The Online Past
The heading up there is a typing error by the way.
It was foggy here this morning, so foggy in fact that none of the buildings nearby were visible. It was only possible to see the ground by looking directly down at it from the window so from a distance away from the window it seemed like the windows were just featureless grey. We could have been on the thirtieth floor rather than the third. I thought about this and the building seemed to sway.
Is it me but does the phrase 'Goa-based analyst' in this story from the BBC not conjure up the right image? I imagine some washed-out hippy who puts a bedraggled tie on any time some two-bit camera crew want a sound bite.
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Blue Boo Boo
In the far Pacific, they live lives unhindered like ours. Well, that is what we like to think. I am not sure that living on a Island with the highest instance of Malaria anywhere in the world is a wonderful idea. Pass thr G&T. All we see is the blue sky and the white beaches. When they want us rich people to come over and spend money, all the bad things get swept into the sea. We don't see the non-biodegradable water bottles or the raw sewage. It is not all clear water and cocktails.
Not sure where that came from. I was blocked for a minute or two and was considering an oblique strategy but that just came to me.
The music on the radio driving home last night was very fine. I cannot actually remember what it was but it seemed to fit with the darkness and lights along the dock road.
Moon Tree
The shadow is a solid thing,
a black space where the tree,
in daylight stays calmly waving.
But in the night and in the moon,
it takes a spirit, ghost or puck,
to walk its field, a soldier, guided
by its fingers to the edges.
And we find it moved but never say,
make no remark on this phenomenon;
Our glance of sub-atomic moments
made to the other never goes beyond
the disbelief, the idea that we,
the rational and concrete ones
are wrong about a walking forest.
The wood has met the castle walls,
broken down the stones and empire
while all about, the green makes light
of what we see as evil.
The laughing soldiers, all the trees,
join in feasting on the lakes of moor,
the sucking roots of rougher ales
and dirty water raise them as gods.
In the far Pacific, they live lives unhindered like ours. Well, that is what we like to think. I am not sure that living on a Island with the highest instance of Malaria anywhere in the world is a wonderful idea. Pass thr G&T. All we see is the blue sky and the white beaches. When they want us rich people to come over and spend money, all the bad things get swept into the sea. We don't see the non-biodegradable water bottles or the raw sewage. It is not all clear water and cocktails.
Not sure where that came from. I was blocked for a minute or two and was considering an oblique strategy but that just came to me.
The music on the radio driving home last night was very fine. I cannot actually remember what it was but it seemed to fit with the darkness and lights along the dock road.
Moon Tree
The shadow is a solid thing,
a black space where the tree,
in daylight stays calmly waving.
But in the night and in the moon,
it takes a spirit, ghost or puck,
to walk its field, a soldier, guided
by its fingers to the edges.
And we find it moved but never say,
make no remark on this phenomenon;
Our glance of sub-atomic moments
made to the other never goes beyond
the disbelief, the idea that we,
the rational and concrete ones
are wrong about a walking forest.
The wood has met the castle walls,
broken down the stones and empire
while all about, the green makes light
of what we see as evil.
The laughing soldiers, all the trees,
join in feasting on the lakes of moor,
the sucking roots of rougher ales
and dirty water raise them as gods.
Monday, December 08, 2003
Russkaya Amerika
No low-life comment ever came your way from this devil. The sadness is overpowering, like all-day darkness of a winter polar station. They light my life like a deep film, all diffused, grey light through dripping windows. Somehow here, this battered and bleached hut is home to many poor people; they live off begged and stolen food, in a room blackened by the smoke of the struggling stove. They should have the power of art, the talent for words to show what has happened to them but they lie still, smoking and reading as the weather ranges through its extremes outside. They do not starve, they somehow manage to keep just alive enough to want more than the food and warmth which sustains them. I walk amongst them, with my own hang-ups and think I would love this life, the garret life, led by every worthwhile artist over the years. The ground so far below, beckons with it rainy sheen or snowy coverings and I feel like climbing out onto guttering. The winter trees strech up to this place, as if trying to keep the decaying clapboard up. The brothers are helping each other, the living trees supporting their dead and dried kin. The woodyard is an evil place. Here, the rough orange wood is stacked up and left to itself for years until the snow has blown away and the lorries come to take this new wood away.
The snow steals all sound save for a continuous muffling, the sound of snow falling. Even a large branch, finally giving up and falling to the ground, makes no more sound than the padding fox out in the woods stalking mice. Reynard turns at the sound and then returns to his lonely trail. He is dead and he knows it; he is dead regardless of the men in their red coats or the baying dogs. No man will have to dig him out of earth and throw him to the pack. Winter takes many foxes as it takes many of all of us. There are coughs from inside the house, satisfying, liquid-filled coughs of those drowning in themselves. Winter takes many of us.
