Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 6

I do wonder, after reading Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem,” whether language has indeed enabled these ancient stories to be drawn out of our unconscious in ways to help us understand who we are, where we came from and what we’ve tried to do to ensure our survival as a species. I ended Part 5 with the Mesopotamian story of Marduk.

In this part, Part 6, I will go through the Egyptian story of Osiris, Isis and Horus but there are a few other things I’d like to include before I get there.

I’ve written briefly in past parts of Do We Know Why We Know about the Nephilim, Anakim and Rephaim. In the article that started this series—A Changing Frame-Of-Reference—I wrote, “And why is there no mention of the pyramids in the Bible? The giant Nephilim people are included.” I also included all three in Part 4 when I wrote, “the soil beneath the earth’s surface,” or how Sheol from (Psalm 6:5) is defined. The Sheol known as the abode of the Rephaim or the dead, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name two of several instances where the giants are mentioned in the OT. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead,” while other names of these giants from this ancient text include the Nephilim and the Anakim. Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim.

That these giants mentioned in numerous places throughout the OT piqued my curiosity, when the pyramids are not mentioned at all. Why is that? What were the authors’ intentions or the hermeneutics behind including the Nephilim, the Rephaim or the Anakim? We may never know. But recently I discovered that in another book not included in The Bible was The Book of Enoch that includes writing about the Nephilim at length.

What I find interesting here is the apparent association of Enoch, who is mentioned several times in The Bible, to Thoth (the Egyptian god of wisdom and writing) and part of Osiris story I will soon talk about. Enoch is also associated with the Greek god Hermes—messenger of the gods. Together the three represent the figure Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes the Thrice Great). Poking my head a little ways down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, I had written about Giordano Bruno who was executed for his ideas around an helio-centric galaxy in Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know, who was one that thought Hermes Trismegistus was a pagan prophet who foresaw the coming of Christianity. There were several other Christian writers including Augustine who predicted the same thing in their writings.

I’m still in the rabbit hole. Hermes Trismegistus seems may be associated with Atlantis but more of that will have to come in my next update. But some more on Enoch from Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Enoch was one of only two people God took to heaven without them dying. The other was Elijah 2 Kings 2, “Now when the Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind, Elijah and Elisha were on their way from Gilgal.”

I will investigate further The Book of Enoch in coming articles but do you know why God took Enoch and Elijah to heaven without them dying? Some believe they are the two people mentioned in Revelations 11:3 that will witness end times, “And I will grant authority to my two witnesses, and they will prophesy for 1,260 days, clothed in sackcloth.” Leave it to say there’s more to come.

But it’s time to get on with the story of Osiris, Isis and Horace.

Osiris was an old king who had established the Egyptian state when he was young. He was great hero but had become archaic and stubbornly blind. Though he represented the embodiment of Egyptian custom and tradition, which is what the “pyramid” had come to represent, he no longer saw the world as he should, given his position. Osiris, being old and unseeing of what he should, represents culture, as culture seems to be an essence that is old and deliberately blind; culture always seems to be this way. It’s a construct of what came from those who are now dead, the dead who have stopped living and are out of date. Being dead they can’t update themselves, and the living inhabit their corpse like in the Marduk story where the gods inhabited their father Apsu’s corpse, the story I describe in my last article Do We Know Why We Know Osiris is old and not seeing what he should and stubbornly won’t look where he knows he should.

Osiris doesn’t have the energy or the spirit to deal with his brother Seth, who is a scoundrel, a precursor to the western idea of Satan. Osiris knows this but underestimates his brother’s malevolence and strength. Seth wants to be the ruler and take over the kingdom.

In reading history, every stable society is threatened by this stubborn blindness and malice. Every bureaucracy becomes stagnate and lethargic. History has shown this in the rise and fall of empires like the Roman and Ottoman but also in the business world with fortune 500 companies of limited life spans (i.e. Digital Equipment, Compaq). Mention DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) or Compaq to anyone under 30 years of age and they don’t know who you’re talking about. I wrote a paper on what makes a company sustainable years ago in holding what made them successful in the first place (as a start up) being quite opposite to what keeps them going in a sustainable way (systems and procedures).

Osiris ignores Seth. Seth waits in the wings for Osiris to one day make a mistake or show his weakness. When he does, Seth is ready and pounces. He kills Osiris and then cuts him up into pieces that he spreads across the entire Egyptian state. The Egyptians regarded their provinces as pieces of Osiris’s body. Now Osiris is a god and can’t actually die that represents the inherent spirit of structure that can’t be destroyed either; there’s always structure, as the new one replaces the old one. The structure may be different but it’s still structure and always returns. Structure can be hurt and broken into pieces like Osiris; things fall apart because they get old and are under minded by something else. It seems to be what the Egyptians were trying to figure out. Not unlike their predecessors in Mesopotamia with Marduk. The pieces of Osiris are spread over Egypt so he can’t get himself back together; things fall apart and can’t be brought back together.

But the spirit of Osiris lives in the pieces. Order is demolished and chaos emerges in Isis. Isis is Queen of the Underworld. She is chaos. She’s also Osiris’s wife. Osiris and Isis (order and chaos) are together like Apsu and Tiamat from the Mesopotamian story in my last article. The order of Osiris collapses and up comes chaos: Isis—searching. She’s looking for order; chaos cries out for order. Isis goes all around Egypt that’s in a state of chaos, trying to put Osiris, her husband, back together. She finds Osiris’s phallus and uses it to make herself pregnant. The pieces of Osiris are still alive and unite with chaos to produce something new—a new order. That’s the story of the dissolution of structure into chaos and its resurrection, or coming back to life. Isis is pregnant and goes back down into the underworld to give birth to Horus on the advice of Thoth, god of wisdom, as he knows that Seth will try to kill her child. Horus is the son of the great mother and the great father.

A quick side note on Thoth, who I mentioned earlier, being connected with Enoch in Hermes Trismegistus, who is also said to be an engineer from the destroyed Atlantis.

