Thank you for taking the time to consider my portfolio. I am a cultural critic who works at intersections of art, music, religion and sports. I am a creative writer working in science-fiction and climate-fiction formats. I am a content creator developing essays and podcasts which speak to my work as a public intellectual.
My daily writing practice, creative or otherwise, is at least 1500-2000 words a day. I love to be in the groove of craft. To me, good writing takes time but also takes energy. The words we write, even in such a visual age, still have the power to hit our deepest emotions. We find that in the craft and in the chance to work together.
My writing style is immediate and sophisticated without ever talking down to the reader. I am able to craft content which is both technically sound yet also poetically resonant to the emotional intelligence of our readers. I consider myself an adept and quick learner on topics and formats which I have interest in adding to my professional knowledge-base and skill-sets. I take joy in seriously researching an existing or new knowledge-base and discovering the most effective ways to communicate that knowledge to our readers according to the best context.
My rates are: .05/word, $100/1000-word piece of content
PlutoTV Is Winning the Streaming Wars
This is an example of a shortform blog which can work as ad copy, web copy, and a promotional blog. I do quite love PlutoTV. It's a great example of using what has worked before, in terms of access to a wide variety of dynamic and classic television content, in a novel use of the streaming format we all increasingly use to watch TV. It's free, it's easy to use, and it's actually quite hip. With the streaming bubble bursting for the biggest players in the game, PlutoTV is winning the streaming wars.
With all of the pundits talking about the bursting of the streaming bubble and with the biggest power players in the game facing immense criticism for their response, PlutoTV is winning the streaming wars. How and why? As their motto says, it's as simple as Drop In, Watch Free.
As someone who lives in that weird space between being a millennial and growing up really within Generation X, I am used to a certain way of watching TV. The joys of channel-flipping are ingrained within me. Recently, as I have felt the streaming bubble burst around me, I have found myself cancelling my YouTubeTV and even my Netflix. Cost is the primary reason, but even more so, especially with the unorganized and haphazard way TV content is being organized and distributed on streaming platforms, I find a lot of comfort and lot of entertainment in what PlutoTV has on offer and on demand at all times. Best of all, it doesn't cost me a cent.
PlutoTV is part of what is called FAST (free ad-supported streaming television). It is essentially a free TV content service styled like 20th Century TV (with plenty of classic 20th Century content with some commercials) in a 21st century format (with plenty of contemporary content as well). When I first encountered PlutoTV, I was taken in by how easy it is to use, how the classic and contemporary content blends together so well, and by how it is always possible to find something really fun and interesting to watch. PlutoTV is how I, the average middle-age person, would actually like to watch TV. As other writers on the medium have highlighted, PlutoTV is really such a vibe, as the youth like to say. It's TV as comfort food, the way it used to be, the way it's supposed to be.
There are four reasons why I love PlutoTV and why I think it's figured out how to be television in the streaming age
1. That's just it. It's television. It's TV. As novel as it was (and still can be) to have entire seasons of TV to binge at once, the streaming model can make us feel overwhelmed and over-subscribed when considering what we want to watch. Watching TV feels like work, when we're already over-worked. At your fingertips, PlutoTV gives you, again for free, hundreds of channels of content ranging from episodes of Yellowstone and Breaking Bad to the I Love Lucy channel to numerous channels covering gaming and anime and kung fu cinema to great contemporary movies across different genres like action, horror, and romance. At Christmas time, for god's sake, there's even two channels that are just a log in the fireplace roasting away and it's so wonderful.
My favorites (as an Anglophile), include the Top Gear channel and the Classic Doctor Who channel. For the Trekkies, there is everything from the classic original show to Deep Space Nine. Naturescape is a wonderful channel of beautiful landscapes and vistas for ambient vibes as you may be writing or working around the house The Food channel has plenty of classic Bourdain and there's plenty of Hell's Kitchen and Bar Rescue if Gordon Ramsay and Jon Taffer are more your speed. PlutoTV draws you in, you sweet couch-potato, and makes you feel right at home. The channel-flipping aspect is the best part, in that it allows you to constantly discover something new in a much more accessible way than it is trying to cross-scramble your way through your diffetent expensive streaming platforms. There is also the standard on-demand option in which you can instantly find any episode of any TV show featured on the platform.
