Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast Haunt me with the Ghost of a Tree About this episode A 15th century saint who would dream about christ penetrating her heart. A 380 million year old extinction event where the plants couldn't decompose when they died Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 At Lowe's, this Veterans Day and every day, military members, veterans and their spouses get automatic Milo's Rewards Silver Status Benefits. Plus, 10% off eligible purchases with no annual limit. It's one way we honor and give back to those who have served and still do. Learn more and verify now at Lowe's.com/military. 10% discount can't be combined with another offer. Exclusions, terms and conditions apply. Loyalty programs subject to terms and conditions. Details at Lowe's.com/terms. Subject to change.
0:30 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
1:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Crease the devil's earlob, you greasy teresus. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Because I reckon I think this week's episode might be a bit weird. I've had difficulty finding a home for the podcast this week. I've been having trouble finding a space to record and I'm in Limerick. So as you know, I spend most of my time in my office. In my office where I record this podcast.
1:43 Blindboy Boatclub? I have a magnificent office with a window that can look out.
1:50 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a perfect place for writing, for researching, but as of late, actually turning on my microphone and trying to record, that's been difficult because there's been a number of distractions. The first distraction, of course, is the seagulls. I have a tin roof, so if there's seagulls or if it fucking rains, it's noisy. I spoke about a month ago about my seagull issues.
2:20 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, I don't, I've nothing against seagulls. The seagulls nest on my roof. And they're squawky, which is okay, and they've loud feet. But the seagulls have no business in the middle of Limerick City. What has them here is food shortages. There's food shortages at sea, their, their natural source of fish is disappearing. So they come to the city to eat out of bins, which they've been doing happily for quite some time. But all that's changed in the past year and a half because of the bottle return scheme. We have this new bottle return scheme in Ireland where if you have a plastic bottle or a can,
3:03 Blindboy Boatclub? there's a little tax on it, so you return your plastic bottles to a vending machine that gives you actual money. What the fuck does that have to do with the seagulls on my roof interrupting my podcast? Well, humans, humans who are experiencing addiction in Limerick City are experiencing homelessness. They now have a, a new revenue stream because they collect bottles and cans and bring them to vending machines and get some money for them. This has led to human beings breaking into commercial wheelie bins. Those huge big wheelie bins that restaurants have and shops have in the alleyways at the back.
3:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Humans are now breaking into these and looking for cans and bottles and causing a big mess. But now as a response to this, the shops and restaurants, they're padlocking the fuck out of their bins. They're putting really strong, human-proof padlocks on their bins. And now the seagulls don't have any bins to get food from anymore. So the seagulls have a food shortage in Limerick City. The seagulls on my roof are loud and anxious and really searching for a source of food. But ironically, it's, it's plastic bottle pollution. Plastic bottle pollution in the Shannon estuary is one of the things that's contributed
4:28 Blindboy Boatclub? to a collapse in biodiversity, a loss of fish or death of sea birds.
4:36 Blindboy Boatclub? Plastic bottle caps in particular, like you might have noticed the past year, you can't just take a plastic bottle cap off a bottle anymore, it's attached permanently. That's because the, the plastic bottle cap is often the most dangerous part of a plastic bottle to sea life, because the plastic bottle caps, they float to the bottom. Where like, plastic bottles, they float at the top and are sometimes cleaned up or salvaged. The plastic bottle caps, they float to the bottom, they break off. Little bits of them get into fish, get into birds, they're really dangerous. This results in, in a collapse of food sources for seagulls.
5:19 Blindboy Boatclub? So the seagulls then move inland to cities to rummage through bins. But the, the bottle return scheme, which is designed to prevent that ecosystem collapse through plastic bottle pollution, that return scheme is now causing urban seagull starvation. I'm seeing it with my own eyes. And then that's making it difficult for me to record this podcast, because I'm getting excessive seagull disturbances. I'm aware that that makes me sound insane. I say this shit on my podcast, I don't say this to people in the street, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say that to my taxi driver, I'm gonna keep that one quiet.
6:02 Blindboy Boatclub? But I'm, I'm fascinated by it because it's a little example of the, you know, the butterfly effect, that small changes in a complex system can lead to large unpredictable consequences over time. It comes from the metaphor that the tiny flap of a butterfly's wings on one side of the world could turn into a tornado on the other side of the world, even though that's impossible, but that's the butterfly effect, it comes from chaos theory. The other, the other thing that's making my podcast difficult to record in my office, difficult to turn on microphones, is noise from other humans.
6:47 Blindboy Boatclub? I moved to my, my new office space about three or four months ago, specifically because I'm on a very, very quiet floor. I'm on a floor where all the offices adjacent to me, they're rented out.
7:04 Blindboy Boatclub? But no one was really showing up to work. There was a lot of people working from home. So the office floor was really, really fucking quiet. But now it's becoming chaotic. Chaotic and anxious, doors banging. And people flustering and moving about quickly. And there's high anxiety in the air. It's been particularly anxious this week, particularly noisy and anxious this week. The humans are behaving like the starving seagulls on my office floor this week.
7:35 Blindboy Boatclub? And I was scratching my head, wondering what's going on. I'm not asking anybody what's going on, I'm just using my eyes. What I'm seeing is people who wouldn't normally show up for work suddenly showing up for work. And they're wearing suits. And I would see them before, they're wearing casual clothes, but now they're wearing suits. People are shouting more, people are arguing more. I'm witnessing what I'd call performative work. It's because of Donald Trump's tariffs. So on the 9th of July, right, so a week away. Donald Trump threatened, a couple of months back, he threatened 50% tariffs on Europe.
