I’m reposting a few articles I wrote over the years after having a hard think about who I am and what I want to do with my life. They reflect various bits of opinion I’ve held and possibly still hold. Some may be incomplete, as I never finished writing them, but I don’t think that matters. I’m going to try and get back into this blogging game again.
Looks icelandic doesn’t it? It isn’t, it’s actually a constructed language called Oríl, one I’ve been playing with for the last couple of years as the background for a novel I was writing, and still want to write at some point. Originally it was going to be a little more Semitic sounding but I ended up with this bizarre cross between hebrew and various scandanavian languages. The fate was sealed when I realised I had managed to construct a word for “the king”, through a legitimate derivation, that was identical to the icelandic word for “presidential”. Weird.
The novel is by the by though. The reason for this post is the sentiment expressed in the title, which (as I show off my little creation) translates as something like “The culture is the mythology of our people”.
I’ve been reading snippets about Tolkien, who it seems I’m attempting to emulate in my own minimal way. Tolkien’s passion was language and his creations are today probably more widely spoken than some real languages. I’m sure he would appreciate that.
His other passion was culture and mythology. The Lord of the Rings was created as part of a larger drive to create a mythos of legends and culture for his languages to reside in. As he famously said in one of his letters, “Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends”·
Something I’ve learned to appreciate in the construction of this language is the necessity for legends and stories to a culture. Legends shape the language, contextualise it and provide a means for it to continually reshape both culture and those legends themselves. Legends provide the imageic meat of a language.
Legends, stories, tales that we tell our children, beliefs about how the world works, these are cultural artefacts make up so much of an ethnos that it is almost likely there would be no ethnic differences, aside from the crude differences of gene expression, without those cultural ones. I could spend a great deal of time on this particular subject alone but there is one particular aspect, more an artefact, that I want to examine. Simply put it is the problem of familiarity.
Anglo-saxon culture, on which the freest parts of the western world are based, derives from a confluence of certain germanic beliefs with a combination of hebraic and greek philosophical ideas. They are considered to be universal, that is, everyone desires these ideas at some innate level. Except, they aren’t. The belief that these artefacts are universal stems from an inability to perceive that they are actually a creation of a particular cultural and, dare I say it, ethnic view. Whilst many of these ideas spawned repeatedly across Europe they only reached their culmination in the low germanies, and their final expression in that peculiar race known as the English. It was England where the basic concepts of freedom were codified (however obliquely, and for whatever selfish gain), England that built a society on these basic freedoms, fought to preserve them and then spread them to the world.
England can only be England when it is populated by the English. We can have other people living here amongst us but they won’t be English, and we can’t pretend otherwise because England is a nation, an ethnicity and we are, whether anyone wants to accept it or not, tied to the land we were born in.
This particular argument reveals the idiocy of “state nationalisms” like British Nationalism. Britain isn’t a nation but a state. It is supranational, above nations. Germany, that isn’t a nation either, but a state. There is no one German nation but several… A certain Mr Hitler believed that all germans were aryan but that simply reveals his particular brand of internationalism. There is no “aryan nation”, just as there is no “European nation” or “Scandinavian nation”.
To put it another way, no other civilisation in history has ever created these ideas. Many have had elements of the ideas that came together to produce the anglo-saxon view but they never took them further. They simply couldn’t conceive of it.
Tolkien’s argument was that the language required a mythos to survive. The mythos in turn generates a culture, which then alters the language, and stimulates the culture to in turn be altered a little more in a neat feedback loop. Take away some element of that and the language and culture will both die.
In an example opf this case, the language of “freedom” dies when you remove from it the anglo-saxon perception of what that freedom actually is. Freedom, as a language, becomes a dead language without the culture, the stories behind it. Freedom to pursue love, freedom to become the mayor of London, freedom to defend the defenceless, preserve truth and justice. All that stuff. The stories of our culture define our language and define our concepts.
The problem, as I said, is one of familiarity. Many living within the anglo-saxon cultural world view are unable to see that their beliefs are not universal. They perceive the world through their culture and the stories that make it up. Their ethnicity alters their perception, creating a blind spot toward other ethncities, other cultures, that have no such concept of anglo-saxon freedom, to continue just that example. Their idea of freedom is genuinely different to ours but we, in our naivety, believe that all people secretly yearn for the same freedoms we do.
