Muddy Water Is Taking Back The Land

Mary, grab the baby, the river’s rising / Muddy water taking back the land

The old-frame house, she can’t take-a one more beating / Ain’t no use to stay and make a stand

(Technically by Seldom Seen, but I refer you to the 1986 Nick Cave version)

I have, in brief flashes, immensely enjoyed writing. To quote Richard Seymour loosely, to write is to give yourself a second body – to inhabit another space and leave a part of yourself there. 

After writing voraciously before and during University, I completed my History degree in a state of exhaustion, and haven’t written anything I’m proud of since. 

A month ago I quit my job. I want to reach for something better; part of that is to try to write again. 

The woke stasi have regrettably destroyed comedy, so if you want to know about benches, bums, what type of fruit your college is, whether or not you are the second coming (one for the fans), or whatever horseshit I wasted my degree writing, you will need to go back to a time when I wasn’t scared shitless.

The blog is called Muddy Water. In a sense, it’s about despair. Muddy Water is part of contemporary iconography: as sea levels rise and once-freak weather becomes everyday, the image of muddy water filling streets and fields with dirt and sewage will be a familiar one in the 21st Century. Muddy Water expresses the Lovecraftian despair of Climate Collapse, inescapable as it is incomprehensible. We will know it through pictures of, and eventual submersion in, Muddy Water. 

I’ve experienced despair in frequent and various states since the last time I wrote: despair about humanity, myself, the future, my job – real, immediate despair and a long, gripping dread. Muddy Water is all around, and needs clear channels to drain away.

Muddy Water is also about discovery. It hides objects below its surface, only for them to burst suddenly into view. Ruptures in the Expected can be terrifying, but the possibility of random and unexpected grace gives me hope. 

Beginning in my final year of University, I experienced an intense anxiety that lasted for almost two years. The focus shifted month by month – I believed I would go insane, I believed I would harm myself, I believed I would harm others. I was desperate to know I would be okay, and to dig through my past to find the cause of my illness. I was struggling with uncertainty – I needed to know what had happened, and would happen. 

One of the ideas that helped me recover was the realisation that the unknown is a near constant in human history. The world has never been predictable, and that elements of human nature will always be mysterious. While I was anxious I jumped from problem to problem, but understanding jumped out suddenly, like revelation. We are entering a period of struggle; despair will grind us to nothing; we need to open ourselves to hope and opportunity.

All pretty serious. Will there be gags? The people demand gags!  

As the cat can have a little salami, the people can have a few gags. But they will be a thin gruel for the joke-starved masses. Only when people share all jokes in common will we be free. The world is cruel and hilarious, and should be a common treasury for all.