Jay Griffiths on the ecology of connection
How We Live Now with Katherine May:
Jay Griffiths on the ecology of connection
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Jay Griffiths’ writing has long explored the link between land, culture and our potential for connection, but her father’s death during lockdown made this more vital than ever. Denied the comfort or closure of a funeral, Jay had to find other ways to connect, mourn and memorialise, and in this gentle, wide-ranging conversation she and Katherine talk about imaginary journeys, ritual and delving into a sense of place.
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Listen to the Episode
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Katherine May:
Hi, I'm Katherine. Well, it really has been a much more mild winter so far than I was ever expecting. In many ways, I suppose there's a lot to be grateful for in that, what with the price of fuel this year. But on the other hand, there's something uncanny about a warm winter. It should bite. I don't know. Don't know whether or not it's an old wives' tale that more bugs go around when there isn't a hard winter to kill them off. It seems that way to me though. And of course people who grow parsnips will be upset because they do need a good frost. I remember that from my granddad.
But just in general, it's a disruption to the order of things as we know it. And I am craving more walks in the whitened wood at mid-winter. It's one of my favorite things of the year. But those days have been alarmingly scarce so far. Still I do keep coming back to my woods. And now at this time of year, all the ditches in the bleen are full again, where they're empty in the summer. It feels like they're much more alive. They're breathing, they smell good.
I wrote in my newsletter recently about the Welsh phrase, which I will not attempt in Welsh, returning to my trees, which means roughly regaining your sense of equilibrium, finding balance again, reaching a state of calm. That's why I returned to my trees over and over. They do that for me literally and metaphorically.
So I was really excited to interview Jay Griffiths for this season of how we live now, where we're focusing on the question of how we can come back together again. I wanted to talk to Jay because her work has so often circled these bigger questions of how we live, how we as a society live, and how we can compare ourselves to other groups. to see if there are other ways to approach things. But I also knew that she'd bring a different perspective to it as a storyteller, as a very intuitive soul, a deep thinker, an interconnected thinker, someone who makes connections between all of the broad aspects of this life. She's a bit of a writing hero of mine. So I do hope you'll love the conversation as much as I did. I'm off looking for what last mushrooms of the year I can find. I'll be back with you a little later.
Jay Griffiths is the author of a shelf full of era defining books including Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Kith, The Riddle of the Childscape and Tristimania, A Diary of Manic Depression. Her most recent book, Nemesis My Friend, explores the changing times we're living through. Jay, welcome to the podcast.
Jay Griffiths:
Thank you so much.
Katherine May:
I tried to give you quite the introduction 'cause I'm such a huge fan of your work.
Jay Griffiths:
That's really lovely. Aw, that's so nice.
Katherine May:
But actually, our governing question for this season is how can we come back together again? And although that's not necessarily the center of what you're writing about, you were one of the people who sprang to mind as someone who in a way is always talking about how humans can operate, how human culture works and how we are divided and how we are similar. Is that a fair assessment?
Jay Griffiths:
I think that's a great assessment, yes. In some ways it's that wherever you look in different cultures around the world and at different times in history is that you see the same needs. You see the same wishes.
But one of the greatest commonalities is the great commons of the natural world. And this is what makes modernity, or at least the dominant culture so weird. It's that everybody has always agreed that that is at the heart of the all, everything. And what the dominant culture has done is to say, "No, no, no, no, no, no. Nature's just a hobby. You might like climbing mountains, well that's just what you like doing." And I totally agree, climbing mountains is a hobby. It's one of my hobbies. But the whole of the natural world, this living breathing thing that gives life to everything, not just what is green, but everything in culture, everything. There is nothing that doesn't depend on the natural world. Nothing apart from obviously going to Mars and those who want to go to Mars. My personal feeling is they should pay for themselves a one way ticket and good luck to them.
Katherine May:
They're very welcome to Mars.
Jay Griffiths:
They're welcome to Mars. They rest of us, this precious place where we live. This is it. This is the glorious, beautiful it. So yes, I am interested in the deep commons of it all. And the commons, the human spirit, this thing that we also have in common, which again is so damaged and hurt by what passes for modernity, the dominant culture. And these things of course are connected as this is where the human spirit feels best and strongest and most vibrant is where it stands in relation to the green and wild world.
Katherine May:
A natural knowledge has almost become rarefied now. It's become a specialist subject. Whereas once it would've been ordinary to name the bird songs or to be able to identify the plants in the hedge, that would've been totally unremarkable.
Jay Griffiths:
And necessary.
Katherine May:
Yes. Well, yeah, necessary, unremarkable because it was the stuff of everyday life because it was part of how people lived. And so it would've been unimaginable not to have been able to name that stuff. But now it feels like the business of a separate class in this country almost. It feels like it belongs to a group of people and not to everybody I think.
