Sanctum is one of the best! An amazing creation, a latter-day Book of Kells; I'm very privileged to have a copy and treasure it a lot. Still, it feels wayback..like before the storm. It's Lifehouses now and perennial "unmonasteries" - though not necessarily in the Sassi! Illich makes a good companion to dance around our God-shaped hole; there are riches in the Rivers North of the Future, btw.
Thanks, Rob! And yeah, it does feel a long way back. What comes to mind is the wave speech from Fear and Loathing, where HST is looking back on 1968 from the vantage point of 1973: "Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Not a direct analogy, we're dealing with darker tides, but that sense of being on the far side of a watershed. Interesting that you mention the Rivers North of the Future, it's come back to mind for a few reasons lately and I've been meaning to get it off the shelf.
Onwæcnaþ sangeras! (Wake up singers!) You are describing what I was calling the small magic a few years ago — the smæl rún — or slow whispers, half-remembered, in the dark. I've looked down one of these tracks a long time — why have we had such diminishment of reason from its mythic capacities or what Voegelin described as the classic, full-fledged experience of reason when it was first differentiated from myth into the language of philosophy, not cut off from its mystic ground, but still as Plato says, a type of theology.
You branch off into the attenuation of the arts as an aspect of modernity in ways I didn't see before for its connection to the problem of wanting a poetics of relation as simply the lingua franca of living cultures — no commodity, no celebrity — just a gift economy of letters and differently abled masters and novices, ordinary practitioners and appreciators.
McGilchrist is helpful here too, a fun discovery from you and Caro, for clues as to why there has always been a struggle (or loss of the tension) in individuals and groups to balance the need to get stuff done and make a living with the distracting, consuming pull to bring alive the symbols that make life luminous for its truths — like Martin Shaw pushing through his herds of bears to find the one that needs to be turned toward us today for its story.
Dana has returned to finish a master's thesis that touches all of this by daring to ask what music really is — in a place where ethnomusicology can admit a few elders and wisdom keepers who say first we must understand everything is singing.
Your thoughts and your friends' contributions to these long winding conversations are very much in our minds and hearts. Something must be spreading, or maybe many people are finding their way on similar tracks. A good and hopeful thing.
At Work in the Rúns, eh? (There's no end of variations can be spun on that title...)
This and your other comment are a reminder that I must get to Voegelin soon. What you say about the "full-fledged experience of reason" speaks to me and reminds me of why I've always pushed back, in a friendly way, against the embrace of Romanticism that Paul or Martin have been prone to. Maybe it's just the lingering influence of Eliot's dissociation of sensibilities, but I hear a rejection of reason in the call for a new Romantic movement ("the quants vs the poets", etc) and it feels too easy, like avoiding the work of careful thought that is part (not all) of what's called for.
Hmm, I always want to pull the other way when there is a strong current in one direction. I am not comfortable with groups formed around a bias of any kind unless they're interested in addressing it from the opposite tendencies. This was never easy to put across to students as a necessity of writing, especially "persusasive" rhetoric, and social tolerance for "negative capability" has only diminished over the years. This also means the loss of capacity to "suffer one's friends" (or to even have them) in Illich's sense, to bear up with how they honestly see us, and to form capacity for community in that form of difficult honesty/vulnerability.
I once upset a Hakomi therapist by insisting I felt my thoughts and did not find it easy to offer up purely "emotional" responses to questions as distinct from what he felt were "too analytical" responses. I don't know how to do that, unless I'm dreaming or writing a certain kind of poem, which is where those two worlds meet — somewhere in Jung's basement above a storm sewer grate with the sounds of a torrent coming up from below it. To access the subterranean river directly, without mediation, would be a kind of possession I think — and not helpful. But neither is hiding out in the garret or attic of rarified rationality. There is a "failure of nerve" that happens in either direction — a neurosis upstairs and the enthousiasmós of the sub-basement.
Looking forward to your episode of The Sacred, and to participating in the Work in the Ruins workshop. So many synchronicities over the past year, for me, that has led to my emergence in whatever this is. Somehow these things all came together: Humbling, Hospicing, Brickshit; then: The Sacred, The Nearness, The Ruins. What seems to be emerging next for me is some sort of reclaiming of the role of artist as an explorer of and collaborator with sacred mystery. That’s exciting because artist is where I’d started and where maybe I always wanted to be, but which always felt impossible and unattainable and even unappealing within the context of modernity.
After hearing about Dark Mountain for years, I finally decided to subscribe. If the quality of work is anything like what I just read, it will be well worth it!
It's a bit self-centred but all I can think of is what's the best thing now for 'scientists' to be doing. I was just reading 'The Dawn of Everything' when you posted this and noticed that Graeber and Wengrow said they initially saw the book as a sort of fun distraction from serious academic work. I came to this essay with that in my head and, by the end of it, I was thinking 'popular science is more important than science now.' Maybe it has been for a long while.
I don't know if it's self-centred, so much as starting from where you find yourself. It seems like a question worth asking, in any case, and it's what I was reaching for with the campfire chapter near the end of At Work in the Ruins.
By the way, I was thinking of you just now as I replied to a comment from Tom on yesterday's post about the relationship between the rupture of modernity and the much deeper rupture of the separation event in our species history, which takes us back to the Fall and all that. I'd be interested in whether my reply there is any help in what we've been puzzling through together over the years.
