Collage, sculpture and video artist Julien Masson collaborates with researchers in a dynamic dialogue between digital technology, science and arts to explore coccolithophores: tiny, photosynthetic marine lifeforms with an important role in our planet’s oxygen and carbon cycles.
800 words: estimated reading time 3 minutes
This art installation, funded by Arts Council England, for the atrium of the Winchester Science Centre and Planetarium takes the form of a cascade of sculptures representing the micro plankton coccolithophores. This figurative work is constructed from carved opaque recycled milk bottles, a method we have used on previous projects. In interpreting the architecture of these microscopic creatures I hope to stimulate both scientific and artistic enquiry. Approximately 1,000 high density polyethylene (HDP) milk bottles will be used to create a series of scaled up Coccoliths.
I partnered with local sculptor and recycling artist C. Cudlip on this project and we were very lucky to be able to work with Dr Samantha Gibbs, Royal Society University Research Fellow within Ocean and Earth Science, National Oceanography Centre Southampton at the University of Southampton. Dr Gibbs provided us with invaluable information relating to the science of the coccolithophores, reference images and advice on how these unicellular phytoplankton are formed and worked with us on outreach events to present the subject to the wider public.
Coccolithophores have an important role in the carbon cycle of our planet. We were very keen on a project that would not only have an artistic dimension but also have scientific and educational connotations.
We proposed to produce a cascade of coccolyths made of recycled milk bottles to recreate the shells of these creatures. In using this throw away material we wanted the public to be aware of the environmental and ecological impact we are submitting our planet to.
Coccolithophores are tiny marine lifeforms called micro-plankton. Measuring just a few microns across, they are made up of smaller sections called coccoliths. The living coccolithophores form into layers called blooms, spanning hundreds of miles of ocean.
These photosynthesise and act as one of the planet’s most important sources of oxygen production. The fossilised remains of these creatures create a vital form of carbon capture, locked into the calcium carbonate of their skeletons.
Coccolithophore microscopy images from Nannotax 1 Isochrysidales, 2 Ceratolithus cristatus HET nishidae type 3 Syracosphaera anthos HOL 4 Nanolith Family
Carbon and coccolithophores.
Next to the rainforests, coccolithophores are one of the biggest producers of oxygen on the planet. Coccolithophores also have an effect on the carbon cycle. The production of coccoliths requires the uptake of dissolved inorganic carbon and calcium. Calcium carbonate and carbon dioxide are then produced from calcium and bicarbonate by the following chemical reaction:
Ca2+ + 2HCO3− ←→ CaCO3 + CO2 + H2O [1]
Because coccolithophores are photosynthetic organisms, they are able to use some of the CO2 released in the calcification reaction for photosynthesis [2]. During calcification, two carbon atoms are taken up and one of them becomes trapped as calcium carbonate. This calcium carbonate sinks to the bottom of the ocean in the form of coccoliths and becomes part of the sediment; thus, coccolithophores provide a sink for emitted carbon, mediating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions [3].
In 2012, it was estimated that there was approximately 165 million tons of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. Polystyrene pieces and nurdles (manufactured plastic pellets used in the creation of plastic products) are the most common types of plastic pollution in oceans and, combined with plastic bags and food containers, make up the majority of oceanic debris. The Marine Conservancy has predicted the decomposition rates of several plastic products. It is estimated that a foam plastic cup will take 50 years, a plastic beverage holder will take 400 years, a disposable diaper will take 450 years, and fishing line will take 600 years to degrade [4]. The decomposition rate of plastic milk bottles is also estimated several hundred years in a landfill [5].
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References in Julien’s text:
1. Mejia, R. (2011), “Will Ion Channels Help Coccolithophores Adapt to Ocean Acidification?”, PLoS Biology 9
Fine artist Mary Eighteen and multimedia artist Julien Masson collaborate in painting and video, to explore the space between seduction and defilement in a world where meaning has broken down in relation to ecological protection of our oceans.
1,030 words: estimated reading time 4 minutes + 3.5 minutes video
As well as researching Benthic Communities in the Shelf Sea, as mentioned in my last blog (have started the first painting, which I will include for discussion in another blog), I am working on a collaboration with the UK-based French artist, Julien Masson. Our project is called The Ocean as Abject. This collaboration seeks to explore the space between seduction and defilement in order to present an exhibition that is ‘A Visual Encounter with Abjection’. In essence, this is at the moment a research project and we hope that when an exhibition site is agreed and formulated, there will be an essay and accompanying information for visitors to take away with them. We would also like to hold a symposium, where a mix of backgrounds – from cultural and ecological, to visual and scientific – could ask questions and provoke a debate.
