I wrote about how I feel about the crisis in my podcast yesterday. But I do have a small narrative to offer, in addition to other narratives trying to make sense of the situation.

It’s been remarkable to see how quickly the ‘worst people’ have pivoted from 2 years of feeding the machine as dress-up epidemiologists to experts in Eastern European international relations and/or War Correspondents. The transparent switch and grift *should* be enough to choke on and cause scales to fall from eyes. But brainworms find their home between credulous ears.

It’s also bonkers the way people speak so confidently about the situation. How they project their own area of interest/side of whatever culture war they are engaged in on to the situation. One such egregious example has been covered at length by Huw Lemmey in his newsletter this week.

I really recommend you check it out. Huw writes “We all have our lenses through which we read the world, and it’s natural that when something new occurs that sits outside our frames of reference, we try to apply our ideological frames to understand it – usually unsuccessfully.”

Now, I have absolutely no fucking idea whats going on.

The situation is hugely complex and cannot be reduced down to one simple narrative or cause. Nato, Putin is hitler, blah, blah, blrainworms. Instead we have to try and complexify outwards. Understand the world in all its myriad contexts and relations (via ‘all the lenses’) to one another. ‘All the things’, the events ‘contain’.

One of the lenses that ‘the worst people’ look out upon the world though is via a European/liberal secular lens. Which means they restrict their view of multi-faceted events down to one myopic viewing angle. (see Huw’s newsletter again). They also seem to think tweeting about shit will stop an invasion or something, perhaps magical thinking does exist somewhere in their universe… anyways.

I’d like to briefly look though another lens. One that I have been seeing the invasion though but haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. else. I checked in with a friend in War Studies yesterday and they sent me this link as the only other example they had seen.

Narrative Hearts

This tweet from US Embassy Kyiv – Posted 22nd of Feb provides the window though which we can see another layer of complexity.

This tweet isn’t just ‘a troll’ as most of the English speaking press reported it. It references an ongoing and very real crisis – see below.

Reconstitution

A 2018 survey found that 71.7% of Ukrainians declared themselves believers. About 67.3% of the population declared adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity. In Russia 66% are believers. With 41.1% indicating adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity.

Since 1991 a great deal of the emergent post-Soviet Russian national identity has been reconstituted around an embrace and return to Russian Orthodoxy. In many respects Russia is one of the first ‘post secular states’ dealing with 100 years of spiritual whiplash. (Think about what it must have been like living though England during Edward VI/Jane/Mary/Elisabeth 1 or something). I also think the post secular state is coming for the rest of Europe this century too. So hold on to your hats.

It’s hard to describe to a secular person – in a Catholic rooted/post-reformation Protestant society – what it means to experience the world as an Orthodox Christian. A return to Orthodoxy means the return of the literal reality of symbols and signs. I don’t use the word Belive here, I purposely use Experience.

As the tweet from the US Embassy indicates: The narrative heart of Russia, ‘Mother Russia’ as a story has her roots in Kyiv and the history of the Kievan Rus’. The ‘Historical Russia and the mistakes of Lenin’ that Putin was rambling on about earlier this week is connected to this longer 1000 year religious and spiritual history.

Before we can go any further we must pivot to talk about ongoing events that I am pretty sure not a single one of ‘the worst people’ knows anything about at all….

UKRAINIAN CHURCH CRISIS

Since 2018 there has been an ongoing schism in the Orthodox Church. I’ve been following it all ambiently via orthochristian.com in my RSS reader for years.

On September 7, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople sent two exarchs, one from the U.S. and another from Canada, to Kiev in order to initiate the process of “legitimatizing” a schismatic “autocephalous” church in the Ukraine, breaking its former promises not to do any such thing, and without any consultation with the existing canonical Church, which constitutes the vast majority of practicing Orthodox Christians in Ukraine.

It really is a crisis. The TLDR is nationalist sentiments in Ukraine are urging the appointment and creation of a ‘Ukrainian Church’. This schismatic unfolding also concerns the Greek Church equally.

A Ukrainian Church would cut the Russian Church adrift from its 1000 years of history and living narrative back to Kiev and its birthplace. Again it’s important to remember that Orthodoxy situates people in a living universe – the literal reality of symbols and signs.

To cut the Russian Church adrift ‘symbolically’ by the creation of a Ukrainian Church is also to do so ‘literally’. Resulting in an unmooring of the national story, a broken heart.

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Russia’s Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was consecrated in May 2020. Delayed due to the pandemic. The 3rd largest cathedral in the orthodox world.

Watch the speech given by the patriarch during the blessing:

It’s also worth noting that Euro News was incorrect, mosaics of Putin and Stalin were installed in the cathedral. Despite the public outcry.

I’m not going to go into the reality of image in Orthodoxy, but it gesturing toward.

So: we have the gathering together of a new and living national story post 1991, the threat of religious schism at its foundations, the consecration of a huge temple to the armed forces, and a war…. A war unfolding at the location of the beginning of the story.

Given the schismatic nature of the Russian/Ukrainian church and its consequences for the literal experience of reality for the people involved. It is worth considering the European wars of religion as a historical current for the ongoings in the world. (History of the European wars of religion of course acknowledge that is more complicated than the easy narrative of reformation for their cause)

Anyways. This is just a snippet of the ongoing present that complicates what’s happening. This lens extends the context of these events backward 1000 years. To what extent Putin himself feels like he is inside this current, given his formative years were spent rooting out the religious folks in the country he controls – we’ll probably never know – and I don’t really care. Regardless, his face is upon the temple wall. And this is a symbolic universe.

I really don’t know what the fuck is going on, nor am I pretending to know. The completeness of crisis is too big to understand. Too awful to try and comprehend. Nevertheless it’s important that we acknowledge that it’s way more complicated than any of the explanations the worst people are offering.

In a narrative war, a cultural war, one has to call out uncomplicated stories wherever we encounter them.

To be quite honest, the sensible thing to do is log off.

Photo 365

One of the things about taking a photo everyday, is that its made me realise *just* how much time I spend around/by the Old Man. “He never seems to worry Doesn’t care for fortune’s fame He never seems to hurry But he gets there just the same”

Say.Act.Feel

A recognition that not one of us knows what the fuck is going on. The past 2 years should have made this abundantly clear.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Been working on my Strelka talk every day – cancelled now obviously
• Working on an application for a thing with Andrew Dana Hudson
• Looking long and hard at a *very* nearly finished piece of creative work
• Learning more about Unity shaders
• Interviewed by Timo Peach on Unseethefuturepod
• Spreadsheeting

Dipping the Stacks

Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson’s Friendship of Happenstance | Fords Theatre

Anderson and Einstein met backstage after the concert and Einstein offered to escort Anderson to the Nassau Inn where she had a reservation. When she arrived with Einstein, the hotel manager denied her accommodations because of the inn’s stated “whites only” policy. Einstein invited Anderson to stay at his nearby home with his daughter for the night.

Chinese Scientists Discover How to Grow ‘Seawater’ Rice – Bloomberg

Chinese scientists have developed salt-tolerant strains of rice in a bid to ensure food security as sea levels rise from climate change.

Spotify playlists are being taken over by bot accounts

Multiple users have complained that their public, collaborative playlists — designed to allow Spotify users and their friends to curate songs in real time together — have been commandeered by bots masquerading as normal users, primarily one account simply named “Ashley.”

Headbangers’ Bangladesh: discussing the state of play with Dhaka’s hard rockers, Crunch

I first met Shahed in the trenches of retail, selling and shifting furniture for the well-healed and oft ill-mannered denizens of the King’s Road area of London while he was studying for an MBA. I knew he was a metalhead right away, with a serious fondness for the classics. 

What’s Their Game? – Outland

The NFT market has spawned a new cultural form that has elements of games but not their rules. Blitmap and Forgotten Runes are two examples.

Reading

I’ve been reading Gordon White’s Ani.Mysitc all week. Nothing else.

Taking it slow to absorb it. Gonna sling the ebook my on kindle and re-read over the next few months and take copious notes.

Music

zexulo.xyz Spotify Playlist

Wovenhand – Silver Sash

Silver Sash is Wovenhand’s first new album since 2016’s Star Treatment. An album I played to death. Wovenhand is of course, the long time musical project of American poet and songwriter David Eugene Edwards – the driving force behind hugely influential band 16 horsepower.

