Category: DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z

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Deaths and births

!Epic Tomorrows

The piece below was originally published on the blogsite, thingsfromsomewhere; republished with permission.

I get very excited when I become someone else. Those are the moments when I feel most alive. When I do something I never expected myself to do, when I find myself in a state I could never have imagined myself in before.

No, I am not talking about our age’s experience sickness. I do not mean the hunting (or should I have said gathering?) of new activities, new places, and new people that are paid for. I am talking about dying and being born. A part of the old me dies, and a new me is born. Life is countless deaths and births. We cannot be born without dying, and we cannot live without dying and being born again.

These are not such great moments of transformation. Everything happens in an instant, with a small spark, in the midst of everyday life. In a word that slips out of your mouth, at a corner you turn while walking, as you sip your coffee, or even while gazing into the distance. A small fire ignites inside you, and you become enlightened. You realize that the uneasiness within you was the agony of that slow death and the birth that was on its way.

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This is the 100th post on Centre of the Web!

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Featured blogs, sites & lit works, Turkey

Worlds are colliding

!Epic Tomorrows

The piece below was originally published on the blogsite, thingsfromsomewhere; republished with permission.

This morning, while having breakfast on the balcony, I heard the sound of someone reciting the Qur’an. I looked and saw that the garbage collector rummaging through the dumpster across the street was playing it on his phone. He was collecting garbage accompanied by a sacred voice. He was illuminated by the holy light of the heavens in the midst of the filth of the world.

He had a beard resembling that of ISIS militants. While I sipped my tea among the flowers on my balcony, he wiped his face with a pair of sweatpants that had come out of the trash and hurried quickly to the next garbage container.

At that moment, an older woman came out onto the balcony opposite and looked toward where the sound was coming from. After watching the man who made misery bearable through a passionate (but reactionary) faith for a while, she called out to me: “Look what we’ve come to because of these ignorant people. Just look at his beard. I swear, I shudder when I see him.”

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Ecology of the absurd, England, Exclusive to COTW

Building Silent Haven: Chapter Four

!Epic Tomorrows

Back once again in London, I was still smoking cigarettes and marijuana and drinking alcohol. I had been suffering from migraines ever since the accident and knew these didn’t help but I was addicted. I desperately wanted a clean and natural life. In Italy I had read a book called ‘The easy way to stop smoking’ by Allan Carr. I had stopped smoking for about four months and then started again. So I decided to take one of his day workshops. A group of us were shown to ‘Parker Knoll’ recliner chairs with ashtrays next to them and we were allowed to smoke as much as we liked!. In the corner was a huge pile of empty cigarette packets. During the day, the group leader talked to us about what was hooking us into smoking and at the end of the day he gave me a business card and said “if you have any problems call me”. I left, passed a newsagent and thought “I’m not buying cigarettes tonight; I’ve just spent £140 on a workshop to stop!” So I didn’t smoke that night. When I woke in the morning I burst into tears. I remembered the group leader suggesting calling if there was a problem, so I did. He asked “What are you feeling?” For 28 years I had woken up and lit up a cigarette, wanting not to, and this morning I had woken up and not even had the desire to light a cigarette. “Relief!” I replied. I’ve never had a cigarette since and the marijuana and alcohol also dropped away and I’ve never had them since.

In 2003 I got an allotment at Ranelagh Road, which was across the road from my flat. I was 44. The allotment was a tiny haven away from the flat and my worries. I met Richard there; he had the allotment next to me and lived in a flat on the other side of Wood Green. Richard was extremely disassociated which was very painful for me. Suddenly he would disconnect from me. He mirrored my lack of self love. For example, I would make dinner for us and in the middle of a conversation; he would get up and walk out. I would try phoning him but he had switched off his phone. Sometimes he would not contact me for two weeks and then call as if nothing had happened. I found it excruciating. However, I was grateful to Richard as he gave me two major gifts, the first was my introduction to the art of looking at and mastering my thoughts and emotional responses and the second was a lightbulb moment which introduced me to the amazing freedom and reality of living and working on the land.

