Call the Copts!

Sorry - another Jodrell Bank photo - I need to take some more this weekend.

An unadvertised joy on the BBC has been Kate Humble's trip around The Middle East following the old Frankincense Trail. Her visit to a Christian Church in Egypt was marked by the joy that her gift of Frankincense brought to one of the monks who said that they were rarely able to get hold of the genuine article. Kate's trail started in Oman where she bought a sack or two of the stuff but she has been handing it out like toffee to various high-ups throughout the region. She will arrive at the end of the series in Jordan, with a matchbox of the stuff. And we mustn't forget the first programme had her accompanying a huge herd of Camels across the desert while carrying a rifle which seems to have got a few of our more libertarian friends a bit hot-under-the-collar.

The Dream of Bee Maps

We thought a lot of the garden at the end of summer. It buzzed with activity just as much as it had in June, but now, with grumblings of how autumnal it had suddenly got, the din was different. It comes down to anthropomorphism - how can the bees sense that they need to work harder to get ready for the cold weather? The seasons have been around for millions of years, plenty of time for the slow workings of evolution to drum ideas into the tiny heads of any insect. We are just as susceptible to the suggestions of the environment, the gradual, unconscious awareness of the gently curving waves that mark the climate and the weather (for they are different things whatever anyone says).

I thought this morning, of making a continuous graph of the temperature and realised that such a thing would almost always be smooth, sinuous and without discontinuities. The temperature rarely changes at a speed that is noticeable to us. It climbs or falls slowly until suddenly someone wonders out loud how it got so hot or cold and the cusp of catastrophe throws everyone into the same thought. The seasons flow like this, like the hands of a clock which when watched seem not to move but always do, moving at the same angular velocity regardless of the observer effect or other more esoteric theories of time. The bees, living so much less time than we do, may have some mechanism that shows them the motion of time in a much more obvious manner. Maybe they 'see' everything, each individual moment as they bumble and blunder from flower to flower, through the slow march of the seasons, sped up in their vision depending on which setting they choose, to the endless variation of climate bringing sense and division to the entire existence of this planet.

We do not have this same intensity in our connections with the world. Many of us don't seem to have it at all. One minute we are racing around the playground, arms outstretched like the heroes we think we are and the next we are slumped in a chair wondering where everything went, the events in between invisible and forgotten. We must commit every moment to memory, be able to recall every second as if we were making internal maps of the three dimensional world to allow us to pretend that we live in four. Apply this trick of space to time and you will step outside of the linear flow, into the hyper-time that links the beginning and the end of the universe, the curve of time analogous to the curve of space. Imagine your house in space, not just the bits you can see at any one time, but the whole thing, hanging in front of you, semi-transparent and able to be rotated with just a thought. You are living now in the next dimension, existing like a four-dimensional god, able to see everything that exists without having to look round corners.

And now, think of how to do this with time, imagine you life to now, possibly like a line with marker posts for significant events. What do you see where it crosses the millennium? Is it any different for that year when compared to the others? Next imagine it compressed like a line turns into a circle and circle turns into a sphere. You have all the time you have experienced in your vision. You can recall any event just by spinning this globe of your life in front of you. I think this is how the bees see time, possibly passing it from generation to generation in junk DNA. The greater part of our identity as defined by our genes, is apparently meaningless; just long lists of seemingly random codes, holding no information that we can decipher, the ultimate in security by obscurity or possible by absurdity. Sometimes I wonder if the secrets to everything about life are encoded in these strands and then I realise that this is a truism, because of course, all life is descended from a single common ancestor. Our DNA is just a version of that original string, with each life experience adding more to the code. There are the pieces we can see and manipulate but mixed in are the mysterious extra links, the pieces we strive to understand.

Is the secret of consciousness held in there? It must be. We are conscious beings and all the construction of the machines which are our bodies is defined in the DNA. All secrets of life are in there - the entire blueprint and history of life on this planet, encoded in each and every tiny cell. The skin cells which fall of my fingers as I type this each contain more information than has entered my brain since I first cast eyes on the dim lights of the hospital where I was born. All the things I have done and all the dreams of things I want to do are nothing compared to those sequences of letters that define the jelly that is us. Each bacterium, washed away at the sink, has information that remains inside us now despite the millions or perhaps billions of years which have passed since the existence of our common ancestor. The earth cannot be young; it needs to be old for all this wondrous mechanism to have developed from nothing, to have been brought about by the random mixing of chemicals, that one day created an accidental self-replicating machine that in its fuzziness has produced all the hatred, joy and delight at existence which humans possess today. The ultimate free lunch. All that you enjoy is the result of random accident and I know that that is true no matter how much you argue with me.

Frasmotic Compunctuousness and Gertrude Stein

Did you like yesterday's poem? I'm not sure I do. It was an exercise in the observation of a small moment of time but I think it didn't stick rigidly to the speed at which it started and accelerated through to get the end out of the way much earlier than it should have. However, lunchtime poems are time-limited anyway and you wouldn't want a poetic equivalent of The Mezzanine would you? My wife has complained that I use the word 'symmetry' in every third poem so I did a search through all 217 pages of poems that I have stored up and found only one instance. I do know that there is at least one word which I do overuse but I can't work out what it is, even using a frequency counter. It certainly wasn't contrafibularities.

