Tuned Up

The next phase of the Well-Tuned Harp

Its quite funny watching where life decides to take you next.

I’ve always had hopes for turning The Well Tuned Harp into a slightly more insane and feral project. Perhaps introducing a healthy dose of The Empire Strikes Back into something that has been relatively New Hopeish in scope thus far. This past semester and absence from substack has proved to be just the push over the brink of sanity that I needed.

At the tail end of the academic year, after driving one too many times past the pawn shops and beaten up parking lots of town something switched on inside of me. Everything I had ever loved and written about, everything medieval and stained-sacred and resplendent that I had clung to in my studies was frantically busy gnawing a hole through my chest to get out. The knights were eager to take on the chain-linked fences and the spheres of Scipio, God bless them, were ready to hurl their influences upon every package of cheese-flavoured chips on the grocery store shelves. Likewise, the half of me composed of american scenery and corporations was equally clamouring for a go at the side populated with faerie.

In short, to quote Northup Frye, it was time for my medieval studies to be displaced.

Growing up in a military family and spending most of my childhood in europe, life often appeared in two stark halves. On one side was the beautiful things, the sacred things, including my medieval studies and research. The other side was my “heritage”, american suburbia and interstates. For the longest time both sides loomed incompatible. I am still working on that harmonization: a bleeding and coaxing of the stories I love into a world which is my heritage but it is time for The Well Tuned Harp to take its next steps across that divide as Ballads of a Modern Man. While this substack will still act as a “sort of digital bard, turning out writing, reflections and on occasion, perhaps a story or two to aid in the battle against discord, and the tuning of our souls to the love which moves the sun and other stars”…it is time to leave the contemplation at the fireside and set off into the wilderlands and parking lots of this world.

Here be dragons.

And pickup trucks.