Homeward Bound: The Threads I Want to Follow

For those who have enquired about joining the online series, beginning on Thursday 14th May, 2020

What’s the heart of the offering I’m making with Homeward Bound? I sat with this question, and another question came by way of answer: suppose that I had two months to live, and I had the energy to spend one evening a week speaking with a group of people who had been touched in some way by my words and my work — what would I teach them, in the time that I had left? Because that’s what I want to offer here.

There are two threads that I want to follow, through the next eight weeks. One is a personal story, the other a larger story — large enough that I can only gesture towards it, without claiming to know how it ends. Both stories have to do with how we find our bearings, what constellations of meaning we steer by.

The personal story is woven of the encounters (with texts, with people, with people through texts) through which I came to find a sense of direction and the course my life has followed. I will be sharing the lines that I treasure, the words that have proven true on the days when little else makes sense. This is the backstory to the organisations with which I’ve been associated — Dark Mountain, but also Spacemakers and this school called HOME — so I’ll be retracing the path from abandoning what looked like the beginnings of a successful career in my mid-twenties, to the years in my early thirties when I came into that role of talking projects into being and weaving the relationships that gave them a chance of taking root.

The larger story emerges from the thinking that animates those projects, the weave of friendships and sources of inspiration in which they have been held. It is about bringing into awareness the deep assumptions by which we have mostly been taught to navigate: tracing the histories of these assumptions, how they infuse the institutions and the ways of seeing we have inherited, what it might mean to steer by other constellations and landmarks, and how we could start to do this, even now. It’s a story about finding beauty within limits, turning for home, without imagining that this could be as simple as going ‘back’.

I’ve yet to finalise the sequence, but here are some of the themes I’m intending to cover, week by week:

• Where We Meet — a story of loss and vocation, loss and lostness as a precondition for finding your bearings, the cost of walking away without having a good answer as to why, and the finding of those few precious things and trustworthy examples out of which you may slowly craft an answer — and how these experiences might accord with the collective journeys called for in a time of unravelling.
• Wishing on Space Hardware — tracing the legacies of Stewart Brand and Ivan Illich, as emblematic of two entwined but ultimately opposed attitudes to ecological crisis and the Earth as a home.
• What do we talk about when we talk about culture? — on the relationship between the ‘Culture’ section of the Sunday newspaper and the ‘cultures’ which anthropology set out to study, and how a deeper understanding of culture in both these senses might help us slip the trap of the narratives of ‘civilisation’ and ‘nature’ that often shape the conversation about the crises around and ahead of us.
• Rigorous subjectivity & the trickster moment — on the activities that sometimes go under the name of art, the roles that those of us engaged in such activities might play in times like these, drawing on what I learned from ten years with Dark Mountain and two years as leader of artistic development at Riksteatern, Sweden’s national theatre.
• Education as Displacement Activity — on the strangeness of schooling and its social functions, not least as a one-way elevator carrying those it rewards away from wherever they may have started out in life, and some places we can look for clues towards a culture of learning that doesn’t assume its function is to take us away from ‘home’ and prepare us ‘to work out there in the world’.
• Hidden forces & literacies of scale — on the practical possibilities that are hidden from view by the logic of the market and the state, and how attuning our eyes to these can help us create and sustain pockets of activity that might help seed the cultural landscape of the unknown world that lies ahead.

Homeward Bound will take place over Zoom, beginning at 8.15pm Swedish time on Thursday, 14th May, 2020 and running over eight weeks. Details of how to book are available here.