The precise balances in the universe are not products of clarity or distinctnesses but emergent qualities of mess, fuzz, sloppiness, blurring, complexity, and obscurity.

Thick and dark, a gleaming beacon like blood spattered on a leaf, the oceanic stink of salt and rot, the hot scent of iron in the cold-and-empty-(but-not)-night.

Purity is what happens when you’re too AFRAID to take a second look and find you may very well be wrong.

Heads up folks! If you want to hear me talking with Loes Damhof and Martin Calnan on (Dis)abling Futures at the World Futures Studies 50th Anniversary World Conference on Wednesday 25th October at 10:00 CET, you can!

Register for free for the online portion of the conference at this registration link.

Should be a fun little conversation. I’ll keep folks posted on the possibility of recordings – they’re running a 24hr talk schedule so who knows, there might be something there to snag your attention!

This post was originally made for and shared with, the folks on Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains 2023: VUNJA! course, but I thought I’d share it here for wider(?) consumption. Bayo’s latest small essay A Grief That Laughs is also worth a (perhaps provocative) read.

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This thought arose in response to something elsewhere, but I’ll share it here, and expand upon it because something like this question is always with me:

So, here’s a thought. Good old Fiona Kumari Campbell –  scholar of Studies in Ableism – often talks about encumbrance as the thing ableism attempts to negate. That is, an ableist society is one which despises encumbrance. In terms of the ranking, notification, prioritisation…of sentient life, those at the ‘bottom’ are the most encumbered, entangled etc.

They are less ‘free’ as per modernity’s idea of freedom, which is ultimate ‘self-sovereign’ – I am the highest ranked being, autonomous, and none shall restrict my ability or desires.  Note that the precise use of ableism is one which suggests a framework of ‘abled-ness’ as superior. Even the notion of ‘supremacy’ conjures an image of being untouchable. (This is why ableism is also intrinsic to most contexts of oppression. Any time any population is viewed as ‘less intelligent’, ‘less able to control themselves’ or ‘more emotional’, has ‘special needs’ or is a ‘drain on resources’, ‘lazy’, ableism is in play)

Being ‘a burden’ is seeing a thing, process, or a self, as an encumbrance a thing that restricts or curtails ability and autonomy. This only works because we selectively commodify certain entanglements, and not others. When they are presented so, they are not encumbrances but ‘aids to freedom’ or some such. A potential question is, what if entanglements can be processed as potential liberation. and encumbrances as processes which deepen our understanding of interdependency? This goes beyond ‘doing it because we love them’ and leaning into burden as noticing how we carry, and carry in turn – and how we are supported by others, or not in doing so. Even the cognitive shift is hard work, but if one can pull it off, it tends to shape-shift modernity’s concept of ‘care’ into something else entirely.

Because it admits that we are all dis/abling each other, and being dis/abled in our turns, what might this mean?

If, say, a speaker uses language we are unfamiliar with and thus meaningless to us, or someone asks us to move in ways that we cannot, find difficult, or exhausting, what then? Suppose for a second, just as an experiment, one leans *into* this dis/abling. What might happen.

Many disabled writers and thinkers explore the phenomenon of crip-time; the way crips, cripples, disabled and chronically ill folks experience different temporalities. They may need different amounts or kinds of time to exist, to process, to think, and be.

I was in conversation with some dear friends the other week, and one of them was speaking powerfully and rapidly about important things. Things I wanted to hear about, but my brain-damaged systems could not keep up with. So rather than burning through energy trying to keep up, I screwed my courage to the sticking post and made myself vulnerable.

“Hold on a second,” I said, “I’m having real trouble processing. Could you slow it down – I need some time, crip time y’know?“

Now, even though this person was my dear companion, I was nervous. What if I broke their flow, what if, even if they slow down, I’m still not going to be able to understand? What if I’m going to be a burden and disrupt the entire conversation and we lose this amazing vibe? But I asked, because I was becoming more and more dis/abled by the way the conversation was speeding by.

But I wasn’t asking, in order to become more abled – I’m a cripple, that’s never going to happen. I was asking because I needed to be more cripple, less abled.

And you know what happened, folks?

My companion stopped, and told me “Thank you, for saying that.” And then they began speaking slow, easy, deep, about deep and rich things. And later, they told me that the reason they said thank you? Well, I paraphrase: You asking me to slow down, they said, made me feel reached for, made me feel you trying to connect to me, and that felt good, felt like you cared.

And I did, and do care.

So much of modernity is about speed, about ‘getting it’, about perfect one to one transmission of information, without mess or loss. Sometimes, making things simple is mere reductionism, in service to speed.

Sometimes it is a pause, a prelude, a stumbling block inserted as gently as possible to trip, and shift our relation to our bodyminds, so we can stagger, fall, and, maybe help each other up – maybe pull each other down into a laughing, weeping, pained, exhausted heap.

If we are dis/abled, and dis/abling in turn, what then?

