HAS JOHN DONE GONE LUDDITE??
Experience a sense of jungian loss……….
I’ve always enjoyed looking up at the stars . . I have not seen them much since I left Ohio in 1983. They are calming, especially with a light summer breeze. Simple beauty.
Then a few magical lines evoked the lost feeling. I was reading AMAZING DISGRACE and found them, the first sentence sets the context…. Then its pure admiration of nature:
I have long since grown tired of explaining that my reasons for living here are not so much because I find Italian culture, cuisine and general approach to the art of living superior to those of contemporary Britain-though I do-but because it is still a place where one can affordably combine those advantages with non-negotiable essentials such as silence and being able to see the stars. Almost the only lights visible in the night sky in southern England are those of police helicopters and passenger jets stacked for Stansted, Heathrow and Gatwick. I doubt if the Milky Way has been visible to Londoners since the blackout during the Second World War. What kind of a place is that to live? Of what use the intellectual delights of libraries, cinemas, galleries and concert halls if one's whole sensory apparatus is dulled and occluded, one's pores irretrievably blocked? Tonight, it is true, I can't actually sit out on my terrace because it is too chilly. But when I turn off the kitchen lights and sit by the window I can see a canopy of stars despite the ever-growing puddle of lights far below spreading to blur Camaiore into Viareggio. And I need only step outside the door to hear the night breeze finding its way through the grasses and the leaves letting go autumn's branches. For reasons I can't explain, such things are important to see and hear; and not just once (seen that, heard that) but as a daily constant, as necessary as my pulse.
From: James Hamilton-Paterson’s AMAZING DISGRACE, Europa Editions, 2006, pages 281 and 282.
++ isn’t that wonderful???? IT’S A great book, a lot of FUN.
I had no say in the banishment of the heavens by light pollution, but I can control the next loss:
Today ipods smother the natural audio stimulus with predetermined playlists. The next vital sensorial loss: SOUNDS –birds, wind, voices . . . Its Ironic, the warning came in a song’s vatic lyrics: “Just listen to the music of the traffic in the city; Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty; How can you lose?” That was what the melodious philosopher queen PETULA CLARK told to us years ago - …. 1964 . . . . then her disciples hummed about the rythym of the falling rain (jason donovan is my favorite). NOW ALL LOST IN AN iPod deafened hell. . . . écoutant la pluie . . .
NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW:
Look up and find the firmament; or refer back to a picture in your mind . . . or block out sound with an ipod and live like a deep sea clam….. , people will be starless and soundless, like deep sea bacteria.
Look up like an ancient greek, find a dream, a story . . . and listen to hear Zephyr speak . . . set sail.
+++++++++++++
some more from the very very funny James Paterson-Hamilton
FROM: James Hamilton-Paterson’s COOKING WITH FERNET BRANCA, Faber and Faber 2004, pages 226 and 224.
I had finished preparing several slices of this tempting snack and had just put them under the grill when, with the punctuality of the inevitable, the phone rang. It turned out to be Filippo Pacini, owner of the best haircut in Tuscany, the nicest profile, the most absurd car. I was at once all ears. He said that, quite independently of our 'fascinating' meeting at Marta's house that morning ('affascinante', eh? Doubters of the Samper charisma please note), his father had been considering a small addition to the film. Towards the end of Arrazzato there was apparently a scene where some young members of a hippie commune or something go to town for a night out and then return to their beach, whereupon the film reaches its climax of dissent and mayhem. I hadn't the faintest idea what Filippo was talking about, I just liked listening to him saying it. It seemed that the hippies' night out on the town was supposed to provide an ironic contrast between their comfortable bourgeois roots and the radical discomforts of their beach-squatting Greenery, something I would scarcely have thought needed emphasis. But Piero Pacini had now decided to add a further twist by having them briefly attend some sort of pop concert. The idea of this was to show the brainless seduceability of modern youth. More specifically to the film, it would illustrate the ubiquitous siren song of postmodem capitalism undermining whatever idealism has been left in some young minds already worked on by insidious fascist influences. Crikey. At this moment my lychees burst quietly into flame beneath the grill and I had to dash over and extinguish them in the sink, where they floated on a series of charred rafts. Too sad.
+++++++++++++++++
FROM: James Hamilton-Paterson’s COOKING WITH FERNET BRANCA, Faber and Faber 2004, pages 112 and 113.
GERALD SAMPER, a ghost writing biographer to the stars (depicted as brain dead lunatics) talks to Nanty, a boy band wunderkin about ethical cooking: Nanty first:
'Beetroot can feel pain?'
'Definitely. Not pain like ours, maybe, at a death in the family or on hearing bagpipes, but certainly anguish of a kind. You must have seen that famous Kirlian photo of half a beetroot? You can clearly see the outline of its phantom other half; its missing limb. I ask you, what could be better evidence of lack _ the absent "twin or brother without whom the amputee beet can never again feel whole?'
' 'You're shitting me: Bacon dangled momentarily from his lower lip.
'Absolutely not, Nanty. Such are the cruelties committed in the name of vegetarianism even as they're concealed by a cloak of virtue. Come to that, imagine dropping a live potato into boiling water:.’
'Nah, you're shitting me, man: said Nanty again. 'Spuds don't have nerves. Someone's been having you on.’
'On the contrary. Did you never see that programme about scientists recording the sounds made by individual cells? It's a new technique called CS, or coherent sonagrammetry. They actually took this potato, hooked it up to electrodes and dropped it into boiling water. Unbelievable. Horrible. As it died each cell gave out this awful squeak. Millions and millions of them, rising in a crescendo and then fading into silence. Even the scientists doing the experiment looked shaken. It really made you think about the everyday vegetable agonies that take ,place below our crude sensory thresholds. We're not aware of even a fraction of the pain we cause each day.’
Nanty was listening with the remnants of a sceptical expression on his face, a last morsel of cold bacon hnpaled on his arrested fork, but his eyes were round.
'So how can you even make french fries humanely?' he asked.
'My very question when I was scripting a video recently for the London Institute of Ethical Culinary Practice. They told me the kindest way to dispatch a potato is to plunge a Sabatier knife cleanly between its eyes." Or else it may be placed gently in cold water and brought slowly and mercifully to the boil. Peeling is agony, of course, so you need to soak the potato first for half an hour in a solution of local anaesthetic. They were using xylocaine.'
'Nah . . . Are you having mean?' ,
'I wouldn't dream of it. Now the trouble with vegans is they're even crueller than ordinary vegetarians because they don’t stop at the usual tortures. It's a good thing there aren't more vegans because if there were their beliefs would cause massive environmental damage as well, by helping to drain the gene pool. How? Think about it. By outlawing all animal husbandry, as vegans would like to do, you'd bring to an end domesticated species such as the humble cow and the humble hen, to say nothing of the humble pig. If at the same time you also outlawed their slaughter, the only ethical thing would be to turn farm animals loose to live out their natural lives. But they've been selectively bred for centuries - genetically engineered, if you like - so they're not proper wild animals and anyway there aren't any wilds left for them to return to. Whoever saw a feral cow wandering the pedestrian precincts of Milton Keynes? I mean, it's not New Delhi. As for chickens, are we to believe this ex-tropical jungle fowl would happily revert to its natural state in Epping Forest? I know some parakeets have found niches in the London suburbs, but can we really imagine vast flocks of rehabilitated chickens darkening the sun as they migrate over the South Downs? And consider pigs. What is the pig's natural predator, other than man? Nothing. Or nothing in Europe, at any rate. After five years of the vegans' benign sway the whole of the EU would be knee-deep ill famished porkers, grubbing up and devouring innocent potatoes and beetroot all oblivious to the vegetables' anguished screams.'What does your 'guru have to say to that, Nanty?' '
'Er, well, I'd have to ask her.' My guest was looking a little abashed. Unconsciously he had pulled from his T-shirt a bunch of amulents, pendants, and stones . . .