2. It's a streaming platform which reaches across the generations. When I have watched PlutoTV with my mom, she has found it much more satisfying than channel-flipping through the same Housewives episodes she has seen numerous times on expensive basic cable. We've really enjoyed watching The Carol Burnett Show and I Love Lucy and old clips from The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. My mom is hip too, so she loves It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, so we get a kick out of watching old episodes of Taxi (which is such a capsule of what wonderful TV is) and marvelling that Danny Devito hasn't aged or changed a bit over the decades.
3. It allows you to really get into it. What's the one criticism of PlutoTV that I might have? At times, the content can feel a little repetitive, but as PlutoTV is owned by Viacom/CBS, I am finding a lot more fresh content and channels popping up. The BBC Top Gear channel is a great recent addition, especially since Top Gear was hard to find on streaming platforms for a while.
There is also a great blessing to seeing a similar movie pop up often. I adore The Queen, the 2006 film starring a riot of great actors such as Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II, Michael Sheen as Tony Blair, James Cromwell as Prince Philip, and Alex Jennings as Prince Charles. The Queen was written by Peter Morgan, the creator and the showrunner of The Crown. I often say The Queen is the best episode of The Crown, since it covers the devastating week after the death of Princess Diana, in which the English people, in the words of their great artist Francis Bacon, opened the valves of feeling, with all of the attendant drama of the Royal Family's response to that feeling. It's one of those movies I will always watch when it's on. When movies are on PlutoTV on the regular, it allows us cinephiles to really study the film and see and experience new things we may have never seen before. At the very least, it's comfort food. There is almost always something on that you would always watch when it's on.
4. Last and not least, PlutoTV shows us how sophisticated and wonderful television has always been. Even as the streaming bubble bursts, we have been blessed with a Golden Age of TV in the 21st Century. TV, as a creative medium, has elevated itself to heights previously reserved for the fine arts. Tony Sopranos taught us how to watch TV in a new and deeper way. We demand more out of TV even as we also always crave its creature comforts. What I often discover, with all of the deeper sense of artistic vision television has given me, is that classic TV like Taxi, I Love Lucy, and the Carol Burnett Show shine for all the dynamic revolutionary quality that they had back in the day and that they still have now. We can rediscover shows we watched before in new, dynamic, and fun ways. It's still comfort food but we see how much love and care and talent and vision went into that food. It's just really damn good and well-made comfort food.
If you haven't checked out PlutoTV, all you have to do is click here , sign up for free, and make sure the app is also downloaded on your smartphone or smart TV. Drop In, Watch Free. It's TV without the work and the cost.
Among The Thugs Again: The Nasty Ghost Of Hooliganism
Bill Buford's book Among the Thugs is quite simply the most remarkable book I have ever read. Even though I read constantly, I very rarely read the same book twice. I have read Among the Thugs three times and counting. It hits particularly different in a real English pub with a glass of Laphroaig on a rainy October evening. This essay (written in 2016) highlights my capacities as a sportswriter, cultural critic, and book reviewer.
All the stories have been told
Of kings and days of old
But there's no England now
All the wars that were won and lost
Somehow don't seem to matter very much anymore
All the lies we were told
All the lies of the people running around
They're castles have burned
Now I see change
But inside we're the same as we ever were
The Kinks, "Living on a Thin Line"
Bill Buford's Among the Thugs is the most remarkable book I have ever read. The front cover features a picture of one of these "thugs", a skinheaded English bloke half-lidded smoking a cigarette whose visage gives off the impression of a personality barely connected to the reality around him, yet who also gives the impression that he's about three seconds away from punching your nose into your brainstem. Below this face is the novelist John Gregory Dunne's very apt description of the experience of reading this book: "A grotesque, horrifying, repellant, and gorgeous book; A Clockwork Orange come to life."
Thugs marks a moment in time, but like any moment in time, that moment's tentacles connect irrevocably to our present moment and how our present moment is warped by our preoccupations of the past and our fears and hopes for the future. Among the Thugs is Buford's deep dive as an American journalist into the horrifying and fascinating phenomenon of English football hooliganism. David Rudin, in his review of Thugs in Howler Magazine, marking the 25th anniversary of the book's publication, writes that "Buford's account of the thugs he moved with are by turns amazing, repugnant, stunning, horrid, and exhilarating. In the same way the 'crowd violence was their drug,' Buford's account gave me a fix. The same passages turn me on and make me want to turn away."
