From Urbex: The Art of Urban Exploration. Photography by Niki Feijen.

Over the past few months, we’ve been posting a lot of interesting articles, pictures and titbits that we’ve found while poking around online on our Facebook and Twitter pages, and we figured it was about time to start sharing some of the best bits on here, too. So, from now on we’ll be doing periodic roundups of things we think you all might find interesting. So, without further ado, here are some things that have caught our attention:

• It’s time for harmony between science and spirituality, an article from Positive News on reuniting reason and religion.
• Beyond money: living without the illusion of independence. Another Positive News piece, this one on the possibilities of gift economics and a moneyless society, from the author of the Moneyless Manifesto.
• On a more photographic note, Dark Pripyat shows us the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, 27 years on. It turns out that Nature is capable of reclaiming almost anything, no matter what disasters we inflict upon it. While the impact of what happened at Chernobyl is still felt amongst all its living things, it is at least a small reassurance.
• Also in the news this week, and peering into the dark waters of prehistory, the latest DNA analysis of our ancient ancestors has shed light on how hunter-gatherers all but disappeared on the arrival of agricultural settlers during the Palaeolithic.
• And, on looking into the dim and distant future, the BBC has also given us some interesting thoughts on possible human extinction, and why it may not come from the places you’d expect.

Finally, this week saw the coming and going of May Day (or Beltane, if you prefer) which traditionally marks the first day of summer. And, although this year has seen the area around North Wales swallowed by snows in the middle of March (and the hawthorn that usually signifies the passing of the seasons is not yet in flower), it is growing warmer every day.

In this part of the world, the first day of May is known as ‘Calan Haf’, and it comes with its own unique and interesting collection of folk practises and legends.

Of course, May Day also has a long tradition of protest and activism, like the Haymarket protests of 1886 in which a number of people were killed. The protests were a contributing factor in the establishment of the eight-hour work day.

For as long as human beings have been living by the progression of the seasons (which is pretty much forever), we have been writing songs, stories and poems about these transitional times between summer and winter and back again. One of the oldest of these (and one of the first that I can remember being taught in school as a kid) is the 13th century rota, ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’.

It seems a fitting point on which to end this week. Until next time!

Sumer is Icumen in,
Loudly sing, cuckoo!
Grows the seed and blows the mead,
And springs the wood anew;
Sing, cuckoo!
Ewe bleats harshly after lamb,
Cows after calves make moo;
Bullock stamps and deer champs,
Now shrilly sing, cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo
Wild bird are you;
Be never still, cuckoo!

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Dreampunk is the search to build a better world in the ruins of the old. To build a world of equality, liberty and community that reaches for wonder, invention, and a more balanced relationship with ourselves, one another, and with the wild world around us.

We are currently seeking submissions for a ‘Dreampunk!’ magazine for release in the late summer or early autumn 2013. The ‘zine will be a collection of fiction, how-tos, essays, artwork and poetry that aspires towards inspiration, sustainability and co-operation.

Some ideas for possible contributions include:

• Bushcrafts;
• Recycling, upcycling, re-use and repair;
• Recipes and sewing patterns;
• Fiction, especially speculative/genre fiction;
• Laments and battle cries;
• Maker culture and vernacular technology;
• Travelogues;
• Permaculture;
• Skipping (dumpster diving) and squatting;
• Mythology, alchemy, and the exploration of self;
• Psychogeography, urban exploration and sense of place;
• The sublime, the mountaintops and stars;
• Modern, practical herbalism;
• Short hints and tips;
• Ritual and shamanism.

We accept submissions from everybody, and judge each work on its own merits. However, we are particularly interested in hearing the voices of people of colour, women, those who are gay, queer, transgender and genderfluid, the elderly, poor or homeless, dominant and submissive, disabled, and people who are managing mental illness.

The deadline is 1st June, and we are looking primarily for submissions up to 5,000 words. We will likely not be able to pay our contributors, but will offer contributor copies where we can to those who help us make it happen.

Artwork should be pure black on white images due to printing restrictions. Woodcut images or engravings are ideal.

For further information, or to submit to the ‘zine, read the Drempunk Manifesto, or email vagrants[at]amongruins[dot]org.

Filed under: Call for Submissions, Vagrant Projects by Admin
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In a hefty tome that has gone through a head-spinning twenty reprints (as of 2011), Christopher Booker brings home one important message: To carry a story through to successful resolution is no easy task.

At heart, Booker’s magnum opus is an attempt to unearth the basic affective categories through which human beings parse the world for meaning. And he goes scavenging for them in the plots of the stories we tell. In the process, he ends up with seven cardinal structures that illustrate the dynamic interplay between the basic moral modes of apprehending the world. The orderly, rational properties that belong to the affective realm of the masculine and of the Father need to be complemented with the sense of relatedness and the attitude of selflessness that stems from the feminine and the Mother.

