I was once part of developing a sort of "12-step for Everyone" called False Selves Anonymous that emphasized contemplative practice as well as vulnerability and working the steps. It never really got off the ground, in part I think because the framework of disease and addiction doesn't quite map onto the larger human condition. But 12-Step continues to be a deep well of resource and inspiration for transformational and collaborative organizing models, and I've been a participant in many communities and networks that have drawn from it.
I'm also aware— and this may be a consequence of being in the US vs Europe— that we can fetishize vulnerability to the point that it becomes a wallowing in emotionality, where we lose sight of our ability to respond to challenges constructively and purposefully. I have seen vulnerable spaces that were constructed well, and also some that allowed the creation of collective "pain bodies" (to use a term from Eckhart Tolle)— even when the organizers were expressly trying to avoid that.
None of which is to be cynical about Black Elephant; what you and Rhyd have described sounds quite healthy and powerful. But the organizer in me can't help but be curious about what's under the hood, and I can't quite get a handle on it from looking at the website. Do you know if Felix has any ties to the Relational Gestalt movement?
Thanks, Rebekah, this is really to the point. I will probably write a full post about what I'm learning from being part of these experiments in "12-step for everyone", somewhere further into this series.
The risk of wallowing in emotionality is real – and not necessarily a purely US phenomenon! Also, as one of the 12-steppers pointed out in Patmos, meetings are only a part of being in AA – and not a substitute for "working your steps".
Then there's the challenge that in AA (and other 12-step fellowships) there's a concrete shared experience of addiction, which both means there's some practical embodied experience in recovery that can be shared within groups, and also that there's a reality check built in (i.e. "am I still drinking or not?").
For me, being involved with Black Elephant is helping me learn a lot more both about how 12-step is for those who have been part of fellowships that have that framework of disease and addiction, and also about the possibilities/limitations of trying to learn from this for the wider work of regrowing a living culture.
I came here to mention Bateson too (after reading the article yesterday I remembered his writings about AA and looked them up). The essay is called 'The Cybernetics of "Self": a Theory of Alcoholism' and can be read here: https://www.are.na/block/12388652
It made a huge impression on me as a student, not because I was an alcoholic but because my sense of "self" was breaking down (I wrote a bit about that in my Dark Mountain essay back in 2012), and Bateson's writings offered a way of thinking about the self or mind being larger than just the brain or individual body (a way that felt primarily scientific rather than mystical, although the two are not incompatible).
His arguments are complex - I've been looking unsuccessfully for a sentence or short paragraph that would sum them up - the most succinct bit I can find is:
"The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, 'thinks' and 'acts' and 'decides', is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self' or 'consciousness'..."
And, "In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole".
Back in 1971 he seems to have had a similar sense to you and Felix that we might need something like AA for a whole culture. Key concepts are "hitting bottom" ("a spell of panic which provides a favourable moment for change, but not a moment at which change is inevitable") and the recognition that "there is a Power greater than the self" (an element of the theology of AA - Bateson says cybernetics would go further, stating that "the 'self' is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes".) Part of the process of recovery as he outlines it is recognising that our relationship with that "Power" or "larger field" is a complementary relationship of part (us) to whole (it), rather than being "symmetrical or emulative" (whereby we might try to compete with, defeat, copy or outdo it, as an alcoholic might try to "battle" the addiction).
He concludes that "The nonalcoholic world has many lessons which it might learn from the epistemology of systems theory and from the ways of AA. If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure".
Ah, thanks so much for taking the time to summarise what sounds like a challenging text! I know I'll be coming back to this as I write more about these things.
Another text from the 1970s – rather different from Bateson's, but also interesting in relation to AA and wider culture – is Lewis Hyde's Alcohol and Poetry. I won't try to summarise it here, as I'll write about it in a future post, but he makes a connection to Illich's Medical Nemesis and to the cultural context of addiction that has been important for my thinking.
Appreciate this thoughtful response. I had a similar thought about the Black Elephant website. Al-Anon meetings helped me during a very difficult time; I was lucky to find just the right group and have great respect for the framework and wisdom there. Especially as a place to share and hold people's stories.
This is beautiful and it has made me weep this afternoon for so many reasons, some that I can't verbalise. Being open "to the strange possibilities glimpsed through the cracks" I try to remain hopeful as head down I get on with my own little life but when I raise my head, and when I read Akram Khan's quote about what our children will inherit waves of despair come to me. To you and all those who are able to look all this in the face, thank you for shinning through the cracks.
