Golgonooza

A further reminder from LiveJournal of what I posted a while back - an appreciation of the artist, Lorna Graves. I remember that first meeting vividly. We were in the White Hart Bar at the conference day's end; and, somehow the poet, David Gascoyne, Lorna, and myself created an ''introverts'' corner (maximum three). We primarily listened to David talk of poetry, existentialism, and his current reading of the Russian religious philosopher, Lev Shestov, making pertinent comments, asking gentle questions, and enjoying each other's presence. Lorna died too young in 2006:  https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/lorna-graves-413087.html "I met Lorna at Dartington Hall at the first Temenos Conference on 'art and the renewal of the sacred'. It was an appropriate location: Dartington had acted as shelter and support for her artistic mentor: Cecil Collins and it was his work that had furnished the cover image for the journal Temenos' first edition....

Having just re-read it, LiveJournal (that is reminding me of past posts from my time when I used it living in Moscow), today offered up Patrick White's 'Riders in the Chariot'. "After contemplating the books not read, thoughts naturally turn to those read and enjoyed of which one always stands out: Patrick White’s ‘Riders in the Chariot’. A contemporary reviewer for ‘The Times’ called it, by comparison to other current novels, a ‘cathedral surrounded by booths’ and the analogy with religious architecture is apt. Like all great art it is a novel that takes risks: it has as a central character a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust who rejects his intellectual past and an offered Zionist future and settles in Australia to become an ordinary worker at the ‘Brighta Bicycle Lamp’ factory. Here on one Good Friday he is subjected, as an outsider and as a Jew, to a mock drunken crucifixion by his fellow workers. Into the vortex of his life come three, equally eccentric, characters...

LiveJournal, the Russian-hosted blog site, that I used to use when I lived in Moscow has been reminding me of what I have posted in the past. Today, it cast this into my email inbox: my best friend, mentor, and who I continue to miss deeply.  "Ann, pictured here on her last holiday in Barbados, and difficult to imagine that she had only six months to live. She was the founder, and I the first employee, of the Prison Phoenix Trust: twenty-one this year. She was, for the five years I knew her, my closest friend and the person whose confidence in me drew me out and restored me to life, after a difficult transition into my twenties. She was an extraordinary person who had originally wanted to be a dancer, and she carried herself as one throughout life. Born in India to a father in the Indian Civil Service during the Raj, she had become the only permanent European student of Uday Shankar, the great Indian choreographer, by dint of persuasion and charm. It was an exploration cut short b...

  When I lived in what is now the Republic of North Macedonia, I had a friend, B, whose sister was happily married and had just given birth to their first child. This sister's sister-in-law, somewhat older, was also married with two children. With the birth of the child, the sister-in-law began to behave in 'interesting' ways that appeared designed to do harm to the newborn (her nephew). She was seen speaking under her breath when the baby was being baptized, items of the baby's clothing would disappear after she had visited their home, the babies' parents became convinced that his aunt was casting the 'evil eye'.  Not knowing quite what to make of these tales, that B would regale me with, I christened the sister-in-law, 'the wicked witch', and would ask periodically how the saga was unfolding.  A couple of months later, I was invited by B to a family St. Nicholas Day celebration. I arrived with the party in full swing, myriad people assembled around...

Whereas their previous novel, 'The Forbidden Book'  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-forbidden-book.html  began with a bomb desecrating a church that itself contains a desecrating image of the Prophet Muhammed, this second novel from the partnership of Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro starts with a more peaceful 'explosion' in an archeological discovery that offers the possibility of re-writing our knowledge of pre-history and of religion - a golden pomegranate in which is sealed two entheogenic substances, carbon-dated to a time when the Mediterranean was land and Malta was the center of a long-lasting paleolithic culture whose monuments comprise one of its attractions to this day. The discovery is made by Monica, an ambitious American archaeologist, and her eccentric billionaire sponsor, Sebastian Pinto. It is a discovery that will trigger Sebastian's murder and Rafael, his son, and Monica's search for the killers as they, in turn, are pursue...

  My report on a fascinating day on transformative ways of knowing held under the auspices of the Scientific and Medical Network and the Centre for Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred recently published in the Network's Paradigm Explorer. Edwin Abbott’s satirical novella, which gave this day its title, imagines the perplexities of a square as it visits a one-dimensional world and is visited from a three-dimensional one, being misunderstood and misunderstanding in turn. Abbott’s principal aim was social satire but, in the process, raised profound issues about how we construct our realities and what happens when those constructs are broken into by new levels of experience, presaging other worlds, other possibilities. The Scientific and Medical Network exists because it speculates that our present world trapped betwixt a dated, ‘knowing’ scientific materialism and patterns of religion that feel socially performative at best, assertively fundamentalist at worst, is indeed flat, two dimens...

My only meaningful contribution to climate change as public policy was helping produce a report on the human impact of such change in Russia ahead of the COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009. In conjunction with this, I liaised with the Russian government's climate change negotiators; and, because this was not a feat that the hosting Danish minister had been able to achieve (sic), I found myself a leading source of intelligence on what the Russian government's stance would be.  I remember asking one of the negotiators what would help him the most in nudging forward his own government. The response was 'noise' about climate change not from people like me (an international NGO) nor even a Russian NGO but ordinary people in Irkutsk, say, talking about it, being concerned by it. Our task was to seed that if we could. Reading Alastair McIntosh's 'Rider in the Storm' reminded me that the 'right noise' remains urgently necessary. But to get there, first, we must acq...