The Burn

Where did 'The Burn' come from?

I have, at times, struggled with my mental health. How can it be otherwise? And to those who haven't, I ask why? Or how? Or maybe just wtf, in astonishment? Inside us there is an exquisite stillness, a deep centre of calm that reaches to every corner of the universe and if you had to bring just one clumsy word to it, the best you could hope for would be 'love', or perhaps 'god', or maybe just 'mmm'. It's there, though it's not always easily reached, found, or kept hold of for very long. That's why meditation is 'a practice' rather than a thing you do and then it's done.

There is some solace to knowing that deep down in the heart of our selves we are not the stories that civilisation has told us we are, often from a lectern, or a pulpit, or through the television, or in constitutions or laws or 'the market'. These stories have been authored as a wiki by the least of us, those who sought wealth and power and sowed division to accumulate comfort and luxury, but they've been internalised by us all, even the most disenfranchised and marginalised of us.

A Canadian friend visited me in England and was astounded by how many big houses there were - mansions, castles, stately homes, big farm houses, converted stables, churches. We pulled into the carpark of Durdle Door, a spectacular coastal feature comprising a promontory that juts out from the mainland into the sea and has a fantastic great archway hollowed out of it. We fancied a swim and maybe a daring climb and dive. We were greeted by a parking attendant in a high-vis vest who asked us if we wanted to park, which of course we did. How much, I asked. 30 quid. Holy moly. We were in the campervan, which is mahoosive, but still, that's insane. The attendant, sensing my alarm, added that it also gave access to the delightful pirate cove a few miles up the road - two for one. Still 15 quid per carpark. I told the man we'd look elsewhere and then, curious to learn more about the extortionate parking culture of the South West, I asked him where that money went? To the council?

'Oh no, it goes to the old chap in the manor. Been here a long time. Good lad - we see him out and about sometimes and he'll shake your hand if you met him in the pub.'

My friend bristled. I felt it. We had driven past a stately pile on the way there and took the liberty of a vehicular trespass to explore the grounds in defiance of the walls erected around it. But the man he was talking about lived on a 12,500 acre estate and owned both Durdle Door and the pirate cove. His story and the story of ownership and wealth are not uncommon in England, go something like this:

Day zero - 1066, the Norman conquest. So weird that the story of our nation so often starts with this defeat. If you were good mates with William and you conquered well, you were given lands and property. The previous resident was turfed out and executed. Centuries later, a government composed entirely of landed gentry passed Bills of Enclosure that allowed the land-owners to legally kick commoners off the surrounding land, enclose it with fences, walls and hedgerows, turn a system of permaculture into a monocrop and turn the impoverished and landless commoners into 'the working class', forced to tend the land for wages in order to pay rent to the lord. Building on the success of this internal colonisation, the wealthy elite reached out beyond the borders to recklessly destroy indigenous culture wherever they found it, decimating forests for monocrops and harvesting it all with slaves kidnapped in their millions and worked to death. How could any decent human go along with this? The pope helped assuage concerns by issuing a papal decree that clearly stated that Black Africans have no souls and, like mules and oxen, could only redeem themselves to heaven through hard labour. The first slaves in the Caribbean were Scottish, Irish and English peasants, but when they got uppity and it looked like revolutions might fester, the Barbadian Slave Code was drafted, which, aside from being a handy guide for slave owners in how to effectively punish slaves and keep them from mobilising, also formalised white as a legal entity and set the foundation for the violent fiction of race. The restive white slaves were given total dominion over the black Africans, and a host of tropes and stereotypes were rolled out to give credence to a fiction of bestiality. The money poured in. As did sugar, tobacco, caffeine, all addictive substances that allowed the elite importers to match the unlimited slave-driven supply with an addictive worker-driven demand. Have you noticed that when you go into a petrol station, this is what you see everywhere - sugar in everything you can eat, a wall of tobacco, and coffee machines.

When slavery was abolished, the wealthy land-owners were compensated by the government for the loss of their property (slaves), which almost bankrupted England, the debts of which were still being paid off as late as 2015. All of the accumulated wealth was diluted among generations of children, but amplified by centuries of compound interest. It's quite likely that in the last fifty years, a property like this, vast, sprawling, bloated and costing a fortune to heat and maintain will have received tens of millions of pounds in English Heritage grants from - you guessed it - the government. This is to fix their crumbling roofs and insulate them because they are integral to our nation's identity and cannot be allowed to fall into ruin. Why can't they be reimagined as community enterprises? They're big enough to house a village, and the land around them could easily be recommoned regeneratively instead of being left as pointless sprawling lawns. The solutions to so many social and environmental challenges of the metacrisis are held back by ownership. Those who own are incapable of stewardship - centuries of exploitation has written the story of their specialness so deep into the culture that they can't even see the bleakness that stares back at them through their windows. Monoculture breeds lifelessness in the soil. Lawns do very little for wildlife and offer nothing to the people if they can't rest upon them. The Great British Parliament was originally formed by wealthy land-owners and they had the only votes. Centuries of democratisation have happened since; the owner of the estate in question serves as a Conservative MP.

My friend - the Canadian - bristled because he knew this history and was astonished that an attendant of one of the lord's carparks - most likely on the legal minimum wage or thereabouts - was characterising a man of such privilege, gained through an ancestry of such violence, by the manners he showed in the pub. He'd shake your hand and say hi. Nice chap. Surely in these post-modern or meta-modern times, this 'good lad' must have reckoned with the privilege of his birth and set about making some kind of reparation? Surely there were greater deeds to speak of than the doffing of a cap and a handshake?

We parked a hundred yards up the road and walked back to the carpark because my friend felt compelled to visit the info centre to see what stories were being told there. He made a beeline for the books that were on sale and flicked through the pages, searching for any gesture of accountability or reference to the more sordid aspects of the history behind the 30 quid car park. The narrative he found was both unsurprising and galling. Centuries of good lads and nice chaps, successful by dint of their virtue, industrious, bold in their entrepreneurship, occasionally 'in the right place at the right time' as fate and the church ordained, powerful and wealthy by merit, hard-won and well-deserved. England is plagued by a culture of class and wealth worship. The Englishman's home 'is his castle'. The bigger the castle, the more virtuous the man. It's a calculus of power couched in the myth of meritocracy, shrouded in the farce of a democracy with corruption tracing sinister lines through a forgotten history.

The solace that we find in the secret commonwealth of our inner worlds is under assault every time we step out into the reality of a world fraught with injustice, the narratives that define the conditions we live by more often than not written by the worst of us. The dominant narratives scream through us in tidal waves we can't control. I call this 'the burn'. Paul Kingsnorth calls it 'the machine'. Joanna Macy calls it 'the great unravelling'. Step one: feel it. Step two? Stay alert. If your defences are down or you haven't taken steps to educate yourself out of an education that told you nothing about who you are and where this all came from, the dogma of this culture will internalise and you might catch your silhouette applauding 'the good lads' of English heritage. If so, go back to step one. Feel the burn. Trust it.

Step three?