by Shaun Chamberlin | Dec 21, 2012 | 21st December, All Posts, Climate Change, Cultural stories, Favourite posts, Philosophy, Transition Movement
Let me tell you a story.
It’s a story about our land – our home – and our ability to live peaceful, harmonious, respectful lives upon it and in partnership with it.
And it’s a story about the big bad political structures and corporate institutions that conspire to stop us doing so, using the unspeakable, impenetrable black magic of bureaucracy and backhanders to bind our best efforts with frustration and fatigue.
Oh, you already know that one?
~~~~~~~~~
Ok, then maybe you’re ready for the next chapter, about what comes after?
Fine. Sit down, make yourselves comfortable.
But you should know that this isn’t a Hollywood story, about a heroic individual battling the faceless hordes of bureaucratic ennui and struggling towards an inevitable triumph.
No, this is a collective adventure, and a story I have to try to tell from the inside, as it occurs. Although perhaps it could be all the more powerful, for that?
This story really matters to me. To us.
It is the story of our lives. It seems you know the early chapters. The ones where the twisted power of the demons seems unstoppable, where calling the future uncertain sounds recklessly optimistic, where our humble efforts seem insignificant, and where our all-powerful superhero is nowhere to be seen.
And you know too that, as in the most gripping stories of our childhood, the stakes are higher even than death. Though death is at stake; for us, for our loved ones.
Higher than the destruction of our entire communities. Though their destruction is ongoing.
Maybe higher, even, than extinction: that death of birth itself. Though that too hangs in the balance, for us and for others.
~~~~~~~~~
Here I sense some of your eyes widen. What could be worse than that?
But some of you nod sadly, knowing that I speak of ‘undeath’. That living death that hollows all joy, pleasure and meaning from our souls even as our bodies continue to feast on all around us. The realm of zombies, of vampires.
This is our story, so we all know it is no fiction. Rather, it is the true story that some of us don’t dare to tell our children, because we know they will be scared, and that we may have no honest way to reassure them.
~~~~~~~~~
You should know that I do not speak of death lightly. Two years ago I lost both my closest partner and mentor, and my fiancée, both suddenly, and within a few weeks of each other. Shortly afterwards, my father suffered a double heart attack and barely survived.
I am coming to know a little of death, of its causes, and of what it leaves behind. And I am learning a great deal.
Eventually, painfully, I am beginning to learn what Nature tells us so clearly, and what our culture fights so hard to ignore.
That death is not evil. That death has its rightful place, as the partner of life, and it always will.
But that undeath does not. Undeath is the enemy of nature and of life. The enemy of art and of love.
It is the hollow-eyed, insatiable hunger that works to consume all that we hold dear, and takes no pleasure in that work.
But I am getting ahead of myself...
~~~~~~~~~
Instead, let me speak a little to those who feel their unity with their lover, Earth.
Those who step into the wild from which we came and can feel the terrible grief that she herself carries.
Unending, as all grief is. As all relationships are.
But who also feel something more from our wise, wise, deep lover.
That grief too has its place.
That feeling the loss of life, aching over it, is, truly, a triumph for life.
Grief cannot – stubbornly will not – overcome death, but it vanquishes life’s true enemy.
This is the gift we can eventually bring back from our time in the underworld, clutched tight against those from whose realm we return.
The gift of the tingling intensity of full life – the simple joys of a path untainted by despair, corruption or surrender. The exquisite tastes of food, the truth and beauty ringing in the music and, for me, always the dancing; my wild, beloved dancing. The aliveness that grief works to return us to - in its agonising, unhurried way - in the aftermath of beloved death.
~~~~~~~~~
And, possibly, the gift for which environmentalism hungers.
So often, when I hear the learnéd speak of environmental collapse, ongoing or long done, all I can hear is their pain - sometimes articulated, often not - lurking among the figures and statistics. Unresolved..
I hear a zombie speaking.
It is no great wonder that when a man seeks a podium to speak of his pain, the audience is limited.
Most flinch before this uninvited onslaught, are put out, offended, impinged upon.
~~~~~~~~~
Yet we can - I can - learn to speak from the place beyond agony.
Joy.
The place that faces down death, even the death of birth, and finds life beyond that. In this world.
In that place I find the other voices, the non-human and the no longer human. The others who share in the life of this planet, and those who no longer do.
All speak in this place.
And those dread, tender voices speak of death. Shatter undeath. Bring life.
