Why won’t they leave Will alone?

Tags

Authorship, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare, Soapbox

William Shakespeare was William Shakespeare

Sorting through a pile of read-but-won’t read-again books to take to the charity shop – lack of available walls and shelf space means ruthless rules apply for real books, and they have to earn their places. Around 1000 is the limit to books I can home and a one-out one-in restricted policy is in operation. Not enforced as rigorously as needed, but that’s another story. What’s so wrong in sitting on a pile of books because the chairs have become bookshelves?

Anyway………….I discovered amongst a stacked pile, an as yet unread book, a novel in the form of a long narrative poem, called The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber.

I got this originally because a novel in poetic form seemed interesting. And I believe is well written. But, but……..I discovered that it is yet another book (albeit in interesting and imaginative, rather than scholarly research form) attempting to prove that Shakespeare was NOT Shakespeare, but some other. In this case (not AGAIN!) Christopher Marlowe.

And this explains why I haven’t yet embarked on the book, distracted by the sound and fume of rapidly boiling blood and spitting invective (mine)

Why? WHY? and even WHY is so much scholarly effort designed (wasted?) on attempting to disprove one William Shakespeare, from being The Onlie Begetter

To me, it smacks first of all of the steeped-in class prejudice of British society – as many of those whom researchers claim to be our Bard were Lords and Knights – Sir Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, William Stanley, Earl of Derby are three. The ‘Shakespeare is NOT Shakespeare’ arguments did not arise at the time – or anywhere near the time – not in fact till about 250 years after his death, in the mid-nineteenth century. I wonder what it was about the zeitgeist of THOSE times that began this (to me) bizarre idea that Shakespeare was a cover for a lordling. Now that might make for an interesting project – why did those denizens of THOSE times (and do those denizens of ours) doubt the man himself when no whiff of this existed previously?

The arguments are basically around ‘how can someone who is not a member of the aristocracy with formal classical education have the wide knowledge shown in ‘Shakespeare’s’ plays’. They claim that WS was some sort of stooge to hide behind so that the powerful, great and good, could espouse views which maybe they would be a little fearful of owning so close to the seat of power as they were.

Sadly, it seems ’twas ever thus, the disparaging of the idea of brilliance arising outside a background of privilege. In fact, although i would never devalue education, or formal education, like everything else it can have its drawbacks as well as advantages. And one drawback can be thinking which is TOO disciplined, too rigid, too received, and curiously the inhibition of wild creativity and originality.

And this is no sour grapes – I’ve been through the whole educational process, and am a product of an Eng. Lit degree. However, I somehow seem to meet people who self-educated. are intelligent, thoughtful, and often seem to think outside the box. Obviously, at its best, education does challenge students to original thought, but there is a strong toe-the-received-thought-of-the day also at work. My modern experience with original thinkers from unusual backgrounds. absolutely squares up with Will being Will, and not Sir Earl of somewhere or other

It is Shakespeare’s origins from outside the court and the University which makes him able to write both the courtly and the common man (and woman)

And, more than all, it seems to me that an actor is well placed to be a playwright. The actor tastes the playwright’s words, gives the two dimensional words weight and viscera, embodies them. The actor has to be able to imagine and inhabit ‘other’ from within. Who better than an actor to create words that ‘speak’ differently, character upon character. 

As for Marlowe………….well,  sure, some fine and elevated language, particularly Dr Faustus, but, really!  Where is the evidence in Marlowe’s known wirting of the wonderful complexity and difference of character found in Shakespeare. Sure the ‘stories’ Shakespeare uses are from others (most stories are) There is a limit to the variations on Boy Finds Girl, Boy Loses Girl, or even King Finds Crown, King Loses Crown that narrative gives – but what really makes narrative sing is the textured complexity of character

Commons Wikimedia

However Beautifully Ros Barber writes, I am back to feelings of unease when literature abuses real characters. And even more so when a kind of arrogance denies genius, depth, and astonishing psychological and philosophical perception to the common man.

Okay, must go and do some work on my scholarly thesis proving that Samuel Pepys was really Sir Christopher Wren, Charles Dickens was really Edward Lear, and that the author of Wuthering Heights was really Karl Marx. My thanks for this valuable aid to research (and, who knows, gentle reader, your chance for some similarly unscholarly research of your own) goes to openplaques.org

Advertisement

Carol S. Pearson – Awakening The Heroes Within

Tags

Archetypes, Awakening The Heroes Within, Book Review, Carol S. Pearson, Mythology

An abundance of heroes

This is a beautiful, soulful and visionary book.

