Please don't…

I zapped across to BBC2 last night. The Proms were playing. I'm not a huge classical fan, but I know what I like, which is mainly Bach, mainly on the guitar or cello, and in moderate doses. Other composers I will give a try, but Beethoven frightens me, Mozart gets a bit plinky after a while and Stravinsky sets my teeth on edge. Anything later than Elgar sounds to my cloth ear like stuff falling out of cupboards or a slow train crash.
Yes, I know.. I'm a philistine, and I don't care. I occasionally spend a few moments listening to people talking about the music during intervals, and I am bewildered. I have ears, like them, and a brain, like them. How is it that they seem to be hearing something entirely different from what I do? I know my sense of pitch is dodgy, as is my memory, so I am largely incapable of remembering a theme from the first movement twenty minutes ago which has just been cleverly repeated by the eighth bassoon, counterpointing the fanfare by the trombones and piccolos. But if I were capable of remembering it.. so what? What is so special about repeating a theme, inverted, backwards, and with a flattened fifth and denatured ninth, seventeen bars, or indeed seventeen minutes later? I don't get it.
I do sometimes wonder if I'm missing something, or whether talking about music is simply an easier way of earning a living than working. Writing music isn't easy though. I know that. So why do so many people feel compelled to write music that I find…. deep breath… pointless or even painful?

Some of it definitely falls into the same bag as Modern Art, much of which is genuine garbage to my finely-tuned mind. I don't have much time for the genius of Andy Warhol, but I think he spoke a great truth when he said that 'Art is what you can get away with'.

Anyway… I zapped into the Proms… and what did I see? A couple of operatic types belting out a popular song from the 1930's, with facial expressions which were clearly meant to signify enjoyment, but which somehow only conveyed condescension and lack of understanding. It was like watching a sort of puppet show. What was going on? I checked in the Radio Times.
It seems the Proms are either making themselves more accessible, or dumbing down (rather like 'A' levels), depending upon your point of view: so they were putting on a programme of songs from MGM musicals.

I caught a bar and a half of an old favourite (oddly my memory refuses to remember what the song was, for purposes of mental hygiene, I suspect) and zapped away as fast as possible. Show songs do not improve by being sung by Great Voices. Kiri te Kanawa should NOT sing I've Got You Under My Skin. Operatic voices are the way they are so they could reach the back of the stalls in the days before amplification. Thus impresarios could build bigger halls and pack more bums onto more benches and thus make more lolly. The Voices have remained with us ever since.
Personally, I don't much care for the strangulated foghorn effect, especially in a language I can't understand, with lyrics that frankly don't seem to be worth the effort (if I've understood the plot of The Ring correctly). If you like it, fine. I wish I could join you, really I do. It would give me a touch of class, so sorely needed. But I can't. I've tried many times, and failed.

However, I do like many of those magnificent songs from the twenties and thirties. The tunes are perfect and elegant and the lyrics poignant and ingenious, and they refer to the concerns of real people in language I can understand. The great crooners made them unforgettable and eternal.
But only people who can sing a little like Sinatra or Ella should attempt them. Dieter Fischer-Diskau should not. These songs are intimate and personal and do not gain a thing from being bellowed into the gods, even sottissimo, which still sounds impersonal, mechanical, and contrived.
So please leave popular music alone, O Great Voiced Ones. This includes modern pop, of course, unless you can do the moonwalk and crotch-grabbing to go along with the full orchestral version of Thriller, falsetto squeaks and all, preferably echoed by the blokes on the kettle-drums.

And this plea includes folk music too. I once heard Bryn Terfel (I think) singing The Foggy Foggy Dew and almost cried. It was pitch perfect, of course, and every phoneme was enunciated with crisply starched clarity; and the piano accompaniment was academically spotless. But forgive me Bryn, if indeed it was you… it was soulless. And we poor cloth-eared plebs like our folk songs to touch us, as they were intended to, before they were Collected and sanitised and incorporated into symphonic scores by Great Composers. Folk songs are meant to be scratched out on cheap guitars and accordions with a couple of reeds missing and sung in pubs by people who can barely stand, and who have a vocal range of almost the full octave. The thing is, it's not about technique.
The Foggy Dew is a song of Life, as meaningful in the 15th century as it will be in the 25th (I've no idea when it was written, incidentally, and don't care. Quality is ageless.)

