tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4253150884145111492024-03-18T14:25:36.911+00:00GolgonoozaNicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.comBlogger1000125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-54173125353127730362024-03-16T08:20:00.008+00:002024-03-16T08:36:41.950+00:00Saved through the world or by escaping from it: Hellenic Tantra considered.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9UrHJCcaT30Byf94E-I6aeg6-WsBIErwTQuTTtKkmzDFTmE_8LhXZJKzn8HzO_7BqQ0Oto0kfmW2sMlPEpMxrxCYGS964g2jZvo0HKbXcl-Rxi2a3C1k6ukkAYcs5jmdBMjmJT11VrHm2suw1mRr9Z1bAqj8gzyeCt0tpXNcnpX0KlkIzb_1pQsB-uPE/s4032/IMG_0496.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9UrHJCcaT30Byf94E-I6aeg6-WsBIErwTQuTTtKkmzDFTmE_8LhXZJKzn8HzO_7BqQ0Oto0kfmW2sMlPEpMxrxCYGS964g2jZvo0HKbXcl-Rxi2a3C1k6ukkAYcs5jmdBMjmJT11VrHm2suw1mRr9Z1bAqj8gzyeCt0tpXNcnpX0KlkIzb_1pQsB-uPE/s320/IMG_0496.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading. </p><p>My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent. </p><p>You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you were meant to realize, I think, how this reconfigured back into a reimagined singular world: the present that we inhabit. The clues were everywhere so, for example, Plato created an image of the world of the forms - the ideal universal instantiations of any particular thing ultimately overseen by the Form of the Good - but as soon as you picture this as 'being elsewhere' in an unchanging eternal realm someplace else than here, Plato (or Socrates) tells you that the ideas are alive, they are fully present, unchanging at one level yet processing. Reality is nothing if not paradoxical to speech. You see the perfect instantiation when you see the world aright, not when you leave it!</p><p>This feeling of displacement was rectified when I read a remarkable book on Plato (and the Perennial Philosophy) called The Third City: Philosophy at War with Positivism by the Croatian philosopher, Borna Bebek, a book that qualifies for that curious title of an under-read masterpiece. Finally, someone who got it - and in a way far more sophisticated than I - and crucially who had come to it from the perspective of a seeker who recognized in Socrates a spiritual magician.</p><p>I was reminded of all this when reading this week another remarkable book (that you hope does not meet the fate of Bebek's) Gregory Shaw's 'Hellenic Tantra: The Theurgic Platonism of Iamblichius'. </p><p>Here too is a desire to rescue a philosopher from scholarly misreadings as both a 'dualist' seeking to unlock the soul from bondage to matter and yet not really a philosopher because a practitioner of theurgy (and, thus, to the eye of our physicalist dominant narrative a misguided practitioner of superstition). Worse this late Platonist is despoiling the tradition of rational inquiry bequeathed us by Socrates/Plato who, though we disregard many of their conclusions, honor their methods (or, at least, those we can recognize - since no dancing is allowed to modern philosophers).</p><p>What follows is an erudite, highly accessible, and engaging account of what Iamblichus was truly interested in and why it matters. To do this, Shaw chooses a comparative method sitting Late neo-Platonism alongside a similar, resonant tradition that of Indian tantra and then contrasting these with their 'competitors': Other Neo-Platonists like Plotinus and Porphyry and emergent Christianity on the one hand and with Vedanta on the other.</p><p>The cleavage between the two sets of traditions, put simply, is whether redemption is through the world, a true embodying, or from the world - a flight of the alone to the Alone to quote Plotinus. </p><p>In Iamblichus/Tantra, the One, the divine, has deliberately, consciously become the Many, has alienated itself in the particular, so that it might be known, and in conscious acts of weaving be re-realized as One present to and within the Many, and not simply in the human soul but in every particular form of matter - animal, plant, stone - and the very forces of our alienation have the potential to be the energies of delight. </p><p>In the neo-Platonism of Plotinus and in Vedanta, matter is either the most remote, disintegrated form of the One or 'Maya' fundamentally illusory - and the purpose of the soul is to realize its fundamental difference from any material entanglement - which is dissolved as illusion. </p><p>Ironically, from the perspective of Iamblichus or Tantra, the alternative path is, in fact, seen as the one of 'dualism' - the soul detaches itself from the world, is a counterpoint to the world, the One identified with is not the One that embraces the Many but divorces it!</p><p>This set of differences is explored in fascinating and enriching detail in the text - and in many ways both Iamblichus and Tantra emerge as traditions that are fully incarnate, so what of Christianity, Iamblichus' chief rival, and one that would come to be the dominant Western tradition, eliminating its rival by force? Is not Christianity the religion of incarnation par excellence? To which Iamblichus' answer would be an unequivocal no! The fatal mistake of Christianity in his eyes was to imagine that the incarnation was singular - in one particular person - and though that event is meant to restore the possibilities of raising all humans to a new 'deified' status in theosis, the cleavage remains, the divine presence in the world is held by a human, 'rented' out to other humans (on certain conditions) and denied in its fullness to the world as a whole of which we are an interwoven, inseparable part. To Iamblichus, this was simply the definition not of cosmic theurgy or magic but of simple sorcery, a terrible demeaning inflation in the divine's proper ordering! </p><p>As well as the scholarly exposition of both Iamblichus' and Tantric thought, there is a recognition, that brings us full circle, of the importance of experience in understanding the spiritually therapeutic nature of both traditions. Both prioritize practice and its resultant experiences, over rational thought which is simply a handmaiden for clarity and discernment. This places us on a collision course with the physicalist presumptions of the academy where such practices would simply be imagined as delusory (or in less polite terms mad) but this Shaw argues intelligently simply stands in the way of us understanding what either Iamblichus or Tantric practitioner is about; and, tempts us into simply either ignoring or sympathetically misinterpreting them.</p><p>So we are back to Plato - who was his better interpreter - Plotinus or Iamblichus? Probably better both than their twentieth-century peers but for me, it would be Iamblichus because he sees better Plato in the round, is less inclined to elide those things that so often disappear in later readings, and miss the fundamentally transformative invitation of the dialogues to a spiritual life that embraces the whole of the created order, right now.</p><p>On a final note, this book is a model of scholarship for its ability to illuminate complex patterns of thinking and practice that both advance the debate and yet remain fully accessible to an 'amateur' reader like me (whose acquaintance with Late Neo-Platonism (excepting Plotinus) and Tantra was nodding at best!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-5339509737971901072024-01-12T17:32:00.006+00:002024-01-12T18:56:10.068+00:00Edwin and Willa Muir: A Literary Marriage<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnVH2wwzuIGrAjFniIiLjElrUurVwvk_-0isrh1iSMiSj8yeSCyZRro83sPi4elg2YOlDa_36Bdcaf06rqIXR_clKI9woObChOj4RZhJ-0fARq-U-DS0NT-i32beamdtS497eN15d2mJNs6je-Q_nWpcX2h8gQkfqRjTvkNpBkh9vefX-3nZ9m4jp4mFE/s900/GDPcA2YXkAAShRA.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="675" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhnVH2wwzuIGrAjFniIiLjElrUurVwvk_-0isrh1iSMiSj8yeSCyZRro83sPi4elg2YOlDa_36Bdcaf06rqIXR_clKI9woObChOj4RZhJ-0fARq-U-DS0NT-i32beamdtS497eN15d2mJNs6je-Q_nWpcX2h8gQkfqRjTvkNpBkh9vefX-3nZ9m4jp4mFE/s320/GDPcA2YXkAAShRA.jpg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago! </p><p>This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies. </p><p>The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to be ascribed primarily to Edwin, with Willa in a supporting, if that, role. Whereas, in truth, the bulk of the translating work was completed by Willa, as Margery McCulloch makes clear (and which, fairly, Edwin always acknowledged). </p><p>The second tendency is the reverse: if only Willa had been more assertive (or had her consciousness raised), she could have forged a greater, more creative career for herself. Forget her sacrifices, often to earn money, which allowed Edwin to develop as a poet and critic. Why allow yourself to be subsumed? Viva the revolution! This tendency, whilst perhaps understandable, rather denies the actualities of the compromises any living together (and its wider context) demands - and would have horrified Willa. Though she certainly regretted the lack of fuller recognition and chaffed at circumstances, the idea of not having supported Edwin as a poet (and critic) would have struck her as a failure of their 'Belonging' (the title she gave to her autobiography that she wrote at the end of her life and after being ten years a widow).</p><p>This returns me to my starting point - how often our picture of people is conditioned by the shadows of life springing to prominence rather than the underlying realities of light. Edwin and Willa Muir's marriage was a fundamentally happy, collaborative, and engaged one that, as McCulloch shows, enabled both to find pathways towards creative expression; and, yes, if circumstances had been different more might have been possible but the actual is only ever misjudged by the ideal. </p><p>The book explores the actual gifts of both with commendable accuracy and judicious judgment including how their works were received, conceived, and, sometimes, misconceived by others.</p><p>They both started relatively late - both into their thirties when they married and serious literary production began - and both produced some of their finest work towards the end of their lives - Edwin's last poems were as good, if not better than anything he had produced before and Willa's idiosyncratic but influential book on the Ballard tradition in poetry and her autobiography. To both, but primarily to Willa, we owe Kafka's establishment as a writer in the English-speaking world.</p><p>They, also, enjoyed a life of significant incident - Germany during the post-First World War inflation and its magnification of anti-Semitism and the sense of the injustice of the Versailles' settlement. Czechoslovakia, after the Second World War, and the bright moment of its liberation being extinguished by the Soviet putsch and a return to authoritarianism. All of which McCulloch skillfully sketches giving you a real sense of the times through which they lived and in which they worked.</p><p>Finally, she shows how appearances can be deceiving. Willa was extroverted, colorful, opinionated, and, at times, brash, even for some people abrasive. Edwin was introverted, the quiet, contained presence, softly spoken, unwilling to intrude. It was Edwin who was often considered the vulnerable one but as McCulloch shows, in truth, ultimately it was Edwin who was the resilient and the practical one - years of earning his way as a clerk had been its training. </p><p>And, ultimately, their greatest gift, and both would have agreed, were Edwin's poems - one of the most imaginatively gifted of English language poets of the Twentieth century - whose poetry, the critic, John H. Summers described, "as larger than the merely literary...Implicit in all his works is the recognition that there are things more important than literature - life and love, the physical world, the individual spirit within the body: those things in which the religious man recognizes the immediate work of God."</p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-52846791887129587062023-12-24T08:03:00.002+00:002023-12-24T10:25:43.341+00:00Merry Christmas <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrIwgpwdMOEuuzn76iVfAxuwDJ2KPyMz3hu-r96q4MCHYha4eBsTljyIg5VSKrIaDfjI68MlgvNWv3An3dhhRCnmux5PUJWMNKwwemyNBlAYbd3k4D_AqPUzgg_z7gVfJcotCJUVAs6A4WfjpbYvmY5s8A9QnLamYjKnwJHaMj5BgE7EmqcOioq5LtkOo/s787/GB9S0hOXoAAfYN2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="670" data-original-width="787" height="272" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrIwgpwdMOEuuzn76iVfAxuwDJ2KPyMz3hu-r96q4MCHYha4eBsTljyIg5VSKrIaDfjI68MlgvNWv3An3dhhRCnmux5PUJWMNKwwemyNBlAYbd3k4D_AqPUzgg_z7gVfJcotCJUVAs6A4WfjpbYvmY5s8A9QnLamYjKnwJHaMj5BgE7EmqcOioq5LtkOo/s320/GB9S0hOXoAAfYN2.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"> "Fireside" 1956 by Winifred Nicholson</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />New Year Snow by Frances Horowitz</div><div><br /></div><div>For three days we waited,<br />a bowl of dull quartz for sky.<br />At night the valley dreamed of snow,<br />lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings<br />flailing the hills.<br />I dreamed a poem, perfect<br />as the first five-pointed flake,<br />that melted at dawn:<br />a Janus-time<br />to peer back at guttering dark days,<br />trajectories of the spent year.<br />And then snow fell.<br />Within an hour, a world immaculate<br />as January’s new-hung page.<br />We breathe the radiant air like men new-born.<br />The children rush before us.<br />As in a dream of snow<br />we track through crystal fields<br />to the green horizon<br />and the sun’s reflected rose.<br /> <br />It is no surprise that Frances Horowitz's publisher, Bloodaxe, chose a painting by Winifred Nicholson to adorn the cover of her Collected Poems. </div><div><br /></div><div>Both were attentive fathomers of particular places, then when attentively seen become translucent to glimmerings of transcendence. The boundaries between inside, warmth, and blanketing cold blur in Winifred's painting, worlds enfold worlds. The boundary in Frances' poem is temporal - the time of looking back - guttering dark, channels of accomplishments and failures - is teased into a blanket white future, awaiting hopeful imprint, where innocence treads first in wondering excitement. </div><div><br /></div><div>Working with people in prison, years back, I noticed that a sign of change not being in prospect was the person's declaration of guilt. This puzzled me, at first, you thought acknowledgment would be hopeful until I realized guilt was always backward facing, trapped in the past, and always about 'me'. My identity is wrapped in guilt, a compelling egotism awaiting its allotted forgiveness. </div><div><br /></div><div>Remorse, on the other hand, was qualitatively different. It did not announce itself except in the person's actions towards change, leaning into a future that was white with possibilities, waiting to be written anew. "As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon and the sun’s reflected rose."</div><div><br /></div><div>This seems the perfect Christmas theme as a child comes to write us anew - fully aware of our pasts yet leaving them there - inviting us to step out, in the light of eternity, always new. The simplest thing in the world that we endlessly complicate (to partially quote Rowan Williams)! </div><div><br /></div><div>So more innocence of childhood rushing into new snow is needed:-) since the paths of presumed realism seem to lead us only back into the trajectories of past years' failures!</div><div><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, the renewing work with people in prison goes on, refreshingly, <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theppt.org.uk/&source=gmail&ust=1703490943229000&usg=AOvVaw0b2fmCuR0Oh_TeXeYyG625" href="https://www.theppt.org.uk/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://www.theppt.org.uk/</a> and into its thirty-sixth year and just as the budget looked wobbly (not for the first time), the founder's kind niece and those innocent Hobbits (a.k.a the Tolkien Trust) came to the rescue, so the future brightened, as it can!</div><div><br /></div><div>Merry Christmas and a blanket white New Year on which to write anew ..</div></div>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-72663632329503624062023-12-11T09:50:00.002+00:002023-12-11T09:50:52.633+00:00Changed in a Flash: Near Death and Comparative Religion.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAfBGFWsrLBHwIwijSsm7nrjLZ-6hU9Zk8JUXDzd7eiLxWBwiPH2_2CPT3k9S101BRZmq4kS4LnMGr5JG9uwvzH165lKo42tx1XkP3Etc6DlZTNobH3lOjSPqWTzdFb-VFXOV9ZV5yNbGpsWcpJCM85sTkqUXdp6u072ekrbIKYjAFUdX0sotovX37epA/s522/81iBqFkxo0L._SY522_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="346" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAfBGFWsrLBHwIwijSsm7nrjLZ-6hU9Zk8JUXDzd7eiLxWBwiPH2_2CPT3k9S101BRZmq4kS4LnMGr5JG9uwvzH165lKo42tx1XkP3Etc6DlZTNobH3lOjSPqWTzdFb-VFXOV9ZV5yNbGpsWcpJCM85sTkqUXdp6u072ekrbIKYjAFUdX0sotovX37epA/s320/81iBqFkxo0L._SY522_.