Love Them Back

/ Tim Wakefield / Leave a comment

I thought I’d take a small break from God and Evolution and whatnot to mention my favourite TV ad of the moment. It’s for a little-known pet food brand called ‘Cesar’, named, appropriately for the Roman Emperor, although with a slight change in the spelling of the name. How proud the conqueror of the known world would be to know that this is what his name is being used for.

Anyways, Cesar, we suppose, is the name of a little dog, a Jack Russel, I think, and in the advert, this Jack Russell, who reminds the author of Greyfriars Bobby – a real dog who once stayed at the grave of his former owner for a thousand years, before the Gods took pity on him, changed his name to Cesar and named an over-priced dogfood after him.

Okay, I’m kidding, Greyfriars Bobby was a Skye Terrier, but apart from that the story is exact. Anyway, in this incredible advert, we see an old man getting himself up and ready, putting on his Sunday best, which of course includes a hideous nylon sports jacket, a too-new flat cap, some polyester trousers that have a permanent razor-sharp crease ironed in. Let’s face it, if he doesn’t look a million dollars exactly, it’s just because he’s old and, for some reason that is not yet clear, is lacking something of the feminine touch in his life – he only has a little dog with him to inform him he looks like every brainwashed old fucker in this entire country, and apparently, he’s not listening to the dog.

Anyway, he gets himself all pressed and dressed and heads out with the adorable little poochie, buying some flowers on his way somewhere. Where could he be going, this lovely harmless old codger? Flowers? Is he going to see his favourite prostitute perhaps?

It’s all very amusing and entertaining so far – we can’t help but wonder if the dog is going to get a look-in whilst this old silver fox is balling his sugar momma – A lick of the flange perhaps? – when suddenly, with a chill, we realise he’s not going to his local knocking shop at all – he’s going to a graveyard. So that’s it!

With tears in our eyes, we watch as this adorable, dapper old pensioner kneels down by a grave, and lays the just-bought bunch of flowers down with due reverence and care – under the watchful eyes of his little dog who looks like Greyfriars Bobby – it is the old man who is carefully tending the grave in this awesome re-working of the classic myth of faithful hound and deceased loved-one.

What a twist!

The advert closes with the caption ‘Love Them Back’ – referring we assume to the dog’s love for his pathetic, badly dressed master who is tending the grave of his dead significant other. We are to assume that the advert (at this, the closing point of the narrative, it is displaying a little tin of the aforementioned dogfood – Cesar) is suggesting that the best way to show love for this animal, and any animal like it, especially if you are a lonely old person who’s only highlight in life – apart, we suppose from watching endless re-runs of old films and sitcoms and the intervening adverts – is a weekly visit to a graveyard to place some flowers, the only real way to show how much you care is to buy this particular brand of stewed meat and offal for your dog.

Genius.

So moving.

I laughed, I cried, I wanked, I puked, I rolled around in my own faeces. Seriously folks, this advert had a strange effect on me. I highly recommend it!

Anyway, enough hilarity. I’m not sure exactly when I cottoned on to this, but I’d thought I’d share my impression of advertising. It recently occurred to me that the things that get advertised are the things with the highest profit margins of all.

The things that get advertised are the things with the highest profit margins of all.

Just watch and remember – it’s worth paying for the TV advertising because the profit margins are astronomical – that’s how come they can afford to advertise on telly. It tells you a whole lot about stuff when you sit and think about it.

What do you suppose the profit margin is on these little 150g trays of stewed offal? My guess is it’s pretty high. I would hearby like to declare that, contrary to the opinions expressed earlier in this post, I actually think this advert fucking stinks.

I know the people at Cesar have to make money. Everybody’s gotta make money, right? But let’s put this in perspective, Cesar is owned by Mars. They are seriously not short of a bob or two. Do they really have to pollute the ideaspace with this kind of manipulative shit? Of course, the answer is yes, Satan is making them do it as part of their deal with him for earthly wealth. In the next world, the people responsible for that advert will have to watch it over and over again, only the old man will be played by the person they loved most in the world, and the grave will be their own. Their only respite will be when they can go and work in the dogfood factories of Hell, in which the offal of the innocents of the world in cooked up in delicious gravy and sold at humongous profit to lonely old people who are still on earth.

Word.

[Questions and comments welcomed. I would like to say in advance that I am a very lazy fact-checker and I make most of this up as I go along, so please feel free to correct me, but feel also free not to judge me harshly for getting anything wrong – I am a human being and these are what’re called opinions. I have every right to them, and I have every right to change them every five minutes if I so desire.]

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What is the Right Word?

/ Tim Wakefield / Leave a comment

Well, since many of you may be starting to get a little bored with my seemingly endless God-bothering, I thought I’d head back over to the meaning of words and see if that gets us any further. The last post proved miraculously unpopular. Oh well.

So, let’s look at the humble word shall we? We all use them.

The word ‘word’ is related etymologically to the latin word for ‘word’, which is ‘verbum’. This word is preserved in English as ‘verb’, which specifically means a word that describes some kind of happening in space-time, rather than an object in space-time.

