Internubbing

Where we might be in a process of inevitable change

Painting by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

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A kind of progress report for those who are interested in these things, on edges (or lack of them) and where Unpsychology might be going in it’s 11th cycle of publication and process…

You can find the tenth edition of Unpsychology - in both print and pdf formats by going to the post below and following the relevant links. You can also access free copies of all previous magazines below:

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Internubbing

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1. There are no edges to be found

Meanwhile the wonder rolls on. It is always still here, always is and was. It is phenomenological. It is what it is and was and always will be. No meaning is necessary. Nothing is required to change; the change will come. I can choose to respond — or not.

I wrote the above words in my introductory piece, Life as a river, in the recent Edges edition of Unpsychology Magazine. Like the other contributors, I was writing in around and about Edges. I was writing about what might have felt like the edges that my Dad (and those who loved him) found ourselves on. In that piece, I recalled a visit to him. He had not been well, and I realised that he may not have long to go in his life. My final realisation in that piece was this:

“My Dad is nearing the end of his own journey to the ocean. And there are no edges to be found...”

At the end of September this year his journey ended, and I was right, there were no edges. There were transitions that felt a bit like edges, but nothing that could be described as having outside limits, lines or boundaries. He moved from this bit of his existence to the next, and then he simply wasn’t alive any more. Even that seeming edge was really just a shift into something else. A state of mourning and grief and then a celebration of his life for those of us who loved him and grieved his loss. A materially different (and partially unknown to us) state of existence of his body, self and/or soul. And for me a sense of absence: a peculiar combination of something that will both be forever missing and a blessed release.

I wasn’t with him when he died, though I was on the morning he moved to his final home. In the hospital, we waited for transport to take him to his new place – a lovely nursing home in North Shields – a stones throw over over the River Tyne from South Shields where he was born and grew up. Understandably, he seemed confused and unsure. He’d had a difficult few weeks after a fall and had become very poorly. His memory had been fading for the past five years, though his storytelling spark sometimes still shone through the clouds, even as the narrative sense seemed to be falling away. In the ward, however, we’d been chatting a bit and he turned to me with momentary lucidity and said, “I just want a room with a bed so I can go to sleep”.

This wish came true for him when he moved to his final home in Room 9 at Princes Court. That evening his beloved niece Ella and I sat beside his bed as he talked animatedly. The stories still came, though the sense of them had almost gone. For the next few days, he mainly slept as Ella and I sat with him for a couple of hours each day. He didn’t eat or drink. His bed looked out on a lovely garden. He had family pictures on the wall. He seemed largely peaceful and content.

For me, that week was a strange, sad and lovely time. I said goodbye to him on the following Sunday, and knew I wouldn’t see him again. That was hard, but I’m pleased that his daughter - my sister Jude - was with him when he died twelve days later...

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LIFE STORY AS RIVER:
...born as a trickle somewhere high; rivulets tumbling, joining, merging; 
deepening; flowing; eroding; carrying; enabling; life-giving; life sharing; 
rushing downstream; leaping upriver; going with the flow; swimming against 
the current; finding islands in a storm; flooding with life; drying up; 
surviving drought; broadening out; enriching; a confluence of waters 
reaching the ocean. Breaching the salt. Sedimentary to the end. Ripples.

From my piece, Life as a River in Unpsychology 10, Edges, 2024.

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2. Un Psychology?

I think grief might be at the heart of what we have come to know as unpsychology. The movement between emotional states that this complex of emotions signifies is akin to the life of mind and soul. The experiential life. The experimental life. The individual, collective and ecological life. The life of a mind that can, as James Hillman puts it:

“espouse its faith without institutional Religion and practice its careful observation of phenomena without institutionalised Science…”.

Moving “nimbly down the middle of these two old contesting dogmas” is Hillman’s acorn theory, which holds the seed of a psychology, “that holds in mind its prefix, ‘psyche’, and its premise, soul…”. Grief, then, might be regarded as a signifier or analogue for soul. Grief as an indicator for love and engagement and for a recognition of change itself.¹

At Dad’s funeral, the Humanist celebrant - a warm, vibrant woman by the name of Megan McKenna - spoke these words:

Grief is the shadow side of love, so take comfort in the remembrance that the pain you feel now is testament to the strength of the bond you shared then. Though you say goodbye, Ian will live on, through his children and grandchildren, the things he used to say, the influence he had, and through all the precious memories those close to him continue holding in their hearts.

