QUOTATION MARKS - Martin Shaw - Two Things

"In the Celtic tradition...
there are two things you need to grow
into a human being.

One of them is
a relationship with place, a landscape,
and that could even be a town.

And a relationship to story
if you don't have stories
wrapped around you
like a swan feathered cloak
you will be bound by anxiety
as you get older."

Martin Shaw - Storyteller & Mythologist

QUOTATION MARKS - Martin Shaw - Culture

"We live in a culture,
that trades growth
for depth."

Martin Shaw - Storyteller & Mythologist

SACRED MOMENTS - The Asterisks of Stars.

In 1988 I'm on a Nile Cruise on a tour of Egypt. And I've purposefully shut myself away in my cabin on the boat. Because, it was a surprise even to myself, to find I was sobbing my heart out. 

Prior to 1988, prior to this cruise, I'd reached a place of creative inertia, that would eventually prove the prelude to the end of my time of living in London. I had reached my thirties and wasn't at all happy or content with where I'd got to in life. My engagement with living, my job, the lack of any meaningful relationship, my performance art work, my culture vulture nightlife, were one by one wizening and drying up in a biblical style creative famine. 

Visiting Egypt, the fulfillment of a lifetimes ambition, was a conscious attempt to remove myself from this feeling of being submerged in the murky terrain that is a dead end. The holiday was meant to cheer me up, through reconnecting with a childhood love affair of mine. Here might be a way out.

A lot then, emotionally rested upon this trip. It couldn't possibly hold all the fantasies and expectations I was presenting it with. And a few days into a fortnights Nile cruise, was the moment it literally collapsed under the weight of them. In this beautiful place I felt the ugly disatisfaction of my existential position in heightened relief. Hence this tearful eruption, a cathartic release, whilst floating gently up the beautiful wide expanse of the Lower Nile.

I can't remember when my enthusiasm for Ancient Egypt had started. Though it appeared to capture me from a very young age. Nor what specifically set alight my fondness for Egyptian culture in my imagination. It presents itself to me as if it has always been there.

As a child I lost interest in reading fiction, and proceeded to voraciously consume non fiction books on ancient history I could find in the Library. I thought they were way better than anything 'made up'. Egyptian, Assyrian, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, whatever the civilisation, these intrigued me. To my young boyish imagination, they were an entirely magical other ways of seeing and interpreting the world.

So there I am standing in the flesh beneath the enormous range and monumental size of the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses. Having watched the perfectly staged Son e Lumiere in the ruins of Luxor, Karnak and Philea, this trans-formative performance I found utterly breathtaking. 

Melding human with animal form, the Egyptian world of their deities begins a representative shift from animistic gods to archetypal human hybrids, which encompasses the cycles and dramatic forces at work in the natural world. Rich with an incomprehensible language, symbolic forms and mystical amulets. Here could be found the origins of Alchemy, a vast cosmically drawn life cycle and dramatic stories of deviousness ,murder and resurrection amongst the god realm, that predates the Greek, and the Christian story, by centuries, if not millennia. 

Egypt beyond the fertile strip immediately bordering the Nile, is largely an vast desert. A lot of it, though low and flat, is not lacking in theatricality. Dawn over the Nile is an awesome sight as you see the first shimmers of sunlight rise up and over the desert bound reed banks of the river. At that moment the Ancient Egyptian's complete obsession with it, makes self evident spiritual sense. Why wouldn't you want to worship this enormous glorious deity as it arose and descended so majestically in and out of the dark impenetrable swamp of the netherworld. Why wouldn't you worry that one day the Sun God Amun Ra might fail to return the following morning. The spiritual anxiety of our own mortality becoming transposed onto the burnishing bronze of our solar companions trajectory. Will we wake to experience another day, or not? Two existences become intertwined. Sun rises, like awakening in the morning, are sacred events.

On a temple visit, I was wandering around. I wanted to explore this temple on my own. Quite consciously separated from any tourist guide. I found myself quietly fascinated by its many side shrine alcoves and their wonderful acoustic properties. Just intoning, nothing too dramatic, for the space just took whatever my vocal chords threw up and hugely amplified it anyway. These vocal experiments attracted a guide, who gestured to me with his finger to follow him. He took me several flights of steps up to the very top of the temple. To one corner where there was a small cubicle like chapel. He obviously thought I was the sort of tourist who'd appreciate whatever this building contained.

The guide gestured up to its ceiling, where carved into, and stretched over and round it from east to west, was the cosmically vast form of Nut, the Egyptian sky goddess. Guardian of the daylight sky and the deep blue astrology of the evening heavens. Dressed in watery clothes, her nurturing pendulous breasts and outstretched arms, spanned a sky bedecked with the asterisks of stars. Nut protected everything beneath them, forming a womb like cocoon around earthly humanity. I was stunned, totally silenced by it, this was just one of the most deeply thrilling thing I'd seen the whole trip. I felt an instant sense of a bond forming between myself and the symbolic arche of love that Nut formed over the terrestrial world. As I've subsequently found elsewhere, female deities, they just get to me like nothing else does.

One evening the dry desert air led to a magnificently clear night sky, the sharpest I have ever seen. The Milky Way spreading out its cloudy band of stardust across the middle of it.  In the last ombre of dusk, I took a trip on the Nile in an Egyptian felluca. Sliding without a sound across the flow of a gradually darkening river. Grand rivers like the Nile act as the geophysical metaphors for life. From the lively vibrancy of the Blue Nile at its source, to the sluggish dementia of the Delta veins. Yet I was transported on it to an altogether calmer and less emotionally ruffled existence, beneath the bright sparkling jewels of the Canopy of Nut.

LISTENING TO - Where's My Utopia? by Yard Act

On first encounter you can tangibly hear that this album is an overwhelmingly huge leap on from their debut. Now signed to Island Records, Yard Act have blossomed in quite an unexpected sprightly manner. 

Their first album The Overload was a stroppy post punk inspired kaleidoscope of the contemporary northern experience. James Smith having an unerring ability to pointedly and humorously nail a few modern archetypes. But it seems Yard Act were barely a fully functioning band at the time, more a gestating idea. The words and the music evolved more once they started regular gigging. 

What we have here on this supposedly difficult second album, is the band displaying the broadest range of what they are capable of. And it is rather magnificent in how it presents and handles its themes. It's an album that reflects on what happens to your experience, when what you aspire to become ( a successful performer ) actually starts to happen. 

Beginning with Illusion which portrays how your naive dreams of success as a musician first manifest themselves. 

Then the giddy self intoxication when it final takes off - Dream Job.

Sonically the album is adventurous. Managing to let go the constraints of how they would perform this live. The album stands alone, a sound and song collage, its a completely self contained and complex piece of work. It has echoes of a multiplicity of influences, Blur, The Blockheads, the ever ubiquitous Cooper Clarke, music hall variety acts, The Kinks, fairgrounds, The Fall. Some tracks are poppy and catchy, others are structured in a more musically complex fashion, such as Down By The Stream. 

Then there's the poignancy of the extended monologue Blackpool Illuminations, the albums penultimate track. 

The final track A Vineyard for the North, is questioning, about what do you do next when, having achieved success as a band, popularity alone doesn't cut it anymore, and you venture into farming or cheesemaking or a making a vineyard for the North.

So Where's My Utopia? is less of a state of the nation vignette, but a personal exploration of ambition, fame and a certain amount of amused self parody. Preluded by the video release of The Trench Coat Museum in the summer of 2023, that eight minute opus encapsulated where the band is now at. Bridging the old with the new Yard Act. Its not included on the album, but it is a great set opener/closer and a declaration of new intent. It's obvious why it's not included on this album, as it would not easily fit into its overall mood and the journey Where's My Utopia? takes you on from beginning to end. This could be a contender for best album release if 2024. Makes you excited to see where they take Yard Act next.