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p>Elizabeth Krohn was on her way into her local Reform synagogue to hear Kaddish said for her beloved grandfather, who had died a year previously, when, in the parking lot, she was struck by lightning. She finds 'herself' outside herself - her body lying on the tarmac, and after assuring 'herself' that her two young children are being cared for, thinking herself dead, she follows a golden light upwards and will spend 'two weeks' in heaven before deciding to return to her body, and as a transformed person, pick up the strands of a very different life, some of whose outlines she has seen in her altered state. </p><p>She returns confident that death is simply a gateway to another modality of life, that we are accompanied in our life by a 'celestial double' and slowly through a cycle of reincarnated lives will reach a transformed state where we become the celestial companion of another soul. This unfolds from our perspective in a linear progression but from an eternal perspective in unfolds 'now' which is why sometimes we here can forsee the 'future'. </p><p>One feature of Elizabeth's transformed life is that she receives 'precognitive nightmares' of serious accidents - train or airplane crashes - that she records by time-stamped email to initially prove to herself she is not crazy, and then for others to be likewise convinced. These nightmares are genuinely distressing until an equally, if differently, haunted person suggests that possibly these visions come to her so that she, in some way, will be able to help the victims on their journey across the threshold of death - though how this might be achieved is left unexplained.</p><p>Anyone familiar with the literature on Near-Death Experiences will by now be nodding their heads, seeing the familiar patterns, and pondering what is new here? It is undoubtedly a particularly vivid example with especially dramatic consequences but no doubt these could be multiplied. </p><p>What is different is that Elizabeth's account has emerged in dialogue with the historian of religion, Jeff Kripal, and rather than being concerned with 'proving' whether Elizabeth was clinically dead and/or responding to skeptical criticism as to mechanisms but asking what, taking Elizabeth's account with due seriousness, adopting the approach of comparative religion might bring to our understanding of human potential (and destination).</p><p>The second part of the book, following Elizabeth's account, is Kripal's reading forward of Elizabeth's experience into an exploration into what is possible, and indeed making the apparent impossibility - from our current scientific materialism's perspective, vividly real.</p><p>What does a comparative reading add? </p><p>First, it reminds us that there is no such thing as an independent fact, facts sit within frameworks, and every event is already an interpretation, and widening the framework can help us see deeper dimensions in any particular event. Being struck by lightning, for example, comes with a whole range of associations from, within monotheistic traditions, God's punishment but within indigenous traditions divine selection to a shamanic role (not necessarily a welcomed one, a necessary burden as was felt in Elizabeth's case).</p><p>Second, it can show how a profoundly transformative experience does and does not fit within a person's frame of reference including their prior religious framing (if any). Traveling to heaven, meeting your divine double and a subsequent belief in reincarnation are not the staples of your average, suburban Reform synagogue; and, yet, they are all there in the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition (of which it is safe to say Elizabeth knew nothing before her NDE). </p><p>Third, even if there is a pattern of likeness betwixt available religious framing and a person's experience - this is not a given - and personal experience remains creative, able to step beyond the bounds of any containing explanation, and may well conflict with commonly held patterns of religious (or other) belief.</p><p>Fourthly, it suggests that the world we inhabit and tend to think of as more or less fixed in its behaviors is, in fact, more fluid than we ever expected - rather than a model to be studied, it is a text to be imagined. Our framings are multiple not because one is right, and all the rest wrong, or because we are simply confused, though we might be ignorant. It is because the world is multiple and fluidly creative, and, still in the making, exploring its potential as creative evolution (at least when seen from our time-bound perspective). </p><p>Elizabeth's NDE suggested that when we arrive in heaven, it is always ''a" heaven (her's was a meticulous garden) that is most deeply appropriate to both our expectations and our needs (as Swedenborg too suggested), so we should be careful what we imagine because the world/the divine will respond appropriately, and possibly trickly. It is not for nothing that the god's messenger, Hermes, is also seen as a trickster - perhaps the reality that God likes to play is the most unsettling of images, especially for those schooled in more strait-laced monotheism. </p><p>Fifthly, the more you look outside our current culturally acceptable straitjacket, the more strange the world becomes - more like science fiction than fact - and this is to be welcomed because there is, at its heart, a lesson in humility. Why would we imagine that the world would 'fit inside our heads' and that we would abolish all mystery, and yet the mysterious and the impossible invite us to continue the exploration - what Elizabeth describes as the peeling of the onion of knowledge - and Kripal describes as the ongoing act of interpreting anew, recognizing that interpretation itself is a creative act; we are as much bringing a world into being as we are discovering its contours - and there is a dance betwixt these two whose steps we are barely beginning to learn, </p><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-42300523485055800002023-11-01T10:29:00.004+00:002023-11-01T14:42:27.083+00:00A tragic tale of a modern spiritualist<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2WYSUkD2ZiUyu8uF-5b9wPh7z9vGpRzUZCrxDulRarHlJbgbdk7VcVqIB2-EY83SqlH_zEOOBaWUZjhVZRs1uRGpwjPMU6y_HIermXMsqDXAtGF_mzTTP0P1NoL9RfFTP1mWSh7q_C9kWyp5U9NV6YpufjopKl4CuQmSnbm-LRZIlSGDRv-loZ38Dj7g/s620/9781802062007.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="620" data-original-width="400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2WYSUkD2ZiUyu8uF-5b9wPh7z9vGpRzUZCrxDulRarHlJbgbdk7VcVqIB2-EY83SqlH_zEOOBaWUZjhVZRs1uRGpwjPMU6y_HIermXMsqDXAtGF_mzTTP0P1NoL9RfFTP1mWSh7q_C9kWyp5U9NV6YpufjopKl4CuQmSnbm-LRZIlSGDRv-loZ38Dj7g/s320/9781802062007.jpg" width="206" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Helen Duncan became famous or infamous (depending on your perspective) as the last person in England to be tried under the eighteenth century Witchcraft Act. Not, one might suppose as a hangover, say in the dawning age of secularism in the mid-nineteenth century say but, in fact, in 1944. </p><p>The offense was the pretended conjuring of spirits (in a paid performance) at a séance in Portsmouth but why this act and not the Vagrancy Act, usually deployed for these purposes? Was it because Duncan was privy to secrets she might only know by psychic means - the destruction of a British battleship in the Mediterranean for example - at a time of heightened security in the lead up to the D-Day Landings? </p><p>She certainly became a martyr for the Spiritualist cause - and the aftermath of the case, imprisonment; and, a subsequent botched arrest may have shifted the landscape towards reform, the act's abolition and the seeing of pretended conjuring of spirits as simply falling within the ordinary legal arrangements for fraud of any kind.</p><p>In the hands of the distinguished historian of early modern witchcraft, Malcolm Gaskill, Duncan's life is explored with sympathetic skepticism against the background of the nineteenth century rise of Spiritualism, of the unfolding nature of physical mediumship; and, the various attempts to investigate it from a scientific perspective.</p><p>Duncan presents a familiar pattern - a person who appears from an early age to have certain psychic gifts, who develops the apparent requisite skills of a medium and who proceeds to encourage, baffle, and alienate those who come into contact with her from then on. For some she is a comforter sent from heaven - heightened by the emotional turmoil many were thrown into by the bereavements of the First World War, to others she was a strange admixture of the potentially genuine and the potential trickster; and, to others simply a fraud.</p><p>Though Gaskill diligently and entertainingly weaves the history as far as the records allow, there can be now no definitive answer or even likely consensus. What is probably clear is that though not specifically charged with the Witchcraft Act because the authorities specifically thought her a psychic danger, the paranoia of secrecy in 1944 probably did lend itself to harsher treatment than at other times (and the Witchcraft Acts burden of proof was so ambiguous as to make it a safer bet than that of Vagrancy). It is, also, true, though not certain, that she may have heard of the battleships sinking by the more conventional means of rumor and gossip than through a helpful spirit guide.</p><p>For my own part, I think the book needed a better framing of the wider exploration of 'psychic phenomena' not least sense that they do tend, for whatever reason, to fall under the shadow of Hermes. They appear to be inherently 'tricky' - you are always in a liminal realm that resists sharp definition, though as to why we might only speculate - perhaps the truth likes to hide and be sought, rather than simply to give itself in the clear light of day for reason that only truth knows? In other words we need a better hermeneutic that helps us to navigate such phenomena rather than the rather shallower, if useful, psychological/ sociological observations we are offered. </p><p>However, it certainly appears, especially over 'physical manifestation' (all that ectoplasm), Duncan undoubtedly, at least some of the time, was cheating. The pressures to perform (including monetary ones) may have tempted (and ruined) many a medium. If these states are inherently tricky (or purposefully come and go according to their own logic) then a medium imagining she (or he) has them on tap is going to be inherently disappointed yet the pressures to perform remain. There is, to my mind, sufficient of the uncanny about Duncan (especially her reported dreams and premonitions) to suggest that there was something there but, sadly, too much of her history equally suggests that it was obscured by the performing aspects of what became her trade. </p><p>Maybe the moral is that all good spiritual work is done in the privacy of small groups or individual contexts, is not ours simply to manage, and requires a greater sense of discipline and grace than, sadly, Duncan had access to.</p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-3460624541455229232023-08-19T16:27:00.026+01:002023-09-17T10:54:12.353+01:00Unidentified Flying Religions<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNQjhqRGxlP8ow4Xzx9vqXi4C92VPlmkzte2HBTPTD60dLL9NzSsCt84jg576nQwO511B2gFRth5IvR0J0C2NyLntU5CTlcmR-ea2Ka8l5HeH36PrbbgbeBsGwqODfLCu4Hzl84z5fYLRBELWx5mUlJXU0kobseuuRdH0MNQwETzm8nFD738JdsgB5gFQ/s615/0_GettyImages-1435285902.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="615" height="266" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNQjhqRGxlP8ow4Xzx9vqXi4C92VPlmkzte2HBTPTD60dLL9NzSsCt84jg576nQwO511B2gFRth5IvR0J0C2NyLntU5CTlcmR-ea2Ka8l5HeH36PrbbgbeBsGwqODfLCu4Hzl84z5fYLRBELWx5mUlJXU0kobseuuRdH0MNQwETzm8nFD738JdsgB5gFQ/w400-h266/0_GettyImages-1435285902.jpeg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>There is a network of highly capable scientists exploring UFO phenomena. They work anonymously and in secret lest their reputations be trashed for dealing with such a fringe subject yet their findings do percolate upwards and outwards in varied ways. </p><p>Two such scientists - Tyler a private scientist and inventor and James a public academic - accompanied by a religious scholar go to an alleged crash site in New Mexico with specially adapted metal detectors searching for debris. They find some and the academic, a molecular biologist, takes it back to be tested. The result is that it was not manufactured on Earth but what is more, it does not appear to have come from this universe. Not only extraterrestrial but from another dimension.</p><p>At this point, the reader may be wondering whether I am describing a lost episode of the X-files but, in truth, I am reading a perfectly sober account of a trip undertaken by the aforementioned scholar of religion, D. W. Paskula, who has earned the trust of the said network and entered its undoubtedly very unusual space.</p><p>This UFO space is broadly divided into two, often sparring, camps. </p><p>The first is that UFOs are the responsibility of a technologically advanced civilization(s) who come from out there to observe us for their own purposes and the truth of this is known to governments but covered up lest we all panic (or maybe simply to quietly utilize those bits of technology they have acquired without others knowing). The truth is 'out there'.</p><p>The second is that UFOs are inhabitants of a different space or dimension and have the ability to move between there and here, and that space might be thought of, in the words of Henri Corbin as imaginal (not imaginary) but certainly as within as without. The truth is 'in there' or 'over there'.</p><p>Our recovered artifact might be thought to establish the first camp's thesis - except it is not from here - and what's more it has properties that include fostering dreams amongst people who have been unknowingly in contact with it! It is definitely 'out there'! Indeed Tyler claims that many of his own patented inventions are the result of tuning into inspiration that appears to come from beyond yet within him. They are inventions that have, incidentally, made him very rich as well as being, in the bio-medical sphere, very helpful.</p><p>Why would a scholar of religion, formerly interested in the multi-dimensional lives of Catholic saints, be interested in UFOs? Because, as she admirably shows in 'American Cosmic; UFOs, Religion and Technology,' the UFO phenomena have recognizably religious impacts and act as an unfolding real-time 'experiment' in religion formation. </p><p>Anomalous events happen to multiple people, these get to be interpreted in competing ways, and patterns of belief and practice emerge that begin to influence (and seek to control) what can and cannot be understood by the unfolding experiences. This will sound familiar to anyone who has read the New Testament and studied the emergence of Christianity.</p><p>Meanwhile, people who have not had such experiences (who may have wanted to) become fervent believers in their possibility and may indeed 'fake' them at worse or unconsciously imagine they have had them at best. </p><p>As Pasulka notes, the brain does a poor job of distinguishing actual from virtual (or fictional events), so a person who may actually not have encountered phenomena may legitimately believe they have. A process accelerated by our immersion, through social media, in a virtual and manipulated world. One of the virtues of Paskula's book is her thoughtful exploration of what a 'virtual world'' may mean in the context of future 'religion formation and development.''</p><p>But it is a world that has real lifetime effects - hundreds of thousands of people have reported UFO phenomena and in a significant proportion of cases these have had long-lasting impacts on what people believe and how they behave.</p><p>The book as a whole is a highly sensitive, and erudite, exploration of how anomalous experiences (in this case UFO phenomena) enter into interpretive spaces and take on extended lives and how difficult it is to return to the phenomena themselves because all experience comes hermeneutically laden. </p><p>It is, also, a very compelling account of the phenomena themselves and how they relate to analogous happenings within the history of religions. Analogous and indeed overlapping with many UFO experiencers (as they are known) interpreting either what they have seen in the light of their faith commitments or revisiting their faith commitments in the light of their UFO experience. Elijah's Chariot or the dancing sun at Fatima anyone? It is an exploration carefully bracketed, as you would expect, with no account or discussion of the phenomena's ontological status.</p><p>But, of course, all through the reader is intriguingly asking themselves exactly that question - what are these phenomena about (and how real are they)?! This reader came away agreeing with the distinguished UFO researcher Jacques Vallee that the phenomena are real events, that they are intelligently guided, and that we should pay attention but that, of course, precludes any definite decision for one or other camp. It is probably a case of both/and. </p><p>The truth is 'out there' but the 'out there' is ultimately within a more complex universe than we currently imagine that breaks the boundaries between consciousness and matter, real and imaginary.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-26959925597935651292023-06-02T06:54:00.000+01:002023-06-02T06:54:29.355+01:00Ventures to the Other Side<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhPKCjRKAdxrFQAEzwpNqrMtaGeGa_joYtc9wnbi_GAQf7XbP_wJmvMDco5sO0j1GMho1Xw1nZiy4r_peBN4FZd7C27iSCIgc7Ztowa6Y4gXR_3BIExPzutOGhYVq-IUfAAZ_nryn5M9LzAeVwJjl2PwvIr9oQR9L4oemUmVUcQliNIeIK6POtLnDl/s600/816IZe3vghL._AC_UL600_SR600,600_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjhPKCjRKAdxrFQAEzwpNqrMtaGeGa_joYtc9wnbi_GAQf7XbP_wJmvMDco5sO0j1GMho1Xw1nZiy4r_peBN4FZd7C27iSCIgc7Ztowa6Y4gXR_3BIExPzutOGhYVq-IUfAAZ_nryn5M9LzAeVwJjl2PwvIr9oQR9L4oemUmVUcQliNIeIK6POtLnDl/s320/816IZe3vghL._AC_UL600_SR600,600_.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Women artists have often, are often erased from the attention of art curators, critics, and historians but this phenomenon has been doubly so if the artist in question has appeared to be concerned with, or heaven forbid, guided by spiritual concerns, especially those seen as anomalous to the mainstream culture. </p><p>At the time of Christian sovereignty in the West, this might have been a perceived entanglement with the pagan, the natural world, and the magical. Christian dominance being supplanted in the nineteenth century by a growing scientific materialism, here the impermissible shifts to a perceived engagement with the magical, the paranormal, and any phenomena deemed impossible by the guardians of this 'scientism', not excluding those nestling in the art world temples of the rationalizing modern!</p><p>Jennifer Higgie shows in her engaging, 'The Other Side: A Journey into Women, Art, and the Spirit World' that this does a disservice not only to the women themselves but to the actualities of art history (and ultimately to the possibilities of art itself).</p><p>Within these pages, we find alert, swift vignettes of what an ''alternative" art history might have looked like (and could look like) if women and the spaces of the spiritual were given deeper, more sustained attention.</p><p>Needless to say, Hilma af Klint, the current 'superstar' of this re-emergence of the repressed is featured prominently - her Guggenheim show in 2019 was their best-ever attended exhibit, and Higgie reminds us, in a way that the curators of that show did not, of the symmetry of one esoteric artist - informed by spiritualism and Anthroposophy - who wanted her work exhibited as a whole in a specially designed tower being shown in the spiraling, tower-like structure of the Guggenheim designed by a Gurdjieff influenced architect in Frank Lloyd Wright!</p><p>Here too is the extraordinary, mercurial Madame Blavatsky and her successor, Annie Besant, whose 'Thought-Forms' (with C.W. Leadbeater) published in 1905 relate, with illustrations, the relationships that exist between thought, rhythm, the flow of energy, and color - a book whose subtle influences of subsequent art history, especially the development of abstraction, has barely been plummed. Both Kandinsky and Mondrian, the latter presently paired with af Klint at Tate Modern, knew it well, as did af Klint herself. It feels no longer possible to simply note that all three artists were influenced by x or y stream of late C19th occultism and then pass over to discuss their formal techniques, their surfaces, without wrestling intelligently with their depths - what is it that they meant to express, how does the art meaningfully lead you into its embodied mysteries, mysteries that in some cases are possibly very precise, others more invitingly open-ended.</p><p>However, the book's own strengths lie not in any systematic exploration of these issues, the book is too anecdotal for that, but as a series of invitations to meet disparate and beguiling women who have swum in these oceans of possibility and have sought to allow, and create, works that seek to evoke them - and to range freely over the last century until now, introducing them and inviting further entanglement. Noting on the way how often these women have been influencing better-known male artists - stories only now re-emerging from their past erasure.</p><p>We meet painters of Tarot cards, weavers of wonderful fabric sculptures, occult surrealists, painters of fairy, and a host of others, exploring multiple media from a wide range of perspectives. </p><p>Common threads include the importance of indigenous art cultures - the Aborigines of Higgie's native Australia, for example, for being inhabitants of a living cosmos, full of persons, some of which are human. The influences of Theosophy, Spiritualism, and Anthroposophy - with their blending of the mystical with the experimental. The touch of Surrealism permitting the importance of dreams and the irruption of the irrational or a-rational. The sense that art could/should be a process of healing and that it carries embodied meanings waiting to be received, inscribed in our own embodiment. That the world is a place of incipient magic, synchronicity, and happenings that take us beyond the ordinary, deepening the felt meaning of our lives.</p><p>Higgie lays many of these intersecting pathways before us, embodies them in the actual lives and practices of given artists and their works, and invites us to wander off in their company in whichever way speaks to our particular desires and conditions.</p><p>It is one of those books that gives you a very satisfying sense, as you take notes, of multiple, challenging, and refreshing discoveries ahead.</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggMi1KJ-ZZbC-wY-fCFN5FtiGLizGaOJ6grN_dLwxwusMcJlolMpln6Rv4q8UDmWMS6AyvvqhzKl9UbrgPEy0OLtJL53An_sO64JFI5kRhxP-9bHr_h74XzV6xAH3NCg0BvXnbAWrP8p-nrexLm_ZASHq83KDrUngptsdyF80nmJKVUBIKMYo585aT/s600/fire-sounds-1930.jpg!Large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="417" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggMi1KJ-ZZbC-wY-fCFN5FtiGLizGaOJ6grN_dLwxwusMcJlolMpln6Rv4q8UDmWMS6AyvvqhzKl9UbrgPEy0OLtJL53An_sO64JFI5kRhxP-9bHr_h74XzV6xAH3NCg0BvXnbAWrP8p-nrexLm_ZASHq83KDrUngptsdyF80nmJKVUBIKMYo585aT/s320/fire-sounds-1930.jpg!Large.jpg" width="222" /></a></div><br /><p style="text-align: center;">'Fire Sounds' 1930 by Agnes Pelton</p><p> </p><p> </p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-38421377819463359452023-05-18T18:05:00.003+01:002023-05-18T18:07:13.740+01:00A restoration in love - four women in an Italian Castle.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijgvjdRoR3NmgQNIzOXFOOdX1NkKMxZh77sNSSZ6dJl-LFwG5BJ-t2JP_0HenLrUAlmwMxiiJ2hOVvqasJvRCV04vzyUAkKU7WFDaPyiUjQq5_6bidc1aQu34Dz8y56KuWTQCoHkzE6_JhXBjb-WHLI8cgchQBtwO9EhbRsYRW3y-ObOlb4P_mpIKa/s500/512R0nRPADL.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="327" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijgvjdRoR3NmgQNIzOXFOOdX1NkKMxZh77sNSSZ6dJl-LFwG5BJ-t2JP_0HenLrUAlmwMxiiJ2hOVvqasJvRCV04vzyUAkKU7WFDaPyiUjQq5_6bidc1aQu34Dz8y56KuWTQCoHkzE6_JhXBjb-WHLI8cgchQBtwO9EhbRsYRW3y-ObOlb4P_mpIKa/s320/512R0nRPADL.jpeg" width="209" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Mrs. Wilkins sitting in her women's club during a dismal, rain-sodden English winter, espies an advert in The Times for renting a castle in Italy in April promising wisteria and sunshine. She is intrigued and notices that Mrs. Arbuthnot, a distantly recognized acquaintance from Church, is similarly engaged. </p><p>"Why not enquire?" she suggests. Using her nest egg, patiently acquired from her solicitor husband's allowance and Mrs. Arbuthnot's savings from a generous, if distant, husband, it may be possible.</p><p>The inquiry must overcome several challenges - the expected disapproval of Mrs. Wilkins' husband and Mrs. Arbuthnot's conscience as to the source of her income, a conscience that rails against self-indulgence and prefers expenditure on 'the poor'. This sits uneasily with her husband who writes best-selling biographies of famous mistresses!</p><p>However, progress is made, and to further share the burden of the castle's expenses, two further women are recruited: Lady Caroline a young and very beautiful blue blood, and Mrs Fisher, much the older of the party, who lives steadfastly in the past admiring the number of eminent Victorians who formed her history. </p><p>All four women's lives will be transformed by their month in San Salvatore, the aptly named castle, that will save them by restoring them to their better, fullest selves and to do so through the experience of love. An impartial love that springs from the ground in the fecundity and beauty of the place; and, from a recognition of who without this grounding in love - impartial, forgiving, generous - they have become. </p><p>This love must, however, become personal. The loving spirit of a place must be translated into the minute particulars of four very different lives with different obstacles to acceptance, </p><p>The unfolding story reads both as an acute and compassionate social comedy, beautifully observed and commented upon, and yet as something deeper as it elaborates on the pathways of the four toward a greater joy rooted in love. For two of the women, husbands, renewed, are restored to them, to the eldest a new sense of burgeoning, greening life breaks through; and, for the youngest, the possibilities of a husband who honors but does not 'grab', that uplifts but does not confiscate the soul.</p><p>As Salley Vickers notes in her introduction to the new Penguin Classic edition, the last part of the book reads like a fairy tale, where happy ever after beckons, but this possibility is grounded in a very real sense of close observation of people's lives, their psychology and, most importantly, their hopes that in the end open up the grace to make lives anew.</p><p>Elizabeth von Arnim's own marriages were not a success and you sense this in her ability to depict the withering of combined hopes but you also sense her giving birth to roads not traveled (by her) but which yet she felt perfectly possible - a book of intelligently imagined wish-fulfillment! It is, also, periodically very funny!</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-52890470694417105752023-02-23T10:25:00.004+00:002023-02-23T13:10:50.068+00:00Adventures after healing <p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrm0Y6ofGu8UW2ce3hPIrHoO4-mUytBBI80RrOCAI9EalMDnEoqd67EPVTN1Q0ZA_73js0bz5EsYrUVshAyri6KT5cht9IxP8Q6Zi8E0Hsk9zRXbBOq_q39gI5x9_iwKS4H9Z6qFbifOcTkC5NzKQ3bhNOrpD60CNs0qqyNs0Zq4yg7ubNUQYngDAR/s600/elixir-gebundene-ausgabe-kapka-kassabova-englisch.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="390" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrm0Y6ofGu8UW2ce3hPIrHoO4-mUytBBI80RrOCAI9EalMDnEoqd67EPVTN1Q0ZA_73js0bz5EsYrUVshAyri6KT5cht9IxP8Q6Zi8E0Hsk9zRXbBOq_q39gI5x9_iwKS4H9Z6qFbifOcTkC5NzKQ3bhNOrpD60CNs0qqyNs0Zq4yg7ubNUQYngDAR/s320/elixir-gebundene-ausgabe-kapka-kassabova-englisch.jpeg" width="208" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>When a Yanomami shaman was asked how they had got from highly poisonous plant to medicinal treatment when trial and error would have been repeatedly deadly, the shaman simply replied: "The plant told me."</p><p>But within our materialist 'western' perspective listening to plants is at best a metaphoric exercise in projection, rather than a simple, if challenging, craft of imagination, perseverance and of the plant's grace.</p><p>This was not always so, nor is this an indigenous practice for which you need to travel far, except perhaps in one's willingness to slow down, slip down and listen carefully. </p><p>In Kassabova's new book, she travels back once more to her native Bulgaria and to one particular valley, that of the Mesta river, and its surrounding mountains to pick up the traces of the traditions of herbal medicine and weaves them into a haunting picture of lives lived enfolded within community, an encompassing nature and souls' journeys after illumination.</p><p>History, as so often, has not been kind to these communities not least to the Pomak - Muslims of Slavic origin - persecuted as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, by the Communists for not 'fitting in' and by the banditry like predations of that mafia infiltrated state that succeeded Communism's fall. But they are nothing if not resilient - and if many have split lives - laboring in wealthier countries of the EU or in the UK - with periodic settlements back home, some manage to sustain themselves within older traditions of agriculture, pastoralism and the collection of wild herbs (of which Bulgaria remains a major exporter); and, on the tourism such traditions attract.</p><p>Kassabova places these traditions of healing within wider circles of reference - for example alchemy and its search for wholeness (rather than gold) and the Bogomils - seekers after a liberating perfection - noting how traditions have mingled and how the dominant religious traditions of Christianity and Islam have been infiltrated. </p><p>We meet a wonderful cast of characters that inhabit, partially or wholly, an animist world, that is full of persons, some of whom are human, and many of which are plants who are beautifully described and their specific healing potentialities outlined.</p><p>But healing, of course, is not simply a physical quest, it is dependent on the psychological states, and spiritual intentions you bring to it, a point repeatedly stressed, and diversely illustrated, by the people she meets and the stories they relate. And, nothing, of course, is ever guaranteed - we remain in the time slapped world where love can be crucified and the Buddha eaten by the hungry tiger. </p><p>The deeper backdrop is our continuing depredations on the more than human world - our appetites consuming outwards what perhaps the author suggests is a compensation for the wholeness we fail to find within - and this failure is, at heart, finally a metaphysical one. Our fantasy is that we live, briefly, as islands of accidental consciousness wrapped in bundles of skin, the only one's gifted with true agency and speech when, in truth, we inhabit an animated world that teems with opportunities to listen, a listening that might be the beginning of healings into renewing wholes, not unwounded, but better able to carry our wounds as blessings.</p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-67048386710976802512022-12-22T15:31:00.004+00:002022-12-22T15:40:24.977+00:00Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyEPs-i3BBrEgwHHHxI6SfmSQQZgwApFF_wCe6axjmFqSiGuSEoqreEjxf3SFvaDbYBk3PZioZY2PwPE0pv3YSnPo3wRv57FECmkZ-0oEIAV5qmPHyP5eubBNakF9SMq0_jMA5E7ylNXC2B4fSXTHLwlykkwCA5Fqez4GR0iWJibm5cHOVN8WjbOTy/s994/DavidJones0422gif.gif" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="994" data-original-width="800" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyEPs-i3BBrEgwHHHxI6SfmSQQZgwApFF_wCe6axjmFqSiGuSEoqreEjxf3SFvaDbYBk3PZioZY2PwPE0pv3YSnPo3wRv57FECmkZ-0oEIAV5qmPHyP5eubBNakF9SMq0_jMA5E7ylNXC2B4fSXTHLwlykkwCA5Fqez4GR0iWJibm5cHOVN8WjbOTy/w323-h400/DavidJones0422gif.gif" width="323" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">David Jones, 'Nativity with Shepherds and Beasts Rejoicing' 1929-1930</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">All four hooves, Welsh as a pony on hill</div><div style="text-align: left;">are inches off the frosted ground. They skip</div><div style="text-align: left;">for a fish tight saviour who is swathed in stillness</div><div style="text-align: left;">between apple breast and pillow of hair.</div><div style="text-align: left;">Come to look at it, all are off the ground:</div><div style="text-align: left;">cow and ladle, shepherdess and lute,</div><div style="text-align: left;">bits of floating Latin, but all stock still,</div><div style="text-align: left;">as if playing statues.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I am waiting for the cockerel to spill</div><div style="text-align: left;">its redness on the page to Botticelli up the colour</div><div style="text-align: left;">and set the world in motion, from out of winter</div><div style="text-align: left;">into summer. Then the snow will melt</div><div style="text-align: left;">and who knows what the sun might loose them into.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">A David Jones Nativity (Gentilis animetur) by David Scott</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">When the wonderful Irish artist, Patrick Pye, and his equally, if not more wonderful wife, Noirin, visited me in Macedonia we went on a Church crawl, punctured by leisurely lunches and dinners, in search of the striking frescoes that populate many of its churches, especially at St. Panteleimon outside Skopje and St George in Kurbinovo. They both returned to Ireland with their feet not touching the ground, surprised by joy. <a href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2011/04/transfigured-in-macedonia.html" target="_blank">https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2011/04/transfigured-in-macedonia.html</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">A joy that was a blend of the haunting stillness and presence of the images they had beheld and the animation of their encouragement - one that was both aesthetic, nurturing Patrick's subsequent art and spiritual. For the frescoes spoke of the true possibilities of what it means to be human.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Both Jones' drawing and Scott's poem implies the celebration, the joy in the stillness of that moment when this possibility, of the depth of being human, is restored in the birth of Christ and which awaits in Scott's poem its full animation in the life of the world to come, soon, now if we wish - though not necessarily achieved without some form of surrender, sacrifice.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Earlier this year I gave a day on Meister Eckhart (Eckhart compressed in three half hour talks - I am nothing if not ambitious) who saw that it was the birth in the soul of the Word, now, here, in this moment, that was what truly mattered - this was incarnation - and it was made possible for each and every person by God's incarnation in Jesus and God's assumption of human nature, not in any abstract sense, but in each and every person. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Each and every person is ready to be flipped from that winter stillness, dancing in anticipation, into a full-coloured summer of renewed, renewing life. It 'simply' requires you to fall back into it - your true nature - your ground in God's groundless ground. A fall back that then propels you forward into the world, serving it naturally from a renewing grace. (Of course, it is a touch more complicated than that - stay tuned for my next Eckhart outing)!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Jones' image too captures a sense of not only the unity of the human but of the human with the whole of creation - everything participates in that wholeness - everything is invited and invested with joy.