For Robin without whom....

I

If we have to choose a single word: Robin’s openness. Open to the world-making possibilities of the new-and-different; the linked, utopian energies of the present, here as well as there, now as well as then, place as the true core of the universal; History yes, but as the memory of the future, for everyone, all ages: La Bella Aila, Joe, Seventy-eight year- olds… everyone! 

In a characteristic Robin word:  new cells, materially rooted and so capable of multiplying, able to accumulate capital-for- Labour with which to out-pace, re-place Capital. The energy which was generated by talking with Robin about anything is still here: Darwin’s worms, ‘biopoetics’, the Hallbankgate Hub…. each and every organic association, within and without our bodies as a ‘meaning-making’ living system: economies in the plural!  

II

I think Robin was quite puzzled, sometimes even challenged, by the fact that he, personally, might have any importance at all. He could never act as his own shop steward. This was integral to his gift, which was to make everyone else, everyone he worked with, and and…all those he loved, feel inseparably – sometimes even a bit frighteningly – capable, beyond themselves. Could what he saw in everyone –  me ? – really be there? ‘Why not?’, he would ask, having listened carefully, followed by a characteristic ‘of course’, said with that mixture of modesty and confidence which was special to him.    

In another characteristic word: twin. Less tentative, more organic than ‘fair’, ‘twin’, was Robin’s way of trading, in ideas as well as goods. I think he had been brought up to suppress any fear of heights he might otherwise have felt: certainly, his company en-couraged his comrades to shed such fears. Robin generated confidence in the first person plural not singular, we, us, rather than me, me, I.  So he was able to act as a large-scale producer and distributor, above all else, of mutuality. Co-operation in the age of google, yes, but – from Robin – mutuality, the commons, grew within an older web, lattice or network of the smile, his smile, welcoming people to the door of whatever it was he was enthusing about, with his eyes and the whole alignment of his body.    

Wasn’t this also what his most characteristic form of writing was about? The notes or memos he circulated after every meeting he went to, whether of three or three hundred people, rehearsing what he liked to call ‘the run of the argument’. It is these pages, sometimes seventeen at a time, that we need to re-collect. ‘Here’s a three-pager’ he would say…. Then, when it arrived …. Did we really get that far? Maybe we did. Is that what I meant ? Maybe next time I will!

III

Robin was, of course, fully active in the age of letraset, offset litho  and the community newspaper paste-up. I can’t do justice to the Brighton years now: a whole cluster of campaigns, distinctive relations of production in themselves: QueenSpark paper and books – ‘culture is ordinary’ – sold door to door, against the commodity form, before any shops were allowed to sell them. Brighton on the Rocks anticipating the consequences of the 1976 IMF loan. Agitations, with Frances as animateur, for the Spa Nursery School, an Alternative Marina, the Hanover Community Centre, collective meals and entertainment….  Robin  had an encyclopedia for labour in mind, long before the technology which enables Wikipedia; our beautiful launderette, in Montreal Rd; our very own and golden city, in Hanover Ward. A utopianism of the present.  Like Marx, Robin knew that unless the alternative is already available, it will never become general. Hence his accumulation of world-wide example after example of making new: of social innovation. Emulation not competition. … It’s a souvey we need, he would say, not a survey. And, and, and…flexible specialization;  the three socialisms; Zero Waste…  Robin’s names for his findings served as signposts, encouraging others into fields he was already digging.  ‘Naming things’, as the poet Frank O’ Hara suggests, ‘is only the intention/ to make things’.

IV

The final eighteen months in Robin’s life were as trans-forming a moment as any.    

This year, we admired Enzensberger’s 1964  ‘Summer Poem’ together, particularly the ‘Note’ which followed it:

‘Its formal principle is that of openness. One can regard poems either as closed and sealed, as impermeable structures, or as net-like constructions with which new experiences can be caught again and again – even when the writing of the text is finished’.

Robin didn’t like dead lines, any more than he worked to deadlines!

Poem/poetry stems from the Greek word poiesis, which means ‘making’, an active labour-process way of talking about production and its forms, perhaps Robin’s longest- living preoccupation.

During the last five years Robin, Beth and I loved – perhaps too mild a word ! –  Alice Oswald’s poems, reading aloud and listening to her recite, celebrating her belief in the poem as a ‘a form establishing and breaking itself as it goes’ and: ‘the whole challenge of poetry is to keep language open, so that what we don’t yet know can pass through it’. Robin said the same about the pictures  which Frances makes and puts together, on and off the wall. He conjured a whole future shape in his mind  before doing his fieldwork – a better word than ‘research’ for how Robin went about his writing. 

He was (is) memorable: easy to re-member. Like William Blake, in his speeches he could startle. After hundreds of live lines about Los (L.O.S.) the mythical figure Blake imagined as the creative impulse behind human history, and Golgonooza ( the City of Art and Manufacture), the poet interrupted  his long prophetic poem Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion –  longer even than some of Robin’s stories! – in a very Robinesque way. In the middle of all those lines,  Blake interrupts himself with one of the best: ‘I write in South Molton Street’. We celebrate, in The Round Chapel, London, E.5.

 As the global hub that you still are, Thank You Robin.