Saturday, August 31, 2013
New Review for The Azimuth Trilogy
Jack Sanger’s sprawling epic, Azimuth is a
trilogy that brings to mind myth and folklore of times long gone. It conjures
memories of a barely remembered past; one that feeds the subconscious and
brings to life archetypes almost forgotten, yet still resonate in our
collective unconscious; the stuff of dreams and legends. The narrator, Kamil has
been commissioned to tell the story of the Magus – ancient patriarch of the
current dynasty - to Sabiya and Shazrad, royal princesses of the court. The
story is a dual revelation; one of origins and the other of court intrigue and
danger. It is reminiscent of such fables as Morte D’Author, Lord of the Rings, The
Arabian Nights and the Adventures of Ullyses; even stories of Krishna and the
Bhagavad Gita from ancient India. Its appeal is multicultural and encompassing;
something for everyone. For those who revel in that nebulous region where myth
and memory blur, this book is for you; and for those who simply love a great
read. The story is broken down into chapters, each one relaying the life and
adventures of the Magus; stories of magic and mystery. Each chapter is self
contained yet the stories are connected and masterfully intertwined with the
myriad plots and conspiracies of life at the royal court, which are the
backdrop to this amazing adventure. I give it a Five Star rating and recommend
it to all lovers of myth and pre-history. Can’t wait for the movie!
Dr. Rachel Campbell
More reviews at www.azimuthtrilogy.com/reviews
Labels: Azimuth reviews.
Monday, August 26, 2013
The
Hidden Persuaders
Working in a convent home for the care of
emotionally disturbed adolescent girls can throw up insights into the hidden
worlds of communication. Telepathy, empathy, subliminal advertising. I remember
Vance Packard wrote a book in the late 1950s, called The Hidden Persuaders. That was sometimes what it felt like as an
atheist working with committed religious women. They were kind, generous and
philosophically open, as earlier blogs will vouchsafe. Anyway, more of their
strange powers a little later.
A form of communication which will have
by-passed most men’s knowledge (and some women’s) is via hormones. All the
women and girls in the convent had synchronized periods. New girls would fall
into the same menstrual cycle within a couple of months of arrival. I remember
taking a nun into town for three months supply of sanitary towels. They filled
the back of the mini van!
The fact that we communicate with each
other in subliminal ways seems to be within most people’s experience. It is
usually laughed off as statistically inevitable that synchronous thought should
occur. Despite all those Russian experiments during the cold war to produce
secret agents who might gain the west’s secrets via telepathy, it remains an
unlit area of scientific progress – unless you add in the latest thought
controlled cursors in computer technology or quantum theory which stipulates
that any observer will change the patterns of movement within atoms by
observing the interactions. My vignette is more prosaic and easier to follow
than Heisenburg’s masterful theory.
We took all the girls to the Lake District.
Climbing big hills is symbolic for urban girls who do not know that milk comes
from big grass-munching beasts and that there are places where you cannot see a
house no matter how hard you look. The nuns had a sister convent up there with
dormitory accommodation and some separate rooms. We arrived in the evening
after a long drive from Norfolk. Nothing much happened to me that night. The
next day was a successful hiking, climbing, blistering, prickling, stinging
sort of day. The girls were tired out. They went to bed early and that was
that. I retired eventually. I lay in bed and was about to fall asleep (or did
so, who knows) when I was presented with a shimmering figure of Christ. The
apparition, delusion, actuality did not speak but communicated mind to mind, as
it were. It was trying to persuade me to become a Christian. It was
surprisingly powerful. I remember my stock reply was something along the lines
of “That’s not why I am here in this life”, thereby opening a door to the
notion or reincarnation perhaps but nothing more. This struggle of wills went
on for a few hours. The Christ figure in hippy beard and long hair, robes etc
(a rather late version of him as artists cloned this image from a Roman god;
all the original images being hermaphroditic, bare-faced and late adolescent)
eventually disappeared. I slept a couple of hours and then faced the day. The
nun who accompanied our party from the convent in Norfolk asked whether I had
experienced anything unusual during the night. I felt a bit embarrassed to
recount what I had seen. Before I described it, she said;
“You see, we were
all praying for you until late in the night, hoping you might see the light.”
There
are many levels and forms of communication of which we are either
unconscious or only dimly aware.
Twitter @profjacksanger
Sunday, August 18, 2013
The bearable lightness of dying
The last blog presented a sliver of the
existence I knew as Sister Daphne. I have always – well, since a teenager –
been preoccupied by the fundamental question of what is this thing called life?
