We give you the bottom-line scoop on Gretel’s crying jags, and answer some of the burning questions of Western Culture and Civilization over a couple of hot pastrami on ciabatas
Part 1 [03:24] - In which we find a deep and abiding connection between The Stooges and mysticism, and ask the burning question of Western Culture and Civilization: Is it okay to wear socks with sandals?
Part 2 [21:49] - In which we figure out exactly why ayahuasca tourism is booming
Part 3 [39:59] - In which we start filling in Gretel’s backstory over a couple of hot pastrami sandwiches, and can’t help but notice that somebody is constantly mopping the floors
Part 4 [58:38] - In which we do some Provençal provenance proofing, make a gratuitous reference to Taxicab Confessions, and ask that other major question of Western Culture and Civilization: Does the pope shit in the woods?
Part 5 [1:16:42] - In which we learn that a mystic is a mystic is a mystic, and realize that a cynic is a cynic is a cynic
Part 6 [1:31:25] - In which we combine ciabata and cardiology in a zen koan and end up with the definitive definition of grace
🎶 🔔 small church bells 🔔 🎶
[this is NOT the official podcast of any pope, living or dead, but yes, those ARE church bells]
Bless me Fader, for I have sinned... it’s been, uh, I don’t know, like over 4 months since my last episode...
[WTF!!!???]
uh, calm down there fader... this is a family-oriented podcast...
[no, it’s not]
[indeed!]
🎶 Anachronist 🎶
heidy ho, all you intuitives out there, and welcome back to the Hansel and Gretel Code... this here is episode 43
[Come on! Let's move this thing along! Get it going!]
alright, alright...
Our last 4 episodes took us on a huge detour from the original theme of the fairytale... and that’s because the brothers Grimm insisted on re-writing War and Peace, and forcing the whole fucking thing down our throats... all through a tiny crack in the manuscript...
of course we didn’t know that going in... we were just performing our philologic due diligence... which is how we learned that their addition to the story was actually a rant — and a very cranky one at that — having nothing to do with main theme of the fairytale!
[that shit is fucked up]
Reading between the lines we caught them red-handed, and discovered the down and dirty, bottom line, honest-to-god, real reason they changed Hansel and Gretel’s mother into a step-mother...
[no, really?]
uh, yeah... really... and it wasn’t some kindly concern for the tender feelings of young readers... or the Grimms’ presumed, mythical reverence for motherhood...
[why not?]
turns out, it was
🎶 La vendetta! Oh la vendetta! 🎶
that’s right, it was revenge... a vendetta...!
[audience gasp] va deliberate and violent act of vengeance carried out... not with a lupara, or the elegant twist of a knife, but with a bloody little twist of satire...
in making that stepmother switcheroo, they castrated,
[gasp]
er, I mean, they performed literary sexual reassignment surgery on Ernst August, the King of Hanover... a man they felt they had every good reason to hate...
[no, really?]
yeah, really... but enough of that... In this episode we’re getting ourselves back on track and we’re gonna figure out what’s behind the repeated emphasis on Gretel’s crying jags...
[and, finally]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 1 [03:24]
Teil eins: In which we discover a deep and abiding connection between The Stooges and mysticism, and ask the burning question of Western Culture and Civilization: is it okay to wear socks with sandals?
[dad joke moans]
alright, let’s start by taking a listen to what happened when the children realized they had been well and truly fucked over, er I mean abandoned by their parents...
sie warten lang bis es Nacht ward, aber die Eltern kamen nicht wieder. Da fing das Schwesterchen an gar sehr zu weinen, das Brüderchen tröstete es aber und nahm es an die Hand.
They waited a long time. Night came on, but the parents didn't come back. Then the little sister began to cry terribly, but the little brother comforted her and took her by the hand.
the first time we heard Gretel crying was back in Episode 21, and even back then, it seemed obvious that crying (which is nearly all she ever does) is consistent with having her represent the Feeling Function.
[huhh??]
remember we’re hanging our interpretive hat on Jung’s basic concept of the 4 Functions of Consciousness: Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition... and we’re using that quaternity as a working model for the symbolic meaning of the 4 members of the Holzhacker family... in other words, we’re taking that symbolism as key to unlocking the intuitive meaning of the whole story...
and no, we’re not getting hung up on any Jungian concepts as strict dogmatic pigeonholes or grouchy procrustean beds...
[huh?]
okay, how about fancy glass slippers to shoehorn the details of this fairytale into...
[ahh, very good]
Jung himself based the concept of the 4 functions on shrewd and empathic observations of both his patients and humanity at large... he saw how human behavior meshed with ancient theories of medicine and personality... theories we’ve already mentioned back in Episode 010... theories about the 4 elements and the 4 humors that are poo-pooed by modern academics...
[for good reason]
well, I gotta tell you, the king of Logic himself, Immanuel Kant, felt those theories were both valuable and valid...
[no way]
oh yeah… he spent a good deal of time lecturing on them... and not putting them down... so unless we run into some obvious or undeniable contradiction, we’re going with Jung’s 4 functions as our working hypothesis...
[alright, if you say so]
now admittedly, so far at least, the evidence for Gretel as the Feeling Function is anything but definitive... I mean, her behavior and activity in the story has been pretty minimal... still we’re going to see more of that evidence gradually and consistently accumulate as we make our way through the story...
in fact, there’s one relevant passage from Goethe that pretty much seals the deal on Gretel as the Feeling function... it doesn’t come up until later in the story, but our author managed to work it in as a marvelous metalepsis... one that ends up being more than convincing... and hell, it even helps us nail down the true identity of our author...
[sound of hammering nails]
[guy hammering his thumb screams]
[ahem]
right here and now, with this new line of the fairytale — and Gretel crying for the second time — we’ve got plenty of serious evidence to back up our hypothesis...
funny enough though, having Gretel do all the crying is a particular new wrinkle deliberately crafted by our author...
[What! What do you mean?]
remember, Giambattista Basile’s 17th century story of Nennillo e Nennella is one of the definitive sources our author used in the construction of Hansel & Gretel... and in it, it’s the father who does all the crying, not the children!
[I don’t believe it! I can’t believe it!]
[just listen!]
E cossi la matina appriesso—’nanze che l’Arva spannesse la coperta de Spagna rossa pe scotolare li pulece a la fenestra d’Oriente - isso pigliatose li figlie uno pe mano co no buono panaro de cose da magnare ’nfilato a lo vraccio, le portaie a no vosco, dove n'esserzeto de chiuppe e de faie tenevano assediate l’ombre. A lo quale luoco arrivato disse Iannuccio: «Nennille mieie, stateve ccà dintro, manciate e bevite allegramente e comme ve manca niente vedite sta lista de cennere che vao semmenanno: chesta sarrà lo filo che cacciannove da laberinto ve portarrà a piede fitto a la casa vostra» e, datole no vaso ped uno, se ne tornaie chiagnenno a la casa.
And so the next morning—before Dawn had hung the red Spanish coverlet from the window to the East, to shake out the fleas—he took his children by the hand, put a nice full basket of things to eat on his arm, and took them to a forest, where an army of poplars and beeches laid siege to the shadows. When they got to that place Iannuccio said: “My little children, stay here in this wood, eat and drink merrily; but if you want anything, follow this line of ashes which I have been strewing as we came along; this will be a clue to lead you out of the labyrinth and bring you straight home.” Then giving them both a kiss, he returned weeping to his house.
[interesting]
seeing as how we’ve already spent plenty of time connecting Gretel’s crying to the Feeling Function back in episode 21, — and here she is crying again — what more can anybody really say about crying, beyond the fact that it’s a wordless sign of extreme emotion...
[absolutely nothing!]
Right... except there’s that interesting, albeit subtle matter of repetition...
in the original manuscript, this is the second of 3 crying jags... and because Wilhelm Grimm catches on to the significance of the repetition — and wants to help any of us stragglers who may have overlooked it to catch on as well — he goes ahead and adds a 4th...
[oh, well that’s nice]
oh!
even without Wilhelm’s extra hint, the repetition tells our Intuition that something else, something extra is being implied by all that crying... something significant and worth looking into...
sure enough, digging into the historic, literary, and, in particular, the religious background of crying gives us a whole new angle on the Feeling Function... one that compliments everything we’ve so far discovered about this fairytale... with its heavy emphasis on Intuition and the Intuitive Function...
[what? what? what?]
well specifically, it expands on everything we’ve already learned about apostolic poverty and the ancient intuitive art of theurgy... something that takes us farther and deeper, and adds another dimension to all of it...
[what?]
Gretel’s crying leads us right into the mystery of mystics and mysticism... and in particular, women mystics of the medieval period...
[seriously?]
I don’t want to get into a big thing about mysticism... plenty of people have written about it, and about the women and men who have been called mystics... although I gotta tell you, despite all the marvels and miracles ascribed to mystics, reading about them, and especially about mysticism itself can be a pretty sterile experience... it can also be pretty obtuse...
[I am so surprised about that]
fer instance... according to
[what’s wrong with that?]
well that’s fine if you’re not really curious about mysticism... and don’t realize it has more to do with us and our modern lives than we can imagine...
[you can’t be serious]
hey, I’m totally serious... and that’s because mysticism is consistent with an experience of eudaimonia... or true fucking happiness...
it’s also concerned with the grace we need to achieve that sort of happiness... the same grace that’s symbolized in Hansel and Gretel bread... the stuff that’s in such poor supply...
[hmm]
Eudaimonia... εὐδαιμονία — which is a kissing cousin to “happily ever after” is an idea we came across back in Episode 18...
[I remember]
yeah, and while it tends to be in pretty poor supply — especially outside of fairytales — it’s still something we’re all entitled to in this lifetime... it’s also completely consistent with the aim of mystics and mysticism...
[what?!]
hey, eudaimonia may sound exotic, but it’s a way more down to earth concept than mysticism... see, the word, mysticism is problematic because it implies both the practice of religion and that peculiar phenomenon commonly known as a religious experience...
😇 🎶 heavenly angelic choir 🎶 😇
in reality there’s no difference between eudaimonia — the experience of true fucking happiness — and mysticism...
[can you please explain wtf you are talking about]
unfortunately, for most every single one of us, eudaimonia is a ridiculously momentary and fleeting pleasure at best, either that, or an otherwise complete pipe dream...
I mean, the commonest artistic representation of mystics experiencing eudaimonia is pretty much religious porn showing someone (usually a woman) having an orgasm, er I mean swooning in the throes of a highly theatrical religious ecstasy...
[you realize some people aren’t going to be happy with this]
well, naturally… so, uh, whaddya gonna do?
the common conception of mysticism is that it’s some sort of hallucinatory meeting up with the divine... you know, like Moses being spoken to by the burning bush, or Bernadette of Lourdes getting a visit from the mother of Christ...
[agreed]
yeah, some miraculous religious jackpot only available to spiritual elites or spiritually gifted fanatics, er I mean saintly individuals capable of prodigious feats of fasting, praying, and physical mortification...
[naturally]
according to wikipedia, the modern idea of mysticism is some kind of personal union with god...
[amen]
but that’s perfectly consistent with the Gnostic concept of henosis... the basic theme of this fairytale that we talked about in the earliest episodes... you know, a return to the one... a re-union with the father... which is of course, what happens at the end of Hansel and Gretel...
[true that]
and so, from that perspective, it’s pretty easy to see both Hansel and Gretel as mystics, because that pretty much sums up the aim and the result of their journey...
[oh wow man!]
but here’s the thing... along with henosis and eudaimonia, another word that could, and probably should, be substituted for mysticism is
[psychopathy]
uh, no... the word is theurgy...
starting with Episode 25 we spent a lot of time — and practically 7 full episodes — covering the subject of theurgy... remember...?
[no!]
uh, yeah, I didn’t think so...
well, the only real difference between mysticism and theurgy is all semantics...
[what?]
theurgy is arbitrarily thought of as being linked to ancient history and ancient cultures... meaning, from the origins of Christianity in the Middle East and then going backwards, into the time of the pharaohs... which tends to explain why it’s not a word that’s commonly mentioned outside of some very specific academic circles...
[precisely]
the word mysticism has connotations linking it to the history of Christianity, but going forwards, from the early Medieval period in Europe, and then even into our own time, since there are modern individuals who pop up every now and then and get labeled as mystics...
