Being with Trouble

I’m showing some creative work in a pop-up for the post-grad art course I’ve been doing this year at the Art Depot in Norwich. My winter project was a reconnaissance of the emotions of witnessing the Earth’s trouble. As part of this, I wrote a long poem, and illustrated it with lots of ink-based paintings. There are many themes and ideas in this but I am letting the art work reveal them to you as I hope it will do that better than with my explanation.

You can see a digital book version here (on Canva)

And you can see a video version, with the poem spoken, here (on You Tube).

The text of the poem is below (although it is intended to be read in conjunction with the images):

This is my cocoon.

A softening between me and the planet’s trouble.

A hopeful barrier, a shelter when the walls of houses are collapsing.

A pause in time, holding off the injury coming to me.

The grateful perception of current safety before imminent danger.

How it feels to be held and kept by a house with intact walls, by friends, with blankets, floating in warm baths, at least now.

The pause is a waiting

For the green bird in my heart.

I’ve been seeing and feeling the trouble as it has grown over decades.

I’ve been walking a high ridge surveying the disasters, the slow and fast ecocides and genocides.

But…While also imagining how this can be healed, all possible forested and beautiful landscapes, and caring, safe and fair ways of life.

The calling is to look both ways, to weave together the terrible and the wonderful.

To see what’s wrong and to know what feels right.

But…It hasn’t felt right to see what is wrong.

It hasn’t felt right to see

what is wrong.

I see far too much.

I am hyperphantastic — continually generating images from whatever I hear or think about. This brain feature can mean an experience of trauma from images seen or imagined.

I close my eyes and see so much. I open my eyes and see so much.

I race through information like a machine, faster than most. I’m connected to many platforms and thousands of people.

I’m across it all.

I see that far too much harm is out there. I see the pain carrying through from the past, bursting into too many places and lives.

The cocoon is the image that I conjure when I must remember that I’m safe, well fed and comfortable…

Yet…

I always know that the trouble is still somewhere present.

Trouble intrudes into the vision-hole in my forehead.

This vision-hole is not my eyes. It’s an amalgam of what is seen, of after-images, of bodily feelings visualised, and of patterns I have formed to make sense of what I see.

It’s my inner eye but is not an organ. It’s an entire world, a frame onto the entire world. An entire world that is breaking.

The cocoon mind-state can help me govern these entire-broken-world images, can make them luminous and forested.

It is a psychic device that helps me sleep.

But…The planet’s trouble is present through my sleep, is the darkness in my dreams. It is all the wandering, the homeless, the never-settling beings. It’s the frozen, the fighting, the fleeing.

And it’s the coffee shot, the cortisol that wakes me up.

There through dark and light.

The dream and the reason.

I try to nurture the green bird in the heart.

Seeing so much trouble can make it very hard to imagine how much better life can be.

It’s an effort to imagine in a way that faces trouble. It’s not a flight of fantasy. It’s a hard, frightening look.

I don’t look enough. There’s so much I can’t look at. I look away too quickly. I give too little.

I look for the green bird in the heart.

I pull the cocoon around me. I can’t stop seeing the trouble. I look out again through the hole because maybe out there will be comfort.

There is flight and fright and freeze.

Children are in bomb-panic right now somewhere.

Horses are fleeing wildfires.

Through the vision-hole I feel all these bodies coming into my head.

I cannot separate my mind from their bodies,

from the body of the world,

the entire biosphere.

There is a tearing apart of this entire fabric. The homeostatic exchange of carbon dioxide and oxygen is breaking. The Gaia Hypothesis proven wrong. The cause of hope proven wrong.

How much resource should we put into loving and rescuing the bodies closest to us?

Closest to our hearts.

Should we avoid getting too deeply into love, pets, children, homes, in case they are lost to us?

How do we rescue the millions of people and other beings all at once?

Can I help more people if I don’t care so much for myself and those closest to me?

If I is the same as we, does that mean I am responsible for we?

What burdens can we bear as more and more falls on our shoulders?

Is anyone coming to save us?

The cocoon whispers comforting fantasies to the fears in me. There will be a rescue crew, a transcendent benign entity, a vast collective of good, a kind of god with no identity but great power.

To calm the clouds, sweeten the rain, defuse the bombs, mend the whole broken biosphere.

Can I rest for a while? Just long enough to sleep?

A rescuer that will just let me sleep. Mugwort, lavender, valerian.

Or are we the rescue crew? And that means no rest?

How can we expect acts of rescue from people who are abject, who have lost everything?

Who have nothing but a path in front of them? No resting.

Who are the wicked that have done this? What has lit their wick? How do we put out these fires?

There are dreams.

Cathedrals falling after centuries.

Lorries piled up in rivers.

Ferries toppled by skyscraper waves.

There is one I’ve tried and failed to paint: a family of refugees carrying their pond, like a coffin, but alive and slopping with cool water and green fronds and frogs. They’re looking for a place to embed it, to call home.

Watercourses cannot be contained with bricks.

There are rivers in the skies now, dropping with full force.

Wet flows with a bang, thunderous, with vengeance against our streets of cars and glass-fronted shops.

