'
May 30th;
Electronic devices
lovelier
than perfume or fresh baked bread.
May 29th;
Japanese girl dressed as French maid gives
toy-robot-reprogramming tutorial.
May 28th;
Sometimes hard to get work done when the girls
drop round.
Wonderful dinner in the evening at Zoe's. Hasso tells me about the German
diplomatic service in exotic locations like Mozambique.
May 27th;
Breakfast with Rob at an outdoor cafe in the shade looking at the sun on
the buildings across the other side of Andrassy street. Later I go to see
the Copy
General photocopy and printing-shop editing fellow with
plenty of time to spare, but find that
editing my rough two-sided business card into shape and printing two sheets
of them {48 name cards} takes two hours. He is very cheerful and precise
and tidies up my prints, and he & I are too tired by the end to notice
that he has erased my phone number and put my e-mail address on both
sides of the card instead. Still, at two hours total, or almost three minutes
a card, almost as quick as penning each one by hand in fine
copperplate with a freshly-cut quill. Part-way through, the two blonde Norwegian
maidens who founded Budadogs
come into the photocopy place with three amiable leashed hounds of different sizes
and colourings, and we briefly chat about animals, their studies, and bookselling.
This
compares Bush's view of US spook priorities and Obama's view of US spook
priorities. A bit plodding, as American articles tend to be, but informative.
May 26th;
Go with Bisan and Jamal to
Bullet's
exhibition opening. Find
Robin &
Zita and lots of others, including 3-Girlfriend Tamas, Dominic, Scott.
May 25th;
Hallelujah, our book is
on
sale in North America. So that only took five
and a bit months. My fault obviously for refusing to obediently melt the text
down into a digital file Amazon can sell cheaply on their reading machine before
it gets cracked and copied and given away for nothing and normal book trading
dies out altogether. May the Lord make us truly thankful for what we are about
to receive. Apparently yesterday President Obama
absent-mindedly signed some visitors' book in London
"2008"
probably because, as the New Yorkers maliciously suggest, he enjoyed that year
a lot and subconsciously wishes it had never ended.
May 24th;
Another depressing day. Weather hot and sticky. Jungle sounds
urge urgent action
in place of feeble introspection.
May 23rd;
Morning green tea with Henri. Sleep off what feels like heat stroke.
Around midnight finish Robert Temple's curious tome
'The
Sirius Mystery', a re-edition he did at the end
of the 1990s adding more findings on a topic he began looking at in the 1970s.
The book ends splendidly with a short polite afterword about his family long
being of note in USA Freemasonry, including a German-British forebear called
John Leonard who was apparently tall and strong, formed part of George
Washington's personal bodyguard, and grew a third set of teeth in middle age
a few years after the American War of Independence.
The book's quite startling thesis is partly summed up on page 258.
"The Dogon tribe are really the last of the Argonauts,
from whom they are quite literally descended - being Minyans in the middle of
West Africa." However, there is more. The Argonauts,
according to Temple, had a quite extraordinary secret in common with some of
the Near Eastern mystery cults, and the Mali tribe studied by two French
anthropologists since the 1930s retain in the purest form yet found these
early mysterious beliefs elsewhere garbled and corrupted beyond understanding.