[yup]
but you see, history, geography, and religious connotations aside, theurgy and mysticism are the very same thing...
[really?]
yup!
not only that... being that there are other cultures outside of the one we modern Westerners were born into — cultures within which mysticism has and had always flourished — there are plenty of other names it goes by...
[oh yeah? like what?]
well, how about shamanism...
[WTF!]
shamanism is one of those words that’s considered pejorative by some and um, mystical, by others... it’s also a word that’s commonly used in academic circles — especially by anthropologists...
still, shamanism pretty much refers to the mysticism of various groups of people who, taken together in space and time, way outnumber us modern Westerners... of course anything foreign to our own culture is often considered exotic, peculiar, and very often, primitive... if not downright flaky...
[is it acceptable to wear socks with sandals?]
[ahem]
it’s for that same reason, the word shamanism gets bandied about in New Age circles as having particularly exotic and somewhat primal, woo-woo connotations...
[woo woo woo woo...]
[ha ha]
one of my favorite authors, Peter Kingsley, seems to be hung up on criticism leveled at him and his exceptional work because of his appreciation for shamanism...
that criticism comes from academics who have no real understanding of mysticism, and certainly no appreciation of and for the Stooges...
[oohhrh... ruff, ruff, ruff]
um, not to mention shamanism... especially the way Professor Kingsley understands and uses the term...
Professor Kingsley has intuited and explained the way shamanism was carried from the Far East and ancient Asian Culture all the way to Ancient Greece... where it influenced Western Culture and Civilization...
[interesting]
part of his problem is that he chooses to use that word: shamanism — even though he really means mysticism and theurgy... but of course, he uses it because the word shamanism has connotations linking it to Far Eastern cultures...
as far as his academic opponents are concerned, linking that word to Ancient Greece is an insult... for them, it means he’s besmirching the dignity of Western Civilization and the sanctity of Logic as the crowning glory of Greco-Roman Culture...
🎶 hello, hello, hello... 🎶
[ahem]
so how do we link this all back to Gretel and her crying...?
[I don’t know]
okay, so far we have 3 different words: mystics, theurgists, and shamans
in my opinion, the words mean nothing... the truth of the matter is that they all mean the very same thing...
there may be cultural differences based on age, or language or geography... but beyond the externals, they all share the same fundamental experience... just the way somebody might be called a Boomer, or a GenXer, or a Millennial... they’re all still carrying around a cell phone that connects them to... well... something that’s bigger than any one of them in Space or Time...
so for now, let’s just go with one word...
[pizza!]
hmm, I like the word, but uh, no... let’s go with mystic...
[alright already, get on with it!]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 2 [21:49]
Teil zwei: In which we figure out exactly why ayahuasca tourism is booming
[I mean, I talked recently about my own ayahuasca journey, um, and... Everybody has an ayahuasca journey, BTW... heh... It’s always a journey... Yeah... I’m on an ayahuasca journey... it’s a... Whaddyou call it...? Ceremony? Ahem. No, that’s even worse...]
[blah, blah blah blah, blah, blah blah]
alrighty... mystics, theurgists and shamans may all worship different gods and lived in different times and places, but as I said, they’re all connected by their experience...
In which we figure out exactly why ayahuasca tourism is boomingand so what is it that makes someone a mystic...? and what kind of experience are we talking about?
[I don’t think you know]
looking from the outside in, the people who have been called or labeled as mystics have either personally reported, or been written about as having visions...
[I see a cloud]
[ahem]
we’re talking about visions in which they’re visited by angels, or saints, or Jesus, or Mary, or even God the father almighty... many of them are reported to have had conversations with those same, um, beings...
[I mean, wouldn’t that be so fucking awesome?]
uh, sure... but let’s not quibble... shamans may have visions of reindeer gods or goddesses, while theurgists might have been visited by Zeus and Athena or Isis and Osiris... they’re all still mystics...
[yes, yes, I can see that]
right now, we’re just going with the conventions of Christian Mysticism...
[okee dokee]
aside from visions and sacred conversations, there are plenty of other phenomena too...
[yeah, like what?]
miracles, especially miraculous cures...
[awesome]
levitations,
[awesome man]
making prophesies that come true... in other words, some kind of holy clairvoyance or divine ESP...
[totally awesome]
and then there’s that famous physical sign of mystical sanctity, the stigmata: 5 bleeding wounds corresponding to those wounds Christ had from his crucifixion...
[no, no, no, no, no!]
[eeh, that could be a problem]
well, of all of them, my favorite phenomenon is the experience of ecstasy...
[I like that!]
not molly, of course, although the way I’ve heard it said, it probably comes close to what we’ve all had a momentary taste of out in Nature...
[oh, very nice]
and what I mean is an experience of the Numinous...
[I ain’t NEVER seen nothing like THAT before]
I think you have... but it’s my opinion that nobody understands what mysticism is without that experience... the experience of the Numinous...
[and what exactly would that be?]
those mystics who’ve had it essentially describe a kind of lengthy divine orgasm...
[ooh, I like that]
but you see, that really seems to be the only difference between mystics and the rest of us... not the miracles and the levitations and the prophesies... that’s all spiritual currency that may or may not be counterfeit, but isn’t worth our time and attention... which is to say it’s not worth applying any of our 4 Functions of Consciousness to...
[hey, speak for yourself]
yeah, well the crucial difference between mystics and the rest of us seems to be the length or duration of their experience of the Numinous... and not just the frequency of those experiences...
[who cares?]
unless we ourselves understand the Numinous and trust our own experience of the Numinous...we’re stuck believing that mystics are special people... kinda like pro athletes...
we’re also stuck believing that mysticism is some super-natural, miraculous achievement... see, but those beliefs just take us further and further away from our own birthright of grace, eudaimonia, and henosis...
[damn!]
let me just interject an important truth here which has to be that the mystic experience isn’t anything like an orgasm...!
it’s been portrayed that way in art and even in the mystic literature because there are no words for it... or orgasm, for that matter... and because we all know the experience of orgasm, that gives us a vaguely useful, but ultimately fake starting point of communality...
a NDE is a much better starting point, except just like with mysticism, it’s not a universal experience... worst of all, most reports of it, first person and otherwise are too focused on the idea of life after death...
everybody who’s had the experience seems to come back with a different message, and the buzz around the concept tends to be exploited by third parties for the sake of attention and commerce and woo-woo-ism —
[nuk-nuk]
whereas the experience itself is definitely NOT all about immortality and life after death...
my own NDE lasted only the briefest of moments — certainly less than 5 minutes — but it led me to realize the euphoric pleasure involved is no different from the experience we get in all sorts of numinous moments that last no longer than the time it takes to consciously inhale and exhale...
[are you done bragging?]
uh, no comment...
in my personal experience, it was a first awakening to and understanding of Intuition that led to an understanding of the Mystery of the Numinous... and to trust in my own experience of the Numinous... but that didn’t happen until I was in my 40s...
[you sure do have your problems]
the problem was, and the problem we all face, is that we live in a historical moment when our culture does its level best to disparage the very idea of Intuition... to block and pervert our understanding of it... and even prevent us from encountering the Numinous, except on its terms... that is terms dictated by the culture... and by culture’s master: commerce
[cha ching!]
the real bottom line is that the Numinous is not something that can be bought or sold — although given the fact that Ayahuasca tourism seems to be booming — well...
🎶 ayahuasca ritual music 🎶
[so we went off to see my first shaman el dragon de la selva maestro orlando fucking legend you know kind of...]
[blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...]
[ahem]
what our culture does endorse is keeping Intuition — and the Numinous — under lock and key... confined to buildings known as churches mosques synagogues shrines basilicas chapels and what-have-yous... and I’m not saying that the Numinous can’t be found there...
[let me outta here!]
[ahem]
being that Hansel is the metaphoric model for Intuition in this story... we all know he ends up being confined to a cage as an intrinsic part of the plot... and a potent (albeit secret) literary allusion to the practice of simony
[audience surprise]
anyway, as I said, the Numinous wasn’t so obvious and available to me until I freed up my Intuition... but then guess what...
[what?]
Peter Kingsley — a modern mystic if there ever was one — he champions the Sensate Function as the driver of his experience of the Numinous...
[yeah, so what?]
well, until I read most of Peter Kingsley’s work, and then listened to his taped lectures, I wouldn’t have thought that Sensation was a way into the Numinous...
yet now, given that the villain of our fairytale — Frau Holzhacker — most likely symbolizes the Sensate Function, I believe that Professor Kingsley’s personal perspective and experience would have to be expressed through a totally different fairytale... that is to say, one with the Sensate Function as hero — or heroine...
[are you crazy much?]
but taking that one step or maybe even four steps further, an experience of the Numinous might require, or be due, not just to the heroic application of one under-appreciated Function of Consciousness, like Intuition — or even Sensation — but a simultaneous convergence, appreciation and application of all 4 Functions at once...
in other words, reaching a level of consciousness or simple awareness we ordinarily don’t bother to work ourselves up or into...
[nonsense]
yeah, well championing any one of the 4 Functions as I do with Intuition, and as Peter Kingsley does with Sensation is likely a matter of personal Typology... but it’s also a matter of cultural influence...
[this is really confusing for me]
sorry, I get it... this isn’t something we talk or think about much in our daily lives... but this fairytale is putting it to us... sub-rosa, it’s speaking to our intuition (and our feelings), not our reason... all for the sake of waking us up to the Numinous... and it’s doing so by waking us up to the impediments our culture has put in our way...
[oh crap!]
yeah, it kinda sucks...
think about it, though, everything I’ve just said about our culture and its demand that Intuition be disparaged and confined to religion, can also be said of the Feeling Function — and its most obvious physical sign: tears... because tears are also a way into the Numinous...
[really?]
by current cultural convention feelings — and tears — are meant to be kept under wraps... and of course, they, as well as the men and women who can’t control them are best avoided — at least in public...
[aye, I agree]
yeah but not in this fairytale... here tears give us the Feeling Function front and center as the focus of this line of the fairytale...and of this episode... not to mention, as the eventual heroine of the entire story...
[hooray!]
Gretel’s tears — and her subsequent heroics — give us every reason to believe that it’s also possible for the Feeling Function be the chief means of reaching Henosis or Eudaimonia or simply the Numinous...
[audience cheer]
and so what would that look like...? I mean what kind of person would that actually be true of... ?
[I have no idea]
well, before we can answer that, a funny thing happens at this juncture of the story...
[what’s that?]
the children hold hands...
[so what?]
I have to confess to a certain Jungian bias here because my Jungian analyst was the late John Giannini of Chicago...
chief among John’s Jungian proficiencies, was his expertise in and championing of Jung’s Typology... and so I learned to appreciate the significance of the 4 functions through our work together... he as analyst, me as analysand (and reader of Jung)... in particular, John led me to appreciate the pairing of functions... my own dominant pairing being Intuition and Feeling...
and so it’s easy to chalk this line of the fairytale up to a simplistic bit of evidence confirming Gretel as the Feeling Function — and the little brother and little sister as an Intuitive - Feeling pairing — and then leave it at that...
[great, awesome]
except just when we thought we were out of this episode, and ready to move on to the next line of the fairytale...
[they pull me back in]
exactly... and they do it with another bible verse...
[huh??]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 3 [35:59]
Teil drei: In which we start filling in Gretel’s backstory over a couple of hot pastrami sandwiches, and can’t help but notice that somebody is constantly mopping the floors
[we need a cleanup in aisle 13... that's aisle 13.]
Psalm 126 verse 5 says:
“They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.”
and so we still have to answer the question: what kind of person would have tears as the expression of a dominant Feeling Function — and have those tears lead them to Henosis, Eudaimonia, and the Numinous...? because that’s exactly what this bible verse is saying...
and so what would that kind of person look like...?
[I don’t know]
hey, it’s okay... lucky for us, there are, in fact a number of historic personalities our author meant for us to consider...
[no way] girl
oh yes, way...
there are a significant number of women who’ve been patiently waiting for our attention — and I mean for centuries — because they have so very much to teach us about the Numinous, and how we can attain more of that Hansel and Gretel Bread... the grace we’re all still so very hungry for...
[really?]
yup...
the most obvious and well-known biblical character associated with crying would seem to be Mary Magdalene...
