Let them know it’s Saturnalia time

Integration

Heal the world from collective trauma says Thomas Hubl

2022’s Medicine Festival in the UK

My journalism network brother Matt Green is the author of Aftershock: fighting War, Surviving Trauma and Finding Peace (New Statesman: ‘Outstanding’, Spectator: ‘A work of integrity and substance’, TV’s Bear Grylls: ‘Compelling, humbling and inspiring’).

He examines collective trauma in his new blog Resonant World – and ways to heal it. Like the UK’s Medicine Festival whereupon he has hence returned. 

“I’m going to sound too idealistic and starry-eyed about what is basically a fun gathering in a field,” Matt reports, “But a core part of me knows I came away feeling more peaceful, grounded and inspired than when I arrived — and I’ve learned to trust that felt-sense more than my fear of sounding naive.”

Matt, who’s on the environment beat for Reuters right now, worked as a war correspondent in Iraq and Afghanistan. He spoke on the launch address call for The Collective Trauma Summit 2022 (oh yes), cooked up by guru Thomas Hubl author of Healing Collective Trauma. Which features basically everyone from the wonderful world of 21st century wellbeing. 

“Trauma on a personal level is energy, on a collective level it’s a storm,” says Hubl, who talks about activating our ‘collective immune system.’ He maintains “it’s an important function of collective health and if we don’t even have it, that’s a sign of our health.”

Matt addressed journalism’s part in mankind’s burnout. “The media is frozen, reporting what’s ‘out there’ as if it’s on a glass screen, stuck in a psychic sludge,” says the father of two married to a children’s therapist, “we’re ‘looking at broken glass through broken glass’ to borrow Thomas’ own phrase.”

Us media scum need unconditional loving too, says Matt: “That’s true of journalists as much as the rest of us who were born into this traumatised society. Journalists are recognising they need to be healing themselves as individuals, having perhaps been part of environments that encourage trauma-causing behaviours. Clinging to the notion that objectivity could protect us, was a fiction.”

When Sunday Times suits wouldn’t sign off heroic war reporter Marie Colvin’s expenses, hacks left a cow’s eyeball on the accounts desk in reference to the eye Colvin lost to a rocket propelled grenade blast while covering the Sri Lankan civil war in 2001 (it gave her PTSD). She sported her signature eye patch thereafter.

Driven on by her own unique quest for homeostasis, Colvin died reporting under news blackout from the siege of Homs in 2012 when her building was hit by Syrian artillery.

“Journalism can be a form of healing too though,” says Matt.

Decorated foreign correspondent Dean Yates was shattered by PTSD after two of his team were killed by an Apache gunship crew. Wikileaks dug up pilot cam footage that made for difficult viewing. Yates beat himself up further for not making enough of a storm with it. Eventually he was admitted to a psychiatric ward.

Now, Yates talks about his experience at edgy institutions. He and Reuters set up a blog site and mini-community where burnt-out broadcasters and wobbly world-slingers could exhume a bit of trauma by banging out some posts. 

“Slowly the culture started to change a little,” says Matt, “I’m not saying there isn’t a long way to go for the media…”

My cousin’s in Ukraine right now with the BBC. The most traumatic my journalism career ever got was when I reviewed Ian Schraeger’s new hotel and the remote for the TV in the suite didn’t work. No it wasn’t. It was when a close colleague and I were on the wrong end of a corporate ‘moral injury’ and he killed himself. 

Not that I, he or anyone in that position was, or is, above such behaviour ourselves. Neither are we discouraged to be, like Matt points out. And we’re the lucky ones. “None of this is possible without a community system that offers support, equity and justice,” points out Matt’s fellow host on the Collective Trauma summit, heavyweight sociologist Dr Ruby Mendenhall. Her work highlights the need to address racism as a health crisis given its eventual, detrimental effects on health, lives and budgets.

“Our own experience of trauma is not deep enough to feel deeper traumas holistically,” says Hubl of social engineering, “We provide properly; we see them as problems and patch them up with ideas. Yet there is an intensity of emotions we are not able to address.” Mendenhall’s work with communities in Illinois includes community wellbeing centres like those in Compassionate Care Frome, plus business incubators, career roadmaps and personal financial advice. 

When not kicking ass, Medenhall dabbles in poetry. Jotting down some rhymes has sort-of neuroscientific healing properties according to the summit’s Dr Laura Calderón de la Barca: “It’s using imagination as a container for healing. Beyond words alone, elements from the future and the past can meet.” Careful or I shall be forced to publish my Burroughs-style cut-ups.

Once and future Albion

Integration

Is this actually it? Builded here? Amongst the mills?

Jeremy Deller’s 2022 cover for The New Statesman magazine’s ‘A Dream of Britain’ issue guest edited by actor Michael Sheen

“It’s a hopeful, optimistic interpretation… blended, dynamic, fantastical,” says British artist Jeremy Deller of his vivid cartographic A Dream of Britain pictured above. 