I'm not sure what it says about me that I'm now into my third reading of this hell-scape tome. But there is a tremendous relevance to Thugs in our present moment. The phenomenon of football hooliganism does indeed seem, at least at the highest echelons of European football, to be a gruesome relic of the past. For those of us, so many of us, who have been part of the great emergence of football in America over the last couple of years, we are learning so much, being exposed finally to the greatest sport the human being has produced. We are experiencing fully, finally, since now the "beautiful game" is all over our tele's and streams, the religious experience of being a football fan. Hooliganism never enters into our vision in the slick, mannered, utterly professional and global presentation of the Premier League. So many of us learn about the mechanics and intricacies of football by playing FIFA and Football Manager and never even think about the hooligans and thugs who once threatened the very emergence of football which now blesses us.
Yet the thug on the cover of Thugs has not completely disappeared. Yes, the corporatization and globalization of the game have moved us far away from the disasters at Heysel Stadium in 1985 and the crush at Hillsborough in 1989 (ESPN's 30 for 30 doc Hillsborough is essential viewing to understand this moment in time -- there are images you must see but that you never want to see again). But the menace of violence surrounding the game of football remains present like a nasty ghost. The violence at this summer's UEFA Championship tournament in France was intense enough that the English and Russian national teams were threatened with expulsion. What is even more pertinent to Thugs' ongoing relevance was the recent Brexit. As Buford makes clear throughout the book, the phenomenon of the thug was/is rooted in people who feel unmoored, discarded, and disconnected from the splendors and wonders of the corporatization and globalization of society.
The thug is threatened by the Other. The Other is what inspires the thug to act like a thug, to create a whole religion of thuggery. Buford writes:
"The rest of the world is a big place, and its essential inhabitant is the stranger. The supporters did not like the stranger... And there was no stranger more strange, and therefore no stranger more detestable, than the foreigner... The problem with foreigners was this: they were incomplete... foreigners had never quite climbed all the way up the evolutionary ladder; there was a little less of the foreigner, especially foreigners of a dark complexion..."
Watching videos coming out of the UK since the Brexit, videos in which modern-day thugs berate people of color on public buses, telling them to "get back to Africa!", hearing that hate crimes have surged 42% in England and Wales since Brexit, understanding that a "frenzy of hatred" not only fueled Brexit but is being fueled by Brexit, we watch the visage of the thug on the cover of Thugs step out and come alive again. We must understand the thug if we are to understand the complexity of the rise of far-right/neo-fascist populism in Europe and in America. To understand the thug we have to attempt to do what Buford did: to enter into the world of the thug, the everyday life of the thug, to even have compassion for the thug and to hear his grievances at being left behind by forces beyond his control, forces which can be considered the real enemy.
"You see, what is does is this: it gives violence a purpose. It makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater-for us. The violence is for the lads"
Mark, resident Manchester United supporter
The reasons why devotion, especially religious devotion, turns, curdles, into violence are always rooted in some kind of structure, logic, and coherence. The practitioners of this violence can most always explain their propensities with some kind of link, some kind of thread, back to the root and heart of what they are devoted to and to why they are devoted to such a thing, whether it's a teaching of faith, their family, their community, their tribe, their nation, or some combination of all of these things.
Mark Juergensmeyer, in his erudite and prophetic 2000 tome Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, writes that "it takes a community of support and, in many cases, a large organizational network for an act of terrorism to succeed. It also requires an enormous amount of moral presumption for the perpetrators of these acts to justify the destruction of property on a massive scale or to condone a brutal attack on another life, especially the life of someone one scarcely knows. And it requires a great deal of internal conviction, social acknowledgment, and the stamp of approval from a legitimizing ideology or authority one respects."
The blokes of English Football Saturday certainly had built what seemed to be a fully functioning, hierarchical, multi-tiered Church and Community behind their devotion to Manchester United or West Ham or Millwall. The old standing-room terraces in their stadiums and dens was where the supporters offered their worship, crushed against each other, moving in what Buford described as a constant motion of shove and counter shove. The firms were the hierarchies the supporters adhered to, with the most proven in terms of their reputation for violence and bling, like fancy track suits, jewelry, and Rolls Royces, acquired from related and un-related criminal enterprising, at the head of the firm.
