Monday, October 27, 2008
Seeing things?
You will probably have heard of the psychoanalytical tool called the Rocharch Test. I believe it was also nicknamed the ‘inkblot test’ at the time of its inception. In it you view a series of abstract shapes, like mutating amoebas, and say what you see. The analyst takes your interpretations and from them construes a narrative representing your deep concerns. So, if you fashion from the ink blots various sexual elements, you may have personal difficulties in managing relationships or in your potency. If you see cakes and biscuits, you may have an eating disorder. Whatever, whether it is a familial problem or some form of phobia, it can come to the surface via your attempts to find meaning in the ink. It is not unlike Freud’s stream of consciousness approach to fishing truths from the unconscious.
Among the variety of TV channels available to me in Ghana (from South Africa!) are several that deal with the supernatural. In them people claim to see a variety of otherworldly objects, apparitions and events from the present, past or from the future. Whether it be a ghost or a UFO, they stare earnestly into the camera lens and aver that it was as real as you or me (an extremely dubious analogy for any philosopher!). The point is that they interpret the data out there in the world, the way their unconscious minds deem appropriate. We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. We manage our successful close relationships, for example, by selecting the facets that make it feel fulfilling to us. By doing so we generate a fairly constant and emotional picture of another person from the vast amount of sensory data we have at our disposal. We don’t want to see what others around us might find disagreeable.
Recently, I wrote a blog about the messages that are displayed on the back windows of tro tros (mini buses) and taxis. I saw one at the weekend which took the Rocharch biscuit.
“Observers are Worried”
What to make of it? Being something of an aficionado of science fiction films and also intrigued by the recent release by authorities of official documents relating to UFO visitations to Britain (!), it seemed like a message from the stars. We are being watched. Aliens are decidedly jittery regarding what we are doing to Earth, that most desirable and eternally entertaining of holiday destinations for the more affluent among them. They are so concerned they are communicating their fears via messages on Accra taxis!
This surely beats corn circles. Not to mention the creamed potato mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind which Richard Dreyfus realised were a sure sign that there was intelligence out there and it was coming to visit and that the mash sculpture portrayed the exact topographical spot.
Aliens are bright enough to send us messages in the appropriate language.... Look around you.
You will probably have heard of the psychoanalytical tool called the Rocharch Test. I believe it was also nicknamed the ‘inkblot test’ at the time of its inception. In it you view a series of abstract shapes, like mutating amoebas, and say what you see. The analyst takes your interpretations and from them construes a narrative representing your deep concerns. So, if you fashion from the ink blots various sexual elements, you may have personal difficulties in managing relationships or in your potency. If you see cakes and biscuits, you may have an eating disorder. Whatever, whether it is a familial problem or some form of phobia, it can come to the surface via your attempts to find meaning in the ink. It is not unlike Freud’s stream of consciousness approach to fishing truths from the unconscious.
Among the variety of TV channels available to me in Ghana (from South Africa!) are several that deal with the supernatural. In them people claim to see a variety of otherworldly objects, apparitions and events from the present, past or from the future. Whether it be a ghost or a UFO, they stare earnestly into the camera lens and aver that it was as real as you or me (an extremely dubious analogy for any philosopher!). The point is that they interpret the data out there in the world, the way their unconscious minds deem appropriate. We all do it to a greater or lesser extent. We manage our successful close relationships, for example, by selecting the facets that make it feel fulfilling to us. By doing so we generate a fairly constant and emotional picture of another person from the vast amount of sensory data we have at our disposal. We don’t want to see what others around us might find disagreeable.
Recently, I wrote a blog about the messages that are displayed on the back windows of tro tros (mini buses) and taxis. I saw one at the weekend which took the Rocharch biscuit.
“Observers are Worried”
What to make of it? Being something of an aficionado of science fiction films and also intrigued by the recent release by authorities of official documents relating to UFO visitations to Britain (!), it seemed like a message from the stars. We are being watched. Aliens are decidedly jittery regarding what we are doing to Earth, that most desirable and eternally entertaining of holiday destinations for the more affluent among them. They are so concerned they are communicating their fears via messages on Accra taxis!
This surely beats corn circles. Not to mention the creamed potato mountains in Close Encounters of the Third Kind which Richard Dreyfus realised were a sure sign that there was intelligence out there and it was coming to visit and that the mash sculpture portrayed the exact topographical spot.
Aliens are bright enough to send us messages in the appropriate language.... Look around you.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Croc of gold part 2
How weird but not very wonderful that my earlier blog today spun together the gold ring in a crocodile’s stomach and the calamity in the stock market. Glancing at the news just now I see that the same croc is not dead and in reward for its gorging on the entirety of a British tourist (the Aussies hate the Poms THIS much?) it has been put out to stud for the rest of its life. Meanwhile, Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers, having brought about the demise of his company by gorging on countless individuals, walks away to his various studs with 500 million dollars a year in a golden handshake.
