Golgonooza

God's wounded hand reached out to place in hers the entire world, 'round as a ball, small as a hazelnut'. Just so one day of infant light remembered her mother might have given into her cupped palms a new laid egg, warm from the hen; just so her brother risked to her solem joy his delicate treasure, a sparrow's egg from the hedgerow. What can this be? the eye of her understanding marvelled. God for a moment of our history placed in that five-fingered human nest the macrocosmic egg, sublime paradox brown hazelnut of All that Is- made, and beloved, and preserved. As still, waking each day within our microcosm, we find it, and ourselves. From The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich, 1342-1416 No. 4 from "Breathing the Water" by Denise Levertov In the icon above, it is the crucified Christ that shows the hazelnut to Julian witnessing to her the three properties she understood from it: The first that God made all, that God loves it and tha...

J.B. Priestley was a myriad-minded man whose outward appearance -gruff, blunt Yorkshire man birthed in the Edwardian era - and authorship of popular novels and plays of social realism disguised deeper veins of interest - in metaphysics, in time and in depth psychology. The outward form has tended to contribute to a decline in his reputation. The inward life at the cutting edge of thought should revive it. This point is admirably argued by Anthony Payne in his new book on Priestley's inner interests, "Time and the Rose Garden: Encountering the Magical in the life and works of J.B. Priestley". It outlines Priestley's engagement with Indian metaphysics that convinced him of the unity of consciousness - we belong to one body that is mind- what we do to another, we do to ourselves. His life as a time haunted man both reflecting on his own and others' experience - of precognition, of time slips, of deja vu and of emotionally anticipating the future - and conte...

The nineteenth-century Russian author, Nikolai Leskov, was apparently not an easy man. The friendships he made were often fragile and ended up broken. Part of this brittleness was conditioned by his own sensed 'inferiority'. He had come from a relatively poor background, he lacked a formal education; and, he singularly failed to master the art of the long novel. Yet as a 'self-educated' autodidact, he absorbed expertise in multiple fields and deployed this knowledge to great effect in his multiplicity of works: fictional and non. He is a master of the short story and of the form that has a narrator introduce a storyteller that allows for the immediacy of the colloquial report, that gathers you to a place where you listen attentively to an uninterrupted voice. In "On the Edge of the World", this too allows him to present the first-person account of an elderly Orthodox bishop in such a way that the bishop can express potentially heterodox positions that ...

"The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters" by Adam Nicolson is a beautiful account of the author's adult rediscovery of Homer having labored unhappily to translate parts of it as a school child. It is an exploration of both who Homer was, where 'he' came from and why we continue to read him. Of course, 'Homer' probably was not, by which I mean that there probably was a Homer figure who first oversaw the transcription of a living oral Homeric tradition onto the page turning the two great poem sequences into text. He was possibly the first of a number of such people who provided variant texts, later edited into a more or less 'whole' version in Alexandria. He may even have been called Homer or then again maybe not! Many are the mysteries that abound. What Nicolson does argue for is a much older tradition than was, in the past assumed. Many of the motifs of both poems come from a world when the Greeks lived on the steppes of Central and Eastern Eur...

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...

Ends never justify means. The Trojans fell not only for the deception of the Wooden Horse but Odysseus' promise to the collaborator, Antenor, that anyone who surrendered would be spared. But both Agamemnon's duplicity and the barbaric logic of pillage swept such a promise aside leaving behind carnage and a burned, destroyed city. During the course of which Athena's temple is desecrated. Athena, until then a dedicated supporter of the Greek cause, turns and out of the jaws of victory falls defeat. Many of the winning kings return to find themselves deposed from their kingdoms and Agamemnon is murdered by his wife consumed by the suffering he has inflicted on her. Many of the men are lost on their way home in the storms that Poseidon, a stalwart of Troy, sends in retribution at its destruction. Odysseus is cast adrift by his own guilt - and wanders forth on a circuitous journey that will only slowly return him to home after great trials. All of which is deeply re...

One day arriving at the office in Macedonia, my assistant informed that my Roma cleaning lady had been in touch. Under the mat outside my flat, she had found an 'object'. The intention of the object (whose character remained undescribed) was malevolent but rest assured, though she did not think it meant for me but the flat's owner, it had been dealt with safely! It was one of a number of tangential encounters with a world of magic that came my way living in 'the Balkans' including a memorable storyline about the 'evil eye' (equally, thankfully, not directed at me). I was reminded of this reading Kapka Kassabova's "Border: A Journey on the Edge of Europe". Her exploration takes her further east than mine - to the place where Greece, Turkey and her native Bulgaria meet. It is a place - in her account - that remains 'apart' - depopulated by the shiftings of border, culture and economics - and saturated in both the edges of the known...