Well, they dominate anyway in ecological terms… But there’s been a meagre addition to this wider accolade within the insignificant sphere of human culture, as the Pestival—a festival dedicated to insects in art, and the art of being an insect—won the Observer 2010 Ethical Aware for Conservation. Apparently it’s the first time a left-field festival has won this award.

I’m honoured to have helped Pestival by getting their website together, which is well worth checking out as they’ve recently taken on some guest bloggers, including resonant figures such as musician and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg, who are over there talking about such things as recordings of oscillations from within insect bodies, and the co-evolution of insects and flowers…

It was a long, winding path of coincidences that led me to Naboland. As it should be.

In the spring I had some time to kill in the West End, so I headed to Charing Cross Road to browse the book shops. I hoped to find something interesting for my research into the Pole Star. I remembered at one point that some good stuff had come up when I looked at material surrounding the terrestrial as well as the celestial north pole. So, in the shop where I found myself, I headed to a section I usually pass by: Travel Writing.

There, laid horizontally on top of the books on the very top shelf, only reachable by ladder—appropriately enough—was a book called The Idea of North by Peter Davidson. I knew the phrase from Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights—though, as Davidson is at pains to point out, it originates with Canadian pianist Glenn Gould‘s experimental radio collage from the late ’60s. In any case, Davidson’s book turned out to be a wonderful, evocative study of the allure of northern climes in literature, legend and art.

Cut to the weekend just gone, and I’m in Dundee visiting my friend Caroline. On Saturday, we’re driving through Fife with a rough remit to visit a souterrain and explore, and Caroline notices road signs advertising an arts festival that’s just kicked off in the coastal fishing village of Pittenweem. I’d never heard of it, but Caroline’s enthused, pointing out as we look for parking the large signs bearing numbers outside selected houses.

Pittenweem, it turns out, is a veritable hive of artists, and the festival is basically a chance to wander around the village, in and out of their houses, where living rooms, conservatories, sheds and bedrooms have been temporarily converted into little gallery spaces.

I was only lightly charmed at first—naturally, much of the art is of the rather twee landscapes-for-tourists variety. Coffee and cake segued into a visit to the village’s old hermit’s cave, and then we started hitting some interesting art. Often the impact of the art was secondary to the unique experience of walking through a kitchen, where the artist is messing with some materials and listening to the radio. You exchange some greetings, and wander into their normally private spaces to view their work.

Going in someone’s front door and our their back door, into a series of interconnected back gardens, some bedecked with sculpture, some just ordinary private gardens… It’s a totally unique experience of art that becomes hypnotically greater than the sum of its parts. Especially when you get to the houses on the steep hills, where you end up feeling like you’re wandering through the creatively labyrinthine communal nesting structures of a crossbreed between genteel artists and some bizarre cliff-dwelling creature.

We’d seen a bare fraction of the houses that had been opened up for the day—maybe a dozen, and we’d seen numbers outside houses go up past seventy. We decided to just pass through a couple more on our way back to the car and call it a day.

As I started browsing the art in the next house we went into, I was gripped by a strong sense of familiarity. I quickly realized I was looking at pieces by the artist whose work graces the cover of Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North. I turned to see where Caroline had gone and tell her this, and, following her into a small, cramped room, I got one of the most potent rushes of artistic wonder I’ve had in years…

The artist was German-born Reinhard Behrens, who, it turns out, has lived in Pittenweem for the past thirty years or so. (It turned out that Caroline knew him as a colleague at the University of Dundee’s School of Media Arts & Imaging, where she’s a forensic artist.) While working as an archaeological draughtsman in Turkey in the ’70s, Behrens was stricken with sunstroke. During recovery, he happened across a newspaper article about a collision between a cargo ship and a submarine in the Bosphorus. Reminded of a toy submarine he’d found on the German North Sea coast a year earlier, and beguiled by the name of the cargo ship (“NABOLAND”), the course of his imagination was set.

