Modernism and Christianity

This is a picture I drew circa 1971. In those days, aged 19, I still carried with me the modernist optimism that had attracted me in my school days of the 60s. During that decade I marveled at the high shiny steel and glass concrete structures that were being thrown up even in Norwich with its awkward medieval lanes and street lines. It made me feel that the future had arrived. To quote (once again) H. G. Wells' The Time Machine:

I saw  great and splendid architecture  rising about me , more massive than any buildings of our own time....

So, the above was my attempt to raise up a piece of architecture of my own; on paper at least! The idea was to create an impression of height, and a rising up into the clouds; notice the unfinished look of the upper most cylinder - yet more units could be added (As it stands the building is about 70-80 stories high). The twisting cross shaped units created a perspective problem that I solved using freehand rather than technically correct vanishing points - the upshot is that a careful check reveals the perspective to be rather awry!

I think I'm still a modernist, but perhaps a little less optimistic. To finish Wells' quote:

.....and yet as it seemed built of glimmer and mist.

Not long after I drew my picture I took an excursion into Christian evangelicalism. Mine was always a fairly moderate version of evangelicalism, but even that did not fit well with me; I always felt uncomfortable with it, a square peg in a round hole. Over the years I've moved away from straight evangelicalism, but retained what I consider to be the real essence of Christianity, the Open Gospel (See link below). Also, my modernist tendencies don't sit well with the stuffy conservatism sometimes found in evangelicalism..... and neither do some of my personality traits which wouldn't be out of place on an Asperger syndrome check list.  But far worse than all this, I found that evangelicalism is just too close to fundamentalism: For the fundamentalist high buildings and high achievement signify the rebellion of Babel and thoughts of man. And yet in spite of high spiritual pretensions fundamentalism itself has characteristics that are so transparently part of a very human complex of conceits, self-deceits and run of the mill failings common to all (wo)mankind. 

The over optimistic humanism of some modernism, when set against the dowdy oppressive observant based religion of fundamentalism, reminds me of that episode in Red Dwarf when Lister's ego is reified into two characters; a flamboyant optimist and a recessive critical pessimist. A balance needs to be kept between optimism and pessimism.Modernist Christianity may be the balance needed in these days of extremist polarisation. As it is with my imaginary architecture so it is with my Christianity.... the cross is central, twists to face in many directions, rises up to a great height and above all, is unfinished.

Some relevant links:

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/blog-post.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/power-houses.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/university-of-big-disappointments.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/the-riddle-of-sphinx.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/behold-we-go-up-to-jerusalem.html

Dan Dare in The Pillars of Creation Mystery!

The above is a picture of the so called "Pillars of Creation" taken by the Hubble space telescope. According to Wiki: 

"Pillars of Creation" is a photograph taken by the Hubble Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, some 7,000 light years from Earth.^[1] They are so named because the gas and dust are in the process of creating new stars, while also being eroded by the light from nearby stars that have recently formed.^[2] Taken April 1, 1995, it was named one of the top ten photographs from the Hubble by Space.com.^[3]

That's very interesting especially if you now take a look at the following picture of deep space; It comes not from the Eagle Nebula but the Eagle Boys Comic of 1957 which was running a Dan Dare story called "The Reign of the Robots".

Is it just me or does that dark space cloud in the Dan Dare story have more than a passing resemblance to the Pillars of Creation? My best guess is that the artists of this particular story* may have seen some of the nebulae pictures returned by the powerful telescopes of the day, such as the Hale Telescope.  See for example this photo of the Eagle Nebula taken by the Mount Palomar Hale Telescope in 1965: 

(Picture from: http://palomarskies.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/astrophoto-friday-m16-eagle-nebula.html)

If you look carefully at this photo you can see the Pillars of Creation. Did the Eagle artists deliberately choose images from the Eagle Nebula?  If so that bright "double" star in the Palomar photo may also have crept into the artist's picture! The Palomar Skies blog spot says this about the photo:

The photo was taken in 1965 with the 200-inch Hale Telescope. M16 is an emission nebula and associated open star cluster located about 7,000 light years distant in the direction of the constellation of Serpent

Perhaps I might be pushing the resemblances a bit too far in noting that the Mekon's satellite which appears in The Eagle's front page deep space picture does look a little bit like the dome of a telescope!

