Recovering academic, wanderer, wonderer, writer, photographer, bespoke retort, part of the process.
With 2012 upon us, I've let Astral Cat's Abroadcast follow this here Posterous out to pasture and begun a new blog, The Place Between Stories, where I'll be posting from here on in.
Please drop over and take a look, and update your blogrolls if you like what you there read :)
Autumn has come early, as spring did. The sun's still warm, but the colour of old gold now, rubbed and passed down from finger to finger. The winds are whippier, and as dawn inches forwards and dusk inches back, there's a whisper of chill in the lengthening dark.
At the end of this month, I'm leaving Berlin and moving back to England. First to London, to find feet and reclaim the possessions that were tumbled into storage two years ago; only then to stand firm, sort through and let as many of them go as must be. After that, hopefully, heading west to settle; dodging likelihoods all the way.
Back in July and August, I spent a long time working on what I though was a very smart and streamlined post for this blog, planned to coincide with its first birthday, which was all about where I thought I'd got to and where I thought I was going, yet I couldn't get it to resolve. The writing kept getting flung sideways and overtaken, first by the massacre in Norway, then by the riots in England, and before and after these events by a brooding disquiet, which hovers still, unwelcomed visitor to an autumn room.
There is an upturning drawing closer; inside, outside. Self pictured as if on an American football pitch, with a ball of intent to be ducked and woven through hazards and interceptions. Maybe, with luck and slight management, to touch down eventually where I need to end up.
Having given its end about as much thought as its beginning, I've decided to let this blog go. I don't think it's here. The logic of maintaining two blogs, which has made a lot of sense at many junctures in the past, now feels an excess to keep tending. The format is looking tired, there are tricks and glitches and iffy statistics. The subject of my previous post here, imagining global jubilee, deserves in due time a home of its own to extend from. And tipping over all these hesitations and sensations of a break point, my laptop packed up - or to be exact, its power connections gave out - calling down a rescaling of computer time and priorities.
So, I'm going to unhook this posterous from my attention and let it float off upon the strange waves of cyberspace. Once I arrive at another platform for putting my writing on-line, I might be minded to resurrect its highlights, and see then what they illuminate.
Thanks for the times you have stopped by and read here, and go well upon your ways.
What would you do if your debts – your mortgage, your student loan, your credit card repayments – were cancelled?
What if this could go further, and the debts of all nations could be cancelled as well – including those of the USA and Greece, who owe such vast sums that the prospect of them defaulting, and crashing the dollar, the euro, and the global economy all over again, is all too real.
This morning I had a short conversation over Twitter with Dougald Hine, after he tweeted:
So back in 2007, I was writing about the need to "Cancel First World Debt" - http://bit.ly/p61kox #collapsonomics
and this connected with some recent vague thoughts of mine about why, in the midst of dire economic problems arising from unmanageable debt burdens, there is no high profile campaign for a global jubilee, comparable to the Jubilee 2000 campaign to cancel the debts of the world's poorest countries.
What follows are a few further thoughts, and some of the questions and ideas we exchanged.
Dougald’s post quotes from this 2002 article by Michael Hudson, which looks at the history and use of jubilee in the agrarian societies of the ancient near East. In essence, these early debt-using economies learned that they needed to declare jubilee periodically – to restore money and agricultural land back to debtors – in order to keep their economies functioning. The principle of jubilee is enshrined in both Old and New Testaments - consider Jesus turning over the tables of the moneylenders - and indeed the Church has played a strong role in contemporary jubilee campaigning.
My non-specialist understanding of economics grasps that sooner or later, debt-driven economies run out of fixes and undo themselves, because coping with the increasing burden of debt stymies the economic activity needed to keep servicing the debt. This is what’s happening across the world economy now, yet the principle of jubilee as a reset mechanism is forgotten. An admittedly quick glance at the ongoing work of the Jubilee 2000 campaign in England and Scotland shows that its main focus is still the poorest countries – yet the terrain has shifted, and the implications of unmanageable First World debt are now of major concern too.
My initial wondering was whether it is possible to design and model a jubilee process that could be successfully implemented across the entire global economy.
Dougald’s first question was how do we make #globaljubilee imaginable?
This question, as I read it, asks how to imagine the idea of global jubilee so that people can run with it, dream with it, and consider what kind of a world they would like to create with it.
One of the things a global jubilee could do is provide the opportunity to reboot the global economy according to post-growth, no-debt principles. An economy grounded in abundance and flourishing for all, rather than on debt and scarcity. Although I had concerns that a jubilee could be used to rehabilitate business as usual, Dougald raised the question of whether it would be possible to do this if you took away the power that debt has over people.
