https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=dXNGTXDwAoU
Alright, hey guys. So yes, I did misspell wood and then I changed it. I’m not good at this whole livestream thing. We’ll get there. So I shouldn’t have put it public before I was totally ready but that’s what I didn’t notice. So I figured that… Sorry, I just need to mute this. So I figured that I had done a stone carving but I didn’t do any wood carving with you guys so I’m going to show you a little bit of wood carving. So for those who have been following the story a little bit, I am actually starting a… I put online a icon carving class. And so this is the actual icon that I used to make the class but I made two at the same time and so the other one was finished. This one is not totally finished so I’m going to continue it with you guys. For those of you who watch the stone livestreaming, wood carving takes longer so I’m probably not going to finish now but I am going to kind of play around with it and show you guys at the same time and it will obviously give you an opportunity to ask questions. If you want to ask questions, I’ll be more attentive to the chat. I have a tablet next to me and so I can answer general questions if you would like. And at some point you might hear my wife because she said she might call me for something so we’ll see. Alright so this is an image of St. John the Forerunner and like I said this is the image that I did for the wood carving class. It was very interesting this whole wood carving class thing because I was supposed to go to Saskatoon to teach a wood carving class. Because of COVID it was kind of like semi-legal. It wasn’t totally clear whether or not we’d get in trouble for doing that so they asked me if I’d be willing to record the carving session and send it to them. So I thought okay yeah I’ll do that and I left myself a certain amount of time and I grossly misinterpreted how much time it was going to take me to make this, not to carve the carving but to do it by explaining and then to edit. And so the first week of Lent there were like 20 guys, 20 Catholic guys who had taken off work to come do this workshop but it was taking so much time that I wasn’t going to be ready to send them the different steps. So the first week of Lent I basically slept like two hours every day. You know it was pretty nuts. So I was able to put it all together. And so once I had put it all together I figured hey since I basically killed myself for a week making this I might as well try to put it online and see how people react. And the reaction has been pretty positive in terms of online as well. So alright. So Michael Olo says, welcome to Christian ASMR. Yeah a lot of people said that about the stone carving because you could kind of hear the scraping and the stone carving. You’re going to hear the same with the wood carving as well. You get that nice wood carving sound there. So you won’t get in, I won’t be showing you, obviously we’re already in the details here as you can see. You won’t get that really nice wood carving sound that you get. That’s not bad actually. So Emile Sundstrom asks, I am so confused are you a Christian? Ha! Why are you confused about that? What makes you confused that I’m a Christian? You think I wasn’t a Christian? Yes, I am a Christian. Hopefully that answers your question. So you’re actually all arriving in this carving at the moment that is the least… Are you seeing everything here? Maybe I should lift it up a little bit. At the least systematic part of the actual carving which is the… I’ll get the top like this that way you’ll see everything. Which is the hair because the hair is kind of wild and so there’s more improvisation with the hair than with other parts. So I have to kind of create these locks here because he has pretty wild hair. So Tara asks, what kind of wood am I using? This is called basswood. Basswood is a… I would say basswood is like a general name for several types of wood which are this light soft wood. And this one is called northern basswood. The technical term is actually linden. And so it definitely has a really good wood. If you’re in North America and you want to carve and you haven’t carved before, getting northern basswood is really the way to go because it’s easy to carve. It has a nice light golden color. It doesn’t have too much grain. It’s good for carving figures because when people carve figures out of… Some wood is really beautiful because it has all this beautiful grain. But when you carve figures out of wood that has massive grain, sometimes the grain of the wood will compete with the figure’s expression or the details in the figure. So Emil Sudrumy says, the reason I am confused is that you have a very intellectual approach in your philosophy. You’re not a fundamentalist. You know, there are non-fundamentalist Christians and there have always been very intellectual Christians. It’s just that sometimes the… Well, let’s put the blame on both sides. Sometimes not very intelligent Christians make a lot of noise. And this plays right into the hands of the anti-Christians who really like to point to the non-intellectual Christians as being the representatives of what Christianity is. But if you read Church Fathers like St. Gregory of Nyssa or St. Maximus the Confessor or St. Dionysius the Areopagite, you will find that it is very intellectual. And that’s not to say that I have a problem with people who are less intellectual. I think there’s room for kind of everything in the church. It’s mostly… The problem is always when people… How can I say this? The problem is when people don’t let others be where they have to be. And so when non-intellectual Christians go after intellectual Christians because somehow they don’t like how they don’t understand everything that’s being said, then that’s a problem. If intellectual type Christians attack the more kind of grounded, maybe less intelligent or less intellectual type Christians, then they’re also… They’re missing the point of all this. So David B asks, can you carve maple? Is it doable? Yes it is. I’ve carved maple before. It’s hard. It’ll take a while. If you want to carve something detailed, you can actually… If you had a good piece of maple that doesn’t have too much grain, you can actually carve quite a bit of detail in there. The craziest thing I did was I made this… You can find it on my website actually. I made this chalice that has the silver lining inside, but the actual frame of it is made out of wood. I made it out of maple to make sure it was like a nice hard noble wood. But the way that I designed it, the base was turned and then at the top of the base there were these patterns around the top of the base. This was when I just started doing this kind of professionally. What I didn’t realize is that I had to carve this ornament in the head of the grain. The head of the grain means the top of the grain where the grain comes up like this. My goodness, that was just insane. I would never do that again. Took me forever and it was so painful. So if you’re going to carve maple, don’t carve in the head of the grain. But most people wouldn’t be stupid enough to do that in the first place. People don’t… I’m really not a super technical person. I’m not very good at the whole tool, technical part of carving. I’m more… I’m better at the formal elements of it. And so in terms of the technical stuff, I learned but I learned with some pain, let’s say. So I’m basically wanting to create some wavyness in the hair and some kind of crazy… Because St. John’s hair is kind of wild. Hey, Adam Shillard is