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, yes. I think part of it is all the great work of the Right to Roam movement. And Nick Hayes spearheading literally writing a book of trespass about saying, "The land is what we hold in common." It belongs to all of us, even if in strict financial terms. The vast majority of the land belongs to a tiny number of people. But we need it. It's ours. This is the gym. This is the temple. This is what we need for psychological health, for physical health. And we are just given access to the tiny scrawny little paths. And even then they're so often closed.
Katherine May:
And you write a lot about indigenous knowledge and indigenous ways of being and how they're threatened. It feels as though we in the West are a very long way away from that knowledge and understanding now, certainly in the UK.
Jay Griffiths:
I think the thing is there's a real issue about this thing of being indigenous because on the one hand I feel really strongly that we all have a birthright to feel indigenous, not by race. This has nothing to do with blood, race, blood and soil. But we have a birthright because we're born human onto this earth, into this world. And there's a really nice expression, the indigenous human being, which I really like and support. And at the same time, there are really, really good reasons for saying that the laws that protect, that specifically outline, define and protect indigenous cultures within their own countries as being people whose land and languages have been stolen from them, whose culture has been undermined. That where there are places where these people, these societies have been given special protection, that is absolutely vital. But I think there's a strange sense of jealousy that I noticed, particularly after I wrote Wild, which was a lot to do with how indigenous cultures around the world see the commons of their own land.
There were some people who were just frankly racist and it was just what do indigenous people matter, which is vile. But it's like it's simple, it's vile and you throw out away. But there was also a strange jealousy by people who felt that they weren't indigenous but they wanted to be.
I find that really fascinating because I think it's a yearning and it's a yearning to be able to name the world, to know the world, as you say, to see in the hedgerows too. It's a yearning to understand the connections between things.
And those connections, they are the life on which we depend. Without insects, no us, it is that simple. But that sort of yearning for an indigenous identity, it's on the one hand, very problematic, and on the other hand, oddly quite sweet, because I think what it says is that people want to feel that they belong with no hindrance to the living world. And we do. And we do. But as soon as non-indigenous people start using the term indigenous Britons, you get very, very -
Katherine May:
It gets sticky very quickly.
Jay Griffiths:
You get dangerously close. It gets sticky as blood and soil very quickly. So it's something that we have to be ... It's a very problematic term. But the wish, what could be better than people saying, "I want to feel the earth, the sand, the ice, the leaves. I want to hear the birds. I want to be immersed," in whatever land it is that you love.
Katherine May:
That desire for connection is so strong. And I think I'm not sure how to put this in a way, but it seems to me that we are in a process of coming to terms with a loss that we've been sustaining over centuries now. And we are maybe finally realizing on a bigger scale that we've strayed so far away from that way of knowing, that way of being in the world. And that's hugely linked, for me, to colonialism because I think we spent a lot of time, I'm talking as a white British person here, defining ourselves against the people that had culture and that we found that rather silly and a bit weird and a bit like the word backwards used to, in my childhood, certainly the word backwards was definitely commonly used. And it's finally catching up with us not only how terribly oppressive and violent and awful those systems were, but also how culture less we feel and what a loss we sustained when we thought we were better than having this thing called culture.
Jay Griffiths:
I think that's really interesting. There's a whole side of the history of ideas which suggests that culture is opposed to nature.
Katherine May:
Yes, that's right.
Jay Griffiths:
So you've got this sense of societies that are land-based, earth-based societies that they are quote, "nature" and quotes, "We are quotes culture." I've got to stop using those quote marks. But you know what I mean.
Katherine May:
It's just so hard on a podcast, isn't it, to use quote marks.
Jay Griffiths:
I know. But the thing is, the word culture is actually related from cultus, which is to do with the cultivation of plants is that linguistically and historically culture and nature have always been intertwined. And it's also if you take nature out of culture, if you take all the bird song out of music, if you take all the animals out of literature, you take the wolf out of Wolf Hall, what you end up with is a couple of dreadful memoirs and a tax return. We have had nature entwined with culture absolutely at every single point. I think it's also interesting to say that one of the first ways in which the colonialism that you're talking about, I'm speaking from Wales, I'm part Welsh and I live here with absolute pleasure and delight. One of the things that's interesting is that in some of the earliest pieces of colonialism, when England took Wales as a colony, took Ireland as a colony, effectively treated Scotland as the colony, is that the culture that was embedded in the lands in the Celtic lands was just as deep, just as profound as the Roman and Greek cultures.