So, I wonder if there are any economists out there who could design and model a serious, workable proposal for global debt cancellation. Or, working back from that, if there are smaller-scale applications of jubilee – on a national or geopolitical regional level, say – that would still bring huge benefits, and create opportunities for a post-growth redesign.
Inevitably, questions and problems arise. The main ones that come immediately to my mind being how to garner the support of those who benefit from the debts (banks et al), and how a jubilee would work through into the grey and black economies, into the worlds of the economically marginalised, those who owe loan sharks and mafiosi and their ilk.
Still I wonder, even if a global jubilee were to prove unworkable in practice – and that this is precisely why there is no high-profile campaign for one – whether the very act of imagining such a thing might seed other, as yet unforseen possibilities for change.
[so it looks like I’ve committed myself to that self-directed crash course in alt. economics that I’d hoped to put off until *later*, then J]
Something I’ve been doing recently, if sporadically, is teaching myself to draw, using Betty Edward’s book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.
One of the interesting artistic concepts the book highlights is negative space: the space that surrounds or is enclosed by whatever subject(s) you are drawing. The three thin cones and a fatter wedge that form if you spread out your fingers in preparation to draw your hand.
Edwards observes that developing a knack for seeing the beauty of negative spaces is often a treasured revelation to her drawing students. Good composition in drawing – you know it when you see it, even if you don’t know precisely how it is achieved – is a matter of arranging both positive subjects and negative spaces into a compelling overall arrangement. And focusing on drawing the negative spaces, rather than the positive subjects they puncture and enfold, is an outside-in way of learning to draw more accurately, because the negative spaces which have no name or preconceived identity fool the brain out of imposing the shorthand symbol-system it has ready prepared for subjects about which we already know all there is to know. Five pointed sticks attached to a roundish blob will surely do.
Intriguingly, Edwards observes that her own North American culture struggles to attend to negative space because it is so much oriented to positive subject-matter (or object-matter if you demur). Other cultures, she notes – without specifying which ones – have a sense not of ‘the problem’ (object), but of ‘working within the space of a problem’ (object plus its negative spaces).
Something else I have been doing recently is taking stock, surfing a wave of feeling drawn to look back at what I’ve been up to. Across this blog (begun, I now notice, with the common flood of regular enthusiasm that then dwindles to a yet persistent trickle), I’ve been interested in navigating change without a map, in dissensus and discrimination, in what enough is. And often enough in things that might be termed the negative spaces of my culture: the depths of winter, the inchoate unknowns of the psyche submerged in the dark lake, the death cycles of abandoned buildings, the terra incognita of ordinary life. Things not ordinarily perceived and so hard to see, yet somehow essential to the composition of the whole.
Enough to want to deter myself from seeing a pattern emerging, that might then tempt me to follow it. For another negative that has taken root for me is negative capability: the capacity Keats identified for accepting uncertainty, living with mystery instead of seeking to resolve it.
Well, I admire the well-wrought urn of this idea; I’m not sure that I actually live inside it yet, curled in the nameless negative space that its shaped clay embraces. Mostly I get as far as noticing the long lists of facts and reasons that I’m inclined conjure up to explain things, and that the lists vary, and that things change according to whatever’s on those lists.
I lead a double life, of a kind maybe more common that I generally allow for. One life is mostly virtual, and is radical in its preoccupations with change, collapse, new stories and emergent alternative ways of thinking and doing. The other is a mostly normal, wholly unremarkable daily existence in a stable, affluent corner of a stable, affluent western nation, where every day clean water comes out of the tap, the shelves of the organic supermarket are full, parents push prams or lead well-fed toddlers along the pavement, workers commute to jobs and hipsters click away at Macbooks in the company of latte macchiatos.
Since emerging from childhood, I’ve always lived some variant of this double life. My cultural tastes, intellectual interests and wildest dreams have always tended to the further extremes of progressive and avant-garde; my life choices have always been markedly conventional, safely located some way back from cutting edges. And you can rest assured that over the years I have regularly beaten myself up to a black and blue pulp over what I’ve judged to be the glaring inconsistencies and spectacular bad faith of such a life.
I’m writing this on the threshold of some major life changes, which are oriented with at least the intention of bringing my values and dreams more into line with the texture of my everyday life – though without much of a plan, or the expectation that reality will pan out as I might care to anticipate. Perhaps as part of an imperceptible process of arriving at this point, I’ve been giving a vast amount of circuitous, inconclusive, and quite possibly useless thought to that bedrock of constant normality that underpins my own life, and which I encounter with a shock of misrecognition each time I quit the Chinese-box interlocked spaces of my apartment, broadband connection and mindset.
