Since 2023, Western governments have done next to nothing to stop Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. Instead, they have preferred to maintain relations with rogue states under the guise of lucrative weapons contracts, all at the expense of their (and our) humanity.
Faced with this monolithic indifference, ordinary people have sidestepped negotiations with governments and instead chosen to act directly. Because that’s what ‘direct action’ means. It is a form of protest that sidesteps political negotiation… That’s it…
You’d think this was a simple enough concept to grasp. Unfortunately, as far as the British state is concerned, this definition might as well be written in Arabic.
My latest for the Canary, following the re-arrest of Qesser Zuhrah for allegedly “encouraging … the commission of [a criminal] offence” by posting the words ‘take direct action’ on social media. You can read it here.
Yesterday, I also wrote a short reflection on the chaos that engulfed the Green Party’s spring conference.
This story is different, making its absence across Western media all the more stark. Bogus claims about children caught up in the ‘realities of war‘ cannot be made here. This is a story about the Israeli state abusing a baby to extract a confession from the child’s father.
I am making my debut in the Canary today with an article on the harrowing abuse suffered by Abu Nasser and his child at the hands of the Zionist entity. The lack of media reporting on the story is one more example of institutional bias, racism, and a declining interest in citizen journalism, despite the latter being more important than ever. Check it out for some cathartic unleashing of long-bottled anti-Zio rage on the page.
This article comes off the back of my new job. I’ve recently joined the Canary as a commissioning editor, working with their slate of guest writers. I’m still learning the ropes, but consider sending me your pitches. My broad remit for the foreseeable future is smashing Zionism, stopping Reform UK, and amplifying voices across the Global South.
Winter returns for a spell. Moods cloud at times too.
Experientially disconnected, we nonetheless recognise the familiar tumult of an emotional vortex flinging us this way and that. No one expected calmer waters on reuniting, but the persistence of the tumult is still jarring. The last six months could never be thrown off so lightly.
Walks through the city’s nature reserves allow us access to new space in which to breathe. We take up space outside and feel equally dwarfed by its vastness. What appears vast to us now is still finite, however. A walk through London wetlands — reclaimed after so much destruction, which reduced this island’s environmental make-up from 25% wetland to 5% — is both nourishing and a reminder that our emotional reserves are also depleted. A system of exploitation infringes on the ponds and on us. We wish to be unalienated, but the world remains so alienating. Is the disparity out there or in us? Probably both. Why is it so much sharper now? The reasons seem obvious.
I still think of Gary Snyder often. Six months into the coronavirus pandemic, I broke free from London and returned north, taking refuge in No Nature, Snyder’s collected poems. Last year, on the back of my right arm, I got a tattoo in tribute to his poem ‘Ripples on the Surface’ — a favourite of mine. In hand-poked ink, a house alone, rewilded; not so much abandoned as reclaimed, plants reaching through broken windows from within. Below, the words ‘no nature’.
The vast wild the house, alone. the little house in the wild, the wild in the house.
both forgotten.
No nature.
Both together, one big empty house.
An embeddedness in the natural world is longed for but seems impossible to attain. So many romanticise its accessibility, but this still requires an ideological bracketing. Snyder’s poetic philosophy hopes to be an unalienated one in this regard, whilst wrestling with the contradiction of how we arrive at such a state.
Take Snyder’s “Tanker Notes” as an example. Vignettes chart his voyage across vast oceans on a ship that lubricates the system he scorns. It is a work of prose that might well serve as the inner monologue for whatever entity offers us its perspective in Logistics— the longest film ever made, which documents the entirety of a cargo ship’s journey in a single shot, lasting for thirty-five days and seventeen hours. The ship itself, permanently occupying the lower half of the screen, is awe-inspiring in its own right. But all of the film’s drama is found upon the oceans it traverses. I wonder if Snyder might be so bold as to classify the film as a nature documentary…
There is a contradiction here that requires we totally disentangle ourselves from a nature/culture binary. It has long been demanded of us, but has never truly made its impact upon popular consciousness. In the 1970s, for instance, Lucien Malson states forthrightly: “The idea that man has no nature is now beyond dispute”. He addresses two intellectual currents that have made this clear to us:
Marxism, which “recognizes that ‘man at birth is the least capable of all creatures’”;
psychoanalysis, which “confirms that ‘there is nothing in human beings to suggest the presence of instincts with their own patterns of development’.”