This reminded me of Irvin Yalom’s wonderful idea of ‘rippling’ (from his book, Staring at the Sun). He writes that the ‘mortal souls’ of those who die live on in rippling-out memories held by those who knew and loved them, and in the actions and reactions to what they have done in the world.² Their physical presence is gone, but the echoes of their complexity remain. Not everyone’s legacy is entirely positive, of course, but equally, after they are gone, everyone will have been loved to some degree or another.

Unpsychology is like this, I think. It’s both complex and neither this nor that. It’s not a movement to change, more a recognition that change happens, and that our intentions and actions – whilst essential in some ways to our individual and collective being – cannot be predictive or certain. On the contrary, it’s deeply uncertain – and there is no big search for truth or meaning or explanation, as such, though there is a recognition that truth and knowledge can exist within the context of our “careful observation of phenomena”, as Hillman put it.

We respond to the world more so; reflect upon it; relate to it, and recognise the power and unpredictability of these relationships. It’s hard to capture this constant interweaving process of being a self – which is why it’s hard to capture 'unpsychology’ as an idea. However, it seems to be an approach akin to Nora Bateson’s Warm Data, and its emphasis on relationality, interdependence, creativity and transcontextuality.³ The converging psychological, experiential flows and pieces of me and us and they and them and it and this emerge from the ecological mesh of life and living.

Sometimes, though, unpsychology has been associated with being against things – maybe lots of things. Against ‘psychology’ primarily, I suppose, with its appearance of top-down, academic and medicalised, hierarchal linearity. Sometimes, therefore, we have been associated with movements and ANTI- positions that are inherent in many so-called counter-cultural activist communities. This is not entirely untrue, I suppose, in that some of us (those in the wider Unpsychology ecology, that is) hold some of these positions. But some of us don’t – and that’s OK…

(…probably… some of the time… I’m not entirely certain about this…)

However, what lies at the heart of unpsychology is a recognition that the culture we live in can often be inherently un-psychological. Psychology sits within a set of contexts, and can’t be held entirely responsible for all its inherent failing. At the same time, matters of mind and soul are seldom considered when decisions of consequence are being taken in the wider culture (unless they are the deified ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’ of institutional religion, or the medicalised neuroscience of academic, scientific psychology).

Let me be clear here. ALL of these perspectives may be essential for a clear picture of the world we live in. A full, phenomenological, ecological view of ‘what is’ recognises the way that reality is always refracted through the psychological lens. Such lenses are multiple and infinitely varied, ecologically interdependent and connected by dynamic relationships within and beyond each nub of awareness that we might call a mind…

That’s not to say – on the other hand – that everything is subjective, and therefore anything goes. If I can claim Ursula LeGuin for unpsychology (perhaps the greatest ever ‘unpsychologist’?), she wrote this about imaginative literature:

“It doesn’t have to be the way it is. That is what fantasy says. It doesn’t say “Anything goes” – that’s irresponsibility, when two and one make five, or forty-seven or whuddeva, and the story doesn’t add up. Fantasy doesn’t say “Nothing is” – that’s nihilism. And it doesn’t say. “It ought to be this way” – that’s utopianism, a different enterprise”. ⁴

Replace the word fantasy with unpsychology, and you get a similar message, I think. It’s no accident we did a double issue on 2022 on Imaginings, and that Ursula’s voice and imaginative passion were right at the heart of those editions too…

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3. Internubbing

The nubs of awareness that make up our minds – the minds of the Unpsychology editors, in this case – are part of this ecology of difference and diversity. There are contradictions. We all thrive on collaboration and relationship. We all feel connected to the world, in different but similar ways. We all share values and ways of seeing that make it easier (though not easy) to work together and help curate and commission the beautiful work of our fellow writers and artists.

We all, however, in our own particular way, also yearn for significance and to be ourselves. This can be subtle, sometimes, or can be more of a pull. When we are behind the scenes, it might feel good to edit, design and otherwise manifest the creative offerings that make up unpsychology. But sometimes, we may want more. This isn’t necessarily a selfish impulse; more a reaction and response to some of our own existing habits in the world.

