Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing

And like enough thou knowest thy estimate.

The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing,

My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how could I hold thee but by thy granting

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of that fair gift in me is wanting

And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thyself thou gavest thine own worth then not knowing

Or me to whom thou gavest it else mistaking.

So thy great gift upon misprision growing

Comes home again on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter.

In sleep a king but waking no such matter.

Shakespeare, Sonnet 87

Back in late 2024 and early 2025 I was very busy yearning for someone who could not give me what I wanted. The yearning was like a stomach ache; dull and weary at times, sharp and vicious at others. I had never really experienced being met in the precise way that I wanted and, for the first time, my whole body was alive with the want. In the longing, I acted compulsively, teenagerly, ecstatically and also stupidly. It was also the first time I had really, properly, allowed myself to want, and I gave myself up to the experience. It probably was quite alarming on the receiving end, but it marked a moment in which I stopped pretending that I was aloof from life, with no needs, no desires, and so was an utterly transformative experience for me.

Because I could not have what I wanted – and what I wanted was probably more so a dream, a whisper, an idea, a wanting to want, than the enfleshed, ensouled person – I became obsessed with the gap between dreams and truth; between imagination and reality.

What’s in a gap? I’ve written some about this before. Potentialities and possibilities, yes, but also a great yawning vista between earthly fodder and some far-off, exalted and much vaunted Eden. During that time, I wanted to know how to reach into this unbearable, exciting, awful gap. I wanted to know what to put there.

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The cause of that fair gift in me is wanting

‘... the Love which moves the sun and the other stars’. That was Dante’s last line of Paradiso. He journeyed through the depths of the underworld to come out understanding that it is all love. Eros. Desire. Want. It is hard to believe during these times – but what if it’s true, yet misplaced? That the desire of capitalism, that aching need for more, is a case of mistaking the ultimate beloved for material gain? That colonial expansionism, environmental destruction and social injustices stem from thinking wrongly that possession of/power over the beloved will fulfill our lack of power with/in? As Bayo Akomolafe writes: ‘one might say that to be modern is to be in a constant state of ornamenting our exile’ [2017: 29].

Etymologically, to want is a funny, paradoxical verb. Is it a hollowness or a seeking? Both? The verb comes from the Old English, wanten, ‘be lacking, be deficient in something’, from Old Norse vanta ‘to lack’ and earlier wanaton, from Proto-Germanic wanen, weno-, suffixed form of root *eue- ‘to leave, abandon, give out’. It holds the same root as to wane; to diminish. The wanting was first a waning; a hollowing out of the soul, a poverty, a lack, a gap. ‘I want you’ meaning ‘I lack you’, ergo ‘I need you’. You could also be tried and found wanting. It was not until the first years of the eighteenth century that the verb took on a quality of seeking and of reaching out – of the desire which, in our contemporary mouths, is usually an outward-facing verb. One seeks to reach out and obtain the object one desires, rather than submit to its lacking.

The verb to desire also holds a wonderful history. Some etymologists hold that its root desiren – from Old French desirrer ‘wish, desire, long for’ and from Latin desiderare ‘long for, wish for; demand, expect’ – originally meant ‘to await what the stars will bring’. This from the phrase de sidere ‘from the stars’ from sidus, ‘heavenly body, star, constellation’.

God, how lovely.

Other etymologists contend that sīder- and sīdus from to desire have an older, non-celestial meaning of ‘mark, target, goal’. According to this theory, dēsīderāre (with the prefix de- meaning ‘down’ or ‘away’) would have originally meant something like ‘to miss the mark’. Interestingly, the ancient theological term harmatia also means ‘to miss the mark’ – for Aristotle and his Poetics, it meant ‘tragic flaw’ – harmatia later became the term used in Christian theology to mean ‘sin’. In this early understanding of sin, all of humanity would inevitably sin, because no one could avoid missing the mark. I don’t know if this confluence is anything to do with why desire comes to be aligned with sinfulness in some doctrines, but it’s a very satisfying discovery.

To lack, to wane, to await the stars, to miss the mark, to sin. So much encompassed in an experience – no wonder it can be unbearable. No wonder that yearning, desire, longing comprise so much of our world’s stories.

In my experience, the desire and the longing was all-encompassing. It was really difficult to feel so much at once. I spent half the time convinced that my body would split open, that it could not possibly contain so much. The slightest bit of hope entailed an avalanche of want. This avalanche also did not feel like it could possibly be all my own – there had to be more going on. Psychology today would mark me as having some original father wound; and of course I do, and of course this unrequited want triggered it. Of course, of course, of course. And yet. And yet. And yet.

At the moment I am studying with Dr. Valentin Gerlier in his new project, School of Sophia. We are reading The Tempest in the style of divino lectio – the ancient monastic reading for revelation. In our last seminar, Valentin spoke about love in Shakespeare’s works; how each play is in service to love, and shows how terrible things can get when someone is mistaken in their appraisal of who the beloved is. We yearn for ultimacy, for the dream, and place this unreal absolute on the beloved object, who then exists under a terrible pressure and cannot help but fail. In our desire, we miss the mark. We long for a shadow and a thought – and no human on earth can live up to the absolute. Inevitably, we all ‘sin’. So this then begs the question; what is the something more that we desire?

Humans have always longed, yearned, and desired. In Sufi philosophy, it is the endemic condition of humanity. In Henry Corbin’s reading of ancient Persian Zoroastrianism, every person is born apart from its celestial Angel, who resides in Eternity and waits for the body’s return at the end of the life cycle. Thus,

‘...up to the moment when the earthly soul meets its Angel on the bridge, the earthly soul is lacking its eternal half–it is ‘lagging behind itself’, incomplete… The earthly soul lives in nostalgia and anticipation, in exiled incompleteness, in longing and hope… “Anticipation is the vital law” of this mode of being…’

[Cheetham 2012: 46]

This finds some resonance with Plato’s conceptualisation of Eros and the Theory of Forms. For Plato, true reality was composed of abstract, perfect forms or ideas, which the material world could only imperfectly reflect. Eros (love or desire) in this conceptualisation was a profound metaphysical force that drives individuals towards the pursuit of beauty, wisdom and truth – towards those divine forms. Each time that we love or desire, we are practising this pursuit, which leads us up the ‘Ladder of Love’, beginning with the love of physical bodies and eventually leading to a vaster, spiritual love of all beings and, ultimately, to the divine. Eros in this way of being is a desire that begins and drives all things. It is, as Dante writes, ‘the Love which moves the sun and the other stars’.

Perhaps it is this Eros that breathed out the universe in the first place, as in the Rig Veda:

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.

There was no air, then, nor the heavens beyond it.

What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?

Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

Then there were neither death nor immortality,

nor was there then the torch of night and day.

The One who breathed without air and self-sustaining.

There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.

All this was only unillumined water.

That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,

arose at last, borne of the power of cosmic heat.

In the beginning desire descended on it—

that was the primal seed, born of the mind.

The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom

know that which is, is kin to that which is not.

And they have stretched their cord across the void,

and know what was above, and what below.

Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.

Below was energy, and over it was impulse.

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation,

so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,

he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,

he who surveys it all from highest heaven,

he knows— or maybe even he does not know.

My bonds in thee are all determinate

Roberta Bondi is a theologian and Professor Emeritus at Emory University in the US. In conversation with Krista Tippett, she spoke about an experience early in her marriage. She was pacing about sick with worry about her endlessly late husband, when she received a calling from the Desert Fathers to pray:

‘And I said to them, “Oh, come on now, look, I am a rational, reasonable woman, and I’m an academic, and this is what you’re suggesting just is not really for me.” And the answer to that was “Ha, ha, ha. You might also consider as part of this that you have put Richard [Roberta’s husband] into the place of God for you. You know how we say or suggest that no one or no thing can fill that hole in your life except God, that your identity rests only in God, and that all other loves come out of that. And that if, and that no human being can ever fill that. Of course you feel the way you do.”’

In the same interview, Roberta goes on to say: ‘we’re made to long for God’. Her words lit up something in me; this endless longing – this time for a person, but other times for a cigarette, for a glass of wine, for oblivion, for SOMETHING – perhaps was never only a longing for those beloveds but always also a broader, greater desire to turn towards the world itself.

For so many now, the word ‘god’ has such a weighty overlay of patriarchal, heteronormative dogma attached, that this statement will make the hackles rise. Years ago it would have for me, too. Brought up as atheist, forced to pray at the Church of England school I went to, confused about the scripture in class versus the secularism of home, I rejected all religion as the domain of nutters – like my dad did at the time. But Roberta’s words took my breath away. They have been part of a broader upswelling within me that I’m still in the process of attending to. For my whole life I have wanted, and have attempted to assuage that want in so many deliciously ill-advised ways, but what if what I really, truly yearned for was god?

I want to say now, when I say ‘god’ I mean that something more. I mean god as soil. I mean god as the sunlight filtered through leaves. God as the tide. God as the Big Bang. God as silence. As imagination and creation. The feeling of the breeze. Elation, ecstasy, fat babies grinning. Sex. Water. Eros. Not the god of omnipotence or omniscience, or even a god that is separable from ‘His work’. God as all that is immanent in the world’s becoming. I have to have some kind of shorthand or I’d go mad with it… so I say ‘god’, or ‘gods’. And what I love about the Platonic conceptualisation of desire as process-towards-divinity, is that each time you are shocked by the love that you feel for any of the above and more, it is that profound metaphysical force working through your body and soul in service of love.

When we release god from God, and release desire from sin, perhaps our wanting becomes a longing in service of love. Love as the always ‘here’ and the never ‘there’. Love as home.

So thy great gift upon misprision growing

Comes home again on better judgement making

‘The heavens we seek are secreted by our own longings and performative quests for a final, static home. We want to get “there”… But there is no “there”; there is only a yearning, an aching, a struggle for “there” — and in the struggle, we change.’ [Akomolafe 2017: 6]

In the struggle, we change. There is something sacred, then, in the yearning. Something inescapably, divinely human. Yet there are pitfalls in this yearning that can have dire consequences: mistaking the beloved, as above, but also the repression of desire – equating it with sin. In the world of William Blake, it is precisely that repression of desire that makes us into hard, self-obsessed and violent beings, which directly relates to putting imagination into a chest and pretending like it doesn’t exist. The release of artistic energy and the liberation of desire is a way out.

Perhaps, if we ever arrived at those perfect forms of Plato, we would find them wanting. Heaven would be too clean. Eden, bland. An absolute love, too pure. Perfection itself might miss the mark. It is also, in Blake’s world, dangerous to believe you have succeeded in building heaven on earth (Jerusalem, for Blake) because then you might believe you’ve found the final, perfect form and thus tyrannise other versions. You have to be constantly striving. Jerusalem is always in the process of becoming.

Yearning also requires attention to all the ways in which you are already being met. In Zoroastrianism, the Angel of each person goes out ahead to ‘manifest new horizons’ [Cheetham 2012: 47], but will also appear in ‘epiphanies that are… each time unique’ [ibid: 46]. We must live in anticipation for these epiphanies, but not so much so that we do not notice them when they come.

So love needs a second dimension, in a minor key: the wisdom of discernment. Not know thyself, as in know what you think you love. Know, instead, when you are being met by that something more. As Akomolafe writes: ‘We want to be met in this stretched-out and awkward muteness of daylight — but we are and have always been…’ [2017: 56]. Wisdom for Tim Ingold is ‘fundamentally attentional. It continually draws our awareness out into the world, rather than referring it back to an originating intention in the mind of the subject’ [2022: 59]. All those pitfalls I have mentioned are involved in acts of closure: fixating on a false beloved; repressing desire; believing yourself to have found or built the one true heaven. Wisdom instead ‘cuts through the transverse connections between intentions and their objects as a river between its banks’ – it follows ‘the grain of the world’s becoming and bending it to an ever-evolving purpose’ [ibid]. Know what touches you in your soul, recognise it well, and then let it go.