Richard had a big open allotment space and made very uniform raised beds. He planted Californian poppies, nasturtiums, and calendula as companions to his vegetables. Both nasturtium flowers and leaves are edible as are calendula petals. They make salads look beautiful. The vegetables were growing well as he fed the tomatoes with nettle tea and the broad beans and potatoes with ash. I was jealous, it looked beautiful. He was an artist. I felt competitive and threatened by his work. I would look at my allotment and criticise it. This was my usual painful reaction to other people’s creativity I admired.

Richard’s allotment

My allotment was the complete opposite; it was right at the back and under some huge trees, a shady woodland area.

My allotment

At first, I completely ignored its character and made a round bed in the middle and planted carrots. I had always wanted to grow carrots, pick them out of the ground and eat them straight away, so all the goodness was still in the vegetable. As soon as a vegetable or fruit is harvested it starts to lose its properties. It amazes me how people survive on food which has travelled many air miles.

The carrots didn’t grow. I began experimenting with vegetables which liked a bit of shade. I had limited success. Kale grew reasonably well but growing salad was hopeless. The shade made the area more damp which attracted more slugs, salad being a delicacy for them. I tried spinach, swede and leeks, also with limited success; my heart wasn’t really in it. By this time Richard was supplying me with veg he grew anyway. So, I gave up.

Richard never seemed to eat the vegetables he grew. He made a pond in the communal area, and I built a fire pit with some bricks, and he would go off to Wood Green, just around the corner and buy meat for himself and cook it on the fire. I’m a vegetarian. I don’t like killing animals, so I won’t eat them.

Produce and the pond

I became a frequent visitor to the local garden centre and usually couldn’t resist buying a plant or two. I wasn’t discerning, if it had pretty flowers, I would buy it. They rarely lasted. So, as with the veg, I started to look for flowers for shade. I became obsessed by which plants I could grow in my plot. I realised I was much happier with flowers than vegetables. I planted geranium, bluebells and wild garlic. 

I would go from the flat when it was too noisy to the allotment, which also had an assortment of human noises, then to the studio, then when that was too much, back to the flat! That is how I managed my noise sensitivities. I was also constantly asking people to turn down their music, which sometimes worked and sometimes got negative comments. I felt permanently unsafe.

In the summer of 2003 Richard introduced me to Wwoofing (Willing Workers on Organic Farms). Farms and smallholdings write about themselves in a booklet and Wwoofers choose places to stay. The host gives us a bed, food and teaches us about the land and growing. In return, we work (generally 7-8 hours a day) Our first host was Alison. Alison and her husband Tristy built their own amazing house and planted a 5-acre woodland in Cornwall. I was so impressed. They had lived in a caravan and built from the ground upwards. She advertised free breaks for Wwoofers and we stayed there for a week without having to do any work! They were philanthropic, kind and eternally generous people. Richard and I stayed in their tiny hut in the woodland which had a cooker, a bed and a chair in it. I loved it. I was struck by a note Alison wrote in the hut which said, “Please do not cut down any leaf or branch from this woodland”. I loved this sensitivity and honour towards the trees. Alison and I connected, and she and Tristy became my friends. The kindness of her offering free breaks was only the first in a long line of future kindnesses which, quite frankly, literally saved my life.

Subsequently, whenever I broke down from the noise or fear of living an unnatural life in London, I would ring Alison. I would often say I wanted to visit and then change my mind as I couldn’t face the journey. She was always there for me, every time I phoned; she would give me time and counsel me. Quite often she would say “come down, just let me know when you are on the train” and I would go to their safe haven.

Firstly, I would stay in the hut in the woods and later, I slept in their daughter Lucy’s beautiful old bedroom in the house, where there were flowers from the garden by my bed. Alison would feed me, counsel me and look after me until I stopped crying and the headaches went away, and I would begin to feel human again. I am blessed to know such beautiful and generous people.

