For me, these neurotic thought patterns are often tinted with shame and self-recrimination. I attack myself for perceived missteps. When these little shame attacks are severe, I will often make some sort of involuntary response. A little noise, or I’ll say a little phrase, or have to get up and start moving. All of this while sitting entirely alone in my little study. Replaying my own bungles and flinching.

It’s not healthy, this life. I’m saying that quite cheerfully, because I’m still feeling very cheerful and aligned (on the deeper level) after the vigil at the weekend. It’s helpful to notice, clearly, again, that this way of life isn’t healthy. And helpful too to write it down and share it.

I still haven’t figured out the balance. I can’t think or write without a good amount of silence and solitude. But too much silence and solitude and I’m this weird little bird, flinching and twittering to myself.

But that’s not true, is it? Or at least it’s not the whole truth. Because the nature of the silence and solitude matters. The thing that seems to send me into birdy neurosis is too much silence and solitude in the company of a computer. I’ve managed days-long stretches of solitude out in the forest, and come back feeling spiritually refreshed, in the bliss of self-forgetting, full of the company of nonhuman others.

It’s the way the black mirror of the screen reflects me back to myself that seems to do the damage.

I went to a regular community meeting last night, something where lots of people from very different walks of life get together for a deep chat about what’s going on for them. Yesterday, for the first time at one of these meetings, the topic of AI came up. It started with someone noting how apathetic they’d been feeling lately, and that they’d just realized this has a lot to do with AI. They work from home, and these days their job entails feeding prompts into AI all day long. So they’re home, alone, talking to a robot all day, which has removed all the meaningful toil and sense of personal achievement from their work. They don’t really have to use their brain anymore, or teach themselves how to do anything. This seemed to spark lightbulb moments for several other people in the room, who realized that for them too, the creep of AI into their jobs has been making them feel more isolated, taking away their job satisfaction, and changing the way they think. The freakiest thing is that it seems to have been so insidious that they didn’t realise it was going on until they heard someone else articulate it.

I am very lucky. I don’t have a job that requires me to use AI. I know a lot of people don’t have much choice about whether to engage with it, short of leaving their jobs, which also isn’t a choice in this economy.

I have used AI a couple of times though. Feels scandalous to admit that given all my loudmouthing against it. But there you go. I used it once to run a profit and loss calculation on a project I was devising. And I’ve used it to reformat the punctuation on a bibliography. Tiny things, but even after this much use, I can see how people get hooked.

It’s about friction, isn’t it? There’s always a bit of friction when you’re trying to get anything going. It takes effort, and it seems to be human to resist that effort, even if only in a very tiny part of yourself, even if the rest of you is eager for the work. In the past, unless you wanted to spend your whole life just rolling pebbles across the floor or some shit, there wasn’t much choice but to push through the resistance and get the thing done.

But now the friction can almost always be outsourced, shunted off to a system, very often AI. And it turns out that life without the friction of effort is meaningless. (I’m reminded of that poem: What are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?)

I know debilitating convenience isn’t new. It probably started with the wheel. Maybe before that. Maybe even the architects of Stonehenge felt a bit disappointed in themselves for rolling the stones on logs instead of carrying them on their backs like their granddads would have done.

But when people are collectively, communally realizing that their lives have started to feel meaningless in the space of just a few months… that’s quite a startling thing, isn’t it?

The essay-writer part of me is trying to link that idea back to where I started. The birdy neurosis. And maybe the link is that even before AI, the screen was a form of debilitating convenience. It gave the illusion of company and connectedness, saving us the inconvenience of interacting with anyone. And that’s why I get into my birdy neurosis – because excessive isolation makes a living being misfire.

At last week’s Edge School, the activist Linda Doyle talked about building collective agency for activists and artists, building on the work of the biologist Michael Levin. I will butcher this, because I’ve got 100 words left and I’m reporting it second-hand. But in brief: there’s a whole system of bioelectric messaging that tells cells how to behave and what sort of cells to become, and cancer seems to be a result of cells getting cut off from the bioelectric messaging, the group information. These isolated cells then believe they’re all alone and simply start replicating themselves. Boom. Disease state.

There’s a swirl of things going on here that I don’t have space to parse today, but I’ll come back. The swirl: The debilitation of isolation. How hard it is to be creative when you’re feeling debilitated. The fact that life requires our creative participation. The lie of modernity – that the world we move through is inert and objective, rather than a field of collaborative co-creation in which we are inextricably enmeshed, dreaming it up and being dreamed. A technology that doesn’t just enable this lie but thoroughly enshrines it, in a way that’s so insidious we don’t even notice it happening. And countless people sitting on our own in birdy neurosis, staring into our black mirrors, the meaningful friction of life taken from us, the group resonance screened out long ago by our isolation.

Tomorrow I’ll cowork from the café. I’ll share giant chocolate buttons with my friend. Not as good an antidote to birdy neurosis as a vigil for memory. But not nothing either.

I wonder if this also happened in the other direction – whether we entered into the stars at all, too. Whether they noticed us, from all the way out there, and wondered what we were doing. Probably not—they’re on such a different timescale to us. One night outdoors isn’t even half a heartbeat, to a star. But then again, if anyone inhabits the place outside of time, where what matters isn’t the linear flow of seconds but the energy that holds meaning together—it’s the stars.

I’m writing a “proper” post for my main page, about the purported end of literacy, so that’s alive in me today too. It’s about everything the mainstream commentators miss when they talk about the end of literacy, because they don’t have any embodied understanding of what orality really is. Not the TikTok kind of orality, of receiving an endless stream of oral communication on digital platforms. That’s not even orality, it’s just a failure of literacy. It’s the kind of communication that mass, mechanized literacy makes possible – voluminous, detached from impact on action – but spoken aloud instead of written.

Orality is totally different. In primary oral cultures, a word is dynamic. It is, to use an overused word, magic – in the sense that it holds a charge strong enough to change things. Because the spoken word is felt in the body, in resonance that (especially when the words are spoken in person instead of through digital mediation) brings speakers and listeners together, physically together as a unified group. And it is evanescent by definition. When it’s gone, it’s gone. Which means that in an oral culture, a culture where you can’t write things down, a word is an utterance that enters people’s bodies and which, if they want to hold on to its meaning, they have to attend to deeply. The only real way to hold on to a word or words communicated orally is to receive it with your whole body and then let yourself be changed by it, and then let yourself work that change in the world.

Magic.

OK, here’s a confession that’s wanting to swim through. This is very embarrassing to admit, considering that I run a memory club where I encourage people to come and recite poetry from memory, and that I’ve just started this Vigil for Memory project where I hope eventually to inspire people to stay up all night reciting poetry all around the world. The confession is: my whole life, I’ve struggled to stay attuned when people are reading or reciting aloud something that I know exists in written form elsewhere. I have really worked on this, because I know that it’s profoundly not good. Actually, some of my current activities grow out of my work to overcome this tendency to tune out when people are speaking. And I don’t tune out during any and every kind of speaking. It seems to be specifically when I know that what’s being spoken also exists in writing somwhere. For instance, I typically don’t struggle at all in oral storytellings, when I know that the story is being composed live in the speaker in the moment (even if the story beats already exist). But I spend a lot of time in addiction-recovery meetings, which typically begin with reading aloud from the fellowship’s literature for ten or fifteen minutes. I would say that I totally zone out during at least 50% of those readings, and when I don’t zone out, it’s because I’m working very, very hard to stay attuned.

More worryingly and shamefully, I’ve been present at the most extraordinary poetry recitals and – I can’t believe I’m going to admit this – lost focus, tuned out.

This is all mortifying to admit, but it also feels important. Because this is precisely the thing, precisely the difference between a primary oral culture, and a literate culture that sometimes communicates in speech. The unconscious feeling that seems to drive my tuning out is, “I’ll just read this later, I’ll be able to absorb it better that way.”

And that’s exactly the thing – the thing that stops me from receiving words as magic, which also stops me from inhabiting the world as magic. Literacy has trained me to live as though meaning emerges, and I receive all valuable information, when I’m alone, isolated from the rest of life, and I can concentrate my whole being in my frontal lobe. It’s as though I tell myself that I’ll get to the stuff that matters when I can press the pause button.

But there is no pause button.

Reviving my capacity for oral communication, for really receiving what I hear in spoken words, means coming to be present in life as it unfolds. It means living life in the knowledge that there is no pause button, that it’s all happening, all the time, and the most important work of my brief incarnation is to be present to that and let myself be shaped by it.

I will try to hold on to that today, a day I will spend mostly at my laptop, editing my clients’ written words into forms of correctness and linear order that would be impossible and meaningless in an oral culture.

More Vigils for Memory definitely in order, to keep counterbalancing this way of life.

I can’t promise good sentences or indeed good paragraphs today, just so that’s clear. We got into our tents around 7am and slept for maybe two hours before driving home.

For anyone who’s been on vigil watch (vigil vigil?) , we stayed up, five of us through the night and another four for spells of it. An even mix of poems and stories and songs, in the end, I’d say, offered through the night. We were on a field that will be directly next door to the data campus and battery storage facility, if it gets built. The only sounds at night there now are owls—who got liveliest just before dawn—and raucous foxes (what are they saying? Why do they talk like that? I love them) and the occasional lowing cow. Very occasionally a passing car. And last night, our voices. If the data campus gets built, of course, it’ll be drone drone drone, all through the night and the day too.

Peter, one of the all-nighters, observed around 4am how it was perfectly obvious—a collective, silent intuition—which parts of the night were for which kinds of sharing. The loose, unplanned trajectory seemed to go: poetry and some singing, then stories, then singing, then silence, then dawn. Not planned or even discussed. Just the way the mood went. At 11pm it felt right to share sombre and intricate poetry that would have been intolerable at say 3.30am, when we needed to sing silly rounds and do a falling-down, dead-legged Greek circle dance. And you’d have had to be insane not to know that the hour before dawn had to be silent, except for a sweet little song for our dear departed friend Romain.

My body feels cellularly altered by remembering or maybe just learning how long a night actually is. Not that it felt over-long, actually. Someone told me it was gone 2am when I could’ve sworn it wasn’t midnight yet. Still, though. That those trees and hedgerows and every blade of grass sit there night and day, watching and chatting to each other – that it’s all always there, even when I’m hiding myself inside, bollocking about doing whatever I seem to do between 7 and 11pm (where does this time go? I don’t have a TV. What am I doing then?). That the night isn’t just a gap but its own country. I’m glad to have remembered this.

I can remember three other times I’ve stayed up through the night just to be with the night, outside and not under the influence of any substances, and if I’m honest, on two of them I actually slept a fair bit.

I want to do this more: be with the world on its own terms, instead of my own. There’s a conversation going on all the time, and it’s much harder to enter into than I like to let myself believe in the day-to-day, taking my little walks and kidding myself I’m hearing, seeing anything.

Last year, on an afternoon with a bird watcher, I got walloped by something world-shifting that I should already have known: That as soon as I go galumphing anyplace, the birds will get scared and clam up or fly away. That I have to stay still and silent in a place for a long time for bird life to go back to normal around me. And so I carry around with me this little sphere of isolation, of alienation, that tints and taints the world I encounter, all day every day, in a very real way, unless I take care to slow down and drop my unwitting offence on the world. I create a diminished lifeworld around me just by existing, and then I assume that’s the whole of reality because this diminishment is constant, unless I work to counter it.

I’m sure that could have been two sentences instead of six or whatever, but my brain is a soft scrambled egg.

Last night felt like a little offering for the other side of the scale. Something to counterweigh all the galumphing and scaring off the birds. Just to sit with and see what it’s like for the night, and for the night selves of the oak and the ash and the fox and the owl.

What will this do about or against the data centre? I don’t know. In the straight-line world, maybe nothing. But I do know that now nine humans and uncounted nonhumans are stitched together through a story, a memory, of a night we lived together in that place, and I also know that memory endures, and that lovingly tended memory helps places endure. I know that that place now lives in me in an indelible way, and I think that changes something. Not least that I’ll be back. We’ll be back. We’re already talking about what we’ll do next.

At dawn, we stood up in our foil heat blankets and ran down the field, flapping our wings like cracked silver birds. I’m not sure if this galumphing scared off the other birds, or whether we’d won a little trust by then. Maybe they were even flattered.

That’s almost 1000 words, and instead of forcing out the rest, I’d like to leave you with the poem Amber shared as day broke after our long chat with night:

“i thank You God for this amazing”
E. E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I’ve been thinking about what I remember. I don’t mean the poems I’ve been cramming into my brain for the past year, but which moments from my life remain resonant, and how rarely it’s the kind I’ve been chasing more and more, mostly unconsciously, as I’ve deepened into adulthood. My default seems increasingly set to seek contentment or achievement or a sense of safety. But those are not the things I remember.

The remembered past is like sand in a desert, shifting all the time. But this morning, as I sit with my first cup of tea and the hydrangea just coming into view through the window, yellow pointed-tongue leaves in the post-dawn mist… this morning the most memorable, or just remembered, period of my adult life was when my ex-husband and I moved into an old, leaking tin can of an Airstream trailer (in November… why?) and spent a winter in the desert, just outside of Joshua Tree. (So maybe the remembered past isn’t like desert sand. Maybe my remembered past is like desert sand.)

I remember one night in particular. I’d woken up at maybe 3am, gripped by the kind of anxiety that lives in the hours between 2 and 5am. I’ve since heard Clark Strand describe those hours as the hours of god. Before industrialisation, before electric light and the eight-hour work day, everyone would have had a period of waking in the small hours. Our pre-industrial ancestors would settle down early, with nightfall, then wake for a spell in the deep dark. And those were special hours, for prayer or reflection or sex or visiting close neighbours. For anything that engages the soul. Then back to bed for the last shift of sleep. A way of stitching connection to the depths into the rhythm of the day.

Then along came electric light and the industrialised workday, and much later, screens. Sleep was optimised and compressed into eight hours (if you were lucky), illuminated either side by unnatural light, night-killing light. But for some of us, maybe all of us sometimes, the hour of god keeps calling. And now, when it comes calling, it can be a terrible fright, because it’s so alien, because we’ve forgotten what to do with it, because given the distracted or obsessive or fearful mode of an average human day in late modernity, whatever we understand as god often wants a serious word, as soon as they have our ears.

Anyway. I’d woken up at 3am, and whatever I understand as god wanted a serious word. I’m not sure what I understood as god then. I’m not sure what I understand as god now. But I do know that that night, I was looking through the window (uncurtained, obviously – we were living in a tin can) at the most astonishing night sky I’d ever seen. Have you ever seen the night sky in the desert? Stars so thick you could run your fingers through them. An embarrassment of stars; so many a person can start to feel crowded by all those sky-pinned eyes.

The thing I remember most from that night was the feeling of freefall. It probably says something about how lucky I’ve been, how privileged, that I’d become a person who habitually pushed myself beyond my edge and into profound discomfort zones, as a sort of mode of growth. By that point I’d moved to a new continent on my own twice, with just a suitcase each time, and eloped with someone I’d known for six weeks, and thrown myself in at the deep end by taking jobs I had no idea how to do, and lots of more hedonistic edge-pushing that I won’t go into here.

But that night in the desert was the first night I remember thinking, maybe I’ve gone too far this time. Maybe there’s no coming back from this. We’d packed up everything we knew in New York, left our jobs to freelance, left our friends, and now here we were, out in the desert, a place that beats into you in the most beautiful but brutal way every day that you are nothing. Absolutely nothing. And I’m just a girl from the suburbs who spent her teenage weekends hanging out at the Glades shopping centre. What was I doing there?

Anyway. Obviously I did come back. But I definitely didn’t come back as the same person. (Maybe we never do.) Back then I thought my night terror was just anxiety about the predicament (financial, professional, social, geographical) I’d backed myself into. But now I think that feeling of freefall was a bit of a word from whatever I understand as god. I don’t think it was a warning. I don’t think whatever-god-is is as basic as that, or as concerned with my human understanding of a narrative arc. I think I was just being shown how big the game can go.

Tonight’s vigil won’t be anything like as frightening as that. I’ll have a home and a life to come back to. I haven’t given everything up to go and be with the stars. But I hope it will be memorable and that the meaning and nourishment of that memory will keep unfolding itself for years to come. In the kind of way that moments of contentment or achievement or safety, the kind of moments I unconsciously seem to seek out now, never do.