Silver Sash isn’t quite Edwards first material in years since Star treatment however. There’s been the 2018 collab album with Alexandrer Hacke Risha, and his surprise 2020 collaboration with one of my favourite synth wave artist’s Carpenter Brut – Which is brain melting good (See below)

Silver Sash is also a collaboration of sorts. Chuck French – guitarist of the now disbanded (sadly) aggressive Emocore band Plans Mistaken For Stars appears as co-writer. I wrote about the death of Gared O’Donnell, and the influence PMFS had on my life last year.

Silver Sash is a fucking fantastic album. Firmly rooted in Edwards religious gothic country, but Silver Sash takes on a more psych rock feel in 2022, with synths and lots of electronics. I wonder if the Brut collaboration moved the dial more in this direction? Then again I also think this may also be the influence of French too.

The albums 3rd track Duat Hawk has desert western vibes,

and contrasts nicely with the noisy (almost) industrial country song ‘The Lash’ which appears late on the LP

This album is so good, pretty much everything you might want from a gothic country band. The albums liner notes say that it was recored and mixed across the groups homes during the pandemic, I wonder if this also contributes towards its psych feel?

Two artists from two of my favourite bands have made an album together. What’s not to love?

By the way. If you have made it this far and NO IDEA who David Eugene Edwards is, I highly recommend The Preacher a documentary about him from the year 2000.

I also urge you all to watch Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (trailer below) a road trip documentary about musicians in the white American south. Its one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

yeule – Glitch Princess

I wrote last Jan that I was “looking forward to this release and hearing more ” after blogging about the opening track My Name is Nat Ćmiel.

The album doesn’t disappoint. Glitch Princess is an album of glitchy ambient pop, hazel vocals and bold imagery float over synths and pulses. Only for the lyrical content to explode into distorted screams.

The subject matter addressed on this album is at times quite difficult, anxieties, relationships, morbid imagery, depression, hyperbole. It is a in many ways a complete psychological character study of ‘yeule’. The album ends with a 4 hour 44 minute long ambient drone track (which I listened to whilst organising my bookshelf last Sunday) – 444 is also of course an angel number. I wondered if this album is an exercise in world building for the ‘character’ of album to live inside. The presence of Danny from PC music as producer and co-writer on some tracks seems to suggest this might be the case.

Friendly Machine is (I think) my favourite track:

Remember Kids:

The post Reconstitution appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

November 20, 2021

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S04E44

In preparation for the rootlessness of England post Union. St Edmund is an important figure who should be retrieved from deep cultural memory.

Full Show Notes: https://zexulo.xyz/2021/11/19/301-2144-st-edmund-the-martyr/

Watch 301 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/jayspringett

Support the Show!: https://zexulo.xyz/support/
Website: https://zexulo.xyz/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

St Edmund the Martyr

I’ve been thinking about landscape, hyper thickness, landship, and history this week. They’re topics that seem to be popping up in my diary a lot, which means there’s a thread to pull. 

A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how successive governments have tried (and failed) to constitute a British identity as a cultural project. Just as the media confuse London for Westminster. So to do people who live in England confuse it for Britain. It was this confused English idea of Britain that fuelled the idea of Brexit for example.

Given that the fractures in the bedrock of the British state are continuing to widen. The breakup and collapse of the union is now inevitable. With this as a position in mind, I’ve been thinking about English identity, specifically ~white~ identity. What (if any) sort of cultural project could be attempted to constitute a new English identity beyond racists online and the population draping themselves in St Georges flags once every 4 years?.

Today is November the 20th. The Feast day of St. Edmund the Martyr. The first and then later co-patron saint of England alongside Edward the Confessor.

St Edmund, Patron saint of torture victims, wolves and funnily enough, pandemics. 

You never hear much about old Edmund these days do you? 

It’s all about OG Roman St George the chad dragon slayer. A saint who grew in the cultural imagination with members of the Order of the Garter and fanatical English peasantry during the crusades. He was finally adopted by the English nobility as their patron in the early 15th Century during the Last War of Independence with Wales. Adopted to help fight the revolt that mustered under the flag of a dragon.

St George the slayer of dragons: patron saint of soldiers; archers; and armourers cuts a romantic figure in the imagination. A patron Saint that helped shape the idea of Britain and its empire from english minds.

But what about the figure of the English king? One who was captured, tortured and tied to an oak tree. Shot with arrows and speared with javelins until he was (to paraphrase the old English) covered with missiles ‘like the bristles of a hedgehog.’ 

St Edmund was elected King in 855 at the age of fourteen to rule Suffolk. Nothing else beyond those details are known. Either of his life or his reign. We don’t even know what year he was killed, but it’s thought to be 869.

What textual evidence we do have is from the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle‘ written the following year – 870.

“Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia, and took winter-quarters at Thetford; and that winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danish took the victory, and killed the king and conquered all that land’’

According to legend, after being killed on the tree, he was beheaded on the orders of Ivar the Boneless and his brother Ubba. His dismembered was head thrown into the forest, but found by searchers following the cries of an ethereal wolf calling out in Latin, “Hic, Hic, Hic” or “Here, Here, Here”.

Edmund’s body was originally buried in a small wooden chapel near to the site of his killing. Thirty years the Vikings of East Anglia began to venerate him. Produced coinage to commemorate his martyrdom. O St Edmund the king! read the coins inscription. In 925 his body was transferred to what is now Bury St Edmunds (funnily enough) and from then on his cult began to flourish and grow.

For centuries the shrine was visited by the various kings of England. The most famous being King Canute. Who after converting to Christianity rebuilt the abbey. In 1020, he made a pilgrimage and offered his own crown upon the shrine as atonement for the sins of his forefathers.

The modern Orthodox Cansted to St Edmund has the lines:

‘Not yielding to sharp and grievous tortures, thou hast gone to them as if they were pleasures, abiding with the Lord and singing, O glorious Edmund. Whilst fixed to the trees with arrows the sound of thy prayers to the King of heaven and earth resounded like thunder.’

Edmunds death of course has echoes of St Sebastian’s martyrdom. The early christian saint who too was tied to a tree and shot through with arrows. Though unlike our English king, survived. Sebastian was also prayed to in defence against plague. There is also the interesting symbolism of Edmund’s headlessness. Which I don’t have time to go into right now. 

Edmunds shrine was destroyed during the English Reformation. Silver and gold to the value of over 5000 marks were taken from the building. Given that a mark is about 200g of silver, 200*5000 is 1000 metric tons of precious metal. Can you imagine? On the 4 November 1539 the abbot and his monks were expelled from the abbey and it was dissolved.

There are already currents in flow to revive St Edmund. In 2006, a group that included BBC Radio Suffolk and the East Anglian Daily Times ran a campaign to reinstate Edmund as patron saint of England. In 2013 another campaign began with the backing of representatives from businesses, churches, radio and local politicians.

St Edmund is an important figure who should be retrieved from deep cultural memory. In preparation for the rootlessness of England post Union. 

We currently have the toxic masculinity of the chad dragon slayer, but maybe we need a literal virgin king martyred against a mighty oak.

Watch

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post St Edmund the Martyr | 2144 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

September 25, 2020

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S03E38

The life of St Thérèse of Lisieux, her parents, sisters and family. The Kaleidoscope clarifies the holy trinity, the ‘Act of Oblation’ working, poetry, and death.

My new youtube show! http://comeinternetwith.me/

Links:

Website: https://zexulo.xyz/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Webshow: http://comeinternetwith.me/
Support: https://zexulo.xyz/support/

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

St Thérèse of Lisieux

It will be October next time we speak and St Therese of Lisieux’s feast day will have passed. In recognition of ancestors: I’ll begin with her parents. Saints Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin. Who’s saints day happens to be today.

Louis Martin was a watchmaker and his wife Zelle a lacemaker. Together they are the first (and to date only) married couple to be Canonized in the Catholic tradition. Married in 1858, they intended to live a life of celibately. However, they consummated their marriage ten months later after encouragement from their spiritual director.

They went on to have 9 children 4 of whom died in infancy. The remaining 5, all girls became nuns. The youngest was Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Born 2 January 1873. Died 30th September 1897 at the age of 24. Her Saints day is October 1. 

As you can imagine, she was raised in a very Catholic environment. Her family attended mass at 5.30am daily, and observed the rhythm of the liturgical year with its fasts and prayers. In 1877, at four and a half her mother died of breast cancer. She would later write “Every detail of my mother’s illness is still with me, especially her last weeks on earth”. “The first part of my life stopped that day“. Her father moved the family to Lisieux months later.

