“Why don’t we know this shit?”
One of my children – my oldest son – asked the question after I had shared some adult detail of my past.
And the reasons are complex: the shortness of time, shame, the fact that some details come into focus as of more significant as each of us age. I have always been secretive about my past in attempts to shield my children – and my self – from its influence.
But then there is also the stuff I just didn’t know…or had not taken the time to inquire about.
My son’s question impacted and inspired both personally and politically.
If we can only truly learn from experience, why is that experience not shared?
If life – as an experiment or a case study – is only a sequence of episodes and sensations, why not leave ‘a life’ – subjective but critical?
The question was the spark that lit the fuse of Improvement Notice. The project is on-going and sits in context with my other projects such as Pibroch and Twilt.
It became clear to me that there are multiple strands informing identity – organic, physiological, historical, cultural. My life (and the lessons it might pass on) is not only shaped by the chance encounters and episodes of my being in particular places at particular times. It is also sculpted by models of identity inherited from my ancestry, stories retold and re-enacted whilst being censored, embroidered, exaggerated, reframed.
Improvement Notice is therefore a part-work – a body of work released in episodes and instalments.
It is divided into two main bodies of work:
- Autobiography – a series of memoirs recounting my life-experiences from a 3rd-person, somewhat novelistic perspective.
- Archeobiography – an interrogation of my past – and therefore that of my descendents’ – as reflected in the (imagined) life experiences of my ancestors.
The Archeobiography represents an attempt to recount and represent moments and episodes from the lives of my ancestors. I do this primarily through a selective re-imagining of historical moments derived from genealogical, historical and sociological research.
I use place, time and imagination to situate the challenges and experiences which I believe inform my received sense of self in an epigenetic sense. I am trying to make episodes more concrete – episodes that the process of organic and cultural transmission have erased.
In this process, I have uncovered strands that have been omitted from the dominant, family narrative of ‘who we were’. I have tried, where I can, to correct the image distorted by patriarchal, colonialist and extractivist constructs and the myths of denial we use to distance ourselves from responsibility.
Constructing this Archeobiography has involved extensive research using
- Data from genealogical databases
- Information from primary, secondary and tertiary historical documents
- Digital mapping technology
- Narrativization and imagination
All of which is, of course, reflexive with feedback loops informing and reshaping the narrative. Like archaeology, it works with fragments which have persistence – often buried and generally experience out of context. It provokes questions about the degree and extent of inter-generational agency, causation and responsibility which link with themes central to Pibroch and Cruineachdh.
It is a truism that we live in the moment. Despite the baggage of the past – insofar as we are aware of it – and our hopes for the future, there is only now. Each of us, as physical beings, is also materially situated in place – on the ground beneath our feet. Time and place situate individual experience whilst each complete self is a lens through which experience is focussed and encoded.
The trace of each self – its scent – is in turn shaped by genetics, ethnicity and caste. Its persistence is conditioned by literacy, property and genealogy.
Selected from one perspective in a specific period in time, this project creates a matrix of episodes to explore, interrogate and, I hope, enjoy. Some of these narratives are generic – typically dealing wit the period before 500 years BP – whilst others attempt to represent specific episodes from the lives on known individuals named in genealogical records.
Each current self is a descendent of ancestors who survived long enough to reproduce and nurture viable offspring. All of these lives and episodes are assumed to have significance in the causal chains of both personal and social history.
An audience member in Moffat during the 2023 Pibroch Tour made the statement that “We must find a way back to a better beginning.” Imagining the experience of different times and places in ‘our’ past, moments when ‘we’ were real, when life was feasible will, I hope, offer insight into how we can and should behave in the moments yet to come.
My former insistence that my ‘stock’ is/was working class Irish and Gael doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny.
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 demands other shifts in personal behaviour and cultural practice that currently imbalance their positive effects. The freedoms so many of us enjoy are and have been funded by fossil capital which we now know to be toxic. And are they really freedoms, given the exploitative frameworks within which they are articulated?
By its nature, this introduction will be a work-in-progress, requiring update 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.least underlined by the long-distance dating thing.
Ethnicities and Castes
[1] We share around 98.9% with chimpanzees and bonobos and 98.6 percent with gorillas. Genetics | The Smithsonian Institution’s Human Origins Program (si.edu). And then there are the bananas.
[2] Yeah: that’s a chew but needed said.
[3] There’s the first ouch!,
[4] As well as trying to get Michel implicated in the project, I’ve found myself increasing drawn to Kurt Vonnegut’s imagining of Trafalmadore in Slaughter House 5. The need to (be able to) see in 4 dimensions (or more) and how vital that is for this world’s (not planet’s) current predicament.
[5] Verging on top 1%
[6] Spell-check corrected ‘foam’ as ‘fame’: which is delicious. The phrase is from (a translated) Dhammapadda.
[7] My partner Aileen and I have spent decades conversationally worrying the dichotomy of Nature/Nurture and the dizzying abyss of social constructs.
[8] Jenny Lindsay
[9] Great names for pubs
[10] All labelling contingent.
[11] Except (half the time) that fussy Y-chromosome.
[12] 2^13333 = 4.294693628 E+4013