[most assuredly]
John 20:11-15
11 Now Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 He asked her, “Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”
I think it’s pretty reasonable for us to suspect that Gretel’s tears are a metaleptic reference to those verses from John...
I mean that last line: “Who is it you are looking for?” might as well read “What is it you are looking for?” and the answer would have to be Grace...
but uh, I digress...
[please, don’t do that]
well the problem with Mary Magdalene is that, as a biblical character, she’s just as enigmatic and minimally described as Gretel herself... and so there’s good reason to believe our author had other, more biographically detailed women in mind...
also, it’s our job to intuit not just who they were, but figure out whether they were known to the author of the fairytale... meaning, could they have been well enough known to anyone in Germany before 1810 — the date of our fairytale manuscript... ?
as it turns out, that’s not the case for all of them...
[oh, oh dear]
the first of these women was only remembered in the centuries following her death by way of a very brief sermon...
her name is St. Maura of Troyes, and she died around the year 850...
it’s certainly possible — if not likely — that she was known to our author by way of that sermon and these minimal, yet self-explanatory words:
“So wonderful was her gift of tears, that she seemed never to fall upon her knees to pray, but they streamed from her eyes in torrents. God performed many miracles in her favor; but it was her care to conceal his gifts, because she dreaded the poison of human applause.”
[audience surprise]
the source of that quote is a 1799 edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints... a popular source of fairytales er, I mean, stories about Catholic heroes and heroines, and read just as much (if not more) for entertainment purposes than personal sanctity back in the day when home entertainment was pretty much all do-it-yourself by candlelight...
[that’s not funny]
ha!
Butler (who died in 1773) took that quote from the brief sermon written about her life by a certain Prudentius who was the archbishop of Troyes... Prudentius knew her pretty well...
[oh yeah]
alright, let’s not get carried away... he didn’t know her THAT well...
[he was holy]
[sure]
Prudentius died around the year 861, only 11 years after her...
that blurb about Maura’s miracles and humility is typical hagiographic propaganda... written — as much of hagiography was — to advance the individual’s case for sainthood, and of course advance the cause of Vatican prestige... not to mention the cause of local tourism, since pilgrimages to the home stomping grounds of saints was uh, big medieval business...
[oh and I suppose you think that’s funny huh?]
****
miracle books were local guide books of saints at their shrine or pilgrimage site relating their deeds and miracles
****
these, of course, are separate from the concept of mysticism, because they are associated with sainthood... and while not all saints were mystics, not all so-called mystics were admitted to that particular club...
obviously, what concerns us here is this business of Maura’s tears during prayer which, Intuition and Logic together tell us is all about a dominant Feeling Function expressing itself in service of the Numinous... or actually, through an experience of the Numinous... a private experience to be sure, but one that can be publicly witnessed — by virtue of those tears — and then logically inferred — or at least taken on faith — because of its inclusion in a well-known volume of hagiography...
I’ll leave a link...
Butler’s Lives of the Saints vol. 9
[thank you]
there’s just one fly in the ointment, though... and that’s the testimony of Logic...which says: hey, what about When Harry Met Sally...???
[what are you talking about?]
you know, maybe she was faking it...
[oh no]
well, Prudentius, who never ate in a Jewish deli, and um, obviously didn’t see the movie...
[dad joke groans]
yeah well he was hip to the problem of fakery AND skepticism... and tried to nip it in the bud by way of a personal anecdote...
in the sermon, Prudentius, describes himself as a dried up old fig tree, pretty much devoid of feeling...
****
“J'étois comme un figuier mort , tout prêt à être jetté au feu.”
****
so after going on and on about what a cold fish he knew himself to be, he mentions an alb, a priestly vestment that Maura had woven herself, and gifted to him... and then he says that he felt himself brought to life by that alb, always breaking out into uncontrollable tears whenever he wore it...
[aww]
“This garment had the same power on me that the staff of Moses once had on the rock. For although I am harder than stone, it has nevertheless made torrents of tears flow from my eyes.”
****
“Je raconterai les merveilles que vous avez faites par votre ſervante Maure . Ce vêtement a eû le même pouvoir fur moi , que le bâton de Moïſe eut autrefois ſur le rocher. Car quoique je fufle plus dur que la pierre , il a fait pourtant fortir de mes yeux des torrens de larmes.”
— a text edition in French of 1725
— there are also 17th C. Vitae in French... (1637 edition)
****
[can you believe that?]
that endorsement was obviously meant to advertise Maura’s saintly power to perform miracles... and prove that her tears were genuine... but perhaps more tellingly, if true, Prudentius — having described himself as practically someone with Asperger’s — is citing a Numinous experience of his own, brought about by the momentary and miraculous awakening of his own dormant Feeling Function...
[sound of someone yawning]
[ahem]
skipping ahead around 650 years, there is a certain Veronica Negroni da Binasco, aka Veronica di Milano, or Veronica of Milan, who died in 1497
there was plenty written about her in a 16th century Latin text...
[oh boy, oh boy]
and that text seems to be the source of all the information we now have about her in English: Dictionary Of Saintly Women, Volume 2 by Agnes Dunbar
more importantly, it’s a text that would have been available to our author who, yes indeed, could read and understand Latin...
[hmm]
according to wikipedia, Veronica:
“experienced ecstasy and mystical visions since she was a child....”
and according to an 18th century volume of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, Veronica was:
“...cheerful, yet often bathed in tears, which (those around her) sometimes perceived to flow in great abundance....”
[it was very copacetic]
****
Ob novum vero ardorem mentis propter contemplata Salvatoris Chriſti mysteria : fluxus ille lachrymarum vehemens exortus est . Cogitavit nonnunque Thadea vas terreum in Virginis cella servare : quod Virginis raptæ ad superum choros oculis supponeret : fluentesque lachrymas colligeret. Id quidem Angelo ministro : tandem effectum est . Fuit autem vas lachrymarum collectum : ponderis librarum duatum Mediolanensium . Tacendum hoc loco minime censeo : Sorores qualdas assumavisse : flentis Veronicæ ad superos taptæ lachrymas : que tunc uberes emittebat : ante pectus virginis stetisse imobiles : deinde ad usus corporeos Virgine regressa hinc inde defluxisse veluti ſuapte natura aquas dilabi conspicamur.
****
given my 2 measly years of high school Latin, the original Latin text isn’t so easy for me to translate — even with the help of Google translate — but it does tell us she did, indeed have many miraculous visions, and, for our purposes: “fluxus ille lachrymarum vehemens”
meaning she had a helluva fucking lot of tears... so much so that whenever she was carried away in one of her divine raptures, the place where she knelt got so wet it looked as if someone had spilled a jug of water... in fact, it became routine to literally keep a jug handy to collect her tears, which would usually end up being about a liter’s worth or 2 milanese pounds...
“...vas lachrymarum collectum : ponderis librarum duatum Mediolanensium.”
[oh brother]
uh yeah, about 2 pounds...
****
****
other points of interest in this text tell us that in some visions, she found herself transported right into numerous bible stories so as to witness them firsthand...
[awesome]
uh, just like our time machine, except for realz...
[I don’t think it would be that hard to implement]
the most interesting of those visions had her watching Mary Magdalene washing the feet of Christ using, according to Veronica: her own excessive flow of tears...
[whoa!]
in other visions, she was often sent by Christ himself to um, deliver a message...
[it’s a sicilian message]
[ahem]
the way wikipedia puts it:
“She received a vision of Christ in 1494, and was given a message for Pope Alexander VI, and traveled to Rome to deliver it.”
🎶 sotto cielo di Roma 🎶
uh, thanks, Dino...
[ahem]
the way the Latin text reads, she visited a number of different famous guys to tell them they’d better straighten up and fly right... Alexander VI — the famous Borgia pope and father to many um, little Borgias — was just one of them...
thing is though, I don’t see Gretel busting anybody’s balls like that... so even if Veronica fits the profile of a prolific crier — going around scolding famous people makes her sound a little more like Frau Holzhacker than Gretel...
but I digress...
[please, don’t do that]
****
“Veronica, a simple peasant who can neither read nor write, talks to Ludovico Sforza (the Moor), Duke of Milan, to reproach him for his sins. She also goes to Rome to the dissolute Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). The blessed Augustinian goes on a journey on the back of a donkey; she is welcomed before the others who have been waiting for days to be received and listened to benevolently by the pope, despite her harsh admonitions.”
****
right... sorry...
turns out the most likely person to have been the original model for Gretel was a famous Beguine: Marie d’Oignies, who died in the year 1213...
Her life story was recorded in Latin as early as 1215 by her confessor, Jacques de Vitry...
and it was so popular and so readily available for centuries, there’s no reason to doubt that our author would have known all about her... the full text of her Vita in Latin is available to us too: and uh, I’ll leave a link...
[um, thanks?]
the problem here is that I didn’t wanna spring for the full English translation because, well, I can’t afford to buy every fucking research text I come across, no matter how much I’d like to, and no matter how useful it might prove to be... and as of now, I don’t have no on-line access to any hot-shot university library...
[well, boo fucking hoo]
[OOH!, Hey!]
fortunately, there’s a freely accessible text on archive.org that gives us just enough translating to confirm our Intuition... it’s not complete enough to qualify as a primary source, but who am I to quibble...?
so if you wanna support the kind of access made possible only by the generosity of archive.org, why not make a donation to them in the name of this podcast... that would be fucking awesome...
[no. not gonna happen. nope!]
geeze!
anyway, check this out: it’s from Professor Elizabeth Spearing’s excellent text called Medieval Writings on Female Spirituality...
I’ll leave a link...
[Excellent, Mr. Renfield. Excellent!]
[nyahh...!]
[ahem]
“One day because of...the gifts which you (Jesus) gave mankind...such plenteous tears (tantam lacrymarum copiam) were forced out by the weight of your cross in your Passion that they flowed copiously down onto the church floor and showed where she had walked. And so for a long time after this visitation she could not look at an image of the Cross, nor speak or hear others speak of Christ’s Passion without falling into a swoon from the great longing in her heart.”
[aww]
this passage not only gives us plenty of tears, it gives us the great longing in her heart — which pretty much nails down the Feeling Function, don’t you think...?
[eh, it’s okay]
well, how about this:
“Water flowed continually from her eyes by day and night, and the tears did not just wet her cheeks — to stop them falling to the ground where people would see them, she used the veils with which she covered her head to soak them up. She used many such linen cloths and needed to change them often, so that while one was getting wet, another might be drying.”
[OMG! OMG!]
****
[16] Principium conversionis ejus ad te, primitiae dilectionis, Crux tua, passio tua fuit. Audivit auditum tuum et timuit, consideravit opera tua et expavit. Dum enim quadam die, praeventa et visitata a te, beneficia, quae tu in carne humano generi clemens exhibuisti, consideraret; tantam compunctionis gratiam, tantam lacrymarum copiam, in torculari tuae Crucis expressam, in passione tua adinvenit, quod vestigia ejus per ecclesiam, lacrymae super pavimentum copiose defluentes ostendebant. Unde longo tempore post hanc ejus visitationem, nec Crucis imaginem intueri, nec loqui, vel alios loquentes audire poterat de passione Christi, quin ex defectu cordis in extasim laberetur. Unde ut dolorem aliquando temperaret, & fluvium lacrymarum cohiberet; relicta humanitate, ad Christi divinitatem & majestatem animum attollebat, ut in ejus impassibilitate reperiret consolationem. Sed unde fluminis impetum restringere conabatur, inde mirabiliter impetus major lacrymarum oriebatur. Nam cum attenderet quantus fuit, qui tam abjecta pro nobis sustinuit; rursus dolor renovabatur, novisque lacrymis anima ejus dulci compunctione innovabatur.
the same thing is also in her Vita here:
****
pretty impressive, huh...?
[no!]
yeah right...
but, I get it... skeptics are gonna skeptate, I guess...
[what?]
hey, I’m just having some fun with... ah, ferget it...
anyway, Marie, kinda like Maura, had her own sort of reverse When Harry Met Sally moment...
her biographer tells of her being scolded by some priest for her “sobbing, sighing, and streams of tears”, the priest telling Marie that she should pray quietly and quit her bawling.
