her first artwork at the site of the colliery where four generations of her family had worked. Out of Darkness, Light was a memorial event: one night on the grassed-over slag heap above the town, 410 lamps were lit, one for each of the men and boys who died in the century in which coal was mined there. On a boat travelling along the river below, a group of ex-miners and their children told their stories. This was art as ritual, honouring the dead in such a way as to bring meaning to the living.

    Last time I spoke to Rachel, we talked about an event that she had put on a few weeks earlier. ‘You know,’ she said with a sigh, ‘it was like organising a wedding!’ I knew: months of energy building up to a big day and afterwards everyone involved is exhausted. Weddings are great, but how many do you want to have in a lifetime? It hit me, as artists we’re good at ‘weddings’, but sometimes what’s called for is the simplicity of the weekly Sunday service. Soon afterwards, I came to a passage in Chris Goode’s The Field and the Forest where he quotes a fellow theatre-maker, Andy Smith:

    Every week my mum and dad and some other people get together in a big room in the middle of the village where they live. They say hello to each other and catch up on how they are doing informally. Then some other things happen. A designated person talks about some stuff. They sing a few songs together. There is also a section called ‘the notices’ where they hear information about stuff that is happening. Then they sometimes have a cup of tea and carry on the chat.

    Both Smith and Goode are impressed by the resemblances between the Sunday service and the kinds of space they want to make with theatre. The connection is not made explicit, but when Goode ends his book with a vision of a ‘world-changing’ theatre where ‘once a fortnight at least, there’s someone on every street who’s making their kitchen or their garage or the bit of common ground in front of their estate into a theatre for the evening’, I think back to that passage and the distinction between the wedding and the weekly service.

    * * *

    I could go on for a while yet, piling up examples, but it’s time to pull back and see where this might get us. The artists I’ve mentioned are all friends, or friends of friends, so I can’t pretend to have made an objective survey. I don’t even know if such a survey could be made, since much of what I’m describing takes place outside the official spaces of art. Even the objects produced by Performing Pictures, though they sometimes hang in galleries, are made to be installed in a church or at a roadside.

    There is nothing new, exactly, about artists tangling with the sacred – indeed, the history of this entanglement is the thread I plan to follow through these pages. Yet here in the end-times of modernity, under the shadow of climate change, I want to voice the possibility that these threads are being pulled into a new configuration. There’s something sober – pragmatic, even – about the way I see artists working with the material of religion. The desire to shock is gone, along with the skittering ironies of postmodernism; and if ritual is employed, it is not in pursuit of mystical ecstasy or enlightened detachment, but as a tool for facing the darkness. I’m struck, too, by a willingness to work with the material of Western religious tradition, with all its uncomfortable baggage, rather than joining the generations of European artists, poets and theatre-makers who found consolation in various flavours of orientalism.

    All this has set me wondering: what if the times in which we find ourselves call for some new reckoning with the sacred? What if art is carrying part of what is called for? And what if answering the call means sacrificing our ideas about what it means to be an artist?

    A Strange Way of Talking About Art

    We have been making art for at least as long as we have been human. Ellen Dissanayake has made a lifelong study of the role of art within the evolution of the human animal, and she is emphatic about this:

    Although no one art is found in every society … there is found universally in every human group that exists today, or is known to have existed, the tendency to display and respond to one or usually more of what are called the arts: dancing, singing, carving, dramatizing, decorating, poeticizing speech, image making.

    Yet the way such activity gets talked about went through an odd shift about 250 years ago. In Germany, France and Britain, just as the Industrial Revolution was getting underway – and with colonialism pushing Western ideas to the far corners of the world – a newly extravagant language grew up around art. The literary critic John Carey offers a collage of this kind of language, drawn from philosophers, artists and fellow critics:

    The arts, it is claimed, are ‘sacred’, they ‘unite us with the Supreme Being’, they are ‘the visible appearance of God’s kingdom on earth’, they ‘breathe spiritual dispositions’ into us, they ‘inspire love in the highest part of the soul’, they have ‘a higher reality and more veritable existence’ than ordinary life, they express the ‘eternal’ and ‘infinite’, and they ‘reveal the innermost nature of the world’.

    Bound up with this new way of talking is the figure of the artistic genius. There have always been masters, artists whose skill earns them a place in the memory of a culture. In his account of the classical Haida mythtellers, the poet and linguist Robert Bringhurst is at pains to stress the role of individual talent within an oral literature, where a modern reader might expect to encounter the nameless collective voice of tradition. Yet a fierce respect for mastery does not presuppose a special kind of person whose inborn capacity makes them, and them alone, capable of work that qualifies as ‘art’. Rather, as Dissanayake shows, in most human cultures, it has been the norm for just about everyone to be a participant in and appreciator of artistic activity.

    The ideas about art which took hold in Western Europe in the late 18th century spread outwards through cultural and educational institutions built in Europe’s image. Were anyone to point out their peculiarity, it need not have troubled their proponents, for the contrasting ideas of other cultures could be assigned to a more primitive phase of development. Today, that sense of superiority has weakened and become unfashionable, although it remains implicit in much of the thinking that shapes the world. Under present conditions, a critic like Carey can take glee in mocking the heightened terms in which Kant and Hegel and Schopenhauer wrote about art; yet the result is a deadlocked culture war in which defenders of a high modern ideal of art are pitched against the relativists at the gates.

    Rather than pick a side in this battle, it might be more helpful to ask why art and the figure of the artist should take on this heightened quality at the moment in history when they did. If a new weight falls onto the shoulders of the artist-as-genius, if the terms in which art is talked about become charged with a new intensity, then what is the gap which art is being asked to fill?

    That the answer has something to do with religion is suggested not only by the examples which Carey assembles, but also by the sense that he is playing Richard Dawkins to the outraged true believers in high art. And there have been those, no doubt, for whom art has played the role of religion for a secular age. But this hardly gets below the surface of the matter; the roots go further down in the soil of history. It is time to do a little digging.

    The Elimination of Ambiguity

    In 1696, an Irishman by the name of John Toland published a treatise entitled Christianity Not Mysterious. This was just one among a flurry of such books and pamphlets issuing from the London presses in the last years of the century, but its title is emblematic of the turn that was taking place as Europe approached the Enlightenment: a turn away from mystery, ambiguity and mythic thinking.

    As the impact of the scientific revolution reverberated through intellectual culture, the immediate effect was not to undermine existing religious beliefs but to suggest the possibility of putting them on a new footing. If Newton could capture the mysterious workings of gravity with the tools of mathematics, then the laws governing other invisible forces could be discovered. In due course, this would lead to a mechanical account of the workings of the universe, stretching all the way back to God.

    In its fullest form, this clockwork cosmology became known as deism: a cold reworking of monotheistic belief, offering neither the possibility of a relationship with a loving creator, nor the firepower of a jealous sky-father protecting his chosen people. The role of the deity was reduced to that of ‘first cause’, setting the chain reaction of the universe in motion. Stripped of miracles, scripture and revelation, deism never took the form of an organised religion or gained a substantial following. It attracted many prominent intellectual and literary figures in England, however, in the first half of the 18th century, before spreading to France and America, where it infused the philosophical and political radicalism which gave birth to revolutions.

    The religious establishment recoiled from deism and its explicit repudiation of traditional doctrine. Yet mainstream Christianity was travelling the same road, accommodating its cosmology to the new science in the name of natural theology, applying the tools of historical research to its scriptures and seeking to demonstrate the reasonableness of its beliefs. The result was a form of religion peculiarly vulnerable to the double earthquake which was to come from the study of geology and natural history. Imagine instead that the rocks had given up their secrets of deep time to a culture shaped by the mythic cosmology of Hinduism: the discovery would hardly have caused the collective crisis of faith which was to shake the intellectual world of Europe in the 19th century.

    To this day we live with the legacy of this collision between naturalised religion and the revelations of evolutionary science; militant atheists clash with biblical literalists, united in their conviction that the opening chapters of Genesis are intended to be read as a physics and biology textbook. It is an approach to the Bible barely conceivable before the 17th century.

    * * *

    Mystery can be the refuge of scoundrels; ambiguity, a cloak for muddle-headedness. The sacred has often been invoked as a way of closing off enquiry or to protect the interests of the powerful. We can acknowledge all of this and deplore it without discarding the possibility that reality is – in some important sense – mysterious. It takes quite a leap of faith, after all, to assume that a universe as vast and old as this one ought to be fully comprehensible to the minds of creatures like you and me.

    Among the roles of religion has been to equip us for living with mystery. This is not just about filling the gaps in current scientific knowledge or offering comforting stories about our place in the world. Across many different traditions there is an underlying attitude to reality: a common assumption that our lives are entangled with things which exceed our grasp, which cannot be known fully or directly – and that these things may nonetheless be experienced and approached, at times, by subtler and more indirect means.

