Uncivil Savant Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

This week is a between-essays week. Here are two short fiction sketches, written in 2007 and 2015, and recent photographs from near my home and from a very nourishing week in Suffolk. Greetings from sunset hour in York, where I am away working on the last edits for my next book. Back with a longer piece and ‘this week’s good thing’, next week. Go well, all, into the season’s change.

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This podcast was first publish here on Substack on 30th September 2024 with full transcript, links and footnotes.

I want to write about music and silence. It’s a few weeks earlier than planned, as yesterday I got the heads up from Lydia Catterall that our episode on her podcast Survival Songs was coming out on Sunday 22nd September, a month before I expected. So why not listen to that now, before reading this? You can click here. It’s only 20 minutes long and it’ll give you more depth on some of the topics in today’s post.

Have you ever just stopped doing a thing you really loved for a decade? What happened when you came back to it? Had anything changed?

Links to the song mentioned in the podcast: Mount the Air - The Unthanks.

Scroll to bottom of the original post for The Shape of Prayer - Tells.

And here’s the Survival Songs podcast homepage.

This podcast was first published here on Substack on 23rd September 2024 with full transcript, footnotes and links.

Aspirant

I have long been in search of a way to write about the real1 without lapsing lazily into superlatives nor anatomising a now-lifeless corpse of the beloved. I have a duty to speak for wisdom only accessible by the body and to somehow say-into-being the unspeakable, and to not just allow, but speak up for, the flawed, the exiled, the tiny, the marginal.

The untethered word is to the real what the virtual world is to lived reality: merely a representation. When words are true, they remain nestled into the fabric of being, connected by an umbilicus to the matrix of real life. When they have finished being useful they can and should return to the nourishing silence that surrounds all speech and action.

The Great Mystery is in all things.4 Matter matters. Sacrifice involves physical loss, even death. The container of insight is material, even though the insight is immaterial. This is the great paradox of embodiment, the heart of all wisdom traditions worth their salt, the current lack of which makes empty husks of men, women and children.

This podcast was first published here on Substack with full transcript, images, notes and links on 20th May 2024.

Loose Ends

I am accustomed to being away from home, but it is a new and tricky thing travelling so far away when one’s love is 3600 miles and 5 hours east. Conversations between hosts, friends and strangers are woven together, the beloved is included. How do we stay in communion with what and whom are not physically present? How do we do this without drifting away from the present moment, from what is close at hand? Maintaining a thread between myself and family, friends or partner has been an ongoing conundrum over the many years where touring with bands or teaching T’ai Chi took me to Poland, Canada, USA, Scotland, Sweden or elsewhere. Now, older, though perhaps only marginally wiser, I realise the importance of puncturing the mystique of that perfect distance achieved by international travel. It can attenuate connection to a point at which it breaks. I have seen friends and myself swept up in that seemingly inviolable self-contained bubble which can accompany anything other than very low-budget travel. Marriages have faltered. Bands have broken up. What starts as a semi-mystical experience soon becomes an excuse for not bringing ourselves fully back home even as we dump our dusty bags by the front door.

In the recent past I have sat on one end of a string and felt nothing but emptiness greet my hopeful pulls. At other times I have let my own loose end dangle, ignoring the tension in the line, refusing to be in connexion, and yet expecting to be able to pick it up on my return.

But these are not those times, thank goodness. So I will write of host-guesting and then of a shawl the size of an ocean.

This podcast was published first here on Substack, with full transcript, notes and links on 6t May 2024.

I am in America, and inexplicably have no phone signal or data here despite paying for it, right after a couple of weeks in Italy.

Here at last are deep green thoughts beneath the Georgia trees, where it is hot and humid and the shade of early evening is welcome. Good conversation and wonderful birdsong fill the air. There is due to be a ‘Biblical storm’ tonight, so people are leaving the camp, but we are trusting in our new tent and the fact that in Britain’s south west, we’ve just had the wettest winter on record. So we don’t feel fazed. My belly is full of the quesadilla and refried beans I cooked on the little camping stove. I have hard seltzer beside me and my travelling friend in front of me. My beloved is 3600 miles away, and so I console myself with the real beauty that is present and the deep conviviality of the people around me.

