‘Sometimes, it is necessary to return to the body, to emotion, or to the still waters of the deep psyche, in order to remember what it means to be human. The world of words is often a kind of trance-state – it can separate us from the immediacy and texture of physical reality; it can draw us into haste, urgency and compulsion; and it is only when we actually try to step away from it that we realise how difficult it is to do so.
This is why, alongside the words and images and ideas, Dark Mountain has always valued the physical and the immediate, whether in craft, in live performance, or in the emphasis on face-to-face meetings at festivals and gatherings. It is why we have run scything, singing, running and ‘Human Rewilding’ workshops at those events, giving word-weary participants the chance to reconnect with breath and body. Perhaps it is also one reason why we have touched tentatively on the topic of the sacred in our publications – because, for uncivilised humans, that notion too is not separate from the unified experience of presence, connection, and physicality.’
– Introduction to Dark Mountain’s ‘Becoming Human’ series, Steve Wheeler
Since the birth of Dark Mountain in 2010, contributors, and especially artists, have broken out of the studio confines to become the work themselves, using their bodies as an intervention against the ‘trance-state’ of civilisation. In times of abstraction and disconnection, as our attention is pulled away from the realities we inhabit and towards ethereal spaces untethered to geography, remembering our earthly bodies is a way to reconnect with the physicality of the living world.
Our next spring anthology will explore bodies in all their forms – animal, plant, bacterial, planetary, cosmological and symbolic – as well as questioning the boundaries modern culture puts between them. The more we learn of complexity, the less the concept of a single body, as an atomised unit, makes sense: on a microscopic scale, our systems are hosts to colonies of organisms that affect our physical and mental health; zooming out, we are all entwined in the movements of wheeling planets. Where does a ‘body’ start and end? What are the kinships between them? How, in these ungrounded times, do we relearn what it means to be protean and oracular, to shapeshift, to become an animal presence in the landscape again – to become re-embodied?
Where does a ‘body’ start and end? What are the kinships between them?
The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty posits that the body presents an array of possibilities for engagement and action. His notion of a ‘body schema’ offers an alternative to perceiving the body as a boundaried, individual thing, and can be applied to ecological thinking.
On a geological level we know that the land was once alive – limestone, chalk and other rocks are formed from the bodies of billions of prehistoric sea creatures, and soil from the decomposed matter of plants and animals. This acknowledgement of animacy, never forgotten by some traditional and Indigenous cultures, is reflected in the language we use to describe features in the landscape: headlands, the feet of mountains, glaciers that calve and have toes and tongues, and of course in bodies of water and bodies of land. Enlightenment thinkers might have understood the universe as mechanical, but in recent decades the concept of Gaia has returned many in the West to an understanding of our planet as a single bodily system.
Bodies are also sites of extraction: from the animal bodies that are consumed, and the plant bodies selectively bred, to the human bodies on whose exploitation our economy depends. The writer Sophie Strand draws connections in her work between bodily and planetary health, and examines what happens when human bodies do not function as expected. What of bodies that become sick, are differently abled or neurodivergent?
In Dark Mountain: Issue 21, she talks about her own state of collapse that not only mirrors the world falling apart, but also offers opportunities for mycelial connections that arise when the ideas of perfection and purity are abandoned:
Instead of thinking we are always failing, narratively and physically, what would it mean to recontextualise these wounds as portals? Instead of problematising that incompleteness, that liminality, I’ve tried to think of it in terms of process philosophy, so I am a doorway which matter flows through, and my experiences have opened that door wider. Instead of trying to close it all the time and enter back into a legibility culturally, what if I open that ‘door’ wider and open it so that I can be in service to the general aliveness and not to my particular aliveness?
We’d like to see thoughts that move our ideas of bodies into uncharted territory: how they cope with heat, cold, humidity and change. In what ways are bodies ecosystems, microclimates, engines and dynamos, compost? Can acknowledgement of the cycles of life create an acceptance of rot and death, leading to a stronger connection with the physical world?
Can acknowledgement of the cycles of life create an acceptance of rot and death, leading to a stronger connection with the physical world?
Concerning human bodies, Walt Whitman asked of the Earth this question:
Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where is the writing and art that might help us make ourselves a worthy compost? How can new ideas of bodies help us become part of this planetary chemistry, that illuminates the entanglements, challenges and delights of embodiment; that conceives of a permeable ‘bodymind’ in flux?
Most importantly, we are looking for work that is not dense with theory – what Steve Wheeler calls ‘word-weary’ – but rooted in experience, exploring what it means to be human and alive on the Earth. We are interested in narratives and testimonies about what takes place when we resist forcing our bodies and those of fellow animals into the shapes an industrial civilisation desires, when we stop treating ourselves as machines or objects, controlled by the 24/7 clock, distracted in our minds by illusion or manufactured fears. Stories about the kinds of interactive creatures we can then become, the kinships and different intelligences we can enjoy. How, by liberating our human bodies, our hearts, our voices, we can hold fast against the abstract, ideological determinism that dismisses Earthly life in all its diversity and beauty.
We are interested in submissions of non-fiction, fiction, artwork, photo essays, portraits, interviews, testimonies – as well as contributions that might not fit any of those categories. Please note we are not soliciting poetry for this issue. As with all our anthologies, do read the Manifesto for an idea of the uncivilised writing and art we might be seeking.
We look forward to seeing what you send us between now and November.
Dark Mountain: Issue 27 will be published on 15th April 2025. The deadline for submissions is Friday 15th November. For details on what and how to submit, please read our submissions guidelines and fill in the online form. Thanks! We cannot read or respond to work that does not fit within these guidelines.
