The Dark Mountain, and other meanderings

[smokingboot]

Wrestling hopelessly with my latest novel, I find myself wondering why poetry is so much easier. The answers arrive almost before I think the question, and they are too obvious to bother listing here. One thing that larians pointed out last night was that I was meant to do nothing for 3 months, and I have completely ignored that. He tells me I haven't followed that rule for 3 days, let alone 3 months, that I never give myself a break;that I shouldn't be squeezing my brain to write now.

But I want to, I want to have the focus and do it.

See a problem, stot the problem. If the problem doesn't fall down, stot it harder. If one falls down stotting the problem, get up fast and stot the problem again. And again. Until it goes away. I never knew a problem stick around having been stotted* properly and repeatedly.

But this time, I do not know if it's is working, only that I tire myself. Still, the sun comes up and I can't sleep, and I am happier in myself than I have been for years. The thing that will perfect this is a sense of good work, the work of my heart.

My coffee this morning is strong and tastes the way incense should taste and never does (another of my childhood experiments, best forgotten) and a friend has led me to the Dark Mountain (http://dark-mountain.net/)

The Dark Mountain is interesting; it seems based on frustration, and a sense that we are at the peak, and that collapse is on the way. It has its roots in the conservation movement, disillusioned that environmental campaigns seem less about championing the earth and more about sustaining our civilisation at this level; an impossibility. The Dark Mountain manifesto quotes this poem as intrinsic to its heart:

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.

Robinson Jeffers, 1935.

Apart from finding RJ's poetry and ideas intriguing, I don't know quite what to make of Dark Mountain. They want to explore art forms that go beyond the comforting myths Mankind has been telling itself...I hear it and am still trying to work out what it means. It's clever despair I think. But there is something strong in it, truth perhaps.

We do not think about the future. It seems we expect our kids to become adult in a time that is just like today, except with better coms and cars. We still believe the myth of progress, that every generation should do better and have more than the last generation. We know we are getting through finite resources, but we don't change. Perhaps we are assuming that science will make some more stuff to use once this stuff has been used up, that the authorities will do something. The dream-led masses...the Dark Mountain isn't even about waking them up. It 's about...something else. Post apocalyptic art? Finding nature again in mountain yurts? I don't quite get it.

But it is very interesting. And this man Robinson Jeffers, he could write.

*You can take the girl out of Glasgow...