69. Near Encounter With Lightning

Thunderstorm cloud

Last Monday a violent thunderstorm with hail passed in the late afternoon over northwest London. When it was nearly over, black clouds receding, I grabbed my digital camera to snap the white carpet of hail on the lawn outside the window. Just as I pressed the shutter, there was a flash of blinding light some 100 yards from the window – a lightining struck something right in front of me. Only when I looked at the photo on the computer, I saw two distinct balls of light emerging from the burst of that lightning hit. I am not sure whether those weird lights could have had any effect on me, but that night I couldn’t go to sleep for some hours. It felt as if my energy levels were too high. Maybe I should have grounded myself somehow, but that didn’t occur to me in the night. What those balls of light were, I have no idea. The fainter ones are easily explained by the lightning flash reflections on particles of water etc. But those two big ones look to me like something else. The lower one seems about to fall apart before it hits the ground. I wonder what my readers think about all that?  Comments would be appreciated. 

Lighting balls enhanced

68.The World of Flowing Changes

Reality has been lately approaching so close to the world of illusions that my glimpses of the unreal have become almost unreadable. What can be more unreal than a descendant of black slaves from Kenya becoming the 44^th President of the most powerful country in the world? What could be more paradoxical than a nation, whose founding Fathers declared that “all men are equal”, built its power and wealth on the blood, sweat and suffering of millions of slaves and then chose a true American mulatto as its Leader? And how very simple and yet penetrating to the very core of human longings were  his electioneering slogans “Hope -Change -Yes, we can!” It was not an illusion that millions of people all over the world , black and white, yellow and brown, listened avidly to his inauguration speech. They believe in their heart of hearts that -Yes! We can change the world if such is our belief, based on true longing. But even that reality was giving me a glimpse of something  out of this world. A weird introduction to this changing world was the suddenness with which the deceptively solid and safe world of finance started to disintegrate before my eyes. Banks became overnight a symbol of greed, recklessness and instability. Governments all over the globe started pouring money into that black hole where it simply disappeared without leaving a trace. The soothing words of the media and spin-doctors sounded more hollow than ever. Their masters couldn’t accept the truth staring them in the face: that their cosy, but unreal world came crashing down and it would never rise again in the same shape or form. All material forms have a built-in obsolescence and they have to perish, because you cannot pour “new wine of change into old bottles”. They could not withstand the powerful  fermentation process of change.  What next? There will be many changes in our complacent acceptance of everything that has been blocking the growth of human mind and spirit for much too long. The new world order is still too misty in outline to allow me a clear glimpse of what is to come. But I believe that millions of people are waking up and repeating to themselves the Obama slogans: Hope –Change-YES! WE CAN DO IT! Just be patient and go with the world of flowing changes. There will be no revolution. There will be only a Transformation.

67.That Many-Splendoured Thing

Love is a many-splendoured thing:
Once on a high and windy hill,
In the morning mist, two lovers kissed,
And the world stood still.
Then your fingers touched my silent heart and taught it how to sing.
Yes, true love’s a many-splendoured thing! (Matt Monroe)

That old song is actually a musical and poetical description of

chemical reactions caused by C₄₃H₆₆N₁₂O₁₂S₂ , known to scientists as oxytocin and to us,ignorant lot, as a “cuddle drug”, “liquid trust” and even a “glue of social bonding” without which we would be lonesome rogue-elephants or worse. Well, don’t take my word for it because no lesser authority than BBC Science programme has recently published the final word on defining that many-splendoured thing, given by a learned American professor of neuroscience. Love, he said, is…” just a series of chemical events.” Quite so, but it would be helpful to know which species of love are we talking about. Because there are as many “loves” as there are “lovers”. For example, those prairie voles which have led the learned academic to his conclusions have a lot of volish hormones in their bodies, but I have never been a vole, so how could I know what sweet words pass between them when they are bonding? The problem with some scientists is that they use a sylogizm “my aunt has two legs and a goose has two legs; therefore, a goose is also my aunt”. Another scientist from Oxford Univ. Future of Humanity Institute is more sceptical about love=spray of oxytocin plus a few other bits”. “We shouldn’t think that this perspective on its own provides a full understanding of what love is. “There are also evolutionary, psychological, sociological, phenomenological (a philosophical approach and method of qualitative research) and humanistic perspectives that offer important insights.” Quite so. But the lure of a sensational headline in all media is irrestible to some academics. I am not going out today to buy a sprayer of “cuddle drug”. But in the threatening financial tsunami, banks could spray their customers with that vital “trust hormone”. Some researchers suggests that when peeople are given a whiff of oxytocin they are “more generous and trusting in tasks that involve sharing money with strangers.” Sometimes I wonder if  my wallet might have been occasionally sprayed by some friends with that misty many-splendoured stuff.  Unfortunately, it is odourless. 

