Challenges

 “It is easier for a Russian Oligarch to enter The House of Lords, than for a Ukrainian refugee to enter into the Kingdom of England.” 

(Johnson. 20:22.)

God and Taxonomy

This is one of the pieces by Ken Brown I mentioned earlier.  Links in the original removed:-

Naming the animals

a meditation on the first two chapters of the Bible

Imagine the Last Judgement...

All of humanity is standing on the shores of the glassy sea, before a great throne on a pavement of sapphire. The saints and angels are arrayed in glorious ranks. One like a Son of Man is sitting on the throne. Books are opened. The people are looking very, very worried.
And God says:

How did you get on with fulfilling my commandments?

And the people reply:

"Which commandments are they, Lord?"

You know. The ones in the Bible. There are only about 360 of them. Let's take them one by one...

More books are opened. The humans remind themselves of what's in Genesis chapter one and begin to look a little more optimistic

"Well, we did the first one! 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth'. We got that one under our belts. "

Good. That's about a third of a percent. Now let's look at chapter two. 'Eat plants'. Well, by the look of you most of you have been doing that alright. But not all of you. Some of you starved to death and got here early. Didn't I make enough plants? Don't answer that, it was a rhetorical question.

Next: do not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. I think we all know how that turned out. What was next? Ah, here we are... Genesis chapter 2 and verse 19... Have you finished naming my animals yet?"

And the people looked around for someone who could name animals. After a while they found some taxonomists, who are an insignificant and harmless folk, mostly overlooked by the Great and the Powerful. They tend to be shabby and bearded and are much given to burrowing around in the earth, quaffing ale, and having long arguments in dead languages about matters no-one else understands or cares.

A great many more books were opened, mostly with one-page descriptions of an extremely large number of animals. Each one had a name; mostly in rather bad Greek with Latin spellings; a few words about what the name meant - a lot of the husbands and wives of the taxonomists seemed to be remembered, not to mention their schools, their favourite rock bands, a large number of obscure villages in China and Sweden and the presents their daughters gave to them for their forty-second birthdays - and each page had a short description of how the animal was found and why it was, or wasn't different from some other animal. Sometimes there were pictures, mostly of somewhat improbable-looking genitalia. More than a million of the animals were insects of one kind or another, usually beetles.

In a distant corner of the throne room some rather tipsy Belgians started arguing about whether Ecribellate spiders were or were not polyphyletic

"Lord, we seem to have named about three million of them. You do seem to be inordinately fond of beetles".

I will be fond of whom I will be fond. But only three million? Where are the rest? I made at least ten times that number.

The people start to look very worried.

"Well, er, Lord, er we, that is they, that is the others really, not us of course, well I suppose it was us really, they made us do it, we..."

Get to the point!

"We killed most of them."

You killed my beetles?

"Not specially the beetles, Lord. Mostly we killed the trees, and the beetles just sort of disappeared."

What about the mites ?

"We didn't really get round to naming them. We're rather sorry but the ecosystem just sort of came apart in our hands. Most of the mites had already vanished before we got round to them."

And the spiders ?

"Yeeuch! We hate spiders."

Why? They never did you any harm. I didn't create them just so you could hate them.

"The Aschelminths caused us a lot of trouble!"

piped up a particularly brave - or foolish - parasitologist

Well, you might have a point there. But the people they infected were mainly my poor little ones that you kept in poverty and oppression while the rich added field to field. The Earth, and the fullness therof, was after all mine, not yours. If you hadn't kept the poor from the land they could have used to feed themselves they would have been healthy enough to resist the infections. And the Aschelminths weren't all bad - what about the Rotifers, Acanthocephalans, Gastrotrichs, Kinorhynchs, Loricerferans and Tardigrades ? I quite liked the Tardigrades, they were cute. Anyway, most of the wormy sort of things were completely harmless - what about the Pogonophora? The Entoproctans? The Chaetognatha? And you never really started on the Priapulids, Cycliophora, Sipunculans and Echiurans - you barely got 500 of them all put together.

"We never even realised most of those existed, Lord."

