Truant Art

All the greetings to you and yours dear reader, dear listener, and thank you for your patience over this last time. I’ve had my head down for many reasons, mainly though to give energy to the beginnings of a new collection of work, to its first push. Lately, I’ve been trying this new work out at various readings and have been encouraged to continue on its thread by some, thankfully, very positive feedback. More on that, and some samples to follow, here in the coming time.

But in the spirit of this Spring’s uprising, mid pulse of resurrection, I return to the elm top desk. Here on the corner of a street in the West of England, the leaves and blossom along the front fence have merged pear to quince, hazel to apple and have gradually, day by day, screened the street and its passing onlookers from me for summer. Though most, as we know only too painfully, are currently down lookers, shuffling along in their own versions of the techno stoop that currently afflicts us. The uncut grass between the tree lined fence and me was full of bluebells and dandelion clocks. I leave it grow into the snatch of meadow it is and, in the heated days to come, with my study window lolling open, grasshoppers will come and spend a little of their time with me as I make. But not yet, now we are closed into a misted hug of spring rain and the view from the window is pearly dropped and dripping. I wonder into a drop of water just arriving at the tip of a sycamore leaf. I sense my attention being sensed, displacing some of its water, changing its shape, altering gravity and we let go and fall together to ground, dissipating into the next story of return.

I’ve been trying to get my bearings in the storm. I don’t know about you, but I’ve been rabbit-in-the-headlights overwhelmed by the last months. I have felt silenced by the ongoing genocidal horror in Gaza, the many wars being waged alongside the rearing up of fascism’s black clad walls of division, the vanguard of the globalised, corporate, techno feudal ambitions. All the while, my own country is being asset stripped by our home grown, offshored super rich and international capital ventures. Empowered by the authoritarian regime currently flying a Labour flag, our police gladly overreach their civil remit (or not!), arresting, detaining and searching the homes of those who are standing up for Palestinian freedom, standing up for life. Day by day, it becomes ever clearer that we are facing the machinery of late-stage capitalism alone, which may be of no surprise to many who have historically always been subject to the colonial whip. But now many more, who have managed to avoid the lash at another’s expense, are seeing the capitalist death machine and its cult hungrily turning its eye to them.

It won’t stop eating until it’s starved, until we prescribe nil by mouth, until we walk away.

Last year saw me travelling with ways of seeing and feeling into the times, with ‘hospicing modernity’, ‘at work in the ruins’ and ‘staying with the trouble’. All laudable works that expanded my thinking and articulated an understanding of our ‘predicament’. I listened to a brace of ‘meaning makers’, out in the podcast universe, who waxed lyrical with their perspectives on facing the meta crisis. I witnessed their fantastic minds unfold into ever deeper intellectual depths. My unschooled, outsider mind began reaching overwhelm as my body’s experience of a lifetime of practical work called out in me for a tangible direction, a solid contribution to my community.

So, it was in late Autumn when I was thankfully gifted a few weeks with a school called Home, taking part in an offering called ‘Pockets, Patterns & Practices’. It was inspiring in the sense of bringing me into the orbit of others who are focussed on regrowing a living, regenerative culture. It brought me, through a process of reflection, to the potential of bringing something more than more writing to the growing conversation on the island I live on about how we move forward together, weaving the roots of a viable, life affirming civilisation that is already beginning the work despite the atrocity.

I found the will to drag myself out of isolation and begin following the thread again. It was then that I got a message about an old plot I’d been involved with back at the end of the nineties and into the noughties that had come full circle, a seed that has taken twenty-eight years to form. It is, as it always is for me, here in the home colony, regarding the liberation of land and our ongoing responsibility of stewardship, of care, repair and regeneration. I’ve sat with the old friend I started that plot with all those years ago and we have decided to remake it, to begin again. More on that very soon. But here is where it will emerge from if you’d like to get involved.

Now, however, there are still the troubles to navigate. My ongoing focus over the last months is a collection of writing regarding ‘the shift’, wonderings on how we move from this madness to the way of being in balance here that so many are dreaming, speaking, spelling and fighting for. For the last four or five years, I have been involved with Dialect Writers, a writer development platform that provides immersive learning, networking and publication opportunities to writers in rural and edgeland places; a rare field that attempts to grow away from the shade of metropolitan and academic elitism and nurtures, though not exclusively, outsider voices. It was via one of Dialect’s mutually supportive writing groups, around last Samhain, that someone offered a Jay Griffiths quote, from her brilliant book Wild from 2006, as a possible writing prompt…

‘To me, humanity is not a strain on wilderness as some seem to think. Rather the human spirit is one of the most striking realizations of wildness. It is as eccentrically beautiful as an ice crystal, as liquidly life generous as water, as inspired as air. Kernelled up within us all, an intimate wildness, sweet as a nut. To the rebel soul in everyone, then, the right to wear feathers, drink stars and ask for the moon… We are — every one of us — a force of nature, though sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.’

