Dreamflesh

This is one of the most interesting, beautiful and evocative films I’ve seen in a long time. A genuinely different cinematic take on the jungle, a welcome and gruelling exposure of the horrors behind the Amazon rubber boom, a skilful blend of indigenous myth and contemporary history, and a hair-raising fusion of stark monochrome photography and patient aesthetic reveries that manages to be deeply psychedelic without relying on the usual psychedelic filmic tropes.

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North is in many ways a very partial book. I fully intended to include all the major caveats, alternate views, and complexities. But if there was one clear theme to the feedback I got from drafts, it was: ‘Find your through-line, and cut down on the caveats.’ I guess if you’re foolish enough to take on a history that starts in Africa 200,000 years ago and ends with the Apollo missions to the moon, you have to accept that you’re not going to be able to satisfy all your discursive urges.

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It was a packed, energised gathering of the Radical Anthropology Group this evening, in a stuffy room in the UCL Department of Anthropology near Euston in London. Host Chris Knight introduced it as the most exciting event in the group’s near-40-year history. Co-presented by anthropologist David Graeber, noted for his involvement in the Occupy Movement and his timely bestseller Debt, and archaeologist David Wengrow, the talk promised to put some perhaps final nails in the coffin of an idea that has infused thinking about prehistory for centuries: the idea that humans started out naive, in simple societies, and gained sophistication as societies grew bigger and more complex.

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Most people interested in the intersections between music, the occult, subversive psychedelia and English eccentricity represented by bands such as Coil, Nurse With Wound and Current 93 will have either read or heard of David Keenan’s history of these artists, England’s Hidden Reverse. Those who have only heard of it will probably have been frustrated for years by the fact that the book has been out of print / hard to find / excruciatingly expensive.

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An excellent article at Aeon by environmental historian and ex-wildland firefighter Stephen J. Pyne on the deep significance of our appropriation of fire in human and ecological history. The significance of fire’s role in human cosmologies — covered in the first chapter of North — is skirted past here, but even the brief mentions of Prometheus and Faust are hardly necessary to underline this classical element’s profound role in world-shaping.

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Even as I baulked at the eccentric conclusions of Samuel Carter’s recent post on a sinister conspiracy behind the figure of Santa Claus, I found it hard to fault the creepy logic behind the idea of a figure at the North Pole — in mythic terms, a seat of domineering power — wanting to know children’s wishes, and monitoring their behaviour.

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Glenn Gould’s fascinating radio documentary exploring the fantasies and realities of the Canadian Arctic.

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This is a guest post by Samuel Carter, an under-appreciated and little-published scholar of the esoteric. I met him in 2011, during my writing retreat in a cabin park on the banks of the Kemijoki near Rovaniemi, northern Finland. Samuel was there researching Lapland traditions. We discussed his graduate studies at a university in northeast Massachusetts, where he immersed himself in the magical theories of Giordano Bruno, myths of the pole star and the North Pole, and unorthodox histories of modern economics. (Regarding the university itself, he remained strangely silent.) We didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but his less outlandish ideas greatly influenced the course of my research for North. Samuel currently splits his time between Manhattan and Longyearbyen, Svalbard. He urged me to publish this piece on the history of Santa Claus. Needless to say, the views expressed here are entirely those of the author.

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Reflections on Erik Wernquist’s short film of cosmic wanderlust, and the realities of our evolutionary inheritance.

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