What the dominant societies then said was, "Oh, it's the Romans and the Greeks." And they made them into these enormous things that had to be taught and learned at school. And you had to master the difficult spelling. You had to know your Poseidon from your Permeus. But in fact, we had those gods. We had the gods of the Wales and the gods of the woods. We had that, but it was dismissed. I think also that I'm not somebody that is interested in saying that this is about the past versus the present. That's a very easy way to talk about it. And it's not really what I think. I think that there's a sense of the permanent connection that the human heart has with the natural world. It's like the permanent and enduring sense of shamanism, even in cultures which appear to have lost it, is that you take the human mind, lean it up against the earth and what do you get? Shamanism every time.
It didn't start in Siberia and spread like the religions of the book spread. It started right under our feet, interpreted by the mind, speaking through the birds and the bears and the eland and everything, everything, everything because everything speaks. And I think that in the context of connection, I think this is one of the most important things is that in that terrible pandemic and the way in which people felt often either so claustrophobic with just a tiny handful of other people or terribly, terribly alone.
I was definitely in the latter category. I was living on my own. It was a very, very hard time. But one of the things for myself and so many people is that when the human voices were forced to be a little bit quieter, what did we hear? We heard all the voices of nature. Audibly the bird song came back louder. People started noticing and caring and having time for the mindedness of nature. And in a sense, I think that that is a beautiful thing that's come out of lockdown is people's sense that yes, disconnected from each other as human beings, what so many of us did was we were first forced to and then welcomed that sense of this is the deep connection that's around us all the time. It's here. It's always here.
Katherine May:
We had be separate to feel that connection, but -
Jay Griffiths:
Yes. Separate to miss it and then to hear it.
Katherine May:
Yeah, to feel the pull of it almost. But you lost your dad during the lockdown and yours was one of those terrible funerals that were not possible to even attend.
Jay Griffiths:
It didn't happen. It didn't happen. There wasn't one.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And so you've long written about ritual and you talk about it in Nemesis as well, and you said, I wrote down the quote, but you said, "In lockdown there were a million missing rituals." And the sense that ritual had already slightly dried up before then anyway. What was your experience like first of all, of not being able to mark that hugely painful and monumental moment in your life?
Jay Griffiths:
It was really weird. It made death into not death, but disappearance. It was a really bad time. The one thing that I did do though, was that I decided that I would hold a funeral for one. And I went to the most beautiful little stream near me. And I took a candle. I picked a couple of flowers and I lit a joss stick when I was there. And I just sat and remembered all that I could that was the best of him. And all that deliberately or by mistake he taught me. And so I had a funeral for one. I lit the joss stick, so that showed the weaving of the air. I lit the candle that was fire, the flowers represented the earth and the stream was the water. And that's what you need. You need the elements. That's all you need really for ritual.
But I think that what it started me thinking of is that way that ritual has also become a privatized thing, it's that it belongs in a church or it belongs to the state, like the ritual of the queen's death, that it belongs to somebody other than yourself. And it made me feel for all its incredible simplicity, it made me feel a very lowly power, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But I made it up because what else was there to do? Made it up. And I think that the rituals that say, "I'm marking this moment," however apparently poor that ritual is no pomp, no ceremony, no other person. Even so it held its own as a ritual. And then also I think I have quite a soft spot for rituals. And I don't like the word. I don't like the word.
Katherine May:
I like the word soft spot. That's the one I was laughing about 'cause that's just such a lovely phrase. I've got a soft spot for rituals.
Jay Griffiths:
I have got a soft spot for rituals.
Katherine May:
Yeah, me too.
Jay Griffiths:
And I think the thing is that one of the things I find very interesting is that there are rituals, which people do at certain times of the day. The mornings are always more ritualized for, well always, I say, how do I know? But for most people, if they do things in a ritual way, in a patterned way, because you could say it's just habit. But I think that rituals are augmented habits that quite often it's the mornings when people will do the same things. They'll get up in the same way. They'll drink the same tea or coffee they'll shower. And especially women, their quote "beauty ritual" thing that it looks skin deep. I don't think it is. I think it's quite a transformative thing is that you go into the bathroom with your sleep face on and your very intimate face.
So it's just for you and the cat and whoever is in your household. And then you come out of the bathroom and it's like, there you are. You have your mask on if you use makeup. But it's even the things of brushing your hair and brushing your teeth and just getting ready is that you feel prepared afterwards when you weren't before. It's like, this is how you can start your day. Breakfast is usually the most ritualistic of meals. People vary their breakfast much less than they vary than other meals, for dinner.
Katherine May:
Yeah. And I've always felt very grateful in our culture that I have a permission to make myself anew every morning. I do put on makeup in the morning even when I'm working on my own from home, because it feels like a transformation into the day, into work and into grown-up ness almost. I feel like I'm playing, like I'm putting on my mom's high heel shoes almost. But yeah, it's actually meaningful.
Jay Griffiths:
It is. I do that generally. But what I also do is that if I've got a date with a lot of admin, I hate admin, we all do.
