There’s a quirky habit I’ve developed over the past year, which requires open space but is best done in private. I was once caught in the act under an old stone bridge, and that was a little embarrassing. Now I scan the horizons before getting down to business.
I do recommend it though.
Me and my teenage lad have been volunteering for a few months now with the neighbourhood group that looks after a local park. An intentional group for an accidental sort of park – an open square of grass, bushes and trees surrounding but not managed by a grand old church. It’s a verdant, much-loved space home to splendid oaks, squirrels galore and cackling corvids.
It was a Thursday last week when I read about the exhibition – Shifting Landscapes – on the South Bank in London featuring an immersive installation titled Breathing with the Forest (pictured above), and figured I needed to be there. It only had three days left to run. There were no commitments stopping me making a round trip to the city on the Saturday, and I was lucky enough to get a ticket online, which was free. I managed to book a discounted train ticket.
Continue reading “Modernity, complicity, and the unbearable bullshitness of being (II)”
Something about the frozen, pained expression on Chandler Bing’s face whenever he sensed the joke was on him or that he’d made a massive boo-boo — just before he restored the playful vibe with a self-deflating quip — captures the off-centre mood I’ve been in for the past few weeks. It’s partly personal and partly societal. I feel like a minor moving part in a huge, accelerating machine that’s veering off-track and beginning to tilt, and while my inner gyroscope is trying to right things it’s clear there’s nothing to be done.
Continue reading “Modernity, complicity, and the unbearable bullshitness of being (I)”
A guy came for the car last month, so we said our farewells and waved it off. Just a generic, metallic grey, five-seater Nissan diesel, in good working order and still rust-free despite a lifetime on the coast of Wales. It was fourteen years old, eleven of those years in my possession, and we liked it very much.
It is said that among peoples of the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederation, it was customary to have a spokesperson for future generations present for the deliberation of important decisions; someone to embody the concerns of descendants seven generations hence, at the far horizon of physical contact. (A youngster in the middle of a chain of seven generations could conceivably hold the hand of a great-great grandparent and then, in old age, the hand of a great-great grandchild.) That presence would provide emotional perspective, bringing the wisdom of hindsight perhaps, to a current challenge.
Continue reading “Seventh Generation vs. (sigh) ‘Longtermism’”
Progress throws up some startling images, and for my money this is one of them. It’s a 26-storey pig farm and slaughterhouse in Hubei, China. In the supply-and-demand scheme of things it’s probably a very reasonable development. It makes good use of technological and engineering capacity, provides for cost-efficient protein production, and could be said to have an environmentally friendly footprint compared with more land-intensive ways of growing pork. But something jars, doesn’t it? Like a sourness in the viscera. Something’s not right, and it feels like a sign. A sign, I suggest, of catastrophic disconnection.
A luminous void for sky, not quite white and not quite grey. Wind, and a spattering of rain. A shiny gloss on the leaves, long yearned for. And a picture-perfect setting, down here, where the trail bottoms out.
Here is where the stream emerges briefly from a tangle and pauses alongside a great, gnarly, dragon-headed log, before wandering off into further tangles. The water is still, clear and shallow; the mud-bank reddish-brown.
If a moving image [video by Jeremy Seifert] could tell a thousand words…
Are the church forests of Ethiopia – precious pockets of biodiversity, remnants of what was once eternal set in sea of monoculture – living on borrowed time?
I
I’ve been wondering for a while about Ingredient X. As in, the part of us, this human animal, that marks us out from the others.
You know all those “humans are the only species to…” (use language / make war / get high / mourn our dead / have the capacity to blow ourselves up / know God / laugh-cry-blush etc.) pronouncements? Most have been overtaken by zoological findings but new ones are continually being minted (…explore space / enjoy extreme sports / watch Bridgerton etc. etc.) What they have in common is an (insecure?) assumption that something very special separates us from the rest of creation.