Which reminds me that Richard Curtis is reportedly going to write an episode of Doctor Who. We shall see - Stephen Fry was supposed to be writing one but he is probably behind with The Dambusters so I don't hold out much hope. Maybe he isn't after all. Long entry tomorrow perhaps so I need to think about it.

Slow Motion Magnetron ...

... sparks the dissolution of two molecules,
Becoming fire with brothers falling in as one,
The growing boil of chemicals, of hate,
That roll together through the pressured air.

This flame, a matchless void of oxygen,
Burns brighter, bound by microseconds,
Melts plastic with its heart aflame for god,
For hatred and all the saints and martyrs.

The liquid orange heart, the blood in water,
Thick and viscous, now takes up your shout,
This thing you ask with no solution possible,
Until it screams, and breaks and steams.

And echoing cosmology, expands in void,
Upstopped by steel, by glass and plastic,
But first of all by you, embracing it in hope,
Of all the celestial ecstasy that surely follows.

Describe the heat on skin, the first embrace,
Of god upon you, a rescue from the sins,
Of being human in this dirty world, this house,
This starting step to harmony.

And so the grip gets tighter, tears apart,
Your skin from skin and flesh from bone,
Fragments this beaming, grinning corpus,
With a final scrape of mind from brain.

And in chaotic space, there hangs this thought,
The thought of proof of nothing, time stretched,
To infinity, perhaps eternity, time to be decided,
By last consciousness as paradise or hell.

Self, Self, Self!

I was going to write something about libraries about which I was extraordinarily excited. That has passed and I can't actually bring myself to put anything about libraries here. Which leaves me without a defined subject. What's new! Anyway, this has reminded me of the strange book I chose from the library on Friday. It is Send in the idiots: Or How We Grew to Understand the World, a book by a UK Policy Advisor about the lives of his autistic former class mates. The author is autistic himself though I suspect that on the spectrum it is quite mild. I am only just starting the second chapter but his description of his own repetitive behaviour and that of others does not yet seem very much beyond my own or that of quite a lot of my colleagues. That of course may just be the line of work which I am in and that any behaviour that I exhibit cannot possibly be abnormal for me. The style of the book is a novelistic mix of narration regarding the reunions with his classmates interspersed with his personal opinions on behaviour and language. It doesn't drag me in like some books but it does seem to have a mysterious draw from the fact that it is so strange. It is well-written and structured which I suppose is what you might expect.

My own personal theory is that we are all autistic to some extent. Thinking about things, I can pick out internal conflicts between my desire for order, resistance to change and the practical necessities of living in a world which is anything but these things. Disorder is maybe the result of the conflict between the individual views of every person in the world as to what order actually is.

Nature, for all its fractal randomness is an order created from the settling of things. Change in nature takes place on a scale far wider and lasting longer than human change which is why we are at odds with nature. The differences in scale and time frames between different groups of humans and different age-groups within those groups creates the disorder. Autistic people trying to live in the non-autistic world survive only by making an intellectual effort to work out what the non-autistic world expects of them, things which non-autistic adults instinctively feel and probably do not even register in themselves.

I look back and wonder if I haven't had to carry out some of this conscious work to be able to interpret the real meanings behind actions and behaviours. I am sure I have but now it seems to be an unconscious things; I have learned this and now the learning has sunk into the regions of my mind where it just comes as "second nature". Maybe this is what all humans do - it just happens faster in most and they are able to pick it up before adulthood. Could it be that emotional traumas at certain ages lock a person into a particular stage and the severity of that trauma decides how long that hiatus lasts. My general criterion for ending such a speculation as this is when I judge that the whole discussion breaks a certain boundary for the complexity of the discussion and this has now been reached in that I see that this is impinging of the whole area of developmental behaviours - Genie and the other so-called feral children.

We are trying to understand our own machine code, a giant self-reference which I think might be the key to consciousness.

Twice Bjorn

Beautiful song from Robyn Hitchcock on the Today Website of all places. He is of course a fun guy to be with.

Well ... apologies for that. What's the real business of the day? The notebook is empty apart from the number of a spare part we need to order. The mind is likewise save for the ear-worm of something very loud and repetitive by FBS, which really needs removing with something soothing. I have just realised that my recent sonnets have played fast-and-loose with standard form in that the first four lines need the same rhyme scheme as the second four ie. abbaabba. I'm not that worried as I am pretty certain that The Poetry Police (a division of the Cultural Bureau of Investigation along the lines of The Folk Police) have not yet been armed with anything more dangerous than a frilly shirt and a pale complexion though of course in the wrong hands even those can be fatal.

Hornless B

Some Vikings invaded the local park the other week. They were very friendly though there was a bit of pursuit with spears going on at times. We did get a rebate on our Danegeld though, in the form of some freshly-minted sliver pennies as you can see below.



They seem to have gone away now which is useful as they were beginning to confuse the dog walkers who thought they might be a Draconian response to the fouling problem.

