Anton's Ideas

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                                                             As You Can Imagine

I have never heard of Google images and cannot find them on my computer; well four desk top PCs, three lap tops, two smart phones, three tablets and my wife’s iPad. I therefore found today’s prompt beyond me. But perhaps not the spirit of it. As a student of iconography and all forms of image-evoking art, I decided to write about the whole concept of images and imagining within the limitations of abstract human thought processes.  As  you can imagine, by this medium so can you be an individual. Think about it. Imagine it, if you will. What do our cerebral images tell us that is actually of any value to us at all when we are not using our eyes? They may be shut in prayer or meditation, under anaesthetic or just asleep, but whatever the cause, I wish to discuss briefly the use of those images which crowd our minds when we are not using our sense of sight.

The most common  form of non-cognitive cerebral image perception is probably the nightmare. I so much prefer the French ‘cauchemare’, it somehow gets right inside you before confusing and frightening you. But the nightmare is invariably a sequence of tableaux which scare you. And this is not least because the pictures they paint across your subconscious are in vivid, screaming colours, yet include recognisable faces of people you know who are either suffering themselves or causing you pain. Many psychiatrists associate nightmares with guilt complexes, but this does not ring true for me. No, for me the nightmare is only the experience of horror or shock which we have stored up when awake and are incapable of suppressing when asleep. Lucky the man who can remember his dreams, they tell him so much about himself.

And on the role of all dreams in this discussion, how sweet it is to dream of love and conjure up in your dream the face of the person without whom you cannot envisage continuing living. For me it is the power of a long remembered smile, a ringlet wafting across her face, an infectious contortion of her entire corporal frame which invariably accompanies a happy giggle or the sensual delight of a playful tickle. When awake I have never seen all these images at one and the same time. But asleep, oh the excitement of them all being there at once! And I dream also of mysteries I can never solve but whose answers appear before me as I slumber. A saint’s face, a racing car cornering at two hundred and thirty miles an hour, my dog playing with the children while guarding them too. Their happy expressions result in such vibrant emotions being stirred up in my brain that I start to think I am awake. But all I am doing is wishing I was, because when I am they are never quite so strong. More real, perhaps, but nothing like as pleasantly engaging..

Now, I did question if  such images had any value because we are not using our eyes, well not controlling their use. I have to say I think they do. I have nearly died several times, helicopter crashes, bombs, gun shots have all pushed me a little closer to the abyss, but the worst moment was just before being put unconscious before a life threatening operation. I deliberately tried to focus on God as I went under, but it was so quick and my return to consciousness eleven hours later was so fast that I recall nothing that passed before my mind during that time. But the next time I fell asleep I dreamed I was dying and the images that sped across my uncomprehending brain were so awful I can never forget them, but neither can I describe them. You ask where was the value in that? Think, my friend. Is it not obvious? I can now talk about things I saw but never set eyes on, eternal mysteries and their solutions I contemplated without ever understanding them. How lucky I was, we all are,  that this type of iconograhic meditational experience is possible and happens to everyone. It is what makes us individuals. And, more importantly, we all enjoy our mental pictures, be they pleasant or terrifying, as you can imagine.

Anton Wills-Eve

Just a short, yet no less sincere, Happy New Year to all my friends and followers on WordPress for 2015. I am changing the order of my current plan for blogs  for the rest of 2015, so don’t be surprised if things look a bit disjointed and some posts are missing. Everything will return in a new format very soon and continue on from there.

God Bless to everyone.

Anton.

Cause, Meet Effect

Who Dunnit?

Having written three full length novels, amongst the miles of articles, poems, news reports and love letters that have sprung from my keyboard over the years, I reflected that they were all basically romances. Some humorous, spiritual and both happy and sad but all definitely based on the burden that love can both place upon, and remove from, our shoulders. So I decided to give myself a complete change and write a detective story.

But there is one common factor in those first three books apart from romance. They all bear titles that are simply the names of the main characters. My first rather controversial novel, James and Jacqueline, received very mixed reviews. Some people just don’t like books on religious themes, even if the storyline is exciting, heart breaking and true. My second effort , John and Gemma was much better in the eyes of many because it really plumbed the depths of human emotions when two people are opposed on every side by relatives and friends who don’t want them to marry. So I lightened life up a bit in Glenda and Hugh and introduced a whole new approach to love. Two people drawn to each other by what they have in common in their likes and dislikes rather than just physical attraction. But frankly I felt I really did need a change so I set about my murder mystery. Yes, but what do you think it’s called. ‘Peter and Phylida’. Oh well, some things never change. But this book is changing me.

