The Paranormal Part 2: Warning: Don’t watch this at home

I Know What I Saw (2009) - Full Documentary (By James Fox)

The above youTube video by James Fox is probably the best collection of testimonies I have seen from ostensively reliable witnesses who claim to have come face to face with inexplicable (aerial) objects. I don’t advise watching this video if this kind of thing causes you deep disquiet; stick with what you do understand. In fact, even a seasoned Ufologist might “confront the subject with dread” (David Jacobs, The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters 2002 edition). The witnesses in the video are not the kind of people whose claimed sighting is woven into some weird and imaginative mythology, but instead their anecdotes stand out as stark and mysterious anomalies in their otherwise relatively humdrum existences. The people concerned often remain perturbed, frightened even, by what they think they have seen. The experiences, if not the phenomena themselves, are very real, too real for comfort, in fact.

However, I don’t myself rush to conclusions about little green or grey men. UFO sightings are of similar anecdotal quality to sightings of ghosts, alien animals, little people, road ghosts, the virgin Mary, angelic encounters, ghost aircraft, ghost vehicles, cattle mutilations, alien abductions and the whole gamut of the occult. In fact, general occult anecdotes imperceptibly blend into one another and into the UFO phenomenon and form a single body of inexplicable texts that do the rounds in our society. The very bizarre nature of all these texts makes one wonder if one is even thinking about them in the right way if one expects them to unravel into a rational narrative: Welcome to the world of waking dreams. The nearest I have myself come to such bizarre accounts is when my father suffered from Charles Bonnet syndrome as he started to go blind in old age (See Part 1 of this series). If we ever solve the problem of, say, ghosts then I suspect we would also have solved the problem of UFOs and vice versa. The whole gamut of occult texts is of a piece and we must cope with them as a whole. That we must never forget.

(The first part of this series can be seen here:
 http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.com/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html)

"Auschwitz" by Francesco Guccini

Here's another song by Francesco Guccini with compelling (disturbing even) lyrics, as translated by my brother in law Jonathan Benison.



I’ve died – died with hundreds
I’m dead – I was a baby
Up the chimney, I went up in smoke
And now, I’m in the wind

At Auschwitz, it was snowing
The smoke rose up slowly
In the cold, cold of winter
And now, I’m in the wind
And now, I’m in the wind

At Auschwitz, so many people
All held in one great silence
It’s strange – still I’m unable
To smile – here in the wind

I ask, how is it that a man
Can kill his fellow man
And yet, we’re in our millions
Here in the wind – dust in the wind
Just dust, out here in the wind

Still thunders the cannon
And yet still it hungers
Blood – the beast that is man
And still, we’re carried by the wind

I ask, when will it be
That man will have learned
To live without killing
And the wind will find its peace
And the wind will find its peace
And the wind will find its peace

Italian lyrics:

Auschwitz

Son morto con altri cento, son morto ch'ero bambino:
passato per il camino, e adesso sono nel vento.
Ad Auschwitz c'era la neve: il fumo saliva lento
nel freddo giorno d'inverno e adesso sono nel vento.
Ad Auschwitz tante persone, ma un solo grande silenzio;
è strano: non riesco ancora a sorridere qui nel vento.
Io chiedo come può l'uomo uccidere un suo fratello,
eppure siamo a milioni in polvere qui nel vento.
Ancora tuona il cannone, ancora non è contento
di sangue la belva umana, e ancora ci porta il vento.
Io chiedo quando sarà che l'uomo potrà imparare
a vivere senza ammazzare, e il vento si poserà.

From: http://www.frascolla.org/FG/01.asp#t5

The song appears on Guccini’s album “FOLK BEAT N.1” (1967)

“Letter” by Francesco Guccini

(See also here)

Translation:

The cherry-tree in the garden has come into bloom with the new sunshine
The neighbourhood is soon filled with snow from the poplars and with words.
At one o’clock on the dot the clatter of plates reaches the ears
The TVs’ thunderous rumble meets the unfazed indifference of the cats;
As you can see, everything’s normal in this pointless sarabande
But blowing through this unchanging pattern of life is the whiff of a question,
The prickly presence of an eternal doubt, what’s past seething like an ants’ nest,
Troubling those who leave it till winter to wish it were summer again.

The streets are coming back to life, a perfect finishing touch to the world,
Mother and daughter brazenly parade the same face and round bottom,
Identical in the head, no history, challenging everything, no limits,
Their strutting briefly outdone by the wailing of swallows and children;
As you can see, nothing out of the ordinary in this cumulus of life and death,
But, sobering thought, I’m not unhappy stuck in this rut of wishes and fate,
This over-shiny net, these goals we dream up for ourselves,
This unquenchable thirst, of those who hold back, unwilling to fly.

