“All the means we’ve been given to stay alert we use to ornament our sleep. If instead of endlessly inventing new ways to make life more comfortable we’d apply our ingenuity to fabricating instruments to jog man out of his torpor!”
​ ― René Daumal, Mount Analogue

There seems to be a growing sense within the dominant culture that there isn’t much left to do that is worthwhile; that the effort to do something and become someone doesn’t seem worth the bother; that the energy and time expended on a project won’t give a measurable return. Life coach types say things like “It’s the process, not the product” (that is important in life), but coming from their self-referential lips “the process” seems like a mere consolation prize. What’s the use in trying to carve out a path for ourselves with the whole system stacked against us,  when it is so much easier to slip into the sleep of passivity?

            In a consumerist society where so many of our wants are catered to, it is easy for the muscle of willpower to atrophy. Our own dreams, the ones we wake up to in the middle of the night, the ones that burn with a sense of urgency, slide down and have a way of becoming less important the more we acquiesce to being spectators of life, audience members at the Main Characters’ show under the big top. So many people feel stuck in service-industry jobs, mouthed off at by Kyles and Karens and snubbed by the whims of management. Others feel stuck in a Matrix–style simulation, disconnected from reality. Perhaps these feelings are behind the memes about Non-Player Characters I’ve seen circulating on the internet.[1]

            Those McGovCorp McManagers have much to gain from keeping us on the line at the fry station. A few may get promoted to assemble Happy Meals and keep the store going, but it seems only a few get to walk through the golden arches and into the gated communities beyond. In my book, having all my wants catered to by rising up the ladder of the kleptocracy is not a meaningful promotion. I’d rather have my actual needs met.  

            This is where one of the key values of the generation I was born into enters into play: slack. Generation X, the Slacker Generation, the Latchkey Kids. Though the ethic of slack doesn’t belong to one age group alone, I think Gen X has done the most to popularize the ideal in the decades since the seventies. A little extra slack may be a saving grace for those who choose to become slackers in the years to come.

            If passivity and lack of willpower are a problem, it seems strange that the idea of being a slacker is an antidote to an absence of personal agency. Slackers have been defined as people who shirk responsibility, who try to get out of work, who are disaffected, apathetic, and cynical. While I concede that these may be part of what it means to be a slacker, I deny that being a slacker means you are without ambition. The question must be: ambition for what, and for who?

            Richard Linklater, writer and director of the 1990 cult-classic indie film Slacker, talked about the word in an interview for Mondo 2000, saying that “I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who's just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I'd like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who's trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”

            Another connotation of being a slacker is that you have the ability to achieve, but you are purposefully an underachiever, often out of protest to the blatant materialism of Western society.  Such conscientious objectors often end up being involved with some form of bohemian subculture. That’s the kind of slacker the 2020s would do well to see a resurgence of. If you’re not doing what’s expected of you now, that list might include not scrolling on your phone, not watching TV, not playing video games, not going to college; because you don’t do these things, you get to move past Go and receive a get out of jail free card. For me, the biggest of these are, first, to make the effort to avoid social media and mainstream media, and second, to not just be a consumer of literature, music, art, but also someone who engages with these ancient forms of leisure and recreation by making them myself, in some way or other. The deindustrial slacker is one who uses their time to  make more than consume and spectate.

Slacking off is a way to sidestep the rat race of meaningless work and the hamster wheel of 21st century busyness in favor of doing your own thing. It’s hard to learn new skills and make preparations for leaner times if there is no slack in the schedule, and you’re always strapped for time. 

            The slacker has time to think their own thoughts. From out of those thoughts, they have time to contemplate and think other related thoughts and develop their own takes on current events, rather than just regurgitating the AI-generated talking points of the talking heads.

            Often the slacker will have a job. What the slacker often won’t have is a career (in the narrow sense of the word, as something for which a person went out and got a degree, did some interning, and then landed with the perfect company). The job is often there to help them pay the bills (most Gen X slackers wanted to get out of the parental units’ house as soon as possible—and in their time that was still economically viable). In time, the work they do on the side might lead them into what sociologists have called a subcultural career: the ancillary work within various businesses necessary to maintain some of the larger subcultures.  Working for a skateboard company, doing live sound at a music venue, or having a gig as a tattoo artist or body piercer are just a few examples. I think subcultural careers could also be pivoted towards those endeavors that would be useful in a less high-tech world, such as cottage industries around the revival of lost arts that may be niche now, but will see wider adoption as the flood of cheap goods become less and less cheap.

            One way to develop such a skill and learn the lore surrounding a craft or hobby is by joining a club, guild or folk school. At the beginning of September my wife and I attended a “Gathering of the Guilds” held by the Weavers Guild of Greater Cincinnati. This group goes back to 1940’s and was founded as an educational non-profit to promote interest in handweaving. It has blossomed to teach everything from spinning, felting, knitting, dyeing, basketry and a wide variety of other fiber arts and techniques. As the Weaver’s Guild grew, they were able to buy a home to house their operations. This year in celebration of their 75th anniversary they hosted the gathering on their property as a way to showcase the rich variety of opportunities to be educated in a craft that are available in my city. It was also a chance for artisans to sell their wares. The other guilds in attendance included: Cincinnati Blacksmiths Guild, Cincinnati Book Arts Society, Clay Alliance, Contemporary Quilt and Fabric Arts, Greater Cincinnati Lapidary and Faceting Society, Ohio Valley Basketweaver's Guild, Ohio Valley Enameling Guild, Ohio Valley Woodturners Guild, and Tiger Lily Press. It seemed like a massive success, as the place was a packed hive that bustled with activity.

Folk schools provide similar opportunities for learning traditional skills. Notable examples in the United States include the John C. Campbell Folk School on the North Carolina side of the Smokey Mountains and the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota.  In addition to traditional handicrafts, some folks schools also teach dancing and music as part of their celebration of passing on culture. With so many interests and things to learn and do slackers don’t have much of a problem with  boredom. Boredom is something the slacker associates with the dominant culture, because it rhymes with banality. For all their supposed inactivity, they get a lot done, and it’s nice to have a conversation with them because they tend to be readers and learners with active interests in a variety of topics. The reason for their disaffection is because of their actual devotion to helping the bohemian diaspora to flourish. This is why they will devote Saturday afternoons to hosting actual radio shows that play underground music, or keeping the lights on at an independent gallery or bookstore where they’ve stayed after to clean up the leftover wine and beer bottles after the poetry reading.

            Boredom is something they’ve even learned to cultivate and accept, because when boredom arrives it is a symptom that they haven’t been paying enough attention, and perhaps a reminder that maybe they’ve been consuming too much and not making enough. Stretches of coasting may be acceptable to any given slacker, but only while they catch their breath to prepare for another uphill climb.

             Through immersion in bohemia the slacker has come to have a heightened aesthetic sense (whether or not one slacker agrees with the tastes of another is a different matter). Through the extended contemplation of books, art, music, and film, it is easier for them to see through the mass-produced simulacrum that’s often passed off as art in the marketplace. Knowing quality is out there, they’d rather forgo tripe to focus on what truly nourishes them. As often as not this includes the creation of their own contributions to the great conversation. (And whether or not their own contributions ever get conversed about is a different matter.)  

            Thus, to be a slacker takes willpower. It’s an effort, especially when sustained. Some don’t make it. They give up in favor of entrance to the golden arches of the gated community. As Herman Hesse wrote in his novel The Journey to the East, “Once in their youth the light shone for them; they saw the light and followed the star, but then came reason and the mockery of the world; then came faint-heartedness and apparent failure; then came weariness and disillusionment, and so they lost their way again, they became blind again.”

            Finding the star again, when assailed on all sides, requires willpower, and an assuredness of a fate and destiny drawing one on to something that can’t be found in the workaday world governed by McGovCorp. As one line in Linklater’s movie has it, “Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

The aspiring slacker who has managed to free up some lost time needs to remain on guard.

“Thee voluntary relinquishing ov responsibility for our lives and actions is one ov thee greatest enemies ov our time,” Genesis P-Orridge wrote in the T.O.P.Y. Manifesto. P-Orridge further wrote on the theme that “Time can be a tool, a liberator, or an oppressor. When we claim time back for ourselves we are at last learning to be free and effective. Control needs time like a junkie needs junk. To escape control we must re-embrace our given time.”

Perhaps it is just my middle age, but it seems like our collective waste of time has only gotten worse since Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth was founded in 1981. It’s become a reality crisis, and it’s related to decision fatigue, another side effect of life within the dominant culture.

Crisis. It’s a word of Greek origin rooted in the verb krinein, “to decide.” While I am all for making wise choices, I think sometimes it is better for those of us who get stuck in analysis paralysis just to choose something and start doing it, if only for the satisfaction of taking action. The inability to decide has claimed many already. The band Negativland had a saying from their album Free  that I come back to often: “Too many choices is no choice at all.” The plethora of choices supposedly offered these days is rather superficial, and they are often presented in binaries: Microsoft or Apple, Pepsi or Coke, Wendy’s or McDonald’s, Netflix or Hulu. All the choices we have to make in our day-to-day life can end up giving a person decision fatigue, and when they finally are presented with a swath of time to do as they please, they may find it is easier to turn on the tube than spend an hour practicing guitar or reading a book about ecology.

Yet, like other kinds of tiredness, decision fatigue can be shaken off. Making small decisions and taking small actions help to develop the willpower necessary for greater acts of will and purpose. Movement and activity dissipate the possibility of the early-onset rigor mortis typified by the “life” of couch potatoes.  

For those of us who wish to collapse now and avoid the rush, the time is always now. We can seek the moments in-between to apply some of the remaining oil to those parts of ourselves that may be in danger of rusting out from not being used or exercised.  There are few of us humans who ever reach the height of our inherent capacities. The potentials inside us are like a syrup that add to the sweetness of life if only they are tapped. Rest may at times be needed, but rust sets in when rest is no longer regenerative.

To direct our mental and physical abilities with consistency and effectiveness takes practice and the development of new habits and self-imposed limits that give added impetus to self-determination and direction of energy. A few simple pointers here will suffice.[1] The saying “Nothing to it, but to do it” is a good start. In other words, whatever it is you have in mind, just start doing it. As one of the characters in the movie Slacker put it, “Who's ever written a great work about the immense effort required in order not to create?” There is an irony I have seen at work over the years: the amount of time and energy spent trying not to do something could have been more easily put into getting a task done, with time at the end left over for munching on a donut and having that third cup of coffee. Waiting for the perfect time to get started is will-weakening. While I concede there is an art to good timing, waiting for perfect conditions is an exercise in futility, and excuses and distractions are liable to pile up. On the road to a dark age, adjusting expectations in acceptance of a flawed existence may be a positive mindset to adopt.

The quest for perfection can also be a danger in finishing a task. “Perfect is the enemy of done,” as another saying goes. Unfinished jobs and projects have a way of weighing down the psyche. It’s an experience I’m very familiar with, and finishing what I start has become for me as much a matter of practicality as it is a habit that gives added strength to finish the next thing that I start. This relates to the idea of not putting off things we find difficult or unpleasant. A case can be made that we are better off doing these things first, rather than last. If a reward helps us finish a task, the thought of the cold beer to be had at the end of an arduous day working outside in the sun on your urban homestead might be what you need to get you through the tedium. 

The right amount of rest, before it turns into sloth and constant napping, is equally important in the wise use of willpower. Those who are tired, irritable and discontent are liable to do whatever is the easiest activity just to escape boredom. The dominant culture encourages this kind of mindless self-indulgence. The easiest activities tend to be those that are more harmful than helpful like snacking when one isn’t hungry, and otherwise being fed empty calories that clog the imaginal system via the screen.

​One of the gifts that comes from slack is time to get real about our needs, wants and wonts in life. I think this was one of the unexpected positive outcomes of the lockdowns during the first year of Covid-19 (all other aspects surrounding that thorny issue aside). The frantic [1] race to accumulate the largest hoard of crap stopped for many, at least for a little while. Some used that opportunity to re-calibrate their lives and minds. The local parks that spring were the busiest I’ve ever seen them and people were getting outside walking and being active. For many it was an opportunity to embrace  silence, as the chatter and stress of constant overstimulation had disappeared for a spell.

