A Review of David William Parry, Cultivating Presence: A Conceptual Autoethnography Examining Neofolk and Its Relation to Contemporary Miracle and Mystery Traditions (Manticore Press, Melbourne, 2025). ISBN 978-1-7638613-5-0.

This book was originally offered for review to Sebastian Wang. This was a mistake. Sebastian is the sort of Roman Catholic who reads the decrees of the Council of Trent for recreation and who regards the Summa Theologiae as suitable bedtime reading. Presented with a book by a self-described “queer theatrical and folk Catholic priest,” he did not produce a review. Instead, he began assembling authorities from St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas, Pope Pius X and the Fourth Lateran Council. Before long, what had been intended as an appreciation had become a prosecution brief. Since the Libertarian Alliance has no present plans to revive the Holy Office, and since burning books has generally proved less effective than reading them, the assignment eventually passed to me.

This is fortunate. Sebastian would have been justified in pointing out that David William Parry’s theology frequently wanders beyond the boundaries of what the Catholic Church has ever recognised as orthodox belief. He would have found much to object to in Parry’s eclectic engagement with Gnosticism, Swedenborg, martial industrial aesthetics and what he calls “magickal humanism.” Yet that would also have been to review a different book from the one Parry has actually written. Cultivating Presence is not a catechism, nor is it an exercise in speculative theology. It is an account of one man’s attempt to understand the relationship between theatrical presence, religious symbolism and artistic vocation, while simultaneously explaining the creative journey that produced three of his major poetic works. One may dispute many of his conclusions while still recognising that the attempt is intellectually serious, refreshingly independent, and frequently illuminating.

One of the less remarked consequences of our cultural decline has been the disappearance of genuine artistic autobiography. The Victorians gave us Newman, Ruskin and Morris. The twentieth century produced Orwell, Koestler and Lewis. Each wrote from an unmistakable personal standpoint while engaging with the larger civilisation around them. Today’s universities, by contrast, encourage a curious impersonality. Every judgement must be supported by approved authorities. Every originality must be disguised beneath methodology. Every conviction must be hedged about with the apologetic language of “problematizing” and “situating.” The result is writing that may satisfy examiners and funding bodies, but rarely leaves any impression that a living intelligence stands behind the page. The personality has been edited out in favour of procedure.

Parry belongs to another tradition. His book grows out of decades of notebooks, theatrical performances, philosophical reading, religious reflection and poetic experiment. He tells us in the Preface that it seeks to place “within an analytical framework three works of theatrical poetry” while examining “the relationship betwixt an actor’s presence and the Holy Presence.” He continues: “as a queer theatrical and folk Catholic priest, the opportunity to address scholarly materials around my research question on the relationship betwixt an actor’s presence and the Holy Presence had been an aim of mine for decades.” There is something quietly admirable about anyone who admits to pursuing a single intellectual question over decades. Ours is an age of instant opinion and disposable enthusiasms. Long attention has become almost an act of rebellion.

The title itself deserves a moment’s reflection. Presence has become one of those words debased by overuse. Companies speak of “brand presence.” Politicians cultivate “media presence.” Every social media platform urges us to maintain an “online presence.” The word has been reduced to little more than visibility. Parry attempts to recover an older meaning. Presence, for him, is not simply being seen. It is a mode of being. It is the quality by which an actor commands a stage before uttering a line, by which a liturgy becomes something more than a sequence of prescribed actions, and by which human beings become capable of encountering realities that cannot be reduced to political slogans or psychological explanations. Whether this analogy finally persuades is another matter. It is, at least, an original question, and originality has become sufficiently rare that one ought not to dismiss it merely because it is unfamiliar.