What purpose ever could one find
In chasing trivial thoughts of those
Who’s tracks so narrowly confined
And minds so petty, choose to close
Their thoughts toward any that make
The choice, another path to take
Obsession strikes and pulls and tugs
A crawling, cramping sort of thing
“Injustice! Lies!” Those hateful thugs!
That dare to step outside the ring
Where thoughts are free, or so they say,
As long as thoughts go just one way.
“We tolerate all thoughts and creeds”
“We pick what’s wrong and right to say”
“We welcome every faith and rede”
“We Tolerate Diversity”
I have a thought, I choose this way
“We don’t agree, you cannot stay.”
To tolerate is all they claim
To do, yet doing always find
A thought, idea, a crime to name
As other, hateful, dark, unkind
As other, any thought you voice
That tolerates a different choice
For some are given greater place
To right injustice, so they say
But justice turns away her face
When forced this futile game to play
For evil surely shall we see
Except that all thoughts are found free
Any man who feels smug about how much he has learned has not looked out at the vast sea of knowledge before him. Any man who considers such a vast ocean yet to be understood will be humbled, for all the knowledge he has gained is but a single drop of that trackless infinity.
Any man who feels it necessary to declare how much better he is for all the knowledge he has gained probably understands very little indeed.
You see, I understand how much there is to know. Whatever I have learned has lead me to realise two things: no man can learn but a fraction of all there is to know; and that, the more I learn, the less proud I become. I have learned that I know nothing, for infinity stands before me.
[quote author=DrThunder88 link=topic=18910.msg1115196#msg1115196 date=1276275919]
I’m genuinely curious about the Devil’s purpose. God, as described in the Bible, is pretty clearly the most heinous tyrant the world has ever known. I think you’ll agree he’s vindictive and evil in ways mortal dictators could only dream of being. What mortal despots have in common, however, is a lack of reluctance to kill perceived betrayers. Why doesn’t God? If I were sitting on even a less-than almighty throne and someone led an unsuccessful insurrection against me, I’d at least throw the agitators in a dungeon somewhere they’d never corrupt one of the rest of my subjects. Why would God, a character who has limitless power and cognizance and who ostensibly cares about his subjects, leave a loose cannon like the Devil running around, spreading anti-God sentiment knowing full well that those who are tainted will be doomed to eternal punishment?
I have my own notions as to why this is, but I have a hard time getting a solid answer on how these rather glaring plot holes are reconciled in the minds of the faithful.
[/quote]
What it comes down to is modern vs ancient explanations of who the devil is. These days we have this image of the guy in red spandex and horns. That isn’t who he is, or was. It’s something of an infection from Persian duotheistic religions such as Zoroastorianism with their concept of the Good god and the Evil god.
Go read the old hebrew texts and it’s pretty obvious that the role Satan played wasn’t one of “anti-god”. He was the accuser. The tester. The voice that says “look what this one did! He’s a sinner!” His “power” was no more than a well paid lawyer. His rebellion was in believing that he could make the law because he knew the law.
In Jewish theology, all sin is debt. All debt must be paid. Since sin is ultimately a debt of life (all sin takes away choice from another or from yourself, diminishing your or their life from that point by a certain amount), the debt of sinning is your life. Remember the old jewish phrase “the life is in the blood”? The spilling of blood ultimately becomes the debt to be paid for sin. Sacrificial proxy, the spilling of blood other than your own, was one way to pay that debt. Originally you had to do it yourself, which was a vivid reminder of the penalty for your sin.
In this theology the accuser, the Devil, would stand before God and say “this man has sinned, make him pay!” but if you’d made your sacrifices, God would look at the docket and say “this man has paid his debt”. Or he could say “I forgive his debt”. Any creditor can do the same.
Jesus, when he arrived, was God enacting a plan to forgive all sin for all time. Life, as we know it, is imperfect;t he debt-payment of blood sacrifice is incomplete because we, in our sinful nature, have been performing the metaphysical equivalent of coin clipping. Sin adulterates our world by its very nature, reducing the value of life and consequently reducing its purchasing power in the sin/debt-payment equation. The only way to correct that is to pay off all the debt with “perfect” life, and the only perfect life is God.