The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that his idea of hell would be to be left alone with himself for eternity. I reckon he could improve on that by having to listen to a loop of Pavarotti singing Where Have all the Flowers Gone? .
Long time passing, indeed….

Not terribly green…

Today I received a notification from the Nationwide building society in a long white envelope. The information was on a slip of paper (a quarter of an A4 sheet). Good thinking Nationwide! Cutting back on wasted paper. Excellent!
However... the slip was enfolded inside a full sheet of A4, bearing the words
PLEASE DISCARD THIS INSERT.
ENCLOSED FOR PRODUCTION PURPOSES ONLY.

One step forward; four steps back. Presumably nobody had worked out that it would have been cheaper in time and paper to print the info on the big sheet and not bother with the slip at all.
The problem obviously lies with their envelope stuffing gear, and no doubt they will be working on that and get it right one day. We hope…
Meanwhile, I wonder how many hundred thousand people will be getting a sheet of completely wasted paper in their post today? How many trees does that represent? And how much wasted fuel in the cutting and transportation etc?

Just by the by… do you, dear reader, buy jotting pads? Surely not! If you take a sheet of one-sided A4 scrap (or two-sided if it's from Nationwide), you can fold it in half and tear it. Then fold the halves into three and tear again. Thus each bit of rubbish paper gives you six handy jotter-sized slips. I use them by the thousand in my writing, and by the dozen for shopping lists and aide memoires. In the kitchen we have a wad secured by a bulldog clip, with a pencil attached to the clip by a piece of string. It never gets lost, and every time I use it I get a warm glow, knowing I've recycled a bit of otherwise wasted paper. Eventually the scraps get burned on the Raeburn, so they are used yet again, and I get an even warmer glow. Wonderful things, Raeburns.

Wonderful…

I've just taken a few minutes off from Sigmund Freud and Chapter 15 of The Book. Freud was a determined Materialist, which means that his underlying premiss is flawed, which means that by definition we can't rely on any of his conclusions. If you start from the wrong assumption, you are going to get things wrong, aren't you? So does that mean that everything he wrote must be wrong? No, I don't think so. But it must surely mean that things won't dovetail neatly. And neither did my writing about him. Grr…

Anyway… I was getting a bit fed up with banging the same old drum all the time and happened to look up and out into the garden. The buddleia is in full bloom, and finally the butterflies have turned up, after being absent for all of the 'summer' so far. One cone of purple florets had five on it: two admirals, two tortoiseshells and a peacock. I had to dash out with my camera.

Is there anything lovelier than a peacock beauterfly? Except perhaps a peacock bird? The tones and designs on its wings are unbelievable. And they are remarkably tame. I could get my macro lens within a centimetre and they wouldn't budge. Admirals are a bit more nervous. They either flap off when you get a bit close, or at least close their wings up. Tortoiseshells are bold as well. One jumped up off the flower and onto my hand. A peacock brushed my ear. I could hear it.
Then a couple of painted ladies joined in. The little buddleia had something like fifteen items of mother nature's jewellery on it, along with three or four 'penny whites'. Plenty for all, of the bittersweet nectar. Everyone getting tanked up as fast as they could.
Just wonderful…

People who think that butterflies just flap about aimlessly have never seen one pick its way faultlessly through a forest of grass stalks in an overgrown meadow, or watched a courting couple in flight. The leader jinks and jiggles 'randomly', but the follower jinks in perfect tune, and instantly, and stays at a constant distance. That isn't random flapping. It is extreme control and intent.

So back now and mentally refreshed; ready to do battle with Freud again. All good stuff, but I'll be glad when I've finished.
The next subject will be 'Hypnosis'. Materialist science hasn't got a clue how it works and thus does its best to avoid dealing with it at all, but it does work and won't go away. How shall I write about this, I wonder?

Onwards…. Have a great day Chas

Hi Pegs!

Good to hear from you, Pegs. glad you're enjoying 'Scenes'. Good luck with navigating Blogworld. It baffles me, I'm afraid...
Have a great weekend Chas

Intuitive chemicals are already here… Watch out!

A friend recently sent me a couple of books to help me with my researches into the truth about ghosts.
So far I've discovered, among several other things, that the reason Big Science doesn't recognise the existence of anything remotely paranormal, is that Big Science has done a Bad Thing, and has adopted a dogma.
This dogma is the Hypothesis of Materialism, which claims, as one quite famous scientist once patiently explained to me, that 'everything is mineral'. 'Even this conversation? Mineral?' I asked, but he was not to be tricked like that. I was dismissed.
This enormous blind spot in 'scientific' logic has a long history (which I'll be addressing in the book), but it largely derives from Darwin's day.
It hinges upon confusion between Evolution and Origination. No serious person doubts that the Evolution of bodily forms is pretty much of a certainty. But development is absolutely different from origination. This fact is what Richard Dawkins and co seem to have wiped from their minds.
By adopting Materialism as a Truth, ie, as a dogma, scientists like RD have painted themselves into a series of corners, all similar to the 'Mineral conversation' above. Clearly, by no stretch of the imagination, can a conversation be called 'mineral', except by someone preferring dogma to reason. It really is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes… and nobody seems to have noticed. Quite extraordinary.

Materialism claims that everything has derived from the mineral world: ie, from chemicals: from 'mud and lightning', if you like. Therefore, as this is taken as an axiomatic truth, it stands to 'reason' for Materialists that everything non-mineral we see and hear and feel must have derived from minerals. That's the 'logic' they follow. Thus Life, Mind, Consciousness must have 'evolved' from chemicals, with no external input of any kind. Ask them 'Do the chemicals contain Life Mind and Consciousness in the first place, then? Or not?' and you won't get a straight answer. Lots of waffle and fancy verbiage, but no straight answer. And the answer must be 'yes' or 'no' must it not? 'Emergence' is no answer: it's just ducking the issue, because for something to 'emerge' it must have been there in the first place. That's what the word means. Try it on a scientific friend... all good (mineral) fun. Gets the (mineral) mind working…

Which brings me back to the book my friend sent. It's called What We Believe But Cannot Prove and so far it seems to be a list of Materialist propaganda. I suspect we won't be seeing any entries from anyone of a religious bent, or even a non-Materialist scientist (and there are quite a few, but they are more or less bullied into silence by Mr Dawkins and co).

Here's the quote from the book I'd like to pass on which illustrates another of the corners that Materialism has painted itself into:

Unlike religious dogma, no matter how fervently a scientist may believe that something is true, his or her belief is not accepted as a true description of reality until it passes every executable test. Nature is the final arbiter, and great minds are great only insofar as they can intuit the way nature works and are shown by subsequent examination and proof to be right.
Carolyn Porco, Ex-Nasa.

An excellent description of the scientific method and process, I'm sure you'll agree. Apart from one thing…
Where does that most un-mineral of entities, 'intuition' derive from? Science has no answer, except ultimately… 'minerals'.

Over to you, dear reader…

Have a lovely day (mineral)Chas

Incidentally, if you are a Materialist-by-default, as most Materialists are, having never properly debated the matter, you may well have written me off as some sort of mad fundamentalist-creationist. I'm not. My faith lies in logic, and nothing more.
If you are genuinely interested in what makes the universe tick, as opposed to defending an unconsidered dogma, please consider that because something is not black, it does not therefore have to be white. It might be grey or striped, or multicoloured. Think Plato; think cave...
You might also like to dig out for yourself, as I have done, whatever evidence you can find for the Hypothesis of Materialism. You might be surprised by what you find. I certainly was.

A Strange Moment

Broad daylight. About 10am. Overcast but bright. No wind. Me taking a leak against the currant bush, as is my wont.
Something catches my eye. Falling from the sky, about twenty feet up and twenty feet from me, is a large feather. It looks like a flight feather from a pigeon, say. Quill type rather than down type. I would guess it was about five to eight inches long, and of a greyish colour. I couldn't really see against the grey sky, but it wasn't brightly coloured.
It is tipping and spinning a little, and generally falling to earth the way you would expect a feather of that size to.
However, there are no birds in the sky, and the speed the feather is falling at, plus its closeness to the ground makes it surprising to me that no semi-nude bird is visible.
'Well that's odd,' I think, and continue blessing the bush.
Then I go to find the feather, which had landed in/on a patch of calf-high grass about fifteen feet away.
No sign of it. I hunt carefully and systematically. No feather. It had definitely landed in that area. But still no feather.
'That's still odd,' I think, and indeed confide as much to the apple tree. Then
I go and have a cup of tea.

Vicars and the Other Thing

Hello eReader…

I keep meaning to write something else on this blog but Life keeps getting in the way.
However, I've just been cobbling together something in response to a BBC programme called 'Sunday' which I thought might interest one, or possibly two, other people.
So I'm just copying it below.

Any interest?

Best wishes to all my reader….



Hello, 'Sunday'...

If I heard you right this morning.... you are putting together a programme based around the antipathy between personal individuation and traditional religion.

The issue here is one education, it seems to me. Christianity (and Islam and Judaism, more or less) is a religion of Belief, not of Understanding. In medieval times, the masses were coerced into religion, and did not have the education or critical faculties to question what they were being told or threatened with.
Over the last hundred years or so, people have become far better informed about the world in general, and have had their ability to think critically sharply developed. Thus, people are no longer satisfied with being told what's what by a bloke in a purple frock; especially when there is no rational explanation supplied for any of the doctrines or dogmas. Hence the rise of Richard Dawkins.

However, education, which encourages individuation (think for yourself; nullius in verba; etc) does not automatically turn people into atheists. The religious impulse, as someone has called it, or the philosophical impulse if you like, will not go away. Hence, many people find themselves in a limbo: religion is more baffling than satisfying; Dawkins can't explain Life; philosophers churn out garbled nonsense... What's a chap to do?

The obvious thing for many is to look for a system that relies not upon Belief, but on Understanding. This is found in the philosophies of Yoga and Buddhism. Thus Buddhism is expanding in the UK (even among prisoners, I believe) while the C of E finds its attendances continually falling and Catholics can't fill their seminaries.

All that is being 'lost' by individuation is the slavish obedience that The Church has become used to over the centuries. The solution would be for The Church to become more 'explanatory' rather than exhortatory. But this won't happen, I don't think, because The Church doesn't actually seem to understand what it's talking about. I saw Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury in casual debate once, and Dawkins won hands down as Mr Williams lost himself and his listeners in a fog of verbiage.

Meanwhile, those of us who have chosen Understanding over Belief are happy bunnies. The universe does make sense after all (and, rather to my surprise, and as a result of what I've learned via the path of Understanding, so does Christianity, deep deep down).. but to become a happy bunny you need to work at it, and take personal responsibility for your own thinking and understanding, rather than being spoonfed paradoxical medieval pap by well-meaning but puzzled clerics (or rationally-challenged scientists, if it comes to that).

Society is, I think, moving from the need (if there ever was one) for 'vicars' and towards the more meaningful condition of personal individuated quest and understanding. The Church will continue to slowly fade away until its clerics understand this, and make it their business to address the issue by personally pursuing Understanding as well as devotion and Belief. Personally, I can't see this happening for a number of reasons. But I hope I'm absolutely wrong.
Please forward a copy of this note to Mr Williams if you have his address! I wish him well!

I look forward to your programme.

All best wishes to all at 'Sunday'.

Chas Griffin


Chas Griffin
CEO, MD, Janitor, Third Leaf Books
www.thirdleafbooks.co.uk