This blog began about two years ago. With hope, fear, insecurity, desperation, and a curious shift in circumstances that brought an unexpected bounty of free time for reflection and naval-gazing (bad pun intended), I promised you all a weekly meeting. With the luxurious wallowing in free time enjoyed in those extraordinary circumstances of my first command (also known as ‘the night shift’) firmly in the rear-view mirror, I feel I should begin this meeting in the customary fashion. That is, with apologies.
I’m very grateful, and slightly amazed, that my number of subscribers on Substack has continued to grow, despite my relatively sparse publishing tempo of late. I’m even more surprised (and grateful) that our number of paid subscribers has continued to increase. Quite frankly, I’ve lacked the quality and quantity of what I promised you in the early days. Hopefully, I can make up for it with enthusiasm and originality. I’ve been working double time since the New Year break, but things are calming down a little now. I hereby pledge the volume will return and fully compensate for the missed weeks of friendship that I hope these letters build.
Part of the reason I write as honestly as I can, even though it alienates half the people I know is because I figure if I piss off half the population, the other half will love me just for doing that. If nothing else. And if I said nothing and stayed in my lane, it wouldn’t matter. I’d still have enemies and critics. I might as well have them for the right reasons. One of the benefits of growing up in poverty (relative Western European poverty, not real poverty), is the countless opportunities for humiliation it affords. Like the ritual humiliation in basic military training, unearned pride will not be an option after that. The value of those sarcastic teachers who used to insult us as kids was sorely underestimated. It’s a true shame that has been classed as abuse by our autistic death-spiral society. Humility and courage tend to compete for the position of primary or pre-requisite virtue. I rather think of them as a singularity. Pride is nothing but fear that one’s veil is slipping. Who can live like that?
Anyway.
I had the great pleasure, a couple of weeks ago, to meet Tim Price in person. As most people who subscribe to this stack will know already Tim is a fund manager, rock and roll aficionado, the author of The Price of Everything, and co-host of the State of the Markets podcast. I will take this opportunity to verify his profile with you. He is also a thoroughly nice person to be with in real life.
By pure chance, a client of mine asked me to attend a briefing in chambers, down in London. As it turned out, the place of the meeting was virtually next door to Tim’s office. I booked a hotel immediately adjacent.
With it being almost 3 years since I’ve been in the City of London, I’d forgotten that Heathrow is actually in Oxford, and that travel time estimates from Google Maps are nothing but propaganda. Despite false promises, I still managed to be only marginally late for the Marine Warranty Survey meetings I’d squeezed in for the afternoon.
After my meeting, I met up with Tim, who very kindly treated me to a few scoops in his near-work local. Our discussions were vastly wide-ranging, and semi-autobiographical on both sides. We covered the comical, the spiritual, and the ineffable. It was wonderful to meet in real life after making friends online. It felt like meeting an old friend, even though it was our first encounter in person. It’s hard to describe, but I think the fact that we share so much of our true selves on these pages, it is clear that any friends we make here online have often seen a part of our spirit that may otherwise take years or decades to discern in the normal course of business with colleagues and friends.
Aside from his love of freedom, his wicked sense of humour, encyclopaedic knowledge of film, contempt for corruption wherever he finds it, and his general incredible openness, there are two really lovable things I noticed about Tim that made clear to me why he stands out as a kindred spirit. The first was that he spoke favourably of his wife (even using her name) in her absence. That, to me, is a sure sign of a deeply honest and faithful person. The other was that he confessed that his career path developed in the way it did because he couldn’t stand to be pigeon-holed as an ultra-specialist in some obscure micro-sector of the world of finance.
A fund manager, a broadcaster, a humourist, an author, and a lover of the arts. The man is a generalist, not a specialist. That is something that I admire in others and aim for in my own life too.
As the late, great, Robert A. Heinlein – author of Starship Troopers and prophetic predictor of Mutually Assured Destruction – once said:
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
Specialisation is for insects. And technocrats, and communists. But I repeat myself.
I had a great time during my short time in London. A pint with Tim. Dinner at what I can only presume was a pizza parlour for flamboyant homosexuals. (Which was excellent, despite very loud and grumpy conversations about pronouns at the table adjacent). A morning wandering around Inner Temple and a day learning a lot from my time in chambers. A quick afternoon tea with an old navy friend, and then a flight home from the only airport that is actually in London, which is City Airport.