Hence Jesus.
Why then? Why not later? We don’t know. Ask God, he might tellyou or he might not but that’s his choice. The answer is irrelevant anyway – God forgave all sin for all time.
But what about the people in hell I can already hear you asking. What about them? Old theology vs new again. The concept of hell developed over the course of several centuries from the words of Jesus about Gehenna. Originally this hellfire place was set aside for the devil and his angels. The accuser and his servants. When humans die they go to sheul, or the Greek hades. The city of the dead. There’s a pretty good description of this concept in the Earthsea book [i]The Farthest Shore[/i], which bases it’s land of the dead on a similar concept.
By the time Jesus had arrived the jewish theology of paradise, heaven, hell and sheul was already in transition. Influence from Persian faith had promoted the devil from merely the accuser to something more powerful, but still less so than the modern, western conception of satan as the prince of hell. The place of hellfire was where those judged to have been immoral were sent for a time, separated from God, but they weren’t a permanent state; cleansing and purification by fire are often mentioned in the bible (which is consistent with a culture transitioning from bronze to iron-age as the Hebrew peoples were when the majority of the scriptures of the old testament were first committed to text). The modern conception of hell and the devil grew out of lack of knowledge of the scriptures and their historical context; modern attempts to retrofit it to scripture are one reason people find so many apparent inconsistencies in the bible.
Jesus’ payment of that debt wipes the slate clean. However, it’s not something that’s simply conferred on you. You have to accept it. If you inherit your old rich aunt’s fortune you have to go and accept it before a certain period of time has passed, otherwise it’s passed on to someone else. Go through your entire life without accepting it and, when you get to the end, you’re sent on a one-way trip to Sheul. You aren’t punished in hell fire. That’s sadism and God is not a sadist.
Finally there’s the issue of time. God is outside time. He’s already done what DrThunder would do. We are inside time. The accuser-devil, all the “sons of God” are, according to their description in the scriptures, beings that operate within time. To them, and to us, it is impossible to know what’s coming; to God it’s been and gone, and will be, and is, in every possible way.
I admit in many ways I’m not even remotely close to current Christian thinking. I’ve tended towards a much more mystical view of the world in recent years, but I am a christian fundamentalist: it’s just that my fundamentals are based on historical context and not modern, convenient interpretations of scripture. Don’t get me started on the whole rapture thing either…
And now some recommended books:
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Von Bek – Michael Moorecock (yes yes, stop laughing); supplies a pretty sympathetic and surprisingly scriptural view of the devil’s motivations and what hell is like (mixed with adventures in parallel universes chasing the Holy Grail. Fun stuff)
The Early Church – Henry Chadwick; Historical stuff.
Confessions – Augustine; just because
And any books you can find on early Indo-european language and culture are an absolute must to understanding the origins of european and near-eastern religious and cultural development.
As is so often the case with my posts I’m writing the end result of a chain of thoughts that has been brewing for quite some time. Without references (unless I can find some) I tend to argue on a wide variety of subjects. At some point soon I’m going to write up a few words about my recent time in Romania, which was quite an experience but at the moment my thoughts seem to be boiling around the concept of trust in the public sphere.
This all stems from conversations I have, either with people face to face, or via various boards, e-mails and whatnot. When I speak of trust I’m not really thinking in terms of politicians, who can never be trusted, but in terms of cultures and ideologies. Movements. Recently a small debate about the Tea Party movement in the states lead someone to proclaim that their links with the John Birch society demonstrated they were obviously crazy.
Links?
Well, a few people who move within the tea party movement are also associated with the Birchers. The logic becomes tenuous when you move past the headlines, of course. It’s the sort of linkage that allows for conspiracy to appear everywhere, but it did provoke me to think a little on the matter of the treatment of cultures and movements verses the individual.
Someone proclaims, my opponent is a Bircher, he’s nuts. Someone claims, you hate Islam, therefore you hate all muslims, therefore you are wrong. You will actually find both these arguments coming from the same mouth if you ask… the contradiction doesn’t seem to register. Of the two positions the first is actually somewhat logical as a starting point. Somewhat. It is logical for a member of one cultural group to expect certain things of another cultural group; stereotypes of other groups are a basic starting point for assessing members of that group, so long as the stereotype doesn’t become overwhelming. I, being broadly of the right wing, Christian and so on would be assessed by others by those basic cultural markers, and they’d form an initial impression of how I might behave based on that. They’d be in for a shock, of course, but that’s life.