This secret apparently was and is no less than that human civilisation was
seeded or at least advised and helped in detail by amphibious aliens of
supposedly repulsive appearance from the neighbourhood of the Sirius star
system, ten light years distant, when they visited the Near Eastern region
around 5,000 years ago. These aliens imparted all sorts of handy tips
like writing, architecture, geometry, large-scale organisation. By-the-by
they left behind detailed accounts of how the stars Sirius B and Sirius A orbit
each other. These details are still recorded faithfully in the inner-sanctum
advanced mysteries preserved in a remote corner of Africa. Mysteries which the
Dogon tribe allowed anthropologists Griaule and Dieterlen, accepted after a
couple of decades as tribe elders, to be instructed in. This becomes more
intriguing to the sceptical eye once it emerges that Sirius B is not only
invisible to the naked eye {being a small and dense dwarf star}, but is spoken
of in Dogon myth as being dark, very heavy, inconceivably dense, hidden etc, and
was only seen by telescopes in
the mid-20th century after Griaule and Dieterlen's first accounts appeared in
print. Seemingly, it gets better. So imagine this Dogon tribe in West Africa
are the unlikely but possible descendents of a fundamentalist ancient Greek sect
that fled persecution inland over a couple of centuries from Libya and eventually
intermarried with native Africans in the upper Niger valley, a remote part of
what is now Mali. Temple says they told their French anthropologist friends about
a third star. Sirius C, also normally invisible, was another part of the Sirius
system according to Dogon sacred stories. The discovery by modern astronomers
of just such a Sirius C in between the first edition of Temple's book in the
1970s and this later edition in the late 1990s rather raises the stakes
therefore. Temple reproduces some notes from the two anthropologists in English
at the back of the book, showing intriguing Dogon diagrams. The Dogon seem to
know of the periodicity of the Sirius B orbit {just under 50 years, around 49
and a half years}. Not taking away from the breath-taking main idea, there is
also a lot of inadvertently poetic language of enormous power : 'The pattern of
the master of the star of the Shoemaker' is one Dogon diagram ; A neighbouring
tribe called the Bozo refer to Sirius as 'Sitting Trouser star' ; an ancient
Egyptian phrase of 'ancestor gods of the circle of the sky'. Most of the book
in fact has Temple searching back from the present-day Dogon, purists in
exile who preserved and passed on the original story in more faithfully
semi-literal detail, to more jumbled traces in
Greek, Egyptian, Persian, Chinese, and Babylonian records. He gives references
to Babylonian accounts {and images} of amphibian visitors who slept underwater
at night, bringing humanity useful and clever ideas despite their hideous
appearance
{Dogon myth explicitly says they came to earth from Sirius, in a sky ship} ;
he points out haunting similarities to the legendary accounts of Fuxi and his
fellow amphibians, mythical founders of Chinese civilisation - probably a
story that travelled from the Near East. He hunts through Greek, Jewish, and
Egyptian myth in search of references to Sirius, the number fifty, "dark and
light" aspects to Sirius, amphibious pioneers, early geomancy, the curious
positioning of several oracular sites at exact one-degree intervals, and so on.
In one appendix, he convincingly suggests that the late Hellenic writer Proclus
knew a lot of material direct from a mystery cult he had been initiated into,
and hinted as much as he could in text without breaking his oaths of secrecy,
including much speculation on the supposedly sacred fraction 256/243. This
approximates to the decimal ratio 1.053 which is apparently the ratio of the
mass of Sirius B to the mass of our sun, and Proclus' context discussing
planetary orbits and masses makes it seem not entirely arbitrary to draw the
conclusion that he might have known of and intended to refer to this particular
ratio with that particular number. Much of the book is quite heavy going as
Temple ploughs through references and sub-topics, though he has the humour to
realise he is testing the reader's patience in places. None the less, the
mounting cumulative effect of all these different scraps of possible reference
is powerful. Even details like the dragon's teeth of Greek myth start to make
more sense in this new frame. Infected by his connect-everything zeal, I
started to wonder why a certain tweed fabric is named hounds'-tooth {dogs,
teeth, and dragons are integrally linked in Temple's interpretative mesh}.
Temple is an American who moved to Britain and settled there in his 20s, in
the 1960s, and the book lists a startling set of affiliations. Opposing my
expectation that this book would be fringe-like is Temple's claimed
membership of the Royal Astronomical Society, the Royal Historical Society,
the Egypt Exploration Society, the British School of Archeology at Athens, and
several other impressive-sounding bodies. He then jars this initial write-up
from his publisher by mentioning how the original publication of 'The Sirius
Mystery' in the 1970s brought him a certain amount of harassment from several
countries' intelligence agencies, such as the CIA. Naturally this makes him
sound like a crank again. However, as he spends just a calm
couple of pages naming two or three CIA agents who made scores of phone calls
to friends and employers of Temple's urging them to cut off contact with him,
insists he still has no idea why he should have aroused such hostility, and
never again returns to the topic, his subjective credibility
starts to recover. The fact, left quite late in the book, that he
became a close friend of pioneering China scholar Joseph Needham and his
Chinese wife and was allowed by them to pull together a huge body of
Needham's unused notes into a book celebrating Chinese accomplishments in
science again reinforces Temple and makes him sound like a serious academic.
