I wrote about how I feel about the crisis in my podcast yesterday. But I do have a small narrative to offer, in addition to other narratives trying to make sense of the situation.

It’s been remarkable to see how quickly the ‘worst people’ have pivoted from 2 years of feeding the machine as dress-up epidemiologists to experts in Eastern European international relations and/or War Correspondents. The transparent switch and grift *should* be enough to choke on and cause scales to fall from eyes. But brainworms find their home between credulous ears.

It’s also bonkers the way people speak so confidently about the situation. How they project their own area of interest/side of whatever culture war they are engaged in on to the situation. One such egregious example has been covered at length by Huw Lemmey in his newsletter this week.

I really recommend you check it out. Huw writes “We all have our lenses through which we read the world, and it’s natural that when something new occurs that sits outside our frames of reference, we try to apply our ideological frames to understand it – usually unsuccessfully.”

Now, I have absolutely no fucking idea whats going on.

The situation is hugely complex and cannot be reduced down to one simple narrative or cause. Nato, Putin is hitler, blah, blah, blrainworms. Instead we have to try and complexify outwards. Understand the world in all its myriad contexts and relations (via ‘all the lenses’) to one another. ‘All the things’, the events ‘contain’.

One of the lenses that ‘the worst people’ look out upon the world though is via a European/liberal secular lens. Which means they restrict their view of multi-faceted events down to one myopic viewing angle. (see Huw’s newsletter again). They also seem to think tweeting about shit will stop an invasion or something, perhaps magical thinking does exist somewhere in their universe… anyways.

I’d like to briefly look though another lens. One that I have been seeing the invasion though but haven’t seen mentioned anywhere. else. I checked in with a friend in War Studies yesterday and they sent me this link as the only other example they had seen.

Narrative Hearts

This tweet from US Embassy Kyiv – Posted 22nd of Feb provides the window though which we can see another layer of complexity.

This tweet isn’t just ‘a troll’ as most of the English speaking press reported it. It references an ongoing and very real crisis – see below.

Reconstitution

A 2018 survey found that 71.7% of Ukrainians declared themselves believers. About 67.3% of the population declared adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity. In Russia 66% are believers. With 41.1% indicating adherence to one or another strand of Orthodox Christianity.

Since 1991 a great deal of the emergent post-Soviet Russian national identity has been reconstituted around an embrace and return to Russian Orthodoxy. In many respects Russia is one of the first ‘post secular states’ dealing with 100 years of spiritual whiplash. (Think about what it must have been like living though England during Edward VI/Jane/Mary/Elisabeth 1 or something). I also think the post secular state is coming for the rest of Europe this century too. So hold on to your hats.

It’s hard to describe to a secular person – in a Catholic rooted/post-reformation Protestant society – what it means to experience the world as an Orthodox Christian. A return to Orthodoxy means the return of the literal reality of symbols and signs. I don’t use the word Belive here, I purposely use Experience.

As the tweet from the US Embassy indicates: The narrative heart of Russia, ‘Mother Russia’ as a story has her roots in Kyiv and the history of the Kievan Rus’. The ‘Historical Russia and the mistakes of Lenin’ that Putin was rambling on about earlier this week is connected to this longer 1000 year religious and spiritual history.

Before we can go any further we must pivot to talk about ongoing events that I am pretty sure not a single one of ‘the worst people’ knows anything about at all….

UKRAINIAN CHURCH CRISIS

Since 2018 there has been an ongoing schism in the Orthodox Church. I’ve been following it all ambiently via orthochristian.com in my RSS reader for years.

On September 7, 2018, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople sent two exarchs, one from the U.S. and another from Canada, to Kiev in order to initiate the process of “legitimatizing” a schismatic “autocephalous” church in the Ukraine, breaking its former promises not to do any such thing, and without any consultation with the existing canonical Church, which constitutes the vast majority of practicing Orthodox Christians in Ukraine.

It really is a crisis. The TLDR is nationalist sentiments in Ukraine are urging the appointment and creation of a ‘Ukrainian Church’. This schismatic unfolding also concerns the Greek Church equally.

A Ukrainian Church would cut the Russian Church adrift from its 1000 years of history and living narrative back to Kiev and its birthplace. Again it’s important to remember that Orthodoxy situates people in a living universe – the literal reality of symbols and signs.

To cut the Russian Church adrift ‘symbolically’ by the creation of a Ukrainian Church is also to do so ‘literally’. Resulting in an unmooring of the national story, a broken heart.

Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces

Russia’s Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces was consecrated in May 2020. Delayed due to the pandemic. The 3rd largest cathedral in the orthodox world.

Watch the speech given by the patriarch during the blessing:

It’s also worth noting that Euro News was incorrect, mosaics of Putin and Stalin were installed in the cathedral. Despite the public outcry.

I’m not going to go into the reality of image in Orthodoxy, but it gesturing toward.

So: we have the gathering together of a new and living national story post 1991, the threat of religious schism at its foundations, the consecration of a huge temple to the armed forces, and a war…. A war unfolding at the location of the beginning of the story.

Given the schismatic nature of the Russian/Ukrainian church and its consequences for the literal experience of reality for the people involved. It is worth considering the European wars of religion as a historical current for the ongoings in the world. (History of the European wars of religion of course acknowledge that is more complicated than the easy narrative of reformation for their cause)

Anyways. This is just a snippet of the ongoing present that complicates what’s happening. This lens extends the context of these events backward 1000 years. To what extent Putin himself feels like he is inside this current, given his formative years were spent rooting out the religious folks in the country he controls – we’ll probably never know – and I don’t really care. Regardless, his face is upon the temple wall. And this is a symbolic universe.

I really don’t know what the fuck is going on, nor am I pretending to know. The completeness of crisis is too big to understand. Too awful to try and comprehend. Nevertheless it’s important that we acknowledge that it’s way more complicated than any of the explanations the worst people are offering.

In a narrative war, a cultural war, one has to call out uncomplicated stories wherever we encounter them.

To be quite honest, the sensible thing to do is log off.

Photo 365

One of the things about taking a photo everyday, is that its made me realise *just* how much time I spend around/by the Old Man. “He never seems to worry Doesn’t care for fortune’s fame He never seems to hurry But he gets there just the same”

Say.Act.Feel

A recognition that not one of us knows what the fuck is going on. The past 2 years should have made this abundantly clear.

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Been working on my Strelka talk every day – cancelled now obviously
• Working on an application for a thing with Andrew Dana Hudson
• Looking long and hard at a *very* nearly finished piece of creative work
• Learning more about Unity shaders
• Interviewed by Timo Peach on Unseethefuturepod
• Spreadsheeting

Dipping the Stacks

Albert Einstein and Marian Anderson’s Friendship of Happenstance | Fords Theatre

Anderson and Einstein met backstage after the concert and Einstein offered to escort Anderson to the Nassau Inn where she had a reservation. When she arrived with Einstein, the hotel manager denied her accommodations because of the inn’s stated “whites only” policy. Einstein invited Anderson to stay at his nearby home with his daughter for the night.

Chinese Scientists Discover How to Grow ‘Seawater’ Rice – Bloomberg

Chinese scientists have developed salt-tolerant strains of rice in a bid to ensure food security as sea levels rise from climate change.