The John Birch society is a culture. Islam is a culture. Marxism is a culture. Judging members of these cultures initially by the fact that they are members of those cultures does fall into the area of “prejudice” (being Latin for “judgement before”) and this is good, as far as it goes. Judging members of those cultures by their membership once subsequent facts about them are known becomes something else, but even then one has to make some allowances for the culture involved. I, personally, would be much less likely to accept members of Islamic culture as trustworthy even after getting to know them as individuals, just because the culture they’re imbued in is one of mistrust and deception.
However that’s a digression. So far I haven’t addressed the problem we face today, namely that we are expected to treat all cultures equally. I tend to think of this as the Windows Security Model, which reflects my background in that whole IT thing. A security model is a set of rules for dealing with agents in a system, where agents can be anything from pieces of software to users (in software terms it’s difficult to tell the difference most of the time). The Windows security mode was initially non-existence, in that everything could access just about everything else, except for a few spots where the software equivalent of OSB had been hastily screwed down over the top of important bits to stop direct access. This attitude was one of the reasons Windows became so easy to crack and infect with viruses. It was like punching through a wet cardboard box.
The best way to understand this is to recall the dictum “Trust but Verify”, popular in American Republican circles for a while, or at least in the more media-facing ones. Trust but Verify is the Windows security model in a nutshell. It started out from a position of assuming benign intent, and then tried to check whether the opposite was the case. When you are operating in a domain where all cultures are equal and equally good, this is a reasonable assumption to make.
It assumes, however, that all cultures are equal and equally good. This is not the case. Some cultures are simply better than others. Some are bad. This flies right in the face of the cultural relativist argument that states all cultures are equally valid (avoiding such patriarchally judgemental and outmoded tribalistic ideas as “good” and “bad” by resorting to personal validity as the only marker is a sign you’ve gone wrong somewhere, I reckon). The Windows security model still operates from a “trust but verify” position but, in the internet era, now has to contain lots of caveats and default behaviours created by previous verifications of behaviour. It is logically inconsistent, but it remains nevertheless, and forces people to constantly suffer the predations of other agents on their personal computers until they have verified that those agents are “bad”. Yet it carries on trusting every new agent it comes across. In a hostile world this is an evolutionary dead end.
Then comes the Unix security model, in use on various Unixen and Unix-like operating systems such as the rather infamous Linux-based systems. The default behaviour for this model is that agents are not trusted, except as far as the system allows them to be trusted. There are rules to follow and those rules are quite simple, but the basic assumption is that unless someone has been given rights to access a particular function, they cannot access it. This is the near-precise opposite of the Windows model and, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good model to follow when assessing members of other cultures. Individual users can be granted rights, and groups can be granted rights, which filter down to individual users, but unless they are granted access, they don’t have it.
I may trust a Muslim (an individual), but I will never trust Islam. If I grant an individual Muslim access to myself, I don’t grant Islam access. But there I go with islam again.
Windows does have a similar system but it starts from the assumption that agents have access and then progressively denies it to them. his can create problems, as you have to constantly monitor your system to be sure that things that shouldn’t be access are still secured.
Here’s the irony: if you apply these models as a political system, they actually work backwards. The Windows security model applied by the state to the individual is preferable as it provides the most freedom to the most agents. The state is the guarantor of rights, and in the idects as little as possible to restrict those rights, as it must operate entirely by the consent of the agents in question. The Unix model is tyranny, when applied by the state, as it assumes that the state is the source of all rights.
So why do I like it so much? It’s actually reversed. When the individual applies the Windows model to the state, you have a tyranny – the state now has access to all things and the individual can only lash up temporary cover to hide things from the all-seeing state. The unix model applied from the bottom up is freedom. The individual denies the state access to all things and allows it access only to that which it desires the state to see. It’s all a matter of perspective and, from the perspective of interacting with cultures that are not your own, the Unix model is preferable as it allows you to verify first, then trust, and only as far as you want to do so.
