“Game of Thrones” - Yunkaporta’s quip - know your own story! ah! Ah! Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings” rings more clearly for me. I’m 78 & read it twice many many decades ago, but just a month ago began it again so depressed by the onslaught of daily news. Ah! There too lies our northern European story. It grabbed me. The way Tolkien tells the story, many underlying threads breaking up the old now tiresome Aristotelian arc, the more-than-human participants, the rich embedding of the natural world full of agency. The way he tells the story breaks up ones normative mechanical consciousness, opens one up to mysterious energies floating around & through events & I begin to notice the daily news in different terms now. Fantasy? Not at all! Fantastical? Certainly!
I want to make a sideways comment here, because it's a topic that has been nagging me for a while. TY is mocking us a bit here, because GOT is about States and Power and the fact that they can ONLY be maintained by violence as opposed to the intricate connectivity and LIMITS of the stateless kinship of the Aboriginal peoples. It's like that line that has plagued me for a decade and that DH has cited before, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." But that goes double for the idea of the State and goes back to DH's questions, what do we mourn? what do we keep? what can we release?
Someone told me years ago, whenever you read a story and you feel there's something lacking in the picture of what the world is like that the storyteller is offering, you can use that as a tool to see that "something" more clearly in the world beyond that story. Seems like that's what you/me/Tyson are doing with GoT.
Coming back to that set of questions, in this context, maybe we could add: where do we start? And which parts of what we're looking for are here already, just misnamed or overlooked or undervalued or not taken seriously?
I listened to this last week and when they were discussing the connectivity of kinship and Tyson barked "And limits!" I could hear the ping go off in Dougald's head, ever attentive to the missing piece of the puzzle. And Dougald admits to an idea that I feel like he has been circling but I haven't yet heard him voice aloud about a "network of villages." I'd like to dig deeper into that idea...
About the "network of villages", one thing to add, prompted by a mail from Nick Stewart – this isn't about a bucolic picture of everyone living in something that looks like what a "village" conjures up in the English imagination, it's village-mindedness in the sense that Adam talks about it, which I guess owes a good deal to his teacher, Stephen Jenkinson:
Gustavo Esteva once told me about a process they went through in Mexico City, trying to work out how you make good decisions in a city of twenty million people, and where they ended up was that in some sense the city itself doesn't exist, it's an abstraction, and the actual life of it was at the scale of the barrios, where the possibility of people's direct involvement in decision-making was real enough. So I guess that's part of what I think of, when I think of a world of villages, that some of them might be packed and woven close together into things that look like cities. Though the trajectory of rapid, extreme urbanisation of the recent past seems like it will go into reverse in any plausible non-dystopian future.
It’s amusing to hear about your experience at Ängsbacka, Dougald, and lovely to hear that, although frustrating, it was part of you getting together with Anna. And wonderful to hear you and Tyson sharing yarns. I will do my best to give you a smoother landing at the GEN gathering 😅 Tack så mycket ♥️
Delightful! I love “Sand Talk” so much. Happy to learn he’s got a new one. In the beginning there was the yarn, indeed. It’s fun how relational all the versions are: conversation, story, yarn. So much better than the authoritarian-tinged “Word.” Looking forward to listening!
Seconded! I read it over the weekend and it's full of the right kind of trouble, unwilling to let any of us off the hook, a journey through the underworld that won't be packaged into a neat Joseph Campbell/Star Wars heroic arc.
Ahhhhhhh! ANOTHER book I must read. Adding it to the pile I keep sorting! I loved Sand Talk, and enjoyed listening into the yarning conversation between the two of you, Dougald, with generous child noise and enthusiastic nods to the Norse. And the very Real observance of how Love shows up and generative space . . . I only have time to hear the first half now, but will return to it!
