“Where we start to move forward is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with ‘Are you like us?’, and more interested in ‘What is it like to be you?” —James Bridle, Ways Of Being
Hi!
I’m a medical student and freelance environmental journalist, with a background in neuroscience and anthropology, and I’ve been involved in music my whole life. The first question from most people who hear that spiel is: “how on earth does any of that fit together?” In our capitalist model of productivity culture, things are supposed to fit. Our roles at work are supposed to feed into each other and our hobbies are supposed to be easily monetisable, and if we have a multi-stranded career, its constituent parts are supposed to be related enough to allow you to ‘upsell’ yourself and make more money in each of them.
Put simply, that approach has never worked for me, and—much as I’d wished I could—I’d given up the idea of forcing my disparate interests together. Until I sat down with my cucumber and chilli hummus sandwich at Kairos one Wednesday lunchtime, and watched a video that changed how I thought about everything.
That video was a recording of a talk given by James Bridle, a writer and artist, in 2022. Over 45 minutes, James (whose pronouns are they/them) delivers their thesis that understanding alternative forms of intelligence—like those of the octopus, the slime mould and the touch-me-not plant (Mimosa pudica)—can challenge our hierarchical, humans-at-the-top perspective in a way that could prove vital to our continued existence.
This concept—of alternative, collective, planetary intelligences—sparked a series of links in my brain. I’d been thinking for a while about how music offers a connection to intuitive, non-conscious knowledge in a way that little else seems able to do: like research showing how dementia sufferers who’ve barely moved or spoken for months get up and begin to dance when they hear the songs of their youth. Music is a medicine.
Music is also a locational technology, as with Aboriginal Australian Songlines, which form “both a navigational aid and a repository of cultural knowledge”. Songlines are ancient Indigenous technologies of sound that, when memorised and deployed sequentially, allow their users to traverse vast distances across the continent of Australia. The music becomes a map: one that includes information about what’s safe to eat and drink along the journey, the location of natural signposts to confirm the route, and messages in the local languages of the places the route passes through, to mark the traveller as non-threatening.
When British colonisers invaded Australia, they belittled Songlines as mere paths with no deeper story. But they used them nevertheless, since the land they covered had already been tamped down by centuries of feet. The Deadly Story cultural archive tells us that, over time, “these traditional routes evolved to become cart-tracks, then gravelled paths, to finally the bitumen covered roads we see today. Examples of roads in Melbourne that were once used as Aboriginal Songlines include the Napean Highway, Dandenong Road, Plenty Road, Heidelberg Road, Geelong Road and Ballarat Road, just to name a few.”
That knowledge, hidden under tarmac and disillusionment and cruelty, still runs humming through the lands it belongs to. And under the tarmac of our disenchanted lives courses knowledge we have forgotten how to access. The intuitive knowledge of the bodies we inhabit beats patiently beneath our bitumenned instincts. Krista Tippett, in conversation with James Bridle, says: “so much that we learn collectively and that we’re learning through all the things you and I have been talking about are things that, in many ways, we knew forever, [even] if we only knew them in our bodies”.
The ways bodies know is also something I think about as I study medicine. Our intuitive senses as patients about what might be wrong with us, or the psychological pains that can manifest themselves in our bodies as physical, are often overlooked by clinicians who refuse to take these kinds of intelligences seriously—particularly when our bodies are marked as marginalised, and therefore less trustworthy, to begin with.
On the other side, although doctors aren’t taught to use their own intuition (it’s been called “unreliable, unscientific and unsuitable”), studies have shown that medical trainees specifically told to use their intuition as a diagnostic tool often reach the correct diagnosis faster. That’s not particularly surprising when you consider what intuition actually means: the “non-linear creation of knowledge where experiences are stored deeply in the mind and re-emerge when needed”. The experiential knowledge stored in the earth, in our bodies, in the bodies of our fellow beings both human and more-than-human: this could be the strand that ties my worlds together.
This is, I realise, a very lengthy intro to what this newsletter will be covering for the rest of this year: an A-Z of alternative / ancient / collective / planetary intelligences (I’m still searching for the best term to use). That’s about all the detail I can give for now, since I don’t know exactly what this will look like—but I hope you’ll stay with me for this new journey into new realms of knowing 🦝🦨🦡🦫🦦🦥🐁🐀🐿🦔🐾🐉🐲🌵🎄🌲🌳🌴🪹🪺🪵🌱🌿☘️🍀🎍🪴🎋🍃🍂🍁🍄🐚🪨🌾💐🌷🪷🌹🥀🌺🌸🪻🌼🌻🌞🌝🌛🌜🌚🌕🌖🌗🌘🌑🌒🌓🌔🌙🌎🌍🌏🪐💫!