WRITING - WHY I WRITE
Why I write?
The challenge of the ‘why’ I write was raised by self-publishing guru, Derek Doepker and so I decided this week to set some time aside to explore this biggest of words in the English language. “WHY?”
First, a few bullet points meanders to get me in the flow of things:
• To sow seeds of consciousness about our political reality.
• I believe in a spiritual realm that is both toxic and good.
• I believe that ideology in a spiritual and political sense, is a form of unconsciousness and a way of unknowing the world.
• The best way to explore these beliefs and the consequences of our unconsciousness is through a dystopian lens/filter.
• In the late 1940s, George Orwell intuited the future development of the despotic control of society, through Oligarchical Collectivism, which would be enforced by the military industrial complex through a continual state of war and political upheaval. These Oligarchical Societies were named by him as: Russia, China and America. (Britain becomes subjugated to America - if you were wondering!).
• I believe that poetry can be the language and the seed of a shared consciousness; the seeds for an awakened state.
• Resistance is NOT futile, but a necessary component of activist creativity.
As a writer, director and producer I have always been inspired by the Russian filmmaker, Andrei Tarkovsky. The poetic filmmaker or filmmaker who is a poet, is best described – by Tarkovsky – as someone who ‘creates a new, different world inside their films, to discuss matters of the real world.’ This eschews ‘social realism’ as objective truth. AS Robert Bresson wrote, ‘Realism is the pale imitation of nature’.
We live in a political era which has nothing to do with climate or Brexit and everything to do with the pursual of a collective unconscious which is reflected in a reactionary rage to every perceived threat.
A note to the reader: when a message on Media is relentlessly promoted, propaganda is being used to manipulate you.
Mystic and spiritual teacher, Richard Rohr said this,
“I am consciously advocating a subversive strategy for future political engagement. Current models of political activity are largely beyond reform. We need to withhold our support and redirect our imagination and energy into different, more egalitarian, ecological and sustainable ways for relating to creation and to other people.”
The Politics of Connectedness, July 17th, 2018.
My writing and creation of worlds such as ‘0w1:believe’ and the World of 0w1 website, are focused on this redirection of my imagination and energy and to help my readers do likewise.
I’m at an age where I have witnessed many political atrocities: pandemics, genocides, corruption at a National Governmental level that destroys peoples’ homes and businesses, war and rumours of wars, carnage on an unprecedented scale, the promulgation of bio and nuclear weapons, State sponsored terrorism and assassinations by toxic lethal chemicals. The list of the Nation States’ inhumanity goes on.
I have become jaundiced with life on this planet, which feels more like we should call it Gulag Earth. (Yes, there’s a story there somewhere, and yes - I’m working on it).
(C) Dan Gardiner, 2020. ‘Ruled by Monsters’ . Used by permission of the artist.
Along with all these atrocities we can add slavery, international human trafficking, domestic abuse, Corporate claims to being inviolable when it comes to prosecution (too big to fail) for environmental crimes. I have seen too many victims; I am weary of this.
Political promises of liberty, equality and fraternity have not been delivered upon, trickle-down economics doesn’t work, there’s no such thing as a holy war, and the system isn’t broken. It is meant to create inequity, to exploit the weak and disadvantaged, to create scarcity as a means of social control, offering freedom whilst controlling thought, speech, and movement.
How long will we be conformists to this model, this system of being. Perhaps we should really call it non-being? For if we conform, then we are complicit in their crimes against humanity and in the tragedy we call Earth, that was once a Paradise.
It is, I think, the responsibility of the writer, the filmmaker, the artist, to raise awareness of this Gulag reality and sow the seeds of a resistant consciousness that rejects any systemisation of life and works towards a reality that is not ruled by the privileged class, under the illusion of power.
This then, is why I’m a writer and sometimes a filmmaker and why I’m looking for communities of resistance.
Now then, let’s have a conversation.
Geoff Hall,
Lucent Dark - Bristol 2022
You can find Derek Doepker here
