I find myself musing on my spiritual journey from Paddington (Congregational) Chapel via Spiritualism and the Church of England to Westminster (Roman Catholic) Cathedral and thence to the vivid experience of the Wicca where we step into the World Between the Worlds and are at one with our gods.
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
In his English Social History (1944) G M Trevelyan writes (pp 363f) of modern education ‘creating an unwanted intellectual proletariat’.
My own experience both as a teacher and as a pupil led me, some thirty years ago, to the conclusion that education (schooling) was primarily designed to produce only just as much literacy and numeracy as was useful to employers. You needed a workforce which could read and write but not a workforce of men and women who might be able to think for themselves.
Circumstances in 2010 are not the same as in those Establishment-dominated years between the wars but when I read that one in five children now leave school without reaching the required standard in English and Maths, I do pause to wonder for our future.
francis cameron, oxford, 5 october 2010
I’d been talking with my friend the Imam who, like the Holy Father the week before, expressed concern with the blight of secularism.
The Imam mentioned Richard Dawkins (and his million followers) as the Prince of Secularism. /* caveat : my mind may perhaps have embellished this interchange! */ I responded by classifying Dawkins as a materialist – in the sense that he, as a biologist, is accustomed to handling plants and animals, material objects, which can be scrutinised in scientific laboratories. Our conversation then deviated to the Imam’s exposition of the traits of secularity. I, for once, remained silent. Wondering.
Later I happened to take up with Roger Penrose and with Douglas R Hofstadter, among others, opening the door to the world of ‘the square root of minus one’ : an imaginary number incapable of observation even under the most intense of microscopes.
Yet the square root of minus one actually exists. I came to be aware of its existence when I first moved for the teaching of the C++ computer programming language. I did not then know what was symbolised by the mystical letter ‘i’. I only saw how its properties once entered into the initial planning made the viable outcome possible.
Our lives are not utterly delimited by the materials of laboratory experiment. Consciousness of the imaginary goes with us. Hand in hand.
Pick me a handful of BlackBerries. Yes!
Pluck me a handful of imaginary numbers? Ah!
francis cameron, oxford, 2 october 2010
I am reading, yet once again, G M Trevelyan’s delightful English Social History : a survey of six centuries Chaucer to Queen Victoria. He wrote it before the war (1939) but restrictions of paper and printing delayed its publication in Great Britain until 1944.
As I read I am aware of a certain prospect of Englishness presented to us in my schooldays and I sense it returning now and then to the more leisurely of our television screens. It’s that looking back to a past which may or may not be distant, which may or may not ever have existed in glaring reality. A past viewed, as they say, through rosy-tinted spectacles.
I see it in Michael Wood’s homing-in on a country town community, digging up its past, blowing the dust off somnolent rolls ledgers and charters which then magically ‘bring the past to life’. I see it in the elder Dimbleby’s unhurried dwelling on sceneries and artefacts which belong with bygone ages. I see it even in Michael Portillo’s quasi-misty-eyed railway journeys, Bradshaw always open in his hand.
My thoughts turn to the books and other reminiscences which make those re-creations possible. Trevelyan brings back to life Defoe’s London, still existing among the ghosts haunting the footpaths and alleyways of the City. Other books, when well conceived and well written can do the same. They are the material of visualisation, treading the spaces and enclosures of parallel universes where the in-tuned spirit may also meander at will.
Words set out on the page are the spellbooks of their authors.
Come with me and bathe and bask in parallel universes just as real as those once green hills and valleys now over-covered with manufacturies of stone timber brickwork and plastic. The boundaries are there to be stepped over. The veil between is no more than the flimsiest creation of our own imaginings.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 october 2010