A hemisphere away, a man takes his breakfast in the sun of California. This is a man with a steady life, a gravy train of Government and big-business. He makes the tat which we all think we need. He kills people with the stuff he makes. Sometimes he thinks about this but he can always justify his line of work. He is just a cog and if he didn't earn this decent living, someone else would. These bombs are made by committee so no one is ever to blame wholly. He has children so he tells himself with great ease that he is not a monster. The sharp end of his business never comes to him. The final resting place of the smooth and hygenic metal things he designs are in some blank or dark corner of his brain. He knows it is all Ok and he is at peace with his God who whispers to him every night that the dead have it coming anyway. They could get knocked down by a bus couldn't they? In their tents in the dusty sand - so like the mountains outside the city - they are meant for what ever comes their way. Not that our man ever thinks these words in his head; They just happen somewhere as a thought that crosses his mind when ever he feels that maybe there is some less-tainted way of making money. These thoughts always fade as he climbs into his blood-coloured european car and accelerates off to the most unnecessary skyscraper on the whole of the Eastern seaboard. It falls into the sea at the slightest tremor but only in his dreams. This man has killed more people than anyone else on earth. He says he has a talent for building missiles but then again maybe so have I. I may have a talent like this, I do not know but I know I will never find out.
Out in the snowy woods, the night is falling. The wooden houses creak in the wind, a cache for hidden weapons the home of a second proposed revolution and we walk away, our hands deep in the pockets of our coats. The guns rust and crumble, cemented into their bunkers until not one is useable. We have grown old and crumbled like them. Out in the woods the skeletons of older victims bleach white in summers and then turn to sludgy plaster with the rain. Our Tsar is still with our children and left to himself he learns to keep himself to himself. The house vanishes and then is cleared and excavated. With prayers and other spirituals, the ground is flattened and this real-place becomes a wood again. The madmen they once dumped here have been cleaned up and sent back home; our cures have been written up and sit unread in some electronic backwater.
One man makes all the trouble and still sleeps well at night, unguarded. His one design, a boiler plate machine gun, a design classic, like some apple, some branded must-have grey accessory, still at his side as if to indicate his status in the world of hard men and freedom fighters. This weapon whistles in the wind, a tight string against the gales of Russia, a killing thing of immense simplicity, this grey and black automatic rifle has replaced the flick-knife of choice, licensed and unlicensed round the world to make us bleed. In piles they take them from the agents and the mysterious children. They look good with any uniform or and freedom fighters rags. In a shed in some cold republic, little women steal in at dawn to assemble these things. They turn them out, thousands in every day, gold-plated, special editions, bog-standard always grey cheapness available to anyone who can steal a couple of hundred dollars, just one mobile phone from a punter with a wristwatch as big as his head. The stampers never stop; they keep making the steel sides to each and every weapon, uncontrolled unmaintained until the winter comes down hard and steals the light and even then the engines chuff off more until the ground is nothing more than gun parts piled up like drying wood. The boot in the human face is one thing, the never-ending manufacture of these is quite another. From the customs man, searching for smuggled sturgeon, to the fanatic assassin wound-up by the rich-kid terrorist, this toy-maker has caught them all. He tells himself he was at the end of orders. The wood drones on and he can lose himself in this Dacha by the sea and live of all the captured caviar his guns bring in.
I dream all this and more but I do not sleep well because these men do.
No low-life comment ever came your way from this devil. The sadness is overpowering, like all-day darkness of a winter polar station. They light my life like a deep film, all diffused, grey light through dripping windows. Somehow here, this battered and bleached hut is home to many poor people; they live off begged and stolen food, in a room blackened by the smoke of the struggling stove. They should have the power of art, the talent for words to show what has happened to them but they lie still, smoking and reading as the weather ranges through its extremes outside. They do not starve, they somehow manage to keep just alive enough to want more than the food and warmth which sustains them. I walk amongst them, with my own hang-ups and think I would love this life, the garret life, led by every worthwhile artist over the years. The ground so far below, beckons with it rainy sheen or snowy coverings and I feel like climbing out onto guttering. The winter trees strech up to this place, as if trying to keep the decaying clapboard up. The brothers are helping each other, the living trees supporting their dead and dried kin. The woodyard is an evil place. Here, the rough orange wood is stacked up and left to itself for years until the snow has blown away and the lorries come to take this new wood away.
The snow steals all sound save for a continuous muffling, the sound of snow falling. Even a large branch, finally giving up and falling to the ground, makes no more sound than the padding fox out in the woods stalking mice. Reynard turns at the sound and then returns to his lonely trail. He is dead and he knows it; he is dead regardless of the men in their red coats or the baying dogs. No man will have to dig him out of earth and throw him to the pack. Winter takes many foxes as it takes many of all of us. There are coughs from inside the house, satisfying, liquid-filled coughs of those drowning in themselves. Winter takes many of us.
