Re-visioning #8: A conversation with Esther Campbell
This is the eighth in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Esther is an artist, student and teacher working with film, story and photography on community facing projects and interventions. She is currently developing a feature for the BFI, studying at Dartington School of Art and making a pack of analogue photography Tarot cards with kids in her local community and woodland non-humans. https://esthermaycampbell.com/
IN: Esther, this is a slight break from the norm for these conversations because actually it was you who contacted me for a conversation about elements of my filmmaking process, in the context of your own research. The kind of things we’ve been sharing are very timely as I prepare to set off on the pilgrimage that is central to the work that I’m currently doing, and which these conversations are also a part of. What it does mean though, is that what we’ve chatted about prior to this has been angled towards my work rather than yours, which is a shame because I want to talk about your work too. I just wanted to acknowledge that at the outset. Maybe the best place to start is for you to explain why you wanted to have this conversation.
EC: So, as you know, I’m doing a masters at the moment called ‘the poetics of imagination’ at Dartington. The first module was wonderful, focusing on pre-written animist stories where identity is fluid and you might find a woman becoming a bear, then a star. I felt very much at home in those stories, but I’m struggling with the second module, which is focused on Celtic hero tales. What I’m finding, much to my surprise, is that deep down, in my inarticulate core, I’m feeling a lot of rage and trauma and I’m curious. What is happening in these stories to make me feel this way? Your film Taking the Michael raises interesting questions around what it means to be a man now, where ones’ masculinity is, and where one’s land is. There’s a longing to belong through the film, your characters are trying to figure out theirlostness, while being open to not figuring it out. So I wanted to talk to you about how you experience the mythological in your work, kick some of these ideas about a bit and see what comes up.
IN: What’s interesting to me is that you’ve identified Taking The Michael as the piece of work where you see some of this material bubbling up and that’s actually the inception of the work I’m about to set out to make. The broad intention of that film was to explore social conscience and the collective unconscious by moving through the landscape and encounters with other beings. That still feels like something I want to do. All that’s changed is that now I call it pilgrimage. So while mythology might not be a direct reference point, the figure of the pilgrim as a mythological avatar is something I’m working with, as a way to embody a methodology in the making of an artwork. So I’m also really interested to go into some of this stuff and it seems like the right moment to do it.
EC: Something that we look at on the course is this tripartite mythic structure of separation, initiation and return. So separation from what you know, initiation into the unknown and what new knowledge or booty you return with, what you bring back from the underworld. It’s kind of an abbreviation of the hero’s journey without the need to be heroic. It sounds like that can be held in the frame of pilgrimage, or at least, your framing of it.
IN: When we met the Cornish antiquarian Steve Patterson, at the end of making Taking The Michael, it was him who first framed what we’d done as a pilgrimage, and who first introduced the notion of pilgrimage into my work. He talked about the intentions you might have setting out and how when you’ve stripped away those layers, you’re left with the act of walking, and the drudgery and exhaustion of putting one foot in front of the other. In your mythic framing, this is the separation. Out of that then springs a kind of ecstatic connection with landscape and a sense of being less human — of being one element in a landscape but of being no more or less important to that landscape than crow, tree or cloud. This sounds like initiation, right? Return is slightly more tricky here because the end of a pilgrimage is really not the point. As Steve says, when your reach your destination, there’s no fanfare or revelation and it can be a bit disappointing. The work then is to assimilate the revelations of the experience back into your life. I’m increasingly suspicious, though, of this pattern of leaving our suburban lives to have a mythic adventure, the revelations of which we build into our suburban lives on our return. I’m coming to wonder if that really changes anything, supposing that’s what we’re trying to do. If anything, I’m trying to move my suburban life in its entirety closer to mythic adventure but I think that may be fucking with the archetype.
EC: So the difference between what you’re describing and the Celtic myths that I’ve been looking at is that the heroes don’t set out for spiritual learning, they set out for action, and they come back with spiritual learning.
IN: But I think that’s what we did. Matthew, the subject and co-director of Taking the Michael, wanted to set out in 2011 because of the Mayan prophecy that the world was going to end in 2012. We wanted to ask people what they thought the end of the world was going to look like. And we set out in a pedal-powered car because that seemed to be an appropriate vehicle for the end of the world. It’s only in retrospect that I can say it was a spiritual adventure and build that into where I am now. It makes me worried now about the potential hubris of setting out with the intention of spiritual advancement. But I’m interested in how the film lands with you in the context of these myths you’re reading.
EC: It’s back to the question, what is triggering me in these stories? Typically you’ve got a man on a quest, going through an initiation. There are women who are rendered symbolic, or activating change from the edges. Women effect the psyche of the man at the story centre. The man comes to the women, learns something about himself and moves on. On the one hand, treating these stories as psychological journeys, their kingdoms as the soul, these are profound stories about understanding oneself more deeply. But also, there’s cruelty and brutality, and how that effects us depends on the context of how the story is being told. If I’m telling a story from the Mabinogi, say of Geraint’s brutality to Enid, his wife, to a group of women it becomes a warning story about signs of a spoilt man becoming sadistic, but if a group of men tell this story in court over wine and food and laughter to other men, as they did, that’s another thing entirely. What I find uncomfortable is the strong likelihood that what we have left of these stories is as a result of powerful men telling them to other powerful men. When the mythopoetic men’s movement emerged in the 80s and 90s, and appropriated these stories putting themselves inside them, what I feel I am bearing witness to is the process of perpetrator making himself victim and ultimately hero, as part of his healing. But to not tell the stories isn’t the answer so we have to be honest about what we think we’re doing when we transmit them. What is our intention? I feel like there’s these female characters at the stories’ edges shouting out to me and I want to know why. Where have they been used to? Who were they before? Your work, while being about masculinity, doesn’t come from the same position. A man is lost, he’s trying to find something, but not at the cost of other peoples’ agency. He’s also made that declaration of vulnerability, which I think is important and absent from these myths.
