Suspension City

Like Kai in the Snow Queen’s cage, my corner of Berlin is trapped in a late midwinter paralysis. Expected post fails to arrive. Glass and grünpunkt recycling have not been collected from my building in Prenzlauer Berg since before Christmas – which means a lot of glass has piled up. Until they were finally carted away yesterday, the bodies of obsoleted Christmas trees lined the kerbs. The streets are two thirds swept, one third still littered with scatterings of grey grit from the heavy snowfall of mid December, and with the mashed card and paper detritus of the New Year fireworks. If you’ve never experienced what goes up in Berlin on New Year’s Eve: trust me, it means a lot of firework detritus.

My first winter in Berlin was the hard Jahrhundertwinter of 2009-10; during which I learned to appreciate that routine street maintenance and waste collection go by the board in the depths of a long freeze, when keeping the pavements gritted is a much higher priority. I also learned to appreciate routine street maintenance and waste collection, which, as an unexceptional city-dweller, I otherwise take entirely for granted.

This year, though, the weather is not so intractable. From just before Christmas until last week, the temperatures were relatively mild – around 8 degrees Celcius in the daytime – and even now, back below freezing under a patchy crisp film of white, there is no accompanying repeat of heavy snowfall and ice forming, only the daily lid of motionless pale grey cloud suspended in the sky.

Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil includes a sequence about the Japanese New Year festival of Dondo-yaki, which consists in reverently collecting together and burning the debris from all the other New Year festivities. The turning of the year inevitably brings new broom feelings into life; it’s hard not to want to sweep up briskly, burn and move on, and the more the remains of the festive season past are stuck behind littering the place, the harder it is to do that.

Or so I tell myself, looking to blame the bags of packaging overflowing from the yellow dumpster in the hinterhof for the fact that it took me until January 17^th to resume what passes for normal service in my world, and that getting through these days remains an uphill drag, clenched against losing breath and losing my footing (literal and metaphorical).

As I’ve written before (ghosts of needless repetition haunt this season too), coming out of the turn of midwinter into gradually lengthening days is a good time to clarify intentions, but not necessarily to move with them. Many New Year resolutions founder – especially, I suspect, those that involve doing something physical out of doors – because energetically, at least in the northern hemisphere, this is a brutally unconducive moment for initiating change. It’s tuned rather to the Janus state: looking backwards and forwards at the same time, using the pause of slowly returning light and feeling to take stock, then allow momentum to return of its own accord.

In this frame of mind, the part-swept pavements and accumulated sekt bottles are a gentler reminder of what season we are in, than the post-New Year haste back to work, tinged with Puritan remorse, that I’m more used to from England. Back there, detox rules and discarded pine trees are whisked away efficiently by the local Council, but what lingers is a touch of regret that the celebrations must be over so soon, that the workaday world must snatch back the upper hand so insistently from the perceived threat of a nation descending into perpetual Saturnalia.

I have a recurrent reverie these days of being swept upside down and suspended. Either I am trying out a friend’s inversion table (a real device for relieving back pain, which is like a massage table with firm ankle straps and a lever for flipping the user into an inverted position and back again), or else catching one foot in a noose trap in a forest and being hoisted into the air. This is the position of the Hanged Man in the tarot deck, hung head down by one foot. I don’t dwell so much on what it’s like to have to hang there, without bearings, waiting unexpectedly for as long as it takes for the unexpected to arise, but on the moment of being swept abruptly up and away from where I thought I was, the rush of blood to the head and the reversed sudden awareness of gravity’s pull.

Looking down at the patterns of old detritus surrounding me, waiting for the momentum to arise in which I will, simply, hang; suspended.

 

Chimæras

A time of strange hybrids.

Charles Eisenstein’s reflections from the end of 2012 carry a title different in one word only from that of this blog. They help recall me to this place, and why it still matters to abide here, pausing where it is difficult, opaque, not honest to go on.

