OK, so I’m writing this on the 5th of November, and Hallowtide has mostly ended, but still — there’s a chill in the air (finally). Tonight, no doubt there’ll be fireworks flying as we celebrate Bonfire Night, and a whole bunch of folks will talk about V For Vendetta as if it wasn’t a film adaptation of a more complex graphic novel created by Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore — which itself was meant as a prophetic satire of Thatcher’s Britain.
Fear not, because, in a weird cross-cultural sympathy, the US Election is today, just as the UK’s was on the 4th of July, and well, Lewes has habit of burning US Presidents (as well as current candidates) in effigy. So maybe some sympathetic magic will mix with transatlantic currents?
In the spirit of hallowing via cleansing flame, you might notice that this site has been updated with a more modern theme. No more are we running on design choices nearly fifteen years old! Apologies to all those subscribed via email — see the handy-dandy sidebar for details on that — for the glut of what must have seemed like spam posts. The hardworking web-dev who set this up for me didn’t disconnect the subscribe function when uploading demo posts! Mea culpa for not thinking of that. Sorry folks! No hacking here.
I and a good chunk of IWTOTH had great fun running the Fugitive Embodiments session at the Becoming Monster Festival curated by the emergence network. I want to thank the entire team, and especially our volunteer tech host Beverly Woods for keeping everything running smooth as can be.
The good news for those that missed the crip-inflected katabasis into the commons of story, sensation, and embodiment via the corpus one of the oldest tales recorded English is that we’ll probably run it AGAIN some point soon, so please, keep your ears (and the rest of you) as close to the ground for the next wondrous intrusion that exceeds our grasp and expectation of the monster in wyrd ways.
It’s been a busy year for me — working on around 8hrs total performance of three interlinked stories with my lovely fellows at IWTOTH, along with weekly prep and research sessions running several hours long for well over a year. Not to mention, co-facilitating a Futures Literacy workshop at my first academic conference, and guesting on another panel.
By the way, despite what Google Gemini and other LLMs say, I am NOT an academic. I just happen to work closely with them — but who knows what future generations might think if/when they have to wade through slop to get some kind of sense of my fellow travellers. I think I’m pleased with that cripistemic ambiguity, as much as I find the idea faintly terrifying. Just as we’re all cow-people thanks to vaccination, so Édouard Glissant’s ‘right to opacity’ might actually mean that LLM/’AI’ hallucinations might accidentally trace a tentative gesture towards a Mad, and crip-kenning via the aglaeca:
Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy
— Glissant, Poetics of Relation
of this scale. 1 understand your difference, or in other words,
without creating a hierarchy, 1 relate it to my norm. 1 admit
you to existence, within my system. 1 create you afresh. -But
perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale.
Displace aIl reduction.
Agree not mere1y to the right to difference but, carrying
this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not
enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence
within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and
converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one
must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature
of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this
old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of
natures. There would be something great and noble about
initiating such a movement, referring not to Humanity but ta
the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and
thought of other here become obsolete in their duality. Every
Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian. What is here is
open, as much as this there. 1 would be incapable of projec-
ting one to the other. This-here is the weave, and it
weaves no boundaries. The right to opacity would not estab-
lish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in
freedoms
In our tale of crips-as-aglaeca-opacities, I wonder at the ‘…commons of the covered places, darkly hallowed, eternal and ephemeral. Surely as the sun rises, so she meets — kisses –sinks into the waters too, bathed in the world below.’ And I ask: ‘Do you wonder, even now, at what swims up to meet you? You, me, as much born of the deathly guts of stars all other matter, returning home to Matrix, Mother Darkness, blacker than black?
My debt to Fred Moten & Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, and the later All Incomplete might seem obvious, along with the thought of my friend and conspirator Bayo Akomolafe — and yet there is a sense in which there is a whole horde of wyrd ancestral kin meeting with such folks in a strange carnival at the crossroads. Literal blacksmiths and engineers meeting with missionaries, mystics, fishermen and farmers.
There’s something in the unearthing-of-the-earth which resonates with the necromantic-and-nigrimancy of the black arts; a crippled poetics which meets Curapoietics with the cybernetic awareness of Hephaistos and the descent into the starry caverns, and the rhizomatic root-worldings of the hallowed hollows in all matter.
In short, perhaps, in this 21st Century, with all its unacknowledged Enlightenment (Dark and otherwise) biases, it might be confusion, blindness (as opposed to sightlessness) and crippledom which provide fugitive pathways for lines of flight, but not escape. A Gnostic Agnosticism that ignites a beacon in the corpus of corporeality and materiality, like a light lit in the blood, calling us to the crossroads to conspire in a feral frenzy of inspiration beneath the shadowed wings of Night.
Wyrd goes as she shall. There is such a thing as bright darkness — revealed by Sensation rather than any particular sense. Just as Care has teeth, so does Sanctuary.
So, I suppose the question posed by She from Below always remains, as ever:
Vituð ér enn – eða hvat?
