Reciprocity – touching body, animal, plant, stone ….

The Language of Trees

I have a degree in Botany …. You can’t even do a degree in Botany now I don’t think. And that education has come to represent the exact opposite of some of the things that are important to me now. I hardly saw a living thing on the course but I learnt how to mash things up and work out how they functioned, and I could write computer programs to simulate gene pool fluctuations in small populations. It taught me little about how to distinguish a rowan from an ash. But much more importantly, it taught me nothing about the whole  immersive sensuous world of sound, smell, mood, change that you experience as you move through the landscape.

For instance, as you approach a stand of tall riverside poplars, their thin branches shimmering, almost like tin-foil in the breeze, sunlight shattered in their lemon-yellow, grey-green, silver leaves, their very presence affects you as you near, they cast their presence over everything for some distance around. And how different to the dark ancient silence around five Scots Pines, grown rugged against the elements on some rocky knoll, somehow you sense, in their presence the resonances of a rich primordial past. Or the line of London Planes planted on London’s South Bank that define the bank of the Thames at that point, setting themselves off against the huge concrete architecture of art and commerce nearby and soothing the movements and conversations of the people beneath them.

Science has almost nothing to say about this lived sensuous world which surrounds us. Not that science isn’t a good thing! It’s not its strengths that I am questioning but its unnoticed limitations and the unseen blindness it introduces in us. And I would argue philosophy. theology and technology work the same way. We become unfamiliar and unskilled in a rich, primary sensuous experience of the world around us and come to treat the abstracted, logical world given to us by our cognitive knowledge, our technologies, even our language as the primary source of reliable information.

The sculptor, Antony Gormley, remarks:

For the past twenty years we have turned from communion with the elements to a fascination with the world of language culminating in the formulation that ‘the definition of the real is that it is possible to provide an equivalent representation’ (Baudrillard). We have fallen into our own reflection into the world of signs which mirror the intellect; for some this is the new nature.

The antidote to this trend must surely be a renewed direct, sensuous engagement with the places we live, and particularly natural places, so that we might once again learn the language of trees, of rivers, of the sea but also of buildings, city squares and old roads.

(This is a short extract from my Greenbelt 2011 talk – which is available for download here)

The Holy Place – Greenbelt 2011 Talk

 

I am giving a talk at Greenbelt Christian Arts Festival for the first time this year. Entitled ‘The Holy Place’, it questions, not so much “what we think” but “how we think” and aims to explore some poetic and sensuous thinking that might offer up new resources for us in working out how to live in the current age.

Heidegger, one of the most influential philosophers of the last 100 years, argued just after the Second World War, that the three greatest sicknesses facing humanity at that time were:

• a deep sense of homelessness
• the loss of God(s) to guide and shape our societies
• a violence towards the earth inherent in the essence of modern technology

Maybe nothing much has changed … yet rather remarkably Heidegger’s diagnosis of the root of these problems was that we no longer know how to think!

I will open up what he meant by this and then push far beyond it, exploring ways of perception and thinking that might let us experience the world and our place in it in more resourceful ways, wandering far from the motorway of western culture to some lesser know paths of thinking. Most know Nietzche announced ‘that we have killed God’ (and indeed, brought an end to metaphysical sources of meaning and value) but he also cried out, ‘Brothers, remain close to the earth’ as the way forward.

Along the road I will be arguing that:

• Science doesn’t think, and nor does theology or philosophy
• Our technology driven world doesn’t give us information overload as much as it hides the fact that we have too little
• God is not the source of the holy but the experience of the holy might make possible the thought of God
• Truth is a shimmering moment of encounter with the world – places, things, people, creatures around us – that conceals as much as it reveals
• One early step to redressing man’s devastating disconnection from the earth may lie more in our senses – sight, touch, smell and hearing – than in our cognitive minds
• Moomin-pappa was one of the most profound thinkers of the last century

In these days of civil unrest, political bankruptcy, financial crisis, simultaneous religious indifference and fanaticism, environmental destruction, … we have a crying need for quick answers, and yes, we must move swiftly on many fronts. However, I am convinced that there is an equally urgent need to explore less certain roads that may ultimately open up a more grounded sense of homecoming and the holy in the places and communities where we dwell.

