Spectrevision Radio

Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel. In case you missed it, my brother, Pierre Rive Martel,

recently released Volume 2 of Weird Studies Music from the podcast on his bandcamp page,

which you can find simply by searching Weird Studies Bandcamp on Google.

There, you can listen to or purchase the music that Pierre Rive writes for the show.

One of the pleasures of editing this podcast is choosing which of Pierre Rieves' musical cues

will bridge the transitions in our conversations.

In finding the right cue, I always get the sense that Pierre Rive has somehow anticipated

where we were going and preemptively composed a piece that renders the precise affect that our concepts

are giving off. That sense was particularly strong in editing this episode, which is nothing,

if not affecting, at least to me. Duncan Barford is an author, podcaster, practicing magician,

and experienced meditator who hosts the wonderful podcast, occult experiments

in the home. Today he joins us to discuss that point in the spiritual journey that St. John

of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Soul, the moment when, in Barford's terms, it all falls

away, and when is exposed to the radical alterity of the real, the weird made flesh.

Duncan is one of the few true mystics I've met in my life, the kind of person whose mere

gaze speaks of unspeakable experiences, even over Zoom.

Ugh, what a cold shower of quotidian lameness that word, Zoom, Zoom represents now that some major corporation has taken it for itself. He used to have whimsy, the childlike just-ssonus, of any automatapeia. Now it's another can of content on the assembly line. At least that other corporation, Patreon, took the trouble of inventing a word instead

of appropriating one that already existed. I mean, what's a Patreon? Nothing. The word's meaningless.

All this to say that digging weird studies isn't the only reason to visit our Patreon page and

support our show. There's also the added value of knowing your patronizing a company

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