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In what has been an extraordinarily difficult year - one in which I quite literally limped through half of it - I hope Christmas in its deepest sense can remind us that joy lurks and can surprise us in unforeseen ways. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I was walking up the stairs at the Boden Museum in Berlin a month ago and tripped forward, a trip that on my dodgy knee can have unpleasant consequences - but my balance held, I recovered, and was overcome with joy. It lurks in unexpected places! May we discover more, many more of those, intended or not.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a joy flipped New Year!</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><p></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-33297569028560137932022-12-10T18:26:00.002+00:002022-12-11T07:21:48.712+00:00The spirit led world of Hilma af Klint<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKRrV3xCOc3v1LdaEnRgbYs8kTQ2zKV9Kf7WdOzqyxHsHA_ILJLShRCRuRBG_HDVAKVxhvi6KYTmKgFXwWMSijPnfQqCFL9KstQDqWD1rHuoogmngeWUMj3qZNRa9eFcC4GVbzliIkPfBQUdBUy8FYinOLV_QHOWF0i1zxWUFO4iNS3TxNYAqZxCYs/s497/what-a-human-being-is-1910.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="497" data-original-width="373" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgKRrV3xCOc3v1LdaEnRgbYs8kTQ2zKV9Kf7WdOzqyxHsHA_ILJLShRCRuRBG_HDVAKVxhvi6KYTmKgFXwWMSijPnfQqCFL9KstQDqWD1rHuoogmngeWUMj3qZNRa9eFcC4GVbzliIkPfBQUdBUy8FYinOLV_QHOWF0i1zxWUFO4iNS3TxNYAqZxCYs/s320/what-a-human-being-is-1910.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">'What a Human Being Is' 1910 Hilma af Klint</div><br /><p></p><p>Hilma af Klint, posthumously, has become the artistic equivalent of a 'rock star' and one who appears to be permanently on tour. Wherever she goes, she can break box office records, as she did at the Guggenheim in New York in 2018-19. You can even buy Hilma af Klint scarves and socks - the height of art gallery shop acclaim! </p><p>When she died in 1944 in relative obscurity, she had bequeathed her artwork to her nephew with instruction not to show it for at least twenty years, imagining that a future audience would be more receptive, which has turned out to be deeply prescient; and, since she appeared at 'The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985' show in Los Angeles in 1988 her reputation has gathered pace.</p><p>This has primarily rested on the fact that her pioneering of abstraction pre-dates that of Kandinsky and that, being a woman, the reality of her pioneering was obscured from view. Would her paintings' reception have been different if she had not labored under the very real marginalization that woman artists suffered at the opening of the twentieth century? </p><p>Though, as Julia Voss aptly shows in her new (and newly translated) biography of af Klint the latter is certainly true - even though af Klint was of the first generation of women to study formally at the Swedish Academy of Art, she would labor under the general assumption that female artists were less significant than male artists, relegated to the back room of exhibitions, barely tolerated - but the first assumption is more debatable. </p><p>For abstraction was 'in the air' and as early as the late nineteenth century was making itself manifest. There was, for example, the remarkable work of Georgina Houghton who in 1871 had held, at her own potentially ruinous expense, an exhibition of her extraordinary abstract paintings to almost universal incomprehension. As Voss shows, af Klint may have known of this work because it had been referenced in publications to which she had access and emerged from a common thought world, namely that of spiritualism.</p><p>At this juncture, I can confess that I had picked up Voss' biography with a significant degree of hesitation: how would it treat af Klint's artistic purpose - with the backward, and thoroughly modern, lens of the sidelined female protagonist of abstraction who happened to attend seances and, like many cultural figures in the late nineteenth century/early twentieth century, show an interest in Theosophy and the Occult (which was essentially the Guggenheim's curatorial view) or as a person to whom her art was a function of her spiritual vision, a vision directed and supported, by her encountering spiritual beings. I was completely relieved to discover it was the latter, not the former.</p><p>This is, in part, I think, because Voss comes from a German tradition of biographical writing of telling the life from the sources available with the minimum cultural/social background necessary for comprehension eschewing sociological analysis or amateur psychotherapy and, in this case succeeding brilliantly! </p><p>There is, for example, her consecutive relationships with two women where she envisages for herself the role of a man. You can imagine what amateur psychotherapy might make of this but Voss cleaves to af Klint's own evaluation - she was a man in a prior lifetime and that is what is spiritually required by the moment - make of that what you will but it gives you a sense of the profound, almost phenomenological approach of the biography, which I confess to finding wholly refreshing.</p><p>Meanwhile, you come to deeply feel the importance of af Klint's spiritual journey, the felt realness of her interaction with her guides, sustained over her lifetime from her first seance aged seventeen, and the depth of her related study, most especially with the works of Rudolf Steiner (and there is a fascinating addendum listing the works in af Klint's library where Steiner predominates).</p><p>This engagement with Anthroposophy was sustained even as her actual encounters with Steiner were limited and only encouraging at the margins - though he did not tell her to keep her works private for fifty years until a generation emerged who could understand them - a legend oft-told and with no evidence to support it! All her strenuous attempts to show her abstract works were followed through with Anthroposophical connections - at Dornach, in Amsterdam, and in London - again belying the commonly held assumption that she sat in reclusive obscurity in Stockholm when in truth she was nothing if not active on behalf of her transformative art even as all her attempts were ultimately thwarted.</p><p>And why thwarted? Partly because the medium of her message was still 'revolutionary' ahead of common taste and accepted understanding but also because she deeply felt her art should be seen as a whole - she had been told as much by her guides. She even designed a tower in which her work could be displayed in its appropriate order leading people through the stages of their own spiritual growth as reflected in that of the conscious development of the cosmos. A tower that would have required significant resources, and accompanying vision, to accomplish, resources that have never materialized (as yet).</p><p>You emerge from Voss' book with a vivid picture of a life well-lived in service to the spirit that always remained open-ended toward its ultimate meaning. She never foreclosed on a given understanding of who her spirit guides were, as to what was their status in the transcendent kingdom but equally, she never flinched from imaging her art and its language of abstraction was necessary to convey important spiritual truths to the contemporary world. Abstraction is indeed almost certainly the wrong word because it suggests a removal from the world, something less than concrete, when af Klint felt every shape, every form was bringing one closer to the world as it truly is, stripped of accident, returned to its eternal, harmonious balancing of forces. </p><p>This was a view commonly shared in theosophical circles and the art it influenced; and, one which might be intelligently compared to the underlying aesthetic of a much earlier exploration of the 'abstract' or 'non-figurative' in the art of Islam. Both imagining that the 'accident' of the time-bound concrete too easily leads the mind astray from contemplation that moves one 'upwards' through purity of form to the non-pictorial transcendent. </p><p>This then returns us to her popularity - it cannot be that her audiences are aware of the complex meanings of her paintings, often illuminated by the notebooks she kept and by referencing them to theosophical/anthroposophical patterns of thought and expression, helpfully pointed to by Voss - and the energy of being the 'neglected founder' perhaps has only so long to run?</p><p>Simply put maybe in af Klint one is faced with a very contemporary version of an artist resting in an arresting spiritual vision of things that carries a conviction in its wholeness and integrity - and might simply also be true, a truth glimpsed by the soul beyond any intellectual deciphering of particular meanings. In this, she reminds you of Blake (and his ongoing popularity) whatever is going on here, its authenticity has been marked by the integrity of the life and that is a meaning (whatever else is held) that remains, and is, deeply alluring. </p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-43135672427936125892022-11-05T16:32:00.005+00:002022-11-06T07:25:55.275+00:00'All Change, Humanity!'<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHAhHuVse4iWl7T1D-rSQ9cWHhuquo3Y-idERoRskmJFxJDrgDW7Y37UXb7pbmYrWK8_UJ1qaSP1XMkyL3jZRTlOL5HG689QuVTPv8Sc7wJnygISv8tYUixcdtwDXPq0h2cakcg3fug4CIgu4gAM5znSL8JYrrbKP8Laa7tXSzblYJVag9tsxq3wm/s381/2103078.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="381" data-original-width="250" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwHAhHuVse4iWl7T1D-rSQ9cWHhuquo3Y-idERoRskmJFxJDrgDW7Y37UXb7pbmYrWK8_UJ1qaSP1XMkyL3jZRTlOL5HG689QuVTPv8Sc7wJnygISv8tYUixcdtwDXPq0h2cakcg3fug4CIgu4gAM5znSL8JYrrbKP8Laa7tXSzblYJVag9tsxq3wm/s320/2103078.jpeg" width="210" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>Claude Houghton was an English novelist, playwright, and poet whose work, whilst being praised by his contemporary authors - J.B. Priestley, Hugh Walpole, Graham Greene, and, most notably, Henry Miller, never ignited sufficient momentum with the public to survive the passage of time (though the excellent Valancourt Books <a href="https://www.valancourtbooks.com/">https://www.valancourtbooks.com/</a> have brought five of his works back into print).</p><p>Reading his novel 'All Change, Humanity!', published in 1942, I began to see why. </p><p>In the earlier novels, the ones republished by Valancourt, his deepest interests are there but offered obliquely. You see his philosophical playfulness, his interest in questions of identity and of the unity and, more often, fragmentation of the self, the ways in which our perception of any person is molded by our needs so differently and culminating at hinting at a prospective transformation of a person that yields a whole new perspective, a renewing Eden.</p><p>In this, later novel, written under the urgency of war, the obliqueness gives way to a straightforward confrontation. The world as presently constructed is given over to fear and out of that fear the wish for control - the mechanization of our public world, the transactional nature of our private world - is leading us to collapse. There is an alternative - a spiritual transformation - to which we are invited but do we allow ourselves to be transformed? It is a fundamental change of attitude that is asked of us rooted in an acceptance of the present, presence that frees us from the knottiness of our pasts and allows us to be wholly present to what presents itself (You can sense Houghton's close reading of Blake, Boehme, and Swedenborg here). </p><p>Indeed you can feel that Swedenborg's question of what do you most deeply desire (and that will reveal your ongoing reality to you) is the principal driver of the text. </p><p>This being so, you can sense how he might alienate his audience because in the course of the plot the safe havens of family, tradition, money, social order, being sensible (indeed 'sane') even valuing your memories are stripped away and you are left with the enigmatic Christopher Bell, who both dominates the book and is rarely present, and who is a challenging image of transformation, a renewed humanity, deeply transgressive of Houghton's (and our) safe, social constructs of what is expected. </p><p>All of this is wrapped within a conventional, dramatic narrative which, with all the infelicities of its time and place, is hugely enjoyable, gifted with a cast of characters that engage and intrigue, and turn the pages along. Yet it continually confronts the reader with the notion that the society in which they are living, even at this moment are fighting for, is in, in fact, on the edge of collapse; and, the only alternative is to change into the renewing humanity that Bell represents.</p><p>This, in truth, makes the narrative ever more timely since 'the machine' has continued to advance, and the time grows late - many of Houghton's sentences could be easily transposed into a time of climate chaos - yet we continue to resist (consciously and unconsciously) the change necessary.</p><p>There is a wonderful moment when the two intertwined and decaying families that offer images of life as normal are suddenly exposed to the fact that the lawyer responsible for their affairs is a fraud (and has committed suicide) and yet, even now, they cannot let go of the hope that all is well and continuity will be assured. </p><p>Read against the background of COP27, you cannot help thinking that this is where we are - all the evidence is against our present styles of life but we will cling to them, even if it means our ruin.</p><p>And what is necessary for change? Houghton is set against the notion that you can argue people into it (or indeed offer a 'religious' program for it) but you can 'infect' people, exemplify its reality, and change will happen. You can neither refute the song of sixpence nor the saint, wrote, Yeats, you can simply allow yourself to be reorientated in their presence. We need Houghton imagines more exemplars who have stepped into the presence of the ever-present truth that gifts wholeness, we need more 'saints'.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-8441515666020807662022-09-28T13:42:00.008+01:002022-09-28T13:42:57.372+01:00The Middle Ages is not done yet...<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSrpy0keYFGy91pbrcw68C8sKqTZqgGRQXvhmzWa-NukE_BRtzG-chjzfSccD0-M5PZD8R39BMJPEL9qAhPQLXbehl826xd0iIlDHAatXbdYYa7uMCwhn214h_7emnhdnNhgXip-HSJQ1iTeZwhgzrxLGIT9JnVyvW20XdjVoN-vDc_xJqa4VjE3og/s550/A0164.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="550" data-original-width="356" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSrpy0keYFGy91pbrcw68C8sKqTZqgGRQXvhmzWa-NukE_BRtzG-chjzfSccD0-M5PZD8R39BMJPEL9qAhPQLXbehl826xd0iIlDHAatXbdYYa7uMCwhn214h_7emnhdnNhgXip-HSJQ1iTeZwhgzrxLGIT9JnVyvW20XdjVoN-vDc_xJqa4VjE3og/s320/A0164.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>Alongside not bathing (a stereotype that happens not to be true) and mouths of rotting teeth (equally false), one other aspect of the Middle Ages we can do without apparently is the Medieval model of the cosmos. Superseded by science, it might remain of antiquarian interest but no more than that. In no way can it be be believed in or operate as a model whose contemplation may have something to offer us in the course of our lives. We have, happily or not, superseded the medieval mind.</p><p>C.S. Lewis, however, thought differently and not only was he an engaged, and engaging, scholar of that very mind but sought to imaginatively transpose it in forms that put it to use in helping shape minds anew whether through Christian apologetics, science fiction or children's fantasy.</p><p>Jason M. Baxter's 'The Medieval Mind of C.S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind' lucidly explores how he did so, and more importantly why we might ourselves think it important.</p><p>We might think it important because the medieval mind was at home in a meaningful cosmos an act of creation in which we could find roadmaps for our own journey as humans. It was a cosmos that was alive with presences, gathered within an understanding of ultimate, personal presence, that of God. We dwelt in a world that, first and foremast, was objectively whole in which values were as robust a kind of thing as trees or rock, perhaps more so! Or perhaps, more precisely, where trees and rocks could be as appropriate to the language of morals as of botany or geology. It was a place where myth, properly understood, remained a tool with which to think.</p><p>None of which is immediately apparent now - in a world which, in the phrase one of one physicist, has become more meaningless, the more we know of it, where values are subjective, where we wander on an uninteresting planet on the edge of an indifferent universe, and where matter, separated from mind, either God's or our own, is simply dead stuff.</p><p>But beneath these appearances, people still possess transcendental longings, the world still appears beautiful, and the cosmos feels suspiciously alive!</p><p>Baxter takes us on two intertwined journeys - one through the Medieval mind and one through what Lewis creatively made of it - to help us reconsider our rejection. </p><p>Two areas of particular interest stood out for me - the recognition by Lewis that myth is akin to modelling - how we create meaningful pictures of how the world might work - and this is a practice of mind that persists. Lewis had an alert interest in the development of quantum mechanics and this long before Capra drew attention to the linkages between mystical views of the world and the strange emergent world of the sub-atomic level (indeed as did many of the founders of quantum physics). Myth is a modality of thought that wrestles with the mystery of things - and, yes, is not factual in a literal sense but neither it is necessarily untruthful.