Golgonooza

  Many years ago, I periodically visited HMP Grendon Underwood, both a prison and a therapeutic community in the UK, whose governor I knew. In conversations with prisoners, I noticed that they consistently distinguished between “here”—Grendon—and “there”—the System, meaning every other prison, of which they had extensive experience. Grendon was an “oasis”; the System, a “desert”. As Alison Liebling observes in this remarkable book, prisoners can be excellent judges of which environments foster human flourishing and which are merely survivable—or worse. The challenge is to develop meaningful, compelling, and measurable descriptions that allow prisons to be compared and more sustaining environments to be identified and nurtured. This has been the focus of Liebling’s evolving body of research over more than thirty years, characterised by a willingness to draw on a wide range of disciplines and approaches within humane inquiry. At the centre of her work is the idea that prisons are mor...

  What if Churchill had not been made Prime Minister in 1940? Removed from the field of possibilities, an alternative in Lord Halifax falls into place, and an armistice or peace is signed with Hitler. No one is the wiser that this has taken place, for time has been magically altered. All is different now. This is the possibility that haunts Francis Spufford's latest novel and that its heroine must thwart. Iris is an unlikely candidate as saviour of Britain. She works as a secretary at a stockbroker's, is highly ambitious, wants to be rich, and she labours under an unexplained estrangement from her mother. She likes sex, has multiple male admirers, and is definitely aiming to 'marry up'', curbing her Watford vowels and having a side hustle so she can both dress well and afford to save for an investable nest egg. Yet, she must be careful; she does not want to be caught by a man who might curb her freedom and throttle her ambition. She definitely does not want to fall ...

  Michael McGregor, in his 20s, decides to go to a Greek island, step into solitude, and write a novel. He chooses Patmos, then, in the 80s, decidedly off the beaten tourist trail, and to make assurance doubly sure, he goes in winter.  Setting himself some ground rules - no alcohol, writing six days a week, no television or radio, etc.- he finds a place to stay, a little cold and austere as it turns out, and begins his experiments in solitude and in writing. So, this thoughtful, reflective book begins, and takes us on a journey to epidsodes of solitude experienced in multiple dimensions - in the isolations of childhood and refuge in libraries, as part of a spiritual retreat at the ecumenical community in Taize, snatched amongst the travails and joys of being a tour guide and in the context of an unfolding writer's life, both as a single man and a happily married one.  In each of these contexts, solitude unfolds its offerings to thought and experience. The challenges of le...

A prosperous family living in Calcutta, conscious of its status and robustly vegetarian, is disturbed when the youngest child of the younger son, at age three, boldly demands to eat fish with rice. Even more disconcerting is her assertion that her 'real' mother is a poor fisherwoman living in the Sundarbans - the extensive region of islands, waterways, and mangrove swamps in Bengal. Consternation reigns! What to make of this? Has someone surreptitiously been feeding her fish? But why would they? Is she ill, and if so, is it physical or mental? Fortunately, her pediatrician is married to a therapist, one who has had reason to study ''cases of the reincarnational kind" and recognises the signs. There follows an intertwining story of two "cases of the reincarnational kind," one apparent, one hidden, woven within a developing environmental campaign to dislodge a prospective coal-fired power station by animating the powers of an 'other world', and weav...

  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...