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I write here in SubscribeStar because however little it might be, I know that we all need to do something to keep the bastards at bay but my true passion for a long time now has been writing books. I do that under the pen name Martel the Hammer and publish with Draft2Digital. Whatever you think of my political views as expressed in these internet pieces, I hope you will buy and read my books.
Yes, Martel the Hammer is an unusual name — someone who led the better part of Europe over a thousand years ago and defeated a Moslem invasion that threatened to swamp Europe — and I am proud to bring it forth into the public eye again today.
Today, we have new and even greater threats than Europe faced a millennium ago. They may be subtle and less well defined but they are in fact even more dangerous — for almost everyone.
I'm only a very small part of the rising movement against communist globalisation and the persistent erosion of individual rights but I do firmly believe that writing, both fiction and non-fiction, play a huge part in the mobilization of human effort towards any worthy goal.
My writing reflects the need for that and to that end seeks to reveal the fundamental need to blend passion with effort.
Like everyone, I have my passions but perhaps unlike many I’ve had to learn the hard way how to reveal and express them.
On my mother’s side, my influences were relatively normal and unrepressed, although she had lost her father, who had served at Gallipoli and The Somme, at the age of ten and her mother went through a long period of mourning.
On my father’s side, perhaps because of his family’s deep involvement in the Masonic Lodge, there was a lot more repression and he was reared to operate under the misguided principle that emotions were better off avoided.
I’m talking about this because I have come to believe that emotions are far more important than most of us realize. I believe my writing has matured and lit up over the considerable time during which this realization progressed from idea to integrated emotion-intellect reality.
While I was emotionally repressed as a young man, as most of my contemporaries would testify to, I was appreciative of the things that should have lit up my emotions and wanted to understand them better. This led me into a life of logic and profound intellectual exploration and this in turn led me to finding out how to switch my emotions back on.
I was lucky to grow up and live in Australia. I believe it gave me a head start in this return to something like wholeness. It’s a big country in more ways than one. It offers a lot in terms of sensual engagement with nature. Temperate weather perhaps allows more in the way of outdoors activity but it’s more than that. Despite a lot of clearing and degradation, there’s still vast tracts of untouched country begging to be explored and while much of it is flat, nondescript and dreary, it hides many small places and sometimes quite large places of incredible beauty.
More than most, I did explore, especially as a young man, and felt a powerful draw from the land. If the wind was up on a cold night, I’d be out for a walk to stimulate the senses rather than hugging the fire. Wind, sky, waves moon, stars, waterfalls, cliffs. All of these things had a strong draw for me — largely perhaps because I was emotionally repressed. Maybe that’s why many men have explored and stronger harder men than me have explored further.
One of the ways that I engaged with nature as I became older and more experienced was to volunteer with the ocean rescue service in New South Wales. Over a seven year period, I took part in ocean rescue missions both day and night in all sorts of conditions. Wales, dolphins, vast schools of tuna, seals and birds. Storms and calms. Happy people and dead people.
It was challenging but gave me a sense of belonging that I had somehow missed before. Then a dispute with the woeful MRNSW hierarchy left me on the rocks and I was suddenly forced to face the gaping hole in my emotions that my stoic upbringing and other circumstances had given me.
It was a lengthy process of anger and suffering but in the end I found healing through learning the value of facing emotions instead of repressing them and through understanding their vital importance in life.
Logic and discipline enabled me to turn around pain into real emotion. The challenge of dealing with this corrupt and blindingly inefficient branch of the Australian bureaucracy, as a whole now such a big part of what is holding this country back, the death of my father and how poorly he was treated by a number of aspects of society in his very old age and the mad strategies of our politicians to deal with the spurious pandemic all shed light on what was missing in me until eventually much became clear.
When I read over my existing work, I became certain about one thing. Emotional expression was almost completely missing and it felt sterile — almost meaningless on that level. It became clearer and clearer to me that both intellect and emotion have a place and that they have to work together cooperatively to light up more and more of the bulbs of consciousness. They can and should work together, in essence to become a turbocharger for conscious awareness.
I had been hostage to the very common misconception that these two vital aspects of our consciousness compete with each other — that they are in a sense at war with each other. The more there was of one, the less there would be of the other. And of course, intellect had to win out because if you were too emotional, you were irrational, directionless and perhaps even dangerous.
The fact is, the less you can express yourself emotionally, the less depth of understanding you will generate with your intellect. And the less discipline you use with your intellect, the less you will perceive and understand your emotions. They’re not in competition at all — at least not in a healthy mind.
For me at this point, music — piano in this case — played a large part in my release, amongst a number of other things. I learned piano as a boy and perhaps reflecting where I was emotionally, only ever played from musical scores. I couldn’t remember music to play it without a score in front of me and I couldn’t improvise. Over the years, especially after I treated myself a quality new instrument, I began to improvise a little but it tended to be repetitive and not very melodic. My technical ability increased a lot but I still couldn’t improvise or in essence I suppose, compose.
