Synopsis
Mavericks and Inspiration.
Two companions, Reason and Soul embark upon a light-hearted poetic journey through creation's evolution, and its legacy:memory. Memory's recovery is traced through the intuitions of scientific genius: from pre-Socratic Greece, through the epochs of Western thought to the dissolution of Modernism where mind and matter re-approach their recovered and essential unity.
The book is half poetic narrative in nine Cantos with linked scientific footnotes that take no knowledge for granted. The chronology is augmented by both painting and music as illustrative of the same recovery of memory, from unity through division and back to unity...
Adding involution to evolution is adding yeast to flour, it bakes a lighter loaf. Saints and scientists break the same bread. What is revealed is a science beyond, one that honours its prophets and restores Man to his origins, his deeper self
About the Author
Philippa Rees. The author is not a conventional academic which this book might suggest; instead this work is reflective of a lifetime's experiences, and accumulated languages which contribute to this integration of unsought spiritual insights. It is about all of life but, force majeur, drawn from one life that in many ways has elements of fantasy fiction. Born in South Africa, fatherless before the age of two, Philippa's early years were spent in the wildest parts of rural Africa in the care of her grandfather, on safari for weeks inspecting rural African schools with a cook, a tracker and a folding table. The other extreme was imprisonment in boarding schools studying the Metaphysical poets, Theology and the English Monarchy, and always hungry. These solitary extremes perhaps contributed to the need to reconcile the influences of two worlds, African liberty and European culture. Related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it is perhaps not surprising that she should arrive at a poetic narrative to achieve her reconciliation between science and religion, matter and mind. The 'leitmotif' of her writing is characterized by a celebration of the individual, often eccentric, always out of the mainstream. After sampling medicine, architecture, classics and fine art she ultimately achieved degrees in Zoology and Psychology. She has lived on deserted islands in the Indian Ocean, fishing for supper; at the Max Planck Institute in Bavaria observing the work of Konrad Lorenz and the esteemed animal behaviourists who visited; lectured to mature University students in Britain; designed buildings; single handedly built her home, an arts centre and concert hall; raised four daughters, and failed to master the cello. Always reading and writing first. This particular work has underpinned an almost obsessive observation of synchronicities and the penetration of spirit into the apparently mundane. She lives in Somerset in her converted barns with an old collie and a long-suffering husband.
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