Seduction and defilement
The proposed exhibition, The Ocean as Abject, presents a world where meaning has broken down in relation to the ecological protection of our oceans. With rising C02, ocean Dead Zones and ocean suffocation, human existence is under threat; the sad reality is that we have done this to ourselves. The seduction of the ocean has reversed to defilement by our lack of thought and our own self-inflicted banality. The essence of The Ocean as Abject invites viewers to imagine a world where the ocean, as we know it, is on the trajectory to extinction. Both painting and video are presented together, to accentuate this experience.
Abjection and Julia Kristeva
The exhibition will re-evaluate the notion of abjection perpetuated by Julia Kristeva, the French/Bulgarian philosopher, literary critic and psychoanalyst, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris Diderot. In 1980 she published Powers of Horror [1]. In this essay, Kristeva refers to the abject in relation to mankind and the body. This could be migration, the humanitarian disaster that is the present famine in Somalia, or individual human trauma of any nature. However, our exhibition places the ocean as central to the notion of abjection. We take the stance that it is the ocean that is in trauma, and humanity has created this by a lack of human responsibility regarding our seas. In short, we have done this to ourselves and there is a reversal of roles as the abject is transferred from the person to the ecology of the ocean. It is human nature that is at fault and the environment that is in trauma. It could be argued that human nature also causes suffering to other humans. But that is not the argument in question here; it is the oceanic trauma that is central to the debate, and it threatens human existence. An ocean finally depleted of oxygen will survive on the planet in another form, but we as a race cannot.
The essence of the frame has always been a commonality between painting, video and film [2]. The construction of composition, light and movement within a frame has fundamental similarities [3]. But of note is the relationship between the artwork and the architectural space within which it is exhibited. Julien Masson has produced a video called The Ocean as Abject, inspired by Acidification. The video is compartmentalised into three sections and, depending on the gallery space provided, can be projected in varied ways. To this end, the projection of the video is determined by the architectural space surrounding it. This clearly brings into force the extended relationship between painting, video and architecture.
Similarly, I have produced a large painting, Abjection 1, which is 230cm high by 190cm wide. Supporting this painting are three further paintings which are narrow (70 cm wide), and are in two vertical sections. With a nod towards installation, the paintings will each sit on a set of steps that will be in line with the canvas and flush with the wall. A gallery space will again determine how these are presented alongside the video. This further examines future possibilities wherein the steps are installed on the wall space and the canvas is on the floor. The steps alluded to are the steps we as a race are taking to our own ecological annihilation. But equally it could be video projected onto the floor! The possibilities are in profusion. Video’s transference qualities are endless. A video can be projected onto the outside of a building, or used as a light installation. The subject of ‘process’ is present in both video and painting. The end product of painting is static, although the process has much movement, while a video is a moving image that involves a different kind of process.
In summary, The Ocean as Abject is an installation of painting and video destined to be curated in relation to the architectural space provided. The collaboration brings together a multimedia artist with an interest in the Anthropocene, and a painter with ecological interests who would also like to extend painting into installation work. Central to The Ocean as Abject is the need to accelerate public awareness of the seriousness of the problem regarding our oceans. To support this notion, the writings of Julia Kristeva’s abjection have been explored and appropriated, placing the abject firmly within the realms of the oceanic cultural dilemma of our time. Our planned exhibition directly confronts the problem, and we want talks and discussions to bring the debate to as many of the public as possible.
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References for the text:
1. Kristeva, Julia: Powers of Horror, Columbia University Press 1982
2. Elwes, Catherine: Worrying the Edges of the Frame, in Installation and the Moving Image, Columbia University Press 2015
3. Elwes, Catherine: Architectural Space, in Installation and the Moving Image, Columbia University Press 2015
Julia Kristeva’s Jackson Pollock’s Milky Way, appeared in Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts (Academy Group, 1989) and there is more at the websiteJulia Kristeva.
An abstract artist and painter whose work addresses the anoxic in relation to human responsibility and far-reaching ecological scenarios impacting the ocean.