there. It’s good to see you. Adam just sent me by email a bronze icon that he made. It was carved out of wax, I think. And he casted in bronze. It looks amazing. I was pretty proud of him. Adam was one of my students one year and he’s continued carving. Adam, by the way, when Adam took my class, he carved this little St. Christopher out of soap and I still have it right there in my workshop. I keep it around. It’s pretty cool. So NotSam says, I make music. I don’t carve but you still inspire me to do art. It’s great. We need better artists. We need artists with the right perspective on things and the right point of, let’s say, the right vision of the world. So I’m kind of improvising with this guy here. I’m going to add more locks than what I usually do. I’m just going to have a little fun here. So because this is a soft wood, you’ll notice that I use a knife to cut around the forms. It just makes it easier and more precise. The problem with the softer wood is that it also doesn’t hold detail as well. So you have to be careful because if you just go in with chisels sometimes, with gouges, then you can mess it up and then you’re in trouble. So obviously if I was carving stone or harder wood, I would just go straight in with a mallet. But here I’m not even using a mallet. I just use a push. According to John says, when a mother complains about my long hair, I just remind her that my patron saint is Saint John the foreigner. If I was your mother, I would say that’s fine if you’re a prophet and you go out into the desert and eat locusts. I’m joking. Obviously I have long hair too. My long hair is usually out of lack of attention. I would actually rather have shorter hair and then not short, but just not long. But then I really hate getting my hair cut because it takes time and it means that I actually have to call the place where I get my hair cut. So what ends up happening is my hair just kind of grows long until I get sick of it. Then I call or I ask or I plead for my wife to call and make an appointment for me. I’m like, come on, please make an appointment for me. So you can see I’m making waves in different directions. So I’m making waves like this, but I’m also making waves in and out like that to create that kind of wavyness. So MCF asked if I have any opinion or resources on painting. I mean, there are plenty of resources on painting. You can learn all kinds of places to learn to paint. It depends if you mean learn to paint icons or if you mean just learn to paint in general. Right now is probably one of the best times to learn to make art because there’s so much available. You know, you can just, you know, I can see because these days or let’s say in the past few weeks what I’ll do often in the evening, I sit with my 13 year old daughter because she really wants to get better at drawing. We’ll just sit at the table and we’ll draw together. But I just realized how much, how many resources she has just because of Pinterest. You know, she just, she wants to say she’s drawing something and she wants to add like, I don’t know, like she said, oh, I want the sheet to look crumpled on the bed or I want the, you know, I want this to look a certain way. And she can just look it up on Pinterest and then she has an example, which we did not have back in my day. So it’s actually a pretty good time to learn to paint and to draw. If you guys are looking for a good book based for icon painting in terms to get to know the basics, it’s obviously better to learn icon painting from someone if you can, you know, obviously with COVID it’s complicated now, but it’s better to learn from someone. But if you can’t learn from someone, then there’s a Aidan Hart’s book called, I think, Techniques in Icon and Fresco Painting is really the best book on icons out there because he has, he has whole sections on the meaning of icons. He has a section on the history of icons. He has a section on like the composition of major, major importance icons. And then he teaches you how to make gesso, how to make your boards. Like it’s, it’s an amazing book. It’s hard to imagine a book like that actually exists. By the way, is it Timon P says Jesus with long hair? This is not an image of Jesus, by the way. This is an image of St. John the Baptist, St. John the Forerunner. So this would be, if you guys watched my, my live stream on stone carving, you’ll notice that I did an image of the Virgin, just her face kind of pointing in the other direction, kind of pointing like this. So this, this is that image of the Virgin and then this image of St. John and in the middle would be an image of Christ, what’s known as a deusis. And so usually, I mean you can have just the face or the half body or the full body. You can see that it’s St. John is, is bowing to Christ and is showing us with his hands, you know, he’s got his, he’s got his hands out and he’s kind of showing us Christ. And so that’s what’s, that’s what a deusis is. And so if you, if you’re, if you’re interested in learning to carve, if you take the online icon carving class, what I’m doing is I’m going to go through the three icons. So I did this one first and then after that I’m going to, I’m also going to do an icon of the Mother of God and then finally an icon of Christ in the end. And each icon has its own particularities like this one is really the hair and the beard as you can see with all these locks and stuff. And then the icon of the Mother of God is mostly about clothing because she has all those folds. And then the icon of Christ is kind of a mix of the two plus with some detail like the book. All right, so Pringle Dingle asks, Pringle Dingle, my goodness, he asks, thoughts on Paradise Lost? You know, I’m not, a lot of Orthodox are really hostile to Paradise Lost and I’m not that hostile to it. I think that, I think that it has, I think it helps us understand what’s going on in the world and I think that, so for example, I’ll give you an example, this is actually related directly to what I’ve been working on. In the past, those who follow me on social media, I’ve been working on a video to talk about the Mark of the Beast but it’s actually really hard to be succinct about it and so I’m struggling to get through writing up the text and so what I’m doing is I’m procrastinating but I remember my first roommate said I was the most productive procrastinator he had ever met. So while I’m procrastinating, I finished my image of the flood, you know, of the image of Noah in the flood and then I just, I made, I was gonna make a video on Little Nas X and the symbolism around his kind of satanic shoes and the Satanism that he portrays in his video and then a strange thing happened. I was, I recorded the video on my camera and then when I went to transfer the video onto my computer from the camera, the file was empty. It was like there was nothing in it. It was just zero bytes and there was nothing in it so I thought, huh, that’s funny and what was weird was that I had recorded little videos around it like just to test the light and to, you know, to make sure that everything was okay and those videos were fine. It was just the one video that had my commentary on these satanic shoes and everything that were gone. Anyways, so I just let it be because I did it in the evening. The next morning, actually I think early in the afternoon the next day, I thought, okay, I’m willing to do this because it was improvised at first so that takes up a lot of mental energy. So I said, okay, I’m going to do it again. I’m going to re-record it. So I re-recorded the whole thing and it’s a long thing. It’s