13 Comments

I always resonate with your posts, David, but this one sung especially strongly to my heart. And when you write "He's enacting a ritual of uncitizenship, ending all obligations to all such powers", I have to laugh at how close this telling of the Gospel runs to the call that led Paul and me to write a manifesto called "Uncivilisation".

I've often thought in later years that what we called "uncivilisation", conceived as a process of unweaving and reweaving (and not just the "anti-civ" position which people sometimes read it as) might just name what it looks like to do the work of "decolonising" (when this isn't just reduced to identity politics), only starting from the places that were the centre of the empire. This piece gives me a third thread to weave into that braid, and much to ponder. Thank you.

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Thank you Dougald. I've felt very late to the party: only first briefly stuck my nose into the Uncivilisation Manifesto when I found a copy in your Shoeshop last year. I've finally downloaded it for a proper read, and pondering it. Its speaking into many of my puzzles and discontents. I would love to map around it a bit and I'd be fascinated to hear more of your retrospective thoughts, which I occasionally hear in bits and pieces. I would like to map those three braids a bit..

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I second all of this, and see all of my longing afresh in the words and re-told stories of another. That other would be you, DBB. You are weaving something sorely needed here, David.

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Thanks so much Adam 🙌🏻

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Oh, I love where this came from, what the implications are, and where it could go! Don't stop, say it in different ways, add characters, trips, visions, and bring it to the present. I am so exhausted from the evil going on, struggling with old and new tales, I cannot intuit any more. I needed this today, and will need more and more . Soon.

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Thanks so much Karen. I'm very glad to be able to make these explorations, energised by very similar feelings I think. More to come. Bolstered by the resonance 🙏🏻

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YES. "The party goes from town to town. There is story-telling. There is feasting in the fields. There are ecstatic experiences. There are marginalised bodies at the front. There is healing and howling. They fraternise with enemies. They go about making themselves guests of the most unlikely hosts. And they host the most unlikely differences around the table..." -- how beautiful (the whole essay is). For many years now, the feeling I've had is: I once belonged to that beautiful rabble, somehow, but somehow wandered away from them (Christianity became the religion of civilization, not uncivilization...)

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Me too. Perhaps the fall might be part of the recovery. I don't know. I hope so

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Yes! Fiercely keen to hear / explore / consider what Uncitizens might look like / be up to here and now...

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Me too bud. Pomona knows.

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This post is so timely, arriving just as I’m trying to understand the increasingly inside/ouside, centre/border nature of (my) life.

– Baptised out of rather than into, a change of direction, a repentance even.

And you put an altogether new and enticing spin on the idea of carnival! Thank you.

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Thanks Mark. Years ago I read a brilliant essay called Imagine A Kingdom by Carol Kingston-Smith and it left a good mark on me.

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Thanks for the heads-up, David. I’ve found and will read it.

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