[asshole]
“And then the priest, while...singing Mass on the same day, was so overcome by an abundance of tears ‘lacrymarum diluvio submersus’ that he (nearly drowned) was nearly suffocated in spirit. And the harder he tried to stop weeping, the more not only he himself, but the (mass) book (missal) and the altar cloths were soaked by his tears.”
[that was impressive!]
her biographer goes on to say: [
“...this man of bad judgement, this critic of Christ’s maiden, learned from shameful experience what humility and compassion had failed to teach him....”
[(little chuckle) asshole]
Marie’s biography, her Vita, is another typical example of hagiography... which, first of all, is supposed to be a shining, but pedagogic (and I gotta say, stultifying) example to the ordinary faithful... those of us who have no capacity for the spiritual stamina of the medieval mystic... not the way it gets written up in these over-the-top super-hero accounts...
hagiography is also meant to serve as a kind of recruiting poster... you know, inspiration for those of us who might aspire to the spiritual big leagues...
for the majority of rank and file faithful...it mostly makes for entertaining reading... but at the end of the day, hagiography was a campaign tool for spiritual politics...
most of these stories were written as blatant propaganda, hoping to get the pope to give the official nod for sainthood... pretty much the way sportswriters pump the tires on players to get them boosted into the Hall of Fame...
[that’s not funny]
consider this hearty endorsement written in the prologue to Marie’s Vita:
“...it is impossible to gather together all the miracles from her life during the many years in which she served the Lord devoutly and faithfully. Scarcely would a day or night pass when she did not have a visitation from God or his angels or from those saints in heaven about whom she almost constantly spoke.”
[Well, that’s very impressive but]
yeah, for whatever reason, Marie was never sainted... her campaign stalled out at getting her beatified...
[goddamnit]
well I gotta say, one look at the super-miracles attributed to her in wikipedia and it seems clear that her saintly powers were a little short of what she’d need to reach the major leagues...
[goddamnit (echoing)]
hell, even her biographer had his doubts...
[oh no]
oh yeah... one of her famous saintly powers was the ability to distinguish consecrated hosts from the unconsecrated variety...
and so, there she was, towards the end of her very short life, wasting away in bed for around 40 days and 40 nights eating nothing but sacred wafers...
[crunchy!]
[ahem]
her biographer admits that on at least one of those days, he himself — in cahoots with the unpleasantly famous Bishop Fulk of Toulouse — unpleasant, that is for instigating the famous slaughter of the French Cathars at Carcasonne... these two geniuses tried testing her saintly palate by feeding her a wafer that had yet to be consecrated...
[it’s such a prank to pull on people, you have no idea]
“Once when we tested her to see whether she could consume an unconsecrated host, she ‘statim odorem panis abhorruit’ was immediately revolted by the smell of the bread. As soon as her teeth touched the tiniest part of it, she began to cry out and to spit, and it was as though her breast would break from her retching, and she began to gasp with a monstrous anxiety. After she had cried out for a long time from her sorrow, and had rinsed her mouth repeatedly, she could barely rest for most of the night.”
[okay...I’m feeling nauseous...]
[that’s not good]
ultimately, Marie was a very complex character, whose um, saintly exploits included some very unpleasant and painful extremes which we don’t need to go into... and so all in all she was pretty much unlike Gretel — except of course, for her gift of tears...
[okay, now what?]
Marie d’Oignies wasn’t the only mystic famous for the, uh, gift of tears... right now, we gotta talk about a certain Douceline de Digne who died in 1274...
[aw why?]
good question...
and I got a good answer...
[but first]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 4 [58:38]
Teil vier: In which we do some Provençal provenance proofing, make a gratuitous reference to Taxicab Confessions, and ask that other major question of Western Culture and Civilization: Does the pope shit in the woods?
[inapropriate!]
[no, it’s not]
hey, he’s from Chicago... and he’s a Bears fan, after all...
[do bears shit in the woods?]
[ahem]
see I’d agree that talking about any more of these mystic crying ladies seems like overkill... I mean, in the first place, why are we even bringing Maura, Veronica, and Marie into our discussion...? why not stick with the most famous of all crying ladies, Mary Magdalene...and just leave it at that...?
[yeah!]
[exactly... I mean... Luke 7:37-38 gives us her most famous tears in a nutshell:
37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee’s house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
[oh yeah, vey nice]
even if there’s no indication that the sinful individual was, indeed, Mary Magdalene, from the 6th century on — and thanks to Pope Saint Gregory — this wasn’t even a question... because Gregory decided it was Mary, and that was that...
not only that... according to John 20:11-18 — the verses we cited earlier — we also get her mysticism in a nutshell... in other words: John gave us tears, plus a vision of angels, plus a conversation with Jesus... the same trifecta attributed to Maura, Veronica, and Marie...
so it turns out that up until the 14th century, Mary Magdalene was indeed, THE role model of religious women who considered themselves sinners in need of redemption and who simultaneously aspired to the spiritual big leagues... HOWEVER from the 14th century on, that role model became Marie d’Oignies...
[I don’t believe you]
I have that information on pretty good authority and you can read it for yourself... so, I’ll leave a link...
("NOLI ME TANGER" MARIE MADELEINE, MARIE D'OIGNIES AND THE PENITENTS OF THE XIIIth CENTURY)
[uh thanks]
****
this is a slightly far-fetched aside, but the line from H&G that has Hansel taking his sister by the hand contradicts the biblical version of Christ telling Mary Magdalene not to touch him...!
17 Dicit ei Jesus: Noli me tangere, nondum enim ascendi ad Patrem meum: vade autem ad fratres meos, et dic eis: Ascendo ad Patrem meum, et Patrem vestrum, Deum meum, et Deum vestrum.
make of that what you will, but I believe it confirms — or at least lends itself to the philologic intuition that Mary Magdalene is not the definitive metaleptic model for Gretel but instead leaves the door open for these various crying mystics...
16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means “Teacher”). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” 18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.
Da fing das Schwesterchen an gar sehr zu weinen, das Brüderchen tröstete es aber und nahm es an die Hand.
Then the little sister began to cry terribly, but the little brother comforted her and took her by the hand.
****
of course knowing that is just one reason we’ve gotta bring up Douceline d’Digne... and so she, just like Marie d’Oignies, was a beguine... in fact, she was born in 1215 or 1216, shortly after the death of Marie... and her Vita tells us:
“To keep her soul always pleasing to God, she washed herself day and night in a great shower of tears, and never forgave her body, nor her weakness. It was to the point that when she was ill, she did not let that hour of the night pass when she was accustomed to crying.”
so her crying certainly fits Gretel’s backstory... but would she or could she have been known to our author...?
[I don’t think you know]
turns out her bio was originally written in the French dialect known as Provençal...
[ooh la la]
it was written just a few years after her death — early in the 13th century — but was it only translated into modern French in 1879... a good 67 years AFTER Hansel and Gretel was first published...
[yeah?]
as far as availability goes, there was a text, published in Latin — in 1733... but Douceline was only named in a single paragraph praising her for um, other feats of spiritual athleticism, and there was no mention of her crying... and that short blurb in Latin was the only information about her anyone outside of Provence would have had...
[who cares?]
turns out it’s philologically significant because before the full story was translated into modern French, you would have had to be seriously interested in researching Provençal — meaning the original writings and language of the Troubadors...
[what a waste of time]
well this was something Ezra Pound was all over in the 20th century... but if it had been true of our fairytale author — or at least her literary posse — Douceline could easily have been on her radar... and I gotta tell you, that’s actually more than a vague possibility...
[well, that’s good news]
except there’s another wrinkle to this...
[what?]
apparently, Douceline’s story was only available in a single manuscript... and digging deeper into the provenance of that Provençal manuscript, turns out, it only arrived at the French National Library in Paris sometime between 1815 and 1830 — at least 5 years AFTER our fairytale could have been written...
[oh well that’s nice]
well, it is what it is...
long before 1815, it was held in the personal library of Louis Charles de Valois, Count of Auvergne, was passed on to a convent after, uh both, Louis Charles and his son uh passed, and then, after Napoleon closed the convent down and kicked out the nuns, it ended up in the personal library of a not particularly famous someone by the name of Philibert Bouché...
so who knows if it ever came off Monsieur Bouché’s shelf and somehow reached the hands of our author before it reached the shelves of the National Library...
[oh my god, ridiculous]
well, you sorta got a point there... because it seems likely that the manuscript, and therefore Douceline along with her tears, was completely unknown to our author...
[I agree]
so uh, why is SHE here? I mean why are we spending any time talking or even thinking about her...?
[I have no idea]
well, whether or not our author had ever heard of her and about her spiritual exploits, WE have access to her story in which she somewhat famously says:
“...a Beguine was made to weep, not to sing....”
[ouch]
of course, that still doesn’t explain why we should be talking about her...
[indeed]
even if the facts we’ve uncovered about her make her interesting to us, the fact that our author didn’t know about her makes her irrelevant, right...?
[unquestionably]
hmm, well, there’s one very good, and extremely important reason why she is anything but irrelevant... and that reason is Intuition... and what I mean is both OUR Intuition and that of our author...
see, WE intuited her presence in Gretel’s backstory, and we found her because, well because we could AND because we were interested in looking...
our author, who may or may not have known about her specifically, intuited that WE would find her...
[how do you know that?]
I know because our author knew we would be interested in looking...
[how do you know that?]
hey the real questions is why...? why would our author know that about us...?
[so...why?]
that’s because stimulating our curiosity is one of the reasons this fairytale was written...
[what?]
of course, one major reason was to stimulate and champion the Intuitive and Feeling Functions in an age when the culture was actively trying to diminish and disparage them... but another important reason was to inspire the very work we’re doing right here and right now, in this day and age, and in years to come... when more such interesting things will be found about and by people like us, but who we ourselves may never know...
[now well that sounds like grade A bullshit]
hey, this may all sound far-fetched... but I can assure you it’s not...
you and I are people our author never knew... but she correctly intuited that we would arrive at her fairytale and be intrigued enough to do this work of philology, memory, and intuition... because, as I said in episode 40, this story was meant to function as a memory palace... and this fairytale is no crumbling old, abandoned pile of ruins...
[It reminds me of the broken battlements of my own castle...in Transylvania]
[nyaah...]
the work you and I are doing here not only keeps it fresh and alive, our work ADDS to that palatial whole by filling in blanks that our author may never have specifically created or even noticed...
[okay alright, we believe you. thousands wouldn’t]
Intuition tells us that our author knew for sure there were more women in Gretel’s backstory than just Marie d’Oignies and those other 2 women mystics... Maura and Veronica...
[how is that possible?]
our author would have known that because of an interesting literary-historic phenomenon known in English as The Convent Chronicles...
[what did you say that was called?]
Convent Chronicles... which, yeah, I know, sounds suspiciously like taxicab confessions, except, of course, everyone in the chronicles is portrayed as saintly, mystical and on their way to paradise instead of someplace like
[third and eleventh...]
[oh my god!]
okay, okay, turns out these convent chronicles include a particular Medieval genre known as Sister Books... or Schwesternbücher...
[ja, ja, that’s okay]
uh, thank you...
these uh, sister-books, were, of course, written in German... and given the fact that the original name of this fairytale is the Little Brother and the Little Sister or das Brüderchen und das Schwesterchen... these Schwesternbücher certainly have a synchronistic place in the story...
[maybe]
okay, there are 9 of these books that we know of, and they came from 9 different convents in Germany and Switzerland... the authors were all nuns, and what they did was to document the mystical visions and spiritual experiences of the other sisters from their convents...
in fact, what we’re talking about here is nuns writing about nuns, instead of the typical patriarchal books placing nuns and what they stand for in the usual subservient role supporting the power of Vatican culture...
[what’s wrong with that?]
[ahem]
according to wikipedia’s sources, these books were influential in developing the typical picture of what medieval mysticism was supposed to look like.
[oh really?]
oh yeah... in other words, the exploits of these nuns became the unofficial guide book defining what you had to do to be considered a mystic...
[why don’t you go ahead and show me]
okay, okay, reading through these books — even translated as they are from Middle High German into modern German — is challenging enough... forget about the slipshod Denglish that Google translate spits out... making perfect sense out of any good source material is ridiculously time consuming...
of course that’s one of the reasons it always takes me so long to produce episodes of the podcast like this one...
but I digress...
