Mondo Cane: it’s a dog’s life….
We keep two or three dogs in the compound here in Accra. They run freely, are well behaved and well trained. Everything they do (in the main) is in the best possible doggie taste. But, as you may remember from a recent blog, two died, leaving old Heracles, a grey muzzled Alsatian cross. He is such a genteel fellow and did not, in any way, mourn the loss of his companions of ten years or more. This is because he was third in line to the canine throne. Now he was top dog with no usurpers in sight. Life could not get any better, could it?
Then, yesterday, we bought a Doberman pup, aged four months, the reason being that you should always have at least two dogs here; one running and one in a (spacious) doghouse, at night. Robbers in Ghana throw poisoned meat over the wall to eradicate the threat of four legged guards. In a couple of months or so we will take ownership of another pup, this time a white Alsatian. Anyway, back to old Heracles and the insurgency. Already, the old dog is teaching the young new tricks. The little one follows the big one round the garden, like an imprinted duckling. And the old one enjoys showing him around. “This is a nice place to pee, this is where my dead friends are buried, this is the swimming pool, here’s where you eat, this is Master, don’t dig up plants or you will be in trouble, I can tell you, this is Mistress etc etc.
In the way of cartoons, Sirius has taken to living here immediately. He did not bark all night but tucked himself up in his shed with Heracles lying on the other side of the wire. In the first day he did the following: he fell into the pool and was rescued standing on his hind legs at the shallow end, his paws on the edge, crying lustily. He walked into windows (the first experience of glass in his life). He bounced off mosquito netting doors for much the same reason. He sat (firmly pressed!) next to Heracles as they got their coconut halves to gouge out – good for the teeth - and took it to eat on the grass next to his sudden big friend). He barked at planes which flew too low and at passing irritations such as boys with bells on little mobile food bicycles. He appears indomitable and eminently ready to be trained in all matters of house protection. As we figured, the greying Heracles is his teacher, friend and playpal.
It brings to mind the whole business of culture. What we are all born into (whether it be as dog, plant or human) helps to define our growth and behaviour in the world. Much of our learning is at a level below the conscious. How else do we come to feel love, loyalty, fairness, protectiveness…? We like exactly the right proportion of external control and freedom of choice (which varies with the individual!).
We, in the house, are not cursed by too much sentimentality. Dogs are dogs and not humans. They have their place in the pecking order and must be shown it. But a dog’s life doesn’t seem that bad – or that different from our own, give or take the odd bone!
Labels: Accra. Dogs. Protection. Change.
Gain without pain
Someone wrote to me the other day and said that I seem to have a hatred of ‘believers’. I suppose some of these blogs could be seen that way but the intention has never been to demean people, only try to understand why they believe. I certainly have a dislike for organised religion which seems to have been able to perpetrate crimes from torture, imprisonment and murder through to genocide without, apparently suffering that much from people’s disaffection. I don’t think that the original tenets of the world’s great religions ever intended to aid and abet their disciples in committing sin, in any circumstances but the fact has been – and is – that they do.
I would be very happy in myself if my quest to find a deeper meaning in this existence was even partially answered. The more I investigate religion, the less it seems a viable route to understanding. Any system of thought that requires an individual to forego so much evidence to the contrary has little chance of seeding itself in my skull.
A friend in Ghana, the other day, said that he went to church because this seemed the only possible way he might meet with and talk with his beloved mother, now long dead, either in this life or when he, too, had passed over to the other side. He is a scientist. It seems that there are very few individuals in Ghana, with a scientific bent of mind, who would follow Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism., or even the softer line of agnosticism. It is culturally unacceptable here. The churches spring up as fast as banks and the preachers are wealthier. Bible classes are for indoctrination and not for critical discourse.
I had something of an enlightenment on these matters the other day. I was watching a programme on pain. When you scan a person in pain (let’s say from the application of some torture of the Inquisition) the resulting patterns of neuron-firing are generalised across the brain and unique to each individual. The same degree and intensity of torture produces wildly differing results. One person’s headache is another person’s decapitation! BUT, and this is very bizarre, it is possible to hypnotise these dissimilar individuals with the following effect.
By telling a person under hypnosis that pain is pleasure, then they can take a dental extraction without anaesthetic and love it. Not only this but, in the residual pain that follows, they gain equal pleasure. They have become hard wired to perceive pleasure where there should be pain. That is how the brain works. Examples were given of people with terrible injuries, crawling for days over rough terrain to get help and only experiencing pain once friendly arms picked them up. So the brain can sublimate for itself, too.