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

FEATURE - The Yellow Scream

 I owe my Husband for this one. He has put me on to the work of this guy. Its sort of self explanatory, so I'm not going to write anything about it at all. Yes, its hilarious, but I also would call it truly wonderful. This is a drastically edited version, the full video lasts forty minutes.

Now, doesn't that make your day feel a whole lot better?

SACRED MOMENTS - Asking The Question

I'm about to begin a series of articles under the banner of Sacred Moments. I thought this explanatory preface might be necessary to lay out my approach. 

It might be tempting to divide what is sacred into two. - What we hold sacred, can refer to secular values we uphold and wish to exemplify -  A sense of the sacred, can be an experience pointing towards something other, the divine in all the various configurations of it that can be imagined.With Sacred Moments I'm more concerned with the latter, whilst at the same time unconvinced such a strict bifurcation can ever be cleanly maintained. There is inevitably some interplay, and this in itself is worth examining.

These articles intend to explore on an experiential level what a sense of the sacred is and has been for me. There is an inbuilt autobiographical slant, usually based sround ncidents that have popped up in a multiplicity of places and circumstances, not just in a religious context or in nature. Sacred Moments simply will note where these have occurred. In the writing of them it has felt similar to an act of archaeology, excavating, identifying, conserving and then placing them in the museum of my Self. To be curious about my own history, how I have told it, and how I now tell it. Noting the shifts in emphasis and implied meaning.

Though a sense of the sacred appears to arise out of nowhere, they do nonetheless have a context, a particular setting. Even if where they are situated doesn't necessarily appear to make much sense of it, nor explain it. I'm attempting to adopt the broadest perspective on what can be conceived of as a sacred experience. I don't think a sense of the sacred is solely about the spiritual highs.

I forget, as do we all, that we have had any such experience, and still do have sensations of the sacred. However evasive or difficult they might be to pin down or own up to. They get easily explained away, denied, rationalised or simply ignored as we quickly move on to the next instance. Sacred Moments is a vehicle for reclaiming them as things worthy of note, and sometimes even to find that they have had a greater influence upon you, perhaps more than you've previously credited them with. 

You cannot chase, hunt down or develop an expectation where and when a sense of the sacred will happen. Similar to happiness you cannot will a sense of the sacred into being. Which is not to say there is an absence of reciprocity. There can be causal encounters arising 'seemingly' in response to intent, but that 'seemingly' is not to be too readily overlooked.

The primary thing is noticing. And in that noticing I'm already recognising themes and patterns. So in my more left brain moments of certainty or cynicism, my tendency to categorically deny or begrudge a perceived lack of spiritual experiences, these examined patterns will make that a more difficult stance to uphold. 

QUOTATION MARKS - Freedom - John Verveake

'Freedom is not an absolute good 

Freedom is an instrumental good.'

John Vervaeke

Taken from a conversation with Jonathan Pageau.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal March 2024

The day to day discipline of a spiritual practice, once established, is often carried out with the aroma of unconscious competence permeating it. At least, that has been my experience. The basic bread and butter of spiritual practice - ethical behaviour and a compassionate and devotional focus, are what I still expect of myself. These essential foundational practices inevitably become second nature. This is so to the extent that I have to check in with myself from time to time - is this what I'm doing or have things gone a bit lax lately?  Such a spiritual health check I find is ongoing, and part of the practice. Any practice is not just a matter of will and discipline, it also requires faith and a sense of its purpose.

Most religions have 'advanced' or 'higher' practices that are more left field. Ones that tend to be placed on the 'mystical' book pile. Teachings often erroneously referred to as 'hidden' or 'secret' ,but are really only reserved. These 'mystical teachings' usually represent the ĺiving breathing soul of a religious tradition. That they are withheld from common knowledge and use, is significant. They are meant to be rare treasures, but as we know the promise of gold, however distant, can also stimulate greed and covetousness. To bring out the avaricious gold hunter in us all.

