Reanimating Collapse

It begins with the old sunken shell of a rowboat, submerged in shallow waters. There are dead leaves and all sorts of wrack and flotsam in the waves, bobbing into view as the perspective pushes out above the scud. First an apple in the drift, then a barrel, now splintered planks of wood. A strange light pulses out across the seaborne trash. At first, it seems like it might be the barrel that’s lighting up, but no, it’s the tiny creature above it—a little shining winged thing that’s pulling forward too, in the same direction. In the air is the mummering of some kind of choir, wordlessly droning out an up-down refrain. The little shining thing pushes on, past a raised clump of stone jutting up out of the water with a twinned cairn of rocks resting on its slope. We follow, over the lily pads to another stone, this one supporting a great metal door with three plastic jugs lashed to its side. Perched atop one jug, a gull watches as black oily muck drips into a bucket below. A new voice joins the choir then, no less garbled, nor more easily understood, full of blips and glitches. The gull calls out too, but the sound doesn’t seem to register. Nearing the shore now, with its dead reeds and twisted bits of bark, and then up and out, onto swampy flats. There are footsteps in the mud, as though we’re following in some other lost soul’s wake. Next we come across a hasty structure of old palettes and rocks and animal bones covered in dead fish, a sacrificial plinth for some kind of ritual doing. The little shining creature passes over, so we do the same, onto ground littered with broken pottery and blighted carcasses. On one patch, it seems like whoever left the footsteps must have reached down and poked the numerals XII into the mud—that’s a judgement number. The track leads us past another cairn and into the tall grass. There’s an old pendant in the shape of a T on the ground, a flute made of carved bone, and a lone shoe left forlorn and friendless. Brushing through some bracken, we come to a forest floor, bugs and snails clambering over other left-behind things until an abandoned campsite stumbles into view. Strange camping it is too, with a steel-frame chair pointed sideways at a makeshift altar: a wooden plank resting on two cinderblocks. Laid out across the plank is a vase of flowers, a dead bird on its back, and a red bowl giving out torpid violet vapors into the air. Behind them all, pictures are playing on a boxy screen of a figure in a pointed hat beating a crocodile about the head with a stick. What sort of people would watch such a thing, and for what reason? There’s a battery below powering the screen, and look, the erstwhile companion of that other shoe lost behind. No time to tarry though, we’re still moving off, past stumps and bumps and bits of old wall, into the floating fields. With the wheat stems moving this way and that, the voices of the choir near enough fade away entirely, replaced by a lonesome strumming and reedy gurzle. Things seem to get all woozy then, with the signs coming on thick and fast. A wagon wheel all covered in candles and wax—isn’t that some kind of portent too? More candles on either side of the track, lighting up the way, and a brooding arrangement of rocks and sticks all decked out with toadstools. The path runs out, but the little shining winged thing keeps pushing forward, into the field, and we do the same. Suddenly, it’s like the whole world is drowning in wheat stems—shifting and moving hither and thither. Enough to give you the heaves, more so than those waters behind us. But just when it seems like we might be lost in that golden field forever, the view hitches up by degrees until we see a figure hanging by their right leg from a post above. Their left leg crosses the other, and their arms are tied behind their back. The ropes used for knotting are all stuffed with verdant flowers and bits of leaves, while on the figure’s chest is daubed the XII again, this time in red. Is that who we’ve been following? The same one all strung up and hanged? The little shining creature seems to think so. It swoops up and out, past the figure’s back and out the other side. Then it passes behind the head, slow and intentional. For a second you can still see it flashing, winking straight through the eye socket, then it moves into the head and up through the chest, pulsing light warm and pinkish through the skin. It all lights up then, everything we can picture, and we’re drawn right into that light, and into that body. The lonesome strumming goes quiet, just like everything else. It’s just a rush of things from a world turned to ruin—all sorts of things, but flowers most of all.

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Youth Grows Forever (2022) by VISIO and Rustan Söderling is a computer-generated music video about the provisional nature of belief in an age of recursive collapse, and how the world might one day become enchanted anew. Through a wandering, first-person journey led by a fairy familiar across a drowned and despoiled neomedieval landscape, the work stages a syncretic process of re-mythologization from first principles: an elusive, ahistorical assemblage of disparate signs and symbols that find their genesis—and closest literary analogue—in Russell Hoban’s post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker,¹ a work of science fiction about the death of futurology.

