After the beheading of King Charles I, The Ranters were a disparate group of sexually liberated spiritual anarchists active in Britain. Challenging church and parliamentary authority, The Ranters called compassionate attention to the outcast and subjugated, embraced non-monogamous and queer formations and vouched for an end to tithe payment and private property ownership. Most original texts were burned for their sacrilegious content, nearly wiping The Ranters from history.
The Ranter address, sprinkling prose with conversation, comedy and swearing, parodies the staid measure of the spoken sermon to escape oppressive social restraints and voice disillusionment. The Ranters represented a response to ongoing religious and social problems. As a label – “Ranter” intended to discredit the speaker as a fringe eccentric – the term itself, in its variant forms like “Rantipoler,” “Rantizer”, and “Rantism,” was loosely applied to anyone of extreme opinions. The Ranters, however, transformed this tag of intended ostracising into an emblem of empowerment – a gesture of subversive resistance akin in spirit to the wilful adolescent.
As a label – “Ranter” intended to discredit the speaker as a fringe eccentric – the term itself, in its variant forms like ‘Rantipoler’, ‘Rantizer’, and ‘Rantism’, was loosely applied to anyone of extreme opinions.
Further to reaching those excluded from political discourse by staging speeches in alehouses, occupied churches, and street corners to preach spiritual and sexual freedom, The Ranters addressed all “Fellow Creatures,” embracing the presence and the importance of non-humans as active co-creators of new subject assemblages or alliances. The Ranters’ concerns, confronting the structural and personal, were met with stolid contest. As the teenager is undermined by a discourse of immaturity, a quiet hope that with age will come alignment, The Ranters were dismissed as garrulous and fringe.
The below Rant performs the practice’s hurried intensity, breathlessness, and mental perambulation, offloading burdens in the present tense. “My body is a weed” sinks into the pantheistic diffuse and the spiritual sublime. It speaks to parks as a space to appreciate scruffiness, release the spirit from bondage, and imagine a return to matter.
My Body Is A Weed
My body is a weed,
My body is a weed,
weirdly green,
break-ing Up!
against
the gas
pres-sures of the sun.
My spirit in the wind,
My spirit in the wind,
streaking grit,
rush-ing full
of pride.
Put your face close to me.
Embrace me like mother. Let us make merry, sing, and dance! Base impudent kisses
Wanton BASE things
Look, the sky
do you think it is lower?
Well look at it!
My body is a weed
spreading in the wind,
rush-ing low
to the ground.
My body is a weed
I go to seed and bloom.
Twist-ed
wet mat-ted tufts
along the bed-rock
of stones.
Little cracks coming in
small white flowers
onioned in the grass.
Cans of Strongbow
Dark Fruit.
The air
smac-king
itself
fluttering cells.
My body is a weed.
A drunk and spoiling
song,
pulling roots
peeling strips
along the woodland floor.
Fingering the mud,
stretching out my neck
Tongue spongy and wet.
Tracing the dawn
inside some
nerve
slowly changing pink.
Discharging frog spawn
on wet grey rocks.
Cold bodies
back-to-belly.
Baby bottom feeders,
thistles, burdocks, water striders, maggots, lob worms, bull-rushes, starlings, tadpoles, red clover.
Bow before those poor
nasty, lousy, ragged wretches!
Their little mouths
caked in soil.
My body is a pylon
V-shaped crackling horns
heady, fast
high voltage arching bird song.
Sour piss-coloured clouds
smearing the sky
at tumultuous sudden turns.
Drink a bitter cup,
my body is a weed,
there is no peace in these green pastures.
Go to the cliffs and the rocks,
listen to the ragged rocks
rise and shake terribly!
Give over
to midnight mischief.
I’ve been looking Up!
for a long time.
Sliding into mud
my song being ended
at the bottom of the pond.
Words By Jude Browning.
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Jude Browning is an artist living in Glasgow who works across performance, publication, and live-event programming.