All of which, I’m now realising, is a very inward-looking way of thinking about the night. Because of course, the main purpose of this night is to offer a gift of my attention and wakefulness and whatever beauty I’ve stored in my body in the form of poems, to a place that is at risk. I suppose I won’t be able to tap into that feeling, though, until I’m actually in the place. And anyway, isn’t this the whole point I’ve been trying to make? That memory is the fabric of relationship with place. That remembering your own being in relation to a place is a way of honouring place and holding it dear? I’ve certainly never forgotten the Mojave Desert, its night skies and its creosote smell after rain. And since space and time are just our material-world translations of energies that originate in other forms, elsewhere, I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess as to how the love of remembered places restructures the map in the invisible dimensions.

See you on the other side.

Edge School last night. 25 or so of us in a local arts space. I’ve got to write this thing unedited, which means I’ve got to be honest and unvarnished and say that through the day yesterday, I felt quite miserable about the corner I’ve backed myself into—or felt I’d backed myself into—with running community events. After a night of insomnia and being awake since 3am, the last thing I wanted to do was cook dinner for 25 people and then hold it together as the host of an event all night. And honestly, part of me felt like something had gone very wrong. I started this community project because I wanted more community, but yesterday, cooking soup for 25 on my own while drop-down tired, I felt incredibly lonely.

But the evening made it all worth it. We had a session from a local activist, Linda Doyle, on building collective agency for activists and artists, and by the end of the night, it felt as though something had happened in the room. People were opening up and bringing their projects into the space. The discussion was alive, and people have asked to be put in touch to start building creative synergy after the session. This is exactly what I hoped for from these sessions.

I can’t help but feel that this will be too boring for anyone to want to read, but that voice is precisely the thing I’m trying to conquer. There’s something I’m trying to say or want to say here without sounding self-important. Shut up, inner critic. It’s something like this: people have told me so many times, over the years, that all anyone wants, when they follow someone on a platform like Substack, is to be taken into that person’s world. To feel included in it somehow, and be able to share in it from afar. And I know this is true! My favourite people to follow on here don’t try to share some paradigm-shattering truth every time. They simply take me into the journey of their thinking life. I end up finding it a bit exhausting, truth be told, being bombarded with all the paradigm-shattering truths written up in meticulous 3,000-word essays on Substack. And I’m a prime culprit of this. I want to be able to engage more from my simple humanity, and let any ideas that come, come, without forcing them. My squeamishness and fear about doing this is partly concern about polluting the internet with yet more words. But a lot of it is to do with a self-protective shame, an unwillingness to just be myself out of fear of rejection. Which, honestly, I’m 42 years old. Get over it, Ellie.

Still, I have been thinking about how for these more personal posts that are going out to so few people, the primary reader will probably be AI. These words will be scraped and these bits of my innards will train the thing that is already too good, frighteningly good, at mimicking the thought patterns I’ve moulded my brain into, after a lifetime of reading.

That’s another reason I’m so glad there was enough support, financial and otherwise, for me to get to do Edge School. And that there are a healthy handful of people who want to do this vigil for memory this weekend. I’ve spent the last 15 years writing, and at present almost all of that writing lives online only. In this way, my whole life’s effort is a phantasm. It would vanish in the event of some cyber attack or the electrical grid going down.

But the school and the vigil are different. There’s a funny paradox: writing seems to be permanent, in that it sits there, inert, after we’ve made it. But, especially in the context of writing online, it takes almost nothing for it to be wiped out.

Events that take place in our physical bodies, in time, seem fleeting and finite by comparison. Evanescent. But they stand a chance of entering our bodies in a lasting way, and when they get in there, they can take on a life that’s so much more enduring, by inspiring us to create change in the world.

(And of course, the best writing does this too. It enters our bodies and changes us. But always aiming for that in your writing is a good way to gum up the gears.)

Probably not unrelated: I just remembered a dream last night of eating an Ikea pencil. Dry splinters of soft wood in the mouth. A weird sense of, what, defiance? as I chewed down towards the tip.

Been thinking a lot lately about Plato and how he thought all art was mimesis. Is it wise to get into Plato with only 200-odd words left? Well, it’s done now. Plato thought that art just copied the material world, and that since the material world is a lie and the truth is only known in the soul, this made art worse than useless, it made it dangerous. A dangerous distraction.

There’s an echo of this that I can’t quite put my finger on in the thinking behind LLMs. Something about treating the material world and the things made in it as soulless—extracting their delimited actuality from their resonance in soul. And then convincing yourself that it’s fine to just mash them all together any old how, because they’re just a copy of something that’s soulless and unimportant. I’d say Plato has a lot to answer for, but poor old Plato, he was just a victim of his time, of the new communication technology of alphabetical writing that had scrambled the ratio of his senses and cut him off from the tactile fullness of the spiritual sense that brings people into ensouled relationship with the material world. And in the same way, we today are victims of the new communication technology of the screen, which takes this scrambling of the ratio of the senses and this severance from tactile, spiritual fullness of experience to the point of psychosis. I don’t think AI can be seen as anything other than the product of a psychotic culture. Poor old us. I hope we get well soon.

And I’m over word count. Until tomorrow xx

This should go to absolutely nobody, as I’ve clicked all the things to make it an opt-in project. If you’re receiving it, something has gone wrong, and I apologise!

I woke up at 3 this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep. There seem to be iron filings in my eyelids. This is bad timing: tonight, I’m hosting, and serving dinner to, 30 people for the conversation series I’ve started. And on Saturday night I have to stay up all night, for the all-night vigil I’ve organised. The Vigil for Memory. Where a small handful of us will stay up all night, offering poems and stories and songs from memory to a piece of land that is threatened by an 850-acre data centre.

My boyfriend pointed out the other day how bizarre my to-do list is. How weirdly… I don’t know, gothic? “Got to memorise the poem for the subscriber call, prepare for the vigil, edit the article for the ontological repair shop [this is what I call my favourite client], prepare a vat of soup.” What?

Christ, though, I’m bored of the sound of my own voice. Not the events. The events make me buzz. But I’m starting to sense such a disconnect between action and language. Or, between what feels alive, and the stale old sentences I trot out. That’s partly why I’m trying this exercise. 1,000 words a day for 100 days. To bust out of the staleness.

Maybe it’s how glutted Substack seems to be now (... adding 1k words a day will help, obviously). Or the conversation I had with a friend about how hard it is to sell nonfiction books now (and this friend is a New Yorker writer and award-winning author). We were swimming in Hampstead ponds when she said that, and among the herons and the ducks and the cold cold water, it didn’t seem to matter much, but I’ve been turning it over in my mind ever since.

I write. That’s what I do. When I woke up at 3 this morning and couldn’t sleep, what did I do? I wrote. I’ve been writing to make sense of the world for 15 years, and for a very long time nobody read it. (And then people started reading it and I got scared and clammed up. Another reason for the 1,000 words a day.)

The kind of writing that has always come most naturally to me is this: prose nonfiction. And I’m beginning to fear that prose nonfiction isn’t just unfashionable, isn’t just (according to my friend among the herons and the ducks) increasingly unviable in the marketplace (I don’t want to think like this, but I do need to earn a living). I’m beginning to worry that it’s part of what’s wrong. That all this linear meaning-making, in a world that is not linear, has moulded my brain into one that can’t actually perceive the full, 360° truth of the living world anymore.

What might replace writing on the page? All this linear meaning making? The things that come to mind for me are theatre and ritual.

That’s not great news for me, of course. A writer of prose nonfiction.

But if I remove myself and think about the big picture, it seems to me that a revival of theatre as humanity’s primary mode of meaning-making might be just the ticket.

Theatre requires all of our senses and our subtle senses too. It’s an activity of whole-body engagement. It is un-AI-able (or, a whole performance is, anyway, even if the writing part isn’t). It’s the artform that’s closest to life. And all this distance from life is so much part of the problem, isn’t it? That Gregory Bateson quote always comes back to me: “The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”

This might be why theatre was the dominant mode of artistic-expression-in-words at times of great rebalancing of the brain hemispheres. The Renaissance. Ancient Greece. In Europe’s cultural golden ages, theatre has been the greatest, most alive mode of art. Maybe humanity’s cultural golden ages were times when the balance of the hemispheres helped us to think in a way that was most like nature. And it must mean something, it must matter, that theatre was what they turned to.

This is the kind of thing I think about when I’m awake at 3am.

This vigil, though. I’ve been in such a tizz about it. It’s hard, organising a ritual in a community you don’t live in, a community that’s in crisis. I have this bone-deep sense (another of my over-used phrases, that: bone-deep. Trying to feel it in my bones now. If I’m going to say the words, I’ve got to work to feel them). Anyway – I have this sense that making this offering to the place and to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, will help, will make a difference. Or at least, that it matters. But it’s very hard to make that case to people who are on the front lines of crisis. I floundered for ages before I found the right people, the people who want to be involved and who have connected us to the land. And by then there was only time to pull together a very small ritual.

But when I meditate, when I zoom far out, when I can sense my way into where my imagination lives, in the milky field around my spine, I know that there’s a dimension of reality where this vigil, this difficult offering to land and the spirit of memory, will be the most important thing I do this year. Because all that really matters is presence. Is paying attention.

There’s a story I want to tell about a near-death experience. About someone I know who had a near-death experience and was told, by whoever tells us things in near-death experiences, just this: that the only thing that ever mattered was being present. The whole story is so much more electrifying than that. It’s the story I always turn to when I feel lost. But it’s not my story to tell, so I’ll have to leave you with the more abstract version and hope it lands anyway.

And that is 1,000 words.

Until tomorrow.

Hi, friends,

(As ever, if you’d rather listen to this post, there’s a recorded version above.)

If you signed up here recently after following a recommendation (maybe from or , two Substack dreamboats who’ve been sending manymany people this way lately), and you’re now looking at my name in your inbox and thinking… what the hell is this? Hello! I’m Eleanor (but call me Ellie). Here are some of the things I write about, which seem to me quite funny to present in a bullet-pointed list:

• I believe that there is an imaginal realm that is an expanded field of reality itself, and that imagination is one way humans access that expanded field of reality.

• I investigate memory, which we could understand as imagination-before-imagination. The ancients didn’t talk about imagination the same way we do. Instead, they revered memory as the way to access expanded realities (by, say, memorising an epic poem so thoroughly that you could sail straight on into the otherworld while reciting it). This seems like bad news in an age when most of our brains and memories have been fried by smartphones. But! Good news! Memory turns out to be a surprisingly trainable, recoverable skill. (If you want to start training yours, there’s an invitation below for you.)

• I believe that one key to surviving this terrifying, mad moment is to shift modes—individually and societally—to creativity. To treat life itself as a work of art, a sculpture we’re all constantly making and remaking. One way to read the long story of humanity is as a constant cultural balancing act: to what extent should we inhabit and place our faith in the material world, and to what extent the imaginal or ensouled or spiritual energies that suffuse it? Different societies have balanced these realms differently, but the big lesson of history seems to be that if you go too far in either direction, you’re in trouble. The trouble we’re living through now is the end of modernity—the end of centuries of insisting that only materiality is real. We’re reaping the payback for treating the living world as inert matter, and meanwhile, many people are getting reattuned to more-than-material realities—raising the age-old risks of dogma and tyranny, along with the new risk that some TikTok idiot will persuade them to drink bleach. I say: art is the answer. Creativity is the answer. Art is humanity’s oldest sacred mode, far older than religion. It’s a way to receive the insights of expanded, imaginal realities, and express them in this material realm not as facts with which to clobber each other around the head, nor as butterflies that have been pinned and so stripped of their truth, their life. Art allows us to express the full, multidimensional truth of this world in the mode of the world itself: as a work of creation that wants to keep unfolding. And it helps us to take responsibility for our role in this living world. We are not passive observers of the world but artists; collaborative co-creators. And if you know any artists, you know that this comes with a responsibility of devotion.

How does life change when you see everything in front of you as a sculpture you are helping to create?

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That’s a lot of abstract words for a Wednesday, so to get a little more concrete, here are some updates on my current experiments in living life as a work of art, including invitations to join.

Vigil for Memory

About an hour’s drive from where I live, an 850-acre data centre and battery-storage facility is planned. If it goes ahead, this will be one of the largest data campuses in Europe. It will involve cutting 20 metres into the hillside, use up to 2.9 billion litres of water a year (if there’s a drought, which there will be), and obliterate the habitats of an unfathomable number of creatures. And all this in the middle of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

The Guardian has called the resistance to this data centre a North Devon revolt. The fight has even reached the pages of the New York Times. If you too are dubious about data centres, one incredibly helpful way to get involved is to sign local councillor Cheryl Cottle-Hunkin’s parliamentary petition for the government to call a moratorium on new AI campuses, pending much more robust studies of their impacts and funding. (The petition says it’s been rejected; do please sign anyway. If the petition reaches 100,000 votes, the government will have to debate it.) You can read more about the local campaign, and sign up for updates, here.

On the night of Halloween, I will gather with around a dozen storytellers, musicians, and poets, on land that is threatened by this data centre. We’ll sit a vigil through the night, offering our wakefulness and attention, and also offering poems and stories and songs from memory.

Why a vigil for memory? Because memory—the ancient mode of imagination—used to be a practice of relationship to land. Before writing, everything humans needed to know was stored in poems and stories and songs that were stowed in land, and tending those memories meant tending the human relationship with the living world. Then writing came along, and humans started to outsource our memories to the written word. We’ve been offloading more and more memory to technologies ever since—and as we’ve lost our memories, we’ve lost our oldest and deepest source of relationship to land. Data centres stand as the extreme point of this story. Once, embodied memory wedded us to land. Now, externalised memory obliterates land.

And so on Halloween, when the veil to the forgotten past is thin, a small handful of us will gather to make an offering, from and to memory and land. We’ll go through the night, because after all these years, we’ve got to show we mean it. We’ve got to put some skin in the game.

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I’ll be honest: I meant to make a big shiny campaign about this vigil. I hoped to inspire more vigils on the sites of data centres around the world. But this night remembered itself into my imagination in a nocturnal, whispered kind of way, and that seems to be the way it wants to keep unfolding. So instead, I’m seeing this as a start. An intimate night with memory and land which will, I hope, show me how to keep holding intimate nights with memory and land, and spread this practice further afield.

But if you do want to join us, to help energise our efforts, please consider reciting a poem or story or song from memory, wherever you are, at dusk on Halloween.

I’ll post an update after the vigil. Watch this space.

This Sunday, 25th October: join me on Zoom to kickstart your memory practice

For the past year and counting, I’ve been meeting with a dazzling, dedicated gang of memorisers on Zoom. Each month, we pledge what we’ll memorise by the next month, then we come and make good on our pledges. I’ve watched people who told me they couldn’t remember anything recite poetry for fifteen minutes straight. Just this last Sunday, one memoriser told us that the practice has deeply enriched his imagination. That when he reads a book now, he enters it in a new whole-body, full-sensory way, because of the ways memory practice has opened him. It gives me goosebumps.

You can join this club by signing up to this Substack as a paying subscriber (and if you want to join but you can’t afford it, just drop me a line and I’ll comp you a subscription, no questions asked). But I also want to open this practice up to more people, so I’m offering a couple of free Zooms for anyone who wants to kickstart their memory practice. Join me:

• This Sunday, 25th October, at 6–8pm GMT (please note that our clocks in the UK change this Saturday night, so do double-check what time that is where you are)

• On Zoom

• To recite a poem you’ve already memorised, or to make a memory pledge for next time

• I’ll share some tips for memorising, to help you with your pledge

Then join me again:

• Sunday 29th November, 6–8pm GMT

• On Zoom

• To perform your pledge

At some point I will learn what Substack Live is and whether I should be using that instead of Zoom, but reader, now is not that time.

If you’re planning to come to one of these events, I’d love if you dropped a comment on this post, so I know roughly how many to expect. Thank you!

Edge School

Earlier this year, many of you very kindly donated to help me start a conversation series where I live in Devon. The update is that it’s started, and it’s a joy.

The original idea was simple: I knew there were people all around me devoting themselves to brilliant ideas and practices that could improve life for everyone. And I wasn’t getting to hear about them. So I wanted to create a forum where those ideas could be shared. Then I started trying to make this a sensible business venture, and while attempting to squeeze out a margin on a profit and loss statement, I lost the will to live.

Inspired by the brilliant , I decided to raise funds so that I could pay the speakers, rent the space, make everyone dinner, and offer all tickets as a gift. My hope was that if people were receiving their tickets as a gift, they might bring a different kind of attention, a different kind of open-heartedness. That we might enter the evening not as consumers but as co-creators of an evening and a community.

We’ve had our first night in the season, and friends, it was alive. A little living nest of new relationships and ideas and possibilities. We’ve got two more evenings coming up in the next couple of weeks, then one a month until March. If you find yourself in South Devon, please do come along. Here’s the page for ticket updates and the mailing list, and here’s our infrequently updated Instagram page.