At the age of 9, her sister Marie Pauline entered the monastery at Lisieux and she was – devastated.  15 years her senior her sister had become a second mother to her. The shock of this departure reawakened the trauma of her mother’s death and she began suffering tremors and neurotic attacks. Cured after she had turned to gaze at the statue of the Virgin Mary in her bedroom, who had smiled back at her. She wrote in a letter aged 10 about the experience: “Our Blessed Lady has come to me, she has smiled upon me. How happy I am.”

On Christmas Eve of that year she then experienced what she called a ‘complete conversion’. After 9 years of sorrow at the death of her mother she wrote that “Jesus accomplished the work I had not been able to do”. The following spring her father suffered a catastrophic stroke. During his recovery Thérèse announced her intention to take up the habit and join the monastery. 

It would take another two years of fervent prayer and an audience with the then pope before being admitted to the Carmelite order in 1888. At the age of 15. An order reformed in the sixteenth century by Teresa of Ávila. Her days from then on devoted to silent labour and personal and collective prayer.  

Her time as a postulant taught her that in religious life no sacrifice astonished her. She learnt that to deviate from routine resulted in “the mind wandering in arid lands where the water of grace is soon lacking”.

Once year later she took the habit and given the epithet ‘of the Child Jesus’. She fell into a life of retreat and subtraction. In her work she returns repeatedly to the theme of littleness and simplicity. Referring to herself as a grain of sand.

Her early twenties were influenced heavily by writings of the mystic St John of the Cross. She wrote she had “no other spiritual nourishment.” It was during this time she began contemplating depictions of the disfigured face of Jesus during His Passion. and gained her second name ‘of the Holy Face’

After 5 years of spiritual work she appointed Prioress Novice Mistress by her sister who was by this time Mother of the Convent.

She excelled at explaining spiritual doctrine to younger novitiates using the new technology of the time. The three mirrors of a Kaleidoscope clarified the holy trinity. The elevator, describes God’s grace, and the Steam train illustrates Christ as Logos. 

It was though teaching these concepts she saw the limitations of her efforts. So she began adding the words, “very little,” (toute petite) in front of her name.

On June 9, 1895 at the age of 22 during Mass, Thérèse was stuck with inspiration that she should offer herself as a sacrificial victim to Gods merciful love. After the service she wrote the “Act of Oblation to Merciful Love” and performed the ritual in her cell with her Sister. It is one hell of a document, though I personally wouldn’t perform it. “In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands. Lord, I do not ask you to count my works.”

Two years later she was dead from tuberculosis. 
She was 24.

In her final years she wrote ‘Story of a Soul‘ from her sick bed at the behest of those in the convent. An autobiography containing diary entries, spiritual commentary, prayers and poetry.

I read it earlier this year during the beginning of the UK lockdown. I emerged from both the book and my years-long depression at the same time. The ‘Prayer to Obtain Humility’ stuck me like a lightning rod. “Each morning I resolve to be humble, and in the evening I recognise that I have often been guilty of pride.” asking to “send humiliation whenever I try to set myself above others”. Other poems like ‘To Scatter Flowers‘ or ‘I Thirst For Love‘ are alive and electric in their performance.

If you feel like a bottle tossed about by a raging sea right now – it may be a book for you too.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post St Thérèse of Lisieux | 2038 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

August 14, 2020

|

Christianity ✝️ | Meditation 🌀 | Permanently Moved 🔊

S03E32

I’ve been reading a bunch of books that relate to several topics of interest recently.

You can now support the show at https://zexulo.xyz/support/

Links:
Wounded By Love: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1532408.Wounded_by_Love
Move Without Pain:https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12786548-move-without-pain
An Actor Prepares: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18856935-an-actor-prepares

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://zexulo.xyz/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com
Support: https://zexulo.xyz/support/

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

The Body Not The Brain

I’ve been reading a bunch of books that relate to several topics of interest recently. These include: A book about prayer in the Orthodox Tradition, several books about Somatic Movement Therapy, mainly concerned with the techniques of Feldenkrais and, An Actor Prepares by Stanislavski. 

It’s funny how one’s seemingly separate interests converge and are actually just all one thing and that realisation at this moment in time, is exciting. However, in the context of everything that is going on in the wider world, I have a certain mix of emotions and feelings about it all. 

Let’s take a quick tour and you can pick at the orthogonal flows between them.

First, Prayer.

I am, at this stage in my life, as interested in prayer as I am in meditation. 

I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t really see much of a distinction between the two.One leaves a window open for metaphysics to flow in and the other doesn’t. I am of course talking about Meditation as we understand it in the west and its the same as the same practices embedded in their local context elsewhere in the world. I would also point you towards McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality by R Purser, a book I also read this year. It’s really good. Anyway.

In the 1930’s a young Saint Porphyrios author of Wounded By Love once asked a local bishop about Prayer. 

Buddests talk about Self-Emptying during meditation. But as far as i can tell in the living orthodox tradition they would say that Self-emptying is an act of love. And because God is love one is not seeking the loss of self but the gaining of a true self instead. You empty yourself with prayer until there’s nothing left but the divine. We are all made in God’s image. 

So then, Prayer is something that is experienced, not practiced.

Somatic Movement Techniques. It seems to me, are all about reconnecting or re-familiarising oneself with one’s own body in a way that impacts chronic issues like pain. What it isn’t is stretching. It’s more like Yoga in its truest sense. Union. To be conscious of the self inside one’s own body. Somatic movement techniques are simple movements that allow the body to recognise muscles that are suffering Involuntary muscular contraction. By moving and relaxing them consciously, with full attention. It allows them to relax past the usual baseline level of extension so that a muscle learns the new level relaxed extension. Again this something that has to be experienced, not practiced.

Now An Actor Prepares. I picked it up off a bookshelf in my old room when I was back on the chalk the other week. It’s not mine so it must be my Brothers. But seeing that he now lives 10,000 kilometers away, plus the fact anyone with siblings knows that possession is 100% of the law – it’s now mine.

Anyone who has studied drama will have read the book, so I’ll presume that a few of you are familiar with it. It is about the inward preparation an actor must undergo in order to ‘act’ in the world of the stage. I’m only 50 pages in so far but with each turn of the page,with the context of my other current reading I recognise a deep sense of spiritual embodiment within the book and the lessons it imparts. Flicking through the book it seems the word soul isn’t used. At least in my Translation anyway. I presume it’s because the actors of 19c Russia were born and raised in the Orthodox Faith and its principles were common knowledge with no explanation needed.

As such I’d like to point you towards the essay ‘The influence of Christian Orthodox thought on Stanislavski’s theatrical legacy‘ By Gabriela Curpan from 2019 which seeks to plug the book and Stanislavski’s work back into the Orthadox socket. As an aside i can’t imagine any GCSE or A level Drama Teacher having the time to put this book in context in today’s teaching environment.

Finally, a few weeks ago I finished Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by James Nestor. It is one of the best books I’ve read in ages. Everyone listening should go buy it immediately.

So to close out this one hundred and first episode of 301 let’s return to what I said about the mix of emotions and feelings I’m experiencing. The subjects I’ve just skimmed I think you can tell, both excite and interest me deeply. The confluence of all these threads are a heady brew. Next, I think like to read a book by a dancer (recommendations welcome!). However there is still some small part of me that thinks my interest and practice of all this is somehow self indulgent. Is it some deep CofE protestantism that makes me second guess the importance of connecting soul to the body? Everything is terrible and I’m sitting at home breathing through my nose and concentrating very hard on the pain in my wrist and forearm. Is that self indulgent? Maybe for some. Certainly less so than sitting at home tweeting angrily about something into the void I reckon. Anyway. 

The one thing I can say for certain tho is that doing puts knowledge in your body and not your brain. 

Hagía Sophía

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post The Body Not The Brain | 2032 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

May 22, 2020

|

Christianity ✝️ | Family 👪 | Permanently Moved 🔊 | The Chalk ♘

S03E20

A simple ceremony at the top of my Grandad’s world in 1932

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://zexulo.xyz/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Ascension Day 1932

I grew up in St Peter’s in Thanet, a place that whenever I include it on an address it feels like an assertion that it is a village with its own identity and history. Not just a conurbation of Broadstairs as it is today. Quite rightly too. 

The village of course is named after its church. A daughter church of Minster Abbey established in 1070. The building has a late Norman nave and an Early English Chancel. Its exterior as with many local buildings is flint and shines like polished black glass on a wet day when the sun is low in the sky in winter.

The church’s tower is 81ft, has battlements and contains a ring of 7 bells. It is tall enough to be seen from the sea and was used as a Naval signalling station in Napoleonic times. It still claims the right to fly the White Ensign to this day. The tower also has a large crack on its west side that is reputed to have been caused by the Dover Straits earthquake in 1580. For those of you who know your Dee, you’ll understand the signs and portents.