like 40 minute video both times and same thing happens. It’s like one of the files this time, so there were two files and then one of the files ends up being completely empty and so I’m like, okay, forget this. Like I’m done. I’m not doing this anymore and I just joked about it kind of online as if it was kind of spooky that this had happened and then I got like 500 comments on that. You know, people saying, oh, you got to put it out. You got to put it out. You put it out and then I got a, I actually got an email from Rod Dreher who said, what are we going to say in the video? If you write it up, maybe I can publish it, you know. So I thought, okay, I’m going to do this. So in the past few days, I wrote up a 4,000 word essay about the symbolism of that video and of also one division and how it relates to what’s going on in culture today. So to get to Paradise Lost, because yes, I know that’s what the question was about. And so what I tried to explain is that one of the things, one of the accusations people level against Christians, you’ve probably heard this, is that the figure of the devil, let’s say, that it’s a kind of composite figure and that it’s something which was made up or that was transformed with time and how, you know, through influence of the medieval imagery, then through kind of the early modern witch trials, then finally through something like Paradise Lost and also Faust’s, Faust’s Mephistopheles. And so they kind of do that to dismiss the image, right? The image that you see in kind of pop Satanism and the image seen in movies and the image that Christians will talk against, let’s say. And so what I’ve been trying to help people see is that you’re missing the point. You’re missing, as usual, scholars always very factual, mostly missing the point. So they’re missing the point, which is that the story of Satan, how the image of Satan has transformed from, let’s say, a kind of shadowy vague figure in the New Testament and in kind of Jewish text, the movement from that to this like romantic Promethean figure that curses at the sky, which goes further even than that image because the Milton’s Lucifer was then used, like recently was used as the basis for Neil Gaiman’s Lucifer character in Season of Mists, which was then the basis of this Netflix TV show called Lucifer. And so the critics will laugh at Christians who find this offensive because they’ll say it’s all a fictional thing based on Milton, based on Neil Gaiman, based on blah blah blah. And like again, once again, I’m telling people you’re missing the point. The point is the very narrative transformation of the devil from that into this kind of Promethean tragic figure is telling you about our world. It’s telling you about what is the value, what are our values, what it is that we think is important and how, you know, how the image of the devil has now almost become a heroic image. And so what, you know, my point is basically that it’s manifesting the end of Christianity in a mythological frame. And so, you can read the article when it comes out. I hope it’s going to get published. If not, then I’ll put it up on the Symbolic World and I might record part of it. I’m not sure I want to record the whole thing because it’s written, I give myself permission to cite a few more spicy things that are in his, in Little Nas X’s video. And it’s not something that I would necessarily want to hear myself say out loud. Anyways, but I, it’s, you know, at first I didn’t want to talk about it, but I can see that the same patterns that are in this, this, this Little Nas X video are the same, which are in one division. So it seems like it’s something that’s going on and is worth talking about. All right, so Drew Flesher says for $10 says, I’m a Christian, most influenced by the reform products and tradition recently inspired by faith and perspective. He suggests a great first or collection, early church and desert fathers. Huh. In terms of the church fathers, I mean, a good, if you want to know, it’s probably best to buy something like, like the Orthodox, the Orthodox Way by Metropolitan Calistos Ware. That’s a really good book in terms of helping you understand the kind of the ethos of the Orthodox Church and you know, how there’s kind of the synthesis of the thought of the church fathers. That’s definitely something. But there are so many, so much online now, like there’s so many texts of the church fathers that are online. It’s not that hard to find. I mean, I would say like for sure read, if you read The Life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nice, that’s a good beginning in terms of change. Sorry, my wife is calling me. I’ll be back. What’s up? Okay, I’m back. See you later. Great. All right, sorry. We’re still having work on our house done. And so my wife says, oh, the, because we had the porch wasn’t finished. Now she’s telling me the porch is finished. She should come see. So I’ll come see soon. Yeah. Dominic Palermo says, St. Ephraim of Syria and Hymns of Paradise. Yes, for sure. Especially for someone who, from a Protestant background, who takes seriously the Bible and scripture and loves the stories in scripture, St. Ephraim’s Hymn of Paradise is wonderful because it can also help people understand the idea of kind of interpretation through narrative, which is something that people aren’t used to thinking about. People aren’t used to thinking about how even within scripture, let’s say the New Testament is interpreting the Old Testament. And so it’s a, it’s kind of interpretation through narrative where, you know, by commenting, by adding, you know, by making certain things more precise in from the Old Testament, it’s actually interpreting, not interpreting in like a relative, you know, you know, just relative, relativistic sense, but interpreting in the sense of helping you see what’s already there which might have not been visible to you at the outset, you know. And so like a good example is, of course, in the Epistle of Jude when it says that, you know, St. Michael contested for the body of Moses before they entered into the promised land. It’s like that’s not in the Old Testament, but this idea that this would be brought about, like that this tradition would then be told to us. What it does is it actually helps you understand why is it that Moses couldn’t enter into the promised land? Because it has something to do with characters like Enoch and characters like Elijah who, let’s say, don’t cross over, you know, that ascend into heaven. It’s as if heaven reclaims its highest thing in order to cause that kind of transition and then the transition happens and then other people will be the ones to start up the new world. And so, yeah, that’s really interesting stuff. Have you, this guy says, have you read Childhood’s End? Are you familiar with the story? No. I don’t know about that story. I don’t know what that is. Childhood’s End. Is it a fairy tale of some kind? So Arthur asks if I’ve read anything from Mario Ferreira de Santos. No, I have not. His treatise on symbolic languages don’t have an English translation yet. I know, I don’t know. Is that someone, is that in Portuguese or is that in Spanish? I know a lot of people have been pointing me towards Portuguese writing. So Steve Radford says, would you advise non-orthodox to refrain from making icons? And so I’ll be totally honest with you. Why does it keep moving? Sorry, my camera keeps moving. I don’t, no I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t recommend that non-orthodox make icons. I think that discovering the language of icons