Pearson looks at, and explains the major archetypes which are found in reading fairy tales and myths, and also at the inner meaning of the ‘quest journey’ which heroes in mythic tales engage in.

There have been many mythologists – foremost of course, Joseph Campbell, and Jung‘s work is deeply based on the collective unconscious, which fairy tales and myths reveal.

And so do systems like the Tarot, and also the poet W.B. Yeats drawing a whole mythology of the unconscious around a mythical idea of phases of the moon

Carol Pearson takes this material, and uses it to offer tools for self-analysis, but it is much, much more than ‘a personality test’ or even ‘self-help’

First, there is the realisation that we are all, constantly engaged on heroic quests – she untangles the stages of the heroic journey, and relates them well to everyday living. The ‘self test’ is really a tool to see where you are, at THIS point, and where you might gain understanding to help you move forwards.

I’ve had this book for some years, and re-read and re-use it from time to time.

One of the excellent approaches of this book is the ‘shadow’ work. Pearson groups the twelve archetypes into 6 pairs, which are mirror images or the other side of each other. She suggests, with each pair, that if you markedly are one aspect, the other aspect is ‘shadow’ – ideally there would be some sort of equal and opposite tension between the two.

Commons, DeviantArt ElderWaden

As an example, Sage and Fool. The ‘Sage’ is clearly seen by most as positive, wise, considered, dispassionate, assimilated. But what of the fool – the fool ‘acts/speaks without thinking’ – therefore has sponteneity, intuition. In literature, the fool was often the means by which truth could be told. There is also the idea of the ‘Idiot Savant’ Our ‘fool’ also has positive qualities. We may desire to develop our sage and deny our fool – or we may be only spontaneous and anarchic, and deny the measured and dispassionate consideration that is our sage.

I particularly like the holistic view Pearson expresses – a realisation that each of us embodies all these archetypes, though at different stages of our lives, some may come to the fore, some may be more hidden. Every aspect rides the light; every aspect also has its veiled manifestation.

Unlike more clinical analysis of ‘types’ such as Myers-Briggs, this is dynamic, rather than static.

If you are someone who has a predominantly right brain way of functioning, responding perhaps more to metaphor, imagery, this will probably be a favoured book and then some. It is poetic, entrancing and deeply engaging. I’m about to saddle my horse and set out on my next heroic journey. Pearson’s book definitely one of my magical companion animals! (Read the Book!!)

Awakening The Heroes Within Amazon UK
Awakening The Heroes Within Amazon USA

Christopher Priest – The Adjacent

Tags

Book Review, Christopher Priest, Dystopia, Sci-Fi, SF, The Adjacent

Dark Ravens, not White Doves, Emerge from the Magician’s Hat

Christopher Priest is adept at mangling the mind of an unwary (and even a wary!) reader; all his books tangle, darkly, with our perceptions of reality and identity. His new novel, The Adjacent, is no exception, weaving his lifelong themes of shifting realities, alternate and parallel realities of time and place, and the alternate and parallel life of individual identity itself.

Other Priest meta themes to be woven in are prestidigitation, illusion and magic, state control, dystopia, mankind’s heavy and bellicose footprint across the landscape of our history, and the lies and deceptions of our, public relations spin accounts of our time and culture, and the dark and shadowy underbelly of social control and our nightmare, `uncivil’ selves.

Vexaton.DeviantArt.com Commons

The Adjacent weaves a story through several settings, beginning with a post-apocalyptic world, some 40 or 50 years ahead of today. Physicists have found another way of manipulating matter, which, similarly to the splitting of the atom, can be (and will be) used in the service of destruction and control, however much the invention may have been designed as `pure science for the good’.

The effects of global terrorism, environmental damage and twenty-first century religious wars have changed our world forever.

Frighteningly, as so often with Priest, none of this really seems like science fiction – the only factor which isn’t clearly visible over the horizon – or already here – is `Adjacency’ (which I shan’t spell out, it is for the reader to discover)

Strep72 photostream. Flicr, Commons

There is a flipping back and forth between post-apocalytic twenty-first century, the First World War and the Second World War, and, to continue Priest’s other territory of islands, specifically post-apocalytic islands, we revisit some earlier landscapes from his previous novels The Islanders and The Dream Archipelago.