Over 500 years later in 1989 I was 4 and my brother wasn’t even born. The parish St Peter In Thanet released a book: Peeps into the past, memories of the village. It contains recollections from local residents from the village and their youth. It includes a piece from former prime minister Ted Heath, but more importantly (to me) there is a piece from my Grandad. About Ascension day 1932. 

I’m going to read it for you now. 

Ascension Day 1932 – By Laurie Springett

May, 1932, stands out in my memory when, as a lad, I was a member of the Y.P.F (Young Peoples’ Fellowship). During the course of one of our meetings that month the curate, the Reverend N. Hodgson, asked us a question which caused quite a stir. He enquired whether anyone would be willing to have prayers and a short service at the top of the Church tower on ascension Day. 

At first we were speechless and just looked at him as this was something quite new. We wondered what our parents and friends would say but the idea seemed to have certain logic and the thought of climbing up the tower staircase appealed to us.

On the following Thursday morning at about 6.45 a.m. a dozen of us turned up, having risen early, and made our way to Church. As I walked along I wondered whether anyone else would be there and I was accordingly glad to see my friends already waiting.

We climbed the tower at a fair pace eager to reach the top. On up past the bells and at last were there. What a view! The air was fresh after the exertion and we stood as a group while the service of prayers and the Ascension Day Collect was said. Way above the world the words seemed to take on real meaning. It was a unique experience, exclusive to us; a moment I have never forgotten.

When the short service ended, conversation commenced. We went to the edge, some gingerly, to look over the top. It seemed we could see for miles. In the distance was the sea but the landscape was mainly flat fields made interesting by the occasional clump of trees. We looked down on the adjacent farmyard and saw the vast barn roof from a different angle. On the other side was Dane Court, almost hidden from view amongst the trees. 

Beneath Us few people were about and those who were resembled tiny model figures. Mr. Hodgson asked if we could name anyone we saw but there was no one I knew. We hurried back down the steps eager to go home and recount our story.

I remember that the Ascension Day weather always seemed bright and sunny, except for 1934, when poured with rain. That year the service was held in the bellringers’ corner.

Eventually the custom ceased so I count myself fortunate to be one of the very few people, probably in England, to have experienced this simple ceremony.

Ascension Day has never attained the same status as other major feast days but Mr. Hodgson’s idea made it special for us. As soon as Easter was over we counted the days till Ascension Day arrived.

Perhaps in 1989, when the tower is restored, one of our curates will reintroduce the custom. If so i shall be there; but this time as one of the model figures on the ground! However, I shall be looking up at the youthful Quest members gazing down on me, remembering how I stood on top of the world sixty years ago.

I read that for the first time at home over Christmas with my family and I wonder: Of all the things he could have written about, the treasure trove of stories and information about the village that he was, why choose this recollection. He would have been about 13 or 14 at the time of its events. Perhaps there is something about climbing a blasted tower that touches everyone, especially if done on ascension day – a potent mix. 

I’ve only ever been up the tower once in the early 90’s. I too remember similar feelings to my Grandad. That new view of a familiar landscape  augmented by height. I am extremely grateful that this was the story he chose to tell and leave behind,

I am lucky to know in such detail what my Grandad was seeing, feeling and participating in in 1932 and will do for the rest of my life. I am reminded (to paraphrase the methodist book of prayer) that he once dwelt on earth, confined by time and space. And had faith in every time and place. And as a child, grandad worshiped at the top of a tower of a blasted tower on Ascension Day in 1932.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Ascension Day 1932 | 2020 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

April 10, 2020

|

Christianity ✝️ | Narratives 📖 | Permanently Moved 🔊

S03E14

A whole lot going on in this episode! Further explorations on ‘canon’. Protestantism, Atheist Boomers, Aliens 3, Frozen, Jesus Fan Fiction and the great 1054 Rage Quit.

Links:

Craving Canon: https://zexulo.xyz/2020/04/10/136-craving-canon/
1926 – On Ritual and Storytelling: http://permanentlymoved.libsyn.com/301-1926-ritual-and-storytelling
2006 – Clock Time vs Plot Time: http://permanentlymoved.libsyn.com/301-2006-clock-time-vs-plot-time

—
Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://zexulo.xyz/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Craving Canon (Redux)

So earlier today I posted a 5000 word post on my blog titled Craving Canon. I explore canon, toxic fandom, solarpunk, narrative, cultural fracking and other problems I perceive with story worlds in 2020. Do check it out.
I spent most of the week writing it. I think it’s an interesting discussion and would like to hear other people’s thoughts. But only via a non social medium please. Ain’t nobody got time for a hell thread on twitter.

One of the things I explored and alluded to in the piece was that people craving canon in stories and appealing to higher authority (the franchise owner) has deep roots in our culture. Specifically in my mind protestantism. However secular it may think itself western society is deeply influenced by its nearly two millennia of Christianity.

Many years ago I used to work with an Atheist boomer who was the sort of insufferable fellow who’d get upset if someone said ‘Bless you’ after he sneezed.

One day he said something about ‘The blind leading the blind’ and I replied. “You know that’s from the gospel of Mathew right?”. He went ballistic. Either I’d caught him at his own stupid game or I’d made him feel like a hypocrite. Either way it’s illustrative.

After the stars (see episode 1926 – on Ritual and Storytelling), Christianity is the other dominant story form we have in the west. And like the stars one we all participate in. Some parts of the Christian story like blind leading the blind are so ingrained in our culture unless you know, you have no idea. Now this is also a fairly recent phenomena even 50 years ago I suspect almost everyone would have known that a “Wolf in sheep’s clothing” is also from Matthew, or “Rise and shine” is Isaiah, or that “The powers that be” comes from Romans 13. 

But friends who didn’t grow up religious certainly don’t. All the useful parables, moral and emotional that the biblical stories contain are unknown to them. So when these same themes show up in movies they miss them.

I mean there’s nothing subtle about Ripley’s Christ-like attributes in Aliens 3.
She falls from “the heavens” to help the prisoners; they deny her role as their saviour; then she sacrifices her life to save theirs. She even does it with her arms out for goodness sake.

I finally watched Frozen last year and it’s one of the most Christian movies I’ve ever seen. Like Satan, Elsa craves freedom, is cast out and creates a frozen Hellscape. And her little sister is a Christ-like redeemer who is wounded for Elsa’s sins, then freezes to death to save her sister and then gets resurrected. Nothing subtle about that either.

The thing that really interests me about Christianity and our culture is just how late the quote unquote canon comes into existence. Early Christianity is my favourite. Books are the hot technology. 

The cool thing about early Christianty is that church wasn’t so much unified as a collection of communities all over the roman empire. All working from their own set of books. Which of course means the first quarrels about doctrinal unity or rather canon became intense around the 3rd century. 

Because Christiany has an eschatology see episode 2006 on Clock Time vs Plot Time. It emerges with a sense of history, and as a formalised religion it relies on the books that record that history. The stories of Jesus and his disciples are central to the project.

The heritage of Judaism was also vital to early Christianity but it was very much an open question which elements should be integrated into the new doctrine and what should be left behind. See Paul’s letters on circumcision and seating arrangements during shared meals for example. 

Gordon White is fond of calling the materials in the dead sea scrolls Jesus fan fiction. I mean in The Gospel of Mary, you have Jesus speaking to Mary in a vision explaining a spiritual path back to him. Wild stuff, and yet the process outlined is not unlike Saint T’s Interior Castle.

Two of the Gospels themselves seem to be delivered from the mysterious Q source. Probably taken from the early Church’s oral tradition. But after 300 years of fan fiction and world building however those in authority thought that something had to be done. 

If you’re a nerd like me  then you’ll know that the Nicein Creed was formalised in AD 325. Essentially excluding all the gnostic fan fiction weirdos. The first catholic canon was fixed at the Council of Rome (382) and everyone was happy. Rough consensus and running code. Things then get a little wobbly with Athanasian Creed in the 5th century ultimately resulting 500 years later with the Orthodox rage quitting having had enough of the toxic fandom.

Fictional worlds that are loved by millions, but controlled by one single authority produce the urge of craving canon. Because it reproduces the effects of the most recent change to our collective cultural story world. They skip the messy first 300 years of early Christianity, ignore the next 1000 and go straight to a protestant position that the highest authority is the Bible alone.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Craving Canon (Redux) | 2014 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

November 1, 2019

|

Christianity ✝️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

S2E31

All Saints Day and All Souls Day. 
Humanising invisible companions
Necromantic Bone Cults
Staying with the trouble
Ancestors as a complicated story


This podcast was nearly 1m 10s over length after the first edit. I cut A LOT out. Hope it still makes sense.