Slowly the roses wither, clusters of fruit appear on the apple-trees,
High up, clouds pass silently through the strips of cobalt-blue sky;
I lie stretched out on the fantastic green-grass plane of my past
But just-like-that age dispels all I believed and have not been;
As you can tell, everything’s just fine in this world free of worries,
As life skimmed past me, I correctly discussed the set topics,
My enthusiasms never lasted long, lots of philosophising stances,
A life of amusing encounters turned tragic, some too close for comfort, some not close enough.

But the times gone by, who will return them to me? Who’ll give me back the seasons
Of glass and sand, who can bring back rage and gestures, women and songs,
The lost friends, books I devoured, the simple enjoyment of appetites,
The healthy thirst of the parched, the blind faith in poor myths?
As you can see, everything’s as usual, just that time is pressing and the suspicion arises
That it’s not a big deal to be weary and breathless at the end of a race,
To be anxious as people are the day after, or sad at the end of a match,
No big deal the slow aimless unfolding of this thing that you call life.

Translated by Jonathan Benison

Italian text :here

The Cosmic Perspective Part 3

Here is the third (and last) part of an essay I wrote in 2000 AD....

Matter is beautiful  and unreal, but there's loads of it out there.

The actual nature of matter is profoundly mysterious, but it is, nevertheless, very common and our bodies and minds are composed of the same mysterious medium that the Great Artist has used in enormous quantities elsewhere in the universe (*1). But as we look out across the cosmos it is clear that the endless cubic miles of sparingly filled volume tell us one thing: That living things, such as our selves, are highly unrepresentative arrangements of matter and what distinguishes us from the relatively prosaic formations scattered across the depths of space is that we are an extremely rare form of matter. This rarity is not just a physical fact but is also true in an abstracted mathematical sense, because of all the myriad upon myriads of the things which can be contrived using the medium the Creator has chosen, living things clearly represent a very, very, tiny fraction amidst the relative banality of all that is mathematically possible. To secure the existence of living entities taken from such a small fraction requires something of unprecedented power to make an extremely precise selection from the enormous but abstract realm of mathematical possibility. Think of it like this; prior to their existence those highly atypical permutations of material particles we call life can be thought of as lost combinations of matter, lost as might be the key to a highly complicated combination lock. Humanly speaking the activity of seeking a lost combination amounts to a kind of computation and computations of all types necessarily involve the knowledge and thought embodied in a context of calculations within which the sought for result is to be found (*2). Likewise, retrieving the extremely rare configurations of life must surely involve the application of Divine knowledge and thought because I don't think for one moment that living things sprung from nowhere, as if by magic, into the Divine mind; if they did one might question if something bigger and better than God himself created that complex idea out of nothing. Therefore, it is likely that God actually did some kind of mental work in the act of conceiving the creation, mental work that amounted to an assembling of the idea in the mind of God. Now here is a crucial question: Just as there exists the question of whether the knowledge and workings encapsulated in a calculation should be packaged together with the product of that calculation, so a similar question arises in regard to Divine creativity: That is, has God chosen to give us some kind of revelation as to the magnitude of the knowledge and thought He invoked in the act of creating life? My guess is that he has done so and in the absence of better guesses I have been able to draw only one conclusion about the meaning of the scale of the universe; that the spacio-temporal dimensions of the cosmos are a revelation of the enormous mathematical costs of seeking and finding highly complex living configurations of matter. In a sense, the surrounding cosmos is not the creation - living things are the creation - but our surroundings, most of which are seen as they were billions of years ago, symbolise the scaffolding and other trappings of a work in progress; a work that was ultimately to be the home of an exceedingly rare organic configuration - humanity. (*3)

Given the vast mathematical space of possibilities from which living configurations have been extracted, the great canvass of the universe is, at the very least, an eloquent comment on the priceless rarity of living conscious material beings such as ourselves. The cosmos is a grand statement on the physio-mathematical cost of life and the living planet is an oasis of interest amidst the relative banality of its astronomical surroundings. "For a single rose a field of thorns was spared", goes a Jewish saying; a picturesque metaphor apposite to the hard mathematical truths of creating organised complexity, truths which imply that something as beautiful as a rose comes with an unavoidable cost. Likewise, the ample and seemingly superfluous cosmic dimensions are ironic allusions to the truth: We may well ask "Doesn't it all seem rather of a waste?" when, in fact, "waste" may be exactly what the universe is! Not all waste, but 99.9999....% of it is waste, waste in the sense that it symbolises the necessary collateral output of an ultimately purposeful activity, output not unlike the workings of a vast calculation. And in case we should have any doubts, the generation of waste is clearly within the Divine prerogative as is testified by the many natural processes that generate what we would evaluate as waste. In the cosmic case the waste we see represents Divine workings on an unbelievable scale; the unavoidable mathematical waste products similar to the workings of a vast calculation, a calculation needed to arrive at highly sophisticated end results; namely, ourselves and the living forms with which we share the planet.

The Turing Bombe: Searching for rare solutions.

