livingroom moon rising
© Jago
¡Amigo de Amazon!
10 years ago
My Blog List
Friday, April 28, 2006
Dandelions
Pedro Terán says “It’s funny how you can know two things for years and not notice that they are the same thing.”
The other night I had a dream. I was playing catch with my grandsons who were in a line in front of me. The one to my left tricked me. He had the ball, feinted to my right, but then threw it to my left. Caught off balance, I lurched clumsily to my left, arm outstretched but far too late to make contact with the ball. The force of my movement woke me up.
Whereupon I thought, slightly agrieved, “Hang on a minute. What deceived me was not a grandson, it was a story (“I am going to throw the ball to your right”) sold to me by the virtual grandson in my brain. But my brain was the sole engine of that story. An “out there” object in my brain tricked the subjective presence of my brain. It was me who was tricked, and I was doing the tricking.
Pedro’s story of the dandelion also suggests that the brain has many virtual sites which seem at one time or another to be paramount, and the conscious “I” wonders among them without much logical record.
The other night I had a dream. I was playing catch with my grandsons who were in a line in front of me. The one to my left tricked me. He had the ball, feinted to my right, but then threw it to my left. Caught off balance, I lurched clumsily to my left, arm outstretched but far too late to make contact with the ball. The force of my movement woke me up.
Whereupon I thought, slightly agrieved, “Hang on a minute. What deceived me was not a grandson, it was a story (“I am going to throw the ball to your right”) sold to me by the virtual grandson in my brain. But my brain was the sole engine of that story. An “out there” object in my brain tricked the subjective presence of my brain. It was me who was tricked, and I was doing the tricking.
Pedro’s story of the dandelion also suggests that the brain has many virtual sites which seem at one time or another to be paramount, and the conscious “I” wonders among them without much logical record.
Coalition of the willing
He talks not like an elected representative, but the chief executive of an occupying power. Maybe for once his perception of himself is near the mark.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
In answer to my question about snakeshead fritillaries below, Charlie Whittaker, clearly a man of wide interests, sent this link.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Monday, April 24, 2006
Fatwahs and immaculate conceptions
Given how religions are based on The Truth, it’s surprising how coy their élites can be about the nature of that Truth. When The Guardian reported the Judas Gospel story it emphasised the populist bit, that Iscariot the bad guy might have been the good guy after all, because he was acting on the boss’s orders. But though it mentioned Christ’s crucial quote, “For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me,” it didn’t explain its appalling heresy for Christians who believe in the Nicene Creed. That is to say, “the man that clothes me” means that Jesus, if we are to take what He says as fact, was not a man, but a god disguised in the flesh of a man. His words would give credence to what some say they saw after the crucifixion, the spirit of Christ hovering above the cross, laughing at all the idiot humans gathered round its base who thought that He was dead.
The enormity of this revelation is not so great now that Christians understand how theology can only be an embarassment in the modern world, but in the three hundred and twenty five years following Christ’s death huge numbers of people made war on, tortured and burnt huge numbers of other people in a squabble over just this fundamental heresy, and Jesus’s manhood was not fully established (in the eyes of most believers at least) until 325 AD.
Likewise, of more recent significance, some twat has resurrected the Salman Rushdie fatwah. And what was that about? Well, those who shape Muslim thought are quite happy for the unlettered rank and file of fellow believers, operating at about the intellectual level of The Sun, to think that Rushdie’s crime against the Prophet in The Satanic Verses was to say that he went with loose women. Heavens above - how many great male figures of all religions didn’t go with loose women at one time or another? The whole Greek pantheon, for a start, give or take the gender specificity of the term “woman”; Gautama, Saints Antony, Augustine... Paul - even JC himself according to the films, which know as much about it as anybody does.
Though one cannot expect the followers of Islam to agree that their Prophet was in good company in this respect, nobody is pretending he was a cold and asexual man.
No, the sin of Satanic Verses is clear, simple, and much worse. In the story, the Prophet’s amanuensis (remember the Prophet himself did not read or write) decided to change the odd word of the Angel’s revelation, first just an “a” or a “the”, to see if Muhammad noticed when he read it back to him. When he didn’t, the amanuensis grew a little more adventurous.
The Word of God is supposed to be immutable and sacrosanct. But if Zâid ibn Thâbit was messing about with it, what does that make it? Provisional and slippery. Clearly the kind of lads who rushed around Bradford burning things couldn’t be entrusted with any such dangerous idea. Much better to say it was because the Prophet went with loose women. (Or even prostitutes. But this too is dodgy ground. What are the however many virgins contractually available to martyrs in Heaven but compliant bodies provided by the house?)