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter

In ancient Europe’s goddess mythology, the goddess was sacred for her ability to shapeshift and manifest in multiplicious ways. She would appear unexpectedly in wells, springs, holes in rocks, animals – one had to be ready to recognise her and mark her as sacred when she showed herself. In my practice now, I am on the road to understanding this. I walk in the woods or along the coast path and I ask god to walk with me. There god arrives, in glimpses, splashes of sunlight, ripples and glints, sideways and peripheral. Usually dashing away when I turn to look, sometimes staying a while, before leaving me dumbfounded and elated-mournful in its departure. God as soil, god as tide, god as the sun on bluebells, god as making really good soup, god as friendship. These brief illuminations of divinity are so totally ungraspable, which is what makes them divine, I think. We live in such a grabby age. Almost anything can be sold — except these moments, really.

The brevity is also what makes the divine so potent and, paradoxically, of such surplus.

‘For Ricouer the divine is ‘capable’... a dynamic potency.. that expresses itself as a desire that is less lack than surplus: an eschatological desire to make human being more capable of new genesis and natality… desire as a love that answers desire with more desire — and death with more life… desire surely reveals ‘God’ as another name for the ‘more’, the ‘surplus’, the ‘surprise’ that humans seek…’ [Kearney 2007: 80].

So this great yearning I experienced was divine, I believe. I’m so grateful for the experience, because it opened out a sacred desire – towards another body at first and now, perhaps, drives me up that Platonic Ladder of Love…? We can only hope, innit.

Listen to the story being told by the reed,

Of being separated.

“Since I was cut from the reed bed,

I have made this crying sound.

Anyone apart from someone he loves

understands what I say.

Anyone pulled from a source

longs to go back.

At any gathering I am there,

mingling in the laughing and grieving,

a friend to each, but few

will hear the secrets hidden

within the notes. No ears for that.

Body flowing out of spirit,

spirit up from body: no concealing

that mixing. But it’s not given to us

to see the soul. The reed flute

is fire, not wind. Be that empty.”

From Rumi’s Mathnawi

How to be that empty?

During my MA Poetics of Imagination, our lecturer, poet Alice Oswald said the following about her own practice: ‘I have to spend my mornings in a state of devotion. You must vow yourself to a practice of visiting it. We have to take responsibility for what we want in life, and the way to do that is through vows and oaths. Everything can be chaotic, or you can find something constant in yourself which allows you to encounter it without ducking away.’

If wisdom is the minor key of good love, and wisdom is attentional, then attention in itself is a prayer for the wisdom of discernment.

‘Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself'.’

[Weil 1988]

When I feel that great upswelling of want, I now do pray, in my own way. During those three or four months of painful ecstasy in 2024/5, I went to the Isles of Scilly for an arts residency. I took my typewriter, and found a spot every day to sit and make a series of poetic image-prayers. They hold words which I wrote repeatedly, over and over again. It was something to do; something to fling out into that void, somewhere to put the nameless, unshakeable want. Each one cut my teeth a little in the art of longing while paying devotional attention – here are some.

I want to leave you with one more thing, another kind of yearning — the kind that will never quite be met ever again.

In that same potent period of time, I went to London to visit friends. It happened to be the 2024 Turner Prize nominee exhibition at the Tate Britain. Among the 2024 Turner Prize nominees was Pio Abad and his response to the Ashmoleon’s archives – an exhibition called To Those Sitting in Darkness. His work was breathtaking in scope, following transnational threads of trafficked bodies, colonial plunder and impunity, and the relegation of contested and hegemonic histories to museum archives. Abad’s piece, Giolo’s Lament recovers the story of a boy kidnapped with his mother, enslaved and taken to England, where he was bought and sold multiple times, and his intricately tattooed body seen as a spectacle. Giolo’s Lament is an eleven-part hewn marble masterpiece showing Giolo’s hand reaching out to his mother as she was thrown overboard on the journey to England. I stood for hours in front of this work.

What do you yearn for?

What emerges now?

And so I begin again with an invitation for your questions. Perhaps yearning towards or out from this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the bag for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Akomolafe, B. (2017). These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter of Humanity’s Search for Home. California: North Atlantic Books.

Bondi, R. (2025). What is Prayer and How to Begin. (Podcast). On Being with Krista Tippett.

Buzguta, C. B. (2024). The Concept of Eros in Plato’s Philosophy and the Concept of Agape in Christian Thought. Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies.

Cheetham, T. (2012). All the World an Icon: Henry Corbin and the Angelic Function of Beings. California: North Atlantic Books.

Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. London and New York: Routledge.

Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Columbia University Press.

Weil, S. (1987). Gravity and Grace. New York: Routledge.

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Here’s a short retelling from memory. Inevitably some parts have fallen away…

Beiberikan lived in a small house in the middle of the woods. She was an old woman, but she desperately wanted a child. She went out to her garden and plucked a mare tail plant from its roots in the soil and took it inside, where she tenderly tucked it into the bed in the second bedroom. That night, as Beiberikan sat next to the fire, she heard three sounds coming from the bedroom, small household items dropping to the floor. When she went to investigate, she found a beautiful young woman asleep in the bed. The young woman awoke and it became clear that she could not or would not speak. Beiberikan was nonetheless overjoyed and they spent happy months together tending the house and gardens.

In the kingdom on the other side of the forest, the Khan’s son went out hunting for a prized stag. He travelled further and further into the woodland following the stag until he lost all trace of where he was. Eventually, he stumbled into the clearing of Beiberikan’s cottage. He knocked at the door, and it was answered by the Maretail Woman. He was momentarily speechless. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. The Khan’s son raced back through the woods to tell his parents that he had found the woman he was going to marry. They acquiesced and sent his older brother to the cottage to make a deal. The older brother arrived and this time, Beiberikan opened the door. She was loath to have the Maretail Woman leave her so soon, but with the promise of a hundred goats and a hundred cows (amount to be disputed), she agreed to the wedding. The Khan’s son was glad to hear the news and after a week travelled back leading the goats and cows behind him. He also brought a magic talking horse for the Maretail Woman.

They set off together into the woods, leaving Beiberikan with her new animals. Halfway into the trees, the Khan’s son hesitated. He was near the place where he’d lost the trace of the stag. He told the Maretail Woman to go on while he hunted. He told her: when you come to the fork in the road, take the right hand fork. And he left her. She went on, but when she came to the fork in the path, she forgot what he had told her and instead went left. Further and further she travelled, until she came to a clearing with an old hovel. She dismounted and went to the door, and knocked. A monstrous witch* came out from the hovel, took one look at the Maretail Woman and ripped her to shreds, keeping her face intact and putting it on her own.

Wearing the Maretail Woman’s face, the witch went to the Khan’s son and they were married. For many weeks they were husband and wife, all the while the Maretail Woman’s ripped up body slowly sank back into the earth. Just a small sliver of her heart remained visible, and one day a small dog came along into the clearing, sniffed around, picked the heart-sliver up with the utmost delicacy and ran with it all the way back to Beiberikan. She was busy with her new goats and cows, not knowing that anything was wrong, and so the dog – as dogs do – buried the heart-sliver in Beiberikan’s garden. The next morning, Beiberikan felt the old pang of loneliness and went out to find that a new maretail plant was growing! She plucked it out and as before, took it into her spare bedroom. As before, three faint noises! Beiberikan rushed into the bedroom and there was the Maretail Woman sitting up in bed. And this time, she could speak. She told Beiberikan exactly what had happened to her, her heartbreak at being left alone in the woods, her death at the hands of the witch…

Meanwhile, the Khan’s son had come to a dawning realisation that something was wrong with his wife. Finally [I can’t remember how!] he realised that it was the old witch! She was chased from the kingdom. He did his research and discovered that the only way to make himself ‘clean’ after his false marriage was to tie himself to a very high pole in the roaring wind and rain for forty days and forty nights. This he did. Afterwards, off he dashed on his horse to Beiberikan’s cottage. There he found the Maretail Woman, just as beautiful as ever, but now absolutely furious. They argued and argued until Beiberikan came between them and said just two words: ‘be kind’. The heat dropped from their words and finally they embraced, and rode back through the woods to be married.

The dog ran off into another story.

* a footnote here: I asked my Poetics group if anyone remembered the name of this witch/hag/crone person and got two responses: 1) 'Careful, it's a spell from within the story', and 2) 'She is a daughter of the eight-legged devil, I seem to remember'. Both responses of course generating more questions than answers - my fave! So, make of this what you will. 

Where do you find yourself in the story?

At the time of listening, I was unnerved by the inability to find myself in the story at all. A day later, courses were reinstated, lecturers scrambled to reimagine their schedules, and we began. After the very first lecture of EDT, however, I had the horror-filled realisation that I was on the wrong course. During that anxiety-fuelled night post-lecture, I decided on instinct to instead join the MA Poetics of Imagination in the morning. I had not even read the syllabus, but immediately I found myself in the story. My face was being worn by something else. My heart needed to go back to the beginning.

And back to the beginning it went. In that first week, we listened to one of our lecturers, poet Alice Oswald, tell another ancient story, The Spirit of Sickness. I closed my eyes. Images from somewhere else seemed to drop into my body one by one – not only in my minds-eye but in all of my body. No sooner would Alice speak a word than a fully formed influx would arrive apropos of nothing. They were not my images; they came from somewhere else. It was absolutely hallucinogenic and I was completely sober. I don’t really have words to describe what happened.

“… the more I struggle to grasp it, the more it withdraws from being fully held… Words fail. It’s so difficult to characterise… I am momentarily lost, with no cardinal direction, with every orifice on my body trembling with animal alertness… this feeling… is a chimeric thing. It is one part an intoxicating expansiveness achieved by touching the virgin newness of a moment; another part a desire to kneel before the ferocity of that which has been encountered, and must be approached with hesitation. My chest expands, my breathing intensifies, my pupils dilate. My body becomes a trembling antenna, the excited needle of a compass, or… a vibrating tuning fork in resonance with another body… As if… I have met the universe halfway. Or I have been met halfway.”

[Akomolafe 2017: 53-4]

Whatever had happened, my heart was planted in Poetics. After the lecture, I remember catching Alice outside the seminar room and asking her quite desperately: ‘What’s inside us and what’s outside us? How do we find our way into stories and how do stories find their way into us?’. She suggested I hold this as a question for the duration of the first module. The first module was named Oral Thought; i.e., an exploration of pre-literate ways of knowing and being in the world. We imagined ourselves back into a world in which words were ‘events’ [Ong 1982: 31], events which produced real vibrations, stirrings and ripples. In such a world, oaths and curses sink deeply into the ground and pre-empt actions and counteractions. Bodies hold promises, cast spells, and become sick from hexes. Words are re-placed back in the mouth and the mouth becomes a portal for either hospitality or excommunication. Time is cyclical, not linear. Repetition is not mechanical repetition but in fact builds in meaning and richness and resonance over time. Bodies hold stories at the same time as they are held in story. And story brings the body closer to the cosmos in its rebalancing of cosmological harmonies. The right phrase at the right time (the right prayer, invocation, spell; ‘be kind’) has an appropriateness which works at restoring a divine balance – or else causing a rupture, a fall from grace. We all became overly aware of the words in our mouths and the power they held.

