jabel

Peasant cosmogony

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:25:53 -0400

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. The single thorn tree bound us to a notion of the potent world of the fairies - and when the Blessed Virgin appeared in a thorn bush in Ardboe, a few miles up the country, the fairy tree took on a new set of subliminal attributes. The green rushes bound us to the beneficent spirit of St Brigid: cut on Brigid’s Eve, they were worked into Brigid’s crosses that would deck the rooms and out houses for the rest of the year.’ The poet also tells us that his upbringing conferred on him a sense of never feeling ‘alone in the universe for a second’ even as he ‘heard the clay hit the barefaced coffin’.

Most of us are not poets, we were not brought up as he, and as long ago as he, a man born in 1939. Six years his junior in time, I also knew that old world, if at a distance, being a country boy only in the summer interludes of being a city one. But my parents brought the old world with them when they left, fervent in retaining it as they negotiated the alien urban life into which they came. Heaney, like me, lost the Catholic faith early and without great struggle, but the peculiar nature of rural Irish Catholicism, in which God, the spirits and the natural world were not completely sundered, has left its mark on me just as it did on him. That mark lies in the sense of the possibility of binding, of religare, just as the thorn tree and the green rushes bound Heaney.

What I am describing in the cosmogonies of peasants is the outlook of those who cannot bend the world to their will. It is part of the culture of those who suffer, and yet are not helpless. Peasants are indeed connected to the Earth, the world, but above all to the place where they are born. Regarding the matter of peasant identity, the answer to the question ‘Who are you?’ is that I am from here, I am a peasant or a farmer, but also, in the European context, that I am a child of God, for the world is made rather than being a world to make, and God, or some overarching force, has made the world, the cosmos. ‘My fatherland is the land of my fathers’ as the saying goes. A peasant may answer the question of who they are by saying who their father and mother were, who their ancestors were.

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 11:25:08 -0400

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.

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:14:37 -0400

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

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 10:10:34 -0400

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

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:17:25 -0400

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.

Religious devotion is blended with natural beauty very effectively here.

The caretaker told me they had a Eucharistic revival at the site a couple of years ago, complete with a tent and a week’s worth of Masses. Who knew Catholics had tent revivals?

From there I drove south on 545 to Troy and then on 66 to Tell City for lunch. I made a quick visit to Cannelton just to drive over the Ohio River bridge into Kentucky, where I made an immediate U-turn. So I was in Kentucky for 30 seconds.

Back up to Troy and visited the Christ of the Ohio statue—one of my favorite things in southern Indiana (and therefore the world).

I drove north again on 545 and stopped at the Chapel of the Vierzehn Heiligen, or the Fourteen Holy Helpers, on a family farm near New Boston. It was inspired by German roadside chapels and modeled on the Basilika Vierzehnheiligen in Bavaria, according to a Jasper German Club newsletter found by ChatGPT.

From what I can tell, the Holy Helpers were fourteen already-known saints that began to be invoked together during the Black Death in Germany because their various patronages worked against plague symptoms. Forgive the analogy, but they feel like a medieval Avengers. Devotion to the group continued through the centuries and spread all the way to a farm in southern Indiana.

Further north I stopped at the Monte Cassino shrine in St. Meinrad. There are candles available there that are formed from the leftover wax of votive candles. I always pick up one or two when I’m in the area.

At that point I felt home tugging me back. I made one last stop at an antiques store in Loogootee with a good supply of old tools. I was looking for a splitting maul but nothing caught my interest. I already have a secondhand department store model that will certainly serve the purpose—but I’m keeping my eye out for a cheap, more interesting one.

In the evening, as I said yesterday, I took Rachel to a old time music jam in Paoli. I loved it and I plan to go to more, even if Rachel’s decides not to play! Steve and Nancy Dickey were there. Watch this excellent little video for an introduction to Steve and his locally famous father Lotus. Lesser known fact: the Lotus World Music and Arts Festival in Bloomington is actually named for him, not the flower.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:33:34 -0400

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.

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 07:13:02 -0400

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.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 13:25:05 -0400

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.

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 06:57:14 -0400

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.

