Q&A With Louder than the Storm

Hello,

Happy October 1st to you.

I recently took part in a Q&A with Louder than the Storm.

To read the interview please click here

To see my short film ‘Betwixt’ in the online exhibition ‘Intertwine Our Branches’ please click here.

Intertwine our branches is an art exhibition highlighting the importance of climate intersectionality to diversify environmental movements, to challenge inequalities, and show the power of coming together to ensure justice. We have brought together 19 artists across the globe from all different backgrounds talking about how climate change has related to their own personal experience, and their journey to create change through art to inspire positivity and hope. 

From talking about mental health to breaking down gender binaries to challenging colonialism, it is clear that climate change is a human issue which affects all aspects of our lives. Each artist in attempting to navigate these highly complex issues, where it is clear that there is no single solution to climate change, advocates the importance of community, of inclusivity, of being activists as the way to move forward. 

We hope everyone by engaging with the art, attending our events and workshops, submitting their own thoughts and artworks, can become a little more closely connected to the beauty of this earth and support each other to reduce and navigate through the effects of climate change.” - Extract about the exhivition taken from Arts Council England

Spiritual Commons

by Mark Vernon

Here’s a pub quiz question. Which piece of British legislation was on the statute books longer than any other? Answer: The Charter of the Forest. It was signed in 1217 and lasted 754 years.

The follow-up question is, do you know what it secured? And the answer to that is: The Commons.

The commons are those shared resources that nobody in particular owns; typically including land and forests, water and minerals. The charter asserted the right of common men and women to subsistence, to work and to reparation for loss of commons.

Nowadays, in an age of enclosures, sell-offs, privatisation and imparkments, it’s shocking to learn that in the Middle Ages, fifty per cent or more of the land was commons, accessible to everybody. Fifty per cent. 

It raises the question of how that was possible and I suspect it was because people had a powerful sense of an even more extensive commons. There was also a “spiritual commons”. The land belonged to nobody because it belonged to everybody, which is to say that people were conscious of it as part of life itself.

It’s why, in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom. It had to do with the relationship of households and cities to nature and deities. The aim was to facilitate the greatest human goods in conjunction with the gods. 

in the ancient world, economics was theorised as a type of knowledge or wisdom

Similarly, in the medieval period, estates and kingdoms were regarded fundamentally as entrusted patrimonies bestowed by heaven, not capital resources defined by law. It was a world “charged with the grandeur of God”, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins, equally blessed and terrifying.

Those times were not utopias, of course. But it does suggest that alongside the tangible loss of the commons, the spiritual commons has been lost to us too. My intuition is that matters. The world has been turned into property that can be traded. It can be manipulated because, stripped of its spiritual vitality, its extrinsic value outshines any intrinsic meaning. The unintended byproduct is that we are now viciously spiralling down a vortex of unsustainable consumption because we are caught in an agony of lost meaning, desperately seeking proxies for the spiritual commons in addictive consumption. 

If this is even partly right, we will need to regain sight of this lost dimension to save ourselves and the planet. But can that be done? Can the spiritual commons be re-imagined again for our times? My hypothesis is that the undertaking is hopeful because spiritual commons is not depleted. It is a type of wealth defined not by scarcity but abundance. It cannot be traded, though we can be trained to enjoy it. It’s here, still, already. It’s disappeared from view but not disappeared. So, what does it look like?

Spiritual commons includes the capacities we have to imagine and to relate, to know and to delight. It’s also the practical wisdom about how to live well and thrive. Its nature is akin to the wealth Albert Einstein had in mind when he asked: “Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi with the moneybags of Carnegie?” 

It is the non-material aspects of life that, more often than not, are crucial for finding meaning and purpose, particularly when life involves suffering. The appreciation of what’s good, beautiful and true should be added to the list, therefore, as well as the freedom to orientate one’s life around them. This also implies that love lives in this domain.

My sense is that the rediscovery of spiritual commons would be primarily an imaginative and educative task. We might train ourselves to relate to it again. It would be known through deepening attention and expanding perception. It’s about focusing on what’s implicit as well as measurable; valuing what’s felt as well as what can be kicked. It’s about toying with the possibility that the whole world has an inner life, not just the bit of it that’s my body and yours.

I think time would be a crucial element to re-imagine, too, the spiritual commons given to us freely each day by the sun. Some simple words could help differentiate between types of time, thereby to experience its qualities afresh.

The ancient Greeks might assist. They could tell the difference between several types of time. There was recreation, which was about fostering spiritual commons such as participation and compassion when going to a play or sharing in a sport. There was leisure, which was time for pursuing activities such education or visiting the temple. And there was inactivity, which Aristotle regarded as vital for the highest human experience of all: conscious awareness of how you are living and what qualities it exhibits. 

