Gathered and Scattered: A report from another fire
By Dougald Hine
Dougald Hine and Anna Björkman are the founders of a school called HOME. In May this year, they made an invitation to Homeward Bound, an eight-week course that was the school’s first online offering. Many of the participants in that first course have gone on to form the Assembly, an ongoing fellowship that meets on a monthly basis. In November, the school held its second online series, Homeward Bound: The Climate Sessions, with guest teachers including Martin Shaw, Vanessa Andreotti, Alastair McIntosh and Lucy Neal. For The Grove, Dougald writes about what he has learned from this year’s experiments.
Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship. Therefore I have tried to identify the climate that fosters and the "conditioned" air that hinders the growth of friendship. — Ivan Illich, ’The Cultivation of Conspiracy’
From the floor of my study I gather up the scattered pages of the script from Sunday night, the last in the series of Climate Sessions we’ve been hosting over Zoom, the last public event of this strange year.
I find the lines I’m looking for: ’Someone said to me, this series has been like a great bonfire, and she was looking forward to the point where it has burned down to the embers. Well, if there’s been warmth in this time together, it’s not come from the cold light of our screens, it’s come from each other.’
These words from the closing ritual of a month-long series – created with Viktor, the ritual-maker of Leipzig – sit so close to the wording of the invitation that arrives a few days later from Sara, and trusting these little synchronicities has been a lesson this past six months, so I know that I should respond.
David Zung, RBG Memorial, 2020
It’s too soon to say much about this latest series that could travel further than quiet conversations, but let me step back and wonder a little over what’s been learned in these online constellations we formed in 2020.
In my case, the impulse to take the work online began with a surprise. Since I live in Sweden and many of my friends and family and collaborators and co-conspirators live elsewhere, my days were already full of Zoom and Skype and Hangouts before it became how everyone was doing everything, but this did not prepare me for the experience of lecturing over Zoom to students at the centre at Uppsala University where I teach a few times a year. What caught me off-guard was that the encounter with the students on this occasion had more life in it than most of the lectures I’ve given in their classrooms. It was puzzling, because welcome as these tools have been in my life, I’d never experienced a situation in which to speak with people through screens and cameras felt like an improvement on the experience of being together in a room and breathing the same air. It may have been luck, the particular chemistry of this year’s group and their course leaders, but it felt like an indictment of the rooms in which such teaching usually takes place and the conditioned air of our institutions.
That experience convinced me that it was worth trying to bring the work of our school, itself a work-in-progress, into an offering that could be made over Zoom. Eight days after the invitation went out, eighty participants from around the world joined me for our first online series, and we began a journey together.
As the year went on, I’ve found myself saying that I am quietly amazed by how much conviviality can slip through the limitations of screens and cameras and keyboards. It’s a double-edged statement, an acknowledgement of what is lacking, along with an honouring of the miracle of what sometimes happens. I’ve found myself naming the losses and the gains, the quiet conversations and chance encounters that would have happened if we were gathered in one place, the people who would not have been able to join us in such a gathering. The trick is to name these losses and gains, without treating them as if they could cancel each other out.
Not long ago, a group of people might be gathered or scattered, but to be both things at once would have seemed absurd. There’s an essay in which John Berger writes that art can have bad dreams, so that the visual space of Bosch’s hell turns out to anticipate the space which all of us are required to inhabit in the globalised world that came about in recent decades. There is something maddening in the disorientation of being gathered and scattered at the same time, alone together through our screens. To keep this in awareness can help, to know that we are working against the grain of the technologies on which we depend just now.
These technologies come packaged with a rhetoric of progress, the trajectory of the singularity, but often they serve as a refuge from the social devastation wrought by progress. In a conversation over Skype, William Wardlaw Rogers and I stumble on the image of scaffolding: rather than treating these tools and systems as an upgrade on the world as it was before the screen and the camera, can we turn them to use for the rebuilding of a living culture? When the house is built, the scaffolding can be taken down. I don’t entirely trust this image, but it’s one that I’ll carry with me from 2020.
I’ll also carry with me the experience of seeing people learn to trust themselves in the quieter online spaces we have brought together, the spaces that don’t invite performance, to which we can bring more of ourselves than it would be wise to bring to many of the workplaces or institutions or families we have known. And the possibility that these online spaces might serve as the outer layers of work whose core will once again involve gathering around the hearth or the campfire, once it becomes easier to cross borders and breathe the same air. Through our travels together online, we may come to a place from which we can make better judgements about when it is appropriate to make long journeys to far-off places in order to meet in the flesh.
Meanwhile, there is gratitude for all the strange blessings that show up in shadowed times, the friendships that began or deepened under unpromising conditions, those who showed themselves willing to tend the fire and carry its embers. How lucky we are.
Dougald Hine, Västerås, 10 December 2020
Dougald Hind has founded organizations including Dark Mountain Project, Spacemakers and is currently running A School Called Home, from his home base in Sweden. He has written things that seem to help people find their bearings in disorienting times. And he has been a visiting teacher at universities, art schools and architecture schools across Europe, as well as giving talks in church halls, community art spaces and the upstairs rooms of pubs.