Peasant cosmogony

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: Seamus Heaney understood the landscape in which as a child in small-farm Derry he grew up as ‘sacramental, a system of signs that called automatically upon systems of thinking and feeling.’ Kevin Williams has remarked how the Catholicism of Heaney’s upbringing was part of an environment that was paradoxically not ‘specifically Christian’. Heaney wrote that ‘Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word religious in religare, to bind fast.

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I have five free one-month subscriptions to David Benjamin Blower’s Substack to give away. Use the reply by email function on my blog (not the micro.blog timeline) if you want one.

This wonderful story was alluded to in an Emerald episode on death: “The Story of Jumping Mouse” (pdf)

I’ve never seen evidence of good men in national politics. The best are only good in relation to the swine roaming DC hallways. Truly good men are only ever known personally and are invisible to every form of worldly power.

An account of my Saturday

I decided late in the week to go to Tell City because the Pour Haus pub there had been on my mind lately. Not that it’s particularly noteworthy—it’s just how this particular day-trip itch popped up for me. So with a few episodes of The Emerald loaded up, I headed south. After brief visits at family graves, I stopped first at Saint Joseph’s Holy Family near Bristow. It’s a wonderful folk shrine that I’ll definitely be visiting again when I can walk it more slowly.

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Rachel is playing in an old time music jam in Paoli tonight. Having no musical talent, I’m one of four or five spectators. Two upright basses, two mandolins, a banjo, a fiddle, a dulcimer, several guitars, and fifteen voices. If you aren’t jealous, you should be.

Finished reading Tools For Engagement: Reclaiming Craft in an Age of Technology by Joshua Klein and Mike Updegraff. This book is full of Joshua and Mike’s characteristic blend of woodworking history, craft philosophy, technological criticism, and practical skills. I appreciate the way they have never let theory drift far from practice. Embodied intellect.

A memory of the old timey internet: in the early 2000s I used to listen to a Christian rock internet radio station. No idea what it was called. It was broadcast live, with actual DJs. It was the station that first introduced me to Evanescence through their breakout song “Bring Me to Life.” Also discovered several other bands through that station: The Benjamin Gate, Jeremy Camp, Kutless, 12 Stones.

Evanescence was particularly big for Rachel and me. We loved that combination of ethereal vocals and heavy guitars. And the lyrics? Well, I’ve always held a special place in my heart for melodramatic goths.

Jaroslav Pelikan, as quoted in Tools for Engagement:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name.

Study finds that Coloradans will be traveling less this summer. Coloradans traveling elsewhere is proof that humans just can’t be happy.