You Must Change Your Life

Do yourself a favor and listen to this episode of Weird Studies with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.

I don’t know what it was about precisely, except that it instilled a feeling in me that magic and the weird, and awe, might still exist in the world. If we are patient and quiet and persist long enough.

The episode is ostensibly about a deep reading of a poem I had never heard of before, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” by Rainer Maria Rilke. But you don’t have to have read it: They do it for you on the episode, and then talk about it. 

The poem is both a convincing case that inanimate art has a spirit of its own, and the call to the heroic is in all of us. The poem concludes with the line, “For Here There is No Place That Does Not See You: You Must Change Your Life.” A command from a stone from antiquity, the muscled torso of Apollo, that arouses you from your torpor and elicits action. Very sword-and-sorcery you might say. 

There are digressions on barbarism and He-Man and Skeletor, and references to RUSH and D&D. In and amongst philosophy and whether it is possible to derive an ought from an is. 

It touched many chords in me. 

The hosts are well-spoken and erudite but also fun and spontaneous. Just an amazing listen, even if I didn’t grasp everything they said after once through it.