Tactics for the Season
All of this is spelt by stars...
Image description: A long neon sign in rainbow colours spelling out, in block capitals, ‘ALL OF THIS IS SPELT BY STARS’, but THIS has been crossed out and replaced with XMAS. Foreground is snowy, walked on ground. Image is of a poem by Mark Robinson, neon by Neon Workshop, part of Stellar Projects Nightfall 21 project.
Welcome
This is a Christmas/end of the year bonus newsletter: a tiny selection box as a thank you to you, dear reader. (And a show-off perhaps, like any Xmas newsletter.) No one wants a chapter extract as they prepare for Christmas, especially under current circumstances. (Although the title of Chapter Six, The Welcoming Space, would have lent itself to the season.)
As always you can listen to what’s here either here or using the widget-thing below.
Tactics
One of the songs I’ve listened to most this year is ‘I’m Not My Season’ by Fleet Foxes, from their 2020 album Shore. It is also featured on the beautiful live-in-a-church-in-lockdown album, A Very Lonely Solstice, which has just been released. You can see a video of that performance above.
The lines in the chorus, “Well, time’s not what I belong to/And I’m not the season I’m in’ have echoed through the year depending on what the world, work and virus have been throwing my way. I’ve found it reassuring to remember that the moment, be it good or bad, anxiety or elation, satisfaction or frustration, something clicking into place or something grinding like a dodgy gear box, is part of the flow of life. No next moment without this one. This absolutely relates somehow to my acceptance of the adaptive cycle and the need to nurture a kind of engaged and energetic calm through both resistance and rest. I’m not claiming to achieve that too often, but it’s what I find most productive, and what I see often in those I most admire.
The line “The old wrenches hardly turn me” also sums up much of my reflection on this last year of Thinking Practice. It’s been a very busy year, and a good one in all sorts of ways, trying to serve some brilliant people in their missions. I’m often a bloke who cain’t say no, but more so this year than ever, as I could see the need in a sector trying to reset and rebalance in choppy waters, and the need for reflecting on what was working and how, in order to find better ways. I’ve connected to and learnt from lots of projects doing inspiring work with others during Covid, connecting communities, artists, freelancers, neighbours, friends. Sometimes they put other words on it - civic, isolation, ageing, socially engaged, regeneration even, again, - but at root what most compels me to work with someone is the way they connect to others as creative equals, as human beings with complex needs and cultures, every last awkward one of them.
There has been a need this year to find new ways of doing things, of looking differently at the old problems littering the shore as the tide seemed to recede from 2020. I’ve worked in different ways: most notably, of course, writing an actual old-fashioned big book. (There’s going to be more of that kind of reimagining next year.)
At times that’s led to a lot of muscle-ache and tiredness in my brain. I have not lived up to my exhortations to keep some slack for myself. (Note to self and anyone else to whom it may be useful: getting up at 5am to fit everything in is not using available slack, it is a deficit, an unauthorised overdraft in the Time Budget.)
The idea of slack feels even harder to consider this week, as Omicron has thrown hospitality (where I learnt to get up at 5am) and the arts (where I’ve worked ever since) into chaos again. So many people having to cancel things, feeling imperilled and unsupported again. The point here being it is the lack of support that puts businesses at risk, not simply viruses or other people.
You cannot be resilient alone, as I have said many times this year. It is exhausting to keep going back to core purpose and work from there. But if you can’t go on, what can you do but go on, to echo Samuel Beckett?
It helps to have companions as you go on, either close by or who you know are out there in other parts of the forest, working on the same mission. That’s what I see people draw on even in the most anxious moments, such as this fresh season of cancellations and doubt. I’m not going to list the people I’ve worked with, by and for this year, but it’d be a good list, it makes me happy and grateful to think of what those people are trying to do and the trust they show in me. (I’ve loved doing talks about Tactics for the Tightrope with many of the people I admire - you can look at my events listings to work out who some of them are.) Nor am I going to list where I’ve been, albeit virtually: trust me, you’d think I was Red Wall Under-Minister for Levelling Up No4…. If you think we’re on the same journey in any way: thank you.
I do want to especially thank Annabel Turpin and Gavin Barlow, co-leads of Future Arts Centres, for their backing for Tactics and support of me through the process. You can still make them happier by buying the book.
Some recommendations
I can’t resist the temptation to make some recommendations of a few books I’ve loved this year - they may not all have been published in 2021 but they were part of this year’s experience for me.
Music: My Rock ‘n’ Roll Friend by Tracey Thorn - the story of her friendship with Lindy Morrison of The Go-Betweens and of how women get written out of Rock History. (See BBC 4 on almost every Friday Night for further evidence.) Funny, heart-felt, moving - even as a Go-Bs fan forever, I learnt a lot and it made me rethink a lot.
