xenogothic

The first magnolia buds began to swell the week of bail. Our anticipation flowered with the season.

The genus of magnolia that proliferates across Korea is different to our European variety. The mountain magnolia is the national flower of North Korea specifically. Kim Il Sung named it Mokran — tree-orchid. It blooms throughout the summer, rather than the spring. Nevertheless, its Korean name is fitting for all varieties: resilient trees beset by fleeting, fragile flowers; strength and fragility in one plant.

The flowers bloom on the day of their return. Bright pink explosions match the curtains we open to let in the spring morning light.

For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief that at times, and often on a long-term basis, lays claims upon us to the extent of having us lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself. Such despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present. Within depression, if my existence is on the verge of collapsing, its lack of meaning is not tragic — it appears obvious to me, glaring and inescapable.

The opening of Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun fades quickly into the background as we begin our journey through her philosophical taxonomy of the abyss. But it is nonetheless here, in the opening paragraph, that she registers a truth often lost to the trick of writing.

Writing is a trick in that, at the moment the written is being read, the writer is announced as someone who knows. It is a horrible weight to bear at times, because it is an illusion and a lie. To write and then publish is only to elongate that always fleeting moment when one has enough assertiveness to say: “This is what I have come to know.” Of course, one likely knew little, or not enough, when the writing began. When the writing stops, it will soon dawn on the writer that they knew all too little at the end as well, and so the writer starts to write again.

When I write, or have written — especially in those bouts of manic productivity I have become well-known for — I generally do not know what I think or what I feel when I begin. I write, but the meaning of what is written is not predetermined. More often than not, meaning is entirely absent, or meaning is lurking somewhere unseen, making oblique suggestions from behind some heavy curtain as to how I might begin its (re)construction. It’s a form of possession, this search for meaning — although whether I possess meaning or meaning possesses me, I’m not sure. Meaning and I are equally silent until we bumble our way into each other. Even then, like a pair of hapless ventriloquists, too much time is spent rummaging around nether regions in the hope that one of us might make the other speak.

This is the truth that resonates outwards from Kristeva’s book on depression. “For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia.” Meaning is a treasure, and melancholia is rarely a source for meaningful writing because melancholia registers an absence of meaning. To be melancholic is, in my experience, to succumb to the overbearing pressure of having no point or purpose. It takes great strength, and even a bit of contrarian madness, to try to fill the void that melancholia opens up in the soul with anything.

I last tried to do this in 2022. On this blog’s archive page, you will find a section titled “The Time I Spent Having a Very Public Mental Breakdown and Manically Writing a Lot About Writing”. It is aptly named… I was exceedingly open about the suicidal depression I was living through and all the crises that emerged from my emotional chaos. I remember receiving a concerned email from my publisher in the midst of things, suggesting I give the outpouring a rest. Perhaps it seemed like I was leaning into the madness. Many months later, we had dinner in London and an alternate reading was proffered: perhaps the writing is what helped.

To this day, I think it did. It was better to write manically every day than give in to the pull of an eternal silence. No matter how unbecoming it can be, writing is how I have learnt to survive. Other periods of productivity have less obviously had their source in my depressions, perhaps because I’ve managed to sustain the illusion that I have something specific to say, but it is always the case. Productive periods of writing are how I keep the demons at bay.

To write about writing itself, however — as I have had tendency to do since the pandemic, whenever I do not have anything in particular to write about — brings its own challenges. It is to latch onto my own tail and try to find some new purpose in an aimless process. Sometimes I wonder what purpose writing could have beyond this. (That is the melancholy talking.) It is humbling to hear occasionally from readers that things I have written have inspired them as they move through the world, but I am painfully aware that I have spent half my time writing only to document a search for something to live for. Perhaps that something is not to be found in writing itself. Perhaps now is the time to log off and do something more than write. Perhaps it would be better to stay silent. Right now, these are the questions that occupy me.

I turn to Susan Sontag, writing on the aesthetics of silence:

Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric.” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture: by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, consumer, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

Still, one cannot fail to perceive in this renunciation of “society” a highly social gesture. The cues for the artist’s eventual liberation from the need to practice his vocation come from observing his fellow artists and measuring himself against them. An exemplary decision of this sort can be made only after the artist has demonstrated that he possesses genius and exercised that genius authoritatively. Once he has surpassed his peers by the standards which he acknowledges, his pride has only one place left to go. For, to be a victim of the craving for silence is to be, in still a further sense, superior to everyone else. It suggests that the artist has had the wit to ask more questions than other people, and that he possesses stronger nerves and higher standards of excellence. (That the artist can persevere in the interrogation of his art until he or it is exhausted scarcely needs proving. As René Char has written, “No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.”)

There is an egotism to this sort of silence in Sontag’s view. An aestheticism that gives way to an asceticism. Writing can so often feel undisciplined — for me, it is certainly an outpouring, an abandon. I’m sure it is for many. Not to write is perhaps to signal you are in better control of yourself (than others are). But to stop writing and stay silent — I can’t imagine it, even when there is nothing much to say. I start to write as soon as I feel the desire to stop, precisely because it is a way to forestall the void of melancholy getting any bigger. As soon as I begin to question what any of this bullshit means, that is the moment I force myself to provide an answer.

Silence beckons like death. The writing ceases when meaning has been rendered inert and inconsequential. It is what seems so counterintuitive about Adorno’s infamous declaration that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”. It is a statement preceded by his observation that “[t]he critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism”. Auschwitz was the ultimate act of barbarism. Culture lost, and since critique of culture is still culture, then what’s the point in writing at all?

I do not wish to ascribe to Adorno’s grief the mere pallor of a creative melancholy. How can anyone begrudge him this devastation after the Shoah? And yet, what strikes me today is that, whilst we might likewise claim that “to write a poem after Gaza is barbaric”, I recognise how so many people have written poetry because the only alternative to writing is death. Decades-worth of Palestinian poetry is a resounding testimony to the contrary of Adorno’s (nonetheless understandable) defeatism in this regard. So too is the prison poetry of Charlotte Head, and others who have conjured beauty out of carceral misery in this country over the last few years. They announce that there is something where there should be nothing, and they have produced it defiantly.

I wonder what might be produced next, if anything, on this page. Earlier this week, my partner and I began to compare our archives. They too have been in prison for their Palestinian solidarity, and between us, we must have sent and received hundreds of letters, poems and drawings over the six months they were inside. From the outside, however, it may have seemed like silence overwhelmed us. At times, it threatened to. Maintaining communication across our disconnection was often a painful process that could have easily been given up on. Our energies were defiant at times and subdued at others. It was only during the last week or so of their incarceration that the writing slowed for me. Admittedly, I had begun to feel defeated. For six months prior, I refused to be so.

Above all else, I refused to stay silent. Even when silence might have been preferable, even when I was speaking only to myself or to one other person, I couldn’t help but write. A running motif in my writing arose, borrowed from a letter by Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, which was to apologise for “the too-much of my speaking”. I spoke in much the same way as I have often written in a crisis. I spoke to speak meaning into existence, even as I routinely felt a melancholic burnout creep over me, since the too-much of my speaking failed to manifest any sustained stability. But my purpose was not to conjure meaning only, in some aesthetic sense of a sublime knowledge; it was to preserve a life — our life. That is truly how it felt. That life has now made a shocking return, and I find myself rocked by the sudden change in circumstance. It is everything that we have been fighting for, and I am overjoyed by their return, but now I find myself without purpose, because I no longer have to worry so desperately about the person I love most in this world. It is surprising to me, just how painful that is.

What should fill the void left by an absence anxiety? I wonder if I might find new comrades to write to. I wonder who has the energy to write and who does not. I wonder who has the desire to write but cannot. It must be said that this mode of silence, which is struggled against, threatening to engulf all those isolated by prison, is not the same as Sontag’s silence. This silence should be in no way aestheticized. But it should be politicised. To accept silence like a noble aesthete may well be an acquiescence to the death drive of a suicidal system that wants us to generate value but not meaning. To refuse this is always political, because it is survival.

Grief is still afflicting all of us, and in moments where grief is felt, a Mount Eerie refrain returns on cue:

It’s dumb
And I don’t want to learn anything from this
I love you

Phil Elverum sings of ‘Real Death’, whereas I feel like we have had a near-death experience. This may sound hyperbolic, but it does not feel so. If death, like melancholy, like disappearance, like destruction, is a voiding of meaning, I have felt like meaning was almost lost. Prison inculcates a culture of devalued existence. It follows a plantation logic that dehumanises inherently. Within it, meaning is evasive. It kills people.

“When real death enters the house, all poetry is dumb”, Elverum sings, perhaps echoing Adorno, whilst singing anyway. A new dialectic emerges here, which Adorno may have failed to grasp, or rather, which may have simply failed him. There is certainly no guarantee of success. It is a dialectic that S.A. Karpukhin distils into a credo to be carried forward always:

When voicedness in art is tied to vulnerability in life, exposure — and not evasion, denial, and declarative muteness — ensures survival.

From prison, you can’t blog. You can’t post on social media. You have the community of those who are inside, and you have whoever might wish to commune with you from without. Although I’d like to claim that my entire life as a blogger and writer can be summarised according to Karpukhin’s credo, never had it felt more poignant than in this six-month fight to sustain a vulnerable voicedness for myself and the person I love. At times, it felt unflattering to give into a familiar compulsion to self-expose, but the exposure did ensure survival. It is an exposure that needn’t always be so public, of course. In private too, to be seen and heard by loved ones is to ensure one’s own survival. But we live in a nightmarish world where strangers are deserving of a reminder as well.

I remind myself of where I am, in my heart and in my body, wrestling with the disorientation that lingers after a traumatic six months. Is trauma ever over? Not until the traumatic event has been provided its narrative place in whatever sense we give to our own lives. That process of narration takes work, and writing helps.

Nevertheless, it is strange to be back here, in this strange dialectic, between voice and a void that surrounds it. Kristeva names the void as “an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief” that threatens to make us “lose all interest in words, actions, and even life itself.” But all the more integral here is the act with which it is coupled. “I am trying to address [it]”, she writes.

