The Private Papers of Crocodile Uppsala

© William Shepherd 1993

Boulogne, Europe.

Sunday 7th November 1993.

Dear Crocodile Uppsala

We are told that October 1993 was the second sunniest October since 1909. Nobody here noticed, so in remembrance of missing it, Vemara and Skua 4 hopped across the channel to enjoy a sudden burst of late fall sunshine coast weather...and escape the king's dragoons, celebrating yesterday's capture of Guy...Fawkes that is.

Sketch #221

Medieval Monastery Garden

But today I feel like a good preach while Mervin is tied up in Kerovnia with Bluff Squire David.

In 1982 shortly after attending a Buckminster Fuller symposium in Philadelphia, I read a book by Peter Tompkins & Chris Bird entitled 'The Secret Life of Plants'. Chris Bird was a leading American authority on dowsing.

Syncronicitously his writings had been added to my list after late night 'aprés Bucky' chats with Phil LaPerle. Phil knew his synergetics and he could dowse. A few months later while World Gaming at the University of Colorado high in the American Rockies, Phil showed me how...and conducted private tutorials on paraphysics.

Before the week was out I was being slipped top-secret papers on the US military's psychotronic weaponry programmes...the evidence implying that the russkies were two decades ahead of the yanks in supernature research. KGB Disinformation, of course, courtesy of Boris Pankin at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm.

I did some follow-ups in Los Angeles that year, producing some investigative pieces on bioelectricity for Marilyn Ferguson's ‘Brain-Mind Bulletin' and reviewing a trilogy of books on the soviet military for ‘Leading Edge'...her other newsletter.

But otherwise what with all that and August on Cape Cod with Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers notoriety learning the coarse art of Neurolinguistic Programmed Hypnosis, courtesy of John Grinder (CIA), deportation via San Quentin...or divorce and black listing by the mandarins of MI5 and MI666 were the best I could hope for from 1982.

There was nothing new in ‘The Secret Life of Plants' but by starting with Culpeper (Another Nicholas? 1616-54 perhaps? Mervin) and the plantlore of medieval monastery gardens and pre-Columbian Native American cultures and grafting on some western scientific laboratory results, a few more pagan phenomena sneaked back into the mainstream of Western Science...or at least West Coast Science.

Two years ago Tomkins and Bird published ‘Secrets of the Soil'. The Cinque Ports Letter lavishly praised the book, but outside this little corner of the quality press, the book was loudly ridiculed. But the reviews were too many, the abuse too loud and the campaign's look just a little too ‘funded'...Methinks the lady doth protest too much.

Sketch #222

The NPK Lobby In Conference

The reason became apparent shortly afterwards when the tabloids started ‘leaking' the news that the Prince of Wales would be making a savage attack on Big Chemical Agriculture at the 1991 Annual General Meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society. Now to understand just why so zealous a pre-emptive info-strike should be made against a future crowned-head of the British Commonwealth, let me introduce you to the NPK Lobby.

 

© William Shepherd 1993

The Nitrogen-Potassium-Potash conglomorates uncomfortably straddle the world's first and second corporate divisions. Under siege from the corporate raiders and in a dubious alliance with Imperial Armageddon Industries, they are, in short, modern chemical companies trying to survive in a fading smokestack world.

Already they have seen their napalm transport planes converted into winged computers bearing smart missiles. And biodynamic farming promises to pack a similar punch for their global pesticide, fungicide, herbicide and ferticide cartels.

As the ICIs of this world are only too aware, Rudolf Steiner represents Marx, Morris and Darwin all rolled into one, with an explosive impact in food politics comparable to the microchip in the information business. Peter Tompkins & Chris Bird had outlined the scientific parameters of a third wave horticulture...and there was not a genetic engineer in sight.

Now it should not come as a surprise to discover that those with large global vested interests in second wave agriculture and with mammoth sunk costs in smart genetically engineered milk producers (cows) do not welcome such a book. Indeed they have a duty to their shareholders to deploy whatever they have in their holsters, their wallets and their computers to defend their interests.

