There are no edges...
... thoughts at the end of a year
No edges …
Ever since we started putting together the last edition of Unpsychology Magazine, on the theme of Edges, I’ve been worrying away at the very idea of ‘edges’ itself.
Our culture seems to operate on the assumption that everything is contained; that there are boundaries that can be thrown up, sustained and understood. This means that, in almost any field or realm of human activity and inquiry, we can define what lies within this or that boundary or edge, and what it means to step over. Laws are edges. Biological models and definitions are edges. Literary genres are edges. And, in the contemporary context, opinion pieces, podcasts and the like are all about redefining and reconfiguring new and ‘original’ edges.
Meanwhile, our politics and economics have always been particularly and dangerously full of edges; almost all arbitrarily generated by powerful humans, becoming enormously important in mediating, rationalising and monetising our capitalist world. At least the edges that emerge from science, art and culture are recognised by those who practice them to be ever-changing and iterative. In the institutional world of decision making and capital, firm edges rule.
I’m writing this at the ‘edge’ of a year, and the economic imperatives of last-stage capitalism are gearing up again. Christmas, Thanksgiving. New Year. Depending on where you live and the culture you are part of, the expectation is that as things end – in this case, the year 2024 – there are always things that need to be celebrated and marked by buying stuff and planning for the next annual edge-boundaried cycle of capitalism, with its commercial and political jamborees.
The point I’ve been nudging away at, however, is that there are really no edges. Relationally speaking, for example, life goes on even when life has ended. In my own small personal world, both my Dad and a very close friend have died this year. Another acquaintance died unexpectedly this past week. There are people I know and care for who are ill and dying. I retired from my job a few days back. These are endings, transitions and challenges but they are not edges – they have no edges. They reverberate within our selves, and on into the world with unknown power and consequence.
Likewise, in the global context, an act of war or a political treaty or act of diplomacy does not end anything, does not win anything – there is never an end to conflict, nor to the super-problems inherent in human systems. There might only be a pause in which there might be marginally less suffering, and in which the seeds are sown for the next phase, and the next. These so-called edges and endings simply bleed into new waves of stability, radicalism, anarchy or clamp-down – and then often into authoritarianism and fascism as the scales tip again.
All this is flowing constantly through our culture’s psychology. Our ‘un-psychology’, we might call it, because it too has no edges, no straight lines or determinisms, only multi-faceted overlapping and interweaving contexts. It’s not all trauma, but it is. It’s not all genetics, but it is. It’s not all relational, but it is. It’s not all generational, or parental, or cultural – but it is. All of these things and more make us who we are.
I sometimes marvel (and sometimes despair!) at how different we all are, we humans. How we experience and interpret the same world in so many different ways, many of them poles apart in terms of beliefs, values and even in what we see as truth. Maybe this happens when all the arbitrary edges are breaking apart - have all broken down? There are no more gods or Gods – not really – just spaces into which yearning flows and transmutes into pain, paradoxically, turning intelligent searchers for truth and meaning back towards the comforts and certainties of religiosity. Some of them are turning towards strange kinds of cultural phenomenology, new atheists coming out as ‘cultural Christians’; former radical ecologists turning to archaic Christianity. Snakes eating their own tails.
As I say, no edges. Who would have thought it?
I can’t see myself heading in these directions. I am more drawn to intertwine the complexities of early Batesonian ideas and later Batesonian Warm Data, post-Marxist ecological insights, LeGuinian speculative fictions, song lyrics, poetry and the experiential moments of everyday life and loss, than any articulation or re-articulation of spiritual or religious belief and practice. However, I can understand the places that fragmentation, brokenness and grief might lead us all in these times. It is so easy to get all theological and apocalyptic – such a relief to slough off all the practical contradictions and complexity. I guess it has always seemed clearer that way…
Anyway, this might seem a long winded way of arriving at this conclusion, which is to point out that the coming New Year is not an edge either. Everything flows from one day to the next, and we will wake up (with good luck, God’s blessing or optimal biochemical and meteorological conditions) on the 1st January 2025, and it will be just another day.
And this is also a point at which to acknowledge that Unpsychology (the magazine, not this Substack) is taking a pause at the moment while we editors,
, and me) try to make sense of our own ‘not-edges’, life experiences and phenomenologies before we decide whether to embark on another big project and, if so, what shape it will carry. We’ve had a change too, as our music editor and talented lovely friend, , has decided to move aside from Unpsychology for the time being. He’s been such an integral part of our work on the past three magazines, and we’ll miss his love and presence deeply. His absence will affect where we go with the next iteration of the magazine. His absence will also become part of our new creative everyday and emerging context.Change happens and so something will emerge, I am sure, as these contextual things flows into those contextual things, and a set of stories emerges around which we can make another offering to the world with our wonderful contributors and subscribers. In the meantime, I can, with all good will, wish you all a wonderful upcoming year, even though it will not be a new start of anything, nor an end of an era, nor are we on the edge of a great awakening.
It will just BE. It will just be another step in the journey, and it will carry more suffering and sorrow, brokenness and bullshit. But it may also carry dollops of hope, happiness, love and unexpected turnings). That is to say, that there will be big things happening that may be good and may be bad, and many small and ordinary parts of all our lives to look forward to and face.
And that is what being human is all about, for good and for ill.
See you all in January 2025!
Thankyou Steve for all the inspiration you have shared this year. It's a beautiful paradox that in writing about 'edges' what you seem to be doing (for me at least) is widening horizons!
Loved reading your thoughts this morning. In my world, we are swirling energetics which form into shapes because our biology in this plane deems it so. In the moment it all seems so defined and finite and yet to watch a piece of snow change from solid, liquid to gas tells me otherwise. Cheers to being here for the mystery✨