And as a corollary, what is this other thing called death? In fact, going back
to the college days represented in a blog a week or two ago, I remember I was
writing nihilistic poetry for it seemed as if I was teetering on the edge of the abyss. Fortunately
my character never embraced any notion of suicide no matter how bleak the
answers to these questions might turn out. Rather, I realized that there was time ahead
of me. And with time might come an answer to what constituted my mortal coil. It was this train of thinking that still finds itself shaping
what I write. Azimuth is a trilogy about the search for meaning. www.azimuthtrilogy.com The four
novellas (three free downloading) I completed earlier this year all dance around a totem pole with a
death’s mask at the top. www.chronometerpublications.me And Twitter is especially good for
fashioning aphorisms and the like which prove to be arrows pointing at my perennial affliction.
For example at @Profjacksanger you have the following:
It is curious is it not that
people want to die in their sleep after a lifetime of waiting for that moment?
A peer of Sister Daphne was Sister Katherine.
I liked her very much. She was translucent. Unlike Sister Daphne she was pure
convent nun. There were no doubts in her and yet there was no attempt to proselytize
either. She emanated goodness. I used to enjoy conversations about life and
death with her, sitting under an oak tree.
I hadn’t seen her for some time and asked
after her health. “She’s a bit weak,” came the answer, “but she’s sitting in
the garden at this moment”. I went to find her. Not the usual place. A glade,
more secluded.
“How are you?”
“Couldn’t be
better.”
‘The Sisters said
you were a little weak.”
“Oh that. Yes.”
She paused and then said, “I am going to die next week on (I'm sure she said)
Wednesday.
“Of course you’re
not!” I huffed, no doubt feeling she needed some uplifting jollity.
“I am. It is my
favourite Saint’s day. We often die on our favourite Saint’s day. I don’t think
there’s anything else I want to do and so another year is too much.” She smiled
her wonderful, engaging smile.
Sister Katherine died the following
Wednesday. Having not seen a physician for a long time, there was a post
mortem. Her body was riddled with cancers and had been, the doctor judged, for
years. He wondered how she had kept going for so long.
Labels: Death. Mystery. Being prepared.
Friday, August 09, 2013
On
Exorcisms
You’ll find references to an exorcism I
attended if you check the blogs for December 2012. Writing about Sister Daphne
in the last foray into my biography reminded me of another one. (Memory is like
thousands of bags full of substance but which are tied at the neck to each
other so that you have a metaview, like a list of contents but have to untie
each neck to get at what is harboured there.)
As I said, I worked as a social worker in a
convent. We had about a dozen extremely emotionally disturbed adolescent girls,
twenty or so staff and used a technique called regression therapy to enormously
beneficial effect for most of them. Despite its efficacy it was never taken up
country-wide because of its sophistication and cost in terms of skilled staff
required. Anyway, imagine the premises we worked in on the convent estate. A
truly gothic, mullioned, slit windowed red brick building with turrets. Very
tall, particularly in morning and evening mist. Bedrooms along narrow
corridors. A chapel which frightened the girls, situated between their rooms
and my flat. Better than a thousand locks.
One girl came to us and Sister Daphne and
the head of the unit, Sister Rita, were soon perturbed by the girl’s smell. So were the other boarders.
Though she washed and had clean clothes she exuded something which made the
hair rise on the nape. She had a thin small voice coming from somewhere deep
within her overweight body. She seemed to look from a depth so deep in her
skull that you could not imagine its source. She heard voices.
One day we heard a noise that antennae told
us wasn’t right and raced into the kitchen just in time to disturb the girl
strangling another and thereby saving her life.
The priest to the convent at the time was
called Godwin, believe it or not. Because we were not equipped to deal with
psychopathy, the would-be strangler was moved to secure accommodation
elsewhere. There were those among the staff who swore that she was possessed.
Despite her leaving and much use of powerful cleaning products, her room retained
her otherworldly odour. Father Godwin conducted an exorcism of the room. The
smell disappeared. As girls left, so did its temporary history of succour to the malevolent.
Twitter: @profjacksanger
Labels: Exorcism. Mystery.
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Sister
Daphne’s Dilemmas
When we first met I was in my fifth year of
teaching. It was the time of liberal studies in colleges of further education.
The naming of courses is always political. Liberal Studies became General
Studies and then Communication Studies as the cultural imperative to give
apprentices and those returning to education after failing at school, a broader
sense of the world, a critical consciousness and a capacity to see behind the
media’s gloss and bias, slowly foundered on successive governments’ strategies
to force social engineering to the forefront, whereby the young would be fitted for
what was called ‘the world of work’.
