M Osmond: Black Light

Mat Osmond: Black Light

For over three years Extinction Rebellion (XR) has offered an introductory talk for those new to its take on our collective predicament: Heading for Extinction and What To Do About It. This essay reflects on XR’s proposed response to anthropogenic mass-extinction – and more specifically the underlying notion of ‘regenerative culture’ at the heart of its campaign – by bringing them into conversation with another and differently slanted reply to biological annihilation: that of an eco-feminist Marian prayer fellowship called The Way of the Rose. 

To contextualise the latter’sapproach to ecocide the essay touches on some of the entangled histories and contemporary connotations of the Black Madonna, approached here through the work of Bengali academic and Kali devotee Neela Battacharya Saxena, and through that of Mestiza psychoanalyst and post-trauma specialist Clarissa Pinkola Estes.  

As civilisation’s obliteration of Earth’s life-systems continues to accelerate despite a well-established awareness ofthe devastating near-term implications of its current trajectory,the essay ponders what ‘doing something about it’ might come to mean, once the obscenity and finality of what our present systems of government are passively handing on to the young can no longer be obfuscated or ignored. 

In the face of catastrophic ecological unravelling on the one hand, and of numbed cultural indifference on the other, the essay (from of an ongoing series of reflections on the eco-spiritual, Gyrovague Meditations) gestures towards a post-religious, ecologically-aligned reimagining of prayer: a necessarily unconditional basis for nonviolent revolution reliant neither on make-or-break deadlines nor on related guarantees of success, but steered by a more immediate sense of existential value. 

Originating as a personal reflection on a related visual poetry pamphlet (The Black Madonna’s Song, Mat Osmond & Kate Walters, Atlantic Press 2020: discussed and read from here), a previous edit of this essay was published in the Dark Mountain Journal, in April 2020.