The Blindboy Podcast - The Art of Storytelling

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

Clare Murphy is a professional storyteller, we discuss the history and applications of storytelling  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Regale the endless pen pals, you generous enias. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. If this is your first episode, consider going back and listening to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. I'm a busy-by this week because I've got two gigs in Kilkenny, two live podcasts which I'm preparing for. I'm looking forward to Kilkenny because there's a 14th century statue there that looks like the Byzone singer Keith Duffy and I'm looking forward to seeing that in real life. So I have a guest this week,

a professional storyteller by the name of Claire Murphy. I was gigging in Bristol about two months ago and I couldn't find a guest, I couldn't find a guest in Bristol that I really wanted to speak to. And someone suggested this storyteller called Claire Murphy. She's Irish. I'd never heard of Claire and I was really intrigued by someone who's a professional storyteller

and I said to myself, this person is either mentally insane or incredibly interesting. Let's take a risk and fuck me did it pay off. Claire is one of my favourite guests I've ever spoken to on this podcast. I would definitely be asking her back. She's a professional storyteller, deeply knowledgeable and passionate about storytelling as an art form, and an astounding storyteller and an incredibly interesting person.

Now, sometimes I get comments about my live podcasts where people say that I speak too much. I disagree with that position because I don't do interviews. What I try to do when I bring any guest on is I try to have a conversation. I don't like the interview format. What I much prefer is like a free form conversation that I'd have with a person in a kitchen or a pub, where we each explore curiosity and speak about whatever. That's what I like doing as opposed to the standard interview

format where you ask a person questions. That's a vestigial format. It's a relic of a time when interviews were recorded on tape. We don't have to abide by those rules anymore. We can document the conversation. So that's what I like doing. So me and Claire had a, we had a conversation about storytelling. We hit it off immediately. We had the most fantastic conversation.

I forgot, there was 2000 people in the audience. I literally forgot there was an audience. Claire was so interesting. I think the audience forgot they were at a gig. It was so quiet. So this conversation you're about to hear, it's quite long. I think it's only two hours long.

I couldn't edit anything out. It was too good. We spoke about the history of storytelling. We spoke about storytelling as an art form, how to tell stories, and we told each other a bunch of fucking stories. So this person's name is Claire Murphy. C-L-A-R-E. Check out her website, Claire Murphy dot org. She's StoryClaire on Instagram. I hope her appearance on this podcast brings her loads of fucking gigs and followers on the internet because she deserves it. Book her for a gig. I'm so happy to have found this person and to have had the wonderful conversation we did.

So without further ado, here's the chat that I had with the professional storyteller, Claire Murphy, who's based in Bristol. And one last thing, at all of my live podcasts, before my guest comes out, I read one of my short stories, but I don't play that on the podcast. So the story that I just read, The Donkey, is what myself and Claire referred to at the start. How are you? I'm grand now. How are you? I'm grand now, how are you? I'm fantastic. That was some story. Did you like that?

You crawled in my heart. You bent it over backwards and turned it inside out and then you put it back together at the end. Thank you very much. Yeah, that was something. I love stories, as you can tell. Yeah. I really, really, not just writing stories, when I explain things,

like with my podcast, what I try to do, I try to democratise things, I try to take things that are really, really complicated and say, how can I make everybody understand this and the way that I always find that the way that I do it is true where is the story where's the story in this and once you do that people remember it people engage with it if the topic is academic we'll say people are no longer frightened yeah you. You know, I love that about storytelling. And also. I feel very proud of it because it feels like mine. It feels very Irish.

We've got that tradition of storytelling. Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about the Irish storytelling tradition? Yeah, yeah, I'd be happy to, but I have to say you remind me of ASAP as well. Who's that? ASAP with the Fables. Oh, fucking I loveesop. Do you know? Because when you said democratise, right, you give people access to the truth, you give people access to science, you were talking to a scientist the other day or a poet or whatever and Aesop, I don't know if you noticed but he was a slave. Yes. And he used story, he never wrote them down, he told them and he made them in his head

and passed them out to him. But his whole thing was to tell stories that would enable other slaves to try and be strong enough to get out, fight back or escape. Was that why Asap was doing this? I think so. How do we, because Asap's stories are, Jesus, nearly 1500, 2000 years old.

Yeah. Do we know with confidence that there was actually a person called Aesop and these were his stories or is it one of these things that we're unsure? I think we've got at least, I can't say who, but I think we've got at least two writers who've mentioned Aesop.

So we think he was a real person. And then I think they were written down 300 years after he died. But you know, the moral at the end, he didn't, that wasn't him. That was someone else analyzing it. Yeah, yeah. Adding the rules. But I can also talk to you about Irish storytelling, I just had to mention ASAP. What I loved, when I met you backstage tonight, I said to you, you're a storyteller and the first thing you said was, but I'm not a Shanna Key. A Shanna Key, it's an Irish

word and we'll explain it in a minute, you never, you could never call yourself a shanakí, the community has to decide that. Yeah, and a shanakí is, it was explained to me by my friend who's an Irish teacher, so he was giving me the breakdown of the language, he said a shanakí is a lore bearer, so you're carrying the knowledge of the village, of the town, wherever. And also a shanakí is usually trained by another shanakí. And so I wasn't trained by the shanakí. So it's like a martial arts thing, except with talking shit.

Exactly. We're martial artists of shit. That's what we are. But I'd say that we're both shkailees, which is the way he put it, which is Scaly. So Scaly is a white belt and Shanakie is a black belt. Is that it? No, I say Shanakie is ahead of us. Scaly is where we are. And just for the people of Bristol, because I don't think... How many Irish people are here?

OK, that's enough. So you know what a Shanakie is. And then for the Bristol people, Shan means old. Okay that's enough so you know what a an owl fella, Eddie Lenahan, fuck me. He's a bane. So Eddie is an owl fella from West Clare and his big long beard. And he has been collecting like Eddie's been going up mountains and finding people who are very old and saying, tell me your stories. And my responsibility is to record these stories. Yeah. But also what Eddie does, motorways haven't been built because of Eddie Lennahan.

That's right. Eddie, they'd be trying to build a fucking motorway with EU money, I'm talking millions and millions. And Eddie will turn up to the developers, he's done it, and said, where you're building this motorway, right there is a fairy tree and a fairy fort. And he'll go, you don't wanna fuck with that. You just don't wanna fuck with it.

And there was one particular place, I think it was where the fairies used to have a meeting. Yeah, every year. The thing is, it doesn't matter whether the fairies are real or not. What matters is that the Vedipers went, sorry EU, we're gonna have to listen to this fella with the beard. we're not building this, seriously, we're not building this

fucking motorway and they diverted it around the fairy tree, you know. We still have that shit in Ireland. I'm not, like I consider myself an atheist, I'm not fucking with a fairy tree. No. It's just, why bother? It's clearly an interdimensional portal of some kind. It connects to something, so you just don't wanna mess with it. You know somebody did though, after they built the road around it.

For the laugh or? Yeah, so one of the construction lads went along. Eddie said it at a festival, and they showed up with a chainsaw and went at the tree. And Eddie's last comment about that was, I feel sorry for him. Not the tree, but the fellow with the chainsaw and went at the tree and Eddie's last comment about that was I feel sorry for him. Not the tree but the fellow with the chainsaw because he knows they're gonna come for him. What's that? Like I've got a first-hand story from so a buddy of mine he bought a house right and after he bought this fucking house

there was a tree in his front garden and all of a sudden Eddie Lenahan arrives at his door out of breath and he's like who the fuck is this guy with his walking stick and Eddie arrives at his door going you're the new owner alright okay don't move that tree alright that's it and your man's like alright thanks very much sir. So your man doesn't listen to Eddie, he cuts the tree down. The next day there's a bull in his garden and then after that Robbins just crash into the window every day and die. Like you know nothing happened to the man but I'd be like that's kind of scary. If Eddie Linehan tells you not to do something, you don't do it.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Story telling in the absence of writing. Yes. So you're telling a story and you're using the landscape or you might be using dance or images or the stars, and that's how you hold this information when you can't write it down.

Is that something that you're fascinated with? Yeah, I mean, they're holding the information as the other piece. So we do it, we talk, we use the air, we use our bodies, we use our voices, we use whatever's coming through this and out here, but we're also using all of those brains and every single person there is listening to your story about Eddie Lennon and they're all seeing a different tree, each one of them and there's a like an energy force to all of that that we feed on which is what creates this whole space between us which storytellers have been doing forever in every culture around the world is using that as a way of building

a world between us where we can all meet it's a community space it's our's our communal space. And that's why it's such a powerful space. And that was always, as far as we know, that's always been there since language began. So writing's only what, like 10,000 years old. So they think story might go as far back as 100,000 years old. And if it's 100,000 years old, some evolutionary biologists think that that has actually changed the shape of our brains. So we've got pathways now that have adapted over a hundred thousand years so that we're, the way he phrases it in this book is, he says it lovely, he says, the baby arrives waiting to hear her first story. Because that's how we're built. So yeah, we use the body and the voice, we use the people, we use the light, we use the history, the memory and the landscape.

And then the story itself comes alive in that space. And what I love too, and this is something that kind of annoys me a bit, is it's clear that story is there for, like humans are unique. We have complex language, we have the, as you said there, like there's a wonderful definition of culture. I keep saying this but I'm gonna say it again. They got these monkeys right and the

monkeys were in a cage and on this cage was a very simple puzzle to solve for them to leave. So monkey number one is in the cage and he walks up to the lock, solves it, gets out. Monkey number two does the exact same thing and on and on and on until all the monkeys have left the cage. They put a bunch of humans in the cage. Human number one goes up, unlocks it, and then explains to everyone else how to do it, and all the humans leave at once.

And that's culture. And culture is the transmission of information using language. It's, when we were speaking about the tree, all of us can think of it's different trees but there's like a 2,000 people here and together we're all thinking of a tree. I don't think other animals can do that. I don't know, crows can barter.

Fuck off. Do you know what I mean? So Come on, give me a bit of that. So I think crows have culture. I think a lot of animals have culture, but crows, two things about crows. Don't piss off a crow.

