Mesolithic me, Anthropocene I
Play is child's work, and the world needs us all to be more childlike right now.
This piece is a contribution to the STSC Symposium, a monthly set-theme collaboration between STSC writers. The topic for this upcoming issue is “Beach.”
The waves are crashing around my hips. The Gulf Stream keeps this bay ice free at this time of year, but not my toes and ankles. The solstice is nearly upon us. That time of year when a Mesolithic me would have stood waist deep in these waters gearing up for a festival, feeling its importance deeply, knowing what it meant.
Whereas we sit around our campfires (if we even do that) and think about it’s importance, to them, to humans at some other point in time; a Mesolithic me maybe. Or potentially a people from a time that is just about in our grasp culturally but not practically, a state of mind that is orthogonal to our contemporary one yet close enough to still glimpse the intersection of, a pre-enclosure Neolithic us if you will, before hedgerows at right angles separated us from the land.
Or, we imagine, if we are being fanciful, that it is somehow important to us. But sat around those flames there are no real answers in any of those thoughts only more questions and the suspicion that we are only “playing” at solstice whatever solstice is anyway.
I’m caught thinking about thinking about the solstice by the cold Atlantic as the water of another wave spreads across my pink puckered skin, slowly seeping between the crevices that lie between fat white goosebumps, a fractal delta pattern in miniature. The biting cold brings me back out of my head and I remember that I don’t know what solstice means. I’m in deep here, not the water, but metaphorically. Standing here in the breakers, in the cold, in just my bones as my skin feels like it has shivered itself away into the dark night, even here in my primal suit of 256 I am still all up in my cranial few, stuck in my head. Thinking about thinking, thinking about what it must have felt to be able to feel the cold water like I am right now and to be able to focus - No, not focus that is a metaphor too much of mind - to just be in that feeling alone and not the thoughts that feelings bring up.
As a slightly larger wave hits me above the shortline I long for the shoreline but I am tethered like the fishing boat bobbing hundreds of yards away further down the bay. The long left arm of thinking human standing Ent like in the waves conjoined to the shorter right arm of feeling human, adult and child stood in the waves, solstice thinker and solstice thinker to be.
She pulls on my hand, the syncopation of three small waves indicates the crashing cymbal of a big wave is about to land. She’s well inside the rhythm of the surf by now and like a jazz trumpeter gearing up for their solo she is itching to lean into it. We hop further out into the foaming white and let the big booming bass of the wave wash over us. We’ve been at this for hours. Sometimes we pause and stand still taking stock of our surroundings. To our left is the impressive rock that sits in the middle of the bay, a remnant of a long gone cliff face that Mesolithic me might have once walked across. Now it is cut off and lonely, left alone to be surrounded by the water on the beach.
Behind us the last of the dog walkers is heading off the beach leaving us to a similar fate. To our right are the bobbing boats down by the jetty, bouncing around in the high tide, the waves lapping at the blue painted waterline. Stand still in this water long enough and you too have a waterline.
The waistband of my shorts separates my cold adapted legs from my air chilled chest that can’t take the icy droplets. So sometimes, as a reprieve, we run up onto the soft sand, towel ourselves off quickly and sprint back into the water, laughing as we splash the water above this waterline. She pulls me back into the moment with her energy time after time. Out of my thoughts and into my feelings.
Not long after we came down to this beach, when there was still a little light, and people walking by in coats commended us as we stripped down to our shorts, I raced a labrador into the water to fetch their tennis ball. She is like that faithful hound, boundless with energy, but every time I think she has had enough she surprises me and comes back for more. Every passing hour we stick at this Wim Hof torture I find as surprising as I found it to come up out of the water to see that my flailing doggypaddle had led me to claim my floating green furry prize first.
We’re a few hours in now and she needs to slow down. Her Dutch heritage takes hold and she starts making a dyke a few metres from where the waves are lapping. It reminds me of my childhood seaside summer trips when I would also hang out in the liminal space of the beach, the wet mud between the sea and the soft sand supporting sunbathers in sarongs. The water never called me further. When we were at school we had to don our pyjamas and swim a length, my skin crawls now thinking about the long white wand the swimming instructor paced alongside with, offering it to the flailing arms of submerged me at what seemed like the last possible moment.
