Cross post from Antonio Dias, Reflections on the Dark Mountain

I went to the Dark Mountain, the home of Uncivilization, and found a living culture. I didn’t know that’s what I would find, my hopes tied up and caught up in theoretical frameworks positing the likelihood of just such a thing. The flimsiness of my previous scope of interaction having been overcompensated by mental calculationsContinue

Cross-post from Antonio Dias, adw

On the eve of leaving for the upcoming Dark Mountain Festival in Llangollen, Wales I’m adding another short story to this constellation of sites. I wrote The Island last September. While I think all of my fiction, as well as my other writing, comes out of a sensibility I share with other Dark Mountain writing,Continue

Clearing the Mind

As the ramp-up to the Dark Mountain Festival gains momentum and these ideas find outlets in wider circles so many people don’t know what to make of this view. They seem to equate the active work of plumbing the depths of our actual situation, stripping away shallow assumptions and hazy pseudo-mythologies that cocoon us within an acceptance of the status quo, as the only possible alternative to some deeply dystopian “end of the world.” They equate this action with “doing nothing” while valuing “doing something,” even as they can find no evidence that whatever their particular “something” is will help. It’s not working.

the Mainstream’s Misunderstanding

This is where art comes in. It’s not in essays or speeches, all of which are so hard to distinguish from polemic by their very form, that minds can be affected. In fiction, in visual art, in poetry we have the best means of establishing a body of shareable “experiences” that begin to forge a new way of being in the world. These can have the effect of drawing people to them as opposed to simply setting up their defenses to resist new ideas. In an eagerness to misunderstand whenever someone hears that “poetry is the answer,” they will only see whatever form of art they personally dislike and find easy to discount. Probe a little deeper and there isn’t anyone who isn’t affected by poetry, of the kind they do open themselves to, by whatever name it goes by.

The Confusion of Cost & Value*

Economics is a fiction attempting to turn linear costs into a semblance of a circular system. We’re fed the line that by paying a cost we provide a benefit and, in turn either directly or indirectly, another benefit will come around to us. This is a line, a lie, since economic costs all ultimately settle onto “externalities.” While these are external to the economic fairy tale, they directly impinge on the Earth’s capacities – including all of our human capacities. We all pay costs, most of them hidden – not so successfully any more, just look at the Gulf of Mexico, before the media has messaged us all into believing it’s “normal” to have a dead sea pumping oil out into the Atlantic in a Gulf™ Stream. These costs accrue and compound and eventually come due; but not in the way the economic fairy tale would have it.

Imbeciles with High IQs

He says, in brief, that any culture advanced enough to be capable of interstellar space travel will be such über-consuming colonizing depradating monsters that we would stand as much chance of surviving contact with them as a West African on the arrival of Shell, or an Amazonian on meeting Rio Tinto.

@Ashcloud

The scar tissue will grow over this most recent intrusion of reality into the delusional system of civilization. Its touts will close over the raw gaps quickly and we’ll all breath a sigh of relief.