Beautiful, isn’t it? But what struck me was in that last sentence, ‘sometimes it is necessary to relearn consciously what we have never forgotten; the truant art, the nomad heart.’ I wondered what she might have meant by that phrase, as did others in the group, ‘truant from what?’ or ‘how do we understand what the truant art leaves behind?’ were two in particular; questions that proved to me Jay Griffiths’ suggested necessity ‘to relearn consciously’.

I felt like the over keen child in class who knows, at last, the answer to one of the passing questions, shuffling on their seat, stretching their hand up into the air, ‘I know! I know!’

What do I think I know and why do I think it has a value beyond my own self-expression? I have never forgotten the compulsive truancy of my pre-teen and teen years. How could I? They have never left me, certainly not their consequences which, along with the other waves of childhood trauma that landed at my shore, shaped the course of my adult life.

So, here’s to that boy…a story lesson.

I am sitting on the wood slat bench at the bus stop, it’s 1976, I am twelve. Punk and tobacco are still a year away and wait to break my anger open to myself and provide a home of sorts or, at least, others to run and belong with through my coming years of truancy.

I am sitting on the wood slat bench which backs onto the railings of St. Christophers, the ‘special school’. I can watch their main gate from here, the minibuses arriving with kids stuck to the windows in their own shapes and me, here on the bench, making eye contact with a few as our exclusionary troubles pass each other by.

I am sitting on the wood slat bench and across the London Rd., I am watching the empty T-junction with Galpins Rd, waiting for the emergence of the red double decker hulk of the 130 bus. Soon, it will appear, like a slow and out of proportion beast, dwarfing the red brick street, the chippy and the cab rank, it’s steamed windows each filled with the faces of other kids getting packed off to the borough’s ‘better’ schools. The moment closes toward me, the choice is closing in.

I am sitting on the wood slat bench, and the bus finally heaves itself onto the London Rd. The time has come, the choice is nigh, I watch the queue dutifully dissolving and look up, along the misted windows, each with a hand wiped gap for another peering face, as though through the bars of a cattle truck. The queue continues to shrink and I am, once more, frozen on the bench, staring back at the faces in the windows, wishing for this pain to end, for a relief from this tension.

I am sitting on the wood slat bench, and the last of the queue steps up into the front of the bus. The driver waits a moment, looking back at me through his mirror and then, finally, the doors close. Another normal school day drives away toward Croydon, and I am left behind. I feel the relief that this moment is done again, mixing with the stomach churning grief, for another chance at a normal life, disappearing away from me, into the traffic; I remember the ache in that child losing his way, falling off the rails, in no way equipped to help himself, desperate to be found out, to be taken under a wing, to be held safe and helped back onto his track.

But, as many who have been through traumatic childhoods will know, it is all just happening to you. You have an inkling that it could be very different, maybe more like the life you see your friends having, but you just don’t know how. After all, you’re not in control of the circumstances which continue to sear into you, like bombs, fragmenting your self at ever deeper levels.

There was one thing I thought I could control though, sort of, and that was my level of engagement, my presence and my absence, and this was how so many of my drifting days began. Somehow, in the crippling, dissociative freeze on that bench, I found the will to stand up, to turn away and to drift back, into the post school rush quiet of those suburban streets and disappear into the long hours of silent solitude in parks and woodlands. Or to ride buses far across London to walk mile upon lone mile through its streets and heath and park land back home to the mayhem.

‘I found the will to stand up, to turn away and to drift back’. It is that moment that I think is something worth dwelling with for here, like a brush stroke, a line making, in this truant’s art that I hope might speak to the times we find ourselves facing.

To turn away, as a physical act, as a youngster at that bus stop, was the beginning of a years long disengagement. Then, it created a four-year absence from conventional education until my release from the register at sixteen to begin decades of manual labour. It later initiated, as I made my first attempts to pick up and sift through the fragments of my life lost to my troubles, this auto didactic journey that has followed its own thread through the years, book by book, and led to the development of my particular way of seeing. That is from the outside in, and has its way to get used to, although by looking ‘in’ still contextualises the experience as being in relation to the in-ness and therefore exclusionary. In this essentially social mammal, that can trigger understandable grievous regret again, the pain and remorse of not fitting into the fold. But really, it is better described as ‘from the outside looking out’, because the more you look back in, the deeper your resolve to keep heading out, to imagine a way that does not fit in and runs eccentric to the herd or the flock.

