Slippery

A (poetic) note from the editor's desk

Photo by Aziz Acharki on Unsplash

In the last few weeks, alongside the work we’ve been doing to select pieces for the next Unpsychology Magazine (Edges), to be published in the summer, there have also been some really interesting currents and conversations swirling around.

As well as the bubbly processes of creating and curating themselves (see our recent posts ‘creating together’ and ‘what matters is already here’), we have also been edging into conversations around some of the key phenomena of our times – chaos, soul, warm data and how to ‘stay with the trouble’ - to use Donna Haraway’s phrase.¹

In February we also published an essay, long in the making - Making Soul - part of my own ongoing exploration of ‘soul’ as a metaphor (or something more, depending on your way of thinking) for the individual embedded in the collective, in the troubled times live within.

We had some interesting responses – not least from writer and therapist, Susan Holliday whose subsequent essay, As Kingfishers Catch Fire – Self, Ecology and 'mattering', was published last week (and a beautiful thing it is too!).² Susan’s essay is poetic, insightful and a deep refreshment, at a time when there are so many ‘ideas’ flying around on social media and elsewhere about how to save the world this way and that.

I’ve found myself overwhelmed a little with ideas, to be honest. They are all over the place, yet none of these clever constructions seem to have the slightest effect at macro (or micro) levels on what goes on in the world, right now. I know that this is also the space that Nora Bateson and the Warm Data community works in – between the macro of ‘saving the world’ and the micro of ‘healing the individual’ – and she sees (as does Susan in her essay), the importance of seeing the world as a place where relationships, ecologies and human practice are ever-shifting, ever-changing.

The other thing that writers and authors I admire do best is to pay attention to the aesthetic and poetic, as well as the relational. Nora’s latest book, Combining, is full of art and poetry. Susan’s work is embedded in the therapeutic and the artistic. Susan Cain (author of Quiet) and Nick Cave, infuse their art, writing and thinking with the inspirations of other artists and value the spiritual and are curious about the religious. Naomi Klein brings humanity and love to her analysis and activism. Carlo Rovelli combines his brilliant work in quantum mechanics with stories and a deep awareness of the poetic and the ‘beautiful’.

There is nothing ‘removed’ about their work. They are in the world big-time (and small time). They have something to say about it all, but they don’t work with certainty, because they know that this is not the way that the world works – especially in the world of ‘science’ where it’s understood that this decade’s big idea can - and probably will - always be transcended by the next.

In a recent email conversation with my friend and Unpsychology contributor, Toby Chown, we were discussing this dilemma of mine (that is, my feeling overwhelmed with ideas), and Toby (who is working his way through the very big ideas of Iain McGilchrist at the moment) wrote something that I really related to:

“Ideas can be a bit like sugar - you get a sugar rush and then a come down.  Then again, sometimes it feels like there is genuine nourishment from books, and a renewal of inspiration.”

… adding…

“There definitely is such a thing as there being too many ideas ….one thing I like about poetry is how it doesn’t rely on ideas but seeks out experiences and images, which are often harder, but feel more nourishing to share.”

So here we are, at that juncture where there are no more ideas to be shared or talked about (for the time being at least), and where I will post a poem - Slippery Hands³ - that might (or might not) have something to say about being in the world:

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Slippery hands

I remember watching you sit there, fierce and fragile, as you dug in your heels, wouldn’t budge or give an inch until you understood the way your pain had embedded itself in the world

And then, when you knew, you took this understanding and made it universal, telling everyone who would listen, these things about love, forgiveness and the nature of fierce spirit

When healing had taken hold,                                                                                                          we met and sat, looked each other in the eye, 			                                                           smiled and shared the knowledge we had learned, 						                       which is, in the end, the only way two people can ever really meet

Now, in our conversations, insights emerge like solipsisms and striations 		                   and playful glimmers of salmon leaping upstream 				             	                                        and we, in dialogue, paw at them like bears with slippery hands,			                           hoping for a meal on the edge of winter

I notice we avoid naming things, preferring to let our words slide apart to reveal unspoken revelations that are themselves transitory – then snap shut

We talk on, smiling at what we never knew but now touch with devotion – never knowing        who we are, never knowing who we will become

An unnamed thing is passed between us, 							                                 shaped and reshaped, caressed with the faint trace of an idea. 				                           It turns to stone, to smoke, then flows downstream, 					                                 carries us to where there are ocean currents to ride

There, we become hyperobjects – sticky, sticky –						                             art and evolution dissolved in correlation: 							                             old photographs, shared grief and histories

There we become lovers, children, elders, parents, friends, allies – 			                        creators of a tangled mess of living and the mesh of dying

There we become nonlinear – slippy, slippy – 					                                      dropping into a background that is indistinct and fuzzy 

this is not magic, but art – you say – something straight out of the real.

(This poem, Slippery Hands, is part of a longer set, provisionally entitled Tangled, to be published in 2024/25.)

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Footnotes

1. Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene, was one of the key jump-off points for the two magazines in our Imaginings edition in 2023.

2. Susan Halliday’s work can be found at https://www.susanholliday.co.uk, together with information on her book, Hidden Wonders of the Human Heart.

3. The poem takes its title (and some inspiration) from letters between Bjork and Timothy Morton, which you can find at https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/gallery/20196/0/bjork-s-letters-with-timothy-morton. Morton also came up with the idea of the Hyperobject – an idea about objects that are too big to get our head around, which could explain some of my existential angst about ideas…: https://www.wired.com/story/timothy-morton-hyperobjects-all-the-way-down/