You have to assume two things. First, that cultures are not equal; some are better than others. Second, that you have the right to judge before you trust, and that your judgement includes the right to deny trust – that is, prevent access. To discriminate. To prefer. The very act of making this assumptions places you in a different culture to others and they will automatically judge you by that, yet immediately dismiss you as bad because you are not judging everyone as good.
Fortunately you are now able to tell them to bugger off.
Something a little different tonight, a whisky called Jon, Mark and Robbo’s The Rich Spicy One. It’s a blend, which I don’t normally drink, but it’s a very special blend. These three chaps apparently set out to create the perfect set of blends from fine single malts. I’ve enjoyed this bottle over the time I’ve had it (about two years) as a little treat, because it really does taste very good. However it has the same problem that all blends have, in that it tends to die a bit towards the back of the mouth. Singles always cut right to the back of your throat in one way or another which is part of why they’re so unique.
One interesting thing about these drinks is that they have a nifty little tasting note attached to the top, which makes this review easier and harder. I dont’ have to write my own notes down for the book sinc I can just copy them, but the pleasure of figuring it out is gone. Hmm… I’ll just drink it.
So the label says:
rich and spicy. Massive cloves, cinnamon and ginger, wood spices with raisings and other dark and drive fruits. Hints of sweetness. Spicy sensory sensation. Cheers!
Sounds good to me!
The smell of this whisky is very intense but not smoky, like sitting in a wood shop with a summer breeze blowing through it. Lots of woody, spicy notes, like the afformentioned sandalwood and spices (and cloves!). Oranges too and a hint of pear, a little whiff of liquorice.
Taste is pretty much as described, though with the problem of losing intensity very quickly towards the back of the mouth. Blends are always very “forward” like that. There’s a little bitterness, which I think might be the result of having sat in the bottle too long (so I’ll have to drink it all. Oh what a shame!) but it’s got a definite spicy note. Just like the label says. Each sip does pull the cut a little further to the back of the mouth but it still never quite gets there.
I’m a single malt fanatic, but I do quite like this whisky. Unfortunately Jon Mark and Robbo seem to have disappeared off the internet so I can’t be sure if they’re still in business. I suspect not.
Despite the name of this place I do like to think of myself as an original thinker (sometimes I even live up to the idea) and I often find myself pondering the way society has locked itself into what are actually very unoriginal and limiting modes of thought.
The one that’s come up in particular is sexuality, after a long and rather roving conversation with a friend on the subject. Western society is obsessed with sex, or at least the part that we get to see in the media on a regular basis. This obsession with sex is alleged to be an enlightened view, a liberation from teh sexually repressive attitudes of yore but it’s still an obsession with sex. Everything is seen through the lens of sexual intercourse, or is tinted by the believe that every single human activity is ultimately about sex. This isn’t surprising, when you realise how sexually obsessed the people creating and sustaining this belief are.
The reason I’m bringing this up is because of how damaging it is to relationships. Most obvious is the idea that every relationship is about sex, which makes it hard for men and women to be mere friends. I know from experience of the “behind the scenes” life of media types that the general perception in the media is that when a man seeks any sort of relationship with a woman, it’s because he’s ultimately or primarily after sex. One could spend hours blaming this or that mode of political thought (especially the whole Freudian interpretation of relationships that permeates the collective mind of the media class) but that might be counter-productive – and, to be honest, I don’t have any papers or books to reference on the subject, which makes it a little hard to produce a coherent and well-founded argument.
As I said, the concept of relationships-as-sex is damaging to the individual in obvious ways, but also less obvious ways. The same misunderstanding of the motivations for human behaviour influence the understanding of sexuality as well. This will take a little while to explain, and on top it necessitates putting out a little bit of information that I’ve tended to keep secret up until now because of the misunderstandings that surround it:I am bisexual.
It might not surprise some people who know me but I’m damn sure it’d surprise others to learn this. But what do I mean by bisexual? The popular (and, as far as I’m concerned, wrong) understanding of the term incorporates a wide gamut of definitions and behaviours but, as far as I’m concerned, bisexuality means that a person wants to experience a sexual relationship with both men and women.
Now, being a Christian I wouldn’t want to engage in promiscuous sexual behaviour. Being married, I have vows to maintain, and because I love my wife completely, I can’t really countenance having an intimate relationship with anyone else. Absent those conditions I’d have a slight interest in sex with men, but then absent those conditions I wouldn’t be me.