DIARIES & MEMOIRS: COUNTRIES A-Z, Exclusive to COTW, Reflections, Ukraine

Dancing During War (Ukraine travel memoir) #3: Thursday August 14, 2024

!Epic Tomorrows
by Keith Hennessey, 2024

Using my phone I read a few things about the war today including the surprise Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Russia. I also tried to learn more about the Air Alarm system so I could emotionally prepare for my first air raid siren. I joined an English-language Telegram channel, which was recommended for tracking potential bombing.

Then I researched queer Ukraine and learned about an amazing 2018 photo project and exhibition featuring queer soldiers within Ukraine’s “Anti Terrorist Forces.” The photo project affirms the presence of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians in general and heroic soldiers in particular. Despite the subjects’ identities being hidden, the photos bring queer visibility and pride into public space.

I went to two large old Catholic churches, both with extremely elaborate interiors. Murals, arches, wood and marble, tiled floor designs, statuary and icons, alcoves and pillars… The first one had a sign outside requesting prayers for Ukraine.

A little later, after visiting a couple second hand stores, I passed a church from which I could hear singing. I entered to a Catholic mass honoring “defenders,” which is how Ukrainians refer to their soldiers. Alongside the interior of the church were photos of hundreds and hundreds of deceased defenders. I had read that both sides were under-reporting their war dead to not weaken national esteem. But everyone knows someone who has died and even more who are physically injured, traumatized, and displaced from their homes.

In a small plaza outside the church I witnessed a combination of info display and memorial for the over 900 Azov brigade soldiers and crew still held in Russian prisons since 2022. The Azov brigade began as an independent “army” made up of predominantly Russian-speaking Ukrainians who were then assimilated into the Ukrainian National Guard and were the last line of defense in the terrible siege on Mariupol. They are highly regarded in Ukraine for their bravery and sacrifices, and there is a movement to keep pressure on negotiating prisoner release.

There’s a lot of follow up study if you’re interested in Azov, torture as a war tactic, and the siege on Mariupol including:

  • The extreme torture perpetrated against Ukrainian soldiers.
  • The critiques of Azov members with neo-Nazi affiliation, and the normalization of radical right Ukrainian nationalism.
  • The bombing massacre of a theater/cultural heritage site used as a citizen refuge in Mariupol.

Walking back to my temp rental I saw a young guy with his bandaged foot casually yet intimately supported by his buddy’s leg as they sat on a street bench. When I looked closer I saw that he was missing half his foot. I’d heard that I would occasionally see wounded soldiers including amputees with prosthetics.

My first appearance at the weekend Contact Improvisation festival organized around my visit was an informal lecture on the politics of dancing, and the political potentials of CI. My talk-discussion was attended by 35-40 people, including two people I’d met before, plus a small livestream audience in Kyiv. The talk happened in a very new studio run by a physical theater company in a renovated-gentrified factory complex of multiple buildings. Next door was a hip gym called Smartass whose logo looked like a tech startup’s.

My talk offered three ideas or frames for thinking about dancing as political engagement and political healing. Ideas and inspirations I’ve been working with for at least 10 years:

  1. Gustav Landauer’s analysis of the state as a system of relationships, a mode of behavior, that cannot be destroyed as an object but rather needs to be replaced by contracting new relationships, by treating each other differently. I proposed the studio and CI jam as a research lab to develop, rediscover, and practice these new relationships.
  2. I introduced a few women from US Black feminism whose work considers and responds to oppressive power and state violence. Quoting Audre Lorde and adrienne marie brown I encouraged them to consider self and community care during a multi-year invasion by one of the world’s biggest military empires as “self preservation” and “political warfare,” and supported care-tuned dancing with brown’s “we learn to love by loving.” Using the touch and change prayer from Octavia Butler’s dystopian novel Parable of the Sower, I offered some fresh ways to understand touch and consent as tools of social
    transformation.
  3. My final idea was to propose solidarity as an ethical goal of these dancing, caring, loving, touching experiments. Identifying the radical right, neofascist, and anti-democratic movements around the world as an intensification of neoliberalism’s crisis of solidarity, I proposed CI as empathy training that might expand our capacity for solidarity, to care for those we don’t know, those who are different from us.

