Fables of the Reconstruction

Fables of the Reconstruction

Fables of the Reconstruction

William Blake, Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing (c 1786)

“Reality is such that both language and imagination have to exaggerate in order to confront it truly.” — John Berger

“We need to set aside these hopeless fantasies of ‘reintegration’ from above and seek instead the recovery, not of a social contradiction that terminated naturally in a metaphysical nihilism, but an ethos of eternal life in the present – maybe a new Romanticism, I would even think, for want of a better word – that loves life, the life of the natural world and of human community, more than property or power or capital or nation or blood or race. An unrelenting love of all the beautiful fragilities and delicate personal bonds that our epoch is systematically eradicating.” — David Bentley Hart

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.” — Ivan Illich

1.

Saturday morning. An upstairs flat in south London. The autumn of 2004.

From the street below we hear the clanking of some poor soul’s car getting towed, and several hours later it will turn out to have been mine, the car I briefly had as a perk of the job I briefly held as a broadband salesman. But for now we are sealed in our innocence, onto the third or fourth pot of strong black coffee, riding the kind of hangover that is not just the bill come due for last night’s excess but an altered state in its own right and weirdly pleasurable, so long as nothing much needs doing; nothing besides this echo location of the soul, sending words across the table, seeing what comes back. In memory now, it seems this was the state in which we did much of our thinking, Mary and I, in those years. Braiding a rope of images by which to climb out of the hole in which a first-class education had left us.

It was an education geared to turn its brightest sons and daughters into intellectual Edward Scissorhands, minds skilled at taking a blade to anything, but unequipped for tenderness. Mary called it “the theory hole”, the pit into which a bright undergraduate could fall in late Nineties academia. Foucault kicked in and suddenly, wherever you looked, all you saw were the operations of power permeating human existence. Everything was a matter of rhetorical construction, an invitation to clever word-games played over an abyss of nihilism. For my part, I had carried some mustard seed of faith out of the end of childhood, which meant I could never quite take the abyss at face value, but to put words to that hunch, to justify it in terms that anyone around me would take seriously – well, that was another matter. Where would all the deconstruction end, and when could we start reconstructing something worthwhile out of the pieces it had left us.

There is a kind of friendship in which you find words that stay with you for decades, though you hardly remember whose mouth they first came out of, since they echoed through an ongoing conversation. Truer to say they came out of the air between us, thoughts we never would have worded without the shared space of that friendship. So the image came of a half-complete shamanic initiation: we were given the tools to cut to pieces whatever body of meaning or beauty or goodness we might have arrived with, praised for showing skill and daring in their use, yet with no attention to the consequences of this self-dissection, no recognition that we would need some new body in which to return to the world.

In a fairytale or at a twelve-step meeting, the first move is to name the trouble you’re in, to hear yourself say it aloud and have it heard. We’d each of us need other friends, other tools and spaces to make good on our escape from the pit and later to become people capable of throwing a rope to others. But it would be hard to overstate the difference our friendship made in that season of my life.

And now, a long while later, in another season, I find myself returning to these images on account of a line which caught my attention from an anthropologist who writes of her own tribe: “Anthropologists talk about culture so much that we can no longer define it.” Surely the same is true for many tribes of academia and their keywords, a point almost too obvious to make; yet reading that line, the strangeness of it struck me, and with it came the thought that our authoritative ways of knowing are themselves stuck in the theory hole.

You might wonder what business this is of mine. As an irregular visitor to certain corners of academia, listening in on their conversations, I feel no envy at the fraught institutional realities, the attacks from without and the ideological minefields laid within. But I do have an interest in language, in the ability to say things about the world, and it seems to me that – to take this example to hand – there are things to be said about “culture”, things worth saying, which become harder to say when the discipline that claims authority over the term has come to treat any definition of it as at best naive and most likely problematic. I sometimes get the sense that our authoritative ways of knowing are hamstrung by a structural dependence on a type of truth claim they no longer wish to defend, but can’t really operate without. The danger is that this leads to a kind of deconstructive dead-end which says less about the world being studied than about the discipline which drives the study.

Make what you will of these claims: I don’t pretend to have substantiated them to the satisfaction of anyone who doesn’t recognise here something of their own experience. But such thoughts were on my mind when I received the invitation to contribute to “A Revival of Romantic Letters”, and one morning soon afterwards, I found myself entertaining the idea of Romanticism as exit strategy, a way past the dead-end, a rope thrown down into the theory hole. Which came as a surprise, I will admit: for though my work has been bound up with images of Mountains and Ruins, and it’s hard to think of two more Romantic tropes, I’ve tended to see the embrace of Romanticism as a tactical error or an allegation to be denied. Maybe I needed to take another look.