Spotify playlists are being taken over by bot accounts

Multiple users have complained that their public, collaborative playlists — designed to allow Spotify users and their friends to curate songs in real time together — have been commandeered by bots masquerading as normal users, primarily one account simply named “Ashley.”

Headbangers’ Bangladesh: discussing the state of play with Dhaka’s hard rockers, Crunch

I first met Shahed in the trenches of retail, selling and shifting furniture for the well-healed and oft ill-mannered denizens of the King’s Road area of London while he was studying for an MBA. I knew he was a metalhead right away, with a serious fondness for the classics. 

What’s Their Game? – Outland

The NFT market has spawned a new cultural form that has elements of games but not their rules. Blitmap and Forgotten Runes are two examples.

Reading

I’ve been reading Gordon White’s Ani.Mysitc all week. Nothing else.

Taking it slow to absorb it. Gonna sling the ebook my on kindle and re-read over the next few months and take copious notes.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

Wovenhand – Silver Sash

Silver Sash is Wovenhand’s first new album since 2016’s Star Treatment. An album I played to death. Wovenhand is of course, the long time musical project of American poet and songwriter David Eugene Edwards – the driving force behind hugely influential band 16 horsepower.

Silver Sash isn’t quite Edwards first material in years since Star treatment however. There’s been the 2018 collab album with Alexandrer Hacke Risha, and his surprise 2020 collaboration with one of my favourite synth wave artist’s Carpenter Brut – Which is brain melting good (See below)

Silver Sash is also a collaboration of sorts. Chuck French – guitarist of the now disbanded (sadly) aggressive Emocore band Plans Mistaken For Stars appears as co-writer. I wrote about the death of Gared O’Donnell, and the influence PMFS had on my life last year.

Silver Sash is a fucking fantastic album. Firmly rooted in Edwards religious gothic country, but Silver Sash takes on a more psych rock feel in 2022, with synths and lots of electronics. I wonder if the Brut collaboration moved the dial more in this direction? Then again I also think this may also be the influence of French too.

The albums 3rd track Duat Hawk has desert western vibes,

and contrasts nicely with the noisy (almost) industrial country song ‘The Lash’ which appears late on the LP

This album is so good, pretty much everything you might want from a gothic country band. The albums liner notes say that it was recored and mixed across the groups homes during the pandemic, I wonder if this also contributes towards its psych feel?

Two artists from two of my favourite bands have made an album together. What’s not to love?

By the way. If you have made it this far and NO IDEA who David Eugene Edwards is, I highly recommend The Preacher a documentary about him from the year 2000.

I also urge you all to watch Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus (trailer below) a road trip documentary about musicians in the white American south. Its one of the best films I’ve ever seen.

yeule – Glitch Princess

I wrote last Jan that I was “looking forward to this release and hearing more ” after blogging about the opening track My Name is Nat Ćmiel.

The album doesn’t disappoint. Glitch Princess is an album of glitchy ambient pop, hazel vocals and bold imagery float over synths and pulses. Only for the lyrical content to explode into distorted screams.

The subject matter addressed on this album is at times quite difficult, anxieties, relationships, morbid imagery, depression, hyperbole. It is a in many ways a complete psychological character study of ‘yeule’. The album ends with a 4 hour 44 minute long ambient drone track (which I listened to whilst organising my bookshelf last Sunday) – 444 is also of course an angel number. I wondered if this album is an exercise in world building for the ‘character’ of album to live inside. The presence of Danny from PC music as producer and co-writer on some tracks seems to suggest this might be the case.

Friendly Machine is (I think) my favourite track:

Remember Kids:

The post Reconstitution appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 20, 2021

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Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S04E44

In preparation for the rootlessness of England post Union. St Edmund is an important figure who should be retrieved from deep cultural memory.

Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2021/11/19/301-2144-st-edmund-the-martyr/

Watch 301 on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/jayspringett

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Website: https://thejaymo.net/

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St Edmund the Martyr

I’ve been thinking about landscape, hyper thickness, landship, and history this week. They’re topics that seem to be popping up in my diary a lot, which means there’s a thread to pull. 

A couple of episodes ago, I talked about how successive governments have tried (and failed) to constitute a British identity as a cultural project. Just as the media confuse London for Westminster. So to do people who live in England confuse it for Britain. It was this confused English idea of Britain that fuelled the idea of Brexit for example.

Given that the fractures in the bedrock of the British state are continuing to widen. The breakup and collapse of the union is now inevitable. With this as a position in mind, I’ve been thinking about English identity, specifically ~white~ identity. What (if any) sort of cultural project could be attempted to constitute a new English identity beyond racists online and the population draping themselves in St Georges flags once every 4 years?.

Today is November the 20th. The Feast day of St. Edmund the Martyr. The first and then later co-patron saint of England alongside Edward the Confessor.

St Edmund, Patron saint of torture victims, wolves and funnily enough, pandemics. 

You never hear much about old Edmund these days do you? 

It’s all about OG Roman St George the chad dragon slayer. A saint who grew in the cultural imagination with members of the Order of the Garter and fanatical English peasantry during the crusades. He was finally adopted by the English nobility as their patron in the early 15th Century during the Last War of Independence with Wales. Adopted to help fight the revolt that mustered under the flag of a dragon.

St George the slayer of dragons: patron saint of soldiers; archers; and armourers cuts a romantic figure in the imagination. A patron Saint that helped shape the idea of Britain and its empire from english minds.

But what about the figure of the English king? One who was captured, tortured and tied to an oak tree. Shot with arrows and speared with javelins until he was (to paraphrase the old English) covered with missiles ‘like the bristles of a hedgehog.’ 

St Edmund was elected King in 855 at the age of fourteen to rule Suffolk. Nothing else beyond those details are known. Either of his life or his reign. We don’t even know what year he was killed, but it’s thought to be 869.

What textual evidence we do have is from the ‘Anglo-Saxon Chronicle‘ written the following year – 870.

“Here the army rode across Mercia into East Anglia, and took winter-quarters at Thetford; and that winter King Edmund fought against them, and the Danish took the victory, and killed the king and conquered all that land’’

According to legend, after being killed on the tree, he was beheaded on the orders of Ivar the Boneless and his brother Ubba. His dismembered was head thrown into the forest, but found by searchers following the cries of an ethereal wolf calling out in Latin, “Hic, Hic, Hic” or “Here, Here, Here”.

Edmund’s body was originally buried in a small wooden chapel near to the site of his killing. Thirty years the Vikings of East Anglia began to venerate him. Produced coinage to commemorate his martyrdom. O St Edmund the king! read the coins inscription. In 925 his body was transferred to what is now Bury St Edmunds (funnily enough) and from then on his cult began to flourish and grow.

For centuries the shrine was visited by the various kings of England. The most famous being King Canute. Who after converting to Christianity rebuilt the abbey. In 1020, he made a pilgrimage and offered his own crown upon the shrine as atonement for the sins of his forefathers.

The modern Orthodox Cansted to St Edmund has the lines:

‘Not yielding to sharp and grievous tortures, thou hast gone to them as if they were pleasures, abiding with the Lord and singing, O glorious Edmund. Whilst fixed to the trees with arrows the sound of thy prayers to the King of heaven and earth resounded like thunder.’