For others there was panic, a feeling of flatness and even further withdrawal into isolation. They escaped the stress of the situation, not out into nature, or by taking time to work on their hobbies or personal interests, but by going deeper into the simulacra of life and community that the internet offers. As the lockdown showed, the opening up of slack time may drive some of our fellows into various forms of binge behavior.

For one teenager in Brooklyn, the use of social media during the lockdown took on a troubling turn. Logan Lane became “completely consumed” with the online personality she had created. Then one day, after getting burned out on the endless scroll, she was so sick of it all that she put her phone in a box. It was after she put her phone away that she started experiencing some of the freedoms I took for granted as a teenager: checking books out from the library and going to the park to read, meeting up with other teens and getting into graffiti, going to shows. Her newfound freedoms spurred her to write a text called the Luddite Manifesto, and spurred her parents to make her start carrying a flip phone on her jaunts around the city, after she “lost” her smart phone. When she met another teen at an all-ages punk show who also had a flip phone, the two bonded over their distaste for social media. These experiences led her to form the Luddite Club with her new friend. An actual  group of people who meet in person, and whose aim is self-liberation by excising themselves from social media and taking a skeptical view of technology. In cutting off their phones they’ve cut themselves some slack.[1] Group meetings typically take place at parks and involve playing acoustic guitar, reading books, writing, and watercolor painting.

Logan Lane has really taken to the analog life and has adopted the use of a sewing machine, typewriter, and Sony cassette player as part of the technological limits she has set for herself. As the Luddite Club organically attracted members from around New York City, the teens talked about opening other chapters based on location, and what might happen when they graduated. I hope their example inspires others to continue and  start Luddite Clubs of their own. [Note: Some time after I wrote this article originally, numerous other Luddite Club's have formed around the country.]

People like these who have taken steps to downshift and simplify their lives, will have a lot to teach those who can’t or won’t give up some of their stimulation ahead of time. These are the slackers of tomorrow who will be able to show others how to get by with less things and more time.

In these moments of slack we can delve into such pastimes as three-sided chess, mathematical theory, formal logic, and philosophical inquiry that develop the cerebral side of life. Others may get into weightlifting, jogging, skateboarding, or shooting hoops, and other activities that are largely physical. Playing and listening to music, writing and reading poetry, and the practice of empathetic listening to friends and family help develop the side of ourselves that is emotional. Soldering circuit boards, playing with vacuum tubes, or fixing bikes and keeping old machines running are all hobbies that advance abilities within the technical and mechanical . Hosting dinner parties, starting a Green Wizards meetup or Luddite Club, or getting involved within an existing order or society  all enhance our lives as animals who are social. Between these different focuses are many areas that overlap in the liminal. Neglected by many, reviled by those with a reductive materialist mindset as trivial, are those practices and activities that fall under the broad canopy of the magical. Working in any of these areas, or the many others not listed, is a useful hedge against the anomie of Western civilization in the time of its dotage and decline.

[1] All of them that I’m aware of are videos, but see, for example: https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/56692/1/are-npc-video-game-the-new-main-character-syndrome-tiktok. Think real-life people putting on the blank faces and stereotyped body movements of video game background characters.

​[1]The full story on the Luddite teens is well worth reading. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/15/style/teens-social-media.html

​RE/SOURCES: 
Here are some books, films, and music you might like, but you don’t have to take this slacker’s word for it. 

Atkinson, William Walker. The Will: Its Nature, Power, and Development. 1909. YogeBooks PDF, 2012. Available for free here: https://www.yogebooks.com/english/atkinson/1909will.pdf   
​This book on the development of willpower is well worth examining by those who don’t mind a little taste of occultism. These techniques can be applied as much to the practical matters of everyday living as they can to the planes beyond the physical. 

Dobbs, J.R. “Bob”. The Book of the Subgenius. New York, NY.: Simon & Schuster, 1987. The following hype from the front pages  says a lot of what you need to know. “Sometimes a book goes too far. Sometimes is... now. First—there was The Gilgamesh. Then... the Bhagavad-Gita. Then... the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran. Then... the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, I’m OK You’re OK. And now...The Book of the Subgenius (How to Prosper in the Coming Weird Times)”. Is it a religion? Is it a practical joke? Is it somewhere in between? You decide.
Folk School Alliance. < https://www.folkschoolalliance.org/> This website is a great general resource and includes a directory of folk schools around the United States.

Greer, John Michael.  “Slack! An Irreverent Proposal” <https://www.ecosophia.net/slack-an-irreverent-proposal/> This post from the spring of 2022 gets into Discordianism, The Church of the Subgenius, efficiency, resilience and the different ways slack can be used. 

Hesse, Herman. Rosner, Hilda, translator. The Journey to the East. New York, NY.: Noonday Press, 1956. In this novel, the narrator H.H. joins a group called The League, going on a pilgrimage through time and space in search of timeless wisdom. 

Hodgkinson, Tom. How To Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto. New York, NY.: HarperCollins, 2005. Hodgkinson is also the editor of the much recommended Idler Magazine (https://www.idler.co.uk/). In this funny book he defends the good life and writes about laziness, idleness, and slack from the perspective of a lounging philosopher, taking in literature, art and history along the way.  

Linklater, Richard. Slacker. 1990; Austin, TX: Detour Film Production, 1990. Film. In general you won’t find me recommending too many movies in this column, but there will be exceptions. This film follows the life of a bunch of bohemians and misfits over the course of a single day in Austin, Texas. Their dialogues and monologues touch on all kinds of subjects from politics to daily life, through a philosophic lens.  

Moshowitz, Zvi. < https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/> I found this article by way of Jeff Russel’s musings on slack (see below). Moshowitz looks at slack as “The absence of binding constraints on behavior.”
Negativland. Dispepsi. 1997, Seeland, Seeland 017. CD. Listening to this album, to me, has always been an education in advertising and binary thinking, as well as a good laugh.

O’Driscoll, Dana. “Reskilling, Rebuilding Community, and Exploring Folk Traditions at the John. C. Campbell Folk School.” < https://thedruidsgarden.com/2023/06/11/reskilling-and-folk-traditions-at-the-john-c-campbell-folk-school/> O’Driscoll’s blog is one of my go-to spots for learning about everything from Druidry to permaculture. This essay is about her experience spending a week at the John C. Campbell Folk School learning bookbinding.

Petrek, Melissa; Hines, Alan. "Withdrawing in Disgust Is Not the Same as Apathy: Cutting Some Slack with Richard Linklater". Mondo 2000 No. 9, p. 81. 1993.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, WA.: Feral House. 2010.

Russel, Jeff Powel. “A Few Thoughts On Slack.” < https://jpowellrussell.com/#a_few_thoughts_on_slack>. Jeff Russel is a frequent commenter on the blogs of John Michael Greer and his own blog focuses on the variety of topics that interest him. His post on Slack came after he spent some time reading The Book of the Subgenius. His take goes more into how “slack means you do what you want.” 

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LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

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​“The only difference between a cult and a religion is the amount of real estate they own”—Frank Zappa

One of the ironies in my life is my long standing love affair with the industrial music genre and my interest in deindustrial themes. The origins of industrial music go back to the band Throbbing Gristle and the label they started in 1976: Industrial Records.  The intention behind their record label was to “to explore the psychological, visual, and aural territory suggested by the term ‘Industrial.’ ”  Industrial music began around the same time as punk rock, and there was a lot of crossover between these subcultures. One of the things I found so inspiring was the DIY ethos at work in these scenes. There were differences too, though. Genesis P-Orridge noted how “the punk rockers said, ‘Learn three chords and form a band.’ And we thought, ‘Why learn any chords?’ We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.”

The industrial music aesthetic and its engagement and critique of the effect of machinery and factories on our culture sucked me right in. Teenage angst played no small part either. Now I’m settling into my own middle age and I’ve already seen many of the original movers and shakers of industrial and punk music die from the effects of hard living. The others who have been luckier, or wiser, are now also starting to trickle away. Industrialism itself continues to take one nosedive after another on the path of decline. The time is ripe to consider deindustrial music for deindustrial people.

As the resources that prop up today’s popular musicians become scarce, so too will the possibility of listening to music with a swipe of a finger. In the later stages of the long descent recorded music may only be available to listen to when received from radio stations where the engineers and technicians keep equipment and storage media in working order, or at libraries that have dedicated time and energy to preserving a selection of formats. The stadium concert, with its vast energy intakes, will still be possible on smaller scales and in buildings designed on acoustic principles that make up for lack of loudspeakers and amplification, as has been the case in musical halls devoted to classical music and opera. Opera used to be much more popular than it is today, and a ticket could be had for a not-outrageous cost. Someone in San Francisco who wanted to see Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1875 could get in for a buck, or about $27 in the dollars of today; personally, I consider any concert less than forty bucks relatively cheap compared to the outrageous costs and fees of top-tier touring acts.[1] If the music business doesn’t continue to gouge its audience, cheaper concerts for national acts and large ensembles could come back.

Listening to local musicians in small venues will become the norm. Admission is often free in bars and cafes, though buying at least a drink is often expected. Music in the home will be played on pianos, fiddles, didgeridoos and other acoustic instruments. Folks will be invited over for front-porch sessions and barn dances. Music in all its diverse variety will still be sought to soothe our emotions and uplift the soul. It may not be quite as electric as it has been, though even that would still be possible on a smaller scale.  

Music is a broad topic and tastes are very individual, even when eclectic. Many different tangents could be followed towards different musical futures. As a form of cheap entertainment in a world with less energy, stuff, and stimulation, it seems that the religious dimensions and spiritual dimensions of music are worth looking into here. In the 20th century as scientific rationalism and a fundamentalist materialism spread in the West, many people left behind the religion they were raised in, and others were raised with no religion at all. In many cases the emotional power of popular music and the mass gatherings at concert halls and stadiums have become a surrogate, replacing the emotional release, rapture and instruction once given by churches, synagogues and temples.  Charismatic rock stars share many similarities with fired-up preachers, and there are now many different denominations to choose from in the form of genres, bands, and artists. As the long decline unfolds all of us will be faced with different tragedies, personal, local, and national. One of the most common ways people cope with trauma is through religion. However in a society where the old religious paths have overgrown into tangled thickets, the cathartic effects of music can be useful to help people heal. Some of the popular styles of music today may even become forms of religious music in our tomorrows.

​ I think it is safe to say there will be a fair number of goat songs in the future, just as there are now. That is, songs about tragedy. Tragedy has two Greek roots, tragos meaning “goat” and oide meaning “song.” These goat songs referred to the dramas about traumas put on by the ancient dramaturges. Dressed in the skins of goats to represent satyrs, these singers incanted their tales of universal woe.

Tragedies were originally performed at the annual festival for the god Dionysus in Athens, and the plays were largely chanted. Some of the ancient Greek and Roman writers state that a goat was given away as a prize to those who put on the best performance.  Later Christian writers speculated the goats may have been sacrificed; it seems the fear of goat-hoofed devil music has a provenance that extends back long before the Satanic panic of the 1980s. 

Aristotle believed that a poet or dramatist showed their skill through the careful arrangement of episodes to evoke emotions of fear, pity and amazement. He preferred for the tragic crisis to be brought about by passionate deeds that resulted in  unexpected destruction or downfall. He opined that the best subject of a tragedy was not a person who was wicked at heart, but that of fortunate person who gets thrown under the wheel of fate by making a mistake. Tragedy can have a noble effect on the human soul by bringing about catharsis, the cleansing of strong emotion through its purification and release, the cathartic effect first being experienced by the performers and then transmitted to the audience.

Release from the tragedies faced by people in deindustrial times might be offered by bards and musicians whose songs could offer catharsis for the feelings brought on by living in a time of massive cultural disarrangement and all the warring and violence that implies.  Before true-crime books were ever popular, and before rap music—which may well go on to form a new mode of epic poetry[1]—jumped on to the stage to bust out rhymes about violence and killing from all angles, the murder ballad was a mainstay of traditional song. Brought to America by English, Scottish, and Irish folk singers, this roots music was one of the threads woven into what became the genre of country as known today. The murder ballad remains a part of that form and offers today’s listeners a sense of release.

