I am exhausted, and doubtless I’m not the only one. I found UNCIVILISATION an intense experience. A knackering one too. Over 400 people gathered in Llangollen over three days and made something quite special happen. There was a wide range of voices and questions, and a lot of fertile ground was explored. It was, I think, a very good start.
I’d really like to know peoples’ thoughts on the event. It was hard to evaluate an kind of general mood – if there was such a thing – as I was run so ragged. I’ve started a feedback thread on the Uncivilisation network, as have other Mountaineers this morning (thanks all). Please let us know what you thought and what you think about the future. Or post on this blog, or send us an email.
I’m about to take a holiday until my head stops buzzing. At the moment I am full of ideas and thoughts provoked by the many people I met at the weekend. Thoughts, too, about how Dark Mountain is developing. One in particular stays with me right now: something Chris Wood said on stage during his intense and mesmerising set on Sunday night, and something which I’d discussed with him over some beers beforehand.
‘I wonder’ he said, ‘whether you’re trying to reinvent the wheel.’ He was referring to our declared search for ‘new stories’ with which to negotiate the age of decline. As a folk singer, Chris suggested that the stories we need might be out there already – that in past human experience we could find the narratives we are looking for, dust them off and re-engage with them.
The same point seemed to come up, from different directions, all weekend – from Alastair McIntosh, Adrienne Odasso, Jay Griffiths, Vinay Gupta and many others. I think they were right. While in many ways the things we are facing are entirely new – climate change, for example, or human-induced mass extinction – in other ways, they are ancient. Civilisations have fallen with regularity in Britain alone over the last millennium, and as they did so people wrote stories, sang songs, told tales to help them relate to what was happening. Those tales are still out there. Even the age of ecocide is not entirely unpredecented – humans have been doing the same thing, on a more local scale, ever since they evolved. Those tales are still out there too.
Digging, I think, is what we need. We’re not so much looking for something new as looking to re-engage in a new way with something very old. This is the image I’ll take away with me from this weekend – digging, looking for treasure beneath the soil, trying to unearth something that’s been there waiting for us. We excavated a good bit of topsoil this weekend, I hope.
I think you are right Paul. It reminds me somewhat of those much over-quoted lines of T.S. Eliot from the last quartet of Four Quartets, Little Gidding:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Eliot as a man perhaps doesn’t fit with the idea of Uncivilisation – but these words speak something true, I feel.
Perhaps this is part of what DM is trying to do, arrive back at the beginning, not be frightened of doing so, showing that all will be well if we do, and, maybe, re-discovering something about humanity in the process, which for so long has been lost and forgotten by many people.
Yes, perhaps we are on a journey of knowing ourselves for the first time.
Paul, & Dougald
Still reeling and recovering here from an incredible weekend.
One interesting thing in relation to your post and Lee’s comment is Llangollen as the space in which the festival happened. At one point I found I was imagining going backwards through all the layers of human settlement and experience that had accumulated there, until it was a watering place with no fixed dwellings, used by hunter-gatherers and animals. All those layers of rising and collapsing settlements, societies and civilizations, waiting as you suggest to be re-learned from.
I’ve posted some feedbacky comments on Melski’s thread on the network, but next to those, simply wanted to thank you both for opening, and holding open, the space in which the Dark Mountain festival and project is happening.
Enjoy your well-earned holidays
Thanks Lee. Dougald and I talked a while back about how Eliot, despite appearances, is in some ways representative of the kind of writing we were thinking about. I love this poem.
Catherine – thanks for the feedback; some good points there, at least some of which had occurred to me already. There’s certainly a lot we can learn form next year; two key lessons for me being more food and more people in the festival team! Very glad the overall gathering worked for you though. I felt that despite inevitable hitches and weaknesses, something quite special had happened, largely due to the quality of the people who turned up.
Love the thought about Llangollen. I often look at landscapes like that. It gives quite a different sense of place and shrinks the ego nicely.
Were any of the talks/discussions recorded and could be posted on the web? I’d be interested to hear some of them. Couldn’t attend since I’m not UK-based..
Stefan – yes, we filmed much of the event and will be posting some of the film up here in coming weeks and months.
I was sorry not to be able to get to the festival after all and will be fascinated to read more comments on how it all went.
Paul’s post gets to the heart of the matter about stories. As I have said here before, and will probably say again, one of the sicknesses of consumer capitalism and hyper-modernity is the contempt for the past as anything other than a dressing-up box or source of cheap smirks at how backward everyone was before Us. Yet the stories that can sustain us are there, refined and tested over millennia and embedded in faith traditions, myth and literature and folk culture. The task of DMP is not just to invent new stories but do what cultures have always done – until now, perhaps – which is what Jewish scholars call Midrash, the retelling of old tales and truths for new settings, making them live afresh for the present generation.
I was glad to see the TS Eliot passage. Eliot’s great sequence Four Quartets is among many things a profound act of recovery and re-imagining of old images and stories from the Bible and English history and many other places, in order to find truth and meaning in a world of chaos and decline (he wrote much of it during the Blitz and the depths of World War Two). Eliot found a place to stand and a meaning to celebrate and hold to in Anglican Christianity, which is also my faith (ie my hope), but the point for DMP is that he exemplifies the quest for re-imagining and re-membering the past as a way to regenerate culture in a time of deep disruption and decline. Eliot’s diagnosis of the state of the West was not that far from that of DMP, in important respects. So he merits his place here.
PS I also loved Catherine’s comment on Llangollen. It made me think of a great book that needs to be dug up and celebrated by DMP, namely A LAND by the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. A LAND was published just after WW2, in 1951, and is a ‘biography’ of the British landmass, delving deep into our shared geology. At one point Hawkes lies down in her twilight garden and thinks / feels her way into a wonderful identification with the land and the planet.
