Recommendations

The reading and listening that've been lighting me up

Hi,

I’m physically incapable of writing anything new to you this week, because my head is so full of all the mindblowing things I’ve been reading and hearing. Here’s a roundup:

Imagination is the answer

• Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand

  I’ve been living via the old stories and myths for years, but there’s often a rigid masculinity to the way these things are discussed: identities are more or less fixed, change is painful, destiny is a punishing master. In many ways, we’re still in the long shadow of Joseph Campbell. Sophie Strand’s radically feminine, connective imagination helps me to breathe again, and to feel the rich, life-giving beauty of breakdown and unknowing—which I especially appreciate as I navigate this great hinge moment in my own life.

• David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything

  I’m reading this a couple of years after release, but mentioning it here because it pairs so beautifully with Sophie Strand’s essays. Graeber and Wengrow’s thesis is that “where did inequality come from?” is the wrong question, and those seeking to understand the current shambles of humanity should instead be asking when we lost our imaginations; when we got stuck in rigid, unchanging social structures—because this is when things started to go wrong. The earliest human societies, they argue, prized eccentricity and would adapt their structures fluidly and often, thus safeguarding against entrenched injustices. Reading this alongside Sophie Strand’s work is giving me the most intoxicating feeling: that we might truly be living through the rebirth of imagination that’s been needed for thousands of years. That a radical, polyphonic, metamorphic, and deeply necessary feminine might really be rising.

• “Shakespeare, Language and Grace with Valentin Gerlier”, on the Hermitix podcast

  I’d be remiss if I didn’t round off this section with a nod to my current studies, which are all about imagination and its critical importance to humanity and human society. Here’s my teacher, talking about these ideas, particularly in relation to his own work on Shakespeare. For any friends among you who’ve been confused about what the hell I’m doing down here in Devon, this might help.

Re-weirding English history

I’m also deep in the novel I’m writing, which (today, anyway) I’d describe as: the trickstery big-history sprint of Orlando, if Virginia Woolf were best friends with Ursula Le Guin, had been radicalized by David Graeber, and had, like me, been insistently visited by a woodland deity for several years. The book is my attempt to understand Englishness, among other things, and right now I’m writing the hinge moment from the medieval sensibility, guided by spirit and imagination, to the new rationalist perspective of the early moderns. Which has led me to:

• Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic
  I’m told this was one of Hilary Mantel’s favourite books, which seems like recommendation enough. It’s juicy and full of incredible details—though Thomas is a little too insistent on rationalism for a deep believer in magic, like me. So I’m counterbalancing it with:

• Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age

  If, like me, the Darwinist notion of human history as an inexorable march towards reason makes your lungs turn to lead, this is the book for you. A luminous account of the mysteries that did so much to shape the early modern era—in particular, the Christian appropriation of Jewish mysticism.

• Heavyweight, “The Elliotts”

  Massive vibe shift here, but bear with me. Heavyweight is one of my favourite podcasts to zone out to—think of it as a sort of therapeutic and narrative detective show, in which the host ferrets out and tries to resolve heavy emotional weights from his guests’ pasts. Strangely, the latest episode speaks to the gulf between old-world and modern ways of living: it centres on a 1525 curse allegedly placed on all families by the name of Elliott, by the Archbishop of Glasgow. It’s a fun ride—and also fascinating and cultural revealing to see how the show instinctively psychologises the curse, instead of taking it at face value.

My struggle

Nine years after I quit drinking, I continue to struggle with my addiction to work—arguably my oldest addiction, and the one that’s done most damage to the course of my life. So I loved:

• BBC Radio 4, “Thinking Allowed: Religion of Work and Welfare”

  It’s almost 120 years since Max Weber wrote about work as the road to salvation for Protestants, but you only have to look at today’s work culture to see that the unconscious transference of spiritual yearnings to work has not abated. If anything, I think it’s getting worse and more widespread. This programme does not shy away from casting Western culture’s insane attitude to work as a full-blown cult experience, and I love to see it.

More soon. Love,

xx Ellie