The oft-considered Father of Country Music was a man by the name of Jimmie Rodgers. Born in 1897 to a railroading father in the rough-and-tumble railroading town of Meridian, Mississippi, he became a railroader himself. Rodgers ran away from home on numerous occasions to join up with traveling shows, where he got a taste for music and the rambling way of life. In addition to the hillbilly and blues styles Rodgers heard growing up, he developed a taste for vaudeville and was inspired to try his own hand at show business. He worked as a brakeman on the railway to support his wife and children, singing and playing on the side, and his several songs about trains earned him the name the Singing Brakeman.

Rodgers eventually took his family to Asheville, North Carolina where he wore different musical hats, playing Tin Pan Alley tunes as well as hillbilly stuff. When talent scout Ralph Peer came to an area near the Virginia-Tennessee border looking for acts to audition for Victor records, Rodgers took the chance and rode that train all the way to stardom. Among the many famous and influential songs he recorded was the American murder ballad “Frankie and Johnny.” It tells the tale of a women who comes home to find her man in the arms of another gal: “She took a little forty-four / rootie toot toot three times / she shot through that hard wood door / shot her man / he was doing her wrong.” Rodgers’ version starts off with, and is interspersed with, his trademark yodel. In this version Frankie’s eventual fate is the electric chair. The Father of Country Music had done his part in continuing the tradition of the tragic murder ballad.  

Another one of the Singing Brakeman’s cuts had a much stranger fate. A tribe in East Africa known as the Kipsigi developed a small cult around Jimmie Rodgers. The Kipsigi were first introduced to gramophone records somewhere in the 1950s and one of the vinyl platters they had was by Rodgers. They pronounced his name as “Chemirocha” and they revered him for his guitar playing ability and thought his instrument was similar to their own stringed lyre, the chepkong.  The Kipsigi found his yodel to sound like a goat.  The girls in the tribe began to believe that Chemirocha was a deity in the form of a kind of centaur, half man and half antelope.

The example of what happened to the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers when they found their way to Africa is only one possibility of the kind of cult that may develop around certain musicians. If a musician is powerful enough they may attain the status of a demigod or saint in the spiritual traditions that get born out of the turmoil to come. Just as religions developed around the teachings of Orpheus and Pythagoras, new mystery cults may be born among fringe subcultures. 

There are many different possible paths a musical cult could take, as divergent as current spiritual paths and styles of music. Some that seem familiar to us now, may not exist as such in the various branches of our futures. Others that are obscure and may seem like the refuge of only a handful of fanatics may go on to become the seeds of movements that become mainstream.

David Holmgren, the co-founder of permaculture, suggests to “use edges and value the marginal.” Something that may only seem like the obsession of a few who are off to the edge of the crowd now, could become common in time. In Wendell Berry’s book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture he writes of the “widening margin of the divergent possibilities” that exist within any system. Just as monocropping isn’t good for the land, the monotony of dominant styles can leave ripe and fertile areas unexplored. These unexplored areas on our cultural edges may be worth spending time in to see if there are useful elements, musical or otherwise, to extract and bring into the greater fold of the collective.  [2] 

For instance, the subculture around ambient, drone and minimalist music might become the seedbed for a new contemplative wordless music. Ambient is very often thought of as just something listened to for its relaxing qualities, or as something to have on in the background while concentrating on other tasks. Yet it has received levels of devotion most often thought of as the reserve of monastics and sadhus. An interesting case for this type of music involves a group of people I call the “disciples of the drone,” led by Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath and his chief students La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. 

 Pandit Pran Nath was an Indian classical singer born in Lahore (present-day Pakistan) in 1918. He was privileged to hear many live performances from the masters of Indian traditional vocal music as a kid, and started singing at age six. At thirteen he made the decision to devote his life to music and left home, much to the distress of his mother.  He attached himself as a disciple to Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, the most distinguished master of the Kirana gharana (roughly, “Kirana school”), a style whose lineage is traced all the way back to St. Gopal Nayak in the 12th century.

In 1970 Young and Zazeela helped bring Pran Nath to New York City. They wanted a formal education in Indian classical music, and Pran Nath initiated them into his lineage, making them his first Western disciples. The couple lived with him in the traditional gurukula manner, where the disciples attend to various chores and duties while learning from the master. Young and Zazeela studied and performed with Nath for a total of twenty-six years. Nath went on to teach a number of musicians inside and outside of Young’s avant-garde circle. Many of these were devotees of minimalism. They began to incorporate drones and Indian ideas about tuning and scale into their emergent styles. They also began playing with long-sustained durations. Many of Pran Nath’s students went on to exert an influence on the development [5] of the ambient genre.

As old religious impulses are revived, and as new impulses are born in the deindustrial era, I can see a situation arising where esoteric music schools and lineages, such as the one represented by Pran Nath and his disciples, pass on their trade secrets of music theory and practice. The constellation of musicians around Pandit Pran Nath is admittedly a niche within an already small subculture. Yet ideas from the fringe can go on to have strange impacts on the larger society.

 In 2016 music producer Brian Sweeney began to organize events under the rubric of Ambient Church, promoting “group immersions into modern contemplative, otherworldly, and universal music through site-specific audio and visual performance.” All the events are held in churches because Sweeney’s aim was to bring a connection to the sacred through music, where the play of light, sound, and incense all lend themselves to the creation of a liminal space. No dogma is preached at the Ambient Church, as belief or its absence is left up to the individual. These creedless events do, though, fill a need for connection to divinity, however it may be conceived. Sweeney has said, “Music is spiritual, and if you come with an intention of finding transcendence, you’ll experience it...churches were built for transcendence.”

In deindustrial times such shrines and holy places as Ambient Churches could still exist sans electricity. There are plenty of ways to create long sustained drones with acoustic instruments and light shows can be created with lamps, candles and other means. One of the longest musical performances in the world is going on right now—if it can be sustained through the long descent. John Cage’s ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible) has so far been running for over 21 years (including a 17-month pause) at the time of this writing, and is scheduled to last until 2640.  The work is being played on an organ in a church in Halberstadt, Germany, with note changes about every 6 to 18 months,[1] Given enough disciples to play this long-form contemplative music, a type of minimalist monasticism may emerge. One of the good things about long wordless music is that it gives a focus for contemplation without imposing a specific dogma or creed. If the Ambient Church movement takes hold it could provide community and solace for people in rough times without imposing a specific set of beliefs or doctrines on those who come in search of transcendence.

Other spiritual impulses seen within our recent music history are less obscure.  For the devoted deadhead the concert itself is a spiritual experience. The other deadheads at concerts shared a common community around the attainment of altered states of consciousness, induced by liberal amounts of marijuana and LSD. The songbook of the Grateful Dead was similar to the hymnbooks in a Christian congregation. The familiar songs, transformed and varied upon in long improvisations, formed part of the gel that brought the community together. Psychedelicized and outside of ordinary consciousness, the deadheads experienced mystical states as they danced and reveled. The feeling of togetherness provided a cohesion as they started to come down. It may not have have been religion in the traditional sense, but it was spiritual, and the deadheads had their own iconography of tie-dyed bears, roses, skeletons, and other imagery, often worn, that served to identify one member of the cult to another.

The shared bond was carried over into alternative living arrangements and an entire subculture built around following the band as a lifestyle. They formed a vast network of people who shared resources in the spirit of community. An underground economy emerged around the band as they toured, with vans selling grilled cheeses and hippie food to concertgoers, and people who taped the live concerts bartering and trading recordings with each other as kind of secondary currency. Some of this subculture has carried over to the spin-off groups made up of former Grateful Dead members, and jam bands inspired by the ethos of Garcia and company that go on tour and play the festival circuits.  All of this continues to be a presence in American alternative culture.

I can easily imagine the initiated acolytes of the current jam bands continuing to form their own traveling bands who perform at ever more homespun regional and national festivals. People would come to experience their music with all the fervency of a tent revival. In deindustrial times the alternative network would provide concert spaces, crash pads, equipment, food and other material for making the events happen. Locals would come for the music, mushrooms, beer, and festivity, and leave transformed. Perhaps devotees would still travel along with the bands, following in horse-drawn carts, perhaps working as part of the traveling show’s operation. Townie fans would wait with bated breath until the next flier runner to come to town ahead of the band, and help plaster up telegraph and radio poles with hand-printed psychedelic posters. There may yet come the day when a mother will be afraid that her child will not just run off to join a circus, but to join a freaky group of latter-day troubadours, playing their endless acoustic drones, afraid they won’t ever hop a train back home.

To circle back to industrial music briefly, a third cult of music developed around Psychic TV, the group Genesis P-Orridge founded after the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth, or TOPY, was formed by P-Orridge in 1981 as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the notion of band fan clubs. It differed in that it was a fellowship and network of chaos magicians, artists, musicians, and ’zine and media makers centered around practicing  magic and creating art. TOPY members were those in the vanguard, popularizing the now ubiquitous tattoos, body piercing, and gender blending at a time when these activities were still frowned upon. Numerous writings, artworks, pieces of music, and acts of magic came out of the work of TOPY members.  The key texts were assembled by P-Orridge into Thee Psychick Bible. 

These are just three examples, derived from some of my own musical tastes and inclinations, out of the diverse and kaleidoscopic world of music. I’m sure readers of New Maps can find examples of other subgenres and styles that would have potential useful benefits to pass on to coming generations. Let us also not forget the practical benefits of playing music. Learning to read and play sheet music can sharpen the mind. Knowing how to play a song by heart gives the player a memory workout. The finger or vocal work involved in playing keeps the body nimble. Learning to play with others teaches us to listen to them and work towards harmony. With a modicum of skill and devoted time each of us can learn enough to entertain ourselves, friends, and family and keep spirits bright in troubled times. Those who go on to become master musicians will, at their best, be able to expand listeners’ consciousness and touch their very souls. 

NOTES:

​[1]McIntyre, Douglas. “The History of What Things Cost in America: 1776 to Today.” 24/7 Wall St., Sep. 16, 2010.

​[1] Though poetry and song are connected at the joint, the topic is too broad to tackle in this article. Perhaps I’ll take up in the future. In the meantime check out Wesley Stine's story "Luke Maxwell" in the Fall '21 issue of New Maps if you haven’t already. Also worth a read is John Michael Greer’s essay “Writing as a Microcosm 3: The Spontaneity Trap” that broaches the topic of rap as a future form of epic poetry. https://www.ecosophia.net/writing-as-microcosm-3-the-spontaneity-trap/

[1]See the John Cage Organ Project for further details: https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt

RE/SOURCES:

Berry, Wendell. The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint. 2015.

Hammon, N.G.L., and Scullard, H.H., eds. The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Holmgren, David. Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. Hepburn, Victoria, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, 2002.

Keefe, Alexander.  “Lord of the Drone: Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground.” Bidoun, 2010. https://www.bidoun.org/articles/lord-of-the-drone

Langer, Ken.  “The Ambient Church: Seeking the Spiritual Through the Power of Music.” Klanger’s Page (website), n.d.  https://sites.google.com/site/klangerdude/home/ministry/papers/the-ambient-church-movement

Miller, M.H.  “The Man Who Brian Eno Called ‘the Daddy of Us All.’ ” New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Magazine, July 22, 2020.  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/t-magazine/la-monte-young.html
Piaza, Tom. Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America. New York, N.Y.: Harper Perennial, 2011.

P-Orridge, Genesis Breyer. Thee Psychick Bible: Thee Apocryphal Scriptures ov Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Thee Third Mind ov Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. Port Townsend, Wash.: Feral House, 2010.

Richardson, Peter. No Simple Highway: A Cultural History of the Grateful Dead. New York, N.Y.: St. Martin’s Press, 2015.

