“Living longer means you witness the daily onslaught of stupid and mean that passes for reality.
Living longer means you witness the toggle between progression and backlash, over and over like a tennis game from hell.
Living longer means you meet young people who are better or worse versions of who you once were.
Living longer means you draw the logic of your perspective into a latticework of meaning that purportedly helps you see patterns, something you might call “maturity.” But more often than not it feels like you’re just decorating a cage of your own design, rendering yourself unsupple and resistant to change.
Living longer means coming to terms with whether or not this is true, every day.”
It was around this time I was given a room at The House of Climate Grief. What exactly is this place? I would tell you if I knew but I really have no idea. Almost no idea. There are about a hundred of us here. Every few months someone leaves only to be quickly replaced.
There are classes, discussion groups, film screenings, walks in the surrounding grounds, music recitals, communal meals plus other things I might be forgetting. Despite the severity of the times the mood was often cordial.
When I arrived there was a mantra that often repeated in my head: I can’t cope. That was the rationale for coming here. To get some distance from my daily life in the hopes it might allow me to find a way forward. The fact that he died, and that I now heard people singing his praises so often, might have been a factor in this more recent inability to cope. But there were of course other factors. Everything was part of everything.
You could choose to participate in the activities or choose to keep to yourself. For the first few weeks I mostly kept to myself. Until one day there was a knock at my door from a carefully diplomatic employee who had been sent to explain that the organization would appreciate it if I were to participate in at least some of the activities. And if I continued to abstain I would eventually be asked to leave. It wasn’t yet clear to me if I wanted to stay, but the idea of being forced to leave also didn’t appeal to me, so the next morning I found myself carefully examining the weekly schedule, indecisive in some way that was exceptionally familiar to me, until finally I settled on a discussion group entitled Voting For The Thing You Don’t Want, a title which appealed to my contrary streak. It began in one hour, and I decided to fill that hour with a contemplative walk around the grounds, something I’d previously planned but had not yet got around too.
The grounds had clearly been rewilded. A chaotic tangle of plants, trees, and grasses everywhere you looked. I was later to learn that there was much food to be foraged in this tangle, but for now my perceptions had not yet been trained to identify any of it. I walked slowly, leaving space for observation and regret.
Being here reminds me of the movie Safe by Todd Haynes. A movie I saw when I was young.
Another thing about this time, I was thinking a great deal about conversion experiences. I wanted something along those lines for myself and I wanted to trigger something similar in others. Often what you want to do, or what you think you’re doing, is not what you’re actually doing. You’re doing something else. That something else might be what you actually want to do, rather than what you think you want to do. But these two possibilities need not be in opposition. My goal, in short, was to bring them closer together.
I’m the first to arrive at Voting For The Thing You Don’t Want. A circle of folding chairs in an otherwise empty room. I sit in one of the chairs and wait. There is so much to think about but instead I find myself barely thinking at all. It seems to make the time go more quickly, and I’m unsure how much time has passed before the first person arrives, who pauses at the doorway before asking me if I’m leading today’s workshop. I reply that I’m not, then ask them if they’re leading today’s workshop, which makes no sense. If they were leading today’s workshop they would have not asked me if I was. We immediately establish that neither of us is leading the workshop.
They sit in a chair across from me, on the other side of the circle. We both sit in silence. It is awkward. It grows more awkward over time, as no one else arrives. After a while I check the time. We’ve been waiting for thirty minutes. They see me looking at my watch and, I suppose, for that reason or some other, decide to break the ice: “What do you think that means: Voting For The Thing You Don’t Want?”
This is a perfectly reasonable question but I have to admit I haven’t given the matter much thought. If I were to take a literal approach, and consider what we might call a “normal election in a representative democracy,” it’s true that when I vote I always have the feeling that I’m voting for something I actually don’t want. But my first instinct is to interpret the title less literally. I start thinking about the difficulty of knowing what one wants, something that has always been a problem for me. By coming here, I was hoping to get away from mundane, everyday decisions. With those things taken care of, my hope was that I could then move on to more substantial questions. I was led to believe we have all come here with some sense of unspoken purpose. None of these thoughts feel like the right thing to say in this particular moment, so instead I decide to throw the question back at them: “I’m not sure. What do you think it means?”