I’ll be back with an essay soon. For now, thanks for reading,

xx Ellie

At dusk on Halloween, when the veil to the forgotten past is thin, we will gather on or near land threatened by data centres.

We will make offerings from memory. Poems, stories, songs.

Some of us will go through the night. The all-nighters will remember the sun up, together.

The only hard rule: No iPhones. No looking up the words. You are warmly encouraged to try, to stumble, to mess it up, to keep going anyway. We are reawakening a long-dormant part of our humanity. Mistakes are good. They’re a sign we’re trying.

You’ll find some more suggestions about how to gather below.1

Why

I’d like to propose one humble but surprisingly radical answer to the big question, What went wrong?

That answer is: We lost our memories.

By this, I don’t mean merely that modernity seems to feature a curious existential absent-mindedness, like we’ve been so busy building empires and amassing capital and convincing ourselves that matter is the basis of reality that we keep forgetting where we’ve left our keys, except by “our keys” I mean “the meaning of life”. (Though, yes, this too.)

I mean something much more literal about memory, which I can best illustrate through three vignettes.

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One

Imagine that you live before the invention of writing and before agriculture took hold—the way people have lived for the vast majority of human history. Let’s position ourselves 5,000–10,000 years ago. (It’s true that the fertile crescent was very much farming already by this point, but it was a slower burn in many other places.)

You live with a group that travels from place to place through the year. You likely have settled residences in certain areas for certain seasons: you need to be near the river when the salmon runs, or in the mountains in the summer, or near a cave in winter. But how do you know the precise time to leave each place in order to catch the fish or the fruiting elsewhere? And how do you remember the minute details of the thousands of reptiles, spiders, crustaceans, fish, winged insects, mushrooms, fruiting plants, and other beasts and beings that surround you? These details aren’t just nice to know; they will quite literally keep you and everyone you love alive. Which is the spider with the deadly bite, and what’s the antidote? Which berries are edible and which poisonous? And that’s to say nothing of the mushrooms. You can’t write any of this down, and you don’t have the equipment to make detailed pictures. So what do you do?

You (collectively) remember it—which means you (collectively) have to make it memorable. All this information and more finds its way into stories and poems and songs that live in the land and in the skies, associated with particular places and constellations, which are passed down through generations.

There’s a funny thing about this kind of memory, something that might be hard for us to imagine now: it is a way of knowing that is whole, unsiloed, and deeply communal. As Lynne Kelly illustrates in her book The Memory Code, memories stored in the land and regularly, ritually, communally retrieved quickly take on deep emotional and even spiritual resonance—especially since such repetition extends over generations or aeons. The stories hold knowledge that is rational and, in a very literal sense, grounded. And yet each ritual repetition infuses the story or song with the emotional weight of its day, and such days stretch deep into the ancestral past. And, too, this is a way of knowing that extends knowing far beyond the individual mind. The mind of a culture of collective memory is as large as the group and its ancestry, and as large as the land. Knowing is something that happens in a lovingly tended relationship between people and land and the past.

This shared, remembered body of stories and songs and poems is your group’s culture, which is to say, among other things, that it’s the ground of your collective wisdom, knowledge, and ethics. It guides you in how to live with each other and in the living world. It is who you are, together.

Two

It’s the sixteenth century, and you live in a European capital—a city on a continent that was a backwater until quite recently. Now, though, it’s all change. Your monarch is funnelling money into the navy and private seafaring missions, amid a continental race to “discover”, plunder, and colonise swathes of the world beyond Europe. The city’s population is exploding as masses of people migrate from the countryside in search of work and sustenance. Partly, this is spurred by repeated crop failures. But people are also drawn by all the wealth suddenly splashing around in cities, thanks to the rising merchant class. The city is a place of opulence, hunger, slums, swollen regal power and the endless effort to court it, disease, theatre, magic, construction, fierce religious fighting, and, I can only imagine, an ungodly stench.

And books. A rising tide of printed books. This is new. Up until the last hundred years, manuscripts had to be copied by hand, a painstaking process that would take hundreds of hours. Books were precious and rare, and only a tiny proportion of people regularly encountered them. Those who did encounter them knew enough not to take such an opportunity for granted. Books weren’t the externalised memory banks they are now so much as spurs and jogs for the internal memory. If you encountered a book whose contents spoke to you, you would work with it deeply, reading it aloud all the way through, possibly in company, and studying each beautifully illuminated page until it lodged in your memory. Retention was the whole point.

(By the way, the beautiful, painstaking illustration and embellishment in medieval manuscripts was in service to this goal of retention. Has something ever stuck in your mind because you can remember where it fell on a page? That’s a vestige of the human superpower for place-associated memory that we met in our first vignette. Humans evolved to remember important information by stowing it in places, and in a manuscript or book culture, the page becomes a place, just like land was for our ancestors. It’s not as memorable a place, since pages tend to be more similar than organic features of land—and so, since their culture still valued memory, the scribes who made medieval manuscripts set out to make pages more memorable, using illuminations. (If you’ve ever struggled to remember something you read on a screen, this also helps explain why. A screen isn’t a place. You weren’t made to remember something that slides around like that.) The fact that many of us still remember information in even plain, mass-printed books this place-based way, without understanding why, is evidence of just how potent and lasting this superpower for place-based memory is. It’s still right there inside us, waiting for us to use it.)

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But I digress. Because painstakingly illuminated manuscripts are not the kind of book that’s now flooding the cities. No, these are printed books. It’s around a hundred years since Gutenberg invented the printing press, and I don’t need to tell you that it’s been a revolution. In the first four decades after the press was invented, up to 20 million books were printed. The price of books has plummeted, and the collective understanding of what a book even is has changed. It’s no longer a spur to the individual memory, no longer designed to aid retention. If you can simply buy and own books at a rapidly dropping cost, then there’s no need to bring their knowledge into your body; you can just build a library. The book is truly now becoming an externalised memory bank.

This has all sorts of non-obvious implications. First, we will notice that knowing as something that happens in a lovingly tended relationship between people and land and the past is mostly out of the window now. Increasingly, knowing is something that happens privately and rapidly, in the mind rather than the body or the land or the community, in a spirit of hunger for more, rather than one of striving for retention.

Next, we might consider the difference between knowing with the ears and knowing with the eyes. A difference that affects a culture’s very cosmology.

In an oral culture—a culture that transmits its wisdom, knowledge, and ethics through stories and poems passed down orally—a word is an event. (I’m drawing heavily here on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy, which, if you’re interested in this kind of thing, I can’t recommend highly enough.) By “a word is an event,” I mean it’s gone as soon as it’s been said, and there’s no way to get it back. (Sure, you can repeat it, but it will be a different utterance each time. No man steps in the same river twice and all that. More to the point, even the repetition will be over as soon as it begins. And in order to be repeated, it will first have to be remembered.)

An oral culture, then, primes its inhabitants to attune to fleeting livingness—the quality of experience and therefore of life that is evanescent and can be felt in the body. Sound enters the body in waves and connects utterers (whether human or nonhuman) and listeners in a field of resonance. A culture that holds it cosmology in stories and songs that must be shared aloud enacts connectedness every time it shares those cosmological stories. In this way, a cosmology becomes a felt sense; not just a story about the way things are, but a feeling that you belong in that way things are.

By contrast, now, in our swelling European capital in the sixteenth century, “the way things are” is increasingly communicated on pages, which are absorbed with the eyes. And when you start to attune to the world through your eyes instead of your ears, you can very easily begin to forget the evanescent, invisible, inherently connective quality of experience and of life. Its livingness.

Because where sound connects people in fields of resonance, vision separates. In order to see something, you have to be outside of it. And so a culture that makes sense of the world in a primarily visual way will tell itself a story about the world—a cosmology—that is founded on separation from that world. It’s no coincidence that the practice and ethos of modern science engulfed the continent and the world only after the invention of the printing press. In order to position “objective truth” as the highest epistemological virtue, you have to first convince yourself that there’s such a thing as an object, an inert piece of matter that is simply external to you, and then have the technological means to communicate, en masse and in a mechanized way that’s not vulnerable to the foibles of human scribes, what you’ve discovered about such objects.

An oral culture experiences truth as something shared, remembered, felt. A literate culture experiences truth as something that can be held still on a page. It has a tendency to pin the butterfly.

Of course I’m not suggesting that we burn the books; that literacy was a mistake. Books are my first and most enduring love. But I do want us to notice this: when humans stopped memorising the sources of our shared wisdom, knowledge, and ethics, and coming together to share them aloud—when we instead began to locate truth on pages that lived outside us, were absorbed with the eyes, and did not need to be memorised—we began to sink into a cosmically scaled loneliness and severance from livingness. Our own and that of all other living things.

Three

It’s 2026. You’ve just lived through a hotter, drier summer than you can remember; areas never before known for fire have been engulfed in flames; crops are failing; the world’s species are dying off at between 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural extinction rate; all because of human mistreatment of the living world. The societies and economies that have ruled this world for the last several centuries are failing and flailing, their fearful, insecure leaders and inhabitants lashing out as the world order collapses. Huge swathes of the global population spend the best part of each day absorbing a virtual world on screens, with their eyes, to the point that this virtual, visual world has come to seem more real and more important than the living one outside of it.

Meanwhile, nobody has a clue what this world even is: cosmology (now a scientific discipline instead of a body of stories) is in crisis, telling us that 95% of the world is unknowable dark matter and dark energy. A human is a being who floats alone, somewhere outside of a tattered, fundamentally unknowable cosmos.

And somewhere, not too far from where you live, another piece of dark matter is planned. A data centre. Hills will be levelled, cement poured across the living earth, acres of warehouses built, rivers poisoned, endless gallons of water siphoned off at a time when living beings are parched, all to support the vast machinery of externalised memory.

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Because now, knowing is not something that happens in a lovingly tended relationship between people and land and the past, nor even something that happens in your fast, hungry mind, in communion with the thoughts of other humans shared on a printed page. It is something a computer does for humans. It’s the machines that have internalised all the stories and poems and songs. The machines that crunch them together and spit them back out at us on demand, rejigged and senseless because a machine, unlike a human body trained through generations in relationship with land, cannot tell which of the poems and stories and songs really matter. Which of them will keep us alive, in body and soul.

Once, memory was stored in the human body and wove us inseparably into the land in which we live. Now, “memory” is stored in external servers and threatens to obliterate the land in which we live.

The good news is, the human capacity to knit ourselves inextricably to the living world by memorising stories and poems and songs, in relationship with places—it’s still right there inside us. Waiting for us to use it.

And so on Halloween, we will gather on or near land threatened by data centres. We will make offerings to and from memory. Stories and poems and songs. (We will first have worked to start committing what matters to memory again, and this is half the point.)

We will remember the sun up, together.

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Many thanks to my friend for her support and expertise as I pulled this idea together. You should all read her book. Follow Kim and me on Instagram for updates on this project in the coming weeks and months.

Huge thanks also to Ella Paul and Alice and Peter Oswald.

For now, here’s some information about a new experiment I’m working on. In a way, this is one of my efforts to enact the ideas in the series—to inhabit the world as a work of art by taking creative action. I hope it sounds fun to you.

More soon,

x Ellie

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself hunched over a spreadsheet, trying to squeeze out a margin on a profit and loss statement.

(If you read these newsletters for thoughts about how imagination is an expanded dimension of reality itself, and the world is a work of art composed of each of our constant acts of imaginative co-creation, and you’re shocked and perhaps disgusted to read the words “profit and loss statement”—please stick around. We’ll get out there into the cosmos in a moment, don’t you worry.)

So there I am, hunched over an Excel sheet, fiddling around with numbers. Have you ever had a moment when you felt the excitement and joy dying in you in real time? Yep, it was one of those.

I was crunching numbers for a new conversation series I’m starting, which I’m calling “Edge School: A hedge school for edgy times.” I decided to start this school because I know I’m surrounded—that we’re all surrounded, no matter where we are—by brilliant people engaged in strange and revealing investigations. People thinking in unusual ways about important things; committed to inspiring and world-making creative practices; lighting themselves up with questions and ideas. And I wasn’t getting to hear about it, but I needed to, badly. If ever there were an age that needed us to share our ideas about how to live and think well, it’s now.

There’s this line I love in Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society: “All over the world, the school has an anti-educational effect on society: school is recognized as the institution which specializes in education.” Illich wrote that in 1970, and I want to be a bit careful with it, in 2026. We’ve lived through years of a culture that reviles expertise, and it has damaged us. Today, we’re losing our educational institutions. Whole university departments are getting chopped, and we’ll all be far poorer for it. We need experts and expertise. We need people who devote themselves to education.

We also need a living culture outside of schools and universities. In fact, our schools and universities—not to mention the vitality of daily life—depend on that living culture. But when there’s a building somewhere over there where learning happens, it’s too easy to cast the rest of life as “not-school” and “not-university”; to operate as though in our everyday lives, we have nothing to learn from each other; nothing to teach. And that flattens us and deprives us of practices that make us stronger and wiser and happier: sharing what we know with, and learning from, others.1

So I decided to start a conversation series—an offering where people could exchange ideas and have vital conversations. An attempt to sustain a living culture.

Then, before too long, I found myself hunched over that spreadsheet, losing the will to live.

I was fiddling around with the food costs when I felt my life force drain out of me. The events I’m planning will include a talk, a shared dinner, and a whole-group discussion. I was trying to find a way to offer tickets on a sliding scale, starting at £5, so that the evenings weren’t exclusionary. But if everyone paid the lowest rate, my spreadsheet was telling me that each event would cost me at least £175 (between food costs, space rental, and the speaker’s fee). So I adjusted the food costs, plugging in the cheapest bread I could buy, the most chickpea-heavy dinner. I played with reducing the speaker’s fee, even though sustaining thinkers and creators in their work was one of my major goals. I toyed with stern wording for the ticket page, about who really has the right to claim a reduced-cost ticket—wording I feared might drive some people away.

And suddenly, the whole process started to feel so joyless. This offering I’d wanted to make for my community started to feel like a burden. Resentment and a sense of failure were already creeping in. Why had I ever embarked on this?

From commodity to gift

It just so happens that I’ve recently finished editing the first book written by , who runs a farm where no food is ever sold for money. You can follow Adam’s adventures here on Substack; I’m sure a lot of you already do. All of the vegetables and meat and dairy that come from the land he stewards are offered as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason.

I’ve spent the past few months steeped in Adam’s wisdom, about all we’ve lost by taking the gifts of life and imprisoning them behind price tags. Primary among those losses is the capacity for true gratitude, which means the capacity to receive these gifts of life and allow them to work upon us, to change us. Fruits and vegetables and the bodies of our fellow animals can, miraculously, grow freely on this living world, but when we put a price tag on them, we can convince ourselves that the coins we hand over in exchange for those fruits and vegetables and bodies are a fair and complete exchange. That what we buy is rightfully ours. There’s no miracle in it, and so no need to be grateful; to think deeply about what we take; to allow ourselves to be humbled and changed by gratitude; to find ways to honour the gift and pass it along.

Here’s a passage I particularly love, from the preface to Adam’s book (shared with his permission):

In the presence of food that is for sale, we tend to ask, “What do I want?”, “How much does it cost?” and “Can I afford it?” The locus of consideration is the self, the same one doing the asking and the answering. The same one we disparagingly call a consumer.

In the presence of free food, we tend to stuff our bellies and our pockets. We tend not to worry about where the food came from, how it became available to us, or what it means for us to eat it.

“I paid for it” and “I got it for free” result in the same market-specific condition we might call “freedom from relational responsibility.”

In the presence of food that is a gift, the wellbeing of others springs to mind: “Surely someone needs this more than I do.” In their gentle protestations, I hear people asking, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?”, “What is an appropriate portion size?”, “Are all the other neighbors being sustained?” and “How might I go about making sure that is the case?” This is the sound of gratitude creaking into motion by turning the human heart toward relationship. This is the sound of a consumer becoming a sustainer.

Sitting there with my sad little spreadsheet, I started to wonder whether the same might be true of the fruits we grow inside ourselves, in the form of ideas—which are, of course, ultimately nourished and made possible by the fruits of the soil.

In the presence of ideas that are for sale, we might ask “What do I want?” “How much does it cost?” and “Can I afford it?”. We might ask, of an evening where such ideas are shared, “Did I get good value for money?” Or “Did that please me?”

And whoever happens to be sharing their ideas will anticipate those questions. I know this from personal experience. To share your ideas in a market economy can be a frightening thing, and in the face of the imagined consumer, the more tender ideas too often hide themselves. It’s easy to fall into armoured positions and well-worn thought tracks.

And yet those tender ideas, the ones growing very close to a person’s heart, might turn out to be the ones that most need to be shared. The ones that will best sustain a living culture.