Listening to Alice’s retelling of The Spirit of Sickness remains one of the most profound experiences I have ever had. Before arriving on the MA, I had always thought of myself as a bounded individual in the classical sense. I saw myself as having ultimate control over an inner sanctum with boundaries, and over what could get in and what could not. The MA showed me how naïve and also how very depressing that conceptualisation could be. So the question was borne: what is inside and what is outside? How could I learn to open myself ever increasingly to story, to poetry, to myth – to the ‘outside’ world? How might I open my ribcage to give my heart to a small dog, racing through a story back to the very beginning of things? And what would it do to me? The journey has taken me from phenomenology to mysticism, from posthumanism to poetics.

the witch ripped the Maretail woman apart

Let’s get into that idea of a bounded individual, or actually, a bounded culture. I’ve written about this before in previous essays – here and here. There was a fascinating moment in relatively recent history in which we self-referentially passed from the pre-modern into the modern. A boundary marker was laid down between the old and the new. We now say (and I use this term too!) ‘the modern human’, ‘in modern times’. Of course, no such boundary marker truly exists [Akomolafe 2017: 28]. The roots of the now are of course in the soil of the then. But there is a curious sense of uprootedness in the now of the now. Akomolafe has spoken of the slave ship not as an object but as a colonial process, and offers us the provocation that we have never truly disembarked but still hover in the shallows between sea and shore [2025: podcast].

Indeed, perhaps we are now again casting off our temporal and spatial moorings one by one, are already thinking ourselves into the new colonial (space)ship process that will take us all to the next place: a new, unruined planet. Perhaps we are busy casting hexes and laying curses that will burn the bridges and make it easier to leave this beloved, doomed place. This ‘new’ ship promises no need to reach into the inner space and make any embodied change, but offers rather the opportunity to extend our process by cutting through outer space with our pristine bodies instead, to colonise again, to take the imperial sword to infinite new pastures fertile and dominatable. This future thought-spaceship carrying ‘the modern human’ absolutely has its boundaries – it is a bubble with thick membranes and a budget designed to repel any unruly and irritating space-junk such as thoughts of ‘won’t we just ruin the next one, too?’.

It is not just a futurific endeavour to protect some essence of nowness. As the climate crisis strikes us dumb and numb, the question of what’s inside and outside takes on a new, glaring urgency. Walls are built or rebuilt, nation-states close their borders, migration is vilified, bodies that will not or cannot colour inside the lines of ‘clear’ categorisation become threats, reproductive labour is seized from AFAB (assigned female at birth) bodies… But such control is an illusion. Life will always happen in the cracks between concrete paving slabs. As Akomolafe has written:

“The very logic of modernity and its quest for the universal…inspired events that undercut its own foundations… Meeting the strange “other” in colonial moments preceded institutionalised slavery and racism, but it also opened up channels of cross-cultural interactions that challenged the imperialist power of modernity.”

[ibid: 29]

On a similar note, Lewis Hyde writes:

‘Cultures regularly suffer from contingency; they bump into things they do not expect and cannot control… Can eternals be shielded from time and from change? Can essences be protected from accidents?... How much control can we have before the good life we’re guarding ceases to be good in any conventional sense?... Is the life that has no risk a human life?... Before the eternals can be fertile, they need the mulch of death, disorder, and decay.’

[1998: 105-6]

A good life is not a controlled one. The friction-free dream of this spaceship leaving for a better place is a terrifying nightmare in reality. Who stays and who leaves? Who would be inside and who would be outside? Without any internal reckoning, would existing structures and hierarchies be replicated exactly on this new ship and/or eventual home? Those who make and fund the ships say aye.

‘There is no way to suppress change… there is only the choice between a way of living that allows constant, if gradual, alterations and a way of living that combines great control and cataclysmic upheavals.’

[ibid: 107]

Perhaps we must submit to the witch.

great control and cataclysmic upheavals

The project of ‘modernity’ has been one of both breath-taking outer change and a fear of inner change. And I get it. For years before my MA I hunted down any boundary-transgressions in a fog of post-traumatic hyper alertness. I guarded that inner sanctum; nothing would get in, and I would make damn sure of that. I was impenetrable. And… I was also lost to the world. Hovering between sea and shore. It was a brittle façade: my desire for control after cataclysmic upheaval inevitably spurred me towards another.

We live and participate in systems which are traumatising, and one aspect of trauma is to delineate the world binarily. In black and white. Inner and outer. Who is inside and who is outside? We can see the result of this in polemical politics and the cancellations of those who do not fit within a certain story, but the history of this goes back to the very seeds of capitalism during the late Neolithic period, when premodern (ha, caught me again) peoples began demarcating land ownership for farming purposes. Suddenly, it was possible to create a wall around your dwelling – and defend it. Land ownership and the concurrent battle for resources initiated a way of imagining the world in terms of who is inside the walls and who is outside. It is worth noting that this development did not go unprotested — labourers and peasants of the land, mostly women, mounted a protest movement across the UK, as writes Federici in her 2004 book, Caliban and the Witch. But the mode of movement throughout Europe gradually became one of expansion and penetration – from the carrier bag modality of Ursula Le Guin (carrying items in a receptacle back into the dwelling) to the sword and arrow modality (stabbing outwards from the dwelling). Myths about the forest out there became horror-filled and gothic [Parker 2020] and the monster was born; a way to locate, embody and revile the Other.

When the sanctum is well held: control. When the monster comes to your doors: cataclysmic upheaval. But what I have come to understand is this: when you meet the monster, anoint its feet.

constant, if gradual, alterations

Our bodies are continually fragmenting. We are eddies of dust, seeping, leaking. If our bodies are this ship-in-process, they are truly Theseus’ ship.

Posthuman feminist phenomenology has shown us to be moreover a watery hydrocommons of wet matter, and our wet matters are:

“... in constant process of intake, transformation, and exchange – drinking, peeing, sweating, sponging, weeping. Discrete individualism is a rather dry, if convenient, myth. For us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are necessarily or only human. The bodies from which we siphon and into which we pour ourselves are certainly other human bodies (a kissable lover, a blood transfused stranger, a nursing infant), but they are just as likely a sea, a cistern, an underground reservoir of once-was-rain”

[Neimanis 2017: 2]

Our wet, spongy, torn-apart hearts being carried in the spitty mouth of a panting pup.

Of everything my study of Poetics of Imagination has taught me, the word hospitality has clung on and settled inside like nothing else. Through careful, attentional, devotional study, we were taught – implicitly and explicitly – to hold our mouths open for the hearts of others, to hold our own hearts open for images and words to pass through us, to allow them to be housed in our bodies, to make hospitable burrows in our imagination capable of hosting strangers.

“Imagination… offers inhabitation… it creates spaces of receptivity… it opens itself to otherness. Imagination is an inner capacity to confer belonging and thus enact what the luminous good already enacts… The words that come through my inner guest house, and that I host, are words that come from ancient lineages and antiquities. Words that have deep, half-secret stories, and that call for a generous hearing. Words whose material presences need warmth and feeding, and need to make themselves be felt and heard as they sit with me…”

[Valentin Gerlier 2025: lecture]

Brandon LaBelle offers a conceptualisation of poetic knowledge as a shimmering; a ‘vibration of attention that moves across inner and outer’ [2026: lecture]. The attention to the movement of life, a deep listening to the vibrancy of the inside, an embodied sensitivity to the unfolding of the world from within. As Kearney writes: “poetics… clears a landing site for the divine stranger without either prohibiting or mandating a landing… out of this tension, faith leaps. A wager of transit between like and unlike, between a host and guest languages” [2009: 15].

All of which denote a transgression of boundaries between inside and outside.

Early Christian mystics, most often female mystics, described divine encounter with the awesome Other – that most radical of Strangers – as a kind of ‘bodily sight’ [Reimer 2026], a knowledge that could only be gained through first-hand physical perception – a seeing that is also a feeling-knowing. These encounters at the site of the porous body were both painful and ecstatic as the boundaries of both the body and soul dissolved. Amy Hollywood writes that this kind of radical hospitality to divine revelation was particularly associated with female bodies during pre- and early modern Christianity due to the perceived openness and porosity of such bodies. They were more ‘labile and changeable, more subject to affective shifts’ [2002]. Such bodies, as with the body of the multiplicious Goddess I discussed in a previous essay, blurred the boundaries of what might be said to be inside vs. outside.

This question of what’s inside and what’s outside, how to allow interpenetration, how to open again our carrier bags, of how to disembark this eternal, colonial ship-process, perhaps finds some ground in the recognition of our porosity, our eddying decomposition, the shedding of ourselves into the world – and also in the deepening of a practice of generous hospitality towards the world’s shedding into our own bodies and souls. Blurring the boundaries of inside/outside, according to these posthumanists, poetic visionaries and mystics, is what it means to come alive. To be porous and hospitable is to live. This is also a paradox. It is to at once be hospitable to language and to become wordless — to break down to the place at which a new eloquence is needed: “the eloquence of a gasp” [Akomolafe 2017: 54]. That in-spraying and out-spraying of air, water, wonder, awe, terror, liveliness, vibrancy. It puts me in mind of Poor Tom’s lilted, fragmented, folktale-lullaby-ecological speech in King Lear.

This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet. He begins
at curfew and walks till the first cock. He
gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and
makes the harelip, mildews the white wheat, and
hurts the poor creature of earth.
Swithold footed thrice the ’old,
He met the nightmare and her ninefold,
Bid her alight,
And her troth plight,
And aroint thee, witch, aroint thee.

Act 3, Scene 4

In the middle of the moor, betwixt and between, the unmoored King Lear meets the faux Stranger and the howling, fragmented madness of Poor Tom begins to make sense of the non-sense with all the eloquence of a gasp…

~

We must wager that the stranger outside will become a friend once invited inside; make space to hold the words and the worlds of radical strangeness so that a fertile space for those constant, if gradual, alterations might expand within us; and resist “the temptation of closure… the urge to confound the sacred with the tribe… the decision for hospitality over hostility is never made once and for all; it is a wager that needs to be renewed again and again” [ibid: 19].

“We often forget that the real laboratory is in our hearts. In that innermost country many tests are being conducted. Sadhana, this pursuit, is necessary to keep the insight bright.”

[Chandra Bose 2026: 50]

How do we do this?

I believe it’s exactly what the old stories tell us. Our faces are being worn by others. Our hearts must go back to the beginning and learn to speak. The story of the Maretail woman is a cataclysmic upheaval, but it is also a wager for renewal that must be renewed again and again. It is the only way that we might disembark that perennial ship. Oral stories are cyclical, not linear. This is not a once-and-done deal. The more it is cycled through, the more the capacity expands for those accumulative changes. The more porous, open, vibrant, participatory the body becomes. The more searing, fierce joy in submitting so totally to the witch.

Here’s what I’ve learnt so far:

1. Put yourself in the way of an accident or a lucky find

An accident comes to disrupt what you thought of as orderly, polite and correct. A lucky find opens up a pore in the fabric of social order. You’ll know it when you meet it. Meet it well.

2. Listen until your body disintegrates

This is a peculiar style of listening that dissolves any sense of youness and worldness. Close your eyes and imagine your mind and body as a cage. Open the door, listen. Be astounded, shocked, wounded, filled with grief, illuminated, ecstatic, transcendental, decayed.

3. Submit to the witch

You won’t have much of a choice at this point, to be honest.

4. Go back to the beginning

Choose your medicine wisely. There’ll be a teacher or an old story or a poem that holds some old wisdom which is so obviously, unfalteringly true that you’ll know it distinctly in your whole body as the truth of the thing resounds through your soul. You’ll feel resonance like a gong reverberating.

5. Learn to speak

With awkward, incomplete, half-formed thoughts; with images and symbols; with angels and monsters; with laterally-linked stories and accumulated, webbed resonances; with Poor Tom’s nonsense lullabies and snippets of folktales.

6. Be kind

7. Renew the wager

What emerges now?

And so I begin again with an invitation for your questions. Perhaps leaking out from this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the bag for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Akomolafe, B. (2017). These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to my Daughter of Humanity’s Search for Home. California: North Atlantic Books.

Chandra Bose, J. (2026). The Man Who Made Plants Write: Essays by Jagadish Chandra Bose. Translated by: Sumana Roy. Yale University Press.

Clementine, O. (2025). Bayo Akomolafe: On Failure, Poetry and Becoming. [podcast: On Love and Liberation with Olivia Clementine].

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Hollywood, A. (2002). Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Columbia University Press.

