Tellpeopleabouttheshow and, if it feels okay, to support it on patreon (especially if you already know your pals are fans of the show but don’t support it).
Give the show a 5starratingandpositivereviewonApplePodcasts.
Tweet and Insta quotes from and thoughts inspired by episodes (with a link!)
Friends,
Let’s ask ourselves a question: What if the appropriate worldview now is neither materialistic or magical?
What if the task is to do is move on and bring forward – through our own individualities – the world from these opposing positions?
I started this conversation with (Though this is a standalone episode!) Phil Ford and JF Martel, hosts of the Weird Studies podcast, on the previous episode, AEWCH 202.
Now we offer our first indications of what we think works here in the face of our challenges and opportunities in this world. What are they?
Vow, prayer, gathering.
This is the second part conversation but it stands on its own. So excited to be walking through these uncharted landscapes with you! X CH
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? For a great book on shifting the groundswell of being from scientific “facts” to the imaginative experience, read Meaning by Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? I talk about Christian principles from an esoteric standpoint on the excellent episode AEWCH 181 with Rev. Patrick Kennedy.
MORE ON PHIL & JF/WEIRD STUDIES You can support Weird Studies via their patreon . You can also sign up for the 8 week course, WEIRDING. Even though it’s already started, you can still jump in and get the previous lectures via recording. If that’s calling to you, go for it. Also, Phil and JF were on the show back on AEWCH 166, and I was on Weird Studies 107 (on which we talk about Joy Williams’s great novel, Breaking and Entering).
Tell people about the show and, if it feels okay, to support it on patreon (especially if you already know your pals are fans of the show but don’t support it).
Give the show a 5 star rating and positive review on Apple Podcasts.
Tweet and Insta quotes from and thoughts inspired by episodes (with a link!)
Friends,
As we enter into this weird world on the other side of the Viral/Trumpist/Nationalistic Collapse/Aesthetic/Opportunity Shock Portal (or, uh, whatever you want to call it), we find ourselves mapless and confused.
It’s apparent that we’re occupying something like a new world, or a new level in a game, or a new stage of development. So… what do we do? More and more people are turning to magic. Astrology, witchcraft, spellcraft, alchemy. But are these the right tools or do they simply feed into materialism more? (Hint: the latter)
I’m so happy to have two of my favorite supernature/strange times thinkers back on the show for this two part exploration of the problem with magic. Phil Ford and JF Martel are the hosts of the Weird Studies podcast, which I consider a sort of sibling podcast to AEWCH. They were on the show back on AEWCH 166 and I was on Weird Studies 107 (on which we talk about Joy Williams’s great novel, Breaking and Entering).
This is a two part conversation: part two will be released shortly, in which we talk about what tools we can use, if not magic, in the new landscape.
So excited to walk through these uncharted landscapes with you! X C
SHOW NOTES
WHAT BOOK YOU SHOULD READ? For another exploration of this topic from a very different angle, I recommend a book I don’t fully get on board with but is nevertheless a classic: Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism by Chögyam Trungpa.
WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO? AEWCH 148with anthropologist Stuart McLean expresses the ways that the magical bursts through into the world to contour reality.
MORE ON PHIL & JF/WEIRD STUDIES You can support Weird Studies via their patreon . You can also sign up for the 8 week course, WEIRDING. Even though it’s already started, you can still jump in and get the previous lectures via recording. If that’s calling to you, go for it.
FRIENDS: Do you find this podcast meaningful? Support it! This podcast is only possible because listeners like you support it. Do contribute to my mission by supporting Against Everyone With Conner Habib on Patreon! Thank you so, so much.
Buy the books mentioned on/related to this episode via my booklist for AEWCH 166 on bookshop.org! The site sources from independent bookstores in the US, not a big corporate shipping warehouse where the workers are treated like machines. Plus when you click through here to order, the show gets a small affiliate kickback!
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.
• 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.
• 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
RT @ConnerHabib: Every time it seems like things are getting worse, remember that feeling comes from your inner knowing of what is better,… 3 hours ago
Conner Habib 