On that basis, I sense I might be writing here a lot again over the coming weeks and months. I will write not because I have anything certain to say. I will write because, in this moment, all writing is dumb. Dumb, in the sense of an inability to speak. The writing does not speak, or rather, it speaks for me, who has nothing to say. This is the writerly dialectic that I find most affirming — precisely because life has been and remains anything but firm. But the trick of writing, obliquely announcing oneself to the world as someone who knows, is doubled here. Writing might just trick you into believing in meaning for yourself anew. It is a dialectic in that this sort of dialogue, even if it is with oneself, seeks a self-overcoming. It seeks a militancy in its determination to go the miles. No matter how temporary the validity of what is inscribed here, the words provide a path down which to walk. We will keep walking.

Around this time last year, I was sat outside a local taproom in Newcastle, talking to friends about new names.

I have not worn my name comfortably for some time now. It was not the name with which I was born, but it is the only name I have known. As my gender bends and old designations grow loose, I had been wondering how I might name myself someone new.

My friend Ged suggested a tribute to a favourite author or fictional character. This would not be someone to emulate, but to feel aligned to. I thought how some people choose names for new babies by lovingly appropriating the name of a grandparent or close friend. These names that are not determinative, but rather become tributes that branch out from a river called community. Love flows, carves stone, births rivulets, which grow into rivers of their own. Newness is a confluence. Who might I newly anoint myself as a tributary to and from?

The first name that came to mind was Emily. I have kept it in my back pocket ever since, having friends trial it out from time to time, before old habits reassert themselves because I refuse to assert myself. That changed recently. I have taken up Emily more intentionally. I have taken up ‘Em’ as a transitory syllable for a transitory time.

Why Emily? Since my teenage years, I have loved Emily Brontë. It is an odd time to re-announce this, what with Emerald Fennell’s loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights currently in cinemas. I have not seen it, nor do I intend to. But one review read recently did well to remind me why I love Emily so much.

Mick LaSalle writes for the San Francisco Chronicle on the 2026 adaptation:

The principal mission here was to sex up Wuthering Heights … Why not take mercy on the characters and let them finally have sex after 200 years? … [But it] turns out that some romances loom large in the collective imagination because they’re not consummated … By giving Cathy and Heathcliff an intense sex life, she gets them ready for the next step in their relationship, but there can’t be a next step, because this is Wuthering Heights. It can’t end with grandchildren. So she gives away all the story’s power of spiritual and sexual longing without gaining a thing in their place.

The power of spiritual and sexual longing is everything in Emily’s world. Wuthering Heights take precedence as her only novel to represent this, but to read her poetry is to be plunged far more forcibly into unyielding Gothic desires. Many of her poems describe a yearning so thunderous it might well rip the earth and sky apart. What lingers and sprawls over decades in her novel finds itself powerfully condensed in poetic brevity. Lack has a tremendous gravitational pull here, like that of a black hole, which threatens to swallow everything. It is a desire so intense as to transcend romantic norms. It is subterranean, subversive, and — dare I say — inherently Sapphic.

Take the final stanzas of “Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun”:

O Stars and Dreams and Gentle Night;
O Night and Stars return!
And hide me from the hostile light
That does not warm, but burn—

That drains the blood of suffering men;
Drinks tears, instead of dew:
Let me sleep through his blinding reign,
And only wake with you!

It is a poem that reminds me of John Donne’s “The Sun Rising”, which I have written about before. Donne presents two lovers in bed as a world in microcosm, albeit one that is not governed by the sun’s announcing of a new day, which suggests they should vacate their bed. Instead, they tell the sun to shine on them as indifferently as it shines upon the world at large. They will ask no more of it if the sun asks no more of them.

I wonder if Brontë was consciously responding to Donne’s poem with her own. She speaks of a different sun entirely — a black sun. The sun blacked out because her lover is away. To be greeted by it every morning is like walking outside to the unwanted attentions of other men. Brontë will think about getting up when it is her love, not the sun, who wakes her.

I have always had a soft spot for this purple poetry of self-effacing devotion. It is a Gothic love that is nihilistic in its catastrophic flirtation with all that is not but could be. Her romance is nihilistic, that is to say, not because it is doomed but because it is speculative. It is a Gothic romance that wrestles with the world as it is and is willing to risk death in pursuing a world that is different. There is a politics to her melodrama in this regard. A person, or an idea of a person, might as well be a world, or an idea of a world.

It is how I have often felt myself when falling in love. In a person, from time to time, I have seen worlds transformed. In the vast gulf that love opens up in me, I have built cathedrals. It can be unbecoming, to feel so intensely. To get carried away in love is dangerous and unwise, but this is only because the worlds we build in the gulf are vulnerable. At any moment, they might be met with disaster, and when love fails, so do the worlds we inhabit when under its spell.

For all her melodrama, I have always loved Brontë’s fluency in this language of nihilistic love. She gambles on the magnitude of her feelings, because they far exceed the bounds of Haworth, the “hedged enclosure”. Daring to love is, for her, to dare to escape — even if her world is inescapable. Indeed, who knows how much more dramatic she might have become if her desires were consummated…

This is something that happened to me when I left West Yorkshire for Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the spring of 2022. I had moved to Brontë Country in late 2020, mid-pandemic, only to watch a long-term relationship die on the vine. I was devastated when the time came to start my life over, but I had also been preparing myself for it subconsciously for two years. I had started to write more openly about my under-explored queerness, gently cracking my egg, and I wrote Narcissus in Bloom as a closeted essay on coming-out. When I stepped out of the closet, however, newly single and uprooted before the bright Geordie sun, I felt it burn my mind. Given the chance to start over, I almost lost everything.

I have dared myself to escape often. I fear it always, but I have dared. Indeed, I have rarely been successful. I have lost numerous worlds over the course of my life, and each ending has devastated me. But I dare again to build anew, in the hope that, one day, something might stick, or some shared sense of transformative transience might be followed for a lifetime. I don’t so much long for stasis as for continuity. I would like to find a world and watch it change, rather than be doomed to a life of planet-hopping.

I may well have found a home-world recently, although I also came very close to losing it. Fast-forward a few years from Brontë Country yearnings, I am currently typing away in bed next to my partner, who was released from prison on bail one week ago today. I felt more Brontë than ever over the six months spent writing them daily letters and messages, or when pining for each other down the phone, trying to preserve our relationship on opposite sides of prison walls. Sometimes, we felt full of hope and purpose, cultivating our determination to survive the ordeal; other times, it felt like we might crush what we hoped to preserve by holding on too tight. To have bail granted felt like a cruel reprieve, snatching us from the jaws of defeat. Prison felt like being waterboarded. Relief was granted at the precise moment we thought we might drown.

A new chapter begins now. It is dizzying and we are traumatised, but slowly we can start to world-build again. I am thinking about how I might write about it, document it, as I always have done. In truth, I’m wondering if I want to write ever again… But I recognise that this desire to throw it all away, to never again write a word, to pull a Rimbaud or a Wittgenstein, is no measure of an ending but the arrival of new standards. My relationship to the world has changed utterly, and a new person emerges who does not yet know how to speak from a new perspective.

I’d like to try. If I do, let it be known that it will be under a new name.

It is difficult to know where to start. Perhaps, like all things, it is best to start small. 

For us, the last six months have been a nightmare. The grief experienced has been unlike anything I’ve ever felt. To reach for someone across prison walls is to feel like Orpheus. It is to feel overcome with love, and at times feel crushed by it, because this system lets no-one love how they want to. It is an anti-social system by design.

We have nonetheless approached the last six months with a tireless compassion, building on the example that our four loved ones have supplied us with. They have shown a compassion and care for human life that is astounding, both inside prison and out. 

It is an example we will never forget. You have all taught us so much about what it means to love and be alive. Our fight is not over, and I suspect it never will be. We continue to move forward, one day at a time, our compassion growing each day. 

When the state clamps down on that compassion, it shows itself to be the loveless entity that it is. The state is exposed for its structural inhumanity, at home and abroad. We will all continue to highlight that inhumanity until things change. Compassion grows outwards from the small acts of love we show each other, spreading through our communities and, ultimately, we hope, across borders.

We will continue to fight for freedom — for everyone who is not free. Whether you’re in Foston Hall or in Palestine, I love you more than I hate prison.

27/02/2026

For now, the nightmare of the last six months has been paused. My partner was bailed on Friday, and we’re very much enjoying taking long walks in the spring sun and catching up on all that we’ve missed.

I wrote a lot throughout this experience, but most of it felt too sensitive to share. There were three exceptions:

• An essay on listening to music together down the phone, published in No Tags, Vol. 2;
• A winter reflection on our co-determination;
• Diary excerpts documenting the first month of prison visits and other encounters with the so-called “justice” system.

Now I’d like to log off and finally finish my PhD, but first, you should listen to a statement they recorded from prison a few days before their release here and below:

Fisher is often remembered for his struggle with depression, culminating in suicide. It is an inescapable fact, but a reductive one. As Mattie Colquhoun told me, his figure recalls that of Walter Benjamin: “an indispensable critic of our world who has nonetheless come to represent one of its great tragedies”. Simon Reynolds confirms that “Mark had a capacity to see things clearly, which inevitably means recognizing the darkness at work in the world, all the soul-destroying forces. Seeing things clearly can bring anyone to despair.” But — and here lies the vital tension that still makes his thought resonate — “On the other hand, Mark was capable of great enthusiasm about things — usually happening in popular culture or its fringes…”

I was recently interviewed by Luca Avigo, along with a few other familiar faces, for an article about Mark Fisher and the new film, We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher. You can read it here.

To have one’s consciousness raised is not merely to become aware of facts of which one was previously ignorant: it is instead to have one’s whole relationship to the world shifted. The consciousness in question is not a consciousness of an already-existing state of affairs. Rather, consciousness-raising is productive. It creates a new subject – a we that is both the agent of struggle and what is struggled for. At the same time, consciousness-raising intervenes in the ‘object,’ the world itself, which is now no longer apprehended as some static opacity, the nature of which is already decided, but as something that can be transformed.

— Mark Fisher, “No Romance Without Finance”.

---

6th September 2025

“How long’s your journey? Going far?”