We are a peculiar species that has no nature apart from the cultures we inhabit. Claude Lévi-Strauss argues “it is impossible to refer without contradiction to any phase in the evolution of mankind, where, without any social organization whatsoever, forms of activity were nevertheless developed which are an integral part of culture.” Within this notion is a knot of culture wrapped around a void — as Lacan would argue, a hole is the essential structural element that allows a knot to be tied — which alienates as much as meditation on it teases us with its opposite. We are faced with the pursuit of an impossible knowledge beyond abstractions — impossible because we are a species that has made a home in abstraction.
Marx, for example, writes how ‘nature as nature‘ is an impossible thing for us to access, since this is “nature separated and distinct from … abstractions”, which makes it “nothing, a nothing proving itself to be nothing, it is devoid of sense, or only has the sense of an externality to be superseded.” It is the fate of humanity to always be alienated from its own essence, perhaps, but it is an alienation that capitalism exploits and exacerbates. We abhor a vacuum, and so fill it with beliefs. Unfortunately, in the presence of a void of meaning, we have made money the measure of everything. Money, Marx writes, which is “the universal and self-constituted value of all things”; money, which has “deprived the entire world – both the world of man and of nature – of its specific value”; money, which “is the estranged essence of man’s work and existence”.
Logistics captures the drama of capital’s movement across nature-as-nature well. Piles of commodities, contained within boxes upon boxes, cut through an oceanic void. It is all the more interesting as a ‘nature documentary’ for this reason. Is there any other way, at present, that one might better experience the ocean’s vastness other than by doing as Snyder or the filmmakers did? That is, by hitching a ride on a commodity-behemoth? It is an apt metaphor for all of human life on earth. Still, I feel overcome by seasickness…
A few days after release, someone comments on how necessary it is to take things easy. We must think about this time as a period of recovery after a long illness. Prison certainly made all of us sick.
I think back to a letter sent into prison, one month into the ordeal. At the time I was thinking about prison’s disruption of a prior sense of wellbeing, at least in a localised sense. The world is sick, but I did not feel personally unwell. Years of therapy had provided a precious and fragile stability amidst global contingencies. To then be confronted by the inhumanity of it all anew… Not so much from afar, through my phone, but up-close and personal… How ‘unnatural’ prison is, how contrary to a supposed ‘human nature’… How displays of humanity are themselves criminalised today in this country…
I was thinking about how we all seemed to turn anew to ‘faith’, albeit temporarily, grasping at some infinitude beyond the petty power of capital. It was around that same time I started going to Quaker meetings. In still jousting with how illusory our ‘nature’ can be, and carving out a place for my sense of the divine amidst various monotheisms, I found myself returning to Spinoza:
It is 9am, Friday 26th September. I wander downstairs to join your Dad in the dining room, carrying 3 books brought from home, all by or about Spinoza.
“Spinoza!” he chirps. “Probably one of my favourite philosophers!”
“Really?!”
“Well, yes. I think Nick Cave has a song about him.”
“He does?!” I’ve never been much of a Nick Cave fan – goth credentials wavering.
“Yes – ‘Into Your Arms’.”
I know it, but I’m not so familiar, so I search up the lyrics online: “I don’t believe in an interventionist God / But I know, darling, that you do…”
[…] It took me back to Mark [Fisher]. He wrote about Spinoza a lot in the mid-00s, about his attempts to develop a “precise science” of “emotional engineering.”
For Spinoza, universal categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are vulgar. Instead, he “urges us to think in terms of health and illness.” Mark continues:
“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 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.”
Where God enters Spinoza’s thought is as an infinity synonymous with the inexhaustible potential of nature itself. Spinoza denies the existence of “a personal God”; God is existence as such. […]God is the infinite grandeur of the universe. When we reduce “Him” to some anthropomorphised mirror image of ourselves, and install him in our minds as some judgemental legislator who holds our personal fate and fortune in his hands, we wilfully denigrate the limitless potential we all contain, our ‘nature’, and so limit not only God but ourselves.
