Hello, friends,

I’m sitting in a tiny mint-green room in the cottage I’m lucky enough to call home, in Devon, in rural southwest England. I’m surrounded by books and poems and gifts from friends, notably various blades. When I turned forty a couple of years ago, no fewer than four friends gave me sharp silver implements of one kind or another, as tools for the second half of my life. Make of that what you will.

I spend a lot of time in this little room, not always writing (or sharpening my many blades). I’m also an editor—something I don’t talk about much. This past month, the manuscript I’ve been editing has been a rare pleasure: This Food Is a Gift: Practical Experiments in Neighborly, Non-Market Farming and Feeding, by , whom some of you might follow here on Substack. Adam has written a life-changing book about the gift. Specifically, about what he’s learned through years of running farms where nothing is sold; where all the food is given as a gift to anyone who is hungry for any reason. If you want to know more about Adam, the book he’s cooked up, or my work as an editor—this part of my work and life that I don’t talk about much—you might like to read the letter I wrote for his Substack recently, on retiring possessive pronouns. With enormous thanks to and for their parts in bringing me into this project, as well, of course, as to Adam himself.

One other housekeeping note:

• The best magic and medicine I know for moments of societal meaning collapse is poetry. Words are how we bring the world into being, and poetry is the purest form of word magic. So if you’d like to join a group of us who are memorising poetry and reading poetry as what it is—a psychedelic drug and a form of magic, both—you might like to join this Substack as a paying subscriber for £10 a month or £100/year. We meet to share poems (ideally from memory) on the first Wednesday evening of the month (if you’re reading this on the day of publication, that’s tonight! And you don’t need to prepare a thing in order to come), and to deep-read poetry on the third Sunday. More info here.

  Join the poetry wizards by becoming a paid subscriber.

Now, here’s some self-help (?) from the Ancient Greeks,

x Ellie

Art’s nice, right? A nice civilised thing to consume or maybe even make when we’ve paid our bills and finished the laundry.

But what if art was far more important than that? What if it was actually a metaphysical practice—the way our species has been bringing the world into being, manifesting its cosmovision, since our dawning days? Since way before religion or science existed? What if modern culture’s weirdo relegation of art to galleries and theatres is a key part of why our world is falling apart?

Because the creative imagination is the glue that holds the material world together, but we’ve convinced ourselves it’s just a luxury.

I laid out this idea last time I wrote to you. This time, let’s get practical. If we’re willing to entertain the idea that the world is a work of art, and we are each artists intimately involved in co-creating it, and living this way is how we hold the cosmos together… what do we actually do about that? How can we live into the opportunity to sculpt a world worth living in, all day every day?

Step one: Act

When I say “act”, you might conjure two meanings that feel quite distinct, even contradictory:

1. Take action; do something.

2. Play a part; pretend (perhaps for artistic purposes) to be someone or something you’re not.

Very different things, right? One means taking action in the real world. The other means making believe in an imaginary world.

Today, I’m going to suggest that these versions of acting have more in common than we tend to think. That in fact, their apparent difference springs from modernity’s mistake about what “the real world” is—this fallacy that it’s inert and objective, instead of a work of imagination that requires our artful and active participation.

Then I’m going to suggest how we can act, all day every day, in a way that feels more imaginative and empowering and alive—a way that remembers that all the world’s a stage, and we’re players in an unfolding imaginative story.

[Of course, because I’m me, I can’t do this without retracing millennia of cultural history. If you want to skip that, feel free to jump straight to the life hack at the end. I never thought I would type the words “life hack”, but there you go.]

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Backstory

To illustrate the deep connection between the two versions of acting I’ve laid out above, and how they began to separate, let’s go back to the origins of theatre. This diagram of the Western world’s first theatre, the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis, can tell us a lot:

This shows the theatre’s layout, including the earliest architecture and later additions made by successive civilisations right up to the Romans—almost a millennium of accreting theatrical architecture. The most instructive part for our purposes today is the circle that says “old orchestra”.

This isn’t the part where the orchestra used to play. That’s a much later adaptation of the word.

No, “orkhestra” just means “a circular space”, and this circular space is where a chorus used to dance. It’s labelled “old” because it’s way older than the stage. The dancing of a chorus originated in the mists of time, centuries before anything called theatre existed.

Before the Athenian city-state was so much as a twinkle in a statesman’s eye, groups of up to fifty men and boys would gather in the countryside every spring to sing and dance in circular formations in honour of Dionysus, a god of, among other things, death, rebirth, and the unruly fertility of the living world. This was a rural practice of a rural, agricultural people, dancing for a good harvest.

They needed a good crop, as a matter of life and death. And they knew that the weather and the living world were controlled by unseen forces, which they understood as gods. So what did they do? They didn’t throw up their hands and concede powerlessness. Nor did they go into micro-manage mode and try to buckle the land to their desires through extractive land-management practices. Instead, they took action by opening their imaginations—the glue that holds the material world together.

They stood in the danger and uncertainty of incarnate life, and they found a form of behaviour—collective song and dance—that expanded what seemed possible in that life. That brought in the felt sense of eternity, to cushion the terrors of time.

Before we look at how these old choruses morphed to give us the artform of theatre, there are a few things I want to notice about the way they danced:

1. The circle they danced in was flush to the ground. An old orkhestra was never raised on a stage, because though people would gather to watch, spectating wasn’t the point. The point was the doing, the participation.

2. The circular shape was important, too. At the centre of the circle, there was an altar—a kind of lightning rod for the god’s energy. So the most powerful and important part of the space was its middle—a point any gathered spectators couldn’t even see. And whatever happened there would ripple out cleanly into the rest of the world, which stood at the same level as the circle.

3. Rites like these were called “dromena”, which comes from the verb “draō”, meaning “to do, act, or perform”. That name higlights something very important: These weren’t just adornments of reality; they were forms of action. They were meant to have an effect. Whatever change occurred inside the circle was very much intended to ripple out beyond it, into the everyday world.

But the people’s relationship with the divine was soon to change. Proto-statesmen would soon start enacting something like democracy—a system of governance that seemed increasingly to bring decision-making out of divine hands and into human ones. And it’s against this backdrop of emergent democracy that the new artform of drama was born out of the dromena.

(Let’s pause a moment to note here that this word, “drama”, also emerges out of the verb “draō”. So in both of these versions of acting, we have this sense of doing something. Of taking action.)

How exactly did the dromena give way to drama? This is one of the big questions in classical scholarship. One story tells us that it happened when a man named Thespis stepped out of the chorus and began to address the audience in character, giving every future thespian their job title.

The truth is more complex and nuanced. It’s about urbanisation and power and those changing relationships with the divine that I mentioned. Books and books have been written about this, but the piece I want to focus on today is this: As the ritualised action of the dromena gave way to the high art of drama, one of the main changes was the sudden emphasis on an audience.

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Remember what I said about the flat structure of the orkhestra, and its most important point being its dead centre. Now check out this photo of the Theatre of Dionysus at the Acropolis (the same theatre you saw in diagram form above):

Check out those seats! And the way the circle has changed to a semicircle, so that its most important part is not the centre but the front edge, where the actors play for the spectators.

Suddenly, the most important part of all this isn’t contact with a god, but performance for humans.

In fairness, I should note that the stone seats were built later, by the Romans. The Greeks had a wooden version. But the audience seating was very important for the Greeks, too. In fact, the seats were such an important part of what was to unfold here—the artform that was to flourish here—that they gave it its name. “Theatre” means “a place for viewing”. The new artform of theatre would be defined by those seats, by the fact of having an audience.

Let’s consider what it might have been like to sit on those fancy seats at the fancy new theatre, watching a stage that at some point came to be raised off the ground, out of the level of ordinary life. You would have been crunched in with thousands of other viewers, listening to their breathing, smelling their bodies, unavoidably exposed to their incarnate reality. You would have been sitting passive in a smelly and bodily world, watching people act—be active—all the way down there, on the stage. The whole architecture heightened the perceived difference between audience and actors. It seemed to posit two separate worlds: that one down there on the stage, imaginary, fictional, determined by the actions of the players. (And increasingly home to the most remarkable creative work, by the likes of Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides.) This one out here in the audience real, factual, not imaginal or imaginary.

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Now, the Ancient Greeks were an astonishingly alive and alert people, intellectually and creatively. They seem to have been able to hold the tension of these posited multiple layers of reality, without getting lazy. They seem to have been able to watch drama and still remember, when they emerged from the theatre, that they too—just like the characters in drama—were living in a world infused with spirit; a world in which imagination was part of the fabric of reality. (I’m saying this because when they stepped out of the theatre and into the political architecture of the Acropolis, they maintained a remarkable amount of ritualised contact with the greater-than-human forces that they understood as gods.)

But it seems to me at least possible that the physical architecture the Greeks built in the form of the theatre began to pave the way for the very lazy attitude we have to the purported levels of reality today. This might have been the beginning of our belief that art takes place in a make-believe world that is supplementary to everyday reality. A luxury. A nice extra. Separate from the real world, which is inert and objective.

And this—this—is where the whole world starts to fall apart. When we tell ourselves that it’s only fictional worlds that are held together by the creative imagination. That everything else is inert and objective and factual.

Life hack, I guess?

I am very surprised to find myself writing the words “life hack,” and yet that’s what this feels like.

Inhabiting the world as what it is—a work of art, a constant unfolding of imagination—means closing the gap between these two versions of “acting”. It means giving up this pretence that there is any level of reality that isn’t shaped by our creative imaginations.

Here’s a very powerful way to do this:

Remember that in fact, there is always an audience.

Even choruses dancing in their flattened circles, focusing on participation, not performance—even they knew that they were being watched. Even they were using the internalised sense of the eyes of others to infuse their actions with power and meaning and beauty, enabling them to bring forth a world that was more meaningful and beautiful and imaginally alive.

It’s just that the eyes on them didn’t require any human architecture, because they were other-than-human.

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In the Ancient Greek (and pre-Ancient Greek) mind, this primary audience was understood to be the gods. That was the whole point of ritual dances like those of a chorus: to offer something to the watching gods.

And if the word “god” troubles you or leaves you cold, just imagine that your audience is something, anything, bigger than you, whose presence makes you want to live more fully and meaningfully. It might be the lives of the plants and animals who surround you and make your life possible, by silently giving up their own lives to feed and shelter you. (This thought very much informed by my recent work with .) It might be your ancestors—all those who fought to survive so that you can live today. It might be your living loved ones. It might be the generations that will follow you.

Whatever you choose, the invitation is to internalise a sense that what you do matters, the actions you take matter. Because something bigger than you is watching. Because in fact, you too are a player in an ever-unfolding work of imagination, and some of that imagination has been pinched off to live in your own psyche and soul.

In every minute of every day, there is the option not to simply rattle through rote behaviours. To feel into the actions that might most delight that invisible audience, who are rooting for us to pull a good show out of this drama we’re living through.

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This is an essay about making art—where “art” can mean a poem or a painting or, in fact, reality itself. And we all know that the first step in making art is to fill yourself with great art. So, hey! Do you want to come hang out with a bunch of us filling ourselves with great art twice a month? We’re on a break for April, but starting in May, paying subscribers to this Substack will be meeting on Zoom twice a month: once for a deep, slow poetry reading, lectio-divina style (we’re starting with Yeats’s “The Second Coming”), and once to share the poetry and art and stories that have been keeping us alive (from memory if possible, so that we’re filling ourselves with lasting beauty as we go). Two art-filling meetings a month—plus access to the chat, where we gather to discuss books and ideas between sessions—for £10/month or £100/year. More info here.

Also: if you’d rather listen to the essay below than read it, as ever, you’ll find an audio version at the top of the page.

Love,

xx Ellie

Take a look at these paintings.

They both depict the same event: the Last Supper. But they position the viewer in very different relationships to it.

When you look at the first picture, you float somewhere outside the scene, but you could equally weave in and out of it. Because there’s no linear perspective, your position is timeless, placeless, and depersonalised. Your point of view doesn’t matter—or rather, doesn’t exist. What matters is Jesus and the apostles, sharing a meal in an unending present moment.

When you look at the second picture, the masterful linear perspective positions you in a single spot: maybe thirty feet from the table, aligned with its dead centre. It tells you where you stand in both space and time, and makes your vantage point—your individual point of view—the organising principle of what’s seen. And by changing the way you see, it also changes the substance of what’s seen. Jesus and the apostles are more human now. Characters. Individual people living in time.

Why the difference? Because the two paintings—the two modes of painting—straddle a revolution in metaphysics. A seismic shift in the way European humans understood the world and their place in it.

And whenever a society’s metaphysics change, its art is already changing too. Humans are already finding new ways to paint and story and sculpt their emerging understanding of reality. And then a funny thing happens: Those paintings and stories and sculptures become the architecture of the new world. They set the parameters of what can be experienced and understood in it. Even now, in 2026, in the last gasps of modernity, I know that the structure and quality of my life are in some way determined by the linear perspective of da Vinci’s Last Supper.

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Here’s what I’m not saying: Art reflects metaphysics.

No. Art doesn’t reflect our changing beliefs about the world and our place in it. It creates the world we live into. It draws that world forth.

Art is not a mirror of metaphysics but the praxis of metaphysics. It’s the workshop of human cosmology, where the infinite is summoned and mixed with what’s earthside, in a shareable shape that shows people what kind of world they live in. It’s a practice that births the world.

Or at least, this is what art can be, and was for a very long time. Here’s the twist: In the story of our cultural amnesia about the power and purpose of art, the difference between the two paintings above is a crucial plot point. Because though this second Last Supper’s way of seeing brought us many wonderful things (not least the masterpiece that is this painting), as far as art and cosmology are concerned, it set us on a path to a dead end.

The good news is, we can find our way back from this dead end.

In the next few essays, I’m going to suggest some ways how, in the form of creative tools from the workshop of art-as-cosmology.

If you don’t consider yourself creative, these tools will be designed even and perhaps especially for you. Because that story you’re telling yourself, that you’re not creative, is just a lie that comes from our culture’s broken story about what art is. I know because I used to tell myself the same story, and it did me a whole lot of damage.

I also know because living is creating. Because the world itself is a work of art, and you have always been an artist.

If your experience is anything like mine, these tools might make life feel worth living again.

But before we get to them, we have to understand how we wound up down this dead end, so far from the workshop where our ancestors carved and sketched and storied and sang their worlds into being.

Only 170 years separate the two paintings above, and yet in those 170 years, a new age had been birthed. Ugolino di Nerio painted his Last Supper in the Late Middle Ages. Da Vinci’s version is, of course, a paradigmatic work of the High Renaissance. Whole libraries have been written about the shift from the medieval to the early modern or Renaissance sensibility, but here’s a quick-and-dirty list of some salient points:

• In the Middle Ages, European humans tended to think of themselves as part of a world created by and suffused with the presence of God.

• By the time da Vinci was painting, he and his peers still understood the world as God’s creation, but they tended not to feel they were part of that creation in quite the same way. They were beginning to occupy a special relationship to creation: set apart. Detached and observing—like the perspective in da Vinci’s painting.

• “Observing” being the operative word. When you stand apart from the world—distant—your best way of learning about it is with your eyes. This marked a change. In the Middle Ages, people tended to trust their felt senses to reveal truths about the real-but-invisible parts of the world that lay beyond the material (like the presence of God that suffused everything). But with dawning modernity and its new vantage point of distance, those felt senses and the intuitions that emerged in them became increasingly irrelevant or even suspect. You can’t feel something that’s a long way away. And so increasingly, only what was seen could be believed. Pics or it didn’t happen.

• From this detached, observing perspective—and with the help of the many classical texts that were being rediscovered and fueling these changes—humans could now deduce or generate insights and meaning that were not received from God, about life, the universe, and everything.

• And it wasn’t only that a human could generate or deduce insights from this detached, visual, intellectualising vantage point. They must. It was the duty of the conscientious human to develop their humanitas—the quality of our species that set us apart from the rest of creation.

• And so the human will and reason were increasingly understood as the driving force of life—and life was increasingly bounded to what could be seen and proven in material reality.

There’s a way in which the whole modern world is right there in the visual perspective of da Vinci’s Last Supper: the way it inhabits time, its leveling of the sacred, its detachment, its emphasis on the evidence of the eyes and the authority of the rational, individual human subject.

(And, by the way, this shift wasn’t only playing out in the visual arts. A similar thing was happening in literature, where a new individualist, humanist form was emerging—a form that was primarily concerned with the way a person creates their own fate. Of course, I’m talking about the novel. I’ve got a longer piece on this, linked just below, if you’re interested. But please don’t click away now! I’d love to hang out with you here a bit longer.)

So: At the dawn of modernity, Europeans began to make art that locked us into a more detached and human-centric stance, which increasingly denied the numinous.