The Hale Telescope

All very intriguing, but I'm not quite sure what it all adds up to! I suppose the artist's work could have been subliminal and dream-like rather than a self aware aping of the telescope images. Dreams can and do patch together linked symbolic images in this haphazard way.

Footnote:

* The artists were Frank Hampson and Harold Johns: See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dan_Dare_stories 

Behold we go up to Jerusalem!

My first view of Jerusalem in 1997.

As this blog serves as my travel blog I'm using this post to make available an essay I wrote after I visited Jerusalem quite by chance in 1997. This essay can be downloaded from here.  Although it would be wrong to say that this "pilgrimage" had a fundamental impact on my me it is true to say that the visit help consolidate some of the views on religion and Christianity that I already held. I say more about this in the essay.

Addendum 17/07/14: The video below is appropriate to this post!

Dan Dare’s Britain

The 1960s Post Office tower was futuristic enough to appear in a Dan Dare episode.  But Dan Dare's future has  actually been and gone.

I have recently been watching the two episodes of the BBC 4 program Jet! When Britain Ruled the Skies, a program that deals with the flurry of Jet aircraft development in the UK from the late 40s to the mid 60s. That title may well say more about how Britain saw itself in the heady optimistic days of the late forties and fifties than about the state of its flight technology. But then optimism has a way of forming a symbiotic coupling to a surge of material creativity.

In the forties and fifties the invention of the jet powered flight had just opened up a very rich mine of technological discovery*. The seams of this mine were being worked out by numerous companies as they explored its myriad possibilities. In those early days jet aircraft hadn't settled down into a standard pattern and so a profusion of independent companies investigated a wide diversity of airframe configurations, some perhaps even looking a little strange. The designers were very much at the experimental stage of finding out: The technology was just getting started and was climbing that steep slope to a maturity which marks optimum designs. Without building and trying out different configurations no one really knew what worked well and what didn't. The market was another unknown factor; it was not always clear what that market wanted, needed and/or could use. Sometimes that market neither wanted nor needed the best technology (The VC 10 airliner is a case in point)

Some strange looking aircraft emerged during the 1950s

In this highly experimental environment the heroic test pilots came into their own. Many of these pilots had war time experience of flying, experience which probably set them up well for what was to prove a risky occupation. The glistening silver skins of their speeding sky-steeds may well have evoked thoughts of the shining knights of old and the age of chivalry. These brave and highly skilled men caught the imagination of the pubic and they become household names. The break neck advances in jet flight had generated an irresistible mix that the general public easily connected with; viz: a visually attractive and ultra-modern looking technology, the exhilarating dangers of speed, and of course the test pilots themselves some of whom as war time heroes had saved Britain in its darkest hour. These pilots cut a silver streak across a drab post war period of austerity. It is difficult to understand where the money was coming from at that time, but the country was on a collective ego trip so who cared about money? The feel good factor after the dark days of war was palpable. But one didn't have to have experienced the war to get caught up in all this: I remember going to the RAF Coltishall air show in the early 60s and seeing an English Electric Lightning taxi a short way down the runway and then take off like a rocket  at a near vertical angle; the noise and the sight was hair raising.

English Electric Lightnings seeing off a Russian intruder in the 60s

As I watched When Britain Ruled the Skies I was sharply reminded of my favorite comic character “Dan Dare; Pilot of the Future” whose strip appeared in the boy’s magazine “The Eagle”. The original Dan Dare stories ran from the 1950 until 1967. I was in my early teens during the 1960s and I caught enough of the end of this period to pick up the ethos behind the Dan Dare stories. When Britain Ruled the Skies is a window into the late 1940s and 1950s and from it is clear that the chivalrous Dan Dare and the fictional world he inhabited is a reflection of the culture in which he was conceived.