In the presence of ideas (and, indeed, on the evenings I’m planning, food) that are a gift, guests might instead ask, “Am I worthy, or could I imagine myself so?”. We might all bring a different quality of attention. A greater willingness to listen. More kindness and wisdom. An openness to being changed by any life-giving ideas that are shared.

In the presence of ideas and food that are offered as a gift, people might leave feeling grateful. Wanting to pass along some of what they’ve received.

And I suspect this might be an important way to re-grow a living culture.2

The practicalities

So I threw out my spreadsheet. I stopped trying to squeeze out a margin, and instead, I asked myself what I would need in order to offer these events as a gift. Here’s what I came up with:

Dinner will be a gift from me to the speaker and the guests (I’m planning for 25 guests at each event). I’ll source the ingredients (likely through a combination of buying, gleaning, and seeking donations from local farms and shops), and cook the meals myself. These will be simple meals—hearty soup and bread—and sourcing and cooking them as a gift will bring me great joy. Far more joy than I could ever have experienced while trying to squeeze out a margin.

But I will need some gifts from others, too, which I’ll pass directly along to speakers and the space I’m renting. For this first season, I’ll run a monthly event between September 2026 and March 2027. That’s seven events, at a total cost of £1,750, or £250 per event. That breaks down to:

• £100 for space rental

• £150 for the speaker fee

At present, I am not looking for any reimbursement for my time. I am very fortunate to have a home and work that pays the bills. If this all goes well, and Edge School continues beyond the first season, I might need to rethink this. But for this first season, I want to offer this as a labour of love.

The ask

This is where you all come in.

Might you be willing to contribute a gift of money to help get this project going, and sustain it through its first season?

Offer a gift

If and when this fund reaches £1,750, I’ll disable it so that no further contributions can be made.

None of this money will go to me. It will all be used to pay speakers (i.e., support activists, thinkers, and artists) and rent the space.

The offer, for you

So what do you get out of this?

These events will be held at the Moor Imagination Centre, an arts and community space in Buckfastleigh, Devon, southwest England. If you live in the area, by donating, you’ll be helping to sustain this centre, grow the living culture of your region, and also create some nourishing and convivial nights out that you can come along to. (Though offering a gift of money won’t bump you up the ticket queue, I’m afraid, as I’m trying hard not to allow money to become exclusionary.)

But even if you live far away, there might still be compelling reasons to support the project. For example:

You’ll be supporting artists, activists, thinkers, and people working towards social change. Putting money in their pockets so they can keep doing their work.

You’ll be creating a wisdom-sharing experiment that might ripple out in untold ways, through new connections and behaviours and thinking.3 The guiding questions in this series will be “Which idea or investigation is lighting you up, which might help us rise to these edgy times?” and “Which questions are you living? Which questions do you long to explore with others?” The emphasis is on enriching and spreading communal wisdom that is fit for our times.

You’ll be making this experiment accessible to everyone in the area, regardless of their resources.

You’ll be supporting an experiment that, if successful, could be replicated anywhere.

You’ll be working some magic in yourself, helping to dismantle what Adam calls the mine-and-yoursness of resources, in ways that will make you feel more worthy to receive what you need, when you need it.

Offer a gift

If you’re able to offer a gift, I’d so appreciate it. And either way, if you’d like to follow along, you can join the mailing list (and find the call for speakers) here, and follow on Instagram here.

Thanks so much for reading,

x Ellie

A few bits of housekeeping today:

• As ever, there’s an audio version of this piece at the top of the page, if you’d rather read it that way.

• The first draft of this essay flew out of me immediately after I read philosopher Adam Robbert’s terrific piece “Perceptual learning and the necessity of form”. Adam is doing some of my favourite work here on Substack. Do check him out.

• I’m doing a new thing! Edge School is a hedge school for edgy times, based where I live in South Devon, inspired by my friends at The Convivial in Cornwall and Kairos in London. A simpler description is: it’s a community conversation symposium that will begin in September of this year, and I’m currently seeking speakers. All speakers will be paid, but this is a small, local experiment primarily designed to foster local community around ideas and creative investigations, and travel budgets will be minimal if not nonexistent. So it’s a local call. Get your proposals in to hello.edge.school@gmail.com by 17th July. (If you saw a local flyer that said 31st July, that was just a fun little game I was playing before I had the sense to look at a calendar. Exciting!) More info here and follow along here.

  

• This Sunday! 21st June! The solstice, no less. Subscribers to this Substack are meeting at 6–8pm BST on Zoom to raise a river in honour of the longest day. By which I mean, we’ll be deep-diving into my teacher Alice Oswald’s poem “Dunt: a poem for a dried-up river”, reading it deeply and slowly and with our whole beings. No prior knowledge required, of this poem or any poetry at all. And if you enjoy the essay below, you might want to join the subscribers in autumn, when we’ll begin a winter-long deep-dive into a Shakespeare play. We’re currently deciding where to go; the frontrunners are King Lear and The Winter’s Tale. You can join the deliberations in the subscriber chat. Fuller details about subscriber offerings here.

  Becoming a paying subscriber to join future meetings.

And now for some very weird thoughts about poetry and the nature of reality.

x Ellie

Picture this, if you will.

A man is crawling over an abyss. He seems to be suspended in midair, nothing immediately obvious stopping him from plunging into the depths below, where chaos swirls like a storm far out at sea. Yet somehow, as this man makes his crawling way above the chasm of chaos, he seems to be experiencing immense pleasure, even a sort of erotic joy. As we watch, we see that he’s crawling along a ladder that extends horizontally over the void. We hadn’t seen this ladder because each rung only appears as he reaches for it. Oh, and it’s made of condensed air.

Allow me to explain. Then allow me to explain what the hell this image might have to do with you, and me, and this moment we’re living through, which I believe is best characterised as a renaissance.

This image, and its accompanying felt sense, is the one that comes to me when I read Shakespeare. Shakespeare is the erotically alive abyss-dangler, trusting that the rungs of the ladder will be there when he reaches for them. The abyss is the chaos of infinite possibility; the beginningless and endless and edgeless stories mythologies ideas realms ages energies that jostle behind and inside any given moment of earthly existence. Out there on his ladder, dangling, Shakespeare can get pleasantly high on the fumes of that infinite possibility, while staying in motion; knowing where he’ll find the next rung.

First, let’s think about the nature of the abyss, and what it can tell us about our own time. Then let’s consider Shakespeare’s ladder, and how we can find our own versions, and why doing so might be so important—and so pleasurable, so erotically alive—right now.

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The abyss

Like us, Shakespeare lived in an age when the old certainties and ways of knowing were dissolving. Even in England, which was slow on the uptake, the Middle Ages were reaching their end. The Reformation had kneecapped the idea that unquestionable divine power could be embodied in mortals, and the Renaissance was getting everyone’s brains jacked on the amphetamine of ancient learning, to the point of birthing brand-new ways of understanding pretty much everything, from the movement of the planets to the anatomy of the body. You might say that humans (in this case, European humans) looked down and saw, with a jolt, that the ground of cultural understanding they’d been walking on all this time was false, and what lay beneath was an abyss of infinite possibility, which also means infinite uncertainty.

Sound familiar?

So there they are, suddenly dangling over the abyss. And it is very hard and very frightening to dangle there. To sit in the mystery, minute after minute and day after day. I’d imagine even Buddhist monks sometimes need to just put the kettle on. And so people started clinging to ways to shut that shit down. Gripping to certainties.

Shakespeare saw exactly what they were doing, and peppered his plays with people clutching for certainty. Trying to rebuild some solid ground beneath them, so they didn’t have to gaze into the abyss. Some gripped to the old structures (think of kings like Lear and Richard II and their loyal followers, clinging to the old dream of divine hierarchy); others—upstarts—tried to seize power in the vacuum, making the world solid by turning it into a trophy.

But for our purposes today, the most interesting class of Shakespeare’s clutchers are the new rationalists: the people who believed there was a perfectly logical explanation for everything, which could be uncovered given enough intellectual investigation. They’re the most interesting because they’ve turned out to be the most enduring—because their ideology has gone on to be a, if not the, core ingredient in the condition we still (just about) live under today: modernity.

The thing about Shakespeare’s rationalists is that they always place their faith in some stable and external idea about truth, which always turns out to fall apart in their hands. For the many Machiavellians (think of Prospero’s brother Antonio, or Edmund in King Lear), the stable and external truth to which they orient—the “effectual truth”, in Machiavelli’s words—is something like: humans are simply little shits predisposed to grab at power, and there’s nothing that can be done about that, so you might as well join in. For Shakespeare’s more benign rationalists, it’s a more Scooby-Doo sort of deal. Just a lovely, comforting sense that there’s a solid, material truth that has nothing to do with imagination or soul or psyche or unseen realms and the way they intersect with this one. Think of Horatio at the start of Hamlet, who’s quite convinced that there can be no such thing as a ghost—until one bloody well appears.

In the image of the abyss that we started with, these rationalists are trying to set the chaos below solid by positing one purportedly objective account of the infinite mystery of existence. And this never turns out well. At some point, these characters always look down and see that the solidity has dissolved and it was an abyss all along. The best example here is King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, who deploys all sorts of rationalising and legalistic language to solidify his (false) belief that his wife is having an affair. His self-righteous wrongness plunges the kingdom into sixteen years of death-in-life, before a dramatic reawakening.

Death-in-life. That’s where we end up, when we tell ourselves that truth is something solid and external and objective.

We in the modern West have been deepening into this kind of death-in-life for nigh on half a millennium now—since Shakespeare’s own day.

And we can’t say he didn’t warn us.

Because here’s what Shakespeare showed us, over and over again:

Truth—real, capital-T Truth—is not solid and external and objective.

It is always an encounter.

It’s something that emerges when we move through life with our whole beings engaged. When we meet the world in its wholeness, from our own wholeness. When we don’t hide from the infinite mystery, or try to set it solid, but stay alive to it.

And the best way to do that, Shakespeare showed us, is to find a ladder.

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The ladder

Alright, so what the fuck is this ladder I keep going on about?

Put simply, it’s a creative or artistic form. Shakespeare’s ladder was famously formed of iambic pentameter.

I’ll admit straight away that form has got a bad rap in the last century or so. It’s come to feel terribly unfashionable. We’re an age of free verse, of abstract expression. Which makes sense, really. Our social norms say truth and reality are simple, and yet we’re all out here experiencing inexplicable chaos. So we throw the formless chaos onto the page or the canvas. The safest place for it.

But when we do away with form, we deprive ourselves. Because it’s form that allows us to dangle over the abyss, and trust that we’ll find the next rung of the ladder, even when it doesn’t exist yet. Which means it’s form that gives us a chance to encounter capital-T Truth.

Consider this speech from Titania, the Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She’s just bumped into Oberon, the King of the Fairies. It’s the start of the play, this is the first time we’ve met them, and they’re deep in a quarrel. Oberon has just jealously accused Titania of paying favours to the hero Theseus, who appears in this play as the Duke of Athens. To which Titania says:

These are the forgeries of jealousy,
And never since the middle summer’s spring
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By pavèd fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beachèd margin of the sea
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge have sucked up from the sea
Contagious fogs which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard.

And she goes on, chucking accusations at him, telling him all the ways he and his helpers have sabotaged her troupe’s recent meetings.

Except that they’re not just accusations. They’re a conjuring act. They call a whole world into being in the audience’s imagination. A sumptuously rich, subtle, alive world, complete with green corn and piping winds and rushy brooks and also its own metaphysics—the whole passage is voiced, after all, by a fairy, a spirit, who’s explaining the spirited origins of winds and floods.

And it’s the rhythm of the line that allows Shakespeare to do all this. Take that pelting river made so proud. It’s the iambic pentameter that calls this particular trochee, pelting, into Titania’s mouth. The line demands it. And once the river is pelting—once the form has turned it into a fighter—it stands to reason that it would also be proud. That’s simply the next rung of the ladder.

For years, I would read Shakespeare and boggle. How could a person juggle all those characters and plots and mythologies, conjure all those vivid worlds, and also fit it all to his famous iambic pentameter?

Of course, it’s because the iambic pentameter isn’t just another technicality to juggle. It’s a form of magic that summons all those characters and plots and mythologies out of the edgelessness of the abyss and into storied being. It’s the magical tool that gives him just enough support to crawl out above the abyss, encounter capital-T truth, and bring it through into expression.

Or to put it all so much more insightfully and elegantly (with the help of the air ladder):

… as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

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How to find your ladder

All of which is a very long-winded way of encouraging you to choose a poetic form and devote yourself to writing in it for a while.

Every day or every week, find a little time to head out into the world, encounter it with as much of your fullness as you can muster, and honour what you meet in a sonnet or a sestina or a simple sequence of rhyming couplets. There’s a helpful list of forms here, if you want some inspiration.

You will be clumsy at first. You might be clumsy for a long while. I certainly am. Don’t worry. The point isn’t the product, it’s the process.

As you deepen into the practice, you will notice that the world itself starts to move in the shape of a sonnet or a sestina or a sequence of rhyming couplets. But this won’t feel like a shrinkage or a foreclosing. Won’t feel like forcing something into a mould. Paradoxically, it will feel like expansion. Bringing a form to your observations will afford you a much fuller encounter with reality. Because you can’t dangle out over the mystery without an air ladder. Without some kind of support.

And the beauty of choosing a creative form as your ladder, as your support, is that unlike an ideology, it won’t set solid like a floor. It won’t begin to obscure the abyss, the great mystery, and tell you truth is simple.

It will keep you alert and alive and collaborating creatively with the world. It will make it possible for capital-T Truth to reveal itself to you, because capital-T Truth is always an encounter. A rung of the ladder that appears only when we reach for it.

(As a postscript, I’ll add that there comes a time when the world starts to tell you which form it’s written in, and you stop wanting to pre-assign a sonnet or a sestina to it. That’s the great mystery of the air ladder. Who or what is making the air condense like that? We can’t know. All we can do is start climbing, and trust.)

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Hello, friends,

I’m sitting in a tiny mint-green room in the cottage I’m lucky enough to call home, in Devon, in rural southwest England. I’m surrounded by books and poems and gifts from friends, notably various blades. When I turned forty a couple of years ago, no fewer than four friends gave me sharp silver implements of one kind or another, as tools for the second half of my life. Make of that what you will.

I spend a lot of time in this little room, not always writing (or sharpening my many blades). I’m also an editor—something I don’t talk about much. This past month, the manuscript I’ve been editing has been a rare pleasure: This Food Is a Gift: Practical Experiments in Neighborly, Non-Market Farming and Feeding, by , whom some of you might follow here on Substack. Adam has written a life-changing book about the gift. Specifically, about what he’s learned through years of running farms where nothing is sold; where all the food is given as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. If you want to know more about Adam, the book he’s cooked up, or my work as an editor—this part of my work and life that I don’t talk about much—you might like to read the letter I wrote for his Substack recently, on retiring possessive pronouns. With enormous thanks to and for their parts in bringing me into this project, as well, of course, as to Adam himself.

One other housekeeping note:

• The best magic and medicine I know for moments of societal meaning collapse is poetry. Words are how we bring the world into being, and poetry is the purest form of word magic. So if you’d like to join a group of us who are memorising poetry and reading poetry as what it is—a psychedelic drug and a form of magic, both—you might like to join this Substack as a paying subscriber for £10 a month or £100/year. We meet to share poems (ideally from memory) on the first Wednesday evening of the month (if you’re reading this on the day of publication, that’s tonight! And you don’t need to prepare a thing in order to come), and to deep-read poetry on the third Sunday. More info here.

  Join the poetry wizards by becoming a paid subscriber.

Now, here’s some self-help (?) from the Ancient Greeks,

x Ellie

Art’s nice, right? A nice civilised thing to consume or maybe even make when we’ve paid our bills and finished the laundry.

But what if art was far more important than that? What if it was actually a metaphysical practice—the way our species has been bringing the world into being, manifesting its cosmovision, since our dawning days? Since way before religion or science existed? What if modern culture’s weirdo relegation of art to galleries and theatres is a key part of why our world is falling apart?

Because the creative imagination is the glue that holds the material world together, but we’ve convinced ourselves it’s just a luxury.

I laid out this idea last time I wrote to you. This time, let’s get practical. If we’re willing to entertain the idea that the world is a work of art, and we are each artists intimately involved in co-creating it, and living this way is how we hold the cosmos together… what do we actually do about that? How can we live into the opportunity to sculpt a world worth living in, all day every day?

Step one: Act

When I say “act”, you might conjure two meanings that feel quite distinct, even contradictory:

1. Take action; do something.

2. Play a part; pretend (perhaps for artistic purposes) to be someone or something you’re not.

Very different things, right? One means taking action in the real world. The other means making believe in an imaginary world.