If this guess is correct then we have before us the extraordinary irony that whilst on the one hand the vastness of the cosmos could be construed as conferring upon us our utter insignificance (as the psalmist provocatively suggests in Ps. 8:3&4:), yet the true interpretation is precisely the opposite. The vast and beautiful overall appearance of the heavens is like some breath taking work of art, an elaborately prepared canvass, which when looked at closely reduces to rough smudges of oil paint, but it is, in fact, a sophisticated piece of finesse with an ironic message. That work of art actually tells us of our staggering uniqueness as living configurations and of the astronomical mathematical costs of creating such configurations. Perhaps the Creator would not have bothered with the universe beautiful though it is, but for living things: "The whole universe was created for the Pentateuch" asserts another Jewish saying, a saying which well expresses the lengths the Creator goes to sieve out that which He seeks and that which He desires. If it was required to search a whole universe for something extraordinary beautiful or desirable it seems that the Creator will do it; and it seems that we are the one sought for case in that Universe.

...Final part added 24/09/2001...

The creation is an extraordinary Divine achievement and its underlying lesson is cost, cost of staggering proportions; literally the computational cost of seeking and finding the incredibly elaborate material juxtapositions we call living things. An alternative view is to regard the creation as a display of magic; the primitive notion that raw brute power precipitates existences from nowhere without effort, without work, and without thought. In a word magic embodies the idea of something for nothing and in the magical context the dimensions of the created order seem unintelligible and superfluous, and perhaps even something to be denied (*4) I don't believe in magic, but I do believe in the Divine propensity to support costs of incredible magnitude. The creation is a virtuoso display of seeking and finding the combinatorial novelties called life, but the Divine person seems to be prepared to go much much further in His seekings and to pay a far greater price than the physical costs of solving mere computational problems, which to Him are no doubt trifles. One cannot underestimate how far God is prepared to go in bearing cost. In fact His main motivation seems to be that of bearing cost for the sake of that which He loves; for it seems that all the achievement of the creation is the mere base and show case, as it were, in which He has set some even greater and more wonderful act of seeking and finding: I am talking, of course, of the costs of redemption. The cost of finding human organic forms, lost in the mathematical pathways of computational complexity, although very great, is nevertheless finite, but in contrast it seems that the price of redemption, the cost of seeking and finding the morally lost involves a far greater Divine personal cost than that of creation. For unlike the creation the work of redemption required, even of an infinite God, the kind of giving we call sacrifice; that is, giving where the giver gives in such proportions that his wealth is compromised. Because somehow, and to us incomprehensibly, in the work of redemption God gave up His greatest possession, namely, the unity of the Godhead. Perhaps no greater sacrifice can be imagined than of Him who has most to give and therefore has most to lose: He who had all things gave up all things, and thus, in a sense, God gave up being God and He revealed that His love was a far greater force to be reckoned with than His hold on honour, glory, strength, power and wealth (Philippians 2:6ff). Thus, He chose to live, not just the humble life style of a primitive Palestinian artisan, that even by our standards was unthinkably crude and basic, but to also suffer loss of honour, shame, pain and above all the nameless horrors of a kind of self-rejecting schism in the Godhead. This is how far He is prepared to go in bearing cost for that which He loves and seeks. If finite resources are required to create finite beings why are the infinite resources of the Godhead needed to redeem finite beings? Perhaps it has more to do with the resources needed to cross the infinite gap that separates us from Him.



Footnotes

*1 That we, our very selves, are material concomitants is apparent from the fact that in Earthly life even our thoughts and feelings are inextricably mixed with the distributions of matter and electric fields within our anatomy and brains. But this mapping between physical matter and our thoughts and feelings, rather than demystifying the mind, probably points to the deeply mysterious nature of matter, a fact that any one who has studied physics understands.

*2 There is often an attempt to disguise the non-trivial nature of the creation by suggesting that the processes needed to form living things can be quite banal. But whatever way you look at it far from trivial conditions are the logical prerequisite of life: Whether appeal is made to the off-the-peg information found in the wonderful complexities of random sequences or the enormous computational resources needed to arrive at complex configurations from scratch, we are dealing with qualities whose existences are in themselves remarkable and deeply mysterious. Ultimate truths, whether we believe them to be simple or complex, being the outermost explanatory context, cannot themselves be explained with reference to greater things; thus, standing as peculiar one-offs they will thereby seem strange and inexplicable.

*3 I have fought shy of affirming a too literal relation between God's creative mental act of conceiving creation and the expansive cosmos by suggesting that the latter is only representative of the former. Thus, cosmic dimensions may only symbolise a mathematical point about the singularity and cost of life by juxtaposing it with its prosaic alternatives by way of an enormous cosmic tableau that contrasts the novelty of life against overwhelming numbers of discarded cases. Certain aspects of physics, however, may suggest a more literal connection between the development of the universe and God's act of creation; if this is true, one may then wonder if omniscient Divine Intelligence could not have short cut what sometimes appear to be the inefficient and haphazard random workings we see in the universe. But a closer definition of the nature of intelligence leads one to believe that its power is to be found in the ability to explore pathways and possibilities in abundance, almost regardless of efficiency. The ease with which we ourselves draw conclusions may blind us to the fact that what comes easily to us actually involves an enormous number of neural events and a very large database of knowledge.

