Kingsnorth and Me

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Somebody who knows me well wrote to say he’s shocked that I like Paul Kingsnorth because he’s the opposite of me. And OK, I’m still me, I disagree with about 80% of what Kingsnorth says. He detests industrial modernity. I love it. But that’s precisely why it’s interesting for me to read this author. I’m discovering an extremely different worldview. In the process, I’m learning stuff of which I would otherwise be utterly ignorant.

For example, Kingsnorth, a lifelong, passionate Green, explains how the Green movement changed into its exact opposite in the past 30 years. The Green New Deals we keep hearing about are a manifestation of a technocratic drive towards eliminating nature, Kingsnorth says. I honestly didn’t know there was any difference between 2002 Greens and today’s Greens who keep repeating the word “sustainability” like unhinged parrots. Turns out these two groups of Greens are engaged in an extinction-level battle against each other. I found this very helpful because I like nature but detest sustainability. I don’t like nature anything like Kingsnorth likes nature because dude clearly spent his whole life bemoaning that it’s impossible to live in a haystack. But it’s very useful to find out when and how things went sideways in eco circles.

I’m still reading Against the Machine, and much of it is alien to me but also every page has something new and useful.

Kingsnorth’s support for nationalism is all backwards and very nutty, for example, but that’s a topic for another post.

Feeling Understood

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This really spoke to me:

This is totally me and N. People online are calling this Eastern European slop and yes, guilty as charged.

A Narrow Escape

~ Clarissa ~ 4 Comments

This makes me want to do something extremely nice for my husband and child for not inflicting something like this on me. I’m not inflicting it on them either, so they must really appreciate me, as well.

Political Horizon

~ Clarissa ~ 18 Comments

What interesting things happened on our political horizon in the past week?

This is for my show.

Unlikeable Traits

~ Clarissa ~ 17 Comments

There’s nothing I dislike more in people than helplessness and self-infantilization. This is why I write obsessively about it in my research.

Imminent War

~ Clarissa ~ 19 Comments

Did you vote for this?

The Woodpecker Foreign Policy

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Only absolute morons keep doing the same thing over and over again and expect a different result:

Russians have demonstrated in every way possible that they don’t want a peace deal. Yet with the insistence of a schizoid woodpecker, the Trump administration keeps trying to engineer one. It’s a closed loop. No external information is allowed to seep in.

It’s the same with Iran.

Heart and Hearth

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One part of Paul Kingsnorth’s book Against the Machine that I really like talks about the increasingly frequent prohibitions on lighting fire in the fireplace of one’s own house. This was done in many parts of Canada, for example, and in Ireland where Kingsnorth lives. Kingsnorth is a lifelong conservationist and even a former Green. But he realizes that these prohibitions are not about nature.

The hearthstone has deep connotations in every European culture. Everybody knows the expression “heart and hearth” or its equivalent in their own European language. Our civilization arose from our capacity to survive and thrive in cold weather. The fireplace, thus, had a cosmological significance across time for Europeans, Kingsnorth explains. It symbolizes the warmth of the household. Somebody needs to stay at home and keep the fire going for those who go out into the cold. “She who guards the hearth” is how Ukrainians refer to a woman*. We say that a woman is the heart of the family because a child’s heart begins to beat under her own.

There’s a lot more to it though. Remember how we talked about focus? We are all in a battle against the technology that tries to destroy our focus, disperse our attention, and steal our capacity to create. Do you know what focus means in the Latin original?

It means fireplace.

If you’ve ever stared into a fireplace, you know why. In our shared European past, the hearth was a point of convergence, a place where the family gathered for warmth, companionship, and stories. We can gather around a fireplace. Or we can stare at individual screens that prevent us from focusing on our own thoughts.

“Lose your fires, and you lose your focus as a culture,” Kingsnorth says.

Thousands of years of cultural memory come alive for a descendant of Europeans who gathers firewood, chops it up, brings it home, and starts the fire. The fragrant smoke, the crackling logs, the jumping flames — all of it awakens the memory of the chain of generations before us that made, smelled, and saw the same fire. You can’t substitute for that with an electric fireplace.

This is what’s being taken from us. Our hearth, our home, our cultural memory. We are being deracinated and de-cultured.

*We say it with one word. Its the translation that’s clunky, not the original.

Book Notes: Bothelford’s Gone by Edward McLaren

~ Clarissa ~ 8 Comments

I’m a literary critic. I can’t like a book if it’s not well-written. There’s no consideration of political usefulness or ideological affinity that can vanquish my desire to read beautiful texts. This is why I am happy to report that in Edward McLaren’s novel Bothelford’s Gone I finally found a right-wing text with artistic value.

Bothelford’s Gone is not a political manifesto or a propaganda screed. It’s a work of art that is as complicated as the world it describes. It’s a Bildungsroman whose teenage protagonist tries to grow up in a world that ditched the idea of growth in favor of mindless, aggressively pursued change for its own sake.

McLaren’s diagnosis of Britain’s (and, by extension, the West’s) ills is neither shallow nor simplistic. The writer correctly intuits that what the Right urgently needs is a philosophy of the times. We need to explain the degradation of our reality, from the devastation of the natural world to the fraying of social bonds, in ways that eschew both convoluted conspiratorialism and superficial sloganeering. The novel is promoted as the first literary portrayal of Muslim rape gangs in Britain, and it is absolutely that. It is also much more.

Bothelford’s Gone portrays Britain as being profoundly spiritually unwell. Families fall apart, culture disintegrates, and meaningless licentiousness overpowers people who are glued to their screens in search of pornified titillation. Before Jack and Agatha, the novel’s teenage protagonists, were brutalized by foreigners, they were betrayed by their own self-indulgent and careless parents.

The novel leaves you wanting to think deeply and obsessively about the reality it portrays. This is how real art works. It becomes part of you. You go into the world, carrying it inside you and touching others with the traces of the art that transformed you. The concept of shared culture has disintegrated into volitional content with everybody consuming—and what a word this is!—their own, highly idiosyncratic list of cultural products. We don’t vibrate in sync because we don’t hear the same music of words, images, and rhythms. Whoever manages to overcome the isolating tendency of our times will win the future. Culture is only that if it is shared. We need to come together over real art.

Bothelford’s Gone is a good place to start.

The Fastest Battlefield Gain

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Once again, thank you, Elon.

It was really dire before he got involved and shut down Russians’ comms. I was completely desperate in early February. I thought Ukraine wouldn’t survive the month. And then there was this dramatic improvement.