Today, I’m going to suggest that these versions of acting have more in common than we tend to think. That in fact, their apparent difference springs from modernity’s mistake about what “the real world” is—this fallacy that it’s inert and objective, instead of a work of imagination that requires our artful and active participation.

Then I’m going to suggest how we can act, all day every day, in a way that feels more imaginative and empowering and alive—a way that remembers that all the world’s a stage, and we’re players in an unfolding imaginative story.

[Of course, because I’m me, I can’t do this without retracing millennia of cultural history. If you want to skip that, feel free to jump straight to the life hack at the end. I never thought I would type the words “life hack”, but there you go.]

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Backstory

To illustrate the deep connection between the two versions of acting I’ve laid out above, and how they began to separate, let’s go back to the origins of theatre. This diagram of the Western world’s first theatre, the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis, can tell us a lot:

This shows the theatre’s layout, including the earliest architecture and later additions made by successive civilisations right up to the Romans—almost a millennium of accreting theatrical architecture. The most instructive part for our purposes today is the circle that says “old orchestra”.

This isn’t the part where the orchestra used to play. That’s a much later adaptation of the word.

No, “orkhestra” just means “a circular space”, and this circular space is where a chorus used to dance. It’s labelled “old” because it’s way older than the stage. The dancing of a chorus originated in the mists of time, centuries before anything called theatre existed.

Before the Athenian city-state was so much as a twinkle in a statesman’s eye, groups of up to fifty men and boys would gather in the countryside every spring to sing and dance in circular formations in honour of Dionysus, a god of, among other things, death, rebirth, and the unruly fertility of the living world. This was a rural practice of a rural, agricultural people, dancing for a good harvest.

They needed a good crop, as a matter of life and death. And they knew that the weather and the living world were controlled by unseen forces, which they understood as gods. So what did they do? They didn’t throw up their hands and concede powerlessness. Nor did they go into micro-manage mode and try to buckle the land to their desires through extractive land-management practices. Instead, they took action by opening their imaginations—the glue that holds the material world together.

They stood in the danger and uncertainty of incarnate life, and they found a form of behaviour—collective song and dance—that expanded what seemed possible in that life. That brought in the felt sense of eternity, to cushion the terrors of time.

Before we look at how these old choruses morphed to give us the artform of theatre, there are a few things I want to notice about the way they danced:

1. The circle they danced in was flush to the ground. An old orkhestra was never raised on a stage, because though people would gather to watch, spectating wasn’t the point. The point was the doing, the participation.

2. The circular shape was important, too. At the centre of the circle, there was an altar—a kind of lightning rod for the god’s energy. So the most powerful and important part of the space was its middle—a point any gathered spectators couldn’t even see. And whatever happened there would ripple out cleanly into the rest of the world, which stood at the same level as the circle.

3. Rites like these were called “dromena”, which comes from the verb “draō”, meaning “to do, act, or perform”. That name higlights something very important: These weren’t just adornments of reality; they were forms of action. They were meant to have an effect. Whatever change occurred inside the circle was very much intended to ripple out beyond it, into the everyday world.

But the people’s relationship with the divine was soon to change. Proto-statesmen would soon start enacting something like democracy—a system of governance that seemed increasingly to bring decision-making out of divine hands and into human ones. And it’s against this backdrop of emergent democracy that the new artform of drama was born out of the dromena.

(Let’s pause a moment to note here that this word, “drama”, also emerges out of the verb “draō”. So in both of these versions of acting, we have this sense of doing something. Of taking action.)

How exactly did the dromena give way to drama? This is one of the big questions in classical scholarship. One story tells us that it happened when a man named Thespis stepped out of the chorus and began to address the audience in character, giving every future thespian their job title.

The truth is more complex and nuanced. It’s about urbanisation and power and those changing relationships with the divine that I mentioned. Books and books have been written about this, but the piece I want to focus on today is this: As the ritualised action of the dromena gave way to the high art of drama, one of the main changes was the sudden emphasis on an audience.

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Remember what I said about the flat structure of the orkhestra, and its most important point being its dead centre. Now check out this photo of the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis (the same theatre you saw in diagram form above):

Check out those seats! And the way the circle has changed to a semicircle, so that its most important part is not the centre but the front edge, where the actors play for the spectators.

Suddenly, the most important part of all this isn’t contact with a god, but performance for humans.

In fairness, I should note that the stone seats were built later, by the Romans. The Greeks had a wooden version. But the audience seating was very important for the Greeks, too. In fact, the seats were such an important part of what was to unfold here—the artform that was to flourish here—that they gave it its name. “Theatre” means “a place for viewing”. The new artform of theatre would be defined by those seats, by the fact of having an audience.

Let’s consider what it might have been like to sit on those fancy seats at the fancy new theatre, watching a stage that at some point came to be raised off the ground, out of the level of ordinary life. You would have been crunched in with thousands of other viewers, listening to their breathing, smelling their bodies, unavoidably exposed to their incarnate reality. You would have been sitting passive in a smelly and bodily world, watching people act—be active—all the way down there, on the stage. The whole architecture heightened the perceived difference between audience and actors. It seemed to posit two separate worlds: that one down there on the stage, imaginary, fictional, determined by the actions of the players. (And increasingly home to the most remarkable creative work, by the likes of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides.) This one out here in the audience real, factual, not imaginal or imaginary.

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Now, the Ancient Greeks were an astonishingly alive and alert people, intellectually and creatively. They seem to have been able to hold the tension of these posited multiple layers of reality, without getting lazy. They seem to have been able to watch drama and still remember, when they emerged from the theatre, that they too—just like the characters in drama—were living in a world infused with spirit; a world in which imagination was part of the fabric of reality. (I’m saying this because when they stepped out of the theatre and into the political architecture of the Acropolis, they maintained a remarkable amount of ritualised contact with the greater-than-human forces that they understood as gods.)

But it seems to me at least possible that the physical architecture the Greeks built in the form of the theatre began to pave the way for the very lazy attitude we have to the purported levels of reality today. This might have been the beginning of our belief that art takes place in a make-believe world that is supplementary to everyday reality. A luxury. A nice extra. Separate from the real world, which is inert and objective.

And this—this—is where the whole world starts to fall apart. When we tell ourselves that it’s only fictional worlds that are held together by the creative imagination. That everything else is inert and objective and factual.

Life hack, I guess?

I am very surprised to find myself writing the words “life hack,” and yet that’s what this feels like.

Inhabiting the world as what it is—a work of art, a constant unfolding of imagination—means closing the gap between these two versions of “acting”. It means giving up this pretence that there is any level of reality that isn’t shaped by our creative imaginations.

Here’s a very powerful way to do this:

Remember that in fact, there is always an audience.

Even choruses dancing in their flattened circles, focusing on participation, not performance—even they knew that they were being watched. Even they were using the internalised sense of the eyes of others to infuse their actions with power and meaning and beauty, enabling them to bring forth a world that was more meaningful and beautiful and imaginally alive.

It’s just that the eyes on them didn’t require any human architecture, because they were other-than-human.

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In the Ancient Greek (and pre-Ancient Greek) mind, this primary audience was understood to be the gods. That was the whole point of ritual dances like those of a chorus: to offer something to the watching gods.

And if the word “god” troubles you or leaves you cold, just imagine that your audience is something, anything, bigger than you, whose presence makes you want to live more fully and meaningfully. It might be the lives of the plants and animals who surround you and make your life possible, by silently giving up their own lives to feed and shelter you. (This thought very much informed by my recent work with .) It might be your ancestors—all those who fought to survive so that you can live today. It might be your living loved ones. It might be the generations that will follow you.

Whatever you choose, the invitation is to internalise a sense that what you do matters, the actions you take matter. Because something bigger than you is watching. Because in fact, you too are a player in an ever-unfolding work of imagination, and some of that imagination has been pinched off to live in your own psyche and soul.

In every minute of every day, there is the option not to simply rattle through rote behaviours. To feel into the actions that might most delight that invisible audience, who are rooting for us to pull a good show out of this drama we’re living through.

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This is an essay about making art—where “art” can mean a poem or a painting or, in fact, reality itself. And we all know that the first step in making art is to fill yourself with great art. So, hey! Do you want to come hang out with a bunch of us filling ourselves with great art twice a month? We’re on a break for April, but starting in May, paying subscribers to this Substack will be meeting on Zoom twice a month: once for a deep, slow poetry reading, lectio-divina style (we’re starting with Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), and once to share the poetry and art and stories that have been keeping us alive (from memory if possible, so that we’re filling ourselves with lasting beauty as we go). Two art-filling meetings a month—plus access to the chat, where we gather to discuss books and ideas between sessions—for £10/month or £100/year. More info here.

Also: if you’d rather listen to the essay below than read it, as ever, you’ll find an audio version at the top of the page.

Love,

xx Ellie

Take a look at these paintings.

They both depict the same event: the Last Supper. But they position the viewer in very different relationships to it.

When you look at the first picture, you float somewhere outside the scene, but you could equally weave in and out of it. Because there’s no linear perspective, your position is timeless, placeless, and depersonalised. Your point of view doesn’t matter—or rather, doesn’t exist. What matters is Jesus and the apostles, sharing a meal in an unending present moment.

When you look at the second picture, the masterful linear perspective positions you in a single spot: maybe thirty feet from the table, aligned with its dead centre. It tells you where you stand in both space and time, and makes your vantage point—your individual point of view—the organising principle of what’s seen. And by changing the way you see, it also changes the substance of what’s seen. Jesus and the apostles are more human now. Characters. Individual people living in time.

Why the difference? Because the two paintings—the two modes of painting—straddle a revolution in metaphysics. A seismic shift in the way European humans understood the world and their place in it.

And whenever a society’s metaphysics change, its art is already changing too. Humans are already finding new ways to paint and story and sculpt their emerging understanding of reality. And then a funny thing happens: Those paintings and stories and sculptures become the architecture of the new world. They set the parameters of what can be experienced and understood in it. Even now, in 2026, in the last gasps of modernity, I know that the structure and quality of my life are in some way determined by the linear perspective of da Vinci’s Last Supper.

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Here’s what I’m not saying: Art reflects metaphysics.

No. Art doesn’t reflect our changing beliefs about the world and our place in it. It creates the world we live into. It draws that world forth.

Art is not a mirror of metaphysics but the praxis of metaphysics. It’s the workshop of human cosmology, where the infinite is summoned and mixed with what’s earthside, in a shareable shape that shows people what kind of world they live in. It’s a practice that births the world.

Or at least, this is what art can be, and was for a very long time. Here’s the twist: In the story of our cultural amnesia about the power and purpose of art, the difference between the two paintings above is a crucial plot point. Because though this second Last Supper’s way of seeing brought us many wonderful things (not least the masterpiece that is this painting), as far as art and cosmology are concerned, it set us on a path to a dead end.

The good news is, we can find our way back from this dead end.

In the next few essays, I’m going to suggest some ways how, in the form of creative tools from the workshop of art-as-cosmology.

If you don’t consider yourself creative, these tools will be designed even and perhaps especially for you. Because that story you’re telling yourself, that you’re not creative, is just a lie that comes from our culture’s broken story about what art is. I know because I used to tell myself the same story, and it did me a whole lot of damage.

I also know because living is creating. Because the world itself is a work of art, and you have always been an artist.

If your experience is anything like mine, these tools might make life feel worth living again.

But before we get to them, we have to understand how we wound up down this dead end, so far from the workshop where our ancestors carved and sketched and storied and sang their worlds into being.

Only 170 years separate the two paintings above, and yet in those 170 years, a new age had been birthed. Ugolino di Nerio painted his Last Supper in the Late Middle Ages. Da Vinci’s version is, of course, a paradigmatic work of the High Renaissance. Whole libraries have been written about the shift from the medieval to the early modern or Renaissance sensibility, but here’s a quick-and-dirty list of some salient points:

• In the Middle Ages, European humans tended to think of themselves as part of a world created by and suffused with the presence of God.

• By the time da Vinci was painting, he and his peers still understood the world as God’s creation, but they tended not to feel they were part of that creation in quite the same way. They were beginning to occupy a special relationship to creation: set apart. Detached and observing—like the perspective in da Vinci’s painting.

• “Observing” being the operative word. When you stand apart from the world—distant—your best way of learning about it is with your eyes. This marked a change. In the Middle Ages, people tended to trust their felt senses to reveal truths about the real-but-invisible parts of the world that lay beyond the material (like the presence of God that suffused everything). But with dawning modernity and its new vantage point of distance, those felt senses and the intuitions that emerged in them became increasingly irrelevant or even suspect. You can’t feel something that’s a long way away. And so increasingly, only what was seen could be believed. Pics or it didn’t happen.

• From this detached, observing perspective—and with the help of the many classical texts that were being rediscovered and fueling these changes—humans could now deduce or generate insights and meaning that were not received from God, about life, the universe, and everything.

• And it wasn’t only that a human could generate or deduce insights from this detached, visual, intellectualising vantage point. They must. It was the duty of the conscientious human to develop their humanitas—the quality of our species that set us apart from the rest of creation.

• And so the human will and reason were increasingly understood as the driving force of life—and life was increasingly bounded to what could be seen and proven in material reality.

There’s a way in which the whole modern world is right there in the visual perspective of da Vinci’s Last Supper: the way it inhabits time, its leveling of the sacred, its detachment, its emphasis on the evidence of the eyes and the authority of the rational, individual human subject.

(And, by the way, this shift wasn’t only playing out in the visual arts. A similar thing was happening in literature, where a new individualist, humanist form was emerging—a form that was primarily concerned with the way a person creates their own fate. Of course, I’m talking about the novel. I’ve got a longer piece on this, linked just below, if you’re interested. But please don’t click away now! I’d love to hang out with you here a bit longer.)

So: At the dawn of modernity, Europeans began to make art that locked us into a more detached and human-centric stance, which increasingly denied the numinous.

Over time, this changed the cultural story about what art was. Art that sealed humans into an increasingly human world also sealed itself off from its metaphysical function. It no longer had to summon the infinite into a shareable shape. It only had to exist for its own sake—for human diversion or gratification. Once the workshop of cosmology, art now became an optional extra, an adornment or leisure activity, and cosmology became the preserve of the new discipline of science.

And just like that, humans lost our most powerful tool for making a world worth living in.

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If we step back and take a long view of art, we soon see how very strange these ideas of the last few centuries are. We soon see art’s older and deeper function as a praxis of metaphysics. We see this in the palaeolithic cave painters who made art as part of shamanic ritual—a way to contact otherworlds and bring their insights into this one. We see it in the fact that belief systems from Christianity to Hinduism to indigenous myth cycles are told in stories. We see it in the way even Plato (no lover of art) reached for story to express his most enduring metaphysical insight, the allegory of the cave. And in countless other examples besides. (And to be clear: there were always individual artists and even whole movements working in this vein, this understanding of art as the praxis of metaphysics. It’s the broader cultural attitude towards art as mere adornment that worries me.)

In fact, the cosmological and metaphysical understanding of art is right there in the word “art”. Did you know that this word shares a root with “arthritis”? That in some way deeply embedded in the English language, art is associated with inflammation of the joints?

Both words derive from the Proto-Indo-European root form –ar, which means “to fit together”. So: an artisan is a person who skilfully fits objects together. A body with arthritis is troubled at the joints, the parts that should fit together. And art—as Lewis Hyde shows so brilliantly in Trickster Makes This World—makes the world by fitting the realms together. Through the stories of Greek messenger Hermes, the Yoruba trickster Eshu, Fon cosmology, and much more, Hyde illustrates that the primary job of such artus-workers is to “create the possibility of movement between spheres” via clever work at the places where the realms join.

Or, should join. Because sometimes, the spheres get too separate—and then gods and humans alike are in trouble. The mortal realm plunges into eternal winter; the gods go hungry because humans have stopped making sacrifices. In these moments, the survival of people, gods, and the universe all depend on the artus-workers—the artists and tricksters—who can articulate a new world by joining the realms.

Friends, we’re in one of those moments now. The separation of the realms has become too complete. I don’t need to tell you that we on Earth are in a long winter of the soul.

And if all this language of the gods and otherworlds leaves you cold, just replace it with the language of science. With quantum dimensions and the scientifically detected nature of reality. Because the paradigmatic questions of our day—about what consciousness is; whether the universe is fundamentally material or made of something else (and if so, what); the nature of time; how particles can be entangled and mirror each other across gulfs that are light-years wide; and what exactly is going on in all those other quantum dimensions—these are all evidence of the relegated, real-but-invisible parts of our world making themselves known, not just in many of our felt senses (i.e., the senses made suspect at the dawn of modernity) but in our scientific observations too. In so many ways, these questions of our day mark a reversal, or at least a great tempering, of the humanist ideals that came into play in the Renaissance, when da Vinci was positioning us all thirty feet out from the Last Supper, to take a good, stable look at a good, stable world scaled for humans.

