17 posts from January 2008

People sometimes talk about an out of body experience when they’ve had a serious illness or suffered an accident from which they survived unscathed. The precise definition of this is neither explained nor really analysed, but the religious among us claim that it is in this area that we would do well to look at. Not look for answers, but to understand that a direction of some sort is being offered. Whatever religious beliefs I have—and I would say that they border on logic first and mystery second—I don’t always think that we can take such a simplistic view. Neither can we really define such things in scientific terms. I believe that we have to accept that there are things we do not fully comprehend and that maybe in time we will get closer to whatever the real meaning is. And it’s not like predicting what life is like on another planet by dreaming up all those weird creatures in science fiction films. That comes from an amalgamation of what we already know, and that we simply reassemble. No, I think that it’s possibly something that we have no conception of at the moment, and we will probably be taken by complete surprise when we learn more.

Our heart essentially controls the functions of the various parts of our body. True the brain gets involved by sending signals to the different parts pointing out pain, cold, heat, etc. but these are automatic functions which we take for granted. We also take for granted the way we understand how to live in society. We know the consequences of actions in certain situations and often don’t need to plan a strategy to deal with them, it’s done almost automatically. These are really the basics, like walking or even driving when we can think about different things at the same time yet arrive at the right destination safely. Our own internal guidance system operates in the background like some computer program, and only when we meet an obstacle does our fully conscious mind awaken to the demand and take over.

Nevertheless there are times when we start to think about a particular emotion and sometimes arrive at a super-concentrated thought. In this state, the world around us becomes a series of objects as if we too were an exhibit in a museum. We become objects that we can examine, initially from within as we go through different scenarios in our mind—acting out all the possibilities that result from how we can project our current thought process onto different events. This thought process becomes stronger as we delve deeper into our mind and ultimately we have detached the abstract from the physical. We are now a thought bubble outside of our bodies and looking back at ourselves. In one sense we have disconnected the experiences of our lives from our physical body and reduced it to that of a child just starting out in life. We have become two entities, a physical and an abstract. The physical is now a vulnerable being who you could probably could knock with a feather. And certainly in this state any vexation would result in that child curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, in an attempt to defend themselves against unknown fears.

The abstract entity however, is like a body of knowledge no longer shackled to a physical prison and therefore able to arrive at many thought permutations. Like a child learning from a story in a tv programme, our thoughts are reflected back to ourselves and in this ethereal state we can derive a conduct that seems suitable—at least at this time. The danger we have at this point is of allowing our thought analysis to go even further and become too distant to re-engage with our body. Physically we are still one person, but inside our brain a kind of wall has been created that separates our ability to join thought and action together. So the automatic functions provide essential life support, but the learning process is now operating as a complete individual within a cage. We can still survive and appear to be part of the society around us, when in fact we have become too distinct personalities. One that keeps us in touch with the basics of everyday life and one that is running both in the background and the foreground, re-interpreting everything to suit our new state.

Lady Agnew of Lucknow

After the nightmare picture below comes this one of ethereal beauty. The sitter was recovering from an illness at the time which may have contributed to the melancholic atmosphere. But it cannot be denied that the painter—John Singer Sargent—knew how to paint the aristocracy. He painted people as they would like have been seen and not all his paintings are so dreamlike. There is however, an elegance in his style that makes even his most forceful subjects to somehow exist on a different plane.

Palendrones - sentances that read the same backwards as they do forwards (i.e. the letters are in the same order:

Able was I ere I saw Elba -(Napoleon in his best English!)
A man, a plan, a canal; Panama? - (the Panama canal)
Borrow or rob? - (confused burglar)
Dammit, I'm mad! - (a subjective view)
Dogma: I am God - (a fundamentalist)
Live not on evil - (an enlightened fundamentalist)
Madam, I'm Adam - (Adam to Eve)
Ma is as selfless as I am - (another subjective view)
Now Eve, we're here; we've won - (escape from the Garden of Eden)
Pull up if I pull up - (traffic incident)
Star comedy by Democrats - (something to do with the American election)
Was it a car or a cat I saw? - (confused motorist)

Fayard (1914-2006) and Harold (1921-2000) Nicholas were the greatest tap dancers, not only of their time but of everyone since, including dancers today.  The above video is a clip from the film Stormy Weather (1943) with Cab Calloway, in which their dance routine has to be seen to be believed.  If you created such a routine in CGI these days, you wouldn’t think it possible for actual humans to reach such athletic heights as they were capable of achieving.  Their dance spots in any film made for an outstanding contribution to the popularity of the film itself—however dull the overall film was.  No superlative is too much for the precision and energy of their dance routines.  More can be found at their website here

The Brits

George Bernard Shaw once said that the USA and the UK were divided by a common language.  Aside from the different cultural references that apply to each country, reflecting certain aspects of society that are often quite unique to them, it has something to do with the letter ‘u’.  Why this should be, I don’t know but in fact the word colour for instance acquired the letter ‘u’ in the Victorian period.  Prior to that it didn’t have a ‘u’ in it and was spelt color!  Then we get other oddities like aluminum which in the UK is spelt aluminium, and consequently has a different pronunciation—although of course the base core is alumina.  Then we have news, pronounced as just that, whereas I hear it from America as noos, and I’m sorry to have to admit but pronounced that way it just sounds funny to me.  I have a friend in Brazil who’s English is perfect—from a writing viewpoint since I have never heard his voice—and it seems that the American form of spelling is used in Brazil.  Although lately I notice that he has been adding the letter ‘u’ where we in the UK would include it.

My sister lives in Chicago and has done so for quite some time, so she has acquired a mild American accent and taken onboard the different spellings and words.  When she visits me, she suggests we go to the movies, whereas I would say we’ll go to the cinema.  Colloquially I could say we’ll go to the flicks, but then that brings us into a whole different area of language.  I remember that on my first trip to the USA I asked for some chips at a bar, and received crisps, which wasn’t what I was expecting.  For chips in the UK have no real equivalent abroad.  People describe them as extra thick French Fries but really, they’re so much thicker that they’re just chips!  Crisps come in lots of flavours and styles in the UK and one manufacturer even tried selling fish ‘n chips flavour!  It didn’t work.  I can’t really describe what they tasted like, but it wasn’t fish ‘n chips—nor did the Smoked Salmon version taste any better!

I’ve never really understood why English should take on a different accent when it develops abroad.  If you go back in time and examine the origins of certain words, it’s the case that English acquires words but never throws any of the previous ones away.  So it’s possible to say the same thing using a whole variety of words and arriving at many unique sentences.  This comes from taking in lots of different cultures over the centuries and a certain laziness with pronunciation.  When the Normans first arrived they spoke French, whereas the existing population spoke English (well we call it old English).  So a series of additional words came into the language.  In particular words for different types of meat.  Beef for boeuf—so meat from any cow became beef, and so on.  This ability to absorb so many words and have such subtle meanings makes English a wonderfully rich language, and I would have thought a very difficult language to learn—although a lot of people seem to cope with it as a second language.

Then we come back to the spelling which often abandons rules altogether!  The town of Keighly in Yorkshire is actually pronounced Keithly and the aristocratic surname Featherstonehaugh is pronounced Fanshaw!  Few people can get to understand the silent letters in Leicester—pronounced Lester.  And in my area there are two towns, one called Cosham—pronounced Cosham—and the other called Bosham—pronounce Bozam.  No one knows why there is such a difference but the train announcements accept the local pronunciation.  When we get into regional accents, it’s a whole new ball game (is that an Americanism?).  I once saw a Scottish film advertised with English sub-titles!  They must have made a mistake I thought but the action was based in Glasgow.  Have you ever heard a strong Glasgow accent?  I could just about understand what they were saying.

Kimwipes advert

What do those guys get up to in the back of the factory!!!  A trade magazine advert from the 1970s illustrating what the composition of oily rags were before companies like Kleenex came along with specialised cleaners!  Mind you I still use cast off clothes (with tears or holes in them) for polishing my furniture!