66. Unreal Visions of Sweet Home

Unreality begins at home. Home itself is unreal. I have always imagined Homeland with a capital H as a place where everybody has his home. We mistake space divided into rectangles and filled with things as our home. It is just another illusion, because if I move tomorrow to another set of rectangles in a different part of the world, somoe body else will move into my old home and call it his home. Spaces are filled with invisible time and equally invisible passers-by. The former is tidal and brings memories which are not my own. They belong to those who had lived in these rectangles before me. The pedestrians who pass through my spaces are humans-in-spirit. The could be described as pilgrims in search of their holy places. Some find them soon after their physical death. Others may follow deceptive trails of scintillating promises and find only a locked gate. Outside the spatial illusion called home is another fata morgana called the Outside World. At the present time it is a very cold world. London where my unreal home is located is unused to sub-zero temperatures, night after night. They create further illusions.

This morning I saw a polar bear in the back gardens. I threw him a piece of bread which made him turn into a white pidgeon. It may have been a dove. Or even the Holy Ghost. Last night the Three Magi sung carols outside my castle, which once belonged to good King Wenceslas. Everyday unreality is like this. A panorama of shifting fantasies, interwoven with bits of something that could be recognized as familiar outlines of the world perceived with my five senses.

65. Magical Year 2009 Ahead?

Well, maybe…but not for everybody, because our stars turn clockkwise for some and widdershins for others. 2009 is numerically interesting because its prime factors are 7,7,41 or 41×49, but the year itself, though not a prime, holds 29 and 11– both primes – in its heart. Horoscopes may foretell our future or not. They outline possibillities, which we can turn into probabilities and realisations – if and when we believe in them.I looked up the first horoscope for the year that opened for me in an obscure provincial weekly and this is what it predicted for everybody, like me, born in the sign of Virgo. The year will be full of mysteries and surprises (I hope so). In the Spring I will learn that even when two people look in the same direction, they rarely see the same thing (true). I am advised to be on my guard because appearances may be deceptive. I should be wary when meeting new people and it will time to review old acquaintances (those virtual ones, I think. Others have disappeared) A nice surprise for the mid-year: an unexpected long journey (other world?). In  the autumn – promotion and big financial gains. That is bad news (promotion at my age?) and good news (my bank will not go bankrupt after all). In the affairs of heart I should not count any longer on love at first sight. As lust at first sight is also unlikely, it looks a rather emotionally peaceful year. Happy New Year to all who visit here.

64.Slap In The Face and Cyberdreams

I was dreaming last night that I somehow discovered that it was now possible to get direct connection to internet dreams.  I was one of those privileged users who was given a secret name and password and all I had to do was to click a link. I did but my name did not appear and the password was the just eight dots. I was a bit disappointed but then started looking for those internet dreams. There were a lot of pages but those I picked for some reason gave details of avant-garde exhibitions.

The titles were uninspiring, mostly based on puns and other word games. I was surfing idly and suddenly an urgent message flashed on the screen. It said ”The Forces of Mubarak are attacking Paris”. I thought that I must have clicked on some dangerous dream and that it was all my fault. was clicking again, trying to return to the boring avant-garde exhibitions and finally succeeded. The next message was that hostilities have ceased. I felt a wave of relief and woke up, mulling over this rather out of the ordinary dream. Was internet a field of dreams, where one mistaken click could cause dreams becoming someone’s reality in another part of the world? Someone described the cyberworld as a living plasma of energy, where we are all connected through our dreams. I surfed the web in my waking consciousness and realized that there is a large number of  sites and articles dealing with the subject of “internet dreams”. Here is a small selection of them. I think that my dream was a journey of discovery. When I searched for “avant-garde exhibitions” I found a few web sites which provided me with significant metaphors, giving me insights and directives which are probably need at this times. One of them was going to be called “Slap in the Face” but its title was finally changed to “Breaking The Rules”. Both metaphors delivered their message. The cyberfield of dreams is open and waiting.