If you happen to be at Greenbelt this year – do come along – the talk is in Workshop 2 at 11am on the Monday - I won’t expect you to agree with everything I say, but if I don’t get lynched and can offer up a few resources and avenues for further thought – I will be happy!

How do we know the earth? Geopoetics … and NLP!?

I am nearly through my NLP Practitioner Training, a long-awaited and richly rewarding experience (with PPD Learning who I 100% recommend). Last weekend Robert Dilts, one of the leading developers of NLP, led the training.

He has developed what is called 3rd generation NLP which sees the mind as spread over three spheres:

1. a cognitive mind which emerges from the brain
2. a somatic mind centred in the body
3. a ‘field’ mind which comes from our connection and relationships with other systems around us.

So Dilts’ NLP works beyond the cognitive, giving an awareness of the wisdom of the body and also offering approaches for working in the wider field. Intellect, senses, the body and our connection to our total environment all come into play.

So what has this got to do with our experience of the natural and physical world in which we live?

Kenneth White‘s Geopoetics, which seeks to’ open up a fresh relationship to the earth and an opening of a world’ (a new mindscape-landscape grounding of culture), remarks that geopoetics seeks:

“a new or renewed sense of world, a sense of space, light and energy which is experienced both intellectually, by developing our knowledge, and sensitively, using all our senses to become attuned to the world, and requires both serious study and a certain amount of de-conditioning of ourselves by working on the body-mind. “

So White sees our engagement with the earth as having both intellectual and sensual dimensions accessed through the mind-body. He argues that on ‘the motorway of Western Civilisation’, our culture has no essential grounding in the earth. He argues that this is a perilous place to be in our current environmental situation and, that at its highest, human culture has a rich contact with the earth. (as Spengler remarks, ’Every great culture begins with a mighty theme that rises out of the pre-urban countryside’).

Coming away from my NLP course, I couldn’t help but be struck by some synergies.  Whilst I have no idea whether Dilts has pushed his work in the direction of the human-nonhuman landscape, I left wondering whether this might be the territory for some fruitful exploration – can a modern psychotherapy that traditionally focusses on personal excellence and interpersonal connections, also have some profound approaches to fuel our move towards a fresh engagement with the earth?

If nothing else, the thought has been the seed of a number of micropoems, including:

On the Beacon drawing on a Mehari,
awareness opens to another presence:
a winter-darkened thorn tree,
we stand together in bleached sunlight.

 

More to come!

 

 

 

 

To forage or not to forage … that is the question.

One of my highlights at the Greenbelt 2010 Festival at the end of the summer was a wonderful walk with Bruce & Sara Stanley through Cheltenham racecourse foraging and sampling dishes that Sara had made from the very plants that we were discovering. It was an inspiring and memorable early morning ramble.

I am also very engaged with the Downlanders (Action for Access) group in Brighton drawing attention to the ‘at risk’ ancient downland grassland areas that surround Brighton. Dave Bangs, the figure-head of that group, recently wrote about his concerns about foraging – feeling that in another time it would be a great thing to be doing but it the current situation of great pressure on the biodiversity of our plant life it is an unacceptable practice.

I reproduce in full a piece Dave wrote in response to a recent article about mushroom foraging in the Guardian. I am partly posting Dave’s essay so it can be accessed on the web and partly to give room for comment. Alongside the greater interest in growing our own vegetables and other activities which seem more in keeping with the current environmental situation, foraging is coming more into focus as a meaningful activity. However,  as Dave points out it may have consequences that are counter to our desire to live more environmentally. What do we think?

A comment on Phil Daoust’s article ‘Fruits of the forest’in the Guardian 16.09.10 by Dave Bangs, author of ‘A Freedom to Roam Guide to the Brighton Downs’ (2008) and co-founder of ‘Action For Access – walking and working for a people’s countryside’

I read the Guardian article “Fruits of the forest” with a sinking heart. For the pleasure that Phil Daoust feels when he forages fungi for the pot is the enemy of the pleasure that I feel when I am foraying in the woods: that most blindingly obvious pleasure… the sheer beauty and profusion of these fungi.

