Naples - fast faded glory...

Naples is quite a shock. Having been in Tuscany in June, Naples feels like a different world - poorer, shabbier. The faded elegance of eighteenth century glamour is covered with graffiti as far as arm can stretch and on virtually every available space. Litter covers the streets and many things look as if nature bids to reclaim it - grasses and weeds emerge from between the cracks even on obviously used buildings. People linger begging - the obvious Roma - but also at a supermarket entrance a young Italian woman in stretched cardigan and sagging T-shirt. The shops are antique - much sold from behind counters (including the bookshops) and every one over-manned. Manned being the right word - even at the hotel, apart from the woman who cleared up at breakfast, they are all men (even the 'chamber person' who brought me a second pillow. It is different here.

I went to the Archaeological Museum which was beautiful - a converted Neopolitan palace with a striking collection from Pompeii. I especially liked the early paintings - so vivid, complex and realistic. The latter true even when dealing with the worlds and behaviour of the gods - they were simply part of the mental furniture of the world. Their stories, our story; however, that was configured in the mind of the beholder (metaphysically or culturally). The mosaics too - refined products carefully constructed out of minute stones and both intimate scene and grand display. I saw the famous mosaic of Alexander pursuing the Persian king in victory and it tastes battle, triumph and fear. There was also rooms of erotica - no shrinking violets here - I especially liked the clay lamp of an ageing scholar reading a text from the underneath of which emerges a (relatively) vast phallus - as if his unconscious dreams of past opportunity, faded hope.

I am in Naples for UN Habitat's World Urban Forum - 11,000 people discussing cities for four days and networking furiously (and moonlighting I expect too).

Comments

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...

Golgonooza

Search This Blog