A man sits down next to me on the train and immediately starts chatting. I take off my headphones, bleary-eyed and unprepared for small talk. Looking down, I see a sausage dog in his lap sniffing at my elbow.

“I’m getting off at the next stop, actually.”

“Oh, I see. Visiting friends, is it?”

“Something like that.”

---

Hana’s parents meet me inside the main entrance of the train station and we hug each other. It is lovely to see them.

I have never been to this city before. My first impression of it – perhaps coloured by the circumstances of our visit – is that it is dismal. When this is over, I hope to never return here.

With an hour to kill, we look for someplace to eat. Finding a restaurant amidst a sea of takeaways for brunch, we talk about Hana over eggs cooked three different ways.

We talk about how much we love them, how we could have possibly ended up here, and wherever the hell we’re going next. We reiterate in person what we have spoken about so much already on the phone: we have all overcome challenges in the past, and we have been made stronger by each one; this is just one more notch to our bones.

But I am still in shock. I suppose we all are.

---

The drive over to the prison is mostly silent as Hana’s Dad navigates the unfamiliar concrete sprawl. It is a silence first punctuated by small talk, which we are unable to sustain for long. As the GPS draws us closer, the silence is broken only by deep sighs that we take turns to make.

When we arrive, we’re early. Getting out of the car, we are waved over by a ‘family liaison officer’, who ushers us into a small outbuilding. Hana’s mum is carrying bags of clothes and supplies that she will ultimately take back home with her. We will later come to recognise the pointless carrying of soon-to-be rejected bags as the telltale sign.

“First time?”

On the inside, the dreary outbuilding is revealed to be half-crèche and half-the-saddest-community-centre-you-have-ever-seen. It is filled with tired toys, self-help books and supportive leaflets, most of which ask difficult questions. “Are you affected by someone else’s drug use?” “Have you noticed a change in someone you’re visiting?” “Are you worried about unwanted contact from a prisoner?” Other leaflets on display are intended to help children and adults adjust to the new reality of having a loved one or parent in prison. The mere thought of children passing through this environment makes me deeply sad.

On every table, there is a copy of ConVerse, the prison newspaper, which is filled with bulletins about the prison and probation service. Flicking through it, I find law firm ads, lists of deaths in custody, and reports of inappropriate behaviour between staff and prisoners. It is nothing less than a tabloid testament to the system’s corruption and incompetence.

I am surprised to see at least one hundred copies of the newspaper stacked against a wall by the entrance, leaning precariously on top of a row of lockers where we will have to leave all of our personal belongings before we are granted entry. I ask myself why this system would so willingly and shamelessly broadcast of its own ineptitude.

A generous reading would be that institutional transparency is essential for accountability, but we have already seen how the system dodges accountability at every turn. On the whole, the prison system is so punishingly opaque, for those both inside and outside, with myriad rules unexplained until you unwittingly break them. Even then, these rules are not always followed consistently. It produces a feeling of constant confusion and disorientation that feels intentional.

I start to think that these stacks of newspaper are an added punishment in themselves. They are part of the system’s psychological warfare on all who encounter it, expanding the sense of shared punishment to include those who love someone incarcerated.

I go to use the bathroom, but there is no toilet paper. Maybe that’s what the newspapers are for.

---

When I return, I settle into a vacant seat at a square wooden table where Hana’s parents have already positioned themselves. We begin to ask the family liaison officer questions about the system we’ve spent two weeks being confronted by. She’s open, unassuming and relaxed, like the social workers I spent so much time around during my childhood. But she doesn’t seem to possess any of the answers we seek, nor we do know how to answer the questions she has for us.

Noticing our bags, she asks: “Have they put an app in?” The answer is: “We don’t know”. We don’t know how the system works. We’ve heard barely a word from Hana since they were arrested, but it seems that everything must come from them. Unfortunately, no one else will ever tell you what needs to happen, and even if you figure it out for yourself and do everything by the book, the system is still likely to inexplicably deny all of it.

Sensing our first-time anxieties, the affable officer starts by telling us how nice this prison is, compared to others she also works in. Then she begins to talk about how much corruption there is in the prison service as a whole, noting the prevalence of guards and governors falling in love with prisoners in particular. We all go pale and quiet. “That doesn’t happen that often,” she adds hastily. I think about how the newspaper on the table in front of me is filled with evidence to the contrary.

It is strange to watch just how comfortable the officer gets. She is clearly too used to all of this. We will come to find this jarring too — the ways that people normalise their embeddedness in a social nightmare. So many who work in the prison service see themselves as doing a good deed, or acting upon some innate desire to care for people. It is a hard rationalisation to swallow when true care would be not putting anyone through this ordeal in the first place.

We ask about the problems we’ve had sending and receiving messages. Another visitor, more seasoned, chimes in to say he only uses the eMates app, which lets you send emails to prisoners, in order to send pictures. Instead, he uses phone calls and visitations for all substantial catch-ups and contact. Having all travelled for over three hours to get here, it feels torturous. We’ve yet to establish any sustained contact whatsoever.

---

Before long, a prison officer arrives, dressed in black uniform with a weighty utility belt, to check our IDs. Identities confirmed, the family liaison officer gives each of us a wristband, before the other officer leads us over to the main gate outside the prison, where we flash our wrists before passing through the first layer of fortifications.

I feel like a host of Kafka characters all at once, both entering a castle and preparing for a trial.

We’re searched, with a little more intensity than any of us are used to from airport security, and are then sent into a large, featureless holding cell. Propped against one wall is an abandoned bulletin board. Pinned to it, there is more advice for parents and their children, as well as an information sheet about respecting the gender identities of trans people who may be held here. It all suggests a performative adherence to a minimum level of humanity and dignity, which we will never come to witness for ourselves in practice. In fact, the enforced heteronormativity is sharper here than it is on the outside.

We stand in the airlock for ten-to-fifteen minutes as the other visitors pass through metal detectors, show the insides of their mouths to staff, and have their shoes knocked around like puzzle boxes. Through a small window in a reinforced metal door that leads to the visits room, we see our loved ones enter and get into position on chairs they won’t be allowed to stand up from. All of us begin to crane our necks to catch an early glimpse of them through the porthole.

The door is unlocked with a heavy clunk and I walk over to Hana as casually as I am able. I hug them tight and then lean in for a kiss, which they dodge in a flash of panic. No one is sure what is and isn’t allowed. They apologise profusely for dodging my affections, then hug their parents. I don’t take it personally, but I sit for the next two hours across from them mired in a rumbling frustration. I am not allowed to love them in any way that I am used to.

We try to get comfortable as Hana’s mum heads to a tuck shop on the far side of the room to buy cups of coffee and a tray of snacks. None of us has any appetite, except Hana. They begin savouring a packet of Wotsits like a gourmet meal. “We don’t get this sort of thing in there!” they exclaim, grinning from ear to ear.

I feel myself staring at them. They don’t feel real. I tell them so, and they say, “I’m real, look!” But I don’t want to look. I want to hold them like I’m used to holding them. I stare gauntly instead, willing my eyes to become black holes that might absorb them from across the garish green plastic table that buttresses my knees.

---

There is so much to talk about, and we cover as much ground as we are able to without exhausting ourselves. Mostly, there is a gentle venting of all the emotional turmoil built up over the last two weeks. There is no anger; only the slow release of a fear valve.

The fear is not totally expended. I can’t imagine it ever will be. This won’t feel over until it’s over.

I am embarrassed to discover that I am the biggest sap in all of this. My eyes well up repeatedly. I am simply too estrogenised to handle this much stress without periodically bursting into tears. Hana and their family, to the contrary, display an incredible amount of strength, despite being so newly immersed in the traumatically unfamiliar.

We talk about how much we’ve been fighting for them. Their Dad commends me for all I’ve done to help so far. He tells me that they’re a family, and families stick together. He tells me that I’m family too now. I hug him instinctively, which I think catches him off-guard. I know he’s right. In their company, I feel at home for the first time in a long time.

I know already that this experience will change all of us. I can only hope, in time, that I am transformed into someone who is as strong as they are. I can already feel it beginning to happen. Although I hardly feel present, I feel my mind begin to unknot itself and sit more at ease.

Still, this won’t feel over until it’s over.

---

Hana begins to comment on some of the eMates messages they have so far received. I have been writing on the app daily and desperately, hurling missives into the void like so many messages in bottles. It is the first confirmation we’ve had that they are, in fact, receiving them.

I gently vent more fears, feeling the strain this has put on all of us, but also on our relationship, not yet knowing how best to relate to each other on opposite sides of a new obstacle, but wanting more than anything to persist. “My padmate has been in a relationship for six years whilst being in and out of prison,” Hana tells me. “And if they can make it, so can we.” I believe them, but first I need to process the grief I’m drowning in.

I tell them about the contents of a message sent the night before, which they won’t receive for a few more days at least.

---

Hi, my love. It’s around 8pm on Friday 5th. I can’t wait to see you tomorrow. I’m on a call right now with your Dad and the other families. It’s been nice to all touch base and be there for each other.

And that’s as far as I got before you rang me! It is always such a dream to hear your voice.

I’m sorry every phone call is full of tears. It’s still so new. I’m sure it will get easier.

I’m sure this will also be a strange thing to hear, but the overwhelming feeling is one of grief. The book your Dad got about surviving prison says something similar, because the bottom line is simply that you’re not here suddenly. It’s why this situation is so strange, because I know grief, and so it’s this deeply bittersweet thing to be able to hear from the person your body is grieving. It’s both miraculous and painful at the same time.

It makes me think about Orpheus. I don’t know if you know the myth. Here’s the quick version:

Orpheus is a talented musician on the lyre, who is set to marry Eurydice. He invites Hymen, the god of marriage, to bless the ceremony, but Hymen does not attend – an omen that their marriage is doomed.

Soon after the wedding, Eurydice is killed by a snake whilst walking through woodland. Orpheus, distraught in grief, descends into the underworld to find her, playing the lyre as he goes in order to anchor himself against the grasping of shades who want him to join them in death.

Coming under the protection of the gods, who admire his determination, they decree that Orpheus can bring his lover back to life, but on condition that she walk forever behind him and he does not turn to look at her.