But Lesson learnt: 2 essays in 301 seconds is … hard.

 —

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://zexulo.xyz/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Saints & Souls

Saints

The saints emerge from a proto-christian tradition. They predate Catholicism by three centuries.

Originally being any dead Christian or Jew but very quickly evolved into what author of ‘The Cult of The Saints’ Peter Brown calls The Very Special Dead. 

The Saints have always produced a certain tension throughout the history of Christianity, many early members of the church uneasy with a faith that had incorporated a necromantic bone cult somewhere along the way. 

So much so the last pagan to rule the Roman Empire and nephew to Saint Constantine, Emperor Julian the Apostate wrote the following after he abandoned Christianity sometime after 351AD

You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres, and yet in your scriptures it is nowhere said that you must grovel among tombs

Emperor Julian the Apostate – Against the Galileans

Some kind of a balance was eventually found by St Augustine in Predestination of the Saints where from about 390AD people began praying TO the saints and FOR the dead. 

This was later solidified by complexifying the idea of worship. As pagans would point at early Christians and laugh over ‘Thou shalt not have any other gods’ and ask if he was jealous of the Saints.

As such, worship was split into two concepts:

1. Worship appropriate to human beings.
2. Worship reserved for God alone. This may sound unnecessary it’s important as it resolves a great deal of the metaphysics.

All Saints Day originally was on May the 13th. The date also chosen for the dedication of The Pantheon (the temple of All Gods) in Rome as a church. It was a movable feast that skipped around the Easter calendar. By the 9th century it was moved from May 13 to Nov 1 with ol’ Bedey telling us (previously on Episode 19-10) that Boniface IV had originally said 4 centuries before “that the memory of all the saints might in the future be honored in the place which had formerly been dedicated to the worship not of gods but of demons”.

In the Chrstian worldview both of these things exist: Demons AND Saints

Saints aren’t is the continuation of Pagan Gods (however much to atheist bros wish to claim). What they are (am) the very special dead of place and in a landscape.

It took nearly a 1000 years before the church took control over the saints lists and canonisation etc. Before then, for a long time, most saints were only venerated locally. 

The afore mentioned complexification of worship was transform the earlier pagan experience of an invisible companion, guardian, or daimon etc into a human being.

Things that people experience everyday and have always existed as part of the human experience. The cult of saints and its metaphysics provides a framework to utilise them.

Saints are things exist in our world.

Listen to Fr Seraphim of the Orthodox Monastery on the Isle of Mull talk about it:

I opened the last episode of last year on Saint Andrew’s day with the following:

He is a saint that has always been kind to me. I was Baptized in his church. … the family parish back on the chalk. And now I live on his square in south west london. We hear the bells from the bell tower. He’s just … always been around.

The saints are all around us, if you live in the ‘West’. You probably live under a saints parish, perhaps live on or near a road named after one, maybe a first or middle name and never given it much thought. But it’s All Saints day, and I think that you should.

Souls

Tomorrow is all Souls Day or ‘The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed’.

All Souls Day is about remembering our ancestors. Many of whom were kind, but others did unfathomably horrible things to people. Some were both.

It is important to remember that to commemorate is to recall and show respect rather than celebrate. 

In 2019 we face: climate change, anti-racist struggles, de-colonisation, biodiversity loss and many other challenges. These are all also intergenerational issues. Some caused by our forebears, Some caused by ourselves. All are issues that will continue to affect our descendants. 

Donna Haraway’s Staying With The Trouble is about exploring new ways of reconfiguring our relations to the earth and all its inhabitants. She posits that learning to stay.with.the.trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth that will provide the means to building more liveable futures.

Staying with the trouble of our ancestors presents a chance to bare witness to them and All Souls is as good a day as any to do this.

A deep rooted problem of modern western society is that it does not favour bearing witness to its past.

It certainly instrumentalises it, but our wider cultural stories of progress and enlightenment demand that we don’t. The UK government tried to convince us that the economy works like a household over austerity: But our history certainly is.

Our culture is like a household that has tried to brush its unsavoury elements under the rug while the cupboards are full of skeletons. 

The past was simply a horrible place, it’s only a hop skip and jump backwards that our immediate ancestors were living grim Dickensian childhoods. Cut yourself? You died, Got a fever? You died. Pretty much everything was out to kill you. People romanticise the past but I’m pretty sure it sucked more ass than primitivists and reenactment fantasists think. 

Everyone’s family no matter how far you go back will repeatedly encounter horrible people. 

People who committed all sorts of horrible acts and violations towards (and of) other people.

They helped lay the groundwork for structural oppressions though ignorance or wilful malevolence. You may even have known these people IRL, but I can assure you, there are more. This is true for everyone that has ever lived.

Ancestry isn’t a value judgement, it just is.

And that IS, is that all bodies breathing on this earth today today are a complicated story.

Complicated by those in the past that didn’t survive either by friend or foe. And that is why we must bear witness to them. Everyone that came before us did so with struggle and that is why you are alive to struggle today. A victory that is worth celebrating. But again they also did things you probably don’t agree with and you should stay with that trouble. 

All Souls Day for me is about the sometimes tragic, bloodthirsty, sad, and malevolent story. But they all also loved and laughed, danced and sang – and so do you.

That’s why we commemorate the dead.

The above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post Saints & Souls | 1931 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

June 28, 2019

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S2E13

The Reverend George Harvest – Rector of Thames Ditton

AKA

‘The most forgetful man in England’

 

 —

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

The Most Forgetful Man In England

For the next 5 minutes let me tell you about Reverend George Harvest – Rector of Thames Ditton AKA ‘The most forgetful man in england’ .

His whole life seems like a paragon of befuddled englishness. But in reality as Gems from a Fable Land makes clear: Though an acceptable preacher and a good scholar, he was offensive and sloven, and his failings made him often coarse and rude.  End quote. 

So I don’t think he was as endearing his biographers make him out to be.

Harvest Was born in to money in 1728 and went on to Graduate Oxford University. After which he prepared to take the holy orders. Already as a young man known by his “singular absent mindedness.“

After becoming a priest and with a secured yearly income of 300 pounds in 1700 monies – He was an extremely eligible bachelor. Very soon he Ingratiate himself with the daughter of his boss – the local bishop and soon they were to marry. 

With this accepted: a date was set, plans made, and the event was to be officiated by the bride’s father. 

The day arrived and amidst the frantic preparations of the bridal party, flowers arranged, and a grand spread being organised. Harvest awoke that morning and was struck by the deepest desire to catch Gudgens (a type of small fish) in the Thames. The weather being excellent, he packed his rod and lure and set off for a full days fishing.

It is not known exactly when Harvest realised his mistake, BUT when he had finally legged it to the church, he found his marriage and ANY prospect of any kind of promotion EVER in tatters. 

Soon after this farce, he found himself in thames ditton – a job (i should note that he only secured via the charity of an influential friend) he soon fell in love and set a date for his second attempt at marriage. The book A field Guide to the english clergy describe what happened next like this.. And trust me, You thought he would have learnt his lesson. 

“On the day in question when the carriage called to pick him up he was nowhere to be found. Several hours later, as harvest was midway though supper with some people he’d met on a morning stroll to Richmond he realised that he was meant to be doing something rather more important that day. He rushed back, only to find another sobbing bride and another furious father. 

Apparently informing the offended party that it had been ‘one of the pleasantest walks of my life”

As you can imagine this did nothing to engender any reconciliation and Harverst remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

Due to his chronic lateness he was also known to shave on route to engagements whilst on the back of his horse. With one memorable incident of having done his ablutions discreetly down the road, His horse startled and rand down the lane. With the hapless, soapy and topless preist coming to a stop right outside a nobel ladies house with her family also standing outside to greet him. 

He was not known as a man who carried money. Instead apparently his pockets were always full of gingerbread, angleworms, tobacco, gunpower which he would carry around until his pockets were quote so corrupt and noisome as to render his company a perfect nuisance’.

The duchess of pembrokeshire one wrote that she turned enough raw dirt out of his coat pockets to fill a dust shovel.

Harvest was also known to misplace his horse at every opportunity. Indeed it’s said that not a single person in THREE counties was prepared to lend him a horse under any circumstances. 

There are not one but several recorded incidents of him misplacing the animal he was riding and returning to stables dragging a rein and bridle along the floor and could offer no explanation as to the status or location of the misplaced horse.

