Postcards from Babylon

It's busy in the Void...

2011-10-06T00:31:00.001+01:00

No posts... but much movement.
PfB to be published July 1st 2012
Watch this space...

Awakening the dreamers

2010-05-14T11:58:00.015+01:00

The Dark Mountain Project and its current offerings of a manifesto, a book and a festival (entitled 'Uncivilisation'), has recently been the subject of much debate, some if it rather heated. It seems to me that, in the way that often happens when complex and radical ideas hit the mainstream, a lot has been misunderstood and misrepresented. I happened across the Dark Mountain at the time of its birth, and it has been a potent catalyst for me over the last year - and was in fact one of the reasons for starting this blog.

Using a topical democratic metaphor, the Dark Mountain seems to have been turned into a referendum on environmentalism - should we have first-past-the-post green capitalism, AV activism working towards low-impact sustainability, or proportional representation of all peoples and species living on planet earth...?

I feel that this is kind of missing the point, and whilst in the tunnels changing tube at Kings Cross, I found myself writing a very long tweet on my phone, which of necessity became this blog post.

My reading of the Dark Mountain Manifesto is that it is:

1, a call to wake-up to the fact that we are in a situation of global ecological collapse, caused by human beings overusing planetary resources, and that the paradigm of 'sustainable development' does not seem adequate to avert this collapse.

2, a proposition that the root cause of this situation lives in our collective psyche - specifically, that civilisation's exploitative, destructive relationship to nature is rooted in the prevelant mythology of human beings existing in separation from their environment rather than in inter-connection with it. And that this is what needs to change if humanity, along with the rest of the biosphere's lifeforms, wants to continue its residency on planet earth. We need to 'uncivilise' ourselves, says the manifesto - and inevitably lots of people have jumped to gleefully condemnatory conclusions about what is meant by 'uncivilisation'.

3, and this for me is where the life and soul of the project reside, a manifesto on the key role of writers and artists in examining and deconstructing this mythology and then setting out to create new myths and new stories to transform the way we think about who and what we are, and how we live.

The Dark Mountain is an invitation, not to let everybody die, not to hasten in the apocalypse, not even to stop being activists, - but to use the power of literary and artistic imagination to co-create a shift in collective consciousness; and thus contribute to initiating and building a substantial foundation for the emergence of new ways and new paradigms which truly are responsive and responsible to the reality of our current situation.

Whilst dreaming when asleep, the unconscious mind creates the dream.
When lucid dreaming, one is able to 'wake up' whilst remaining in the dream, and it is then possible to choose the dream and change it.

In a nutshell, the nightmare we are living in needs lucid dreamers.

.

By way of introduction...

2010-04-16T15:32:00.012+01:00

This is the opening passage of the book. (see "A Book" in the info column) The text runs across a double-page spread, after a sequence of 3 images also running full-bleed across full spreads. It's kind of like the pre-credits sequence in a film. The photograph below is the first image in the book.

London. The last years of the twentieth century, AD.
A post-industrial metropolis in a state of creative and evolutionary flux. A vast and tangled grid of concrete, human life and economics. The original unreal city, capital of Great Britain and grandmother of the western empire, now affirming a new status as global nexus of finance and culture. The prodigal motor of the world.

So how to begin to explain what I’m doing, wandering through the streets with an SLR camera, a head full of electricity and a pair of headphones in my bag?

Well, the official version is that I’m training as a photojournalist and preparing to embark on a respectable career in the media. Developing a visual voice to tell the stories of the world and the masses. Learning to distill the monumental existential epic that’s known as current affairs, into what are known as features: topical tales and bite-sized, digestible chunks of edutainment, for consumption with your morning coffee. All in the name of information and understanding in a liberal society. A worthy mission, says the rhetoric.

Version 2 is the telling of a young man’s story. A protagonist emerging, searching for the zone, looking for a job and purpose, for expression, and connection, something like transcendence - perhaps even quietly dreaming of art and poetry with some success. A personal history unfolding through points in time, fairly clear in chronology, but more hazy in emotion. A story of life, haphazard growth, some euphoria, some loss and loneliness. A love of cities, trees, photography and music. A mild obsession with the politics of alienation. For lack of anything else to do, chancing it at college - looking for a way to communicate the intensity. Trying to learn how to make a portrait of the eco-systems of power, the mind wars, this feeling of a missing.

Version 3 just goes what the fuck is going on? This world, this insanity we’re living, the state of things acute, exhilarating, unprecedented... What is the nature and the origin of this situation so mired in contradictions, shadows, and multiple catastrophes...? Big questions, and in the labyrinth of modern life there doesn’t seem to be substantial answers. So basically I’m just testing out the A-Z, moving through realities and postcodes, staring at the lines on pavements. Wondering what a city is and how we came to come, to this point of rapture, this weird, apparently apocalyptic climax of our evolution...

Version 4... I had no choice. London called me, a long, long time ago. Bear witness, she said, to the opus magnus of these buildings, streets and lives, this unimaginably complex, subtle web of synergy and structures layered upon the land. Surrender to the vision of my chaos and listen for my buried rivers...

CdS PfB-1 2010

The resurrection of the artist

2010-04-04T01:31:00.006+01:00

01:31AM, Easter Sunday.
A man named Christian is chipping away at the rock. Suddenly, the large boulder spontaneously rolls away from the stone entrance and out comes...
...a blog!
Its been some time since yours truly put anything artistically significant out into the world... I've been taken up with dance work (5Rhythms, Movement Medicine and other explorations, all of which has its own artistry, but of embodied transience) I've also been discovering what it means to be a Dad, experiencing my heart stretching wide open every day, as I see my two-year-old daughter being and becoming...
And perhaps most challenging, I've been relentlessly beavering away on The Long-Term Project. This book thing... the mention of which anyone who has known me for time will respond to with a wry smile...
12 years and counting since the seed of this tenacious vision first appeared. Still an epic task ahead to bring the crazy opus to fruition - but it's happening - trust me...
And now 2010 seems to be funneling a lot of its formidable power into new connections and new vibrations - the Dark Mountain and Encounters collectives both catalysing process and progress.
And without knowing exactly how this whole thing is going to develop, a fluid sense of what's required now, has brought me to these digital hallways of words.

So greets to any and all humans out there in the blogospherical world.
You wanna read some postcards from Babylon? They're in the post.

Whassat? What's a flaneur? Check yer letterbox, I'll send a definition.