Orpheus accepts the gods’ proposal, but comes to believe he has been tricked, and it’s not really Eurydice who walks behind him but another shade.

Unable to resist temptation, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice, who is then pulled straight back to Hades.

For the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, the myth was a good model for thinking through a patient’s attempts to reckon with grief and separation trauma. It’s fitting because the name Orpheus is thought to derive from proto-Indo-European words for ‘orphan’, ‘servant’, ‘darkness’, ‘fatherless’, or a word for someone who changes allegiances. Ferenczi also speaks of ‘Orpha’ as “organizing life instincts” that allow us to proceed through life without longing disastrously for a return to the womb.

‘Orpha’ can nonetheless be the source of great distress, as the ‘orphan’ is a figure who may never find the help and support they seek. But sometimes they do.

In his Clinical Diary, Ferenczi notes how one of his patients, “with the aid of an omnipotent intelligence (Orpha) … scoured the universe in search of help”, and “her Orpha is supposed to have tracked me down, even at that time, as the only person in the world who owing to his special personal fate could and would make amends for the injury that had been done to her.”

I’m feeling all of that right now, probably a bit triggered, but nonetheless stronger each day and more full of determination than I have ever felt before. If I’ve got any Orpha, they’re pulling me to you. I can feel yours pulling toward me too.

I can feel it because it’s happening! I’m going to get an early night because I’ve got to catch an 8.30am train tomorrow morning so I can come and give you a really big squeeze.

I adore you. Mattie xx

---

Before I know it, our two hours are up. I give them the biggest squeeze I can, but leave my body at some point during. It’s not long enough. It will never have been long enough. I can’t wait to hold them again without feeling observed.

As we turn to leave, I try to catch their eye and give them one final wave. They have turned around to share a moment with another prisoner instead, no doubt in order to blunt the pain of a lingering farewell. The other prisoner is someone I recognise: Lottie, one of the Filton 24.

---

Heading for the next train home, I am numb. I reach out to their friends and try to process the experience over message, but I can already feel the desperate need for sleep as some deep recess of the unconscious strives to start making sense of the ordeal.

I reiterate my feelings to them about the past two weeks, which have felt like someone has kidnapped the person I love most in the whole world. All I’ve been able to do is reason speculatively about the kidnapper’s would-be demands, ready to drop everything to prepare a ransom, whatever it might be.

It’s the only analogy that fits. One of their friends says that this isn’t an analogy at all; it is exactly what has happened.

---

Pulling into Durham station at around 8pm, my phone rings. I hold my breath through the prelude: “This call is from a person currently in a prison in England…”

“I’ll have more credit soon”, Hana says. “This is just a quick call to say goodnight.” I tell them how wonderful it was to see them, and I can’t wait to see them again soon. It is the sort of train-home phone call we’d have on any other night as a long-distance couple, turning the page on our last day together for some time. I start to feel calm for the first time in two weeks.

7th September 2025

I begin reflecting on the last few days, caught in a tug of war between a tacit acceptance and a refusal to normalise the baked-in inhumanity of the prison system.

In recent years, and like so many others, I have been taken by arguments for prison abolition, at least in the abstract. However, if someone were to ask me about the more complicated consequences of such a position, I would not know how to answer them. Maybe I’d mumble something about a “Nordic model” I know nothing about and then have little more to say.

Now, having survived the last two weeks, which have felt like an eternity, I feel I have learnt more about the British criminal justice system than I ever expected to. As is no doubt the case for most people, I had never given it much thought before. I never expected to have any contact with it. Prison was something that happened to other people. But right now, I am feeling its foreboding presence encroach on a life of freedom, because someone I love is not free.

It is a difficult situation to make sense of. Every thought, every ounce of energy, is being spent on concern for the welfare of someone I love deeply. They have been arrested for alleged involvement in direct action, in light of a set of political beliefs I share. But politics has also been the last thing on my mind. I feel stressed “beyond all belief”, crushed under the full weight of that banal idiom. I struggle to find my bearings.

---

A few weeks before their arrest, I sent Hana a draft of an essay [still forthcoming] I’d been working on about David Lynch. They said in a letter that they had been thinking about it a lot whilst inside.

In the essay, I reflect on attempts made by various commentators to claim a politics for Lynch, whether from the left or the right. I opt instead for the argument that what Lynch most often expresses is an

anti-politics, which complicates the illusory certainty of any political programme. Politics, in this regard, is of little overt concern to Lynch’s cinema – at least beyond his distorted mirroring of everyday ‘norms’. His films instead plunder the other side of politics, where the signs we all too readily ascribe a place in the symbolic order are free-floating and untethered from common sense. In this way, Lynch dramatizes the ambiguous interzones that we are all caught up in, irrespective of our political allegiances. His operative perversion lies precisely in the observation that we all occupy a world of horror and intrigue, where errant signifiers always remain open to interpretation.

Anti-politics is not the absence of politics. Anti-politics is like antimatter: it looks like politics, but moves with an ‘opposite charge’. Right now, I feel that negativity pounding in the space between every positive atom that I am.

I do not yet know what to think. How to make sense of a prison politics on the ‘wrong’ side of the system? If ‘politics’, generically defined, is a set of activities that seek to improve life and increase power, then what does it mean to find yourself so abjectly on the other side of it, where one’s life and power are drastically diminished?

Prison is political, of course — achingly so. But the fact remains that, when your face is pressed up against the system, it feels hard to access any politics under the immediate devastation wrecked upon the personal by its sudden presence. Indeed, the impositions of the prison system are felt so powerfully, Hana talks about how they now understand what Mark Fisher meant by ‘capitalist realism’ with a new intensity, feeling like they are now situated at its core but also at its limit. This is a nightmare, a trauma, and we are afforded no alternative to it under the weighty assertions of judicial-state power.

To sense the anti-political in this way is to be situated acutely in an old Marxist paradox. Frank Ruda writes how “the early Marx argued that one can only conceive of the capitalist system in its entirety from the subjective perspective of those who are essential for its reproduction yet — politically — excluded from it.” I come to recognise the imprisoned as a hyper-proletariat in this regard. Their treatment epitomises the underside of a sense of justice and morality on which “free” society rests. This is to say that prison is taken to be an institution of justice for those on its outside in the rest of society — a society that those who interact with the prison system are themselves now excluded from. For all the paltry progress our society has made, gesturing toward new equalities, none of this applies to the incarcerated. It barely applies for us either, who are pulled into its orbit.

It is a situation further complicated by the fact that Hana has been imprisoned for alleged involvement in the ‘wrong’ kind of political act — an act that aimed at improving the lives of others. The consequence of this act is the neutralisation of all politics. From out of this collision between political particles, anti-politics spools. Although we are going through the most politically significant experience of our entire lives, we all feel excluded from any capacity to act upon it and decide our own fates.

I hope that changes. For the time being, everything that is more than personal daunts me like never before. The news makes me feel sick. I wish the world would stop spinning because it’s not helping my head, which is now spinning in the opposite direction. I am shocked by a new kind of fear. I am embarrassed to hear myself whimper before it.

---

“Gratitude goes a long way, as well as acceptance,” Hana wrote in their first letter to me, reflecting on their first few days on remand. I try to close the gap between my experience and theirs. Of course they are trying to accept their current circumstances. What good would come from actively resisting an enforced passivity? But since I remain on the outside, I am accepting it far less easily.

The more I learn about the reality of imprisonment, the more it curdles my blood. I cannot imagine how they are able to reckon with the fact that, as far as the system itself is concerned, there is little difference between anyone incarcerated. All are deemed to have broken the law; the question of which law is largely irrelevant. Everyone inside is reckoning with the myriad reasons why they are in there. Camaraderie over a shared cause is a luxury afforded to very few.

Two of their co-defendants are being held in another prison nearby. In their communications with the outside, they’ve discussed how allusions to what they’re in for have brought them respect from some prisoners; less so from others. “The entire political spectrum is in there, from far left to far right,” a family member informs us on a group call. Apparently, the guy who cuts people’s hair is a white supremacist. “They won’t be getting any haircuts any time soon.” Thankfully, others more sympathetic to their cause are looking out for them.

It is a much stranger position to reckon with for those of us on the outside. Almost everyone in our personal lives knows what our loved ones are in for, but I feel incapable of talking about it or declaring my own position publicly either way, out of a fear that any commentary might harm them or me in some way. We are reassured that, at the very least, we should feel free to talk about our collective experience of prison itself. But I struggle even with this.

I try to reassure myself that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights must still apply: I have “the right to freedom of expression”, and “[t]his right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.” But the second clause of Article 10 nonetheless gives me pause:

The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary.

Where we stand in relation to all of this is unclear. In truth, the uncertainty of the present has dissolved all familiar reasoning into a soup. Struggling to embody all of the principles I hold dear, I feel disembowelled. Every valence of the word ‘abolition’ is felt at once in the context of incarceration. I can’t help but get Hegelian about it.

---

In Hegel’s philosophy, the term aufhebung is used in a positive and negative sense, meaning both to “‘clear away’ or ‘cancel,’ [and] ‘to preserve’”. Due to its complexity, it is a term that has been translated into English in a number of different ways – for example, as ‘abolition’ or ‘sublation’.

What becomes of the person who must abolish their politics, that is, both clear away and preserve them simultaneously? Everything is scrambled by fear, and I soon understand that this too is the point. Although untouched, state violence becomes a more ambiguous force that leaves me feeling bruised all the same.

I feel the way in which the law becomes a weapon. I crumble in the face of judicial and political intimidation, fully aware of the seriousness of the situation. Were this any other moment, maybe my response would be less complicated. But right now, authoritarianism is unequivocally on the rise. I feel it biting at my heels. At the very moment we feel most implored to speak up, we are crushed under the fear of doing so.

---

How does one think about prison abolition in this context? In many ways, with more clarity. No matter what anyone is alleged to have done or has been convicted of doing, speaking from this painfully immediate experience, it is not a punishment I would ever wish to see inflicted on anybody.

