The Seam of Chastity
Lecture on Houdon’s Louvre Diane, where toe-balance and a crescent seam make chastity a crafted law. What runs on a single toe yet makes your own feet grow heavy; what bares a body yet tightens a law; what offers a…
Martin Smallridge
Cupid Sleeps While Fate Hunts
Room 044 in the Museo del Prado carried a disciplined brightness, the sort a ministry might approve, as the building’s stone drank the street and returned it as a pale, steady radiance. I stood where the wall surrendered to Titian’s…
Aiming Makes Souls Wander.
What travelled farther: the bolt that left the string, or the hand that held the string and trembled, deciding, for a heartbeat, whether mercy had any jurisdiction over hunger? Quid longius it: telum an animus? A question suited to a…
Bow of Forgetting’s Gauge
A pale field, washed like chapel plaster after incense has settled, holds its own weather, and in that weather a severed head—half mask, half reliquary—floats as if a saint had been converted into an instrument, while the word Ariette (petite…
Between Gāṇḍīva and Blackboard
The first bamboo bow that entered my life never breathed Indian heat; it lived inside a grainy photograph pinned above my crowded desk in Portlaoise, between a postcard of Velázquez and a stained reading timetable. The photograph came from an…
A way to freeze time…
Late light spills over a summer field that could belong to any stop on the World Cup caravan—air thick as steamed linen in Shanghai, sharp as dry paper in Madrid—and in that blur of geography the camera for Mr and…
The Winged Bowyer of Parma
Bologna received him and gave him work. In that university city, where jurists and humanists argued late into the night under painted ceilings, he devised altarpieces whose saints seemed to hover between devotion and daydream, bodies elongated like instruments, fingers…
The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula — Red Cloak, Black Ground
I climbed the marble stair while a red weather gathered over my head, since Jacopo Foggini had wrapped the well in a suspended nuvola—a cloud with shadow sewn through it—and the stair rose as if the city itself breathed upward…
The Fellowship and the Bell-Founder
The ring rests on a small palm and drinks the room’s window-light as if metal could breathe. Smoke hangs in a slow veil over maps and teacups, an ember answers the draught with a soft pulse, and the hobbit’s fingers…
Aim and Flow: Attention as Archery, Presence as Craft
Knowledge gathers in the hands first. Before theory spreads its mesh, the body enters an agreement with wood, string, air, and ground. A seasoned yew settles into the palm with a weight that carries memory; cool grain moves under the…
Author’s reflection on An Arrow Knows no master — thirteen lectures framing archery axioms in Western philosophy
Time walks as my fiercest rival. It gathers more than it gifts and measures each hour with a strict hand, so I stepped straight through that pressure and wrote this book. The seed took hold two years ago as a…
Wild Protein, Wild Ethics: Bowhunting, Foodways, and the Land
Elders share a winter story from the northern woods. Frost wrote its fine script across alder and birch, and a young hunter walked a corridor of blue light where breath rose like white birds. A doe stood in the hush and faced the hunter with calm eyes that held a country of knowing. The hunter lifted the bow, and the deer spoke across the space in a voice that sounded like river over stones: “Choose kinship or hunger, and shape hunger through kinship.” The hunter lowered the bow, set palm on the ground, and offered a strand of hair, a button, a pinch of meal from a pouch. The doe stepped forward, breathed into the hunter’s hand, and left one slender rib beside the offerings. From that bone came the first whistle for calling, and from that calling came a covenant—the people would eat through an agreement that carried respect in both directions. The deer would give, and the people would give in return, and the land would carry the memory of that exchange in grass, in hoofprint, in human song. Every archery season rises from that early promise: power serves when consent guides it, and meals carry honor when gratitude leads every step.
Foucault and the Learned Body
It begins with the heft of a thing in the hand, a weight rising like a question shaped in the palm. The first encounter with a tool that means business—a plane or a chisel—draws the room to attention. The body,…
Telos of the Bow
A sage from the auld days, a Roman steady at the helm of his own heart, praised the archer. He watched the draw and saw a likeness for a life well shaped. The whole purpose, the gathered labour of person…
Forest Linecraft: Field Archery by Ear and Eye
A field course in Ireland carries its own weather with a pulse that travels through boots and bone. Moss feeds stone, wet fern lifts the air, and the path to each peg breathes peat and birdsong. The target waits amid alder and furze like a small moon, pale and sure, and the bow answers with old memory held in the limbs. Every lane whispers a fresh set of laws. Curiosity greets those laws and draws a richer circle with every arrow. A course turns into an instrument, and the archer learns to play it by ear, tuning the shot to the forest’s metre. You hear the stream keep time. You feel the breeze pluck the string. You see light change distance. The ground shapes stance and stance shapes thought, and the whole enterprise gathers a music that rewards patience, craft, and that stubborn Irish delight in hard work done with a grin.
Slope begins the learning. Uphill invites a ribcage that rises and a pelvis that settles so the spine grows long and the shoulders level. Downhill invites knees that soften and heels that claim the earth so the line from back heel to drawing elbow stays true. Hips and shoulders form a steady gate for power to pass through, and that gate grants the draw a clean corridor. Feet choose ground with care: a forefoot that finds purchase on wet root, a mid-foot that rests on shale, a heel that holds on clay. A quiet triangle forms between both feet and the aim, a geometry that steadies breath. Ireland’s banks and ridges reward ankles that sing through the arches. An archer who trusts that song carries balance uphill and down, across boggy patches and shale scars, with the bow sitting easy and the head afloat, alert and glad.
Light writes grammar across distance. Shade compresses space inside a green tunnel; pale foam gathers a halo that stretches the path to the rings; dapple scatters attention like coins. The eye reads edges with greatest ease when a soft glow gathers around a hard line, so a tiny ritual helps. Blink once, glance beyond the lane to a patch of untroubled colour, return to the centre, breathe, and allow the sight ring—or the inner circle of intent—to frame the mark. Vision gathers to a needlepoint again. Field lanes often deliver a trick of magnification when the trees pinch perspective; a deliberate breath resets scale. Recurve and barebow minds favour the memory of a circle; compound minds favour pin, peep, and bubble in gentle accord. Each approach earns clarity through that small ceremony of attention, carried peg to peg like a blessing.
Between Bow and Being: Plato, Aristotle, and the Archer’s Path
“ There is no fault nor detriment / in facing bare the cruelty of world…” — We’ll Go Asleep Imagine, now, not just a tool or a sport, but a whisper that’s survived since we first dared to shape the…
How Archers go blind…
They go blind, not suddenly, not dramatically, but like stone crumbling beneath ivy. A slow erosion hidden under the costume of stillness. Archers — who speak so often of form and silence, of the sacred breath before release — rarely…...