Golgonooza

  The physics department at an American university once opposed the appointment of a particular English professor because they were a scholar of Blake. A university, even if in a different department, was no place for that 'mad' critic of the method (Bacon), the underlying philosophy (Locke), and the paradigm-shifting discoveries (Newton) that had fundamentally shaped modernity (and what was then taken for the truth of things)! Despite subsequent discoveries in physics yet, I think, to be absorbed, this world, linear, sense-bound, material, is the one we broadly inhabit - our briefly conscious minds inhabiting a bag of skin that looks out on an objective world colored in by our projected subjectivities, but always threatening to drain back into grey purposelessness, a threat we postpone by a variety of strategems usually including some form of hopeful consumption - of things or experiences! Or maybe we seek to escape this version of things with the veneer of religion - hoping t...

The Sun Bearers, 1961 by Cecil Collins The Good Man in Hell by Edwin Muir If a good man were ever housed in Hell By needful error of the qualities, Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil, Or speak the truth only a stranger sees, Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate, Fill half eternity with cries and tears, Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate In patience for the first ten thousand years, Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat That, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill, Forcing his praying tongue to run by rote, Eternity entire before him still? Would he at last, grown faithful in his station, Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell, And sow among the damned doubts of damnation, Since here someone could live, and live well? One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace, Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in, Hell be a place like any other place, And love and hate and life and death begin. Cecil Collins was once giving a talk (at the Institute of Contemp...

  I cannot recall why I decided to read the stories of Algernon Blackwood, but having acquired the volume shown above, I set off on an extraordinary journey. It began with a visit to a haunted house occupied by the ghost of an obsessive lover and his victim, which I subsequently discovered was based on one of Blackwood's own researches as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, before encountering a village of witches, vengeful willows, a loving forest, and, most famously, an indigenous North American folk creature fond of a dangerous form of dancing! Strikingly, Blackwood claimed that his stories were based on real experiences, either of himself or trusted friends, which raises the question of how much of each story is grounded in ''actual" experience and how much is subsequent imaginative embellishment filtered through Blackwood's own framing beliefs, shaped by his interests in ''occult" thought and psychic research, and his membership both o...

  Each day, except Sunday, which is the Sabbath, Maisie and her six companions are taken by Donald, their owner and companion, on a 'mile' long amble across his croft and common land to exercise, feed, rest, and fertilize the landscape.  As this daily pattern unfolds, so does Donald's mind, accustomed to its place, roaming across and around time, remembering the stories that give him and the landscape, partly through him, their meaning and purpose. Once these purposes were shared in a wider community of knowing, but this lies sadly fragmented and steadily lost in the passage of 'progress'.  The language, Gaelic, has faded away with the passage of time and generations, and the economic basis of life - crofting and the sea - has crumbled to be 'replaced' by the uncertainties of wind generation, a futuristic 'spaceport', holiday homes, and tourism. A shared faith, and Donald is a practicing Catholic, has frayed. Yet Donald never steps into the same worl...

  As the journalist and biographer of Pope Francis, Paul Vallely noted in an article for the Church Times, the process of canonization in the contemporary era has been made more complicated because we know so much more in our promiscuous information age about any potential candidates, giving the Devil's Advocate an advantage in hindering any Promoter's efforts (let alone the reluctance of expert authorities especially medical ones to adduce a requsite miracle in our materialistic age).  Thus, though Harry Oldmeadow suggests that none of his cloud of witnesses are saints in certain of his Catholic and Orthodox exemplars, only time will tell, as the wheels can move exceedingly slowly, St Charles de Foucauld, who might have been a fitting companion here, required more than a century to elapse before his election.  Be that as it may, this is a compelling collection of essays on Christians in the twentieth and our own century who have aspired after holiness and who have reflec...

  When Charles Darwin first encountered the indigenous people of Tiera del Fuego (whom he characterized as the Fuegians), he was mortified by their ugliness, uncleanliness, and the habitation of what appeared to be a forlorn land, windswept, barren, and cold. Why would anyone, any human, want to live in this way? They were closer to beasts than humans and destined for 'extermination' in their encounter with that higher form of humanity that Darwin obviously represented. By 'extermination,' Darwin did not appear to mean a conscious act of genocide. On the Argentine mainland, he had witnessed the government's war against its indigenous population and strongly disapproved of its violence (as he too opposed the slavery he had seen in Brazil). He rather appeared to mean by the natural progress of mankind in what would become to be seen (and explained) as its progressive evolution, the strong driving out the weak. Indeed, Darwin was to be a lifelong contributor to the loc...