This position might be unbelievable, as it is one seldom heard in public discourse. Talk of prison is always centred on protecting the public from the most dangerous individuals, but within the prison population itself, these individuals constitute a minority. The majority are traumatised people who are being subjected to further trauma. It fixes nothing. The notion that prison is a site of rehabilitation is made disgustingly laughable.

8th September 2025

Graham Linehan is in court today to answer for an online harassment campaign against a seventeen-year-old trans woman. Owen Jones, commenting on Linehan’s arrest and subsequent court appearance on Twitter, writes:

I think that Graham Linehan is beyond awful.

We should not be arresting people for hateful things they say online.

It’s not a solution to these problems and trusting an increasingly authoritarian state to be the arbiter of acceptable speech is a major mistake.

Jones comes in for the usual amount of flack, since his ubiquity on social media has often led to him being used as a punching bag for online commentators across the political spectrum. But I also know that he has experienced Britain’s criminal justice system up close, after he was assaulted outside a pub in 2019.

At that time, following his attacker’s sentencing to two years and eight months in prison, the BBC reported how Jones 

tweeted that “prison is not a solution to far right extremism” as [his attacker] “will go to a prison a violent far right extremist, and probably leave prison a violent far right extremist.”

“There is no judicial solution to the far right: it is a political problem,” he wrote.

It was heartening to see Jones reiterate his opposition to prison and its uselessness when it comes to breaking cycles of political violence. Indeed, whilst I too abhor Linehan, it’s hard not to sympathise with Jones’ unequivocal opposition to the court system in this moment as well.

Reading the comments under Jones’ most recent post, I quickly find myself resenting all those savouring the schadenfreude of Linehan’s appearance before a magistrate’s court. He is undoubtedly an idiot and a fanatic, incapable of lucid thought. Instead, he gesticulates wildly, projectile-vomiting an ideological position fuelled by hate, denouncing the rights and basic dignity of all trans people. He too is all too easy to despise.

But just as Jones tweeted following the sentencing of his attacker – a sentence aggravated on the grounds that he was motivated by Jones’ “sexuality and political views” – Linehan too embodies a political problem, which cannot be solved by dragging him before a system that is unwilling to treat trans people with any dignity either. This is to say that the powers being enacted to curtail Linehan’s rabid expressions of hatred towards trans people – and I say this as a trans person – are being just as (if not more) readily applied to someone I love. None of those clambering to see Linehan punished for his undoubtedly grotesque pantomime of bigotry know anything of the fear we are currently experiencing.

Perhaps Linehan is an easy mark in this regard. With no family left to speak of, he is the archetypical ‘divorced dad’ with brainrot. But my principled opposition to his comportment toward trans people makes little difference in the eyes of the law. To watch the system sharpen its blade against him is little comfort when that same blade has cut through our lives already.

Perhaps some who read this will think I am blinkered. They may be right. Our struggle feels achingly particular right now, as I stand aghast before towering statutes of legalese. Is this really the world we live in?

I wonder how I might connect this feeling to something more universal. All attempts to do so feel like uncertain strides through the ruins of a world I once knew. My faith in this country’s various institutions was never assured, but any belief in the tacit compliance that founds a sense of ‘good citizenry’ has been utterly shattered. I do not see a way out of our current political climate that leaves any of these institutions intact.

9th September 2025

I hear a helicopter hovering overhead as I sit in the bay window of my flat in Newcastle. Craning my neck to see, my whole body twists through panic and nausea. It flies away after ten minutes or so.

It is not unusual to hear helicopters over Byker and the Ouseburn Valley. It is common knowledge that many individuals on the run take shelter in the valley’s woodland, which is home to makeshift camps occupied by the unhoused.

Recently, a patch of dense shrubbery, within which you’d find the remnants of campfires and tents, has been reduced to a brown patch of mud and rumble. Nature is decimated to remove what is perceived to be a hiding place for undesirables. What a response this is: to destroy a habitat with total abandon; a scorched-earth approach to moving on the desperate.

I think about a local man who I frequently helped out with cash and snacks whilst working at my pub job — a job I had to leave when this ordeal started. He was arrested and charged with murder earlier this year.

He had previously been in court for child neglect and abuse, and was acquitted on lack of evidence and/or due to the incompetence of the Crown Prosecution Service. I did not know any of this before his most recent arrest. Rumours nonetheless circulated, and I was regularly told to be wary of him by others. In my experience, however, I always found him to be a well-meaning man who was more desperate for human contact than anything else.

The more we got to know each other, the more comfortable I became in giving him a hug when he asked for one. Whoever he might once have been, whoever he still was in secret, and no matter how misguided and dangerous he was assumed to be by others, it seemed he never recovered from his experience before the courts. His alleged neglect of the humanity of another never made me feel like ignoring his own humanity was deserved.

He hadn’t come around to the pub in months, because he too was on remand.

I thought about him often when closing up after a long shift. Sometimes, during the witching hour, after switching off the lights and turning the keys in the locks, we’d wait for our taxis home to arrive in the dark, lighting post-work cigarettes as we looked out across the wooded valley below. In those moments, the valley was transformed from a daylight idyll into a nightmarish hunting ground, where the state occasionally played cat-and-mouse with those on the very edges of society. Not infrequently, we would watch a lightshow of police cars on a nearby viaduct, helicopters circling nearby.

When I finally catch a glimpse of the helicopter overhead today, I wonder who is being hunted and why. I laugh at my irrational prayers that it is not me. My proximity to Hana alone makes me concerned that there is a target on my back. Is love enough to found a sense of guilt by association?

10th September 2025

I don’t know how many times I’ve read Hana’s first letter at this point. I return to it again and again, drawing on their strength and wringing out droplets of solace for myself. “Just gotta cling to wherever you can find autonomy and feel worthy of dignity when the state is denying that for you,” they wrote.

I imagine this is strangely easier to cling to when the state has clamped down on you so absolutely. There is little ambiguity about what is a product of your own agency, when agency itself becomes a luxury almost entirely neutralised.

From my position on the outside, I still do not know where I stand. I fear I am going round in circles as I write the days away. What autonomy and dignity I do have feels precious. I feel the threat of it being taken away, after bearing witness to how easily this can be done. This threat is companied by another, as I continue to fear that any assertion of my own dignified autonomy and self-expression might damage Hana’s future in some way – no matter how remote and unfounded the possibility might be.

The space of writing has always been where I find my autonomy and feel worthy of dignity in the midst of life’s struggles. I reflect on whether the mode in which I am writing now will be seen as pretentious… Is it possible to express a pretentious amount of humility? Am I imbuing myself with a more fearful deference towards the state than is required? The taste of boot in my mouth compounds the nausea felt in Hana’s absence.

---

I turn to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, reading a short fragment entitled ‘From a Theory of the Criminal’:

Like the criminal, imprisonment was a bourgeois affair. In the Middle Ages incarceration was reserved for the offspring of princes who symbolized an inconvenient hereditary claim. Criminals were tortured to death, to instil a respect for order and law in the mass of the population, since the example of severity and cruelty teaches the severe and cruel to love.

For Hegel, heredity is an essential consideration within any dialectical movement. Children become social syntheses; combinatory vessels for the continuation of tradition and the seeds of all that is new.

I think of Hana as an inconvenient prince who has inherited a world in which happiness is hard won. Is it the function of prison to instil within its captives a love of whatever form of freedom they have previously been offered, no matter how superficial that freedom may have been? Isn’t it often the case that those past freedoms were not enough?

When reading the passage from Adorno and Horkheimer above, I am also not sure I understand what is meant by ‘love’ in this instance. Is love being attributed to the state here? It feels incapable of it.

The fragment continues: “Regular imprisonment presupposes a rising need for labour power. It reflects the bourgeois mode of life as suffering.”

---

When Hana’s parents return home from our first joint visit, they find a letter waiting for them on the doormat. Inside, Hana reflects on all that they are missing, and reckons with just how much they miss ‘normality’. It echoes the letter I received five days earlier.

Remaining true to their undeniable compassion for others, Hana keeps the suffering of those around them at the forefront of their thoughts:

It’s so important for prisoners to feel supported and motivated by something that nurtures them – many are deprived of that support. It can feel so dehumanizing.

Watching the news on far-right violence against the asylum seekers in hotels fills me with pain and anger and fear. The real problem is austerity and the deprivation of the working class and public infrastructure by the bourgeoisie and ruling class – seeking asylum is a human right.

I think about how they are desperately seeking asylum with us, just as we are desperately seeking to house them once again.

When I hear these people saying that migrants are treated better, it’s because they feel unsupported and have turned their frustration and misery collectively on people who aren’t responsible, who are going through their own struggle with a system that dehumanizes them, trying to find safety and dignity.

This is obviously related to why I’m here…

But I hold onto this version of the serenity prayer: “God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, the courage to change the things I cannot accept, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Reading of their resolve gradually shakes me from my shellshocked stupor. Resentment towards the state still grows as I increasingly feel like a prisoner of my own anxious thoughts. How much is this experience ungrounding my understanding of what love is? Not a love that the state seeks to enforce through fear and brutality, but a love that runs radically to the contrary. It is a new kind of love, perhaps already known in some sense, but taken for granted. It must now be enacted with a new purpose and intensity.

12th September 2025

I wake up an hour before my alarm at 5.30am. Five hours, two trains, and two buses later, I approach the prison on foot for my second visit. I am 90 minutes early, and sit outside in the rain waiting for an officer to arrive and unlock the outbuilding. I am surprised my loitering doesn’t raise more suspicions. I remember that, although I am at a prison, I am still free.

I sit on a wooden bench, slotted behind the outbuilding and an shipping container, which has been repurposed as some sort of shed for the groundskeepers. To my left, the prison, imposing and quiet; to my right, a vast field of tall grass and a few old trees. The vista to my right is beautiful, and I am aware that I am the only person currently around who has the freedom to take it all in.

The prison looks a lot like a school, albeit with additional 30ft high fences and barbed wire. From my last visit, I also know it smells like a hospital. Every time I am struck by the memory of another institution that the prison is reminiscent of, all I can think is that Foucault was right.

