1. Read all of this out loud, please.
This will either be (I am told) the beginning or the end of the event
today. So could you do me a favour? Could you look up and tell the
folks listening to you, in front of you, one thing that you are
feeling grateful for? And could you leave a pause, so that they can
each turn to the person sat next to them, and they can tell each
other something they feel grateful for? An exchange of gratitude as
it were.
<pause>
So I don’t know if we’ve met before, but my name is Selina Thompson.
It’s really beautiful to be here with you all today, to share space
with you, in this way. I have been writing this provocation in bed.
Lying on my stomach, listening to music from the mobile phone game
‘Two Dots’. This is the fifth, or maybe the sixth draft.
I’m sort of inhabiting as a vessel for a time, the lovely person who
has been so brave as to read this for out to all of you, but mostly for
me.
Thank you, to you.
We are at another juncture where art and creativity can feel like a
move away from concrete change, rather than feeling like the vehicle
that should be driving it. I felt like this in 2014 when Ferguson
happened, and Michael Brown was shot by Darren Wilson. A lot of
other folks didn’t feel this way until Trump, or Brexit. For some it
was less of a lightning moment, and more of a slow grinding away
of hope and optimism.
A few months ago, I felt a deep fear and panic. Apocalypse, the end
of the world felt so near – and not in the way I had envisioned it.
All I could see was suffering.
Usually, when I feel like this, art making is what I turn to – but
I’m trying at the moment, with all my might, to not let art, my
job, fill up the space where personal growth could be. Solo,
autobiographical work, which I made for a very long time, fits
neatly into neoliberal models, and this can mean that I think
making art products to sell is the same as doing the work of

2. healing. But it isn’t. I sometimes think artists and creatives lean so
hard on using art and culture for change that we forget about what
can be achieved when we use the full breadth of our humanity, not
just our creativity.
I decided instead to turn to art as an audience member, rather than
as a creator – nothing reaffirms the purpose of art quite like
experiencing it when you are afraid – and During my search, I came
across a beautiful podcast about rocks.
Rocks!
Specifically, the work that geologists are currently doing trying to
define the Anthropocene. Or, in English, the work that scientists that
study rocks are trying to do to figure out if we as a species have
left or will leave enough of an impact on this planet – it’s climate,
its environment and most importantly, it’s rock formations - for us
to be considered one of the ‘ages’ of the earth.
The International Commission of Stratigraphy are a group of
scientists that watch over the earths 4.6-billion-year history. They
do the definitive thing that humans do, and create order out of
chaos. The podcast, published by the Guardian (of course!) described
them as ‘the custodians of the earth’s timeline’. I loved this. Made
them sound like a council of Gandalfs.
Back to the Anthropocene.
It is a surprisingly controversial topic.
Philip Gibbard, the secretary-general of ICS, said, and I quote:
“Few would deny we are in a period of climatic turmoil, but many
feel that, compared with some of the truly apocalyptic events of the
deep past – such as the period, 252m years ago, when temperatures
rose 10C and 96% of marine species died – the change so far has not
been especially severe. “Many geologists would say: it’s just a blip,”
A blip! It blew my mind somewhat. Xtinction rebellion were occupying
the streets of London and Generation Z were storming the UN. And
this man was describing all of this as ‘a blip’.

3. This is not uncontested, of course.
One geologist, Anthony Barnosky, argued that we have ‘scrambled
the biosphere’, removing species from their natural habitats and
releasing them into new ones, and making the natural world more
homogenous. The world’s most common vertebrae are the broiler chicken
(at any one time there are 23 billion of them alive) and they’re a
species that we created for us to eat.
We have built mines and roads and towns and cities; we have
created new materials and tools – a conservative estimate states
that everything humans have ever built and manufactured will weigh
30 trillion tonnes; and all of this, from our smart phones to our
ballpoint pens could leave a new type of ‘technofossil’ that the planet
has never had before.
We have also coated the earth with a fine dusting of radioactive
fallout, settled, the podcast said, ‘like icing sugar on a sponge
cake’. The earth will always hold a remnant of our compulsion to
self-destruction, whatever steps we may or may not take next.
Despite all of this, the Anthropocene – the time of humans – is
nothing more than “two centimetres of unconsolidated organic
matter”, and when compressed into rock after millions of years of
pressure, it may not even be that. In purely geological terms, our
entire existence as a species has been nothing more than an
instant,” The epoch prior to us, the Holocene, was 12 millennia long.
There is, many of the geologists argue, no compelling reason to
believe that we humans will ever be legible in the rock of this planet.
I found this oddly comforting.
There is something deeply compelling about the solidity of rock in
the face of Climate Catastrophe. Learning about the work of
geologists reminded me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians from
Slaughterhouse 5 ‘seeing all time as you might see a stretch of the
Rocky Mountains. All time is all time. It does not change. It does not
lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is’.

4. Everything I am reading about climate change suggests to me that
the path we are on is fixed, that we do not get to change oncoming
catastrophe; only that we get to decide how we are going to interact
with it. What do we want out 2 cm of unconsolidated organic matter
to say about us? If our species is to die out, how might we go with
grace? How do we wish to disappear from this glorious and ancient
planet, ancient beyond anything we can even conceive? How might we
earn our place back in the ecosystem, so that whoever sees our sliver
of rock views it with a wistful sigh, rather than a tut of disdain?
What might we learn from Climate Catastrophe from looking at it
like Tralfamadorians, accepting an end, and thinking about
different ways of getting there?
Recently, I heard a description of Brexit as being like ‘arguing over
the bar bill on the Titanic’. I wish I could remember who said this –
it’s a great and pithy take.
The Titanic feels like a rich way of thinking through ‘the end of
the world’. One of the most enduring tales of the Titanic’s demise is
that of the string quartet, that continued to play as the Titanic
sank. Music, and musicality is something unique to humans. There’s a
very specific combination of abilities that enables us to create and
experience music as we do, and so far, no other species is known to
have all of them. It is not hyperbole to say that music – in so many
ways, the purest of creative expression - is a defining human trait.
So what does it mean to keep playing music as the Titanic goes
down?
That decision. To see death. To accept it. In those dying moments to
reiterate once more the best and the most beautiful of what humanity
can be: that we can create things- ephemeral and delicate, lasting
only as long as it takes for vibrations to move through the air -
and to decide to share it, to bring comfort and to inspire. To be
completely in the moment. I keep coming back to it.
It doesn’t offer me an easy solution. But it does comfort me. It
grounds me in the present, and reminds me that I can think through
the how, as well as the what. That’s what I’d like to offer you today.
How.

5. I hope that you are all having and continue to have an excellent
day.
Sending Warmth, Strength, Softness and Solidarity -
S xxx