Wednesday, August 26, 2009
A grave subject
I’ve done my share of investigating the beginnings of religion, not first hand, using primary evidence like a proper researcher but reading this and that. Fodder for the mind and also the very long epic I am writing about the times when there were many Gods and the current one – Jehovah – won the lottery to become the one and only God, at least for the Jews of the time. As I gathered it from such reading, He had an advantage over all the competition in that He was responsible for everything. This omnipotence meant that suddenly when things went wrong, He was displeased and when they went right, he was over the moon. (That’s where heaven is). Thus it was far more economical in time and effort to pray to the one and only God, even if he punished you for untold crimes by dispersing you all over the world.
A branch line of conjecture for me then and now, is the disposal of our bodies on death. Though it is not an inclusive list, for there must be tribes and races who turn up some more exotic ways of dealing with the fleshy and bony remnants of a person, the more common procedures offer a choice between interment, burning (fires and cremations), a Davy Jones or Ganges-type submarine experience and being left on a mountain top for the buzzards to strip you clean. Being shot into space will be the next.
Of all these I prefer the buzzard on the mountain top ritual. It fits with the vaguely Buddhist notions I have about being dissipated into billions of atoms and reforming as something else. An organic death.
So, as usual, I can now reveal what brought on this bit of flimflam. The plot next to Marilyn Monroe was sold for 2.4 million dollars recently. So far, the successful buyer has not let himself or herself be known. It must be a he, I’d think. Lying next to Marilyn! An ex-Kennedy (ie one who is dead) or her assassin (conspiracy theory) or someone she rejected and is still determined to be her eternal companion, or someone who wants his or her own grave looked at and feels s/he will find fame by association or someone for whom I cannot construct a motive, has won the Ebay auction.
At some point in the last century, an entrepreneur realised that car number plates could be sold on if they had magical acronyms or initials. In the same way, this Marilyn story might be the beginning of a lucrative new trend whereby we can bid to lie beside a lifetime's obsession. Someone we could not get near yet exalted from afar. Out with family tombs and in with celebrity squares of sacred soil where the famous one is surrounded by the less-desirable coffins of his or her fans and followers.
Labels: Grave. EBay auction, Marilyn Monroe
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Shofar sho good
On the news the other day was some footage of a number of Rabbis in an aeroplane, circling over Israel. One was blowing a ram’s horn, called the shofar and the others seemed in various degrees of commitment to the cause. This, it turned out, was a high altitude prayer-in to help Israel repel the invasion of the virus that we know as swine flu.
It set up the following train of thought, as I watched it. How do those religions that have forsworn pork manage swine flu in their systems? Does it contaminate their souls as well as their bodies? Both virus and soul are invisible to the naked eye, though the virus can be seen with instrumentation which has yet to catch a glimpse of whatever is imagined to be the holy spirit; that which bestows life upon humans, though not, as yet, on animals. Is being in an aeroplane an act that might bring these holy men nearer to God since in the early days of religion He was ‘up there’? If this is so then, knowing how competitive religions are, we have a new prayer race on our hands. The further up, the closer my God to thee. Or does praying at twenty thousand feet mean that the prayers will fall, weighted by their solemnity, like rain on as wide an area as possible? The height must be just right or they could fall on Palestine which could prove to be a sad waste of supplication by turning God’s beneficence into support for the enemy.
It was a curious piece and Sky News didn’t know how to play it, other than show it. There was an element of ‘straight-faced but aren’t they funny’ in it but not enough to inflame the Jewish lobby and its propensity to see anything amusing or critical as anti-semitism.
At the same time, it was announced that swine flu had reached Amazonian Indians. In fact, it is certain that it has invaded the hosts of believers of every religion known to the planet, as well as agnostics and atheists.
My partner pointed out that if this had been a group of traditional village doctors from the countryside of Ghana, the story would have been much more satirical, with a sub-text suggesting that Africans have not yet emerged from the age of superstition and magic, even though it is conceded by some of the more liberal adherents to world religions, that, unlike animals, they could have souls....