The conceptual heart of the book appears remarkably early. “Neofolk is my religion,” Parry writes. “Or more tellingly, folk Catholicism tinged with martial industrial poetics.” [13] It is a sentence that will delight some readers and horrify others. Sebastian Wang’s eyebrows would, at this point, have disappeared into his hairline. Yet it deserves to be considered rather than condemned. Like many striking aphorisms, it gains force precisely because it refuses immediate clarification. Parry is not proposing a new creed or inviting us to exchange the Nicene Creed for a record collection. Rather, he is describing the imaginative landscape within which his artistic life has developed. Neofolk, for him, is less a musical genre than an inheritance of symbols, memories, landscapes and moods through which questions of transcendence may again be approached. Romanticism, folk memory, Catholic ritual, industrial melancholy and theatrical performance become, not competing systems, but overlapping languages.

This immediately distinguishes Parry from the dominant tendencies of contemporary criticism. Modern literary scholarship possesses an impressive capacity to reduce every artistic movement into a dispute about power. Music becomes an expression of class interests. Painting becomes coded imperialism. Poetry becomes an argument over race or gender. The work itself disappears beneath political interpretation. Parry explicitly rejects this reduction. Recalling his own engagement with neofolk, he insists that its imaginative world “is indisputably irreducible to the concerns of leftists, rationalists, rightists, or secularists, because religious creativity, like life, is never straightforward.” [31] This is, I think, one of the strongest passages in the book. It deserves to be read beyond the relatively small audience interested in neofolk.

There is, indeed, something unhealthy about a civilisation that insists every artistic judgement must first declare its political allegiance. Modern criticism increasingly resembles customs inspection. Before one may admire a poem, a painting or a piece of music, one must declare whether it satisfies the ideological regulations currently in force. Is it sufficiently progressive? Does it contain inappropriate symbolism? Can some historical association, however remote, be discovered that renders appreciation morally suspect? The object of criticism ceases to be understanding. It becomes quarantine. Parry’s refusal to play this game is one of the reasons his book possesses an independence that many more polished academic studies conspicuously lack.

Nor is this independence merely theoretical. Throughout the volume there runs an unmistakable sense of artistic self-reliance. We encounter the formation of the Gruntlers Arts Group, performances in marginal venues, poems written during lunch breaks while earning a living, years of notebook-keeping, and a sustained attempt to construct an original theatrical vocabulary outside the institutional machinery of contemporary arts funding. These are not the memoirs of a man waiting for permission. They are the recollections of someone who has simply continued creating because he could imagine doing nothing else. In an age when so much artistic production depends upon grants, fellowships, diversity statements and bureaucratic patronage, that independence deserves admiration even from readers who remain unconvinced by every aspect of the resulting work.

Particularly interesting is Parry’s repeated return to Gabriel Marcel. Modern philosophy has largely abandoned questions of presence in favour of questions of language, power or cognition. Marcel never did. Parry observes that Marcel “neither feels compelled to demonstrate the existence of God, nor offer arguments in support of religious belief, since this would reductively quantify supernal questions relating to meaning, value and spiritual presence.” [32] This is not an argument against reason. It is an argument against mistaking reason for the whole of reality. The deepest human experiences are not always susceptible to demonstration. Friendship, beauty, loyalty, love and religious worship all involve dimensions that disappear if treated merely as objects of detached analysis. Marcel understood this. So, in his own rather different way, does Parry.

The point becomes concrete in one of the book’s most memorable episodes. Describing an improvised performance at Birmingham’s Metropolitan Community Church, Parry recounts how the apparent grotesquerie unexpectedly dissolved into mystery. Watching the performer, he found “the stage presence of this singer transfigure into something akin to a pious communicant listening to Eucharistic invocations.” [30] Whether every reader shares that perception is almost beside the point. What matters is the seriousness with which Parry attempts to describe an experience that many writers would either sentimentalise or dismiss altogether. He refuses both temptations.

That seriousness runs throughout the book. One may occasionally question his theological synthesis. One may think that his enthusiasm for Swedenborg, Gnosticism or martial industrial symbolism sometimes carries him beyond the limits of persuasive argument. Yet these are the excesses of intellectual curiosity rather than ideological conformity. They arise because Parry is attempting to discover something, not because he is repeating what everyone around him already believes.