Which leaves the very reasonable question of why a career re-examining world
myth in search of references to visitors from Sirius should cause spooks
like those of Langley, Virginia irritation. In several places, Temple's view
has the refreshing ring of common sense. He asks why everyone thinks the
Sphinx is a lion with a human face when it doesn't look at all like the body
of a lion, and suggests it is much more likely to be a giant sculpture of a dog,
namely the jackal god Anubis, with the head of some vain pharoah later
superimposed on it. Now he mentions it, I have to agree the Sphinx never looked
particularly lion-like and this is something that I, like everyone else,
just accepted because that's what we were told.
May 22nd;
My internet connection having run out, I get to
the showroom to find its
billing software disabled by a burst pipe. Oddly the WiFi also does not work
on my laptop, although it seems to work for everyone else.
May 21st;
Go to
a curious
poetry reading where Allison is, and it turns out so are Bisan
& her cheery younger brother Jamal also, along with Nick the chess player who
admires
Capablanca
above all others.
May 20th;
Depression continues. Breakfast with Allison The Linguist, where we bump into
Kalman's
friend Attila. Afternoon Arabic lesson attended by Bisan's brother Jamal, who
gives Eva a small set of cartoon angel stickers.
May 19th;
Depression returns. Have a look at the
standard
argument against free will, and
Strawson's restatement of it. It seems to be not much more than
a bald pincer attack between determinacy and indeterminacy.
May 18th;
2nd and 3rd chair vaguely underway.
Now
a standard frame to hold them in place.
May 17th;
Woman in white rolls eyes in rapture while dutiful
hound keeps the straight gaze of dignity.
May 16th;
Wake up in Budapest after 12 hours sleep. How feeble I am. Interesting web-design
lesson with Monika & her baby. I'm slowly starting to get the feel of
Joomla. Afterwards two
quick Tarot spreads for her.
May 15th;
Unpleasant night of being short of breath with totally blocked nose, meaning I
sleep from about 3am to 5am the rest of the time struggling for air. At about 8am I
stumble over to Robin's studio to doze a couple of hours on his sofa there in air
wholly free of cat fluff but instead soothingly scented with linseed oil. This is
because I had that strong Turkish coffee yesterday for Ernesto to read my fortune
from: I can almost hear Roger the Wizard's sad tut-tutting noises. Meanwhile Zsuzsi
has somehow pulled a muscle in her shoulder. In the afternoon, Robin & I untangle
some fishing line sitting on the grass under grey, vaguely thundery skies, then
eating lots of Marcsi neni's extremely good strudels.
Although the design of this rather adorable
paper cut-out is nostalgic, I
assume it needed a laser cutter.
May 14th;
At Robin's. I goad Robin into action and together we mend the latch on the
sitting-room door before lunch. At lunchtime charismatic half-Hungarian, half-Chilean
interior designer Ernesto and his fetching all-Hungarian wife Eva arrive to look
round Robin's
studio and choose artworks. After lunch we have cups of strong black
coffee with lots of sugar so that Ernesto can do the coffee-grounds fortune-telling
trick he learned in the Balkans from Greeks and Serbs. I pay with intensified cat
allergy later for breaking my coffee fast, but the two readings are interesting.
Ernesto sees in Robin's grounds a dog, a kneeling woman, and two scorpions. In my
coffee-cup grounds he sees a V for victory {very soon, apparently}, three people
helping me, of whom a woman with a big lucky snake on her back is seemingly the
most important.
May 13th;
Excellent Arabic lesson with the bubbly Bisan, mild-mannered Kristof turning up
one hour twenty five minutes late, and Eva getting really good. Quite inspired by
this cheese
advert in Arabic to press on with the language. As night falls, Robin appears
at my flat ready for our trip to the Great Plain. We drive out into the dusk,
batting ideas back and forth as the countryside gets flatter, lonelier, and darker.
May 12th;
Some striking, attractive Tarot card designs by
an Argentinian artist, via Mark With The Dog.
Fool /
Chariot /
Death.
May 11th;
Those Walloons. Music
to dance naked to while splattered in vomit. No collection complete without,
etc. Sunny day. Rob takes me out to lunch and goes home with
the first chair, texting me later
with kind tales of how when he picked up his daughter, little Mali's playmates' mothers at the
nursery all cooed over my first ever carpentry.
May 10th;
Tea Party for starting work on the Second Chair.
Terri &
Bisan come in the warm afternoon, and Ilan, Kalman, & Attila turn up after dark and take it in
turns to sit on the First Chair on the balcony while we eat biscuits and drink tea.
