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Friends,
One thing that’s come up many times on AEWCH is my dislike for the phony “radical” statement that “everything is political.” It’s enlightening I suppose, to people who have no political conscience or consciousness, of course. Yes, there’s a political dimension to the everyday, to entertainment, to design if we seek it out.
But the statement also relegates us to being subjects of the political sphere. As David Wengrow and AEWCH 99 guest David Graeber (RIP) point out in their latest book,The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, it’s not a coincidence that the word for politics shares its roots with the word for “police” and “politeness.” These are words of subjection and subjugation and submission. They are words of the polis, the location where governmental and religious decisions were/are made, a seat of authority.If everything is political, everything is extending, in a very real sense, from our subjugation to the political – it’s an infecting being, and one that does not deserve to determine the ground of being.
Maybe we can say something a little more definitive and truer and more interesting: that everything is weird. And that everything is weird defies the political. Why? Because if things are weird – and they are weird – then they can’t be contained just by politics. They are baffling, intense, unknowable, imaginative, uncanny. The weird is a question that gives us an individual vantage point. Everything unfurls from the infinite, from the plenipotentiary.
I talked about this a bit on AEWCH 148 with anthropologist Stuart MacLean; the way the imagination and what we call the real meet and inform each other. Go listen to it if you haven’t, but also consider the fundamental weirdness of reality. Everything, everything, is weird, especially the everyday, since it denies its weirdness. Just take a second: The space between things and the space between the atoms that make up things. The way literature works. The fact that different cultures experience things differently. Not being able to see your own face. And on and on.So this is where Weird Studies and its hosts, Phil Ford and JF Martel , come in. Each week Phil and JF explore the reality of the weird and weird reality. It could be the way Glenn Gould thinks or plays the piano, it could be the movies of John Carpenter, or the I Ching. Or it could be the episode we just did together: I was just on Weird Studies talking about Joy Williams’s bizarre novel, Breaking And Entering.
Phil and JF show us that the weird is everywhere, and may even be the groundswell of being.
I’m so excited to share this episode with you.
SHOW NOTES
• For more on the guys, go to Phil’s website and JF’s website. We talk a bit about Weird Studies 67, which features the documentary Hellier, featuring AEWCH 46 guests, the paranormal investigators Greg & Dana Newkirk, and here’s their episode on the work of John Carpenter. Be sure to support their patreon.
• If you haven’t yet watched Twin Peaks Season 3 (or Heaven forbid Twin Peaks at all), watch it. • JF mentions the Secret History of Western Esotericism Podcast, which you can find here.
• Here’s the video for Bjork’s “hyperballad“
• I don’t know too much about occult/magic writer Ramsey Dukes‘s work, but the guys have definitely gotten me interested.
• Here’s AEWCH 79 with Billy Bragg, all about a “socialism of the heart,” and AEWCH 162 about forgiving violent offenders with Dr. Gwen Adshead. And I talk about the nature of evil on AEWCH 165.
• “The hope is that (art) saves us in reality by damming us in art.” – JF Martel
• “The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. These are kinetic emotions. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Until next time friends, stay weird.
CH
Conner Habib 
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