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.

At a dinner party, there are many dishes and many guests. Conversation flows, along with the drinks, and relationships are formed and re-fomed. This is the metaphor you need to keep in mind for this post, the central axis about the whole thing turns. It\’s being front-loaded like this, precisely because it\’s something I want you to return to if you\’re feeling lost – if you lose the point. Consider it the well-worn path through the forest – a thing of ritual that both strangers and friends may use, made so by long practice.

Do not ignore the fact that a dinner party is the province of the middle and upper classes. Do not ignore that the working class have been getting together and enjoying food and fellowship since time immemorial. Neither should you forget that, in some senses, a dinner party began as highly formalised. There is an etiquette – specialist crockery, cutlery, even sometimes in seating. All these are used to gain particular effects.

I\’ll leave it to you to decide what those effects might be.

Nevertheless, every time Gordon brings up Big Table Animism, I have to work through the image of a dinner party. Though it\’s an excellent coinage, a dinner party is what the phrase summons, and that\’s deliberate. Many of us have little concept of  what a ritualised feast would  be like, after all. The closest we get is Christmas Dinner, or something similar. While for many, it and its equivalents may or may not take place on holy days, as modern Westerners we have few conceptions of ritual feasting  – unless one is say, Catholic and in a neighbourhood filled with folks who are not WASPs.

Sure there\’s the Eucharist, a potent ritualised remembrance of a Pesach combined with deity sacrifice. But is it a feast?

feast (n.)c. 1200, \”secular celebration with feasting and entertainment\” (often held on a church holiday); c. 1300, \”religious anniversary characterized by rejoicing\” (rather than fasting), from Old French feste \”religious festival, holy day; holiday; market, fair; noise, racket; jest, fun\” (12c., Modern French fête), from Vulgar Latin *festa (fem. singular; also source of Italian festa, Spanish fiesta), from Latin festa \”holidays, feasts, festal banquets,\” noun use of neuter plural of festus \”festive, joyful, merry,\” related to feriae \”holiday\” and fanum \”temple,\” from Proto-Italic *fasno- \”temple,\” from PIE *dhis-no- \”divine, holy; consecrated place,\” suffixed form of PIE root *dhes-, forming words for religious concepts.

Now, one might rejoice in the Mystery of the Resurrection, but the Old French feste clears things a little: market, fair; noise, racket; jest, fun. These are not genteel things, like Hyacinth Bucket\’s \”candlelight suppers\”.

They are messy, noisy common things. And that commonality does not preclude Mystery, indeed, these are often the periods when the High Wyrd manifests throughout the community. The dinner party is for a select few, carefully invited. Even if those invited are merely family and friends, merely a group connected by occupation or acquaintance, the host invites  them to the table. That invite might be a religious initiation, a passphrase, an accident of birth, etc, but it is still there.

The reason the dinner party metaphor works is because all those invited are still small sections of the population. Monoculture as whole will not permit a feast,  a noisy festive, fuzzy, barbarous expression of irrational and primal urges.

It\’s interesting to me that Gordon wrote the post that inspired this one, and that I\’m writing, during the  Notting Hill Hill Carnival.  A famous celebration of London\’s vibrant multiculturalism – arising out of attempts to deal with race-relations combining with street festivals. In its early years, and up until 1987, the police were severely antagonistic towards it, before taking a more conciliatory approach. Today, in 2017, the Guardian is running articles that the carnival is \’unsafe\’ and about police crackdowns in the run-up to this event. But this kind of thing is nothing new:

\”Carnival is not alien to British culture. Bartholomew Fair and Southwark Fair in the 18th century were moments of great festivity and release. There was juggling, pickpocketing, whoring, drinking, masquerade — people dressed up as the Archbishop of Canterbury and indulged in vulgar acts. It allowed people a space to free-up but it was banned for moral reasons and for the antiauthoritarian behaviour that went on like stoning of constables. Carnival allowed people to dramatise their grievances against the authorities on the street… Notting Hill Carnival single-handedly revived this tradition and is a great contribution to British cultural life.\” – Professor David Dabydeen

As Gordon points out:

\”It\’s even worse among the Frenchies, of course. You get caught up in the Paris trap of Latour and the like: Turning your telephone into a scary monster, fetishising the ‘primitive’ yet finding spirits too icky so pretending you’re doing the opposite, making everything a natural-cultural hybrid so no one can disagree with you and still somehow end up with something that looks like the secular republic: ‘political animism as hyper-rationalism’. It’s idiotic at this point, held together only by its self-justification that everything can be a hybrid so anything goes. Over-written jibber-jabber. (Shout out to Dr Clever: This is the origin of Ingold\’s suspicion of the hybrid, I surmise.) What are the hyper-rational, animist politics of the Fatima Incident?\”

Earlier in the week, I got into this on tumblr, with Mother the Ever-Animate. Except in my case, it wasn\’t a telephone, but the keyboard I\’m writing this on:

\”You don’t have to “believe” in spirits to understand that all objects are capable of conjuring experience within human neurology when we interface with them. But what our enculturated epistemological frame has done is excise 95% of those felt-senses.by saying it is impossible for the interface between so-called “ordinary” objects and humans to generate meaningful felt-sense-experience.

To say “my laptop is alive” invites ridicule, because people naturally assume this is some kind of anthropomorphism. The laptop is patently not human.

This is anthropocentric reductionism and “inanimism” at it its finest.

But, if we approach the laptop, openly, pathically – in a state where we are open to all felt-sense-experiencesof it, then the ‘ordinary’ object becomes capable, within that context of conjuring, of Being itself.

If we managed to break free of the enculturation, all objects – all phenomena would be capable, would be revealed as enchanting us. That is, we are ensorcelled by our world; we act and react in response to it, though we know not why, because we have been *trained out* of the idea that the things we interact with act on us

[…]

As I type this now, opening myself to the felt-sense-totality of typing on this keyboard, I realise I am experiencing a charge of sort, an electric thrill, not unlike the moment you brush a lover’s hand for the first time – subtle tightening of the throat, subtle hair-raising of the scalp, the tingle in the spine.

There is something akin to desire there, to continue the complexity of the interaction. A feeling of being drawn in further, into a world of electric sparks and living plastic, metal and stone. Not human, not complex, but along with this, the knowledge of all the things we have created together, this keyboard and I – a desire to continue such conjurings.

Some might say I am projecting human emotions onto the keyboard – I disagree. I am not projecting. Rather I am experiencing, feeling, knowing. Sheer imagination though detractors might call it, nonetheless it has a biophysical effect on me, and as I go deeper, those sensations become richer, stranger – transporting me to a world where my sense of self is constantly being impressed-upon-and-impressing-on all phenomena.\”

Now, you might read this and  wonder if I\’m saying that my keyboard has a spirit. Actually, I\’m not. What I\’m describing above is a method of interaction with the kosmos. Some folks have replied to the original post questioning whether the keyboard is truly answering back or not – if it has a volition of its own. Here\’s where we get technical, because an answer can come, even if there is no-one there to give it – it is the attitude of question which generates answer. In an interaction, the inter portion occurs through the action.

Technically the keyboard is a monster – in its original sense of portal, or marker, sign of divinity. But it\’s not a hybrid – not two things slapped together, to make another.  It is its own thing, allowing \”[T]he recognition of semiosis, language and communication in the \’beyond the human\’ world\” as Gordon puts it.

It\’s sort of like my shewstone, or ouija-board in a sense, a constructed thing that allows me to write thousands upon thousands of words, some of which, I admit, have been written when my consciousness was capable of communicating with \’beyond the human world\’. In the right state of mind, it becomes a ritual tool.

But it\’s not a spirit, because animism isn\’t simply saying that everything has a spirit. An individual or group engaging in animistic realpolitik recognises that:

1.  The anthropocentric view appears very, very wrong.
2.  There are other Beings or wights which are capable of thought, action and communication. These three things may, or may  sometimes very much not be like the human versions.
3. Ockham\’s Razor is like bringing a knife to a gunfight – any reductionism you apply will be shot full of holes by the Kosmos at large and any inhabitant you attempted to reduce to your map. Probably with a weird-looking AK-47, because those things are everywhere
4. Understand that, not only is the map not the territory, you\’re making it as a security blanket, investing it with talismanic power. Recognising this has its uses, but ultimately, it\’s only a security blanket.
5.  Relationships and pacts are not only useful but are in fact essential. Humans are not only social animals, we are daemonically social.

That daemonic sociability is fairly obvious in a carnival. Think of the masks, the floats with their effigies, the music, the dancing – all the things that Archontic forces would want to reduce, make \’safe\’. Think of the press of bodies, the rhythms. Think yes, of the psychoactive properties of them, of the drugs consumed on the sly, the offerings made, the entheogens interfacing with nervous systems.