A hemisphere away, a man takes his breakfast in the sun of California. This is a man with a steady life, a gravy train of Government and big-business. He makes the tat which we all think we need. He kills people with the stuff he makes. Sometimes he thinks about this but he can always justify his line of work. He is just a cog and if he didn't earn this decent living, someone else would. These bombs are made by committee so no one is ever to blame wholly. He has children so he tells himself with great ease that he is not a monster. The sharp end of his business never comes to him. The final resting place of the smooth and hygenic metal things he designs are in some blank or dark corner of his brain. He knows it is all Ok and he is at peace with his God who whispers to him every night that the dead have it coming anyway. They could get knocked down by a bus couldn't they? In their tents in the dusty sand - so like the mountains outside the city - they are meant for what ever comes their way. Not that our man ever thinks these words in his head; They just happen somewhere as a thought that crosses his mind when ever he feels that maybe there is some less-tainted way of making money. These thoughts always fade as he climbs into his blood-coloured european car and accelerates off to the most unnecessary skyscraper on the whole of the Eastern seaboard. It falls into the sea at the slightest tremor but only in his dreams. This man has killed more people than anyone else on earth. He says he has a talent for building missiles but then again maybe so have I. I may have a talent like this, I do not know but I know I will never find out.
Out in the snowy woods, the night is falling. The wooden houses creak in the wind, a cache for hidden weapons the home of a second proposed revolution and we walk away, our hands deep in the pockets of our coats. The guns rust and crumble, cemented into their bunkers until not one is useable. We have grown old and crumbled like them. Out in the woods the skeletons of older victims bleach white in summers and then turn to sludgy plaster with the rain. Our Tsar is still with our children and left to himself he learns to keep himself to himself. The house vanishes and then is cleared and excavated. With prayers and other spirituals, the ground is flattened and this real-place becomes a wood again. The madmen they once dumped here have been cleaned up and sent back home; our cures have been written up and sit unread in some electronic backwater.
One man makes all the trouble and still sleeps well at night, unguarded. His one design, a boiler plate machine gun, a design classic, like some apple, some branded must-have grey accessory, still at his side as if to indicate his status in the world of hard men and freedom fighters. This weapon whistles in the wind, a tight string against the gales of Russia, a killing thing of immense simplicity, this grey and black automatic rifle has replaced the flick-knife of choice, licensed and unlicensed round the world to make us bleed. In piles they take them from the agents and the mysterious children. They look good with any uniform or and freedom fighters rags. In a shed in some cold republic, little women steal in at dawn to assemble these things. They turn them out, thousands in every day, gold-plated, special editions, bog-standard always grey cheapness available to anyone who can steal a couple of hundred dollars, just one mobile phone from a punter with a wristwatch as big as his head. The stampers never stop; they keep making the steel sides to each and every weapon, uncontrolled unmaintained until the winter comes down hard and steals the light and even then the engines chuff off more until the ground is nothing more than gun parts piled up like drying wood. The boot in the human face is one thing, the never-ending manufacture of these is quite another. From the customs man, searching for smuggled sturgeon, to the fanatic assassin wound-up by the rich-kid terrorist, this toy-maker has caught them all. He tells himself he was at the end of orders. The wood drones on and he can lose himself in this Dacha by the sea and live of all the captured caviar his guns bring in.
I dream all this and more but I do not sleep well because these men do.
Friday, December 05, 2003
Richard Dawkins for President
Music is Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab
I just passed quickly over a blog with the word 'meme' in it. I got the feeling that the word 'meme' is being overused when someone just wants to refer to some cultural entity but that is the definition of meme and why use more words than one to describe just that. Do you ever find that something you are trying to define and which turns out to be complex, suddenly flips over so that you realise that in fact it is quite simple? It happens a lot to me. The simplest solution is always the best.
Don't read this rubbish.
So much in the world is just too complicated. The tax and benefit system seems to be divided into so many small compartments to ensure the scrupulous fairness of it all. Sometimes my view of taxes being necessary annoys a few people who see them selves paying for something they don't use. Of course it is true that there are many people who use everything that is provided by all levels of government and contribute nothing to it. (I could mention a few tycoons at this point) but overall the idea is that we all contribute to the welfare of everybody and we all benefit to some extent. I know this sounds like an over-simplification. Bear with me. Maybe you could decide say on ten rigidly defined levels of taxation and ten corresponding levels of benefits. Wait for the howls. I don't really want to make a point one way or the other and the reason is precisely because any system has to be complicated to keep all but the most anti-government reactionaries slightly better than discontent. See the howls over the repeal of the Steel tariffs. As you can see, if you wanted to see me on one or other side of the fence you are mistaken which probably devalues all the above rubbish. Hence the instruction I am going to put above the paragraph now.
