By Denis Stewart
“I began ..to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as ..the murderous.” Seamus Heaney, Crediting Poetry, 1995
I’m composing this piece a few weeks before Imagine! 2025 gets underway and, specifically, as a preamble to two events in this year’s festival programme, both scheduled for Tuesday 25th March. First, during the early part of the day, Towards a Culture of Peace, a conversational gathering that will be convened in the welcoming civic space of Federick Street Quaker Meeting House. Secondly, on the evening of the same day, Cabaret for Change – Addressing the Political through the Poetical, a seriously convivial get together in the creatively performative civic space of Belfast’s Accidental Theatre. Each event – along with others in this year’s packed programme for the Imagine! Festival – offers those who choose to participate a way of responding, critically and constructively and in mutually encouraging togetherness, to the turbulent and troubling times in which we find ourselves.
The state of today’s world is dire. The prospects for tomorrow’s world feel bleak. Ours is an era of deepening cultural fragmentation, widening economic and social inequity, savage wars and rumours of wars, and ever more apparent ecological and environmental destruction. It is a time when the murderous, to which Seamus Heaney referred in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1995, feels like it is overwhelming the marvellous. And, in communities and societies where people are experiencing a growing sense of separation and polarization, of isolation and frustration, it feels like being at peace – within ourselves and with others – is becoming ever more challenging.
As I contemplate the murderous yet also marvellous messiness of the world, I wonder about how we should be and what should we be doing together in constructive resistance to so much that is wrong with the world whilst also taking heart from hopeful signs and diversely wise initiatives?
Connecting with other like-hearted, if not necessarily like-minded, persons is helpful, I find. And so too is browsing in books and others places where worthwhile words have been recorded. As an example of the latter, I’ve just procured and begun to peruse a copy of We Are Free to Change the World, subtitled, Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Right at the beginning of the book, its author, Lyndsey Stonebridge, notes how, following Donald Trump’s election in 2016, interest In Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, mushroomed. In Stonebridge’s words, a politics of the absurd and grotesque, the cruel, mendacious and downright incredible had returned, and Arendt seemed to have something to say about it.
Now, as many of us struggle to come to terms with the pernicious ugliness, appalling ignorance and ghastly arrogance of another ‘Trumpist’ Presidential term in the USA – and its echos in the growing prominence of ‘far right’ and fascist voices in the European (including UK) political landscape – it’s clear that the political culture that Stonebridge describes so aptly has come to the fore once more. The consequences of this politics of fear and false freedom are likely to get dire. And that in a world already riven by violent conflicts, self-aggrandising greed and deepening economic and political rot. A world where people are being increasingly challenged by an emerging climatic catastrophe. Added to that, there is now the disturbing spectacle of an American President who, along with too many like-minded others, is, as one commentator puts it, more interested in US plunder and profit from places like Gaza, Ukraine and Greenland than in upholding a just peace or good order.
Without having done more than skim the surface of Stonebridge’s text, I find myself responding appreciatively to two key words in the subtitle – ‘love’ and ‘disobedience’. Both are necessary as we seek to live hopefully and peacefully in the “sorry reality” that we finds ourselves in, engaging, however we can, in acts of creative transgression.
And so, turning again to those two gatherings in Belfast on 25th March, I guess those who show up to join in will have their questions in mind. Here are a few of mine:
How can we resist the sorry reality which we inhabit and, in words of Hannah Arendt, humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves?
How can we be at peace – within ourselves and with others – in circumstances that foment feelings of personal fear and unease, and general societal dis-ease?
How can we, however powerless we are feeling in the face of the world as it is, embody and express a culture – a collective ‘heart-mind-set’ – of peace and practical hope in our corners of the planet?
Perhaps these are the sorts of questions that those of us who gather to converse, civilly and creatively, in the welcoming civic space of Frederick Street Meeting House on the morning of 25th March may choose to pose and ponder together. And perhaps we shall also hear questions such as these being addressed through poetry and song, fiercely and with good humour, in the conviviality of the Cabaret for Change that evening. However these festival events unfold, I hope that they will help us, as our poet of great renown from Bellaghy mused, to make space in [our] reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as the murderous.
25th February 2025
