Moving Down and In

Breadcrumbs through the darkness

There’s a further instalment to come in the America Through the Cracks series which I began writing after the tour in September, but that will come on the far side of tomorrow’s US election. For today, I wanted to share the film of the conversation I had Catherine Keller and Bayo Akomolafe, hosted by Alex Forrester, along with a couple of other texts that have been echoing off that conversation.

Before we get going, a final reminder that the Pockets, Patterns & Practices online series gets underway on Wednesday and Thursday this week, and there’s still time to sign up for that.

Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth at the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, 2008, to which I was brought back by Vanessa Chamberlin’s latest post. (Photo: Wonderferret)

Among the mail that was waiting for me, on my return from America, there were two actual old-fashioned letters. One brought an invitation to speak in the village of Dals Långed, where I’ll take part in a symposium called Reimagining Rural at the end of this month. The other came from a reader, Ben Swain, responding to a passage in At Work in the Ruins where I had written about a question from a young man in a workshop a few years ago:

How do you sustain anything other than utter pessimism … given the strength of the forces on the other side of the line? When you can see the speed and the scale of the destruction unfolding, how can you place hope in anything without feeling delusional?

I suspect that many of you reading this have been through some version of the dark night in which such questions sit like an immoveable weight on the chest. My sense is that such questions can’t be answered neatly, with comprehensive calculations and irrefutable logic, but that it is possible to live an answer to them, to embody the paradoxical patterns of hope that slip the trap of despair. To hear others tell of their experience of the journey can be helpful, not because it gets you off the hook of your own dark night, but perhaps as a trail of breadcrumbs through the darkness. Yet, unlike the breadcrumbs in a fairytale, in this case it may be helpful to catch sight of multiple answers, different people’s lived responses to questions like the ones that you are living.

If At Work in the Ruins gathered together some of the breadcrumbs I’ve found over the years, then another place to which I sometimes point people is the first instalment of

Rebekah Berndt

’s occasional spiritual advice column, You Do Not Have To Be Good, where she responds to a similar question from a friend:

Life Is The Destiny You Are Bound To Refuse Until You Have Consented To Die

Enclosed with Ben Swain’s letter was an admirably succinct essay which took up the same kind of question, though in a philosophical key that is quite different to the one in which Rebekah or I tend to express ourselves. With Ben’s permission, I’m republishing his essay in its entirety, because it struck an unexpected set of chords, including with the conversation with Bayo Akomolafe, Alex Forrester and Catherine Keller which marked the opening of my American tour, the recording of which I share below. First, the essay:

What to Make of the End of the World

There is no question here of opposing the utopia of a new ‘heavenly Jerusalem’, like that of the Apocalypse, to the harsh necessities of our time, but of establishing a ‘subjective city’ at the very heart of these necessities.
(Guattari, ‘Machinic Eros: Writings on Japan’, 2015)

Joff Bradley (‘On the Philosophy of Trembling’, 2019) testifies to “the contemporary incapacity of thought to think beyond the utopos of the unworld as it is”: the “apocalyptic end and unfolding catastrophe are perpetually disavowed, infinitely deferred and repressed. … Faced with ruin, destruction, and annihilation, there is an exhaustion of thought; there is nothing left to say of the future, save a sickening and contagious delight in extinction, horror, and ecocatastrophe”. How then to think our acceleration towards the singularity at the heart of the Anthropocene in a manner that is virtuous, rather than being “sunk down in existential and solar apoplexy” (Ibid.)? At this time of overwhelming psychological stasis and dissolution, how to actually, affirmatively, creatively move?

In the words of Deleuze and Guattari (‘A Thousand Plateaus’, 1988) “this matter-flow can only be followed”. Learn therefore to do so freely, mindfully, unreservedly; do not attempt to resist the event horizon taking over. Entrusting yourself to the process, take heart from the fact that it “fills capitalism with dread; it is a flow that eludes its codification” (Bradley, above). Remember where you are headed, for utopia is realist when it prefigures what will, as Glissant says, “allow us to accompany the actions that do not tremble” (Ibid.). Let us willingly, joyfully then “descend into these depths; let us make these abysses our sure retreat. … The earth calls us to its inner self” (Tarde, ‘Underground Man’, 1905). This is after all why we came, to answer the earth’s call. Going forward, we are moving down and in, who have no other function now.

Typing out Ben’s essay here, this afternoon, I catch a new set of resonances with an essay published yesterday by

Vanessa Chamberlin

, which dances with a waking vision she had a decade ago, the etymologies of the Hebrew Bible, and Doris Salcedo’s artwork, Shibboleth, where the artist opened a crack in the massive floor of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern gallery in London. Vanessa’s vision was of “a large crack emerging down the centre of the North American land mass”, and people running (understandably, as she says) in both directions to escape from it. But by the end of the essay (and please, read the whole thing), she asks a question that rhymes with Ben’s words about “moving down and in”:

What if we step towards the cracks? They will swallow us up at some point anyway. So rather be intentional? And what if those of us that fear them can learn from those of us that don’t?

What practices can lead us there? Can give us courage to stay long enough to hear gladness through the pain of renunciation. To listen for notes from the resounding Deep.

One of the inspirations with whom Vanessa dances in this piece, and in all her writing, is the theologian Catherine Keller – and among the gifts of my time in America was the chance to meet Catherine and to join in a public conversation with her, my friend Bayo Akomolafe, and the philosopher Alex Forrester, who brought the three of us together. The film of this conversation is now out, and there’s one passage I want to highlight, near the end, where Bayo picks up on a way in which his language of “post-activism” sometimes gets misunderstood:

Sometimes, people enter the room thinking, “We have to save the world! We have to save the planet!” By the end of the talk, they often swing the pendulum to the other extreme, where it’s “Oh, OK, we just surrender to whatever is!” And I’m not sure that’s the point here: the salvific response versus the whatever happens, happens feels too fatalist, too deterministic. But there’s a space between, and I will venture … to call it, Selah!

At this point, he explains about the mysterious word that appears in the Book of Psalms, whose original meaning is lost, then offers his personal interpretation:

I think of Selah as the immediate environment that sprouts when something new wants to be born. Something new, monstrous, desensitising, almost violent, wants to be born. That when something bursts into the fray, the radius of explosion is what we call Selah. It’s negative space, but it’s space that invites us to create, to think together, to grieve together, to think about what good ruins might look like. That’s Selah, it’s a call to create, it’s a call to fall together, it’s a call to let go and it’s a call to hold on tight.

These are strange themes, strange ways of talking, I know. There are threads here that I want to pick up and weave into other questions from my recent travels, but for today, I hope you’ll find something in this patchwork that speaks to you.

DH