My Final Blog Post – Searching for Urban Songlines

Thanks for checking on on my blog, Cities of Light. I’m winding it up with this post, not because i don’t believe in it anymore but something like the opposite. Now i feel i have a good idea of what i want to go on doing and my mates at Easy Website Creator have helped me upgrade to a new website (visit them here).

It is called The Play of Light and will focus more consistently on my ‘adventures in ecospirituality,’ with more of that nature-lovin’ stuff we all dig.

So here’s my last post – about a workshop this weekend in Melbourne, where i am appearing as a guest presenter on the idea of songlines being treated creatively in a modern, urban context. It’s called “Searching for Urban Songlines” and the promo for it can be found here.

I’m proud to say the title came from my work and that i’m presenting alongside Yvette Soler, AKA Tigrilla, who is a citizen and Ambassador of Damanhur, an ecologically inspired intentional community in Italy.

I’m doing two gigs on the weekend, as well as helping to shape a round circle discussion about Ecopsychology as Medicine. the first one, on Saturday morning, is called Global Songlines and the Collective Indigenous Soul. It follows the idea, which i first found in the writings of Martin Prechtel, that we all have an Indigenous Soul, whether we are native to this land through generations or newcomers with a deeply felt connection to another place on the other side of the planet. Following him, i started to realise that it’s all about being loyal to place: that the Indigenous Soul seeks out relationships unique to the place it lives in, enters into conversation with the rest of nature and its complex myriad of living beings, and pays respect to the fact that we are part of a wider song of the earth. Tapping into this deeply rich source gives us the opportunity to activate it for our own benefit as well as on behalf of all the other beings we share this incredible, rare planet with. Global Songlines and the Collective Indigenous Soul is designed to help us delve into this realm of meaning so that we come out of it with a new understanding of our own sense of being native to the land, loyal to the earth, and part of this place.

My other main gig, on Sunday, is simply called Urban Songlines. I believe that there’s never been a better time to bring everything together and to sing the song of the land, the song of the body, the song of all the creatures and the song of the city at the same time. But where do we fit in all this, as modern urban folk? That is the perennial question answered by myth: the great story that links the human to the rest of nature and to the powers of the cosmos. I also believe that it is time we enjoyed a new mythic paradigm that responds to the special nature of the places we live, to its indigenous history and its modern realities. What i’ve started calling the Urban Songlines Project responds to this need and calls all willing participants to join in and help co-create a way of being that ties many different levels together. According to the Urban Songlines Project, we will listen to nature within and without, draw beautiful words from the depths and bring them together on behalf of all creatures. We will make links between the things that surround us and their origins, the ways they got here and how this could be done better. We will explore kinship relations between ourselves and the lives – animate and ‘inanimate’ – that we share this planet with. We will share stories that recognise the inevitability of conflict and the fact that everything has its place. We will link all of this together, with feeling and heart and mind and soul and body, exploring the exchange and possible synthesis of mythic paradigms from the west, east and indigenous traditions. We’ll compose new, inclusive songlines that arise from our deep collective journey through this body of land. And then we’ll sing them. And dance.

For more on the Urban Songlines Project, Global Songlines and the Collective Indigenous Soul, and for more adventures in ecospirituality, please visit and follow http://theplayoflight.org/

And may the blog continue!

Enchanted Forests – Mountainous, Underwater and Upriver

Path leading off towards Cradle Mountain

What is it about that path into the wilderness that piques the curiosity and lures us into the otherworld that sits just the other side of this world? It’s as old as the fairytale, as contemporary as ever. I stuck to the boardwalk as long as it lasted, to help conserve the bog lands beneath the feet, the button grasses and the mosses and ferns, the soft soils in the perpetual wet of western Tasmania. But as soon as I’d climbed up from the lost lake, passed the designated tourist’s lookout, and come around to the back of Cradle Mountain, I just couldn’t choose the well worn path back to the visitor’s centre. It’s off on bushwalking adventure for me. Which is of course how I soon got lost.

