Have you heard of Walter Segal?”

“No. Who’s that?”

“He was a German who wrote a kind of house-building manual for regular people. He ran an interesting project in Lewisham in London, in the Eighties. People were given plots of land in exchange for building the houses themselves. None of them had any experience with construction. They did it on evenin... See more

There’s really nothing you can learn abstractly. The only thing you can do is experience it and do it yourself. You have to do it, you have to experience it, it has to happen to you. Bodily, physically—because you’re part of the world. The world is fucked because we are fucked. Healing ourselves is part of healing the world.”

But the feeling did not leave me: that the voice had come from the other side. Not from the realm of the dead, of course, but from the realm of the lifeless. It was the lifeless matter that spoke.