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Internet nastiness as accessibility need.

There's a really troubling disjoint between the central nature of the internet in our lives, and how horrible it is to be here.

I've got a couple of books 80% finished, say - but publishers aren't interested unless you have a blog or a twitter following. What if I want to opt out of that? Worse - why are publishers still taking such a significant cut of author profits, while passing promotion and branding tasks back to the creators? Traditionally, it was extremely hard for anyone to get exposure without a publisher's help. It is certainly good that the internet has disrupted this, and allowed anyone a shot at exposing themselves.

But "exposed" is the central word here. Participating online makes me feel acutely exposed. Sorry, sorry if you've messaged me or replied to a thing and I've yet to respond; the sign of a full inbox makes my heart sink and my stomach clench.

There's a problem here I can't fix. I want to participate in active Pagan culture. Those conversations are online. I want to join some in-person groups. They all advertise online. I want to get my book out there, or even just my articles and ideas to share them. For that, you need to be visible online. I can't opt out; attempting to is profoundly disabling. I still need to bank - banks are closing, and their telephone lines direct you to their website. I am currently looking for a job - they're all online, as are their submission forms. I've tried telling my friends - I'm not online, please telephone me? But people have forgotten how to do this, or are happier with the social norm of messaging. The avenues for access which existed before the web are gone.

But internet use is disabling for me too. Typing brings on hand pain that prevents me from playing music, drawing, or sitting without pain. I use it addictively; I spend three or four an hours late at work stuck in a loop. It upsets me. The experience of being jumped by a hundred or a thousand strangers, on various occasions in the past decade, and the irregular but frequent drive by harassment has left deep, deep scars; knowing the damn thing is sitting there in the corner feels like I'm being watched.

The two years I spent without the internet were two of the happiest of my life. It was a peace I cannot describe. Since then, my mother insisted on installing it - and when I repeatedly went over the data limit, due to an addiction I cannot beat, chose to make it an unlimited supply; and now my partner insists he doesn't have a problem, and mostly uses it to communicate with long-distance friends - and spends eight or nine hours a day playing addictive web games and watching American news shows. We're not even bloody American.

(The expectation that I'm up to date and care about what's happening in the US is perhaps the encapsulation of how the internet has changed our experience in a way I cannot opt out of. On the day of the Pulse shooting, a couple of friends texted me and said they'd been upset by what had happened in Florida. I had no internet at the time. If they hadn't told me, I wouldn't have known. When I got their texts, I was extremely upset because for me, Florida means Florida Disney, and my first mental image was of a terrorist attack on families. Discovering it had targeted adults was almost a relief. I can't help but think I was better off not knowing, for all the good I could do to help once I knew; than my friends were for having it roll in in all their social spaces.

And then the expectation you are up to date on literally everything. What if my desire not to know about what's happening to X group in Y country wasn't erasure of X group, but a psychological necessity to focusing on what's here, what's now, what's around me; the amount of time I have in the day to keep up to date; the quantity of resilience I have to know about so much suffering and unhappiness and death and not having a jot of power to do a thing about it.)

If internet use is necessary and mandatory for modern living, it needs to be made fit for purpose somehow. As it stands, both access and lack of access are disabling - and one of those must give.

Encountering the Landweird

Lack-of-internet-access has become increasingly central to my understanding of the Landweird - which for those just joining us, is the central concept in the tradition I'm developing.

The Landweird is not-knowing-ness. It was originally connected to the idea that England had forgotten its gods, and that the very act of forgetting left an uncertainty, a liminal space, an almost Lovecraftian sense of things which were out there, nameless in the fields and the furrows and the fens.

Soon, Fencraft developed a strong link with folk horror. Folk horror often depicts a rational hero travelling from an urban environment, to a rural and isolated one which is wreathed in the Landweird. Certainty and rationality is left behind, and the hero acknowledges the awesome power and horror, ancient and limitless. The best source for learning about folk horror is the blog & book We Can't Go Back, which writes personal reflective essays on the canon which capture some of the creepy mood.

