{The Green Shift [continued]}[24th August 1990]

[Redbook7:232][19900824:2328b]{The Green Shift [continued]}[24th August 1990]

19900824.2328

[continued]

In C[ircles] A[nalysis &] S[ynthesis] terms, the relationship* can only be shown by dividing the colour green:

**

***

****

*[See last previous entry]

**(re-revised <19900825>)

***(all this [see also last previous entry] revised <19900825>)

****(No doubt there is a difference between the two greens, just as gold is of a different order from red, and silver from blue. <19900825>)

[PostedBlogger19102021]

{The Green Shift}[24th August 1990]

[Redbook7:231-232][19900824:2328]{The Green Shift}[24th August 1990]

19900824.2328

When he saw that we had painted the window-sills, guttering etc. of [CH] green, our neighbour [...] – who has become quite friendly since he heard we were going – said: ‘The old people wouldn’t like that’: and yes, it was Bad Luck to paint a house green, although he, of course, did not believe it.*

In my C[ircles] A[nalysis &] S[ynthesis]-based fictions, green, I think, represents the shift of (for example) Archetypes – in particular, the upwards vertical shift of the Archetypes C and +Mk – +C†I~, and A~ (antichrist).** But although the direction of shift is the same, the result (to Human perception at least) is quite different. The upwards shift of +C, represented by the greenness at times of (for example) his eyes, moderates him, and to some extent moderates the Qualities, Principles, Attributes, etc. of the Christ Archetype, in an ‘outward’ direction: as he is at the degree of ‘goodness’, which is a relative movement towards the Spirit, moderation outwards is not so ‘good’.

The similarly green-tinted upward shift of A~, by contrast, moderates the nadir of darkness in him, a darkness which is the extreme of separation from the Spirit and in which arises the extreme of evil; and this inward shift can only be to the ‘good’, as defined in terms of movement towards the Spirit.

***

*cf white as a colour of bad future and mourning in eg Indonesia <900825>

**(also xP (J~) in [2]. <900825>

***(all this re-revised <19900825>)

[The 2^nd & 3^rd paras in the ms contain many deletions, mostly so complete as to conceal what has been deleted]

[continued]

[PostedBlogger18102021]

{Schizophrenia and Birthdates (1)}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:231][19900823:1402b]{Schizophrenia and Birthdates (1)}[23rd August 1990]

1402

[­continued]

[A press-cutting from the Independent for 19900823:3 inserted here in the ms is headed ‘Illness during pregnancy may cause schizophrenia in child’ by Nicholas Schoon, Environment Correspondent, reporting on the British Association for the Advancement of Science ‘Science 90’ conference. It suggests that the association of schizophrenia with late winter births (where there is no family history of schizophrenia) may be due to infection of their mothers by winter illnesses in the late stages of pregnancy, causing abnormal brain development.]

*

**

(I’m glad I made that point this morning*** about cyclical patterns being descriptive, not deterministic.)

*{But see [[Redbook7:268][19900829:0026]{Schizophrenia and Birthdates (2)}[29th August 1990]] 268,

[[Redbook7:272][19900830:2335]{Schizophrenia and Birthdates (3)}[30th August 1990],] 272}

**ref II. [[Redbook2:372[19850923:0048c]{The Man Made of Glass}[23rd September 1985], fn ult] 374A,

[[Redbook2:133][19780831:2240]{Narrative Dreams}[31st August 1978] fn,] 133

***[[Redbook7:226-229][19900823:1142]{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990], para2, parenthesis]

[PostedBlogger17102021] 

{Mighty engines In The Sky...?}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:230][19900823:1402]{Mighty engines In The Sky...?}[23rd August 1990]

1402

I don’t know whether it has anything to do with American troop movements,* but I keep hearing disconcerting and almost sub-audible rumblings which continue for several minutes before dying away – only to be replaced a little while later by another. By some trick of acoustics (or of hearing) I am more aware of this when I am inside the house than when I am outside.