Of a new ‘Story of the People’, one to replace the narrative of reason, progress and human supremacy that is unravelling all around us, Eisenstein writes:

We are not quite ready for such a story yet, because the old one, though in tatters, still has large swathes of its fabric intact. And even when these unravel, we still must traverse the space between stories, a kind of nakedness. In the turbulent times ahead our familiar ways of acting, thinking and being will no longer make sense. We won’t know what is happening, what it all means, and, sometimes, even what is real.  

Eisenstein’s reminder, or warning, that this is not a time in which we can run confidently ahead of ourselves, into bright new understandings and fully-fledged new stories, is strongly echoed by Sharon Blackie, in a wonderful, wide-ranging conversation with Jeppe Graugaard, also from the year’s turning:

But note this: we don’t change the meta-narrative by sitting around thinking up new stories. We do it by getting out there. By not only seeing in new ways, but living in new ways. By being the subjects for those stories. More than that – by being the stories. We ARE the stories. That’s how it’s always been. It’s part of the dualism that we’ve forgotten it, that we see the transformative myths and stories as something separate from us, that we can create – simply conjure up. It makes me want to weep. It isn’t like that at all. If we approach it in that way, we’re still in the old paradigm. We’re not understanding how stories work.

Which invites many questions, one of which may be: if we are the stories, what, then, are we?

In The Book of Imaginary Beings, Borges offers us the Chimæra as described by Homer, ‘the head of a lion, belly of a she-goat, and tail of a serpent’, and as described by Hesiod, with three heads: lion, goat and dragon-serpent. A famous bronze statue of the creature by Arezzo places the goat’s head in the middle of her back, and the lion and dragon heads at her two ends. ‘Her’: for as Borges notes, ‘all concede that the beast is female’.

Of all mythical beings, there is something exceptionally preposterous about the Chimæra. Borges calls her ‘too heterogeneous’; she resists the merging of her diverse parts into a coherent hybrid animal (in contrast, for instance, to the somehow more terrifyingly plausible Sphinx). The word chimæra in English usage now refers to exceptional flights of mental fabrication, those on the dizzy rim of folly that dissipate at the merest touch of solid fact and probability.

Since the Chimæra is a marker for how far unrestrained imagination can take us in the direct of ‘what if …’; and how difficult it is then to agree upon and cohere the disparate parts that the mind’s flight can bring together, there is something to be said for re-conjuring her, a talisman for this year 2013, in which we may or may not find ourselves.

Although I have to insist that the beast is still female, if that provokes in you too great a resistance you are free to embellish your Chimæra with male attributes, or others entirely.  It is fairly certain that from one side, the limbs are rotted green and black with gangrene, while from the other, healthy newborn skin shimmers with rainbow iridescence. The tail – and spine – remain a dragon serpent; the rest you may cobble together from the most outrageous body part combinations that you can dream up  – rhinoceros, hummingbird, ibex, narwhal, sloth – as long as somewhere you include one segment of the worm that bears the phoenix, and allow for animals both extinct and genetically modified. The heart is strong enough to break, repeatedly, without dying. The sex has been violated, repeatedly, in ways I cannot bear to describe. At least one eye is full of joy, at least one ear despairs (remembering that this Chimæra has as many eyes and ears as you care to give her).

The point about this Chimæra is that we imagine her, she is all of us, and that her impossibility is more real than a story. We change into her before we change out of her.

Wishing you all whatever is needed in your worlds for the forthcoming year.

 

Serendipity, Edges and Dissolving Language-Armour: A Conversation With Jeppe Graugaard

I’m delighted and honoured that a conversation begun with my friend Jeppe Graugaard last spring, and then developed in a back-and-forth email exchange, has become a post on Jeppe’s site Pattern Which Connects.

Starting out from our mutual interests in the Dark Mountain Project, we range far and wide: through serendipity and creativity, over the edges of language and its fixities, and towards a questioning exploration of how stories of collapse can become as one-dimensional as those of progress.