Edmunds death of course has echoes of St Sebastian’s martyrdom. The early christian saint who too was tied to a tree and shot through with arrows. Though unlike our English king, survived. Sebastian was also prayed to in defence against plague. There is also the interesting symbolism of Edmund’s headlessness. Which I don’t have time to go into right now. 

Edmunds shrine was destroyed during the English Reformation. Silver and gold to the value of over 5000 marks were taken from the building. Given that a mark is about 200g of silver, 200*5000 is 1000 metric tons of precious metal. Can you imagine? On the 4 November 1539 the abbot and his monks were expelled from the abbey and it was dissolved.

There are already currents in flow to revive St Edmund. In 2006, a group that included BBC Radio Suffolk and the East Anglian Daily Times ran a campaign to reinstate Edmund as patron saint of England. In 2013 another campaign began with the backing of representatives from businesses, churches, radio and local politicians.

St Edmund is an important figure who should be retrieved from deep cultural memory. In preparation for the rootlessness of England post Union. 

We currently have the toxic masculinity of the chad dragon slayer, but maybe we need a literal virgin king martyred against a mighty oak.

Watch

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in the audio due to time constraints.

If you’d like to support this blog and its various projects, please consider making a regular contribution here. It genuinely helps me keep things up and running, so thank you!

The post St Edmund the Martyr | 2144 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

September 25, 2020

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Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S03E38

The life of St Thérèse of Lisieux, her parents, sisters and family. The Kaleidoscope clarifies the holy trinity, the ‘Act of Oblation’ working, poetry, and death.

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St Thérèse of Lisieux

It will be October next time we speak and St Therese of Lisieux’s feast day will have passed. In recognition of ancestors: I’ll begin with her parents. Saints Louis Martin and Zélie Guérin. Who’s saints day happens to be today.

Louis Martin was a watchmaker and his wife Zelle a lacemaker. Together they are the first (and to date only) married couple to be Canonized in the Catholic tradition. Married in 1858, they intended to live a life of celibately. However, they consummated their marriage ten months later after encouragement from their spiritual director.

They went on to have 9 children 4 of whom died in infancy. The remaining 5, all girls became nuns. The youngest was Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face. Born 2 January 1873. Died 30th September 1897 at the age of 24. Her Saints day is October 1. 

As you can imagine, she was raised in a very Catholic environment. Her family attended mass at 5.30am daily, and observed the rhythm of the liturgical year with its fasts and prayers. In 1877, at four and a half her mother died of breast cancer. She would later write “Every detail of my mother’s illness is still with me, especially her last weeks on earth”. “The first part of my life stopped that day“. Her father moved the family to Lisieux months later.

At the age of 9, her sister Marie Pauline entered the monastery at Lisieux and she was – devastated.  15 years her senior her sister had become a second mother to her. The shock of this departure reawakened the trauma of her mother’s death and she began suffering tremors and neurotic attacks. Cured after she had turned to gaze at the statue of the Virgin Mary in her bedroom, who had smiled back at her. She wrote in a letter aged 10 about the experience: “Our Blessed Lady has come to me, she has smiled upon me. How happy I am.”

On Christmas Eve of that year she then experienced what she called a ‘complete conversion’. After 9 years of sorrow at the death of her mother she wrote that “Jesus accomplished the work I had not been able to do”. The following spring her father suffered a catastrophic stroke. During his recovery Thérèse announced her intention to take up the habit and join the monastery. 

It would take another two years of fervent prayer and an audience with the then pope before being admitted to the Carmelite order in 1888. At the age of 15. An order reformed in the sixteenth century by Teresa of Ávila. Her days from then on devoted to silent labour and personal and collective prayer.  

Her time as a postulant taught her that in religious life no sacrifice astonished her. She learnt that to deviate from routine resulted in “the mind wandering in arid lands where the water of grace is soon lacking”.

Once year later she took the habit and given the epithet ‘of the Child Jesus’. She fell into a life of retreat and subtraction. In her work she returns repeatedly to the theme of littleness and simplicity. Referring to herself as a grain of sand.

Her early twenties were influenced heavily by writings of the mystic St John of the Cross. She wrote she had “no other spiritual nourishment.” It was during this time she began contemplating depictions of the disfigured face of Jesus during His Passion. and gained her second name ‘of the Holy Face’

After 5 years of spiritual work she appointed Prioress Novice Mistress by her sister who was by this time Mother of the Convent.

She excelled at explaining spiritual doctrine to younger novitiates using the new technology of the time. The three mirrors of a Kaleidoscope clarified the holy trinity. The elevator, describes God’s grace, and the Steam train illustrates Christ as Logos. 

It was though teaching these concepts she saw the limitations of her efforts. So she began adding the words, “very little,” (toute petite) in front of her name.

On June 9, 1895 at the age of 22 during Mass, Thérèse was stuck with inspiration that she should offer herself as a sacrificial victim to Gods merciful love. After the service she wrote the “Act of Oblation to Merciful Love” and performed the ritual in her cell with her Sister. It is one hell of a document, though I personally wouldn’t perform it. “In the evening of this life, I shall appear before you with empty hands. Lord, I do not ask you to count my works.”

Two years later she was dead from tuberculosis. 
She was 24.

In her final years she wrote ‘Story of a Soul‘ from her sick bed at the behest of those in the convent. An autobiography containing diary entries, spiritual commentary, prayers and poetry.

I read it earlier this year during the beginning of the UK lockdown. I emerged from both the book and my years-long depression at the same time. The ‘Prayer to Obtain Humility’ stuck me like a lightning rod. “Each morning I resolve to be humble, and in the evening I recognise that I have often been guilty of pride.” asking to “send humiliation whenever I try to set myself above others”. Other poems like ‘To Scatter Flowers‘ or ‘I Thirst For Love‘ are alive and electric in their performance.

If you feel like a bottle tossed about by a raging sea right now – it may be a book for you too.

The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post St Thérèse of Lisieux | 2038 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 28, 2019

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Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S2E13

The Reverend George Harvest – Rector of Thames Ditton

AKA

‘The most forgetful man in England’

 

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The Most Forgetful Man In England

For the next 5 minutes let me tell you about Reverend George Harvest – Rector of Thames Ditton AKA ‘The most forgetful man in england’ .

His whole life seems like a paragon of befuddled englishness. But in reality as Gems from a Fable Land makes clear: Though an acceptable preacher and a good scholar, he was offensive and sloven, and his failings made him often coarse and rude.  End quote. 

So I don’t think he was as endearing his biographers make him out to be.

Harvest Was born in to money in 1728 and went on to Graduate Oxford University. After which he prepared to take the holy orders. Already as a young man known by his “singular absent mindedness.“

After becoming a priest and with a secured yearly income of 300 pounds in 1700 monies – He was an extremely eligible bachelor. Very soon he Ingratiate himself with the daughter of his boss – the local bishop and soon they were to marry. 

With this accepted: a date was set, plans made, and the event was to be officiated by the bride’s father. 

