Crossposting from Reddit r/GreenandPleasant:
There was a post earlier on this sub today about how Reform UK are gonna win because of the obsession the people of this island with nostalgia, and I thought it raised a very good point and to which i replied, “then let’s create a different version of the past… the *real* histories… better histories…nostalgia for the future we want…because time is not linear and we can project the future we want into the past…history is not static… lets tell *those* stories!”
I do think we need to know where and what we have come through as an island and remember the right stories which serve this island. I don’t think nostalgia is necessarily a bad thing and it can be a strength for our peoples if directed appropriately with the right stories. Building on that, I want to share a story from this island’s history we could share, remember and feel nostalgic about. I am also only just learning and remembering, so just sharing my process here as I do that…Please feel free to add what else you remember of this story…or any other story from our wonderful island’s past…let’s not give liberals and rightwingers control over the stories of this healing island…because they only tell partial, surreptitious and fake stories…we belong here more than they ever can…
So here’s a true story you can remember in your bodies as I tell it…
Now remember in the past a lot of this island was covered by woods and this was a good thing because there were lots of creatures in the woods, and common people like the woods and knew the woods had magic powers and worshipped them. But obviously this scared the clergy and kings and feudal lords and aristocrats because the more people connected to the woods and realised their power the less they would feel fear of the Monarch and the Church, the Monarch-Church entered alliance post-Henry VIII started cutting the woods off and killing the creatures in them at a wider and wider scale…and fencing the lands and preventing the people from using the Commons in the name of “improvement” (later termed “development”). And they called it Enclosure as if they were protecting the beautiful people of this island from those wild creatures of the woods, but actually they were trying to take away the beauty and power of this wonderful island and its peoples and turn it into a curse.
Now of course, the true peoples of this island who we descend from, the so-called ‘Commoners’ were not stupid and they were well-aware of this aristocratic-church trick, and they tried to fight this attempt at cursing us. Maybe some of you remember some of these peoples already…they were the Levellers and the Diggers from the Commonwealth era in the 1600s, and apparently they had a lot of socialist principles, but alongside them, there emerged this little known group called the Ranters. Now “Ranter” was actually a slur thrown at this group who preferred to call themselves “The Mad Crew.” At a time when monarch-clergy-aristocracy-and-the-rising-middle-class-with-aristocratic-ambitions-like-Cromwell were destroying the woods, grabbing lands, and enclosing the commons and fighting foreign wars and doing colonial expansion, The Mad Crew was rising all across England and Wales, connecting, gathering in communities, and taking back the commons, planting the lands where trees were being destroyed….what a glorious time it was! They even established their own communes, asserting that the land did not belong to kings or aristocrats or clergy or aristocratic-wannabes…they said they were the guardians of the lands and the woods, and theyll decry any monarchic or church authorities, because fuck them those lords and ladies call themselves “stewards” but they don’t care for the land, they only extract what they can get from it, they are not in good relationship with the land. They also wrote a pamphlet about this called “A Justification of the Mad Crew.” They had such a glorious vision, wow! I feel nostalgic just thinking about it…
The Mad Crew weren’t just typical socialists either…they didn’t wanna just exploit land for all human peoples, no…they understood that society was not just “human”, it was made of good human-and-unhuman, more-than-human relationships… If this vision were brought into fulfillment it would destroy the very idea of Empire and control…that’s how gloriously our ancestors on this island have thought about our futures!…wow!….so of course they called themselves “Mad”…because they were so angry at was happening with the destruction of the relationships between humans and woods and the bogs…but also because their vision of reality was so radically different from the Parliament, the Church, the Aristocracy and associated wannabes…that it just didn’t compute in the latter’s world!
The Mad Crew didn’t simply oppose the Kings, Clergy, Parliament, and their false stories of this island….they worked tangential to them… they weren’t with them, they weren’t against them, they were on a completely different plane of reality! They were antinomians and rejected the very notion of obedience. Wow!
The Mad Crew believed that the divine is in every creature, including themselves. And without this connection with the more-than-human, which was essentially a connection with the woods, the rivers, the bogs, the fells, the seas, the hills for them…without this wonderful deep connection no society would sustain. So, they rejected the Church, which asked them to be in closed buildings, read disconnected books, and be away from this real land connections (and ‘land’ here includes everything….water, soil, air, sky, birds, fish, flowers, plants, trees…seas…all Creation!)…
Unlike the Church which glorified misery, The Mad Crew also believed that pleasure and joy was a good thing…they openly shared meat, drink, pleasures, and sexuality….they were curious and gender-bending as well as sexually explorative…believing that our purpose here is to be and enjoy every aspect of life and that the land offers…including food, pleasure, sickness, health…and all the emotions…pain and darkness…they are all here to tell us a wonderful story if we listen to it…because as island people we are all part of these landseas, and we shall have more authority from the land which is the most ancient of all than any human institutions…so they were all very queer…
Yet, The Mad Crew had the most tradition and had the least radical ideas because they went really far back to derive authority and lineage of the realest of the real, which is this island itself! and not from any human institutions. But of course you-know-who with bad agendas and lust for power slurred The Mad Crew and called them ‘radical’ to undermine their power and authority. You-Know-Who also made The Mad Crew pamphlets and sharing stories about them illegal so that we would forget. Later they also burnt many children of The Mad Crew as “witches” (which included both men and women), all in an attempt to make us forget our real history and destroy and manipulate our memories. But you remember now and you still remember…Because stories are not just written in books and media…they live in the land, and by extension, in our bodies….because we are only of the land… we born from the land, go back into the land….water cycle, food cycle, carbon cycle…the tides…it’s all our stories remembered in the land and given back to us when the time is right…
so what do you think? is the time right for you now to remember the true stories of this island? If yes, please do share more here in the comments and on this sub generally…let’s remember together and get nostalgic for the real pasts of this wonderful island and break the curse those fascist and liberal fakers are trying to put on us again…
Remember to build on each others’ stories rather than rejecting or criticising them outright…because each one of us has a valuable unconscious memory…and an important part in the story…and it is only together that we create a whole!
Thanks! 🙂
PS. sorry i didnt really tell the brethren of the free spirit story, post got too long ^^’ story for another day maybe? if there is interest…