“No nature; one big empty house…”
Nature-as-nature for Marx, natura naturans for Spinoza, takes on the quality of a voided divine, as God was for Simone Weil.
21st September 2025. I post a letter about Weil’s Gravity & Grace into prison:
[…] “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” I think of this gravity of the soul as a force that keeps us tethered to some reality, and it is notable how gravity lessens the closer we get to the heavens. We can break through gravity, if enough energy is expended. But in our day-to-day lives, gravity is powerful and ever-present. Gravity is what draws us to some bodies and repels us from others, as we float through our social orbits. Perhaps gravity feels grave at times because the force drawing me to you can feel crushing.
Gravity is a force that draws us to all that we desire. It pulls us down into our baseness. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Hunger too is gravitational. If we go without food for long enough, we feel that pull within us towards an animal baseness. A search for sustenance. I think about zombies as a kind of total baseness, where an animal hunger decimates our humanity. Gravity can lead us to follow our desires with an ugliness that is (an) unbecoming.
Grace, however, is an act of faith and resilience. “To come down by a movement in which gravity plays no part … Gravity makes things come down, wings make them rise: what wings raised to the second power can make things come down without weight?”How do we satisfy our baseness angelically? “To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity”, Weil says. “Moral gravity makes us fall towards the heights.”
Grace is the opposite of pity. “Whoever suffers tries to communicate his suffering (either by ill-treating someone or calling forth their pity) in order to reduce it, and he does really reduce it in this way.” Pity is a salve, if only for the ways it can bestow good will upon us. Better that than to suffer without pity, which only “poisons” us, enabling us “to spread evil beyond oneself”. But this means that “beings and things are not sacred enough to me. May I never sully anything, even though I be utterly transformed into mud … Even in my worst moments I would not destroy a Greek statue or a fresco by Giotto. Why anything else?”
Weil says that what provides us with an improper sense of “social stability” is a willingness “to see others suffer exactly what we are suffering.” It makes “every good or beautiful thing … an insult.” It flattens everything. “The desire for vengeance is a desire for essential equilibrium. We must seek equilibrium on another plane … There we reach the void. (Heaven helps those who help themselves…)”
Therefore, we must “grasp (in each thing) that there is a limit and that without supernatural help that limit cannot be passed – or only by very little and at the price of a terrible fall afterwards.”
[…] Supernatural help comes when you least expect it – it is governed by different laws than natural ones, of course. I think again about when we first started talking, how I felt this reticence to let myself be taken over by something outside of myself. That something was you. You are an angel, and your presence led me to let go and fall to greater heights than I ever thought possible … [L]ove is a powerful guiding force, if you let it steer you and uplift your wings.
Love of God works in the same way. “A beloved being who disappoints me”, Weil writes. “I have written to him.”I think about when you said you were finding it hard to pray and hard not to pray, because “it’s like I’m avoiding someone I’m annoyed at, someone that will just keep disappointing me.” But a relationship with God is not unlike any other in that regard. Weil even speaks of men she has loved in the same way. “To accept the fact that they are other than the creatures of our imagination is to imitate the renunciation of God.” Faith in each other is essential. A commitment to one another, no less in the full awareness of our flaws, is to cultivate a relationship with the divinity in each other.
Maybe God feels like a bad partner – avoidant, uncommunicative, distant. But where is God located? Out there in some distance or always residing in you? When God does not answer, is it because you do not have the answers yourself? God may feel distant, but God is also far more in reach right now than I am. I know you don’t love me any less for that.
[…] God does not respond to prayers like we are able to respond to each other’s letters and calls. God exists in the void that envelops us and infiltrates us. But that void is also a space beyond the natural limit of who we are. God resides in what is supernatural. God resides in love. God resides in the changing nature of the soul.
“Like a gas, the soul tends to fill the entire space which is given it.”The soul fills the void. “Not to exercise all the power at one’s disposal is to endure the void. This is contrary to all the laws of nature. Grace alone can do it. Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void.”