Since then, he has produced a range of paintings and installations that seek to document Naboland, a fantastical continent apparently lost between Arctic legend and Himalayan fancy. But, thanks to Behrens’ meticulous archaeological illustrations and imaginative coherence, Naboland has grown more and more elusively tangible, through images of ancient rusty cutlery and decaying hunting tools (as seen on the cover of The Idea of North), and reconstructions of the research dwellings of the explorers who had set out to discover more—chiefly the diminutive occupant of the submarine Behrens had found. This little adventurer pops up in otherwise realistic depictions of realms associated with Naboland—Tibetan monasteries, Arctic wastelands, even the canals of Ghent found in Flemish art of the Northern renaissance.

The room I stepped into in Behrens’ house was a staggeringly detailed installation crammed with the tools, finds, and paraphernalia of this explorer. A half-caged bit in the centre contained a desk, with scientific instruments, tiny whisky bottles, endless little trinkets, even a half-size bunk bed slotted in just above and to the side of the study area—everything faded, aged, battered by long use and harsh Arctic conditions.

At one end of the room was shrine-like tall, shallow decorated Buddhist cabinet, opened to display a brown fur coat with a golden lining. This was from Behrens’ installation ‘The Great Yeti Hall’, and the coat purported to be the coat of the last Yeti, the triumphal treasure from an expedition to the Himalayas in search of remnants of Naboland…

Behrens is currently raising funds for an animated short which will “prove the existence of Naboland”.

For more information, visit www.naboland.co.uk.

(Transcript here.)

When he first posted about it, someone piped up with concerns about Merrick’s tone.

The third question regards the (to me) overly aggressive attitude you took whilst you were talking about the Liberal Democrats. I was wondering how you thought it would come across to the general population of the UK? I compare this to the amiable way that Nick Clegg spoke after you.

Our culture’s gone through many cycles of upheaval, greater and lesser anger against the State and the failings of our elected representatives (and the lack of real alternative offered by their rivals). Direct action seeped into mainstream consciousness in the 1990s, mainly through environmental activism such as anti-road and anti-GM protests.

As the scientific evidence of the seriousness of our ecological blundering mounted, and the blundering continued apace, many assumed that the (supposedly) incoherent, “angry” approach to political action had failed. Corporations and the bland public reality they’ve created dominate, so the only game left is to work from within, they said. It’s the “smart” way forward; ranting from the sidelines simply engenders conflict and stand-offs, and doesn’t win over the public at large. People like “nice”, so that’s what we need to give them if we want to win them over.

There’s rarely a day goes by now that doesn’t show this attitude to be a load of shit. Of course, any intelligent person recognizes the value of tactics. However, I question the automatic association of anger with incoherence. I think this is a legacy of a culture—and I’m especially talking about my own country here, England—that seems constitutionally uncomfortable with strong human emotions. We lose coherence when angry because we’re entering alien territory, natural emotional landscapes that we’ve been alienated from.

Hatred, as Primal Scream said, will eat you whole, and has to be let go of. But all too often, in therapy, politics, and society in general, we confuse these twisted emotional brambles with the healthy shoots of anger. Our lack of emotional literacy leaves us prey to those who want us to “let go”, when actually they’re talking about repressing.

Merrick got quite a few boos at Glastonbury. The commenter on his blog took this as an indication that, if even such a left-leaning audience as Glastonbury Festival booed, the public at large would react badly to the anger expressed at the Lib Dem’s failure to offer a real alternative. Therefore, we should tone down our anger, and be more “amiable”, like Clegg. Better still, we could “let go” of our anger…

If you’re not angry—at least sometimes—at 99% of politicians today, you’re blind or numb, or both. And if you think the way forward is to publically make our emotions conform to the flattened landscape that is preferred by politics and corporations, where most of us are forced to live much of the time, you’re wrong. This public landscape, where spontaneous emotion is distrusted, and emotion and intelligence are forced apart, is the medium through which our catastrophic disconnection from nature and each other is expressed.