A Hero’s journey is precisely an allegory for the process of weaving together these two attitudes: separatedness and connectedness, order and chaos. The seven plots then stand out as a depiction of this basic process from a myriad different standpoints. I won’t go into all the different types of plot, but a few are worth mentioning. Overcoming the Monster stories, for example, depict precisely the process whereby, after an “old Kingdom” comes to be threatened by a lurking monster, a hero is required to restore order by undertaking a quest that has to be selfless and directed to benefit the community as a whole. On a deeper level, the Monster as a narrative device is just a projection of moral tendencies which can be seen at work inside the Hero himself. Often, in fact, the Overcoming that is required of him is ultimately a self-overcoming, of his own moral outlook that is, for some reason, not yet adequate to the task of restoring equilibrium.

When this process does not come to a complete resolution, then one is catapulted into the world of Tragedy. Tragedy shows what happens when the hero ultimately fails to weave together the dynamic qualities that are necessary for a successful resolution, a balance of centredness/self-discipline and empathy/selflessness of purpose. The heroes and heroines of Tragedy find their focus in a purpose that ultimately turns out to be one-sided and not appreciative of the needs of the wider set of relations of which they are a part. As such, tragic heroes turn into the Monsters of Overcoming the Monster stories. Their inflexibility overlooks fundamental aspects of the world around them, which are necessary to maintain a state of dynamic balance. As a consequence, a progressively larger front of opposition constellates against them, until they leave the stage vanquished.

What Booker’s book also shows is how the constitutive elements of affective experience which come under the Father (the wise king whose kingdom is threatened by a Monster), the Mother (from whom the hero parts, headed to free that other feminine element that is captive in the claws of the Monster) and the Hero are all – ultimately – double-sided figures. The Father can feature just as often as the inflexible ruler that prevents two lovers from marrying, as it occurs in the Comedy plot. The Mother, similarly, is both a source of nourishment as well as a character that can stunt the hero’s development by being overly protective. Last, but not least, the Hero’s quest is itself a teetering on the edge of that elusive balance of masculine and feminine traits, which – if unfulfilled – can have the hero star into yet another Tragedy.

Where this tussle between a light and a dark side is most evident, perhaps, is ultimately within Booker himself. “The Seven Basic Plots” was written over a period of thirty years, and – as such – it also ends up tracking the author’s own uneasy quest to harness the dynamism of the inner processes he has unearthed. So, on the one hand, he is cautious to remind readers that what stories really convey are metaphorical descriptions of inner processes of a fundamentally moral character. As such, it makes little sense to try and read archetypal processes into history. The risk, he says, is to be too quick in labelling something as invariably evil ‘without recognising that we may have the seeds of those same failings in ourselves’ (p. 584). And, yet, in the last part of the book he contradicts himself by engaging in a sort of mythologised retelling of history that makes him sound more like a nostalgic Tory than a mythologist: ‘In 1953, the ancient pageantry surrounding the Coronation of a new young Queen, attended by representatives from Britain’s Empire and Commonwealth, projected an extraordinary image of a worldwide ”family”, gathered together to pay homage to the archetypal symbols of its collective Self’ (p. 671). Contrast this to the attitude of that other famous mythologist, Joseph Campbell, who cautioned  against too readily applying the moral categories emerging from the tapestry of stories to the historical plane.

In a similar fashion, too swiftly does Booker project what are ultimately affective categories, the masculine and the feminine, into actual gender roles that people should fulfil. Instead, these are better understood as a shorthand for particular moral modes of relating to the world.  Indeed, after reading Booker’s book I am perhaps convinced of the opposite proposition, namely that it is precisely by withdrawing of our unconscious projections from others (so as to not try and force people in the simplistic straitjacket of ‘woman equals feminine’ and ‘man equals masculine’) and integrating them within ourselves that we can reach the balance which the Hero wins at the end of the quest.

That being said, the real value of “The Seven Basic Plots” lies in how you react to it. As although it does contain some politically shaky statements and failings, there is still much merit to be found for those interested in mythology, narrative and story-telling.

Filed under: Articles, Mythology, Writing by Luigi
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Dreampunk is the rediscovery of wonder and beauty in an age of collapse, conformity and decay. It seeks a modern Romanticism: embracing the ideals of love, liberty, equality and freedom, whilst utterly dismissing the systems of colonial and patriarchal wealth and the privilege. It shuns those who hide themselves away from the processes of life and death, and instead embraces the raw spirits of creation and destruction.

Dreampunks seek to find the extraordinary within themselves and their own locus in place and history. We are explorers of the wilderness and urban wastelands alike: psychogeographers who are deeply connected to wherever we happen to be standing, and whoever we are standing with. Dreampunks blur the line between the real and unreal: experimenting with ritual, the occult, and the transformative as ways of understanding our journeys through life. We work to reunite reason with emotion: rejecting those who dismiss overwhelming evidence in the face of personal bias, or those who refuse anything that is deeply felt and understood simply because it cannot be explained.

