These posts are part of my ongoing wandering between worlds, ideas, viewpoints. They don’t really have an aim because they have no commitment – in the sense that they are an expression of detachment. Not in a specifically negative sense. Detachment is a healthy way of practicing a kind of Buddhist realism, which points to the ever changing nature of reality. And besides, detachment also seems like a necessity in a time where our collective behaviour has become absurd. Fully post – post-modern, post-political, post-real. Our existence is bathed in a soft-pollution that is going to kill us first and then perhaps the planet. Meaning itself seems to be over: the big stories that frame our time are now so all-encompassing that personal action feels totally meaningless.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing because even that can seem pointless. Only the vague feeling of being part of a larger conversation keeps the letters bubbling in this space. It informs the whole undertaking. A few friends from here and there stay in touch and our ideas and writing bounce off each other. Most folk I know think my writing is awfully abstract. And of course it is. But it is always aiming at fusing concrete meaning into lived experience.

And so this space keeps being important to me. I’m thankful that I have somewhere to place these thoughts, which in most other circumstances seem abnormal or inappropriate. They feed on the idea that there is a reader somewhere. Not because I need to be heard or applauded – then my writing would be very different – but because it forces clarity onto the writing. Clarity with myself.

But to go on writing in this space, I need to clarify some things about where I am for you, dear reader – whoever you are that have followed me into this space. Because if you’ve got any clue where I am, physically and geographically, you’ll wonder how the hell I ended up here. And I’ve now moved past a doorway where the life that was centred around academia is behind me (it has actually been so for a long while), and where teaching is ahead and all around me.

The last years have moved incredibly fast. Since we left England and moved to Berlin. Since I finished writing my PhD. Since we moved from Berlin to Copenhagen. And since we’ve moved from there to here. To Ry, a small town in provincial Denmark, where we’ve settled in a big house in the woods. Where good quality fire wood really makes a difference.

So many things have happened that I haven’t even had time to fully understand them.

Last June I got a son. Yes, a little son!

I have been too in the midst of life to be able to formulate anything about fatherhood. Every time I’ve tried, I got stuck in clichés and expressions of joy. It’s joyful! I think there hasn’t been much I could say about it exactly because it is joyful and simple. Seeing a little creature becoming himself is just an absolute… It’s that simple! It is one of the largest contrasts I have experienced in my life because it penetrates everything. This thing is not going away. It is not a thing. It is life. There is no choice involved.

My world kind of stopped when Jona came. But the rest of life kept moving and suddenly I had to look outwards again and work out how to get some sort of livelihood strung together. For a while I was a little frustrated running around talking with people and slowly acknowledging that the project I had in mind simply couldn’t live. A hub for transition in Denmark. The little interest there was could perhaps have grown if there was funding to get started but there was only ever a shadow of money that autumn.

In November I went back to LungA School and taught the course ‘Navigating Uncertainty’ again. We’ve got a good thing going up there.

Then I got a job.

And we moved.

And I started working as a teacher at Ry Højskole.

The teaching is fun and I’m certainly on the learning side too. It’s great to get to know the lives of a bunch of 20-25 year olds who have decided to spend twenty-two weeks at the school doing subjects like Outdoor living, Songwriter, Ceramics, Mythology, Journalism & society, Theatre music and Drawing. The students are actually motivated to learn something here. And they’re paying for it too! May sound like a very privileged school, and of course it is, but it is very normal in Denmark.

The Folk High School movement has a long history of doing schooling, which goes back to the poet and pastor Grundtvig whose enlightenment ideas about education where first put into practice in Rødding in 1844. Based on the ideals of popular education and lifelong learning the movement has grown into a diverse range of schools with very different subjects and objectives. Common to them all is that there are no entrance or final exams, huge pedagogical freedom and a clear focus on developing creative potential and democratic competence. For good and for bad the Folk High Schools are steeped in tradition. And in an age of competition and goal-oriented learning, they have become an oasis for learning.

I was hired to create a subject called The world around us and to “take care of” another one called Journalism & society. I’m also teaching Philosophy and Integration, and then I’ve created two other subjects called State of the planet and Life journeying. It’s a big mouthful and I’ve had to forgive myself completely before even attempting the task of creating five new subjects and holding 150 classes this spring.

The weeks are flying by because once a class has been held another needs preparation. I’m trying out a variety of formats and am beginning to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. And I’m sure this will change once I do it again with another group of students! So far the highlights have been doing a ceremonial aufguss in the sauna and dragging seven blindfolded students attached to each other with a piece of rope around the school.