The violence and bling trickled down in the manner of the jib, in which the supporters, by the sheer quantity of their marauding, would find and take and steal anything they could on Football Saturday, from places in the terrace without having tickets, to handfuls of shoplifted bacon-flavoured potato crisps and lagers, and free stowaway passage on planes, buses, and trains all over England and even into Europe.
The jib, which in many ways was the mechanism of the supporters' devotion, was based on the principle, Buford noted, that "everyone-including the police-is powerless against a large number of people who have decided not to obey any rules. Or put another way: with numbers there are no laws."
Buford noted that many of the supporters were tattooed, but not entirely quite like what Pete Townshend once wrote about. Marking their bodies with what Buford describes as "totemic pledges of permanence", such as great hellscapes with Man U Red Devils devouring famous players of other clubs in eternal flame, or simply with the names of club superstars like Bryan Robson running across the entire forehead, the devotion of these blokes was a matter of needle and blood.
All in all, the rituals of Football Saturday were all well and structured. Everyone was there for the match and the drink and the laugh, and even if the blokes were a little rowdy at times, especially when they traveled to the foreigner's place, as Buford did with a number of Manchester United supporters to a 1984 Cup-Winners Cup match against Juventus in Turin, they claimed again that they meant well. That they most indeed not hooligans.
The rudeness of the supporters, as noted by Buford, "was their vitality, and these people were very rude; they were committed to rudeness, as though it was their moral banner." They were boisterous, kleptomanic, and oafish because their devotion to their club was so much a part of their very identity, and their devotion was so strong, that anything which was counter to that devotion, like Juventus, or the people of Turin, whether these people were Juventus supporters or not, or anyone in the way of the cut of their jib, deserved their rudeness, simply because they were not a member of the Church.
***
Yet rudeness is one thing and brutal, rib-cracking, skull-crushing violence is another. The difference is what turns the supporters from blokes into thugs. The difference is when it goes off.
Following the match in Turin, which the home-side Juventus won 2-1, to clinch a berth in the Cup-Winners Cup Final, where they beat FC Porto, 2-1, to win the Cup, in case you're keeping track of such things, the Man U supporters, with exquisitely disturbing precision and intent, reflecting and expressing the structure of their Church, "like some giant, strangely coordinated insect", laid waste to the people and places of Turin. Buford noted the sudden, startling change: "If anyone here was drunk, he was not acting as if he was. Everyone was purposeful and precise, and there was a strong quality of aggression about them, like some kind of animal scent. Nobody was saying a word."
It goes off. The threshold is crossed. The blokes encounter the Other. The blokes become thugs. They batter merchandise sellers, bashing heads repeatedly against the merchandise table. Shop windows, buses, and cars are assaulted by maniacs wielding giant blocks of concrete they shouldn't be able to carry aloft in more normal, more sober circumstances. They swarm upon local lads hopelessly caught in the mob, beaten to a pulp by six or seven supporters at a time, Yes, some of these local lads are Juventus' own firm, there to protect their turf, but many, all too many, are not. It is, by any definition, a riot. It is, by most definitions, terrorism.
Most disturbing is an encounter with a family caught in the mob of thugs. The husband, in a panic, is somehow able to get his wife and children in their car before he is set upon, struck across the face by a metal bar. Buford horrifically wonders "Why him?... What had he done except make himself conspicuous by trying to get his family out of the way?... The others followed, running on top of the man on the ground, sometimes slowing down to kick him-the head, the spine, the ass, the ribs, anywhere."
As much as there is a consistent consistency to the presence of coherence and reason within the phenomenon and practice of religious violence, to the ways and means devotion curdles into violence, there is always something profoundly incoherent and irrational to it as well. The mystery of religious violence which tortures us stands against the rational structures and ideologies which support it. The rationality of the structures and ideologies behind religious violence, which can be so easily identified when we widen our contextual lenses, only make the mystery of the irrationality deeper.
We can only go so far in our study, our understanding, our attempts at sympathy. There is something so dark in human nature which emerges in this mysterious space which defies our intellect and stains our heart and soul. What causes someone who is so devoted to a cause, a club, a community, a deity of any sort, to decide the Other, whether or not this Other is a legitimate threat to the devotee's safety and well-being, must be violently attacked, even to the point of murder, of slaughter?