There was also work, though the Greeks might also advise taking a stand against the use of phrases like “free time”. It implies that work is the owner of time, which is one of our fundamental mistakes, removing it from our spiritual commons.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights. I think we’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products. We’d also have to show that the horizons of human intelligence reach far further than the domains of decision-making and problem-solving, as is assumed by researchers in artificial intelligence. It includes contemplation and appreciation, imagination and inspiration, all of which are truth-bearing too.

To care for spiritual commons would involve fights… We’d have to make the case for free will and the life of the mind, which means resisting both being reduced to brain products.

Another area of contention has been highlighted by Andrew Kimbrell, not least in his publication, Cold Evil: Technology and Modern Ethics. “Cold evil” is the insidious valuing of objectivity over intuition and understanding; efficiency over affection and friendship; competition over help and vulnerability – in other words, another loss of spiritual commons. He cites the dictum that “technology is a way of organising the world so that we do not experience it”. Experience is at the heart of regaining spiritual commons so technology may often, therefore, be an opponent, though the hope is that a rekindled imagination would help us to spot that and see how it can mindfully serve not mindlessly shape us.

Spiritual commons are often manifest in and through the loveliness of the material world, so that matters as well. It’s another area, alongside education, where spiritual commons has practical implications. That was spotted early by John Ruskin. 

Consider his 1884 lecture, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, in which he noted that “one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw” was in 1876, almost a decade previously. The colours back then were “prismatic”, he said, the sun going into “gold and vermillion”. “The brightest pigments we have would look dim beside the truth,” he continued. He had attempted to reflect that glorious manifestation of the spiritual commons in paint.

He also knew that his experience of its beauty was lost because the atmosphere was becoming polluted. As a keen observer of nature, he noted how dust and smoke muddied and thinned the sky’s brilliance. In short, it would be crucial to clean up the environment if the vivid, natural displays were to return. Of course. But the subtler point Ruskin draws our attention to is the one about motivation: he wanted the vivid, natural displays because he had an awareness of, and desire for, spiritual commons.

Imagination, relationship, knowledge, delight. Wisdom and time, truth and love, the implicit and the felt. The meaning of suffering and the purpose of struggle. Life has been organised around spiritual commons before. Might training ourselves to become conscious of their abundance again help us to do so once more?

Mark Vernon is an Associate at Perspectiva and the author of A Secret History of Christianity

Thoughts on Becoming, Paper as Medium and Animals

The process the paper has undergone, it has transformed, from seed in the soil to tree to pulp to paper, to printer, the life is transformed, metamorphosised and then discarded. As the human-animal, this is what we do, every day, to many animal, plant, mineral and elements.

"Our culture values product. We live in a culture that has very little understanding of - and therefore little value for process." BK Loren

Newspapers possess the most ephemeral quality of all reading materials. I collect my newspaper from inside a shed belonging to shared living accommodation where all the residents all over the age of sixty and staunch recyclers. They place many newspapers inside the recycling bags. I do not have to purchase papers due to this reason, as it is so readily created and I can find it here for free once used and has no longer given value to it, it is a quick turnover from being manufactured, sold, bought and discarded, much like cardboard and plastic packaging on many products.

Given that paper is so easily attainable, and open to being transformed, it's own becoming through imagination and hands through a process of adding moisture, has been seen throughout the centuries and repeatedly more recently in acknowledgement to political and social disturbance.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/Haiti-Jacmel-papier-mache-parade-180962549/

"But nature can never be a thing. Unlike any object created by humans, nature is always in process. It never is. It is constantly becoming. When it stops becoming, it transforms into not - nature. Then, it is sheer object ( a tree = a chair, an element = a bomb). And in our mainstream culture, objects are either used or discarded." BK Loren

If we are to remove process in nature, we remove a dreaming, a becoming, from our bodies, and the bodies of otherness. You can still have a process through mechanism, but the output or ending is determined. There is no discovery, or rather shedding in certain mechanistic reproductions. We as humans, non-humans and nature are phenomena that shed our interior selves, which alternates and cocreates the variety and shape of physical existences, realms going outwards through spiralling time.

The space between the hand and the eye is sometimes called 'the magic space' where psyche or as Hillman writes 'container' and imagination come into play. When tuned in our containers Hillman describes that we are opening up to our wounds and afflictions, with the grief of ongoing species degradation and a sense of loss, witnessing acts of becoming are hugely consoling, art is connected to social change, and a revival of repurposing materials, which in turn reflect a time of how slowing down is detrimental for ongoingness of life. Repurposing what we have as opposed to consuming new is a minor disturbance in the system, a minor disturbance in a mechanised system of waste discarding process and of consumption of new.

Paper is prolifically produced, discarded and recycled and resold cheaply and most today do undergo several generations of a process of recycling through machine. Paper was once imported from Asia, and mills to produce paper by hand survived in Britain until the industrial revolution.

