Storyteller’s World

‘humourless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts’: Thus Salman Rushdie on Foucault’s Pendulum.
Telegraph | Arts | Heavyweight champion
Well, I haven’t been able to get into The Satanic Verses, as it happens.

A good page of links about Africa on the Seeds for Africa web site.

It looks like one of those charities which might actually help Africans help themselves, rather than perpetuate the cycle of dependency by just pouring in more and more aid, and choking them with aid money.

I particularly liked the link to the BBC World Service’s series, The Story of Africa.

Browsing through an old copy of the TES, I found a poster about the Send My Friend To School campaign, acting on behalf of the 5 million children in the world who have no opportunity for education.

Into my mind came the association with the Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall anti-authority anthem, which just about sums up our society’s contempt for teachers, education and culture. Visions of those fly-on-the-wall documentaries about unruly, undisciplined teenagers rioting in English classrooms and threatening their teachers.

So here’s the remedy: Instead of excluding these yobs from school, the Government could institute a compulsory exchange programme, where they exchange for a year with an African child who has no access to schooling. This would be wonderfully educational for both British and African child: all-round gain.

I wanted to write something very measured and eirenic for the parish newsletter, in the aftermath of the London bombings, about how all world religions are, at heart, about peace: peace between God and humanity, peace between people. And that all believers of any faith who know God, also know that God never commands his followers to take human life.

The trouble was, I started worrying about whether there was all that much evidence for these assertions.

I don’t currently have access to any Muslims or Jews to discuss with them what they see as the heart of their faith. And when I turned to the Holy Koran, I found a passage that reads: “The only reward of those who make war upon Allah and His messenger and strive after corruption in the land will be that they will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off, or will be expelled out of the land. Such will be their degradation in the world, and in the Hereafter theirs will be an awful doom.” (Surah 5, 33.)

But then I remembered that our Scriptures have a passage that reads, “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire. And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell.” (Mark 9.43-47.)

At that point it occurred to me that, with our own Scriptures, we have generally learned (even the fundamentalists among us) a sense of which bits are to be read literally and which figuratively. When we read other people’s Scriptures, we have no such acquired sense and are much more likely to err on the side of reading everything literally. e.g. “All Christians are told to mutilate themselves in order to acquire holiness.”

It’s a distressing thing to conclude that the last thing we should do, if we want to try to learn about someone else’s faith, is read their Scriptures. (Bit of a blow to the Bible Society, this one.) And given the numbers of alleged believers in any faith who do seem to interpret literally the bits about smiting Canaanites, slaying infidels and mutilating on all sides, maybe it’s not such a good idea for anyone to read their own Scriptures either.

Perhaps, after all, there is great wisdom in the Holy Koran being untranslatable from the Arabic, so that millions of the world’s Muslims don’t understand it. And maybe we should go back to using the Vulgate too. Brush up your Latin reading folks: this Sunday’s Gospel says:

aliam parabolam proposuit illis dicens simile factum est regnum caelorum homini qui seminavit bonum semen in agro suo
cum autem dormirent homines venit inimicus eius et superseminavit zizania in medio tritici et abiit
cum autem crevisset herba et fructum fecisset tunc apparuerunt et zizania
accedentes autem servi patris familias dixerunt ei domine nonne bonum semen seminasti in agro tuo unde ergo habet zizania
et ait illis inimicus homo hoc fecit servi autem dixerunt ei vis imus et colligimus ea
et ait non ne forte colligentes zizania eradicetis simul cum eis et triticum
sinite utraque crescere usque ad messem et in tempore messis dicam messoribus colligite primum zizania et alligate ea fasciculos ad conburendum triticum autem congregate in horreum meum

You won’t find Christians hearing that and immediately running out smiting people.

Sleeplessness does strange things. The heat doesn’t help; neither did that stiff whisky after the PCC meeting, and sitting up watching another bizarre edition of House. I ‘awoke’ after a restless night which included a horrible dream (during the 5 minutes or so I was asleep) about looking after a brain-damaged child, to find the Muppet Show’s rendering of ‘Manamana’ dancing around in my head. Insult to injury, you’ll agree.

This hooked on to another memory of Statler and Waldorf, the two crusty and bored old gentlemen who sat in the gallery night after night criticising and finding fault with everything that went on. It was only years later that I learned that our children - vicarage kids to a man and woman - not knowing the names of the characters, had always called them The Vicars. With kids like that, who needs critics?