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 09:48:32 -0400

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

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 09:54:24 -0400

Women get a lot of crap about being basic in the fall, with the pumpkin spice lattes and sweaters and such. But, listen, I have a long beard and use beard oil and love brewpubs with craft beer and dabble in woodworking. It doesn’t get much more basic than that. 😂

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:17:34 -0400

Beautiful coneflowers

It matters what thoughts we think with

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 18:24:39 -0400

Klein and Updegraff, Tools for Engagement:

It’s necessary, absolutely necessary, for us to first recognize that it’s good to be human—inefficiencies, blunders, and all. We are not machines, nor should we desire to be. This means taking a strong stand against what author Wendell Berry describes as “our slovenly willingness to allow machines and the idea of the machine to prescribe the terms and conditions of the lives of creatures, which we have allowed increasingly for the last two centuries, and are still allowing, at an incalculable cost to other creatures and to ourselves.” Berry goes further: “We should banish from our speech and writing any use of the word ‘machine’ as an explanation or definition of anything that is not a machine. Our understanding of creatures and our use of them are not improved by calling them machines.”

Rather than regard ourselves as biological mechanisms calibrated to efficiency and expediency, it would be better to think of ourselves as trees who anchor our roots in the earth yet reach our branches up into the heavens. This metaphor invites us to think of our work in terms of fruitfulness rather than output. As a tree slowly, imperceptibly, organically adds layers of depth and rooted strength as it matures to production, so we too grow imperceptibly over time and through experience. We have times of rest and restoration, times of leafing out, and times of pruning. And the end result of this quiet, patient process is a crown laden with good things to share: apples, acorns, peaches. This is the model of human life and work that our culture desperately needs to recover, because it is the very way that we will acquire the ability to express ourselves creatively and competently.

As Donna Haraway has said, it matters what thoughts we think with.

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 14:18:35 -0400

Picked up a load of wood from the Amish farm today. Ol’ Green struggled a bit under load on the hills between here and Buddha Bypass Road but we made it. The farm was, as I suspected, open despite the holiday. What to the Amish is your Fourth of July? 😉

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 13:02:00 -0400

Looky at Rachel’s tall, lovely sunflowers

Fri, 03 Jul 2026 06:33:09 -0400

Finished reading Daimonic Reality by Patrick Harpur. Highly recommended, if you couldn’t tell by all my quotations from it. The great gift of strange books like this is a fresh pair of eyes. There’s always something invigorating in a Jungian perspective, even when I don’t end up fully adopting it.

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 09:09:29 -0400

Despite what I said the other day about not wanting to analyze what I love, I’m listening to a podcast where David Benjamin Blower and Lydia Catterall discuss his new album. He’s just confirmed my suspicion that “The Boot is on the Other Foot Now” is about the Gazan genocide:

We are all here
Be upstanding for the hellscape yonder there
Roman stakes sprawl across Judean hills again
Scroll through the dust. Meander round the famine
Vespasian, who wears your crown now?
Done something with your face. Wearing a different gown
Wearing the boot on your other foot now
Hear the screeching tables turning round round
Aeola Capitalina on the mount again
You recognise yourself? Tell me what you’re thinking…
Making offerings to Moloch there in topheth: these
Never crossed even God’s mind: you’re a genius
Your king keeps his throne for another year
And Rachel is weeping for someone else’s children
Your king keeps his throne for another year
And Rachel is weeping for someone else’s children

Make room for the daimons

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 06:21:12 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

To make room for the daimons is to set a distance between us and them. This enables us to reflect, and reflect on, them; or, perhaps more accurately, allows them to reflect themselves through us. Reflection is “an act of becoming conscious.” If we become conscious of the daimons, and remain mindful of them, we avoid becoming possessed by them. For we are always vulnerable to neurotic fixations and compulsions when unconscious daimons drive us to act out, against our will, their fixed mythic patterns. Of course there is no way we can break entirely free of the compelling power of the daimons, any more than we can sever ourselves with impunity from our own souls; but we can collaborate with them, through reflection and imagination, so that their compulsion begins to resemble what we think of as an artist’s vocation. In this case, a dialogue is opened between us and our daimon, as if it were (as it often is) a Muse, so that there is struggle and passion, but also negotiation and inspirational exchange. We are no longer compelled to act out the daimonic pattern in a literal sense; rather, we are enabled to body it forth in imaginative acts—works of art, for example, or artifacts, or even ideas and hypotheses. All these, to a greater or lesser extent, contain and define the daimonic exuberance that might otherwise overwhelm us. Work of art are, in this respect, daimonic shrines, like the statues of the ancients which were wrought in order, magically, to draw down and contain a daimon or god.