People, cats, bins, trees caught up, just minimal flotsam.

We watch aghast, there before the grace, here safe for now.

This is Water Displacement.

All out of place.

People, homes, subtle systems of care, long histories, all out of place.

Collapse is the just-in-time calibrated system breaking apart.

Collapse is the sudden decisions of autocrats rippling across a global set of dependencies.

Collapse is extreme uncertainty making careful thought both necessary and difficult.

Collapse is both the literal erosion of landscapes and the abstract erosion of clarity where less can be taken literally.

Collapse is a conundrum.

Collapse has always been here and is very new.

Collapse is horrible and tedious to describe.

Collapse is unseen and ignored.

Collapse is literally felt in our bodies.

Collapse is felt in the entire biosphere.

We are holding together the rocks of our bodies, our minds and our needs with tenuous mortar.

This holding is with fingertips, coins thrown, emergency bootstrapping.

Hoping against hoping. No hope is the spring of hope.

The ground is tipping, the gravity is loosening our many parts, so many we can’t know or hold them all.

But the cracking is how the light gets in.

This is how we know the collapse in our bodies, the entire biosphere.

Look for the cracks, speak about the light.

Don’t give up.

Let go.

When the knife cuts, bandage the knife. (Joseph Beuys)

We don’t feel the knives that first enter the bodies we later eat.

We tell stories of human separation, of humane culling and of humanity’s need to prevail. These stories are an anaesthetic.

From this numbness, it is too much of a leap to care about the thousands of species, millions of bodies, that lose their lives and homes in bigger storms and fires and floods, and in the tearing down and poisoning of habitats.

The knife is just a useful tool.

The heart is just an organ of circulation.

The heart is formed of two spiralling muscles, folded like hair braids into an updo.

The heart is where we feel who we are, how we react to what happens outside of us.

The heart is the centre of homeostasis, the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen maintained in the body.

Due to its human inhabitants the Earth’s body is not in homeostasis. We are emitting more CO2 than can be absorbed.

Where is the heart of the Earth? Where is the place that maintains the balance of gases?

Where is the green bird that balances on the wind?

If I’d known how fast it would all go I’d have lived more slowly, averted my eyes from the news of rapid unfolding, planted some hazel trees and watched the millimetres of growth with each greening year.

I could have grown magic.

But I was habituated to looking on elsewhere, watching the massing thunderous clouds and flames, unable to exist in peace and darkness in one slow place.

Even though there has sometimes been no ground beneath my feet, like a drone hovering over the curved surface of the world, stabbing and flicking with my impotent wand, trying to help and failing.

Addicted to the descent.

The heart spirals in two directions.

It brings life force in from the energy of the world and drives it around the body.

When energy moves the body we can enact change in the world.

The meeting point of the two spirals is…

Inner and outer adaptiveness

Relaxing and exerting

Being fed and feeding others

Protection and exposure

The cocooning and the witnessing

The heart is the heart.

The heart is more than the heart.

The hurt and the health.

Both / And : And / Both

I look both ways, to the terror and the wonder.

I not only look, I act. I really do, because thinking of action is an action. Mind is not indivisible from the physical world.

What we pay attention to drives our intentions to act. If nobody witnesses the suffering, it won’t be healed.

I am a mammal that shares DNA with bananas, chickens, fruit flies, with all living organisms.

I am nature. I am green. I have a green bird living at the heart of me. The green bird spirals in two directions.

Creation was a woman.

The last universal common ancestor grew from a uterine soup.

Life forms evolved from one cell that divided. All things are parts. All things come to their completion.

The cocoon is a womb, a holding space for generation, for coming to completion. A space of infinite care.

An inside for being outside.

A dream is a rehearsal of action.

Wu-wei is the effortless flow of nature. Yu-wei is turning towards a goal, the outside world.

Left and right sides of the brain.

And / Both : Both / And

There is no future where the world I live in will allow effortlessness.

The cocoon will be harder to conjure.

Witnessing will not be a choice.

Some of us will not notice the damage even as we see it.

As we prepare for heat, we also need to imagine and prepare for catastrophic freezing.

Scouring and blasting our green and pleasant land.

Even the scoured ground will be bought, developed, car-parked, no sign on the hoardings of the green birds that used to live in these heartlands.

73 per cent of biodiversity has been lost since 1970.

I hate this fact. The fact of the fact. The factishness of this verbal lid on the story of devastation, in multiple horrific ways, the losses, three times an hour, of countless entire species that have as much right to flourish as humanity.

The lid on the rage I feel.

The demand on us to turn facts into single words and graspable charts beneath which is unthinkable suffering, greed and catastrophe.

We’re slowly boiling frogs.

Please carry us in cold fronded ponds to places of sanctuary.

I am an animal.

I am a kin to aimals.

I have owl ears and eyes.

What I see and hear hurts and astounds me.

Seeing and hearing too much.

It hurts too much.

Too much is hurting.

How do I heal this hurt without becoming deaf?

In this dance between chance and necessity, can our goal centre be to flow effortlessly?

Towards what needs attention from the green bird in my heart towards yours?

Its two wings

Spiralling one way and another

Both / And : And / Both

And / Both : Both / And