2.

Once upon a time, I got quite cross with a critic in the TLS who pronounced Dark Mountain a Romantic project.

A few months before the review came out, she’d quizzed me in the beer garden of a Gloucestershire pub. I’d talked about why you found little appeal to the Romantics in our manifesto or the pages of our journal, how I’d resisted an early suggestion that we position ourselves as new Romantics, and the grounds – tactical, historical, temperamental – for my strength of feeling on all this. As one half of the project’s founding partnership, I’d thought this information might count for something, but apparently not.

In hindsight, I guess we were both half-right.

If you wanted to make a slam-dunk case for the Romantic origins of Dark Mountain, I could tell you about the post on Paul Kingsnorth’s blog which first set the two of us talking. At the top of that post was Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, which is literally the first image on the Wikipedia entry for “Romanticism”.

There you have it, the windswept archetype: solitary, far-sighted, male. Yet by the time it arrived in the world, Dark Mountain was a collective endeavour, and here the story twists a little.

Among the readings at our manifesto launch in July, 2009, there were two poems from writers who mattered to us, each conjuring with mountains and deep time. Paul chose Robinson Jeffers’s ‘Rearmament’, in which the poet finds refuge from his sense of doom in a zoomed-out perspective, the mass of people seen as atoms within the disastrous beauty of a geological process. My choice was the poem that opens John Berger’s And our faces, my heart, brief as photos, its lines a Möbius strip of intimacy and vastness: the mountain here is the Aravis massif, under which the poet lives, its geological fastness made small in time when set against the force of life itself, seen in a flower’s pollen:

The flower in the heart’s
wallet, the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.

And our faces, my heart, brief as photos.

Romantic enough, I see now, and the whole book reads as a love letter, but already we have glimpsed two rather different faces of the mountain, and this will bring us to a clue as to what gave the project its charge.

My first reason for not embracing Romanticism as a frame was tactical. When you set out – as in our manifesto – to question “the myth of Progress” and to name the disastrous losses which it hides from view, the first charge thrown by those such thoughts discomfort is that you are “romanticising the past”.¹ You can run with that, if you like, and declare it no bad thing, or deny that it’s a thing at all, but I was always more inclined to say: sure, that’s a risk, just don’t imagine pointing it out will get us out of the trouble we’re in, or that what you’re pointing to exhausts the possibilities that come of turning our attention to the ways people have made life work in other times and places. But to make such distinctions clear is hard enough, it seemed to me, and harder still when wrapping yourself in the flag of Romanticism.

My second reason was historical. To home in on the Romantics – to make them the constellation we are going to steer by – is to locate ourselves in relation to the turn of the nineteenth century, the age of Revolutions, political and industrial. Whereas my focus was on what came before: the struggle for subsistence, for what Ivan Illich called “the vernacular”, the plurality of relatively autonomous ways of livelihood which people fought hard to defend against the logic of industrial productivism. In the places closest to the centres of modernity, this struggle had been fought and largely lost by the time of the revolutionary year zero (whichever one you pick) out of which modern political consciousness is said to have been born. Beyond that point, the contending ideologies which frame the space of politics tend to obscure, distort and marginalise both the history of that struggle and the ways it has continued in places which get seen as the periphery.

In my mind – and quite possibly nowhere else – there was a connection between this earlier struggle and what T. S. Eliot was getting at with his “dissociation of sensibility”. Eliot’s thesis started as a series of sweeping asides in a TLS review of a selection from the Metaphysical poets. “Something […] happened to the mind of England,” he wrote, “from which we have never recovered.” It happened around the midpoint of the seventeenth century: a coming apart of head and heart, after which poets “thought and felt by fits, unbalanced”, no longer able to do both things at once. This claim started a debate which ran for decades and shaped the thinking of a generation, not so much for the details of his diagnosis of the difference between Donne and Milton, but because it offered a memorable formulation of a larger historical idea.