Backcountry, looking away from Cradle Mountain

A quick glance at a map in the turnoff hut revealed that there probably existed a way back that could provide me with many more hours’ walking as well as a look at the justly famed landscape beyond majestic Cradle Mountain. I was keen to blow off a year of working in the city in one day of wild Tasmanian weather, which could easily provide me with a combination of blustery winds and the sleeting showers of rain that come up and over the ridges and hit me square in the face, interspersed with occasional bursts of brilliant, welcome sunshine. So I headed off, bottle of water with a muesli bar and some chocolate in one pocket, phone camera with no coverage and just enough power for a handful of photos in another.

Looking back at Cradle Mountain in high mist

I saw the turn off but ignored it, reasoning there would be another and anyway, I’d read that that one was very steep and not recommended. A couple of hours later I caught up with another walker – enjoying paths like this all to yourself, solitary walking in the wilds, is a particular pleasure for this contemplative soul – and found out I was heading directly away from civilisation. I had not consciously chosen to do this, but was there something within me that couldn’t resist the lure of the wilderness? I had one spare day only and no gear for anything longer. Yet somehow the forest had enchanted me just as it did those innocent children in countless fairy tales, tempted by the promise of encounter with the fairies, or communication with nature spirits of some other kind; of magical experiences or just new worlds, of another time and place that somehow put this one in perspective, if we were allowed to return at all. For isn’t this the same sweet song that lured the hero into battle or quest and tempted the sailors across the horizon? It’s not just for the innocent, then, but for the curious – for anyone who wonders what lives across the porous boundary between this world and the next, which dreams and myths and fairytales tell us exists at all times beneath the elastic boundaries at the edge of perception. And tricksters live there…

 Tricky Currawongs! How did they know i had chocolate in that pocket?

Having returned to the turn off, which was naturally the only way back after all, I did find this track was very steep – and hardly used. The weather turned a little nastier and this is where the cautionary tale shapes up. Stepping down across an exposed tree root onto a mossy rock, I slipped and almost twisted my ankle. And suddenly the reality of my situation sank in.

Tiny Life – lichen and fungi on granite

I am a 4 hour walk from anyone else, let alone the meeting point of tourists to this picturesque region. I am on a path that is almost unused – I see no other footprints and there is almost definitely nobody else behind me (it’s not yet high season and I’ve hardly seen a soul since I left the suggested tracks). If I can’t walk out of here, I’m hunkering down for the night – and exposure in the Tasmanian highlands is not to be underestimated; ever. All of a sudden, every step matters and my walk takes on a new note of Zen concentration.

Wild rainforest

I love it. Perhaps this is partly, secretly, why I allow myself to be led across the threshold. It might not be quite a matter of life and death, but it is intense, everything becomes significant, nothing is taken for granted. This is how I wanted to live. Not forgetting.

A tiny tree, woody rooted, with delicate white flowers

A few days later I am cruising up the Gordon River in the great south western wilderness heritage park and I can’t help thinking about all those stories about the madness upstream, about the great short novel Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, about the film Apocalypse Now that was made in its image, about the song “Somewhere Down that Crazy River” by Robbie Robertson. About the idea that when we’re tempted far enough upstream we lose contact with civilisation and its mores and end up “going native.” I don’t trust the lack of confidence this has so often been treated with – as if losing civilisation and returning to primal life ways would be such a significant loss, as if we are truly mad beasts beneath the veneer of socialisation and should be thankful to the factory line and Sunday school for bringing us up to this point of merit. It just never sang true to me. For every gain, a loss, as far as I can tell, when all the gloss is stripped away from our modern lifestyles. Agriculture and abundance plus environmental inbalance, industrialisation and machine locomotion plus pollution, technology and instant global media plus disembodied alienation, capitalism and more stuff plus greatly increased inequality. Something about the consensus story of modernity always seems to suggest we should be thankful for it but I’m not. I wish we were still living at close quarters with the rest of nature, our technologies immersed in the sacred, our psyches in conversation with our kin amongst all the other beings.