With feigned unawareness (FU) no longer tenable, contrived kontempt (CC) is launched, in which the vitally important is juxtapositioned with the gross, the obscene and the utterly ridiculous (VIGOUR) to manipulate and muddy the message (3M). For good measure, the character of any authority is also destroyed on the time-honoured principle of undermining the message by attacking the messenger. Now you know how they orchestrate their second wave media campaigns. But do you know how you should counter them? With a July 17th birthday I think crab and reach for the pincer movement every time.

A little bit of first wave face to face talking (FTFT) from Ilbereth and Aslak alongside some good 'ole...Sven loves this. Go for it Sven...Yee-hah. Third Wave Interactive Mobile Convertible Connectible Ubiquitous Globalized Hypermedia. (If you mean fax, phone, satellite & video, say so. Mervin)

Sketch #223

Counter Insurgency Measures

The trouble is that media mind games like these are pretty superficial. The heart of the matter is modern western man's disregard of the quality benefits that human tender loving care imparts to the plant kingdom and our separation from our food. We are all earth organisms. And replacing Goethe's nature studies with Newtons biological sciences in our primary schools did nothing to help matters. So we now have a culture that is deeply ignorant about what it eats and has no Philosophy of Soil.

Have you been taught anything about the monastery gardens of the medieval monks? Do you think that the rituals of the Catholic Church with its sacred places and its holy water are hooey? Are you not convinced by your scientific studies that water divining & exorcism, astrology & fairies, cold fusion & orgone energy belong in the several anti-scientific worlds that go to make up some magical Cloud Cuckoo Land where imaginations wallow when off-duty or under age? ('Yes-No-Yes' wins you a Mervin T-Shirt).

 

© William Shepherd 1993

Mervin! Hold your unicorns! There is more rhetoric! Have you ever considered the idea that bird song mighty help plants grow? (Tomatoes just lurve Beethoven's string quartets. Mervin.) Do you think that Sean Connery's insistence on discriminating between a drink which was shaken and not stirred is a mere affectation? ('Yes-No-Yes-Yes-No' and you will wear your Mervin T-shirt as Wally and Harold teach you the latest dance craze...The Duck & Plummet).

If instead you registered a dismal 'No-Yes-No-No-Yes' to all of the above then 'Secrets of The Soil' should be placed at the top of your scientific reading list for 1994. Here are a few highlights. Start with Henri Coanda and Patrick Flanagan. For several decades they have been trying to understand the behaviour of that most mysteriously anomalous substance...water. Have a guided tour through their work. You will find out why Leonardo da Vinci's was fascinated with vortices, you will cease to mock the Catholic Communion...and you might start to take an unnatural interest in salmon.

However if bumble bees are more in your line you will be pleased to find that Philip Callahan has always been intrigued by the ways of the insect world. Insects have a way of tuning in to Nature. Tomkins & Bird describe Callahan's research...making no bones about its implications for chemical company pesticide futures. Linnaeus and Goethe are the key.

Browse through the pioneering work of Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, Lily Kolisko, Alex Podolinsky and other bio-dynamic farmers. You talk about boomerangs and shaven men. You ain't seen nothing to compare with the persecution of scientists struggling to pass on the intellectual inheritance that Goethe rescued from the collapsing civilisations of medieval Europe.

Rudolf Steiner was a Goethe scholar. Get hold of a copy of Colin Wilson's biography of Steiner if you want to know more...or keep your mother company when she next visits Gunnar and Annika in the leafy groves of Chalmers University on Sweden's West Coast...their children are Christopher and Waldorf scholars. After that, if you are still wanting to read around the subject, then you could try Paul Hawken's ‘Magic of Findhorn' and Tom Graves' ‘Needles of Stone'.

