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Alastair Vere Nicoll

@avnicoll

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Environmentalist, writer, traveller, reader.

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I’m not religious per se, but it is interesting to me that the two papal encyclicals that have come to my attention - and I’ve read - are Laudate Si by Pope Francis in 2015 and the latest Magnifica Humanitas by Pope Leo published this year.

Encyclicals are essays/pronouncements by the Pope. They can be regular or rare depending upon the habit of the pontiff. This is Pope Leo’s first.

Encyclicals are named after the ‘incipit’; their opening Latin words. In Pope Francis’ Laudate Si they come from a medieval poem by St.Francis of Assisi that I went back to find, about the Brother Sun, Sister Moon and Mother Earth. The encyclical is a beautiful call to arms on climate change. ‘Praise be to thee’.

The new encyclical by Pope Leo, ‘Magnificent Humanity’ is a stark warning that we are creating a technological Babel in AI, that we are reaching for the sky and in so doing are turning the sacredness of human being into computational utility and locking us into digital slavery. It glorifies the human rather than the artificial - but our magnificence is not without irony.

I’ve devoted the principal part of my career to combatting climate change and now it feels that that issue has been sacrificed because the inevitable result of the technological Cold War is an energy explosion, an exponential requirement for water and power that dwarfs any attempt to reduce our emissions footprint. We are in an insulin-coma, our environmental consciousness in seizure from a greed-induced gold rush to spawn our own technological nemesis.

And, larger than that, and more frightening, is that I never felt that the Scylla of climate change - the very sanctity of the planet - could be dwarfed by an even scarier problem; the Charybdis of the unchecked expansion of super intelligence. It has been clear to me for years that we are utterly hubristic in under-estimating the threat of AI.

How can the largest issue we could ever face in any incarnation, the pollution of our fragile star, now be being subsumed and obliterated by an even bigger one, Oedipus wilfully fucking his Mother Earth, and creating an AI that the myth tells us will murder his own father.

📷 Asmara, Eritrea. by @avnicoll

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2 days ago

Fascinating evening at an exhibition of the work of Richard Dadd at the Royal Academy. Dadd was a very gifted painter known for his paintings of scenes from Shakespeare who developed severe psychosis after returning from a grand tour of Europe, Egypt and Turkey and ended up killing his father, believing him to be a devil, and was hospitalised in Bethlehem Hospital (Bethlam- or more popularly Bedlam). In Bedlam he continued to paint pictures reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch with the flair, whimsy and madness of an obsessive imagination. There he came under the care of a physician who happened to have started The Society for Improving the Condition of the Insane in 1842, Sir Alexander Morison, who happens to be my great, great, great grandfather. Morison was painted by Dadd on his retirement in 1852 (from memory and a drawing sent to Dadd by Morison’s daughter, of his house in Newhaven near Edinburgh) holding his top hat and looking very austere. Dadd was eventually moved to a new hospital in Broadmoor in the 1860s where he continued to paint. It is interesting to reflect on the creative output of madness, of the balm of art to a troubled soul, to try to imagine what Bedlam must have been like, and also to hope (but not know) that Morison was good and kind or worry whether he was unsympathetic and tyrannical. I stared at his face across the void of time and pondered the meaning of the forbidding and funereal black suit and yet the friendly blue sky that hint at the ambivalent feelings a troubled genius must have had for his physician. by @avnicoll

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10 days ago

Drawn to Sicily, like so many of my travels, by a book. It’s fascinating to me the way a static page, a frozen story, a fiction, can bring you out of time and to a place, to a real experience, to something living. The force of the page to change time, place and destiny (super dramatic but who has not been inspired to change career, country or even to find love by a story?) is astonishing to me.
In the case of Sicily, it was a conversation last summer by a friend who told me that The Leopard had been made into a Netflix series. Not liking to watch a film of a book before reading it and the fact that Lampedusa’s classic novel has been sitting on my shelf for twenty years unread, I took this as a cue. It is Lampedusa’s only novel. He wrote it as a lament for the ending of the aristocratic age, for the collapse of a time of slow beauty about a family living on the lip of the modern world. He was also pre-emptively mourning another ending - his own - as he wrote it knowing he was dying. It was refused publication, he died, and it was published directly afterwards (1958) immediately becoming one of Italy’s greatest classics. The novel then drew me to Visconti’s Oscar winning film of the story from 1962, then onto the modern remake and finally to Sicily itself. The hero of the book is the Duke of Salina, a tiny forgotten island four hours off the coast of Sicily. No action in the novel takes place there but, inspired by the name, I’ve just returned from both Salina and an unspoilt 1958. by @avnicoll