After the crisis I had with Marine Rescue, my father’s prolonged, difficult death and the difficult resolution of his estate, I felt I was on the edge of a precipice but I had also come to know the proper relationship between intellect and emotions and with every choice I was making, despite the pressure of all that was happening around me, I was slowly but surely digging myself free. Every challenge dealt with brought a sense of freedom and everything I felt and expressed became clearer. I was also beginning to improvise more and better on the piano.
I had inherited my father’s beloved old Bechstein grand, built in the 1840’s when Liszt or Chopin might have played it. Sometimes as a teenager I had under the influence of strong emotion improvised on it and now that it was mine, it inspired me to do the same again. It sits back to back now with my William Knabe grand, and between them they take up most of the space in my living room.
One piano is a round 170 years old and the other is nine and they have very different characters but this somehow seems to suit improvisation and I often move from one to the other spontaneously. As my emotions become more free and open, what I improvise on the pianos improves. When I write and edit, the right words seem to fall into place and the hidden meaning becomes clearer.
I know now that when people read books, they are at least as interested in what the characters feel as in what they think or do. Why? Because they wish to be inspired emotionally — because they want to be free to feel as much as they can of the astonishing array of human emotions that are possible.
Many people also need release and healing. This a good instinct — a positive drive but unfortunately, modern culture panders to it without the proper consideration by placing too much emphasis on emotions without any revealing intellectual understanding. It’s all out of balance.
Sure, we need to tune into our emotions more effectively and properly understand them but that’s not going to happen except on the most temporary basis when we watch shallow movies, listen to the low level pop-music of today and read the tawdry crap that the international corporate publishing industry produces.
The fact is, industry trades on our emotional repression and injuries. They feed on them like vampires and we have learned to go and watch a movie designed to pluck on our heartstrings for an hour or two at best when we’re feeling down.
There’s a lot more to the state of social control as I’ve discovered but no doubt you get the idea.
So, yes, I have got something to say and I hope that it will serve you when or if you read some of my published work. Preferably all of it, of course, LOL, but what else can you expect me to say?
Today, we have new and even greater threats than Europe faced a millennium ago. They may be subtle and less well defined but they are in fact even more dangerous — for almost everyone.
I'm only a very small part of the rising movement against communist globalisation and the persistent erosion of individual rights but I do firmly believe that writing, both fiction and non-fiction, play a huge part in the mobilization of human effort towards any worthy goal.
My writing reflects the need for that and to that end seeks to reveal the fundamental need to blend passion with effort.
Like everyone, I have my passions but perhaps unlike many I’ve had to learn the hard way how to reveal and express them.
On my mother’s side, my influences were relatively normal and unrepressed, although she had lost her father, who had served at Gallipoli and The Somme, at the age of ten and her mother went through a long period of mourning.
On my father’s side, perhaps because of his family’s deep involvement in the Masonic Lodge, there was a lot more repression and he was reared to operate under the misguided principle that emotions were better off avoided.
I’m talking about this because I have come to believe that emotions are far more important than most of us realize. I believe my writing has matured and lit up over the considerable time during which this realization progressed from idea to integrated emotion-intellect reality.
While I was emotionally repressed as a young man, as most of my contemporaries would testify to, I was appreciative of the things that should have lit up my emotions and wanted to understand them better. This led me into a life of logic and profound intellectual exploration and this in turn led me to finding out how to switch my emotions back on.
I was lucky to grow up and live in Australia. I believe it gave me a head start in this return to something like wholeness. It’s a big country in more ways than one. It offers a lot in terms of sensual engagement with nature. Temperate weather perhaps allows more in the way of outdoors activity but it’s more than that. Despite a lot of clearing and degradation, there’s still vast tracts of untouched country begging to be explored and while much of it is flat, nondescript and dreary, it hides many small places and sometimes quite large places of incredible beauty.
More than most, I did explore, especially as a young man, and felt a powerful draw from the land. If the wind was up on a cold night, I’d be out for a walk to stimulate the senses rather than hugging the fire. Wind, sky, waves moon, stars, waterfalls, cliffs. All of these things had a strong draw for me — largely perhaps because I was emotionally repressed. Maybe that’s why many men have explored and stronger harder men than me have explored further.
One of the ways that I engaged with nature as I became older and more experienced was to volunteer with the ocean rescue service in New South Wales. Over a seven year period, I took part in ocean rescue missions both day and night in all sorts of conditions. Wales, dolphins, vast schools of tuna, seals and birds. Storms and calms. Happy people and dead people.
It was challenging but gave me a sense of belonging that I had somehow missed before. Then a dispute with the woeful MRNSW hierarchy left me on the rocks and I was suddenly forced to face the gaping hole in my emotions that my stoic upbringing and other circumstances had given me.
It was a lengthy process of anger and suffering but in the end I found healing through learning the value of facing emotions instead of repressing them and through understanding their vital importance in life.
Logic and discipline enabled me to turn around pain into real emotion. The challenge of dealing with this corrupt and blindingly inefficient branch of the Australian bureaucracy, as a whole now such a big part of what is holding this country back, the death of my father and how poorly he was treated by a number of aspects of society in his very old age and the mad strategies of our politicians to deal with the spurious pandemic all shed light on what was missing in me until eventually much became clear.