Mark Goldthorpe reviews John Gardner’s Grendel, a novel that reimagines the monster of the Old English epic poem Beowulf and speaks to us about ‘Othering’ the natural world, and how our excluded monsters insist on coming back in.
1,900 words: estimated reading time 7.5 minutes
“The dragon tipped up his great tusked head, stretched his neck, sighed fire. ‘Ah, Grendel!’ he said. He seemed at that instant almost to rise to pity. ‘You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for a long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves.’ … I was sure he was lying. Or anyway half-sure.” – John Gardner, Grendel
John Gardner’s 1971 novel, Grendel, reimagines the monster of the Old English epic poem Beowulf. Grendel lives in a cave beneath the mere, beyond the settlement of warrior king, Hrothgar. He visits terror and death on Hrothgar’s people: “I burst in when they were all asleep, snatched seven from their beds, and slit them open and devoured them on the spot”.
Border dweller, walker of the world’s weird wall
This beast is an “I”, not an “It,” and his discovery of self, humanity and the world that mankind is making blurs the boundaries between human and monster. Boundaries are important. In Old English, Grendel is mearc-stapa, ‘border dweller’. In the novel he’s the same: “shadow-shooter, earth-rim-roamer, walker of the world’s weird wall”.
The story takes Grendel from his late childhood, knowing only the cave he shares with his speechless, unfathomable mother and the questions he can’t answer about what and why he is, and out into the world of nature and humans. He observes the growing society of warriors as they settle and transform the world he comes to know, and watches their wars, art and religion. Terrible to confront, he’s rejected by humans and rejects them in return, but is unable to deny his fascination with their determination to make meaning of their own existence. And he encounters the know-it-all dragon, who sees all space and time and the apocalypse at the end of the universe, and subjects Grendel to its nihilistic cynicism. Struggling with the animal, human and dragon-like aspects of his own nature, Grendel ravages Hrothgar’s meadhall time and again and eventually meets his own, inevitable death at the hand of Beowulf. The dragon has seen that too, of course, and so have we; we know the story, but nobody told Grendel.
The novel provokes the question: who is it that is speaking? Grendel is the ‘I’, John Gardner his author. Gardner uses the creature he found in Beowulf, a text handed down from unknown Anglo-Saxons writing in a Christianising England before the 10th century; who took their sources from oral traditions we can’t know fully; which told of another country, another time, another (pagan) worldview. Many versions have come between Beowulf and Grendel (including a 1957 prose translation by David Wright – I’m fortunate to have an edition with cover illustration by Michael Leonard, who also illustrated my copy of Grendel), and more since, including films, books, cartoons, songs; each one pouring other texts into their own work, as Gardner did with his novel.
Creating realities
Of course fiction is creative – but in the reading as well as the writing. Reading is not so much about uncovering what lies beneath: the author’s intent. We cannot go beneath the text in the way Grendel dives under the mere to reach his hidden cave. But we bring to this text the others we’ve read, heard about or imagined, and make something out of our particular constellation of them all. Our reading cannot fail to include and use all we’ve read, seen and heard before; and so, creatively, we understand each ‘new’ text through past experiences, and our anticipation of more to come. This is the sort of sense-making that mystifies and torments Grendel.
Reality, however, is always in ‘excess’ of our perceptions, texts and sense-making. Our senses are limited in what they can detect, and they filter out what we do not ‘need’ to know. They can’t bring everything inside; if they could, reality would overwhelm us, crippling our ability to do anything about it. As biology, we reduce our environment to things we can discriminate, then rebuild it into something we can use: something always incomplete. The dragon sees this:
“Counters, measurers, theory-makers … They only think they think. No total vision … They’d map out roads through Hell with their crackpot theories … They sense that, of course, from time to time; have uneasy feelings that all they live by is nonsense … That’s where the Shaper saves them. Provides an illusion of reality – puts together all their facts with a gluey whine of connectedness. Mere tripe, believe me … He knows no more of total reality than they do – less, if anything.”
Gardner saw his novel as a defence of human values – of life, love, art, home, knowledge, self-sacrifice, loyalty, hope, friendship, and faith – against the ironic alternatives represented, not by Grendel but by the dragon who lectures him on the bleak universe.
When Grendel first emerges from his dark, womb-like cave, he encounters humans as they also first discover the land they will settle. Shocked by their violent rejection, disillusioned in his repeated attempts to learn meaning from them, he becomes alien, the ‘Other’. A self-reflexive Other:
“I observe myself observing what I observe. It startles me. ‘Then I am not that which observes.’ … No thread, no frailest hair between me and the universal clutter.”
