”HOOKLAND IS THE RECOVERED MEMORY THAT YOU CANNOT DISMISS. HOOKLAND IS THE RECOVERED MEMORY YOU SECRETLY HOPE IS TRUE. HOOKLAND IS THAT PLACE YOU VISITED ONCE, BUT CANNOT FIND ON ANY MAP. HOOKLAND IS WHERE ALL THE WEIRDNESS YOU’VE EDITED OUT OF YOUR LIFE COMES FLOODING BACK. HOOKLAND IS GHOST SOIL.”

Similar to the rest of my internet accretions, was my discovery and subsequent adoration of Hookland, who’ve I’ve seen primarily manifest as handcrafted Twitter microfiction… but the point of Hookland is that it is a mossy underthing, a misty everything, a kind of hidden place. Because that’s the thing.

When trying to define Hookland you fail. This falls in line with many other defintions you’d find in this work, each of them a collection of half-connected apparitions that we use blindly and yet fluently, but Hookland is unique. It tries to comprise something unspoken. It invites others to contribute to it, which I might describe as becoming part of it. Though I’ve seen it only manifest as microfiction its modus is collective, as an auto nominative folklore, which talks about coast-witches and The Hum in the not-necessarily-rural landscapes of England. In sects and sectors forgotten enough to be historied, and historied enough to be strange.

It probably has to do with my practice of faith, there, to remain invested in it, but otherwise it represents various things that are each important to me. The same relief in speaking aloud the unsaid, or should not be said. Hookland represents the teeming suffusion of nature in regular life, so foreign it might as well be divine (though that last part might just be wishful thinking). It represents people’s collective desire to form a folklore, to believe in that strangeness, if not as a function of faith then as part of a human storytelling instinct.

And as an extent or example of hauntology. Hauntology is a neologism between haunting and ontology, putting a term to “the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.” While Hookland is often narrative, hauntology has more philosophical-near-politcal origins…

.Either way there’s something I’m seeking. There, or something I was seeking, back when I rattled my chain of research with such fervour, hoping for a spiritual answer to a political feeling, and wanting to be taken seriously about it. I think that’s my fear, or my torture: being unable to translate what I mean.