reckoning

Sixteen years ago, I became involved with an arts community (the Dark Mountain Project, or DMP) which was freely and confidently naming our unravelling social order as a civilisation in collapse. At the time collapse-talk was still fringe and people engaging in it were commonly met with discomfort or derision, mostly regarded as doomers or end-timers. Talking collapse was considered extreme, unnecessarily bleak: a party-pooper conversation-stopper.

My involvement with the DMP community coincided with several other demanding circumstances in my life, and with the existential impact of a decades-long effort to unpick my certainties and assumptions. The DMP (with its own shortcomings and hypocrisies) became tangled up with my emotional and mental landscape, with family and societal narratives, and ended up being the springboard for a personal breakdown. I stepped into a transformative madness, tasting truth at the source, tearing down all the scaffolding that was keeping me propped up in the role of good girl. I’m eternally grateful. I learned so much.

I bring up this piece of my past for a specific reason. The issues around collapse no longer reside at the fringes: heatwaves, flooding, institutional decay, financial precarity, social instability… this appears in our news headlines every day now, pushing at the cracks of the mainstream narratives of growth and progress. People are recognising collapse as not just a possibility, but a real dilemma in which we are already engaged. The business-as-usual brigade still demand that we “look away, nothing-to-see-here!” but many people know in their bones that the future we were promised in classrooms and on televisions is built on sand.

I was recently introduced to the work of Sarah Wilson – and specifically to her latest book, i eat the stars. It’s a beautiful book, with chapter headings such as “metacrisis,” “denial,” “pain,” and “reckoning.” Sarah – according to the brief blurb on the backcover – is a multi-bestselling author, journalist and social philosopher.

I have to confess: my gut reaction upon receiving this book were twinges of envy and frustration. Why is Sarah Wilson heralded as a social philosopher when I was, with the same concerns, sectioned as a madwoman? Well… I do understand envy: it is a signal to me, saying that there is something inside me wanting expression, that I too have this capacity to write and create and speak with authority and value. And I understand the frustration: Sarah is published, acknowledged, crowned a bestseller, where I was disregarded, and drugged, and spat out the other side of a mental health assembly line toward ‘recovery’ and ‘employment.’

But how ridiculous it is to feel aggrieved! We all of us follow the threads of our own lives, wherever they may lead. I am so delighted to find Sarah’s work, to discover its resonance. Meanwhile my experience has afforded me a degree of insight that many people don’t have, and has shaped my understanding of the relationship between collapse and madness.

Madness is the frontier, it is what happens when one embraces collapse so closely to oneself that the self unravels into a million points of darkness and light – eat the stars indeed. The madfolk understand collapse intimately. Madness has thrown us against the wall of so-called reality, reshaped our lives, taught us survival, taught us humility, brought us face to face with our own personal metacrisis, denial, pain and reckoning.

Civilisation in collapse could learn something from the madfolk. And this is what drives me in my mission to grow the Centre for Mad Culture UK. We are weaving together a community of mutual aid, a space to share our insights and to take our place as baffling cosmic meaning-makers. This crazy world needs us – sorely - and perhaps that’s why it fears us and tries so hard to sweep us aside.

So with this as context, I invite submissions to the Book of Mad Insight, which we aim to publish in September 2027. What has this community got to offer to a world in collapse? What home truths can we reveal? What clues to survival? What mad wisdom do we possess, to be shared out like a banquet or a treasure?

For more information, please see our call for submissions. Enquiries and submissions can be directed to hello@centreformadculture.uk

photo by Ilker Ozmen on Unsplash