*4 Young Earth Creationists and Christian geocentrists both have difficulties accepting with the size of our space-time context and our physical insignificance. They cope with the apparent slight on our significance with a denial of our physical circumstances; Viz: denial of the temporal dimensions of the cosmos and the non-centre place we have on its stage.

The Cosmic Perspective: Part 2

I was always fascinated by the stars. The extreme dimensions of the velvet black void they inhabited first came to me as a child when I learnt that those delicately twinkling points of light were in fact suns in their own right; huge balls of nuclear fire dwarfing the Earth and even, in many cases, our own sun. It was obvious to me even then that it must take a very, very great distance to diminish the light of something as bright as the Sun to such an extent that it became a barely discernible shimmering fairy light. The vast distances of the heavens thus dawned on me for the first time.

My cigarette card collection of the planets also fascinated me. These showed the planets as perfectly spherical objects with surfaces as smooth as a billiard ball, but marked with the diffuse and patchy details discernible in Earth based telescopes. One of those cards even illustrated Mars with the mysterious Schiaparelli canals, now thought to be an illusion. But my pre-space vehicle collection was soon obsolete: As the transmissions of robotic probes came back across millions of miles of vacuum, high resolution scans displayed one feature which removed any remaining mystique that the planets may have: They showed each planet to have texture. Texture! That great destroyer of mystery! As the filmmakers well know, anyone or anything can look beautiful and ethereal under blurred and misty focus! Remove that inadequate focus and the object is seen for what it is. And so it was with the planets; gone was the veil of the Earth’s atmosphere and the attenuating effects of countless miles of intervening distance to reveal, in some cases, a wrinkly and gritty earthy texture. We saw pictures of mountainous landscapes, tumbled and complex fields of dust and rock, and the long defunct riverscapes and flood plains on Mars. Grab a handful of beach sand at Gt. Yarmouth and I don't suppose it feels much different to a handful of dust from one of the rocky planets. The gas giants, like Jupiter, showed chaotic weather systems, and high speed winds that evidenced violent change on an enormous scale. These entities were as changeable as anything on Earth.

None of these revelations, I suppose, were really unexpected or upset any fundamental ideas, but any vestigial feeling that there might exist out there something really mysterious, like those ineffably sublime crystal spheres of the middle ages or the little green and gray men of more recent years, was finally dispelled by the compellingly down to earth reality (so to speak) of those pictures from space. Yes it was marvelous, but perhaps only because objects that had been out of reach for the entire history of man were now shown to be so earthy. To ancient people for whom the reaches beyond the atmosphere were utterly unreachable the heavens were the location of sacredness, the domain of unearthly principles, perhaps even the dwelling place of ineffable beings. But they cannot be so for us and, in fact, in a post enlightenment milieu we never really expected them to be anything radically different: There might be the occasional exotic object like a black hole or a neutron star but even these are just an extreme application of a physical paradigm hammered out in near Earth vicinity. When it comes down to fundamentals there is nothing out there, it seems, that is of a radically different quality to what is found on Earth.

The empyrean looses its mystique:The planets are not sublime and ineffable.

Mystery is provocative and when something loses its mystery it may also lose its fascination. As one ponders the data that has come back from outer space giving proof positive that the planets are little more than tiny textured pieces of rock or gravitationally concentrated balls of gas embedded in billions of cubic light years of emptiness, one might plausibly claim that this loss of fascination is precisely what has happened to the heavens. In fact one might even feel that there is a touch of banality about what it has taken multi-million dollar hi-tech projects to reveal; just more of the same - gas, dust, rocks, magnetic and gravitational fields and above all plenty of space; nothing out there to really excite the casual observer for long, unless (s)he is perhaps an astrophysicist trained to be excited by theoretical nuances. For the average observer it might all feel, well, rather boring.

But whilst the postmodern atheist may dismiss any substantial existential interest in the heavens, the irony is that for the theist, particularly the theist who believes in a deeply personal God, the demystification of the heavens has cleared the ground of superstition to reveal an overwhelming mystery, a mystery that has simply taken on a new form. For whatever the demystification of outer space has cost in terms of a public interest deficit, there remains that one really mind blowing feature that we all appreciate, namely, the sheer scale on which those physical parochialities are fashioned. Lots has been written about the dimensions of outer space, but illustrations of those dimensions never fail to leave an impact: It is a place where something the size the solar system (a structure traversed by a beam of light in as much as 10 hours) which if scaled to the dimensions of a pin head still leaves the Galaxy, on the same scale, as an object with a colossal 1000 mile diameter. These immense distances are only rivaled by the depths of time: Distance and time are intimately related in space by the travel time of light and some of those distant Galaxies are seen as they were billions of years ago. For the theist, given that these grand dimensions are the work of a Deity, the questions start crowding in and the mystery of the heavens is raised to new and provocative heights of subtlety. It all seems a rather uneconomical creation for what one might expect to be a parsimonious God, a God who could surely be more selective. What's it all about? What's He up to? In fact as most of what we see in the heavens is the distant past, perhaps we should ask what has He been up to? Why fashion so much time and space, when, if as some seem to think, God need only utter the right word of magic for something to almost instantaneously to jump into sight? Does He really require so much space and time? Doesn't it all seem rather of a waste?

