I am a big fan of Ursula K Le Guin’s writing. Everything from the Earthsea series, through the straight science fiction to Always Coming Home, which I regard as the best fictional deep mapping going.
Back in 1974, Le Guin wrote a short piece called Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons? I’ve just re-read it and realise that it goes some way towards to explaining why, sadly, Donald Trump is merely a grossly exaggerated symptom – however unpleasant – of something deeply embedded in the culture of the USA. Not the centre of the universe, as he apparently believes. If Le Guin is right (and I believe she is), it all has to do with the American male’s fear of dragons or, to be less metaphorical, with the fact that ‘a great many American men have been taught … to repress their imagination, to reject it as something childish or effeminate, unprofitable, and probably sinful’. Given the fundamental role of imagination in our ability to empathise with other beings – human and more-than-human – that’s a pretty concerning claim.
Le Guin doubts that ‘the imagination can be suppressed’ and that attempts to do so result in it being ‘deformed’, in its transformation into ‘mere ego-centred daydreaming’ or, at worst, into a form of ‘wishful thinking, which is a very dangerous occupation when it his taken seriously’. Particularly by the types of individual now hell-bent on “making America great again” and whose fear of imagination is actually fear of anything that might deepen their understanding of their world, and their fellow beings, their own feelings and destiny, rather than confirm the narrow-mindedness and prejudice that allow those with pathological fantasies to stoke tendencies to hatred and vindictiveness to advance their own authoritarian ends.
I think that understanding this has a certain value, if only because it points beyond the media fascination with one or two American “big fish” – who feed on being the focus of media attention – towards the roots of the global problems we must now face. Namely, that Europeans have long been absorbing the values that feed those root conditions. We may not be able to do anything about Donald Trump, but we can certainly be more watchful with regard to the ‘fear of dragons’ and its consequences in our own lived culture. That’s my reason for recommending reading Le Guin’s piece, which you’ll find in Dreams Must Explain Themselves: The Selected Non-Fiction of Ursula K Le Guin, Gollancz, London, 2018.
I have spent the morning writing the following to my MP. If you’re a British citizen, please consider doing the same on behalf of many of those in our society least able to fight for an ethical and just approach to social benefits.
I am contacting you as one of your constituents and as a member of an Advisory Committee to the ‘Healthier Science through Collaboration’ project (https://www.ukdri.ac.uk/hxc-healthier-science-through-collaboration). I am intimately involved in issues of illness and disability through both family and work; not least as the result of my wife and I having been carers for my daughter for the last thirty-five years.
It is abundantly clear to those involved with the ill and disabled that the government is presenting wholly false figures to the public to justify its claim that benefit cuts are necessary.
As the Rowntree Foundation makes clear, the proposed policy amounts to an attack on those least able to survive it, showing that “72% of people receiving LCWRA or PIP are in the lower half of the income distribution, rising to 89% for those only receiving the LCWRA component of UC and that the proposed cuts would damage the financial security of these low- and medium-income families the most”.
No amount of rhetoric about “the dignity of work” or “the economically productive” can disguise the fact that the Labour Party is simply continuing the previous government’s attack on the most vulnerable members of our society. To impose further economic hardship on the ill, the disabled and therefor on their (often unpaid) carers, rather than address the root causes of our current social situation, is profoundly unethical and, in the long term, economically and socially counterproductive.
Instead, what is needed is:
fair and proper taxation of those whose “dignity of work” consists of collecting very substantial economic benefit in the form of unearned income;
proper analysis of the situation that has resulted in a health system unable to properly address long-term illness or to address the consequences of covid and long covid and swift action to address this;
legislation to ensure that there is meaningful and effective support for those many ill and disabled individuals anxious to find appropriate paid work, rather than the current ineffective lip-service in this respect.
It is time that the Labour Party stopped pandering to those with a vested interest in sustained the Tory status quo and listened instead to those at the sharp end of the current crisis affecting the ill, the disabled and their carers.
Much of my work deals with the human condition; the passage of time, mortality, vulnerability; universal themes in other words. Although the materials and imagery may be seen as arising from a particular culture or a way of life, this is only the beginning.
Lois Williams (in Bala 1999: p. 144)
A note to the reader
All images used in this essay are kindly provided by the artist, are copyright, and should not be reproduced without her permission. A bibliography will be provided at the end of the essay.
Preface
The artist Lois Williams’ work, first shown in the1975 Northern Young Contemporaries, has since been exhibited in venues in her native Wales, across the UK, and internationally. This essay draws on the thinking of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell to ponder the geopoetic resonances of that work, its experiential relationship to our being in place. To avoid raising expectations that this essay will not meet, I’ll begin by setting out what’s not attempted here.
I do not discuss Williams’ work in relation to other visual art, in terms of movements such as Minimalism or Arte Povera, or from a particular art critical or theoretical viewpoint. I’m not Welsh and respect Gwyn Alf Williams’ claim that: ‘Wales is a process. Wales is an artefact which the Welsh produce. The Welsh make and remake Wales day by day, year by year, generation by generation, if they want to’ (quoted Bala 1999: 6). As a result, I’ve made no attempt to locate Williams’ work in relation to current cultural debates in Wales. However, I believe that the identity of individuals and communities is, to a greater or lesser degree, formed as much by the stories told about them as those they tell about themselves. This essay would not have been written otherwise.