Last Sunday we walked in a forest in our local countryside to enjoy what is proving to be the best season for fungi for several years. At the edge of the car park lay a pile of discarded fungi, with a bruised and battered Beefsteak fungus of huge dimensions, and an equally huge bolete, now broken into several pieces. Walking through the pines and spruces near to the car park there were plenty of brittlegills, russula spp., and smaller brown fungi, and some pretty caps of Rosy Spike, but the Bovine Bolete which normally accompanies that species was absent. Absent, that is, except for the tell-tale cut bases of its stalks. Everywhere through that pine wood were those sad little golden circles the size and colour, more or less, of pound coins. Cut, cut cut, those collectors had gone. And that was to be the story everywhere in that part of the forest which was most easily accessible from the car park… and sometimes, too, in the more remote areas beyond the barbed wire and ‘Keep Out, Private Woods’ signs. Cut stalk bases everywhere, and little discarded piles of dropped Blushers and Panthercaps and pieces of Ceps, at frequent intervals along the rides and banks.

The scene reminded me of childhood expeditions into the Kentish Bluebell woods back around 1960, when we would frequently see groups of happy cyclists wobbling down the lanes with great bunches of Bluebells hanging from their baskets or draped across their handlebars. Such innocent pleasures…but such pleasures taken by the millions of Londoners meant that the woods and forests that circle the metropolis have been stripped almost entirely of their Primroses. Those collecting pleasures and the local extinctions they brought about were the reason why legislation was needed to forbid free collection of wild plants.

I feel sad…sad that this culture of collecting and using nature like a bottomless bag of unlimited provisions has not been more thoroughly eradicated. To be sure, those Kentish woods are far free-er now of such obvious pillage. Collecting today is usually a much more furtive business.  Except when it comes to fungi…

I remember seeing an old eastern European man with his family gathered round in Epping Forest a few years ago. They showed him their baskets of fungi and he picked them over one by one. “No good. No good. No good” he went, breaking and throwing aside lovely caps-of-many-colours as he sorted the edibles from the non-edibles. I admired his easy knowledge and confidence, his sense that nature was a provider, not a thing to be frightened of. Yet there are good and robust reasons why that culture of fungi collecting does not really exist in this country. Poland and Germany, Sweden and Russia are countries of woods and forests. They have far, far more than we do. The greatest biomass of macro fungi are to be found in such woods. Fungus collecting is a woodland phenomenon, largely, despite the delights to be found on old downland, heath and meadow. We do not collect in this country at least partly because there are relatively fewer good places to collect.

Fungi are having a seriously hard time. Air pollution and the destruction of habitat have vastly reduced the European biomass of larger fruiting fungi. They cannot take the additional stresses of foraging. When my mum was on summer holiday as a girl in the 1920’s she and her dad used to get up at dawn and climb the Down, where the hillside would be “white as snow” with Field Mushrooms, which they collected for their family breakfast. I’ve heard that experts call that phenomenon a “white out”. I’ve never seen it. Nowadays, I’m pleased to see even one decent troop of mushrooms, and I’m careful not to tell others where I find them.

Phil Daoust’s article shows us “five fungi to collect”. Amongst them is Orange Birch Bolete. On last Sunday’s foray we found just one solitary specimen of that species, way away from the public access part of the forest. Though it may be common in some areas it is not a species that we find frequently in our countryside. What we did find, though – in an even more remote area – was a truly gorgeous troop of Orange Oak Bolete, a far rarer edible look-alike of the Orange Birch. Huge and handsome brick orange caps above black-flecked stems, catching the dappled evening sun through the oak canopy. How long will that loveliness survive before some of Phil’s friends discover it?

Phil encourages us to collect Ceps. “Common in woods”, he says, and that can be true. Last week I took a party on one of our Action For Access walks through a local wood. We’d found button Ceps there the week before at the path sides, when we rehearsed the route our event would take. They weren’t there when we did our public walk. Someone had taken the lot. That meant 25 eager walkers who missed the pleasure of seeing those delightful ‘penny buns’.

