Another World, JULY 2021 Edition
Welcome to the seventh edition of our supporters’ journal, Another World!
Thank you deeply for your support of our work!
Upcoming Courses
Our course schedule for the rest of 2021—including courses from Asa West, Emma Kathryn, Alley Valkyrie, and Rhyd Wildermuth—is published here. To join any of these courses as part of your member benefit, please email us at distro@abeautifulresistance.com with your name and the course you would like to participate in.
In this month’s Another World
A Ring Around Utopia, by Slippery Elm
We’re thrilled to feature an exclusive essay by poet and writer Slippery Elm (author of The Dead Hermes Epistolary).
In this beautiful essay, Slippery Elm explores the concept of Utopia from the perspective of a radical and a dreamer, both complicating and illuminating our alternative fear and desire for the world of our imaginings.
Similar to dreams, if Utopia is no-where it is also everywhere. It cannot be charted, only circled, slowly, by the soaring albatross. It is a similar Greek word, eutopia, which means “good place”— and its eventual conflation with the word utopia (no-place)—that has beguiled many into believing we are searching for unattainable paradise. However, Utopia is unattainable only insofar as dreams are unattainable, and only good and paradisal insofar as dreams can also be nightmarish.
The weaponization of Utopia is one of the most common means by which agents of empire and state attempt to dismiss, disqualify, quell, or silence the revolutionary aspirations of radical visionaries. It has also been used by those selfsame radicals in wars against each other that only ever seem to amount to “pyrrhic victories,” and are often waged against those that the aggressors would do well to stand beside as comrades, if not always as friends.
By traveling to Utopia, we may recuperate the potential for this fraught and lovely place of dreaming as an important tool in the struggle for emancipation. By traveling there, we can nullify the barbed dismissals of our enemies while at once bolster our own rhetoric. And through an understanding of immanence rather than transcendence, we can see that no-place is paradoxically every-place.
Being Pagan: On Connection to Land
The second essay from Rhyd Wildermuth in his series Being Pagan (part of his manuscript-in-progress). This essay is on connecting to land and its meaning.
Reconnecting to the land first of all requires reconnecting to a pagan sense of time, as was discussed in a previous essay. The reason we start there is because it is the time of the land itself, the rhythms by which the land breathes, grows, dies back, and comes alive again. The seasons determine the cycles of trees, plants, and animals, just as the moon tugs on the oceans and the water within our own bodies.
This sense of time, the time of the land, is not the time of Empire nor of the political and cultural reach of the cities.
Consider how this affects our sense of food. Now we have become accustomed to the same foods available all year, regardless the season. The time of land, on the other hand, tells us when a blackberry is ripest, when the animals of forest and field are giving milk or can be hunted or culled best with the least disturbance to their herds’ survival. It tells us when birds make their nest, when salmon swim up rivers from the sea to spawn, when the starchy and sugar-rich roots of carrot, potato, turnip, onions, garlics, and beet are best unearthed. The time of land tells us when fruits are sweetest on the branch and vine, when nuts are fullest and ready for roasting. And it tells us when all such foods will dwindle into scarcity, the first chill winds heralding winter and calling us to store what is left for long cold months of want.
Audio and Video: Empires Crumble, episode 25
In this episode, Alley Valkryie and Rhyd Wildermuth discuss Land, its history, its meaning, and its politics. Available in video or audio form now, a week before its public release.
Upcoming On Another World:
The Pagan Music List 12
(15 July, 2021)
A Discussion with Paul Kingsnorth, with Rhyd Wildermuth
(1 August, 2021)