Overview

What if the universe is stitched together with absences? What if our deepest realities – personal, political, cosmic – are not shaped by grand ideas or all-encompassing ‘explanations’, but by the tiny, unremarked gaps between them? In this kaleidoscopic essay, Phil Smith covers some unlikely terrain: from the quantum unevenness of the cosmos to the haunted ruins of mines and the fragile misadventures of lost mariners. He rejects the siren call of big, smooth answers and plunges into the turbulent space where anomalies, coincidences and disturbances matter. Phil gathers stories, observations and practices from the disturbed edges of culture, ecology and everyday life – inviting us to attend to absences, to find hope in the vacuum and to experiment with living differently in the leaks and loopholes of existence.

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9781917251129

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Author Information

Phil Smith is a performance-maker, writer and researcher. He is the author of numerous books and plays. With visual artist and poet Helen Billinghurst, he is one half of Crab & Bee, co-authoring Crab & Bee’s 'Matter Of Britain' (Peakrill Press) in 2025 and 'The Pattern' (Triarchy Press) in 2020. With Tony Whitehead, Phil is co-author of the novel Bonelines (2020), author of the neo-gothic novellas of 'The Silversnake Project' (2023) and of 'Living In The Magical Mode' in 2022. He wrote 'Albion’s Eco-Eerie: Films And TV Of the Haunted Generations' in 2024 (Temporal Boundary Press) and his 'Albion’s Atomic-Weird' is due out in 2026. Since 1980 Phil has been company dramaturg for TNT Theatre (Munich) and is an Honorary Associate Researcher at University of Plymouth. He is currently researching diagrammatical performances with Helen Billinghurst, and together they are writing a book about these for Routledge for publication in 2026.

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