Horus is known as the Egyptian eye and a messianic figure. Much of the mythology that described Horus parallels the Christ story from the Judeans coming out of Egypt and Christians emerging from the Jewish community. There’s influence of Mesopotamian and Egyptian thinking apparent in the development of later ideas on organizing society. Paintings of Isis with Horus on her lap seem similar in content and form to Mary holding infant Christ. The Holy Mother of God and the hero described as a metaphor by Joseph Campbell. This is not only a Christian motif but goes much deeper. “It’s a human motif,” as Jordan Peterson describes.

Isis gives birth to Horus and Horus grows up outside the kingdom in the underworld. He sees what differentiates him from his father Osiris, and like Marduk from my last article, he can see, see like a falcon and is symbolized as such. Birds of prey have better sight than humans.

Horus comes back to fight Seth. A significant difference between Horus and Osiris is that Horus doesn’t underestimate Seth malevolence and knows what he is up against. Horus battles Seth to get the kingdom back. While Horus and Seth are fighting, Seth tears out one of Horus’s eyes. Horus’s eye is torn out but still he defeats Seth banishing him to the nether regions of the kingdom. Horus can’t kill him because, like structure, the malevolent destructive force that threatens structure never dies. It’s always there and can only be removed temporarily.

Horus is king. King god. With his removed eye, one might think he’d pop it back in his head and take his place in the upper most position amongst the pantheon of the gods. But that isn’t what Horus does. He goes back to the underworld where Osiris’s metaphysical existence lies. Horus hands Osiris his eye giving Osiris sight. Osiris regenerates himself only with vision. Horus and Osiris now linked together return to the world to rule jointly. The Egyptians came to believe that the pharaoh, who had an immortal spirit, was the embodiment of the conjunction of Horus and Osiris and gave the pharaoh sovereignty. The Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians I wrote about last time, were trying to puzzle out who should lead civilization. Who should be pharaoh and what does the pharaoh have to be in order for things to work and order to be restored? The pharaoh has to be awake to evil and chaos while embodying Egyptian tradition to place him at the highest pinnacle of society’s structure.

This in a way is similar to the battle of the gods through the centuries with the expectation that the highest possible moral virtue would emerge as a consequence of that competition. That’s the eye on the top of the pyramid that hasn’t yet been part of my pyramid discussion. What’s at the top of the pyramid isn’t the same as what the rest of the pyramid is made of. The pyramid is a representation of structure. Something rises to the top of the pyramid—the eye in this case. The Egyptians figured out what puts something at the top of the pyramid is attention, paying attention. Keep your eyes open; keep watch, which is not the same as thinking. The thing about human beings is that we can see, better than any other mammal. The capacity to see is what we use in the world. More than fifty percent of the human brain’s cortex—the largest part and the ultimate control of—is organized around vision. The brain of most animals is organized around smell. We stand up right and can see a long distance. The human ability to see is what saves us and what saves human communities and that’s what the stories like Marduk and Osiris seem to be trying to tell us.

Why didn’t storytellers just say so? They likely didn’t know how. It’s taken a long time—forever—to figure out. We’re still trying to understand it.

This extends back to the first article I wrote for Do We Know Why We Know and the Cormac McCarthy essay, “The Kekule Problem.” McCarthy describes that our unconscious has been whirling around and developing for two million years or longer and language infected us with the primary purpose to help us understand our unconscious, for less than a hundred thousand years. That is virtually all but an instant in time when we know our universe is 13.8 billion years old; earth is 4.5 billion years old and life on earth is 3.5 billion years old. However long our unconscious has been developing 13.8 billion years or 3.5 billion years the development of language is a mere, smidgen of an instant of that time; we’re still in the beginning of the beginning stages.

I’m still finding out lots. For me, it’s an interesting journey. I hope next to look deeper into Enoch with the potential of learning more on the Greek story of Gaia and Uranus. Maybe some more even on Atlantis. We’ll see.

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More will come in my next post.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what many readers have already discovered. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 5

I ended my last part of the Do We Know Why We Know series alluding to the Osiris and Marduk stories being part of this next article. I was also relieved that my computer woes were behind me and I hadn’t lost any of my work. I won’t be labor the point any more and get right into things. As it turns out there’s too much to include both Osiris and Marduk in a single writing especially after what I discovered.

I’ve chosen Marduk as I recently learned that Bel, who’s mentioned in the Old Testament, is Marduk, the patron god of Babylon. Bel is included in several places in the Old Testament including Jeremiah 51:44, “And I will punish Bel in Babylon, and take out of his mouth what he swallowed”, as well as Jeremiah 50:2 and Isaiah 46:1. Through this search I also learned that there are three additions to The Book of Daniel with more on Bel but are considered deuterocanonical and not considered part of The Bible by Protestant dominations. They were rejected in the 16^thcentury by the Protestant movement because those sections of Daniel were not in Jewish Bibles. There is an extension to Chapter 3 and two additional Chapters, 13 and 14. Chapter 14 is entitled Bel and the Dragon that seems appropriate until you read the text. Tiamat, in the Marduk story, is recognized as a dragon who fights Marduk for control of the world hence my thinking Bel (Marduk) and the Dragon (Tiamat). But in the Daniel story, it is Daniel who destroys both Bel and the dragon. The Daniel chapter is more about Bel the idol than the Marduk story. There’s more here but that’s for another time. The actual Marduk story will come later in this article.

Let me try and set the stage for the Marduk story is relaying to us.

Joseph Campbell wrote, “Mythology … is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.” I haven’t used the word “mythology” in any of the Do We Know Why We Know articles but in the last one I wrote that these “stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them” and were “filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us.” I’m including this here to keep in mind not only the literality but the interpretation and translation of these stories from ancient times in what they’re saying. There are clues about us but if language infected us as Cormac McCarthy suggested in his essay “The Kekule Problem” to explain our unconscious, which I wrote about in the first Do We Know Why We Know, we are still in the very early stages of understanding what has been constructed in our unconscious in the two million years of its existence, with language seemingly as useful as chopsticks would be to build a house; simply put language may be the tool for the job of deciphering our unconscious but it’s a long way from ideal. But I suppose it’s a start.

In the last article, I briefly mentioned the city of Troy, from Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, that most thought was a story of fiction, until it was discovered at Hisarlik, Turkey in 1870. I mentioned Atlantis as well that hasn’t yet been uncovered but how the Plato story of the legendary, mythical city, from his dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, sank into the ocean in 9,600 B.C. and how this date aligns exactly with the date of the dramatic rise of sea level that is now recognized as the end of the Younger Dryas period 11,600 years ago. The advanced, ancient civilization of Atlantis is somewhere; we just haven’t found it yet or we don’t recognize it for what it is.

What I also think is extremely difficult to understand about knowing what we know, is the conception of what life was like or will be like in the past or the future respectively. I’ll illustrate in a moment. That the time was millennia ago makes it all the more difficult to understand what we knew and were at that time. Like the adage, “the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.” We only discover parts from the past that we use to decipher the whole.

This is one of the reasons I’ve landed on the Mesopotamian story of Marduk to start with, potentially being the first metastory that some seem to think may be the beginning of our conception of the fundamental structure of reality. The Mesopotamians, like other civilizations, appeared to be trying to get it right in how to organize society to create a sustainable civilization.

When we read the stories, it’s difficult not to put our spin of how we see the world today versus how the people of the time would have seen, heard or even understood things. Think of this today, in youth trying to imagine the world with what’s been developed for our every day lives in the last thirty years. In our home 1990, we didn’t have the Internet and didn’t know anyone that did. I don’t know that I even really knew what it was. We had VHS tapes, CDs, cassettes and albums. Then, it was nearly unimaginable to think we’d soon have more songs than we could listen to in a lifetime contained in a small device we could hold in our hand or put in our pocket. Never mind imagining what we have today in a smart phone that allows us to access the Internet, phone or text anyone anywhere in the world, buy things, take high quality photos and videos, watch almost any movie we want to or listen to any song that has ever been recorded in history that’s affordable to the vast majority of us. We can listen to any and as many songs as we want to at a cost per month that’s less than what one CD would cost in 1990. How does a person who’s twenty today even picture 1990? And that’s only thirty years ago. The Marduk story is eight thousand years old! It’s hardly inconceivable.

Let me continue my pause on the Marduk story a little longer.

I mentioned in Part 4 of Do We Know Why We Know that the pyramids are not mentioned at all in The Bible. It seems strange when in Exodus, great lengths are taken to describe the relatively “simple” construction of the tabernacle where the Ark Of The Covenant was contained. The pyramids were there according to the historic timeline. The powerful King Khufu built the Great Pyramid of Giza in 2,540 B.C. According to Josephus, who I’ve not mentioned yet but wrote about biblical times in his epic The Antiquities of the Jews, includes the word “pyramids” once in Book II, “they set them also to build pyramids.” Interesting here when the word “pyramids” is used, most, I think, would immediately figure the Great Pyramids of Giza.

So if the pyramids were there and only significant enough to warrant one mention between the two epic accounts of the times—The Bible and The Antiquities of the Jews—then maybe it’s not a pyramid thing at all but a people thing. Were the Judeans and Hebrews who wrote The Bible even in Egypt then? Maybe the Judeans and Hebrews didn’t want to include them.

The first Judeans in Egypt came with the First Persian Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 B.C. Apparently Cyrus credited Marduk with the inspiration to allow the Jewish community to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple of Yahweh. There’s much more detail on this but according to the Old Testament (2 Kings 25:22-26) many Judeans took refuge in Egypt with the destruction of Jerusalem and Judah that took place in 597 B.C. after the assassination of Gedaliah, who Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar had appointed governor of Judah.

Additionally, the term Hebrew is first seen in The Bible in Genesis 14:13 of the Old Testament, “Then one who had escaped came and told Abram the Hebrew.” Archeology has related Hebrews to the name of the seminomadic Habiru people found in Egyptian inscriptions of the 13^th and 12^th centuries B.C. as having settled in Egypt. This fits close with Moses leading the liberation of the people of Israel out of Egypt in the 13^th century—the time of Exodus.

With these dates neither the Judeans nor the Hebrews were around for the building of the Great Pyramids.

Then I wondered maybe the pyramids the Hebrews or Judeans worked on from Josephus’s works were the much smaller, man-made brick pyramids that have not fared well over time. But when I looked, even these last pyramids were built in Egypt around 1,700 B.C. If the Judeans didn’t begin to come into Egypt until 597 B.C. and the Hebrews until the 13^thcentury we have a 1,100-year to 500-year gap respectively between when Judeans and the Hebrews were first in Egypt and the construction the man-made brick pyramids. So from Josephus’s writing, maybe the Hebrews or Judeans were repairing the brick-constructed pyramids but they weren’t building them. The pyramids are not likely mentioned in The Bible because the Hebrews and Judeans didn’t build them or want them included.

Now before I leave the pyramids and why I’m even writing about them here, is the construction of the Great Pyramid, the first pyramid built in Egypt, was remarkable. The design, precision, ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Great pyramids are what make them the only Seventh Wonder of the World that’s still in existence and leaves experts to question how the Egyptians even built them. But as incredible a feat as the construction of the first great pyramids were in 2,500 B.C. as building them continued until 1,700 B.C., their construction grew steadily less impressive. Man-made brick replaced the quarried limestone block construction in the later pyramids and the impressive precise construction grew consistently shabbier. Some say this is attributable to the pharaohs’ decline in power and dwindling financial resources. No one seems to know for sure.

Why am I spending so much time on pyramids when I said I was going to talk about Marduk and one of the earliest civilizations to exist?

Well because there seems a connection between the pyramids and the Mesopotamian culture and the story of Marduk. The Mesopotamian existential view of the world had the earth as a disk and the space above it, a dome (I couldn’t help but think of Jim Carrey in The Truman Show when I learned this). Surrounding the disk was seawater and below the earth was fresh water; the disk floated on freshwater. They extended this (potentially from what I wrote earlier about language and our unconscious) to the water, recognizing it as deities: Tiamat (the god of the seawater) and Apsu (the god of the watery deep beneath the earth or fresh water). More on water is coming in a future article; oh, what we don’t know.

