From Y DYN GWYRDD//THE GREEN MAN
Dancing and digging make a meaningful life.
Getting ready to review my copy of Shaun Day-Woods’ latest work, Dancing & Digging, out through Night Forest Press, I did exactly what you’re told not to do at the beginning of the book, which is sitting and reading chunks of the text at once. The small, beautiful bundle of ink and paper is a collection of proverbs and aphorisms “on freedom and nature” created by the author, woven through with stark woodcuts by artist Rick Herdman, and despite my inconsiderate approach still offered deep insight and inspiration.
To live freely is often to live dangerously.
I was excited going into the book, since I’ve admired the author’s work under other names – reading the essay titled post-literacy made a deep impact on how I see the culture of writing and the academically-derived book-fetish, while their other writing in the collection Land and Freedom is hugely influential to me. There Shaun Day-Woods/Seaweed brought together insights around the need to integrate into a habitat and the related urgency of defending that habitat as an extension of your own body as self-evident foundations for healthy local culture in a no-nonsense way that I’ve not seen from other green anarchist writers. They handle messy topics as varied as spirituality and militancy with humble tenderness and sincerity, and their work has come to greater and greater attention within the tendency as a result of that nuanced but accessible style.
An empty mind heals.
The essay post-literacy has a lot of relevance to the project of this book. It suggests that literacy and the book-fetish are non-neutral components of the civilisation we’re embedded within, and that an anarchic worldview would most likely resist those practices:
Is orthography more important than say community songs and dances? In an ecologically sane, imaginative, horizontal world, are there going to be school buildings in which we are forced to sit quietly as children, being taught how to write and spell, or will we be at the river learning how to fish, or in the field learning how to gather medicinal herbs and edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its machinery and oils and noise, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will we be in the machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry from memory to our lover in a meadow?
Their mention of poetry is well-placed – David Abram, in The Spell of the Sensuous, points to poetry as an exemplary technique that allows words to live in the body, through the internal pulse of spoken intensities resonating in the beating heart and opening lungs of the individual performing, or those appreciating the performance – poetry is visionary technique for remembering story and embedding knowledge for passing between people.
Identify with your kin, your spirits or your habitat, everything else is just politics.
Dancing & Digging isn’t a book of poetry though. My sense is that, where poetry is a deeply expressive, often ecstatic, and essentially personal thing, Seaweed’s proverbs are aimed more as a challenge to the essay-form, taking a more measured, meditative approach – like good poetry, the book lends itself to slow digestion and piece-by-piece consumption, but the experience is different. Not all the proverbs landed for me, and it’d be unreasonable to expect that they would. At its best the book presents you with distinct mental artefacts, ideas like hand-woven nets or rough clay pots, that don’t function as answers in themselves but instead imply – or demand – a spreading web of consideration around themselves. For example, “deceive the enemy without shame” is an aggressive statement that’s going to feel immediately uncomfortable for folks who might still be holding on to their humanism, but has a weight behind it of long experience. Meanwhile “seek harmony but don’t avoid turbulence” and “walk with the elderly, run with the children, sleep with the animals” both call for contemplation on practices to carry through life, not just martial considerations. Anyone who’s read Land and Freedom should really enjoy the more warlike proverbs scattered through the book (they were my favorites), and they’re also some of the most challenging. Seaweed draws from the Daoist tradition, and influences from The Art of War are clear and enthusiastic. I won’t work through my interpretation of individual proverbs (which sounds about as fun as explaining a joke) – I get the sense that even misinterpreting one of these proverbs, as long as you thought about it, is probably better than being hand-held through an essay and agreeing with the author’s conclusion because they didn’t leave the mental wiggle-room for you to think around their writing. That’s been my experience, anyway.
The beasts have nothing to learn from humans.
The book is divided into four sections: These Came from the Wind, These My Village Taught Me, These I Learned Along the Way, and These are the Words of My Ancestors. Each section handles the core thinking behind the book differently. Wind feels light and mobile, nebulous, broad. The proverbs here handle “freedom and nature” more broadly. Village deals with community, how political power can be articulated and confronted, how culture can be held, as well as the nature of cities. The Way is an exuberant set of musings on reason and science, mysteries, the individual, being, and time, among other topics. Ancestors landed most heavily for me. It feels possessed, and a language of spirits and solar eclipse burns out of those pages. This section creates closure to looping thoughts while offering a stepping-off point for the mind to greater depths and clarity. Two proverbs from the Way and Ancestors make this point. In the Way the question of prisons is opened most explicitly: “A society with prisons has no greatness”. Other proverbs then move around this issue, opening and exploring the relationship. In Ancestors the circle closes: “A society with prisons is a prison”. From this I feel that the book is worth treating both as a whole that presents a series of ideas developing in intensity and complexity, similarly to a more conventional structure but using proverbs to replace the prose, as well as a collection of individual insights that can easily be integrated into your own practice and life.
The perfectly still child can hear her own growth, the perfectly still elder can hear her own decomposition.
My takeaway is that Seaweed’s language is both easy and intense, and has utility whether you throw it piecemeal into conversations with friends outside the green anarchist tendency or examine it deeply with accomplices to deepen and broaden your perspectives and tactics. Day-Woods suggests that you “memorize [their] words and make them your own”, and there are blank pages at the back for noting down your own proverbs and those of your friends. This book is a pointing text aimed at fighting text generally, a collection of wise insights aimed at weaving together a wise culture more than elevating wise individuals, and a nourishing ground in which the flower of liberatory oral skills can begin to root. I have some battered trousers with big pockets that I wear most days, and now most days this beautiful little book sits in one of those pockets.
Comments
I wish anarchist booksellers
anon (not verified) Mon, 07/18/2022 - 11:34
I wish anarchist booksellers should have photos of the actual book they want people to buy. Excerpts and simple things like page count, dimensions, etc are nice too. Get it together, people!
Anarchist booksellers…
Ben Dover (not verified) Mon, 07/18/2022 - 15:19
The op is a review by someone who is not associated with the publishers.
The info is here if you are interested:
https://www.nightforestpress.com/product-page/dancing-digging-proverbs-…
Hi Ben,
anon (not verified) Mon, 07/18/2022 - 17:02
In reply to Anarchist booksellers… by Ben Dover (not verified)
Hi Ben,
Thank you for your useless comment that proves my point completely. There is no photo of the actual book nor any information specified that I was lamenting not being present Yes, I had also visited that website before writing my comment which your failed mansplaining is responding to. Sit down. You don’t need to comment on everything
It's an 8-page folded inkjet
PublisherBot (not verified) Mon, 07/18/2022 - 18:06
In reply to Hi Ben, by anon (not verified)
It's an 8-page folded inkjet zine with cover art ink-stamped onto the inside of reused cereal box cardboard attached with one heavy duty staple. The text is 6pt Libertine-sans. Shipping will be roughly 20$ CAN. Enjoy!
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