    This attitude shows up in the deliberate strangeness of the way that language is used in relation to the sacred. The thousand names of Vishnu, the ninety-nine names of Allah: the multiplication of such litanies hints at the limits of language, reminding us that words may reach towards the divine but never fully comprehend it. A similar effect is achieved by the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Bible, written without vowels so as to be literally unspeakable.

    For Christians, a classic expression of this attitude to reality appears in Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, from the chapter on love that gets read at weddings:

    When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. (1 Corinthians 13:11–12)

    The emphasis is on the partial nature of knowledge: in relation to the ultimate, our understanding is childlike, a dark reflection of things we cannot see face-to-face. The most memorable of English translations, the King James Version gives us the image of a ‘glass’, but the mirror which Paul has in mind would have been of polished brass. Indeed, it is carefully chosen, for the Greek city of Corinth was a centre for the manufacture of such mirrors.

    The thought that there are aspects of reality which can be known only as a dark reflection calls up another Greek image. The myth of Perseus is set in motion when the hero is given the seemingly impossible task of capturing the head of the Gorgon Medusa, whose gaze turns all who look on her to stone. The goddess Athena equips Perseus with a polished shield; by the reflection of this device, he is able to approach the monster, hack off her hissing head and bag it safely up. In the shield of Perseus we glimpse the power of mythic thinking: by way of images, myth offers us indirect means of approaching those aspects of reality to which no direct approach can be made.

    Few passages in the Bible are more at odds with the spirit of the Enlightenment than Paul’s claim about the limits of human knowledge. To put away childish things was the ambition of an age in which the light of reason would shine into every corner of reality. What need now for dark reflections – or mythic shields, for that matter? By the turn of the 18th century, such things were no longer intellectually respectable: the unknown could be divided into terra incognita, merely awaiting the profitable advance of human knowledge, and old wives’ tales that were to be brushed away like cobwebs.

    The institutional forms of religion were capable of surviving this turn away from mystery, though much was lost along the way, and none of the later English translations of the Bible can match the poetry of the King James. Meanwhile, if anyone were to go on lighting candles at the altars of ambiguity, it would be the poets and the artists, the ones upon whose shoulders a new weight of expectation was soon to fall.

    Toys in the Attic

    When the educated minds of Europe decided that humankind had come of age, the immediate consequence for art was a loss of status. If all that is real is capable of being known directly, then the role of images and stories as indirect ways of knowing can be set aside, relegated to entertainment or decoration.

    I say immediate, but of course there was no collective moment of decision; we are dealing rather with the deep tectonic shifts which take place below the surface fashions of a culture, and the extent to which the ground has moved may be gauged as much through the discovery of what was once and is no longer possible, like the epic poem. The pre-eminent English poet of the first half of the 18th century, Alexander Pope aspired to match the achievement of Milton’s Paradise Lost by producing an epic on the life of Brutus; yet, despite years of telling friends that the project was nearing completion, all that he left upon his death was a fragment of eight lines. The failure seems more than personal, as though the mythic grandeur of the form was no longer available in the way it had been a lifetime earlier.

    In Paris in 1697, a year after Christianity Not Mysterious had rolled off the London presses, Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé launched the fairy tale genre, committing the stories of oral tradition to print with newly added morals. By the time the first English translation was printed in 1729 – ‘for J. Pote, at Sir Isaac New-ton’s Head, near Suffolk Street, Charing Cross’ – the publisher could advertise Perrault’s tales as ‘very entertaining and instructive for children’. Stories which had been everyone’s, which carry layers of meaning by which to navigate the darkest corners of human experience, had now been tamed and packed off to the nursery.

    Meanwhile, a strange new form of storytelling arose which put a premium on uneventful description of the everyday and regarded unlikely events with suspicion. ‘Within the pages of a novel,’ writes Amitav Ghosh, ‘an event that is only slightly improbable in real life – say, an unexpected encounter with a long-lost childhood friend – may seem wildly unlikely: the writer will have to work hard to make it appear persuasive.’ A masterful novelist himself, Ghosh is nonetheless troubled by the 18th-century assumptions encoded within the form in which he writes. What troubles him most is the thought that these assumptions underlie the failure of the contemporary imagination in the face of climate change.

    In the kinds of story which our culture likes to take seriously, all of the actors are human and most of the action takes place indoors. Such realism is ill-equipped to handle the extreme realities of a world in which our lives have become entangled with invisible forces, planetary in scale, which break unpredictably across the everyday pattern of our lives. The writer who wants to tell stories that are true to this experience had better go rummaging in the attic where the shield of Perseus gathers dust among the toys, the sci-fi trilogies devoured in teenage weekends and the so-called children’s literature where potent materials exiled to the nursery grew new tusks.

    But writer, beware: the boundaries of the serious literary novel are still policed against intrusions of myth or mystery, and the terms used to police them are telling. In notes for a never-finished review of Brideshead Revisited, written on his own deathbed, George Orwell marks his admiration for Waugh as a novelist, but then comes the breaking point: ‘Last scene, where the unconscious man makes the sign of the Cross … One cannot really be Catholic and a grown-up.’ Almost half a century later, Alan Garner met with the same charge when his novel Strandloper was published as adult literary fiction. The Guardian’s reviewer, Jenny Turner, found the author guilty of crossing a line with his insistence on depicting Aboriginal culture on its own terms:

    … such a phantastic view of history cannot ever rationally be made to stand up. This underlying irrationality usually works all right in poetry, which no one expects to make a lot of sense. It’s okay in children’s writing, which no one expects to be psychologically complex. But in a grown-up novel for grown-ups, it just never seems to work.

    Carrying the Flame

    As Paganini … appeared in public, the world wonderingly looked upon him as a super-being. The excitement that he caused was so unusual, the magic he practised upon the fantasy of the hearers so powerful, that they could not satisfy themselves with a natural explanation.

    So wrote Franz Liszt on Paganini’s death in 1840. The Italian violinist and composer had been the model of a virtuoso: a dazzling performer who stuns audiences with technical audacity and sheer force of personality. The term itself had taken on its modern meaning within his lifetime, shaped by his example. In those same years, an unprecedented cult of personality grew up around the Romantic poets, while in the theatres of Paris and London a strange new convention had emerged, according to which audiences sat in reverential silence before the performers; half a century earlier, theatres were still such rowdy spaces that an actor would be called to the front of the stage to repeat a favourite speech to the hoots or cheers of the crowd.

    A new sense was emerging of the artist as a special category of human. The conditions for this had been building for a long time. In ‘Past Seen from a Possible Future’, John Berger argues that the gap between the masterpiece and the average work has nowhere been so great as within the tradition of European oil painting, especially after the 16th century:

    The average work … was produced cynically: that is to say its content, its message, the values it was nominally upholding, were less meaningful for the producer than the finishing of the commission. Hack work is not the result of clumsiness or provincialism: it is the result of the market making more insistent demands than the job.

    Under these conditions, to be a master was not simply to stand taller than those around you, but to be looking in another direction. In the language of Berger’s essay, such masterworks ‘bear witness to their artists’ intuitive awareness that life was larger’ than allowed for in the traditions of ‘realism’ – or the accounts of reality – available within the culture in which they were operating. Dismissed from these accounts were those aspects of reality ‘which cannot be appropriated’.

    Berger warns against making such exceptions representative of the tradition: the study of the norms constraining the average artist will tell us more about what was going on within European society. Still, exceptionality of achievement fuelled the Romantic idea of the artist set apart from the rest of society. If the Enlightenment established lasting boundaries around what it is intellectually respectable for a ‘grown-up’ to take seriously, then the Romantic movement inaugurated a countercurrent which has proven as enduring. In Culture and Society, Raymond Williams identifies a constellation of words – ‘creative’, ‘original’ and ‘genius’ among them – which took on their current meanings in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as part of this new way of talking about the figure of the artist.

    The artists themselves were active in creating this identity. Here is Wordsworth, in 1815, addressing the painter Benjamin Haydon:

    High is our calling, Friend! – Creative Art …
    Demands the service of a mind and heart
    Though sensitive, yet in their weakest part
    Heroically fashioned – to infuse
    Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse
    While the whole world seems adverse to desert.

    Keats’ formulation of ‘Negative Capability’, the quality required for literary greatness, is among the clearest statements of the role which now falls to the artist, a figure who must be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

    * * *

    I have been making a historical argument, though it is the argument of an intellectual vagabond who goes cross-country through other people’s fields. Since we are now coming to the height of the matter, let me take a moment to catch my breath – and recall an earlier attempt at covering this ground, made in the third chapter of the Dark Mountain manifesto:

    Religion, that bag of myths and mysteries, birthplace of the theatre, was straightened out into a framework of universal laws and moral account-keeping. The dream visions of the Middle Ages became the nonsense stories of Victorian childhood.

    The claim towards which I have been building here is that those elements which became increasingly marginalised within respectable religious and intellectual culture by the middle of the 18th century found refuge in art. In many times and places, and perhaps universally, the activity of art has been entangled with the sacred, with the rituals and deep stories of a culture, its cosmology, the meaning it finds or makes within the world – and all of this wound into the rhythms which structure our lives. What is new in the historical moment around which we have been circling is the sense that the sacred has passed into the custody of art: insomuch as it dwells with mystery, ambiguity and mythic thinking, it now fell to the artist to keep the candle alight. Here, I submit, is the source of the peculiar intensity with which the language of art and the figure of the artist is suddenly charged.

