Charlotte Du Cann
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She also teaches collaborative writing and art, and radical kinship with the other-than-human world. In 1991 she left her life as a London features and fashion journalist with a one-way ticket to Mexico. After travelling for a decade, she settled on the East Anglian coast to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the Earth. The first of these 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth documents an exploration into the language and medicine of plants from the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the high desert of Arizona. Recently, Charlotte has written about activism, myth and cultural change for publications including New York Times, the Guardian, Noema and openDemocracy, and is co-producing a collective Dark Mountain project about the ancestral solar year called Eight Fires. Her second collection of essays and memoir, After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time, centred around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, was published in May.
Charlotte Du Cann speaks to Writer’s Rebel’s Sally OReilly about her new book, After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time. Described by head Rebel Librarian Matt Rose as “part memoir, part essay, part travelogue – that follows a real life journey of descent in a world on the tip of crisis”, Charlotte’s work pulls from the rich seams of ancient mythology and the metaphysical in seeking to understand the human race’s contributions to and relationship with a natural world in crisis.
Sally OReilly: Your essay collection looks at the way that reframing ancient myths can help us in our struggle to face the climate catastrophe. Could you tell us more about what inspired you to write it? You ask the question ‘What kind of people do we need to become for the future to happen?’ What is your own view here? What changes would you like to see?
Charlotte Du Cann: I was looking for a myth that made sense of the act of ‘powerdown’ which I feel is a key individual and collective response to the current crises. As a child, the myth of Persephone’s ‘fall’ into Hades captured my imagination, but the first myth I worked with was the Sumerian myth of Inanna and her descent into the Underworld, which is a deliberate move, rather than a calamity. Inanna (Venus) has to divest herself of all her power and attributes of civilisation to reconnect with her sister Ereshkigal (the Earth). I became a different person once I had stripped away my fashionable life as a journalist in London and reconnected with the sentience of the planet. The book charts this cultural divestment, what Jem Bendell has termed relinquishment, one of the four R’s of Deep Adaptation [the others being resilience, restoration and reconciliation]. I don’t think we can break our addiction to power and control if we are not guided by the structure and meaning contained in myth. If there was one change I would like to see, it is a levelling of hierarchy in the human world.
SOR: What do you think might be the role of writers in the Anthropocene?
CDC: Probably not to use that term! Seriously though, writers by their nature can look into the layers of time, into the dreaming of things, and bridge dimensions to show the forces and structures that people cannot see with their ordinary sight. What is sometimes termed as ‘right hemisphere’ thinking. Writers often look for interventions within the conventional narrative arc that change the plot or direction of travel. In mythic terms these are the ‘Kairos’ non-linear interruptions into the ‘Chronos’ march of linear time. So the essays in this book ask: what happens when we see our collective life in terms of those interruptions?
There is writing that supports and glorifies the Empire and there is writing that cracks open its distracting veneer. This kind of writing brings connection and coherence in times of collapse, bears witness, makes meaning of all experience, challenges the status quo, and can also act as a tool and practice to foster perception, to see value in our small roles in any shared resistance. You think you have to change everything, you don’t. You just have to intercept the linear narrative of History in a Kairos way and bring into play everything that has been left out, in time, and let the rest unravel.
SOR: Is there a specific thought or idea that motivates you into taking action over the climate and ecological emergency?
(or, if you like, what frightens you the most about the crisis?)
CDC: My primary motivation is an intense love for this Earth and all its creatures. In a time of emergency, you do the thing that matters, that you are able to turn your hand to, but first you need to create enough time and space to see what really matters. If you are caught up in a state of crisis, you are rarely able to act correctly. The human heart, like the Earth, works at a much slower speed than the so-called rational mind. A radical remembering and reconnection with deep time, with the tempo of the ancestral Earth, is what I focus on as a writer and teacher; to ‘loosen’ on an inner level, as Nora Bateson advises, so we are not trapped in 24/7 digital clock time and are open to perceive the planet we are part of.
SOR: Another thought-provoking quote from your book is: ‘Art is like a strange attractor, that breaks a limit cycle and brings chaos into play.’ Can you say more about this, and how art can act as a ‘strange attractor’?