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This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:
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A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE DOWNWARDLY MOBILE DANDY AND THE TRAILER PARK QUAINTRELLE

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

LEGEND TRIPPING, THE DEINDUSTRIAL GOTHIC, AND A WORLD FULL OF MONSTERS

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

.:. .:. .:.
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

“Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the Creator is revealed.” -Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

​“When we speak of excellence in dress we do not mean richness of clothing, nor manifested elaboration. Faultless propriety, perfect harmony, and a refined simplicity,—these are the charms which fascinate here. It is as great a sin to be finical in dress as to be negligent.” --“A Gentleman”

For centuries, fashion trends have been driven by the elite for the elite. The royals, the aristocrats, the movie stars, the moguls, all have held a high degree of influence over fashion. Wearing the best duds has long been associated with wealth and status. Yet the common plebe did not always have to muck about in plastic clothing subject to disintegration when caught in acid rain. In the past, good clothing, and good-looking clothing with style and verve, was also in the grasp of everyday, salt-of-the-earth working people.

The most celebrated brands these days, from Louis Vuitton to Chanel to Gucci, are icons of unobtainium for mere commoners. The aura of their status is imbued with exclusivity. The fashion figures who command respect inside the echo chamber of the Spectacle wear outfits costing thousands of dollars. Those who can afford them are obsessed with maintaining the spectacle of their elitism. Many who can’t even afford to emulate the spectacle, yet still seek to, maintain an illusion of wealth under the burden of debt and enslave themselves to keeping up appearances. 

As much as the entertainment industry likes to rub the red carpet in the faces of the masses, propping up their extravagant lifestyle on the adoration of those they insult, a well fashioned life is not just the province of the fashion elite.

As whatever remains of the middle class gets wiped out and swiped up by the plutocrats of our day, there are other options for those of us who choose to live within our means, and live well. To be able to manage with what one has will once again be a virtue as the realities of all manner of shortages come home to roost. It is often nice to have things we want, but it is also a virtue to be content with just having our needs met. Choosing to embrace the life of LESS[1] puts one in a position to be downwardly mobile. Yet even in the case of downshifting to the realities of energy descent, a person can be a downwardly mobile dandy, or a trailer park quaintrelle.

The dandy, and his counterpart on the female end of the gender spectrum, the quaintrelle, are best characterized as people whose appearances, combined with temperament and wit, have a sublime effect on those they come in contact with. This is achieved through cultivating an aesthetic of composed elegance, dignity, equanimity, and a keen sense of wit and whimsy.[2] Self-expression through clothes may seem less important than just having functional attire for work, and keeping warm in winter and cool on the long, ever-hotter days of summer, but it is important. Clothes can influence how we think and feel about ourselves and the ways others interact with us. In times of energy descent and cultural crisis these powerful factors aren’t to be ignored.

From the very beginning the dandy has been downwardly mobile. George Bryan “Beau” Brummell, who is considered to be the first dandy, died penniless in a French asylum in 1840. If he’d done some other work and had some other interests instead of spending the first five hours his day getting dressed, he might not have lost his mind. I don’t want readers to take dandyism so far they end up on the wrong end of a psychiatrist. How we dress isn’t that important. Rather, the trailer park quaintrelle makes a conscious and controlled descent into that lap of luxury sometimes called genteel poverty. The downwardly mobile dandy chooses to live a life of nonchalant refinement, leisure and the cultivation of culture even as the current civilization slowly disintegrates around him. 

Brummell’s descent is actually a cautionary tale for the would-be deindustrial dandy. It is a lesson in the power of staying out of debt and out of the madhouse, and his story is worth looking at in brief. Brummell came from a middle-class family, but his father William had high hopes of his son becoming a gentleman. On his father’s part it might have been psychological compensation for the rumors that had swirled around his own birth: that he was the bastard child of no less than Frederick, Prince of Wales, casually cast aside. The elder Brummell imposed his thwarted aristocratic aspiration onto his own boy, and the imprinted desire of being genteel manifested in an obsession with clothing.

When the young Beau Brummell was at Eton College he made one of his first marks on fashion, a modern variation on the cravat, adorned with a gold buckle. This distinguished him amidst a sea of schoolmates whose families had more coins in the coffer than his own. After a brief stint at Oxford where he spent his time composing Latin verse, he left at age sixteen to join the military, and began to rub elbows with people in power.

He found a spot as a low-ranking officer in the 10th Royal Hussars, the personal regiment of the Prince of Wales, later to be King George IV. These dragoons became known for their lavish and elaborate uniforms. It wasn’t cheap to be a member of this branch of the military. Brummell could barely afford it, even with the inheritance left to him by his then deceased father, which amounted to about £22,000, no small sum in the last years of the 18th century. The 10th Hussars held elaborate banquets and paid extra for fine entertainment, so as to divert and impress the prince, and these expenses came out of the officers’ own pockets. To fit into this milieu Beau developed a habit for spending. During his three years of service he used his style and charm to enamor himself of the Prince and was raised to the rank of captain, much to the chagrin of his fellow officers.

The Prince was fascinated by Beau, whose wit and elocution were on equal footing with his flair for flashy dress. When Brummell left the service, he found himself well positioned to have a place in London society. His dead father would have been proud to know his son was circulating among posh people. He even came to be an “influencer.” Opting for a slightly less ornate way of dressing than others at the time (though no less expensive), he donned well-fitted bespoke coats, clean bright shirts, and trousers. The showpieces were his cravats that he knotted into elaborate designs. Soon other fops were flocking to him for advice on how to rock their neckerchiefs to maximum effect.   

As he drifted along inside his aristocratic fantasy, he lost touch with his middle-class background, and with reality. A nightmare of unchecked excess followed. He thought an adequate yearly allowance for a wardrobe was £800, when at the time a typical craftsman only made about £52 a year. Instead of using spit, he recommended that boots be polished with champagne. Perhaps it was easy for him to live this way, for after he had disposed of his father’s fortune, he started disposing of other people’s money loaned to him on credit. He’d also picked up the ever popular pastime of betting. Living beyond his means, gambling money that wasn’t his, he was on borrowed time.

A spat with the Prince sent him on a downward spiral into disarray. His exorbitant lifestyle caught up with him and he fled to France to escape debtor’s prison. His life was built around keeping up appearances, and when his ascent up the social ladder was canceled, he had to turn his life into a disappearance.  Away from his home country, and without others to prop him up, he unraveled and over time started to look more and more like a slob. Two decades later, sick with syphilis, he ended up in a madhouse where he died.

To me this fastidious focus, obsession, and single-minded devotion to fawning over fleeting fashion, seems, let’s say, a touch shallow. But here the maxim “The opposite of one bad idea is reliably another” can be useful. In America, it seems, many people have gone to the opposite extreme and their outer form of dressing is as neglected as their inner lives.

The dandy is dead. We have entered the age of fugly. Websites such as “People of Walmart”[3] attest to the many atrocities against decorum.  Just as the built environment influences our experience with the landscape, so does the prevailing fashion of our time influence our experience within the social landscape. If deconstructionism in architecture can be considered an aesthetic assault on the consciousness of people, so too can the embrace of fugly clothing.

What is fugly? Think neon-pink stockings, studded cowboy wear, neck tats, loud floral Hawaiian shirts made out of rayon, plastic sneakers, bubble coats that make people look like they are ready to be shipped somewhere by an angry Amazon employee.

Meanwhile haute couture remains forever out of reach of the common everyday woman or man. Whatever glamour remains in the spectacle of red-carpet taste-shapers is now just as often defiled by publicity stunts: Lady GaGa wore a suit of raw meat that would have been better left alive, or as dinner for a hungry family. The value of the jewels on a celebrity’s ankle bracelet could pay off the mortgage of a modest home.  
 
The fashions of our futures need not resemble the haute couture of today’s clueless class. The way people dress ten, twenty, thirty years from now may look like a pastiche of punk rock style, as people make do with patched together pieces found in forgotten dressers and scrounged from Goodwill warehouses. One hundred years from now they may hearken back to seventeenth-century styles once prominent in coastal towns, even as the coasts themselves continue to shift; they may in time be echoes of garments once worn by Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians or other tribal cultures; five hundred years from now as new great cultures emerge from the ashes of the coming dark age, the way people adorn themselves may well be in an unknown idiom tongue, yet timeless.

Just as the architect Christopher Alexander proposed there is a timeless way of building, I think there exists a timeless way of dressing.[4] Clothing, like architecture, should seek to mimic universal proportions and harmonies, and so encourage the elevation of body and mind. Many styles now considered old-fashioned reflect this timeless way. These ways may have been temporarily thrown into the dumpster, but for those willing to dive into history’s bin, the timeless style may yet be reclaimed.

Natural materials will complement a natural environment. The garish monstrosity of a sloganeering T-shirt, nylon shorts, and synthetic accoutrements reinforces the spectacle of a synthetic life. Wearing artificial clothes lends itself to being an artificial person. Mass produced in dehumanized factories, the products of mere transactional relationships, they are vestments of a mechanized life. Absent are those threads which bind us together by the rituals of growing, harvesting, shearing, and weaving. Shopping becomes a bandage patched over the wound left from living in an asymmetrical built and fashioned environment. 

Somewhere in between the out-of-touch cluelessness of Beau Brummell–like celebrity-level pretense and the decrepitude of the deliberately awful, there exists a mean where the two extremes may resolve and find a useful proportion. As the world deindustrializes, the downwardly mobile dandies and trailer park quaintrelles bring a modicum of taste, decorum, and style back into society.  

​In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made by Hand novels, he addressed the idea of being well dressed as something that contributed to the mental and cultural health of the citizens of the fictional town of Union Grove. Yet many couldn’t be bothered. These were the characters who seemed to have the most trouble coping with the realities of collapse and decline that had happened in his future America. When the religious leader Brother Jobe and his flock in the New Faith Church migrated from the southern coast to the town in upstate New York where the novels are set, many of the townspeople were amazed to see his congregants wearing clean linen shirts, fitted trousers and dresses, hats, and other accessories. Their attire was made so well they stood out from the slapdash townies making do patching off-the-rack clothes they’d bought in the times when the big-box stores and chains still existed. Over the course of the books Brother Jobe determined to raise up the depressed spirit of the people. One of the ways he went about doing so was to get them fitted out in something better than rags. He organized his people to open up stores selling tailor-made clothes, even a haberdashery. These enterprises contributed to the restoration of Union Grove’s main street. With the help of Robert Earle they put together a town laundry. With people cleaned up and feeling good about themselves in well-defined duds they began to act with greater self-esteem and civility.

In John Michael Greer’s novel Retrotopia he contrasted the cruddy synthetic materials used for clothing in the Atlantic Republic with the refined sense of comfort, elegance and timeless style from eras past that had been readopted by the people of the Lakeland Republic. The main character Peter Carr is wearing bioplastic-based clothes when he first arrives in the Lakeland Republic. It isn’t long after he gets settled into his hotel, and goes for a long walk around the capitol of Toledo, that his plastic shoes fall apart. On arrival he thought the way the Lakelanders dressed was a touch odd and antiquated, until circumstance forced him to buy new shoes, which felt good to wear and walk in. Then, to fit in and to keep from being cold, he changed his whole outfit. He went from wearing what sounds like a threadbare tracksuit to a wool jacket, hempcloth shirt, and a raincoat over top of it all. His getup was topped off by the addition of a porkpie hat. After donning the local style he was happy that folks stopped staring at him for one, but he also felt comfortable, warm, dignified.

In thinking of people wearing plastic, I’m reminded of a remark about cyclists I once heard from adventurer and author Alistair Humphreys in an interview he gave on a radio show. He commented on a certain type of “MAMIL” or “Middle Aged Man In Lycra,” and that acronym has stuck with me ever since. I’m just a casual rider myself so I have never understood the obsession many cyclists seem to have with wearing spandex.

MAMILs remind me of some of the worst fashions ever presented in science fiction futures:  the stale synthetic unitards, I mean uniforms, worn by the space cadets of Star Trek. I can definitely see a version of Jean-Luc Picard training for the Tour de France in full MAMIL attire. Yet for a character who is an erudite diplomat his clothes are questionable at best. I think Picard would have looked better sipping his tea, Earl Grey, hot, wearing some kind of space finery we haven’t yet heard about. In Star Trek, and similar visions of impossible futures, it’s usually either MAMIL attire or robes. The cast of The Next Generation certainly didn’t care to wear the costumes. The material tended to bunch up, giving Picard the memorable tic of adjusting his uniform. The costumes even gave some of the cast back problems, as the tightly stretched spandex dug into their bodies for twelve- to fourteen-hour work days. Off set, the costuming department had to deal with the accumulated stench; spandex is good at soaking up the sweat and body odors.[1]  

Part of the draw of steampunk literature and its offshoots in other media is the sense of excitement about what characters get to wear. Top hats, cloaks, capes, and coats, all filled with hidden pockets, pocket watches, finished off with monocles or goggles, all made to withstand the rigors of adventure, inclement weather, and fine enough to lounge in with a snifter of brandy in a well-appointed study while plotting all manner of subterfuge.