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So what now?

Now, we must be artus workers, joining the realms. We must make our home again in art as the workshop of cosmology, and use our devoted attention and our craft and our imaginations to birth creative worlds that are worth living in.

Which probably sounds intimidating. But that sense of intimidation belongs to the last few centuries of unhelpful thinking about art. It’s the bullying, perfectionist voice of cultures where art is an adornment instead of a way of life. Where it has become a place to prove your prowess and earn prestige, rather than a human’s basic way of being.

So how do we recover art as a way of being? How do we become, once more, the artists who make the world, which is itself a work of art?

In the next few essays in this series, I’m going to share some tools for living art in this way. For starters, we’ll look at:

1. Acting

2. Playing with form

3. Putting a frame on it

And more will be revealed.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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I’ve got an uncharacteristically practical post for you today. Below, you’ll find a how-to (and why-to) guide to a memory-and-imagination practice I’ve been working with, which is so easy and joyful and helpful and imagination-firing that I can’t believe I haven’t been doing it my whole life. It’s adapted from the work of science and memory writer Lynne Kelly (especially The Memory Code) and medieval scholar Mary Carruthers, from the wisdom of non-literate and medieval monastic cultures, and from my training with oral storytellers and poets. And it’s been enormously nourished by the pinch-me wonderful subscribers to this Substack, with whom I’ve been meeting for the past six months to investigate whether memory might be a magical power that can remake the material world. Do you know, I think it might just be. I hope you’ll try this practice and let me know whether you agree.

Also, hey! Do you want to meet with me and those pinch-me wonderful, imaginative and curious and kind and wise subscribers twice a month? If so, now is a good time to become a paying subscriber to this Substack, as we’ve just finished our six-month investigation of memory. From now on, we’ll be meeting on Zoom twice a month, starting in May (Wednesday 6th and Sunday 17th):

• First Wednesday of each month, 6.30–8pm UK time: We’ll all share the poems and stories and songs that have been lighting us up, with a hearty encouragement to share from memory when possible, so that we’re filling ourselves with lasting beauty as we go.

• Third Sunday of each month, 6–8pm UK time: we’ll deep-read poetry, lectio-divina style and very sloooowly, to allow the gods in the poem to wobble on through. No prior expertise in poetry required, nor any requirement to read between sessions; just show up ready to be awe-struck by words. We’re going to start (on Sunday 17th May) with Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—even if you know it well, mark my words, this one will wobble something wild into the room when we sit with it together.

Both these sessions for a £10/month membership fee, or £100/year.

And in case you’re mulling it over, here’s what a few memory club members said about the last six months as subscribers:

“Getting involved in the Word Swallowers Memory Club is one of the best things I’ve done. Exploring memory not as information retrieval, but as a faculty or form of imagination, and essential to creativity—as drinking from the pool of Mnemosyne—has been tremendously inspiring.”—Kenny

“The memory club was a rich and endlessly stimulating mix of ideas about mythology, self and society, and the combination of cognitive and episodic aspects of remembering. But perhaps more importantly it was held by a small group of people bent on a gentle way of changing the world through personal practice.”—David

I’ll be back next time with an essay on how to inhabit the world as what it is: a constantly unfolding work of art.

Until then,

xx Ellie

How and why to plant a memory garden

The problem

• Humans have been outsourcing our memories for millennia, to technologies beginning with the written word and going right up to AI. This outsourcing has accelerated and escalated wildly since the dawn of the internet age.

• Along the way, we’ve convinced ourselves that outsourcing memory is harmless, because memory is really just a sort of hard drive; an inert store of facts. That what really matters is creative and critical thinking. That’s what makes a person smart.

• Recent pedagogical practice in the modern West (and many societies we’ve colonised, whether militarily or culturally) reflects these assumptions. Schooling is now typically geared to test students on how they think, rather than what they know.

• But all this is built on a fundamental misconception about what thinking is. As neuroscientists are now finding (h/t to Ruth Gaskovski for the link), your ability to think creatively and critically is massively impaired if you don’t hold enough in memory (ideally deep, subconscious levels of memory), because you’re having to juggle too much in your conscious cognition, leaving too little free space for free-roaming thought and creative breakthroughs.

• Our severance from memory has also brought a violent severance from land. In non-literate cultures, land is the primary organising structure of information. When you can’t write things down, but you have to remember a lot of life-saving information about how to live in a place, you stow that information in stories and poems and songs that live in the land. Then, when you want to retrieve it, you walk that land, either in the flesh or in imagination. Over time, these practices gain an indescribably rich resonance of personal and cultural memory and, yes, love. Because this stitching of story and knowledge to land is also a stitching of the heart to land. I contend that we moderns would never have been able to destroy land in the way we have if we still had land-based memory practices; if we still used memory as a thread to stitch our hearts into the land we love. It simply wouldn’t have been possible. If you try the memory practice below, I’d love to know whether you end up agreeing.

• To state a final facet of the problem of widespread forgetting: an idea that seems to be gaining ground in our culture is that the way we think, and the kind of attention we pay, determine the nature and dimensions of the world we move through. This isn’t a new insight—you’ll find it running in some form or other through much of the history of serious thought, from Buddhism to the Stoics to the existentialists to today’s McGilchristians, and more. But it seems to be gaining ground in the mainstream today. If we accept this premise, then we must be concerned with what we remember when we show up for that attending—with which truths and beliefs and ideas about the world we’ve turned into muscle memory. Neuroscientific studies confirm that it matters: that our perceptions are shaped by schemas, or collections, of past experience and knowledge, which are constantly predicting what we might encounter—and so determining which qualities we draw out from the world and call reality. What we remember, both consciously and subconsciously, dictates what we can perceive, which shapes the world we live in.

• Luckily, there’s something we can do about all these problems. We can start stitching our hearts and imaginations back to the land, reclaim our ability to think critically and creatively, and prime ourselves to encounter a more ensouled and alive world, by reviving land-based memory practices.

A solution: Plant a memory garden

Step one: Select your personal canon

Which books, stories, poems, ideas, songs, and other great works have made you who you are? Spend some time assembling a list. It doesn’t need to be—can’t be—exhaustive. It will grow and change for the rest of your life. That’s as it should be.

If you’re anything like me, this in itself will be a rich provocation. How many of you have come up frustratingly blank in response to the question, “What’s your favourite book?” We so often hold things so lightly, so carelessly, in our culture. This is an invitation to honour the work that lives in your bones and wants you to feel it there.

Step two: Select your memory walk

You’re going to “plant” these ideas on a walk you know well and can visit often. I happen to live on a hill in a somewhat rural area, so I’m planting my garden along the road and dirt track that wind up that hill and down the other side, from my front door.

Some pointers:

• Length: My route is about a mile long, though I’m finding that land is extremely capacious for memory, and you could stow a lot of stories and ideas in even a half-mile’s walk. (And remember that with most walks, it’s possible to extend the route if you need to.)

• No need for this to be a rural route. All you need is a place with some distinguishing features. Buildings will do just fine. Though since you’ll be making associations between your canon and the landscape, and since your canon is likely varied, some variation in the landscape will help. By which I just mean, a couple of plants or trees as well as buildings will serve you well.

• Go with wherever you walk most regularly. Maybe the route to your local shop or bus stop or train station.

A question that often comes up when I share this practice is, “What if I move to a new area and I can’t walk that route anymore?” At the risk of sounding dramatic, this question really comes down to: “Why love in the face of death?” Because make no mistake, what you’re doing here is an act of love. And all acts of love stand in defiance of impermanence, because the love weighs heavier. So do it anyway. It’s worth it. And it will live inside you and inside the land, no matter the distance between you.

Step three: Plant your canon on your memory route

Set out on your route, with your personal canon in mind. As you walk, look out for associations that suggest themselves between the land and your texts. For instance:

• A text in my canon is William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. On my memory walk, I pass through a green tunnel created by trees growing on either side. The space inside this tunnel has always felt very charged to me, to the point that on a few occasions I’ve felt frightened or unwelcome in it, and turned back. This experience of finding myself in a very charged space created by two polarities (i.e., the trees growing on either side) is very similar to my experience of reading The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. So that is where I’ve planted that book.

• Associations can be much sillier than this. Further along the walk, there’s a shelf fungus growing from a tree. It juts out in a straight ledge, seeming to hover many feet in the air. Seeing this, the word “hover” came into my mind, and I planted the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Windhover” in the fungus. (The fungus will come and go with the seasons, and eventually maybe even kill the tree. I’m excited to see whether I still associate this poem with that location, or whether I’ll need to find a new place to plant it. Which is to say: a memory garden, like any garden, will change and be a living relationship.)

Don’t try to plant everything at once. Things will stick in your memory more firmly and richly if you take it slowly and allow each association to take root, before moving on to the next.

Step four: Plant with intentio

This is where we’re going to smoosh some medieval monastic practice into this land-based memory art inspired by non-literate cultures. Because this smooshing will supercharge the creative potential of this exercise.

When medieval monks meditated, Mary Carruthers tells us in her fascinating book The Craft of Thought, they were engaged in an effort to have creative thoughts about God, to “make” thoughts about God. This all-day-every-day kind of meditation was intended to help them live in a felt, personal encounter with the divine. So how did they “make” those creative thoughts? It began with rote memorisation of Scripture. But atop that memorised Scripture, they also stocked their memories with personal associations, images, feeling tones, and multisensory impressions that the Scripture stirred. In other words, the memorised texts were a foundation for other material that was much more personal and imaginally alive. And it was by meditating upon this other material—these images and feeling tones and impressions—and allowing them to recombine in new ways that they arrived at their creative thoughts about God.

Here’s an example of how to apply this in practice:

• When I planted The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I didn’t just deposit Blake’s name and the name of the book in the tree tunnel. I also associated that tree tunnel with the feeling the book stirs in me, of a charged pressure between two poles. I recalled and re-experienced this feeling, and consciously associated it with that place. Then I also recalled and consciously associated an image that once came to me while reading the book, in which the surface identities of Earth’s energies dissolved to reveal their true forms as squirming blue worms. Long story. The point is, as well as the book itself, I stitched into the land my personal associations and images and full-sensory responses. And I didn’t just think about those things, I felt them in that place.

Walking the route now—walking through the personal images and full-sensory impressions I associate with multiple works that are meaningful to me—I find myself walking through a personal history of deep, felt responses. I find those deep, felt responses stirring in me again. And I find that this meditative process blasts my imagination wide open. If I walk this route when I’m stuck on a writing project, and allow those images and energies to move through me, something always shifts.

Step five: Add detail

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about land-based memory practice is the way it un-silos our ways of knowing. Lynne Kelly writes about this beautifully in The Memory Code. While it’s true that my memory walk is becoming very emotional, imaginative, and even spiritually resonant, it’s also a highly practical way of storing detailed rational information. If I want to remember quotes from a book in my canon, or the year of its composition, I simply find small aspects of the relevant memory location to which I can attach this factual information. It’s basically an infinitely capacious cheat sheet that doesn’t use written language.

This is helpful in and of itself. It also reminds us that the separation of our ways of knowing into cognition, imagination, sensory imprints, and so on is artificial and modern. All these ways of knowing live together, as a whole way to know ourselves and the world.

Step six: Keep walking the route

In oral cultures, people would return to stories stowed in the land in ceremonial cycles, and this rhythm of return would ensure that the knowledge was not lost—that, in fact, it was always being enriched with new experiences, new layers of living and memory.

It will be important to do the same with your memory garden, because like any garden, it needs tending. This doesn’t mean you have to establish an elaborate ritual calendar. Just decide on a regular rhythm for returning to your memory route. Maybe it’s your daily morning walk, or a stroll every Saturday afternoon. When you set out for one of these walks, take a moment at the start to set the mood and your intention to be present to all the recollections that come.

Finally, a disclaimer: This is very much a personal adaptation of a technique that can be practised many other ways. Where I’ve used these techniques to store a personal canon, they’re typically used to store a community’s wisdom. I’m conscious that for all my carping about the toxic individuality of our creative culture, what I’ve outlined here is a highly individualist approach. I’m considering some workshop programming to create more communal memory routes. Watch this space.

It’s also worth noting that Lynne Kelly’s method is much more structured, planting information in chronological order, in sets of ten memory items per division of the given route. Nobody has ever accused me of having a logical mind, so that version didn’t come naturally to me—though I might still try it. If you want something more logical/methodical, check out The Memory Code. The beautiful thing is, you can try any number of ways, since you can have as many memory routes as there are physical walking routes in the world.

Planting knowledge in land is one of the very oldest human practices. You can do this. It’s in you. It’s your birthright.

Let me know how it goes,

xx Ellie

Some quick housekeeping before we get cosmic:

• I’m speaking at the Kairos Club in London on Thursday 12th March, and I would love to see your face there. We’re going to have a lot of fun. I’ll be talking about why to memorise stories and poetry (hint: it’s world-making magic) and we’ll learn how. You’ll even leave with a poem sown into your bones. And though it’s very fun, all this is also surprisingly consequential: I’m going to argue that the modern fallacy that memory is nothing but a mechanical function that can harmlessly be outsourced to tech is a big part of why IQs are dropping and creativity can feel so tortured and these tech twats are managing to become our overlords. Tickets here.

  

• If you’re a passionate nerd interested in imagination and language and the glimmering weirdnesses of human knowing, you might like to come hang out with more such people on Zoom twice a month. Truly, I can’t quite believe the loveliness of the little community that’s springing up around this Substack. Paying subscribers meet twice a month, and when we reach the end of our memory club just after the spring equinox (our last meeting is March 22nd), we’ll be shifting to a more open format: one session a month of deep-reading poetry (no reading required between sessions), and one session a month of sharing poetry and stories and other gems we’ve loved, with a hearty invitation to share from memory if possible. Something wild and shiny very often wobbles in from the otherworld during these Zoom sessions. Do join us if that sounds up your street. We’d love to have you.

  Come hang out by becoming a paying subscriber.

  And now for an essay. As ever, if you’d rather listen to it than read it, there’s an audio version at the top of the post.

I spend a lot of time sitting in damp church basements, eating crap biscuits and swapping tales of recovery from addiction. One of the great joys of my life is seeing people come in to these meetings sick and tired and at their wits’ end, and slowly, over the course of weeks and months and years, get well.

Today, I want to talk about what that process of getting well looks like, because I think it has implications and applications far beyond addiction. In fact, I think it mirrors the mode shift that this moment is calling for: a radical reawakening of art as a way of being.

So: the thing about the end stages of addiction is the sense of powerlessness. When people (including me) first enter recovery, they tend to feel as though life has them pinned to the floor so it can pummel them in the face, leaving them (us) with only one possible response: to escape, over and over again, into the numbing of their (our) substance or behaviour of choice. There seems to be simply no space between the onslaught of life and the response of picking up a drink or finding some other way to evacuate your own consciousness. No choice to do anything else. (Of course, when you’re in the grip of addiction, you can’t or won’t see that it’s the escaping, the numbing—i.e., your own behaviour—that’s keeping you on the floor.)

When someone starts to unpin themselves from a floor-pummelling like this, it starts with a tiny little space. A hair’s breadth, no more. For an addict, this is the space between the urge to pick up and the act of doing so. It takes time, but after a while, the gap widens. You find other things to do when the urge spikes—other tools and ways to cope. You might call someone who cares about you, or pray. At this point, you’re no longer an automaton; no longer at the whim of some malignant and overpowering force. You’re beginning to have agency.

The hair’s breadth of space you’ve opened keeps widening every time you exercise this agency. Until, if you work at it, there comes a day when the gap is wide enough for you to slip your whole body in, and dance. And that’s the point when you learn that the world and its possibilities are in fact as wide as your own mind.

This is a story of addiction recovery, but it’s also there, or at least available, in every story of becoming. In some crucial way, life begins the moment you find that hair’s breadth of space between the world (especially when it’s an onslaught, a floor-pummelling) and your response to it. Or to use the famous words of someone much wiser than me: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I know I’m eliding a lot here. I know that both inside and outside of recovery rooms, the forces pinning people to the ground are very different and unevenly distributed, and therefore that what it means and takes to find that hair’s breadth of space varies wildly. But for all this inequality, I vehemently believe that the hair’s breadth of space is or should be available to everyone, and that where societal forces make it feel unavailable, it is the social body’s job to fucking well do something about that.

