crucifix versus cross

When I was in Portugal earlier this year, it occurred to me that not a single one of my Portuguese readers has ever mentioned the violence inherent in the Stone Dance, never mind complained about it. This stands in stark contrast with reactions in the English speaking world – where the violence contained in the books is often mentioned. This contrast linked in my mind with a comment my therapist once made to me that “you imbibed Catholicism with your mother’s milk”… At the time I was taken by surprise, being that I am an atheist and that I do not recall even being in a Catholic church (though I was baptised in one). My mother is a devout Christian, but though she was brought up Catholic, when we moved to Scotland, she abandoned Catholicism because she was uninterested in the schisms in Christianity. Her attitude seems to be that she believes in Christ and can’t see the point in denominations. As it happened, she walked down the street and joined the first church that she came to. As this turned out to be the Church of Scotland, she nominally is now a Protestant – though, as I’ve said, she’s not interested in such distinctions.

What, you may be wondering, does this have to do with the Stone Dance. Well, when I was in therapy, I became aware that the Stone Dance has a layer of structure that is profoundly Catholic in its sensibility. In fact, Catholic themes of suffering and redemption run through the books; there are fundamental subversions of the Garden of Eden story, of original sin, of the casting out of Satan from Heaven… All this in spite of me being an atheist and having been brought up with only a moderate smattering of Christian influence… But we can none of us, it seems, be free of what we “imbibe with our mother’s milk”…(see the first epigraph of The Third God)

What then does this have to do with how different cultures react to the violence in the Stone Dance… First: I myself was not really aware of the violence in the books as being an issue – violence seems to be such a natural part of our lives, that for people to take exception to it, seemed to me a tad perverse. I was, after all, writing a book about the world as I see it… and who can claim that that world is not saturated with violence? I began to see that it might not be the violence per se that some people were finding difficult, but rather something about the way that that violence was being portrayed. Please understand that I am here feeling a way through the shadows – I don’t claim to fully understand this – but I now wonder if it could possibly be accidental that the only other group of people who have not noticed the difficulty in this violence should happen to be people from the country in which I was born; that though I was only in Portugal for 8 years of my life… that I am still Portuguese. And what then could it be about being Portuguese that leads to a different attitude towards violence?

My solution, a solution that came to me when I was in Portugal on my recent visit, I can best explain by what I see as a distinction between the crucifix and the cross. In my experience, the dominant symbol in the English speaking world is the bare cross, unadorned, abstract. In Portugal, in the Catholic world in general, this cross has a man suffering on it. How profoundly is a culture shaped, the minds of its children shaped, by the difference between these symbols? The contrast between the abstract instrument of torture and execution, and the instrument being demonstrated in use, viscerally, by having a man depicted on it suffering? And it seems to me that the profound mystery (in the religious sense) here is that a man suffering on a cross should be thrust into the face of people – especially children – as the symbol of the most profound love. This seems to me to provide some insight into the difference in how people react to the violence in the Stone Dance. For that violence is ultimately about sacrifice and redemption. And it seems that I am Catholic enough to have portrayed a unity between violence and redemption, between violence and love, that is immediately understood by people who have grown up with the crucifix and causes much more of a problem for those who have grown up with the plain, bare cross.

a graphic novel

Over the past 4 weeks I have been writing a graphic novel called Malta with my friend Adrian Smith. I can’t really talk about details at present… Adrian and I have been talking about doing some joint project for a long time.

I’ve not written a graphic novel before and have been pleased to find that it is a form that comes naturally to me. This shouldn’t perhaps be that much of a surprise when you consider how visual my writing is.

going barefoot…

I had a revelation some years ago while camping with some friends near Cape Wrath when, over three days, I went barefoot. Not only did I discover that my feet could cope with any kind of terrain (by changing shape, they proved to be the best all terrain ‘shoe’ *grin*) but, more importantly, I realized in what a profound way feet ‘feel’ the earth. We clump around our world with ‘space suits’ on our feet – as if we are walking on an alien planet. Another way to think about it is that we inflict deliberate leprosy on our feet – making them entirely numb and ‘blind’ to the earth.

Various conclusions seem me to arise from this. Firstly, that what we fear seems predominantly be the human environment – the danger of broken glass, for example: it is in our cities that we feel footwear to be most essential. Then there is a notion of ‘pollution’ – that we might inadvertently stand on some dog shit. How many of us can’t even walk on gravel without behaving as if it were white hot. We seem to believe that our feet are too delicate to walk naked on anything harder than a rug. Tough, of course, the human foot is as perfectly developed for walking on the earth as any hoof or paw. (It’s possible that we’ve evolved a more delicate foot – but I’m not convinced we’ve been wearing footwear long enough for this to have happened.)

And here is what I consider to be most important: if it is the case that footwear is one of the ‘gifts’ of civilization – is it possible that this profound numbness to the earth: to soil, to stone, to stream, to boggy ground, to plants, to sand (perhaps the only one we regularly walk on – and, interestingly, one of the most sterile) – is it possible that it walks hand in hand with the literal disconnection from our planet that makes it easier to despoil, pollute and destroy her?