</p><p>The second was to remind us that though the medieval mind thought the cosmos was geocentric in no way did this imply central - matter, in fact, was the outer rim of creation and humanity might be loved by God but not uniquely so; and, other realms existed that held radically different beings to whom God responded and loved - a feature deeply apparent both in the Chronicles of Narnia and in Lewis' Science Fiction. The universe was as expansive to the medieval mind as the contemporary, even as it imagined that expanse in a different modality.</p><p>Meanwhile, Lewis was alert to what we have lost in the modernity - the separation of values and facts, a sense that this world is enfolded in another higher world, of the possibilities of meeting God as person, rather than a spiritually significant, if somewhat abstract force that makes no demands. The beauty of Baxter's book is to show how Lewis puts all those possibilities back in play in a contemporary form yet a form deeply informed by his reading of 'Old Books'.</p><p>Once again I came away realizing that my mind (in so far as I have one) is attuned to a different world - in this illuminating book - it is ‘medieval’ but could equally be thought of as ‘indigenous’. It moves through an alive world that is a spiritual gifting, and deeply personed.</p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-21177039285567356432022-08-01T09:50:00.000+01:002022-08-01T09:50:34.051+01:00The Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh87H2BbqHsGctz-ZwRNTMiGpbz6LrMHOmlsiwrccgcwVKWboR0wBh0F_fLh1rqXBCLY_ncr0Cxlv2gRbrIGVgX8IAQ1Gx6ELIJXdRsOSpXuolpFfJqg8hluFR5d-p9aZmIK0d4f8o14gyPxmGlVTdJRlBM6_IcQKnuU7dWPsxxbGxP4ehgG9ouAhnQ/s658/Screenshot-2022-07-12-at-15.35.54.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="537" data-original-width="658" height="326" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh87H2BbqHsGctz-ZwRNTMiGpbz6LrMHOmlsiwrccgcwVKWboR0wBh0F_fLh1rqXBCLY_ncr0Cxlv2gRbrIGVgX8IAQ1Gx6ELIJXdRsOSpXuolpFfJqg8hluFR5d-p9aZmIK0d4f8o14gyPxmGlVTdJRlBM6_IcQKnuU7dWPsxxbGxP4ehgG9ouAhnQ/w400-h326/Screenshot-2022-07-12-at-15.35.54.png" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>The story one tells oneself, and projects toward others, at a particular time, might be wholly necessary for your well-being, even your survival but, as time passes, if not relinquished or refashioned, it may become destructive of your, and others' lives. It was one of the most helpful lessons of my own analysis - the story was necessary then, but now? How might it be surrendered and reshaped?</p><p>Hugh Brody's mother was a Jewish refugee from Vienna, fleeing to Sheffield in 1938, falling in love, marrying, and hiding into the safety of English 'normality' by silencing her past, sheltering her children from the knowledge of where she had come from, why, and how many of her extended family were perishing in the Holocaust. But silences like this, though very real, are rarely watertight. Her mother, Brody's grandmother, whispers, and intimates other narratives; and, his mother is distorted by a passionate anger that rips through his family life, unexplained.</p><p>Brody was initiated young into the dangers of silenced narratives, silenced people. It is an ambiguity that he rediscovers on a youthful trip to a kibbutz in the early 60s. Here the life of high idealism and socialist equality is in evidence but is it a life lived in denial? The land was purchased from Palestinians at a 'fair price' but there is evidence of their dispossession. The land was empty before our energy and commitment transformed it but the landscape gives a lie to this. And so on ... but, it is also where Brody meets previously unknown relatives - all dispossessed by mass murder - Israel is founded in hope yet is already slipping into the silences that disguise its colonialism. </p><p>Is there a place that lies beyond the reach of these complex strands of displacement, silence? Is there a place where people seek to inhabit their place, weave themselves into its contours, live with it and from it, without thought of conquest either of people or place? It draws Brody to the Arctic and the Inuit - and yes, there is evidence of a people so entwined with place, so intimately connected, that meaning is drawn so naturally from the unfolding patterns of daily life that everything speaks and where silence is a natural feature, a balance, not a place of hiddenness, of unbearable secrets. People appear to be widely comfortable with the close proximity of lives, and the endless weaving of narratives of togetherness.</p><p>But this intimacy (undoubtedly imperfect) is already being unwound by the forces of colonialism - of the white man's demands for 'civilization', 'order', and exploitation - with all its accompanying abuses. Brody writes movingly of the things he did not see, of which no one spoke, of the teacher he knew later convicted of widespread sexual abuse; and, of the community's widespread sense of powerlessness in the face of the white man's bureaucracy (and how his goods had created new dependencies that needed the Inuit to re-negotiate the manner of their lives).</p><p>Brody weaves profound connections between these dual narratives - his own and that of an indigenous community that he knows and loves (and which embraced him as family). </p><p>I remember meeting a potential chair of Oxfam when I worked there, and they asked a wonderful question, that I have pondered (and used) ever since: "What is the story the organization tells about itself that is not true?" (For organization, you can substitute yourself, your family, indeed a unit of any organization up to and including countries). Brody's beautifully written meditation, 'The Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Artic' explores the inverse question: "What is the story that lays untold, hidden, silenced?" The story that if told might deepen and widen your grasp of the truth of things and might help bring a deeper sense of liberatory meaning (even at the cost of exposing grief and pain).</p><p>The stories we tell matter - and there is a haunting section of the book on the high rate of suicide amongst the Inuit, particularly the young where a repeating story of idealized romantic relationships simply cannot sustain the work of healing and redemption they are required to do, and when they inevitably break up, lead to catastrophic breakdowns of meaning, and of life. We need always to be in search of better, wider, deeper stories and the ability to interrogate our silences in search of them - and create safe spaces in which those dialogues, with ourselves and others, can emerge and be shared, and embodied.</p><p>And it is never too late, if not for one generation, for the next. With the fall of the Berlin Wall comes the opportunity for Brody's mother to receive restitution for property seized in Berlin by the Nazis. She remains mostly disengaged, unwilling, unable to pick up the threads of a story untold but Brody feels he can and must - even in such an imperfect process as this - threads of justice and acknowledgment can emerge if one can lean into the silence and restore some form of voice.</p><p>The book is not, nor should be a comfortable read, it takes you to some of the darkest places hidden in the silence of our histories - personal and collective - but is never devoid of hope. A return to the Arctic in 2018, twenty years after his extensive fieldwork - shows that the bonds of friendship live and that much of the knowledge of the Inuit in relation to their land (itself being dramatically affected by climate change) remains intact and flourishing in spite of ongoing assault. </p><p>Nor is it devoid of inspiration to ask what sits in the silences and who is being silenced - and how can we recognize that it is often at the margins of what we imagine as the (our) world that we can better understand what is happening at its heart - and that these are the voices we need to pay most attention to. </p><p>P.S. I cannot finish without noticing one infelicity (and it is the only one). There is a moment in Berlin with his mother, an uncomfortable trip when he is pursuing the property restitution, when (for reasons that need not be explained) Brody dismissively writes referring to his mother (and as a good Jewish atheist), "She had no more time for fantasies about reincarnation than I ..." An infelicity because it is a belief that his wider Inuit family would indeed entertain as meaningful and might expect a more careful disavowal if their story is to be honored (if disagreed with). </p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-73373849510390458282022-06-13T12:22:00.005+01:002022-06-13T14:12:28.774+01:00An accomplished journey through the shadow side of Latin America<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEMU0Ieo_CvevyQ8xnoW8-DJ1m7W_KdzeBUeVbicR_0o3pU2rmevqx_P-ICbnwMbJlwzrKM8XyFfytohHC0bqxdq4GpPbmIQ2nbhnG70trbkMxcO-r2uWQ0w0Wz0-wzk2WDnKIF_r1J-zSXmu03YcaXvhYzJVz7l9aPx3inxCStghLglf8vhoPw-K4/s2113/42201445.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2113" data-original-width="1400" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEMU0Ieo_CvevyQ8xnoW8-DJ1m7W_KdzeBUeVbicR_0o3pU2rmevqx_P-ICbnwMbJlwzrKM8XyFfytohHC0bqxdq4GpPbmIQ2nbhnG70trbkMxcO-r2uWQ0w0Wz0-wzk2WDnKIF_r1J-zSXmu03YcaXvhYzJVz7l9aPx3inxCStghLglf8vhoPw-K4/s320/42201445.jpg" width="212" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>What doth it profit a man if he gains the whole world but loses his own soul? </p><p>Quite a lot actually. You can go from the illegitimate son of a nobleman, illiterate, disregarded in Spain and become the Governor General of Peru, lord of all you survey (Pizarro) or you can use your manipulative charms (and unbounded capacity for deceit) and move from being a notary to lay claim to Mexico (Cortes) - and maybe, just maybe if you weave into your entourage just the right kind of priest, you may cling to your soul as well!</p><p>Maria Arana's exploration of Latin American history is through these three lenses: silver (extractive industry and greed), sword (violence and authoritarianism) and stone (religion) and how they interweave.</p><p>It is not a pretty sight. By her own admission, she is looking at the dark side of her continent's history, one that continues to cast a shaping shadow over the present, making all the real progress that has been achieved, especially most recently the reduction of poverty, fragile. </p><p>She does this by moving from three vignettes of individuals representing the realities of extraction - a Peruvian woman who labors to extract silver from the waste load of mines - a Cuban who serves the revolution (in Angola) but finds himself exiled by Castro and in a decaying, drug induced life spiral in the US; and, a Catalan Jesuit faced with the contradictions of serving the indigenous in Bolivia between revolution and reaction; and, from this to the wider arc of history and its patterning.</p><p>The book is primarily a narrative rather than an analytical study but its strengths are its breadth - exploring pre as well as post Colombian history, its even handiness between right and left; and, its ability to paint the continuities as well as the discontinuities of conquest. </p><p>It is often a harrowing tale - not simply for the sustained violence - 43 of the world's fifty most dangerous cities as of today are in Latin America - but mainly because of the continued sense of hope postponed especially when a liberator and reformer appears only either to be assassinated or displaced or to slowly corrode into an authoritarian. The primary example of which would be Bolivar, the great liberator himself, whose enlightenment ideals collapsed against the weight of the savagery of the wars of liberation and the competing visions of what liberation should look like. For the creole elite (self-perceived as white 'pure bloods'), this vision did not entail sharing power with the indigenous or black (and poorer) majority - and Arana is exceptionally fierce when exposing the ongoing, pervasive racism that stains through Latin America - around which much remains in denial. </p><p>Nor does she have any truck with pretending, as a response to this obvious bigotry, that Columbus is a simple dividing line: pre = good, post = bad. Not only was pre-Colombian America dominated by empires maintained through systemic violence (though better moderated than the post-Colombian version) but it fails to address the current complexities. The President of Mexico might want a Spanish apology for empire (and that might not go amiss and be welcomed as Pope Francis apology on behalf of the Church, given in Bolivia, electrified his mostly indigenous audience) but it would assume that all Mexicans were somehow now 'indigenous' rather than a complex, mixed, often deeply divided and unequal society - and that complex society is what it is because of the Spanish conquest. For unlike later colonial empires, the Spanish (in spite of their rhetoric of whiteness) mixed freely shaping the population of Latin America that we find today (undoubtedly accelerated by the depopulation that accompanied conquest).</p><p>She is, also, excellent on religion both that of its indigenous population (both pre and post Colombian) and on the role of the Catholic Church. Though as fitting a survey her brushstrokes are broad, you get a real and compelling sense of the original Conquistadors complete lack of interest (despite personal faith) pre-occupied as they were with gold and silver. The way the Church played catch up and slowly imposed itself on the culture - with only exceptional and remarkable attempts at mitigation of the conquest's impact - Bartolome de las Casas and the Jesuits in Paraguay being notable examples - and its sheer ambiguity - provision of aid and education to the masses and yet bulwark of conservatism only to be partially reassessed in response to the birth of revolution in the 50s and 60s and of liberation theology. She is, also, good on the rise of Pentecostalism and its appeal - social reforming at the level of individual habit, the opportunity for prosperity and an ecstatic, personally experienced religiosity.</p><p>The weaknesses of the book is in the analysis as you are left still wondering why - the propensity towards violence and its persistence (even in its apparent rituals), the default to the authoritarian despite persistent failure; and, the willingness of elites to shaft their own people and yet fail to adequately resist the extraction of wealth that is colonialism in a different form. It lacks too a theory (or theories) about these trends that might better explain them - though the slight attempts leave you wanting more. There is a fascinating dip into the complex field of epigenetics for example.</p><p>It undoubtedly also requires a balancing volume - the virtues of Latin American culture - not least the extraordinary resilience that helps people navigate such challenges and retain an ability to celebrate and strive - and that acknowledges the progress made and the examples to lean on or into. It does not explain why so many people fall in love with the region(s) including myself. </p><p>It does, however, make you deeply wary of buying anything made of gold or silver again (or in my case happy that I own neither)!</p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-85343792883866045882022-05-22T15:06:00.001+01:002022-05-22T15:06:19.700+01:00An incredible healer yet not a saint<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVMrqwXp16OaiNi-g-EVbtE30Bv3aGnfOXDyWcmQ3_zwdvijMmOawBjbdXJKA15b-o_GNCB-h_ap3hb6KSoKfY-acAM5-tH5Bb2ORmHGvdSvR3TB5Mqv1pejTmcLh_tQQ8TsFzJ7bFyqzo8g329KYdcrAVgf1OJ4MVSY0ywJq_4FwR-Q0NsaPkWGoY/s225/download.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="225" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVMrqwXp16OaiNi-g-EVbtE30Bv3aGnfOXDyWcmQ3_zwdvijMmOawBjbdXJKA15b-o_GNCB-h_ap3hb6KSoKfY-acAM5-tH5Bb2ORmHGvdSvR3TB5Mqv1pejTmcLh_tQQ8TsFzJ7bFyqzo8g329KYdcrAVgf1OJ4MVSY0ywJq_4FwR-Q0NsaPkWGoY/w320-h320/download.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>You are a healer, projected by the dispossessed as a saint in such a way that you spark a revolt, that some would hope to become a revolution. It fails in blood and misery and you are expelled to the nearest neighboring country: in this case, the United States at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century, what happens next?</p><p>This is the subtext of Urrea's wonderful sequel to his 'The Hummingbird's Daughter'. This first novel has followed its champion, Teresita, from illegitimate bastard of the local peon, herself thus half Indian, half Mexican, to the pinnacle of her apparent fame as a healer and for many a saint and trigger point for a revolution of the oppressed. Her father has accepted her, loves her, yet fears her consequence, rightly as it happens, because the dictatorship of Diaz falls on his head and he, and his extended family, find themselves in exile in the United States, pursued by Diaz's agents offering assassination. </p><p>Meanwhile, Teresita is famous (or infamous) and can continue to exploit her healing powers but what may this mean in this new world and for her a young woman with all the competing desires that this brings?</p><p>So this wonderful, poetic, and moving, novel unfolds. It is historical fiction, based on the very real life of Urrea's great aunt, but, as he says, the story, his story, this story is not simply history.</p><p>Her adventures are manifold - escaping assassins, being enfolded in revolutionary plots, traveling across the United States, being helped and exploited by a wealthy Consortium that seeks to benefit from her healing fame, finding a lover, having children, losing her father's sheltering and, at the last, finding home and returning in the last scenes, as she dies from tuberculosis to her guiding tradition of indigenous healing from which she has strayed.