Other well known stories about this useless man included. One day he spies his friend and his friend’s wife in a room together and thought it would be funny to lock them in. 

Turning the key he slipped it in his pocket, and then joke slipped his mind. The prisoners were not released until well after nightfall.

Another time on a fine walk Harvest and his acquaintance had stopped to skim pebbles along the thames. On being asked the time, his friend looked on in horror as he proceeded to skim his golden pocket watch across the surface of the water and pocket the flat stone. He apparently didn’t realise his error until late in the day.

Once, forgetting it was a Sunday (naturally), he burst in on his shocked congregation with a loaded gun thinking them squatters or thieves. 

There are so many more redonkulous stories I don;t have time to recount them here in any detail. He once urinated mistakenly in the dark on one Lady Onslows leg whilst lecturing on the wonders of celestial mechanics, once hit Onslow round the head trying to kill a fly so hard that she temporarily became ‘deranged her faculties’.

And apparently once cured a parishioners chronic quinsy by laughter at his blundering about in the dark, falling down some stairs and destroying furniture and drapery. Oh, and he also got lost in Hrance whilst accompanying the Lord of Sandwich and was returned to the Inn he was staying in by soldiers thinking him an escaped english maniac. 

I haven’t even got to some of the cruel jokes played on this dysfunctional man by his parishioners. He died in August 1789.

I have two books that include his stories but I’ve just ordered the book ‘The Absent Man’ to learn more. 

Speak to y’all next week!  

The post The Most Forgetful Man In England | 1913 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

April 5, 2019

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S02E04

The life an times of the Priest Mermaid: Robert Stephen Hawker

—

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Robert Stephen Hawker (1803–1875)

Robert Stephen Hawker was born in the Charles Church vicarage at Plymouth in 1803 Grandson to the formidable Calvinistic preacher and writer Robert Hawker. He attended several preparatory schools but disliked them, and frequently ran away. 

At nineteen Robert entered Pembroke College, Oxford to study for the Anglican priesthood where he discovered a love of poetry. 

His first term was memorable; in November 1823 he married Charlotte l’ans, a Cornish gentlewoman of forty-one, but despite their age difference the union proved happy. The couple spent their honeymoon at Tintagel – a place that kindled his lifelong fascination with Arthurian legend and later inspired him to write ‘The Quest of the Sangraal’.

Ordination followed in 1831 and he began a curacy at North Tamerton near Bude, where he discovered he had a joint calling. Not only to be a priest but also a Mermaid. 

In order to live out this life he fashioned a wig out of seaweed and naked apart from an oilskin wrapped around his legs, would row out to to the rock in the harbour where he would sit and sing brushing his seaweed hair with a comb. 

Each evening the superstitious locals would gather on the cliffs edge to watch the mermaid perform. There are two stories as to why robert  stopped his life as a mermaid. One is that the winter was coming and it became too cold, the other is that a sceptical farmer arrived one day with his gun, threatening to pepper the damsel with shot is she stayed warbling any longer. Whatever the reason, one night in late autumn to a particularly  large audience the mermaid substituted her haunting lament for a rousing rendition of ‘god save the king’ finishing with great gusto she plopped into the water and swam directly home.

Shortly after this incident Robert was appointed vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall’s most northerly parish in 1835. When he arrived at Morwenstow there had not been a vicar in residence for over a century. Smugglers and wreckers were apparently numerous in the area. A contemporary report says that the Morwenstow wreckers “allowed a fainting brother to perish in the sea … without extending a hand of safety.”

His parishioners Robert became known as Parson Hawker had strongly-built figure, with long fair locks, blue eyes and an increasingly weather-beaten face.  

Robert dressed oddly. Sober clerical garb wasn’t for him and it was said his only black clothes were his socks; he loved bright colours.  Often he wore a long purple coat or a yellow poncho he’d fashioned from a horse-blanket, and underneath a fisherman’s blue jersey.  Crimson gloves, brown or red trousers, and dark sea-boots added to his strange but cheerful appearance and he enjoyed hats, either broad-brimmed or a more flamboyant fez. 

In addition to his outlandish fashion sence Hawker was regarded as a deeply compassionate person giving Christian burials to shipwrecked seamen washed up on the shores of the parish, and was often the first to reach the cliffs when there was a shipwreck. Formerly, the bodies of shipwrecked sailors were often either buried on the beach where they were found or left in the sea. 

He built a little hut on the cliff at Morwenstow, using timbers washed up from the Caledonia and two other vessels wrecked the following year.  He’d sit out on nice days composing his poetry, and during times of storm scour the grey waters for ships in distress.  For many years he continued his gruesome duty of recovering corpses from the sea, and the harrowing task grew to weigh heavily with him; altogether, he rescued nearly fifty bodies. The driftwood hut is now the smallest property in the National Trust portfolio. 

Early in 1863 Charlotte Hawker’s health, poor for some time, worsened; Robert nursed her constantly, sitting at her bedside reading to her.  After her death in February he suffered a period of profound distress, and sought solace in poetry.  

He however remained a polish Governess a year later in December 1864 making her Pauline Hawker who bore him three children. The marriage was happy, but it could not prevent him from sinking into despair and depression. 

Robert Stephen Hawker also adored animals, and acquired several unusual pets. Robin the domesticated stag would sometimes pin vicarage callers to the ground, which perhaps stretches our view of the tameness of the deers domestication.

He talked to birds on the cliffs edge and in the church yard., always invited his nine cats to church and they followed him every sunday, eventually they made up the vast proportion of his congregation. However one day, he reacted with fury when he saw one catching a mouse and publicly excommunicated it in front of the other shocked animals for mousing on a sunday.  

He made friends with a highly intelligent pig named GYP who would roam the vicarage and alert the occupants of any visitors.

Toward the end of his life Hawker wrote increasingly of witches, the evil eye, and the Devil’s emissaries he’d begun to believe he encountered, in a blend of growing persecution mania and mysticism perhaps fuelled by his opium addiction as well as his creative nature. He died penniless in 1875

He you want to read some of the his poetry I would recommend unofficial Cornish anthem  ‘The song of the western man’

The post Robert Stephen Hawker | 1904 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

November 30, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

Episode 30 – Acts of St Andrew

 It’s St Andrews Day, So i thought maybe I could talk about him and make you listen.

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Acts of St Andrew

 It’s St Andrew’s Day.

He’s a saint that has always been kind to me.

I was baptised in his church, the family parish back on the chalk, and now I live on his square in southwest London. We hear the bells from the bell tower, and he’s just always been around. So if you don’t know his story, in addition to being the first to follow Jesus, Andrew was a demon hunter. After the ascension, the apostles dispersed to preach in various countries and towns.

It was on the road to Nicaea where one of Saint Andrew’s most famous acts took place. There were seven devils living amongst the tombs by the wayside. At noon, they would stone passers by, and they had killed many people. When Andrew arrived, the whole city came out to meet him with olive branches, crying, Our salvation is in thee, O man of God.

And when they had told him about the spirits in the tombs, Andrew said, “If you believe in Christ, you shall be freed.” They cried, “we will”, and he thanked God and commanded the demons to appear. The seven beasts came in the form of dogs, and he said to them, “These are your enemies, and if you profess your belief, I can drive them out in Jesus name.”

“We will do so, the people cried out. We believe in Jesus Christ, whom thou preachest is the Son of God. And then Andrew commanded the demons go into the dry and barren places and hurt no man till the last day.” They roared and vanished. The apostle baptized the people and made Callistus the bishop and set about extending the church.

Later, at the gate of Nicomedia, Andrew met a dead man born on a bier. Which is a kind of coffin, cart, with wheels. The man’s body was led by his older father and mother, and they said to Andrew, he was alone in his chamber, and seven dogs rushed on him, and killed him. Andrew had said, “this is an ambush of the demons that I banished from Nicaea”.

The death of this child then being his responsibility, Andrew prayed, Let the spirit of this lad return. And the faithful responded, Amen. Andrew bade the lad rise, and so he rose from the dead, and all realized great is the God of Andrew.

Demons Possessing Beautiful Women in Baths.

The Apostolic Romance, ‘The Acts of Andrew’, is a rip roaring book that has several editions.

And in the middle section, like a modern Marvel movie, there is a crossover story with Jon. That includes even more resurrections by Andrew. And as we slide into an alternate take view on the acts of Jon, they team up together. And Jon gives a long speech and afterwards heals many women in the city.

John gives some more long speeches that are quite moralistic, and their content is somewhat removed from the message of the New Testament. But John also raises more people from the dead, but also wags his finger at Andrew, and stresses on the fact that spiritual resurrection is more important than the revival of the body.