To begin with I seldom know my own story lines before I write a work of any length. With the love stories just the setting has been in my mind as I started them and this gets me interested in what is going to happen next. It has led to quite a few troubled nights wondering how my hero and heroine were going to deal with their latest crisis. Got me quite uptight on occasions too.

But, oh dear, it won’t stop. The most awful thing has happened. I have started a gripping tale of double murder, with a string of odious obvious baddies and several herrings which, if not bright red, are rather obviously pink. As Peter and Phylida are the work’s eponymous characters they have to be the amateur sleuths who have the thick, plodding policemen well beaten in their race to uncover all the twists and turns leading to the solving of the crimes. But I’ve hit a snag. As with all my works, except possibly when having the misfortune to be in charge of the news desk in Paris the night De Gaulle died, or when being nearly killed in a helicopter crash on the banks of the Mekong river between Vietnam and Cambodia, I don’t know what to write next.

You see my detectives cannot agree on what certain clues mean and so come up with different solutions to the events which rocked a small town community. Actually both endings would be equally good and I love them both, but I can only have one. So what do you think I decided to do? Well this prompt was about cause and effect. So I think I’ll name the endings A and B and take a coin and spin it as high as I can. If it comes down heads you get solution A and if tails denoument B. I hope if the poor people who publish this work of unalloyed crypto-suspense ever get to hear of how I decided on the ending they won’t just throw away the MS without even reading it.

That would be a shame, because I also could not resist making the main characters eighteen year old sixth formers in their last term at school who fall hopelessly in love right at the start. This gets my appalling inability to keep romance out of my novels out the way as fast as possible. Also I don’t actually want my readers to go out and search the highways and byways of their town to find, and strangle, the horribly precocious thirteen year old poetess who reduces our sleuths to tearing their hair out when judging a school poetry competition and having to read her absolutely sick-making entry. But it is a major clue so it has to stay. Now can you see what this prompt had done? Basically it’s made me put everyone off my next great work before it’s even hit the bookshops.

Ah well. Ask me to change my traditional writing themes and the effect will be that you have to wade through a disjointed thriller with an ending that only satisfies half of even the author’s brain. But do buy it when it comes out. That would be a really good effect!

Anton Wills-Eve

Final Trio

Who’s a Clever Boy Then?

Once again I played my record of Dame Joan Sutherland singing the mad scene from Lucia di Lamamoor by Donizetti, one of the all time greatest soprano arias ever composed. Those who have heard it will know that the way La Stupenda, as the Italians called her, held the final top C was amongst the most astonishing achievements in the history of the human voice. Well she got it spot on again, not surprising as I always played the same record, and her voice smashed a crystal flower vase on the bookcase.

I was confined to my room for the rest of the day but it was worth it, both to hear such wonderful music and to complete a word press prompt in the space of just eight consecutive words.

Anton Wills-Eve

If I appear to keep disappearing: I haven’t posted anything for six weeks! the anaesthetic must be stronger than the doctors realise. So instead of having nightmares I shall merely share the press release on my recently published novel, James and Jacqueline which is now in book stores and available on line.

New book is a tale of love, organized crime, phobias and university life
Anton Wills-Eve tells the story of ‘James and Jacqueline’ and their wild romantic adventures

UNITED KINGDOM – Two people, lost in the dizzying maze of life, haunted by the vicissitudes of fate and gripped by their myriad fears, come together and find strength and solace in each other’s presence in Anton Wills-Eve’s new novel. “James and Jacqueline” is a tale that follows the eponymous couple’s romantic hijinks – and the myriad personal, mental, familial and criminal crises they face – which begin within the walls and halls of an English university, and eventually reach all the way to Paris, the city of love and light.

The lovers start off broken by their respective phobias, which dominate their lives, and are initially defined by how they face their circumstances. James believes that God is his greatest aid, while Jacqueline cannot accept the idea of any creator who could make her so cruelly ill. He suffers from agoraphobia, she from claustrophobia, reflecting their similarities and their polar differences. Their meeting is fateful, and eventually they fall for each other and face the challenges before them, which range from dogmatic doctors, the difficulties of living and working in the university, the loss of loved ones and parents, and family involvement in a major crime syndicate. As they go on this arduous journey, they are changed by each other and by the hardships they encounter, the courage they muster as they fight against their inner demons, and the help they get from those who come to their aid. Lives are threatened, anxieties and neuroses inevitably manifest, passions and emotions run wild, and appalling revelations emerge as the couple makes their way towards the end of the story and their journey.

