Leaves caution behind

It is 1.45am, and he has gone to bed, but does not feel sleep is near. He has been talking to someone far away, and reading that the US is called Turtle Island by its older inhabitants, a name that seems friendlier than the political description. And useful: perhaps if you know you are on a very large beast of uncertain temperament, you might step more lightly.

The book is by a physicist who points out that there are different kinds of time; that not everyone feels that progress is necessarily progress; that not all are naive enough to think that one can have eternal economic growth without eventually eating the whole planet; that there are greatly different worlds of perception which he cannot imagine.

He is startled to feel these thoughts nudge the world into a different texture, and he is reluctant to submerge them in sleep. He has a painful headache. But the mountain is near.

He did not run earlier as he had meant to; he had not enjoyed the last one, not at all. The itch is now here, though, and the night not too cold and he yields; out of bed, into shorts; a moment to take the portrait of Read the rest of this entry »

In July, I spent a day out on False Bay with the ad hoc crew of the working fishing boat Star Life, harking from Kalk Bay. It was a very long day, pretty tough physically, but beautiful and fascinating. I’ve still not finished editing my notes, but here are some of the pictures.

Last night I dreamt of someone I knew at school. He has not entered my conscious mind in nearly twenty years, probably because before that I didn’t like him very much. In the dream he offered me a bite of a roast potato, while my car was burgled. Hmm. But the potato, the car and the burglary are not the point of this excursus (thanks for that word, Nadia; perhaps blogs should rather be called excursions).

Joseph Paton’s Study for the quarrel of Oberon and Titania.
Pic: Wikimedia Commons

For on waking I remembered how very different people seemed to me as a child. When I was six, in a school in Johannesburg, bathed in the (then) comfortingly bright light of fluorescent tubes as the deep gloom of thunderstorms battered around us, as beans grew behind blotting paper in glass jars and potatoes surrendered to the hands of early Gutenbergs, the forms of people around me shifted immensely. If children of 11 or 12 entered the classroom, there seemed to my eyes to be very little difference between them and the teacher. All were huge, infinitely wise and worldly, inhabiting a remote domain I could only dream of entering. Of my peers, who to adult eyes would have seemed then almost uniformly innocent, some were saints and some literally almost as threatening as trolls; and indeed, some would waylay me on the road home.

It seems possible then, given these huge variations in perception, that the realm of fairy tales is perhaps not so much one originally conjured by those who wished to spin tales for the entertainment of the young, but a function of the medieval tribal mind boggled by encounters with merchants and nobles; encounters which for many, isolated by geography, must have been far, far more occasional than we imagine. And if I, as a medieval peasant remote even from the feudal system, somehow entered the world of these “elves and fairies”, and for a few years lived a vastly different and more prosperous life away from my people, then on my return to those left behind, they would indeed have been aged by grueling lives, while I in turn would feel comparatively untouched by time.

We do not know how dark are the depths from which we have sometimes clambered. (I say sometimes, for I do not believe the minds of all pre-feudal peasants were dark; while many of us remain in the dark.) These fixed forms, our bodies, are more instantly mutable than we imagine; they shift and change in the minds of others. The shape of the world we see is far more a function of our minds than we imagine. The gloomy insistence of science that there is an objective, “standard” reality to which we should shape our perceptions and conform, is rather totalitarian. Sure it’s helpful, when we’re conducting open-heart surgery, or casually obliterating children and their mind-cloud-blossoms of light and thought with high-tech weaponry, but it’s totalitarian.

Reality is a language we speak to each other.

(Or shout at each other. Or broadcast with stadium-scale speakers. So blogging, the willingness, most often, to speak only to the few – or none – is many times an advance.)

[There are a number of retrospective postings on this blog.]

God judging Adam — William Blake, 1795 … Poor Adam

One of the oddest things about Richard Dawkins’ scathing opinions about religion is that in forming them he has ignored phenomena that inform his life’s work: inheritance and mutation, which I think he would agree apply to memes as much to genes.

The concept of inheritance is relevant to religion because it describes the transmission, generation to generation, version to version, language to language, context to context, culture to culture, oral history to written word, via which concepts and histories and traditions are passed down.

But what of mutation and evolution? Dawkins himself extended these to cover memes. For each new iteration of manuscripts, concepts, histories and traditions, for every passage from one mind to the next, there are invariably mutations and changes.

So when we read in the Bible that “the Lord said to Moses, or Joseph, or Isaiah …”, the connotations of these statements are vastly different for us and our peers to how they seemed to those who originally heard and wrote them.

Was “the Lord” in each instance a spirit? Was he visible or invisible? Was he merely a compelling presence in the mind of the awed prophet? Was he a voice in the head, or an urgent feeling or sensation, or even an impulse? What did the particular word that is translated as “said” mean to those who first wrote or heard it? Certainly scholars of ancient Aramaic, Hebrew or Greek may give us a more precise idea – but they cannot be certain of all the varieties of ways in which the word was used at the time, for we know that ambiguity in play or relation to context is inherent to the human use of language.

In other words, evolution applies to meaning as much to beasts. But Dawkins ridicules and parodies religion as if he has access to the meaning of its original concepts, while ignoring the best contemporary interpretations. In his ignorance of the original meaning of religious concepts and his blindness to the most blessed of modern interpretations, he stands shoulder to shoulder with the fundamentalists he abhors.

Update: 31 May

After visiting churches involved in refugee relief, and seeing what good they do, quietly and without fanfare, I cannot help thinking what self-indulgent, ignorant fools Richard Dawkins and the rest of the militant atheist crowd are, with their sweeping condemnations of religion.