Speaking personally, I begin to find it more by doing less, by fully inhabiting the empty spaces – the gaps – and I increasingly wonder whether a culture so self regarding as ours does no more than create an ever denser, ever darker palimpsest that will ultimately obscure it’s own evidences with impenetrable blackness over the entire page. Mind the gap? No! Find the gap!

Shameless self-plug: I’ve recently been pondering the role of myth, language and magic in food production. Lansing has a lovely quote, referring to what outsiders had called “magic” in Balinese rice management:

“Both the water mountain and the desires of the farmers who sustain its artificial shape must be aligned to far more rigorous patterns than they would take if left to themselves. All this is a question of engineering, not magic. The magical idea is that the two problems are really one – that the forces needed to align the water mountain already exist in the inner world of the farmers.” [Lansing, Perfect Order]

This is, to an extent, reducing myth to its function, but I hope not narrowly. Really I just wanted to convey that, in the Venn diagram of culture and production, there’s plenty happening in the overlap. This might sound like I’m condoning culture only where it meshes with our innate self-organising “tendency to be productive”; not so – as in Bali, Peru and many more places, making that kind of functional-cultural distinction is simply impossible. And, for whatever future we find ourselves in, no-one can pre-empt what patterns we’ll weave.

Let us tilt at the windmills full well knowing it is going nowhere, and be stoic about it. And this is supposed to help civilized life to survive?! Sounds like desperate grasping for some effective opposition to what you say so well…