Deep Space: A waste of space?

The Cosmic Perspective: Part 1

Here is the first part of an essay I wrote in 2000 AD....

Power Paradigm: Give the old V2 some portals and you've got a fifties sci-fi rocket. As for reaching the stars, it’s about as effective as climbing a church spire; if you've still got one to climb.

In the science fiction genre of the 1950s space travelers were often depicted using WWII V2 style rockets, up until then amongst the fastest thing man had invented. With their powerful and sleek lines those machines at least looked up to the job. After the war a burgeoning rocket technology dramatically shrunk the planet with vehicles that could reach their destination within minutes. Surely, I remember thinking as a boy; these were the tools with which we were going to conquer space. Moreover, in outer space the remarkable speeds of rockets would be enhanced because their progress would be unhindered by atmospheric drag. In fact, whilst engines burn space vehicles never reach a terminal velocity (unless it be the speed of light) and just keep getting faster and faster. But the sleek sci-fi rockets of the 50s were misleading; those smooth bullet shaped hulls might give them a fast look, but sharp aerodynamics, although creating an impression of speed and power, does nothing to improve performance in the high vacuum of space, and the ungainly and fragile looking pioneer 11, an essay in naked machinery, is as equally up to the job and as the sci-fi V2 based rockets. In fact Pioneer 11, as it was catapulted past Jupiter in 1974, reached a speed of over 106,000 miles an hour and became amongst the fastest of all man made objects. At that speed one can circle the Earth four times in an hour or make the trip to the moon in just over two hours. 

Given that we are capable of such technological power surely we can make vehicles that can rapidly consume astronomical distances unhindered as they are by atmospheric resistance? But as everyone knows there is that one very basic, simple and unsophisticated snag which confounds the best technology; space is simply too big even for the fastest vehicle we can think of, let alone construct. Rockets may be able to eat up the miles on Earth, but the beckoning depths of space are so immense that we may as well send an arthritic snail on an round trip to Australia as send a rocket to the stars. However, a more practical proposition than trying to get there is the Hubble space telescope, which, like pioneer 11, is another piece of space bourn Information Technology. It is an incredibly powerful instrument many orders of magnitude more acute than the first telescopes. It is capable of resolving some of the surface details on a ten pence coin placed 50 miles away. With this power it has extended our sight across the universe and way back towards the beginning. But even in its keen gaze the most distant galaxies, huge objects though they are, seem as insignificant flecks of light.

Compared to Neolithic man who first cast his eyes into the heavens, we are unbelievably more powerful. But the cosmic leviathan (Job 41) makes a mockery of that power and has the potential to soak up and consume everything we can throw at it as if our existence was inconsequential. That sense of our apparent inconsequentiality on the enormous astrophysical stage is just another special case of a more general malaise of ultimate futility which plagues our society at so many levels and means that theists must come to terms with, and begin to understand, the COSMIC PERSPECTIVE....

Information technology: Pioneer 11 beams down its messages. Naked machinery replaces naked power.

Rationality and Mystery.

This why I love palladian architecture: Symmetrical, elegant, unembellished, clean and in this case of Bath stone without stain or blemish, looking as though it has just been built. However, during a recent visit to Basildon Park I found parts of the interior just a little more fussy that I would have expected or liked; perhaps the restorers over did it.

Basildon Park is a late palladian construction (1776) which makes my identification of the neo-classical Ickworth house (1795) as "unusual palladian" look not quite so bad. Both display a clean and symmetrical rationality of build that dispels any sense of gothic mystery. Ickworth in particular is abstractedly platonic almost to the point of being surreal and thus is ironic.

Talking about the surreal: Gothic flavoured mystery and legend are being revived at musty old Blickling hall this summer (18th-19th June) with a Tudor Pageant that features the "Return of the Queen". Blickling Hall's facebook page bills it thus:

Blickling returns to the 16th century with a spectacular Tudor Pageant at the childhood home of Anne Boleyn.

The "Queen", I guess, is none other than Anne Boleyn of whom, last time I looked, there was no definitive evidence that she was at Blickling Hall in her childhood. But, hey, this is myth and legend and myth and legend intrigues and fascinates; above all they are often far more meaningful than bland history. Perhaps it will result in a few more sightings of the ubiquitous Anne at the Hall and that's bound to be good for the heritage business. For the record, I never saw her whilst there, but don't let that put you off; Blickling is one of the most romantic and mysterious settings I have had the pleasure to frequent.

Blickling Hall, like all the spookiest and creepiest  places, has turrets and pinnacles

Evocative Scenes at Blickling Hall

See and feel the troposphere at Blickling Hall; all 30,000 feet of it

Here is Flickr album by Kenny Gray, house steward at Blickling Hall. It contains some very professional looking pictures of the Jacobean Hall and its environs (along with other curious and interesting material). Kenny has managed to juxtapose the Hall and its grounds with some stunning skyscapes and lighting effects.

Light and sky combine together to prompt our minds to imbue scenes with moods. These moods are taken from a rich repertoire of qualities, qualities that are intangible, unseen and yet when evoked are strangely pervasive; everywhere and yet nowhere. Mood manipulation makes art work. The Romantics knew all about the effects of sky and light on our psyche and it’s no surprise that the word “atmosphere” has become so closely associated with ambiance. (See also here)

Hardwick Hall

Hardwick Hall: Square, Imposing and crystalline.

Hardwick hall was the home of the Elizabethan heiress, Elizabeth Shrewsbury. “Bess”, as she was known, was born c1527 into a relatively unimportant gentry family*. In those days women could only make social progress via marriage and/or inheritance and in Bess’s case she was blessed with four advantageous marriages  outliving each successive husband, and each time she got a little richer – quite a bit richer, in fact, until she was the second richest woman in England after Queen Elizabeth. Some credit can, I suppose, be given to Elizabethan England in as much as it was not impossible for a woman to become so rich and influential. Bess was in her early sixties when her last husband died in 1590 and shortly after that she started building Hardwick hall as a powerful statement of her position in society. Later generations of her family, however, moved their principle seat to the fashionable baroque pile of Chatsworth, and Hardwick became a little neglected; this may partly explain why even today it has the touch and feel of a time capsule sent from the Elizabethan world.

I recently visited Hardwick hall and I don’t think I have been to a prodigy house that feels so atmospheric and original. This is probably down to a combination of the subdued lighting (always necessary from a conservation point of view), the ancient tapestries filling the walls, and above all the rush carpeting whose smell permeates the place (this is an original Elizabethan touch created by the National Trust who now own the house**); was this how the house smelt in Bess’s day? The famous staircase at Hardwick fulfilled all my expectations of an impressive and idiosyncratic formal processional way to Bess’s great chamber on the second floor. The great chambers of prodigy houses are normally found on the first floor, but as second richest women in the land perhaps Bess was signaling her extra special status by placing her state rooms one floor above the usual level. The great chambers of this time were a far cry from the days when the medieval lord dinned on his dias in the communal entrance hall. The withdrawal of the Lord’s and Lady’s presence from the hall to the great chamber in the upper regions of their houses was a sign of a richer stratified society, as the population was now dispersed over a wider spectrum of wealth.

The National Trust guide book bills the hall as “Hardwick hall, more glass that wall” and this is a reference to its collection of huge closely spaced windows, no doubt a secular application of all that had been learnt from the perpendicular period of ecclesiastical architecture. Like everything else about the house these expensive windows were another conscious display of wealth and ostentation.

Bess was the kind of person who, if it came to a choice between art and impressiveness would likely opt for the latter; for, to my eye the house is more imposing than it is beautiful. The rectangular, unfussy and heavy lines of the hall and the expanse of glass are reminiscent of the 60s modernist tendency to build square glass buildings. Large areas of glass signal optimism, extraversion and self-belief. Moreover, glass as the quasi-invisible crystal wall has that slight otherworldly feel about it, a reaching to heavenly realms perhaps. It probably says a lot about Bess and how she thought of herself.

The renaissance period to which Hardwick belongs was a time when ostentatious displays of individual wealth were less inhibited by a feudal religious milieu; feudalism with its straight jacket on aspiring social mobility was departing. Renaissance humanism promoted the exercise of human gifts, and gloried in the genius of human creativity. It is in the heat of this creative humanist context that an authentic spirituality becomes aware of the potential dangers of an enslaving pride and self indulgence. A studied detachment from the glory of one’s own works and/or wealth is always in order. And yet spiritual detachment can itself go horribly wrong: Having moved amongst some very pious people I have seen how meekness is so easily misinterpreted as the subjection of one’s humanity, and this subjection, Screwtape wise, can itself become a point of pride that manifests itself in affected displays of self-abasement that suppress creativity energy. Accordingly, the pious so easily imprison themselves in an inauthentic humility and become pray to sectarian religion. I have have come to despise what the religious sects stand for – the oppression of humanity and its self expression in favour of the submission to a bland group think based on the lie that salvation is achieved through the imprisonment of the soul. A memorial stone epitaph in a Norwich church warns us about a pious masquerade: “A scholar without pride, a Christian without bigotry, and devout without ostentation”. Ostentation, pride and bigotry are the temptations of the religious ascetic as well as the rich.

When I visit a building like Hardwick I find it a very difficult leap of the imagination to try and recreate in my mind its halcyon days when such buildings would have been considered state of the art. Today it is difficult to see past the dust, the staining, the warping and the general damage these structures have accumulated in their passage through time. In particular, the now faded tapestries of Hardwick would have been far more vibrant than we see today; they are shades of what they once looked like. The ambiance of modernity that would have pervaded Hardwick hall 400 years ago is impossible to duplicate today; although the National Trust do all they can to assist the imagination of the visitor. In its day Hardwick was where it was at and its lady was a towering dignitary whose subjects looked up to. Important though it once was, Hardwick has suffered that inevitable diminishment in significance with time: At one time it was a mountain dominating the social landscape. But as we look back through the distance of time it is seen to be little more than a largish foothill in the cosmic perspective of history.

Footnotes

* It is possible Bess’s family had come up through ranks from the ex-peasant yeomanry; in which case it says a lot for social mobility post-black death.
** I have since learnt that the rush carpeting concept pre-dates the NT, but the NT gets the credit for maintaining and replacing the carpeting as it wears out. 

Curious Norwich

Apparently a much eroded and reduced outlier from the 15th Century. Why did it survive as the modern world developed around it? What did the original street it occupied look like? Or is it a Tardis that's got its period wrong? See here for the Curious Norwich album.

Musical Interlude: Is it a Dream?

For Classix Nouveaux fans, here's what claims to be a rare low budget original: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAiKC1FEc-A&feature=related

The Paranormal Part I: Noumena, Cognita, or Dreams?

What is reality?

Towards the end of his long life my father’s sight started to deteriorate. During this degeneration he suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a hallucinatory condition common to the early stages of blindness. In my father’s case the hallucinations were largely of buildings that weren’t there. I was reminded of my father’s casual interest in architecture and the large number of postcards he had collected of the cities he had visited during wartime. In fact in one of his visions he saw the buildings surrounding his house in a state of destruction. Occasionally he also hallucinated people in and around the house and this rather spooked my mother for whom it was no doubt too reminiscent of a haunting for comfort.

As far as I am aware no one has a good theory on CBS; the best I’ve heard is that deprived of the bright and complex patterns of sensory input the visual cortex becomes sensitive to random perturbations and goes into a kind dream state. A particularly strange feature of CBS is that it often synthesizes its visions into the daily context; for example, illusory people will appear to be interacting with the physical surroundings. When sufferers of CBS report seeing people in their houses one cannot help but think that a more generalized version of CBS may throw light on the nature of ghosts and all sorts of occult events. Moreover, it is possible that CBS analogues may also apply to the sense of sound, smell and touch, not to mention a whole array of internalized intuitions that crop up now and then, such as the sense of somebody being present.

I’ve never got to the bottom of the positivist’s question of whether reality and perception are one and same or whether physical reality goes beyond the sum total of perceiving agents (Which according to Berkley includes God Himself) and is something other than perception, the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. But whatever the answer to that question we do know that as far as the solitary perceiving agent is concerned the world, the cosmos moreover, is effectively only what (s)he is conscious of. From the first person perspective reality is a mode of consciousness and therefore if there are sophisticated hallucinations that occur under an altered state of consciousness, then as far as the first person is concerned those perceptions are reality – of sorts. But having said that it seems that the visions experienced under altered states of conscious don’t usually follow the coherent, rational and strictly systematic logic we associate with the “really real” physical world; as science has shown us the logic of the really real is immaculately coherent, highly synchronized and faultlessly consistent. Without this coherence and consistency there would be no really real world with the touch and feel of physicality and solidity. The physical world passes the physical equivalent of a kind of Turing test for reality in as much as no matter what test you submit to it all but invariably it returns the observations that you would expect if that reality was really there. In contrast, however, the occult fails this test; for as soon as we move into altered states of conscious and the like, things get much less coherent and much more vague and anomalous: If a CBS vision appears, it usually fails to synchronise with the other senses, or if one looks again perhaps it has gone or changed. Like ghostly apparitions these visions lack a coherent integrity and integrateness with one’s wider experience. Both CBS and the occult fail the “Turing test” of reality. Like the actors who have mere bit parts in a play the actors of the occult make a brief appearance, but their character parts are not worked out in sufficient detail to have the multidimensional depth of presence we are used to in the physical world. Ergo, their attenuated reality is that much less instantiated.

I have never been witness to anything one that might call ghostly or paranormal. Even though I spent three years working (cleaning after hours, in fact) in one of England’s premier haunted houses , many times on dark winter evenings, I never heard, smelt or saw anything ghostly. However, from time to time stories and rumors did the rounds, but it always seemed to happen to other people; do people bring their ghosts with them? Sometimes I would stop and listen silently; absolutely nothing on all occasions – even the sense of a spooky ambiance was absent.

