Thursday 22 January 2015

Love in the Ruins of Warsaw

     "Most of us had some sort of psychological problem at the time. I used to suffer blackouts. Both of my brothers were in the Resistance. I remember walking along a street in Warsaw when a van drove up with blood leaking from it. Some stranger hustled me away into a side street. I was only fifteen."
     That story was told to me just over forty years ago by a Polish lady whose daughter I was dating. You don't know how lucky you are. By the end of the war, 85% of the city had been destroyed. Bloody were those days, and unholy their secrets.

Saturday 3 January 2015

The God Who Talks to Earthworms

     The Aetas [eye-tas] of the Philippine island of Luzon are negritos: one of those strange group of black pygmies, pockets of whose populations dot the fringes of southern Asia, remnants of a very early human migration from Africa, hunter-gatherers pushed into the rainforest by later, agricultural peoples. Psychologist Kilton Stewart visited them in the 1930s, accompanied by a half-Aeta interpreter. He discovered that, although not strictly speaking monotheists, they did worship a Supreme God, in this case with the name of Tolandian.