Grapefruit Are Not The Only Bombs
To view Welcome To The Dark Ages as a simple three-day event is a tricky task.
Day Three tied itself together neatly: Toxteth Day of the Dead, The Rites of Mumufication, and The People’s Pyramid were all interconnected. But what about the two days before?
Looking back, it’s obvious everything was leading to the revelation of Mumufication. Coffins, brick collectors, pyramid imagery — the signs were everywhere. But how did our activities connect to it?
Day Two could easily be seen as just an extension of Tuesday night’s book launch. Clever, really: get 400 people personally invested in a book that might otherwise have sat on a shelf gathering dust. Not now. Not when we each own pages, used them to create something, and may one day see our names in future editions.
But I think The Day of the Book had a deeper role than just selling copies.
If you consider the burning of the pyre to be a ritual (and I do), then Day Two was all about stockpiling creative energy.
We had outfits. The JAMs had their MuMu horns. Oliver got us chanting “All Bound for MuMu Land” (later “Burn the Shard”). Fires were lit. Something went into those coffins. It had all the hallmarks of a ritual.
If you accept that, then you can also accept that keeping 400 people awake, collaborative, experimental, chaotic, and free from social conditioning for three days straight is going to generate an energy of its own.
You could see who was familiar with these kinds of events. Some people went quiet at the pyre, gave their full attention, and focused that energy into the fire. The energy we’d nurtured since The Day of the Book.
As Phil of the Psychedelic Detective podcast put it: “We know what side our bread is buttered.”
For me, when the pyre was lit, I finally exhaled. Three days of nervous, manic energy dissolved in the flames. It was the first time I fell quiet and still all week.
Does it matter if a ritual like that has a “real world” effect? Not really. The point isn’t whether you believe it or not. The point is that belief itself can create real-world benefits — a kind of placebo with teeth. Put even a little faith in it, and you might be surprised what you get back.
For me, that “something” is motivation. In those moments where I’d usually procrastinate or give up, the belief in the ritual keeps me moving. Maybe it’s subconscious, maybe it’s just stubbornness, but I treat it as having the weight of magik behind it.
Boil rituals right down and they’re just statements of intent. The JAMs didn’t make their intent clear, but that doesn’t stop you from making your own. Even if the whole thing was just an excuse for a fire, there’s no reason you can’t choose to treat it as ritual and make it work for you. Put the energy of the 400 to use.
That’s my take, anyway.
My biggest hope now is that Grapefruit Are Not the Only Bombs becomes available to the wider public — assuming it wasn’t thrown on the pyre.
I’d love to read through all 23 chapters, pause at each, and look at the art created by that chapter’s 400. To try and trace why they did what they did, where it came from, and what it meant to them. Wouldn’t that be something?
Returning to the “real world” is brutal, isn’t it? How am I supposed to sit at a desk and prioritise nonsense over what happened last week?
Like the Jura burning (at least as John Higgs frames it), Welcome to the Dark Ages has lodged itself into my reality tunnel. I can’t ignore it. In every quiet moment, my mind drifts back. I assumed the buzz would wear off in a day or two. Instead it feels like a bomb went off in the 400.
It’s up to us now. To push on. To take this experience and make something of it. Imagine how depressing it would be if we all went home, never met again, and produced nothing.
I don’t think they put us through all that just so we could go back to sitting on our hands.