Uncivil Savant Podcast

Fate It's my fate to work with the fragmentary, the partial, detritus, the discarded and the unwanted. Matter is holographic. If the Divine is in everything, then any one thing is a holograph of the whole. Completeness can be accessed through incompleteness more easily than through the search for completeness. Searching for ‘wholeness’ is a fool’s errand. 2 Attention to the unwanted, the vestigial...

The Dragon In the Taoist Classics, dragons signify many things, depending on context, but the one I want to talk about is the sky dragon as the spirit of nature and the nature of spirit. In many Chinese artifacts and art you will see a joyful, sinuous dragon, mouth open, wide eyes, and wider smile, front legs outreaching with all its energy towards its goal - the pearl. What is this pearl? Well, t...

I have been grinding bone ash, marble dust, chalk, oyster shell white and ochre into various binders: gum Arabic, aquafaba, linseed oil, gum tragacanth, cherry tree gum, oat gruel… My cunning plan, to one day wean people off plastic marker pens when they see how great metal marks made on prepared grounds can look: bold, permanent, soft, shiny, grey, black, brown, golden… And so I mull things over...

Talking with friends is like spring water to me , which also means I sometimes neglect it in favour of another cup of strong tea when I should return to the source… Some years, it can seem like our energy is scattered and broadcast in all directions. It can feel like all the work we are doing, the research, the admin, the writing, the organising, doesn’t seem to add up to anything, let alone somet...

This week I am grieving my dear aunt, and cannot write. We’re on an in-between-essays week, so here are four things for you, sent with care, sadness and bursts of feral joy, all mixed up, as befits such violent times. There’s a somewhat ranting letter to a friend from 2022, plus three poems against tyranny and empire, inner and outer. Here, Boudica stands for a correct, noble, defence of lifeways,...

As I walked out today , the great tits were already singing their spring songs: ‘I am here! See how fit and healthy I am! I wish to mate!’ 1 I had woken up with far too much love and nowhere to stow it. So, with a prayer and a wry smile, I laid my bundle at the door of The Great Mystery. And then He said, ‘Tell them about that time I fixed your back.’ I spent a long time forgetting this, thereby r...

Many thanks to Peco who last week wrote to me with an interesting question regarding the Taoist view on evil. Peco’s writing was some of the first I discovered on here, and, as I have written before, it often moves and educates me in equal measure, as does the writing of his wife Ruth. In answer, I cannot write for all Taoists, and especially not for ‘Taoism’. These thoughts below are personal and...

From the beginning in November 2022, this Substack has included many letters and excerpts from letters which I have sent to my dear ongoing correspondents. I only give names or initials when I have received permission to do so. Sometimes it is correct to anonymise them. I write best by communicating with friends, the land of my home here in Wessex, with certain trees, or materials which call to me...

It is a fact that no matter how well you try to live your life, there will be people who don’t like you. This is as natural and unavoidable as weather, and occasionally as unpleasant. Before the internet, and especially before mobile phones, kids could get away from bullies after school, workplace difficulties could be left behind for the evening, and the private sphere was actually still pretty m...

Fragments from a sandstone cliff face in early winter light. 1: I note the present impossibility of loving smoothly. The heart’s Archimedean screw , continually turning to bring up the flow. It must always be spiralling if you want there to be fresh water. As though the heart’s turning is caused by some attachment to the gyring cosmos making it so. Blessings never accrue enough to stop the need fo...

For the first time in a year there is no Substack post due on a Monday morning. I have been cooking venison in many different ways all weekend for a group of 15 while my friend teaches her ‘using the whole animal’ course. Around me as I type, people nibble jerky, carve gorge-hooks for fishing from leg bones and paint designs on buckskin using a surprisingly excellent paint made from ochres and vit...

A year and a day In old tales we often hear the phrase ‘a year and a day’ to denote a magical, significant period of time, or a poetic way of saying that a year has passed by. Thirteen lunar months of twenty-eight days (13 x 28 = 364), plus one extra day is 365 days, a regular solar year. That is how long I will have been writing publicly here on Substack by Tuesday 21st November 2023. It feels fa...