Mystical teachings tend to turn what you thought you knew about a tradition completely on its head. Whatever is knowable as divine or transcendent, becomes this absolutely unknowable thing. Whilst that daily spiritual practice you thought really necessary,  can suddenly appear to have no value, if viewed absolutely. Because ultimately it is a provisional teaching, thoroughly transitory by its very nature.

I've become quite intregued lately by the degree of coincidence in trajectory of differing religions 'mystical' traditions. That so many of them ascend into this territory of the unknowable. Whether it's- the Tao which can be known is not the eternal Tao - the Shunyata that escalates its emptiness to the point of emptying emptiness of itself - the Zen concept of thusness, of abandoning any self consciously directed, goal orientated path towards Enlightenment - the apophatic Christian Mystical traditions where the cuddly notion of the bearded patrician, the interventionist God, is completely abandoned. Everything becomes an series of statements of what God is not. And what God is definitely not, is gendered, or even a being you can make requests of. Whatever the tradition, the graspable knowableness of a religion vanishes up itself. And on this most critical of horizons, dissolves into the vast unknowable ocean of nothing in particular.

In past eras such 'mystical' or 'advanced' teachings would never be mentioned to a person who was thought not yet ready for them. In fact it was often considered detrimental to a person's spiritual progress to do so. What was once a carefully guarded initiation, is now available in book form or on the Internet, or worse still, dispensed like a sweety to suck on at the end of a public talk. 

We have an easy unfiltered and casual access to what are basically 'higher' teachings. Instinctively we recognise them as important, even though we'll most likely misunderstand or misapply them. The temptation to believe we can skip adhering to our foundational practices and simply head straight to the nub of it all, can prove irresistible. Why waste time on things that require application, time and devotion, particularly when you have to let go of them in the end? Why not go straight to the heart ? Save time and effort. This is where hard graft finds itself in an unseemly tug of war with instant gratification.

There is a story from The Lotus Sutra about The Magic City. A group of travellers sets out on a long and dangerous journey. Knowing many of them might be inclined to give up, their leader and tour guide conjures up The Magic City. Telling them this is their destiny, what they are heading towards, its just over the horizon. Having heard about the Magic City they all want to get there. After weeks, months and years pass The Magic City still has not yet been reached. Many travellers lose faith in their objective, turn back, or fall by the wayside. Eventually those that stick with it do reach The Magic City. At this point the leader clicks his fingers and makes it all disappear. Confessing to them that the Magic City was simply a skillful ruse to help them maintain their focus and confidence, so they did not lose faith in their journeys purpose. Enabling them to get to a place where they can do without such imaginary destinations.

Buddhism refers to its own foundational teachings as The Raft that gets you to the farther shore. The place where it's raft of practices and teachings becomes redundant. And Buddhism is not alone in having this inbuilt structural redundancy. In the story of The Magic City the disciples are only told of their leaders deception of them at the end, once they've reached their goal. Would it not then be intrinsically unhelpful, if not demoralising, to know about this 'deception' right from the moment of embarking on your spiritual journey,? How would you respond? How would that feel? For once you know, you cannot unknow.

Whether its a Magic City, Enlightenment or The Promised Land, however we mythologise or imagine the goal, destination or purpose of our religious faith, its an inaccurate, if not illusory, comprehension we are dealing with. So when an atheist says - religions they're all made up and a comforting fantasy - well, in a way they are. They are an instrumental truth, not an absolute one.

Magic Cities are of necessity illusory, and to simply highlight that does miss the point of them big time. Underneath these foundational myths lies the ocean of unknowing, that an atheist too has no answer, conception or understanding to effectively encompass it with.