Gerlier, V. (2025). Imagination — The Hospitality of Being. [audio recording]. The Temenos Academy audio archive.

le Guin, U. (1986). The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ong, W. J. (1982 ). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London and New York: Routledge.

Parker, E. (2020). The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

When I feel ugly, it’s usually when my body is in a stress state. I get swollen lymph nodes in my neck, dry and flaky skin and I often slow down so much that my body inevitably changes shape and gets bigger. Modern sensibility reviles an expanding waistline – it is an indication of some kind of inherent failure of comportment, perhaps revealing an inclination towards laziness or excess. Excess. We’ll come back to that...

I have this memory of reading or hearing a Marina Abramović quote about ugliness, which I now can’t find anywhere. In my vague half-recollection, I remember her saying that she feels completely ugly just at the moment before she is about to bring something new into the world.

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This aligns heavily with my own inner experience. The slowing down and the stress happens when a decision is about to be made, a new insight from layers of research emerging, or a phase drawing near of deep, intensive, almost obsessive work on writing or making. My body knows before I do. And, on the cusp of emergence, I feel utterly grotesque. There is something writhing inside which is at once me and not-me. After years of being a participant-observer in my own creation cycle, I know that, before things start moving, my rosacea springs up, the skin flakes, the nodes swell. It is as if the creation is in the process of becoming another body, and my own body swells up and begins to overspill itself in the process of birthing it. During the actual birthing: electricity. Becoming lost in the something more.

Tim Ingold writes:

“The composer Manuel de Falla once observed that to write a piece of music is to give birth to a new life. In the throes of creation, the composer allows himself to be taken over by the work, to have it inhabit his very being as it swells within him. Eventually, after a period of gestation, the composition bodies forth, and goes on to live a life of its own in the world.” (2022: 27)

I like Ingold’s description of this process, but it leaves out inner experience. How does the composer feel, with this thing that is not-him gestating inside? Uncomfortable, restless, utterly engaged with trying to get it out?

As a new creation ‘bodies forth’, there is a splitting, a fracture, a stress. When new branches grow on a tree, it is a signal of abundance that the tree can afford the energy to make a new branch. It is an act of hope: the tree can believe in a surplus of future sunlight from above and future nutrients/water resources from below. As a new branch bodies forth, the bark around it splits and sometimes even sloughs off to make space for the new limb. A rupture for creation. An overspilling of the boundaries. I was walking in Glendalough national park in February, and I became entranced by observing trees, particularly the part at which a branch springs out of the trunk. In some species it twists the entire tree, forcing it into a new shape to bear the new load.

I think the feeling of ugliness before or during creation comes from an experience of discomfort as one becomes two. In a previous essay, I wrote about the emergence of cells at the very beginning of everything. How does a cell feel when it is on the cusp of splitting? Does it writhe inside? Does it feel grotesque? Does it feel ugly?

These words, ‘grotesque’, ‘ugly’, ‘excess’, ‘surplus’, have a long history.

At the moment, I’m revisiting an epically brilliant course I undertook with Jasmine Reimer at Berlin Art Institute in February 2025. We examined the role of hybrid bodies throughout history; from the divinity of the shapeshifting neolithic Goddess through to the Grotesque and the Surreal. Throughout, there was worship of the body’s endless transformative potential. Bodies are always in the process of becoming: according to Marija Gimbutas, this becoming-in-process was sacred in Europe in the neolithic era. Hybridity was akin to divinity. People, writes Gimbutas in The Language of the Goddess [1989], valorised a regeneratrix (both death-giving and life-giving) and parthenogenetic (self-reproducing) Goddess who manifested herself as an ever-hybrid form which was always shapeshifting and creating new bodies. Sculptures and statues dedicated to her were often bulging out, overspilling themselves, absolutely and abundantly excessive.

(As a side note, it feels fitting to publish this at Easter. Gimbutas calls the above image an example of 'the ‘double-egg buttocks’ fertility symbolism. Some say that Easter eggs came about because of surplus. Before Lent, people would eat all the eggs they had, before going into fast. But of course, chickens would not stop laying, so at the end of the fasting period, there would be an excess of eggs to eat. And of course in Christianity the egg also symbolises the empty tomb/womb of the Christ’s rising. Schrodinger’s regeneratrix egg.)

Anyway… with the arrival of Indo-European mythologies, with their (male) heroes and aesthetic visions of bodily ideals, the hybridity and excessive potentiality of the Goddess became dangerous. In Greek and Roman times, she split in two, and then many more – finding herself in the light as a Venus, a Diana, an Aphrodite… Interestingly, there is an androgynous or intersex manifestation of Aphrodite who was worshipped on the Island of Cyprus as Aphroditus, and said to bring good luck and fertility.

The Goddess’ shadowy sides became a dark surplus, splitting off to become the Crone, the Hag, the Witch. Her body-in-becoming became fixed and categorised into archetypes; she was no longer hybrid, no longer multiplicious.

Yet even in Rome, artists subverted this erasure. The term ‘grotesque’ has only come to be related to disgust or excess relatively recently. It is etymologically derived from the Italian grottesca, meaning cave or grotto. This is because Emperor Nero, the reviled Roman emperor, filled his palace Domus Aurea with the work of avant garde artists, all painting – you guessed it – hybrid bodies. Bodies looping through processes of impossible transformation into plants and animals. Nero was so disliked that upon his death, his palace was buried and only rediscovered when a boy fell through a hole in the ground into these great caves, or grottos, of duplicating, excessive, transforming bodies. Nero’s ugliness in life became intrinsically intertwined with a distaste for his preferred art form. The artwork in his palaces was denoted as monstrous, unruly, impossible, grotesque.

The darker surplus of the Regeneratrix became punishable by law during the Witch Trials from the 1500s to the 1800s across Europe. Witches were portrayed with protruding noses, identifiable by warts and other bodily protuberances. Their bodies went past the bounds of appropriateness and were therefore damned. Silvia Federrici’s Caliban and the Witch is a fabulous read on witches and the control of the female body during the rise of capitalism. In the early nineteenth century, however, the Grotesque as an art form began to flirt with excess as an artistic subversion of the classic bodily ideal. Suddenly, paintings, films and artworks filled again with bodies duplicating, sprouting, turning into something else. Parts of bodies even sloughed off and ran away (Gogol’s The Nose, for example).

“The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.” [Bakhtin 1984: 317]

Apologies: this is a whistlestop tour, and I really recommend Reimer’s courses for a more thorough journey through these stages.

Now, though, we can see the ancient fear of bodies-in-becoming playing out in the control of female reproductive rights (Federicci is also excellent on this topic) and also trans and queer bodies. Women breastfeeding in public. Bodies which exceed the classical boundaries or yet refuse to be categorised at all are treated as dangerous, grotesque and excessive. There is a deep desire to control them and the spaces they inhabit in case they somehow ‘infect’ other bodies with the possibility of transformation…

Back to this inner experience of ugliness. It can be this moment of fecundity and creation; the duplicate body on its way out of your own, but it can also be an invitation to go inwards; to reconcile with some part of our own selves that seeks to be recognised, witnessed, even extracted.

During my MA dissertation, I wrote a story about a girl who splits off from her body due to traumatic circumstances, and finds herself in the Underworld with a creature called Grub. She is terrified of the place and immediately seeks to return to normality. Moving through life, she ignores Grub’s calls to return until Grub bursts up and into her body, creating swellings in different places and increasingly yelling obscenities until – grotesque, ugly, overspilling – she must return to the chthonic earth to reckon with her past. Sound familiar?

Grub plays out in other cultural pieces. Spirited Away contains multiple visions of the grotesque and of excess; the parents who are turned into pigs, the giant baby, the duplicate witch with her awe-inspiring nose, the spirit who, in his desire to please Chihiro/Sen, endlessly produces gold and then rampages around eating the other inhabitants. And of course, the Stink Spirit, who slimes his way into the halls of the otherworldly bath house, monstrously ugly, seeking only relief from all the junk that writhes around inside him.

I think we do have a morbid fascination with this image. There are so many spot-popping videos on YouTube…!

Yet in our contemporary world, the ugly and the grotesque remain mostly confined to a darker, shadowy split off. We still valorise the individual, bounded body. We still cling to those Classic visions of an ideal (often white, often male, often slim) body, which battles through life overcoming the monstrous Other without letting anything in or out. Without letting anything change it. Such boundedness requires a lot of upkeep. Where does all this ugliness go if it is not allowed to be recognised inside? The overspilling goes outwards from the body instead; waste piles up, there are ‘corrosive spillages and a frightening excess of broken ecological boundaries’ [Akomolafe 2018]. Instead of being acknowledged and reconciled inside, the monster is always located (queer bodies, trans bodies, black bodies) or replicated and duplicated (waste, warfare) somewhere outside of our own selves…

So what if – instead of exploring ugliness at its most surface level – we got curious about the inner experience of ugliness as a portent of transformation? What if ‘feeling ugly’ was a signal to look inside, to discover what’s growing there, and to either birth it or reckon with it?

As Bayo Akomolafe writes: ‘When you meet the monster, anoint its feet.’

What emerges now?

And so I begin again with an invitation for your questions. Perhaps protruding from this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the bag for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Akomolafe, B. (2018). When You Meet the Monster, Anoint Its Feet. Emergence Magazine.

Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Federici, S. (2004). Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.

Gimbutas, M. (1989). The Language of the Goddess. London: Thames & Hudson.

Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. London and New York: Routledge.

Reimer, J. (2025). BECOMING PLANT: The New Weird Divine. Berlin Art Institute Masterclass.

Spirited Away. (2001). [Film]. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli.

The sound was first.

The first sound was ohhhhh.

The sound of a sigh.

The first sigh became two; a longing, and a fleeing.

A movement was borne from longing and fleeing.

The first movement, and it was two at once.

Towards and away.

The movement split in two.

The two movements fled away from and towards each other.

The first object was borne from two movements.

The first object contained the sigh, the split, the longing, the flight.

The first object left traces and stains of itself.

Everywhere were stains and traces of the object.

The presence of its absence.

The towards and the away.

These stains and traces were the first marks.

The first marks of the first object became ideas.

Tiny islands of ideas that contained stains and traces, objects and their absences, movements away and towards, a sound, a sigh.

These ideas longed and fled, longed and fled.

They split and became new ideas.

The ideas reached out to other ideas.

Some ideas longed for each other.

Other ideas raced away.

They became allergic.

Each idea blossomed and withered, waxed and waned.

They left stains; others, traces.

All ideas grew hooks.

The first hooks.

The first hooks grasped into the ground and took root.

They hooked onto other ideas.

At the other end of the ideas, wings sprouted.

The first wings.

Even as the hooks dug deep into the earth, the wings caught threads of wind.

They pulled in the other direction.

With each grasp of earth and each flurry of wind, the first idea split into two.

Each time, it split, it left a stain and a trace, and made a sigh.

Each time an idea hooked onto another, it left a stain and a trace, and made a sigh.

Eventually, enough ideas came together to form a cluster.

The cluster stayed together for a long time, holding its movement, its longing, its flight, its sound, its sigh.

It grew a hook.

It grew wings.

My fieldnotes from Berlin, 2025.

~ ~ ~

I have always sat in the tension between leaving and staying. The ecstasy of departure into an entirely new world, entering those ‘clouds of unknowing’ [Kearney 2009: 6], is a very enchanting thing. Leaving London in Summer 2020 after eight years and a pandemic-induced sojourn in Gloucestershire I packed all my belongings into a new car and drove down to Cornwall into what I knew not. I didn’t know anyone there and had no job, only a room in a shared house. As I drove I imagined that tin whistles and other objects were threaded and rattling from the car, as if I had ‘JUST MARRIED (TO MYSELF)’ on the back bumper. I ate the new vista with my eyes. I drank it, dissolved into it. The road stretched out in front of me and my phone battery ran low and I was entirely lost and completely self-possessed.

