Holiday in Southern Ireland

The wife and I recently had a holiday in Southern Ireland, county Wicklow in fact.  Here are some of the places we visited:

Wicklow Gaol: This was our first visit of the week. Wicklow Goal is now museum. I anticipated before we went in that it would likely be a monument to British oppression of the Irish people. (Unfortunately for Ireland much of its history is covered by the history of British rule). I was right about this but I was glad to see that the story was told without any bitterness on the part of the Irish; one came out feeling the Irish still want to be friends with their somewhat larger neighbour. And a good thing too; we need friends like that! As an aside: We neither felt nor saw any of the many ghosts that are supposed to inhabit this building!

Glendalough: This is the ruins of a once busy monastic town. It is actually located in a glacial valley and as I looked around me I could see the high walls of the U-shaped profile of glacial action. The inhabitants of that town would no doubt have unconsciously viewed the landscape around them as ancillary and incidental to the cutting edge of creation; namely Man’s dealings with God.  Today, however, we find such a vision much more difficult to take for granted.  Changes in our perspective of time and space tempts us to view humanity as the ancillary objects, almost like inconsequential insects crawling around in the corners of the huge vista of a cosmic stage. When one understands something of geological history the setting of Glendalough, it only reinforces this tempting thought: This epic landscape with its huge space-time dimensions dwarfs human activity. It is easy to appreciate why Christian fundamentalists fail to come to terms with the cosmic perspective and can only cope with it by shrinking the cosmic backdrop to pre-scientific time scales and sometimes even returning to geocentric and flat earth cosmologies.

The central tower of Glendalough is its most notable feature: In the heyday of the monastic town it is thought to have served as a bell tower dividing up the day into its devotional segments; it was in fact the sacred equivalent of the city clock towers necessary for the marking out of secular time with a clock and bell before cheap mass produced time pieces were available to all.

Glendalough is now a town of the dead; It is still regarded as sacred and much of it covered by a grave yard that is in use today. I find some of the funerary paraphernalia that goes together with death full of pathos, a cathartic and apparently futile gesture in the face of the inevitability of termination. (See also here)

Aughrim: On the last day we walked round the small town of Aughrim not far from where we were staying. We had lunch by the gently chattering stream that passes through Aughrim. I reflected on the fact that this beautiful country with its neat well-kept shire-like feel is nothing short of a rural idyll. And yet southern Ireland is remarkably under-populated. There is in fact a very large Irish diaspora which dwarfs the 4.6 million inhabitants of Ireland. Sometimes an idyll can seem like heaven, a place where one wants to be for eternity.  But in this world it is difficult to tame the ambitious human spirit even with a mock paradise, a spirit that so often is looking for more. Sitting by a gently chattering stream is a solace and balm, but if you are ambitious you eventually get bored and have to move on. Many Irish people have done just that to the benefit of the world as a whole I would have thought!

Aughrim's quiet waters, but the allure of pastures new is always there.

Jurrassic Landscapes

Znedek Burian's Jurrasic landscape: When I first saw this picture I could hear the wind in those trees and the cracking of falling dried wood. What did it mean? 

I have in my possession a book called "Prehistoric Reptiles and Birds" which I received as a school prize at the age of 11. It was written by paleontologist Josef Augusta and illustrated by Zdenek Burian. The text was perhaps a little dry for an 11 year old, but the illustrations by Burian fired my imagination. Burian is justifiably well known for his pictures depicting prehistoric animals. To my eye Burian's pictures are wonderfully impressionistic; although not meticulously detailed they convey a sense of life, animation, realism and above all prehistoric atmosphere. Somehow Burian's pictures take me back in time. One might expect that a boy of 11 was inspired by the pictures of prehistoric birds - and I was - but surprisingly it was Burian's Jurassic landscapes that had an even greater effect on me.

  

Burian: landscapes with a sense of depth

These landscape pictures made me feel as though I was actually looking through a window in  time at the actual thing.  The light, the atmosphere, the mood and the sense of a wilderness absent of the management of man became very real when I looked at Burian's pictures. Those landscapes receded into a misty background blur that I knew spoke of huge wild unmanaged spaces beyond. Those spaces were inhabited by monstrous roaming beasts uncontrolled by human interference and organisation. This was a very alien world that left me with nagging questions that I never shook off: What did it all mean? Why were there huge tracts of time absent of human presence? 

Ironically this was a spiritual experience: Unlike some for whom the questions of meaning eventually abate to be replaced by nihilistic resignation, for me the quest for meaning would incessantly nag. It was as if I was being shown a landscape and a still small voice whispered: "Look at this; what do you think it means?". In an effort to get closer to that question, if not to answer it, seven years later I attempted my own pencil depiction of a Jurassic landscape (See below). Not of Burian standard, of course, but it got the need to express something off my chest. In fact today I'm reminded of those scenes in Close Encounters of alien contactees who obsessively groped for meaning in the enigmatic picture of Devil's mountain that had been impressed on their minds.

And the obsession continues: If I ever come across a landscape that reminds me of Burian's pictures I photograph it. In fact here is an example I snapped in the early spring of this year: 

A modern Jurassic looking landscape.

The Hemlock Stone

The Hemlock Stone

I recently visited this interesting place: The Hemlock Stone just outside Nottingham. It is a peculiar and singular formation, which like an old decayed tooth stands proud of the otherwise toothless gums of the eroded Triassic sandstone hills of Nottingham.  There is nothing else in the vicinity like it and one wonders why it too hasn't long since been eroded. According to the geological blurb the sandstone at this spot is more strongly cemented than the surroundings and hence its resilience to erosion; however there is apparently some disagreement as to whether human quarrying activity might also have been involved. The Hemlock stone therefore presents similar doubts about its origins that the Cheesewring on Bodmin moor might once have done. For my blog post on the Cheesewring see here: 

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/contingency-conjecture.html

According to Geologists the 400 metre thick pebbly sandstone layer around Nottingham was deposited in Triassic times by monsoonal rains eroding an ancient mountain range to the south of Nottingham. Nottingham was a dessert region landlocked in the huge mono-continent of Pangaea. In some places water rounded pebbles are seen half embedded in the sandstone floor and can be removed with a bit of effort. I  took one as a souvenir.

The Pebbly Sandstone of Nottingham

The likely depth of time occupied by the sequence of events  needed to generate this Nottinghamshire landscape is, as is so often the case with geological sequences, breath taking: Those ancient mountains may well have started their life as ancient rock layers themselves. They were then uplifted and eroded by rains and rivers which deposited them as silicate grains and pebbles.  As Pangaea broke up advancing and retreating seas deposited further layers of rock hundreds of metres thick on top of the sandstone. Over long periods of time all these layers were uplifted, folded and in turn eroded down to the basement sandstone  rock, eventually producing the the landscape we see today.

Like the Cheesewring the Hemlock Stone's singularity probably attracted the attention of man's sense of the numinous and it has therefore been the place of religious ritual. Not surprisingly its conspicuous form strikes a sense of awe even in those whose reaction is not necessarily spiritual:

Thou petrified enigma.....what tempest sculptured thee?   (Henry S Sutton, 1848)

Similar awe has been expressed by antiquarians about the Cheesewring:

If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones he would dream such a pile as the Cheesewring

...this wonderful pile of stones...but whether the work of nature or not I know not.

The Cheesewring. Bodmin Moor: Granite, not sandstaone

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.