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I am a citizen of a world which waits to be born.

What would you think of someone who said that to you?

I’m guessing you’d smile, slightly, politely—I like to assume the best of people until I have good reason not to, and sometimes even after that—but you’d also think of a word like “dreamer”, “utopian”, or “fantasist”. That word (or words) would have a sense of labelling something basically good, but at the same time futile, and maybe also naive: a sense that it’s the sort of thing we all indulge in from time to time, particularly when young, but which we slowly learn to set aside in favour of more pragmatic approaches to the world. For there exist many challenges in that world, do there not? Time enough for dreaming when we’ve fixed them, assuming we ever do.

So I’ll say it again: I am a citizen of a world which waits to be born.

And I’ll say, if you’ll indulge me, that there is time to dream in the present—that in fact, those problems you mention, which are indeed very real and very pressing, are not the result of too much dreaming, but rather of too little. Will you indulge me? Will you gift me your attention, a little piece of the present? I know that it is precious.

I’ll also say that I’m not the only citizen of such a waiting world. For there are many—and as many waiting worlds as there are citizens thereof.

Does that sound too like Twilight Zone? “They walk among us!”, right? Well, no, not quite; it’s more a matter of “you walk among them”. They’re not aliens, though they are in some respects Others… but then you’re no alien Other, either. Or, if you are, then so are they… and if we’re all of us aliens and Others, well, that category doesn’t mean much, does it?

But I digress, so I’ll say it once again: I am a citizen of a world which waits to be born.

And then I’ll ask you: d’you wanna see it? D’you wanna go there?

It’s not far—a decade or so downstream from today, maybe less, though dates don’t matter so much as you might think. It’s not some sci-fi spectacle, either, not a world of radical technologies or dire dystopian outcomes—though I could show you those, too. (Some other day, perhaps.) It’s just a world much like the one you know, where people—some people—are doing things a little differently. Are you ready?

OK, then—let’s start...

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… here.

Where is here, though? Let your mind’s eye see a small spare-room office in an apartment: there is a desk and chair, of course, and perhaps some flatpack bookshelves sagging with stuff. Maybe there’s also a laundry basket, and a drying rack bedecked with a mixture of children’s and adult clothes, and perhaps also a single-width bed divan stood upright against the wall, waiting to accommodate an overnighting friend.

Now, can you see the woman sat at the desk, perhaps in her early thirties, facing a mismatched pair of monitors? Good! This is Jenny. She’s an artist, really—perhaps the haircut was a clue?—though what pays her rent is a mixture of care work and seasonal teaching gigs at a local college.

Don’t worry, she can’t hear us through those big headphones she’s wearing—but we need to stay quiet, because she’s about to start talking into the microphone that’s hanging in front of her, attached to a boom stand which her partner lashed up from broken pieces of mid-century modernist furniture held together with duct-tape. Let’s listen to what she says….

“Good evening, Planet Earth! I am Jenny Sparks, and you are listening to the Psychic Weather Station. It’s been a turbulent day out there; we’ve had reports of a big depressive front passing northward up the eastern seaboard, and a strong wind of doubt and uncertainty blowing down out of the highlands. I hope those of you in the affected areas have managed to keep yourself warm and comforted. But as always, we’ve got some rays of sunshine breaking through all over the place…”

Jenny isn’t broadcasting live, though she likes to maintain the fiction that she is. Her Psychic Weather Station started as a podcast, but now there’s a video version as well, because it allowed her to cast her net wider in her search for stories, and to share them with a wider audience. Her selection criterion is that the stories must be hopeful—a criterion that she freely admits is intensely subjective and impossible to define, except by way of its opposition to optimism. She doesn’t want to hear that everything’s going to be fine; she wants to hear that people are working toward making things better.

The Psychic Weather Station started as a personal habit, a search for nuggets of hope to help her through the day during a period, not quite a decade ago, when global calamity coincided with the more intimate challenge of caring for a baby daughter. She started out sharing them with a few friends in a group-chat app, but after a while, said friends were forwarding so many of the items to other people off-list that she figured she might as well just put the things up publicly. (She’d dabbled in blogging as a teenager back in the Noughties, and it felt like something of a return to that practice.)