By the end of all that you will have gone full circle, covered the ground, found your way back along the ley lines and the St.Michael-Apollo axis to the aquastats on Stonehenge and Uluru...and be about ready to read 'Megaliths, Meis and Miners' by William Shepherd.

Hold it! Hold it! Repetition! Anyway, this preaching's gone on quite long enough.

You've told 'im what you were gonna tell 'im and you've told 'im

so now wind it up by telling 'im what you told 'im. Mervin.)

What was that little one in the middle? Well. OK.

 

© William Shepherd 1993

On 2 February 1886 a few weeks before his fifty second birthday, William Morris replied to a questionnaire by the Pall Mall Gazette as to his favourite books. He, at least, had come a long way since John Ruskin shocked the comfortable complacent mid-Victorian world with his talk of wealth and riches twenty five years before.

After a spell in the real world earning a living, you could do worse than devote the second quarter century of your life to understanding ...through work and play...the theory and practice of life embedded in this Library of Wisdom. Life is after all the only wealth. Here's a summary of his list:

Sketch #224

William Morris at Work

Homer; The Edda; Beowulf; The Kalevala; Norse Tales; Irish and Welsh Traditional Poems; Heimskringla; Icelandic Sagas; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; Danish and Scotch-English Border Ballads; Plutarch's Lives; Herodotus; Plato; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Aristophanes; Renard the Fox; The Best Rhymed Romances; Morte d'Arthur; Shahnemeh and Mahabharata; Dante; Chaucer; Piers Plowman; Omar Khayyam; other Arab and Persian poetry; The Thousand and One Nights...

Shakespeare; Blake (the part of him which a mortal can understand. Mervin Poet Laureate); Coleridge, Shelley, Keats; Defoe; Scott; Dickens; Dumas; Hugo's novels; More's Utopia; The Pilgrim's Progress; Ruskin; Carlyle; Grimm's Teutonic Mythology; The Nibelungennot; The Mabinogian.

Scott and Dickens were specially praised while Milton was hated for his cold classicism and Puritanism. As for Morris' own writings, his last works, after 1885, are best: ‘Pilgrims of Hope'; ‘Dream of John Ball'; ‘Tables Turned' and ‘News from Nowhere'. While for background ‘The Life of William Morris' by Edward Thompson in 3 Vols (1965) and ‘A Biography of William Morris' by Jack Lindsay (1975) are well worth a read.

End of classes for today. Get that lot under your belt in 1994...even though you are overschooled and miseducated like everyone else from our North Atlantic industrialised nations...and you might just be able to hold your own against the well-educated citizens emerging from the Marxist colleges of Eastern and Central Europe. And if everybody read them, then we would have the European cultural renaissance some of us are hoping to see rising up from the debris of the most disastrous hundred year civil war ever waged on Planet Earth...that of man against mankind.

 

© William Shepherd 1993

But meanwhile why not start a local chapter of the Crocodile Uppsala Book Club. There are three classes of member: Writing Members; Reading Members and Subscribing Members...cunningly designed to turn the class war upside down by reclassifying Top, Middle and Lower class along Randian lines.

Writing members earn their status through a Crocodile Uppsala Book Club publishing their story about Wally and his friends. And to break out of the Topside-Takers attitudes to writing, the Crocodile Uppsala Book Club will be a contributing club with writer and illustrator services available to storytellers.

Reading members will review new tales and provide a reading democracy while the subscribing members will share the experience one year on...paying for the privilege.

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CrocUpp Publishing

Legends are not made. They are born...given birth by the likes of you and I...and then nurtured into adulthood. Legends have lives of their own, distinct from the lives of those whose lives and sagas bring human warmth and give human personality to these tales. Our legends live and die just as we do. But the best legends endure...often returning renewed to live some other life or to relive the old life. Perhaps the souls of men are the legends our gods make their dreams on? Your Australian aborigine friends might agree with that.

G'Day Mate!

 

© William Shepherd 1993

German Sea...Sunday 14th November 1993.