I am a connoisseur of airports now. I still remember the thrill of those first few trips overseas, to Hong Kong or Sydney or Fortaleza, when some driver meets you holding up a sign with your name at arrivals, just like in the movies. Now all I care about is clean toilets and a corner with some peace and quiet. The absence of decent Wi-Fi is often quite a relief these days.
City is great because they’ve already upgraded to those new scanners, so you don’t have to take anything out of your hand luggage. And you’re now miraculously allowed to bring a bottle of water through with you! It felt like the 10th of September 2001!
As I hoped this moment of sanity would be portentous, and an indicator that sanity may soon return to these islands after 22 years of limbic antagonisation, I recalled that this was the first airport where I insisted that I was ‘mask exempt’, back in the days of iconoclasm, circa 2020.
May the City of London lead the way in loosening the grip of tyrannical nonsense, as its airport staff appear to be doing.
As a navigator and a lover of maps and charts, I reflected on the pattern of airports from a geospatial perspective. The airport is a corridor of order. Like a tree trunk with roots spreading far and wide into the city. The flow of people coming from disparate places – every physical and social nook and cranny of that vast city represented – and being sucked into the airport through security, via cafes, bars, and toilets, up into the departure lounge. For a little moment, we strangers all share one thing in common. A departure point, and a destination. And for this short time, no matter how varied and colourful the group of passengers, we all share a single overriding point of attention. The flight.
As we board, and fly onwards, the flow of people at the airport now completely mirrors the shape of a tree. Each flight, containing the lifeblood of our societies and cultures, takes off, branching out in every direction imaginable. The passengers disperse into the world at the other end, like spring buds, or pine needles, pointing outward, every which way.
As I pondered the shape of a tree, and what patterns are, I began to notice the motif everywhere. In art, on buildings, in podcasts, in the bible.
Take the movie Shaun the Sheep: The Flight Before Christmas, for example. (Yes, we watch Christmas films all year round in my house. Because they’re ace). One of the climactic scenes involves the (very silly and naughty) flock of sheep who’ve been intruding in the fancy house of a TV celebrity (totally not meant to be Ben Fogle and Mylene Class), escaping from the attic window to a treehouse. In a scene strikingly similar to the end of another iconic Christmas film, Home Alone, the sheep use a string of Christmas lights as a zip-wire, to take a leap of faith and escape to safety, away from their pursuers. There is even a little death and resurrection motif, as little Timmy (the toddler’s favourite, of kindergarten show ‘Timmy-Time’ fame), loses his grip and falls into a dark icy abyss. Only to be rescued by the farmer’s dog (Bitzer), who is acting like Saint Nicholas, and saves Timmy from his untimely demise.
Since all things have purpose and meaning, (even the void), we might very well ask what the symbolism of the treehouse is.
To the modern materialist mind, the answer is simple. In both Home Alone and The Flight Before Christmas, the treehouse is a status signal. An accessory to the well-built homes of the neo-aristocracy that is the professional management class (PMC) who’ve benefited from inflation policies. Often because they just so happened to hold what are euphemistically called ‘assets’ before the printing presses got stuck in the ‘ON’ position, sometime around 1973. In both movies, the treehouse is an upper-middle-class privilege, and the prototypical ‘safe-space’ that so many of their panty-wringing offspring have come to expect in the workplace or at university. Leaping from the top of the attic to safety at the top of a tree is emblematic of the old boys’ network. The privileged are too big to fail and can always leap from the top of one pyramidal hierarchy to that of another when pursued by the earthy proletariat, who’ve finally come to take what’s theirs.
I could probably get tenure at Harvard by expounding further on that dim-witted thesis. But let’s not encourage the autistic tendencies of our post-puritan, post-enlightenment, post-industrial world, shall we?
Such disdain for the wealthy is a sign of our inflationary times. The resentment of wealth becomes much easier when the youth are excluded from it, and when people are so fully shielded from true poverty. It’s impossible for people today to fully appreciate the symbolism of a home when the financial cost of one is more than ten times the average income. Even if you can get on the ladder these days, it takes so much out of you, that the very notion of a home has changed.
