The call of the wild...or shall I stay indoors?

I went for a run yesterday. Running can be quite meditative. It shakes my mind and my body and draws up any lethargy that's been collecting. It leaks out in my sweat and I feel like I'm running away from my own laziness. Or running to combat my laziness. I also get restless. So running is a great antidote to restless jigging and building frustration.

I'm in the south of Finland on holiday. I kept to the road on my run, but there were tall silver birch and pine trees either side of me, where the forest stretches out.

As I ran, I stole glances into the trees. I always associate the forest with peace and stillness. But as I peered into it, a deep sort of anxiety started to well up. The forest here was wild, unkempt, close to people, but not looked after by them. I could spy rotting, fallen trees and thick darkness. Masses of moss and tangled branches. There was something chaotic and futile about it.

 

I am the first to romanticise nature and idealise notions of 'returning to the wilderness' but I started to realise just how divorced I really am from the wild. I am a smart-phone wielding, distracted, safety-groping modern person with little knowledge of nature beyond the greenness we cultivate in our back gardens. I am a massive, laughable hypocrite. I love the ideal postcard picture of a forest, not the real thing.

As I ran and looked into the forest, I thought about creativity, artists and anyone who dares to travel to the edges and beyond what men and women have already cultivated. I thought about madness. Henri Matisse famously said 'creativity takes courage.' Looking into the dark forested chaos from the paved road I started to feel like I understood what he meant.

The act of creativity involves submitting to chaos. It means going beyond the social constructs of all the labels and boxes we have created to order things and put ourselves in a position of mastery. To create something new, one first has to screw up and destroy all sense-making maps and step off the trodden path. Creativity is walking into the wild and trying to keep your wits about you, letting yourself be an instrument, absorbing what you see, using your eyes as if for the first time, and then hopefully coming back with new forms of meaning. Prolific American artist Georgia O'Keefe's words in a 1923 letter to Sherwood Anderson ring out; 'whether you succeed or not is irrelevant - there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing - and keeping the unknown always beyond you.'

We worry about creating meaning as a species. Don't all our forms of progress come from creativity? Daring to imagine something new? Realising there are endless ways of making sense of chaos. Submitting to nothing, and coming back with something.

In 'The Courage to Create', American existential psychologist Rollo May distinguishes creativity as the product of a raw, undefended encounter between self and world. Courage is needed to withstand the intense anxiety provoked by a natural world with no meaning ascribed to it. When one puts aside empirical fact, order, the history of everything we 'know' and meets the world just as it is,

'Our sense of identity is threatened; the world is not as we experienced it before, and since self and world are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before[...] The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness.'

May goes on to define artists as those who 'do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being.'

I wrote the below after my run and wanted to share it here. There's a sense  of futility to it, but I'm not going to apologise for that. Futility is uncomfortable, but it exists. Artists probably know it well. It's a scribbled homage to all the artists out there, sacrificing themselves as instruments, travelling beyond their edges, and bringing back visceral meaning for all of us.

What if we veer off course?
End up lost, among the fallen trees, compounded by moss,
Confused by thick, impenetrable bracken.
Weighed down by the damp, with just an echo for company,
An echo that fritters away, gets swallowed by the deepest forest,
And disappears.
Into nothing.

What if we submit to the chaos and it devours us?
Turning to see the path we marked on the way here, to keep us safe,
We are shocked to find that it's gone.
Was it ever there, we start to wonder...
Did order exist at all,
Or did we dream it up to put ourselves at ease?

What now?
We summoned the courage to create,
And we teeter on the edge, grabbing at the hand of destruction,
Desperate for company when we find ourselves alone.
Futility creeps in on us with the beetles.
Is this the only way back to ourselves?

What if we lose the web of language that keeps us rooted,
If we see new forms we cannot live without.
How do we express them?
How do we share them?
Will people call us crazy?
Will we be crazy?

Trapped in limbo with the longing call of the wild,
With messages for men and women who no longer possess ears to hear.
Will you take us back, when we have been away so long?
Or maybe we've walked too far,
Stepped over the edge.
We're knee-deep in chaos and there's nothing left.

Either way, wouldn't you rather say you took the risk?

 

 

Dear David Cameron, and maybe all of us, me included.

I received a letter from David Cameron yesterday. I live in what is considered a marginal constituency in the coming election and therefore he wanted to beg for my vote by bad-mouthing Ed Milliband and the SNP and talking about the economy. A lot. And nothing else.