We’re still in this conversation.

http://patternwhichconnects.com/blog/serendipity-edges-and-dissolving-language-armour-a-conversation-with-cat-lupton/

Have Another Pinion

‘In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be eaten. In the human kingdom, it is define or be defined. The struggle for definition is the struggle for life itself.’ – Thomas Szasz

Man. Woman. Liberal. Conservative. Economy. Environment. Right. Left. Nature. Culture. Old. New. Optimist! Pessimist!

Definitions, labels, meanings, identities. Oppositions, debates, opinions, positions.

In the hiatus of moving countries I’ve been dithering around, looking for a way of writing about my growing loss of ease with these noun-driven things. My unease, and my sense of tongue weakening; losing more of whatever fluency I might once have had in the confident business of nailing the world down here and there with the grand words of being. Sometimes the loss occupies me to the point of obsession; in day-to-day conversations, in statements and exchanges that I encounter in my reading and listening, as routine wrangles in my thoughts.

I skirt around the topic, blaming laziness and inadequacy and having just moved country; or play clever and go round and round in the dead conundrum of not being able not to define the problem. If I get any closer, a stampede of clichés thunders to mind and blocks the view. ‘The death of language’; ‘the crisis of meaning’; ‘all naming is already murder’ (the last most variously attributed to Dennis Hopper or Jacques Lacan).

Still, I keep catching the note of mounting desperation these days in whatever voice wants absolutely to insist that things must be things, and must, yes must, remain firmly under the jurisdiction of the identities which have already been prescribed for them. It’s a tone that sounds hollow whenever I knock against it, it grates and makes my spirits sag. For the so-named things are wriggling around impatiently, eager to cavort and sing outside the box, become more than a limited edition of being forged in a fading era. We’re deep into an epochal flux in which things are manifesting all around us as no longer what they seemed to be. The old words that served to bind them are dead;  the new words that will, in time, be fit to call them, are still for many just faint heartbeats from a distant incubator.

The favourite devils habit and fear, the cultural condition of impatience, the desire to keep a story straight and above all the urge to stay in control, all conspire in the brittle insistence that of course this is this, and of course that must under every circumstance remain that. All these, and another force, unexpected.

When I had a garden, I slowly learned to stop pruning the old growth right back to earth in the autumn, to leave dead stems and leaves as something for the frost, wind and snow to catch on, and so protect the new shoots of the coming year from harm.

It’s hard to let go. If identity, purpose, belonging, or just keeping food on the table depend upon a worn-out label staying stuck on, power must be diverted for artificial life support. The suppleness needed to tolerate honest differences is no longer available, questions and hesitations must be countered by the endless, ritual repetition of the preferred word-charms.

Victim. Monster. Doomer. Pollyanna. Silence. Music. Noise.

The thud of incantation sounds like poison, yet echoes as protection; and not necessarily of what is dead and no longer defensible.

Until the difference arises in plain hearing, it helps to remember that dead objects float, and not to feed them your own – or anybody else’s – life blood. To keep a back door in your mind open to the air. To improvise instead of reciting, and listen closely to which of these comes back out of the people who surround you. To act without words; to misread and mishear wherever possible.

To learn, or dream in, or invent more of, those fabled languages like Navajo and the Ursprache of Tlön, which hand the power of nouns over to rich, ever-unfolding variations upon verbness.

 

 

The Place Where We’re Held: Thoughts on the Setting for Uncivilization 2012

Montbretia at the Sustainability Centre, photographed by Allie K Stewart, August 2012

August 2011, early morning. I’m at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire at the second Uncivilization festival, rapt by a swaying bank of montbretia.  These fiery flowers are old friends, but there’s a vitality, a gleeful shimmering in their presence here that is much less familiar; a sparkle I’ve only met in two or three other places in the world. Most recently, in the Ökowerk nature preserve and learning centre, a repurposed waterworks near the Teufelsee in Berlin. Like the Sustainability Centre, Ökowerk is run through respect for its natural ecosystems, and so allows parts of its land to flourish wildly, meaning that the plants, creatures, soil and stones are largely left alone to manage themselves, and to teach human visitors something of what wildness is.