IN: The question that comes up for me there is how do I avoid being in that position? If I find myself in a space where white people are telling indigenous myths to other white people, then I’m in that court. I’m one of those powerful men, so what responsibility do I have in that space? How can I restore agency?
EC: The film that I’m working on at the moment is a feminist future love story, and I’ve struggled with the question of how to set up the ways women have restored their agency and form an egalitarian society. One tool is laughter. If someone in the group, our idea of a ‘hero’, is continually going out on quests to prove himself, then in an egalitarian society, that becomes laughable. Women use laughter to keep individuals in place so the community can survive. We need everyone to be able to bring back the booty — not just Luke Skywalker.
IN: Maybe another way is to trust in the power of the story, and the agency of the story itself. My experience of making Taking The Michael was that once we had stepped into the process, we were moved along by things outside our control. It took me a while to stop resisting that movement, and I think the success of the film in some ways rests on that tension between control over the story and surrender to the stream of ridiculous otherworldly events, which is played out in the relationship between me, the filmmaker, seeking control and Matthew, the subject, seeking immersion. To make a life and a living as an artist in the world we live in, it takes a lot, you have to arm yourself with a certain degree of cynicism or you’re not going to make it. It also takes quite a lot of planned stages — if I do this then I can do this — and you end up treating art-making in that way, which doesn’t necessarily produce good work. Making that film was a stripping away of those layers. I think I’m ready for another experience like that, which is probably why I’m heading out on another pilgrimage. Disarming myself is probably a more appropriate way to describe the process of making myself ready. It’s a commitment to losing control that I’m actually not very good at, so I need this framing for it to happen.
EC: What’s ringing slight alarm bells there is that you’re going into this process expecting initiation because of the experience you had last time. If we go into something expecting that, it may not come. By definition, initiation has to take you out of what you expect. In my own experience the initiatory forces have always been unseen, unknown and unexpected. What’s important is intention, because we have no idea what’s going to happen anyway. So the question you might want to ask is, what is your intention?
IN: This is my moment of stuckness. I’ve been really struggling with the question of whether to keep to the same route, since the original intention for walking this particular has kind of fallen away through the pandemic, and I’m left asking myself why I would be walking a Medieaval Christian pilgrim route to draw out this narrative about a positive future society.
EC: If you take the concept of medieval pilgrimage, what you’re looking at is the beginnings of a history of the ways in which we’ve sought dominion over the realms of landscape, animal, vegetable, and mineral, and tried to conquer them with brutality and violence. If you look at that alongside a pilgrimage along a ley line, because that’s the other pilgrimage you’ve made, there’s a different energy there that’s more interested in mystery, making connections and understanding our place in the landscape.
IN: What springs to mind here is something that Dougald Hine wrote for me in support of the original crowdfunder, where he talked about the walk as ‘an act of weaving, stitching together the torn fabric, starting from where we find ourselves.’ So the question, is where do I find myself? What is my relationship with that history? Are we still in the conflict or are we surveying the wreckage? And if we are looking at the wreckage, then what lies ahead? But what you’ve said there might also the key to unlocking this stuckness. There’s this quote from Walidah Imarisha, let me just find it because I don’t remember it in full. “The decolonzation of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive form there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless.” I’m also thinking about a previous conversation with Sunshine Wong, when I talked about how, through slowing down during the pandemic, I came to realize how deeply embedded the driving forces of capitalism are in everything I do, in the received need to achieve and progress and keep moving. So the intention of walking this route might be to decolonize my own psyche of the last millennium or so of white, male European energy and everything that’s led to that we know about. Maybe by the end of that walk of undoing, I might be in a place to ask what lies ahead. It sounds a bit much when I put it like that but it’s the intention that’s important I think.
EC: It would certainly be a noble attempt. I’ve been looking at archetypes recently and found this podcast called This Jungian Life, and at the end of each episode the three analysts analyse a dream that one of the listeners has sent in. The space they hold is that everything that happens, everyone that appears, whether it’s your best mate, a murderer or an otter, is an aspect of you, and these aspects, or archetypes, need to talk to each other, which dreams allow us to do. So the archetypes might be the old blind man, or the fertile goddess, or the warrior or they might be ungendered, or group archetypes or community archetypes — you can think of them as things or you can think of them as energies. It’s a way of stepping outside the binary and taking in the whole, so if you’re thinking of your walk as a medicine walk, which you are, in which things are going to become known to you that were hitherto unknown, about yourself, the land, and history, then everything is a different archetypal energy that you’re having to navigate, integrate and become conscious of. So while you could obviously go too deep into that, I think it’s worth tuning into a little bit so that you can see mythically what happens on your journey rather than just rationally or neurotically. It’s a way of being neurotic without the neuroticism.
IN: Brilliant!
EC:What I’m trying to get at is how framing your walk as a dream or a myth might help you to be open to initiation, without pushing it.
IN: I think I just became unstuck.
