Having finished Umberto Eco`s excellent Baudolino, I began reading Paul Auster`s most recent novel, The Book of Illusions....It was a most pleasant surprise, Paul Auster has become established as a storyteller of brilliance..the tabloids have been full of praise..I was becoming suspicious, was this "hype". I have to admit I waited to pick up this book until it had hit the paperback format....
David Zimmer, Professor of Litterature at Vermont College, age 39, enters into the most deciding crisis of his life. His anchor of identity and confidence, belief is unrooted as his family plummets down from the sky in a planecrash. Only memories, too confounding and painful, remains... by a coincidence, he discovers the work of Hector Mann, a struggling late 1920`s silent movie director/actor - and the comic and dramatic universe of his films. As a work of consolation and obsession, Zimmer begins to track down the director`s lost movies and writes a book about them....a decision not without consequences.
The book has style, a well defined personae dramatis and the eloquence and timing that Paul Auster is famous for.. It gave back a lot for the little time and effort I invested in reading it.
The Gospel of Mary of Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle
by Karen L. King
Karen L.King, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard Divinity School - have contributed in the field of Gnostic studies especially as it pertains to the role of women, feminity and gender symbolism with her - Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism . It is only natural that, following the "lead" of Jean-Yves LeLoup`s The Gospel of Mary Magdalene , she takes on this cryptic writing from the earliest Gnostic Christian traditions. You can find one of the earlier translations of the Gospel of Mary in the Gnostic Society Virtual Library... Anyways, Im sure I will pick up both her new book, which is the most recent - and Jean Yves LeLoup`s, which is in the bookshelf at the Bruchion Centre (our Chapel).
At a significant stage in my life, I quite believe I had the perspective that this life is so arbitrary that it has no interior value. My experiences coincided with what were popularly being interpreted of the Cathar Gospel "Hell is not some other place, some other time ; Hell is the world now! ".
In my poetic ramblings at that time I used to call existence in the world a sickness tiring out the intellect, draining out the last resides
of soul. Today, if I turn on the radio, at some time in the day, Black Eyed Peas "Where is the Love?" will inevitably be playing...not thats a nice song full of hopeful desperation, perhaps more in keeping with our times - when I awoke with these visions of the world, a dark harrowed place, at least Norwegian culture were divided into two camps completely disinterested in eachother and working at cross purpouses - lets say I thought of myself as participant in "the other camp" - listened to Punk Rock, read anarchist classics, joined angry demonstrations against the "establishment" - all the while thinking
no justice could ever grace the "world" and only luck and coincidence would ever secure anything of the kind for myself.
I agreed with the catchphrase at the beginning of "Bullet with Butterfly wings" by Smashing Pumpkins:
The world is a vampire!. The topic, which is insiduous in "post-modern" culture - I only have to say the word "Matrix" and only the most detached and uninterested "initiate", that is to say, viewer of that
cinematic experience, will not get what I mean.
Im wondering if more people, especially the young and impressionable, while keeping it a secret, wakes up with a scream, in a cold sweat, all tangled up in their bedsheets... drawing back the curtains, not to be entirely comforted... I was, but perhaps it was because I had an "overactive imagination", perhaps also, if you are twelve in 1984 you are destined to have your ears propped full of dystopian rants and the screeching moral anxiety of a generation that did not push over the "Status
Quo", but joined it, the 68`ers, now in their late 30`s and with a serious ideological hangover..
Now our culture has elevated shallowness,superficiality,so-called irony and decadence to the position equal to any
other behaviour and expression of our humanity and our civilization
Jim Jones was nothing, if not an idealist. Now youre worried I am going to glorify the man and what he did - or made others do. But, while I suppose you shouldnt care, wouldnt care - the story told by the
tabloids arent exactly true, a lot of generalizations and ignorant banter doubtless is justified when speaking of infamy which is undisputeable. Let`s say that someone as supposedly detached as Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple thought of themselves as, spoke of themselves as - the Pastor,
or rather "father", the Patriarch -would never allow what happened to begin to happen, it was a process and thats what scares all of us well-established,sane,analytical brainboxes looking at the photos circulating
today. I wouldnt have mentioned it in my blog if it hadnt been for the disgraceful way a tragedy is being dragged in front of us because someone thinks it is interesting to give whatever he dislikes a kick. I dislike Media as the animal it is, I despise it - not individual papers, not individual television companies, not the radios, the corporate tabloid mill, the commercial and private Internet.. but what, bunched up like a fist, the Media is, in the experience of one soul. I watched the Gulf War with the infrared, night-goggled
vision of an "innocent assassin", some young man, like the pilots of Enola Gay, just flicking a switch, following orders... 30 years after Stanley Kubrick`s Doctor Strangelove!...If I resented, felt strongly against,
despised,loathed, wished the demise of one Iraqi president, and partied with the ranting lunatic in Washington - I could subsconsciously slip my hand in, and support the killing hand.. so easy, like a computer game, like
pretending -like crashing toy tanks against eachother in the sandbox.
There`s no doubt in my mind that the right temperature for ignition, as far as the massacre at Waco,Texas - were supplied by the national Media,
the Media of course, is innocent by definition - even propganda does not draw the killing blade against people, it puts images in front of the eyes, and voices inside the heads - that does these terrible things.
Im saying these things because these brown eyes saw the world, when the curtains were drawn apart and
daylight could come in - when the demigod in the livingroom, whether radio or television doesnt matter - droned on, when the inkblots of newspaper headlines could be visible.. much in the same manner as Jim Jones did. The world werent significantly different in terms of Zeitgeist, we lived in the same century,
the west were the west, when I think of it, despite a suspiciously communist friendly regime plodded along and created good little socialist citizens in Norway - it was much the same as some suburbian Texas or California or wherever at that time.. I am not sure how it is with everyone else, but I am desperately trying not to become a product of my own envoirment - in my view you have lost everything if you allow that to happen, as a sociologist concession to the fact of criminal behaviour, perhaps its barely workable, but only the most defeated will resort to it on their own behalf. From what I see from the CIA tapes and other materials published in the wake of what ensued, which actually originated either from Jim Jones himself or from Jonestown - there are quite in evidence that he and the whole demographic he associated and which drew his audience, his supporters, his family - were worried about what would happen if a war broke out which no one could stop, which would keep on escalating, he was worrying what would become of humanity, of the children - of our world, if a nuclear war was unleashed between the two superpowers.
Jim Jones was "unamerican", he was not an ordinary patriot, and with regard to fundamentalism, if you bother to read up about what it is, and consider that we are dealing here with Christian theology, you`ll see he was not a fundamentalist - I am saying this because he said he believed that America would drop the bomb on communist China or Soviet because America
could and would profit, probably just briefly, from the carnage; which is a political statement, his symphaties for the prophesied victims of such an action did not make things better. He quit talking about the Bible, God and Jesus
- he went over the top and out of some strange whim began to speak about Principles and Divine Socialism, of how real justice, real freedom and real salvation only could be the product of people`s efforts and hard work...
This is what his moral supporters in the 1960`s heard, this was what he was saying - while not as extreme at the time, and in a proper evangelical christian vocabulary, at the very beginning of the congregation which became
the Peoples Temple. People denigrated and pestered over their early symphathy for Jim Jones included Martin Luther King Jr., none of them would ever agree with the extremist, radicalist, defeatist action done on
the "White day" (they planned a "white" or "dark" - lik Elijah Mohammed, Malcolm X`s former guru, Jones thought that the english language and its definitions attaching to "black" and "white" were racist and furthered
racist thinking, as a measure against this he shared his enthused conviction that God was Black, probably also a Woman, when you think about it - or why just one woman or one man... and so forth) - that day was about how a dream
had died in one person,upon whom "everyone" relied and who the collective would not allow to be questioned, Jim Jones, as we perhaps say it in the vernacular, had gone over the top and become insane, mad, crazy..
as a consequence of the extreme violence, not merely physical - but psychological, unfortunately, the Media has had to make a cartoon character out of him, and by consequence, his victims.. the Media does not allow
these to have choices, invidiuals lives, personalities... and the priorities necessary. Media exaggerates the power of influence of one person to vindicate the "innocent", which is any body laying around dead when the
smoke has settled..
All over the world a very little body of human beings will have remembered the horror, the violation which this "white day" of November 19th 1978 in Jonestown represented. To the immediate family (913 chiefly Americans died) and survivors of this "utopian" "socialist"
"experiment" in the jungles of French Guyana it is still a heavy day, a difficult day, a day unreconciled.
Apropos - you can find A brief CNN interview with Laura Johnston Kohl, Jonestown survivor -
http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/West/11/17/cnna.kohl/index.html
On the occasion of the 25 years of attempted healing after "event Jonestown" - when media pissed all over itself as if there hadnt been a World War 1, World War 2, Holocaust, Hiroshima Bomb, Stalag death camps, Vietnam, Cambodia and so forth...