63. Hot-Footed King Wenceslas

The subject of one of the most popular Christmas carols in England is a tenth century Czech duke(later king) Wenceslas (actually Vaclav). Somehow he had emerged into that invisible unreality of this “sceptred Isle”, where Stonehenge, leylines and Merlin are but small scintillating glimpses of the weirdest country in the world. I know it because I have been living here, off and on, for some centuries. That is also my personal unreality. To listen to English people singing about thick snow and cruel frost, you can see that faraway look in their eyes, dreaming about foreign lands and strange foreigners going hot-footed through snow drifts to treat a poor man to a feast of Stephen. Good King Wenceslas didn’t seem to care much for his poor page whom he ordered to carry pinelogs, food and wine through waist-high snowdrifts, only to satisfy the king’s strange whim to entertain just one man on Boxing Day. But that kind of eccentric philantropy is very close to English hearts, especially when Wenceslas, a saintly man created hot spots in his footsteps which apparently, and magically, heated the worn out page-  “in  his master’s steps he trod, where the snow lay dinted; Heat was in the very sod which the saint had printed.” Why the cult of St Vaclav blossomed only in Bohemia and England, no one will ever know. But the carol is somehow enchanting in its weirdness and out-of the-way unreality.

62. The Magic of Winter Solstice

The morning was grey, sad and frayed on edges with tiredness. The return of the Sun was scheduled for 12.02 GMT (UT) but it didn’t look that he would show his radiant face. And yet…At noon the sun suddenly parted the clouds and chased them away.  Two minutes later it was blazing away straight into my window which is facing south. It was pure magic and quite unreal. I prayed silently and chaotically, trying to say all that was in  my heart as my eyes filled with unshed tears. Three minutes later the clouds returned, but the magic of the returning Sun remained like a whispered promise of other things yet to come.

61.Silent Night In My Unreal World

With lovely visuals and Sinead O’Connors soothing voice this gives me a feeling of unreality on the threshold of the Winter Solstice and the Return of the Invincible Sun.

Happy Yuletide and  a Wonderful New Beginning at the End of the Old Year to all who come here, visiting my unreal blog.

60.Misty Glimpse of Unreal World

Unreality hits so often in the real world, in the most mundane happenings. Unreality arrived at the doorstep, when my elderly wife, suffering from Alzeimer and practically bedridden for the last three years after a stroke, suddenly managed to walk unaided all the way from the first floor flat, in search of her mother who died 45 years ago. Was she hallucinating or was her mother’s spirit actually there, visiting her for some reason? Were the two brothers from Finland who have just moved in as our downstairs neighbours real or a figment of my imagination? They spoke perfect English and said they came to London because they got bored with the Finnish tundra and renifers. They came out to help me and we moved my wife into their comfortable flat to wait for the ambulance. The Royal Free Hospital is a short distance away from our place, but the atmosphere inside the Emergency Ward is always on the border of unreality. The nurses and doctors look and act like somnambulics, probably because they deal with a wide range of unreal people, many of whom are close to death and often never make it even to the new Assessment Ward on the first floor, where my wife eventually found herself , after a timeless wait in cubicle 7 (her birth number) and was put in bed 7. Unfortunately, it wasn’t her lucky number this time because when she was moved two days later to the seventh floor ward and given treatment in room seven, someone robbed her, forcibly removing her platinum wedding ring and another ring with a precious stone she was very fond of and regarded as her talisman. The only people who had such access to her that would give them an opportunity to remove jewellery were nurses and doctors. I cannot imagine that real people who choose to care for the sick could rob an elderly helpless woman, knowing that with her memory affected by Alzheimer and infection , she would not be able to identify them. This is where I feel that the real world ends and I find myself in total unreality of dark callousness and heartless indifference. It is not the high value of the stolen property that matters but the happening itself. I was given a glimpse of something I find difficult to comprehend – an unreal world with its unreal inhabitants which was truly frightening. As William Yeats wrote prophetically some 88 years ago in The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre,

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

A hospital is almost like a temple where one expect love, help, understanding and caring… Perhaps, that hospital was a phantom place and this whole sad episode has never happened. The borders between real and unreal are often made of mist.