Intention and invitation
Antidotes to the Hubriscene, pt8
Intention
Time has flown and Uncivil Savant has taken its own shape. When I draw, no matter if I have very specific plans for a piece, the ink, paper and brush always conspire1 to make a far more interesting and lively, if sometimes unexpected, translation of the movements of my hand, (and by inference, the movements of my unconscious, as well as my so-called conscious will). Thankfully, the same happens with writing. Although I am still tapping away at a keyboard rather than writing long-hand, if I relax and get the tension of the inner strings just right, not too tight, not too loose, unexpected resonances and overtones have a chance to vibrate in the words on this glowing screen.
In December I will move to publishing a piece every fortnight, with occasional extras pieces, so that I can write more in depth. At this point, I will create a subscribers only space. I also plan to host paying subscribers on a Zoom call this winter, so that we can talk about some of the recurring themes we have been discussing here, both in the main articles and in your comments. We can discuss our paths and practices in good, hearty company. I hope you will join me. I’ll post details nearer the time.
Coherence
Part of what I love about all the seemingly disparate things I do, is the opportunity to reclaim tool use from machines. Whether that’s handcrafting paints and pigments, sewing bags made from homemade leather, or assembling words to speak to you; mindfully making things gives me a feeling of deep coherence. Much is written of the ‘flow’ state, that ineffable good feeling of being absorbed in creative or physical work that is challenging and rewarding enough to confer an almost meditative ease upon the doer. I would say that this is part of the famous ‘non-doing’ (wei wu-wei) of Taoism, and I wrote more about it here and here. But what is the outcome of training this flow state over and over, whether consciously through one’s own study, or serendipitously, by falling into a living lineage of craft, martial arts, song, dance or embodied spiritual practice, for instance?
The result is what we might call coherence.
It cannot be achieved by the mind alone and one cannot just wish it to take place; it is, like happiness, an emergent property of a life lived mostly in accordance with the nature of things2. Firstly, with our bodies, adapted over millions of years so beautifully as part of this astounding planet, and secondly, in harmony with the uniquely syncopated tune that has somehow been placed in every one of us. Tunes that are recognisable and often beautiful to each other, but that must be sung in our own way. If we ape another’s way of singing a tune (or living a life), we will always be slightly outside ourselves. And if we slavishly seek to fabricate a novel tune, throwing away the ancestral beat and inherited harmonies that are rightly ours, we’ll be little more than synthesisers, running a program from our left hemispheres, creating music fit for machines, lives better suited to automata.
People regularly tell me how they feel scattered, inchoate, as though they have lost the threads of their lives. They mention feeling dislocated and pulled in many directions at once, for so many reasons, including: no longstanding ties to the place where they must live for work or study, no extended family or kin nearby, no meaningful work, little feeling of agency, no sense of their place in the world, a lack of a mythic or overarching shape for their lives, a creeping feeling of surveillance and manipulation by many aspects of the digital world, and the states and companies behind it. Plus so many more deeply personal reasons, as unique as each human.
There are no purely personal solutions for the things that have gone wrong at the societal or civilisational level. People selling ‘try this simple trick’ methods are themselves double agents of the commodity capitalism which is breaking us all apart, whilst encouraging us to look for quick fixes. When we work to achieve things together, in community, with others, even if just one other, we get a foothold in the real, and a chance to step towards a coherent society. Working only on ‘the self’, just like ‘personal salvation’ or ‘individual enlightenment’, is an oxymoron. Where is this self, anyway? Nowhere can you find a human who is not born of another, not connected to others, not fed by intricate webs of plant, animal, fungal and microbial life.
Methods, not techniques
It’s my first day off at home since mid-March. I made a to-do list.
Rest in the interconnectedness of life.3
Throw myself into embodied practice, according to my heart, the season, and what is needed. 4
Pray and rest in not-knowing.
Look to nature, seeing how all things in the universe are wave-like and subject to change.
Seek to cultivate good connections, work with others, and take care with relationships.
Rest.
Disparate elements can come together. A way ahead can be glimpsed. I see friends there, waving.
An Invitation
Looking through my files for this piece, I found these notes from the final hour of last year’s Found and Ground course, where I read a little bit of what I hadn’t been making explicit, over the time we had been working together. Using the false to cultivate the real5 is always best, but it’s ok to talk about it afterwards… The sighs of, ‘I knew it!’ from a couple of the students really made my week.
You can join me in Devon, UK, 2-6 October 2023 when I will be teaching for four days again, making a huge variety of natural art materials; paint, cordage, pigment, ink, charcoal, sketchbooks, pastels… The course physically brings together so much of what I write about here at Uncivil Savant, while being held in the astoundingly beautiful ancient grounds of Dartington Hall. You can read more about it here.
The Taoist Classics gnomically say, ‘Hide the World within the world’. That week, I think perhaps we did.