It’s hard to beat the feeling.

Now, after six years, I am at home here in Cornwall, I think. There are deep and nourishing roots and tendrils holding me in place; pets, relationships, work, home. But the old itch arrives, a silky voice sticking its tongue in my ear: ‘Do I stay or do I leave? Do I merge further or find a new path?’ As is my wont, I have been entirely overthinking it. This essay is a result of that.

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The universe is borne of movements away and towards. On a macro-cosmic level, the Big Bang, Khaos, flung itself out from void into being some 13.8 billion years ago. It moves now, still expanding, but according to data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, it has begun to slow down. With the breath of Eros it breathed out; perhaps now it begins to fill its lungs for the next breath. On a micro-cosmic level, the first cells on Earth emerged from a primordial, prebiotic soup – the startlingly accurate ‘cosmic water’ [Eliade 1967: 109], the ‘watery abyss’ [ibid: 97] of many mythic cosmogonies across the planet. The Rig Veda of the Upinashads has a delightfully illusive version of events:

Then even nothingness was not, nor existence.

There was no air, then, nor the heavens beyond it.

What covered it? Where was it? In whose keeping?

Was there then cosmic water, in depths unfathomed?

Then there were neither death nor immortality,

nor was there then the torch of night and day.

The One who breathed without air and self-sustaining.

There was that One then, and there was no other.

At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness.

All this was only unillumined water.

That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing,

arose at last, borne of the power of cosmic heat.

In the beginning desire descended on it—

that was the primal seed, born of the mind.

The sages who have searched their hearts with wisdom

know that which is, is kin to that which is not.

And they have stretched their cord across the void,

and know what was above, and what below.

Seminal powers made fertile mighty forces.

Below was energy, and over it was impulse.

But, after all, who knows, and who can say

whence it all came, and how creation happened?

The gods themselves are later than creation,

so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,

he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,

he who surveys it all from highest heaven,

he knows— or maybe even he does not know.

[ibid: 109-110]

Scientists still do not know why or how cells formed; what life force drew the ingredients together and then inspired them to split into two, then to replicate. To form a cell, you first need a membrane. Some posit that the very first cells formed their first tender, and very simple, membranes like bubbles in the spit and froth of the soup. I like this theory for the image. And it gets more complicated once you move into nucleation. One theory suggests that the first nucleated cell arose from two different non-nucleated (prokaryotic) cell species, which had formed a symbiotic relationship in order to carry out anabolic and catabolic digestive functions. Other theories argue for a communal metabolism, wherein early living cellular communities would have comprised thousands of different cells, all sharing their genetic material.

I am absolutely fundamentally fascinated by what it took for the first cells to emerge. What kind of force propelled the movement? What kind of desire? What kind of yearning?

After those first brave cells formed a sense of inside and outside, complexity then bred complexity, with cellular structures forming ever more complex systems, building for themselves organisms which lived and breathed and moved and became sentient. But still, at the heart of it, those two movements: away and towards. Attraction and repulsion. Longing and fleeing. Merging and individuation. Porosity and boundedness. Separation and togetherness. These movements, these impulsive proclivities, are built into absolutely everything. In Freud’s terms, fear and need.

My yearning for belonging and to be known, my desire to leave and become unknowing.

My own painting, 2024

Greene writes that: ‘Mathematical analyses of the inflationary burst [of the earliest moments of the universe] then reveal that it should have left an indelible imprint, a fossil of creation in the form of a specific pattern of minute temperature variations across the night sky.’ [in Finer 2020:51]. The Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) that Greene is describing are patterns of wrinkles in the density distribution of galaxies across the universe. As the universe initially expanded, matter was at first spread relatively evenly, but the interplay of pressure and gravity pushed it apart and together again, creating oscillations that were the equivalent of sound waves. Incredibly, these oscillations are visible – indelible imprints of these vast movements towards and away.

Tim Ingold writes that: ‘Creation signifies God himself…. what is coming into being with Creation.. is nothing less than existence, life itself, refracted in the proliferation of its worldly creatures. To bear witness to its becoming is to join in a moment of creation that, apperceived from its inside, stretches to eternity… this is what it means to enter into the presence of God’ [2009: 25]

Do we then carry this refraction, this indelible imprint of yearning and fleeing within us on a cellular level? A specific pattern? Where does it play out in our fundamental instincts, and the stories we tell? What about in global religions? Could it underlie my own constant ‘holy insecurity’ [Kearney 2009: 5] between remaining and departure? Or is this absolute wank?

Freud was deeply sceptical of religion, seeing it along with Nietzsche as a ‘a cultural representation of disguised symptoms of fear and need… a coverup for a denial of life, an illusory projection of a supersensible world driven by the calumny of this earth’ [Kearney 2009: 72]. In some senses I think they were right in terms of the interweaving of away-and-towards into every facet of life. But perhaps instead of covering it up, the storytelling of wisdom traditions, including religious storytelling, bears witness to the oscillation by generating stories in which ‘God’s perspective is part of the texture’ [Bausch 1986: 61] — stories of inner/outer, yearning, fleeing, replication and separation writ large — in which we do not cover up but instead might explore and inhabit these cosmic movements inscribed on our very cells; the yearning towards the primordial soup, the desire to individuate and replicate, the desparate fear of finding ourselves alone.

Cultures have cycled through belief systems tending either towards or away. Practitioners of early, experimental Christianity such as the hermitic Desert Fathers lost in the silence of Wadi El Natrun, sought to do away with worldly concerns and to be ‘absorbed in the void’ [Maitland 2009: 213]; perhaps to be reabsorbed in the Watery Abyss of pure God (albeit in a very dry place). Moving away from other humans and indeed themselves in order to yearn more wholeheartedly towards God. Since the Enlightenment period, Western culture has become revolted by this kind of asceticism – for the Romantics, moving away from other humans and walking the landscape alone was not an act of blurring boundaries or merging with the divine but instead of re-strengthening the Ego, finding the poet-self. No community metabolism here. Throughout modernity, we have shorn up and strengthened ‘the boundaries of the self; to make a person less permeable to the Other’ [ibid: 251]. We move away from God to return to ourselves. In a post-Freudian world, self-abnegation is a sign of pathology, self-abnegation being required in any process of community metabolism.

Kearney’s Anatheism: Returning to God after God is a fascinating delve into a post-religion religious world, a return to God after God’s death by reason in the philosophical Western imaginary throughout the Enlightenment project and particularly after the Holocaust. He describes the ‘poetic oscillations between loss and recovery, between turning away and returning’ [2009: 12]. And indeed it is easy, when talking of movements away and towards, to think of straight lines and a binary choice of either/or. But we are of course on a planet which spins, turns, revolves. Any turning away from is by its nature a turning towards; head due north on this planet and you’ll eventually find yourself turning south.

Global movements away from always contain the seed of the towards. The rise of popularist far-right movements swing out from a proclivity towards progressive politics, and vice versa. Likewise, the project of shoring up the bounded self is currently turning towards a dissolution of those self-same boundaries. Researchers in the fields of phenomenology, posthumanism and transcorporeality are poking holes in (heh) the membranes of our very skin in ways which remember both that primordial soup and the indelible patterning of the BAO. Astrida Neimanis writes of the molecular hydrocommons our bodies share with deep time:

‘If I share one molecule of water with a tsunami that occurred thousands of years ago on the other side of the world, is that tsunami bound up in my own body of water’s virtuality, or its actuality?... Both demand a stretching of my comfortable human scales of spatial and temporal proximity. Both demand a way of tapping into a bodily more-than-humanness that is lived, even if our molar selves have difficulty grasping these experiences.’ [2019: 53]

I imagine water as that first yearning towards and fleeing from. Water yearns for our bodies, it will find any means possible to come inside. We also yearn for water (a cold glass on a hot day, an oasis in the desert). It also flees, is expelled, and we are repulsed by its residue (piss, spit, sweat, tears, vomit). And then we drink again and are quenched.

It is now a kind of idiom in many circles (pun intended) to say that life is cyclical, but perhaps we do have to leave in order to return. For all my efforts at rooting myself, I do not truly know home but by the umbilical tug below my belly button that lets me know I have been too long away.

My study of mythopoetics tells me that humans have always known the importance of departure and return. The oldest stories tell of journeys to the underworld and the reckonings that must happen alone there, in the ‘middle of the night, in the depth of a cave, in an instant of holy not-knowing’ [Kearney 2009: 46]. Moving away from tells us what we have left behind, and the absolute joy of return… Sophus Helle’s gorgeous translation of the ancient Mesapotamian epic of Gilgamesh gives a startling account of Gilgamesh’s re-emergence from his journey deep under the mountains. The epic is in fragments and dashes denote lines of missing text.

When he had walked for two hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for four hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for six hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for eight hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for ten hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for twelve hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

When he had walked for fourteen hours,

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

After sixteen hours, he was running like a -

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

After eighteen hours, he felt the north wind,

- his face

the dark was dense and void of light,

there was no way of looking back.

After travelling twenty hours,

- was near

After twenty-two hours, there were just two hours left,

and after twenty-four hours of darkness,

he walked out into the sun.

- full of light.

He went straight to look at the trees of the gods.

One tree bore fruits of carnelian,

it was laden with grapes and lovely to look at.

Another tree bore leaves of lapis lazuli,

it was blooming and beautiful to see.

-

-

-

-

-

-

cypress -

cedar -

fronds of pappardilu stone and -

coral - - sasu stone,

its thorns and spines were shards of crystal.

Gilgamesh touched a carob–it was abasmu stone,

agate and hematite -

Instead of -

instead of - - turquoise -

- mother of pearl -

it had -

As Gilgamesh walked around and gaped,

she looked up and saw him.

[Helle 2021: 85-87]

When I leave Cornwall for long enough, I gape to see her. Upon my return she looks up and sees me. The colours sing again, the sea calls my name – I enter into a kind of wonderment, Ricoeur’s second naiveté – ‘Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again’ [Ricoeur, 349]. It is the follicular after the luteal. I imagine a hand, my hand, reaching out to my home again, and being met by it anew. The world is transformed once more into poetry, the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins: it is all speckled, ‘dappled things’ which play out in ‘ten thousand places, lovely in limb and lovely in eyes not his…’ I could not return to experience this kind of beauty if I did not first shut my eyes to it by leaving.

Pre-historic people often prayed for the sun to rise. To a modern imagination, this seems a bit inane: of course it will rise. But will it if you do not will it? And more importantly — will you be there to see it happen? If you do not pray, will you be present to see those first divine shards illuminate the night sky? As a friend said to me recently: ‘the bus will come, but will you be on it?’ Maybe such prayer was not merely for the return of the sun but the concurrent return of human eyes from the hearth towards the horizon at dawn. Corporeal and celestial bodies turning towards each other after a night or a winter turning away.

Am I longing to leave or am I fleeing from something? I don’t know. So, for now, until I can answer that question, it is a process of departure and return: to go north far enough that I inevitably turn southwards again. And perhaps it’s not a pathological indecisiveness or a coverup of fear and need. Perhaps it is a turning away and turning towards that is inscribed cosmically, acoustically, cellularly and mythologically upon the human heart. Less a binary either-or than the worlds of journey and return that open up in the gap between ‘yes’ and ‘no’.

Whatever I decide, I wish for the kind of attentive awareness to impulses of yearning and fleeing that tilts me always upon the ‘downhill path of consciousness’ [Bachelard 1971] – to fall into cycles of knowing and unknowing, to oscillate with gravity and pressure, to impart my own fossils of creation along the way.

~ ~ ~

I still have the memory of all those starlings flocking to those wounds of mine that would have me go. How do we respond to our own woundedness? I want to stay and I want to leave. Each time an impulse arises, it is entirely who I am. Each time I believe it is who I am, the impulse changes; a trickster figure weirding the way of being human. Are humans not of plant and yet also migratory bird? Are we not borne of longing and fleeing, of stasis and transformation? This endless shifting between calcification and decay and rebirth. The state of things is alive to me today, more so than usual, and it is dangerous. Even as I write ‘the state of things’, it changes, slips away. To try to capture anything at all is a fool’s errand.