Katherine May:
We do.
Jay Griffiths:
But sometimes it just builds and builds and builds. And I look at it and I go, "Okay, I can't deal with this in my usual way, which is one quick hour in the afternoon and see how much I can do." So what I do is that I get my assistant to come in. My assistant is called Sincerely Sally. She can be there within three minutes of my asking her to come. It's amazing.
Katherine May:
Wow.
Jay Griffiths:
She is really efficient, friendly, helpful. She hasn't got a creative bone in her body, which is brilliant because I just want the admin.
Katherine May:
That's what you need.
Jay Griffiths:
Now the thing is, the reason why Sally, Sincerely Sally can be here so quickly is that all she does is she puts on one of my dresses, one of my pairs of boots, one of my jackets and red lipstick that I don't wear, but I do have in the cupboard. So obviously she's just a sub personality. But I like sub personalities. I think it's quite helpful. So that's a little ritual that creates in a different part of my writing self.
Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. Actually I do think we're craving -
Jay Griffiths:
Oh, she plays golf as well.
Katherine May:
Oh my goodness.
Jay Griffiths:
[inaudible 00:23:59].
Katherine May:
She's amazing. Can I borrow her?
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, you can. That's the beauty of her. She's just fantastic. Anybody can borrow her.
Katherine May:
I actually go somewhere else to do my admin. If I've got a load of admin to do, I take myself to the co-working space down the road and other people are busy there.
Jay Griffiths:
Very good.
Katherine May:
It makes me feel like I have to also concentrate.
Jay Griffiths:
That's very good.
Katherine May:
And I can't fiddle with anything.
Jay Griffiths:
I like that a lot.
Katherine May:
That's really good. But I think more generally about ritual that we're like it needed to be remade because we'd got to a place where our existing rituals had gone very stale and they were out of date and they were excessively formal. And they'd put us all off really from wanting to take part.
I've ended up writing about ritual a lot the last few years 'cause people keep asking me about it. And I've come to think of good ritual, useful ritual as something that's actually fairly neutral. It's a set of behaviors that you can invest whatever comes to you at that moment in. So you just bring the actions and you might even need to wait to see what feelings arise. We're so rushed all the time anyway, you might not even know what mood you come to the ritual in or what baggage you're carrying into it. But if you have a set of actions to carry out, then you are inviting the meaning in, the meaning makes itself. I think in the past we've imposed too much meaning onto the ritual. We've said, "You'll do this and it represents this and you will feel like this." That's what I remember from school. It is Easter and therefore you'll feel sad, et cetera, et cetera. But actually ritual's actually neutral. It's a container that we hold other things in.
Jay Griffiths:
I think that's perfectly put. I think it's perfectly put. I think it's also that there's a strange thing with rituals that sometimes it really is the oldest ones that have enormous profundity just because of their age. And at the same time, sometimes if you work out your own ritual for something, it's not that it gives it more meaning, but it gives the ritual a very specific sense of seeking to create a container for your own specific feelings and also for that specific day and the specific time. So I think creation of rituals is a beautiful thing to do.
Katherine May:
It's the seeking that matters almost. And I think we need to learn to seek out that space again, to make that even tiny bits of time. It doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be three hours with incense and multiple costume changes. It can just be a moment. Before I record my podcast, I always light a candle because I'm changing the space. I'm changing my mode and I'm saying, "It's important."
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, yes. It's a way of directing one's own mind, which is something that it seems really obvious that we all have a human mind and therefore have the right to direct it where we choose. But there's an odd way in a society which is dedicated to trying to get people's attention, so your attention is in effect up for grabs. It's for sale as an assault on the attention, which makes people, I think less practiced, not less able, but less practiced in mental sovereignty and mental sovereignty where you choose what you are going to think about. And then you think about it.
Where you choose what your attention is going to be directed towards. And it's not just about focus, it's not just attention like that, but it's about attending. It's about listening to certain things, but most of all, it's that you retain control over where it's going, what avenues it's stepping towards, rather than it being very passive and easily manipulated thing as it is on the Internet. Of course, I'm as prey to this as anybody.
Katherine May:
Oh, we all are, yeah.
Jay Griffiths:
It's this morning as it happens. You know what I'm going to say, don't you?
Katherine May:
Yeah, yeah. I know. We both jumped onto this completely just got taken away. Let's fix it.
Jay Griffiths:
But today is the day that the British -
Katherine May:
Our beloved Prime Minister.
Jay Griffiths:
[inaudible 00:28:44] Shortest serving Prime Minister ever resigned.
Katherine May:
She's going to be so pleased with that.