He witnesses the humans’ systematic destruction of their environment. Unlike the dragon, Grendel is not so much supernatural as a force of nature attempting to understand humanity even as it seeks to control, expel or destroy him.
This monstrous protagonist-narrator foregrounds questions of how we order the world, border it, make sense of it. How does this (b)ordering privilege some ‘things’ and marginalise or exclude others? How do the marginal and excluded parts of the world respond? What becomes of us in the process of creating our world this way?
Grendel lives on our borders. Hrothgar’s meadhall is ours, created to keep out the cold and dark wilderness and contain the telling of tales by the fire. The meadhall is the new centre of a human world that’s set on expanding forever. Hrothgar subjects and absorbs other tribes, demands tribute, pushes back the world around him. Nature is to be managed, defended against. And, where its threats are too great to be directly comprehended, they’re ‘contained’ in the words of Hrothgar’s poet, Shaper, or the religion of his priest, Ork. ‘Others’ managed as stories: darkest fears hidden in plain sight. But the monster keeps reappearing, whatever words Shaper conjures up. As humans centre the world on themselves, Grendel is increasingly decentred in his, forced onto the margins, but always ready to slip back in.
In that gap between excess reality and incomplete perceptions is space for ambiguity: room for manoeuvre, for creativity – or denial. When we use culture and politics to continue the job of biology, filtering out aspects of the world that we deem unimportant, inconvenient or fearful, we’re pretending something doesn’t exist even though we know it does. We grant it power: the agency to intervene, Grendel-like. Excluding what would overcomplicate our lives, we find it overflowing our frame, pouring back into what we wanted to simplify and manage. Our lives recomplicate, our meadhall doors thrown down again.
Monster culture
In Monster Culture: Seven Theses, English and Medieval Studies scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen says that “We live in a time of monsters”: from global terror to global warming, WMD proliferation to technological acceleration, and ecological collapse to industrial pollution. (Or, as the future-seeing, nihilistic dragon says to Grendel: “Pick an apocalypse, any apocalypse. A sea of black oil and dead things”). That this has led to a state of generalised anxiety is revealed in
“a cultural fascination with monsters – a fixation that is born of the twin desires to name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate (and therefore disempower) that which threatens.” – Jeffery Jerome Cohen
Cohen proposes seven ways to read cultures through the monsters they engender:
Thesis I: The monster’s body is a cultural body
As construct and projection of fears, “the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns’ … Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself”.
Thesis II: The monster always escapes
Whether ‘defeated’ or not in any telling, the monster escapes classification and slips back beyond our re-secured borders, ready to return in another guise: “its threat is its propensity to shift”.
Thesis III: The monster is the harbinger of category crisis
Monsters refuse to participate in the order we seek to impose, reappearing at “times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematises the clash of extremes”, of binaries. Grendel: “All order, I’ve come to understand, is theoretical, unreal – a harmless, sensible, smiling mask men slide between the two great, dark realities, the self and the world – two snakepits.”
Thesis IV: The monster dwells at the gates of difference
As “difference made flesh, come to live among us” the monstrously embodied ‘Other’ “justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering the act as heroic”. Differences multiply and “slide together like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram, abjecting from the centre that which becomes the monster”.
Thesis V: The monster polices the borders of the possible
Once we’ve created our multiplying and shifting Others, this uncategorisable assemblage takes a “position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes … borders that cannot – must not – be crossed”.
Thesis VI: Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire
What is forbidden is also appealing and the fact that it is beyond control only enhances this attraction. “We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time as we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair”.
Thesis VII: The monster stands at the threshold of becoming
Although we push them back, they always return. “And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear self-knowledge, human knowledge”.
Fiction offers safer encounters with our monsters, but an encounter nonetheless. Grendel invites you to explore your boundaries and beyond. And when you come back, a returnee to what you regard as a human-centred world, you maybe find your self-knowledge a little changed. Perhaps you ask yourself ‘How am I human? How am I monster?’
At the British Museum Beowulf page you can view their digitised copy of the manuscript in their collection — and Electronic Beowulf, a collaboration between the British Museum and the University of Kentucky.
