It was strange how right it felt, like we had turned a corner and started building the world we wanted. In the mornings Claire and I opened up the back doors to birdsong and the beautiful sound of absence from altitude. It was like a different sky, a bigger sky above us. Someone wrote to Claire saying that looking at the sky now was like looking at the sky in old landscape paintings. Inside me I felt myself willing the ash cloud on, seismic solace - if this just continued 2 years say - Europe would have to change how it operated, and then we might never go back. On the weekend, we checked the time of sundown and rushed up to Parliament Hill - and I don't know if the colours were really any different, but the skies were, and we weren't the only ones who had chosen to find out. I had personally give up flying four years ago, but I was still so connected to this air-freighted existence. My brother was in Germany with work, my parents in the USA on holiday, one friend vacationing in Crete, two more teaching briefly in Croatia, work colleagues in Mumbai and Japan. Still I didn't want flights to resume - let friends and family find the opportunity for adventure. Each extension of the no-fly time issued through the news - each 0100 to each 0700 to 1900 and round to another day's 0100 held open a portal to this zone of quiet. But we felt the temporariness painfully, like a holiday these days would end, and eventually the news was of air space opening. That first evening I watched a single red taillight in the sky. The next day sat at my workdesk I looked out the window and saw a contrail streaming out the back of a silver jet, look! a plane, I said. A novelty, but instantly I saw another contrail, and another, and more planes to-ing and fro-ing from Gatwick, Heathrow, Stansted and who knows where. Business as usual. It was hard for the heart not to fall.

Diploma In Applied Permaculture Design

I've decided to return my energies towards completing the Permaculture Diploma. Last weekend I attended a Diploma Induction Weekend, facilitated by Graham Burnett and Hannah Thorogood. It was a good reminder session/space for those "what about?" questions/and gave some structure to what had been for me a pretty loose set up.

The next achievable (and important step) seems to be getting a regular Action Learning Guild going - I've created a new group for this purpose on the London Permaculture Ning.

Human Ecology Writings

The best of last year's human ecology writings are now up on scribd. Some of the formatting appears to be out - but the content is pretty much there.

Mend & Make Do to Save Buying New

The MSc in Human Ecology is over, the thesis is written. Read it, or download it from, here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/22084827/Mend-Make-Do-to-Save-Buying-New-Decoding-Messages-of-Austerity-in-a-Consumer-Culture

Designed Visions

After completing the Human Ecology dissertation I planned some downtime, instead.... I spent 8 days on a Permaculture Training of Teachers Course run by Naturewise and Designed Visions.

Claire White Gardens

New site by Forest Garden designer Claire White:

http://www.clairewhitegardens.co.uk/

Office Recycling

I'm part of a group pushing "Green Issues" up the agenda where I work. We have had some success, but there's still a lot to do. I've created a new Collection on the London Permaculture Flickr site for issues to do with "waste?". One of the included Sets features photos and explanations of the recycling facilities in the offices of Amnesty International in Central London.

The already established provision of paper recycling has recently been bolstered with staff generated schemes for recycling cds/dvds and used batteries.
The group has also successfully encouraged the organisation to take advantage of Islington Council's free recycling service for charities - adding glass, plastic bottles, tins & cans and cardboard to the materials recycled.

Next stop - office composting, dealing with tetrapaks, etc etc....

The Gift

The Gift

The gift
And the feeling behind the gift
The character of the giving
The process and action
Which presented this gift.

A dance around the question
Of selfishness
And selflessness
An attempt to act
In a way which is ‘Right’

To offer each action up
As some recompense
Or sacrifice
For my no doubt myriad other sins?
Failures to take it
To stand where I am
Speak what I think
Not lie
Nor circumvent
Look for easy paths
Short cuts
That avoid a necessary journey.

And in this search for ‘Rightness’
I sense a ghost
Of lost romance
Broken eros
Trying to reform as agape
Afraid of eros
Afraid of breaking.
In a woman
In Love
There was a bridge
out of an isolated sense of self
Love is the Magick
But now where does the bridge lead?

A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants

This assignment has led me to reflect on my creativity in a number of ways and also to consider the role that an artistic attitude and creative engagement might play in a human ecology perspective. I will explore this through personal narrative, thoughts around my poem The Gift (which itself reflects on creativity) and interaction with the texts of others.

Over the years I have engaged with creativity in a number of ways, and I remember how as a child I enjoyed the play of art making. Around the time of adolescence my relationship moved from being primarily a producer of creative activity to becoming a receiver and commentator. I studied literature for three years at university and later studied cinema for a year. In between I worked in the art school’s library surrounded by volumes of artistic expression and by creative artists themselves – painters, sculptors, weavers, and performance artists, artists exploring time, space and materials in a thousand different ways.

I had (have) friends who were (are) poets, painters, musicians and my brother makes his living designing clothes. I read and read, I have visited art galleries around the world, worked in cinema archives, maniacally bought and consumed recorded music, seen music performed live innumerable times. Through out much of this time I attended little to my own creativity. In many ways I was like the ‘shadow artist’ described in The Artist’s Way (Cameron, 1995) “Shadow artists often choose shadow careers-those close to the desired art, even parallel to it, but not the art itself”(p.27).

But I was not completely cut off from my own creativity – I wrote poetry, furtively, not for general consumption; and I scribbled, doodled, sketched on hundreds of pieces of scrap paper. I took photographs; I took a class in photography.

