Golgonooza

  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...

  I cannot recall why I decided to read the stories of Algernon Blackwood, but having acquired the volume shown above, I set off on an extraordinary journey. It began with a visit to a haunted house occupied by the ghost of an obsessive lover and his victim, which I subsequently discovered was based on one of Blackwood's own researches as a member of the Society for Psychical Research, before encountering a village of witches, vengeful willows, a loving forest, and, most famously, an indigenous North American folk creature fond of a dangerous form of dancing! Strikingly, Blackwood claimed that his stories were based on real experiences, either of himself or trusted friends, which raises the question of how much of each story is grounded in ''actual" experience and how much is subsequent imaginative embellishment filtered through Blackwood's own framing beliefs, shaped by his interests in ''occult" thought and psychic research, and his membership both o...

  Each day, except Sunday, which is the Sabbath, Maisie and her six companions are taken by Donald, their owner and companion, on a 'mile' long amble across his croft and common land to exercise, feed, rest, and fertilize the landscape.  As this daily pattern unfolds, so does Donald's mind, accustomed to its place, roaming across and around time, remembering the stories that give him and the landscape, partly through him, their meaning and purpose. Once these purposes were shared in a wider community of knowing, but this lies sadly fragmented and steadily lost in the passage of 'progress'.  The language, Gaelic, has faded away with the passage of time and generations, and the economic basis of life - crofting and the sea - has crumbled to be 'replaced' by the uncertainties of wind generation, a futuristic 'spaceport', holiday homes, and tourism. A shared faith, and Donald is a practicing Catholic, has frayed. Yet Donald never steps into the same worl...

  As the journalist and biographer of Pope Francis, Paul Vallely noted in an article for the Church Times, the process of canonization in the contemporary era has been made more complicated because we know so much more in our promiscuous information age about any potential candidates, giving the Devil's Advocate an advantage in hindering any Promoter's efforts (let alone the reluctance of expert authorities especially medical ones to adduce a requsite miracle in our materialistic age).  Thus, though Harry Oldmeadow suggests that none of his cloud of witnesses are saints in certain of his Catholic and Orthodox exemplars, only time will tell, as the wheels can move exceedingly slowly, St Charles de Foucauld, who might have been a fitting companion here, required more than a century to elapse before his election.  Be that as it may, this is a compelling collection of essays on Christians in the twentieth and our own century who have aspired after holiness and who have reflec...

  When Charles Darwin first encountered the indigenous people of Tiera del Fuego (whom he characterized as the Fuegians), he was mortified by their ugliness, uncleanliness, and the habitation of what appeared to be a forlorn land, windswept, barren, and cold. Why would anyone, any human, want to live in this way? They were closer to beasts than humans and destined for 'extermination' in their encounter with that higher form of humanity that Darwin obviously represented. By 'extermination,' Darwin did not appear to mean a conscious act of genocide. On the Argentine mainland, he had witnessed the government's war against its indigenous population and strongly disapproved of its violence (as he too opposed the slavery he had seen in Brazil). He rather appeared to mean by the natural progress of mankind in what would become to be seen (and explained) as its progressive evolution, the strong driving out the weak. Indeed, Darwin was to be a lifelong contributor to the loc...

   In her previous book, American Cosmos  https://ncolloff.blogspot.com/2023/08/unidentified-flying-religions.html , Paskula, a religious studies professor, did a remarkable job of showing how the UFO ecosystem functioned and how it possessed the properties of an emerging religion. In this follow-up volume, she takes the advice of the distinguished UFO researcher, and West Coast venture capitalist Jacques Vallee, and returns to explore the experience of key experiencers of such phenomena. She discovers how our media mediated images of such encounters deviate from their living reality, often by excluding their spiritual/religious dimensions and their accompanying paranormal realities. I use the word 'realities' advisedly because though as a professional student of religion, Paskula concentrates on the phenomenology of people's life events and their emergent metaphysical and cosmological speculation, bracketing any view she takes as to their underlying truth or otherwise, y...

Bird of the Spirit, 1943, by Morris Graves The Bird in the Tree by Ruth Pitter The tree, and its haunting bird, Are the loves of my heart; But where is the word, the word, Oh where is the art, To say, or even to see, For a moment of time, What the Tree and the Bird must be In the true sublime? They shine, listening to the soul, And the soul replies; But the inner love is not whole, and the moment dies. Oh give me before I die The grace to see With eternal, ultimate eye, The Bird and the Tree. The song in the living Green, The Tree and the Bird – Oh have they ever been seen, Ever been heard? Winter Bouquet, 1977, by Morris Graves

  "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Or not quite, as Jack did not begin life on the island, which becomes home. When a primary school child, his father, a teacher, took him, and his mother, reluctantly from Glasgow, to the island, where he, the father, is to become the Headteacher of the local primary. Jack is grafted into island life, but the graft remains visible to child and islanders alike, this is not where he began, fully belonging is withheld, not unkindly but with the realism of places where communities grew up with one another, in lockstep, for good and ill. His transplantation is softened by his friendship, and growing if unarticulated love, for Sally, his peer both in the classroom and in their joint, quietly competitive athleticism.  Yet Jack's arc will lead him away, from Sally through tragedy, and by the draw first of professional football with Chelsea,...

