Be cause
I invent worlds, commercial campaigns and artistic moments with language at their heart. I’ve spent my life thinking about what writing can do. If you favour my ideas and style then please consider sharing my website with the ambitious brand owners and sensitive artistic patrons in your life. I’m an independent practitioner and I do what I do through building partnerships. Here is a list of some people I’ve worked with so far.
I do like writing.
To form a fresh world from imagination and then to tackle the gnarly technical challenges arising as you transubstantiate airy thought into immutable language.
One of my buried knowns is that I could have been things other than a poet. We all like the romantic idea of vocations don’t we? The idea some force vaster than ourselves (though isn’t everything) allocated a role for us in utero. ‘You’re a nuclear physicist’, ‘you’re a radio DJ’, ‘you’re an oceanographer’, ‘you’re a sculptor’ … and if we pay heed to the calling, our life’s flow will be true. Aristotle’s entelechy.
Makes for a good personal brand.
But I know the way my mind works and I think it’s predominantly a pattern-spotter and problem-solver. I would have loved to have been a scientist. The creative act for me is about seeing patterns in reality, having an idea that synthesises them in a new way and then *solving* the many, many mechanical language problems that crop up.
So why apply this approach to poetry and art and words and pictures? Well – and this is a recent realisation for me – I think it’s to do with the importance of non-linear causality.
Hold that thought, I’m going to come back to it. But first, three stories …
Story one. That’s the solstice sunrise on June 21st in Kent, England at around 4.40am. I’ve walked through meadows and fields to get to this hill. The clouds weren’t awake yet and lay languidly on the ground. My shoes and trousers are soaked.
I was due to see this sunrise from Hackney Marshes in London. Along with friends David of Accept & Proceed, Clare and Charlie of XR, and Stuart and Nova of Breathpod, plus anyone else who wants to join, we’ve started greeting the equinox and solstice dawns. We’ve called these gatherings ‘We Don’t Know What This Is’. A comfortably uncertain name.
But at the start of the week I got a late invitation to join the Dark Angels at Bore Place in Kent on a retreat they were running. It was too good an offer to ignore. Bucolic surroundings, lovely food and new friends. But it was also *useful* because I was just completing the final sections of my new book, The Idyllegy. This work is a pastoral and receiving an unexpected invitation into Arcadia seemed to come from Pan himself.
Bore Place was glorious. It was the longest stretch I’ve ever had in my whole life to focus purely on poetic writing.
And the solstice sun appears. As it does so, something else beautiful happens. An eerie sing-song chanting begins from the woods to my left. Maybe local pagans, maybe the Good Folk. It deepens an already spiritual moment into something vibrating with glorious humanity. It’s a moment which will stay with me.
Story two. I met and talked with Mary Moore, Henry Moore’s daughter, recently. She was *magnificent*. Intelligent, imperious, forceful, sensitive.
I’m creating a brand campaign for the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens and we needed her approval. Happily she liked the work. Her perspectives were both macro and micro – instantly grasping the overall brand positioning the campaign offered, but also zeroing in on subtleties of font weight and kerning. A rare skill.
‘I was trained to judge form at an early age’ she told me and I was reminded of the story from the opening of this interview with her.
‘For Mary Moore's eighth birthday party her father produced a set of bathroom scales and invented a game that involved guessing the weight of each guest. 'He was very accurate - within a couple of pounds,' she says now, over 50 years later, and clearly still tickled by the memory. 'Of course, as a sculptor, he was used to weighing lumps of stone. It was bizarre and ridiculous but at the same time I totally accepted it. I do remember being slightly embarrassed because I thought we were going to play pass the parcel or something conventional.’
Story three. I was at Cambridge University shortly after the Kent solstice, giving a talk to scientists about my ‘Dataset’s Dream’ installation, and then sitting on a panel discussing art and science collaborations.
I created the ‘Dataset’s Dream’ with Bryony Benge-Abbott, it’s a piece about bio-diversity loss and bringing our imagination to nature. It depicts the UK’s butterfly and moth dataset having its first dream. Its full title is ‘Beginning today we’ll rebuild the world from all of the good little feelings everyone is having.’ The butterfly effect if you will.
After a recent showing, Guardian Country Diary writer, author, and co-founder of Right To Roam, Amy Jane-Beer had this to say …
‘Last night, a dream. I loved this so much. I loved how exploring the installation made us part of it, loved that the experience will be unique for every moth-person, every time, loved the way connections and relationships between place and poetry and light materialised and passed in moments that won't be repeated. I loved the colour, the mesmerising lights, the setting was perfect. What you can't hear in the videos but I could through headphones, the dreaming voice of the vast UKCEH lepidopteran dataset exploring its own content and context... strange, beguiling, even down to little Al stumbles in phrasing. A little bit of nerd magic.’
That’s not story three though. The story is that after the talk to the scientists, whilst I was at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, I met Boaty McBoatface.
Lots of readers of this Substack are non-UK, so let me share the legend.
In 2016 the British Natural Environment Research Council held a search for name suggestions for their new £200 million polar scientific research ship.