Looking up Gordon River – wanting to go around just one more bend …

I don’t want the boat to turn around, when it must, and look longingly upriver to the even wilder lands I recall from a previous kayaking trip past here. I go diving for crayfish another day and again the fancy hits home. I don’t want to come up, washed this way and that as I am by the swell and the surge, scared occasionally by the looming shadow above, waving kelp that takes the shape of a giant octopus, fiend of the deep and shadow creature of the walking consciousness.

Why do I feel so lonely in my love of the wild lands beneath and beyond this waking world? I know plenty of others share it. But we are the minority, still, the ones who would actually choose to make modern life simple so that others may simply live. Especially when those others include the ugly and uncommercial creatures, the unproductive lands being flattened for new housing estates, the quiet streams and silent atmosphere we are drowning with our disastrous dream of unending plenty.

I recently wrote about the utopian desires of mainstream society here; next up, I should respond with an ecotopian vision that satisfies the kinds of criteria i’ve mentioned here, about the otherworld of life that lures us beyond our urban confines and reminds us that we are part of nature. And there’ll be no apologies if it sounds outrageous, radical, unconventional or shocking. Because accepting the current consensus reality means missing everything beautiful about the forests, the mountains, the underwater and upriver worlds that continue to draw our romantic imaginations forward and challenge the stupid and selfish that holds so much sway in the human spirit today.

Rolly Rooster – live

Rolly Rooster is a song by the Severins (Anderson, Berry, Bruce, Wilson).

You can hear it on Soundcloud here

And these are my lyrics (along with the insanely surreal one line chorus coined live by bass player Richard Anderson):

They’re selling you back your souls

In plastic wrappers

with the colourful logos

Of the corporate elite

(And their sacred profit motive)

[Chorus: Your name is Rolly Rooster]

They’re selling you back your souls

In plastic wrappers

And they’re going cheap.

[Live improvisation: this version =

They’re going to help you feel so beautiful,

They’re going to make you get it on

Making you feel wonderful, they’re gonna …

Give you everything, you’ve been dreaming about,

In those hollow moments when the darkness sits

Beside your soul]

[Chorus: Your name is Rolly Rooster]

They’re selling you back your souls

In plastic wrappers

with the colourful logos

Of the corporate elite

And their sacred profit motive

They’re selling you back your souls,

They’re selling you back your love,

They’re selling you back your labour

[Live improvisation: this version =

You’re buying back yourself,

You’re buying back yourself …]

Prometheus, Epimetheus & Pandora – does technology offer us hope?

The name Prometheus means forethought; clever, always thinking and one step ahead, inventive and creative, solving problems people didn’t even know they had yet.

Prometheus, imagined by Heinrich Fueger, 1817

By contrast, the Titan’s brother Epimetheus stands for afterthought; accepting what comes and reflecting upon it later, passive in the face of forces beyond his understanding, slow to react and seemingly simple for this.

But perhaps the positive and negative values we have ascribed to these two characters from Greek mythology need to be reversed in the face of climate change. Prometheus defends we poor humans with the gift of fire, and while this helped gather our cultures around a common power we could hardly imagine ourselves without, it has also led to coal powered electrical stations, oil fuelled cars (way too many of them), and the general problem of greenhouse gases out of control in the atmosphere. We love fire – and the power it grants us – to death. The whole project of ever-increasing technology follows this Promethean path towards devastating ecocidal behaviours.

Meanwhile, Epimetheus sits forlorn alongside Pandora, his beautiful gift of womanhood from the gods, whom he accepted against his smarter brother’s advice. She, out of pure curiosity, has slammed shut by now that gift that set upon us all the poxes and plagues that affect humanity. Like so many Greek myths, it is a patriarchal warning against the hubris and foolishness of ‘men.’ Women are the ultimate deadly enemy in this strange, unbalanced vision; while only hope, the one thing that we need the most, failed to escape this deadly gift from the higher realms.