By this point in Buford's immersion, he clearly understands the structure of Football Saturday and the devotees of the clubs. He understands, and experiences, their rudeness. But when it goes off, when their devotion turns into violence, when they become thugs, the structure of it all becomes a horrific, unfathomable mystery. What is most mysterious of all, to Buford, was the emotional reactions of the thugs to the violence they were committing.
Buford writes:
There was an intense energy about it; it was impossible not to feel some of the thrill. Somebody near me said that he was happy. He said that he was very, very happy, that he could not remember ever being so happy. Here was someone who believed that, at this precise moment, following a street scuffle, he had succeeded in capturing one of life's most elusive qualities.
Even when they are back in Manchester, far away from the animal scent of that evening in Turin, the supporters, even some of the most obviously successful ones, those with jobs and pensions and wives and kids (and Buford will clearly point out later in the book that the kind of economic depression which otherwise logically explains the phenomenon and practice of religious violence is not widely present with these highly privileged young English men) continue to express that their violence is a kind of emotional and spiritual necessity, that the violence is a part of their inherent being which can not not be expressed.
Buford meets a Keith Richards look-alike who quite logically insists: "The violence, we've all got it in us. It just needs a cause. It needs an acceptable way of coming out. And it doesn't matter what it is. But something. It's almost an excuse. But it has to come out. Everyone's got it in them."
We go back to the lead quote, from Mark, one of those supporters with the job and the pension and the wife and the kid. For him, even for him, the violence "makes us somebody. Because we're not doing it for ourselves. We're doing it for something greater-for us. The violence is for the lads." There is nothing inherently wrong with the kind of devotion that brings atomized individuals together for a common cause and purpose, something "greater" than mere individualism. There is something inherently spiritual in such common cause. Yet there is something deeply wrong when the kind of violence the thugs commit is needed to justify and keep the devotion together, to make it stronger, to make it something real and meaningful. There is nothing spiritual about that (but is it still religious?)
It makes perfect sense, yet it is so, so disturbingly macabre, senseless, and mysterious. The violence and the devotion of the thugs is one-to-one, hand-in-hand. It makes perfect sense to the bloke why he becomes a thug. To those of us observing the thug, studying the thug, we are horrified, perhaps because we know these tendencies are not ultimately foreign to our own experience and nature. Buford, again recalling an encounter with one of the materially successful supporters, writes that "he was rational and fluent, and had given much thought to the problems he was discussing, although he had not thought about the implications of the thing-that this was socially deviant conduct of the highest order... I don't think he understood the implications; I don't think he would have acknowledged them as valid."
The deeper Buford gets into the crowd of the thugs, the more clear and the less clear it becomes. In our next blog, we will examine Buford looking at the nature of the crowd itself, the phenomenon of the crowd, when the morals and ethics and boundaries that we, as civilized individual citizens, hold dear and claimed that our ancestors fought and died for, disappear under the influence of that mysterious compulsion which turns sanity into insanity, bonds into bones breaking, devotion into violence.
Excerpts from Pralaya: An Anticipatory Story (1:2)
I'm happy to share these recent examples of creative fictional writing in a climate-fiction (cli-fi) mode. I was inspired to write this by reading The Ministry of the Future by the acclaimed science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. His world-building and capacities to emotionally imagine both a realistic and surrealistic way forward sparked my own bout of storytelling. Pralaya imagines a collapse we all feel is coming, in the ache of our bones getting up every morning for a job we hate to the way we feel civilization as we know it cracking at the seams. Pralaya is a stew of sci-fi, cli-fi, neon shades of cyberpunk and what the theorist Mark Fisher calls K-Punk, bits and pieces from my doctoral dissertation on the idea of anticipatory community. I plan to develop this as an audio podcast in the near-future.
Scottish Highlands: 2025
The pralaya is the regularly scheduled destruction of the universe according to Hindu cosmology; the Natya Shastra also describes it thus:
“Pralaya (प्रलय, “fainting”) occurs due to too much toil, swoon, intoxication, sleep, injury, astonishment and the like. Loss of Consciousness should be represented by inaction, motionlessness, imperceptible breathing and [finally] by falling on the ground.”)
It’s remarkable to think how normal that day and that week still felt even as everything we take for granted was tossed up into the wind. It was an unconscious revolution that suddenly and violently became conscious like a volcano. It was Earth penetrating all of our consciousness’ with a message so urgent we all had to stop and listen. There was little other choice.