By this definition bisexuality is fairly simple. It’s about sex. The problem is, relationships more often than not aren’t about sex but about closeness and intimacy. Not “intimacy” in the modern understanding, which is again coloured by the assumption that it necessarily requires a sexual component, but intimacy in an older, more defined meaning of the term that would have been familiar to the writers of pre- and early-post-renaissance romances. The crude term often used is “platonic” or idealised love but that doesn’t really cover it; the word “platonic” is thrown around as often as the word “love” these days, without any real understanding of it’s meaning. Intimacy as I’m trying to define it is the sort of knowledge of the inner soul, the intimacy of life-long companions who know each other’s needs and desires and motivations so implicitly that they often don’t have to speak to communicate. The intimacy of Frodo and Sam from the lord of the rings is often given as an example, but in more general terms the intimate closeness of any partnership that has survived adversity, either of events or simply time.
The post-modern, sex-obsessed world of the media considers such intimacy to be obviously homosexual in nature, because for all their talk about enlightenment they can’t see past their genitals. At one level it’s fun to joke about a gay relationship between Frodo and Sam but, at the same time, it reduces something that is very powerful down to the base and carnal. The idea that two men can be affectionate towards each other without there being some level of homosexuality underpinning the affection has distorted society’s view of relationships to an enormous degree, to the point where you have a lot of people who have accepted the false label of homosexuality or bisexuality for what are perfectly natural, non-sexual behaviours, or who suppress any sort of intimate behaviour, towards both men and women, out of fear of being perceived as “gay”, or less masculine.
It is actually possible to find the male form attractive without being sexually interested in it, and it’s possible for men to be affectionate with other men at a very intimate level without ever having any sort of sexual involvement. The problem is that society, as arbitrated by the media, assigns these behaviours to a sexual foundation rather than one of innocent intimacy.
When I say “I am bisexual” I mean that I find both men and women sexually attractive. I have a rather high sex drive and, if not for my faith, would have very little taste or discernment when it came to sexual partners. This has absolutely no bearing on whether or not I love them and find intimacy with them appealing because, despite the contemporary reductionist belief that all human activity stems from the desire to mate (a belief that was hammered home constantly by the media establishment types when I was at university), sex does not equate to intimacy and sexuality is not love. It is possible to know someone intimately without sex ever coming (so to speak) into the equation. It is possible to love someone so deeply that you would sacrifice everything for them, without every being sexually attracted to them. Our impoverished linguistic understanding of “love” cannot really describe the concept without taking up several paragraphs (in fact C.S Lewis had to take up an entire book – well worth the read, incidentally), and even then the definition is cognitively tainted by the subconscious filtration of love through the concept of sexuality as the primary metaphysical urge. To the post-modern mind, the mind that currently dominates our culture, everything is motivated by sex. The concept that two people can love each other innocently, that love and sexuality are actually separate and sometimes contradictory drives, is alien to a psyche so dominated by an obsession with the sensual that it can no longer understand the spiritual. Even those who claim to be seeking a spiritual understanding tend to let slip that they’re seeking a spiritual experience, falling back to their sensual or “soulish” interaction with the world. But that’s another rant for another day.
In lieu of legal lollygagging, and inspired somewhat by Tasty Infidelicacies, a recipe, for a dish I call
… or, chicken in a pocket with cashews.
Now I’m not so good at precise measurements and tend to go for things in handfuls and pinches rather than kilos and grams, or even pounds and ounces, so the recipe that follows will reflect this. I also like to cook bulk on a budget. Handy, since I have big hands.
That said, on to the ingredients. You can find most of these in Aldi or your local equivalent.
One bag of frozen chopped chicken breast
One or two cloves of garlic
Salad vegetables
Dried or fresh chopped coriander leaf (optional but adds a nice fresh hint)
Lemon juice
Pita bread or a similar bread pocket
Cashew nuts
Ginger
First prepare a salad. Salads are simple, you can buy a bag of Mediterranean salad from Aldi for 99 pence, and then top it up with other veg as you need it for a similar price again, or you can buy all the bits yourself and make it that way. Either way it’s fast and easy, not to mention useful to have around for sandwich filler. I used mushrooms, spring onions, tomatoes, some left-over walnuts and baby sweet corns. Half a bag plus veg can last you several days without any problem, and if it’s going a little bit limp by the end then it makes a perfect backfill for burgers, giving you that authentic McDonalds texture.
