Hi everybody. There are two more pieces to read in my Substack publication, My Special Interest.
‘Ceremony of Innocence’ (readable here) takes its name from W B Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’. It’s a chonky essay about the origins of astrology and astronomy, and archaeological evidence that suggests (often very strongly) that human beings have been tracking the movements of the stars, and reading into those movements, for longer than we’ve been doing just about anything else. In other words, astrology may be one of the things that makes us human, and one of very few practices that unite cultures throughout history, and all over the world.
The most recent upload leads with a slightly provocative question: Was Jesus of Nazareth Autistic? (click here to read it) This question isn’t definitively answerable, but that’s not the point. Thinking about the idea that one of the most significant literary-historical figures in all of human history was in fact neurodiverse, in some way, can actually be very interesting. This piece was informed by my reading three texts – a novel, a nonfiction book, and an academic article about the role of “collaborative morality” in the “emergence of personality variation and autistic traits”.
In other news, I’m back in Bangkok, staying in a wonderful flat with three Frenchmen, in the room of a friend I met first in Ukraine, in the village of Polyanytsya, in the gorgeous Carpathian Mountains. It’s good to be here, among friends old and new. Today, I baked bread and chocolate chip cookies, and drank wheat beer in the afternoon. I also went to the gym in the morning, but only managed about 30 minutes before I was too sweaty to touch anything. It’s hot season in Thailand. Next week I’ll start my massage therapy course, and the week after that is the biggest holiday in the Thai calendar: Songkran, aka Thai New Year.
I’ll leave you, just for the stinking hell of it, with a video of the inimitable Tom Waits reading a poem by the incorrigible Charles Bukowski. See you when I see you! X
Hello, team. I have launched a publication on Substack. The name of the publication My Special Interest. The idea is to get sh*t on the page, or get whatever’s already on the page out into the open. Otherwise it will sit and gather dust, and My Special Interest is not about gathering dust. It is about the joy of learning, leaning in, and turning towards.
I will keep putting stuff on ONURBICYCLE. It will continue to be a personal blog for ditties, poems, short stories, articles, and updates about the trip. Some of what goes on Substack will also go here, possibly in abridged form. The Substack publication is specifically for longer form nonfiction pieces on a range subjects including early religion, myth, UFOs, messianism/environmentalism, and meditation/consciousness – and short pieces of fiction relating to the life of Jesus and other much-mythologised figures.
It is/will be an ongoing project, and I invite any and all contributions, ideas and feedback.
Mary blinked lightly in the silence. Wood dust hung in the air – he hadn’t cleaned. Joseph, her husband-to-be, a carpenter with hands heavy and thick with scars, heaved his body up from the table and, rising, caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror that hung on the wall, darkwood-framed. His eyes were wet and confused. The familiar fire grew inside him, the thirst. He longed for a tonic, a brew, something to dull the senses.
‘We made a vow,’ he said, his voice breaking, ‘both of us. You betrothed yourself to me.’
‘And you to me,’ she said. Mary wept. She understood. She couldn’t explain it any better than she already had. It sounded absurd, and yet there it was.
His mind raced through possibilities she had already considered. They would have to divorce; their betrothal was legally binding. A baby would bring scandal and ruin. Worse still, without his protection, she would be regarded as an adultress. Justice would stone her to death. Joseph continued to watch himself in the mirror, felt the temperature rise inside his chest. He saw what would become of him.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ His eyes searched for hers.
‘I’m four months along, only,’ she said. ‘He told me to go.’ He, Him. And before Joseph could say anything, ‘Elizabeth is pregnant too.’
‘Elizabeth?’ He turned to face her. Mary looked up from the table. She had been carving it nervously with her fingernails and now, meeting her partner’s gaze, she picked clumps of wood out from underneath them. In the orange glow of a modest fire he shone like a demigod, trembling with rage.
‘Joseph, I told you where I was going. Don’t pretend you’ve forgotten.’ But they were getting off topic. ‘I know it’s hard to believe.’
‘Not only for me,’ he reminded her.
‘I know.’ She did know. It had taken her long enough – of course she’d denied it, but that was before it had become a physical thing, tangible, with legs. She dreaded to think of the neighbours. ‘But they will,’ she said, ‘believe, I mean,’ as much to try to convince herself as to win him over. ‘If I tell them and you tell them, soon enough they will. The one who told me said he is to be great.’
‘And you believed it?’
‘I gave my consent, didn’t I?’
‘Did you? Didn’t you? What do I know?’ Joseph was incredulous. ‘What if you hadn’t?’ he wanted to know. ‘What if you had said “no”?’
‘To God?’
But that wasn’t the point. So when each went to bed that night in separate beds, under different roofs, it was he who faced a choice. She had already made hers.
