Generous refusing, landfall, travelogue(ing)

All the reach that can be visioned and sustained

I find I’m in a journey in a large and heaving landscape: both personally, in a life, and as a member of the quote-unquote 'post-war' baby-boomer cohort. It’s something I need to write about, for both personal and collective-activist-generational reasons; for purposes of day-to-day navigation and for continuing mobilisation. I’ll start from two experiences – that's the kind of thing I'll persistently do here, because that's how in fact it is, this living – and move along from these, exploring and travelogueing, in the blog I’m initiating with this paper here.

The first experience: in 2001 I found myself, somewhat to my surprise, living and working in a university research group in Sydney, New South Wales, and after a few months, holding a strong sense that in some way I was there ‘on the other side of the world’ (I’ve lived my life otherwise in England) in order to ‘become an elder’. More than 20 years on – I was in my mid-50s then – I have some sense of what 'being an elder' might sensibly, practically mean. In this blog I’ll explore the landscape of #elder years in terms of a number of threads – traditions, intuitions – that persist in this life of this baby-boomer, #globalNorth activist, and in relation to challenges and responses that have risen to be powerfully prominent in this intervening time, which bear powerfully on the life prospects of the grandchildren’s #grandchildren.

My grandkids' feelings as they grow, and their feeling for their grandkids in due course, matter to me a lot. Why else would I work so hard, writing, travelling, looking, reaching out, radar-scanning?

I mean to do this here, as persistently as I can, in terms of relationships, both personal-particular and generic-human, in-here and out-there, with humans and non-humans and stuff; and in terms of the wise well-informed setting and mobilising of intentions: in deep time, in our movements, in our places of everyday habitation, in a life. This is the kind of scope I find myself needing to recognise, move in, reach across, engage, represent, speak of. In pursuit of this, behind these blog pieces I'll set in motion a scheme of four 'zones of reach'.

In this most recent twenty-year arc of activist life, ‘eldering’, I find that a mapping like this, of reach and scope, becomes necessary, in weaving a sufficient weave, engaging a sufficient plurality, stretching a sufficient stretch, balancing a sufficient balance, dancing a sufficient dance. The zones of reach serve as warp, in a #weave of conceptual space, within which I want to begin placing a whole array of practical possibilities in living an activist life; approaching these possibilities through an assemblage of #patterns that we, co-conspirators in blessed unrest these past fifty years, can be pretty sure are good-to-have in what we do, and to offer as working legacy for ongoing activist life. The weave is called #foprop: foprop stands for forces of production, relations of production. More on this in due course. foprop weave

And the second experience: through my entire adult, activist life, I observe myself bouncing, generally uncomfortably, between two relationships with the world. On one hand, somehow primal and typically primary, is a profound rejection – refusal, opposition, subversion: NO, not like this, not for these reasons, not with these intentions and consequences, not out of these (desperate, poor, mean, fragmentary, compromised) resources; NOT in my name, not on my watch. These made me the libertarian #feminist #socialist activist of my younger years (a struggle persona that I think of as ‘m’: I probably will speak of #m later, ‘m’ continues to be present in my elder years). And on the other hand, more recent, tenderly facilitated like a hermit crab fresh in a new shell, a search for what might be deeply accepted, wholly inhabited, given the deepest whole-body YES: wise intention, mutual recognition and mutual aid, equanimity, cumulative skilfully-cultivated skill, reparation, regeneration, movement #BeyondFragments: an end of suffering, #landfall.

This has put my recent decades into a mode of making a #LivingEconomy. The #ZonesOfReach, above, are basic framing for this challenging and oh-so-needed practice of #regenerative making. It is of course much more than economy. It is the life of our hearts (heart-mind, cittā). It is our relationship with the living planet, and our own subsistence and wellbeing as members of a species among species. It is us, ‘we’, the ones who inhabit blessed unrest, convene civil society, do the groundwork – the invisible work – and reflect on it; and start in on it again, the next day and the next, in some kind of dance-rehearsal-dance, hopeful or desperate as we might be. It is our small moment in #DeepTime. To make a deeply living economy, all of these relationships and practices need to be continually re-inhabited, re-made, regenerated, revolutionised, storied.