~~~~~~~~~
epilogue
There is a time for everything – a time for grieving, a time for reflection, a time for action, a time for silence. I feel that the time for storytelling, and for sitting comfortably, is drawing to a close.
On Dark Optimism I sometimes speak of the paths I am choosing to walk, and if they seem a little inadequate in the face of the big bad, well it is because they are. But they bring me life – true life – and a little voice whispers to me that that is enough. That that is everything.
I know that voice, and I love her.
in memory of Maria Elvorith, 13/06/82 ~ 21/12/10
by Shaun Chamberlin | Dec 21, 2011 | 21st December, All Posts, Cultural stories, Reviews and recommendations
David Buckland, text Amy Balkin, ‘Going to hell on a handcart.’, Ice Art
"Untitled, 2010" was written by artist Maria Elvorith for The Future We Deserve, a book project about collaboratively creating the future we deserve, set for publication in January 2012.
---
“The war that matters is the war against the imagination, all other wars are subsumed in it.” ~ Diane Di Prima
With each day we move towards a necessary revolution. Resource depletion, mass species extinction and the risk of runaway climate change highlight the great flaws in our current worldview and the society it has built. It is in this nebulous inner realm of intuition and story that a revolution quietly gathers strength.
And it is in this realm that art has a unique power. Its intrinsic nature allows it not only to powerfully mirror ‘the now’, but to inspire and demonstrate a vision of where we can go from here.
However, if society is not engaged with these pressing issues or actively debating the absurdity of the current system, then most artists won’t be either. It has taken a painfully long time for the predominant western civilisation to begin to acknowledge the devastating consequences of its current systems. Perhaps then it is no wonder that a lot of the artwork produced in the 21st century comments on excess, commoditisation, self-immortalisation and isolation.
Artists are a part of society, and once they are aware of or involved in a debate, they will inevitably create works that communicate this understanding, whether through content, creation or presentation. But to ask an artist to respond to something that they have little or no understanding of – or interest in – invariably produces work which is contrived and short lived.
Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’, Oil on canvas, 1937
The greatest and most striking artworks tend to emerge instead from the expression of a tension within the artist, usually without a planned agenda. Take for example Picasso’s Guernica[1], painted almost immediately after the devastating casual bombing of the town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War and famous for its depiction of the horrors of war. When asked to explain the symbolical references in the painting, Picasso would often refuse:
"...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are." [2]
And herein lies our Catch-22. The urgency with which we need to respond to these issues calls for the inspiration that artists carry with them, which could help to move the debate forward into actualisation. Dr. Gerald Bast describes this well:
"The true beauty of art lies in its ability to move us intellectually, motivate us to follow new paths, shape awareness and character, demonstrate interconnectedness and teach us to employ all the things that surround us in a conscious manner. The achievement of social effectiveness can neither be the aim or the purpose of art. Nonetheless art has a social influence, either in the sense of change, or in the spirit of affirmation and conservation." [3]
Yet unless artists themselves are genuinely intimately involved in the exploration, and can escape from the commoditisation of the arts sufficiently to find their true voice, then the need for their distinctive contribution may go unmet.
In a sense, the future we deserve is inevitable – we will reap what we sow. But if artists can be released from their bind, then their ability to unite our hearts, minds and imagination could catalyse the creation of a future we all hope for.
--
References
[1] http://www.pablopicasso.org/guernica.jsp
[2] http://www.pbs.org/treasuresoftheworld/a_nav/guernica_nav/gnav_level_1/5meaning_guerfrm.html
[3] U-n-f-o-l-d: A cultural response to climate change, exhibition catalogue, 2010, Springer-Verlag/Wein
by Shaun Chamberlin | Jun 3, 2010 | All Posts, Climate Change, Cultural stories, Favourite posts, Philosophy, Reviews and recommendations
I got back from the Dark Mountain Project's Uncivilisation festival a few days ago, and while I could write about many of the aspects of that stimulating week, one thread it really tugged on for me was the role - the critical importance - of the arts in shifting the cultural stories that shape our future.
So today I would like to highlight a few musical artists who have inspired my personal journey, and to invite you to suggest a few artists of any kind who have brought something to your engagement with the global problematique, in whatever way, and perhaps deserve a little more exposure.
The 'headline act' at Uncivilisation was George Monbiot debating the usefulness of the Dark Mountain project with one of its founders. Sitting in the audience I was engaged by this - if rather frustrated by some of the arguments unvoiced or misrepresented - but then found myself profoundly refreshed to have my intellectual cogitations blown away by what followed. Immediately afterwards, Alastair McIntosh took the stage, and used the language of music to speak to the spiritual in us - to our connection with our homes, our land.