Over time, this changed the cultural story about what art was. Art that sealed humans into an increasingly human world also sealed itself off from its metaphysical function. It no longer had to summon the infinite into a shareable shape. It only had to exist for its own sake—for human diversion or gratification. Once the workshop of cosmology, art now became an optional extra, an adornment or leisure activity, and cosmology became the preserve of the new discipline of science.

And just like that, humans lost our most powerful tool for making a world worth living in.

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If we step back and take a long view of art, we soon see how very strange these ideas of the last few centuries are. We soon see art’s older and deeper function as a praxis of metaphysics. We see this in the palaeolithic cave painters who made art as part of shamanic ritual—a way to contact otherworlds and bring their insights into this one. We see it in the fact that belief systems from Christianity to Hinduism to indigenous myth cycles are told in stories. We see it in the way even Plato (no lover of art) reached for story to express his most enduring metaphysical insight, the allegory of the cave. And in countless other examples besides. (And to be clear: there were always individual artists and even whole movements working in this vein, this understanding of art as the praxis of metaphysics. It’s the broader cultural attitude towards art as mere adornment that worries me.)

In fact, the cosmological and metaphysical understanding of art is right there in the word “art”. Did you know that this word shares a root with “arthritis”? That in some way deeply embedded in the English language, art is associated with inflammation of the joints?

Both words derive from the Proto-Indo-European root form –ar, which means “to fit together”. So: an artisan is a person who skilfully fits objects together. A body with arthritis is troubled at the joints, the parts that should fit together. And art—as Lewis Hyde shows so brilliantly in Trickster Makes This World—makes the world by fitting the realms together. Through the stories of Greek messenger Hermes, the Yoruba trickster Eshu, Fon cosmology, and much more, Hyde illustrates that the primary job of such artus-workers is to “create the possibility of movement between spheres” via clever work at the places where the realms join.

Or, should join. Because sometimes, the spheres get too separate—and then gods and humans alike are in trouble. The mortal realm plunges into eternal winter; the gods go hungry because humans have stopped making sacrifices. In these moments, the survival of people, gods, and the universe all depend on the artus-workers—the artists and tricksters—who can articulate a new world by joining the realms.

Friends, we’re in one of those moments now. The separation of the realms has become too complete. I don’t need to tell you that we on Earth are in a long winter of the soul.

And if all this language of the gods and otherworlds leaves you cold, just replace it with the language of science. With quantum dimensions and the scientifically detected nature of reality. Because the paradigmatic questions of our day—about what consciousness is; whether the universe is fundamentally material or made of something else (and if so, what); the nature of time; how particles can be entangled and mirror each other across gulfs that are light-years wide; and what exactly is going on in all those other quantum dimensions—these are all evidence of the relegated, real-but-invisible parts of our world making themselves known, not just in many of our felt senses (i.e., the senses made suspect at the dawn of modernity) but in our scientific observations too. In so many ways, these questions of our day mark a reversal, or at least a great tempering, of the humanist ideals that came into play in the Renaissance, when da Vinci was positioning us all thirty feet out from the Last Supper, to take a good, stable look at a good, stable world scaled for humans.

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So what now?

Now, we must be artus workers, joining the realms. We must make our home again in art as the workshop of cosmology, and use our devoted attention and our craft and our imaginations to birth creative worlds that are worth living in.

Which probably sounds intimidating. But that sense of intimidation belongs to the last few centuries of unhelpful thinking about art. It’s the bullying, perfectionist voice of cultures where art is an adornment instead of a way of life. Where it has become a place to prove your prowess and earn prestige, rather than a human’s basic way of being.

So how do we recover art as a way of being? How do we become, once more, the artists who make the world, which is itself a work of art?

In the next few essays in this series, I’m going to share some tools for living art in this way. For starters, we’ll look at:

1. Acting

2. Playing with form

3. Putting a frame on it

And more will be revealed.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

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I’ve got an uncharacteristically practical post for you today. Below, you’ll find a how-to (and why-to) guide to a memory-and-imagination practice I’ve been working with, which is so easy and joyful and helpful and imagination-firing that I can’t believe I haven’t been doing it my whole life. It’s adapted from the work of science and memory writer Lynne Kelly (especially The Memory Code) and medieval scholar Mary Carruthers, from the wisdom of non-literate and medieval monastic cultures, and from my training with oral storytellers and poets. And it’s been enormously nourished by the pinch-me wonderful subscribers to this Substack, with whom I’ve been meeting for the past six months to investigate whether memory might be a magical power that can remake the material world. Do you know, I think it might just be. I hope you’ll try this practice and let me know whether you agree.

Also, hey! Do you want to meet with me and those pinch-me wonderful, imaginative and curious and kind and wise subscribers twice a month? If so, now is a good time to become a paying subscriber to this Substack, as we’ve just finished our six-month investigation of memory. From now on, we’ll be meeting on Zoom twice a month, starting in May (Wednesday 6th and Sunday 17th):

• First Wednesday of each month, 6.30–8pm UK time: We’ll all share the poems and stories and songs that have been lighting us up, with a hearty encouragement to share from memory when possible, so that we’re filling ourselves with lasting beauty as we go.

• Third Sunday of each month, 6–8pm UK time: we’ll deep-read poetry, lectio-divina style and very sloooowly, to allow the gods in the poem to wobble on through. No prior expertise in poetry required, nor any requirement to read between sessions; just show up ready to be awe-struck by words. We’re going to start (on Sunday 17th May) with Yeats’s “The Second Coming”—even if you know it well, mark my words, this one will wobble something wild into the room when we sit with it together.

Both these sessions for a £10/month membership fee, or £100/year.

And in case you’re mulling it over, here’s what a few memory club members said about the last six months as subscribers:

“Getting involved in the Word Swallowers Memory Club is one of the best things I’ve done. Exploring memory not as information retrieval, but as a faculty or form of imagination, and essential to creativity—as drinking from the pool of Mnemosyne—has been tremendously inspiring.”—Kenny

“The memory club was a rich and endlessly stimulating mix of ideas about mythology, self and society, and the combination of cognitive and episodic aspects of remembering. But perhaps more importantly it was held by a small group of people bent on a gentle way of changing the world through personal practice.”—David

I’ll be back next time with an essay on how to inhabit the world as what it is: a constantly unfolding work of art.

Until then,

xx Ellie

How and why to plant a memory garden

The problem

• Humans have been outsourcing our memories for millennia, to technologies beginning with the written word and going right up to AI. This outsourcing has accelerated and escalated wildly since the dawn of the internet age.

• Along the way, we’ve convinced ourselves that outsourcing memory is harmless, because memory is really just a sort of hard drive; an inert store of facts. That what really matters is creative and critical thinking. That’s what makes a person smart.

• Recent pedagogical practice in the modern West (and many societies we’ve colonised, whether militarily or culturally) reflects these assumptions. Schooling is now typically geared to test students on how they think, rather than what they know.

• But all this is built on a fundamental misconception about what thinking is. As neuroscientists are now finding (h/t to Ruth Gaskovski for the link), your ability to think creatively and critically is massively impaired if you don’t hold enough in memory (ideally deep, subconscious levels of memory), because you’re having to juggle too much in your conscious cognition, leaving too little free space for free-roaming thought and creative breakthroughs.

• Our severance from memory has also brought a violent severance from land. In non-literate cultures, land is the primary organising structure of information. When you can’t write things down, but you have to remember a lot of life-saving information about how to live in a place, you stow that information in stories and poems and songs that live in the land. Then, when you want to retrieve it, you walk that land, either in the flesh or in imagination. Over time, these practices gain an indescribably rich resonance of personal and cultural memory and, yes, love. Because this stitching of story and knowledge to land is also a stitching of the heart to land. I contend that we moderns would never have been able to destroy land in the way we have if we still had land-based memory practices; if we still used memory as a thread to stitch our hearts into the land we love. It simply wouldn’t have been possible. If you try the memory practice below, I’d love to know whether you end up agreeing.

• To state a final facet of the problem of widespread forgetting: an idea that seems to be gaining ground in our culture is that the way we think, and the kind of attention we pay, determine the nature and dimensions of the world we move through. This isn’t a new insight—you’ll find it running in some form or other through much of the history of serious thought, from Buddhism to the Stoics to the existentialists to today’s McGilchristians, and more. But it seems to be gaining ground in the mainstream today. If we accept this premise, then we must be concerned with what we remember when we show up for that attending—with which truths and beliefs and ideas about the world we’ve turned into muscle memory. Neuroscientific studies confirm that it matters: that our perceptions are shaped by schemas, or collections, of past experience and knowledge, which are constantly predicting what we might encounter—and so determining which qualities we draw out from the world and call reality. What we remember, both consciously and subconsciously, dictates what we can perceive, which shapes the world we live in.

• Luckily, there’s something we can do about all these problems. We can start stitching our hearts and imaginations back to the land, reclaim our ability to think critically and creatively, and prime ourselves to encounter a more ensouled and alive world, by reviving land-based memory practices.

A solution: Plant a memory garden

Step one: Select your personal canon

Which books, stories, poems, ideas, songs, and other great works have made you who you are? Spend some time assembling a list. It doesn’t need to be—can’t be—exhaustive. It will grow and change for the rest of your life. That’s as it should be.

If you’re anything like me, this in itself will be a rich provocation. How many of you have come up frustratingly blank in response to the question, “What’s your favourite book?” We so often hold things so lightly, so carelessly, in our culture. This is an invitation to honour the work that lives in your bones and wants you to feel it there.

Step two: Select your memory walk

You’re going to “plant” these ideas on a walk you know well and can visit often. I happen to live on a hill in a somewhat rural area, so I’m planting my garden along the road and dirt track that wind up that hill and down the other side, from my front door.

Some pointers:

• Length: My route is about a mile long, though I’m finding that land is extremely capacious for memory, and you could stow a lot of stories and ideas in even a half-mile’s walk. (And remember that with most walks, it’s possible to extend the route if you need to.)

• No need for this to be a rural route. All you need is a place with some distinguishing features. Buildings will do just fine. Though since you’ll be making associations between your canon and the landscape, and since your canon is likely varied, some variation in the landscape will help. By which I just mean, a couple of plants or trees as well as buildings will serve you well.

• Go with wherever you walk most regularly. Maybe the route to your local shop or bus stop or train station.

A question that often comes up when I share this practice is, “What if I move to a new area and I can’t walk that route anymore?” At the risk of sounding dramatic, this question really comes down to: “Why love in the face of death?” Because make no mistake, what you’re doing here is an act of love. And all acts of love stand in defiance of impermanence, because the love weighs heavier. So do it anyway. It’s worth it. And it will live inside you and inside the land, no matter the distance between you.

Step three: Plant your canon on your memory route

Set out on your route, with your personal canon in mind. As you walk, look out for associations that suggest themselves between the land and your texts. For instance:

• A text in my canon is William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. On my memory walk, I pass through a green tunnel created by trees growing on either side. The space inside this tunnel has always felt very charged to me, to the point that on a few occasions I’ve felt frightened or unwelcome in it, and turned back. This experience of finding myself in a very charged space created by two polarities (i.e., the trees growing on either side) is very similar to my experience of reading The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. So that is where I’ve planted that book.

• Associations can be much sillier than this. Further along the walk, there’s a shelf fungus growing from a tree. It juts out in a straight ledge, seeming to hover many feet in the air. Seeing this, the word “hover” came into my mind, and I planted the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem “The Windhover” in the fungus. (The fungus will come and go with the seasons, and eventually maybe even kill the tree. I’m excited to see whether I still associate this poem with that location, or whether I’ll need to find a new place to plant it. Which is to say: a memory garden, like any garden, will change and be a living relationship.)

Don’t try to plant everything at once. Things will stick in your memory more firmly and richly if you take it slowly and allow each association to take root, before moving on to the next.

Step four: Plant with intentio

This is where we’re going to smoosh some medieval monastic practice into this land-based memory art inspired by non-literate cultures. Because this smooshing will supercharge the creative potential of this exercise.

When medieval monks meditated, Mary Carruthers tells us in her fascinating book The Craft of Thought, they were engaged in an effort to have creative thoughts about God, to “make” thoughts about God. This all-day-every-day kind of meditation was intended to help them live in a felt, personal encounter with the divine. So how did they “make” those creative thoughts? It began with rote memorisation of Scripture. But atop that memorised Scripture, they also stocked their memories with personal associations, images, feeling tones, and multisensory impressions that the Scripture stirred. In other words, the memorised texts were a foundation for other material that was much more personal and imaginally alive. And it was by meditating upon this other material—these images and feeling tones and impressions—and allowing them to recombine in new ways that they arrived at their creative thoughts about God.

Here’s an example of how to apply this in practice:

• When I planted The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I didn’t just deposit Blake’s name and the name of the book in the tree tunnel. I also associated that tree tunnel with the feeling the book stirs in me, of a charged pressure between two poles. I recalled and re-experienced this feeling, and consciously associated it with that place. Then I also recalled and consciously associated an image that once came to me while reading the book, in which the surface identities of Earth’s energies dissolved to reveal their true forms as squirming blue worms. Long story. The point is, as well as the book itself, I stitched into the land my personal associations and images and full-sensory responses. And I didn’t just think about those things, I felt them in that place.

Walking the route now—walking through the personal images and full-sensory impressions I associate with multiple works that are meaningful to me—I find myself walking through a personal history of deep, felt responses. I find those deep, felt responses stirring in me again. And I find that this meditative process blasts my imagination wide open. If I walk this route when I’m stuck on a writing project, and allow those images and energies to move through me, something always shifts.

Step five: Add detail

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about land-based memory practice is the way it un-silos our ways of knowing. Lynne Kelly writes about this beautifully in The Memory Code. While it’s true that my memory walk is becoming very emotional, imaginative, and even spiritually resonant, it’s also a highly practical way of storing detailed rational information. If I want to remember quotes from a book in my canon, or the year of its composition, I simply find small aspects of the relevant memory location to which I can attach this factual information. It’s basically an infinitely capacious cheat sheet that doesn’t use written language.

This is helpful in and of itself. It also reminds us that the separation of our ways of knowing into cognition, imagination, sensory imprints, and so on is artificial and modern. All these ways of knowing live together, as a whole way to know ourselves and the world.

Step six: Keep walking the route

In oral cultures, people would return to stories stowed in the land in ceremonial cycles, and this rhythm of return would ensure that the knowledge was not lost—that, in fact, it was always being enriched with new experiences, new layers of living and memory.

It will be important to do the same with your memory garden, because like any garden, it needs tending. This doesn’t mean you have to establish an elaborate ritual calendar. Just decide on a regular rhythm for returning to your memory route. Maybe it’s your daily morning walk, or a stroll every Saturday afternoon. When you set out for one of these walks, take a moment at the start to set the mood and your intention to be present to all the recollections that come.

Finally, a disclaimer: This is very much a personal adaptation of a technique that can be practised many other ways. Where I’ve used these techniques to store a personal canon, they’re typically used to store a community’s wisdom. I’m conscious that for all my carping about the toxic individuality of our creative culture, what I’ve outlined here is a highly individualist approach. I’m considering some workshop programming to create more communal memory routes. Watch this space.

It’s also worth noting that Lynne Kelly’s method is much more structured, planting information in chronological order, in sets of ten memory items per division of the given route. Nobody has ever accused me of having a logical mind, so that version didn’t come naturally to me—though I might still try it. If you want something more logical/methodical, check out The Memory Code. The beautiful thing is, you can try any number of ways, since you can have as many memory routes as there are physical walking routes in the world.

Planting knowledge in land is one of the very oldest human practices. You can do this. It’s in you. It’s your birthright.

Let me know how it goes,

xx Ellie

Some quick housekeeping before we get cosmic:

• I’m speaking at the Kairos Club in London on Thursday 12th March, and I would love to see your face there. We’re going to have a lot of fun. I’ll be talking about why to memorise stories and poetry (hint: it’s world-making magic) and we’ll learn how. You’ll even leave with a poem sown into your bones. And though it’s very fun, all this is also surprisingly consequential: I’m going to argue that the modern fallacy that memory is nothing but a mechanical function that can harmlessly be outsourced to tech is a big part of why IQs are dropping and creativity can feel so tortured and these tech twats are managing to become our overlords. Tickets here.

  

• If you’re a passionate nerd interested in imagination and language and the glimmering weirdnesses of human knowing, you might like to come hang out with more such people on Zoom twice a month. Truly, I can’t quite believe the loveliness of the little community that’s springing up around this Substack. Paying subscribers meet twice a month, and when we reach the end of our memory club just after the spring equinox (our last meeting is March 22nd), we’ll be shifting to a more open format: one session a month of deep-reading poetry (no reading required between sessions), and one session a month of sharing poetry and stories and other gems we’ve loved, with a hearty invitation to share from memory if possible. Something wild and shiny very often wobbles in from the otherworld during these Zoom sessions. Do join us if that sounds up your street. We’d love to have you.

