Where the Horses Sing

by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee

Photo by Bear Guerra

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I LIKE TO WALK early and am often alone on the beach, the ocean and the birds my only companions, the tiny sanderlings running back and forth chasing the waves. Some days the sun rising over the headlands makes a pathway of golden light to the shore. Today, the fog was dense and I could just see two figures walking in the distance, until they vanished into the mist, leaving a pair of footprints in the sand until the incoming tide washed them away. It made me wonder what will remain in a hundred years, when my grandchildren’s grandchildren are alive? Will the rising sea have covered the dunes? Climate crisis will by then be a constant partner, and so many of today’s dramas will be lost in a vaster landscape of primal change.

Sensing this reshaping of the seashore, where the waves roll in from across the Pacific, makes my mind stretch across horizons. How this land and our own lives have evolved. One story of science says it was only seventy thousand years ago that humans left Africa on their long migrations across continents, arriving here on the Pacific coast just thirteen thousand years ago, when the Bering Strait was dry land and not ocean; or possibly they came earlier in boats down the coast. But how was life then, long before the written word, when we traveled as small groups, communities of hunters and gatherers?

They may have carried few possessions, but their consciousness contained a close relationship to the land, to its plants and animals, to the patterns of the weather and the seasons, which they needed for their survival. Fully awake with all of their senses, they had a knowing, passed down through generations of living close to the ground, even as they migrated across the continent. Today we are mostly far from the land and its diverse inhabitants. Cut off from these roots, we have become more stranded than we realize, and while our oncoming climate crisis may present us with many problems, we hardly know how to reconnect, to return our consciousness to the living Earth. It is as if, having traveled to the far corners of our planet, we now find ourselves in an increasing wasteland without knowing how to return to where the rivers flow, to where the plants grow wild. And unlike our ancestors, we cannot just pack up and move on, because this wasteland surrounds us wherever we look, like the increasing mounds of plastic and other toxic material we leave in our wake....

Walking the shoreline, watching the little birds searching for insects, my awareness drawn to the sky, the sea, and the shifting sands, I wonder at this gulf between the simple, magical awareness of our ancestors, and our present-day mind, as cluttered as our consumer world. What has happened to our consciousness, now divorced from the multidimensional existence that used to sustain us? Did we need to exile ourselves from this primal place of belonging? And now, as we tear apart the web of life with our machines and images of progress, is there a calling to return, to open the door that has been closed by our rational selves?

When the fog is dense and you can only see a few yards in front of your feet, the world around becomes more elemental. Watching each wave come to the shore is like watching the breath. Sometimes my feet become wet from the rising water, or I move further up the beach. I try to keep my mind empty, part of the sky and the waves, simple, essential. Here nothing is separate, and the inner and outer worlds are closer.

You can read the entire essay at: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/where-the-horses-sing/

Invasives

Unknitting Despair in a Tangled Landscape

by Catherine Bush

Illustration by Lucille Clerc

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IN THE FOUR-HUNDRED-ACRE park a few blocks from my home, I uproot plants: small rosettes of serrated, palm-shaped leaves; slim stalks of jagged-edged green topped with florets of tiny white flowers. It’s mid-morning. I’ve brought garbage bags. I make no attempt to be clandestine. I’m not foraging, like the Polish-Canadian women who come to pluck fresh nettle leaves in the spring, or the man whom I spot cutting orange chicken-of-the-woods mushroom from a decomposing log. Of course you’re not supposed to harvest here. I abandon my stuffed bag by the garbage bins. In clearing the ground around a couple of aged black oak trees in Toronto’s High Park, I’ve stopped perhaps a few hundred thousand seeds of garlic mustard from forming, an infinitesimal drop in the bucket of the invasive plant growth that is spreading through the ravine understory. Futile, likely, but I’m searching to kick-start a response beyond the complicated grief I feel at the sight.

Everywhere humans have traveled, we’ve brought alien species, intentionally and unintentionally. Arriving in a new place, the populations of some such species explode, cause land trauma, displace and eliminate native species, chemically altering the soil to make it inhospitable to other plants.