BBC Radio Jersey presenter James Hand added Boaty McBoatface to the online poll and – with the slow inevitability of petrochemical-sponsored rising waters – the name gathered 124,109 votes, becoming the most popular choice.
Then the actual government intervened and the ship was titled the ‘Sir David Attenborough’, despite this moniker coming only fifth and receiving less than ten times the votes Boaty McBoatface did. That name was given instead to the submersible you see above.
And ‘McBoatfacing’ became a new verb, defined as ‘making the critical mistake of letting the internet decide things’.
But the amazing thing is that, because of the saga, Boaty McBoatface has a whole wikipedia entry detailing the science that it does. Which wouldn’t exist if a radio DJ hadn’t tried to prank a poll.
Non-linear causality. My love for poetry and creativity and design and art and all the magic we do is really a love for non-linear causality.
We live in a world which has an operating system defined by rationalist science and growth-focussed capitalism. A system which tells us the best kind of causality is linear and mechanistic in nature. Pull a lever, something happens. Raise interest rates, reduce inflation. Strangle artistic education and more people will take up maths. It’s a world dominated by left brain thinkers. Ideal cause and effect are regarded as being, if not almost adjacent in time, at least clearly explicable. And should always be purposeful. We are told to do one thing to make another, beneficial, thing occur. We must control stuff.
Which is why creativity – or let’s be a bit more soulful about it and say human spontaneity – is often so mistrusted and sidelined. Unless it’s given an economic weight (usually rebadged as ‘innovation’) the activity of just making stuff up as a way of laughing joyfully into the abyss doesn’t figure much in our cultural conversations.
Our current system likes the linear. It isn’t set up to deal with the idea of non-linear causality. It just doesn’t understand things that seem … ambiguous, pointless, surreal.
The three stories are about non-linear causality. Creative acts without obvious purpose, other than to amuse, which have genuine but unpredictable outcomes.
Perhaps the easiest to affirm is Boaty McBoatface – a Dad / Dada joke by a DJ resulting in a wikipedia entry explaining science.
Less obvious is Mary Moore’s genius sculptor father guessing children’s weights at her birthday party. But in my conversation with Mary I felt that that practice, that way of looking at the world, installed at an early age, flavoured her considered judgement on my creative work.
And least linear is the chanting I heard from the woods as I watched the solstice sunrise. A creative act carried out by people who will *never* know they reached me or how I their voices now live in my mind.
We do the artistic thing because the gravitational waves it creates in reality always result in something *unexpected*. We do the artistic thing because we sense deep below the rational oceans there are currents of chance essential to societal and personal evolution. We do the artistic thing because the non-utilitarian creative act is the essence of existence.
And really our creative work reminds us of this all the time. Put aside your notions of ‘process’ and ‘strategy’ and ‘research’ – they’re just concepts radiating from the rational world determined to order everything in its own image – and recognise that when you make stuff up you do so in a non-linear, non-rational, ambiguous manner. The form of the playing is also the effect it has. Micro to macro.
Scientific, utilitarian thinking led to the bomb and the dropping of the bomb. Chance discoveries, instinct and the echoes of form cluttering Henry Moore’s workshops led to beauty.
You might enjoy this story about how David Lynch cast an actor as the terrifying demon villain BOB in Twin Peaks. Watch until the end.
The book I was completing in Bore Place around the solstice is The Idyllegy. It’s released now. One hundred copies. It’s about Arcadia. There are fifteen copies left. You could buy one of those here if you wished.
Set in landscape format the verses of the work are scattered around the pages like classical ruins. It’s designed that way to allow readers to doodle through the meadow of white space. I like collaborations and it pleases me very much to think every copy has the potential to be an artistic partnership. New currents.
There are also five artists who are illustrating five unique copies right now. These are Geraldine Hudson, Will of Margaret, Wendy Haydock, Bryony Benge-Abbott and Joanna Hruby.
Non-linear poetic relationships. One person’s imagination being responded to by other imaginations and that creating something that didn’t exist before.
When completed towards the end of September, we are going to auction off these five copies for an environmental charity. I haven’t figured out the best way to do this yet – online or in-person – suggestions welcome.
I chose the poem below because it is non-linear, but also about accepting non-linearity. Plus Oppenheimer of course. Should you fancy it with pictures, Lynch and a Barbie reference then here’s my instagram version.
If I have ever been loved
If I have ever been loved,
may it be for what I love in myself.
And if I have never been loved
little boy, it’ll be because
I could not accept myself. Acceptance
metaphor. The morning bomber’s mothering hum.
Lulled, August-white sky.
Even coldmountain echoes
pacify, like milk.
Nuclear codes radio in.
Belly doors open with a rich man’s pride.
An atomic cloud sucks up itself selfishly
and sucks up all the shadows of the city
into the impossible entelechial object.
Generals and pilots accept that this is what
they must do and you, too, must accept that
this is what the unloved do.
If I have ever been loved,
may it be for what I love in myself.
I will, and put a frame around it, too.
I'd like to doodle my way through this letter, but Substack doesn't allow for it.
Splendid ponderings. Very resonant.