Transmissions from Nowhereland

Issue 005/September: The Gospel Truth and the Enshroudenment

“Get out my city, you mediocre psued”

The Curse of the Local Celebrity

Before we leave Stephen Mitchell and his Gospel of Jesus behind (see last newsletter) I wanted to highlight this passage:

From there he went to Nazareth, his native town, and his disciples followed him.

And when the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many people who heard him were bewildered, and said, “Where does this fellow get such stuff?” and “What makes him so wise?” and “How can he be a miracle-worker? Isn’t this the carpenter, Mary’s bastard, the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon, and aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they were prevented from believing in him.

And Jesus said, “A prophet is not rejected except in his own town and in his own family and in his own house.”

And he was unable to do any miracle there, because of their disbelief.

Which Mitchell compares to Zen Master Ma-tsu:

Don’t return to your native town:
you can’t teach the truth there.
By the village stream an old woman
is calling you by your childhood name.

The Ma-tsu is much more poetic, but they both speak to a truth about the artist life: you have to leave your home/hometown to really develop and grow as an artist. That appears true in a majority of cases. Caveat: Unless your hometown *is* an art mecca in some way (London, NYC, Paris, etc.) and even then I would suspect this still involved moving from an “uncool” area to a trendy/trending area.

As I’m bringing in my own immigrant experience as an artist into my research, this passage hits home. But where is home?

The Enshroudenment, an Introduction

As I promised last newsletter, I want to talk about the Enshroudenment. Everything that follows comes from discussions with Mica Touchwood, and I want to point out that her ideas have influenced mine and vice-versa. We are just hashing these ideas out, and first we hashed these out over Whatsapp chat, and now I’m hashing them out in text in this newsletter.

To wit: The Enshroudenment is the shadow-self of the Enlightenment. For as much as the Enlightenment opened our eyes through science, there is an equal result that the scientific method shrouded our minds to things that humans once saw and felt. Our interest is in the gaps where the hidden, the repressed, the unheimlich, the uncanny, call it what you will, break through.

This can take form many ways: ghosts, faeries, visions, demons, dreams, UFOs, out-of-body experiences, religious fervor, ceremony, witchcraft…you name it. Some of this can lead to chicanery, of course. We are only humans after all! But we are also humans, that is, evolved apes with evolved speech and reasoning, and still tied to the gaia that birthed us.

Another way of thinking about it: just as one human can not *see* something in front of them through societal conditioning, trauma, experience, etc. a whole society can not *see* things directly in front of them for the same reasons—the weight of history, the tyranny of narrative, prejudice, etc. For everything we have gained, we have also lost something. But things have a way of coming back whether we like it or not. The call sometimes will come from inside the house.

This is just the beginnings of a theory I want to explore a bit more over the coming year. (Hey, why not join our Substack chat and let me know what you think?) Which leads us to:

Colonialism, Animism, and the Paranormal

This long comment/short essay was posted on the Otherworld Podcast sub-Reddit. I highly recommend Otherworld—tales of paranormal experiences told by the people they happened to, free of judgement or debunking/interrogation, although host Jack Wagner is rigorous in his screening process. The podcast has no agenda except to let these people tell these stories. And a lot of people who have strange things happen to them more often than not keep these stories to themselves, lest they be ridiculed, ostracised, or worse. It’s like the example I’ve heard: If you saw Bigfoot while camping, would you tell anybody? Because realize this: from then on people are not going to see you as some person, they are going to see you as The Person Who Saw Bigfoot. Do you really want one camping trip to define your entire life? (Yes, $ome people do, I gue$$).

Anyway to the comment, which comes from user “curiosity killed the fat cat” (CKTFC) who was commenting on, I believe, Episode 88: Sawyer River Road, in which two campers encounter possible cryptids, a world-ending-like sound event, followed by moments of family synchronicity. CKTFC equates scientific reasoning with Colonialism, with Western Methods superseding and destroying indigenous thought and/or Animism:

Colonialism is not just about asserting dominance over material resources, it is about asserting the dominance of materialism. The destruction of indigenous ways of life, the desecration of sacred artifacts, the usurpation of sacred places, and the massive efforts to “convert” people to Christianity are inseparable from the project of colonialism. Just look at South America, where so frequently Catholic churches were built directly on top of indigenous sacred sites.

CKTFC cites Aboriginal Dreamtime, the Malian Dogon, Lakota Sioux, and Hopi people’s “star people,” and Shamanistic practices as indigenous versions of the paranormal.

He ends by suggesting that to experience the paranormal and to accept it, to let it change your worldview is a way of self-decolonization. And yes, there is a place for science in all this:

I’ve come to believe, over time and for a variety of reasons, that a consciousness-oriented metaphysics, like Animism or Panpsychism, is far closer to reality than the ever-pervasive materialism that persists in modern western culture today. I don’t believe that Animism or Panpsychism is incompatible with science. In fact, I believe that science is pointing to the reality of a “living universe,” and that in many ways scientific progress is being held back by prejudices and biases of materialism.

Or in other words, we might call this the De-Enshroudenment.

Next Up

More Tales from Nowhereland dates and Wellington Zine Fest!