(actually, the more observant amongst you may have already noticed that Universe does not contain ‘nouns’, that is to say ‘objects’ – there is no division between anything and anything else, except in our languages)

The latin ‘verbum’, if you look it up in a latin dictionary, shares a page, a column with a load of other words that begin with the ‘verb-‘. For example:

•    verber
•    verberablilis
•    Verberatio
•    Verbereus
•    Verberare
•    Verbero

These mean, respectively:

•    Whip, scourge, thong, blow, shock
•    That deserves a beating
•    A beating
•    That deserves blows or stripes
•    To beat, scourge, chastise, torment
•    One that deserves stripes, a scoundrel

Does anyone notice a theme here? Is it any wonder that the Christianity of the Middle Ages, which bears uncanny resemblance to much modern Christianity, and unfortunately Islam too, was so obsessed with punishment and sin? What’s this got to do with Christianity? Well it’s the old Gospel of John isn’t it?

“In the Beginning was The Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God.”

Now, the Gospel of John was, we think, originally written in Greek. In the Latin Vulgate Bible, like I said, the word is verbum – the word that shares a first syllable with all those words of punishment we see above.

In Greek the word for ‘word’ is something a little different. It’s logos.

Perhaps the problem we have here is simply one of mistranslation?

What does logos mean exactly? Well, here’s something I grabbed off the net, to save me copying out from my Liddell and Scott:

 reason, the mental faculty of thinking, meditating,  reasoning, calculating 

This is just one of the meanings of logos. Another is story.

Now, my Liddell and Scott also points out that in the New Testament, the sense of logos is both Word and Reason.

It even gives the Latin equivalent of logos as ratio. This word as come down to us as an expression of a mathematical relationship, and is also present is words like rational, reason, reasonable etc. This is not dissimilar to the words we get from the Greek logos I.e. Logical, any words ending in -ology.

So, put briefly, my argument is that the New Testament argues that reasoning is divine. The logical faculty of man, the ability to deduce things is in fact the highest and most sacred thing we have, and it is not separate from the force or power that brought everything into existence in the first place.

Of course, I’m at least four parts Daoist to one part Christian, so I can’t help but think of the opening to the Dao De Ching, which I am going to paraphrase:

The Reason which can be reasoned is not the true reason.

The idea here is that there is some kind of reason for everything happening, and that reason in your life for the things you do is the most important thing you have. Crucially, however, we will never completely grasp the Ultimate Divine Reason ourselves. What that means, I reckon, is that no one is ever going to be able to wrap up the meaning of Life or the Origin of Life or whatever in some way that can be grasped by the mind of man, and taught to the masses so we can have peace on earth. That is not going to happen. Anyone who claims to be doing that is a bullshitter, and a False Prophet, IMHO.

I think a lot can be achieved, however, by teaching people how to think for themselves.

We should, in short, think for ourselves, and have our own reasons for doing what we do – this is the truest expression of the Divine Will that there can be. Those who blindly accept anything are the ‘servants of darkness’, whether they know it or not.

I think, with this interpretation of the Gospel, we can all agree that those who fudge medical trials, for example, so that Big Pharma can make more money out of poorly people are, by misusing the scientific method, and claiming to have used sound reasoning, actually the Servants of Satan in a literal as well as figurative sense.

We talk of the ‘light of reason’ with good reason. Jesus claims to be Light and Love and Life. In Chinese the ideogram denoting ‘cleverness’ is a symbol combining the ideograms of the sun and the moon. We say someone is bright, when we mean they are clever and their reasoning powers appear to be in good working order.

So, my bombshell is that the materialists and the atomists and the scientists and even the atheists are all, for my money, better candidates to be called those of the True Faith i.e. those attempting to map out reality by studying it and reasoning out the whys and wherefores of existence and refusing to fudge the results just because they don’t like them or won’t get paid for them. Those that have actual standards because they understand that their work is for the good of all are the Servants of the Lord – Angels in Labcoats.

I choose to characterise things like this because I like them that way. I prefer to think of things as an eternal interchange between light and darkness, and that those of us who love the scientific method actually love God, and that there is some kind of Natural Law in the Universe that will, ultimately reward those who think and choose and do for themselves, because that is exercising the great gift: Free Will.

So there you have it people. The etymon of Life, the Universe and Everything was mistranslated, by the Roman Church. Christianity, a doctrine of reason, sanity, of education, of personal responsibility was stolen by the crumbling Roman Empire, mistranslated and used as a doctrine of control by stressing the aspect of Divine Punishment or Torment as the root of existence.

What I contend is that it is okay to have both reason and hope, both faith and scepticism. Only have faith in the ultimate ineffability of things, in the idea that nothing, ultimately can be known completely, that there is a thing about which we will never know, and it’s on our team, and treat everything else as data to be evaluated accordingly.

As I said in a previous post, and as anyone who has regularly meditated, or danced until they forgot themselves, or been transported by a piece of Art or Music, there is a boundless Good in the world, there is Deity, and it is available to all of us, any time. Whatever it is, it will not heal all the world’s suffering until we allow it work through us, by which I mean, there is no man on the white cloud who can wave his hands and declare world peace. I’m afraid we’re all going to have to work for it, think about, try to reason it out, and for God’s sake don’t believe everything you see and hear  – work it out for yourself!