I like to be a fool.

To engage and be swallowed by the trying, even as it dissolves around me like stomach acid and even as I dissolve too. What would it mean to let go entirely of the illusion of a grip on life? To find the footholds and handholds only in their disappearance. To find footholds and handholds only in the slippery quick; only as they melt back into the cliff face and I fall, turn into a plant or a migratory bird, back to the hole in the ground, murmur into it, web over it, mesh the entrance and still fall, still fall...

Field notes from my journal, Berlin 2025.

What emerges now?

And so I begin again with an invitation — a yearning — for your questions. Either fleeing from or reaching towards this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the patterned pool of human experience for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Bachelard, G. (1971). The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos. London: Beacon Press.

Bausch, W. (1986). Storytelling: Imagination and Faith. Twenty Third Publications.

Eliade, M. (1967). Essential Sacred Writings from around the World. HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

Finer, E. (2025). The Cosmic Oval. Spiral House (Silver Press).

Helle, S. (2021). Gilgamesh. Yale University Press.

Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. London and New York: Routledge.

Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Columbia University Press.

Maitland, S. (2009). A Book of Silence. Granta Books.

Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

We beg: How could you pave this hallowed ground? Why would you even want to?

It is deeply discomforting when heavy order ambushes the seedling’s ascent.

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But look, concrete crumbles in the end. Anything rigid, anything brittle will always form a crack. And then the seedling seizes its chance; it sprouts up through the cracks and over time, its roots create new cracks, eventually crumbling the concrete into ash. Life will riddle itself out.

Credit: https://www.bbcearth.com/news/abandoned-places-reclaimed-by-nature

What is a riddle in this landscape?

A riddle is a young plant pushing its way through cracks, finding its way in between the myth of certainties, unsettling old stories, reimagining the world anew. A riddle is a lucky find, a queer body, a question without an obvious answer, a rip in the fabric of social custom. A riddle is fresh whenever you hear it and it will make you do the work.

Below is an essay I wrote as part of my MA Poetics of Imagination, exploring riddling through the story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (author unknown), and Wodwo by Ted Hughes. It explores the need for riddling when a set of virtues seem to encase culture – just like the rise of far right politics now.

What kind of riddles can sprout in the cracks in the pavement? How might we use riddling as a form of rebellious resistance? How might we ourselves become a riddle — lively, multiplicious in our answering, plantlike in our disruption of structure?

Essay

On a frosted January morning in the Redwoods at Schumacher College in 2024, Valentin Gerlier facilitated a walk-through scratch retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

As a group of students, we wandered through the forest helping to perform sections of the quest-story. The forest floor was thick with dead leaves, marshy with semi-iced rivulets and we squelched through it all. In this landscape-based retelling, we were Sir Gawain, riding through the lush but deathly cold forests of mediaeval Wales in mid-Winter. The Jurassic ferns were deep bronze and frosted; the moss feathering the forest floor a fractal green. When the trees exhaled, their breath was misted. We were certain that this quest would be our last – at the end of this journey, we expected to die. In these forests, which were strangely familiar yet foreign and foe-filled, we met trolls, boars and other foul creatures that had to be fought and felled… At a ditch halfway through the retelling, Valentin stopped us to perform the battles between Sir Gawain and these fearful foe. All of a sudden, a twentieth century ex-Cambridge poet stepped across our path. It was Ted Hughes.

“Look here!” said Hughes, indicating a strange, upside-down being looking up from underneath the surface of the slow-moving river in front of us. “A wodwo! How peculiar. Whatever can it be doing here, now? Let’s riddle it out.”

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

I enter water. Who am I to split

The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

Of the river above me upside down very clear

[Hughes 1967: 184]

In this essay, I will explore riddling and its relationship to storytelling through reading Tolkien’s 1950 translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [2021 edition] in conjunction with Ted Hughes’ 1967 poem Wodwo. It is my intention to create a ‘bacterial landscape’ [Hyde 2017: 133] of storytelling and riddling full of ‘pure poroi’ [ibid] in which we might walk about and explore the relationships and affinities between the two from a variety of viewpoints – riding through the trees, nosing about on the forest floor and from the perspective of a porous body in this terrain. I keep a keen interest in peering peripherally at the settling and unsettling of answers as they traverse such a landscape, are passed to and fro along storylines, and are found (or sometimes lost) at the bottom of riddle rivers. In keeping with the theme, I will not be searching for an ultimate conclusion nor arguing for one, but will instead nose along into aspects of these landscapes and what happens within them as I read the two texts together. We might get a little lost along the way, but as the wodwo eventually must see its own image in the water and as Sir Gawain finds his way home, I believe there will be some sort of reflection trickling out by the end. By way of conclusion, then, I will offer a reflection on the process of reading in such a bacterial landscape.

First, some notes on theoretical framework and translation. In reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Wodwo together, I follow a post-critical approach in bringing two texts together across time and space in order to see what might become possible. This approach is in keeping with Rita Felski, who invites the ‘language of addition rather than subtraction, translation rather than separation, connection rather than isolation, composition rather than critique’ [2015: 182]. In intertwining the two texts, I hope to allow them to ‘barge energetically across space and time, hooking up with other coactors in ways that are both predictable and puzzling’ [ibid]. In this spirit, I treat Wodwo as a ‘lucky find’ in the temporal landscape of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight – ‘an opportunity, then, a pore or penetrable opening in an otherwise closed design’ [Hyde 2017: 133], and invite the reader to creatively approach this essay as poly-dimensional and poly-temporal: both a linear mediaeval quest-story and an upside-down, inside-out twentieth century riddle rooting through the dead leaves on the forest floor.

Of course, Sir Gawain has already been projected through time, space and language by Tolkien’s translation of the unknown author’s Old English original. A note on the translation is necessary here: in his work, Tolkien decides to translate wodwo in the original Old English to woodtroll. This is interesting to me in the context of settling and unsettling answers, as the word has no such definitive translation. Etymologically, wodwo has been theorised as deriving from wudu-wāsa: the word wudu meaning ‘wood, forest’ and a noun wāsa coming from the verb wesan, wosen meaning ‘to be alive’ [Withington 1972: 74]. So, a woodbeing of sorts. When I hear the word woodtroll I am already holding an answer in my mind – indeed, a fairly ‘Tolkienised image’ [Oswald 2024: pers. comms.] of what a woodtroll is and its place in the landscape. In translating so, Tolkien passes wodwo through a translation-riddle process and comes out with an answer. With a wodwo or woodbeing, however, no such image jumps out, and I must go through my own imagining process to generate some kind of shapeshifting answer to suit the landscape and context. Hughes, of course, uses the original and much more mysterious wodwo as the title (and indeed, answer) of his riddling poem, and so in replanting the original word back into the story for the purposes of this essay, we have already a fascinating puzzle of events and coactors as a possible answer is sought out, found, or lost by accident or by design. Let us enter this puzzled landscape.

Riding through the trees

What am I doing here in mid-air?

[Hughes 1967: 184]

Our first viewpoint from which to approach storytelling and riddling is from atop the horse Gringolet, a few feet above the forest floor and behind a shield…

Humans have forever been concerned with the philosophical and existential riddle of what it means to live well. Virtues – qualities or standards for personal conduct or social policy – might be seen as an expression of an answer to this most existential of riddles. As a Knight of Arthur, Sir Gawain meets his world from behind a set of virtues which, at the time of the poems’ authorship, were starting to solidify as the values of the Christian church started to ‘superimpose themselves onto the knight’ [Gerlier 2023: lecture]. We might then see Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a ‘transition document’ [Hyde 2017: 104] between different orders of being in the world. The inner sacred sanctuary versus the outer wilderness, the pure versus impure, the moral versus immoral, the mythological versus the psychological or religious – all of these dualistic pairings seem, at first, to have become static enough under this newer Christian imagining to be an answer ‘fixed at five points that failed not at all’ [Tolkien 2021: 46] upon this shield. These ‘perfect five’ [ibid] are protections of the chivalric soul, a knotted answer that will protect the knight’s soul ‘wherever the process was put in play or passed to an end’ [ibid].

What strikes me about this way of entering into landscape is the loneliness engendered when such a static answer is passed from its locality into a different context. When a body floats above the ground and is hidden behind all manner of protections, it will not meet the world as a site of teeming selves, but rather as a fearsome yet oddly deadened wilderness to be wrangled with and fought off. In moving through the forests, Sir Gawain is ‘ironclad [and] all alone in need’ [Tolkien 2021: 49]. He is the only alive thing in this forest of frosted-over greenery and other dangerous things wishing him dead. Of course this is not necessarily true, but the way in which his solidifying virtues have formed his imagination make it so. All cultures have their imagined worlds, their ‘particular vocabularies that are deployed in paradigmatic patterns, in locally understood webs of signification…which hang together in a locally felt manner’ [Hyde 2017: 74]. In a linear, questing sense, Sir Gawain and his shield are drawn from his particular locality, in which those pairings may remain untroubled, and into an otherworld – the home of magicians and wyldwomen and other beings who make their home upon the forest floor.

Nosing here, turning leaves over

Why do I find

this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret

interior and make it my own? Do these weeds

know me and name me to each other have they

seen me before do I fit in this world?

[Hughes 1967: 184]

In marked contrast, Ted Hughes’ riddling poem Wodwo burrows into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a startling, snuffling little creature who, underwater and upside down, adds an extra spatial and temporal dimensionality and texture to the questing tale. For the wodwo, no linear quest guided by hardened principles for living, no protection; only a wiggly, ‘unsettling quest for whatness’ [Eddins 1999: 105]. The creature, new to the world, uses its body as a first means of exploring its selfness and the environment in which it has surprisingly found itself. ‘Nosing here, turning leaves over’, the wodwo delves nose-first into Sir Gawain’s world without any protection or concept of sacred versus profane, moral versus immoral. It is only a riddling, curious body, ‘entering into relation with all things’ [Abram 1997: 38] in order to strike out towards some sense of an answer. The wodwo, dropped anew as it is into this mediaeval forest, must act as an ‘active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world’ [ibid: 39]. As such, the riddle of its existence affirms the aliveness of the world around it via a process of ‘creaturely inseeing’ [Heuser 1985: 35].

I seem

separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped

out of nothing casually I’ve no threads

fastening me to anything I can go anywhere

I seem to have been given the freedom

of this place what am I then?

[Hughes 1967: 184]

The riddle-poem unsettles any idea of a static answer; it starts from the trouble of having no ‘webs of signification’ [Hyde 2017: 74] with which to root itself in time and place – yet the wodwo also generates webs with every question uttered by evoking other beings to riddle out its own existence. In this sense the wodwo in this riddle-poem is a trickster figure, someone set ‘against beings that are anything but aimless, beings that are situated in space by their nature’ [ibid: 41]. The wodwo marks webs already in place through the process of attempting to nose its way into understanding its place in the world. The creature speaks to the landscape, and the ‘weblike nature of language ensures that the whole of the system is implicitly present in every sentence, in every phrase’ [Abram 1997: 57]. There is a generative nature, then, to the riddle: it creates affinities, relationships and webs with which to attempt to nose along into some kind of answer.

Becoming a porous body in landscape

Yet the wodwo has no settled answer for the question of what it is and its place in the world. It only has questions and its own body with which to investigate, and its aimlessness and unrootedness (in my reading) seem to give it some consternation.

And picking

bits of bark off this stump gives me

no pleasure and its no use so why do I do it

me and doing that have coincided very queerly

[Hughes 1967: 184]

What are we if we have no threads? If we are completely separated from the ground? If what we find ourselves doing has no meaning? No pleasure in having no answer at all.