What if disability is larger than any of us, and the way we move with it is indeed, to paraphrase Bayo, to slow down in urgent times? What if the way to regulate nervous systems overclocked by modernity, is to shift and crip our relationship to time and space, to acknowledge our encumbrances, and how we encumber others in turn. Not as a methodology of getting rid of them, because we can’t – and the belief that we can become master and mistress, dominar of all we survey, that we can scramble up the pole to the top, is fundamentally an ableist proposition.

But as a methodology of sensing, rather than making sense and commodifying it as thing that can be got, or had, kept or hoarded. The essence of a container is to carry, after all. To carry and be carried in turn, to leak and slop and overspill.

Auntie Ursula knew this too.

For those who saw me talk about noticing the impossibility of stillness, perhaps you have a hint of what that sensing might be – the impossibility of being in control, where our own bodies give the lie to the concept of being ‘able’ to be still.

Here’s to crip-time, stumbling, and leaning into the way disability leaks into all our lives – after all, one either dies or becomes disabled in some fashion, no? And if so, maybe care is something different.

Something where care is not teleological – not done to, or for, but is itself a dis/abling ontology where we are all vulnerable. Where there are no Instructors, only teaching, and the teaching  what happens when we trace our entanglements, where a fridge and a father’s laughter down a phoneline whisper something beyond divisions of sacred and profane, where academic language might be a disconcerting and arresting kind of poetry we’ve never encountered before, as well as the excreta of hundreds of years of thinkers shot through with the whiteness of so-called Enlightenment.

Suppose it’s ok to crip and crawl and stumble, to wave our feelers in the air in confusion and consternation, a confused cacophonous swarm of dis/oriented disabled dung beetles pushing our worlds of shit, following the paths of the Milky Way as we have done for millions upon millions of years and countless generations.

Suppose we even crip that “OK” into “inevitable”, “unanswerable”. Suppose all we can do is smile, and weep and scream, and hold each other as we mourn the injuries we receive and inflict; explore our wounds together, and allow the world to carry us as it will, as we are also worlds and worldings; the many countless weavings and braidings of baskets which we perform, but whiteness would have us look away from, gaze fast and fastening on the next thing, the next novelty, the next product of progress and evolution – beckoning us with promises of freedom, autonomy, and above all power?

I’ve said before, I don’t believe in power. It might be real, is very real, for a given value of real, as real as a Potemkin Village, an ersatz bulwark against porosity encumbrance, and above all, vulnerability. Smoke and mirrors coalescing into a heroic boot on a monster’s throat. Clean, shiny, ever-new-and-eternal order over messy primordial chaos.

What might dis/power appear as?

Failing. Not getting it. Missing more than hitting. Lying the f*ck down when every part of your body is screaming that you should be productive, should be doing something, should be doing something to get us out of this bloody mess.

Should contribute. Should organise. Should fix. Should  solve. Should learn how.

Letting those Shoulds scream out elsewhere and meanwhile; playing with the thickness of your pain and exhaustion, your overwhelm, your overload, your nausea beacuse you have no other choice.

Noticing how it moves you, how half your movements don’t belong to ‘you’, but are those of ancestors, the subtle influences of soil and microbe, the myriad imagistic influences of mountains encountered, waters drunk from, plants (and fleshes, if that’s your thing) that ‘you’ think ‘you’ have eaten, but maybe, just maybe, inveigled themselves into your tissues and teeth for their own ends and desires.

Notice what comes and goes, and what stays, and yet where it comes and goes within that. Feel the luxuriant terrible wait of your own bones that throb and sing in concert with the rhythms of heart and lung – remembering that oxygen turns iron to rust and dust. Why should you, who breathe, be any different?

care (n.)

Old English caru, cearu “sorrow, anxiety, grief,” also “burdens of mind; serious mental attention,” in late Old English also “concern, anxiety caused by apprehension of evil or the weight of many burdens,” from Proto-Germanic *karō “lament; grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon kara “sorrow;” Old High German chara “wail, lament;” Gothic kara “sorrow, trouble, care;” German Karfreitag “Good Friday;” see care (v.)).

care (v.)

Old English carian, cearian “be anxious or solicitous; grieve; feel concern or interest,” from Proto-Germanic *karo- “lament,” hence “grief, care” (source also of Old Saxon karon “to lament, to care, to sorrow, complain,” Old High German charon “complain, lament,” Gothic karon “be anxious”), said to be from PIE root *gar- “cry out, call, scream” (source also of Irish gairm “shout, cry, call;” see garrulous).

If so, the prehistoric sense development is from “cry” to “lamentation” to “grief.” A different sense evolution is represented in related Dutch karig “scanty, frugal,” German karg “stingy, scanty.” It is not considered to be related to Latin cura. Positive senses, such as “have an inclination” (1550s); “have fondness for” (1520s) seem to have developed later as mirrors to the earlier negative ones.

Hidden in every word and world is an ancestry of grief. And in that grief, that cacophonous noisy wail, there is a song, countless songs, carrying a cosmovision only found if we feel the weight of those encumbrances, are rendered and re-membered as crooked and bent by them.