By the time my friends and I were getting thrown down the theory hole, Eliot’s critical speculations were beyond unfashionable, but somewhere I caught wind of his dissociation thesis and it haunted me. Then in Alan Garner’s essay, ‘Achilles in Altjira’, I found a potent restatement of the divide towards which Eliot seemed to gesture, now mapped onto class and language by an author who knew himself heir to two tongues, two Englishes, the abstract intellectual fluency of the French and Latin vocabulary and the felt force of the language’s Germanic core:

What words can tell my story? The words are the language, heart and head: a language at once idiosyncratic and universal, in the full growth of the disciplined mind, fed from a deep root. To employ one without the other is to be fluent with nothing to say; or to have everything to say, and no adequate means of saying it. Yet, for historical reasons, those are the alternatives for the artist in Britain today, unless he or she, consciously or unconsciously, wages total war, by which I mean total life, on the divisive forces within the individual and within society.

Here was my cause, to whatever extent I could serve it: not to accept the divide which sets heart and head against each other, but to wage total life on it. And from where I stood, perhaps the Romantics had been searching for a new covenant between head and heart, but what they came to stand for was heart-against-head, a revolt against the Age of Reason which was caught inside the logic of dissociation.

And so to my third reason, the matter of temperament. The energy of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer was strong in the beginnings of Dark Mountain. I’m thinking of the declaration near the close of Paul’s great essay, ‘Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist’:

I withdraw from the campaigning and the marching, I withdraw from the arguing and the talked-up necessity and all of the false assumptions. I withdraw from the words. I am leaving. I am going out walking.

That need to walk away, though you can offer no explanation that will satisfy anyone; to retreat to the high hills, the place where the words run out, and wait with empty hands for a gift that may not come. That was where we met.

Yet there’s an edge here that I’m wary of by temperament, the stance of the lone truth-teller, up above the clouds. We’d gone there, now and then, in the manifesto, as in our declaration about “Uncivilised writing”:

It is writing for outsiders. If you want to be loved, it might be best not to get involved, for the world, at least for a time, will refuse to listen.

A couple of years after we wrote that, Martin Shaw showed up with his strange talk of “Romanticism as Activism” and his depth of experience taking people out to sit and fast on the side of actual mountains. The first time I met him, he told me with a grin that the pair of us looked pretty civilised to him, which seemed fair comment from a man who had lived for four years in a tent.

The heroic individualism of the Romantic imagination was never my thing. I’m more for the collective genius of scenes, the way that thoughts and images come out of the air between us, when we meet under the right conditions. Everything I write has been the fruit of certain kinds of conversation, shared in the hope of seeding other conversations. So that was the side of the work of Dark Mountain that I tended, with the help of others, through its early years, a balance to the work that Paul had shouldered as the project’s frontman, taking the slings and arrows, telling the story that was his to carry with great power.

My point here is not to frame a binary to choose between, as though this were a matter of someone being right, but to describe a project which had two poles, like a magnet or a battery, energising the field into which others were drawn. Or two poles like a tent, a large enough space in which to meet: as one of our later editors said, on first encountering the project, “I thought if there was room for him and there was room for you, then maybe there was room for me.” If one of those poles was recognisably Romantic, the other was held by my reservations – tactical, historical, temperamental – towards Romanticism. And remembering those years, I’d say to those erecting the tent of Romanticon: blessings upon the tensions you’ll no doubt find between your understandings of what you’re up to, may they give this project the charge it needs!

3.

But Dark Mountain is in good hands now and I am free to go out wandering.

“I am neither a Romantic, nor a Luddite, nor a utopian!” declares my walking companion in excitable exasperation.

You’ve met my friend Illich already, but it’s time I introduced you. By his own confession, he’s fond of an extravagance. (From extra vagare, he adds: to wander outside.) I met him the year after he died, in a footnote of a book which read like a letter from one of those older, wiser friends I badly needed.

Who was he, then? Not a Romantic, but a Roman Catholic – a Monsignor, no less – though also the son of a Jewish mother, his adolescence interrupted by the family’s flight from a city where most who shared their origins did not survive. The marks of historical experience he carries make him a more trustworthy companion in the landscape of loss and dissociation than Eliot, who could talk so loosely of a Europe poised between Christianity and Paganism.