</p><p>It creates a beautifully credible life of a healer (who equally credibly refutes her life as a saint) painted against the background both of a judicious and appropriately reverent attitude to traditional beliefs (that Urrea acknowledges that he has experientially studied), the complexities of human character lovingly, and often humorously displayed, and the unfolding history of two (or multiple) different worlds - that of the indigenous in the Americas and the (very different) historical trajectories of Mexico and the United States.</p><p>What I most deeply loved - apart from Teresita and her father's very disparate characters in dialogue and dispute, is the way Urrea simply allows the very different world of healing to have its place in the novel, acknowledged but not over-emphasized. It is what it is - a phenomenon closely reported and responded to, out of kilter with what we fantasize to be true about the modern world and its materialism, and yet there, indubitable in people's lived experience. His great aunt was precisely who she was - a remarkable healer, with a given vocation, mysterious to explain, and not a saint but a wounded, complex, lovable human being doing her best to respond to what is given.</p><p>The last scenes where she meets her healer guide, and friend, as she passes into death, are one of the most compelling descriptions of 'passing over' that I have read. Get ready for reading your life with humility and awe - and traveling on in awe and humility.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-82291728505844492142022-04-25T09:39:00.001+01:002023-08-15T20:45:47.388+01:00Mary Webb: A 'neglected genius'?<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG7d1YYNCivLQtXQ6-5PvT5z5oXIgXIIo8oUjvHmEkNiWsAh2dmqS3IutPlHenJjkiTsvZkb9qwL0-_LbqYKMvIa808OddiRLWA8t7XeZAcwU77c--zj--MPVCxELggXI46ZJcJ0gG4mkzo36zKH50g10s7zdAYouLY03hKbdx_U1VADnsVFwnsUS4/s1080/mary_webb.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG7d1YYNCivLQtXQ6-5PvT5z5oXIgXIIo8oUjvHmEkNiWsAh2dmqS3IutPlHenJjkiTsvZkb9qwL0-_LbqYKMvIa808OddiRLWA8t7XeZAcwU77c--zj--MPVCxELggXI46ZJcJ0gG4mkzo36zKH50g10s7zdAYouLY03hKbdx_U1VADnsVFwnsUS4/s320/mary_webb.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p>When Mary Webb died in 1927 at the untimely age of 46, she was a modestly admired writer noted for her observant nature descriptions tinged with a touch of mysticism. A year later, Stanley Baldwin, then Prime Minister, referred to her as a 'neglected genius' and sparked a craze. </p><p>Johnathan Cape reissued her works that sold in the thousands a trend that lasted through the 30s. Her, and similar, writing was satirized in Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (1932), and her writing was typecast as 'soil and gloom romance.' The height of this posthumous fame was probably in 1950 when Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger turned one of her novels, 'Gone to Earth' into a film.</p><p>After which her work fell into abeyance with Virago bringing three of her novels back into print in the 80s and modestly keeping them there ever since.</p><p>This is undoubtedly a shame. It is true that her fondness for the local dialect and expression of her native Shropshire can create barriers to full comprehension (and probably a loss of access to her allusion and depth) but nothing that is not surmountable with a touch of patience; and, what a world opens up?</p><p>Certainly, it is a living world - not only in the sense that she is a gifted nature writer observant both of what is present and what it has come to mean in the weavings of folk traditions and of place but also as the aliveness in which we live, and move and have our being. Nature has its purposes that unfold transcendent to any particular self that invites us to a deeper navigation - and is charged with potential for good and evil. The landscape and its creatures take on character and act in ways that point beyond mere projection or the pathetic fallacy.</p><p>Webb was ambiguous in her attitude to Christianity - too alive, like Hardy, to tragedy and fate to be fully at home in its hope-filled messaging, more comfortable in something at once more homely, Pagan yet forbidding too. It is contrasting these two worlds that the Medieval setting of her last unfinished novel, 'Armour Wherein We Trusted', turned and beautifully illustrates the differing worlds on offer that may (or may not) find ultimate reconciliation in an earth renewed by heaven.</p><p>She is oft-criticized, like Hardy, for having her characters too driven by their fate, resistant to change even when there is an urgency for it, too bearing down on the tragic possibilities of life. This is probably a matter of taste (and viewpoint) but can easily be flipped into a realistic perception of the balance between our own agency, the fixities of our character, and of the custom and society we find ourselves in. She is a perceptive psychologist (even if our own fantasies of free agency rebel) and excellent at describing what the French psychologist, Henri Wallon, would call 'confiscation' where we surrender ourselves to the portraits other people paint of us. In a world of anxiety over our social images, and their shaping in social media, what could be more topically relevant?</p><p>And, finally, she can write a well-paced engaging story with characters about whom one cares and with a freedom about their relationships one with another that belied the age of her writing. She can write stories that deserve multiple readings and always offer up something new, so if not quite a genius, certainly a neglected author deserving of a wider, and deeper, audience.</p><p>Gladys Mary Coles' biographical study, pictured above is excellent, as is her fuller biography, and captures Webbs' gifts and shadows beautifully. One final 'tragedy' was the late estrangement from her husband, who with his new wife, was ironically to benefit from her posthumous fame! </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-15629336433742961712022-04-16T07:16:00.003+01:002022-04-17T18:03:30.817+01:00A guru and not his disciple<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVDHvCWiiWmWqgSB6rRBh9uKT7I1EjuK3E6OfCa1xfJRLOa-o5zP9QAVNIaYEnKMwVODJ8FyLA9wmnZOaRbnmiE0G7oVCPkQrgyL_5iSdQLOC2hp60fIcGKEGoKM_HSxYEn5JVCjhgrpgY3QyA_Tfuw9TjM0pQfln9mln55R1ORKPyJr-thmPt70OQ/s1360/61AtmtDsdkL.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1360" data-original-width="907" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVDHvCWiiWmWqgSB6rRBh9uKT7I1EjuK3E6OfCa1xfJRLOa-o5zP9QAVNIaYEnKMwVODJ8FyLA9wmnZOaRbnmiE0G7oVCPkQrgyL_5iSdQLOC2hp60fIcGKEGoKM_HSxYEn5JVCjhgrpgY3QyA_Tfuw9TjM0pQfln9mln55R1ORKPyJr-thmPt70OQ/s320/61AtmtDsdkL.jpeg" width="213" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Setting out to evade the political turbulence of Darjeeling, the American writer & photographer, Thomas K. Shor sets off with minimal baggage and walks. Following the example of his mentor and friend, Ed Spencer, the 'Harvard renunciate' whose story he has admirably told here: <a href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2022/04/inner-and-outer-adventures-in-india.html" target="_blank">Into the Hands of the Unknown</a> he steps out in no particular direction intent on the present moment and what will emerge and be gifted.</p><p>Being Shor with a talent for stepping into stories, he comes across a local guru, simply called Gurudev, for whom he is the first real encounter with a Westerner. A relationship develops not of guru and disciple, Thomas is too true to his name for that, keeping always a vigorous level of doubt, but of admiring enquirer met by the mutual curiosity of Gurudev.</p><p>What could have unfolded was a classic teaching text of observation, perplexity resolved, and illumination; and, in many ways, the book is this. Gurudev is a remarkable man - by Tibetan Buddhists seen as a reincarnation or tulku of a prior realized monk and by Hindus as an incarnation of Shiva - and yet, in his own mind and teaching, transcendent to all traditions, pointing simply to God as Love. Strikingly, and affectingly, at some of his ceremonies where darshan is offered to myriad devotees, both Tibetan monks and Hindu priests are present offering simultaneous patterns of chant and worship.</p><p>Gurudev's main practice appears the 'circulation of offerings'. His devotees bring him gifts - material and money - and he often in staged, elaborate ways, re-gifts them, often to teaching purpose about detachment and sharing - though what the meaning of handing out black Jockey men's underwear is anyone's guess! He, also, has an extraordinary talent at enabling his audience to laugh, often keeping them in stitches for hours, which, given the hardship and poverty of many of his devotees' lives, might on its own be a welcome relief.</p><p>All of this is witnessed through Shor's careful observation and inquisitive probing. He keeps his skepticism of many of the stories of Gurudev's miracles yet notices a handful of remarkable moments of healing, of almost telepathic insight, and of rolling synchronicities. </p><p>But all through Shor remains struck by Gurudev's underlying equanimity and love - even as the 'master director' contrives situations that can discomfort as well comfort his followers - and as Shor, himself somewhat tires of what he sees as Gurudev's continuous acting in this regard. Why cannot Gurudev more often remind or tell his devotees that they are directing too much of their energy towards him rather than to that which he points?</p><p>However, Shor's fundamental stumbling block comes when he discovers that Gurudev's principal sponsor is Subash Ghising, the local political overlord and, not to spare a point, a thug who under the guise of agitating for greater autonomy from West Bengal for this Nepali 'minority' area around Darjeeling, has drawn all power to himself often secured by violence. The very car that Gurudev and Shor travel together in is a gift from Ghising, one that he should not be able to afford on his government salary; and, he is diverting money from the Tourism budget to build Gurudev an improbable monastery. </p><p>How can Gurudev appear so enlightened and yet not refuse such gifts, not least because such a close relationship confuses many of his own disciples?</p><p>In a tense moment, Shor confronts Gurudev with these questions, much to the distress of the young men who form Gurudev's team of helpers. Gurudev's reply is simple: how can love choose who to spend itself on? Yes, he knows Ghising is a 'bad man' but he has often, not always, been able to temper his bad actions and is not love patient, and does it not spend itself this way? Shor himself compares such a response with Jesus in the Gospels being criticized for dining with tax collectors, the Ghisings of his day, replying that one comes for sinners, not the saved.</p><p>This response will ultimately convince Shor of the nobility of Gurudev's intentions - if never completely remove the question that even the best of intentions can lead us in the wrong direction - but it also signals a parting of the ways. Shor's questioning of the guru has agitated the immediate disciples and they are not as forgiving as Gurudev, and Gurudev himself realizes perhaps that the presence of the American will prove too disruptive. Events including the shifting, and ongoing, political tension, mean that Shor and his wife have reasons to leave the area, and though occasionally follows Gurudev in the media, the story is at an end.</p><p>The story, however, is a beautifully, lucidly, and honestly told story of a guru and his non-disciple. An admirer yes but not an uncritical one; and, in the telling of the story multiple observations emerge about the relationship between spirit and religion, between the role of the teacher and what is taught; and, between guru and disciples/devotees. It, also, raises perennial questions about the relationship between love & justice - can you pursue the one without nodding attention to the other - and between religion and politics, a usually terrible coupling that, however, is well-meant often ends in tears.</p><p>I came away with all my prejudices intact that, as it happens, resonate with Shor's. This is notably in recognizing that though there may be a role for the guru/disciple relationship it so often appears to get 'stuck' - even when the guru appears, as here, a 'realized being' - it appears the conveying of that realization is inhibited by the disciple's idealization - putting the saint on an impossible pedestal rather than realizing what the saint is pointing to that namely we are all, in fact, sitting on the same pedestal! The saint's role as inspiration all too often does not lead to the disciple's efforts at perspiration towards the same goal, rather substitutes for it. In other words, this idealization can be supremely comforting (and you can understand the temptation of this) but it does not move you on, open you up, or enable you to see through. Or as Shor is fond of quoting the Zen Buddhist saying if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him! With reverence no doubt, but boldly!</p><p>The text is accompanied by a whole series of wonderful photographs that illuminate both Shor's descriptions of Gurudev and the world created around him - and help to anchor you in the perception that Shor himself is a balanced, compassionate, and fair witness to his complex, loving, sometimes frustrating encounter with Gurudev.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-33207291803501651272022-04-02T15:32:00.046+01:002022-04-03T07:43:52.687+01:00Inner and outer adventures in India<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQvA14vWS9ksf4CUMn51DCEVCT8lV-U8RLISVHLcKIdsfWEzRi2DhIunnYJ0eRS0DcJGehGJNJIJ6SLhV7DEsFgVygVkoJrW3me9unV21uooVkpMqL_nuhAJV67qwzyz8PVHG4dntxmjn0VAeEYUtBunNkkcZ2p94jqcMpnS1QA4lUg4jpM4TSO9S/s500/41HXGi+AtfL.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="312" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvQvA14vWS9ksf4CUMn51DCEVCT8lV-U8RLISVHLcKIdsfWEzRi2DhIunnYJ0eRS0DcJGehGJNJIJ6SLhV7DEsFgVygVkoJrW3me9unV21uooVkpMqL_nuhAJV67qwzyz8PVHG4dntxmjn0VAeEYUtBunNkkcZ2p94jqcMpnS1QA4lUg4jpM4TSO9S/s320/41HXGi+AtfL.jpeg" width="200" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>You meet an elderly man on a ferry bound for Greece. He is a fellow American in his 60s, you are a young man in his early 20s, fresh from a stay in a Greek monastery. He tells you part of his story and invites you to accompany him to India, the country that has been his home for decades and where he lives the life of renunciate enjoying an extended pilgrimage, with the only fixed destination: love! </p><p>He may be a saint, he may be mad, he might conceivably be both, but why not? Why not indeed if you are the writer and photographer, Thomas K. Shor who in a series of books and extended photographic essays has shown a remarkable ability to befriend people with striking stories to tell that touch on the transcendent, the holy, and not occasionally the eccentric and strange. (As here, for example, <a href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/04/searching-for-paradise-in-hidden.html">https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2019/04/searching-for-paradise-in-hidden.html</a> ).</p><p>Ed Spencer, the renunciant, had taught medieval history at Harvard until the Second World War brought him into the services and a posting to India. India greeted him as home and a subsequent encounter with a guru in Bihar sealed this connection (not one to be shared by his future wife as when he returned with her after the war, she quickly left and divorced him, leaving him to his life of walking). He traveled the length and breadth of the sub-continent, befriending people, earning a reputation as a saint or sage, but always maintaining a certain distance; and, always moving on.</p><p>Shor's account of meeting him, being and traveling in India with him, and their amicable parting of the ways that releases Shor into his own adventure is a compelling and engaging read for three principle reasons.</p><p>First, you see India (in the 80s) through the eyes of an engaging neophyte traveler open to new experience, open-minded and observant yet too not reluctant to share their doubts and hesitations. His portrait of Spencer is eminently balanced with admiration and a recognition of his gifts not excluding observing him as a human being with continuing flaws; not least a certain impatience and continuing cultural blindnesses.</p><p>Second, you are with a traveler who is learning the art of surrender - that when the whole that is India invites you simply to flow with it, you take a deep breath and, mostly, do. So as they hit the road, Shor allows himself to be guided by Spencer's intuition of where to stay, how to receive hospitality, how not to be afraid. That this does not always work, and that Shor cannot maintain Spencer's standards about not using money or running to a convenient shelter at the hint of obstacle makes the account more endearing and realistic. It, also, means that finally they must part ways, amicably, but realising too that Spencer's renunciant discipline has taken decades to acquire, and Shor's path is different.