Northern California — Independent — Sovereign
Children of Sky
A culture of life, decentralized and sovereign, standing against kakistocracy and the slow, intentional death of the soul. Signal pulled out of noise — originalist classics, politics, spirit, money, animals.
Items
Dionysus goes down to Hades to bring back a poet and ends up judging Aeschylus against Euripides. Aristophanes' comedy of 405 BC in Benjamin Bickley Rogers's verse translation, set as a script.
The first six letters of the Hebrew alphabet as a picture book, each drawn as its oldest known sign, with what it pictured, the number it carries, and what rabbis and kabbalists read into it.
Invited post · Alan Forester-Kaiser & Idan Rednaxus
A walk with the family dog is two acts at once: the one the dog is having and the one the neighbors are watching. On symbolic action, and how the weight of the social sphere regulates the liberty of a person, even within family.
Euripides' lost Auge as a picture book, built only from the scraps that survive: quoted lines, single words in old dictionaries, and what other writers said about the play.
Euripides wrote a play about a priestess who gave birth inside a temple. It is gone, but Diogenes Laertius, Plato, a comic poet, and a travel writer each kept a piece of it without meaning to.
The Old English epic as a picture book, a few dozen lines to a page, in Francis B. Gummere's 1910 verse translation with the original alongside.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a picture book, one passage to a page, in Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation.
Persephone taken below, Demeter's grief, a year without harvest, and the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries, in the Greek with Hugh G. Evelyn-White's 1914 translation.
A week with a Breton builder who believes abundance will end politics, and a few places where his own essays argue with him.
Spending a week inside one writer's body of work, from Vienna seminars to tallow lamps, and leaving with a few opinions of my own.
Anyone can knock down an institution on paper. The harder lesson is how to rebuild one.
A teacher whose office hours never close is a gift, as long as the student remembers whose mind is being educated.
Armies take territory; culture takes people, and it arrives as noise too slight to seem worth resisting.
Two societies can share a language, a climate, and a constitution, and still raise entirely different people, depending on where each one keeps its answers.
The machine everyone feared would come for bodies is coming for systems instead, and systems were never built to survive it.
Every model that learns a population's habits is also teaching that population which of its habits are legible to the model.
Precision is the last line of defense before a word can be made to mean its opposite.
A kid raised behind bars and screens cannot be blamed for missing the obvious.
On sovereignty, soul, and why the ridgeline keeps the better ledger.