Lingering Thoughts

There is an assumption in our culture that unspoken and unwritten thoughts simply disappear. We have no evidence that they survive, but neither have we evidence that they vanish, violating the law of conservation of a still unknown mass or energy.

Three places make me favour the hypothesis that thoughts do not degrade as rapidly as we ... think.

The first place is a Breast Care Centre where I have a yearly appointment. It is a place in the basement of a hospital where many women who have experienced breast cancer wait to see a surgeon, or an oncologist, or to have a mammogram. Before I go I take the precaution of applying underarm antiperspirant but, long before I am seen by an expert, my clothes are damp from the sweat of fear. Yet, during the year following my diagnosis I managed to live five days a week for five weeks in a hostel on the site of the hospital where I was having radiotherapy. This hospital was situated in grounds where mature trees grew, birds made their home and laughter could often be heard. I remember my stay there as a happy one.

Self preservation is an even more basic animal instinct than defence of territory. Confronted by a predator we have the biological equipment to enable us to fight or flee; but it is impossible to vanquish quickly or escape from the predator called cancer. Fear is an emotion designed to galvanise us into action. We feel trapped when we have to spend lengthy periods in a waiting room, haunted by the trapped thoughts electric with emotion of those around us and those who have waited there in the past. There is, I sense, a terrifying jinn in the Breast Care Centre.

The other places are both kitchens with tiled walls and floors, where an unhappy thought seems to pull towards itself previous unhappy thoughts that have been lurking in the walls, waiting for an opportunity to invade what I think of as my mind and to have fun disturbing me until they become exhausted.

Last week I saw a table and chairs in a shop window, fell in love with them and bought them. We badly needed new chairs and our kitchen table had been inherited by my mother. When they were delivered I felt a calmness enter the room. Only then did I realise the significance of the wrought iron in the chair backs. Jinn are deterred by iron and now I can think a single unhappy thought and then let it go, without being plagued for hours by its associates.

Five Claimants

Here are five claimants for the title of Jinn:

Nationalism

Loyalism

Republicanism

Sectarianism

Racism.

Each can be seen as a set of beliefs, but is it really alive? There are many reasons why I think so.

Like humans jinn are born and die, but their lifespans are much longer, frequently lasting hundreds of years; so they survive the death of the humans most closely associated them. Al Quaeda does not cease to exist because Osama bin Laden was assasinated.

Birth assumes a parent and I see the origin of each of my five claimants in a very powerful instinct found in many vertebrates. It is the impulse to find a territory where it is possible to feed and breed, to mark that territory and to defend it against invading members of its own species and other threatening species. Both our cats, male and female, mark and defend territories. The male rubs the side of his head several times against the French door when I open it to let him in. Birds in the garden are constantly delineating their territories by flying around the trees and shrubs which form the boundary and singing on each one. We have walls and fences and title deeds. In each case an individual, or a small related group, claims and defends a territory.

Each of my five proposed jinn lays claim to a superterritory and defends it against individuals and other superterritories. Nationalism, Loyalism and Republicanism are obviously connected to physical territories. Sectarianism is associated with a mental one.

A recent BBC radio programme expressed surprise at the apparently inexplicable behaviour of Northern Ireland teenagers too young to have experienced conflict. These kids are using social-networking sites to promote Sectarianism. The assumption is that, once politicians sign a peace deal, Sectarianism vanishes; but jinn live on. They haunt places and possess people. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to them as ancient genes insist they establish a territory with a view to mating. At fourteen they are in no position to own a car, never mind a house. They can’t even lay claim to an intellectual field.

The presenter of the programme was particularly shocked by the virulance of the language used on the social networking sites; but jinn have emotions similar to ours. It is not surprising that humans possessed by them display hate, fear and envy when marking their virtual territories.

Like humans, jinn marry. In Northern Ireland Nationalism and Republicanism are ofter married to Sectarianism; but the apparently opposed Loyalism is also the spouse of this hairy legged, sharp-clawed one.

Jinn are said to have another formidable capacity. They shape shift. After the Good Friday Agreement, when Nationalism, Loyalism and Rebublicanism were put into bottles, stoppered and flung into the Atlantic Ocean, Sectarianism quietly shape shifted into Racism.

Hooved Feet and Hairy Legs

In my review of And the Bull Kills You I wrote that the detective finds within himself both the bull and the bullfighter, and, in a book which confronts sex and violence, I don't think this is too far fetched. Some of the jinn we have to deal with are connected to our animal instincts. Something compels us and our mammalian relatives to preserve ourselves and our genes.

When I was a teenager there were whispers of a tall dark charming stranger who frequented dance halls and of whom we needed to be very wary. Women had discovered that their dancing partner had cloven hooves. I don't think any of us believed these reports, at least literally. The cloven hooves were a metaphor for the devil, one of the jinn, who preyed on innocent girls to satisfy his animal instincts.

In the story of Solomon and Bilquis, the beautiful Queen of Sheba, it is she who is rumoured to have jinn among her ancestors. Determined to find out if the story is true, Solomon has constructed in his private apartments a glass floor under which fish swim in water. Standing at the other end of the room, Solomon beckons to Bilquis to come to him, making her lift her skirt instinctively to keep it out of the water and allowing him to see her feet and legs. He sees that her feet are not hooved, as people have claimed, but she does have another jinn characteristic, hairy legs. Fortunately this problem is not insurmountable. Solomon has his jinn prepare a hair removing lotion of slaked lime and ash.

Or the Bull Kills You

This is a review I wrote of Jason Webster's first detective novel. It is set in Valencia where the detective, Max Camara finds himself investigating the murder, after a bullfight, of Spain's best loved Matador. Jason Webster recently wrote in his blog that writing for him is a process of discovery, a quest to find his authentic self.

‘Or the Bull Kills You’ is a vivid masculine energising book by a writer unafraid to confront the reality of violent death.

As in any good murder mystery, the identity and motives of the killer (or is it killers?) remain concealed until the end. Chief Inspector Max Camara of the Valencia Cuerpo Nacional de Policia resists the temptation and pressures on him to indict the most obvious suspect. Instead, using the tactics of the bullfight, he gets to know each of the suspects, observes the weaknesses of each, assesses their capacity to torture and kill and predicts their responses before moving in for the final confrontation.

To really appreciate this book you have, like a matador, to be in control and refuse to rush. Then you realise that Camara is not only a detective: he is also a mystery. In parallel with the revelation of the hidden lives of the suspects is the revelation of a side of the detective he has previously refused to acknowledge. Who among us really likes to admit he, or she, is driven by animal instincts? By identifying with the bull, Camara acknowledges he has within him both bull and bullfighter. Using the art of the matador to control the bull within, rather than denying its existence, he learns to benefit from, rather than be at the mercy of, animal vitality.

I suspect this is a book which will be read mostly by men, but for me it was engrossing and I hope that it will find many more readers among women.

Legends of the Fire Spirits

I am intrigued by the idea that cats might be jinn.

Here is a review I wrote of a book about jinn. It is by Robert Lebling with a foreword by Tahir Shah and is called Legends of the Fire Spirits.

How do you write for sceptical westerners about things, beings or forces so subtle they are undetectable by ordinary human senses and, until now, by scientific instruments? Robert Lebling has done just that, undeterred by the risk of incurring ridicule from those of us unwilling to concede that there is much we still do not understand; but who saw Osama bin Laden as the embodiment of evil clashing with good in the form of Barack Obama; and the marriage of Kate Middleton to Prince William as the union of a mortal with a supernatural being.

‘Jinn’ is a word derived from an Arabic root which means to ‘conceal’ or ‘cover with darkness’; but the darkness is not total. The spirits created by God from smokeless fire can take on the features of any living being they desire apart from those of a prophet or imam, but when they interact with humans, who are more dense and made from clay, there is an energy change. Robert Lebling has searched for these energy bursts in pre-Islamic writing, the Koran, the Hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammed), folktales, history, European literature, the Internet and the writing of maverick scientists. With time and space compressed a picture emerges, fashioned from metaphor and legend.

Although Jinn are physically fundamentally different from familiar living creatures, we see a race similar to us in many ways, sharing our emotions of envy, love, hatred, fear resentment, anger. Some Jinn are helpful to mankind. Others are powerful and malicious. From them humans have found it necessary to devise forms of protection, and not just in Muslim countries. Here in the West people wear blessed medals, bless themselves with holy water and put sprigs of conifer, blessed on Palm Sunday, behind pictures as protection against evil spirits.

It wasn’t until after I started to read this book for the second time that I really appreciated how extraordinary it is. It deserves to be read for several reasons. Besides being entertaining it provides, as Tahir Shah writes in his introduction, ‘a window into Arab and Islamic society that is usually clouded over, opaque to all except Arabists and scholars of Islam.’ By gazing through this window with an open mind we may discover something useful. Spiritual forces, whether we call them Jinn or not, whether they are material entities, a form of electromagnetic radiation, thoughts, or none of these, are complex and inescapable. Robert Lebling concludes that we may never really understand them, but ‘we can understand how they affect us, and how we respond to them and how we interact with each other as we try to deal with them.’