I wrote in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference about the pyramids being representative of the spherical earth or a hemisphere and how the height divided by the perimeter is equal to 2Pi. If the Mesopotamia idea of the world was a dome on a disk, which is a hemisphere, the pyramid seems a likely representation of the dome concept of the world. Were pyramids being considered prior to the Egyptians?

Why did I really choose the Marduk story to start? Mesopotamia appears to be the first existence of human society that dates back to 6,000 B.C. Why I mention this is because of what I wrote in Part 4. My three areas of focus for the Do We Know Why We Know series seem to be centred on: the space above us (the universe or everything outside of us), the space below us (the ground we stand on), and, the space inside us (our unconscious and language). The Mesopotamian story is the first to capture these. The space below us is Apsu, the god of fresh water beneath the disk of the earth. The space above the earth and around it is the dome and Tiamat, the goddess of seawater around the disk. Even now, in searching for who we are and where we came from and why we know what we know 8,000 years later, we’ve penetrated the seawater to its greatest depth at the Challenger Deep. There’s a huge focus on the dome and what lies “out there” in space with space agencies around the world like NASA and Spacex but very little (other than the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia) on what lies inside earth and what we stand on beyond what’s just below the surface as are most archeology sites.

I’ll throw in here from my last article that I’ve started reading Jules Verne’s 1864 novel Journey To The Center Of The Earth. I wonder what I’ll find?

Okay, the Marduk story. Mesopotamia became the amalgamation of middle-eastern tribes over many years. The gods of all these tribes warred in an abstract space out of which the metastory of Marduk emerged. Could this be our unconscious?

Apsu and Tiamat are inseparable and often depicted as two serpents entwined together like the double helix of DNA. How did the Mesopotamians know about the building blocks of life? Was it from our unconscious? From Apsu and Tiamat’s combined waters are created a family of unruly gods that Apsu decides he needs to deal with. The gods become upset and choose their resourceful god Ea to save them. Ea casts a spell to make Apsu sleep and then slays him (Apsu represents structure and culture). Tiamat is enraged at the killing of her husband and promises revenge (she represents chaos and nature). The gods are afraid of Tiamat’s reaction to what they’ve done. They know her power and hide, by inhabiting Apsu’s corpse. Tiamat creates an army of dragons and monsters to destroy the gods and takes Kingu her son, the demon of demons, as her consort and establishes him as leader of her army of monsters. Tiamat gives Kingu the Tablet of Destinies that give the bearer great powers and he wears as a breastplate. Ea and his wife Damkina create Marduk who is destined to become king of the gods. Tiamat wants to destroy Marduk and make Kingu the all-powerful one. But Marduk with arrow and net goes after Tiamat and destroys her by filling her up with a wind and killing her with an arrow that splits her in half. He uses each half of her to create the Earth and the heavens that he contains in his net. Marduk kills Kingu and captures the Tablet of Destinies to become the all-powerful. Marduk is all seeing with eyes all around his head and has the magic of speech. Marduk mixes Kingu’s blood with clay from the earth and molds the first human beings entrenching them with the element of evil. He makes human beings to serve the gods. Marduk becomes head of the Babylonian pantheon by the middle of the second millennium B.C.

Again from McCarthy’s “Kekule Problem” of language infecting us with the ability to explain our unconscious; we being the only mammal of five thousand that has language while all the others seem to do fine without it (think of how your cat rules the house). The evil element in human beings from this Mesopotamian story makes us different than all other beings as well. We’re the only creatures capable of deception and malevolence. We see this in the Adam and Eve story, Genesis 3:6-7, “she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” When they knew they were naked, they knew the difference between good and evil and that they could do evil. Was language part of the evil package? Marduk brought the magic of speech to the table. Certainly seems part of allowing us to understand it.

Why is this so important? It appears to be the beginning of our (human beings) conception of the fundamental structure of reality. In this story, the Mesopotamians appear to be doing their best to get it right. They’re looking at how to best organize society. When structure and culture fall, nature and chaos take over until the next order takes control. Their Marduk story illustrates how Marduk got organized against the emergence of chaos and how he mastered it. The gods declare a top dog that has eyes and speech and goes out voluntarily to encapsulate chaos cutting it to pieces to make the world. Isn’t that who should be top dog? That’s the heavenly domain. Now think of the story of David. Transferring the myth existentially to the Emperor of Mesopotamia then becomes the manifestation of Marduk on earth, the sovereign being, and all seeing, all knowing and able with speech. Why should they be king? They pay attention. They speak properly. They keep chaos at bay. They make ingenious things happen as a consequence. Was this what the Mesopotamians were trying to work out? What should be sovereign and why? That Marduk is the mapping for a new society seems implicit in his confrontation with the absolute unknown.

In my next article, I’ll write about Osiris and Isis and the Egyptian story. Then maybe Gaia and Uranus and the Greek story and more on the Judeao-Christian story as I make my way through The Bible. This seems like the beginning of the foundations of what western civilization is predicated upon leading to the sovereignty of the nation and of the individual. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And is language drawing all of this from our unconscious?

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Again, more is coming in my next posted article.

I hope you’ll get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and take them for a ride. You can follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 4

I tried to start my MacBook but nothing happened. I felt a sudden pressure filling the room that I couldn’t get away from. As I stared at the blank screen, my heartbeat began pound in my ears. The screen remained black. Beating faster, my heart now a belligerent to my brain desired full supremacy. Failed technology seemed not only intent on shutting down my computer but me as well.

I turned the computer off then on again. An icon I’d never seen before appeared in the center of my screen: a picture of a file folder with a flashing question mark—not a good sign. I repeated the off and on again to the same result. The nightmare I had feared had arrived. In disbelief, I could only think of my life’s work in writing being annihilated.

As has happened previously when staring over the edge of the cliff of panic, taunting me to jump, my brain seems to kick into action. A hand seemed to reach inside my chest and ease my pounding heart. I had backed up three days before. I was not in unfamiliar territory either as less than a month before panic had snuck up on me after receiving an emergency message that my wife was lost on a hiking trail; but that’s a story for another time.

At once I was on my phone and Googling the file folder/flashing question mark icon in front of me. I followed the instructions. Still my computer wouldn’t start up.

I called Apple support; my world was slowing. I thought of the sign, “Keep Calm and Carry On” though finding “calm” is tricky.

My experience with Apple has been remarkable. This time was no different.

I share this experience, as it is part of our world today. “My computer doesn’t work, what do I do?” It’s agonizing but part of being the best, smartest, most advanced civilization in history, or more, the best, smartest, and most advanced human beings that have ever lived. At least that’s how many see it; we’re certainly better than our ancestors, right? Today, we carry technology in our hands and pockets that’s equivalent to all the computing available to put the first person to the moon over 50 years ago. Our computers allow us access to information from anywhere in the world about anything known for as long as we have known it—instantly (if it’s not instant in our hyper-active world, we hear “this sucks!”) As the great Charles Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” When technology is working, as we have come to expect it to, it is usually the best of the times. When technology fails, it isn’t.

Technology failed me as I was finishing Part 3 of Do We Know Why We Know but just before that, one of the topics for this article came in an email from a friend about the archeological site, Gobekli Tepe.

What, you might ask, is Gobekli Tepe and why? Gobekli Tepe is one of the most important archeological sites in the world today. Gobekli Tepe is a Neolithic archeological site near the city of Sanliurfa in Southeastern Anatolia, Turkey. Why? Because it is rewriting our history books as we know them. It seems a perfect way to continue what I started writing about in my article A Changing Frame-Of-Reference.

Neolithic is by definition the later part of the Stone Age where ground or polished stone weapons and tools existed. The Neolithic period preceded the Bronze Age and dates between 10,000 and 4,500 B.C.

The limestone megaliths found at Gobekli Tepe date back 11,600 years. That’s 7,000 years before Stonehenge and the Great Pyramids of Giza, 6,000 years before the invention of writing and 500 years before the development of agriculture. In the megalithic columns found on the site are indications of the earth’s precession (I briefly described precession in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference). Some see Gobekli Tepe as the world’s first observatory. A central column at the site, Column 43, is dated at 10,950 B.C. but there seems to be evidence that parts of Gobekli Tepe date back 14,000 years that place it directly in the time of the Younger Dryas period.

Again, from my A Changing Frame-Of-Reference article where I wrote about Younger Dryas, its revelation and recognition has relevance in the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and what is being revealed about our ancient history. The Younger Dryas was a period of glacial condition globally. Caused by multiple fragments of a giant comet disintegrating and hitting earth plunging the earth’s temperature in 10,800 B.C. (12,800 B.P.). Fragments from the same comet impacting the oceans again in 9,600 B.C. (11,600 B.P.) saw a dramatic rise in temperatures. The science of what happened is still not clear but whatever the cause, the evidence on the ground is not in dispute. The global temperatures soared and the polar ice caps collapsed into the sea causing an enormous pulse of sea level rise. What is astonishing is that the 9,600 B.C. date is the same date that Plato gives for the submergence of Atlantis.

Whoa! Just a second here, where did Atlantis and Plato come from? You were talking about Gobekli Tepe?

You’re paying attention. Good. I haven’t yet mentioned Atlantis or Plato but introduce them here as from another ancient text in perhaps telling us why we know what we know. Written by Plato, a Greek philosopher and an important figure in the development of Western thought, Atlantis is a story that most believe is fiction not unlike what I’ve heard about the stories I’ve been writing about from The Bible.

Atlantis, from Plato’s dialogues of Timaeus and Critias, was an advanced civilization lost to the ocean in 9,600 B.C. It’s hard to believe that date exactly aligns with not only the time Gobekli Tepe existed but also for the enormous rise in sea level of the Younger Dryas period. There are many theories on where Atlantis existed including the archeological site at Gunung Padang in West Java, Indonesia and Santorini, the classic Greek island of Thera. There are also theories of Atlantis in Donana National Park in Andalucia, Spain, Crete in Greece, a Minoan Civilization, and Gibraltar, in the straits of Morocco. There’s much more on Atlantis, which may find a place in a future post.

But what if these ancient stories are not made up but actually took place? The metastory or story within a story perhaps best describes their function that is left to us to figure out. Remember Homer’s epic poem The Iliad and the supposed mythical city of Troy that was found at Hisarlik, Turkey. The stories may be an explanation on what happened without the availability of writing or language as we know them today, filtered by or construed in our unconscious until language further found its way into us to give us a means of explanation; the purpose of which we’ve yet to fully comprehend. What if the ancient stories we read today, though having passed through a multitude of storytellers, are based on what was true? The storytellers and those experiencing the events—as spectacular, fantastic, and impossible, as they seem to our minds today—were limited in what tools (language, writing, pictures) they had at their disposal to formulate a record of what they experienced. We, in a lesser way, experience the same today with the limitations of language in trying to write or speak what we mean.

I used the example previously of the Great Pyramids of Giza not being described in The Bible but surely existed having been built according to the historic timeline nearly a thousand years before biblical times. Were the pyramids originally included in the texts but removed because the Jewish and Hebrew writers did not want to share what they saw as Egyptian greatness, and incredible craftsmanship, with the rest of the world? Or were the pyramids not there in the timelines of the stories of The Bible with the Jewish people coming out of Egypt even longer ago than we know (though that history seems well documented)? I did write about “time” in Do We Know Why We Know and being recognized as a dimensionally measurable thing. The Egyptians were the first to measure time, some time before 1500 B.C., using the sundial, on what we know today.

We’re told in The Bible we’re not supposed to understand, in passages like Philippians 4:7, “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” Or similarly in Psalm 139:6, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.” But are they related to understanding God as opposed to the stories told by the people about who we are and experiences on this planet. As I wrote in Part 2, we’ve been given this propensity to feed on information. Our brains react to it, according to Jordan Peterson, the same way we react to food; we need to be fed. But then there’s the warning in 2 Timothy 3:7,  “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” This leaves me unsettled and in a quandary.

In another part of Psalm 139, verse 15, seems another clue both mythical and magical in speaking to why we know what we know. “My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.” Archeology discoveries are in the earth but most often close to the surface like Gobekli Tepe. But, as the psalm verse indicates, what lies even deeper beneath the ground we stand on?

We have incredible resources leading us into space. That apparent final frontier, “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Hollywood loves it. But does any ancient text describe that that’s where we need to go to find out more about the secrets of life? Psalm 139:15seems pretty clear that it’s “in the depths of the earth.” I’m now in Proverbs in my reading of The Bible but I don’t recall space or planetary travel having yet been mentioned.

So let us go into the earth. Almost two-dozen people to date have descended to Challenger Deep (the deepest known point in the earth’s seabed at 36,200 feet) of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (including film director James Cameron). But even at that great depth it doesn’t come close to the distance it is to the center of the earth at 20.9 million feet.

What one man imagined lies in the earth can be read in Jules Verne’s science fiction story Journey To The Center Of The Earth. The deepest man has drilled towards the center is with the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia. I’d never heard of it. A scientific drilling project by the Soviet Union started in May 1970 in Pechengsky District on the Kola Peninsula near the Russian border with Norway was to drill as deep as possible into the Earth’s crust. A 9-inch diameter hole was drilled a record 40,230 feet by 1989. Drilling had to stop as higher than expected temperatures of 180°C were reached exceeding the expected 100°C. Along with the higher temperatures, lower density and greater porosity rock, that behaved like plastic, made drilling any farther impossible at that time. That’s thirty years ago!

But they did find fossils of microscopic plankton almost 20,000 feet down. There’s much more to investigate here.

After learning of this limited effort to explore the inside of the only planet humans have ever existed on, I am intrigued further by the text in Psalm 139. What is down there that would cause someone to write such text? This takes me back to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Kekule Problem” on our unconscious and language, the central topic of my three prior articles on Do We Know Why We Know. What would cause the passage of Psalm 139 to remain through the multitude of edits this ancient text has had to have gone through? Why such a limited investigation into earth and obsession and drive into outer space?

This causes me to pause and reflect on the three areas that will be the focus of Do We Know Why We Know going forward. We know because of what we learn from: one, the space above us (the universe and everything outside of us); two, the space below us (when standing on the ground); three, the space inside us (our unconscious). Ancient texts like The Bible have much to feed us.

Space today is our focus. It’s our future, like Columbus sailing the ocean blue for new lands (or a shorter route to India). But it’s also what we see all around us two thirds of every day. (I couldn’t find how long our eyes are open each day on average. I’ve conservatively used two thirds if we sleep for 8 hours every 24). Visually, we consume what’s around us, while our eyes are open (our second most complex organ next to our brain) but have little idea what and how much our brains are recording. That leaves less than one third of our time for the “eyes closed” part of our unconscious that goes on inside of our heads. What’s below our feet, the earth, we cannot see into and maybe part of the reason for its limited exploration. The earth is where we come from and where our body goes when we die. Every thing that we’re made of comes from the earth as written in Ecclesiastes 3:20, “All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.” Seeing that everything we’re made of and being where we go when this incredible gift of life ends, is it any wonder it gets such little attention?

But maybe there’s more beneath our feet than we realize. The fact that it seems much more challenging to get to than all we see around us, like space, is a significant hindrance but when did that ever stop us. There are certainly enough stories about what we might find to persuade us.

Sheol is known as the abode of the dead and also, the Netherworld, beneath the earth’s surface, beneath our feet. “And the ground opens its mouth and swallows them up with all that belongs to them,” Numbers 16:30 describes Sheol. Interesting is Sheol is known as the abode of the Rephaim, the people described as being greater-than-average height and stature as found in Genesis 14:5 and Deuteronomy 2:11 to name but two of the instances where these giants are mentioned in the Old Testament. The Rephaim are also referred to as “shades”, “spirits”, or “dead”. Other names of the giants in this ancient textinclude the Nephilim (fallen angels) and the Anakim (a race of giants descended from Anak). Goliath, the giant that David slew, was a Rephaim. The earth is sure to offer us much more on these ancient ancestors and who we are.

Interestingly the inner core of our planet is nearly as hot as the surface of the sun. The sun’s surface is estimated to be about 5,500°C where as the earth’s core is about 5,420°C!

“Science, my boy, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.” Jules Verne, Journey To The Center Of The Earth.

More on the earth, the universe and our unconscious, and what the ancient texts tell us in my next article.

But now to finish my Apple story …

The woman from Apple had made an appointment for me locally. Unbelievably, the Apple dealer is across the street from us. Things were coming together though I remained concerned about all my writing on the drive.

‘What if,’ the voice that speaks in the back in my head. A voice that has been there for some time, maybe my whole life, only I listen to it now more than I used to. The voice was repeating a phrase I hear often, “Why are you afraid, O you of little faith?” from Matthew 8:26.

I broke down why I was worried. If the drive was toast and I’d lost everything on it, what would I do? My calmer state of mind realized The Actor, The Musician and The Drive In, my first novels, were published. They would be unaffected. My recent work, as I described in A Changing Frame-Of-Reference was on a drive I share with my agent. Also, as I wrote at the beginning of this article, I had my entire drive backed up. Why was I still worried? All I might have lost was what I’d done over the weekend. That wasn’t colossal. But still …

As it turned out, Jeremy, the outstanding tech at Apple, discovered the cable connecting the drive had failed. Everything on the drive was recoverable. Not as good a story as one where everything was lost but, to be sure, that story could remain fictional as far as I was concerned. The bad news was a new cable was a few days away. Most, I think, would have left it there—having done their job—but not Jeremy. He jury-rigged an external drive so by late afternoon I was back and working on my MacBook Pro like nothing had happened but a bad dream.

Osiris and Marduk might be next. Stay tuned.

* * *

There’s much more to come. Who knows where we’ll go. 

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician my first three books. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.

 

Do We Know Why We Know? - Part 3

We did think the sun orbited the earth; some still do apparently. And though I flippantly ended my last post with this, it was pretty serious business.

Nicolas Copernicus, a Polish polymath, announced his discovery of a heliocentric or sun-centered universe in 1543 in his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres published just prior to his death. As it turned out, he wasn’t the first (although independently) as Aristarchus of Samos, a Greek astronomer, had discovered the same thing between 310 BC and 230 BC. But after Copernicus, the idea upset the Roman Inquisition and they burned Italian cosmologist Giordano Bruno to death in 1600 for such a heretical idea as a non-earth centered universe. That wasn’t all he was charged with, as he denied several core Catholic doctrines that included eternal damnation, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the virginity of Mary and transubstantiation.

Bruno was known to have said just before he died: “Perhaps you who pronounce my sentence are in greater fear than I who receive it.” It’s an ideal quote for the theme of my recent posts challenging what we know and why we know it and the power of an “establishment” in upholding that knowledge, be it accurate or not.

Theology of the day proclaimed the earth as the center of all things. Bruno believed in an infinite universe, a universe where nothing is fixed and everything was relative including time and motion (in 1600 no less). The world is a tiny part of the great unknown and God is a universal mind, found in all things. Bruno's unorthodox views got him in trouble; challenging the status quo got him executed. James Joyce commemorated him in his 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

So how does this fit into what I said I’d write about language from Cormac McCarthy’s essay “The Kekule Problem” in my last post? (Here is the link if you want to go back). McCarthy wrote that language arrived to help us understand our unconscious. The title of the essay came from August Kekule, a German chemist important to the world of organic chemistry. Legend has it that the ring-shaped molecular configuration of benzene came to Kekule after dreaming (our unconscious) of a snake swallowing its own tail. McCarthy’s essay centered on why it is so difficult for us to understand what our unconscious is trying to tell us if indeed it’s trying to tell us anything. He went on to explain the possibilities of language coming to man as a way of explaining our unconscious.

Before language did a person know that another person even dreamed?

As mentioned previously in this space, I’m also reading the book passed down from antiquity that year after year remains one of the world’s best selling books. That book is The Bible. After watching the popular The Bible series produced by Mark Burnett (the creator of Survivor and The Apprentice) and his wife Roma Downey several years ago, and repeatedly after that, I was fascinated how the stories depicted our behaviour as people and our history. More about this will come in future posts. I started reading The Bible last October at the beginning of the Old Testament and Genesis “In the beginning ...”. Genesis is one of five books that start the Old Testament that are known as the Torah or Pentateuch and attributed to Moses excepting the last eight verses of Deuteronomy where Moses dies. I have reached Psalms (Psalm 130 as of this writing passing the halfway mark which is Psalm 117, the shortest chapter in The Bible and 595 chapters in). I’m reading it like a book from the beginning to the end. All of my previous exposure to The Bible was anecdotal from quotes of verses in chapters spoken of in sermons and different teachings. Many individuals, more knowledgeable and intelligent than I, over many centuries, put this ancient text together in this order. Why wouldn’t I read it like a book? My hunch is that not so many have in our modern times; it’s epic (1189 chapters) and difficult. The book does have a plot and is full of joyful and horrific stories of who we are.

I’ve been using the term “ancient text” in referring to The Bible for a couple of posts now. Briefly this is what I mean. The Bible consists of two volumes, the Old Testament and the New Testament, 66 books in all, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. The Aleppo Codex (920 AD) and Leningrad Codex (1008 AD) were the oldest known manuscripts of the Old Testament until the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls at Qumran that moved the date back another thousand years. Prior to that fragments of the Old Testament text go back to 650 BC with the Ketef Hinnom scrolls. Who knows what more will be discovered. The New Testament has been preserved in more manuscripts than any other ancient work of literature. This is partly why I believe it can serve, combined with the Old Testament, more than the purpose of a religious document but the single most important source to who we are and have come to be. Marcion of Sinope published the first collection of the New Testament books in the second century. In AD 325, the Roman emperor Constantine the Great conducted the First Council of Nicaea to select the books that would remain in the New Testament. In AD 367, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, canonized the 27 books of the New Testament in use today. Thus my use of the word “ancient.”

Okay, back to where I was on the "Kekule" essay. In my last post, I wrote on our unconscious, one of the two parts that made up McCarthy’s essay and said I would write more about language, the second part, in this one. Here we are.

I might tell you where I’m going with this if I knew but I don’t. For me, it’s an exercise in both thinking and learning. I’ve talked often in conversation about some of the subjects I’m writing about in this space and I was encouraged by a few to write about “it” not knowing quite what “it” is.  We’ll see what happens as this is the fourth post about “it” that started with – A Changing Frame Of Reference. The territory of not knowing where the story is going is not so strange to me as most of what I’ve written (i.e. novels, short stories, poetry), I didn’t know where I was going either; I don’t start with the end in mind like some writers do. In fact, I’ve written an article in this space about this if your interested – Don’t Start With The End In Mind.

But back to McCarthy’s “Kekule” essay on our unconscious and the origins of language, and why language landed only on our species of mammal. One might wonder how the two are even connected. That intrigued me. In my last article, I wrote on what McCarthy had discussed on our unconscious; there wasn’t room for language in that article. There were two things that intrigued me on what he said about language. I wrote about the first in Do We Know Why We Know? where he hypothesized that language came to us to help us explain our unconscious. In this posting, I wanted to explore his idea of how language came to us, likening it to a parasite invading a host.

A parasite gets its nourishment from the host. A parasite stays depending on whether the host can harbor the various stages of its development. Parasites cannot survive without a host where as other foreign invaders like viruses and bacteria can. The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus arrived by Darwinian selection; language has not. We, with our brains, were in no way structured to receive language. There was no place for it; language just found places to fit in.

He writes that language is not a “biological system” as no selection takes place in the evolution of language and there is only one language; the ur-language is the “linguistic origin out of which all languages have evolved.“ Though all languages may evolve from ur-language, we do know that knowing one language doesn’t give one abilities to communicate in any other.

There was no need for language (five thousand other mammals do fine without it) but it is useful for something in us.

From Britannica.com the purpose of language, in most accounts, is to facilitate communication, in the sense of transmitting information from one person to another. But as McCarthy says, why do the other five thousand mammals appear to do fine without it?

Julie Sedivy, a psychology professor at Brown University in Calgary, who has also written for the Nautilus magazine where I discovered McCarthy’s first science non-fiction essay, says, “The purpose of language is to reveal the contents of our minds.” 

A thought. I re-read the story of The Tower Of Babel.

Genesis 11:6 reads: “And the Lord said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.’“

Though the dates are not necessarily consistent could this story be a clue into a rejected attempt for language to come into us. Knowing parasites, God knew what language would do. As a parasitic invasion, language would not come from a good place but still come provided it could feed on the host. Remember Facebook didn't come from a good place either starting at Harvard as a way to compare girls. That didn’t slow its growth.

This also seems like a warning in how success affects us, the invincibility of achievement.

Then the solution in Genesis 11:7: “Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” Here we’re told of the Almighty's intention for us not to understand each other. Was there something more important that we must do? History obviously has demonstrated that language found its way in whether there was room for it or not. I think of the brain as an organ of infinity; there’s always room for things in infinity. Language landed, physically or metaphysically, and we use it—by and large for communicating with each other.

Kind of unbelievable but it took my thoughts in another direction. Mankind has been so keen, especially in the twentieth century, on trying to use evolution to understand who we are and where we came from that maybe we’ve missed something. Something big like our unconscious that we still know very little about. Evolution is incredibly compelling but does have its holes (We'll leave this for a future post.) Is our unconscious just too hard to fathom with the existential tools we have today?

Yet here we are with a language that apparently didn’t come out of need and is not biological but useful. We don’t seem to completely understand the reason it found us, nor exactly what its purpose is and the other five thousand mammals aren’t about to help.

Did human development miss a turn along the way or take a turn off the path we were supposed to be on? Why figure out something we don’t understand when there is so much that we think we do? Is language our portal into our unconscious that we must venture into somehow to learn more even if we don’t know how to?

Reminds me of a quote credited to Mark Twain; “What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so.”

Again, my thinking on this has been opened largely by Graham Hancock’s book Fingerprints Of The Gods. But it’s also tweaked another book I remember that I was introduced to as a teen. Immanuel Velikovsky’s book Worlds In Collision, though much refuted and disproved by the science world, brought me maybe a more naive feeling but a nevertheless similar feeling to what Hancock’s did, namely that we don’t have it all figured out and some of what we think we do isn’t right as Mark Twain seemed to recognize. I’ve said before it’s wonderful what science has brought us like computers and mobile phones and the Internet and any piece of music we want to listen to in seconds yet we still struggle with the same questions Abraham did in departing from familiar territory into the unknown. Also, as Hancock wrote, are we “a species with amnesia” which he credits to Velikovsky’s book Mankind In Amnesia?

I wonder whether this is a trajectory familiar to my own experience from science to somewhat identifying with metaphysics and what cannot be reached through objective studies of material reality. Not that science is unimportant because it is important but not when it’s held up as a control or power mechanism preventing the truth from being understood. In The Tower Of Babel it’s like we’re being told that control is not where we’re going to find our answers. When things are under control real answers are not forthcoming. Since the Industrial Revolution, science has been driving things; driving things further into the hands of those in control or in the very least maintaining that control. It’s no wonder we know so little about the mind and our unconscious; we’ve hardly been looking at it, whether through intention or naïveté. The Tower Of Babel seems to tell us we were on the wrong track in building a tower to the heavens yet it didn’t stop us in that pursuit. Maybe we don’t admit we’re building things for the same reason, to get closer to heaven, but we don’t say we’re not either. If anything it’s the ostentation of our power. We seem almost wired to that pursuit. In The Book of John, was he not telling us “the Word” was arriving? As I’ve hazard to suggest previously, did we misunderstand the reason for the Almighty’s arrival as a way to save us from our sins by understanding our unconscious through language “the Word”; a way to fulfill needs inside us by protecting us from ourselves through avoiding the seven deadly sins and living up to the Ten Commandments. Or is this all part of our intended path, and we’re now approaching the epoch of that understanding.

Language was held back in The Tower Of Babel, maybe a first attempt to descend upon us, but not annihilated and like a parasite, as McCarthy writes, it was able to survive and thrive in its host, us, as we found it useful. Then, a way was discovered on how we use it and was written in John, “In the beginning, was the Word.” I am surprised in not having linked The Book of John with the advent of language coming to us to stay, language in the form of our saviour.

The tower was built apparently generations after the flood in the land of Babylonia and interpreted as a time when diverse languages came about. Genesis 11:9 “Therefore its name was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth.” Interpretation has Babel being similar to the Hebrew word “balal” which means confusion. Does our unconscious not bring us much confusion? Are there not many interpretations for the teachings found after Christ's arrival?

Again is the Bible written to speak to us from our unconscious or a way into it? Is heaven our unconscious? Was the story of The Tower Of Babel telling us that building a physical tower wasn’t the way into heaven or our unconscious? Was it a foretelling of our unconscious that language wasn’t intended for communication between ourselves or that we even had control of it? Why though? As McCarthy indicates, why make what our unconscious seems to trying to tell us so difficult to understand?

Maybe the intention is not only, not to understand God’s work, Philipians 4:7 “the peace of God surpasses all understanding” but that language was not the means to understand each other as in talking and listening, which we often don’t anyway, but a means to greater understanding of our unconscious and the purpose of the Babel story.

Language wasn’t taken away from us obviously; only we took it as a means to communicate with one another rather than something else that we’ve yet to figure out.

I then received an email from a friend about another Tepe site in Turkey, sister to Gobekli called Karahan. There is more to come, so much more.

That was last Sunday night. 

And then hell descended on me. Monday morning my MacBook Pro that I do all my work on, ceased to function for the first time.

* * *

There’s more to come in my next post.

Get yourself a copy of The Actor, The Drive In and The Musician and find out what other readers have already discovered. Follow me on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or LinkedIn or visit my website at www.douglasgardham.com.