As I grew older, I became more confident in expressing myself in these ways – though that expression remained largely without an audience, and while I didn’t hide away what I did neither did I make any effort to share my output. I remained caught in a problematic conception of art and creativity. The need for me create and the value I felt in creativity was tempered by a perceived sense of the low value of my creative output.

I recently encountered the work of psychologist Guggenbühl-Craig on creativity and this formalised a lot of my only partly consciously thoughts. Guggenbühl-Craig divides the concept of creativity into three distinct manifestations, which he describes as: personal creativity, collective creativity and transcendent creativity.

He is dismissive of the first kind, writing that (Guggenbühl-Craig, 1995) “we should not refer to personal creativity as creativity at all”; we should in fact refer to it as “self-development, self-expression or something similar” (p.7). By collective creativity he meant the work of the advertising and fashion industries that attempt to follow and shape the zeitgeist. Finally, in transcendent creativity he identifies what we conventionally consider ‘high art’ – the work of ‘geniuses’ Shakespeare, Bach, Michelangelo etc.

For several years I had been dismissing my creativity as not really “creativity at all”, and thus of little value. I was in fact devaluing my self and my actions, looking back on this now it is easy to see both that this mirrored my sense of political agency and that many others seemed to be trapped by this same dynamic. In placing a low value on what I could personally achieve, and deferring value to others I was handing away my own power. I felt so dwarfed by the attempt to reach that transcendent creativity, the only art in which I was socialized to find value that I tended to not act at all. This is what Cameron (1995) describes as debilitating perfectionism “Part of the game here is lining up the masters and measuring our baby steps against their perfected craft” (p.121).

This inertia, the sense of being daunted by the scale of the task immediately resonates for me with my own and others’ feelings about global ecological problems and issues of social justice. I wondered if there might be support from artists and radical politics that might suggest routes out of this way of thinking.

Audre Lorde (1984) in a perfect challenge to Guggenbühl-Craig’s value division of creativity writes “yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference-between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” (p.58).

I found that the surrealists spoke of a ‘communism of genius’, and that the situationists made a revolutionary call for an ‘art made by all or not at all’ (Debord, 1957). Similar sentiments to Lorde’s were evident in the Fluxus movement (Higgins, 1984) “They said: "Hey! - coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants "” (p.87).

The therapist Thomas Moore (1994) offered another take suggesting the association of creativity with “lofty fantasises of exceptional achievement’” (p.198) is a juvenile romanticization of the creative act. He suggests we bring our idea of creativity down to earth and realise the role of creativity in our everyday lives. He proposes that human creativity is “a participation in the act of God creating the cosmos”, but this lofty claim is rooted in quotidian practice “As we do our daily work, make our homes and marriages, raise our children, and fabricate a culture, we are all being creative” (p.199).

The artist Joseph Beuys formulated an idea of artistic practice he called ‘Social Sculpture’, in which all humans are seen as ‘artists’ responsible for the shaping of a democratic and sustainable social order. He wrote that we are all, everyday working with “invisible materials”:

Thinking Forms - how we mould our thoughts or

Spoken Forms - how we shape our thoughts into words or

SOCIAL SCULPTURE - how we mould and shape the world in which we live:
Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an artist.
(Harlan, 2004)(p.9).

These ideas are all rich to me, fertile with possibilities of how I might live life and how creative practice might play a role in social engagement.


To thine own self be true

As I was considering the creative element of this assignment I was reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. In this book Hyde (2006) makes the case that “the art that matters to us – which moves the heart or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience – that work is received by us as a gift is received” (p.xiv). In considering the transactions of art as gift exchanges he writes of other gift economies – a modern one referred to by sociologists is blood donation (Titmuss, 1971).

While I pondered creativity and what this gift quality might mean, I also thought on the importance of these convivial actions that form a sense of world. So I made an appointment and a few weeks ago I donated blood. The session took place in Conway Hall a “hub for free speech and progressive thought” (Anon. 2007).

I took a place on a bed and a phlebotomist examined my left arm. Unable to find a vein, she said she would need to try my other arm and had me turn about head to tail. She quickly found a vein on my right arm but it was close to the surface, it would likely bruise she said, but this might elicit sympathy for me. Calling a colleague over, they considered another vein – one that was deeper, less accessible, reaching which might cause more discomfort.

They successfully punctured it and left me reclining, right hand gripping and releasing to act as a pump – hand become another heart at the extremity of my arm. Now, as I had been turned about, I faced the stage of the main hall and I found myself staring directly at a legend painted upon the proscenium arch:

“TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE”

It was the only thing available to read for the 10 minutes of the session, and filled my attention. I remembered it being from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius’s advice to Laertes. In this period of contemplation two words stood out from the others: “SELF” and “TRUE”. The Human Ecology course has led me to consider anew questions of identity, and my recent reading and thoughts have constellated about ideas of the transpersonal. These ideas have challenged me to think about where my sense of self begins and ends, to consider an expanded sense of self. Now this line also challenged me, forcing me to ask: what I considered “self”, what constituted my “own self” and what was/is “true” to that self? How could I be true to an expanded sense of self? In any creative expression how could I speak truly?

In The Artist’s Way, Cameron (1995) writes of synchronicity, the attractive force of action in the world, that when one acts, one draws towards oneself what one needs (pp.62-67). Although dubious about this idea I was struck in the following week to find the line “to thine own self be true” again: in Cameron (1995) (p.80) and then in Carol Gilligan (1982) (p.135). This question of a true self seemed determined to be confronted.