Ian -
Interesting coincidence that you mention Jacquetta Hawkes, as her biographer Christine Finn gave one of the talks at DM festival. She was looking to redress the neglect of Hawkes’s work and explore how it can offer us ways into re-imagining our relationships to land and the past.
Thanks Catherine. I wish I’d heard Christine Finn on the great J Hawkes.
Maybe there should be a Dark Mountain anthology of poems, passages and chapters from pre-1960s texts, all the way back to the Bible, Greek myths, etc etc.
Not a bad idea Ian! All suggestions for inclusions very welcome.
In terms of anthologizing pre 1960’s poetry, there’s a vein of material written in the early 1800’s that brilliantly confronts the growing condescension of nature and the old ways. Poets like Holderlin, Blake, Novalis, and De Nerval took the culture head on, creating some pretty amazing works, which like Yeats’, ring true today.
Here’s some lines from Novalis:
When geometric diagrams and digits
Are no longer the keys to living things,
When people who go about singing or kissing
Know deeper things than the great scholars,
When society is returned once more
To unimprisoned life, and to the universe,
And when light and darkness mate
Once more and make something entirely transparent,
And people see in poems and fairy tales
The true history of the world,
Then our entire twisted nature will turn
And run when a single secret word is spoken.
Great poem Rob.
So was yours in the Dark Mountain book.
What the ants are saying…
dear boss i was talking with an ant
the other day
and he handed me a lot of
gossip which ants the world around
are chewing over among themselves
i pass it on to you
in the hope that you may relay it to other
human beings and hurt their feelings with it
no insect likes human beings
and if you think you can see why
the only reason i tolerate you is because
you seem less human to me than most of them
here is what the ants are saying
it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
man has oppressed us for a million years
but he goes on steadily
cutting the ground from under
his own feet making deserts deserts deserts
we ants remember
and have it all recorded
in our tribal lore
when gobi was a paradise
swarming with men and rich
in human prosperity
it is a desert now and the home
of scorpions ants and centipedes
what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
man is never on the square
he uses up the fat and greenery of the earth
each generation wastes a little more
of the future with greed and lust for riches
north africa was once a garden spot
and then came carthage and rome
and despoiled the storehouse
and now you have sahara
sahara ants and centipedes
toltecs and aztecs had a mighty
civilization on this continent
but they robbed the soil and wasted nature
and now you have deserts scorpions ants and centipedes
and the deserts of the near east
followed egypt and babylon and assyria
and persia and rome and the turk
the ant is the inheritor of tamerlane
and the scorpion succeeds the caesars
america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
who slashed the timber all to hell
and would not be controlled
and changed the climate
and stole the rainfall from posterity
and it wont be long now
it wont be long
till everything is desert
from the alleghenies to the rockies
the deserts are coming
the deserts are spreading
the springs and streams are drying up
one day the mississippi itself
will be a bed of sand
ants and scorpions and centipedes
shall inherit the earth
men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn
rainfall passing off in flood and freshet
and carrying good soil with it
because there are no longer forests
to withhold the water in the
billion meticulations of the roots
it wont be long now It won’t be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone
dear boss i relay this information
without any fear that humanity
will take warning and reform
archy
Written in 1935 by Don Marquis, in “archy does his part,”
http://www.donmarquis.com/readingroom/archybooks/ants.html
Your project is interesting, but from our perspective, it seems you are still formulating the problems and just beginning a search for the solutions. You’re right, you have to change your ontology, replace the false stories with some real ones. But you also have to change your way of life and consciousness from material to spiritual, otherwise it will not be truly sustainable.
Our spiritual master taught us all these things many years ago, including the imminent fall of Western materialism and the need for a sustainable lifestyle. We assembled our disciples, moved to India and have integrated ourselves into the traditional spiritual community here. All these questions were addressed and resolved long ago by the Vedic sages. We have a complete Vedic library on our site, which everyone is welcome to visit free of charge. Help yourselves to the real wisdom.
[...] Posted by leavergirl under civ, community, pattern language Leave a Comment The Dark Mountain Project just convened their first festival in Wales. Dubbed as the base camp of the uncivilization [...]
Could I suggest Aftonland (Evening Land) by Par Langerkvist (1954)? A long series concerning the end of a life with lots of resonances I thought, images of childhood, the wanderer, the stranger, a “god who may not even exist”. And what is left afterwards, rain on the grass …Mythic and compassionate.
Good translation by W.H.Auden 1974.
WB Yeats surely is a much better dark mountaineer than TS Elliot:
The Second Coming
TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
wolfbird – great stuff! i’d not come across marquis before. and wilfried – yes, yeats, of course. you can never read too much yeats. ‘i went out to the hazel wood…’
[...] Interesting mentions of Jacquetta Hawkes and her “biography of a landmass” A Land in comments on the Dark Mountain Project website. The commenters reflect on their experience of the Uncivilisation conference, which included a [...]
“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
and a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made…”
and something-something-something until Yeats’ poem gets to
“the bee-loud glade”
which is the phrase that always comes to me when I’m in my own garden and the bees are working over the rosemary blossoms, or the tiny flowers of the Russian sage.
Yes, Yeats, for sure. And Robinson Jeffers, of my own home country of the California coastal areas. But women, too. Lots and lots of women’s voices, stories, poems, fables, perspectives, imaginings, to be recovered and revered from the deep and near pasts, and from our current age of Operation Enduring Fuckup, as Pakistan drowns and Russia burns and the polar ice “calves” and the stock markets continue to send out their flashy bursts of dangerous nonsense…