These Scattered Tables

Three words from friends – and three gatherings as winter arrives

The sun just past its zenith

“I keep running into people who are convinced that I’ve described Donald Trump as a Trickster.”

Sometime in 2017, I guess, we’re sitting around the kitchen table with

Martin Shaw

and he voices this puzzlement.

“Ah,” I say, “that might just be my fault.”¹

There was a time, and I can date it quite precisely, when one of the things I did was to write into the rawness of moments of political disorientation. The first occasion was the morning after the British general election of May 2015, when David Cameron won an unexpected majority for the Conservatives, and the last came in June 2017, when Theresa May unexpectedly lost that majority. In between these bookends came the Brexit vote, the election of Donald Trump, and Jeremy Corbyn becoming leader of the Labour party. Different kinds of events, on different scales, but each a rupture.

Under normal circumstances, I know better than to try to offer commentary on political events. But there is a liminal quality to those moments when the narrative has been derailed, when the certainties of all the grown-up commentators turn out to have been borrowed from the emperor’s new wardrobe. For a few days, a lot of people are going around with one skin fewer than usual. And while it’s foolish to put too much store by a blogpost that goes viral, the things I wrote in those moments travelled further and were read more widely than almost anything I’d written up to that point.

The images I scattered across those posts would rattle their way into the columns of mainstream commentators. Thoughtful people inside institutions of various kinds would reach out and want to talk, and then within a week or two, the line would go dead, or the open puzzlement they brought to our first conversation would be replaced by a set of talking points, as an interpretive consensus formed around what had happened. Generally a consensus which insulated those inhabiting it against being changed by what had been revealed, against the risk of learning anything from an event which had momentarily shaken their certainties.

It’s ten years this week since I sent out the first issue of Crossed Lines, the newsletter which eventually moved to Substack and became Writing Home. This was where I learned to write again, after burning out on public blogging and tweeting in my early thirties. The intimacy of sending words direct to the inboxes of a few hundred readers helped me find a voice, the voice in which I went on to write those posts I have in mind. One of them, When the Maps Run Out, started out as a letter sent to readers of Crossed Lines, three days after the US election of 2016.

I’ve been thinking about that era, and how little appetite I have today for trying to speak into such moments of large-scale disorientation. (“Oh, has the world changed or have I changed?” yodels Morrissey in the back of my head.) You get older and you let go of the kind of confidence it took to hold forth that way about places far from where you live. I’ve written elsewhere of how the Covid spring of 2020 brought it home that my body is vulnerable to the decisions of the Swedish government, rather than the British government, so that I knew in a new way what it was to have made my home here. I’m more inclined to leave the commentary to those whose bodies are vulnerable to what just happened. Another shift in these past years: I’m more convinced that the fault-lines which matter these days are only tangentially related to the choices that can be framed on ballot papers.

But it was my fault that people were running around convinced that Martin had named Trump as a Trickster. In my 2015 UK election post, ‘The Only Way Is Down’, I’d written about the weird role Russell Brand had come to play in British politics, and I quoted something I once heard Martin say as he leaned over his drum, mid-story, in a tent at a Dark Mountain festival: “This isn’t a hero time, this isn’t a goddess time, it’s a trickster time.” In November 2016, I returned to that line, quoting from Corey Pein’s Baffler article on Trump as trickster, and putting all this alongside a passage from an interview where Martin told Rob Hopkins, in words which continue to resonate:

The stories that we are being fed now are not myths. They are what I would call, toxic mimics. But when we are deprived of the real thing, we will take even an echo and grab on to it. So in other words, the most horrible lies always have a little bit of truth in them.

How to listen for that truth, without seeming to swallow the lie? The answer is rarely found in the heat of the moment.

As I said on this week’s episode of The Great Humbling, a couple of days after the election, I sat down to record a conversation about US politics with

R. G. Miga

, but by mutual consent we canned the recording. Trying to add further analysis just felt like missing the point.

A friend who has been thinking and writing and arguing against Christian nationalism since the 1990s described his weariness, the need for space to regather and work out how to continue to speak in a world where there is already so much noise. Without laying claim to a fraction of his grounds for weariness, I felt his words echo in my heart.

In place of the kind of liminal analysis I used to offer, then, here are three words from friends, written in these past weeks, that feel worth sharing.

First, a word from Nora Bateson:

I think it’s time to go underground. Stealth care… Create women’s health clinics that are safe and secret. Create assistance and care for climate disaster victims. Create portable homes for people in motion. Create safe havens for whistle blowers and dissidents. Create help for immigrants. Create care centers for substance and tech addiction. Tend the communities of people who are making new paths. Make music. Create restoration of waters and soil that are not state bound. Time to go beyond borders and tend beyond nationalistic boundaries. Tend your and others’ mental health. It’s time to get off the stage and on the ground. Time to get to work in ways that are not ensnared in polarized politics. Unseen and unnoticed acts of generosity and triage are needed, regardless of who has the microphone. 

Then Bayo Akomolafe, also speaking of care:

As the institutional care of dominant politics breaks down, as politics becomes a vassal for something else, revealing other desirous vocations that disrupt the idea of the isolated discerning human subject, may we find the openings to do more than we think possible now. Something more compelling than victory (and the moral assemblage that makes finish lines and trophies meaningful) shimmers in the near-distance. Something that urges us to lose our way, together.

And finally,

Andrew

, starting with a quote from Gustav Landauer:

“The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently toward one another… We are the State and we shall continue to be the State until we have created the institutions that form a real community.” Gustav Landauer

[…]

Those communities prophecied by Landauer are, I think, like Illich’s kitchen table, the limits of the political at world’s end. Elections, here and now, are maybe more about the habitat in which those small togetherings will have to survive than they are about any lasting shelter in themselves. I don’t know which niche is more likely to hasten the looked-for wonder of an Us that can muster real change, the tempered or the brazen. And I don’t feel a need to praise the devil by promising only doom beneath the sick flag of a fool. But I would have more than welcomed a shift of form, a following of woman for a change. Plus dancing on the grave of makeshift dreams making do with what they find in the wreckage is bad table manners. And these scattered tables are where anything close to the end of such a State as this will be born.

Read more in his post, including the poem he wrote for his daughter.

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Winter is upon us here, my shoulders are feeling the after-trace of shovelling the drive after our first big snowstorm of the year. In this little, local life, a quietening comes over the horizon, but it is not quite here yet.

Instead, a small run of public events to finish the year, two here in Sweden and two in the everywhere-and-nowhere space of the internet:

• Thursday 28 November – online (register at the link) & in-person at HDK-Valand Steneby, Dals Långed, Sweden – ‘I Make Where I Am (or, At Work in the Ruins of the World’s Most Modern Country)’

• Friday 29 November – online event with Dr Elizabeth Debold and Evolve magazine – ‘How Do We Find Our Place in a Time of Crisis?’

• Tuesday 3 December – seminar at Lund University, Sweden

And out today, an episode of the Farm Gate Podcast, in which I talk to ffinlo Costain about At Work in the Ruins.

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After ten years of sending out newsletters, I continue to be full of gratitude to all of you who read and share and comment and take out paid subscriptions. Thanks for your support, in all the forms it takes.

DH

1. I was reminded of this conversation by Martin’s latest post, The Trickster, The Temple, The Mount.