In not going for the shallow vein, the phlebotomist’s decision to first choose my right arm, my writing arm and then to go for the deeper vein that would be more difficult, possibly painful seemed like a message to deepen my own enquiries. So in writing for this assignment I felt the need to explore in poetry what the creative act might mean to me, how it might function in my life, and what it might serve.

I was aware that my past writing had often been born of emotional turmoil, out of the fracturing of romantic love. Applying more thought to the issue I noticed how questions of love and creativity had become entwined in my imagination.

I realised that, for me, both art and love were a ‘bridge’, a pathway out of a purely individual conception of self toward a communion with other – be that a lover or a more abstracted sense of ‘audience’. When this link had been the bridge of romantic love – the destination had been one other person – but in making a leap from oneself a connection to everything outside the individual self was made possible. The creative act was in itself an act of love because it was about the formation of relationship.

I wondered in The Gift whether perhaps a bridge toward community and a “more-than-human”(Abram, 1997)(p.22) world would require a different kind of love – not eros (romantic love) not even what the ancient Greeks called philia (familial, brotherly love) but something of what Christians understand by the term agape (unconditional ‘divine’ love). I discovered that Lorde (1984) also wrote of this bridging quality of love, but without the need to divide up love she simply expanded the conception of the erotic. She writes that the spiritual and political are connected and “the bridge which connects them is formed by the erotic - the sensual - those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meanings” (p.56).

I believe that by engaging with our creativity we participate in forging a better world, that an artistic approach to life might form a cornerstone of activism, I feel inspired by these words of Robert Sardello (1999) “Beauty, which will be here defined as the act of living artistically, is love made visible in the world. Artistic living consists of the ability to display, through our actions and attitudes, the power of soul and spirit in the world” (p.209). Shakespeare’s Hamlet which, indirectly, inspired much of my thinking here, has been seen as a core text of the birth of individualism in humanistic thought – a form of consciousness that encouraged an isolated self perception, a separation of what we consider ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ ourselves (Bloom, 1998)(Johnson, 1991)(Lane, 1996). That powerful line “To thine own self be true” also seems to contain the beginnings of another conception however, that of a truer vision of selfhood. Creative engagement, considered as an act of love, of giving, seems a way that I might find that a truer self.

References

Abram, David (1997) The Spell of the Sensuous. New York, Vintage.
Anon. (2007) A Brief History of Conway Hall [online]. Available from: http://www.conwayhall.org.uk/conwayhallhistory.htm [Accessed 13th February 2008].
Bloom, Harold (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York NY, Riverhead Books.
Cameron, Julia (1995) The Artist’s Way: A Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self. London, Pan Books.
Debord, Guy (1957) Report on the Construction of Situations In: Ken Knabb (Ed. and Trans.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press.
Guggenbühl-Craig, Adolf (1995) From the Wrong Side: A Paradoxical Approach to Psychology. Woodstock CN, Spring.
Harlan, Volker (Ed.) (2004) What is Art?: Conversation with Joseph Beuys. Forest Row, Clairview Books.
Higgins, Dick A Child’s History of Fluxus In: Charles Bernstein et al. (eds) (1984) Horizons: The Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale IL, Southern Illinois University Press.
Hyde, Lewis (2006) The Gift: How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World. Edinburgh, Canongate.
Johnson, Robert A. (1991) Transformations: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness. San Francisco CA, HarperCollins.
Knabb, Ken (Ed. and Trans.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. Revised and Expanded edition, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006.
Lane, John (1996) A Snake’s Tail Full of Ants: Art, Ecology and Consciousness. Dartington, Resurgence).
Lorde, Audre Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power In: Audre Lorde (1984) Sister Outsider. Freedom CA, The Crossing Press.
Moore, Thomas (1994) Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life. New York NY, HarperPerennial.
Sardello, Robert (1999) Freeing the Soul from Fear. New York NY, Riverhead Books.
Titmuss, Richard M. (1971) The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy. London, George Allen & Unwin.

Facebook

I’ve retreated from Facebook. Tom Hodgkinson’s article in The Guardian was the tipping point, but that just crystallised a number of thoughts I’d already been having. The fact that when I talked to friends who weren’t on Facebook they reminded me of me a couple of years ago before I finally relented and got a mobile phone – which made me think maybe I should have held out. Each one of these technologies had a mystique of inevitability, of a new world of communication. Keith reminded me also of Jerry Mander’s book In the Absence of the Sacred, and the questions he suggests we ask of new technologies.

I’d already investigated the intricacies of extracting oneself from Facebook’s embrace – the fact that you could “deactivate” but not “delete” your account; that like so many of the corporate relationships we engage in so willingly these days, our eyes closed in the first flush of love, ending the affair is not easy – getting “our stuff” back is not easy - working out who owns what when our personal details and interactions have gained impersonal value as marketing information, intellectual content… is not easy.

The corporate compromise is everywhere of course, this is written on Microsoft software and published through a Google service and I’ll probably alert some friends to its existence using my Yahoo mail account, and I stick photos up on Flickr, another Yahoo service. So who am I to moan about Facebook, come back when you’re all open source – and even then my words will depend on some Cisco server somewhere – is there no escape? Am I choosing to focus on some perceived downslide of all this, a killjoy who can’t just dissolve into the jouissance of global capitalism? Shouldn’t I just shut the fuck up, take my macbook down to Starbucks activate the wireless and put mea culpa up on Facebook and MySpace and Bebo and Friendster, so all my “friends” can see I was wrong on their RSS feeds. Can you DIGG it?