It’s a fact – you can’t tell one croc from another.
Labels: Richard Fuld. Lehman Brothers. Crocodile. Gold ring.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
A croc of gold and the global market crash
During the last three weeks I have been travelling: England, Paris, South of France, a party in Cornwall and now back here to Ghana. The curious aspect to it all is that, despite only having lived here for a few months, it felt very good coming back. I was born in India and my parents took me to England after a four year life of servant orientated luxury. Not only to England but to dismal Leeds in late November with food rationing, no fuel and certainly no special servant assigned to make my little life all a-cosset. There’s a certain familiar feel to being here (apart from having a batman or Ayah!!!) in that nothing can be taken for granted; poverty, though not starvation, stalks the rutted earth roads and there are great disparities between the urban middle classes and country villagers and the squatters who grab any spare land in the city, and have corn as high as an elephant’s eye in a matter of weeks. Thus I am claiming a kind of circularity, a tarot cycle which has brought me through innumerable vicissitudes back to being the unnumbered Fool card, a wandering rootless character, wondering whether I have finally come home.
I wrote a blog or two while travelling, on issues that drift like leaves in the autumn of life and put aside, for future writing, what seemed like nourishing material in the news. This included the ring of a missing person in a crocodile’s belly, Colin Powell dancing impromptu hip hop at a public gathering in London, the fall in the World Stock Markets and the fact that I am suddenly in receipt of the State Pension, which I still think of as the ‘old age pension’. Can they be encapsulated in one blog?
First, I have no time for Powell who is regarded here as a coconut (black only on the outside). The fact that he has a sudden public penchant for hip hop just shows how deeply hypocritical the man is. I am old school rock and roll and never felt that the Devil’s Music could be aligned with the Right in politics, never mind the fundamentalist/neo-con/creationist extreme of it. Second, sixty five seems a good age with lots to look forward to, including strutting to some raucous band or other, mouthing an anthem to sex, liberty, nomadic adventure or the political struggle and fantasising what life might have been like if I had had even a modicum of musical ability in my fingers. Third, watching, rather too closely, the shifting shares in the global market place was a bit like viewing bad election results, knowing that those flickering figures represented not just the inane financial risks taken by executives of banks (who, no doubt, pilloried and/or imprisoned Joe or Jane Bloggs for some overdraft transgression, re-possessing their houses, while themselves receiving 79 billion pounds over eight years in bonuses) but those same figures equated to lost pensions and unemployment for millions.
Fourth, the croc of gold. A man goes missing in Australia and his ring ends up in a crocodile. Certainly a human tragedy. Beyond that, symbolic. A crocodile is killed or dies. Forensics discover that the swallowed human cadavar has been digested and transmuted into crocodile flesh but the ring of gold remains, immutable, unchanging, desirable. The Stock Exchange normally has bull and bear markets. But that was in the protectionist old days of gluttony and self-gratification among our financiers. What we have now is a crocodile market. Everyone’s lives are being ground up in the teeth of rabid market forces that are gorging on everything, including themselves.
Only gold holds its value.
During the last three weeks I have been travelling: England, Paris, South of France, a party in Cornwall and now back here to Ghana. The curious aspect to it all is that, despite only having lived here for a few months, it felt very good coming back. I was born in India and my parents took me to England after a four year life of servant orientated luxury. Not only to England but to dismal Leeds in late November with food rationing, no fuel and certainly no special servant assigned to make my little life all a-cosset. There’s a certain familiar feel to being here (apart from having a batman or Ayah!!!) in that nothing can be taken for granted; poverty, though not starvation, stalks the rutted earth roads and there are great disparities between the urban middle classes and country villagers and the squatters who grab any spare land in the city, and have corn as high as an elephant’s eye in a matter of weeks. Thus I am claiming a kind of circularity, a tarot cycle which has brought me through innumerable vicissitudes back to being the unnumbered Fool card, a wandering rootless character, wondering whether I have finally come home.
I wrote a blog or two while travelling, on issues that drift like leaves in the autumn of life and put aside, for future writing, what seemed like nourishing material in the news. This included the ring of a missing person in a crocodile’s belly, Colin Powell dancing impromptu hip hop at a public gathering in London, the fall in the World Stock Markets and the fact that I am suddenly in receipt of the State Pension, which I still think of as the ‘old age pension’. Can they be encapsulated in one blog?
First, I have no time for Powell who is regarded here as a coconut (black only on the outside). The fact that he has a sudden public penchant for hip hop just shows how deeply hypocritical the man is. I am old school rock and roll and never felt that the Devil’s Music could be aligned with the Right in politics, never mind the fundamentalist/neo-con/creationist extreme of it. Second, sixty five seems a good age with lots to look forward to, including strutting to some raucous band or other, mouthing an anthem to sex, liberty, nomadic adventure or the political struggle and fantasising what life might have been like if I had had even a modicum of musical ability in my fingers. Third, watching, rather too closely, the shifting shares in the global market place was a bit like viewing bad election results, knowing that those flickering figures represented not just the inane financial risks taken by executives of banks (who, no doubt, pilloried and/or imprisoned Joe or Jane Bloggs for some overdraft transgression, re-possessing their houses, while themselves receiving 79 billion pounds over eight years in bonuses) but those same figures equated to lost pensions and unemployment for millions.
