A Very Strange Time in My Life

The year of the book gets underway – and a live event today with Bayo Akomolafe

See the bottom of this post for an invitation to a live Zoom event where I’ll be speaking with Bayo Akomolafe, Ciclón Olivares, Maya Kovskaya and Athong Makury. It’s starting in under two hours time, so apologies for the very short notice – but there will be a recording.

There’s always a day, a week or so into January, when the work of the year gets underway. Some years it’s a gentle movement, like watching from a train window as the platform starts to slip away; other years, it’s being fired out of a cannon. This is a human cannonball kind of year.

So welcome, firstly, to the several hundred of you who signed up over the holidays. I hope you have your safety helmets on. And thank you to

Substack Reads

,

Uncivil Savant

,

The Wonderland Rules

and Bella Caledonia for kind words that brought this ’stack to the attention of a wider audience.

When an influx of new readers comes along, it seems customary and appropriate to take this as a moment to reintroduce yourself and what you are doing. I could tell you that I’ve only really been on Substack for ten weeks and I haven’t figured out the elevator pitch yet, except that I’ve been on this Earth for forty-five years and I’ve yet to figure out an elevator pitch for anything.

For thirty years, I’ve been someone who was (not) writing a book. For a good part of that time, I’ve even been known as a writer, publishing essays and pamphlets and collaborating on all kinds of publications, but the full-length book I was threatening never quite happened. Until last year, when it did.

It’s called At Work in the Ruins: Finding Our Place in the Time of Science, Climate Change, Pandemics & All the Other Emergencies and it’s coming out four weeks from today. I’ll have more to say about it in upcoming posts, but here’s the post where I announced it – and here’s a page with links to some of the places it’s available for preorder.

We live after the end of the age of “bookish reading”, in the phrase that Ivan Illich – one of the thinkers who has mattered most to me – borrowed from George Steiner. In his last book, In the Vineyard of the Text, written in the first half of the 1990s, Illich sought to make sense of the moment in which screens were displacing books by looking back eight centuries to the moment in which books as we know them first emerged, generations before the development of the printing press. Still, it lingers, the accumulated power of all those centuries in which books stood at the centre of Western culture, as magical or sacred objects, tools of liberation or indoctrination. And I have a hunch that – precisely because it is no longer necessary as it was a few decades ago, in order to put ideas into circulation – there is or can be a ritual potency to the act of putting words into the form of a book, all the other kinds of work that then go into making that book a physical and aesthetic object.

So whatever else I am doing with this Substack, for the next while it will serve as a place to talk about what’s happening with the book and to reflect on the consequences (for me and maybe even others) of bringing it into the world.

Because here’s the thing – in the words of the closing scene of Fight Club – “You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

I’m just going to put that picture there, because it’s the quickest way to flesh out that statement.

That’s me at the back – looking rather tall and feeling rather small – on what was in fact my second working day of 2023. I had travelled into Stockholm yesterday morning from my home in a small town a couple of hours to the north. The great Indian activist and scholar, Vandana Shiva, indefatigable campaigner against globalisation and its destruction of cultures and ecosystems, was in Sweden for a few days. We have the same publisher and they had arranged for the two of us to meet and film a conversation. As I wrote in an earlier post, it felt deeply appropriate for the first of many public conversations in this year of the book to be with Vandana, because if it hadn’t been for hearing her speak in Cape Town in 2001, I might never have found myself on the path that led to this book and the rest of the trouble I have spent the past two decades getting into.

While we were waiting at Vandana’s hotel, another indefatigable activist dropped in on her way home from school. There had been a plan for Greta and Vandana to meet, except that Vandana had gone for a coffee round the corner with a friend and no one knew which coffee shop she was in. So we sat chatting in the hotel reception.

One of the strands in At Work in the Ruins has to do with the climate movements that erupted in the autumn of 2018 and how they differed from earlier waves of attention and activism around climate change. As I put it in the title of the first essay I wrote on the way to writing this book, “Al Gore didn’t want you to panic”. So at various points in the book, I find myself writing about the school strikes and the role that Greta played as the most powerful voice within the larger set of movements that emerged in the years immediately before the pandemic.

I’d like to tell you that we had a conversation about all this, but actually we ended up chatting with Matthew, my editor, and Menakshi, who was volunteering with us for the day, about languages and the similarities between Swedish, Danish and Norwegian and the challenge of learning these languages as an English-speaker in countries where so many people are keen and able to speak English. So my main memory of the encounter is making Greta laugh when I said that whenever I give a talk in Swedish, I start by quoting my seven-year-old son: Pappa, du kan inte alla ord på svenska! “Daddy, you don’t know all the words in Swedish!”

