Dreaming of it?
Breakthrough.
Or given up?
What can you do now, right? What can any of us… do?
If the word “breakthrough” doesn’t resonate with you, maybe scroll away now. If it stings, let me ask you another question.
Who are you?
Who do you think you are in everything going on right now? Because you’re obviously still thinking about the state of the world, you poor sap. How could you not be.
If you say you’re a changemaker, how dispirited are you?
If you’re paid to be a leader, how frustrated are you?
If you once thought you were an artist… how suppressed is your art?
This, I will remind you, is a shame-free zone. If you follow me, this will be one of the reasons why you do; you’re safe to confess your own imperfect work. I’ll be the first to admit my own hypocrisies, my failures and privileges; I am nothing if not a reluctant revolutionary. And I still can’t explain why my calling has led me the very long way round, so apparently unable to cause any decent rebellious scenes.
But these sure do feel like revolutionary times. Times pushing ordinary people closer and closer to limits.
Where are your limits? And do you have any idea what happens past them?
I think it’s generally accepted that it’s the point at which things start flying off.
What we can do.
I’ve not posted anything for, what, six weeks? It’s flown. I’ve continued to have a slightly unusual time privately, moving from that virusy sort of soul time over Christmas that unlocked some final writing and arrangement for the new LP and may have accidentally radically transformed my whole spiritual frame of the universe, into an intense development and production time for the project with a new client, that reminded me what a young man’s game are early mornings and late nights making stuff.
It’s been a trip, especially the last week of February. That I seem to have been down with some more flu bullshit in the week since is, I guess, hardly surprising. In any year, it’s March. In this year, it is also whatever the hell 2025 so far is.
Here in the UK, I’m not sure it’s possible to feel in the same immediate peril as friends in the US. Even over there, there are always radiations of peril, at the outer rings of which one can ignore political realities for a while. But if any of us as Europeans can recall that sense of soul-deep dread every story about the rise of Nazi-led Germany evoked in our history lessons, we could sip on a stiffening dram of it for a reality check now.
The most shocking depiction of America I have read in recent years was Octavia Butler’s. That she effectively puts you in the shoes of the historic black slave experience in her science fiction work The parable of the talents does nothing to deaden its dreadful sense of prophesy. Written in the mid nineties, her first Earthseed novel sounds like life under a rabidly well-established President Trump, all sense of community, humanity, shared emotional values strip-mined out of the nation’s soul with state violence. I have no idea if she felt America ever really had one, a soul. That very much depends on your experience of it, and that always faces the cattle prods of your skin colour, gender, sexuality and asset level.
Everyone can see that The Full Putin has been opened up on America. As Rachel Maddow put it, it’s hard to imagine what else the new commander in chief could possibly have done for the Russian president in his first weeks back in office. War has been openly declared on trans people, brown people, queer relationships, female bodies, human rights activists, law firms, environmental organisations, liberal global allies and the facts of climate change across government websites and departments. Books are being removed. Allegiances demanded. The ramping cultural assault on women’s independence is chilling, said out loud after lurking in reactionary narratives for so long. The “creative” expressions of interest in the territory of Gaza were fully breathtaking coming from a democratic government office.
The energy this must feel like to live under is unimaginable to me. This strategic weaponisation of fear could be soul-collapsing.
Except.
There are two things this semi-deliberate clown-car horror show American administration is doing for us.
Firstly, it’s finally showing its hand. We know the playbook, and here are the techbros dumbly playing it out for us right on cue – sow chaos, reap government control.
Secondly, it’s calling us out. Are we people with vision and courage, or are we content to stay asleep and let the police come for our sisters and brothers and habitats and futures?
Now, if your answer to that last question is an unhesitating yes and a lunge for the vodka… poppet. You are still spending too much time with the noisy big organs of news. My mother barely sleeps because CNN is on permanently at home. To induce drowsiness, maybe she should try C-SPAN. Or remembering she lives in the UK.
I may believe lots of sculduggery was in play around the last US election, and that this would explain how off the vibe of the result felt. I may hope to dear God that there are legal champions and leaders of principle in the armed forces scheming a plan to defend a line of some sort over there. I may fancy that all this will come out and maybe sooner than we all could have believed. But I don’t need those daydreams to factor in hubris, incompetence, gangland politics and the stiffening of resolve that enough injustice eventually produces in people. Even people as machine-dociled as us. That plus the sheer fact of complexity.
