Lessons from the Lighthouse – Being Human with Madzines.
During the course of this project, we’ve sought out and shared countless examples of Madzines.
Image Credit: Charlotte Done
All have broadened our understanding not only of experiences of madness and distress but, more generally, of what it means to be ‘human’. Perhaps it follows from Hamja Ahsan’s insight that ‘all zines are mental health zines’, that all mental health zines (including Madzines) deal with fundamental aspects of human experience.
Although we have framed our research in classic sociological terms (using C Wright Mills’ notion of ‘turning individual struggles into critical issues for society’), we have always seen our Madzines project as sitting as comfortably with the humanities – and medical humanities – as it does with social science. That fits with the transdisciplinary nature of mental health (and Mad Studies).
What’s more, encounters with Madzines have deepened our understanding of human needs, desires and human rights – and the pain and harm that result when those are violated and denied. In that context, we’ve become intrigued by the potential of Madzines, as ‘restorative objects’, to create possibilities for meaningful dialogue, even – or especially – in the aftermath of significant harm.
In devising our methodology we’ve tried to cultivate a madzine sensibility, which has involved ‘being with’ madzines in ways that mirror the capacity to ‘be with’ other human beings during periods of madness and distress. All of these ideas chime with the notions of ‘being human’, that underpin Being Human: the National Festival of the Humanities.
The Being Human Festival
The Being Human Festival, held across the UK in November each year, aims to celebrate and demonstrate how the humanities can inspire and enrich lives, through helping us to understand ourselves, our relationships with others, and our place in the world.
For some time now we’ve considered applying to run a Festival event and have finally made that happen this year. The Being Human Festival theme for 2024 is ‘Landmarks’ and we’ve chosen Plover Scar lighthouse, on the Lune estuary near Lancaster – as our focal point.
Together we set out creatively to explore, through ‘making’ things, ideas about restorative objects and practices. How, we wondered, might our learning from other kinds of tangible and ‘evocative objects’ – things that can be received and handled, opened and closed, treasured or discarded – help us to grasp the restorative potential of Madzines?
Each Conversation took a different collection of ‘objects’ as its starting point – creatively exploring one set of objects led us to the next set. .
We started by sharing treasured things that we felt were restorative in some way to us. Our explorations of these restorative objects drew us to boxes.
In our next session we set out to make boxes and we found ourselves intrigued by maps.
Then, through a day of (individual and collective) map-making, we produced an expansive ‘Archive of Lost Ideas’ – an outsized zine that traced our conversation series as a whole.
We might see that as – to use Erin Manning’s term – an ’anarchive’, with the potential to ‘seed’ new happenings. An Anarchive is ‘a repertory of traces of events. The traces are not inert, but are carriers of potential. They are reactivatable, and their reactivation helps trigger a new event which continues the creative process from which they came, but in a new iteration’.
We realised that our creative conversations provided space – away from the online world – for engagements with embodied objects that both drew on, and in different ways, have furthered, our understanding of objects like Madzines. We have deepened our understanding of their qualities as treasures to be gifted, as containers for emotion and as charts or maps – to guide ourselves and to help others navigate. Read Sarah Hymas’s blog post, reflcitng on the collaboration.
Those ‘making’ sessions also provided space for us to move into three dimensions. We have been inspired by Nick Sousanis’ groundbreaking graphic book Unflattening, and these experiments helped us to appreciate how experiments in zine form might allow us more accurately to express different ways of ‘being human’ associated with experiences of madness and distress.
As we were mulling over our treasures, maps and boxes we saw that the theme for the 2024 Being Human Festival was ‘landmarks’. We wondered how an encounter with a landmark – as a related physical ‘object’ – might help us take our thinking further (up).
St Mary’s Lighthouse, Whitley Bay. Image credit: Jill Anderson
Markers and Guides and Comfort and Warning
Two powerful novels centre Lighthouses. Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping characterises their beams as ‘Markers and Guides and Comfort and Warning’. The lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s novel, ‘To the Lighthouse’, is a longed for destination, symbolising human desire.
It is perhaps because of such associations that lighthouses are commonly invoked – in the logos and titles of mental health services – as ‘beacons of hope’ or symbols of ‘recovery’, or as a means for ‘getting your life back on track’. As Arthur Frank has warned, whilst some people experience the stories that are evoked by metaphors like these as inspirational – in enabling them to ‘hold their own’ in the face of the choppy waters of illness and distress – others may find them trite, unhelpful or even harmful.
We were intrigued by what encountering or ‘being with’ an actual – rather than metaphoric or literary – lighthouse, might provoke. And the Plover Scar lighthouse struck us as particularly intriguing in the light of our interest in restorative objects. In 2016, it was hit by a passing cargo ship, and has since been painstakingly restored. What, we wondered, could a lighthouse that had experienced such trauma and recovery have to teach about harm and restoration in a human context?
Plover Scar was an obvious choice for a second reason too. Even in the absence of any wayward cargo ship, Morecambe Bay can be treacherous. The tragic deaths twenty years ago of least 21 undocumented Chinese migrants – who were drowned by an incoming tide, while harvesting cockles – are etched in many people’s minds. It was helpful that one contributor to our Creative Conversations, Sarah Hymas, lived in the lighthouse keeper’s cottage and was very familiar with the Bay’s terrain and tides.
To the Lighthouse
Image Credit: Charlotte Done
We walked to the lighthouse in late July , with Sarah dressed in the style of Beatrice Parkinson – the last keeper of the light. Read Sarah’s own blog post about our walk to Plover Scar.
Through ‘Beatrice’ we touched on what it means – in sometimes inauspicious circumstances – to tend, to nurture, to help to keep our own lights lit. We saw traces too, as we walked, of the route that the repair vehicles had taken during their – painstakingly methodical – reconstruction of the battered light.
After the walk we facilitated a zine making session at the Good Things Collective in Morecambe – enabling us to reflect on, and to process, all of that experience.
If we took comfort from our encounter with Plover Scar, we were heedful of its warnings too. . .
We’d been glad to stand with the light – lighthouses, because they share with us an upright posture, can feel somehow human. And we had been sad to leave. . .
Like the earlier Creative Conversations, both the walk and the workshop provided opportunities for sharing. My life. . . Your life. . . the life of a light. . . Light-turned. We’re keen to explore these ideas further in our next activity…
What next?
Plans are being made for late October /November when the lighthouse will leave its rocky outcrop and takes to the streets during the Light Up Lancaster festival. Our friend Wendy, from Revamp Racoon, is at this moment crocheting seaweed and mussels to adorn an amazing Lighthouse costume.
We’ll be supporting Zine making workshops during ‘Explore week’ in Lancaster, and a Madzine workshop in conjunction with the CCrAMHP group, when illuminations (comforts and warnings) will be produced for the lighthouse to dispense during LIght Up Lancaster. The lighthouse will then head to the Gregson Arts and Community Centre for a Mad Zine takeover of Morecambe & Lancaster Zine Library when – through the lens of the lighthouse – we will be considering the many ways of being human.
Reference this blog post: Anderson, J. & Spandler, H. (2024). Madzine Research. ‘Lessons from the Lighthouse: Being Human with Madzines’. 17 October [Blog]. Available: https://madzines.org/lessons-from-the-lighthouse-being-human-with-madzines/
