Obituary for The Ancient Mariner
My friend Sean, poet and translator of the Greek into the Irish, sent me an email today regarding footballers who cross themselves at the beginning of matches. Sean wonders what gross perversion of morality has them praying for a hat trick rather than for the millions who will die from starvation in the oncoming months. This religious egocentricity is common enough and aeons old. As Mrs Thatcher might have said, “There is no such thing as Christianity or the Caliphate, only Christians and Muslims!”
News yesterday that the bones of a 14 year old boy have been found close to Stonehenge, that circular astrological and religious wonder of the Ancients. He had an amber necklace around his neck. Very important person. A bit like footballers’ bling. When his teeth were analysed it was discovered that he had grown up in the Mediterranean. This was 3,500 years ago when Stonehenge was THE place to be seen at, praying. How had he got over to the sceptered isle? No doubt by rowing, think the archaeologists.
What did he pray for? Should we conjecture? Hardly for the wealth and wellbeing of nations, tribes or clans. More likely that he would have a long and successful life and become a Chief of men. But he only made it to fourteen.
No change there then.
Christians awake!
The other night I watched a Derren Brown special on demystifying magic and miracles. For anyone who does not know this entertainer, he produces illusions of consummate skill. Where others might saw a woman in half, Derren Brown would quarter her, where others might suspend themselves in shackles from a rope, he would do it in a pool full of piranha. But where he really scores is in the psychology of deception. He beats top class poker players and chess players at their own games but not by their rules.
He is also a hypnotist. In his programmes, conservative people have conducted themselves outrageously, whether in bizarre social behaviour or by undertaking fiendish or seemingly impossible challenges. Whole groups have ‘seen’ ghosts in ancient buildings. Taxi drivers are suddenly unaware of a landmark like The London Eye which towers above them, in full view. I read recently that he ‘persuaded’ the passenger on a plane to take over the controls because the captain and co-pilot were struck down by illness. The man, unknowing, ended up in a flight simulator but believed, totally, he had undergone the heroic act of bringing down the plane and saving his fellows.
Back to magic and miracles. In the programme he set out to show that faith was a trick of the mind, only and bore no relation to evidence. He passed himself off to well known protagonists in a range of fields and was accepted by them as a great purveyor of their arts. Ufologists, spiritualists and the like found him demonstrating extraordinary, supernatural powers. Then there were the atheists.
Gathering together a profoundly irreligious group of individuals, within ten minutes he had them believing in God. Rather like all priests of the smack em on the head and dump them in water, brigade, Derren Brown placed a hand on the forehead of an unbeliever and the individual would experience a profundity unlike anything he or she had ever known. They fell, one after another, into their chairs and woke up announcing that they now believed there was a god. What struck me pleasingly, as an academic who likes the notion that evidence should guide human action, was Brown admitting that he had been a devout Christian until, in his twenties, he had reviewed the historical evidence and realised that it didn’t add up. Synchronous viewing, on my part, had me watching programmes on how the Christian church developed in the early days, how the New Testament was formulated by men who eradicated women from power within the church, vilified Judas (the disciple closest to Jesus and chosen by him for the dastardly deed) and created the patriarchy of the priesthood. I also watched, on Euronews, a chief honcho of the Vatican saying, brazenly, that it was the Catholic Church that was responsible for civilised behaviour in the world. Very little appeal to evidence there, then!
Here in Ghana, conversions are every day events. The preachers have big churches, wear their gold neck chains and drive chauffeur driven cars. They encourage prayer for consumer items. They are very much like Derren Brown. Only he shows us that there is nothing mystical or magical in all this. Just sad, vulnerable people who would rather subordinate themselves to belief than face the evidence that there is probably nothing out there and our lives are (as a priest said eloquently) flights of butterflies through the front door of a building and out of the back.
Is God a Diagnostic Molecular Imager?
Well, He, She or It seems to be a prevailing theme for many of these blogs. God. Does He, She, It exist? How do we know? Does the knowledge liberate us or further constrain our paltry attempts to be free agents beyond the scheme of an all-seeing Fate? It’s a good week for God doubters. As I write, the Pope is trundling around ‘secular Britain’ in his Popemobile just as described in my last blog. As he passes by, the crowd is hysterical with the adulation accorded to pop stars. Would the sound of their screams and supplications, their raptured eyes and offerings up of babies for him to bless be any different if another Messiah, say Elvis, was risen from the dead and equally enbubbled in his glass topped car? I doubt it. In fact all the tickets would have been sold. But, as in Julius Caesar, I come to bury God, not to praise him.
By that I mean, bury the memory of a rather bizarre event the other day. Being an academic of sorts, as you can see from the CV on the website, I like to go to lectures in other disciplines. Why? Well, rather like Thomas Kuhn or a 19th Century rennaissance man, there is a certain pleasure in seeing that science, that flagbearer of the objectively focused, has common themes and structures that appear everywhere and follow the fads and fashions of the philosophy of the day. So, anyway, I went to a symposium in a medical department of a university here in Accra. It was on the treatment of osteoporosis. It turned out to be less a forensic account of the condition and its effects (there is no epidemiological data on it, in Ghana) but more a chance for Roche, the pharmaceutical conglomerate, to sell a drug and an independent entrepreneur to advertise his mobile machine for diagnosing the disease in the first place.