After each idea the circle was opened up to comments, questions, discussion. Several of the questions circled around the gap between the studio and the world, the counter cultural gap, the power gap, the hopelessly small scale of the CI network. At one point, even though I had decided to not critique nationalism given how it was functioning as a primary tactic of Ukranian survival and defense, we got into it. I suggested that nationalism is resonant with the tactically effective yet dead-end strategy of identity politics. This was the edgiest thing I said. One person pushed back and said it was crucial to their survival right now. One person thanked me for bringing it up. One person said let’s move on. I apologized. One person responded, we forgive you, because you dared to come here.

After the talk there was an open CI jam. Approximately 30 people stayed to dance. As usual I watched more than danced but I had a couple of lovely dance connections. The floor was hard but new.

Will there be dancing during wartime? Yes. There will be dancing.

At the jam’s closing circle one person praised that there were dancers from at least 7 different cities including a few from Kharkiv and other places experiencing active bombing. They were so grateful to have Ukrainians from around the country dancing together at a jam. One of the long term CI teacher/organizers in Ukraine reported that she could feel love in her dancing tonight, maybe for the first time in over 2 years. A young enthusiastic guy finished his comments by saying, “Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine.)” Someone asked for a moment of silence for the “defenders, without whom we wouldn’t be dancing.” The “moment” lasted six full minutes. It was intense and reverent.

After the jam a young dancer came up to thank me for talking about nationalism. She said she was from the Eastern part of Ukraine, in the contested Donbas region. Speaking Russian as a first language she felt excluded from Ukrainian nationalism despite her identification with Ukraine and critique of Putin’s Russia. I asked her where she was living now and she replied, Krakow (in Poland), describing it as “heaven on earth.”

A couple people including my main host took me out for pizza where the conversation continued for another hour. A young man explained why he hadn’t registered for the draft and how he was prepared to defend his refusal to military recruiters who sometimes pick up young men in the street. He felt that his family had served enough already. His older brother was at the front for five years and is now disabled. His father, a former journalist previously jailed for criticizing the army, was now serving in the Ukrainian air defense. He said, “It happened in late 90s. My father wrote about government crimes in a newspaper. One evening, he was illegally abducted by the police. Without a trial and unlawfully, they held him in the forest for half a year. We didn’t know if he would return alive.”

It was getting close to the midnight curfew and we were all tired so we hugged goodnight.

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The hottest day

!Epic Tomorrows

By Tadzio Mueller; originally published in German on the blog Peaceful Sabotage. Republished with permission.

Dear people,

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:27 a.m. I’m sitting in the kitchen, a small pot of green tea beside me, my laptop on my lap, writing these lines. This isn’t my usual routine; when I work on a Saturday, I usually don’t start until 10 a.m., after I’ve had a bit of a lie-in and finished reading the morning paper in bed. But today is supposed to be one of the hottest days in Germany since records began. Yesterday, a weather station in Saarbrücken recorded 41.3 degrees Celsius, the highest temperature ever measured. Today, this record will likely be broken; 39 degrees Celsius is forecast for this afternoon in Berlin, the highest temperature I’ve ever experienced in Germany. Neither my office nor our apartment has air conditioning, and I’m under pressure to finish this book, so here I am at 6:46 a.m., already hard at work, because it will simply be too hot from midday onward. It will be too hot to work, too hot to think, too hot to tell stories. It will simply be too hot for everything. End of June. In northern Germany, not in Ecuador.

