Blyad can mean both whore and reality since the external world is
Posted in General on 08. Oct, 2010
Blyad can mean both “whore” and “reality” since, “the external world is.. enchantment… vanity and ruin.” The word for “democracy” is linked to the word for “to steal”.As Wilk constantly points out, Western Europe’s 500-year-long wariness of Russia springs from seeing itself parodied on a vast and grotesque scale, itself and not itself. Europe feared Russia: as a king fears his jester, as Frankenstein feared his homunculus. The Great, “tolerant” enlightenment was mocked in a society whose upper classes spoke French and read Voltaire while the peasants ate God and vomited anti-semitism. Long before the Cold War and McCarthy, the West saw that this mighty enemy was the enemy within, and, in its own way, the still, small voice of spiritual reproach.. Francis Pryor, an archaeologist with 30 years’ fieldwork behind him, has set out to write a popular, accessible guide to the story of Britain from earliest times to the Roman invasion of 43AD.
But his book is a curious mish-mash of styles, idioms and motifs and in addition, it really collapses three distinct volumes into one. What we may call Book One is the straightforward historical guide based on archaeological evidence. After bringing us up to date on the latest thinking on that classical Darwinian problem, the descent of Man, he introduces Cro-Magnon Man, our common ancestor who first evolved in Africa 150,000 years ago and was the first example of homo sapiens to appear in Europe. Next comes Neanderthal Man (about 60,000BC), the classical exemplar of a nasty, brutish and short life, the product of what Pryor calls the first 15-minute, immediate gratification culture. Pryor seems obsessed with how these early humanoids would strike observers in today’s Oxford Street (doubtless his gloss on the man
Francis Pryor, an archaeologist with 30 years’ fieldwork behind him, has set out to write a popular, accessible guide to the story of Britain from earliest times to the Roman invasion of 43AD. To judge from the drawing of the Neanderthal he produces, I can answer with an emphatic “no” for his hominid looks a dead ringer for Grant Mitchell in EastEnders.
But Pryor is keen to move on to the first real signs of history, around 8,000BC.
Recognisable human society first emerges in Scotland at this time, quickly followed by the severing of Ireland from the rest of Britain by rising sea levels (c7500BC). By 6000BC Britain was a series of offshore islands and the stage was set for the emergence of the Early Neolithic Age (c4200-3000BC). Here the great transition was from hunter-gatherers and scavengers to farmers. 2500-2000BC provides the passage from Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, followed by a Middle and Late Bronze Age from c1800-700BC; Pryor establishes that copper mining was far more extensive in this period than in the traditional accounts. Finally, the Early Iron Age finds the State in inchoate form, with political elites, specialisation of labour and a priestly caste. Throughout his historical sketch Pryor tries to insinuate one of his favourite ideas: that the Atlantic side of Britain, facing Brittany, Portugal and Spain, has been overemphasised while East Anglia, with links to north-east France, the Low Countries, north Germany and Scandinavia, has been neglected; in other words that Britain is as much a North Sea culture as an Atlantic one. And throughout his historical analysis the author seems obsessed with trying to get inside the minds of Britain’s early inhabitants.