The day arrived and amidst the frantic preparations of the bridal party, flowers arranged, and a grand spread being organised. Harvest awoke that morning and was struck by the deepest desire to catch Gudgens (a type of small fish) in the Thames. The weather being excellent, he packed his rod and lure and set off for a full days fishing.

It is not known exactly when Harvest realised his mistake, BUT when he had finally legged it to the church, he found his marriage and ANY prospect of any kind of promotion EVER in tatters. 

Soon after this farce, he found himself in thames ditton – a job (i should note that he only secured via the charity of an influential friend) he soon fell in love and set a date for his second attempt at marriage. The book A field Guide to the english clergy describe what happened next like this.. And trust me, You thought he would have learnt his lesson. 

“On the day in question when the carriage called to pick him up he was nowhere to be found. Several hours later, as harvest was midway though supper with some people he’d met on a morning stroll to Richmond he realised that he was meant to be doing something rather more important that day. He rushed back, only to find another sobbing bride and another furious father. 

Apparently informing the offended party that it had been ‘one of the pleasantest walks of my life”

As you can imagine this did nothing to engender any reconciliation and Harverst remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

Due to his chronic lateness he was also known to shave on route to engagements whilst on the back of his horse. With one memorable incident of having done his ablutions discreetly down the road, His horse startled and rand down the lane. With the hapless, soapy and topless preist coming to a stop right outside a nobel ladies house with her family also standing outside to greet him. 

He was not known as a man who carried money. Instead apparently his pockets were always full of gingerbread, angleworms, tobacco, gunpower which he would carry around until his pockets were quote so corrupt and noisome as to render his company a perfect nuisance’.

The duchess of pembrokeshire one wrote that she turned enough raw dirt out of his coat pockets to fill a dust shovel.

Harvest was also known to misplace his horse at every opportunity. Indeed it’s said that not a single person in THREE counties was prepared to lend him a horse under any circumstances. 

There are not one but several recorded incidents of him misplacing the animal he was riding and returning to stables dragging a rein and bridle along the floor and could offer no explanation as to the status or location of the misplaced horse.

Other well known stories about this useless man included. One day he spies his friend and his friend’s wife in a room together and thought it would be funny to lock them in. 

Turning the key he slipped it in his pocket, and then joke slipped his mind. The prisoners were not released until well after nightfall.

Another time on a fine walk Harvest and his acquaintance had stopped to skim pebbles along the thames. On being asked the time, his friend looked on in horror as he proceeded to skim his golden pocket watch across the surface of the water and pocket the flat stone. He apparently didn’t realise his error until late in the day.

Once, forgetting it was a Sunday (naturally), he burst in on his shocked congregation with a loaded gun thinking them squatters or thieves. 

There are so many more redonkulous stories I don;t have time to recount them here in any detail. He once urinated mistakenly in the dark on one Lady Onslows leg whilst lecturing on the wonders of celestial mechanics, once hit Onslow round the head trying to kill a fly so hard that she temporarily became ‘deranged her faculties’.

And apparently once cured a parishioners chronic quinsy by laughter at his blundering about in the dark, falling down some stairs and destroying furniture and drapery. Oh, and he also got lost in Hrance whilst accompanying the Lord of Sandwich and was returned to the Inn he was staying in by soldiers thinking him an escaped english maniac. 

I haven’t even got to some of the cruel jokes played on this dysfunctional man by his parishioners. He died in August 1789.

I have two books that include his stories but I’ve just ordered the book ‘The Absent Man’ to learn more. 

Speak to y’all next week!  

The post The Most Forgetful Man In England | 1913 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

April 5, 2019

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Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S02E04

The life an times of the Priest Mermaid: Robert Stephen Hawker

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You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

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Robert Stephen Hawker (1803–1875)

Robert Stephen Hawker was born in the Charles Church vicarage at Plymouth in 1803 Grandson to the formidable Calvinistic preacher and writer Robert Hawker. He attended several preparatory schools but disliked them, and frequently ran away. 

At nineteen Robert entered Pembroke College, Oxford to study for the Anglican priesthood where he discovered a love of poetry. 

His first term was memorable; in November 1823 he married Charlotte l’ans, a Cornish gentlewoman of forty-one, but despite their age difference the union proved happy. The couple spent their honeymoon at Tintagel – a place that kindled his lifelong fascination with Arthurian legend and later inspired him to write ‘The Quest of the Sangraal’.

Ordination followed in 1831 and he began a curacy at North Tamerton near Bude, where he discovered he had a joint calling. Not only to be a priest but also a Mermaid. 

In order to live out this life he fashioned a wig out of seaweed and naked apart from an oilskin wrapped around his legs, would row out to to the rock in the harbour where he would sit and sing brushing his seaweed hair with a comb. 

Each evening the superstitious locals would gather on the cliffs edge to watch the mermaid perform. There are two stories as to why robert  stopped his life as a mermaid. One is that the winter was coming and it became too cold, the other is that a sceptical farmer arrived one day with his gun, threatening to pepper the damsel with shot is she stayed warbling any longer. Whatever the reason, one night in late autumn to a particularly  large audience the mermaid substituted her haunting lament for a rousing rendition of ‘god save the king’ finishing with great gusto she plopped into the water and swam directly home.

Shortly after this incident Robert was appointed vicar of Morwenstow, Cornwall’s most northerly parish in 1835. When he arrived at Morwenstow there had not been a vicar in residence for over a century. Smugglers and wreckers were apparently numerous in the area. A contemporary report says that the Morwenstow wreckers “allowed a fainting brother to perish in the sea … without extending a hand of safety.”

His parishioners Robert became known as Parson Hawker had strongly-built figure, with long fair locks, blue eyes and an increasingly weather-beaten face.  

Robert dressed oddly. Sober clerical garb wasn’t for him and it was said his only black clothes were his socks; he loved bright colours.  Often he wore a long purple coat or a yellow poncho he’d fashioned from a horse-blanket, and underneath a fisherman’s blue jersey.  Crimson gloves, brown or red trousers, and dark sea-boots added to his strange but cheerful appearance and he enjoyed hats, either broad-brimmed or a more flamboyant fez. 

In addition to his outlandish fashion sence Hawker was regarded as a deeply compassionate person giving Christian burials to shipwrecked seamen washed up on the shores of the parish, and was often the first to reach the cliffs when there was a shipwreck. Formerly, the bodies of shipwrecked sailors were often either buried on the beach where they were found or left in the sea. 

He built a little hut on the cliff at Morwenstow, using timbers washed up from the Caledonia and two other vessels wrecked the following year.  He’d sit out on nice days composing his poetry, and during times of storm scour the grey waters for ships in distress.  For many years he continued his gruesome duty of recovering corpses from the sea, and the harrowing task grew to weigh heavily with him; altogether, he rescued nearly fifty bodies. The driftwood hut is now the smallest property in the National Trust portfolio. 

Early in 1863 Charlotte Hawker’s health, poor for some time, worsened; Robert nursed her constantly, sitting at her bedside reading to her.  After her death in February he suffered a period of profound distress, and sought solace in poetry.  

He however remained a polish Governess a year later in December 1864 making her Pauline Hawker who bore him three children. The marriage was happy, but it could not prevent him from sinking into despair and depression. 

