So, it comes down to this. The answer to these crazy times, is to evacuate & de-spend the enclosures and to inhabit and re-spend the skill, ingenuity, sensuality (intelligence gathering) and moral probity of the common.
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Enclosure desensitises intelligence of our terrains and replaces it with the teachings of enclosed status. There, we will never find the truth. What’s more that status has no skills, it is inextricable from discretion, wage, rent, institutional loyalties, schools of thought, and peer/career review. It is set apart from what people do and resides in a sphere of what people say, pay and have become in regards to hierarchy. It has no sense of the climate changing, though it bends to the consensus that climate is changing. The sense (urgency of action) is secondary to the “professed” idea.
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Meanwhile, cultures are what people do to make them. A culture is not a state of things. It is a living process – an organism. If you like, it is a gathering of verbs – not nouns. Sensual intelligence of a changing world is harvested by the “actuality of being”. Enclosure – that is property – intellectual, land, money and status – resides in a place we may truly call nothingness. (sorry Heidegger).
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Currently we ask nothingness to solve the problems of being. That is crazy.
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In a wonderful poem about Walter Scott (Green Breeks), Douglas Dunn explores how “professional” people (law, medicine, bank and so on) reside (in their residencies), whereas working people inhabit their slums and cottages. We don’t do much in a residence. We do a lot, when we inhabit. Do we want to give further credence to those who reside? Let’s inhabit. We inhabit the common, we reside in an enclosure.
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By inhabiting, we touch what we inhabit – our gardens, crops, materials, foraging grounds, the dew on the grass… They react to us and we to them. Actions and reactions demand both personal morality and communal morality. They also evoke a story, so that we come to inhabit both a mythic sense of how life is and could/should be, and also a wonder at the sensual truth revealed as we tread.
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Here is Tony Harrison, from A Cumquat for John Keats. It is the cumquat’s fruit expresses best, how days have darkness round them like a rind – life a skin of death, which keeps its zest.
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Come on, the new middle-class is killing us. There’s work to do, which they cannot. Of course, some may say, Bugger my career, I’m human. – and join us.
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