can help to help people that aren’t orthodox to kind of understand. But I would also say that as orthodox we need to be careful because obviously if non-orthodox people are making icons then they might not know what, they might not know some of the important things that are being represented in icons and so you have to be attentive and not buy heretical icons if you’ve got non-orthodox people doing icons. I mean in the end it’s like you’re not going to stop people from making icons if, the language of iconography is actually the universal language of Christianity. Before the West started going a little wild with the Renaissance and the Baroque, it was the languages that crossed over in terms of East and West were very similar. It really was like this kind of universal language which was developed in the church. So Jacob is there. Hey, good to see you man. Brad is there as well. It’s good to see you guys there. Thanks for dropping in. Jacob says that his wife, that it helped his wife to understand some things to make icons. And you see that like Jacob wasn’t orthodox and then his wife, let’s say plunging herself into iconography, having been someone who has some artistic talent was probably part of her own conversion experience and now his whole family is orthodox. As usual, I’ll say it again, it’s all about hierarchy. It’s always about hierarchy. Someone asked if I’ve seen the animated movie The Prophet based on the work of Kelly G. Brown. No, I have not seen that. I read that book a long time ago, like really a long time ago, and so I don’t remember. I don’t really remember very well what it was about. My impression, like memory of it was that it was kind of new agey. And maybe I say that and I’m being maybe I’m being I’m not being generous towards the work just because just because new agey type people like that book. Maybe that’s why I think that. So I maybe if I’m wrong, then it’s possible that I’m wrong. As you see, I’m cutting. That’s basically the idea is that I want to make sure that I’ve got these cuts right, mostly because the wood is so soft. This wood is so soft that. Oh, that’s why it’s moving. It’s because I knocked the camera with my turning table. I have to not turn it so much. So Lisa is there. That’s awesome. Good to see you, Lisa. She says, can you talk a little bit about the Valiant Taylor? Um. Yeah, it’s the Valiant Taylor obviously is. Is about the problem of boasting, you know, Lisa, the outset. That’s what it is. But I’d have to I’d have to read it again. All right, you see, I’m I’m making the beard to make the beard. It’s almost I’m making these staircases. So I put I am putting each strand behind the other, but they’re all on the same level. Like they’re all on the same level. It’s just that I I will tip the the beard under. Like that. So Matt, the hazard says, does new atheism, woke culture need to completely kill Christianity in order for it to be resurrected and reinstated as the norm? Look, I don’t know how it’s going to play out. Let’s be totally honest. I don’t know how it’s going to play out. Like, I don’t know how far all of this has to go. You know, there’s that famous verse where Christ says, you know, when the Son of Man returns, will you find faith in the world? It’s like the fact that that Christ is even asking that is I mean, it’s scary. There are other places where it seems to suggest a remnant of some kind of a remnant. And so. And so I don’t know. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but it’s going to play out. Because right now we’re really in this weird like Antichrist pattern, you know, that is it’s hard to avoid. It’s hard to hard to deny. I talk about that in this in this article on Little Nice Exile, I wrote. So you’ll see a little bit, you know, obviously talking about about Rene Girard as well and his ideas about the scapegoat and victim culture. But I try to I try to expand that a little bit and talk about just upside down. You know, like a good example that you see the difference between that’s a normal Christian thinking and what’s going on in the world today is that there is a sense, right? There is a sense in there’s a sense in Christianity that let’s say Christ, the image of Christ going out and finding the lost sheep. So there is this sense of, let’s say, even leaving the majority behind in order to go out and save the lost sheep. And so because of that type of imagery, a lot of people get duped by social justice thinking because they think that that’s what’s going on. So let’s say the way that that way that we’re treating COVID, the way that we’re treating exceptions, all of this is the way is this image of Christ going out to find the last sheep. But it’s actually the very opposite of of that. And so it’s it’s it’s actually not Christ going out to get the lost sheep. It’s the lost sheep that is demanding that all the other sheep be put in the wild like they are. It’s the lost sheep demanding to be the measure by which all the other sheep is measured and by which all the other sheep are recognized. And so it’s it’s like it’s not. You know, it’s it’s it’s it’s it’s like an upside down version of the story of the lost sheep. It’s very strange. So someone asked, I missed the name. I’m aware of George McDonald. Yes, I am. Not a lot. He’s one of the people that are on my list that I that I definitely need to look into more, you know, with people like Paul VanderKlay talking about him and and others who like C.S. Lewis and all that. So for sure, I’m going to there’s even some people who wrote about George McDonald for the for the Symbolic World blog. So he’s definitely on my list. But it’s like there’s so many things to read in the world. Let’s see. So while chances are I dislike the normal dog hole and wedge type carving bench, would you be able to describe yours? Is it a lazy Susan? Yes, it is a lazy Susan. And how do you get it to stay in position after rotating? So this was made by my cousin, it’s in who is an awesome guy, who’s an engineer, who’s an engineer, who’s an engineer. He’s actually an aeronautics engineer and works on like at 16 and stuff. But he he made this for me like a while ago, I would say nearly probably eight years ago or seven years ago. And so it’s basically a lazy Susan underneath. And then this board on top. That’s why it can turn like this. Right. But then on on the side, I can show you. I want to see. Sorry, move the camera a little bit. So there’s this there’s a there’s a handle. When I push the handle down, there’s a screw underneath and it clamps the the lazy Susan together. Not together, it just clamps down on the lazy Susan and stops it from moving. There’s like a rubber, like a little like a little piece of rubber on the on the that that goes up against the lazy Susan and stops it from rotating. So yeah, it’s pretty cool. So wood carving, it requires of me more attention. You can see it’s like I’m going slower. I’m not just banging away at it like I did with the stone carving. Stone carving, I find, is more natural to me also because I can use a mallet and wood carving is I find trickier. It’s more accessible at the same time, which is why, you know, the wood, the eye carving class that I put online, it was a wood carving class because the wood is easy to find. The the tools are easy to find, you know. Whereas if I was going to to carve stone for a class, it’d be a little complicated because I don’t know where you would find that stone. The stone I get, you know, from Kenya and I import it from Kenya. And so I said that I was I was I was going to do that. There’s so many things insane, but