Dear Crocodile Uppsala

'Twixt 'Umber and Skagerrak. ‘Here I am, somewhere in the middle of The North Sea' as a gentleman by the name of Fyfe Robertson was wont to say on Cliff Michelmore's Tonight programme in the 1960s in a broad Scotch accent. One day Fyfe Robertson will become famous again, not as a Down Your Way Broadcaster, but as the brother of Thomas Robertson, a Herriot-Watt university professor who wrote ‘Human Ecology' in 1947 and 40 years later featured prominently in ‘The Rise and Fall of The Swedish Green Party (1982-1997)'.

Boating, you may recall from my other Boulogne letter...the one before last week's...is, and I quote, ‘Slow. Slow. Quick. Quick. Slow...with the occasional pretty damn quick...like now! Fast!' John Pierce and I had one of those little ones at the end on our way across to Boulogne last weekend. The u-bolt holding Skua 4's back stay sheared in mid-channel under full sail in a force three. John was at the tiller and three minutes later as we continued on our way without our canvas engine...to all the world as if nothing had happened...I had occasion to reflect once again on the delight of travelling with a good skipper. John was at the helm when the bang came two hours out from Rye. I reckon it must have taken him about five seconds to figure out what had happened.

Tiller hard over. Kick engine throttle to low. ‘Take the tiller! Hold her into the wind!' Foresail rolled in. Up onto the deck. Mainsail dropped. Back to the cockpit. Hanging bottle screw lashed onto the stern rail. ‘OK! Back on course!' By the time Vemara shot her bowsprit across our stern to see what was going on, we were back on course for Boulogne. Well that's boating for you. What part did I play in this drama at sea? Well, you shouldn't underestimate it. I obeyed orders...on the instant. ‘Aye, Aye' Sir! And did my duty well...adding half an hour later. ‘Think you forgot to do the topping lift, John!' He hit me with the nearest rhythm stick.

John replaced the u with a U in Boulogne, Gilbert, for all his seeming casualness about his boat always having what is needed on board. I was at our Tabac with Connie, David, Paiwa and Laura at the time and returned to find everything shipshape for the return trip. No hassles with John. If there's a job, he gets on and does it.

Sketch #226 - Emergency at Sea

And here Laura deserves a mention in dispatches. We were about to set sail back for Rye on the Sunday morning at 0800 when she pointed out that our topping lift line was twisted around the back stay. Thank you Laura. Paiwa meanwhile impressed Connie on the return trip in quite a different way.

Vemara has been ferrying Barry Britten, a nephew of the great man, back and forth across the channel quite a lot of late. A man of means with a house on Mermaid Street in Rye and another on Rue d'Artois just below The Old Town in Boulogne. But at present his liquid means are in distinctly short supply whenever they're demanded, cash right now, for mundane matters like keys 'n locks. Barry was on the tiller nattering on to Connie about his last trip, and bewailing his misfortune at having 'Howard's father' preaching Jesus-talk at him the whole way back.

Sketch #227- Vemara Removals Limited

Now Barry makes himself unpopular by sounding off a little too often, a little too negatively, about a little too many people. Rye is a small town. He lacks...hmm, what shall we say (social discretion? Mervin.) Thank you Mervin...the southerner's social discretion.

But Paiwa loved it. She and Laura were rolling around the deck laughing their heads off, because, unbeknown to Barry, Howard is Paiwa's brother...and hence the aforementioned preacher was none other than Paiwa's Daddy. Their spirits buoyed by this merriment...it made a change from chaperoning David...the girls spent the rest of the trip playing their harmonicas for the migrating seabirds as they flew down channel.

At the end we concluded it had been a lot of fun having the two young teenagers aboard. David had his Neferdinghy along for the first time on a cruising trip, so that could have made a difference...the three of them spending all of Saturday sculling around Boulogne Harbour so that we hardly saw them all day.