In Dan Dare; Pilot of the Future we find all the ingredients of the 1950s and 60s Jet age. There were, of course, the ubiquitous sleek flying machines piloted by heroes like Dan Dare. These heroes were set against enemies like the Mekon who probably had more than an accidental resemblance to the still fresh in memory stereotypical Nazis: Like the Nazis the Mekon had a genius for secret weapons and commanded hoards of identical and disposable shock troops (The Treens) whose sole personal characteristic was an unquestioning servility. This depersonalization of enemy foot soldiers into deluded quasi-automata is one way of dealing with the issue of killing them. In the Dan Dare series “The Reign of the Robots” (which I just happen to have read recently) we find further allusions to war-time. The Mekon, in Dare’s absence, has conquered the Earth where he has set up concentration camps and experiments involving humans. This latter abomination is not only reminiscent of Nazis, but it represents a 1950s British identification with all those who suffered in the Nazi concentration camps.

Depersonalising the Enemy foot soldiers makes it easier to dispose of them

In spite of his strength and genius, the Mekon was always ultimately foiled by the upright heroes of Spacefleet.  They fought against the odds and yet won.  As with the pilots of the Battle of Britain Spacefleet were few in number, but like super heroes they saved millions. Dan Dare was not actually supposed to be a super hero in the sense of having super powers but his luck, his wit and above all his chivalry were super human and it is with these unfailing powers he defeated his formidable foes.

The Dan Dare stories depicted a situation where space flight in the late twentieth century had become routine. In the original comic strip Dare was supposed to have been born in 1967 (See the wiki article on Dare). This would mean that Dan Dare would be 47 today; clearly the Dare stories projected a rather over optimistic view of the development of space flight. But to be fair the very rapid advances in aircraft since the Wright Brothers first "string bag" flight only fifty years before the jet age would lend credence to the idea that the conquest of space was imminent. In fact given the sleek looking spacecraft of the Dan Dare stories one could be forgiven for thinking that outer space was just an extension of the atmosphere and not a whole new can of worms altogether. It took the excellent sets of 2001 Space Odyssey to disabuse the popular mind of the view that space-ships need be sleek. A simple linear extrapolation of technology is seldom a good predictor.**

Spacefleet rockets seeing off some intruders

In as much as Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future  reflected the culture, ethos and technology of the post war period Dan Dare was in fact very much a pilot of the 1950s rather than the future. Coincidently, but very appropriately, the Dan Dare comic strip, in its original form, wound up in 1967; so in a sense Dan Dare wasn't born in 1967 but actually died in that year. As a type for the pilots of the post war years we see in the Dan Dare stories the indomitable spirit of war time Britain. During the War there was a firm belief that the country would pull through in spite of the odds. In fact my mother, who had been through the war and had been bombed out, once told me that no-one she knew thought for one moment that Britain would be defeated and this was in the face of the set-backs the country had experienced; while there was life there was hope as Dan Dare himself used to say! Evidence of this dogged self-confident spirit can be seen at the Farnborough airshow crash of 1952: In this crash a Sea Vixen Jet Fighter, an aircraft which at the time had a design fault, broke up mid-air during its display, killing the pilots. One of the engines ploughed like a missile into the spectators killing 29 of them and injuring 60. Today it is almost certain that an accident of this severity would put a halt to all celebrations. But no, this was Dan Dare’s Britain and so according to the wiki article:

Following the accident the air display programme continued once the debris was cleared from the runway, with Neville Duke exhibiting the prototype Hawker Hunter and taking it supersonic over the show later that day. (1952)

I suppose only for people who had been through wartime and who had faced a rain of bombs, V1s and V2s, could such a horrific event fail to quench their determination to keep going.  For them disasters were almost routine. It’s worth comparing this disaster with a recent event here in Britain: A half-marathon was called off because supplies of water failed to arrive.. This action was no doubt taken because some health and safety regulation was at stake and the organizers didn't want to take the rap if anyone killed themselves by becoming dehydrated during the race. Of course this is no comparison to a flying engine killing and injuring 89 people, but to their credit most of the competitors said go and hang to health and safety and did the run anyway. So perhaps the flame of Dan Dare's 1950s Britain is not entirely extinguished.