*[See [Redbook7:185][19900802:2155]{Dream: Of a military expedition}[2nd August 1990], inc fns]

[PostedBlogger16102021]

{Wee Scots}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:230][19900823:1341]{Wee Scots}[23rd August 1990]

1341

I was amazed to discover the other day that the population of Glasgow is under one million – well under, in fact, at around 700,000. It’s not that it matters or makes any difference – it’s rather a good size for a city – it’s just that for as long as I can remember I had thought of Glasgow as a city of many millions, comparable to or larger than (say) Manchester at c.2½ millions* – which is about the population of the whole of the Scottish region of Strathclyde, including Glasgow.

Perhaps one automatically includes more-or-less adjacent areas such as Dumbarton(?) and Motherwell in one’s image of Glasgow; or perhaps it is a survival characteristic of the Scots to seem larger than life, more important than their relative numbers in Scotland might seem to justify (c. 5 million).

*(metropolitan county)

[Perhaps this was the equivalent of Strathclyde? Strathclyde however included extensive areas of open country, including parts of the Scottish Highlands and the Border uplands, with a number of detached towns and smaller settlements; whereas the Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester ‘roughly covers the territory of the Greater Manchester Built-up Area’, whose population in 2011 was 2,553,379 (Wikipedia). A better comparison might be with the Greater Glasgow conurbation, ‘consisting of all localities which are physically attached to the city of Glasgow, forming with it a single continuous urban area (or conurbation)’ (ibid), which in 2001 had a population of 1,199,629; or ‘the Greater Glasgow “settlement” (a chain of continuously populated postcodes) [whose population estimate] in mid-2016 was 985,290 – the reduced figure explained by the removal of Motherwell and Wishaw, Coatbridge & Airdrie, and Hamilton settlement areas east of the city due to small gaps between the populated postcodes’ (ibid).]

[PostedBlogger15102021]

{The Middle Classes [continued (5)]}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:229][19900823:1142b]{The Middle Classes [continued (5)]}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

[continued]

So far as Britain{’}s backwardness* is concerned, the suggestion is (and this is not new) that we are indeed hidebound by an excess of that middle-class, middle-of-the-road, pragmatism which has always seemed to us to be one of our greatest virtues (perhaps that is why our eccentrics are so eccentric, so rare and so treasured, if [they are] harmless).

This pragmatism tends towards peace in trouble times, and stubbornness and reliability in war; but in times of peace and prosperity, it fails to nurture the creative developments which only specialised eccentricities can produce, and which are essential to material and moral evolution.

*[See [Redbook7:226-229][19900823:1142]{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990](ff)]

[PostedBlogger13for14102021]

{The Middle Classes [continued (4)]}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:228-229][19900823:1142d]{The Middle Classes [continued (4)]}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

[continued]

Intermediaries,* I suppose, tend to be conventional, by the requirements of the job: an intermediary, whether the ‘media’ be economic or (for example) communicative, requires the kind of financial and mental investment which arises most easily from, and tends to re-inforce, bourgeois values. The intermediary class and the middle class are nearly identical: the fact that a practitioner of art-dealing or stock-broking or publishing had working-class parents is no more relevant than that mine were middle-class.

All the same, television probably stands a better chance of presenting choice to the market than any other intermediary, if only by virtue of its hunger for material and its fluidity and transience of form: the problem, of course, is that it is the most active of the media by comparison with its market, and tends to overwhelm the more passive consumer by the sheer force of its projection. The exercise of intuition and conscience is aided by some pause for reflection, which television does not encourage.

*[See last previous entry but one]

[continued]

[PostedBlogger13102021]

{The Middle Classes [continued (3)]}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:228][19900823:1142c]{The Middle Classes [continued (3)]}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

[continued]

That * ‘market’ can, of course, itself be subject to convention and ignorance; but I have great faith in the ability of ordinary people to evolve freely ‘upwards’, to finer forms, if guided by those from whom intermediaries tend to separate them; and by intuition or con-science, to recognise those guides, when they see them, appropriate to the next stage.

*[See last previous entry]

[continued]

[PostedBlogger12102021] 

{The Middle Classes [continued]}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:227-228][19900823:1142b]{The Middle Classes [continued]}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

[continued]

This problem* actually seems to be getting worse, not better: Mrs Thatcher’s** insistence on financially profitable market-led Science is paralleled by the Murdoch/Reed type of insistence on financially profitable market-led Publishing.

The problem is that the Market cannot, of itself, invent anything new: it can only buy and sell things that exist, in actuality or at least within its own knowledge and experience. *** In order to develop in quality, not just in quantity, it needs to have a continual stream of new things presented to it directly, for its choice. 