Yet there is also no pleasure in having no freedom whatsoever. The expectations laid out on Sir Gawain’s shield extol that he must either succeed in his chivalric quest and die, or flee and fail. There is no third way – until, that is, he is drawn out of the aforementioned locality of the courts and into the wild. Here his paradigmatic webs are put to the test, and it is in the bed of the wild and via his own body (sans shield) that his set of virtues are riddled through. Night by night the lady of the house comes to his bed and slowly his body begins to respond to her until finally on the last night, ‘at once joy up-welling went warm to his heart’ [Tolkein 2021: 83]. It is in this otherworld that Sir Gawain’s unprotected body is able to become porous to the troubling question of what it means to live well, and his answer begins to become less static, less unassailable.

Indeed, when Sir Gawain takes up the lady’s mantle upon his body as a further protection, his ‘perfect five’ is fundamentally unsettled. The shield becomes a permeable membrane: a sixth element passes through, an additional web of signification harking back to a wilder time before chivalric virtue. We might then see the mantle as a ‘lucky find… a fleeting opening’ [Hyde 2017: 132]. For Sir Gawain, a third way beyond the polarity of death versus flight and failure opens up in his imagination, and it is significant that this option comes from imagining a pagan symbol to have some power beyond that of his guiding star. The question of how to live well becomes the question of ‘how much control can we have before the good life we’re guarding ceases to be good?’ [ibid: 106] – and Sir Gawain begins to engage as a porous body in the bacterial landscape of this riddle. In the exchange of kisses between him, the lady Morgan le Fay and Bertilak de Hautdesert, he touches flesh to flesh and his borders begin to blur.

But what should I be called am I the first

have I an owner what shape am I what

shape am I am I huge if I go

to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees

til I get tired that’s touching one wall of me

for the moment

[Hughes 1967: 184]

As Sir Gawain begins to blur, we see the wodwo begin to find some kind of shape. It is still porous – the answer comes just ‘for the moment’, but there is a sense of relief. The wodwo finds its edges by moving through the landscape until it reaches the end of its own energy, and that is some kind of an answer. There is something finite about its ability to pass through the trees which allows it a ‘wall’ or a membrane to rub up against, and it uses the land to ascribe this membrane.

There is also a membranous event at the end of Sir Gawain’s newfound porosity in this seeping landscape. When he finally meets the Green Knight at the Green Chapel, he bows his head for the blow and on the third attempt, the knight:

‘...hurt him no more

than to snick him on one side and sever the skin.

Through the fair fat sank the edge, and the flesh entered,

so that the shining blood o’er his shoulders was shed on

the earth.’

[Tolkien 2021: 101]

In this way Sir Gawain becomes truly porous and adds his own bacteria to the landscape: he is irrevocably now part of the webs of signification lacing the wild. As the landscape has infected him, so he now reciprocates. The answer is both unsettled and settled with this exchange. Sir Gawain goes on to leave and re-enters the courts having re-oriented himself again around the polaric notion that he has failed in his quest. The third way closes again… for the moment.

Bacterial landscapes

In the cross-infection of these two texts, there is something interesting in the settling and unsettling of static answers, and thus the making and unmaking of culture. When one meets the world from behind a shield of preset virtues, as does Sir Gawain, an anti-existentialism occurs in which the body might move through life untroubled by the reality of things. It is hidden and encased behind a fully formed ‘whatness’, a hardened membrane of acceptable beings and doings. Going back to the notion of this story as a ‘transition document’ [Hyde 2017: 104], we might imagine the unknown author watching the cultural landscape shift and change shape as Christian values seemed to settle like permafrost on the forest floor, and see why it would perhaps have seemed important to riddle out what this new way of being might entail; to unsettle the new order and make it somewhat squelchy, to attempt to open a pore, offer a third way.

Acting from the other end of the making-unmaking spectrum, riddles make us go through the process of sensing, troubling and reimagining for ourselves. We are called upon to sense into some kind of answer or answers by exploring our own webs and affinities.

If I sit still how everything

stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre

but there’s all this what is it roots

roots roots roots

[Hughes 1967: 184]

In the end, there are always roots to everything. The riddling poem Wodwo, while seemingly rootless, has of course its own roots in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which has its own cultural roots in the tradition of Anglo-Saxon riddling [Oswald 2024: pers. comms]. My interest in the conjunction of these texts in a bacterial landscape has its roots in my participation in Valentin Gerlier’s retelling in the Devonian Redwoods. Stretching out into vast webs of possible relationships, and yet acting from different spatial and temporal dimensions, riddles and stories queer the world and show its weird collaborations, co-morbidities and webbed tangents. Answers are found, lost and rediscovered throughout the two texts. They hang in the air, they nose through leaves and they look up at us through the membranous surface of a forest river.

Reflections from under the surface

and here’s the water

again very queer but I’ll go on looking

[Hughes 1967: 184]

Reading in this way has been an interestingly mulchy process. It was a challenge to not merely compare the texts but allow them to bump up against one another with ‘no tragic opposition…rather, the creative play of necessity and chance… the way and the no-way, the net of fate and the escape from that net’ [Hyde 2017: 117]. I felt that setting the mood was the most important thing, which is why I lingered at the introductory paragraphs; allowing the reader to be just as puzzled as me, just as puzzled as Sir Gawain and just as puzzled as the wodwo. That way, we could all come into genuine contact with this polytemporal and polydimensional world and with a ‘terrain that is itself continually shifting’ [Abram 1997: 39]. The temporal and membranous logic of the story has been unsettled in this reading and in so doing, some reflections have been generated that could not have come from residing in an enclosed, linear dimension. By opening up a time-pore in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, all sorts of interesting bacteria have nosed into the landscape. I hope that we have then nosed along in turn into some suitably infected and unsettled answers, ‘into knotty situations with monstrous others. Into the realisation that knowledge is con-fusion, agency is dispersed, identity is mangled and indeterminate…’ [Akomolafe 2016].

Or, at least, we’ll go on looking.

What emerges now?

And so from this riddle, I begin again with an invitation for your questions. Either sprung from or webbed out from this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the riddle pot for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

Akomolafe, B. (2016). Alethea’s Lesson: Queer Homecomings and the Quest for Community. Available at: https://www.bayoakomolafe.net/post/aletheas-lesson-queer-homecomings-and-the-quest-for-community (Accessed: 14 February 2024).

Eddins, D. (1999). Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: The Poetry of the Will. Twentieth Century Literature. 45: 1. Pp. 94-109.

Felski, R. (2015). The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Gerlier, V. (2024). Hunts, Wounds and Severed Heads. [Lecture]. SCH5460 2023/24: Glorious Distortions. Schumacher College. 12 January.

Heuser, A. (1985). Creaturely Inseeing in the Poetry of G. M. Hopkins, D. H. Lawrence and Ted Hughes. The Hopkins Quarterly. 12: 1. Pp. 35-51.

Hughes, T. (1967). Wodwo. USA: Harper & Row.

Hyde, L. (2017). Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture. Edinburgh: Canongate Books.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (2021). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Pearl and Sir Orfeo. London: HarperCollins Publishers.

Withington, R. (1972). English Pageantry: An Historical Outline. Vol 1. Ayer Publishing.

I’ve been obsessed with – or haunted by – gaps since experiences of dissociation during my early twenties. Things happened, the world carried on, but I was not present for them although my body apparently was. So where was I? And what is the ‘I’ that was missing?

Let’s start with a story. When I was twenty, I lived in Palestine for a year during my BA Arabic and Social Anthropology at SOAS University. After nine months of studying at An Najah, I moved to Bethlehem to work for three months as a translation intern at a news network. While there, I promptly ran out of cash. As an anthropology major, I was fascinated by the stories laced into landscape, so I turned to those stories as a way of feeding myself and gave tours to tourists around the many biblical sites of Bethlehem. One of them was a cave in which it is said that Joseph, Mary and Jesus hid from Herod’s soldiers on their escape to Egypt.

Here’s a retelling.

Joseph and Mary had heard about Herod’s plan to kill any male infant under the age of two. Mary had just given birth to Jesus, and so they decided to flee Judea and take sanctuary in Egypt. Setting out at dusk, they quickly found themselves at risk of being overtaken by Herod’s soldiers. They found a cave in the side of a mountain and hid at the very back where the only sound was the drip, drip, drip of water from the roof of the cave. Exhausted, Mary and Jesus settled into an uneasy sleep while Joseph kept watch, a sword laid across his lap in readiness to defend his world. To his horror, Joseph heard the soldiers coming closer and closer, until they were right outside the cave. Unbeknownst to him, however, a tiny spider had taken it upon itself to weave a shimmering web right across the cave mouth. The soldiers stood outside and debated: could a spider have hidden their quarry in so little time? Some versions of this story say that the soldiers decided that it couldn’t have, so there was no point in searching the cave. Others say that the captain of the soldiers was so enchanted by the delicate beauty of the web, that he gave the order that it must remain unbroken. Either way, the soldiers camped outside the cave and moved on at dawn, while the terrified Joseph guarded his precious jewels all night long, and Mary and Jesus slept.

What an image! Picture the darkness inside, the cold breath of the cave’s inhabitants catching the distant light of stars outside, the jewelled and dewy web hanging in mid air, the fragility of the illusion, the enchantment. The many possibilities for how the black night could end. The many viewpoints: the Christ child’s family hidden and afraid, the eight-legged and many-eyed angel hanging in-between, the bustling soldiers settling down to sleep. The possibility, from the outside, that everything or nothing could be inside, and the decision to allow the dark hole to be empty. Did Joseph pray? What about the spider? Was its web a prayer?

This essay is a wrangle with gaps, absences, caves and illusions. I will start somewhere between modern psychology and poetic wisdom to explore those absences or gaps I experienced, before webbing out into other ways of ‘minding the gap’. The first section is compiled from notes from a talk I gave to University of Plymouth’s Auto/Biography study group in November 2024.

Falling out of time

When modern psychology and neuroscience explores and speaks about ruptures from embodied presence, it often goes deeply with its microscopes and lights and surgical knives into the cells and neurons, into the darkness of the brain. It tries to understand everything by placing the messiness of human experience into neat categories. Over the years of modernity we have seen the vast expansion of both the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases (ICM), both of which have undertaken an almost colonial project to classify ‘more and more distressing emotions as pathological’ (Francis 2026). We are no longer undergoing a spiritual, relational or religious journey but rather experiencing distress – an integral part of being human – as disorder. Modern psychology, for all I have benefitted from it, either tries to describe gaps by only the emptiness from the soldier’s perspective (it says the web could not rationally have been built so quickly and that the cave must, therefore, have always been empty – disorder, derealisation, dissociation – a dead end) or instead it shines a light into the cave; forces the precious bodies to come out into the light before their prayers are complete, their transformation undertaken. In the former, no enchantment. In the latter, a broken web. A captured and slaughtered Christ family.

We live in an age of trypophobia – a culture afraid of holes, of gaps, of not knowing. Ingold has written of life and lifeforms as ‘folds in the plenary fabric of the ever-worlding world’ (2022: 56). So what if the fold is suddenly or traumatically too tightly folded, and in its unfolding rips open at the seam? When something extraordinary happens, devastating or overwhelmingly blissful (because each can be annihilating in its own right) a rip in the fabric of being opens up. In my experience, I have deep memory gaps where the lived experience of participating in the world has torn right open. For me, after years of wrangling, it’s simply not interesting enough to either describe this as dissociation and move on without question, or to wrest the hidden something out to be examined and ultimately butchered. Mystical traditions are rife with these ruptures from the mundane, material world, so what’s there? An awful lot, as it turns out. Although the experience has been unnerving and at times incredibly distressful, there is so much possibility in this gap, if you can get comfortable with the discomfort of allowing there to be one.

And the possibility of this comes down to (or unfolds with) enchantment.