Dan Dare Pilot of the Future connects with sublime themes and archetypes that are never far away in the back of our imaginations. Stories of shining chivalrous knights whom the populace loves to follow in their battle against evil intelligences will always inspire the imagination. Moreover, in Britain there is the archetypical legend of King Arthur who, the legend says, will in times of need rise to save his country; never mind that Arthur was probably a Saxon hating Celt! (The Anglo-Saxons were invading the country at the time – no RAF to help out then!). The overriding theme of the Arthurian legend is the savoir as a motif rather than as actual history. This motif has the power to stir the imagination. Dan Dare stands in this tradition.

Footnotea:

* I hold the view that invention being a kind of search, find, reject, and select operation is a way of discovering configuration.
** Technology often at first goes through an exponential period, which then levels out to a logarithmic period.

Relevant links:
http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/symbol-legend-and-destiny-at-sutton-hoo.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-1.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/cosmic-perspective-part-3.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/modern-norwich.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/university-of-big-disappointments.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/family-history.html


Addendum 01/11/14
Some things don't change:

This story broke today on Yahoo. See:

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/raf-fighter-planes-intercept-russian-bombers-122844380.html#WZTkDX

Fifty years later the Russian Bear Bomber is the same, but this time it's intercepted by the  UK's Typhoon euro fighter.

The Paranormal Part 5: The Last Straw

Crop circles, Rabbit Holes and Time Loops - Rob Buckle

Crop Circle Truth, with Rob Buckle on Circlemakers

See also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krA-PYWZQPc 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=ofNNwsNCB0g

And the channels Zenrabbit1 and Zennrabbit on YouTube

The above videos are talks by crop circle researcher Rob Buckle. His interest is in human made crop circles – that’s right there really are human constructed crop circles out there and they are very impressive by the sound of it! However, as a result of his emphasis on the human aspect of this phenonmenon Buckle has earned the ire of the traditional circle researchers who have placed a huge stake in the “alien intelligence did it” hypothesis. Ironically it is these people, whose life’s work and businesses swing on this thesis, that have become the powerful crop circle establishment. As might be expected given the natural state of human affairs, this establishment via their well entrenched interests have backed themselves into a corner, unable to gracefully bow out. They have burnt their life boats and Buckle has not just rocked their ship, he has also pulled the bilge plug.

Evidently Buckle has some acquaintance with the circle of circle makers and can tell us which circles he knows for a fact to have been created by them. None of this is to say that Buckle himself doesn't have some rather exotic notions of his own: He appears not to rule out that some circles may have non-human origins, but he is more interested in the far more frequent human created circles and that is because of the strange lore and anecdotes that now surrounds the making of these prodigious works of art. In his talks Buckle relates some of the weird paranormal events that have haunted, yes,  haunted is the right word, the circle makers; for example, frightening tall shadowy figures appearing in fields at night, presences that have barred entry to fields, lights, orbs, UFOs and this is just for starters: Particularly intriguing are the circle makers who have had to abort their corn circle mission for various reasons and then found later that either their planned circles were executed by other (unknown) parties, or, if they got only half way through, finding that by the next day someone, or something, had completed them.  Watch the videos to hear more. Unfortunately most of the evidences Buckle offers are one-off anecdotes that cannot be tested by traditional hard science; in fact it is all too likely that such peculiar phenomena are far too anomalous and erratic to yield to test tube precipitating and spring extending science. But having said that let me mention that Buckle also shows a video of a scientist who attempted to distinguish between so-called “real” and “hoaxed” crop circles using his instrumentation only to find that these instruments showed just as strong readings in circles known to have human origins.