Jun 28, 2023·edited Jun 29, 2023Liked by Dougald Hine
What a beautiful and weepy read to start the morning. I feel like Khan’s story is what we live our lives for if we are open. It’s what I look/looked for as a photographer. I spent a couple years seriously taking pictures to stay sane during the pandemic where I had so many encounters like Khan’s.
A person bought a book in my micro store that had their childhood friend’s name inscribed in it even though they both grew up in another state just days after I read a similar story by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I met a young man named Tal, short for Taliesin, and came home to find The Book of Taliesin sitting on my partners chair. Days later I had a strange encounter with a man named Lazarus. Then months later watched an online talk at the Salem Witchcraft Festival (roughly 1,200 miles away) about the Biblical Psalms only to find out that the Moses who taught the class lived minutes away. Mind you this is a small community and I could go on.
I think I wanted these things to mean there could be some miraculous change or shift, that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seems so I started actively trying to slip out of reality to collect them. I suppose I was experiencing and trying to make something of a photographic Bardskull. Then mundane things took over and I couldn’t or wouldn’t continue and am now sitting on my stoop reading this wondering why I stopped, where to go next, and if I’ve said too much.
Thank you for sharing the origin story of the Black 🐘 and the wonderful start to my day.
When I told Khan's story on Patmos, the next member of the crew up was Martin Shaw, and he began by telling the story of the time Hugh Lupton told him he had to read Ted Hughes's Moortown. He couldn't get hold of a copy anywhere, but months later, in a bookshop on the far side of the country, he found a first edition. Guess whose name and phone number were written inside the cover? Hugh Lupton.
As I start to open up these themes, a few responses have reminded me of the care that's called for when we head into this territory. In old stories – and in my own experience – on the threshold of this kind of strangeness, the request to enter is refused, once, twice, and then grudgingly conceded on the third time of asking. If we take no for an answer the first or second time around, it was the right answer. But, partly because of the limits modernity set on what can be 'real', this guarding of the threshold is hard to take seriously, or may just not be there, in the contexts many of us are starting from.
I remember my dad, a United Reformed Church minister, saying that if someone comes to him, thinking they have a vocation, the last thing he is going to do is to encourage them. If the vocation is true, they will follow it anyway. This seems like the same kind of logic as the refusal at the threshold.
Another version of this is the artist's experience of having no choice but to do the work you do. If there is another option, you should take it. Bardskull is hard country, not somewhere to go by free will, but somewhere you go because you can't not go there.
But the other side of this is, if you've been brought to the threshold once, the chances are you'll circle around to it again. And the next time, maybe you are ready.
These are the thoughts that come to me, sitting in my reading chair, thinking of you on your stoop, not knowing much more than you've said in this comment, and also thinking of a few messages I've had from others since publishing this piece. I hope there's something helpful to you here.
Thank you, your response alone means a lot. I’ve listened to enough by Martin Shaw to know the type of experience you shared is not uncommon for him. There was a story he told about meeting Ai Weiwei and for whatever reason he brought a book of Chinese poetry that was published in the US. In it was a lost poem by Ai Weiwei’s father. Neither had a clue the poem was in it.
In the same discussion Martin recounted another story about Robert Bly. For some reason Robert Bly read Kerouac’s On the Road for the first time while staying with him. It seemed Bly had a grudge against it up until then but when he finished it he just said “damn, that was good.” Kerouac is intrinsically tied to my understanding of men’s work and art. I think of how much that single piece of literature changed culture in a matter of a decade and how we need that scale of shift toward dealing with climate. Also so much of what’s needed in terms of men’s work and where we are stems from that book. I also live a mile from where Kerouac first describes the Rocky Mountains while laying in the grass outside of a gas station. Once Burroughs referred to Kerouac by saying “by their fruit you shall know them”.
Anyways, it just felt like an impossibly absurd anecdote that couldn’t have spoken any more personally to me.
There is something of a magic word bearing street sign in this post itself. Like another reader I found myself tearing up, which is odd for me, and not where I would have expected such a feeling. It punches way above its weight as you only hint at what it is exactly speaking toward. Is it because I am bit worn thin by the times lately, in way that isn't weariness or despair but the opposite, the kind of threadbare that lets the light in and out knowing that, though the approaching sadness is real as real, so is the angels and otherlings of flotsam and ruin, natality and newsong that will be our company into what comes. I might be a bit short on sleep from a tough work week but I am gonna watch your space here, friend.