The explosion of interest in Tiny Homes is a modern phenomenon driven purely by inflation. Like so many others, this crushing disappointment of our financial system requires this ersatz solution to the housing crisis to be dressed up in a thin veneer of eco-altruism and fake aspirational pseudo-philosophies of minimalism. Seven-dollar-latte pride. Forget Boethius’ Consolations of Philosophy. The Zoomers have marketing, instead.
Treehouses also became indelibly linked with high status in the British psyche in 1952, at the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II. Our late Queen was in the Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park Kenya at the time of her father’s death. The guestbook from that hotel famously reads:
“For the first time in the history of the world, a young girl climbed into a tree one day a Princess and after having what she described as her most thrilling experience she climbed down from the tree next day a Queen — God bless her.”
Treehouses as garden accessories have indeed been an indicator of wealth since the Industrial Revolution. However, let’s not fall into the stupid trap of reductionism, and imply that this means treehouses act simply as a ‘status symbol’. We’re not making an archaeology show for the BBC here.
A far more universal tradition in popular culture has been the Treehouse of Horror episodes of The Simpsons. The greatest tv show in history has effortlessly and indelibly linked the celebration of All Hallows Eve (Halloween) – the last surviving inversion festival in the west – with the treehouse. The place where the younger generation gather to mock death, and ridicule demons, in the finest traditions of Christendom.
If people began to build treehouses the very moment, they had a bit of prosperity and leisure time, thanks to industrialisation (and shock-horror, deflation), then we can assume that means they already wanted treehouses.
We can infer, by dint of being human (much like our forebears), that treehouses are quite fun. That people want their children to have fun. That we want our children to be close to nature for some reason, and that the price of some timber and nails probably didn’t amount to the equivalent of half a year’s disposable income for a typical sea captain.
Treehouses clearly had a purpose and meaning to people for their construction to be a priority upon coming into a little bit of freedom.
As it turns out, we’re not the only one in history to value a treehouse. Franciscan monks used treehouses as an escape from earthly troubles and would ascend aloft to meditate. As recently as 2001, Franciscan monks in the USA have maintained this practice. Queen Elizabeth I is reported to have wined and dined among the branches in her treehouse garden.
Luxury, frivolity, and meditation are the fruits of the Western world, so it is no surprise that our use of the treehouse reflects our cultural prosperity. Material prosperity has been the defining feature of our society when compared with others.
More traditional societies, like tribes in Papua New Guinea, use treehouses for far more practical reasons. Elevation out flood zones, defence from enemy tribes of head-hunters (not the city of London kind), and protection of food stores from wild animals.
It is thought that early humans lived in treehouses before cave dwellings, not because any evidence has been found, but because great apes have been observed building nest-like shelters in treetops. Jordan Peterson is famous for echoing the sentiment of evolutionary psychologists that the Biblical importance of trees, and the ‘forest-like’ nature of columns in medieval cathedrals are representations of a genetic memory that human beings have of life among the treetops over 40,000 years ago.
I don’t know anything about that. I find it increasingly hard to accept such stories as either useful or authoritative. The earliest writing we have is from about 5,000 years ago, so as far as I’m concerned, that is the beginning of our knowledge. Everything else is speculative. The idea that our bodies and societies function merely to serve the self-propagative will of our DNA seems to illustrate the limitations of the human mind better than any criticism I could level.
Scientism is religious in nature because it is human. Human beings are religious. There is no escape from that pattern because it is our essence.
We must ask simply, what ‘will’ brought self-replicating DNA into existence? What ‘will’ is at work when ‘epi-genetic’ activation and deactivation occur to add or erase elements of DNA? What principle operates in DNA that gives it a hierarchy of values, that allows it to select elements of itself for destruction or activation? And if the operating principle of human DNA is indeed self-multiplication – the virus with shoes hypothesis – then how could it possibly transpire that human beings evolved gender and sexual reproduction? Why not simply evolve asexually, with self-spawning Parthenogenesis? Why evolve the capacity for homosexuality, or asexuality? Why does suicide exist?
The ever-accelerating chain of random accidents has a funny way of expressing its simple selfish will.
One thing I confessed to Tim is that, while I’ve been on this spiritual voyage of discovery, I have been rather unfaithful as a Christian. But one thing I have achieved is a new way of reading the Bible, and of looking at the world.