Jeffery Jerome Cohen essay Monster culture (seven theses), appeared in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Cohen J, ed), published by University of Minnesota Press (1996).
John Gardner’s Grendel was published by Gollancz (1971).
David Wright’s Beowulf(a prose translation), was published in 1957, and is out of print.
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.
Composer and pianist Lola Perrindiscusses isolation: to create, we need to be alone (physically or mentally) and this can be an unpleasant process. And yet, we carry on creating because suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant.
1,150 words: estimated reading time 4.5 minutes
Last September I started touring my latest piano suite; ‘Significantus’, a keyboard conversation about climate change. The idea was that I would perform specially composed solo piano music, a guest speaker would talk and then facilitate a conversation with the audience about positive response to climate change. My aim was to stimulate audience members to carry the conversation into their communities after the concert.
It was during a post-performance debrief, at the request of post-graduate composer Kate Honey who had invited me to perform the ninth date on this tour at Conservatorium van Amsterdam, that I admitted to a lack of satisfaction from performing this work. I wished none of it was necessary, that I wouldn’t have to look into the eyes of twenty-something year old research students studying Significantus and think how they, along with my sons of similar ages, would be facing unimaginable challenges in their later lives. During our debrief I realised how much I craved a return to my old simple ways where ambition lay in the same space as the notes, where satisfaction naturally followed from simply completing the work and the act of sharing my music was the point of my concerts.
For many of us, to create we need to be alone, if not physically, then at least mentally. We have to cut ourselves off and live in our heads. It’s generally an unpleasant process for me and may well be for you too; insecurity, doubt, lack of self-understanding, worry that it’s a repeat of your previous work or a copy of someone else’s, or just that it’s not very good …. the list goes on. Yet we carry on creating because we don’t know any other way of being, and suppressing that creativity is even more unpleasant; without our work processes we’ve lost so much of our identity and meaning.
Whiteread in the Arctic
I found my real identity with my first piano suite. I’d been up all night at the window, watching a south London road gradually transform and as the dawn arrived, it began to morph into a favourite Hopper painting of an empty street at dawn. I decided to compose a set of pieces about the people behind the windows in that painting; people we can sense but not see. I made up their lives and dreams and found a compositional sound I hadn’t heard before. Inspired, I was soon onto my second suite, this time working from memories of how Ansel Adams photographs had made me feel. Later, after witnessing children set free at the piano, I copied their abandonment to write my third suite.
Then came an idea to follow Rachel Whiteread’s casting of physical spaces (such as in Untitled (Black Bed) 1991 where she captured the shape of the space beneath a bed). I wanted to see if I could do something similar in music. Whiteread was in the Arctic at the time on a trip with Cape Farewell, so I decided to imagine the changing shapes within icebergs and allow the peaks and troughs of those imagined shapes to dictate the musical lines.
Writing this fourth piano suite was difficult. The three beforehand weren’t easy but I hadn’t become stuck the way I was stuck writing this one. It was 2005 and I was not yet clued up on climate change. That I was composing directly from Whiteread while she was in the Arctic cast a shadow over me. I was uncomfortable and resistant to learning much about the terrible reason for her journey. The feelings of Whiteread visiting ice because the ice was melting had the effect of blocking me. I tried hard, but for six months I couldn’t make the music work and felt disturbed. Finally, I turned to photographic sources also preoccupied with the depiction of spaces; six light drawings by Nazarin Montag revealing a hidden world, and cloud stories travelling the world by Roberto Battista. During a few short days the ideas finally joined up and ‘Music from Fragile Light Spaces’ was rapidly completed.
A different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility
That first experience of engaging in climate change, albeit inadvertently, was like a warning for my subsequent climate-engaged compositions. There’s a different challenge, a razor-sharp fragility when you’re creating work in response to the climate emergency. Each time I’ve become greatly blocked during, and often after, the externalising process of giving artistic expression to the inner world of dealing with climate change.
While touring Significantus, I’m learning about the extent to which we are living the climate change story in our heads. During one performance, a close relative contributed to the audience conversation and this moved me in a way I didn’t recognise. How could it be that we had not ever spoken together about anything to do with climate change? Yet there he was, in the public space of a performance venue, sharing with the strangers around him his carefully thought-through ideas for how to how to make things better. But in our walks around Dovestone Reservoir and on trips to the Moors we had never thought to delve into the climate change story permeating our internal lives, no matter how much each of us might be swallowed up by it.