The book changes noticeably in its second half. The first chapters establish the conceptual framework through Gabriel Marcel, neofolk and the nature of presence. There is necessarily a certain density to this material, and readers unfamiliar with Marcel’s distinction between problem and mystery will occasionally wish that Parry had slowed the pace. The later chapters, however, place flesh upon the philosophical skeleton. Here we encounter the making of an artist rather than merely his theories, and the book acquires an autobiographical warmth that is largely absent from the opening pages.

Parry remarks that writing the theoretical chapters forced him to realise “that I have been exploring the nature of presence for at least three decades.” [39] He goes on to describe how this exploration was tested “by authoring and staging my own texts, organizing events and slowly building a congenial réseau of professional colleagues despite their inaugural dearth.” This is, I think, the real subject of the book. It is less an abstract study of neofolk than the account of a long apprenticeship. The philosophy matters because it explains the practice; the practice matters because it continually tests the philosophy.

One of the pleasures of reading Cultivating Presence is that Parry has no interest in presenting himself as the product of institutional success. His artistic life develops, not through grants, fellowships and university appointments, but through obscure poetry readings, small theatrical companies, friendships maintained over decades, notebooks filled during lunch breaks, and endless revision in the light of experience. The Gruntlers Arts Group emerges as a kind of laboratory in which ideas could be tested before living audiences. As he recalls, each monthly gathering at the Poetry Café allowed him “the chance to recite neofolk poems of my own, as well as gauge audience reactions,” while his work was continually revised according to “their impact” rather than the demands of any academic supervisor. [39]

There is a lesson here that extends beyond poetry. The modern world has developed an almost superstitious reverence for institutions. We are encouraged to believe that every worthwhile activity requires official validation, quality assurance, professional accreditation and, preferably, state funding. The independent scholar, the independent artist and the independent thinker have become faintly embarrassing survivals from another age. They possess no departmental webpages, no diversity statements, no strategic plans, and therefore appear somehow illegitimate. Yet almost every genuinely original movement in European culture began precisely in this way: with a handful of people pursuing an idea because they found it compelling rather than profitable.

This is why I find Parry’s account so attractive even where I remain unconvinced by aspects of his theology. He belongs to that older tradition of self-created intellectuals. One is reminded less of the modern university than of William Blake engraving his own books, or of William Morris setting up the Kelmscott Press because commercial publishers had ceased to satisfy him. Originality seldom begins in committee.

The autobiographical passages dealing with The Grammar of Witchcraft are among the strongest in the volume. The title alone, Parry tells us, was enough to alarm Christian friends, “who refused to physically hold this slim volume,” obliging him continually to explain that its protagonist was Shakespeare’s Caliban, “the son of a witch named Sycorax.” [40] One smiles, but only briefly. There is something revealing about this anecdote. The modern religious imagination has become strangely timid. Words themselves are increasingly treated as dangerous objects. A book may not be judged by its contents because its title has already rendered it suspect. We live, after all, in an age when novels require trigger warnings, Shakespeare is scrutinised for ideological offences, and readers increasingly demand moral reassurance before they dare admire a work of art.

Parry refuses this atmosphere of perpetual caution. He is willing to risk misunderstanding if the alternative is artistic dishonesty. That willingness deserves respect. Every original writer eventually discovers that the safest course is to write nothing likely to offend anyone. Every original writer worthy of the name eventually decides to ignore that discovery.

His recollections of writing poetry while employed as “a lowly paper keeper” are equally revealing. He describes composing the earliest material for The Grammar of Witchcraft during lunch breaks, while bemused colleagues attributed his preoccupation with theatrical presence to “an inescapable alcoholism.” [41] There is something almost comic in the image, though the underlying point is serious. Creative work rarely announces itself with dignity. It advances in stolen hours, on scraps of paper, in notebooks, on trains and in lunch rooms. Looking backwards, artistic careers often appear inevitable. Living through them, they generally resemble organised improvisation.