it’s good stuff. Like it’s good. It’s good. But there’s so much going on because I’m redoing like I’m rebranding the website and redoing. We’re redoing even maybe like redo the logo and we’re going to to redesign the whole website so that it’s easier to access the different at different information. There’s going to be a French aspect part of the website. So there’s a lot of stuff going on kind of in the background. And so I need to I need to definitely make some videos soon. That’s for sure. So one of the videos I might be doing too very soon is I when I first did these these videos on the kind of satanic symbolism of Little Nice X, I explained the upside down pentagram a little more. And so I was going to do that in the article that I wrote now for on all that. But for some reason in writing it, it didn’t fit so well into the whole thing. It’s like it was it was one thing too many. So I didn’t. And so maybe I can make a video on that. It’d be like a compliment to my video where I try I try to debunk the people who get freaked out when they see geometric shapes and they think that they’re automatically satanic. I could make a video which still explains why these symbols are used. Like there’s a coherent reason why, let’s say an upside down pentagram would be used by by people by kind of satanist to manifest their their their thinking or their their rituals. It makes sense in terms of the of the actual geometric shape itself. And you can explain it. You can describe it. So maybe that’s something I’ll do. Tetrimorph says you definitely need a better logo. Yeah, my logo is a little complicated. What do you think? Yes, I definitely wear that. And so so we’ll work on it. I still want to I still want to keep that image of the six days because I I don’t know a lot of people know that. But I still want to keep it. I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it. I’ll keep it. the six days because I really love that image. It’s so perfect in terms of what it has. So I might keep it in different ways but I need a need a better logo. That’s for sure. So the company that’s doing that for me is called Modern Animal. The guy behind it, Nathan Meffert, he interviewed me at the very beginning of all of this. Just when Jordan Peterson just came out with the Jordan Peterson stuff, he interviewed me for his podcast which he had at the time. At the time he was like an agnostic, just general, kind of, you know, just basic atheist type. Since then he’s become fully engaged in the Catholic Church and is married and is just doing some awesome stuff. He actually designed and is selling a kind of devotional calendar planner, kind of like a regular planner that you use with a book that’s like a planner. But in it is also all of the liturgical year and there’s this whole devotional aspect to his planner. So for Catholics it’s a pretty cool thing. It looks really nice too. All right, so there’s some discussion in the chat about iconography and about idols and all that stuff. I guess I have never really made a video about that directly. I mean it probably would be interesting to do that at some point. So for example, Boltz Relic says, interesting enough, he says, nobody knows how the incarnate Christ looked, however. And this is a really interesting argument. It’s interesting because it’s a very technical argument. It’s like one of those arguments that is missing the point. Of why we have images of Christ. And so let me just exemplify that for you quite simply. So you could say, no one knows what Christ actually looked like because we don’t, because none of us have seen him in the flesh. So we don’t know what Christ actually looked like. I would actually dare argue that even if you had a photograph of him, you wouldn’t know what he looked like. You would have a semblance of him. But besides that, you could say the same about the name of Christ or the name of God. You could say, nobody knows how that name is actually pronounced because we only have written versions of it. And you cannot transmit exactly the sonority of something in a text. So because of that, you don’t know what Christ’s name sounded like. You don’t know what Jesus actually sounded like, which means that you have a problem. Maybe you can’t pray. You can’t pray because you’re calling out this name that probably doesn’t sound like the name that Jews used in the first century. That is, it’s not the same. And so maybe you have no way of calling upon God because you don’t know what that name sounded like. And so the technical argument is actually quite useless. The idea of this kind of weird notion that you would know because you don’t know what Christ looked like in a kind of very quantifiable technical way, the fact of the image is real. The fact of the revelation of God’s name is real. And it doesn’t depend on a kind of technicality of pronouncing it exactly the way that people pronounced it, but rather this communal coming together and this recognition together of how when I hear the name Jesus, I recognize that as talking about this man. When you hear me say it, you recognize it as well. And so together we are together in a communion where we recognize the name of Christ. Obviously it can’t be completely removed from it. And so the name of Christ couldn’t be just changed for the word donut and neither could the image of Christ be changed for red-haired lady. But there is a kind of organic reality of transmitting images and names, of receiving them, of recognizing them together. And that is how, not just the image of Christ, but that’s actually how reality works. It doesn’t rely as much on the kind of precise technicality that you’re suggesting in that comment. So, all right. And so, yeah, not Sam says, even though we don’t know what Christ looked like, you never confuse him with someone else when you see an icon of him. And of course, to avoid that problem is one of the reasons why the fathers in the Seventh Decadential Council said that for an icon to be an icon, what it needs is the image of the saint and then an inscription of the name, which is why in Orthodox icons there will always be the name written if you want it to be an image that will participate in the life of the church, that will be venerated, that will be liturgical. So if an image doesn’t have the name of the saint, it’s not quite an icon in the sense of a sacred image. And so you can kind of, it’s like, I’ll tell you guys a little secret. It’s like I play with that a little bit in the sense that for some of my, let’s say, semi-liturgical images or let’s say borderline liturgical images, sometimes I don’t put an inscription because I don’t want people to, I want people to recognize what it is that’s going on, but I also don’t want people to think that this is exactly at the same level as an image you would see in church and that you would, that would participate in the liturgical life. So that’s why if you notice that a lot on the lot of t-shirts I’m doing, I don’t write the name of Saint George or Saint Michael. Not to say that I couldn’t, I mean maybe I could and it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but it’s one added kind of precaution so that people don’t totally confuse this image with being at the same level as the one that would be in an icon stand in a church. That it’s in a hierarchy of images. You guys know everything is in a hierarchy. I would usually be carving faster than this. I realize that it’s actually demanding more attention to me to carve in wood and talk to you guys than it did with the stone icon. So I’m going very slowly. All right, so really going into the beard here, into the little details. So I’m curious to see if there’s anybody in the chat that has actually started the the the the wood, the icon carving class online. I’d be curious to see if there are people that have and what they think or what they, how they’re how they’re dealing with it. I realize that sometimes it might take a little while before people get into it because they need to buy the tools and receive them. So I understand if there’s some delay. All right, and so kind of happy with this hair. Not bad. Yeah, so Spencer Reel said he started class but had no tools. So I got stuck. Same thing with James. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to do it. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to do it. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to do it. I’m not sure if he’s going to be able to So I got stuck. Same thing with Jacob says he’s ordered the the tool. So yeah, I figured that’s what we would that’s what the situation would be. So I will be patient with you. But if you can, like send me pictures guys. I really would like to see to see to see some pictures of the how the carvings are doing. That’d be cool. There is one guy who sent me some pictures on Twitter on on the direct messaging. And he was doing pretty well actually. He’s doing pretty well. I think he had probably had tools already. So the knife is really there to like clarify certain things when especially when it’s little like in here you can’t maybe you can’t see it but there’s like a nostril in here so that’s always really tricky very small. All right, so I’m going to make the lips here. This is going to be a little tricky. So Jacob says he has wood tools but not exactly what we need. Yeah, there’s a few tools that are definitely are definitely I would say important to have like this one this number three like a small one or a bigger one you can it doesn’t have to be the same size but these number three tools they’re magic. I love these. I mean these are the ones I use all the time. So if you have that and you have a V tool already it’s not bad you’ve got a nice you could probably start. So dog days of with storms is our 12 year old son and our 13 year old daughter will soon be starting the course. We already purchased the course. We too are waiting for the tools and we have to come in. Cool. Yeah, that’s that’s awesome. So make sure you make sure if you run into some problems like I don’t know if there’s a technical problem or if you feel like some things are not clear make sure to to send me the to contact me and to tell me because if there’s something that is like if there’s something that is really not clear the course was tested out completely with some guys in Saskatoon. They did the whole week and I was able to get their review. They seemed like they felt it was it had everything you need but you never know like if there’s something you feel is really not clear there’s still I can still change it like I can still let’s say add another another few minutes on a video if there’s something that is totally unclear. My feeling is that it’s pretty good because like I said I already had it evaluated and the reaction was pretty positive. So both relics says so Jonathan do you mean to say that information represented in the image is objective in a symbolic transcendent sense and as such it is not constrained by the image. I’m not sure I totally understand your language but what I would say is that there’s a play there’s a game or there’s an exchange a dance between the identity of something and its potentiality in the world right and so that’s also the same with an image and so you have to remember that the image is not the person is not the person so it’s like if you have a drawing or photography or a photograph of someone that’s not the person this is something also this is actually one of the great damages that photography has done to us is that people think that a photo is the same as a person that somehow the photo just represents a person without any language to it and that’s not true for photography by the very framing right even by the framing that is by the fact that photography limits the world to a square in which you decide what is important that’s already a form of symbolic reality it’s already a compression of the world into symbolic patterns so that’s one and second of all there is a there’s a game there’s not a game but there’s an interplay between let’s say the potentiality of a of a being and then the way he’s represented and so I could let’s say I can represent you a picture of you in a few lines in a way that people could recognize you like let’s say like in a caricature and people would recognize you in those two lines I could also take you know three weeks to make a painting of you that is trying to be as detailed as possible but even that painting will be will will be an interpretation because you’re constantly moving you you don’t stay still like an image a person isn’t still like like in a painting and so even the stillness of the painting is already a form of of uh of let’s say transformation and so the idea is that there’s a there’s a there’s an aspect to which an image is manifesting a being in a way that fits the description or the the memory of that being and then there’s a way that it’s received and then that kind of plays in there’s a play in between these different these different things so um you could say that even for let’s say pictures a good example would be that certain famous people have certain pictures of them which have become iconic of them and so when you see those pictures those are the pictures which most mostly typify a person um and then there are other pictures that don’t so you could experience that even in your own self like haven’t you ever taken a picture of someone uh on on let’s say you take a picture of of uh of your wife of your kid and then when the when you look at the picture in your phone or in the camera you think well that picture doesn’t look like them and then you delete it and then you end up keeping the pictures that look like them but they look like them because there’s already a there’s already a kind of language relationship there’s already a a relationship of seeing and receiving and memory and how you remember how what what constituted being and so that’s what it’s like for images but it’s also the same for for anything any memory any story you tell you know it’s the same with like let’s say even the the gospels that are that are told of christ that these are in a symbolic filter in the sense that they’re a compression of things which most manifest christ to the world because obviously christ did a whole bunch of other stuff that’s not mentioned in the stories like i don’t know tie his sandals or whatever like get dressed in the morning and uh you know all the things that people do that aren’t mentioned in scripture not even speaking of the things with which which might even have meaning that aren’t mentioned in scripture but those that are more peripheral and so that’s actually how it all works there’s this this kind of dance between memory recognition story compression and so whatever you whatever bothers you about images the question you need to ask yourself is is is it different for a story um and stories also have the same issues and problems that images have in terms of the idea of a technical technical representation of something so the sit asked why doesn’t that you’re not like doing youtube stuff i mean he is definitely an introvert and uh he he you know he he doesn’t