Phil encourages us to pick the Common Morel. Is he crazy? Some years ago I naively revealed a local site for the Morel in an article I did for a wildlife website. I was roundly and rightly told off by a mycologist (fungi expert) friend of mine, for he knew of only five sites for this species in the whole of our countryside.

About the same time, I found two specimens in a springtime wood, like giant golden honeycombs on sticks, under hazel coppice, with warblers belting out their trills in the canopy above, and orchids gracing the woodland floor around. That is one of the most treasured memories I hold. Yet I did not leave it at that. I took one specimen, and we cooked it as we were instructed that night. It was a feeble business. I’ve enjoyed a plain fresh slice of bread and butter far more than that culinary let-down.

I have always regretted my behaviour that day. The way I stole some of the pure loveliness of that springtime wood. And I damn well hope that I am strong enough never to repeat that shameful collapse into cupidity.

Phil encourages us to collect Giant Puffball, and to eat it before it matures, that is, before it completes its life cycle and releases its millions of spores to renew itself in new places. THIS IS A RARITY, MATE ! I’ve found it so rarely that I can remember almost all the occasions upon which I’ve found it, and I keep well quiet about the spots where I know it occurs. LEAVE IT ALONE ! I know, I know, it tastes delicious, just like steak. I’ve eaten it. Big deal.

In any case, if you are patient and look widely you will eventually find a troop that has been driven over by some daft farmer’s landrover, or by some chelsea tractor crushing a troop along the drive side of some posh herbert’s country hideaway. Wait till then, and pick up some broken fragments for your fry-up. The mud and crushing won’t spoil the taste, if they’re fresh enough.

Believe me, I am not opposed to taking one or two fungi for the pot, provided the population you find is obviously abundant. It’s nice to know what a wild mushroom or Cep tastes like, though most edible species – including the classy ones – are not worth the bother. And if you saw me in the woods at this time of year you could easily mistake me for a collector, for I routinely carry my gran’s old shopping basket and a ‘hobby box’ with little compartments, so’s I can take examples of new species for identification. All that does no harm, and wildlife records are essential. But foraging? Hiding behind Phil’s paean to the pleasures of the pot, there are battalions of collectors taking van loads to order for posh restaurants – asset stripping our woods and forests.

And it’s not just the beauty of these things that Phil’s foraging diminishes. They have a value far beyond the pleasure we get from looking or eating. Many other species depend upon them. For the hundreds of species of fungus flies and beetles, for the slugs and snails, for the small mammals, for other fascinating and often beautiful parasitic fungi and moulds, or for those species of weird half-animal slime moulds that move across the woodland hunting them, this annual harvest is life sustaining stuff. Phil plans to disburse his Ceps to his mates. Those creatures just plan to stay alive.

They have many more layers of human value, too, besides their value to other life forms and their value as objects of beauty and flavour. We could study them all our lives and never get tired….so many questions…how do they live; how do they work; what are their life cycles; what medicinal and productive possibilities do they contain; why are they distributed so and so? Eating and enjoying their beauty are just single steps on a mountain of pleasure we can take in them.

I have campaigned for a long time for full and free access to our countryside…for ‘allemansratt’ – ‘every man’s right’ – to wander the land which is our birthright. We held many mass trespasses to fight for the right to roam legislation when New Labour came in, and still hold them for the extension of its half-hearted provisions. I truly love to see folk in the countryside. Yet for one short season of the year I feel far more ambivalent. I want to walk those woods and see that huge cornucopia of milkcaps and brittlegills, glistening suillus and shammy-leather-like leccinum caps. I want to see that gorgeous splash of orange and yellow that is chicken of the woods sprouting from that rotting trunk. I do not want to look in vain, or to see just the discarded relics of people’s pillage.

Phil’s pleasure is simply not sustainable. For if we are to encourage –as we must – people to reconnect with nature and the countryside on a mass scale – all the many millions of us – then our common behavioural culture must be one of the most careful respect for that which we mutually enjoy. Not just every song bird nest and wild orchid, but every troop of beautiful boletes and hidden springtime morels must be respected.