“Game of Thrones” - Yunkaporta’s quip - know your own story! ah! Ah! Tolkien’s trilogy Lord of the Rings” rings more clearly for me. I’m 78 & read it twice many many decades ago, but just a month ago began it again so depressed by the onslaught of daily news. Ah! There too lies our northern European story. It grabbed me. The way Tolkien tells the story, many underlying threads breaking up the old now tiresome Aristotelian arc, the more-than-human participants, the rich embedding of the natural world full of agency. The way he tells the story breaks up ones normative mechanical consciousness, opens one up to mysterious energies floating around & through events & I begin to notice the daily news in different terms now. Fantasy? Not at all! Fantastical? Certainly!
I want to make a sideways comment here, because it's a topic that has been nagging me for a while. TY is mocking us a bit here, because GOT is about States and Power and the fact that they can ONLY be maintained by violence as opposed to the intricate connectivity and LIMITS of the stateless kinship of the Aboriginal peoples. It's like that line that has plagued me for a decade and that DH has cited before, "it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." But that goes double for the idea of the State and goes back to DH's questions, what do we mourn? what do we keep? what can we release?
Well said, Jack.
Someone told me years ago, whenever you read a story and you feel there's something lacking in the picture of what the world is like that the storyteller is offering, you can use that as a tool to see that "something" more clearly in the world beyond that story. Seems like that's what you/me/Tyson are doing with GoT.
Coming back to that set of questions, in this context, maybe we could add: where do we start? And which parts of what we're looking for are here already, just misnamed or overlooked or undervalued or not taken seriously?
I listened to this last week and when they were discussing the connectivity of kinship and Tyson barked "And limits!" I could hear the ping go off in Dougald's head, ever attentive to the missing piece of the puzzle. And Dougald admits to an idea that I feel like he has been circling but I haven't yet heard him voice aloud about a "network of villages." I'd like to dig deeper into that idea...
New essay on limits coming up, partly catalysed by yarning with Tyson, so I won't try to say more here, except yes.
About the "network of villages", one thing to add, prompted by a mail from Nick Stewart – this isn't about a bucolic picture of everyone living in something that looks like what a "village" conjures up in the English imagination, it's village-mindedness in the sense that Adam talks about it, which I guess owes a good deal to his teacher, Stephen Jenkinson:
https://peasantryschool.substack.com/p/village-mindedness
Gustavo Esteva once told me about a process they went through in Mexico City, trying to work out how you make good decisions in a city of twenty million people, and where they ended up was that in some sense the city itself doesn't exist, it's an abstraction, and the actual life of it was at the scale of the barrios, where the possibility of people's direct involvement in decision-making was real enough. So I guess that's part of what I think of, when I think of a world of villages, that some of them might be packed and woven close together into things that look like cities. Though the trajectory of rapid, extreme urbanisation of the recent past seems like it will go into reverse in any plausible non-dystopian future.
It’s amusing to hear about your experience at Ängsbacka, Dougald, and lovely to hear that, although frustrating, it was part of you getting together with Anna. And wonderful to hear you and Tyson sharing yarns. I will do my best to give you a smoother landing at the GEN gathering 😅 Tack så mycket ♥️
Delightful! I love “Sand Talk” so much. Happy to learn he’s got a new one. In the beginning there was the yarn, indeed. It’s fun how relational all the versions are: conversation, story, yarn. So much better than the authoritarian-tinged “Word.” Looking forward to listening!
If you loved Sand Talk, then you will love his new book, Right Story, Wrong Story
Seconded! I read it over the weekend and it's full of the right kind of trouble, unwilling to let any of us off the hook, a journey through the underworld that won't be packaged into a neat Joseph Campbell/Star Wars heroic arc.
Ahhhhhhh! ANOTHER book I must read. Adding it to the pile I keep sorting! I loved Sand Talk, and enjoyed listening into the yarning conversation between the two of you, Dougald, with generous child noise and enthusiastic nods to the Norse. And the very Real observance of how Love shows up and generative space . . . I only have time to hear the first half now, but will return to it!