Thoughtfully-tended gardens can be places of vibrant plant energy as well, but I’ve found that the particular kicked-back exuberance crackling in that montbretia arises in large swathes of land under human guardianship, where wildness is broadly allowed and maintained. “Really? You mean we can? WHHHEEEEEEE!!” A zest that has something to do with a permission granted by humans that is more commonly denied, and so is different from the character of wildernesses where the impositions of humans don’t matter as much – or not so intimately.

 Sigh for Thought Leaves wish-tree, created by Allie K. Stewart and Daniela Othieno for Uncivilization 2012, photograph by Cat Lupton

In the last couple of days, many people have been sharing, and voicing deep sadness prompted by, a short article published in the Guardian about the work of musician and naturalist Bernie Krause. He has spent 40 years travelling and recording the natural sounds of Earth, and incidentally supplying stark testimony to the effects of habitat destruction and the erosion of biodiversity upon the once-dense and intricate soundscapes of the more-than-human world.

What really haunted me about the article was listening to the embedded ‘after’ recording of a meadow in California’s Sierra Nevada which had been logged. It sounded fine. There were plenty of birds singing, still a feeling of delight and cohesiveness. It was a sound you could get along with and believe nothing important was missing from it. The ‘before’ recording lets you hear, assuming you have ears for it,  what you don’t even know you’re missing. A patterning in depth, a responsive inner harmonic,  which doesn’t translate into something as straightforward as ‘more, and more different, bird songs and other natural sounds’.

This is what’s terrifying: what you put up with and get along with because it basically seems okay, and you’ve barely or never known anything different; even though you perpetually sense that it’s flat and muted and vaguely disappointing. “Is that all there is to Nature, then?” Or, as Rachel Carson writes in Silent Spring (with thanks to Earthlines magazine for the timely sharing):

“Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?”

Light Leaves open-invitation photo-installation, created by Cat Lupton, Bridget and Brian McKenzie for Uncivilization 2012, photograph by Cat Lupton 

Uncivilization 2012. This year, without amplification, with the work and play of curating and setting up the event shared out among a larger community of Dark Mountaineers, the festival seems to kick back and relax, to know of a sudden what it’s about and what’s drawing people back to it time after time. My experience is different this year because I’m part of this community, a member of Mearcstapa, so as well as arriving a few days before the main festival, to help dress the site and improvise doings around the Fool’s licence we’ve been granted, I’ve had opportunities earlier in the year to visit the Sustainability Centre, to discuss plans and explore the site more fully, seeking out spots for installations and impromptu happenings. To see the place stripped bare and holding its breath over a snowy late January weekend, to visit around midsummer and catch glimpses of the Centre’s everyday work with local children and adults with learning disabilities, as the wild life of the place dances green all around them.

During the festival, I keep drawing back from the swirling human centres of engagement to walk in the woods and pathways of the site, to pause with the trees, the flint and chalk pile, the meadows, to do a round of qi gong or just sit and reflect. Many of my fellow festival-goers are doing the same, seeking or reaffirming our connections with this remarkable wild alive place where we find ourselves, but there’s a kind of unspoken protocol that it’s something we each do alone. Some people choose to walk with companions, but otherwise we don’t engage each other with more than a smile when our paths through the woods happen to cross.

Skeletal Dragon (or is it ..) created for Uncivilization 2012, photograph by Cat Lupton

Those of us giving readings, holding workshops, facilitating discussions or telling stories might step out into the land specifically to prepare ourselves: to clear our heads, firm up our plans, ask or wait for guidance from the genii loci. One morning I set out to seek help in this way; with the blind, insistent, slightly backhanded manner in which I do things that I know I need to do but don’t really know how to, so that too much ceremony doesn’t stymie me. What came to me in answer was a profound sensation of letting go and being caught and supported; the understanding that anything I got caught up in feeling egotistically responsible for holding I could let drop through me with the reassurance that the land – this damp woodland earth, these soaring beech trees, and the earth and rocks and trees stretching around the world far beyond them – would catch it, could readily hold it; because this land is far vaster and stronger and much less of an egotist than I am.