From there, it passed on to The Haunted Generation. This lovely term refers to a British tradition of 70s children's weird media, originated by Bob Fischer in a Fortean Times article. If you can find it, this article is essential reading -  or check out Scarred For Life, a book all about this teatime nightmare-fodder television. Core folk horror was also 70s, and a lot of the eerieness of the Haunted Generation media came from its odd use of English pastoral - We Can't Go Back has a special section for children's folk horror, including Bagpuss of all things. Crucial to this is the phenomenon of lost TV - early broadcasters reused, burnt, or lost many of their programs, not imagining video and DVD or the ability for consumers to re-view a thing, and it is associated with Britishness again as the BBC notably lost much of the early Doctor Who. This occasionally happens of film - The Wicker Man was buried under the M25 and rediscovered by a miracle. We almost lost it. Would folk horror exist and be recognised without The Wicker Man?

But for me, this pulls in a lot of other media that isn't folk horror, but fantasy which sits in an uncomfortable "aimed at children but really very scary" place - Legend (1985), The Neverending Story (1984), Dark Crystal (1982), literally every adaptation of Alice In Wonderland. Or things which I am uncertain who they were aimed at, like Snow White: A Tale of Terror (1997), Company of Wolves (1984).

(And note that while I do pull god-concepts and words and imagery from all these sources, they are primarily part of the tradition to explain  what the Landweird is and feels like.)

Although I'm content and keen to share, a personal tradition will always be driven by what one personally finds awe of the divine in, what one wishes to revere and make sacred. The final veer is into hauntology, the interest in nostalgia as a kind of unsettling, half-remembered presence in the cultural detritus. Paganism can often be quite LARPy, a make-believe version of an imagined past; for me, this extends to media from the 70s and 80s. The Landweird isn't merely old, but forgotten. Vapourwave is the hauntological sense of the 90s. The Caretaker the hauntological experience of dementia and the haunted 30s ballroom. They too form part of the corpus - because I love them, because they speak to me, because the Landweird is England's strange dreaming, and we will never fully remember.

Anyway - to get back to the internet. The internet never forgets. The internet makes everything accessible. The Haunted Generation were haunted because they did not have home videos or cheap photography - their childhood is wholly memory, and memory fails and gets mixed up with dreams.You could forget its name and be unable to find it. You could remember something terrifying, and now you rewatch it on youtube, learn you'd remembered it all wrong. It was the last era where you could miss a show, and know you would never see it again. My dad missed a William Hartnell episode of Doctor Who which was later burnt; he cannot go back. He saw others, and his memory is all that exists of them, his memory and the memory of every child who saw them - a strange gestalt, the memories of the land. Things existing in memory, things being lost.

The early internet was Landweirdy, because you could look - I remember using it to try and track down a Celine Dion video which had marked me, the magic of finding a sparse website devoted to Look and Read, my own scarred-for-life experience, with a couple of RealPlayer clips that took an hour to download. Now you can find it all on Youtube. Tomb of the Cybermen was landweirdy when it was lost, but not when it was found. My grandparent's wedding photo is landweirdy. My 30GB memory-card is not.

Our god of the gaps needs the gaps to exist in.

Folk Horror Primer

Here's a starter collection of Folk Horror resources. I hope to keep reading and reviewing them as a form of devotional work, and using this list as a guide to where to go next.

Paganism suffers from a lack of art. That is, Christianity has had the very best and most beautiful and well funded art for hundreds of years, and deliberately-made-Pagan art can rarely complete. They have Michaelangelo! I feel positive about actively rummaging through the rest of the culture for art made by non-Pagans to fill the gaps of hymns and poetry and art.


Books-With-Associated-Blog

• We Can't Go Back
  
• A Year in the Country
• Folk Horror Revival
• Celluloid Wickerman

Films

Brilliant starter list at:

• We Can't Go Back

Extra resources

• Where to start with folk horror - BFI
• Hallowed Ground - Empire
• How Folk Horror is flowering again in Brexit Britain
• The Welcome Return of Folk Horror
• Review of the Scovell book
•  

Blogs

• Landscapism
  

Radio

• What Is Folk Horror

Articles

• The eeriness of the English countryside - very good!

Books and music - TBA

Essentially, the best folk horror music doesn't know it's folk horror music. Right? You can't accidentally disturb the ancient Pagan echoes of the land on purpose. There are bands which use clips from Blood On Satan's Claw and cherrypick the creepiest folksongs and market themselves in this zone, but they fall short of what I want from them. For example, I think Let England Shake by PJ Harvey is extremely landweirdy, in a way that anything The Hare and the Moon do is not, no matter how many times I listen with optimism.