Golgonooza

When I first came to live in Switzerland as a present to myself (for landing in 'tax efficient' Zug), I bought the two volumes of Kathleen Raine's 'Blake and Tradition'. Beautiful volumes now sadly out of print unlike 'Blake and Antiquity' the foreshortened version of these her Paul Mellon lectures. Last night, after a three year pause, I managed to finish the second volume. They are masterly and beautifully illustrated. Under her PhD supervisor at Cambridge, none other than C.S. Lewis, she set out to read everything that Blake was known to have read or reasonably supposed, from textual evidence, might have read; and, against this back drop, read the poems and the paintings. Her argument is, simply put, that Blake was the conscious inheritor of a tradition, a Christian esotericism, woven of elements from the Bible, Neo-Platonism, Christian Cabala, Boehme; and, more closely to hand Bishop Berkeley and Emmanuel Swedenborg and was writing in opposition ...

I was once accused by an Anglican Benedictine Abbot of, "being a victim of my own articulacy". This stung because I suspect it was true. It stung too, as I later realised, because it was said with all the rapacity of a person describing themselves! Of all the encounters in my life, I remember this one as perhaps the least pastorally sensitive! It came to mind reading Monica Furlong's short, pithy and accomplished biography of Alan Watts - philosopher, trickster, showman of the 'counter-culture'. He was both a man of rare gifts and insight and profoundly wounded such that he reminded me of that saying of a Siberian shaman: that the gift of shamanism was also a curse. Watts was preternaturally gifted. His first book, 'The Spirit of Zen' being published when he was nineteen. Yet running through his life was a thread of self displacement, self destruction that he never allowed himself fully to see. Every misstep could be justified with graceful, articulat...

To coincide with the launch of a new book: Peace Inside: A Prisoners Guide to Meditation, its editor, Sam Settle, was interviewed on BBC 4's 'All in the Mind' here. The piece starts at 10.20 minutes into the programme. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08v09y4 More details on the book can be found here:  http://www.jkp.com/uk/peace-inside-2.html And the Prison Phoenix Trust (that I helped found) here:  http://www.theppt.org.uk The book is beautifully constructed and the explanation of how to meditate one of the clearest and simplest I have read necessarily so given it may be the only source of information a prison inmate might have at their disposal. But like any good account it is suitable for all - inside or out under any number of conditions of our 'imprisonment'!