This week, I’d like to share a film of a recent conversation with Iain. As so often happens with friends, one wishes it were possible to capture the deep, spontaneous conversations that arise around meals or while relaxing. That not being possible, here’s us discussing a little of what we’ve been talking about over the last couple of years since my last visit to Skye in 2023 with
. (You can watch the conversation he had with Iain here).It’s not possible for me to fully delineate the influence of Iain’s work on both my own thought and practice, as well as that of many people in the T’ai Chi schools of which I have been a part. I go into some details about it in the film we made two years ago, which you can watch here.
Below I have added links regarding some of the things we mention in conversation. Mostly these relate to points Iain makes. So many of the things I talk about pertain to creaturely knowledge gained over years in an oral tradition, taught week-in, week-out, in a physical environment and understood in an embodied way before any words coalesced around the knowing. They mostly remain ‘unsearchable’ online, but they are nonetheless real. These understandings are possibly the thing I discuss most with my trusted friends; it is rewarding to compare insights gleaned from their particular realms of study and expertise. We see where shafts of light that have percolated through our own unique vessels refract and finally, together, illuminate a tiny portion of the beloved shared table that is our too-brief time on earth together.
I hope that my gestures, analogies and stories go some way to giving you a little insight into my particular area of study and begin to explain why encountering The Master and His Emissary and more recently, The Matter with Things, was so important.
Of course, the real joy is simply knowing Iain, to whom I am profoundly grateful for his time in making this film, for his encouragement, and for his ongoing friendship.
I would like to thank my partner for beautifully shooting and editing the film. We currently have a very good and equitable skill-swap going on (I mend and sew things and he films and photographs things) but if you’d like to show him some extra appreciation, please feel free to:
All tips from the appropriately transformed ‘buy me a coffee’ button will go to Jonny this week! Thank you.
I’ll post a purely audio version of this conversation on the podcast section of Uncivil Savant later in the week for those who prefer to listen while cooking or on the move and not stare at a screen for 1h 15m.
Selected notes: (h:m:s)
5:00 Newgrange Spiral carvings
5:35 Heartwork, T’ai Chi lineage
9:40 Dōgen finger pointing at the moon
11:20 Ultramarine extraction from lapis lazuli
11:40 ‘The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but the Lord trieth the hearts.’ Proverbs 17:v3, Old Testament, KJV Bible
14:44 Keats’ Doctrine of Negative Capability
16:34 Niels Bohr deep and shallow truths
24:25 Dreyfus brothers’ model of acquisition of skill
26:51 Sincerity,
32:53 D H Lawrence we are transmitters of life
33:30 Goethe uniting the divided
38:46 Matter and consciousness
41:36 Rabbinical saying ‘you are not tasked with completing the work…’
44:08 Dougald Hine the question that is yours to carry
48:13 Necessary distance
49:38 Henri Bergson time, duration, paradox
50:08 Dōgen If there were no time there would be no mountain
51:28 Zeno’s paradoxes
52:05 Heraclitus Panta rhei / everything flows
53:19 Marcelo Gleiser the same situation cannot occur twice
55:45 The third heart, connexion, longing
56:49 Max Scheler
1:01:15
Past, People, Place, Prayer from ‘Against The Machine’1:04:05 Jan Zwicky (also of interest - The Experience of Meaning)
1:05:59 Love Story ‘love means never having to say you’re sorry’
1:06:46 Orangutan rofl
1:07:35 Marcel Theroux ( of interest - In Search of Wabi Sabi)
1:08:24 Commedia dell’Arte
1:09:10
1:13:00 Stewart Lee
1:14:00 Life of Brian, new stage show
This week’s good thing: Just look at the colour of these goethite (yellow ochre) and haematite (red ochre) ironstone concretions with naturally formed solid iron crusts. I have never found such strikingly beautiful pieces of ochre on my local pigment forays. Nature never ceases to astound me. Thanks to Lucy Mayes of London Pigment and geologist Ruth Siddall, for helping me identify these from my photos today.
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