The Immaculate Conception of the Christians is interesting for a slightly different reason. It’s all a bit tacky, and they don’t really like talking about it at all. A lot of Catholics, and this isn’t just ignorant peasants, used to think until quite recently that it referred to the precise process by which the Holy Virgin became pregnant. I knew even an ex-priest who thought this, and maybe that’s what they were taught, to save awkwardness (this same guy, an old friend, left the priesthood one cold wet night when, as a very junior servant of Christ’s cause on Earth, he'd been out to administer the last rites, found a cold wet and starving mother and baby on the street and brought them in to the priests’ house ("Fathers" waited on by nuns) for warmth and a meal. The senior men of God told him to put her and her baby back out on the street again where she belonged. At three o’clock the next morning my friend got out of bed, packed his few things, and walked out. “What, the house...?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the whole package.”)
The Immaculate Conception wasn’t invented until 1854. The question had been raised of how the V. Mary could have been permanently and essentially without sin as, since Eve’s trifling indiscretion, every human being in existence had been and would ever be conceived in sin.
This was an embarrassment. There was no doubt that Mary’s parents had been at it in the usual way preparatory to her conception, with unCatholic bodily secretions and maybe vocalisations and all the rest of the unfortunate business. What to do? What to do? In 1854, Pius IX went and asked God, and God told him that Mary had official exemption from the curse of Eve. She had been conceived without sin.
But then the Curia might anticipate the questions of the great gullible unwashed (the kind you might find in the street of a wet cold night.) “Conceived without sin? And exactly how would you set about that, father? Tell us the method and maybe we could be giving it a go.” No, inform on a need to know basis, but best hush it up as much as possible.
The only religion which seems to avoid this kind of muddle is Hinduism. There you can worship what deity or demon you want, with whatever attributes you wish, and nobody seems to need to kill you for it. Hardly a proper religion at all in fact.
The enormity of this revelation is not so great now that Christians understand how theology can only be an embarassment in the modern world, but in the three hundred and twenty five years following Christ’s death huge numbers of people made war on, tortured and burnt huge numbers of other people in a squabble over just this fundamental heresy, and Jesus’s manhood was not fully established (in the eyes of most believers at least) until 325 AD.
Likewise, of more recent significance, some twat has resurrected the Salman Rushdie fatwah. And what was that about? Well, those who shape Muslim thought are quite happy for the unlettered rank and file of fellow believers, operating at about the intellectual level of The Sun, to think that Rushdie’s crime against the Prophet in The Satanic Verses was to say that he went with loose women. Heavens above - how many great male figures of all religions didn’t go with loose women at one time or another? The whole Greek pantheon, for a start, give or take the gender specificity of the term “woman”; Gautama, Saints Antony, Augustine... Paul - even JC himself according to the films, which know as much about it as anybody does.
Though one cannot expect the followers of Islam to agree that their Prophet was in good company in this respect, nobody is pretending he was a cold and asexual man.
No, the sin of Satanic Verses is clear, simple, and much worse. In the story, the Prophet’s amanuensis (remember the Prophet himself did not read or write) decided to change the odd word of the Angel’s revelation, first just an “a” or a “the”, to see if Muhammad noticed when he read it back to him. When he didn’t, the amanuensis grew a little more adventurous.
The Word of God is supposed to be immutable and sacrosanct. But if Zâid ibn Thâbit was messing about with it, what does that make it? Provisional and slippery. Clearly the kind of lads who rushed around Bradford burning things couldn’t be entrusted with any such dangerous idea. Much better to say it was because the Prophet went with loose women. (Or even prostitutes. But this too is dodgy ground. What are the however many virgins contractually available to martyrs in Heaven but compliant bodies provided by the house?)
The Immaculate Conception of the Christians is interesting for a slightly different reason. It’s all a bit tacky, and they don’t really like talking about it at all. A lot of Catholics, and this isn’t just ignorant peasants, used to think until quite recently that it referred to the precise process by which the Holy Virgin became pregnant. I knew even an ex-priest who thought this, and maybe that’s what they were taught, to save awkwardness (this same guy, an old friend, left the priesthood one cold wet night when, as a very junior servant of Christ’s cause on Earth, he'd been out to administer the last rites, found a cold wet and starving mother and baby on the street and brought them in to the priests’ house ("Fathers" waited on by nuns) for warmth and a meal. The senior men of God told him to put her and her baby back out on the street again where she belonged. At three o’clock the next morning my friend got out of bed, packed his few things, and walked out. “What, the house...?” I asked. “No,” he said, “the whole package.”)
The Immaculate Conception wasn’t invented until 1854. The question had been raised of how the V. Mary could have been permanently and essentially without sin as, since Eve’s trifling indiscretion, every human being in existence had been and would ever be conceived in sin.