Oh, they'll remember you, yeah. They'll remember you, they'll tell their children, they'll tell your grandchildren, they're all coming for you if you piss off a crow. So leave your trees in your garden. And if they like you, and if you leave things that they like, so let's say you leave out, I don't know what they like,

but maybe cashew nuts or seeds or something, they'll go find something, could be, I don't know, shiny stone. They found a pound, they brought a dollar to this girl and she was like, this is great, this is a dollar, it's in America obviously. So she went and she got more seeds and she put those seeds out again and they were like, well that works. They kept bringing her money every day. Did that one crow witness money being exchanged for seeds or did they have a system of communication amongst the crows where they understood what money did? I think they will also exchange objects so it doesn't have to

be money so they understand that you should give when you receive and I think that's part of culture. That is culture. Also, I've been looking at fucking like Arca, Wales, you know, but do you anything about the salmon hat trend? Go on. No. There was a population. I mean, they know they I did a podcast on it a while back, but there was a collection of Arca Wales off the northeast coast of Australia in the 1980s. And this one kind of alpha female whale decided one day to start wearing a dead salmon as a hat. And then every other fucking,

she was like Beyonce of whales. Then all the whales in this pod for like, from about 1981 to 1985 wore dead salmon as hats and then it fell out of fashion See and that's culture. That's culture. But also Like orcas are orcas. So orcas all around the world are the same orcas, but there's orcas that are like up in the Near Antarctica or down in Antarctica and they have specific ways of hunting like. Yeah, down south. If they see a seal on an iceberg, those are because no

knock the fucking seal off it and then get it. But they don't do it up north. So they reckon that it's not instinct. It's just one orca had a great idea one day. And this culture of orcas know this. And they told everyone about it. Yeah, and the ones up north just haven't found that information yet. Yeah.

Which is, so that's why, you know, for me sake, we humans definitely have very sophisticated culture. Yeah. But it is clear that, and we might know, we might. We just don't speak mushroom. They just found a species of mushroom that they've located electrical signals which indicate there's at least 50 words in mushroom that we don't speak. Go away out of it.

Do you know what I mean? Fuck off. So I think we love this idea that we are really special and I think what it is is we just don't speak proper whale. We don't speak, you know, chaga mushroom mushroom, we don't speak oak and as soon as we start learning to speak the other languages, the frequencies and all of that, we'll probably realize that the entire world is animate and we've just been sitting here going we're all alone, we're all alone and we're probably not. There's a wonderful writer called Ted Chiang. He wrote, do you know Ted Chiang?

Arrival. He wrote Arrival, yeah. But he also wrote a short story about, it was about these scientists trying to look out into the universe to find intelligent life, but then it turns out that the actual intelligent life was parrots all along. it he does it in a really complex way. Ted Chang is amazing. The Irish storytelling tradition. Yeah let's get into it. What parts of it, what's unique to us? So I used to think, so I got started back in like 2006 telling stories and whenever I started traveling people were like you're an

Irish storyteller. That's it yeah. And I'd go yeah and they go oh well you like basically you own storytelling and I go no no we don't like there's loads of people who tell stories. The more I've traveled to other places and other countries now I'm starting to realize about ten years in like we do have something there's there's a handful of countries that have as long a tradition as we do right so Nigeria's got a really good story town tradition Mali pre-dictatorship had a really good story town tradition but we have ours was never broken I think that's the key thing that's that's my take on it? So the Industrial Revolution never really got to Ireland,

as you'll know if you've ever tried to take a train in Ireland. There's no roads or transport that works. But because we didn't do the mass migration they did in England where they broke up the villages and people left, so you didn't have intergenerational families anymore. People went to the cities and they sent money back

and all that. That's my take on why we never did, because we always had the line back to the village. Okay. But we're also, every Celt I've met, we're very verbal, like we're an oral-based culture. So I think it's in our practice, whether you're from France or Scotland or Wales or Ireland, we have this practice of,

it's in the talk that you find out everything you need to know. It's not in the silence, you know, and it it's in the talk that you find out everything you need to know. It's not in the silence, you know, and it's not in the writing. So we have records like how far would our written like we've got some stuff from the sixth century. About as soon as St. Patrick gets to Ireland in about 430, then you start to see when monasteries came about, then you have Latin being written down. So that's our writing.

Yeah. But then there's that thing of, you know, we have stories that we believe could be thousands of years old. Yeah. But they're written down the fifth century onwards. Yeah. And then they started to bring Christ into it for some reason. And he didn't survive too well. No, no, no. He kept getting pushed to the side because all the other characters were more interesting. And the monks were writing going, do you know what the locals believe? Isn't this mad? And by doing that they preserved our stories. And loads of other people's myths just got eaten by the rise of the Catholic Church. So I think we were kind of lucky in that way.

Absolutely. And there's so much shit too. Because I'm making a documentary with RTE at the moment about monasteries. And there's stuff I'm finding out. We invented spaces between words. Yeah! So before, because the thing is you have to realize, so with Britain over here, the Roman Empire collapsed at about the 4th century and with that collapse you lost writing and then Patrick came over to Ireland from Wales, so we were preserving writing. So a lot of, and the Roman Empire was collapsing all over Europe, so it was Irish monks would spend ages and ages just trying to get certain

Latin books and then translating dictionaries. So the Irish monks actually went back to Italy in like 600. Now by that time the Italians had forgotten to speak Latin. What they were speaking was now modern Italian. So Irish monks went back there and said, oh this is what Latin is. We've preserved these books because we didn't have the Dark Ages. see, we had a Golden Age and Rome never came to Ireland. So we preserved a lot of stuff. But while we were doing these dictionaries, some of the Irish monks were like, fuck it, there's shit that could be done better here.

And spaces between words was the thing. So before Irish monks, all writing was like a text from your ma. Do you know what I mean? And we put spaces in. all writing was like a text from your man and we put spaces in but imagine reading a story because what I love about spaces is that your drum. Spaces is your rhythm and when you don't have

those spaces I mean I don't know if James Joyce knew that but he does have chapters where there's no fucking spaces at all. Yeah, he was trying to go back to Rome. So do you think that us putting the animals in, do you think we were the first to do that as well? To put the... Do you know the animals and all the woven, like the book of cows and that kind of thing? That's kind of something that you see across all monastic traditions in Europe. But I can tell you an interesting thing I found out recently. Well, it's an hypothesis.

I reckon I can prove that our modern vision of hell is based on Cork. No, I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. So here's the thing. In the Bible, right? There's no actual mention of hell in the Bible. Like hell as in, when we think of hell, you think of fire, torture, demons, all this stuff.

That's not present in the Bible. Hell in the Bible is the absence of God. So it's a place where God can't reach it, so it's lonely and sad, and that's what hell is in the Bible. There's a manuscript from the 11th century in Ireland called the Visio Tnogh Dallas, and what it is is, it's a story about a knight from Cork, right? And basically this knight, he lived a life of riding, drinking, eating everything,

just debauchery. And then one weekend this night got fucking shitfaced and knocked himself out. And he spent three days unconscious. And they thought he was dead. His name was Thnogh Dallas. When Thnogh Dallas awoke from his hangover after three days, he said to everybody, you won't fucking believe where I went.

And they're like, where the fuck did you go? And he said, I went to where you go after you die if you live the life that I lived. And they're like, what? And then he starts to say it. So because I ate too much, St. Peter was there and he took me to a landscape where everyone's been force-fed food and that was the torture. And because I had too much sex, he took me to

a lake of fire where they're stabbing me in the mickey. You know what I mean? And what you saw was specific tortures for specific sins and see that didn't exist before. So this Vizio Tnogh Dalas which was written in about fucking Cork, written in Cork, about Cork in the 11th century because we had so many Irish monks around Europe, this story starts to go viral in the 11th century. It starts to get copied and placed all over Europe and by about the 13th century it becomes a very popular text about hell. But then what happens is,

there were these other illuminated manuscripts known as bestiaries. Now this is about the 14th century. And what a bestiary was, was it was a medieval book that just contained pictures of animals because you couldn't go to Africa and just see a lion. So if you wanted to know

what a lion looked like, you had to consult the bestiary. If you worked in a monastery and you opened it up and there's a drawing of a lion. Now most of the times it wasn't. It was some fella who said he'd seen a lion. So they looked like large cock or spaniels. But one of these bestiaries was demons and hell. And the monk who was drawing what hell looked like, he based this on the Viziotan of Dallas. So now you've got this book of hell. But our modern vision of what hell is, there's two main sources that we say came from.

Number one, Dante's Inferno, that's really popular. The other one one the fucking paintings of Hieronymus Bosch the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch are where loads of what we think hell looks like where we saw it now Bosch was an interesting fucker because Bosch he did his paintings as triptych so it's one two, and it was usually like Garden of Eden, Purgatory, Hell. And Bosch's paintings were like a wardrobe. Yeah, so how, the way that Hieronymus Bosch's paintings were presented, they weren't to be viewed in a gallery. It was like a type of scam.

So Bosch's best friend was a bishop, and this bishop used to sell indulgences. Remember selling indulgences? The bishop would go to very rich people and say, oh you've got a terrible life but if you give some money to the Catholic Church, you won't go to hell. So Bosch used to work with this bishop and they would hold these huge dinners for very rich people. And then at the end of the dinner Bosch would come out with his wardrobe and he'd go here's the first panel this panel here is like the Garden of Eden and everyone goes up and looks at it and goes oh my god everything's so beautiful and then Bosch goes but if you live a terrible life this is what's gonna happen and he pulls it out and it's hell and it's everyone

being tortured and all of this but Bosch got his imagery from the beast series that were based on the Visio Thnog Dallas from 11th century Cork so that's why I believe our vision of hell is based on Cork. Do you know what I mean? It makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah there's a lot of people in Cork right now who are very unhappy about that. I know yeah Yeah, that's all right. Um What is it about So one definition of story telling I heard that makes it different from we say a short story So my short story there that's committed to a page and I read it out the exact same every time

Yeah that's committed to a page and I read it out the exact same every time. Yeah. But what I just told you there about fucking Bosch, I've told that a lot of different times and each time is different. Is that what makes that storytelling? Yeah, I think there's a few things that make it storytelling. So there's no set of rules, right? I can tell you from my own experience, but I don't learn things off. So I tell a lot of the old myths and legends and folk tales and fables and all of that I don't learn them off

because this happens so this that I was talking about earlier this space between us and everyone else and that's what feeds it so that changes my rhythm and my pace and whether I tell it for five minutes or ten minutes and whether you add humor or not and all of these kinds of things so stories alive and it comes it I think it should come out different every time. There are some traditions around the world, like in China they have the tea house tellers. I met one of them at a festival and he was appalled at how much we move. Because when I tell stories I'm jumping around and all of that and when

he tells stories he sits and he's got a table and he's got a fan and he uses the corners of the table. He puts the fan down and his body will make a triangle and he will stay like that and deliver. Then he will pick up the fan, he'll make a move and then he'll deliver the next line, then he'll put the fan down. And everything is choreographed and every line is the same that he was taught and has been taught for 10 centuries.