Thank you, Andrew. I recognise that threadbareness. And I'm glad to discover your poetry. Maybe you'll like this song by my friend David, the angels and otherlings in your comment brought it to mind:
well , after reading this lovely piece which fell on my lap straight after listening to David Bentley Hart and Salley Vickers in conversation, I really do think that those cracks in the world where unexpected surreal human connections happen (and animal ones, if you listen to Bentley Hart a bit) anyway, yes, those cracks are there to show us where to go.
Thank you for the link to the PM World paper - what larks! It's good to be acknowledged but I'm really glad that I didn't spend the last 14 years writing books and speaking at conferences about Black Elephants™️ while fiercely defending my intellectual property. I'd love to have been there when Felix explained it to you for the first time :)
Dougald - thanks, as always, for your wonderful writing. I literally laughed, got chills, and was moved to tears—all three. A hat trick! The comparison with addiction reminded me of this essay I wrote 6 years ago on the Deepwater Horizon, the Devil Tarot card and Marquez' city of Macondo (also the name of the Deepwater Horizon rig). These resonances are all around us, if only we tune in.
Ha! Funny you should say that. Another side to the story of the Institute for Collapsonomics is that it came into being just as I discovered The Invisibles, and the months that followed were definitely a high tide of that kind of high weirdness in my life.
I was once part of developing a sort of "12-step for Everyone" called False Selves Anonymous that emphasized contemplative practice as well as vulnerability and working the steps. It never really got off the ground, in part I think because the framework of disease and addiction doesn't quite map onto the larger human condition. But 12-Step continues to be a deep well of resource and inspiration for transformational and collaborative organizing models, and I've been a participant in many communities and networks that have drawn from it.
I'm also aware— and this may be a consequence of being in the US vs Europe— that we can fetishize vulnerability to the point that it becomes a wallowing in emotionality, where we lose sight of our ability to respond to challenges constructively and purposefully. I have seen vulnerable spaces that were constructed well, and also some that allowed the creation of collective "pain bodies" (to use a term from Eckhart Tolle)— even when the organizers were expressly trying to avoid that.
None of which is to be cynical about Black Elephant; what you and Rhyd have described sounds quite healthy and powerful. But the organizer in me can't help but be curious about what's under the hood, and I can't quite get a handle on it from looking at the website. Do you know if Felix has any ties to the Relational Gestalt movement?
Thanks, Rebekah, this is really to the point. I will probably write a full post about what I'm learning from being part of these experiments in "12-step for everyone", somewhere further into this series.
The risk of wallowing in emotionality is real – and not necessarily a purely US phenomenon! Also, as one of the 12-steppers pointed out in Patmos, meetings are only a part of being in AA – and not a substitute for "working your steps".
Then there's the challenge that in AA (and other 12-step fellowships) there's a concrete shared experience of addiction, which both means there's some practical embodied experience in recovery that can be shared within groups, and also that there's a reality check built in (i.e. "am I still drinking or not?").
For me, being involved with Black Elephant is helping me learn a lot more both about how 12-step is for those who have been part of fellowships that have that framework of disease and addiction, and also about the possibilities/limitations of trying to learn from this for the wider work of regrowing a living culture.
"Do you know if Felix has any ties to the Relational Gestalt movement?"
No, I don't think so! But I shall look up that movement, in any case.
Dougald, have you read Gregory Bateson? theres a lovely bit in Steps towards an Ecology of Mind on AA in which he applies his depth and wisdom
Ah, thanks for mentioning that! I've read parts of that book, but not the bit about AA. I'll dig it out.
I came here to mention Bateson too (after reading the article yesterday I remembered his writings about AA and looked them up). The essay is called 'The Cybernetics of "Self": a Theory of Alcoholism' and can be read here: https://www.are.na/block/12388652
It made a huge impression on me as a student, not because I was an alcoholic but because my sense of "self" was breaking down (I wrote a bit about that in my Dark Mountain essay back in 2012), and Bateson's writings offered a way of thinking about the self or mind being larger than just the brain or individual body (a way that felt primarily scientific rather than mystical, although the two are not incompatible).