    * * *

    If art has carried the flame of the sacred through the cold landscapes of modernity, it has not done so without getting burned. The scars are too many to list here, but I want to touch on two areas of damage.

    First, the roles assumed by artists over the past two centuries have overlapped with those which might in another time or place have been the preserve of a priest or prophet. In a culture capable of elevating an artist to the status of ‘super-being’, there is a danger here: the framework of religion may remind adherents that the priest is only an intermediary between the human and the divine, but there are no such checks in the backstage VIP area. The danger is that the show ends up running off the battery of the ego instead of plugging in to the metaphysical mains. Even when an artist sees her role as a receiver tuned into something larger than herself, without a common language in which to speak of the sacred, the result may be esoteric to an isolating degree. How much of the self-destruction which becomes normalised – often romanticised – as part of the artistic life can be traced to the lack of a stabilising framework for making sense of the mysteries of creative existence?

    Another danger arises from the exceptional status of the artist. While the reality of artistic life is often precarious, there exists nonetheless a certain exemption from the logic which governs the lives of others: the artist is the one kind of grown-up who can move through the world without having to explain their rationale, whether monetary, vocational or otherwise. In theory, at least, if you can get away with calling yourself an artist, you will never be required to demonstrate the usefulness, efficiency or productivity of your labours. Where public funding for the arts exists, if you can prove your eligibility, you may even join the privileged caste of those for whom this theory corresponds to reality. (And you may not: ‘performance targets’ for funded arts organisations can be punishingly unreal.)

    The danger of the artistic exception is that it serves to reinforce the rule: get too comfortable with your special status as the holder of an artistic licence and you risk sounding at best unaware of your privilege, at worst an active collaborator in the grimness of working life for your non-artist peers. (Arguably, the only ethical model of artistic funding is a Universal Basic Income, which is how many young writers, artists and musicians approached the unemployment benefits system of the UK as recently as the 1980s.)

    Begin Again

    And here we are, back in the early 21st century, where the legacies of the Romantics and the Enlightenment are both persistent and threadbare. We don’t know how to think without them, and yet they seem out of credit, like a congregation that attends out of habit rather than conviction, or not at all.

    A few years back, there was a fire at the Momart warehouse in east London. Among the dozens of artworks that went up in smoke were Tracey Emin’s tent and the Chapman brothers’ Hell. John Carey has some fun setting the reactions of callers to radio phone-ins against all those high-flown statements about the spiritual value of art: ‘Only in a culture where the art-world had been wholly discredited could the destruction of artworks elicit such rejoicing.’

    Under these conditions, do I truly propose to lay a further weight on the shoulders of my artist friends – to charge them with the task of reconfiguring the sacred? Not quite.

    If art gave refuge to the sacred and served as its most visible home in a time when it was otherwise scoured from public space, I believe the time has come for art to let it go. In the world we are headed into, it won’t be enough for an artist caste to be the custodians, the ones who help us see the world in terms that slip the net of measurable utility and exchange. One way or another, the ways of living which will be called for by the changes already underway include a recovery of the ability to value those aspects of reality which cannot be appropriated, which elude the direct gaze of reason, but which so colour our lives that we would not live without them.

    This is not a call for a new religion, nor for a revival of anything quite like the religions with which some of us are still familiar. I have met the sacred in the stone poetry of cathedrals and the carved language of the King James Bible, but buildings and books never had a monopoly. For that matter, art was not the only place the sacred found shelter, nor even the most important – though it was the grandest of shelters and the one that commanded most respect, here in the broken heartlands of modernity. Out at the places we thought of as the edges, there were those who knew themselves to be at the centres of their worlds, and who never thought us as clever as we thought ourselves. Even after all the suffering, after all the destruction of languages and landscapes and creatures, there are those who have not given up. But if we whose inheritance includes the relics of Christianity, Enlightenment and Romanticism have anything to bring to the work that lies ahead, then I suspect that one of the places it will come from is the work of artists who are willing to walk away from the story of their own exceptionality.

    And though I know that I am drawing simple patterns out of complex material, it seems to me that something like this has begun, at least in the corners of the world where I find myself. I don’t think it is an accident that several of the artists I have invoked here returned to work in the towns where they grew up; the pretensions you picked up in art school are not much use on the streets where people knew you as a child.

    Unable to appeal to the authority of art, you begin again, with whatever skills you have gathered along the way and whatever help you can find. You do what it takes to make work that has a chance of coming alive in the spaces where we meet, to build those spaces in such a way that it is safe to bring more of ourselves. This does not need to be grand; you are not arranging a wedding. A group of strangers sits around a table and shares a meal. A visitor tells a story around a fire. You half-remember a line you heard as a child, something about it being enough when two or three are gathered together.

    Published in Dark Mountain: Issue 12 ‘SANCTUM’, a special issue on the theme of ‘the sacred’.

  • You Want It Darker

    As things stand, I don’t believe we will get a story worth hearing until we witness a culture broken open by its own consequence.

    Martin Shaw, Dark Mountain: Issue 7

    The regular mechanisms of political narration are breaking down. The pollsters lose confidence in their methods, the pundits struggle to offer authoritative explanations for events that they laughed off as wild improbabilities only months before.

    It’s a measure of how badly things have broken that, over the past year or two, members of the strange crew that meets around Dark Mountain have found ourselves filling the gap. I’m thinking of posts we’ve written in our various corners of the internet that were read and shared far more widely than most of us are used to, seemingly because they helped readers find their bearings in a time of deepening disorientation.

    There’s a role for this kind of writing now that seems clearer than it did eight years ago, when we started this project. That’s why, today, we are launching a fundraising campaign – asking for your help to build and launch a new online publication. It won’t replace the Dark Mountain books, but it will run alongside them and provide an online home for writing that seeks – as my co-founder, Paul Kingsnorth put it at the start of this series – ‘to make sense of things, and to examine our stories in their proper perspective.’

    At this point, if you want to head straight for our fundraising page and make a donation, then be my guest – but in the rest of this post, I want to make a few suggestions about why this kind of writing matters now, based on what Dark Mountain has taught me over the past eight years.

    * * *

    Let’s start with a few of the pieces I mentioned – the chances are you already read some of these, but setting them alongside one another, something else comes into view:

    These are posts that got shared and reblogged and quoted and seemed to travel halfway around the internet. Mostly, they were written for our personal blogs or websites – but the authors are editors or regular contributors here at Dark Mountain. You can see places where we spark off each other’s ideas, as well as significant differences in perspective. If you read them all, you’ll probably find some that jive with you and others that jar. But I want to point to some common ground.

    For one thing, while we draw on different political traditions, this is writing that starts a couple of steps back from the familiar terrain of political debate and analysis. I’m reminded of an answer I gave, years ago, when asked if Dark Mountain was a political project: ‘I think there may be times when it is necessary to withdraw from today’s politics, in order to do the thinking that could make it possible for there to be a politics the day after tomorrow.’ Or as Paul put it at the opening of this series, ‘Sometimes you have to go to the edges to get some perspective on the turmoil at the heart of things. Doing so is not an abnegation of public responsibility: it is a form of it.’

    If you start exploring the work of any of these writers, you’ll find that mythology is a recurring reference point, a deep element in how we make sense of things. At the end of his post from the morning after the Brexit vote, Martin Shaw wrote, ‘Television, radio and internet will be able to tell you all the above-ground implications of what’s just taken place.’ When these surface accounts fail to satisfy, though, there’s a hunger that is fed by the underground currents of old stories.

    One of the things that marks out this writing, then, is a willingness to enter territory that we could call ‘liminal’. It’s a term that comes from the study of ritual, given to the middle phase of a rite of passage: the preliminaries are over, you have shed the skin of an old reality, but not yet acquired the new skin that would allow you to return to the everyday world. The liminal is the space of the threshold, with all the vulnerability and potential of transition: the costliness of letting go, with no guarantee of what will come after. The liminal phase of a ritual is the moment of greatest danger – or rather, ritual is a safety apparatus built around the liminal. Whichever, the liminal is where the work gets done, where the change happens.

    So here’s the first suggestion I want to make: if this writing is filling a gap left by the failure of more conventional kinds of political narration, it’s because it is able to operate in the territory of the liminal, and these are liminal times.

    * * *

    It’s not just the broadening audience for this writing that points to its timeliness. The past year also saw more conventional voices getting drawn into the territory that Dark Mountain has been exploring.

    Take Alex Evans, a former advisor to the UK government and the United Nations, who just wrote a book called ‘The Myth Gap’. After a career based on belief in the power of ‘evidence, data and policy proposals’, his experience of global climate negotiations brought him to a crisis, and to a sense of the need for something more than facts and reasoned arguments. ‘We’ve lost the old stories that used to help us make sense of the world,’ he says, ‘but without coming up with new ones.’ And he quotes Jung: ‘The man who thinks he can live without a myth is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.’