The truant art is that of actually going missing, not the idea, not the mind picture, and certainly not the concept, but the feeling. To understand the feint weight or presence, behind a shoulder, of a guiding hand that helps you to feel how to turn away, from the day, from its empty promises, the tyranny of ‘potential’ and to not look back. It is to know, like now, in this life of witness, as a deep fibrous memory, like a stain on the bone that holds it, the ‘letting go of’ as a repeated, embodied practice, of relinquishing delusions of control and power that emancipates you to walk away from the game and wander out; into the ultrastretch of time, unknowing of consequence, barely aware of action more than following, moment to moment, the singular pull of the heart’s string guiding you back to source.

Why am I offering this?

The wounding that brought me truancy also brought me to right here, nearly fifty years later. That what I carried as a great burden could eventually become a source of knowing, not the source but, at least a spring, a trickle song of a preperception of here, a gift from out there, beyond the pale.

This leaving of it may be easier than we think, even while we live in the deep-set slave culture of a near thousand-year-old colony, shackled with rents, mortgages, tethered, by fear and hopelessness, to the game. But the absenting of ourselves from this demented machine, may be crucial to our survival now, turning our back on it in some way and beginning, joining the making of a place that makes sense in our hearts. But how do we resource that journey? On the material front, there are obviously huge amounts of repair, redress and reconciliation required for us to become a viable species in relation to our home. My own feeling is that we will prevail. I have come across many of the mapmakers in my recent travels, great thinkers who are laying out the ways step by step. But what is the way here, now? What is the choice each of us must make? My guide’s a little closer to home.

I want to wonder back to that Jay Griffiths quote and her ‘nomad heart’. Could it be that this practice of turning away, of leaving behind, can nurture the making of a nomad heart? Is there something in the leaving, or its impetus, forming intention even as the body is stopped, gazing toward the still and ever open horizon?

The nomad I imagine in me now is not necessarily wandering aimlessly, that is a myth of sorts. Maybe a nomad follows different lines, alternative routes.

Once it is deep-set, engrained, the path of absence can only ever be punctuated by these occasional times of re-entry, lines of passing, that puncture back through the village bounds where there is resting; until the pull of the horizon’s unknowing, the promise of its undoing, that draws at all the material of loss and other perceptions of solidity, even its gravity, to source, becomes too much to bare once more. Then, again, to the drift, in plain sight, back out into the ultrastretch, into the wilderness of future time.

I suppose here there could be a take on the romantic, filmic image of following the stars or the ancient trails, certainly possible in clear skies with the requisite skills (lost to most of us). But we live in the ruins, in the bomb site of capitalism. So, I think now about the map and meaning makers currently busying themselves with routes through to the next village, the next stopping place that they hope will nourish a new belonging, a place that has kept the best of us after all the leaving ahead.

But the leaving, with maps of futuristic constellations and instructions for the living anew stowed away, will lead to where it will. Maybe there is the navigation of not following the stars, or those who think they have an idea about how it all pans out (you gotta watch them very closely!), nor to project our damaged selves onto any map at all; but simply being part of it, a subtle movement, wandering out into the territory, into the wilderness of our unknowing. What if that movement is stillness, a belonging already instilled in each heart, to the truth that resides here in every breath, that is nurtured in the act of turning and walking away from the illusions of this worn-out game, in the line making of a truant art?

What if, in the practice of walking away from the picture, from the many tyrannies, not least that of growth potential, and out into the expanses of unknown territory, we relearn a lightness of travel for the ‘rebel soul’ in us?

There is obviously much work to be done, many times in the coming years where will need to stand up together for life and against the death cult and its machine, endless repairs to begin, amends to make.

I wonder how much stronger we will be when we’ve found being as kin, with each other and all we’ve found and learnt in the wilderness beyond, in the practice of our truancy. Maybe this will be a return of sorts, to the indigenous roots in land, whether real, imagined or pieced together in some resonant hybrid, but still, one we make together; a peace that can stand in the face of the trouble and know that all this, like us, will pass.

Let’s walk away, in our hearts as well as our minds and, only then, walk back in, in our versions of gnosis, to begin drawing the picture, making the line, a vision of peace. I look around and think, well, what have we got to lose, except this burden? And to gain? Knowing the new weight across our shoulders, the journey of repair and regeneration woven with something of the thread of our knowing.

I’ll see you in the fields.

I’ll see you in the streets.

I’ll bid you farewell from here dear reader, dear listener, with the brilliant Saul Williams and a way of walking away. Stay with it, please, and stay together.

Until next time. With Love.