It’s a big ask and, as you can already see, my own intuition is that we need to be a bit conceptual about this! I don't believe we can just trust ourselves to ‘be authentic’, or cling to values, or stand in solidarity, or anticipate an outflow of spontaneous creativity, or embrace something 'natural' (or worse, magical) that is imagined to lead to salvation or rightness. My conviction is that all of this is a struggle; a struggle and a profound making; a dance that needs choreographing and rehearsing, and an engagement with powerful not-human, historical infrastructures and dynamics that slide by, outside of awareness, if we don't get our conceptual minds in gear and under the skin of things, to mindfully (re)consider our relationships with stuff, and the nature(s) of the stuff(s) we engage with and depend on – including the stuff of our own consciousness. Routinely, we vastly over-rate our capacity to know, or take well-founded action, or act with considered intention.

These are all capacities to attend to; and (alongside #cittā) the conceptualising mind does some of this work. Indeed, the dance of the ‘two minds’ – intellectual-conceptual mind and cittā heart-mind – is one of the basically most challenging things that #CareWork has to engage in? In a way that easily seems paradoxical, this most intimate field of care work in-here has a lot to do with the most intractable field of work, beyond knowable community, across regions of habitation and in deep time: zone ¿4 stewarding work #StewardingWork.

The game is not the same

Journeys of activism and humane inspiration now – at this time in a life, and at this time in the storying of human existence – are not being travelled by humans with the same sense of self or of stakes that my own baby-boomer generation received as modernist-progressive legacy. The game – it may even be the end game – is no longer the same.

Alongside ‘m’, the activist in struggle – recognisably 'me' for my entire wage-working life, actively refusing, continuously aspiring to makership – other personae began in my elder decades to make their presence feel needed. Walker took the stage: a beat-up traveller-on-foot in melancholic-marginal terrain, who stepped off the high-speed train (did he jump, was he pushed?) and started walking the foothills of emotional territory, making maps. Thanks to the barefoot doggedness of #Walker, Rogers could come out of the closet: courageous sponsor of unconditional positive regard, compassion, resonant suchness and profound equanimity, intent on discovering the YES that could stand in the place of the NO.

I won’t make a meal of m, Walker and #Rogers (and I don’t actually propose such personae as a mode of analysis or insight, they simply turn out to be the way this particular journey has been made) but I introduce them as being in some way markers, in this particular life, of a significant recognition: that the game is enormously changed, and the revolution it asks for is much more enormous than young 'm' had been told it was. It goes deep under the skin into the preconscious. It goes way over the horizon, in regional space and generational time. It implicates not only labour and ‘the #RealEconomy ’ of use value, as maybe it was possible to believe 50 or 60 years back. It also implicates #WildNature (biting back now, fiercely and implacably, after generations of extractive and hubristic abuse) and the digital (which I think of as ‘the #Golemic ’; but that story’s for another paper). ‘The economy’ is the entire material frame of our continuing existence. #SubsistenceWork

Nevertheless, one of the outcomes of Rogers’ emerging contribution has been a deepening sense that, in the face of all the necessary refusing and the deepening crisis, and through the unceasing travelling and #travelogue(ing), it is possible, in a life, to ‘arrive’ somewhere; to ‘come home’ in some meaningful way; to learn to navigate an unfolding animated territory or an unchartable storm-blown ocean, and to make landfall. The work I’m bringing to these papers – personal journal, language-of-struggle, pattern language – is the work of becoming able to eventually arrive ‘home’, in a skilful, gracious relationship with all the tough stuff, the unending challenge, the unfinished (unfinishable) labour, the migration, the churning mind. This kind of ambition was intuited 20 years back, by the man who found himself entertaining the possibility of becoming an elder. He sees the possibility of making his necessary and determined refusals increasingly generously, of becoming able to make #landfall while also constantly setting out to voyage over the deep, of learning and shaping the landscape by walking the miles and by ‘phoning home’ into some emergent community of practice, via pages like this one, right here. Generous refusing, landfall, travelogue(ing).