Deindustrial writers can also make their characters clothing appeal to readers who might want to mimic it. The idea of clothes made to last and made by hand has already begun to show up as a trope in deindustrial fiction beyond Kunstler’s World Made by Hand quartet and Retrotopia. It can be found in the After Oil anthologies and Into the Ruins, and has continued with the stories in New Maps. The characters in David England’s “A Hollow Honor” (iss. 1:3) , for example, are all dressed to the nines for a fine occasion.  By contrast, in Karen Mandell’s story “Tug of War” (iss. 1:2), the soil had been so depleted it couldn’t support the growth of cotton or other plants needed for textiles. When the characters in her story go to a dance they have to raid the wardrobes left behind by the former occupants of a home they took residence in. The other attendees wear a mishmash of styles taken from whatever is available.

In contemplating the varieties of futures ahead of us, I think it is probable people will wear a mixture of legacy clothing from the industrial era, as well as new homespun and bespoke clothes. The decades ahead may look a bit punk, a bricolage of styles and eras, all stitched together, with needle, thread and safety pins, just as the punk rock movement itself was made up of a mixture of previous youth and artistic subcultures.[2]  

If you want to “collapse now and avoid the rush” in terms of clothing, what I suggest for fans of deindustrial fiction is a bit of everyday cosplay. Let us start to wear now the kind of clothes we envisage the various peoples of the various futures to wear. Let us look to older styles and fashions, and combine them with new imagined styles, informed by personal vision, in order to create something unique and our own. We can also stock our wardrobe with necessities in the same way we might stock the pantry with dried beans and rice. In addition to having extra pairs of work clothes, socks, underwear and shoes, fancier dress-up clothing should be also be stashed in our closets for weddings, funerals and other occasions. A fortune need not be spent if you accept hand-me-downs and invest a bit of time in combing thrift stores, garage sales, and other second-hand venues. Sewing, mending, weaving, knitting, and other related textile arts are sure to be profitable skills, within the home economy, and as a primary or secondary income stream.

As the current system runs into overshoot, and its baroque complexities falter, folks will, of necessity, look for local and low-power solutions. As the resources needed to make synthetic clothing gradually disappear, the ability to fashion a life at an earlier level of technology will become an enviable skill. Looking backwards and making note of what worked for other peoples in various climates in older times can be part of the process. The lives we fashion might as well be beautiful, and with an aesthetic sense that is in harmony with natural patterns.    

“The real reason I like natural fabrics,” outdoorsman Fennel Hudson writes, “is not just because they are traditional, but because of their provenance. I like the thought that, for example, a favorite tweed jacket was once a sheep, living upon a mountain in Scotland.”

The non-profit Fibershed organization offers another useful “farm-to-closet” vision. They are working to develop local natural dye and fiber systems with an emphasis on land and soil regeneration, while helping to create bioregional textile economies. As necessity puts us back in touch with local and natural materials, the timeless way of dressing, in tune with the ecosystem, and in tune with the needs of the people, will be spun out. Woven within that cloth will be the many styles and stories of our futures.

​Fashions are subject to ebb and flow, and change in some ways from generation to generation. The tide of the dandy may have gone out to sea, but I think it is due for a return. All we have to do is go down and comb the beach beneath the streets for those gifts of the dandy the ocean has seen fit to cough back up.  

NOTES:
​
[1] “Less Energy, Stuff, and Stimulation,”in John Michael Greer’s phrase from The Blood of the Earth (Bibliotheque Rouge, 2012).

[2] The dandy is also often a flâneur, as Charles Baudelaire gave definition to both and linked them together as being part of the metaphysical aspect of Romanticism in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life.” 

[3] https://www.peopleofwalmart.com

[4] Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

​[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3022935/how-star-trek-killed-something-worse-than-klingons-spandex

[2] Jon Savage shows in his book Teenage: the Creation of a Youth Culture, that the punk rock subculture had antecendents in a number of post WWII subcultures such as the Beats, Situationism, and others all combined and "stuck together with safety pins".

RE/SOURCES:

There are numerous books on style and fashion, from the timeless to the fleeting, available from your local library if you, as an aspiring dandy or quaintrelle, need a touch of inspiration. The genre is so well represented I refrained from listing those kinds of books. Happy hunting!

D’Aurevilly, Barbey. 1928. The Anatomy of Dandyism: With Some Observations on Beau Brummell, trans. D.B. Wyndham Lewis. London, England: Peter Davies.

Burgess, Rebecca. 2019. Fibershed: Growing a Movement of Farmers, Fashion Activists, and Makers for a New Textile Economy. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green.

“A Gentleman.” 1836. The Laws of Etiquette: or, Short Rules and Reflections for Conduct in Society. Philadelphia, Pa.: Carey, Lea & Blanchard.

Greer, John Michael. 2016. Retrotopia. Founders House Publishing, s.l.
Hudson, Fennel. 2013. A Meaningful Life: Fennel’s Journal, No. 1. Marford, Wrexham, Wales: ‎ Fennel's Priory Limited.

Kelly, Ian. 2006. Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style. New York, N.Y.: Free Press.

Kunstler, James Howard. 2009–2016. World Made by Hand series: World Made by Hand (2007), The Witch of Hebron (2010), A History of the Future (2014), The Harrows of Spring (2016). New York, N.Y.: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Savage, Jon. 2007. Teenage: the Creation of Youth Culture. New York, N.Y.: Viking.
Whimsy, Lord Breaulove Swells (a.k.a. Victor Allen Crawford III). 2006. The Affected Provincial’s Companion. London, England: Bloomsbury

.:. .:. .:.

This was another essay for my Cheap Thrills column in an issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:
​
A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

DREAM FORAGING

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

​“If we can't be free at least we can be cheap.” - Frank Zappa

​Greetings and welcome back to Cheap Thrills, your source for speculation on bargain-basement entertainment during the long twilight of industrial decline. In the first column I grappled with Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle and the entertainment-industrial complex as embedded in three forms of mass media. Now I turn my attention to dreams, a natural resource rich in wisdom, full of puns and funny amusements. Dream have been available to us for a long time, are available to us now, and will continue to be available long in the future when other resources may be in short supply. The pool of dreams is also an excellent fishing hole. With patience and the right bait, symbols can be caught and reeled up to the surface. I have found this imagery to be more nourishing than the bland offerings available from the McGovCorp menu.

The Surrealist movement in the arts was rife with dreams as part of their attempt to liberate the unconscious and shock mainstream sensibilities. Yet in short order Surrealist techniques were recuperated[1] by advertising agencies, who found the school’s techniques perfect for implanting imagery into the unconscious. This was the power of the “incongruous image,”[2] where two or more things that don’t normally belong together, like a sewing machine and umbrella, or a lizard and a car insurance salesman, are made to hang out together. When the Situationists came on the scene they were critical of the Surrealist movement’s interest in psychoanalysis and all things metaphysical and occult. They launched similar criticisms against the American Beatniks who they thought were equally mired in mysticism. The Situationists wanted to create new situations for living, and their critique of these movements was a necessary counterbalance to their tendency towards astral escapism: going off into the realms of dream at the expense of the physical world.

Yet the study of dreams and the various metaphysical and mystical traditions that have evolved on this planet do not mean physical existence with all its troubles and problems has to be ditched. By the same token, embracing the material aspect of this world does not mean a person has no need of the insights and perceptions which come to us from more subtle avenues.

What if instead of looking at dreams and waking life as a binary, we used three-valued logic to allow for the interplay of a third position? The material world and the dream world are both connected via the interface of our imagination, forming a potent and fertile triangle.  Giving the imagination a place in our way of thinking about the world and our place in it allows for solutions to our problems to come from places outside the binary narratives pushed by McGovCorp.

            Dreams and synchronicities are accessible to everyone as a source of guidance through the vagaries of the long descent. Yet if we wish to profit from their wisdom, we first must listen to what they are saying to us now.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began to play havoc with our institutions and the world went into various degrees of lockdown in the spring of 2020, there was a noted upsurge of people reporting intense dreams to their friends, family and fellow travelers. Many in the healthcare industry claimed that the uptick in bizarre dreams was due to folks getting extra sleep. People’s bodies finally had a chance to play catch-up from the sleep-deprived rush of the 21st century schedule. Whether laid off or able to work from home, many people used the time to catch their breath and an extra wink. The regenerative nature of sleep had been deprioritized in the haste of working and consuming. I find that the longer I am able to sleep, the more dreams I have, alongside a greater ease in remembering them. From my experience there is some truth to what the health care workers claimed—yet I believe there was also something more.

As people decompressed from the rituals of the rat race, one form of stress was replaced by a slew of others: not knowing when the next paycheck was going to come, not knowing who and what to believe in a divisive media matrix during a divisive election year, with a divisive virus on the loose, while also dealing with toilet paper shortages. Cognitive dissonance abounded. For healthcare workers, police and other public safety personnel there were other kinds of stress brought on by the pandemic. One thing the whole debacle has brought into awareness is just how little control we humans actually have.

Covid-19 marked an interruption to the regularly scheduled spectacle. It was a crack in the illusion of a controlled existence. Panic erupted from that crack in the form of Covid-19 dreams. These dreams were also a break from the dominant materialist interpretation of reality.

Deirdre Barret, a dream researcher and assistant professor of psychology from the hallowed halls of Harvard University in Cambridge, started studying the phenomenon of people’s intense dreams during the lockdowns.[3] She noted that a change in the content and character of dreams is very common during a crisis. Her research documented the huge numbers of people who had dreams of being attacked by bugs, worms, armies of roaches, wasps, flies, gnats and other creepy crawlies. Dreams often have a punny way about them, and the pun of getting a bug, a.k.a. catching a virus, is apropos here.  As people tried to cope with the situation, unprecedented for those accustomed to luxury elite lifestyles and the comforts of a materialist society, the suppressed contents of their minds could not be contained, controlled. The bugs burst forth. 

Dreams are adept at pointing out our fears. In my experience of keeping a dream journal for close to two decades I have found that dreams can also show us a way to patch up some of the separation that has occurred between people, other species, and the planet we all share. If we can see past the wounds our dreams often show us, we can also grasp some of the light pouring through those wounds. Maybe when we have dreams of insects, instead of bugging out, we should bug in, learn about those bugs and see what they have to teach us.

I used to have a strong fear of spiders and for many years they showed up consistently in my dreams. I would wake up from these encounters with shudders but also a sense of awe. As part of my dream play I was inspired to learn about their biology and ecological roles, the various myths and folklore that surround them. Now when I see a spider I don’t shudder anymore, but talk to them and say hello. I approach them with respect and fascination instead of fear and apprehension. Spinning out from those dreams of spiders entire webs of connection were born.

Dreams are a way to reconnect with the greater web of reality. Making the effort to remember them is one way to begin healing the false sense of separation between ourselves, nature, and the subtle realms that interpenetrate us, the many threads that connect one thing to another. Dreams can help an individual flourish and regenerate when the landscape and the media-space around them are otherwise barren. Dreams can help a person to navigate along their individual fate path, mining the unconscious for clues to lead them on to their destiny. The person who studies, records and shares their dreams will find that they are just as often practical as they are otherworldly. Dreams bring us the messages we need, whether or not they are messages we want. In doing so they can help attune us back to the rhythms of nature and the Earth.

Derrick Jensen has never been one to back away from controversy in putting forth his agenda of ecological education and critique of civilization. His 2011 book Dreams also showed wisdom, bravery and courage as he challenged the view that there is no such thing as knowledge outside of science.