[please stop that]
yeah, yeah alright...
anyway, one of those wiki sources tells us that in 2 of these 14th century sister-books there were 11 specific activities, behaviors, or experiences attributed to the nuns which got them labeled as mystics... all stuff that pretty much defined the very idea of mysticism for the next 1600 years or so...
[so what did they do? did they cry?]
well, uh, yeah...
one of those 11 activities was — you guessed it: the Gift of Tears...
[ha, ha, ha... right]
well, as I said, mysticism is a pretty important topic although it’s something I didn’t think I’d have to elaborate on... and while I do, indeed, have plenty to say about it, in the interest of brevity, let me just read a typical story out of one of these books:
[oh no]
hey, relax... this will be over before you know it... not only that, you too will be in the know...
[alright, of you insist]
“We also had a very holy sister named Sister Elisabeth Zolnerin. Our Lord did much good with her. We were told of her that she had so much grace that she had to resist it in order to retain her sanity. And that our Lord dwelled so lovingly within her was clearly evident in her outward demeanor. She was very quiet. Her demeanor was sweet and gentle, and she spoke very little. And when she stood in the choir at prayer times, tears would stream freely down her cheeks. We were also told that her spirit had been so lifted up in God that her body sometimes floated in the air.”
from: Deutsches Nonnenleben: Das Leben der Schwestern zu Töss und der Nonne Von Engeltal Büchlein von der Gnaden Überlast by Weinhandl, Margarete
****
Von der seligen Schwester Elisabeth Zolnerin.
Wir hatten auch eine gar heilige Schwester, die hieß Schwester Elisabeth Zolnerin. Mit der wirkte unser Herr viel Gutes. Denn man sagte uns von ihr, daß sie der Gnade so viel hatte, daß sie sich ihrer erwehren müßte, damit sie ihren Verstand behielte. Und daß unser Herr gar minniglich in ihr wohnte, das zeigte ihr äußerer Wandel ersichtlich. Sie war gar still. Ihr Wandel war süß und sanft, sie redete ganz wenig. Und wenn sie zu den Gebetszeiten im Chore stand, so rannen ihr die Tränen recht emsig über ihre Wangen herab. Auch sagte man uns, daß ihr Geist etwann so in Gott emporgezogen gewesen sei, daß ihr Leib zuweilen in der Luft schwebte.
****
[this is so fun!]
just to be clear, us Catlick kids were absolutely sure all the flying that Superman and Mighty Mouse did... that was pure fiction... a superpower we all wanted, but knew we would never possess... at least not within the bounds of sanity... or outside of certain dreams...
[I could just fly around and shoot people, OMG!]
right... but hovering like some of those angels and saints up there on the ceiling of the church or in books about saints and mystics...? well... does the pope shit in the woods...? you uh, never know...
[ugh, ew!]
and speaking of shit, with all the shit you’d have to go through to get fitted for a halo...? I mean... I don’t know, life is tough enough as it is... we all might want the gift of um, hovering but who the fuck really wants to try being perfect...?
🎶 here I come to save the day! 🎶
[okay Boomer]
yeah, well, that was uh, back in the 50s...
back in the Middle Ages, when life was plenty tough... plenty of people did try being perfect... just like all of those nuns in the sister books...
but I didn’t find out about them until just recently...
[uh, excuse you]
that’s because when I started digging into the backstory of Gretel’s tears, the first and most obvious model I came across was a woman by the name of Margery Kempe (c. 1373 – after 1438)
her story was so impressive and so on target, I figured there was no need to look any further...
[and why not?]
well... because...
[but first]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 5 [1:16:42]
Teil fünf: In which we learn that a mystic is a mystic is a mystic, and realize that a cynic is a cynic is a cynic
[A religion, almost a religion, any religion, a quintal in religion, a relying and a surface and a service in indecision and a creature...]
[wow!]
****
"A religion, almost a religion, any religion, a quintal in religion, a relying and a surface and a service in indecision and a creature and a question and a syllable in answer and more counting and no quarrel and a single scientific statement and no darkness and no question and an earned administration and a single set of sisters and an outline and no blisters and the section seeing yellow and the centre having spelling and no solitude and no quaintness and yet solid quite so solid and the single surface centred and the question in the placard and the singularity, is there a singularity, and the singularity, why is there a question and the singularity why is the surface outrageous, why is it beautiful why is it not when there is no doubt, why is anything vacant, why is not disturbing a centre no virtue, why is it when it is and why is it when it is and there is no doubt, there is no doubt that the singularity shows."
Excerpt from the poem Tender Buttons, part 3, "Rooms" by Gertrude Stein (in public domain on Project Gutenberg). Reading by Ariane Stolfi. Performed at the Web Audio Conference in Berlin (19-21 September 2018)
****
according to wikipedia, Margery Kempe was an English mystic who died in her 60s, sometime after the year 1438... and her legitimate claim to literary fame is that she left behind a book that’s considered to be the first autobiography written or published in the English language...
[oooh]
and you see, reading through her book, which I gotta say, is pretty entertaining... (and yes, I did spring for it)... well, it’s nearly 300 pages worth of her describing a life of almost non-stop crying...
then, in between crying jags, she also reports having vivid conversations with Jesus, Mary, God the father and a whole host of saints...
[isn’t this a strange conversation for men who aren’t crazy?]
[ahem]
hey, based on her life story, we might even call her the Gertrude Stein of mystics — because not only was she a writer, she was something of a spiritual saloniste with plenty of long dead religious figures coming and going as um, guests...
[ha ha ha ha, that’s fucking not funny]
well, unlike Gertrude Stein, she was apparently illiterate... and although she could neither read nor write, she had all sorts of books, including the bible, read to her... and obviously, we have her book, but only because she dictated it to a willing scribe...
[so, you know, effectively, it’s better]
well, I don’t know about that, but as I said, what makes her autobiography such an intuitive part of Gretel’s backstory (and so entertaining, as well) is her own admission of prolonged public demonstrations of loud wailing, sobbing and writhing around — much to the irritation and consternation of both commoners and clerics.
I mean really... if anyone in history could be said to have had a dominant feeling function... Margery sure fits the bill...
of course, as I said, the Feeling Function is something our culture tries it’s damndest to keep a lid on...
I mean, outside of ancient funerals with those wild and crazy professional mourners...
Western culture has pretty much always considered public displays of emotion to be an embarrassment... if not outright pathology...
[so cut the crybaby shit!]
in Margery’s case we read that:
“at a certain point her cries and her weepings increased so much that priests dare not giver her communion openly in the church, but priv(ate)ly in the Prior’s Chapel at Lynne, away from the people’s hearing... And in that chapel...at the time of communion, two men had to hold her (down)...till her crying had ceased, for she could not bear the abundance of love that she felt...”
(from Chapter 56)
[oh I love you, I love you. I fucking love you]
[OMG]
and then, whaddya know, turns out even Margery had heard of Marie d’Oignies... writing (in chapter 62):
“The famous friar preaches against her, without naming her... afterwards he read of a woman called Maria de Oignies, and of her manner of living, of the wonderful compassion that she had in thinking of His Passion, and of the plenteous tears that she wept....”
despite the awkwardness her crying engendered, she was often invited to dinner, and had many conversations with ordinary people who were eager to hear her talk about her visions and visitations...
in other words, those who believed her may or may not have been embarrassed by her behavior, nonetheless, they considered her to be a living saint and were eager to get whatever grace they could from being in her company...
[so it’s okay]
but of course, not everyone believed her... in fact, to this day, there are people who believe it was all
[acting!]
yeah... just another When Harry Met Sally case of histrionic theater...
in fact quoting from the blog of one current historian skeptic:
“...she did it in a way that was just super performative, and it seemed to the people around her that she was specifically doing it so that people would pay attention to her, or for some sort of personal gain. Obviously, Margery did not see it that way. Margery was very much of the opinion that she was simply experiencing religious ecstasy, which she had no choice but to respond to with absolutely copious weeping.“
[fuck]
hey, the very definition of histrionics includes insincerity and exaggeration... and you know what... Margery was well aware of the problem...
in chapter 3 she writes that many people said she could turn the waterworks on and off at will and that “she wept when in company for advantage and profit.”
[not good]
well, I gotta say, I believe Margery... maybe especially because she herself wasn’t always so sure what the hell was going on...
in fact she sought out authorities who she thought could tell her that she wasn’t just, uh, well, as that modern historian-blogger believed: that she was um, full of shit...
one of the spiritual authorities Margery visited was Julian of Norwich... a card carrying celebrity mystic who lived as an anchoress, and was trusted beyond any shadow of a doubt because of her writings and well, because she had chosen that sort of macabre life of being walled in... only communicating with the outside world through a window, and dispensing spiritual advice presumably without histrionics or narcissist agenda...
in chapter 18 of her book Margery writes, there were:
“...many wonderful revelations, which she shewed to the anchoress to find out if there were any deception in them, for the anchoress was expert in such things, and good counsel could give.”
Lo and behold, Julian, who had plenty of visions of her own (and most likely, an NDE in May 1373) told Margery to
“...follow her promptings and her stirrings, and trustingly believe they were of the Holy Ghost and of no evil spirit.”
(from the Proem)
[okay, that’s what you fucking do!]
reading Margery’s book makes it obvious that she’s a terrific model for Gretel and her repeated bouts of crying... and if there were any question about her being a model for the Feeling Function, listen to this — just know she always speaks about herself in the 3rd person:
“Christ Jesus, whose melodious voice...softly sounding in her soul, said, ‘I shall preach to you and teach you myself....’ Then her soul was so delectably fed with the sweet converse of our lord, and so fulfilled with his love, that like a drunk she turned herself first on one side and then on the other, with great weeping and sobbing, powerless to keep herself steady because of the unquenchable fire of love which burned strongly in her soul. Then many people were amazed at her, asking what was wrong with her; to which she, like a creature all wounded with love, and in whom all reason had failed, cried with a loud voice:”
(from Chapter 41)
[I’m pretty drunk. Oh shit! whadid I do?]
[OOH!]
oops...! um, sorry... she said:
“The Passion of Christ slays me.”
[oh!]
there are enough skeptical people in this world who read or hear all this and believe she’s either making it all up or is just mentally ill...
[and they should go fuck themselves!]
[yes, and that is what your English doctors would say]
I choose to believe her because she also said this:
“Nor could she herself ever tell of the grace that she felt, it was so heavenly, so high above her reason and her bodily wits; and her body so feeble at the time of the presence of grace that she could never express it with her words as she felt it in her soul.”
(from the Proem)
[the experience continues]
[ooo]
see, that’s about as decent a description of a personal religious experience as any I’ve ever read...
[yeah! that’s what it is]
it also jibes with my own experience of the Numinous...and probably jibes with yours as well...
there’s just one issue I’ve got... and that’s with the specifics she relates that have to do with Christianity...
[what do you mean?]
well christian references are, after all, part and parcel of mysticism... but only in the more limited sense... in other words mysticism as culturally defined... as if there were no such thing as mysticism outside of not just Christianity, but Catholicism...
[I don’t get it]
see I trust that Margery is telling the absolute truth about her experience of the Numinous... except just as fishermen dream of fish, and dogs dream of bones, a Catholic is bound to dream of Jesus and Mary... yet even a dyed in the wool Catholic can be visited by the Numinous without any guest appearances or cameos by biblical actors...
[oh, it costs too much]
[ahem]
there’s more to say about this, but before we do we’ve still got that one pesky philologic question we’ve gotta find an answer to: could our fairytale author have known about Margery and her tears...?
and the answer is:
well... the answer is coming right after this word from our sponsor:
[this presentation sponsored by]
[spaghetti]
alrighty, well
there are a couple of modern translations of Margery’s book... and they’re needed because the original was written down first in a bizarre and difficult to decipher half English, half German... and then ultimately got itself transcribed into that oddly spelled, odd sounding Middle English of Chaucer’s time...
there are also dozens and dozens and dozens of books and papers that have been written about her book and her life...
turns out though, that the full text manuscript — in other words, the book itself — was only discovered in the early 1930s and identified as such in 1934
[wow]
so that makes knowing about her problematic for any German author prior to 1934...
