Editorial notes: This is one of Shai’s longest essays, written in seven instalments, six within a period of just ten days in 2016 (from 13th October to 23rd October 2016) and the seventh, a year later, on August 31 2017. Reflecting on Shai’s complete collection of writings, this can be seen, perhaps, as the zenith and culmination of his intellectual journey. As he was writing this essay he was...
[Fraudulent document? — Editor] Marcus Garvey’s diaries were amongst the improbable finds at Saddam Hussain’s ill-financed palaces. Their contents have always been overshadowed, by the incredible story of their theft and doctoring by the Church of Scientology away from the Catholic Church (who were hiding it from common knowledge). They describe a man who investigated other wisdoms...
Editorial notes: This post/story appears in two versions (see also Warm Rays in Cold Rooms (v1)) and it is not clear which one is the later or more up to date of the two, hence they are both published here. I was walking around the room, trying to focus on discovering new meanings between the storylines that were painted in items and their histories amidst history. I returned to sit on the bed...
Editorial notes: This essay/story appears in two versions (see also Warm Rays in Cold Rooms (v2)) and it is not clear which one is the later or more up-to-date of the two, hence they are both published here. After paying his respect to the anonymous pornstar, Professor Steven Stephenson, said, slurring his words [it was the one and only time I caught him blind drunk (nb. ethanol)], “I tried to...
It is oft-repeated that Buddhism is not a religion, but rather a pragmatic psychology – it is quite here that the controversy within Scientology found its ground-swell, ensuring that the archaeological finds be immune to apathetic amnesia. Professor Chowdhury and three graduate students were completing work at a monastic complex in northern India when a hermetically sealed cave was...
Editorial notes: Shai opens this essay on how life and beauty (symbolised in the term “lilacs”) can be produced out of what looks at first like mere dead materiality (“dead soil”) with what looks like a claim to have had a mystical experience of God. He terms that experience as “How I solved the theocratic paradox in trans-noumenal space” – “trans-noumenal space” refers to the infinite...
From me, Not really the same colour as you. There is a potent danger which I mostly leave unstated – due to seeming irrelevance to most – but which I hope I can articulate by imagining you as my audience. Bullet points thinking: Moshe unites oil into menorah that is tended by Aaron’s offspring Teruma and ma’aser etc (?) allow am ha’aretz to unite with cohanim etc...
Yochanan Goodall’s research into non-human primate linguistic capacities results in an unexpected plaintiff (gorilla or whatnot) for the courtroom of Rabbi Moses. The genius judge had considered himself to be a lone wolf, but in the eyes of a being who becomes a synecdoche of all that he opposes, he finds for the first time a mirror and sympathy. “The Torah does not deal in extraordinary cases,”...
[Editor: Has potential, but lacks momentum until a vector is adumbrated for the answer] Every year Edge.org designs a question for the leading intellectuals and innovators to pit against their visions, with the hope that the rest of us may thus gain some insight into their mind and understanding[I]. After deliberate deliberation, we will be reincarnating our approach which had become stale and...
Contextual auto-horizons as determining originary experience of television-serials[1] Editor’s Note: Written c.2006 1. Introduction In the 30 years since the zenith of reader-response criticism, aesthetic theory, as it appears in our venerable institutions, has become increasingly focused on its subject field’s relevance to fields outside itself. This attempt to self-validate by associating...