For a long moment I’m worried they’ll reply with ‘I don’t know, what do you think it means?’ but this anxiety is unfounded. Nonetheless, just as moments ago I made them wait, now it is their turn to make me wait. (This also draws attention to the fact that we are probably no longer waiting for anyone else to attend or lead this session.) Finally, they begin to speak, and to the best of my recollection this is more or less what they say: “I’ve been here for about three weeks now. It’s a strange place. I can’t quite figure it out. There’s a schedule of activities but only some of the activities actually seem to happen. Some of the others don’t seem to be real. But I’m not even sure about that. Because the two of us are here, which is a situation that has a certain reality to it. Perhaps whatever you and I end up discussing is now the activity. You and I are Voting For The Thing We Don’t Want. This discussion we’re having right now is it. But that’s just a whimsical idea. I’ve always believed in making the best of any difficult situation. But in the past I’ve always been able to more or less identify what the situation was. Here I can’t even tell what exactly it is that I’m trying to make the best of.”
I admit to my companion that this is the first activity I’ve attended, so I have no point of comparison. I then recount the recent story of how I wasn’t participating in any of the activities, and was admonished by a staff member into doing so. So I speculate that perhaps many others here are also avoiding the activities, and the staff is concurrently working to rectify the situation. If one decides to come here, one is likely involved in a fairly high degree of despair and despair is not a state of mind that lends itself to participating in daily, poorly organized activities.
I pause as we both mull this over. Just then a third person enters the room. Unlike either of us, they begin by immediately introducing themselves. Their name is Lowen. I say “Hello Lowen,” but for some reason don’t offer up my name in return and neither does my companion on the other side of the circle, who instead says “Are you here to lead the workshop?” Unsurprisingly, Lowen is not here to lead the workshop, but nonetheless finds a seat and joins us in the circle.
Lowen apologizes for being late and explains the reason is that the previous workshop he’d attended ran over. They’re still trying to get his head around it all. It really stressed them out. The reason it ran over was the discussion at the end had transformed into a rather heated argument, stopping just short of physical violence, which I found surprising. Lowen worried that this session would also turn into a violent group argument and we both assured them it seemed unlikely.
Without prompting, Lowen goes on to describe the nature of the group argument. They were discussing stories. How important stories were for creating social change. And there seemed to be a general agreement in the room that stories were important. That stories shaped the way people think and changing people’s underlying assumptions was of the upmost importance.
But then someone said that, overall, this discussion was completely pissing them off. That all this emphasis on changing the stories that were the basis of our cultural norms were okay as far as they went, but in his opinion didn’t go anywhere near far enough. Because on top of all that we needed to blow up oil pipelines, assassinate fossil fuel CEOs and board members, blockade shipping ports, burn down police stations and break open prisons, and generally attack all physical infrastructure currently enforcing the status quo. Only then would there be enough room for the new stories and ways of thinking that seemed so important to everyone in this room. He took an aggressive approach to making these points, yet he was also concise, which was appreciated.
The first responses to his outburst were conciliatory. Of course one approach did not preclude the other. All approaches were necessary. This particular workshop focused on using stories to create change. If he wanted to lead one, or many, workshops that focused on strategies for direct action, he was both welcome and invited to do so.
All of this only made him angrier. Didn’t we all realize that the time for idle talk was done.
Someone replied that we could assassinate all the CEO’s we wanted, there would always be new assholes to take their place. If we didn’t change people’s stories, people’s understanding of the world, change them to the extent that people no longer wanted to be CEOs of anything, we would never be able to break the cycle.
