The Wipe Board

In April 2014 I arrived at the threshold of a practice-led PhD. My proposed project borrowed a phrase from the eco-philosopher David Abram: ‘cultural recuperation’. I had a vague plan in mind to make pictures and poems which spoke to a widespread contemporary re-imagining of the spiritual, understood here as an undirected and largely unmapped process of cultural recuperation in the face anthropogenic mass-extinction.

By the end of summer 2014 my resolve to address ecological collapse through an ‘art-led research project’ had foundered, despite the green light I’d been given by the Graduate School. I’ve been left with the puzzle, ever since, of what it was that so abruptly sucked the wind out my sails, leaving me with a humiliating yet somehow utterly non-negotiable inability to continue, just when all had seemed to going well.

There’d been signs, I think, if I’d wanted to listen. Little tells that linger in memory the way a dream continues to offer up new layers of meaning, decades afterwards. Here’s one. The night I posted the first PhD fees-instalment, my left hand – the hand I’d used to drop the envelope into the post box at the end of our road – began to swell up. By morning the hand was covered in hives and its reddened skin had begun to weep. The hives dispersed after a month or so, but that reddening hand has remained a barometer of internal weather ever since, swelling hot and leaky when the internal contradictions begin to overspill.

Another memory invested with dream-like resonance: the day I understood that I wasn’t going to follow this project through. A fidgety, brisk academic was demonstrating to a roomful of us aspiring PhDs how this business of ‘contributing to knowledge’ works. He took a red dry marker and drew a large, loose circle on the room’s plastic wipe-board. Then he wiped away and redrew a tiny portion of its rim, nudging the circumference outwards just here, to create one tiny little dent.

Here we each were, then, edging back the frontier of ignorance as we hammered out our own little contributions to knowledge. Tap tap. My mind was wandering, maybe, because what began to absorb me was the empty white space inside that expanding circle. As I imagined its continued outward spread, swelling ever larger as the dominant culture’s knowledge hoard continues to grow, the pattern intrinsic to its omnicidal escalation came back to me like a caption that needed to be added beneath that loosely scrawled circle.

Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.

However we choose to respond to it, Derrick Jensen’s blunt maxim summarises the irrefutable natural history of that dominant culture. What’s proceeded in close step with its global proliferation is a deepening silence, as industrialised modernity\coloniality has progressively wiped Earth clean of her abundant more-than-human communities of life. Over 98% of American old growth forest gone since the arrival of European settlers. Since I was five, 68% of Earth’s already depleted wild mammalian life*, gone. Over the same period 75% of the insects gone – and that’s before we get to dying oceans. Taken in the round, there’s surely no recuperation at hand in the face of this relentless devastation other than grief. Than grieving.

As my mind loitered along some such morose track, now fully dissociated from what we’d come here to learn about, I caught myself entertaining a particularly ridiculous hope. If climate-driven societal collapse were to come about as soon as I kept reading that it might, then at least I wouldn’t have to go through with this fucking PhD. Sitting in that airless Bristol seminar room a second thought arrived, hard on the heels of the first. Might it not be better, then, to take responsibility for this decision myself, and leave the Great Dying to its own obscure schedule?

A decade later, here I am. Not exactly back, having never really left the room. Overwhelmed by this stuff now just as I was then. But also trying to work out what’s changed, because it seems that something’s changed. Even my left hand’s doing fine.

And I think I’ve worked out where to begin this now. Which is to say, to begin this again. Suppose finding yourself paralysed or dissociated in the face of mass extinction wasn’t the obstacle I took it for, as I sat there staring miserably at that wipe board? If you’re not overwhelmed by this stuff, as they say, you’re probably not paying attention. Meanwhile here we are, a mass extinction still gathering pace around us, with time on our hands. One way or another, each of us trying and failing, trying and failing, to offer our best answer to the same unavoidable question: How to use that time well?

*[Edit] In the two years since I re-commenced this project that figure has been revised to a 73% loss of wild mammalian life.