Jay Griffiths:
Obviously the signs were there. I know we were delighted. But of course, every right thinking person is, when I say right, I think correct not right [inaudible 00:28:59]. And in fact, most of them thought she should go as well, which is -
Katherine May:
Yep, they did.
Jay Griffiths:
So all morning, although I was directing my mind in certain ways, but I also was aware that it was being beguiled upon by my own curiosity and leaving various websites open on my computer.
Katherine May:
There was refreshing of screens happening in my house this morning.
Jay Griffiths:
I know. I know. I don't think I've ever refreshed something so much ever. But yeah, so it is not that I'm immune to that thing of being distracted. I'm very distract able, it's not that. It's just that I also think that the practice of directing and controlling your own mind and retaining mental sovereignty is vital.
Katherine May:
It's really important. This is a great moment to bring in Nemesis because it feels like she's a little bit in action today. Tell us about, maybe, I don't know, or is that hopeful? Tell us about Nemesis. Who is she and why is she really important?
Jay Griffiths:
Okay, here we are. The thing with Nemesis is that people always think that she's the goddess of vengeance, that she wants retribution, that she's cruel, that she's an enemy. And in fact, she's incredibly important in the widest sense of justice.
She's the goddess of Greek myth whose role is to give people what they are due. This is about justice, it's about balance. So she looks at people's actions and effects on others. And then she assesses the cost of it, and also where humans display an arrogance towards the gods, Nemesis steps in. She's often pictured as a beautiful woman with bold white wings. But what she ensured is that people had a balance of happiness and sadness, an equal measure of good luck and bad. It's interesting that one of the things that's so important about her that she sets limits. And this is an age which detests limits as the libertarian Tories have so appallingly demonstrated, that they think that the natural world will limitlessly give the ridiculous idea of endless financial growth, without limit. The thing about Nemesis is she said, "There are limits." When it comes to something like climate change and the ecological emergency is that this is a lesson of metaphysics and lesson of ethics taught in physics very directly. We kill the insects, we kill ourselves. We kill the bees, there is -
Katherine May:
Everything has a knock on effect.
Jay Griffiths:
Everything has a knock on effect. So we need her. We need this goddess of balance and limits and justice. So when I've titled the book Nemesis My Friend, that's why.
Katherine May:
And there's a sense in your book that Nemesis is maybe, I don't know, not in as much operation as we need her to be at the moment in some ways, that she's maybe a bit confounded by the trickster-ish nature of our contemporary politicians, that somehow that we are eluding her grasp a bit at the moment.
Jay Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. It's a funny one. I suppose what I'd say is, "It's just there. It's not that I believe in a god or a goddess of anything. I don't. But what it is that the principle. And the principle of limit is just there. The effects of crossing the line and of the numerous anti ecological transgressions for some people in the world, they are already here. They're already here. People are suffering terribly. It just doesn't happen to be all that many of people in wealthier countries. This is one of the devastating injustices of the whole climate change effect is that all people who are suffering from the limit breaking of the wealthy minority, the majority world is and will suffer. And it will come to all of us. The heat wave was a case in point. That was so interesting. That was clear, all the limits of temperature were absolutely breached. And I don't know about you, but my usual thing with sunshine is give me more.
Katherine May:
No, I'm the opposite. I'm always hiding from it.
Jay Griffiths:
I love sunshine. Oh, okay. Well I'm solar powered. I just love sunshine. But even for me is that those days were sinister. They were absolutely sinister because nothing felt right. Nothing felt okay, nothing.
Katherine May:
No. And still now, we're speaking at the end of October, the woods are still drier than I would expect them to be at this time of year. They don't smell right. They're not behaving in a way that I would normally expect them to. They do not feel okay.
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, yes.
Katherine May:
It's more than just those summer days.
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. Yes. There's a drought declared in Wales. It's a contradiction in terms, but there has been.
Katherine May:
It's extraordinary. One of the, I would love you to pronounce the Welsh word for me, is he heareth? Say it for me, for homesickness. Say it.
Jay Griffiths:
Hiraeth.
Katherine May:
Hiraeth. Okay. So you talk about this concept of hiraeth which is similar to homesickness or yearning for familiarity.
Jay Griffiths:
It is, but it's famously a word that translated into English in one word. It's similar to [foreign language 00:35:06] in Portuguese, which I hope I pronounced that right.
Katherine May:
Yes. I never know that one.
Jay Griffiths:
But what it is a longing and a yearning. It's for something that could be home as a place, but it's also got a feeling of the past. It's an ache. It's something also for something that might not be. It's a subtle longing and missing and yearning, which is like homesickness.
Katherine May:
And I think we are beginning to feel that very commonly now. I think that word might explain some of what we're experiencing as a whole society, this sense of home being suddenly elusive. And we are not sure if it's gone forever or not right now.