Nobody's mentioned the Urochordates yet I see. Or the Pycnogonids, Amblypigi, Uropigi, Opiliones - OK, I realise the Opiliones were a bit silly, but so were the Collembolans and all you did was spray pesticide on them. Which you would not have needed to do if you hadn't already driven the spiders out of your houses.

The taxonomists carried on arguing amongst themselves. Everyone else began to look very sheepish. At least most of them could remember what sheep looked like.

... and the Gastropods, Scaphopods and Cephalopods...

A long time later - in so far as there is time in the heavenly places - the list was finished. There was silence in heaven for a while

I don't think this is going very well, is it?

Ken's Writings...

(Also on Ken's Facebook page)

I suspect none of us saw everything Ken wrote online. I've been looking at some of the writing I remember...

This from his ancient CIX account, is a marvellous piece on God and taxonomy...
http://www.cix.co.uk/~kbrown/genesis/story.htm

This is more recent, from his View from Nunhead Station blog a couple of years ago. Much of the blog is about Ken's travels in London and further afield, and foundspeech. This is a little different, and I think it's self-explanatory...

http://ken.wibsite.com/2012/03/16/towards-a-new-railway-history-of-middle-earth/

I'll try to capture the originals and place them here, also, soon.

RIP Ken

I posted this on Facebook yesterday:-


Bugger.
 
Rest In Peace, Ken Brown.

A generous, kind, clever man taken from us far too soon. Christian, socialist, scientist, SF fan, father, beer consumer, wargamer and friend.

At university he was one of those individuals that you were continually being introduced to by people, '...and you must meet Ken...'. As though they wanted to share the good news that there was this wonderful person in the world that they knew you would like.

I remember sitting in the audience watching him win University Challenge with Durham. Sticking up a fanzine with him. Watching him play the penny whistle. And, of course, innumerable cups of tea (and pints) in Durham, Brighton, Glasgow, London and elsewhere, while he explained stuff to me, and many others,in his inimitable Kennish manner.

Our thoughts are with his family, of course. Abigail, Sarah Woolford, Chris Brown and Muriel.

Ken would always find the right words for an occasion like this. Something fitting and open, about celestial horns cheering him to heaven and reaching a place of peace in Heaven. But for me, only one word comes to mind.

Bugger.

Oh Dear, Oh Dear

Graham James, Bishop of Norwich got Archimedes' Principle completely wrong on Thought for Today this morning.  Quite annoying...

Smart

There have been books lying around in our house for many years that I haven't managed to get around to reading. Some of them aren't even mine. A while ago I decided to try one of those - one which I wouldn't normally pick up. Ninian Smart: The Phenomenon of Christianity, (1979). This tries to be compendious in its discussion of the characteristics, history, and relationships of many different Christianities and Christian beliefs.

It's a hard read, not least because it is sometimes poorly written, and when it compares Christianities with, say Marxism (which it does several times) it is quite shallow. But I stuck with it, and it had its rewards. However, I was nearing the end when I came upon this passage:

Moreover, in the social democracies in Europe and to some extent in America and other English-speaking societies, the new postwar prosperity, distributed not of course with anything like utter fairness but sufficiently spread around, had brought a situation where many of the grossest problems of hunger, shelter, poverty and worklessness were allieviated. In principle (it was often felt) the various social agencies should be able to mop up residual problems, and it was easy for the Christian Churches to see themselves as playing something of this supplementary role. It was traditional enough for it to be concerned with the poor. But of course, important as such a social task is in mending lives and helping those who are in despair, it does not represent an adequate destiny for a movement of such richness and power manifested so diversely over two thousand years. (p.306)

I have to say this made me quite cross. Not so much because he is essentially arguing against the church doing good works, but because of his avowed reason for so doing: "... it does not represent an adequate destiny for a movement of such richness and power...".

Well tough. It seems a perfectly fine and laudable result to me. And it doesn't detract at all from the myth, the numinous, the ritual (the magic) which he is quite taken by elsewhere.

Sigh. But maybe that's just me.
Rant over.

Spain Tour 9: Santa Maria de Lebena

Pre-Romamesque churches. Sigh. I don't entirely blame Cees Nooteboom for this; Spain had these churches well before he started writing about them - and actively promotes them at tourists. But I think he prompted this visit of ours.
A hot day; but only a short drive North from Potes - just back into the Gorge - and there is a hidden-ish turn-off to Lebena. The Church is a few hundred metres from the village, and although they have built a new car park, it felt quite deserted when we were there. Just a couple of other cars.