In that moment I touched the sense of an experience I’d had the previous day, in the practical part of Tom Hirons’s wilderness rites of passage workshop. Having turned up unsuitably dressed for the muddy option – which is beautifully recounted here – I chose to walk and pray for guidance. Taking a path along the wildflower meadows as far as a fresh, lily-clad grave in the burial ground, stepping out of my sandals to meet hard, painful pathway gravel under my feet, I prayed for as long as I could concentrate, which isn’t that long. To escape the nag of the gravel I walked into a meadow and stood still, then steadily became aware of the dense sound of late summer insect life completely filling the air, around and inside me. I seemed to hear every single bee buzzing among the flowers, every single cricket rasping its legs, every small utterance of every insect I couldn’t even see or lend a name to. An enveloping feeling of richness and fullness came with the sound, and a plane passed overhead so far in the background of my consciousness that it didn’t bother me as it normally would. Then I heard screams, coming from the workshop participants who’d chosen the muddy option, and felt my petty human irritation and judgement rising to yank me out of immersion in the insect soundbath. In the next moment, my annoyances dropped clean through me and stopped mattering: the buzzing, sound-full land caught them and drew them away.

Feral Bunting for Uncivilization 2012, photograph by Cat Lupton

Of course, there are limits to what and how much humans can expect the Earth to catch and hold on their behalf. What I learned, in a limited way, from my local experiences at Uncivilization, is that I could only feel that the Sustainability Centre land was able to catch and support me because I had stepped out and asked for that support. And once you ask the land for something, and mean it – even if reasonable parts of you feel self-conscious and silly, and your manner of asking is slightly backhanded, because you’re trying not to let too much ceremony stymie you – you have created a relationship. That relationship demands at the very least courtesy; that you regard the one you’ve asked as a sentient, reciprocal entity, not simply an inert thing into which you can keep on dumping whatever you can’t be bothered with.

Another part of this is being lucky enough to be on land alive and strong enough to catch and hold a human and her need for help, because it is land respected, land allowed to be wild. Although this isn’t something I’ve tested extensively for myself, it makes hypothetical sense to me that the answers you get back if you ask the land anything will depend not just on the questions asked, but on how that land is; whether it’s been left alone or well-tended or infernally abused. The Sustainability Centre’s nurtured wildness, its native vitality, is the gift that the Centre is to Uncivilization, why it’s a perfect unfolding venue for the Dark Mountain festival. In turn, for me one of the beauties of Uncivilization is that by far the majority of people who come to the festival trust their own wildness enough to honour and reciprocate that gift.

So this place holds all of us, brings us to its edge to taste – even if just for the weekend – that there is more to live in and for than a world which is just not quite fatal.

Campfire at Uncivilization 2012, photograph by Cat Lupton

This year the crackle of the montbretia captivated my friend Allie, who asked to borrow my camera, and caught the beautiful photograph of its fire that sits up at the beginning.

Unsettlement

 

Having set out this virtual stall, I’ve found little to say here. Thankfully, the words of others have flowed in to lend it shape and sustenance. More than once I’ve reached an edge where I toy with abandoning this blog and meticulously deleting every trace of it. But I need this place between stories to go on existing, as much as I can’t be bothered, wish it didn’t. I live in it as a promise made and not broken, for as long as it remains unfulfilled.

Long stretches of my life pass when nothing rises to the surface and suggests itself to be written down. If I grab at a calculus which values only that which becomes, sooner or later, writing, these times are void. In them I forget the dark matters of the untold, and of gestation.

***

For much of this past year, I’ve been blithely orienting myself by the expectation that I would find a place to put down roots, to come home. I grabbed at an already-woven pattern of settled life, and expected it to enfold me, let it tug me along because it seemed to promise a hard-wrought virtue, the right way to live in these times. Rooted, relocalised, reintegrated by stages into the bedrock substance of my homeland.