  When is a bear, not a bear? Answer when it is a Jungian archetype! If you were Sioux, a bear was someone who, over generations of observation, had acquired a cluster of characteristics from which one could learn.  In their own right, they were intelligent creatures adapting to their world, living their own best life. A bear might choose to befriend you, possibly as a result of your beseeching, coming to you in vision and dream, one that might yield real-time effects - a healing song, say, or a new herb for a particular ailment, even self-decorating tips (for bears like to paint their faces with colored mud).  What a bear would not be would be a symbol generated from your own projecting consciousness, or, for that matter, as an animal, an inferior being. It might be true, as in Christianity, that humans were created last for the Sioux but this did not make them the apex of evolution (as they were in Jung's evolutionary frame) but the youngest and most foolhardy creature...

In 1944, C.G. Jung had a near-death experience and like many recipients of this experience found returning to the body challenging and was only ‘persuaded’ to do so by the sense that there was unfinished work for him to do. He experienced the subsequent return as a case of felt imprisonment. This sense that the everyday world we inhabit is seriously out of step with a deeper underlying and freeing reality is a common one. It is one of the key drivers of ‘religion’. We are not as we are meant to be. The world, as currently perceived, is, at best, awry, at worst, an imprisoning entrapment. Is this simply a misplaced uncertainty? One that should be dispelled from our minds with a healthy, materialist reminder that this is the only world that there is, or could possibly be. Purposefully enjoy it until the end comes, and all is finished. Learn to love your transiency! Yet, as Richard Smoley notes, in his recently published erudite, well-constructed and thoughtful book, "A Theology of L...

  In your New York apartment in 1971, days away from defending your PhD in Philosophy, you are listening to the music of John Coltrane when you notice an intense pattern of lights outside your window. They have no obvious origin - unidentified aerial phenomena would be their future designation - and your girlfriend, Jane, sees them too. They appear entrained to the music, answering it with their own dance. You watch haunted until they disappear and then you both rush to the rooftop, trying to figure out what you have just seen so marvelously. There a young drummer, who lives in the same block, and who you have just turned on to Coltrane’s music, has seen the lights to.  Three witnesses of a meaningful spiritual event held under the rubric of music. For the author, Michael Grosso, one of the prompts from this luminous event was to undertake a deeper exploration of music, music that prompted soul, that helped one go beyond the simply intellectual in life, at once opening it to t...

Loren McIntyre is an accomplished photographer and old Amazonian hand but in his enthusiasm for photographing an 'uncontacted' tribe allows himself to be led into the jungle without laying a trail. Lost, he is now wholly dependent on their continued friendly disposition towards him. To add to this complexity, none of the tribe, at this point, has anyone who speaks either Portuguese or Spanish. He is adrift in a wholly impenetrable linguistic space except for body language and the 'beaming'. The beaming is McIntyre's terminology for his communication with one of the tribe's headmen, a form of telepathy, where McIntyre finds in his head words emerging in English that he feels comes from the headman, and which the headman's subsequent behavior confirms. McIntyre is conscious that this makes him sound deranged (from the perspective of our current materialist assumptions) yet it is a conviction that never leaves him - and the existence of this ''ancient...

  When as a philosophy undergraduate, I found myself reading Plato for the first time, I noted a troublesome disconnect between the Plato that I was reading, and possibly fitfully understanding, and the confident nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators that accompanied this reading.  My Plato was the practitioner of therapeutic wisdom who aimed to convert your being through the devices of dialogue, storytelling, and myth-making accompanied by unambiguous references to embodied spiritual practices (gymnastics, corybantic dance, and so forth). The Plato of the commentators was a rational philosopher and a committed 'dualist' separating an 'ideal' realm of the good from the messy binding world of 'matter' from which we were presumed to want to escape in a fleeing ascent.  You could see where this dualist, binary Plato had come from for he (or better still Socrates) often creates separate images of contrasting worlds to elaborate his points but reading on you ...

One of my realizations reading this excellent double study of the marriage of Edwin and Willa Muir was that exception reporting (the world is going to hell in a handbasket) is a feature of not only news coverage (after all 99.99999% of the population of the United States were not murdered today) but potentially of biography too, built as it is primarily on letters, memoirs/memories and diaries. We tend not to record the everydayness of our contentments and quiet achievements but how our plans went awry, our anxieties over recognition gnawed, or our painful lumbago!  This is important here because Willa Muir especially has been caught between two tendencies.  The first was to downplay her own creative role in comparison with her husband. The patriarchial nature of the society in which she lived (and which continues) meant that her achievements, especially those secured together, most notably the translations from German literature - Kafka and Herman Broch especially - tended to...

                                                             "Fireside" 1956 by Winifred Nicholson New Year Snow by Frances Horowitz For three days we waited, a bowl of dull quartz for sky. At night the valley dreamed of snow, lost Christmas angels with dark-white wings flailing the hills. I dreamed a poem, perfect as the first five-pointed flake, that melted at dawn: a Janus-time to peer back at guttering dark days, trajectories of the spent year. And then snow fell. Within an hour, a world immaculate as January’s new-hung page. We breathe the radiant air like men new-born. The children rush before us. As in a dream of snow we track through crystal fields to the green horizon and the sun’s reflected rose.   It is no surprise that Frances Horowitz's publisher, Bloodaxe, chose a painting by Winifred Nicholson to adorn the cover of...