Imbolc

Turning Towards the Light

This is the first of a series of posts in the ‘Grounding’ section of this project that I want to use to pause and bring my attention to the wheel of the year. Late last summer I relandscaped my small courtyard garden in Brighton (it’s not quite finished yet!) and chose the planting especially to help mark the turning of the year. In an age of dematerialisation and extreme political distortion, I think it matters more than ever that we take time to keep connected to the ground.

Imbolc marks the moment when, after the death of winter, life starts to stir. The garden is still cold but everywhere you look, small buds are starting to form. There are red nodes swelling on the stems of the bareroot roses delivered last November, while the older shrubs are already starting to sprout. The first flower, the snowdrop, a symbol of Imbolc, has pushed its way out of the earth, its flashes of white and green stark against the bare ground. At this point in the year, there is still something tentative about the new life extending itself into the crisp air. The garden is gathering itself, but we are several moons away from that deep tingling rush when the sap really starts to rise, and everything bursts into unfolding.

For me right now, this feels amazingly apt. In November last year, we sent the final issue of The Radical Notion to the printers, the end of a four-year, twelve-issue cycle. The magazine began in 2020, a time I now remember as the feminist zenith of gender critical activism in the UK, the moment when, as in midsummer, the sun stands directly overhead. We put an image of a cresting wave on the cover, and spoke, perhaps too confidently, of ‘resurgence.’ The last major event before the Covid pandemic had shut us all inside for months on end had been the Women’s Liberation 2020 Conference, organised at UCL by WPUK on February 1st (that is, exactly five years ago today, on Imbolc). Over a thousand women in one huge hall, tens of panels and workshops, everything abuzz with a palpable sense of energy rising. But as Naomi Klein has documented in Doppelganger, the pandemic would mark a strange and certain turning in our political life.

Those many months inside exacerbated our already dissociated, doomscrolling culture, sucking many into what Klein calls ‘the mirror world.’ The unconcealment of our interconnected vulnerability and powerlessness before a new viral threat was too great an assault on cherished dreams of sovereign mastery for many people to comes to terms with. It perhaps felt soothing to slip into a story that proposed the pandemic had been deliberately engineered by people with a plan, even if those people were a dastardly cabal of WEF-agenda globalists who were somehow also Marxists and probably paedophiles to boot. Klein is not wrong about the conspiracy-fuelled reality-bending of the mirror world, nor about its damaging political effects, although predictably, like most high-profile liberal-lefties, she refuses to adequately address the culture of reality-bending by the identitarian left that prefaced, and in many respects, poured rocket fuel on it.

Nonetheless, the facts are that in the years since the pandemic, the anti-woke populist backlash to the excesses of left identitarianism has more-or-less swallowed the feminist and materialist responses, or perhaps more precisely, cannibalised what can be accommodated and regurgitated the rest. Indeed, authoritarian populism (along with its assorted enablers) has by now put considerable work into portraying the puritan witch-hunting and conceptual gibberish that characterised ‘the great awokening’ as pretty much the fault of feminists (duh!) and the ‘feminization’ of Western culture, proposing a ‘Daddy’s Home’ form of dominance as the de facto remedy, a manoeuvre I will discuss in a forthcoming post. What this gesture conceals is the extent to which both left and right identitarians are locked in an idealist, specular embrace, each committed, in their own ways, to a patriarchal domination fantasy of humanity freed from embodiment and material dependence.

During his speech at Trump’s inauguration, Musk’s dubious gestures included not only the sketchy-af-Seig-Heil-alike, but a mime of triumphantly planting an American flag in the surface of Mars, one more in a long line of transcendence fantasies that encompass Silicon Valley’s techbro obsession with the emancipatory potential of death-defying technology and the AI singularity, as well as the metaphysical underpinnings of trans ideology in Rothblatt’s transhumanism. Neither Patriarchy 1.0 nor Patriarchy 2.0 has any intention of learning to live inside its ‘meat-suits’ or within our material limits, choosing tech-accelerationist escapism over grounded materialist responses to the approaching ecological catastrophe. They would like us to believe we have failed as a civilization because we just haven’t dominated shit hard enough yet, having been led to rack and ruin by wokeist ‘pussification’ and an insufficiency of ‘masculine energy’ (to quote the great nerd alpha known as Zuck).

Clearly, my witch’s instinct here is that this is all dangerous, dick-waving bullshit. In the still cool garden, seeing the fragile life just beginning to emerge, I wish, as I have so often, that we could muster some humility and reverence before miracles beyond our control. That we could find a way to be okay with death being the condition of life, as surely as winter precedes spring, and grasp that wishing for some transcendent eternity outside the existing world is nothing but a destructive death-drive. Acceptance is, I will admit, far from easy. The last two years have reminded me how hard and painful it can be to let go of what you dearly love, even long after your mind knows it no longer exists. All we can do is return to the knowledge that we must let things die to make room for what grows next. Like the garden, I haven’t shaken winter off quite yet, but by beginning this new project, I can feel new buds starting to swell, and despite all the darkness in the world, that gives me some sense of movement and hope. One begins, most often, tentatively, but as the days lengthen, and the earth starts to warm, you can soon feel the buzz of life-force in your veins.