Maria Elvorith, ‘Red wine, Lipstick and the World in my hand’, 2009
The shift in energy in the room (and in me) was palpable, as we moved from our separate intellectual camps to what felt a unified sense of wonder and shared values.
Thinking back on this, I am put in mind of some insightful advice from the late Howard Zinn which I recently discovered and am endeavouring to embed into my outlook:
"Don't look for a moment of total triumph. See it as an ongoing struggle, with victories and defeats, but in the long run the consciousness of people growing. So you need patience, persistence, and need to understand that even when you don't "win", there is fun and fulfilment in the fact that you have been involved, with other good people, in something worthwhile."
The arts are so key to that fun and fulfilment, as well as to the growth in consciousness, that I feel the need to acknowledge some of my own inspirations...
Saul Williams - Act III Scene 2 (Shakespeare)
Ani DiFranco - Self Evident
My new friend Alex Fradera has already suggested adding this link to three folk songs on the subject of the credit crisis (though clearly none as well-sung as this one).
For me personally though, Nine Inch Nails' 2007 album, Year Zero, was the point where my musical interests collided head-on with my life.
The mysterious initial trailer video (above) contained the critical clue to send online fans worldwide spiralling off into an 'Alternate Reality Game (ARG)' set in a dystopian near-future ravaged by climate destabilisation and social breakdown. Without ruining too much of the fun for newcomers who want to explore, the Viability Index site gives one flavour of the world that music fans were drawn into, some parts of which are genuinely moving and disturbing. And drawing us ever deeper was the fact that a few of the tracks off the forthcoming album lurked in its depths.
I talked with people for whom the experience - and the music it uncovered - opened their eyes to the realities of our present, as well as to new ways of engaging with those realities. And for me it led to my work on the Superstruct ARG, which tried to expand on that success.
But that's another story. For now, I'll leave you with some of the art that has affected me, and look forward to discovering more through you.
--
Nine Inch Nails - Zero-Sum
Sir Edwin Landseer, ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ 1864
Photograph by Iain D. Williams, Canada, Nov 2009
---
Edit - March 2011: This is just too good not to add to this post:
by Shaun Chamberlin | Dec 1, 2009 | All Posts, Climate Change, Cultural stories, Favourite posts
Off the back of taking part in CheatNeutral's spoof chat show 'Going Neutral' at the Science Museum, this feels like the perfect time to take a look at the concept of carbon offsetting, the most recognised example of which is the planting of trees to 'soak up' our carbon emissions, thus supposedly making our net impact 'carbon neutral'...
Now there is no denying that the right trees, growing in the right place, are a truly wondrous thing, with myriad benefits for local people and wildlife, and for the global climate. Indeed, I am a long-term supporter of organisations like Tree Aid and Trees for Cities, which have long been carefully planting trees where they are most appropriate.
Yet neither these charities nor I claim that my donations give me any kind of right to emit more carbon (or to make fewer efforts to emit less). I donate for the traditional reason - simply because I believe it contributes to creating the kind of world we all want to live in. I might donate to Amnesty for the same reason, but would any of us claim that in doing so I earn the right to perform a small amount of torture?
This comparison lays bare the true nature of 'carbon offsetting'. The claim is that we are doing some good to compensate for the unfortunate damage caused by our lifestyles, but the truth is that the damage caused by our emissions is (more than) offsetting the good we might hope to do with our donations to these offsetting companies.
And why would we choose to send our money to them ($705m last year, worldwide), rather than to the charities mentioned above? Because we have a reason to believe that they will do more good with our money? Or because we believe that they have some kind of moral sanction to cleanse our consciences, with their websites full of soothing words?
Not to mention the fundamental physical problem with planting trees to offset emissions. Carbon in nature moves through what is known as the active carbon cycle, cycling between the atmosphere, oceans and biosphere as air and water meet, and as life on Earth breathes, lives and dies. There is also inactive carbon (technically part of a much, much slower cycle), laid down in long-term deposits to which we grant names such as "fossil fuels" or "the white cliffs of Dover". These are, if you like, Earth's natural form of carbon sequestration.
