Golgonooza

LiveJournal, the Russian blogging site, reminded me today of something I wrote in 2008. Herewith one of the Prison Phoenix Trust's then director's wonderful annual fund-raising letters that focused on prison officers. "When I am assailed, like James Stewart's character in 'It's a Wonderful Life', by the thought of 'what have I done to justify my life'? I reassure myself with thinking about the Prison Phoenix Trust https://www.theppt.org.uk/  both in helping to found it and in leaving it at the right moment, and in more capable hands. One thing that Sandy, its (then) current director does, is writing an exceptional annual appeal letter. Here is this year's, focusing as it does on that most neglected category of men and women: the prison officer. Dear Friend This year sees an increase in our work to offer more yoga and meditation classes to prison officers, who are the subject of this annual appeal letter. Between 1997 and 2007 inmate numbers rose...

Another LiveJournal discovery from the past that popped up on exactly the right, Father's Day: It was only when writing his funeral oration that I realized how alike I was. This may have been the reason why we were so wary of each other, never wholly, happily connecting, except twice that I recall vividly. The first was a road trip to the West Country. I was fourteen or fifteen. It was October and half-term from school. My mother was away on a meditation course and we went off with no plan - wandering through Glastonbury and Wells, a beautiful castle (whose location I cannot remember), across Exmoor to Clovelly and Tintagel. We stayed in guesthouses either casually met or remembered from my father's many past work-based wanderings as an engineer. We ate in restaurants - an unfamiliar affair. We talked, bonded, no more so than when deciding to return home across Dartmoor in the fog. We could have taken a safer detour but I had an insistent romantic longing to see the moor in fog...

Once upon a time, the BBC for eight weeks on a Saturday evening on what was then one of its only two television channels showed all the films of Andrey Tarkovsky in chronological sequence from 'Ivan's Childhood' to 'The Sacrifice'. At the outset of this season, they showed a documentary on Tarkovsky two scenes of which remain vividly with me. The first was an interview with the English film director, John Boorman, "Here was a man (Tarkovsky)," said Boorman, 'who believed in God with no apology." It was perfectly apt of Tarkovsky and, inversely, of Boorman, who, whenever he turns directly to the metaphysical slips into embarrassment and loses his usual consummate grip on his unfolding narratives. The second was a clip from a Polish documentary, made on the set of Tarkovsky's last film, 'The Sacrifice'. The documentary maker is following the director through a wood, interrogating him on his beliefs. In answer to the question as to what h...

This is Wade Davis' (an ethnobotanist's) vivid account of exploring the phenomena of 'zombies' in Haiti in the 1980s. It works on every level - as a remarkable detective story, as a lucid account of exploring the toxicology of plants (and animals), and an exploration into a unique culture forged out of the searing injustice of slavery. A zombi is created out of the marriage of two separate forces: one biological - a drugging that feigns death and the second cultural - a person judged by their community to have failed it is 'initiated' both through the drug and its cultural contextualization into a form of bondage/imprisonment. What is so compelling about this account is Davis' recognition of the malleability of persons - the set (a person's own framing of what is happening to them) and setting (the wider context in which a life unfolds) is as important in yielding the result as the biological impact of the given poison. What is striking to is the way in ...