I’m starting to feel a contact between the ideas that underpin Refigurations and the teaching. So there’s a post brewing which sets out new territory for emergent figurative thinking. All in due time.

This underlines my need for this space to be a place of connection. Not just between my own wondering and wanderings but to others people’s work and lives. I’d like to make these Refigurations more interactive and conversational but for now they’ll continue to be little messages in a bottle. I just don’t have time for more. So I’ll continue to use the other islands of communication to connect and hope that those signposts eventually reach the right people – although I’m completely past any hope that those platforms can be purged of soft pollution.

Take Facebook. Why stick with it? What does it really do for me? I’ve long felt that it is mostly a no-where, somewhere people go to share things that make themselves feel good or to argue some silly arse point about politics, the state of the world or this week’s TV show. Not to mention the surveillance problem. So why keep using it? Leaving seems the only other option but those of my friends who have left have (nearly) all come back. There is something to Facebook that we can’t do without.

Is it as simple as this: we need Facebook because we need to feel connected? The connection is becoming more and more superficial as our connection is mediated by algorithms that bring us an ever more tailored and narrow viewpoint (and more and more ‘sponsored’ stuff). But we need to feel connected because we feel isolated.

Perhaps there comes a point when it simply becomes too many ads and too little content. Where our communication is so penetrated by soft pollution that we recoil and say NO! No more. That point has already been reached for some of course (Tony and Paul have written about this). But to be honest, I doubt that ‘we’ in any larger sense will ever put our foot down because we are not a unity by any other virtue than that we are users of Facebook. And meanwhile, I do get a lot of interesting stuff from Facebook, 90% distractions, yes, but real gems in between. (Example: this was the last post that came to me via Facebook and I’m sure it wouldn’t have happened without it.)

Maybe the problem is rather with what I think Facebook is or should be. Maybe Facebook is just entertainment. A place to have an easy laugh, scream in horror and waste time I don’t really have. But that doesn’t quite cut it either because if none of my friends were there, I wouldn’t be there either. Has Facebook turned my friends into entertainment? That is a scary thought.

The truth of course lies somewhere in between and I guess our reasons to use Facebook or to leave will be as diverse as my imaginary ‘we’ presumably is.

So how to handle Facebook? I guess I have to forget any rose tainted notions of a community and my longing for meaningful connections with friends. If I want to use Facebook I guess I have to accept that we are caught in the web of industrial civilisation, which will keep eating up our common spaces until they are all sucked dry of profit, meaning and any resemblance of life. In this condition it seems like the best we can hope for is to use whatever channels are available, however corrupt and polluted, to create something different. A different form of communication, a different conversation.

Accepting the poison and taking the long view is a bitter pill. I am not sure it is worth it. But for now my life is too tied up in it to pull the plug – even work is now partly unfolding on the Facebook groups the students create for the classes. So I’ll stick around and wait for the day when enough interesting people start hanging out elsewhere.

What can be done is to clarify what I mean by a different form of communication. A first stab is communication that is honest, open and doesn’t care to be right. That accepts the difficulty and complexity of modern society. That accepts failure. That accepts the improbability of being understood or even heard through the noise. That doesn’t try to programme anyone in any way but instead seeks dialogue. That doesn’t argue. That is sincere and truthful. That cares about taste more than opinion. That lets mystery slip into existence and doesn’t explain everything to death. That is playful. That loves life. That seeks friendship. That doesn’t waste time with people who seek enemies. That wants to create by improvising instead of controlling. That knows when to speak and when not to.

What did I miss?

(Another point is that maybe one doesn’t have to pull the plug but can simply ignore Facebook whenever it is necessary, which is an exercise in attention and self-restraint as much as it is about communication.)

I’m sure similar points apply to Twitter and Tumblr. My point is not so much about Facebook as it is about the conditions of being a user of social media. We have to give up the notion of being a community online and slowly begin locating community elsewhere – in life and as an expression of belief in life.

I keep this space because it brings me into contact with that belief.

I keep writing here because it helps me feel closer to you, the unknown reader.

I keep seeking you out because it increases the chances that you’ll some day seek me out.

Sharing this space with someone makes me feel connected both with the spirit of life and the spirit that conceived of the internet.

Sitting here in the late evening, watching the fire, I feel like switching off the machine. I guess that’s how it’ll happen. I’ll just walk away. Until then I’ll keep sending out these bottled messages to make contact and help myself make sense of it all.