Uncivil Savant Podcast

There was a thoughtful piece on beauty by Anja Byg this week about things I have mulled over for many years too (and which Ted Chiang wrangled meaningfully in his short story “Liking What You See: A Documentary”.) For me, the crucial pivot which supports the always-ambivalent weight of beauty is how it makes us behave. Does it enliven the spirit and make us better able to join in with life and wit...

I set the twisted candle in the holder and lit it. Heat may have melted it S-wise but its light remains undimmed. Something so skew suddenly so dear. To burn while the Great Bear is in the south and my north star with him. A whole week in another land and yet at home. Incomparable gifts. The return of a blessing . ‘Soft cheese, blue cheese, hard cheese,’ he shouts, ‘they’re all good, they’re all h...

Winged beings Red-tailed hawk is always nearby. She swooped down from the veranda rail corner as I opened the door, the exhalatory sigh of her wings the first intentional sounds I heard from another being yesterday. We both like to spend the early morning facing west, sun behind us, meadow lit up below. She’s looking for prey, me, for glimpses of newly germinating peace. The bluebird box sits righ...

I am thousands of miles from home but amongst dear friends. I’ve only been here 28 hours and I have been moved to tears several times by the hospitality and love that comes from the humans, creatures and land that I meet, some deeply familiar, some new to me. I can’t write about it all now, prosaically as my phone (new to me second hand phone, new sim, new plan) yet again does not work here. Plus...

Years ago, when I first began this Substack , I regularly included excerpts from the many letters, emails and long-form voice messages I send to friends, and with permission, from our correspondences. It’s been a while and as it’s Easter Week and I am taking time off with my loved one, here is a piece, originally a voice-letter, to a dear friend from the middle of an ongoing conversation about the...

I have a spring basket full of good things for you this Easter week. As is appropriate to the season, some are sweet like chocolate, some are wrapped in colourful sleeves and others partake of endings and difficulty, before the beauty of transformation is apparent. I hope you enjoy them. The art, writing and and audio at Uncivil Savant is available to all with no financial barrier to access. Pleas...

When did your heart first leap out of itself , wanting to reside in the body of they-who-had-just-walked-past? They were surely more you than your own self, yet without ungainly stoop, spot-free, gaze level rather than downcast, half smile rather than self-conscious frown. With that leap, which can only be achieved by a kind of projection, the poetic aspect of ‘projection’ not explained by psychol...

A tree offers an uncontrived response A strong westerly is blowing and there’s a ‘yellow warning’ of high winds. The still-bare trees outside my window are bobbing and weaving like a lad in a pub, hands over-full of a large round of drinks, somehow making his way back to his mates through a throng of wildly gesticulating half-time big-screen football fans. Will he stay upright? We shall see. The d...

Back in the Imaginal Field , skylarks spill their trailing cascades above the field like sugar on the tea break tablecloth. Sweetness above, mud underfoot. The last week of winter neatly folds down the sheet on spring’s bed. Dock seeds scatter the floor of the shepherd’s hut where my new books sit on a Formica table like two eggs in a nest. Damp air has buckled the essay’s nine printed sheets, the...

I have often remarked to friends that the River Thames is a hidden, long, thin county of England, with its own customs, rules and celebrations which only boat dwellers, river users, lock keepers and island dwellers know. But there is a longer, thinner complete country, more vast and yet less visible even than the stretched shire that is the Isis. Tidelandia. Today I know that it is the rock of thi...

It is Wednesday, named for Woden, Odin, he of the one baleful eye. With it, even without the parallax view, he would see that today is a golden coin, unearthed from the ploughed field of autumn. Bright, chill to the touch, marvellous. I reach down to pick it up. Whose face glints on it? Minerva, goddess of wisdom , justice, law, trade, victory, crafts, sponsor of the arts, patron of trade and of s...

Oak comes to the rescue, yet again. This laptop sits on a cork mat which prevents the cold hard aluminium edge of the camping table, which provisionally serves as my writing desk, from digging into my my wrists. I send heartfelt thanks to the cork oaks of Spain, Portugal and southern France, where the raw materials for this mass-produced natural cork-fragment mat were likely harvested. Years ago,...