He writes about how “dreams are living, willful beings, as alive as you or I or a cat or a dog or a bird or a fire or a river or a flash of lightning or a song or a kiss. As living beings, dreams act with…willful unpredictability. They are not machines. They cannot be managed, only denied, and they can only be denied temporarily, and then to our own poverty and at our own peril. They are not bound by laws, and will be constrained neither by scientific equations nor other holy texts. They, more than most, maybe more than almost any others, will not be enslaved. Dreams can be messengers, as can you or I or any of these others, but they cannot be domesticated. They are proud, and they are free.”

Dreams erupt unbidden, coming through when and as they see fit. In this they have a unique capacity to jolt us awake from the sleepwalking trance of waking life. A dream can direct a person to things in need of tending, and the personal issues we’d rather not address.  In his book Jensen explores his own dreams and imaginative insights and along the way gropes towards reconciliation with the wild side of nature we humans have longed to suppress and control.

Have you ever tried to control your dreams? Just as trying to control the behavior of another individual is difficult, and often misguided, I believe the same is true when we try to control our dreams. Yet like many other things in life, people do try to rein in and control them. The practice of lucid dreaming, where people first try to become aware they are dreaming, and then attempt to shape and control the dream, is a case in point. Lucid or conscious dreams do happen at times, but they are often just as spontaneous and outside of the sleeper’s control as is the dream content itself. At best we can influence them through the practice of dream incubation, when a person goes to sleep with a specific intention or question they wish to have answered by a dream. But the shape the answer comes in is often unforeseen.

Personally, I think it is best to not try and control dreams but to be open to receiving whatever comes through that window of consciousness.  Trying to control our dream life strikes me as just another way for humans to fool ourselves into thinking we are ultimately in charge. But just because I don’t think dreams should try to be controlled doesn’t mean I think they shouldn’t be worked with, interpreted, and used as source of wisdom, meaning, entertainment and authentic imagery. When we quarantine our minds from the influence of corporate media, we make space for other voices to be heard. Some of those voices may whisper to us in the chamber of sleep.

To get back to one of the purposes of this column, dreams are often a great entertainment. Sharing your dreams in the morning with a loved one is a great way to start the day. Telling your dream as if it was a story that happened to you—because on some level it did—is a free way to sharpen the skill of telling tales. I have a dream that one day people will talk about their dreams with each other as much as they talk about sports games or what happened on the latest episode of The Bachelor or Seinfeld or whatever it is people watch these days. Instead of saying, “Did you see that one where Kramer had kidney stones?” or “What did you think of the ending of Game of Thrones?” we could ask each other where we went when we went to bed.

There are other ways of working with dreams too, besides just writing or telling them as stories. We can act them out in dream theater, draw, paint or sing them, put them together on a workbench when a solution to an invention is dreamed up, or hold them in our hearts as a source of radiant heat on the cold days of winter when all else seems bleak.

Elias Howe had a dream that gave him the breakthrough he needed for a major invention. He was an inventor who was working on the concept and design of a machine for sewing. There was one problem which he couldn’t resolve until the answer came to him in a dream. In his original idea he was going to use an ordinary needle with the eye located at the heel for the automated stitch, but this didn’t work.

Howe dreamed he was being chased down for a meal by cannibals who had spears with holes in their tips. Awaking from this dream he had a flash of insight and realized that the needle in his invention needed a hole in the tip for the thread to be put through.  This led to his innovative design for the sewing machine which he received a patent for in 1846. His invention changed lives all across the globe.

Answers come in dreams and solutions to the various problems imposed by decline can also come to us in this way. The mad scientists and cranks of the long emergency would do well to keep a pad on their nightstand to sketch down diagrams and ideas that might otherwise wisp away if not caught on waking’s cusp.
There are a lot of resources out there for learning about how to play with dreams and many approaches. I found the books of Robert Moss to be the best practical guides, though your mileage may vary.  For the history buffs out there I recommend his The Secret History of Dreaming. In that book he shows how dreams have shaped world events and how they are vital for the future. In this context he calls dreams the secret engines of history.  To jumpstart the practical and fun use of dreams I’d say it’s best to start with his book Conscious Dreaming which gives the foundation to his approach. After the basics have been established through, his book Dreamgates:  An Explorer’s Guide to the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death goes into more esoteric territory. It is quite the useful guidebook to some of the places a dream traveler might go. 

Yet there are other books and approaches. Something a lot of them have in common is the keeping of a dream journal, or written record of dreams. Making a record of your excursions to the ethereal realms in some physical way seems to be an essential component for building up and strengthening the capacity for dream recall. Perhaps it was different in oral cultures, and in times when sharing dreams was a matter of course. For those of us who are addicted to the written word, these notebooks will become in time your own vital travelogue, wildcrafted from the jungles, deserts, spectacular cities and temples of the imaginal realms.
For all of you writers and aspiring writers out there, keeping a dream journal is an excellent tool for developing skills in narrative and description. Characters, settings, moods and themes all emerge from the sanctuary of sleep, ready to be transcribed.  Dreams can also be the key to giving you the solution to a tricky plot problem—or delivering a fully formed plot. This latter happened to Stephen King when he dreamed up his novel Misery while sleeping on a trans-Atlantic flight to England.  After he woke up he sketched the idea on a cocktail napkin, and when he and his wife Tabitha finally got to the hotel they were staying at in London he outlined the rest of the novel in sixteen pages of notes that came flowing out of his dream inspiration. The story has gone on to entertain countless readers. 

The novels in Stephen King’s epic Dark Tower series were likewise inspired by a dream, though not his own. The idea for this tale of a traveling gunslinger searching for the Dark Tower was inspired in part by his love for the Robert Browning poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. The poem itself had come to Browning in a dream which he then wrote down the same day. The title for Browning’s poem, and its last line, in turn came from a line in Shakespeare’s King Lear. So it is that one dreamer passes along a key that unlocks a door for another. 

H.P. Lovecraft was another avid dreamer of the dark fantastic. Many of his stories were fueled by his vivid nightmares. His first adult story, The Tomb, is a tale of dream incubation set inside a decrepit crypt. Polaris, Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and the fantasy stories of his Dream Cycle, among many others, all had dreams as points of origin. By trusting his dreams Lovecraft created tales that continue to haunt and delight devotees and new readers alike. Iä iä Cthulhu fhtagn!

Notebooks and pens are cheap and with just a few basic tools we can all become dream foragers. This is bounty that once a person begins harvesting, will continue to give, and when one person is enriched, that dream, as compost, becomes cultural fertilizer, giving back to others further stories, poetry, inventions, and different ways of organizing the situations of life. Big dreams await those who are willing to let go and forage in in the wild undergrowth of the sleeping mind.

RE/SOURCES:

Here are just a few seed books and articles for growing a dream practice and further exploration.

Jensen, Derrick. 2011. Dreams. New York, N.Y.: Seven Stories Press.

Kelley, Buckley. May, 26, 2015. “13 Dream-Related Stories by H.P. Lovecraft.” HuffPost. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/13-dreamrelated-fictions-_b_7446952>

King, Stephen. 1982–2012. The Dark Tower (series). New York, N.Y.: Donald M. Grant Publishers Inc.

• For more on dreams by King see the “Coda: Pages From a Writer’s Journal” at the end of A Song of Susannah.

King, Stephen. 2010. On Writing. New York, NY.: Simon and Schuster.

Lovecraft, H.P. 1995. The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Tales of Terror and Death. New York, N.Y.: Del Rey.
 McDonough, Tom. 2002. Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

• See in particular Guy Debord, “Contribution to the Debate ‘Is Surrealism Alive or Dead?’ ” (1958).

Moss, Robert. 1996. Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life. New York, N.Y.: Three Rivers Press.
Moss, Robert. 2009. The Secret History of Dreaming. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.
Moss, Robert. 2010 Dreamgates: Exploring the World’s of Soul, Imagination and Life Beyond Death. Novato, Calif.: New World Library.

[1] The use of avant-garde techniques and strategies by mainstream culture was a process the Situationists called “recuperation.” In their writings they showed the problem of institutional forces co-opting oppositional tactics and practices from the underground to be put back in service to the mainstream.

[2]Jill Lawless, The Selling of Surrealism, LA Times, <https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-apr-02-et-surrealism2-story.html>

[3]Kelli Miller.  COVID and Sleep: Sweet Dreams Aren’t Made of This. <https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20200527/covid-and-sleep-sweet-dreams-arent-made-of-this>

.:. .:. .:.
This was the second essay for my Cheap Thrills column in a 2021 issue of New Maps. I am adding these all to my website now, since they originally appeared first in print.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

A COMPLEXITY OF SPECTACLES

STREAM FORAGING

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
​
​

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​

“From everything I’ve extracted the quintessence / you gave me your mud and I have made it into gold.”
—Charles Baudelaire, draft epilogue for the second edition of Les Fleurs du mal

Rivers and streams around the globe have long been held sacred within many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. The Ganges is revered by Hindus who understand it as a personification of the Goddess Ganga.  In Judaism and Christianity the Jordan River is considered holy. Stretching from Lebanon to the Dead Sea, it is the water that the Jewish people forded into the Promised Land; Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan. The Nile sustained innumerable aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization and it also played a major role in their spirituality. They considered it to be a causeway on which souls flowed into life, death, and the afterlife. In the pre-classical period of the Mediterranean, historians have surmised the existence of various cults based around river gods and goddesses. In the Americas the rivers were no less sacred. Along the banks of the Scioto in Chillicothe, Ohio, are massive earthworks and sites that may have functioned as astronomical calendars; it has been postulated the sites were places of pilgrimage for the Hopewell.
​
Rivers and streams are a connection to history, and in their continual flow we are reminded of the movement of time. The stories of the rivers, and the artifacts found along their banks, can connect us to that history, and in turn to the genius loci, or spirit of a place, that may manifest in specific watersheds.
If one is inclined to, a possible way of engaging these rivers and streams in conversation is through the practice of mudlarking, or foraging for lost and forgotten items washed up along the banks. Mudlarking can also be a fun pastime with other beneficial side effects: cleaning up a bit of the mess we’ve left behind in our streams and finding useful materials in ages of scarcity.  

Mudlarking is perhaps most closely associated with the River Thames, which is tidal, revealing its deeper recesses and aspects at low tide, when rubber-booted adventurers pluck its hidden treasures from the muck. London has been occupied by humans for a long time, and the materials that have disappeared into the Thames make it ripe for the picking. Everything from its ages—centuries-old pottery, pipes, rings, shoe buckles, and other bits—has found its way into the water, and back out by way of plucky pickers. Yet mudlarking isn’t just for the British, even if they gave us the word for the activity. Mudlarking along the Ohio, Wabash, or Mississippi is not unknown, and foraging along your local river or smaller stream, will also bring rewards if you bring diligence.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a mudlark as “a person who scavenges for usable debris in the mud of a river or harbor.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, people who lived near the Thames were able to scrape together a meager subsistence through the activity. Usable debris is something the denizens of the deindustrial world are going to be on the lookout for. It might not be something you’d quit a day job to pursue full time, but could be a way to supplement alongside other ways of creating a living.

Driftwood can become firewood. Bones from fish and other dead animals can be collected and ground up to use as fertilizer. Old bottles can be gathered and traded or sold to those who brew their own beer and make their own medicines. Washed up old coins may have their own inherent value. Other found metals, when amassed into enough of a pile, could be taken to to a scrap yard and traded for cash. Fishing for metal with a large magnet on a line cast into the water is one way to hunt for sunken metal. Accumulated pieces of water washed glass and broken pottery might be used for tiling projects and transformed into mosaics. If a person mudlarks often enough they may be able to find unique antiques, to be cleaned up, traded and sold on the second hand market.

In one possible deindustrial future I imagine riverside camps or jungles full of rowbows: people who travel from city to city by canoe or kayak, looking for work or adventure. Their shacks get lashed together with stray bits of rope, nails and bolts pulled up out of the mud. Around the fire the rowbows cook their carp based mulligan stews in steel containers scavenged from the shore.

Mudlarking the banks of rivers, or beachcombing  around oceans and lakes, also has artistic  applications when found objects get used for the aesthetic enhancement of the environment.