Weight is mass multiplied by gravity. Enough gravity, and space and time are bent into new shapes. Temporalities and spaces that exceed clock and maps’ attempted clarity and precision. Let us wail the gravity together, and discover what we have been trained to avoid.

Crip-time indeed.

Hello world.

I think it may be time to be in this space more. Social media uberplatforms are becoming moribund, and in all honesty, I think that’s a good thing. Please do check out the FYI  page for what I’ve been up to. I won’t bore you with laying it all out, but it’s been a busy few years, catalysed by our our ongoing pandemic, and making connections; relations that have led me to co-authoring a book as well as doing some speaking bits in concert with Bayo Akomolafe  et al, and co- lecturing in a seminar series in Ableisim in the Arts for a German university.

In a few weeks, I’ll be giving a talk, along with Martin Calnan and Loes Damhof, at the World Futures Studies Federation 50th Anniversary Conference in Paris – via Zoom. Provisionally entitled Dis/Abling Futures, I hope it’ll be a fruitful conversation for all. There may even be some somewhat useful writing to come out of it!

As I sit here in an ever-warming-October, with war in Europe and in the Middle East. there’s a lot to be said, but I think there’s more richness in the keening, in the inarticulate howl.

In the knowledge that we can’t carry this weight without being bent by it, my falling and skinning ourselves, letting blood low into the earth. The goês, the participator in that ongoing wail of loss-and-incapacitative generativity, the enfleshed daimonic field, the way-opener into the realms of death-in-life, and life-in-death is ever with us.

And the in the gravity of these times, may their croked path lead us to a carnival of joy and loss, in awe-fulin-betweenesses which allows us to overflow ourselves.

(Also, hello. I\’m not dead after all.)

A veritable horde has come together to help us manifest some of mine and Frater Acher\’s words, via Hadean Press in may 2023. Below is Acher\’s original announcement post:

A veritable horde has come together to help us manifest some of mine and Frater Acher\’s words, via Hadean Press in may 2023. Below is Acher\’s original announcement post:

Here is a sneak peak of what we are currently preparing for you: GOÊTIC ATAVISMS, Hadean Press, May 2023.

A whole motley crew of us is incoming together to bring this book to life: My partner in crime, Craig Slee and I wrote the content, Frater U∴D∴ is contributing a preface, Gianpaolo Tucci and his AI engine created the cover title based upon my design suggestion (draft below), and my long time magical companion José Gabriel Alegria Sabogal is currently sharpening his pencils to add his own iconographic visions of our joint Goêtic Atavisms.

Stay tuned via the Hadean Press webpage for further news in 2023.

Until then, have a magical winter solstice and a great break before we embark into the new year.

https://www.hadeanpress.com/schedule

So yeah, that\’s happening!

“I am a cyborg in lineage with Hephaestus.” – The Cyborg Jillian Weise

Forge-fire and seafoam. They say Aphrodite cheated, that she chafed at the marriage. They wish. That she was unfaithful. They have no concept of polyamory or, radical chthonic relationship anarchy amongst the More-Than-Human, the daemonic, do they?

What they have is Ancient Greek straight bullshit. Be it homo, hetero, or eromenos-erastes? State sanctioned norms makes it straight. We don’t make the rules. We make worlds and break them. Moment to moment, breath to breath, ebbs and flows. Crip time, crip space. Illegitimate, illegible.

You want to say that Aphrodite mothered us? Or perhaps Aetna? Want to say it was Charis? Want to say we descend from the spunk left on Athena’s thigh? Oh, you abled do so love your straight lines, don’t you. Your taxonomies, categories, your specs and measures. Want a family tree, without realising the roots are rhizhomes. We know lineage, indirect, crooked paths and labyrinths to get lost in; cracks to huff the sibyl-steam, sightless spasms and katabasis-crawlings. You want chrome and shine and light; we bring you hot and cold running darkness, occult plumber-spume.

Weighty, gravitic. In your world of speed, we shuffle, we limp, we gimp, we spaz, and strut. We roll and thrash and spit. Dead weight, to you. Over we go, under the bus, into the water down, and down. Sinking like lead, bodies inevitable transports to the ecstatic; the outsides-insides which are beside the legitimate selves you would have for us.

We’re always bastards. Illegitimate, illegible.

Listen. We cripped the Queen of Heaven. We made her immobile, Gave her the throne that shone, everything she wanted; deus-gleam payback. Made Mother one of us. Gifted her the crip-gnosis  – the daemonic lived experience. Returned her ferality. What? You thought Dionysos came to get us like an obedient whelp? The Liberator comes to the fetter-maker at the behest of the would-be free?  As if we’d not been drinking, conspiring, sharing breath together for aeons. As if we’d not been shifting, twisting, out of our skulls and skins together, faster than Athena from Zeus’ forehead?  As if we’d not taken counsel from our Grandfather Kronos, legs all Saturn-bound with lambswool, freed only when the times of Misrule are upon us. As if we didn’t learn how time fucks and is fucked with when you’re leaden-made.