    Or check out the series on ‘spirituality and visionary politics’ that the political strategist Ronan Harrington edited for Open Democracy last year – and Jonathan Rowson’s report on spirituality for the RSA. ‘Scratch climate change confusion long enough,’ writes Rowson, ‘and you may find our denial of death underneath.’

    There’s lots to say about these examples, but for now I just want to take a couple of points from them. First, that the call of the liminal is making itself felt ‘above ground’. But then, that there is a danger of wanting to jump straight to rebirth, to promise bright visions and new positive narratives. Evans draws on Jung, but I’m not clear how much room there is here for the shadow – nor for the loss and uncertainty, the darkness and disorientation that are the price for entering the liminal.

    Then again, by the end of 2016, others were ready to make the descent. I once spent an hour on stage with George Monbiot pounding me over the pessimism of Dark Mountain, so it was striking to read his list of ‘The 13 impossible crises humanity now faces’. Then you had John Harris discovering Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Watching experienced journalistic commentators move in the terrain that Dark Mountain has been exploring for the best part of a decade, it strikes me that there is another danger. To navigate at these depths, you need a different kind of equipment. Facts alone don’t cut it down here.

    This brings me to the other aspect of Dark Mountain which may be crucial to finding our bearings within the liminal – the centrality of art and culture to the work of this project.

    * * *

    A man is whispering in your ears, disorienting you, playing tricks with your perception, even as you watch him alone on stage with little more than a few bottles of water and a cast of microphones. This is Simon McBurney’s The Encounter, one of the most staggering pieces of theatre I witnessed in 2016: a show that leads you into the story of a meeting between a photographer lost in the Amazon and a tribe whose world is under threat. Their response to this threat takes the form of a ritual, a journey to ‘the beginning’, which is also a deliberate bringing to an end of their culture in its current form.

    The concept of liminality was first used to describe the structure of rituals like the one at the centre of The Encounter, but its application as a term for thinking about modern societies is connected to the study of theatre and performance. The anthropologist who made the connection, Victor Turner, distinguished the ‘liminal’ experiences of tribal cultures – in which ritual is a collective process for navigating moments of change – from the ‘liminoid’ experiences available in modern societies, which resemble the liminal, but are choices we opt into as individuals, like a night out at the theatre. This distinction comes with a suggestion that true liminality, the collective entry into the liminal, is not available within a complex industrial society.

    Now, perhaps this has been true – but here’s my next wild suggestion. The consequences of that very complex industrial society are now bringing us to a point where we get reacquainted with true liminality. To take seriously not just what Dark Mountain has been talking about, but what Monbiot and Harris are touching on, is to recognise that we now face a crisis which has no outside. The planetary scale of our predicament makes it as much a collective experience as anything faced by the tribal cultures studied by Turner and his colleagues.

    If this is the case, then where within our existing cultures do we go for knowledge about how to navigate the terrain of liminality? Not to the sources of factual authority, much as we need them, but to the places where liminoid practices have endured – to the arts, especially those forms in which people gather and share a live experience, and also (Turner would tell us) to those traditions and institutions that deal with the sacred.

    In 2016, I came to the end of two years working as leader of artistic development with Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre. The collaboration came about because their artistic director had been strongly influenced by the Dark Mountain manifesto. In the workshops we ran together, writers, directors and performers met around the question of what art can do, in the face of all that we know and fear about the depth of the mess the world is in.

    The answers that emerged began with a rejection of the usual invitation to put our art to use as a communications tool to deliver a message on behalf of scientists, policy-makers or activists – not out of some misplaced sense of ‘art for art’s sake’ purity, but because this isn’t how art works. 

    Instead, many of the possibilities I caught sight of during this work had to do with the liminal. Art can hold a space in which we move from the arm’s-length knowledge of facts, figures and projections, to the kind of knowledge that we let inside us, taking the risk that it may change us. Art can give us just enough beauty to stay with the darkness, rather than flee or shut down. Like the bronze shield given to Perseus by Athena, art and its indirect ways of knowing can allow us to approach realities which, if looked at directly, turn something inside us to stone. Art can call us back from strategic calculations about which message will play best with which target group, insisting on the tricky need for honesty – there’s a line I kept coming back to, from the playwright Mark Ravenhill, that your responsibility when you walk on stage is to be ‘the most truthful person in the room’. Art can teach us to live with uncertainty, to let go of our dreams of control. And art can hold open a space of ambiguity, refusing the binary choices with which we are often presented – not least, the choice between forced optimism and simple despair.

    These are strange answers. For anyone in search of solutions, they will sound unsatisfying. But I don’t think it’s possible to endure the knowledge of the crises we face, unless you are able to draw on this other kind of knowledge and practice, whether you find it in art or religion or any other domain in which people have taken the liminal seriously, generation after generation. Because the role of ritual is not just to get you into the liminal, but to give you a chance of finding your way back.

    Among the messages of the liminal is that endings are also beginnings, that sometimes we need to ‘give up’, that despair is not a thing to be avoided at all costs – nor a thing to be mistaken for an end state. 

    * * *

    Somewhere in the tumbling days that followed the US election, I saw it go by in the stream of social media. ‘It’s basically Breitbart vs Dark Mountain now, isn’t it?’ someone wrote, like we’re the last ones left whose worldviews aren’t in smithereens after the year that just happened. And like a few things in 2016, it had the taste of a bad joke that might have more truth in it than you’d want to be the case.

    In the last weeks of the year, as we were putting together this series of reflections, a discussion got started among the Dark Mountain editors about what the role of this project should be, in the years ahead. Bad jokes aside, it’s clear that the work we’ve been doing has taken on a new relevance, and with that comes a sense of responsibility.

    A couple of things are clear. The books we publish will always be at the heart of this project – and the work of artists, the makers of culture, will always be our starting point.

    Every year, thousands of copies of our books go out to readers around the world. By the standards of an independent literary journal, it’s an achievement, and it’s through the sale of our books that we’re able to pay for some of the work that goes into Dark Mountain. (The rest of the work, as you can imagine, is a labour of love.) 

    A sobering realisation this autumn, though, was that the audience coming to this website each year is a hundred times the size of the number of people ordering the books. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – but over the years, we’ve given only a fraction of the attention to this site that goes into each of our print issues.

    So we came to the conclusion that it’s time to do something online that comes closer to the richness of the books we publish (and will go on publishing). Exactly what form this takes, we’re still working on – but it’s going to be an online publication, something more and different to a blog – and a site that reflects more of the web of activity of the writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, makers and doers who have taken up the challenges of the Dark Mountain manifesto.

    To make this happen, we need your help. 

    We’re asking for donations to cover the costs of building and launching a new online home for Dark Mountain. You can send a one-off amount, or set up a small monthly subscription – or if you’d like to talk about other forms of support, then you can get in touch. Everything you need to know is here, on our new fundraising campaign page.

    How ambitious we can be with the next phase of Dark Mountain depends on the level of support we get, so at this stage we’re not setting a fundraising target or a deadline – but we’ll tell you more as we go along. 

    Meanwhile, thank you for reading and sharing the work we publish. From the crowdfunding of the manifesto onwards, everything Dark Mountain has done over the years has been made possible by the support of friends, collaborators and readers. We don’t take that for granted – and wherever things go next, however dark it gets, we’re thankful for the journey we’ve been on with you.

    Published on the Dark Mountain website as the closing essay in a series reflecting on the political events of 2016 — and to launch the campaign that crowdfunded the new online edition of Dark Mountain. Over the following six months, we succeeded in raising over £37,000 to fund the creation of a new online edition which launched in June 2018.

  • Medan klockan tickar

    Four researchers are thrown together in a room. They come from different fields and different backgrounds, they are at different stages in their careers, but what they have in common is that their work has brought them to the frontline of human impact on the living world. We listen in on their conversation, as they talk about what it does to you when climate change isn’t something you read about in the newspaper, or go to a protest about, or try not to think about, but the thing that is waiting on your desk at nine o’clock each morning.

    As part of the Människans scen project, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm commissioned four members of the Dark Mountain Workshop to collaborate on a play. Each of us was paired with a scientist and through conversations with these partners, we created four stories which were then woven together into a script.

    The play toured Swedish university cities as a rehearsed reading, the audience seated in a circle, the actors among them, followed by a facilitated discussion. An afternoon performance with an invited audience of researchers was followed by a public show in the evening.

  • Maps for the Journey

    Maps for the Journey

    In 1678, the protestant preacher John Bunyan published what was to become one of the most widely-read books in the English language: The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to that which is to come: Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. On this wintry morning in Stockholm, we are not headed for the Celestial City – if we talk about the world which is to come, it is a world turned upside down by the consequences of ways of living which we grew up taking for granted – yet Bunyan’s title seems to fit this journey.