So when we extract fossil fuels and burn them, we are moving the inactive carbon they contain into the active carbon cycle. If we then lock it back up in forests or any other aspect of the biosphere, we are not removing it from the active carbon cycle - we are not offsetting the deed done. Carbon sealed in coal or oil would have remained there for many millennia, but trees are not nearly so long-lived, especially in a rapidly-changing climate, and when they die and decay the carbon is released into the atmosphere once more. The difference in timescale is striking - the lifetime of a tree is orders of magnitude shorter than the 'lifetime' of a coal or oil field... trying to stabilise our climate with tree planting is like trying to keep sea levels down by drinking more water.
So by all means plant some trees - or, failing that, financially support others in doing so - but give not a moment's credence to the notion that these actions give you some moral right to ignore your own contribution to the world's most pressing challenge.
Of course, despite the public perception, proponents of carbon offsetting argue that they have moved on from tree planting, and now concentrate on schemes to build renewable energy infrastructure, fund energy efficiency projects, reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions etc, thus preventing emissions and avoiding the inconvenient truth about carbon cycles.
But the more insidious problem with all carbon offsetting is that it is the inevitable 'perfect consumerist solution' to climate change - "just pay us some money and you can forget about it all and get on with your life". Inconveniently enough, peak energy and climate change together represent probably the greatest challenge in the history of humanity, and paying $12 here and there just is not going to cut it.
If we are serious about retaining a hospitable climate, we need a fundamental re-evaluation of our entire way of life, and the only way that will come about is through changes in the fundamental stories we tell ourselves about life and what it means.
The notion of carbon offsetting is an offshoot of our deep cultural story that money equals value, and that the key way to contribute to something is to give money to it. Until this mindset changes, we will not find our way out of the mess into which we are hurtling head first. Douglas Adams put it well,
"This planet has, or had, a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much all of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small, green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small, green pieces of paper which were unhappy..."
And yet, for many it is becoming hard to even conceive of any way of measuring the value of life other than small, green pieces of paper, or computerised digits in a bank account. One good friend (and Philosophy graduate) memorably described money as the only way he knew to 'keep score' on his life. And in a world overwhelmingly dominated by money, it is all too easy to feel alone and lose resolve when trying to live by unpopular alternative beliefs.
Yet it is interesting to note that, as in so many cases, our intuitions and instincts do not seem to match with the beliefs we are conditioned to. One example would be the musicians who outright refuse to sell their songs to advertisers, despite that this is by far the most lucrative market for their art. I have heard it argued that "if they are so holy, why don't they take the million dollars and give it to charity? After all, someone else will surely sell the advertisers a catchy song, and probably keep all the money for themselves". Nonetheless, we instinctively feel a respect and admiration for their decision to turn down the easy buck. But why?
My theory is this. Even without studying the detail, we recognise that the whole financial system is designed in such a way that money flows inexorably to the top. That the bankers and financiers who to all intents and purposes run the system are essentially able to magic more money out of thin air than we could earn through a lifetime of hard graft. And that if this is so, then any decisions in the world that will be determined by money will be determined by them - despite all the lists of what could be done with the money, in reality a musician's million dollars would barely make a dent.
All of which means that the only things which we do not cede to their control - the only things, if you will, that remain sacred - are those things on which we simply and absolutely refuse to put a price, whether that be a work of art, an entire natural environment, or the carbon cycle that maintains a benign climate.
Oscar Wilde wrote over a century ago that, "Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing". This still rings true, but if we can avoid actually giving a price to everything, perhaps we will leave open the path back to real value.
--
Edit - 27 March 2012 - A noteworthy event today, Prof. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research - a man for whom I have great personal respect - has withdrawn from the Planet Under Pressure 2012 Conference due to being forced by the organisers to participate in carbon offsetting. He has explained his reasons, carefully justifying his belief that "offsetting is worse than doing nothing, it is without scientific legitimacy, is dangerously misleading and leads to a net increase in emissions".
by Shaun Chamberlin | Jul 11, 2008 | All Posts, Climate Change, Cultural stories, Favourite posts, Philosophy
Those of you who know me personally will be aware that the indescribable exhilaration of physical movement to music (more commonly termed 'dancing') is my greatest release and joy.
Over the past couple of weeks I have been much enjoying the latest issue of Resurgence magazine, which focuses on the theme 'Music for transformation'.
I have learnt, to my delight, that one of the founders of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, told his students that they should see the world as made of music, not of matter (by which, as far as I understand it, he meant to emphasise that reality is process, not form).