Some time ago during the nineties “corn circle” (as they were then called) craze I remember watching a TV program where a farmer said that his parents, who were farmers between the wars, would find the occasional (simple) crop circle in their fields. In those days they just shrugged their shoulders and got on with their work. Since seeing that program I’ve had the sneaky suspicion that although the recent highly sophisticated circles are likely to be the product of expert and well practiced crop artists there has been all along a background of simpler formations that are not a product of human agency. Buckle, in fact, confirms this opinion in the comment thread of his second video above:

The few that still have a question mark over them are usually small and simple, but with swirled lays, done in one movement. These type were more common in the early days, but now are very rare.

In these simpler designs the emphasis is on their faultless machine like execution. That suggests to me a very algorithmic type "intelligence" rather than the very general necessarily mistake prone* all-purpose intelligence of humans. Who knows, perhaps the mysterious agency behind these machine perfect circles is becoming jealous of human efforts which have put their rather simple formations into the shade and this may explain why crop circle hauntings have had the effect of frightening away some artists!

It is wrong to call the crop circle creators hoaxers or pranksters – they are true artists who love the adventure, creativeness and artistic high that their clandestine work gives them as they have pushed it to the very highest level of development. Also, in view of the hauntings perhaps there is the added frisson of a dangerous liaison with the supernatural. But with that must go a warning; they are outlaws beyond the protection of society and opening themselves up to who knows what. Hauntings have a disquieting way of attaching themselves to people if those people find themselves in a position where they can become “infected”. Therefore I would categorically advise against proactive attempts to make a connection with the otherworldly. On the web site of crop circle researcher Colin Andrews (who has similar views to Buckle) we can read of a case where an off duty policeman who spotted tall white entities in the vicinity of a crop circle near Silbury hill and tried to interact with them. Faced by this custodian of the law these beings legged it over a hill pretty fast, but that didn't stop the officer subsequently picking up a haunt: See here http://www.colinandrews.net/UFO-PoliceSergeant-SilburyHill.html:

After the experience the officer suffered what he called poltergeist experiences. Several electrical items began to malfunction and there were strange knocks at the front door. When the officer answered the door there would be no-one there. The officer felt he had brought something home with him, several days after the experience he said that he had felt a presence within his home. Sometimes, when walking out to the kitchen, he said he saw in his minds eye a brief flash of a towering black figure (approx 8ft)) standing before him (Much like the figures circle makers see - Ed). These types of experiences are quite common with experiencers.

The officer’s continuing experiences show that whatever the origin of these events, once they enter into someone's life they seem to have a continuing presence.

To me that’s the equivalent of the frightening health warning picture on the back of a cigarette packet; I don’t think we have an inbuilt fear of the numinous for nothing. Better to keep to passive research rather than proactive research – that is, don’t try to stimulate "occult systems" to produce test output by poking them – instead just sit back, watch and think.  The occult is looking to me as if it’s a breakdown of the coherent rationality of our world in favour of some kind of cognitive delirium with, perhaps, a Freudian diagnosis of crises  in Jung's collective unconscious partly explaining it's meaning. But who knows; that's just a guess! If a passive approach helps keep this at bay it can’t be bad.

Other posts in my paranormal series:

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/paranormal-part-i-noumena-cognita-or.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/paranormal-part-2-warning-dont-watch.html

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/paranormal-part-3-westall-66-and.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/the-paranormal-part-4-monsters-from-id.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/identified-lying-object.html

Footnote:
* Due to a trial and error heuristic of "search, reject and select". Human minds necessarily use error feedback to learn.

Silbury Hill from West Kennet Long Barrow taken during one of my visits. I have never seen or felt anything odd! I suppose I ought to be pleased!

Addendum 03/02/2014

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-399136/Crop-circles-hit-spiritualists-suicide.html 

http://noumenacognitaanddreams.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/ross-well.html