The imaginal realm interests me here. For modern day mystic Cynthia Bourgeault, the imaginal realm exists between the formless or esoteric or spiritual and the material or embodied realms. It is the place of possibility, where we might find ‘the deep structures of existence itself’ (Gerlier 2025) on the ever-emergent cusp of taking form. In Henry Corbin’s words, the imaginal realm is ‘a precise order of reality corresponding to a precise mode of perception’. This means that when we journey to the imaginal realm, that journey is a real one. It is not, as my fellow Poetics grad Eleanor Robins writes, the same as taking a flight of fancy or getting lost in daydreams. Journeying to the imaginal realm means changing our consciousness such that we can access a wholly different field of reality itself. And in return, accessing it changes us. Those sacred bodies hiding in the cave are not the same bodies who emerged in the daylight. In this light, those gaps, those ‘dissociations’, were a different order of consciousness, a rip in the fabric between the cognitive and the material, an imaginal realm.

What a beautiful thing, an enchanting thing, then, that our brains (prayerful little spiders that they are) might go ahead and weave a web of illusion over the cave to hide those precious stories-in-emergence from the violence outside, that they may come out blinking in the freshness of the dawn and go on living.

Once we are enchanted, so much more can happen. Poetic images pour through the rupture – William Blake’s divine influxes emerge and incarnate. These are what poet Alice Oswald named, in a 2023 lecture at Schumacher College, as ‘the dark or luminous gifts’ of inhabiting the cave without shining a light or pathologising the experience. A flashback, if you can stay with it long enough, might become something else entirely. A kaleidoscopic figment, an embodied and visceral something with its own life process. Flashbacks for all their terror are ultimately boring, they are like jump scares in a crap horror film. A poetic image, on the other hand, is more like living with Frankenstein for the length of a lifetime; we empathise with the monster’s inner world, we find humanity in his monstrosity and his monstrosity in our own humanity. We meet and touch and there is a reconciliation of sorts.

Ancient mythology knows that of course there are monsters and other beings in the cave, who are very real, who take ‘the shape of fear itself’ (Ingold 2022: 64) and live in the space ‘of rupture between heaven and hell’ (ibid). Since the dawn of Christianity and the crystallisation of patriarchal chevalric values, we’ve tried to get our armour on and slay the damn things, but I can tell you that this approach does not get you very far. If you treat it like a quest, you’ll find an endless line up of monsters, many-headed transmutations of the same old beast. These beings are rife throughout history and literature. Furies, daemons, dragons, Ted Hughes’ Crow spill out of the rips in the fabric of the world and they must be lived with, submitted to, negotiated with, understood and even loved before they will take their leave.

‘…where you had thought to find an abomination, you shall find a god. And where you had thought to slay another, you shall slay yourself. And where you had thought to journey outward, you shall come to the centre of your own existence. And where you had thought to be alone, you shall come to be with all the world.’

Viola Davis, 2019

It’s a whole process, and good news: it’s a human birthright. We’ve been falling out of the material realm and into gaps for millennia.

A word of caution – the imaginal realm is not a place you can control. Poetic images have their own density and destiny, and once they’re invited into your life, they have a habit of hanging around as long as they want, not as long as you want. Ted Hughes in his letters talked for years about Crow not leaving him alone, about wanting to ‘get out from under his horrible little wing’ (2009: 307). And I don’t advocate that people go charging off and re-traumatise themselves by unpreparedly hanging out with their flashbacks… There is preparation and safety involved. When Inanna went to meet her underworldly sister Erishkigel, she told her maidservant Ninshubur to appeal to the sky gods for her rescue. When Theseus went into the labyrinth to meet the minotaur, he first visited Arachne who gave him a spool of thread to unspool as he travelled, so that he could find his way back. So, what’s your thread? What’s your web? Who is your Ninshubur?

What’s in a gap?

Monsters? Tricksters? Our own mirror image? God? From the perspective of human experience, there are all sorts. So, can we ever say that there is nothing in a gap? Does a gap actually exist?

If you gave me a glass with no liquid in it, I might call it empty. From my perspective, it would look empty. If I held it up to my mouth, I would not receive anything substantive from it. But of course, it would be filled with air. Air rushes in to take the place of anything else and air is never empty. It carries particles of all sorts. In quantum physics, the perfect vacuum remains as of yet impossible to achieve experimentally.

So can we say that anything is ever missing, or that anything truly recedes or withdraws? Is a gap actually more of an accumulation of potential stories? Is absence generative? There is just a nano-second between breaths before new air comes rushing in to fill the lungs. When a tide goes out, it pulls the air with it. When you lose a loved one when they die, their devastating absence creates a void. It is also permeated with your desparate grief; your boundless, placeless love is poured into the gap they leave. Even if the gap feels, and perhaps is, endless, the grief is ever poured in. When the light fades from one side of the world, a velvet darkness creeps over the landscape, offering its own opportunities. When love is retracted, deep yearning reaches out over the absence, or else fury (or both, as well as an explosion of other colours). Something always comes to meet and infuse the absence of what was once there. Even if it is a ghost, another kind of poetic image that haunts.

We can talk more, perhaps, about a gap in knowing. Look! There, a cave.

I don’t know what’s inside it. So is it a gap? Or is it then full of uncertainty or possibility? Good old Schrodinger’s cave. A gap of knowing creates all sorts of opportunities for fear but also for playful, creative energy. Richard Kearney speaks of divine absence as an invitation for ‘risk and adventure’ (2011: 22), as God is always revealed ‘in the wake of the encounter, in the trace of his passing’ (ibid). Jacob wrestles in the dark, only realising après coup that he was wrestling with an angel all along. In Trickster Makes The World, Lewis Hyde writes of trickster figures across mythologies whose role it is to create pockets of doubt in the fabric of custom through riddles, accidents, trip-ups, lucky finds that tear ‘a hole in that cloth so we can slip free.’ (1998: 132-133). God, the ultimate trickster. Perhaps we need those rips and tears to let a little uncertainty in so that we might ‘proliferate new structures, new symbols, new metaphors…’ (Turner in ibid: 130).

Wisdom traditions from across the world tell us that the practice here is to hold open a space of deeply attentive not-knowing for as long as possible. This openness is often exciting, often incredibly discomforting, always vulnerable. Ingold also calls this resistance to closure wisdom: ‘It is alive with transformative potential, but this is not a potential that is ever actualised… Wisdom’s potential, like that of life itself, is both inexhaustible and undestined’ (2022: 60). In a trypophobic world, we cling to knowing – to filler, to content, to anything at all that will stop the unbearable vulnerability of being ever open to possibility. But if Hyde is to be believed, we live in ‘bacterial landscapes [which] are often pure poroi’ (1998: 46). In Bodies of Water (2017), Astrida Neimanis evokes our own bodily porosity as our elemental means of connectivity within a greater hydrocommons of life. We are bathed in, with, and through the waters that connect us in a conmingled intrasubjectivity; a watery womb, a watery world, all pouring in and out through the gaps in the membranes. Through this lens, we can no longer settle comfortably in the concept of having a bounded, protected self. We are viscerally laid open and what’s more, our lives depend on it.

And so what if we could convert the modern desperation to fill these meddlesome holes into an ongoing flirtation with not knowing? This can be much more deeply satisfying and regeneratively invigorating. I would also call it erotic, the tentative reaching out across the void into the world. The soft hand reaching out wants to be touched, by what it knows not. It is an act full of tender and fertile potential, a ‘hope in spite of hopelessness that the estranged God may return’ (Kearney 2011: 68). Given enough time in the luminous dark, it can (eventually) give birth to something ready to break the enchantment and to open its eyes to the world as if for the first time.

In Greek cosmogeny, the first being to exist was Khaos. Khaos, as a quick search on Wikipedia tells me, means:

‘emptiness, vast void, chasm, abyss’,[a] related to the verbs kháskō (χάσκω) and khaínō (χαίνω) ‘gape, be wide open’, from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰeh₂n-,[2] cognate to Old English geanian, ‘to gape’

…and, presumably therefore, gap. A wide open gap, which soon gave rise to other beings – namely, Gaia, Tartarus and Eros, that erotic energy of yearning. Hesiod’s Theogony suggests that Khaos was a realm of nothingness below earth, but also paradoxically filled with a primordial substance called ‘aperion’, a divine unity from which all elements arise and from which all elements must return. Kearney writes of the ‘khora akhoraton’ (2011: 26), the container of the uncontainable. A formlessness giving unto form and back again. Dissipating structures. In a 2024 lecture during my MA, Alice Oswald said that, from the totality of his immersion in imagination, Dante began speaking in fractals of threes and nines. He became, she said, an ecstasy of honeycomb.

She went on to say that the mind itself is ‘a natural phenomenon and obeys the same properties as a fern or a fossil.’ The imagination has its own architecture, its own patterning. Prehistoric people, when they entered caves, drew repeated geometric and concentric patterns throughout alongside the more famous images of animals and other beings. As Gerlier says, in the imaginal realm can be found the ‘deep structures of existence itself’. Where you had thought to be alone, you shall come to be with all the world. And in journeying there we spool our threads to weave artistic, musical and poetic work; we draw through these deep architectures and form them, ensoul them in the material realm. So in flirting with or attending to the gap, are we proliferating new structures, symbols and metaphors (as Turner suggested), or remembering ancestral ones and making them anew? How far back does this pool of memory (oh, Mnemosyne!) take us?

I find echoes, quite literally, in recent investigations of the Big Bang – our Khaos, our quantum leap from not-being to being from the gap of not knowing.

In The Cosmic Oval, Ella Finer quotes Greene (2020: 51):

‘Take a moment to let this sink in. Physicists describe the earliest moments of the universe using Einstein’s equations, updated to include Guth’s hypothetical energy field filling space, subject to the quantum uncertainty we learned from Heisenberg. Mathematical analyses of the inflationary burst then reveal that it should have left an indelible imprint, a fossil of creation in the form of a specific pattern of minute temperature variations across the night sky. Sophisticated space-based thermometers built nearly fourteen billion years later by a species just coming of scientific age here in the milky way have now detected precisely that pattern.’

Pure possibility, deep architectures of life, honeycomb, fossils of creation, indelible imprints, eros, the Christ child. Holiest of holes (pardon the pun). All things are possible.

Perhaps, as any wise purveyor of gaps should, we might now resist the temptation of closure. Perhaps we might instead allow ourselves to be enchanted by the web.

What emerges now?

And so from this mundus imaginalis, from this imaginal realm, I begin again with an invitation — a gap! — for your questions. Either sprung from or webbed out from this essay: what question would you like me to wrangle with next? What’s alive for you?

Send me a question or leave a comment, and I’ll dip into the patterned pool of human experience for a question to hold in convivial hands.

References

Bourgeault, C. (2018). Introducing the Imaginal.

Corbin, H. (1958). Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi. Princeton University Press.

Davis, V. (2019). Speech at Barnard College, Columbia University. Available at: https://barnard.edu/commencement/archives/2019/davis-remarks

Finer, E. (2025). The Cosmic Oval. Spiral House (Silver Press).

Greene, B. (2020). Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Hyde, L. (1998). Trickster Makes This World: How Disruptive Imagination Creates Culture. London: Canongate Books.

Francis, G. (2026). ‘What I see in clinic is never a set of lables’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? The Guardian.

Gerlier, V. (2025). Art, Imagination and Revelation. Schumacher College.

Hesiod. (2018). Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia. Harvard University Press.

Hughes, T. (2007). The Letters of Ted Hughes. London: Faber & Faber.

Ingold, T. (2022). Imagining for Real: Essays on Creation, Attention and Correspondence. London and New York: Routledge.

Kearney, R. (2011). Anatheism: Returning to God After God. Columbia University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and mind. In The primacy of perception, and other essays on phenomenological psychology, the philosophy of art, history and politics. Ed. J. M. Edie. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Pp. 159-90.

Neimanis, A. (2017). Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Robins, E. (2024). Gleanings, so far, from a life devoted to imagination.