So I think the story, like the storytelling that I know that we know from Ireland is there's the K'Kul'an story, right? And there's the way you tell it, and then there's the way your friend told it, and then there's the way Eddie would tell it. And it's always distilled through the body and the mind of the storyteller, right? And it's that job and that responsibility of the storyteller

to make sense of the story in the now because we have to interpret what's coming through. Some of this stuff is really old, right? Some of it is wisdom, some of it is knowledge, and some of it is stupidity dreamed up in Kirk, you know, when it gets passed on, it becomes law. Like the amount of people, when I think of the amount of people who suffered with the idea of hell because this one guy knocked himself out, do you know what I mean? So like, it's, so because you're telling that story, you're starting to rupture this, I would say concrete vision that bound so many people up

in a very horrific and painful, like in Ireland anyway, kind of imprisonment. So that's the storyteller's role is to sit with, do we need this now? What do I tell? What's in service to the community? And then bring that alive in the moment. So yeah, no books, no script.

It's all in long-term and short-term memory. And yeah, you see what comes out. Do you ever think, because what I find really interesting there is when you compared with say our tradition and the tradition you described there, the Chinese tradition. Yeah.

Sometimes, so what I always think about and whenever I speak to an Irish writer, the question I always ask is why do we punch so much above our weight as a nation when it comes to writers because there's a huge amount of Irish writers for a tiny country. And one theory that I have, I compare it, we'll say, to anyone who's from the African diaspora. If you look at the African diaspora, whether it be people who are enslaved and they found themselves in America or the Caribbean, without a doubt, anyone of the African diaspora, they punch above their weight

when it comes to music. And you can look at the culture of musical tradition. And specifically, if you look at, let's just take jazz music. What makes jazz music brilliant, not just jazz, fucking hip hop, also blues, consistent and continual change in improvisation and resistance to rules. Whereas Western classical music is like, here's the scale. The notes are based on Pythagoras. It's based on science.

You must sing from the same hymn sheet. No, no, no, no. This is classical music. So this performance has to be done exactly like this and the same as that before it. And that results in a stagnation. But then with a tradition that comes from Africa, it's like, no like, no fuck that. Where is the fun here? What are we feeling? Tonight's performance is different from tomorrow's performance because that's just how we do it. We do stories like that.

Yeah, we have to adapt and survive and thrive so I think the improvisation is part of that and also there is a huge amount of creativity at Ireland and it might be the lithium in the water. But I think we do punch above our weight but I think we like to play. We like to play so you look at St. Brendan going off in his boat or you look at the biggest, weirdest, darkest thing we can find and go let's go towards that and tell a story while we're doing it and set it on fire. You know, we just have a very mischievous nature and rules are the opposite.

So I've had to explain this to. So when I moved to England, I was really, I was really confused by how they cross the road. What do you mean? Well, like they go to the traffic lights and they wait for the green man. Yeah. And then you wait till the traffic stops because they might not stop and then you walk safely across the road. You do that every time. Yeah. So I had to learn how to do that to not get hit. Whereas in Ireland we

resent lights and we resent green men and stuff telling us what to do so we just march, at least in Galway when I was living there. So yeah it's... And also we have this thing of, it'll be grand. Yeah, yeah. They're not going to hit us because they'd have to stop, roll the body out of the way and it would slow them down.

They probably won't do that. Yeah. It'll be grand. Did you ever see a video online called English people giving directions versus Irish people giving directions versus Irish people giving directions. It's hilarious but it tells me so much about storytelling because they go to these people in London and it's a camera crew and they say how do I get to the bank and every person they stop the English people go oh the bank okay you go straight that way and then take

a left and then right and there's your bank, see you later. They keep doing it, they keep doing it. Then they go to Ireland and they meet this old lad at the side of the road and they say how do I get to the market? And then he goes, well you want to go down there but if you go as far as that tree you've gone too far because Jimmy McGinty's is over there. But then you might turn around and there might be a sheep at the end or there might not either. And they're not directions.

No. It's a story about the landscape. Yeah, it's a way of life. You know what I mean? You're getting someone's philosophy. It's useless if you want to go somewhere. Yeah, no, you can't get anywhere. But it's fantastic if you're holding the information

of the landscape. Yeah, you don't want to be in a hurry like. Do you ever think, sometimes I wonder if writing is a good thing or a bad thing. Writing's great, but also it can be a bad thing because when you think of the richness of I'm going to tell a story and instead of writing it down, the landscape tells this story or this is how I remember it. Or in indigenous Australian tradition where you've got the song lines and they can walk over miles and miles and that's

how they remember these things. How do you feel about writing? So once there was a king and he was a good king. He was a king of Egypt and I mean a good king was quite a rare thing in those days. So one day a runner comes running into the throne room and says, your majesty, your majesty, there's a god coming. And he said, which one is it? It's very important, you know,

is it the god of war and whatnot. And he said, it's Thoth. And the king was happy, because it's the god of wisdom. So he still might get killed, but maybe they get a good chat beforehand. So he sets up a big feast, you know, to try and please the God. And the God comes along, walks in, terrifies everybody, looks at the King and says, are you King Thamus?

He says, yeah. He says, I have a present for you. And he brings out this box. And he says, before you open it, we're going to walk your city and you're going to show me why you're a good King. Let's go. So they start walking, this King and this God, and you're gonna show me why you're a good king let's go so they start walking this king and this God and they're walking along and they turn a corner and there's all these women and they're

singing they're praise singers and the God says you have good singers he says King says yeah well we pay our singers you pay your singers he says yeah well when they sing they make our hearts light and happy. And the God says, is singing the greatest of all the arts? And the King says, I don't know. He says, good answer, come on. So they walk on a bit further and they see a man and he's painting this huge mural on the side of a building, much like you'd see around Bristol. And he says, that's a very good painting. You don't pay your painters as well, do you? And the King says, we do, yeah. Why? He says, that's a very good painting. You don't pay your painters as well, do you? And the king says, we do, yeah.

Why? He says, well, because when we see through the eyes of the artist, we see the world a different way. We clean our own eyes when we look through their eyes. Is it the greatest of all the arts, says the god? I don't know, says the king. They come back around, they're going up towards the throne room and there's these women dancing

and they're throwing their bodies up into the air. And he says, you're fantastic dancers. I'm guessing you pay them as well. We do, says the king. And why do you treat them so well? He says, when they twist their bodies, we see what's possible in the world. We're inspired to great heights. And I don't know if it's the greatest of all the arts. I know you're going to ask me and I don't know." And the God starts laughing and he says, I'm playing a trick on you. I brought you the greatest of all the arts. And he opens up the box and out spills paper. And on the paper are all these marks. And the King says, what's that? And the God says, this is writing. My wife invented it, but I brought it to you. And I give it to you.

I give it to you now, so that you can teach your people to write. And the king says, why? He says, because of all the knowledge in their heads, you teach them to write, they'll write it down, and your people will be famous forever. And the king takes all the paper, puts it back in the box. Don't offend your greatness but I'll say no. He says, what? You refuse the gift of a god. And the king

says, if my people write down everything they know, they will forget everything they know. And that was from Plato. That's from Plato. That's Socrates and Plato. The beauty of that is they're talking about writing and that's the exact same anxiety that all of us have about the fucking Internet. Exactly. Exactly. And there's a point to this, right, because we've been doing this for as long as we can remember but we're all starting to notice what's happening when we do this or when we

write things down. My memory is gone because I don't need it anymore because I've got Wikipedia. I'm not using it. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the point, right? It's the muscle of it. But we're also forgetting how to do this.

We're forgetting these small communications because we have also, you know, along with you, I'm very worried about this. this is my impersonation of a phone where we have access to more information now than we've ever had ever and there's no processing time none so I mean I know you all know this but I just think it's worth saying it again because we used to have time to think things through and if information doesn't get processed it doesn't turn to knowledge or wisdom so there's this there's this thing your brain does you know about the default mode network no oh I love this right so I met a neuroscientist and she gave me this gift this is the gift she said you

ever have that thing where you're standing in the shower or maybe you're going for a walk or you're not doing anything you're not looking at your phone you're not reading you're not watching telly but you're also not really doing anything and you get one of those aha moments. Yeah. Right? The epiphany, right? She said the reason you get that is because your brain goes into something called the default mode network and there's more parts of your brain connected than at any other time. They call it mind wandering or daydreaming as well. Your brain is doing more work in

that moment than it's doing at any other time. You're doing your deep thinking, you're strategizing, you're reflecting, you're decision making. But because we're here, we're taking in all the information about all the everything that's happening all the time, the deep thinking isn't happening. And so the quality of our thinking and our ability to remember what we're thinking is swiftly going out the window. So it's not going to be the companies that do it, right? Because they have profit in mind, it's up to us, right? There's one bit we get to own,

and that's what we have inside of our heads or in our hearts, right? So they're gonna keep colonizing that unless we create a little bit of space so we can wander around and talk to crows and stuff. You're spot on too, because... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When you you refer to what you're speaking about there is basically like our attention and our attention another word for our attention is our data and that's

what the billionaires are getting when like the whole purpose of an app is how can I get the most of your attention possible because the longer you're on this app the more I can harvest that data and the more money that they can earn You know, so it is our attention. I Want to tell you a little story that before we break for so they can have a pint in a piss You're just you'll enjoy this. It's a little it's a theory that I have that you'll enjoy. So Have you ever heard of the story that the goddess Shunock and the origin of the Shannon River? No. OK, so in Ireland, there's this this huge fucking river,

the Shannon, right? It flows through limerick, massive, massive river. One of the things I adore about storytelling and folklore is that you can't just have a river or a mountain. It needs to have a goddess or a god attached to it and that was our way of doing geography in the absence of writing. So the origin of the River Shannon is that somewhere up at the top of Ireland, near the border or around the north, there was a spring, an ancient spring. And in Irish mythology, we believe that a spring is where knowledge comes from. Any spring where minerals and bubbles in particular are coming up from the

water, that was the source of knowledge. That was the portal to the other world where all the knowledge exists. And what I love about that too is it kind of makes sense. Because 1,500 years ago, you can't go into a chemist and get baraka but you can and you don't have access to a clean source of water that's a difficult thing to get so if you can find yourself a natural spring or a well of which there's a lot in Ireland you're literally talking about water deep deep underground with zinc magnesium all these things our brains need and you can get it there so the poets used to hang around these wells in order to get this water. And they believe that's where inspiration came from.

But maybe they just had healthier brains because they were better nourished. You know what I mean? So there was this goddess called Shunock. And Shunock wanted to be the fucking best poet in Ireland. She wanted to write the best poetry. And she was like, the only fucking way I'm going to do this is I need to get at those bubbles at the bottom of the well. Fuck this drinking shit. I can see where those bubbles are. I want to go down and get them and get to the source.