8:20 Blindboy Boatclub? So if European goods are to be sold to the United States, there's going to be a 50% tariff. And this is particularly threatening to Ireland because of the pharmaceutical industry. We have a massive pharmaceutical industry in Ireland.
8:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, think, put it this way. 61% of our exports to the United States of America are the pharmaceutical industry. It's 72 billion euros a year. That's huge, that's fucking huge. These are American, mostly American pharmaceutical companies based in Ireland. Like Limerick alone, we've got Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Regeneron are fucking huge. These are massive, massive employers in Limerick City alone. It's most of our economy. The Irish economy is hugely reliant on US pharmaceutical companies who have their base here,
9:24 Blindboy Boatclub? who manufacture here and export mostly to the US. So Trump's tariffs have the potential to absolutely...
9:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Destroy the fucking Irish economy. He wants these American pharmaceutical companies back in America. But of course, that's difficult. The American pharmaceutical industry in Ireland, it has a history that goes back forty, fifty years. We have serious expertise and manufacturing hubs here. These companies are quite reliant on a highly qualified, highly skilled Irish workforce. But I don't think Trump is thinking that way. But in my office, a lot of the businesses here are pharmaceutical adjacent businesses. They might handle the accounts.
10:18 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't know what the fuck they do. The admin side of pharmaceutical adjacent companies. And since Trump announced these potential tariffs, and they're, they might only be a week away. I'm seeing the humans, the human beings on my floor, they're the exact same as those fucking seagulls, the seagulls on my roof who can't access the bins, who can't get into the bins to get the food because of this, this new legislation about bottles. I'm watching humans being starving anxious seagulls for their jobs or their industries. So no one's working from home anymore. That was clearly the case. There was all these offices that were being rented out, but they were fucking empty.
11:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, two months ago, nobody was showing up. Completely empty. And the giant company that owns the offices can afford to rent them and just keep them fucking empty. But now everyone's trying to justify their job. So loads of people are showing up and they're wearing suits. And when I walk past the offices, what I'm seeing is they're putting out these giant televisions. And on the TVs are like multiple Yanks on Zoom calls. And I know they're Yanks because I can hear the American accents. So the offices in Limerick, they're trying to show over a camera link.
11:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Look at us, we show up every single day, we're wearing suits, this is an invaluable professional environment, we need to be here, look at how busy we are. And even when I tried to stay late at my office to record, you know, after five o'clock, where I'm like, everyone's gone home, it's like, no, new people come in because it's morning in Los Angeles. So it's this constant footfall of people showing, trying to show how valuable they are, wearing suits, constant Zoom calls, constant banging of doors, anxiousness, frequent arguments, and I'm stuck in the middle of all this, in my little office, where no one
12:27 Blindboy Boatclub? really knows who I am or what I do, and my, my artistic disposition, I'm, I'm, I have to try and stop myself, going to the toilet and trying to say to one of these pharmaceutical workers, they're saying to them, there is a massive correlation between your behaviour right now and the behaviour of the seagulls on the roof of our building, there's a huge, huge correlation, can I please have 20 minutes of your time to explain my thesis, because I think you'd be very interested, you can't do that, you can't do that to people, you can't do that, I don't do that, I do it here on my fucking podcast, I'm not doing that
13:09 Blindboy Boatclub? in my office, that's how you get your reputation for being eccentric, for being a nut job, I've been stung by that wasp before, I know when to keep my mouth shut in real life, but two complex systems, the system of urban limerick seagulls, who are forced to eat from dustbins, and limerick people working in the pharmaceutical industry who are dependent on American exports, their respective food chains have been disturbed by two different policies, and the seagulls and the humans are now panicking, they're panicking and they're in survival mode, and now I can't, now it's difficult for me to record my podcast
13:52 Blindboy Boatclub? because of these things, and I suppose what I'm describing there, that's just economics, that's economics, and a knock-on effect that now is...
14:04 Blindboy Boatclub? I can no longer trust my office space as a quiet place to record. I can still work there, I can still throw my headphones on and write and read and do all that, but when it comes to recording where I need silence to throw on this microphone, I can't rely upon the office space anymore. And where I'm recording right now, my home studio, my acoustics are all wrong here. I have to whisper, I have to whisper. If I'm to record here in my home studio, I have to whisper because there's a big echo. So what I've been doing over the past few weeks is I'm now building a little custom-made
14:44 Blindboy Boatclub? studio with proper soundproofing and a hundred percent reliability that no seagull or human or raindrop can interfere with, because this is my job. I don't want to become the seagull on the roof. I must seek sustenance in the dustbin of hot takes. I can't allow external factors jeopardize putting a fucking podcast out each week. I've got to take this seriously. So I'm in the process of building a sterile, reliable environment. Thing is, I'm purchasing this, I'm paying for someone, like I'm not doing it myself because I don't have that skillset.
15:27 Blindboy Boatclub? So I'm now, I'm paying somebody who knows what they're doing to build this space for me, but that's only happening because of the seagull situation which is caused by the bottle return scheme and the pharmaceutical worker situation which is caused by Trump's tariffs. So within all that chaos, a new piece of business has been created where I now need someone to create a studio for me. So that's fucking economics, that's what that is right there, that's, that's. Economics is a great, it's a great discipline to try and see the, the patterns, the patterns of the butterfly effect.
16:08 Blindboy Boatclub? So these are the things I was thinking about the day when I couldn't, I couldn't record in my office and I decided, fuck it. I'll have to go home to this studio here and record and whisper slightly so that we don't get an echo. But in the coming weeks, I will have a, a dedicated sterile space that I can rely upon to record. So I went out, I went for a walk, I went for a walk to get out of my office. I accidentally wore two different shoes. Now luckily, they were very similar shoes. So even though I was wearing two different shoes, it didn't look like I was wearing two different shoes. So I was happy with that.
16:49 Blindboy Boatclub? I wore two different shoes because I was distracted. I was thinking about. I'm big into extinction events recently. In the history of this fucking planet that we live on, there's been multiple massive extinction events in the history of life and things being alive on this planet. And there was this, this huge extinction, like there was the, the late Devonian extinction
17:26 Blindboy Boatclub? event, which was about 372 million years ago, where 75% of all species on earth died. So it means that all life that came after that is descended from the 25% of survivors. And then there was 252 million years ago, there was the, the great dying event, the end Parmian extinction event that killed off like 96% of all marine life. And the one we're most familiar with is the, the Cretaceous, the Cretaceous period extinction
18:08 Blindboy Boatclub? event, which would be 65 million years ago. That's the one that killed the dinosaurs. 75% of all, of the life on earth was killed by an asteroid arriving from fucking space. But the extinction event that I'm fucking obsessed with is.
18:29 Blindboy Boatclub? It was called the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. Now, it wasn't a giant extinction event like the other ones. It was about three hundred and five million years ago and it mostly killed off plants. There was this, before the extinction event, there was this explosion in plant life. Now, animals existed, this is before the dinosaurs. You would have had like early reptiles, early amphibians, insects, fish, sharks. Fair play to sharks, fair fucking play to sharks, sharks are very ancient.
19:11 Blindboy Boatclub? There were sharks around, sharks invented sex. Sharks invented having sex. Before sharks, you had these fish with no jaws that would lay eggs. And then another fish would have to come along and wank on the eggs. But sharks were the first ones to have penetrative sex, I suppose. To copulate and internally fertilize. That was sharks, this isn't about sharks. So, around this time that the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse, okay? So this is three hundred and five million years ago. The atmosphere was very different, you had, there was loads more oxygen in the air.
19:54 Blindboy Boatclub? The oxygen levels were like thirty-five percent. Today they're twenty-one percent. So, we'd have had difficulty breathing that air if we were around. And the earth was covered in swamps with loads and loads of plants and trees and ferns. Like fucking loads. But trees started to evolve. This substance called lignin, right? Lignin is
20:27 Blindboy Boatclub? It's what makes, I suppose, wood hard. Lignin is, it's the tree part of a tree. It's the really durable, woody part of a fucking tree. Now, I'm compressing millions of years down into a few sentences. But when ferns started to evolve this lignin, now they started to stand tall and grow up towards the sun and hold their fucking shape. They were probably really lanky and thin, like pencils, the ancestors of modern trees, because they developed this lignin stuff, which is what makes wood solid and durable and hard.
21:11 Blindboy Boatclub? But this lignin, it really impacted the art's carbon cycle, right? So the air I was talking about there, the air now is 21% oxygen and 70 something percent carbon. We have a lot of carbon in the air now. There was less carbon in the air back then. All these new primitive trees that have lignin, that have this, what we'd recognise as strong wood, now the trees are standing up. So the trees are growing like trees today, using photosynthesis, okay? So the sunlight comes down, the leaves are green, they've got chlorophyll that allows
21:53 Blindboy Boatclub? the leaves to use the power of the sun for the plant to make its own food, right? Glucose. The roots are absorbing water and nutrients, but also the leaves, they're absorbing carbon dioxide, the carbon from the air. But these new trees that are evolving then with the lignin, these new sturdy trees, the ancestors of our trees today, these new trees with their lignin, they're storing fuckloads of carbon. So they're taking the carbon out of the air to make this tough, durable.
22:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Rigid tree trunk. We're not dealing with floppy ferns anymore. We're dealing with primitive trees. And these trees with the lignum and the cellulose in them, they're taken. Trees are made out of air. The carbon, the carbon, becomes the bulk of the fucking tree. And it's been taken out of the air and now it's stored in the fucking tree, full of carbon. But these new trees that are evolving, they're taking so much carbon out of the atmosphere that oxygen levels are higher and carbon levels are lower. And this reduces the greenhouse effect.
23:16 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, we know about carbon today because of global warming. Carbon in the atmosphere is causing everything to warm. But back then, the trees were sucking the carbon out of the air. And now they're getting, the, the, the earth is getting the opposite of the greenhouse effect. It starts getting colder and colder. And that cooling creates ice caps. And this is what started to bring about the extinction of all these forests. But here's the thing. The whole earth is covered in these, these forests. And the trees are dying. Now, again, I'm compressing millions of years into a few short sentences. But as the trees are dying, they're not decomposing.
23:59 Blindboy Boatclub? The plant material is dying and like falling on top of each other and creating like bogs. But the carbon that's taken out of the air, because the plants aren't, because the trees aren't decomposing, it's holding on to that carbon. It's, it's holding it in, in the wood and the rotting material. The carbon, it isn't being returned to the atmosphere. So oxygen levels are getting higher and you have global cooling. And that carbon is staying, it's staying in the dead trees. And they pile on top of each other and get compressed and compressed and compressed. Now, one theory is the, like, what the fuck's going on?
24:42 Blindboy Boatclub? How can you have all these forests of trees all over the world? And when they die, they don't fully decompose? What's that about? That's a bit weird. But what would happen now is if a tree dies in the woods.
24:58 Blindboy Boatclub? It would decompose fully. And the reason it decomposes is because of fungus. Mushrooms, that's what fungus does. In particular, stuff called white rot fungus. This will fully decompose a tree. But there's a theory that back around this extinction event, the type of fungus that was able to eat and decompose the lignum substance, the stuff that makes wood hard. Those funguses hadn't evolved yet. And that meant that the carbon, the carbon wasn't returning to the atmosphere. Like shiitake mushrooms. We eat shiitake mushrooms. Look at how shiitake mushrooms are grown.
25:42 Blindboy Boatclub? They're literally grown in a log. If you look at how shiitake mushrooms are grown, someone gets a log of oak or something like that, they inoculate it with the spores of the shiitake mushrooms, and the mushrooms grow out of the wood. Same with oyster mushrooms. And these mushrooms are eating this lignum. And when they eat the lignum, they're returning carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's decomposition. But so here's the mad thing. So what happened to all those trees? Those trees that didn't? Like, this is a mass extinction event. The whole world is covered in fucking forests, the ancestors of trees. What happened to all those trees that never fully decomposed?
26:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Well, through great pressure over the years, it became coal. So that's what fucking coal is. There's a seam down under the earth, and that is the coal seam. And that coal seam comes from this extinction event 303 million years ago. All that carbon was stored under the earth as coal. But then. From the Industrial Revolution onwards, seventeen hundreds onwards, humans, we started to dig this shit up. And we went, fuck, this burns really well.
27:06 Blindboy Boatclub? And we started the burn coal. But here's the thing, three hundred and five million years ago, whatever it was. So like I said with photosynthesis, the tree is using the, the sun's energy, so the energy from the sun is going into the leaf. Then the leaf uses that energy from the sun to separate oxygen and carbon from the air. And then it stores the carbon in its, in its tree, in its fucking lignum, and, and releases oxygen from the leaf. But then three hundred and three million years later, you, you're left with a lump of coal, right? That coal is the stored carbon.
27:48 Blindboy Boatclub? And then when you introduce the energy of fire, of flame, the carbon of the coal burns. And you reunite that carbon with oxygen. So, so burning coal, it's like the, the reverse process of photosynthesis. Fire becomes the energy, fire becomes the sunlight. The carbon is, is the carbon, the coal, and that's then fusing again with the fucking oxygen. But when we burn the coal, the carbon dioxide goes into our atmosphere. Now, coal is what drove the Industrial Revolution, and I'm aware there's, there's other fossil fuels. But coal has been incredibly damaging
28:30 Blindboy Boatclub? to the crisis we're facing now with global warming. Now we have all this carbon dioxide in the air and it's warming the planet. And you and me right now, we're, we're living it right now. We're consistently getting like the hottest days of the year. Because there's all this fucking car- where's the carbon coming from? We're haunting ourselves with the ghosts of trees. We're burning a previous extinction event. Three hundred and five million years ago, these trees evolved. They took all the carbon out of the air. They didn't decompose properly, so they stored deep, deep, deep under the earth as the seams of fucking coal.
29:13 Blindboy Boatclub? Coal will probably never happen again. Like, all of the coal comes from this one event, this one extinction event, where trees started to store all this carbon, but it didn't decompose. That's probably never gonna happen again. Because, like I said, if a forest fucking dies now, it decomposes. The fungi, the mushrooms exist to decompose that and return the carbon to the atmosphere. Not with this situation. So, global warming, the extinction event that we're doing to ourselves and to life on earth. It's like we dug up an ancient grave that's kidding us.
29:57 Blindboy Boatclub? We're burning a previous extinction event and that's gonna make us extinct. We're haunting ourselves with the ghosts of trees through the reverse process of photosynthesis. And I was thinking about this on my walk while I was trying to avoid my office with the seagulls and the pharmaceutical workers. But what I was thinking about, when I was finished thinking about that, I started to think about this saint, there's this saint called Saint Teresa of Avia, right? She was from the 1500s. She used to have visions that Christ was having penetrative sex with her heart. I don't know what got me thinking about that.
30:37 Blindboy Boatclub? I think it was possibly the sharks, but I'm fascinated with this particular saint, Saint Teresa of Avia. She was Spanish and she was known for, she reformed the Carmelite Order. Actually, before I get into Saint Teresa, we'll have a little Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina, what I do have is, I've got my trusty Aztec death whistle, which I don't know how to play and I won't play it very loud because it is quite a frightening instrument. I'll blow gently on the Aztec death whistle and you'll hear an advert for something.
31:19 Blindboy Boatclub? It's supposed to sound like someone being tartred to death.
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35:26 Blindboy Boatclub? I can't get, I don't want to give it the full blast, so I'm gently puffing it.
35:36 Blindboy Boatclub? That was the Aztec death whistle pause. You'd have heard an advert. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If you listen to this podcast for distraction, entertainment, mirth, merriment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider becoming a patron. This is a listener-funded podcast. You, the listener, pay for this podcast. This podcast is my, it's my full-time job. It's how I pay all my bills. It's how I earn a living. It's how I have time to research and make this podcast. It's how I pay the rent for my fucking office that I can't currently use.
36:18 Blindboy Boatclub? It's how I'm gonna afford to pay for this new studio that I'm building. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it. You listen for free. Listen for free, because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. So, everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. And most importantly, because this is listener-funded, I get to show up each week and talk about what I'm legitimately passionate about. That's the most important thing. I am not making advertiser-friendly content.
36:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Advertisers don't want a podcast where I present my, my seagull thesis
37:07 Blindboy Boatclub? and my, the global warming is us haunting ourselves with the ghosts of three thesis. And Saint Teresa thinking that Christ was fucking her heart thesis. They don't want these things. They want chicken fillet roll content. Although I will say, I did a chicken fillet roll podcast, but that's before it became mainstream. I did the chicken fillet roll podcast as an ironic warning about things to come, before it became what it is now, which is just unimaginative fodder. But I did the chicken fillet roll podcast maybe in, in 2019, from an economic perspective. But now advertisers will be like...
37:53 Blindboy Boatclub? Interview a celebrity and ask them what their favourite filling is on a chicken fillet roll. If you're not from Ireland, you're not going to get that specifically, but this is what advertisers want in Ireland. Do chicken fillet roll content. No, that's not what this is about. I'm not beholden to any advertisers. No advertiser can tell me what my content should be. I don't have to think about what do people want to hear, what will get clicks, what will get listens. I don't give a fuck about any of that. I just want to share my passion and curiosity with you. That's what I've been doing for nearly nine years, and that's what I want to continue doing. So, please support the podcast directly, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast.
38:36 Blindboy Boatclub? And if you are signing up, don't do it on your iPhone on the Patreon app because Apple are greedy bastards and they take 30%. So do it on a browser, please. Upcoming gigs, September, September. I'm chilling out for the summer. I have up in Derry, there on the 19th, sorry, 19th of September up in Derry. I'm in the millennium. Come along to that. On the subject of forests, Derry means dera and oak wood. And then Dublin, I'm in Vicker Street. I'm in Vicker Street on the 23rd of September up. Both of those gigs are going to be absolutely fantastic. Derry and Dublin there in September. Come along
39:21 Blindboy Boatclub? to them. So Saint Teresa of Avia, she was from Spain in the 1500s. Now, I'm not into Catholicism and I'm not into, I'm not a religious person. I was baptized Catholic. It was something that was done against my will because I was a baby, but I'm fascinated by Catholicism in particular because it's absolutely mad. I love reading about the lives of saints. I love reading the words that they wrote. I adore Christianity as mythology. I adore Christianity the way I adore Greek mythology or Irish mythology. They're ancient words
40:04 Blindboy Boatclub? written down by human beings and Catholicism is particularly bizarre because of its, it's effectively the way that it worships death.
40:17 Blindboy Boatclub? You know, relics, holding on to bits of bodies of saints and the cannibalism that's present, eating Christ and drinking his blood. They called the pre-Christian savages and pagans because they worshipped and respected nature. Thalys isn't mad. So Theresa of Avia, she was a young girl in the 1500s and she became a Carmelite, right? The Carmelite Order in the 1500s, they would have taken her name from Mount Carmel, which is in what we call the state of Israel today. But Mount Carmel, it was a mountain range where, so
41:00 Blindboy Boatclub? in real early Christianity, third or fourth century, I'm taught, so that's 300 years after Christ, you had the Desert Fathers. These were very, very early Christian monks, like Saint Anthony the Great or Saint Macarius of Egypt. And these lads basically fucked off into the desert and lived in caves, in lives of meditation and contemplation. But during the Crusades, around the 1100s, crusading monks fucked off up to Mount Carmel and lived in caves there. And from that came the Carmelite Order. So Theresa became a Carmelite, right?
41:37 Blindboy Boatclub? But she was obsessed with mortification. She would starve herself of food. She would starve herself of water. She'd spend days in quiet meditation and prayer. She'd whip herself. She'd hurt herself. She'd wear a garment called a Achilles or a hair shirt, it was known, which is a really weird jumper made out of coarse hair of an animal, like goats, like a goat's hair. Or there might be metal inside there. It was jacket that you'd wear on your skin. That's...
42:21 Blindboy Boatclub? Itchy isn't the word. It would cut at you. It'd be like sandpaper. If you were wearing this jacket, you would never be at peace. You'd be, every movement would be consistent pain and annoyance because you'd be mortifying yourself. Saint Teresa would meditate on the Passion of the Christ. So when she would meditate and mortify herself, she's trying to experience the pain of Christ as he's whipped and punished before he goes to the cross. If you're a studious ten-foot deckling, you'll know that I have a short story, in my second collection of short stories, Boulevard Rennes, I have a short story called The Hellfire Scum,
43:06 Blindboy Boatclub? where a character in my story invents a type of jacket made out of tweed that's so abrasive that it can rip the fabric of time, and he turns into a half an hour. Well, what inspired that for me was this, the killis, the hair shirt, this ancient Catholic method of mortifying yourself, this profoundly uncomfortable jacket that would cut you. So Teresa used to wear these and not eat and not drink and meditate and try to experience the Passion of Christ, the suffering and torture that he experienced in the hope that her soul
43:49 Blindboy Boatclub? would have communion with God. But anyway, when Teresa was a young girl in the Carmelite, she would mortify herself so much that she'd frequently find herself sick. Like if you're wearing, if you're not eating, you're not drinking, you're wearing a shirt that cuts you open, it's the 1500s, you're gonna get infections. So she felt terribly ill, so sick that she had to spend a year in bed. And while she was in bed, probably with multiple infections, modern medicine doesn't exist, she would then, in her most sickest moments, experience religious ecstasy.
44:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, the thing is with Teresa, by the sounds of things, she was a young woman. By the sounds of things, she was...
44:43 Blindboy Boatclub? Very horny. She, she, sexual desire was, was a big thing for her. Um. The one big giveaway is she loved reading the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Now, I've done a podcast on Saint Augustine before. If you want a mad bastard, read the Confessions of Saint Augustine. This fella. Augustine of Hippo, he was around about the third century. He was a bishop in what we'd now call Algeria. Augustine is fucking fascinating. He pretty much invented sexual shame in Catholicism.
45:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Saint Augustine was, I suppose, a sex addict. And the beauty of it is that, like, we have his confessions. We have this fucking huge book that he wrote, that he wrote in Latin, which means it's the translation. It's easy to translate. Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine dedicated his life to trying to prove that boners didn't exist in the Garden of Eden. Anytime you hear Saint Augustine or the Augustinians and you go, who the fuck is Saint Augustine? This is a man who dedicated his life trying to prove that boners didn't exist in the Garden of Eden. The reason Augustine was obsessed with this is he couldn't stop thinking about riding.
46:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Like fucking everything, he was tormented by sexual desire, tormented. His earliest memory is going to a public baths with his father. And Augustine was 12 or 13 and he got his first erection, but he was nude in the public baths. And his dad pointed at his dick and made everyone laugh. And this, this put Augustine on a very strange course and.
46:35 Blindboy Boatclub? He just would have sex with men, with women. There's a very plausibility in his sexual relationship with his own mother. And he could not escape what he described as the torture of sexual desire. He couldn't escape it. And sexual desire was so extreme for Saint Augustine that he basically came to the conclusion that nah, this is, this is actual punishment from, from, from God. That's what this is. So Augustine set about with the theory that in the Garden of Eden, right? You've got Adam and Eve. He's like, sex existed in the Garden of Eden, but it wasn't like a nice thing to do.
47:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Augustine reckoned that when, if Adam and Eve had sex in the Garden of Eden, it was just to try and have kids. That erections, an erection, it wasn't sexual desire. It was just like putting your hand in the air. That sex was like eating food or taking a shit or going for a piss. There was no desire attached to this whatsoever. Sex was just to procreate and that's it. And sexual desire and boners did not exist in the Garden of Eden. Then Eve eats the apple. Humanity gets kicked out of the Garden of Eden. God punishes humanity and then gives humans shame. So everyone in the Garden of Eden, they're in the nip, but it doesn't matter because
48:03 Blindboy Boatclub? sexual attraction and desire doesn't exist. So it doesn't matter that anybody's in the nip. But as soon as, as Adam and Eve are cast out from the Garden of Eden and given original sin, now they're given shame and now they must cover up their, their bits because their bits now, their genitals and whatever, what with their bodies, now they become the objects of sexual desire. And that was Augustine's thing. Yeah. As soon as humans got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, then all of a sudden they became tormented with the desire to have sex because Augustine was a fucking sex addict. And after Augustine of Hippo, third century, that's when you start to see.
48:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Sexual shame start coming into Christianity big time. It didn't really exist before Augustine. The sex addict whose dad laughed at his fucking penis in a swimming pool, who probably also had sex with his ma, he's who started these roles. So anyway, Teresa of Avia in the 1500s. She's lying in bed sick because she's been mortifying herself. And she's really identifying with the confessions of Augustine. She, her quote was, "I found comfort in his work because he was a sinner too." So that tells me that she,
49:29 Blindboy Boatclub? she was probably just a very horny person and had a lot of shame around this and thought about sex an awful lot. And maybe was mortifying herself and hurting herself to get away from these thoughts. So anyway, Teresa's lying in bed. And she experiences her religious ecstasy and she has a vision. But in her vision, what happens is someone appears to her. It's either Christ or an angel. And she says, "I saw in his hand a long spear of gold and at that point, there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart and to pierce my very entrails.
50:12 Blindboy Boatclub? And when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. And the pain was so great that it made me moan. And yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it." So Teresa now is having these ecstatic visions. So she's feeding it. She's describing, she's describing orgasm there, but, but uh.
50:43 Blindboy Boatclub? Orgasm, that's also, there's a pain involved, there's a mortification. If she was around today, maybe we'd say she'd be into S and M. There's, there might be a kink or something going on here, but everyone around her then has to start, they start taking her seriously and like, what's going on with Teresa? Well, apparently Christ is showing himself to her and he's penetrating her heart repeatedly. And she's mourning in pain and pleasure and it's happening repeatedly. And we have to take this seriously. And then after that happens, like she also had a problem with levitation.
51:29 Blindboy Boatclub? And she, the levitation used to embarrass her. She would all of a sudden start to levitate and everyone would have to hold her down. Teresa was a prolific writer, so she, she wrote all of these experiences down. Now, there's other theories now, modern like psychologists look at the life of Saint Teresa and they reckon she had temporal lobe epilepsy. And that would explain the burning sensations that she'd experience or hearing voices. And also the levitation that if she would suddenly levitate and people would have to hold her down, that possibly that she, she's describing an epileptic fit.
52:11 Blindboy Boatclub? And people who experienced epilepsy back then may have been seen as this is spiritual, this is religious. And one thing I, I find fascinating is the people today with temporal lobe epilepsy. Some people with this condition respond very well to intermittent fasting and quite restrictive diets. I think the ketogenic diet is used to manage the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. And I find that interesting because Teresa is mortifying herself. She's, she is going long periods of fasting and not eating.
52:53 Blindboy Boatclub? And maybe this, even though for her, she was trying to experience the passion of Christ and trying to mortify her body. She might've been managing the symptoms of temporal lobe epilepsy. But her experiences and her visions, they were taken quite seriously by the church. She was seen as. A miracle person, someone who could experience or see God or see Jesus, even if for her it appeared that Christ was penetrating her in some way. It's called bridal mysticism, that as a nun, as a bride of Christ, that maybe the spiritual expression of that was in some way sexual.
53:36 Blindboy Boatclub? I think what caught me thinking about this is, again, going back to the sharks. Like, I enjoy Christianity as mythology. These are things that human beings wrote down.
53:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And they wrote them down and they might have been oral beforehand. Like, you know, I'm fascinated with flood mythology. I'm fascinated with the story of Noah's flood, because this may actually be humans who orally remember the Ice Age 10,000 years ago, when the ice caps melted and there was quite a lot of floods. And the story of the great flood in the Bible, or the epic of Gilgamesh that happens about 2,000 years before that, that this might actually be an oral folk memory of human beings who remember the great floods of the Ice Age. And taking it back to St Augustine there with his obsession,
54:29 Blindboy Boatclub? his obsession that sex didn't, sex and sexual desire did not exist in the Garden of Eden, that this was a punishment by God when, at the fall of man, that one of the prices for original sin was sexual desire. And in a way, he's right.
54:51 Blindboy Boatclub? There was no one fucking each other before sharks. 380 million years ago, there were jawless fish. And the fertilization of eggs, it was not a sexual act. The eggs were deposited. The female fish fucked off and then the male fish with no jaw had to put his sperm onto the eggs. And then sharks evolve as, no, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna find a partner that I, that I like, that I'm attracted to, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna try and have sex with that one. I'm, I'm here trying to be cautious and use the language of consent with 380 million year old archaic sharks.
55:36 Blindboy Boatclub? But like, yeah, that sharks were the first ones with sexual desire, sexual selection. They're making a choice. I would like to have sex with that one. You have to assume that within the shark's little brain, this is some type of attraction or desire. This is sexual selection. So in a way, as mad as Saint Augustine was, he was right. Sex did not exist. For, for the jawless fish, sexual desire, it did not exist. It's, there's a pile of eggs, where do I wank? And then all of a sudden, now there's desire involved. There's desire and there's competition. So Augustine was onto something. But back to Saint Teresa.
56:21 Blindboy Boatclub? So when she died, and she died, she died in, in 1582. And the interesting thing about Teresa's death is, so dissection, dissection of a human body to investigate, it was not something that happened in the 1500s. But with Teresa, they, they, they wanted to see if there were holes in her heart because she had so many visions of an angel or Christ penetrating her heart. So they cut her open and looked at her heart and then claimed, yes, there's holes in her
57:04 Blindboy Boatclub? heart, but you can't trust the Catholics when it comes to fucking relics. You can't trust them. And what I mean by that is, that's another really strange thing about Catholicism is, is relics, parts of a saint's body being used to, to venerate as almost magical, powerful objects because...
57:27 Blindboy Boatclub? They were just, it was just about tourism. A saint's relic, a piece of a saint's body.
57:35 Blindboy Boatclub? A monastery gets their hand on it, or a fucking church. A cathedral gets their hand on the relic and all of a sudden there's pilgrimages to see that relic. So bits of saints' bodies were used for tourism, basically, for capitalism. So I don't trust the priests that cut her open and said they found holes in her heart. I'd say someone put it there so that they could earn money from tourism. They took multiple parts of Teresa's body and turned her into relics. If you go to Rome, you can visit a church and her right foot and part of her upper jaw is there. In Lisbon, you can visit her hand. In Spain, in Randa, her other hand is in Randa.
58:19 Blindboy Boatclub? One of her fingers is in Paris.
58:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Bits of her are all over the place and the church used these as relics because they said too that her body was incorruptible. And this is the sign of the highest saint is when the body doesn't decompose. But she reformed the Carmelites.
58:40 Blindboy Boatclub? Eamon de Valera was big into the Carmelites. Eamon de Valera was, he was buried in Carmelite robes, which is quite a strange thing for a layperson. Eamon de Valera, he was in the IRA. He was President of Ireland. He's a very divisive figure in Irish history. Because Dev, he wrote the Irish Constitution. Eamon de Valera, he wanted to be a priest. He was very, very fucking Catholic. That's why he's getting buried in Carmelite robes. He would have been a big fan of Teresa. Um, Dev, Eamon de Valera is the one that gave the Catholic Church so much power in Ireland.
59:25 Blindboy Boatclub? He wrote religion into our constitution. Eamon de Valera consulted with a Catholic bishop, Bishop McQuaid, when writing the Irish Constitution. The Irish Free State.