When I read over my existing work, I became certain about one thing. Emotional expression was almost completely missing and it felt sterile — almost meaningless on that level. It became clearer and clearer to me that both intellect and emotion have a place and that they have to work together cooperatively to light up more and more of the bulbs of consciousness. They can and should work together, in essence to become a turbocharger for conscious awareness.
I had been hostage to the very common misconception that these two vital aspects of our consciousness compete with each other — that they are in a sense at war with each other. The more there was of one, the less there would be of the other. And of course, intellect had to win out because if you were too emotional, you were irrational, directionless and perhaps even dangerous.
The fact is, the less you can express yourself emotionally, the less depth of understanding you will generate with your intellect. And the less discipline you use with your intellect, the less you will perceive and understand your emotions. They’re not in competition at all — at least not in a healthy mind.
For me at this point, music — piano in this case — played a large part in my release, amongst a number of other things. I learned piano as a boy and perhaps reflecting where I was emotionally, only ever played from musical scores. I couldn’t remember music to play it without a score in front of me and I couldn’t improvise. Over the years, especially after I treated myself a quality new instrument, I began to improvise a little but it tended to be repetitive and not very melodic. My technical ability increased a lot but I still couldn’t improvise or in essence I suppose, compose.
After the crisis I had with Marine Rescue, my father’s prolonged, difficult death and the difficult resolution of his estate, I felt I was on the edge of a precipice but I had also come to know the proper relationship between intellect and emotions and with every choice I was making, despite the pressure of all that was happening around me, I was slowly but surely digging myself free. Every challenge dealt with brought a sense of freedom and everything I felt and expressed became clearer. I was also beginning to improvise more and better on the piano.
I had inherited my father’s beloved old Bechstein grand, built in the 1840’s when Liszt or Chopin might have played it. Sometimes as a teenager I had under the influence of strong emotion improvised on it and now that it was mine, it inspired me to do the same again. It sits back to back now with my William Knabe grand, and between them they take up most of the space in my living room.
One piano is a round 170 years old and the other is nine and they have very different characters but this somehow seems to suit improvisation and I often move from one to the other spontaneously. As my emotions become more free and open, what I improvise on the pianos improves. When I write and edit, the right words seem to fall into place and the hidden meaning becomes clearer.
I know now that when people read books, they are at least as interested in what the characters feel as in what they think or do. Why? Because they wish to be inspired emotionally — because they want to be free to feel as much as they can of the astonishing array of human emotions that are possible.
Many people also need release and healing. This a good instinct — a positive drive but unfortunately, modern culture panders to it without the proper consideration by placing too much emphasis on emotions without any revealing intellectual understanding. It’s all out of balance.
Sure, we need to tune into our emotions more effectively and properly understand them but that’s not going to happen except on the most temporary basis when we watch shallow movies, listen to the low level pop-music of today and read the tawdry crap that the international corporate publishing industry produces.
The fact is, industry trades on our emotional repression and injuries. They feed on them like vampires and we have learned to go and watch a movie designed to pluck on our heartstrings for an hour or two at best when we’re feeling down.
There’s a lot more to the state of social control as I’ve discovered but no doubt you get the idea.
So, yes, I have got something to say and I hope that it will serve you when or if you read some of my published work. Preferably all of it, of course, LOL, but what else can you expect me to say?
To that end, you will find a list of book links below.
(Narrow 0 is the number zero. Wide O is the letter.)
In the Darkest Hour: https://books2read.com/u/4jgpl5
Dawn of the Shadow Circles: https://books2read.com/u/m0EjqA
Thor’s Bane: https://books2read.com/u/bzV0rn
At the Rising of the Star: https://books2read.com/u/badPgP
Dragon Lore: https://books2read.com/u/bQNx66
Fire in the Sky: https://books2read.com/u/4X0ZOv
Rise of the Luminari: https://books2read.com/u/bzKd1q
Valour in Arms: https://books2read.com/u/4NoxnY
Voyage of Dominion: https://books2read.com/u/bPNyWl
Centari Honour: https://books2read.com/u/47VYQj
Stellar Regia: https://books2read.com/u/m0qv8P
Odin’s Genesis: https://books2read.com/u/mqeXZd
The Wolf Pack: https://books2read.com/u/b6VVzZ
Valhalla Covenant: https://books2read.com/u/bW0J67
Sirens of the Dark: https://books2read.com/u/m0qX7M
Dark Revelations: https://books2read.com/u/m0qyqJ
The Profane Dominion: https://books2read.com/u/bpy58J
Phoenix Fire: https://books2read.com/u/b6V1L6
Kill the Bull in Individual Identity https://books2read.com/u/4ENoz0
Kill the Bull in Social Identity https://books2read.com/u/3JoXeX
Kill the Bull in Religion and Politics: https://books2read.com/u/mBVZZZ
Stealth Invasion. Vaccination: Mark of the Beast? https://books2read.com/u/m2QZGk
A Return to Empire: https://books2read.com/u/bPNxP7