Like several of my heroes, his life was sent off course by an encounter with peasants and the displaced children of peasants. In his case, it started the night he landed in New York in November 1951, when he heard his grandfather’s friends bitching about those damned Puerto Ricans. He dropped his studies for a second doctorate and asked to be assigned to a parish in Washington Heights, where the new immigrants were congregated, immersing himself in the shared life of his parishioners and travelling to the island itself, where he walked from village to village, sleeping on the steps of the barrio chapels. Later he would walk and hitch the length of South America – he doesn’t believe in doing things by halves – before finding a home for the Centre for Intercultural Documentation which he and Valentina Borremans set up in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

For much of the 1960s, the centre’s official purpose was as the language school for Catholic missionaries sent from Europe and the North. Illich saw it as his duty to either send them home again, or else see to it that they understood that they had more to learn from the people they were going to than they had to teach. By the time he emerged as a public figure, he had fallen out with the Vatican and into the sphere of those whom Anthony Galluzzo calls the “Critical Aquarians”, that ragbag of thinkers around one side of the counterculture for whom limits mattered. In a series of short, sharp books – Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality, Energy and Equity, Medical Nemesis – he analysed the counterproductivity of the institutions of industrial modernity, while arguing that two-thirds of the world could still “avoid passing through the industrial age” and choose instead “a postindustrial balance in their mode of production which the hyperindustrial nations will be forced to adopt as an alternative to chaos.”

Those books were being sold off cheap from university libraries when I found them. Now and then, I’d come across someone of my parents’ generation for whom Illich’s name still rang a distant bell. But for much of the 1970s, his interventions made him famous, in the era of the Oil Crisis, the interregnum between the postwar boom and the rise of neoliberalism.

What sent me out on this present extravagance is the turn his work took after the years of his fame, when he put on the mantle of the historian. The critique of contemporary institutions gave way to a project of archaeology – similar and different from that of Foucault – unearthing the buried assumptions behind our modern “certainties”.

These later writings often take him into the etymological root-work of everyday words and in that spirit, we pick up the trail of the word “romance”, following a hunch back into the Middle Ages. It helps that I live half my day in a language where, as for many Europeans, roman is the word for what the English call a novel. So I take out the etymological dictionary to follow this thread and instead I’m brought up short by the obviousness of something that has never occurred to me: as the name for a chivalric adventure tale in medieval France, “romance” just means it’s written in the vernacular, the everyday language, not in Latin. And I laugh, because this was not what we were looking for, but – as you may have gathered – “vernacular” is one of Illich’s big words. He sets out to resuscitate its older, larger sense:

Vernaculum as a Latin word was used for whatever was homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade, as opposed to what was obtained in formal exchange.

On his lips, it becomes a name for all that falls into shadow, becoming hard to take seriously or even imagine, once the logic of exchange has come to dominate our lives and everything is reshaped to fit the “realism” of the disembedded market. So I wonder, in this rumoured new Romanticism, is there room for the Illichian foolishness of insisting that the vernacular is not just lost and superseded: that it survives in traces, in the shadow of modernity’s grand structures, or like the sleeping knights under the hill, and may yet prove vital in reseeding the landscape as those structures come to ruin?

Let’s take that thought along with us, because the wandering isn’t done. I should probably have warned you by now, it’s best to watch your step when out walking with Illich in his guise as historian, because not all is as it seems. More than once, his friends have told me of their puzzlement when trying to follow up on what looks like a historical claim, only to find the trail peters out. David Cayley says he can find no source to back up the story Illich tells about the role of prophets in the early Church. Toby Everett went on a similar quest for the basis of his remarks about an early Christian ritual of the “mouth-to-mouth kiss”, and admits “it could be that Illich has access to sources that explicitly name this practice as conspiratio”, but, if so, these sources are not available to the rest of us. (With a man who once fought the Inquisition to a stalemate in an underground chamber at the Vatican, you can never entirely rule out the Dan Brown option. And Illich – well, he just grins at me and says, by the way, did you know I have two graves on different continents?²

The cheap take on all of this would be that Illich is a bad historian doing naughty things, a spreader of out-of-date fake news. He’s certainly a Trickster, and all the usual warnings apply. “I am a hedge-straddler, a Zaunreiter, which is an old name for witch,” he once declared to an audience of Catholic philosophers.

But before we get too indignant, he’d like to draw our attention to how funny the English distinction between “history” and “story” can sound when you’re straddling different European languages. As if there could ever be a firewall between the two: on one side “the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge”; on the other, the thing that children get told off for telling, or that beardy tent-dwellers tell to a spellbound audience at a festival called Uncivilisation. You do know they are the same word? he says, his eyebrows leaping.

And this is why I wanted to take this walk, out around the edges of the language of “romance”, because it’s what I think he’s doing when he puts on the mantle of historian: he’s taking it back to the fire around which we’ve all been telling stories, all along, because telling stories is what we do. He’s going diving for the pearls that were our fathers’ eyes, as Arendt said of Benjamin. He’s activating the tradition that never could be timeless and unchanging, modernity’s imagined other; the past which is not even past, whose significance can still be changed by what we do next, because the significance of an event lies in its consequences, and consequences tend to come afterwards, sometimes a long time after.