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3 months ago

Abdallah Ag Alhousseyni from Tinariwen (which means ‘people of the desert’ in Tamashek) in his tour bus. I’ve been listening to this band for a long time, been down to Djanet and Tamanrasset in the Sahara where they’re from (when they are not moving between Libya, Mali and Algeria) and fighting in Tuareg insurgencies, and I’ve written about them, too. Abdallah and Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (who looks like a Taureg Bob Marley) are the original pioneers of desert blues and have won a Grammy. We had tea and Abdallah told me about how listening to cassettes left by tourists coming to the desert in the eighties was the only way they got western musical influences. He found the Brazilian Chico Cesar that way, later meeting him in a gig in Denmark. His biggest influence? Dire Straits! Brilliant afternoon/evening. If you’re interested, listen to their album Elwan. by @avnicoll

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5 months ago

Two miners corrugate the earth with handheld picks to pan for blocks of salt to feed to livestock. This salt would have been transported by camel caravan for centuries many thousands of miles up towards Morocco. They were the only people for miles around in a cold and desolate patch of the Sahara known as the Tagant plateau.
As you ‘pan’ out, you become aware of how lonely and small they are in such a disorientating expanse. Some lives are very very hard. by @avnicoll

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6 months ago

Algerian Sahara 2023
One of the most extraordinary landscapes I’ve ever been to.
📷 @roam.beyondtravel by @avnicoll

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6 months ago

Back in 2021, researching a writing project, I travelled into the winter darkness of the Arctic circle up in the crown of Norway, north of both Sweden and Finland, first to Alta, then to Karasjok, to visit the Saami and undertake a dog sled crossing of the Finnmarksvidda plateau in the gloaming. by @avnicoll

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7 months ago

Tea in the shade of a thorn tree #mauritaniansahara

📷 @ bbcphil 🙏 by @avnicoll

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8 months ago

More from @avnicoll and @michaelturek collaboration - structures tilting, settling, and held in suspension between land and sea, on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast. The second and final instalment is now live on The Marlowe Review.

Read the full piece, along with our other recently published work, via the link in our bio. by @avnicoll

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8 months ago

The Marlowe Review returns to a collaboration with writer, poet, and traveller @avnicoll , joined here again by award-winning documentary photographer @michaelturek . Together, they present a piece - through Nicoll’s poem and Turek’s imagery, photographed on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast - which moves through abandoned spaces, sand-filled doorways, and the skeletal remains of vessels overtaken by the desert. Together, poem and photograph trace a landscape shaped by time, memory and erosion.
This is the second of two instalments from Nicoll and Turek, reflecting their collaborative friendship through travel writer @sophy_roberts . by @avnicoll

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8 months ago

This week, The Marlowe Review returns to a collaboration with writer, poet, and traveller @avnicoll , joined here by award-winning documentary photographer @michaelturek . Together, they present a piece - through Nicoll’s poem and Turek’s imagery, photographed on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast - centred on the act of listening, both inwardly and outwardly. Poem and image work in parallel, using restraint, suggestion, and what is left unsaid to carry meaning.

This is the first of two instalments from Nicoll and Turek, reflecting their collaborative friendship through travel writer @sophy_roberts . Keep an eye out for the second instalment, coming soon.

To see the piece and our recently published work, head to the link in our bio. by @avnicoll

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8 months ago

Porte de Pêche, Nouakchott, Mauritania. by @avnicoll

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8 months ago