Frames – All the reach that can be visioned and sustained

Earlier I wrote of activist traditions and intuitions. They can be tagged (very loosely) as: feminist, buddhist, socialist and . . this is hard to tag, this fourth one; it’s an intuition rather than a tradition. I might call it the mindful-sensual, materialist-mutualist intuition, or the post-animist intuition or, most simply, the impulse to skill that rises in a being with reflective consciousness and a capacity to act care-fully, in a sensuous body. I’ll need to flesh this out rather fully because perhaps – as a tendency, something that might even in time become an aware tradition – it is the newest and most tender of these frames. I have Bayo Okomolafe to thank for putting a name on it for me and making it searchable (feminist neo-materialism; although I’ve had to rename it and make a whole other animal out of it!).

Bayo Akomolafe (2017), These wilds beyond our fences, North Atlantic Books.

Is this set of four interweaving frames sufficient? Well, it’s simple enough (few enough) to offer possibilities of grasping and mobilising in real time, even in conversation. It’s rich enough, extended across all four zones of reach (another frame-of-frames), to furnish cues for practice at all kinds of places in an activist life. So my feeling is, it will serve. Anyway, more on these families of frames later; another paper or two, somewhere down the line. And it’s not the only frame – how would one frame be sufficient for being in relationship with the world! Pluriverse!!

The terrain of this short list itself is enough to blog/travelogue for many months: the terms (the regions of experience and insight, affiliation and inheritance) are large, diffuse. But be clear on one thing: although these tend to look like the isms of philosophy, what I bring into play here are forms of actual struggle and organisation; specifically struggle and (radical re-) organisation in-here, in the field of our own perceptions and impulses, our habits of sañña (attributing name-and-form, routinely ontologising the world) and sankhara (triggered responses, #StructuresOfFeeling). There is ‘theory’ going on here, not academic but ‘organic’ intellectualism, not just avid storytelling but disciplined conceptualisation: theory-of-and-in-practice, and the practice is moment-upon-moment life practice. There is no time out. These are frames of existence.

Likewise the challenges and responses that have become inescapably prominent during my activist lifetime are enormous in scope. I can start listing these too : climate and biodiversity catastrophe, a globalised oligarchic order founded in obscene accumulations of wealth as finance capital, fundamentalist-nationalist wars with consequences in the shifted balance of global regions, massive migrations under desperately life-threatening forces, crises of subsistence and peasant-indigenous living close to the land and the seasons, the disappearance of sense and mutuality under the combined globalised forces of means of ‘narrowcasting’ in digital media and human community and value(ing) forced to the margins and into residues, by algorithmic process, absurdly and wantonly applied and enforced. Etcetera. This is a horrifying, horrifyingly proliferating list.

These terms are awkward and I’m not going to struggle in this paper to justify them as a language, or to expand them: they’re here to evoke a sense of what I find it necessary to orient to in these elder years as an activist. These are not the things I (we?) thought we needed to attend to, fifty or sixty years back, still wrapped in modernism and welfare-ism. But into our own lives has bled a kind of sense that we fondly believed might have fallen into un-necessity with our parents’ generation: world war, holocaust, the male-midwifing of nuclear terror. We live now with regional wars that pulse with global investments, fascist and supremacist cultures and regimes of genocide and relentless humiliation, the hatching in our hearts of a fearful monstrosity: climate and biodiversity collapse-terror. We were not really expecting any of this? We’ve been really caught napping, on our watch? The work is barely started?

How to write . . . what?

How to write . . A journey. A landscape. A relationship with-and-in landscape. An intention for landscaping. A dance of pluriverse and mutualism ‘beyond the fragments’.

OK, something now about how I mean to do this work here in The Methuselah papers. This is writing as-and-in-and-of journeying, of a kind that I feel I have no choice but to try. We make the roads by walking; and here I am, on foot, in the foothills of the future, a young elder, writing maps and map-methodologies for all I’m worth, while I yet breathe!