Think of them, and then think of that route into the forest, I mentioned.

The politik part of animistic realpolitik is important here:

politic (adj.)early 15c., \”pertaining to public affairs,\” from Middle French politique \”political\” (14c.) and directly from Latin politicus \”of citizens or the state, civil, civic,\” from Greek politikos \”of citizens, pertaining to the state and its administration; pertaining to public life,\” from polites \”citizen,\” from polis \”city\” (see polis). Replaced in most adjectival senses by political. From mid-15c. as \”prudent, judicious.\”

polis (n.)\”ancient Greek city-state,\” 1894, from Greek polis, ptolis \”citadel, fort, city, one\’s city; the state, community, citizens,\” from PIE *tpolh- \”citadel; enclosed space, often on high ground, hilltop\” (source also of Sanskrit pur, puram, genitive purah \”city, citadel,\” Lithuanian pilis \”fortress\”).

The high ground, the enclosed space – the body that is recognised as itself, the state as entity. All of these, at root, both imply the need for sociability, community, affairs of state. But such things cannot happen in isolation. The structure of the polis must, occasionally, with deliberate spontaneity (not actually a contradiction) come to resemble what is beyond it.

beyond (prep., adv.)Old English begeondan \”on the other side of, from the farther side,\” from be- \”by,\” here probably indicating position, + geond \”yonder\” (prep.); see yond. A compound not found elsewhere in Germanic. From late 14c. as \”further on than,\” 1530s as \”out of reach of.\” To be beyond (someone) \”to pass (someone\’s) comprehension\” is by 1812.

yon (adj., pron.)Old English geon \”that (over there),\” from Proto-Germanic *jaino- (source also of Old Frisian jen, Old Norse enn, Old High German ener, Middle Dutch ghens, German jener, Gothic jains \”that, you\”), from PIE pronominal stem *i- (source also of Sanskrit ena-, third person pronoun, anena \”that;\” Latin idem\”the same,\” id \”it, that one;\” Old Church Slavonic onu \”he;\” Lithuanian ans \”he\”). As an adverb from late 15c., a shortening of yonder.

The forest has roots and branches, an ecology all its own. There are in fact, many paths. Many ways to navigate it. You could even cut yourself a new one, but in doing so, you might get lost, or irritate one of the inhabitants. Creatures once confined to its environs might enter your city, as you encroach on their habitat, and thus change the polis\’ ecology.

But if we investigate the carnival route, the spontaneously generated, well-worn path, what do we find but a method of engaging with the Forest which it allows – for that well worn path was begun that way, very often, because there was a pre-existing route – where the difficulty gradient of travel was, if not easier, then had less complications.

BTA is, in a sense a coming-to-terms, with our own daemonic sociability. It is easy to say, well yes, humans are wights, are spirits too. But beyond that? Its implications and consequences are massive, philosophically, morally, and existentially. If one is able to summon spirits, to bind or make pacts with them, then what does that say about us? Are we operating, functioning through habitual behaviours due to the interconnections of our daemonic sociability – peculiarly contoured due to pacts made and interactions had by our ancestors, by those in our locations?

Have our cultures evolved in response, not just to ancient and modern environmental and physicalist ecologies, but to those we might call spiritual? Do we act and react in response to localised and ancient animistic realpolitik? 

If we suppose this is so, beyond Western New Age misinterpretations of karma, are we, as living entities, active or passive  participants in the Pandaemonium?

There is a sixth rule which should be borne in mind by those engaging in animistic realpolitik:

6. There is no such thing as being in control. There is only the possibility of negotiation

In Mama\’s Carnival, the rules are very real. But they evolve out of politik-al expediency, custom, and experimentation.

This blog isn\’t dead, y\’know? Neither am I – just missing half a foot, expertly removed by a team of surgeons led by a South Asian-extracted flesh-wizard whose last name means doing/getting. The health problems that have plagued me, apparently solved by skill with the knife. The name seems a little on the nose, if you ask me.

And people talk about the death of the blogosphere, whatever that means. Everyone seems to have an email newsletter of some sort, something that isn\’t necessarily automatically public. You have to subscribe, write your name on the line – sign below or in the form field. Make your pact, make your exchange.

Not surprising, given the sympathies between communications. commerce, and magic:

(Will the real bird-headed, staff-bearing, magician exemplar please stand up?)

I\’m not dead, and the blog isn\’t either, because this was never just a blog – never just a poorly updated personal website.. It was, and is, a public interface point for the concept of COLD ALBION. Albion-as-island; an island in the North, that gave rise to myth and legend. A land stuffed full of gods and  spirits and crazed magicians. Cold, because it is a cold medium in McLuhan\’s sense; it requires engagement, interfacing-with. Only by that do we begin to understand, does it begin to come-forth.

concept (n.) 1550s, from Medieval Latin conceptum \”draft, abstract,\” in classical Latin \”(a thing) conceived,\” from concep-, past participle stem of concipere \”to take in\” (see conceive). In some 16c. cases a refashioning of conceit (perhaps to avoid negative connotations).

conceit (n.) late 14c., \”something formed in the mind, thought, notion,\” from conceiven (see conceive) based on analogy of deceit and receipt. Sense evolved from \”something formed in the mind,\” to \”fanciful or witty notion\” (1510s), to \”vanity\” (c. 1600) through shortening of self-conceit (1580s).

conceive (v.) late 13c., conceiven, \”take (seed) into the womb, become pregnant,\” from stem of Old French conceveir (Modern French concevoir), from Latin concipere (past participle conceptus) \”to take in and hold; become pregnant,\” from com-, intensive prefix (see com-), + comb. form of capere \”to take,\” from PIE root *kap- \”to grasp.\” Meaning \”take into the mind\” is from mid-14c., a figurative sense also found in the Old French and Latin words. Related: Conceived; conceiving.

As a concept COLD ALBION is where I take in the experience of existence on-and-with this island, and bring forth that which is born of the conception. In that sense, I give birth, I bring forth language, poetry, myth and memory:

What is knowledge to a pre-literate culture, but that which is held by memory; brought forth, shared-between, and returned? Rain falls, returning to the rivers, seas, and streams from which it evaporated. It wells up from the deep places to be hoisted to the heavens, only to drain back down, drawn by gravity to the centre of all things.

I am not dead, and neither is the blog. My mother is though.

She died, on the 29th of January 2017, in the ward next to mine, at 9:30 am. I\’d been hoisted out of bed to see her, in the middle of the night, because we knew she wouldn\’t make it. I spent four hours by her bedside, and she was unresponsive. I was in pain from the surgery – it had only been 5 days since the operation, after all.  Next month would have been her 63rd birthday.

Everything dies, and everyone is mortal- at best they become unrecognisable as themselves. They become other things, people and places.

Cattle die, kindred die,
Every man is mortal:
But the good name never dies
Of one who has done well

Cattle die, kindred die,
Every man is mortal:
But I know one thing that never dies,
The glory of the great dead

My Mother is now Memory. Memory is Mother.

I remember, she gave me words, held me close. Gave me language, told me stories. Handed me The Hobbit, introduced me to Asimov and Clarke, to Spock and Kirk, Picard, and of course the Doctor. She gave me the wandering wizards. When I was older, I gave her Rivers of London and others. Back and forth, forth and back – the weavings of a life well-lived. Though she died at 62, her lungs were just over 40, fruit of a rainslick-road – a motorcyclist\’s gift.

Memory is Mother. Mother is Memory.

Within my blood, I carry her, within my bones. Within my heart and head, though she be amongst the dead. She carried me on her hip, in her womb. It is now my time to carry her, to bear her in my body, and to bring her forth when required.

I\’m not dead, but neither am I as I was – for the knife cuts, but it does not heal. it is is not the thing that makes-whole. That is the body itself; bleeding, binding, pulsing. Electric arc along nerve, pumping wave of particles diffusing along concentration gradients, fluids dissolving, flowing solutions burning with the light of a hidden sun.

I\’m not dead, but neither am I as I was – I am undergoing physiotherapy, orthotic and prosthetic appointments. I will need a new wheelchair. All these, before I am independent and functional – and I am at the mercy of those who can provide them. I have no idea when they are likely to happen, until they do. In this, I am a victim.