This accords with some recent thoughts on co-creation.

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:22:12 -0400

Remember the reported UFO sightings at Malmstrom Air Force Base and other sites associated with nuclear missiles? One way of understanding that phenomenon is as some kind of manifestation of our collective fear. How long until we start getting UFO sightings at data centers?

The gods have become symptoms

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 06:27:08 -0400

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:

Too much of our recent history has been soul-slaughter, imagining the past as merely primitive and, muscle-bound with technology, bulldozing the sacred places, hunting the daimonic animals with high-velocity rifles, dispatching the jets to shoot down the UFOs, violating the moon-goddess with phallic rockets, and so on. Having severed all connection with the gods and daimons, we reckon we are getting away with it. But we aren’t. The victory over the daimons is hollow; we simply make a hell of our world. And, as we drive out the daimons before us, they creep back in from behind, from within. We compel them to seize and possess and madden us. If we want to know our own fate, we would do well, perhaps, to look at the fate of Heracles. He neglected his wife, his soul, who, in order to rekindle his attention, sent him a shirt soaked in what she had been told was a love potion. But the potion was a poison that coursed over his body, corroding his too-solid flesh. The more he tore at the shirt, the more he tore himself to pieces. He was glad to find death on a burning pyre. (His wife killed herself out of remorse.)

This is a warning of what happens to spirit when it becomes divorced from its soul pairing, when it ceases to find its reflection in soul — and loses it. It becomes the solitary heroic rational ego which deludes itself into believing that there is no soul. It creates a correspondingly delusional world for itself which, deprived of its connection with a personal and personified counterpart, opens onto the soul’s depths, as abysmal as deep space and as impersonal as the subatomic realm.

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:07:41 -0400

I’ve revised my “Memory is an Otherworld” post and added audio narration. I may start doing this now and then. Nothing improves a piece of writing like a rural accent with authentically dropped g’s. 😂

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:03:01 -0400

Meet Fred and Ethel (named by my adorable wife). You should get one of these feeders that sticks to your window. It’s wonderful to be able to see birds within two feet of my chair. The marking you see on the window are flowers drawn by Rachel to make sure the birds don’t bonk their noggins.

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 15:44:21 -0400

Ridiculous dog raised to a new level of ridiculousness.

Memory is an Otherworld

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 09:13:50 -0400

Listen to this post:

Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability.

This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.

The rules of the waking world do not apply in Memory. There we meet the dead and re-experience events no longer available to us in the waking world. The tick-tock time of the waking world has no hold in Memory. Decades can be traversed in an instant and, stranger still, subsequent events can alter earlier events.

Memory is built of stories. It has a strong relation to history—the story of the waking world—but the relation is less strong than the machine model assumes. Memory is liquid. Two experiencers of the same event, when they visit Memory, re-experience that event differently. This is often because of other events in each experiencer’s personal Otherworld. That is to say, events in Memory alter other events, of their own accord, against our protestations.

Memory is related to Dreaming. Both involve the waking world fading away. Both ignore tick-tock time. Memory has a stronger relation to history than Dreaming. Dreaming has a stronger relation to the imaginal than Memory. The Unconscious is related to both Memory and Dreaming, though more openly acknowledged in the latter.

Synchronicity is a link between the waking world and Memory. A being without Memory would never experience synchronicity. Synchonicity is when Memory breaches the waking world and imparts meaning to some event there.

Memory is a land we most often visit alone. Some parts of it we know extremely well; some parts we’ve never heard of. It is not, however, a personal land existing only within our own heads. Memory is both personal and shared. The shared places are how we understand our lives together. They are built from history and, in turn, shape history.

Memory is the land of the ancestors. As the elderly approach death, the ancestors call to them out of Memory. The dying spend more and more time there, in preparation. Sometimes the ability to transition between the waking world and Memory fails; this is what we call dementia.

Medical professionals tell me that the dying often see people who are not there. I say that death is the moment when the barrier between Memory and the waking world is unbearably thin. In that moment, spirits from the Otherworld of Memory cross over to bear the dying into their new existence.

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 20:23:11 -0400

Awesome: Ten year old boy from Santa Claus, Indiana, catches a huge catfish with his bare hands. Are you more surprised by a ten year old noodler with the active support of his mom or that we have a town named Santa Claus?