Now her English heritage is kicking in. The infrastructure is crumbling. The tide has run up the beach; the walls have been breached. She embraces her Englishness, there are no complaints from her about the decaying state of the dams. She changes gears, the water must be contained now. She moves from dyke to polder and I watch her go about her busy work totally lost to the world.
I am sat up the beach from her wrapped in my towel watching her entwined hands digging frantically and thinking back to my sandcastle days. When I was her age I was a voracious reader of Horrible Histories so I knew that the 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, whilst playing cards and not wanting to leave the table, invented the food that would become the hurried midday diet of the office worker when he asked for slices of roast beef to be placed between two pieces of bread.
However, once a year, I would doubt this story as I wondered, do I really need the sustenance of ham and bread and butter my mother was presenting me. Was it really worth the grittiness and crunch provided not by iceberg lettuce but thousands of years of weathering of igneous rocks? The etymology doubted, I would pronounce this to the family and after my sandywich I would carry on my day in the no man’s land of the sandcastle builders.
The tide has picked up pace. The dyke has gone, the polders have been swamped and paddling in an ever expanding lagoon she has no choice but to abandon her engineering. So instead she hauls me back down the beach. With the waves down at our feet I wave up at the cliff face. The balcony of the house we are renting is visible, the light is on and the silhouettes of cousins, uncles and grandparents are looking down at us still as statues.
We might as well be in the Mesolithic now, down here in the elemental wild just beyond the civic order of above. The beach is pitch dark, the house is full of light. We are supple, lithe and warm with aliveness in this cold, feeling the elements, embracing being in their midst, as we wave up at them. They look cold, coat clad, heads hatted, and backlit by the electricity of the Anthropocene. They keeping passing through the threshold of the double glazing into the warmth, I assume to get away from December itself. Down here there is no December, just winter cold.
I point them out to her and we hold hands and wave up at them, but when they don’t wave back we decide they probably can’t see us in this dark and run back into the waves. I am tethered again. Not just to her, but to the Anthropocene, to this time and place that I am from, where thinking me feels most at home. I am physically on the beach but psychically a part of me is already warming by the fire with a rioja sliding over my tongue with the resonance of Schumann, not pulsing through the soles of my feet, but tinkling on the radio in the background.
I’m reminded that my knowledge of solstice is not experiential and can never be, it is always mediated by a mind that grew not on the trees of the woods but the trees of Horrible Histories, by a tongue that concerned itself less with tasting the sand and the ham, but twisting out words that twisted etymology, a tongue of the mind not the senses. But she is still a child of the Mesolithic; wild, elemental and engorged on being engrossed.
There’s nothing wrong with being a human being full of thoughts, furthermore the Mesolithic me would have been no less of a thinker than Anthropocene I. But I know that I know nothing of the Winter solstice beyond the science of the earth’s rotation and shortening days, and I doubt that many of those who are gearing up to traipse around Stonehenge do too. But there was a time when people laid those stones down and knew why. Felt it in their bones and shared it in their culture, practiced it over and over, year after year.
This reflection of the Anthropocene I that we have all become is not one on climate change but on deep and meaningful play. But maybe there is a metaphor in here that relates the two. I am reading Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything right now and have recently got to a section that speculates that we have got “stuck” in this Neolithic way since farming became agriculture. They argue that our understanding of history needs to be revised as the first few thousand years of humans farming was not what we now consider agriculture to be but more akin to “play farming”.
John Vervaeke proposes that there are four ways of knowing: propositional (knowing about things), procedural (knowing how to do things), perspectival (how to perceive the world), and participatory (how to relate to the world). Down on that beach I realised it was not that I didn’t have a perspectival or participatory grip on knowing the solstice, but on the beach as well, until now. Because the child of the Mesolithic lives in that space of participation, the space of play, and I had never played on the beach like that before.