Riddley Walker is set some two thousand years after an epoch-ending nuclear exchange has reduced Britain to a scattered, barely literate iron-age society clinging to the marshes and downs of what was once Kent in southeast England. Its narrator, the eponymous Riddley, is a twelve-year-old boy who comes of age when he inherits his dead father’s post as “connexion man”—part shaman, part civil servant—whose job is to interpret the Eusa Show, a traveling allegorical puppet play directed by a shadowy governing bureaucracy known as the Mincery. In the show, the parable of Saint Eustace, a popular medieval Christian tract, has fused across centuries of oral corruption with a garbled folk memory of the science of nuclear fission. Instead of splitting the atom, Eusa pulls apart “the littl shynin man, the Addom” to bring about “the 1 Big 1”: the source of the ensuing and long-enduring “Bad Time”. Riddley narrates his world in a corroded phonetic English, a re-regionalized dialect that has transformed just as thoroughly as the society that speaks it. As a whole, the novel forms a fictional model of how meaning survives the collapse of its governing institutions, badly, by recombining whatever shreds of mythology happen to survive devastation. Naturally, the people of this world look back on our contemporary culture, whose ruins they squat amongst, with superstitious bewilderment:

“Counting counting they wer all the time. They had iron then and big fire they had towns of parpety. They had machines et numbers up. They fed them numbers and they fractiont out the Power of things. They had the Nos. of the rain bow and the Power of the air all workit out with counting which is how they got boats in the air and picters on the wind. Counting clevverness is what it wer.”²

While Youth Grows Forever is based on Hoban’s text, it borrows very little of its plot and nothing of its orthography. Despite this, it induces precisely the same analytical apprehension on behalf of the viewer: the archaeological anxiety of reading a ruined world for meanings it may or may not still hold. To move through the virtual landscapes of the video is to pick at ideological wreckage the same way Riddley circumnavigates the degenerated terrain of “Inland”, unsure at every turn whether a given object affords divine instruction or merely figures as abstract debris. The cairns evidently left behind by persons unknown, the suggestive mysticism of makeshift altars, the crux commissa or Tau cross pendant lying discarded in the dirt: each encounter both affords and withholds context in equal measure. Even the voices of the choir which haunt the video’s first half refuse to offer as much as a coherent lyric. Any “connexions” must be assembled ad-hoc, out of whatever symbolic fragments the anamnestic tide deigns to deposit.

The work’s only direct sampling of found media, the recording playing on the campsite screen, is of the enduringly popular English puppet show Punch and Judy. First documented in London in 1662, the anarchic figure of Punch has his origins in the character Pulcinella of Italian commedia dell’arte theater, with other accounts connecting him to the much older Roman Maccus—another hunchbacked and beak-nosed recalcitrant—of the Atellan Farce (c. 300 BCE).³ Punch’s disorderly authority over whatever stage he happens to occupy finds a further Roman ancestor in Saturnalia, the festival during which social hierarchy was ritually inverted for a fixed number of days, and a medieval English counterpart in the Lord of Misrule, a figure appointed each Christmas to preside over a licensed season of chaos and revelry before order duly reasserted itself.⁴ In Riddley Walker, Punch is the one figure that the governing Mincery cannot fully absorb into its state theology; the discovery of one such fire-blackened puppet forming the inciting incident for Riddley’s own errant journey across Inland. When Goodparley, the one-time “Pry Mincer”, eventually produces his own Punch puppet for Riddley, he explains that the character predates even the Eusa Show—"he’s so old he can’t dy”—a claim Hoban traces in his afterword to an almost identical remark made to him by the real-life Punch and Judy performer Percy Press.⁵ At the novel’s conclusion, Riddley mounts an unlicensed traveling Punch show of his own, smuggling the trickster back into a mythology that had attempted to erase him. The monitor playing the footage of Punch beating the Crocodile with his slapstick in Youth Grows Forever—a surprisingly asynchronous example of modern technology amid the otherwise agrarian setting—performs the same return of the repressed.

It would be a mistake, however, to read either work as describing a cult. Most of what circulates as belief in Youth Grows Forever and the wider references it draws from is looser and more associative: a fantastical popular imaginary of tabletop role-playing games, tarot and other forms of divination, standing stones, neopagan rituals, and the visual language of video games, where the medieval supplies a ready-made grammar of quest and covenant. Indeed, in a 2011 interview with the writer Will Self, Hoban pleaded “innocent to the charge of intellectuality”, describing the bones of the Riddley Walker narrative appearing to him unbidden while viewing the faded fifteenth-century fresco of Saint Eustace in Canterbury Cathedral.⁶ What Hoban describes as a private, almost involuntary act of synthesis is, at scale, the same semiotic metaphysics laid bare in his ensuing narrative, and VISIO and Söderling’s by extension: belief arriving as pattern recognized, seized upon, and pressed into service as provisional doctrine—a new narration of reality. The effect is something like Max Weber’s entzauberung running in reverse: magic, expelled from a disenchanted world by the Abrahamic monotheisms and their rational modernist heirs, quietly reentering through the back door of collapse.⁷

