Improvement Notice arises from an intuition during the production and performance of Pibroch that we, collectively, need to re-imagine our pasts in order to imagine the future.
Leave aside the truism that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. If we cannot imagine a future outwith the current extractivist and patriarchal paradigm, there may not be many of us around to repeat anything. Science, and the flow of contemporary events, suggests that Eurocentric ‘modernity’ was (and is) a catastrophic wrong-turn for the welfare and sustainability of living things on this planet. ‘Modernity’, it has been suggested in feedback from the Pibroch performances, has failed and is failing us and future generations of life on earth.
Yet we seem to remain unable to imagine re-tracing our steps: like the Kitten Up a Tree in the Pibroch collection, we can’t easily imagine the route ‘back’ to a safer, saner world.
And anyway, some ask, was there a safer, saner world?
And besides, some assert, greed, selfishness and extractivism as simply ‘human nature’ : we are a greedy species.
My sense is that many saner practices and infrastructures, which are now deemed too difficult to replicate, were embedded in the cultural fabric of my own childhood: yes in a rich imperial centre benefitting from centuries of colonial extraction, but the issue, I suggest, is imaginability not, immediately, climate justice…though we must come to that.
Meanwhile, the NOWism of contemporary (Northern) culture obscures the tactile sense of historical realities. We have unparalleled access to data, constructs about history, analytical tools, scholarship but we do not have a culture which enables us to slow down sufficiently to convert this data into knowledge and wisdom. At best, we browse the surface of the clouds for information: practical ideas, resilient DNA…or just the comforting fantasy that it wasn’t always ‘this bad’ or that we ‘never had it so good.’
These inklings and provocations have led me to reflect, at the local-personal level of my material and cultural being, on the question of who am I/ who was I? And, through thought-experiments try to imagine who ‘we’ were and who ‘we’ might be.
In part this is informed by the opacity of my own past…my children querying ‘Why don’t we know this shit?’. In part through a dawning realisation that ‘I’ don’t know ‘this shit’ either. Inhabiting, for better or worse, these moments between 24th January 1958 and the present, my attention to the world was partial and conditioned by a vast frame of cultural assumptions and presumptions.
Improvement Notice was selected as a working title as a nod to the practice of the UK Health & Safety directorate in Offshore Oil & Gas of issuing Improvement Notices to oil field operators who are found to be working outwith safe operational parameters: they do not, in general, shut the operation down until it becomes safe (how can an oil & gas installation be ‘safe’?) but issue a request that the operation is ‘improved’ within a specified timescale.
It is not clear how much ‘time’ life as we know it has left to improve and, obviously, we are not in a position to simply shutdown – though geophysical processes might do that for us. But there is a desperate need for ‘Improvement’ in my/our behaviours and cultural practices if the ‘operation’ of planet Earth is to be safe and sustainable for those onboard.
The practice of this work will be manifest in 3 bodies of work, published on this website.
- Archeobiography – a selective re-imagining of moments and episodes from the lives of my documented ancestors from the beginning of the early modern period about 500 years ago. In this I am using place, time and imagination to situate the challenges and experiences which, in an epigenetic sense, inform my received sense of self. In this process I have uncovered strands that have been omitted from the dominant narrative of ‘who we were’ so there has been an effort to correct the image distorted by patriarchal, colonialist and extractivist constructs : but also the myths of denial we use to distance ourselves from responsibility, my insistence that my ‘stock’ is/was working class Irish and Gael doesn’t always stand up to close scrutiny.
- Autobiography – an earnest attempt to excavate and relay my life experience in context.
- Futurography – a sequence of posts reflecting on the discoveries made in creating the other two strands and conclusions we might draw in imagining a different future. Sort of ‘letters home’ from the journey.
Even a cursory review of 500 years exposes the shifts which have been labelled progress. Cholera, small pox and bubonic plague, famine and infant mortality, filth and untreatable pain and injury are all less present in our lives (at least in the North and for the present) than they were 150 years ago. These features of 21st century modernity need not to be dismissed – or sacrificed. But perhaps their retention demand other shifts in personal behaviour and cultural practice that balance their positive effects. The freedoms so many of us enjoy are and have been funded by fossil capital which we know to be toxic. And are they really freedoms, given the exploitative frameworks within which they are articulated?
I suspect this introduction will require to be updated frequently over the months to come as this project evolves. In the meantime, I hope those of you who take the time to explore the work find insight and some enjoyment in these pages.