More, I will not say, there are love stories within here, and a surprising (but perfectly apposite) appearance of a pertinent author, but even to mention characters is to destroy the careful series of shocks and recognitions which it will be the reader’s pleasure to discover.

In effect, with his interest in stage magicians and their world, I always feel as if Priest’s readers ought to become, in effect, bound by the rules of the Magician’s Circle, and NOT reveal Priest’s tricks!

I did have a slight feeling of let-down with the ending of this one, and that is all I will say against this book.

An earlier criticism, which is that Priest cannot inhabit female sensibility well, and that there is always a certain coldness and detachment in his accounts of sexual encounters between men and women, something which feels like a flaw, an over-cerebral approach to the possibility of human warmth, did dissolve away, rather, late on the book.

Priest remains a deeply disturbing, sometimes a little chilly and cerebral, but ALWAYS challenging, unsettling and thought provoking, writer. Wallpaper, muzak, marshmallow writer he is NOT. Rather a pearl from the grit in the oyster kind!

I have been an uneasy, sometimes uncomfortable, admirer of Priest’s writing for nearly twenty years, since first encountering The Glamour which may well have been the first of his novels to escape from being sidelined by the often dismissive Sci-Fi label. Priest indeed being one of the authors (along with Doris Lessing, Ursula K.Le Guin, and John Wyndham, not to mention H.G. Wells) to sternly tell me not be so snobby, narrow minded and dismissive, and to realise its not the genre, it’s the WRITING I should look at.

The unease, by the way, is caused by the often scarily prescient quality of Priest’s vision. His is uncomfortable and challenging, not escapist, literature

The Dream Archipelago Amazon UK
The Dream Archipelago Amazon USA

 

Eowyn Ivey – The Snow Child

Tags

Book Review, Eowyn Ivey, Myths and Legends, The Snow Child

Charmingly whimsical, full of heart, in love with landscape

In her afterword first time author Eowyn Ivey recounts the sense that all her life she has been looking for a particular story:

For as long as I can remember, I have been looking for ‘my’ story…….I turned the pages (of everything she read) and searched for something that would fit this empty space inside of me

It is this sense of longing, and that a story can be more than itself which gives this book its flavour. Based on an Arthur Ransome retelling of an old Russian fairy story, Ivey’s The Snow Child speaks of the longing for children, the pain of their loss (whether through death or just the inevitable leaving behind of childhood) and, particularly the connection to landscape.

She sets her story in the Alaska of the 1920s where Mabel and Jack, a childless couple in their 50s have come, leaving the city to find quiet and make a connection with the reality of the land. So the book is also about a group of people who struggle with, and against, the harshness of an implacable, indifferent, stunningly beautiful landscape and climate. As much as the story of the relationships between parents and children, lovers and friends, the fierce independence of frontiers people, this is a story about our connection to the mythic as well as the actual, power and presence of the natural world.

                                Fox In Snow Wikimedia Commons

This might not do for readers who prefer a more directly narrative writing. Ivey takes her time, finding the description of a snowflake as important as narrative drive – here, she diverges from her source, as plot is the essence of the faerie tale, which gets there in the shortest possible time.

If, on the other hand, you are still a reader of faerie and myth, well told, this should delight you with its charm and sweetness – NOT saccharine at all, but a genuine sweetness

As a complete aside, I wondered whether the author’s name was her birth name, or a nom-de-plume. And, if the former, whether given names mould character. Her name is so redolent of misty Gaelic or Olde Anglo-Saxon – I assume her parents may have been Lord Of The Rings afficionados. Perhaps an upbringing richly steeped in the telling of old tales shaped our author’s affinity for them!

The Snow Child Amazon UK
The Snow Child Amazon USA

Frances Hodgson Burnett – The Secret Garden

Tags

Book Review, Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

Not putting away childish things…………..

Copyright Michael W Beales BEM Creative Commons Licence.

There are books from my childhood that I have no memory of, and then there are those books which made a huge impression, and loomed large, and have been periodically, and pleasurably, read again throughout my adult life. And this is one, my absolute favourite of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s works.

My guess is that any little girl with the remotest thread of fierce independence in her nature will identify with Mary and will also have idolised and envied Dickon, with his ability to charm the birds and squirrels from the trees, fox-cubs from their lairs, not to mention surly adults and surlier children!