“Stories can tell what history cannot describe,” he declares, on the threshold of one of his most extravagant historical ventures, near the end of Gender. And this is the other thread I want to speak for, Romanticism as romance, as telling stories. But whatever this way of telling is, however it breaches the rules of the game, it is nothing like the hallucinations of an LLM. It’s not epistemological slop, anything goes, whatever-you-want-is-true. It is in service to a truth altogether trickier and more alive than those rules can handle.

4.

My friend Caroline Ross went to art school in London in the nineties. It put her off being an artist for twenty years. She learned that there were words you absolutely couldn’t use. Words that mattered to her. Words like “beauty”.

Rather than get trapped in the theory hole where words that matter turn to empty husks, she fled the way the shapeshifting hero of an old Irish story flees when chased: “I became a stag! I became a salmon! I became a hawk!” So she moved through forms: the frontwoman of bands, Tai Chi teacher with a school, back into painting, but now as the woman who combs beaches and scrambles up trees to scavenge for making her own paints and teaches others to do so, then on into writing, as her years of correspondence with a web of friends broke into wider view as Uncivil Savant.

As the years went by, there came a change in the air. Words like “beauty” became speakable again, not perhaps in the institutions, but in other spaces where people no longer cared about those judgements. Perhaps this is why there’s talk of a New Romanticism, these days, because we need beauty, even – especially – amidst and against all the horror of the world, amidst and out of all the shit.

With this set of stories, I have been braiding some strands of my own into the rope of what a New Romanticism could be, that it might have room for beauty and friendship, for the wisdom and foolishness of vernacular ways, for history as storytelling, for culture as the necessary unnecessary, for the extravagance and exaggeration needed in order to confront reality truly. My hope is that this rope might hold when we get to the place where the power words we inherited no longer grip the world as they were meant to, and remind us that there are other ways to touch the world than gripping it.

One Sunday night in early spring last year, Caro and I invited our readers to join us for a conversation. Like so much else these days, it took place in the in-between space of a Zoom call, sixty faces in boxes around the world. When we shared the recording, I called it ‘Taking Beauty Seriously’, because that was the theme we found ourselves weaving words around. Near the end, someone asked Caro a question about the nature of beauty, and her answer makes me smile, every time I come back to it:

If you could ever get to the bottom of love and kindness and art, then our lives are too short. One’s own taste and what one is given and what is made by others and what is considered beautiful, may we never get to the bottom of it! And may we never all agree, and may we always continue talking about it, forever, and may that conversation itself be a wellspring of beauty. And the heated conversations over red wine, may they continue forever!

Yes, I say, amen! That’s what to do, when the old strong definitions won’t hold: not to get stuck in a ghost-modernism where we are haunted by their failure, but to laugh and climb down from the big ex cathedra chair and rejoin everyone else telling stories around the fire, to bring the fruits of our hunting in archives or data mines or forests to a gathering where the words are live and wriggling and won’t be pinned down, but we can still talk with them and say things about the world, because wording is one of the things that our kind does, one of the things we bring to the ongoingness of the world, one of the ways we dream it into being. And at the risk of making asses of ourselves, may we never get to the bottom of this dream, because it hath no bottom!

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I have not gone out of my way to peg this story down with footnotes and sources, beyond the occasional link or comment, nor have I always made it clear when channeling other people’s words. On my walk with Illich, the lines in quotation marks are ones you’ll find written down in one source or another. Once or twice, I mention someone and quote what they wrote, or what I remember them writing, without naming them, because what their words meant to me may bear little resemblance to what they intended by them. Sometimes a line taken out of context can come to stand for a tendency that’s bothered you for years. Sometimes I may only be fighting my own ghosts. No one is indicted here; it’s only a story, only a dream. But to all the friends with whom I dreamed it, past and present, I say thank you.

Footnotes

1 As Paul points out in an early essay for the journal, this mostly comes from those who are fine with “romanticising the future”.

2 This is true – and I only found out as I was writing this paragraph! I’d made a pilgrimage last year to the churchyard where he’s buried on the outskirts of Bremen, but a few weeks ago someone published an essay about their pilgrimage to his grave on the outskirts of Cuernavaca. Both have a wooden cross marked with the same dates.

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