The vibrant painting of the United Kingdom closed the British Museum’s smash Stonehenge show of spring/summer 2022. Deller is colourblind so sees it differently to you and I. This he says reflects a national identity that is forever intersubjective, and in flux.

In issue one of the Vital Student Zine I pulled out Albion Dreaming Andy Roberts’ history of psychedelic Britain. “From the Sixties onwards sections of the counter culture used the term Albion to refer to their vision of a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD” he says of the romantic goal gathering pace in pop culture.

All the big gun historians from Pliny the Elder, through Marinus of Tyre, to Geoffrey of Monmouth cite Albion as the original name for these sceptred (in a non-dual way) isles. The legend is kick-ass. First, the original King of Syria, or a King of somewhere in Greece maybe, had 43 (or possibly 33) illegitimate daughters who all got married on the same day, killed their husbands on the same night, and fled right here. Where there were no men. So they had it off with incubi – the male equivalent of a saucy ‘succubus’ sex demon – and produced a race of giants. The sisters named the place after their alpha female, Alba.

William Blake’s ‘The Dance of Albion'

In the sequel, beleaguered Brutus of Troy is fleeing his eponymous horse fiasco when the freaking goddess Diana appears and tells him to voyage beyond Gaul to “raise a second Troy”. There were only 24 giants left by then including the fearsome Gogmagog, who got chucked off the white cliffs of Dover. That’s my GoT-style swashbuckling version with apols to Geoffrey of Monmouth and the crew.

“To the counter culture Albion refers to a land, society and individual consciousness based on the insights offered by LSD”

Any sort of ‘New Albion’ got off to an auspicious start after Sir Francis Drake used it as the first name for California upon landing in 1579. Since then it’s had further ups and downs. The Esoteric saint, the poet and painter William Blake named Albion the primeval titan from which his four aspects of man sprang, and pictured it as a giant wearing nothing but a broad grin against a rural Utopian background featuring splashes of pastel colour… apropos of nothing. Blake implores Albion when in need of a term to idealise Britain: his Vision of the Daughters of Albion is a feminist protest poem influenced by his friend and collaborator Mary Wolstencraft Shelley, while he cries “does this thing happen on Albion’s shores?” in Little Boy Lost, an ode against child cruelty. The English cricket, rugby, and Commonwealth Games athletic teams all use Blake’s proto-socialist hymn Jerusalem instead of the official national anthem.

Pete Doherty’s Margate HQ The Albion Rooms

Shadow side ‘Perfidious Albion’ was a term invented by French bishops to bemoan England’s Dark Ages clerical set-up. Later, French Revolutionaries assumed support from the country that toppled its monarchy and installed a puppet aristocracy a century previous. When it didn’t come, the former miserables ran with the term propagandising an, erm, supposed track record of diplomatic betrayal, even bringing up the whole Joan of Arc thing again which everyone knows they were in on.

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone by Mark Sheeky

Two Roman Legionaries Discovering The God-King Albion Turned Into Stone is a 2008 painting by Mark Sheeky. He says, “It’s inspired by Brief Encounter, a film from 1949 that showed a Britain which no longer exists, a country and time so alien to the Britain of 2008 that it is difficult to believe that a place like that ever existed. I wanted to represent the end of that old Britain, so I chose the end of another era as the setting. Two foreigners, Roman legionaries, walk towards the edge of Britain in the grey rain. Through mud, to the grassy limit of the country, the top of the great white cliffs. As they reach the edge they discover a giant stone man standing in the sea, the once king Albion, now dead and grey and cracked. A statue preserved like a memory. A reminder of an ancient time now gone forever.”

Or has it? Under re-story-ation rules fiction can be considered as powerful as the imagined past, right? And in terms of syncronicitous relevance, the phrase Albion cropping up like this must be some sort of sign?

“I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist”

Here in C21 the Dionysus figure of our second Atlantis, musician Pete Doherty evokes Albion so strenuously that he’s opened a hotel in Margate (it’s like Portland crossed with Oakland, by the sea) called The Albion Rooms. ‘Reebok classics, and canons at dawn; terrible warlords, good warlords, and an English song” goes his band Babyshambles’ gentle rabble-rouser Down in Albion. “I’m not an activist, I’m a fantasist. Inverted snobbery is just as dangerous as snobbery itself, you know – that pride in having nothing.”

By Erwin Wurm at Albion Fields sculpture park

Over at the other end of the quantum funnel from this grass-roots desire for a new national identity lies Albion Fields sculpture park, open till end of October 2022. It’s an outdoor exhibition free to anyone but to which nonetheless ‘the glitterati are flocking’ according to Tatler magazine. 

The woodland’s owner (in fact it was planted at his birth) is Michael Hue-Williams, an art dealer who first showed Ai Weiwei in the UK and represents generation-defining photographer Nick Knight. He says, ‘Walking through these beautiful grounds during lockdown, I realised I have a unique opportunity to share the experience.’ Perhaps reciprocity can exist at all levels. Once and future.