As. If.

Stagger-drunk, spaz-swagger as we roll up Olimpos, sniggering at the reterritorialisation, slack lips and shivering limbs. Mama’s in and under the mountain now, back to archaic times. Heaven’s revealed as the Starry Cavern, the vasty gulfs of space felt as the upward-downward path. Grandma Gaea greets us all, leader of the countless, innumerable Mothers ever-animate. Gravitational-crip sorcery is like that, profusive, multiplicitous, generative. Doubleheaded poetry. What did you expect from Dactylos-kin? Our measurements and meter is always difference.
Forge-fire and seafoam. Kybernetikos.  Who says the organisms best equipped to steer aren’t those that move cripwise?

(Disclaimer/CN: This post discusses such things as depictions of rape, theft, murder, kinslaying and incest. None of what of what I write here should be taken as approval of, or apologia in relation to these acts.)

“You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ \’star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of \’trees’ and \’stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was \’myth-woven and elf patterned’.”
— J.R.R. Tolkien 

The above quote is a charming one, isn’t it? Tolkien’s invocation of another way of seeing, of existing, beguiles us with its sense of possibility. It is, like much of myth and story, fundamentally conservative – not in the political sense, but in the conservational sense. As an attempt to preserve, or at least, keep possibilities open in the mind of the reader, it’s pretty good. Of course, the wrinkle is – or some may say – that this took place in the distant past. Nobody, they might say, sees the world like this – or if they do, then their perception is deluded – because we are past that. We see the world representationally now, striving towards accuracy. Anything else is just superstition, is it not?

The mistake these stereotypical straw men make – within the context that I have breathed life into them for – is to suggest that a linear path between “then-now”, and “past-future”. Actually, they make several mistakes, not least because of their unexamined bias. I’ll not elucidate them all here, but suffice to say that our vegetative friends have not considered, amongst other things, the role of the cultural, historical, and philosophical structures which influence how we perceive and know things. In philosophy, such consideration of knowledge and how, why, what, and where we know things is called epistemology.

The thing with philosophy is that it covers many things: morality, ethics, metaphysics, linguistics, epistemology, sociology etc. We have words for all these things, and they are often their own disciplines. Philosophy – literally descending from “philia” + “sophia”, meaning affection or love for wisdom – can cover a kind of work in them all them all, precisely because understanding and using what is learnt in these many and varied arenas, and dong so well? Understanding the implications? Knowing that we know nothing for certain and that things are seldom as they first? 

This is wise, these things are wise, and so: wisdom is the useful, sound, and valuable deployment of knowledge and living life itself well.

Our straw men, conjured into existence by the magic of speech and words – shapings of breath digitized and transmitted across the planet to you, dear reader? They are brought forth into a world where the majority of its unexamined structures descend from the cultural shapings of men with pale skins. Dig further back, and deeper, and you will find that those men re-ordered, restructured and built upon the knowings and experiences of people who were not white or male. 

The structures of how we perceive, how we know what we know – even how we are taught to think, and express and feel? These did not come from nowhere – unfiltered and whole from the mind of one omnipotent, omniscient, Creator. Rather, many powers and potencies, principalities and agencies act all together. 

The flows of power, influence, propaganda, social and economic capital; the emotional and cultural response to events and experiences. All of these are contoured and shaped by the many. That many of the pale-skinned men shaped much of our world today is an accident of birth which is then compounded by economic and social factors based on climate, trade routes, geography, resources etc. This acquisition is then compounded  and backward rationalized – the accidental conflux of factors becomes a self-justification for ideas of false superiority, which drives behaviours which weight things in the favour of that group.

Make no mistake reader – there are still many worlds, even today. Bounded spaces, their boundaries staked out by those with the influence and ability to enforce them. That this is being written by a pale skinned man from North Western Europe is no coincidence. Nor is the fact that many will be able to read this, though my tongue is not what they speak natively – their first words carried a history different to mine. For various reason those people learnt my language which sneaks up behind others and mugs them in dark alleys, or engages in savagely lucrative trade deals.  

History literally is an accounting what has gone before, thus recounted by those later to be reckoned as accurate sources and authority. It is not all violence, theft and brutality. It is cultural exchange, trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion also. All these things flow between in flux – this is influence. Influence is often codified and commodified under the rubric of power in an attempt to wield it more universally – which inevitably divorces it from its original context and forces a more acquisitive mindset amongst those who seek it, rather than seeking out points of influential confluence and integrating oneself within that.

The orality of history, and cultural transmission, is not something often thought of today. With the advent of writing, information and knowledge conservation shifts to the texts themselves as authority – the metaphor of something being “there in black and white” refers to newspapers, but the sense of it descends from textual authority. 