Anne Boleyn is, of course, Blickling’s celebrity ghost and there are some famous reports of encounters with female apparitions that are usually assumed to be Anne; although I have to say they are remarkably consonant with the generic grey lady reports that one hears of so often in haunted locations. In particular the stories of two encounters at Blickling are repeated time and again: One involves men delivering the Ditchley portrait of Anne’s’ mother, Elizabeth I, to the long gallery of the Hall. The delivery men were met by an old fashioned looking lady who signed for the portrait. But Blickling’s house steward was confounded when the men told him that the picture had already been signed for by a lady in the long gallery. The puzzled house steward examined the paperwork and found no signature on the dotted line. A search of the house yielded no sign of the spooky recipient of the portrait. Another story of an encounter with the lady of Blickling hall was provided by the butler to Lord Lothian, the last private owner of the hall. The butler approached a women dressed in grey standing by the lake, a lake a few yards far from the walls of the hall. She responded to the butler’s enquiry with “That for which I search is lost forever”. The butler looked away for a moment. He turned back only to find her gone.

Because of the similarities and analogies between the paranormal and the altered states of perception such as we see in Charles Bonnet syndrome and dream states, I have, as a kind of hobby, taken to using a sort of Freudian analysis to interpret ghost stories – looking on them as products of the imagination, and/or the Jungian deep collective mind which encodes meanings into stories, pictures and symbols. However, to call it “Freudian analysis” is really to put a respectable scientific gloss on a folk activity that has a lineage going at least as far back as Joseph’s interpretations of the dreams of Pharaoh ’s butler and baker.

My first foray into this area was with the famous lake-side sighting of Blicking Hall’s “Anne Boleyn”. Whatever the actual ontology behind this report, whether an hallucination or even an invented story, it nevertheless retains some highly symbolic elements that can be interpreted as a subliminal message of a modern malaise. The results of my “analysis” can be found toward the end of this blog post. Unfortunately information about the butler’s state of mind is not available to us, but I suspect if he did have some kind of hallucination it may also have connected with his circumstances in some way. I have a feeling, however, that these grey lady reports would come out of Blickling Hall whether Anne Boleyn’s visits were historical or not: What is crucial is that she is such a subliminally significant figure that even the rumour of her being connected with a place is enough to help trigger reports.

I call it “analysis” but frankly that term makes something which is very evanescent and insubstantial sound as though it is readily tractable to “hard science”. But then perhaps even history as a discipline would not want to make a claim to being analytical in the hard science sense. Equivocation is the name of the game. The past is one of those objects that is starting to pass out of the realm of “Turing testability” for physicality*. History cannot be tested at will, its evidence is often partial, and many of its practitioners have to accept that their theories may ultimately have no high standard of proof. Accordingly, Historians are not just people who can remember lots of facts, but they tap into a very wide experience of the human situation in order to interpret historical data with great feats of their imagination.

To embark on a creative task like interpreting the meaning of ghost reports one needs the free imagination of the artist and mythologist in order to join the dots with a grander imaginative narrative. As with the historian it too requires one to draw on one’s knowledge of the total human situation: history, psychology, religion, art, literature, ascetics, science, philosophy etc. What one ends up with is probably little more than conjecture, conjecture that perhaps shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But if that is all we have to got to go on then we must remember that epistemic beggars can’t be choosers.

However, as we shall see in the next part the quasi-Freudian/Jungian approach to the paranormal is far from original.

...to be continued...


Footnote: * The case of history is an indication that a negative on the "Turing test" for reality may be down to the object simply being epistemically inaccessible rather than it being intrinsically incoherent and fragmentary.

Ugly Norwich

Get the prozac ready: As dreary as the grey skies that sometimes hang over Norwich
("Heck!" said the architect, "there's not enough room for a door and a window, so I'll just make a little lean-to like so...")

What makes a building ugly? In this facebook album of pictures taken in Norwich it seems that one of the problems is context – buildings that would otherwise be passable become ugly blots in an inappropriate setting and this is certainly true in Norwich with its sometimes dissonant mix of old and new buildings: Modernism, functionality, and the hardnosed practical world of office and factory don’t sit well with the romantic, the quaint, the arcadian cottage, and the homely; we like to keep these two worlds apart (except solicitors). Other buildings however (see my picture above) would have a struggle looking anything but ugly in any context.

 I suspect that the overriding factor in determining ugliness is one’s mental context and the associations triggered by the building. Viz: What does the building signify to you? Does it trigger a sense of boredom? Does it look run down, neglected and dirty? Is it threatening in some way? Is it associated with danger? Does it signify either values or a life style you dislike? Get the mental associations right and a building can look beautiful: Perhaps even the building  I have pictured above, if rendered in brilliant shinning white and with flamboyant canopied windows, could look exciting and beautiful on a summer’s day; but it wouldn't be "Norwich".

City Office Block vs. Bucolic Cottage: Norwich is not well known for getting its building contrasts right

***

For centuries, perhaps since the rise of the merchant classes and gentry toward the end of fourteenth century,   the attitude to building in Norwich has been "Let's just do it guys!". In the doing we have been left a hotch-potch of monuments typical of an Anglo-Saxon market free for all. And yet unplanned and unsystematic though it is the net result of many architectural foibles can often be unconsciously quaint and charming. But sometimes, as we see above, this outcome is hilarious.