---

In his book on Foucault, Gilles Deleuze describes how he establishes a new ‘cartography’ of power, which is based on

a strict immanence where centres of power and disciplinary techniques form multiple segments, linked to one another which the individuals of a mass traverse or inhabit, body and soul (family, school, barracks, factory, if need be prison). The thing called power is characterized by immanence of field without transcendent unification, continuity of line without global centralization, and contiguity of parts without distinct totalization: it is a social space.

In one of Deleuze’s most famous essays, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”, he makes the point even more sharply:

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment.

Prison is only an acute enclosure, concentrating the general unfreedom of bourgeois life at the tip of a blunt instrument. I think about how the system’s cascading ineptitude is symptomatic of a failure to fully transform discipline into control. Deleuze continues:

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors – scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.

I think about Hana’s request for the writings of Mark Fisher; their commentary on the intensification of capitalist realism felt within the prison’s walls.

I think about an essay Fisher wrote for Gonzo Circus in 2015: “Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”

It is a provocative claim, which does not hold up when compared to reality. Time is administrated with far more intensity inside than out. The mind is always a risk of atrophy. Hana will mostly read fiction and knit.

---

After about an hour or so on my own, some other relatives arrive to visit their loved ones. Three women show up with bags of clothes and looks of bewilderment. This must be what we looked like a week ago.

Two other women join shortly afterwards, accompanied by two children. Last week, the very thought of children occupying this space made me sad. The reality is worse.

One of the children needs their nappy changed, but the disposal unit in the toilet is full to bursting. The entire outbuilding quickly starts to smell of putrid shit. I try not to gag.

At 1.45pm, a baby-faced guard comes in to check our IDs against a list of names on a clipboard. The list is littered with typos, causing the guard to warn some of the families now present that, unless his boss gives the go-ahead, they might not be allowed in. Everything has to correspond and match. It gives the illusion of authority and stringency, but the litany of errors, the visitors exclaim, is due to prison administrative error. It becomes one more incident of the prison service openly displaying its cruel incompetence.

---

The two hours Hana and I get to spend together disappear in a flash once again. It is undoubtedly the weirdest date I have ever been on.

We still don’t know what is or isn’t allowed. We wait to be told, and so begin to test its limits.

Hana and I hold hands. We are tentative at first, stealing sensations, playing footsie, savouring the warmth of each other’s skin for brief moments, until we entwine our fingers without letting go. At the same time, we gaze deeply into each other’s eyes, reminding each other through insinuation about the last time we were freely intimate.

I tell them about how I previously found it difficult to hold onto memories of our intimacies. The amnesia may well have been wilful. Allowing myself to forget what it was like to hold them became as good an excuse as any to organise a trip down to London to see them. Today, I have never remembered those intimacies most viscerally. I hold onto them, remember them, and make them sharper every day, retreading neural pathways to make sure it all continues to feel like yesterday.

We laugh about it and edge ever closer. Roughly an hour into our visit, a screw comes over to reprimand the both of us. “We’ll need to lessen the touching.” I hate them for it.

The guards want to ensure that we are not passing drugs or notes between us. It is a restriction implemented purely to avoid the smuggling contraband – which, according to reporting earlier in the year, is one more thing the prison is utterly terrible at enforcing. Indeed, their vigilance feels misplaced. Drugs are apparently accessed so easily, but visitations are policed so excessively, it makes it clear that contraband is far more likely to be smuggled in by the guards themselves.

And anyway, for what it’s worth, we’re both sober.

---

We say goodbye and I hug them tight. They kiss my neck in our embrace and I feel myself melting into them. I try not to make the goodbye more difficult than it needs to be, and make my way to the exit.

18th September 2025

From my bedroom, I see flashing lights all around, refracted through the gaps around my curtained windows. Through the peephole of my door, I see cocked rifles and balaclava’d cops. I jolt awake at the very moment I am taken, having managed only one hour of sleep.

The last few weeks keep registering themselves as a trauma. I’m going to need so much (more) therapy when this is over, if I am ever going to get over this whole ‘kidnapped-by-the-state’ thing.

---

Later that morning, my ears prick, anticipating the sounds of the postman. At 10.45am, I receive another letter from Hana, alongside two books recently purchased: Dance in Chains by Padraic Kenney and Free Them All by Gwénola Ricordeau.

I open Free Them All in front of me with a pot of coffee and it immediately resonates with my experience so far. Ricordeau begins:

The day that prisons stopped being an abstract notion to me, I was convinced that they needed to be abolished. The idea of prison abolition did not come to me through theory, but through my gut; I did not really know how to go about it – nor even if others had considered it before me.

Ricordeau describes how her experience of having loved ones incarcerated was explicitly “a woman’s experience”, because it is “women, for the most part, who perform the outside tasks of material and emotional solidarity that are necessary for the survival of men on the inside.” It is strange how much I can relate to this. Prison both ignores and underhandedly affirms my transness. I quit my job to undertake these new labours. I too am a prison wife now.

Ricordeau’s ‘womanly’ experience is further sharped by her frustrations with the criminal justice system, not only as a relative of someone incarcerated but also as a victim of violence herself:

Due to the structural nature of the violence I was confronted with, whether interpersonal or from the state, I knew perfectly well that nothing had ever truly been resolved – even if defending yourself against a man and defending yourself against the state have very different implications. So I was far less interested in the idea of exercising my right in the legal realm than in contributing, in the political realm, to the collective dismantling of the conditions that had made this violence possible.

I think about the dissonance wrestled with a week or so ago, when thoughts of abolition first came to mind. I think about the difficulty of holding together tandem experiences of interpersonal and state violence as a trans person.

I take comfort in Ricordeau’s acknowledgement that there is no “simple answer” to the questions that arise from conversations around prison abolition. But in having these conversations regardless, we can begin to uncover

a few paths for reflection that suggest that in feminism, one can draw out a radical critique of the criminal justice system. Aren’t there at least as many reasons to combat “patriarchal” justice as “bourgeois” justice or “racist” criminal justice? And if one considers what the impact of “justice” is on LGBTQ people, can’t those radical critiques at least draw from queer thought?

I think about the layers of injustice being enacted by a system that abolishes all outside politics. Prison is, after all, where people are kept and ostracised in order for the rest of society to feel safe. Is Hana the same as these people? The answer is moot. The question that keeps me up at night is: ‘Are they safe?’ Because prison is not a safe place for anyone. I want to articulate new provisions that might protect everyone, both inside and out. I am left wanting.

The contradictions leave me dizzy. They are the sorts of contradiction that already unsettle an abolitionist politics in general, especially as it pertains to women’s justice. Indeed, an abolitionist politics calls the very concept of ‘justice’ into question. Within an abolitionary quest for justice, what are the elements of the ‘justice’ we know that are to be preserved, and which are to be cleared away?

Ricordeau writes how

penal abolitionism finds itself, along with several currents of feminism (as with certain antiracist or LGBTQ struggles), facing a real contradiction: the politics of recognition fought on the terrain of law and rights are naturally accompanied by activist calls to create new crimes (for example, linked to discrimination).

But we must remember that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house…

---

To be continued (maybe)…

If you’re in New York, the Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at NYU has organised a listening session for English Heretic’s Plan for the Kidnap of Princess Anne. Featuring “doomloops and dank hymnals and CCRU hyperstition by way of JG Ballard (with an uncredited Mark Fisher as Ian Ball)”, the session will be accompanied by new recorded contributions from Andy Sharp and myself.

More details can be found on Instagram with the when and where below:

WHEN: Thursday 12 February 2026, 6:45pm

WHERE: Recording Studio, 194 Mercer Street [between Bleecker & West Houston Street]

Free, open to the public, non-NYU guests must RSVP to – ss162@nyu.edu

My recent reflection of Mark Fisher, nine years on from his death, has (already!) been translated into Russian over at Insolarance. It comes with the following translator’s preface:

Today marks the ninth anniversary of the death of philosopher, theorist, critic, and future-seeker Mark Fisher. Mark struggled with depression throughout his life and died tragically in 2017, leaving behind a controversial and extensive body of work, which is gradually being published in Russian (Capitalist Realism, Ghosts of My Life, K-Punk, Postcapitalist Desire). This text by fellow researcher and Mark Fisher scholar (and author of the foreword to the Russian edition of Postcapitalist Desire) Mattie Colquhoun sums up nine years without Fisher, arguing that the only way out of a cultural depression like the current one is to act as if things could have been different.

Colquhoun cites Fisher’s “Abandon Hope,” in which he argues that constructing the future, the courage to strive for it, involves a sober and pragmatic assessment of the resources available to us here and now, alongside a reflection on how we can best utilize and increase these resources. It’s about moving — perhaps slowly, but certainly purposefully — from where we are now to something entirely different. “There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript to Societies of Control.’ Hope, passivity, must recede from the political imagination, giving way to confidence, the joy that arises from the idea of a future or past thing, the cause of doubt in which has been removed. Media and cyberangelism scholar Bogna Konior also writes about something similar, about navigating a world of possibility that develops into courage in the face of present circumstances. And although Mark Fisher suffered from severe depression in his final days, whether in his office or at political events, as Colquhoun writes, Mark’s confidence in a world that could be — that would be — free was more palpable than ever.

The text is further relished by Colquhoun’s personal tragedy: her partner, Hana, was arrested by British police on August 26, 2025, for allegedly participating in a pro-Palestinian protest in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire. Communicating across the prison system, Colquhoun and Hana establish a new form of life alongside each other.

The translation is provided in an abridged version, safe for publication under existing legal conditions.

Elsewhere, over on the Fotograf Zone, an excerpt from my last book Narcissus in Bloom has been translated into Czech.

My thanks to the translators for their diligence and solidarity <3

The number nine is the last numeral of the decimal system, and its associations with death and fatality are primarily based on this purely numerical (modular) function of termination. There are nine rivers of the underworld, and the mortuary aspect of the cat is indicated by her nine lives. Charles Manson’s adoption of the Beatles’ Revolution-9 (or Revelation IX) as an apocalyptic ‘family anthem’ was fully in keeping with this aspect of the number.

Alternatively, nine is acknowledged as the highest numeral, and associated with celestial inspiration (the nine muses) and bliss (Cloud-9). Nine solar planets are recognized by modern astronomy (as also by the ancient Lemurian Planetwork).