Found and Ground Natural Art Materials Course, final session talk notes.
30 September 2022, Dartington.
The Earth speaks, we listened. I brought no books, poems, film suggestions, etc, as this was to be five days in our bodies. Our bodies are earth. Body, hands, eyes, movement, speech, action, diet, when coming into good relationship with earth, (which is to say the universe, which is to say all things), let us receive all the guidance and information we need. ‘We do things, and then we think about them’, said an MA student here to me this week. We let practice lead, work out our theory later. Absorption, flow, delight, are the gifts for us from nature for our sustained loving attention.
The Earth is easy to love, but sometimes it takes a decision to love the world and the people. But we must be the ones who do this. So we need a good centreline to hold onto. (To walk in wild places, or even through the city, to do chi kung, to swim, to sing, to share good meals or stand firm with dear ones, will strengthen this.)
Tao
Vitality, energy and spirit pervade all things.
Alchemy
This week we've been working with ‘true lead’ more than ‘true mercury’. Lead is: the true sense of real knowledge. This means genuine sensing, neither indulging the senses nor dismissing them, but attending to the present moment wholeheartedly without judging it. Mercury is: the essence of conscious thought. This means the clear awareness of the mind, without any extraneous thoughts in words, just the shining, spacious presence before words appear.
‘False lead’ is indulgence of the senses, sensuality without discernment. ‘False mercury’ is the kind of accelerated, frenetic thinking that often passes for thought, but is in fact a mechanistic, looping, reductive imitation of true thought.
So this week we worked with true lead by attending to earth, letting our unencumbered ‘animal love what it loves’, as Mary Oliver said. We found ourselves absorbed in and delighting in earth. Thus we returned to our senses, literally. From this profoundly sane place, may you rest and renew your vitality, energy and spirit. I trust you to find the work you need to do, to follow your intuition.
The short version.
Gather nettles, find rocks, make tea, paint, twist cordage, and show others how to do these things.
The wild world itself is enough. You are also the wild world. When we work with earth we transform ourselves. We refine feelings when we mull, we strengthen our calm when we twist cordage, we settle ourselves when we levigate rocks. Metaphor means ‘to carry something across’. We carry across the embodied knowledge from our artistic practice into the word-space of the mind. Then our speech and writing can be made of true lead, (rather than a flimsy film of false mercury.) The physicality of the world does not need to be transcended. That place we seek is not ‘away’. There is nothing to be done or undone. The gift to earth of our continued physical, mental, and loving attention will give us back everything we always wanted, and more.
This week’s (small, shiny) good thing: When funds allow, I like to buy something from the huge array of skilled makers and artists I know nearby or further afield, rather than buy something mass-produced. Richard F Burns is a local jewellery designer / maker whose distinctive work I came across near my home last year. Now, after a very peaceful bus trip to Mudeford Quay arts festival today, I finally came home with a Sterling silver ring from his stall to celebrate my next book being commissioned. Its empty circle form reminds me of a classic Zen circle, or ‘wuji’, the pregnant void, the nothing that gives birth to everything. I also love the way it seems like a setting, but has no gem set in it. It is a little frame around an ordinary bit of skin on my middle finger. It is mysterious, and I like it a lot. I now have my eyes on a pair of ‘petit bateau’ earrings in the shape of a ulu, the round headed half moon knife I use to scrape parchment. Do you have talented local jewellers near you? It’s worth finding out.
literally, ‘breathe together’.
Tao, or The Way.
Insistence on pure individuality at any cost would be like the little band of yellow light announcing it will go its own way from the fleeting spectrum cast on the wall, when a child holds a glass prism up to the light.
This work allows flow to emerge, and after some time, all the elements of my life feel lit as though by that beloved low slanting ray, and suddenly cohere. (It is like when notes heard on the air from afar suddenly coalesce to form a tune. And we know this tune, and begin to sing along, unselfconsciously…)
This is a phrase coined by my T’ai Chi Master Mark Raudva of The T’ai Chi Centre to concisely describe a classical Taoist technique where you study an art or discipline wholeheartedly, for instance T’ai Chi, and thereby cultivate a oneness with Tao that could not easily be approached ‘head-on’.
Using the word conspiring for the interaction with the physical in order to express is so descriptive. It is exactly how I experience it. It changes my attempts of writing about it into conspiracy theories....the unavailable phrase. But seriously, conspiring with is such a beautiful intention. I feel like being in the same movement in trying to show ways to reconnect, to plug back into life, to practice the practice without the need to ever agree on the how.... Thank you, you hone me
I love the todo list. It’s a complete subversion of the form, which is normally meant to increase busyness and productivity, measure accomplishments and monitor progress toward concrete tasks.
Your todos are not so measurable and cannot be checked off a list so easily. They are practices to be done repeatedly, experienced rather than completed.