BBC Radio 4’s Classic Serial, Greenmantle, was quietly dropped from the schedule last Saturday.

It tells of the threat of an armed uprising across the whole Middle East, led by a legendary figure who will unite the Arab world against its enemies. The danger is averted thanks to the intrepid Richard Hannay and his comrades.

John Buchan, whose ashes are buried in Elsfield churchyard, still has the power to stir up controversy with his ’shockers’.

But one reading of the story, is about the way that the world’s Great Powers try to use religion and religious aspirations for their own ends. It is Germany who have tried to channel the messianic expectation of Greenmantle against their enemies, but Hannay and Co. act so that it serves the Allies (and therefore Good and Right), instead.

I’m not sure whether this is the kind of thing that should actually be quietly silenced at times like this, or shouted from the rooftops.

Do my eyes deceive me, or is Richard Dawkins teetering on the edge of a “God of the gaps” mind-set?

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Universe ‘too queer’ to grasp

Surely not. But you do wonder why some of those other organisms that must necessarily exist in or around this complicated ungraspable universe couldn’t actually be the same as what religions call spiritual beings. If he can’t grasp the universe, how can he be so certain there’s no room in it for God?

* The story is told of a man suffering under the unassailable conviction that he was dead. His grieving wife called the doctor who came and did his best to convince the patient that he had none of the symptoms of deadness. At last he persuaded the man that if he was dead, the blood would not be still flowing round his body, whereas if he was alive he would bleed, when cut, since dead men do not bleed. As soon as the patient had accepted this medical fact, the doctor whipped out his scalpel, made a small cut on the man’s arm, and naturally the blood flowed out. The man took one horrified look at it and exclaimed: “My God! Dead men do bleed after all!”

BBC NEWS | UK | One London bomber died in blast

Property belonging to one of the suspects from West Yorkshire, who was reported missing by his family just after 10am on Thursday, was found on the devastated bus.

Do we ever really know our children? This little piece of today’s news strikes me as yet another small, yet for one family huge, piece of the tragic collage of stories of loss, survival, and narrow escapes, that is last Thursday.

A quiet day for reading and praying with the Psalms. In Eugene Peterson’s Answering God, p.7:

The practice of Christians in praying the Psalms is straightforward: simply pray through the Psalms, psalm by psalm, regularly. People who belong to liturgical traditions have prayer books to guide them through a monthly cycle of praying the Psalms daily. The rest of us can easily mark the Psalms into thirty or sixty daily sections to guide an orderly monthly or bimonthly praying of the Psalms. That’s it: open our Bibles to the book of Psalms and pray them - sequentially, regularly, faithfully across a lifetime. That is how most Christians for most of the Christian centuries have matured in prayer. Nothing fancy. Just do it. The praying itself is deliberate and leisurely, letting (as St Benedict directed) the motions of the heart come into harmony with the movements of the lips.

This is why I have gone back to using BCP for my daily prayers. The Church of England, with its unerring instinct for breaking what our forebears fixed, has thrown out the monthly praying through the Psalms, in favour of a highly selective use of a few of them during the main liturgical “seasons”, and in “Ordinary Time” (blessed Ordinary Time!) an approximately consecutive use which gets through 150 psalms in just over two months, except for the frequent interruptions and diversions for saints’ and other holy days. Because they have made Ordinary Time so scarce, even after Trinity Sunday you never get through the whole Psalter more than twice and a bit, before you’re into the Kingdom Season, whatever that is.

The London bombings still dominate the news, as we would expect. I noted a news item about whether the perpetrators were a terrorist cell made up of people of British or foreign origin. I’m not sure which of these I “prefer”.

On the whole, I think it is worse to think they might be British-born. Because that would mean - assuming, as everyone seems to, that they are in fact an Al Qaeda group of Muslim extremists - that they have lived in this godless, infidel society. They have benefited from its liberty, liberalism, freedom of speech and religious belief and expression, education and exchange of ideas, tolerance, rule of law, protection of ethnic and religious minorities. And instead of fleeing this society to go and live under a repressive fundamentalist regime, they have taken advantage of all those freedoms, to strike at the society that nurtured them. This really does look like the most wicked and despicable envy, sheer hatred of people who enjoy good things (the outworkings of a mature Christian world-view) that their own world-view does not afford.

