Welcome to my blog which is a mood enhancer; which mood depends on you. Strange thing, a mood. My Shorter Oxford defines mood as follows:
1. Mind, heart, thought, feeling.
2. Courage, anger.
3. A frame of mind or state of feelings.
Shakespeare is used for two telling examples: ‘Who, in my moode, I stab’d unto the heart’ and ‘Fortune is merry, And in this mood will gives us anything.’
Last week I received an email from the somewhat laid back editor of the magazine that I submitted to some while ago. To save you reading back, I’ll recap. My topic has been ‘spiritual needs’. At first I argued that the notion of spiritual needs, as different from religious needs, was so vacuous as to be useless. Those who were pushing the ‘spirituality’ line were, I said, were essentially christians who were disenchanted with christian practise or doubtful about some doctrines.
In response I was told it was an good article, would be published and ‘was a debate that needed to be had.’ One of the reviewers, however, wrote that of we abandoned ‘spiritual needs’, we would lose one of the few vehicles of compassion in the Health Service. In fact, I was already dissatisfied with my thesis because it appeared to support the humanistic/materialist forces – something that was definitely not my intention to do. Also, by then I had read John Lash’s book and understood why christianity is so inherently awful. I therefore rewrote the article arguing that spirituality and Christianity were antithetical and that unless spirituality disassociated itself from religion, and specifically the Abrahamic ones, it would wither.
The Editor lost this article. This I found out after three months patient awaiting.
Resubmitting once more, I received a response a couple of weeks later. The Academic Advisor had said no. Would I like to read the reviews? Not really. And certainly not until I was in the mood. That took six days. What changed? Another mood.
On Tuesday I was feeling a bit frustrated and stuck (over planning the festival). Late afternoon, a friend came round and so happened to show me how to do something on my website. Suddenly my mood improved enormously but it was only when it did so, did I realize what had been getting me down – precisely the websites. That night my energy had returned and I spent half the night playing with my new skill and putting to rest my embarrassment over the appearance of these portals to my world. Thus relieved, I was ready to face criticism.
There were two reviews. First, from the head academic. Scathing.
This paper is a confused and limited account of spirituality towards the end of life, intermixed with a potpourri of some of the different claims that are made about the effects of hallucinogens on spirituality. I found the paper very difficult to understand as it was not written in a logical way. The writers seemed to be overcome by their subject and were very critical of religious faiths without giving the necessary data to support this view.
This paper is not set up in a format suitable for an academic journal. There is no abstract, no conclusion, no full reference list. I do not feel that the authors have a full grasp of the subject, or if they do, are able to express it logically and coherently. However, I do feel that the authors have raised an important topic which does need to be discussed.
I would suggest that it would be helpful if they were able to find a mentor who is used to writing academic papers, putting ideas into a logical sequence and developing an argument. A paper along those lines would be very useful as it would direct attention to the way that spirituality could be enhanced in an elderly community and they could also link it onto the use of hallucinogens for the dying.
The reviewers are anonymous, which makes reply redundant. I would like to tell this man that I have two Masters Degrees and was told by my professor to offer this theme to the magazine. The lack of abstract etcetera was because I was asking if the editor wold be interested in this as an opinion piece. I can add the song and dance later. Also, I would add, approaching this ‘academically’ would be academic, because there is no history of this discussion and bugger all evidence.
But also I’d admit, that I was consciousness raising rather than checking my logic and I suspected myself it may no longer hang together.
The second review began:
It is an unqualified yes from me.
i found it both provocative and revolutionary.
Now I admit I didn’t have to keep that font in the size that it arrived but hey, provocative and revolutionary: I could die happy. The very sobering critique of the abrahamic religions is both persuasive and powerful.
Provocative, revolutionary, persuasive, powerful.
I love this reviewer. (Though the spelling was poor, which is a little off-putting.)
But will the editor do anything, suggest anything, offer me a mentor? I suspect not. Will I come back and have another go? Probably not. Why not? Because, as I pointed out in the conclusion that the academic missed, there’s not a lot that can be done. Again, why not?
Really I want to leave this subject alone right now, especially as you don’t have the article to hand – unless I’ve added it somewhere. It is late at night on a day where I went to Bristol to play with my grandson for a few hours and then went to see a friend who was talking such arrant nonsense about ‘the youth of today’ that I had to leave almost immediately. Even if what he said were true, how can any respectable 60+ year old let himself be heard saying ‘when I was young we…’? Especially as we didn’t.
Phew, got that article out of my head. Bed.
***
Six o’clock on a Sunday morning. I’ve had my tea and settled down at the computer. A car draws up outside the house and four twentysomethings can be heard disembarking: loud happy voices discussing the night’s events briefly fill the street as the drunk ones stumble back to their home. I ask myself, when did I last come back from a party at this hour in the morning and I have to go back nearly forty years and the acid days to come up with an answer.
***
I’ve never thought of myself as an artist; a writer, yes, an artist, no. And even though I’ve been calling the Day of the Dead, a creation, I still didn’t think of myself as an artist. This week I saw an amazing program about a play put on through and for the community in Port Talbot and I began to see my effort as an ‘installation’ done with humans and ideas.
Does thinking of myself as an artist make me feel better or different? Nope.
***
Knowledge is food. Vitiated knowledge is bondage. (Shiva Sutras.)
How have I lived so long and learned so little? This week I have been reading more about the Sumerians and the development of writing circa 4,000BCE. I guess I was taught much of this stuff at school but it has taken forty years to become interested. It has constantly puzzled me that the Christian myth still holds any sway at all after 2,000 years. One would have thought that the very fact that something took place so long ago would self-evidently have only historical interest to a society and world which consider themselves to be rapidly evolving and so ultra post-modern as to be contemplating the end of history. What I am discovering is that the opposite is true and thoughts thought by our Sumerian ancestors are prevalent now and condition how we perceive ourselves five thousand years after they were first thought.
So it goes.
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