Music is Emperor Tomato Ketchup by Stereolab
I just passed quickly over a blog with the word 'meme' in it. I got the feeling that the word 'meme' is being overused when someone just wants to refer to some cultural entity but that is the definition of meme and why use more words than one to describe just that. Do you ever find that something you are trying to define and which turns out to be complex, suddenly flips over so that you realise that in fact it is quite simple? It happens a lot to me. The simplest solution is always the best.
Don't read this rubbish.
So much in the world is just too complicated. The tax and benefit system seems to be divided into so many small compartments to ensure the scrupulous fairness of it all. Sometimes my view of taxes being necessary annoys a few people who see them selves paying for something they don't use. Of course it is true that there are many people who use everything that is provided by all levels of government and contribute nothing to it. (I could mention a few tycoons at this point) but overall the idea is that we all contribute to the welfare of everybody and we all benefit to some extent. I know this sounds like an over-simplification. Bear with me. Maybe you could decide say on ten rigidly defined levels of taxation and ten corresponding levels of benefits. Wait for the howls. I don't really want to make a point one way or the other and the reason is precisely because any system has to be complicated to keep all but the most anti-government reactionaries slightly better than discontent. See the howls over the repeal of the Steel tariffs. As you can see, if you wanted to see me on one or other side of the fence you are mistaken which probably devalues all the above rubbish. Hence the instruction I am going to put above the paragraph now.
Marimbas and Mixing
Music is Reich Remixed by Steve Reich
This is an excellent album though I can't help feeling that it removes the essential processes of Steve Reich's music. The remixes here sample the evocative hooks and then simply loop them without the progression that is so much a part of most of his output. I suppose if you just listen to one of the un-mixed originals, the process does not immediately jump out at you and is only revealed over time like finding that the hands of a clock have moved after five minutes of watching it with no perceptible shift. Having said that, there is some evocative background to most of the mixes and they do show the plain gift for melody that Reich has. To have that gift and to then be able to take those melodies and shift them to other killer melodies by way of yet more is a rare talent.
The current track is Howie B's take on Eight Lines and it starts with some creaking string samples which I don't recognise though which sound like the straining ropes of a sailing ship. Howie B is always difficult to get along with; he takes everything down to short samples and then just throws them back at the track without any real reference to the source. The Orb at their worst do the same; I sometimes think that their remixes have no trace of the original track though they will probably retain a single hi-hat to maintain the remix tag. Eight Lines is a difficult track to place anyway because I think it is a version of another Reich track.
Think about mornings in the winter, the drive through lightening skies with the trees black against the dark blue. I love that early morning feel especially in the cold as it is now. Full daylight seems oppressive after the gentle introduction given by dawn. I was listening to my daughter read the other night and I had to hide a small clear plastic bouncy ball that she had been playing with. Just by accident I put it to my eye and found it was a microscope in the mould of Robert Hooke's single lens ones and that it would give me a massive close-up view of silhouettes. The view was obscured at some angles by small pieces of glitter that had been embedded in the plastic along with small bubbles and smaller debris that had been introduced at the manufacturing plant. I surmised that a lot of this debris was dust and pollen from the plant in china that the moulding declared was where the ball had been made. This tiny part of the universe, something normally unseen and rarely though about, brought home to me how complex everything is. Even in terms of structure without reference to function, there is so much out there. Introduce atomic forces and then gravity etc and you get an exponential rise in complexity. After going through all these additions to the plain material world, you have to add on emotions and subtle qualities that humans possess and it becomes a wonder that we have managed to create a relatively balanced and civilised society. This is of course a raw analysis of the way things are but that last but seems to reference the influence of tiny things on big events. Are we one quantum event away from disaster? One decaying atom might change the universe completely.
Back to Earth now.
By the way, Shift by Chris Hughes is a much better take on the processes of Steve Reich's music. It uses the original melodies but I think Hughes uses his own processes or those of a sequencer, to produce the required changes. One of the pieces, Slow Motion Blackbird uses one of the processes but has a different source melody - in this case a sample of a blackbird (from a sound-effect album I think because the same blackbird sings the same melody on so many TV programmes) which is slowed down to a length many times that of the original without any change in pitch. I have decided that I have run out of adjectives or maybe never had any in the first place so bye for now.