My illumination is this. Life, in general, is a painful business. We look around and see the horrors of war, famine, Man’s obscenities in every day life and, really, we should top ourselves. We are the most insidiously disgusting, immoral creatures imaginable. How do we cope? Well, if we are a Muslim suicide bomber, we turn the pain of a bomb belt into a Paradise with virgins. If we are Christian, then God’s judgment will take us into heaven. If we have a more eastern religion, we may be reincarnated as someone better. All beliefs. All based on perception. All based on a form of hypnosis via conditioning. That is what belief without authentic evidence amounts to. It is also why preachers from Africa to Asia, from the Bible belt to Russia, regurgitate quasi-evidence along with hypnosis techniques to get brains to perceive the opposite of what real evidence might tell them.
A great example of this was on a Ghana TV channel the other night. A preacher was asking people to get their credit cards out and make donations of at least a thousand dollars to his church. We saw four or five operators in a call centre, apparently taking the ‘gifts’. The preacher told people to keep trying to get through because the lines were so busy. “Give your seed of a thousand dollars and you will reap God’s harvest!” He raged at immorality, he thundered about being saved, his choirs were great and sang lustily for the Lord and he told his viewers that they could only be saved if…..
Labels: Ghana. Religion. Pain. Hypnosis.
Three Men in a Boat
Here is the image of the front cover of a new novel. It is also part of a tale of synchronicity. Three or four decades ago (my mind is sharp on image and blurry on time) you would have found three men with a modicum of middle age adorning their skin, sitting in an old attic, like the upturned hull of a barge and reading poetry and prose to each other. As I recall, it was a ripening experience. All three of us went on to write, in our various media. One was Mike Mackmin and one was Lindsay Clarke. The other day he sent me this poem:
THE STILLNESS OF THE FOREST
Ghana. Dry season. Nineteen Sixty-Three.
the heat was dropsical, and if we felt
the need to swim we’d drive for hours along
the road the JCBs had opened through
two hundred humid miles of forest
till we reached the coast at Winneba
where palm fronds rattled in the breeze
and lush Atlantic combers surfed the beach.
I can smell the stillness of that forest now -
the steam already rising off the bush
at dawn, the grey, high-buttressed trunks
of Odum trees, a hot mist sauntering
across the canopy, the cobwebs strung
from branch to bough, green strobes of sunlight
shuttered by the leaves. And if you took away
the road, the world had always been like this.
So I remember the relief of breaking out
on to the coastal plain - that breathing space
of scrubby grass and sand abased beneath
unshaded sun. And if you’d told me then
that long before I came to write this poem
those close-packed multitudes of trees would all
be gone, I would have called you fanciful,
and had my swim; then turned back for the long drive home.
He spent three years in Ghana but his memories of it remain powerful and are still helping to form him. His first novel was called Sunday Whiteman which leant more than a little upon his time here.
Meanwhile, across the road in a terraced house in Norwich, I met a white woman who had lived in Ghana. She had had some success with a children’s novel called Ashanti Boy.
Fast forward our lives and here I am, beyond prediction, in Ghana, living, writing.… Meanwhile, no less in this country, though physically in the softer climes of Somerset, England, Lindsay has just published The Water Theatre. Ghana permeates it. The pull of this country does not end.
So, this blog is a preview of his new book, as I await its arrival here in Accra. I am certain it is a fine novel and a testament to Ghana's capacity to seduce and stimulate. The reviews suggest as much. To have kept the forest fires of West African experience alive and then to have tempered them in literary steel, is
a gift from the ancient gods...
Read it. I shall.
Sad but true
I am becoming a scholar of the early Catholic Church, a curious fact, given my distress and anger at what organised religion can and does get up to. Anyway, the latest fruit of my labours (apple shaped since it involves knowledge that the early orthodox Christians tried to place beyond mortal ken) is the Seven Deadly Sins. So what about them?
First, there were actually eight. These were drawn up by Evagrius of Pontus, alone in the desert, excommunicated from social life and trying to muzzle his consequent desires. To those sins we have all had drummed into us, he added vainglory and sadness. Pope Gregory, at the end of the 6th century, removed these latter two and instituted envy instead. So, the final list is the work of the fevered minds of men (like the contents of the bible, the Koran, the Vedas …). It all depends on your belief systems, the degree to which you feel that God was speaking through their authors.
