It came to me when talking about the film interstellar with Melissa. That the moment Abraham does not sacrifice his son Isaac is the very moment at which Isaac’s body becomes substituted by his emotional life. Whilst the sacrifice of the body ended it has been the sacrificial emotional life which took its place.
Category archives: Uncategorized
today it is music
I start the car to get to the shops and as is my habit I turn on the radio. It is tuned to radio four. The sound gets on my nerves. I press the preset button for radio three. I enjoy the music. Now on one hand I am lucky perhaps, I find myself listening …
agony of circular thoughts
I am bereft of belief in the uniqueness of the weft. I was sitting quietly at the back of the meeting looking at the sleeve of my sweatshirt top.The stitches were so fine, I was fascinated and started wondering how fine stitches might be made by hand? Could they be as small as this? Did …
iSiS?
Two things I want to write it down concerning ISIS. Firstly, I don’t find it particularly difficult to understand why young men and young women might choose to travel to fight with ISIS. Despite coming from a privileged background myself I was aggressively favourable towards the IR A in the late 1970s and early 1980s. …
ukraine
This I posted to facebook with trepidation – the situation is so unpleasant that it feels like a radical act to even publise an alternative point of view. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH35raTPVu8&w=560&h=315]
the Califano clan…
During our time in the Ardeche we visited Claude Califano and her parents Gaetan and Monique. How long is it since I have seen them? 30 years at least. What was strange about being with them again with their wayward daughter Claude is quite simply that nothing had changed in a sense. Everybody looked exactly …
dolmens, blood and pools
We went on a walk. A mythical walk. One of those wonderful meaningful and completely fortuitous series of events which are the very nature of embodied ritual, religious life and yet have no meaning at all. It’s just the story. Gaetan, Claude Califano’s father, who had been a keen walker on his retirement, had given …
Charles Henry Neal at Ypres
Charles Henry Neal was killed on the front line in Ypres on 21 January 1916. He was my paternal great-grandfather. I never heard anyone talk about him because nobody I have met even knew him. My grandfather would have been only four or five when he went off to war and never returned. My great …
Ukraine
The situation that is developing in the Ukraine is of course profoundly disturbing. What I am finding most disturbing however is the attitude not of Russia but of the Western powers and the European Union. The Ukraine is not a nation state like say for example France, with a very long history of struggle to …
palimpsest being
So – a few days here and there feeling depressed at not having achieved anything of note – nothing special there – and there’s the rub. Nothing special. I’ve always found it difficult accepting being like everyone else. So, in this instance, I rationalise myself, my view of myself as someone who’s not bad, as …