Perhaps not so coincidentally, the historic belief structure of those pale people is rooted in a distortion of a heresy of a Middle-Eastern monotheism, which in itself seems been an offshoot of various Middle-Eastern polytheisms. That Judaism has a central authoritative text, leavened with thousands of years of oral and written commentaries and arguments should be noted. That this text was itself an edited version which scholars believe contains multiple texts, and was added to and redacted from, in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time,  is also of note. That that text was selectively edited and canonized, before being translated in various languages in response to socio-political and religious reasons over time, is worth further note. 

That this collage of ancient material is elevated to holy scripture and used as basis for moral authority for the majority of the pale people for over a thousand years, and used as justification for imperalism, rape, murder, theft, oppression, oppression on grounds of sexuality, gender – and was a fundamental source of, and during, the social construction of the concept of race – would be shocking, were it not for the desire for that which is referred to as ‘power’ and ‘authority’. 

The singularity of authority and power presupposes scarcity. This is to say that fixed, codified protocols of behaviour, perception, and emotional affect allow definition and navigation in an unpredictable kosmos. By structuring experience, we make sense and it is by sense that we structure the world in a feedback loop. 

In a society based on orality, it is the stories that are told which preserve, iterate upon, and transmit knowledge and culture. In this, it’s worth quoting Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.”What this means is that how a message is transmitted influences the message content and context. Similarly, it is how and by whom-as-medium it is transmitted which influences the message. Oral societies are often conservative in nature – there are ways things are done, and for reasons. Thus, to deviate from that is dangerous, precisely because things are done that way for a reason which benefits certain people.  Whether those certain people are an elite or a society as whole varies according to societal structures.

Those who deviate are dangerous for several reasons – they are unpredictable, which in many societies at one time meant that they are or were a potential threat. They are non-conformist, which implies they may not honour the social contract which is supposed important in keeping everyone safe and keeping the world-order-as-society knows it running.

Recall Tolkien’s charm? His elder possibility is a world-order or worldview (weltanschauung) which sees the numinosity in all things. It thus sees flux and agency and multiplicity.  In the case of polytheism and animism, the multiplicity of agents  and powers suggests a multitude of agents all acting on one another and interpenetrating – rather like ripples or interference patterns. Gods and “Big spirits” ( terminology that is pretty much synonymous in the mind of this author for the purposes of discussion) can be said to have mythic “mass”. A large stone dropped into a pond will make bigger ripples and cancel or interfere with smaller ripples generated by smaller pebbles. 

When considering gods as establishers of world-order – or even creating worlds, it’s instructive to consider that in many mythologies, this is accomplished by the overthrow of a previous order or set of structures, and their reconfiguration. Which is usually, to judge my many world mythologies, a polite way to suggest murder and butchery; fundamentally catastrophic  in all the linguistic and etymological senses of the word.. Once bloodily established, it is usually the actions and processes of the gods which keep the kosmos running. This accreted behaviour forms mores. Myth is thus a recounting of these behaviours and deviations therefrom, not simply as dry recounting but as felt experience which stimulates emotional and psychological affect which joins all participants (human and otherwise) into a shared epistemological framework.

In any society, the element of performance is key in any media – not just what the media ism but how it does it, as mentioned above. In an oral society where knowledge is shared through speech, whether by poetry or storytelling, the performance of the teller is key, as is the setting and context of the delivery.

Many myths depict rape, murder, theft,  trade, sharing, incorporation and diffusion. In this, they are as much like other forms of media as anything else. Likewise, it of course is the choice of those personally affected by such things not to engage with such things if they feel it would be detrimental to them. Yet, in dealing with myth, particularly if one views it not as synonymous with falsehood, but in fact expressive of some world-reality which forms the root of of our perceptions and experience, we often have questions of morality.

To say that myths containing rape, incest, murder, theft etc “offer a window onto a different time” or to suggest that the actions of a mythological figure are literally representationally true and thus that figure should be hated and despised is to present only a fairly shallow reading in the view of the author.

Let us take the Norse god Odin – he who, according the texts we have, committed near- genocide against giant-kind; slaughtering his own kindred the god (along with his brothers) butcher the primeval giant Ymir and use his body to make the worlds. The brothers then create humans by breathing life into two logs/trees found by the sea shore – far better then men of straw, no?

He steals the Mead of Inspiration (itself brewed from the blood of a murdered god) after seducing and tricking its giant-maiden guardian, but not before killing nine thralls in order to get close to her father – bearing the name Bolverk (evil-doer). He uses magic to impregnate Rindr after she turns him down repeatedly, making it so that Valli, the agent of vengeance over thr death of Baldr, is a product of rape – regardless that he is in the shape of/dressed of a woman at the time.

He attempts to have his way with Billing’s daughter, but is discovered and chased away by a pack of angry men. He sets up heroes to die in the midst of battle, abandoning them at the precise moment they need his aid. He is, in short, a major bastard. 

Did the Norse enjoy stories of rape? Was it a particular genre that pleased them? We have the images of Vikings as raping and pillaging, after all?