Misrecognition, to the extent that ordinary life is a blind spot, a terra incognita, a sticking place in much of the radical thinking in which I steep my attention. By ordinary life, I sort of mean that of the big, middling social tranche of the so-named ‘silent majority’: the people whose worlds are only ever sketched en masse and are so steady as to be unremarkable, fitting neither the archetypal narratives of progressiveness – personal transformations in social consciousness through will or suffering – nor the poster-child needs of ultra-conservatism. Those men and women that you pass every day, whose stories are not on your radar, who go to work and keep paying the rent / mortgage and sending their children to school and university, are not made redundant and do not write to their political representatives.
This ordinary life sits uneasily nowadays, cast as both victim and perpetrator of interlocking global predicaments of almost beyond-thinkable complexity. At the quick, leading edge perceptions of economic collapse, global warming, peak oil and large-scale environmental degradation contend (and I agree) that the life that passes for ordinary in affluent industrialised nations is wrong, and needs – or will be forced – to change. Yet, implacably, for the moment at least, in a great many places, because it is normal that life goes on. The lack of mainstream political will and vision to lead on the changes needed is well-rehearsed, and is matched by a deep vein of distaste for paternalistic state interventions aimed – with mixed success – at persuading or nudging citizens towards behaviour changes. Yes, there is also a groundswell of ground-up progressive ideas and initiatives, such as Transition Towns, that are significantly expanding their reach and influence; but for understandable reasons their self-reporting focuses predominantly on positive successes and self-reinforcement, and has little to say about the people and communities not at all touched by or involved with them.
Apart from the unknown quantity of silence, the faltering of silent majority as a placeholder for the ordinary lives of ordinary people is that – like sheeple, sleepers, mindless consumers, zombies, and the other labels which righteously point up the wrongness of ordinary life – it’s a big picture idea that breaks up once you start looking closely. On a personal scale the labels evanesce, leaving other human beings much like yourself who, as the film director Jean Renoir put it, also have their reasons. Consider also the basic facts of diversity and sharp discontinuity in the social, economic and environmental circumstances that undergird human lives and behaviours. To meet those discontinuities I could choose to travel from my stable and affluent home district in Berlin to Athens, to Detroit, to Multan, to Tuvalu; or I could move to a different district of this city, or all I honestly have to do is cross the street. Right across, in the interstices of this jagged graph, normal life goes on.
Keith Farnish dwells in some detail on the incompatible existential scales of human life. In the big picture of life evolving on Earth, the human species is an expendable nuisance; down at the single pixel level of my life and personal freedoms, or your life and personal freedoms, our importance to ourselves is absolute. Normal life has always been understood as fragile and uncertain; now it’s fundamentally unsustainable on top of that; yet once you get next to or inside normal life it can also prove astonishingly persistent and resilient, a near miraculous blend of inertia and flexibility under duress. [Dave] Pollard’s Law states that we do what we must, then what’s easy, then what’s fun. Ordinarily, people gravitate within the boundaries, possibilities and expectations shared by their families, communities and peers, and while such conformism is ritually frowned upon, it is also its own form of practical resilience. Meanwhile, ‘broken’, crisis-riddled systems somehow keep chugging on and delivering the goods (universities) or they become more porous to ingenious workarounds (black markets). And when things fall apart, some people will always manage to keep going, to get through another day, and another, and another; whatever it takes or costs.
This isn’t a romantic apologia for (my) ordinary life. To mangle Beckett, it can’t go on, but it goes on anyway. The trick, I don’t know, is to try and keep the picture in sight at all scales, whatever pain and dissonance to the sighting faculties this demands. To see the sudden and potential drastic changes, the upendings and unravelling; at the same time to see where normal remains unaffected, and life goes on. The long panoramic view of civilization collapsing; the day-to-day-to-day continuity of things where you find yourself being more or less the same – until they no longer are. To find out an impossibility: whether it is ever possible to stop short of closing the loop according to one’s own beliefs, so creating a blind spot: those textures and patterns of life that you don’t see, don’t speak or listen to, because they don’t fit the stories you believe in.
If this pitch has pointed one way, towards the terra incognita of progressive thinking; it also holds for other directions. Suggesting that ordinary life too needs to look beyond itself, and down; to see what are those groundswells lying perhaps directly beneath its feet.
From the place between stories, it’s worth reaching over to the far side of stories. Especially if your take on the place between is as a temporary aberration, before the normal service of being in full possession of a story is resumed.