Intermediaries are not good enough: they tend to lead to the distortions of selection outlined in the current series of articles by Geraldine Norman and Edward Lucie-Smith in the Independent Weekend on Saturdays.**** In effect, such intermediaries act as censors: this is so whether their motivations are primarily academic or financial. They become rationers of quality: not because they limit its height, but because they reduce its breadth, and therefore reduce the choice available to the market.

*[See last previous entry]

**[UK Prime Minister 1979-1990]

***!

****ref: Geraldine Norman & Edward Lucie-Smith, the Independent Weekend, Saturdays 19900804; 11; 18: {?} 44{; 25: 43,}

04: ‘The good, the Bad & the Pollocks’;

11: ‘If it sells it must be good’;

18: ‘The powers of the taste makers’.

{25: ‘Artists create, Dealers decide, People purchase’}.

[continued]

[PostedBlogger11102021]

{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:226-229][19900823:1142]{The Middle Classes}[23rd August 1990]

19900823.1142

‘I asked: “Why are our new projects moving so slowly? Why do we always lag behind the USA and other countries, why are we losing the technology race?”* …. I don’t know what kind of answer I expected. Twenty years later, when Turchin, Medvedev and I posed the same question … we answered that insufficient democratic institutions … and a lack of intellectual freedom … were to blame.’

– Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, quoted by Ernest Gellner in his review in [The] T[imes] L[iterary] S[upplement] 19900817-23: 863; 864, describing his answer when Beria unexpectedly asked him if he had any questions.

The interesting thing is that the problem as summarised by Sakharov (and glossed by Gellner as ‘The conclusive defeat in the technological and economic race’) for the Soviet Union, is also the problem for Britain, as compared with Germany, France and now Italy rather than with the United States of America. Could our answer be the same? (Incidentally, the fact that I ask this question should make [it] clear that I regard any cyclical pattern of history as as descriptive, not deterministic.)

Conventional explanations relate to history, size, economic practices; but I have been conscious for years, and never more than now as I follow the Writing School course with its confident guarantee, of the dead weight of conventional thinking which controls all sectors in the United Kingdom.

*(Gellner adds the economic race to this, in his comments)

[continued]

[PostedBlogger10102021]

{Scots Devils}[21st August 1990]

[Redbook7:226][19900821:0940]{Scots Devils}[21st August 1990]

19900821.0940

Not too pleased to see that in Lowland Scots the “Earl of Hell” is also known as ‘Auld Bobbie’.

But MacDiarmid’s* remark, reported in the same review article,**

‘Scotland cares not, Caesar, clown,

Whoso in her lays him down.’

– is, in my experience of our time, no longer true.

*[Hugh MacDiarmid (aka Christopher Murray Grieve), 1892-1978, Scottish poet, journalist, essayist, and nationalist/communist politician]

** – Ind[ependent] on Sun[day] 900819:27

[PostedBlogger09102021]

{‘Capricorn’: Max Ernst}[20th August 1990]

[Redbook7:225A][19900820:1218b]{‘Capricorn’: Max Ernst}[20th August 1990]

19900820.1218

[continued]

[A press cutting from the ‘Independent on Sunday’ (19900819:22) headed ‘The Other Side of Max Ernst’[:]’Hilary Robinson asks why the artist [sic] was allowed to eclipse the sculptor’ includes a photograph titled ‘“Capricorn” (1948): eloquent witness to Ernst’s confidence with sculpture’; underneath is an article headed ‘Self-centredness in full Bloom’[:] ‘Art’ ‘By Tom Lubbock’, reviewing ‘Barbara Bloom’ at the Serpentine Gallery (‘The Reign of Narcissism’). Underneath is a note: ‘Now see under (reverse of cutting)’, referring to an article ‘Critics’ Choice’[:] ‘Free love returns to boxer-shorts city’[:]‘Hugh David greets a revival of a notorious 1970s “sexual musical”’, of which only the part of the article so headed (on the reverse side of the two previously-mentioned articles) is shown]*

*ref [[Redbook7:225A][19900827:2250#]{The Swinging Sixties}[27th August 1990],] 267

[PostedBlogger09for08102021]

{Flying Saucers}[20th August 1990]

[Redbook7:224][19900820:0035b]{Flying Saucers}[20th August 1990]

(19)

19900820.0035

[continued]

The curious fact that 1950’s – 1960’s flying saucer films and ‘experiences’ were generally of a hostile nature, whereas those of the 1970’s and 1980’s were generally neutral or friendly, has been accounted for by the thawing of the Cold War. 