John Vervaeke also thinks a severe problem with contemporary society is that as adults, as a culture, we have forgotten how to play; how to do the deep play of ritual that all healthy cultures make space for adults to do.
But I would argue also we also need more of the shallow play, the playing around in the shallows with the children, and here again, I am not talking about the water, but metaphorically. We can learn so much from children if we just stop and let them take our hands and like a riptide drag us out into the waters of playing, taking us out of our heads, away from propositional knowledge of the solstice and into the participatory knowledge of just being in the deep midwinter cold laughing and smiling.
We need to be dunked by children and come up coughing and spluttering. It’s important work being a thinking adult, but we also need to be baptised by them regularly, washing away some of that periodically. Maybe this is about climate change. And all our other crises. Maybe we don’t need children to solve our contemporary crises, but adults1 who are willing to be dunked by them and come up wet, soaking, cold and humble. Humble enough to realise that we can play our way out, childlike. Deeply playful and yet deeply serious.
I believe that the solutions to the global are local, and the solutions to the local must be playful; convivial if you will.2 Maybe “play farming” is one of those solutions and what we need again. Permaculture is radical and playful gardening. And self-directed education is a radical political act; unschooling is radical and playful child rearing.
As for me, I think I’m quite good at all this relatively. It’s what I do for a job. But it’s a hard job for any contemporary adult, even one given enough time to explore and experiment with it at work. As an example, last week I got paid to play running games (variations on tag) with children. Furthermore, I thought it would be fun to invent a running game that was cooperative and team based. So I did. But I did it with a pen and paper at a desk, and then brought it back to the group. Procedurally. No child would ever invent a game like that, they would do it in the moment, participating in the process of creation.
We spent a few hours on the beach that night. The coat clad relatives on the balcony disappeared eventually and we stayed out for a while longer. Eventually the cold was too much, running against the force of the waves too tiring and we called it a night. Walking back up the stairs and along the promenade we came across her mum and her grandma walking towards us with spare towels in gloved hands.
You two were ages, we were so worried. What were you doing? What were you thinking?
About the solstice I thought, about the waves, the boats and the Mesolithic. About play and about coming back to this beach so she can teach me all she was born into this world knowing already: how to participate fully as a creature of the moment.
But we don’t have much time I thought, she just took one step closer to becoming solstice thinker to be as you asked her that question, and she thought, I was meant to be thinking? I thought I was meant to be feeling?
A colleague of mine went to an event organised by youth activists and was blown by how mature they are and on point. But to me it sounded like they had the playful down too. Maturity might just be the ability to play with seriousness; to have seen enough of the world to know that in the end it all comes down to play. And it is no surprise that it is the youth who might have the answers, they potentially have a foot in both camps, living as both thinker and thinker to be, with the wild imagination of potentiality that the playful mind still holds as possible.
This is the first of my essays that references Illich, but he is everywhere across this substack lurking in the shadows at every turn.
"I believe that the solutions to the global are local, and the solutions to the local must be playful; convivial if you will." Print that for my wall.
"Maturity might just be the ability to play with seriousness"
This is something that's always made me comfortable as an artist. Is actually one reason I've never really suffered the artist vs. client thing other artists complain about ("the client doesn't know what they want" "the client doesn't let me do what I know is right" etc). Dealing with a client is procedural, not playful. But you play up to the point that the client stops playing with you, and exactly at that point you shrug and just execute procedure. The more playful the client the better of course, but artists take it too personally when they stop playing. On the flip side, I'm lucky enough to have avoided that many procedural only, non-playful clients. This is largely because if there's no play available, I just tell 'em how to do it themselves. There's always a template, literally, that does just what they want.
This was a beautiful meditation infused with an awareness of time in so many ways, on the nature of man as a species, and as a family man in the current age, on the nature of our age relative to things like childlike play, the seasons, sense memory. A gentle reminder to sometimes get out of our own headspace and get into the water and splash around while we can.