With that said, in this essay, I want to talk about this last of the human freedoms, this hair’s breadth of space between the world and our response to it. The only place in the world where something truly new can open up. Because this space is not only—as Viktor Frankl told us—the source of the freedom to choose your own attitude. It is also the birthplace of art. It is where culture comes from. Which means it’s a portal, forever open to a lightning strike from the infinite.

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What actually is art? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and it’s been made all the more difficult by a few centuries of bizarro thinking in modern, post-Enlightenment cultures.

Since the late eighteenth century, and owing to developments primarily in Enlightenment England and Germany, art has been understood in cultures like the one I (and perhaps you) live in as both a product and, relatedly, a domain that is somehow separate from the rest of life. In other words, art is stuff, objects and material, that lives in galleries and theatres and books. It is separate and different from the rest of life, and because it is a product, a thing, naturally people must pay to consume it, which means it is a job, a profession, which means that only certain people are equipped to do it. Special people. Creative people. Geniuses and those with the means to pursue the necessary training and survive the years it can take to start making a living.

When you zoom out historically and geographically, you see that this really is a remarkably strange way to think about art, and it has brought all kinds of problems, beginning with the fact that it doesn’t make any sense. If art is a certain kind of product or item, it should be possible to define that product or item. But what makes an art object art? Is it its beauty? But what’s that? How do you define beauty? And what, then, about all the art that is deliberately ugly or discordant or challenging?

There are many such questions, and none of them are new. Philosophers of art wrestled with them for so long, and concluded so little, that ultimately they sort of gave up trying to define art. As far as I can tell, it’s not very fashionable anymore to even think about it.

Cool; I guess I’m going to be unfashionable then. Because I want to suggest that in this moment of brutal collective and societal floor-pummelling, it is, in fact, a matter of mortal and mythic importance that we settle on some far better ideas about what art is and does and who gets to do it. Cos we gotta get up off the floor. We have to find the gap, the hair’s breadth of space between the onslaught of the world and our responses to it, and crack it open wide enough to dance. And that means yanking our idea of art out of the galleries and back into daily life, where it belongs.

So if art isn’t a product, what might it be?

Let’s go back around 3,000 years, to the dead of a hot, dry September night just outside of Athens. We have walked fourteen miles in procession to a temple. We have fasted for three days, purified ourselves by bathing in the sea, and drunk psychedelic barley wine. Now, in this wide, forever night, we are ready to enter the temple’s ritual hall, where three things will happen: the bone-old story of Persephone and Demeter will be acted out and brought to vivid life, we will be shown sacred items, and a secret will be shared with us. By the time we leave the sacred hall, we will have been changed forever.

We have just been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, rites held annually in Greece-before-it-was-Greece for more than a millennium. It’s hard to overstate how important these rites were. How foundational they were to the growth and flourishing of Greek culture. Aside from being a cradle of the civilisation’s spiritual practice, it’s often argued that they were the seed point of drama itself, which in turn made the democratic experiment possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Nobody really knows what happened in that temple—it was always kept top secret (and I suspect it couldn’t have been communicated in words anyway). But we do know this: things were done.

That probably sounds facile, but it holds a whole world of meaning. To unpack that meaning, we must first understand the world these devotees were living in. The Eleusinian Mysteries started in the Bronze Age, the early days of agriculture. A time of great change in the human relationship to the living world. A time of much more concentrated risk. Sure, life hadn’t been easy for hunter-gather tribes. There would have been lean times and lots of starvation. But with agriculture, and its community-wide dependence on ultimately uncontrollable things like the weather going one very particular way, a new spectre of civilisational wipeout entered the scene.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were a response to this vulnerability. The myth at the heart of them—the story of Demeter and Persephone—is the story container for the passage of the seasons, and therefore for the fertility of the earth. By reenacting this myth—by bringing their creative faculties to the reenactment—those devotees were standing in their vulnerability to the onslaught of life, the possible floor-pummelling, and claiming that hair’s breadth of space where the whole world can open up. They were doing things.

Here’s the legendary classicist Jane Ellen Harrison expanding on this facile-sounding phrase in her 1913 book Ancient Art and Ritual (which, full disclosure, I haven’t read; I’m quoting this from Ellen Dissanayake’s Homo Aestheticus, on which more in a moment):

The Greek word for a rite is dromenon, “a thing done.” … To perform a rite, you must do something—that is, you must not only feel something but express it in action… you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it.

Now, let’s compare some of the received ideas we swim in in the present day. These days, we’re often told that in the face of danger or difficulty, we have a set menu of possible responses, which reads something like this: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, befriend. But when she talks about dromena (the plural of dromenon), Harrison is presenting another option altogether. Doing things. And not just any things, but things designed to make a difference. These rites weren’t designed to control the weather, per se. They did something more nuanced and beautiful than that. In the words of anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake—whose ideas I’m riffing on heavily in this whole piece—these dromena, these things done, were calibrated “to convert reality from one state to another more special one”.

A “more special” state of reality. Like “doing things”, it’s such a simple phrase, but it holds so much. In the case of rites like the Eleusinian Mysteries, Dissanayake tells us in her book Homo Aestheticus that the nature of the “things done” in the face of life’s difficulties include scenarios where:

A person’s being or consciousness may […] be transformed through ceremonial rites of passage, so that he or she moves from a prior natural or neutral state through a “liminal” phase outside ordinary life and then back to social reintegration in the new (and now “normal”) state.

In other words, a transformation has taken place, which makes everyday life better: more liveable, more full of possibility. Dissanayake suggests that this is the core of art: the human ability to not just sit passively in events as they unfold, but instead “make special”, which doesn’t mean getting out the fancy cutlery. It means first understanding that there are multiple dimensions of reality and experience, and that a human has the agency to choose whether to contact nonordinary and expansive states. And it means then using whatever tools and skills you have to stitch those nonordinary states into the everyday; to create experiences and works that embroider this sense of the infinite into earthly life.

In this understanding of art, it is not a fetishised object made by a tortured genius to sit in a gallery and sell for as much money as it can fetch. No, it is a behaviour. A verb. A way of being that inhabits and celebrates the truth that a human always has the option to make special; that this world and its possibilities are in fact as wide as your own mind.

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Reading this essay, you might think I’m saying that art is simply ritual; that they are interchangeable. They’re not, and in a future essay, I plan to unpack some differences between art and ritual in a way that yields some practical ideas about how to orient to art as verb, art as way of life. But it’s worth noting that for most of human history, art and ritual have been intimately entwined. In Homo Aestheticus, Dissanayake talks at length about art, ritual, and play as behaviours that share this capacity to make special; to open expanded possibilities. In brief, what makes art art, as opposed to ritual or play, is the way it works with form, taking care with the specific ways an idea or energy is expressed, via language, visual adornment or embellishment, combinations of sound, and so on.

Today, these formal aspects of craft are often fetishised to the point that they seem like the end in themselves. The art is for the art’s sake. If there’s anything to appreciate, it’s the artist’s mastery of technique. And, well, of course this is how we see it. In a world that’s lost almost all of its rituals, its practices of devotion and passage to expanded realms, form loses its primary devotional and threshold-crossing function and becomes simply cosmetic. Art becomes simply cosmetic.

But even this word that’s so often used pejoratively today—cosmetic—is trying to tell us what we’ve lost. Because “cosmetic” shares a root with “cosmos”. Careful work with a poem or painting or play to make it as cosmetically powerful as possible, as potent in form as it can be, is not shallow or superficial. It is a way to unite the realms; to give that lightning bolt from the infinite its most effective earthside expression. It is the very thing that holds the cosmos together.

In those damp church basements I like to sit in, the most joyful moments for me are when people who’ve been coming back and doing the work for months or years start talking about new hobbies; new projects they’re working on; how they’ve remembered that they used to love singing or painting or dancing, and they’ve started again. It sounds like a small thing, but nothing in the world could be bigger. Because it means they’ve found that hair’s breadth of space and opened it up, and from there, they are weaving a whole new cosmos.

Before I start, a quick note about some upcoming fun. I’m going to be talking at London’s Kairos club again in the spring, on Thursday 12th March. It will be a night themed on memory: memory as the basis of creativity, memory as connection to land, memory as a way to bring otherness into our bodies and embrace a less individualist creative culture. My goal is for you to leave this night fired up to start memorising stories and poems—and with some tools to help, and a little poem already sown in your bones. Tickets here.

As this year draws to a close, I am sending out a call—a prayer—for the new one. I am praying that we radically reorient all of life, from our everyday routines to what happens in our centres of power, around art and the creative act.

I am calling for poetry to be read at the start of every session of parliament. I am calling for our failing institutions to bring storytellers into their board meetings. I am praying for a day when people in conflict are given the resources and support to act out Ancient Greek tragedies together. I am praying for us all to remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality, and we don’t have to spend a single second or penny more resigning ourselves to the bullshit baubles thrust at us as the pinnacle of choice under consumerist capitalism, when in truth they’re nothing but a knife to imagination, to the energy and courage to create.

Our unused creativity is a poison, and it is killing us. A human is an inherently, definitively creative being, and when we don’t use this creativity, it curdles inside us and turns destructive. It comes out in attacks against ourselves or others, as aggression, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, over-control, or sheer life-sucking boredom. I know, because I’ve spent too much of my own life being poisoned by it.

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on here that reached a lot of people. It was a sweaty, breathless sort of essay, which suggested that for the past 500 years, the mainstream West has been labouring under a restrictive, straitened consciousness contract—an implicit agreement that only experiences in rational waking consciousness are valid, and things experienced in dreams, imagination, meditative states, intuition, journeys facilitated by plant medicine, and so on, have no value. At best, says the modern paradigm, those experiences are irrelevant. At worst, they’re dangerously delusional.

That essay argued that what many of us—probably most of us in this particular corner of Substack—are experiencing right now is a resurgence of all those subjugated and relegated shades of consciousness and the expanded realities they open.

I still believe this. But I’ve always been embarrassed by the end of that essay. It ends in a very feeble place, essentially saying: to expand the consciousness contract—to safely reintegrate the dangerously relegated parts of reality—make sure you read books as well as embracing being a weirdo. Make sure you’re rigorous with your weirdness.

Which, yes. Do those things. But it’s not enough. It’s not a good enough answer.

Here’s the dilemma I was grappling with—which we’re probably all grappling with: we know it’s a lie that there is nothing beyond the material world. We know that the mystical and expansive experiences we’ve read about or had ourselves are in some deep way true—truer than parking tickets and emails and ready meals. But the core wisdom of modernity—the whole drive behind the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution’s insistence on empirical evidence—is that once you open that door to the beyond, dangerous things can and do happen. If there’s no way to prove what’s true, it can seem that truth is up for grabs, which means that power is up for grabs. Which means mounting tyranny, social media awash with dangerous nonsense, and everyone from dictatorial bigots to yoga-smoothie individualists capitalising on the instability.

I know I’m stating the obvious here. I think sometimes the obvious wants to be stated.

So that’s the lay of the land. The question, of course, is: what now?

And the answer is: now, art.

Art is how we reintegrate our deep weirdness with our intellectual rigour.

Art is how we safely expand and rebalance the consciousness contract.

Art is how we honour the ineffable and unquantifiable dimensions of reality—bring them into the fleshy realm—without sliding into relativism or superstition or the dangerous predations of conspirituality.

Because this is what art does. I would argue it’s what it has always been. It’s why it exists.

The very first art we know of seems to offer visions of expanded worlds, reached through expanded consciousness. When our oldest ancestors went into the caves to paint, they weren’t just sloshing shapes and colours around to see what looked nice. Acoustic studies show that they were highly attuned to resonance—that they were very often working with sound and echo that would have altered their states, bringing them into bodily intimations of more-than-material reality. My strong suspicion is that, in fact, the divide we feel between material and more-than-material reality had yet to be drawn; that all things were felt to be porous and suffused with soul, and perhaps never more so than in one of those art-making cave ceremonies.

And what do you do when your consciousness is wide enough that powerful new marriages of form and formlessness are ever presenting themselves inside you?

You express them.

You create something that reflects this encounter, and which in many ways is truer than the rock it sits on, because it attempts to convey what’s beyond the rock, too—and because it offers this vision of truth in the spirit not of fact but of art, meaning a spirit that holds itself as very real, and yet not single or stable but rather hoping to inspire more unfolding.

To most humans through time, I suspect it would have seemed idiotic to even have to state that when you make a painting or a poem or a play, you are doing so to express intimations of things both within and beyond material reality, in a way that though creative is profoundly true. The Western literary tradition is the one I know best, and it’s shot through with this knowledge. The Odyssey begins, “Sing in me, Muse.” The old Celtic stories tell of Otherworlds, alternate realms where the happenings in this one are often sourced. The first woman to publish a book in English, Julian of Norwich, wrote it to express her mystical experiences. Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval polymath who wrote ten books, invented languages, and revolutionised musical composition, talked about being nothing but a trumpet, who needed the breath of God blown through her in order to produce a sound. The most famous poet in the English language, Shakespeare, lived at the border between the seen and unseen, and spent his life giving voice to the relationship between them. Time and again, his plays—I’m thinking especially of The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—tell us that art is the mediating link between the realms, and thus in some way more real, because more inclusive, than material reality itself.

And all this is to say nothing of the Romantics, or of course of William Blake, who made his bed in the imaginal more than anyone else in the Western canon. The recent spate of books about Blake suggests we might finally be catching up to what he was always telling us:

This world is wider than you dare dream, and waiting to show itself to us.

If you pay attention, it will reveal itself in mysterious and miraculous ways. In your subtle senses. In the edges and felt spaces of your knowing.

Trust it. Allow yourself to believe it.

But don’t stop there.

Apply yourself to expressing it, whether in words or movement or song or paint.

Because that effort to express the inexpressible, to create something that illuminates your encounter with the world, can be your ticket to a life of joyful rigour and humility and an alert, alive devotional form of attention.

You will fail, because every attempt fails.

The point is not to succeed.

It is to change gears. To remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality.

That the world itself is a marriage of form and formlessness, the seen and unseen, and that this marriage is presenting itself to each of us in ways that are asking to be expressed; woven into the world to feed the continued unfolding.

Because, no matter what the modern paradigm would have us believe, reality was never merely material. Was never just a bunch of stuff, sitting solid as rock, revealing its full factual truth in the view through a microscope.

The world has always been a work of art, and you have always been an artist.

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I’m memorising the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. Yes, I’m a nerd. But also, this is my pledge for the memory club that’s come together through this Substack—a club that’s investigating whether memory can be a form of resistance. (By the way, if your instinct is to click away from anything about memory because you fear that yours is crap, please don’t! I’ve been having many more conversations about memory lately, and I’m noticing that most people’s immediate response is to note how awful theirs is. This has always been my response too! And it’s no surprise, really: atrophied memory seems to be a condition of modernity. So if you worry about your memory, you’re not alone and you’re not excluded from this conversation. In fact, I’d urge you to stick around, because it turns out that memory is highly trainable, and training it might be surprisingly important. OK, back to the point.)

The premise of the memory club is that bringing stories and poems to live inside our bodies might be an act of resistance. Originally, I thought of this as a resistance against AI—against the invitation to outsource our very thinking to the large-language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence, which are essentially externalised memory banks. By internalising the things we wanted to know deeply, I hoped we might bring at least some of this meaning-making back into human hearts and heads.

But as I memorise—as I bring the Inferno into my body—I’m beginning to believe the scope of the resistance might be bigger than I’d thought. I’m beginning to think that the loss of human memory that has come with creeping modernity—the way we’ve outsourced our remembering to technologies beginning with the written word and coming right up to AI—has constituted an inner desertification that has helped us to wreak the desertification, the stripping of wildlife, in the outer world.

Back in the mid 2010s, there was a lot of talk about the environmental concept of shifting baseline syndrome. As far as I remember, it was George Monbiot who really championed the idea, helping us to see that each generation experiences the world it’s born into as normal, as the baseline—and in a world that has been rapidly losing wildlife and healthy ecosystems, this means that generation on generation, we are normalising staggering losses. “We’ve lost almost everything, and yet we regard that as normal and natural,” Monbiot said in an interview in 2017. And this doesn’t stop with environmental degradation. “I’ve used it in the political sense,” Monbiot says in that same interview, “to say: Why do people accept tyranny and despotism and the erosion of democracy? It’s because you normalise whatever surrounds you.”

I’m only at the start of my memory practice, but it’s already becoming clear to me that we also normalise whatever is inside us—meaning, the norms we receive about what a human is and needs to know, and even the metaphors and imagery we use to comprehend and describe our inner lives.

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We are a storytelling species. Once upon a time, every human would have carried inside themselves a polyphony of stories and poetry. They would have brought plurality of voice and view into their flesh. Today, we’re exposed to more writing, more art, more viewpoints than humans living at any other time, but it’s all external. We don’t take the trouble to bring it into our flesh anymore.