Anyway, back to the Catholics. Pope Gregory, in tightening up the vices, re-engineered the way that the church operated in those turbulent times. As well as refining what constituted vice, he saw to it that priests should be celibate. The reason appears to have been economic. If priests married then their wealth would be passed to their children and not the church. In order that priests might manage their celibacy, the move became part of the train to make sex a sin. Full stop. Soon it was for procreation only and must never share a bed with lust. Before this, lust was seen as a natural expression of male and female desire in Greek and Roman times and had none of the demonology associated with it that came with Gregory et al. Were they such evil civilisations? Only a lateral branch of ‘heretics’ or free lovers, called Gnostics, continued in the old ways, seeing priestly, public and group sex as a form of sacrament; that is until they were ruthlessly expunged and their religious writings destroyed.
But I digress. What interested me was not the behaviour of the Catholic Church, then and now but why sadness was regarded as a sin in the first place and then later airbrushed from the list along with vainglory. The latter seems obvious in that every time I have entered a Catholic house of God, I have been struck by its glorification of the material things of life. The gold, the tapestries, the art, the incense, the wine, the rich life of priests even in poor communities. Yet sadness…
It is a subtle and enduring emotion. Perhaps it was felt that sadness, caused by the death of another, or the loss of a lover, was an emotion which undermined the glories of the life hereafter. How could a truly religious Catholic, imbued with the spirit of the Holy Ghost, feel sadness? Pray and this corrosive emotion could be washed away.
I would have it back there among the Seven Deadly Sins instead of lust. Lust, as those who study the brain might aver, is the result of chemistry which, more often than not, subjugates reason. As long as it is not imposed on another and causes no physical, emotional or mental harm, lust should be de-listed. Sadness, however, whilst part of the mourning that comes to us now and then, should not be an indulgence. Then it truly is a vice. I’ll finish with a story from my own experience.
I was talking with an old soldier who lost all his platoon companions during the first world war. He was perpetually sad, even morose. Why had he survived? It wasn’t fair. I suggested to him that he should be living a celebratory life on behalf of those who had died for his sake. It was an illumination. He grasped my hand and went home. I felt the sin of self-congratulation.
The next day we met and he told me that his wife wanted me to keep my mouth shut. For her, the man was an embodiment of sadness. That was what she loved and what kept them together.
God and the Fortune Tellers
Having just returned this weekend to Ghana, I watched a History Channel programme on Nostradamus and his modern equivalent, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Who is he? Well, he’s a mathematician who has a futurological algorithm which suggests prediction of events involving humanity is possible. Paid handsomely by Fortune 500 and the State Department for his secretive maths he has cross-checked Nostradamus’ various foretellings, and come to similar outcomes. QED, we are all about to die in catastrophic events involving some combination of the rise of the third great Anti-Christ, an asteroid hit bringing fire from the heavens and/or nuclear war. Grim plot lines.
Since Bruce was roughly correct on the rise of Al Qaeda and the Twin Towers attack, among other modern events, he has a certain fervent following. Some fellow mathematicians are pretty irritated that they can’t take out their red pens and check his workings. But they couldn’t with Nostradamus, either, since he cracked the number codes in the texts of the Ancients and then hid his discoveries in cryptic, revelatory prose. I suppose if you are reading this and have a penchant for global hypochondria, then you can imbibe your fill of doomsday scenarios by following the thread of December 21st 2012 on Google and see how the world will end, according to all the available predictions from the Mayans, Revelations, the Chinese Horoscopes and, of course, Nostradanus, himself.
This latter prophet could not proclaim his predictive capabilities at the time, unlike Bueno de Mesquita, because he would have been hung, drawn and quartered by the Catholic Church for assuming a power which only God exercises. He had to stay this side of heretical. And here is the nub of the paradox. Those among us who are critical of the place of organised religion in society may agree with the Catholic position, if not its reasoning. If there is Fate, then there is possibly a god-like force that has written the script of life on earth, the universe and everything. If Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is right and his sums add up so that his QEDs equal actual scenarios, then atheism may have to float out of the window. And, unfortunately for many of us, so might religion. Why? Well, it seems to this benighted thinker that people tend to pray in order to persuade their God to do this or that; save a stricken relative from an incurable disease, save one’s soul, save the planet or win a lottery. There is an assumption that S/he can intercede.
Either God knows everything that ever was and ever will be or S/he has set in train humanity’s careering journey into the future, giving it the capacity to choose a path that is either self-destructive or filled with glory. If everything is laid out in warp and weft and we have no choice, then God becomes a bit of a supernumerary and certainly beyond any need for disciples and their prayers since they wont change one jot of the narrative. If it isn’t then Nostradamus and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita are remarkable indeed, for their mathematical equations are taking the forces that bind us to life and, by the application of Games Theory or numerology, are prognosticating events which are as beyond the ken of God as they are us.
Which is exactly what God might have planned for the two of them. Or not.