Music is Reich Remixed by Steve Reich
This is an excellent album though I can't help feeling that it removes the essential processes of Steve Reich's music. The remixes here sample the evocative hooks and then simply loop them without the progression that is so much a part of most of his output. I suppose if you just listen to one of the un-mixed originals, the process does not immediately jump out at you and is only revealed over time like finding that the hands of a clock have moved after five minutes of watching it with no perceptible shift. Having said that, there is some evocative background to most of the mixes and they do show the plain gift for melody that Reich has. To have that gift and to then be able to take those melodies and shift them to other killer melodies by way of yet more is a rare talent.
The current track is Howie B's take on Eight Lines and it starts with some creaking string samples which I don't recognise though which sound like the straining ropes of a sailing ship. Howie B is always difficult to get along with; he takes everything down to short samples and then just throws them back at the track without any real reference to the source. The Orb at their worst do the same; I sometimes think that their remixes have no trace of the original track though they will probably retain a single hi-hat to maintain the remix tag. Eight Lines is a difficult track to place anyway because I think it is a version of another Reich track.
Think about mornings in the winter, the drive through lightening skies with the trees black against the dark blue. I love that early morning feel especially in the cold as it is now. Full daylight seems oppressive after the gentle introduction given by dawn. I was listening to my daughter read the other night and I had to hide a small clear plastic bouncy ball that she had been playing with. Just by accident I put it to my eye and found it was a microscope in the mould of Robert Hooke's single lens ones and that it would give me a massive close-up view of silhouettes. The view was obscured at some angles by small pieces of glitter that had been embedded in the plastic along with small bubbles and smaller debris that had been introduced at the manufacturing plant. I surmised that a lot of this debris was dust and pollen from the plant in china that the moulding declared was where the ball had been made. This tiny part of the universe, something normally unseen and rarely though about, brought home to me how complex everything is. Even in terms of structure without reference to function, there is so much out there. Introduce atomic forces and then gravity etc and you get an exponential rise in complexity. After going through all these additions to the plain material world, you have to add on emotions and subtle qualities that humans possess and it becomes a wonder that we have managed to create a relatively balanced and civilised society. This is of course a raw analysis of the way things are but that last but seems to reference the influence of tiny things on big events. Are we one quantum event away from disaster? One decaying atom might change the universe completely.
Back to Earth now.
By the way, Shift by Chris Hughes is a much better take on the processes of Steve Reich's music. It uses the original melodies but I think Hughes uses his own processes or those of a sequencer, to produce the required changes. One of the pieces, Slow Motion Blackbird uses one of the processes but has a different source melody - in this case a sample of a blackbird (from a sound-effect album I think because the same blackbird sings the same melody on so many TV programmes) which is slowed down to a length many times that of the original without any change in pitch. I have decided that I have run out of adjectives or maybe never had any in the first place so bye for now.
Thursday, December 04, 2003
Big Numbers
Music is Quiet by Sheila Chandra
It is possible to be completely unaware of the ground at this height. I know I am not miles up the air in some skyscraper but the sound of the ground does not reach here, even the roar of city traffic seems to travel only at ground level.
The largest Prime number has just been discovered, which reminds me that my daughter (5YOD © Ed Broom) was insisting that she knew that Googleplex was the last number. I kept trying the old add 1 to it to get a higher number and indeed she did join in with Googleplex plus 2 etc. This discussion came about because of a question on The Weakest Link (No emails please) over what was the last consonant. 5YOD knew this easily but could not really explain what a vowel and a consonant actually were. Can you explain it in fewer words than Merriam-Webster? The clue is constriction and the solution is obvious when you read it. I love numbers.
Is understanding infinity like understanding four spatial dimensions? (Goodbye to my Wife who has just switched off). I know what infinity is but I cannot visualise it just like I can calculate with four spatial dimensions and indeed find one dimensional distances between points in any-dimensional space but not see how that space exists in any real sense. It does not mean that the space is not there, just that humans do not have experience or sensory apparatus to cope with it. Even space, which as Douglas Adams is famous for saying, is really big, is not infinite, not even close to being infinite. Maybe I am wrong on that and scientists have said at various peaks on the Sine waves of believe in such things, that space is indeed infiniate and full of an infinite amount of matter. Adams got that bit wrong, any proportion of infinity is infinity and therefore the population of the Universe is one rather than nothing. That one is me - and er - you obviously which just goes to show you the beauty and strangeness of space etc.
I suppose I should start being serious again now. It must be all this Zen like calm that has washed over me since listening to the Sheila Chandra. This is a long way from Grange Hill. Even the name - Chandra - seems mantra-like, conjuring up images of telescopes and other astronomical things. So many people ask why mankind looks outside its own realms for information about objects and events which can have no bearing on this planet. The answer is obvious even to most people who ask the question. The very scientific advances which, if directed correctly, will save mankind and individuals from miry death in pits of bacteria, are created through mankind's desire to understand the world. You may know my view that we will never understand everything because distance will retreat from us and microscopic things will break down to reveal further levels of complexity but this should not be a brake on us attempting to do so. Conversely, does the fact that our ancestors had a definite belief in how the world worked which maybe involved some form of supernatural actions and affects, stop the world having been real for them? Think about it - but not too hard.
Music is Quiet by Sheila Chandra
It is possible to be completely unaware of the ground at this height. I know I am not miles up the air in some skyscraper but the sound of the ground does not reach here, even the roar of city traffic seems to travel only at ground level.
The largest Prime number has just been discovered, which reminds me that my daughter (5YOD © Ed Broom) was insisting that she knew that Googleplex was the last number. I kept trying the old add 1 to it to get a higher number and indeed she did join in with Googleplex plus 2 etc. This discussion came about because of a question on The Weakest Link (No emails please) over what was the last consonant. 5YOD knew this easily but could not really explain what a vowel and a consonant actually were. Can you explain it in fewer words than Merriam-Webster? The clue is constriction and the solution is obvious when you read it. I love numbers.
Is understanding infinity like understanding four spatial dimensions? (Goodbye to my Wife who has just switched off). I know what infinity is but I cannot visualise it just like I can calculate with four spatial dimensions and indeed find one dimensional distances between points in any-dimensional space but not see how that space exists in any real sense. It does not mean that the space is not there, just that humans do not have experience or sensory apparatus to cope with it. Even space, which as Douglas Adams is famous for saying, is really big, is not infinite, not even close to being infinite. Maybe I am wrong on that and scientists have said at various peaks on the Sine waves of believe in such things, that space is indeed infiniate and full of an infinite amount of matter. Adams got that bit wrong, any proportion of infinity is infinity and therefore the population of the Universe is one rather than nothing. That one is me - and er - you obviously which just goes to show you the beauty and strangeness of space etc.
I suppose I should start being serious again now. It must be all this Zen like calm that has washed over me since listening to the Sheila Chandra. This is a long way from Grange Hill. Even the name - Chandra - seems mantra-like, conjuring up images of telescopes and other astronomical things. So many people ask why mankind looks outside its own realms for information about objects and events which can have no bearing on this planet. The answer is obvious even to most people who ask the question. The very scientific advances which, if directed correctly, will save mankind and individuals from miry death in pits of bacteria, are created through mankind's desire to understand the world. You may know my view that we will never understand everything because distance will retreat from us and microscopic things will break down to reveal further levels of complexity but this should not be a brake on us attempting to do so. Conversely, does the fact that our ancestors had a definite belief in how the world worked which maybe involved some form of supernatural actions and affects, stop the world having been real for them? Think about it - but not too hard.
Tir Na Og
The back of house was pounded with Oranges and Apples last night. My rational mind came up with an immediate explanation, that the fruit was being projected from a hovering flying saucer, quite possibly the very same craft that was above Deely Plaza 40 years ago and from where those fatal shots were fired. That of course was not rational enough so I decided that it must be stray city-dwelling fairies upset at some slight on one of their number. The solution in the end was even more fantastic; It was a bored teenager in his own back garden, letting fly at all the neighbouring houses. Oh well, I always knew that the world was far stranger than we can imagine. Poltergeists! Who needs them?
The back of house was pounded with Oranges and Apples last night. My rational mind came up with an immediate explanation, that the fruit was being projected from a hovering flying saucer, quite possibly the very same craft that was above Deely Plaza 40 years ago and from where those fatal shots were fired. That of course was not rational enough so I decided that it must be stray city-dwelling fairies upset at some slight on one of their number. The solution in the end was even more fantastic; It was a bored teenager in his own back garden, letting fly at all the neighbouring houses. Oh well, I always knew that the world was far stranger than we can imagine. Poltergeists! Who needs them?
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
Reductionism
I cannot say the things in my head at the moment because I am unable to sort out how to say them. I can understand these things perfectly well but I don't have any way of structuring them using words. It has something to do with the seeming reductionism of events as one gets older. It could be worse; I could be without a memory though if this was the case it seems I would not worry about it so much.
How can the brain be so much more than its outputs. Sometimes I feel trapped in here because I cannot specify the state my head is in. I suppose that is what art and music are for, as alternative output devices. What if we had alternative input devices as well?
Back to my aching head.
I cannot say the things in my head at the moment because I am unable to sort out how to say them. I can understand these things perfectly well but I don't have any way of structuring them using words. It has something to do with the seeming reductionism of events as one gets older. It could be worse; I could be without a memory though if this was the case it seems I would not worry about it so much.
How can the brain be so much more than its outputs. Sometimes I feel trapped in here because I cannot specify the state my head is in. I suppose that is what art and music are for, as alternative output devices. What if we had alternative input devices as well?
