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PODCAST

Uncivil Savant Podcast

The complete audio version of my regular posts. Notes from the Way, words from the woods, waters from the springs. carolineross.substack.com

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

10:05

Episode 42 - Shoals

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/05

Muse in me is at once like a guest, a meal and a wolf; consumed and consuming. At times hunkered down like a prepper with protein bars and weaponry, sometimes loose-limbed and striding out speaking in tongues to trees. Other times he is tight as wind-knots in fishing line, the hard place that will not run smoothly through the eye of life.He likes (me) to fight, to fish, to wrestle, to draw, to write…First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, September 4th 2023. Get full access

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21:16

Episode 41 - The Naked Uncivil Savant

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/05

It was twenty past ten and the spotlights were hot and bright. The raised dais and carefully draped couch were still empty, our pencils were all sharpened, there was a muttering in the life room. The tutor said, ‘Right then, who’s volunteering? One hour each, we’ll need five of you.’It was 1989, early in the first term of my two years at Shelley Park1 art college, housed in the repurposed, characterful clifftop home of Percy Shelley, son of the writer Mary Shelley. The life drawing studio was on the

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12:41

Episode 40 - The Oxford lacuna

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/04

When I started this Substack I regularly included pieces expanded from my ongoing practice of writing to, and thinking with, friends, which is, apart from discussions at the table with food and wine, my favourite mode of meaning-making. It’s time for another recent instalment culled from my trusty ancient Hotmail account, that tireless μεταφορά (removals, transporter, metaphor…) machine.I have removed anything personal to my correspondent, my friend Nicholas Wilkinson, added links and tidied the

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16:41

Episode 39 - Doing something about it

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/04

One day the internet will failFirst come family and friends, the bushel of people I love most. When my world suddenly changed and I came home to roost a mile from my birthplace, I realised instinctively that rebuilding a meaningful life came from committing to love and being loved by this group of people, and that other goodness would flow from this. I had tried to please or placate, control or ignore people and things in pretty much every combination and situation an adult life could offer, and I

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12:23

Episode 38 - Intention and invitation

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/04

Time has flown and Uncivil Savant has taken its own shape. When I draw, no matter if I have very specific plans for a piece, the ink, paper and brush always conspire to make a far more interesting and lively, if sometimes unexpected, translation of the movements of my hand, (and by inference, the movements of my unconscious, as well as my so-called conscious will). Thankfully, the same happens with writing. Although I am still tapping away at a keyboard rather than writing long-hand, if I relax and

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9:59

Episode 37 - To know the tides you need an edge

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/04

I have been thinking lots about boundaries, edges and limits, partly around the use of electronics, my engagement with ‘the machine’, and my own personal energy. There have been some good posts over the last few months from several writers I follow here about their own need for, and strategies around, such things. I have found this a fertile and timely area of reading, and have a few thoughts to add to the collective mulling-over of this somewhat gritty topic. Last week, demonstrating making paint

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19:11

Episode 36 - Grasp the nettle

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/04

There is a saying in the Taoist Classics: ‘The Sage is sick of being sick of sickness.’Well, I am no sage, but I have been sick. I am as well, physically, as I have ever been, but I have been experimenting with many aspects of life this year, sometimes mindfully, sometimes by accident, and both ways have taught me, and continue to teach me, a huge amount.In a living culture, we would have elders to ask about how our discoveries could enrich our community, plus we could ask advice. Instead, I have my

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12:05

Episode 35 - Restore and re-story

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/03

Once, everywhere, the land was storied.Here is where uncle Joe met your auntie, this is where we rest the sheep during the droving, here is where we found the best cherries, on that hill is where our ancestors made a vow… My late nan told me about Bealach na Ba, the Pass of the Cattle, high above Applecross in the west of the Scottish Highlands, how she had seen other farmers drive a herd down from the heights to the village below, followed by one of the first motorcars to make it over the pass. 1We

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15:43

Episode 34 - Remedies for Lyme disease of the Soul

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/03

I have been thinking about thinking. This is nothing new. A couple of decades doing T’ai Chi with the cotton-slippered elephant in the room being my own tedious thoughts going round and round was, as you can imagine, educational. Over the years I have approached the use of words by the mind in several distinct ways, some methods were classical meditation techniques taught by my teacher or learned from books. Others were ways which evolved naturally, or which were passed on by friends. Yet others

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9:07

Episode 33 - Chalk Cutting

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/03

The bioavailability of nutrients to the body is like the mytho-availablity of earth to the soul. Without regular physical contact to the ground, stories untether and become fragmentary, denatured, even toxic. We cleave to the broken parts like children hoarding rounded flints, not knowing it’s the sharp edges that spark fire from steel. Those sharp edges that can also do the cutting. If you are going to hoard flint, then go to Grimes Graves and ask to dig a big nodule, take it home whole and turn it

