4. W.I.H.E. Festival: Re-Member - Simon Mercer - Brighton, England

Re-member

Undecided whether to take Theodor’s 4^th Plumpton/Carol/Ook-burning festival title Re member as recalling and holding useful or useless pieces of recollection and thought or to expound on getting back together with lost friends, groups or even in the John-Wayne Bobbit sense, with one’s own member. I have fudged it and gone with both.

Amidst what filters and feeds to us through the portal of the media we consume it is easy to wallow mired in the awfulness of sumptuously messy, end of days apocalyptic* dread that this ghastly diet nourishes. However, reading a film review and interview on Friday, William Nicholson the playwright and director reminded me to remember, “there is a narcissism about thinking we’re in some especially bad time. This is normal. I don’t despair about politics or the disease or whatever. Things have been really, really shitty forever actually, in different ways. If you have any sense of history, you know people have frequently been saying “This is the worst time that’s ever been. It’s all going to end in tears. The world’s probably about to explode”. It’s always been like that. Therefore, it always will be like that. Therefore, it isn’t like that actually”.

Reassuring huh? I am still guilty off thinking that climate change means shit’s real this time. I need to remember that the nuclear threat felt like that in the 70’s and 80’s.

Some other things handy to remember which can seem contradictory but complement one another well for me in terms of reassurance. Firstly, my uncle is fond of remembering his father taking great pains to explain to his children that in the scheme of things they are utterly insignificant and didn’t mean that (snaps fingers). Then from another perspective, this one being Alan Watts; when attaining a kind of zen enlightenment “…you can conceive yourself...not as a stranger in the world on probation, not as something that arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental. What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself”. We can have it either or both ways- we are everything and nothing at the same time, depending on what is useful at the time.

Getting back together like this today is a delightful re-membering of Theo’s ‘Particular People’. Brighton yesterday was heaving busy in a lovely way that felt like a return from Covid weirdness (and fantastic peace). I like the sense that by our living and reproducing we are ever re-membering the human population. I love what astonishingly splendid and peculiar animals we are and have an avid interest in what we are going to do next.

*  About an hour after I read this- a very young person overheard people talking about the apocalypse and asked “what about alpaca lips is so bad?”