In short, we’ve internally monocropped ourselves, and—though this is an intuitive leap—my gut is telling me that that has made it far easier to monocrop the outer world. The singleness of view and voice becomes singleness of purpose and deed in our outer dealings. And in a living world that’s relational and ecological in structure and form, this kind of solipsism is always, ultimately, death.

If that all sounds a little vague, let me get more specific. We’re not just a storytelling species but a nomadic one. It’s in our evolutionary makeup to learn landscapes, and to stitch our knowing to them. This aspect of humanity finds its most famous expression in the songlines of indigenous Australian cultures—routes through the land that stitch the material realm to the Dreaming, and hold a wealth of mythological, geographical, and cultural storying. But there’s some version of this in every oral storytelling culture, which is to say at the root (however forgotten) of all of humanity. In our earliest days, humans made meaning by moving through the land, receiving its stories, and embroidering the insights of eternity onto the mountains and rivers and forests, in the form of stories and poems. These stories and poems were passed on, and their truth lived in the encounter between landscapes and humans.

And this evolutionary heritage is still inside you now. In our memory club, we’ve been studying the classics of memory literature—the great works written over the past half century or so, which have investigated and begun to resurrect this art so long lost to the modern mind. You’ve probably heard of some of the central insights of these memory classics. The most famous among them is the memory palace: the practice of memorising something by turning it into images, which you then imaginally stow around a place you remember very well, like your childhood home. To remember the passage, you imaginally walk around the palace, retrieving the images. This practice rests on the insight of the Ancient Greek poet Simonides, who realised (through a pretty wild event that I won’t go into now) that the human mind is primed to remember images and physical locations better than anything else.

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Why? Because this is what a human is: a nomadic, storytelling being. A creature evolved to move through the land, listening for stories, then telling those stories back to the places they were heard from, generation after generation. We are walking story maps.

Which means that internal and external geography have always been critically linked. I don’t have songlines for my current home of southwest England, nor for the region I grew up in, the southeast of England (though in the southwest in particular, the folk revival is restoring some of the polyphony of land). But I do know that when I memorise the opening of Dante’s Inferno, I am enriching my inner world with a forest—the dark forest the poet awakens in to find himself lost. And I know that when I take that imaginal, remembered forest—a forest co-created between me and Dante and rich with its own presence—into the real forest near my home, my experience, my encounter, is deeper and wider and fuller.

An inner landscape that’s barren of voices and places means a much shallower encounter with the outer land. And when the land appears to us in this impoverished form, it’s much easier to destroy it in service of our own will.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia. The “lethe” in the middle is the River Lethe that runs through the underworld—the river of oblivion or forgetfulness. And the prefix “a” means “not” (as in “asexual”). So for the Ancient Greeks, truth wasn’t a series of facts. It was a moment of remembering. Of emerging from oblivion and remembering the fullness of the world, with the fullness of yourself. It was always an encounter.

So how do we encounter a full world, in its fullness? A lot of it comes down to attention and awareness in the moment. To not spending our lives zoned out. But when we do manage to be present, what we bring to the moment matters too. We’ve all had that experience of meeting a person and feeling that we’re simply missing each other—that we have no frame of reference, no perceptive apparatus, for who and what this other person is in the world, and so no way to really meet them.

By externalising our memory of stories and poems to books and tech, and desertifying our memories and imaginations, we are doing the same thing in our encounters with the living world.

And that is why I believe reviving the ancient memory arts is an act of resistance.

xx Ellie

PS. This wasn’t a plug for the memory club! It’s just what I’ve been thinking about. But if it’s inspired you to join, you can still do so by signing up to this Substack as a paying subscriber. And you can read more about the club here.

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Did you know that for thousands of years, people believed that imagination—meaning the capacity to create both art and a life worth living—grew out of memory? That the soil of what you could create was all the great works you had memorised, internalised?

If you’re anything like me, that is a frightening thought, because memory is a thing you long since outsourced to notepads, printed books, Google, and other technologies.

I probably don’t need to articulate that the urgency of all this spikes when you add AI—the ne plus ultra of memory outsourcing—to the mix.

If you want to join the memory club and do something about all this, you’ll have access to a book club, talks from experts, and an opportunity to pledge to memorise a piece of literature of your choosing. There will be practical tips for improving your memory, as well as philosophising.

Open for £8/month to all paid subscribers to this Substack. More details on my post Reviving the ancient memory arts as an act of resistance.

A few years ago, when I’d been lost in the underworld for so long I thought I’d never get out, I experienced something I can only describe as a miracle. I found myself on the grounds of a medieval hall, learning about imagination and poetry and story and, well, how to be alive, from great minds and souls. Somehow, this magical state of affairs went on for the best part of a year. It was a master’s degree, but more than that, it was a rebirth, for me and—I can say with confidence—many other people in the room.

Among the great minds and souls who taught me that year were the poet Alice Oswald, and the scholar of Shakespeare, Blake, and much more Valentin Gerlier—and I’m thrilled that I get to publish some of their thoughts here today.

In so many ways, my studies with Alice and Valentin turned me into the person who writes these essays to you about imagination and the ways humans have related to it through the ages. So I am even more thrilled to share that it’s now possible to study with Alice and Valentin again, on a course very much like the one I took back then.

Though the college where I studied has disappeared, in a heartbreaking and enraging way I wrote about here and won’t revisit now, Poetics of Imagination is back, at a revived Schumacher College, after years of work from my teachers and many others. Honestly, just typing the words “Poetics of Imagination is back” almost made me cry.

If you want to take a version of this course, you can apply to do so now. There are bursaries available—click through to that link for details.

Towards the end of this chat, Alice and Valentin mention the wider community they’re hoping to foster around these teachings; the culture they’re hoping to grow. In a funny way, if you follow this Substack, you’re already part of that growing community, because what I’m at least trying to do here is keep passing on the living stories and ideas they transmitted to me. But anyway. I’ll let them explain what I’m talking about, below. For now, thanks for reading.

Oh—and, an apt thing to note considering that Poetics of Imagination is a course in (among other things) the oral arts: we started this exchange via email before realising we’d all rather just have a chat. That’s why you might notice a tone shift after Alice’s first answer.

OK. I really am going to shut up now and let you read the interview.

Love,

Ellie x

Ellie:

Shall we start at the most obvious place? What does the phrase “poetics of imagination” mean to you?

Alice:

Poetics are the laws or systems which govern the imagination. Already that is a paradox, since imagination is more often characterised by its freedoms. But in suggesting that imagination has laws or at least principles we are mostly just implying that it is a real and structured place which can be visited. Many of the texts where we visit the imagination come from a time which had no word for imagination. They also had a different conception of poetry. For that reason, the name of our course is really no more than a magic cloth which must be whipped away at the right moment…

Valentin:

Well, I can’t beat that response. I might just add that what is now called the imagination, but which over time has had many other names, as you point out, Alice, is also a kind of human birthright—or perhaps better expressed as something like the waters of our birth, a primordial source, or pool, in which we all participate and of which we’re all partners. And if you trace back the history of literature, or of language even, you come to some very, very ancient language forms, which are usually in the form of story or poetry. To me, that speaks about the primordial source of language and also of culture. So in exploring the poetics of imagination, we’re exploring, as Alice says, the rules or the waters of that primordial place from which we all spring and from which we all take our meanings.

Alice:

I really love that. And one of the reasons I like it is that it feels so easy for people to regard the imagination as a luxury or a merely aesthetic add-on, and something that doesn’t need to be funded or looked after or carefully passed from one generation to the next. And it’s so good to be reminded that that’s almost like saying we can do without a skeleton. We’ve evolved through the imagination, with the imagination, because of it. And that’s why it’s worth studying.

Ellie:

I love that. So imagination is a birthright—as essential as a skeleton. Can it also be nurtured or cultivated? And if so, how?

Alice:

I think it’s very clear that it can be not nurtured. And that one can see the effects on people of attempting to block off the imagination. And therefore it’s also pretty definite, as far as I’m concerned, that you can become more aware of it, put faith in it, and make sure that you take time to encounter it in all its various forms.

And as with all the best things, among which I include plants, it’s one of those things that… there’s just more and more of it. The more you find, the more there is. That’s what I think is worth finding: that source of proliferation.

Valentin:

Yes, exactly. I was going to turn the question around and say it can be nurtured, but that it’s also the place of nurture, and that it nurtures us. And actually, the challenge is to return to this place of nurture, which is already here. There’s a plentifulness, I think, that can be reached in that exploration. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, that the imagination is understood as this aesthetic, optional extra. It seems to me that human culture is in a very dangerous place when it assumes that, or when it assumes that all the imagining has already been done, that we’ve already come up with all of the kinds of knowledge that are always going to be in place—and the lifestyles and the narratives of human lives that are always going to be dependent on these kinds of knowledge—and that anything other than that is just escapism. I think that’s a weird situation that happens in human culture, when one particular form of imagination starts to dominate, to the point at which you don’t notice that it was once imagined, and is now called realism or fact or what have you. And I think that’s where we are. We’re in this funny situation in which we’re almost being asked to not notice the blatant. The blatancy of the imagination!

There’s a quote from that old film, The Usual Suspects. There’s this line, “The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled on the world is convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” And it’s a bit like this. It’s saying that actually, the roots of where we are today, for good or for ill, are in the imagination that gave rise to the dominant forms of knowledge and understanding of the day. And our culture has convinced us that that imaginary realm doesn’t exist.

I think this course is bypassing that order and returning to what really does need to be looked at.

Ellie:

I love that. Maybe this would be a good time for me to speak a little about my own experience of the course. For me, the thing that was so life-changing, truly life-changing, about Poetics, was that… the best way I can say it, and I might still not manage, is that I had always been seeking—without necessarily knowing that I was seeking—to put myself at that place that’s not a place—the place or state or experience where receiving becomes active. The only way I can describe it is as a place beyond known categories, that you reach by simply trying very hard to receive, to attend, until you find yourself at this place where the receiving becomes active and somehow starts to speak of its own accord.

And that’s an experience I’d been chasing forever, in some way or other. But what I found in the course was that you two were able, in your own, often quite different but very powerful ways, to lead me to that place that I can only describe as the place where receiving somehow becomes active, where listening starts to speak. And then when I was there, to begin to learn how to work with—apply some craft to—what I found there.

I feel I’m not being very articulate, but I suppose I wonder if there’s anything you can say about that place or state or experience, your insights about it, or how to work with it once you’re there.

Alice:

I love everything you said. And primarily I think that what you imply in the way you talk about active receiving or active listening is that there is actually something there to receive or to listen. So that sense of the already there—it’s like turning your head around and seeing that there is something there. You don’t need logic to discover that there is something there, but once you get that and attend to it, you can hear it more and more precisely.

In practical terms, when you talk about craft, the main thing I always say is the importance of a daily habit of, once you’ve made that switch, making sure you attend to it every day. And that does its own growing. My main muse has always been inadvertence. I think that one has to do it almost out of the corner of the eye. Just acknowledge that the imagination exists and make sure you pay attention every day, and then the rest will happen of its own accord.

That’s my tip.

Valentin:

I liked what you were saying about active listening, which challenges this idea that we’re either active or passive. It suggests there’s this middle voice, where you are both listening and making. That you’re a partner in a reality that also exceeds you, you’re a participant in something that is also beyond you. So there’s this way of being active and passive all at once.

When I’m involved in the crafts of the imagination, I notice that’s when I’m at my best, there’s this sort of middle place. You’re not just surrendering to utter contemplation, but neither are you furiously trying to enact your vision onto a sort of blank canvas or inert reality. There’s a weird partnership that occurs, as Alice says, between what’s already there and how you’re responding.

Ellie:

Yes, and thank you for reminding me of that phrase “middle voice”, which took me back to the feeling of some of the discussions we had on the course, where it really felt—to me, anyway—as though something was coming alive in the room, in the conversation between us, in a way that I had never experienced before. And so in a way, the teaching itself enacted the middle voice.

Alice:

Yes, and I think that point must have been in the middle air, already between us. I was going to say that for me, because I’m very interested in theatre and also in a definition of poetry where it is a much more communal activity and a participatory one, I’ve always hoped to try to animate the space between everybody in the room in a lecture. And there is something unforgettable about that moment when everybody’s imagining the same thing, or when a poem or a play actually comes into the space between us and we’re all participating in it in the same way.

I think that kind of tasting the communal mind is a wonderful thing. You don’t forget it once you’ve tasted it.

Valentin:

It’s funny, Alice and I were speaking about this the other day: that something that we’d like to do more is keep that communality going, keep that community going. The experience you have had is something that, of course, one carries in one’s heart, but we’re hoping to develop an ongoing community or a place where people can return to and share where they’re at, so that the communal listening continues. We hope that it won’t just be this one experience that you take away and then go on in your life. We’re hoping there will be a wider community, so that there’s a sense of—for want of a much better word—apprenticeship, or a kind of a guild. Something where the skill gets nourished and grown because of our continuing interplay with each other.

Alice:

We’ve even spoken ambitiously, or at least I have, of the idea of actually growing a culture, haven’t we? The idea that you begin to sow the seed of ideas of a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing, and you trust that it will continue to spread as people come back. Come back to the course and come back to each other.

Ellie:

My experience is that that’s happening already. That there’s something living that’s unfolding among those of us who’ve taken the course and been in its orbit. It’s a wonderful thing.

To change direction a little—because of my own research at the moment, I’m really interested in this idea you mention, Alice, of many works of imagination having come from cultures that didn’t really have a concept of imagination. What is there to learn about imagination from studying and engaging really deeply with the poetry and stories and other forms of art of very old cultures, which maybe wouldn’t even have thought they were practising imagination?

Valentin:

I’ll answer by way of an anecdote if I may, a very short one. There was this article in the newspaper a few years ago about Fiji islanders who, because of the rising tides, had to remove their seaside villages to somewhere further upland. And they were being helped to do that. But for them, one of the key problems was the bones of the ancestors. Where they were, by the sea, was also where the bones were. And they couldn’t work out this problem. If we leave this land, what do we do about our ancestors, who somehow also live here?

Perhaps this strikes some of us as really odd, because we’re so used to thinking of the past as something chronologically past and therefore no longer of use. Our instinctive reaction to the past is to turn our back and face in a different direction, a “forward motion”. Whereas these more ancient cultures had this sense that the bones were not just the past but also the future, that the relationship with the ancestors is actually something that nourishes life as it goes on.

We’ve trained ourselves so very well for the last 400 years to turn our backs on the past and move in this “forward motion”. But there’s something about going back to the resources of the past with fresh eyes and open hearts. I think it can nourish us in quite unexpected ways, both in making the present very weird, because you’re learning to inhabit other peoples’ visions and therefore you cast a different eye to the way daily life operates. And also in this very real sense that—like earlier when we were talking about the middle voice—when we speak, even in our daily speech, we speak with the ancestors’ voices as well. Language is… I’m seeing a long cathedral corridor full of sounds and voices. That’s the best way to describe it. And when we speak, we speak with these ancestral beings and these ancestral voices and stories and little bits of phrase and semi-forgotten similes. We speak with these “bones”. And to reinhabit that is to re-enliven the present in very surprising ways.

Alice:

I love that idea, that we are already speaking in the past. We almost don’t need to unearth those things. And yet also for me, quite a preoccupation is the extent to which we think we know, for example, who Homer is, or what the Iliad was. But when we go back to that extraordinary poem and try to hear what it really is, it’s so astonishingly different from the rather British Empire thing we’ve turned it into. And it’s a huge gift that it’s a living presence; a poem that just changes you when you really encounter it.

So I think the really amazing, nourishing ancient poems are living presences, and not to encounter them is a bit like saying I don’t want to meet a particular God, or I don’t want to learn from a particular person. They’re alive. And I think that those oral or originally oral poems are even more alive than literary poems, because they were made of a constant updating. So they have in them a sort of freshness that is to do with how they were composed.

Valentin:

And just to add that encountering these works doesn’t require any expertise in literature or poetry or what have you. It just necessitates interest, enthusiasm and an open heart. As I said before, it’s all of our birthrights. So consequently, everyone is welcome. It’s a convivial kind of learning that exceeds whatever happens in the session and exceeds whatever Alice or I might deliver. It includes the entirety of our time together. That seems to be such a crucial part of it—that it’s so good just being together.

Alice:

And maybe one would include in that conviviality the various landscapes where we run these courses, and remember what happens when we start to tell stories outdoors, and how we’ve been surprised by the landscape joining in and helping. So I’d say, the landscape is part of the conviviality.