I haven’t yet “deactivated” “my” Facebook account though, I’ve not followed any of the suggested routes to full deletion. I have tried to remove every bit of personal data that was up on there and basically replaced it with Tom Hodkinson’s article. Which I guess is a provocation.

My friend Brenda, my most distanced friend – being on another continent, living in another time zone in Ohio, USA wasn’t happy about my decision or what I’d done. I guess I provoked her. This is what she had to say:

In response to the posting of Tom Hodgkinson’s article:

Uh...you can't talk to people who live 4,000 miles away in the pub? Phone is better, but long distance costs money.

In response to the posting of the Alternet article “Facebook: The New Look of Surveillance”:

If you thought posting things online was private, then you're thick. Don't post things you don't want people to see. Done.

I’m assuming that she wont mind me repeating her comments here as they are evidently not “private”.

Of course to learn this Brenda’s opinion I had to open 2 emails from Facebook telling me I had messages from Brenda on Facebook, which I then had to log into to go read. Brenda could have emailed me direct, she still can email me whenever she wants – we don’t need Facebook to stay in touch. Or we could write properly, pen on paper into envelopes marked with “air mail” stickers or “par avion” and stamps that will look funny when they arrive across the globe. And that will be “slow” communication, but it also might be “deep” communication – and it might be worth keeping. How many people make screen grabs of their friends and lovers Facebook postings so they can keep them for ever more – perhaps the digital seems eternal (which it assuredly is not) or perhaps (more likely) it just doesn’t seem so important. Am I the only person I wonder who frets, as their mobile phone meets its capacity to hold messages requiring me to delete some/all of them – the requirement for receiving new communication suddenly becoming that I go back through my inbox, reading, remembering previous communication deciding to blast an other persons words into oblivion. I want to download their messages, I want to print them out, I want to keep their exact words… yes perhaps I’m in the wrong era. But what the fuck does that mean? That the things I feel are important aren’t important anymore?

Imagine No Possessions

To Have Or To Be

Erich Fromm

Jonathan Cape, Great Britain, 1978

We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse

James Hillman & Michael Ventura

HarperCollins, USA, 1992

_______________________________________________________________

As the global situation deteriorates in the face of resource depletion, climate change and ecological destruction it is becoming increasingly apparent that the roots of our problems may not be primarily scientific, political or economic but rather psychological and spiritual. Change toward a sustainable and equitable society will require a paradigm shift in our conception of the world and an expansion in our sense of self if our actions on other levels are to be truly effective. These two books by eminent therapists provide psychological approaches that offer a diagnosis of the global situation, reading back from the symptoms and the “presenting issues” to find the underlying causes and a process that offers a means of healing. To differing degrees they advise how we might think differently so that psychological and spiritual inquiry might be fed back as engaged action into the scientific, political and economic spheres.

Erich Fromm's book is an academically rigorous, referenced work aimed at a wide popular audience, and is written in such a way as to communicate easily. His theme in To Have Or To Be is set out concisely by his title, that humanity faces a choice between two modes of existence: that of having (ownership, possession, domination, an experience of the world as a collection of objects) and that of being (belonging, reciprocity, becoming, a relation to the world as a communion of subjects). Human society has been pursuing the first mode up to the point of our current crises; Fromm considers the second mode to be the necessary base for our salvation from them.

Crucially, however, Fromm also believes that switching modes alone is not enough to produce effective action. Social change results from a transformation in what he calls the ‘social character’, a blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socio-economic structure of which the individual is part. To alter that socio-economic structure we require new social forms ‘that begin to bridge the gap between what is necessary and what is possible’. Sadly the more detail Fromm provides as regards action, the more apparent the historical distance between the period of authorship and the present becomes. The existing socio-economic structures he discusses have already gone thorough a series of changes. While the ‘fake socialism’ of the USSR he decries has fallen with that state, the capitalism he bemoans has proceeded, as he feared, to even greater triumph in dictating the direction of the world. Also, when he espouses the ‘energizing attraction of a new vision’ he states it with the caveat that the chances of a change in the mode of existence of the global population ‘remain slim’. Three decades on from its initial publication I found it difficult not to assume the disempowering stance that those slim chances will have attenuated to extreme emaciation, if not impossibility across the intervening years.

James Hillman and Michael Ventura's book We've Had 100 Years Of Psychotherapy - And The World's Getting Worse plays off the interaction of two voices - the learned sagacity of Hillman and the New Journalism of Ventura. The resulting tone is populist, informal, conversational and determinedly in your face, an instant contrast to the structured prose of Fromm. The statement late in Fromm's book that ‘[p]urely psychological change... has been completely ineffective’ is however at the core of the Hillman/Ventura dialogues. In fact, as their title reveals, their book exhibits anxiety about the solipsism of the current therapeutic mode, of a psychological inquiry that only looks inward not outward at a worsening world. The authors counsel that we have become a little too obsessed, possessed even, by “our” problems. Hillman pointedly notes that ‘[p]ersonal growth doesn't automatically lead to political results’. He also poses a question to Ventura: ‘could analysis have new fantasies of itself, so that the consulting room is a cell in which revolution is prepared?’

Ventura relates an exchange with his son about agency in the world in the face of ‘ecological disaster’ and the authors offer him and us a look at the worst and a challenge in how to act. The purpose of concerned souls, they propose, is found in ‘trying to be a wide-awake human during a Dark Age and keeping alive what you think is beautiful and important’. They suggest these might be ‘ideas, art, knowledge, skills, or just plain old fragile love, how we treat people, how we help people’. This is a call to build resilience in what we cherish, to maintain what is valuable in being human, and to support hope. Hillman and Ventura’s choice to share authorship and to present their ideas in this discursive form provides a literal example of dialogic relating and a conversation I certainly felt we were invited to join.