[…] I think of Weil as a new modern woman. She is known as a mystic and a woman of profound faith, but she was no nun. She worked in an automobile factory. She fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. She seeks to measure her faith against new scientific knowledge. She comes to understand the heavens as the void of outer space, looks at the moon without abstraction, and tries to reckon with how this void of wonder can remain the place where God resides. A void is a total absence. How to maintain a sense of wonder before that absence and still know it as God’s domain? How to hold onto both science and faith – like Agent Scully – and the contradiction that an earthly nature abhors a void?
We know that our atmosphere clings to this verdant rock, and although the void surrounds us, gravity stops all that is essential to life from leaking into outer space. We are a tiny planet that endures the void and dreams of it. “To love truth is to endure the void.” “To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural.” […] How to hold onto the oxymoron that true resistance is resisting gravity, which in turn resists our desire to take flight?
[…] It is “imagination which fills the void.” “In no matter what circumstances, if the imagination is stopped from pouring itself out we have a void (the poor in spirit).” I think about how telling you my dreams of reunion might be too painful, and they are dreams that hurt me too. Longing is painful, for sure, but imagination is light. Imagination carries us on the way to a reality that is to come, whereas longing is a reminder from gravity that this reality might be distant. I can think of plenty of other examples where a longing for reconciliation starts to hurt when faced with a reality that is actively dispersing a people…
But without that imagining, what are we left with? Despondency, apathy, stasis. We must keep walking gracefully toward the future our hearts desire. “The future is a filler of void places.” “When pain and weariness reach the point of causing a sense of perpetuity to be born in the soul, through contemplating this perpetuity with acceptance and love, we are snatched away into eternity.” Not the eternity of now, because we know the future imagined will arrive to replace it; it is the eternity of a love born in faith. We create a new world imaginatively, which decreates this one; we create a new world that we will one day come to inhabit, drawing its blueprint on top of a world already inhabited. “We participate in the creation of the world by decreating ourselves.”
Anne Carson writes about Weil and decreation. “Love dares the self to leave itself behind.” […]
As an afterthought, I wonder if hearing me speak of God is surprising to you. I am not a religious person. [But] I have my own faith in the power of love. It is Spinozist. A faith in “God, or nature”, in a higher power within earthly power. I find my faith in what is supernatural and surreal, in what defies gravity. I find faith in metaphysics and ethics that defies what is merely physical. I find faith in making myself worthy of the things that happens to me. I find faith in what is science-fictional. I find it in my love for you.
Walking around the nature reserve, we hear the roar of a crowd from a nearby football stadium. We think about environmentally conscious death factories on industrial parks, scattered around the UK, probably adhering to all the necessary checkboxes that show they are acting in accordance with local laws regarding environmental protection, only to export death and destruction abroad. We ponder bizarre and contradictory notions of a “green” arms industry, imagining the sorts of dissonant conversations that only liberals could dare to engage in with any seriousness.
Ours is a sick society that finds all kinds of novel ways to transform its suicidality into an inevitability, even a virtue. At a societal level, we appear incapable of acting in its own best interests. The accumulation of wealth provides access to the individual, but on the basis of a wider immiseration. All the while, what is made ‘accessible’ diminishes for all. Billionaires chart ocean depths and the threshold of a wider cosmos — areas increasingly littered and disturbed by the excrement of their industries. I think about these well-meaning attempts to ‘decolonise’ nature of industry and return it to endangered species. I wonder how long it will be before we are taking a similar same approach in clawing back the heavens.
Today we understand, beyond all abstraction, the punishment for resisting this immiseration, which is time spent in a vat of sickness. Over a few days, we bridge the gap between our experiences as I hear stories about prisoners who have spent years, even decades, inside. “Whole life” tariffs might be rare, but it is hard to imagine how anyone is able to reintegrate into society after a protracted period of institutionalisation. I struggle to imagine how anyone would want to reintegrate into a society of such cruelty. A nature-culture distinction is the least of our worries when culture-culture is already jarring. Contradictions abound.
Walking around the wetlands, we tick off all the animals we see. No nature, not even here.
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.
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.
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:
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:
