Things to Come

The story of a hundred year way that starts in 1940 and lasts so long no one remembers why it began. After a plague kills most of the society, small groups survive and finally reconnect to rebuild, until it grows so prosperous a new uprising begins again progress, claiming it is what starts wars in the first place.

It seems H.G Wells the author was a prophetic. He did predict a war would erupt in 1940, just a few months after world war two actually started in 1939.

The Holy Land and world culture

Gustave Dore - New Jerusalem

The people of Israel had re-established their state in Land of Israel after two thousand years of exile and the Holocaust. One of the lessons of the Holocaust is that a strong Israel is a moral obligation of the free world.
But the Promised Land borders are not defined precisely in the Bible. The Bible says that God, the people of Israel, and Land of Israel, are a consolidated entity. This definition has already decided the fate of the Jewish people. But unlike the people's clear concrete rules, the boundaries were vague and undefined.

Research has determined that there are different border settings of Greater Israel. These territorial definitions were created at different times by different people, and caused absolute misunderstanding. There are also those who claim that the country's borders expand and contract as needed.

Lack of clear map has always been an obstacle for the Zionist idea. Jerusalem became abstract term, one that reflects value and is intangible, in the eyes of the Jews themselves in the Diaspora, from the destruction of the first temple and later.

In modern times, the lack of a map defining the boundaries of Greater Israel influenced crucial political decisions. For example, Sinai Peninsula was given to Egypt casually, because it was not considered by the government of Menachem Begin as part of Greater Israel.

The Catholic Church announced a few years ago, based on an Israeli scholar's research, that Mount Sinai is in the Negev plateau.


In contrast to its mental cancellation as a tangible object, the Land of Israel has always evoked the deepest feelings in all Western and Monotheistic cultures. Longings to Israel, the Holy land, find their expression as a strong physical and emotional experience in prayers, hymns, and works of religious art throughout history.

Gospel songs expressing longing to the Holy Land are major assets of Western Culture. They are earthy level of religious poetry. In them, religious and folk poetry is combined in an inseparable connection.


An American Gospel song:

I'm a Pilgrim

I am a pilgrim and a stranger,
Travelling through this wearisome land,
got a home in that yonder city, oh Lord,
and it's not, not made by hands.

I got a mother, sister and a brother,
who have gone to that sweet land.
I am determined to go and see them
oh Lord,
all over on that distant shore.

As I go down to that river of Jordan,
just to bathe my weary soul.
If I could touch but the hem of his garment,
oh Lord, well, I believe it would make me whole.


A philosophy that deals with human beings must adjust to the images of poems and continue their flow. Philosophy must learn poems honestly, because poetry is the peak of contemplation and expression, the climax of thought and dream.

The connection in this poem between the physical Jordan River and the abstract celestial city is too clear and strong then required for a simple metaphor.
It arouses questions regarding the intimacy between religious and material experiences.

The consistant relationship between the personal religious experience and the physical Holy Land calls for examining its sources.

Airplane on Water

Many men drowned in front of mirrors. - Gaston Bachelard

photo: axiepics

Chicago's Annual Air and Water Show

Near water, light takes on a new tonality; it seems that light has more clarity when it meets clear water. - Gaston Bachelard

photo: Chaseism

Air and Water

To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds his image in the destiny of water. - Gaston Bachelard

photo: ms4jah

Wind

Of all the airy substances, the wind is the one that provides the most restless dynamic air images, the most unstable, the world of storms. The wind creates very clear and accumulating psychological imagery.

It looks as the tremendous emptiness, awakens suddenly to act, changes into a particularly clear image of cosmic rage. The angry wind is a symbol of pure anger, anger without target or cause.

Sounds of the winds of rage create airy monsters. It's possible to the hear them scream. In the reverie of the storm, it is not the eye that creates the images, but rather the frightened ear. It is not the scream that arrives from a beast's throat, but rather the scream of the storm. The power that created it is the cry of anger.

By means of the restless air we are able to understand a basic anger, which is absolutely movement and nothing except of movement. From personal experience of storms we learn how furious and useless the desire is. The exaggerating wind is anger situated everywhere and nowhere, born and reborn from within itself, distorted and revolves.

By following the great dreamers of universe doctrines in the creations of their imagination, we find that they often give to anger a courage validation. The anger attacks the work that has to be done.

As if by way of provocation, the world is created by means of anger. Anger puts the foundation to the dynamic entity. Anger is the action by which the entity begins.

The first thing created by this creative anger is the storm. The swirling air of storm creates the stars. The cry creates images, speech, and thought.

The more any action is considered, and as much as it promises to be canny, it still must first cross a little threshold of anger. Anger is the acid that without it any impression is not engraved in our mind. Anger creates active impression.

For many dreamers, the four compass directions are first and foremost the counties that belong to the four great winds. In many aspects, these four great winds are the four elements. They produce the double dialectic of heat and cold, dryness and humidity.

This renewed soul of the world has a profound self. The gust of wind is wild and pure. It dies and reborn again. In the wind breathes a virginal soul that was not corrupted by any earthy thing. Life is so great that even the winter has a future.

Exercises of breath receive moral significance in alternative religions. They are real ceremonies that place mankind in contact with the universe. Wind for the world and breath for mankind demonstrate the expansion of infinite things.

When the fire desists, it desists in the wind. When the sun set, it set is in the wind. When the moon disappears, it disappears in the wind. So the wind consumes everything.


From Gaston Bachelard's book 'Air and Dreams'