No techbros are fully in control, whatever the grand plans. And the dream of being so is as corruptly old fashioned and stoopid as every ruff-necked lordly boy from courtly medieval Europe. Those boys got away with colonising and plundering and sowing trauma into generations, but this is the very other end of that equation and I think the maths is about to run out.
My friend Peter John Cooper said to me: “I like your optimism.”
“Thank you,” I nodded knowingly.
“Your completely unfounded optimism.”
I… oh.
Well, it certainly does call out our foundations.
Who we think we are determines what we will do to respond to this. And it may well be that the more desperate we feel, the more revolutionary we may be prepared to be. You might not see it yet, but I observe more of us are, steadily.
The protests in the US are heartening. The falling away of faith in old leadership oddly too. The Dems, like Labour here – “in it for the money not the many” as poet Miriam San Marco put it – have long lacked the leadership to admit their complicity in an economic system that is cancerous to society. But it’s getting more and more and more obvious.
The real potential of now is the people. Leadership must come from us, not anyone teetering at the top. We simply have to help each other, most especially across the boring old cultural expectations, where we safely can. But good news, there is a way to engage with this impossible feeling task.
Something of it has spoken afresh to me again this week. I too have been wondering who I am in all this, even as I have had a chance to work through the very mechanisms of the value I add to my clients and finally put in a couple of invoices.
I’ve noticed again who approaches me at events to chat.
Wherever I go, I am an artist. I may be no firebrand romantic, or radical lightning rod; I lack a true bard’s common touch. But I am a creative still deeply considering how we tell stories about our futures and the very place of artistic practices in human life. This does something to one or two people when I show up. They want to remember that they are themselves creative. That they still care about the state of the world and that they once had some silly dreams about expressing themselves.
Those dreams aren’t silly. They are your soul calling – don’t let it go to voicemail, you dick.
It’s giving me a new level of resolve about something I thought I’d already resolved personally. I just want to be known as an artist. To show up as that – even that much I don’t feel consistently great at. I am surprisingly unbothered by legacy, I’m more interested in the moment than hoping for a blue plaque on the studio – I’m not even expecting a bench plaque on Southbourne Overcliff. But my experiences might enable me to help people looking for a little creative breakthrough in corporate spaces, and when I know I can give something to a frustrated leader or a dispirited changemaker or a suppressed artist I don’t do so simply with any technical storytelling skills. I’m always showing up with what I most know we can do right now.
We must unsee the future.
The inevitable seeming one where fear wins.
Making art is how we do that.
Maybe you’re a bit like me, a reluctant revolutionary, even with my artistic hair. It’s privilege that gives me any time and space to think about it but I know what gets me feeling differently about our fearsome times, wanting to live as though these are not simply end times but a fizzing beginning.
Artistic expressions change the feeling of the world in you – and that changes what you do, and so what you think is even possible. This is the kind of miracle energy we need right now. You have it within you already.
I’d go so far as to suggest that engaging with creative work, with vision and testimony and world building, is like cheating death. Hardly surprising because you are unplugging from fear and plugging into heart energy when you’re doing it – life force power. It changes your sense of being alive.
Everything I share with you from here on will be an example of how I’ve seen others doing this, and the difference it’s begun to make.
The voices in my feed are no longer all fearsome. I hear a lot of people with a great sense of expectancy about all this. Sober, serious, but almost excited. That’s compelling.
I may be filled with fragments of my own art like pottery shards along a Roman path; I sometimes feel like Rory waiting two thousand years for Amy. But that path has led me to here, and whatever my personal fears I am trying to face every day, I can only say that most days feels like a little breakthrough at the moment.
And, man, forced to take the long way round, I have a LOT to share about what I’ve seen getting here.
Hope you find the work I will be sharing this year inspiring. x
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I have been privileged to accompany you the long way round, and on the way I've questioned my own relevance as an artist too. The youthful notion that I would make a difference in some seismic way is not only a ship that has sailed, but has dropped below the horizon. Recent years have been about wrestling & reframing what art personally means to me - what is its use in my life , let alone the wider world. And I think it has boiled down to this: if I'm creating, then I'm not dead. However pathetically small that artistic spark is (and most days it is barely a glowing ember), then there is life. And as Dr Ian Malcolm reminds us - life finds a way. My art probably won't change the world, but it might change me - and that seems as good a place to start as any.