My parents arrived in Toronto at the end of the 1950s amid the vast, postwar boom of immigration. Both had histories tying them to the city. In the mid-1930s, my paternal grandparents gave up their brief immigrant life in Toronto running a fish-and-chip shop and sailed back to the UK with their Toronto-born, two-year-old son, only to meet the onslaughts of war a few years later. Fearing a Nazi invasion, my maternal grandparents sent my six-year-old mother from their English home to Canada; after five years in Toronto with a foster family, she returned to Norwich an eleven-year-old stranger. History nevertheless entangles us in the waves of Anglo-European invasion that have swept across the continents, including the six centuries of genocidal colonialism in North America.

How can I, child of immigrants, with a long cultural history of colonial extirpation behind me, object to the presence of other invasives, I wonder, as I walk the park’s wooded landscape. Aren’t humans apex invasives, triumphant at eliminating other species and creating monocultures? What I’m trying to figure out is how, in these days of mounting ecological loss, I can love and care for land that isn’t mine, land that I’ve inhabited for years yet where I have no personal ancestry, land historically stolen from its Indigenous inhabitants, which has nevertheless become my microclimate.

You can read the entire essay on: https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/invasives/

When Will We Ever Learn?

All good myths and fairy tales begin with a journey. The heroine takes their first step into the unknown, a new vision of the world is revealed on the path before them. They stop and see the world anew before taking the next step.

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THE CONTEXT

I first read about zoonotic pandemics as a threat to planetary health whilst researching my PhD nearly ten years ago. Covid-19 is not happening on top of climate and environmental change. The virus is an integral part, a symptom, of the environmental crisis. Viruses that should not be transferred between species would not be -- if we understood how to live with our planet and its life systems in a reciprocal way.

We have much to learn from the wisdom of indigenous First Nation peoples and nature-based rituals, along with what we know from climate scientists. Opening to ancient knowledge along with contemporary insights, we will better know how to forestall deadly climate and environmental mutations. Pandemics, along with pests, fire, floods, drought, massive storms and mass migration have long been foretold, going back to Judeo-Christian narratives and other ancient myths. Contemporary global research updates the realities of climate change, augmenting age-old tales with scientific data.

In this first quarter of the twenty-first century, a global viral pandemic has been unleashed. Surely we must rely on science, technology and political will to get us out of this mess? Surely the wealthy West can prevail, given our technology? Of course we’ll return to normal – if not the old normal, we’ll paper over the cracks to bring back our sense of certainty in comprehending past, present and future. We’ll return to expectations of progress, jobs, justice, homes, holidays, health, social events, coffee shops and pubs, friendships.

I think not.

I began construction of the Future Machine in 2019. It continues to evolve, and to make its journey amongst communities across England. The Future Machine is a witness to change, and a way to voice our hopes and fears for the future. I wrote about it in December 2020.

When the lever on the back of the Future Machine is pushed to Present mode, sounds emanate from its large copper trumpet. The sounds are based on data captured by weather sensors attached to a wooden pole affixed to the back of the machine. The performance brings these scientific sensors -- a technology driven process I designed with engineers and programmers -- together with the human feelings of the weather, the climate, the moment, the place.

The Machine compares the data to the monthly averages for its particular location and then an algorithm decides if it is cold, mild, warm, hot, breezy, windy etc. The algorithm also ‘decides’ if the climate is expected, unexpected or extreme. A collection of weather-descriptive words was given to the composers and musicians Alex Dayo and Dave Kemp. They created a process on improvisation with the words, the weather and their vast variety of instruments, along with Miles Ncube's bird songs and the singing and mutterings of Alex and Indira Lemouchi.

In a live performance, the Machine plays the algorithm and the musicians play their feelings. Their creativity demonstrates an emotional, reflective and experiential ability to translate the being-ness of a place and time. Their music incorporates the wind, rain, air and smells along with sensations of moisture and dryness, warmth and coldness, the air prickling their skin.

The Future Machine prints future quests for people to take away. An algorithm decides what will appear on these quests. It’s based on four dials representing myths we humans hold about the future, our moods, our planet and the seasons. The choices people make on the dials compose personalized future quests. I want this to be a poetic undertaking, the quest as something people will treasure and which will inspire renewed imaging of the future. I want people to inhabit different moods and stories. I insist the future can be a journey of our own making.

MY INTERIOR JOURNEY

Working on the Future Machine, especially after the first lockdown, I’ve thought more and more about poetry, about the experience of being in a place that attunes you to feelings you cannot place. It’s a space where emotions arise, the sense of an unspeakable moment, being-ness, awesomeness, sacredness, uncanniness.