At once touching, exciting and humorous, the story of “James and Jacqueline” shows readers how to live with a serious anxiety neurosis while being faced with moral, romantic, family, criminal, religious and social crises. Wills-Eve’s unpredictable tale, and the flawed characters populating it, contains something of everybody’s concept of true love and life.

For more information on this book, interested parties may log on to http://www.XlibrisPublishing.co.uk.

I am not going to indulge myself this year in telling you everything that is going to happen in 2014. This time last year I got seven of my top ten forecasts hopelessly wrong, so I am restricting this year to three dead certs.

Firstly sport. I am tipping Argentina to win the world cup if, and only if, they have to play Brazil before the final, or some other country knocks Brazil out for them. A quarter final match would be the best time for Pope Francis’ XI  to meet and beat Brazil, probably 2-0 or 2-1. The final should be Argentina v Germany or Italy and a 1-0 scoreline after extra time is the most likely result. But all this does not say who I would LIKE to win the trophy. Being a Scots Australian who was born in England and educated in France and  Switzerland, I have to stick with my favourite soccer team. Italy! I don’t know why I love the Azzuri, I just do. It’s like my support of the Pittsburg Pirates which probably stems from my favourite uncle being a native of Pennsylvania who taught me the game in exchange for cricket lessons. But  if Italy win I’ll be happy and if Argentina win I’ll be richer. Oh, and while on the subject of sport, this year the British golf open is at the Royal Liverpool links at Hoylake. As the tenth hole is only 784 yards from my home I shall be glued to the television that week trying to spot  my house!

My second forecast is in the field of politics. I have a very strong feeling that David Cameron is going to call a snap election just when the Eastern European immigration crisis is coming to a head and the Tories will squeeze back in, this time in coalition with  UKIP who should pick up at least fifty seats. Election to clash with the golf? Heavens, I hope not!

And finally an entertainment forecast. Absolutely nothing new that is worth watching for even five minutes will break out in our sitting rooms  anywhere in the English speaking world. As far as drama is concerned 2014 is going to reach a new low in the world of the small screen.

Right, that’s the forecasts over, so all I have to do is wish everyone a very happy and enjoyable, above all enjoyable, year and for those of you who are so inclined I would be very grateful for a short prayer that my cancer hurries up and disappears. I am beginning to get a little fed up with it. Thanks.

All the best.

Anton

Very soon now we will be into 2014 and marking the centenary year of the first world war. It must have been wonderful a century ago today to be looking forward to a New Year in which most people in the western world feared that conflict might soon break out between Germany and Britain, if not more countries, but safe in the belief that the power of the British Empire would soon crush any military threat from Kaiser Bill. We were invincible in those days, or so we believed, and could see no further into the future than a week or so ahead  because the world was not going to change and we ran it. What lessons have we learned since then?

To start with, we forgot that our power and wealth were based on the money we had accrued from  our great days of industrial invention which spanned the century from 1770 to 1870. From then on, approximately, we were living off the wealth which our lead in the means and the source of everything we needed to maintain our place as top nation were, by 1914, dependent on owning our colonies and sitting back and enjoying the fruits of our forefathers’ labours. The Germans, on the other hand, had spent the whole of the previous 100 years from Waterloo in 1815 to the start of 1914 in gaining supremacy in continental Europe where only the French could keep up with them, and again only because of their colonial possessions . The Franco-Prussian war of 1870 to 1871 should have told us to stamp on the German threat then. But as most of our rulers had German relations we had neither the interest nor the inclination to do this. When the United states produced the first working aeroplane at the turn of the century the whole world should have seen that the New World was about to become the New Top Nation as well. But those who did just sat back, again, and lived well off what they had. It was obvious to a blind man that the balance of power was moving but those who could have made sure this balance was carefully monitored and controlled for the good of everyone did nothing. And then there was another element that effectively changed the world in the last half of the nineteenth century.

Industrial wealth and colonial exploitation of sources of wealth were only made possible by the use of very poorly paid workers or slave labourers. Two works which changed the world’s approach to the poor appeared in the 1850’s and 1890’s. The first, Das Kapital, by Karl Marx advocated a complete change in the world order and the levelling of all social orders under what came to be known as Communism. But this was a doctrine opposed to the possession of money or almost any property and thus also was against any religious teachings which allowed people to hold what they had. The great encyclical of Pope Leo XIII in 1891, Rerurm Novarum, (concerning the new order of things) laid down for the whole world the first sensible rules governing the rights of workers and their duties to their employers, and the duties of these employers to treat their workers humanely and pay them a negotiated living wage. This idea that a trade union need not be anti-capitalist, but on the contrary a tool for making capitalism work better for the good of all, ultimately became the central idea of all political parties which used the word liberal in their names. But it took a war which killed millions of working men, but very few rich employers, to awaken the average citizens of all countries to the plight of workers globally.  Unfortunately it also stigmatised the people who owned and controlled the means of workers’ earning their living and, by being ignored by too many governments for too long, led to the forty five years of dreadful Communist oppression in Asia and Eastern Europe from 1945 to 1990. If a Tory government had been returned to power in Britain in 1945, instead of a Labour Party with a huge chip on its shoulder and no concept whatever of world affairs, it is most probable that Communism would never have been allowed to survive in Eastern Europe and possibly even China.

Yet today we can look with hope upon a different world map to that of 1914. Islam controls the majority  of the world’s wealth, and for the same reason as we and the United States, did 100 years ago. The ethos behind its method of ruling the countries it controls does not allow for the inhabitants to have a say in what is or is not right concerning how the ordinary citizen conducts their own life. We did this in Asia, Africa and the West Indies especially, but today we do it nowhere. Islam has another 623 years to go to catch up with our concept of democratic government and we can only hope that it will not take this long for it to change its ways. If it does not I greatly fear that the third world war will be between Muslims and the rest of the Industrial countries. But personally I suffer from optimism and do not believe that the average Muslim would let this happen. At least it is my fervent hope and prayer for the next hundred years, even if I will not be around to see whether I am right or not.

I have no idea how many people ever read my posts and poems but to those who do I wish a very happy, healthy, holy and enjoyable Christmas. Tomorrow is the celebration of the birth of our Saviour and I was very upset today to read the lead story in the Daily Telegraph pointing out just how persecuted Christians are in our modern world in their own country. I have no idea whether reminding people that Christianity is how God wants everyone to live, and how all other religions just get in the way of making this possible for so many people, is permitted or not in our politically incorrect country. There is no reason I can think of why I should not be allowed to say that I love all my fellow men and pray for them every day, while at the same time reserving the right to preach the gospel as God wants me to no  matter how many other religions it may contradict. The greatest tragedy in Britain in my lifetime has been the way infidels, and by that I mean people who do not share my Faith, have been encouraged by so many people in authority to claim their right to preach heresy with immunity, while Christians  are not allowed to point out that these doctrines are false.

So my main resolution for 2014 is to do all I can to work towards changing the law in this country so that everybody can preach what they believe without the fear of being fined or imprisoned as they are now. I do not wish any members of any other religions, or people who do not claim to have a religion, any ill will at all. Quite the opposite; they are all God’s creatures and for that reason they should be allowed to hear and decide for themselves  whether the Christian Church preaches the truth or not. I believe it does and I do not recognise any person or organisation’s claim to say they have the right or the power to stop me telling all my fellow men that this is so. Therefore I repeat my message. Have a happy and holy Christmas and make your resolution next year to help bring about tolerance in everyone’s heart no matter what they believe or how they worship.

God Bless you all.

Anton

Censoring the Internet.

Given that the internet has slowly crept up on the world and taken over the role of ‘communicating medium en chef’, without anyone really appreciating what that role would ultimately control, we are now faced with a world in which half the population have access to some form of hardware that allows them to read, watch or talk to , with, against or at each other. The question that has to be asked today, therefore, is should such freedom of ‘access to communicate’ be controlled by any government or international organisation or should everyone in the world include among their civil rights the right to post or publish, preach or pray on, to, for or at the world as a whole, without being subject to a regulating body? I can think of no argument in favour of either giving total freedom of expression or exercising any degree of censorship or control in this matter at all. The Wikileaks farce that the US took such exception to was a wonderful example of how if there is one body that should never have this power it is the military, in any country. If a security system is as easy to penetrate as the emailed information contained in the Wikileaks messages then the US armed forces should thank all the people who demonstrated how insecure their military intelligence was. At least in Britain we only allow deliberate disinformation to reach the press. But the main point at issue here is should censorship of communication be enforced when it is done to protect the young, the old, or the mentally ill? Yes it should.But only where defence of the most vulnerable members of society is at issue.The picture (above) demonstrates better than anything why censorship never works. This is an image which any normal person would look at with perhaps fleeting interest and not give it another thought. But if I was to tell you what it represented to those who had already been told its significance and, more importantly, the message which it carried instructing those in the know how or when to act in a particular way, you would be horrified. But how could any censor, who was not previously primed to expect and then interpret such an image, be able to say whether it should or should not be shown? They would have an impossible and meaningless task. Would someone please tell me how to regulate the displaying of such iconography. I know that it desperately needs to be done. But not how !