Mr Nooteboom drives there too. He finds the church locked, goes into the village, and meets an old couple who feed him strong liquor (orujo), and then open up the church for him. Nowadays there are published opening times. We get them wrong, can't be bothered to go into the village and just sort of hang around outside for a while.
It does all appear to have been very nicely refurbished, and there may be wonders inside, but we don't get to see them.

It's Tenth century and "a notable example of Mozarabic church architecture". Lots of people have researched it - and written a lot about it.

But what really excited us in the end were the lizards. Having a bask.

The church is meant to have a mighty fine yew and an impressive cypress outside it. But the yew, I fear, is no more and I got confused about which one the cypress was.


... and so we went away again...

Spain Tour 7: Up at the Monastery

High above the campsite sat the monastery of of Santo Toribio de Liébana. Famous for its major relic- the largest remaining piece of the true cross - and its associations with Saint Beatus of Liebana.
From Wikipedia:

According to tradition, this relic is that part of the True Cross that Saint Helena of Constantinople left in Jerusalem. From there, Saint Turibius of Astorga, Custodian of the Holy Places, took it to the Spanish city of Astorga. When the Moors invaded Spain in 711, the relic was hidden along with others in a fold on Mount Viorna in the Liebana Valley, next to St. Turibius' relics. Both relics were eventually transferred to the monastery that became immediately an important place to be visited by pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela. Documents dated 1507 state that, "since time immemorial" the Jubilee is celebrated every time the saint's feast-day falls on a Sunday.

Fr Sandoval, chronicler of the Benedictine order, this relic is the "left arm of the Holy Cross. It was sawed and assembled post-mode Cruz, leaving intact the hole was nailed down the hand of Christ". The vertical bar is 635 millimetres (25.0 in) long and the crossbar is 393 millimetres (15.5 in) long. The cross has a thickness of 38 millimetres (1.5 in)[1]. It is the largest preserved relic of the True Cross.

The Wood was embedded in a Gothic silver gilted cross, manufactured by a workshop of Valladolid in 1679. It lies in housing of golden wood in a baroque, domed, early 18th century chapel in the north wall of the church, looked over by an effigy of the chapel's founder, Francisco Gómez de Otero y Cossío (1640-1714), inquisitor of Madrid and archbishop of Santa Fé de Bogotá, who was born locally.

We went inside and could just see the window in the gothic cross, but I for one could not make out any wood.I found the stories around Saint Beatus (c.730-800) in some ways more interesting and accessible. A monk, theologian and polemicist from around the Picos area. He is not that famous today but his Commentary on the Apocalypse was hugely influential at one time (often referred to just as a 'Beatus'). He took part in the religious disputes of his day, and arguably his writing helped to inspire the early Asturian movements that eventually resulted in the expulsion of the Moors from Spain and its re-establishment as a Christian kingdom. The Wikipedia article is helpful - see here - but the whole story is a complex one, and the details are fascinating. The books about Spain I decried in On Holiday Reading are, to be honest, quite helpful in this regard.

The monastery itself seems set up for far more visitors than we saw. There is a huge car park, and multiple bench seating for a (rather weak) video show. Presumably it is inundated on special feast or holy days, or whenever the Cross is brought out on show.

We spent very little time on the monastery, however. There is a very nice cloister, with a series of images from Beatus's Apocalypse, which is cool and restful, and the church associated with the monastery is worth popping into for a look (and a squint at the relics), but we were more interested in the walks around about.

Scattered across the hillside around the monastery there used to be a series of hermitages - tiny dwellings where hermits would be found - now marked by small chapels and other commemorative buildings. Walking up the paths into the hills to look at these, we came across some quite astonishing views of the surrounding mountains and valleys.


The photograph above doesn't really do justice to the glaringly white patch of snow we spotted in the arms of the distant mountain range.

Nor does this next one really give a sense of how high up we felt we were.


These next few give a sense of one or two of the small chapels commemorating the hermits. At night they are lit up and look quite exotic and surprising from below.





And we were surrounded by butterflies...