. The more astute of you will already know that I'm continuing to think about the shadow emotions and have moved on to,Weltschmerz, anomie, angst and nausea.
Why isn't there a simple English word? Perhaps because it's a very unEnglish emotion. When my eyes slowly fill with tears while standing in the queue of the supermarket checkout I have to beat a retreat to the shelves of malt whisky where any tears will be seen as quite acceptable tears of delight or envy. When I go to the doctor and there is that embarrassing moment when they, or hesh, asks what is wrong and I reply Weltschmerz, there is yet another embarrassing silence. This is understandable, because what I am really saying is give me some of those pills that will make me see the world like you do, or a fistful of money, or a bottle of gin, a ticket to the Congo or something to make me feel truly deeply and joyously miserable. Anything but more of those damn antibiotics you love so much. Life is a disease. And is the moments of awareness of the fact, when it is caught in the headlights dashing across the road, that are interesting to consider. I sometimes think that David Hume did not find David Hume when he went looking for him because the wrong David Hume was doing the looking. David Hume was actually in a cupboard under the stairs calling out, 'I'm in here! Come and find me!' I shall think about this while I drive to Birmingham for lunch.
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Hello Darkness my old friend... I woke just before dawn this morning, and dawn comes early now, thinking I could hear the twittering of small birds outside my window. But as the mists inside my head cleared I realised it was nothing but the squeaks of my sinuses as I breathed. As light slowly filtered in through the window all was silent outside: no cock crowed in the dawn, no bird sang, no muezzin turned his amplifier up to eleven and blasted the call to prayer out of speakers on top of the minaret, no hawker stood in the street outside yelling that he could sell me a breakfast better and cheaper than I could make it, and throw in a free coffee. All was silent and cold as the dark paled into grey. A greyness that brought with it a lethargy that has not lifted all day. Do you remember the tiger-striped dogs? I'll remind you with a picture. Well, a vistor to this blog Called Charles in China has bought one and wrote a comment saying that he has given it a very thorough examination and it is indeed a real tiger-striped dog.
Wait until you take it out for a walk in the rain, was my first reaction. But Charles does not seem to be someone who would be easily duped so I take him at his word. So just think how cute one of those puppies would look under your Christmas tree this year. Cringing Hell. Your response to my question on cringing was very disappointing, and no Mars Bars will be awarded. It is such an interesting topic too. The obvious emotions are too easily recognised. We only have to see two googly-eyed teenagers walking hand in hand to recognise lurv, or to have an apoplectic bus driver chase one's car down the road to recognise anger ( Happened to me.) It is the emotions one can only catch from out of the corner of one's eye darting from shadow to shadow that are worth giving some thinking time too. I think that cringing feeling is a very nasty one and all to do with status, power and pecking. I think the emotion might have a lot to do with a desire to hurt people we see as being socially beneath us; to put them back in their place. Decent people don't cringe. However the word is ambiguous, there is the submissive cringing of the whipped dog and the false 'empathetic' cringing we feel when we see a bad amateur actor. Something brilliantly described in the opening chapter of Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road. Is there really much difference between the two? I don't know. I forgot to mention one of the most intriguing things in the Current Ice Age exhibition at the BM, and one that might easily pass unnoticed. It is a small disc, perhaps between 15 and 20 cm in diameter with a hole in the middle, the purpose of which is 'unknown'. Do you remember the much later Stone Age Chinese bi I wrote about? Also 'purpose unknown'? It's just a flat disc yet... hmmm. Before moving on from the Ice Age exhibition there is also the issue of the spear throwers. Like the example below. There are several beautifully carved spear and elaborate throwers on show. And that is my problem. Who wants a fancy-nancy spear thrower like that to go hunting with? Look at working spear throwers from the peoples that still used them until very recently and though they may be decorated they are mostly pretty basic and made for efficiency. I have often derided the archeologist's ploy of labelling anything they cannot understand as 'ritual', but I would bet that these objects had more to do with status or ritual than chucking spears at mammoths. Spear throwers are also called atlatl. Isn't that a great word! WARNING:The above link contains strong language and moderate violence. Of course, I know very little about archeology and next to nothing about the Ice Ages, but then what did Albert Einstein know about hamsters? But that did not stop him having an opinion on them.
There have been some veiled suggestions that I should provide evidence for some of my ideas or shut up, but naturally I have no intention of doing so. I just throw sticks for dogs to fetch. I'd be a damn fool to fetch the sticks myself. I have a spade and will at times do some digging, but I'm not going to dig on command, especially in other people's gardens. Don't let that stop you using your own spades though. I remember reading about some natural-philosophers in the Renaissance who were discussing the purpose of a particular organ in the body, I forget which, using the Aristotelian method and came to a completely wrong conclusion.One that could have been easily put right by some simple dissection or observation. Their method had proven good enough to last a thousand years so why take the trouble to do any extra work? I have some sympathy with this attitude. By the way, I wanted to use 'proved' in the phrase 'had proven good enough' and only put in 'proven' as a sop to the pedants. It's a bright cold day here with patches of snow still clinging to roofs and pavements. I'd like to be out walking in the country and making atlatl, but will spend the holiday weekend doing mundane chores instead. A recipe from my forthcoming book Oriental Cooking for the Under Fives. Make your favourite dal in the usual way (see page 764) only cook for a longer time until the dal becomes thicker and has the consistency of porridge Warm some chapatis, tortillas or other flat bread. Mix a tablespoon of sweet mango chutney with a carton of plain yoghurt. Spread the dal on the flat bread, drizzle with the yogurt then sprinkle with finely chopped fresh chillies. Carefully roll the still warm flat bread, tuck in the ends and serve. This is my most popular snack for hungry children. I call it Rolled Dal. Yes, I will go a long way for a bad pun. I heard the New Archbishop of Canterbury on Thought for the Day and thought he sounded more like the Assistant Manager of a Tesco Metro than an Archbishop. As an Atheist I like my Archbishops to be a little more robust and punchy when it comes to broadcasts and sermons. I was also struck by the fact that the Archbishop's crozier looks a lot like a spear thrower. 7:15 on Sunday morning and instead of being out on the hills enjoying the snowy weather I'm trapped in NuL. I am going up to Liverpool today and then across to Manchester to meet Kit at The Royal Northern College of Music tomorrow. I can'r risk driving the Morris Minor so have to go by train. Hardly ever a pleasant experience in this country, Two early morning thoughts Last week I was looking at the carving above and others like it in The British Museum. One would have imagined life to be quite difficult fro such hugely obese women in the Ice Ages, But what if the cave people had a kind of eusocial society? We would probably have evidence of true eusociality but it could have been closer to polyandry. One woman stays in the safety of the cave and has children while the men and perhaps childless women too, go out hunting the ubiquitous mammoth?
This might also help explain the lack of plant art, as gathering berries and plants was women's work in many early societies. The idea that stone age societies were matriarchies is not new and nowadays is somewhat discredited, and I am sure the idea of polyandry must have been suggested too, but I don't have the time to check. Perhaps one of you knows the answer. Now get down on your knees and pray. One reason for having a large family in the modern world is religious belief. Some religions discourage contraception and most are against abortion of any kind. So does religious belief give a competitive advantage when it comes to passing on one's selfish genes in the 21st.Century? If it does then we should expect the behaviour to increase. Could it also become 'hard wired' into our system like the complex displays of Birds of Paradise? The current resurgence of atheism is a tiny blip in world society and only evident in the West. Religion has regrown in both Russia and China. So there will at some point in the future - perhaps as in the past - a tipping point where religion becomes a part of us, a perceived reality. I call this the Theongularity. Some of you may see a reference to The Singularity in the name. You would be right. As usual I could right a book on either of these two ideas but have no time. I have a suitcase to pack and a warm hat to find. And I still have not said anything about cringing. I have to say reader response on that topic has been rather disappointing so far. Those of you who read The Public Domain Review will have recognised the picture above. If not just click on it to read the sad and instructive story.
I'm back in NuL and work, but this is a short week and I'm going to Liverpool for the weekend and seeing Kit. On Monday we're gong to the Royal Northern College of Music in Lancaster to see Martyn Jacques of the Tiger Lillies doing the music for the silent classic Dr. Caligari. It's a Birthday treat for Kit. I included the story of the rabbits because I was struck by the discrepancy between the illustrations and the story itself. I felt it related to the Mughal Crocodile I had been searching for and some of the cryptozoological websites I looked at. I like cryptozoology; it is often hopelessly amateur and shambolic in its approach but it has a hopeless enthusiasm that one can't help but admire. Descriptions of bizarre events and Big Fierce Animals are almost always exaggerated. Nobody wants to be attacked by a below average size tiger with small rounded teeth. If you are going to be attacked let it be by some enormous slavering and befanged brute that will be worth describing in great detail at every dinner party you attend from then on. In Mughal art it seems to me that often the dullest and most boring creatures may be the most accurately drawn; the squirrels, sheep and mice. The mundane truth of hidden detail becomes the most beautiful part of the picture. But I would have liked the pictures of Mary Toft's brood of bunny children to have been the reality. The truth made me cringe. And I shall return to cringing another time. In the last blog I said all tortoise shell cats are female. That is not entirely true. There are rare male mutations with an extra X chromosome but they are always sterile. Cats are all female. I'm writing this in the uncomfortable new Members' Room in the British Museum. The old Friends' Room - we are no longer 'friends'. The relationship has been formalised to 'members'. - had a kind of shabby gentility about it and always reminded me of a rather seedy first class waiting room from the age of steam trains. The 'friends, more often than not, ranged from the slightly eccentric to the completely batty and laptops were banned: The 'members' all look like lecturers from Milton Keynes University and have Apple laptops and iPads. (I write this on my Apple laptop,) From where I sit I can look down on the riffraff milling around down in the Great Court. I'm glad I was around for the last years of the Friends Room. It was friendly and has left fond memories. I came to London especially to see The Act of Killing but also visited the Ice Age Exhibition at the BM, a marvellous Mughal art exhibition at the British Library, Trogg at the Cartoon Museum and Light Show at the Hayward. I came down with Viv and stayed with her sister. - The one with the tortoisehell kitten. - Viv was Katie Patterson's mentor/fairy godmother/knew her mother and was very keen to see Katie's light bulb. The bulb gave had the just same luminescence as the moon and in an extraordinary coincidence look almost exactly the the same as the ones I have at home in NuL. I bought mine from a Pound Shop. I particularly enjoyed the fountains in strobe lighting. Sensitive, artistic souls see the water as a delicate frozen sculpture,but Philistines just see flickering water, and come away with a headache. There was one exhibit however that could be enjoyed by Eloi and Morlock alike and that was the three coloured rooms. Now I must dash for my train, so can say no more.
Read the reviews if you want to know the details. Now on the train back to Oop North. Viv commented that there were no depictions of plants In the Ice Age exhibition. It is rather curious given the huge time span covered by the Ice Age art. In fact, it was two Ice Ages, not just the one. Fruits, nuts and berries must have played a very important part in Stone Age diet and the shape and colour of flowers makes them ideal for decoration and design. But can anyone think of a cave painting of a plant? Portraits of people are rare and landscapes, plants, fruit, and flowers are unknown. Perhaps this gives strength to the theory that cave paintings are a kind of ancient animated cartoon. Who goes to the cinema to see plants? Just like us an early audience sitting watching the changing shapes in the flickering torchlight would have wanted the excitement of mammoths, lions, bison and so on. What is the earliest depiction of a plant? I also wanted to do some searching for the S dragon in prehistoric art but did not have time on this trip. There was a dragon in the Mughal art exhibition, but I would guess it it was Chinese and had come to India via Tibet. There was a very interesting depiction of a tusked crocodile in the Emperor Babur's natural history book. Mughal artists were brilliant nature painters and their birds, animals and plants are nearly always accurate and precise. They would have been very familiar with ordinary crocodiles, so why did they include this distorted beast? Unless, perhaps, the remnant of a species of tusked crocodile was still around, or more likely the ancient skull had been preserved in some collection or temple. Who knows? No disrespect to His Holiness. Good Luck to you Francis!
(No one can call me a bad looser. I'm not going to bring up Los Desaparecidos. Oh no, not me!) I'm talking about the Fat Fool Transfer. At 4am this morning -my favourite urban hour - I was wondering why the word Pope, in English, had a different vowel sound to words like papal and padre. Thinking about words, their origins and relationships can be quite addictive once you start. Its fun but I must be careful not to get hooked. I'll leave it to you to sort out the Papal problem for me. I have my best ideas at 4am, but generally forget what they were by 8am. It's now 8.30. I could be quite an Einstein, if only I had the Maths. And I would have had bacon and eggs for breakfast, if I had any eggs. Or bacon. I had my usual toast, marmalade and good black coffee. Last night I experimented with pizza. As you all know, Thursday Night is Pizza Night. I bought a deep pan cheese pizza, scraped the cheese off, sliced it through, spread tomato paste, oregano, mozzarella and chilli sauce, before replacing the top. Then the original cheese was supplemented by a huge variety of delicious toppings, including three varieties of chopped chilli, to make a kind of pizza sandwich. It turned out to be a rousing success and has been added to the repertoire. Oh, I forgot to mention the drizzle of anchovy oil. Whilst on the subject of chillis. Anak laki-laki yang pertama, or Number One Son, as they say in China, gave me a chilli growing kit for Christmas. He is not all bad, despite the fact he plays accordion. Yesterday, I planted the seeds of five varieties of chilli, and with the two plants that have survived the winter I hope to be chilli self-sufficient later this year. At 8am my thoughts turned to the emotion of 'cringing'. This had been brought on by a conversation about poetry that makes one cringe. It struck me that cringing is a curious emotion in the context of poetry, and the like. There is the cringing that comes with fear, but that is understandable and not so interesting. The cringing that comes with social embarrassment is much more subtle. And it starts very early on. I have observed it in quite small children. -You will often find me in the park on a Sunday afternoon with my binoculars...- Damn it! I didn't mean to write that. That insufferable Smart fellow is bound to pounce on what was just harmless foolery. Anyway. I find cringing interesting for a lot of reasons that would take to long to explain thoroughly here. But briefly, cringing seems like an almost physical manifestation of otherwise hidden prejudices and values. Values of class, caste and status. It is not as strong as revulsion but has something of the same flavour, and is tinged with pity. I would not do that: one of us would not behave like that. I am very interested in trying to untangle this a little. So please let me know what makes you cringe. Last month I had a record number of visitors but only one new commenter. So if you do read this I repeat, please let me know what makes you cringe. I am genuinely interested in trying to understand more about the basis of those emotions that are a kind of unconscious social glue, and any systematic structures that might underlie them. - I have to do something to pass the long hours of a lonely old age - I have a small bet with myself - a bottle of Appleton's rum - that nearly all the replies will be, 'Blogs like this!' Don't let me down. PS. I said there had been a record number of visits to these pages. Well, I suspect that most of those visitors were robots. Never mind, everyone is welcome here, and someday soon I intend to make an entry just for the bots. I have just been asked why 'good' and 'foot' are pronounced differently.
I guessed they would have different origins, but a quick search proved me wrong. They are both from Old English. The difference comes down to the mess caused by The Great Vowel Shift and the delightfully named:- Foot-goose merger The foot-goose merger is a phenomenon that occurs in Scottish English, Ulster varieties of Hiberno-English, Malaysian English and Singaporean English, [1] where the vowels /ʊ/ and /uː/ are merged. As a result, pairs like look/Luke are homophones and good/food and foot/boot rhyme. The merged vowel is usually /ʉ/ or /y/ in Scottish English and /u/ in Singaporean English.[2] The use of the same vowel in "foot" and "goose" in these dialects is not due to phonemic merger, but the appliance of a different languages vowel system to the English lexical incidence [3]. The full-fool merger is a conditioned merger of the same two vowels before /l/, making pairs like pull/pool and full/fool homophones. Having just finished a large plate of delicious rabbit curry, the full-fool merger has a certain attractive ring to it as well. The International Phonetic Alphabet is an exotic creature, and one I want to keep at a safe distance. But if you want to hear examples of some of the symbols used in the passage above this web site is quite fun: http://web.uvic.ca/ling/resources/ipa/charts/IPAlab/IPAlab.htm As usual I turn to writing something to avoid housework.
I found Lucy's comment on the word 'nuclear' interesting in light of the lectures I have been listening to. (To avoid housework.) I think it is a word that was bound to change its pronunciation. The ny sound at the beginning is rather strange. With the exception of 'new' and that is often pronounced 'noo'. We are not sure what that y sound is. When I was at school there were only five vowels, aeiou and y was given some kind of associate status.English speakers often have trouble with the Indonesian ny. Especialy when it is duplicated in words such as nyanyi, sing. So I would expect over time the word nuclear to be pronounced nookleer. The final r I would expect to go too as English does not like rolling its rs the way Scots and Indonesian do. So finally the word would be pronounced something like nookleeah. Newkulla sounds as if it has a glottal stop in it and may just be a fashion like the rising tone at the end of a sentence; that fashion already seems to be on the way out. It could also signal a hesitancy, an unconscious doubt over the correct pronunciation. Linguistic change is largely unconscious and we speak very differently from our parents and grandparents. It is fascinating how sudden and complete some of these changes can be. For example, our rules of spelling are such a mess because many of them were set down just before The Great Vowel Shift in an attempt to standardise the printed word. Consonants shift too according to Grimm's Law. That's Jacob Grimm, the fairy tale collector and linguist. Vowels have the Chomsky-Halle Trisyllabic Laxing Rule. This may have some relevance to the change in the pronunciation of nuclear. But I am getting out of my depth and my nose is starting to bleed. Which reminds me of Jill's comment on In Our Time on Absolute Zero. I thnk most people came away knowing next to nothing about Absolute Zero but I bet we all remembered Faraday picked shards of glass out of his eyes. Most will forget it was Faraday and the essence of the programme will have been distilled down to, 'Some bloke picked bits of glass out of his eyes.' I think this says something profound about the process of education. At least, my education. Now I'm going to make wild rabbit curry with three types of chilli, garlic, cinnamon, tamarind, lime juice and ginger, and spiced with wild Laotian cardamoms, cloves, star anise, and my favourite juicy black cardamoms. I shall eat it with lots of beer chilled to just below Abolute Zero while watching a good fillum, flick or movie. Talking about films... Last night I watched The Berbarian Sound Studio directed by Peter Strickland. |
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