In memoriam : RI Obituaries

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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby semper occultus » Mon Oct 01, 2012 4:26 am

Edwin Wilson

Edwin Wilson, who has died aged 84, portrayed himself as the American spy left out in the cold after being branded a traitor and jailed for running arms and explosives to Libya in the years before the Lockerbie bomb. He insisted, however, that the undercover arms deals were done for, and with the knowledge of, his country.

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6:50PM BST 28 Sep 2012
www.telegraph.co.uk

No one disputed that Wilson had spent his working career, from 1955 to 1971, as a CIA agent. But furious debate surrounded his precise status afterwards. For it was in apparent retirement that Wilson set himself up in the international weapons trade, establishing a host of companies in the United States and Europe. The millions he earned bought him luxury properties in Switzerland, America and Britain, and not one but three private planes. He clad the mistress he called “Wonder Woman” in furs, and entertained congressmen, top military brass and senior CIA officials at his sprawling farm in Virginia.

He also spent a great deal of time in Libya, But his high-flying, lifestyle imploded in 1982 when he was lured out of the country in a “sting” operation carried out by his erstwhile colleagues at the CIA. Arrested on charges of having gone “rogue” and shipping 20 tons of powerful C-4 plastic explosive to the Gaddafi regime, he was returned to the United States. Apart from the C-4, prosecutors there said, Wilson had also organised elite military veterans, including US Army Green Berets, to train crack units in Gaddafi’s regime which then assassinated Libyan dissidents in the United States and Germany.

At his trial the following year, Wilson insisted that in 1977, when the huge shipment of explosives was made (just 250 grams of plastic explosive can bring down a commercial airliner), he had still been working for the CIA. The government in Washington, however, denied that the CIA had any contacts with him at the time. Largely on the strength of this assurance, Wilson was sentenced to 52 years. But in 2004, after more than two decades in jail, Wilson and his lawyers convinced a federal judge that the government had told “a pack of lies”, and his conviction was overturned. “America will not defeat Libyan terrorism by double-crossing a part-time informal government agent,” the ruling noted.

In 1993 a book, Trail Of The Octopus, by Lester Coleman (a disgruntled former agent for the US Defence Intelligence Agency), alleged that far from acting as a lone, rogue agent in Libya, Wilson’s deals had been part of an operation to get close to Col Gaddafi, gleaning intelligence all the while, on behalf of the CIA. The price for doing so, the book suggested, was that the spy agency for a decade provided Gaddafi with explosives and training – of the kind essential, for example, to building and planting a bomb on a commercial airliner such as Pan Am Flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie in 1988, killing 270 people.

Edwin Paul Wilson was born on May 3 1928 into a poor farming family in Idaho. Having worked as a merchant seaman, and graduated in Psychology at the University of Portland in 1953, he joined the US Marines and saw action in the closing days of the Korean War. On his discharge, he went to work for the CIA in 1955.

He admitted that after leaving the spy agency, his years in the arms trade had furnished him with a lavish lifestyle. “I had a couple of villas that were very, very nice,” he told the Washington Post in 2004. “I had Pakistani houseboys and I had Libyans working for me, typing up proposals in Arabic.”

After his arrest and trial, a federal court in Virginia convicted Wilson of illegally exporting firearms to Libya and sentenced him to 10 years. Another court in Texas handed him a 17-year sentence for similar crimes. A third court, in New York, sentenced him to a further 25 years, to run consecutively, for attempted murder, criminal solicitation and other charges involving claims that Wilson conspired – while in custody – to have witnesses, prosecutors and even his own wife, Barbara, killed.

In prison, Wilson spent years in solitary confinement trying to prove that he had been framed by the US government, and used the Freedom of Information Act to access official documents that he believed would clear his name. Eventually he found what he was looking for: internal records suggesting that the CIA had been in touch with him at least 80 times during the 1970s, many of those times close to the arms deals for which he had been locked up.

On his release, Wilson filed a civil lawsuit against seven former federal prosecutors and a former executive director of the CIA, but a judge in Texas dismissed the case in 2007. Though his conviction for explosives trafficking was quashed, other convictions against him still stood, including one of trying to hire a hit man from prison to murder the federal prosecutor, something that Wilson denied. At liberty, the former jet-setter was forced to eke out his social security benefits in a room rented from his brother. “Even McDonald’s wouldn’t hire me,” he recalled.

His campaign to restore his good name was not easy. During his career he had not aspired to amiability or morality. Rather, he said, he was simply serving his country. But even this boast won him few sympathisers. “The problem is Ed is not a perfect soul,” remarked one reporter. “He was crooked in his heart.”

Edwin Wilson’s two sons survive him.

Edwin Wilson, born May 3 1928, died September 10 2012
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby Hammer of Los » Mon Oct 01, 2012 6:52 am

...

He clad the mistress he called “Wonder Woman” in furs.


:shock:

...
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby semper occultus » Sat Nov 24, 2012 8:53 pm

In memoriam Professor Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (1953-2012) - 29 August 2012

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Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke
(1953-2012)

It is hard to write an obituary that does justice to someone of the stature, brilliance and manifold human qualities of Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, who died of cancer in Torquay, England, on 29 August. To his relatives and many friends he will be remembered for his warmth and generosity, his enormous charm, his humour, his sparkling personality. To the world of learning he will be remembered for his colossal contribution to the field of western esotericism through his many books and through his initiative in setting up the Exeter Centre for the Study of Esotericism at Exeter University (EXESESO) and the corresponding professorship, of which he became the first incumbent. The programme offered by EXESESO has made it possible for the first time for students all over the world to take a course by distance-learning leading to an MA in the field of Western Esotericism, with the PhD as an additional option. Since the programme began in the autumn of 2005 many students have successfully completed the course and some have gone on to pursue academic careers in the field.

While Nicholas always seemed destined for an academic career, he had a long journey to his professorship. Born in 1953, he was educated at Lancing College and Bristol University, then went on to St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, where he received a doctorate for the thesis that later became his book The Occult Roots of Nazism. The book, first published in 1985, has been continuously in print ever since and has been translated into twelve languages. Initially unable to find a university post, he worked, inter alia, as an inspirational schoolmaster, a banker, and a highly successful fund-raiser for Oxford University. After a brief collaboration with the University of Wales Lampeter, he was appointed to the newly created chair of Western Esotericism at Exeter University in 2005. Meanwhile he was already making an impact as an author. He followed up The Occult Roots of Nazism with two more books on the interface between esotericism and the far right, namely Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism (1998) and Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (2002). An entirely different type of book was his Enchanted City - Arthur Machen and Locality: Scenes from His Early London Years, 1880-85 (1987), reflecting his fascination with topography and history-laden places. He also edited compilations of extracts from the writings of Paracelsus (1999), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (2004) and (with Clare Goodrick-Clarke) G.R.S. Mead (2005). In addition he translated two books on Swedenborg from German, wrote numerous articles and appeared as a compelling and engaging lecturer in many different settings, including the conferences organized by the New York Open Center.

In 1985 he married Clare Badham, an English literature scholar working in publishing who went on to become a homoeopathic practitioner and a specialist in the history, symbolism and practice of alchemy, on which she has written two books, Alchemical Medicine for the 21st Century (2010) and The Hermetic Art of Alchemy (forthcoming) and a number of articles. For some years they ran a publishing house together. Then, when EXESESO was founded, she joined the faculty as a lecturer on “The Hermetic Art of Alchemy” and “The Esoteric Body”. Nicholas and Clare had a rare marriage of hearts and minds, and their silver wedding in Oxford in 2010 was a moving occasion. Their beautiful home, Magnolia at Teignmouth, was the scene of many delightful gatherings and stimulating conversations that always left one inspired and re-charged.

I am one of those who will miss Nicholas intensely as a dear friend over 29 years. I have a diary entry recording the first time we met in July 1983 when I and four others gathered at the Museum Tavern in Bloomsbury, London, to plan the formation of a society where papers on broadly esoteric subjects would be read and discussed. I remember clearly how struck I was by Nicholas’ vitality, charisma, eloquence, humour and loud, infectious laugh. Shortly afterwards we held our first meeting at the Plough in Museum Street, where Nicholas read a paper on Arthur Machen. He later contributed papers on the Gothic revival, which was a major interest of his. We could never agree on a name for our initiative, so we just called it "The Society". Others involved in it included Ellic Howe, Robert A. Gilbert, Gerald Suster, the novelist Eric Towers and the masonic scholar John Hamill. Clare, soon to become engaged to Nicholas, was also an active member. We had many very lively and fascinating evenings, and we thought of ourselves as a sort of avant-garde group of scholars of esotericism.

Those were early days for our discipline. In terms of organized study programmes within academe there was only the lone, pioneering department for the History of Esoteric and Mystical Currents in Modern and Contemporary Europe within the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne, headed by Antoine Faivre. But things were changing gradually, and a few scholars within academe were already beginning to take a serious interest in esoteric subjects. One of them was Frances Yates at the Warburg Institute, who was coming out with books like Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, The Art of Memory and The Rosicrucian Enlightenment. A major break-through came in 1999 with the establishment of the programme at Amsterdam University for the History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents under Prof. Wouter Hanegraaff, followed six years later by the Exeter chair. Another important step was the founding in 2005 of the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism with Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke as one of the co-founders. By then he had become recognized as one of the leading scholars in the field, with a world-wide reputation.

Today esotericism is becoming increasingly firmly established as a field of academic study, with its specialist journals, its conferences, its learned societies and a growing number of university programmes devoted to it. Among those who brought this about, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke stands high. He would be pleased to know that EXESESO is being continued in his spirit. We, his friends and colleagues, owe him an enormous debt, and there are many people throughout the world to whom he will always be an inspiration.

Christopher McIntosh

http://www.esswe.org/#p/archive_2.html
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby Cosmic Cowbell » Mon Dec 17, 2012 11:56 am

Elementary School Shooting

“Fold your small child small, smaller, smaller still
within your palms. Smaller, so that you can
fit her between your molecules. Smaller, still,
so you can wrap her in your nucleus
so she’s always somewhere
closer than close can hold.

If only we could put the ones we loved in places
where we know they could never get hurt.
Chest cavities, the soles of your feet
the places between your fingers.

For there are people who will hurt even the ones
who don’t know what hurt means. There are those
who will pull the trigger at a toothless and grinning
child who has never even seen a gun.

The speed of a bullet travels is 1400 feet
per second. The sound of your heart breaking
and shattering across the floorboards when you
get the phone call saying that your child
may have been killed is endless,
an echo of a scream.

When children die, their parents don’t know
how to live with the other as a reflection of the one
that they had lost. This is the effect
of grief. You can never be around your own
reflection.

This is the color of the light the afternoon
we found out that someone could hate himself
and the world so much that he would kill
a child who doesn’t have a mark
on his skin.

You think of the smooth planes of a child’s cheek.
How they are drenched in such innocence, so much
that you could look at them underneath a microscope
and see only water and more water.

This is the clearness of children.

And what can we do now? What can we do
but hold our children closer, fold them up smaller
within ourselves. Smaller, smaller still —
and make sure that they can never
get far enough to let the world hurt them.

Smaller, still, so that
we can always keep track
of their heartbeat against ours.”

~ Shinji Moon
"There are no whole truths: all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil." ~ A.N. Whitehead
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby semper occultus » Fri Aug 16, 2013 5:39 am

'The Devil's Advocate' Jacques Verges dies aged 88

Jacques Verges, the French lawyer who earned the nickname "Devil's advocate" by defending a series of high-profile criminals from Klaus Barbie to Carlos the Jackal, has died in Paris aged 88.

www.telegraph.co.uk

By AFP
7:34AM BST 16 Aug 2013

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Verges died of a heart attack around 8pm on Thursday in the house where 18th century enlightenment philosopher Voltaire once lived – an appropriate setting for an iconoclast who devoted his life to defending unpopular causes, according to his publishing house Pierre-Guillaume de Roux.

"The ideal place for the last theatrical act that was the death of this born actor who, like Voltaire, cultivated the art of permanent revolt and volte-face," said the publisher in a statement.

Christian Charriere-Bournazel, the head of France's main bar association, told AFP that Verges had lost a lot of weight and mobility since a fall a few months ago.

"We knew the end was near but we didn't know it would come so soon," he said.

Born in Thailand in 1925 to a father from Reunion island and a Vietnamese mother, Verges was a communist as a student and later supported the Algerian National Liberation Front in its fight for independence from France.

After securing the release of Algerian anti-colonialist militant Djamila Bouhired, he married her.

Verges went on to become a high-flying lawyer, making headlines around the world thanks to a client list that includes some of the most infamous names of modern times: Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Venezuelan revolutionary Carlos the Jackal, former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz and ex-Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic.

One of his last high-profile cases was the defence in 2011 of his long-time friend, Cambodia's former communist head of state Khieu Samphan, who faced charges of crimes against humanity over the 1975-1979 Khmer rule.

Then aged 86, the short, bespectacled Verges delivered a pithy riposte to prosecutors who had spent two days detailing the horror the country suffered under the Khmer Rouge regime, during which up to two million people died through starvation, torture and execution.

The prosecution's version of events "sounded like a novel written by Alexandre Dumas about what happened in Cambodia," said Verges in a 10-minute speech, laced with a hint of irony and an occasional suppressed smirk.

Attacking prosecutors' "fantastical view of reality", he told the court: "Remember what Monsieur de Talleyrand, Napoleon's foreign minister, another bandit, said: 'Everything that is excessive is vain'."

"Everything you said was excessive and therefore vain. May the tribunal remember that. I hope I haven't wasted your time, thank you very much," concluded Verges in a trademark summing-up.

Verges' life story reads like a novel, but there is one chapter that he prefers to leave unopened: from 1970 until 1978, when he left his wife and children, and disappeared.

He has referred to this period as "the dark side" of his life, leading to much speculation about these missing years.

Among the more persistent theories are suggestions that he fostered ties with Palestinian militants, that he passed through Congo – or that he lived in Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

Verges himself said he "passed through to the other side of the mirror."

"It's highly amusing that no one, in our modern police state, can figure out where I was for almost 10 years," he told German newsweekly Spiegel in a 2008 interview.

On his return, he became the champion of extremists from both left and right.

He was an advocate of Palestinian violence against the "imperialism" of Israel but he also defended neo-Nazi bombers and leapt at the chance to expose what he saw as establishment hypocrisy in the Barbie trial.

Most of his clients lost their cases but Verges' flair was in courtroom provocation, attacking the prosecution and maximising the publicity of his defendants' cause.

Once asked by France Soir in 2004 how he could defend Saddam Hussein, after he said he was prepared to represent the Iraqi dictator, Verges replied: "Defending Saddam is not a lost cause. It's defending (then US president George W.) Bush that is the lost cause."

Verges, a lover of thick Robusto cigars and author of some 20 books, had his colourful life portrayed in the 2007 Cannes Film Festival documentary "Terror's Advocate" and starred in his own play in France, called "Serial Defender."

In his Spiegel interview, Verges caused a storm when he said "I would have defended Hitler."
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby elfismiles » Mon Aug 26, 2013 4:15 pm

RI threads with "Bob Bowman" ...
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A ... +bowman%22

Remembering 9/11 Truth Scholar Dr. Bob Bowman
“The most unbelievable of all the wild conspiracy theories is the one our government has told us”

Julie Wilson
Infowars.com
August 26, 2013

A highly admired American patriot, advocate of the 9/11 truth movement and dear friend of Alex Jones, Dr. Robert M. Bowman passed away last Thursday in his Florida home.

Dr. Bowman’s career spanned nearly five decades including his service as the former director of the Advanced Space Programs Development (also known as Star Wars) for the U.S. Air Force during the Ford and Carter administrations. He also served as Lt. Col. for the Air Force completing a remarkable 101 combat missions. Academically brilliant, he obtained Ph.D.’s in aeronautics and nuclear engineering from the California Institute of Technology.

An honorary piece by Veterans Today describes Bowman’s shock of the US military’s “insistence on pursuing a purely offensive space weapon capacity – whose only purpose was to launch a sneak attack on Russia and prevail in a nuclear war that would kill tens or even hundreds of millions of people.”

The report says the program was designing space weapons, “including ‘artificial meteorites’ to be dropped on enemy targets, and an energy weapon that could cause whole cities to go up in flames – because it was planning to strike first.”

“During the 1980s and 1990s, he did everything he could to expose the big lie that ‘Star Wars’ was a defensive project, and to work for a sensible, fiscally-responsible, genuinely defensive military posture,” reported Veterans Today.

Back in April of 2011, Dr. Bowman appeared on the Alex Jones Show and discussed his views on the correlation between the economic collapse of America and the pursuit of endless wars. Dr. Bowman accurately described the reasoning behind America’s wars as a way to “secure and maintain an empire for multinational corporations and banks.”


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIrnfg-TqDg

He exposed the government’s abuse of the American people by pointing out their only role as taxpayers funding the wars, leaving the people further impoverished, while the money is directly funneled to the banks and the billionaires.

He expressed the need to no longer have “puppet dictators around the world” that the government supports with troops and weaponry. He strongly called for a “constitutional foreign and military policy.”

Dr. Bowman said, “by bringing our troops home, we can enormously enhance our national security, and at the same time reduce the defense budget by 80%.”

Bowman’s experience as a fighter pilot made him extremely skeptical of the government’s 9/11 narrative. Based on his experience, Bowman “knew that every time a commercial plane goes significantly off-course, a military fighter plane shows up next to it within about ten minutes. The fighter pilot rocks its wings as a signal to ‘follow me’ and get back.”

He wondered how four allegedly hijacked planes flew through America’s skies for nearly two hours without being harassed by US air defenses.

As a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth, Dr. Bob Bowman gave an amazing speech at the 2006 American Scholars Symposium in Los Angeles, in which he exposed the fraud of 9/11, questioning the true motives for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Throughout the speech he discusses the ignorance surrounding the events of 9/11 and its aftermath including the details of the NORAD cover-up surrounding intercept procedures that were not properly executed on that day,” reported Infowars.

See below for a clip of his incredible speech.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKoqEQ7hb_4

Courageous truth telling men such as Bowman rarely find their voice heard the way he did. His patriotism, intellect and bravery will surely be missed by many.


This article was posted: Monday, August 26, 2013 at 1:53 pm

Tags: 9/11, activism, constitution, government corruption, terrorism, war


Related Articles
•Dr. Bob Bowman: Star Wars
•Bob Bowman: Star Wars Secrets & Lies
•Patriots Question 9/11 – Robert Bowman Interview
•Dr. Bob Bowman & Alex Jones: DARPA’s Secret Little Air Force in Space
•CBS Covers Robert Bowman and 9/11 Truth Event

http://www.infowars.com/remembering-911 ... ob-bowman/
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby seemslikeadream » Sat Aug 31, 2013 12:31 pm

I'll dig with it



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Seamus Heaney, Irish Poet of Soil and Strife, Dies at 74
Paul McErlane/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013: Seamus Heaney, an accomplished and admired Irish poet, died Friday. He was 74.
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: August 30, 2013

Seamus Heaney, the 1995 Nobel laureate in literature, who was often called the greatest Irish poet since Yeats, died on Friday in Dublin. He was 74.

His publisher, Faber & Faber, announced the death. The Irish poet Paul Muldoon, a longtime friend, said that Mr. Heaney was hospitalized after a fall on Thursday. Mr. Heaney had suffered a stroke in 2006.

In an address, President Michael D. Higgins of Ireland, himself a poet, praised Mr. Heaney’s “contribution to the republics of letters, conscience and humanity.” Enda Kenny, the Irish prime minister, said that Mr. Heaney’s death had brought “great sorrow to Ireland, to language and to literature.”

A Roman Catholic native of Northern Ireland, Mr. Heaney was renowned for work that powerfully evoked the beauty and blood that together have come to define the modern Irish condition. The author of more than a dozen collections of poetry, as well as critical essays and works for the stage, he repeatedly explored the strife and uncertainties that have afflicted his homeland, while managing simultaneously to steer clear of polemic.

Mr. Heaney (pronounced HEE-nee), who had made his home in Dublin since the 1970s, was known to a wide public for the profuse white hair and stentorian voice that befit his calling. He held lectureships at some of the world’s foremost universities, including Harvard, where, starting in the 1980s, he taught regularly for many years; Oxford; and the University of California, Berkeley.

As the trade magazine Publishers Weekly observed in 1995, Mr. Heaney “has an aura, if not a star power, shared by few contemporary poets, emanating as much from his leonine features and unpompous sense of civic responsibility as from the immediate accessibility of his lines.”

Throughout his work, Mr. Heaney was consumed with morality. In his hands, a peat bog is not merely an emblematic feature of the Irish landscape; it is also a spiritual quagmire, evoking the deep ethical conundrums that have long pervaded the place.

“Yeats, despite being quite well known, despite his public role, actually didn’t have anything like the celebrity or, frankly, the ability to touch the people in the way that Seamus did,” Mr. Muldoon, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the poetry editor at The New Yorker, said in an interview on Friday. “It was almost like he was indistinguishable from the country. He was like a rock star who also happened to be a poet.”

Mr. Heaney was enraptured, as he once put it, by “words as bearers of history and mystery.” His poetry, which had an epiphanic quality, was suffused with references to pre-Christian myth — Celtic, of course, but also that of ancient Greece. His style, linguistically dazzling, was nonetheless lacking in the obscurity that can attend poetic pyrotechnics.

At its best, Mr. Heaney’s work had both a meditative lyricism and an airy velocity. His lines could embody a dark, marshy melancholy, but as often as not they also communicated the wild onrushing joy of being alive.

The result — work that was finely wrought yet notably straightforward — made Mr. Heaney one of the most widely read poets in the world.

Reviewing Mr. Heaney’s collection “North” in The New York Review of Books in 1976, the Irish poet Richard Murphy wrote: “His original power, which even the sternest critics bow to with respect, is that he can give you the feeling as you read his poems that you are actually doing what they describe. His words not only mean what they say, they sound like their meaning.”

Mr. Heaney made his reputation with his debut volume, “Death of a Naturalist,” published in 1966. In “Digging,” a poem from the collection, he explored the earthy roots of his art:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

Though Mr. Heaney’s poems often have pastoral settings, dewy rural romanticism is notably absent: instead, he depicts country life in all its harsh daily reality. His poem “A Drink of Water” opens this way:

She came every morning to draw water

Like an old bat staggering up the field:

The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket’s clatter

And slow diminuendo as it filled,

Announced her. I recall

Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel

Of the brimming bucket, and the treble

Creak of her voice like the pump’s handle.

Mr. Heaney was deeply self-identified as Irish, and much of his work overtly concerned the Troubles, as the long, violent sectarian conflict in late-20th-century Northern Ireland is known.



Another Kind of Music
By PAUL SIMON

Press Association, via Associated Press
Seamus Heaney in 1970.
I was in the audience at the Abbey Theater in Dublin on June 9, 1991, when Seamus Heaney read from his new book of poems, “Seeing Things.” I know the exact date because he kindly inscribed his book for me and dated it. But I wouldn’t have forgotten that night, with or without the month and year. Seamus gave a mesmerizing, witty and emotional performance, and it was a rare opportunity for me to hear the sound of his words spoken with their true accent.

Popular culture likes to house songwriters and poets under the same roof, but we are not the close family that some imagine. Poets are distant cousins at most, and labor under a distinctly different set of rules. Songwriters have melody, instrumentation and rhythm to color their work and give it power; poets accomplish it all with words.

Seamus, though, was one of those rare poets whose writing evokes music: the fiddles, pipes and penny-whistles of his Northern Irish culture and upbringing. You can hear it in “Casting and Gathering”:

Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:

On the left bank, a green silk tapered cast
Went whispering through the air, saying hush
And lush, entirely free, no matter whether
It swished above the hayfield or the river.

And later in the poem:

One sound is saying, ‘You are not worth tuppence,
But neither is anybody. Watch it! Be severe.’
The other says, ‘Go with it! Give and swerve.
You are everything you feel beside the river.’

I love this poem and return to it from time to time to hear the “hush” and “lush” of the fishermen casting their rods from opposite banks, like politicians across the Senate aisle. And I like the friendly pep talk Seamus gives himself when self-criticism is about to get the best of him.

It’s frustrating to try to capture even a glimpse of the man, his verbal virtuosity, his wit and Irish charm. Recovering from a stroke in the hospital, he greeted his friend and fellow poet Paul Muldoon with, “Hello, different strokes for different folks.”

I admire the directness and simplicity of his work, a virtue most writers aspire to but rarely achieve. Seamus and I met through our mutual friend Derek Walcott. I visited him in his home outside Dublin, and we continued our conversations at my place in Manhattan. Obviously, I’m a fan even more of the man than the poetry, though there are few poets I would rank as his equal.



I can feel the tug
of the halter at the nape
of her neck, the wind
on her naked front.

It blows her nipples
to amber beads,
it shakes the frail rigging
of her ribs.

I can see her drowned
body in the bog,
the weighing stone,
the floating rods and boughs.

Under which at first
she was a barked sapling
that is dug up
oak-bone, brain-firkin:

her shaved head
like a stubble of black corn,
her blindfold a soiled bandage,
her noose a ring

to store
the memories of love.
Little adultress,
before they punished you

you were flaxen-haired,
undernourished, and your
tar-black face was beautiful.
My poor scapegoat,

I almost love you
but would have cast, I know,
the stones of silence.
I am the artful voyeur

of your brain's exposed
and darkened combs,
your muscles' webbing
and all your numbered bones:

I who have stood dumb
when your betraying sisters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the railings,

who would connive
in civilized outrage
yet understand the exact
and tribal, intimate revenge.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby MacCruiskeen » Sat Aug 31, 2013 5:26 pm

"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby justdrew » Tue Sep 03, 2013 3:39 pm

On JuIy 9, 2011, parapsychology lost another of its prominent researchers when Milan Ryzl passed away.

http://mankindresearchunlimited.weebly.com/milan-ryzl---esp--hypnosis.html
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby elfismiles » Sat Sep 14, 2013 11:54 am

Seeing LordBalto's post about the origins of the Protocols reminded me that the first place I ever heard about the probable re-write of those controversial docs being a rehash of another doc, substituting one group name for another in a sort of literary false flag attack - whose ripples still infect so many today ... that I remembered I'd seen a notice about the passing of one of the authors of the book where I'd read that, HOLY BLOOD HOLY GRAIL's Michael Baigent.

Re: The Prague Cemetery - Umberto Eco
Lord Balto » 14 Sep 2013 13:37
wrote:
According to the introduction to my now lost translation of the Protocols, it was not "cobbled together," it was taken from another document blaming the Russian aristocracy for everything the Protocols blame on the Jews. It was nothing more than a cut-and-paste job substituting "Jews" for "aristocrats." This sort of literary trickery goes all the way back to the Hebrew bible, where "God' (or IAHUEH) was substituted for the "king of Egypt" or "Pharaoh" (="Royal House") of the original documents. Generally, forgers tend to be not very creative.




Michael Baigent

Michael Baigent, who has died of a brain haemorrhage aged 65, was a co-author of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, one of the most controversial books of the 1980s; in 2006, with Richard Leigh, he lost a plagiarism case against Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, the spectacularly successful thriller which they claimed was based on their book.

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Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, authors of Holy Blood and Holy Grail. Photo: John Downing

6:58PM BST 21 Jun 2013

Written by Baigent, Leigh, and Henry Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail claimed to have uncovered a vast conspiracy to conceal a bloodline descended from Jesus of Nazareth that had played a key role in European history.

A decade earlier Henry Lincoln had produced the television film The Lost Treasures of Jerusalem? about the village of Rennes-le-Château, north of the French Pyrenees where, around 1900, the village curé, Bérenger Saunière, had somehow amassed huge wealth. Between them they developed the theory that Saunière had stumbled on evidence that Jesus had not died on the Cross but had married Mary Magdalene, escaped to southern France and fathered at least one child, starting a royal dynasty that begat the Merovingian kings.

This knowledge, the book claimed, was kept down the centuries by an order called the Prieuré de Sion, a secret society which worked for the restoration of the royal line. The authors speculated that the source of Saunière’s wealth could have been “hush money” paid by the Vatican.

Rollover for sound


Despite its extraordinary claims, which earned the authors threats of hellfire and damnation, the book, published in 1983, impressed at least some critics. “If this sensational conclusion remains both unproved and utterly incredible,” wrote a reviewer in the Financial Times, “much of the material displayed on the way is fascinating.” Anthony Burgess observed that the plot would make a “marvellous theme for a novel”.

Yet when, in 2003, elements of the story were used by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code, Baigent and his co-author Leigh (though not Lincoln) took umbrage, and in 2006 the pair sued Brown’s publishers Random House – coincidentally also the publishers of their own work – for copyright infringement, claiming that the “architecture” of Brown’s work had been taken from their book.

The case went badly for the plaintiffs, particularly for Baigent, who cut such a sorry figure in the witness box that one observer compared the spectacle to “watching a man being flayed alive”. Though Brown freely admitted making use of the book – even to the extent of naming one of his characters Sir Leigh Teabing (an anagram of Baigent) – there was nothing in law that prevented a thriller writer drawing upon someone else’s research. The case, and the subsequent appeal, were lost.

The case attracted international media attention due to the reclusive Brown’s appearance in court and the imminent release of the blockbuster Hollywood film based on his book. The High Court proceedings boosted sales of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, which had stalled at 3,500 copies a year in Britain, to 7,000 copies a week. But against their royalties windfall, Leigh and Baigent were left with a legal bill of about £2 million.

The case took its toll on the two men’s health. Richard Leigh died in 2007, and within six months Baigent collapsed and ended up in hospital, where he was given a liver transplant. He also had to sell his home and move into rented accommodation. There was little disagreement over the biggest winner in the case – Random House, which reaped the rewards of hugely increased sales of both books.

Michael Baigent was born into a Roman Catholic family in Christchurch, New Zealand, in February 27 1948 and grew up in the South Island city of Nelson and the small community of Wakefield. His father left the family when Michael was a boy and he was largely brought up by his maternal grandfather, Lewis Baigent, who owned a sawmill in the Kina Peninsula, and whose surname he took.

From Nelson College, Baigent went up to Canterbury University where he studied Religion and Psychology. After graduation, he left New Zealand, hoping to make a living as a photojournalist. After drifting for several years around Australia, southeast Asia, Bolivia and Spain, in 1976 he arrived in England, where he became interested in the history of the Knights Templar and began researching the mysterious medieval order for a film project.

In the course of his research he met Richard Leigh, an American novelist and short story writer who introduced him to Henry Lincoln, a television scriptwriter, at a summer school where Lincoln was lecturing. The three discovered that they shared an interest in the Knights Templar and agreed to work on what would become The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. While Leigh did most of the writing, Baigent carried out the research.

Matthew d’Ancona, who met the two men during the plagiarism trial, described them in the Spectator as an “exceedingly odd couple ... suspicious as cats” who exuded the “twitchy eccentricity of two men who don’t get out very much”, the bearded Leigh resembling a “retired roadie for the Grateful Dead” and the dapper Baigent “a Wardour Street film distributor on his uppers”.

The pair continued their collaboration in a series of follow-up books, all of which dealt to some extent with sects, secrecy and subversion. In The Messianic Legacy (1986, also co-written with Lincoln), they claimed that the then Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion, Pierre Plantard de Saint Clair (1920-2000), was seeking to restore the Merovingian dynasty and assume some sort of monarchical role in the EU. (It was later proved that Plantard had made up the Prieuré as a hoax in 1956).

Further collaborations included The Temple and the Lodge (1989), a history of Freemasonry and its role in the creation of modern Europe and the United States, and The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception (1991), alleging a Roman Catholic conspiracy to conceal the scrolls. Secret Germany: Von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade against Hitler (1994) was a highly imaginative recreation of the plot to kill Hitler, and The Elixir and the Stone (1997) concerned the hermeticists and their search for wisdom. Their final book together, The Inquisition (1999), was roundly rubbished by the critics as slipshod, historically inaccurate and biased.

Baigent was sole author of several books including The Jesus Papers; Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History, which was released during the plagiarism trial in 2006 and was little more than a reworking of themes from The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. “Nothing in this book,” observed one critic, “need concern grown-ups”.

Michael Baigent was a Freemason and a Grand Officer of the United Grand Lodge of England. From 1991 he was editor of Freemasonry Today.

He is survived by his wife, Jane, by their two daughters and by a stepdaughter and stepson.

Michael Baigent, born February 27 1948, died June 17 2013

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... igent.html
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby KUAN » Sat Sep 14, 2013 5:25 pm

This doco caused a sensation when it came out - among RI types...

In 1972, British script writer Henry Lincoln introduced the Mystery of Rennes-le-Château to the English speaking world through his documentary "The Lost Treasure of Jerusalem." It immediately created a storm of publicity and eventually led to the production of a 2nd documentary "The Priest, the Painter and the Devil" in 1974 and the "Shadow of the Templars" in 1979. This last documentary was already co-researched by Michael Baigent which later led to Henry, Michael and the late Richard Leigh writing the international bestseller Holy Blood Holy Grail.


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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby elfismiles » Fri Sep 20, 2013 3:54 pm

Lucifer's Lodge: William H. Kennedy

Author William H. Kennedy found dead in his home

elfismiles » 20 Sep 2013 19:51 wrote:Was just alerted to this info by a listener... I'm not familiar with his work:

https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A ... lic+Church

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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby elfismiles » Wed Oct 16, 2013 12:49 pm

Dr. Levengood has passed...

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The B and the L of BLT Research have passed leaving only the T (Nancy Talbott)

http://www.bltresearch.com/WCLObit.pdf


William C. ("Lefty") Levengood
March 13, 1925 – September 28, 2013
"Lefty" Levengood, a pioneering biophysicist and long-time resident of Grass Lake, Michigan (and the "L" in the original "BLT Research Team"), has died at the age of 88. Educated at the University of Toledo (B.S. in Physics and Mathematics, 1957), Ball State University (M.A. in Bioscience, 1961) and the University of Michigan (M.S. in Biophysics, 1970), Levengood worked as a research physicist at the now-defunct Institute of Science & Technology and the Dept. of Natural Resources at the University of Michigan from 1961 through 1970, after which he was employed as the Director of Biophysical Research and as a consulting scientist for various private-sector companies.
Because of his wide-ranging scientific curiosity he maintained a well-equipped laboratory at his home in Grass Lake, where he pursued a variety of interests and obtained multiple patents, several relating to seed germination and vigor and the development of new plant varieties through genetic transduction. He also authored more than 50 peer-reviewed papers published in professional scientific journals, including several in the preeminent journals Nature and Science, as well as in a diverse selection of other professional publications, ranging from The American J. of Physics and the J. of Applied Physics to The J. of Experimental Botany, The J. of Chemical Physics, The J. of Physics and Chemistry of Solids, Bioelectochemistry and Bioenergetics, The J. of Geophysical Research, to The J. of Insect Physiology and many others.
In December of 1990, after his wife Glenna had seen a TV crop circle show (which he then subsequently also watched), Levengood contacted Pat Delgado (one of the original British investigators of the phenomenon) and they arranged for Delgado to begin shipping plant samples and controls to "Lefty's" Michigan laboratory. Almost
immediately Levengood began to find multiple anomalies in the plant samples from within the crop circles as compared to the control plants taken at various distances outside the formations (but in the same fields). In these early trial stages of his crop circle research some approaches were non-productive, while others began to build a consistent data set of abnormal changes characteristic of the crop circle plants.
By 1992 both John A. Burke, a New York businessman with a strong avocational interest in electromagnetic theory and Nancy Talbott, a New England music festival producer with a research background at Harvard College and the University of Maryland, had both also become aware of the circle phenomenon and Levengood's involvement and--encouraged by WCL's early laboratory results and the indication that something highly unusual was taking place in the crop fields of England—an informal research collaboration was formed which became known as the "BLT Research Team."
Over the next ten years crop circle plant (and after 1993, also soil) samples and controls were being colllected by hundreds of field personnel in multiple countries and arriving at Levengood's Michigan lab non-stop. During these years "Lefty" worked on circle plants and soils not just from the UK, but also from Germany and Holland, Israel and Australia, the U.S. and several Canadian provinces. In later years circles in Belgium, Poland, Italy and Scandinavia were also examined and three peer-reviewed papers were published presenting many of the research results: Levengood, W.C. (1994) "Anatomical anomalies in crop formation plants," Levengood, W.C. & Burke, John (1995) "Semi-Molten Meteoric Iron Associated with a Crop Circle," and Levengood, W.C. & Talbott, Nancy P. (1999) "Dispersion of energies in worldwide crop formations." The 1994 and 1999 papers were published in Physiologia Plantarum and the 1995 paper in the J. of Scientific Exploration (see: http://www.bltresearch.com/published.php).
One of the clearest indicators that mechanical flattening of crop circle plants by planks and boards was an inadequate explanation of the phenomenon--and that a complex electromagnetic energy source was involved instead--was the discovery that the apical (first plant-stem-node beneath the seed-head) node-length increase regularly documented in crop circle plants was found, repeatedly, to match the degree of change consistent with that predicted by the Beer-Lambert Principle, a well-known law in physics which predicts the results of the absorption of EM energy by matter (see Item #6: http://www.bltresearch.com/plantab.php; see also, the introduction to the v/d Broeke case: http://www.bltresearch.com/robbert.php, and the1999 paper: http://www.bltresearch.com/published/dispersion.php).
Perhaps the most significant discovery of the early BLT circle research resulted—as is often the case in science—when Levengood accidentally forgot to dispose of boxed left-over crop circle samples which had been deprived of water and light for between 10-14 days--and his observation upon re-opening the box that the circle plants so deprived were not only alive, but growing vigorously…while the controls had all died.
He and John Burke were eventually able to reproduce this effect in the lab--creating enhanced growth-rate, increased yield, and increased "stress tolerance" (the ability to withstand drought and lack of sun-light)--in a variety of cereals and vegetables by
exposing normal seed to very specific electrical pulses. Named the "MIR process" (Patent #5740627, and carrying the registered trademark "Stressguard"), the MIR equipment delivers "organized electron-ion avalanches" which then form "organized plasmas," to which the normal seeds are exposed (Item #7, "Laboratory Replication of Crop Circle Plant Changes: http://www.bltresearch.com/plantab.php ).
Mechanical flattening of plants cannot produce this result…and the fact that the MIR process can replicate this regularly-documented capability of those crop circle plant seeds taken from formations which occur late in the growing season (when the seed is fully formed) is proof, again, that highly unusual electromagnetic energies are involved in the authentic crop circle creation process.
Levengood's published hypothesis regarding the causation of crop circles involves the exposure of the plants to multple energetic, interacting, thermodynamically-unstable plasma vortices, which he felt most likely originated in the ionisphere (as opposed to Terence Meaden's more meteorological idea of a plasma vortex which originates in the earth's lower atmosphere)--which vortices, upon impact with the crop surface, then create a wide variety of crop imprints. The fact that plants taken from many "non-geometric" or totally randomly-downed areas also have exhibited the same plant "indicators" of authenticity as many "geometric" circles lends further support to this hypothesis (Item #2: http://www.bltresearch.com/otherfacts.php).
Some of Levengood's crop circle plant findings have been replicated by two other scientists, but the strongest overall substantiation of Levengood's work comes from the Laurance Rockefeller-funded "Clay Mineral XRD Study" conducted on a 1999 Edmonton, Canada crop formation. WCL's participation in this study was limited to his typical plant work and examination of soil samples for the presence of magnetic material. Of the four scientists involved in the XRD study, Levengood was the only one who had ever even heard of a crop circle—a protocol specifically designed to avoid any possibility of "experimenter bias." Also, none of the scientists involved knew each other or had any contact during the study.
The results showed not only a statistically-significant increase in the crystalline "structure" of the clay minerals examined (at the 95% level of confidence)—but also revealed a statistical correlation at "greater than the 99% level of confidence" when Levengood's plant-abnormality data were compared with the clay mineral XRD results—the sampled plants and soils having been taken from precisely the same sampling locatons. With a correlation at the 99% level of statistical confidence there can be no question regarding Levengood's accuracy.
Finally, the eminent clay mineralologist and XRD expert who interpreted the results of this study, Dr. Robert C. Reynolds, Jr. of Dartmouth College, not only reaffirmed the previous XRD and statistical results, he concluded that the energy involved in creating this crop circle had to be an "energy unknown to science."
Throughout his career Levengood remained interested in transformations caused to living organisms by exposure to various energies, and the methods through which these alterations were achieved. Toward the end of his life his research focussed primarily on bioelectric fields in living organisms and "subtle energies" and methods by which to demonstrate their presence.
As seems to be the unfortunate "norm" in the scientific arena today, profoundly new ideas and concepts are often initially overlooked or dismissed, or—if they represent possible serious challenge to currently accepted scientific paradigms—are usually vigorously attacked. Lefty was aware that much of his later work would likely face this problem, but with an ongoing desire to expand his knowledge and though the application of his professional expertise, he persisted. In regards to the crop circles his work has laid a foundation upon which future scientific efforts will build, and he will be remembered by many other people also with whom he worked on additional not-yet-understood "anomalous" phenomena.
- Rest in Peace –
Nancy Talbott
BLT Research Team
October, 2013

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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby Carol Newquist » Thu Oct 17, 2013 7:17 pm

Only the good die young.

http://gothamist.com/2013/08/28/gus_the_central_park_zoo_polar_bear.php#photo-1

Image

Gus, The Central Park Zoo Polar Bear, Dies At 27

Gus, the beloved Central Park Zoo polar bear whose "depression" made headlines, died at age 27 yesterday.

The Wildlife Conservation Society explained, "Gus was euthanized yesterday while under anesthesia for a medical procedure conducted by WCS veterinarians. Gus had been exhibiting abnormal feeding behavior with low appetite and difficulty chewing and swallowing his food. During the procedure, veterinarians determined Gus had a large, inoperable tumor in his thyroid region. A necropsy will be conducted to determine the full pathology of the condition." The WCS adds, "The median life expectancy for a male polar bear in zoos is 20.7 years, according to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums."

Gus was not a native New Yorker: He was born at the Toledo Zoo in 1985 and arrived at the Central Park Zoo in 1988. In 1994, Gus became a media darling when it was noticed that he swam endless laps in his pool. It was determined that he was bored, so the zoo developed an enrichment program for him, which, the WCS says, "included providing moveable items for him to manipulate, implementing positive reinforcement training sessions, and having Gus forage for food to keep his mind and body active and healthy."
He had a great time with his companion Ida, but Ida died in 2011, raising concerns that he was depressed once more.

Jim Breheny, WCS Executive Vice President of Zoos and Aquarium, "Gus was an icon at the Central Park Zoo and a great source of joy for our visitors and staff. He was an important ambassador for his species bringing attention to the problems these bears face in the wild due to a changing environment. Polar bears are apex predators - the kings of their domain, but vulnerable in a world affected by climate change brought on by human activity."
Gus really did love swimming in his pool—here's some footage we took last year:

http://gothamist.com/2013/08/28/gus_the_central_park_zoo_polar_bear.php#photo-1

The Wildlife Conservation Society estimates that 20 million people saw Gus.
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Re: In memoriam : RI Obituaries

Postby justdrew » Sun Nov 17, 2013 6:40 pm

British author Doris Lessing, whose powerful feminist and anti-colonial writing won her the Nobel Literature Prize, died Sunday at the age of 94, her agent and publisher said.

The author’s longtime agent and friend Jonathan Clowes said Lessing had died peacefully at her London home in the early hours of Sunday morning.

“She was a wonderful writer with a fascinating and original mind,” he said.

“It was a privilege to work for her and we shall miss her immensely.”

Best known for the 1962 novel “The Golden Notebook” which is today considered a landmark feminist work, Lessing became the oldest winner of the Nobel Literature Prize in 2007.

She penned more than 50 novels, ranging from radical political critiques to science fiction.

Nicholas Pearson, her editor at HarperCollins, said her life and career had been “a great gift to world literature”.

“She wrote across a variety of genres and made an enormous cultural impact,” he said in a statement.

“Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational. We’ll miss her hugely.”




Doris Lessing wrote:“At the risk of boring you, I must repeat, I am afraid, repeat, reiterate, reemphasize, it is not a question of your arriving on Planet Earth as you leave here. You will lose nearly all memory of your past existence. You will each of you come to yourselves, perhaps alone, perhaps in the company of each other, but with only a vague feeling of recognition, and probably disassociated, disorientated, ill, discouraged, and unable to believe, when you are told what your task really is.

You will wake up, as it were, but there will be a period while you are waking which will be like the recovery from an illness, or like the emergence into good air from a poisoned one. Some of you may choose not to wake, for the waking will be so painful, and the knowledge of your condition and Earth’s condition so agonizing, you will be like drug addicts: you may prefer to continue to breathe in oblivion. And when you have understood that you are in the process of awakening, that you have something to get done, you will have absorbed enough of the characteristics of Earthmen to be distrustful, surly, grudging, suspicious.

You will be like a drowning person who drowns his rescuer, so violently will you struggle in your panic terror.

“And, when you have become aroused to your real condition, and have recovered from the shame or embarrassment of seeing to what depths you have sunk, you will then begin the task of arousing others, and you will find that you are in the position of rescuer of a drowning person, or a doctor in a city that has an epidemic of madness. The drowning person wants to be rescued, but can’t prevent himself struggling. The mad person has intermittent fits of sanity, but in between behaves as if his doctor were his enemy.

“And so, my friends: that’s it. That’s my message to you. It’s going to be tough. Every bit as tough as you expect.”
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