Myles Horton & Paulo Freire (1990), Brenda Bell, John Gaventa, John Peters (eds), We make the road by walking – Conversations of education and social change, Philidelphia: Temple University Press.

The writing will be in the form of a blog; this present paper is the first blog post. I mean to blog once a month, and to maintain the schedule I'll cut the suit (more or less scope) to tactically fit the cloth of time and headspace.

At the same time, I'll publish the paper in federated wiki at papers.wiki.foprop.org. Federated wiki is a wonderful medium for writing in the fashion of a `commonplace book`: pagewise, in notebooks, in hypertext assemblages, with helpful tooling and UI, in public (under a Creative Commons licence). #FederatedWiki (from here onwards, plain `wiki`) is also a protocol with a proud lineage in programming and the crafting of digital artefacts (Hypercard, Smalltalk, Hypertext, turtles, hands-on relationship), which is designed to make material available for forking and repurposing by others, in their own hands-on construction as writers of commonplace books. Further, being federated across all writers, wiki furnishes machineries of relationship (it’s an ‘awareness engine’) within a distributed space of computational objects and data, curated and re-used by distributed writes. Wiki is a digital medium with a lot under the hood.

But we just write in hypertext in it! Do bricolage. Make palimpsests. What else?!

Wiki affords possibilities that ordinary web content doesn’t, via a ‘lineup’ of pages in parallel. This takes a little getting used to. Here’s a note on how to navigate in wiki.

How to write these papers here is a matter of poetics. See the pinned note: Poetics. This is another approach to the framing of this enquiry; #poetics includes an ontological frame on ‘what is in the world’ and how we may be in relationship with it, as writers and dancers.

I have an intention of opening each blog in a personal way. Hence, in this present paper, the two experiences that generate some kind of frame or scope for the paper. By ‘personal’ we mean, arising in the life of an actual person, as an intrinsic aspect of living the life. We mean also, the existential, mostly preconscious field in which the formation of Selves occurs (with consequences, with a downside).

This is one of the zones of reach I referred to above (zone ¿1, I call it 'in-here', it’s the field of ‘care work’ in making a living economy) and it's one that I mean to particularly stress in a politics of making a living economy – or indeed, in any kind of politics. Because: if politics is the substantial altering of social relations of production, then the altering of the relations of production of 'self' is fundamental in making a living economy, through the living, moment-to-moment, of an activist life. As you may guess, 'in-here' has a lot of Buddhist #dhamma insight in it. More anon. #CareWork

We also mean, of course, to mobilise the mantra of the personal is political that my generation of feminists has grown up with; giving it a concrete framing as a disciplined, skilful practice ‘in-here’ in the landscape of the heart-mind, with large consequences of power and possibility.

The personal opening makes these papers part of a stream of journal(ing) work. Adopting the framing of the foprop weave makes them part of a project of language(ing) of struggle. And we hope in any paper to propose at least a couple of patterns for the project of pattern language(ing). These three modes of writing, and the need to work and weave them all, are highlighted in A book of skill.

Patterns

This is as good a place as any to begin pattern languageing. Sketches of three patterns in the zone of formación work might be commenced:

These all are components of travelogue-ing, which is another pattern #travelogue(ing). These all weave in with further patterns in the zone of #FormaciónWork, in several families of patterns: Dance of knowing, Festival of visiting and Reporting (the practice of News from Elsewhere).

Next

Öcalan, 2013, Liberating life – Women’s revolution

We’ll see ;–)

The Methuselah papers

Elder regions, deep time, living economy – https://write.as/papers/ This is mike hales blogging on pattern language(ing) and language(ing) of struggle as everyday activist practices in making a living economy.

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Contact and comment: – Email: blog AT conviv.mayfirst.org – Fediverse (Mastodon) : @mike_hales@social.coop

This blog is linked with some federated wiki sister sites: – The foprop frame – Pattern language of making a living economy – A book of skill – The living and storying of an activist life – Methuselah papers – Mirror site for the blog, in the fediverse