His arguments are complex - I've been looking unsuccessfully for a sentence or short paragraph that would sum them up - the most succinct bit I can find is:
"The total self-corrective unit which processes information, or, as I say, 'thinks' and 'acts' and 'decides', is a system whose boundaries do not at all coincide with the boundaries either of the body or of what is popularly called the 'self' or 'consciousness'..."
And, "In no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole".
Back in 1971 he seems to have had a similar sense to you and Felix that we might need something like AA for a whole culture. Key concepts are "hitting bottom" ("a spell of panic which provides a favourable moment for change, but not a moment at which change is inevitable") and the recognition that "there is a Power greater than the self" (an element of the theology of AA - Bateson says cybernetics would go further, stating that "the 'self' is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger field of interlocking processes".) Part of the process of recovery as he outlines it is recognising that our relationship with that "Power" or "larger field" is a complementary relationship of part (us) to whole (it), rather than being "symmetrical or emulative" (whereby we might try to compete with, defeat, copy or outdo it, as an alcoholic might try to "battle" the addiction).
He concludes that "The nonalcoholic world has many lessons which it might learn from the epistemology of systems theory and from the ways of AA. If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure".
Ah, thanks so much for taking the time to summarise what sounds like a challenging text! I know I'll be coming back to this as I write more about these things.
Another text from the 1970s – rather different from Bateson's, but also interesting in relation to AA and wider culture – is Lewis Hyde's Alcohol and Poetry. I won't try to summarise it here, as I'll write about it in a future post, but he makes a connection to Illich's Medical Nemesis and to the cultural context of addiction that has been important for my thinking.
Appreciate this thoughtful response. I had a similar thought about the Black Elephant website. Al-Anon meetings helped me during a very difficult time; I was lucky to find just the right group and have great respect for the framework and wisdom there. Especially as a place to share and hold people's stories.
This is beautiful and it has made me weep this afternoon for so many reasons, some that I can't verbalise. Being open "to the strange possibilities glimpsed through the cracks" I try to remain hopeful as head down I get on with my own little life but when I raise my head, and when I read Akram Khan's quote about what our children will inherit waves of despair come to me. To you and all those who are able to look all this in the face, thank you for shinning through the cracks.
What a beautiful and weepy read to start the morning. I feel like Khan’s story is what we live our lives for if we are open. It’s what I look/looked for as a photographer. I spent a couple years seriously taking pictures to stay sane during the pandemic where I had so many encounters like Khan’s.
A person bought a book in my micro store that had their childhood friend’s name inscribed in it even though they both grew up in another state just days after I read a similar story by Stephen Harrod Buhner. I met a young man named Tal, short for Taliesin, and came home to find The Book of Taliesin sitting on my partners chair. Days later I had a strange encounter with a man named Lazarus. Then months later watched an online talk at the Salem Witchcraft Festival (roughly 1,200 miles away) about the Biblical Psalms only to find out that the Moses who taught the class lived minutes away. Mind you this is a small community and I could go on.
I think I wanted these things to mean there could be some miraculous change or shift, that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seems so I started actively trying to slip out of reality to collect them. I suppose I was experiencing and trying to make something of a photographic Bardskull. Then mundane things took over and I couldn’t or wouldn’t continue and am now sitting on my stoop reading this wondering why I stopped, where to go next, and if I’ve said too much.
Thank you for sharing the origin story of the Black 🐘 and the wonderful start to my day.
Thanks, Randall.
When I told Khan's story on Patmos, the next member of the crew up was Martin Shaw, and he began by telling the story of the time Hugh Lupton told him he had to read Ted Hughes's Moortown. He couldn't get hold of a copy anywhere, but months later, in a bookshop on the far side of the country, he found a first edition. Guess whose name and phone number were written inside the cover? Hugh Lupton.
As I start to open up these themes, a few responses have reminded me of the care that's called for when we head into this territory. In old stories – and in my own experience – on the threshold of this kind of strangeness, the request to enter is refused, once, twice, and then grudgingly conceded on the third time of asking. If we take no for an answer the first or second time around, it was the right answer. But, partly because of the limits modernity set on what can be 'real', this guarding of the threshold is hard to take seriously, or may just not be there, in the contexts many of us are starting from.
I remember my dad, a United Reformed Church minister, saying that if someone comes to him, thinking they have a vocation, the last thing he is going to do is to encourage them. If the vocation is true, they will follow it anyway. This seems like the same kind of logic as the refusal at the threshold.