Robert Stephen Hawker also adored animals, and acquired several unusual pets. Robin the domesticated stag would sometimes pin vicarage callers to the ground, which perhaps stretches our view of the tameness of the deers domestication.

He talked to birds on the cliffs edge and in the church yard., always invited his nine cats to church and they followed him every sunday, eventually they made up the vast proportion of his congregation. However one day, he reacted with fury when he saw one catching a mouse and publicly excommunicated it in front of the other shocked animals for mousing on a sunday.  

He made friends with a highly intelligent pig named GYP who would roam the vicarage and alert the occupants of any visitors.

Toward the end of his life Hawker wrote increasingly of witches, the evil eye, and the Devil’s emissaries he’d begun to believe he encountered, in a blend of growing persecution mania and mysticism perhaps fuelled by his opium addiction as well as his creative nature. He died penniless in 1875

He you want to read some of the his poetry I would recommend unofficial Cornish anthem  ‘The song of the western man’

The post Robert Stephen Hawker | 1904 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

March 29, 2019

|

History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

S02E03

A brief history of the aphorism “May you live in interesting times” and a little about what to do about it.

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May You Live in Interesting Times

There are so many things I could talk about this week, from the US media waging a two year long mind war on the domestic population, to the minds of men swallowed by the seas of social media, bowing their heads in reverence to a feed that could destroy their lives at any moment from the whims of a virtual the mob. Instead I want to talk about interesting times… 

“May you live in interesting times”. A phrase you have heard many many times I’m sure.

In 1966 Robert F. Kennedy delivered a speech that included it:

There is a Chinese curse which says “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.

Unfortunately this whole story is a load of old bollocks. There is no evidence of this phrase in china at all. The website Quote investigator found that the earliest match for the phrase appeared in The Yorkshire Post in March 1936

The expression was used in a speech by the influential British statesman. Sir Austen Chamberlain – addressing the annual meeting of Birmingham Unionist Association.

He was speaking about: the “grave injury” to collective security by Germany’s violation of the Treaty of Locarno.

Sir Austen, who referred to himself as “a very old Parliamentarian,” said:—

“It is not so long ago that a member of the Diplomatic Body in London, who had spent some years of his service in China, told me that there was a Chinese curse which took the form of saying, ‘May you live in interesting times.’ There is no doubt that the curse has fallen on us.”

“We move from one crisis to another. We suffer one disturbance and shock after another.”

And there you have it. A very old white dude relaying a pithy expression from his mate who probably made it up but instead attached it to the wisdom of the orient.  But there’s still more to this story.

Sir Austin Chamberlain’s father Joseph Chamberlain wrote in a speech in 1898:

“ I think that you will all agree that we are living in most interesting times. (Hear, hear.) I never remember myself a time in which our history was so full, in which day by day brought us new objects of interest, and, let me say also, new objects for anxiety. (Hear, hear.)

So perhaps the phrase comes from the mind of Austins father, and became a foreign curse after the events of the first world war. I’d also like to note that new objects of interest / new objects for anxiety line echos the message of Paul Virilio’s ‘Invention of the ship is the invention of the shipwreck’

There is a clear implication i think that “uninteresting times” of peace and tranquillity are more life-enhancing than interesting ones, which, from a historical perspective, usually include disorder and conflict.

Indeed yer man Hegel wrote in the History of philosophy:

“History is not the soil in which happiness grows. The periods of happiness in it are the blank pages of history.”

Even in 2003 Hillary Clinton released an autobiography that included an instance of the expression where she joked that Bill and I would ask each other, “Well, are you having an interesting time yet?”

The question i have about all this is WHY? What is it about the truth of the phrase ‘May you live in interesting times’ that makes it feel like a curse. Perhaps even A truth perhaps so powerful that it becomes one – regardless of its origins. 

In 1944 D. W. Brogan of LSE wrote that interesting times are “times not to be made better by any simple formula.“

It is safe to say that we do indeed live in interesting times. But it is also essential that we ask or challenge the blank pages of history and ask:

‘Interesting for whom?’.

Yes we are living through catastrophic biosphere collapse, wealth inequality last seen by eyes in heads rolling into blood soaked baskets, and of course the contemporary age of planetary scale computation. Last year I spoke a lot about living in a time like this, and strategies for living though:

Focus on your friends, family and loved ones. They actually do matter more than any of the problems i just mentioned. People in your life experience tragedy and apocalypse all the time. Sharing these with friends and helping people though is more important than worrying about the tides or times of history.  

Focus on the little things and make them better.  The smear on the mirror that needs cleaning, the fraying seam of your friends jumper that needs sewing. Hold someone weeping like you will never let go.  

The only person who can make times better for others and less interesting is you. 

The post May You Live in Interesting Times | 1903 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 30, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

Episode 30 – Acts of St Andrew

 It’s St Andrews Day, So i thought maybe I could talk about him and make you listen.

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Acts of St Andrew

 It’s St Andrew’s Day.

He’s a saint that has always been kind to me.

I was baptised in his church, the family parish back on the chalk, and now I live on his square in southwest London. We hear the bells from the bell tower, and he’s just always been around. So if you don’t know his story, in addition to being the first to follow Jesus, Andrew was a demon hunter. After the ascension, the apostles dispersed to preach in various countries and towns.

It was on the road to Nicaea where one of Saint Andrew’s most famous acts took place. There were seven devils living amongst the tombs by the wayside. At noon, they would stone passers by, and they had killed many people. When Andrew arrived, the whole city came out to meet him with olive branches, crying, Our salvation is in thee, O man of God.

And when they had told him about the spirits in the tombs, Andrew said, “If you believe in Christ, you shall be freed.” They cried, “we will”, and he thanked God and commanded the demons to appear. The seven beasts came in the form of dogs, and he said to them, “These are your enemies, and if you profess your belief, I can drive them out in Jesus name.”

“We will do so, the people cried out. We believe in Jesus Christ, whom thou preachest is the Son of God. And then Andrew commanded the demons go into the dry and barren places and hurt no man till the last day.” They roared and vanished. The apostle baptized the people and made Callistus the bishop and set about extending the church.

Later, at the gate of Nicomedia, Andrew met a dead man born on a bier. Which is a kind of coffin, cart, with wheels. The man’s body was led by his older father and mother, and they said to Andrew, he was alone in his chamber, and seven dogs rushed on him, and killed him. Andrew had said, “this is an ambush of the demons that I banished from Nicaea”.

The death of this child then being his responsibility, Andrew prayed, Let the spirit of this lad return. And the faithful responded, Amen. Andrew bade the lad rise, and so he rose from the dead, and all realized great is the God of Andrew.

Demons Possessing Beautiful Women in Baths.

The Apostolic Romance, ‘The Acts of Andrew’, is a rip roaring book that has several editions.

And in the middle section, like a modern Marvel movie, there is a crossover story with Jon. That includes even more resurrections by Andrew. And as we slide into an alternate take view on the acts of Jon, they team up together. And Jon gives a long speech and afterwards heals many women in the city.

John gives some more long speeches that are quite moralistic, and their content is somewhat removed from the message of the New Testament. But John also raises more people from the dead, but also wags his finger at Andrew, and stresses on the fact that spiritual resurrection is more important than the revival of the body.