Many might deride this status – accuse one of running a so-called victim-script. The pernicious idea that we can and should be able to control our destinies absolutely, whether through magical or mundane means, that we might rise from the realm of the oppressed into the realm of the Archons? This reveals that a terrible con – a confidence trick – has been perpetrated on humanity as a whole.

con (adj.) \”swindling,\” 1889, American English, from confidence man (1849), from the many scams in which the victim is induced to hand over money as a token of confidence. Confidence with a sense of \”assurance based on insufficient grounds\” dates from 1590s.

confidence (n.) early 15c., from Middle French confidence or directly from Latin confidentia, from confidentem (nominative confidens) \”firmly trusting, bold,\” present participle of confidere \”to have full trust or reliance,\” from assimilated form of com, here probably an intensive prefix (see com-), + fidere \”to trust\” (see faith). For sense of \”swindle\” see con (adj.).

faith (n.) mid-13c., faith, feith, fei, fai \”faithfulness to a trust or promise; loyalty to a person; honesty, truthfulness,\” from Anglo-French and Old French feid, foi \”faith, belief, trust, confidence; pledge\” (11c.), from Latin fides \”trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief,\” from root of fidere \”to trust,\” from PIE root *bheidh- \”to trust\” (source also of Greek pistis \”faith, confidence, honesty;\” see bid). For sense evolution, see belief. Accommodated to other English abstract nouns in -th (truth, health, etc.).

From early 14c. as \”assent of the mind to the truth of a statement for which there is incomplete evidence,\” especially \”belief in religious matters\” (matched with hope and charity). Since mid-14c. in reference to the Christian church or religion; from late 14c. in reference to any religious persuasion.

And faith is neither the submission of the reason, nor is it the acceptance, simply and absolutely upon testimony, of what reason cannot reach. Faith is: the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, not to our lower and apparent self. [Matthew Arnold, \”Literature & Dogma,\” 1873]From late 14c. as \”confidence in a person or thing with reference to truthfulness or reliability,\” also \”fidelity of one spouse to another.\” Also in Middle English \”a sworn oath,\” hence its frequent use in Middle English oaths and asseverations (par ma fay, mid-13c.; bi my fay, c. 1300). 

The trick is this: that those Archons, those with power to move the world in certain ways, are masters, or rulers at all.  That the criteria for being what they claim is even correct. In good faith, we see these gleaming towers, these bundles of cash, the guns, bombs, and armies, and we think we see Masters. So, we must ask, who told us what Archons were, who told us \”These are who you should aspire to be, in this way.\” Who told us that they, and the way they do things, is even legitimate?

Who indeed?

What separates the Archon from the Victim? Wealth and power, is the obvious answer. The ability to have one\’s needs met without effort, perhaps? Without suffering?

victim (n.) late 15c., \”living creature killed and offered as a sacrifice to a deity or supernatural power,\” from Latin victima \”person or animal killed as a sacrifice.\” Perhaps distantly connected to Old English wig \”idol,\” Gothic weihs \”holy,\” German weihen \”consecrate\” (compare Weihnachten \”Christmas\”) on notion of \”a consecrated animal.\” Sense of \”person who is hurt, tortured, or killed by another\” is recorded from 1650s; meaning \”person oppressed by some power or situation\” is from 1718. Weaker sense of \”person taken advantage of\” is recorded from 1781.

To whom is the victim sacrificed, how is it set apart? What is it set apart from?   Marked by difference, it is no longer subject to the same rules as everyone else. It must move, it must be in a different way to the rest of the herd – even, and especially if, that being  requires a different way of living and dying. Protections may be removed from it, or taboos and prohibitions might be applied.

I am a cripple with half a foot, who has lost virtually all his physical strength, is physiologically dependent on painkillers, who sleeps in his livingroom in a hospital bed because the hoist won\’t fit his real bed, and whose partner has been sleeping on the sofa since  he came home from the hospital in February. It takes two people to get me up and put me to bed every morning and every night. I say this, not as a tale of woe. I do not want pity or sympathy, though I spent a year in agony as my foot [WARNING: following links contain grim photos] ulcerated, wept blood, and blackened before amputation – nerves screaming all the while.

I am now pain free thanks to painkillers, whereas before, I was still waking in the night screaming.

I personally know people who are in worse states than I – people whose daily lives I can barely imagine – and they survive. We live in such a way as to be living markers of what can happen to anyone. Even with the best medical care in the world, there is still the suffering, the pain.

There is still the disruption – the anomalous, the Black Swan that even the greatest cannot prepare for – a Great Flood that drowns all but a few. Those waters are more than a memory, they are Memory. The flood, the surge, the tide which swallows all into solution, dissolves it, makes everything part of it,

The waters are all-encompassing.