But perhaps we are more like him – the dumb brother, the slow one – after all. And maybe, more controversially, we should aspire to be! All the things that come with nature – being born into a body that suffers and dies, living amongst creatures that can eat you, being exposed to the difficulties of social interactivity – should be our lot. We should be more at home with this receiving of life and not constantly trying to escape it into denatured fantasies of a world on purely human (let alone masculine) terms. Will more inventions save us? I don’t think so. Would more patience and acceptance help us to accept that we need to change, to slow down, to embrace the cyclical nature of life and love and loss and the pain – and gain – that comes with this? I suspect it would.

Pandora with her box (originally jar), John William Waterhouse, 1896

And maybe that hope left in Pandora’s box is in fact the last and greatest gift, kept secure in her chest, saved by the same doltish, fumbling response as we saw with Epimetheus. Afterthought, more slow witted than the inventor and thief but also ready thereafter to reignite the heart, even when it is with the only thing we have left … hope. Perhaps it was meant to stay locked in, where it could survive the insane growth fetish that leaves us precariously balanced now at the edge of our ecocidal plunge into the next ‘great’ extinction event.

Perhaps Epimetheus is the hero after all, in his less impressive, more passive way. Certainly he speaks to the present moment better than his cleverer, thrill seeking, formerly helpful brother. And as Ernst Bloch saw, hope lights the way to a more deeply satisfied human heart and soul more surely than technology, any day.

‘Open Systems,’ chemical threat, the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and sunshine

When I was a high school student in chemistry class, our teacher told us the difference between an open and a closed system. When we performed an experiment in a sealed container, it was a closed system. When it was exposed to the atmosphere, it was an open system. I knew instinctively and immediately that the scientific mindset had a serious problem, because what it was trying to say to us was that if our chemical experiment escaped into the atmosphere it was no longer to be considered as part of the experiment; the data no longer counts, the findings are lost… forget it and start again. But what about the chemicals, i wondered? Isn’t the earth itself a closed system? This was before i’d read Silent Spring and learnt about how exactly such things do matter. I recognised in my naive but accurate way that we are responsible for what we do, what things we mix together, what we spill and dismiss.

Likewise, then, what goes on in the ‘closed system’ remains problematic. Goodness knows what horrible experiments are being undertaken right now in the name of profit and the twin utopian dream of the dominant paradigm for immortal youth and eternal power. Once some of that stuff is released, we certainly do find out about the mechanics of an ‘open system,’ as the new chemicals infect all manner of life forms with their poisons, as well as bringing benefits. So often we deal in Frankenstinean forces, which are initially designed to ‘pour a torrent of light into this dark world’ (Shelley) but thereafter hold us in thrall to their power, evolving quickly from being a ‘slave’ designed to serve us into becoming a master of the situation, as we chase our tails to fix the many problems we have created.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice comes to mind, shattering each broomstick in an attempt to stop the demonic power only to see a new set of two appear out of the split. Ironic that this is exactly the kind of dark, watery feminine monster Hercules tortured into submission in the swamps of Lerna; the Hydra too sprang a new head out of each wound, until the ‘hero’ cheated with the aid of his companion in order to guillotine the central, immortal head and cauterise the wound so that nothing new could grow there. It should be remembered that the deathless power of the sacred feminine, feared as monstrous by the Olympian/Hellenic corporation, is held in place in its shallow grave by a mere rock. It takes a very powerful story to maintain this kind of murderous brutality as a norm; and we’ve got one, with patriarchal profiteering.

From another end of the spectrum, the earth as a closed system, which must deal with every new molecule and chemical and weapon we invent upon it and spread within its atmosphere, is also an open system when it comes to the forces of the galaxy. Solar energy enters the planetary atmosphere and fosters growth, enables our home to resist the entropy that sees all life eventually fade back into the cosmos out of which it arose. Light does create life, in combination with certain chemical processes and base line ingredients. All of which were provided by bursting stars, originally. Shine on.