I have no wish to demean the individuals selling the treatment and the diagnostic machine: everyone seeks to survive here in Ghana, but I wanted to recount a couple of incidents during the event that brought God and Science together in my head; an unhappy conjunction. The screen saver on the inevitable power point presentation had three nails that appeared (I have no idea if this was so) like bloody iron impalers. The text said, Tougher than nails!” I DID think of Christ when I saw them, despite myself. When the session eventually got started (attendees at any event in Ghana arrive an hour or more late for sessions) the MC, running the programme, asked us all to pray, with the phrase, “Christ take control of this meeting…” I didn’t genuflect, feeling outraged as an agnostic and a fellow traveller of Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and the rest, not to mention Dawkins and his irreverential ilk. When the event came to its end, the same MC thanked God for overseeing it and prayed that Roche Pharmaceuticals would enjoy great success in its business.
I am sure that Roche is very happy to have Dylan’s anthem, “With God on our side", playing in all its lifts in Switzerland, the US or wherever.” Maybe the Pope has it playing in his “look but don’t touch” motorcar. But, to be frank, I don’t want God on my side. Call me perverse if you like but I’d rather have the same equanimity at facing eternal darkness as our dog, Juno, who died on Sunday aged 10 years. He came to say goodbye to me and my partner, separately. Then he walked unsteadily down to a patch of earth beneath a bank of bougainvillea and died. His eyes were open, taking a last long look at the world he was leaving.
I should cocoa…
When I wrote the title for this piece, it occurred to me that most of my readership (which is truly multi-national) would not understand its nuances. The phrase I should cocoa means that you are not going to do something, whatever someone has asked of you (see the following explanation).
It is rhyming slang and originally stood for “I should say so!”, a sarcastic exclamation to express disbelief, derision, scorn or indignant negation. You might also render it as "“You must be joking!” “Not on your life!” or “No way!” http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-ish1.htm
Anyway, after this long-winded beginning, I used the title to refer to one of those events that occur rather rarely except when you are in a new country (Ghana, here). The title is ironic because I feel, having encountered it, that everyone should cocoa!
A member of staff gave me a present the other day. In a plastic bag I found three alien objects. I knew that they were fruit of some description but had not seen them before. He said they were cocoa pods and I should scoop out and eat the contents.
This I have done and the results are astonishing, appealing to all the senses. Inside the brown-speckled yellow rugby ball shaped exterior are cocoa beans the size of thumbnails, each packed in a sweet, sticky white glutinous film. The beans are bitter. They lie inside as if they are extras from that fifties film, They Came From Outer Space. I looked them up and discovered that these raw beans contain a myriad of essentials for a healthy body and are the number one killer of free radicals. They also increase brain power which may explain my earlier long-windedness – more words per second, unfortunately! They are the greatest superfood on the planet.
Meanwhile, the Pope is visiting secular Great Britain in a multi-million pound beano, paid for by the tax payer. They are paying their agnostic taxes and he will go there and try to convert them. He will travel around in the usual papal bubble. After the Vatican’s failure to make available its files on child abuse across Europe, I think he will be a little like a bean in the pod in my photo. Sweet on the outside and leaving a bitter taste in the mouth. But in his case, there are no health benefits.
NB If the Pope’s visit turns you to smoking, eat very dark chocolate – the cocoa in it redresses some of the worst effects of tobacco. Then shout “I should cocoa”
Labels: Pope. Cocoa beans. Health.
A Vampire May Visit You Tonight
Maybe there have always been fears of the bloodsucker. I remember as a child, wading in streams and ponds and watching diligently for a leech to attach itself to my welly. I was magnetised and terrified at the same time, wanting to see whether it could suck my blood through the rubber. It never materialised but that didn’t cross it off my list of horrors. In the taxonomy of terror, long before Bram Stoker’s Dracula gave it a human form around which to coalesce, we have worshipped the vitality of blood and we have known that having it siphoned from our body is bad news (except for the aforementioned leeches, which have recently made a medical comeback). Maybe the Aztecs or Mayans drank it in acts of religious fervour and Christians attach great significance to drinking Christ’s blood, if only in a symbolic form. Nature programmes show bats and other creatures suckling away at their unaware victims and the sight can disgust us with tremors of identification.
Here in Accra there are vast colonies of very large fruit bats in the city centre that hang blackly on avenues of trees, like dark, misshapen fruit. Despite their provenance as vegetarians, visitors can be decidedly ambivalent when they see the heavens darken as their collective will sees them reach for the skies.
In Ghana, mosquitoes are the great bloodsucker. I am told that the malarial mosquito does not come out until after nine o’clock but I don’t believe that these creatures from the depths, are timekeepers. I take my medicine and daub on my toxic barriers the whole time. We also have mosquito nets and spray the rooms. The consequence is that we feel pretty secure. Imagine us in netting that has a heavy hem to keep it snug to the floor. Nothing can get in. But, ironically, it is like a film of innocents locking themselves in their ‘panic rooms’ and then discovering….
What the audience discovers in horror films and what we discover inside our net is that something unearthly exists ALREADY inside. It is voracious and wants our blood.
The bedbug.
News is out today from America that there is a global pandemic on the way with these creatures of the night. They are becoming impervious to sprays. They bite and cause nasty discomfort although, at least, they do not spread disease or, like Cronenberg’s The Fly, infect and transmogrify us into giant bedbugs. But, let us be plain about this, we do not want ANYTHING inside our sanctuaries. A human being should have a bed to call his or her own where the predators of the world are either banned or exterminated if they try to force entry. We have enough nightmares without that particular reality.