And if I can do that, I'm going to write the best poem. So it's this tiny well and it's up at the north of Ireland. And Seanach says, fuck it, I'm going in. well and it's up at the north of Ireland and Seánach says fuck it I'm going in. So Seánach jumps in and swims and swims to get to the source of where the bubbles are coming from which she knows is that that's the other world. But whoever's guarding the other world is like fuck you Seánach you're getting too close you're not getting all the knowledge so the spring gets angry and it fucking blasts her into the air with all the water and Shona is miles in the air and then she crashes down and dies and

the spring overflows and that's Shona to Shannon River and it carries her body all the way down to the Atlantic Ocean But also what's carried in that water is knowledge and all the rivers in Ireland in mythology carry and hold knowledge and information but now all the fucking multinational corporations in the world are bringing their data centers to Ireland right to use our water and rivers but what the fuck's in the data center the internet all the knowledge of the world is being held in data centers in Ireland and they're using our ancient water to do the same shit. It's not mad, isn't it?

Can we stop them? I know we should stop them, yeah. I don't know if you have an issue with data centers over here, but in Ireland... Well, we have an issue with water here, because there's lots going on with people.. Oh really? Yeah, yeah, we're having trouble swimming in the water here. Well in Ireland, so we don't, our water is free which is a good thing but the problem is is that because our water is free and because you don't have to pay tax if you're a multinational corporation in Ireland, you have your Googles and your Amazons and they're putting these gigantic data centers and data centers, it's the internet, it's where you

store the fucking internet and the internet is hot, it's very warm, so you need water to cool it down. But one data center can use the water of three towns, so it's terrible for the environment, but the internet, the brain of the world, relies upon Irish water, this ancient thing that holds knowledge. It's beautiful and horrible at the same time, but I love the synchronicity between the two things. That's gorgeous. I'm going to, we stayed a little bit too long now. They were supposed to get an interval 15 minutes ago.

Sorry lads, sorry. You can have a gentle pint and a piss, and we'll be back out in about 15 minutes for more chat about stories. Dog bless. Let's have a little uh let's have an ocarina pause now hope you're enjoying that that chat there. Let's have a little ocarina pause. I've got my my otter, my otterine, my ceramic otter so I'm gonna blow into this otter's ceramic anus and you'll hear an advert for something. Ooh. Ooh.

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That was the ocarina pause. Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This is a listener funded podcast. This podcast is how I earn a living. This is how I make my wage. It's how I rent out my office. It's how I pay my bills.

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Some upcoming gigs. Some upcoming gigs. some upcoming gigs. You know I'm taking the summer off from gigging. I'm not doing much. You can see me at the Edinburgh Book Festival if you're over in Edinburgh, that's in August sometime. What else have I got? Fucking Electric Picnic.

Look, if you're at Electric Picnic, come and see me at a LivePod guest. I actually have a wonderful guest for Electric Picnic. I can't wait to chat to this person. So I'm looking forward to that, even though I hate festivals. 15th of September, the Cork Podcast Festival. I know that's a festival,

but for me, it's just a gig in the Cork Opera House, which I love doing. I love the Cork Opera House. So 15th, and check out the gig in the Cork Opera House, which I love doing. I love the Cork Opera House. So 15th... And check out the rest of the Cork Podcast Festival, because the lads who run it are pure sound. So 15th of September in Cork. I'm going to have a class guest for that too, actually.

But 15th of September, come to Cork, to the Cork fucking Opera House, whatever it's called. Then what else have we got? What month is the 11th? Is the 11th November? That's November isn't it? The 11th is November. Yeah. The 2nd of November. I mean Claire Morris in Mayo. This is the nature of it. Look, one minute I'm setting out Hammersmith Apollo, doing big gigs in Bristol, and the next minute I'm up in Clermorris in Mayo apparently in November 2nd. You know what that is now? That's my agent being a greedy bollocks.

And I bet you I would have agreed to that gig while I was on my bicycle. I'd have gotten an email while I was cycling. Couldn't see it and agreed to a gig. And now I'm looking at my sheet of gigs. So I'm nothing against Mayo, Clare Morris. It's just, I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't, fuck it.

Fuck it, I haven't been to Mayo in about two years. So on the second November, 2024, I'm doing a live podcast in Clare Morris in Mayo. And then what have I got? I'm doing Vicar Street. I mean, I don't know why I'm plugging gigs in fucking November, lads. What are we now, July? And that's probably not even on sale, is it?

I'm doing Vicar Street on the 19th of November. Back to the live podcast with the fantastic Claire Murphy. This second half is actually more cracked than the first half. So we were chatting backstage and I think we were being a pair of greedy Irish pricks talking about our fine oral tradition and the thing is is something I'm always trying to, when I'm over here in particular, I feel really fucking sorry for English people. I feel, no, I'm serious. I feel sorry that it's so fucking difficult for you to celebrate and have taken interest in your history and culture

without looking like Tommy Robinson. You know what I mean? We're up here, like, loving our history, loving our culture, loving our, and it's fine, because we were colonized, so when we're doing it, it's an anti-colonial act to do this. But, did any of you hear the podcast I did with Professor Carl Chin? That's why I brought Carl on. Carl is a historian of the English

working class and his whole thing is, no, no, no, there's a way to appreciate the language, the culture, to be proud of an Englishness that isn't just, I want India. You know what I mean? Yeah, there is, there is. You're living in Bristol a good while and I'm sure you're intermingling with storytellers from around Bristol. What have you learned about the English storytelling tradition? So they have at least an old, as old a storytelling tradition as we do, right? And so their folklore is really healthy. They've got loads and loads of folklore that they still tell. What they don't tell as much of but is coming back is their myth. So because what you were saying, it's all the stories of empire. So I found a story which some of you might know about how England got populated originally.

Does anyone know this one? So there's 33 women in Syria. And they are the baddest, most mischievous, most raucous, adventurous, wild women you've ever seen. And they're all sisters and their dad gets really pissed off because he can't control them. So he decides he's just gonna marry them all off on the same day and let the husbands take care of it, you know what I mean? Needless to say that doesn't work out because all 33 women

decide they don't want to be married. In some versions, they all kill their husbands on the first day. And in other versions, they simply escape, right? And the leader, she gets them all in a big ship and they set sail and they sail the boat themselves out into the ocean away from Syria, out to get anywhere at all. And they sail on and on and on

until they get to a beautiful island or where there are no people but there are these kind of demon giants but they're kind of hot and the 33 sisters are like yeah I could do this and the leader was was known as Alba and she gave the name Albian to the land and they all had a lot of babies and their descendants are right here. That is fucking lovely. Isn't that delicious? So England is founded by a bunch of absolutely raucous wild women. Who fuck demons. Fuck demons. Yeah. How old is that? So that got really popular in the 1700s.

They were telling it a lot. Some versions say it goes back to the 11th century. Some people said, oh, it was a remake. Somebody made it up. I mean, someone made up all stories. So yeah, I think it's anywhere between 300 and a thousand years old. That's amazing. There's an English storyteller, Dr. Steffi Harrop,

who's made this into a show called Queens of Albion and she started telling this around England. So the storytellers here are starting to pick up myth. They're starting to pick up the really old, because what we have to do, I was thinking about your word for the break about attention, right? And what we have to do is storytellers attend,

like what are you attending to? And storytellers attend to these threads and they start pulling them back in. So yeah, so I mean their myth is the same as one of our myths. So we've got Cesar, they've got Albion. So we had a woman in a boat as well and 150 women showed up to Ireland and there was only three lads. Didn't go well, didn't go well, the lads succumbed to the pressure of the great reservoir and they all died. So, yeah. You've got strong opinions about the work of Joseph Campbell.

I do. So, there's a thing called the Monomyth, right? Every fucking film that you watch on TV, nearly every story that you read, it follows this structure. Like Star Wars is the prime example. They worship this in Hollywood. It's a certain way to tell a story. It's, I'm probably going to fuck it up, but like, let's just take Lord of the Rings, right? Starts off with Frodo, he's the hero, he's living in the golf course place

at the start. Everything's beautiful in the golf course. Then a challenge happens. A challenge happens that means he has to leave the golf course and go somewhere else and he meets a mentor a Beardy Gandalf then they leave the golf course and go to a fire and There's a woods and then it all comes right around until everyone's in the golf course at the end That's every story that Star Wars. That's every every, that's a shit telling of the hero's journey but it's a circular structure of the hero's journey called the Mono-Mith and it's based on a fellow called Joseph Campbell who claimed that he studied all of the mythology

in the world and found a common theme that is this is how humans want stories to be told. You think that might have done a bit of damage? I think it's probably done a lot of damage, yeah. So I read Hero with a Thousand Faces and after I threw the book across the room a few times, I didn't read any more Campbell. So he might have written lots of other things that are great. So I'll just say that as a preface. So he was a white American man academic in the 50s doing this research. So when you think about how stories are collected, especially how myth is collected, so myth is sacred territory for most people, so how is he getting the myth? Even if you look at

Irish myth it's the same, how is it being translated, how is it being gathered? If it's being gathered by someone from outside of the culture, are they getting the right translation, all this kind of thing. So he looked at all the myths in the world and he found these commonalities. There are commonalities between all stories everywhere. Unfortunately, by creating this formula, we love to distill things down. There is a 17-point path to this story. We love that because it's fixed and then we know how to do it. So George Lucas fell in love with Joseph Campbell and they started being best buds and hanging out. And he wrote Star Wars based exactly on the model.

It's a good model because it works. It's a type of story that works, but it's one type of story, right? And then Hollywood decided, oh, that works. Let's just keep doing that. So now we have what I call the man with the gun. Okay. Which is the version of Hero's Journey. So you've got the white man with a gun, you've got call the man with the gun. Okay. Which is the version of Hero's Journey.

So you've got the white man with the gun, you've got the black man with the gun. Now you've got women with guns, so that's interesting. But it's not interesting because it's just the same thing, which is there's a call to adventure, but the answer to the call now isn't Gandalf and throwing the ring in the fire, it's usually find a gun and execute the problem,

and then you've solved the problem and you return then but you're changed. And I, first of all you can't do that, you can't take myths from other cultures and fully understand them. I will spend the rest of my life looking at other people's myths and reading them endlessly but not understanding them right, because you're not within that culture, so you've got to move with respect if you're treating other people's sacred territory. But don't boil it down to 17 points and say that's all there is,

because what we have now is we have this bizarre relationship to hero. It's a word we need to get rid of because it's not serving anybody. And also it's the idea that a single person, usually a man, is the only one that's gonna save the day. But what we know is that all cultures have stories about the community working to save the day.