Certainly, there are texts that suggest they had a different view of sexuality and violence than we do today. But is perhaps our take on Odin in the myths we have had passed down to us heavily biased? Of course. For one, it appears the idea of Odin as chief god in Iceland was due to the preponderance of preserved texts. Archaeology suggests Thor was more popular with the population-at-large than the weird and terrible bastard wizard Stabby McOne-Eye the murder hobo. 

But Odin is the Master of Inspiration – and both kings and poets were buoyed by his patronage. That this is passed down, collected and written down by a Christian after Christianization of Iceland, and then translated to English, some eight or nine centuries later?

This influences the medium and message. Further, amongst certain neopagans and heathen polytheists, there is a tendency to look at the preserved texts in a similar way to the Bible. This is a product of the mutations of that North West European brand of heresy we mentioned, contextualized in sectarian manner (Protestantism has a lot to answer for).

Even if the myths are treated not as literal, we have been culturally contoured to look at myths which describe religious and numinous experience as exemplary. That’s to say, things that serve as examples or moral models, illustrations of general rules. In a sense, that’s akin to looking to police procedurals or popular movies, or 24hr news channels for a sense of morality today. Such things do contain troubling assumptions today – valourisation of violence if it “gets the job done” in movies, or  news stories inciting rage for political or social gain as example. Yet their key raison d’etre is experiential affect. Information and mores may be passed on and inculcated unconsciously, yes. But to view their content as explicitly and directly representational without bias? This is surely dangerous.

Furthermore, our attitudes to sexuality and violence, both as distinct groupings and how they interplay in all forms of media are worthy of critique – exactly what is acceptable and why? What is the historical and social context for this?

So if myth is not to be read as moral exemplar, what then? In this we must engage beyond a surface reading, if we so choose. As method of epistemic transmission and framing, myth is is not exemplary, but does aid in modelling. It is the response to myth that aids modelling not the myth itself. 

To say Odin is a rapist, a murderer, and thief is important – not because he is, or is not these things, but what that means  to the audience participating in the myth, both historically and currently in context. This is why his self-naming as Bolverk is so important, within the context of the myths. Performer and audience and mythic figure all acknowledge this behaviour as unacceptable to humans. 

Throughout the myth cycle, the “morally dubious” stories illustrate deviance from acceptability is only viable longterm if one is influential, and this motif exists across cultures. There are always consequences for such behaviour, whether it be the dooming of the world, or more subtle responses. Yet they serve a doubly illustrative function in the case of Odin, and other such figures (often Trickster or magical figures) wherein their behaviour and character is ambiguous precisely because of that nature – existing asocially, breaking rules and remaking them, surviving and prospering in impossible ways, in often hostile environments. This renders such figures “unsafe” “criminal” or “unnatural”, perhaps even queer in relation  to wider society. For such figures, it is the transmission of this quality via the myth which the narrative preserves, even when preserved and iterated upon by time. 

In this context, to state again, solely literal representational readings of myth are mistaken. This is not to say it is all symbolic, but rather that metaphor transmits information – an Iroquois story says their people learnt to tap maple syrup from squirrels. 

An Iroquois boy  saw a red squirrel cutting into tree bark with its teeth and later returning to lick the sap; the young Iroquois followed the squirrel’s lead and tried the same technique by cutting into the tree bark with a knife, thus discovering the sweet sap. Long derided as mere “myth” or “folklore” it took until the 1990s for a scientist named  Bernd Heinrich to observe and record it, publishing in a scientific journal – thus ‘legitimizing’ pre-existing indigenous knowledge. 

That such knowledge only became ‘acceptable’ or ‘real’ when performed outside of its original form tells us much about the biases of so-called ‘Western Culture’ as regards myth and folklore. Yet, this example proves the utility of such transmissions, existing over the centuries. That Iceland’s corpus of myth (even in those tales that remained to be written down) may contain metaphorically encode experience which can be re-experienced through felt-sense is made all the more likely, given the preservation of highly localized folklore and histories.

Questions of legitimacy or lack are defined by flows of influence and power – inextricably linked to agency and consequence. Myth is therefore conceivable as a manifestation of currents of social influence and should never be held as a fixed thing, whether or not one has positive or negative emotional response to its figures

Hello folks. I\’ve been extraordinarily quiet, but some of the things I\’ve been working on will soon be available to the public. Tonight I was interviewed by Dr. Vanessa Sinclair for the RENDERING UNCONSCIOUS Podcast. Join us, herein, where I she lets me talk, ramble, loop and riff about #cripkult, myth, disability writing, and things that are my jam.

More soonish. Promise.

Imagine something stirring, shifting as it raises a hoary head. It huffs awake, breath simultaneously freezing and burning, and with rolling eyes and crack of jaw being opened we may see a tongue feverishly slither over dolmen-teeth. We may feel something stir in the fields, under the skin of valleys; rivers may flex in their beds and giants stir in their cliffs-beds.