The duplicate reiteration of nine is remarkable for its theo-mystical resonances. Islam (= 99) lists ninety-nine ‘incomparable attributes’ of Allah. The Anglossic value of YHVH = 99. According to the cryptic Black Atlantean cargo-cult Hyper-C, the number ninety-nine — as dramatized by the Y2K panic — designates the cyclic completion of time.

— Ccru, “Zone Nine”

In a few days’ time, on Tuesday 13th January 2026, it will have been nine years since we lost Mark Fisher. It is hard to believe.

As I tend to do every New Year, I was revisiting some of Mark’s blogposts over the first week of January. In particular, I was reading his May 2015 post, “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”.

“Abandon Hope” was one of the last substantial posts Mark put on his k-punk blog. He’d stop posting two months later, roughly 15 months before his death.

There are two likely reasons why Mark stopped blogging; both may be true at once:

1. Mark was spending more time organising politically in meatspace, having already recognised that the internet he once called home was a sinking ship;
   
2. Mark was increasingly struggling with his depression.

Given his eventual death on 13th January 2017, Mark was evidently depressed towards the end of 2016, but between 2014 to 2016, he also appeared to be doing more to publicly fight back against his depression than he’d ever done before.

This fightback was felt most powerfully in Mark’s writing when depression had every reason to overwhelm him and us. The context for the May 2015 post, of course, was that month’s general election in the UK. The Labour Party, led by Ed Miliband, had just lost to David Cameron’s Conservatives, who had somehow converted their disastrously austere coalition government with the Liberal Democrats into a (very narrow) Conservative majority.

It is an election I remember well (and I may have recollected it on this blog before).

I was working at Ffotogallery in Cardiff at the time — my first job after graduating from university. On showing up to work at Chapter Arts Centre on 8th May, where our offices were located, the morning mood was thick with misery. Everyone knew what was coming. Funding cuts at the community arts centre were presumed inevitable and did eventually come to pass. In January 2016, I felt them personally when I was let go from my job.

Citing precarious future funding, I remember my boss took a moment to soften the blow by reminding me that I’d already expressed plans to leave later in the year. I had been accepted onto a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths, and so, at the end of the summer of 2016, I was going to move to London to start my studies, which I hoped would be under the tutelage of Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun.

I was sad to leave the gallery and I was very worried about money — nothing much has changed there — but my future overall was looking bright. I was chasing a dream. Whether I’d read Mark’s latest post at the time or not, I can’t remember, but I do remember the hope I was clinging onto then, with no way of knowing what further pains were to come.

Ten years on from that concentrated sequence of political disappointments and real grief, hope once again feels like a fragile affect of late. But in the midst of a particularly blue January, when my mental health has once again felt fragile, I am trying my best to convert hope into confidence, in order to assuage the anxiety of another personal limbo.

Although the anniversary of Mark’s death is always a painful moment of reflection for me, I am also long overdue a return to his work. It may look like I write about little else, but it has actually been a while… And I have not been disappointed. Especially right now, what we might call Mark’s late ‘confident’ writings offer a powerful vision of the future, enmeshed in the real potentialities of what was then the present. These writings are no less pertinent, even if the world feels very different, because Mark’s struggle is timeless. What he was wrestling with was an attempt to overcome various “passive affects”, which might be felt even more sharply now than back then.

These affects are named across Mark’s last two months of k-punk posts. Alongside the confidence of “Abandon Hope”, which we’ll return to shortly, we find him trying to express more ambivalent feelings through a couple of mixes on his blog.

The first, “Look What Fear Has Done To My Body”, takes its title from the lyrics to Magazine’s “Because You’re Frightened”. The mix was shared as a tribute to Mark’s students on his ‘Popular Modernism’ module, which he taught as part of the BA(hons) Fine Art & History of Art degree at Goldsmiths (if I’m not mistaken).

Two months later, “No More Miserable Monday Mornings” was shared as a less explicit tribute, but a worthy one nonetheless. “You don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism” is here an adage turned inside out. In private, Mark had expressed how he came to treasure Mondays as one of his postgraduate teaching days, and so he turned this personal joy into a new mantra of post-capitalist desire.

Both mixes are sonic excursions that place the feelings to be counteracted — fear and misery — at the forefront, like two curated séances for exposing and then exorcising sad affects. But what is most sobering about these exorcisms is how clearly Mark was attempting to reaffirm some sort of emotional-engineering project for himself, in order to forestall a familiar depression.

The electoral defeat of the Labour Party in 2015 — although who can say what amount of good they would have actually done, had they won — could have devastated Mark. Maybe it did. When his essay “Good for Nothing” was published a year earlier in 2014, he was clearly gearing himself up for overdue change and an end to a politics of austerity that had followed the financial crash in 2008.

There, Mark begins by diagnosing the depression that had long stalked him. Returning to the materialist psychiatry of David Smail — who was a major influence on his 2009 book, Capitalism Realism — Mark wrote about the source of his feeling that he is “good for nothing”, and his attempts to silence the “sneering ‘inner’ voice which accuses you of self-indulgence – you aren’t depressed, you’re just feeling sorry for yourself, pull yourself together”; the voice that “isn’t an ‘inner’ voice at all”, but “the internalised expression of actual social forces, some of which have a vested interest in denying any connection between depression and politics.”

Mark wanted to re-emphasise this connection, not to wallow in it, but in order to more forcefully cut the knot; depression is political, but Mark did not want to advance a depressive politics. He concludes:

We must understand the fatalistic submission of the UK’s population to austerity as the consequence of a deliberately cultivated depression. This depression is manifested in the acceptance that things will get worse (for all but a small elite), that we are lucky to have a job at all (so we shouldn’t expect wages to keep pace with inflation), that we cannot afford the collective provision of the welfare state. Collective depression is the result of the ruling class project of resubordination. For some time now, we have increasingly accepted the idea that we are not the kind of people who can act. This isn’t a failure of will any more than an individual depressed person can ‘snap themselves out of it’ by ‘pulling their socks up’. The rebuilding of class consciousness is a formidable task indeed, one that cannot be achieved by calling upon ready-made solutions – but, in spite of what our collective depression tells us, it can be done. Inventing new forms of political involvement, reviving institutions that have become decadent, converting privatised disaffection into politicised anger: all of this can happen, and when it does, who knows what is possible?

What eventually came to pass in 2015 was a disappointment for all of us, even if the improvements dangled before the electorate now seem minimal in hindsight, when compared to the drastic change we so desperately need today. But it is further heartening that Mark did not (publicly) give into the sort of depression he was prone to. The negativity of his intellect intensified, but so too did his capacity for confident action.

Ever the Deleuzo-Guattarian, this intellect/action dialectic was ever-present on Mark’s k-punk blog, continuing to intensify over time, as he persistently attempted to short-circuit the alienation felt between self and society. As in “Good for Nothing”, he persistently described and critiqued the manner in which the privatisation of mental-health issues is a consequence of neoliberalism’s penchant for privatisation in general. It is certainly misleading to transform the personal effects of social conditions into nebulous folk-pathologies that let governments off the hook for the misery they cause, but the tension within Mark’s work as a whole is that thinking about the human condition in terms of health and illness is not, in itself, a bad thing to do. Neoliberalism has only perverted such an outlook, which might otherwise be agreeable to us, for its own ends. Indeed, to think more emphatically in terms of socialised health and illness is a key site of (re)new(ed) possibility in privatised times.

If there is a sharp contradiction present in this argument, it is a contradiction acutely British in nature, since our National Health Service is held up as both a bastion of socialised medicine at the same time as it is a political football and gravity well of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Since Mark was Britain’s most perceptive guide for navigating the contradictions of British culture, he had first wandered into the fray of this contradiction a decade or two earlier than most. For example, in a 2004 post about Spinoza titled “Emotional Engineering”, he writes:

In place of the ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ a vulgarized Kantianism and vestigial Christianity has inculcated into us, Spinoza urges us to think in terms of health and illness. There are no “categorical” duties applying to all organisms, since what counts as “good” or “evil” is relative to the interests of each entity. In tune with popular wisdom, Spinoza is clear that what brings wellbeing to one entity will poison to another. The first and most overriding drive of any entity, Spinoza says, is its will to persist in its own being. When an entity starts to act against its own best interests, to destroy itself – as, sadly, Spinoza observes, humans are wont to do – it has been taken over by external forces. To be free and happy entails exorcising these invaders and acting in accordance with reason.

One looming problem at the heart of the capitalist-human condition is that we are so riddled with invaders, we have never been more assured of our various sicknesses and ailments. We know this because we seek to name them constantly, albeit too often without investigating their root cause. Without the more granular work necessary to meaningfully diagnose our contemporary condition, all we end up doing is neoliberalism’s work for it. We do this by buying into every new social-media symptomatology presented to us like a monthly horoscope — the sort found in the back of glossy magazines that enlarge our insecurities only to sell us new snake oils to treat them.

Intervening more thoughtfully within this perverted economy of affects, we can uncover grounds for newly honed critiques. But an awareness of what fear is doing to our bodies can just as easily devastate us, trapping us in reflexivity. It is a situation that can result in the most pernicious condition of capitalist realism, which Mark termed “reflexive impotence” — “yes, [we] know things are bad, but more than that, [we] know [we] can’t do anything about it.”

Mark never took this depression for granted, even whilst he too was affected by it. Clearly he felt it too, but he refused to languish in it, all the while acknowledging just how difficult it can be to overcome. This is important, because it made Mark’s optimism hard won; it was never a whimsical flight into fantasy or delusion. He stayed with the trouble precisely because he so often felt in trouble. This is how he was able to intervene in these very British paradoxes so astutely, albeit with difficulty.

Initially, when writing Capitalist Realism, Mark tried to ‘denaturalise’ this depression with public theory. As he argued in 2010:

There has been some discussion of whether Capitalist Realism is a pessimistic book. For me, it isn’t pessimistic, but it is negative. The pessimism is already embedded in everyday life – it is what Zizek would call the “spontaneous unreflective ideology” of our times. Identifying the embedded, unreflective pessimism is an act of negativity which, I hope, can make some contribution to denaturalizing that pessimism (which, by its very nature, does not identify itself as such, and is covered over by a compulsory positivity which forbids negativity).