Like there's this story from China, which is brilliant. A vampire attacks a village, a real vampire. So they're real, sorry to anyone who doesn't believe. So he's killing people, he's draining their blood and everything. And there's loads of them dying, they don't know what to do. So they get whatever money they can, they send three strong men that are left down to the city

to get some help. And more people are being killed as soon as the sun goes down. And then the three men finally come back and everyone's like, what did you bring? Is there an army? What'd you bring? And they turn around and they've brought a little old dude with a bag of books.

And the women are like, are you serious? And they're like, no, no, he's a wise old man. And the man says, is it a vampire? And the women are like, are you serious? And they're like, no, no, he's a wise old man. And the man says, is it a vampire? And the women are like, yeah, it's a vampire. So he goes, all right, here's what we need to do. Gonna need a volunteer, right? And everyone in the village is like, ah. But there's one guy who,

his sister was just killed and his parents, and he goes, I'll do it if I have to. And so he hands him these two bells. And then everyone goes to leave it and the old guy goes no no no no no no everybody come back everybody make a circle around the guy because he's gonna need all your strength and basically the vampire comes out as the sun goes down and he's told him just ring the bells that they can't handle the sound so he has a vampire in his face with blood and guts and the worst breath in the world breathe on I'm trying to break his will and the whole time he has a vampire in his face with blood and guts and the worst breath in the world, breathing on him, trying to break his will.

And the whole time he has to just bang the bells. And the whole time the village are around him chanting his name. And the vampire can't get past him, can't get out, can't get free, sun comes up, vampire dies. And the whole village rejoices. They grab the old man and the young man and collectively they'd saved themselves.

There are stories like that that we're not telling because we're so addicted to this idea that if we just get that hero, we did it to our NHS when the pandemic happened here, we're gonna clap for our heroes. The worst thing in the world you can do is call someone a hero because you're basically putting them up on a pedestal

so you can destroy them. So there's a whole, and also just to make another leap, I also think there is a tie between this connection to hero and the rise in solo shooters and lunatics with guns, because we see that as the only solution. This is the way all problems are solved in Hollywood. So we need to be making better stories on this.

As well. That's fantastic. If we look at the Joseph Campbell monomyth, okay, which is, as you said, an American white man looking at global myths and this one thing, and then American culture is fed to us via movies, but then you look at American imperialism like America's an empire, America's a fucking empire. It's not like the British Empire was where you were very obvious about it. It's like, we're going to take this country and put a Union Jack up and you have to speak

English. The Yanks don't do that. They use democracy and sphere of influence and you don't know you're part of the American Empire. You feel it. democracy and sphere of influence. And you don't know you're part of the American empire. You feel it. There's, I did a podcast on this, there's the golden arch theory. Wherever there's a McDonald's,

that's how you know you're within the American sphere of influence because they say that no two countries that have a McDonald's can go to war with each other. And then you look at Russia. When Russia invades Ukraine, what happened two months later? Fucking McDonald's pulls out.

You're not having any golden arches, you know what I mean? But if you look at the Monomet and the hero, that's what America is. America claims it's the fucking hero. Any global conflict, who's the one to sort it out? America, the hero, you know? And it's part of, it's the issue we're having right now at the moment because we have the narrative of America, you're the good guys,

you're supposed to sort it out. And now you've got Palestine. And it's like, I thought you're supposed to fix this America. I was like, no, no, no, not really. Yeah, we have to fix things like collectively. This is the shift that needs to happen. Go from the singular to the collective. Tell other kinds of stories, like the story you told about the river, right? So those stories don't get told. So we have to find the stories that aren't being told. 33 lunatics getting in a boat, you know,

and starting England. That's the ones we have to find because that's the antidote to the toxic narratives that we're dealing with. Well, that origin story as well of England is it flies in the face of what's happening in England right now. I mean, a boat of Syrian people came to England and intermingled and that you know what I mean?

Like, and now like that's the flies in the face. Like that's like so. can I tell you another one? Go on. This this isn't an English story, but just it fits what you were just saying. So do you know where I'm Freddie Mercury? Yes. Do you know what his religion was? No. So he's one of the Parsi people. They've got a few different names for it. So in the ninth century, they they're nomadic people. They've been traveling around.

They got kicked out of Iran and they ended up in India. Couldn't have two more different languages, right? So they all show up on the shore, a bunch of refugees, and the king hears about a bunch of refugees on the beach. And he's like, you know, he gets his advisor and he goes, look, we don't speak their language, we're gonna have to find a way to tell them that we're full. And so the advisor goes down, he's thinking all the way down

and he gets down and there's all the refugees and they're wrecked and tired and they're standing there. And a man comes towards him, he's obviously the leader of this people. And so he takes a cup and then he takes a little satchel of milk and he fills the cup right to the brim so there's no space. And he hands it to the leader of the Parse people to say, we're full, there's no space for you. And he reaches into his bag, the leader of the Parsi people, he takes out a little sack of sugar, he gets a spoon,

puts a spoonful of sugar into the milk, mixes it and hands it back. And he takes that to the king and the king says, if they're smart enough to do that To make the promise that if we let them stay that they will make make life sweeter for us We best let them stay and that's the creed. They that is fucking beautiful And you see oh my god, how old is that that that's ninth century, but look at how that makes you feel right? Look, so this is this is story telling

This is the power that it can transmit directly into somebody's body a belief system and emotion loads of lovely delicious neurochemicals and you just suddenly all feel really good this is why do you know this is why we be at us 9th century I think for 7th have you ever have you ever heard examples of how we'd say folklore has been weaponized by colonial powers? Well, Germany. What did they do?

I don't know enough about this, but I know that no German storytellers will tell me any German myth. And every time I bring it up, so I go over to Germany sometimes and I teach their storytellers, they have a lovely year and a half course there. And I'm like, I was telling them all about Irish myths and the gods and it's amazing when you hang out with myth because you feel really great And they're all like it sounds very nice And I was like well you choose not do you have myth I mean this is you know you got myth in Europe They're like we don't tell I

Was like oh, okay. You seem very I mean you seem very uptight there. Do you want to tell me what happened? They're like Hitler What so apparently Hitler weaponized the them. I mean I knew he was big into it. I don't spend too much time reading up on psychopaths. I have seen some Nazi iconography that looks... They're big into their symbols and all of that. Yeah. I think he took the gods. A goddess. I think he took them all and erect them with his bad thinking. Right. So no they can't celebrate them. They can't. Yeah they can't tell their mitts They probably need to take them back and clean them up. Mm-hmm because mitt isn't supposed to be used like that That's that no one. Yeah, fuck that. It's that you know, I mean, yeah. Yeah, did you ever hear about them?

the CIA and the Philippines say more so Just that the vampire business you were talking about right so vampires is Just the vampire business you were talking about, right? So vampires, it's a theme you actually see in a myth in a lot of Asian countries. You get vampires. So I think this was the 1950s, right? And America had some type of influence on the Philippines.

And they were concerned that there would be like a Philippine IRA. They were like, we don't want the people who are farmers and stuff to get together and decide to fight us. So how do we stop that in advance? So the CIA came in and studied the local folklore and mythology of the Filipino people. And they found that certain farming communities were fucking terrified of vampires. They were afraid if you go out into the forest, the vampire will get you.

They were fucking terrified of this. And these are people, it's the 1950s, they might not have access to writing. This is their folk belief, this is their world. I'm fucking scared of vampires, these are real to me. So whenever a pocket of potential rebels might pop up in the Philippines, a bunch of people get together and say, fuck it, let's invent an IRA, let's fight the Yanks. The CIA would go into that village at night time and they would kidnap people, drain the blood

from their bodies. I'm serious, you can look this up. Drain the blood from their bodies, put holes in their necks, hang the bodies upside down outside the village. The villagers would wake up, see their relatives who have been killed by vampires. Then the CIA would record the screams of the person as they were being tortured, put the speakers up in the trees, and then play the screams. And the people, they don't know what a fucking speaker is. So they would weaponize fears within folklore and literally, they did it like,

you can look that up, look up CIA, Philippine vampires, that's a fucking thing they did. In the Vietnam War also, the Vietnamese people, I think it was a form of ancestor worship. They believed that if someone died who was close to you, that they would exist in the forest. But if this person was unhappy in the afterlife, you could hear their screams through the forest. So the Americans during the Vietnam War as a type of psychological operation, they would torture Vietnamese people, people local to the village, record their screams,

and then play those screams in speakers through the nighttime. But the people in the village, they might not know what a speaker is. So this is their folk belief. And they thought that their relatives were screaming from the other world. And that's not conspiracy theory. That's conspiracy. And again, you can look that up. That's that shit that happened. The Brits did it in the north of Ireland. In the 1970s, during the period of the satanic panic, you know, where everyone was scared of fucking

satanic rituals for some reason in the 70s, when there was, we'd say, an IRA bomb or there was an IRA shooting up in Belfast or in Derry, MI5 used to sneak in at night time. And wherever there was a shooting, they would put like pentagrams, they would put satanic witchy stuff candles and then the next day people would associate IRA shootings, IRA bombings with a satanic thing because they were like these people are Catholic maybe that would turn them off the IRA. So the weaponization of folk beliefs, Pischogs, the use of fucking magicians in colonization. When, yeah, when Britain was colonizing,

and the French did it too, I think fucking Houdini might have actually been involved in this. When Britain was colonizing Africa, they would go to a village, we'll say, and there might only be 16 British soldiers, and there's a huge village of African people. So the British were like, okay, how do we take this over? We might lose in a fight because there's lots of them and not that many of us. So some of the British would travel with Victorian magicians

and what they'd do is they'd go to the village, the village had never seen white people before, and the magician would be dressed as a soldier and he'd have like a rock, but underneath the rock is a fucking magnet, right, a magnet that he can turn on and off. And they'd put like an Excalibur sword into it. And then they'd go to the village in Africa and they'd say, bring your strongest man. The strongest man would come down, they'd say, take the sword out of that. And he'd be trying and he fucking couldn't. And then they'd get the tiny, weak little, tiniest British soldier they have. And he'd just take it straight out. But really, the magician has released the magnet.

But then the people in the village are like, fuck this. I don't know what the fuck these, I don't know what they are. The Spanish conquistadors did this. Yeah, very much so. They took the myth. They used horses. Yeah. When the Spanish were colonizing parts of Central America and South America, the people there had never seen horses.

Horses didn't exist. So when they would come on horseback, the people would perceive it to be one creature. This isn't, it's not a man on a horse. I've never seen that. This is one terrifying thing and I'm not fucking with that. Yeah. Yeah, so it has been weaponized. So I'm gonna tell the other side of that story.