This was an embarrassment. There was no doubt that Mary’s parents had been at it in the usual way preparatory to her conception, with unCatholic bodily secretions and maybe vocalisations and all the rest of the unfortunate business. What to do? What to do? In 1854, Pius IX went and asked God, and God told him that Mary had official exemption from the curse of Eve. She had been conceived without sin.
But then the Curia might anticipate the questions of the great gullible unwashed (the kind you might find in the street of a wet cold night.) “Conceived without sin? And exactly how would you set about that, father? Tell us the method and maybe we could be giving it a go.” No, inform on a need to know basis, but best hush it up as much as possible.
The only religion which seems to avoid this kind of muddle is Hinduism. There you can worship what deity or demon you want, with whatever attributes you wish, and nobody seems to need to kill you for it. Hardly a proper religion at all in fact.
Friday, April 21, 2006
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Noise and silence
I was riding up the very steep hill out of H, eventually towards Hades [SE 136 049] and Elysium [SE133 054]. An old lady came out of a house gate further up, a little oedemic about the legs but smartly dressed and carefully made up. As we tottered past each other, me upwards on the lowest granny gear, the old lady with ten centimetre steps valleywards, we exchanged greetings. Mine was, good morning, though it was probably well into the afternoon, and she said, “I’ll ‘ave yer by.” I have no idea what it meant, but I took it to embrace our relative athletic prowess.
A couple of hundred metres up the road around twenty stones the size of my head but rough square-cut crashed down on the road in front of my wheel with some forceful clatter. I looked up the three metre dry stone wall to my left and there was a disconcerted, very hairy Alsation that had just demolished the top two courses of the corner of its garden wall. I said nothing. It neither.
I awaited the third happening, because things are meant to come in threes. But there was no more.
Except the day after, yesterday evening, I was riding up to High Brow, an even steeper, stonier less travelled track. On one side was a hanging oak wood, on the other another high dry stone wall with a narrow grass verge at the bottom, and there on the grass, neatly side by side like they had been taken off and carefully placed before someone climbed into bed, was a pair of Reebok ankle boots, black with white logo, in good condition.
A couple of hundred metres up the road around twenty stones the size of my head but rough square-cut crashed down on the road in front of my wheel with some forceful clatter. I looked up the three metre dry stone wall to my left and there was a disconcerted, very hairy Alsation that had just demolished the top two courses of the corner of its garden wall. I said nothing. It neither.
I awaited the third happening, because things are meant to come in threes. But there was no more.
Except the day after, yesterday evening, I was riding up to High Brow, an even steeper, stonier less travelled track. On one side was a hanging oak wood, on the other another high dry stone wall with a narrow grass verge at the bottom, and there on the grass, neatly side by side like they had been taken off and carefully placed before someone climbed into bed, was a pair of Reebok ankle boots, black with white logo, in good condition.
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Jarndyce's metaphor
I have just come, far too late and via Curious Hamster’s exemplary analysis, to Jarndyce’s metaphor in justification of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq:
OK, most metaphors fall to pieces in the end, but this one never gets together in the first place. I suggest that slightly more robust, though clearly not invulnerable, is:
You're walking past a duck pond. In the pond, a child is drowning. You have the power to save him. There are twenty people sitting on the bank doing nothing about it, and you fail to swim in and save him. If he drowns, you've done a bad thing.
OK, most metaphors fall to pieces in the end, but this one never gets together in the first place. I suggest that slightly more robust, though clearly not invulnerable, is:
There is a prison which we helped to set up and staff. Over the years a régime of bullying and even lethal abuse emerged. At first we encouraged it. Then the prison governor gave some friends of ours a kicking. We stormed the prison and killed some of the prisoners. Then we withdrew, leaving the prison governor in charge, but we put the prison on short rations, which the prisoners had to pay for through the nose. The young and weak died in significant numbers.
The bullying continued, got worse, and to stop it we occasionally flew over the prison and bombed it. Tales of lethal substances inside were rife, though, apart from stuff we had helped the governor to procure, not substantiated.
Ten years after we gave the governor his first kicking we decided to go and give him another, even bigger one, kill a lot more prisoners, steal as much stuff as we could, trash the prison infrastructure, and liberalise the prison régime by handing over power to a group of conflicting prisoners’ councils.
Despite the resilience and good will of a majority of the prisoners throughout this time, parts of the prison descended into non-stop, high casualty rioting, and the infrastructure deteriorated even more. The bullying did not stop.
We started to talk about leaving the prisoners to their own devices and going and kicking the shit out of another prison next door.