The key for me has been taking seriously something that Jonathan Pageau once said on the Symbolic World podcast. Which was along the lines of, ‘don’t just look at Bible stories as simple minded, one-for-one allegories. It isn’t Aesop’s fables. When you study Jesus, everything he does, and everything he says has multiple layers of meaning. Which is really what you should expect from the creator of the universe’.
For example, in Mark 8, verses 21-26, when Jesus has to heal the blind man’s sight twice.
‘A Two-stage Healing’
“Then they came to Bethsaida. They brought a blind man to Jesus and asked him to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and brought him outside of the village. Then he spit on his eyes, placed his hands on his eyes and asked, “Do you see anything?” Regaining his sight he said, “I see people, but they look like trees walking.” Then Jesus placed his hands on the man’s eyes again. And he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly. Jesus sent him home, saying, “Do not even go into the village.” – NET.
I got stuck on this for ages. I was captivated by it. But when I looked online for commentary, I was struck by how hopelessly materialistic and reductionist most commentary has been for the past 100 years+. Most scholars basically say that the blind man was a bit stupid, and should have realised that trees can’t walk around, so these must be people, but that he’d been blind from birth so didn’t know what people looked like. Or that Jesus just needed a Mulligan, because he f*cked that one up on the first go. Even the creator doesn’t get a hole-in-one every time.
I mean basically, that was the level of analysis for 95% of the commentary.
Only a couple of theologians pointed out that in order for this poor man to have ‘eyes to see’, Jesus first healed his spiritual sight. Only then might he have true vision, to see things as they are.
I have noticed this recently when teaching people at the yacht school. I’ve written a Small Ships Nav and radar course, and I’ve been teaching electronic navigation at their simulator since last year. I have noticed that it is nearly impossible to teach an abstract technique like radar plotting by starting with theory. Almost all of our education is so poor now because it comes from materialist viewpoint that a human being is a car on a Ford assembly line, and education is just like adding parts to the body. ‘There you go. I’ve added radar theory. Now you can operate a ship.’
It is far, far easier to teach old salts who’ve been at sea for a while. They have been out in the deathly silence of thick fog. They have felt the fear that comes with having zero visual reference to the coastline and being totally dependent on an electronic instrument. They know what it means to lose power. They understand the purpose of the instruments, because they know the meaning of the experience.
So when the creator of the universe shows us, that human beings are trees, what is he on about?
The biblical tree is the symbol of the living union between heaven and earth. Pagan gods and demons lived on mountain tops, not because the ancients couldn’t climb a mountain and see what was there. They lived there because it is the physically particular place – a permanent place – where heaven meets earth.
The tree, by contrast, is a living union between heaven and earth. It is particular, but temporary. It has roots, and shoots, but coheres in a central trunk. It is a symbol of identity.
All trees are the tree of life. The tree of knowledge of good and evil. The fig tree. The thorn tree. The burning bush. Moses’ staff. The cross.
They are principles made real.
It is also a symbol of the fractal nature of reality. The identity of the mighty oak that is cut down, seasoned, and becomes a battleship, is already contained in the acorn. The growing hole in its trunk reflects the diminutive role of darkness, in duality. The acorns left behind to grow its successor symbolise the ultimate renewal of creation, resurrection, and goodness. The pattern of the tree in the tiniest leaves, and the first buds of spring, become the kaleidoscopic canopy of the forest, as the pattern radiates and repeats.
That is how all life exists.
Mark 4 – The Parable of the Mustard Seed’
“He also asked, “To what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable can we use to present it? It is like a mustard seed that when sown in the ground, even though it is the smallest of all the seeds in the ground – when it is sown, it grows up, becomes the greatest of all garden plants, and grows large branches so that the wild birds can nest in its shade”. – NET
The human being, like the tree, is a kind of union between heaven and earth. A mobile one. A generative and destructive one. An iconic, and co-creative one.
Sow when we build treehouses for our children, our for our monarchs, we are living this symbolism. We want for our children to learn and participate in building the next generation of society. The rudimentary construction of the treehouse reflects that. We want them to be closer to heavenly principles. We want them to bear fruit. And we want it to be good.
And so, we make symbolism happen.
Even the windy farmers can’t escape the symbolism of the cross, and the tree. Even if they are accidental Gaia-worshipping statists.
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