    And today, we are joined by an artist whose feet have followed long paths across Europe, the paths by which pilgrims have travelled through the centuries. Monique Besten is a walking artist: at the centre of her work are the encounters that happen on these journeys, the chance meetings and conversations, and the relationships that she weaves together as she walks. On her most recent journey, she walked from Barcelona to Paris for the COP21 climate conference.

    In a world of cheap flights and expensive trains and car manufacturers who cheat on emissions tests, what does it mean to walk for weeks to a destination that could be reached in an afternoon? (I am writing this, three days after the workshop, on a bus between Västerås and Uppsala, a journey that would take two days on foot – or one on skis, under current conditions.) And what difference does it make to walk as an artist, rather than as a protester or a holidaymaker? These questions are in the room, as Monique tells us stories from her walks.

    Also in the room is a fleet of paper ships. As she walked to Paris, Monique collected whatever discarded paper she found lying along the way – flyers, betting slips, pieces of newspaper – and folded it into ships. Each ship is dedicated to one of the people who helped her on this journey. In the evening, when we welcome the guests who have come to join us for The Village & The Forest, the ships are in the space between the pillars, in the middle of the room. (The same patch of floor that was covered in salt, three months ago, when Ansuman Biswas was here.)

    This month, Monique and Fredrik and Johan and I sneaked in to Kägelbanan, the day before the workshop, and played at being spiders. We made webs joining the pillars, four walls of string that became the background to the maps that the group would make together.

    I want to tell you about these maps.

    Words-that-matter

    The first map is a map of language, a map of words that matter.

    This project started with questions like: what is the role of culture, under the shadow of climate change? What can we do, as artists, with this knowledge? We can’t make work that pretends that we don’t know. Nor can we pretend that art works as a delivery mechanism for messages – to treat art as a sophisticated extension of the Public Relations department, a low-paid advertising agency, is a misunderstanding. So we are searching for other answers. 

    One suggestion is that art can offer other languages in which to talk with each other about the mess the world is in. The language in which we generally talk about this mess is a daylight language, an expert language, a language of facts and models and policies. You can see some of these words, clustered towards the left-hand side of this map, some in English and some in Swedish. You can probably think of others that belong there: climate change, sustainability, resilience, security, technology, resources.

    Art can remind us that other languages are possible, that other languages may be necessary, if we are to navigate the shadowed paths that lie ahead. The languages of night time and of twilight, of the ‘vargtimmen’ – the wolf hour, before dawn – that someone has added here, of the hour between dog and wolf.

    To say that other languages are needed is not to suggest that the daylight words should be abandoned, though it may mean putting them in question. Around the cluster of these words, I notice the pairing of ‘hypocrisy’ and ‘honesty’, and the injunction to ‘slow down’.

    My eyes cross the map to another cluster: ‘uncertainty’, ‘trust’, ‘grace’. We need words that touch parts of our lives that cannot be held at arm’s length.

    Others invite us to reframe our conversations. What happens if, instead of accepting the designation of the new phase in planetary history as ‘The Anthropocene’ – ‘The Age of Man’ – we talk about ‘The Humbling’?

    Sticking-and-starting-points

    The second map is a map of the terrain in which we find ourselves – as artists, as people, as societies – when we start trying to face the mess the world is in. 

    The idea is to name the sticking points, the places where we see ourselves or others getting stuck, but also the starting points, the landmarks that might help us find a way forward.

    Maybe you recognise some of these: ‘The Dragon of False Optimism’, ‘The Dead End of Dystopia’, ‘The Mountains of Madness’, ‘The Future City of Everything Is Gonna Be Fine’, ‘The Desert of No Conflict’, ‘The Great Swamp of Asking for Permission and Waiting for It’.

    At this point, we are channelling Bunyan’s allegorical mapmaking, and this seems to make it possible – not just possible, but playful – to give names to our fears and darknesses, as well as to the fragile zones of hope.

    There are images here that will stick with me. I’ve stood gazing out across ‘The Infinite Clearcut of Facts’, my heart sinking at its endlessness. With bare feet, I have walked ‘The Pebbled Beach of Guilt’ and sometimes arrived, unexpectedly, at the ‘Shore of Happy Meetings’.

    Widening-the-web

    The third map is a map of widening webs: the people, projects, networks and organisations with whom it feels as though this work is or ought to be connected.

    The Dark Mountain Workshop sits at its centre, but this is only a reflection of the perspective from which it has been drawn. We place ourselves around the workshop and use threads to mark the connections. Green threads plot existing connections, orange threads connections that should exist. (Someone has strung an orange thread out to a distant card which says ‘Popular Culture’.)

    Looking at this map, I see a reflection of the different roles we play. For some of us, building networks is at the centre of our work; for others, work happens in solitude, so that this day we spend together once a month is a chance to reconnect with a wider web.

    These maps were made quickly, in between the other activities of the day – and what I am telling you is only one route through each of them, there are other routes to be taken – but of the three, it is this last which feels most obviously incomplete. We are five months into our eight months together, just past the halfway point. If the first half was a journey inwards, now we have turned: it is time to start asking what we are bringing back that could be shared and how we could widen these conversations.

    So, at six o’clock, a small group of guests gather in the foyer of Kägelbanan, friends and strangers, people who heard the invitation that went out quietly over the past week or so. A camera at one end of the room captures how they enter in small groups, each group joined by two or three of the artists from the workshop, retracing the journey through these maps.

    Later, we gather in the space beyond the maps and listen for a while as Monique tells stories of walking across Europe in the soft armour of her suit, and then a group goes off to one corner where Anders reads from a script he’s working on, while others gather again around the maps or at the bar, talking in twos or threes.

    This was the first time since November that we opened up for the evening. Back then, we were charging for tickets, so we got an audience – but we realised that we are not looking for an audience, not yet. We are looking for people who care about the same questions that have brought us together. More than anything, we are looking for other artists and writers and musicians and performers who are willing to join us in this space.

    The invitation went out quietly, because we are still learning how to open this up. But people came – and I hope we made you welcome. You encouraged us to take this further. 

    So we would like to invite you to join us for three more evenings over the spring – and to share this invitation with others who you think should be in the room, to help us widen the web a little further.

    On 7 March – ten days from now – we will be working for the first time with music as a starting point: our guests are the British psych-folk duo Billy Bottle & Martine, longstanding collaborators of the Dark Mountain Project. With their help, we invite you to come and think about ‘What will survive of us?’ What forms of art and culture will continue to make sense in the world which is to come? (RSVP here, Facebook event here)

    On 4 April, we are joined by the cultural ecologist, philosopher and magician, David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal. With his help, we hope to ground ourselves a little more firmly in ‘the more-than-human world’, ‘the breathing commonwealth’ of which we are a part. (RSVP here, Facebook event here)

    On 2 May, we bring our current journey as a group to an end, with the help of the British theatre critic Maddy Costa. This will be a chance to reflect on what we’ve learned over these eight months together and offer some glimpses of where this may lead next. (RSVP here, Facebook event here)

    The Dark Mountain Workshop is Anders Duus, Andrea Hejlskov, Andreas Kundler, Ayesha Quraishi, Clara Bankfors, Dougald Hine, Emelie Enlund, Jesper Weithz, Lisa Färnström, Liv Elf Karlén, Måns Lagerlöf, Ninna Tersman, Patrik Qvist and Ruben Wätte. This project is made possible by Riksteatern, the Swedish national theatre, in its role as expert support to the performing arts in Sweden.

  • The Predicament

    The Predicament

    A problem calls for a solution; the only question is whether one can be found and made to work, and once this is done, the problem is solved. A predicament, by contrast, 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.
    — John Michael Greer

    The world is on fire.

    We know this. We have been hearing the messages since we were in our teens. And somewhere down the line, it got real to us.

    We changed lightbulbs like it would save the planet, clambered on desks at the end of late-night shifts to switch off every screen in the newsroom. We recycled with an obsessive compulsion. We got fired up by speakers at rallies, gathered signatures on petitions, marched chanting to the gates of summits.

    The Village & The Forest

    And still a day came when doubt would not be ignored. We had to admit to ourselves that no amount of lightbulbs would be enough and we no longer believed that one more giant mobilisation of activists would do it.

    What then? It’s not like we went out and bought SUVs. Many of the things we had done, we went on doing. It’s just that the slogans on the placards and on the adverts for the eco products no longer rang true; the movements we had been part of no longer spoke for us in the way that they had seemed to.

    *

    As artists, we found ourselves getting asked to help. Mostly this meant helping to deliver the message that the world is on fire.

    It doesn’t work. The words slacken on the page; a gap opens between stage and audience. Art is not a communications tool for delivering messages and the importance of the message doesn’t change this.

    Yet we cannot retreat into a feigned ignorance. To make work that pretends not to know that the world is on fire is to have a lie in our work like a worm in an apple.

    So we begin again. We try to find ways to make work that can go into the darkness, go down deeper even than the mess we are in; work that crosses the rivers north of the future and comes alive, beyond all expectation, there, on the far side of hope.

    *

    Here is one measure of the depth of the mess we are in.

    Since we were in our teens, scientists have been warning about the threat a changing climate poses to our whole way of life. World leaders have been making speeches about the need to cut emissions.

    Eighteen years ago, they signed a treaty in Kyoto. In those eighteen years, there has only been one year in which global emissions fell. That was 2009, when financial crisis shrank the world economy. In 2010, emissions leapt by the largest amount ever recorded.

    Not long ago, I listened to someone who has been in the negotiating rooms explain, quite calmly, that it would not be possible today to get the countries involved to sign again the agreements they already signed in the 1990s.

    This is one measure of the depth of the mess we are in.

    *

    Listen to the words, though; the ones we use to talk about this mess. Don’t they die as they are spoken? Don’t they turn to ashes in the mouth? At the bottom of all this, there is something that turns our imagination to stone.

    In old stories, there are forces like that, creatures so terrible that even to look on them would turn a person to stone. But there are also cunning ways to approach such creatures. Athena gives Perseus a bronze shield and, by following its reflections, he is able to creep up on Medusa.

    There are stories that work like that shield, stories that give us a dark mirror with which to approach the source of our terror.

    This could be the kind of clue we are looking for.

    *

    ‘I haven’t a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 years or another 10,000 years,’ says our first guest, the storyteller Martin Shaw. ‘We can’t be sure. What matters to me is that we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair, a kind of dream-tangle, with the Earth itself.’

    Could you get any further from the grown-up language in which serious discussions of our predicament are meant to take place? And yet, there is something here that demands admittance, a voice that will be heard.

    Before all this is over, we will have to find a way to talk together again about loss and longing and love, and it will take voices such as this to call the deep words out of the private places within us.

    This is the kind of task that lies ahead.

    First published on the blog of the Dark Mountain Workshop, a project I created during my time as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s touring national theatre.

  • The Shield of Perseus

    ‘Julian and Theo met among a million protesters in a rally by chance.’ The camera glances across a collage of news clippings on the wall of the house in the woods. Among them, an ageing photograph of a sea of placards, the slogan familiar: Not In My Name.

    When Alfonso Cuarón adapted P. D. James’ novel The Children of Men for the screen, he laced the film with these threads of detail that link its grim imagined 2027 back to the world in which it was made. In another scene, Theo is chauffeured through Admiralty Arch into an enclave where a nostalgic England of Horseguards and brass bands is preserved against the chaos. Behind him, Trafalgar Square is filled with people holding placards that read simply, Repent!

    We are halfway between those two demonstrations. So far, human fertility has not collapsed, but in other respects things are not looking great. The warnings from the scientists who study our changing climate get starker every year, yet the only year in which global carbon emissions have fallen since the signing of the Kyoto treaty was 2009, when financial crisis shrank the world economy. It would not be possible to get the countries involved in climate negotiations to sign again today the agreements that they signed in the 1990s: I heard that said, last month, by someone who has been in the negotiating rooms. It is one measure of the depth of the mess in which we find ourselves.

    Those of us who work with words get asked to help and usually what is meant by this is that we should write things that help get the message across. Write a poem, or a play, or a short story that will wake people up to the depth of this mess, that will stir people to action or bring about ‘behaviour change’. The work that results is mostly bad art, because this is not how art works. As the playwright Anders Duus put it to me, ‘Our job is to complicate things.’ Not to be difficult for the sake of it, but to do justice to the strangeness and the messiness of life in a world like this, and to create the kind of space in which stories come alive. This is not helpful, if what you are looking for is a communications tool to get across the message that the world is on fire.

    Meanwhile, how much of the art being made while the world burns will look irrelevant or offensive, a generation from now, given what we already knew about the mess we were in? I remember voicing that question on the evening, seven years ago, when Paul Kingsnorth and I sat down to have the first of the conversations that would lead to us writing the Dark Mountain manifesto. A passage in a novel I had just read seemed to exemplify what I was getting at. The novel was Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Another set of fictional characters are sent among the million protesters who filled London that winter’s day in 2003 to protest the coming war on Iraq. At the centre of the story is Henry Perowne, narrator, neurosurgeon, non-protester. As he drives through the clogged city, psyching himself up for a squash match, his thoughts are on the future:

    If the present dispensation is wiped out now, the future will look back on us as gods… lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    It seemed that neither Perowne nor McEwan himself was attuned to the likelihood that generations to come would look back on us quite differently.

    These are two kinds of failure for writers to try to avoid: on the one hand, scribbling while the world burns, producing work that seems oblivious to the seriousness of our situation, and on the other, writing words that die on the page because a sense of the duty to ‘do something’ is forcing the hand that writes them.

    If our job is to complicate things, we might start instead with whatever seems to be getting taken for granted. Take this urge to get the message across. Is it really the case that the information about climate change hasn’t reached people? Or is it that we struggle to make sense of what this information means, to fit it into the frames we use to make sense of our lives? I sometimes suspect that the climate deniers have a better grasp than many of us of what is at stake: their willingness to twist evidence and turn reason inside out betrays an awareness of what it would cost to admit the alternative, an awareness that seems lacking among those who talk optimistically of the prospects for making the current way of living of the western countries sustainable.

    Art is not an information technology, a tool for delivering messages, but it does have a knack of drawing our attention to the frames by which we have been making sense of our lives, disturbing these frames, bringing them into question, suggesting the possibility of other framings. This kind of activity is not immediately useful, in the way that the work of a communications department is useful, and it does not deliver anything that could be described as a solution. At most, it offers clues, it opens our eyes to paths that might turn out to lead somewhere or might turn out to be dead ends.

    Over five years as an editor for the collections of new writing that Dark Mountain publishes, I read a lot of fiction that tried to tackle climate change as a subject. Love stories set against the background of international negotiations, science fiction futures set among the ruins of civilisation. Almost none of it worked. Instead, the stories that we found ourselves publishing approached this predicament obliquely. I think of the sense of loss that echoes through Nick Hunt’s unsettling tales of encounters with strange creatures. I think of Charlotte Du Cann’s ‘The Seven Coats’, a personal account of a journey through a myth.

    The mythographer Martin Shaw offers an image which has helped me make sense of the difference between these two kinds of story and why the first of them fails. There are horrors, he suggests, that cannot be looked at directly, that will turn us to stone if we try. Such things can be approached only by following the dark reflection in the mirrored shield that Perseus uses to approach Medusa. This is an attitude that fell from intellectual respectability sometime around the 17th century, when such indirect ways of knowing were put away as childish things. The shadows were chased out, first by Enlightenment and then by electrification. We no longer inhabit a world of terrifying forces that exceed our understanding, or so we like to tell ourselves. Surely climate change is a problem that can be fixed with the right combination of technological, financial and policy innovations? As this framing of our situation loses its plausibility, we find ourselves clambering through the attic to dig out those half-forgotten things we put away in the corners of children’s literature or the more unfashionable genres.

    The alternative is a dead language, words that turn to ashes on the tongue. Slogans we repeat because we feel we ought to, because we have to do something, even if parts of us no longer believe what we are saying. Activism can go on in this way, it often does, but this is where art has to revolt. ‘To be a good artist you have to be the person who walks into a space with integrity and tells the truth,’ says the playwright Mark Ravenhill. ‘That’s what marks you out from the audience… you are the most truthful person in that room.’

    This relationship to truth does not allow for tactical calculation. If the Dark Mountain manifesto could be read as a defection from the environmental movement as we knew it, this was because that movement was coming to feel like a church whose priests had lost their faith. At rallies, you heard the same rousing speeches you had heard five years ago, but if you caught the speaker later, in a private moment, they would confess to a pessimism verging on despair. As writers, the duty to truth – not some cold, omniscient, placeless truth, but the messy, paradoxical truth that you meet in medias res – would no longer allow us to be part of this.

    Who needs poetry or plays or manifestoes, when the world is on fire? I have said that art is not useful, in the way that many who are rightly alarmed at the flames would like it to be, and all of this talk about truth is liable to sound foolish. I don’t want to make any strong claims for the role that art can play, but here are a few weak, tentative, questionable ones.

    The insistence on not using any language that rings false – the lifeline on which any writer who is not dead yet depends – may lead us to other ways of talking about the mess in which we find ourselves. I can’t bring myself to write about tackling climate change, or to use a word like ‘sustainability’ in the way I hear it used. What I can say is that there remain actions worth taking, actions that might set things on a less bad course than it looks like they are on. And when I need reminding of this, I can go back and reread John Berger’s essay on Leopardi and arrive again at that final paragraph, where he writes: ‘Something is always in the balance. Reality is always in need. Even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.’

    The insistent probing of language may be inconvenient. It opens up holes which the agreed vocabulary had papered over. It may force us to ask whether climate change is actually the problem, an unfortunate and unforeseeable consequence of human activity which might otherwise roll onwards on its current course, or only the most obviously alarming symptom of something larger, something that needs to be defined in other terms. How far down those holes go is anybody’s guess.