Anyway, as a liberal studies teacher I
taught psycho-drama to professionals
(doesn’t that have the ring of the times?) The acid generation, the hatred of
the establishment, the dropping out, the hair and gaudy attire, the last great
surge towards personal freedom and anarchy, were all part of an optimism that
helped constitute and drive the curriculum.
One of my students was Sister Daphne. I set up a mining accident in the
classroom. Lines of chairs became tunnels. The game revolved around whether you
would escape or save others at risk of dying. One of life’s great dilemmas. Sister Daphne died
on the classroom floor. In tears. Afterwards she said it was totally
disturbing. She also came to me with dreams she was having. I don’t remember
them now except that they revolved around the shattering of structures –
including the convent walls.
When she joined the convent the biggest day
of her life was the day she would leave her novice status and take the ring of
Christ. A bride. She was overjoyed and after the rituals and prayers she told
me she ran outside, flinging her arms in the air in exultation. Her new ring
slipped away into the bushes. The
search took hours. Once repatriated with it, she said that the sun shone every
day for five years.
This did not mean that she was immune to
tests of faith. Her most graphic story involved her at Evensong prayers. Her
mind began to slip away from a holy focus. A darkness seemed to cloud her
thought. Her head ached. She put her hand up to ward off the pulse of evil and
her hand contacted an enormous spider, sitting over her ‘third eye’.
I was very fond of her. She was always open
about her internal battles between faith and skepticism, always tolerant of
others and it was she who asked me, an atheist, to work in the convent, to care for emotionally disturbed
adolescent girls, an experience that has coloured my social and educational
philosophy ever since.
Twitter: @profjacksanger
Thursday, August 01, 2013
Ch ch ch ch ch ch changes…
David Bowie’s song came to mind as I
started writing this blog. I was reflecting on the mysteries surrounding what we
call fate. Fate is often a rationalizing of events that have occurred and which
seem to have conspired some change in one’s life. A trauma, a chance meeting
with someone who becomes one’s partner, an act of god, a range of domino-like
incidents that then create a context which enwraps one in its coils. In an
earlier blog I recounted how such a train of events over decades became a
pattern - in hindsight - that led me to live in Ghana.
When I left school in 1962 and went on to a
teachers’ college in Sunderland I took a spur of the moment decision which
completely changed my life. Until I walked into the men’s hostel room which I
had been allocated I was known by family, school and village friends as Eric.
Now Eric was a quiet, retiring, shy boy in glasses, somewhat askance at the
very sight of a pretty girl. Until the last couple of years he had been thin,
bony and gawky. Then he had applied himself with some discipline to body and
mind. He became a good tennis player, cricketer, swimmer. He did weights in his
bedroom. He meditated on a cigarette lighter to levitate it from its resting
position. He read Zen. I suppose Eric was both consciously and unconsciously preparing
himself to be a different person. Like a snake his skin was too tight, too
dull and too unattractive.
In the hostel, a young fellow from a nearby
room wandered in and introduced himself, following this up with the “what’s
your name?” question. “Er…Jack,” I answered, using my middle name for the first
time. Within an hour I had met a dozen or more new compatriots and was known by
my new monicker. I remember my brain turning rapidly on the axis of this newly
discovered ‘Jack’. Who was he? Well, he was the opposite of Eric in many ways.
He was outgoing. He was easy with the girls, he was sporty enough but didn’t
mind being philosophical. He wrote poetry. He acted. He directed plays. He wore
sideburns and a quiff. He played bass. All these things I admitted to within
that first day. All these things became me and were expected of me. Are me.
Although, over the years as I’ve experienced more and reflected more, the two
sides of my character have melded. Introversion and extroversion only dominate
in certain contexts.
There seems to me little doubt that major
changes can be effected at any time in a person’s life despite the obvious
caveat that the later one leaves it the harder it becomes because one’s history
and one’s current circumstance tend to combine to force one’s ‘self’ into the
straitjacket of social expectation. A close friend told me, when dying, that a
sudden revelation in the previous weeks had led this individual to a sense of a
life misplaced, of cards badly played, of an unnecessary subordination to
social forces. Of a sense of loss.
I feel a lot better for being Jack with a
bit of Eric going about his business happily underneath than the other way
round; a timidly unassuming fellow with an increasingly frustrated other self wanting
to burst from its constraints.
Twitter @profjacksanger