Written in 1911, there are of course attitudes to class and race which are deeply patronising, but what enchanted me so as a child was the delight in and celebration of, the natural world, in a way which almost verges on the mystical. As a child (and an adult) who had a huge love of the plant and animal kingdom ‘The Secret Garden’ spoke to me powerfully. My guess this book feeds right into some deeply satisfying archetype of a lost, but recoverable, Paradise, which even a child resonates with.

Delighted to find a Kindle version with illustrations. The formatting isn’t perfect – the full page illustration and its caption occur on separate pages, and often there is also a blank page (not a missing page) before the picture, but this is a minor interference to enjoyment.

The illustrations on the digital version I have are by the American illustrator Tashia Tudor. (though in black and white rather than the colour of the paper version) Unfortunately the American digi version with Tudor’s drawings either seems to be a hideously expensive out of print paper version, or a very cut down (dumbed down?) version of the original rewritten for a younger audience. Why? Tudor’s illustrations are lovely, very in keeping with the period of the book. UK Kindlers are fortunate to be able to have the combination of the proper text, and the lovely illustrations. Having your cake and eating it indeed!

The Secret Garden Kindle illustrated edition Amazon UK

Ian McEwan – Sweet Tooth

Tags

Book Review, Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

Into the labyrinth

I was left triumphally shouting `YES’ at the finish of this gorgeous and playful weaving of the personal and the 1970’s political, and the centre stage placing of the art of narrative fiction itself.

In Saturday, McEwan was sombre, dark, reflective and brilliant, ultimately presenting literature with the power to redeem.

Here, with a novel set in the shadowy reaches of MI5 in the early 70’s, Heath, the miners, spiralling oil prices, the Cold War – and the emergence of 70’s feminism – his central character is a young mathematics student at Cambridge, with a love of literature, and of men.

              Saltley Gates Picket

Educated by an older lover into a greater degree of external sophistication than she otherwise would have, she enters the Civil Service at a lowly grade. These are not spoilers, so much is explained by the book’s publicity material. More I won’t really say about the plot – its clearly about the Secret Service, about the 70s, has a female protagonist and the art and craft of narrative writing itself is at the heart. So expect issues of trust, duplicity and honesty, masks and roles, the battleground and fields of peace between the sexes, and these issues of truth and duplicity explored as part of the relationship between literature and life. All to be woven – brilliantly – into the mix.

Sweet Tooth Amazon UK
Sweet Tooth Amazon USA

Ashley Montagu – Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin

Tags

Ashley Montagu, Book Review, Touching

A passionate and committed plea for good touch using evidence based results

Ashley Montagu was an anthropologist, who amongst other writing wrote this deeply compassionate, humanitarian, and at the time (1971) rather revolutionary book on the importance of proper nurturing touch in order to help babies thrive, both physiologically, and emotionally.

This wonderful book, which appears to go in and out of print – so get it if you can! – is a densely written and fascinating account of that most ignored of senses, touch. The skin is of course our largest sense organ, and the one which develops first, in embryonic terms.

Montagu’s book, containing often horrific accounts of experiments carried out on baby animals – and human babies – shows the deep importance of good touch in our lives.

For a bodyworker, a book like this is an absolute treasure. It provides the evidence which we know, that the effects of massage are incredibly profound, on soma and on psyche, and that massage is much much more than just ‘fluffy feelgood’ – in fact, this book, along with, for example, The Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel really demonstrates the scientific basis for good touch.

He cites a wealth of evidence on studies (often heart-breaking to read) carried out on baby animals of many species – including humans – to show that deprived of early touch, not only does the baby human or other animal have a more suspicious, less confident, more fearful/aggressive nature, but that, in the life of a young mammal, early touch stimulates the respiratory and excretory functions into proper functioning.

One particularly heartbreaking study involved a prem baby unit. With understandable anxieties around infection, babies were sealed in their incubators and touch was minimal. The group of babies were divided into two, with half, receiving gentle stroking through the incubator, whilst the control group only had the minimum touch for feeding/cleaning etc as the main worry was infection.

The study had to be abandoned once the nurses realised that the touched babies were gaining weight more quickly, thriving, and making up in development, whilst the babies with the absolute minimal touch were more fragile, and taking much longer to reach the desired weight and development

Montagu was clearly a deeply compassionate individual, and the fine combination of heart and head in his writing is refreshingly balanced.