    Art may lead us to other framings of what is at stake. Again, I think of Martin Shaw and his way of talking about this mess that we are in:

    I haven’t a clue whether we humans will live for another 100 or 10,000 years. We can’t be sure. What matters to me is the fact we have fallen out of a very ancient love affair – a kind of dream tangle, with the Earth itself.

    Could you get any further from the grown-up language in which serious discussions of our predicament are meant to take place? And yet, there is something here that demands admittance, a voice that will be heard. Before all this is over, we will have to find a way of talking together about loss and longing and love, again, and it will take the voice of a Martin Shaw, a Jay Griffiths or a Jeanette Winterson to call the deep words out of the private places within us.

    Finally, it may even be that the foolishness of art has a role to play. Meeting activists who are preparing to travel to Paris this November, what strikes me is the contrast to the mood ahead of the Copenhagen meeting, six years ago. Then, everyone seemed to be straining to believe that one more push could do it, so that when the summit ended in disappointment, people were devastated, broken by the result. This year, at least among those I have met, the disappointment seems to be assumed from the start and this gives a different atmosphere to the mobilisation. If there is no longer a rational story about the chain of cause and effect by which our presence will help lead to an agreement, we are participating in something stranger. The risk is that it comes to resemble that flash of the crowd as the limousine passes Trafalgar Square, the placards calling on the world to repent, the classic form of political protest hollowed out into the ritual of a puritanical sect. But this is not the only possibility. Art knows something about the power of seemingly useless acts, of giving voice to desperation, and the strange kind of hope that sometimes arrives when you have given up everything. Such experiences make you no promises.

    The world is on fire. None of us knows for sure where this will end. I would bet on humanity making it through the hard years that are coming, but who can say what shapes human culture will take along the way? Much that we cannot imagine living without has been with us for a handful of generations, often less – the supermarket cornucopias, the wondrous machines – but there are certain elements within our experience that seem to be as old as being human. Making images and telling stories are among them. If things turn out less badly than it often looks as though they are going to turn out, in the time ahead, I suspect that these old parts of ourselves will play some role within that turning.

    Commissioned by the Free Word Centre, London.

  • Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    Introduction to the Fifth Anniversary Edition of the Dark Mountain Manifesto

    It is unusual for a twenty-page, self-published pamphlet to be given a two-page lead review in the New Statesman, and rarer still for that pamphlet to start a cultural movement that the New York Times can introduce to its readers as ‘changing the environmental debate in Britain and the rest of Europe.’ Yet those are two of the more public markers of the strange journey taken by this manifesto in the five years from its first publication to the preparation of this new edition.

    We get emails most days from readers who have found something here that resonates with their own experience. They write about hope, recognition, a sense of feeling less alone. Sometimes an email leads to a collaboration, some- times a collaboration deepens into a friendship that would not have existed were it not for this text. The fruits of those collaborations make their way into the Dark Mountain books – six books so far, and counting – where hundreds of writers, thinkers and artists from around the world have ventured further down the paths we started to sketch out here.

    Then there are the attacks. We have been called all sorts of things: Romantic dreamers, crazy collapsitarians, defeatists, utopians and nihilists. A professor of social policy used a paper in an academic journal to present Dark Mountain as an example of clinical ‘catastrophism’: ‘a temporary or sometimes recurring difficulty in getting things in perspective or proportion.’ The journalist Bryan Appleyard made the rather startling allegation that we represent ‘a form of psychosis’ likely to ‘create more corpses than ever dreamed of by even the Unabomber.’ There have been thoughtful critical responses, too, sometimes leading to conversations in which we come to understand each other better, but these are less frequent than the angry accusers and the long-distance psychoanalysts. 

    Putting all these different reactions alongside each other, trying to make out the pattern that they form, what strikes me is how little it resembles a taking of sides over a recognisable argument. Something else is going on, something that reaches into murkier corners of ourselves than are generally given space on the shores of public debate. The lines of thinking that run through this manifesto are also the contours of a dark shape, an inkblot shape of our puzzlements, doubts and fears—so that, even more than is always the case with the slippery substance of language, every reading is also a veiled reflection of the reader. There are monsters here, if you look for them; there are dead ends, but there are also slender threads of possibility waiting for someone to pick them up. 

    The text which became Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto took shape over a period of six months, starting in the summer of 2008. From this distance, it already seems like the last summer of another age. Not an innocent age – no one could call it that – but an age in which certain delusions were easier to sustain. Then, wham! Lehman Brothers came down and for a few weeks we saw the naked fear of powerful men with no idea how much of their world will be left standing. If you got any kind of a kick out of that final scene in the film Fight Club, when the music swells and the credit card companies’ skyscrapers detonate, then you had to feel some exhilaration, even as your wiser self whispered that all this was not about to end in a jubilee of cancelled first world debt. 

    As the mayhem of those weeks subsided, as the months that followed became years, we found ourselves in an age where crisis has become the new normal. An age of widening extremes and darkening horizons, when outbreaks of hope spark sporadically like broken power lines across networks and onto the streets, but the future no longer holds the promise it used to. Young people struggle to achieve the everyday security on which to build a life, something their parents took for granted. And all the while, beyond the bubble of the disorientated west, the epic of loss grows louder: more species, more languages, more landscapes every year. 

    None of this started with the financial ruptures of late 2008. But most of it intensified in the aftermath of those events, becoming at the same time harder to ignore. And if this manifesto has travelled further than we imagined, one explanation is that it has helped people to get their bearings in a world where the thin, shiny surface of prosperity has cracked. Trying to make sense of our own experience, it seems that we put words to a feeling that others shared and that has become more widespread in the years since. A feeling that there is no way through the mess in which we find ourselves that doesn’t involve facing the darkness, being honest about the scale of the unravelling that is under way, the uncertainty as to where it will end. A feeling that it is time to look down. 

    After it was published, people assumed that we must have been friends for years, but in reality Paul and I were still getting to know one another. We had met on the internet, reading each other’s blogs and recognising common ground. Both writers, both recovering journalists, both of us had been through intense periods of involvement with activism and arrived at a certain kind of disillusionment. 

    We were disturbed by the state of environmentalism. It seemed that sustainability had come to mean sustaining the western way of living at all costs, regardless of whether this was possible or desirable. As carbon emissions continued to mount, prominent campaigners spoke privately of their pessimism, but still got up at rallies to give the same rousing speeches. The movement was in danger of becoming a church where the priests have lost their faith, but don’t believe the congregation are ready for the truth. And when you tried to talk about this, it was always framed as a choice between insisting on the efficacy of more marches, petitions, boycotts and treaties, in spite of decades of failure – or giving up, which meant despair. 

    We were disturbed by the state of literature and the cultural landscape. I remember feeling that most of the books being celebrated in the Sunday newspapers were going to look irrelevant or offensive in a generation’s time, given what we already knew about where things were headed. A passage from Ian McEwan’s 2005 novel Saturday embodied this, when Henry Perowne starts musing about what will happen if ‘the present dispensation’ is wiped out: 

    the future will look back on us as gods … lucky gods blessed by supermarket cornucopias, torrents of accessible information, warm clothes that weigh nothing, extended life-spans, wondrous machines.

    The possibility that the future might view us in a different light did not seem to cross his or McEwan’s mind. Even on those occasions when writers did their best to face the entangled ecological, economic and social crises that surround us, the results tended to be unsatisfying: art deadening into a communication tool for messages from scientists and campaigners, soap-opera scale stories playing out against a backdrop of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. The literary tools inherited from the recent past seemed ill-adapted to the times into which we were heading. 

    These were the conversations we had, first over email and then in the corners of pubs, making lists in our notebooks, sharing names, mapping constellations of writers whose words we had found we could steer by. The idea of a literary journal came naturally, not because we thought it was the answer to all of this, but because it might provide a space to ask the questions. Besides, from the age of eight, I had always been starting little magazines and newspapers, and I can’t imagine Paul was any different. He had more experience of the grown-up world of publishing, not least from his time running The Ecologist, while I had been discovering the way that words can spread over networks, as one of the editors of Pick Me Up, a weekly email newsletter of DIY culture. That gave us the idea of crowdfunding for Dark Mountain, at a time when inboxes were not yet deluged with invitations to Kickstarter campaigns. 

    If we were going to start a journal, it seemed a good idea to kick this off with an essay that explained why we were doing it, that framed an invitation or a challenge. That was what we agreed at the end of an evening in early summer in a pub beside the Thames just outside Oxford. It was in the barn behind the same pub, just over a year later – on the 17th of July, 2009 – that we launched the resulting manifesto to an audience of a few dozen friends and family who between them had put up the money to fund its printing. Someone suggested afterwards that it was strange to ask people to support a manifesto before they had read it, and I suppose that is true, but I don’t think any of our funders had seen the text before that night. 

    The first edition of the manifesto was a hand-stitched pamphlet, made by our friends at Bracketpress of Rochdale, Lancashire. It went through three more printings before the number of copies needed exceeded the sensible limits of their fingers and we decided to republish it as the slim book you now hold in your hands.  