Our work strives towards the creative empowerment of the normal, and you may find us amongst midwives, makers, gardeners and blacksmiths—working together as true equals in a world that hoards power amongst the few. We make, reuse, repair and recycle what we have, because we understand the true destructive power of planned obsolescence upon our spirits and surroundings. Our hands are in the bare earth of our permaculture gardens, and we are out there in the wilderness: beneath a canvas sky with a firesteel and waterskin, seeking to leave only footprints in the mud behind.

Dreampunks build living, maker-driven, vernacular technologies which are powered by the wind and waves or the strength of our own bodies, and which do not require the destruction of the deep forests, the oceans, and the mountaintops to enable their existence. We reject the propaganda of Big Bio and Big Pharma, who tell us they can solve our problems with money, drugs and chemicals, who would try to copyright life itself, and who are caught up in what is little more than an arms race against Nature. There is much reason to rejoice in the unfettered curiosity of the human spirit, but there is also good reason to be wary of those who would use its achievements for profit. We consider it our responsibility to challenge anyone who disguises their greed behind the cloak of scientific advancement, and reject any efforts to label this willingness to question as opposition to science itself. Instead, we seek systems of participatory and collaborative science, medicine and agriculture—reclaiming use of the medicinal plants that corporations attempt to refine, re-package, and sell back to us, teaching others how to feed and heal themselves, and learning to live long and healthy lives exploring the wonders of this universe.

In the place of intellectual property and the outsourcing of cheap labour, dreampunks reclaim the methods of production as our own. We see this work for what it is: not as tiresome drudgery, but as tasks that are vital to our existence. We realise that even as we give up our ability to produce and repair, we surrender the control we have over our own lives. And so we work to inform and to share our skills, knowledge and stories with anyone who needs them.

When we tell these stories, we will aspire towards new myths and legends—finding fresh ways of exploring our relationships with one another and the land. This work will be achieved with whatever tools we feel are best, without mind for what society tells us does and does not have merit: employing genre as well as the literary in our storytelling, breaking down the barriers between the performer and the audience, and using the laundry as well as our poetry as an expression of ourselves.

We seize both freedom and responsibility in equal measure, and we will not suffer to be told who (or how many) we may take into our hearts and into our beds, what gender we should present to the world, how we should dress ourselves and fix our hair, or suffer any such restrictions on who we are or what we are capable of being.

Dreampunks do not believe that the world we build for ourselves is perfect, or that it will be magically free from pain, discrimination or oppression. We realise that we live in a time which is often filled with an unassailable darkness, and do not seek to immerse ourselves in utopia and ignore what is happening around us. We are flawed people living in a flawed world, but if we are to make things better than they are, then we shall have to get out there and find another way.

Even if the only place it can be found is in the blaze of the night sky above the crumbling walls and creeping ivy: in ruins where we creep so softly, with bare feet, afraid to break the silence.

We will live it. In the living, we will give it life.

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.:Picture by joshunter:.

A cliff’s turned collar sheds sunset gold.

Bare rock darkens to accept
what the deep sky lowers
through dense steam onto stone,

into river breath and this truck driver’s gaze.
Pulling freight between white lines and starlight,

wanting to roll right upriver, scrape the dust
of many roads into a slow, cool swirl near
Mt. Hood, then lay out naked beneath shimmer.

Breathing in and out, waiting for a crescent
to silver a clear path to needed change.

I see all women in the sway of river birch.

Resting on warm stone while bats
wing-brush ciphers, dusk rolling
dark blue thighs onto the burlaps of sky,

my transit across thin crust is a mural
hinged on trust and faith. I imagine

the moon touching a lace sari onto lovers
sleeping back-to-back and raise my arms,
spreading the ten roads of my fingers

inside cool river breath
and this light.

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So we find ourselves, our ways of telling unbalanced, trapped inside a runaway narrative, headed for the worst kind of encounter with reality. In such a moment, writers, artists, poets and storytellers of all kinds have a critical role to play. Creativity remains the most uncontrollable of human forces: without it, the project of civilisation is inconceivable, yet no part of life remains so untamed and undomesticated. Words and images can change minds, hearts, even the course of history. Their makers shape the stories people carry through their lives, unearth old ones and breathe them back to life, add new twists, point to unexpected endings. It is time to pick up the threads and make the stories new, as they must always be made new, starting from where we are.