In ancient times, offerings were consigned to the place where the waters dissolved the solidity of the land; marshes, pools and rivers. In others, they were burnt, scent and ashes  rising up, only to fall again.

Where is the fire then? Where is that which causes those all-encompassing waters to rise, and by what power do they fall?

But that’s because they don’t understand language. They think words are things, that vocabulary is like a word-hoard full of pretty shiny baubles you can pick up and put down. They have forgotten the root of language. Forgotten that it’s made, brewed in the body and brought forth by the light of blood.

The above is part of something I wrote a week or so ago – the first thing that gripped me, that came forth without weariness. Because language comes from the body, from arrangements of it in particular ways as we respond to sensory experience, consciously and unconsciously. It is endless – experience generates a response experience which generates yet more…

Are we looking for a First Cause then? An igniter of the Primal Fire? A Luciferian, or Promethean figure?

Where and when did I stop being part of my mother? When did the chemical fire, the combustion of life become my own? Was it when I began to strangle, to choke as I hanged myself on the umbilicus? As the rope of nerve fibre and veins began to damage my brain through lack of oxygen? Was it when the surgeon sliced down and opened that womb to the world?

Was the knife, again, my FIAT LUX? My illumination by cutting?

All these questions are rhetorical devices, yes, but they are also genuine. Is this knife-gnosis, the knowing of the blade that separates?

In ancient times folk would consult an oracle, but all I have is me, here and now. And so we say that my mother is now Memory, and Memory is Mother. As we are conceived, so we are taken into the body,  and fused with that body. It, not we is the catalyst. Yet it is the interface betwixt us and the catalyst, which creates – that which brings forth.

So it is, that COLD ALBION acts upon us if we let it – language transmitting experience to be received. Such transmissions to be incubated in the flesh; ideas, oracles and images. Seed-syllables scattered hither and yon, waiting for fertile soil, deep dark earth. Engage with that which lies behind the words – see what happens to that which is left behind when the phoenix burns, that which emerges intact from the flaming waters.

As this island has nourished and shaped me, beyond all conception of race, nationality, or political boundary, so it lies quiet until you render yourself hospitable to it:

hospitable (adj.) \”kind and cordial to strangers or guests,\” 1560s, from Middle French hospitable, which is formed as if from a Medieval Latin hospitabilis, from the stem of Latin hospitari \”be a guest,\” from hospes (genitive hospitis) \”guest\” (see host (n.1)). The Latin adjective was hospitalis, but this became a noun in Old French and entered English as hospital. Related: Hospitably. 

host (n.1) \”person who receives guests,\” especially for pay, late 13c., from Old French oste, hoste \”guest, host, hostess, landlord\” (12c., Modern French hôte), from Latin hospitem (nominative hospes) \”guest, stranger, sojourner, visitor (hence also \’foreigner\’),\” also \”host; one bound by ties of hospitality.\”

This appears to be from PIE *ghos-pot-, a compound meaning \”guest-master\” (compare Old Church Slavonic gospodi \”lord, master,\” literally \”lord of strangers\”), from the roots *ghosti- \”stranger, guest, host\” (source also of Old Church Slavonic gosti \”guest, friend;\” see guest (n.)) and *poti- \”powerful; lord\” (see potent). The etymological notion is of someone \”with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality\” [Watkins]:

The word ghos-ti- was thus the central expression of the guest-host relationship, a mutual exchange relationship highly important to ancient Indo-European society. A guest-friendship was a bond of trust between two people that was accompanied by ritualized gift-giving and created an obligation of mutual hospitality and friendship that, once established, could continue in perpetuity and be renewed years later by the same parties or their descendants. [Watkins, \”American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots\”]

My mother gave me words, and much more besides. She was my origin, and in return I shall carry her til the end, for there are some gifts which may never be repaid. She is now amongst all the mothers of Memory, all the way back to Before and After all things. Mum and island, dissolving into one. Assuming new shapes, new currents, in my blood and breath and bone.

And while the Knife marks boundary, eventually, it heals – it becomes part of the whole, while different.

A scar, a stump, a mound: all beacons, all signs, arrangements in the landscape.  Made by those who experience that landscape, to bring forth more; to become mediums and hosts to that which emerges. To gift it an eye, and receive Sight in return.

To make the pact of body and mind, to make oneself host to the Stranger, the wanderer, the alien God not of this bounded world – to be the gift that demands the gift by virtue of its existence alone.

This is how to speak Mother\’s words.