Layers

As I cycled with River along the seafront this morning, there was a dense layer of cloud along the horizon. It was well below freezing, and the sand was frozen under our tyres, cracking and popping when we hit the drifts that partly obscure the promenade out of season (in summer, the beach is groomed and perfect, swept clean overnight, and brushed smooth before dawn, by a swarm of tractors that retreat before sunrise, like a ski resort, but with surf).

There was a bright orange dot int the cloud, and River asked me what it was: I answered that it was the sun. He was intrigued by this, I think the first time he had considered the layers of the sky, how the clouds do not replace the sun, but rather that they obscure it. And the sun was fighting back, burning through the cloud. By the time we made our way to wind up the cliff path, it had won the battle, bathing us in that winter light that carries with it the hint, a promise, of warmth.

It made me think about the layers of our own understanding and insight: how some things obscure or hide others, and what causes truth, belief, or action, to burn through.

In the new Planetary work, I talk in detail about how we have distanced ourselves from our natural world, and what it has cost us. We have lost texture, belonging, motion. We traded it away for an extractive and exploitative fiction, a civilisation that preys upon, denudes, the ecosystem that it inhabits, from our fast fashions to rapid transport, our paved streets and industrial farms. We have sought to control nature and in the process we have lost a connection to it.

This work seeks to set a new context: to see how technology has altered our social context, and how our legacy of nations based on blood and soil are being overturned by digital citizenships and fluid identities. It is the foundations of a new social order and social identity: the roads along which the stories and narratives of our societies flow have proliferated and shifted, becoming a tangled web of both opportunity and fear.

We are, at heart, storytelling creatures: stories are the basic units of our culture. Perhaps we need space to listen, to share, to remember and recite, and to rewrite certain of these stories. To reconnect ourselves to something of great value, that we have lost. A connection within our ecosystem, a planetary philosophy.