Next take a bag of frozen chopped chicken breast, one large clove of garlic, chopped finely (not crushed!), and half a red pepper that I found getting ready to go soft in the back of the fridge, also chopped finely. Glaze the garlic in olive oil in a large pan (preferably not non-stick – it’s probably my imagination but teflon always seems to add a funny flavour) and then start frying the chicken on a low to medium heat straight from frozen, as this will give it a nice browning and infuse the garlic flavour. Toss in the cashews and some ginger and continue turning for a while until everything is well coated in the oil, then leave to soak heat on a low setting.
Whilst the chicken is infusing, pop the pita thing under the grill to start warming and toasting it. Depending on your bread choice the time for this can vary.
When the chicken is starting to brown a little, throw in a couple of shakes of the coriander and the chopped pepper and turn up the heat for a final blast, turning vigorously. Towards the end add in a little lemon juice and if you’re feeling adventurous a splash of white wine. Continue to turn until the coriander is well spread and everything looks satisfactory.
Remove the bread from the oven when it’s toasted to preference.
Now fill the pocket with chicken and salad and add pepper or whatever else takes your fancy. Two pockets will probably fill you up, and from a single bag of the chopped chicken you get enough to make at least six. Once cooled the chicken also makes a decent sandwich filler or can be mixed with the salad and some feta.
From a comment on Gates of Vienna.
A person, especially one not trained to consider what one sees with at least a bit of dispassionate skepticism, can simply absorb ideas passively by watching films or television.
More true than you even realise. When I was doing my undergrad, part of the course on media analysis included information on how the brain reacts to television and film compared to other forms of media. Television and film specifically create a very passive state in the viewer. The combination of the hypnotic effect of a fast strobe light and the generally passive state the viewer must enter to take part in the piece work together to produce an incredibly suggestible state of mind, one where ideas are much more easily absorbed by the viewer than in any other situation. It’s akin to hypnotic suggestion. Film in particular is immensely powerful in this regard, as the scale and overwhelming force of a film in a cinema strip away any natural defences against the ideas being presented to you.
C.S. Lewis would have described this as the difference between contemplation and enjoyment of a particular thing, which he outlined in Medition in a Toolshed, where he compared Contemplation and Enjoyment by refernece to a beam of light shining through a crack in the door. Contemplation is looking at the beam of light from the outside, in the dark of the shed, seeing the motes of dust twinkling in it and being able to see that it’s a beam of light, where it falls, what angle it’s at. Enjoyment is akin to looking along the beam, so that you no longer see the beam of light but are immersed totally in it; along the beam you see sky, clouds, the top of a tree. You no longer contemplatively see the beam of light, you are “enjoying” it.
Looking at a film from outside, reading the plot and examining the ideas contained produces an contemplative effect that isn’t nearly as potent as the “enjoyment” effect caused by actually watching the film. When you contemplate a film you examine it’s characteristics in a different way to when you are enjoying it. This state of enjoyment is where film and television become so powerful and consequently so easily used for manipulation. In the enjoyment of the film you are totally immersed in it to the point where your own self, your id, almost becomes lost and quiescent. “You” nearly cease to exist, your role is so passive and so enjoined. In that state, the message presented to you is absorbed as easily as a sponge soaking up water.
Perhaps with the exception of staged theatre, no other media has this effect. Not even computer games. Anything that requires an active participation consequently requires a contemplation, and contemplation requires personality and individuality. And whilst both contemplation and enjoyment – looking at the beam and along it – are necessary modes of thought one must be aware that each requires the other to be whole. To be totally looking along the beam one must necessarily give up looking at the beam – one must give up more logical and rational assessment to become lost in the experience.
Most people in the industry don’t even realise this. They just instinctively know that television and film are very powerful tools for spreading a message.
If I were to watch this film it’d be on my computer with the lights on, a cup of tea, and perhaps with some music. That would prevent me from losing myself in the spectacle and allow me to rationally examine its message and undertones. I’d be able to enjoy the impressive special effects without losing myself in the message. I certainly wouldn’t watch it in a cinema.