Parry’s account of the Gruntlers reinforces this impression. They emerge as “a loosely knit phalanx of authors,” together with musicians, actors and pagan poets, meeting in cafés, pubs and bookshops to discuss each other’s work long before any wider recognition arrived. ‘This is how cultural life has generally renewed itself. Bloomsbury, the Inklings, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Imagists—all began as conversations among friends rather than programmes administered from above. There is perhaps a warning here for governments forever searching for “creative industries” to subsidise. Creativity flourishes best where it is least managed.

Theologically, however, one cannot entirely follow Parry without hesitation. His description of neofolk as something that “unyokes Catholicism from expired conventions and brings it back to the people” [42] will inevitably alarm readers of a more orthodox disposition. Sebastian Wang, I suspect, has at this point quietly reached for Bellarmine. The difficulty is not that Parry asks imaginative questions. Christianity has always encouraged imagination. Dante, Hildegard of Bingen and George Herbert hardly lacked imaginative power. The difficulty is that Parry’s attraction to Swedenborg, Gnosticism and esoteric traditions sometimes blurs distinctions that historic Christianity has generally insisted upon maintaining.

Yet it would be unfair to leave the matter there. Parry is not writing as a dogmatic theologian. He is writing as an artist attempting to understand the symbolic landscapes through which his imagination travels. There is an important difference. Artists are often untidy thinkers because they work through images rather than syllogisms. One should therefore resist the temptation to treat every metaphor as though it were a formal theological proposition. Sebastian’s abandoned review would no doubt have catalogued every deviation from orthodoxy with forensic thoroughness. Mine is content simply to observe that readers seeking Catholic doctrine should consult the Catechism. Readers seeking an account of one artist’s spiritual imagination will find something rather more interesting here.

Indeed, the recurring figure throughout the book is not Swedenborg but Gabriel Marcel. Parry repeatedly returns to Marcel because Marcel offers him a philosophical vocabulary for experiences that refuse reduction to empirical description. The language of “presence” allows him to speak about theatre, liturgy, friendship and artistic creation without flattening them into sociology or psychology. Whether every analogy convinces is less important than the larger insight. Modern civilisation has become remarkably adept at explaining away precisely those realities that give human existence its depth. Beauty becomes evolutionary adaptation. Worship becomes tribal bonding. Love becomes neurochemistry. Art becomes ideology. Marcel—and following him, Parry—insists that explanation is not the same as understanding.

This, in the end, is why I think Cultivating Presence matters. It is not because every reader will emerge persuaded by its theology or captivated by neofolk. Many will not. It matters because it is the work of an independent intelligence attempting to recover mystery in a civilisation increasingly organised against it. We inhabit a managerial culture that prefers procedures to imagination, measurable outcomes to contemplation, and ideological conformity to genuine originality. Against this background, a book that speaks unapologetically of presence, symbolism, ritual, theatre and transcendence has already performed a valuable service.

Sebastian Wang will, I fear, remain unconvinced. Somewhere, I imagine, there is a manuscript review running to thirty thousand words, complete with extensive quotations from St Irenaeus and a concluding recommendation that the author spend a quiet month rereading the decrees of Trent. Perhaps one day the Libertarian Alliance will publish it as a companion volume. Until then, I am content to recommend David William Parry’s book on rather different grounds. It is learned without pedantry, personal without narcissism, speculative without becoming merely fashionable, and independent in a way that has become increasingly rare. Readers will not accompany him along every path. They will, however, find themselves in the company of a man who has spent decades thinking, reading, performing and creating outside the comforting orthodoxies of our age. That is no small achievement, and it makes Cultivating Presence a book worth reading, arguing with, and returning to.