The various efforts I put into securing this settlement were thwarted at every turn. Upon the third, definitive turn, I finally shook awake and began (am still beginning) to admit that the rootedness which I’d too safely assumed was my duty and lot simply wasn’t. At least not for the time being, or not in the places where I’d been looking to find it.

Where I am now going is the last place I expected: back around in a near-perfect circle to Berlin. Back – or forwards – into further transit and transition, suspension and storage facility. The unsure urban footing of the urban foreigner with her one suitcase permitted on board. To the place where much of what matters to me here in fact began.

***

Going around in these circles I question why I’m here, what it’s making of me, and most of all how not to keep deceiving myself and grabbing onto the edges of stories as if they were lifebuoys. Perhaps because they’re the wrong stories – stories that don’t truly belong or sing to me – or because I place in them the wrong kind of faith, as a recourse to get once and for all to the bottom of the world.

For this brief moment worth sharing, I learn over again that the place between stories is not an anteroom, where you hang around, listless and inadequate, until normal, storied service is resumed. It’s a state of holding at arm’s length every single story that suggests itself, of slowly learning not to force it to fit, of hearing the piper’s beguiling tune and sensing when not to follow it, where you would be led to be saved, and then drown.

 

 

Losing, Choosing – a guest post from cricket7642

Rebecca Solnit’s The Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland devotes much of a chapter to the mediaeval Irish tale Buile Suibhne (The Frenzy of Sweeney), which tells of a king afflicted with the behaviour of a bird. Two explanations are offered: either he was driven mad by the horrors of battle, or cursed by a Christian holy man whom he had offended. “His flight is an odd business”, writes Solnit. “Sometimes he skims along the earth, sometimes he makes prodigious leaps, sometimes he can rise up out of the trees, often he falls.” Not-quite-bird yet no-longer-man, Sweeney takes to the edges and wilds of exile, belonging nowhere but in the long shadows cast by 20^th century literature – damned by Eliot, hymned by Joyce, translated and tempered by both Flann O’Brien and Seamus Heaney – until he is speared through the chest as prophesied, dies in a church doorway and is promised the ambivalent redemption of being sent to heaven.

I did not realise quite how much this story had touched me until I found it resonating clean through my reading of the following guest post from cricket7642. Stopped in the tracks of living by the gravitational push-pull of stories taking flight then tumbling to earth, meaning everything and nothing all at once, she leads us with fearless patience to contemplate that place of limbo too easily labelled ‘a breakdown’, as she disentangles for herself again lines of necessary orientation. Here and there, before and after; about, among, within and throughout. No choices without expectations – yet always the possibility of surprise. Stories that take wing again as soon as we recall the gift of choosing, and rewrite them as we must (no spear, Sweeney restored to the love and care of his family, reincarnation as a barnacle goose over heaven.)

This, then, a story of the grace and mess of being human, of being not quite a bird yet still, sometimes, able to fly.

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,

Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.

Choose:

For we meet by one or the other.

Carl Sandburg

A few weeks ago friends took me on an excursion to the ruins of a 14^th century castle along the coast. I happened to be first in the door of the small reception room and shop, where the clerk welcomed me enthusiastically. However, when my friends followed in behind me, with their combat fatigues and steel toe boots, adorned copiously with tattoos, piercings and chains, the same clerk drew a thick cloak of caution around himself and bustled about, flustered and overconcerned with the rules of the car park and closing time. My friends noticed his change of manner and commented on it afterwards, stroking their beards and shaking their heads in amusement and weariness. How many people must recoil at their choice of fashion?

We take shortcuts, don’t we? We categorise and sort and filter all manner of information about the people that we encounter, as well as objects, events and observations. We try to contain all this inside the parameters of the familiar, whatever that may be to each of us. Sometimes we manage to reach beyond categories, but it requires time and effort which we don’t often spend. Our minds are set up to follow the shortcuts, which have evolved over millennia as a method of conserving our energy.

