jabel

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…

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. 😂

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.

Ridiculous dog raised to a new level of ridiculousness.

The popular idea of memory is a machine model. Memory is a 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 an Otherworld. It is a place we visit which exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not. The rules of the waking world do not apply there. There we meet the dead and…

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?

A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them.

I love this video on shillelagh making by Eoin Reardon. Also, from another of his videos, I learned the wonderfully symmetrical rule about renewing the finish on a handle (and maybe a walking stick?): re-oil once a day for a week; once a week for a month; once a month for a year; then twice yearly.

Cory Doctorow: “Age verification” means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry’s fondest dream, a world where it’s literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kids…from them!

Stove-mas continues! The interior work is done. Tomorrow they’ll finish the chimney outside. There’s a practical reason for the 45 in the stovepipe but I love the character it gives it.

Greg Cello: Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection. The work is not glamorous, and it will not always feel triumphant, but it is the work by…

Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.

I made a walking stick and posted a short video about it.

The gap between who do I want to be and who will I be is rooted in who I am now.

CNBC: Chiefs of the world’s leading AI companies are descending on the G7 conference in France Wednesday, in a sign of their growing geopolitical influence as artificial intelligence rises to the top of the global agenda. Gordon White’s comment about the tech bros presence at the last inauguration applies here as well: the new archons are making themselves known. May their rule be brief.

Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell. We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not. I feel a bit useless to her here because, although I can speak that language, my words don’t carry a lot of…

Thinking back on my phone call with mom last night, how she was cried, worried she would go to Hell. Remembering a line from an old David Bazan song: “I discovered Hell to be the poison in the well.”

From Wendell Berry, The Country of Marriage Horseback on Sunday morning, harvest over, we taste persimmon and wild grape, sharp sweet of summer’s end. In time’s maze over the fall fields, we name names that went west from here, names that rest on graves. We open a persimmon seed to find the tree that stands in promise, pale, in the seed’s marrow. Geese appear high over us, pass, and the sky closes. Abandon, as in love or sleep, holds them to their way, clear, in the ancient faith: what we need…

You may have noticed how much I’ve been quoting Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality lately. It’s been so engaging that about a third of the way through I knew I needed to return the library copy and buy my own. Which I received today. Flipping through it tonight I came across the publisher on the copyright page: Guys, that’s like right over there. I’m not sure you can appreciate how utterly bizarre it is that this book I love so much was published by a company not five minutes from my house—in…

Based on Albert E. Brumley’s All-Day Singin’ and Dinner on the Ground: Traditional Songs and Recipes 2 tbsp flour 1 tbsp cornstarch ½ cup white sugar ½ cup brown sugar ¼ cup sorghum ½ cup cider vinegar 4 eggs 1 tbsp melted butter pinch salt ¼ tsp nutmeg ½ tsp vanilla Cinnamon for sprinkling Heat oven to 350 and grease a casserole dish. 9x13 makes a thin custard but it bakes uniformly and quickly; a smaller dish would give you a thicker custard but the baking might be trickier. Mix all…

Many years ago, mom needed some books to fill up her bookshelves so I gave her some that I still had around but no longer cared about. Now I’m cleaning out some stuff in her house and there are a few I’m taking back to my shelves. There was a time when Wilson and Sproul were very important to me, despite one of them becoming quite notorious of late. I told a friend recently never to be embarrassed about who they were before; that’s what makes them who they are now.

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not…

Two wonderful songs by local folk music legend and forest protector Andy Mahler. 🎵

After my recent post, I decided to look into the context of the Lewis quote on the longaevi from The Discarded Image. What follows is a summary, not intended to be thorough and, as usual, aimed at unapologetically pillaging ideas for my own use. To begin with, here is Lewis describing some fundamentals of the medieval model, into which he will later situate the longaevi: In the Mundas which God built of that raw material [the four contraries of hot, cold, moist, and dry] we find them only in…

Me, anytime I have a cold brew coffee. Rachel has listened to an unusually large amount of talk from me this morning.

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: In his book The Discarded Image, C. S. Lewis tries to depict the universe as it was seen through the eyes of a medieval person. He describes their view of the heavens, with its precise system of crystalline spheres towering like a great cathedral, vast but finite, into space. And he is just about to describe their view of Earth and its inhabitants who occupy the lower end of the Great Chain of Being, which stretches down from God and the angels, to man,…

The dark chthonic waters – essentially ancestral waters – rise from the unseen land of the dead into light and become visible. This process is controlled by ancestral agency, the waters becoming a medium through which ancestral presence surfaces and circulates. (Mark Nemglan) The part of southern Indiana I belong to is characterized by karst topography, where water flows through soluble limestone and forms sinkholes and caves. Sometimes the water even disappears underground in what is called a…

“Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad” is the key to understanding the politics of our time.

I need to get outside today. Rachel and I are going to take a walk this morning, then I’m going to doing some berry picking. Also, I’ve been thinking about the Lost River lately so I think I’ll visit the Orangeville Rise and the Wesley Chapel Gulf today.

In an echo of Bruno Latour’s “we have never been modern”, David Abram argues “we are still animist.” We have built devices that speak to us, even have conversations with us, in an attempt to find our way back to the living landscape of our ancestors. Yet these devices are not radically other; they are only extensions of human consciousness. Our living landscape is thus only ever human, thinning our experience, dulling our senses, and pushing us deeper and deeper into artificial environments.…