More five star reviews for The Voyage of the Kresala

 'The Voyage of the Kresala is a new classic.'

The latest addition to The Seven Songs series now has two more five star reviews.

See the Amazon book page (link below)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TXWJSE0

 CJM 05/2015

Seeing isn’t believing, after all ...

 

We say that ‘seeing is believing’, but it isn’t. In a long tradition, many films and dramas use the theme of different witnesses’ interpretations of the same event, sometimes called the ‘Rashomon effect’ after Kurosawa’s film of that name. Vantage Point (2008) directed by Pete Travis, is a good example. Here the assassination of a US president is seen from seven different perspectives, progressively unravelling the real nature of the event. The film literally winds back the action again and again for each witness account to be shown, all restarting from the same departure point.

I found myself thinking about such ‘subjectivity of perception’ this week as a number of articles and reports came together to demonstrate the paucity of digital experience compared with written and read media. The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in an interview with The Telegraph, warns that: ‘Children struggle to read emotions and are less empathetic than a generation ago because they spend too much time using tablets and smartphones.’ He went on, ‘Children spend more time engaging with machines and with virtual reality than they used to in the past where they don’t have to face the consequences of real life. In virtual environments they don’t have to interpret the subtle cues of real-life environments …’

This is a convincing angle on the limited quality of virtual experience as opposed to ‘real’ experience. Such limited and limiting perception is becoming an increasingly common feature of social activities almost universally. It’s all too common nowadays to see tourists arrive in some monumental and significant place and, instead of using their eyes to see, immediately lift their cameras or iPads to record what is before them. The true visual experience is lost. Here again, as McGilchrist puts it ‘the subtle cues of real-life environments ….’ are left out of the act of perception.

But, as we see all around us, the unthinking (unseeing?) activities of tourists pale beside the daily obsession with smartphones that we find in groups of youngsters. Connected as they are digitally, they barely need to look up and absorb the presence of their friends around them.

 In a related comment from another angle, the writer MarioVargas Llosa, in an interview with Antonio Caño, the director of the Spanish newspaper El País, goes so far as to say that ‘if the world continues the process which leads to the written word being replaced by the image and the audiovisual, we run the risk that freedom, the capacity to reflect and imagine will disappear along with other institutions like democracy.’

“Si el mundo sigue el proceso en el que la palabra escrita es reemplazada por la imagen y lo audiovisual, se corre el riesgo de que desaparezca la libertad, la capacidad de reflexionar e imaginar y otras instituciones como la democracia”, advirtió ayer Mario Vargas Llosa en conversación con Antonio Caño, director de EL PAÍS.

He considers that ‘the word that is read, language that is communicated through print, has an effect in the brain which complements and completes what is read.’ He goes on, ‘images don’t produce the same mechanism of transformation. In reading, there is a creative and intellectual effort which is barely present in the visual.’

La advertencia la hace al considerar que la palabra leída, el lenguaje comunicado de manera impresa, tiene un efecto en el cerebro que completa y complementa lo leído. En cambio, el autor de Conversación en La Catedral, afirmó que “las imágenes no producen el mismo mecanismo de transformación. En la lectura hay un esfuerzo creativo e intelectual que casi se elimina con lo visual”.

This statement may seem to deny the great visual arts their power, but clearly this isn’t what Vargas Llosa is referring to. Along with the poverty of the smartphone event, often goes low quality of the visual or audio material, inviting no creative effort at all.

We come back to the quality of true perception as opposed to vision, remembering William Blake. ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’ The poet sees with an eye that captures multidimensional layers of experience, just as a gifted visual artist does. Such direct forms of knowledge, for that is what it is, namely ‘knowing’ the object, are irreproducible except through the channels that allow them to come alive again in the perception of another person. As T S Eliot summed it up, there is the event of seeing, the event of writing the poem about what is seen, and the event of the reader recreating what was seen in their own mind.

In such a refined event of reading and recreating come together the ‘creative and intellectual effort’ of which Vargas Llosa speaks, and ‘the subtle cues of real-life environments’ held up by McGilchrist.

Young people need the full range of such experiences to allow their emotional and intellectual lives to flourish. In which case they will become more and more sensitive to the profound difference between seeing and believing.

CJM 4/2015

Five star treatment for the Kresala

It's good to see the first five star reviews of The Voyage of the Kresala appearing on the Amazon page. See:
 
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00TXWJSE0

"A hero's journey in a classic sense ...," says one reviewer. "... a joy for both children and adults alike."

I'm really glad that the importance of the hero's journey has shone through for this reviewer.  In the book, Gentil truly has to travel into the unknown and face new dimensions within himself as well as in the world around, and therein lies the heroic journey.

For the same reason I wanted to include the "voyage" in the book title, and again the same reviewer notes that the boat herself "is at the centre of a mythic quest" in which all on board participate. All are in flight, but at the same time in search of a kind of redemption. Itxaso's mission binds them all on the physical journey, but for each one an inner quest mirrors the outer.

