Darkness.

Enigma.

Secret.

Curiousity.

Surprise.

Paranormal.

Superstition.

Rapture.

Riddle.

Myth. Magic. Mystery.

* * *

The definition of mystery, though multi-faceted, is a good place to start:

Anything that arouses curiosity or perplexes because it is unexplained, inexplicable, or secret.

That [which] is not fully understood or that baffles or eludes understanding; an enigma.

But it goes further. I’m not the only one that has noticed the prevalence of mysticism in contemporary civilisation:

The skills, lore, or practices that are peculiar to a particular activity or group and are regarded as the special province of initiates.

A religious truth that is incomprehensible to reason and knowable only through divine revelation.

An incident from the life of Jesus, especially the Incarnation, Passion, Crucifixion, or Resurrection, of particular importance for redemption.

The derivation is even more interesting:

From Latin mystērium, from Greek mustērion, secret rite, from mustēs, an initiate, from mūein, to close the eyes, initiate.

So you can see, the concept of mystery is old and likely prehistoric, pre-dating all forms of modern civilisation. Though Christianity is the only religion mentioned by name in the definitions, all theistic religions rely solely on mystery as their driving force; their ‘hook’, if you will. That’s why those few that actually communicate with God (or gods) are referred to as ‘mystics’ — they’re dealing with mysterious, inexplicable, unprovable phenomena. Gods are mysteries, in other words.

The fundamental axiom of all advanced lifeforms can be generalised as ‘What’s around the next corner?’ On a low-level it might be as simple as finding new hunting grounds; for humans it might as complex as finding a new partner, a new job — either way, it’s about moving. Not necessarily forward or back, but moving. There are higher concepts but at the end of the day it’s exploration and horizon-hunting that really does it for us; what really satisfies us.

Why then are we so damn addicted to mystery? Mystery is the polar opposite of exploration, science, truth. But we embrace it! We find comfort in the not-knowing. We set out on epic journeys to seek out new continents and new civilisations, all the while seeking solace in the gods that illumine starlit skies. There’s something about that which we do not know.

And these mysteries will forever remain because we don’t try too hard to solve them. No matter how hard we try, a mystery remains just beyond the reach of our grasping fingertips — or rather, we don’t stretch our hands too far in case we actually reach the mystery. The moment we close our fingers and find it to be nothing more than insubstantial smoke and deceptive mirrors — we shatter. Our world-view contorts and shifts and finally buckles under its elusive enormity. The shattered fragments of mystery lay limp and unravelled between our fingers. There’s nothing there. There never has been. There never will be.

Gosh.

Why do we keep reaching? Why do we raise our hands to the sky in search of salvation and heavenly oases?

Why does it hurt so much when we find out that a mystery is really nothing more than random chance or laws of physics? Because we’re rational creatures; we feast on order, reason. For every effect we must attribute a cause.

Someone somewhere once prayed to the very first heavenly and inexplicable body: the stars. The constellation of Orion perhaps. ‘Let tomorrow’s hunt be a success’ he prayed. And you know what? It was. The hunt was a rave success. Forever after, he prayed to the stars.

Then one day, sometime in the near future, the hunt wasn’t a success. In fact, some of the hunters were gored by the wild boar and died. So of course he prayed harder. What other option was there?

I’m stretched really thin at the moment, so the best I can do is a damn history lesson.

Let me tell you a little about Lindfield. It’s one of many ancient towns that dots the south of England. It has existed in some form or another way back into prehistoric antiquity, but apparently it entered ‘modern’ history back in 765AD. There’s a photo (below) of the oldest ‘original’ building in the town below — it’s called the Church House now. It doesn’t look that old though; it’s probably been rebuilt a dozen times in its life. No one knows exactly how old it is, but it dates back to around 1100 — 900 years old!

The name of the town comes from the Saxon/Old English ‘Lindefeldia’ — you gotta love old place names, they’re so simple — it literally means ‘field with lime trees’. You Americans probably don’t realise this, but almost every English town name has a very literal meaning. My nearby town of Crawley, for example, means ‘a meeting place for crows’. York (as in New York!) probably comes from ‘a place of yew trees’, but it’s been through about four different languages and transliterations to arrive at modern English. Obviously ‘Palm Springs’ is the modern-day equivalent of such naming schemes…

[Did I bore you all yet? No? Great!]

Anyway, fast forward a few hundred years and Lindfield is now a proper town on the route between London and Brighton. There’s a lot of 15th and 16th century buildings (big, exposed wooden beams) that were probably built by important Tudors. One of them is a ‘hunting lodge’ (it’s huge), and it’s near the church, so that’s probably where some king or prince hung out during the hunting season.

Most of the modern High Street (do you have that term in America? Or is it just ‘central avenue’ or something?) is 17th and 18th century. It’s almost entirely Georgian architecture. There’s a big manor in the middle of town (I didn’t get a photo), but it’s been renovated so many times that it’s impossible to say how old it is. The fascia is Georgian (and painted a nasty grey/green), but if you look at the side/back it’s obviously a lot older. A lot of old England suffers from this problem — damn FASHIONS! It’s not uncommon to see a 400-year-old house with 1970s-style rendering on the outside. Makes me die a little inside.

Lindfield even has an original red post box AND telephone box. You’ll need to be British to really appreciate this — everyone else, just… I don’t know… take my word for it: they’re a massive part of modern English history. Anyway, enough with the lecture (but feel free to ask for more info if something tickled you) — on with the pretty photos!

