My aunt and Ben Hur

Early on Monday morning, my aunt died, peacefully by all account, following prayers with the local Chaplain. She was chugging into her mid-90s.

My fondest memory was my brother and I being taken to what (in memory) has become my first real restaurant - an Italian one in Birmingham - where our attempt to order the cheapest items on the menu was firmly (and kindly) reproved by her: that would not be necessary. What I did order I cannot recall but it added to my sense that this particular aunt was exotic. She, also, drank wine (the only person I knew who did so) and lager (that became a drink, a pale substitute for real beer, that I forever associated with women though this association, strangely, did not colour my appreciation of wine)!

As a single woman, with a mysterious white collar job at the strangely named 'Kalamazoo', she travelled to far distant places, even beyond Europe, going to the Seychelles once and excitingly (for me if not for her) found herself briefly stranded on the tarmac in Khartoum on her return journey whilst a coup unfolded or failed to unfold around her.

The other great event of the restaurant day was going to see Ben Hur (that must have been a revival) at a cinema with an exceptionally large screen (probably only the second cinema I had visited) and curiously, like the theatre, this cinema (for this production at least) produced a programme as if for a theatrical production. This I think I still possess and, at the time, I read it over and over. I vividly remember its golden cover and the stills from the earlier (silent) version of the film.

Our first loves leave their mark on us - and this was one. Films came charged with meaning as well as excitement. I was marked by an exciting epic and yet one stalked by an ever present but oblique Christ. The subtitle of Lew Wallace's original novel is 'A Tale of the Christ', so as well as my first restaurant, my aunt's other gift that day (if consciously wholly unintentional) was my first real encounter with the person of Christ in a way that intrigued me, capturing attention.

It is an attention that continues ever fruitfully for which my gratitude to my aunt can only be continuously boundless. May the presence she introduced me to then accompany her now.

Comments

Red Shambala

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

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

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

The Jewel in the Crown

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

Golgonooza

Search This Blog