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19:16

Episode 32 - The hart of the wud

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/03

I am freshly returned from my favourite woods in the world, the woods near Stonehenge that I know and love best. I have my ‘forest face’ back, softer, though perhaps grimier, than my ‘town face’. I have been coming here since 2015, according to the kit packing lists file on my laptop, though it seems like longer. Here, I gather chalk dug by badgers for my art and paints, pignuts for nibbling, chicken of the woods fungi for meals, hazel for carving box lids and gourd stoppers; in fact, everything I

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13:17

Episode 31 - Softness

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/03

A changeTwenty feet outside my window, the chestnut, oak and pollard lime trees sway. For over a month this coast, whose trees habitually bow their heads and turn their backs to a prevailing sou’westerly, has experienced cold, insistent winds from the east. This happened last year, too. Despite the sunshine, whitecaps rise in the sheltered bays, swimmers huddle in the surf, eyeing their expensive Dryrobes, wistfully. I am sitting at my desk, facing west, feeling something shift - inside? Outside

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14:22

Episode 30 - In the company of saints

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/02

What sets them apart from us is twofold. Firstly, their remarkable lives or deaths. Secondly, that their lives are no longer their own. A saint’s life is for us, far more than any monarch, minister or hero, who usually have a hand in how their story is spun. In death, saints’ lives are plucked up to be placed into the common basket of goodness, to become apples of instruction. Or at least they were, until knowledge and study of the lives of saints fell away in almost every faith to make way for the

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7:18

Chapter 29 - She moves toward you to speak

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/02

This week, a letter between gods, from January 2018. The verbatim account of an everyday yet mythic encounter in a bank in Wimbledon in November 2017. A poem / lost song from 1999. All alongside new works from my drawing desk, this May.I am home, floating strangely between jetlag and the task of levigating deep blood red ochre for my next class. Wish me luck, as I am not yet quite here, nor still there.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 29th 2023. Get full access

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6:26

Chapter 28 - 6 months at sea

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/02

This weekend sees 6 months since I began to write here on Substack. You can read my first post again as to why I started, but why I’ll continue, and what I hope to cover, is the subject of this post. First I’d like to thank all of you who read this and subscribe, whether paid or free, and to all of you who post such interesting comments. I always read them all. I had no idea that I would find a readership of even 150 people, let alone 1500, so thanks again for your continued interest in my obscure

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11:34

Episode 27 - Dreaming

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/02

Today I wanted to give you something really useful that took me years to develop and hone, but has been proved effective by many people who have tried it.Over fifty artists, writers and T’ai Chi colleagues have used this practice to feed into their work or to gain connection to a wellspring of unconscious creativity. I hope it is of benefit to you. Please do get in touch if it is.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 15th 2023. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at

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8:03

Chapter 26 - Interlude Three poems

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/02

Here are three poems that feel right for this moment. The first is a glimpse of how I write or draw and brings a recurring childhood dream and menopause together. The second gathers all my gathering into one place and queries the compulsion I have to unearth. The final one, from last autumn, is about class, and seems apt given the aristocratic shenanigans in my home country this weekend. I am 5000 miles away, and happily so.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, May 3rd

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20:04

Chapter 25 - The Machine stops us moving

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

The embodied lifeFor me, even though I write almost every day, a hearty physical life is non-negotiable. There are thoughts I can’t have and feelings I can’t reach without access to the green. Similarly, I may be well in myself and reasonably fit, but if I spend whole days glued to the screen, I end up jittery and stiff, even if I don’t watch or read anything untoward. It is not only the timbre of what I see that affects me deeply, but the medium. Since the day before the World Trade Center attacks

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11:04

Episode 24 - Spring

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

This week, while I settle into the refuge of the roads in USA, I’ll share something from my archive. This piece was originally commissioned for Dark Mountain 22 - ARK, and returns us once more to the shore. I have added photos and a map. I hope you enjoy it. See you next week with something new.First published here with full transcript, notes and more images, April 24 2023. Get full access to Uncivil Savant at carolineross.substack.com/subscribe

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11:04

Episode 23 - Full of emptiness

Uncivil Savant Podcast ·

2024/02/01

It gets harder to come back from the place of no wordsWithout access to sea edge and forest there are many thoughts I can’t have and many kinds of silence, too. Sensation, movement and perception roll along without words and take on the green tinge of leaf or the glint of grey flint. Last week the cove remade me in its image - tidal thoughts, harder, durable stone ideas, softer yet more tenacious seaweed feelings. Irascible mind chatter flies past, as persistently as the gulls diving for morsels

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