We all want to be lords & ladies

Have you ever noticed that most people who mention a past life experience or memory believe they were someone important or glamorous? There are not too many reports of those believing they were a muck raking peasant, that’s for sure. And this tendency towards association with royal blood can make things easy for critics of the whole idea of past lives.

But there’s another aspect to it, which I think deserves further reflection. Why not? Or rather, what is so surprising about us identifying – even through the idea of another incarnation – with a feeling of power and prestige?

It seems to me a neat way of giving voice to that part of ourselves that remembers that this is the way we were supposed to feel about life. Filled with exultation at the opportunity to live as conscious, self aware and embodied beings on a beautiful planet in a star studded universe full of wonders. Rich beyond compare, just in our breathing and movement and love and imagination. Powerful and capable of changing the way we think, the way we act, the very nature of our being and even of our world.

We are all lords and ladies, pulled out of this recognition by a society that equates such qualities with hierarchy and capital. But we are that society and we can change it back, away from this limiting fascination with power as domination and riches as toys, and towards our birth right – that other life where we know our inner wealth and almost unlimited potential.

What is ‘the rest of nature’?

I’ve come to use this phrase ‘the rest of nature’ a lot and there is a reason for that. There’s a lot of ongoing discussion about the dividing line between ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ – about how we fit into the world but somehow sit outside of it too. It all starts when we recognise that a big part of the ecological crisis comes about because individuals within urban civilization identify themselves as being so distinct from the rest of nature.

An older-fashioned argument might take this up as ‘the divide between humanity and nature,’ but thanks to continuously advancing work in ecophilosophical disciplines we know that this kind of language actually maintains the division. So, there’s humanity and there’s nature – separate? Isn’t that part of the problem?

But what to do? Some argue that we should dispense with the term ‘nature’ altogether. But i think this misses two important opportunities:

One, so many people relate to the word and that way it represents so many things they really want to protect from the rapacious appetites of ruthless transnational corporations, and their opinions and potential political power are so important to any widespread resistance to the ecological crisis, that it seems a shame to set them outside the debate by dispensing with the term ‘nature’ altogether.

And two, as one of those people in both camps (ie romantic tree-hugging member of the public and academically trained ecophilosopher), i want to underscore the difference between the way human beings have shaped their way of being in nature and the way the rest of nature lives (and dies). In the 21st century, humanity is consolidating a global colonisation that puts all life on earth at risk (apart, apparently, from cockroaches and viruses, those hardy little buggers). We increasingly do this in huge hives called cities, which suck the life out of surrounding countrysides and seas, draw enormous reserves of fresh water in and send equally vast amounts of waste out, while we demand evergreater technologies of domination and bigger and better displays of wealth and prestige all the time. Even as we know the grids of our cities are destroying the rest of nature, projections for the near future predict continually increasing appetites (especially for power, which will still be largely provided by fossil fuels) around the world.

This is not the nature i want to protect. I want to work for the rest of nature. The loggerhead turtles that walk into probable death on city streets because the lights lure them away from the full moon, which used to seduce them siren-like into the ocean that would be their home. [Answer: effective downlighting for such situations is available] The forests that keep so many countless other creatures alive and prospering [log only sustainable forests and replant them with diverse trees not monocultures], the fresh water that almost every living thing wants to drink [stop fracking everywhere], the fresh air [drastically reduce carbon emissions now], the stuff that doesn’t conform to the gridlike thinking that may be part of nature but certainly doesn’t work well with the rest of it and which – when we don’t escape the cities and actually breathe some real fresh air and see some stars at night and recognise where our food and water comes from – exacerbates our division from it and does not promote creative thinking about how precious actual trees and fish and insects and wetlands really are …

Without appreciation of the rest of nature, we become dry and caged in the nature of the cities and we all too readily accept the dominant story of human colonisation, as well as the associated story of how bad we are and how we need more lights and police and laws to keep the danger away.