This really should be under a miscellaneous header..but it`s okay.
Yesterday I finished reading Umberto Eco`s new novel Baudolino.
I am very satisfied, it was well worth the time and effort - while I suspect quite a few of us will be surprised reading the book through a second time, as certainly were the case with his epic The Name of the Rose - when details, subplots,symbols,characters,coincidences will begin to form new coherent patterns - it read like a "tall tale" , a tradition Eco does homage in his story of young Baudolino`s coincidential entry into capital letter "H" - History...
From a squalid,poor background as the surviving son of his farming parents in rural Fraschetta - his qualities as a fantast, a "liar" with qualities of imagination and fervour unparalleled by your common con-artists, impresses a passing red-haired, red-bearded German Knight, who just happens to be Frederick the IInd, nicknamed "Barbarossa" (red-beard) - thus Baudolino became the adopted son of what would become the first Holy Roman Emperor. Eco has Baudolino following on the campaigns of his "father", and have him studying in Paris, and introducing the idea of intellectual freedom and self-sovereignty in the universities(?).. whiling the time as students would, only a fraction of daylight spent in the intense quest for erudition - Baudolino plots for the advantage of his father, Frederick II. This is where the story speeds up and grows... Byzantine.. in intrigues..
While not desiring to give any more away.. there are some ingredients which perhaps isnt too obvious from the blurbs and reviews, but which are quite interesting to the type of people I associate and correspond with.. these are, in no particular order:
Item A. Prester John, or the Presbyter John - or at least the rumour, myth and legend which follows him - plays a significant role in the story as it progresses..
An article in the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912 informs us that the first reference to one John, Priest and King, of India - appeared in the Chronicle of one Bishop Otto of Freising(1112-1158). Of this particular work, the same source informs us that:
"The "Chronicle", dedicated to the cleric Isingrim (perhaps Abbot of Ottobeuren), is a universal history in eight books based in the main on the great medieval chronicles, especially on Ekkehard, but also on the church histories of Rufinus and Orosius. Otto's work, however, is by no means a chronicle in the sense of its predecessors. He himself did not call it a chronicle, but gave it the title "De duabus civitatibus", since, as he asserted, he did not wish merely to enumerate the different events but to combine, as in a tragedy, a picture of the evil which abounded in his time.For this purpose he adheres closely to St. Augustine's teaching of two states, especially as elaborated in the "De Civitate Dei", though he also used the ideas of Orosius concerning the misery of the world. Although the doctrine of the two states as it appears in Otto's historical work can be variously interpreted, he undoubtedly wished to represent the conflict between the civitas Dei (City of God) and the civitas diaboli (City of the Devil), between the children of God and the cives Babylonić mundique amatores (citizens of Babylon and lovers of the world)."
Otto of Freising`s life ended before he could complete his second great work, while having time enough to be applauded and lauded for his accomplishment of the Chronica.. more from the Catholic Encyclopedia:
"Otto began his second historical work, "Gesta Friderici", almost ten years after the completion of his "Chronicle". But he could not finish it, and at his death entrusted the continuation of it to his chaplain Rahewin."
Bishop Otto plays a part in the story of Baudolino, in fact, Baudolino learns significant lessons from Otto`s pious, yet pragmatic approach to truth, especially the Historical. Like the Doctor of Gonzo, Dr.Hunter S.Thompson, Baudolino realises that with History, as for Dr.Thompson for Journalism, there are much less satisfaction from sitting in a deck chair observing and reporting events as they randomly flit by, than intevening and making things happen in a proper and appropriate manner... which is to say, according to his designs and desires. All that being said, no - Baudolino is not a Fear and Loathing in the Second Crusade..if Eco set his wits to it, im sure that he could have tumbled out something like that, but why on earth should he?
Trailing back to the famous Priest-King John. Kerala is known as the "Christian state" - situated in the West of India, facing its coast faces the Arabic sea, small sailing boats with goods make the journey from Oman to the Kerala coast on a weekly basis, even today... Christian communities in India were reported on already in the mid 2nd century, and the tales of the Oriental Christian churches report that St.Thomas the Apostle (see Herbert Christian Merillat`s The Gnostic Apostle Thomas to find out where he fits in with the Gnostic traditions, especially the Syrian) were supposed to have been sold by Jesus to a merchant so that he would make the missionary journey to the heathens of India, of which the Acts of Thomas is a beautiful monument.