Peace brothers and sisters and may the Etymon shine bright all the days of your lives.

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Miracles Happen Every Day

/ Tim Wakefield / Leave a comment

This is an understatement.  Actually, miracles happen every moment.

It is a strange thing that modern man can become so distracted by everything that appears to be going on around him, that he simply does not notice this plain fact, and instead becomes completely obsessed with the process of his own mentation on what he perceives. His own mentation is, in fact, so out of control, that man begins to mistake it for his actual perception of what is real.

What is real is the miracle of existence, of his own existence.  This is the only thing of which he can be absolutely sure – the presence, the existence of one’s own point of view, of one’s own unique self, and yet man denies this truth, and gives this blessed reality away to the things outside of himself, giving them more significance than what is inside him – thinking himself insiginificant, and the events of the world great.

If anyone can actually stop, wait, breathe, cease mentation for a minute, or maybe two, just to contemplate two things, and do this daily, then miraculous changes might occur.

The first thing to be considered, in relaxed silence, in peace, is the physical form. Let us start with the bones. Just think of the bones. Another day he might think of the flesh, and the next of the blood, and the next of the nerves, and finally of the invisible energy network – the electromagnetic body. Think of one aspect of the physical self.

Start with the bones. He will find he knows much about bones, and that suddenly their workings will be revealed to him. Right now, every moment they are manufacturing cells by the thousand, by the million. They themselves can repair themselves, by some mechanism unknown to his rational conscious mind, but somehow absolutely second nature to some part of him – the body he so carelessly inhabits.

The flesh is no less miraculous. He will find he has grown muscles, and skin, that his bones are clothed in a garment finer than the finest cloth, and that this garment lives and responds to his every command.

In the blood he will see a network whose complexity rivals a full grown oak, or an entire globe’s worth of roads and rivers and tributaries. And to think it was there all along, and he never even thought of it, because he was too busy watching the news, or reading the paper, commuting, working for the elusive dollar.

Each of these things in turn, when considered in relaxed silence, will yield to man a whole host of knowledge, true knowledge, knowledge that is felt and known, not just thought to be known. The bones will tell him amazing things about who he really is,  as will the flesh, and the blood and so on.

Only a minute, two minutes a day and he will begin to see, begin to know himself in a way that he never believed possible. Who can’t find time for that?

The second part of the mediation is perhaps more important, since he is not simply trying to elevate his powers of perception and bodily control to the level of the purely physical, man is trying to move beyond that, to the realm of spirit. The second part of the mediation will just be the opening of the great and spiritual heart – the invisible counterpart to the real heart. It is located between his actual heart and the solar plexus.

He will know when he has found it, because all thoughts will have ceased, and he will begin to perceive directly what it is that he is. As he identifies his great and spiritual heart with the centre of the Universe, of the Multiverse, and knows that the same impartial force that moves the galaxies also moves the atoms in his body, just as his physical heart mediates and controls all the functions of his body, moves his blood, moves him.

He will know the little thing he thought of as self, which was so worried and concerned about the things it thought it perceived, the things that were not of its abiility to control or affect, is an illusion. He will know another self, a timeless self that inhabits the wondrous temple of his own form, and he will feel all the better for it.

He will know then, without the shadow of doubt, that life, his life, this moment, every moment, every second is a miracle the proportions of which beggar the rational mind.

Just sayin’. 🙂

 

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War and the Promise of Peace

/ Tim Wakefield / Leave a comment

The choice of title for my blog post comes from two sources. One, a friend recently compared me, I think favourably, to Tolstoy, inasmuch as he noted that an email to me might lead to War and Peace in return.  I did the world a favour once upon a time and taught myself how to touch type, and woe betide anyone who expects to get away with meaningless or useless verbiage in correspondence with me. I know I’m not perfect, but I demand high standards of myself and I don’t mind demanding them of others.  I’ll admit my prose does tend to run on a little. 😉

That said, I was also reminded, as a result,  of a lovely little play by Tolstoy called Ivan the Fool, which I think had a great influence on me growing up. I studied it in my fourth year at senior school.  I did not know it at the time, but this little tale, which has been called a folk tale and a fairy story, has some pretty heavy duty politics in it, albeit in a nice simple form.

Looking it up today I found that this piece gives away some of Tolstoy’s views as a Christian Anarchist. Religion-wise, I think I’ve found my brand. I am currently reading Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov, and I think a similar thing is coming through in this book, although I have not yet finished it. I’ll keep you posted. I’m more syncretic than your average Christian though, and probably rather more conservative than your average anarchist.

The basic idea seems to be that there is some kind of Natural Law at work in the Universe, and that it is somehow self-regulating, self-aware, and perhaps most importantly, holy.  Following from this, we get the notion that Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohammed, Elijah, Moses, Taliesin, and indeed all the saints, heroes the prophets have done no more than helped to elucidate this Natural Law. This, I think is where we start heading towards this idea of Christian Anarchism that comes through in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

People wonder why I am so obsessed with Darwin and the concept of Evolution, and the answer is that I currently believe that although Darwin’s theory has much to recommend it, it has been seized by the materialists and used to destroy everything that was once holy. The baby has been thrown out with the bathwater, and it was the Christ-child! I wouldn’t mind, but Darwin himself admits in his letters that he doesn’t think his theory is incompatible with religion, and later he says that he really wouldn’t like to comment because he hasn’t given the matter much thought anyway. Thanks Chuck, you’ve been a great help there.