There is something inherently magical about found objects, which have been a staple in the art world (highbrow and low) since the storm of Dada erupted from the aftermath of the horrors of World War I. Part of it has to do with finding random things by chance. Hans Richter, a participant and historian of Dada, noted that the found object emerged like something from a dream, from the unconscious. “Chance appeared to us as a magical procedure by which one could transcend the barriers of causality and of conscious volition, and by which the inner eye and ear became more acute, so that new sequences of thought and experience made their appearances. For us, chance was the ‘unconscious mind’ that Freud had discovered in 1900.” Messages appeared amidst the rubble, caked with meaning as much as grime.

Dadaist and pioneering collage artist Kurt Schwitters noted the effect of the destruction of Europe, and how that helped him to develop his personal artistic concept that he called Merz. “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready ... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” As society traverses the downward deindustrial staircase from one breakage to another, the practical toolkit of Dada remains available for those who would make new things out of the fragments.

Schwitters extracted Merz from the German word Commerzbank in a collage using newspapers. He then applied the term as a name for his small periodical, and finally to his work and himself.   

As a movement Dada is forever iconoclastic, contradictory and full of paradoxes that can never be resolved. It was an opening salvo in revolt against pure reason. After WWI many people felt the ideals of the Age of Reason to be empty. Dada embraced the irrational. Those who contemplate its works are rewarded with spontaneous illumination, in a way similar to the Zen student who puzzles over an absurd koan and catches a glimpse into the sublime. And like Zen, Dada had little use for dogma. It wasn’t born from a shared aesthetic vision, but from interconnected nodes of ideas, ethics, and materials; it did not rely on a strict formalism, and this has given art historians no end of trouble when studying what Dada is and what it was not. These very characteristics, if they can be called such, are part of what make the techniques pioneered by those caught up in the Dadaist impulse potentially useful  to the artistic scavengers of the deindustrial world. Looking for random things, whether manmade or natural, is a way to sidestep the passive consumption of images.

If the natural world is alive with its own inherent intelligence, then the rivers of our world are literal streams of consciousness. What messages might their dark and murky waters cough back up, in the form of found objects, from within their polluted interiors? What treasures might they spit back out onto their banks and shallow edges for intuitive mudlarks to discern as forms of communication, linkages in the chain of history?

When poet and percussionist Z’ev first started mudlarking the Thames in 2010 he had already built an extensive musical praxis around playing found objects. Born to a Jewish family with the given name Stefan Joel Weisser in Los Angeles (February 8, 1951 – December 16, 2017), he adopted the drums early in life, at age eight, and later the name Z’ev as one of his artistic aliases. At age twelve he no longer considered himself a practitioner of Judaism. He had asked a rabbi about the practice of meditation and burning incense he had read about in prayer books. The rabbi told him it was all just metaphors. That answer didn’t sit well with him so he went to the library and started looking for answers. This began his lifelong journey as a seeker, as a student of world religions, and to Western esoteric spirituality and the study of Qabalah.

Z’ev played in a number of rock, jazz and experimental bands around LA from the late sixties until the mid-seventies, even sending demos to Frank Zappa’s Bizarre Records label. These tapes were “too bizarre for Bizarre” however and he eventually left LA for the Bay Area in 1976. Two years later he started using found objects in his percussion set up. Much of the material was stuff he found in junkyards or lying on the side of the road, or scavenged from industrial areas. This was two years before German squatter band Einstürzende Neubauten developed a similar practice in incorporating found materials from construction and destruction sites into their sound. Z’ev used stainless steel, PVC pipes, titanium, anything he could get his hands on if it made a good tone. It was a natural move for Z’ev to pivot from being a seeker of wisdom to being a seeker of physical materials he could transform from the base matter found in salvage yards into the resonating metals of his sonic creations. This practice of looking for free materials to repurpose for art earned him the nickname of “the Finder.”

In the Industrial Culture Handbook he had said, “Z’ev uses these metals, and has to do with the fact that you can go out and build and create your own music – you don’t have to go out to a store and buy the latest musical things. It is on one level anti-consumer technology (‘to be able to do something you have to spend a certain amount of money, get the state-of-the-art this and that’). I’ve always been very committed to low-tech as opposed to high-tech!”
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In this phase of development Z’ev pieced together assemblages he used in a movement-based performance style that was like a form of marionette, with the salvage bits suspended from wires and rope on homebuilt frames. He hit and tapped and hammered these pieces in a dramatic manner he referred to as “wildstyle,” a term originally related to graffiti. It was scrap metal music, performed with verve. The sounds themselves are as expressive as a highly stylized script. Z’ev said, “There's a tremendous amount of calligraphic language in the instruments themselves. If you closed your ears and just watched it, there is a language almost like a puppeteers’.”

As a side note "Wildstyle" is a form of graffiti composed of complicated interlocking letters, arrows, and embellishment” that is “intentionally hard to decipher” (Noah, Josephine: “Street Math in Wildstyle Graffiti Art.” Artcrimes, 1997: www.graffiti.org/faq/streetmath.html). A possible connection is that Z’ev sometimes also stole materials he needed off of industrial lots, making his art in some respects another form of “illegal art” like graffiti. 

Z’ev eschewed the tricks and licks of contemporary rock and jazz drumming, though he was trained in them and more than capable. He favored  a style that harkened back to the way drums have been used as tools for communication and ritual. “There is this language to rhythm where there’s a meta-message occurring, almost a mathematical situation with repetition, refrain, like formulas repeated and transmuted this way and that way.”

A lot of his early shows as Z’ev were at venues such as the punk oasis Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco. He ended up traveling the world with his found-object percussive kinetic sculptures, and lived in a variety of places in North America and Europe. By the 2010’s  was in London, where his long habit of scrounging for materials took him into the mud of the river Thames. 

He writes of his first experience mudlarking, and how his projects Effigies and Familiars: Sticks and Stones of Darkness came out of the practice. “on the 26th september 2010 i visited the river thames and spent a few hours there. towards the end of that time i was walking well down to the water line and came upon 3 pieces of wood and 3 of metal. i took them back to anstey road and assembled them into an initial configuration in the garden. … I had constant thoughts about my relationship to the thames with regards to developing a project around the general notion of ‘sticks and stones’ and the specific notion that this project would be a collaboration with tamessa, the ancient Celtic personification of the elemental energies of the river … while the title ‘sticks and stones’ had come into my mind from the very beginning, … it was only in october 2010 that the distinctions of effigies and familiars became associated with, respect[ive]ly, sticks and stones; that is, for the most part, sticks are effigies and stones are familiars and so as far as I’m concerned in clarifying this distinction: effigies are representations of mythic thought-forms, familiars are anthropo/zoo- morphic concretizations of elemental energies. Put another way: effigies are lenses for focusing on/the focusing of mythic powers, familiars are objects of subjective power(s) in-and-of themselves.”

Z’ev communicated his intentions for the project to the river using the techniques he had found as a spiritual seeker.  He committed to gathering what he could find at least once a week during the low tide. He gathered driftwood, stones, and other materials from the detritus of the river and from these created effigies and familiars in concert with Tamessa, entering into a dialogue with the genius loci of the river.

Z’ev noted a specific state of his own consciousness he entered when going on these mudlarking forays. “In the past when I’ve written about my work and its basis in the found-art tradition I’ve generally just used the term finding to describe the process… The reason I’m using gathering in this instance is that it better describes the process specifically. On one hand: the finding mode can be compared to a mental state of wide-band reception, that is, as I don’t know what I’m looking for, by my expectation my sensitivity is heightened, and I’m scanning all frequencies. On the other hand: the gathering mode differs from this in that, as I know what I’m looking for when I’m on the river bed, all of my sensitivities are attuned to the reception of the Tamessa bandwidth  (note: both the terms gather and reception resonate strongly through my Qabalistic work as well). A very interesting phenomenon:  while for over the past 30 years I’ve always made it very clear that my work with acoustic phenomena was based on my relationship with elemental energies, no one ever looked askance at that position, but it seems that now I have severely crossed into the land of delusion by stating that I am actively engaging with a thought form, that is, a personified elemental energy. And my response to that is that this ignores the fact that since at least some 3000 years ago the Celts had recognized their goddess in this river – not in a tree, not in a stone, not in a spring, but in this river, and all I am doing then, is reinvigorating a tradition that has lapsed for, at the very least, well over 1000 years.”

Making sculptures out of stones and driftwood found in the mud in honor of Tamessa has something of a parallel in Hinduism. On the banks of the Kali Gandaki in Nepal, some Hindus collect what are called shaligram stones from the banks. Most of these are fossils of ammonite shells from the Devonian period, over 400 million years ago. whose origins go back some 400 to 66 million years . These fossilized shells are seen as representations of Vishnu because in their natural form they contain symbols associated with him. The story of how they originated is mentioned in many Vedic scriptures.

From sticks, stones, fossils, and other usable debris the consciousness of streams might be glimpsed.

Beachcombing is an associated corollary pastime where the intertidal zones of oceans are scoured for flotsam and jetsam. Lakes can also be good places to beachcomb, especially when the water is low or after a flood has receded to reveal treasures or trash, as is happening at the time of this writing with droughts causing a significant drain on Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

Angela Haseltine Pozzi turned to the ocean for comfort after the sudden death of her husband of twenty-four years. She had been a teacher, and came from an artistic family, and her husband Craig had also been an artist. They had both been fond of using found materials scrounged from thrift stores and other places in their work. After his death she relocated from Portland to Bandon, Oregon, so she could be closer to the ocean. She would take walks every day with her dog, stepping over the bits and pieces of trash she saw on the beach. One day she saw a wrack line, or linear pile of marine debris, that contained a huge amount of plastic. She saw people combing the beach for shells and agates, but leaving the plastic behind, and she realized the ocean needed healing just as she needed to heal.

She made a decision then to only use garbage from the beach as her medium. She also wanted her work to be public, so people could see it and get engaged. She decided to make sculptures of things most everyone loves: animals. She tightened her focused further and decided to make sculptures of marine animals whose habitats were at risk from plastic pollution. Then she went to work.

Out of her passion she created the non-profit Washed Ashore in 2010, a group dedicated to picking up trash from beaches. From this garbage they have created an immense body of public art. Over seventy sculptures have been created out of 40,000 pounds of waste, collected by 10,000 volunteers.

Preindustrial artists didn’t have the luxury of going to a supply store in the local university district to buy ink, paints, brushes, clay or other materials. Learning their art required them to know everything from acquiring and stretching canvas, to mixing paint, to sourcing materials for sculpture. As the trend of globalization reverses, the deindustrial artist will face similar limitations. Looking for found objects and recycling plastics into plastic arts may be one of the ways to get a hand on precious materials, and make something beautiful out of the trash flow.

​The things that fall into the river often end up there by chance. Chance again washes them up years, decades, centuries later. A mudlark taps into the stream of consciousness that is the river. By pulling out buttons, shells, bullet casings, coins, pottery, a connection with history is made. What we do with the bits that wash up from these streams of consciousness is our own choice to make. They could become paperweights sitting on desks, a piece of jewelry dangling from a neck or ear, musical instruments, or soaring sculptures. By interacting with rivers and other bodies of water, our own consciousness gets into a state of flow, and can perhaps touch what lies hidden beneath the mud. 

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This essay originally appeared in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

Find my other Cheap Thrills articles here at the links below:

THE POWER OF THREE: TERNARY LOGIC, TRIOLECTICS AND THREE SIDED FOOTBALL

RADIOS NEXT GOLDEN AGE

THE ART AND PLEASURE OF LETTER WRITING
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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.” –Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’ (1971).

Binary thinking seems to be a plague visited upon mankind, locking our minds into grooves that oscillate between the extremes of yes or no, true or false, love or hate, good or evil, left or right, black or white, communism or capitalism, utopia or oblivion, leaving little room to explore variances on the spectrum between polar opposites. This habit creates false dilemmas when all the available options get reduced down to just two. Entire fields of possibility are left unexplored.  When our minds identify with just one pole it tends to create fundamentalist antagonisms towards people and institutions whose thinking centers on the opposite pole.  When we ignore the vast terrain of middle ground that lies between, like ignoring the experience of those who live in the flyover states between the coasts, we miss out on many nuanced realms of meaning. The worst aspect of binary thinking is probably the deleterious effect it has on our ability to imagine what may yet be possible.

