Waiting for the Waters to Rise
Homecoming Diary (Day 4 of 23) – and Vandana Shiva video
I once met a man who was building an app that would tell you where your soul was. “For all the machines we’ve invented to move the body,” he said, “the soul still mostly moves at walking pace.” So his app would show you how far behind you’d left your soul and how long it would take for it to catch up with you again. I thought of the kind of people who live their lives in airport lounges and I was taken with the idea that the world is run by those who move so fast they long ago lost their souls. Wouldn’t this explain a lot?
The first time I visited Alan Garner at Blackden, he told me something he had learned in the research for Strandloper: in the Aboriginal culture at the centre of that book, when someone had completed a journey, they would sit for a time at the edge of the settlement at which they had arrived, “waiting for the waters to rise”. Waiting for a shift that told them they could enter.
Whatever speed the soul may travel at, I can recognise a truth here: that travelling and being in place are different states, that it takes time to move from one state to the other, that simply having reached your destination in a bodily sense does not mean you have arrived, and that it can be foolish to attempt to do or say much at all, until you have allowed yourself to complete the process of arrival.
In a letter to paid subscribers on Monday, I wrote that I plan on marking 23 days of homecoming, to follow my 23 days on tour, to create a frame for the process of reentry and reweaving that’s called for after a journey like the one I just made. By this reckoning, we’re on day 4, and I can tell you, I spent the first days a little seasick, or like a recently landed sailor struggling to walk on a surface that doesn’t move. Then last night something shifted and I saw part of what had unsettled me.
Since early January, my whole energy has been thrown into carrying this book out into the world. On tour, I wasn’t always sure if I was pushing it along or riding its momentum. But in the sudden quietness of being home, with no big adventure to plan, some part of me was feeling, “Is this it?” Is the ride of At Work in the Ruins over already?
And then, last night, I got a message from a woman called Stephanie in Maine:
I'm part of a bread CSA that runs out of a small, independent bookstore. Their newsletter last week featured your book. I bought it. Read it. And now I am moving between clear-eyed softness and also a good, but heart-hurting weepiness. I had never heard of your work before, and I am so, so glad that’s changed. Thank you for offering your gifts to the world so that people, I, may receive it and be grateful.
So firstly, let me say how heartening it is for authors when a note like this arrives. If you’re ever on the edge of sending such a message, do.
And secondly, as I read Stephanie’s message, I saw that it’s not that the ride is over, it’s that the book is out there, doing its work, and not all of that work requires further effort from me, and much of it will be done without me knowing of it at all, which is as it should be. Don’t get me wrong, I still see lots that I want to do with this book, to help it on its way, and I’m still full of energy for this – it’s just that my sense of what’s happening and how I contribute to it needs to be informed by a recognition that, if this is working, then my role gets less important over time.
“Are you bored of the book already?” a writer friend asked me, one night midway through the tour, and it was good to be able to tell him no, without a shadow of a doubt. There’s so much that’s still alive for me in what I wrote, and it’s only a year since I was working on the first draft, so it still feels fresh.
There’s also a sense that, just as the last two lines of the Dark Mountain manifesto formed the doorway through which the twenty-odd chapters of At Work in the Ruins arrived, there are lines within this book that open onto the things that I will need to write next. And there were experiences I had on tour, things that happened in the rooms where we met, that open onto other parts of the work that lies ahead. In these weeks of homecoming, I’ll be making space to bring these possibilities in to land.
Meanwhile, I’m catching up on all the recordings of conversations that I’ve been part of since January – and I intend to share these with you as I go along. So let’s start with that strange day in Stockholm, six weeks ago now, the fruits of which include the film below, released the other day by
. As I’ve already said, it felt deeply appropriate to begin taking this book out into the world in conversation with Vandana Shiva, who made such an impact on me when I heard her speak in Cape Town, what must be 22 years ago this month.I hope you enjoy watching – and thanks again to all of you who are helping At Work in the Ruins on its way, as it continues to reach more and more readers and listeners.
DH
Illich wrote in Tools for C.: that if you travel faster than by mule or a third world bus, you cannot possibly take your soul along with you. But you know this.
I'm researching for the writing of my own first book. The book is on the topic of knowing (usually called 'knowledge' -- the noun rather than the verb). I'm interested in the verb -- in knowing as a process in which we're at any moment in its present moment. The moment passes, it moves on... or does it? Do we let it move on fully as needed? Anyway, I'm exploring knowing in relation to thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining -- and how to go about wedding these to one another so they work together in harmony. This, I think, would bring about another world! Or it could.
Anyway, while researching, Dear Dougald, I chanced upon this quote which resonates with your writing and thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting and imagining.
*****
“Our age,” says Kierkegaard, “will remind one of the dissolution of the Greek city-state: everything goes on as usual, and yet there is no longer anyone who believes in it. The invisible spiritual bond which gave it validity no longer exists, and so the whole age is at once comic and tragic—tragic because it is perishing, comic because it goes on.” 2 Beckett’s works, at once tragic and comic in just this sense, are indeed works of and for our time.”
― David Michael Kleinberg-Levin, Beckett's Words: The Promise of Happiness in a Time of Mourning
from https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/15732798.David_Michael_Kleinberg_Levin
Also similarly salient to your work, Dougald:
“In the clearing, world and earth are in interaction: earth is the ground on which the world is built, and world is that within which the earth is given its meaning as grounding. Earth and world are in incessant, endless strife, the earth ever reclaiming for itself, reducing to earth, what the world builds upon it, whereas the world struggles with the earth, and against the earth, to make it serve human purposes. But it is only in the world that the earth receives meaning; and it is only in relation to the earth that we can fully understand not only the fragility and power of our world but also the frightening vulnerability of our grounding and building on the earth—and can harvest some meaning in our fated mortality.”
― David Kleinberg-Levin, Heidegger's Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction