Skip to main content

Wild Child



This trailer for Francois Truffaut's 'The Wild Child' probably says more about the publicity team at MGM's view of childhood than Truffaut's - the juxtaposition between 'innocence' and 'animal' as if the human is the former and the latter is freighted with the unkempt, the unruly and the dangerous. If only humans were as innocent as animals, the earth could breathe more freely!

I saw this beautiful film many years ago and reading about it in Jay Griffiths' 'Kith' reanimated a desire to see it again. It tracks the historic story of a child found in eighteenth century France who, to all appearance, had grown up in the woods and the efforts undertaken to allow him to re-enter and learn human society (mostly forlorn). Such cases, few and far between, have fed long running debates on what it means to be human, most especially what is the role of language in the act of making human.

Similar territory is traversed by David Malouf in his wonderfully imagined novel of Ovid in exile interacting with a child who has been nurtured by wolves: 'An Imaginary Life'. Malouf decidedly comes down on the side of believing that empathy and communication lie on the other side of language. Its emergence makes more complex the possibilities of expression, it does not prescribe its possibility. The natural solution of a Romantic.

Truffaut's film arrived in the daily of dose of purchases - I do have to learn to stop (or, at least, slow down, lest the prophecy of my mother's birthday card is realised: an elderly man submerged to his shoulders in books)!

Amongst the incoming was Frances Hodgson Burnett's 'The Secret Garden' another meditation on the nature of childhood, courtesy of reading Griffith's beautiful evocation of this much loved 'children's book'.

'The Forbidden Book' by Joscelyn Godwin and Guido Mina di Sospiro which is an 'occult' novel written by actual esotericists, scholars of the subject, one of whom, Godwin, many years ago I enjoyed getting to know at Temenos' conferences and who gifted us, as a conference, a beautiful way of collective singing, using only the vowel sounds, chosen by each participant of their own volition, yet collaboratively evoking the most magical and beautiful wordless song.

And finally a book I did not have to buy, 'Leading from the Emerging Future' by Otto Scharner and Katrin Kaufer as one of its author's, Otto, kindly sent it to me as we explore how better we might collaborate with the Presencing Institute he founded at MIT.

When any of them will get to be read is anyone's guess!!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age
13 comments
Read more

Searching for paradise in the hidden Himalayas

At moments of dislocation and intense social uncertainty people will appear offering the possibility of another land where people will be blessed, liberated and genuinely at home. In this case, it was not 'Brexit' but a hidden land of actual immortality, enfolded within the mountain ranges around Mt Kanchenjunga on the Nepalese/Sikkim border. Unlike Shangri-la, Beyul Demoshong was not simply a physical space, carefully hidden (as imagined in Hilton's Lost Horizon) but an occulted place spiritually hidden. The person offering this journey and opening the way to it was the 'crazy lama', Tulshuk Lingpa. Lingpa was a 'terton' a finder of 'terma' which were texts magically hidden until discovered at the right moment for them to be of maximum usefulness to people's spiritual development. They were often hidden by Padmasambhava, the robust wonder-working bringer of Buddhism to Tibet; and, Tibetan Buddhism is alive with such discoveries (though und
Post a Comment
Read more

Parzival and the neutral angels

Fresh from contemplating 'Lost Christianity', I read Lindsay Clarke's fabulous re-telling of Wolfram von Eschenbach's poem, 'Parzival and the Stone from Heaven' from which 'Christendom' is lost! Von Eschenbach was a sacred poet but one of ecumenical sympathies where not only is Parzival's final battle (unknowingly) with his brother, the piebald Saracen, Feirefiz, essential to his self-discovery but the two of them enter the Grail castle together and are granted together a vision of the 'stone' that is the Grail. When Feirefiz asks whether it is permitted to see this Christian  mystery, Parzival answers (in Clarke's version) yes for, "all Nature's increase is there, so I think that this stone from Heaven must be a living emblem of the earth itself, which is mother and father to us all." There are knights, ladies, sorcerers, hermits and wise old hags abounding in Eschenbach's world but interestingly for a mediev
Post a Comment
Read more