What both books propose is an expansion of our sense of self, of soul - beyond the skin of the individual to include the flesh of the world, the world soul, anima mundi. This transpersonal sense of self would end divisions, dualisms such as man/nature or world/self and extend our essential concerns across the entire ecosphere. Hillman writes ‘I would rather define self as the interiorization of community’ that is: include within the sense of self that which has previously been considered outside self. This is where the psychological gains a spiritual dimension, as this expanded non-dual conception is akin to the ‘you are that’ of Vedanta or Martin Buber’s call for the boundless relationship of an I-Thou rather than an I-It attitude towards the world. But the authors of both books stress the necessity of turning insights outwards; the psychical and the spiritual must drive action in and with the world. Effecting global change cannot be programmatic, domineering - the problems we face cannot be solved at the same level we were at when we created them. Our solutions must be creative, participatory and dialogic. In facing the challenges ahead it is clear that our heads and hearts must share the task of our hands, we need a praxis bold as love.

Wakey Wakey!!!

Been a bit slack here of late, but active offline. Attended the first "Transition City London" event on Tuesday this week at the LARC (London Action Resource Centre) in Whitechapel.

It's still hard to see how this would work on a city wide scale, especially in a city on the scale of London. A general feeling is that dividing the city by its boroughs would be an appropriate approach - which does split the city into more manageable sized units and works with rather than against pre-existing social and political structures. However London boroughs are also quite large units (too large?) and I wonder how identified Londoners are with their borough per se. Many Londoners live in one borough, work in another and perhaps socialise in one or more others... Well this is all stuff that needs to be worked through.

Meanwhile Transition Town Brixton is off the starting blocks, Sustainable Haringey is looking at Transition Culturing and if this stuff happens organically and from any grass roots level at all it's going to work much better.

Anyway here's some of the brainstorming over what a sustainable London might look like:


Excitingly there's also a UK wide tour of events "Wakey! Wakey!" trying to raise consciousness about Peak Energy just kicking off, learn more about it here.

ALSO: New FLICKR slide show of my photos in the sidebar ->
I've got other Permaculture related photos on the Naturewise FLICKR site.

Orphic Trinity - Orphic Resonance

Last night I attended the first of the Gaia Foundation’s 2007 evenings, this one with Brian Goodwin, leader of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher college (and thus a close colleague of the previous speaker Stephan Harding’s whose talk I covered here).

As you would expect there were many parallels with Stephan Harding’s talk, and both were based around new publications – in Harding’s case Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, in Goodwin’s Nature’s Due: Healing Our Fragmented Culture. Both speakers made the case for holistic versus reductionist science and for a reappraisal and acceptance of animism – the belief that a “soul” or “spirit” existed in every object, even if it was inanimate.

Goodwin asked us to reconsider the stories of science, by telling different stories we find a different path. Following a Jungian, archetypal model Goodwin identified a “new” story that has emerged in our culture, which is actually the re-emergence of an old story – which alters our perceptions on science and opens up through animism a new connection with nature. This story is the myth of the Orphic Trinity – Chaos, Gaia and Eros.

“Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundations of all the
deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim
Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros,
fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and
overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men
within them.”
Hesiod, Theogeny (c.700 BC)

Goodwin posited the era of the 1960’s as the genesis point of this archaic revival, first with the re-emergence of Chaos in the work of mathematician Edward N Lorenz. Lorenz attempting to apply mathematical modelling to meteorological phenomena and weather prediction discovered that apparently small changes in initial conditions produced large changes in the long-term outcome. These variations in initial conditions could be so numerous and so slight that they made accurate prediction of future effects impossible. What he described as Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow has become better known as Chaos and has become an important part of mathematical and scientific enquiry. It would appear, as some anarchists and magickian’s claim: that “chaos never died”.

"Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wing in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?"
Edward N. Lorenz, paper delivered to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1972)

“For the mass of practicing scientists... the change did not matter immediately... But they were aware of something called chaos... More and more of them realized that chaos offered a fresh way to proceed with old data... chaos was the end of the reductionist program in science.”
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

The second element of this archaic revival was the re-emergence of Gaia in the pioneering earth systems science work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. This work finally gained its crucial nomenclature as a result of a conversation between the neighbours Lovelock and novelist William Golding in 1969.

“Most of us sense that the Earth is more than a sphere of rock with a thin layer of air, ocean and life covering the surface. We feel that we belong here as if this planet were indeed our home. Long ago the Greeks, thinking this way, gave to the Earth the name Gaia or, for short, Ge. In those days, science and theology were one and science, although less precise, had soul. As time passed this warm relationship faded and was replaced by the frigidity of the schoolmen. The life sciences, no longer concerned with life, fell to classifying dead things and even to vivisection. Ge was stolen from theology to become no more the root from which the disciplines of geography and geology were named. Now at last there are signs of a change. Science becomes holistic again and rediscovers soul, and theology, moved by ecumenical forces, begins to realise that Gaia is not to be subdivided for academic convenience and that Ge is much more than just a prefix.”
James Lovelock, “What is Gaia?”

The final element of the trilogy is Eros, the force of love, also known as Eleutherios, "the liberator" and through that shared role connected with Dionysus – god of intoxication, music, peace, the civilizing urge – and thus also connected with Orpheus and the Orphic mysteries (I wrote about some of this previously in The Rebirth of Orpheus over at Rubedo). Goodwin asked the audience “who here lived through the 1960s? Can you recognise anything familiar here in the aspects of this deity?”