But Mark’s forceful negativity was never the be-all-end-all. He insisted that we must also reaffirm our capacity to act alongside every armchair critique of what stands in our way. As such, Mark updated Antonio Gramsci’s famous mantra about “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will”; his version was subtly but powerfully different, and can perhaps be formulated as “negativity of the intellect, confidence of the act“.

This formula was most often put to work in Mark’s challenges to a toothless twenty-first-century ‘poptimism’. He always insisted that optimism counts for nothing on its own and must always include a negativity that is honest about the material conditions that seek to deflate us. Refusing to be deflated is not enough, because we do in fact have every reason to be so! Therefore, without an intellectual negativity, our observations all too easily align themselves with a “spontaneous unreflective … compulsory positivity” that helps no-one.

I have made this point many times before: Mark’s critics typically only see his negativity and nothing else. But contrary to this, Mark’s coupling of a “negativity of the intellect” and an “confidence of the act” is forthright and persistent. Together, they generate friction, yes, but that is better than the two poles cancelling each other out.

By way of an example, in a post from 2006 entitled “Optimism of the Act”, Mark explicates an early version of the above formula with a clarity often ignored by his more uncharitable readers. Here, Mark critiques the very mode of cultural critique he remains associated with, and also challenges the utility of theory in addressing the “cultural depression” his critics also diagnose him with:

In particularly acute cases of depression, it is recognized that no verbal or therapeutic intervention will reach the patient. The only effective remedy is to do things, even though the patient will, at that time, believe that any act is pointless and meaningless. But ‘going through the motions’ of the act is an essential pre-requisite to the growth of belief ‘in the heart’. Much as Pascal famously argued in his Wager, belief follows from behaviour rather than the reverse. Similarly, the only way out of cultural depression like now is to act as if things can be different.

This was an inversion of capitalism realism: not the reflexive impotence of ‘there is no alternative’, but an active insistence that there are alternatives right here, right now, and we can live (in) them. It is a new realism; a communist realism:

We need a new, communist, realism, which says that businesses are only viable if they can pay workers a living wage. This communist realism would reverse the capitalist realist demonisation of those on benefits, and target the real parasites: “entrepreneurs” whose enterprises depend on hyper-precarious labour; landlords living it large off housing benefit; bankers getting bonuses effectively or actually out of public money, etc.

But the concept of communist realism also suggests a particular kind of orientation. This isn’t an eventalism, which will wager all its hopes on a sudden and final transformation. It isn’t a utopianism, which concedes anything “realistic” to the enemy. It is about soberly and pragmatically assessing the resources that are available to us here and now, and thinking about how we can best use and increase those resources. It is about moving – perhaps slowly, but certainly purposively – from where we are now to somewhere very different.

So far, so Fisher. But all of this comes together with a new profundity in mid-May 2015 for Mark. His post on abandoning hope, published a few days after his argument for a “communist realism”, feels like the culmination of the k-punk dialectic, at a time when its essentiality was more obvious than ever (and it is surely even more so now). Indeed, Mark’s prior wager in 2006 that “belief follows from behaviour” returns here as a powerful new motor for political organising, which he ponders on but refuses to restrict to a rapidly waning blogosphere.

Where Mark’s legacy suffers — although it seems clear that the depths of his k-punk blog remain uncharted territory for many — is that he did not document this move into meatspace as diligently as he might have done a decade earlier. He seemed to see little value in a paper trail beyond the material interventions and improvements he now wanted to make in the lives of others.

This is what I found most moving, when I stumbled unexpectedly into Mark’s orbit at the time of his death. Having forsaken the internet on which he made his name, most seemed to think he disappeared. But to speak to those who knew him IRL, Mark may have had even more of an impact than ever before, although this was initially restricted to his family, friends and students, as well as the people he met whilst out organising.

It is what made Mark’s death so shocking. We knew he was depressed — the last time I saw him, in the admin office of the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in December 2016 — he looked a hollow man. But in the classroom or his office or at political events, Mark’s confidence in a world that could be — that will be — free was more palpable than it had ever been.

Whenever I think about this rarified Mark, I think about “Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming)”. This is the passage I think about most:

“There’s no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons,” Deleuze writes in ‘Postscript on Societies of Control’. He was no doubt thinking of Spinoza’s account of hope and fear in the Ethics. “There is no hope unmingled with fear, and no fear unmingled with hope,” Spinoza claimed. He defines hope and fear as follows:

Hope is a joy not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.

Fear is a sorrow not constant, arising from the idea of something future or past about the issue of which we sometimes doubt.

Hope and fear are essentially interchangeable; they are passive affects, which arise from our incapacity to actually act. Like all superstitions, hope is something we call upon when we have nothing else. This is why Obama’s “politics of hope” ended up so deflating – not only because, inevitably, the Obama administration quickly became mired in capitalist realism, but also because the condition of hope is passivity. The Obama administration didn’t want to activate the population (except at election time).

We don’t need hope; what we need is confidence and the capacity to act. “Confidence,” Spinoza argues, “is a joy arising from the idea of a past or future object from which cause for doubting is removed.” Yet it is very difficult, even at the best of times, for subordinated groups to have confidence, because for them / us there are few if any “future objects from which cause for doubting is removed.”

To achieve this kind of confidence, we must dedicate ourselves to new forms of action that are wholly contrary to communicative capitalism’s dilution of the social realm. Mark went in search of these things offline, and later brought back a salvagepunk blueprint of what could be built from the wreckage of the present.

He ends “Abandon Hope” with a list of ten forms of action that are essential for changing the world, beyond his own negative interpretations of it. I won’t reproduce them all here, but I do want to pause on number seven, which struck me with a new significance:

7. Engage in forms of activism aimed at logistical disruption 

Capital has to be seriously inconvenienced and to fear before it yields any territory or resources. It can just wait out most protests, but it will take notice when its logistical operations are threatened. We must be prepared for them cutting up very rough once we start doing this – using anti-terrorist legislation to justify practically any form of repression. They won’t play fair, but it’s not a game of cricket – they know it’s class war, and we should never forget it either.

As I already mentioned in my last post, my partner Hana is currently in prison for engaging precisely in this form of activism. Just as Mark predicted, they are been targeted with (a misuse of) counter-terrorism legislation, in order to justify a deeply cruel and lengthy remand. A direct-action movement that has aimed for logistical disruption (during an ongoing genocide no less) has led to new repressions heaped on the sorts of activism that this country has otherwise championed historically. It is an incredibly painful and fearsome thing to experience up close, because no one is playing fair. But this has never been a game of cricket.

What is to be done? It has admittedly been a while since I’ve had this thought, but I really wish Mark was here writing about ‘the now’, doing something about it, inspiring and gathering others as he did so effortlessly.

‘Now’ encroaches on us. I don’t think I’ll be able to write anything here for a while that doesn’t mention what were going through. In truth, it feels difficult to write anything about what we’re doing. Suffice it to say that we’re doing all that we feasibly can, but it is a situation that continues to cause me a great deal of heartache, over four months in.

Without Mark, we are our own guides to the future, and we’re making the best we can of these new roles. It’s not easy. But just as I felt my knees begin to buckle under the weight of things at the very start of this year, in going back over Mark’s writings from a decade ago, I am grateful to be reminded of the negativity of his intellect and the confidence of his actions. It is what made me fall in love with his writing, with my partner, and it is what has led us to now.

With my partner’s confident act undertaken, resulting in an extended period of enforced passivity, negativity of the intellect dominates violently. To wit, some days it feels like wild oscillations between fear and hope are all that we are left with. But there are many more confident acts at our disposal in the here and now, even if they are dwarfed by the act that has led us to this situation. Regardless, they are not “good for nothing”. On the contrary, doing what we can to preserve our confident belief in a better world, in a better life on the horizon, is essential. We hold that confidence before us right now, actively, in the light of a future that will arrive, because we will have made it.

What remains devastating about the loss of Mark Fisher is that he succumbed to his own oscillations between hope and fear. These hopes and fears, as Tariq Goddard has always insisted, were far more personal than they were political. I feel that pressure myself some days. What frightens me the most is that the relationship I cherish and hold so dear to my heart is strained by the prison system’s anti-social impositions. This is a personal battle that feels distinct from the more political fight on our hands. Yes, the personal remains political, but in terms of the affects produced, it is painful to feel that the personal is at the mercy of the political nonetheless.

How to acknowledge the political source of this fear without espousing a fearful politics? As the locomotive of 2026 pulls sluggishly out of its station, my anxiety has at times gotten the better of me. Hope is transformed into fear at the slightest provocation — is that not a good definition of anxiety, or perhaps just neurosis? The question is how to borrow a confidence from the political that can buoy the personal in turn.

Thankfully, on January 7th — the day before I started writing this post — my partner and I achieved this on the phone, and not for the first time. The cultivation of confidence is a process that requires diligent upkeep. We found it again when we spent over an hour daydreaming about what our life together might look like when this is over. We talked mostly about caring for animals, keeping bees, and growing our own food in some countryside idyll far from the pressures of city life — all joys that Hana is extracting from their prison job and hopes to continue with new purpose on the outside. Hana credits this new passion to their more eco-conscious co-defendant, Frank, who has taught them a great deal, as well as the broader community of people who work alongside them in the prison gardens, with whom they share so much camaraderie. We also talked about doing more to organise in our communities, because nothing makes you more desperate for new integrations than prison does.

In making these connections between the present and the future, an anxiety that had weighed heavy for a few days was gently lifted. Confidence was reaffirmed as we plotted all the ways that we will live more intentionally, now and then, utilising all that we have learned and will learn from this experience to found a new form of life by each other’s side.

I recall a short poem, written on the back of a drawing I received in the post from Hana on 16th October 2025:

In future memory
the prison untouches us like shadows
and we are flesh before it.

Our best phone calls make that future already present, allowing us to feel like any long-distance couple talking into the night. The confidence I am determined to cultivate in 2026 is one fuelled by the knowledge that this future memory is not a fantasy, but one that will materialise…

“… and when it does, who knows what is possible?”