Let us compare that with what Alfred Russell Wallace, the fellow who did most of Darwin’s legwork, and who, according to some, came up with the  idea first (Erasmus Darwin has a pretty good claim too as it happens).

After many years considering Darwin’s work in detail and adding to it and producing field evidence to support it, Wallace’s final chapter of “Darwinism”, “Darwinism Applied to Man” is worthy of note in this context. He has a couple of  objections to Darwin’s Theory, which he otherwise wholeheartedly supports. One of them is to do with human culture. Of maths he says:

“We conclude, then, that the present gigantic development of the mathematical faculty is wholly unexplained by the theory of natural selection, and must be due to some altogether distinct cause.” (my emphasis)

Excerpt From: Alfred Russel Wallace. “Darwinism (1889).” Project Gutenberg

His passage on Art betrays the hideous curse of Darwinism, clear even in an enlightened man like Wallace:

“The glorious art of Greece did not prevent the nation from falling under the sway of the less advanced Roman; while we ourselves, among whom art was the latest to arise, have taken the lead in the colonisation of the world, thus proving our mixed race to be the fittest to survive.” – Ouch! (emphasis added)

Excerpt From: Alfred Russel Wallace. “Darwinism (1889).” iBooks.

He’s a great man, this Wallace, but I think terribly naive. His treatments of both art and mathematics singularly fail to mention the Egyptians, and despite his mention of the Chaldeans in another book, he does not remotely grasp that whole problem of civilisation; namely that it seems to suddenly spring into existence with an already established knowledge of the movements of the heavenly bodies, such as is only possible to amass over prolonged observation. However, his logic is otherwise sound, so let’s continue to follow it.

(I just thought I’d point out the hideous nonsense that crept into European thinking through universal acceptance of Darwin’s creed i.e. the idea that one race is proven more worthy of survival if it can beat the shit out of another. Fuck Peace man. Forget Jesus. Forget love thine enemy. Kill him and prove yourself fittest. God is dead! And he never existed anyway!)

Now then, where was I? Oh yes. Wallace. He identifies music and art and humour as being faculties peculiar to humankind, bearing no relation to what has gone before from study of the so-called ‘savage’ races. He begins to draw some remarkable conclusions:

“The special faculties we have been discussing clearly point to the existence in man of something which he has not derived from his animal progenitors—something which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive development under favourable conditions. ”

Excerpt From: Alfred Russel Wallace. “Darwinism (1889).” iBooks.

In conclusion he points at three distinct stages in the development of Life as we know it that are simply not explained by the theory of natural selection, and this assessment, made over a hundred years ago by Wallace, is as true now as it was then, if not more so, since the Evolutionary Theoriest now have had a lot more time and have inordinately greater resources at their disposal than in his day. The three stages are these:

1. The transition from inorganic to organic – the point at which the first cell came into being, from the chemical soup, or the primordial soup as it was when I was taught it. You know, those puddles in the rock pools on the primordial earth where somehow atoms decided to form up into these outrageously complicated molecules and then further organise into cellular organisms.

2. The arrival of consciousness, or individuality. He feels that it is preposterous that mere complexity of form could give rise to something so odd, so unprecedented as the individual ego that characterises each member of the animal kingdom, even the tiny ones.

3. The development of the higher faculties in man. His noblest and most characteristic facilities.

Alfred Wallace, Darwin’s champion, concludes, and I love him for this, that these three otherwise inexplicable leaps up the evolutionary ladder point clearly to another, invisible dimension of influence, a spiritual one.

“…a change in essential nature (due, probably, to causes of a higher order than those of the material universe) took place at the several stages of progress which I have indicated; a change which may be none the less real because absolutely imperceptible at its point of origin, as is the change that takes place in the curve in which a body is moving when the application of some new force causes the curve to be slightly altered.”

Excerpt From: Alfred Russel Wallace. “Darwinism (1889).” iBooks.

In conclusion, Wallace has this to say:

“We thus find that the Darwinian theory, even when carried out to its extreme logical conclusion, not only does not oppose, but lends a decided support to, a belief in the spiritual nature of man. It shows us how man’s body may have been developed from that of a lower animal form under the law of natural selection; but it also teaches us that we possess intellectual and moral faculties which could not have been so developed, but must have had another origin; and for this origin we can only find an adequate cause in the unseen universe of Spirit.”

Excerpt From: Alfred Russel Wallace. “Darwinism (1889).” iBooks.

So, when George Benard Shaw said of Samuel Butler (one of Darwin’s forgotten opponents) that he was the only Englishman who understood what we were taking on when we so wholly accepted Darwinism, I think he may have had a point. Wallace, bless him, apparently has no clue as to what exactly had happened to European thought. He still apparently believes when writing this that he can change things with this last little chapter of his pointing out that mankind’s most precious gifts, and the most wonderful things about humanity and life in general simply cannot be explained by Darwin’s theory. He was pissing in the wind, evidently, since this is decidedly not the view that has been taken on by mainstream science, and Wallace’s words on this subject are nowhere quoted in our schools.

Even Bill Bailey, Wallace’s latter day champion is more interested in getting Wallace acknowledged for ‘Darwinism’ than for examining what Wallace really thought of Darwin’s theory i.e. that it pointed to a spiritual basis for reality, for the mind-before-matter hypothesis that it was originally used to dismantle. I will have to check this, but that is my superficial impression anyway. (Apolologies Bill if you are reading this and fuming because you are an idealist and not a materialist after all. If you are reading this then please get in contact, I’ve another bone to pick with you over the same topic I deal with here )

I’m going to leave it there for the moment. I haven’t quite got round to explaining the title of the blog, except the more perceptive amongst you might be beginning to guess where I am headed with all this. Bluntly, there is no justification for War anymore, not even Natural Selection, and Peace may yet be possible as the latest evolutionary mutation of consciousness, but more on that later.

Until next time…

Take care and don’t forget to eat your Etymon.

 

 

 

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The Etymon

/ Tim Wakefield / 1 Comment

Okay, so I thought I’d put up a little post about the name of this blog.  The Etymon, in case you didn’t know, means the true meaning of a word. We get the more commonly used etymology from this word. Now, despite being a Greek scholar, once upon a time, I had never heard this word, never knowingly heard it spoken by another human being, until I found it by myself by a curious little word experiment a couple of years ago.

I was journalling in my journal one evening, and I noticed the word “Text’. It occurred to me that the word “Text” carries within it the seed of another word, or another few words in fact. Like extend or extenuating. The last three letters of the word could be the beginning of another word. Aha, thinks I, this could be fun. So, I took Texture as my start, (probably after the name of the news feed in Alan Moore‘s Promethea).  Here’s how it went after that:

Text

Texture

Urethane

Anecdote

O text   (We are back to the beginning – “O” can be used in Greek as a definite article or in English poetically)

Extend

Endorse

Dorsal (around this point I decided that it was the sound that was important, rather than the extact spelling)

Salinity

Nitty-Gritty

Teleological

Calories

Reasons

Onset

Etcetera

Erasure

Surety

Etymon

I wasn’t sure if Etymon was a word. Imagine my surprise when the dictionary turned up this definition:

Etymon (n) – the true meaning of a word; an original root; the genuine or literal sense of a word (rare) – pl. etyma or etymons.

Wow.

As I wrote in my journal at the time:

“This is an excellent example of something. There is a phenomenon of some kind at work here. As I was writing the prose at the top of the page, I began to become aware of the possibilities, the endless permutations, and sensed the existence of poetic forms, undiscovered idioms jostling in the cosmic flux. I became disillusioned with what I was writing, feeling that there was more power in words than I was harnessing. I thought not of poems, but of the possibility of poems……”

“Ask and ye shall receive, seek and ye shall find, knock and it it will be opened to you…” – Matthew 7:7

This word has proven to be something like a key to a door that is not exactly visible, a door to a realm of knowledge, shall we say. That is a nice metaphor, and perhaps it is something more than that, something literal rather than figurative, since with this word I have found things that have made my toes curl. I have even named my Church after it – The Church of the Etymon. This is my own quasi-religious organisation that values meaning above all things, not unlike the humanist view espoused here by Stephen Fry:

I’m basically down with this, except that I don’t like it when someone starts talking authoritatively about what other people do or not not think. I, for one, do not know if there is a divine plan, but I quite like the idea that there might be one. I agree that the Universe is a natural phenomenon, but I really don’t see how anyone can say for certain that there is no design behind it. I mean, in the materialised world there are plenty of things that are designed. Buildings for example. According to Fry, humanists apparently believe that although there may be such things as designed objects, there is no design behind the creatures that designed these designs. Or that human design is somehow distinct from Divine design. I say design is design.

“I saw design, and it opened up my eyes, I saw design.” – Ace of Bass

Personally, I think that this whole video, and the others in this series are trapped in the Aristotelian either/or world, and also in the world of linear time, in which designing somehow must happen beforehand and that a God, in a religious definition, is a pre-existent being. Another video – this one – seems to be under the impression that the people who believe in an invisible world are necessarily distinct from those who use the scientific method.  This is quite simply a False Opposition, or to put it another way, a steaming pile of horseshit.

The Faithful of Islam laid the entire basis for modern mathematic and scientific reasoning. Newton was a practicing alchemist,or so I hear, and Mendelev came up with the periodic table in a dream. Jesus Christ and all the Saints, give me strength!

Let’s try and scientifically repeat Mendelev’s dream shall we? FFS. Get a grip Stephen. The most rigorous scientist I have ever read was Aleister Crowley, and he may have been the best poet too. Believe me, he’s bloody ruthless, particularly with himself and his own subjective judgements. Crowley warns about confusing subjective reality with objective reality, but he does not deny the validity of subjective reasoning, or the usefulness of objective conclusions.

English: Aleister Crowley's unicursal hexagram.

English: Aleister Crowley’s unicursal hexagram. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am coming round to the idea that God was not here first, there is no first, or second or last, there is just now, and God is here and now and just as real as we are. (As Stephen so rightly says, the time to be happy is now.)

God, in fact, is just another way of defining reality (or so it seems to me). As I have discovered on more than one occasion,

“All roads lead to God, because God is the only place there is.” – Tim Wakefield

Perhaps that is just some kind of weird idiosyncracy of my particular life. Who knows? Perhaps I have a natural predispostion towards the ineffable.

I look around and alls I see is miracles,

miracles and angels,

lit by the light of meaning,

the warm glow of the Etymon.

Peace unto you, brothers and sisters.

 

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Festival Express

/ Tim Wakefield / Leave a comment

Red Crystal Dragon – sometime in 2013

In case you didn’t know, The Festival Express was a private train that was hired to take some of the brightest and best musicians of the period across the wilds of Canada to play a series of concerts. The year was 1970. The sixties was dead, it died in a pool of blood in a mansion in Laurel Canyon, and then was taken out to Altamont and dragged behind a motorbike round the old speedway track until there was nothing left but streak of hideous gore on the asphalt….. but not everyone had quite realised yet.

Most of the people riding this train certainly hadn’t quite cottoned on, but since at least two of the performers on this video were dead within the year (as was Hendrix), I think this video represents something of a high-watermark before the whole hippie dream collapsed for good and all under its own uncertain weight.

I am fascinated by the idea of this, since the train was packed with musical instruments so that the musicians could jam with each other whilst they were wiling away the hours and days between shows. Canada is a big place.

There are a number of strange things about this event, or series of events. One of these is that the documentary film about the journey was only made in around the turn of the century, some thirty years after all the footage was taken, and if you believe the story told by those who ended up making the film, no one really knows the reason for this delay.

The film canisters and the sound reels just kind of turned up one day in someone’s garage, having been gathering dust since whenever they were put there for whatever reason.

Now, I know that the sixties and the movement that went along with it got totally de-railed in the seventies, for reasons that are too numerous to go into here, so I suppose I can believe that for one reason or another, after a few years at least, no one really gave a shit about this film, but since the DVD, when it was eventually released gave me my first glimpse and indeed the first glimpse almost anyone outside of the good ol’ US of A had had of Delaney Bramlett in many, many years, I have cause to wonder if there were other forces at work.

When you watch the film it really isn’t very clear at all which one Delaney Bramlett is. Even after all these years, for some reason, they are being deliberately obscured. Is this the dreaded Copyright again? Virtually every decent musician in the present epoch has been shafted by Copyright laws, particularly the really good ones.  If that doesn’t happen then their manager or accountant tends to fuck them up the arse instead and steal all their money. Sad but true.

The names Delaney and Bonnie come up in the opening credits to Festival Express, but you don’t see Delaney and Bonnie on screen when they do, even though they were on the train and one of the headline acts for the tour. There is no actual footage of any of their shows in the film itself or in the extras, despite their being plenty of The Band, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Buddy Guy, Ian and Sylvia and The Great Specked Bird, and even Mashamakan, if anyone outside of Canada actually remembers those guys.

Ken Gradney, who went on to play bass with Little Feat, but who was in the “Friends” (as Delaney and Bonnie’s band were known), is actually interviewed in the film, but underneath his name, he is just given the title “Musician”, whereas everyone else who is playing on the tour and interviewed has the name of the group they were playing with included.

You see a little footage of D&B (on Youtube it starts around 2.54), but that is it.

What the fuck is going on here? To this day, virtually no one I speak to has heard of Delaney Bramlett, despite him being perhaps the most interesting and arguably the most all-round talented musician to have come out of the whole rock’n’roll revolution. I still wonder about this, and I have much more to say about it, but for now, I’m going to wait until I actually have time to write a blog post without seriously interrupting my sleep.

Anyway, here is the Youtube link. Watch it while you can, or better yet, buy it, it’s phenomenal stuff.  Like I said, what interests me is what they don’t show, and I simply cannot wait to get my hands on the footage of D&B from this tour, which is out there somewhere. For reasons unknown, it is still being sat on.

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Copyright Hilarity

/ Tim Wakefield / 2 Comments

Okay, I’ve just remembered something I’ve been meaning to blog for a while. Here goes.

I would like to see the BBC (or someone!) held to account for something which I consider to be a crime against humanity. I am possibly exaggerating here, but I mean to convey how seriously I take this issue -I think I could probably argue that it is a crime, and I’m going to have a go. It’s all to do with this monster we have created called Copyright.

Now, thanks to the bizarre nature of the music industry, which, let’s face it, is basically a gigantic machine designed to rob the fuck out of artists and musicians and people in general, there is something called a publishing deal, which the vast majority of artists have to sign if they want anyone to hear their music. It is the deal with the devil. It means their music will get ‘out there’ and they’ll get paid, but it means that they no longer own the rights to that music.

The publishing company has the right to sell the music wherever and whenever it wants under whatever terms. Now, music is interesting, because unlike, say, a painting, it can be effectively reproduced infinitely and each copy is as good as the original. Also, to the untrained ear, a little snippet of music from a masterpiece can go completely unnoticeed and can even be thought of to belong to someone else.

Let me give you a pertinent example. Once upon a time in the UK there was a program called Film 93. Now, the year before it was called Film 92 and the year after Film 94, and it had been running since 1971. The theme music was perhaps the best bit of the show and like many BBC programmes that I grew up with (I was born in 1978), it was like part of the furniture – familiar, comforting, real. It was the BBC!

Now, it wasn’t until many years later that I first heard Nina Simone singing a version of this song. It’s actually called “I Wish I Knew (How it Feels to be Free)”. It’s by an American Jazz pianist called Billy Taylor. He wrote it for his daughter.

It’s a gospel song. It’s a spiritual song. In Billy Taylor’s own words, this was the best version he did because ‘it’s very spiritual’. Note the word “spiritual” rather than, say, “materialistic”, or “it reminds me of a film program that I would like the BBC to make”.

Okay, so that’s example 1. Another example is for the BBC program Top Gear. The tune that the BBC picked for this one is called Jessica.

Coincidentally, the author of this song, Dickie Betts, also wrote this song for his daughter.

Now, the bottom line is that neither of these men may have much of a complaint about the fact that these songs of theirs were picked up by the BBC and used as theme tunes for some of their shows – they probably made a bob or two out of it, but I think there is a scandal here. It’s just a personal opinion, but here it is.

The fact that these tunes were used in this manner gave people the impression that they were somehow part of the BBC. Now, adults who watched these programmes may not have thought this, but I’m talking as someone who grew up with these programmes. It was a revelation to me to find that both of these tunes were actually real music.

Not only that, but they were real music from an era, which is almost being forgotten, when music looked like it was becoming something more than just entertainment. Music, for a little while there, was seen as a vehicle for the Divine by the performers, and they performed in that spirit. Now, there are probably still people in America who do it like this, but I was brought up in a world where gospel music didn’t exist and neither did God, and the best music in the world was just themes to TV shows, nothing more.

I haven’t quite identified the program that used my final example it, but it’s off Mobius Strip by Delaney Bramlett – it’s a loop of the intro to ‘I’m A M-A-N”. Like I said, I haven’t placed it, but it was seriously familiar to me when I first heard it. I think it was Match of the Day, but I’m not sure.

Anyways, the point is, it took me years to discover this music in its natural habitat, as it were, that is to say on albums by actual artists, and despite this “Jessica” still makes me think of Jeremy f*cking Clarkson, and cars. Considering The Wall Street Journal actually described this song as a national heirloom, I think this association is unworthy of the song. As I also think that Barry Norman (great though he was as a film reviewer), is not the person we should be thinking of when we hear “I Wish I Knew”.

Just sayin’.

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The White Goddess

/ Tim Wakefield / 5 Comments

 

Red Resonant Moon – sometime in 2013 – Algarve

 

It is a full moon this evening, and it seemed a good idea to go and visit the local Goddess site here in the Central Algarve, which is called Alcalar.

 

It is a full five thousand years old, and in a pretty good state of repair considering.

 

I took some photos, for some reason I forgot to meditate. It made me wonder, naturally, about a people who spent so much time and effort building this thing that would stand for several thousand years. Why?  What was the point?

 

Come to think of it, what is the point of everything, or anything? Take modern British Society for example. What exaclty are we trying to achieve?

 

I asked my dear mother the same question recently. It seems, for example, that the Victorians had a pretty clear idea of where they were going and what the point of their society was, but I’m not sure us moderns have any real idea what it is we are doing here, either collectively or individually, besides accumulating possessions or experiences.

 

Once upon a time, I thought I stumbled upon the answer in a fairly huge book by Robert Graves, called The White Goddess.

 

Cover of "White Goddess"

Cover of White Goddess

I found a recommendation for it in the pages of a book by Robert Anton Wilson, who vouched-safe that he had read it several times, and enjoyed it each time, with its heady mix of mythology and re-constructive surgery on current culture and its dim and distant origins.

 

One thing that I grasped out of all this was that true art was Divinely Inspired, and its purpose was to provide proof of the Divine within our mundane lives, thus giving us poor sinners meaning in an otherwise unintelligible world.

 

It is difficult to put exactly into words what I mean. I was concentrating chiefly on the power of lyrics in songs.  I wondered what it was that made a song great, and if there was somehow some power inherent in the right combination of words that would galvanise a band into making something groovy out of it, when another song would just fall flat.  I was searching for a magic formula.

 

Robert  Graves traces the history of the Bardic tradition from the pitifully few extant fragments we have coming down to us through the ages. He focuses particularly on Gwion’s Riddle.

 

This riddle, he asserts, is the work of a full master of the Bardic craft, someone so steeped in arcane lore that they are able to make a riddle that carefully avoids any overt heresy, and thus the censorship of the church, but which, nonetheless, encodes the true philosophy of the Bards, the one true religion, and preserves it like a fly in amber.

 

The reason he was able to do this, Graves tells us, is that he was schooled in the tradition that had links to Egypt and all across Europe, encompassing the wisdom of countless tribal mythologies, all of which tell the same story.

 

The reason Gwion had to do this was because of a little gathering of lovely Catholics called the Synod of Whitby.  The main relevant thrust of this particular Synod, from a Bardic perspective, was the flowering of Art and Music and Culture that was happening in the British Isles, as a result of the merging of the teachings of the Christian Church, and the old ways of the Celtic Shamen or Bards.

New Haven, Connecticut, USA

New Haven, Connecticut, USA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

According to the Bards, the Word was true.  The Good News was indeed Good.   God had sent his only begotten son into the world to save mankind, and this was generally a wonderful event.  It was in fact, just the latest flowering of a cosmic phenomenon that gave the Bards their raison d’etre, their joie de vivre, their inspiration and their faith.  It was this great cosmic wonder that the Bards were the guardians of, and it was their job to compose music and stories to allow the regular populace to glimpse the Grand Design behind everything.  At each of the stations of the Agricultural year the people got together to celebrate on or other specific aspect of the same timeless Divine story, and the Bards were on hand with the correct song and the pertinent story to remind everyone why they did what they did, and why all was safe in the hands of the Divine Author.

 

Now, the goodly folk who attended the Synod of Whitby decided amongst themselves, no doubt with some gentle urging from Rome, that this flowering, however beautiful and sublime it might have been, was the work of the Devil, and was, in fact heresy.

 

The Bards knew, you see, that Jesus was just the latest in a long line of incarnations of the Divine Avatar.  His names are many and various and they are writ large on the walls of the temples from here to Memphis and beyond. This is the story of the Sun, the Son, the male principle, and his exemplary life, which always has certain key features.

 

His names, as I said are many and varied.  Dionysus, Zeus, Hercules, Adonis, Osiris, Gilgamesh, Moses, Shiva, Krishna, Alexander, Rameses, Theseus, Perseus, Lugh Long-handed, Cuchulain, Bran, Dylan, the list really does go on and on.

 

His origin is always Divine, and if there is not always, a Virgin Birth, there is always some wonderful confusion regarding the birth of the holy child.  There is a life of wonders, labours, miracles, with teaching of men and the bringing of great gifts.  There is a journey to the Underworld, or to the land of the Dead, beyond the veil, and there is resurrection and, ultimately, deification as the Avatar takes their place amongst the immortals from whose seed he originally sprung.

 

The Bards were more than happy to put Jesus in there as the latest and perhaps greatest of these paragons of humanity, but they tended to want to tell his story within the context of the unbroken chain of God-beings that stretched back into eternity.  He will return, they said, because he always does.

 

However, the Synod decided that this was heresy, and that the official line was thus:  There was only one of him, and his name was Jesus Christ, our priests are his sole representatives, and we will tell you when and if he pops his head up again.  All reference to these other pagan idols was quite against the grain and must be stamped out at all costs.

 

So, this was the need for the secrecy for the all-but-impenetrable riddling in Gwion’s riddle.  If he was caught espousing the ancient philosophy then there would be trouble, but his credo would simply not allow him to tow the party line – his heritage was part of all humankind’s heritage, and he was not going to allow the Flame Eternal to be casually stamped out by a bunch of philistines to whom the Word was the Latin verbum a word much more closely related to words for punishment and torture than the Greek logos,  or the Latin ratio – words which are so rich in beauty and meaning as to actually be the very etymon of those things – God itself.

 

Hot stuff, eh?  Well, that’s all for now folks – to be continued.  Here’s a pick from inside the great womb of Alcalar, the holy Necropolis of Europe’s southern Atlantic coast. A site sacred to the Goddess, we assume, since it is mounds and hollows, rather than uprights.  We will get into her role in the story of the incarnate male principle in due course.  Let’s just say this – he doesn’t quite just pop out of nowhere, this Divine Child, and he tends to have a little help here and there from a certain someone as he makes his way through history, righting wrongs and generally giving everyone a reason to live.

 

IMG_1981

 

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Identity Crisis

/ Tim Wakefield / 1 Comment

Like many of you out there, I now have more email addresses than I have pairs of pants, and more twitter accounts than I have gonads. I also have more blogs than I can shake a stick at, and basically none of them are really doing anything.

So, I am being brave and sorting this shizzle out. I am confining myself to just three identities, roughly speaking.

I am Starvin Tim Wakefield, a washed-up blues and country musician who tragically misspent his youth playing saxophone in someone else’s Ska band.

I am also Taliesin Maelstrom, prophet and High Priest of the Church of the Etymon, which is my quasi-religious organisation dedicated to the salvation of humankind and also to divine comedy.

I am also, secretly the mastermind behind Timbo, an honourable robot who believes that the world should be run by honourable robots – he is a Robo-Timocrat.

So, I hope that’s cleared that up.

Shit, okay, I’m also the Daoist Cowboy, although I have long since lost my hat. I don’t know what that identity is for at present, but I’m sure it will come in handy.

Now I think on, I’ve got a bit of a heavy bias towards male personalities.  Perhaps I should re-invent myself as a woman too, like Thor.