Hearth & Horn

One of the Landweirdiest things about Penda's Fen - one of the things that struck me as important, unaccountably important, was that it was screened once in 1973 and then lived on only in memory. It's a dense text. It rewards rewatching. Nontheless, for over 30 years, it belonged only to those who saw it and fragmentarily.

This wasn't within the material, it was a characteristic of the material itself - and this is how I came to think of Gods, an essential part of Fencraft - that the lostness is part of what they are now.

Hmmm, like Susan Schuppli's Material Witness - a harrowing academic text which scratches a delicious itch in my brain, the sensation of discovering a new way of thinking. Schuppli talks about the physicality of the recording medium itself in various social horrors - photographs, telephoned transmissions, gaps in taps, radioactive water. It's sort of like, The Stone Tape as geopolitics - so immediately appealing to me. The book is a hard read because, of course, it includes photographs - as well it should, because the book is about witnessing and recording media as material evidence and of course, my instinct as a reader to want to turn away from these images is participating in her argument.

Anyway, then sometime in the 90s or 10s - I forget which - Penda's Fen was screened again - once. It already had this mystic allure, as semi-lost media (and for a film to survive the BBC from the 1970s is by no means a sure thing. My heart breaks for David Rudkin's first television play, The Stone Dance, about a pastor coming to town and having an encounter with a teen who's having a gay crisis with the standing stones - wherever it went)

And so by that point we had VHS, and that's how Penda survived the next decade, passed hand to hand on increasingly battered tapes, in which the battery was part of the charm. You know this is mythic. Eventually, that one VHS copy made it to youtube. I know this because the booklet that came with my DVD talks about it - and that at the climax of the film, the very tape begins to give out, as if the medium can no longer contain the unearthly vibrations being unleashed.

And now it's on DVD, at last, which diminishes some of the charm of all that, but it does mean it's easier to see - which you should, not for religious reasons but because it is a masterpiece.

I say all this because I just stumbled upon these dopey graphics I made in the archives of my file system, and because some sneaky bastard has slipped it onto the Internet Archive for all to see.

I think the forest is like something that you can sense. So it makes sense that they should give that feeling a face, you know?

Popular culture carried on, pretending covid never happened. Radio and television suggested a jolly parallel universe where everything was as normal. This leaves an odd gap in our cultural history. In The Earth was filmed during Covid, making the most of the constraint - a small cast and an isolated location

(the other one I know is Enys Men, also Landweirdy. I guess coronavirus lends itself well to mood pieces about isolated rural people)

But I hadn't realised just *how* coronavirus it was, as a total narrative. Here are some things this film is about:

air that's dangerous to breathe and might get through your air mask because the microns are small; going mad in isolation; medical powerlessness; being away from nature for too long; fear of the natural world beyond human control; fear of strangers; "how we can live with one another without destroying one another"; and grief at not having saved loved ones from sickness (any kind of covid grief and mourning continues to be so taboo and inexpressible, I'm not sure its been permitted anywhere else I've seen. Death occurred only ever as a number, never as people.)

"(In Ireland, the COVID-inspired pandemic setting contributed to the film receiving the highest age rating of 18. The IFCO claimed it was borderline (16/18), but tipped over by the "setting... of a familiar feeling pandemic")"

Disorientation begins almost immediately - the protagonist arrives at a remote station goes through virus protection protocol, familiar, and yet strange because 1. you have never seen them represented in film before, and 2. that is frightening, it suggests a new permanence for those behaviours, because every other film is colluding in pretending it never happened, and yet once its entering the visual lexicon - perhaps it will stay, and 3. imperceptibly, you come to understand this is not coronavirus. It just looks similar. So when is it? And where is it? They are going into a forest - five days deep. Where in England is that?

I didn't love the middle section (sort of, outback/hillbilly violence horror, its not a pleasurable genre) - but I recognise what it adds in terms of terror and mood overall, without it the film would lack stakes. The forest should be scary, and it's embodied in a man, but the sense of threat pervades the location nontheless (& it's better than trying to embody it as a rubber monster). From wikipedia on another of Wheatley's films: "The film's most violent scene...came about when Wheatley was surprised at the shocking violence in The Orphanage, which he had assumed would be a subtle art-house film. Wheatley stated that this turn toward violent horror in The Orphanage made the rest of the film unpredictable; he wanted a similar unpredictability in his own film, so that viewers were never sure whether the film would be subtle or explicit."