Another version of this is the artist's experience of having no choice but to do the work you do. If there is another option, you should take it. Bardskull is hard country, not somewhere to go by free will, but somewhere you go because you can't not go there.
But the other side of this is, if you've been brought to the threshold once, the chances are you'll circle around to it again. And the next time, maybe you are ready.
These are the thoughts that come to me, sitting in my reading chair, thinking of you on your stoop, not knowing much more than you've said in this comment, and also thinking of a few messages I've had from others since publishing this piece. I hope there's something helpful to you here.
Thank you, your response alone means a lot. I’ve listened to enough by Martin Shaw to know the type of experience you shared is not uncommon for him. There was a story he told about meeting Ai Weiwei and for whatever reason he brought a book of Chinese poetry that was published in the US. In it was a lost poem by Ai Weiwei’s father. Neither had a clue the poem was in it.
In the same discussion Martin recounted another story about Robert Bly. For some reason Robert Bly read Kerouac’s On the Road for the first time while staying with him. It seemed Bly had a grudge against it up until then but when he finished it he just said “damn, that was good.” Kerouac is intrinsically tied to my understanding of men’s work and art. I think of how much that single piece of literature changed culture in a matter of a decade and how we need that scale of shift toward dealing with climate. Also so much of what’s needed in terms of men’s work and where we are stems from that book. I also live a mile from where Kerouac first describes the Rocky Mountains while laying in the grass outside of a gas station. Once Burroughs referred to Kerouac by saying “by their fruit you shall know them”.
Anyways, it just felt like an impossibly absurd anecdote that couldn’t have spoken any more personally to me.
*Thank you again and for opening the door.
There is something of a magic word bearing street sign in this post itself. Like another reader I found myself tearing up, which is odd for me, and not where I would have expected such a feeling. It punches way above its weight as you only hint at what it is exactly speaking toward. Is it because I am bit worn thin by the times lately, in way that isn't weariness or despair but the opposite, the kind of threadbare that lets the light in and out knowing that, though the approaching sadness is real as real, so is the angels and otherlings of flotsam and ruin, natality and newsong that will be our company into what comes. I might be a bit short on sleep from a tough work week but I am gonna watch your space here, friend.
Thank you, Andrew. I recognise that threadbareness. And I'm glad to discover your poetry. Maybe you'll like this song by my friend David, the angels and otherlings in your comment brought it to mind:
https://benjaminblower.bandcamp.com/track/home
well , after reading this lovely piece which fell on my lap straight after listening to David Bentley Hart and Salley Vickers in conversation, I really do think that those cracks in the world where unexpected surreal human connections happen (and animal ones, if you listen to Bentley Hart a bit) anyway, yes, those cracks are there to show us where to go.
On Holiday, in the ruins.
(smiley face).
Thank you for the link to the PM World paper - what larks! It's good to be acknowledged but I'm really glad that I didn't spend the last 14 years writing books and speaking at conferences about Black Elephants™️ while fiercely defending my intellectual property. I'd love to have been there when Felix explained it to you for the first time :)
Ha, yes, you dodged a bullet there! Just stumbled on your 2019 tenth-anniversary Black Elephant Day post, which made me smile:
https://www.facebook.com/lloyd.davis.92754/posts/10161536658890697
Thanks I've bounced it over to my corner of the open web for the time when Facebook finally gets it's own trampling.
https://perfectpath.co.uk/2023/06/29/the-return-of-the-black-elephant/
Dougald - thanks, as always, for your wonderful writing. I literally laughed, got chills, and was moved to tears—all three. A hat trick! The comparison with addiction reminded me of this essay I wrote 6 years ago on the Deepwater Horizon, the Devil Tarot card and Marquez' city of Macondo (also the name of the Deepwater Horizon rig). These resonances are all around us, if only we tune in.
https://juliegabrielli.com/2017/04/20/between-the-devil-and-the-deepwater-horizon/
This is a beautiful piece, my friend.
Ha! Funny you should say that. Another side to the story of the Institute for Collapsonomics is that it came into being just as I discovered The Invisibles, and the months that followed were definitely a high tide of that kind of high weirdness in my life.
Yeah, remembering a few episodes from that half-year, I count myself lucky that the tide went out again for a while.