It seems to me that much could be gained by moving towards – if not walking barefoot – the development of some kind of footwear that would allow as much sensation to come through to our feet as possible…

As ‘civilization’ marches on, more and more people are cutting themselves off from touching, daily, Mother Earth. Soon, not one of us will stand barefoot upon her and that seems to me a dangerous divorce…

entrevista com Diário de Notícias

Isto é uma entrevista que dei ao Diário de Notícias de 22/5/10… não é fácil ler o artigo assim, mas o texto também está aqui… As fotos foram tiradas num daqueles dias de chuva em maio – e estava muito frio – deve ser por isso que parece que tenho uma cara de enterro… *sorriso*

(edited text courtesy of Daniel Cardoso)

orange and teal…

A friend sent me this. I had noticed this kind of thing happening, but had, rather quaintly, put it down to something to do with ‘film stock’, or the use of digital video…

Beyond what Todd Miro says, what occurs to me is that this is yet another example of ‘virtualisation’… Before the advent of digital technology, filmmakers were forced to ‘push’ against the media they were working in… as artists in other media had to wrestle with the limitations of oil paint (here is an example of virtualization in this area), violins, typewriters etc… As the digital tsunami washes over ever more of our cultural world, there are no longer any limits except those imposed by the artist. On one side this could be seen as freedom; on the other, it could, as in this example, open the floodgates to homogenizing ‘fashion’…

the invisible gorilla

I have just read an article about a famous experiment (that you can try for yourself here…) in which a large number of people focusing on counting ball passes on a video are completely unaware of someone in a gorilla suit walking on screen, beating its chest to camera, then walking off. This counter-intuitive result is used to show how blind we can be to what we’re not paying attention to.

This issue of attention is interesting enough, but something else occurred to me (actually, this occurs to me quite a lot *grin*): that human vision is nothing like a series of images caught on film or video – in which each frame is recorded with every detail that the camera is capable of recording. This analogy may seem an obvious one to make, but it is wholly false. We have the illusion that we are seeing a complete picture, but in fact what we see is much more analogous to the way in which we parse a sentence – a sequence of words that, together, when processed by our brain, conjure up a complete meaning. Let’s not go into what the exact equivalent of ‘words’ might be in what we are seeing – what is seems to me interesting is that we similarly construct the ‘meaning’ of what we’re seeing by assembling it from a few large pieces – and the pieces that we choose to build our ‘visual sentence’ from are determined by what we’re paying attention to. Thus, because we’re not paying attention to it, the gorilla simply is not one of the ‘pieces’ and so forms no part of what we ‘see’.

coming up for air

ok, anyone visiting this blog may well have noticed that I have recently disappeared without a trace. Some of this was due to the pressures of organizing my midsummer party – an annual event – and one upon which the sun shone :O) – In Scotland this is not something that can be counted on. The reason I host this is because the life of a writer can be very solitary and I have many friends that I love dearly but rarely see. Some indeed came from far afield – including Joanne who I have seen only once since we shared various mind-numbing university lectures in extremely abstruse mathematics. There are not enough of these events that, momentarily, provide a node where many people’s lives meet.

After that I went camping in the Lake District with some friends. This too is an annual occurrence – though, normally, we go off into the wilds of north-west Scotland – which wildness perhaps better suits my temperament.

Before all this madness began, I was having some difficulties with my ancient historical novel. I had started writing it, but it simply wasn’t ‘energizing’ me… I pulled my head free of it and surveyed the ‘view’… and discovered that I was doing it all wrong! I simply wasn’t being ambitious enough. I know, I know… look what a mess ambition got me in last time *grin* So, I’ve worked out what I need to do to my historical book to make it challenging enough for me and, hopefully, worthy of my readers’ attention… This said, I have put it aside for a while because I am working on another book. It came to me suddenly and I have vanished down a rabbit hole pursuing it ever since. It looks like being a cross between fantasy and sci-fi and is pleasingly bizarre and very strange – just how I like it! *wide grin* I am going to try and write this one quickly… but no promises.

I intend to resume a more regular pace of blogging… but, again, no promises.

Meanwhile, here is a link (it begins on page 12) to an article to which I contributed some muddled thoughts. It’s about Google’s ongoing attempt to put the world’s books online. Overall, this is a goal I tend to feel good about, but I am not at all sure that the way Google is doing it is a good way – indeed, I am a tad suspicious of Google’s motives… This said, I don’t really understand the issues well enough – for some reason, I just have not wanted to engage with them – not sure why, but there it is.

One final thing, I would very much like to put as many of these blog posts up in Portuguese… Though in matters concerning Portuguese editions I am prepared to muddle along in my rather dodgy Portuguese, I really couldn’t face trying to ‘translate’ a blog of this length. If there is anyone out there (or a number of people out there) who might like to do this for me, I would be very grateful.

oh, and I am going to FINALLY get round to responding to a number of comments that were left hanging.

psychic origins…

Been somewhat busy of late engaging with a massive restructuring of my garden – involving the moving of many tonnes of earth and the building (by stone masons) of some rather lovely retaining walls of local stone… but that’s for a future blog – when I shall attempt to express my delight in natural materials and the skill and craft of human hands…

Now I would like to share what I believe about an aspect of the origins of the individual psyche… This goes to the roots of what I understand about my own psyche.

It could be the case that a psyche is like soup – to which experience is added as ingredients that constantly change its flavour. By this reckoning, it should be possible, by adding a little pinch of this, a little pinch of that, to sweeten the soup if it is to bitter; to add a dash of bitterness if it is too sickly – and thus to transform the psyche to a perfect balance…

Alas, my experience of therapy suggests to me that this is not possible. Instead it seems to me that the psyche is like a seedling that grows into a tree. At any point in its life, the form this tree takes is the sum of all its experiences: the sunlight of love that has fallen on it, the nurture that it has been able to draw up through its roots from the soil in which its seed fell, the storms it has endured. But it is clearly the case that the further back to the seed we go, the more fundamental are the influences on its future form. In its adult form, the psychic tree will need a gale to tear off one of its branches. By contrast, as a seedling, a glancing blow might be enough to take that branch off in its embryonic form…

No form of healing can hope to replace a branch lost in ‘seedlinghood’. What therapy can do is to bring awareness of how small that injury was – though it came to have such massive and lasting consequence – and thus a psyche can come to understand, accept and value the shape it has, without regret, as the natural consequence of its life experiences…

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