There’s more wild stories of healing the blind and the sick, and the goddess Diana appears to a pregnant woman who is married to a murderer, and says to her that she doesn’t deal with trivial prayers, and that she should go to Andrew. Andrew apparently says the child will be born dead.

In the Gnostic Manichaean version of the Acts of St Andrew, of which there are only fragments, mainly surviving from detractors that considered it a heresy, But there is the general gist that visible things do not proceed from their own nature, but from that man who of his own will has become worse through seduction.

Whilst obscure is definitely the kind of thing that would appeal to those who thought of material things and phenomena as evil. His martyrdom is pieced together from several fragments and differing texts. But he is said to have been martyred by crucifixion at the city of Petraeus. Early texts describe Andrew as being bound, not nailed, to a Latin cross, the kind that Jesus would have been crucified on.

Yet tradition has developed that Andrew has been crucified on a cross of the form of the Crus de Custa. Or, X shaped cross, now commonly known as the St Andrew’s cross. Supposedly, at his own request, as he deemed himself unworthy to be crucified on the same type of cross that Jesus had been. The iconography of the martyrdom of Andrew, on the X shaped cross, does not appear to have been standardized until the later Middle Ages.

His prayer chaplet has 15 beads, and today is the day that you can begin Advent with his Christmas novena.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Acts of St Andrew | 1830 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

November 9, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Politics ⚖️

Episode 29 – Remove excess salt

It’s just an angry rant about having an opinion on gammons. You don’t have to bother listening to this episode – I’m not pleased with it.

301 – 1809 – Remembrance 

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Remove Excess Salt

I didn’t know what to talk about this week, but time is getting on in the day and as this whole thing is meant to be written and recorded in one hour, i’ve decided to hit record and let words spill out of me, where the next few minutes goes is going to be a much a mystery to me as it is to you.

Here’s the thing. I’ve already done an episode on remembrance. Back in June. I traveled with my family to the Poperinge Military Cemetery in Belgium to commemorate the 100 year anniversary death of my great grandfather Henry John Springett. It’s episode 1809 if you want to go back and listen to it. 

We could take a left turn here in to ancestral practices and how the commandment to Honour they father and thy mother, so that you may live long in the land is reflexive, and that to live for any amount of time on any land results or even requires you the opportunity to honour any and all ancestors. But i won’t. Instead I will assure you that actually, remembrance is so much more than pinning a poppy to your coat and trothing loudly online about ‘our boys’ and ‘sacrifice’.  

A dangerous discourse thats gets more ridiculous and hysterical every year. 

So many burly, tough and patriotic boomers stuck in a cultural temporal no man’s land, confusing Chronos and Kairos with the wars of their fathers and the wars of today. 

The meaning of that term—gammon,’ said Mr. Gregsbury, ‘is unknown to me. If it means that I grow a little too fervid, or perhaps even hyperbolical, in extolling my native land, I admit the full justice of the remark. I am proud of this free and happy country. My form dilates, my eye glistens, my breast heaves, my heart swells, my bosom burns, when I call to mind her greatness and her glory.”

Charles Dickens – Nicholas Nickleby  

Too many are sat behind keyboards curing slowly with age, getting saltier and saltier, wishing they could wash themselves through with the magic ingredient that prevents their heart from rotting. Saltpetre or potassium nitrate – a highly toxic substance that can be dangerous if it is not mixed in the right proportions. It is no longer sold freely as it can be used in bomb-making. Regardless of the state of their souls – it is fortunate for us that the key to roasting a gammon is to soak it in water for 24 hours to remove the excess salt. 

When exactly the gammons of this world get placed a bucket labeled ‘reality’ to desalinate them I don’t know. Perhaps the Brexit bucket soon will relieve them of some hubris.

I’ve spoken before on how the media perpetuates and boosts certain narratives. I look around and am aghast at the people, friends even, that have taken up bats and gone out to the fight. I personally question the utility of even engaging in a fight that takes place on a stage, in a ring or perhaps a pit of powers construction. 

It is convenient that this discourse is yet again played out online, in the papers and on television. It is not news it’s opinion. Whether one should drown any energy in engaging in this kind of combat these days is an open question. There are at the end of the day just too many fronts. Focus instead on clandestine raids, and other approaches that can make space for voices that can operate as outside or the consensus.

I have a book of sermons by Leslie Dixon Weatherhead (Born 1893 – Died 1976) a methodist priest and minister of the City Temple known for both for its nonconformism and spiritualism. The book is called That Immortal Sea and was first published in 1956. In it there is a remembrance sunday sermon called This Haunted World, delivered just 5 years after the end of the second world war.  

Nowhere in it does he he mention the troops, or the army, the military or even the state. Instead he rails against materialism, and the reality of spiritual. He says that we shouldn’t believe that God has stopped talking to us through our dreams.

He talks of how spirits haunt the spirit world that is inside of all of us and everything. And that it is the truth that everyone has had some mystic moments on a mountain, or heard the birds calling on the moore, or slepts by the sea with the windows .

you can find it online as a PDF proppably tho i havn’t looked. Like i said i have the book. 

 it’s interesting how priorities and the message changes.  I assume we all want nothing to do with full face poppy make up, or poppy shaped remembrance ham

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Remove Excess Salt | 1829 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

August 17, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | The Chalk ♘

Episode 19

Nostalgia? A folk festival, the Horizon, and a weeping virgin

I have a cough and a cold. 

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

Stella Maris Iterum

 So this is the first week in my adult life that I haven’t been home to Broadstairs Folk Week during August.

For those that don’t know, Folk Week is a traditional folk music and dance festival. You can find the folk at the beach in the pavilion, impromptu sea shanties on the pier, circus skills and performers on the sands.

It’s in the town’s historic Crampton Tower and the modern Baptist Centre, as well as in every pub and cafe on High Street. There’s usually 70 plus events a day, and most of them are free. It really is a festival like no other. And of course growing up around there as a teenager, you could spend all day and all night, chain smoking and drinking on the beach, in the park, or at a venue.

I had a lot of great times. But what I really wanted to talk about, was the idea of going home for this festival. Because when I first moved to South West London 15 years ago, I would have said that it was a place that I escaped from. When I was doing my GCSEs or AS levels, I don’t remember which, my English teacher, Mr Ratcliffe, described Broadstairs, or rather the Isle of Thanet, where it is located, as like the Isle of the Tempest.

You’re either born there or you wash up on its shores never to leave. Which of course is a cheery thing to say to a 16 or 17 year old. But again, let’s talk about home. There’s no place like home. You can travel the world, but the thing that you’re looking for is usually found at home. Home is not a place, it’s a feeling.

My friend says that home is the place in the world that they have to let you in if you knock on the door in a storm. T. S. Eliot said, home is where one starts from. Now, I’m not sure But these, to me, feel and sound like platitudes. Perhaps I am suffering from nostalgia, in its truest meaning of the word.

Nostos, or homesickness.

But can this really be true? At 33, the place that I fought so hard to escape from is drawing me home. Perhaps Mr Ratcliffe was right, for those that were born and grew up in London, like Eve, the star of City’s All. But Thanet, and Broadstairs, with its cliffs, the sea, the sky, the stars, feels like a real place, much more real than London, weirdly.

But as I sit here and record this podcast, I’m thinking to myself, perhaps I’m talking bollocks, because it’s also a place of grey skies and sideways rain, and despite what the hipsters will tell you, Margate certainly isn’t, and will ever be, Shoreditch on Sea. It’s also funny that the artists that I know that want to move or have moved to Margate, have only ever been in the summer.

Walk up the high street on Christmas or Boxing Day, and I think you’ll change your mind about moving there. But despite all that, as Ptolemy’s Geography says, Telliapis, a small island on the east coast of Albion, opposite the country of Trinibantes. Or, it is Tannitus, the Island of Light. Or alternatively, Ynys Thanatos, or the Isle of the Dead.

I prefer the former, whose Welsh Gaelic etymology means fire, or bonfire, and height. This is suggestive of a lighthouse, or a burning cliff. And I grew up 10 minutes walk from North Falkland Lighthouse. It is the northernmost point on the southeast of England. It’s a point where the channel meets the North Sea.

And growing up in Broadstairs, There was a bookshop, now a pub, that’s also a bookshop, called the chapel. It was the shrine of Our Lady, Star of the Sea. A building dating back to at least the 1350s, however, there was a shrine known to have existed on the site in 1070. The shrine of Our Lady of Bradstow. A statue of the Virgin Mary, mounted on a tall column, position so that she faced seaward.