My focus here is on suggesting correspondences between the thinking of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell and resonances I find in Williams’ work, with its emphasis on a haptic sculptural “language”.
Introduction
Slip
Slip.
Left: taken while the artist was making the work in a small attic studio space in Sheffield. Right: taken when the work was shown at Oriel Mostyn Gallery Llandudno in the exhibition Lois Williams: From the Interior.
The art historian Philip Rawson distinguishes between the subject of a drawing and its topic. The subject is what a work literally presents, often what’s named or implied by its title. In the case of Lois Williams’ 1986 work Slip, her subject is the light undergarment worn next to the skin by women. Traditionally a slip provided extra warmth, protected the body from chafing, provided an additional degree of modesty if a dress was deemed too revealing, or reduced the need for cleaning a dress which was not washable by protected it from perspiration and other body fluids. By contrast, any attempt to identify the topic of Williams’ Slip would require, at the very least, a detailed account of its particular qualities and resonances in relation to its subject, an account that, ideally, warrants both considerable attention to detail and a poet’s sensitivity to language.
Such an account might start by noting that Slip is made of rough sacking, a coarse-grained, utilitarian material with a particular smell and cultural resonances that include notions of penance, as implicit in the phrase “sackcloth and ashes”. There’s also Slip’s size, weightiness, and elaborate yet unfished nature. All qualities that put in question any taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between a slip as a utilitarian object and the female body. Qualities that might draw us into a reverie grounded in careful attention both to the particular qualities of this unique work and the associations that arise from them. Qualities able, as the poet Paula Meehan writes in response to W H Auden’s claim that poetry makes nothing happen, to stop ‘something happening’ in the sense of stopping ‘time’, taking ‘our breath away” Qualities, she adds, that may act “like negative space in a painting by which what is there is revealed, to be apprehended by human consciousness’. (2016:19)
There are several points I want to stress in relation to this. First and foremost, there’s the fundamentally lyrical nature of Williams’ work, as that term is used of poetry. From this it follows that our experiencing the felt moment of engagement that’s engendered by a work such as Slip, itself the consequence of our navigating the productive tensions between its subject and topic, the title and material object, are always particular to that work itself. So, while objects that are part of Williams’ Follow, as a Shadow (2014) are made from the same sacking as Slip, the play between that work’s components – nominally a sheep’s skull and leg which reference flesh and bone – and the sacking they’re made from, evoke resonances particular to that work. These will be quite distinct from those evoked by the sacking of Slip. In short, each work asks that we attend carefully to the relationship between its title, all its elements, and the various resonances they evoke for the viewer. Consequently, when Tony Curtis refers to the teapot in Red (1995) as ‘pouring blood’, Williams points out that the piece’s title is Red, a word with ‘many associations’ (in Curtis 2000: 233).
I’ve begun with the creative tension between subject and topic in part because the topic of this essay is not identical with the subject indicated by its title. Instead it lies at the confluence of three concerns: with the resonances of particular qualities in Williams’ work; with how we engage with the places we find ourselves in, and with what the topopoetic reflections of the poet and geographer Tim Cresswell may suggest about the first two concerns.
As often happens, a topic that’s preoccupied me for a while continues to be pondered somewhere other than in consciousness. I have been reading two very different books – Paul Hammond’s Constellations of Miro, Breton (City Lights Press, 2000) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Books of Earthsea (Gollancz, 2018), which collects together all her writing on that place, the six main books and a number of short stories. Having done so, it now occurs to me that I need to add an afterthought to my earlier posts about art and magic.
In a section entitled The Wish-Landscape of This Everywhere, Hammond discusses the relationship between Breton’s book L’Art magique (1957) and his texts to accompany (‘illustrate’) Miro’s set of paintings known as Constellations. To do so he sets out Breton’s understanding of magic as it relates to Surrealism and the history of art in which he locates it, which in many respects draws heavily on Freud. Reading Hammond’s account, it seemed to me that Breton (and Freud) ultimately don’t offer us an understanding of the relationship between art and magic that breaks with the dominant culture that is now in the process of not only destroying itself but much of the web of more-than-human life along with it. A reading of Le Guin’s collected Earthsea material, on the other hand, does seem to me to do just that, both by drawing on her own concerns as a feminist and by reaching back to, and re-imagining, past understandings from non-Western cultures and how they might be enacted in everyday life.
It’s very possible that the particular reading of Le Guin I’ve come away with is coloured by having recently worked my way through the philosopher Eureka Santos Aesthetics of Care, an extension of her previous thinking in her Everyday Aesthetics in relation to a possible project. I read the second three books, and some of the short stories, as a critique and correction of the ‘masculinist’ assumptions that result in over-investment in the kinds of power enacted as ‘art magic’ (Le Guin’s term) in the first three books. I will not insult the subtlety, pathos and humour of Le Guin’s powerful storytelling by trying to paraphrase it in a “message”. However, while if I were to begin to address the notion of thinking art and/as magic together again, I would come to broadly the same conclusions, I would have save myself (and the reader) a good deal of time and unnecessary meandering by drawing directly on Le Guin’s Earthsea narratives.