And this heat wave is just the beginning. The world’s oceans are warmer than ever before, or at least not within the context of a stable, human-friendly climate. In the Pacific, the “Godzilla El Niño” is gaining momentum, and in the North Atlantic, the “cold blob” is causing alarm, already influencing the monsoon in India and representing the first clearly visible sign of the coming collapse of the AMOC, which will one day trigger a climate catastrophe of its own in Europe. When? We don’t know, but the date is getting closer and closer since I started reading the studies on the subject.

It’s the last weekend in June, normally a weekend packed with festivals, Pride marches, village celebrations, and whatnot – and news is pouring in from all over Germany that most of them are being canceled this weekend. My good friend and fellow collapse enthusiast Scully wanted to go to the Christopher Street Day (CSD) in Ilmenau: canceled because of the heat; I had considered going to the CSD in Bernau with Wolf, like Scully, to make sure there were more of us there than potentially disruptive fascists: canceled because of the heat.

Yesterday, the hottest day in Germany since records began, roads collapsed, people died, and Berlin felt like a ghost town; nobody wanted to be outside, nobody wanted to be in the sun. About an hour north of Berlin, the left-wing alternative music festival Fusion is taking place this weekend, as it always does at the end of June. Around 50,000 hedonistic holiday communists are partying there exuberantly for several days, a significant number of them drunk, stoned, or high on amphetamines. I myself spent many a sleepless night there in my younger days. For several years now, I haven’t gone to Fusion myself, but every year when I’m not there, I experience FOMO, or ” fear of missing out .” Someone else might be having more fun than me.

This year I’m not worried about missing out. This year I’m worried that people will collapse there in droves, possibly even die of heatstroke. I’ve read *The Heat Will Kill You First * and * Ministry for the Future *; I know how, in extreme heat, our bodies dissolve in on themselves, how our insides turn to scrambled eggs. I’m afraid of the heat, and this year it will reach up to 40 degrees Celsius at Fusion. I’m afraid that people will simply die a miserable death while partying because, as a society, we’re just not prepared to live in *Hothouse Earth *, as an influential paper described it a few years ago.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:28 a.m. Today will likely be the hottest day in Germany since records began. And tomorrow the record might be broken again. As the well-known meteorologist Özden Terli reminded us in yesterday evening’s news: we are emitting more greenhouse gases, not less, and as I predicted a few years ago, the more the climate catastrophe escalates, the less we care about climate protection.

It’s Saturday, June 27th, 6:29 a.m., and the last report on Deutschlandfunk radio before the 6:30 news is about the lack of civil defense in Germany. I didn’t hear everything; it’s still early, and I’m just making my green tea. A middle-aged man is asked when he last experienced a siren alarm: he replies that it must have been quite a while ago, perhaps 40 years? I promise myself I’ll listen to this report again later; maybe I’ll find a few more good quotes in it.

Quotes that are supposed to prove something? That I woke up on June 27th in a different world than the one I described in the last chapter. A world where “disaster preparedness” is something to be ridiculed, something to be dismissed as “fascist prepperism” with all the self-assurance of those who have never had to react to a disaster themselves. A world where it’s becoming increasingly clear: disasters are coming, in fact, they’re already here. You can prepare, or you can’t—but if you don’t, then things are going to go wrong.

June 27, 2026, is one of the few days I’ve experienced that truly feels like this: like a world on the brink of collapse. A world where everything is falling apart. A world that, in a crucial sense, is coming to an end. And this is casting its shadows. Shadows that many are still ignoring. But the exciting and dangerous thing about heat is: it’s hard to ignore, and expensive. So we now have a brief window in which we’ll talk about heat waves, climate collapse, and civil protection. The window will close again quickly because of our society’s tendency to deny the truth. But perhaps it will stay open long enough for me to finish my book about collapse and preparing for collapse. Cognitively, that would be stupid, because heat makes you stupid. But symbolically, it would fit. And stories are all about symbols. So here we go : the world is ending, this book will soon be too, let’s wrap it up, people.

With diligent but heat-worried greetings,

Yours truly, Tadzio