August 6, 2025 • 77 mins
I sat down for the second time with my favourite philosopher, wordsmith, truth-teller - and now matrimony's fiercest ally - Stephen Jenkinson, to dive deep into love, relationships, and the rituals that hold them together... or should.
What started as a conversation about weddings quickly turned into something much bigger. Stephen shared how officiating ceremonies led him to defend matrimony itself - not the performance, but the sacred, messy, meaningful practice of two people choosing each other, again and again. He calls himself matrimony's ally and a 'spirit lawyer' of sorts for marriage... and after hearing him, you’ll get why.
He brings the same fire and the depth as he did it his first phenomenal appearance on the show (ep695) - telling stories that are as unorthodox as they are unforgettable, breaking down the meaning behind words like 'catastrophe' and 'matrimony', and exposing how far we’ve drifted from the roots of our language, our rituals, and our relationships.
This conversation doesn’t float at the surface. It goes all the way down into ancestry, witnesshood, grief, and the quiet work of keeping love alive when the honeymoon’s long gone.
True to form, there’s nothing surface-level here, and Stephen leaves my mind whirring... Enjoy!
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STEPHEN JENKINSON
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is role with the punches and we're
turning life's hardest hits into wins. Nobody wants to go
to court, and don't. My friends at test Art Family
Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
all areas of family law to facto and same sex couples,
custody and children, family violence and intervention orders, property settlements
and financial agreements. Test Art is in your corner, so
reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Stephen Jenkinson, it is
(00:54):
such a pleasure to have you back. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Ooh, it's been a while, hasn't it has?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
But if it's been a while, but it still feels
like yesterday.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Well good, I mean in the best way pass.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Of my help, the best way possible. I was just
telling Natalie before we jumped on and hit record that
I have not stopped raving about your brilliant show that
you had in Melbourne, and I have not stopped talking
about that since.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Ah huh, Well, you're very kind, I think. I mean,
we had a good day, didn't we. We had a
good evening, and life was kind to us right then.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It was. And I had never experienced anything like that,
I was saying to Natalie. I sat there with my
jaw on the floor, going, what is this experience? Do
you want to tell my listeners? What that what we're
talking about? What that experience was?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Sure? Well, we some I'm listening to track how long
something like twelve or fourteen years ago, a fellow that
I didn't know at the time at all basically volunteered
to graft his considerable musical skills onto me. And it
(02:11):
turned into a kind of Tentshio revival of a kind
of let's see what happens bravado and very poetic, very musical,
very sort of rock and roll sensibility in some ways,
and all of that mixed together, plus a little sort
of biblical reference here and there when you need it,
(02:32):
and a refusal to be steimied. I mean, all those
things together worked out amazingly well. And we've gone all
over the world with the tour. It's called Knights of
Grief and Mystery. That's the name of the event. And
it's it's been on the shelf for a little while,
but we're just finishing the putting, the finishing touches on
(02:52):
a new record. Yes, a new record. Yeah. And the
record is a well, we've been saying it's a love record,
or he's been saying it's a love record. I've been
saying it's a makeout record, which is I mean, hopefully
there's some overlap there, you know. And then we realized
as we listened to stuff we've done in the past, man,
(03:13):
everything we've done is basically a love record of in
some fashion or other. This one maybe is a little
more deliberate than a little more intentional than it was
in the past. But along with Orphan Wisdom School, the
Night's Degree for Mystery is the best thing I have
ever done. Not just skillful best, but but bravado best,
(03:38):
and conscience best and skillful, you know. And I mean
to have lived long enough to outgrow your shyness I'm
talking about myself now, to outgrow your shyness and and
end up in a stand to deliver circumstance, you know,
where you're the sort of the front man. I mean,
(03:59):
I never saw that coming. Really, That's what happened. Yeah,
so I was kind of I was, I was called upon.
It was ever glad I was.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It was just the type of thing I couldn't even describe.
I was like, I'm not sure what this is. I
don't know what I'm in the middle of. But it
had such an impact on me. Like you said, it
was musical, it was biblical, it was profound. My jaw
was on the on the graw on the ground. You
(04:33):
left me hanging on thoughts and perspectives and ideas and
questions and answers, and I was just I was just
left there spinning.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, well, I'm glad in a lot of ways. Glad,
But I mean it's an example of what you can
do when you decide that the things you've seen in
the past, it's not the sum total of what's possible.
That you can supersede the narrow categories like poetry or
(05:04):
or even modern music for that matter, you can you
could simply ask more of yourself while you're still able.
That's I think what we did. And you know, we
were old enough that we were we had made all
of the young person's mistakes available, and so we were
(05:28):
in an entirely other kind of realm of sort of
older persons. We were cooked, you know, we were we
were we were ready, Yeah, and we were unhesitant. And
sometimes you know, they say, you ask for permission, and
sometimes you ask for forgiveness and knights of grief and
(05:51):
mystery is a is a huge leap for all concerned.
And I mean, one of the best accolades I ever
received about it was I used to come off the
stage and sort of blend in with the crowd from
behind as they were filing out. I was making my
way to the foyer to sign books and all that
(06:11):
sort of thing. So I listened to what people were saying,
and they didn't know I was there. You know, I
don't really stand out, so I'm not tall or anything.
So I was just able to sort of shuffle along
with people and overhear them. And one person said to
the other who brought them? Do you know I had
no idea what this was as it was described to
(06:33):
me before I came. Now I've seen it, I have
no idea what it was.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
That's exactly how I feel. It is exactly how I feel.
And it's frustrating because you want to tell people, you
want to tell people this experience you've had, and there's
no words for it.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well there are, but you have to sort of forsake
the typical categories and silos and all that sort of thing,
and you have to sort of go for it, you know,
in the description you have to. So I think the
word biblical belongs, for example, and the word sort of
(07:11):
ten show revival that sort of belongs to, and a
kind of recitation of a very old kind of order,
well that belongs as well. And you know, we asked
a lot of this of the audience, of course, But
I mean that was my word of treating them like
grown ups, like adults, you know, like people who were
(07:34):
who deserved an opportunity to be kind of staggered instead
of just affirmed. I mean, it's not that hard to
get affirmed. Really. You just look at your sort of
preference schedule and just follow it and you will find
all kinds of yes men and yes women you know
that gather around you. But the thing that we did
(07:57):
for a lot of chances, and I'm exceedingly proud over
all those years that we did so, and we didn't
do it alone, you know, of course I had a
band and all of that, But the people who came
quickly ceased to be an audience and became sort of
core conspirators, and so we were rarely alone.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So I find intriguing. I'm just thinking about it now,
and I'm trying to think of any other experience where
you can deliberately evoke curiosity to excite people and leave
them without giving answers necessarily, So leave them with the questions.
They didn't come with it, they didn't know they had,
(08:43):
give them the questions, get them to walk away still
holding the questions, and be fully satisfied with the experience.
How often can that even happen in the world we
live in today?
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well indeed, I mean one of the things that we
didn't do is we didn't treat people like they were consumers.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
M So.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
I think it was a kind of soothsaying. That's what
it was. Really it was. It was kind of it
was old order conjuring, you know, And if we say
much more, we're going to frustrate people about, you know,
in case it never gets on the road again, I mean,
I hope it does. I don't know that it will.
I mean, we'd have to learn this whole new record
(09:28):
and reconfigure the band and you know, it's very expensive
to be on the road. And uh, but then again,
you know, the least the less possible things seem, the
more attractive I find them to be. So you never know,
I might.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Just hold my breath. Hey, before we move into I
feel like you've pivoted. You've had these huge pivots, but
there is I need to address something in the background.
That boxing gloves behind you. Tell me more, aren't they.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
You know they are?
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I know they are.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah. Well, well, first of all, I mean, I can't
let you have all the fun that was the.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
First Was it my black either I had the day
we met that inspired you?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I was, I don't know if that was inspiration much
as it is kind of a warning, a bit warning
about it. But no, I thought to myself, honestly, honestly,
now I'm going to tell you the honest truth. The
first time we spoke, I was, I was kind of
mesmerized in a fashion that you, you know, had the kind
(10:39):
of life and the kind of interest that you did.
And then you came to me the way you did,
and we had the conversation that we did. It was,
I mean, it's I've done a lot of these encounters.
I mean, scores and scores and scores of them over
the years, and I don't think it belittles anyone to
say most of them are not men. But honest to God,
(11:03):
the one with you is certainly stays with me. It's
one of the reasons we're talking now, and it's one
of the reasons that I was compelled here, so I
went down. I often find the winter's a bit excessive now,
so I do have to sort of duck out for
a little while. And they I don't know if this
(11:23):
revokes my Canadian citizenship, I hope not. But anyway, I
was down in San Diego in h this February March April,
in that zone, and the woman who was kind of
sort of looking out for me, you could say, decided
we needed to endeavor to pursue something she ended up
(11:44):
calling the Joy Project. And this involved a number of activities,
you know, including doughnuts stores and and and retro movie
theaters and and boxing lesson. And I said to myself,
I thought to myself, this can't be. I mean, you know, what,
(12:07):
what code of is it kind of a vanity project?
I mean I was really I was really hesitant, but
the guy in question was an amazing He was a
Korean American kid, and he was very smooth. He was
kind of he was pretty, if you know what I mean.
He he had that kind of sugar ray kind of
(12:27):
prettiness about him, you know, and he's lithe he's not
all muscle bound, and he moves in a sort of
cat like fashion. And you you know, after ten minutes
you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I could do that, which
is a complete nonsense. Of course, you can't do that,
not today, not never, but but the root of finding
(12:49):
out that you can't do it could be very interesting.
And so, you know, ultimately what it was kind of
just lay the joking aside for a minute, was we
knew that there was a beautiful sort of acxis between
just the obvious physical activity and a kind of marriage
(13:13):
of brain and brawn, right how much I mean, I'm
telling you stuff. You of course, you know, but it
just began to dawn on me that they call it
the sweet science for a reason. And I came to
understand that the engagement of my with my with all
(13:34):
the aspects of my cognition was really an important thing
to pursue, sort of very intentionally and that's what it did.
And so I mean not to mention the fact that
it will certainly put you in your place. That the
little speedbag, for example, is just I mean, I'll never
(14:01):
forget the abject humiliation of hitting that thing and waiting
for it to come back. And you know, you know
exactly what I'm saying, right then, Yeah, trying to get
that bubba, the bubba, the bubba, the thing going on
and finally being able to do it, and it's like
I'm finished. I don't need to do anymore. I got
(14:22):
it to go bubba bubba, bubba bubba forwards and backwards,
and it was a beautiful thing. And then put the
gloves on, and then you feel like a just a
terrible pretender. And then we sort of do some shadow
boxing and various other things, and I'm doing it still.
This is an investment. I actually bob my gloves. I
(14:43):
feel ridiculous, to be honest, because I'm wearing them maybe
a couple of times a week. But recently we hang
a heavy bag from the rafters in the barn here
at the farm, and I go there most days and
shine the shoes, you know that one.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, yeah, I love this so much for you, so much.
I feel like my connection with boxing cracked open my
mind and the links and the metaphors and the self
reflection and the understanding about life, and I'm there's just
(15:20):
all of the wisdom. There's all of the wisdom I
could ever ask for in what I saw, felt and
went through in the process of learning that sport. I'm
so glad you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yeah, yeah, it's very It has a devotional aspect, doesn't it?
A contemplative devotional aspect. And here's the thrill of a lifetime,
very recently, because I'm doing it here at home. When
I returned back to the farm and in the studio
or whatever they call it, the gym. In one corner
(15:54):
of the gym, there's a ring, okay, that you have
to climb up to, and he had son, and the
teacher at his son, he said to me, we're going
to have some fun at the end of it. Okay, great,
And for the first and only time so far, I
walked into the ring, stepped into the rink, through the
(16:16):
ropes and all that thing, and his son put on
the lid right, and my job was to hit his
son however I could hopefully trying to remember the basics
of what I had learned so far, you know, the
stances and the shuffles and the combinations and things like that.
(16:36):
And the Sun's job was to not get hit by me. Yeah, right,
not to be like really evasive, but to be moving
and ducking and all the rest. And my god, what
an unbelievable experience it was. And it didn't feel adversarial,
it didn't feel dangerous, it didn't feel assaulted in any way.
(16:58):
It felt like two people choreographing a kind of veneration
they had for what they were both involved in. It was.
It was, in its way beautiful.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
You see aspects of yourself and others that cannot be
seen anywhere else. There is there is a level of
instinct and intuition that that can't be forged that side
of that place. I've never found anywhere else that forges
it anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Right. A close second is standing on the stage with
the night's a grief and mystery and that people opposite. Yeah,
it has some of the same elements. Yeah, nobody knows
what's coming. And you know, what I do depends a
little bit on what you do, what you lead with,
what you follow with you know all those things. Yeah,
(17:51):
so I credit you with inspiring me to think that
this would not be an utterly fool's errand for me
to pursue.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Wow, this is I'm chaffed. I'm like, yeah, the smile
on my face right now almost hurts. Thank you. Hey.
I would talk about boxing until the cows come home.
But I want to talk about you on New Endeava.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
We will someday, yes, yeah, but sure by all means
you have some questions. I know you do.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
I do because the death guy, the death guy, has
all of a sudden become the matrimony guy. We've gone
from death to love and marriage. I feel like you're
Benjamin buttoning the whole process. What's going on?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Well, I didn't mean to, but then again, I never
meant to be the death guy either. In fact, I
didn't know there was such a thing as a death
trade in those days and kind of backed into it.
It's a whole other vignette, but it was an accident, really,
and it's something I turned out to be born to do.
(18:59):
So time on I got older, I instituted something called
the Orphan Wisdom School. A lot of people came from
all over the world. I mean, this is a real
big surprise to me, is that the people who decided
I was worth a try turned out not to be
(19:19):
a sort of a single, very narrow demographic. These people
came from all kinds of walks of life, all kinds
of ages, and various kinds of devotion and trouble and
things like this, and in that mix of people. From
time to time as the years went along, starting about
(19:40):
twenty twelve or fourteen, people would ask me if I
would consider doing sort of the high end events for
them of life. For example, would I consider naming their
child that was an amazing quessee? Yeah, that was several times.
That's how would I consider house blessings and things of
(20:08):
that kind? And you know where I'm leading to here?
Would I consider marrying them? And after I corrected them
the understanding that you know, I didn't have the legals
and they'd have to pursue the paperwork from somebody else
and all that sort of thing, they said, yeah, yeah,
we you know, we kind of figured you probably weren't
that guy. And I said, well, so why me? And
(20:33):
pretty routinely all of these people said something like this, Well,
we're looking for something that's honest and true and genuine
and authentic and meaningful and personal. I'm listening to all
of this, and I kind of know where this is headed,
(20:54):
and it's not necessarily good. But the word that showed
up more than all those other words was real. That's
what they were asking for, something, a wedding that was real.
And the way they were saying all these things told
me that they were certain that these were all synonyms
for really good. But I know what the word real means,
(21:18):
and it doesn't mean really good. Real means the whole
friggin thing, the whole crazy matrix, the whole heartbreaking, heartwarming proposition,
you know, all of it. And I knew they didn't
mean that. I knew they wanted this kind of event
(21:39):
that they had in mind to be sequestered from the world.
And it's weary ways you could say, but I'm not
that guy. I'm not the guy that will build a
fence around your most precious stuff and not let the
world in. You're fully capable of doing that without my
(21:59):
help or my complicity, you see. So I kind of
challenged them, you know, on the level of the request,
and I put them through the ringer, honestly and I
made them kind of well, they had to ask me,
(22:21):
as it turned out, three times on three separate occasions.
And you can imagine these are sort of card carrying,
standard North American, sort of dominant culture type people. They're
not keen on appearing to be approaching someone who looks
like them on bended knee. But if this is what
(22:42):
you want, this is not a bad way to go
to get there, to petition and to plead and to
kind of make a case. And the promise I made
in exchange for the petition went something like this, I'm
(23:05):
going to be matrimony's advocate in this. I'm going to
be matrimoni's spirit lawyer. You're going to have your friends,
You're going to have your families there, you're going to
have your orchestrations, right, the band, whatever, it's going to be,
the money, the whole thing. That's all you're doing, to
(23:28):
do it as you see fit. But my job is
to see to it that matrimony stands the chance of
happening happening, and that's what I'm that's what I'm committing to.
And sometimes the result will be that you've decided that
(23:48):
I've ceased to bear you in mind, because I'm bearing
matrimony of mind instead, and I'm not persuaded by the
marzipan figures on the cake longer the way everyone else is,
you know, And you know, the probably the last part
of the answer to the question would be this, in
(24:09):
order to I'd never done anything like this before, but
probably not unlike yourself and many people listening, I had
been to the odd wedding, and I had come away
from those things with an awful sense of squander and
missed opportunity and a terrible case of blinking and a
(24:34):
folding under pressure, and of not getting it right, and
of not daring things like this of this order, you know,
and you know, the fifteen minute wedding and get onto
the reception as quickly as possible, all that sort of thing.
And the thing frankly troubled me, and it made me
feel that there was a kind of a hole in
(24:56):
my life, that it was the approximate shape of what
I just sat through. And so I had to wonder,
you know, is it just me? Do I have unreasonable
expectations of such a thing, or is it possible that
until fairly recently, I mean in terms of historical time,
(25:18):
it was possible to be wed alchemically, not familiarly. Familiarly
I don't even think that's a word anyway, It was
possible to have your edges melted, you know, your psychic
autonomy challenged and thwarted. And that's what I meant by alchemy.
(25:46):
How how I asked myself, if I'm going to say
yes to these people, what am I going to do?
That's not that? And I took my cue from a
very simple moment in the standard ceremony. I thought about
the invitations that are sent out pretty routinely. I thought
(26:07):
about typically what they say, and often what they don't say.
And usually they'll take the form of something like, you know,
please get the honor of your companies, requested at the
celebration of love and life between so and so and
so and so so. That sounds very good, a little generic.
(26:30):
But what's the problem, I mean, Jenkinson, what's the problem? Like,
why don't you just roll with the punches once in
a while, to use the phrase, why don't you just
go with it? Man? Why do you wonder about stuff
so routinely like this? And you know, it's partly the
way I'm built. I guess it's partly why people approached me,
to be honest, and it's partly this. I was willing
(26:55):
to learn where this hankering for more that I had
came from. And I took my cue, of all things,
from the difference between a promise and a vow. I
actually did the work. It started to chase down that thing.
(27:17):
And this is, for whatever it's worth, is what I
came up with. Those things that happen at the front
of the room, at the front of the hall, at
the front of the church, whatever it is on the beach,
those are not supposed to be promises. But we don't.
(27:37):
You know, English speaking people don't make much of a
distinction between promise and vow. They're kind of the same thing.
One sounds a little more serious, but maybe not. Maybe
that's basically two forms of the same thing, two wings
on the same bird, so to speak, but they're not
at all. Here's why to promise literally means two in
(28:00):
evoke your intentions for the future. That's what you're doing
when you're promising something. You're not making something happen anytime soon.
You're banking on the next day and the next day
and the next month and year. Wherein the promises that
(28:20):
you're making can find some opportunity to announce themselves and
to appear and to cash out. Etymologically, that's literally what
the word promise means. It means to throw forward, right,
to cast forward. So, I mean, there's nothing wrong with promising,
(28:41):
But the truth of the matter is it's a little conditional.
The nature of a promise goes something like this, Well,
I certainly will try to do that. I mean, with
every fiber of my being to do that. My full
(29:02):
and deep intention is to follow through with that, et cetera,
et cetera. Can you imagine standing at the front of
the room getting married to someone and somebody's asking you
about your intention, and that's what you talk that's the
way you talk about it, I really hope. So who
would stand for that? How would the other person? I mean,
(29:26):
you can just imagine the crestfallen face that the person goes.
You know, all in, I'll do my best, You'll do
your best. This is not a time for doing your best,
is it? And this is why there's the word vowel.
The word vowel is not about the future at all.
(29:49):
And if you don't believe me, just ask yourself. The
last time you heard officialdom at the front of the
hall in the form of the celebrant with a caller
or without the chance this is are very good. You
heard something that sounds like this, not will you do you?
(30:11):
What tense?
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Is that?
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Present? Tense? Yeah, it's a very deliberate formulation. In English,
it might as well say, are you, as of this
moment doing this thing you're declaring not just declaring it?
Are you doing it at the same time because you must,
because that's what matrimonia calls for from you. Well, the
(30:39):
failure to make that distinction results in the kind of
weddings that I saw and the kind of weddings that
these people who were asking me were fleeing from. And
that's kind of how it began.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
You've got me in the same exact state that I
was in our first conversation. I've got a thousand a
thousand things wearing around in my mind, our relationship with language,
which I experience deeply when I speak to you in
a way I never experienced in other ways, as you
(31:12):
were doing that. I fell in love with Brene Brown's
book Atlas of the Heart for this reason, because she
goes into the definitions of our language, And I was
thinking about that as you're speaking, and how we are
at the mercy of how we converse with each other
(31:33):
and communicate and the words we choose and use, but
we don't necessarily experience them until we know them. So
we're at the mercy of them. They're change, they're dictating
our life, but we're not experiencing that in the same
way until we connect with the They're the differences, the definitions.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
How about this. You don't honestly know what you're thinking
until you open your mouth, and there is a degree
of dismay when you find out what you're thinking. So
there's some fundamental connectivity between your cognitive anticipatory wonderment glands
(32:25):
or or lobes and the simple act of doing what
you and I are doing now is reaching towards the words.
Reaching towards the words, and in some fashion or other,
trusting their efficacy, Maybe not so much trusting your skill
(32:47):
as trusting the potency and the valance of the words themselves,
that they will not fail you if you don't take
them for chumps and bums and goofs, if you take
them seriously, if you don't use them like like you
(33:08):
would have used an unfortunate romantic partner when you're a teenager,
that sort of thing. Yeah, And you know, to my
good fortune, I've had an instinct for that as long
as I can remember. I trust the language, but I
also have veneration for the language at the same time.
(33:30):
So when people slander English, which you know, I understand
where the motivation comes from, and the idea being that
somehow other languages are much more adept, I mean at
the sort of the romantic life, at the poetic life,
things of disorder, I say, at least to myself. Well,
you know, considering what English has been through in the
(33:52):
last several hundred years. Yeah, I understand the sense that
it's a cheap artifact, it's a kind of ball, but
it's it's suffering terribly in the marketplace. It's suffering terribly
on this machine that you and I are talking back
and forth, and it's going to suffer horribly with the
advent of artificial intelligence as it's being rolled out, you know,
(34:15):
as we speak. So it behooves us, I think, to
call the depths of the English language forward and up
by by resorting to it, you know, rather than accepting
the notion that it's had its day.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I've got a couple of lines that I've taken out
of your book that I want you to elaborate on.
One here is ceremony does not serve the people doing it.
It serves what is not there, the ancestors, the unborn,
the village not yet visible. That is the burden and
its grace. Now, these days, in our culture, we're obsessed
(35:02):
with our material things are individual fulfillment. How do we
even begin to comprehend what it means to serve what's
not even here.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. It's a confounding question,
but it's really important and it is answerable as you're
about to hear. So here's the consideration. The indigenous people
in my corner of the world are credited, and you know,
(35:37):
properly so, with clinging to preserving in some fashion of
practice which they would often refer to as the seven generations.
And the notion very quickly, and it won't come as
a shock to anybody listening. Is this, when you're considering
what kind of decisions life decisions you should make, what
(36:03):
kind of romantic decisions and economic decisions and meaning of
life decisions and so forth, One of the ways you
do this is by considering, to the best of your abilities,
the likely consequences that will ensue from these decisions seven
(36:23):
generations from now now. A lot of people who are
not keen on this kind of discipline would dismiss the
notion out of hand as saying, it's purely phantasm, it's
purely inventiveness on your part. You can't realistically, in any
(36:45):
way anticipate seven generations from now. And I would say, well,
if you're imagining yourself as at a standing start, you're
absolutely right. It's just guess work at best and fantasy
the rest of the way. Unless you see yourself not
(37:07):
as the beginning of seven generations from now, You see
yourself as the intermediary of fourteen generations. That that seven
generations before you are pouring through you, you see, and
your best stuff comes from them. You are being remembered,
(37:33):
and their memories are your inspirations, your drives, your sense
of deep obligation to the world, to the planet, to
your fellow humans, and so forth. So, in other words,
the kind of moral of the story is you're not
the beginning of anything, and this is very good news.
(37:56):
That the beginning was sometime considerably sometime before you and
your work is to imagine that seven generations a goal
people were proceeding as if you may yet be imagine
seeing yourself on the receiving end of that kind of conscience,
(38:21):
that kind of deliberation, those many lifetimes ago, that will
do something by way of calling you to account and
calling the best of you forward. I think at the
same time, so this is more than doable. This is mandatory.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
How do how does that translate? How do we sit
and take that from a deep philosophical contemplation that has
so much weight and then walk into our daily lives
and relationships and turn that into an action or a
(39:06):
process or a reality.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Well, rather than formulate the question how do you? I
would try to answer it this way. How did I?
So it's not hypothetical, it's observational. How did I try
to do the very thing that you're asking me about?
And this is going to sound a little vainglorious. Perhaps
(39:34):
it's going to sound distinctly non Anglo Saxon of me
to speak, if I may put it this way, somewhat
highly of myself. But here goes, I'll risk it. Okay,
I can hear my mother now going, don't be bold.
I can just hear saying. But anyway, you see apropos
(39:55):
of this generation story. I was just telling you, if
you are indeed the conduit through which conceivably fourteen generations
of human wisdom poor through, then two things happen at
the same time. At least one of them is you
(40:16):
have tremendous obligation to live as if that's true one. Two,
the rumors of your insignificance are highly overrated, highly overstated,
and unworthy of you. So this, this word worthiness begins
(40:43):
to become operational instead of conceptual. So you understand yourself
to be born to purpose. You see the nature of
the purpose, The actual nuts and bolts of the thing
remains to be seen. That's what your life is for.
(41:04):
But it's not a rumor that you were born to purpose,
and you were born to a troubled time. You yourself,
you were, as was I everyone who's listening to us now,
and then you know the conceivable future will be born
into serious hardship and sorrow and degradation and things of
(41:25):
this kind. With that in mind, I think we have
a tremendous obligation to to proceed formally by which I
mean this formality is the grace of inheritance from prior generations. Formality.
(41:53):
It's the kind of thing that Anglo North Americans in
particular not keen on formality. We think it's artificial, alien,
uncalled for, arbitrary, fakery and the rest and actual fact
what formality is, and this is in terms of, you know,
(42:14):
your social engagement, in terms of your romantic proceedings, in
terms of how you stand and deliver should the call come,
or the opportunity be there, or the need announce itself
in a forum, in some kind of circumstance, in this
in a moment like the one we're sharing now. All
(42:36):
of these things require that you understand that if it
has come to this, and if it includes you, it's
all but prophetic that it has. Here's what I mean
by that, You know, it is in the nature of
all prophetic traditions that typically when the call comes to
(42:58):
the person in question, person's first response almost automatically is me,
you're joking. I know half a dozen people more capable
of carrying this considerable burden and responsibility to the culture
and to the future. It's on much more able, and
(43:19):
you should go talk to them. At which point the
other world, or the visitation or the God however you'd
like to refer to it for now gets to say.
So let me understand this when it comes to you,
we could be wrong. Do you know who you're talking to?
(43:39):
At which point you have to say, you're totally defeated. Now,
you see, you have to recognize that the appearance of
this in your life is all the affirmation you're likely
to get about your worthiness and your capacity. Now you
have to rise to the occasion.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Does all love deserve matrimony? What is love? What is love?
And what is matrimony? And what do we think it is?
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Okay, okay, okay, that's enough in one question. Let's see. Well,
love is a kind of coaxial cable of of arousal, summons, infinity,
(44:35):
ultimate possibility, just to name a few. You know, it
has that going for it, right. It also has, frankly,
a kind of shelf life that's demonstrable that left at
the level of sort of the glandular imperative. It doesn't
have a long shelf life. It has to transmography into
(44:59):
other things for it to be able to really last.
And last doesn't mean stay the same over time. Last
fundamentally means find its way through the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune. Matrimony has very little to do with love.
(45:20):
I mean, just just linger around the word for a moment.
The first part of the word, the prefix or it's
I suppose it's the root, actually is the word for mother.
As far back into the English train as you can
go that the ma difthong means mother. So this, of
(45:48):
all words to use to describe that event at the
front of the church, a word that that revolves around
the realities of motherhood. I mean, doesn't it seem a
little a little premature to invoke the notion of motherhood
in a circumstance where presumably there's no no procreativity that's
(46:10):
undergone so far and the answer is yes. So then
you have to come back to the word. The money
part means something in the order of the repertoire or
the tool kit or the frame and the terms of
reference of mothering. That's what matrimony means. It means the
(46:36):
ways by which mother ing, not motherhood, mothering is invoked
and evoked. So what it actually means then, clearly, is
that the act of entering into matrimony is the act
of entering into a generative reality that has nothing to
(46:57):
do with child bearing. I shouldn't say nothing to do.
It's not principally understood as child bearing. Matrimony is culture
mothering what sometimes one human baby at a time, but
ultimately it's understood to be culture work. And if you're
(47:19):
still a little bit uncertain as to whether or not
that's true, ask yourself the following. Have you ever heard
someone stand at the front of the room in that
circumstance and invite yourself and the other people sitting there
to consider or to enter into the holy bonds of patrimony?
(47:45):
You know you haven't. You've never even thought the thought
until I said it never even occurred to you, Right,
So what's going on in an age that prides itself
an inclusivevity? There's no mention of patrimony in this circumstance
at all? Why not? And it took me a long
(48:09):
time in the book to elaborate the answer to this
question why not? But the principle answer, the quick answer
for you, is this patrimony in time and in function
precedes matrimony. And the simplest version I could give you
to give a feel for what that means. Ancestry is.
(48:32):
Patrimony's job is to build the house of life. Matrimony's
job is to festoon that house of life until it
becomes a home. Matrimony's job is, culturally speaking, is home making.
(48:56):
And patrimony's job is to provide all of the nuts
and bolts, the machinery, the understandings that this worldly, convictions
that give the shape, the kind of crucible shape for
(49:16):
the advent of homemaking to appear. Taken together, these two
things make a home for the best part of us
culturally speaking. Right. Yeah, so that's a very very brief answer,
but that's that's why it's called matrimony, because it's a
(49:36):
culture mothering. It's the mothering of culture. Patrimony is the
fathering of culture. Yeah, so typically matrimony is missing in
most weddings.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
At the very front of your book, you've got a
quote and on one note why this quote was chosen
for the front of that book. So it's a quote
by John Berger. Women usually know more than men the
extent of catastrophe. It was the first thing I read,
(50:12):
and again it was like you evoked curiosity and gave
me no answers, and I was like, you've given me
the first taste of this book in a quote that
gives me no idea what I'm about to read.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yeah, well, it doesn't give you content, but it serves
notice though, doesn't it. It's clear I'm saying this with approval.
It's clear that there's something in my own experience that
testifies to this fact. It's clear that something's up. Okay.
So this thing revolves around the etymology of the word catastrophe,
(50:54):
which is worthwhile. We'll take a minute now for me
to tell you what it is. It's two Greek words.
The katah part means a descent. It means a kind
of sometimes it's a plummet. Sometimes it's a lot more
(51:15):
study than that. But the general thing is you descend,
and you descend, and if you descend long enough and
in the right spirit, you eventually enter. Okay. So you
have a feeling a sense of the subliminal here is
being evoked in the In the first part of the word,
which is a preposition, It answers the question where secondarily
(51:38):
how the answer is descending in order to enter. So
you get a feeling of kind of mystery and things
that are not happening on the surface, not easily available.
A kind of descent often implies a kind of ordeal
of sorts. Yes, absolutely, this is in the in the
mix too. How about the other part of the word,
(52:00):
the stroth part of the word. This means I mean
I could run you through quite a ragged making sensibility
on the meaning of this word. But the short version
is stroth goes. If you go back far enough, it
means something like, okay, there are disparate things. If they
(52:22):
are organized or woven in certain fashion, they gain for
themselves a kind of strength in their arrangement that they
never had when they were unarranged. Okay. And a perfect
example of it is this. If this, if my hair
(52:42):
was quote loose, you could literally tear it out of
my head. You'd be heart pressed to tear it out
of my head in this form right because it's braided.
This is stroth. Okay. So if you think symbolically, what
you get out of these two words when they're reunited,
(53:04):
is this a catastrophe is a way of going down
into the mysteries of life, into the mystery days, a
way you would not choose for yourself, but a way
that you don't have to quite invent for yourself either,
because there is a way that's been made by those
(53:24):
who preceded you, who established the notion of this kind
of descent for access into mystery. A catastrophe is a
way of going down into the mystery days and a
proof positive that while you were, while you will undergo
that ordeal alone, you are not alone in the ordeal,
(53:50):
because there's been a way made for you before there
is even you. It's a remarkably redolent word, catastrophe, and
it has nothing to do with you know, stuff we
don't like or we don't mean to happen, or bad
accident or random chaotic shit, or it doesn't mean any
(54:11):
of those things. But you can see from our associations
with the word that our preferences are not to descend
to try to be in charge, in total control over
the you know what's going on. And this is where
the sense of the sort of prejudicial hue around the
(54:32):
word today, this is where it comes from. It doesn't
come from the word, It comes from our adverse reaction
to it.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
You'll like the epitome of equanimity. You'll like I just
I hear you talk and you take me on this
journey with words where I go, oh, how did he
even get me to ride here? But I reflect as
you talk on the ability that you have in everything
you do in simple terms, manage your emotions. Like man,
(55:04):
even when you said before about people coming to you
and wanting you to marry them, and I was like,
how do you when someone approaches you and says I
want we want you to be a part of the
most special day of our life. Obviously there's going to
be emotions that make you like, okay, this, I want
(55:26):
to do good. I want to I feel really grateful
I've been chosen for this, all the feel goods, and
then you choose to be matrimonious ally on values.
Speaker 3 (55:39):
Right, yeah, this is the best way I can take
care of the people that are asking me to do
this for them. You see, my understanding is this, thank
you for the accolade. By the way, I do appreciate
the recognition, and it's certainly in there, But there's some
kind of discernment that's in there too on my end,
(56:01):
and it goes like this, do you know it was
legal requirement of the matrimonial event in my part of
the world until fairly recently, I don't think it's law anymore.
But the legal requirement included the following. Somebody, usually the
official had to say something in the order of, if
(56:23):
there's anyone here who knows any reason why this should
not proceed, now speak or forever hold your piece. Everybody
knows that last part, I dare say almost nobody knows
why that's in there. But I worked and worked and
worked to discern why that appears. A part of it
(56:45):
is the challenges of bigamy and poorer record managing in
the battle days. That was part of it. But the
rest of it goes back much longer than that. The
rest of it is this, Okay, you know those high
end feelings, all the excitable ones, all the special ones,
(57:07):
all that sensibility that's already being covered, isn't it that's
already guaranteed to be in place? Why Because it's a
quote celebration of love, That's why. What about the rest?
What do you mean? What's the rest? Well, all the
stuff you're seeing to it that never appears on the
(57:28):
special day? What about that stuff? Where does it go?
Does it?
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Do?
Speaker 3 (57:33):
Just send it away for the weekend? You send it
out to pick up a dozen donuts and keep it busy.
Where is it where? And why has it not received
an invitation the way we have? Why is life so
underrepresented in the wedding ceremony? It's just a very thin
(57:58):
sliver of life that's represented there, and the rest of
it is nowhere to be found. So what did I
do about that? In the weddings that I concocted? Here's
what I did. I mean, this took me a book
to describe. I'm going to try to do it in
a few sentences for you. Okay, I'll tell you two
(58:22):
vignettes that hopefully carry the understanding. Here's the first one.
I said to the couple in question, gather your people together,
the so called wedding party. Gather them all. I don't
care how many there are. If there's fifty, great, the
more the better, no problem for me. What we'll do
is I'm going to tell them about the year long
(58:44):
preparation that I'm intending to put you through, and which
will include them and a few other things besides. Okay, great.
So the day in question showed up, it's this downtown Toronto,
nothing but urban hipsters and the joint right I walk in,
They're a little dismayed because I don't look in any
(59:04):
way exotic, nowhere, funky, no cafe ola complexion, nothing, just
I look like them. So you could see that they're
going to like, oh shit, well, well that kind of thing.
So no pride. It's not the first time, I understand.
So I I did my best ten minutes of stand
up on the matter in the at hand, what I
(59:24):
was going to do, how it was going to go,
what we're up to and what we're up against, and
then I stopped. I said, now that's enough. There will
be more. There'll be more today, but not now. I'm
going to stop there, and I'm going to say to you,
(59:45):
with the information I've just given you, I'm asking you
to decide right now, are you in or are you out?
Are you with us or are you leaving. I'll give
you a couple of moments to decide. I think in
tituitively you already know the answer, but you think about
it for a few moments, and then make your call,
(01:00:07):
make your decision, and act accordingly. Starting now, well, you
can imagine everybody's like, holy shit, what's going on? Like
this is this is way too something. It's just it's
intense it's insane, it's it's abrupt, it's uh, where's all
the special da da of it all? And but anyway,
(01:00:30):
I didn't blink. They're kind of waiting for me to
just kidding, and of course because I wasn't kidding. And
after a few moments, honest to god, a third of
the room got up and left. Don't forget who these
people are to them, they're there, they're friends, their deepest
you know, allies in life and at work and and
(01:00:52):
and so on. Anyway, so the two people in question
are in shock. I mean, the last person's walked at
the door, and there's some disgusted looks that have come
my way and worse, and there's empty chairs. So somebody
gets up and starts to move the chairs around so
as to mask what's just happened. And I say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
(01:01:15):
please sit back down. Leave all the chairs, including the
empty ones, just as they are. And here's why, Because
six and eight and ten months from now, when we're
going through it, when you're learning stuff you didn't even
know existed, I want you to remember how hard it
was on the day that it started, that you begin
(01:01:39):
to recognize that we're not beginning with our pockets full
of tradition and understanding and wisdom and spiritual plalm, nothing
of the kind. We're starting this whole thing basically with
empty pockets, with a kind of a poverty you don't
even suspect it's there, and the empty chairs will stand.
(01:02:00):
Has solid testimony that that is true, that when I
offer people a year of tuition where their souls can
be burnished into service for the sake of matrimony and
for the sake of a better day, they walked on you,
not me. That's how we started. Okay, yeah, that's true. Story.
Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Shit, I'll got goosebumps.
Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Yeah, yeah, it was quite quite a day. Quite a day.
What was the other thing I was going to tell you? Oh? Yes,
who could forget this one? The ceremony, as I did,
it lasted at the very least seven or eight hours.
(01:02:50):
Oftentimes it lasted longer than that, upwards of twelve hours,
but seven or eight was probably the average. At one time.
At what point we're in the proceedings, the wife, excuse me,
the mother of the the wife to be, the bride
slid up to me and said to me in a
(01:03:14):
hissing voice. Now she said to me, is this a
real wedding? Now, bear in mind, who asked me to
do this? Her daughter asked me to do this. She
knows that I didn't, you know, parachute in from the sky.
I didn't volunteer to do this, you know. I mean,
(01:03:38):
there's not enough pay in the world to make this
thing a good idea from that point of view. And
with all of that going on, so you might you
might ask me, so, what did you say? You know,
I didn't know this was coming, right, I'm in the
midst of trying to manage one hundred and fifty, one
(01:04:01):
hundred and seventy people. Yes, I'm doing that basically as
a three ring circus master that the last chapter of
the book basically describes what happened when I actually did it.
You know, but I said, I'm not proud of the response.
(01:04:23):
I have to say. I said to her, are you
a real mother? You see? It was way too harsh.
It was way too harsh. But I was don't forget.
I was very fiercely defending matrimony at this moment, wasn't
(01:04:44):
I And you could hear it. It wasn't an attack.
I was setting her back on her heels the way
you would in boxing, right, not trying to take her
head off. I'm just trying to get her to step
back and out of range, because you're in way too
close right now, and it's not good. And you don't
(01:05:06):
know what you're talking about, and you don't know what
you're asking, and you don't know what you're putting into motion.
You don't know the darkness that's coming in through what
you're saying, and the degradation that you're subjecting this to.
You don't know what's at stake. You don't know how
bad this can go, but I do. So that's what
I said, Are you a real mother? What I meant,
of course, was do you think I'm at a time
(01:05:28):
like this in your daughter's life? This is what a
mother does. And so, as I said, I'm not that
proud of the response, but I probably could have said.
Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
And probably canna punch bruh.
Speaker 3 (01:05:42):
That's right. I ducked and countered. Now Instead I said something.
I could have said something like this, have you been
to any weddings before this one? I know the answers yes,
of course, because that's where your question is partly coming from.
I said, at any point all those other weddings that
you're thinking of right now. Did you ever go to
(01:06:03):
the front of the room to the guy with the
caller or the woman with the caller, and did you
ever say to them what you just said to me?
I know what the answer is, you never did. Do
you know why? Because you think that was a real wedding?
What makes you think that was a real wedding? And
this isn't where are these standards coming from? Have you
(01:06:26):
even thought the thought? But I knew what the answer was.
Of course she hasn't the thought. What she's doing is
defending the threadbare tradition of that quote special day, and
she's trying to make sure that the world doesn't appear
in the proceedings the way most people were doing. The
(01:06:49):
final part of the answer is this. This might surprise you,
but I did not actually do most of the talking
once the ceremony was underway. I mean, it's not like
I don't like to talk. I do, but this was
not my moment. I'd put the thing into motion and
I had to let it play out. The lion's share
(01:07:12):
of the speech making, if you will, was conducted by
the invited guests, who were mortified to learn that the
fulcrum of the whole event basically was them, well, what
are you called when you're invited? Are you not called witnesses?
(01:07:33):
Are you not? Okay? What does the word witness means,
especially the phrase in English to bear witness? What does
it mean? It means to carry the burden of obligation
of having seen something unfold before your eyes, not today,
but six months and six years from now, when these
(01:07:54):
people are in trouble, as they will be. We all
of us know this. No matter what they're saying to
each other now, within five years, it'll be a shit
show sometimes, and they're going to need some solid reminding
of what was important to them once and what they've
lost track of since two point two kids later, and
(01:08:16):
the rest. And you have that responsibility to bring to
them their best intention of those days, to help them
contend with the rest of the story. You can't do
that if you blink. So you are the ones that
(01:08:37):
are going to answer the question if anybody knows any
reason why this should not proceed, that's got to be
part of In other words, that's how the world gets
an invitation to the event. And that's why finally i'm
talking too much here, I'm sorry. That's why. Finally, this
thing is not a celebration of life. I mean, if
(01:08:59):
that's what you want to add, I have great, don't
bother with the legal stuff. Just sit around, just hug
each other a lot, just thank everybody for coming one
hundred different ways. Just spend as much money as you
can afford, and just do it like that, which is
basically what it amounts to. Anyway. You see, what I
(01:09:23):
was doing was not celebrating that something that already existed,
called the feelings too people have for each other. What
I was doing was trying to call into existence something
that did not exist yet, the alchemy, and the two
shall become one, that alchemy, the spirit alchemy of Well,
(01:09:48):
there's too much if I keep going, there's too much
to say, but let's suffice it to say I never
understood this to be a celebration of something that was
already there. I knew that the feelings they had for
each other and all the rest, of course, of course,
but this is not a solid foundation for anything. The
(01:10:08):
solid foundation is ritualistic, not intentional, and the ritual cease
to it that the ancestors and the ancients of days,
and the dusty worthies and the rafter dwellers, and you know,
all of them get a seat, front row seat at
(01:10:29):
the proceedings, and all of them lend their voice to
the matters at hand. And that was my principal responsibility.
So nobody knew that when they came to me. I
didn't know that myself at the beginning. But when I
seriously took the responsibility that they were asking me to shoulder, immediately,
(01:10:52):
that's what I began to feel the presence of the abiding,
presence of tradition. And I was just now formally this
tirade by saying, do you know what tradition is traditional?
Do you know what formality actually is? Especially in ritualistic,
(01:11:15):
ceremonial circumstances. Formality is there to rescue you from the
frailties of your autobiography. That's what it's for. You see
that you don't have to invent everything, that certain things
existed before you, and that you rely upon them and
(01:11:39):
invoke them. You don't throw them all under the rug.
You don't throw them all out the back door and
just wing it. Find yourself saying things that sound so
arch in your mouth, so formal, so unlike you, and
begin to recognize it's not always great for you to
sound like yourself. You know, there are moments, there are
(01:12:04):
moments when you ought not to sound like your casual self,
and that's when someone some other kind of language is
coming from you. And that's what I was alluding to
earlier when I said, sometimes the best part of you
is that seven generation stuff. And they're the ones that
should have been issued an invitation to the proceedings first,
(01:12:26):
not last. But anyway, I saw to it that they
were there, and I did, all right.
Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
You've done it again. You've done it again with me.
You've just put me in a space. And you know,
I listened to our last conversation in excess of seven
or eight times, and I had listeners contact me saying
they had listened several times. And like, you are such
(01:12:55):
a gift. You are such a gift in how you
whatever the magic it is that you do with how
you speak. Look, I'm I will be basking in this
all day again. It's I don't know, like I just
it starts. It starts a train of creative thought and
perception and perspective that beyond anything I've experienced. So you're
(01:13:18):
bloody awesome. How can people get their hands on your books,
your shows, your albums, your songs, your everything.
Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Well, the book itself is formally available on the twelfth
of August, so about three weeks from now or so.
I don't have I haven't seen it yet. I believe
they've told me that it's it's in the warehouse and
they're beginning to ship out, you know, my copies and
all the rest of it. Of course you've seen it,
not in pay per form, but in PDF, I would imagine, right, Yeah,
(01:13:53):
And then there's a form in which I recorded the thing,
me reading the thing, because I didn't know what it
was supposed to sound like. So that was me again,
you know, rendering the book. So Orphan Wisdom dot com
that's the name of the website, and that's of course,
like everybody else, we have a store there. And and
(01:14:13):
this is the seventh book I've published now, and I'm
starting to get the hang of it. So I'm starting
to get kind of good at it, I think. And
I think this one's worth the trouble. This one's really recognizable, Yeah,
I think so. And you know, you don't have to
be in the in the market, in the romantic marketplace.
(01:14:36):
This this is not a book that's predicated on the
presence of romance. This is a book it's predicated on
the poverty, which is our over reliance on romance. That's
what it's about. It gives it. I think it gives
the romantically challenged a fair shot at the real thing.
(01:15:01):
That's what it does. I never thought of that before
until I just said it now.
Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
But that's because you're maybe, because you're speaking to a
romantically challenged person right now that that got to vote.
Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
Ye could be And the rest of the gear to
the other books and the CDs and the and we're
Gregor and are working on a new record. Almost finished
it and it'll come out I would think within six
weeks or so, six weeks or two months. Somewhere's in there.
We don't have a name for it. We do, but
(01:15:33):
I'm not at liberty to discuss it at the moment.
I don't even know why that's such a big deal,
but he's asked me to keep it under wraps. So
it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool record and a
lot of all brand new material that he and I
have collaborated on and uh, and maybe we get on
the road again with nice agree from mischie god willing.
(01:15:54):
You know that I'm up to it, and that that
the v he's a hooligans agree and let us into
various countries and all that other gear, and and then
you know, if none of that comes to pass, man,
we've had a pretty good run.
Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
Please please please let me know if you're touching down
in Melbourne. I will get the gloves out. I'll be there.
Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
Okay. I don't know if we should be strapping on
the gloves now. You'd have to be really taking it easy.
Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
Are we kind? Are we kind?
Speaker 3 (01:16:28):
All right?
Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
Thank you so much, Steven Jenks and everyone, go and
check it out. I'll have some links in the show notes.
Thank you so much for coming on the show again.
Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
Pleasure again, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
It in
She said, it's now never I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
I'm tiff. This is role with the punches and we're
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Lawyers know that they offer all forms of alternative dispute resolution.
Their team of Melbourne family lawyers have extensive experience in
(00:29):
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reach out to Mark and the team at www dot
test Artfamilylawyers dot com dot au. Stephen Jenkinson, it is
(00:54):
such a pleasure to have you back. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
Ooh, it's been a while, hasn't it has?
Speaker 2 (01:01):
But if it's been a while, but it still feels
like yesterday.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Well good, I mean in the best way pass.
Speaker 2 (01:06):
Of my help, the best way possible. I was just
telling Natalie before we jumped on and hit record that
I have not stopped raving about your brilliant show that
you had in Melbourne, and I have not stopped talking
about that since.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Ah huh, Well, you're very kind, I think. I mean,
we had a good day, didn't we. We had a
good evening, and life was kind to us right then.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
It was. And I had never experienced anything like that,
I was saying to Natalie. I sat there with my
jaw on the floor, going, what is this experience? Do
you want to tell my listeners? What that what we're
talking about? What that experience was?
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Sure? Well, we some I'm listening to track how long
something like twelve or fourteen years ago, a fellow that
I didn't know at the time at all basically volunteered
to graft his considerable musical skills onto me. And it
(02:11):
turned into a kind of Tentshio revival of a kind
of let's see what happens bravado and very poetic, very musical,
very sort of rock and roll sensibility in some ways,
and all of that mixed together, plus a little sort
of biblical reference here and there when you need it,
(02:32):
and a refusal to be steimied. I mean, all those
things together worked out amazingly well. And we've gone all
over the world with the tour. It's called Knights of
Grief and Mystery. That's the name of the event. And
it's it's been on the shelf for a little while,
but we're just finishing the putting, the finishing touches on
(02:52):
a new record. Yes, a new record. Yeah. And the
record is a well, we've been saying it's a love record,
or he's been saying it's a love record. I've been
saying it's a makeout record, which is I mean, hopefully
there's some overlap there, you know. And then we realized
as we listened to stuff we've done in the past, man,
(03:13):
everything we've done is basically a love record of in
some fashion or other. This one maybe is a little
more deliberate than a little more intentional than it was
in the past. But along with Orphan Wisdom School, the
Night's Degree for Mystery is the best thing I have
ever done. Not just skillful best, but but bravado best,
(03:38):
and conscience best and skillful, you know. And I mean
to have lived long enough to outgrow your shyness I'm
talking about myself now, to outgrow your shyness and and
end up in a stand to deliver circumstance, you know,
where you're the sort of the front man. I mean,
(03:59):
I never saw that coming. Really, That's what happened. Yeah,
so I was kind of I was, I was called upon.
It was ever glad I was.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It was just the type of thing I couldn't even describe.
I was like, I'm not sure what this is. I
don't know what I'm in the middle of. But it
had such an impact on me. Like you said, it
was musical, it was biblical, it was profound. My jaw
was on the on the graw on the ground. You
(04:33):
left me hanging on thoughts and perspectives and ideas and
questions and answers, and I was just I was just
left there spinning.
Speaker 3 (04:43):
Yeah, well, I'm glad in a lot of ways. Glad,
But I mean it's an example of what you can
do when you decide that the things you've seen in
the past, it's not the sum total of what's possible.
That you can supersede the narrow categories like poetry or
(05:04):
or even modern music for that matter, you can you
could simply ask more of yourself while you're still able.
That's I think what we did. And you know, we
were old enough that we were we had made all
of the young person's mistakes available, and so we were
(05:28):
in an entirely other kind of realm of sort of
older persons. We were cooked, you know, we were we
were we were ready, Yeah, and we were unhesitant. And
sometimes you know, they say, you ask for permission, and
sometimes you ask for forgiveness and knights of grief and
(05:51):
mystery is a is a huge leap for all concerned.
And I mean, one of the best accolades I ever
received about it was I used to come off the
stage and sort of blend in with the crowd from
behind as they were filing out. I was making my
way to the foyer to sign books and all that
(06:11):
sort of thing. So I listened to what people were saying,
and they didn't know I was there. You know, I
don't really stand out, so I'm not tall or anything.
So I was just able to sort of shuffle along
with people and overhear them. And one person said to
the other who brought them? Do you know I had
no idea what this was as it was described to
(06:33):
me before I came. Now I've seen it, I have
no idea what it was.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
That's exactly how I feel. It is exactly how I feel.
And it's frustrating because you want to tell people, you
want to tell people this experience you've had, and there's
no words for it.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
Well there are, but you have to sort of forsake
the typical categories and silos and all that sort of thing,
and you have to sort of go for it, you know,
in the description you have to. So I think the
word biblical belongs, for example, and the word sort of
(07:11):
ten show revival that sort of belongs to, and a
kind of recitation of a very old kind of order,
well that belongs as well. And you know, we asked
a lot of this of the audience, of course, But
I mean that was my word of treating them like
grown ups, like adults, you know, like people who were
(07:34):
who deserved an opportunity to be kind of staggered instead
of just affirmed. I mean, it's not that hard to
get affirmed. Really. You just look at your sort of
preference schedule and just follow it and you will find
all kinds of yes men and yes women you know
that gather around you. But the thing that we did
(07:57):
for a lot of chances, and I'm exceedingly proud over
all those years that we did so, and we didn't
do it alone, you know, of course I had a
band and all of that, But the people who came
quickly ceased to be an audience and became sort of
core conspirators, and so we were rarely alone.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
So I find intriguing. I'm just thinking about it now,
and I'm trying to think of any other experience where
you can deliberately evoke curiosity to excite people and leave
them without giving answers necessarily, So leave them with the questions.
They didn't come with it, they didn't know they had,
(08:43):
give them the questions, get them to walk away still
holding the questions, and be fully satisfied with the experience.
How often can that even happen in the world we
live in today?
Speaker 3 (08:56):
Well indeed, I mean one of the things that we
didn't do is we didn't treat people like they were consumers.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
M So.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
I think it was a kind of soothsaying. That's what
it was. Really it was. It was kind of it
was old order conjuring, you know, And if we say
much more, we're going to frustrate people about, you know,
in case it never gets on the road again, I mean,
I hope it does. I don't know that it will.
I mean, we'd have to learn this whole new record
(09:28):
and reconfigure the band and you know, it's very expensive
to be on the road. And uh, but then again,
you know, the least the less possible things seem, the
more attractive I find them to be. So you never know,
I might.
Speaker 2 (09:45):
Just hold my breath. Hey, before we move into I
feel like you've pivoted. You've had these huge pivots, but
there is I need to address something in the background.
That boxing gloves behind you. Tell me more, aren't they.
Speaker 3 (10:03):
You know they are?
Speaker 2 (10:04):
I know they are.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
Yeah. Well, well, first of all, I mean, I can't
let you have all the fun that was the.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
First Was it my black either I had the day
we met that inspired you?
Speaker 3 (10:18):
I was, I don't know if that was inspiration much
as it is kind of a warning, a bit warning
about it. But no, I thought to myself, honestly, honestly,
now I'm going to tell you the honest truth. The
first time we spoke, I was, I was kind of
mesmerized in a fashion that you, you know, had the kind
(10:39):
of life and the kind of interest that you did.
And then you came to me the way you did,
and we had the conversation that we did. It was,
I mean, it's I've done a lot of these encounters.
I mean, scores and scores and scores of them over
the years, and I don't think it belittles anyone to
say most of them are not men. But honest to God,
(11:03):
the one with you is certainly stays with me. It's
one of the reasons we're talking now, and it's one
of the reasons that I was compelled here, so I
went down. I often find the winter's a bit excessive now,
so I do have to sort of duck out for
a little while. And they I don't know if this
(11:23):
revokes my Canadian citizenship, I hope not. But anyway, I
was down in San Diego in h this February March April,
in that zone, and the woman who was kind of
sort of looking out for me, you could say, decided
we needed to endeavor to pursue something she ended up
(11:44):
calling the Joy Project. And this involved a number of activities,
you know, including doughnuts stores and and and retro movie
theaters and and boxing lesson. And I said to myself,
I thought to myself, this can't be. I mean, you know, what,
(12:07):
what code of is it kind of a vanity project?
I mean I was really I was really hesitant, but
the guy in question was an amazing He was a
Korean American kid, and he was very smooth. He was
kind of he was pretty, if you know what I mean.
He he had that kind of sugar ray kind of
(12:27):
prettiness about him, you know, and he's lithe he's not
all muscle bound, and he moves in a sort of
cat like fashion. And you you know, after ten minutes
you're thinking to yourself, yeah, I could do that, which
is a complete nonsense. Of course, you can't do that,
not today, not never, but but the root of finding
(12:49):
out that you can't do it could be very interesting.
And so, you know, ultimately what it was kind of
just lay the joking aside for a minute, was we
knew that there was a beautiful sort of acxis between
just the obvious physical activity and a kind of marriage
(13:13):
of brain and brawn, right how much I mean, I'm
telling you stuff. You of course, you know, but it
just began to dawn on me that they call it
the sweet science for a reason. And I came to
understand that the engagement of my with my with all
(13:34):
the aspects of my cognition was really an important thing
to pursue, sort of very intentionally and that's what it did.
And so I mean not to mention the fact that
it will certainly put you in your place. That the
little speedbag, for example, is just I mean, I'll never
(14:01):
forget the abject humiliation of hitting that thing and waiting
for it to come back. And you know, you know
exactly what I'm saying, right then, Yeah, trying to get
that bubba, the bubba, the bubba, the thing going on
and finally being able to do it, and it's like
I'm finished. I don't need to do anymore. I got
(14:22):
it to go bubba bubba, bubba bubba forwards and backwards,
and it was a beautiful thing. And then put the
gloves on, and then you feel like a just a
terrible pretender. And then we sort of do some shadow
boxing and various other things, and I'm doing it still.
This is an investment. I actually bob my gloves. I
(14:43):
feel ridiculous, to be honest, because I'm wearing them maybe
a couple of times a week. But recently we hang
a heavy bag from the rafters in the barn here
at the farm, and I go there most days and
shine the shoes, you know that one.
Speaker 2 (14:58):
Yeah, yeah, I love this so much for you, so much.
I feel like my connection with boxing cracked open my
mind and the links and the metaphors and the self
reflection and the understanding about life, and I'm there's just
(15:20):
all of the wisdom. There's all of the wisdom I
could ever ask for in what I saw, felt and
went through in the process of learning that sport. I'm
so glad you're doing it.
Speaker 3 (15:31):
Yeah, yeah, it's very It has a devotional aspect, doesn't it?
A contemplative devotional aspect. And here's the thrill of a lifetime,
very recently, because I'm doing it here at home. When
I returned back to the farm and in the studio
or whatever they call it, the gym. In one corner
(15:54):
of the gym, there's a ring, okay, that you have
to climb up to, and he had son, and the
teacher at his son, he said to me, we're going
to have some fun at the end of it. Okay, great,
And for the first and only time so far, I
walked into the ring, stepped into the rink, through the
(16:16):
ropes and all that thing, and his son put on
the lid right, and my job was to hit his
son however I could hopefully trying to remember the basics
of what I had learned so far, you know, the
stances and the shuffles and the combinations and things like that.
(16:36):
And the Sun's job was to not get hit by me. Yeah, right,
not to be like really evasive, but to be moving
and ducking and all the rest. And my god, what
an unbelievable experience it was. And it didn't feel adversarial,
it didn't feel dangerous, it didn't feel assaulted in any way.
(16:58):
It felt like two people choreographing a kind of veneration
they had for what they were both involved in. It was.
It was, in its way beautiful.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
You see aspects of yourself and others that cannot be
seen anywhere else. There is there is a level of
instinct and intuition that that can't be forged that side
of that place. I've never found anywhere else that forges
it anyway.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
Right. A close second is standing on the stage with
the night's a grief and mystery and that people opposite. Yeah,
it has some of the same elements. Yeah, nobody knows
what's coming. And you know, what I do depends a
little bit on what you do, what you lead with,
what you follow with you know all those things. Yeah,
(17:51):
so I credit you with inspiring me to think that
this would not be an utterly fool's errand for me
to pursue.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
Wow, this is I'm chaffed. I'm like, yeah, the smile
on my face right now almost hurts. Thank you. Hey.
I would talk about boxing until the cows come home.
But I want to talk about you on New Endeava.
Speaker 3 (18:13):
We will someday, yes, yeah, but sure by all means
you have some questions. I know you do.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
I do because the death guy, the death guy, has
all of a sudden become the matrimony guy. We've gone
from death to love and marriage. I feel like you're
Benjamin buttoning the whole process. What's going on?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
Well, I didn't mean to, but then again, I never
meant to be the death guy either. In fact, I
didn't know there was such a thing as a death
trade in those days and kind of backed into it.
It's a whole other vignette, but it was an accident, really,
and it's something I turned out to be born to do.
(18:59):
So time on I got older, I instituted something called
the Orphan Wisdom School. A lot of people came from
all over the world. I mean, this is a real
big surprise to me, is that the people who decided
I was worth a try turned out not to be
(19:19):
a sort of a single, very narrow demographic. These people
came from all kinds of walks of life, all kinds
of ages, and various kinds of devotion and trouble and
things like this, and in that mix of people. From
time to time as the years went along, starting about
(19:40):
twenty twelve or fourteen, people would ask me if I
would consider doing sort of the high end events for
them of life. For example, would I consider naming their
child that was an amazing quessee? Yeah, that was several times.
That's how would I consider house blessings and things of
(20:08):
that kind? And you know where I'm leading to here?
Would I consider marrying them? And after I corrected them
the understanding that you know, I didn't have the legals
and they'd have to pursue the paperwork from somebody else
and all that sort of thing, they said, yeah, yeah,
we you know, we kind of figured you probably weren't
that guy. And I said, well, so why me? And
(20:33):
pretty routinely all of these people said something like this, Well,
we're looking for something that's honest and true and genuine
and authentic and meaningful and personal. I'm listening to all
of this, and I kind of know where this is headed,
(20:54):
and it's not necessarily good. But the word that showed
up more than all those other words was real. That's
what they were asking for, something, a wedding that was real.
And the way they were saying all these things told
me that they were certain that these were all synonyms
for really good. But I know what the word real means,
(21:18):
and it doesn't mean really good. Real means the whole
friggin thing, the whole crazy matrix, the whole heartbreaking, heartwarming proposition,
you know, all of it. And I knew they didn't
mean that. I knew they wanted this kind of event
(21:39):
that they had in mind to be sequestered from the world.
And it's weary ways you could say, but I'm not
that guy. I'm not the guy that will build a
fence around your most precious stuff and not let the
world in. You're fully capable of doing that without my
(21:59):
help or my complicity, you see. So I kind of
challenged them, you know, on the level of the request,
and I put them through the ringer, honestly and I
made them kind of well, they had to ask me,
(22:21):
as it turned out, three times on three separate occasions.
And you can imagine these are sort of card carrying,
standard North American, sort of dominant culture type people. They're
not keen on appearing to be approaching someone who looks
like them on bended knee. But if this is what
(22:42):
you want, this is not a bad way to go
to get there, to petition and to plead and to
kind of make a case. And the promise I made
in exchange for the petition went something like this, I'm
(23:05):
going to be matrimony's advocate in this. I'm going to
be matrimoni's spirit lawyer. You're going to have your friends,
You're going to have your families there, you're going to
have your orchestrations, right, the band, whatever, it's going to be,
the money, the whole thing. That's all you're doing, to
(23:28):
do it as you see fit. But my job is
to see to it that matrimony stands the chance of
happening happening, and that's what I'm that's what I'm committing to.
And sometimes the result will be that you've decided that
(23:48):
I've ceased to bear you in mind, because I'm bearing
matrimony of mind instead, and I'm not persuaded by the
marzipan figures on the cake longer the way everyone else is,
you know, And you know, the probably the last part
of the answer to the question would be this, in
(24:09):
order to I'd never done anything like this before, but
probably not unlike yourself and many people listening, I had
been to the odd wedding, and I had come away
from those things with an awful sense of squander and
missed opportunity and a terrible case of blinking and a
(24:34):
folding under pressure, and of not getting it right, and
of not daring things like this of this order, you know,
and you know, the fifteen minute wedding and get onto
the reception as quickly as possible, all that sort of thing.
And the thing frankly troubled me, and it made me
feel that there was a kind of a hole in
(24:56):
my life, that it was the approximate shape of what
I just sat through. And so I had to wonder,
you know, is it just me? Do I have unreasonable
expectations of such a thing, or is it possible that
until fairly recently, I mean in terms of historical time,
(25:18):
it was possible to be wed alchemically, not familiarly. Familiarly
I don't even think that's a word anyway, It was
possible to have your edges melted, you know, your psychic
autonomy challenged and thwarted. And that's what I meant by alchemy.
(25:46):
How how I asked myself, if I'm going to say
yes to these people, what am I going to do?
That's not that? And I took my cue from a
very simple moment in the standard ceremony. I thought about
the invitations that are sent out pretty routinely. I thought
(26:07):
about typically what they say, and often what they don't say.
And usually they'll take the form of something like, you know,
please get the honor of your companies, requested at the
celebration of love and life between so and so and
so and so so. That sounds very good, a little generic.
(26:30):
But what's the problem, I mean, Jenkinson, what's the problem? Like,
why don't you just roll with the punches once in
a while, to use the phrase, why don't you just
go with it? Man? Why do you wonder about stuff
so routinely like this? And you know, it's partly the
way I'm built. I guess it's partly why people approached me,
to be honest, and it's partly this. I was willing
(26:55):
to learn where this hankering for more that I had
came from. And I took my cue, of all things,
from the difference between a promise and a vow. I
actually did the work. It started to chase down that thing.
(27:17):
And this is, for whatever it's worth, is what I
came up with. Those things that happen at the front
of the room, at the front of the hall, at
the front of the church, whatever it is on the beach,
those are not supposed to be promises. But we don't.
(27:37):
You know, English speaking people don't make much of a
distinction between promise and vow. They're kind of the same thing.
One sounds a little more serious, but maybe not. Maybe
that's basically two forms of the same thing, two wings
on the same bird, so to speak, but they're not
at all. Here's why to promise literally means two in
(28:00):
evoke your intentions for the future. That's what you're doing
when you're promising something. You're not making something happen anytime soon.
You're banking on the next day and the next day
and the next month and year. Wherein the promises that
(28:20):
you're making can find some opportunity to announce themselves and
to appear and to cash out. Etymologically, that's literally what
the word promise means. It means to throw forward, right,
to cast forward. So, I mean, there's nothing wrong with promising,
(28:41):
But the truth of the matter is it's a little conditional.
The nature of a promise goes something like this, Well,
I certainly will try to do that. I mean, with
every fiber of my being to do that. My full
(29:02):
and deep intention is to follow through with that, et cetera,
et cetera. Can you imagine standing at the front of
the room getting married to someone and somebody's asking you
about your intention, and that's what you talk that's the
way you talk about it, I really hope. So who
would stand for that? How would the other person? I mean,
(29:26):
you can just imagine the crestfallen face that the person goes.
You know, all in, I'll do my best, You'll do
your best. This is not a time for doing your best,
is it? And this is why there's the word vowel.
The word vowel is not about the future at all.
(29:49):
And if you don't believe me, just ask yourself. The
last time you heard officialdom at the front of the
hall in the form of the celebrant with a caller
or without the chance this is are very good. You
heard something that sounds like this, not will you do you?
(30:11):
What tense?
Speaker 2 (30:12):
Is that?
Speaker 3 (30:15):
Present? Tense? Yeah, it's a very deliberate formulation. In English,
it might as well say, are you, as of this
moment doing this thing you're declaring not just declaring it?
Are you doing it at the same time because you must,
because that's what matrimonia calls for from you. Well, the
(30:39):
failure to make that distinction results in the kind of
weddings that I saw and the kind of weddings that
these people who were asking me were fleeing from. And
that's kind of how it began.
Speaker 2 (30:52):
You've got me in the same exact state that I
was in our first conversation. I've got a thousand a
thousand things wearing around in my mind, our relationship with language,
which I experience deeply when I speak to you in
a way I never experienced in other ways, as you
(31:12):
were doing that. I fell in love with Brene Brown's
book Atlas of the Heart for this reason, because she
goes into the definitions of our language, And I was
thinking about that as you're speaking, and how we are
at the mercy of how we converse with each other
(31:33):
and communicate and the words we choose and use, but
we don't necessarily experience them until we know them. So
we're at the mercy of them. They're change, they're dictating
our life, but we're not experiencing that in the same
way until we connect with the They're the differences, the definitions.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
How about this. You don't honestly know what you're thinking
until you open your mouth, and there is a degree
of dismay when you find out what you're thinking. So
there's some fundamental connectivity between your cognitive anticipatory wonderment glands
(32:25):
or or lobes and the simple act of doing what
you and I are doing now is reaching towards the words.
Reaching towards the words, and in some fashion or other,
trusting their efficacy, Maybe not so much trusting your skill
(32:47):
as trusting the potency and the valance of the words themselves,
that they will not fail you if you don't take
them for chumps and bums and goofs, if you take
them seriously, if you don't use them like like you
(33:08):
would have used an unfortunate romantic partner when you're a teenager,
that sort of thing. Yeah, And you know, to my
good fortune, I've had an instinct for that as long
as I can remember. I trust the language, but I
also have veneration for the language at the same time.
(33:30):
So when people slander English, which you know, I understand
where the motivation comes from, and the idea being that
somehow other languages are much more adept, I mean at
the sort of the romantic life, at the poetic life,
things of disorder, I say, at least to myself. Well,
you know, considering what English has been through in the
(33:52):
last several hundred years. Yeah, I understand the sense that
it's a cheap artifact, it's a kind of ball, but
it's it's suffering terribly in the marketplace. It's suffering terribly
on this machine that you and I are talking back
and forth, and it's going to suffer horribly with the
advent of artificial intelligence as it's being rolled out, you know,
(34:15):
as we speak. So it behooves us, I think, to
call the depths of the English language forward and up
by by resorting to it, you know, rather than accepting
the notion that it's had its day.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
I've got a couple of lines that I've taken out
of your book that I want you to elaborate on.
One here is ceremony does not serve the people doing it.
It serves what is not there, the ancestors, the unborn,
the village not yet visible. That is the burden and
its grace. Now, these days, in our culture, we're obsessed
(35:02):
with our material things are individual fulfillment. How do we
even begin to comprehend what it means to serve what's
not even here.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. It's a confounding question,
but it's really important and it is answerable as you're
about to hear. So here's the consideration. The indigenous people
in my corner of the world are credited, and you know,
(35:37):
properly so, with clinging to preserving in some fashion of
practice which they would often refer to as the seven generations.
And the notion very quickly, and it won't come as
a shock to anybody listening. Is this, when you're considering
what kind of decisions life decisions you should make, what
(36:03):
kind of romantic decisions and economic decisions and meaning of
life decisions and so forth, One of the ways you
do this is by considering, to the best of your abilities,
the likely consequences that will ensue from these decisions seven
(36:23):
generations from now now. A lot of people who are
not keen on this kind of discipline would dismiss the
notion out of hand as saying, it's purely phantasm, it's
purely inventiveness on your part. You can't realistically, in any
(36:45):
way anticipate seven generations from now. And I would say, well,
if you're imagining yourself as at a standing start, you're
absolutely right. It's just guess work at best and fantasy
the rest of the way. Unless you see yourself not
(37:07):
as the beginning of seven generations from now, You see
yourself as the intermediary of fourteen generations. That that seven
generations before you are pouring through you, you see, and
your best stuff comes from them. You are being remembered,
(37:33):
and their memories are your inspirations, your drives, your sense
of deep obligation to the world, to the planet, to
your fellow humans, and so forth. So, in other words,
the kind of moral of the story is you're not
the beginning of anything, and this is very good news.
(37:56):
That the beginning was sometime considerably sometime before you and
your work is to imagine that seven generations a goal
people were proceeding as if you may yet be imagine
seeing yourself on the receiving end of that kind of conscience,
(38:21):
that kind of deliberation, those many lifetimes ago, that will
do something by way of calling you to account and
calling the best of you forward. I think at the
same time, so this is more than doable. This is mandatory.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
How do how does that translate? How do we sit
and take that from a deep philosophical contemplation that has
so much weight and then walk into our daily lives
and relationships and turn that into an action or a
(39:06):
process or a reality.
Speaker 3 (39:10):
Well, rather than formulate the question how do you? I
would try to answer it this way. How did I?
So it's not hypothetical, it's observational. How did I try
to do the very thing that you're asking me about?
And this is going to sound a little vainglorious. Perhaps
(39:34):
it's going to sound distinctly non Anglo Saxon of me
to speak, if I may put it this way, somewhat
highly of myself. But here goes, I'll risk it. Okay,
I can hear my mother now going, don't be bold.
I can just hear saying. But anyway, you see apropos
(39:55):
of this generation story. I was just telling you, if
you are indeed the conduit through which conceivably fourteen generations
of human wisdom poor through, then two things happen at
the same time. At least one of them is you
(40:16):
have tremendous obligation to live as if that's true one. Two,
the rumors of your insignificance are highly overrated, highly overstated,
and unworthy of you. So this, this word worthiness begins
(40:43):
to become operational instead of conceptual. So you understand yourself
to be born to purpose. You see the nature of
the purpose, The actual nuts and bolts of the thing
remains to be seen. That's what your life is for.
(41:04):
But it's not a rumor that you were born to purpose,
and you were born to a troubled time. You yourself,
you were, as was I everyone who's listening to us now,
and then you know the conceivable future will be born
into serious hardship and sorrow and degradation and things of
(41:25):
this kind. With that in mind, I think we have
a tremendous obligation to to proceed formally by which I
mean this formality is the grace of inheritance from prior generations. Formality.
(41:53):
It's the kind of thing that Anglo North Americans in
particular not keen on formality. We think it's artificial, alien,
uncalled for, arbitrary, fakery and the rest and actual fact
what formality is, and this is in terms of, you know,
(42:14):
your social engagement, in terms of your romantic proceedings, in
terms of how you stand and deliver should the call come,
or the opportunity be there, or the need announce itself
in a forum, in some kind of circumstance, in this
in a moment like the one we're sharing now. All
(42:36):
of these things require that you understand that if it
has come to this, and if it includes you, it's
all but prophetic that it has. Here's what I mean
by that, You know, it is in the nature of
all prophetic traditions that typically when the call comes to
(42:58):
the person in question, person's first response almost automatically is me,
you're joking. I know half a dozen people more capable
of carrying this considerable burden and responsibility to the culture
and to the future. It's on much more able, and
(43:19):
you should go talk to them. At which point the
other world, or the visitation or the God however you'd
like to refer to it for now gets to say.
So let me understand this when it comes to you,
we could be wrong. Do you know who you're talking to?
(43:39):
At which point you have to say, you're totally defeated. Now,
you see, you have to recognize that the appearance of
this in your life is all the affirmation you're likely
to get about your worthiness and your capacity. Now you
have to rise to the occasion.
Speaker 2 (44:00):
Does all love deserve matrimony? What is love? What is love?
And what is matrimony? And what do we think it is?
Speaker 3 (44:12):
Okay, okay, okay, that's enough in one question. Let's see. Well,
love is a kind of coaxial cable of of arousal, summons, infinity,
(44:35):
ultimate possibility, just to name a few. You know, it
has that going for it, right. It also has, frankly,
a kind of shelf life that's demonstrable that left at
the level of sort of the glandular imperative. It doesn't
have a long shelf life. It has to transmography into
(44:59):
other things for it to be able to really last.
And last doesn't mean stay the same over time. Last
fundamentally means find its way through the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune. Matrimony has very little to do with love.
(45:20):
I mean, just just linger around the word for a moment.
The first part of the word, the prefix or it's
I suppose it's the root, actually is the word for mother.
As far back into the English train as you can
go that the ma difthong means mother. So this, of
(45:48):
all words to use to describe that event at the
front of the church, a word that that revolves around
the realities of motherhood. I mean, doesn't it seem a
little a little premature to invoke the notion of motherhood
in a circumstance where presumably there's no no procreativity that's
(46:10):
undergone so far and the answer is yes. So then
you have to come back to the word. The money
part means something in the order of the repertoire or
the tool kit or the frame and the terms of
reference of mothering. That's what matrimony means. It means the
(46:36):
ways by which mother ing, not motherhood, mothering is invoked
and evoked. So what it actually means then, clearly, is
that the act of entering into matrimony is the act
of entering into a generative reality that has nothing to
(46:57):
do with child bearing. I shouldn't say nothing to do.
It's not principally understood as child bearing. Matrimony is culture
mothering what sometimes one human baby at a time, but
ultimately it's understood to be culture work. And if you're
(47:19):
still a little bit uncertain as to whether or not
that's true, ask yourself the following. Have you ever heard
someone stand at the front of the room in that
circumstance and invite yourself and the other people sitting there
to consider or to enter into the holy bonds of patrimony?
(47:45):
You know you haven't. You've never even thought the thought
until I said it never even occurred to you, Right,
So what's going on in an age that prides itself
an inclusivevity? There's no mention of patrimony in this circumstance
at all? Why not? And it took me a long
(48:09):
time in the book to elaborate the answer to this
question why not? But the principle answer, the quick answer
for you, is this patrimony in time and in function
precedes matrimony. And the simplest version I could give you
to give a feel for what that means. Ancestry is.
(48:32):
Patrimony's job is to build the house of life. Matrimony's
job is to festoon that house of life until it
becomes a home. Matrimony's job is, culturally speaking, is home making.
(48:56):
And patrimony's job is to provide all of the nuts
and bolts, the machinery, the understandings that this worldly, convictions
that give the shape, the kind of crucible shape for
(49:16):
the advent of homemaking to appear. Taken together, these two
things make a home for the best part of us
culturally speaking. Right. Yeah, so that's a very very brief answer,
but that's that's why it's called matrimony, because it's a
(49:36):
culture mothering. It's the mothering of culture. Patrimony is the
fathering of culture. Yeah, so typically matrimony is missing in
most weddings.
Speaker 2 (49:51):
At the very front of your book, you've got a
quote and on one note why this quote was chosen
for the front of that book. So it's a quote
by John Berger. Women usually know more than men the
extent of catastrophe. It was the first thing I read,
(50:12):
and again it was like you evoked curiosity and gave
me no answers, and I was like, you've given me
the first taste of this book in a quote that
gives me no idea what I'm about to read.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
Yeah, well, it doesn't give you content, but it serves
notice though, doesn't it. It's clear I'm saying this with approval.
It's clear that there's something in my own experience that
testifies to this fact. It's clear that something's up. Okay.
So this thing revolves around the etymology of the word catastrophe,
(50:54):
which is worthwhile. We'll take a minute now for me
to tell you what it is. It's two Greek words.
The katah part means a descent. It means a kind
of sometimes it's a plummet. Sometimes it's a lot more
(51:15):
study than that. But the general thing is you descend,
and you descend, and if you descend long enough and
in the right spirit, you eventually enter. Okay. So you
have a feeling a sense of the subliminal here is
being evoked in the In the first part of the word,
which is a preposition, It answers the question where secondarily
(51:38):
how the answer is descending in order to enter. So
you get a feeling of kind of mystery and things
that are not happening on the surface, not easily available.
A kind of descent often implies a kind of ordeal
of sorts. Yes, absolutely, this is in the in the
mix too. How about the other part of the word,
(52:00):
the stroth part of the word. This means I mean
I could run you through quite a ragged making sensibility
on the meaning of this word. But the short version
is stroth goes. If you go back far enough, it
means something like, okay, there are disparate things. If they
(52:22):
are organized or woven in certain fashion, they gain for
themselves a kind of strength in their arrangement that they
never had when they were unarranged. Okay. And a perfect
example of it is this. If this, if my hair
(52:42):
was quote loose, you could literally tear it out of
my head. You'd be heart pressed to tear it out
of my head in this form right because it's braided.
This is stroth. Okay. So if you think symbolically, what
you get out of these two words when they're reunited,
(53:04):
is this a catastrophe is a way of going down
into the mysteries of life, into the mystery days, a
way you would not choose for yourself, but a way
that you don't have to quite invent for yourself either,
because there is a way that's been made by those
(53:24):
who preceded you, who established the notion of this kind
of descent for access into mystery. A catastrophe is a
way of going down into the mystery days and a
proof positive that while you were, while you will undergo
that ordeal alone, you are not alone in the ordeal,
(53:50):
because there's been a way made for you before there
is even you. It's a remarkably redolent word, catastrophe, and
it has nothing to do with you know, stuff we
don't like or we don't mean to happen, or bad
accident or random chaotic shit, or it doesn't mean any
(54:11):
of those things. But you can see from our associations
with the word that our preferences are not to descend
to try to be in charge, in total control over
the you know what's going on. And this is where
the sense of the sort of prejudicial hue around the
(54:32):
word today, this is where it comes from. It doesn't
come from the word, It comes from our adverse reaction
to it.
Speaker 2 (54:39):
You'll like the epitome of equanimity. You'll like I just
I hear you talk and you take me on this
journey with words where I go, oh, how did he
even get me to ride here? But I reflect as
you talk on the ability that you have in everything
you do in simple terms, manage your emotions. Like man,
(55:04):
even when you said before about people coming to you
and wanting you to marry them, and I was like,
how do you when someone approaches you and says I
want we want you to be a part of the
most special day of our life. Obviously there's going to
be emotions that make you like, okay, this, I want
(55:26):
to do good. I want to I feel really grateful
I've been chosen for this, all the feel goods, and
then you choose to be matrimonious ally on values.
Speaker 3 (55:39):
Right, yeah, this is the best way I can take
care of the people that are asking me to do
this for them. You see, my understanding is this, thank
you for the accolade. By the way, I do appreciate
the recognition, and it's certainly in there, But there's some
kind of discernment that's in there too on my end,
(56:01):
and it goes like this, do you know it was
legal requirement of the matrimonial event in my part of
the world until fairly recently, I don't think it's law anymore.
But the legal requirement included the following. Somebody, usually the
official had to say something in the order of, if
(56:23):
there's anyone here who knows any reason why this should
not proceed, now speak or forever hold your piece. Everybody
knows that last part, I dare say almost nobody knows
why that's in there. But I worked and worked and
worked to discern why that appears. A part of it
(56:45):
is the challenges of bigamy and poorer record managing in
the battle days. That was part of it. But the
rest of it goes back much longer than that. The
rest of it is this, Okay, you know those high
end feelings, all the excitable ones, all the special ones,
(57:07):
all that sensibility that's already being covered, isn't it that's
already guaranteed to be in place? Why Because it's a
quote celebration of love, That's why. What about the rest?
What do you mean? What's the rest? Well, all the
stuff you're seeing to it that never appears on the
(57:28):
special day? What about that stuff? Where does it go?
Does it?
Speaker 2 (57:33):
Do?
Speaker 3 (57:33):
Just send it away for the weekend? You send it
out to pick up a dozen donuts and keep it busy.
Where is it where? And why has it not received
an invitation the way we have? Why is life so
underrepresented in the wedding ceremony? It's just a very thin
(57:58):
sliver of life that's represented there, and the rest of
it is nowhere to be found. So what did I
do about that? In the weddings that I concocted? Here's
what I did. I mean, this took me a book
to describe. I'm going to try to do it in
a few sentences for you. Okay, I'll tell you two
(58:22):
vignettes that hopefully carry the understanding. Here's the first one.
I said to the couple in question, gather your people together,
the so called wedding party. Gather them all. I don't
care how many there are. If there's fifty, great, the
more the better, no problem for me. What we'll do
is I'm going to tell them about the year long
(58:44):
preparation that I'm intending to put you through, and which
will include them and a few other things besides. Okay, great.
So the day in question showed up, it's this downtown Toronto,
nothing but urban hipsters and the joint right I walk in,
They're a little dismayed because I don't look in any
(59:04):
way exotic, nowhere, funky, no cafe ola complexion, nothing, just
I look like them. So you could see that they're
going to like, oh shit, well, well that kind of thing.
So no pride. It's not the first time, I understand.
So I I did my best ten minutes of stand
up on the matter in the at hand, what I
(59:24):
was going to do, how it was going to go,
what we're up to and what we're up against, and
then I stopped. I said, now that's enough. There will
be more. There'll be more today, but not now. I'm
going to stop there, and I'm going to say to you,
(59:45):
with the information I've just given you, I'm asking you
to decide right now, are you in or are you out?
Are you with us or are you leaving. I'll give
you a couple of moments to decide. I think in
tituitively you already know the answer, but you think about
it for a few moments, and then make your call,
(01:00:07):
make your decision, and act accordingly. Starting now, well, you
can imagine everybody's like, holy shit, what's going on? Like
this is this is way too something. It's just it's
intense it's insane, it's it's abrupt, it's uh, where's all
the special da da of it all? And but anyway,
(01:00:30):
I didn't blink. They're kind of waiting for me to
just kidding, and of course because I wasn't kidding. And
after a few moments, honest to god, a third of
the room got up and left. Don't forget who these
people are to them, they're there, they're friends, their deepest
you know, allies in life and at work and and
(01:00:52):
and so on. Anyway, so the two people in question
are in shock. I mean, the last person's walked at
the door, and there's some disgusted looks that have come
my way and worse, and there's empty chairs. So somebody
gets up and starts to move the chairs around so
as to mask what's just happened. And I say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
(01:01:15):
please sit back down. Leave all the chairs, including the
empty ones, just as they are. And here's why, Because
six and eight and ten months from now, when we're
going through it, when you're learning stuff you didn't even
know existed, I want you to remember how hard it
was on the day that it started, that you begin
(01:01:39):
to recognize that we're not beginning with our pockets full
of tradition and understanding and wisdom and spiritual plalm, nothing
of the kind. We're starting this whole thing basically with
empty pockets, with a kind of a poverty you don't
even suspect it's there, and the empty chairs will stand.
(01:02:00):
Has solid testimony that that is true, that when I
offer people a year of tuition where their souls can
be burnished into service for the sake of matrimony and
for the sake of a better day, they walked on you,
not me. That's how we started. Okay, yeah, that's true. Story.
Speaker 2 (01:02:27):
Shit, I'll got goosebumps.
Speaker 3 (01:02:29):
Yeah, yeah, it was quite quite a day. Quite a day.
What was the other thing I was going to tell you? Oh? Yes,
who could forget this one? The ceremony, as I did,
it lasted at the very least seven or eight hours.
(01:02:50):
Oftentimes it lasted longer than that, upwards of twelve hours,
but seven or eight was probably the average. At one time.
At what point we're in the proceedings, the wife, excuse me,
the mother of the the wife to be, the bride
slid up to me and said to me in a
(01:03:14):
hissing voice. Now she said to me, is this a
real wedding? Now, bear in mind, who asked me to
do this? Her daughter asked me to do this. She
knows that I didn't, you know, parachute in from the sky.
I didn't volunteer to do this, you know. I mean,
(01:03:38):
there's not enough pay in the world to make this
thing a good idea from that point of view. And
with all of that going on, so you might you
might ask me, so, what did you say? You know,
I didn't know this was coming, right, I'm in the
midst of trying to manage one hundred and fifty, one
(01:04:01):
hundred and seventy people. Yes, I'm doing that basically as
a three ring circus master that the last chapter of
the book basically describes what happened when I actually did it.
You know, but I said, I'm not proud of the response.
(01:04:23):
I have to say. I said to her, are you
a real mother? You see? It was way too harsh.
It was way too harsh. But I was don't forget.
I was very fiercely defending matrimony at this moment, wasn't
(01:04:44):
I And you could hear it. It wasn't an attack.
I was setting her back on her heels the way
you would in boxing, right, not trying to take her
head off. I'm just trying to get her to step
back and out of range, because you're in way too
close right now, and it's not good. And you don't
(01:05:06):
know what you're talking about, and you don't know what
you're asking, and you don't know what you're putting into motion.
You don't know the darkness that's coming in through what
you're saying, and the degradation that you're subjecting this to.
You don't know what's at stake. You don't know how
bad this can go, but I do. So that's what
I said, Are you a real mother? What I meant,
of course, was do you think I'm at a time
(01:05:28):
like this in your daughter's life? This is what a
mother does. And so, as I said, I'm not that
proud of the response, but I probably could have said.
Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
And probably canna punch bruh.
Speaker 3 (01:05:42):
That's right. I ducked and countered. Now Instead I said something.
I could have said something like this, have you been
to any weddings before this one? I know the answers yes,
of course, because that's where your question is partly coming from.
I said, at any point all those other weddings that
you're thinking of right now. Did you ever go to
(01:06:03):
the front of the room to the guy with the
caller or the woman with the caller, and did you
ever say to them what you just said to me?
I know what the answer is, you never did. Do
you know why? Because you think that was a real wedding?
What makes you think that was a real wedding? And
this isn't where are these standards coming from? Have you
(01:06:26):
even thought the thought? But I knew what the answer was.
Of course she hasn't the thought. What she's doing is
defending the threadbare tradition of that quote special day, and
she's trying to make sure that the world doesn't appear
in the proceedings the way most people were doing. The
(01:06:49):
final part of the answer is this. This might surprise you,
but I did not actually do most of the talking
once the ceremony was underway. I mean, it's not like
I don't like to talk. I do, but this was
not my moment. I'd put the thing into motion and
I had to let it play out. The lion's share
(01:07:12):
of the speech making, if you will, was conducted by
the invited guests, who were mortified to learn that the
fulcrum of the whole event basically was them, well, what
are you called when you're invited? Are you not called witnesses?
(01:07:33):
Are you not? Okay? What does the word witness means,
especially the phrase in English to bear witness? What does
it mean? It means to carry the burden of obligation
of having seen something unfold before your eyes, not today,
but six months and six years from now, when these
(01:07:54):
people are in trouble, as they will be. We all
of us know this. No matter what they're saying to
each other now, within five years, it'll be a shit
show sometimes, and they're going to need some solid reminding
of what was important to them once and what they've
lost track of since two point two kids later, and
(01:08:16):
the rest. And you have that responsibility to bring to
them their best intention of those days, to help them
contend with the rest of the story. You can't do
that if you blink. So you are the ones that
(01:08:37):
are going to answer the question if anybody knows any
reason why this should not proceed, that's got to be
part of In other words, that's how the world gets
an invitation to the event. And that's why finally i'm
talking too much here, I'm sorry. That's why. Finally, this
thing is not a celebration of life. I mean, if
(01:08:59):
that's what you want to add, I have great, don't
bother with the legal stuff. Just sit around, just hug
each other a lot, just thank everybody for coming one
hundred different ways. Just spend as much money as you
can afford, and just do it like that, which is
basically what it amounts to. Anyway. You see, what I
(01:09:23):
was doing was not celebrating that something that already existed,
called the feelings too people have for each other. What
I was doing was trying to call into existence something
that did not exist yet, the alchemy, and the two
shall become one, that alchemy, the spirit alchemy of Well,
(01:09:48):
there's too much if I keep going, there's too much
to say, but let's suffice it to say I never
understood this to be a celebration of something that was
already there. I knew that the feelings they had for
each other and all the rest, of course, of course,
but this is not a solid foundation for anything. The
(01:10:08):
solid foundation is ritualistic, not intentional, and the ritual cease
to it that the ancestors and the ancients of days,
and the dusty worthies and the rafter dwellers, and you know,
all of them get a seat, front row seat at
(01:10:29):
the proceedings, and all of them lend their voice to
the matters at hand. And that was my principal responsibility.
So nobody knew that when they came to me. I
didn't know that myself at the beginning. But when I
seriously took the responsibility that they were asking me to shoulder, immediately,
(01:10:52):
that's what I began to feel the presence of the abiding,
presence of tradition. And I was just now formally this
tirade by saying, do you know what tradition is traditional?
Do you know what formality actually is? Especially in ritualistic,
(01:11:15):
ceremonial circumstances. Formality is there to rescue you from the
frailties of your autobiography. That's what it's for. You see
that you don't have to invent everything, that certain things
existed before you, and that you rely upon them and
(01:11:39):
invoke them. You don't throw them all under the rug.
You don't throw them all out the back door and
just wing it. Find yourself saying things that sound so
arch in your mouth, so formal, so unlike you, and
begin to recognize it's not always great for you to
sound like yourself. You know, there are moments, there are
(01:12:04):
moments when you ought not to sound like your casual self,
and that's when someone some other kind of language is
coming from you. And that's what I was alluding to
earlier when I said, sometimes the best part of you
is that seven generation stuff. And they're the ones that
should have been issued an invitation to the proceedings first,
(01:12:26):
not last. But anyway, I saw to it that they
were there, and I did, all right.
Speaker 2 (01:12:34):
You've done it again. You've done it again with me.
You've just put me in a space. And you know,
I listened to our last conversation in excess of seven
or eight times, and I had listeners contact me saying
they had listened several times. And like, you are such
(01:12:55):
a gift. You are such a gift in how you
whatever the magic it is that you do with how
you speak. Look, I'm I will be basking in this
all day again. It's I don't know, like I just
it starts. It starts a train of creative thought and
perception and perspective that beyond anything I've experienced. So you're
(01:13:18):
bloody awesome. How can people get their hands on your books,
your shows, your albums, your songs, your everything.
Speaker 3 (01:13:29):
Well, the book itself is formally available on the twelfth
of August, so about three weeks from now or so.
I don't have I haven't seen it yet. I believe
they've told me that it's it's in the warehouse and
they're beginning to ship out, you know, my copies and
all the rest of it. Of course you've seen it,
not in pay per form, but in PDF, I would imagine, right, Yeah,
(01:13:53):
And then there's a form in which I recorded the thing,
me reading the thing, because I didn't know what it
was supposed to sound like. So that was me again,
you know, rendering the book. So Orphan Wisdom dot com
that's the name of the website, and that's of course,
like everybody else, we have a store there. And and
(01:14:13):
this is the seventh book I've published now, and I'm
starting to get the hang of it. So I'm starting
to get kind of good at it, I think. And
I think this one's worth the trouble. This one's really recognizable, Yeah,
I think so. And you know, you don't have to
be in the in the market, in the romantic marketplace.
(01:14:36):
This this is not a book that's predicated on the
presence of romance. This is a book it's predicated on
the poverty, which is our over reliance on romance. That's
what it's about. It gives it. I think it gives
the romantically challenged a fair shot at the real thing.
(01:15:01):
That's what it does. I never thought of that before
until I just said it now.
Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
But that's because you're maybe, because you're speaking to a
romantically challenged person right now that that got to vote.
Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
Ye could be And the rest of the gear to
the other books and the CDs and the and we're
Gregor and are working on a new record. Almost finished
it and it'll come out I would think within six
weeks or so, six weeks or two months. Somewhere's in there.
We don't have a name for it. We do, but
(01:15:33):
I'm not at liberty to discuss it at the moment.
I don't even know why that's such a big deal,
but he's asked me to keep it under wraps. So
it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool record and a
lot of all brand new material that he and I
have collaborated on and uh, and maybe we get on
the road again with nice agree from mischie god willing.
(01:15:54):
You know that I'm up to it, and that that
the v he's a hooligans agree and let us into
various countries and all that other gear, and and then
you know, if none of that comes to pass, man,
we've had a pretty good run.
Speaker 2 (01:16:13):
Please please please let me know if you're touching down
in Melbourne. I will get the gloves out. I'll be there.
Speaker 3 (01:16:20):
Okay. I don't know if we should be strapping on
the gloves now. You'd have to be really taking it easy.
Speaker 2 (01:16:26):
Are we kind? Are we kind?
Speaker 3 (01:16:28):
All right?
Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
Thank you so much, Steven Jenks and everyone, go and
check it out. I'll have some links in the show notes.
Thank you so much for coming on the show again.
Speaker 3 (01:16:38):
Pleasure again, thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:16:42):
She said, it's now never. I got fighting in my blood.
Speaker 2 (01:16:51):
It in
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