Sanctum is one of the best! An amazing creation, a latter-day Book of Kells; I'm very privileged to have a copy and treasure it a lot. Still, it feels wayback..like before the storm. It's Lifehouses now and perennial "unmonasteries" - though not necessarily in the Sassi! Illich makes a good companion to dance around our God-shaped hole; there are riches in the Rivers North of the Future, btw.
Thanks, Rob! And yeah, it does feel a long way back. What comes to mind is the wave speech from Fear and Loathing, where HST is looking back on 1968 from the vantage point of 1973: "Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era... So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back." Not a direct analogy, we're dealing with darker tides, but that sense of being on the far side of a watershed. Interesting that you mention the Rivers North of the Future, it's come back to mind for a few reasons lately and I've been meaning to get it off the shelf.
Onwæcnaþ sangeras! (Wake up singers!) You are describing what I was calling the small magic a few years ago — the smæl rún — or slow whispers, half-remembered, in the dark. I've looked down one of these tracks a long time — why have we had such diminishment of reason from its mythic capacities or what Voegelin described as the classic, full-fledged experience of reason when it was first differentiated from myth into the language of philosophy, not cut off from its mystic ground, but still as Plato says, a type of theology.
You branch off into the attenuation of the arts as an aspect of modernity in ways I didn't see before for its connection to the problem of wanting a poetics of relation as simply the lingua franca of living cultures — no commodity, no celebrity — just a gift economy of letters and differently abled masters and novices, ordinary practitioners and appreciators.
McGilchrist is helpful here too, a fun discovery from you and Caro, for clues as to why there has always been a struggle (or loss of the tension) in individuals and groups to balance the need to get stuff done and make a living with the distracting, consuming pull to bring alive the symbols that make life luminous for its truths — like Martin Shaw pushing through his herds of bears to find the one that needs to be turned toward us today for its story.
Dana has returned to finish a master's thesis that touches all of this by daring to ask what music really is — in a place where ethnomusicology can admit a few elders and wisdom keepers who say first we must understand everything is singing.
Your thoughts and your friends' contributions to these long winding conversations are very much in our minds and hearts. Something must be spreading, or maybe many people are finding their way on similar tracks. A good and hopeful thing.
At Work in the Rúns, eh? (There's no end of variations can be spun on that title...)
This and your other comment are a reminder that I must get to Voegelin soon. What you say about the "full-fledged experience of reason" speaks to me and reminds me of why I've always pushed back, in a friendly way, against the embrace of Romanticism that Paul or Martin have been prone to. Maybe it's just the lingering influence of Eliot's dissociation of sensibilities, but I hear a rejection of reason in the call for a new Romantic movement ("the quants vs the poets", etc) and it feels too easy, like avoiding the work of careful thought that is part (not all) of what's called for.
Hmm, I always want to pull the other way when there is a strong current in one direction. I am not comfortable with groups formed around a bias of any kind unless they're interested in addressing it from the opposite tendencies. This was never easy to put across to students as a necessity of writing, especially "persusasive" rhetoric, and social tolerance for "negative capability" has only diminished over the years. This also means the loss of capacity to "suffer one's friends" (or to even have them) in Illich's sense, to bear up with how they honestly see us, and to form capacity for community in that form of difficult honesty/vulnerability.
I once upset a Hakomi therapist by insisting I felt my thoughts and did not find it easy to offer up purely "emotional" responses to questions as distinct from what he felt were "too analytical" responses. I don't know how to do that, unless I'm dreaming or writing a certain kind of poem, which is where those two worlds meet — somewhere in Jung's basement above a storm sewer grate with the sounds of a torrent coming up from below it. To access the subterranean river directly, without mediation, would be a kind of possession I think — and not helpful. But neither is hiding out in the garret or attic of rarified rationality. There is a "failure of nerve" that happens in either direction — a neurosis upstairs and the enthousiasmós of the sub-basement.
Looking forward to your episode of The Sacred, and to participating in the Work in the Ruins workshop. So many synchronicities over the past year, for me, that has led to my emergence in whatever this is. Somehow these things all came together: Humbling, Hospicing, Brickshit; then: The Sacred, The Nearness, The Ruins. What seems to be emerging next for me is some sort of reclaiming of the role of artist as an explorer of and collaborator with sacred mystery. That’s exciting because artist is where I’d started and where maybe I always wanted to be, but which always felt impossible and unattainable and even unappealing within the context of modernity.
I like the sound of this, Lillian. Look forward to having you with us for the series. I hope you find good company for the journey you're on.
THIS! Masterful
After hearing about Dark Mountain for years, I finally decided to subscribe. If the quality of work is anything like what I just read, it will be well worth it!
Love this essay Dougald- you are on the nail here, thanks so much for articulating what I am sure many of us have been sensing for some time.
It's a bit self-centred but all I can think of is what's the best thing now for 'scientists' to be doing. I was just reading 'The Dawn of Everything' when you posted this and noticed that Graeber and Wengrow said they initially saw the book as a sort of fun distraction from serious academic work. I came to this essay with that in my head and, by the end of it, I was thinking 'popular science is more important than science now.' Maybe it has been for a long while.
I don't know if it's self-centred, so much as starting from where you find yourself. It seems like a question worth asking, in any case, and it's what I was reaching for with the campfire chapter near the end of At Work in the Ruins.
By the way, I was thinking of you just now as I replied to a comment from Tom on yesterday's post about the relationship between the rupture of modernity and the much deeper rupture of the separation event in our species history, which takes us back to the Fall and all that. I'd be interested in whether my reply there is any help in what we've been puzzling through together over the years.