Notes From Overground #2

The missing episode of The Great Humbling & an Uncivil Savant

This is the second in a semi-regular series where I share new work published elsewhere, let you know about upcoming events and celebrate the voices of others who have set me thinking. Look out for a post early next week in which I finally tell you about this book I’ve written – and the next instalment in the main Writing Home essay series, coming later in the week.

The Great Humbling: The Missing Episode

Back in the early weeks of the Covid time, I began to record a series of conversations with Ed Gillespie, a futurist and ‘recovering sustainability consultant’. We didn’t really know each other, but we had spoken a couple of times and were due to meet that spring in London.

Well, you know what happened next to plans that involved crossing borders and meeting in person. But meanwhile, Ed had picked up on a suggestion I’d made as to how we name this time in which we find ourselves. Geologists seem set to call it ‘the Anthropocene’, social scientists have proposed a whole menu of alternative ‘-cenes’ – but whatever it’s official title, I said, the rest of us might as well call it ‘the Humbling’, because, one way or another, that’s how it will play out.

So we met around this thought and the result was The Great Humbling, a podcast that is now in its fourth series. The format is simple: we share what we’ve been reading and thinking about, puzzle through what’s going on in the world and the stories that have been taking shape around it. But I’ve come to appreciate these conversations a great deal and we seem to have developed a loyal audience, some of whom aren’t afraid to prod me when too long has passed without a new episode!

If you haven’t been along for the ride, then I encourage you to dip back into some of the earlier episodes. My favourites include State of Play from series two, Get On Your Knees! from series three and the Belief episode from earlier in the current series.

This summer, Ed and I got to meet in person at last, at his fiftieth birthday party – and a few days later, we recorded our thirtieth episode over coffee at the back of the old watermill where he lives.

That was a hard one to follow, but in early October we sat down once more to record over Skype – and then, somehow, things unravelled. We usually get the recording edited and published within a few days, but this time around, it took six weeks, and by the time it finally went live today, the UK had (yet) another prime minister, Sweden had a new government (over which the far-right Sweden Democrats exercise an unprecedented influence), and generally the world has changed enough to make our conversation feel like a historical document.

But we decided to put this out anyway, because it belongs to the longer flow of our conversation – and anyway, plenty of what we talk about hasn’t dated. So, I give you The Great Humbling S4E7: The Missing Episode!

An Uncivil Savant

‘Grave Goods’, Caroline Ross

I can think of a dozen things I could tell you about Caroline Ross, any one of which would make her sound remarkable. Start with her longterm art project, Grave Goods, in which she is making the objects with which she will be buried, including a bronze sword and buckskin clothes. (Good luck to the future archaeologist who uncovers her remains!) Her artwork will be familiar to readers of Dark Mountain and followers of her Instagram, Found & Ground, her music to fans of Delicate AWOL, Tells and Rothko, and her skills as a teacher to all the students who have passed through her tai chi school or her workshops in making inks from foraged materials.

What’s less well known is that she is also a remarkable writer – and this is because, up to now, most of her writing has been in the form of correspondence. Indeed, Caroline has woven an extraordinary web of words over years in sustained email exchanges with correspondents including Paul Kingsnorth, Iain McGilchrist, Stewart Lee and Elizabeth Slade. I know this because I’ve been lucky enough to be another of the beneficiaries of her words and her capacity to generate a field within which ideas and possibilities arrive, not as products of an individual mind, but out of the spaces between us, whether as we sit drinking tea around the kitchen table, or in the loom of words passing back and forwards over networks.

So I am delighted that she has chosen to bring her writing into public view with the launch of her Substack,

Uncivil Savant

, an extension of the web of conversation and friendship which I have valued so much. As she says in her opening post:

I wish to write to you how I do with these friends: with honesty, openness, humour, in good faith, without fear of ambush; in short, in conviviality. Perhaps this is not currently the default way of the internet. But I trust we can create another corner here where we may discuss all matters soulfully, without ever dehumanising each other, nor descending into pointless conflict.

On a good day, it feels as though this is what Substack makes possible, just as the form of the podcast can allow for long, slow conversations that deepen and soften over time. An antidote to the stimulus-and-response of the louder platforms of social media, a space with room to breathe and to seek to understand each other. No substitute for the joy of being gathered around the same table, breathing the same air, but a trail of breadcrumbs that might just lead us back to that kind of embodied conviviality, or nourish us during the times when such possibilities feel far away.

So read Caroline’s words and be nourished by them, and let her stir into being the possibility that there is something remarkable in all of us, if we can allow ourselves to be grounded in the truth of experience and openness to encounter. For, as she says:

Writing is not only for writers, language is for us all, the makers, the movers, the quiet ones and the prophets. When language works at its best it embraces the real, has its feet on the ground and is not full of tricks. I hope you will find my words anchored in the hips, galls, ochres and pushes that are my embodied life.

Thank you for reading – and especially to those of you who have chosen to support my work through a paid subscription.