Go on. Which is, it's absolutely been weaponized, but it's also the secret way with which we carry forward knowledge. So I can't remember which country this happened in, forgive me, some place in Africa where they're having trouble with their elephants. They're having trouble because they want to preserve their elephants, but their elephants are also in the habit of running and destroying these tiny farms. Farms are only one acre.

And so it's a difficult position because the farmer only has this one acre to make enough food for their family. And if the elephant who's getting hungry, whose land is being pushed by the cities they're expanding, needs to find food, will run into the farm, right? So they need to scare away the elephants without killing them, but the farmers are just killing them because that's the quickest way to solve the problem. And then someone remembers an old story and there's an old folk tale about the elephant and the bee. And in this story is very simple and it's just this idea that elephant, basically the wisdom in it is that elephants are afraid of bees, right? And so

a scientist gets a hold of this and she designs beehives with no bees in them. She has, because it's expensive to have a beehive and they can't afford it, so they've got one real beehive and four fake ones on the edge of the acre of land just to see if it would work Elephants come in they hear the buzz of one bee and they flee Wow, and so they're able to then repeat that on every farm that they can within that distance With the money that they had to just build little beehives with just enough bees to make a little bit of noise and the elephants flee the elephants stay alive the farmers stay fed all because of a folktale. And no one died. But that's something, you know, and we've been doing that in Ireland for, you know,

we've been doing that in each country, the folklore just keeps carrying the wisdom doesn't it? It carries the wisdom but a big hot take that I have and I've gotten to the point now where I've nearly said it on every fucking live podcast, but I have to repeat it. My belief, based on this, I'm nothing other than a gut feeling. I think that folklore and mythology exists within the human animal to keep us in line with systems of biodiversity. You know what I mean? Oh, that's so good. I think that's why it exists. Because if you think of the example I often give in,

it was illegal, punishable under the law to kill a white butterfly in Ireland up until the 16th century, because people believed that white butterflies contained the souls of dead children. But it's a great idea not to fuck with butterflies. They're pollinators. Saint Bridget and her bees.

Saint Bridget, well, we say Saint Bridget, but we mean Bridget the goddess, who ye had as well. Bridget kept bees in the other world. So remember I spoke about the other world earlier. You can access the other world in a spring under the ground, but also in Ireland we believe that the other world existed beyond the mist. So when the fog and the mist would come, if you go through that,

you can pass into the other world. And the myth around Bridgette, Bridgette was the goddess of the earth. And people really fucking respected her. People looked at bees going to plants and was like, what the fuck is this about? They're mad there. So you're telling me the bees go up there and all of a sudden there's an apple. That's fucking mad. They didn't know what pollination was. They're just like, this is incredible. So the story they came about with was those bees, they fly through the mist and they belong to Bridget.

And Bridget is over in the other world with her magical garden and she's priming these bees and they travel here and that's why we have food. Don't fuck with them bees. If you fuck with those sacred bees, it's a good idea not to fuck with bees. Science agrees that we knew that we knew that. We knew it all the warnings about don't cross the land at certain times of night. Don't cross this field. There's a ring of trees.

There's a ring of stones. Whatever you know, you said earlier, you don't believe in basic. All of this is ways for us to protect the land. I went and did a session on the Aran Islands, right? I was invited to go tell a bunch of stories to a bunch of Swiss tourists, and because they were shipped there to be Swiss, and but they're all the locals there, right?

So the locals were the ones who were doing the dancing and doing the basket weaving and everything, and then all the Swiss tourists get bundled up and put into their bus and shipped back down to their accommodation. And I'm sitting there and it's just me and the locals and they look at me and they go, do you know any ghost stories? And I knew well enough what to do. I said no, because I knew they had much better stories than me and I was just going to shut the hell up and see what happened. Then they started talking and the stories that came out but one woman to your point one

woman said yeah we tried when we first came here we tried to build a house and we were someone came up and told us you can't build your house here because that's the path of the dead and if you build here they'll be walking to your kitchen so you need to move it over there by about 10 metres and they move the house. And I reckon that pathway is probably a pathway for otters, it's probably a pathway. Do you know what I mean? I think we protected wildlife and trees and plants in all of these ways, like you're saying, by wrapping them into stories but I've never heard a put like that. Myth is there to protect biodiversity. It is. And even something I did for the crack recently was

so there's this, you know, Yellowstone National Park. So in the 90s, they did this phenomenal thing. Scientists did this thing with Yellowstone National Park, which was biodiversity was collapsing in Yellowstone. Yeah, everything was dying. The rivers were dying. Everything was dying. The rivers were dying. Fucking, it was falling to shit. And this scientist came along and said, what if we bring back wolves? What if we just try bringing back wolves? And people were like, fuck off. No, let's bring back wolves.

So what had happened in Yellowstone is that humans had killed all the wolves. And the wolves were the apex predator. They were at the top. And when the wolves were gone, the deer started getting lazy. So now the deer aren't scared anymore. Wolves were there to cull the deer, to keep the numbers manageable, and also to make sure the deer were hardening.

If there's wolves around, deer aren't gonna chill out. But when the wolves were gone, deer started hanging out by the river and going, fuck that, I'm going nowhere. There's no wolves. They started fucking up the river with their hooves. They started eating all the young trees. The young trees didn't have a chance. Those trees roots, they held the river together.

So now the trees are gone. The river's muddy. Now the river's getting sick. There's plants dying in the river, there's fish dying, everything's fucked. They brought the wolf back. Within about 10 years, everything starts restoring, salmon start reappearing because the wolf had restored the system of biodiversity. So scientists did that and I found that amazing and it's a study that everyone looks at and they think it's incredible. I went looking for, I said I wonder what

indigenous people live there, what indigenous people live in Yellowstone and what I found was it was a people called the Crow Nation so then for the crack I went I wonder what the Crow Nation's mythology is like so I went looking and you know what their God is? A fucking wolf. So the Crow Nations mythology is like. So I went looking and you know what their God is? A fucking wolf. So the Crow Nation mythology, they've been living there for maybe a couple of thousand years. Their origin, the most important animal to them. In some stories it's a wolf, in other ones it's a coyote, but that's their mythology. That's not an accident. That's human beings looking at the land and going, that wolf up

there is fucking important and so important, we need to base all our mythology about it. Because when he's gone or when she's gone, we're fucked. Yeah, and that's why you have to walk carefully when you're walking in someone else's myth, because if you're not living in that land, you don't know the importance or the relevance of that wolf. Even my book there, I call the topography of Hibernica, because remember, we were talking earlier about Joseph Campbell. And when you arrive into another culture and you're asking for the mythology,

even if those people tell you that mythology, because you don't belong to that culture, you might not understand this. Or they might bullshit you. So the reason I call this Topografia Hibernica is there's a document called Topografia Hibernica and it was written in 1186. And Topografia Hibernica in 1186 was the document that Britain used to justify the colonisation of Ireland. Yeah. So a fella from Wales, he was a Norman, called Gerald of Wales. Yeah. I know his book.

Yeah, that's topographia hibernica. So Gerald headed over to Ireland, didn't speak the language and went on a fact-finding mission. And Gerald went speaking to people going, tell me the mythology, tell me this, tell me that. Some people lied to him, other ones he couldn't understand the stories and then he compiled this manuscript, Topographia Hibernica and went to the Pole Badrian who was English and said these Irish are lunatics. You know what I mean? He misinterpreted a kingship ritual. There was a kingship ritual in Ireland which did involve a horse. But Gerald got it wrong or someone lied to him. And in Gerald's topography of Hibernica, it's like I witnessed the kingship ritual.

This is how they make kings in Ireland. First off, they get the perspective king, then they bring in a horse, then he fucks the horse. After he fucks the horse, he chops it into bits with a hatchet. Then he gets the bits of horse meat and puts it into a giant bathtub. Then he boils himself in the soup of horse meat while fucking bits of horse meat and eats like a duck. Then all

the other men get in and they have a horse meat fucking duck eating orgy. And that's in Gerald's book from the 12th century. And he's going to the Pope going, that's how they make their kings, not like us with God. But then Adrian goes, grace, go over and civilise them. And that's the story of our colonisation. That's how it happened. We are mad, mad bastards with our crazy stories, but it was a mistranslation or just straight up lying

about our mythology. And as I was saying there about biodiversity and its relationship with folklore and its relationship with mythology, if you have strong beliefs about the land and these are associated with stories and superstitions, then you will respect that land, you won't exploit it. What does colonization do? You remove the language, you remove the culture, you remove the myths, and what happens now? The land is yours for the taking, it's capital. And that's what has has us right now in this position

we're in where the art is dying. Yeah, yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, a friend of mine ended up in Australia and she met guardian of the languages. This woman whose job was to protect the languages that were no longer being spoken. And she said, my friend was really amazed. She said, that's quite the job, you know. And she looks at her and she said, well, you're Irish.

And she said, yeah. And she said, so you know. And she said, what do you mean? She said, Well, if you don't allow someone to speak their own language, you you take the soul out of the person. And there's that there's that all these pieces that are that are missing, like like the English missing their myths, you know what I mean? There's all these pieces of us that are missing, that we have to start bringing back that aren't a product that don't cost anything that we can't't buy, that you know that don't have a tangible quantifiable value, we have to start bringing them back and we have to start tending the fabric and putting them all back together, putting each other back together, because otherwise you know we'll just, it's

our data and it's our barcode and that's what happens. And for ye as well, get stuck into some Anglo-Saxon mythology because some of it is fucking hilarious because what I adore about, now a lot of it ended up in Lord of the Rings because, watch his face, Tolkien was obsessed with Anglo-Saxon mythology, but there's a lot of Anglo-Saxon mythology that's really funny because the Anglo-Saxons are a bit like... imagine the apocalypse happens tomorrow, right, and then you arrive from Mars and you find Disneyland. That's a bit like the Anglo-Saxons when they came to Britain because a lot of the Saxons, they were from parts of Germany, forests. Some of them didn't have contact with Rome. So when they eventually arrived to England,

Rome had collapsed and you had cities like London that were falling apart. But the Saxons arrived in London and they didn't know what a city was. So when they saw London they assumed it was built by giants. So a lot of them were like, I'm not fucking going in there, I'm going to build a tree house. The giants are going to come back. And you see it too with, there's a fucking Anglo-Saxon, it's not Beowulf, there's another Anglo-Saxon poem, I think it was written by an abbot, I can't remember the name of it. But it's about this abbot. So all around England were ancient Celtic mounds

like we have in Ireland. So it would have been maybe a castle or wooden castle or a ring fort back in the day, but just a hill, an unexplained hill. And when the Anglo-Saxons saw these hills, because of whatever relevant serpents had in the part of Germany or Belgium where they were from, when they saw a mound they believed that within this mound is a coiled dragon and a lot of

gold. And you see that, I think it's in The Hobbit isn't it? Yeah, it's in The Hobbit. It's also in Welsh mythology. Welsh mythology is class too. Jesus, they're great. Do you want to bring the mic a little bit closer? Can you hear, Clary, you can? Hello, sorry. It's great fucking sound in here.