“THE COURT: "Erotic," did you say?
THE WITNESS: Erotic.
THE COURT: E-R-O-T-I-C?
THE WITNESS: Eros. That means love, your Honor.”
From the Court Testimony of Timothy Leary at the trial of the Chicago 7 (1970)

“Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.
Love, love, love.

There's nothing you can do that can't be done.
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game.
It's easy.”
Lennon/McCartney, All You Need is Love (1967)

Goodwin indicated that we are still in the process of integrating these archetypal forces into our science and into our culture, with the attractive force of Eros suffering from most neglect.

The discovery of DNA by Rosalind Frankin (Crick, Watson, Wilkins etc.) in 1953, with its beautiful double helix formation began a quest in the biological sciences to decode the organism and gain some total understanding of life. Goodwin quoting Evelyn Fox Keller’s The Century of the Gene presented the case that the completion of the human genome project had, rather than bringing such a total understanding, in fact revealed how large the gap is between genetic information and biological meaning. How the particular structure of organisms develop largely remains a mystery, there is some embodied meaning in the cells which is inaccessible to consciousness. Goodwin posits that the development and organisation of form by cellular DNA occurs through the action of a kind of language – and that particular forms are the stories told in that language.

Thus herbalists may develop the ability to read the story of a plant as manifest by its form and intuit the qualities of that plant. The holistic enquiries of wise women and cunning men from the era before reductionism took hold may have genuinely born a “shamanic knowing” that is not only dismissed by our modern science but is beyond its conception. Goodwin stated that meaning is “immanent” not “transcendent” – when science attempts to de-particularise and abstract, it in fact moves further from rather than close to meaning.

So Goodwin asked, how do we engage with this? How do we go about re-integrating this sense of nature in our science and culture? How do we achieve harmony with our fellow entities? Relating this back to the Gaia Foundation’s work and the influence of theologian Thomas Berry, Goodwin suggested that by beginning to change our conceptions we participate in a greater change in consciousness, that this is part of “engaging in the great work” – the alchemical transformation of ourselves and society – the paradigm shift which might be understood as the Magnum Opus.

An Inconvenient Truth

Another tip from Keith, the full version of Al Gore's climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Watch it here by clicking above. Taken from the source on Daily Motion.

(To good to be true (inconveniently) the producers would prefer you not to see this film for free I'm afraid. It's now been taken down)

The official site for the film is here, and features more information including a free downloadable "companion educational guide".


Support the Campaign Against Climate Change.

Sites for sore Is

There’s been a slight site redesign, more forced on me than chosen by the “modernising” ethic of the new blogger… anyway that’s boring geekspeak, I’m falling asleep already myself. In the course of putting the site back together again I had to re-upload the banner links in the sidebar, and this seems a useful point to reflect on those:

The Oil Depletion Protocol

“A Plan for a Sensible Energy Future...
As we move into an era of oil depletion and energy constraint, everything from transportation to medicine to food to climate change response strategies will be affected. Almost everything we do is dependent on oil.
The transition to a future of reduced oil supply will require the development of clean, reliable, and renewable energy sources and reduced oil production and consumption. The Oil Depletion Protocol will allow us to accomplish both - simply, conservatively, and cooperatively. It is a plan for a sensible energy future.”

The oil depletion protocol is a plan to move the planet through the end of the fossil fuel era by getting the countries of the world to sign up to a simple plan: oil importing countries reduce their annual imports by the global depletion rate; and oil exporting countries reduce their annual exports by their national depletion rate.

My good friend Keith has recently added a new e-petition on the 10 Downing Street website calling on the UK to sign up to the Oil Depletion Protocol; you can add your voice to the call here.

Richard Heinberg author of the book The Oil Depletion Protocol has been interviewed recently speaking on the subject here.

Irrepressible

This Amnesty International campaign seeks to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress. Bloggers around the world are encouraged to carry the Irrepressible badge which will display material which has suffered from attempts at political censorship. Individual are also encouraged to sign up to a pledge on Internet Freedom. Learn more here.

Stop the War/Stop Trident March

Slumming It

"The city is our ark in which we might survive the environmental turmoil of the next century. Genuinely urban cities are the most environmentally efficient form of existing with nature that we possess because they can substitute public luxury for private or household consumption. They can square the circle between environmental sustainability and a decent standard of living. I mean, however big your library is or vast your swimming pool, it'll never be the same as the New York Public Library or a great public pool. No mansion, no San Simeon, will ever be the equivalent of Central Park or Broadway."

Mile Davis interviewed by Tom Engelhardt in “Tomdispatch Interview: Mike Davis, Green Zones and Slum Cities”

On Monday evening I went over to RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architects) to see a talk by Mike Davis, the American cultural historian, political activist, social commentator etc. (you may remember me linking to his piece on Dubai in a post last year). Davis is in London all week doing a series of events on different subjects ranging from the future of the “New Left” to his new book: Buda’s Wagon: A Brief. History of the Car bomb.

The RIBA event was billed in different places as being about “Architecture and Climate Change” or his earlier book Planet of Slums. I was happy to hear about either, and it actually turned out to be about both and about much more. The issue of climate change was neatly folded back on to and revealed in the light of the economic hegemony of neo-liberal globalisation.

Having become pretty disillusioned with “leftist” politics and generally feeling that, while the intellectual analyses and critical techniques of Marxist and Socialist thought were still valuable, close association with these as part of a political programme was an ideological trap that kept us in a dualistic dead end – it was amazingly invigorating to be shaken about a bit by a serious hardcore mind from the Left.