Jay Griffiths:
Well, some of it honestly, sometimes it makes me so angry the way, the right to have a home. Every animal has a right to a home and a hare, a rabbit, a badger, a squirrel, a bird. And so do humans. Our animal bodies need homes. It's in the Human Rights Act. The right to home is in the Human Rights Act. And yet we've got a situation in Britain, which just makes me cry with anger, where people have second homes, third homes, fourth homes, where a house becomes a property and it's something which is an investment. And then you've got the huge number of properties ... I said it myself. Houses, homes.
Katherine May:
Properties, yeah.
Jay Griffiths:
In central London that are basically dead. They've been bought, swallowed up as investments, so-called opportunities. And people are homeless. And some of that homelessness is clear, it's obvious. People sleeping on the streets. Some of it is just incredibly painful. The homelessness of sofa surfing, the homelessness of sharing a very overcrowded house. The situation where people really, really want to be able to start a family and cannot because they cannot -
Katherine May:
Because they can't make the space.
Jay Griffiths:
Because they can't make the space.
Katherine May:
Or the permanence.
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, or the permanence. A friend of from a village in Dorset and all four of her grandparents were from there. She was a Dorset maid from that area. She'd been working in development in Nepal and she was going to have a baby. And she wanted to come back and have a baby at the place which was her home. There was nowhere that she could buy. There was nowhere that she could rent. Everywhere was a second home, everywhere. And she ended up having her baby in a cow shed. In a cow shed.
Katherine May:
It's biblical.
Jay Griffiths:
It's biblical. And honestly, I felt so protective towards her and I just wanted everybody who had a second home to know that she had her baby in a cow shed because she couldn't get a home.
Katherine May:
And on an even more diffuse level, I live in Whitstable where again, we have lots of second homes, lots of holiday homes, lots of empty homes, honestly.
Jay Griffiths:
Lots of Airbnb, also, which is just awful.
Katherine May:
Lots of Airbnb. And the town relies in part on tourism. And I don't object to that. But the problem is that there are many families who have lived in Whitstable for a very, very long time, who can no longer live in Whitstable because they're not wealthy. Because it's pushed house prices up so far. I certainly couldn't move here now. That actually the ordinary people who've always lived here can't live here anymore. And we're just at this point where ordinary people, people with just everyday jobs, the jobs that we desperately need people to do, can't make enough money to survive, can't live anywhere, can't save for a pension. We haven't accounted for this group of people who make up the majority of our society. And what do we think that we can live without nurses or that we can live without cleaners? It makes no sense.
Jay Griffiths:
Well, it's also the whole issue of the younger generation is that one of the things in that sense of what connects us as humans, one of the things that all societies all through history have held in mind is that the adult generation protects the younger generation. At every point in life, you put the younger ones ahead. They're the ones that have to be looked after and thought about. And what's been happening in the last few, couple of decades for the younger generation, it's unhallowed. It's absolutely unhallowed to put a generation into a situation where they probably can't get a home of their own. They're probably going to really, really suffer with overpaying terrible rents. They're probably also paying for an education that should have been free.
Katherine May:
That won't serve them anymore.
Jay Griffiths:
And so they're walking into their adult life absolutely submerged in debt. And then we say, "Oh by the way, we fucked up the climate for you as well. So you don't have a home in the sense of your personal animal body, but you also don't have a home in the sense of the shelter and sky, that which will be steady and protective." And it's beyond a crime. I can only think in almost religious terms for it. That's what sin looks like.
Katherine May:
Yeah. So big sigh.
Jay Griffiths:
That was a rant, wasn't it?
Katherine May:
No, well I -
Jay Griffiths:
[inaudible 00:41:06].
Katherine May:
I'm very glad for it. This is where we are because we are imbued, I think as a whole society now, except for a very few people who are so obviously out of touch that we can almost discount them. But we're imbued -
Jay Griffiths:
But they're in power.
Katherine May:
They're in power. I know.
Jay Griffiths:
Sorry about that.
Katherine May:
I can't even about that into skim on how that works, but absolutely. And it just doesn't seem to make any sense to me that we would elect anyone like that. But there we go. Apparently we do.
Jay Griffiths:
But it makes a lot of sense if you consider the role of the media. The way I see it, most people are good. Most people are reasonably kind. Most people are reasonably honest. And most people, if they had the power, would probably handle it reasonably well. But when people are lied to repeatedly over and over again through the media, not just about what is an absolute lie, but the lies of omission, what people are not told about the climate and ecological emergency more than anything. So people are lied to and then they vote according to the lies. And I don't hold the person who is lied to responsible. I hold responsible those who tell lies and who fail to tell the truth.
Katherine May:
That's right.
Jay Griffiths:
There's another rant. You can't stop me now, can you?
Katherine May:
No, no, I've wound you up and I'm going to let you go.