May 9th;
With the crucial offstage help of Mystery Friend 1, I've now heard several other of the
Melvyn Bragg discussions that were eluding my laptop, such as the Spartan and
Francis Bacon ones. Clear the
In Our Time webpage
hasn't been properly maintained for years though: old shows still in Real Media, lots of 2009
iPlayer files not playing, the timer slider not working if you interrupt a playback
for too long, and so on. During
Joomla lesson with Monika, see some
rather unsettling Tarot
card art by a friend of hers.
May 8th;
Grey rainy morning. Brunch with Fraser, over from London. We chat about
cosmonauts
and the Scots
typographical tapeworm book.
May 7th;
A couple of days ago, during a sunny afternoon, am in the sports shop being
served by the blonde who clearly does a lot of weight-training. From one
visit weeks ago, she remembers to ask me how the
publishing is going, which
is kind. She's the one with the beautifully outlined breasts, the slightly too
well-defined dense upper biceps, the thick blonde rope of multiply-rubber-banded
ponytail swinging down her back as far as her slim waist ...and the deep male voice.
May 6th;
One of the more atmospheric 70s blaxploitation
movie
tunes. 'Out There' by Willie Hutch from Foxy Brown, which I saw
in Desiree/Bill's night club Bitch round the corner. This
the film that has for its McGuffin a severed penis in a jam jar.
May 5th;
Warm, sunny, yet oddly depressing Friday. Wake with back ache. Miss my
Arabic lesson. Surprise evening curry with Terri
& Alvi at the Taj Mahal up Szondi street, bigger and better-furnished than I
remember. On the tram home at the end of the evening, finish a book called
'Genesis
Machines' by Martyn Amos. Apparently, Amos got the
world's first Phd for DNA computing in the 1990s, and now teaches at what
used to be Manchester Polytechnic. This is the place where, alongside all
the engineering labs and industry-based courses, our art teachers
rented a studio for a week three times over sixth form for the practice of
drawing nude girls. Amos describes how researchers in both biology
and computer science realised already 20 years ago that lab vessels of DNA,
cooked and filtered in the right ways, could in principle be used for
massively parallel assaults on
NP-hard
calculations like the travelling salesman problem. Amos tells the story of
how the new field grew up, and how the emphasis subtly shifted away from
biological computing as such towards areas like synthetic biology. It ends
in 2006, five years ago, with Craig Venter's scientists still working on
stripping the insides of a bacterium out, and stocking it all over again only with
working "parts" (such as enzymes) that they thoroughly understand. This is the
spirit of the "Registry
of Standard Biological Parts", which styles itself as a catalogue of basic
biochemical tools
& components needed to make cells work. At last, four years after the book
went to press, Venter's team finished building the world's
first man-made lifeform
last year. Lively, but more diagrams would have been nice.
May 4th;
Not sure how comfortable these would be -
benches made of tennis balls.
Small impromptu tea party to celebrate Completion of the Chair goes well, with
Jeremy popping over and Rob bringing his very sweet and well-behaved 5-year-old
Mali, who seems pleased when I show her my fluffy crocodile and inflated
aeroplane. Everyone seems to like the fact that I haven't repainted the thing
yet, and so have inadvertently given it a distressed, antiquey, characterful
battered-item-on-a-boat look. They protest when I say I want to paint over
the sanded surface with a nice new coat of gloss. Rob says the height & narrowness
of the chair would be perfect
for his violin practice. He asks me to build a second wooden chair for him.
May 3rd;
A couple of days ago US soldiers
supposedly found Osama bin Laden in a secure-looking compound in Pakistan close to
the capital, killed him, checked his DNA against a DNA spec of Mr bin Laden they
somehow had
on file, and then dumped his body into the Indian Ocean hours later. Lunch outdoors
with Rob in chilly shade which becomes hot sunshine as the shadow of the edge of the
building retreats across our table over an hour.
May 2nd;
Translations into English of Rumi's blissed-out verse about love & ecstasy. Fine
minimal website, give or take the odd typo. The first poem is called either
'Like
This' or 'If Anyone Asks You'.
May 1st;
Spring
creeps up, but not the unbroken seven months' sunshine belting down
from April until October of previous years.
Warm half-days turn suddenly chilly, gusty, mysterious, northern, dark.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