I pack a box, clean a table, write more. The day is all mixed up. I cut my toenails then cry into my phone at the beauty of a message. The world is mixed up. The aspect ratio of verity and simile is not even. Joy is still joy. Hate is still hate. They were so before, during, and after, I wrote this post, which likely changes nothing except for the itching in my two typing fingers and the density o...

Welcome to the 100th podcast episode! There’s an off the cuff intro plus the full audio from my recent Zoom conversation with Paul Kingsnorth from his Machine Sessions 1 for the launch of his upcoming book Against the Machine . As soon as I have read it, I’ll write about it here. But for now, enjoy our conversation. If you’d like to watch the video of it, and all Paul’s other conversations in this...

Ships of differing flags have come to moor inside myself , anchoring in the part of me which welcomes-in mystery. Here come the big ships - Goodness, Truth and Beauty. Are they from one fleet or from opposing navies? I do not recognise their flags and pennants nor do I understand the movements of the crews. But I have a deep interest in their cargoes. My two beloved wisdom traditions have such con...

It’s coming up for three years since I started this Uncivil Savant , and for the first time in many months, I have been taking a look through some of the pieces from the years before I opened this particular writing space. The space before this one was letters and emails to my dear friends and trusted colleagues. Thinking in conversation. It’s still a joy, but with so many of my gang of friends no...

The function of the Machine is onslaught The oil that allows its gears to turn is provided by your mind. The mill which expresses the oil from your mind is precisely calibrated to extract the maximum levels of anxiety from your thoughts, as, like the industrially mined and finely micronized graphite additive in engine oil, your raised cortisol and adrenaline levels greatly aid the smooth functioni...

The oaks bear it. The brunt of the sun. Turn their bitterness to acorn and gall. Buddleia is wilting, the weight of the butterflies barely registers. Whispering - ‘Remember how to be gentle before the burning time’. The forest always goes past at 80 miles an hour. My eyes are impatient lovers, the purple bruise of heather spreading under my proprietorial gaze. Yet the shimmering heath renders beau...

In a time of the unsayable not only being said, but being enacted, I have withdrawn into speaking less. I haven’t been calling people, (my generation still phone each other), only leaving occasional short voice messages, like my younger friends. I love to talk with people, but I feel a time of silence is needed, so by the time you read this, I will have had three days quiet time with the sea and t...

I spent most of last week on an art residency. For those of you from other walks of life, this is where you are invited and sometimes paid, to go away from home and make your art, often in response or relation to some aspect of the venue, people or institution that invite you. Perhaps it's easier to sit a 7-day Zen retreat. My mind, stripped of all stimuli but my body and a blank wall, quickly qui...

Every six months or so, inspired by thoughtful writing by Ruth Gaskovski , I end up writing a tactile / haptic response or addendum to something rich from School of the Unconformed. In this case Architecture for the Free Mind was the prompt and my desire is to add a little detail to a possible materiality for a free life. I contributed some snaps of my studio areas, full of unmade objects and hand...

This week, glimpses from a week wrestling with good. The Great Mystery, as I experience it, is in all things and makes itself known hour by hour. We have never had a pugilistic relationship. Instead, I struggle with good , that is, how people, including myself, behave to one another, especially online. Online is where I must sadly spend a large amount of time at the moment to make certain projects...

This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with Dougald Hine . (Y...

This week, four poems. Some take years to find a shape, others arrive fully formed. Their promptness or tardiness to the party, their languishing in my laptop or notebooks in various states of déshabillé - none of these correlates to whether they will be good mixers, or that they’ll skulk in a corner, eyeing the host’s impressive bookshelves morosely. Also this week, my, what interesting times to...

This week, a story gathered fresh from the wild last week about how we unwittingly get caught in serfdom, and how we might walk away free. Some things that seem to be dead can haunt an unwitting culture or even possess it. A way of life as old and long-lived as feudalism , which persisted in diverse forms for centuries in Europe and Japan, and millennia in China, amongst other places, rears its he...