 

© William Shepherd 1993

But a few words about these Bible Thumpers because they are becoming something of a public menace and a private nuisance. With Livets Ord's world headquarters in Uppsala you will know the type.

The trouble starts with their ignorance of theology in general and of the place of their own faith in the ecology of all faiths in particular. We have The Truth.

A society endowed with collective wisdom would probably incarcerate their fanatical besser-wisers on bread and water for 40 days and 40 nights with a copy of Tom Paine's ‘Age of Reason' and Aldous Huxley's ‘Ends & Means'...allowing them out only after they pass an exam and promise to hold all their possessions personally for ten years (...and for persistent offenders D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Apocolypse’ should be thrown in for good measure. Rev. Mervin).

Christians make the enormous mistake of burdening themselves with the Old Testament, which contains along with much fine poetry and sound morality, the history of the cruelties and treacheries of a desert people, fighting for a place in the sun under the protection of its local tribal deity.

Christian theologians do their best to civilize and moralize this tribal deity...by talking of King David's god as the poetic muse...translate the Old Testament word ‘prophet' with the correct translation ‘poet' for a start recommends Tom Paine.

Sketch #228

The Anti-Church

But inspired in every line dictated by God himself the Old Testament is always there to refute them, the God portrayed being personal to the point of being sub-human. Ancient ignorance is sanctioned as revelation. The upshot is that The True Believer feels permitted to give way to every worst passion justifying the conduct by reference to a God who cannot control his rage and behaves like a ferocious oriental tyrant.

The frequency with which men have identified their own passions with the voice of an all-too-personal God is really appalling. Those whom it suited to be ignorant, along with the innocent and uneducated, find in this treasure-house of barbarous stupidity, justifications for every crime and folly...texts justifying such abominations as religious wars, the persecution of heretics and breaking faith with unbelievers being used again and again in the history of the Christian Church to mitigate the inconvenient decency of civilized morality.

Sketch #229

Red Sea Anchorage

All this folly and wickedness can be traced back to a mistaken view of the world. The ancient Hebrews once thought that the integrating principle of the universe was a kind of magnified human person, with all his feelings and passions. The theologians were always at pains to insist that the personal God was an absolutely perfect person.

But, in spite of their precautions, the deity tended to be thought of by his adorers as being like the only kind of person of whom they have direct knowledge...the human individual. It is one of the ironies of history that the modern world should have taken over from the Hebrews the worst of their cultural heritage - their ferocious Bronze-Age literature; their paeans in praise of war; their tales of divinely inspired slaughter and sanctified treachery; their primitive belief in a personal, despotic and passionately unscrupulous God; their low notion that virtue deserves a reward in cash and social position.

There are grounds for wondering if we are not the victims of the world's best ever Jewish joke. After improving the Old Testament with The Talmud, the rabbis offloaded the unimproved version on the goyim...like giving somebody your out-of-date charts. Shipwrecks guaranteed!

 

© William Shepherd 1993

The Jews themselves meanwhile...individually amongst the most cultured and civilised of people...have retained the admirably sensible things like the rabbinical tradition of an all-round education. ‘He who does not teach his son a trade', the Talmud says, ‘virtually teaches him to steal'. St. Paul was not only a scholar, but also a tent-maker...and there are some of us who wish he had stuck to his tenting.

1987 was my last year in Boston and I was closing up shop and selling off my goods and chattels. But on the side, I was doing various odd bits of scholarly research. One of these got as far as a 40-A4 page booklet on 'The Jewish Question'. But it was too partial a treatment for so emotive a subject, so I never circulated it. Besides, I felt it needed complementing with essays on Celts, Catholics, and Moslems before I could put it out to the world...and I just wasn't that interested. (My colleague A.Baccus informs me that in medieval times all good Christian missionaries were expected to read mark learn and inwardly digest Thomas Aquinas' Gentiles Manual. St. Mervin of Toyland) Thank you Mervin. A gentleman and a scholar.