There’s more wild stories of healing the blind and the sick, and the goddess Diana appears to a pregnant woman who is married to a murderer, and says to her that she doesn’t deal with trivial prayers, and that she should go to Andrew. Andrew apparently says the child will be born dead.

In the Gnostic Manichaean version of the Acts of St Andrew, of which there are only fragments, mainly surviving from detractors that considered it a heresy, But there is the general gist that visible things do not proceed from their own nature, but from that man who of his own will has become worse through seduction.

Whilst obscure is definitely the kind of thing that would appeal to those who thought of material things and phenomena as evil. His martyrdom is pieced together from several fragments and differing texts. But he is said to have been martyred by crucifixion at the city of Petraeus. Early texts describe Andrew as being bound, not nailed, to a Latin cross, the kind that Jesus would have been crucified on.

Yet tradition has developed that Andrew has been crucified on a cross of the form of the Crus de Custa. Or, X shaped cross, now commonly known as the St Andrew’s cross. Supposedly, at his own request, as he deemed himself unworthy to be crucified on the same type of cross that Jesus had been. The iconography of the martyrdom of Andrew, on the X shaped cross, does not appear to have been standardized until the later Middle Ages.

His prayer chaplet has 15 beads, and today is the day that you can begin Advent with his Christmas novena.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

The post Acts of St Andrew | 1830 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

November 2, 2018

|

Culture 🏛️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

Thinking about the Luddites this week, what are the wide frames of today? which bits of the stack need a visit at midnight? 

Designed Conflict Territories
Luddites have been getting a bad rap for 200 years. But, turns out, they were right

The buck stops here: ‘mass civil disobedience is the only way to reverse climate breakdown’

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General Ludd

Today on November Second in 1811 “Luddite” weavers & knitters destroyed machines in Nottingham, England which were a threat to their livelihoods. 

Luddite: A word still sharp with edges. Spat even today at others demonstrating so called technophobic leanings. But the idea that luddites were opposed to all technology is a history written by the victors. 

The Song ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’ opens with the declaration that Robin Hood was over in the public imagination, I’m a pirate so I’ll let Chumbawamba do their thing:

Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood,
His feats I but little admire
I will sing the Achievements of General Ludd
Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire

Chumbawamba – The Triumph Of General Ludd

Now I’m sure you know this, but Luddites were opposed only to technology ‘hurtful to Commonality’. ie. to the common good, rather than the narrow interests of the few. In midnight raids they entered the workshop and destroyed some machines whilst leaving others alone.. 

The guilty may fear, but no vengeance he aims
At the honest man’s life or Estate
His wrath is entirely confined to wide frames
And to those that old prices abate
These Engines of mischief were sentenced to die
By unanimous vote of the Trade
And Ludd who can all opposition defy
Was the grand Executioner made

Chumbawamba – The Triumph Of General Ludd – YouTube

So what are the wide frames of today? How do we bring being a sceptic about the dogma of technology as progress, whilst not denying the real benefits of other technologies. We are to insist that crucial decisions about which technologies are developed are made democratically, not just imposed by corporations and technocratic elites. And it means standing up for our own ideas of what progress really is. 

Are there even wide frames?

In his essay Design Conflict Territories back in 2014 Tobias Revell wrote:

Google very, very gradually built a future around us. The point stands that the entities constructing and steering our futures, or what they often like to call the future – with all the baggage of powerlessness and inevitability that that wording brings – aren’t states, and they work on a completely different geopolitical strata: There is no town square for Google.

Tobia Revell – Designed Conflict Territories

Clive Thompson writing on the Luddites in 2017 for Qz.com wrote that “The lesson you get from the end of the Luddites is: Do the people that are profiting off automation today want to participate in distributing their profits more widely around the   population, or are they going to fight just as hard as they did back then?” 

Indeed Co-founder of the new climate action movement Extinction Rebellion just today said ‘A hundred years of political sociology shows you can only change entrenched power through creating economic costs for the people who hold that entrenched power,’

I was extremely excited by the Google walk out yesterday. They stepped out and back into the town square. They’ve also been successfully made their employer to not bid for the Pentagon’s $10B cloud computing contract. Their demands are strong. Especially the last one. Appoint a employee representative to the board. And a future Labour government would introduce laws requiring businesses to reserve a third of board seats for workforce representative.

But for the rest of us what is there to smash? What parts of the stack – the technological and social entity that leans through time and touches us today – needs a visit at midnight? Because at midnight now, including me, most of our are sleeping with devices of black glass that host entities that are harmful to the commonality. And the same people that have stepped out into the town square are also the people building them.      

The script above is the original script I wrote about General Ludd for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

The post General Ludd | 1828 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

August 31, 2018

|

History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊 | Sorcery 🧞

Episode 21

It started off as a simple show about the great abolitionist Harriet Tubman, but unexpectedly spun out into occult left history, criticism of the awful the law of return, and a soft landing via peter greys rewilding witchcraft.

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Get Down On Your Knees..

 Do you know much about Harriet Tubman? I’m sure the Americans amongst us do. But for the others, Harriet Tubman was born in 1822 and died 1913. She was an American abolitionist and political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people. Families, and friends using the network of anti slavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

Tubman was devout, and she began experiencing powerful visionary and dream experiences which occurred throughout her life after sustaining a traumatic head injury as a child. She interpreted them as revelations from God.

She began having seizures and would seemingly fall unconscious, although she claimed to be aware of her surroundings whilst appearing to be asleep. These episodes were alarming to her family, who were unable to wake her when she fell asleep suddenly without warning. This condition remained with her for the rest of her life.

In modern times, it has been suggested that she had suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy as a result of the injury. As a result of all of this, Edward Brodess, her owner, tried to sell her, but could not find a buyer. Angry at his action and unjust hold he kept on her relatives, Tubman began to pray for her owner, asking God to make him change his ways.

I prayed all night long for my master, she said later, till the first of March and all of the time he was bringing people to look at me and trying to sell me. When it appeared as though the sale was being concluded, I changed my prayer. 1st of March, I began to pray, “Oh Lord, if you ain’t never gonna change that man’s heart, Kill him. Lord, take him out of the way.”

And a week later, Brodess died, and Tubman expressed regret for her earlier sentiments. Later in life, the visions from her childhood injury continued, and she saw them as divine premonitions. She spoke of consulting with God, and trusted that He would keep her safe.

Thomas Garrett once said of her, “I never met any person of any color who had more confidence in the voice of God as spoken direct to her soul. “

Harriet Tubman is an important voice and figure, not just on the American left, but also for human rights globally. Her visions and conversations with God, however, seem, in this modern age, to be swept under the carpet.

An epileptic, vision having, old time religion, curse throwing woman. And that is the best kind of activist. I sometimes think that there’s real scope to write the occulted history of the left, from the strong and powerful women involved in the spiritualist movement, that later gave birth to feminism, or new thoughts influence on the civil rights movement.

But there’s also Rosa Luxemburg’s Speaking Tour of America, paid for, sponsored by, and she spoke at Theosophist Lodges. I find there’s something interesting in these troubled times, of the rise, or the renaissance, of a magical movement. Of the witchy aesthetic, the insta witch. I my witchy femmes. But the movement seems bound quite literally by the awful law of return.

