I think in patterns, more than in straight lines. My mind wanders.

My friend Tim says these patterns are like mandalas, the concentric diagrams which mirror the inner and outer worlds in Indian religions. Maybe they’re also like the patterns in a carpet.

I’ve been thinking a bit about weaving and stitching. The rhapsodoi of ancient Greece were wandering poet-singers, practitioners of an oral tradition of improvisation. Literally, a rhapsode is ‘one who stitches together songs’, with the suggestion of working from the materials to hand (rather than creating ex nihilo, or designing from a blank slate), and of mending, making good what appears to be broken. To improvise a story, Keith Johnstone says, the trick is to be like someone walking backwards, not worrying about what’s coming next, but alert to the moment when you can weave in a thread from earlier.

If I thought in straight lines, I suppose writing would come more easily. It doesn’t. It’s always a struggle, trying to draw a thread of meaning through the needle’s eye of the alphabet. When it works, nothing feels more satisfying; when it doesn’t, meaning itself seems to fray and lose substance.

I’ve been wandering around for the past five weeks, hanging out with some amazing people — above all, the marvellous gang of Ivan Illich’s friends and co-conspirators — slowing down, sharing ideas, giving improvised talks, noticing things I don’t have time to notice when I’m in London having five meetings a day.

Two nights ago, as my mind turned for home, I realised that I had a series of recordings and writings that it was time to put online. It was only as I began editing and set these pieces alongside one another that I saw how much of the pattern they map out.

It was a strange feeling, looking at them, because they reflect more of the heart of my work than I’ve generally shared outside of late night conversations. I told a friend, “It’s as if everything else I’ve been doing was a smokescreen for this stuff.” Or else I could say that the rest of it — Space Makers, School of Everything, Dark Mountain, The University Project — consists of attempts to translate these thoughts and stories into practice.

Well, that’s how it looks right now. The pattern will probably look different when viewed from back in London. Anyway, here are the pieces of it:

Remember the Future? is the essay I wrote for Dark Mountain: Issue 2, which explores the strange disappearance of “The Future”, the connections between improvisation and the myths of Prometheus and Epimetheus, and the possibility of finding hope in losing control.

It’s Wrong To Wish On Space Hardware is a short talk (audio and transcript) in which I begin to apply this pattern of Prometheus and Epimetheus to explain the power and the failure of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth narrative. Is the answer to the mess we’re in really to use more technology to become further alienated from the level of our sensory experience?

The Return of the Vernacular is a recording of a conversation with Sajay Samuel, one of Illich’s friends and students, in which we explore Illich’s concept of “the vernacular” in the light of Sajay’s work on the intellectual roots of modern quantitative rationality and my ideas about “remembering the future”.

Coming To Our (Animal) Senses is a dialogue with David Abram, also published in Dark Mountain: Issue 2, in which we pursue the mathematisation of reality further, and explore the sense of grief which comes with returning to our bodies and recognising the situation in which we find ourselves. (This is based on the conversation we filmed in Oxford last September, but reworked into a written text, and including material that was missing from that video.)

One further piece I have put online today stands at something of a distance from these four. An interview with Tristan Russell, published this month in Umelec magazine, it took place in Prague last August. Although the ground it covers intersects with the other pieces, I’m conscious of a difference in tone. In part, this can be attributed to a different kind of encounter — where the other dialogues were free conversations, this was more of a journalistic interview. But it also reflects a turn in my work which began shortly after that.

At root, it was a turning away from the kind of combative public discourse which I’d had a taste of in my head-to-head session with George Monbiot at last year’s Dark Mountain festival. Whatever the merits of such contests of arguments, I came away clear that this was not my way of speaking or being in the world, that I didn't like the person I would become if I went further down this route, and that I had to find another mode of thinking in public.

That began to crystallise with a thought that came in response to Dave Pollard’s blog post about Dark Mountain: “Perhaps it’s only by a withdrawal from today’s political questions that we can do the thinking which will leave us with a politics for the day after tomorrow?” Around the same time, I started to take more chances with improvisation, turning up to events with no plan for what I would talk about, and allowing myself to say whatever seemed to be needed.

It seems significant that the set of pieces I’ve shared today all began as spoken words — even ‘Remember the Future?’ is a reworking of an improvised talk which I gave at the Landscape/Mindscape weekend at Laurieston Hall last October. Perhaps spoken language has more room for the wandering patterns in which I think than the austere linearity of the written word?

I don’t know. I’m still working out how I combine all of this, the stories which end up as words on paper, the stories that end up bringing people together to make things happen. Every time I think I’ve got it worked out, something unexpected comes along.

But it feels good to have been able to stitch this much together tonight.