[can you believe that?]
still, there were 2 pamphlets our author could have been aware of... one published in 1501, and the other in 1521... the problem is, they were both very short and only contained the briefest of excerpts from her book...
as far as we know, those brief excerpts were all that our author could have had access to... and while they were both published in Middle English... this was not likely to have been a huge problem for our author... and so the bare fact is, she certainly could have known about Margery...
[so it’s okay]
digging deeper though, turns out the 1521 pamphlet is pretty meagre and doesn’t fill out Gretel’s back story anywhere near as well as Marie d’Oignies...
and while the 1501 pamphlet does briefly mention weeping... it too, is pretty fucking meagre, and somehow doesn’t satisfy our Intuition as well as Marie d’Oignies does...
[bummer. this is a bummer man. that’s a, that’s a bummer man.]
it certainly is... funny thing about research, though... you never know who or what is gonna surprise, delight, or even disappoint you when digging into primary and serious secondary sources... and just to be clear, wikipedia is a very helpful tool, but it works best as a source of sources... which makes it more of a 3rd hand source, I guess...
that said, in searching for that 1501 pamphlet on Margery Kempe, I came across a paper that mentioned another someone who might have filled in Gretel’s backstory just as well, and been easily known to our author...
[oh no, not again]
hey, trust me, this lady is important to our work... and she’s the last one I’m gonna mention...
[oh, good]
*🎶*🎶*
PART 6 [1:31:25]
Teil sechs: In which we combine ciabata and cardiology in a zen koan and end up with the definitive definition of grace
[I’ll believe that when I see it]
[you better believe it. that’s right!]
our final crying mystic is known as Dorothea von Montau... she died in 1394 at the age of 47, and was long considered the patron saint of Prussia...
****
*Dorothea was the fourteenth-century housewife from Gdańsk (Danzig) who travelled across much of Europe yet ended her life as an anchoress in Marienwerder (Kwidzyn)
*Günther Grass included Dorothea von Montau in his novel Der Butt [The Flounder]
****
[god bless me]
let me just quote briefly from the lengthy Latin version of her Vita, written after her death by her Confessor, Johann Marienwerder: and when I say lengthy, holy crap, I mean it...
[oh crap!]
relax, this just a little snippet, although just so you know, it’s from Chapter 29 of Book 5...
[OMG]
“...iussa est a Domino suis lavare lacrimis....”
[ahem]
uh, sorry...
“she was commanded by Jesus to shed abundant tears not only for her own purification, but also for many others...that they might be cleansed from sins.... ...therefore she not only wept abundantly out of compunction and devotion, but also out of compassion.... and out of the joy of her heart....”
[I’m not crying, you’re crying]
[aww]
what makes her such an intuitive match for Gretel isn’t just the fact that she seems to have cried almost as much as Margery Kempe... and it’s not even the fact that she was very likely a Feeling Dominant person...
[well what then?]
there’s something else that connects her to our fairytale in a way that kinda makes for a real holy shit — dare I say, almost Numinous — moment...
[this better be good]
yeah well, I think it is, so, uh, here goes:
“Now specially commanded by the Lord...she wept abundantly, shedding sweet and fruitful tears, by which she was nourished, that is, by the bread of tears... thus could she say with the prophet: My tears were my bread both day and night.”
[holy shit!]
see...? whaddid I tell ya...?
[wait a second]
THAT, my dear frents and listeners, is one helluva a confirmation of our original intuition about the meaning of Hansel and Gretel bread...
[I don’t get it]
well... one of those 11 signs of saintliness we mentioned before... you know, the ones derived from those sister-books, die Schwesternbücher...
[ja, ja, that’s okay]
uh, thank you...
well, one of those signs — as we said — was the gift of tears... which in German is called die Gnade von der Tränen... which more literally means the Grace of Tears...
[yes, I know]
uh, right... of course...
it means that right here, Dorothea’s tears are being called the bread that feeds her... in other words, the Grace that feeds her...
so while so many other women mystics fit Gretel’s backstory with their crying... it’s only in Dorothea’s Latin Vita that this type of holy crying is referred to specifically as cibata...
[are you kidding me?]
hey, I kid you not... the Latin text says:
“quibus cibata, scilicet lacrimarum pane,”
“that ciabata, namely the bread of tears”
[oh that’s funny]
I don’t know about funny, but it certainly was a ginormous surprise... at least to me... so there’s no doubt Dorothea’s tears fit the bill as part of Gretel’s backstory... but this bread business makes it even more likely that Gretel’s repeated crying was a deliberate metalepsis referring back to this very passage from Dorothea’s Vita...
[yes, I think you’re right]
oh, nice!
the quote itself is already a metalepsis referring back to Psalm 42:3 which says:
“My tears have been my food day and night....”
not being so familiar with the Old Testament, that’s something I certainly didn’t know... and while our author would easily have know about the Psalm, I don’t think she would have been satisfied connecting it to Gretel without having found it connected specifically to this particular woman mystic, Dorothea...
[maybe]
well, I think that our author deliberately gave Gretel tears in order to have them function as a metalepsis... and in connecting them to Dorothea what our author actually did was create a metalepsis to a metalepsis...
[OMG]
and, just to throw an extra dose of gratuitous literary silliness into the mix, let me remind you that the literary critic Harold Bloom called metalepsis “a metonymy of a metonymy.”
and so do I need say it...
[no, no, no, no...]
our author created a metonymy of a metonymy of a metonymy of a metonymy...
[WTF!]
sorry, I couldn’t help myself...
[dad joke groans]
[this is really confusing for me]
hey, I get it... but the only thing that’s really confusing is the academic gobbledygook concerning metalepsis...
it turns out that Gretel’s tears are a devilishly clever literary reference to a literary reference...
[it’s all complicated]
sure it is...
the original literary reference would had to have been the Psalm verse, of course, but since most everyone in our author’s literary circle would have been more than familiar with the Psalm... the reference to Dorothea and this line from her Latin Vita became a double clever twist... and that meant only serious cognoscenti, and German ones at that, would have been familiar enough with Dorothea to connect her with Gretel — AND see the connection between her tears and the Psalm...
[holy shit!]
well the cool thing is that... now, you and I found it too... and that ain’t no small thing...
but you see, now, on top of the tears, there’s even something else, something even wilder in Dorothea’s Vita that links her to Gretel and the Feeling Function...
[like what?]
that’s her, um, open heart surgery...
[oh no, you can’t be serious, that is some bullshit right there]
no, no, seriously...
in Book 3 Chapter 1 of the Vita, it says:
“...the Lord Jesus, her wonderful lover, pulled out her old heart, and in its place inserted a new and fervently burning heart.... the reception of which she delighted (in) so magnificently that she was unable to tell anyone (at that time).”
[jesus christ!]
uh, yeah... her, um surgeon, Dr. Jesus uh, later uh, told her:
“Before I took out your heart, [Antequam tibi cor extraxi] you wept much... and you will not yet cease weeping, but you will weep frequently until your last day....”
(Book 2 Chapter 38)
[OMG]
obviously, this wasn’t a literal, physical cardiac transplant procedure... it was a metaphoric change of heart...
[of course]
so here’s the thing about the tears of these mystics, and why Gretel’s tears support our intuitive assessment that she represents not just the Feeling Function but the feelings and experiences of these mystics...
outside of hay fever, and of course tear gas or pepper spray, we all know that tears are engendered by feelings...
[thank you very much captain obvious]
right, that’s simple enough... what’s not so simple is that tears, and the feelings that engender them, are utterly subjective...
[what the hell do you mean by that?]
no matter what we say or what we think, we can’t know for sure what somebody else is feeling... not unless we’ve had the same experience and those same feelings ourselves...
we can only see tears, and despite any and all empathetic, sympathetic, or antagonistic assumptions we might make — whether correct or not — we can’t see the feelings behind them...
of course we can talk about feelings as something that takes place in the heart... but we can’t see what’s happening in someone’s heart... which is to say, we can’t know for sure what someone is experiencing when they are crying...
[why not?]
well even if they tell us... there’s always gonna be Harry and Sally having a moment in that NY Jewish deli...
[so what’s your point?]
in talking about Gretel’s tears, intuition has led us to read and talk about the experience of these women mystics... in choosing to believe them we’re taking it on faith it was an experience of grace that engendered those tears... and not some personality disordered, combination of histrionics and narcissism...
[and why not?]
hey, the point here is that even with 9 books worth of descriptions of those sister mystics, a few heavy-duty Latin biographies, countless stories from Alban’s Lives of the Saints and even Margery Kempe’s amazingly detailed autobiography, not one of those mystics could tell us exactly what they were experiencing...
sure, some of them tried, but none of them could tell us exactly what their experience of grace really was... in other words, as much as they may have wanted, they couldn’t share or give us the feeling they were experiencing... and this is crucial: because there’s no understanding the experience of the mystic without having had that experience ourselves... no amount of descriptive words can accomplish that...
[well, this is fucking depressing]
hey, I get it... and I’m really really sorry...
the truth of the matter is that nothing anyone tells us, and certainly no descriptions that we read can give us that experience... in fact that’s why Zen koans were invented...
all the descriptive words are — at best — just that old zen finger pointing at the moon...
[words, words, words]
yeah... well, at least that zen story gives us the best clue to understanding and even having that experience for ourselves...
[how?]
because the moon in those zen stories represents our own experience... so too does this Grimms’ fairytale...
so the question remains: our own experience of what...?
[you tell me!]
Hansel and Gretel is based on an experience we all know very, very well: an experience of hunger...
not for bread though...
and not exactly for the bread of tears...
and not even for the Grace of tears...
but for Grace itself...
and the experience that turned those women into mystics, was that they were sated... sated in their hunger for grace... just as much as we all wish to be...
these women mystics of the medieval period considered that grace to be a benediction... a gift of god — the Catholic god they were brought up to believe in and worship... but as you and I know, mysticism is code for a phenomenon that transcends place, time, culture, and yes, even religion... just as grace is a term for something that transcends place, time, culture, and yes, even religion...
so the real question — as it has been throughout these last 42 episodes of the podcast — and indeed the question at the heart of the fairytale itself is:
what the fuck is Grace...?
[well, what is it?]
I have an answer for us everyday ordinary everyones... believers and non-believers alike... which is to say those of us who aren’t mystics or theurgists or shamans or saints... and if you’re interested, you can ask me...
but the grace experienced by these mystics is what this fairytale is aimed at... and the clue to what that is is right there in their stories... which is that the one thing these crying mystics all had in common wasn’t just the pleasure of their tears... it was the very experience of pleasure...
as Dorothea said, her tears:
“were...friendly, consoling, comforting, fervent, sweet, delighting body and soul for many days.”
as an outward sign of grace, they gave her pleasure...
but it wasn’t the tears that brought the pleasure... it was the grace that did so... and make no mistake, this was no chicken or egg deal... Dorothea, like all mystics, experienced the pleasure of grace... and that’s exactly what grace is and what it’s for: pleasure...
[what?]
but not just any pleasure... not the kind that comes from something (or even someone) you can control in any way... and not from something you can purchase or something you can consume...
[goddamnit!]
according to these medieval women, grace is the pleasure of the presence of god...
[but what good does that do me?]
Hey, take it easy cowboy... I get your frustration...
The problem is, that for their zeitgeist that word god may have worked perfectly... but for our zeitgeist, the word god is way too limited...
[in god I trust, trust god, he is there for you ]
yeah, well that’s fine, but that word is still limited by the culture and religion we were brought up in... so let’s just call this pleasurable presence, the Numinous...
[aw mom, do I have to?]
um, I’m uh not yer muther... and no, uh, you don’t have to...
Numinous is just a word... but it’s a damn good word because it cuts across all sorts of constraints and limitations imposed by culture, religion, and geography...
[there is no obstacle or limit that can stop me]
well, that’s great... just know that what we’re choosing to call the Numinous is the very source of the mystery of eudaimonia and henosis and mysticism and theurgy and shamanism and grace...
in the end, Mysticism just means an encounter with the Numinous... and encountering the Numinous is an experience of pleasure that happens to all of us...
the only real difference between us and the mystics is just the length of the encounter... and the permanence of the effect... what Zen masters might call Satori 悟り and what we might call enlightenment... something that’s nowhere near as esoteric as it sounds
for mystics, that effect is a metaphoric cardiac transplant... a deep and abiding change of heart, and a constant supply of Grace... the grace not just of the presence of the Numinous... because indeed, the Numinous is always and everywhere present... the grace of a legitimate and genuine awareness of that presence...
the Numinous is not some abstract idea — religious or otherwise — but a serious experience of the pleasure the awareness of it brings... a genuine and legitimate pleasure beyond words... and a pleasure we’ve all experienced...but only in the briefest of moments...