With my head in a fog, unable to sharpen my wits to finish the new essays, I offer instead two pieces from the last half decade of letters to friends around the loose theme of uncertainty, which cajoled my handful of functioning brain cells to put them together. When I publish emails here, I edit them only very lightly. Some pieces were originally off-the-cuff, others were serious replies in month...

This week I offer thoughts on how words can be written during wartime, (carefully, sincerely, mainly). I send warm greetings to those who read my dispatches, I appreciate all your emails and comments, thank you for joining me here. Also, many thanks again to the friends with whom I remain in many-years-long communion by email and other ways of connecting, in conversation with whom many of the thou...

There will no brave solo hero like in films. Pervasive awareness and sustained attention are hardly telegenic. What must be borne, transformed, returned or achieved will be done by some ordinary people together and not by a maverick lone man or teenage girl who is gonna - godammit - save the day. It'll most likely be small groups, large groups, not necessarily even exclusively by humans. These peo...

The Door There is a holy place where an impossible feeling resides. I used to name it euphoria , but it is not that, in the way moderns use it. It is the natural joy of many organisms, and now I see that it is not only human, but is everywhere. The cat turning over in the dusty sun, the swan hooting and puffing, the moment when the chords resolve only to suddenly suspend again, as in late Bach or...

This week I want to gather a few things that stem from ordinary moments of neighbourliness, abundance, or lack, as well as the deeper storing, mending and testing that are appropriate for me in these times. I was due to post on this topic last week, but a little late is fine. Plus, I feel that the basket of foraged thoughts this week will be a little less sorted and tidied than usual, as reflects...

There is a pervasive contemporary opinion that feeling or expressing joy somehow makes you a ‘less serious person’. This is patently nonsense, akin to dismissing someone’s ideas because of their accent or dialect, which still happens widely in my country, (especially with people from the Midlands or the West Country being seen as coming across as somehow less intelligent). As a large, widely distr...

This afternoon was spent with my great friend Nick Hunt and his photogenic dog Otto. Years ago Nick stumbled upon a valley near Bath, the site of a now defunct ochre works which ran for hundreds of years. When he sent me the pictures of Otto’s red feet I could not believe the intensity of the colour, I had never seen anything like it. Within a week a parcel of uncanny weight arrived at my boat and...

A series of interesting challenges has presented itself, one will be very public, others are private, and one regards health. All of them present the same conundrum at heart: how do I stand my ground using softness? This seemingly oxymoronic term is used regularly by my T’ai Chi Master Mark Raudva as an elegant way of describing what an ideal yield in pushing hands is like: we neither lean nor inc...

This week has seen a series of unexpected events which have kept me by the sea’s edge and nowhere near this laptop. However, that now gives me an opportunity to share this letter to two friends from May 2021. There is a profound and sterile solipsism in the death-denying culture I am surrounded by, perhaps where you live, too. In a series of emails, we discussed death, life and the initiatory proc...

Muse in me is at once like a guest , a meal and a wolf; consumed and consuming. At times hunkered down like a prepper with protein bars and weaponry, sometimes loose-limbed and striding out speaking in tongues to trees. Other times he is tight as wind-knots in fishing line, the hard place that will not run smoothly through the eye of life. He likes (me) to fight, to fish, to wrestle, to draw, to w...

It was twenty past ten and the spotlights were hot and bright. The raised dais and carefully draped couch were still empty, our pencils were all sharpened, there was a muttering in the life room. The tutor said, ‘Right then, who’s volunteering? One hour each, we’ll need five of you.’ It was 1989, early in the first term of my two years at Shelley Park 1 art college, housed in the repurposed, chara...

When I started this Substack I regularly included pieces expanded from my ongoing practice of writing to, and thinking with, friends, which is, apart from discussions at the table with food and wine, my favourite mode of meaning-making. It’s time for another recent instalment culled from my trusty ancient Hotmail account, that tireless μεταφορά (removals, transporter, metaphor…) machine. I have re...

One day the internet will fail First come family and friends, the bushel of people I love most. When my world suddenly changed and I came home to roost a mile from my birthplace, I realised instinctively that rebuilding a meaningful life came from committing to love and being loved by this group of people, and that other goodness would flow from this. I had tried to please or placate, control or i...