Labels: Ghana. Rabbis. Swine flu.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
You Dirty Rat (Part 2)
The rat is a proven master at managing the hurdles that humans present it. Following on from my last farrago of nonsense (though admittedly chilling for those who fear the creatures) sticky paper was laid on the track the rats were taking from entry via the hole in the mosquito netting to various locations of food, placed there for their delight and hastened death. But it seems to be more like their delight and edification. After the first one left all its body hair on the said carpet of glue and retired to its lair, prematurely bald, subsequent familial rodents have somehow managed to remove the succulent opiates from the centre of the sticky pads without even getting a gummed up paw or whisker. How do they do it? Do they work in pairs like acrobats? (Actually they do – I saw a film sequence once of a rat on its back carrying an egg and others pulling it along like a trolley! Or was it ants I am thinking about…)
But, laying my erratic memory on one side, news of other creatures’ activities puts everything into context.
Rooks can, when first meeting the problem of a worm floating in a test tube, drop enough stones in the tube to raise the water level and, therefore, the worm to their beaks. Like Aesop I hear you cry. I reported magpies some time ago that were seemingly capable of recognising themselves in a mirror. And another account purported to show that wallabies in Tasmania raid the marijuana fields of a medical research centre (nice work if you can get it) gorge themselves, then retire to the nearest corn field and proceed to dance like dervishes, creating – you guessed it – corn circles!
I remember reading a theory once (called morphogenesis, I think), though those who read this column regularly will have a suitable wariness at any claim of mine to be factual. The theory was that if a creature learns something in one part of the world, his or her ilk in another gains something cognitive from it, So, if we take the rat learning a complex maze in the UK, it might take an hour. Once it learns it, it runs the maze very quickly, of course, But a rat in the Amazon, faced for the first time with the same maze will achieve a result which suggests learning from the first rat has been ‘transmitted’. We might posit Jungian pools of the unconscious here. We might consider that animals have telepathy. We might hypothesise that creatures of this world have forms of intelligence way beyond our capacity to comprehend.
But it is intriguing to project a scenario where any one of the aforementioned life forms uses ingenuity to bring a meal to its mouth, checks that it is properly groomed in a mirror and then heads for a rave in the nearest clump of illegally sown marijuana and finishes off in a perfect circle of flattened cereal crop, sleeping it off.
One thing is for sure, it will appear on YouTube and we will sit in ignorant wonder on our settees and imagine, erroneously, that it was staged with computer graphics.
The rat is a proven master at managing the hurdles that humans present it. Following on from my last farrago of nonsense (though admittedly chilling for those who fear the creatures) sticky paper was laid on the track the rats were taking from entry via the hole in the mosquito netting to various locations of food, placed there for their delight and hastened death. But it seems to be more like their delight and edification. After the first one left all its body hair on the said carpet of glue and retired to its lair, prematurely bald, subsequent familial rodents have somehow managed to remove the succulent opiates from the centre of the sticky pads without even getting a gummed up paw or whisker. How do they do it? Do they work in pairs like acrobats? (Actually they do – I saw a film sequence once of a rat on its back carrying an egg and others pulling it along like a trolley! Or was it ants I am thinking about…)
But, laying my erratic memory on one side, news of other creatures’ activities puts everything into context.
Rooks can, when first meeting the problem of a worm floating in a test tube, drop enough stones in the tube to raise the water level and, therefore, the worm to their beaks. Like Aesop I hear you cry. I reported magpies some time ago that were seemingly capable of recognising themselves in a mirror. And another account purported to show that wallabies in Tasmania raid the marijuana fields of a medical research centre (nice work if you can get it) gorge themselves, then retire to the nearest corn field and proceed to dance like dervishes, creating – you guessed it – corn circles!
I remember reading a theory once (called morphogenesis, I think), though those who read this column regularly will have a suitable wariness at any claim of mine to be factual. The theory was that if a creature learns something in one part of the world, his or her ilk in another gains something cognitive from it, So, if we take the rat learning a complex maze in the UK, it might take an hour. Once it learns it, it runs the maze very quickly, of course, But a rat in the Amazon, faced for the first time with the same maze will achieve a result which suggests learning from the first rat has been ‘transmitted’. We might posit Jungian pools of the unconscious here. We might consider that animals have telepathy. We might hypothesise that creatures of this world have forms of intelligence way beyond our capacity to comprehend.
But it is intriguing to project a scenario where any one of the aforementioned life forms uses ingenuity to bring a meal to its mouth, checks that it is properly groomed in a mirror and then heads for a rave in the nearest clump of illegally sown marijuana and finishes off in a perfect circle of flattened cereal crop, sleeping it off.
One thing is for sure, it will appear on YouTube and we will sit in ignorant wonder on our settees and imagine, erroneously, that it was staged with computer graphics.
Labels: Rats. Wallabies, Rooks and Morphogenesis