Mutiny

October 2023. As storm Ciaran approaches landfall we gather for an Ecological Citizenship reading group. What happens next opens into a reflection on how living through a pandemic led me to begin writing formal haiku.

Falmouth so quiet

a dunnock’s take-off startles

the dry leaflitter

We open with a passage by John Michael Greer that ponders the difference between a problem and a predicament. What use would it have been to the inhabitants of an English midlands village in the early 1800s, Greer muses, if they could somehow have been made aware of the all-encompassing processes of change that were even then bearing down on them? Changes which would within a few decades obliterate their community, their culture and livelihoods, their very sense of who they were. Like those villagers, Greer suggests, we too “may turn out to have less problems than we think, as so many of them turn out to be in fact not problems at all, but predicaments”.

Then we turn to Katie Teague’s short film Living in the Metacrisis with Jonathon Rowson. Having seen it a couple of times already, it surprises me how viscerally the film affects me. The obscure relief of having one’s experience seen and named. Or is it glimpsing a way to slip the deadlock grip of overwhelm? Either way it feels both instructive and quite funny to then discover that others find Rowson’s take on metacrisis pompous, long-winded and annoying. One woman exclaims in frustration ‘Who is this meant to be for?’. Me, apparently.

Somewhere a small dog

announces the sun’s descent

into endless night

We begin our discussion by riffing on Bayo Akomalafe’s notion of ontological mutiny, a phrase that appeals to Rowson. Threads which unspool from here include being too pleased with our own eco-critical subtlety to recognise the growing sense of betrayal and abandonment among under 25s – and not only them – for what it is: a crucial moving part within an apparently stuck system. We speak of complexity, bluntness, rage and grief, of bearded white males in designer kitchens telling us in five-syllable words what we already know, of reading groups and what kinds of knowing they allow – versus, say, those which a dancing, ritual or civil resistance group might offer.

As our talk weaves back and forth the temperature in the room begins to drop with the light, the heating system having gone offline for some reason. Storm Ciaran blows in exactly on time, and now we have to lean in closer to catch each other’s words. We choose to leave the lights off as rain begins to thrash the windows, and a steadily growing roar takes hold in the myrtle and eucalyptus outside. As the plate glass shudders I begin to feel uneasy about the seven-mile journey home. By the time we break off that unease is shared, and my friend Bex and I take the tree-lined backroads in convoy, both of us glad of the company.

The next day we wake to a loss of power. All three roads into town now unpassable: a fallen tree, a flood, a downed cable. With my phone on 2% I learn that the power’s out across the whole region, and as it dies a few minutes later an unplanned and welcome suspension of normal routines settles over us, all connectivity beyond these four walls now paused. The little pool of quiet that day becomes recalls the furtive exultation of the first 2020 lockdown, when we wandered the centre of empty main roads and marvelled at the quiet. It also reminds me how even as that other brief, uncanny reprieve laid hold of us, a flood of real-time commentary rushed into the gap, the pandemic-wisdom offerings seeming to come faster and longer by the week. Not least from the good Akomalafe, his tentacular sentences looping ever outwards.

Black skylight. A moth’s

electrifying quiet

drumming on the glass

Our talk of mutiny the night before was mostly about what difference we might or might not make to the omnicidal entity that runaway modernity has become. In the stillness after Storm Ciaran another take on Akomalafe’s loopy phrase comes to mind: that the processes of change it speaks to aren’t ones that even require our consent, much less our willed agency.

How much of who we feel ourselves to be is mediated, now, by the pervasive digital web that’s so thoroughly enclosed our lives? Not what we think about or dream about or worry about or shout about, but the bought-and-sold realm within which almost all of this now happens – within which we happen. Turn off the power for a day and here we are, marooned on familiar, half-forgotten ground. A bored dog, candlelight by 6pm. My bed-ridden partner looking for a novel to fill the digital hole in her day. Unable to reach friends or even to read, now, because candles won’t do for reading.

Ever since the pandemic – or especially since the pandemic – this gathering wave of connectivity. Struggling to even remember life before apps. And underlying all these enriching, congruent exchanges, a more basic energy-voracious proliferation, feeding and feeding on an insatiable appetite for meaningful connection. Consumers of meaning, as Vanessa Andreotti will put it later, helping to name the obscure, self-contradictory nausea that began to take hold of me back in 2020, arriving like an uninvited guest who then refuses to leave: a deepening sense of pointlessness – the pointlessness of adding to the ever-growing noise with yet another essay, argument, thought piece. Like this.

Swimming air, swimming

stars, three gulls pass in silence

over Orion

In the pause after Storm Ciaran I think of my friend Matthew, coming to terms with the news of an inoperable tumour deep in his brain. Matthew now facing a difficult and unpredictable procedure to remove whatever can be removed. About 40%, he tells me. The financial unravelling this heralds for a New Yorker of modest means. Matthew likens the place he finds himself to aquaplaning, an idea which seems to rhyme with that queasy sense of mutiny Akomalafe speaks of. Come unstuck, we slide away from the foreseeable,  consequences immanent but not yet arrived, a lurch in the pit of our stomach as what comes next rises in the path of what we’ve become.

Recalling Akomalafe’s musings about AI: how he’d be more curious about a machine’s intelligence if it were to one day falter before a question, finding itself suddenly lost for words. Recalling the American painter Morris Graves, finally turning aside from all those elegant spiritual metaphors, to gaze at flowers – ordinary, actual flowers – until he died. Tired of the blat of it all was how he put it. Recalling Richard Wright, the great black American novels already behind him as his last illness took hold, finding himself unable to finish anything, now, except more and more of those damned haiku.

Those damned, sweet haiku. Recalling again that brief reprieve in 2020 when everything and nothing slowed to a stop, and all that was left was this pared down, boundless little game. Looking and counting, looking and counting. Fiddling with syllables as we wander the body of God. The rest of it gradually faltering, lapsing into silence. Like this.

Sources

The Love of Nature & The End of the World: the unspoken dimensions of environmental concern, Shierry Weber Nicholsen (2003), MIT Press

Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality, Aníbal Quijano (2007), Cultural Studies #21

The Forest and the Field: changing theatre in a changing world, Chris Goode (2014), Oberon Books, encountered in:

At Work in the Ruins: finding our place in the time of climate change, science, pandemics and all the other emergencies, Dougald Hine (2023), Chelsea Green