The new notebook has been broken open and with it I have defined a new system for notes and decided on keeping it neater. First up is this article ABOUT CAPS - YOU MUST READ IT. I'm not sure that anyone should lose their job for using all CAPS but a quiet word (possibly in italics) might be in order. And loosely connected to notebooks is my daughter's purchase of a perfectly formed facsimile of The Journal of Impossible Things - the dream diary of John Smith from the Human Nature episode of Doctor Who. Because it came with a sonic screwdriver pen, I was convinced that this would be a throw-away cash-in but it turns out to have 72 printed pages of rough notes in terrible handwriting, interleaved with charcoal drawings of many of the things from the recent series. Fantastic value! I can only hope that whoever created it has been well paid - this really is like a window between the real world and the Whoniverse.

Daughter has also bought and constructed a half-scale cardboard Dalek which is currently creating further restrictions to entering her room by being stuck to the door.

Both Specious and Spacious

I polished off The Tent, The Bucket and Me in a few days and very funny it was too. Just the right level of scatology to be funny without being off-putting. It is one of those books you don't want to end. Actually, thinking more deeply about that, it must be rare for a book to end exactly when you think it should. I have been making an effort to finish books I start and it seems to be working though as part of this I hope I am being more selective. Back into Desperate Romantics now though I lost the bookmark and was struggling to work out whether stuff I had read was because I was re-reading passages or because it was just generally familiar from the Lizzie Siddal Biography. Back on track now though.

While I struggled to fill up the previous notebook I am now loathe to start the next. I just can't think of anything to put that will allow the thing to start in the way I want which is all very sad.

You'd Think There'd be an ATM at Least.

(Stereo Double - Needs Crossed Eyes rather than "Magic" Eyes)

We got to Jodrell Bank at last on Saturday and it is still impressive. Of course for my daughter it is where The Fourth Doctor fell off and turned into that nice vet though I think the overwhelming presence of The Lovell Telescope got to her as well. I'm still excited by the whispering dishes which allow you to whisper a greeting across 100 metres of space using two aligned dishes. Standing in the middle of them surrounds you with disembodied voices from the people at either end; maybe the sound analogy of those strange dished which create real images of objects placed within them. And then to add value to the day, there is an arboretum which I imagine is populated with cerebral astrophysicists, though I get the feeling that all the data is actually worked on remotely with the whole gantry swinging away to commands beamed in from various labs all over the country. As the Lovell Telescope is part of at least two synchronised radio telescope arrays, it is possible to think of the massive apparatus as part of a dance team with all the other telescopes turning at the same time to target the same object in the sky. We went right up close to the giant railway bogies which handle the yaw of the dish and could see the wheels moving gradually to keep the whole think targeted allowing for the rotation of The Earth. All very impressive.

All we have to walk around at lunchtime is a pond hewn out of a gravel pit. Actually "hewn" probably suggests a bit too much organisation; it was probably just the result of moving earth around when the business park and it being allowed to flood. Oh well!

Some Needless Sentimentality

Well I did write that sonnet and unusually here it is.

Dove With Poppy

Your taking, as requested, was as you had defined,
With lofty passion; showing much deceit
The hundred drops in one, your failure to eat,
Becalmed and in your lover’s arms entwined.
The dove has taken you across the poppy sea,
This bird, a haloed angel taken by the hawk,
In arguments and faces split with angry talk,
That always tears apart your gilded symmetry.

And now we live with all these faults and doubly,
Paint you over, redo the arc and only praise,
With fading images and much dispersing thought,
Of how we failed and let you sail away; we ought,
To love you still and as Virgil’s sad saint, raise,
To scintillating void, you at your end and free

What do you think? Too Much? Well I like it.

I was feeling slightly let down by the first chapter of The Tent, The Bucket and Me but the second chapter has taken off and rendered the book far more than a cheap 70's memoir. It is hard to reconcile the use of decimal money with the lighting of gas lamps and the total lack of indoor toilets in some parts of the UK; it gives the book a strange timeless air with the date somehow floating back between the eras of depression and space hoppers. Reviews seem so suggest an obsession with bodily functions and some proof-reading issues - ho hum.

Oscar Wilde! What a Git!

I finished the Lizzie Siddal biography last night; there were no real revelations though the author Lucinda Hawksley does seem to assert that there was indeed a suicide note based on a 1949 biography by the Granddaughter of one of the main figures in the tale (probably Ford Madox Brown but I can't remember). However, one of the last tales is the gossip regarding Lizzie's death put about by a certain wit and playwright of Irish origin who claimed it was murder on the part of DGR. It is poignant then that in this story, the school aesthete gets named after Wilde. The idea that the PRB "were the spiritual forebears of both the Happy Mondays and the Blackpool Illuminations" is maybe a candidate for Pseuds' Corner but I can see where it comes from. I've just noticed (sparked by the slightly fuzzy notion that Lizzie and DGR were a bit like Ted and Sylvia) that Sylvia died exactly 101 years after Lizzie on February 11th 1963. Slap me someone!

On to The Tent, The Bucket and Me. I feel a sonnet coming on.