Back to my aching head.
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
Who are you calling Horatio?
Music is Wah Wah by James and Brian Eno
There appear to be many rabid opinions regarding the un-trialled use of the Death Penalty at the moment. I know there are probably situations in which I might be pushed into accepting its use but they would be very extreme situations and of course probably very personal to me. The use of lynch-mobs in Trafalgar square has been suggested in this vicinity though this was triggered from a discussion of the costs of high-profile trials. No emotion! Just save some money and hang-em-high. Sick hey? Of course I am on the comedown from To Kill a Mockingbird. Stand a while in another person's shoes.
How big is the world? We each think we know the world but there is so much outside our understanding that we can never be fully aware of all nuances of behaviour. I don't mean any super-natural stuff, just cultural differences. Even walking down a road adjacent to your own can throw up differences that make you feel uneasy. This may be wrong but my estimate is that most people have a mind-view of the world that is about as big as the town in which they live. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth ...". Get over it and accept the world for what it is before a misunderstanding over a type of cake causes World War III.
Take it personally and we will judge you on your reaction. In some dark alley where no one has been for a hundred years we find the debris of the Century before last rotting into homogeneity; all is black dust and mud, paper, food - all turned to a uniform gunge. Just a few feet away, today's technology races by, sending eddies and vortexes into this empty place, lifting the few remaining bits of paper. Take your mind away from this to the change of green life, the forests and plains forever re-arranging into new things. The wind refreshes the trees - takes the dead skin from the ground and filters it through the oceans. Man has stifled the planet; his cities are baffles in the movement of the atmosphere and currents. One day when the great movements of water over all the seas have moved and we lie frozen in the stillness of a new natural cold war, we will look back on the hear and dust with fondness.
I toast the future. Sat by the massive flow of water, I see electricity and light from the sun as all we need to live. We will launch ourselves into space until our satellites have filled the sky and stolen all the sun to grow the food we need. At the LaGrange points our modern Puck will sit and girdle the solar system in minutes, driven by magic and mechanics. They tell me numbers are the most important thing; not doing things but numbers, writing down what you have done and telling everyone. Stifle science and drive ambition down; this pessimism kills us all. Anarchy joins at the top of the circle.
Music is Wah Wah by James and Brian Eno
There appear to be many rabid opinions regarding the un-trialled use of the Death Penalty at the moment. I know there are probably situations in which I might be pushed into accepting its use but they would be very extreme situations and of course probably very personal to me. The use of lynch-mobs in Trafalgar square has been suggested in this vicinity though this was triggered from a discussion of the costs of high-profile trials. No emotion! Just save some money and hang-em-high. Sick hey? Of course I am on the comedown from To Kill a Mockingbird. Stand a while in another person's shoes.
How big is the world? We each think we know the world but there is so much outside our understanding that we can never be fully aware of all nuances of behaviour. I don't mean any super-natural stuff, just cultural differences. Even walking down a road adjacent to your own can throw up differences that make you feel uneasy. This may be wrong but my estimate is that most people have a mind-view of the world that is about as big as the town in which they live. "There are more things in Heaven and Earth ...". Get over it and accept the world for what it is before a misunderstanding over a type of cake causes World War III.
Take it personally and we will judge you on your reaction. In some dark alley where no one has been for a hundred years we find the debris of the Century before last rotting into homogeneity; all is black dust and mud, paper, food - all turned to a uniform gunge. Just a few feet away, today's technology races by, sending eddies and vortexes into this empty place, lifting the few remaining bits of paper. Take your mind away from this to the change of green life, the forests and plains forever re-arranging into new things. The wind refreshes the trees - takes the dead skin from the ground and filters it through the oceans. Man has stifled the planet; his cities are baffles in the movement of the atmosphere and currents. One day when the great movements of water over all the seas have moved and we lie frozen in the stillness of a new natural cold war, we will look back on the hear and dust with fondness.
I toast the future. Sat by the massive flow of water, I see electricity and light from the sun as all we need to live. We will launch ourselves into space until our satellites have filled the sky and stolen all the sun to grow the food we need. At the LaGrange points our modern Puck will sit and girdle the solar system in minutes, driven by magic and mechanics. They tell me numbers are the most important thing; not doing things but numbers, writing down what you have done and telling everyone. Stifle science and drive ambition down; this pessimism kills us all. Anarchy joins at the top of the circle.
Monday, December 01, 2003
He Would be There When he Waked up
Thanks are due to Alice Bachini who despite quoting me out of context in her sidebar has linked her site to mine (under the Countrymen section). She called me Rogier though.
The morning has been lost to pension discussions that I suppose is enough to make you stop reading any more. So I will stop talking about it and promise that there will be more interesting stuff later. Not necessarily so though.
