François Skyvington's moped road movie #6

Episode #6 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

François and his moped left the sunny south of France for another exotic corner of Europe: the German Bight, on the edge of the North Sea.

His excursions started at the North Frisian port of Husum, where François boarded a vessel for a bit of prawn fishing.

Funnily enough, the crew members were intrigued to find that their French visitor was accustomed to crunching into small cooked prawns without removing their shells.

Next, François abandoned temporarily his moped and took a plane out to the remote archipelago of Heligoland, some 50 km off the German coastline, where he had a rendezvous with Rolf Hagel, in charge of the local seal population.

They started out immediately, on foot, to inspect seals on the nearby beaches.

They soon came upon a pair of baby seals that had been abandoned by their mother.

They would have to be captured rapidly and transported to the local seal nursery for feeding and care.

Next, François boarded a ferry for the bleak windswept island of Pellworm, which seemed to lie in the middle of nowhere.

Here, men were constantly building and repairing sea walls made of wooden stakes and bundles of branches.

Taking advantage of the least strip of earth emerging from the waters in this steel-gray setting, these warriors of the sea strive ceaselessly to prevent the island from disappearing into the North Sea.

François was guided by a local resident, Knud, who, besides his work as a seawall supervisor, has a job as a barefooted postman, walking across the beaches to deliver mail brought across on the ferry. On this particular day, the island's postman got a helping hand from François and his moped.

François' final encounter in this lonely but lovely universe was with a lady named Ruth.

After meeting up with François in a mainland food-supplies store and piling his moped into her van for the trip towards her island home, Ruth parked her vehicle and took control of her personal train for the journey along a narrow causeway with the sea on both sides.

She explained that she only owns the train, whereas the railway line belongs to the German Republic.

As for her home, it's built on a mound of earth that rises magically out of the flat sandbanks and the sea.

Whenever the sea surrounds the house, they simply close the doors and windows.

François saw amazing photos of what the house looked like whenever there was a tempest, several times a year.

Apparently, at the top of the house, an emergency attic has been built on four hefty concrete pillars. So, even if the rest of the house were to be swept into the sea, Ruth and her children could wait in safety for the waters to subside.

For the second time in his road movie, François was surrounded by a big flock of sturdy sheep, which enable Ruth to earn her living in this exotic setting.

When François asked Ruth naively if it might not be better to reside on the mainland and only step across to the island to take care of the sheep, she replied with a smile that her ancestors had been settled in this remote paradise for the last two and a half centuries, and that she felt fine there.

Finally, François trudged back along the causeway beside his trusty steed.

A big fat ewe watched him leaving.

The animal seemed to be saying to itself: "Why would anyone decide to leave this marvelous island?" In one of Ruth's amazing photos, we saw that, in times of tempest, the sheep gather on the lawns of her house as if it were Noah's Ark.

It's easy to understand that—for Ruth, her children and her sheep—abandoning this kind of existence for a mainland house at the other terminus of her railway line would be unthinkable.

Half a century ago

In September 1962, I was spending my final fortnight with IBM in Paris. After seven months working as a computer programmer in the IBM Europe headquarters in the Cité du Retiro—a few hundred meters away from the Elysées Palace of the Général de Gaulle—I had the frustrating impression (which later turned out to be false) that I hadn't learned much French.

For the next three months, I would hitchhike around France and Spain before moving across to London for another IBM job, in the UK company's Wigmore Street headquarters. For the moment, in Paris, I must admit retrospectively that I had not yet heard the new sound that was emerging on the other side of the English Channel.

However I had vaguely sensed that lots of things were happening in London at that time. It seemed to be the place where the action was.

Jesus

Having just announced the creation of a new religion—in my previous blog post [display]—I'm aware that it's somewhat risky to submit this new blog post about Jesus, who could well upstage me. What I have to say is so important, however, that I don't think I'm behaving foolishly. Indeed, if it were to come to pass that the two great religions of our Third Millennium were Christianity and Awestruckism (as I firmly believe), I'm completely fairplay. I want to give Jesus a chance.

I've just finished reading (rereading in the case of the first title) a pair of extraordinary books:

If ever there were required reading in the Vatican (and elsewhere), this is it! But the arguments of the distinguished authors—James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici—are often so complex (while remaining perfectly lucid) that I'm more and more convinced that Christianity, in spite of all its obvious merits, is likely to be soon engulfed, for the better or for the worse, by the limpidity of my Awestruckism. The change will evoke the way in which the terribly complicated "nested spheres" theories of Ptolemy were surpassed by the splendid simplicity of Kepler. For the moment, it's a little too early to say whether Awestruckism is likely to demolish Christianity (and Judaism and Islam, just to name a few old religions) in the same revolutionary style. But today, if Jesus were a corporation on the Chicago stock exchange, I wouldn't buy shares...