But I prefer to relate the latter* to the rotation of the C[ircles] A[nalysis &] S[ynthesis] cycles, and the former** to the ever more powerful archetypal manifestation of the C[ircles] A[nalysis &] S[ynthesis] pattern.***

*[ie the thawing of the Cold War, presumably]

**[ie, presumably, the change in flying saucer perceptions]

***{cf VIII. [[Redbook8:10][19901006:0017]{‘Invasion of the Demon Body Snatchers’}[6th October 1990],] 10}

19900820.1218

[A press cutting inserted below this journal entry, from the Cambrian News ‘Weekender’ (19900817:25), by ‘Llowarch’, is headed ‘Blue lights at closing time’, and discusses the Egryn Lights associated with a specific religious revival of 1905 led by Mary Jones in various locations in Wales; and other unexplained nocturnal illuminations in Wales.]

[PostedBlogger07102021]

{Circle of Animal Symbols (Nietzsche)}[20th August 1990]

[Redbook7:223][19900820:0035]{Circle of Animal Symbols (Nietzsche)}[20th August 1990]

(19)

19900820.0035

Joseph Campbell* on BBC2 [TV]** this evening referred to a passage from Nietzche, about the Individual starting life as a camel, when young, on whom society’s(?) burdens are laid; developing through them into a lion; encountering a dragon whom he has to kill, each of whose scales represents one of the burdens; and finally through this becoming a child, but not the child who began it. Apart from the camel, this is a perfect fit – 3 out of 4 isn’t bad:

***

The details, however, are at variance: specifically in J~, where there is understandable ambiguity (as it was related) over becoming and overcoming the Dragon.

*[Presumably, the Joseph Campbell]

**The series is introduced each week by a sequence which includes a number of photographs of circles in mythological and religious art, from various places and times. So far, I have not found any direct reference to these. <900820> [ie in the TV series, presumably]

***{[ref Human face:] cf xS in [2]

[PostedBlogger06102021]

{‘The Black Cloud’: Science and Art}[18th August 1990]

[Redbook7:222-223][19900818:1407b]{‘The Black Cloud’: Science and Art}[18th August 1990]

19900818.1407

[continued]

Re-reading Fred Hoyle’s ‘The Black Cloud’ after many years was interesting. I had an uneasy feeling after writing [2] that I might have unconsciously borrowed from Hoyle, but found that I had no copy of my own; this second-hand copy shows that there are similarities, but only of the kind which are to be found in books on broadly similar themes written in the same culture at the same time.

What stands out from the book* is how little scientists such** as Hoyle understand the inspirational ‘counter-culture’ to which they act as both consumers and (as in this case) occasional producers. The interest of an insight into the mind of a leading astronomer (even if his major cosmological argument*** is now generally discredited) does not altogether compensate for the fact that this is a very poorly written book to be produced by a man of Hoyle’s intelligence (I also wish he’d explained his geometry a bit more, cf p[age] 24 in Penguin first edition).****

I have the feeling that by enjoying music, reading Thucydides, and scoring off politicians, Hoyle thinks that his numerate scientist# proves himself to be some sort of superman. But his appreciation of these matters appears to be even less than mine, and that’s no basis for claims of cultural superiority. Fortunately, Hoyle does have a sense of humour about it, revealed in one or two flashes....

*[ie presumably ‘The Black Cloud’, not [2]]

**[ie ‘how little such scientists as Hoyle’; Hoyle was not so far as this writer is aware, a little scientist...]

***[ie the Steady State theory, as an alternative to the Big Bang theory]

****His conclusions seem to lack a distance on the diagram. Hoyle’s workings, to a non-mathematician, switch from the obvious to the incomprehensible, which is not a bad description of mathematics itself (to the non-math[e]m[atician], at any rate).

#[in ‘The Black Cloud’, presumably]

[PostedBlogger04for05102021]