In his essay Dreaming of the Middle Ages, published only a few years after Riddley Walker, Umberto Eco suggests that the medieval persists in the modern imagination as a shifting repertoire of ideas and images continually repurposed to meet the cultural and political needs of the present.⁸ This recursive return of Middle Age forms within the supposedly modern world has come to be described, in both cultural studies and political theory, as neomedievalism. The idea was popularized by the professor of international relations Hedley Bull in his 1977 book The Anarchical Society, in which he describes the sovereign nation-state losing its authoritative monopoly to a tangle of overlapping, competing jurisdictions (multinational corporations, transnational blocs, and armed non-state actors) in a manner Bull thought structurally analogous to the divided loyalties of medieval Christendom.⁹ Even then, academics and analysts were readily anticipating the demise of Pax Americana—the supposed period of stability under US hegemony that followed the Second World War. In their book thN Lng Folk 2go: Investigating Future Premoderns™, the Confraternity of Neoflagellants extend Bull’s diagnosis to describe a global managerial class of financiers and technologists inheriting the mobility and extraterritorial reach once enjoyed by the medieval clergy.¹⁰ Citing Stephen Kobrin, they locate the origin of this new-old “space of flows” in the internet, whose networked architecture, organized by relation and affinity rather than fixed territorial sovereignty, recalls a Middle Age cosmography.¹¹ Reading Simon O’Sullivan’s foreword in the same source, we might say that a capital so late-developed comes to loop back upon itself, a coiled and recursive shape mirroring the spiral rhyme of “Fool Circel 9wys”, a prophetic verse sung by the children of Riddley Walker that plots eight Kentish towns in a tightening coil with Canterbury at its center.¹² Wassim Z. Alsindi, writing more recently, traces the same assertion of borderless, extraterritorial authority by tech entrepreneurs pursuing the establishment of cryptographic “network states”, arguing that their self-image as industrial disruptors barely conceals an older Crusader logic of righteous acquisition.¹³ The medieval thus returns twice over: as a political morphology in the fragmentation of Westphalian sovereignty and as a symbolic hall of mirrors through which a wider temporal retroactivity is imagined, narrated, and desired.

Nuclear catastrophe, in particular, provokes visions of regression in which advanced technological civilization could rapidly collapse into the premodern past. The eerie quality of dread carried by the desolate landscapes of Riddley Walker and Youth Grows Forever, however otherwise enchanted, chimes with our own recent strains of apocalyptic anticipation among the death throes of US empire. In their 1983 study Doomsday: Britain after Nuclear Attack, the geographers Openshaw, Steadman, and Greene calculate that even a moderate Soviet assault would likely kill or injure four-fifths of the country’s population, seriously damage two-thirds of its buildings, and blanket seventy percent of inhabited land in fallout lethal to anyone caught in the open—a set of figures the authors argue the government had a direct interest in keeping out of public discourse, with sustained political support for nuclear weapons dependent on the general population not fully grasping the consequences of using them.¹⁴ In the same vein, R. N. Ormerod’s contemporaneous Nuclear Shelters: A Guide to Design notes that a government facing such an attack had every incentive to see the general population suffer as many casualties as possible, before survivors could compete for the limited resources that would remain.¹⁵ In 1984, the BBC docudrama Threads gave this statistical prognosis a face, following the people of Sheffield through the abject devastation of a speculative nuclear strike and the grim decades of its aftermath.¹⁶ After the immediacies of the attack—millions dead, the collapse of civil defense, the slow attrition of survivors through starvation, radiation sickness, and social disintegration—the film ends with a subsistence agricultural society, shrunken to medieval population levels and struggling to draw nourishment from a poisoned landscape. The speech of the generation of children born after the assault has already altered to a colloquial post-nuclear dialect.

Riddley Walker’s “Bad Time” is the collective folk-memory of the same radioactive devastation. And what’s more, mysterious forces operating throughout Inland seem to refuse to let the catastrophe stay safely in the past tense. The specter of technological progress and the power it affords possesses characters at different times: Goodparley rewrites the doctrinal Eusa Show from one of warning to predestination, appending new verses to the canonical text as proof that the lost arts of “chemistery and fizziks” should rightly be recovered.¹⁷ Later, he is dethroned and blinded by his second-in-command, who justifies the coup by framing the seizure of power as an obligation his position imposed rather than an ambition consciously chosen.¹⁸ Even Riddley, after his rediscovery of sulphur (the “yellerboy stoan”), feels the same compulsion pass temporarily to him, wondering aloud whether he remains the author of his own actions or merely their instrument.¹⁹ These events gesture towards a familiar technological determinism and its presence writ large across the land. Once a society possesses what Federico Campagna calls Technic, the metaphysical disposition that renders the entire world as raw material awaiting exploitation, the tendency expresses its own volition, regardless of any single actor’s will to prevent it.²⁰ This fatalistic reading recalls Oswald Spengler’s concept of morphological history, in which cultures rise and fall along fixed, quasi-biological cycles rather than any single onward line: the “Bad Time” always waiting to recur once the appropriate Faustian conditions of “clevverness” assemble themselves.²¹

