What's Boring Culture? And why we need to guard against it.
Welcome! If you're new to Talismans, read this first.
Boring culture is the hyper bureaucratic, imagination-impoverished world of mass-produced experiences, pre-packaged thoughts and domesticated language. It is a culture whose sense of the sacred is so uprooted it has to fill the void with ceaseless entertainment, dazzling gadgets, pseudo-food and digital friendships.
A distinct lack of wildness characterizes boring culture. This might be alarming were we not so anesthetized, but who can blame us? It’s a frightening time to be alive. AI, nuclear weapons, gene editing technologies, social media echo-chambers, broken politics, eco-systems collapse… no wonder we hole-up with ice cream and Netflix.
But for the people with neither Netflix nor ice cream, ‘boring’ would hardly be the way to describe the world. ‘Dangerous’ or ‘terrifying’ might be more accurate. The four horsemen are gathering pace, yet where I live in the North of England, the birds are singing, flowers are blooming, kids are coming home from school. This schizophrenic reality is what I have to live in. A time between worlds, no doubt about it.
‘Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.’
— Ursula K. Le Guin
Boring culture is symptomatic of something deeper. That deeper something has been called the Machine, Urizen, Moloch, and the World of the Left Hemisphere. It has a long history, but what I don’t want to do here is provide a scholarly treatise on how broken the world is. I’d rather talk about what I love, what inspired me, how to gather up the fragmented scraps of magic around me and use them to make a life worth living.
‘I think something more is needed than the idea of sustainability. It’s got to be something much more profound that touches the heart… you realise that our job on the earth is to fall in love with it, and you only fall in love with it if you’re aesthetically alive to it.’
— James Hillman
To be aesthetically, sensuously, courageously alive to the magic of the world - that is how I want to live.
‘I was told at an impressionable age that “writers should write about what they know.” I wanted to write magical fiction, so I have endeavoured to lead a magical life.’
— Terri Windling
How to live a magical life without getting captured by wage slavery or ground down by world events? How to reach one’s deathbed with a sense of dignity for a life well lived? Not easy to do at all. I’m just one flawed human trying to navigate this. The writing here shows my efforts.
Some of the essays so far include Movement as Resistance, Blessing Deficit Disorder, The Star in the Animal, Reanimating the Queen, The Spirit of Leonardo, The Majesty of Dung Beetles. Each one is crafted with care but together they are building toward something that might be called an Ecology of Magic.
‘Talisman’: a charm or amulet to ward off insidious powers
Ben Patrick Holden is a writer, poet, and storyteller from a small town called Hebden Bridge at the Brontë end of the South Pennines. He grew up in a traveling circus surrounded by massive puppet dragons and fire-breathing performers, and now lives in the Derwent Valley with his wife and two children, trying daily to balance the quest and dishes.