It left me pondering: was there a place between stories in that single encounter? There will have been one brief moment, with me in the doorway and my friends just behind me, one moment when the clerk was juggling the story of plain-looking me with the story of scary-looking them. We’re always gathering new information through our senses, the story is always changing, eternally changing. Margaret Wheatley has said “To resolve most dysfunctional situations, the first thing to do is flood them with information.” So we flooded the rattled clerk with information: we paid for tickets politely, explored the castle respectfully, and left the car park well within closing time. We provided him with a new story to consider – one in which scary hairy biker-type men are not always trouble.

The place between stories is a very small place indeed, like the moment after an inhalation and before an exhalation; it is the present moment lodged between future possibilities and past actualities. But it’s therefore also a very large place, a vast and formless chasm full of potentials.

Once upon a recent time, I took a visit to a place where stories littered the terrain like papers and photos from upturned boxes, like clothes strewn across the floor. Every step met the clutter of stories, some of which had been told to me as I grew up, some I have told myself; some of them truths, some of them half-truths, and some downright lies. Impressions and fears and beliefs and bliss all tumbled about together in a psychic spin cycle, contradicting one another at every turn. Stories piled up into thick heavy clumps; I picked them up and set them down, kicked them aside or carried them along, with neither rhyme nor reason guiding me. It all made sense yet none of it made sense, and no matter where I turned there were more, and still more stories. Our lives are simply full of them. I felt tossed about on frightening waves, overwhelmed and alone, until my family and friends anchored me.

Folly is an endless maze

Tangled roots perplex her ways,

How many have fallen there!

                                William Blake

Our minds seek meaning. They filter the neverending flood of reality and select which material to receive and acknowledge. Our minds plot these selections into a cohesive narrative, just as I am doing now in recounting some things that have happened to me. My visit to the place between stories is just another story in an existential hall of mirrors. But as Cat herself says, In the First Place Between Stories, “it still matters deeply which stories you choose to believe, and what that belief then makes real.” The power to choose is profoundly humbling.

If we set the place between stories on a linear progression, with one narrative ending and another narrative due to replace it, we can envision it as a pause, a gap set after one and before the next. In the salvation story of Christianity, death is followed by resurrection; in the earned affluence story of consumer capitalism, hard work is followed by personal wealth; in the collapse story explored by the Dark Mountain Project, the cultural paradigms of the present age (including the linear model of progress, ironically) are followed by… well, by what? And as Cat has described, the personal narratives of self-stories too can sit on this line of before and after, when we consider our experiences as vehicles that transform us from the person we were to the person we are and even to the person we might become.

Like Cat, I have been dwelling in this transition space. Last year I wrote about limbo, a place of not knowing. I lingered there conceptually, and found myself haunted by expectation, paralysed by indecision – trapped in a fractured space between the pretty world of ideas, and the mucky world of actions which themselves descend so frighteningly easily into failures and shortcomings. Eventually this led me to my recent visit to a seemingly-real land of limbo, a place where past and future had me cornered, and every possibility was presented with its equally valid opposite; a place where surrender of self became so vivid that, reeling drunk on the human condition, I felt I had joined the living dead, unable – unwilling  – to choose.

Expectation places a heavy burden on those who taste it, because it taints now with the demands of then. But it is part of our human nature, part of the set of skills we possess – remembering the past, anticipating the future: making meaning – allowing us to navigate the overwhelming flood upon our senses. There is no such thing as choice without expectation. The beauty of it is that expectation can be trumped by surprise. For instance, in the midst of my sojourn in literal-limbo I was offered an unexpected piece of sweet wisdom from a surprising source: a Catholic nun. She was friendly enough but I was guarded, and our conversation was brief and uneventful, except that as she took her leave she said to me, “If ever you feel that you must choose between God and yourself, always choose yourself.”

For me, the place between stories is becoming a place about and among and within and throughout stories: personal stories, cultural stories, family stories. Our stories surround us, they flap and fly around us as magically as the fantastic flying books of Mr. Morris Lessmore. I’m choosing to believe that the infinite present moment is poised among them, weaving them together into contrary complements which abide within a sacred circle. Fussy clerks, tattooed blokes in stompy boots, Catholic nuns, you, me, we all get to choose, and that itself is the gift.