Fourth, the croc of gold. A man goes missing in Australia and his ring ends up in a crocodile. Certainly a human tragedy. Beyond that, symbolic. A crocodile is killed or dies. Forensics discover that the swallowed human cadavar has been digested and transmuted into crocodile flesh but the ring of gold remains, immutable, unchanging, desirable. The Stock Exchange normally has bull and bear markets. But that was in the protectionist old days of gluttony and self-gratification among our financiers. What we have now is a crocodile market. Everyone’s lives are being ground up in the teeth of rabid market forces that are gorging on everything, including themselves.
Only gold holds its value.
Labels: Crocodile and gold ring. Stock market crash. Old Age pension. Colin Powell.
Monday, October 06, 2008
The End of the World is Nigh: 21/12/2008
Does December 21st 2008 (11.12 am GMT) strike a chord with you? It will. I shall be in Ghana then and the fanatical charismatic Christian churches will be whipping their supplicants into a crescendo – if they have read their Mayan, Druid, Chinese…and scientific futurologists’ claims about this particular day. There appear to be innumerable warnings that the world will change irrevocably come Judgment morning. While the soothsayers are in some accord, so, it appears may be the scientists. This is because Earth lines up exactly on the axis of the Milky Way, in direct and rare congruence with the Black Hole that lies, menacingly at its centre. There is, some say, a likelihood of transgressive solar flares disrupting all communications, the magnetic poles could flip and/or appalling elemental forces unleashed. On the other hand, if the science is discounted, the clairvoyants (using the ancient sources mentioned above) predict a massive asteroid collision or something equally calamitous.
Try Googling the date and you’ll see it’s big time in the fear stakes. I was alerted to it by a History Channel programme that was so alarmist I hardly savoured the wine I was drinking at the time.
So, what is the import of all this on us mortal souls? Woody Allen said, pithily, that life is hard and then we die. What seems to be wired into us is some mysterious desire NOT to know the date and time of our death. We live in perpetual denial of any construct that undermines the open-endedness of our days, as though, superstitiously, to admit such thinking would take away the final vestiges of our belief in immortality. The fear of death is bad enough and is the central battering ram at the doors of atheism. But to KNOW the exact moment of extinction would actually change every religion as we know it.
The death of everyone – or most of us – on one particular day creates a certain kind of fateful frenzy. No longer do we have to contemplate our own individual deaths, as some kind of unique solipsistic event and, therefore, memorable but now we have to share the finality with everyone else. Sartre said, ‘Hell is Others’ which sums it up, really. I want my own, unique ending, not some messy travesty of an apocalypse involving all those people I don’t know and never met. How banal and anonymous!
Does December 21st 2008 (11.12 am GMT) strike a chord with you? It will. I shall be in Ghana then and the fanatical charismatic Christian churches will be whipping their supplicants into a crescendo – if they have read their Mayan, Druid, Chinese…and scientific futurologists’ claims about this particular day. There appear to be innumerable warnings that the world will change irrevocably come Judgment morning. While the soothsayers are in some accord, so, it appears may be the scientists. This is because Earth lines up exactly on the axis of the Milky Way, in direct and rare congruence with the Black Hole that lies, menacingly at its centre. There is, some say, a likelihood of transgressive solar flares disrupting all communications, the magnetic poles could flip and/or appalling elemental forces unleashed. On the other hand, if the science is discounted, the clairvoyants (using the ancient sources mentioned above) predict a massive asteroid collision or something equally calamitous.
Try Googling the date and you’ll see it’s big time in the fear stakes. I was alerted to it by a History Channel programme that was so alarmist I hardly savoured the wine I was drinking at the time.
So, what is the import of all this on us mortal souls? Woody Allen said, pithily, that life is hard and then we die. What seems to be wired into us is some mysterious desire NOT to know the date and time of our death. We live in perpetual denial of any construct that undermines the open-endedness of our days, as though, superstitiously, to admit such thinking would take away the final vestiges of our belief in immortality. The fear of death is bad enough and is the central battering ram at the doors of atheism. But to KNOW the exact moment of extinction would actually change every religion as we know it.
The death of everyone – or most of us – on one particular day creates a certain kind of fateful frenzy. No longer do we have to contemplate our own individual deaths, as some kind of unique solipsistic event and, therefore, memorable but now we have to share the finality with everyone else. Sartre said, ‘Hell is Others’ which sums it up, really. I want my own, unique ending, not some messy travesty of an apocalypse involving all those people I don’t know and never met. How banal and anonymous!
Labels: Death. 21st december 2008, End of World.