Jay Griffiths:
Sorry.
Katherine May:
No, but I think what you're capturing is how so many of us are feeling, it's this sense of utter despair and of lost ness and fury and homesickness and anxiety all rolled into a big ball. And my question for not just for you but for both of us to discuss really is what the hell do we do now? Where do we go? What do we begin with to start to recover the sense of home that we deserve on symbolic and practical levels?
Jay Griffiths:
Oh gosh isn't that the everything? Some of it is that thing of don't feel alone with it. I think that's incredibly important. It's that for so long, housing has been treated as if it's a private problem. It's just your problem that you haven't got the money together for you for a down payment for a mortgage. It's just your problem that you can't afford the rent because it's 80% of what you can earn. It's just your problem. And one of the most important things is turning these things instead of being private anxieties into being public anger. Because collectively we're better. I think that education about everything's important. I will try not to echo Tony Blair, but obviously education, education, education. It's a great antidepressant. Learning something new is always really, really good for the brain. But it also, that's where the sense of the politics that we're in now starts to connect with some aspects of the history of thought.
And that starts to connect with aspects of the weird psychology, which has got going at the moment, which is a narcissistic personality cult in our leaders, but also in narcissism. So that everybody is encouraged to be on Instagram, to put themselves forward, to sell yourself, sell yourself, sell yourself and be ... Oh, it's wearying. And a lot of people, even if they do it, don't like doing it. And it's no surprise because it's bad for us. It's really bad for us to be constantly staring at a mirror or a screen, which is in effect a mirror because we're putting ourselves out there.
Katherine May:
Oh my goodness. That's the first thing we did today when we started our conversation is we turned off our cameras.
Jay Griffiths:
Yes and what a relief. It was such a relief. It's a mercy for me.
Katherine May:
Because it doesn't pay to keep looking at yourself all day.
Jay Griffiths:
No, it doesn't.
Katherine May:
It doesn't do you any good whatsoever.
Jay Griffiths:
It's really unhealthy. You feel it, and young people feel it really badly. When the daughter of a friend of mine was just getting really upset with the amount of social media that she felt compelled to do. And she really, really summed it up for me once she said, "The trouble is from the moment I wake up till the moment I go to sleep, I feel judged all the time." This is not good. This is not good.
Katherine May:
Gosh. Particularly not for a forming brain.
Jay Griffiths:
No, it's not good for any of us. But that sense of connection that we try and make the connections between what's happening to the waters in the river why? What's happening in the pages of the Daily Mail? What's happening in terms of what are the deepest strands in culture that have led us here? And the converse of these things. What are the things that do take us to better places is good communication is good writing is true reporting and true as in the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the whole truth. And a sense of -
Katherine May:
Going back to those absolute values again that we've been -
Jay Griffiths:
Yes, isn't it?
Katherine May:
That we've been a little bit uncomfortable with for a while, but I think we are really feeling their lack now.
Jay Griffiths:
Like honesty and respect and -
Katherine May:
Compassion.
Jay Griffiths:
Compassion. That's a good one. It's how everybody needs to be treated and how everything needs to be treated.
Katherine May:
So I want to ask you about a final thing perhaps to end on a slightly lighter note even. But I loved the part in your book, where unable to travel, you took an imaginary trip to Prague.
Jay Griffiths:
Oh yeah. No, I really enjoyed that. I decided that I got a commission from a brilliant magazine called Inque, I-N-Q-U-E. And I said that I wanted to go to Prague because I've never been. And also because I thought my father might be there. And then I had to say obviously it being lockdown that it wasn't either legal or possible to go to Prague. But what I was going to do was instead of flying there, it's obviously impossible and anyway bad, that I thought I would ride there on a horse with no name called Herbie. And so I borrowed the idea of Herbie for a month and then entirely in my imagination with the help of Google, I went to Prague and I was looking for my father because my mother had said he was once seen and she had gone there with him to a cafe in a bookshop behind Wenceslas Square.
So because my father was looking for basically Czech beer and Czech sausages and my mother is more of a white wine and salad kind of person. But she agreed to go to the sausage and beer place. And I thought somewhere probably hidden inside the pint of beer that's hidden inside the cafe, that's hidden inside a book shop, that's hidden behind Wenceslas Square will be my father. And he wasn't there, but I did find him in the Illusion Museum of Prague. The whole thing was a gorgeous illusion. And I got my travel expenses paid because I asked the editor to cover my travel expenses. I said, "The difficult thing is going to be stabling Herbie all the way to Prague across Germany." So I said, "If he could send Herbie a picture of Rocinante, who's Don Quixote's horse, then that would utterly cover my travel expenses. And he did, bless him.