I write this to you now from our farm in the Scottish highlands. The person I was before the pralaya, the person I was during the pralaya, and the person I am now after the pralaya is certainly on a continuum of funky spacetime with a mind of its own. It’s a leaky one. That is how we have to tell the stories. It has to leak through the spectrum-what has come before, what is now, what is to come. All of these experiences are always already connected. Not exactly a snake devouring its own tail, but not exactly cause-effect-Cartesian cut.
The reason I write this story is because I believe I can reach back to that person I was before to guide them to be the person I am now. I believe I can reach out to the person I am still to become. This isn’t (just) because I spend a good deal of time now learning about the philosophical and dare I say theological implications of quantum physics. I sit here in my cowshed/office, looking out at the highlands outside my dear, precious Edinburgh. The combination of spectral mist, the undulations of the bogs, the ever-present sea spray vibe, the sheep and cottages in the distance which have been there seemingly for centuries-I cannot describe the metaphysical pull this ecosystem has on me. A fancy way to say I fucking love this soil, these cows, this landscape in which the Goddess whispers and roars.
Julia’s Land Rover rumbles up the road to our humble homestead. She is a regenerative ecologist I befriended when I landed at Cambridge one year ago. She’s a scientist. I’m the ecotheologian. Scully and Mulder. We are working together on the Anticipation Project. The Anticipation Project strives to be a bulwark against the ecofascists beginning to emerge in full force in Central Europe, in some parts of Russia and Austraila, and of course everywhere in America.
The pralaya did not make everything automatically hunky dory. Instead, the best and worst of the impulses of that impenetrable social animal, the human being, have been unleashed and unfiltered.
Julia and I are going to meet the Agential Realist. It’s a hike, due east to the docks off of Portobello Beach. Julia’s schooner, originally her uncle’s, is a sleek machine, weathered, embittered, and efficient. We need to take it out to Inchkeith, the island where the Realist has his garden. It was off of Inchkeith where many, many people saw a giant spacecraft enter the water two years ago almost to this day. There is video documentation of the spaceship on the encrypted networks that were set up after the system buckled.
Three hours later, through the sea-mist, tasting the rasa of ages and cliffs and castles and the endless grey eternity around the sea, after a 45 minute mostly uphill hike to the garden, the Agential Realist meets us at the holy basil he is growing at the front gate. He eyes us with mischief.
“Terminal-stage capitalism is UPS charging you $285 to send a 1 oz package across the Atlantic. They say you’re essentially paying for a plane ticket for the pots and pans you’re sending to your wife. Terminal-stage capitalism is everyone who continues to die in high-rise building fires, the same way they died a century and a half before in the tenements on the Lower East Side.”
The Realist snaps a few holy basil leaves into his wicker basket. He’s wearing that same factory worker outfit that Pete Townshend wore on the Tommy tour for the Who in 1969, except in classic Aston Martin green. The Realist is wiry, plucky, not exactly slight, apparently has a black belt in judo (“so I can kick Putin’s ass” as he once joked). His father was from Kerala. His mother from Edinburgh. Haggis masala.
We follow him into the sprawling ranch house at the southwest end of the garden, closest to the sea. You can see from the sea from his attic, intentionally so he says. The tea is always flowing in the house. So is the Scotch. So is any number of pharmacological manifestations. Orchids and pine and leaves leaves everywhere, spackling the soft sea light flowing in from the numerous skylights.
Because this is a work assignment, we take the tea on offer. For all of the Realist’s eccentricities, it’s just Earl Grey in the pot, “my one concession to imperialism.” Before we begin, as always, the Realist can’t help but engage in some “shop talk” with Julia and I. Again he has the dog-eared, annotated copy of the book on anticipatory communities and the art of anticipation that Julia and I self-published with the Kabir Initiative earlier this year.
He eyes Julia with that mischief, and reads this paragraph from our manuscript:
This book asks a fundamental question: what will we do, what do we do, when the shit hits the fan?
“Hope for the best, prepare for the worst” my wife always says. I never really like it when she says it, because it both punctures my uselessly naive romantic side and makes my cynical side feel overly competitive. I want to be the dark sullen old poet wandering around Edinburgh in this relationship!