In the preface to the third edition he writes:

‘Where touching begins, there love and humanity also begin – within the first minutes following birth. It is to make these facts known, and their consequences for each of us and for humanity as a whole, that this book has been written’

This is a scientific tome which is also humanitarian, and potentially of interest to psychologists, psychotherapists, bodyworkers, sociologists, educators, paediatricians and other clinicians as well as those with an interest in mysticism given form.

Amazing!

John Bradshaw – Cat Sense

Tags

Animal behaviour, Book Review, Cat sense, Cats, John Bradshaw, Soapbox

Anthropomorphism debunked – or are we really guilty of human special pleading?

I confess to a strong desire to stand scientists on their heads when I read any animal studies which look at those of us with a tendency to ascribe ‘human’ motivations, feelings and even thoughts to ‘dumb animals’, as being guilty of anthropomorphism.

Particularly in relationship to ‘dumb animals’ we may choose to share our lives with. In common parlance, pets.

John Bradshaw is a British biologist, probably its fair to say that he is really (whispers) a dog-lover, but clearly does like cats. QUITE a lot

I remember, years ago, reading an earlier book which Bradshaw wrote on the subject of woman’s best friend, and thinking, hmm, doggy person, distinctly doggy. There was a little too much stressing the superior qualities of the canine versus the not quite so intelligent, personable qualities of the feline.

I cannot deny my own reverse prejudices. I like dogs rather a lot, but my heart belongs to tabby.

But it isn’t this which makes me wish to invert Mr Bradshaw and his fairly interesting (though a little dryly written – a bit four square and lacking in cattish whimsicality and quirkiness for my tastes) tome.

It is the assumption that those of us who ascribe the prevalence of complex emotions to non human, or at least non-primate, species, are guilty of anthropomorphising animals.

There is another way of looking at all this – and it comes, not just from those who have strong connections with our companion animals, or other animals, but from OTHER scientists, who study animals with less of a sense of the uniqueness of the human animal, and more of a sense of a continuum of evolution which means that our very complex ‘humanity’ may be seen as a developing continuum across other species. 

Anyone who is interested in this approach may well find that the observations and studies cited in books by Jonathan Balcombe an absorbing, convincing and educative read

But one doesn’t have even to go along with this to think that some of the studies Bradshaw cites, ‘debunking’ animal ‘owners’ beliefs, may themselves miss the point.

One particular study involved disproving the fact that dogs could feel guilt, by setting up a double blind experiment whereby owners believe their dogs have been guilty of a misdemeanour (food theft) when in fact only SOME of the dogs have been, and comparing which owners recognise the guilt of their dog by the ‘expression’ on the dogs face, on coming back into the room (the owners are told their dog has ‘offended’, though not all dogs HAVE). The owners (including those with with innocent dogs) report guilty looks from the dogs.

Two ideas hit me – dogs (and cats, as Bradshaw acknowledges) have the skills to ‘read’ their humans – it is an evolutionary advantage to be able to be able to second guess and interpret what another animal is about to do. Given a dog WILL read its owner it is not a far jump to assume an owner projecting ‘bad dog’ posture, and facial expression WILL result in the ‘interpreting your-human’ sensitive dog in itself projecting ‘Whoops I have been a BAD DOG’ – as the animal will have picked up ‘bad dog’ from the owner and so is likely to reflect their bad guilty dogness back

The other thought is that PEOPLE readily ASSUME guilt, feel guilt, and even project clearly ‘I am guilty’ when they are no such thing.  One only has to think about situations where wrongdoing is being checked for – think about the airport scan experience,  or even, what most of us may feel on passing a policeman on patrol, even though we are squeaky innocent as the driven snow. MOST people, even though they know they have no contraband etc and are not breaking the law,  will feel a prickle of imaginative anxiety and guilt and begin to LOOK a little shifty

I’m not saying the dogs were going through that process (though of course such a complex cascade cannot have sprung into being fully formed in homo sapiens with having some sort of ‘proto development at an earlier stage) But the projection/imagining ‘my dog is guilty’ to dog LOOKING guilty does not mean it is purely an owner’s imagination that the dog expresses a certain look.

Whilst I appreciate there may be a fairly narrow window of opportunity, within a kitten’s life, for socialisation with humans to happen, so that a very young kitten (we are talking around the second month), needs to be used to humans, and being handled by humans (kindly) for it to be receptive and desirous of human touch, this surely is not so different from the experience of a baby. Where Bradshaw (I think) is talking about genetic ancestry from the wild, versus the imprint of early experience and environmental modification, he does I feel rather look at cat response as different in kind from human response. Whereas, much work on the development of small babies also shows the profound importance of habituation to good touch. Brains have plasticity, both the brains of Homo sapiens and the brains of Felis catus.

Ashley Montagu in his profoundly informative book Touching, though it is subtitled Human Significence of the Skin is very much about a common mammalian inheritance. Montagu shows that young babies, young primates, young puppies, kittens and indeed the poor old lab rat, may not be that different from each other, and that the plasticity of the early brain is profoundly important (for good or ill)

So….interesting though Bradshaw’s book may be, it also frustrated me somewhat, as it was coming from a place of difference between humans and other animals. A difference which some animal behaviourists, like the aforementioned Balcombe, indicate may be much narrower than we think

Bradshaw did not really tell me much I didn’t already know, except in the closing chapters of the book where he looks at the FUTURE of the domestic cat, as influenced by the fact that most responsible owners who share their lives with ‘moggies’ are likely to have had them neutered. This means that outside pedigree breeding (which has its own potential problems as visual desirability makes breeders choose mates for their queens, rather than cat choice selecting for health) there is a greater tendency for un-neutered domestic queens to be breeding with feral toms. This is more likely to result in the resulting kittens to have a wilder, less ‘socialised domestic’ temperament than the mating of 2 moggy domestics. This of course assumes that some of the suitability for domestication in our cats will be of genetic base and not just environmental. There is interesting genetic evidence in terms of a long history of genetic mingling between small wild cats Felis lybica, Felis sylvestris and our domesticated catus.

Finally, I have no wish to leave Mr Bradshaw standing on his head, though I have no idea what this less than pleased looking tabby feels about that.

My own felines do not appear within this post. They are extremely private individuals and request that the paparazzi leave them alone, at this challenging time.As this book was an ARC from the publishers via Netgalley, and it not yet appearing on the Amazon’s for prepublication ordering, links will have to wait

I did enjoy reading this book, though I was often in disputatious mode, snorting crossly at the elevation of homo sapiens and man’s best friend

Having shared my life with various cats (and dogs) over many years, most of which have been rescue animals, and none of which have been pedigree, I have only ever had one cat which was more attached to place than person and did not intensely form a relationship with me. And it does not surprise me that this was my very first cat, when I was in some ways too young to understand MYSELF never mind how best to respond to the complexities of the needs of other beings in my world, whether human or cat.

A Rose by any other name would not BE as sweet

Tags

Aromatics, Chemistry, Cosmetics, Fashion, Health and wellbeing, Other Stuff, Perfumery, Soapbox

A Killjoy post about synthetic perfumery

I happened, as one does, on an interesting blog devoted to perfume. The only reason I’m not linking to it, or doing a pingythingy, is because THIS post is actually an anti SYNTHETIC perfumery post, and it might seem it is a post against the perfume passionate blogger – which it isn’t. Though it is a killjoy post about pretty well all modern perfumery, despite my love of aromatics, as evidenced by earlier posts – and rants – wrapped up in reviews of two books by Jean-Claude Ellena

I have become deeply concerned about the fact that virtually ALL perfumery is using synthesised ‘novel’ chemical constituents – this is very different from the complexity of naturally occurring chemical compounds as they arise within the chemistry of a plant.

A fine example is the fact that the fragrance industry has now identified linalool, a naturally occurring chemical constituent in many essential oils as a potential skin irritant, so its use in compounds is restricted to a maximum level. This is because (for example) tests with synthetic linalool isolate showed a potential to trigger eczematous reactions in susceptible individuals

This is now having a (negative) effect on aromatherapeutics as MANY essential oils – including some of those known to be amongst the ‘safest’ – for example, Lavandula angustifolia, true lavender, is high in linalool (Sometimes also referred to as linalol)

And information which tries to equate the synthetic isolate with the whole herb synergy has herbalists and aromatherapists turning quite puce with rage – as the two are not the same.  Linalool rich true lavender is one of many essential oils which may be effectively used in topical applications to TREAT eczema

So what is going on here, and how has a plant which has been used, both aesthetically and therapeutically, for thousands of years, suddenly turned out to have restricted levels in ‘products’ And by the way, I mean ‘thousands’ literally as documented use stretches back that far in herbal texts from classical times, as whole herb use, and also, from a few hundred years later, as essential oils. The invention or re-invention of distillation occurred around the 10th and 11th century by Ibn Sina (Avicenna) a Persian (Iranian) doctor/herbalist/healer/writer of medical texts.

What no one really seems to be getting their heads round is that complex evolved chemistry in a plant is not a chemical in isolation, but a synthesis of hundreds – creating a particular new synergy. Plants (like people) are made of chemical checks and balances to maintain integrity. A particular chemical component may be toxic but may be contained or have its toxicity ameliorated or modified by the presence of other chemicals

A fine example is that. within our own bodies, the contents of the stomach are highly acidic, through the presence of corrosive  hydrochloric acid, which is present to break down foods, particularly as part of protein digestion – however the aggressive and necessary effects of HCl (hydrochloric acid) are moderated by the presence of mucus secreting cells which protect the lining of the stomach itself being ‘burned’ by the acid

So, within plants, there may be aggressive or irritant chemistry which is contained by the presence of other chemicals. It is just not true to say that a plant containing high levels of linalool, like true lavender, has the skin irritancy potential of much LOWER levels of the synthesised chemical isolate, linalool

Perfumery Chemists-behaving-like-gods are creating ‘novel’ chemicals which have never existed before, as well as creating synthetic versions of preexisting chemicals. The situation is further complicated by the fact that although synthetic linalool, for example, and linalool as a naturally occurring compound may indeed have the same chemical formula – the molecules may not have the same shape. How chemistry is utilised in the body is often linked to receptors on cells,with a particular shape, designed to be activated by the presence of a chemical fitting the receptor (like keys in locks) And like keys in locks, the wrong key, or a badly cut key may not only ‘not work’ but get jammed into the keyhole

The above picture of two naturally occurring forms of linalool is a diagrammatic illustration of how the same chemical molecule may exist in different spatial arrangements – and the shape itself will alter various characteristics of the chemical. For example, the two forms of the same chemical compounds even SMELL completely different.

Naturally occurring chemistry has been part of an evolutionary process, species will evolve ways to use or protect itself if it comes into contact with specific chemistry, over many generations. But evolution on that level works quite slowly.

However NO ONE KNOWS  how we are really responding to the new chemistry flooding out into the market place – whether in perfumery, household products, food, atmosphere, industry etc. And we know EVEN LESS how all these individual novel chemicals will react with each other.

Sure you may be able to test for obvious things in cosmetics, like application to the skin, and at what levels an irritability reaction may occur with each chemical, or even the finished product. But, long term? And as many of these compounds belong to classes of chemicals which are related to naturally occurring compounds which absorb into the body via various routes, it is LIKELY that they may well be absorbed into the body, through those same routes, reaching the brain, via the olfactory receptor cells, the respiratory system, or with a partially fat soluble partially water soluble structure, being absorbed through the skin (in cosmetic or perfumery application)

Allergic and intolerant responses have been on the rise for some time, and a percentage of those are from people who are claiming strong perfumes trigger headaches and migraines. In fact there have been some who are trying to stop the wearing of ‘strong perfumes’ in public places and are using some of the arguments akin to those brought up around the dangers of passive smoking. Which of course took many years of known negative health implications and growing statistical evidence before the might of Big Tobacco was overpowered enough to create changes in legislation

To return to synthetic perfumery – It is my own belief that it is nothing to do with the ‘strength’ of the perfume, and everything to do with the pervasiveness of synthesised chemical compounds, both ‘copies’ of naturally occurring compounds and entirely novel ones. That belief comes from the number of people who begin to use only natural perfumes and cosmetic products because they DON’T have the intolerant reactions to these latter products.

In what might seem a disconnect (but isn’t) some years ago we were all deluged by advertising claims that margarine was better for us than butter, because of the danger of saturated fats (primarily animal origin) as compared to mono – or poly, unsaturates (primarily plant origin)

The difference between a fat (solid at room temperature) and an oil (liquid) is that the latter has a bendier, more flexible structure. A saturated fat, like butter, contains all the hydrogen atoms the carbon atoms will hold. Hence, the carbons are saturated’ with hydrogen. Our bodies can recognise and process these naturally occurring substances

With a monounsaturated fat, like oleic acid ( naturally occurs in olive oil) or a polyunsaturated fat for  example, the Omega 3’s in fish oils, or the Omega 6’s in borage or evening primrose or other seed oils, one (monounsaturated) or more (polyunsaturated) of the carbon atoms in the chain of carbons forms a double bond with another carbon – so it is no longer ‘saturated’ with the maximum number of hydrogens it could hold. The double bond makes the molecule bendier

And still, the body can recognise the shape of these different molecules. However, the process of hydrogenation turning a liquid plant oil into a solid, spreadable fat, effectively, re-saturates them again – except – except the hydrogen atoms attach in a different way. which is not a naturally occurring ‘shape’ and which the body is unable to properly recognise and utilise.