like that kind of attention he’s just not looking for it he i think he also feels i mean i’m speaking for him which is probably not a good idea but i think he also feels i mean i’m speaking for him which is probably not a good idea but i think he also feels that in a way when you make videos and you’re kind of speaking and you’re there’s an aspect of yourself that you’re kind of compromising yourself to a certain extent that you’re um yeah i guess that’s the best way to say it but um who knows you know i would love to have him back on the channel but at least for now he’s he’s clearly communicated that he doesn’t that he doesn’t want to do that i’m kind of moving all over the place in this image here i said i’m going to do the lips and then i keep moving around it’s all you guys are distracting me you know so jacob asked if i made my workbench no i didn’t i mentioned that just a little earlier it was made by my cousin um along a while ago like maybe seven eight years ago he he made it as a gift for me it’s very nice and it yeah it’s really a wonderful thing because i i’m not the kind of person that would have been very good at making that for myself so don’t worry for those who want to take the uh the uh the icon carving class all the things that i’m doing that i’m not explaining right now i definitely explained in the carving class i want you to think that i just kind of carve and i make you guys watch me okay because it looks very useful yeah it’s pretty cool it’s a it’s like like i said it’s a lazy susan uh with like a clamp on it so the clamp stops the lazy susan when i need to stabilize it and uh but there are some people that i’ve seen that have made some uh some simpler versions of this that are actually pretty good in terms of uh using so for example my my assistant who works in stone he has like a piece of plywood on an angle like this and then he cut a um he cut like a more like a little like a half circle in it like that and then he has a piece of uh plywood that’s cut in a circle over it so it’s like just two pieces of plywood on top of each other and so the the circle is kind of in the half circle so you can turn it but if you hit it with a mallet it tends to stay it’s it hits the side so it doesn’t tend to move so much and so just that for him is enough like he just turns it and carves and so it does the job for sure it’s helpful to turn like now i’m not turning it because it keeps hitting the camera up there i should probably move it around but usually i turn it way more which is one of the reasons why i’m going so slow now it’s mostly because i’m talking to you guys though so symbolic memes is there cool nice and he says calling it lazy susan is pretty susanist yes i have very strong prejudices against oh against susans i don’t know am i wrong or i’m pretty sure all the susans are lazy right i mean if you met one susan you’ve met them all right hopefully there’s nobody named susan in the chat that would not be good that would not be good i don’t know where that comes from the lazy susan i don’t know like what that with that uh like what that with that uh who came up with that name i’m sure there’s a spicy story behind that like someone who was angry at their spouse or something made it up and then named it after them something like that sure google has the answer to the origin of lazy susan so so for those who ask what kind of wood it is it is basswood or linden which is kind of the more technical name for this particular type of basswood and it’s not it’s northern basswood really um because one time i gave this workshop in south carolina and uh i didn’t i tend to i always every time i did these workshops i would like carry the wood across the border so i’d like put all these boards in my luggage and you know fly with them or or carry them down to the u.s. and so i thought it was really complicated and i figured maybe i could buy local wood while i’m down there or have someone buy it and bring it to the workshop we found a place that had basswood and uh we ordered it in south carolina but it was very different it was very very different it was way chipier it wasn’t as uh as smooth as northern basswood and there’s something about like there’s something that that’s interesting to be explored i haven’t really taken the time to do it but for example northern basswood like this stuff here they’ll they’ll like cut it in the middle of winter on a full moon and all of this like really weird stuff uh and supposedly it’s really to help in terms of uh of its quality that if you cut it in the winter then the sap is not is not uh in the um in the tree and same thing like with the full moon or something that how it affects the the the quality of the wood i don’t know if i don’t know if that’s there’s then any any causality or any that’s a physical uh causality to that or if it’s it’s more about attention and care you know a lot of these things one of the things i like to do is that this is kind of um just use a brush to remove some of the slivers sometimes it’s just giving away so nate asks what is the correct manner of relating to science natural philosophy as a physicist workaholic i feel like in my profession we struggle with idolatry um i think it’s just it’s really it’s just about understanding the limits of knowledge and the limits of the limit of certain types of knowledge um and so i think that a physicist has a lot of has a lot of capacity to probably more than more just more practically oriented type of of scientists that would that would not be able to see the limit of their knowledge or the limit of the effect or the the scope of their knowledge seems like at least in physics if that’s what i understood to do then there’s at least the possibility of recognizing the the limit of the physical categories of the quantifiable so shadow beast must die says when i made maple syrup the sap only runs during the day so yeah so maybe it is something to do with sap running uh during the day and then they’re cutting it at night so that the sap doesn’t run so that might be that might be it doesn’t explain why they have to like turn seven times around the tree before they cut it though i’m actually joking that i just wanted to say that the sap is running during the day so that’s why i’m cutting it at night so that the sap doesn’t run so that might be that might be it never heard that i just like the idea i just like the idea of like people uh cutting down uh carving carving wood seeing it as some kind of like more as a ritual or of some some kind more than just cutting wood it’s just i remember the first time someone told me that they cut in the dead of winter on a full moon i thought wow man it’s like am i watching a i feel like i’m watching some movie or something so paul r says you feel like your left-handedness contributes to your discernment of subtle patterns in reality i think that let’s say it this way i think that not left-handedness i think that left-handedness because as a left-handed person you you actually have to uh adjust yourself to the world more um and so you have to the world is made for right-handed people so you have to adjust yourself to the world and i think that that makes you become aware of certain patterns so i don’t think it’s only that but i do think it probably did play a little part in my my own experience of patterns one thing i’m surprised that hasn’t happened yet is is how no one has talked about the marginal identity of left-handers because i mean if any category of person has been mistreated and uh and maligned narrative until today it’s it’s left-handed