It doesn't need you. It knows what it wants. I've seen it. I've seen inside the world. You were drawn here to live in the land. Did you ever consider what the ultimate expression of that was? When you completely separated from the process of humans, when you return to the green, to its rhythms, rather than the selfish beat of humans. I'm making flesh what you know is right. Your world has shrunk. Your world is sleeping and ritual. Praising him.

• As ever in folk horror, a key plot point is politeness - a need to be polite brings you into danger


• Odinic image of the seer who loses an eye


• Learn about sounds made by trees


• Learn about fungal networks (apparently plants began to outcompete fungi so they turned it to their advantage, kind of...linking up with the plants and benefiting from their processes. Trees communicate through fungal networks. apparently if deer are eating leaves, trees can make those leaves more toxic so they go away. "The film characters mention the word 'mycorrhiza'. The term, of Greek origin, defines the symbiosis between a fungus (myco-) and the roots (rhiza) of a plant. As in many symbiotic relationships, both partners reap benefits.")


• Parnag Feg means 'light and sound'. Is this what we are doing? Light is implicit in these focus on sunlight, moonlight, etc, and then sound that comes up a lot in just how much time I spend thinking about strange sonic landscapes.


• interview with the director

I've been experimenting with trance recently. I'm making notes, I'll share them in a bit. One thing I'm noticing that's interesting is...see culturally, there's this idea that if you take LSD once it stays in your body (like ragwort for the cinnabar moth) and comes back and comes back as bad trips, if you're Ozzy Osborne or someone who did too much acid in the 60s. Well, I've done weed once, but it's interesting because I can...remember how to do it again. Sort of. It's like, a thing my body can do now it knows how to do it. It's not an outcome of me being constantly stoned and lying about if it's turning into a problem. When I've been trying these trances, there's a feeling that's...weedy...& trying to remember and re-experience those bodysensations amplifies them and the trance. This is fascinating to me.

Anyway, I'm staying with someone who has a big telly and a big sound system, so I proposed we watch In the Earth - which I've seen before - specifically because it is a big sound system kind of film, & there were a couple of moments when I felt that trancelike feeling hit (sense of euphoria, of floating, of finger-energy and of backward-giddiness). This wasn't unexpected - I know what the film is like, I wanted to be put in a certain sort of mood - but it's also not happened before and I didn't expect to actually feel trancey so easily. It was quite brief.

& I think it ties in, perhaps, to this being a thing the body can learn to do, and therefore get better at (?) when exposed to the right conditions

Note - having looked it up, apparently it's a myth that LSD stays in the body, and the leading theory is indeed that it's a kind of body-memory. Well, this tallies with what I had been considering. It is fascinating.

I read 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by Johnathan Crary & I think it's going to single handedly turn out to be the most important Disconnection book I've ever read. It is a political critique of the pace of living, using themes like sleep, digital connection, technology and consumption to illustrate some problems of our age. I'm not doing it justice. It's not just a rant, and the focus is less on internet bad than capitalism bad with the web as a lens onto it.

I also found Lalla Ward's Embroidery Book at a second hand store and it's the fastest £1 I will ever spend in my life. The book has 12 tutorials for embroidery pictures using stumpwork. I lost my heart to stumpwork at the Avebury Manor museum - it's an Elizabethan embroidery technique where you pad under the embroidery so the picture has bumps, lumps and dimensionality. In the Snooker Room of the Avebury Manor is an A3 piece done by Leonora Jenner and I just lost 20 minute staring at it, and I pay for a ticket to go round the house again as often as possible just to see it.

The book can be borrowed at the internet archive, and anyone who wants a permanent pdf copy can message me, for I have Means and Tricks - or they are under £10 second hand.

From the book:

Restoration-era stumpwork:

Jenner's mirror from the museum: