The children have been reading, no, devouring, the Percy Jackson books. The central theme of these is that there are in this world ‘real’ Greek Gods and more particularly their children, demi-Gods, who inhabit both the normal mundane world and the super-powered world of the Gods. Now being a lover of Greek myths I found …
Author archives: pasdelasbas
Saddleworth, Brass, Morris and Rushes
Today, Saturday, we went to Greenfield, one of the Saddleworth villages. Our friends there are married and both come from the villages and we visited them on the occasion of the Saddleworth Rushcart. I won’t go into that suffice to say that a large group of Morris men process and dance around the various villages …
Darwin
Darwin’s theory of evolution developed the first unifying theory offering to explain all aspects of human life with no attention paid to cultural or other social differences. Darwin’s theory allowed us from the West who understood it (perhaps) to suggest that there was an evolutionary route that took us back to shared ancestry perhaps …
Heritage
So heritage shows emerged as a property transaction. And it remains effectively a property transaction today. Heritage is mapped by ‘heritopography’, the sets of lines of communication or cultural understanding which allow the outsider to feel in place where ever they are provided they have a guidebook all mobile device. The British tourist standing on …
History
We have all obsession with history in the Western world from whence I emerge. A compulsive interest in the past and an ability to produce that past as historical record and to consume such records. There are psycho analytical events taking place. This fascination with the past and is perhaps linked into the continual need …
Holy languages
Arabic is a wholly language. Language in which the angel Gabriel spoke to Mohammed. The holy language of the Koran is one whose themselves and consonants in and of themselves have some materiality and thus impact on the lives of those around. This idea of language carrying on certain magical properties reminded me of the …
St Paul as a prophet
Christianity has this unfortunate obsession with the figure of Jesus Christ. In turn has been a constant struggle within Christianity to return to the original figure of Christ as a way of combating a form of legalese religiosity which installs itself. Every movement like this faces the issue that the actual content of the Gospels, …
Walsingham – You Only Live Once…
It wasn’t difficult to find our way to Walsingham but when we arrived it wasn’t clear what we should do. I had persuaded my partner and our three children to come with me to visit Walsingham. My partner was interested in going but the three children had asked me “what is it?”. It’s the site …
Hamlet 2 & Tsotsi
I watched two films last night, both by mistake rather than planning, practically the only way I see films these days. Hamlet 2 I started watching this and in an early scene when Dana Marschz (Steve Coogan) was emoting I turned to my friend and said “God I hate actors” which was appropriately misplaced as …
apostasy
The conceit of the development of Renaissance humanism was that, like Hercules, “man” could perfect “himself” and become a God. The apostasy of Salman Rushdie was to take the word of God and relativise it, offering a human interpretation to something inspired and directed by God. In the Western intellectual tradition, the Western philosophical tradition …