The quest gives meaning to life. I am reminded here of Viktor Frankl's renowned work in Vienna with suicidally inclined youngsters, where his therapy consisted in helping them to find a meaning and purpose for their life. We know that suicide is alarmingly common in young people in our own time, in the US being the second leading cause of death in youngsters from age 15-24.

It should be said here that my "seven songs" are all meant as songs of life and meaningfulness.This is the connection that all of King Abba's children have to make with reality, each in their own way.

Thanks to those who have taken the time and trouble to write their comments.

CJM  April 2015


 

Europus or Europa?

I have just released The Voyage of the Kresala, the latest title in my Seven Songs fantasy series, where we start to see more clearly the great divisions taking place across the European continent. The conflict, of course, arises from the question of the moment, currently affecting several countries and it boils down to this: Which do we want? The megastate Europus, uniformly bent to (for want of a word) Germanic aims and standards? Or the beauteous Europa with her myriad and varied delights that Zeus himself could not resist, and so carried off to Crete on his bull-like shoulders?

 When I put it like that, I suppose it’s fairly clear which of the two I would rather see. It’s also fairly clear which of the two is preferred by Syriza’s Yanis Varoufakis, the "erratic" Marxist now heading the finance ministry in Athens ....

For the full text of this article, see www.kingabba.com

A new sequel for King Abba

Check out www.kingabba.com for the latest sequel in The Seven Songs cycle, titled The Voyage of the Kresala.

This is Gentil's story, the younger of the two princely brothers. Escaping from the destruction of the royal palace, he arrives at a coastal harbour where he enlists as crew on board the yacht Kresala with his friend Alick. The two of them are ready and keen to go in search of adventure across the ocean.

But he soon finds himself entangled in the destiny of Nestor, Gorka and the mysterious Itxaso, who have a secret mission to fulfil, vital for the future of Europe.

Sail with Gentil on a journey of drama and adventure ....

CJM February 2015

Alien, or just alienation? The Varoufakis solution

When I started this blog, I thought the world was mad enough, hence the title Reflections on Absurdity. How was I to know that humanity would descend so rapidly into even more madness, to fuel aggression and hatred in so many ways, in so many places? The problem seems to be alienation, or in another term, exclusion.

Wherever we look, we find people suffering that awful feeling of not being taken seriously, not fitting into the pattern of things. Everyone from poor Mr Putin who didn't think NATO could be so insensitive as to park their bombers and tanks at his garden gate, to the disturbed individuals whose "difference" leads them to believe that salvation is in the barrel of a gun, or at the edge of a butcher's knife.

What mystifies me is that if you are one who truly believes in the  invalidity of another point of view, your comfort surely is that that other way will become untenable, will hold the seeds of its own destruction. Why do you need to hasten the process with over the top aggression?

This brings me to the enlightened figure of Yanis Varoufakis, recently appointed Finance Minister in Greece, with an impossible task before him. Mr Varoufakis is a self-confessed Marxist, but what he calls an "erratic" one. He deviates in some regards from Marx's own canon of beliefs but is sure of one basic Marxist tenet, namely that capitalism continues to demonstrate its inherent self-destructiveness.

This being so, he declares that he doesn't need to bring down the system, unhinge the eurozone, lead his country into a battlefield -- ends that he could potentially bring about (as he says of himself, if he weren't scared, he would be dangerous ...). But no, the Europe that he dislikes so much will disintegrate in its own time. The enemy will fall into the pit of their own making. Of that, he has no doubt.

So please withdraw the heavy artillery from Ukraine, Mr Putin, please ISIS let the infidel wander blindly into their own hell without adding more infernal ingredients, please Germany give a little slack to the new Greek government, and please everyone, from Chelsea supporters to Marine Le Pen, let everyone get on the same Metro train, or we shall be paying more than just the train fare for a long time to come.

CJM February 2015

Richard Dawkins -- wizard or ogre?

 How does one enter into the mindset of Professor Richard Dawkins? His recent sally against all that is "supernatural", speaking at the Cheltenham Science Festival, would have us believe that children must be raised as sceptics, trained in scientific rigour, and that childish things such as fairy tales with their dose of improbability, must be "put away". He himself successfully achieved this rigour at an early age, he tells us.

Scientists, of course, have always believed in their own brand of magic, and not just because of its older roots in alchemy. Innumerable wizards populate the world of modern IT and we can be sure that the mood at NASA or at CERN when hitting the target can be described as nothing less than magical.

Here Dawkins misses the point, surely. All these highly successful scientists were children once. Where and how did they learn to open their imaginations to visions and dreams soaring high above daily routines, if not in that wondrous hour of storytelling which leads them into sleep?

A prince turning into a frog is too improbable, says the wise professor. Just as improbable as oxygen and hydrogen turning into water? Or iron filings arranging themselves in sonar fields? Plants and organisms tracking the lunar cycle? Surely what matters to the growing child is to learn to open the imagination so that the mind can fly across boundaries, whether on magic carpets or in school laboratories.

To impose what is "correct" for the imagination to play with, and deny what is "incorrect", is a tyranny that serves no purpose. The expansive dimension of the creative, imaginative mind, proclaims that there are no boundaries. And yes, magic carpets will still get you there.

CJM June 2014