Folks from all walks of life may begin to feel something stir in their bones as the pressures of life and the uncertainties of the future begin to gather on the horizons like ominous stormclouds. Some of those feeling the stirrings of something old and and terrible might try the old words out for size. Words like sovereignty, phrases like will of the people, making things great again. 

They might employ language, thought and image, to reawaken dark dreams of so-called purity and to summon up the root-stock of imperialism. Or they might speak of the times and tides of myriads of incomers absorbed into this land over the aeons, of inventiveness and the glorious variety which enriches us all.

Apparently wise and distant commentators might put the source of such a sudden profusion of narratives down to fear, down to a longing for some imagined golden age when everything was Right and Good – a nostalgia which is is being whipped up by various agents on all sides of the political spectrum, whether cynically or within a grounding  of fanaticism. Perhaps it is furthered by good-hearted folk swept up by tides of emotion and sentiment, who are so entranced by the felt-sense of being part of something larger that they fail to see the consequences.

Perhaps.

Perhaps some, feeling this connection, this swelling of rawer experience, use its justification to embrace tribalism and primitivism, flirting coquettishly with savagery like unaffected tourists enjoying disaster tourism, right up until disaster irrupts into their lives – until they are unable to deny that some portion of the multitudinous hordes of Others, those barbarians they fear touches them and contaminates their own idea of purity.

Perhaps.

Yet, in the face of the cracking of the veneer of so-called civilization, where climate change and surety of access to necessary resources combines with political uncertainty to create a heady cocktail of fear, uncertainty and anger, the roots remain embedded in the land. The land, and its Powers and Presences, remains. The stars, the cold night above, these remain, just as they always did, describing their own shapes and paths in Kosmic journeys which pull this planet along in train. The emmanations and radiations of such heavenly bodies bombard us with cosmic rays, absorbed by the atmosphere we are slowly poisoning.

While we may be now capable of disrupting the planet\’s own rhythms faster than ever before, we are still incapable of disrupting the stars in any meaningful fashion. To view ourselves as apart from the ever-living Pandaemonic kosmos is our fatal mistake – to view ourselves as not subject to the rhythms of our planet is not only the height of arrogance, but manifestly mistaken. This mistake is being corrected, slowly but surely, by circumstances.

Survival always has been about working within the interplay of these rhythms, In making use of one flow of energy to achieve another goal before feeding back the result. In order to do this, we must acknowledge that their are things larger than us, indisputably capable of disrupting our apparent environment.

Cries of sovereignty, urges to make things Great again? These are understandable reactions – urges to reassert the authority of a pre-existing order which is being confronted with a threat it cannot force to kotow. A stirring of giants, which are larger than the reductionisms of modernity and its children, a Hydra of chaotic complexity which erupts from beneath a mere half millennium of accreted arrogance.

A friend asked why British folklore and myth seemed resurgent. There are, of course, many reasons, but one of them is that myth and folklore develops out of the interaction between human and environment. The less certain, or wilder the environment becomes, the less certain a hegemony of a particular inflammation of perception becomes. People once again return to stories and narratives of the weird and strange because they are and were engendered when there were other ways of seeing and being.

Localized strains of epistemology compete for usefulness – the prominence of a particular epistemological oeuvre which has distinct localized origin combined with the legacy of colonialism is understandable when the political class appear to be awaking old reactionary dreams which provided justification for that same colonialism.

Yet, on a psycho-spiritual level, we might argue that despite competing dreams, what remains is not the immune response, but that which inspires it.

Whether that of fascistic isolationism or massively ableist so-called \”Green\” primitivism, or the wiser Albionic invocation and evocation of Foolish People\’s Armageddon Gospels, or the sidereal folkloric histories and ways of Hookland, and even the biting social satire of Scarfolk Council – all of these are inspired by memory and experience which was engendered by the interaction with the land and its human inhabitants.

These same inhabitants are shaped by their own histories, their own memories and stories, to act and react in certain ways, generating more stories which shape how the land and its Presences and Powers are reacted to.

This land has seen many a giant-killer in its time, and yet there\’s always one more that escapes. As a long distant cousin to young Jack the lad, Cornish giant-killer extraordinare, I know this as one Cornishman to another. Hell, even Odin didn\’t cull them all in Norse myth, and often tested his wisdom against theirs.

Reaching past and through the second hand stories to interact with the place we dwell, to live our lives by participating in  its rhythms, even if it\’s the things and beings in your house, your garden, your streets. To tell our own stories to each other, and understand how they interlink with the places and people we have been with, are with, and may yet be with.  To sit and feel and know that which manifests in our minds and bodies is to also do so with our environments; teeth filled with local isotypes, thirst quenched by coffee from distant lands brought from a local business who tells tales of the local farmers he interacts with on distant journey, brewed with water that has been drawn through local soil.

\”In such societies, the sacred and the mundane are not easily distinguished and may not even be seen as separable from one another. The land is often seen as being infused with the sacred history of the people living on it. It may, for example, contain metaphysical creation stories, such as those of a valley being formed from a god’s footprint, or a cliff being an ancient spirit turned to stone.