But in particular, a section of Mark Kidel's article Conversation & Crossroads set me tingling, and ultimately led me to consider how climate change challenges the very basis of Western thought. He writes:
"Some of the most powerful - and healing - forms of music combine strict 'ways' of doing things with free expression and the possibilities of interpretation or improvisation... Wisdom and experience have suggested, in every corner of the world, that excessive self-expression is self-defeating and just as destructive as an over-zealous observance of rules and regulations. There is a need for a middle way which balances 'hot' and 'cool: the release of deep emotion with the articulacy and sophistication of formal aesthetic structures.
Rock music, which has always been about partying and letting go and the realm of the Dionysiac, has fostered excess. This is in large part a 'return of the repressed' as the psychoanalytical tradition would put it; a reaction against the tight-arsed pleasure-denying credo of Protestantism, the dominant religious philosophy of the two main cultures, British and North American, that generated rock out of a complex marriage of black and white musical traditions.
Whereas the enjoyment of pleasure was never frowned upon in the African context, it was set within a deeply rooted sense of ethical and aesthetic 'right behaviour' (as well as a strongly hierarchical community structure which held potential excess in check, and understood, in a highly sophisticated way, the need to balance creative self-expression with collective interaction and mutual support). In the African and African-American context, the dancer who goes into trance is always being controlled in some sense by a divinity or spirits, so there is an element of ritual theatre which contains the fragility of the individual ego. Similarly, at celebrations, no dancer hogs the floor for longer than a minute or two, reaching a brief climax, but not prolonging the transcendent thrill of near-ecstatic movement and expression beyond what is in some way 'safe' or acceptable in terms of strictly personal as opposed to collective expression."
This I find fascinating on a number of levels. Firstly, with direct reference to my own experience of dancing, I immediately recognise the distinction between the relief of cathartic individual expression and the wonder of contributing to, and subsuming oneself to, coordinated collective communication in the language of movement.
But what I had never appreciated before was the way in which a community can hold an artist safe while he or she explores the wilder reaches of individual expression. As Kidel goes on to argue, the absence of this protective tradition around Western rock music can clearly be seen in the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison who, in the context of a culture entranced by individualism, found their lives overwhelmed and consumed by the awesome powers unrestrained artistic expression can unleash.
But these ideas also have a wider application. Rock music has merely reflected Western philosophy and culture in its deification of the individual. When existentialism announced that 'existence precedes essence' - that we simply exist, and that any meaning we might then attribute to this 'blank slate' existence is solely created by ourselves and our own choices - we assumed that the 'we' in question must be our individual selves.
Our culture moves further and further away from any sense of the collective, let alone concepts like oneness with Nature, or with all of creation, or even (Science forbid) God.
And it is this philosophy of individualist existentialism - deeply embedded in our culture - that leads to the pervasive story that while some might find their meaning and fulfilment in trying to assure the future of endangered species, or disadvantaged humans, or even life itself, others may equally find theirs in greed, gluttony and destructiveness. For the true believer there is no contradiction here because there is no underlying meaning to seek - only individual constructs.
Within the tenets of Western philosophy it appears a logically unassailable position - if everything is fundamentally meaningless and the freedom of the individual is simply self-evident, what possible reason could there be to cease doing whatever I may fancy?
There seem to me to be two key answers to this question. The first is consequences. What I fancy now may not produce what I fancy tomorrow. If I choose to attach meaning or desirability to a reliable electricity supply, or food supply, then there are certain things I should really pay attention to.
But the second is empathy. While we may feel less empathy with beings more different or distant from ourselves, few of us would claim to feel no empathy at all. There is perhaps a sliding scale from total individualism to the sense of oneness with everything which is described in many of the Eastern mystical traditions, as well as among earlier representatives of the Abrahamic religions like Christianity. It is no coincidence that we tend to find individualists despoiling our common environment, and those at the holistic end of the scale defending it.
Existentialist individualism argues that one's position on this scale is a fundamentally meaningless personal decision. Our innate sense of empathy might whisper otherwise, but our scientific understanding of collective consequences like climate change forces us to recognise that even if individual freedom is our sole aim, we still have to change course, as the consequences of our actions will seriously curtail the future choices facing both ourself and the rest of life on Earth.
Viewed from this perspective, climate change represents the death of passive individualism as a coherent philosophy. If we don't realise that soon it will also bring the deaths of all the coherent philosophers!
So when Kidel speaks of the highly sophisticated understanding African cultures have of "the need to balance creative self-expression with collective interaction and mutual support", he is not just talking about a better way to dance, he is talking about the very wisdom we need to chart a sustainable future for life on Earth.
Recent Comments