But then you read about some of the responses there have already been to the bombings. On the one hand, retaliatory attacks against mosques in different parts of the country. On the other, the views of some disaffected Muslim youths like the one who was quoted as saying, “Britain wants us out. I bet Tony Blair did it so people hate us more.”

If either of these becomes the response of more than the most lunatic paranoid minority of individuals, the terrorists really will have won.

It should come as no surprise to find the climax or conclusion of Umberto Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana written as a pastiche of the Book of Revelation. The same part of the Bible features largely in The Name of the Rose, and in any case will always be an absolute gift to a professor of semiotics, who must (poor chap) spend a large part of his life there - even more than a parish priest has to.

Wikipedia says: Semiotics is the study of signs, both individually and grouped in sign systems, and includes the study of how meaning is transmitted and understood.

Having read two Ecos in the last few weeks (echo, echo? ecce, ecce!) I think I’ve come to a deeper appreciation of how il professore deals with the second part of this in his novels, namely the transmission of meaning so that it is not only understood but also felt or experienced.

What I mean is that Foucault’s Pendulum is a story about an invented (or is it?) global conspiracy, and the paranoia of those who believe in conspiracy theory. And it affects the reader by making you paranoid too: there comes a point at which you catch yourself seriously asking, What if this is true?

The Mysterious Flame is about a man trying to recover his lost memory by reading the books of his childhood, and listening to the popular songs of the time. Is it his personal memories he is rediscovering, our the shared experience of a generation? Both, of course; and this includes the oppressive Catholicism of his upbringing, as well as growing up under Fascism and the dark times of the closing years of the Second World War. And over and over again it stirs up the reader’s own memories of childhood and childhood reading or popular songs.

It is, of course, an irresistible fantasy: a man returns to his childhood home and finds all the books he read and loved as a boy, and revels in them for several weeks like a man in a warm tub of nostalgia. (In fact the last part of the novel is called “hoi nostoi”: the homecomings.) Who wouldn’t give his right arm for this? yet for Yambo it really happens. I kept finding myself half-remembering books I read as a child, and wishing I could remember them more fully and find them again.

Perhaps that recovery of the past is part of what this blog (or all forms of journal) is all about.

In the mean time I’ve decided that from now on I will only read novels with illustrations. “What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?”

At Morning Prayer today one of the group prayed for West Papua, an area we are concerned about because we have some West Papuans in the congregation, and Oxford is one of the centres in the UK of the Free West Papua campaign.

My heart sank when another member of the group described West Papua as “one of those parts of the world where Muslims are attacking Christians”. This is a person who is knowledgeable, committed, a real praying person. Yet I wonder what hope there can ever be for people to share the world in peace, so long as we define conflicts in this way, or define the people involved in them in this way.

The fact is that the Indonesian Government is attacking West Papuan people who want to be independent from Indonesia. Indonesians are committing atrocities against West Papuans: it so happens that most Indonesians are Muslims while many West Papuans are Christians. Unless we are willing to define the invasion of Iraq as “one of those wars in which Christians were attacking Muslims”, and to justify and take full responsibility for that, we should not describe other conflicts in religious terms.

Yet the dilemma is that believers always will define themselves in terms of their faith. If God, and the way we believe in God and live out our belief, matter to us at all, they are bound to matter more than almost anything else. (As a priest I have no doubt said it matters more than anything else: the trouble with this is that it confuses God - who does matter - and religion, or our understanding of God - which ought to be secondary.)

Faith leaders in London - Christians, Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Hindus - have stood together and affirmed that all people of faith are appalled by the terrorist atrocities in London. But how possible will it ever be for all people of faith - or people of all faiths - to be able to define themselves as human beings first and foremost, and only secondly as Christian, Muslim or Jew?

Hasn’t that got to rise to the top of all our agendas? Way above evangelism or pastoral care, or even making poverty history or climate change?

When I quoted from my 35 year old journal of 1970, a few weeks ago, I quite thought it might become a regular feature of this year’s blog: that there would be numerous posts in the category ‘35 Years Ago Today’. Why hasn’t this happened? Not to draw a veil over the truth, it’s because I’m ashamed and embarrassed of most of what I read there, and of the me I was all those years ago.

I was selfish, heartless, callous, two-timing, cynical, contemptuous of other people. I was in love with love, only slightly less than I was in love with myself. I treated girls, and friends in general, manipulatively and with little concern for their feelings. I think now that this was partly the result of immaturity and lack of self-confidence. Although I had attended a co-ed school, there wasn’t much real integration of the sexes. Whereas all my children have had groups of friends of both sexes, we pretty much segregated ourselves into same-sex groups that eyed the Other Sex suspiciously or lustfully or fearfully or doubtfully (or all four at once), while suffering agonies about our own sexual identity. The crushing juggernaut of the drive to pair off was irresistible, and I didn’t want to resist it even while I was useless at it.

It’s a mystery to me how I ended up making what has actually been a success of marriage (in spite of myself, and thanks to Alison having patience the size of a planet, and always “so far”, goes without saying). But I’m sure it’s got a lot to do with what did happen later on in 1970: that God started taking hold of my life, big time, to save me from myself and the mess I was getting deeper and deeper into.

Maybe I’ll remember to blog about that, later in the year.

Tom passed through Aldgate East about 20 minutes before the explosion there:
version 0.1 Blog Archive We’re back

On London’s mass transit you can move many thousands of people through in 20 minutes. But it’s still closer than I like to think of.

TomPaine.com - Why London, Why Now?: an intelligent comment, urging that progressives should not let Western Governments sidetrack us again into thinking about counterproductive military adventures, but concentrate instead on the G8 agenda of “draining the swamp” - i.e. dealing with climate change and poverty - neither of which Al Qaeda wants, because it drains away their reason for hating the West, and the source of their power and influence.

Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger - his eccentric range of interests, his resolution “to write down what I see and hear and feel daily,” his use of journals to “let off” rants of “indignation,” his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the “greater part of the day writing in his room.”

From Caleb’s article in Common-place: Blogging in the Early Republic

Eccentric range of interests. Yes, that’s what I aspire to.

Because of a meeting most of the morning, the first I know is an email from Tom - first day back at work after his honeymoon - saying “I’m OK”. Scary. Then I go and turn on the TV and watch the news from London unfold, with all the uncertainty and confusion, changing accounts of numbers of explosions, endless repeats of the same few scenes. The only thing that increases relentlessly is the number of confirmed fatalities.

I’m appalled that these acts have been perpetrated by human beings. That somewhere there are men who have been so consumed by hatred, or the injustices they believe they have suffered, that they no longer see their “enemy” as human. And so are able to destroy lives wantonly like this. Men, like me.

And it is men, like me, who are able to take the decision to bomb Baghdad and invade Iraq, and still to sleep at night.

Men, like me, who make decisions to maximise profits for themselves and their shareholders, at the expense of workers, whole economies, and the environment.

Men, like me, who abduct and rape children, or force them to become child soldiers.

Men, like me, who trade in drugs and carry out gangland shootings and keep the so-called “sex industry” booming.

Tom is OK. Thank God.

But Everyman is sick, sick unto death.

Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison.

The other favourite part of the Ashmolean I visited yesterday was the Cast Gallery. This is hidden away in a back alley off St John St. It’s crowded with casts of classic sculptures from Greece and Rome: gods and goddesses and heroes all packed in huggermugger like surprised guests at some Olympian cocktail party.

I could sit there for hours gazing at these forms and dreaming of the people, so like and so unlike us, who first brought them to light. And what are we to make of the sudden appearance in the 2nd century (was it?), alongside all those divinities, of images of the common man, like this gnarled fisherman:

Is there some Christian influence about this? Is this a portrait of the Fisherman? The first Pope?

I turn from Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten, in which the President of the English republic is George Formby, to Umberto Eco’s latest, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which appeals to me because it’s described on the jacket as ‘An Illustrated Novel’, and does indeed contain lots of pretty coloured pictures. (I’d read much more theology, too, if it came with pretty coloured pictures.)

And there, on page 101, I read:

I recognized George Formby with his horsy smile, I knew he sang while playing his ukulele, and now I was seeing him again …

You can go for years - possibly a lifetime - without reading a single novel that mentions George Formby (unless you happen to be reading Jasper Fforde, that is). But what are the odds, seriously, of finding him mentioned in any two consecutive novels you happen to read?