Five months later, surrounded by shepherds, farm animals and magi, Mary gave birth to a boy. She wrapped him in swaddling bands and named him Jesus.
It’s been some time since I wrote anything here, and naturally that means there’s too much to contain within one blogpost.
But know that I – and we – are still here, and still trucking on. Laura is giving her legs (and everything else!) a rest in Cambodia, and I am in a small Vietnamese town called Hoa Binh, pointed west. I will cross over to Laos in the next few days, and then pedal onwards to Luang Prabang. Then I’ll travel by bus to rejoin her, and hang out with our friend Adam, in Siem Reap. Adventures await, and yet, at the same time, they’re also happening right now!
So much for the geographical stuff. There are a couple of other things – projects! – I’d like to tell you all about, partly because sharing them (as they are) will help motivate me to continue pursuing them. Ideas don’t do well locked away.
The first one, actually, is proving quite easy to work on, as it has to do with our trip. We recently launched a website with the same name as our Instagram handle (@OnOurBicycles) – we’re branding, see. Its purpose is to communicate what we’ve learned, and what we’ll learn in the future, about cycling in different places, to an audience of other cyclists. For this reason, not much of it will be relevant or particularly interesting to people who follow me/us because they’re friends or family. However, if you’d like to look at the photos we’ve been taking along the way, and want a better way to view them than by going on Instagram (I understand!), then the Photo Gallery part of the website may appeal. Just click here to find it, and click on whichever country takes your fancy. We’re working our way through backlogs of photos, which is why there isn’t yet a Vietnam section, and why the Turkey/Georgia photos are raw and unedited.
The second is something I’m working on by myself. It’s more booky, long-form prosey, and at its root its about the long-overdue Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Except, it’s not really about that, is it? It’s about humans and society, and what the so-called ‘second coming’ means. The question that kicked it all off – and the sort of working title, although I’m steering away from it somewhat – was/is: If He came, would we believe Him? As in, what would it take for the actual (second) coming of God On Earth to convince us that he (/He/She/It) was legit? It would certainly take more than walking on water, because David Blaine (or was it Dynamo) already did that.
Or, conversely, assuming Jesus wasn’t actually the Son of God but was instead an excellent preacher who provided humanity with something it didn’t know it needed, what would a contemporary equivalent look like? One of Jesus’ key selling points was that he wanted to democratise the religious experience: bring it inside the home. Slaves made up a huge proportion of Roman society; Jesus said they were made in God’s image as much as the emperor. He offered his flesh and blood, and his devotees really dug it. In an age of multi-layered irony and social media addiction, a poststructural, post-climate change, anthropocene age, what message could we receive that would awaken us? Can any one person provide that? Where should we be looking?
Threads that tie into this whole shebang include Brian Muraresku’s book The Immortality Key, which makes the (very convincing… possibly conclusive?) case that what really made Jesus’ stand out from all the other religious movements of the time was his way of democratising religious experience was by revealing the Eleusinian Mysteries to the masses: inviting everybody to God’s table by giving them wine spiked with psychoactive substances, allowing them to experience god at home, rather than by trekking to Eleusis. There is lots of juice here, but archaeo-chemistry (the scientific study of what people were eating and drinking during periods of ancient history) is a fledgling science – so young it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page!
They (the threads) also include one woman’s claim, published recently in the Pentagon’s UFO files, that she had experienced an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’. As in, aliens abducted her and impregnated her. Her claim was included in statistical form in a cache of previously classified documents released (to The Sun) by the Pentagon in April 2022. Which is obviously nuts, right?
But you know, in his 1957 book Flying Saucers, Carl Jung explains that the way we interpret inexplicable phenomena has changed over time. For thousands of years, weird lights in the sky were messages written by the gods – astrology was the ‘science’ of deciphering these messages. Then for a while we called them ‘angels’, then they were evidence of fairies and pixies. Now we call them foreign military aircrafts, or aliens. No one believed the woman from the Pentagon files was really carrying the Son of Aliens. But you know who else had an ‘unaccounted-for pregnancy’, and who was (ultimately) believed? Mary! And all it took was a thumb up from Joseph. Well, no, it took a lot more than that, but the comparison says something, I think.
So anyway, that’s what’s ticking over on my end. It’s a work in progress. And I’d like to open up some sort of dialogue with it, which is why I’m considering starting a Substack dedicated to it, where I’ll post things as and when I write them. Serialise it, sort of. That way, if people are interested, they can read along. And if they have any recommendations for things to consider/read/watch/listen to, they can chip in. I’d love that, and it would undoubtedly help the work. You can probably subscribe to my existing Substack at this link in order to get future updates. But I’ll get round to setting that up properly in the coming weeks. Or months.
OH, and there’s another prose thing I’ve been mulling on, but which I won’t bore you with now.
So for now, thank you for checking in. Be good to each other. We love you.
ONURBICYCLE 