Two extremes in a story of extremes
For my forthcoming initiative, ClimateKeys, due to take place around COP23 (more about that in the next blog), I’m reaching out to people all over the world and encountering a myriad of responses; from a call centre worker in the Philippines who speaks of how the crops have recently and unseasonably frozen, to a Chinese geologist who speaks of his jaw-dropping invention to clean up toxic water by utilising carbon dioxide. Two extremes in a story of extremes which we cannot afford to see in any other way but as the Number One Global Emergency if we are to rescue our civilisation from the consequences of our dwindling carbon budget. That’s what needs much more talking about and of course, much more acting upon. And soon, I will be returning for another walk around Dovestone Reservoir with my relative and will try to remember to break my own silence and really talk with him about what matters.
A composer, pianist and collaborator on keyboard conversations about climate change with economists, lawyers, scientists, artists and other thinkers across the world.
Writer Mark Goldthorpe joined the gathering for The Night Breathes Us In, part of Reading’s year-long Festival of the Dark, and found three simple, unexpected ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – came inside the tent.
1,600 words: estimated reading time 6.5 minutes
Saturday 25th March – almost on the Spring Equinox – was the perfect day to be in Reading for the latest instalment of its year-long Festival of the Dark. Blossoms and blue skies and a temperature to match, with a good crowd making use of Forbury Gardens just off the town centre. I’ve never discovered this Reading park before. I’m glad I’ve done so.
It was also my first Dark Mountain experience, although I’ve often explored the digital foothills at their site. Their approach to the complexities of climate change and our uncontrolled planetary experiment has intrigued me, and continues to as I feel myself circling closer into its nuances. The name of the event, The Night Breathes Us in, captures this beautifully, expanding our focus to the more-than-human and its agency over us (even while we disrupt it) but acknowledging the unavoidable centrality of our selves within our own experience.
Sadly, in my case, the night only partially inhaled; I was able to stay for the afternoon but missed out on the evening. So, this is an invitation to someone else to post a blog on the second half!
The black marquee in the middle of the gardens was an intimate space to share stories and experiences under the guidance of Dark Mountain explorers, and the three sessions I took part in there brought quiet reflections and gentle conversations.
We began with the launch of Dark Mountain’s new book, with readings from the poems and essays in Uncivilised Poetics, and music and natural sounds from the book’s companion CD. Writer and editor Nick Hunt suggested poetics as a needed counterweight to the dominant language and statistics of technical and policy narratives. Poetics – not just poems, but art as exploration and an open-ended questioning – helps engage us in a world that cannot be captured in the beguiling, make-safe terminologies of ‘management’. Nick quoted from William Stafford’s poem, A Ritual to Read Each Other: “For it is important for awake people to be awake … the darkness around us is deep.”
Everyday language can trick us into unseeing important truths, and even our attempts to see a bit wider can still fence us inside our illusions. One of the passages shared in our dark tent in the middle of a city park was from Robert Bringhurst’s essay The Persistence of Poetry and the Destruction of the World:
“When I was a youngster in school, someone asked me, ‘If a tree falls in the forest with no one there to hear it, does it make a sound or not? The question is demented. If a tree falls in the forest, all the other trees are there to hear it. But if a man cuts down the forest and he cries that he has no food, no firewood, no shade, and that his mind can get no traction, who is going to hear him?” – Robert Bringhurst
This demented quality to a lot of what we tell ourselves about ‘the world’ and ‘ourselves’ is what Dark Mountain, the Festival of the Dark and others are countering. Poetics is part of what can help us overcome this strange collective lack of traction on the depths and connectedness of the world. Bringhurst also quotes Skaay, a Haida poet from America’s north west indigenous cultures, who refers to humans as xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay: “plain, ordinary surface birds.”
“Creatures with more power – killer whales, loons, grebes, sea lions, seals – know how to dive. They pierce the surface, the xhaaydla it is called in Haida.” – Robert Bringhurst
Poetics is one way for us plain, ordinary surface birds to pierce the flatness of our worldviews.
Crossing the Bridge
Art editor and writer Charlotte du Cann guided us in Crossing the Bridge, an exploration of the traditional solar and growing cycles of the year: the solstices and equinoxes, and the seasons of fertility, growth, fruitfulness and latency that they help to parcel out. These are transitions from which we are easily distanced but never truly separated. We need to know how we are creatures in and of time: a deeper one than is surfaced in our phones or clocks. Deep time is not just in the rocks and soils. It’s built into our substance: bones, tissues and cells, and in the bacterial cohabitants inside us. Everything that makes us ‘us’. It’s inside the shallow time of our daily preoccupations, even as these try to hide it from us.