Throw curses, hex your boss, get what you want by whatever beads necessary. Peter Gray in Rewilding witchcraft opens with how tame we have become. How polite about our witchcraft in our desire to harm? None. We have become harmless. We have bargained to get a seat at the table of the great faiths to whom we remain anathema.

How much compromises have we made in our private practice for the mighty freedom of being able to wear pewter pentagrams in public and at school? How much have our elders sold us out? Genuflecting to the Academy, the Establishment, the tabloid press, in return for the bargain that we have gained precisely nothing.

The supposed freedoms we have been granted are empty. Late capitalist culture simply does not care what our fantasy dress up life is like, as long as we work our zero hours contracts, carry our mobile phones, and keep consuming. End quote. So in the immortal words of Bill Monroe,

“Get on your knees and pray.

Get on, get on, get on, get on your knees and pray.“

The post Get Down On Your Knees | 1821 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

July 6, 2018

|

Christianity ✝️ | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

I was wondering what to make a podcast about so I pulled down one of my favourite books ‘The Bad Popes’ by Russell Chamberlin and opened it to a random page.

That page was my favourite story from that book and also took place exactly 724 years ago to the day. So there you go episode 13 – all a bit Paul Western to be honest with you.

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or search in all your favourite podcatchers. 

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 Celestine V

Today is Thursday, the 5th of July, 2018, and 724 years ago today, nine weary, stubborn men met yet again in conclave, as they had been doing for the last 18 months. There had been 12 of them when the reigning pope had died in 1292, but even this tiny, sacred college had suffered further depletions during the long debate.

The old dean of the college had died. Another cardinal now lay grievously sick. And on this July morning, a third was mourning his brother’s death.

You’re listening to episode 1813 of Permanently Moved online, and this is the abridged story of Pope Celestine V—the man whom Dante placed just outside the gates of hell, the man who made the great refusal.

The conclave was taking place not in Rome but in Perugia, for Rome was in the grip of a plague. The Roman cardinals were aware that their power was rooted in the city and had remained there, accepting the heat and the stench of that Roman summer for the sake of political advantage. But it was all too much. Eventually, they gave way, and in October 1293, they joined their colleagues in Perugia, where, for the next nine months, they endlessly debated the election of the new pope.

And of course, because this is Holy Roman history, two great families were divided and at war during the meeting: the Colonna and the Orsini. The last pope had been an Orsini, and the neutrals—wary of taking sides in case of losing political advantage after the next pope’s election—were also playing hardball.

The times were evil. The Saracens had retaken Acre and Tripoli. The kings of France and England were plunged into a war that threatened the unity of Christendom. The nations of Europe might have considered the Chair of Peter to be raised above nations, but the cardinals saw it for what it was: the supreme prize for a Roman family.

It was on a heavy, hot July day like today that a letter arrived from a Holy Roman hermit. I can imagine Benedict Gaetani looking up with a smile and saying, I suppose this is one of your Peter of Morrone’s visions. And it was. It was an urgent letter from the holy hermit, foretelling divine vengeance upon them all if a pope were not elected soon.

Now, Peter of Morrone was a holy man who hung his cowl upon a sunbeam and whose hours of devotion were marked by the tolling of a supernatural bell. He closely resembled a fanatical anchorite, with a near-fanatical devotion to poverty and simplicity. He lived a thousand feet in the air, on the edge of Mount Morrone.

The cardinals discussed the letter, laughing at the thought of this mad old man on the edge of a mountain. But suddenly, Cardinal Malabranca stood up and declared, In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, I elect Brother Peter of Morrone.

It seemed like a fantastical idea—almost miraculous. But in the past, divine guidance had manifested itself in similar ways. Five cardinals immediately assented. And so, an old hermit of 80, who lived in a cave, was elected by the same spirit to which he had dedicated his life: the Holy Ghost. He didn’t know it yet, but he was the new pope.

Usually, the new pope would be waiting outside the room, anxiously hoping to hear if they had been elected. But not Peter.

And of course, traveling the wearisome journey to the desolate mountain range where Peter had his cell was beneath the princes of the Church. It took the party five days to make the journey, and when they arrived, they found that others had already gotten there ahead of them. Charles, King of Naples, had already been informed of the new pope’s election. So the papal and royal parties—mutually suspicious—began the ascent of the mountain to Peter’s cell.

Peter’s cave was set on a narrow plateau, with sheer drops on either side. The party was forced to crowd together. News of the approaching courtiers filled Peter not with mere dismay, but with outright terror, and he had intended to flee yet again to one of his remote refuges.

When the party arrived, they saw an old man with swollen eyelids from weeping, his face emaciated. He barely seemed to understand what was being asked of him. He threw himself upon the ground, prayed, rose, and, with infinite reluctance, refused to go to Rome. Instead, he went with the King of Naples, where he built himself a wooden hermit’s hut inside one of the palace rooms.

The coronation took place in Aquila on August 29th, when Peter of Morrone took the name Celestine. And of course, being a Benedictine, Celestine had no conception of the value of the rich gifts he could now dispense and was bewildered by the hunger for benefits. If people were in need, so they should receive—he granted them casually upon request. As you can imagine, this was abused immensely, while the courtiers around him ate and banqueted at his expense.

Celestine, a lifelong ascetic, was not so much offended by the display of luxury around him as he was lost within it. He was pictured wandering from room to room of the castle, pining for the open air of the mountain, munching on dry bread and drinking water. It was quite clear that he had absolutely no idea what he was doing. In little over a month, Celestine had reduced the bureaucracy of the Church to chaos with his casual gifts, and apparently, he even appointed a cardinal quite casually—after dinner.

After 15 weeks of this, it was left to Dante to pin a badge of shame on the broken man. He put Celestine not in hell, but in its dismal approaches—wandering with those who had neither been friends nor enemies of God.

The post Celestine V | 1813 appeared first on thejaymo.net.

June 7, 2018

|

Family 👪 | History 🏛️ | Permanently Moved 🔊

Catching up on the events of last week. Think I’m going to make a custom cover for every show moving forward too. 

1 Thessalonians 4 13:18

13 But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.
14 For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.
15 For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep.
16 For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:
17 Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord.
18 Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

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Remembrance

On the night of May 30th–31st, 1918, the Royal Engineers 255 Tunneling Company had set up camp next to the Poperinge-to-Boeschepe train line when it was bombarded. There were 35 casualties.

My great-grandfather, Henry John Springett, was among them. He was 26.

He and 14 of his comrades are buried in Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery.

Last week, my family and I traveled to Lijssenthoek Cemetery and the town of Poperinge in Belgium to commemorate 100 years since his death.

Last Thursday, my mum, dad, little brother, and my uncle Michael traveled to Lijssenthoek Cemetery in Belgium. We woke up at dawn and drove from Thanet to Folkestone to take the Channel Tunnel over to Calais and then continued on to Belgium. There were five of us in the car—my brother, my uncle Michael, and myself in the back. My brother was in the middle, and he just about survived the journey.