“No,” the angry man shot back, “you don’t understand. It’s too late for all that. Everything’s collapsing. People won’t be able to become CEOs because all multinational corporations will have collapsed. You can’t become a CEO of a corporation that no longer exists. But we need to stop them before they drag everything else down with them.”
The arguments against such clear-eyed alarmism also grew more heated and soon half the room was working to shout him down. Lowen didn’t actually stay to the end, doesn’t know the full end of the story, slipped out when everyone was yelling. In general, their nervous system was not able to withstand that level of heated conflict.
There was a pause as I worked to process everything they’d just told us. This current session seemed much quieter than the one Lowen recounted. It seemed there were many different kinds of activities. Lowen did seem shaken. I wondered if I would have been shaken if I had been there. In general, I found many difficult situations fairly manageable, while also finding it difficult to predict which reasonable situations I might find challenging. I was rarely shy in the face of conflict, but nonetheless often avoided it. I tried to imagine myself blowing up a pipeline or setting a police station on fire. It was nice to imagine, but hard to believe I would have the nerve to actually do so. Maybe in the future that could change.
Lowen said: “So can someone tell me about Voting For The Thing You Don’t Want?” Neither of us could. So, following our previous pattern, we asked Lowen what they thought it meant. They didn’t hesitate: “People now live bombarded by false desires. Whatever you think you want is likely not going to work. I’m not just talking about consumerism. On every level we want what we don’t want and that’s what we get. I think both of you know what I mean.”
We both agreed that we knew what they meant. It was something about being a person. When you were a person you didn’t just make yourself. You were also made by your environment. And our environments were giving us false flags from the moment we were born.
This session was scheduled for one hour and my companion on the other side of the circle now mentioned the hour was almost up. Most of the activities were allotted two or three hours, but for some reason this one was shorter. Maybe the thing we were supposed to vote for, that we didn’t want, was a longer session. We politely said our goodbyes and a strange emptiness overcame me as I retraced my steps on the way back to my room. I now knew a little bit more about this place and, at the same time, also knew less than ever.
Ryan Dombal: “…your career is a good example of how being an underdog isn’t necessarily something to overcome.”
Robert Wyatt: “Well, that’s about the nicest thing anybody’s said to me in years. I hope that’s the truth. It’s not even a moral question. It’s a question of pride. You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, and I don’t know how some people do that. God knows I’ve been so wicked and selfish in the past, but nevertheless, I do really think the things I think and support the people I support. I would encourage people to realize that you don’t have to panic if you’re not part of a mainstream or if you find yourself outside the flow. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t go along with it. Just sit it out and get your stuff done. Don’t just sit moaning or getting drunk—I spent some years doing that. But if you can just come up with something of your own, however minor it is, that’s going to be easier to live with when you’re at the end of your life.”
“I kind of had nervous breakdown in ‘95. I felt burnt out before my time and just collapsed. I just didn’t want to be me anymore. I was tired of it, though not suicidal. A lot of the stuff we’re talking about is me attempting to find an identity outside of the given one, whether it’s listening to Spanish music or Russian communist music or black music. They’re all ways of getting out of the prison of self, really. But at that point, I couldn’t get out. I just felt trapped. Maybe that was a decade-late delay about the accident – at last, the difficulty I was in kicked in. Alfie and I spent most of our time in a sort of fancy wooden cabin on the coast at this point, half an hour away from where we lived in Lincolnshire, and there was no electricity. We didn’t even have records. We listened to stories you could get on cassette.
I got some treatment. I actually went to the doctor and went to anxiety management classes. Alfie said, “I can’t handle this at all,” because I’d gone mad. She’d dealt with everything up to that point, but not that. I came out of that and started working on a record, which became Shleep, and that’s really what took me out of it.
I’d been making records on my own, and somebody said, “Why don’t you get some other people in? You don’t have to marry them. They can just spend a couple of days at your house and do a song with you.” And I thought, "Why not?" From that point on, my records got more crowded. [laughs] It’s helped me. I made two or three records totally solo, and I was going mad in this musical isolation. I just felt so cut off from the world.”