By using these terms, by talking about human cultures and the rest of nature, i want to keep this usually unspoken stuff in mind, the stories that are always sitting just behind the everyday realities of modern urban life, the ones that acknowledge that there is us humans and ‘the rest of nature’: the other stuff we so often like to think we are separate from but that we actually rely upon (like soil and fresh water and air and trees and plants and other creatures).

And also the stuff we aren’t actually dependent upon for life but need to appreciate if we want to live fully. Like stars. Just looking at them.

Finally, a mention of ‘inner nature,’  the part of us that is nature but that is also both physical and spiritual (or free of the dictates of biology, the mind, our imaginations and our souls), the part that cannot be located, but can also be programmed to receive the dominant paradigm via our internalisation of the model. If the soul is truly a mirror of the world – and vice versa – i want mine to look like it loves the rest of nature, as well as what is within and distinctly human.

City Lights From Above – We Are Bleeding Fuel

Flying home to Australia, i spent a bit of time looking out at the surface of our planet from the sky, as i always do when flying. (Yup, i know this international flitting about is part of the problem of excessive fossil fuel usage and i’ll come back to it later.) Because of the flight path and cloud cover, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to observe the landscape, by day or night. But landing in Melbourne before dawn meant that i finally had a moment to dwell upon the city lights after which this site is named. And there i was reminded of two images that accompany the sight of so much artificial light, dotted in grids and curves and extending out from our city centres to cover the land more each year.

One image is that of the humble campfire, which prompts me to reflect upon each light of the city as if it is like a symbolic flame around which people warm their hands, keep the darkness of the night at bay, allow us to see each other and feel a bit safer and cook and stay warm and converse. This stands whether the actual lights seen from above line a street, illuminate a factory or glow from a house window – they all help to fulfil part of the same set of functions.

The other image that comes to mind is not so conducive to homilies about the timeless human spirit and communal values. Because each electric light is also a contained fire, an ingeniously crafted combustion of fossil fuels that we have become so used to commanding that each example is another open wound in our ecological relations on this planet. We are bleeding fuel because of our love affair with contained fire.

We know how to suck up the dark fuel from the ground and ignite it in safe, confined hollow tubes of glass and we warm ourselves at the flame. We can virtually reproduce daylight at night, granting almost unlimited extra time to work and play, and we have quickly come to assume that this is our right. I suppose it’s pretty much the same for any invention; new technology becomes naturalised and in no time at all we can hardly remember living without it. But what do we do when we realise it is killing us and so many of our fellow creatures?

I’ve travelled enough to know i’ve burnt my fair share of aviation fuel. George Monbiot, in Heat, claimed that international flight was one of the few problems that couldn’t be solved in terms of creatively rethinking the way we deal with the carbon costs of modern life. Yet Michel Serres, in Angels, saw that same industry as a messenger of the gods, bringing loved ones together from all over the world in a sign that some of the magic of modern technology could still outweigh the costs. (Serres also wrote the impressive Natural Contract, asking for a new way of thinking the culture/nature balance.)

The campfires are getting bigger and spreading further afield from each original space of settlement, covering the land with cement and steel, bitumen and pipelines and the structure of civilisation. The developing world is claiming such facts of life for their own. And while we huddle around our magical new form of light, the world burns, in a new way. We’ve touched the fire and are touched by it – and we cannot seem to stop. This fascination is already burning us back but we control the way this story is told and our creativity is threatening to kill us and so much more with it. The mirror is alight.

Zen and Earth Spirit at the City Walls

“Does it make you feel safe?” Earth Spirit asks Zen, as they sit staring at the wall that marks the limit of the city.

“From what?” asks Zen.

“From the rest of nature. From the marauding hordes.”

“What I see is a division of space, between here and the other side of the wall.”

“But this side is within the city, that side without. Do you not recognize the political significance of this division upon your body and mind?”

Zen was unusually loquacious I response to Earth Spirit’s inquisitiveness. “I can. But it makes no significant difference to me. Sure, within I may enjoy certain privileges, or protections, as you intimate. But without, I may forego them without necessarily losing anything. The advantage of being inside the city walls is accompanied, surely, by a set of obligations – to be a part of the maintenance of order, to pay tax – which makes the outside relatively free.”

“Indeed,” responded Earth Spirit, “you strike to the heart of the matter. In political terms, and where inclusion or exclusion does not connote some form of punishment or structural inequity as it sometimes does, you may balance the ledger thus. But what of the rest of nature? What of the world outside of the human?”

Zen wasn’t sure what point was being made here and hummed politely.

“Have you been to the supermarket lately, Zen?” asked Earth Spirit rhetorically, before going on. “Inside the city walls, we feast on seemingly endless streams of produce. The shelves are always full of a startling array, no matter what the season. And at home? Fresh water always on tap, literally, even in the driest summer drought. On the streets, the lights are always on, even if nobody is around and even when we know we’re burning coal to banish the night and pumping carbon into the air as a result. The economy of perpetual growth continues unabated, even though we know we’ve already overshot the earth’s carrying capacity. The cities grow at three times the rate of population growth, draining evermore of the planet’s resources, while the cumulative effects of this catastrophe are soaked up in the 24/7 white noise of throwaway mass media pop culture and news cycles. Most members of advanced economies enjoy an unearned sense of entitlement in regards to all of this, while the laws of consumption and profit continue to sponsor clearfelling of forests, strip mining, crops drenched in poison and the devastation of every biosystem we find outside the city walls where profit can be made.”

Zen was silent. Earth Spirit looked excited and exasperated, deflated by his effort to compact the entire Big Problem into a few concentrated images. The glint in his eye, which almost always accompanied his cynical, almost sardonic destruction of the ills and seeming advantages of civilization, was suppressed by his realization at how desperate things had become.

The wall remained silent as its shadow inched closer to their feet and the afternoon wore away. A fly buzzed by.

Zen composed himself. This being a habit of his, it didn’t tax his resources very much. It was being true to his emotional life he found trying. But years of practice had taught him that being any state at all held exactly the same amount of reality as any other – that they all pass, as the rule of impermanence states – and this knowledge seemed enhanced by the very wall they faced now, both physically and symbolically. “If this walls divides one truth from another,” he began, “it is illusory and its seeming concreteness can be easily dissolved. If it guarantees plenty within at the cost of unnecessary suffering without it is a symbol of selfish greed, a testament to unrestrained desire, an emblem of attachment that distracts from the greater truth – and therefore it must be dissolved, in terms of an inherently unequal system at least.”

“I thought there was no greater truth?” asked Earth Spirit, wanting to embrace Zen’s seeming endorsement of his embodied politics but not at the cost of hypocrisy or ideological contradiction.

“There is a greater self, that is everywhere,” said Zen. “The truth of my life here in this body and time – which is itself a compact with the endless eons of cosmic expanse and genetic inheritance that have led to this point, a dance between all that has happened on this earth and all the possibilities inherent in my present and future – is connected, through my food, water, fuel and other goods and services, to the places they come from and go to after I have benefitted from them. My health and life are owed to those places. I would not want to harm them, or know that harm would come to them, simply for the benefit of this mind and body I identify as the me that is speaking. That would be short-sighted and selfish and so, ultimately, self-defeating. I repeat: if the wall is illusory and damaging to all concerned, it must be dissolved so that a new arrangement can be made between the partners of life on this earth.”