            Polarities do exist, and they often exert tremendous tugs at one another, as in the polarities of magnets, of male and female. When the polarities in question are political or religious in nature it animates the animus and people tend to slip into acrimony. The increased animosity between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over the past decade or more is a case in point. On some deep level I think they subconsciously get off on this attraction to each other. The foaming mouth of a fundamentalist Christian denouncing heavy metal, role playing games, and gay sex is as often as not projecting their shadow side onto the object of their hate. By the same token an angry anti-gun activist may harbor secret wishes to wield destructive powers over others. Is there a way out of these twin blind alleys of diametrical opposition? Can we find healing from our collective bipolar disorder?

            I think there is a way and it can be found at the fulcrum, the center point of the scales, the point of perfect balance and integration between two opposing poles. We can take steps towards moving to that fulcrum by exploring philosophy, in the form of ternary logic and triolectics, and by playing games designed for three teams, in this case Three-Sided Football.
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            In the past philosophy wasn’t just a way for academics to get tenure. Serious contributions to philosophy and science came from engaged citizens who weren’t tied to publishing and pushing papers on regular basis just to keep their position. As “dollar dollar bills y’all” became the name of the academic game, theories seem to have become increasingly harebrained, existing only within the phantasmal realm of a mirrored echo chamber. Universities continue to flounder,  and the study of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, is a suitable pastime for those downwardly mobile dandies who don’t want to get their hands dirty on mudlarking expeditions, but would rather get lost in thought as they drift about as aspiring flâneurs. They will have to be willing to dirty up their minds, however, as mind is not separate from nature, as the Cartesian dualists would have people to think.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, mathematician, logician and scientific thinker. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was also of scientific bent, and was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. Growing up in an environment of high intellectual achievement honed Peirce’s considerable natural gifts, and a career in academia was almost a given for him, if he hadn’t scandalized the prim and proper minds at Johns Hopkins University. His teaching job there was terminated without warning due to the fact that he was living in sin with his second wife, Juliette Annette Froissy, a.k.a. Juliette Annette Pourtalai, before the divorce from his first was official. Juliette also happened to be Romani, and her heritage was another mark of prejudice against the couple. This fall from the graces of higher learning left him unemployable at other universities. He ended up eking out a living by writing for scientific journals, crafting entries for Century Dictionary, and doing intermittent work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. When his father passed away he was left with enough inheritance to buy a farmhouse on property near Milford, Pennsylvania, where the couple was able to remain independently poor. Their poverty was not quite genteel, but it did allow him to be extremely prolific in his writing, much of which is still unpublished. He often had to write on the reverse of manuscript pages because he was at times unable to afford fresh paper.

            As the university system implodes, those who have an interest in philosophy, science, or other academic pursuits could do worse than follow Peirce’s example, and continue to study, write and publish as independent scholars.

 Thinking in terms of threes seemed to be natural to Peirce. Triads, trichotomies, and groupings of threes are found throughout his work.  His system of logic consisted of three parts: speculative grammar, speculative rhetoric, and what he called critic.  He also sketched out a formal system of math based on triadic logic. Peirce is also credited as the philosopher who kick-started the contemporary study of semiotics, or the general study of signs and signification, representation and meaning. Peirce defined a sign as being triadic, composed of three parts, these being the sign vehicle, the object and the interpretant.

Peirce had suffered from the painful effects of facial neuralgia, a condition he had since his teenage years, which may have been partially responsible for the couple’s relative social isolation. Yet out of his suffering came the gift of his prodigious thinking and his obsession with logic. Peirce believed that some propositions in logic are neither true nor false.  He rejected the Principle of Bivalence that states that any proposition can only be false or true. This provided the motivation he needed to pursue triadic solutions.

In his concentrated thought Peirce was led to create a triadic logic of induction, deduction and abduction. Induction is an inference that is probable, while deduction is a type of inference where the conclusion is supposed to follow necessarily from the premise. In a deduction it is impossible for the premise to be true and a conclusion to be false. Abduction is the process of inference by which a hypothesis can be generated and formed. This term is also sometimes called retroduction, and can be further defined as a way for researchers to conceptualize that requires them to identify those circumstances the concept cannot exist without. Peirce took these even further than logical argument forms and used them as the basis for truth-seeking that he called “scientific method.” In his thought, induction, deduction and abduction become the three phases of scientific inquiry.

Just as philosophy contributes to the practice of science, so too can it contribute to the practice of art. Enter Danish painter and philosopher Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a co-founder of the Situationist International. In the early 1950s, after convalescing in a sanitorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Jorn wrote the text Held og hasard (“Luck and Chance”). He submitted this to the University of Copenhagen, which he hoped would approve it as a thesis. The text, however, was too unconventional. In it he argued that alongside the two dominant modes of thinking, philosophy and science, there was a third, valid alternative: an artistic mode. As per the title, he also wrote extensively on the role of luck and chance in all manner of situations.

            In Jorn’s text he speculated on how humans first learned to walk, and cited Erik Nyholm, who believed the first humans were apes who had learned to sing, due to a new jaw structure that allowed for more movement of the tongue, which in turn allowed for the creation of new sounds. Singing became an incitement to dance, and dancing distinguished early humans from other animals. Singing and dancing apes learned to walk by first learning to dance on their hind legs. From this perspective, Jorn suggested that game playing is a way to enter new stages of evolutionary change. The inclination towards pleasure and fun is an incitement to new behaviors. Games are also very often subject to the role, or roll, of chance, which brings about novel experiences.

            Peirce had also been an advocate of chance and its role in evolution. He thought that chance, what he termed Tyche, or Tychism, “must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth.”
            The Situationists espoused many interventions to break people away from the trance of the society of the spectacle. Games were used to break apart the rigid binary of work time and leisure time. They strove to show how play was not just a way to spend “free time” in the off hours away from office, factory, or cashiers register, but a way to transform existing energies and put them to use on life giving activities.

Asger Jorn had long been smitten with Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. While the dialectic method of philosophical argument can be traced back to Plato, and was used under the rubric of medieval logic, it was given a new lease on intellectual life when G.W.F. Hegel made it a core aspect of reality itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then got a hold of it and further retooled it into dialectical materialism. As communism spread, the idea of dialectical materialism became a major part of the intellectual ecology of the era, and Jorn was among those who became enamored.

Jorn, however, saw many restrictions in dialectical materialism. As a writer, philosopher, and theorist he tinkered on it, blending in his own ideas, and attempted to extend it with insights from quantum physics. What he came up with was Triolectics, a playful rebuke. In time, due to a thought experiment in his book Natural Order, it became the basis for Three-Sided Football.

Jorn came up with the game of Three-Sided Football (TSF) as an outgrowth of his writings on Triolectical Materialism. These were first written about in his pamphlet, “De la méthode triolectique dans ses applications en situlogie générale” (“The Application of the Triolectical Method in General Situology”) published by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.  According to the members of the team Strategic Optimism Football, triolectics “went beyond linear transfers of energy, constructing spatio-temporal fields of possibility and negotiation. Not oppositional but superpositional – contradictions resolved by blending multiple simultaneous potentialities.”

For Jorn, Three-Sided Football was just a thought-experiment, a way to play with the philosophy behind Triolectics. In Natural Order, he wrote, "Three teams meet on a six-angled plane instead of a rectangular one… First of all one wants to quickly discover that it is impossible to control who of the two enemies attacking is shooting the goal. It becomes necessary to turn the rules around… so that the victorious side is the side that has best defended themselves, and where the fewest goals have been let in. The victory has become defensive and not offensive... It will not at all be an exciting match... a third force can in this way neutralize a tension between two forces. That is why two-sided opponents are always aggressive or attack-minded, while three-sided are defensive. Whether this in itself marks a transition from dialectic to complementarity, I would like to leave unsaid. ... There are in these observations absolutely no political suggestions. I am only searching to find out what is actually going on… Whether a triangular relationship is static or constant, that would depend on whether there is an increasing tension. In that case this might lead to a real explosion, whereas the possibilities in the two-sided relationship are cancelled out by the two-sided fight’s neverending energy use.”

Such insights from Triolectics could be useful to those who want to escape the state of advanced rigor mortis that seems to be the inevitable byproduct of the forever culture war.

In the 1990s a number of post-Situationist groups began to bubble up in the UK and Europe. Psychogeography and détournement were the prime interests. In the writings of the Situationists they had found a still valid critique of art and the leftist politics artists so often kept as bedfellows. At an anarchist event in Glasgow in 1994 Jorn’s football thought-experiment descended from the Platonic realm of ideas, and the first actual games were played. Since then it has been played at different locations around the world. A World Cup for three-sided football was even organized at Jorn’s hometown of Silkeborg, Denmark.

 The game is pretty much played the way Jorn sketched it out. The winner of a TSF match is the team who gives up the fewest goals. If your team scores zero goals, it can still win, as long as the other teams gave up more goals than yours. The three teams play on a hexagonal pitch with three goal areas. Instead of splitting the time of the game into halves, it is played for a duration of three twenty-minute thirds. As the teams strive to concede as few goals as possible, various alliances are formed and dissolved in swift and fluid formations. With its roots in philosophical anarchism, the rest of the rules are flexible in the extreme, and a number of variations are played within the small TSF community.  

The members of the Strategic Optimism Football team contend that the playing of the game teaches a way of strategy that removes two-sided oppositions. “Strategy is no longer the illusion of mastering a totality. Rather it is the negotiation of undecidables that removes both the binary fixity of formal Aristotelian logic and the teleology of dialectical change at once. One is presented not with the binary and fixed categories construed by media-imposed ideology. Rather one can glimpse an externality – the larger matrix of general emergencies that contain and triangulate the particular emergency.”

 As the world struggles to find solutions for our many crises and predicaments, ternary logic and triolectics can help individuals and communities escape from the rat race of us-against-them, and develop defensive survival strategies. For those of us who seek liberation from political binaries, and the Cartesian binary thinking that has divided humanity’s experience and made it somehow apart from nature, we could do much worse than to spend time playing games of ternary logic inside our heads, and games made for three teams with our friends. If we engage with our fellows in an interplay of imagination, we might just catch glimpses of the futures that lie beyond oblivion or utopia.

RE/SOURCES:

Illuminating more than just these brief snippets of the deep thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce and Asger Jorn is beyond the scope of this essay. They are all worth digging into for those who want to explore further. Reading and contemplation are among the cheapest of pastimes, especially if you access material through your local library system. In my original sketch of this essay I had included information on the three-sided chess variant. It didn’t end up fitting in the space allocated here. Readers may find it easier to organize a three-sided chess match than a three-sided football match, but the philosophical underpinnings differ.
 
The Art Story. “Asger Jorn: Danish Painter and Scholar” <https://www.theartstory.org/artist/jorn-asger/>

Bateson, Gregory.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1972.  Bateson’s essay “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” is contained within this quintessential collection of his work that traverses across the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and genetics, systems theory, and ecology.

Burch, Robert. “Charles Sanders Peirce.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2022. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/peirce/>.

Colapietro, Vincent M. Glossary of Semiotics. New York, N.Y.: Paragon House, 1993. A useful text for anyone interested in semiotics. It contains many definitions of the abstruse terminology employed by Peirce.
Information Philosopher (website). “Charles Sanders Peirce” and “Gregory Bateson.”  <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/peirce/>, <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/>. The Information Philosopher website, hosted and written by Bob Doyle, is a massive resource on philosophy and science as seen through the lens of information analysis. 

Jorn, Ager. The Natural Order and other Texts, trans. Peter Shield. New York, N.Y.: Taylor and Francis, 2017.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen, eds. Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2015.
Strategic Optimism Football (website). “Triolectical Materialism and the Beautiful Game of Three-Sided Football.” <https://strategicoptimismfootball.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/triolectical-materialism-and-the-beautiful-game-of-three-sided-football/>

Parks, Tim. “Impossible Choices,” ed. Nigel Warburton. Melbourne, Australia: Aeon,  Jul. 15 2019. <https://aeon.co/essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves> A biographical essay on Bateson and his work. 

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This essay originally appeared in 2022 in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.