The social and ecological strands met in an examination of the emerging “landscapes of inequality”, where resource depletion and climactic change are already causing the migrations and tensions over migration which many see as an unavoidable part of the global future. Davis focussed on the American South West, especially the US/Mexico borderlands – the area he is most familiar with – but also referred to the analogous spaces of the Mediterranean, and the near Middle East.

I went to the talk imagining that Davis would be outside the energy descent sphere and that I would be taking what he said and doing my own mental associations and analysis to assimilate what I learnt there with what I’m learning from elsewhere. It quickly became apparent that I wouldn’t be required to make the connections alone – “peak oil” and “peak water” rolled off Davis’ tongue with familiarity, he referred to suburbanisation and Kunstler, he could see what was coming.

When it came to the environmental issues, Davis reinforced what I’m increasingly learning: that the necessity for consensus in the IPCC report, and the lead in time on the data it is produced from mean that it reflects a “moderate” view far from the beliefs and predictions of many serious and significant climate analysts, and that new information is already radically reshaping our view of what might be currently occurring. Most significant is the rising body of opinion and data indicating rapid melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves, concomitant sea level rises, the passing of several significant tipping points, and the possibility that, as Lovelock suggests, the Earth is adjusting to a new hot state – that we could be seeing the end of the Holocene.

After years of it being on my list of “to reads”, Davis’ compelling prose style has finally led to me picking up his “LA book” City of Quartz, which is excellent and I think that pretty much everything else he has written is going to have to follow… One thing I am especially interested in following up on, is encapsulated in the quote at the top of the entry. A lot of my current thoughts are about the possibility of Transition Cities - a scaled up version of the Transition Town idea. My gut feeling was that a city the size of London (let alone one the size of Bombay or Karachi say) could not effectively and sustainably function in a state of energy descent. Recent conversations and other inputs (not least Stewart Brand's "City Planet" lecture at the Long Now Foundation) have encouraged me to re-examine this supposition. I will return to this issue as my ideas develop.

Rethink Trident

I’ve talked about this before – nuclear weapons are a nonsense. In the UK we have an opportunity again to call a halt to this madness. Let’s not replace Trident.

Today the Compass Parliamentary Group launched RETHINK TRIDENT with a front page story in the Independent.

This is what they have to say on the matter and how you can help:

"The Government is proposing to replace the UK’s fleet of Trident nuclear submarines and extend the life of existing missiles in plans that carry an estimated cost of £20bn. But they have given MP’s, scientists and campaigners just three months to weigh up the proposals, due to come before Parliament in mid-March.

Jon Trickett MP, Chair of the Compass Parliamentary Group, has been working to construct an umbrella group of organisations who believe that the case for the renewal of the Trident nuclear deterrent has not been sufficiently made, and that the timeframe for parliamentary approval of the decision is premature and insufficient.

The initiative - RETHINK TRIDENT – is supported by the following organisations: United Nations Association of Great Britain, One World Trust, Friends of the Earth, Scientists for Global Responsibility, War on Want, National Union of Students, British American Security Information Council (BASIC), SERA, MEDACT, People and Planet, Greenpeace, Oxford Research Group, CND, UNISON and CWU.

Today RETHINK TRIDENT released a statement endorsed by a Committee of 100 including faith leaders; academics; prominent politicians from all parties; leading authors and poets; musicians; and celebrities.

The full statement reads: We believe that:

- Britain should not be rushed into a premature decision to replace its “Trident” nuclear weapons system;
- More time should be taken for Parliamentary and public scrutiny and debate;
- The urgent need is both to halt the spread of nuclear weapons to new countries, and for all states which possess them to move more rapidly and substantially towards nuclear disarmament;
- Therefore the priority for the UK government should be launching a renewed diplomatic initiative to seek a breakthrough in disarmament and non-proliferation negotiations, as it has taken a lead in relation to such global challenges as climate change and acute poverty.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams; Professor Stephen Hawking; Bianca Jagger and Vivienne Westwood are amongst those who put their names to the statement. (view the full list).

The statement and the broad-base of support that we have worked to secure are intended to encourage MPs to support an amendment along the same lines as the statement. The Compass Parliamentary Group will work cross-party to ensure the amendment gets the necessary support.

This is our only chance to mobilise in the Commons to prevent Trident being renewed – calculations are that we will not win on an outright ‘no’ vote but have much more chance on a ‘the case hasn’t yet been made’ vote. If the Bill goes through as the Government proposes it will be the end of the matter for the foreseeable future."


Please lobby your MP to support the RETHINK TRIDENT initiative! For details on how to contact your MP click on to http://www.upmystreet.com/commons/l/

If you’re not already, please become a member of Compass and help support our work including this important campaign, join at http://www.compassonline.org.uk/join.asp

Sign up to the RETHINK TRIDENT public debate taking place at 7pm in Parliament on Tuesday 27 February 2007, full details at: http://www.compassonline.org.uk/events.asp

Sign the petition against TRIDENT at the 10 Downing Street website:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/trident/

March against TRIDENT on 24th February assemble 12 noon at Speakers Corner then proceed to rally in Trafalgar Square. Flyer here: http://www.cnduk.org/pages/24feb.pdf

Memories of romance

Yesterday I walked over Golders Hill Park and Hampstead Heath to visit the Keats House, where the poet John Keats lived before leaving for Italy in an ultimately vain attempt to recover from tuberculosis. The disease had killed his mother and brother before him. Tuberculosis was known at the time as consumption or 'phthisis' from the Greek for wasting. When I reflect on the fact that he died aged 25, his poetic achievements seem outstanding, and his loss seems such a waste too.