For a believer the way to miss the point is to mistake the myth of The Magic City for a real place. To believe in its literal existence. What the story is informing you of, is that our beliefs are only ever useful inexactitudes. Partial truths that gesture you roughly in the right direction. The degree to which you rigidly hold yourself to those beliefs, will not necessarily speed your progress. No one gets far on a spiritual journey without a provisional faith that there is some sort of top to the mountain that you are climbing. Even that the mountain itself is real.

Faith, I find, is perpetually in a productive, but often slippery, interactive dialogue with our doubts. My religious doubts usually arise from the desire for a sense of something tangible, of having made progress, for an achievable goal, for a conclusion to the journey I'm travelling, banging their head against reality, the hard resistant wall of unknowing. I have had to learn to be more equanimous towards the unknowable nature of where faith itself may be leading me. That makes holding to its amorphous nature challenging. Hence. I guess, the need for The Magic Cities in the first place. 

This is a humbling place to find myself in. To know that I don't know. My ego bristles with being held in the trap of my not liking it. 

FINISHED READING - Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

In November 1944 a V2 hit the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. One hundred and sixty eight people died. Fifteen of them were children, lives cut off from all the fascinating and tragic things the second half of the 21st Century would bring. Francis Spufford teaching at Goldsmiths College on his way to work, passed every day a plaque that marked the place and date that doodle bug fell to earth, and its obliterating consequences for all those lives, robbed of the unfolding of their lives.

Out of this single adopted tragedy he has created the entirely fictitious lives of five children who died on that November day. Inventing a life for them, ordinary lives with ocassional flashes of the extraordinary. Lives filled with significance and insignificance, joys and mistakes, moral incident and immoral ones, aspirational and thwarted dreams.

Through this authorial slight of hand he takes us on a multifaceted journey through the edited highlights, the significant peaks and troughs of their lives and the last half century we simultaneously journey through. Those moments, the ones with greatest emotional significance, frequently dashed with the stinging vinegar of regrets and remorse. They are all here, richly embellished, but different in their essential trajectories.

One character struggles all their life with the consequences of mental ill health. Another has success as a rock star only to fall back to earth as a teacher in a local comprehensive. Hiding her past life from everyone, including herself. Another is a bit of a wide boy, an ethically dubious chancer who swindles people, stomping over the lives of others on his way to a fleeting success, who loses it all in the end. There are infidelities, both real and imagined. Relationships turned sour and abusive as a partner becomes embroiled in the brutal politics of the far right. A families inability to help their bulemic daughter. One man struggles to make a success of his life, stymied again and again by the rapid advances of economic change.

These can only ever present you with small glimmers of the flavour of this wonderful book. Spufford's writing has a uniqueness of voice, deceptively light, but with great lyrical dexterity, a sense for the colourful detail and the incidental but significant landscape within which everything takes place. None of the characters are quite able to escape the circumstances of the place of their birth. 

As all these five people approach the end of their entirely fictitious lives, we see them reflecting on what has passed, with all the mixed feelings that a looming point of demise will inevitably summon. The usual recipe for life, is a meal of paths followed and not followed, actions with consequences, decisions and indecision, obstacles overcome and flows gone with. How often the memories of our past are so discoloured by our emotions at the time. Misremembering there significance entirely.

This book is founded upon the strength or otherwise of its origin story. All of it arising out of the conceit of a 'what if.' This allows Spufford to take us on an evocation of periods and events. Events that these five people travel through and become ciphers for, in a much larger comment on the way people have adjusted to the changes wrought, for good or ill, upon this country. The consequential damage to people's lives, the malformations of spirit in everyone who lived through them.

I couldn't quite find my way out of the nagging question, of what the framing of five tragic deaths with imagined future lives brought to the table. How different would the book be if the sentiment of its origin story was removed ? I wasn't convinced that it mattered enough. The significant power of the book would remain and stand up well in the telling.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

QUOTATION MARKS - Martin Shaw - Navigating Mystery

'We need to move
from living with uncertainty
to navigating mystery.

It's just inelegant
to not at least fail beautifully.'

Martin Shaw.

Mythologist & Storyteller.