Evade the Constrictor
Longhand words from an early spring field
Back in the Imaginal Field, skylarks spill their trailing cascades above the field like sugar on the tea break tablecloth. Sweetness above, mud underfoot.
The last week of winter neatly folds down the sheet on spring’s bed. Dock seeds scatter the floor of the shepherd’s hut where my new books sit on a Formica table like two eggs in a nest. Damp air has buckled the essay’s nine printed sheets, the broadside print poem, and the other concertina book I left out overnight as an experiment. Wood fibres, even at so far a remove from their arboreal beginnings, cannot help but draw water into themselves.
Similarly, given space and time, now reconstituting myself after three months’ absence from your inboxes, I find I must write. Capillary action: clay drawing-up water, paper soaking-in ink, is at the heart of my visual arts practice. Dry materials drink to create the longed-for form, whether pastel stick or drawing. Back in the flat fields of the once-was-fens, new to me in sodden guise, the chilly damp atmosphere, much to my surprise, hydrates the Muse, desiccated by a hard winter of additions and subtractions. You cannot account for the imaginal, nor factor its flow.
The book of Uncivil Savant did not send up shoots this winter, it is still germinating in the dark. Artemis Scribe shot up instead; a little letterpress chapbook with a poem distilled from last summer’s scorching art residency in the Imaginal Field, in the East of England. You can read the essay I wrote there, here. The heat of those June days lifted pollen high into the air, which descended at dusk to land on us, nestled four feet below sea level on these pumped-dry fields. I sniffed and sneezed and wrote and talked with my hosts. This time, all the artists who took part in residencies are here and the conversations we are sharing over the weekend feel like spring water to me.
On Friday, I re-met the overwintering field after seven months of it lurking in my imagination bustling with insect life, painted with wildflowers. Now the dry umber stalks of burdock, the dove grey mugwort and bleached wild carrot tops stand out in perfect contrast to the bright but overcast February sky. What was a riot of entangled greens in June is now a procession of neutral tones, some warmer, some cooler, giving no hint of their former bright flowers or sixfold symmetry.
From where I write in the tiny home in the veggie garden, I hear the cat before I see it, or rather, I become aware of the sudden absence of chirping which alerts me to the mood of the birds. The old tabby limps around the herbs and past the still-green chard. Tits, robins and sparrows wait on the uppermost twigs until the ancient cat slopes off, before resuming their bawdy banter. The artists flock and disperse to our own rhythm. A long talk with David Wege about immersion in the woods when bush-crafting is followed by hot soup and warm humour in the kitchen. Christopher Majewicz puts down his medium format camera, picks up a guitar, and starts singing the Goblin Band’s version of Widdecombe Fair accompanied by a creaky fiddle. I seek a little solitude in the hut but a kestrel hovers above it, stopping me at the field-edge rushes. The wind is constant and brings the sound of laughter and conversation from the house, in blasts.
Since pausing in December, I’ve missed writing here each week but I have loved the chance to think without words. The same impulses which helped me delight in discussion around the - almost archetypal - farmhouse kitchen table here, are closely twinned with those urging me to write to you. The complementary desire to perch quietly on my own has been vastly less honoured by me and last year I suffered for the lack of formless time. The Muse stamped off in a huff, my busyness is hazel pollen to his nose. On Epiphany this year (6th of January), the day that I feel a New Year has truly begun, something returned to me along with the bones of a short story, the outline of a book about one of my very niche craft practices, a couple of courses with esteemed colleagues and, as always, the desire to sing again. It would be mad to do all the things which rise up wanting to be done in me like good weeds. It takes time to decide what will be encouraged each year and what pruned back to thicken up and bloom another season.
When I took my break I was beginning a themed series ‘In Our Hands’ but that is not how I intend to go on. Other souls can organise their thoughts by theme, and I have done so in the past but now is not the time for me to be plotting courses and delivering methods. In these last few months the tone of even the mellower parts of the internet where I hang out has changed greatly. The grip of the unreal intensifies. I do not want to continue with business as usual.
Evade the constrictor
Last week I dreamed I saw a huge, white and sickly yellow boa constrictor beginning to wrap itself around my friend. I shouted to him,
‘Get free before it’s too late! It will crush you to death as soon as that last loop goes around you!’
‘It’s OK, I’ll deal with it later, Caro,’ called my friend nonchalantly, as another white leg-thick coil enveloped him. More boas flexed across the floor below me and I ran, picking up my feet like I was high-stepping between tyres in an obstacle race, until I was free of the moving maze.
When I awoke I did not know what I had truly been evading or warning my friend of, and, as with most tutelary dreams, it is rarely about only one thing. Today, this moment, just back from taking down my work in the shepherd’s hut, I see the constrictor for what it is. It is not AI nor ‘the Machine’, not state surveillance nor tech-bro oligarchy, though it includes all of these things. It is not ‘the Stirring Mind’ nor the machinations of a hypertrophied left hemisphere... though it partakes of these. It is hard to write in words a formula to match the rising muscular power of that which would eat us alive after crushing the breath out of us while holding us fast, rapt and immobile. So, I return to considering the dream image which encompasses it all better than any paragraph, however neat.
In a late night BBC interview overheard by a friend, source now forgotten, a wise philosopher said,
‘Tragedy is the inevitable consequence of complete adherence to any ideal.’
Unfolding at great speed is the inevitable and somewhat sickly coiling of something hungry for our energy. Fixed ideals1 - whether algorithmic, religious, secular, economic, political, ‘altruistic’, predatory, sexual, powerful, philosophical, cultural or otherwise are tightening around us. Some have deadly outcomes, as my Persian friends have witnessed in horror in their homeland all winter, others are deadening to the soil, to the soul or to compassionate action in the world, as in the UK, the US and amongst so many places, as we speak. They seek for us to adhere to the Ideal, stay still, allow ourselves to be digested, once crushed. No instruction or advice can help us once we are bound. Shouting ‘get yourself free!’ at a friend in the grip of a death-within-life is of little use. We could run over with a knife and cut them free, or we could run away from the carnage and keep ourselves sane and safe in the ever-diminishing zones of freedom. A lack of facts and opportunities to communicate them can no longer so cited as the problem.
Pure ideals, without contingency and context, are not conducive to human, creaturely or earthly flourishing. Idealism is all the rage again. By which I mean, the fanatical adherence to an idea, without regularly checking to see what effects actions based on these ideas cause, and without moderating our path accordingly to lessen suffering, stupidity and carnage.2 It is not the ideating mind which best sets the course for the human but the intelligence of the heart-mind, which is the true seat of wisdom and wise action.
Right action springs from a flower-like integrity that is grown in the heart, not an immovable ideal that is on a plinth in the mind.3 Such an unchangeable graven image held fiercely in the mind’s eye will always eventually require a sacrifice, whether of your enemies, your neighbours, your family, or your conscience.
Philosophy is (or can be) a practice of how to live with what we have already done, and how to act in ways that will not strangle the natural goodness and creativity that seeks to flow out of us like water from a spring. Love for our neighbours, for the Earth, and for the Great Mystery is not an adjunct to life nor an ideal to fall short of. Love is the natural resting state of every unencumbered human, the disposition of a mind not constricted by tallying the costs of modernity; it is the unambiguous movement of a freely-beating, well-tempered heart.
I will continue to write about all these things and more, as well as about what I had planned to before, but in a way that arises naturally each week, rather than to complete a pre-determined plan. I don’t have answers and I don’t wish to suggest easy fixes in neat lists, as I think this would be dishonest. I am returning to writing what I must, in whatever order it must be, because it is incredibly easy to become part of the apparatus of what I call (with a nod to Castaneda) ‘the foreign installation’. It is that artificial overseeing force which stifles all that is good in people so that they will submit to the mechanisms of control. I want to work with the ungainly, pollen-filled, mud-footed, windblown friend who shouts, ‘free yourself!’ then helps me wrestle out of the grip of the Ideal.