In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco writes: “Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another.” (p.377) So what’s this connection all about? What is George Formby trying to communicate with me? And why?

Asha, a girl from Sichuan:
I am going to do everything I want to do.

Qu Lei Lei (b. 1951) became well-known in 1979 for his part in the Democracy Movement in Beijing. As one of the Stars (xingxing) group of artists, who were banned from displaying their work in the National Gallery of Art, he defiantly hung his work on the railings outside the gallery, where it hung for 24 hours before being removed by the authorities.

In 1986 he moved to London, since when he has taught and lectured on calligraphy and painting. A common feature of his work is collage of text and image. Recent work incorporates English as well as Chinese text. The use of brushwork creates images in a more Western style, forming a synthesis that reinforces his concern with representing human life.

I’m ashamed to have nearly missed the exhibition of Qu’s work in the Chinese Painting gallery of the Ashmolean: Everyone’s Life is an Epic. A series of four-times life-size portraits faces you. Each subject is painted in shades of black and grey: the only colour is in some of the background. Each looks directly at you with an open, positive, hopeful expression. The whole exhibition creates an impression of optimism and hope, even with those subjects whose lives have obviously been a hard struggle against poverty or adversity. Qu wants to affirm the goodness of life.

As so often in exhibitions, I’m drawn as much to the sketchbooks as to the finished works. Qu’s sketches seem so effortless, make it look easy. I suppose you’ve just got to be doing it all the time: sketching with lines and shade, the same as I try to sketch with words.

The pictures are poems and inspirations, as much as they are portraits:

Ma Jian, a writer:
The inner world is the only real direction and I will walk right to the end of it.

Ai Lian, a dancer:
After the storm of lightning and thunder all is calm, bringing Peace to the world.
Life is part of Nature and we all have the right to survive.

The exhibition runs till July 17. If you’re in or near Oxford, go see.

Here’s the answer to my question: Is this the last Thursday Next?

The Nursery Crime Division’s Official Website tells me that Jasper Fforde’s next novel, to be published this month, inaugurates a new series, introducing Detective Inspector Jack Spratt and Sergeant Mary Mary of the Nursery Crime Division.

Right. If you haven’t yet discovered Jasper Fforde (why not?) you’ll want to know what kind of books they are. That’s easy. They are surreal, laugh-out-loud funny, literate, comedy sci-fi detective thrillers. Set largely in and around Swindon. In an alternative England which has been embroiled in the Crimean War with Russia for over 130 years, which was defeated and occupied by Germany and since liberation has been a republic led by President-for-Life George Formby. In which genetically reconstructed dodos, mammoths and Neanderthals roam the land. And where the hugely avaricious Goliath Corporation is a constant threat to freedom and the very survival of the human race.

The action hinges on the fact that it is possible for people and fictional characters to move backward and forward between the world of fiction and the real world. Thursday Next, a Swindon-based Litera-tec, is initially in trouble for changing the bland and generally unpopular original ending of Jane Eyre. Due to an accident while she is in the novel, Mr Rochester’s house is destroyed by a fire in which the first Mrs Rochester dies, and her husband is hideously disfigured. But Jane returns to care for him, and ends up marrying him.

Through a series of novels, Thursday continues to battle to keep out of trouble, thwart the evil machinations of the Goliath Corp, get her husband Landen uneradicated, and generally save the world again and again.

In the latest volume, Something Rotten, we find her back at her mother’s home after two years in fiction, sharing the house with Lady Emma Hamilton, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Count Bismarck and assorted dodos. Then the 13th century visionary St Zvlkx is resurrected in time for his Seventh Revealment to be fulfilled: that Swindon Mallets will win this year’s Superhoop Croquet Championship, and thus avert Armageddon and the triumph of Goliath. Naturally Goliath are prepared to do whatever it takes to prevent the Mallets from winning.

Now read on.

This novel has the feel of some kind of a resolution. Can Fforde continue this crazy whirl of invention? Or is this the end of Thursday Next?

In the process of upgrading WordPress (for security reasons, supposedly) I seem to have lost all my comments, RSS feeds, permalinks and what all else.

Apologies for the inconvenience, which is, well, inconvenient. I hope normal service will be resumed shortly.