Episode 102: On Pan, with Gyrus

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2021

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"What was he doing, the great god Pan, down in the reeds by the river?" With this question, the Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning opens her famous poem "A Musical Instrument," which explores nature's troubling embrace of savagery and beauty. It seems that Pan always raises questions: What is he doing? What does he want? Where will he appear next? Linked to instinct, compulsion, and the spontaneous event, Pan is without a doubt the least predictable of the Greek Gods. Small wonder that he alone in the Greek pantheon sports human and animal parts. In this episode, Phil and JF are joined by Gyrus, author of the marvellous North: The Rise and Fall of the Polar Cosmos, to capture a deity who, though he has made more than one appearance on Weird Studies, remains decidedly elusive. Support us on Patreon: Find us on Discord Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop REFERENCES Gyrus, "Sketches of the Goat God in Albion" Gyrus, North James Hillman, Pan and the Nightmare Pharmakon, philosophical term Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive Philippe Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece Hellier, television docuseries Weird Studies, Episode 98 on exotica Pink Floyd, Piper at the Gates of Dawn Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows Clayton Eshelman, Juniper Fuse Plutarch “On the Silence of the Oracles” Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger D.H. Lawrence, “Pan in America” Jim Brandon, The Rebirth of Pan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weird studies. This is Phil.
0:53.2	In a prefatory note for her novel, Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor muses on her protagonist, Hazel Motes,
1:00.9	suggesting that the integrity of this tortured character, quote, lies in his trying with such vigor to get rid of the ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind.
1:12.8	The ragged figure here is Jesus Christ, who also pops up in weird studies from time to time.
1:19.2	But I wouldn't say that Jesus haunts our show the way he haunts Hazel Motes and his
1:24.1	Holy Church of Christ without Christ. No, for your hosts, the spooky and unassimilable figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of our minds is the great God Pan.
1:36.6	For Hazel, Jesus is not the kindly, familiar, peace and love, hippie and a nightgown kind of dude he is in the popular imagination.
1:45.5	Jesus, for Hazel, is scary and dangerous, a crazy-eyed stranger in the bushes, enigmatic but
1:52.0	inescapable, always dogging your heels. Everything Jesus is for Hazel is what Pan is for us,
1:59.9	or at least me. That's a bad habit I've gotten into,
2:03.1	saying we whenever I mean I, as if JF and I constitute a single being with two heads,
2:08.3	like an Etton. All I'm saying is Pan is always a stranger, and he's always a threat. He's not friendly,
2:16.5	not familiar, not even knowable, really, and we don't
2:20.1	understand his awful power. We don't know what he'll do. It could be the worst or best thing that
2:26.3	ever happened to us, or the worst and best thing that ever happened to us. Penn has popped up
2:34.0	in a few of our shows, for instance, in the one on Hellyer.
2:37.7	He darts in and out, appearing as a statue in Susanna Clark's novel Pyreneasy,
2:43.3	as an offstage presence in M. John Harrison's The Course of the Heart,
2:47.8	in the works of Arthur Mocken, in the neo-pagan revival in British folk music,
2:52.8	and elsewhere in the art we talk about on weird studies. He's not always in the picture,
	...

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