The chief Apostolic succession of the modern Gnostic Churches originate from the Malabar autocephalous Catholic community of the 19th century which had roots in the fertile soil of the Thomas Christian,Syrian Orthodox (Jacobite) and Nestorian traditions present from ancient times in India, only incidentally informed by the 16th century portuguese Roman Catholic missions to India which tagged along with the East Asian Company and their colonialist military occupation.
The Medieval Sourcebook online, an excellent resource - reproduces an english translation (by James Brundige) of the significant portion on Prester John in his Chronica - were we can find the following:
"We also saw there at that time [Dec 1145] the aforesaid Bishop of Jabala in Syria.... He said, indeed, that not many years since, one John, a king and priest living in the Far East, beyond Persia and Armenia, and who, with his people, is a Christian, but a Nestorian, had warred upon the socalled Samiards, the brother kings of the Medes and Persians. John also attacked Ebactanus . I . the capital of their kingdom. When the aforesaid kings advanced against him with a force of Persians, Medes, and Assyrians, a threeday struggle ensued, since both sides were willing to die rather than to flee. At length, Prester John so he is usually called put the Persians to flight and emerged from the dreadful slaughter as victor. The Bishop said that the aforesaid John moved his army to aid the church of Jerusalem, but that when he came to the Tigris and was unable to take his army across it by any means, be turned aside to the north, where he had been informed that the stream was frozen solid during the winter. There he awaited the ice for several years, but saw none because of the temperate weather. His army lost many men on account of the weather to which they were unaccustomed and he was compelled to return home. He is said to be a descendant of the Magi of old, who are mentioned in the Gospel.He governs the same people as they did and is said to enjoy such glory and such plenty that be uses no scepter save one of emerald. Fired by the example of his forefathers, who came to adore Christ in the manger, he proposed to go to Jerusalem, but he was, they say, turned back for the aforementioned reason. "
In the lieu of these rumours, contributed by the Bishop of Jarbala - at a significant stage of the power struggle between the Byzantine Emperor, Manuel Comnenos, and Frederick Barbarossa, who had become the Roman Emperor at that time - which all revolved around the important pilgrim trail and the city of Jerusalem which still served as a grand symbol for the entire christianity - letters appeared, signed by the famous King, John the Priest.
CE reports: "About a hundred manuscripts of the letter to Manuel of Constantinople are still extant (with many variants), and afford an interesting insight into this exceedingly complicated fiction." Eco has Baudolino write one of those letters, in fact, he lets Baudolino discover and invent the genre.
In his letter, Baudolino makes reference to a certain artefact which would be of great use for Frederick to authenticate his authority over the Papacy....while not mentioning it by name or direct reference, it was construed to be the Gradaal,
the Holy Grail.. which leads us smoothly to
Item B.The Gradaal,also known as The Holy Grail.
In Germany Wolfram von Eschenbach, in "Parsifal" ,was the first to unite the legend of the Holy Grail with this history of Prester John.
Baudolino contributes in this fashion.. choosing original means, which turns miraculous by way of a certain mythosophical psychology necessary, I suppose, for anyone in the middle ages to survive the pressures of its zeitgeist. Prester John and the Gradaal (or Grail) are beacons of light, vehicles or receptacles, according to the person, of a hope which extends beyond the bleak horizon. In fact, in Eco`s story of Baudolino and his merry company`s journey, although irreverent in treatment, holds up - both the story - as form,activity,occupation and reality - and its object - and the objects - as receptacles of such hope, an inventive, restless hope.. a hope like some scamp running circles around the noblemen, who grown up and sane and proper, knows better.. but for knowing, bears the heavy weight of their heavy heart every day, only dreaming the scent of an exotic bloom or the taste of ....green honey.
I now realise that I had better not contribute more about Baudolino... it will be handed around to my friends... "read it", I`ll say... "it`ll do you good.".
Me and my gal got handed two tickets 5pm for a 8pm performance in the city of the (in)famous Musical Cats..."Do you want to go?" my father asked. Me and my girlfriend bandied around a bit, but do you know.. we went, and I suppose I shouldn`t say anything about it, but it was good. What did we expect except a few cheesy, but catchy tunes.. and entertainment all-around and a tiny bit over-the-top? That`s precisely what we got. So I have condescended into accepting an invitation into the glorious world of pop culture once again... usually such endeavours comes out of my own pocket, so those times are remarkably few.. OK: The dancing were breath-taking,the costumes looked good, the songs were ..catchy.. That`s all youre going to get me to admit, OK?