Malicious review in TLS strikes a chord with me

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Harry Strawson, studying for an MA in Classics at University College in London, took to task Frederic Raphael’s Antiquity Matters [Yale University Press, $26] in TLS [the Times Literary Supplement] August 3, 2018 [Pages 28-29].

The review caused me to order the book posthaste from North Atlantic Books.

Mr. Strawson wrote that “Raphael’s sparkling conversational style has little time for the duller but enriching work of explication."

"Raphael is consistently interesting; but it can be hard to keep up once he settles into his digressive narrative.” [Page28

“More interested in displaying his own cleverness than in offering a meaningful introduction to the ancient world, Raphael fails to make a case that antiquity matters much beyond intellectual showboating.” [Page 29]

(Who does Raphael sound like?)

Frederic Raphael offers a riposte to Mr. Strawson in the August 17 TLS correcting Mr. Strawson’s slight slur that Mr. Raphael wasn’t a bona fide academic. [TLS, Page 6]

What enthused me about the review were the many examples of content therein: A note about Marcel Proust’s father, an anecdote about Pier Paolo Pasolini (the perverse film-maker whom I adore), a snide remark about the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, an insight about the "ban nuclear weapons" movement, and, especially a note about Lucian’s second-century tale of visiting the moon:

https://publicdomainreview.org/2013/06/26/lucians-trips-to-the-moon/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_True_Story

I sympathize with Mr. Raphael, a writer after my own heart and an academic chap who provides, it seems, entertaining material(s) that normal folks can understand and enjoy.

RR

Alien (Extraterrestrial) communication….one more time.

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

In considering the many ways that humans (and Earth’s other creatures) communicate, I wonder why the supposed alien/extraterrestrial visitors’ communication skills are so pathetic.

When the first human species began to communicate can only be guessed at but there are suppositions:

The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis Williams [Thames and Hudson, London, 2002], Inside the Neolithic Mind by Williams and David Pearce [Thames and Hudson, London, 2005], Gods, Voice, and the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes, edited by Marcel Kuijsten [Julian Jaynes Society, NV, 2016], The First Artists, by Michel Lorblanchet and Paul Bahn [Thames & Hudson, London, 2017], and The First Signs by Genevieve von Petzinger [Atria Books, NY, 2016] among many others.

It seems obvious that the first humans would have to communicate, in order to survive and to make sense of their existence, even in their supposed primitive state.

How they communicated may be surmised: guttural sounds, gestures, and even music.

Neanderthal musical instruments have been located and tested:

http://discovermagazine.com/1997/apr/andaoneandauhuh1108

(But what was the very first sound and from what or whom? That’s a fascinating story to pursue I think.)

As mankind evolved other modes of communication became prominent: poetic utterances, elaborate gesticulations, singing, emotional outbursts, drawings and paintings, graffiti, articulate speech, body language, and semi-conscious or unconscious, even symbolic communicative gestures.

Humans have refined all of these things but in UFO reports, involving humanoid or entity contact, the communication between the beings encountered and the witnesses are paltry communication, although ETH enthusiasts would say that telepathic thought is generic and advanced for the alleged species that is confronted.

But is it?

One can assume that the “contact” between alien beings and humans are projections from the human psyche and the communication in the human heads are imagined or provided by the witness.

Let’s assume that isn’t the case, rather that the thoughts are inserted by the alien visitors.

The messages received (communicated) are prosaic and too human, just as the aliens are too human as Jacques Vallee proposes and academic Bryan Sentes (and I) agree.

The Marian visitations (witnesses thinking they have seen the virgin Mary) are fraught with simplistic suggestions and pleas, the messages often self-serving or ego-oriented, hardly a trait one would assume for the mother of Jesus Christ.

And the messages from extraterrestrial beings are just silly: they come from planets known not to harbor sentient life or platitudes about peace or nuclear war are too Earth-specific to make one think that the messages are from an advanced race from elsewhere in the cosmos.

The Rosales’ Humanoid books are replete with supposed communication from alien (ET) beings, all of that communication quasi-moronic or foolish.

This seems to confirm the ideas of Spanish researcher Jose Antonio Caravaca’s delicious Distortion Theory where an “external agent” (a psychical construct) is creating the messages.

I can’t recall one interactive account wherein the perceived alien provides communication of an esoteric scientific kind or anything resembling “advanced” thinking.

That this is the case makes me think that we have a pre-psychotic or hallucinatory backlog of alien communication that would make for bad-fiction or  case studies in insanity.

RR