[oh!]
the mystic, the theurgist, the shaman... they all live in the space of that awareness... for the rest of us, encounters with the Numinous are all too brief, and much too heavily interfered with by the culture...
we all do, indeed know the Numinous... we just need to remember how it felt... how it feels when we’re there... how it feels when we notice it...
[omg]
what we’re saying is that reaching henosis, or eudaimonia, or having a mystical experience — however brief and transitory, is exactly that: an experience of the Numinous...
🎶 heavenly angelic choir 🎶
exactly... except without the musical accompaniment... although, we all know, music itself can transport us there...
now in the earliest episodes, but especially in episode 26 we tried our best to put the idea of the Numinous into words... but words don’t cut it... not unless you’re Walt Whitman and capable of heroic acts of down to earth poetry... because normally, words either hijack or contradict an experience of the Numinous... sometimes deliberately, sometimes innocently
when deliberate, they gaslight us into misunderstanding our own experience... but all too often, they innocently snuff out an experience of the Numinous... and put an abrupt end to the pleasure...
[ooh!]
and if there’s one word in particular that’s especially important to beware of it’s:
[pizza!]
uh, no...
pizza’s a pretty damn good word, especially because it usually brings something pretty specific — even numinous — to mind...
[we’ll eat frozen pizzas all day. All day, every day]
well, frozen pizza may do in a pinch...and for me, it even works better than any Chicago deep dish... but for numinosity, I’ll take a NY slice any day of the week... fuggedaboudit...
[ahem]
no, seriously, one terrible word to look out for is:
[beautiful]
uh, that’s right...
[it’s a beautiful word, isn’t it?]
[it’s fucking beautiful!]
[I’m not saying nuthin’]
good, because your next encounter with the numinous is going to be exactly that: beautiful...
but if you feel the need to use the word — and get duped into doing so — you’re really just closing the door on your experience... and replacing the pleasure with the word...
[I don’t fucking want that!]
In our next episode the kids get back home... and in this instance, they don’t bring any jewels, but they do spark a helluva discussion about Dostoyevsky...
[what?]
hey, I really wanted to skip over the next 3 lines of the fairytale... after all, they’re kinda anti-climactic... and fer cryin out loud... it’s already taking me forever to put together this whole thing as a podcast... but, uh, come on... Dostoyevsky...!
[why the fuck not?]
exactly...
so if you’ve been with me this far, you might as well come back for what comes next... I promise to try and make your time listening more worthwhile than watching
[a team that is known as da Bears. da Bears]
yup, my ridiculously disappointing Chicago Bears...
[fuck]
of course, I wrote that before they won their last 2 games... uh, make that 3 (uh, now 4) games... still, watching them can often be more terrifying than any horror movie... and usually makes me feel exactly like Dr. Seward when he says:
[No, Mina, no!!!]
[Mina screams]
[da Bears]
before we go, shout out to all the freesound.org members of kristo’s peanut gallery, all of the purloined and shanghaied members, and especially to the special voice contributors, Jürgen Lexow, voice teacher extraordinaire, Nicole Warner, German teacher extraordinaire, and my extraordinary parts partner, Anna Jacobsen...
you can find Jürgen at voice-lexow.de, Nicole is at germanwithnicole.com, and Anna is at annajacobsen.de
links are in the show notes...
[good idea]
just remember you can find transcripts, links, full credits, and a few philologic surprises on the website...
[how do I find your show?]
hey, you know the drill...
[visit us on the web @ www]
betweenthelines.xyz...
alrighty then, ciao a tutti...
🎶 bear down 🎶
[OOH!]
crap... sorry about that...
🎶 The Music 🎶
[well, good night]
got a question, or just want to say hi...?
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
*Chapter Titles, and sonstiges material read by Anna Jacobsen*
*Original German Fairytale Reading by Jürgen Lexow*
*English translation of manuscript read by Nicole Warner*
*Laboratorio Artigianale di Fandonie recording of Nennillo e Nennella (in Neapolitan dialect) read by Domenico D'Agostino*
*Librivox recording of Nennillo and Nennella (in English) read by Joy Chan*
Music Credits:
*🎶*🎶* Bleeping Demo by Kevin MacLeod of incompetech.com and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License
🎶 Anachronist 🎶 by Kevin MacLeod of incompetech.com and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License
🎶 The Music 🎶 courtesy of David Berdahl and freesound.org
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License
kristo's awesome Peanut Gallery
(in order of appearance, and most, courtesy of freesound.org)
@00:00 "this is NOT the official podcast of any pope (etc....)" - AI Announcer
🎶 🔔 small church bells 🔔 🎶 (Sancta Mariae de Planctu) (Holy Mary of Weeping) — recorded by the podcaster...😇
@00:23 "WTF!!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@00:31 "no. it's not." courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@00:32 "...indeed!" - Sir Joseph Whemple
@00:49 "...let's move this thing along...!" - Mitchell Pritchett & Cameron Tucker
@01:44 "that shit is fucked up" courtesy of cheesepuff and freesound.org
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@02:02 "no, really?” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@02:16 "why not?" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@02:20 🎵 La Vendetta! 🎵 - Sam Carl as Doctor Bartolo
@02:33 audience gasp courtesy of FreqMan and freesound.org
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@02:52 crowd - gasp" courtesy of jayfrosting and freesound.org
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@03:05 "no, really?” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@03:19 "and, finally!" courtesy of Tim Kahn and Amy Gedgaudas and freesound.org
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PART ONE / Teil eins @03:24
@03:42 "dad joke groans courtesy of TeamMasaka and freesound.org
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@04:46 "huhh???” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@05:27 "huh...?" courtesy of deleted_user_2104797 and freesound.org
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@05:35 "ah, very good" courtesy of The Baron and freesound.org
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@06:05 "oh yeah” courtesy of Tim Kahn and Amy Gedgaudas and freesound.org
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@06:16 "no way" courtesy of kathid and freesound.org
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@06:36 "...if you say so" courtesy of Anna Jacobsen
@07:26 sound of hammering courtesy of Tallis0410 and freesound.org
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@07:31 "owwww!” courtesy of xtrgamr and freesound.org
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@07:34 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@07:58 "What!Whaddyou mean?" - Walter White
@08:20 "I don't believe it…!" - Commissioner Gordon
@08:23 "just listen" - Bullwinkle J. Moose
@09:14 "...interesting" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@09:37 "absolutely nothing!" - The Skipper
@10:08 "oh well that's nice" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@10:46 "what? what? what?” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@11:06 "what?" courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@11:19 "seriously?” courtesy of Alba_Mac and freesound.org
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@11:48 "...so surprised” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@12:01 "What's wrong with that?" - Tony Soprano
@12:12 "you can't be serious" courtesy of blue2107 and freesound.org
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@12:40 "hmm..." courtesy of agent vivid
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@12:52 "I remember" - the head of Nostradamus
@13:16 "what?" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@13:37 😇 🎶 angelic sublime choir 🎶 😇 courtesy of bone666138 and freesound.org
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@13:49 "can you please explain..." - AI Frenchie
@14:26 "some people..." courtesy of owly-bee and freesound.org
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@14:49 "agreed" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@15:08 "naturally" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@15:17 "Amen!" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@15:38 "true, that" - Omar Little
@15:51 "oh wow, man" courtesy of bowlingballout and freesound.org
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@16:05 "psychopathy" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@16:23 "No!" courtesy of theuncertainman and freesound.org
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@16:35 "what?" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@16:58 "precisely" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@17:20 "yup!" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@17:32 "really?” courtesy of michellelindemann1 and freesound.org
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@17:51 "oh yeah…?" - Michael Knight
@17:56 "WTF!!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@18:38 "…socks with sandals?" - The Voice of Western Culture & Civilization
@18:41 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@18:56 "woo,woo, woo..." - Curly
@18:59 "Ha, Ha" courtesy of qubodup and freesound.org
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@19:24 "ruff, ruff..." - Curly
@19:52 "...interesting" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@20:29 🎶 hello… 🎶 - The Stooges
@20:40 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@20:48 "I don't know" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@21:36 "pizza!" courtesy of Nighteller and freesound.org
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@21:44 "alright already, get on with it!" courtesy of metrostock99 and freesound.org
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PART TWO / Teil zwei @21:49
@21:58 "Ayahuasca journey…" - Aaron Rodgers & Joe Rogan
@22:12 "blah, blah, blah..." courtesy of unfa and freesound.org
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@22:37 "I don't think you know" courtesy of jhyland and freesound.org
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@22:52 "I see a cloud" courtesy of wjoojoo
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@22:55 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@23:11 "...awesome?" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@23:31 "yes, yes, I can see that" - Ralphie Cifaretto
@23:39 "okee dokee" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@23:47 "Yeah? Like what?" - Sam Malone
@23:55 "awesome!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@23:58 "awesome, man!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@24:10 "totally awesome!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@24:24 "nononono...!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@24:27 "eeh, that could be a problem" - Andi Burns
@24:36 "I like that!" courtesy of FreqMan and freesound.org
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@24:48 "oh, very nice...” courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@24:55 "I ain't never seen...” courtesy of alphahog and freesound.org
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@25:10 "And what exactly would that be?" - Joe West
@25:21 "ooh... I like that" courtesy of nuncaconci and freesound.org
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@25:47 "Hey, speak for yourself" - Corny Collins
@26:03 "who cares?" courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@26:33 "damn!" courtesy of Tim Kahn and Amy Gedgaudas and freesound.org
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@27:34 "nyuk, nyuk..." - Curly
@28:07 "are you done bragging?" - AI 46/48
@28:31 "you sure do have your problems" courtesy of the_semen_incident and freesound.org
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@29:02 "cha-ching!" courtesy of angelak_m and freesound.org
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***
@29:18 Ayahuasca Ritual Drum Music:
native hand drum courtesy of sandyrb and freesound.org
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ritual drums courtesy of Manuel.Ed and freesound.org
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native Shaker courtesy of sandyrb and freesound.org
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***
@29:21 "ayahuasca blah, blah, bragging" - Aubrey Marcus
@29:27 "blah, blah, blah..." courtesy of unfa and freesound.org
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@29:36 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@30:01 "Let me outta here!" - Homer Simpson
@30:03 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@30:22 "audience surprise courtesy of jayfrosting and freesound.org
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@30:38 "what?" courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@30:51 "yeah, so what?” courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@31:26 "are you crazy much?" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@32:04 "nonsense!” courtesy of afterguard and freesound.org
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@32:22 "...confusing for me" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@32:53 "oh crap!” courtesy of AmeAngelofSin and freesound.org
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@33:18 "really...?" courtesy of juror2 and freesound.org
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@33:35 "aye, I agree" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@33:53 "hooray!" courtesy of javapimp and freesound.org
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@34:10 "audience cheer courtesy of jayfrosting and freesound.org
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@34:22 "I have no idea" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@34:33 "what’s that?" courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@34:38 "so what!" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@35:33 "great. awesome.” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@35:45 "they pull me back in!" - Michael Corleone
@35:56 "huh...?" courtesy of deleted_user_2104797 and freesound.org
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PART THREE / Teil drei @35:59
@36:16 "cleanup on aisle 13..." courtesy of aprilariesman and freesound.org
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@36:56 "IDK” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@37:10 "no way!" courtesy of owly-bee and freesound.org
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@37:33 "really?" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@37:46 "most assuredly" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@38:57 "please, don’t do that" courtesy of girlhurl and freesound.org
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@39:41 "oh dear!" - Senex
@40:30 "crowd - gasp courtesy of jayfrosting and freesound.org
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@40:59 "that's not funny" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@41:19 "oh yeah" courtesy of qubodup and freesound.org
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@41:27 "he was holy..." courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@41:30 "sure" courtesy of AmeAngelofSin and freesound.org
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@42:07 "oh, and I suppose you think that’s funny, huh" courtesy of shawshank73 and freesound.org
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@42:48 "thank you" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@43:01 "what are you talking about?" courtesy of laelizondo and freesound.org
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@43:07 "oh no" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@43:15 "dad joke groans courtesy of TeamMasaka and freesound.org
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@44:03 "awww" courtesy of vahdena and freesound.org
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@44:20 "can you believe that?" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@44:50 "sound of yawning courtesy of sheblum and freesound.org
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@44:54 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@45:17 "(an exasperated) oh boy... oh boy..." courtesy of AmeAngelofSin and freesound.org