Stories, yes, are the enchanted threads of human consciousness, weaving meaning, possibility, senses of purpose and belonging with extraordinary tenacity across cultures, over land and water, and through time. As pop psychological parlance has it, human beings are believed to be ‘hard-wired for narrative’ – as far as I know the only species though to be so configured. The right to tell one’s story – and to have that story heard and respected – isn’t among the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, yet a compelling case could be made that it ought to be. Telling stories has a special power over silencing (whether by overlooking or brute force), and in gaining traction over the sudden traumas of life and death. When my father died several years ago, I called a close friend who lost his mother very young, and remember his encouragement to me to narrate what had happened because – and I believe he was right about this – “it’s important to tell the story.”
The dilemma around stories in this civilization is their repeated attenuation into a cookie-cutter form which appears to guarantee certainty and control. One arc, three acts, and the comfort of closure. The further humans exert their dominion, the more the carrying capacity of stories gets overextended, from being a particular way that human beings have of making sense of their world, into the way that the whole of creation makes sense of itself: a conceit epitomised in the poet Muriel Rukeyser’s quotation-friendly line “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms”. This catch-all invocation of stories – and inflated expectations of what stories do – becomes another glib meme issued on autopilot, in the rush to reach a solution, second guess what’s going to happen, or simply remain in the loop du jour; a point that Tony Dias also catches cleanly from another angle in a recent post titled ‘Stories’; which in serendipity crossed the path of the writing of this one.
Further cause for concern turned up when I was Googling for reassurance on human-hardwiring-for-narrative, and found the majority of top citations came in the blunt context of marketing pitches about using the power of stories to get consumers to buy more stuff.
* * *
In the presence of stories, listen (or read) for the ones that are told by clambering, one hand before the other, one foot then another, along the edge where stories meet their far side. All that which is beyond story, other than story; even while becoming the subject of a story.
Standing on my human edge, a forest to me is a mystery before it’s any kind of story, and – although I dearly love stories involving forests – I don’t look for the forest to be swallowed up in stories that might make me believe I understand the first thing about it.
A forest, an oak tree at the edge of the forest, a hawk perched in the oak tree, a mouse nesting in the oak tree that the hawk will prey upon, an oxygen molecule that circulates in transformation through all of them. Do they experience their own existences as stories? The ready answer is no, insofar as we assume that other animals have instinctual memories but no conscious, continuous sense of self; and we are incredulous at the idea of a tree or a chemical element being sentient. Even if we don’t make these easy assumptions, is there certainty that living awareness within the beyond-human world takes, for itself, the form of stories?
No objection, no barrier here to humans inventing and appreciating wonderful stories of the relations between all these beings. Or to pondering whether the interface between the human and the beyond-human adopts the lingua franca of storytelling. But there will be stories that respect the edge, and stories that ignore or erase it.
Same among the artefacts of human creation, in the encounter with those that plainly don’t take story form, that present resistance to being explained entirely by stories. Take the dense, figure-and groundless, ‘all-over’ drip-painted surface of Jackson Pollock’s Lavender Mist – one of the landmark paintings of mid-20th century American Abstract Expressionism. I’d defy Scheherazade to tell it as a story – so much so that I was struck as a student of this style of painting by how compulsive was the critical and cultural insistence that there must be a story – in this example furnished by the biography and public persona of Pollock himself – to block that disquieting gap in meaning and certainty which the radical appearance of the painting opened onto.
* * *
The edge entails the possibility of slipping, not knowing, losing control. Fumbling, building negative capability, redirecting to poetry. The art of taking long diversions in order to arrive, humbly, back at a story; knowing how to juggle forces between here and there. Traditional folk tale openings are adept at this: ‘once upon a time last week’. Sifting patiently through the stock of stories to find one that fits the occasion, turning an almost-but-not-quite story over and over to rejig it. All preferred to the blithe streamlining of persons and events to fit an existing narrative.
For where stories are dying, they live in sight of their far side.
I'm very glad to have struck many chords with The Place Between Stories; thanks again to those who read it, and those who read, liked, shared and commented so positively :)
A flurry of spring meandering over on my Wordpress blog:
Two wanders involving woods and water:
http://astralcatabroadcast.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/walking-in-the-rain/
http://astralcatabroadcast.wordpress.com/2011/04/23/greenwood/
Homage to the humble dandelion and an invitation to order Dark Mountain 2, to help them meet their funding target (plus sneak preview of unmissable contents.)
http://astralcatabroadcast.wordpress.com/2011/04/26/ah-dandelion-ahoy-dark-mountain-2/
And a longish self-story about getting lost in reading:
http://astralcatabroadcast.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/the-unread/
You may be wondering why two blogs and how the division works. Astral Cat's Abroadcast is the place where I chronicle my wanderings around Berlin, put posts that are more private and inward-facing than the Posterous essays, and turn the wheel of the year. Like having two arms and two eyes and numerous other paired body parts, having two blogs seems to balance, and if one don't work out there's always the other :)
One of the reasons I have not been posting much recently is that I am between stories.
