SACRED MOMENTS - Picture This

The human desire to express themselves through visual imagery, has a history thousands of millennia old. From the very beginning the fundamental volition behind this has been a sacred one. A religious impulse akin to a magical, often animistic shamanism, informed art then, and can do so now. Driven by the desire to capture, conjure or beseech something into being through a symbolic visual form. Art was never solely an activity we chose to do, just to while away the long winter evenings in the cave, with a leisure hobby. This was not interior decor, it had a spiritual intent behind it.

That quality of capturing the essence of an experience or sense of divinity through art, continues to this day. In my experience, it is not necessarily the degree of lifelike verisimilitude in art that means it will move you, or connect you with what could be couched as sacred. Its probably better to consider art as a human patterning impulse, that is usually some form abstracted from reality. There have been modernist abstract works of art that have mesmerically stopped me in my tracks. 

Art can be a channel for the sacred to speak to us through the medium of our soul. Why that happens, very clearly evades closer examination and repetition. The sacred experience is always a one off. It takes you by surprise. Familiarity, expectations of where it might be found, or analysis actively kills it off.

During my nine years of living in London I  frequented galleries a lot. Often popping into The Tate or National Gallery on the spur of the moment of a Sunday. Usually with no particular purpose in mind. I wasn't in search of something. I was simply there to idly commune.

On one such visit I turned into one gallery in the Tate. My eye instantly drawn toward an absolutely gigantic picture hung on a false wall, disguising the exit at its other end. It was a painting where the mountains and heavens were collapsing in upon everything beneath it. The sense of awe and dread conjured up, astonished me. I stared open mouthed for quite some time. This was John Martin's painting - The Great Day of His Wrath. 

Mass produced engravings of Martin's work, made him the most popular painter of the Georgian era. The burgeoning hell realms of the Industrial Revolution, often referenced via the fire and brimstone of biblical stories. The anxiety over where all this modern technical innovation might be leading humanity, is a concern we still experience to this day. That one day God will just have had enough of us, and decide the best thing to do is wipe the slate clean, yet again. Sacred moments can therefore possess both a hubristic and an apocalyptic tone. The small insignificant face of humanity encounters the incalculable majesty of a divine presence in its wrathful form.

In a little corner of the National Gallery is a grouping of paintings by Van Gogh. It's where tourists generally seek out the well known Sunflower painting. There is also one smallish painting, often only casually glanced at the first time. It's visual humility makes it easily overlooked. On a subsequent visit, in the right receptive mood, I became utterly captivated by this painting. Overcome by a whole body experience of suspension in a deep ocean of calm. Long Grass with Butterfiles was painted by Van Gogh whilst he was recovering from his recent ear cutting breakdown in a hospice. And yet it has a peaceful, unassuming demeanour, one profoundly enraptured by its very ordinary subject matter.

Many years later, I'm in Amsterdam visiting the Van Gogh Museum. I've wanted to go there for decades. So yes, I was really hyped. I wandered around excitedly taking in all these familiar paintings 'in the flesh' so to speak. In one gallery I turned sharply left, I found myself facing another unfamiliar modest sized painting of woodland, called Undergrowth. The instant my eyes rested upon it I had this intense emotional rush, waves of energy ossilated rapidly from head to toe and back. For a few minutes I was taken aback by my heart racing, and this throbbing physical sense of an ecstasy. 

Afterwards I very inadequately explained to my husband what had just happened. This painting also came from Van Gogh's time in the San Remy hospice. I've pondered long on its significance. Was it something about the painter or the subject matter? Certainly there was an element of resonance, an emotional mirroring. But it is these particular Van Gogh paintings, which for some reason, channel a deep and unfathomable reciprocity, an identification within me.

Decades later The Royal Acadamy held a retrospective of Mark Rothko. On previous Tate Modern visits I usually prioritised visiting his brooding Seagram paintings. A favourite place to come, sit and contemplate. The sombre shimmering quality of foreground and background only really emerging in the half light they were originally intended to be viewed in. 

In the retrospective one painting, on the surface it was just the usual Rothko fuzzy rectangles of orange reds, yellow and purple captured my attention. For a brief moment it felt as though this painting was actively wanting to pull me into an altogether more elevated consciousness. The indistinct nature of its feathered painterly edges suggestive of the transcendentally ineffable. I stepped momentarily onto a liminal doorstep To which my bodily form felt drawn. Then just as quickly, I was back in the room.

Its 1985 The Royal Acadamy held a now famous exhibition devoted to 20th Century German Expressionism. The paintings which caught me spiritually off guard were really small. Emile Nolde, a man previously a supporter of the Nazis, found his work included in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. This propelled him into a state of extreme distress. Though he escaped to Norway, he remained petrified. He could only paint on a small scale. Reduced to executing work on the back of postcards. All so they could easily be hidden away.

Occasionally he painted in oils, but his small scale seascapes are more often executed in watercolour.  Vivid washes of colour incredibly expressive, intense seas, darkly brooding skies. Yet they are full of a magnificent strength and energy. With a raging sun trying to set or break through on the horizon. They give form to a more hopeful, defiant, uplifted perception. The swirls of colour hypnotising my emotional breath for a brief elevating few seconds. They were art that could unexpectedly plunge you into deeper emotionally sacred waters, the insightful reflections of a dawn or dusk that lingers.

Kettles Yard Gallery in Cambridge, 2011, held a retrospective exhibition of paintings by Bridget Riley. These vast canvases of sensationally coloured irregular patterns, are a highly stimulating optical feast for the eyes. Riley plays with, and deliberately misleads, your perceptions. But they are so much more than a technical experiment in optical colour and balance effects. What they do is communicate a whole love of colour and its joi de vivre. 

This is a quality she shares with Sol Le Witt's large scale wall paintings. Whose size and execution likewise thrills and conspires to uplift, not just the heart, but one's entire being. Placing you within touching distance of what is positive and optimistic within you and outside of you. Adjusting your supra conscious state for one brief slice of time.

Now the common thread for me in all these paintings, is that the sense of something sacred that they communicate, is not necessarily in what they are painting, but is contained within how they are painted. None of these artists deliberately set out to paint a painting to feel or create a sense for, the sacred. Its also connected with what we ourselves bring to the paintings too. There is a mutual reciprocity of perception and emotion present in the moment of our first meeting them. One that cannot necessarily be replicated later, by expectation or design.

ART n ab ART - Thinking Through Drawing Exhibition

This exhibition has a broad and eclectic range of artists. They are all using drawing as a means to explore ideas, ways of thinking about what they are doing - through technique imagination or concept. Four exhibitions into this year's programme, and this is the first one to both excite and challenge.

There is the usual mix of bold, the boring, as well as baffling work on show here. Stretching your ideas of what drawing can be and do. Proving you can sketch using a wider variety of media, it doesn't have to be just pencils, pens or charcoal. Though there are example of those here too. The rapidly executed sketch and the slowly evolving and more considered drawing. But there is also room for drawing that has immense thoughtfulness and insight within it. 

The stand out work, for me, was Sam Hodge's beautifully evocative drawings of broken tablet and smart phone screens. The cracks in the screens are carefully transfered and etched into plasticated sheets, that are then inked and printed. There was also an accompanying book, which has text on the opposite page explaining how the screens got broken in the first place. With brilliant titles such as - It works, which is the main thing - Nick thinks there is a delicious irony in the Universe -  A lot of things have happened. The overall title for this work A Catalogue of Misfortune, could be a statement about the human condition. The associations and humanity of these drawings provoking further thought.

Other drawings worthy of note are Phillip Walmsley's 3D sculptural like drawings of imaginary spaces and Marion Piper's sequences of tonal forms and shapes.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

POEM - Too Far Out

In this instant of hope breaking its

bridges the ones that failed to be mended

previously return, they are here

providing immoral support because there

has become 

too far out of reach and tangled up in all
the swaddling coddling and attending to

the darker edges of what our self 

encumbered soul requests to be unseen

carrying on its existence off stage behind the

privacy of the dressing room door

balms cannot sooth it nor honey raise

the taste to be sweeter to sprinkle

meaning upon it or renovate its interior

decor back into a pristine light for

a heart malformed into a shrug

is insensate.

Written by Stephen Lumb

May 2024

CHURCH LARKING - Wiveton Parish Church

St Mary's sits in the pretty village of Wiveton. Positioned over what was once the wide tidal estuary of the River Glaven. With only the ocassional linear mounds of what was once its harbour pier jettys, to suggest its alternative medieval history. From the bottom of the church graveyard you can look across the old flood plain to St Margaret's Church in Cley. But its clear just from one look at the fabric of Wiveton's church that this was always the poorer cousin to Cley and Blakeney. The swanky ones on the opposite bank of the river Glaven.

View over Glaven valley to Cley Next The Sea

The fabric of the church is nothing like as richly embellished as its close neighbours. This may reflect that when the tidal harbour did begin to silt up, it was Wiveton that was devastatingly affected first, and hardest. It bares the scars of past neglect in the many blocked up windows and entrances. The quickest and cheapest way of dealing with a deteriorating building structure.

It's becoming a repeated experience to discover that most churches on the North Norfolk coast, have gone through a period of dilapidation, even to total ruin. Usually in the 18th century. This comes to an end when wealthy Victorians in the 19th, begin putting their new found wealth into repairing the broken walls, windows and roofs. That's obviously been the case in Wiveton, because all the original window glass was either robbed out or shot to bits. To be uniformly replaced with the garish turquoise and orange yellow glazing colour scheme we see before us today. A solution, no doubt, but far from the best one one would have thought imaginable. And one so thoroughly applied everywhere.

Not having the financial resources to embellish this house of God with grand architectural flourishes, it seems to have had to chose a cheaper option. Painting Bibical texts in black gothic lettering above the pillars all the way down the nave. These make Wiveton quite distinctive, but it is a bit like having misguided tatoos from your days of youthful enthusiasm, that you live to regret in later centuries.

This aside, Wiveton has an unremarkable interior, but it is now a sound functioning church. If anything it reveals in its exterior architecture something of its richer past history. The outside walls of the chancel has some delightfully decorative flush work. These might not appear that remarkable, but this is one of the earliest examples of this Norfolk building technique. Its perhaps hard to imagine now, how once upon a time flint flushwork was at the trendy cutting edge of church architecture.

The other thing of note in its exterior are the pinnacles on the tower. No Gothic flourishes here, we have full baroque styled pinnacles  stuck with unselfconscious incongruity on top of its 15th century podgy little tower. From a distance at least this makes it look ever so posh. Which makes you realise what a statement these once were. Wiveton Parish Church, may have once been down, but it was never completely out.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal May 2024 ( 2nd Entry )

I've been reading the New Testament for about a month now. I started by reading an accompanying commentary alongside it, and to be honest this roughed up and aggravated my soul too much. I found some of the lite theological explanations for what Jesus was really saying or not saying,  a bit slippery. They appeared to me to be creating self justifying hoops to jump through, in order to explain it all as somehow making common religious sense. In short however cleverly convoluted it was, it was still bollocks.

To be honest, I find most of the New Testament easy enough to read and follow. Jesus comes across as a great deal more wild, wacky and off kilter than I expected. Though I can't see myself ever saying I am a Christian, when so much appears to be taken on faith. 

That the content has so far largely failed to connect and excite my imagination, is reflected in my deep absorption and fascination with the history and origins of how the New Testament came into being. Now I do find this wonderfully compelling. The similarities and differences in approach in documenting their founders teachings. Buddhism and Christianity both span that watershed moment when oral transmission morphs into the written word. With recognisible conversations about provenance and conjecture about authenticity. The outcome, the sort of books that are produced, could not be more different in content and structure.

The central, and I would say my primary difficulty, is the nature and status of God. I can understand God as a sacred creative principle within the universe, and hence also in us. Who by our coming into alignment with its fundamental nature within reality, we are fundamentally changed or Enlightened by. From a distance there is something in Christianity that draws me towards it. But looked at too closely, I can no longer get a sense for what that impulse might consist of.  The miracles, the prophetic and apocalyptic nature of it all, well, it just gets in the way.

An interventionist God, whom you can please or displease, who will help or hinder you in less rational ways in order to 'teach you a lesson' out of love for you. All of that strikes me as unlikely or questionable, not to mention patronising and cruel.The reasons why we suffer and God's supposed role in that, become just so clearly inexplicable, not to say inconsistent, that the idea of an interventionist God just cannot be how things really are. There are just too many contradictions for this to be left standing. And yet curiously it still does. Maybe we choose to anthropomorphise God, in order to make God easier to relate to. A sacred creative principle is, admittedly, not simple to just rub along with. Neither model maybe ultimately be correct, but an example of skillful means that may get you to somewhere that is.

Personifying God, gendering God, beseeching and making prayerful requests of God, all in a sense compound the delusional error. God, if he exists at all, is for me something you come into alignment with, and become 'born again' as the son and daughter of. If there is a creationist God, then I'd call into question why he would make the universe and us, at all. Are we really just a part of some divine version of Squid Game or a religious lab experiment, humanity as the play things of a God, who supposedly sent his Son to salvage the test from possible failure. This is either shameful or ludicrous, I can't make up my mind which.

The Buddha, more wisely than I, simply said the nature of the universe, and whether God or Gods exist or not, are imponderables. Things you will never ever resolve from an earthly perspective. Certainly not this side of Enlightenment. We will never grasp or get to the bottom of God or No God. And so we find ourselves having to resort constantly to conjecture. The whole subject is simply not a good use of ones mind or time, as The Buddha indicated. Its more than likely that I am entirely incorrect in my assessment.

IT'S A TESTAMENT OF SOMETHING - Mark & the Origins of the Gospels

Codex Sinaiticus 4th Century New Testament

The St Mark attributed to this Gospel, was part of St Peters entourage, acting as his companion and translator. Mark, unlike Matthew, was not a disciple of Jesus at the time of his ministry. As I read the New Testament I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the whole history and process of how the New Testament came about. Not to mention some Christian's desire, however unrealistic, for these gospels to be the literal unvarnished words of the Apostles and Jesus.

Religions with founders from the so called ' Axial Age' ( 500 BC to 300 BCE ) encounter similar difficulties with provenance. The ' Axial Age' spans the period where all the worlds major religions emerge. This runs in parallel with increasing more widespread literacy. Prior to this period, mastery of the written word was the prerogative of priests, scribes and business. General society operated through a network of orally transmitted information. From the Axial Age onwards the written word slowly replaces that oral transmission. However, most religious texts from the Axial Age do not emerge until a few hundred years after the founding events. A clear sense of the sources and origins of those words, how they came to be written down, and by whom, at some point disappears off a cliff into a very murky pool of hearsay and suggestive inferences. It's in the nature of studying it, that one is forced into making conjectures. 

.

Even though the Gospels have Saints names attached to them, there remains a huge amount of contention between biblical academics and Christians about authorship and sources. There are disparate Christian reports from 100-200  years later that vouch for Matthew, Mark, Luke and John's involvement in the creation of them. But you'd be unwise to take these word of mouth accounts unquestioningly at face value. Particularly when textual analysis tells you something that runs partially contrary to that narrative.

Matthew's own Gospel mentions Matthew the tax collector as having a part in one biblical incident. Talking about yourself but not owning it, would be a curious thing for any writer to do. This is suggestive that the compiler of his Gospel, was most likely not Matthew. But its important to stress here, that doesn't mean the accounts contained within it didn't originally come from Matthew. We just cannot say that with 100% certainty. 

Some biblical scholars take the view that all the four Canonical Gospels are not eye witness accounts, but are knitted into a narrative from a wider range of early Christian sources. Its certainly true that they are mostly written in a matter of fact style. That may have been a conscious choice, to deliberately depersonalise them. Though it would seem counter intuitive to name them after an apostle, who you then neuter the references to. Though perhaps they thought a degree of perceived objectivity was required.

Textual analysis of the four Canonical Gospels indicates that Mark seems the first gospel to be written down. Even though reports from nearer the time of Jesus, suggest that it was Matthew's gospel.  Matthew and Luke, share 60-80% of their content verbatim with Mark's. Its more likely they were adding the bits that Mark left out, wasn't aware of, or, heaven fore-fend, might possibly wish to exaggerate or elaborate upon. For Mark to deliberately omit including these stories, would be a very odd practice indeed. What Mark's Gospel does not have is the nativity and everything prior to John the Baptist's arrival. It also has a more abbreviated conclusion after the crucifixion.

Its clear that if any fiddling, elaborating or hagiography were to be introduced into the biblical stories, then that would have to be executed within a very narrow time frame - In the century or so immediately after the death of Jesus. Because quite remarkably early on, the form of the Gospel stories appears to have become set in stone. After which precious little is altered, except by human error during the copying of texts. Variations within the accounts of The Transfiguration, for instance, may be evidence that they came from different streams of oral storytelling originally.

One question that has crossed my mind is - why did they not just compile all the known parables and facts surrounding Jesus's life and ministry into one complete unified story? Why did they chose to go down the road of presenting them as individual apostles gospels? Particularly when so much of their contents was literally copied and pasted from one to the other? What is the benefit of leaving them as seeming to be the written testimony of individual Apostles, when they are patently not? Was there originally an evolutionary drift towards producing a definitive complete version of Jesus's life and ministry that got aborted half way ?  Which leaves us with the four Apostolic Gospels, repeating the same stories with slight to moderate differences in content, feeling tone and length. 

I think the reason for this may be similar to the words - Thus have I heard...that preface most Buddhist Sutras. This phrase was meant to be a guarantee that these were the actual words of the Buddha, but sometimes this plainly cannot be the case. Maybe here it is about having the Apostles name there to reassure you of the truths they contain. Its a familiar name that sells the book, the musical and the film versions. Without a named Apostle, how could you determine whether even one singular comprehensive version of Jesus's life and ministry was a transmission that could be relied upon to be truly authentic? What is authenticity anyway?

The Canonical Gospels are very consistent in the story they tell, and have, as I've previously said, remained largely unaltered over the millennia. This may suggest that the compilers/writers/editors, were more concerned to remain faithful to the integrity of the original stories, than putting their own individual spin on it. Which if you were writing a personal eyewitness account you would have been unable to resist doing. This may explain why the stories tend to be narrated from quite a removed authorial distance.

There really isn't much mileage in the idea that the church at a later date compiled a list of what was and wasn't Canonical. This contemporary false perception can be unceremoniously dumped at the feet of Dan Brown. The Church itself was too widely dispersed and disparate for far too many centuries to be able to do that. To this day there still remain differences in content between Orthodox, Coptic and Ethiopian Bibles, and their Roman Catholic and Protestant equivalents. 

Yes, Constantine did want a Bible to distribute across the Holy Roman Empire. But what he requested was coherence, with nothing too theologically contentious or liable to be misinterpreted in it. So every day folk could understand and follow it. He was authorising, essentially, what the basic teachings were to be.

Bible contents do appear to have mostly grown in an organic evolution. For example, The Shepherd of Hermas was a text in extremely widespread use in early Christian bibles, but this simply fell slowly out of popularity, so over time it disappeared from being included in bibles.

There are obvious incidents of excision, such as the Gospel of Thomas. Rediscovered in the cache of papyrus in Nag Hammadi. Its a book of sayings, not pinned into any narrative structure. Some of the content is similar to the Canonical gospels, but a lot is not. It openly declares itself to contain the secret mystical teachings that Jesus spoke only to his disciples. From a traditional perspective there are contentious ideas and perhaps misleading presentations of Jesus, within it. Its validity has hence been questioned from antiquity onwards. The primary reason is the metaphysics of it, this runs at variance to the Canonical version.  Elaine Pagels, a leading expert on Thomas's Gospel believes the enigmatic style of Jesus's teachings here, is clearly aligning itself with that of traditional Jewish mysticism. That it may possibly be exactly what it says it is, in its opening line - secret mystical teachings of Jesus.

Whilst I might feel at times cynical or dismissive about the New Testament, I would not be the first to do so. But I recognise in the title of this blog post that - It is a testament of something. And it would be very foolish and egotistical of me, after two millenia of Christianity forming the shape of Western Civilisation, to sweep it aside as of entirely no value, now or in the future. 

One point in my reading the New Testament is by way of investigating another faith, to probe deeper into what my own consists of. And when I come up against things I disagree with, or react badly to, this is all par for that course. I've already uncovered some fixed views, some harsh judgement or simple prejudices, founded and unfounded. All of these obstruct better understanding of why Christianity has struck a chord with people for so long. What is there that remains good about it? What do I feel about that?

These days we are made all too aware of Christianity's many reported failings. But the Buddha urged his followers not to be a fault finder. Primarily because its unhealthy to feed negative thoughts, but also there is inevitably a downward spiral inherent to the avid pursuit of negative criticism. One that progressively worsens the more entrenched one digs in to the self righteousness of it. One rarely reaches the truth through it, nor happiness, nor become equanimous, more the exact opposite. 

Yet it remains, in our age of anxiety and confusion, distinctly harder to speak up for the good. Because for the good to reach you, you have to consciously open up your heart and mind to it. It's so much easier to use negativity to close the whole lot down, so you don't have to think, feel or behave differently.

QUOTATION MARKS - Whether God Exists Or Not Is Unprovable

 

Follow me closely now: whether God exists or not is unprovable, so for an individual person, whether He exists or not, is always going to be a matter of belief. But at the same time, quite independently, He either exists or He doesn't, irrespective of whether He's believed in. He's a fact, or a non fact, about the nature of the universe.

So if you believe, you're making a bet that God exists whether you believe or not. If you believe, you're not perceiving God as a creature of your belief, called into being by it, ebbing and flowing as it ebbs and flows. You're perceiving a state of the universe. You may be wrong, but if you are wrong, you're not wrong because you're weak and credulous. You're just wrong. 

Likewise, if you're right, you're not right because of anything you did or felt, because there was anything deserving or admirable about your feelings. You just are right. I realise this may come as a shock, but wishing does not in fact cause things to exist. Or to cease to exist. If something does exist, then wishing for that something does not infect it with wishfulness.'

Taken from Unapologetic, by Francis Spufford,
Published by Faber & Faber, 2012.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 108 - What I Always Say Is........

As the tourist season has its first premature reawakening, we are making more visits to the Blakeney craft gallery, to check or take stock. Sometimes Hubby and I do these together, travelling the eight miles by car. Otherwise, it entails me carrying a medium sized canvas bag, curtesy of the RNLI, to carry stock there. Travelling there via the Coasthopper on my OAP bus pass. These buses are noticeably becoming fuller, and more frequent, as the weeks progress. The days of the Pandemic when hardly anyone travelled on public transport, if they could help it, are long forgotten. Only a few respiratory challenged individuals still don the ubiquitous mask.

On a recent Blakeney delivery, as I queued to board the bus, ahead of me were a couple in their late thirties, with six or seven pieces of continental style luggage. Struggling to get on the bus, pay their fair and find the best way to organise their luggage in the minimal racks provided. I watched all this rigmarole from the cheap viewing seat two rows behind them. As they talked I gradually realised that they were not talking English at all. It went through my mind what the possible options were. Not being any sort of linguist I settled on Dutch and was happy to leave it there. 

I observed the way the couple related, and could not sense much warmth. The dialogue between them felt touchy and quietly fractious. The man seemed to be trying to be attentive, but the woman wasn't having any of that sort of fuss. After a while I just let them be, and my attention drifted to focusing upon where the nearest stop request bell was. Would I lean forward to use the one opposite the seat in front, or turn ninety degrees to use the one behind me. It was a dilemma.

However, a couple sat immediately behind me suddenly piped up talking about the foreign couple. It was the sort of conversation that was a little too loudly vocalised, to be comfortably ignored.  The man hardly said a thing, it was the woman whose voice predominated. It was the type of monologue I was more than familiar with. The same sort of unfiltered monologue where the moment ideas came to her mind they came out of her mouth, that bore echoes of my own Mother. An uninterrupted flow of commentary upon the experience of reality. She had also cottoned on to the idea of what the origins of the couple ahead of us might be. So a succession of statements about the possible language they were speaking, struck up.

'No, I don't think it's German at all, do you......

doesn't sound quite right.... Perhaps it is Dutch...... but if not, its certainly Danish, or Latvian, maybe they could be Finnish. Yeah, I bet you they are Finnish. I don't know, who am I to say?'

Indeed. What went through my mind was - does she not realise that couple might be able to hear her talking, and might also understand English. Of how uncomfortable that might be to hear yourself being talked about in this way. Her conjectural associative ramble might have gone on for a bit longer had not a gentleman then got on the bus. He stood at the bus entrance and was scanning the passengers. Finally he declared himself:

"Sorry, I'm looking to see if my wife is on board. I'd agreed to meet her here. But I see she isn't here yet, Thank you'. 

And with that got off the bus and stood by the bus stop, evidently awaiting her arrival. That arrival was loudly announced by the lady behind me.

' Oh here she is, here she is. She's not in a hurry at all, is she? She's taking her time, as if we have all the time in the world, look at her, she's not geting a move on is she. She's doing it deliberately.....Oh, she's disabled....( short pause ) Still keeping us waiting though. Goodness me, that took quite a bit of doing.'

And with that air of heavy judgement left hanging , she quietened down. This is not the first time I've heard this type of instant condemnation of an individual they clearly cannot know. It appears to be most prevalent  amongst the elderly. I want to say mainly women, because this is who I've mostly heard, but there have been men too. The sort who take one look at a person in a bus queue and instantly think they know what sort of person they are. Someone usually completely deluded in their world view. And so a torrent of unfiltered prejudicial judgements will come forth from their mouths, like an oracle speaking from entirely another realm where an almost scriptural authority resides.

I was walking down Sheringham's main street the other week. A loose gaggle of a family. Father, Mother, son and girlfriend were ambling along excitedly chatting amongst themselves. They were dressed in the type of stylish casual fashion wear you would only find on an urban city dweller. Not locals then! The Father was notably wearing a kilt with a black V necked jumper. A couple of ladies walking just behind me piped up commenting on them - 

' Well that looks absolutely ridiculous on him, that doesn't work at all as a combination. Not at all. Some folk, the way they chose to dress in public. Beggars belief.'

 

And these types of comment are not unusual in Sheringham. North Norfolk is conservative with a small c, and quite traditional in its viewpoint. A society happily, defiantly, content with being several decades out of date. Many folk come here specifically to escape the modern metropolitan world. And who am I to be critical, as we too came here for a change of location, from university town to seaside resort. 

I prefer to think of myself as being a left of centre progressive, decidedly more liberal at heart than a some of my fellow incomers. North Norfolk is the sort if political constituency where Labour always comes third, with barely a few hundred votes. Local MP's and Council, ossilate solely between Tory and Lib Dems. Many incomers leaving London or the Midlands, do so to specifically escape the encroaching of immigrant neighbours. Sometimes you do have to be very cautious when engaging in conversations with some folk. For fear of where they might lead. Forever aware it could take an obliquely racist turn with very little prompting. For anyone can find a way of mounting their favourite hobby horse at the drop of a hat.

'What I always say, is...........'  

which translates as 

 'I'll say this again, because no one has a yet taken heed of my opinion or prognosis, which is, in my view, a real shame.'

And Finally.

On a recent drive through Nottingham I spotted from the car a hairdressers with this fabulous name - HAIRITAGE

ITS A TESTAMENT OF SOMETHING - Matthew, Prophecies Past & Future

Just when I haven't quite settled on what to make of the wacky stuff, the miracles, walking on water, feeding thousands of people with a few loaves of bread, then comes The Transfiguration when Jesus lights up like a large illuminated Christmas decoration and becomes momentarily part of a triumvirate with Moses and Elijah. After which he tells his disciples - 'For God's sake don't tell anyone what you saw.' Yeah, too right, they'd think you've completely lost your bloody marbles.

Parables in this half of the Gospel possess a grittier more pointedly ethical purpose. These are not the dumbed down public parables, but spoken in private and clearly aimed at his disciples, well, any disciple really.

During the journey to Jerusalem, Jesus tells them frankly what's about to happen once they get to Jerusalem - the betrayal, the abuse, crucifixion and resurrection. It all passes without comment from Matthew. The conversation is interrupted by someone pleading for healing. But the statement is not gone back to for an explanation. You are not given any sense of how his disciples responded to it. Did they fully take it on board? Are they in complete stunned denial? Do they plead 'say not so'? Or have they heard this all before, and are indulging him?

The spectre of the crucifixion therefore haunts each moment of what follows. Emotionally I feel indifferent towards the symbolism of the crucifixion, well, the crucifixion full stop. The way Christianity traditionally has framed it, either doesn't adequately explain it to me or it simply fails to hit home. Most probably because I don't want, or feel the need, for what it has to offer.

Why does Jesus, as the son of God, need to suffer and die in this way for our benefit?  The idea of a God that would send his son to sort out Israel, with the specific intention of killing him by the end, as some sort of spiritual imperative to resolve suffering, then bringing him back to life. This feels way out on the barmy to weird scale. It makes no practical or religious sense to me.

The God, The Son, The Messiah, feels over loaded with too much symbolic mystical  psycho drama, blah di blah, you name it, it's all thrown in there. Jesus uses a phrase to describe the crucifixion's purpose - To give his life as 'a ransome for many'. And I can't make head nor tail of that statement either. What is the ransome his life is paying off?

As they near Jerusalem, Jesus tells a series of parables heavy with metaphor, about the need to be ready, not just for what is about to happen, but a prophecy of what will happen sometime in the near future, or when Jesus will come again, when God's kingdom will arrive. Temples falling, a cleansing, a restart, etc, you know the form. 

Such prophecies generally tend to teeter along the tightrope between sounding specific, but vague enough to be applied to numerous situations in the future. I baulk at taking them 100% seriously. With so much validity placed on them as evident proofs of Jesus being who he says he is, it makes settling my faith on them a precarious thing.

And as we proceeded through the familiar dramaturgy of Holy Week, I got the discomforting feeling of stoically enduring the reading of it.  Bearing with, meant I was not enjoying reading the text much, nor finding it illuminating or insightful. Frankly I struggle to fully comprehend the structure of Christian beliefs about the nature of God and Jesus Christ. If you can believe in miracles, transfiguration, prophecies, and that someone can die in order to save us all, then all this will seem so second nature. To me, it appears at the moment, for the cuckoos.

So, yes, I've found this second half of Matthew really heavy going. Unable to connect on a productive or appreciative level with assertions as to what it symbolises concerning its true meaning. My response  has been more emotionally challenging than I'd expected, and obviously its provoking a lot of reactivity within me. I've been surprised at how internally angry and insensed I've been finding myself. 

However, on reflection, I do have a tendency to get like this when emotionally conflicted. Wanting to, but unable to, comprehend the spiritual purpose of something. I don"t like the suspicion that I might be being stupid. So there are a whole bundle of issues arising, not just in relation to Christianity, but personal issues and whatever it is I believe or have faith in. I have to be careful not to take my reactivity at face value. To hold myself to the possibility that there might be something else lurking underneath them, unbeknownst to me.

As I was intending to read the entire New Testament I'm wondering now whether I've bitten off more Christianity than I want to chew here. I think simply to maintain my sanity it maybe better to space my New Testament reading out. I don't have to doggedly see my intention through, if I don't wish to. But to give up, doesn't feel entirely the right thing to do either.

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1973 - Pyjamarama - Roxy Music

Roxy Music's Virginia Plain; reached No 4 in the charts, a quite remarkable feat for a debut single. This one song introduced everyone to the bizzare unearthly delights of early Roxy Music. As a follow up to such a huge hit; Pyjamarama found itself struggling to break into the top ten. But it remains a fond favourite of mine. From its opening chiming thrang of guitar, to the popping keyboard sound that Eno, on Top of The Pops, pretended to play with drum sticks whilst wearing glittery gloves. This had a sense of something extraordinarily special about to arrive, and when it does it slides into a song that unfolds a fabulous mood. A sound uniquely, dramatically, all their own.

This also was the first time you see Bryan Ferry wearing his classic white jacket and black dicky bow tie. The moment he shifts from the slightly sinister, predatory lounge lizard to the louche lounge singer he was very soon to become famous for. Their second album For Your Pleasure was soon to be released. As was the late exit of Brian Eno. His sound treatments of instruments is all over this track. Manzanera's introductory guitar riff clangs like a bell in an echo chamber, and afterwards sounds as if he's playing partly submerged under water. The song building to a crashing crescendo,with wailing guitars and thunderous drums, determined to go out on a high.

Upstaging Mr Ferry, say not so.

Virginia Plain you could dance to, just about, but Pyjamarama it's unclear quite what's expected of you, other than to listen. It was a very strange choice of follow up single when you think about it. But I suspect it was a track they liked, but didn't quite fit with the new albums more refined style. It still bears the lingering hallmarks of the rougher more experimental debut album. It was soon to be followed by the single Street Life, which points out the direction Roxy Music were now intent on heading. Eno left because he didn't feel he needed to be part of this ultra slick version of Roxy Music, and went on to do, well, we know what he went on to do.

QUOTATION MARKS - Taking No Notice Of Boundaries To Love

 'As for attitudes towards those seen as being on the dirty outside of the tribe, especially if their difference is frightening in some way, especially if their difference has to do with sexuality: oh my. It is of course an illusion to imagine that the dykes and the queers and the trannies are all safely locked out there in the outer darkness rather than being in here with us, in fact being us, but that's what the corrupting little map of virtue suggests, and quite a lot of those who are conducting my own church's stumbling rearguard action against gay rights seem to feel that they are defending a fortress of traditional behaviour against hordes of drag queens on crack.

The record of the church here is, frankly, rubbish. We are supposed, always to be trying to love what we don't like or understand or want to touch; we are supposed to be taking as little notice of boundaries to love as we believe God does. We are supposed to be looking at each other in guilty brotherhood and sisterhood. We are not supposed to be assigning guilt according to who does what with whom.'

Taken from Unapologetic by Francis Spufford
Published by Faber & Faber 2012

ART n ab ART - 8 x 8 Exhibition

The second exhibition of The Salthouse summer season, is work by a handful of professional artists. The styles of art work on show is very broad, from cleanly formed still life's, to horse paintings, to richly textural abstracted landscape painting, to paintings of striped mugs in various stacked formations.

It was not an aesthetic triumph on the whole. Collectively it feels just a very odd mix of not very complementary styles of painting. Little noticeable dialogue going on between the disparate range of pieces on show. The artist whose work I most appreciated was Rachel Thomas, whose loose and expressive use of colour, playing with the form of the landscapes she paints, I've appreciated previously. It's exciting to look at someone fully in charge of her style, but constantly pushing at its boundaries. The other artists, frankly, I could take of leave. Skilled painters, but with not a lot to say, at least to me.

CARROT REVIEW - 3/8

LISTENING TO - All Born Screaming by St Vincent

All Born Screaming, is a truimphant return to form for St Vincent.  For a couple of albums there has been a distinct tilt towards presentational style over musical substance. All Born Screaming, however, more than matches the musical coherence evident on 2014's Digital Witness. Snaps of funk, heavy metal and the psycho guitar cutting across it, she's utilised since working with David Byrne.  Her present visual look resembles a heavily made up inflatable sex manikin.

One of the qualities I've appreciated about St Vincent's music is the way she plays around with musical tropes, wrong footing your expectations. So on the album's title track, All Born Screaming, starts as a gently lilting song, that morphs into a break in a dub echo chamber, to emerge as a repeated choral refrain that rises to climax via an increasingly thumping dance rythym. Yeah, unexpected.

Similar unexpected trajectories accompany other album highlights. Violent Times is sung and orchestrated as though its a Bond film theme song. 

Broken Man starts with a sparse musical soundscape that is broken into by a earthshaking guitar riff that only gets more and more thunderously heavy with metal, as St Vincent's voice becomes angrily distraught. This is terrific.

Big Time Nothing is the track that owes the most to mid period Talking Heads. A superb funk workout, with a vocal line as dry as a desert. St Vincent expertly tip toes along the boundary between infectious song writing and arty musical pretension. Her desire to amuse, startle and unnerve probably affects the possibility of her ever breaking into mainstream success. Yet it is this shifting of her musical perspective and persona that I really love about her work. In a time when perhaps its not that popular a musical genre anymore, St Vincent is constantly proving there's life and meaning to be found in art pop-rock still.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

SACRED MOMENTS - Glimmers, Glimpses & Moments of Gosh

Moving to Diss in Norfolk was a fresh start. Living outside London, after eight very full and often internally turbulent years. I was sort of up for trying somewhere, or something, completely new.

In the latter years of my time inhabiting 'the boil', as I called London at the time. I'd begun tentatively delving into spirituality as more than a book category. Discovering Taoism, by reading Alan Watts's - Wisdom of Insecurity. The title alone drew me in. This was, at the time, a complete revelation, on the surface so paradoxical. I'd spent much of my adult life trying to overcome, find ways to side step, or get around feelings of insecurity. Instead of suppressing and pushing them away, to embrace them as just how life is, felt counter intuitive. This began opening up a whole new way of perceiving life, the world and its real meaning.

As its implications fully dawned on me, this also brought a letting go and a consequential deep relief. I was out walking in the busy hubbub that is the centre of Crouch End. North London. Emotionally light headed I had to sit down on a bench. I found myself gazing up at the brilliant blue sky of that day and calmly encountered an elation. Goodness knows what passers by thought, but this was London, so they'd give that grinning idiot on the bench a wide berth. Probaby thinking I was off my head on drugs. If, of course, they were aware of me at all. Blinkered on a mission or walking around with their Sony Walkmans blaring loudly in their ears.

Having had that moment, I read more about Taoism. But Taoism as an active religious practice in the 1980's seemed all but none existent in the UK. And the one thing Taoism needs above all else is a teacher and guide. One forgets now, in the age of the internet, just how difficult it used to be to follow up on things. If it wasn't in Time Out or City Limits, you often had to depend on responding quickly in the moment to a fortunate encounter.

Back in Diss, I saw a Buddhism class was starting up in the High School. I decided to go along. Learning to meditate, as a useful tool, became a revelation too. But when it moved on to The Four Noble Truths my mind was somewhat blown out of the water. The universal nature of suffering, the cause of suffering, the way to end suffering, the path that leads to the end of suffering. So simple a diagnostic. 

I remember cycling around the country lanes encircling Diss for weeks, literally buzzing with the excitement of it. Everything I examined in my experience, I saw as literally riddled with the desire for that situation or person, to be something other than what they actually were. And when most of the time reality did not comply with my most ardent wishes, boy did I suffer.

When I was later introduced to the multiplicity of deity forms of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas I reactively bounced out of Buddhism for a few years. Eventually to return, a little wiser and less resistant. I was at a practice night at the Norwich Buddhist Centre, still more than a little bit green. There was to be a devotional ritual called a Puja. In the middle of which is the recitation of precepts. Now here is a strange thing. There are two iterations of the precepts; the five precepts used in general contexts such as this; and the ten precepts that are specifically for recitation by order members. What I heard that night, for the first time, was the ten precepts. As they were recited, a level of excitement just grew and grew and grew within me. To the point where I was absolutely bursting to get a copy of them, as soon as this apparently interminable sevenfold ritual was over. There was a quality of reciprocity in the precepts. They put into words exactly what I wanted to live my whole life by.

A year later I was on my first meditation retreat, up in the hills of North Wales. I'd been there for at least a week out of the total fortnight. I'd never done such intensive meditation and devotional practice before. One afternoon, during a meditation sit, the heavy weight of my consciousness felt like it dropped away like a veil, and I physically and mentally felt lightened. As though I was just floating unruffled on a sea of calm. I remember sitting in the refectory afterwards awaiting dinner being served. Passively observing everyone loudly gabbling away maniacally. I looked at them impassively, this was all just too bonkers. I felt a broad pervasive connection with them all, but at the same time I had a heightened awareness of how much inconsequential drivel we talked. Trying not to engage, because as soon as I opened my mouth to contribute it felt like the calm stillness of my state, was in danger of being rapidly sucked away down a near-bye plughole.

On another occasion on a Just Sitting retreat, during an evening period of meditation, it was as though a thick cloak that I wore. enveloping and defending me, literally fell to the floor in an instant of Ta Da!  Unveiling a spiritually naked, pure, and incredibly grounded me. The same feeling of calmly floating through reality and a beautiful pervasive connection with everyone, as I watched them individually heading back to there dorms. Luckily, this time it was silence overnight, so no one was talking. I didn't have to converse with anyone. Yet, even as I lay in bed I could sense my own mind starting to pick at and analyse what I'd experienced. Bit by bit my inquisitive mind dismantling the heightened state of awareness I'd been in.

All of these encounters with the sacred, arose unexpectedly and without any premonition. They are examples of what Buddhism refers to as experiences of 'calm abiding' that are frequently mentioned in Buddhist texts. Finding one self in such a state often arises in ones early practice, its due to Beginners Mind. Where we are innocently open and unpremeditated in our good natured curiosity. We become unconsciously focused in an entirely natural manner.  What happens subsequently is these 'peak' experiences become patterned and expectations enter our minds. So they become consequently rarer, or vanish altogether because we have a tendency to pre-empt them. You are encouraged to preserve Beginners Mind, but I've found to do this consciously, when it is based entirely on an unconscious unpremeditated state, pretty much impossible. You can't reverse engineer an experience of the sacred 

I look back at these with a residual longing, and an element of sadness at my own perceived meditative inadequacy. Inhabiting a space where they haven't occured for a long time. Its clearly true that clinging to any of them can be a major problem. Yet these early glimmers, glimpses, and moments of gosh, made me be a Buddhist. They have sustained me through troughs of despondency and the daily winnowing away at one's faith by modern secular life. Sustenance, seems to me, to be their primary function, but at the same time 'peak experiences' of any kind can be fundamentally misleading. They are the proverbial fingers pointing towards the moon. They are what Dogen terms beautiful but 'imaginary tigers' that prevent us from recognising the 'real tiger' when we encounter it.

ITS A TESTAMENT OF SOMETHING - Matthew, & the Apocalypse Now

I, like many of my generation, ceased studying the Bible after I left Methodist Sunday School. Consequently I've found that my understanding and knowledge of what is actually in the New Testament remained infantile in nature. Apart from once playing Jesus in the Dennis Potter play Son of Man, in the 1980's, I've not returned to the gospels etc for nigh on fifty plus years. Hence this blog post. I'm interested in how my perceptions and interpretations of it are now.

I have N T Wright's relatively recent translation of the New Testament, and settled on buying his accompanying commentaries to guide my progress through it.  I'm not sure exactly how that will be reflected in this blog. Though, judging by my first foray, it's most likely to include impressions, insights, difficulties and sheer bafflement. 

Matthew, the reformed Taxi Collector, structures his gospel with all the meticulousness one might expect of a seasoned accountant. Short punchy paragraphs with a strong narrative woven through them. It'll be interested to see whether there is a different feel to other gospels. Even if there is some overlap in content. The content here maybe Matthew's in origin, but compiled into a gospel at a later date, no one can truly say for sure who wrote it in its present form. 

Initially this gospel recounts the early life of Jesus, it feels familiar. These are the stories I heard and read as a child, the shepherds, the magi, the parables etc. Its notable which particularly tricky paragraphs have been left out of the version presented to the under twelves.

A lot of these earlier events are often written to foreshadow the later ministry and crucifixion. If not that, then its to uphold any claim Jesus makes to being either God's Son, or the Messiah. Though I'm not confident you can always conflate those two conceptions. So, Yes, there is frequent foreshadowing in Matthew, plus the obligatory prophecy being fulfilled from the Old Testament. It appears to be a given that these prophecies never fulfill themselves in quite the way people expect, and Jesus is forever having to retrospectively point this out. So what is the point of them then?  Doesn't that make them, as prophecies, rather unreliable, redundant even? I find I am greatly irritated by the Old Testament being wheeled out to provide Jesus with authority all the time.

So 'the prophetic streak' in the New Testament is getting on my tits quite a bit. The Old Testament as I read it seems to arise out of an entirely different view of what the Godhead is like, to the one Jesus talks of. Lots of vengefulness and retributive punishment. It is the interventionist view of God at its very cruelest - Do as I say, or I'll get extremely cross and throw things about.  I don't buy into the whole concept of an interventionist God. It creates so many inconsistencies that they eventually rob it of any credibility. Any conception with that many gaping holes in it, cannot be left standing as correct surely?

Whether one believes in the miracles or not, you have to hand it to Jesus they are a great way to promote and get yourself noticed. They certainly pulled in the crowds to hear his message. That's a bit cynical I know, sorry! But I've seen far too many American evangelists 'performing miracles' to not see it as anything other than emotionally manipulative. Looked at another way, I wonder how literal one can be in interpreting the miraculous events. There role could be more symbolic. So, yeah, I have difficulty taking the recounting of miracles as actual events. If you do see them as living miracles, you have to then see Jesus as a really special person, or a very skilled magician, or a false prophet in league with Satan, not God. So far, let's say, I'm a bit suspicious of them all.

But then I encounter chapters like when Jesus sending out his disciples to spread his message. Having trained them in how to heal, and what to do and not do, where to go and not go, what to say and not to say. Basically giving them advice on how to handle ministry, how to deal with opposition and speaking in public. This struck me quite powerfully as a very real sounding account of an actual event. If it all goes down badly guys, just do a runner. I now understand why Christianity is so keen on proselytising, Jesus encouraged it first.

He sent them out literally to be his proxies. It's not recounted in Matthew's gospel, how he trained them in healing, raising the dead etc. How that was conveyed and accomplished is left unwritten. Though when they fall short in their mission, he makes it clear its down to their lack of faith in him. Jesus personality comes across as being a whole lot sterner and uncompromising, not to mention wilder, anarchic and unconventional than any 'meek and mild' version that was painted to us as children.Though I guess you wouldn't want to scare the poor dears rigid at the age of six.

There is a vein running through Matthew's gospel of 'end of times', an apocalyptic urgency to get on and do this now, before it all goes to shit, that echoes some of our own present day zeitgeist. Undoubtedly Israel at the time being under Roman occupation and hence unfree, had led to many futile rebellions and figures claiming to be the longed for liberating Messiah. Jesus was just one more. So its probably unsurprising there are no corroborating accounts from the time, other than the New Testament itself, of Jesus's ministry and crucifixion. You have to go a hundred years after the time of Christ to Tacitus, who gives some withering confirmation of the facts surrounding Jesus's death from a Roman perspective.

The details of the period, places and people, Roman leadership etc do all tally. And its also clear that Jesus's ministry initially stayed below the Roman radar. His focus was primarily on speaking to, and meeting, the needs of the home crowd. And his entire ministry from start to finish was barely three years long. Why would anyone else take note of it? So far as the Romans were concerned Jesus was a pain, but also an insignificant flash in the pan, quickly dealt with.

The opposition baddies, The Pharisees, constantly try to wrong foot Jesus. Questioning why he allowed his disciples to disobey Jewish practice, or why Jesus performed acts of healing on the Sabbath. I always thought The Pharisees were the Temple Elders, but no, they are just an ultra traditional rival evangelical group, very religious hardliners, who supported the military overthrow of the Roman backed leadership. In many ways The Pharisees are the Christian equivalent of The Brahmins in Buddhist discourses, who always come off the worst in any conversation with the Buddha. The Pharisees are the po-faced stooges that Jesus's teaching shows up.

Jesus was apparently adept at expanding a few loaves and fishes to feed thousands. Which is a very good way to do improvised catering when more turn up than you expect to an event. Its such an odd thing to be miraculous over, making food go further. Though you can bet there was an Old Testament prophecy somewhere being fulfilled - And low they will verily stuff themselves with his bounty.

NEXT TIME
Gospel of Matthew - Part Two.