</p><p>Third, having left Spencer, Shor's journey compellingly becomes even more the gift of the whole - rife with significant coincidence and spiritual happenstance. He decides to travel north to meet with Lama Anagirika Govinda (whom Spencer has known) and who should he meet at the Delhi Tourist Office but the only person capable of showing him the exact way to Govinda's house and providing the requisite map for the journey. However, his potential host and introducer to Govinda is not there, though she would be unable in any case to provide an introduction to Govinda as owing to the onset of Parkinson's disease he has returned to the US. Nevertheless Shor stumbles into the house of a person who can help him, who has met and been given the same sacred token that Shor acquired in Delhi, and who studied with Govinda. Shor finds himself full circle, staying with a Tibetan lama and his family, who as a child had known and loved Spencer.</p><p>You close the book with a smile on your face, remembering all those common moments, possibly less pronounced, when you yourself let things unfold, stopped layering the world in your expectations, and allowed things to emerge. This includes in my case reading this book - that I had on my pile for so long - but picking up at the right moment, when I am 'stuck' and the world's answering activity has apparently departed only to discover in reading it a renewed sense of possibility if you pay attention and allow surrender.</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-79538320554918844662022-02-07T11:08:00.010+00:002022-02-07T11:35:46.582+00:00The Cure for Sleep<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJyRNLR7Qg9vysIlIOyAq4bcvaEqPpNIsGj1RkRCrIKK3zzA9-BfMdDYaFfO7LsqBJIO72YyR0oSE3Njnbj8NJwB0efG76gq_X71h5h1bd0o-ze2fh19WS54g6YOlMCkJfT5rrOad47JMc3j19-pqRC-2pynMFkW2DQy_b-yNoFX-xrKSzY2nbK023=s500" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="308" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgJyRNLR7Qg9vysIlIOyAq4bcvaEqPpNIsGj1RkRCrIKK3zzA9-BfMdDYaFfO7LsqBJIO72YyR0oSE3Njnbj8NJwB0efG76gq_X71h5h1bd0o-ze2fh19WS54g6YOlMCkJfT5rrOad47JMc3j19-pqRC-2pynMFkW2DQy_b-yNoFX-xrKSzY2nbK023=s320" width="197" /></a></div><br />We are woven of stories - the ones we tell about ourselves, the ones others tell of us, the ones that lurk in the shadows of our and others' minds that shape, often unconsciously, our beliefs, patterns of behavior, habits. We might, rightly, as my wise, challenging Jungian analyst showed me, develop a necessary supportive (or defensive) belief or habit with its accompanying story, wholly appropriate for its moment, yet as time progresses, it becomes at best a worn shell better discarded, at worst a self-defeating neurosis holding you bound.<div><br /></div><div>And what shifts these stories and their attendant possibilities, writing with us anew? </div><div><br /></div><div>The careful sifting of memory, the circles of care or neglect we live in, our conversations with others, the lowering or deepening of the circles of our awareness, the practice of trying on different frames, new versions of ourselves; and, of course, events!</div><div><br /></div><div>Tanya Shadrick's beautifully written memoir and manifesto explore many of these dimensions of the stories that wove and weave her life, with searching intelligence, honesty, and candor. It opens with an event.</div><div><br /></div><div>Safely delivered of her first child, she subsequently begins to hemorrhage and she hovers between life and death, she has a near-death experience accompanied by that familiar light that seems to vibrantly enfold and connect her with others, with the world. She apportions no necessary metaphysical or religious explanation to this but it does shift the boundaries of what she imagines possible for her life, here and now. Supported by the husband, she met at university to build a securer life after a challenging childhood - her mother the only single parent in the village, divorced, disastrously remarried, and retreated from her best hopes, abandoned by her father who yet lingers at margins uncaringly - she now discovers renewed challenges. Her choice of birth was primarily a response to her husband's desire, her capacity to love and care for her boy uncertain; and, the luring sense of renewal that her near-death experience has given her prompts thoughts of escape. This and sheer bloody tiredness and continuing health problems!</div><div><br /></div><div>But she chooses differently and decides to stay put, dig in, "to polish the stone'' (to use a Zen expression) of her experience and discover within and without a new world of wonder, that genuinely opens up her felt possibilities. In doing so, she deploys many of the practices alluded to earlier - and finds herself on a liberating journey towards herself as writer and artist, that like many such journeys, rightly honed, gifts space to others to discover their own potentialities, to liberate their stories towards abundance and away from harm. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is undoubtedly not a story without struggle, inwardly and outwardly, it can be difficult to leave harmful scripts aside even when we recognize them, change often threatens those we love, interestingly the divorce rate of those who have an NDE is high as their partners fall out of sync with the new, renewed values of the recipient; and, of course, the world does not necessarily spring to our assistance. It remains a world of multiple discriminations against women, around class, against artists, around unsettling, assertive differences of belief and behavior. And, of course, all the practicalities of money and childcare and so on and on ...</div><div><br /></div><div>Yet she emerges, is emergent, wondering in her place, working at what feels is her vocation, though she is reserved about any such language, within and with her family but also with cherished independence. All this is traced in precise, moving, revealing language, stories that make the heartache outwards towards and with the participants and that have you alert and awake at the end, asking yourself what are the stories I could tell about myself that might lean into new possibilities, new wonder; and, which are those I might hope to lay to rest, reframe as a past, that I might honor as a reality but to which I am no longer bound.</div><div><br /></div><div>Each section of the book is given an epigraph from Walt Whitman whose 'Leaves of Grass' famously opens with, ''I celebrate myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." When we celebrate ourselves in this way, as Tanya does here, we make a gift and an invitation of recognizing that if we step out in this way, it is, in truth, an exercise in true humility, we stand exuberantly in our place, alive, as each and all are invited to in their own ways, their places, uniquely contributing to that light that enfolds us all. </div><div><br /></div><div>Now that would begin to see the world aright to quote another poet of liberating light.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><div><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p></div></div>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-52720714914567804142022-02-04T09:10:00.002+00:002022-02-04T12:40:48.698+00:00It is a wonderful life.<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKyKlLrjPKv05N6dzlIvUE1Lfi18rKljoNmuXdNY-xM4bkxEWLCFMxFKU-beSYyLAgHURw-Yblb9Daf5UtFgSw6sXXbmNaqjUNblb4U2n5EQDNiGp0cVNM8Nz4SKK935F43fvNXrW7v0IUyQBDNYD7RT9jNQGXcm5x4nKofh4G_PGWJsevpzXjBwvS=s500" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiKyKlLrjPKv05N6dzlIvUE1Lfi18rKljoNmuXdNY-xM4bkxEWLCFMxFKU-beSYyLAgHURw-Yblb9Daf5UtFgSw6sXXbmNaqjUNblb4U2n5EQDNiGp0cVNM8Nz4SKK935F43fvNXrW7v0IUyQBDNYD7RT9jNQGXcm5x4nKofh4G_PGWJsevpzXjBwvS=s320" width="210" /></a></div><span style="font-family: inherit;"><br />As a student, Huston Smith used to wake up, bolt upright, hands outstretched, declaring in a loud voice, “Good!" He maintained this grateful, wondering attitude through a long, inwardly and outwardly, adventurous life told with aplomb here, though thankfully, for Kendra, his partner for more than 60 years, he had surrendered this particular waking practice by the time they met!</span><p></p><p>Nevertheless, it was practice that was at the heart of Smith's sustained, lifelong exploration of the religions of humankind. His book, 'The World's Religions' sold in its millions and he was an early adopter of television as a medium of communication. Though thought of as a religious scholar, Smith preferred to describe himself as a 'religious communicator'. He would immerse himself in a tradition, practice it himself, to the extent permitted, listen carefully and attentively to its wider practitioners, and befriend them in meaningful, engaged dialogue.</p><p>Born the son of Christian missionaries in China, and though never abandoning his primary Christian faith and orientation, Smith remarkably progressed through serious, decade long engagements with Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, gleaning insight, being challenged and challenging, able to give accessible, experientially based accounts of their fundamentals; and, in a way, as he acknowledged, that put their best foot forward into the wider world. He was not blind to religions' multiple, often institutional failings, and sought to correct them but was essentially in love with the magic of a divinely gifted world which these traditions at their best sought to navigate and provide inspiration and healing to their human (and other) membership. </p><p>That other membership became important to Smith when he realized after the first edition of The World's Religions was published (then titled the Religions of Man) that he had managed to exclude ''primordial traditions" and their enfolded relationship with the natural world of other persons/beings, so, in an act of correction and contrition, he embarked on a series of engagements with indigenous traditions especially in Australia and North America. Here too, not content with reading or outward observation, where possible he shared peoples' places and practices, exhibiting a rare and compelling gift for friendship. He writes movingly of being excluded, he thought wholly rightly, from a Native American ceremony, where his indigenous interlocutor tells him that they know he is ''on their side" but certain things must remain mysteries to the outside world. </p><p>Not content, however, with exploring religious traditions, Smith's capacious mind absorbed science (he taught at MIT, not wholly happily, for over a decade) and explored entheogens or psychedelics. He was a friend of Aldous Huxley, who introduced Smith to Timothy Leary and Richard Allport (Ram Dass); and, he took his first dose of LSD with the former in his kitchen! He wrote about his experiences extensively, with sober enthusiasm, and successfully campaigned to legalize peyote use within the Native American Church. In reading, you often wonder where all his extraordinary energy came from!</p><p>Though lived in wonder, it was not a life lived without suffering endured and negotiated. One of his daughters dies of cancer, in excruciating pain, but thinking serenely of the sea. One of his granddaughters, their mother's only daughter, was murdered at sea in circumstances still unexplained, her body never found. He writes movingly of his family and what these tragedies meant to him and how they came to be seen within his wider faith.</p><p>Wide faith might be a good summary - we are gifted into being by the divine, to good purpose, that we live out to the best of our abilities, shared with others, in service with others. We may find ourselves in a loving relationship with a tradition, as he did with Christ, that makes it unique for you. Yes, on the horizontal, historic plain, you can compare and contrast this with other traditions to useful effect, but on the vertical, eternal plain, you know that ultimately truth is one, embraces all, and to live into this is to grow wider, deeper, evermore in union with all, in love in all.</p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-11352235557904863722022-01-10T07:15:00.002+00:002022-01-10T07:15:49.269+00:00The World We Used to Live In<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi1dwwiK0l4lRCu-cjW8IrAp_v6D--FJ1k3yi7f8iBJyFd1HRNhTGJ7--jia6-zKwt1QUzjmGKsB8wR_zrW9nSp34PuFjTkLSDJ5jjPEqAaJ4O1iD7vUSp86D6gzueV0OXYo3M0c5HNNcv3Aq-Eyv9jLl93PmhzneUrMt2XWXnChcGY1Cl8B0lw0c_V=s500" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="354" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi1dwwiK0l4lRCu-cjW8IrAp_v6D--FJ1k3yi7f8iBJyFd1HRNhTGJ7--jia6-zKwt1QUzjmGKsB8wR_zrW9nSp34PuFjTkLSDJ5jjPEqAaJ4O1iD7vUSp86D6gzueV0OXYo3M0c5HNNcv3Aq-Eyv9jLl93PmhzneUrMt2XWXnChcGY1Cl8B0lw0c_V=w284-h400" width="284" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p>Imagine attending a ceremony in Spring (in this case with the Zuni in what is now New Mexico) where the local medicine men gather around a square of compacted yellow sand in which a single seed of corn is planted. As they chant, pray, you watch emerge over the course of hours, not days or weeks, a fully-fledged corn plant, glistening green, emerge whose cob will be closely inspected for its prediction of the forthcoming autumn harvest. What do you make of this? If you are a white person, observing this in the nineteenth century, you tend to presume a trick but what kind of trickery? All of your explanations sound either hollow - the use of a corn plant from the previous year but then how is its greenery maintained? Or equally fantastical to what you have just witnessed - for example, mass hypnosis or a secret accelerant growth chemical.</p><p>Later, reading this historical account, you can fall back on the assumption that it is a piece of fantastical literature - except the mostly moderately hostile or condescending witnesses (there are honorable exceptions) do not appear the imaginative type, and their bafflement rustles off the page. Nor is this an isolated account nor confined to only this group of indigenous inhabitants of 'America'. Interestingly the nature of the hostility shifts over time - the Jesuits in the seventeenth century presume what they witness is possible but caused by devilry but by the nineteenth century, the witnesses assume it must be simply trickery even if they do not know how because what they have witnessed cannot be possible!</p><p>Vine Deloria Jr.'s 'The World We Used to Live In' might be described as the Varieties of Native American Medicine Man (and occasionally women) Power Experiences (after William James' pioneering exploration of religious experience). He has structured an unfolding picture of what, according to the best possible, most reliable accounts, medicine men were able to experience of, and utilize with, the cooperation of the sacred and its accompanying powers, cleaving to the phenomenology of that experience, without seeking to place them in any contemporary reductive, materialist framework. </p><p>Visions and dreams guide, stones speak, travel and de and re-materialize, animals collaborate and correct, people are cured, hidden, found, kept from danger, the weather is manipulated and the future foretold - all within the given limits of the overarching mystery in which we live and the ability of the medicine man (and their wider communities) to understand, learn from and, importantly, live up to the gifts they are offered.</p><p>The examples, structured as they are, are meant to have a cumulative effect - and they do. The world you step into is rather akin to that of Marvel, though more homely and domestic (rather than what we take for 'reality') but, of course, as Jeffrey Kripal has deftly shown - the world of Marvel and its kin owes not a little to their creators own encounters with the 'paranormal'. </p><p>Nor is 'paranormal' the right word here because though these practices and their accompanying powers belonged only with exceptional individuals, they were seen as everyday realities, accepted within the diverse communities that composed pre/post-Colombian America as beautifully witnessed to in James Welch's novel, 'Fools Crow' <a href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-wholly-realised-different-world.html">https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-wholly-realised-different-world.html</a> These are very practical powers with an everyday consequence, finding a lost horse, for example, being renewed in the lives of countless practitioners over the generations.</p><p>Deloria was a scholar (science, law, religion) and activist for indigenous rights, and his purpose here was both to defend indigenous ways of seeing and being in the world and, tentatively, connect them to contemporary shifts in our own scientific understanding of the world (in which he clearly, if very briefly, takes an 'idealist' position - the world is mental, the material 'frozen thought' and this may account for its greater fluidity/flexibility than materialism would allow) - and ponder the meaning of his title - the world we used to live in. </p><p>For it is clear for him that a tradition that was so pervasive in multiple indigenous, communal contexts is if no more, seriously attenuated. What is the relationship between traditions of deep practice and the world's response? Are there seasons to 'magic' and if so does this seasonality lie on the side of the sacred powers withdrawing their favor or of our ignorance occluding our ability to see the world aright? How difficult is it to practice if either your (or the wider community) is not sufficiently attentive or their epistemology/ metaphysics is indifferent or actively hostile? </p><p>Equally, it raises fascinating questions about why certain of these powers were not, apparently adaptive, on the white man's arrival, carrying, for example, new and terrible diseases for which the medicine men and their sacred helpers had no cure. Are the powers localized and so too subject to time, change and learning? There was no time to adapt and the sheer pressure of the colonial juggernaut demoralized any attempt to. You can see a whole interface/dialogue here between distinct theologies/epistemologies. But it was a road not traveled. </p><p>For this was Deloria's last book, completed shortly before he died, and it does have an unfinished feel to it. You wanted him to pick up certain of these threads and go deeper - in the implications these accounts have for how we understand how the world works and in why what was so common appears now uncommon though possibly not as great as he thought - since the 'miraculous' seems, if not as structured as here, highly resilient and persistent, whatever our mainstream patterns of thinking maintain. </p><p>Yet the book does achieve (for this 'outside' reader), one of its aims which were to speak to its own communities of the rich's of its past - and potential future - and again for this outside reader honor, the ancestors of multiple yet interwoven indigenous spiritual traditions.