    Why go to all the bother of printing, when we could just have released it onto the internet? We got asked this occasionally, sometimes with an edge of moralising at the waste of resources, as if the servers that hold up the web run on fairy dust.  

    From the outset, the text has also been available online, and a hundred times as many people must have read it on our website as in print. But there is something about the unnecessary effort of making a physical object in a digital age that changes its meaning. So long as letters were the primary form of correspondence, their existence was functional, taken for granted. Now, think what it means today on the rare occasions when a handwritten letter arrives from a friend, and think about how different this feels to the arrival of another email in your inbox. 

    For those who believe – not unreasonably – perhaps that a manifesto should offer a set of proposals, a plan of action, a prescription for the new school of writing it intends to inaugurate, this may not be the most satisfying of manifestos. ‘What are you saying we should do?’ was a frequent reaction, put to us with varying levels of frustration, not least by activist friends. 

    Slowly, over time, we worked towards our own answers to this question. If you follow Paul’s essays through the course of the first five Dark Mountain books, they trace a journey towards one such answer. Other contributors offer their own examples, and the examples differ, because these are not loud, confident, once-and-for-all answers. They are provisional, maybe good enough for here and for now, for putting one foot in front of the other. They do not relieve you of the responsibility of finding your own answers, though they may provide clues as to what the process looks like. 

    But all that came after the manifesto, which was written when we were still working out how to frame the questions. To write a manifesto is to write loudly – ‘A manifesto,’ bellows Tristan Tzara, ‘is a communication made to the whole world, whose only pretension is to the discovery of an instant cure for political, astronomical, artistic, parliamentary, agronomical and literary syphilis!’ – but under all the sound and the fury, at the heart of this manifesto is a hunch that sometimes it is right to walk away, to withdraw, to give up on hopes that no longer ring true, even though you have no answer to the accusing questions that will follow. Sometimes retreat is the only action left that makes sense. To give up things you have held dear – beliefs, identities, habits – is an end, but it can also be a beginning, though it makes you no promises in advance. Only the chance that, having let go, as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you may catch sight of something that your bright certainties had hidden from you. 

    If you were to ask either of us, five years on, do we stand by what we wrote in this manifesto, I suspect our answers would be similar. We stand by it, not as a stockade to be defended, but as a first attempt to say something, to work out how to say something, the fuller significance of which we are still discovering in the company of a growing gang of friends and collaborators, most of whom would never have met if we hadn’t been brave enough, or foolish enough, to commit these words to print in the first place. 

    Published in the 2014 and subsequent editions of Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto.

  • An Outlandish Generosity

    An Outlandish Generosity

    A review of Martin Shaw’s A Branch from the Lightning Tree and Snowy Tower.

    The condition of Capitalist Realism, according to the political theorist Mark Fisher, is defined by ‘the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative.’ When I try to explain in daylight terms, rather than in the flicker of the campfire, why I think that Martin Shaw’s writings on myth, wilderness and wildness matter, I find myself remembering Fisher’s diagnosis. Then another passage comes to mind, from Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Research:

    Climate change is not ‘a problem’ waiting for ‘a solution’. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity’s place on Earth.

    They differ in the focus of their arguments, but both Fisher and Hulme point towards a crisis in which imagination — or its failure — plays a central role. The grip of neoliberalism is tightened by its success in closing down our imagination, while the ongoing collision with planetary boundaries forces us into a confrontation with the stories we tell ourselves about the world and our place within it. To take these suggestions seriously would mean giving the work of culture an importance that goes well beyond the familiar deployment of the arts as a transmission mechanism for messages about change.

    The past decade has seen no shortage of high-profile attempts to ‘tackle’ climate change as a theme in the arts. The results are generally disappointing. We get Ian McEwan writing an Ian McEwan novel about a philandering climate scientist. We get the National Theatre’s Greenland, in which storylines with all the depth of a soap opera play out against a background of melting icebergs and failing negotiations. Part of the trouble, I think, lies in the forms and conventions we have inherited from the recent past. Writers are schooled to grind sharp lenses of observation, to offer a microscopic attention to social detail, stereoscopic panoramas or endoscopic explorations of the individual psyche. There are some subjects, though, which can only be looked at indirectly, through the dark mirror of the shield with which Perseus approaches Medusa. As the shadows were driven into corners, by Enlightenment and then by electrification, we felt we had outgrown such ways of telling: stories that once belonged to everyone were sanitised, moralised and packed off to the nursery. Now, to our surprise, we find there is no position of detached observation left. As shadows lengthen over our whole way of living, we may once more be in need of the kind of storytelling that stalks truths so monstrous they turn our minds to stone if looked at straight on.

    This is the territory in which Martin Shaw works. Like the trickster characters who inhabit his stories, Shaw is a trafficker between worlds: as likely to be found retelling medieval epics around a Devon campfire or guiding rites-of-passage retreats for inner-city teenagers on a Welsh mountainside as lecturing on the course in Oral Tradition that he devised at Stanford. Readers of these, the first two volumes of what promises to be a trilogy on myth, wilderness and wildness, will meet him in all these guises. At times a little out of place in the formality of the written word, some of his sentences seem to have been dragged through a hedge backwards, but they build into a feast of language and image, infused with an outlandish generosity. Here is rich food for the imagination: old stories from Ireland and Norway and Siberia, stories of witches and knights, bear kings and wild women of the woods, capped with a full-scale telling of the Grail epic of Parzival.

    Running through both books is Shaw’s conviction that all of this is more than entertainment, romance or a relief from life’s hardships: that there exists, within stories like these, a kind of ‘mythological thinking’ that has its own rigour and that is of practical relevance to the largest and most urgent questions we encounter. Start out in this direction and, before long, you will pass the bounds of what it is respectable to take seriously as grown-ups in the kind of culture in which most of us grew up. Shaw is not remotely troubled by this: ‘If you don’t want to be Crazy Horse, Boudicca, or Pablo Neruda,’ he announces at the start, ‘stop reading now.’ Those afraid of looking foolish need not apply. Yet he insists on both the difficulty and the importance of bringing whatever wild insights we find out there back to the everyday world, the world which appears in these stories as that of the village or the court. ‘Don’t make a marginal life out of a marginal experience,’ he says, more than once, warning against the ‘smugness’ of an alternative culture in which we surround ourselves with like-minded souls.

    Within the traditions on which he draws, Shaw distinguishes two modes of story, the pastoral and the prophetic:

    The pastoral offers a salve, an affirmation of old, shared values, a reiteration of the power of the herd. The prophetic almost always brings some conflict with it — it disarms, awakens, challenges, and deepens. It is far less to do with enchantment and much more to do with waking up.

    It is this second kind of story we need right now, Shaw suggests: the kind that takes us out of who we think we are, that allows for the emergence of something new. Yet one of the characteristics of mythological thinking is that such pairings are not reduced to oppositions: instead, if we look carefully, we catch sight of the mutual dependence between seeming opposites.

    The old stories most often end with a homecoming, a feast, a celebration of the union of opposites. By contrast, if we go any distance along the wild paths to which Shaw invites us, our own return to the everyday is likely to be lonelier. We come back to a reality in which a myth is something to be debunked. Our experience of the possibility of other ways of knowing is met with incomprehension or disinterest. One of the strengths of these books is that they contain a great deal of experience of how to live between worlds — which is to say, between very different ways of understanding the world — without withdrawing, going crazy or burning out. That alone is worth the price of admission.

    There remains, though, the larger question: what does it mean to appeal to the imagination, to the realm of fairytales, in a world of failing negotiations and melting icebergs?

    One answer is that it provides a clue to the real nature of this crisis. The environmental movement has long tended to frame things in terms of the vulnerability of the planet. This is, in an important sense, a misunderstanding of what is at stake. Yes, we are living in a time of extraordinary ecological destruction, a mass extinction, perhaps the sixth in our planet’s history. But there’s the thing: the planet has been here before. Even the rapid shift in climate we have set in motion may not be unprecedented from a geological perspective. A million years from now, the planet will almost certainly be here, alive, in some as yet unimaginable ecological configuration. This is not to excuse the epic of destruction we have unleashed, but to try to understand it better.

    What is at stake is not the planet, as such, but a way of living within it that we have created as a species, parts of which go back tens of thousands of years, while other parts are barely a generation deep, though we already struggle to imagine living without them. Our sense of loss at all the shadowed beauty being driven out of existence, our guilt, our still-remaining desire to feel proud of our place as a species — all of this exists in tension with our attachment to what we know and our sense of powerlessness within the structures we have built. These forces play out within us and on a planetary scale.

    To understand the relationships between the inner and outer worlds that define the crisis, something like the subtlety of mythological thinking is required, its ability to dance with paradox and its openness to surprise. And perhaps, even now, there remains within the stories the capacity to make those relationships anew. For as Shaw says, that has always been the power of story: to ground us in such a way that a universe becomes a cosmos.

    First published in STIR: Issue 07.

  • Five Years on a Mountain