Niamh Cunningham as an artist with a training in biomedical sciences who has been working as an artist in China for the last fifteen years. She has made a wonderful international homage to trees called The Memory Palace of Tree Stories. It seems to me this is just the kind of internationally-based work we need at this time.
If so, like me, you probably need to change your news reading habits. You might start with articles like this from Heather Cox Richardson. It’s not comforting but, unlike the BBC, it won’t skate over the important news about our current reality and then tell you about the lovely dog that found it’s way home after years away!
Rebecca Solnit has drawn attention to J. D. Vance saying that: “If American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”
Setting aside all that’s ridiculous in that statement in terms of the inference that Thunberg threatened US democracy, not to mention the imbalance between the two figures, I think it suggests an interesting truth. Vince’s strange comparison seems to me to imply a wholly disproportionate fear of a young woman – Thunberg is still only 22 – whose concern for the global environment on which her and all our futures depend, he characterises as “scolding”. Scolding is, of course, a word most frequently used to refer to a female authority figure, most usually a mother, in relation to a child that has repeatedly done something stupid, inappropriate or wrong. Doesn’t his statement suggest a very real fear of, and resentment about, a woman telling truth to power and, behind that, a childish fear of, and resentment about, anyone who draws attention to his appallingly “bad behaviour”?
I find it very hard to write anything for this blog that feels worthwhile at present. This is in some small part due to the complexities of our current family circumstances but, much more centrally, as a result of what is happening in the wider world. I’m probably not alone in feeling that recent events in Gaza, Ukraine and the results of the election in the USA signify a slide back towards a world dominated by gross egoism, greed, bigotry, religiously-justified hatred, and much else that it might be hoped we, as a species, were slowly moving away from. And of course the increasingly rapid destruction of a habitable world, not only for the human population but, in all probability, for all living things.
I am in consequence very grateful to those who, like Rebecca Solnit, are continuing to do what I don’t feel able to do; to think and feel clearly and to act accordingly See, then, Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergence.
Not a lot of good news comes out of the USA just now, so today’s report in The Guardian on Pamela Hemphill’s choosing to reject Donald Trump’s pardon is particularly welcome. Formally caught up in the attempts by MAGA supporters to overturn the democratic result of the previous election – an activity that made a mockery of democracy and resulted in wholly unnecessary deaths – Hemphill has come to accept responsibility for her (minimal) participation in the attack on Capital Hill. She recognises, as any honest person must, that Trump’s pardoning of his supporters who took place in that attack makes a mockery both of the American justice system and its democratic process.
I respect, and want to celebrate, anyone prepared to speak out against the Presidentially-led culture of lies and intimidation now in place in the USA. The call to “make America great again” is simply an attempt to mask an often deeply problematic, indeed murderous, historical reality. What I suggest is badly needed instead is a MASA (“make America sane again”) movement.
Recently I heard from a friend, the South African earth artist Hanien Conradie, whose environmental work I first came across when she spoke at Dartington in 2018 about her film Dart, made in collaboration with Margaret Le Jeune (USA) at the UK leg of the Global Nomadic Art Project.
I was very pleased to hear that her Flood Series (The Malawi Paintings), in which she explores the theme of flooding, will be shown at the end of next year in Cape Town. Also, that she’s received a commission from the Spier Arts Trust to make a painting of the latest flood in the Breede River Valley, where her grandmother farmed and where the clay she paints with comes from. But for me her most interesting news was that, through her work with the cosmology of animism, she now feels that she’s finding an alternative way to address the ethical and environmental complexities that arise from making a living as a painter in the art world.
Central to this is what struck me as so significant when I first hear her speak – namely that her work is inseparable form the stories that bind it (and her) to specific ecologies. As she writes:
‘It seems that the paintings are representing a process and a story that people can relate to. Once they make that connection, they seem to gain a better understanding of what the paintings are. That they are made with matter that I have fostered long and deep relationships with; I mean the clay and ochre I use from very specific places’.
This insight into the connection between the work and stories about the relationship between people and land has allowed her to try: ‘to move people away from the idea that my paintings are objects to purchase for ownership’. Instead, she is putting forward the idea that individuals who buy her work become custodians of a process that belongs to many beings – including other-than-human beings – but that someone needs to be responsible for looking after it, to live with and have a relationship with it. By promoting this shift from passive ownership to an active notion of the custodianship of an object that is also a process and a story, she is reconnecting those who buy her work with a very old and pervasive respect for the custodianship of shared stories and their role in “making” the world. While she acknowledges that this is ‘quite a leap in consciousness’ for most of her buyers, she rightly sees it as a subtle invitation to a fundamental change of heart.
Hanien will be coming to England in July 2025 to teach a course about Art and Animism, called The Rainmaker, at Loweswater in England’s Lake District. When I’ve more information about this course I’ll post it on this website.
