Mythic Activism
{Literary, affective and perceptual activism}
In its official definition, activism is the opposite of passivity, implying action, movement, militancy, and actively participatory attitudes. Online dictionaries say that it also carries the tendency towards violent or extremist acts. The very origin of the word activism says it is something ‘given to worldly activity’ (as opposed to contemplative or monastic), directly from the Latin activus, from actus ‘a doing’ (from the root ‘to drive, pull out or forward, move’). When I think of activism, images form of the much-needed and essential front-line protests, public demonstrations, and often massive demonstrations—rallies of injustice against oppression and inequality.
Proclamations of injustices, tyrannies, violent policies, blind justice, and monopolies highlight the inevitable consequences for all of us. These are extremely valuable collective protest actions of ‘taking to the streets.’
In my book The Sanctuary, I wrote: ‘(this book is a) form of literary activism, a possibility to actively contrast the limited and superficial modern perception - since the beginning we have been making space in the monolithic and purist idealisations of the contemporary mind - by rescuing the eco-mythological psyche.’ I wrote this book from a lens of intersectional, affective, and mythical activism, as a statement and protest, a voice in vulnerability, which provokes, animates, instigates, encourages, and challenges the comfortable and supposed normality of the historically erected worldview.
All the research and writing have intentionally pierced our membranes of denial, affection, and humility.
This demonstration of the profound injustices that constantly dehumanize us, denaturalizing us into supposed universal and stable essentialisms, also might bring us into a confrontation with ourselves. Intense emotions can arise, shrill and piercing, like squeals of rejection, anger, and refusal for the inner places where these essays can take us, unblocking difficult questions that confront us in some way.
Affection and myths within introvert activism
As an introvert, I found a voice in this form of protest, which unfolds under the interstices of normative cognition and perception. In other words, it reveals different ways of relating, devoting, and intertwining with the vast human and non-human territory. It's literary because, through research-prayer, in the experience of body-in-place, I write tales, re-fabulated from traditional tales and ancestral myths, glimpses, and fragments of other forms of being human.
Mammalian, native, and animistic forms of ecological symbiosis, forms that recover our relational wisdom, from the ruins of the improverished modern cognition.
Normative activism is direct action, and the question of practice arises. We expect practice to give us answers or solutions and demonstrate the undeniable oppressions—or at least to release some tension from the frustration, mourning, and disillusionment of a world so unequal and on the verge of collapse. But practice alone does not change our frames of reference, does not make us see the lenses through which we view the world. It does not undo the perverse mouldings of normality, including the accepted model of how to protest and resist.
Mythic Activism is not a choice between action and passivity, but a fertile and nourishing complement, a regenerative lap to the exhaustion of our collective and intersectional struggles.
As I say in The Sanctuary: "Literary and perceptual (…)activism does not negate the importance or necessity of ecological, political and social activism on the intervention front, in demonstrations and direct actions. Literary and perception (…)activism is a fruitful practice, from the bowels of Life, which assumes the importance of encompassing the subjectivity of the webs of thought, bringing imagination, the arrational and art as fundamental languages in the possibility of changing cultural perception." This is a paradoxical invitation that follows both the lines of science and mythical plots.
We assume that the collapses and violence are not just about us, individually or anthropocentrically, but about the possibilities of the resurgence and unfolding of Life, anchoring a poetic and profound responsibility that does not deny the multiple crises. We converge to recover intimate relationships of affection in our relationship with the world. We claim that amnesia and the attempt to extinguish mythical thinking infertilise the psyche and the Soul, linearising and abstracting modern Western Life.
This is a slow activism, a labour of care and care, devotion and attention, which allows us to find the cultural matrices that avoid or alienate us from participating and encountering the world. Anchoring sacred rage, we crack normopathy, fabricating other stories.
May we find space for surrender and digestion, slowly labouring, slowly blending, and incorporating. But also where the various myths and tales can stir us up, igniting sparks of fierceness, resistance, revolution and the will to transform. Because here, in the ruins of the Sanctuary on the edge of the abyss, we surrender to confess the fragmented alienation in which we live.
May myths and speculative fabulation assist us in recovering our innate wisdom of mystery, complexity and paradox. May they help us to stay with the problem (Haraway).
May we find fertile ground, gentle and symbiotic, anchoring and regenerating. May we dive into enveloping and sacred waters. Sprouting from the possibility of reciprocal intimacy with the world. Let's rescue the affective and mythical wisdom that makes us act responsibly—actively cultivating places of transgression and cognitive dissidence, where experiences and concepts can co-exist in the micro-politics of grief and enchantment, of both creation and extinction. We imagine and nurture anchoring dreams that archive borderline ideas, living ‘habitats’ of alternative narratives and resistance that enrich us collectively.
In the alchemical invitation of Mythic Activism, we change skin repeatedly, rooted in flux and madness, because there is no single form of protest. We anchor the convulsions of the revolution between rage and mourning. We are affected and not look away amid so much violence and paradoxes but also so much beauty, tenderness, and affection.
{Cycle of Tales of Mythic Activism - Tales with totemic and animist plots, inspired by traditional tales! ❤️ Whispers and writings in flux and resistance. Fabulations in revolution and convulsion, between rage and awe.}
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