Sometimes I get pulled into conversations that I know aren’t good for us. The kind where a third are absolutely loving it, a third are uncomfortable but trying to enjoy it and another third have checked out.
Being the kind of person that does fairly well out of the game, it takes me a minute to see this. Before I do, I’m having a time. I got some big words and big ideas swirling around, and these conversations are a chance to make them mean something. It’s not usually about being on top, (though it can be) but a kind of play. It’s fun trying to think fast, dig into shit you’ve read and can only half remember, defend a position and when things get complicated try to ride the wave.
The fun stops when you look around.
Good to name why we have these sad little moments: the supremacy regime of analytical intelligence, one of many outgrowths of a culture that has used a certain kind of intelligence to enforce a social order for the past 200+ years.
Good to name some responses to them: fear, anti-intellectualism, rebellion that cements oppression, and -mercifully- experiments with thinking in other ways.
If I’m paying enough attention I might try open things up. Ask a question or two. Say something funny. Start a little side chat. Or I might just go do the washing up and not have to navigate my contradictory desires.
But now I’m writing my newsletter and what better place to unravel some contradictory desires:
Desire number 1 (in no particular order). I want chats where we think carefully and intricately.
Desire number 2. I want everyone to get something out of a chat. I don’t want my good times to be at the expense of someone else’s. And I don’t want to remind people of how shit they were made to feel in school.
Desire number 3. As much as I love the analytical (the abstract, the theoretical etc), it’s no fun by itself.
The right thing to do now is share some slice of life that shows what I’m talking about and how things can go well. (The wrong thing to do is to talk about Hannah Arendt’s theory of animal laborans and Richard Sennet’s ideas about the inseparability of knowledge and craft.) Instead, I’m going to tell you about this Aboriginal Australian guy Tyson Yunkaporte’s new book. Or in his words, I’m going to invite you into a three-way yarn between you, me and Tyson.
I found this book, Right Story, Wrong Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking, at exactly the moment I was looking for some guidance out of this mess. Some might interpret this as a ‘Something’, the Aboriginal event where a meaningful communication from the universe appears as a coincidence, to which Tyson would say ‘please don’t’. (If “you’re one of those people who is into inspirational self-help, new-age woo-woo and native wisdom. Gosh, you’re going to be disappointed.”) Tyson invites us into his adventure with caution. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes to our accumulating problems.
To hold us he builds us a canoe. It’s an old practice, core to his Apalech Clan from the remote far north of Australia. The canoe is going to be the vessel for the rest of the book. We’re going to get in it with him and journey through the nine circles of hell of today’s world. Everyone’s needed to make a canoe. How it works is, a few seasoned hands will start the crafting, others will watch until they are ready to craft too, then they’ll join in as experts. The wood used, the design, the place where the trees grow best for the oars, these are known in knowing the land and its history. The making of this object is a paragon of “a non-centralised knowledge economy embedded in a kind of cognition distributed throughout creation”.
The rest of the story involves many more objects, boomerangs, clubs, a spear. Each chapter is laced with Tyson’s attempt to make something, sometimes with help from friends, sometimes alone. Some of these objects are beautiful some are ugly. Each helps us re-embed our cognition “in landscapes of meaning”.
One of the many things Tyson’s trying to explore with us is the particular way that his culture’s thinking about the world is tied up in the physical reality of the world. Their founding mythologies are encoded in songs that map onto the landscape as you walk it: songlines. Their interiors and exteriors are woven tight, while ours (forgive me if I’ve made assumptions about you here) fray. Matter means a great deal, and meaning emerges from matter.
Although it’s impossible to build an entire indigenous memory framework in our industrial society, he’s got this suggestion for how we can reinstate some of our capacities to know ourselves and the lands we inhabit. Start by creating a symbolic map of a route you travel regularly, he says. Turn information that’s important to you into stories and then encode that story onto your map. Make phrases which repeat, rhyme and alliterate and if you can, make these symbolic maps with others who are doing the same. I get distracted every time I try and do this, but it sounds like one solid path to re-enchantment.
If you’ve read it, you can’t help think of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s call for a synthesising of science and traditional land-infused wisdom. Tyson’s more comfortable playing with cynicism and sarcasm than Robin. He’s not a sermoniser. His book is about the right story and the wrong story, but if you think that it’s going to be Tyson lecturing the rest of us non-indigenous folks about our wrong stories you’re wrong.
Tyson, frankly, is a big mess of right and wrong. The journey between the two is key. The canoe he makes for us is the wrong canoe (bit like this whale belly probably) because he made it by himself. He is “disconnected in this particular activity because my spouse is looking after the kids while I take off for half a day to show the world how special and worthy I am, instead of fulfilling my obligations to family.” There can be no right stories today without a long hard look at the wrong out there and the wrong in here, and even then, no guarantees.
Recently, after one of these conversations that aren’t good for us, I heard from a young woman with years of experience in a workers' cooperative on the frontline supporting vulnerable, isolated and disabled people felt she has nothing useful to share… this, in a conversation about revolutionary change!
The fear, felt by my friend, is felt the country over by all kinds of people. We are taught it in school. Public failure at analytical intelligence means humiliation in the first instance, and relegation to lower increasingly chaotic sets if it continues. We spend the rest of our lives afraid of seeming dumb, and it encloses the big questions about how we should live.
To resist the vast, life-determining power of this regime, young people construct a counterculture where taking the classroom seriously is for losers and learning is stupid. In one of the most influential works of British anthropology, Paul Willis spends half a year in a working class comprehensive in the midlands and documents the ways that students cement their own futures in undervalued manual labour through their rebellion against the regime of the classroom.
What Willis doesn’t get at so much is that physical work isn’t inevitably oppressive. Work that means knowing the world by interacting with it can be a lot less shit than an office job. Nonetheless, (despite the hipsterish 2010s yearning for authenticity) it is totally degraded in our culture. But it doesn’t need to be. What EP Thompson and other working class people point out is how an autonomous, rebellious working class culture has been built by reclaiming a physical entanglement with the world through work. Funny to see that synchronicity with Tyson…
Where I am, I can see a yearning for other ways of knowing. The economic conditions we live in are fuelling this insurgency. The promise of university education (largely still confined to rewarding analytical intelligence) was expanded to millions in the UK in the early 2000s, while apprenticeships were undermined. Many of those graduates discovered that their newfound knowledge was either impossible to practice or only useable in entirely useless (bullshit) jobs. The expansion of this ‘learned class’, with the ever-growing sense that we are totally out of sync with the reality of our ecological world and the total inability of most of our “thought leaders” to notice, creates the perfect conditions for a rebellion against this regime of analytical intelligence. What’s salvageable? Where do we look for alternatives? How do we resist without reinforcing it?
Right Story, Wrong Story is so good, and laugh out loud funny! Looking forward to a reread