Thanks are due to Alice Bachini who despite quoting me out of context in her sidebar has linked her site to mine (under the Countrymen section). She called me Rogier though.
The morning has been lost to pension discussions that I suppose is enough to make you stop reading any more. So I will stop talking about it and promise that there will be more interesting stuff later. Not necessarily so though.
Atticus Maximus
Finished 'To Kill a Mockingbird' on Saturday. Couldn't really put it down. The film left out lots of gentle conversation between the town's women folk that seemed to give a restrained air to the book. There are of course the several powerful moments for which the film is rightly famous and in the book they are far stronger because they are backed up by the thoughts of the narrator. An excellent book though again, I suspect the power is wasted on the teenagers who get forced to read it as part of their school-work. These worthy books - nineteen-eighty-four, To Kill a Mockingbird etc - are probably given to children as part of a plan to 'improve' them, a plan probably seen by some people as a lefty idea. Maybe I was unworthy at that age, not that I read any of these books. We got 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' and books so boring that I have forgotten them.
Strangely, while I was looking on Amazon for 'Where Angels Fear to Tread', I was presented a list of 'just reads' which included both this and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Looking through all the other lists, they seemed to contain these two books which is obviously Amazon's clever way of pushing recommendations at you. Look at the Sorority Girls' lists! SP must be their patron Saint.
So much I want to write about and it has all retreated to the back of my mind like a rat hiding under the furniture as you try to bash it. I did have so many ideas and it seems that I will have to resort to an oblique strategy in order to write anything further. Sometimes, I do not believe in anything, even myself. This world must be real but think about how your mind reacts with it. I sit here and all my interaction with the world goes fuzzy as if I am falling asleep. There almost seems to be a physical problem with the thoughts moving through my mind, a limit to their speed. Of course, when I start talking to someone, the brakes come off and all returns to normal but the problems are internal, a reaction to thinking about thinking. The poems may fly out of me, and I have been writing more than ever recently, but in the depths here there is something which I think is really important, the solution to everything - everything in relation to me rather than the rest of the world. When I was about 15, I went up on the British Camp, an Iron-Age fort in the Malvern Hills just above our house, and looking down on the Severn Valley, I got a feeling of completeness, an idea of that very moment as the one true point in the Universe. It did not matter that I could not define what it meant; it was enough that I had been there to experience it. The fact that I cannot define it by anything other than knowing that it happened has left me feeling empty at times over the years since it happened. Rationally I put it down to a chemical thing but you can see the idea of it being a religious or spiritual moment.
Lead on Peasants.
Finished 'To Kill a Mockingbird' on Saturday. Couldn't really put it down. The film left out lots of gentle conversation between the town's women folk that seemed to give a restrained air to the book. There are of course the several powerful moments for which the film is rightly famous and in the book they are far stronger because they are backed up by the thoughts of the narrator. An excellent book though again, I suspect the power is wasted on the teenagers who get forced to read it as part of their school-work. These worthy books - nineteen-eighty-four, To Kill a Mockingbird etc - are probably given to children as part of a plan to 'improve' them, a plan probably seen by some people as a lefty idea. Maybe I was unworthy at that age, not that I read any of these books. We got 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' and books so boring that I have forgotten them.
Strangely, while I was looking on Amazon for 'Where Angels Fear to Tread', I was presented a list of 'just reads' which included both this and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Looking through all the other lists, they seemed to contain these two books which is obviously Amazon's clever way of pushing recommendations at you. Look at the Sorority Girls' lists! SP must be their patron Saint.
So much I want to write about and it has all retreated to the back of my mind like a rat hiding under the furniture as you try to bash it. I did have so many ideas and it seems that I will have to resort to an oblique strategy in order to write anything further. Sometimes, I do not believe in anything, even myself. This world must be real but think about how your mind reacts with it. I sit here and all my interaction with the world goes fuzzy as if I am falling asleep. There almost seems to be a physical problem with the thoughts moving through my mind, a limit to their speed. Of course, when I start talking to someone, the brakes come off and all returns to normal but the problems are internal, a reaction to thinking about thinking. The poems may fly out of me, and I have been writing more than ever recently, but in the depths here there is something which I think is really important, the solution to everything - everything in relation to me rather than the rest of the world. When I was about 15, I went up on the British Camp, an Iron-Age fort in the Malvern Hills just above our house, and looking down on the Severn Valley, I got a feeling of completeness, an idea of that very moment as the one true point in the Universe. It did not matter that I could not define what it meant; it was enough that I had been there to experience it. The fact that I cannot define it by anything other than knowing that it happened has left me feeling empty at times over the years since it happened. Rationally I put it down to a chemical thing but you can see the idea of it being a religious or spiritual moment.
Lead on Peasants.