The concept of psychic weather came from a conversation with her mother, whose lifelong careening quest through fringe belief systems has supplied her with a vast store of inconsistent and contradictory metaphors. Jenny usually laughs these off—once the phonecall has ended, obviously—but psychic weather just kind of clicked, and gifted her a structure for her daily bulletins.

We can borrow that metaphor ourselves, as a way of moving around in this world more swiftly; I’m sure Jenny won’t mind. So let’s follow along with her audience, climb the ladder of Jenny’s words into the global psychic slipstream, and see what’s happening in her first item...

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Our viewpoint is from the photographers’ pit at a fairly standard press conference, and taking the stage is one Javier F_____, founding associate of a transportation consultancy called Organic Network Research. He is there to talk about the consultancy’s recently accepted bid to oversee the light-rail network promised by the region’s new administration.

The room is packed, but the air of anticipation has a certain edge to it: a significant chunk of the audience is here to heckle, or at least to be able to say they were there when someone else heckled. The discourse—with a capital D—has been a-churn ever since Javier's consultancy put out a press release explaining that their proposed map for the new network was designed not by computers or artificial intelligence, nor even by human analysts, but rather by Physarum polycephalum, a form of acellular myxomycete better known to to non-biologists as “slime mould"”.

A youngish man, clad in workwear more appropriate to a lathe operator than to a denizen of the C-suite, Javier strides onto the stage to the cascading click of shutters. He introduces himself with cursory brevity, wasting no time before addressing the eukaryote in the room.

“We've taken a lot of flak this week; our social media manager has done enough overtime to take the rest of the month off as time in lieu! The week before, however, it was wall-to-wall praise: this young transport consultancy no one had heard of, coming out of nowhere and winning the bid to design the new network. What was their secret?

“The praise was nice, we admit, but it felt wrong to take it without telling the full truth. And now I'll tell it again, for the full public record: we used a slime mould to develop the network map in our winning bid, and to develop the prioritisation plan for the construction of the lines and stations.”

Javier looks up from his notes, grins boyishly at someone down in the front row of the auditorium. “Actually, we used a bunch of them... though our in-house biologist tells me that the distinction between one slime mould and a number of them is pretty fuzzy. You'll need to ask her to explain that, though! It's well beyond my pay-grade.”

“My job is to explain the network map—though it really explains itself, and that's the whole point. It's widely known in the field of transport planning that designing these sorts of network—which is a form of what mathematicians call the Travelling Salesman Problem—is incredibly difficult, computationally speaking. But it's comparatively easy to evaluate any given solution… and the solution provided by our slime mould colleague passed with flying colours. If you're thinking that maybe we marked our own homework, then I refer you to the regional planning office assessment of the final bids, which are a matter of public record, and available on their website.”

A susurrus of discussion rises from the audience, punctuated by shushing and requests for quiet. Javier leans in to the mic a little, speaks slowly and clearly.

“I would also like to extend my gratitude to the planning office, and to the regional government in general, for sticking with us on this. We let them know the full story when they told us we'd won the bid, and we sought their approval before last week's press release. They would have been within their rights to annul our bid entirely. But they didn't—because it works.”

More mutterings, more shushings. But Javier has the look of someone who’s done the hard bit, and is about to do the fun bit.

“Here's another question I've been asked a lot over the last seven days,” he continues, the PA system pushing his voice over the surf of the commentariat. “Why confess? We could have just kept the slime mould stuff quiet, basked in the glory, snapped up more projects, sold up, cashed out, retired early!”

That boyish grin again. “A comprehensive answer to that question would be very long, very involved, and fairly personal. As for the short version, well, I can't speak for all of my colleagues, but I can say that we've all grown up in a world where our trade is basically a byword for corruption, waste and runaway budgets. If we wanted to be rich, we'd have gone to work for the usual suspects—the same big consulting firms whose bids we beat, hands down. We started our cooperative because we wanted something different: a world where public transport is well-designed, and where the planning process is not just one more opportunity for the enrichment of shareholders at the expense of the public whose transport it will be.”

The audience is silent, but for the click of shutters and the frantic clatter of keyboards.

“So that's one answer. And here's another, which I want to address directly to the commentators who wonder why we would give away the trick. Don't you realise, they ask, that now government planners know they can develop optimal networks by hiring a few graduates and a test tube full of gunge, they'll just skip the consultation process entirely in future?

“We do realise that, yeah. And we consider it a feature, not a bug.”

Uproar, shouted questions. From the back of the room, the sound of chairs scraping across the floor, door-springs straining to accommodate a partial exodus.

“There are other reasons, however,” Javier continues, a little louder again. “So now I'm going to hand over to Natawnee, our biologist and slime-wrangler—because it was she who convinced me, and I'm sure she has a better chance of convincing you than I have.”

Javier walks away from the dais, where his place is taken by a woman with dark skin and a cumulus of frizzy hair, likewise wearing overalls and an attitude that looks just as buoyant and bouncy as her ‘fro.

“Thanks, Javier. Persons of the press, I think Javier has already made the practical point: one very good reason to use slime mould for this work is because it does it extraordinarily well, far better than humans and computers can do it. Furthermore, we’ve known this for a few decades already—there’s a list of peer-reviewed scientific papers and projects on our website, which provided the basis for our approach.

“But there is a broader point to be made, I believe, acknowledging the often unacknowledged assistance of non-human agents in human affairs. And the hypocrisy: if we’d been giving this press conference a decade ago, and had announced that we’d used some sort of machine learning tool to develop our map, the business press would have been crawling over one another to put us on the front page of their websites and magazines, praising us as ‘innovators’ and ‘disruptors’.”

She throws her arms wide, her gaze sweeping the room like a searchlight.

“And we have innovated, have we not? But it appears this is not the sort of innovation that we are meant to celebrate. As for disruption, well”—Natawnee arches an eyebrow with impeccable disdain—“I can see plenty of disruption at the back of this room right now. I assume you’re all hurrying home to put our award nominations in the mail, gentlemen?”

This earns some laughter, and a handful of whoops and cheers from the cheap seats.

“But the heart of it is that we, as a species, have spent far too long pretending that our success, our civilisation, is defined by its separateness and distinction from the environment in which it has developed. The true relation is one of dependence... and our denial, our refusal to concede that dependency has manifested as something that looks a hell of a lot like an abusive relationship, or even slavery. What we’re trying to do here is to turn that around, to acknowledge that everything we’ve ever achieved was built on the quiet, invisible labour of non-human things. We’re trying to re-establish that relationship as an open and acknowledged collaboration…”

Natawnee is hitting her stride now; the audience has fragmented, with some patches cheering her on, other patches arguing openly with one another, and other patches sat in stunned silence; the camera people from the TV stations and streaming sites are shouldering one another aside for a better position at the front of the stage, and the security people are struggling to hold back a knot of young activists trying to take to the stage with banners and musical instruments.

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This is a moment that will be much discussed in the weeks to come—though let us not pretend that everyone will be discussing it in positive terms. Jenny likes to open with a big, brash story: something with a proper podium-thumping vibe, a little bit of stick-it-to-the-man. When she caught wind of this story, she knew it was a headline from the way it cracked her face with a grin.

Ah, but perhaps this seems mundane to you. Isn’t this just another activist spectacle, a highjacking of sensible procedures which, while it may produce a bit of discursive churn—and maybe even a new light-rail network, if the political wind doesn’t change too soon—is mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing? Is this really so different a world?

Now, don’t make your mind up yet—there’s lots more to see! Jenny’s already introducing the next item, so let’s get ourselves aloft again and see where she’ll take us next. Looks like we’re headed somewhere urban, somewhere outdoors...

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Across the chalk-drawn divide of the lobby—for this parliament has retained the linear symmetry of the mother of all parliaments, and none of the many motions to make it circular have yet passed a majority vote—the Badger is winding up a long and impassioned diatribe. The Badger’s speech is punctuated by supportive declamations from the Fox, the Water Vole, and other allies of the Mammalian Lobby, a group which this time—unusually—includes the member for Local Human Industry, glowering quietly beneath the chimney-shaped hat which designates both their identity and authority.

The Badger’s orations now concluded, the Rook rocks up to the opposition lectern, austere and severe in a suit that even a Victorian mourner might have thought a little too glum, to speak for the caucus (a word they struggle to pronounce, to much amusement from the assembly) comprising the Birds and the Fish, as well as a rare defection from the Mammalian massive, namely the Bats. Already the Insects, who introduced this session’s motion on pesticides and swiftly lost control of it, are fidgeting and suppressing the urge to interject, but Old Prince River has his gavel ready to hand, the maintenance of constitutional order being the last vestige of the power he once had. Like the speaker of that other parliament, his impartiality is always suspect, always notional; whoever is assigned the role does their best to walk that impossible line.

To the untrained eye, this session of the Forge Brook River Parliament might be mistaken for a group of art students engaged in costumed amusements on a patch of waste ground behind a factory. This would be unfair and inaccurate, and not only because most of the people involved are not students.

Not long ago ago, the Forge Brook was mostly forgotten: a minor river winding its way beneath the tarmac and concrete of a slowly gentrifying industrial neighbourhood in a second-tier city. Time was, the Brook lent its power to the forges that gave it a name, but then came steam and electricity and civic sanitation; what had once been a source of power (or at least a sink for filth) became an obstacle to be paved over. For many years known only to the planning department of the local council, and to an uneasy alliance of graffiti muralists and urban-exploration daredevils with access to a pair of fisherman’s waders, the Brook broke through again—quite literally—during a hundred-year rainstorm around a decade ago, when it flooded the area.

Partly deculverted—a technical term for “exposed to the sky’s eye once more”—as a flood mitigation measure, the Brook’s heretofore hidden travails were suddenly clearer to see. Most visible of all was the rubbish, rafting down the Brook from its source a dozen miles outside the city, and coming to rest in a large culvert where the Brook joins the much larger river for which the city is known. A volunteer clean-up session at this culvert, held in the dog days of a long, dry summer five years ago, ended in an impromptu piece of theatre: one volunteer of dramatic inclination (if not of training) stood, beer in hand, and gave voice to the Brook’s discontents, as if the Brook were some aggrieved principality and they its grand vizier. This prompted a fusillade of objections, qualifications and points-of-order from various other spontaneously self-elected agents of the riverine assemblage—from animals and fish to bugs and plants, from small communities to transcendent concepts—and the new principality found itself swiftly reduced (or is it raised?) to the status of a fractious republic, full of factions and uneasy alliances: a compound subject of history and geography, brought to life through drama.

This unplanned game at the end of a hot and companionable day of physical labour might have gone no further—and it would have been undiminished by such momentariness. But in beer-gardens and on buses home, the thrill of the thing—of the shapeshifting, of the secular speaking-in-tongues—was kept alive for hours afterward, and then for days more, gradually connected through conversation to theories and actions and imaginings already known to the players: a mountain granted personhood here, a lawsuit brought on behalf of a species there, and decades of precedent in protest and performance alike. But what always comes up is the fun—and it’s the fun that informs the four annual “river parliament” performances held every year since that first clean-up, and that still fuels the less-than-fun stuff that has come with it: the writing of press releases and website copy, the clearing of blocked river arteries, the managing of a loosely-bounded volunteer organisation on a shoestring budget, the many bureaucracies which are democracy’s wage.

But the magic of the thing persists in every media mention, in every kind word and every condemnation, in the bringing together (if only temporarily) of different actors in the urban landscape through the mediation of their randomly-selected human proxies, in the sparkle of thrill seen in the eyes of children and adults alike: in the sudden recognition that this is simultaneously a game and a matter of great seriousness. And while some players feel that the parliament is an end in itself—an impactful way to get certain issues onto the local political agenda—others insist that it is rather a means to a far greater end, namely that of a world in which the means and the end are the same question, as they always were (and still are, and always shall be). Both arguments are resistant to quantification, to the sort of evaluative procedures that confer legitimacy; this issue is raised repeatedly, particularly by outsiders and new arrivals, but is ultimately always dismissed. What matters—what keeps them coming back, keeps them putting in the hours—is the instinct that doing something, and doing it with others, is in some way more important than exactly what is done.

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That was a bit more worthy, wasn’t it?

Or does it seem somewhat childish? These poly-species parliamentarians are playing a game, after all: pretending to be something which they’re not. You might object to the arrogance of the unavoidable anthropomorphisation involved, of course—and I dare say some of the more theoretically-minded players would grant you that, yes, this is an act of interpretation and imagination. But better, surely, to at least attempt to think and feel like a river, a badger, a rook, a bumble-bee or a factory, than simply to put them all in the big box marked “The Environment” and then carry on as usual. Better, surely, to speak as than to speak over.

Do you want change? We all want change, or so we say. Well, this is how change happens: a few dozen people at a time, maybe more, maybe less, if you really want to quantify it.

It might not be the change you want; it might not be the change that changes everything in one swift flourish. But still, this is how change happens: through people acting it out, through being it, and through other people seeing it and realising not even that this particular change is the change that they also want, but that they nevertheless still want change, and that they can be change: realising that it’s as easy as choosing it, and as hard as following through on that choice.

But OK, sure—you want to see something really radical. So let’s listen again to Jenny’s voice, let’s float up and out and over and into the rural hinterlands, where a primal drama is being enacted...

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Wolves have no names, no names of their own. Men have named wolves, both collectively and individually—as they have named so many things down the years, in hope of thus claiming dominion over them—but no wolf would come to those names, nor to any other. The wolf runs free, hunts where it will; it respects no human borders, least of all the fences erected though language.

This particular wolf is in a belly-crouch among bushes at the edge of a large field, breathing slowly and quietly, eyes locked on to the evening’s prey: two fat sheep in a pasture free of obstacles or places to hide. The wolf is not alone. Its packmates are out there, also, watching and waiting, their locations known at a level below consciousness, the extended cognition of the pack. As always, some instinct is gathering across this assemblage. As it peaks, then comes the knowledge without words, a call to action coursing through the veins, sinews and nerves: a unity of intent and deed, the explosive activity of the attack.

As the wave breaks across the pack, they launch from their places of concealment. Some take the crow’s route straight to the prey’s position; others, subject to some unspoken agreement, move to block lines of flight. For all its watchful anxiety, its inescapable knowledge of its place in the order of things, the prey is slow to react—fatally so. Their slowness is compounded by their decisions to run in the same direction, thus focussing the power of the pack on one path across the pasture. Too late, they realise, attempt to diverge… but they are already caught in the tightening noose of the pack. One prey stops still, petrified perhaps by the imminence of death, while the other runs all out for a closing gap between members of the pack—but to no avail. The hunt reaches its eternal conclusion.

Afterward, the wolves will discuss which of the prey made the wiser choice. The one that stopped may have spared itself the agony of struggle, they note, while the one that ran could be said to have clung to life, and all its possibilities, right to the end. Which of these is the course of dignity?

The prey, recovering from their exertions, offer their own opinions. The one that ran was reminded of fleeing from larger, crueller creatures in its youth, and contrasts the near inevitability of failing to escape with the fleeting possibility of freedom. The one that stood and waited for death admits, without rancour or regret, that it is something of a fatalist—but that the experience has given it cause to question that position.

Shedding costumes and characters, the wolves and the sheep slowly reassume the human identities that they hung out to air before the hunt commenced. The wolves are much scratched and bruised by their movements through the woodland surrounding the field—true wolves, it bears observing, do not suffer such indignities—while the sheep are exhausted from hours of anxious tension culminating in the adrenaline-drenched exertion of their final flight. Ointments, bandages and flasks of hot beverages are shared between the species as they begin, together, the dark walk back to where their bikes are chained together by a tree at the edge of a car-park.

The group has been meeting for a few years now: a hard core of six regulars supplemented by a few now-and-thens, who must fit the game around the demands of the school run or a big audit at the office. Every now and again, someone new turns up to a meeting. Sometimes, these are large men with unsettling tattoos, their gym-bulked bodies fidgety with supplements and unspoken assumptions: the quiet, watchful dynamic of the hunt lacks the crude and brutal symbolism they’d been hoping to perform, and they rarely make it past the briefing session before the game begins, balking at the rule that all new players must first take a turn as the prey.

The old hands have had many turns on both sides of the fence, and they try to run things so that everyone gets a regular experience of playing the prey. In the debrief discussions, after the hunt has ended, the prey players are given ample space and time to reflect on a role that the human animal has (mostly) forgotten. Their metaphors and images polished with practice, the core members of the pack narrativise the experience—on either side, or both—in such a way as to encourage the new cubs to match them. Each wolf’s tale grows with the telling; the story of the pack grows, too.

That is less of a problem than one might think. Stories like that of the pack have become more common in recent years, and thus attract less opprobrium from those who like to play the role of authority: like veganism or refusing to shave one’s body hair, roleplaying as predators and prey—whether for the exercise and outdoor companionship, or for some more nebulous notion of multispecies empathy—has become one more thing that “those people” sometimes do. It’s not normalised, by any means, but nor is it persecuted directly. There’s too much of such weirdness afoot to waste one’s time chasing it down. Keeping the old show on the road has become an all-consuming task, and it leaves no time for making examples of those who refuse to play, or who prefer to play differently.

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As we jump back onto Jenny’s words and float away from this place where the forest meets the fields, perhaps you’re thinking to yourself that the wolf-pack is only (only!) people playing games in the wild-lands, and that now, what—they take their costumes off, get a bus back to civilisation and just return to their workaday doings at the warehouse, the coffee-shop, the call-centre cubicle-farm?

Well, yes—that’s exactly what happens. What matters is what they take back with them. At some point, even Jenny eventually takes off the headphones and turns off the mic, knowing that she’s done her bit, that she has manifested—if only for a few hours a week, to a few thousand, a few hundred, a few dozen people—that different world she bears within her. It’s a child of her heart as much as a child of her brain—as if those two things were ever separate—a world in which the rules are different: a world in which “nature” is no longer “out there”, beyond the borders of the city and the columns of the balance sheet, nor even “in here”, like some notion of virtue clutched tight against the artifice of consumption. No, neither of these, but rather a world where “nature” is a property which we all possess, and which in turn we all are possessed by, a world in which agency—the capacity to act, and to be acted upon—is no longer the exclusive demesne of the animal that calls itself (though not all of its peers) “human”.

What might they be achieving, you wonder of these wolves, of the parliamentarian players and the transportation consultancy, and of Jenny, by acting out these utopian sketches. Perhaps it makes them feel good? That, at least, is a permissible motivation in our world—the one excuse that forgives the indulgence of fantasy, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of your making a productive contribution to society.

Look again at Jenny, patiently putting together an imaginary radio show in her free time: perhaps she does it because, when she lays down those headphones and switches off that mic, she knows that there are a few thousand, a few hundred, a few dozen people who have not just been told of the possibility of a better world waiting to be born, but who have seen-heard-smelt-felt it, however imperfectly, however briefly. They have not been sold it, either, with slickly contemporary graphic design and focus-grouped calls-to-action, but have instead seen it acted out in such a way that only people who believed it was worth something other than money could have acted it.

But OK, perhaps we pushed too far here: perhaps you’re not ready to accept vulpine roleplay as a way to build a better world. Jenny’s got one more item on the slate of today’s show—the final slot, where she always grabs hard for the heartstrings. Let’s soar with her words one last time, and come back down to something a bit more grounded...

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It’s Sunday evening, and Greil is stuffing envelopes at the kitchen table.

The letters are facsimiles of a hand-drawn original (which Greil may or may not have scanned and printed at a workplace where he sometimes helps out) but the envelopes are all addressed personally in Greil’s hasty block-capitals. If anyone asked him—and no one yet has asked him, much to his frustration—he’d tell you that addressing the letters by hand makes them feel like they were sent by a person rather than an organisation, an interlocutor. But no one ever asks him about that—and it’s probably Greil’s own fault, because it turns out that when you start describing your ongoing project by saying “I’ve spent most of the past winter being a stork”, people tend to jump straight over questions of method and practice and go straight for the existential stuff.

When challenged on this claim—“C’mon, no way did you spend the winter pretending to be a stork!”—he replies that of course he wasn’t pretending to be a stork, because that would be absurd. Indeed, it was precisely to avoid the absurdity of mere pretence that he was therefore actually being a stork, which is a very serious business indeed. Furthermore, in recognition of that seriousness—and also to reduce the risks attendant upon using the magics of shapeshifting—he has also been being, for at least a few hours a week, a number of entirely different animals. (It wouldn’t do to get trapped in one form, after all; the fairytales have always been very clear on that point.)

Shapeshifting came late to Greil, who has for a long time put “writer” in the OCCUPATION field of official documents, often following it with a question mark when the institution or computer system in question allows for such levities. He thinks of shapeshifting as an extension of the writing, really, like a hidden level or power-up tucked away in the more obscure antechambers of a magic that can never be fully mastered.

It emerged, as shapeshifting often does, as a response to feelings of guilt. As one of a pair of guest speakers on climate issues to six-year-old children, he was floored by the simple sincerity of one child’s question: “what can a writer do about climate change?”

This question has haunted Greil (and many other writers and artists) for many years. One can become accommodated to one’s ghosts, however: tacitly working out with them the sort of itineraries that structure a failing relationship, all routinised avoidance and minimised proximity. But this kid’s bright-eyed rehearsal of it, asked as if he fully expected Greil to have an answer, and was fully ready to be grateful for it, his child’s mind as yet unfettered by the standard rhetorical positions, by the wearinesses and bitter ironies, by the instinct to point the finger anywhere else but toward oneself… well, it was a suckerpunch. “I don’t know, really,” Greil answered, before saving himself with a quickly appended “but when you work it out, you can let me know!”

The Question—rudely awakened, encountered unexpectedly—wouldn’t take that for an answer, and it gnawed at Greil throughout his fellow presenter’s talk.

The fellow presenter’s name was Lena and she was... well, Greil forgets the exact term, but it’s some sort of biology thing. Basically she studies storks. White storks lived in this landscape for a long time, but almost disappeared during the twentieth century, for all the usual reasons. Conservationists built the population back up from hand-reared birds, which was interesting, because the captive birds don’t migrate, but their hatchlings do: that instinct inheres in the species, it seems, even if it gets trained out of one generation in captivity.

But these are all five-dollar words, too many syllables, so Lena’s explaining to the children how the storks (and some other animals) go away for part of the year, go somewhere else. One of the children asks if it’s like a holiday, and Lena says a little, but not really, because we (she means humans) go on holiday to escape our lives, but for these animals, the migration is part of their lives. One little girl becomes really upset, she’s crying, because she’s decided that the animals go away because they’re unhappy with the things we (she also means humans) are doing, and maybe they won’t ever come back. This little girl is totally distraught, and emotions go viral real fast in this sort of environment, so soon half the kids in the classroom are crying, and Lena finds herself in the awkward situation of trying to explain that it’s not their fault that animals migrate, while also admitting that yeah, the things we do to their environment is kinda really not good for them.

On the bus back to the city, Greil commiserated with Lena about the upset kids, discussing how hard it is to explain animal motives to them, when an answer to The Question just fell into his brain: wouldn’t it be great if the animals themselves could explain it to them?

He talked with Lena about her research, about the storks: what they like, where they go and when, how they live. With Lena’s help, he wrote a letter to the class of children, but as if he were a stork: “hey, we’ve gotta head off now because winter is coming and we have stuff to do elsewhere, but we’ll be back next year”, some bits about how the region has changed over the years, about how it has been difficult for them sometimes, but that all’s basically well and they’re excited about the big trip ahead. Just like a letter from a friend, you know? A friend who happens to be a stork, and who is trying their best to pitch their letter to primary school pupils.

That felt good. What felt better was when, about a week later, the children wrote back—all fifteen of them individually (with some help from their teacher). After a difficult weekend, the sight of their letters—full of crayon drawings, scribblings-out and excitement—moved Greil like nothing had moved him in a very long time. He knew, then, that he’d found an answer to The Question: not the only answer, nor even an answer that would necessarily work for anyone else, but an answer that worked for him. What can a writer do about climate change? Well, they could write letters to small children from the point of view of animals, obviously!

Nearly six months later, Greil’s still at it—and his address book, as well as his roster of animal personae, is still growing. He started out with more school classes, but eventually word got around, people found the little website he’d put together, and new pen-pals were signing up on the regular from all over the country. Not just kids, either: Greil reads every reply, but the ones from people his own age—often wrestling with loneliness and other forms of existential malaise, as well as the guilt of The Question—are the ones he treasures.

Greil’s girlfriend, long accustomed to the sudden emergence of all-consuming projects, is mostly pleased that this one seems to bring so much joy to Greil himself—though she loves to look through the letters from the children sometimes, which can feel like a sunbeam in a world of storm-clouds. A small grant and some kind donations have allowed Greil to drop one of his day-jobs and free up more time for the letters, but who knows how long it will last?

Greil, for the first time in years, is unconcerned: this is the right thing, right now.

#

So there we go—the show is almost over.

You wonder how literally to take all this stuff, don’t you? Does Jenny really believe in psychic weather? are there people who really think that play-acting as a wolf will have any effect on habitat loss or human relations? should we really let slime moulds plan railway networks, put penguins on the boards of energy multinationals, train trees to whisper poetry at us when we pass by?

To tell the truth, I do not know—but I’m not sure it matters. Even in attempting to dismiss these ideas, you have been changed by them, you have been altered, added to. It is your choice to reject or invite those additions, as you see fit. No one can force you.

Aye, there’s the hard truth of it: no one can force you.

But let’s leave Jenny to finish up. It’s getting late; her daughter will soon have finished her homework, and she needs to rerecord the last segue: Greil’s story got her a bit choked up, and while she’s not embarrassed about being seen to have emotions, she’s quite perfectionist about the show. Besides, it’s time to return to your world, the world where we met...

#

… though of course, in a sense, we never really left it.

These dreamers we’ve just met—and let’s include me in that category, here, in case you weren’t already—these dreamers are not trying to force you. They’re not even trying to persuade you, really.

Tell me: do you feel forced, or that you are subject to suasion, when you see a child pretending to be a dog, a fairy, a Batman, a dog-fairy-Batman? Or do you smile, much as you did when I first spoke to you, with perhaps a hint of sadness for their innocence, for the ease with which the child will become something—anything!—other, anything Other, than what they (supposedly) are?

I’m guessing the latter’s more likely. (As I said before, I prefer to think the best of people.)

But what if—just suppose!—what if the sadness you feel is not for the loss of the child’s innocence, which has yet to happen, bur rather for the loss of your own, which happened long ago?

A child adds to the world incessantly, relentlessly, in joy and sorrow both, until such a time as they’re trained out of it, taught instead to focus on more worthy things: the accumulation of capital and kudos, the cultivation of a respectable persona somewhere in the middle of the bell-curve of the possible. Don’t feel sorry for that child: feel sorry, if sorry you must feel, for the child that was (stolen from) you, the child that was put to bed early beneath reason’s comforting, smothering blanket.

Feel angry, if angry you must feel—and I wouldn’t say you must, but I will say it wouldn’t hurt—for the dreams you were cajoled into swapping for more material aspirations.

Feel sad, if sad you must feel, for the instinct within you—and me, and all of us—to dismantle the dreams of others; feel sad for the way we all tirelessly redraw the pencil-mark bars of our collective cage, day in, day out, and then tell ourselves that we quite like the view, actually.

It’s not your fault; it’s no one person’s fault. But it’s a fault that runs through us all—the fault that threatens to quake and yawn and swallow us.

That why it doesn’t matter whether they really believe it, whatever “it” may be. Or rather, to reiterate, it matters oh-so-much to them—but if it doesn’t matter to you, well, so what? Walk away, if you will. Other dreams are available!

So listen, one more time, once and forever: I am a citizen of a world which waits to be born.

And I’ve tried to take you there… but this writing, this words-on-paper thing, it’s an old magic: not without considerable residual power, perhaps, but outcompeted nonetheless in a world—your world, my world, our world, this world—where a thousand things clamour for our monetised attention, a world where text seems unbearably slow and long: who’s got the time, y’know?

Well, you could make the time… and if you’re here, and I’m here too, near the end of this story/dream, then you’ve made the time. That honours me, and I thank you.

But yes, my preferred means of dreaming aloud is slow. Perhaps that’s why I dream of a world where there are more people dreaming aloud, staging the play, playing the stage? Because the more of them there are—the more of us there are—dreaming aloud in different ways, the more chances we have of waking up the sleeping child in those we meet, in those who come to see or hear or taste our work, to play our games. That sleeping child is the part of us that dreamt. That sleeping child is the world that waits to be born.

That’s what they’re all saying, these dreamers, with their psychic weather stations and cosplay wolfpacks and mychorrizal transport consultants and who the hell knows what else: they’re saying that the dreaming child still sleeps in all of us, and that they want to wake that child and let it play. That they want to change the world, and that they want it enough to try; that they’re willing risk your ridicule, and the bitter taste of failure.

They’re saying that they dare to dream. That’s what I’m saying, too.

I am a citizen of a world which waits to be born.

So are you. Will you show us?

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~o0O0o~

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