</p>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-38349501539225085232022-01-09T14:19:00.001+00:002022-01-10T08:49:01.198+00:00Meeting Mr Gascoyne<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFR75b72_KOpIRZoNq_vNWEmX2ovS1rLagEKoGfmykDqMVQrVl0ewkRjv91TCGEpaRSB3qAOLV_YX19k2ghaqxVXonBjL2OCbGUTGkA3iswNaFrPt1Q1wdqn7n-rS6LZjQYn_o07wUM2VM41lmDvgYzq4iBX1dqgLSYNRRUT1EOiddIgQTzJJ8Kik3=s252" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="252" data-original-width="200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiFR75b72_KOpIRZoNq_vNWEmX2ovS1rLagEKoGfmykDqMVQrVl0ewkRjv91TCGEpaRSB3qAOLV_YX19k2ghaqxVXonBjL2OCbGUTGkA3iswNaFrPt1Q1wdqn7n-rS6LZjQYn_o07wUM2VM41lmDvgYzq4iBX1dqgLSYNRRUT1EOiddIgQTzJJ8Kik3=w254-h320" width="254" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">I first saw the poet, David Gascoyne, across a crowded room in the Primrose Hill Community Centre in London. It was my first ever attendance at a poetry reading (when I was at university) drawn by his name on the bill - one of three Surrealist poets (though in truth all three had drunk at the well of the unconscious and moved on).</span></div><p></p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">I had only the description of the poet, Kathleen Raine, to go on and this was not a description of physical characteristics but of character and quality of being. There was a tall man, quietly standing to one side, at the far end of the room, with an air of such collected vulnerability and searching presence that I knew it could be no other. There he was in his signature bow tie waiting to speak, to read. He read beautifully (not always a characteristic of poets with their own work) and I had my admiration confirmed.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Later we were to meet (at a conference) and hold a long conversation about Christianity, existentialism and that quality of being that is presence - that sees into the suchness of things and their significance. He was a gentle soul, much wracked by depression and long periods of poetic silence, even as he began young.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">His first volume of poems had emerged when still in his teens. Beginning as a 'surrealist', it had led him to an appreciation of the mystery of things and how this rested and was completed by faith in Christ. It was a faith utterly individual, wrestled from misfortune, but deeply held. It was held in the face of a world disintegrating into the chaos of conflict and later a world where materialism crowded out the spirit, a move that could only alienate. </span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">In this darkening, David's was a mind and heart always seeking a redemptive touch, a hopeful (and challenging) sign of redemption.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Snow in Europe</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Out of their slumber Europeans spun</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Dense dreams: appeasements, miracle, glimpsed flash</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Of a new golden era; but could not restrain</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">The vertical white weight that fell last night</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">And made their continent a blank.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Hush, says the sameness of the snow</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">The Ural and Jura now rejoin</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">The furthest Arctic's desolation. All is one;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Sheer monotone: plain, mountain; country, town:</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Contours and boundaries no longer show.</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">The warring flags hang colourless a while;</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Now midnight's icy zero feigns a truce</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">Between the signs and seasons, and fades out</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">All shots and cries. But when the great thaw comes,</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;">How red shall be the melting snow, how loud the drums!</span></div>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-4441893602888643872021-12-31T19:11:00.009+00:002022-01-04T17:08:39.033+00:00A wholly realised, different world<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKsI8_lNN2VIYMmhZ3cvUYo29lwPWtCDIljbMTXJES4y4QWS9aiCPiInHJgM0rQPHqpeNviQ2HPJisRTtidfFG_riQ7Un_TWL0wc1vTge0oh9eo5fV4o0IwIDQRhq16V1TKPz7PPPuz6haoeICnfrTZl5hdP9XzGHoGAj_jlFwBOmVWNkr4WSYDKoL=s600" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="392" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjKsI8_lNN2VIYMmhZ3cvUYo29lwPWtCDIljbMTXJES4y4QWS9aiCPiInHJgM0rQPHqpeNviQ2HPJisRTtidfFG_riQ7Un_TWL0wc1vTge0oh9eo5fV4o0IwIDQRhq16V1TKPz7PPPuz6haoeICnfrTZl5hdP9XzGHoGAj_jlFwBOmVWNkr4WSYDKoL=s320" width="209" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div> <p></p><p>It is a challenge for a writer if their setting is in historical time not to allow their own contemporary context to intrude, even if lightly. Can you genuinely depict another world? The best example of success that I would point to is Margaret Yourcenar's remarkable 'Memoirs of Hadrian'. That moment when the Emperor refers obliquely to Christians as a minor irritant across the surface of his attention to be quickly forgotten is a compelling example of the world as then inhabited with no hint, because no awareness, of what is to come.</p><p>Welch's novel falls into the same category of world-building. In this case, we are with a sub-group of the Blackfeet in Montana in 1870. From its very first sentence, we are in their world, as the main protagonist, White Man's Dog, who will become Fools Crow, sits, restless, on the cusp of Cold Maker bringing winter.</p><p>What unfolds is the story of his growth into manhood as a warrior, apprentice medicine man, husband, and father amongst his community - a community that lives within a world that speaks, that is inhabited by persons, some of whom are human. A world where signs come, require interpretation, and whose interpretation can be adequate or not according to the circumstance. It is a world that requires reading but which can also be over-interpreted, sometimes a thing is simply a thing, not pointing to something other. It is a world too of great variety - some, many follow the paths laid out by the ancestors, others, a few, reject these paths and strike out on their own - not least in how to react to the encroaching others, the colonizing whites.</p><p>Welch's achievement is to wholly immerse you in this world without any wish to 'explain' it. Raven speaks - is it imagined, dreamt, fantasized? - no simply Raven speaks and what is spoken is part of the real world in which its inhabitants dwell. Even the descriptions of 'known objects' make no concession to our reckoning - black horns are buffalo, white horns are cattle - but this is never 'said' simply shown.</p><p>It is a world too that is meant to be seen as simply real - true, embodied and, of course, threatened. Running through the whole book is the presence of the Napikwans (a naming of the colonizing whites that is, if I am not mistaken, never explained) and the seizers (the soldiers who enforce their claims). This is a world that is on the verge of a collapse - and the understanding of that collapse from within the community - what is the 'fault' that generates it will be the subject of Fools Crows' vision. A vision as beautifully realized as the opening chapters of Genesis and one that equally carries a promise of hope as well as a burden of sorrow. </p><p>When my copy arrived dressed in Penguin Classic black (for a book first published in 1986), I was tempted to think that it was a mite premature but as I read I became convinced that it was only too right. </p><p>It works as a celebration of a way of life, as the lifeway of a particular person within a community, and as testimony. The testimony is to a people living rightly (not perfectly, the flaws are there to see) in a particular place - that particular place is not only natural - in the plains, foothills, mountains of what we now know as Montana - but cosmological where you locate yourself within a story that embraces every dimension including sun, moon, stars whose persons touch the earth, speak, enter dreams, weave the very dimensions of your, my reality. </p><p>You step away from the book convicted of what was so thoughtlessly destroyed and confident of what truly remains if you allow yourself the right kind of imaginative attention. </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br />Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-425315088414511149.post-5537879624743416432021-12-24T06:18:00.001+00:002021-12-24T06:18:29.449+00:00Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjADrsuKdTjRt-oWr56ZzFGEdVfgYtHJSngC8rZlE3XjPmhwUKNQ2WSQDFvkp_qV8gM4AcU3QZkhmH93LkPLqOSfVLz64ztWfrwYnQ1cSW-brFWBfsqopvBTg_OK5cjAdv2h8VrXTTCKaSL08sYIsmVL_Jye4nFQGgfAMxLxlfYkRqYQiQC9H-GL9y8=s800" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="800" data-original-width="397" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjADrsuKdTjRt-oWr56ZzFGEdVfgYtHJSngC8rZlE3XjPmhwUKNQ2WSQDFvkp_qV8gM4AcU3QZkhmH93LkPLqOSfVLz64ztWfrwYnQ1cSW-brFWBfsqopvBTg_OK5cjAdv2h8VrXTTCKaSL08sYIsmVL_Jye4nFQGgfAMxLxlfYkRqYQiQC9H-GL9y8=s320" width="159" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: center;">'The Virgin of St. John of the Cross', 1953, by Patrick Pye</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kenosis<br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"In sleep his infant mouth works in and out.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He is so new, his silk skin has not yet</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">been roughed by plane and wooden beam</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">nor, so far, has he had to deal with human doubt.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">He is in a dream of nipple found,</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of blue-white milk, of curving skin</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">and, pulsing in his inner ear, the inner throb</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">of warm heart's repeated sound.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">His only memories float from fluid space.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So new he has not pounded nails, hung a door</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">broken bread, felt rebuff, bent to the lash,</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">wept for the sad heart of the human race."</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This poem by Luci Shaw takes us to a figure at once so natural, so truly child - the mouth working in and out - and yet luminous. The child who is God will grow into the man who is God and never once forsake his humanity, will never be anyone other than truly human, transparent in God, as we are all asked to become. Jesus will always be present in that trusting reality that is true of any birth, so beautifully evoked here, through all the trails and trials of his life, equally evoked here.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Retaining innocence, and the innocence of attention is not easy, difficult it is to relax into our true selves, but it is always the original place from which we can meaningfully start to navigate the world, to allow the pause of being to be the route/root of all our doing. Tuning our inner ear to the heart of whatever presents itself to us, pierce through the clamoring, to cultivate a sense of what is going on here, and its meaning. The better to navigate by, and our present world is not short of clamoring and doing! 'Relaxing into our selves' was a phrase I used in one of my wonderful Feldenkrais sessions this year, that my teacher particularly liked, as you learn to play a particular kind of attention to how you are in the world and micro-adjustments can make such a difference to how you see and carry yourself. Each session has felt like a cumulative renewal in body/mind flow.</div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">One of the many fruits of re-reading this year Kent Nerburn's extraordinary <wbr></wbr>trilogy of books of his encounter with the Indian elder, Dan (that I discussed here: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2017/10/journeying-with-indian-elder.html&source=gmail&ust=1640412578600000&usg=AOvVaw20AlecOt7zTsYEoSW2qHXe" href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2017/10/journeying-with-indian-elder.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr>2017/10/journeying-with-<wbr></wbr>indian-elder.html</a> and here: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-girl-who-sang-to-buffalo.html&source=gmail&ust=1640412578600000&usg=AOvVaw0KFoQprJ98W2BZlABHBQdi" href="https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-girl-who-sang-to-buffalo.html" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/<wbr></wbr>2017/11/the-girl-who-sang-to-<wbr></wbr>buffalo.html</a>) was being reminded of realizing why many of the indigenous people I have met, especially in Central America, have such 'soft' handshakes. Our firm pumping being seen as misplaced self-affirmation, the overweening assertion of 'ego' and again of how even small adjustments in our attention (and how one shakes hands in this case) can yield different, positive responses.<br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When I realized this, I found myself thinking how much else goes missing from view as I blunder through the world? How do we spend so much time thinking out what we should be doing without ever pausing to ask: what precisely is going on here? Perhaps the salvation of the world hinges on resting into this latter mode more often, more consciously. Practicing the kenosis of incarnation in everyday ways.<br /><br /></div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This pause to pay attention, to empty oneself of opinions, to be present to allow the other in, in all their plenitude. Such self-emptying, kenosis, is at the heart of the Christian mystery; and, God is present, as the Hasidic saying goes, wherever we let God in. We are all invited to the kenosis that is incarnation: what does it matter, asks Eckhart, if God is born into the world if God is not born within me? </div><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLy4elPDNKIYWNEJT0IvA-OZRp2KwPZpfloOjXX814_TntBkJq-RHpVFHIP9OB026ZABY9jxdefgRb7PVamOHXllFvfgl6ajBlYNIm-jmS0SIFiH85hI-V1nTAvAx8_5_HaYa9kYEyy707HLtWHldcte6TtBYFAFipgxl2NljoIWa3Smd2UDNXYafG=s750" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="750" data-original-width="735" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEgLy4elPDNKIYWNEJT0IvA-OZRp2KwPZpfloOjXX814_TntBkJq-RHpVFHIP9OB026ZABY9jxdefgRb7PVamOHXllFvfgl6ajBlYNIm-jmS0SIFiH85hI-V1nTAvAx8_5_HaYa9kYEyy707HLtWHldcte6TtBYFAFipgxl2NljoIWa3Smd2UDNXYafG=s320" width="314" /></a></div><br /><div style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><div style="font-size: small; text-align: center;">'The Nativity', 1305-1315, by Giotto</div><div data-smartmail="gmail_signature" dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><br /></div><div>Meanwhile, what another year it has been - work done remotely that continues through the hard work of our partners to reap rewards of resilience as well as of growth. One of my favorite entrepreneurs, who I did 'meet' virtually, was Sylvia Kuria, who grows affordable organic vegetables in Kenya and who we featured in our annual report here: <a data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.argidius.com/en/learning/learning-placeholder-i6023-sylvias-basket-kenya/&source=gmail&ust=1640412578600000&usg=AOvVaw0XSpNWcuTLJE5C8rc2Lnl9" href="https://www.argidius.com/en/learning/learning-placeholder-i6023-sylvias-basket-kenya/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">https://www.argidius.com/en/<wbr></wbr>learning/learning-placeholder-<wbr></wbr>i6023-sylvias-basket-kenya/</a> </div><div><br /></div><div>Droughts, pandemics, logistical challenges, nothing has stopped Sylvia going from strength to strength ...! </div><div><br /></div><div>And, the best thank you note we received was from a Mayan-based business organization in Guatemala that acknowledged the gratitude of the ancestors as well as of their current team (or is there actually any difference)? Now when Zoom depresses, I conjure up an image of my office populated by benign Mayan ancestors nurturing us on! Working with them has been a continuous acknowledgment of mutual difference, not least in our conceptions of time! </div></div></div></div>Nicholas Colloffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09677907138534928912noreply@blogger.com0