You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain

To Dawn

This journal is recording the news of our community, giving members a voice and let the editor and proprietor – me – occasionally come out with a column. (Right now there are only my own articles – as the Chinese say: “A man past his forties is the proverbial rogue,” a wise old bird full of stories, profanities and bawdy anecdotes – but this is going to change. Not the anecdotes but me the only one telling them.)

    I am an archaeologist by training and interested in the sciences and anthropology. My outlook is metropolitan and laissez-faire – you are OK, I am OK. The French statesman Clemenceau noted: “Man has no soul, if only he had manners.” So, no big messages, just mutual interest and assistance between registered members, helping each other to make themselves more comfortable in this world as it is. Our best hope of mutual understanding and global unity is the ever-growing Invisible City of the Worldwide Web. It’s still a construction site with all the customary dust, debris and rubbish; I am not saying it is an unmixed blessing. The idea that everybody is wanting choices, the more and unlimited the better, is against human nature. Constantly choosing and then worrying whether one missed out on something better is a pain in the neck, sometimes even debilitating. Google’s famous algorithm is a value for the popularity of an information, not necessarily for its quality. Yet given the choice between a parochial backwater where the sheep vie with the shepherd for the price of naivety, and unlimited access to information and the stimuli of culture and art, there is really not much to choose. The trick is to find the right kind of neighborhood, away from the dust and noise of the big building site out there. A place among trusted friends who know stuff and lend a helping hand and respect you for your own contributions of expertise. It saves time to find the ropes and one day this is going to be a great place to be. We all can make a difference.

In the meantime we keep our alotment clean and clip the hedges. As for now everything is still very much under construction but in August we should be up and running.

[... How are we going about this: ...]

The design of this site may not strike you as particularly fancy, but it does read well on handheld media like iPhones and the iPad.

Enjoy!

michael sympson

© – August 2010 – all rights reserved

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			I see Jeremiah as a kindred spirit; he's also the best-documented personality in the entire book. A rare fluke has the otherwise fragmented sources and the archaeology from Mesopotamia, Judah and Egypt falling in sync for the same period of his activity. Here is a genuine voice speaking to us.
			Prophets and “saviors” come a dime a dozen; we can reinvent Einstein and the infinitesimal calculus, if we have to, but the combination of circumstance and character in Sappho’s work gives testimony to a unique sensitivity, almost obliterated by censorship and persecution of her work.
			“We did not see even one beautiful woman.” Montaigne wasn’t exaggerating. His was the period of Lucas Cranach, Albrecht Dürer and the incomparable Hans Holbein – exceptional artists who had eyes to see and the training to accurately reproduce their vision. Yet none of their erotic paintings is even remotely stimulating.
			Descartes wrote in an age of thumbscrews and auto-da-fés for everybody who had the temerity of thinking for himself. This could sometimes make him giving the appearance of affirming what he didn't really believe.
			Laurence Sterne had his appointment with destiny rather late. At the age of forty-nine, he offered his first and only novel to a publisher who of course knew better than to risk his money on this nonsense. So Sterne paid for the costs of printing and published himself. Publishers know nothing.
			Many of his critics liked to denounce him as a provincial dullard, somehow granted a magnificent writing talent, but too shallow ever to write anything of importance. Only after his death the great Tolstoy gave Chekhov the seal of approval: "With no false modesty, Chekhov is technically far superior to me."
			Some authors even give classes on the critical appreciation of good fiction. Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures in Cornell are readily accessible in print. Then, how is it, that Nabokov, and so many other authors, are purblind when it comes to the correct appreciation of their own work?

(2) I Beg to Differ

			Resentments are the forge of nation building. All it takes is a William of Orange or a George Washington and a new nation is born out of the resentment against the Spanish Inquisition or taxation without representation. King Saul was the George Washington of the Hebrews when the tribes began resenting the yoke of the Philistines.
			He demanded to sever all family ties: "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God. If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, yea, and his own life, he cannot be my companion.” A statement worthy of a mujahid with Semtex strapped to his chest!
			Sabellianism was probably the first unequivocal enunciation of consubstantiality for the Christ and the Father. But there was a dilemma. If the Christ and the Father were of identical substance then God the Father must have suffered at the crucifixion just as badly as his son.
			What has done more harm to the human race, the Bible, the Koran or the Kama Sutra? After sixteen hundred years of a Christian sex “education,” women in the west barely suspected that they, too, could have an orgasm.
			Never before has anybody of us been exposed to such intrusive surveillance, and never before has the anxiety of failing the sales target given so much power to the bigotry of the common philistine. Like in the film Spartacus everybody should rise and shout “I am Big Brother!”

(3) About Me

			My great-great Grandmother’s letter is a genuine document. She was in her teens when she lost everything and became a fugitive because of the religious turmoil of her time. I think it was an even greater loss for the country she left behind.
			My grandmother was a very down to earth person. I owe my existence to her conceited ways. Yet all this common sense and survival skill didn’t prepare her for this confrontation with the weird and wonderful.
			Her husband was shipped in a sealed boxcar to Auschwitz. The guards rushed him to undress and he was told to deposit his belongings in a neat pile, so that “later he could find it again.”
			People have expressed their interest to actually lay money on the table if I would publish my biography. Very flattering, but I am not sure I will expand very much beyond this little sketch.
			Limited shelf space can be a blessing. Most of my books are stored away in the loft. So, from time to time I make a review of my references on shelf and look what I really, really want. Then I climb upstairs.

(4) Insights and Outsides

			“Love itself,” says William Butler Yeats, “would be barely more than an animal hunger without Sappho having given it shape in her poetry before,” and this, I think, is true. All fiction is escapist – no, I retract that – all good fiction is escapist and embarks on a “dream, and again follows the dream – and so – ewig – usque ad finem..." (Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim).
			I rather pull crumbs from the hairy chest of a passing sailor, screaming and banging the headboard,” she said. She tilted her head, inspecting the hair. She decided to color it.Red,”she said, “it should be red.”
			The dominium of Pachacuti came as a late arrival in South America, almost as late as the Spanish. The remaining quipus – strings and knots to aid the memory of a messenger – tell us how this was achieved. They give us the time – four knots on a scarlet thread, indicating the fourth year of the ruler – and the number of subdued regions: ten small knots on a grey string.
			Instead of a linear progression, Professor Hawking proposes a permanent one-off, something beyond our cognitive categories of time and space. Hawking doesn’t mean to say that expansion and contraction occur in a cycle of infinite repetitions, but that the whole process is laid out and suspended in a timeless hyper-dimension of simultaneous occurrences.
			Personally I think the Universe is teeming with life, perhaps even in the voids between the galaxies. But if E.T. is out there, why doesn’t he visit us? Is there an insurmountable barrier? And even if there isn’t and he is capable, why should he be interested?
			I had a conversation with a very down to earth Yorkshire woman, a retired nurse. For her every thought of an afterlife held the horrors of prolonged infirmity, “and why should anybody want this,” she said. Why indeed. But then she came up with a surprise.
			I don't question the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, but the existence of extraterrestrial poetry is still an unproven proposition. Just to arrange colored plastic chips, sniff a complex pheromone or the inarticulate howl at the full moon, will not do.

(5) How We Became what We are

			At some point women discovered agriculture. In the longhouses the women were in charge of distribution and storage. A new social model emerged. It meant organized labor and supervision in ways unthinkable for the free wheeling trapper of our hunter and gatherer past.
			The new system of Christian ayatollahs began rolling out the shroud over culture and education. It took almost a millennium before the dissent of courageous functionaries would bring about changes from within. Without the legacy of Symmachus and his compatriots, a kind of cultural time capsule, the darkness could have lasted even longer.
			We take for granted a sheltered, spoiled rotten period of prolonged "innocence" and supervision, and call it “childhood.” Yet this is a rather recent innovation. In medieval society and the Renaissance this was a foreign notion even for the high and mighty.
			For most people it was not the letter that was holding together their recollections and ideas. It was the rhythm, a striking figure of speech, a hypnotic rhyme. The scanning of words became a science. For a long time this was the only available custodian for the accuracy of our traditions.
			Given the seemingly irrational character of some of our taboos, does our morality not defy such explanation? It is all good and well to ascribe to a code of high-minded ethics – the morals we believe we should observe – but that’s not the morals we actually do observe. So what is really at the core of our moral makeup?

From Our Library

(1) Golden Books and Classical Texts

			“For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities, but gradually our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing” (Douglas Adams, How to stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet).
			Theophrastus’ Characters was written 2,300 years ago, ages before the Freudian and Jungian claptrap, as an aid for the aspiring playwright, and it is still as true as it was then.
			In 1887 Oscar Wilde wrote: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, the language.” It’s a matter of thinking as well, not just of different words (Raymond Chandler, Notes on English and American Style).
			My wife believes she can recognize an American composer by certain characteristics in his baseline and harmonics. The same could be said about the American way with words. And it is a good way. William Strunk’s Elements of Style is more than a manual of good expression, it is an education in democracy.
			“Other things being equal, which they never are, a more powerful theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet some very dull books have been written about God, and some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff, and what he has in him to write it with” (Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder).

(2) Translations

			"Everywhere, at home and abroad, the younger generation, with a moving enthusiasm, gave in to the poet of sentimentality and love, to the smart sound-bite and the tendentious aphorism, to philosophy and humanitarianism." (Theodor Mommsen).
			Was it a twitch of the upper lip or some indecisive fiddling with the sleeve cuff that became the cause for the French Revolution? Considering the way we manufacture Ideas as we speak, this is very possible.
			“When the pot-roast was particularly bad, we turned to debating the existence of God. The good Lord always was with the majority. Only three at the table held atheistic views; yet they too listened to reason if we had at least a good cheese for dessert” (Heinrich Heine).

At present I am writing at my novels. Of the finished copy I shall put up a taster. If you like what you read you make the payment and download the password protected PDF from the page that appears after confirmation. I send you the password, and you can read to your heart's content.

Live well and be happy.

michael sympson