7th — 8th March 2026
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.