  Come hang out by becoming a paying subscriber.

  And now for an essay. As ever, if you’d rather listen to it than read it, there’s an audio version at the top of the post.

I spend a lot of time sitting in damp church basements, eating crap biscuits and swapping tales of recovery from addiction. One of the great joys of my life is seeing people come in to these meetings sick and tired and at their wits’ end, and slowly, over the course of weeks and months and years, get well.

Today, I want to talk about what that process of getting well looks like, because I think it has implications and applications far beyond addiction. In fact, I think it mirrors the mode shift that this moment is calling for: a radical reawakening of art as a way of being.

So: the thing about the end stages of addiction is the sense of powerlessness. When people (including me) first enter recovery, they tend to feel as though life has them pinned to the floor so it can pummel them in the face, leaving them (us) with only one possible response: to escape, over and over again, into the numbing of their (our) substance or behaviour of choice. There seems to be simply no space between the onslaught of life and the response of picking up a drink or finding some other way to evacuate your own consciousness. No choice to do anything else. (Of course, when you’re in the grip of addiction, you can’t or won’t see that it’s the escaping, the numbing—i.e., your own behaviour—that’s keeping you on the floor.)

When someone starts to unpin themselves from a floor-pummelling like this, it starts with a tiny little space. A hair’s breadth, no more. For an addict, this is the space between the urge to pick up and the act of doing so. It takes time, but after a while, the gap widens. You find other things to do when the urge spikes—other tools and ways to cope. You might call someone who cares about you, or pray. At this point, you’re no longer an automaton; no longer at the whim of some malignant and overpowering force. You’re beginning to have agency.

The hair’s breadth of space you’ve opened keeps widening every time you exercise this agency. Until, if you work at it, there comes a day when the gap is wide enough for you to slip your whole body in, and dance. And that’s the point when you learn that the world and its possibilities are in fact as wide as your own mind.

This is a story of addiction recovery, but it’s also there, or at least available, in every story of becoming. In some crucial way, life begins the moment you find that hair’s breadth of space between the world (especially when it’s an onslaught, a floor-pummelling) and your response to it. Or to use the famous words of someone much wiser than me: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I know I’m eliding a lot here. I know that both inside and outside of recovery rooms, the forces pinning people to the ground are very different and unevenly distributed, and therefore that what it means and takes to find that hair’s breadth of space varies wildly. But for all this inequality, I vehemently believe that the hair’s breadth of space is or should be available to everyone, and that where societal forces make it feel unavailable, it is the social body’s job to fucking well do something about that.

With that said, in this essay, I want to talk about this last of the human freedoms, this hair’s breadth of space between the world and our response to it. The only place in the world where something truly new can open up. Because this space is not only—as Viktor Frankl told us—the source of the freedom to choose your own attitude. It is also the birthplace of art. It is where culture comes from. Which means it’s a portal, forever open to a lightning strike from the infinite.

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What actually is art? This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and it’s been made all the more difficult by a few centuries of bizarro thinking in modern, post-Enlightenment cultures.

Since the late eighteenth century, and owing to developments primarily in Enlightenment England and Germany, art has been understood in cultures like the one I (and perhaps you) live in as both a product and, relatedly, a domain that is somehow separate from the rest of life. In other words, art is stuff, objects and material, that lives in galleries and theatres and books. It is separate and different from the rest of life, and because it is a product, a thing, naturally people must pay to consume it, which means it is a job, a profession, which means that only certain people are equipped to do it. Special people. Creative people. Geniuses and those with the means to pursue the necessary training and survive the years it can take to start making a living.

When you zoom out historically and geographically, you see that this really is a remarkably strange way to think about art, and it has brought all kinds of problems, beginning with the fact that it doesn’t make any sense. If art is a certain kind of product or item, it should be possible to define that product or item. But what makes an art object art? Is it its beauty? But what’s that? How do you define beauty? And what, then, about all the art that is deliberately ugly or discordant or challenging?

There are many such questions, and none of them are new. Philosophers of art wrestled with them for so long, and concluded so little, that ultimately they sort of gave up trying to define art. As far as I can tell, it’s not very fashionable anymore to even think about it.

Cool; I guess I’m going to be unfashionable then. Because I want to suggest that in this moment of brutal collective and societal floor-pummelling, it is, in fact, a matter of mortal and mythic importance that we settle on some far better ideas about what art is and does and who gets to do it. Cos we gotta get up off the floor. We have to find the gap, the hair’s breadth of space between the onslaught of the world and our responses to it, and crack it open wide enough to dance. And that means yanking our idea of art out of the galleries and back into daily life, where it belongs.

So if art isn’t a product, what might it be?

Let’s go back around 3,000 years, to the dead of a hot, dry September night just outside of Athens. We have walked fourteen miles in procession to a temple. We have fasted for three days, purified ourselves by bathing in the sea, and drunk psychedelic barley wine. Now, in this wide, forever night, we are ready to enter the temple’s ritual hall, where three things will happen: the bone-old story of Persephone and Demeter will be acted out and brought to vivid life, we will be shown sacred items, and a secret will be shared with us. By the time we leave the sacred hall, we will have been changed forever.

We have just been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, rites held annually in Greece-before-it-was-Greece for more than a millennium. It’s hard to overstate how important these rites were. How foundational they were to the growth and flourishing of Greek culture. Aside from being a cradle of the civilisation’s spiritual practice, it’s often argued that they were the seed point of drama itself, which in turn made the democratic experiment possible. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Nobody really knows what happened in that temple—it was always kept top secret (and I suspect it couldn’t have been communicated in words anyway). But we do know this: things were done.

That probably sounds facile, but it holds a whole world of meaning. To unpack that meaning, we must first understand the world these devotees were living in. The Eleusinian Mysteries started in the Bronze Age, the early days of agriculture. A time of great change in the human relationship to the living world. A time of much more concentrated risk. Sure, life hadn’t been easy for hunter-gather tribes. There would have been lean times and lots of starvation. But with agriculture, and its community-wide dependence on ultimately uncontrollable things like the weather going one very particular way, a new spectre of civilisational wipeout entered the scene.

The Eleusinian Mysteries were a response to this vulnerability. The myth at the heart of them—the story of Demeter and Persephone—is the story container for the passage of the seasons, and therefore for the fertility of the earth. By reenacting this myth—by bringing their creative faculties to the reenactment—those devotees were standing in their vulnerability to the onslaught of life, the possible floor-pummelling, and claiming that hair’s breadth of space where the whole world can open up. They were doing things.

Here’s the legendary classicist Jane Ellen Harrison expanding on this facile-sounding phrase in her 1913 book Ancient Art and Ritual (which, full disclosure, I haven’t read; I’m quoting this from Ellen Dissanayake’s Homo Aestheticus, on which more in a moment):

The Greek word for a rite is dromenon, “a thing done.” … To perform a rite, you must do something—that is, you must not only feel something but express it in action… you must not only receive an impulse, you must react to it.

Now, let’s compare some of the received ideas we swim in in the present day. These days, we’re often told that in the face of danger or difficulty, we have a set menu of possible responses, which reads something like this: fight, flight, freeze, fawn, flop, befriend. But when she talks about dromena (the plural of dromenon), Harrison is presenting another option altogether. Doing things. And not just any things, but things designed to make a difference. These rites weren’t designed to control the weather, per se. They did something more nuanced and beautiful than that. In the words of anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake—whose ideas I’m riffing on heavily in this whole piece—these dromena, these things done, were calibrated “to convert reality from one state to another more special one”.

A “more special” state of reality. Like “doing things”, it’s such a simple phrase, but it holds so much. In the case of rites like the Eleusinian Mysteries, Dissanayake tells us in her book Homo Aestheticus that the nature of the “things done” in the face of life’s difficulties include scenarios where:

A person’s being or consciousness may […] be transformed through ceremonial rites of passage, so that he or she moves from a prior natural or neutral state through a “liminal” phase outside ordinary life and then back to social reintegration in the new (and now “normal”) state.

In other words, a transformation has taken place, which makes everyday life better: more liveable, more full of possibility. Dissanayake suggests that this is the core of art: the human ability to not just sit passively in events as they unfold, but instead “make special”, which doesn’t mean getting out the fancy cutlery. It means first understanding that there are multiple dimensions of reality and experience, and that a human has the agency to choose whether to contact nonordinary and expansive states. And it means then using whatever tools and skills you have to stitch those nonordinary states into the everyday; to create experiences and works that embroider this sense of the infinite into earthly life.

In this understanding of art, it is not a fetishised object made by a tortured genius to sit in a gallery and sell for as much money as it can fetch. No, it is a behaviour. A verb. A way of being that inhabits and celebrates the truth that a human always has the option to make special; that this world and its possibilities are in fact as wide as your own mind.

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Reading this essay, you might think I’m saying that art is simply ritual; that they are interchangeable. They’re not, and in a future essay, I plan to unpack some differences between art and ritual in a way that yields some practical ideas about how to orient to art as verb, art as way of life. But it’s worth noting that for most of human history, art and ritual have been intimately entwined. In Homo Aestheticus, Dissanayake talks at length about art, ritual, and play as behaviours that share this capacity to make special; to open expanded possibilities. In brief, what makes art art, as opposed to ritual or play, is the way it works with form, taking care with the specific ways an idea or energy is expressed, via language, visual adornment or embellishment, combinations of sound, and so on.

Today, these formal aspects of craft are often fetishised to the point that they seem like the end in themselves. The art is for the art’s sake. If there’s anything to appreciate, it’s the artist’s mastery of technique. And, well, of course this is how we see it. In a world that’s lost almost all of its rituals, its practices of devotion and passage to expanded realms, form loses its primary devotional and threshold-crossing function and becomes simply cosmetic. Art becomes simply cosmetic.

But even this word that’s so often used pejoratively today—cosmetic—is trying to tell us what we’ve lost. Because “cosmetic” shares a root with “cosmos”. Careful work with a poem or painting or play to make it as cosmetically powerful as possible, as potent in form as it can be, is not shallow or superficial. It is a way to unite the realms; to give that lightning bolt from the infinite its most effective earthside expression. It is the very thing that holds the cosmos together.

In those damp church basements I like to sit in, the most joyful moments for me are when people who’ve been coming back and doing the work for months or years start talking about new hobbies; new projects they’re working on; how they’ve remembered that they used to love singing or painting or dancing, and they’ve started again. It sounds like a small thing, but nothing in the world could be bigger. Because it means they’ve found that hair’s breadth of space and opened it up, and from there, they are weaving a whole new cosmos.

Before I start, a quick note about some upcoming fun. I’m going to be talking at London’s Kairos club again in the spring, on Thursday 12th March. It will be a night themed on memory: memory as the basis of creativity, memory as connection to land, memory as a way to bring otherness into our bodies and embrace a less individualist creative culture. My goal is for you to leave this night fired up to start memorising stories and poems—and with some tools to help, and a little poem already sown in your bones. Tickets here.

As this year draws to a close, I am sending out a call—a prayer—for the new one. I am praying that we radically reorient all of life, from our everyday routines to what happens in our centres of power, around art and the creative act.

I am calling for poetry to be read at the start of every session of parliament. I am calling for our failing institutions to bring storytellers into their board meetings. I am praying for a day when people in conflict are given the resources and support to act out Ancient Greek tragedies together. I am praying for us all to remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality, and we don’t have to spend a single second or penny more resigning ourselves to the bullshit baubles thrust at us as the pinnacle of choice under consumerist capitalism, when in truth they’re nothing but a knife to imagination, to the energy and courage to create.

Our unused creativity is a poison, and it is killing us. A human is an inherently, definitively creative being, and when we don’t use this creativity, it curdles inside us and turns destructive. It comes out in attacks against ourselves or others, as aggression, perfectionism, anxiety, depression, over-control, or sheer life-sucking boredom. I know, because I’ve spent too much of my own life being poisoned by it.

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About a year and a half ago, I wrote an essay on here that reached a lot of people. It was a sweaty, breathless sort of essay, which suggested that for the past 500 years, the mainstream West has been labouring under a restrictive, straitened consciousness contract—an implicit agreement that only experiences in rational waking consciousness are valid, and things experienced in dreams, imagination, meditative states, intuition, journeys facilitated by plant medicine, and so on, have no value. At best, says the modern paradigm, those experiences are irrelevant. At worst, they’re dangerously delusional.

That essay argued that what many of us—probably most of us in this particular corner of Substack—are experiencing right now is a resurgence of all those subjugated and relegated shades of consciousness and the expanded realities they open.

I still believe this. But I’ve always been embarrassed by the end of that essay. It ends in a very feeble place, essentially saying: to expand the consciousness contract—to safely reintegrate the dangerously relegated parts of reality—make sure you read books as well as embracing being a weirdo. Make sure you’re rigorous with your weirdness.

Which, yes. Do those things. But it’s not enough. It’s not a good enough answer.

Here’s the dilemma I was grappling with—which we’re probably all grappling with: we know it’s a lie that there is nothing beyond the material world. We know that the mystical and expansive experiences we’ve read about or had ourselves are in some deep way true—truer than parking tickets and emails and ready meals. But the core wisdom of modernity—the whole drive behind the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution’s insistence on empirical evidence—is that once you open that door to the beyond, dangerous things can and do happen. If there’s no way to prove what’s true, it can seem that truth is up for grabs, which means that power is up for grabs. Which means mounting tyranny, social media awash with dangerous nonsense, and everyone from dictatorial bigots to yoga-smoothie individualists capitalising on the instability.

I know I’m stating the obvious here. I think sometimes the obvious wants to be stated.

So that’s the lay of the land. The question, of course, is: what now?

And the answer is: now, art.

Art is how we reintegrate our deep weirdness with our intellectual rigour.

Art is how we safely expand and rebalance the consciousness contract.

Art is how we honour the ineffable and unquantifiable dimensions of reality—bring them into the fleshy realm—without sliding into relativism or superstition or the dangerous predations of conspirituality.

Because this is what art does. I would argue it’s what it has always been. It’s why it exists.

The very first art we know of seems to offer visions of expanded worlds, reached through expanded consciousness. When our oldest ancestors went into the caves to paint, they weren’t just sloshing shapes and colours around to see what looked nice. Acoustic studies show that they were highly attuned to resonance—that they were very often working with sound and echo that would have altered their states, bringing them into bodily intimations of more-than-material reality. My strong suspicion is that, in fact, the divide we feel between material and more-than-material reality had yet to be drawn; that all things were felt to be porous and suffused with soul, and perhaps never more so than in one of those art-making cave ceremonies.

And what do you do when your consciousness is wide enough that powerful new marriages of form and formlessness are ever presenting themselves inside you?

You express them.

You create something that reflects this encounter, and which in many ways is truer than the rock it sits on, because it attempts to convey what’s beyond the rock, too—and because it offers this vision of truth in the spirit not of fact but of art, meaning a spirit that holds itself as very real, and yet not single or stable but rather hoping to inspire more unfolding.

To most humans through time, I suspect it would have seemed idiotic to even have to state that when you make a painting or a poem or a play, you are doing so to express intimations of things both within and beyond material reality, in a way that though creative is profoundly true. The Western literary tradition is the one I know best, and it’s shot through with this knowledge. The Odyssey begins, “Sing in me, Muse.” The old Celtic stories tell of Otherworlds, alternate realms where the happenings in this one are often sourced. The first woman to publish a book in English, Julian of Norwich, wrote it to express her mystical experiences. Hildegard of Bingen, the medieval polymath who wrote ten books, invented languages, and revolutionised musical composition, talked about being nothing but a trumpet, who needed the breath of God blown through her in order to produce a sound. The most famous poet in the English language, Shakespeare, lived at the border between the seen and unseen, and spent his life giving voice to the relationship between them. Time and again, his plays—I’m thinking especially of The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream—tell us that art is the mediating link between the realms, and thus in some way more real, because more inclusive, than material reality itself.

And all this is to say nothing of the Romantics, or of course of William Blake, who made his bed in the imaginal more than anyone else in the Western canon. The recent spate of books about Blake suggests we might finally be catching up to what he was always telling us:

This world is wider than you dare dream, and waiting to show itself to us.

If you pay attention, it will reveal itself in mysterious and miraculous ways. In your subtle senses. In the edges and felt spaces of your knowing.

Trust it. Allow yourself to believe it.

But don’t stop there.

Apply yourself to expressing it, whether in words or movement or song or paint.

Because that effort to express the inexpressible, to create something that illuminates your encounter with the world, can be your ticket to a life of joyful rigour and humility and an alert, alive devotional form of attention.

You will fail, because every attempt fails.

The point is not to succeed.

It is to change gears. To remember that we are not consumers but co-creators of reality.

That the world itself is a marriage of form and formlessness, the seen and unseen, and that this marriage is presenting itself to each of us in ways that are asking to be expressed; woven into the world to feed the continued unfolding.

Because, no matter what the modern paradigm would have us believe, reality was never merely material. Was never just a bunch of stuff, sitting solid as rock, revealing its full factual truth in the view through a microscope.

The world has always been a work of art, and you have always been an artist.

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I’m memorising the first canto of Dante’s Inferno. Yes, I’m a nerd. But also, this is my pledge for the memory club that’s come together through this Substack—a club that’s investigating whether memory can be a form of resistance. (By the way, if your instinct is to click away from anything about memory because you fear that yours is crap, please don’t! I am far from a memory athlete. In fact, I’m in long-term recovery from alcoholism, and I did my brain and my memory some real damage, back in the day. And I’m finding that even I can nurture my capacity to remember, to quite an astonishing degree. All to say: if you struggle with memory, you’re not alone (in fact I think atrophied memory might come hand-in-hand with modernity), and it is trainable, and training it might be surprisingly important. OK, enough brackets.)

The premise of the memory club is that bringing stories and poems to live inside our bodies might be an act of resistance. Originally, I thought of this as a resistance against AI—against the invitation to outsource our very thinking to the large-language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence, which are essentially externalised memory banks. By internalising the things we wanted to know deeply, I hoped we might bring at least some of this meaning-making back into human hearts and heads.

But as I memorise—as I bring the Inferno into my body—I’m beginning to believe the scope of the resistance might be bigger than I’d thought. I’m beginning to think that the loss of human memory that has come with creeping modernity—the way we’ve outsourced our remembering to technologies beginning with the written word and coming right up to AI—has constituted an inner desertification that has helped us to wreak the desertification, the stripping of wildlife, in the outer world.

Back in the mid 2010s, there was a lot of talk about the environmental concept of shifting baseline syndrome. As far as I remember, it was George Monbiot who really championed the idea, helping us to see that each generation experiences the world it’s born into as normal, as the baseline—and in a world that has been rapidly losing wildlife and healthy ecosystems, this means that generation on generation, we are normalising staggering losses. “We’ve lost almost everything, and yet we regard that as normal and natural,” Monbiot said in an interview in 2017. And this doesn’t stop with environmental degradation. “I’ve used it in the political sense,” Monbiot says in that same interview, “to say: Why do people accept tyranny and despotism and the erosion of democracy? It’s because you normalise whatever surrounds you.”

I’m only at the start of my memory practice, but it’s already becoming clear to me that we also normalise whatever is inside us—meaning, the norms we receive about what a human is and needs to know, and even the metaphors and imagery we use to comprehend and describe our inner lives.

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We are a storytelling species. Once upon a time, every human would have carried inside themselves a polyphony of stories and poetry. They would have brought plurality of voice and view into their flesh. Today, we’re exposed to more writing, more art, more viewpoints than humans living at any other time, but it’s all external. We don’t take the trouble to bring it into our flesh anymore, even though the dimensions of our inner landscapes have never been more ample than in this therapised age. (And I don’t mean to be totally dismissive; I’ve had years of therapy. It’s been tremendously helpful. But in my experience, there are some problems baked into the form. And a certain tendency towards solipsism might be one of them.)

In short, we’ve internally monocropped ourselves, and—though this is an intuitive leap—my gut is telling me that that has made it far easier to monocrop the outer world. The singleness of view and voice becomes singleness of purpose and deed in our outer dealings. And in a living world that’s relational and ecological in structure and form, this kind of solipsism is always, ultimately, death.

If that all sounds a little vague, let me get more specific. We’re not just a storytelling species but a nomadic one. It’s in our evolutionary makeup to learn landscapes, and to stitch our knowing to them. This aspect of humanity finds its most famous expression in the songlines of indigenous Australian cultures—routes through the land that stitch the material realm to the Dreaming, and hold a wealth of mythological, geographical, and cultural storying. But there’s some version of this in every oral storytelling culture, which is to say at the root (however forgotten) of all of humanity. In our earliest days, humans made meaning by moving through the land, receiving its stories, and embroidering the insights of eternity onto the mountains and rivers and forests, in the form of stories and poems. These stories and poems were passed on, and their truth lived in the encounter between landscapes and humans.

And this evolutionary heritage is still inside you now. In our memory club, we’ve been studying the classics of memory literature—the great works written over the past half century or so, which have investigated and begun to resurrect this art so long lost to the modern mind. You’ve probably heard of some of the central insights of these memory classics. The most famous among them is the memory palace: the practice of memorising something by turning it into images, which you then imaginally stow around a place you remember very well, like your childhood home. To remember the passage, you imaginally walk around the palace, retrieving the images. This practice rests on the insight of the Ancient Greek poet Simonides, who realised (through a pretty wild event that I won’t go into now) that the human mind is primed to remember images and physical locations better than anything else.

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Why? Because this is what a human is: a nomadic, storytelling being. A creature evolved to move through the land, listening for stories, then telling those stories back to the places they were heard from, generation after generation. We are walking story maps.

Which means that internal and external geography have always been critically linked. I don’t have songlines for my current home of southwest England, nor for the region I grew up in, the southeast of England (though in the southwest in particular, the folk revival is restoring some of the polyphony of land). But I do know that when I memorise the opening of Dante’s Inferno, I am enriching my inner world with a forest—the dark forest the poet awakens in to find himself lost. And I know that when I take that imaginal, remembered forest—a forest co-created between me and Dante and rich with its own presence—into the real forest near my home, my experience, my encounter, is deeper and wider and fuller.

An inner landscape that’s barren of voices and places means a much shallower encounter with the outer land. And when the land appears to us in this impoverished form, it’s much easier to destroy it in service of our own will.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the Ancient Greek word for truth, aletheia. The “lethe” in the middle is the River Lethe that runs through the underworld—the river of oblivion or forgetfulness. And the prefix “a” means “not” (as in “asexual”). So for the Ancient Greeks, truth wasn’t a series of facts. It was a moment of remembering. Of emerging from oblivion and remembering the fullness of the world, with the fullness of yourself. It was always an encounter.

So how do we encounter a full world, in its fullness? A lot of it comes down to attention and awareness in the moment. To not spending our lives zoned out. But when we do manage to be present, what we bring to the moment matters too. We’ve all had that experience of meeting a person and feeling that we’re simply missing each other—that we have no frame of reference, no perceptive apparatus, for who and what this other person is in the world, and so no way to really meet them.

By externalising our memory of stories and poems to books and tech, and desertifying our memories and imaginations, we are doing the same thing in our encounters with the living world.

And that is why I believe reviving the ancient memory arts is an act of resistance.

xx Ellie

PS. This wasn’t a plug for the memory club! It’s just what I’ve been thinking about. But if it’s inspired you to join, you can still do so by signing up to this Substack as a paying subscriber. And you can read more about the club here.

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Did you know that for thousands of years, people believed that imagination—meaning the capacity to create both art and a life worth living—grew out of memory? That the soil of what you could create was all the great works you had memorised, internalised?

If you’re anything like me, that is a frightening thought, because memory is a thing you long since outsourced to notepads, printed books, Google, and other technologies.

I probably don’t need to articulate that the urgency of all this spikes when you add AI—the ne plus ultra of memory outsourcing—to the mix.

If you want to join the memory club and do something about all this, you’ll have access to a book club, talks from experts, and an opportunity to pledge to memorise a piece of literature of your choosing. There will be practical tips for improving your memory, as well as philosophising.

Open for £8/month to all paid subscribers to this Substack. More details on my post Reviving the ancient memory arts as an act of resistance.

A few years ago, when I’d been lost in the underworld for so long I thought I’d never get out, I experienced something I can only describe as a miracle. I found myself on the grounds of a medieval hall, learning about imagination and poetry and story and, well, how to be alive, from great minds and souls. Somehow, this magical state of affairs went on for the best part of a year. It was a master’s degree, but more than that, it was a rebirth, for me and—I can say with confidence—many other people in the room.

Among the great minds and souls who taught me that year were the poet Alice Oswald, and the scholar of Shakespeare, Blake, and much more Valentin Gerlier—and I’m thrilled that I get to publish some of their thoughts here today.

In so many ways, my studies with Alice and Valentin turned me into the person who writes these essays to you about imagination and the ways humans have related to it through the ages. So I am even more thrilled to share that it’s now possible to study with Alice and Valentin again, on a course very much like the one I took back then.

Though the college where I studied has disappeared, in a heartbreaking and enraging way I wrote about here and won’t revisit now, Poetics of Imagination is back, at a revived Schumacher College, after years of work from my teachers and many others. Honestly, just typing the words “Poetics of Imagination is back” almost made me cry.

If you want to take a version of this course, you can apply to do so now. There are bursaries available—click through to that link for details.

Towards the end of this chat, Alice and Valentin mention the wider community they’re hoping to foster around these teachings; the culture they’re hoping to grow. In a funny way, if you follow this Substack, you’re already part of that growing community, because what I’m at least trying to do here is keep passing on the living stories and ideas they transmitted to me. But anyway. I’ll let them explain what I’m talking about, below. For now, thanks for reading.

Oh—and, an apt thing to note considering that Poetics of Imagination is a course in (among other things) the oral arts: we started this exchange via email before realising we’d all rather just have a chat. That’s why you might notice a tone shift after Alice’s first answer.

OK. I really am going to shut up now and let you read the interview.

Love,

Ellie x

Ellie:

Shall we start at the most obvious place? What does the phrase “poetics of imagination” mean to you?

Alice:

Poetics are the laws or systems which govern the imagination. Already that is a paradox, since imagination is more often characterised by its freedoms. But in suggesting that imagination has laws or at least principles we are mostly just implying that it is a real and structured place which can be visited. Many of the texts where we visit the imagination come from a time which had no word for imagination. They also had a different conception of poetry. For that reason, the name of our course is really no more than a magic cloth which must be whipped away at the right moment…

Valentin:

Well, I can’t beat that response. I might just add that what is now called the imagination, but which over time has had many other names, as you point out, Alice, is also a kind of human birthright—or perhaps better expressed as something like the waters of our birth, a primordial source, or pool, in which we all participate and of which we’re all partners. And if you trace back the history of literature, or of language even, you come to some very, very ancient language forms, which are usually in the form of story or poetry. To me, that speaks about the primordial source of language and also of culture. So in exploring the poetics of imagination, we’re exploring, as Alice says, the rules or the waters of that primordial place from which we all spring and from which we all take our meanings.

Alice:

I really love that. And one of the reasons I like it is that it feels so easy for people to regard the imagination as a luxury or a merely aesthetic add-on, and something that doesn’t need to be funded or looked after or carefully passed from one generation to the next. And it’s so good to be reminded that that’s almost like saying we can do without a skeleton. We’ve evolved through the imagination, with the imagination, because of it. And that’s why it’s worth studying.

Ellie:

I love that. So imagination is a birthright—as essential as a skeleton. Can it also be nurtured or cultivated? And if so, how?

Alice:

I think it’s very clear that it can be not nurtured. And that one can see the effects on people of attempting to block off the imagination. And therefore it’s also pretty definite, as far as I’m concerned, that you can become more aware of it, put faith in it, and make sure that you take time to encounter it in all its various forms.

And as with all the best things, among which I include plants, it’s one of those things that… there’s just more and more of it. The more you find, the more there is. That’s what I think is worth finding: that source of proliferation.

Valentin:

Yes, exactly. I was going to turn the question around and say it can be nurtured, but that it’s also the place of nurture, and that it nurtures us. And actually, the challenge is to return to this place of nurture, which is already here. There’s a plentifulness, I think, that can be reached in that exploration. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, that the imagination is understood as this aesthetic, optional extra. It seems to me that human culture is in a very dangerous place when it assumes that, or when it assumes that all the imagining has already been done, that we’ve already come up with all of the kinds of knowledge that are always going to be in place—and the lifestyles and the narratives of human lives that are always going to be dependent on these kinds of knowledge—and that anything other than that is just escapism. I think that’s a weird situation that happens in human culture, when one particular form of imagination starts to dominate, to the point at which you don’t notice that it was once imagined, and is now called realism or fact or what have you. And I think that’s where we are. We’re in this funny situation in which we’re almost being asked to not notice the blatant. The blatancy of the imagination!

There’s a quote from that old film, The Usual Suspects. There’s this line, “The greatest trick that the devil ever pulled on the world is convincing the world he doesn’t exist.” And it’s a bit like this. It’s saying that actually, the roots of where we are today, for good or for ill, are in the imagination that gave rise to the dominant forms of knowledge and understanding of the day. And our culture has convinced us that that imaginary realm doesn’t exist.

I think this course is bypassing that order and returning to what really does need to be looked at.

Ellie:

I love that. Maybe this would be a good time for me to speak a little about my own experience of the course. For me, the thing that was so life-changing, truly life-changing, about Poetics, was that… the best way I can say it, and I might still not manage, is that I had always been seeking—without necessarily knowing that I was seeking—to put myself at that place that’s not a place—the place or state or experience where receiving becomes active. The only way I can describe it is as a place beyond known categories, that you reach by simply trying very hard to receive, to attend, until you find yourself at this place where the receiving becomes active and somehow starts to speak of its own accord.

And that’s an experience I’d been chasing forever, in some way or other. But what I found in the course was that you two were able, in your own, often quite different but very powerful ways, to lead me to that place that I can only describe as the place where receiving somehow becomes active, where listening starts to speak. And then when I was there, to begin to learn how to work with—apply some craft to—what I found there.

I feel I’m not being very articulate, but I suppose I wonder if there’s anything you can say about that place or state or experience, your insights about it, or how to work with it once you’re there.

Alice:

I love everything you said. And primarily I think that what you imply in the way you talk about active receiving or active listening is that there is actually something there to receive or to listen. So that sense of the already there—it’s like turning your head around and seeing that there is something there. You don’t need logic to discover that there is something there, but once you get that and attend to it, you can hear it more and more precisely.

In practical terms, when you talk about craft, the main thing I always say is the importance of a daily habit of, once you’ve made that switch, making sure you attend to it every day. And that does its own growing. My main muse has always been inadvertence. I think that one has to do it almost out of the corner of the eye. Just acknowledge that the imagination exists and make sure you pay attention every day, and then the rest will happen of its own accord.

That’s my tip.

Valentin:

I liked what you were saying about active listening, which challenges this idea that we’re either active or passive. It suggests there’s this middle voice, where you are both listening and making. That you’re a partner in a reality that also exceeds you, you’re a participant in something that is also beyond you. So there’s this way of being active and passive all at once.

When I’m involved in the crafts of the imagination, I notice that’s when I’m at my best, there’s this sort of middle place. You’re not just surrendering to utter contemplation, but neither are you furiously trying to enact your vision onto a sort of blank canvas or inert reality. There’s a weird partnership that occurs, as Alice says, between what’s already there and how you’re responding.

Ellie:

Yes, and thank you for reminding me of that phrase “middle voice”, which took me back to the feeling of some of the discussions we had on the course, where it really felt—to me, anyway—as though something was coming alive in the room, in the conversation between us, in a way that I had never experienced before. And so in a way, the teaching itself enacted the middle voice.

Alice:

Yes, and I think that point must have been in the middle air, already between us. I was going to say that for me, because I’m very interested in theatre and also in a definition of poetry where it is a much more communal activity and a participatory one, I’ve always hoped to try to animate the space between everybody in the room in a lecture. And there is something unforgettable about that moment when everybody’s imagining the same thing, or when a poem or a play actually comes into the space between us and we’re all participating in it in the same way.

I think that kind of tasting the communal mind is a wonderful thing. You don’t forget it once you’ve tasted it.

Valentin:

It’s funny, Alice and I were speaking about this the other day: that something that we’d like to do more is keep that communality going, keep that community going. The experience you have had is something that, of course, one carries in one’s heart, but we’re hoping to develop an ongoing community or a place where people can return to and share where they’re at, so that the communal listening continues. We hope that it won’t just be this one experience that you take away and then go on in your life. We’re hoping there will be a wider community, so that there’s a sense of—for want of a much better word—apprenticeship, or a kind of a guild. Something where the skill gets nourished and grown because of our continuing interplay with each other.

Alice:

We’ve even spoken ambitiously, or at least I have, of the idea of actually growing a culture, haven’t we? The idea that you begin to sow the seed of ideas of a new way of thinking, a new way of seeing, and you trust that it will continue to spread as people come back. Come back to the course and come back to each other.

Ellie:

My experience is that that’s happening already. That there’s something living that’s unfolding among those of us who’ve taken the course and been in its orbit. It’s a wonderful thing.

To change direction a little—because of my own research at the moment, I’m really interested in this idea you mention, Alice, of many works of imagination having come from cultures that didn’t really have a concept of imagination. What is there to learn about imagination from studying and engaging really deeply with the poetry and stories and other forms of art of very old cultures, which maybe wouldn’t even have thought they were practising imagination?

Valentin:

I’ll answer by way of an anecdote if I may, a very short one. There was this article in the newspaper a few years ago about Fiji islanders who, because of the rising tides, had to remove their seaside villages to somewhere further upland. And they were being helped to do that. But for them, one of the key problems was the bones of the ancestors. Where they were, by the sea, was also where the bones were. And they couldn’t work out this problem. If we leave this land, what do we do about our ancestors, who somehow also live here?

Perhaps this strikes some of us as really odd, because we’re so used to thinking of the past as something chronologically past and therefore no longer of use. Our instinctive reaction to the past is to turn our back and face in a different direction, a “forward motion”. Whereas these more ancient cultures had this sense that the bones were not just the past but also the future, that the relationship with the ancestors is actually something that nourishes life as it goes on.

We’ve trained ourselves so very well for the last 400 years to turn our backs on the past and move in this “forward motion”. But there’s something about going back to the resources of the past with fresh eyes and open hearts. I think it can nourish us in quite unexpected ways, both in making the present very weird, because you’re learning to inhabit other peoples’ visions and therefore you cast a different eye to the way daily life operates. And also in this very real sense that—like earlier when we were talking about the middle voice—when we speak, even in our daily speech, we speak with the ancestors’ voices as well. Language is… I’m seeing a long cathedral corridor full of sounds and voices. That’s the best way to describe it. And when we speak, we speak with these ancestral beings and these ancestral voices and stories and little bits of phrase and semi-forgotten similes. We speak with these “bones”. And to reinhabit that is to re-enliven the present in very surprising ways.

Alice:

I love that idea, that we are already speaking in the past. We almost don’t need to unearth those things. And yet also for me, quite a preoccupation is the extent to which we think we know, for example, who Homer is, or what the Iliad was. But when we go back to that extraordinary poem and try to hear what it really is, it’s so astonishingly different from the rather British Empire thing we’ve turned it into. And it’s a huge gift that it’s a living presence; a poem that just changes you when you really encounter it.

So I think the really amazing, nourishing ancient poems are living presences, and not to encounter them is a bit like saying I don’t want to meet a particular God, or I don’t want to learn from a particular person. They’re alive. And I think that those oral or originally oral poems are even more alive than literary poems, because they were made of a constant updating. So they have in them a sort of freshness that is to do with how they were composed.

Valentin:

And just to add that encountering these works doesn’t require any expertise in literature or poetry or what have you. It just necessitates interest, enthusiasm and an open heart. As I said before, it’s all of our birthrights. So consequently, everyone is welcome. It’s a convivial kind of learning that exceeds whatever happens in the session and exceeds whatever Alice or I might deliver. It includes the entirety of our time together. That seems to be such a crucial part of it—that it’s so good just being together.

Alice:

And maybe one would include in that conviviality the various landscapes where we run these courses, and remember what happens when we start to tell stories outdoors, and how we’ve been surprised by the landscape joining in and helping. So I’d say, the landscape is part of the conviviality.

It’s the thirteenth century. The dead of night; a cool black stillness. Stone walls; star-frosted sky beyond. We’re sleeping outside the chamber of Thomas Aquinas, the priest and prominent scholar of his age. I imagine our bed is lumpy and smells of sweat and hay and horse-hair, though I can’t say for sure. No matter. Because now, into the night, comes a mumbling. It stirs us from sleep. As we surface from the depths to waking, we tune in to the cadence of what seems to be a conversation, though we can’t make out the words. We lie frozen, unbreathing. Who is speaking? There is only one man in the next room, and though we are his scribe and companion, not his bodyguard, his safety—the safety of his incomparable mind—weighs on us. Has someone slipped past us while we slept? Is the great man in danger? But even as we dither over what to do, Thomas calls out to us: “Reginald, my son, get up and bring a light and the commentary on Isaiah; I want you to write for me.”

We light a candle on the embers of the fire—smell of hot wax, flash of first light—and go to him. He is alone. Before we can ask any questions, he begins to dictate “so clearly that it was as if [he] were reading aloud from a book under his eyes”.

Later, when he’s finished dictating, we ask him whom he’d been speaking to before he called out to us, and he tells us that the apostles Peter and Paul had appeared to him. That the conversation that unfolded between them had shown him the way forward in the manuscript he’d been stuck on.

So what really happened in that room? This question brings us face-to-face with another, this one surprisingly huge and rich and important: What is memory? And from here, more questions still: How does memory relate to imagination? What are the implications of all this in an age in which we’re outsourcing our memories to ChatGPT, or Google, or even just the written word itself?

And then for the fun part: What can we do about it?

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***

Thomas Aquinas lived from around 1225 until 1274 and wrote some 8 million words. For reference, that’s the same as writing Middlemarch twenty-five times over. There’s been all sorts of theological point-scoring about his legacy over the years, but I don’t want to focus on that here. What I’m interested in is the precise nature of his brilliance, as assessed by his contemporaries. These assessments are interesting because they reveal some pre-modern ideas about intelligence and originality that are very different to our own, and so, by contrast, shine a rare and fascinating light on this thing we call modernity.

In her fantastic book The Book of Memory (from which I drew the seed of the vignette above), the scholar of medieval thought Mary Carruthers shows that accounts of Thomas’s brilliance focused, to a degree that’s surprising to the modern mind, on his memory. It’s said that if he read something once, he remembered it forever, and that having committed a work to memory, he could recite it backwards or forwards, from any point in the text. This great facility with memory was known to allow him to dictate (his customary mode of composition) to up to four scribes at once, on four different topics, skipping between trains of thought with ease.

Carruthers compares this medieval genius with a modern one, Einstein. Or rather, she compares what each of their contemporaries said about the nature of their genius. Where Thomas was praised for his memory, applause for Einstein is shot through with awe for his imagination and intuition. Where Thomas’s method of composition entailed a deep inner consultation with scripture and the other great works he had memorized, Einstein is invariably described as venturing outward into uncharted territories of ideas, boldly pressing on through the darkness, fuelled by his ferocious and very individual intuition.

Here’s what’s most surprising to the modern mind: though it was known to derive from memory rather than what we might call creative intuition, Thomas’s work was hailed for its originality. He wasn’t just regurgitating old work; he was swallowing it, making it part of his flesh, so that it took root inside him and came to new life.

Take the example of the midnight visit from Peter and Paul. What was really going on there? Was he just hallucinating? Had he eaten too much cheese before bed? Carruthers—a serious scholar, mind you—suggests that no: Peter and Paul really did appear to Thomas, in a manner of speaking. Because Thomas knew his scripture, knew his Peter and Paul so intimately, she says, that their voices and their beings may well have animated in his imagination—or rather, in his memory.

Memory. Imagination. I’m increasingly convinced that you can’t have one without the other—or perhaps I should say, convinced that they might not be separate things at all. Because even Einstein on his wild flights of creative imagination was passing every novel thought through (if not sourcing it in—but that’s another conversation) a mind, a soul, and a body shaped on every level, from the cellular to the neural to the intellectual to the linguistic, by his experience and prior knowledge.

There’s so much more I want to say here, about how we got from there to here in our understanding of genius and originality; about the rise of the cult of the individual in creative work; about the fascinating ways in which memory practices require and enhance imagination; about the different varieties of memory, and more. But they’ll come in future essays (see below for an idea of what I’ve got planned). Because right now, I want to talk about what all these ideas about memory might tell us about our present moment, and then suggest a route of resistance.

As we’ve seen, the medieval memory functioned by bringing great thinking and great compositions not just into a person’s mind, but somehow into their whole being, in a deep and permanent way. Medieval thinkers made themselves the soil for whole root systems of earlier thought, which in turn enriched their inner soil, so that these venerable roots of earlier works could send up fresh shoots of life.

I’m not saying that this was a perfect model of creation. The medieval insistence on tradition certainly kept society stuck in some ways I wouldn’t want to go back to. But increasingly, these ideas seem to me like a critical counterbalance to the conceptions of thought, imagination, and originality that have given rise to AI.

Let’s consider what a large language model (LLM) is. I’m no technologist, but my understanding is that ChatGPT and the like—the kind of AI that’s powered by LLMs—function by feeding as much existing text into the system’s memory as possible, then recombining it in new ways.

In other words, it mechanizes the process that the medieval world recognized as the very source of genius and originality. In our world—living as we do under the Einstein model of genius—we don’t conceive of recall as part of genius or imagination. It’s all about individual creative intuition; about striking out for uncharted territory. This means that even those of us who wouldn’t dream of having AI actually write our work or generate our ideas might think it’s fine to outsource our research to it. To have it do the heavy lifting of reading and processing the sources we want to draw from.

But I can hardly imagine the horror Thomas Aquinas and his contemporaries would have felt on learning of an LLM. Because for them, memory was not just (!) the source of all original thought, but also the ground of morality and ethics. A person’s bearing, behaviour, and being, just as much as their creative thought, were animated by the texts and thinking they had swallowed and made flesh. The richer your memory of great works, the greater your character.

I also want to bring all these ideas squarely into the remit of this Substack. I often talk, here, about imagination as a capacity to access and source ideas from an expanded realm of reality itself, and thus expand the possibilities of our material world. That might seem to be a very outward-facing conception of imagination and original thinking. But as the hermetics would tell us, as above so below. The imaginal possibilities we’re able to pick up depend on the kind of landscape we’ve nurtured within.

In short, if imagination really is steeped in memory—and I don’t see how it could be anything else—then the very dimensions of the future are determined by what we’ve taken the trouble to internalize and make flesh.

What a terror, then, to have developed technologies that allow us never to remember anything at all.

All of which delivers me to an invitation. I plan to spend the coming winter nourishing the deep soil of my memory, and I would like to invite you to join me.

Introducing The Word Swallowers’ Winter Memory Club

This winter, between the autumn equinox and the spring equinox (around 21st September to 21st March), I invite you to join me in nourishing the deep soil of your memory, with a dive into the memory arts.

[Please note: this offer is for paying subscribers (see below for rates), but if you can’t afford it and you want to participate, just send me an email and I’ll comp your subscription, no questions asked.]

Here’s what we’ll do:

• You’ll be invited to set a pledge: an oath to memorize a passage of literature of your choosing, before the spring equinox. (This isn’t compulsory, but I think it will be very FUN.)

• Around the spring equinox, we’ll have an in-person event in London, and an online event for those who can’t make it. The shape of these events will be determined by numbers. But bottom line: this will be an opportunity for you to prove completion of your pledge and memorization of your chosen passage, as well as hang out with fellow word swallowers and imaginauts.

• The goal of the pledge isn’t simply to learn one passage by heart. It’s to learn to practise the memory arts, for the enrichment of all our future learning and imagining. Whether you pledge or not, we will learn how (and why) to nourish our memories, together. (I’m very much a co-learner here.) We’ll do that through:

• Monthly book club: discussing the classics of memory literature (a genre that contains some absolute belters). If this sounds daunting, don’t let it be: wherever possible, I’ll suggest crucial chapters. (Sunday evenings GMT, on Zoom, not recorded, to allow intimate conversation and confident participation.)

• Monthly talk from/discussion with an expert in an aspect of memory. This might include practical tips from a memory athlete, philosophers on the meaning of memory, and more. (A weekday evening GMT, on Zoom; will be recorded and sent to all members.)

• I’ll open the chat on this Substack for members, so you can discuss progress and tips/tricks on your pledges.

All of the above will be available to paying members of this Substack. Membership is £8/month, or £80/year. (To my current paying subscribers: if you didn’t catch it, I sent you an email about all this yesterday.)

This season is an experiment—I’m making this up as I go along, really—but the goal is to keep offering similar cycles on different themes, after this six-month journey is up.

If you want to join but can’t afford membership, please just email me and I’ll comp you, no questions asked.

Meanwhile, I have more essays in the pipeline about imagination and memory, and these will be available to all readers, for free.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you’ll know that I’ve been struggling to find a way to keep showing up here consistently. I miss talking to you all, but I can’t write the kind of essay I want to on a publishing schedule. My hope is that this experiment gives me a way to stay really engaged without requiring me to write to a schedule, and at the same time allows me to make enough money to cut down on other work and devote more time to you and this space. Fingers crossed.

Phew! That’s it for the logistics. I am so excited to embark on this journey with you.

Edited later to add: not quite it for the logistics! I’ve now confirmed dates and many of the talks for memory club, and am including here for anyone who’s thinking of joining up. All dates are for the winter of 2025 into 2026.

You don’t have to come to every session! Just come to whatever you can make.

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 21st September, 6–8pm: introduction to Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory. (Please read the introduction, not the preface. It’s about 15 pages in my edition. Available online at the link above.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 1st October, 6.30–8pm: My teacher Valentin Gerlier with a talk on Mnemosyne, memory, and the archaeology of consciousness

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 19th October, 6–8pm: Frances Yates, The Art of Memory, Chapter One: “The Three Latin Sources for the Classical Art of Memory”. (This is only about 20 pages of an absolutely belting book. If you can’t get hold of a copy, email me and I’ll send you a scan.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 29th October, 6.30–8pm: Memory athlete Sam Drew on memory sports techniques and memorising literature using memory sports. Get your tips and tricks here to help with your pledge!

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 16th November, 6–8pm: A.R. Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Wednesday 26th November, 6.30–8pm, I’ll be in discussion with actor Alexandra (Ali) Dowling, who has fascinating insights on how actors memorise lines and the role of emotion in memory.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but I’m aiming for Wednesday 7th January, 6.30–8pm.

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 18th January, 6–8pm: Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting.

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but aiming for Wednesday 4th February, 6.30-8pm

• BOOK CLUB: Sunday 15th February, 6–8pm. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I Scene II. (No need to read in advance! I’ll give an introduction, then we’ll read together in the session, using a slow-reading practice a little like lectio divina.)

• TALK + DISCUSSION: Date and speaker tbc, but aiming for Wednesday 4th March, 6.30–8pm. We might also decide to use this for a final book club doing lectio divina on Dante, or a “gathering threads” session.

• PLEDGE EVENT: Sunday 22nd March, 6–8pm. Pledgers, get ready to prove up! (Let’s keep the pledge-proving online, so we don’t split the pledgers and nobody’s left out. But I might also suggest a more casual meetup in London around this time, for anyone who can make it.)

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What’s in the soil of this piece?

As we’ve learned from Thomas Aquinas, ideas don’t come out of nowhere. I owe these ideas and this incipient investigation to several people. First, I want to thank Alice Oswald for comments she made about memory’s relationship to imagination, earlier this year, which set me off on this investigation in the first place. I’m also indebted to Valentin Gerlier and his teachings about the Ancient Greeks, memory, and the muses. A lot of the ideas in this piece were sparked by Mary Carruthers’s The Book of Memory—if you enjoyed reading this, consider checking it out. I also want to heartily recommend that you subscribe to Adam Robbert’s Substack The Base Camp. He’s also been on a journey through Carruthers and other medieval and early-modern ideas about memory, and he’s now continuing to explore memory through other avenues. His writing and thinking are so deep and revealing. Definitely worth your time.

And finally, huge thanks to my dear friend Rose-Marie Caldecott for allowing me to use her painting “More Than a Gap” (inspired by the felling of the Sycamore Gap) as the header image for this post. Do check out Rosie’s art; it is profoundly soulful and beautiful.

Here’s a little video update. Salient points in writing below if you’d rather not watch me waffle on.

Here’s all that info in a nutshell:

• I’ve got 20 copies left of the little booklet I had made of my essay “This Moment Needs Your Deep Weirdness and Your Intellectual Rigour”. I’ll post one to you anywhere in the world, if you make a donation to an organization of your choice that’s providing aid to Gaza. If you want inspiration, I’ve donated to Reviving Gaza, a Gazan-led mutual aid organization that is working to get food, money, and cash gifts to people in Gaza. Donation link for them here. Email a screenshot of your donation to an organization of your choice that is giving aid to Gaza, and your address, to eleanor@eleanorrobins.com. If and when we reach 20 booklets claimed, I will update this post to let you know.

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• There’s a little explanation above of why I haven’t been posting so regularly. It’s nothing dramatic! Mostly I really want to thank you for your patience and the generosity of your reading, and to apologize for dropping some balls. Also! I have been nerding out pretty deeply, and am veryvery excited to share some new ideas with you. Will send them over next week, when they’re ready.

• Finally! A few years ago I took an MA called “Poetics of Imagination” that changed my life. There’s a weekend-long taster of the Poetics of Imagination world in London on the weekend of 23rd and 24th August 2025, taught by my incomparable teachers Alice Oswald and Valentin Gerlier. If you’re interested in the themes I talk about on this Substack, I cannot recommend it highly enough. Tickets and more info here. I hope to be there for at least some of it. [I should also clarify that the course is not currently running as an MA but as a long course, and this weekend is a taster that you could take as a standalone, or an introduction to the long course.]

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That’s all from me. More next week. Until then,

xx Ellie

I hope you enjoy this piece. I particularly loved writing this one. It made me feel very alive.

I want to say a huge thank you to my dear friend /Joseph Rizzo Naudi, who put up with me locking myself away to work on this while he was staying last weekend, and also let me read the whole thing down the phone to him while he was trying to go to a party on Friday, and even made suggestions that vastly improved it. What a gem. I’m extremely lucky to have friends who understand my obsessions.

It’s fairly long, so as usual, I’m including a voice recording that you can put on in the background while you do the dishes. Which is, as I hope you’ll soon agree, a wildly complex and beautiful act of sculpting reality.

Love,

x Eleanor

I was chatting to a new philosopher friend a couple of weeks ago. We’d been talking about writing and the nature of reality—you know, the usual stuff—when he said something that made me shout “YES!”. He told me that he encourages his students to approach their work, and their lives, as though they’re painting an oil painting, not completing a jigsaw puzzle. Meaning (and this is my very liberal paraphrase): Try not to trick yourself into believing that there’s a picture on some box somewhere, a way things are or should be, and that your job is to assemble it correctly or puzzle it out. There is no picture on the box, no answer to the question of life. The task is to take the raw materials in front of you—the ocean of information and experience that is The World—and use them to paint the picture you want to live in and gift to others.

There is no picture on the box. There’s only the oil painting you make, day by day. And in fact, I would extend the metaphor. I would say that more than an oil painting, reality is a sculpture. A work of art that we make with all our senses and our whole bodies.

(The philosophers among you might have guessed that there’s all sorts of Kant and Heidegger going on underneath this analogy, but friends, we have a lot to get through, so I’m going to keep moving forward.)

I’ve seen a lot of dire articles lately about how AI is affecting the work of college students; about how much thinking is being outsourced to ChatGPT, and the effect this seems to be having on attention and engagement and honestly the will to live (mine, at any rate). This analogy of completing a jigsaw puzzle vs turning your life and learning into a sculpture is the most inspiring and succinct argument I’ve heard against that way of studying. After all, if life is a jigsaw puzzle and we just have to find the answers and piece them together, it’s someone else’s picture we’re working to. And to whom, exactly, have we handed that power?

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But this isn’t a lesson for students alone. If students are over-relying on AI, that’s because our whole culture is fucked all the way up. AI itself is just a direct and obvious extension of a mistaken belief that modern, Western culture has been deepening into for at least half a millennium.

The ideology of scientism (which doesn’t really reflect the often intuitive and imaginative practice of science) has, for 500 years, been telling us that material reality is a jigsaw puzzle that we solve with our analytical and “detached” observational skills, and that imagination and creativity are luxuries, nice extras.

What a crock of shit. To be human is to create. As a function of being incarnate and sentient, we are at all times creating an image, a sculpture, out of infinity, because that’s the only way to get from sunrise to sundown without melting into bafflement. The world isn’t divided into trees and tables and Burger King and hairdressers. It’s an ocean of pure being, including (as confirmed by physicists—but we’ll get onto that) intimations of realms beyond our material reality. That ocean of pure being is the raw material. The clay. We take it and form the sculpture, all day every day, as the first and most essential act of our existence—taking, for instance, a particular collection of light waves, and laying the word “green” on it, and then layering on top of that all of our personal and cultural associations with the colour green, and all of this done in all of the senses at once, so that while we’re labelling light waves “green” we’re also labelling and associatively layering, say, May warmth and a distant sound we assume to be a train and the smell of wild garlic, and all subconsciously and instantaneously and incessantly, to create a fully functional and richly layered hallucination that serves as reality. And it’s impossible to do this neutrally, without bringing ourselves into the creation. We simply cannot be in the world without being sculptors, because our world is itself a sculpture we make in order to live in it. It is of necessity an imaginative co-creation.

And when we pretend that we’re not co-creating the world as we move through it—when we subscribe to the jigsaw-puzzle model of reality—we enshrine at the base of all our operating and decision-making, societal and individual, the least imaginative, least expansive, least life-giving interpretation of the infinite, beautiful strangeness we swim through, then tell ourselves (or are told) that this impoverished vision is the incontrovertible reality. And that’s how we end up with the fallacy that human intelligence is comparable to or replicable by AI, and besides that with coup by tech broligarchy and social-political-economic collapse and ecological collapse and this sense in so many if not most of our lives that we are missing the point of life itself. And all of it built on a fundamentally broken idea of what reality is.

Right now, as we’ll see, we are butting up against the limits of what materialist science can tell us about the nature of the universe. In my view, this means that sooner or later, the ideological, culture-wide mistake into which materialist science has been distorted—that the full truth of the world can be known through supposedly objective experimentation and the rational mind—will soon be debunked, if that’s not happening already. The days of this ideology of scientism, of the jigsaw-puzzle model of reality, are numbered. So what’s the opportunity here? And how do we make sure the reappraisal of materialist science doesn’t degenerate into the kind of material-reality-is-a-scam, coffee-enema, give-me-$500-to-read-your-aura-on-Zoom, spiritual-bypass bullshit that is so rife right now? How might we seize this opportunity to live into a base agreement about reality, and therefore a culture, that are much more life-giving than we in the West have known for at least 500 years, if not a couple of millennia?

Let’s go.

***

What is it that separates you right now from, say, the south pole? Most of the readers of this Substack are in the UK and the US, so, if you’re in London, it’s about 9,800 miles. If you’re in New York, it’s closer to 9,000. You get the picture.

But what if I told you that actually, the south pole isn’t distant from you at all? And not just the south pole but everywhere you think of as distant, as well as all the far-flung people you love? That in fact, the space between you is an illusion?

This isn’t just a thought experiment or some sentimental image. It’s what physics is telling us is the structure of our world. For a while now, physicists have known that space is an illusion. Of course, that’s not to say that you’re actually standing at the south pole right now, and you simply haven’t noticed it. It means that whatever’s separating you from everything that feels distant is actually something other than space. Some other kind of energy or quality that originates in another dimension of reality, which we can’t fathom in its full, original form, here in our three-dimensional realm.

It might be helpful to use the thought experiment of flatlanders: two-dimensional beings who live in a two-dimensional world, in which everything is laid out on a plane. If those flat beings and their two-dimensional world were positioned as a plane inside our three-dimensional one, they’d experience our three-dimensional reality very differently to the way we do. They’d sense it as strange interruptions flitting across their plane momentarily before disappearing. Naturally, they would come up with some explanation for what was going on, but how could they possibly intuit the fullness of what we’re up to here in three dimensions? From those two-dimensional flashes, how could they know about ballet and music (since sound relies on three-dimensional vibrations) and clouds and rivers and all the rest of it?

In the same way, physicists are telling us that what we experience as space originates as another force in another dimension of reality; it’s just that in our three-dimensional world, we’re only able to fathom it as space. In the words of the science writer George Musser: “Locations that seem far apart can lie right on top of each other. What appears to be spatial distance is in fact a distance in energy.”

Physicists have been arriving at these conclusions for a while now—I’m late to the party. I first wrapped my head around all this a couple of weeks ago while driving on the motorway (on a journey that sure as hell seemed to involve crossing an annoying amount of real space), and I had to pull my car over to blink and breathe for a bit and sort of stare idiotically at the backs of my hands. I was listening to Lights On, a new audio documentary by writer and researcher of consciousness Annaka Harris, which journeys into the idea that consciousness might be fundamental—meaning, felt experience might be the base element of the universe, preceding even space-time. (Hat tip here to my friend Bert, who recommended Lights On. Thanks, Bert!)

Now here’s the part I wanted to get to. Having established that space is an illusion (you know, no big deal), Harris goes on to say a couple of things that made my ears prick up, even as my brain was leaking out of my eye sockets from trying to understand the science. Here’s the first, which she says in conversation with George Musser:

[I have a] very strong intuition that drives a lot of my interest, and it seems to be confirmed as I’ve worked in the sciences, that there is so much right here with us. It’s all right here. We just are very limited in our ability to perceive it and access it, based on the limits of the human brain and what we evolved to be able to perceive.

Then, a few minutes later in the same episode, she says this:

If space is not fundamental, it seems like there’s a sense in which everything, at least the stuff that we can potentially interact with [as opposed to e.g. a pebble on a moon on the other side of the universe] is actually right here, in a sense. Because there is no space. And the space we perceive between everything is just a hint of some more fundamental structure or force or law of nature.

This framing made me sit up straight, because I’ve long had this same intuition: that in some way, everything is right here. (We’ll get on to what I mean by “everything” in a moment.) And that the scale and dimensions of our experience are determined by our perceptions; by what we are able to pick up from all the everything.

And of course it’s not just me. I’ve found this intuition reflected everywhere in the texts of mystics and artists who have spoken about their imaginative and meditative processes. For instance, here’s modern-day mystic Cynthia Bourgeault in a book I quote often and highly recommend, Eye of the Heart:

Virtually all spiritual teachers in all traditions have insisted that the “higher” (i.e., less dense) realms are not somewhere else but within—already coiled inside us as subtler and yet more intensely alive bandwidths of experience and perception. The reason we do not typically notice them is that the laws governing any realm are generally too coarse to allow the penetration of those finer vibrations emanating from the next realm “up” into its normal sphere of operations.

Here’s another lovely image from Bourgeault:

Impressionistically, the imaginal penetrates this denser world in much the same way as the fragrance of perfume penetrates an entire room, subtly enlivening and harmonizing.

Or there’s this familiar banger from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

OK, OK, you might be thinking. Surely we’re talking about different things here. Harris is talking about demonstrable findings about the structure of the material universe, whereas Bourgeault is talking about a divine realm of vastly expanded potential, an ineffable field that is the causal origin of events in the material world. Harris is talking about the nature of space and the possibility that all the physical objects in our known world are in some way right here around us, whereas Blake is talking about his innate capacity to see spiritual emanations of items in the physical world.

I’d say two things in response to this distinction, in this quite strange conversation I seem to be having with myself in your inbox. First, it does nothing to negate the core idea that there is far more to material reality than meets the eye, and that our capacity to encounter that something-far-more is intimately bound up with the limitations of our perceptive apparatus. Second, I’m not convinced that the undetected presence of a kind of material infinity, and the existence of an ineffable realm of infinite possibility, are actually different things. If the universe is infinite, and there’s a possibility that everything in it might be here with us all at once, but beyond perception—isn’t that the same as the realm beyond our perception holding infinite possibility? (And in fact, Harris herself arrives at a similar question in a later episode of the documentary.)

I don’t know the answer, but I think it’s worth staying with the question, which boils down to: If space is an illusion, and everything is right here, what exactly is it that’s right here? What’s the unseen stuff we swim in all day? And how can we best relate to it?

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The whole arc and effort of Harris’s documentary is to pursue these questions through the research findings of materialist science. She wants rigour and she wants empirical evidence. And yet the journey brings her to the edge of what science can tell us. Here’s cognitive psychologist and scholar of consciousness Donald Hoffman, explaining in one episode of the doc how at a certain point, because we have no way to test what’s going on in the expanded or alternate dimensions, physics—the study of the fundamental matter of the universe—has to give way to mathematics, a much more theoretical pursuit:

[Physicists are] hitting a very interesting wall. Because [...] all the real physicists understand, it’s over for space-time. It had a good run for several centuries, but it’s over. The only flashlight that they have to peer in the darkness behind space-time, to try to figure out what’s deeper, is mathematics.

But if you ask me (not that anybody did), even maths will only get so far in telling us about those expanded dimensions of reality, because this is at base simply not a problem for maths, or for science as we know it either. In fact, Harris acknowledges this herself. Towards the end of the documentary, when she concludes that it’s worth working with the premise that felt experience is the most fundamental stuff of the universe, she notes that this would require humans to develop a new kind of science. After all, the whole discipline of science is founded on the assumption of objectivity; on the attempt to establish through observation and experimentation the full truth of “things as they are”, to use Enlightenment bigman John Locke’s phrase. But if the root of all things is simply felt experience, then there is no solid, external “things as they are”. There is only the forever dance of experience, feeling itself, and changing through the very act of being felt, being perceived. (I feel its pain. Nothing more destabilizing than being perceived.)

And so what we need now, Harris suggests, is new technology that is able to incorporate this primacy of felt experience into empirical scientific methodology. She suggests some sort of neural tech that could give the wearer an accurate experience of what it is to be another person or non-human being. This way, she suggests, we could begin to build up a picture of the infinite perspectives on all this felt experience that together create what we call reality.

At this point, I laughed aloud in my car. (I think if we’ve learned anything in this essay, it’s probably, don’t get in a car with me.)

And truly, I don’t mean that to sound mocking. I thoroughly enjoyed and was deeply inspired by Lights On. Annaka Harris is an insightful guide to this emerging picture of reality.

But it’s so funny, the lengths we humans will go to to keep our left brains in charge. To cling to the fiction that we’re living in a jigsaw puzzle; that there’s some way to find certainty, to locate the picture on the box that will give us the answers.

Because if reality is just a formless felt experience, inventing ways to feel itself.

And if to be incarnate is to briefly be a way the universe experiences itself.

And if what we’re looking for, in order to expand our understanding of all this felt experience that constitutes reality, is a method that enables us to enter into the experiences of others—human and nonhuman and even not-yet-incarnate, even taking the form of ideas—deeply and fully and with devoted rigour, and begin, from those intimations of felt experiences from beyond the self, to paint a picture of a possible world, a possible whole.

Then we already have the method, the technique, and the technology we need.

We’ve had it all along.

It’s called art.

It’s called imagination.

It’s humanity’s age-old, incomparable, perfect method of sharpening our perceptive capacities; expanding our consciousness to intuit felt experiences and realities beyond the self; and committing, rigorously, to bringing those intuitions through into material reality in the most illuminating way possible.

I want to be clear here. I’m not saying that we should abandon materialist science. I’m not saying that it’s been useless all along. I’ve taken antibiotics. I’ve eaten commercially grown food. I’ve flown on planes. I’m using a computer right now. I know my debts.

I’m saying that the scientific method should only ever have been one of our ways of knowing the world.

It can only tell us about a certain level of experience in the material world, in which so-called objects appear to be objective. To try to apply it to divining the felt experiences of other beings and other realms is a category error, to use the phrase uses so brilliantly in his book At Work in the Ruins.

If we want to know about the more-than-material world—about the infinite and ineffable realms in which everything appears in its original form, meaning as a temporary tension in consciousness—then we don’t need to develop new technology. We need to begin to trust our other ways of knowing.

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Because here is a secret that’s not so secret to anyone who’s read this Substack before, or been following the last few decades of developments in archaeological research: art did not begin as a practice of generating products in order to make a buck. It began as a practice of cosmology. The earliest artists of our species, who made prehistoric cave paintings and sculptures, seem to have worked by expanding their consciousness in order to enter into felt contact with expanded realms of reality, and then brought intimations of those other realms back to our material world, in the form of paintings and sculptures. In the words of archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, “The images were not so much painted onto rock walls as released from, or coaxed through, the living membrane […] that existed between the image-maker and the spirit world.”

Humanity’s first painters were our first and to my mind best-ever cosmologists, best-ever explorers of the full reaches of the universe, because their method of cosmology presupposed the truth towards which physicists now seem to be inching: that we can’t know anything without felt experience and without creativity.

And this process has been going on ever since: artists coaxing deep and previously unseen truths about the universe into their perception, then expressing those truths the only way they can be expressed: as works of art, of imagination, that do not try to pin down but rather keep unfolding more creativity because that is the nature of reality itself, to keep unfolding more creativity.

I think of my teacher Alice Oswald turning herself into a river and all the voices that make it, for her book-length poem Dart. I think of Shakespeare absorbing the voices of the living being that was England in the sixteenth century, and producing plays that incarnate that being, that England, on the stage. I think of the Ancient Greek playwrights who invented the enduring art form of theatre not by puzzling out their plots, but by transcending the bounds of self at festivals in worship of Dionysus, and receiving intimations from the gods that could only be expressed by inventing an entirely new form of art.

I think of this poem that is in fact a bird:

Or this painting that contains the kind of elemental energy most humans through history have known as a god:

Or this painting that is a country at a mythical moment in time, a fleeting but eternal epiphany of integrity:

And I know that we have and have always had as full a guide as we could ever need to the expansive reaches of our universe, and to what it is to be alive.