I’ve been teaching T’ai Chi again online each week since the New Year and the cadence of movement starting the week has unlocked a previously bound-up thing. In the classes, it seems that I give instructions, and I suppose I do, verbally, but underneath all of it it feels like ‘get yourself free!’ There are no ideals being peddled, only better moves toward freedom, more or less helpful responses to life, greater or lesser tendencies toward the vertical, the pole, the centreline - AKA integrity. There are endless ways to circle the essential source of all energy, that divine and reciprocal motion of the heart towards connection with all that is, even with the Great Mystery. Our T’ai Chi is just one of them.4
My conscience, practices, words and art can’t grow at the same time as being bound-up in an ideal. The light-stepping, swift movement of liberty is poisoned by certainty, surely the most ubiquitous and viscous of the draughts of oblivion the death gods offer humans. So what will grow here in my rewilding Substack field? I can’t tell you exactly but I hope that it will continue to be multifarious, full of spiky burrs that stick to your socks and travel back with you into your homes, bitter herbs that enliven your teas, and images that lodge in your mind like iron stains on wood grain.
Dusk falls in the tiny home and it is time to light the wood stove. I think of Adam Wilson in his tiny home and my several friends upon their little boats on the Thames and I dedicate my thoughts to them as they too place chopped wood in little metal boxes, relying on the solar economy, photons becoming wood, at last becoming radiant heat.
Here, pen in hand, borrowed A4 lined pad of paper on a stool in front of me, I send you shouts and wishes for your freedom from constriction, from death-dealing ideals, from the inability to step swiftly to where your true sense of reality pulls you. I will be back here, writing from the Way as I go, an older woman, right now in a young wild field, that was once an ancient fen. I have missed you, but more than that, I have missed the energy to call out to you. My heart leaps at its return.
This week’s good things:
Artemis Scribe is my first letterpress poem published as a concertina-style chapbook. It was handprinted by Princetown Press in a signed, numbered edition of 100 and finished with a hand painted sleeve. Incidentally, the tiny book contains four different black inks: oak gall ink for the sleeve painting, iron sumac ink for the quill-pen title, the printing ink of the letterpress and carbon ink in my fountain pen for the signature. For a poem about writing, numbers, land and growth, that particular four-ness makes me very happy. As the book is ‘just a card’ according to the postal gods, you can order a copy from me for only £10 plus standard letter postage to your country. Message me here or reply to this email if you’d like to buy one. Founding members can receive a copy for free instead of one of my published art materials books, if they prefer. I shall spend a purposeful couple of days assembling the remaining 95 copies this weekend.
I have started recording my Substack voiceovers podcasts in a much simpler way on my laptop using open source software, without the fancy web-based text-to-speech editing facility of my previous method, as, of course, it used AI. When even our word processing applications use AI, even when we try and turn it all off, I am not sure how much good it does, but it’s a step. That means I am playing old-school cut and paste with visual mountains and valleys, which is how WAV files show up in my software. I expect things will sound a little less polished, a bit more real. I think it will make me read things out better, too. Anyway, I wanted you to know about the change.
Tai Chi lessons online have begun, you can join anytime. Everything you need to know is here. You can study live on Zoom each Monday or watch the recorded sessions at your leisure. All are welcome and, apparently, it’s good fun! For the record, I have been teaching T’ai Chi since 2002 so I am not a shiny AI generated ‘master’ and you will not get six-pack abs by studying with me. I am a middle-aged woman wearing baggy clothes in a flat in Northumberland, however, I have taught T’ai Chi to at least 600 real human beings, some of them for decades. Lots of them still practise, which I think is the best bit.
Uncivil Savant is available to all without a financial barrier to access but that is not the same thing as ‘free’. If you can afford to take out a paid subscription, whether for a month or a year, then I’d be hugely grateful. There is a also a button for one-off donations below. My writing is what supports me and my partner’s day-to-day life. I’m grateful to everyone who is a paid subscriber, you make a huge difference to our lives, thank you. If you’d like to comment, but can’t afford a subscription, just drop me a line and I will comp you six months for free.
Fixed, immutable ideals, without allowing changes for changed context. This is not the same as a beloved guiding principle held in the heart, cherished and acted upon, consulted as though a compass.
Ah, the many plinths, supporting Unity, Capital, Leftism, The Party, Conservatism, Progress, Purity, Technology, Sex, ‘Women’s Honour’, Youth…
As Rumi said, ‘That which circles moves from its centre.’
Missed you. Welcome back.
Kx