It’s hard to connect to feelings as you write rules for algorithms, testing and blowing up computers and printers in the process of creating. It’s hard for any of us to connect to deeper realities as we go about our everyday lives. Feeding, clothing and housing ourselves; getting absorbed by our phones, social media and streamed video dramas; zoom calls and objects of desire; letting consumption and other banalities be the stuff of our lives.

I’ve been working with a senior climate scientist, Prof. John King from the British Antarctic Survey, to create Future Machine quests. We’ve been having ongoing discussions about poetry, art, science and data. We talk about what happens when what science shows us about the world reaches its limit, and it’s time to look to experts in human behaviour and emotion to understand how we might react. Increasingly, research shows that the stories we tell and how we then respond to our imagined tales is a very different process from gathering evidence and using cognitive processes to understand the data we gather.

Suddenly, in the midst of creating Future Machine quests, I realized I had to stop. This was not poetry. The technology, the data, the systems, the algorithms could never create a mystical, poetic, emotional and transformational experience.

I moved away from the pile of technology, the Machine's innards strewn like cold spaghetti on the floor of Furtherfield Commons in Finsbury Park, where I have generously been given residence during this pandemic.

I stopped, went for a walk under the London Plane trees, with their crackling tawny and orange leaves underfoot. The sky was autumnal blue, sparklingly clear. The oxygen of the trees mingled with the poisonous emissions of the North London traffic. I wrote about our mutating world, and the story of the Future Machine became clearer. I returned to it.

TRAVELS OF THE MACHINE

Now the Future Machine is fully functional, ready to move from place to place in its journey around England as the seasons change.

In November 2020, the Future Machine was due to appear in Nottingham when one of my collaborators, Caroline Locke, ceremonially planted a new blossom tree in Christ Church Gardens to replace one blown down. We zoomed the event. Frank Abbott, another artist collaborator in Nottingham, witnessed the tree planting on his mobile phone, leaving a message for the future via Zoom.

Highlights of this ceremony are available at https://www.emergingvoices.co.uk/profiles-of-activists

In April 2021, the Machine returned to Nottingham, when the cherry tree blossomed in ChristChurch Gardens on the hottest day in April ever recorded. Sounds of the Machine mingled with the murmurs of seven socially distanced people gathered under the trees. A local school (Mellers Primary) made light boxes with birds which we hung in the tree. At the witching hour, Frank Abbott filmed the magical moment when the sun went down. We lit the light boxes using small hand generators, creating a new ritual to celebrate the coming of Spring. We hope the rituals will evolve as the Future Machine returns each year, hopefully for the next thirty years.

THE QUEST CONTINUES

Now, as the country is tentatively opening up and Spring turns to Summer, I plan to throw myself into exploring the ineffable and the poetic. I want to create ritual and a sense of special occasion with the Future Machine in each of the places it will appear as the seasons change. The music of weather and the Autumn leaves falling in Finsbury Park (London), the cherry blossoms in Spring in Christ Church Gardens (Nottingham), the bells ringing change, renewal and the planting of new trees in Cannington (Somerset), celebrating the harvest along a watershed and the uncanniness of a damaged river (the River Leven, Cumbria) the growth, change and survival of ancient woods and still existing commonland (Rotherfield Peppard, Oxfordshire).

In this time of uncertainty and survival, during this global pandemic, the value of art, poetry and music is being questioned more than ever. Massive cuts to arts education have just been announced. Yet the story I return to tells me that without taking a step away from the science, technology, industry, economics and systems we’ve built to protect us from uncertainty, we cannot reconnect with the essence of the earth that protects us. Only via a connection to nature, poetry, art and music can we see the world anew, to experience the moment between what has passed and what happens next. To take the next step into the future and create new and sustaining narratives.

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Rachel Jacobs is a practicing artist, academic researcher, interactive games designer, writer and arts facilitator. In 1996, she co-founded the award-winning artist collective ActiveIngredient. Rachel is currently an Associate Researcher at the University of Nottingham and Visiting Research Fellow at Central St Martins (University of the Arts London). Her current project, Future Machine, is designed to help communities across England respond to environmental change. She is a frequent contributor to Emerging Voices.

Also see www.whenthefuturecomes.net

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