I have some awesome sunset photos which I need to share at some stage. I guess I can put a few up here tomorrow, and some on Flickr.

(Note that the church house used to be a pub… ah, irony…)

(The sun’s really starting to set by the time I took this photo… lovely.)

(This isn’t the most amazing photo in the world, but it’s pretty rare to find both famous red boxes next to each other. Only in ancient towns like Lindfield I guess!)

(The old people walking towards us would, in about 30 seconds, be treated to the spectacle of my mother and I playing around in the phone box…)

As you can see, I didn’t actually get many photos of old houses — because I’m a die-hard landscape photographer. The first photo, of the house, is pretty nice though, right? It’s just that the sun was very low, and all the ancient Tudor houses were in the shade of other houses and trees.

Anyway, some sunset photos to follow!

I was a little bit torn when titling (heehee) this post. Originally, I had planned to paint my face brown, make myself one of those conical rice-farmer hats and take some self-portraits in my garden. But Abi told me I couldn’t: ‘That’s just plain wrong, Seb. Think of the children.’ — and she’s right, it would’ve been completely insensitive and political suicide… but it would’ve been really damn funny. Ah well. Maybe I can still get a shot of myself in a conical rice-farmer hat when I visit ASIA!

Last week I looked at Africa, this week it’s Asia’s turn.

As a reminder, if you haven’t read about my Grand 2010 Tour, the plan is to cover south-east Asia: Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines — you get the idea. The more I think about it, I’m pretty sure South Korea and Japan (and China?) will have to wait for another trip. I could however hop down to New Zealand, stay there for a few weeks, and then over to Los Angeles (there’s a big ‘around America’ tour I’ve been thinking about for years, I’m just not sure when to do it!)

Anyway, Asia, after a little more research, is a lot more affluent than Africa — probably because of the secular, capitalistic powerhouses of Korea, Japan and Singapore. It’s a little rougher up on the mainland: if I go to Cambodia or Vietnam life is dirtier and more dangerous — but they have ELEPHANTS (so does Thailand, mind you… so I could probably just skip over potential-death-by-land-mine and head for the transsexuals of Bangkok.)

Re: Thailand, there probably isn’t much you don’t already know through the wonders of the modern media. It’s a melting pot of everything and anything, where east and west culture collides and something not wholly human emerges in the aftermath. Thailand appeals to my hedonistic streak because I get the feeling you can ‘find’ anything there: salvation and debauchery, food and drink — but also beautiful vistas and remnants of ancient civilisations. I guess it’s a ‘gateway’ country, much like Greece or Turkey — the multitudinous influences from every other culture in the vicinity have surely left their mark on Thailand.

For some reason (I’m going to research it more, but if anyone has the answer, let me know), the entirety of east Asia is really populated. Thailand with 63 million people has the same population as the UK, Vietnam has 85 million, the Philippines 92 million — and Indonesia has a stonking 231 million! At least Malaysia and Cambodia are fairly sparsely populated, so I’ll have a chance to spread my legs there. Is it simply because they’re really big countries? And I know less-developed nations tend to have more children for lots of reasons… maybe they grew big in the last 100 years, and now they’re slowing down as their ‘development index‘ increases? Oh, incidentally, Singapore is the third most-dense place in the world… more so than Hong Kong. It’s going to be a tight squeeze to get me in. 19,000 people per square mile, in Singapore — 12,000 per square mile in London, and 5,500 in urban New York City, by comparison. (They also speak Singlish in Singapore… which I am quite eager to hear! The other south-east Asia islands have similar pidgin languages right? Indo-English, Malay-English?)

Did you know that Russia has 11 time zones? And you thought scheduling in the US was hard! They go all the way from UTC+2 to UTC+12… which means Russia runs almost half the circumference of Earth… eep. Just threw that one in there, sorry. (Seriously, the amount of random shit in my head…)

It’s now time for this week’s ’site of photographic interest’, this week… Sumatra!

Sumatra

The first thing that caught my eye was the name: ‘Coffee!!’ Sumatra, along with Java (the main Indonesian island) are two of the most recognisable names when it comes to coffee. It’s no surprise tho’, considering all of the world’s coffee is grown within a narrow band around the equator — coffee beans come from trees that do best in hot-and-wet rainforests (and incidentally, the coffee infographic/comic by Oatmeal is very, very good).

So, it’s rainy, quite heavily forested and also right smack-bang on a fault line. The west ridge of the island is one long line of volcanoes! And there are elephants! (I’d really like to ride an elephant — I can’t think of a more apt mount for my gargantuan self.) Just look at this photo by Hank Hammatt (I don’t know who he is, but he takes nice photos it seems):

That’s Sumatra. I don’t even know how such a landscape is possible. It looks like a painting. God knows, really, but I want to find out!

* * *

Anyway, this week you get some totally unrelated photos. We had a light snow a few days ago which started to look really pretty when the sun eventually came out. They’re just assorted photos from around my garden and estate, and all using a 50mm lens in the hope of getting a little better at using it!

(In another photo you can see the number of rings… it was only about 60 or 70 years old. Quite young for a fallen tree!)

(I like the streaks of snow-free grass, from where sun has shone from between tall trees to the right)

(Look! A little… blob of snow!)

Now to brainstorm a disgusting story involving Vietcong rice-farmers and Japanese school girls…