I felt angry. I thought I should respond, it would be rude not to right? Even if it was just so I could untangle my own angry knot. As I wrote, my anger grew and became uncomfortable and itchy. I realised my anger was not exclusive to David Cameron, but probably many of the other parties, the choice I face in this election, the pressure to have to vote tactically to keep someone out, rather than vote for who I want to see in government, and also anger at the world, our age old global cultural paradigm built on White colonial power that still covertly rules, however politically correct we pretend to be. And at myself, for my impotence in being any different or standing up to things I disagree with. It's easier to eat a doughnut or watch a YouTube video of a cat meeting a lizard and freaking out.

Anyway, this letter won't really help. But more than anything, it's a message to myself not to forget where my passion lies and to keep doing the work I think is important, on myself. It starts from right here, where each of us stand. If we can't be the change, what's the fucking point?

Here is David's letter:

 

 

 
My response:

David!

How did you know how much I love receiving post? Aww, you really shouldn’t have. Especially at such a busy time.

No seriously...you needn’t have bothered.

It felt like getting a letter from an old friend, except for the fact that you left off my younger sister who has been knocking around for 21 years and is also registered to vote in this constituency. I would expect an old friend to know that. But she will soon be footing her £44,000 bill of tuition fees, so perhaps you thought she might not want to hear from you right now?

If I’m honest, by the 5^th use of my first name I started to feel quite uneasy David. As if you didn’t want to tell me anything at all, or fill me in on your news, but just show off how good you are at mail merge.

Language is interesting, your letter reminded me of that.

-          You mentioned us by name 7 times. Cheers for that. Really hammered home my own name to me.
-     You mentioned the economy or used money-based language 15 times. In one short letter. You used it even when you weren’t talking about the economy. Shows where your priorities lie eh David?

I get it - you want to put an end to austerity and ‘continue building the British economy’. The problem is, you don’t seem to care about the fair distribution of that wealth or anything else besides economic wealth?

Let’s talk about what matters; our country. Oh, and how about the rest of the world, other species and the environment? Hang on. If we think about the rest of the world, we risk actually giving a shit about people other than ourselves don’t we? As we’ve seen, that’s not really on, because division is absolutely key to your economic plan. And the economy is key to, well, everything.

Britain needs to get back on top in your eyes, clamber back up on its hierarchical ladder where it can poke away any rage from the marginalised with a sheepish smile, a furrowed brow and the insistence that using the newest politically correct language means you are actually politically correct or aware of or open to discussing issues of diversity or inequality.

If we look inwards, to Britain, we see stories of how you have helped to grow the British economy and started getting us back on track. All this success while more people than ever are using food banks. So where is their share? The welfare and social care sectors are facing increased cuts in order to ‘balance the books’ while the corporations get away with lucrative deals and tax-dodging.

How you treat your own people is reflected in your view on to the wider world. But it’s not just you David, I’ll admit that. It’s the whole of our archaic global cultural paradigm that desperately needs to shift. First World nations have set the bar by cashing in their wealth and attempting to drown out protesting voices that don’t fit their narrative. We have forgotten the sacred importance of community in favour of focussing on the individual. We need voices that represent everyone. We need to recognise that we are everyone. If we fail at diversity, we fail to connect in the deepest sense as a community. We become unsustainable as a group and do little good for anyone around us. Shit needs to change. Badly.

How do we do it? Awareness. Start by being aware of your own functioning. Seek to come into contact with your own prejudices every day. Don’t pretend you don’t have any. Talk to someone that repels you, or that you realise you already have a stereotyped perception of, before you’ve met them. Name what comes up for you – discuss the stuff we try to avoid all the time because it makes us uncomfortable and causes friction with our rooted perception of the world. Seek to expand beyond mainstream ideas that can make you feel like a claustrophobic pea. What do YOU think? The work is everywhere, in every moment, for all of us to do. Try to be open, be curious. Try listening. Until we own our own shit, we’ll just keep projecting it onto ‘the other.’ It’s safer that way apparently. But the danger is what we’re seeing playing out in the world – repression of a problem doesn’t make it go away. If we fail to own our own shadow, we cast a collective darkness much bigger than the one we’re running away from.

It’s a tall order, but one we can all do something about. Starting right now.

It may seem like I’ve gone off on a tangent, but really these issues underlie the surface of a politics and a modern culture that frustrates a great many of us today. I’m looking for a leader who is actually a decent human being with enough self-awareness to understand how his or her decisions will impact the group of people he or she is leading. A leader who looks out for everyone, not just his own. David - your inability to acknowledge the marginal voices in Britain (as well as elsewhere) is why I won’t be helping you out in this marginal constituency on 7^th May.

As far as I’m concerned, you can jog on.