Monday, April 17, 2006
A point of principle
Every time I write something on the British Government/inert anaerobically pullulating mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party/unspeakable quagmire of rotting shite we call Downing Street, I mean it to be the last. I really am a strong believer in doing things that are fun, constructive, enjoyable, creative, all that stuff. Sometime over the weekend J and I walked down to the white bridge, it was warm and sunny and just ahead were our son and daughter shoulder to shoulder laughing about something and up ahead again were five grandchildren, mounted on bicycles, bows and swords at the ready for the rocks and woods, they were shouting at the tops of their voices, the birds likewise, a woodpecker drumming, and we observed to each other that it was all OK. And that’s the kind of thing I should write about. The British Government/inert anaerobically pullulating mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party/unspeakable quagmire of rotting shite we call Downing Street, could they just be like sewage management and refuse collection, something which has to be done but we can comfortably ignore; or like a pathogenic body which has lodged in ours, unexpellable, but something we can encyst so that it festers in isolation and its gaseous distillations, which could kill from disgust alone, let alone toxicity, are imprisoned by impermeable membranes.
Sometimes I think that’s possible. Then you read stuff like this; the Saudi Arabian state imprisoned and tortured four British citizens for crimes which they knew, and the British Government knew, had been committed by native Wahabists. The British Government, incapable of a statement of principle, incapable of defending or standing up for it’s own citizens, incapable of anything, quite frankly, than getting its tongue as far as possible up the arses of bullies, torturers, militaristic thugs, atavistic oligarchs (all this, it is true, may be uniquely part of the psychopathology of Anthony Blair, but it does rub off, you know, you suppurating pus of New Labour, you can’t plead you were just obeying orders, or not quite yet, not till Princess Tony has been in power a little longer and done a little more relevant legislation); the British Government, incapable of championing anything but manifold and manifest oppression and degradation of the ordinary of the earth, could not demand that their citizens were immediately released, and shame the Saudis into doing so, because, apart from it not being in their governmental nature to do anything other than what was vile, they were tied to the Saudi Royal Family by webs of corruption so deep and strong and interpenetrating that they had no freedom of movement. So that when the Saudi Royal Family imprisoned and tortured four British citizens, the British Government acted “discreetly” and “behind the scenes” (oh for Hamlet to skewer them through the arras) - that is to say not at all. And the four British citizens endured imprisonment and torture for months (what fantasies we have of Princess Tony, Jack Straw, that Reid guy and a. n. other or your choice being substituted for our innocent citizens and put under the probe and the vice) while the British Government/inert anaerobically pullulating mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party/unspeakable quagmire of rotting shite we call Downing Street dithered and pussy footed oleaginously around for months. Fair enough. We’d had a New Labour régime for six years by that time. We knew the kind of creatures they were.
But now this. The British Government is arguing in the House of Lords for the immunity of Saudi torturers of British citizens. It is, they say, a point of principle.
Oh, sorry, you do have principles then.
Sometimes I think that’s possible. Then you read stuff like this; the Saudi Arabian state imprisoned and tortured four British citizens for crimes which they knew, and the British Government knew, had been committed by native Wahabists. The British Government, incapable of a statement of principle, incapable of defending or standing up for it’s own citizens, incapable of anything, quite frankly, than getting its tongue as far as possible up the arses of bullies, torturers, militaristic thugs, atavistic oligarchs (all this, it is true, may be uniquely part of the psychopathology of Anthony Blair, but it does rub off, you know, you suppurating pus of New Labour, you can’t plead you were just obeying orders, or not quite yet, not till Princess Tony has been in power a little longer and done a little more relevant legislation); the British Government, incapable of championing anything but manifold and manifest oppression and degradation of the ordinary of the earth, could not demand that their citizens were immediately released, and shame the Saudis into doing so, because, apart from it not being in their governmental nature to do anything other than what was vile, they were tied to the Saudi Royal Family by webs of corruption so deep and strong and interpenetrating that they had no freedom of movement. So that when the Saudi Royal Family imprisoned and tortured four British citizens, the British Government acted “discreetly” and “behind the scenes” (oh for Hamlet to skewer them through the arras) - that is to say not at all. And the four British citizens endured imprisonment and torture for months (what fantasies we have of Princess Tony, Jack Straw, that Reid guy and a. n. other or your choice being substituted for our innocent citizens and put under the probe and the vice) while the British Government/inert anaerobically pullulating mass of the Parliamentary Labour Party/unspeakable quagmire of rotting shite we call Downing Street dithered and pussy footed oleaginously around for months. Fair enough. We’d had a New Labour régime for six years by that time. We knew the kind of creatures they were.
But now this. The British Government is arguing in the House of Lords for the immunity of Saudi torturers of British citizens. It is, they say, a point of principle.
Oh, sorry, you do have principles then.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)