But that is what marriage tells us, what religion tells us, what our politics tells us, and increasingly what Earth is telling us: hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
In this book we will talk about preppers and lifeboat politics and ecofascism and climate totalitarianism. We really shouldn’t avoid these topics. We need to understand what it means to anticipate a more beautiful, resilient, and just way forward. Otherwise the implications are frightening. We may descend into models of authoritarian and totalitarian forms of governance as the climate catastrophe overwhelms our borders and boundaries. Nothing in recent human history tells us that this hellscape is impossible. It is already the everyday reality of countless people on this forlorn Planet Earth
In this book we attempt to ask a very simple but complex question: do we expect the best of each other or the worst of each other when the shit hits the fan?
Are we mere survivalists or are we anticipators?
It is the practice, the art, of anticipation and our networks of anticipatory communities which will create the regenerative bulwark against the worst of our temptations to detain and gas the problem away.
The practice of anticipation has an inner flame: think of the anticipation one feels when one is falling in love with someone, or when one is aching deeply for a return to one’s Earthy roots, or when one is aching for a reunion with the divine beloved (these are often one and the same experience). That ache, that sense of devotion, in which prayers for such a reunion rise naturally like incense from the heart, is the inner flame of anticipation which makes the practice of anticipatory community possible.
“The inner flame of anticipation…” The Realist closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He begins laughing that samurai laugh.
To Julia (never to me for some reason): “Do you have the answer yet? The best of us or the worst of us when the shit hits the fan?”
Julia looks at me (as she always does in these situations) and sharply says to him: “They’re fucking coming.”
“This way, eventually” I add.
The hermitage silence is gently broken by the wind chimes which are the ringtone of the Realist. His IPhone 9, the screen cracked of course, is still linked to the encryption. Moving like a Zen cat, the Realist takes the call in his solarium, whispering so we can’t hear him.
I get up to stretch my legs and enjoy my Earl Grey. On the wall is this passage embossed in black and a hint of neon molten gold
Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discursive practices are the material conditions for making meaning. In my posthumanist account, meaning is not a human-based notion; rather meaning is an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility.
Intelligibility is usually framed as a matter of intellection and therefore a specifically human capacity. But in my agential realist account, intelligibility is a matter of differential responsiveness, as performatively articulated and accountable, to what matters. Intelligibility is not an inherent characteristic of humans but a feature of the world in its differential becoming. The world articulates itself differently.
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Being.
Ah yes Barad. For me the equivalent of listening to a very technically complex but very evocative prog rock album. It had become a narrative in the classrooms I inhabited before and after the changes: Indigenous peoples never forgot this seemingly complex knowledge your Western scholars are “discovering.” This is always a completely compelling accurate critique. Why fold the erotic, the loam of Earth, into so many syllables, symbols, and notes?
Still Barad, especially on some of those pharmacological manifestations available in the house, was marvelous. Her writing is like diving into the atomic freeways of the microcosm, beholding the theology of the quantum paintbrush of the Divine-at least that’s how I took it. The erotic and the devotional all entangled like limbs and hopes and little deaths in every quanta and every superposition and every concrete kiss on the lips. That’s reality. That’s what we stupidly call “God.” Dancing in the moonlight, on the shore of the Yamuna, forever in embrace, that is it.
“For clearly what is at issue in the shift from classical to quantum physics is not merely the nature of human knowledge but also the nature of being.”
The Realist comes back into the dining room next to the kitchen. He shares a quick look with Julia (always with her) that communicates that he has completely heard what she (we) just said. They are coming here and they are coming here soon. To get the kids.
Nevertheless he glances back at our manuscript. Another point the Realist wants to make. This is also part of the real work too, he often says, always looking at me, gauging whether or not I’ve finally given up on the dream of a tweed tenure-track, an office high in the tower, with stain-glass windows, endless bookshelves, my pipe, that pipe dream…
“Organic intellectuals we are,” reading from the manuscript while he prunes his butterfly bush.
We have to do the ecotheology!
The anticipator is an organic intellectual in the Anthropocene, with a primary emphasis on the organicness, the Earthiness, which defines and forms the intellectual content of her work. She does not demand regeneration as a linear progress. The messiness of her Earthiness as an anticipator contains within itself certain creative energies which refuse to be tamed or ordered or domesticated. The anticipator gives herself to the vulnerability of becoming in the service of regeneration. The anticipator even questions traditional languages of revolutionary thought and practice. Too much attachment to revolutionary fervor also implies an over-attachment to massive structural change at the expense of local and organic change. As the political theorist William E. Connolly argues “the point today is not to wait for a revolution that overthrows the whole system. The ‘system,’ as we shall see further, is replete with too many loose ends, uneven edges, dicey intersections with nonhuman forces, and uncertain trajectories to make such a wholesale project plausible. Besides, things are too urgent and too many people on the ground are suffering too much now.” William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 42.