As Campagna insists, however, Technic holds no permanent monopoly on reality: the world remains just as available to Magic, the cosmology it once displaced. While there are many hints along the way, Youth Grows Forever converges in its final sequence on an image unmistakably lifted from the tarot: the Hanged Man. Relatively unchanged since the Visconti-Sforza and Tarot de Marseille decks of the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries respectively, the card was popularized in its present form by Pamela Colman Smith’s 1909 designs for A. E. Waite.²² Tarot itself began as a fifteenth-century Italian card game, tarocchi, entirely without occult associations. Its recruitment into divination is a comparatively late invention credited to the eighteenth-century French clergyman Antoine Court de Gébelin, who believed the deck to be Ancient Egyptian in origin, and to the nineteenth-century occultist Éliphas Lévi, who systematized its correspondence to the Hebrew alphabet and the Kabbalah. The Hanged Man (card XII) typically represents the surrender of control rather than death—a revelatory reversal of ordinary sight. Read this way, the symbolic image, paired with a Quixotic windmill turning in the background of the scene, supplies Youth Grows Forever with its clearest thesis about vision itself: in a visual culture increasingly generated rather than witnessed, where the authority of the photographic index has quietly been withdrawn, illusion becomes the ambient condition of perception. The fairy, lingering behind the Hanged Man’s exposed eye, seems to invite a compact with this new horizon of the real.

Departing from Colman Smith’s design in one crucial aspect, VISIO and Söderling’s Hanged Man is not merely bound and suspended but interred in green matter, the ropes constricting his body stuffed with leaves and blossoming flowers. This gesture makes explicit a latent valence of the card: an older, half-forgotten lineage of hanged and sacrificed gods associated with the turning of the seasons—the dying and resurrecting vegetable king that James George Frazer traces across a dozen disparate mythologies in his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion.²³ Some occultists, following Waite’s own eclectic borrowings from esoteric Christianity and Kabbalah, have also sought to connect the card to the Norse god Odin’s nine nights strung up on Yggdrasil in pursuit of runic wisdom.²⁴ In Youth Grows Forever, the hanged body is given over as a substrate for something else’s growth. The medieval Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen called the generative force of creation viriditas: the divine greenness through which life perpetually returns after decay.²⁵ Something similar occurs in The Dream of the Rood, an Old English poem possibly dating to the eighth century in which Christ’s cross speaks as a living thing and is venerated as a sacred tree.²⁶ Of all spiritual traditions, animism is older still, recalling the Neolithic goddess-worship cults which subsequent deities could overwrite but never entirely erase. Perhaps because their core insights—that all life is interconnected and that agency inheres in more than the human—can be grasped more or less intuitively if one remains open to the world.

Riddley Walker furnishes an almost exact equivalent to this vegetal contra-mythology in the shape of a carved stone face of leaves discovered amid the ruins of Canterbury Cathedral, which Riddley names Greanvine. Distinct from Eusa, whose story concerns rupture and the promise of recovered power, and from Punch, whose antisocial disorder at least bears an inverted relation to the functioning of society, Greanvine belongs to a more ambiguous, organic presence that Riddley associates with the way a person’s death invites a vine or growth to spring forth from their grave. The same figure is known to us as the Green Man, whose modern identity was itself assembled from disparate sources: medieval foliate carvings decorating churches, leaf-clad figures from vernacular pageantry, and folk traditions of seasonal death and renewal. The folklorist Lady Raglan’s influential 1939 essay gathered these strands into a single mythic figure,²⁷ but the resulting Green Man is better understood as the persistence of a vegetal imaginary through successive acts of recombination. Regardless of its origins, the collective meaning imbued in the Green Man as a symbol of modern paganism gestures towards a metamorphic mythopoesis: one in which an old residual image germinates into new forms of belief.

It is this very process of creative renewal that Youth Grows Forever enacts in its final moments. As the fairy’s light envelops the screen and flowers float towards the viewer, we can assume that the verdant hanged body has been given over to transcendental rejuvenation—world-ending rather than world-building—and that a new reality awaits us beyond. Many similar acts of symbolic transformation have been charted over the course of this text: Punch’s disorderly shapeshifting through the theatrical canon; the unstable temporalities of the medieval and the nuclear, returning first as fantasy then as political reality; the syncretic history of the tarot; and the contemporary vegetal symbolism of the Green Man. What these examples share is a capacity for existing symbols and systems to become otherwise, a retro-causal gnosis that yields meanings and possibilities that couldn’t have been anticipated from their original configurations. What VISIO and Söderling ultimately present is a virtual diorama for inhabiting collapse: the ruins of an exhausted world composting into something newly animate. The capacity to produce meaning, and not any single system of belief, is what grows forever.