I understand why it might feel dangerous to suggest that art is our real guide to reality. All these hundreds of years into the mistake that is the dogma of scientism, our culture fundamentally misunderstands art and imagination. As I’ve already observed, they are seen as luxuries; as nice extras. As frivolous acts of fanciful invention. And meanwhile, we have a serious problem on our hands, in the form of this backlash against the Enlightenment that has people drinking bleach and getting sucked into cult-like “healing” methods and who knows what else.

So I want to be very clear. The kind of imagination I’m talking about is not about plucking ideas out of your own unresolved ego and passing them off as truth. “Passing things off as truth” isn’t the objective at all. That’s the whole point.

The kind of art and imagination I’m talking about begins with deep and devoted attention to the world around us. Truly, the artists I know in all disciplines are the most devoted and rigorous people I’ve ever met, engaged in a ceaseless, life-and-death effort to observe the world and the ways it meets them, because this is the raw material of their craft, and then to bring what they observe through in the most illuminating and beautiful way possible.

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But the goal of this effort is not to establish objective truth, much less hoodwink anyone with it. That’s not how the imaginative sensibility is oriented. Unlike the scientific sensibility, it doesn’t seek to pin down or puzzle out, because to live in the world imaginatively is to know, on some level, that there’s no answer. No box somewhere that will show you the picture you’re trying to piece together. To live this way is to recognize that all attention is co-creation; that we bring the world forth by beholding it. And if that’s the case, there is, ultimately, nothing to pin down; there’s only the continued creation.

Here’s , in his brilliant, beautiful book Imaginal Love [bolding mine]:

Any reality supposed to be literal: this fact, this rock, this Book, this Truth, anything we try to pin down as stable, universal and immutable—the rock-solid facts of existence—these are all abstractions. The literal is always abstract—because reality is so much more than we can ever know or experience or imagine. Nothing stays put—everything real, embodied, concrete, ramifies, multiplies, sends out roots and shoots and explodes into images. There is no end to telling the stories of persons and things. Only the fictive is concrete. That is why there is no end to the telling of stories. Of people, of things. Fiction, myths, fairy tales, gossip and rumors—these are the fictions of persons. The astounding richness of the stories science tells us, and continues to tell us seemingly without end—these are some of the fictions of things. Nothing stays put.

And this is why belief is such a dangerous thing. […] Belief wants to know; the imagination wants to hear more stories, to unfold the endless tale of reality.

And the most beautiful thing is, you’re already doing this. You already know how to use your imagination, how to sculpt reality, because you’re doing it all day every day, without even noticing it. It’s the first thing you learned as a baby.

The key to turning that constant and automatic act of co-creation into an art is simply to slow it down, become conscious of it, and take some joy in it. Have the audacity to intentionally create the most beautiful sculpture you can.

Because everything is right there. All the clay you could ever dream of, and more. And reality is not a jigsaw puzzle but a sculpture. Which means the task of life is not to pin down or puzzle out. It is to love the ceaseless creation.

Hi friends,

Happy May Day. Warning: don’t click that link if you don’t want a Cornish folk song stuck in your head for a full year, like it has been in mine.

I’ve been recording incomprehensible voice notes on my phone while driving, and filling pages of my notebook with scribbled half sentences connected by mad arrows—which is to say, I have an essay brewing, and I hope to send it next week.

Meanwhile, here are some snippets of news.

1. If you happen to be in or near Totnes, Devon, on Thursday 22nd May, come along to a talk I’m giving. It’s free, there will be a vegan dinner, and after I’ve talked we’ll all nerd out chatting together. I’ll also be announcing some workshops and other in-person events on the night. Reserve a ticket here.

   

2. Late last year, I had the pleasure of talking to Andy Cahill for his podcast The Wonder Dome, and the episode is out now. You can listen to it here. I remember that we talked about mystical experiences and the difference between fantasy and imagination, as well as stars and cosmology and, I believe, Beowulf. I also remember that I was quite sweaty and overexcited when I got off the call, which is usually a sign I’ve enjoyed a conversation. You know, just in case you were wondering about my personal perspiration tendencies. Big thanks to Andy for rolling with a curveball I threw him at the start of the episode.

3. The Blake deep-reading series I announced a little while ago has now come to an end. There was a lot of enthusiasm in the group for another series, and it seems likely that we’ll read The Tempest. All of the details are still tbd, and there will likely only be a few slots available as there’s so much interest from the original group. But if you’d like to register your preliminary interest to join us on this reading journey, and let Prospero work his magic on you, please drop me an email and I’ll keep you posted. A bit on what to expect: In these sessions, we read sloooooooowly, meeting a text with our whole bodies and letting the energies in it unfold and envelop us. I’m running these series with my teacher Valentin Gerlier, who held the reading session in which Blake sent me to the dark side of the moon a couple of years ago. (In case that means nothing to you, here’s what I’m on about.) Valentin happens to have written a book about Shakespeare that Rowan Williams described as “exceptionally sensitive and creative”, so, ya know, he’s no slouch.

4. I made a book! This teeny-tiny baby is a version of an essay I published on here last year, printed so you can throw it in your bag and read it beneath a tree. I can’t be the only person around here who absolutely loathes reading on a screen.

   Would you like a copy? I would like to send you one. I’m sending out ten free copies, postage paid, to the first ten people who reply to this post. (Most of you are in the US, so fret not about me mailing this there, or wherever you happen to be. I know what I’m signing up for. I just love the idea of these little things finding their way all over the world.) Drop a reply in the comments and I’ll be in touch.

That’s all from me for now. Until very soon,

xx Eleanor

A friend of mine tells me he’s weary of all this talk about paradigm shifts. Every second Substack post or podcast seems to point to the historic moment we’re living through, the change in consciousness, the great awakening, the crisis, the collapse. (I suspect he told me this because I’m one of the worst offenders, ha.) To this friend of mine, it’s beginning to feel formulaic. What does it mean, to talk in terms so broad?

This friend is a poet, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. On the whole, poems concern themselves with particulars—first and foremost, the particularity of language. An essay wants to reason out an idea or draw a conclusion; a novel wants to tell a story. In both cases, it’s tempting to neaten or gather threads, which can easily lead to sweeping, generalizing, totalizing statements or sentiments—and when you’ve teetered over into that territory, you’re at risk of being glib or even outright false. (And I say this as an essayist myself. If there’s any shade here, I’m throwing it in my own direction.)

Meanwhile, poems—at their best, anyhow—mostly want to notice. To attend closely. They embrace silence and fragmentation. Right there in the form, there’s the option—the encouragement, even—to avoid drawing simple lines of pseudo-logic, and instead say only what you can truly see, allowing the world itself to speak into the silences. And when you allow the world itself to speak, the world itself invariably surprises you.

And yet (said the essayist)… I can’t help but feel that we are living through a paradigm shift, and that paradoxically, the people to lead us through it are poets—the very people whose art form might make them loath to speak in terms so dangerously vague. Why? The best way I can answer that is to tell you about an experience I had while reading William Blake. (Madly, this isn’t even the same experience I told you about a few months ago, when Blake sent me to the dark side of the moon. It’s a whole other thing, less dramatic but possibly weirder.)

(Before I go any further in these observations about poetry and why language matters so much in times of collapse, I want to honour my teachers Alice Oswald and Valentin Gerlier. I’ve been lucky enough to spend a lot of time with them over the past few weeks, discussing King Lear and Blake and other works of literature, and if there’s any insight in what I’m about to write, it starts with them. Similarly, if there’s anything that feels glib or hollow, that starts with me.)

So. Blake trip, mark two. Some of us have been having a grand old time exploring hell with Billy Blake. A dozen or so readers of this Substack have been gathering weekly with Valentin—who’s a Blake scholar—by the soft blue glow of a Zoom screen, to slowly, slowly read The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

If you’re not familiar with this book, Blake wrote and illuminated it (i.e. illustrated it with his own unique engraving method) fairly early in his career. It’s partly a response to the Swedish mystic Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, which Blake saw as too morally conventional; too simplistic about good and evil. Though he was a devout Christian, Blake didn’t really believe in “good” and “evil” per se; to him, the things that bore those labels were just elemental energies, and both of these energies were important, both belonged to the fullness of life. He saw his society as calcified, fossilized under moralizing stories about good and evil—stories deadened by centuries of accreted cultural and religious baggage. And he hated it. To him, this was the major mistake underlying the calamities of his culture and his day—namely, in his view, the dry, dire form of religion that posited a distant, punisher god he brilliantly called Nobodaddy, and the Enlightenment philosophy that was severing humans from felt relationship with the world around them, by seeking to understand it all “objectively”, meaning scientifically and through detached, empirical observation.

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (and really all his work), Blake didn’t just want to comment on this calcification of the spirit under deadened and deadening stories. He wanted to actively reverse it—or at least begin to. He wanted to reintegrate vital banished energies—to use language as an active medicine that could reawaken people to the astonishing fullness of existence. And as far as I’m concerned, he did a pretty fucking good job of that.

So here’s what happened for me. Early in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, there’s a passage headed “The Voice of the Devil,” which proclaims all sorts of exciting ideas, like “Energy is eternal delight” and “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” Even for someone like me, raised with no religion, there’s a certain amount of energy required to push through the mental blocks, the moralizing tightness, against reading the purported voice of the devil—and this, of course, is the point. By the time we reached the second and third pages of these pronouncements, in their booming, prophetic, diabolical but also weirdly funny voice, I was sitting in the strange suspended energy that seeps in after certainties have been shattered.

Then we reached the following, where the booming, prophetic, weirdly funny voice gives a whistlestop tour of accounts of the devil, via Milton and the Book of Job and the Gospels. (Don’t click away if you don’t want to read this right now! I know it’s jarring to jump from essay to poetry and back; I know they require different kinds of attention. You can absolutely just keep reading the essay. But I would say, do come back to The Marriage of Heaven and Hell later. It’s more than worth your time.)

Around the time we got to “in Milton, the Father is Destiny, the Son, a Ratio of the five senses & the Holy-ghost, Vacuum,” I had a strange felt sense of something squirming beneath the words. As my cognition laboured to piece together all these abstract concepts—Destiny, Ratio, five senses, Vacuum—and to keep up with this expert sprint through scripture and literature, an energy bubbled up from underneath the abstractions, and with that energy came the clear certainty that making cognitive sense of it all wasn’t the point. That in fact, the confusion was at least partly the point. That I was being guided to see that all this liturgical litigating is really just pontificating over the top of … and there’s no other way to put this … a sort of infinite pileup of squat, fat, and, weirdly, blue worms, writhing on top of each other, beneath all the words.

(I realize that’s a bit of a side-swipe, so sorry about that. I can’t really explain more than to say that what I saw with my inner vision and felt in my chest was an infinitely receding mass of short, fat, blue worms. Blue worms all the way down, if you will. Why were they blue worms? Who the hell knows? I didn’t *not* take a lot of psychedelics in my youth. Maybe best to leave such questions aside.)

ANYway. Each of these blue worms was an energy, I suddenly felt—an elemental, inconceivably potent energy. And when humans come into contact with such energies (whether they feel like blue worms or, more likely, not)—when humans come into contact with them, we put stories on them. That’s the only way to even begin to understand and work with them. And these stories are where mythology comes from; these stories are mythology. The stories that make up the Bible as well as the Celtic myth cycles, the Greek and Roman pantheons and their shenanigans, the stories of the Hindu gods—every mythological system began with an encounter with elemental energies and the need to put a story on them, to put language on them, in order to make them comprehensible and communicable. Because it’s much easier to talk about and worship an energy if you put a face on it.

But of course, then you have an entity, something more or less stable, where before there was an energy. And this—this!—is the whole problem. “Entities” are necessary; we need to make indeterminate energies determinate and bring them earthside. (I want to honour here that the language of determinacy and indeterminacy is inspired by the brilliant and his thinking about the energy of money, on which more in a future post.) Entities are necessary and they’re susceptible to calcification, to eclipsing the originating energy and becoming a dead structure. And when they’ve eclipsed or become abstracted from the sacred and true energies that inspired them, these entities, these ideas, can all too easily be weaponized—just like the ideas of good and evil, Nobodaddy and the devil. This calcification of an energy into a dead entity is what Blake saw playing out all around him, driving the worst kind of small-mindedness, institutionalization, prejudice, and death-in-life.

I don’t need to tell you that that dynamic hasn’t miraculously ended since Blake’s day. That it’s playing out all around us too. Because what underlies fascism if not a delusional certainty about a falsehood, a false story, which has been abstracted over the course of many years from the living, breathing fullness of life?

So what’s the solution? (A question a poet might not be gauche enough to ask, but I’m an essayist so, yolo.) The solution is language itself. It is imagination itself.

I wrote a whole bunch of woolly and yes, essay-glib warbling here about what we need to do and what this moment needs. I could almost hear my poet friend’s eyes rolling. So instead of droning on at you, I’m going to illustrate the suggestion that it’s language itself we need, and end this essay, by turning to perhaps the greatest poet of all. Anything there is to say about the dynamic of language making the world anew when an old order is collapsing, he can say far better than I can.

I’m talking about Shakespeare and King Lear, a story in which the old certainties about sovereignty and authority and the cosmic order are being shattered, leaving language terrifyingly untethered from meaning. We see this untethering in the famous first scene, when the aging Lear—figurehead of the old order—demands that his daughters win their share of his kingdom by telling him how much they love him. Goneril and Regan give it a shot, wittering on emptily about loving him more than their own husbands. But when she’s called on to speak, Lear’s favourite, Cordelia, can’t. Though she dotes on her father, when she’s asked what she has to say in response to this absurd and unwise question, she repeats, “Nothing… Nothing,” then adds: “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.” Her refusal to be glib, her insistence on honest words rather than easy ones, gets her banished, while the spillers of empty nonsense are rewarded with half each of the kingdom. Spoiler alert: things don’t go well for anyone after this.

This untethering of language from meaning sets off a spiral that leads the play to a storm on a blasted heath, where Lear has been brought to his knees and lost all sense, dragging his entourage behind him. On this heath, he meets Edgar, a nobleman also driven from the court by lies and language twisted against him, who is now reduced to playing the part of a madman, Tom O’Bedlam, in order to escape death at the hands of his own father.

Edgar as Tom O’Bedlam seems to speak in nothing but nonsense. His words are strings of broken nursery rhymes, of proverbs, of garbled half-rhymes and a voice that shifts from singing to hectoring to maudlin warbling. And yet—as my brilliant teachers Alice and Valentin have helped me to see over the past few weeks—what he’s actually doing is creating the tiniest chink of possibility for a new world to come through. He is sitting out on a blasted heath, exposed to the elements, and refusing to speak in glib certainties about what the world is now. He is, in fact, fracturing those certainties and letting his language leap into the unknown and uncontrolled, so that the world itself can speak through in his silences.

When Lear asks him who he is and what he has been, Edgar-as-Tom-O’Bedlam says:

Wine loved I deeply, dice dearly; and, in woman, out-paramoured the Turk: false of heart, light of ear, bloody of hand; hog in sloth, fox in stealth, wolf in greediness, dog in madness, lion in prey. Let not the creaking of shoes, nor the rustling of silks, betray thy poor heart to woman. Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lenders’ books, and defy the foul fiend. Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind, says suum, mun, nonny, Dauphin my boy, my boy, cessez! Let him trot by.

And fuck me if that line “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind” (where Tom’s repeating himself from a few moments earlier) doesn’t blow through me like the wind in the hawthorn itself. From the whole play, this is the line that stays with me, that sends a forever shiver through me. By piling up platitudes, the “Keep thy foot out of brothels” and the like, and allowing them to tumble over and through him losing all sense (instead of clinging to their glibness, as others in the play have done), he frees himself to say something true that cuts through the crap. It might not seem like much, this line, this “Still through the hawthorn blows the cold wind,” but it’s a rare moment in this play of words being unfailingly, feelingly tethered to meaning. And it’s no coincidence that Edgar is the character who ties the play’s plots together, and ultimately seems to carry whatever tomorrow there might be.

This is what poetry, what language, does at its best. It creates the possibility of a new world, even in the midst of ruin. It has the courage to take up residence in the place of uncertainty, listen very carefully, and try to find the right words, the true words, even if they don’t seem like much at the time. It sits at the place of the border dream where the indeterminate is forever becoming determinate, a place before and beyond stale certainties, and stakes everything on finding new words, even as the storm is howling.

Like us, and like Lear and Tom O’Bedlam, Shakespeare lived in a moment of shattering certainties. The Middle Ages, with their hierarchy and their tradition and their long-unquestioned cosmic order, were crumbling, as up soared the new order, modernity, the condition we still live under today (just about). Shakespeare’s lasting genius comes at least in part from his ability to speak in the tongues of both times, the old and the new, so that the stage is held in a kind of turbulent, forever-suspended energy of change—and in his ability to speak another tongue altogether, too. The tongue of the blasted heath. The tongue that only grows when you have the courage to sit out in the elements and listen, and listen, and listen, until something new swims up and asks to be plucked and put on the page. Sometimes, Shakespeare knew, those words won’t seem like much, won’t seem to make much sense. All the better. If you live in nonsense times, a nonsense to that nonsense might just contain some sense, some oak-tree truth.

The limits of my language are the limits of my world, and right now, I’m off to find some better words to put on my squirming blue worms.

Love,

xx Eleanor

PS. I need to thank David Jennings for reminding me of the Wittgenstein quote that gives this post its title. Thank you, David, for being such a fount.

• Come to an event I’m speaking at in London on Tuesday 11th February! I’ll be one of a panel of speakers thinking through the intersections between magic, AI, science, and imagination, hosted by Hurry Up We’re Dreaming magazine. It’s at Reference Point and it’s going to be a lot of fun. Tickets cost £10 plus Eventbrite’s small booking fee, and you can nab one here.

  

• Just a little FYI for anyone who was kindly paying to subscribe to this Substack: I’ve temporarily suspended paid subscriptions. I’ll be restarting them soon, with a new suite of offerings for paying subscribers, but while I’ve been too busy to post anything much at all, I didn’t want to keep charging all those among you who’ve been generous enough to subscribe on a donation basis.

• Thank you for bearing with me during these long gaps between posts. My bind is that I want to be in regular contact, but I don’t want to succumb to what Doug Rushkoff calls “the pace of the internet”. We’ve all got too much to read anyway, and I only want to post when I’ve got something worth saying. That said, I’m slowly shifting my other, bill-paying work so that I will—I hope—have things worth saying more often. All of this is what’s going on when I go silent for a month. It’s all a juggle, and I love you all for being here and bearing with me.

Hello,

I’m sitting in my office, in my little cottage on the southern edge of Dartmoor in southwest England. It’s a tiny room—about eight feet by six—dominated by a huge desk, a two-foot-deep oak job running down one of the long walls, whose entire surface area I somehow invariably manage to cram to invisibility even though it’s sixteen foot square (am I showing my age with these imperial measurements?). When I moved into this house a couple of years ago, I painted this room olive green—walls, vaulted ceiling, the lot. I knew when I bought the paint that I hated the colour; became even more certain as I slathered it on every surface. I don’t know what I was doing. Maybe trying to be a grown-up. Why does some part of me think that olive green is a grown-up colour? What I really wanted to do, and have since done, was paint every surface in this room a startling mint green that makes most people gasp a bit (in horror, I think) when they peek in, but which seems to hold my particular nervous system in perfect equilibrium. I think it’s something to do with dopamine.

If anyone asks me, in thirty or forty years’ time, where I spent these turbulent, transitional years, years when there is still so much to play for in the state of the world (will there always be? Has there always been?), I will have to tell them that I spent an awful lot of them right here, in my lurid green cell. I’m in here by six most mornings and often late into the night, and I’ll typically do a day or two in here at the weekend, too.

When I imagine this fictional (and, let’s be honest, quite narcissistic) conversation, I feel some shame. Shouldn’t I be out… there? Wherever there is? Doing… something else? Instead of hiding away in here, putting myself through a self-administered, totally unaccredited, mysteriously motivated equivalent of a PhD in English history?

Who knows? “Should” is the most perplexing and pointless way to live a life, after all. Perhaps a better way to frame it is: Is it possible that we are doing anything of value in these strange years, those of us who are constitutionally inclined to hole ourselves up and devour books?

It’s not certain, but it’s certainly possible. I’ve been thinking a lot about George Orwell’s famous formula for totalitarianism, as presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” This seems true to me, and it seems also to hold the key to an opportunity, in our present moment. Because while our understanding of the past—the version of history that is handed to us—absolutely creates and circumscribes our sense of what’s possible in the future, I don’t think it’s at all clear right now who controls the present enough to control the past. I think what we’re living through is a seismic destabilization and even rupture of old certainties, and I think that this presents an incredibly exciting opportunity for the nerd activists among us. Those of us who are interested primarily in what is known, and how, and how it shapes the world.

Maybe it seems ridiculous to say it’s unclear who controls the present, especially as all of you in the United States face the new presidency. I don’t mean to be flippant or obtuse. I know that control is being wielded with violence and a breathtaking, gut-punching lack of wisdom. But it also seems to me that precisely in this violence and unwisdom, in this absolute idiotic flap, is evidence of the instability of this control; evidence that even those who wield it know on some level that it’s unstable. I’m not a political commentator, and I don’t want to get in over my head, but it seems to me that at least in terms of the history of ideas, what we’re watching is not the dawn of a cogent new political philosophy that will bind together past, present, and future for a few hundred years. It’s the death throes of an old one—specifically, the final, fatal kicks to the worldview and the picture of history (and so of the future) handed down to us by the Enlightenment.

Who controls the past controls the future, and for centuries in the West, we have been living from a playbook of past and future inherited from the Enlightenment—from a specific moment 250-odd years ago, in which after centuries of perceived tyranny enabled by tradition and faith, academically educated Europeans set out to ensure they could be hoodwinked and oppressed no more. In the place of old, received certainties about, for instance, the authority of the church and the rights of kings, they would enshrine a new epistemology, a new way of knowing, rooted in what can be materially observed and rationally understood. An “objective” way of knowing that promised immunity to bias and the human will and other hijacks. It was understandable, but it was a reaction, an extreme swing of the pendulum that brought untold unforeseen consequences. And for centuries, this movement and its prejudices have circumscribed our understanding of what happened in the past, and so what’s possible in the present and the future. It has been the water we swim in.

If you ask me (and I know nobody did), the present moment is, in myriad ways, one giant rebellion against the Enlightenment. Pankaj Mishra has been saying so for years. In his 2017 book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, he traced the anger and resentment that fuel today’s far-right movements and militant violence (the ressentiment, in the Nietzschean vein) back to the Enlightenment. It was the Enlightenment, after all, that made such a song and dance about all men (yes, men) having rights and being individuals with status at the very centre of political and social life, not to mention at the foundation of newly conceived nations like the United States. I’m not being flippant, by the way, about the infinitely complex question of human rights. I’m saying “song and dance” because this promise of the individual right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness was always empty. Wealth and opportunity were only ever truly available to the few, and everyone else just had to eat the fumes of the lie they’d been sold, for the sake of which, by the way, they’d also lost the old structures and supports of tradition, community, and faith. If that ain’t a recipe for rage, I don’t know what is. It’s this brewing discontent that Mishra traces right down to the present moment.

But it’s not just the violent far right that’s kicking at the corpse of Enlightenment promises. A version of that very same thing is also happening in circles that might be much closer to home for the people reading this essay. Many of us here in this corner of Substack have set out on paths of spiritual seeking that rebel against the rationalist materialism we were raised in. We’re exploring esoteric philosophies and alternative medicines, astrology and the occult and, shock horror, even resurgent religion. (And yes, I know, this kind of seeking has always taken place. But it’s clear that we’re in A Moment; that it’s happening more widely now than at many times in the past.) We are done, so many of us, with the disenchantment of the world that Max Weber identified as a consequence of the Enlightenment. We are done with rationalist materialism, with suppressing our instincts and intuitions, with leading half-lives, with ending each day yearning for deeper meaning and a connection to some quality of this world that we know, in our bones, exists before and beyond inert matter.

It’s uncomfortable to admit it, but this means we have more in common than we might think with those who are acting out in rage against the broken promises of the Enlightenment. We’re all, in our very different ways, fighting a ghost. Fighting this philosophy that was injected into the air we breathe hundreds of years ago.

As an aside (bear with me), there’s a weird thing that happens in nations that have had a populist government at some point. Maybe political philosophers write about this extensively and I’m pointing out the obvious. For me, it was simply something I noticed it when I lived in Argentina, back in 2010–11. After populism, it seems a country really has no such thing as a political right or left anymore. Everything becomes either populist or anti-populist; the particular brand of the country’s populism becomes the new yardstick of meaning, and traditionally leftist and rightist stances are cherry-picked in ways that feel very confusing if you arrive in the country without context, decades after the populist government has left.

In the same way, our culture is arranged around and railing against a movement from the past that has become invisible, but which skews everything we do. We’re fighting a ghost, and the ghost is the Enlightenment. And for my money, this is why, for instance, we see the seemingly strange alliances and emergences charted in a podcast like Conspirituality, which highlights the specific spot in our culture where New Age and alternative lifestyles join up with the kind of conspiracies once associated with the rage-filled far right and libertarians. If you’re looking at this phenomenon through the lens of left/right, or progressive/conservative, it’s very confusing. But when you realize that it’s all united by frustration with Enlightenment convictions, it makes much more sense.

My friend Aaron, who if he’s reading will hate that I’ve named him here (hi, Aaron!), has pulled me up in the past on my sometimes lazy rejection of Enlightenment principles. And I am the first to admit that I too often come out swinging for intuition and imagination and the subtle ways of knowing that the Enlightenment rejected for being possible sources of tyranny or delusion. So I want to be clear that I’m in no way rejecting science or the intellect or even the rational mind. I am simply saying that the Enlightenment went too far. That that’s where all this disaffection comes from. That we need a balance in our ways of knowing; that whatever future we’re moving towards, it needs to make space for intuition, imagination, ritual, faith, and tradition as well as the intellect, scientific investigation, and rigorous reasoning. If you insist too strongly on one or the other, you’ll always end up with a painful counter-movement that throws the baby out with the bathwater.

What might this balance look like, in practice? Honestly, I don’t know. Again, I’m not a political philosopher; I’m just an idiot with a Substack. I’m not about to start writing Utopia over here. And in any case, I think attempts to shape the world to come will always be heavy-handed. There’s so much that’s out of our control, not least because there is a great consciousness shaping events in our world that is infinitely more imaginative than I could ever hope to be.

What I’m more interested in than designing a future is, as the title of this essay might suggest, reappraising our past, to shift the parameters we unconsciously place on the present and the future. The Enlightenment handed us a restricted picture of history, and that restricted picture made this strange mode we call modernity feel utterly inevitable and inescapable. So what if we remember all the things that were left out of that picture? What might that open up?

For instance, in their 2021 book The Dawn of Everything, David Wengrow and the late, great David Graeber trace back to the Enlightenment the simplistic trajectory that we moderns impose upon the deep history of humanity. Our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors, this story tells us, lived in primitive, politically unsophisticated tribes. Then, with the advent of agriculture, humans began to settle and develop increasingly complex social and political structures, which inevitably, we’re told, led to rising inequality.

Wengrow and Graeber point out that in fact, there was a remarkable degree of complexity and imagination in the way the earliest hunter-gatherers organized themselves. Some seem to have employed entirely different systems of government depending on the demands of the season, and been able to shift seamlessly between these different systems. Meanwhile, networks of trade and communication suggest enormously wide-ranging and cosmopolitan peoples. But Enlightenment thinkers, they suggest, were coming into contact with indigenous peoples whose quality of life outside of European “civilization” threatened the Enlightenment idea that statecraft in the very fixed European vein is the necessary and only way to create conditions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. So those Enlightenment thinkers, whether deliberately or not, misrepresented the “primitive” nature of life outside of modern European civilization, handing us a fiction about what a human actually is, and how imaginatively we might be able to live together, as a simple facet of our human nature.

Then there’s the way the Enlightenment represented the classical world of Ancient Greece and Rome, widely seen as the dawn of European “civilization”. The most famous work of history from the Enlightenment is probably Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a majestic undertaking in which Gibbon draws clear links between the Enlightenment era and the Roman age. Writing at the height of the age of reason, when, as we’ve seen, Enlightenment thinkers were keen to overthrow faith and tradition and their potential for tyranny, Gibbon tells us very clearly that the adoption of Christianity played a large part in the fall of Rome. He writes:

Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more Earthly passions of malice and ambition kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country.

There’s an indication here that faith was somehow aberrant in this world; that the superstitions and heightened passions of religion were infecting an otherwise rational society, bringing about its downfall.

But this is a very selective picture of the classical world. Let’s consider what was going on in Ancient Greece, which in so many ways formed the prototype for Ancient Rome. (As an aside, it’s telling that Enlightenment philosophers were generally more interested in Rome than in Greece. What I’m about to share might shed some light on why.)

It’s common these days to think of the dawn of democracy in Ancient Athens as some seed point of earthly, materialist rule; to draw a straight line from Athens to the governmental buildings in London or Washington DC. I’ve been guilty of doing something similar on this very Substack.

And yet when we actually look at Ancient Greece, even after the dawn of democracy, we find practices that are absolutely baffling to our modern sensibility. In his book Classical Athens and the Delphic Oracle, Hugh Bowden writes:

In modern discussions, “democratic” or more properly perhaps “Western democratic” regimes are assumed to be liberal, individualist, capitalist and secularist. Democratic Athens was none of these things.

My dear friends, the truth of democratic Athens is so much stranger than we allow ourselves to believe. Difficult decisions depended on sending ambassadors to oracles like the one at Delphi, where the priestess proclaimed the divine will from a trance state enhanced by drugs. And that was only on special occasions. Every single day in Ancient Greece, animals were sacrificed so that the marks of the gods could be read in their entrails; these markings would dictate policy and other critical decisions. Battles were sometimes held up, leading to great loss of human life, because the signs of the entrails weren’t clear enough yet. And here’s the orator Aeschines describing what went down in a typical meeting of the Athenian assembly in 345 BCE (as quoted in Bowden):

After the purificatory victims [that is, sacrificed piglets] have been carried around, and the herald has said the ancestral prayers, the law commands the proedroi [the presiding magistrates] to proceed with discussion concerning ancestral sacred matters (hiera), heralds and embassies, and other matters of civic concern (hosion).

Sacrificed piglets. In the assembly! Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that the key to our future is to introduce sacrifices into the halls of congress. Jesus, that’s the last thing we need right now. But let’s soak in for a second just how ritualized and reverent those early democratic processes were. Let’s recognize that even if Christian factionalism had something to do with the fall of Rome, that’s far from the full story of faith and its role in the classical world.

Humans have always been guided by beliefs and behaviours that anchor us in something meaningful and nonmaterial. And while those beliefs and behaviours were vulnerable to hijack and corruption, they also created space for imagination and intuition and a sense of belonging to each other and the world, and a sense, too, that some great story is playing out. That there is a point in waking up every day besides paying your credit-card bill.

I’m rubbish at endings, and I think I’ve already laboured this point enough, so let me leave this here, with a reminder that whether we like it or not, many of us are grieving a common loss and fighting a common foe. And with a warm invitation to blow the fucking walls off everything we think we know about the past, present, and future.

Love from me, forever nerding out in my lurid green cell,

xx Ellie

The idea

Writing is a form of magic. It creates associations, moods, and worlds that can alter material reality.

Ideas are alive, they inhabit the imaginal realm, and they select their human channels.

We can create the reality to come by writing into association the ideas that are tapping each of us on the shoulder, asking to come through from the imaginal realm.

More details here.

The first 297-word spell

Ingredients:

• A wallflower at the ideas dance

• The Word made flesh

• The expanding universe

Meet Georges Lemaître. A Belgian Catholic priest and theoretical physicist, he originated Big Bang theory (his “primeval atom hypothesis”) and the understanding that the universe is expanding. (Perhaps you’re thinking, “That was Hubble.” But no: Lemaître hypothesized expansion in 1927; Hubble published proof in 1929. In 2018, the International Astronomical Union renamed Hubble's law the Hubble–Lemaître law.)

To Lemaître, it was not strange: to pledge submission to Christ; to posit the explosion of an atom as the origin of the universe. To vow chastity, poverty, obedience; to pioneer computing in physics and lecture alongside Einstein. The Bible and astronomy occupied different orders of reasoning. The Bible treats salvation, while science investigates the physical phenomena of the universe.

Some physical phenomena of the universe: 13.8 billion years ago, a Big Bang. Then: cold rushing. The world as a hiss, searching for the outside of itself.

A metaphysical phenomenon of the universe: Logos. A tricky word. In the New Testament, it’s translated as “the Word”, as in “the Word made flesh”, but that ain’t it. We might try “divine reason” or “orderly direction”. It’s the root of logic.

Two thousand-odd years ago, we’re told, Logos, “the Word”, was made flesh in Jesus. When God bodied himself, it was Logos he bodied.

Physics has its own Logos, supposing that there is an order to all things. But is there intention behind the order?

Picture Lemaître visiting the Vatican to urge against such comparisons; to avert a search for Logos through a telescope. Picture him—the man misremembered as a wallflower at the ideas dance: clerical collar, round glasses, fleshy face, a body bound in skin like any other, the Word of God burning eternal in his heart; his ears pricked to the universe, ever rushing to the outside of itself.

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