I suspect that having a lousy summer (weather-wise) has finally got to me - and most everyone around me.  Fortunately, our annual holiday tied in with the only two weeks of decent weather to be had and, living on the high ground in the Weald of Kent, flooding was never an issue. The whole miserable thing was tolerated on the assumption that a bad July and August usually means an Indian Summer in September.  No such luck as we have sidled now into low temperatures and gloomy skies.  

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Peter Mahoney's events once a month on a Friday night at Treadwells are already stimulating the spirit - one wishes one could say more but the whole point (in my opinion) is that it is experienced and not talked about.  Whether I will stick the course, given the dangers of my dark side infecting a rather sunny programme of work, is a moot point but the whole thing is worthwhile and that opinon is clearly shared by others.

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The business of life can be enervating.  Two businesses to run and a domestic economy with all the juggling involved ... and we don't even have to worry about having any funds in Northern Rock.  Sometimes it is harder when it is going well (as seems to be the case now), simply because time then becomes available to do all those jobs that one put off as not so important - they then catch up on you and prove to be important after all.  So, it's away from living with the fairies and back down amongst the dark elves in sorting out insurances and pensions.  I am not that sort of anal personality that gets their bourgeois rocks off by listening to the money programmes on Radio 4 and studying interest rates in the personal finance columns of the Sunday Press, but I have to accept that the job has to be done - eventually.  And eventually is becoming now.

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Book reviews now go on my Facebook Virtual Bookshop but I have to commend (as a short sharp guide) the little book on "What Do Astrologers Believe" in the Granta Series by Nicholas Campion as a sound and readable guide to this contentious area.  I noted the odd accuracy of my 'stars' in my last entry but I retain an open mind - in both directions of scepticism and acceptance.  What I am prepared to accept in all these occult arts (or sciences) is that something is going on in a space that is within the mind and maybe within matter itself where interpretation and action, will and intellect, being and becoming, operate as a grey liminality.  Things are never as truly knowable as scientists and religions of the book may like to claim.  This space may not be quite what many of its believers think it to be, but, with its shifting boundaries and symbolisms, it has been too easily dismissed as 'non-sense' by our intellectual elites, certainly in the last 350 years.  It is not 'non-sense', it is 'different-sense'.

I still hold to my view that the secrets of this unknown space will never be uncovered by conventional means. - though conventional science may push the boundaries forward to isolate the phenomena. it will create doubt that intellectual explanations are sufficient for what remains.  Scientists may say that such-and-such falls within some Darwinian, neuro-physiological or physical framework but there is going to be a point where such claims are going to be matters of faith without serious recourse to scientific method.  

What will probably be uncovered will be fragile, shifting, subjective and dependent on time rather than space - and yet expressive of a reality no less for that.  The proven impossibility of knowing anything formal about the numinous and the subjective is surely going to make the latter more interesting as its boundaries become more defined.  At a certain point, rationalism will simply cease to deliver the goods and either have to cede ground or become what it despises - a religion of faith.

Traditional faith and science-based ways of seeing have not protected us from discovering just how little control rational elites have over the course of current and future events - and how the interpretation of past events is so often contingent.  The necessity of the present is generally drawn as a backward working from a fixed point when it might be equally fruitful to make imaginative leaps into the many possibilities that might have resulted from different decisions.  Re-thinking time as possibility as well as actuality may be the most liberating development yet in the human condition, enabling decision-makers to halt their cowardly determination to act like cogs in a machine, no longer digging deeper when they are in a hole of their own making.

Tags: general news, philosophy, religion
Current Location: Tunbridge Wells
Current Mood: tired