Every Jew I have ever met has been happy to talk at great length about their jewishness and the world's anti-semitism, whenever I have shown the slightest knowledge of the subject.

But I have yet to encounter the detachment that would also see how little interest us of the goyim have in the matter. Nor is this blindness peculiar to Jews. It is actually a characteristic of The Bore...and he appears in many different disguises.

Sketch #230

Tavern Bore

For instance, I have no great wish to think, write or talk about The Irish Question, Apartheid, Abortion, Jesus, Classic Boats, Golf or any of the one thousand and one other private obsessions which seem to afflict others. My attention is directed elsewhere. Other things interest me.

But somewhere out there, homing in on me from afar, lurks always The Dreaded Great Bore ...intellectual junk mail at the ready, poised, awaiting the chance to thrust it deep into my private cognitive space.

(Practice what you preach!...Oh and while you're about it, preach only what you've p ractised! A few days curled up on the sofa with Charles Ashworth, Jon Darrow, Neville Aysgarth and Venetia Flaxton hardly qualifies you to dispute with the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University (1932-1950). Father Mervin.)

Oh, how right you are, Father Mervin. Yet you underestimate me. It was Aldous Huxley in 'Ends & Means', and not I that was disputing...and Susan Howatch's sextet of novels about Christianity are destined to become my 1994 birthday book tips for Constanza. What more can a teacher do?

(Corrupt the youth with D.H.Lawrence's Apocalypse...and dump The Book Of Revelations and its rule of second raters in the furnace of the nearest Pentecostal chapel. Thomas Mervin Paine Esq.).

But enough of theology. Back to basics!

 

© William Shepherd 1993

Returning from Boulogne, I found a typically cryptic letter from Bob Stuart in my mail that went like this. 'Just a word to let you know we're all fine. Dina and I will be here in San Antonio winters and parts unknown about 6 months of the year...at least that is what is planned.'

And it continued, 'How about those Canadian Elections...flushed the toilet on the bastards. A party in Western Canada called The Reform Party...offshoot of something known as The Social Credit Party...won big in the western provinces. The Tory Party kept only two seats in their parliament. No one here is talking about any of this. The Economist are a sickening bunch. Enuf!'

The letter was addressed to The Crocko'guile Grandee and went on to let me know that Bob was ‘hard into the art thing' so had not been keeping up with ‘events'. (Join The Club. Mervin) But otherwise, John & Celeste are still at Charles Street in Boston and Bob & Dina plan to visit them for a month in May after which they might head out this way...although I'll probably be in South America by then.

Sketch #231

Bryts & Goys

Before settling on Crocodile Uppsala Letters as my writing for 1993, I considered an epistolic dialogue with Bob instead. But in the end I was persuaded to talk 'bout normal things. I figured the glimpses into my everyday being 'n becoming lifestyle might encourage others to think about what they believe and what they actually do each day. Nothing is so well hidden...unless it is what every woman dreams every night. Hypocrisy has once again become local and personal. Life is 30 000 days.

Otherwise...Vi ses snarast! If in doubt, run away! Enjoy changing light bulbs! And watch your Ps and Qs. The Celtic people are one of the great founding civilisations of Europe.

There are sixteen million of them living in the Celtic lands and four million speaking a Celtic language...a quarter of them living outside the Celtic areas. There was an ancient Druidic prohibition against committing knowledge to written form and partly as a result, some 2 500 years ago, the Celts separated into two linguistic groups: the Goidelic Celts...the Irish, Manx and Scots and the Brythonic Celts...the Welsh, Cornish and Bretons.

According to Aslak it all began when the Bryts simplified their case endings, dropped the neuter gender and dual number and allowed their initial mutation and aspirations to drift. The Goys, in retaliation, replaced their Ps with Qs...pen and pryf in Welsh became ceann and cruimh in Irish. The English dived for their proverbial cover...and have been watching their Ps and Qs ever since.

Breakfast in Uppsala with Linda on Tuesday morning at 9 am.

G'Day Mate!