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@45:36 "hmm" courtesy of esperar and freesound.org
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@46:03 "...copacetic" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@47:04 "oh brother!" courtesy of max_cristos and freesound.org
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@47:21 "awesome" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@47:26 "...to implement" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@47:42 "whoa!” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@47:51 "...a Sicilian message" - Salvatore Tessio
@47:54 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@48:09 🎵 sotto cielo di Roma 🎵 Dino
@48:17 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@48:57 "please, don’t do that" courtesy of girlhurl and freesound.org
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@49:40 "uh, thank you" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@50:06 ".boo fucking hoo" - Rod Tidwell
@50:10 "OOH!!" - thanks to Slak, Sam, Matt, and John of my favorite podcast: Live from the Five Hole
@50:44 "nope...not gonna happen" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@51:03 "Excellent, Mr. Renfield! Excellent! - Bela Lugosi
@51:10 "nyahh..." - Curly
@51:12 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@51:48 "awww" courtesy of vahdena and freesound.org
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@52:01 "...it's okay" courtesy of MatteusNova and freesound.org
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@52:30 "OMG! OMG!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@52:35 "No!" courtesy of theuncertainman and freesound.org
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@52:43 "(confused) whaat...??" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@53:13 "asshole" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@53:38 "that was impressive!" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@53:54 "...asshole!" courtesy of pyro13djt and freesound.org
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@55:02 "that's not funny" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@55:33 "very impressive, but…" - Diana Prince
@55:44 "goddamnit" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@56:00 "god damn it! (echo)" courtesy of pycckuu20032003 and freesound.org
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@56:06 "oh no" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@56:29 "crunchy!" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@56:31 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@56:58 "it's such a prank..." courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@57:40 "...kinda nauseous..." courtesy of MadamVicious and freesound.org
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@57:47 "that's not good" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@58:11 "ok, now what?” courtesy of zein.hg and freesound.org
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@58:26 "aw, why?" courtesy of kurtless
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@58:33 "but first..." - Mark Carman
PART FOUR / Teil vier @58:38
@59:00 "inappropriate!" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@59:02 "no. it's not." courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@59:09 "do bears shit in the woods?" - Green Forest presenter
@59:12 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@59:37 "yeah!" - Frank Nastase
@1:00:14 "oh yeah..." - Tom Hagen
@1:01:25 "I don't believe you" - Tiffany Case
@1:01:35 "thanks" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:02:26 "I don't think you know" courtesy of jhyland and freesound.org
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@1:02:36 "ooh la la" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:02:54 "yeah...?" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:03:22 "who cares?" courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@1:03:41 "what a waste of time!!" - Phil Connors
@1:04:07 "...good news" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:04:11 "what?” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:04:38 "oh well that's nice" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@1:05:25 "Oh my God! Ridiculous!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:05:40 "I agree" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:05:50 "I have no idea" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:06:10 "ouch" courtesy of girlhurl and freesound.org
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@1:06:17 "indeed" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:06:29 "unquestionably" courtesy of bectec and freesound.org
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@1:07:12 "how do you know that?" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:07:19 "how do you know that?" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:07:40 "what?" courtesy of ballOOnhead and freesound.org
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@1:08:12 "...Grade A bullshit" courtesy of cookies+policy and freesound.org
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@1:08:49 "It reminds me... - Bela Lugosi
@1:08:56 "nyahh..." - Curly
@1:09:14 "oh, we believe you. thousands wouldn't" - Dani Christmas
@1:09:34 "How is that possible?” courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:09:48 "what did you say that was called?" courtesy of itinerantmonk108 and freesound.org
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@1:10:07 "third and eleventh..." - two New Yorkers
@1:10:12 "OMG" courtesy of yeahyeahyup and freesound.org
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@1:10:26 "ja, ja, it's okay” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:10:53 "maybe” courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@1:11:28 "What's wrong with that?" - Tony Soprano
@1:11:30 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:11:43 "oh, really?" courtesy of xyahka and freesound.org
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@1:11:55 "...show me" courtesy of itinerantmonk108 and freesound.org
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@1:12:33 "please stop that!” courtesy of Deathstardude and freesound.org
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@1:13:02 "...did they cry?" - Tony Soprano
@1:13:15 "ha, ha, right" courtesy of itinerantmonk108 and freesound.org
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@1:13:38 "oh, no!" courtesy of AmeAngelofSin and freesound.org
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@1:13:48 "alright, if you insist" courtesy of bogenseeberg and freesound.org
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@1:14:37 "this is so fun!" courtesy of Anzbot and freesound.org
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@1:15:26 "ew!" courtesy of isabellaquintero97 and freesound.org
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@1:15:47 🎶 Here I come to save the day...! 🎶 - Mighty Mouse
@1:15:51 "okay Boomer" - Chlöe Swarbrick
@1:16:10 "uhh, excuse you" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:16:33 "and why not?" courtesy of annadnewby and freesound.org
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@1:16:38 "but first..." - Mark Carman
PART FIVE / Teil fünf @1:16:42
@1:16:55 "a religion, almost a religion...” courtesy of tender_buttons and freesound.org
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@1:17:04 "wow" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:17:25 "ooh" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:17:56 "isn't this a strange conversation... - Renfield
@1:18:02 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:18:22 "that's fucking not funny" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:18:45 "...it's better" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:19:47 "...crybaby shit" - Jake Taylor
@1:20:22 "...oh I love you" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:20:29 "OMG!" courtesy of buggly and freesound.org
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@1:21:32 "so it's okay" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:21:42 "Acting!" - Master Thespian
@1:22:22 "fuck...!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:22:47 "not good" courtesy of nooc and freesound.org
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@1:24:17 "that's what you do!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:25:25 "I'm pretty drunk..." courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:25:29 "OOOH!!!" - Johnny Vincente
@1:25:36 "oh!" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:25:46 "they should go and fuck themselves!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:25:49 "...your English doctors... - Dr. Abraham Van Helsing
@1:26:18 "the experience continues” courtesy of Tim Kahn and Amy Gedgaudas and freesound.org
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@1:26:22 "ooo" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:26:31 "that's what it is!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:26:50 "what do you mean?" - Elaine Benes
@1:27:11 "I don't get it" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:27:39 "Oh, it cost too much" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:27:41 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:28:06 "this presentation sponsored by" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@1:28:09 "spaghetti" courtesy of Nighteller and freesound.org
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@1:28:58 "wow" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@1:29:06 "can you believe it?" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:29:45 "so it's okay" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:31:07 "oh no, not again!" - John Hurt
@1:31:20 "oh, good” courtesy of Iceofdoom and freesound.org
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PART SIX / Teil sechs @1:31:25
@1:31:28 "you better believe it! That's right!" - Carmella and Tony Soprano
@1:31:40 "...when I see it" courtesy of itinerantmonk108 and freesound.org
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@1:31:43 "...better believe it! / that's right!" - Carmela and Tony Soprano
@1:32:01 "god bless me” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:32:20 "oh crap!” courtesy of AmeAngelofSin and freesound.org
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@1:32:31 "OMG!" courtesy of buggly and freesound.org
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@1:32:38 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:33:07 "I'm not crying...” courtesy of jozef_sound and freesound.org
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@1:33:10 "awww" courtesy of vahdena and freesound.org
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@1:33:26 "well what, then?" - Robert Fischer
@1:33:41 "this better be good!" - Tony Soprano
@1:34:07 "holy shit!" courtesy of Deathstardude and freesound.org
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@1:34:11 "wait a second!" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:34:26 "I don't get it" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:34:39 "ja, ja, it's okay” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:34:58 "yes, I know” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:35:29 "are you kidding me!?" courtesy of LittleRainySeasons and freesound.org
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@1:35:45 "Oh that's funny" courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:36:11 "yes, I think you're right" - AI 44
@1:36:50 " Maybe " - Stringer Bell
@1:37:07 "oh my god" courtesy of MatteusNova and freesound.org
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@1:37:27 "nononono...!" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:37:36 "WTF!" courtesy of unfa and freesound.org
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@1:37:42 "dad joke groans courtesy of TeamMasaka and freesound.org
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@1:37:45 "this is confusing..." courtesy of Krystal Flores and freesound.org
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@1:38:03 "it's all complicated” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:38:43 "holy shit!" courtesy of AlienXXX and freesound.org
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@1:39:06 "like what?" - Paulie Gualtieri
@1:39:12 "oh no, you can't be serious..." courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@1:39:41 "Jesus Christ!" courtesy of max_cristos and freesound.org
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@1:40:05 "OMG!" courtesy of pyro13djt and freesound.org
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@1:40:16 "of course" - Frank Alexander
@1:40:42 "...captain obvious" courtesy of cheesepuff and freesound.org
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@1:40:57 "what the hell do you mean…?" - Vince Ricardo
@1:41:41 "why not?" courtesy of nuncaconci and freesound.org
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@1:41:51 "so what's your point?" - George Costanza
@1:42:16 "and why not?" courtesy of annadnewby and freesound.org
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@1:43:12 "Well this is fucking depressing" - Janae Matthews
@1:43:39 "words, words, words” courtesy of Roses1401 and freesound.org
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@1:43:53 "How?” courtesy of simons7er and freesound.org
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@1:44:09 "you tell me!" courtesy of deleted_user_1390811 and freesound.org
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@1:45:25 "Well, what is it?" - Carrie
@1:46:45 "(confused) whaat...??" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:47:00 "goddamnit" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@1:47:09 "but what good does that do ME?" - Homer Simpson
@1:47:29 "trust in god..." courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:47:47 "...do I have to?" courtesy of PureDesignGirl and freesound.org
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@1:48:09 "there is no obstacle..." courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:49:42 "oh!" courtesy of jppi_Stu and freesound.org
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@1:50:12 "OMG!" courtesy of pyro13djt and freesound.org
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@1:50:28 😇 🎶 angelic sublime choir 🎶 😇 courtesy of bone666138 and freesound.org
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@1:51:24 "ooh!" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@1:51:31 "pizza!" courtesy of Nighteller and freesound.org
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@1:51:42 "…frozen pizzas…" courtesy of Sean-TE0 and freesound.org
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@1:52:04 "ahem" courtesy of Alivvie and freesound.org
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@1:52:11 "beautiful" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:52:13 " it's a beautiful word, isn't it?" - 46/48
@1:52:16 "it's fucking beautiful" courtesy of Duisterwho and freesound.org
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@1:52:18 "I'm not sayin' nuthin'" courtesy of Anzbot and freesound.org
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@1:52:41 "I don't fucken' want that!" courtesy of nuncaconci and freesound.org
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@1:52:54 "What!?!" courtesy of Reitanna Seishin and freesound.org
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@1:53:14 "why the fuck not?" courtesy of cheesepuff and freesound.org
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@1:53:28 "…Da Bears" - Bill Swerski's Super Fans
@1:53:41 "fuck" courtesy of cognito perceptu and freesound.org
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@1:54:00 "no Mina no!! / scream" - Dr. Seward / Mina Seward
@1:54:04 "…Da Bears" - Bill Swerski's Super Fans
@1:54:57 "good idea" courtesy of Legnalegna55 and freesound.org
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@1:55:06 "how do I find your show?” courtesy of Tim Kahn and Amy Gedgaudas and freesound.org
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@1:55:10 "visit us on the web @ WWWWWs…" courtesy of WillFitch1 and freesound.org
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@1:55:23 🎶 Bear Down... 🎶 - Polar Bear Singers / John S. Steele
@1:55:27 "OOH!!" - thanks to Slak, Sam, Matt, and John of my favorite podcast: Live from the Five Hole
@1:55:45 "well...good night - Renfield
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Ep. 42 - The Revenge of the Grimms... / Ep. 44 Dostoyevsky meets Frau Holzhacker...