I spent a while in the garden of the house afterwards and my mind travelled back sixteen years to a trip I had made alone around Europe, partly in pursuit of the romantic poets. I went to the Château de Chillon on Lake Leman where Byron set his poem "The Prisoner of Chillon" and where his scrawled name still remains carved in the wall; I went to the Villa Diodati near Geneva where Byron and the Shelley's and Dr Polidori sat up telling ghost stories, the genesis place of Mary's "Frankenstein" (and I was thrown out of the garden - it is a private house); I went to Pisa where Shelley lived and wrote "Adonais"; I went to Rome and to the rooms by the Spanish Steps where Keats died; I went to Rome and to the Cimitero acattolico where Shelley and Keats are buried (and now Gregory Corso too).

The Protestant Cemetery is a beautiful place, when I was there a rain shower came and went and the Autumn sun that followed returned the water to the sky in twisting spirals of mist between the gravestones and the trees. Shelley himself wrote that "It might make one in love with death to be buried in so sweet a place", and so he was - the stone of his tomb engraved with lines of Arial's song from The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/into something rich & strange". Shelley drowned off the coast of Tuscany aged 29.

In the course of my trip I also had the chance to see how wasted modern youth could get too.


Wasted Youth

For John Keats

“I always somehow associate Chatterton with autumn”
John Keats Letter to John Hamilton Reynolds, (September 21st 1819)

“The life can burn in blood, even while the heart may break.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821)


In Pisa, in the palace
where Shelley wrote Adonais
they shoot up heroin now
and syringes group in the
corners of the ruins
grasses growing through them
as they continue from the cracks.
Spent little cylinders
flecked with the rust of blood.
The view from the gallery
is part antique, part industrial
and it’s ugly where it’s not frozen.
The surface of the Arno
flotsam forming letters
legends dissipating in the flow.

In Hampstead in the garden
by the plum tree twice replaced
unseasonal flowers are in bloom beneath
where the older tree shaded only grass
and a place for a chair.
Rest for a small brown bird
with a song science calls unremarkable.
The lawn here well tended
wealth and fame of patrons of the arts
securing pleasance and the friendly
shadow of a library.
Here lived a friend
he called close with a candle
to witness a droplet of breath
on his bedsheet
flecked with the rust of blood.


IMAGE: Keats House, Hampstead; Shelley's Tomb in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome (1873) by Walter Crane [actually shows Keats' gravestone]; Sketch of the Dying Keats (1821) by Joseph Severn.

Weary of Time

Last Sunday the Renoir Cinema had a screening of “Ah! Sunflower” a 1967 documentary on Allen Ginsberg in London originally shot for WDR Television in Germany (now available on DVD from The Picture Press). The screening was introduced and later discussed by the novelist psychogeographer Iain Sinclair who had participated in the films production. The programme also included some short films, loosely gathered under the sobriquet “Beat London”.

In the introduction Sinclair read from Kodak Mantra Diaries, an account of the period which formed his first prose work (recently republished by Beat Scene magazine). Forty years old, some of Ginsberg’s words at the conference The Dialectics of Liberation sliced through the intervening period. Prescience or a further record of how long we have had knowledge and not action?

We can leave the planet
We can destroy the planet
We’ve never had history with those possibilities
We’ve had little wars in Asia
Or wars between America & Europe
But we never had a whole planet that could blow itself up
Or could destroy itself WITHOUT even blowing itself up
By destroying its forests
& changing its weather
& making carbon dioxide all over
Raising the temperature of the earth
Melting the polar ice cap
Causing a flood again

Art (not just) for Art's Sake

Last year I read the revised edition of Suzi Gablik's 1984 book Has Modernism Failed which dealt quite a lot with how divorced from the "world" art was becoming in the 20th Century - disappearing up its own fundament in a post-modern frenzy of self-congratulation and self-flagellation.

Well here we are in the 21st Century, I wonder if anything is different? I think there is a movement towards more meaningful engagement - but perhaps that is because I don't really look to the art world "greats", the largely male celebrity figures of the art world for my artistic fix. I'd rather stick with the marginal figures, the unknowns, the gallery system rejects and refuseniks. I don't really want some totalitarian style social realism, neither am I normally turned on by agit-prop - nevertheless I do sometimes enjoy an art piece which actually says something.


I've recently seen a few things that "say something" which I've quite enjoyed. Graphic work by James Joyce for the Stop Climate Chaos campaign - some of his work is currently on display at The Social. Photo-montages by veteran trouble maker Peter Kennard (sadly I missed his recent exhibition). Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher's installation at the Gillespie gallery last year. In these works the politics, while central, do not take over to the denigration of their artistic appeal. That is to say that the aesthetics and the politics are in symbiosis, rather than one being in service to the other.

But for some reason I still find Mark Wallinger's Tate Britain installation "State Britain" a bit wanky. Not that I have seen it in the flesh, but the whole idea seems to be to take a political act and turn into an artistic one. I think maybe I'm looking for something going in the opposite direction?

IMAGES: Santa's Ghetto (2006) by Peter Kennard; Dump the Dinosaurs (2006) by James Joyce; the sound of stones in the glass house (2006) by Christian Brett and Gee Vaucher; and Brian Haw's Protest (2006?) photographed by Mark Wallinger.