Using stones that the group had brought in pockets or memories – stones from beaches, flint soils and rivers, from ancient glacier beds or the mysterious recesses of ebay – we toured the eight solar and soilar doors of the yearly cycle. We explored the associations, memories and feelings through whatever door we found ourselves placed at on our stone clock. What do the light of summer or the dark of winter do with us, within our minds and bodies?
And we talked about the stones we’d brought to share. I found memories of the shingle of Orford Ness in Suffolk, and how on one scale – the beach itself – it reveals the seeming fragility of places and lives on the edge, constantly subject to the waves and currents eroding matter here, depositing it there. On another scale – the individual pebble – shingle reveals the persistence of matter as it’s shaped and smoothed and swept onwards. Beach and pebble contain deep time in cycles that “it is important for awake people to be awake” to. Sharing a pocketful of stones brought a beach of stories into the tent.
Holding the Fire
My afternoon inside the black tent closed with theatre maker and author Lucy Neal guiding us through Holding the Fire. She shared inspiration from three key character for her: women from history, personal experience and mythology.
Lucia of Syracuse, a Sicilian Christian of the Third Century, used a wooden headtorch to show her a path through the darkness as she took food and comfort to the poor. And Lucy demonstrated her own candle headdress to great effect.
Lucy met Hildegard Kurt at a workshop in Slovenia. Hildegard used moments of quiet reflection and exchange to reveal: how we hold knowledge and creativity inside ourselves; that this can help us recognise our active part and potential within the flux of environmental crises; a shared space can enable us to explore a different possibility.
Hestia, daughter of the Titans Cronus and Rhea, was the ancient Greek Goddess of the Hearth. Her role emphasises the importance of the fire in domestic and public life; Homer’s hymn to her acknowledges that “Without you, mortals hold no banquet.”
With these examples in mind – of the hearth, shared space and light in the dark – we spoke in pairs, sharing stories of times and experiences of seeing and being seen differently and of awakeness.
Taken together, it was a lot of time to spend in the half-dark tent, but refreshing. And the ‘outside world’ was never absent. Early on, for about 30 minutes, a ladybird crawled over my left hand. It paused occasionally as it struggled to stretch the wings from under its red enamelled carapace, testing if they were ready. Eventually, it managed to unstick itself and take off. Later, speeding police sirens tore across our quiet voices inside, momentarily taking our minds back outside. Everyday life was proceeding all around us. Later, when I looked at the photos I’d taken inside the twilight, I saw how the automatic exposure had kept the camera’s aperture open long enough to paint the black fabric walls almost transparent, the unseen sun revealing a shadowy world beyond the veil. Three simple ways that the ‘outside’ – human, more-than-human, solar – had pierced the surface for the xhaaydla xitiit ghidaay.
Find out more
The Night Breathes Us In is part of the Festival of the Dark, a year-long festival in Reading, produced by Outrider Anthems. You can read Jennifer Leach’s blog leading up to The Night Breathes Us Inhere.
Dark Mountain Project – published Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto (“Think of it as a flag raised so that we can find one another. A point of departure, rather than a party line. An invitation to a larger conversation that continues to take us down unexpected paths”) in 2009, and has produced many events and 10 volumes of fiction, poetry, non-fiction and images since then.
Nick Hunt – part of Dark Mountain’s editorial team, Nick is a writer of non-fiction and fiction (including the short story Green Bang, which was one of the commissions from TippingPoint’s Weatherfronts programme). His second book, Where the Wild Winds Are is his account of walking the invisible pathways of four of Europe’s named winds – the Helm, the Bora, the Foehn and the Mistral – to discover how they affect landscapes, peoples and cultures. You can read a series of exclusive excerpts for ClimateCultures, starting here.
Theatre maker, writer and community activist, Lucy Neal is interested in the role the arts play to nurture and provoke the changes needed to transition our society to a more ecological age. She is the author of Playing for Time: Making Art as if the World Mattered.
An independent researcher, project and events manager, and writer on environmental and climate change issues - investigating, supporting and delivering cultural and creative responses.