Earth Spirit was touched by this level of accord between the two of them. He reached out and patted Zen’s shoulder. “Well done old fella,” he said. They walked away from the shadows of the wall towards their respective homes, to a greater truth of fresh water and food, clean air and cooperative agreements amongst all beings. But as they parted, Earth Spirit added an invitation, almost ominously, to Zen: “We’ve got to go and see Eve…”

 

Symbolism, Art, Culture, Nature

‘From Van Gogh to Kandinsky; Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910’

Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh

There is this tension threaded throughout European thought between the desire to know things as they are and to understand the forces behind them. The first seeks to benefit from scientific, rational, objective analysis and know the world as it is, in its physical properties, free of mystical taint or superstitious nonsense, while the second wants to know better the way things feel, what motivates them, what lies in the mysterious depths behind surface realities. The Symbolist movement, which became influential in the late nineteenth century, reacted against the way scientific rationalism had begun to reduce the world to its facts, to what could be observed and quantified, and instead sought to represent life with art that radiated meaning.

‘Clytie’, Leighton, 1892

In ‘Clytie’ (1892), Lord Leighton Frederic painted the myth of Clytia, from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but in this rendition the lovelorn girl is not yet turned into a sunflower, destined to face her god Apollo every day. Instead she sits in the shadows of a hill at dawn, awaiting the sunrise and its glory. Frederic himself knew something of this yearning, it would seem from his words: “Sunlight can never be accessory – its glory is paramount.” Golden clouds, filled with the promise of light, roil above the still dim land and her silent waiting. The Arcadian world of nature could embrace us, even in death, so that human frailty and mortality could find its place in a greater reality.

Van Gogh ‘Wheatfield with a Reaper’ 1889

When Van Gogh painted his ‘Wheatfield with a Reaper’ in 1889, he wrote in a letter that he sensed the possibility of such reconciliation (even as his mental and physical health was failing him). G F Watts’s ‘After the Deluge; the 41^st Day’ (1885-86) similarly makes the sun significant as a symbol of rebirth into a world refreshed after trauma, while J F Willumsen’s ‘Sun over the Southern Mountains’ (1902) lights up the city below as if it were a place where life was saturated in abundance. Philosophies of vitalism, the healing power of nature and the spiritual possibilities of humanity abounded and the Symbolists brought them to life in vividly impressive colour.

Watts ‘After the Deluge; the 41st Day’ 1885-86

Willumsen ‘Sun over Southern Mountains’ 1902

To say it was not all visions of splendour would be an understatement, however. At the same time, many Symbolists made extensive use of sombre, dark tones that explicitly spoke of a tragic, wasteful end to civilisation as we know it. The city was often characterised as a site of disease, corruption, squalor and death, and in the exhibition these paintings are matched with musical Nocturnes that share a similar mood of melancholy (by Debussy, Chopin and Whistler, for instance). Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem ‘The Isle of the Dead’ matches perfectly the sense of loss featured in this section of the exhibition, which interestingly features the city as an empty place of silence (like a dark reflection of Wordworth’s London before it is filled with the noise of the day) rather than as a place of chaotic destruction. This is the sense of foreboding that sent Gauguin to his beloved tropical islands, visiting indigenous societies as a way of reconnecting with nature and communicating his love of simplicity in his naïve and sophisticated manner.

The recognition of humanity’s smallness can confer either a freedom to be lived or a threat to be blotted out and this is another tension featured in this collection.  The symbol, like myth, can convey something particular to a certain person or time, yet it can also transcend that specificity. It acts to suggest certain moods, which often lead beyond the bounds of reason, or even the senses as they are conventionally understood. It can be completely open to interpretation but convey a definite atmosphere; it transgresses and blurs yet points towards, offers hope, or acts as a warning. The Symbolists sought to escape the machine of industrial civilisation and its ‘iron cage of reason’ (as Weber put it), seeking surcease in timeless truths (all things must die but there can be beauty in this) and representing the quest to escape being caught up in the engine of linear progress. Some of the paintings in this exhibition seem to have been forced into line with its framework: that landscape can be treated in a way that conveys ideas as well as moods and moments in time (see Richard Dorment’s review in The Telegraph 17/09/12). But the way light is used to convey both hope and threat, while darkness can equally offer a new path into deeper mystery or the ominous menace of coming doom, made it a fascinating survey of another moment in European thought and art where the tension between culture and the rest of nature is treated with sensitivity and complexity, optimism and dread.