Anger isn’t a “solution”, and focused on to the exclusion of joy, sadness, compassion, and the rest of the spectrum (a reasonable working definition of “hate”), it can become as much of a distortion of humanity as its repression. But it’s precisely the amiable fuzziness, the tactical avoidance of anything uncomfortable or unseemly, of people like Clegg that has us continuing our trajectory towards ecological collapse.

The apocalypse is enabled with a whimper, not a bang.

The International Arts Pestival—a celebration of insects in the arts and the art of being an insect—is looking for volunteers for this year’s event, which will take place at the Southbank Centre in London, 3-6 September.

“Calling all insect workers, educationalists, artists and budding naturalists. . . . Reasonable out of pocket expenses paid.”

More details »

The past decade or so has seen an intermittent but healthy blossoming of various conferences and festivals celebrating intercourse between esoteric thought and the wider culture, between academic and fringe archaeologies, between the many varied disciplines and perspectives that any serious-minded, open-hearted student of consciousness gets embroiled in. Thankfully there’s been no centre to this flowering, no bloom that has easily outshone the rest; but the Occulture Festival, back after a 6-year break, has been one of the more colourful (see my review of the 2003 event).

The term “occulture” was a neologism waiting for the 20th century, when supra-cultural and sub-cultural exploration of consciousness burst the confines of eccentric little clubs and spilled into the mainstream. This represented a chaotic, perhaps unfulfillable, but certainly vital rejoining of wider cultural practices and gnostic spirituality—arenas which “religion”, etymology notwithstanding, has torn ever further apart since the dawn of civilization.

The Occulture Festival espouses “tolerance, open mindedness and celebration of life”, reflecting a rejection of the kind of naive political ambitions that have marred some attempts to promote modern occultism, whilst holding fast to the belief that this maturing phenomenon has a positive role to play in the future. For every caricatured, visible example of the all-too-familiar failings of modern esotericism, I feel that dozens of inspirational fires are quietly ignited in every walk of life. At their best, gatherings like Occulture promise to bring some of those flames into public view, and fuel them with new connections before they disperse back into society.

Leading proceedings for Occulture this year on 23rd May in The Courtyard Theatre, Hoxton, is the prolific chronicler of recent esoteric currents, Gary Lachman. Also lined up are speakers from Scarlet Imprint‘s expanding catalogue, Iain Sinclair introducing his psychogeographic circumambulation of the captial, London Orbital, a premiere of Disinformation’s film on the 2012 phenomena, and performers such as Dreamflesh contributor Orryelle Defenestrate Bascule. More information and tickets available on the website…

Tickets are now on sale for the exciting-looking Equinox Festival, to be held from June 12th-14th at Conway Hall in London.

Performers include Comus, John Zorn, Aethenor, Z’ev and Arktau Eos; speakers include Ralph Metzner, Erik Davis, Stephen Grasso, David Beth, James Curcio, Philip Farber, Carl Abrahamsson and Orryelle Defenestrate-Bascule; films include The Holy Mountain, Divine Horsemen and The Mindscape of Alan Moore.

Seems likely to be an essential gathering.

I was a little unsure about how my info-heavy talk would go down following the wonderful party vibe that kicked everything off (thanks to Stephen and Allison’s voodoo ceremonials). I was amazed that everyone kept a respectful quietness going throughout. Maybe everyone fell asleep! Judging by the lively and mixed feedback I got, thankfully not. Though Donal Ruane and Dave Luke’s much livelier talks got people going.

The biggest disappointment of the night was undoubtedly the question and answer section being squeezed out by time constraints. Since starting public speaking, it’s always seemed to me that actual talks are best as preludes to Q & A, something to get people sparked up enough to start thinking and questioning. I sorely missed that group interaction. Next time we’ll make a point of it.

Of course the whole night was an experiment in treading the line between spiritual celebration, intellectual melting-pot and boozy shindig. It came off for me; hope you had a great time.

More information here…

If you want to link to the event, please use this URL. You can also reserve tickets there (we expect it to be busy); plus, it looks better on black.