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So yeah, that was day two of the working year, but that photograph also brings me back to the lack of the quick snappy description, the elevator pitch, the statement the length of a Twitter bio that sums up who I am and what I do. (Actually, for a few months in 2011, my Twitter bio just said “You met me at a very strange time in my life”. If I still went on Twitter, I’d have to revert to that version.)

For a while, my publisher was worried that I had an allergy to nouns. Not in the manuscript itself, but in their attempts to tell people who had written it. Actually, it was one particular noun I reacted against, when they wanted to call me an “activist”. Now and then, people use this word to describe me and are puzzled when I flinch at it. I’ve not always done a good job of explaining myself, but a couple of days ago in an interview I landed on the answer I’d been looking for.

Because it’s true that I’ve spent a good deal of my life around activists, a few of whom you would recognise, most of whom you will never have heard of. And it’s true that I’ve been involved in activism at various times in my life. But to the extent that I have a public profile, it’s the result of words that I’ve written or spoken, conversations I’ve brought together, and a handful of projects that grew out of those conversations and that I helped to bring into the world. None of this is what I would call activism – except in the humblest sense, which Menakshi reminded me of when we spoke about this yesterday, that there is an activism of everyday life that consists in the attempt to live as if the things you say are true, however often you will fall short of this.

But when I look at that picture, I see two remarkable women – one a quarter of a century my senior, the other a quarter of a century my junior – both of whom deserve to be called activists, because the impact their activism has had and the courage that this took is why you know their faces or their names. So call me what you like, I say, but save that word for them!

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There’s another reason why I’ve flinched when people call me an activist, though, and it’s that, if I’m known for anything, it’s generally for writing the Dark Mountain manifesto with Paul Kingsnorth – and the project that grew out of that manifesto was often seen, in its early years, as a rejection of activism. That was always a little misleading. As Charlotte Du Cann wrote when she came to our second festival in 2011:

Everyone I meet at Uncivilisation is an individual with a collective story to tell: a poet from Scotland, a professional forager, the captain of a Greenpeace ship, a designer of hydrogen cars, a researcher into Luddite history. It’s the café I wanted to walk into ever since I first read about existentialism when I was 16.

Still, it’s fair to say that the space of Dark Mountain has tended to exist at an odd angle to the worlds of activism, and much of the energy that brought it into being came from Paul’s willingness to wrestle publicly with his disillusionment with the environmental activism to which he had dedicated his life up to around the time the two of us met.

What we didn’t have back then was the language of “postactivism”, the strange vocabulary to which the Nigerian poet–philosopher Bayo Akomolafe has been inviting people over recent years. I’ve often felt that Bayo has given more eloquent and generous words to things we were struggling to say in the beginnings of Dark Mountain, so just as it felt appropriate that the year of the book should begin with recording a conversation with Vandana, so it feels equally right that the first live public event around the book – starting in, gulp, about ninety minutes from now – should be a roundtable where I’ll be giving a talk called ‘How to Give Up’ and Bayo will be among the speakers responding.

It all starts at 1pm Swedish time today (that’s CET, if you’re looking to compare time zones) and this is the Zoom link you need to join the call. There will be a recording for those who aren’t able to join us live.

Meanwhile, I’m going to leave you for now with the words that Bayo wrote after reading At Work in the Ruins:

I’ll get right to it: every time the world ends, it leaves a mark. Yes. Impliedly, the apocalypse is not new. There have been many before.

But this mark I speak of … it is like a signature. A prophetic molecule of sorts. A sense of discomfort with the rush of the familiar. A taste for questions too slippery for the public imagination. A slant of the eye. An initiation that queers the flesh. Like fungal spores inseminating a zombie ant in the forest. A virus.

Not to worry: not everyone is so marked. But Dougald Hine clearly is. Dougald Hine is mad. And he has my full attention and trust. 

In this sonorous swoosh of earnest prose composed with the cadence of a fugitive journalist who has a news story that should end all other stories – as well as the unmistakable lilt of an elder who would have sat at the edge of my Nigerian village – Dougald ushers us into the Gordian knots of our strange times where “following the science”, “solving the climate challenge”, and “saving the world” no longer hold much cartographical promise. Ironically, talking this way about a phenomenon that calls into question humanity’s claims to sovereignty is how the modern machine keeps reproducing the fires we want to extinguish. 

Pushing past popular tropes, Dougald helps us see that how we talk about and address this end-of-world crisis is the crisis. Something else is needed. Mutiny of some kind. An apostasy. Definitely more than a manifesto, a new solution, or a new campaign. 

Let Dougald Hine’s masterful storytelling mark you; let his song of loss and longing, his call to fugitivity, dispossess you of your steady gait and poise. Perhaps then we, collectively infected, might together witness the incomprehensible.

Here are the full details for today’s event. There will be more online events coming up in the weeks ahead – and I’ll be back in a day or so with news of a line-up of offline events taking place around the UK and beyond next month.

Thanks for your company in these strange days.

DH