Papermaking is associated with craft and recycled paper making has recently had a resurgence due to the easy obtaining of paper materials. Those who do seem to continue to re-make by recycling paper by hand sometimes add elements to the paper, such as scent, seeds, flowers and natural dyes, in this process the paper seems to take on an unexpected character of its own, due to the cellulose contained within it.

It rather resembles more of what its plant life existence was before in texture. I am choosing to recycle the paper but into a three-dimensional form with which I often have the intention to take on the shape of some animal form. The tearing and deconstructing and remaking, emerging shapes that change depending on water, salt and air, once dry I paint them, just enough that the original printed script still shows, revealing, as I feel the act of newness is not detrimental. I am not attempting to present an entirely shifted object with unrecognisable origins, but more to show that it has gone through a re-making, a process that is not quite finished, to celebrate process, but also, in turn, rethink it, reclaim it and relearn it.

Nature, soul and time spirals, it is not a single straight line, it goes in circles and unexpected motions, curlicues and turns like that of a tree. Paper has its own sort of disobedience too if you go against the grain of it, I discovered this whilst making pages for a handbound book with my bone folder, the paper informs you by resistance until you go with the grain, the paper continues to push, and many creases and lines are emitted from the intended fold. Paper, being a cellulosic material meaning the containing of microorganisms, these shift, or dissolve in water, a process that makes recycling paper by hand entirely possible.

The term papier-mâché can be roughly translated as “chewed paper,” presumably because the original paper becomes destroyed to a certain extent (DeVoe 1971). The slowness of formation, the forms of papier-mache develop at its own speed, a process that adheres to the element of air due to the adage of the element water.

Drying time depends on the overall atmospheric conditions if left solely to. This can be a slow process, which requires time and patience. The overall end effect is also an unfolding of sorts, much like a body, wetness in this new becoming, like birth and gradual shrinkage, thinness like that discovered in the ageing process. Kiki Smith, artist of papier-mache "Hard Soft Bodies" (1992) expressed a preference for "Materials that don't have much significance to power."

"Her work illuminated how much paper is like skin, at once frail and robust, susceptible to puncture and able to weather the years. The act of using paper-mâché itself can be read as a pantomime of caring for such bodies: bandaging the skinned knee, wrapping the corpse." - NewYorkTimes The overall outer exterior of layered papers can resemble that of skin, and such as skin, degrades and weathers over time. Porous and impermanent, unlike gold or metals.

"The cause of our suffering is ignorance, a false way of looking at reality, Thinking the impermanent is permanent that is ignorance. From ignorance is born greed, anger, fear, jealousy and countless other sufferings. The path of liberation is looking deeply at things in order to truly realise the nature of impermanence, the absence of a separate self, and the interdependence of all things. This is the path that overcomes ignorance. that is true liberation." ~Thich Nhat Hanh

Kiki Smith - Hard Soft Bodies

Thought Zine, Notes & Umwelten

My body is your body.

My body came from your body.

Once my heart was inside my mother's body.

Now it sits approximately five feet six above your body ~

~ Biosemiotics - A recognition that communication, interpretation and meaning-making are not limited to human life, but to all life everywhere.

~ Learning to listen to the myriad of other voices beyond the human.

“Biosemiotics, which bridges the sciences and the humanities, is a new field of study and a new way of understanding the world. It takes its name from bios (Greek for life) and semeion (Greek for sign). Its central insight is that all living organisms experience their world through signs which they must make sense of, or interpret. In other words, all organisms are in a communicative relation with their semiotic worlds, and these worlds are full of other forms of communicative semiotic life. Biosemioticians refer to these semiotic worlds as umwelten (plural of umwelt, or semiotic environment). They consist of all the sign relations which species’ evolution has made relevant to the organism’s meaning-making.

For example, many birds and insects see at the ultraviolet end of the light spectrum, where humans do not. Their umwelt, in other words, is slightly different. For humans, the cultures they have made are relevant to their existence as humans, and these exist – as living ideas, artefacts and technology – interwoven with the human umwelt of nature. There is an underlying reality, but every species has evolved to experience it in the way that is most useful for that species’ life and survival.” - Wendy Wheeler, extract from In Other Tongues: Ecologies of Meaning and Loss

You can find the full script here >>>>>

https://modernforms.org/blog/colourful-speculation/

“Both nature and culture grow from the same evolutionary source. Whether we are super-aware of it or not, we are all influenced by the communicational feedback loops that flow between selves and natural and cultural environments. When meanings (or functions) go wrong at any point in these sense-making circuits, all our living systems fall into potential danger. So what are we doing to ourselves and the planet when we allow this ceaseless slippage of natural and cultural meanings that starts to dismantle the life of our worlds?” - Wendy Wheeler