We may habitually retreat or obscure our ‘selves’, and sometimes our best work may arise from this. However, the opposite reaction is that this can cause pain or, if not hurt of a heavy kind, remind us of something vague and dreamlike in memory that we might still be avoiding.

If we stepped forward would this dissipate? If we entered the limelight, would we be dazzled? Or dazzling? Or both at once? If we took our own acorn and grew it, what shape would the tree be, if we allowed ourselves to be fed, watered and nurtured – both practically and metaphorically?

Each of us - Julia, Patrick, Lesley and Steve - have our own habits, acorns and ecosystems. We all have our own versions of this process looping away inside: these loops always catching other loops – expectedly and unexpectedly – in the contexts, communities and cultures we exist within.

So what would it be like - we asked ourselves - if the next iteration of unpsychology echoed these concerns? What would it be like if each of us took a nub of an idea: a seed of something we feel individually passionate about, have agency in and engagement with? What would it be like if each of these nubs were allowed to grow and form the basis of not just one single publication in this our eleventh creative cycle, but an interconnected series of smaller editions with specific processes, themes and intentions running through them?

We would invite submissions and contributions as we always do, but these invitations might have very different processes and enquiries behind them.

One might be to participate in an inquiry and conversation into, say, mad studies. Another might invite people to join together to build a world – say, a fictional representation of what Ursula LeGuin playfully explored as a Utopiyin – a Yin utopia.⁵ Another might focus on the process of collaboration and putting this front and centre in designing and curating a publication or an album of music or a multimedia project that could, perhaps go out into the world in a different way entirely from the usual publication process…

Each of these nubs would grow, in their own way, then interweave themselves in a process we might call internubbing.

So, as you can see, we are not there yet. We don’t really know. This piece is partly a response to a question that we have been asked a few times recently: what is the theme of the next magazine and when can we submit? And as you can also see, there is no theme yet! Unless internubbing itself could be said to be a theme. Instead, we have some nascent themes or nubs that could grow into a number of themes and a number of issues and editions.

We want to take our time getting there. We want our decisions to emerge from the process of conversation that we have become used to in our enriching and lovely editorial meetings – and in our workshops and conversations with collaborators and contributors. We want to explore how each of us can be both collaborative and ‘warm’ in relationship, whilst tracking new ways in which our own individual passions, contradictions and directions might be explored. How can Steve be more Steve. And Lesley more Lesley? How can Julia lead us down this track, and Patrick down another? How can these routes, journeys, pathways and flows come together – if they can?

We’re mindful also that the contexts for our Unpsychology explorations have always emerged from deep within the troubled, breaking world we live in. The magazine asks how humans can respond – as unpsychologists, artists, makers, musicians, creatives or just ordinary people in an ordinary world – to its contradictions, challenges and to the beauty and devastation we experience and witness, all of us, every day, whether we choose to notice and respond to it or not. We’re mindful too that how we respond to all this might turn out to be the most important question of all…

Where next? We’ll keep you posted…

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Notes

1. James Hillman’s acorn theory can be found in his 1996 book, The Soul’s Code. You can find an explanation and exploration of the theory in an interview he did with Scott London here: http://scott.london/interviews/hillman.html

2. Irvin Yalom’s 2008 book, Staring at the Sun, is a beautiful reflection of death and dying. You can find an excerpt from it on his website here: https://www.yalom.com/staring-at-the-sun-excerpt

3. Nora Bateson’s original and individual take on the way complexity weaves itself through our lives is expanded in her two beautiful and intriguing books, Small Arcs of Larger Circles (2016) and Combining (2023), both published by Triarchy Press. She has also written a three part essay for Unpsychology Magazine (which appears in issue 8, The Warm Data anthology) entitled New words to hold the invisible world of possibility. Find Part 1 HERE, part 2 HERE and part 3 HERE.

4. It Doesn’t Have to Be the Way It Is is a blogpost by Ursula LeGuin, written in June 2011, and published in her book of short essays and blogposts, No Time To Spare. You can read it online at her website here: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/28-it-doesnt-have-to-be-the-way-it-is

5. Utopiyin, Utopiyang is also a blogpost by Ursula LeGuin, written in April 2015, and also published in her book of essays, No Time To Spare. It’s a beautiful piece which you can read online at her website here: https://www.ursulakleguin.com/blog/97-utopiyin-utopiyang