59:39 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, after the Irish, the twenty-six counties got independence from Britain, we post-colonially, post-colonially mortified ourselves, we flagellated and mortified ourselves through the Catholic Church and through sexual shame and through violence against women and the imprisonment of women in the Magdalene system. And Eamon De Valera, he laid the groundwork for that huge abuse of power against women and children that happened in Ireland in the 20th century by the Catholic Church. De Valera's name gets brought up a lot recently because of, because of Irish solidarity with
1:00:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Palestine, because of Irish-Palestinian solidarity. Often you'll see in American media, or Israeli media, or British media, Eamon De Valera is often used as an example of Ireland being an anti-Semitic country because in 1945, when Adolf Hitler died, Eamon De Valera called on the German minister to offer condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, and that's seen as very controversial. And the thing is, De Valera, De Valera didn't do that because he agreed with Hitler or
1:01:09 Blindboy Boatclub? liked Hitler. Ireland was a neutral country in World War II. Ireland didn't take any side. And what De Valera did, which was a bad decision, a fucking stupid decision to do, Eamon De Valera stuck to fucking protocol. And the official protocol for a neutral country is to offer condolences to the loser and congratulate the winner. And that's what De Valera did. He followed that fucking protocol. And De Valera's not, he is not a popular figure in Ireland. You'll be hard pressed to find people who like Eamon De Valera because his legacy is Catholic fascism. That's De Valera's legacy.
1:01:54 Blindboy Boatclub? The Magdalen laundries work, that was fascism. Industrial schools, mother and baby homes. The power granted to priests and bishops. That's De Valera's legacy in Ireland. But when we see international fucking newspapers, then bringing up the De Valera, writing condolences to Hitler thing as an example of Ireland being an antisemitic country, we get really fucking annoyed because then it puts us in the position where we're defending fucking Eamon De Valera. He was a religious fanatic that was buried in carmelite robes. But here's the mad thing. In Israel now, there's a forest. There's a forest in Israel called Eamon De Valera Forest.
1:02:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Israel planted a forest in the 60s and named it after Eamon De Valera. And you're left thinking, why would? If British media, American media, Israeli media uses Eamon De Valera as this example of a history of antisemitism in Ireland, why would they name a forest after fucking Eamon De Valera in what's now the state of Israel? Well, the fact is, De Valera hated antisemitism. So in 1937, Eamon De Valera was writing the Irish Constitution. And by 1937, in Germany, Jewish people, they'd been stripped of their German citizenship.
1:03:23 Blindboy Boatclub? They were banned from marrying non-Jews. Their property was seized. There was full-on systemic antisemitism happening in Germany under Hitler. And as a response to this, Eamon De Valera, in Article 44 of the Constitution, he wrote that Jewish people specifically are entitled to be equal citizens and practice their religion in Ireland under the new Irish Constitution, which was a radical thing at the time. Because not just in Germany, in a lot of European countries, antisemitism was fucking rife. And Dev, one of his closest friends and advisers.
1:04:07 Blindboy Boatclub? Was the chief rabbi of Ireland, Yitzhak Herzog, who's the grandfather of the current president of Israel right now, Isaac Herzog. And this is why there's a forest in Israel called Amen de Volera Forest. Because he, into the Irish constitution, he wrote that Jewish people to be, are protected in Ireland as a direct response to rising antisemitism in Europe in 1937. So bear that in mind when you see the Amen de Volera offering condolences to Hitler thing as an example of people trying to paint Ireland as an antisemitic country because we have solidarity with the people of Palestine who are being colonized.
1:04:51 Blindboy Boatclub? But there is a correlation here with forests and with Mount Carmel in particular. Because I said Mount Carmel, you know, of the Carmelite Order of nuns that Teresa reformed and that de Volera was buried in Carmelite robes. All around Mount Carmel now, loads of these forests. And in the state of Israel, they have massive problems with wildfires. Israel spent the 20th century planting loads and loads of forests. Now, that sounds like a good thing, like Amen de Volera Forest is one of these forests. Forest planting in Israel was a big deal.
1:05:35 Blindboy Boatclub? And people would give donations to plant forests in Israel. A lot of forests were planted in Israel as an act of colonialism to completely erase Palestinian villages. In 1948, the period known as the Nakba, the foundation of the state of Israel, loads of Palestinian people are murdered, kicked out of their homes and sent off as refugees. What happens to their towns and villages, the smaller communities in particular? Loads of them around Mount Carmel. What happens?
1:06:11 Blindboy Boatclub? The Israeli state planted forests so that the villages and land would completely disappear. So that if those Palestinians ever were to even try and return to their village, that could have been there for hundreds of years, thousands of years, it wouldn't exist anymore. The land wouldn't exist because now it's a forest. It was a type of quick green colonialism. But because the forests were planted, but mostly European, non-native trees, they're not in tune with local biodiversity. So you've got these massive forest fires
1:06:52 Blindboy Boatclub? now. You have European trees that have no relationship with the soil or the land, and they're burning, they're burning because they have no resilience to the desert. They don't belong there. They were planted like mushrooms to decompose the Palestinian homes. So that's a series of thoughts that interested me this week while I was walking around the place because I couldn't use my office. That was a bit of a strange podcast that took many turns, many tangents. But we need that every so often. We need a palate cleanser like that, a nice fever dream of a podcast. I'll catch you next week. In the meantime,
1:07:33 Blindboy Boatclub? rub a dog, genuflect to a swan, wink at a worm. Dog bless.
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