Poetry: The Wreck of the Fathership by W.N. Herbert - this has just grown and grown in my mind every time I’ve picked it up this year. I can’t do justice to the way it combines the personal and the political in a range of inventive and - whisper it - entertaining ways: just search it out.
Novel: The Mermaid of Black Conch by Monique Roffey - this won lost of prizes in 2020 and deservedly so - it is literally about a mermaid but so brilliantly done I didn't stop to doubt her existence once. Also fierce and sharp on race relations.
Cultural thinking: two related books here… The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart is an amazing set of prose poems - that also serve as cultural criticism and cultural theory. Each piece has a 100 words - or a multiple of that - and footnotes. The book also includes a set of responses, one of which is by Fred Moten, which led to me reading The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, a discovery for which I’m really grateful.
What I loved about The Undercommons is that theory is practical and rooted in day to day resistance that is unapologetic and joyous. They talk about ‘the right to refuse what has been refused to you’ in a way I find challenging and energising, and which helped me understand some of my own refusals, past and present. As they suggest in these quotations, there is another world beneath this one, which cannot be accessed by simple repossession:
‘The point is: it’s fucked up here, how can we think about it in a way to help us organize ourselves to make it better here?... it struck us that this is what workers who are also thinkers have always been trying to understand. How come we can’t be together and think together in a way that feels good, the way it should feel good?…
That the insidious thing, this naturalisation of misery, the belief that intellectual work requires alienation and immobility and that the ensuing pain and nausea is a kind of badge of honour… Enjoyment is suspect, untrustworthy, a mark of illegitimate privilege or of some kind of sissified refusal to look squarely into the fucked up face of things which is, evidently, something you can only do in isolation….
I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refusal of the academy of misery.’
Hindsight
Image: small violet neon sign reading ‘Vault the far ends of vision!’, in front of green bushes and ground covered in brown leaves.
One of the highlights of this year was being commissioned by Stellar Projects to write some poetry to form or inspire light works at their Nightfall event earlier this month. I also commissioned a poem from Kirsten Luckins, and then worked with Kirsten to commission stories from Lisette Auton and Carmen Marcus, all on the event’s theme of ‘stellar rainbows’. You can read all the work in an anthology on the Nightfall website, and also find activities relating to Lisette’s brilliant story.
You can see one of the pieces in the image at the top of this newsletter - adapted for Xmas obviously. This was originally the title of a poem that people walked through with each line a small light piece, as show just above. It was a kind of exhortation to life, after a period of darkness.
The longest poem, Hindsight, was an attempt to address the theme and create a moment of post-lockdown reflection. The installation featuring the last of seven stanzas came almost at the end of the procession visitors made through the park, and is shown below.
Image: Dark woodland scene, with trees lit in reds, yellow, violet, with red line leading to white ‘board’ with last stanza of poem Hindsight.
Here it is in its entirety. Although it’s not a seasonal poem as such, I did write it conscious of when people might experience it at the event, as the year drew to a close, so I’ll let it have the last word. I hope you have a restful and safe time before we see what the next seasons bring. HINDSIGHT Known only to the crane, the drone And the pilot hunting a soft landing Right by its furthest reach, A place never touched or left alone, Further and dustier than a star, Every rainbow is secretly a circle, Were we far enough away to see. The bow from which the arrow flies, That joins the dots and worlds And bridges night and day, Ourselves and those we’ve yet to join, Is one step from perfect, always Bending towards something better, Were we far enough away to see. The long arc is slow but makes rain stop. We cannot touch the possibilities, Each star already cracked to let life in, Its blues and golds and greens Dimmed to orange then red to cool Colour into tonight, and tomorrow, Were we far enough away to see. Where the rainbow ends the land forms, Villages, towns, cities, worlds grow, Families, gangs, bands and fellowships, All the polyphonic shapes of identity Assume their place in the dance, To shift from flat earth’s rhythm, Were we far enough away to see. Your night’s colours overlap mine, Even as we stand side by side. They shift with the angle of our tears, Or how the moonlight bounces Off the ghosts in the curves of our faces, And their gestures, their waves, Were we far enough away to see. This year the rainbows twinned in glory Triplet branches into every corner, Set muted hues to hunt in shadows Till we can bear to look no longer. And then the moon comes out, fresh As milk, as snow on a bin-lid, Were we far enough away to see. And all the colours are a little harder To pin down as they stream towards us, A rainbow caught only with luck, Bright, bold, playful, nameless and full Of what the naked eye knows only as love, Falling at the right angle, to a backdrop of rain, When we are far enough away to see.