It's amazing. I forgot they were there. They were so quiet. Look, there they are again. Are you enjoying this? You're having crack. You're not bored. OK.

Sometimes it's hard to tell if they're captivated or if they're bored as fuck. Or asleep. It could be asleep. We don't know. Or asleep. It could be asleep, we don't know. Hey, hey. Hold on, I'd see if I had any other questions for you that I kept under my recorder. I'm very professional as you can tell.

The amount of fucking guests that come out and have to bring the questions that I have, because I've forgotten them. Oh, I'd love to, actually, yeah. How did you get started? How do you decide I'm gonna become a storyteller to have it as an artistic practice? I did not decide.

I think it decided for me. So I had no idea it was a job at all. I was writing all my life. I was writing and then someone read my writing and said, try storytelling. So I called up a storyteller and she was very kind and said, oh yeah, it's a thing. Do you want to come see what I do? Her name's Liz Weir. And I went up to the north where she was living and I shadowed her for three days, watched what she did. And I was like, oh,

it is a job. And then I sort of took a step back from it. And I was reading stories, but I wasn't doing much with it. And then I went and saw a man speak. Did you ever see John Moriarty? No, but I'm aware of him. Well, I had no idea who he was and my friend said, Come here, you're always talking about storytelling. There's a fella talking here at University of Galway. Do you want to see him?

So I showed up and it was smaller than this room, but it was big room, 400 seats and about 30 people in it late at night, no one there, you know, and this old fellow comes out and he's got the big hair and the wild face and he just stands there like a human bowl of a man and he just starts telling myth and like you, I was raised on Irish myth so I knew German and Gráinne and I knew all the stories. I never heard anything like what he was saying. He had a piece of paper like you have and it very quickly became redundant because the paper dropped away and suddenly the room disappeared. And

I had one of those experiences you get when you have a transcendental experience with art and the top of my head was blown off and he set a part of my brain on fire. And that was the, I didn't know at the time, but that was this kind of turning initiation point. And a few years after that, I was volunteering at festivals and things. But to be honest, it was my friends kicking me. And these two storytellers that I met,

they were like, come on, you're always talking to my stories, tell some stories. So we got together, bottle of wine, lit a candle. And I stood up and I told the first folk tale I'd ever learned when I was about 13. So I'm, what age was I then? I was like 20. No, I was nearly 30.

And I told it, and I swear, blind boy, it was like stepping into a river. Like the story just came through me. And it was just the most sublime feeling. And I stopped, and everybody was looking at me and I could see they had the story and I was in college I was on my last six months of college as a like mature student you know doing an English degree it's no good for anything and can't get a job and Spanish and so the last six months I was just doing my friends like do that again and so they invited more

people and then every time we got together in their house there were just So the last six months I was just doing, my friends would like to do that again. And so they invited more people. And then every time we got together in their house, there were just more people. And then it just so happened there was a bit of artistic revolution in Galway that year in 2006. So I had this great opportunity to just tell everyone I was a storyteller, that's what I did. And it went like snowball to avalanche.

Every time I told a story, this kind of world opened up and then I'd get another job and then I'd do another and it didn't seem right to get a real job so I just kept telling stories. Fair fucking play to you. That's how it happened. When you're telling a story, do you have an opening technique? Like something I always, when I'm telling or writing a story, what I always try to do is, how do I deliver an image to somebody that's so arresting that they must use their imagination? Like that story I read at the start of this podcast, the opening line, there's a donkey selling Christmas trees

off the roundabout. It's amazing, yeah. You have to think of that. There's too much detail. Donkey, Christmas trees, roundabout, you're there. If I can get you there, then it's about, where's that moment where you can get a person's head where they've left the room, they're in Imaginationland and then it's like come

with me yeah that's what I'm looking for is it the same with you like when you even when you were speaking about John Murray actually there it was how you described the room the place I'm there now take me wherever the fuck you want to go yeah yeah and there's some that's I hate to use the word magic but I'll use the word magic because then I want to say I'm a magician and I'll be getting different kinds of gigs. But there's a magic in it, right? But your opening image of your story was absolutely arresting, right? And we had to know, we had to know what happened. There's a way to do it even before you speak.

Go on. It has to do with all the ways in which the body and the space and the people are. So I spent years thinking about it. You absolutely can come out with an amazing opening line, but you can also, you can start out there before you get here. Once you get here, there's a combination of silent agreements that happen, because actually they're addicted to stories completely. So much as they want the arresting image, they're going to go with the least provocation.

You give them a tiny invitation, they're gone because they get access to their imaginations, which is the most intoxicating place they can go. So if you can make your, there's a whole series of steps, but if you can make your energy open and generous and you can connect to the story and to the people without fear, so you have to get past all your judgment and your nerves and all of that, because all of that exists, I still get nervous, right? But there is so much fun that I will do anything to go there and so will they. So as long as I remember that and prepare myself properly, like you do when you're getting into process, then getting there becomes a

kind of a step and then we all go to the other place together. And the language is important, the pacing, the content, all of that really matters, how you use your body, where you put your eyes, all these things matter. But it's a harmony of all the things and then you come back at the end and you let everyone go and they're safely back in their bodies. But they made the thing with us. That's the difference. So when you write, you're writing by yourself in a room and that's hard work. When we tell, we co-create. So I've brought the words, yeah, I've definitely got the words. But they've got the, so the words are the paint and they've got the canvas. And they issue the paint and they've got the canvas. Yes. And they issue the paint onto the canvas.

Mm-hmm. So you get, there's 1600 people here tonight, you get 1600 versions of that story. But the amazing thing is they have an individual experience and a collective experience at the same time. So with a room full of strangers, they are connected to everyone around them and themselves and their own creativity and their imagination and the story and expands their whole self they're filled with wonder and then they come back and they they slightly love everyone in the room a bit more because they've done this together. Yeah, 100%. And that's why it can change behavior and do you know what I mean? Like it's a it's a it's a

power and we we don't actually need screens to do it. No, and the thing is too is you're talking about something that's essential to the human condition. We didn't need technology for this. What we needed was our voice and language and that's it. So this is... And some ears and a fire and... Yeah, but it's probably up there with water and food. Yeah, a lot of people say that, like a lot of the great writers like Ursula Le Guin and all that, they say that we need the stories as much.

Because like you said earlier, it's what helps us carry culture. Like how do you survive on the mountain top if you're doing your rite of passage without the story that told you how someone else got through that rite of passage? Stories keep us company when we're, you know, you saw with Covid as well, you know, when we're in isolation, when we're locked down. I'd love to share a story, but it's not mine. I'm going to quote the woman who comes from, just to give an example. Her name's Jess Wilson. She's an amazing nurse.

She runs a hospital in Wales. And you just need to look her up, Jess Wilson. But she was working in a psychiatric unit as a nurse and they had a very volatile patient who was very violent, who required high doses of meds and to be restrained, that kind of level. And they were at their wits end where she wouldn't sit still.

And Jess turned around one day and said, "'If you sit down, I'll tell you a story.'" And the woman just got real defiant, but she sat back and she went, go on then. And Jess was in a really difficult position because she didn't think the woman was gonna take her seriously. So she suddenly had to find a story.

So she reached into her brain, back to her childhood, remembered a story she had been told when she was nine, which is Baba Yaga. So some of you know Baba Yaga, the Russian witch, yeah? It's a really visceral story, but she could barely remember it. This is years ago. So she's going once there was a witch

whose name was Baba Yaga, and the woman just sat into the bean bag, and with each sentence she sat more quietly. And when she got to the end of the story, the patient looked up at her and said, tell it again. They didn't have to medicate her. She started doing it with other patients. She wrote a masters on it.

But she started using story instead of medicine, instead of restraints as a way of calming the psyche of somebody who's disturbed. I have endless examples like that around the world where people have done this. When you say it's as important as food and and water, I mean it is. I mean you think of the importance of a story to a two-year-old. A two-year-old, like the thing is with sleep, that's a skill we have to learn and we learn how to sleep

when we're very young and little children need stories to sleep. Because when you said there about that lady again, I saw her as two years of age because that's what little kids do. Can I have that again, please? And then they fall asleep because their nervous system is nice and calm. You know, something that I find useful with stories as well is so loads of you probably found my podcast because of mental health issues over fucking COVID. Loads of people, I don't know, fucking panic attack, depression, whatever the fuck,

and sometimes even doctors recommend my podcast. Seriously, yeah, to go listen to this fella. Listen to him speak about fucking whatever and some people find this helpful. And the thing is with myself, so I trained to be a psychotherapist for three years. I didn't fucking qualify because I had a song called Horse Outside, so I left for that instead.

But I did my three years of psychotherapy. I learned about psychology, transaction analysis, Carol Rogers. I learned all this stuff. And I fucking adore it. I love it. That's what made me who I am today. But I realized not a lot of people knew about psychology. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, people only find out about this when they go to a therapist, but it's not part of everyday discourse. But also, a lot of the language around psychology is quite academic and exclusive. It's for professionals to talk to professionals. So what I started doing with my podcast was going, how can I speak about something like transaction analysis, something like attachment theory, but how can I do this in really funny, interesting

stories? And then people are, it's touching with them. And then I found that you had, I was getting mails then from people who were lecturing this stuff, going, is it okay if I play your fucking CBT podcast in my lecture? Because, but the thing is, I'm saying, nothing I'm saying, I'm not inventing anything. I'm reading books of psychology. Someone else has done the work, the research, years of it. What I'm doing is explaining these difficult theories in very accessible entertaining metaphor. Fucking storytelling.

And now you can connect with it and you can take it on board and it feels like you just washed your brain. That's storytelling. And that's the medicine. That's the fucking medicine. That's the medicine. Yeah. Yeah. It's ten o'clock, right?

Technically we're supposed to be kicked out by now but fuck that. Yeah go for that one there for the crack usher thank you. Hello. How are you? What's the crack? I was wondering if there was a storytelling themed fancy dress party, what would you go as? Oh my God. Koo Collins warp spasm. They don't know what that is.

