leech@thethirdthing2017

Twists and Turns I Friday 7pm–  Let’s Twist Again with The Skeleton of Anarchy – “Ye are Many they are Few…Hang out with Leech  and turn the Twisted Yarn of History

Twists and Turns II Saturday 11am The Conversation is Getting Tense…
Past, Present and Future are before and after us! What are you on about ?
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” George Orwell

Twists and Turns III Saturday 4.15pm Enclosure
The philosophy walks with Chris Ellis and Leech used to roam freely over the land: now they will twist words with in tent. ‘Enclosure like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain…they even hung the moles for traitors” John Clare

Whose Land is it anyway? Saturday 8.30pm
Leech will host this plenary session drawing the twists and turns of the day together with reference to land ownership, custodianship, and the nation.  A time to pose a few questions…

 

Twists and Turns in the Tradition  Sunday 10am
Folk Tradition and the Political Song: recovering strands of the Stainsby School, a brief introduction to the ‘form of life’ that is revealed in folk song and tunings.

Handing on the Tradition Sunday11.40am
What is handed on playing folk song?

In Whose Trust ? Sunday 2.30pm
The twists and turns of the programme of the Third Thing lead us to here. Our final plenary session is a forum for questions about the future of the festival and the land. Come and join the discussion…

Twists and Turns IV : Sunday 4pm A Twist in the Tale
A final spin of the yarn with Leech

“The Earthwork” Stainsby

‘The village known as Steinesbei in the Domesday Survey was surrounded to the north by a semi-circular moat with banks and ramparts, approximately eight feet in depth.

Some of this still remains visible.

This is known as

“The Earthwork”

thethirdthing

Landscape and Memory

Source: thethirdthing

leech@thethirdthing 2015

The Hodcarrier of History

 

 

Earthwork Walks
Stainsby 2014

A hosted walk & talk will set out from the festival on Saturday and Sunday.

What Have We Got In Common?

In 2012 the first Earthwork walk led to the trough of truth by the ancient earthworks of Stainsby. Last year we walked the table of memory via Hodmire hill to the burial place of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.  This year we shall walk to the Common.

In this landscape of memory the acts of remembering, talking,
debating are transformed when we walk the landscape.

Each short walk & talk will be approx 1.5miles
Part 1. Saturday Rendezvous The Third Thing at 11.00am.
Part 2.Sunday Rendezvous the Third Thing at 1.30pm.

 

A Mire of Blood

I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim; Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two, He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
Next came Fraud, and he had on, Like Eldon, an ermined gown;
His big tears, for he wept well, Turned to mill-stones as they fell.
And the little children, who Round his feet played to and fro,
Thinking every tear a gem, Had their brains knocked out by them.
Clothed with the Bible, as with light, And the shadows of the night,
Like Sidmouth, next, Hypocrisy On a crocodile rode by.
And many more Destructions played In this ghastly masquerade,
All disguised, even to the eyes, Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips, Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown; And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw – ‘I AM GOD, AND KING, AND LAW!’
With a pace stately and fast, Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood The adoring multitude,
And a mighty troop around, With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword, For the service of their Lord.

from The Masque of Anarchy  Percy Shelley

Meeting in the Mire of Memory

     “Strange, friend,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.”
     “None,” said the other, “Save the undone years,
     The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
     Was my life also; I went hunting wild
     After the wildest beauty in the world,
     Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,
     But mocks the steady running of the hour,
     And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.
     For by my glee might many men have laughed,
     And of my weeping something has been left,
     Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,
     The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
     Now men will go content with what we spoiled.
     Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled.
     They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress,
     None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.
     Courage was mine, and I had mystery;
     Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery;
     To miss the march of this retreating world
     Into vain citadels that are not walled.

from

Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

Via Hod – Via οδ

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

The Ghost of Hamlet’s Father

A Spectre is Haunting Earth

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please;
they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.

Karl Marx

In the Mire

“The condition of man…is a condition of war of everyone against everyone”    

from Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes

 

The Table of Memory

O all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?
And shall I couple hell? O, fie! Hold, hold, my heart;
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!

Hamlet