May you feel it too.

This was first published here on Substack with full transcript, more photos and footnotes on 23rd April 2024.

On the seventh, and final, celebration of the anniversary of the initiatory circle of the Incorporation of Muse. Below are some extracts of the many meetings of the participatory Beings and the Mistress of the gathering basket. Losses are recouped. A new door opens. We draw a crooked line under everything with charcoal made from our brothers’ vines, and heave a glad sigh.

This week, an unknowable horizon beckons, we go to pack old hurts away and find them turned to thick black ink.

This post was first published here on Substack with full transcript, photos and footnotes on 8th April 2024.

A month or so ago, David Knowles, a writer I love to read, asked me to write something about knowing, after I had written this in a short Note about an earlier piece:

Somewhere between the fort-town of Facts and the river of Knowing is a meadow where I gather leaves of wild faith.

I was making notes, mulling it over, as you do, when a friend died. Washed downstream into a gully of grief, several of us swam together and kept each other afloat. Now, on the banks of that peaty force, I sit to regather my thoughts and find them changed. I cannot write about epistemology1, not only because I have not read the requisite books, but also because I do not keep a kenning that could be culled and flayed thus.

So, I will describe some of the different ways I ever know anything, (if I ever do), as I have never tried to list them in words. Perhaps it will chime with how you know what you know.

Then, I will speak of a recent long moment spent outside time with my pack.

This piece was first published here on Substack on 25th March 2024, with full transcript, more images, links and footnotes.

Fate

It's my fate to work with the fragmentary, the partial, detritus, the discarded and the unwanted.

Matter is holographic. If the Divine is in everything, then any one thing is a holograph of the whole. Completeness can be accessed through incompleteness more easily than through the search for completeness. Searching for ‘wholeness’ is a fool’s errand.2 Attention to the unwanted, the vestigial and the marginal always yields more than expected. The devil is not in the details, the devil is in the Grand Unified Theory. The Great Mystery is in the tiny details, the unforeseen events, the mysterious turns, the strange, small objects and strangers well-met on the path. It's found in the unexpected embrace, the impromptu dance, the fireside gathering bursting into song, the sudden meal assembled from scraps that tastes delicious, full of unlikely combinations: sausage and mango? Amazing.

This piece was originally posted here on Substack with full transcript, more images and links on 10th March 2024.

The Dragon

In the Taoist Classics, dragons signify many things, depending on context, but the one I want to talk about is the sky dragon as the spirit of nature and the nature of spirit. In many Chinese artifacts and art you will see a joyful, sinuous dragon, mouth open, wide eyes, and wider smile, front legs outreaching with all its energy towards its goal - the pearl. What is this pearl? Well, talking of it with my old friend and T’ai Chi teacher Mark Raudva this weekend, he raised his eyebrows and smiled, ‘Ah, the mysterious pearl of great value…’

What it often represents is true wisdom.

How the dragon is portrayed shows us how we too could gather all our vitality, energy and spirit1 to pursue this great prize. That this is our true nature.

But our vitality is drained by the dopamine cycle. Our energy is wasted chasing complicated accoutrements and enervating experiences, which cannot replace simply being at home on the earth, which we ancestrally crave. Our spirits are tranquilised by fake ritual which numbs, but never kills, our longing for connection with each other, the living world and Great Mystery.

This was first published here on Substack on 26th February 2024, with full transcript, more images links and footnotes.

I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden… And so I mull things over on the slab while listening to this and this. The work is long and full of haptic richness, smashing, grinding, milling, then long strokes of the brush as I lay the grounds down on watercolour paper before making test marks on them next week. Shop-bought grounds are expensive and often made of acrylic (microplastics which go straight down the plughole, which is where the sea starts…) Tapping the sieve to let the yellow ochre through just enough to tint the various subtle whites. The splash of water droplets from a pipette before scooping them up with a palette knife on the speckled granite slab, a 1990s placemat from the charity shop.

First published here on Substack with more images and links on 19th February 2024.