Way back IN THE 50s concerns were already being expressed about health issues related to  ‘trans fats’ where the hydrogen atoms are forced onto opposing ‘sides’ of the carbon. It took 40 years before, slowly, slowly the food industry made changes (were forced to make changes) so that now we know to check our spreadable plant oil-turned-into-fat is ‘free from trans-fats. This time, the Big Food industry were the ones doing the heel-dragging

My rather lengthy deviation into butter versus margarine is really not a deviation at all. We make and use novel chemistry in a rather ‘because we can’ way, without really knowing the effects

Back in the time of the first Queen Elizabeth it was fashionable for ladies to have a complexion which was as white as possible, and lead was used in cosmetics to give the desirable pallor

We gaze on smugly at the ignorance and folly of that earlier generation dicing with death due to the follies of fashion

In fact, our ancestors, knowing less about chemistry, had far more excuse for their ignorance than we do. Watch, as they say, this space (the cosmetics and perfumery industry space) and see what the next 40 years may bring.

June Tabor and Oysterband – Ragged Kingdom

Tags

Folk Music, Folk Rock Fusion, June Tabor, Music review, Oysterband

Electrification and melancholy benefit from each other

I saw June Tabor and Oysterband in concert when they were ‘previewing’ what would be tracks from this album.

I went to that concert because of Tabor, but ended up also being seduced by Oysterband as well. Tabor’s dark, brooding voice still reaches most deeply and soulfully I think on the very simply accompanied The Hills Of Shiloh, and/but she is equally at home as chanteuse with the driving rhythms of Oysterband, and a more folk rock fusion. From the exciting opening track Bonny Bunch Of Roses the listener is taken unstoppably through Tabor and Oysterband’s John Jones duetting on Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and Son David.

Here is that exciting, driving, opening track – which they also used to open the gig – I could barely keep seated!

It’s probably wrong to expect a studio album to quite reach the excitement of a live concert, but Jones’ voice seems a touch more exposed, on piano high notes in the studio, against Tabor’s powerful, but never straining vocals, specifically on Love Will Tear Us Apart. Notes which seemed to be pushed through only through felt emotion from Jones in that live performance here seems almost to be the result of technical strain on Love Will Tear Us Apart, though in the tight duetting on Dylan’s Seven Curses Jones soars freely, and he is beautifully tender with Tabor on the closing track The Dark End Of The Street

However, here is a beautiful, un-strained rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart filmed at Union Chapel London, which I think matches the two voices brilliantly. A little gem, for all broken lovers

Highlights for me are the excitement of the opening track, the aforementioned The Hills of Shiloh, the dynamism and vibrant excitement of If My Love Loves Me – particularly Ian Telfer’s violin, the folk/religious ballad The Leaves Of Life, contrasting again, the driving, punchy beat and some beautiful acapella from Tabor and Oysterband.

But, hey, on subsequent plays, I found myself adding more tracks as highlights!

Oysterband and Tabor seem to spur each other enjoyably on. My big regret on this album is the non-inclusion of a couple of numbers from the live show – an electrifying performance of Jefferson’s Airplane’s White Rabbit and Velvet Underground’s All Tomorrow’s Parties (admittedly the latter one featured on the previous album with June Tabor , and as they were then called, The Oyster Band, 21 years ago) both proving Tabor can out Nico Nico and out Slick Slick. Her voice is truly amazing, and Oysterband have just the energy to match it. Rock’s loss has been Folk’s gain, with Tabor. She could I think sing almost anything .

I love the dark and painful reflective melancholy of Tabor’s vocals, but the drive imposed by Oysterband’s more urgent music works as a brilliant accelerator to Tabor, and she imposes a discipline and restraint well on them, so the balance point between the two is wonderful, electrifying.

Ragged Kingdom Amazon UK
Ragged Kingdom Amazon UK