The community sees itself as sharing the landscape with the local flora and fauna, the dwelling places of their dead ancestors, and the sanctuaries of spirits and gods.

Stories and taboos are then used to explain and preserve this relationship between people, their history, and the seen and unseen landscape.

As a result, mundane farming techniques, political rituals, hunting practices, day-to-day life and interactions with the unseen go hand in hand. Mythology and history have no clear dividing line…Law, religion, and morality similarly are entwined with traditions and taboos that serve to maintain social and (the perceived) natural order.\”

– Ascending the Steps to Hliðskjálf The Cult of Óðinn in Early Scandinavian Aristocracy, Joshua Rood

The reason I have long witten about this, the reason I have called this place, this space and conflux of ideas, COLD ALBION is because it draws people in – one cannot exist with it passively. It is in interaction with that which inspires myth and folklore that we are nourished, that we may, if we are so inclined, develop and participate in rhythms and Mysteries which provide a continual upwelling and nourishment for the Soul. In an interconnected world, the nourishment of one, ultimately, leads to the nourishment of others – because one cannot survive without others.

So while uncertainties breed, and the complexities of chaos mathematics are revealed and show an interconnected world to those with eyes to see, our only certainty is in that same primordial ever-changing complexity which we inhabit and participate every day.

Albion abides. It was here before demagoguery. It was here before empires. It nourishes its inhabitants in subtle ways most do not notice, and for those who do, layer after layer of those who have gone before speak the lie to fixed eternities and civilizations. Its raw existence, its power to inspire exists without exertion.

To steal from two great creative forces, William Blake and J Michael Strazcynski, if the giant Albion were to speak I suspect it would echo the words of the inscrutable Ambassador Kosh in the tv show Babylon 5:

\”I have always been here.\”

It\’s also intriguing in this vein to consider his words to Captain Sheridan on repeated occasions, who can be seen as a metaphor for King Arthur in a fallen Camelot:

\”You have always been here.\”

As manifestation and agent of the Land, Arthur as sacral monarch who does not die but will awaken when needed, echoes various King in the Mountain myths, returning to the Land only to awaken at a special or needful time. Over and over again, mythic time is held to be that space-time which nourishes and regenerates in new, endlessly changing forms.

Eternity is endless spiralling flux.

Albion abides. The pavement cracks, the forest revealed in city streets and farms and valleys alike.

Then, when he had all the knowledge he needed, all the secret places, all
the unspoken promises, all the wished and fleshed depressions, the power
that lurked … surged free.
(It had been there all along.)
(Since the dawn of time, it had been there.)
(It had always existed.)

The universe moves toward godhood. It started there and it wishes to
return there.

— Harlan Ellison, \”The Region Between\”

Albion abides. Be seeing you.

Gentlefolk: It is with great honour on this strange day that I announce the birthing of SANCTUM. Mine is the sixth(!) of twelve officially commissioned pieces, but there are 13 voices. In the words of the editors:

“As you follow us into these pages, the path will take you along the wild edges of belief, through the dream-space of myth and down the back alleys of history. A cave mouth stands open: enter it and you may find an entrance to the underworld, a philosopher’s allegory, or a woman who sits in meditation. The book itself becomes a space in which sanctuary is offered to parts of ourselves which we grew up learning to suppress.”

My piece entitled Cripples & Crooked Paths speaks about disability, Norse myth, and landscape.

The book as a whole is DAMN PRETTY. as you can see here. If you want to buy it, then click here.

As the blurb says:

What, if anything, is sacred?’ This is the question that opens SANCTUM, the twelfth Dark Mountain book – and, in the pages that follow, the reader is led along the wild edges of belief, through the dream-space of myth and down the back alleys of history.

The words come from the darkness of Rikers Island jail, where Sara Jolena Wolcott serves as a prison chaplain; from the Burmese monastery of Pa Auk Tawya, where Sayalay Anuttara uses meditation to investigate direct experience; and from a Cumbrian hillside where Craig ‘VI’ Slee’s friends lift his wheelchair over a locked gate to reach the site of an ancient ruin. John Michael Greer confronts the Cthulhucene and contemplates a future in which Man is no longer elevated to the role of deity, while Elizabeth Slade investigates the ‘god-shaped hole’ left by the collapse of institutional religion in much of the West, another set of ruins within which strange possibilities are growing.

Meanwhile, Thomas Keyes has brought together a gang of artists – part monastic scriptorium, part graffiti team – to illuminate the letters of the writers on parchment he has made from the skin of roadkill deer. And the margins of the book are taken over by Sylvia V. Linsteadt and Rima Staines, whose words and images summon the voice of the Sybil of Cumae to offer a commentary on the main text, before claiming the final words with her vision of the cave at the end – and beginning – of the world.

I\’m extraordinarily glad to be part of this project, and hope mine and other voices can provoke some deep thoughts in all who hear them.