There is an old story, phrased in the past tense, which begins ‘I was a university lecturer, I used to teach Film Studies.’ This story continues to echo through me, for better and worse, but it’s no longer who I am. When I find the bones of this story poking through too much in my writing, that writing will be abandoned as unsuccessful.
And I trust that there is a new story, except that I don’t know what it is yet. There is a continual temptation, an internalised expectation, to craft myself a new story and tell it proudly. But it doesn’t feel right; new labels I try sticking to myself never look or sound right. What does feel right is just to keep going in small unsensational ways, until a time when something that I don’t currently have ways to describe is ready to emerge.
What’s brought me to this awareness of being ‘between stories’, is following Julia Cameron’s creative recovery course The Artist’s Way. One of the things the course invites participants to do, is to look carefully at the stories they tell about themselves and the beliefs they hold, with the end of shifting those stories and beliefs where they persistently set up blocks to creativity.
My experience so far with personal stories is that chasing the truth of stories is a scarlet herring, but that it matters deeply which stories you choose to believe, and what that belief then makes real. My self-stories are many and vary widely, depending on my mood and who I’m talking to. How true they appear to me can be pretty arbitrary, given that memory will misremember to suit itself. But if one story gets me sat down writing, and another story has me passing a miserable day in assorted displacement activities because I don’t believe I’m good enough to be a writer, well for me that’s an important distinction.
***
Approaching the wider role of stories within a society, it’s likewise helpful to observe how far the familiar question ‘is it a true story?’ gets you, compared with ‘is the story believed, and what does that belief make real?’ Red fish spit out true stories because there are countless stories, they’re all true, and they all contradict each other.
This civilization’s official version, though, is that truth can be one thing only, best authorised in the form of measurable, empirical facts. Conveniently, this version permits truth to be hoarded as power by those who proclaim ownership of truth, and disfavours its radical egalitarian proliferation through all that is.
Which winds back to the Dark Mountain Project calling for new stories – a diversifying and multiplying of stories – to re-tell the place of humanity within the more-than-human world, as the old certainties of civilized humanity shift, break apart, and edge tentatively towards new shapes.
Nests of small warm stories in the cracks of the old edifice, which, for the time being, persists and persists.
Three things can happen when a story begins to die. First, it becomes newly, painfully visible as a story. For the official version, which holds that its stories are not stories at all, but hard, factual, measurable truth, such visibility is literally invisible – unthinkable – and can only be seen by its projection, vicious and symptomatic. Second, adepts with a facility for switching stories, and those already living under the radar by means of different stories, emerge to a newfound degree of credibility for their alternatives. Third, those invested so deeply in the old story that they believe they have no alternative but to believe in it, will cling to it harder than ever, for bloody murder and dear life.
***
The place between stories is not any of these. It’s a cussed, borderless, conceptless place, unsanctioned by a society devoted to Purpose and Focus and the reckoning of cost at all costs. Culture too abhors a vacuum, any person without a readily communicable meaning. What do you say to new people when they ask you what you do, what direction fills your time? There are no stories to tell of the place between stories, to the extent that our rules for stories are that one event must lead, meaningfully, to another. (Although in principle it’s possible to essay the place, to chronicle, to pillow book or stream its consciousness.)
Or, the place between stories might fill up, quite unexpectedly and to a pitch of delirium, with original stories, forgotten stories, lacerating stories, beatifying stories. Stories laid as mortar between the bricks of other stories. The stories you had stopped realising you were relying upon to hold you in the place between stories. Any one of which might be the sidetrack you need urgently to take next.
Pitch again, and the place between stories might drop you backwards through a concealed gateway, beyond which there are no stories at all. Where everything becomes worth the living, and only shadows can be told.
Apologies for the absence of posts recently.
I've been away a lot the past couple of months, in connection with where to go next. This outer movement is mirrored inwardly as a broader feeling of transition, which isn't germinating ideas to write out here. More what metaphorically you might call a lot of root canal work :)
With camera, though, I persist in refinding.
A belated happy Spring Eqinox.
http://astralcatabroadcast.wordpress.com/2011/02/16/the-devils-bridge/
Là-bas: existential misadventures in French Catalonia. With links and pictures ;)