people and it’s like one in nine people in the entire world or something and so you know i think we need a movement i think we think we need like a left-handed uh woke movement to to free the world from the constraint of left-handed uh hegemony you know so that we can uh i mean think about it every time you like walk into a room every time that everything is made for left for right-handed people there’s like a right-handed supremacy that we need to uh then we need to free ourselves for free free ourselves from anyways i’m feeling pretty cheeky here as you can tell talking about that probably the reason why i don’t want to do too many of these live streams is that i know that if i do these live streams for too long i’m really gonna say something stupid that i’ll regret but i don’t regret the the right-handed comments everybody knows right-handed people are big it’s so oh man all right so mcf asked if i will do more in video games everybody so many people have asked me that and that the one i did on on uh on donkey kong got so few views that it kind of bummed me out about it um but i think a lot of people are still asking me to do it i probably should i probably should have chosen another game besides donkey kong but you know it’s good it’s always good to interpret the origin of something in order to understand what’s going on and so i i really did feel like donkey kong because it’s because it’s the first narrative video game really then it has a lot to offer night arnold says video games are for losers i would say entertainment most most our entertainment culture is is not is not wonderful so but there i don’t think i don’t think video games are worse than watching netflix series or watching movies no sorry you can hear my neighbor there uh i think i think if you want to understand like the whole the whole uh video game thing i think a good way to understand it that it really is like a garment of skin in the sense that you know i see people in the chat saying that that video games help them think mythologically and i think that’s actually true um i think that on the one hand it can really be a place for people to get an intuition of these patterns you know uh like i haven’t played those games but i know like a lot of people told me zelda has that and uh i know that uh let’s say the elder scrolls has that kind of mythological pattern in it and so the problem is that so on the one hand i think it’s totally true and i think it really can jolt someone into into have mythological understanding but it’s also for that same reason it can also be dangerous to trap someone at that level it’s almost like um a good example a good way to understand it would be something like let’s say spiritual experiences if you read the church fathers the church fathers actually tend to speak against spiritual experiences they say you know be careful of spiritual experiences uh you know be doubtful of them question them don’t look for them don’t search them out because on the one hand the spiritual experience is the thing that will make you often desire god it can also have its own appeal which will trap you at a certain level and so you’ll you’ll you won’t be able to see further than that experience so i think that the danger that i see with video games is that is that some people get caught up in the video game world and then they they they don’t live their lives and so they they kind of yes the video game offers them more almost more mythological structure than regular life and so because of that it becomes a place where you want to be in but then it can also be be a proxy uh like a like a crutch that you just carry along and then you and then you wonder why you you know you can’t learn to walk and so so i think that that’s the situation so i don’t i think i i don’t have a problem with video games i felt i see i noticed that during covid i played more video games than i used to but at the same time we need to be careful that it’s it’s one of those things that can kind of swallow you up because it’s so attractive and so and like it’s it’s made to kind of to suck you in So VT says how important is it to have community when it comes to religious practices? I’m still finding my place in all this and i live in a region with absolutely zero orthodox community um yeah i i get i feel you it’s tough i think that it’s definitely important uh but it’s a it’s hard like even myself it’s hard because you know the world is the world is messed up right now and so you know my parish for example like we’re very few people and we all live very far from each other and so we don’t we don’t have the chance of that they seeing each other during the week or communicating outside of church and so it creates a it doesn’t it’s not the ideal situation and i think we’re all dealing with that we’re all dealing with not ideal situations um and so you just have to do with what you can um so um so mike zazik says what he’s talking about is exactly what’s happening in mm or pgs men are growing up wondering why they aren’t as fun as they used to be when they should be applying those patterns to life yeah that i think that that’s what that’s what i see is the problem with with video games like i said is that it’s that it’s it’s so encompassing and there and also let’s say the stakes are so low when you can get a major kick and a major let’s say kind of uh a very condensed pattern with very little consequence and so it’s easy to get drawn in and to then just live to live there because because yeah you know it’s it’s it’s like eating uh it’s like eating fast food you know it’s like eating uh it’s like eating candy uh my neighbors are talking about talking something with uh to my wife and i i just told them so you know you’re on youtube right now right and so they’re like okay we need to go somewhere else and talk about this so maxi says as a fellow left-handed person i’m looking forward to purchasing your course very soon cool yeah i’m really looking forward to seeing how people react to that um it also helped me kind of decide if i’m gonna do a second one probably will especially because covid doesn’t seem like covid’s going away soon so at least here that people are completely taken up so feels like we’re going to be in lockdown for still quite a long time so all right folks i think i’m gonna stop it’s actually harder to carve wood on here than it is to um to uh to carve stone because i feel more distracted and it’s trickier because you know stone i can’t it can’t just move the tool and i make a major mistake it’s like here i’m not careful i can just flake a piece off of wood often that’s it all right so since people had asked for me to do these uh these kind of uh live in progress work things i might um i might do a last one so i did one stone i didn’t bring one wood i might do a last one where i’ll be drawing and so you can you can if you’re interested in watching me drawing i might do that in the next few weeks so we moved a little bit not as much as i would have if i had been just working so all right guys thanks for for uh for tuning in it was fun just to do a little bit of this so you can see me wood carving and uh and yeah so i should be hopefully be putting out some uh some videos pretty soon you know and uh for some reason they’re all going to be about satanic imagery hopefully that won’t last very long and uh and so yeah so thanks everybody for dropping in thanks to jacobs about memes i saw lisa was there and uh brad and tumor v’s is there sweet it’s good to see you who else is there that i know that i know all right guys i will see you soon