Source: Uncivilisation – The Dark Mountain Manifesto

It was whilst reading this paragraph, that I had one of those moments when two things I had put into separate boxes suddenly click, and come back with a new, enticing twist. Aesthetic expression can take us to a time beyond the narration of history, and enable us to establish a connection with wells of archetypal wisdom, ripe with images of overcoming and renewal, from which new meaning can be breathed into efforts to co-create a more beautiful world. As such, reclaiming spaces to tell and sing new stories and experiment with creative dramatisation is both an act of political insubordination, as well as a tribute to the ability of art to craft the world anew from its ruins.

These thoughts reminded me of the (ongoing) experience of the Teatro Valle Occupato in Rome, a theatre that was occupied after it faced closure and privatisation upon the shutting down of the Italian public funding body for theatres, Ente Teatrale Italiano. Beyond mere physical occupation, however, the dwellers of the Teatro Valle have undertaken an intriguing experiment in self-managing its activities. Today, the Teatro Valle Occupato hosts a regular programme of eventsand workshops, and is – in my opinion – one of the most interesting experiments in the rebuilding of new commons underway. In so doing, they have effectively managed to fuse political and aesthetic struggle, creating a space where art meets Occupy.

If you find this intriguing, below is a link to a documentary on the Teatro Valle (in English), produced by the International University College of Turin (by my friends Saki Bailey and Tommaso Dotti).

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A report-back from our own Allegra Hawksmoor, who spent the weekend in Doncaster for an event of post-civilised proportions. With many thanks to Carolyn Dougherty for supplying the pictures!

This weekend just gone saw the coming and going of Imbolc—the first of the spring festivals in the pagan and druidic calendar. It marks the time of year when snowdrops begin to peek through the frozen ground, when candles are lit in pools of bright, cold water, when wells are dressed, and we renew ourselves for the coming of the year ahead. I don’t always mark the passing of these festivals formally, but I do always like to keep them in mind. To stay in touch with the viscous rhythm of the seasons, which Western society tries so hard to alienate itself from.

This year, as it happened, Imbolc fell on the same weekend as The Telling: an event of post-civilised misrule organised and put on by, amongst others, my friend Warren. And so Dylan and I packed up our bags, and set off for Doncaster to see what this weekend on the cusp of the turning year might bring.

Before I start, however… (more…)

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After many sleepless nights and early mornings–after all those editing, proofreading, image-making, layout-grinding hours–our very first publication, ‘Journeys in the Winterlands’, is finally here!

It contains three stories, by three different authors, all set in the same world. All fragments of the same myth. It is a world of ecological chaos, delirium and steam: where the earth has frozen over, the sky is filled with twilight, and where most of the people left have been driven out of their senses–spending their time constructing monsters that are part-engine, part-alive. It is the story of Callista, the Flowergirl of Crossbones, and her unending search to rescue her mentor, the elusive Web of the North. It is the story of the sky-crazed Affected who now make up the majority of the world’s population, and the elusive thoughts that chase around and around inside their heads for all eternity. Most of all, it is the story of the things we value when the world is frozen, life is hard, and hope is hard to come by.

It has been printed in a 53 page chapbook, on recycled paper, by the Footprint Workers Co-Operative, and is also available in a variety of digital formats. We would be delighted to know what you think of it, and hope you enjoy reading it as much as we’ve all enjoyed creating it.

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The Terrible Father is a mythological figure that represents any system of knowing that wilfully discards new information when it does not fit with its world view, and obliterates that knowledge from its gaze. He is a powerful reminder that chaos is not only found in the lack of order or ability to make sense of the world. It is also found in too much order, which leaves us unable to accept anything that doesn’t fit comfortably into our way of seeing things.

Terrible Fathers abound in fiction, both literary and cinematic. Darth Vader, the aspiring Jedi who loses his compassion on a quest for unbridled power, is a good example. Sauroman, the evil wizard that enforces a machine-like order in his kingdom that eats all surrounding life, is another terrible father.

This character however, like all characters, stands in for a much more encompassing process that is not just about one individual. It represents all those systems of knowledge that have become so rigid that they refuse to accept any deviance from the norm. It may be religious dogma used to justify hatred towards the “strange” other, or the paradigm of “scientific” knowledge that refuses to acknowledge anything which does not come packaged with the markers of “science”.

Most of all, the Terrible Father can be civilisation itself, the moment it becomes oblivious to the consequences of its reproduction:

Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation — which has set the terms for global civilisation — was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.

Source: Uncivilisation ~ The Dark Mountain Manifesto

Terrible Fathers are always laid to rest sooner or later, however, and the process always involves the dismantling of the old world view, and its reconstruction into one that can make sense of the previously discarded information. This process has many names. The one I’m most familiar with is “synthesis”, a term that comes from transpersonal psychology which denotes an ability to harmonise otherwise separate and ill-fitting realms of experience. You could also call it the Hero’s Journey: the process by which our way of seeing the world (and the way in which we structure it) are renewed after the fall of the Terrible Father, allowing a new time of peace to begin.

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.:Picture by Flickr’s How I See Life:.

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