Escaping from Sing-Sing

Listening to - Gala - Lush

There is a helicopter hovering about a mile away. It has been there for at least a minute and shows no sign of leaving. It is about 200m above the ground and as I said just floating there. Obviously it is the police helicopter.

It has just gone. And with no meaning whatsoever. There is nothing outside the text so you will never know. I may know what it was doing there but that is because I work here and there is a greater chance that the information will get to me. Having said that, this is not a novel and so I may post the information here should I receive it. Thoughtforms and little lies.

It's back though it is not hovering any more. The clouds at sky-height hide it from us and we start to read again. I feel in an empty sort of mood where anything I write is just chaff spilling out into space. There is no weather and all the days are playing holidays. On the edge of some featureless green hill, the wind cuts across the path of children on holiday. The happiness is real and you could package it, bottle it, slice it with a knife and keep it in a box under the bed to bring out in times of hardship. My favourite day ever was when I was 10 and I walked across some seaside greenery between the road and the beach. There was a path to the sand and no buildings. In a hollow, out of the wind, the sun came down and made the world pleasant. In the sky there were larks and other birds. Their alarms were our sweet music and we lay down with our faces to the sky and thought of everything that made us happy. Poetry came to me first on that day and I have lived with it ever since. I cannot keep the plot of my life in my head. I could not write it down. No detail other than a vague and fuzzy impression of what life was like. This is a memory book, a book of daydreams for that is what life is. Try and define anything other than now in any definite terms and you will fail. The further you go back (or forward) the less your memory or your wishes fit with the real path. If the Universe - space and time, exists all at once, then time simply keeps things nicely structured - it stops everything happening in one big splurge of emotions and events.

We make the Universe and anything in it. I feel a prisoner in this split second. I cannot go back and though I can make myself go to other places, I am still imprisoned by the speed of light and how I want to behave in a world or morals. The only consolation is that we are all in it together. It is never a lonely journey. We all live on top of each other in time so that we all experience the same things. The world made smaller by wireless and electricity is now here instantly. Antipodean experiences are seconds away and we all see them wherever we are. Nothing is hidden from us and no one can cover anything up. Government must become accountable and for the people rather than for itself. They name one person wrongly and the whole parade of ghosts will tumble, each naming and bringing down the next until the figureheads and the great and the good will fall before us and we know they were wrong and over-complex for the world we live in. Science is complicated but humans get simpler the higher up you look at them. I talk to a friend and there are many levels of interaction, little feelings and things known between is which are not known to anyone outside the conversation. Watch a Prime Minister or a President talking to his or her nation and you will see a masterly distillation of what they think we want hear into a few simple words that convey all within themselves. There is no blurry, fuzzy edge where subconscious meaning lurks, for TV or Radio cannot capture this edge. In that case, why bother using it? Say what you mean and forget about the rest. Annoy half the people and keep the other half asleep.

An emotional broadcast system - a piece of technology which can detect and re-broadcast those little faithless betrayals which make up our relationships with each other. A rainmaker for the mind. A recorder of feelings and meanings. A decoder of speech and lies. When we are all sensitive to these things then maybe we could make the machines to read them. Everything is a machine. The mind is a machine for processing thoughts but it links in deep with the physical world to exploit chemicals in the blood to create all the experiences of life. All the emotions within us are just chemicals but at the deep level, the universe and the mind connect and every time we think we are able to find this link, the Universe of the chemical composition of consciousness retreats into a realm too far away to detect with optics and electronics. By observing them we change how they work anyway so again, why bother? Maybe we think we need to know without realising that we never can know everything. The concepts at that low level are so complex that only a few brilliant minds with ever fully realise them. Maybe we need a new type of scientist - a bio-cosmologist - to link the worlds of the very small and the very large. This is a prose poem for science, a memorial to all those dead cats and their living twins - exactly one-for-one. How many times have they done that experiment. The answer is inside a box and 50% of the time will have been incinerated before the lid is opened.

I am back in that green meadow by the sea. All these thoughts were in my head then and though the matter that held them is gone and my brain is made up of a completely new collection of particles, my mind has held these images for all that time. At 10 years old, I had the whole world defined for it was what I could see and touch and smell and taste and feel. There was nothing outside the text of the novel of my life. The world has got bigger since then but as far as I know it has physically grown since as well. I did not know about the details of the war, or all that humans are capable of doing to other humans. These horrors did not exist. And then my life came up with a few horrors of its own. I have learnt to live with these but they are always there, making black marks on the inside of my head, visible scars to trip up the MRI machine, to silence its giant rumble and clank with a view of human history as an evil thought within the head of some insignificant human. If this was you would you feel important chastened by the weight of the world within a single mass of matter? It is all true for everybody. What is real? Where do you want to go today? You can take a walk to the shops or lie back and dream of worlds that never were, xenofictions that redefine your culture. None of them are the best route. Some people will die in these worlds. Pity them for the real world is more complex than anything you may make up. Try and record the whole world and you will fail. Complexity is nothing wonderful.

The electricity will fail and all this world within a machine will fade and die and where will we be then? I see people throwing rocks at each other as the world falls under clouds of poison and evil emotions. And then I realise that the world has been falling forever and will fall until the sun swallows it up and spits it out as gas to make a new star somewhere better than here.