It was an extremely hot and humid day. Storms were due right at the time we were expected to arrive at the cemetery. On the way, we stopped at an extremely fancy chocolate shop and bought a couple of boxes. My parents, who visit Belgium once a year for the Christmas market, managed to get their sixth stamp on their customer loyalty card—so they’ll be using that for this year’s Christmas market.

When we arrived at the cemetery, we went straight to the visitor center rather than the cemetery itself. As we walked through the doors, there he was—on the TV screen.

It’s absolutely surreal to walk into a building in a different country and see a member of your family on a screen, on the TV—especially when they look like you, your brother, your dad, and your grandad. And further to that, none of the people listed ever knew or met him.

We had always thought that Great Uncle Owen was born in 1914—a four-year gap between him and my grandad. But last week, we learned he was actually born in 1913. There’s nothing quite like a 100-year-old clerical error.

It also may explain Great Uncle Owen’s “big smoky bonfire,” as the family refers to it—the time when he burned a lot of family documents.

Because Henry John was listed on the TV screen, we were able to print out the details of his grave’s location. So we did, and then we headed into the cemetery.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a war grave cemetery, but the sight of row upon row of white headstones is remarkable. Lijssenthoek is relatively small compared to some of the others, but it still took us a while to find his gravestone.

28F, 10A.

And there it was—relatively unadorned, with some roses growing in front of it.

548425, Corporal Henry John Springett, Royal Engineers, 31st of May, 1918, age 26.

A cross was engraved beneath his name.

My mum placed a ceramic poppy in front of it, among the roses. My dad had brought Henry John’s pocket watch—the one he was given as a wedding present. He had it restored. He kept it in his pocket the whole time and only showed me later, as we were walking away from the grave.

My Uncle Michael said a few words, and I read 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18. I read it from my Great Uncle Owen’s King James Bible. It had once belonged to his mother—Henry John’s wife, Lily.

At some point, Owen had written in the front: “This was my dear mother’s book.”

It was given to her in 1907, and then to him in 1925. Both entries shared the same address—Soul Street, St. Peter’s—the house where my grandad grew up.

After we finished paying our respects, we walked through the cemetery to find the infographic fence that runs the entire length of the grounds.

While we were there, we met a Dutch and a French family who were signing the visitor’s book. They had also printed off Henry John’s details and were on their way to find his grave just as we were leaving.

My brother, who is fluent in French, spoke to them about what we were doing. We also discussed the military hospital and various other things while we were there.

Then we got back to the car, and as we drove away from the cemetery toward Poperinge to get some lunch, the heavens absolutely opened.

It was a strange and emotional day, but I really enjoyed being with my family.

Permanently Moved

Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo

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Narrative

The Shrine of Our Ladye Star of the Sea was an old chapel on the cliffs at Broadstairs. Dating back at least to the 1350s. However, it’s said that the Shrine and its Chapel were known to have existed prior to the year 1070, as it was in that year that the old Saxon Church of St. Peter’s (Where four generations of my family are buried), was rebuilt with stone and flint.

The original building contained the famous shrine of “Our Ladye of Bradstowe”, a statue of the Virgin Mary, mounted on a tall column, positioned so that she faced seaward. It stood outside in the Chapel garden at the cliffs edge. The Chapel was a gathering place for the maritime community.

The tradition maintained by the Royal Navy of “showing the flag” at seaside towns to uphold the morale of the Navy is said to have its origins in a service held at the Bradstowe Chapel in 1514 with the crew of the Henry Grace a Dieu in attendance, whilst the largest and latest addition to the King’s Fleet was moored nearby.

It is known that coastal towns and village’s displayed some kind of beacon on the high points of their coastline as a warning against the potential hazard’s locally known to shipping, thus in medieval times the Chapel of St. Mary was known as “The Chapel of Blue Light”, for its light was given out into the dark seas through a blue glass lantern.

During the 1520s a severe storm that lasted several days swept into Viking Bay with a storm surge and destroyed the Shrine, badly damaging the Chapel. The chapel was rebuilt in 1601

The shrine was at some point – probably after 1601 – placed inside the Chapel. She was no longer facing her sea. Thereafter local seamen came to refer to her as “The Weeping Virgin”. (Hot weather is said to have caused humidity and thus condensation in the Chapel and caused the figure to appear in the countenance of the Virgin, weeping.)

This portent indicated a bad omen as a storm would often follow, atmospheric changes indicated in the Chapel were thus a good rough guide to those who would face the perils of the sea.

The shrine of Our Lady of Bradstowe now resides in Holy Trinity church Broadstairs, 30 seconds from the old chapel building. In the church I was confirmed.

This is not the end of the story though. As you can see in the picture above it was in recent years a bookshop. The Albion Bookshop.

As you can imagine…. I went to this bookshop all the time when I was a kid. As a teenager almost every week.

It was here I discovered books about: The hollow earth, Alien encounters, NDE books the blew my mind, Crowley, 1960’s LSD trip report zines, Roman history books, Plays, Poetry, Comic Trades, and Star Wars Books. Lots and lots of Star Wars Books.

I am grateful to the spirit of St Mary’s Chapel for the guidance and serendipity the space provided me as young man I certainly wouldn’t be the person I am today without her. Both as Star of The Sea. but also As Sophia.

Like most second hand bookshops in the age of Amazon and airplane hanger sized wear houses the bookshop is now closed. But all is not lost. It has gone though one of though better kinds of re-gentrification and it’s now a busy ale pub. Its a place that has created even more strong memories, every Christmas Eve since it (re)opened.

The Moon my Father,

My Mother the Sea,

To thy shelter take us,

Chaste and gentle make us.

The opening of a landscape prayer my Nana used to say.

Dipping the stacks

• Masons G.Beck routine was extremely good
• Less impressed with ‘cancel culture’
• The UK Gov is absolutely petrified of the internet
• The Bank of England is absolutely petrified of the internet and its money
• Russia is behind the Anti GMO movement now I understand

The Ministry

I received the notes back on the meditation manuscript I have a lot to do.

Depression and Stress over the little things in life. (But it might be related tot he fact i have barely left the house for a week)

Im a week behind booking flights and an Air B&B in Berlin.

Blame no-one but oneself

Reading

Im about 2/3 of the way through Sustainable Revolution: Permaculture in Ecovillages, Urban Farms, and Communities Worldwide it’s from 2014 and the Forward is by a pre-Project Drawdown Paul Hawken.

I like it because the permaculture framing is a bit more Holmgren than Mollison. Some of the projects mentioned I have not come across before it’s Really impressive stuff. I just wish all these projects had time/energy for social media.

Each project/chapter is based around The Permaculture Flower it’s a great way to structure the information. The whole book back to back full colour spreads featuring wonderful photography – tho its hard not to take bad photos of some paradises I guess.

 Music

I picked up Mellow Waves by Cornelius on vinyl last weekend it came out in the summer of 2017. I’ve literally only been listening to that when I’ve had the chance to get on our turntable. (please assume the default soundtrack to my/our lives in the flat i Django or Lightning Hopkins)

Its very chilled, with some fantastic production and synth sounds with a hint of 80’s Prince. It sounds fantastic with headphones.

If you are a fan of Japanese electronica or have listened to Cornelius at any point before in the 20 years or so since Point came out, this album represents a musician thats confident in their craft and knows it.

Remember kids:

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