Golgonooza

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...