Anyone who practices anticipation must avoid the temptation for a change which is either too big or too small. If it is too big it will not provide the kind of radical intimate creativity which is necessary for vulnerable becoming and regenerative practice at the grassroots level. If it is too small it will not attend to the massive systemic evils of the Anthropocene. If it is too small it may attend to sufferings only in the key of charity and not in the key of justice. The anticipator insists on justice, for “charity means helping the victims. Justice asks, ‘Why are there so many victims?’ and then seeks to change the causes of victimization, that is, the way the system is structured.” Marcus J. Borg, The Heart of Christianity (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 201.
Anticipation as regenerative ecotheology is always a seeking a queer hope and opportunity in the movements between homesickness and homegoing. It lives and moves with and within the unbounded yet still coherent rhythms of watersheds and ecosystems, of forest groves and pandemics and People’s Shocks from below, from the “underconscious” and/or what the Black American poet/scholar Fred Moten and his colleague Stefano Harvey describe as the undercommons. The anticipators in the undercommons are the people who create “disruption and who consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval...to renew by unsettling.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 20.
Moving to the Earthy rhythms of the undercommons is to move within the faith, put into practice, that the impossible is possible. Anticipation, especially in its political key, demands that the only real possibility is that which the turbo-capitalist considers impossible. These are the possibilities of regenerated Earthy flourishing, hand-in-hand with a defiant Earth which is not our enemy, and certainly not our redeemer, but instead our fierce, mysterious, and motherly companion in this Great Work. Rooted again and anew in this Earthy body politic, we become rooted and connected to everything around us and within us and we become creators of everything which must change. As Moten and Harvey declare “we owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination.
We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”
“We have to do our ecotheology. It’s also part of the work,” he says, again staring right through me.
Back to pruning. Back to Earl Grey. The one thing about Inchkeith is the silence. It’s so enveloping. No one can be manic or static here.
“It seems that we must unsettle and entangle and anticipate and grieve. Isn’t that what we have been doing all this time. What makes this time any more or less special?” Pruning the butterfly bush.
Julia gets that look in her eyes, that Scottish fire again. She says to the Realist
“They know that we are here. The ones who want all the remaining free lands.”
This time he looks at both of us. He knows who they are, the people who are coming. He knows because he was once one of them, the tech bros of the Book of Revelations, the Singularity seekers, the planetary travelers of the new century (at least until Musk died trying to flee to space).
The Realist puts down his pruners. He finishes his tea.
“What I have been thinking about so much lately is whether or not it’s true that we can control our destiny. Is astrology right? Is quantum physics true? No, it’s not such a binary. It’s never a binary. The Lord is the Illicit Lover. He breaks apart the world of karma and of normal relationships.”
He looks at us. “That’s A.K Ramanujan, my favorite poet. From Speaking of Siva”
“Does the universe respond to our desires and actions, like pulling on the matrix to shape life the way we intend it to? Which means we must be very careful to know what we intend. Most of the time what is unconscious is the coal in the engine. The unconscious is always striving to become conscious. When we ignore her…Or are we just being dragged around by a bunch of damn planets all of the time? Anyway it’s all just fucking exasperating. Bunch of hockum.”
He comes over close to both of us. “The kids at the farm. They’re coming first for them?”
The kids are a brilliant group of young Scottish youth who have destroying fossil fuel infrastructure all over Europe. Really they’re the best of the various groups of youth who have been doing this all over the world for the last three years. All of them brilliant jewels. We made the farm in the highlands expressly for the purpose of protecting them, sheltering them, and giving them the contemplative space to strategize. (Imagine the conversations I had to convince my city-slicker wife who is scared of cows about this entire plan. Earth had ways of making the choice not only obvious, but urgently necessary)
The Realist looks closely at us this time (not through us). Tears are in his eyes.
“Either protect them there or get them out ASAP.”
We make the three hour journey back. Julia and I don’t speak much. We never really do. But we both know who we need to be in touch with to protect the kids.