It is known that most coastal towns and villages displayed some kind of beacon on the high points of their coastline as a warning against the potential hazards known locally to shipping. Thus the medieval times this chapel of Saint Mary was known as the chapel of blue light, for a light was given into the dark seas through a blue glass lantern.

It was also not without its miracles. At some stage, the statue was placed inside the chapel, and thereafter, local seamen came to refer to it as the Weeping Virgin. Hot weather, it is said, to have caused humidity and the condensation in the chapel, which settled on the face of the Virgin, and caused the figure to appear to weep.

This effect was considered by the religious mariners as a bad omen. As a storm would often follow and thus the atmospheric changes indicated in the chapel was a good rough guide to those who would face the perils of the sea. And in fact the motto of Broadstairs as a town is simply Stella Maris. And perhaps that’s what I miss the most about home, is the horizon.

The star of the ocean, and the portal of the sky.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Stella Maris Iterum | 1819 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

July 6, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

I was wondering what to make a podcast about so I pulled down one of my favourite books ‘The Bad Popes’ by Russell Chamberlin and opened it to a random page.

That page was my favourite story from that book and also took place exactly 724 years ago to the day. So there you go episode 13 – all a bit Paul Western to be honest with you.

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes

or search in all your favourite podcatchers. 

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Show Supporter 📻

£5 MONTHLY 👏

Quarterly zine; my gift to you ✉️

Subscribe 🔊

Wherever you get your podcasts

 Celestine V

Today is Thursday, the 5th of July, 2018, and 724 years ago today, nine weary, stubborn men met yet again in conclave, as they had been doing for the last 18 months. There had been 12 of them when the reigning pope had died in 1292, but even this tiny, sacred college had suffered further depletions during the long debate.

The old dean of the college had died. Another cardinal now lay grievously sick. And on this July morning, a third was mourning his brother’s death.

You’re listening to episode 1813 of Permanently Moved online, and this is the abridged story of Pope Celestine V—the man whom Dante placed just outside the gates of hell, the man who made the great refusal.

The conclave was taking place not in Rome but in Perugia, for Rome was in the grip of a plague. The Roman cardinals were aware that their power was rooted in the city and had remained there, accepting the heat and the stench of that Roman summer for the sake of political advantage. But it was all too much. Eventually, they gave way, and in October 1293, they joined their colleagues in Perugia, where, for the next nine months, they endlessly debated the election of the new pope.

And of course, because this is Holy Roman history, two great families were divided and at war during the meeting: the Colonna and the Orsini. The last pope had been an Orsini, and the neutrals—wary of taking sides in case of losing political advantage after the next pope’s election—were also playing hardball.

The times were evil. The Saracens had retaken Acre and Tripoli. The kings of France and England were plunged into a war that threatened the unity of Christendom. The nations of Europe might have considered the Chair of Peter to be raised above nations, but the cardinals saw it for what it was: the supreme prize for a Roman family.

It was on a heavy, hot July day like today that a letter arrived from a Holy Roman hermit. I can imagine Benedict Gaetani looking up with a smile and saying, I suppose this is one of your Peter of Morrone’s visions. And it was. It was an urgent letter from the holy hermit, foretelling divine vengeance upon them all if a pope were not elected soon.

Now, Peter of Morrone was a holy man who hung his cowl upon a sunbeam and whose hours of devotion were marked by the tolling of a supernatural bell. He closely resembled a fanatical anchorite, with a near-fanatical devotion to poverty and simplicity. He lived a thousand feet in the air, on the edge of Mount Morrone.

The cardinals discussed the letter, laughing at the thought of this mad old man on the edge of a mountain. But suddenly, Cardinal Malabranca stood up and declared, In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I elect Brother Peter of Morrone.

It seemed like a fantastical idea—almost miraculous. But in the past, divine guidance had manifested itself in similar ways. Five cardinals immediately assented. And so, an old hermit of 80, who lived in a cave, was elected by the same spirit to which he had dedicated his life: the Holy Ghost. He didn’t know it yet, but he was the new pope.

Usually, the new pope would be waiting outside the room, anxiously hoping to hear if they had been elected. But not Peter.

And of course, traveling the wearisome journey to the desolate mountain range where Peter had his cell was beneath the princes of the Church. It took the party five days to make the journey, and when they arrived, they found that others had already gotten there ahead of them. Charles, King of Naples, had already been informed of the new pope’s election. So the papal and royal parties—mutually suspicious—began the ascent of the mountain to Peter’s cell.

Peter’s cave was set on a narrow plateau, with sheer drops on either side. The party was forced to crowd together. News of the approaching courtiers filled Peter not with mere dismay, but with outright terror, and he had intended to flee yet again to one of his remote refuges.

When the party arrived, they saw an old man with swollen eyelids from weeping, his face emaciated. He barely seemed to understand what was being asked of him. He threw himself upon the ground, prayed, rose, and, with infinite reluctance, refused to go to Rome. Instead, he went with the King of Naples, where he built himself a wooden hermit’s hut inside one of the palace rooms.

The coronation took place in Aquila on August 29th, when Peter of Morrone took the name Celestine. And of course, being a Benedictine, Celestine had no conception of the value of the rich gifts he could now dispense and was bewildered by the hunger for benefits. If people were in need, so they should receive—he granted them casually upon request. As you can imagine, this was abused immensely, while the courtiers around him ate and banqueted at his expense.

Celestine, a lifelong ascetic, was not so much offended by the display of luxury around him as he was lost within it. He was pictured wandering from room to room of the castle, pining for the open air of the mountain, munching on dry bread and drinking water. It was quite clear that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. In little over a month, Celestine had reduced the bureaucracy of the Church to chaos with his casual gifts, and apparently, he even appointed a cardinal quite casually—after dinner.

After 15 weeks of this, it was left to Dante to pin a badge of shame on the broken man. He put Celestine not in hell, but in its dismal approaches—wandering with those who had neither been friends nor enemies of God.

The post Celestine V | 1813 appeared first on zexulo.xyz.

Narrative

I’m back on the chalk for Easter. Its nice to be home – which my teenage self would find extremely an annoying thing to hear myself saying – I haven’t been back for a little while.  Got to eat cauliflower straight from the garden. I went to the stripping of the altars at the family church (I think of it this way as my great grandad was a stone mason on the tower) of St Andrew’s on Thursday night, and on Friday the parental unit sang Stainers Crucifixion with the choir – it was really amazing.

I don’t care for Christmas or Easer Sunday as much as I care for Good Friday to be honest with you. The bible and the stories of the Saints are lousy with resurrections and miraculous births.

But there is only one Crucifixion.

It hasn’t stopped raining sideways since I got here which is no surprise at all, but the Full Moon has added the surprise event of some dramatic spring tides to enjoy if you can survive the bracing north sea wind.

The photo below is the harbour masters building, I have always thought it looks like it jumped straight out of a  pre – linear perspective drawing. And I wonder if the perspective wasn’t bad back then, just maybe all their buildings didn’t have a right angle on them.

Permanently Moved

Just a pointless discussion on Feedback including some of what I received for the the first episode.

The content is pretty mediocre tbh. But it learnt a lot this week about what it means to smash something out in an hour (including editing)

Dipping the stacks

I really haven’t spent that much on the socials this week at all.

• People are still mad at surveillance capitalism
• Russia is still the boogie man despite the original reports unravelling
• ‘Conspiracy Theory’ the term is a PSYOP and always has been. Sad to see so many people falling for it. Blanket banishment.

The Ministry

I was asked the other day why I call this section ‘The Ministry’. I was going to answer that it stands for fact that I’m The minister of my own labour, but I just shrugged. The other implied connotations are also acceptable.

Had a call about the event in the Netherlands in May – announcing next week.

Spoke to my editor about the damn meditation book, what do you do if you wrote something that you no longer agree with even before its published?

Wrote a short primer covering the next 10years of tech roadmap for ecological sensing and warring AI’s. Might post it to medium soon.

Wasted a lot of time playing DOOM on my switch. Not really ‘Work’ but it felt like it the amount of stress it’s causing me.

Reading

I was just about to start The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf but Improbable Botany arrived – a book I backed on kickstarter back in May 2017 so I started reading that on the train back to Kent instead.  I haven’t even read it yet but I’m going to recommend it.

“Eleven leading science fiction authors imagine alien plant invasions and botanical futures in this short story anthology.”

Music

Only ‘new’ thing i’ve been listening to this week is Charlotte Adigéry’s S/T EP from last year.

Remember Kids:

The post Contradictions appeared first on zexulo.xyz.