As we enter 2021 together, I do so personally with a deep sense of foreboding.
Degradation of the planet and use of resources, mineral, vegetable and animal is accelerating, sea levels are rising and more and more people are being displaced. In response, nations who could help to solve these problems have instead of reaching out retreated into nationalism and racism to preserve what they fear others will steal from them.
Those baser instincts are being repeated across the world, now. As countries seek to hold on to the resources they have, be they fish, or land, or oil or whatever, co-operation is undermined and the game of King of the Hill continues apace among people and nations alike.
It has to stop. The dangers facing the world, be they the pandemic, climate change, deforestation, slavery, plastics poisoning, carbon emissions, pollution, overproduction are all based on an economic and political model that simply cannot hold any more. And that reality, once again, that pressure for change, has people afraid of others.
Leaders like Trump and Johnson – and there will be more like them – plug into the cognitive dissonance of those who refuse to accept the real causes of their situation and turn to conspiracy narratives and simplistic solutions for comfort.
So, do I stand at the start of 2021 with the normal sense of hope I feel at New Year? No. I can’t pretend I do. Even that energy has been sucked out of me by – not by the pandemic alone – not by one thing or another – but by a sense of tiredness that people seek to solve difficult problems with simple answers, with narratives that cast others as “evil” and themselves as “good” – and that the storytelling instinct applied in this way makes no sense and is destroying the world.
We need new ways to tell stories.
Ways that will pull together people from across the world in shared endeavour, events that will cause people to lower the drawbridge and help people connect.
In 2019 I was involved in just such a project – the transmedia storytelling event that was Cursed City: Dark Tide, which grew out of my novel The Snow Witch, and which generated a brand new narrative created by numerous writers, based on the characters from the original story.
Fumbling our ways through learning how to make narrative in entirely new ways, with stories fractured across numerous media, from street art to facebook to art exhibitions to a Tarot-reading night to musical performance was deeply liberating. After three weeks, it culminated in this magical night of music, that I give you a snippet from here:
No longer was I just a writer working alone in my room to wind out a story, but was part of a massive group of artists and writers who made storytelling something I never knew it could be – far more interesting and diverse than I ever imagined.
It was our first attempt at storytelling in this way, and so of course we made mistakes. But it was also a joyous event and it showed us ways to draw people together in ways we had never fully anticipated.
This, then, is what I wish for 2021. For new ways to deliver stories, to weave stories in a more complex manner than before and to engage a general public in solving problems and learning more about themselves and others. It is a small thing, really, but it is the expression of a different type of consciousness from the one that has reigned for the last decade, and especially the last year.
2021, then, you may be a monster ahead, but we will go round you and through you, and you will become our friend. We need to train you, and contain you and show you, in the end, that love is stronger than hate, that curiosity and interest will burn through fear and that difference between people is constructed from lies and fear.
2021, let’s remake you in our image with art, hope and kindness. Let’s bedeck your pelt with stars and feed you with love and tickle you with joy so that you become tamed, and trained and you learn that we are all on this planet together and have to find a way to live and love side by side with the hate and anger gone.
Quite a task ahead, then.