You have to tell them what it is. No, you tell them. Do you know, can you talk about Koo Collins warp spasm? I can. Go for that. I can, and all the while I'm talking, I want you to imagine Blind Boy as this. So when Kukulun goes into his warp spasm,

he gets the rage on him. He goes blood red from the tips of his toes to the top of his head. His hair goes straight up into spikes. His hair is so sharp that if you land on it, it will cut you and you will die. One eye gets big and one eye retracts into his skull so that he can see all the outer world and the inner

world. The knee switches places with the back of the knee. The calf switches places with the shin. The toes with the ankles. And in this state he vibrates at such a frequency that he can kill thousands of people with his bare hands so much so that he usually ties one hand behind his back to make it a fair fight. That's what he's going to go at. And you know, something that I love about Irish storytelling is we're wonderful liars. It's all exaggeration and lies and hyperbole isn't it? I love that about it. What would you dress up as if it was some type of storytelling?

Well if you're going as his warp spasm I'd have to go as the Morrigan's crow. Go on. Do you know the Morrigan is the goddess of war and death and she would send out her three huge crows to cruise over the battlefield and if everyone wasn't dead, they'd call out. It's a terrible thing to go to a party as, because I wouldn't be able to talk to anyone.

I realize as I say, maybe I should go as Bridget's cloak actually. Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean? Because Bridget's cloak, you know, she was trying to get the land and he said you can have as much land as your cloak covers. So she goes, all right, then she throws the cloak and it gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So I'd be the person at the party who just had like an enormous blanket.

You're the perpetual cloak. I'm the perpetual cloak and you're the warp spasm. Brilliant. Do we have mics up? Is Usher up there? Pick someone from up there for the crack and I can just imagine what you look like. Very good. Joyce said, very good. Jais said that you could reconstruct the universe using his words from Finnegans Wake. He was always a humble man. Yeah. The entire universe. I haven't even had a crack at Finnegans Wake because it's too terrifying. I'm very familiar with Ulysses.

I adore Ulysses. Now, one thing that was said about Ulysses is, Joyce wrote it when he was in France, but they say you could recreate Dublin by just reading Ulysses, and I find that beautiful. He wrote such a wonderfully, and it's so Irish, it's the oral tradition, he wrote an exact fucking map of Dublin while he was in France,

and he did not have Google maps. He didn't even have photographs, you know. It was the mind's eye. I haven't tried Finnegans Wakes. I can't answer that. Finnegans Wakes scares the living shit out of me. I must have a go of it at some point, but I mean what I adore about Ulysses is you don't have to read Ulysses as an entire book if you don't want to.

And anyone who says to you, because Ulysses is considered to be, oh, this is the big highfalutin book. That's impenetrable. That's just for really smart people. Stay away from that. Fuck that. Ulysses is just your drunk Irish uncle at a wedding. That's all it is. Crack open Ulysses on any page you want and just admire the language. It's fucking beautiful. Ulysses, my God, like I did a podcast before on James Joyce.

What I did it on was his story. It's in Dubliners, The Dead. Oh yeah. The Dead. But you know what I love about The Dead? So not loads of people know this about James Joyce. James Joyce opened the first ever cinema in Ireland. Yes, the Volta Cinema, he opened it in 1914. So when James Joyce is writing to dead this short story,

it's amazing because there's multiple perspectives and angles. The man who opened the first cinema is trying to write a story imagining what cinema could be. Cinema at this point was only maybe five or six years old. Cinema was shit. It was mostly one camera and it was a play. But Joyce, when you read The End of the Dead where he's talking about the snowflakes over the grave, he's imagining a shot on a helicopter. He's imagining the possibilities of what cinema could be through the mind's eye. That's what I love

about Joyce. Joyce did cinema before cinema existed, and I would love to know what it felt like to read that at the time. I'd probably have just said, this is a lot of shit, like most of the critics did at the time, because it was too far ahead. It was too far ahead. He's got a full chapter about wanking on the beach. I'll take a question from down here because we do have a mic. At the back there with the... I like this, you're going like this. Usher, if you wouldn't mind at the back there. I'm so sorry, Usher, that you have to go all the way up back there now. I didn't know that this place was as big as it was. I thought there was only like 400 people

and then I came out and I was like, oh fuck. Yeah, no, I had a look. We do have to get a photo up there. They're very beautiful, aren't they? Oh yes, magnificent. I left my phone backstage like a prick. You don't look at your audience. I don't, I try not to.

Do you? Why? Why do you not look at your audience? I like to have a conversation with myself. I see. Pretty much. Rather than, and a bunch of people are allowed to listen if they want. I see.

But if I start talking to everybody then the old autism kicks in. Hiya! How are you? Hi, I'm good, how are you? What's the crack? So I've read a lot of Irish mythology and I find that there's a lot of, as you kind of mentioned before, like Jesus and Christianity kind of being pushed into it. I was kind of wondering when you tell your stories, do you find that you kind of tell the bits that are kind of relating to you personally

or general storytellers tend to kind of keep those bits and tell those bits and so every story is kind of relevant to who tells it and so do you find that there's never kind of like a go-to way of telling it because of everyone telling their own personal interpretations of it whether as to how... You mean when I'm talking about mythology now? Both really. Or when I'm writing my own fiction? Mythology, I'd say.

If I'm telling you a story about fucking cool calling, if I'm talking to you about Greek mythology, whatever it is, I don't tell it the way I read it. I tell it the way that's relevant to me and I feel comfortable changing certain details if it's still faithful to the story. I'll change, it's jazz music, I go jazz music with it. What is right for the audience at this time? You know what I mean? Yeah, and everyone who gathered those stories and wrote them down,

the only reason they're written down is because someone wrote them down. I know that's a really obvious thing to say, but just think about that for a second. The person who wrote them down had their own bias and their own lens and they just happened to fix it to a page and we trust the page as a source of authority so every storyteller has always interpreted it and but when I started telling myth I didn't think I could do that because I thought it's on the page and then I tried telling how could Cullen got his name and I had a full out-of-body experience so it was a choice. I can either

tell the sacred myth and tell it exactly as it was gathered back in 1907 or I can tell what happens when I try to tell Coughillan. I went with the latter. You went with what works for you right now. Yeah. But that's the way to do it. This is mythology. I think that's what we've been doing in Ireland for thousands, not in China, but in Ireland I think we play with our myth. And if you think of the thing too with Irish myth is, so you have an oral tradition, we don't know how long that goes back, then from 500 onwards monks decided to write

these down, they had to get Christ involved or else it was pagan. So that fucked it up. And then sometime around the 18th century, men started translating our mythology and making it about how can we get young Irish men to join the IRA and fight the Brits. So a lot of translations that we read in English, you find, why is it only Cooke Holland that's important? Why is it, like Cooke Holland's warp spasm there, that violence. That's also from a translation that would have been written in the late 1800s. And what does that say? What that says is, I know you're a poor farmer and you live in Wexford and I know the British army have guns, but you can do this and you can run towards.

And one example I always think of, I know people have to leave now, I'm just gonna leave this as the last thing. During the 1916 Rising, you might know, the 1916 Rising, it happened in 1916, let's call them the IRA, even though they weren't, they took over a post office and they led a rebellion against the British. They all died. It was blood sacrifice,

crazy in the middle of Dublin. Let's fight the British Army and lose. Let's sacrifice ourselves. One of the participants in the 1916 Rising, his name was the O'Rally and how he died was he came out the side of the general post office. The British soldiers were over there with machine guns and the O'Rahilly actually ran out and he ran towards machine gun fire. So he sacrificed himself. Machine guns are firing at him and his body ripped up to bits as he ran towards guns so that other people could escape behind him. Now that's blood sacrifice, that's him giving his body up and running towards machine

guns. His sister, she was one of the people who translated the mythology of Fionn Macaul and what she... No, no, no, not Fionn Macaulil, Cú Collin. She translated some of the Cú Collin stuff. If you look at her translations of how Cú Collin died, Cú Collin died by tying himself to a stone and fighting as they came towards him. So he would never fall down. He tied himself to a stone and swung and swung as attackers kept coming at him. That's how her brother died in 1916.

So that's what you see right there. That's how Irish mythology was weaponized as a tool of nationalism, I suppose you'd say. But then what's written out? The goddess, the stories of Bridget, the collectivism, individual heroes. The community. They're coming back though. All those stories are coming back. There's a woman out in the West called Carol Barrett and she's digging up all these fragments and I'm bringing up all these goddesses and bringing them up to the light. It's just their time. And what I want to see with mythology, I want to see it being brought back to nature. I want us to be afraid of bees again. I want us to be afraid of nettles. That's what we

need to, because biodiversity is collapsing and the climate is collapsing. We need to bring back the stories so that we have a regenerative attitude towards nature rather than one that extracts and exploits. So we'll end it there. We'll end it there because usually at the end of a live podcast I thank my guest and I thank the audience, but I always scream it really loudly and I don't think it's too pleasant to listen to. I want to thank my guest Claire Murphy. I want to thank the wonderful audience in

Bristol as well. But my guest Claire Murphy, the storyteller, that was a fantastic conversation. I'm definitely gonna have her back on again. I was so happy to have come across Claire's work and that she agreed to do the podcast. Check her out, Claire Murphy dot org, C-L-A-R-E, and also she is Story Claire on Instagram. Give her a follow and book her for the gig, whether you're putting on a large gig or if you're doing a corporate event. Have a professional storyteller, not only a professional storyteller, but she's more than a professional storyteller, not only a professional storyteller, but she's more than a professional storyteller. She's a natural storyteller and you can tell she cares deeply about the art. I'd love to see Claire reach bigger audiences and do brilliant things. She's fantastic. So I'll catch you next week.

In the meantime, rub a dog, blow kisses at a swan, genuflect to a heron, I'm off to Kilkenny to do a couple of gigs. I'm gonna have a delicious, freezing cold pint outdoors somewhere in the lovely July heat. I don't really drink anymore. I don't drink cans at home anymore. It's just hangovers aren't worth it.

I'm getting late 30s hangovers. A late 30s hangover, it's a three-day affair, right? And it's basically on the first day, you get your late 30s hangover. That's utter hell. That is absolute hell. Then on the second day, you get late 30s hangover. That's utter hell. That is absolute hell. Then on the second day you get the type of hangover that you would have gotten when you were 25 and then on the third

day you get the hangover you would have gotten when you were 19. So I don't have the time or patience for that anymore. Especially when like three fucking days. Fuck that. Not when I can be out meditating and walking and running and doing wonderful things like that. So I really pick and choose when I'm gonna have a pint. What I'm looking for is freezing cold glass. Nothing too fancy. A Marete or a Madri, a Madri even if I got it, or a fucking San Miguel. I like shit Spanish lager. If I got a freezing cold San Miguel from a fresh keg and I want to drink that outdoors in the heat of a July night, I'm going to do that and then I I'm gonna visit that 14th century statue that looks like Keith Duffy. That's all I want from life.

I don't want much more than that. Alright, I'll see you next week with a hot take. You I'm sorry. Thank you.