Brussels: Parlamentarium & EU Parliament Building

There are at least three great reasons for visiting Brussels at present. First, the city's cultural offer (more on that in a subsequent post). Second, support for its tourist trade following the airport bomb attack. Third, to show solidarity for the EU project in the light of the Brexit vote. In relation to the latter, these photographs from Parlamentarium, the European Parliament Visitors’ Centre, and of the European Parliament Building speak for themselves ...

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Kraftwerk - Trans Europa Express.

A Wizard of Earthsea: The real battle is moral or internal

In today's Guardian David Mitchell writes on one of literature’s most fully formed fantasy worlds, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin:

'From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”'

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Wizzard - Angel Fingers.

Religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite

Today's Guardian has a perceptive article by John Mullan about Hilary Mantel's fiction which includes the following:

'... theology is often alive and well in Mantel’s fiction. She was brought up as a Roman Catholic, formed by her early experience of Catholic doctrine and her later battles of cunning with the nuns of her convent school. In her next novel, Fludd, set in the 1950s, she creates a bizarre village on the edge of some northern moorland where the Roman Catholic church holds a redoubt. Transformed from her memories of Glossop in Derbyshire, where she grew up, it is another of Mantel’s prisons of the spirit. Fetherhoughton is presided over by a Catholic priest, Father Angwin, who seems to have lost his faith in God while keeping to his horrified belief in the devil, and the appalling Mother Perpetua, mother superior of the local convent. Into this benighted world comes the curate Fludd, a spiritual alchemist who can free anyone who will listen – but particularly the rebellious Sister Philomena – with the influence of his beneficent magic. It is the only Mantel novel with a happy ending.

Religion always impinges on Mantel’s fiction, but not because, like those Catholic converts Muriel Spark and Graham Greene whom she has diligently read, she uses it to detect any providential shape to events. Emma, one of the main characters in A Change of Climate, published in 1994, thinks of the Catholic church as a “bauble shop”, even as, in bereavement, she visits a shrine to tap its sympathetic magic. Religion reflects back the needs and fears of its would-be believers and its no-longer-believers. A Change of Climate, which moves back and forth between present and past, Norfolk and Africa, centres on a married couple, Ralph and Anna, who, driven initially by Christian idealism, have dedicated themselves to philanthropic work. Ralph is a “professional Christian”, but the novel tests any Christian faith in human goodness well past breaking point. Not in disdain of religiosity though: it may be that religion is rather good at telling us about human weakness, self-admiration and enslavement to appetite. Mantel’s characters tend to have, as we say, their demons, and the temporal shifts of this novel are devised, in true Mantelian manner, to show us how these good people are haunted by their hardly repressed memories of evil.'

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16 Horsepower - Bad Moon Rising.

Saved from death (snake bite)

This week at our Lent course we debated, without fully understanding, Nicholas Sagovsky's statement that:

"There is, perhaps, in Jesus's comparison of himself with the ‘brazen serpent' the suggestion of his identification with poisonous evil - precisely for the purpose of healing. Like the brazen serpent, he assumes the form of evil, as a way of embracing the evil itself and bringing healing."

Here is my reflection on the meaning of his words:

Fatal snake bite inflicted in a garden;
serum spreading through the human
body, poison inflaming man
to be a wolf to man - vampiric
predator normalizing evil, unthinkable
terror routinely inflicted by militant
ignorance, the disease of legion.

Brazen serpent on a pole, innocent victim,
scapegoat, a second Adam lifted up. Venom
taken into God initiates immune system response;
antibodies - taken intravenously - bind and
neutralize. The form and flowers of evil
assumed, embraced, transformed
as antivenom, for the purposes of healing.

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Ricky Ross - This Is The Life.

The Dreams of William Golding

Last night's Arena documentary on William Golding was a fascinating study of a fascinating writer:

'In 1954, William Golding's Lord Of The Flies, a terrifying vision of the latent savagery of society and the struggle between good and evil, burst upon the polite world of English fiction. It was originally turned down by more than 20 publishers, but has since sold 20 million copies worldwide.

Golding, an unknown schoolmaster and D-Day veteran, went on to win both the Booker and Nobel Prizes. His dozen novels, awesome in their scope, range from the dawn of humanity to medieval man and maritime epics, and reveal an imagination which is dark and powerfully compelling. Arena has been given unique access to Golding's family and to his extensive personal archive for the first film to be made since his death in 1993. Rooted in the mysterious West Country landscape that Golding made his home, and with testimony from his neighbours including John Le Carré, James Lovelock and Pete Townshend, and his admirers Stephen King and Ian McEwan, it embraces the bewildering range of Golding's genius, and the continuing importance of his vision.' 

The Presentation Speech for his Nobel Prize gives a helpful summary of some of his core themes and approaches as a writer:

'Golding has a very keen sight and sharp pen when it comes to the power of evil and baseness in human beings. He often chooses his themes and the framework for his stories from the world of the sea or from other challenging situations in which odd people are tempted to reach beyond their limits, thereby being bared to the very marrow. His stories usually have a fairly schematic drama, almost an anecdote, as skeleton. He then covers this with a richly varied and spicy flesh of colourful characters and surprising events.

It is the pattern of myth that we find in his manner of writing ...

Golding inveighs against those who think that it is the political or other systems that create evil. Evil springs from the depths of man himself - it is the wickedness in human beings that creates the evil systems or that changes what from the beginning is, or could be, good into something iniquitous and destructive.

There is a mighty religious dimension in William Golding's conception of the world, though hardly Christian in the ordinary sense. He seems to believe in a kind of Fall. Perhaps rather one should say that he works with the myth of a Fall. In some of his stories, chiefly the novel The Inheritors, 1955, we find a dream of an original state of innocence in the history of mankind. The Fall came with the motive power of a new species. The aggressive intelligence, the power-hungry self-assertion and the overweening individualism are the source of evil and violence - individual as well as social violence. But these qualities and incentives are also innate in man as a created being. They are therefore inseparably a part of his character and make themselves felt when he gives full expression to himself and forms his societies and his private destiny.'

In his Nobel Lecture Golding said that:

'Under some critical interrogation I named myself a universal pessimist but a cosmic optimist ... I meant, of course, that when I consider a universe which the scientist constructs by a set of rules which stipulate that this construct must be repeatable and identical, then I am a pessimist and bow down before the great god Entropy. I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore ... Twenty years ago I tried to put the difference between the two kinds of experience in the mind of one of my characters, and made a mess of it. He was in prison.

"All day long the trains run on rails. Eclipses are predictable. Penicillin cures pneumonia and the atom splits to order. All day long year in year out the daylight explanation drives back the mystery and reveals a reality usable, understandable and detached. The scalpel and the microscope fail. The oscilloscope moves closer to behaviour.

"But then, all day long action is weighed in the balance and found not opportune nor fortunate nor ill-advised but good or evil. For this mode which we call the spirit breathes through the universe and does not touch it: touches only the dark things held prisoner, incommunicado, touches, judges, sentences and passes on. Both worlds are real. There is no bridge."

What amuses me is the thought that of course there is a bridge and that if anything it has been thrust out from the side which least expected it, and thrust out since those words were written. For we know now, that the universe had a beginning. (Indeed, as an aside I might say we always did know. I offer you a simple proof and forbid you to examine it. If there was no beginning then infinite time has already passed and we could never have got to the moment where we are.) We also know or it is at least scientifically respectable to postulate that at the centre of a black hole the laws of nature no longer apply. Since most scientists are just a bit religious and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole while his religious intellect believes in them outside it. Both, in fact, now believe in miracles, credimus quia absurdum est. Glory be to God in the highest. You will get no reductive pessimism from me.'

Watch the documentary on i-player by clicking here.

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Lou Reed - Waves Of Fear.