Kitty Marion - singer, actor and a radical suffragette.
Some thoughts...
Okay, before we dive in to the list of '5 exciting things on history' here are some thoughts. For many years I’ve been wondering - on and off - about how we humans seem to think in opposites (nerdy, I know). How we tend to approach the world in an up-down, black-white, either-or perspective. Like if I say I don’t like hot summers, then a reaction to this could be: Oh, so you love cold summers?! Or I might think: I’m not a great fan of sports. I’m not particularly eager to watch it on tv, and I’m not joining a sports club either. So, am I an inactive person?
Not long ago, I listened to the radio show “Supernatural Japan”, and it brought back my curiosity on opposite thinking.
In the programme, the British historian, Chris Harding, travels from Tokyo to the deep countryside of Japan’s northeast. Throughout history, the people in this area have had a close relation to ghosts, and therefore, many ghost stories exist here.
A recent example is the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, after which taxi drivers started reporting ‘ghost riders’ in their vehicles. Also, the local fire services experienced being called out regularly to locations that turned out to be deserted. The people of the area discovered, though, that when they started praying for the souls of the dead, the ghosts disappeared.
So how do you explain this? Chris Harding immediately turns to the opposite thinking: do the ghosts exist? Or do they not exist? However, after interviewing several local people, the answer he ends up with is not a straight ‘yes’ or ‘no’.
According to the Japanese, a deceased person, a ghost, has a very real presence - although this can not be proven in a (western) scientific sense. The Master, Jikisai Minami, puts it this way: the ghosts are as present as the furniture in your house. They are real, and you can’t control them. You might try to switch them off, but they will still be there. The ghosts appear regardless of human action, regardless of our intentions or feelings. In other words, the ghosts have a life of their own.
Although Harding seeks to explain this genuine presence of ghosts as a “very vivid thinking of the deceased person” (as if it’s all happening inside the mind of the (living) person), he must admit that this explanation still doesn’t quite cover the fact that the Japanese are experiencing the deceased to have a life of their own, independent of the living. (At this point, I came to think of an experience I had not long ago. I was walking just outside my house, and suddenly, out of the blue, I started thinking about an old school mate with whom I haven’t been in contact for years. Less than two weeks later, I got the sad news that he’d recently died.)
Anyway, back to Japan. In the end, Chris Harding ends up answering his own questions with a ‘maybe’. “You have to slap a big fat ‘maybe’ over the ghost stories - taxi drivers taking ghosts to where they wanted to be taken, for example”, he says. But not a maybe in a bad way, he emphasises—more a way of making space, even just a little, for the supernatural.
The ‘making space’ is very interesting, I think. It forces our minds to open up to a third answer. It allows us to start looking at the world in more than two opposites positions.
Kurt Spellmeyer, a Zen teacher and professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, New Jersey, comes up with this explanation. The human mind has a strong tendency to organise everything into “binaries”, he says, that is, pairs of opposites. Each “up” has its “down,” each “heaven”, its “hell”, and so on. Why? Well, it has to do with the fact that it helps us organise our experiences when we see the world in opposites. If we didn’t do it, the world would appear utterly chaotic. Still, we reach certain moments, he acknowledges, when we recognise that reality is never so black-or-white.
According to Spellmeyer, Buddha has a saying in this matter. He taught that we should look for a Middle Way whenever we find ourselves getting trapped by our binary thinking, meaning: stepping back and seeing things from a new and broader viewpoint.
One story from Zen tradition illustrates how the Middle Way works. In the story, a Master poses this question to his student: “When you meet a person who is truly awake, you shouldn’t greet him with words or with silence. Tell me, then, how will you greet him?” If neither words nor silence is acceptable, it looks like we’ve exhausted our alternatives. But sooner or later, the Zen student recognises that such a person can be greeted in many ways — with a smile, a melody, or a bouquet of flowers.
Looking at the world in opposites can serve us to some extent; however, only to use this viewpoint is way too simple. And of course, we know this when we stop and think for a while. It just takes a little patience and effort to find the ‘maybes’, but it surely makes life a whole more interesting.
(And, for the record, I do not love cold summers - I prefer blue sky and a lovely moderate temperature - let’s say 25C/77F. Also, I am very fond of physical activity - however, I prefer being active in other ways than what the more traditional sports-way prescribes. :-) )
Here’s to you, a Handful of History - 5 exciting things on history I thought were worth sharing. Enjoy!
It’s March, and it’s Women’s History Month, and there are lots of great books on amazing women out there. Podcasts too. Recently I finished the book “Death in Ten Minutes: The Forgotten Life of Radical Suffragette Kitty Marion” by the British historian Dr Fern Riddell. It has a narrative approach and is written in a most inspiring way. By the end of it, you have learned a whole lot about not only the life of Kitty Marion - which is rather adventurous - but also the suffragette movement (which I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t know much about…until now). In this interview, Riddell speaks about “Death in Ten Minutes”.
2 Movies on - strong - women. “Arab Blues” and “Colette”.
Watch Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Charles Darwin, Van Gogh, and Alan Turing being animated into 'living portraits’.
David Suchet has played the character of Hercule Poirot for ages. Recently he made the podcast "Questions of Faith", in which he discovers what connects three of the world's major religions, Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Most interesting.
I took the personality test: “Which Famous Historical Figure Are You?” First, I landed on Mahatma Gandhi (Yas!). However - on a more gloomy day - I ended up as Queen Victoria (Oh well).
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Early roller coaster, Britain 1898. Notice how the people in the car to the right switch to a return-car once they reach the top end :-)
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