The earth is a common treasury, Phil…so let’s treasure it, and end this fungus foraging relic of the millennia-old culture of pillage, which has so incessantly ratcheted up the destruction of nature.

Let’s start by walking our woods in the spirit of the saying: “take only your memories, leave only your footprints”.

77 Million Paintings and non-religious places

It was a great delight to visit Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings at Fabrica gallery in Brighton. I regard Eno as a remarkable and important mind in addition to his music and his lightbased artwork. And his installation is in my favorite Brighton art space. I have had the laptop version of 77 Million Paintings for a long while and have visited Fabrica to see it three times already and plan to be back again a few more times before the end of the Brighton Festival in May. I am a great fan.

However I have some significant misgivings about the installation atleast in part because of the context it sets for itself as an attempt to create a ‘secular religious’ space, a place of surrender and reflection in the midst of city life.

Brian Eno has worked with video and light since the late 77s from his pieces Mistaken Memories of Medieval Manhattan andThursday Afternoon. In the 80s he merged slow moving light works with ambient sounds to create ‘Quiet Clubs’. Of these places Eno said in 1986 ‘I hope the present exhibition suggests a type of ambience that might be produced in a more particular social space – perhaps a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square and a park and sharing aspects of all of these’. Fabrica and Eno seemed to have positioned the installation of 77MP in this context.

Fabrica is a converted deconsecrated church and the tilted square of interlocking shapes that makes up 77MP are positioned high on the wall like a slow moving rose window at one end of the room. Large settees are arranged like comfy pews directed towards the image. You sit facing towards the image in near darkness. Eno’s generative wandering sound surround you, issuing from suspended boom boxes.

The installation opens up a number of lines of thought for me:

Firstly, in placing the image high on the wall a sense of authority is suggested – we sit beneath it looking up. A rose window educates, inspires, comforts, it usually has content. Eno’s shifting patterns occupy that elevated space but they say nothing but themselves. As a recent tweet remarked – they are essentially a kaleidoscope. Might today’s meditative images not sit on a plane with us, working against that notion of elevated transcendence, but rather opening up a space that is contiguous with our everyday experience?

Likewise the orientation of the settees, facing in one direction towards the image at one end of the room. For me, a decentred experience might present a far more interesting creation of a contemporary ‘non-religious’ space. Living as we do after Neitzche-Heidegger-Derrida and their escape from metaphysics and their deconstruction of ‘truth’, much contemporary religious thinking, atleast of a christian persuation, argues for a de-centred approach. Such thought is not inclined towards an objective being or an explanation for everything but is an event in experience, in the narrative of a specific culture. The installation is in no way trying to tackle such matters but the layout of the room creates a linear focus rather than surround us with a number of equal surprises of equal wieght from different places.

The orientation of the room had another effect for me too. The images change so slowly that even watching intently they are hard to follow. What I find far more wonderful in the installation is in looking way for a while, observing others in the gallery and then looking back to the image to discover both the remarkable change and continuity with the past. The spectator setup encourages persistent studying of the image only.

Finally, despite Eno’s use of painted and found images, the effect is still that of a flat digital surface. I am always intrigued that Eno speaks of the early influence of choral music and his great passion for gospel and yet his use of vocals is often bereft of passion and poetry. In a way his visual imagery follows the same path. I longed for a sort of sensuality, a richness and depth that would come from an escape from the digital but know that the same manipulation would not be possible. Nonetheless the presentation medium leaves me hungering for some more.

I guess in summary the installation guestures at a traditional church buildng context which is not an unnatural approach considering that Fabrica is a church building and has some interest. However pushing the exploration into territory that escapes such traditional motifs would seem to be a more fruitful approach. .

For me, Eno’s ‘quiet club’ ambient public spaces point in a direction that even though he started it 30 or 40 years ago has not been explored to any degree either by himself or by others as far as I know. Certainly for me, 77 Million Paintings is a pleasure to experience but also a gauntlet thrown down to push the medium further.

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