It's a tale of two tombs, which I shall refer to (jumping ahead, for simplicity) as the Jesus Tomb and the Arimathea Tomb. Basically, book #1 talks of the first tomb, whereas the existence of the second tomb, almost alongside the other one, is only revealed in book #2. But the themes of the two books and the two tombs are so intricately interwoven that you need to delve into both.

First, I should make it quite clear that we're not talking about the literary effusions of crackpots. I'll let you look up the credentials of the North Carolina professor James Tabor and the filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. They're smart guys, not necessarily in the Judeo-Christian religious mainstream, but terribly convincing. Their competence extends from deciphering ancient Biblical texts down to the analysis of DNA. And they write in a beautifully convincing style, which leaves little doubt about the likely truth.

So, the great news is that we now know, most probably, where Jesus, his family and his companions were buried. It is becoming clearer that Jesus was indeed the sexual partner of Mary Magdalene.

Retrospectively, it's amazing that the bones of Jesus were probably accessible (able to be examined genetically) not so long ago, before being whisked away into eternal obscurity by the Ultra-Orthodox morons of the Holy City. The stupidity of the latter guys has given unwittingly an enormous boost to my new religion of Awestruckism...

New religion

I've been trying to define the principles of a new religion: its creed, you might say. It's not often that I do this kind of thing, so I'm a bit of a newcomer to such a challenge. But creating a new religion is a pleasant and fulfilling task. For the moment, I'm the only clearly-identified adept of this new religion, but that could change overnight once my system of beliefs becomes more widely known.

In spite of all that talk about a rose being a rose by any other name, I consider that names (and symbols, too) are quite important when you're creating a new religion. For the moment, I'm forced to admit that the name I've been using for my new religion is a little clumsy: not exactly the sort of word that rolls off your tongue, harmoniously, like most good names of religions. But it's the best thing I can find. I'm calling it Awestruckism, from the well-known adjective "awestruck". And I'm using a nice big purple-hued letter A as our symbol.

It's not a particularly complicated religion, in that it has no dogma whatsoever, no sacred rituals and—last but not least—no clergy. In fact, I don't think my new religion can even be associated with something that might be referred to as a theology. Individuals who adhere to Awestruckism won't be expected to pray, or take part in any kinds of official ceremonies. Indeed, the sole religious duty of those who decide to accept this new faith can be summed up in a single sentence:

Adepts of Awestruckism are expected to remain constantly awestruck by the nature of the Cosmos.

That's all. Being awestruck is our sole profound goal in existence. But we must understand the multiple meanings of this adjective... which have been conveniently grouped together in my online Macintosh dictionary:

awestruck: awed, filled with wonder, filled with awe, wonderstruck, amazed, filled with amazement, astonished, filled with astonishment, lost for words, open-mouthed.

The dictionary concludes with four more, of a slightly different kind:

reverential; terrified, afraid, fearful.

Without going into details, I believe (here, it's my faith that is talking) that the practice of awestruckism can be associated with any and all of the above-mentioned senses. Indeed, I consider that one of the great early intellectual pioneers in Awestruckism was the French philosopher Blaise Pascal when he said:

The eternal silence of these
infinite spaces terrifies me.

Unfortunately, he was waylaid by conventional religion and science, and never had an opportunity of developing his Awestruckist beliefs.

Within the context of the new religion that I am promoting, there will be no arbitrary rules concerning the nature of the phenomena capable of striking such-and-such a believer with awe. For example, if I were approached by a young male baptismal candidate who told me that he was utterly awestruck, first and foremost, by the insanely sexy allure of a certain young female (or male, for that matter) whom he had recently encountered, I would not hesitate in looking upon him as a potentially serious member of our congregation.

Admittedly, no self-respecting religion can survive without a certain number of forbidden themes. For example, if somebody informed me that he was totally awestruck by the recent phenomenal gains of Ajax shares, say, on the Chicago stock exchange, I would hesitate a little before looking upon him as a potentially-rich adept of our faith. Potentially rich, maybe, but not necessarily the kind of spiritual profile we're seeking.

To call a spade a spade, many (but not all) of our sources of awe are likely to come from the various domains of contemporary science: genetics, cosmology, etc. But an Awestruckist might just as surely discover his revelations of awe in art, literature or, simply, in everyday life. Our religion is largely open-ended.

Already, I can hear folk of other faiths claiming that I only chose this name because I'm "Awe-stralian". But I assure such heretics that my having been born Down Under has little, if anything, to do with my religious beliefs. Even if I had been born in France, for example, I'm sure that I might have evolved into a pious Awestruckist.

Other infidels are going to draw attention to the proximity, from a pronunciation viewpoint, of the term ostracism, designating exclusion and banishment from an established group. This criticism worries me less, because it's undeniable that Awestruckism will be tinged inevitably by a mild and inoffensive form of elitism. What I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't like to see hordes of people flocking to our new religion simply for superficial pretexts such as baptisms, marriages and burials. Besides, I've decreed (pardon my absolutism) that it's out of the question for Awestruckists—at least for the moment—to build religious edifices or organize regular ceremonies of any kind whatsoever.

Talking about religious edifices (churches, temples, synagogues, mosques, etc), I feel it's not too early—even before I get around to exploring the tenets of Awestruckism (in later posts)—to refute categorically certain suggestions of a complicated and indirect kind that are sure to arise. Let me explain. The French philosopher Auguste Comte [1798-1857] created a vaguely science-oriented belief system known as Positivism.

Friends know that I lived for many years in the Rue Rambuteau, Paris, on the outskirts of a celebrated neighborhood: the Marais. Not far from where my children went to school, there's a mysterious temple, in the Rue Payenne, inspired by the beliefs of Comte.

You can read about this place (in French) here. Surprisingly, the creation and upkeep of this so-called Temple of Humanity (which I've visited on countless occasions, simply because it's so weird) has been financed by anonymous Brazilians. And, if you're still under the silly impression that the Brazilian flag displays a soccer ball, let me show you in closeup what it says:

The national motto of Brazil—Ordem e Progresso (order and progress)—has been taken indirectly from the work of Auguste Comte. In other words, the creation of the modern nation of Brazil was in fact inspired by the Positivist faith of its founders.

Although I was once greatly intrigued by Auguste Comte, I hardly need to point out that there are no direct links between his Positivism and my Awestruckism. On the other hand, I must admit that I'm highly interested in the possibility that, somewhere on the surface of our awesome planet, an emerging nation might decide to use a quote from one of my Awestruckist texts. Let me propose immediately the following five-word motto, which would look good on a flag:

All things bright and digital.

François Skyvington's moped road movie #5

Episode #5 of the road movie was presented yesterday afternoon.

Still in the Cévennes, François met up with a friendly pipe-smoking shepherd.

The traditional grazing method involves seasonal operations known as transhumance. The shepherd walks his flocks up to highlands for the summer season, then back down to the plains for winter.

During the brief sequence, no less than three new lambs were born, with no problems.

François and the shepherd looked on, amused (there was no cause for alarm), as one of the ewes continued to follow the flock with the head of her half-born lamb sticking out behind her.

A few minute later on, the baby was sitting on the ground.

The shepherd collected the lambs by their front legs and carried them over to where the main flock was located.

Next, François met up with a man who organizes walking excursions in the company of Provençal donkeys.

 

The conversation moved inevitably to the story of the writer Robert Louis Stevenson [1850-1894], author of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes. As a Scottish Presbyterian, Stevenson had been fascinated by tales of the Protestant insurgents in the Cévennes, back in the time of Louis XIV, who became known as Camisards. At that time (1879), Stevenson was troubled by his romantic attachment to a married woman, Fanny Osbourne, ten years his senior and the mother of three children, who had abandoned him temporarily. (A year later, she would later become his wife.)

What better way to meditate about religious history and romance than while walking across the Cévenol mountains in the company of a faithful donkey...

François then followed an itinerant butcher on an excursion to isolated villages and houses.

In this sparsely-populated corner of France, Didier's meat van has remained a vital service.

François then met up with a rural puppeteer.

Here we see the most famous puppet of all time: Polichinelle, from the Italian Commedia dell'arte.

The puppets' heads have been created by talented sculptors.

Then the puppeteer paints them and dresses them up.

In former times, puppeteers would operate at rural fairs, in order to attract customers to the merchants' stands.

François was thrilled to discover that he had his own puppet.

They all set off on the orange moped—François, his puppet and the puppeteer—to reach the place where the puppeteer's mobile theater was parked.

François and Polichinelle were the stars of the show...

At the end of the day, François stopped for a moment in the village of Ganges to pay homage to Charles Benoit, inventor of the moped. He left an orange scarf attached to the commemorative plaque.

Finally, the episode terminated with a short trip in a hot-air balloon: an 18th-century French invention of the brothers Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.

The orange moped surely enjoyed the excursion into the skies of the Cévennes.

François certainly did.

Robotic runner

Vehicles that run on wheels have played an essential role in human civilization ever since... the invention of the wheel.

And they're likely to continue to roll on for a long time into the future, at least up until somebody puts together an impeccable automobile that darts around on an air cushion.

Or maybe there'll be some kind of marvelous "personal mover" (unimagined today, like the personal computer a century ago) that will take us magically and rapidly—along with our kids and dog and shopping basket—from one place to another.

Vehicles that run on tracks can be useful in places where wheels wouldn't work well.

But, for getting over obstacles, nothing beats legs! So, engineers at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and Boston Dynamics have been working enthusiastically on a speedy legged robot named Cheetah.

Recently, performing on its treadmill, Cheetah set a record of over 45 km/hour, which is slightly faster than Usain Bolt.

Junk's not junk

For ages, it has been said that humans use only a small percentage of their cerebral potential. Personally, I've always been wary of this kind of evaluation. The experimental evidence for such a conclusion is obscure, to say the least. What would it mean, at a practical level, if my cerebral performances were suddenly doubled, say? Would I understand twice as many things as I did previously? Would I have a vision of our human existence that was twice as deep as my old way of looking at things? Would I be capable of thinking twice as rapidly as I used to? Would I be able to master new fields of learning? Would I now have a clear perception of things that once appeared fuzzy in my mind? Would I be clearly conscious of the fact that I was twice as smart as I used to be? Frankly, I've always imagined all that extra yet-unused brainpower as akin to the legendary multiple lives of a cat. It sounds like a great idea... up until you try to imagine what it might mean in practice.

More recently, I've often been similarly wary, indeed stupefied, when I've heard geneticists talk of so-called junk DNA. The idea is that only some 2 per cent of our precious genetic heritage plays an essential role in the synthesis of proteins and operational cells and organs. The remaining 98 per cent would appear to be biological "dark matter" that simply comes along for the ride, in an almost parasitical fashion.

Once upon a time, when scientists told us that the human body was largely composed of water, I used to wonder whether it might be possible to "dry out" a human being, by removing magically all this surplus wetness. Would the waterless creature work just as well? Or would he simply shrivel up and die like a fish discarded on a sunny riverbank? In a similar way, I wondered naively about all that junk stuff that I was carrying around with me. If it were completely useless in my survival, then we might imagine a zapping device capable of eliminating everything that wasn't essential. Normally, after being zapped, I would be reduced to a dwarf, with only 2 percent of my original volume, but I would remain just as smart as before... or even much smarter, if I decided to combine the junk-DNA-zapping with a foolproof method for gaining control of all my unused brainpower. I would be transformed into a mighty midget! As Hamlet said:

I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.

We adepts of genealogical research have always been stalwart admirers of junk DNA. Funnily enough, although specialists affirmed that all this vast quantity of code achieved nothing of a useful nature, it was nevertheless the object of mutations. And the analysis of such mutations in Y-chromosomes has enabled us to trace paternal lineages. So, the junk hasn't been as totally junky as you might imagine. For example, if ever I were able to discover the identity of the first fellow in England who procreated dozens of generations of descendants named Skeffington (Skevington, Skivington, Skyvington, etc), then my junk DNA would be far more precious, for me, than all the crown jewels in the Tower of London.

Meanwhile, researchers concerned with the human genome have just announced that it is high time for us to realize that so-called junk DNA is anything but that. These researchers have been participating in a huge research project known as Encode: a consortium, based at the University of Santa Cruz in California, that is building a huge databse of the various bits and pieces of the genome.

DNA strings that don't code the synthesis of proteins take care of a multitude of necessary behind-the-scenes activities such as switching genes on or off, and regulating the context in which genes carry out their functions. Suggesting that DNA segments are "junk" simply because they don't have a star role in the coding of proteins is as silly as saying, for example, that the fabulous Avatar movie was created solely by a single director, or a pair of actors, and that all the background support was of no importance.

I liked the comments of an observer who referred to research in genetics by means of a sporting metaphor. "We're still in the warm-up, the first couple of miles of this marathon."