CDC: The strange attractor is a term borrowed from chaos theory that understands the world to be in flux at all times and shaped like coastlines and clouds. For civilisation to work, the forms that hold it in place have to be static and controllable, so our modernist consumer culture is formed around fixed points, straight lines, boxes and pixels. Anything that doesn’t fit its brutal geometry is excluded. The strange attractor contains all the ‘missing information’ that is left out in order for a fixed system to operate. So when it comes into the system, it disrupts it and forces it to change its direction – this is as true of deliberate interventions into the conventional narrative such as Extinction Rebellion or unexpected ones like Covid. Art that honours the Underworld and the Earth breaks the limit cycle and brings culture back into the wavy regenerative nature of the non-linear system. This is the role of quicksilver or mercury within alchemy in an older soul-based understanding of the process. The first stage of alchemy is known as the nigredo, the forcing of the invisible dark materials into the light. This is the world we are currently experiencing, and the world art reveals.
SOR: The title also makes a central point, that you are looking at narratives in a post-‘hero’s journey’ context, in which community is more important than the individual. ‘Maybe we don’t need a beginning-middle-end story. Maybe we need ‘an ancient curving one hidden beneath our feet.’ Can you say more about this?
CDC: Most of our civilisation’s stories are set on the upward heroic path of progress. This why I deliberately look at the ancient female myths which go in the opposite direction, where we have to become humble, take off our princess dresses and lose our self-obsession. Solo inner work is key but real change can only happen within an ensemble set and setting, where we are part of a mycelial network, which is a challenge for people raised as individualist consumers. The story of the book focuses on the deep and difficult work of transformation. It is shaped by the mythic Underworld tasks of Psyche, whose name means butterfly, one of the oldest metaphors for change.
SOR: Many of your insights about the climate emergency and our relationship with the planet were derived from physical journeys in different parts of the world. Yet now we have to reconsider air travel and long haul journeys. Are such explorations now possible – should we consider making global journeys by other means than flight? Are there more local journeys that can be similarly revelatory?
CDC: Yes, of course. Some of the most pivotal encounters with the other-than-human world have happened just outside my back door in England, in what ecological poet Sophie Strand calls engaging in the ‘deep life’ of the neighbourhood. I was on the road for many years before I knew anything about carbon emissions or the oil industry. Now I no longer travel, apart from small (train) journeys to teach. In After Ithaca I write about giving up flying 16 years ago after encountering the Transition movement; what that means for a once-nomadic writer who loves deserts and mountains. The book is about the difficult practice of return, about making yourself at home in a hard place and giving back.
SOR: What is the most powerful piece of writing that you have read about the climate and ecological emergency?
CDC: Most of my Kairos wake-up moments about climate came via documentaries where talking heads would deliver shocking reports about the effects of extractive industries on the planet. One of these was Derrick Jensen talking about the wrecking ball of agriculture. A realisation that the present climate emergency began a long time ago, when our negotiation with the wild world collapsed as grain-based civilisations advanced violently across the world. The erosion of this primary relationship hit home much earlier however with a book by Norman Lewis called Voices of the Old Sea, in which he witnesses how a traditional fishing village on the Costa Brava is gradually destroyed by consumer tourism, including how the fishermen once related their interactions with the sea in improvised verse. I saw how language is a bridge to speaking with the Earth, and if that is forgotten, the relationship is forgotten.
SOR: Do you have a vision for a regenerative future? Does literature have a part to play in creating this future?
CDC: I am more interested in seeing the future that is always present in physical and dreaming form, the way you can see a plant or flower in its seed. This is what our ancient mysteries tell us. People are seeds too that need germination and the right conditions to flourish. Regeneration is part of the Earth cycles of growth and decay. So aligning ourselves with those cycles in our lives and imaginations is crucial. None of us is going anywhere in this crisis without the backing of the other-than-human world and Indigenous knowledge, so we need to reconfigure our perception to open up to these communications. Writing provides a crucial bridge in this reconnection: not necessarily ‘literature’ sanctioned by mainstream institutions, but creative work by people who love the kinetic world, holding the collapse of ecological systems in their sights.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She also teaches collaborative writing and art, and radical kinship with the other-than-human world. In 1991 she left her life as a London features and fashion journalist with a one-way ticket to Mexico. After travelling for a decade, she settled on the East Anglian coast to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the Earth. The first of these 52 Flowers That Shook My World – A Radical Return to Earth documents an exploration into the language and medicine of plants from the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the high desert of Arizona. Recently, Charlotte has written about activism, myth and cultural change for publications including New York Times, the Guardian, Noema and openDemocracy, and is co-producing a collective Dark Mountain project about the ancestral solar year called Eight Fires. Her second collection of essays and memoir, After Ithaca – Journeys in Deep Time, centred around the four initiatory tasks of Psyche, was published in May.
Discover some of the books that shape Charlotte’s oeuvre by reading her book recommendations in May’s Rebel Library.
CALL TO ACTION
Connect with the other-than-human world and ancestral knowledge embedded in the place you live.