Katherine May:
But I think you also found your dad in this sense of the surreal, in this playfulness and it just struck me as this incredible way to reconnect, both on a global scale but also on a personal scale. You did end up traveling with him.
Jay Griffiths:
Finding him.
Katherine May:
Yeah.
Jay Griffiths:
Well yes because that was the odd thing is that what I ended up doing in looking for him in a city that I'd never been to and he had, I actually felt that I could walk around it and imagine it through his eyes. He trained as an architect and he was really obsessed with buildings. So he would go somewhere and there would be, let's say, an elephant walking down the street and a drain pipe. Everybody in the world would notice the elephant except my father. He would be getting his camera out and saying to my mother, "Well good lord, do you see how that drain pipe is joined at that particular angle just so it reaches right over the tremor." And the whole world be going -
Katherine May:
That's architects for you.
Jay Griffiths:
Yeah, I know the whole world would be saying, "There's an elephant." But yeah, it was quite good because I could go looking at everything through his eyes and it was surreal. He did have a very surreal streak.
Katherine May:
I love it. Well Jay, thank you so much. It's been lovely traveling with you.
Jay Griffiths:
It's been lovely to talk to you. Bless you. I'm sorry about me rants. Nevermind. There we are.
Katherine May:
Well my dear old dog, she's not very old, she's only three. She seems like an old soul to me. She's trotting behind me today. She seen a squirrel. I had to take her to the vets yesterday because she wasn't very well, but she's very much recovered now.
But while I was there, she shook like a little leaf and I had to hold onto her and tell her everything was okay. I hate that part of pet ownership. The fact that you can't transmit to them that some of the things you do are genuinely for their own good, even if they seem so cruel. It made me think of the conversation I had with Jay somehow. I suppose really about the way that everything circles grief at the moment. When we talk about the environment, when we talk about our people, so many of whom we lost over the last few years. When we talk about the griefs we project forward into a future we don't know yet.
I had a gardener come to my house last week to prune my green gauge tree, which has grown so out of control over the summer. And I wanted someone to do it properly rather than me hacking at it. And of course winter is the best time to prune a tree because it's dormant. So as he was doing that, he trimmed back my neighbor's beautiful ash tree a little that overhangs our garden.
And I'd already raked up all its leaves a few weeks before and used them to mulch my garden. And he said he saw the first signs of ash die back in it. And he said he'd tapped its roots and they were hollow already. And I felt this incredible wave of grief come over me, not just for that tree, but for all the beautiful trees we're in the process of losing. Great big trees that shade our gardens, which are all passing this terrible disease from one to another and we'll lose them. We already lost elms when I was a child and now the ashes are going too. I suppose the question I'm leaving you with today is how do we make space to grieve for the things that we don't have a pattern for grieving for? Jay talked about having to grieve her father without access to ritual. And I think there's a lot of things in this life that we're grieving without really understanding how grief or having an outlet for it, or being able to really voice it.
And of course that becomes a part of the question of how we come back together again, because grief is a very individual experience, but also a very collective one, and maybe it holds a key for us. This is one of the ways we can join again, one of the ways we can come back together. Thanks for listening. I'll see you very soon.
Show Notes
There’s a guiding question of each mini-season of How We Live Now, and this time around it’s ‘How can we come back together again?’ I posed this question to some of the world’s most important thinkers in this field: political journalist Ece Temelkuran, radical Buddhist Lama Rod Owens, digital native Emma Gannon, gathering expert Priya Parker, spiritual teacher Simran Jeet Singh and ecological writer Jay Griffiths. Each of them offered something thoughtful and fresh, and each of them changed the way I think about this current - often divided - life.
Jay Griffiths’ writing has long explored the link between land, culture and our potential for connection, but her father’s death during lockdown made this more vital than ever. Denied the comfort or closure of a funeral, Jay had to find other ways to connect, mourn and memorialise, and in this gentle, wide-ranging conversation she and Katherine talk about imaginary journeys, ritual and delving into a sense of place.
Behind all of Jay’s work is an ecological urgency, and a sense of grief for the life that we seem to be losing. Here, it’s expressed through the idea of homelessness, both literal and metaphorical. But she also introduces us to the character of Nemesis, offering us a model for justice that might just see us through the next decades.
Join the conversation! We’re also inviting your thoughts on each episode from now on click here to join the conversation. Answers, challenges, ideas and further questions are all welcome - there will be a further episode in a couple of months focusing on your voices.
Links from the episode:
Other episodes you might enjoy:
Season 3: Ross Gay on delight
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Enchantment - Released March 2023
“Katherine May gave so many of us language and vision for the long communal ‘wintering’ of the last years. Welcome this beautiful meditation for the time we’ve now entered. I cannot imagine a more gracious companion. This book is a gift.”
New York Times bestselling author Krista Tippett
