Small Gods
We hear it everywhere these days. Time for a new story. Some enthusiastic sweep of narrative that becomes, overnight, the myth of our times. A container for all this ecological trouble, this peak-oil business, this malaise of numbness that seems to shroud even the most privileged. A new story. Just the one. That simple. Painless. Everything solved. Lovely and neat. So, here’s my first moment of rashness: I suggest the stories we need turned up, right on time, about five thousand years ago. But they’re not
The Soul and the Star
An Interview with Martin Shaw WHAT IS YOUR WORK ABOUT? An on-going nostos—a homecoming—to the heart, I suppose. There’s an old image in folktales of people that bury their heart under a tree so they can acquire more power without the distraction of conscience. I don’t wish that for myself alone, or as a father, or for the wider culture at this point. There is an inheritance, which the West has largely turned its back on, that I am very interested in. We glimpse it sometimes in