Silent Spring

Where do you go when you sleep? The other side of the world or just an atom away in all those extra dimension they tell us really exist wrapped up amongst the dancing particles that make us all up? It's the time of year when the cool of the evening brings out the last gasps of the summer insects, battering themselves against the windows in their mistaken flight around the artificial moons we make for them. I see the garden leading down to the stream, dimly lit at the far end but deliciously inviting in the slanted light from our windows and the open door. The ground is littered with apples and we have piled some of them up in an old tin bath by one of the sheds; they fall at random over the days until the pile rots into some sort of equilibrium and the sweet smell of them fills our noses in all parts of the house.

And here is an army of insects, all types and all sizes, battering against us and the light, invading our spaces with no purpose, no direction other than to use our lights as their beacons. They think they are travelling in straight lines because of course the moon has no parallax at this distance. But our lights move and the insects try to keep them on one side and end up confused into flying in circles.

And when does this end of summer turn in to Autumn and then in turn what point defines the start of winter. Looking at the time as one whole thing, they just roll along, with the first ice in the landscape of empty trees, no more than a second away from the first fogs of late August. Because place stays place. The trees don't move, the house stays the same, the changes that the seasons bring simply paint our world with a thin layer of pastel because underneath things change so slowly.

We have so many levels of change around. Deep down all is moving and the instant state of the universe is gone for ever as soon as you begin to try and catch it. Then in the processes that keep us alive, things are spinning and dividing and moving and yet lying here I cannot catch any of it save for a faint pulse of blood in my ear or the rasp of breath through my lungs. Even my brain which has all these processes in its control, cannot let me know of them. I can think about these processes with the help of neurons which are in the same networks that keep all these processes going. A neuron which fires now as I think of these words will an instant later be part of the network that kicks my pituitary gland into some important hormonal task and I will never know. Just 200 years ago, most of this was not known to any human being. The brains which make the music that lives beyond our allotted time, could not think about the processes which they carried out all the time. We were simple machines then, unable to think about the processes which led to thought. Of course we could think about thinking - the philosophers have always done that - but they could not know how they thought about thinking.

I am thinking about everything in the universe and then the nothing that came before it. And then to extend this thought which has come back to me many times over the years, I think about my brain thinking about everything and nothing. It is odd to me that again the neurons that think this do not have defined roles within my head. They are just conduits for electronics and chemicals and yet in an instant I can translate the sounds that hit my ears, process them through countless billions of processes and return with a word to sum up what I have heard. You cannot follow a program through the brain for even a single photon hitting a single receptor in the eye, branches out through some sort of amplification into a cloud of thought that is filtered and distilled through processes which change at each new use to form a defined and pointed response. That is remarkable but it is obviously the product of a heuristic attack on development; it is so obviously right and correct that it must have been created as the result of responses to all the stimuli that have passed through every creature between the first and now.

There is just no way that any entity could design something like this. It is the process of finding the centre of a ruler by balancing it on two fingers in thousands of dimensions. It may take time but it will always succeed. And all of a sudden I know that this proof of life outside our world. But what if our existence became at one with the method of creation? The world is so well defined - we have regulations and just outside the window I see a plane, a complex construction of well-defined and smoothly polished machinery, pointing the way forward from one place to another in as few steps as possible. And that is the way humans go these days. We want these well-defined paths and yet this is at odds with the way we have developed. Mind maps are designed to reflect the way our brains work logically so that there is as much correlation between the way we think and the way we record what we think. What if we extended that to the way we act as well? I would guess that most people feel a deep fracture between the way they have to live their lives and the way they would want to live them. Beyond the basic needs for survival (but even there is potential for change) we could just drift like thoughts, start from the tiny point of our birth and grow like impulses in the cortex, lighting up different parts of the world and then closing them down again, waves of existence across the brain of the world. Maybe this sounds like a plea for anarchy and I know that I am the wrong person to try this. I don't like the unknown. I like things to be certain before they happen.

“Nothing to forgive, Sydney, nothing.”

Over-stretched - the Black Moon Rises
cruelly on the slicker sea,
a hole in iron,
through which the war

has come to us
for rain and food
to keep alive;

for many things
from us who hate her
yet supply the steel

through turning hard
against the view
of burns and scars,

our riots hidden
in the wrinkled cortex
and hypocrisy.

Lie, Fly, Cry, Nighy, Die, Sigh, Dry, My, etc etc.




Big book this!

I have terrible tinnitus at the moment - at first I thought it was a bad disk drive somewhere in the office but as it carries on at home I have decided it must be the Alien implant or the other source of voices inside my head. One of them is whistling - probably.

Actually apart from this, which isn't even keeping me awake, things are quite good at the moment thank you very much. Not sure what else to write about so it's bye for now.

Degrees of Separation.

The day is like syrup, sweet and heavy, with the birds suspended from the thick air. I cannot tell the time – the lights are on but it could just be the afternoon of a thick storm. This is a high street, seemingly busy with activity and commerce but empty of people. I have been searching for someone to whom I am attracted but I have forgotten her phone number - it comes to me in segments which slip away like egg white when I try to pin it down so I have had to actually come out to find her. Now the timing of all this activity is not quite clear in my head. It is possible that what I am describing after now actually happened before I left the house for the search. I do know that my house is a strange balcony around a central room. One part has a tiny arched door which I have to squeeze through sideways and as usual my house has no roof and probably no walls.

The street has a normal mix of shops and businesses, but they all seem vaguely foreign to me, though at the same time I remember them from some time ago. Maybe they are from an alternative world that I have already made up once in my head. I reach the door of the place that I know this woman to be. It is some sort of performance place, with a huge arched front, pierced by dark, stained glass windows, possibly in the form of writing which I cannot remember or might not understand. I knock at the main door which has a large clear glass window and the person I am search for appears behind it and too one side as if she has walked through the front wall to my left from a magic room which exists in a different space to the pavement outside. She is pleased to see me contrary to my normal quests in these circumstances. All things are finished and resolved.

But yet there are events which happen after now, in this place which I remember from before the time I first got there, quantum resolutions perhaps, the door opening and ending the story, is just the collapse of some equation. My new friend and her family perform a stage show for me. It involved real actors and what are obviously robots performing in the pit of the theatre round which the audience sit, though the actors come and go through the audience as if they are not there, walking like ghosts into the scenes. The robots amongst them are marked with a hazy white label that hovers around them – just the writing, no surface onto which it is written, like a computer game to indicate that they are indeed mechanical. I am not aware of a plot or even of dialogue though there is music from films and the whole thing appears to be a choreographed battle, with the ugly robots being easily circled by the beautiful real people who do nothing more than this. There is no contact, just this weird ballet without meaning but it is beautiful and absorbing and makes me love the real people.

And then it hits me that everyone in this act is a robot of some sort. The woman I have come to see, although she seems happy that I am here, does not seem entirely simpatico as she did to my blind eyes earlier. No one tells me this – it just becomes a fact in front of my eyes, the trashing of the brilliant idea of this quest and in its place the knowledge than any affection is the result of a program, a neural net which has been trained using saps like me. And this is the real end – the last event that happens in either my house or the theatre of robots. I am possibly part of an audience, captive or otherwise but drawn into staying here for ever by the discrepancy between the beauty of these people and the simplicity of their behaviour, the trusting affection that now seems abhorrent. There has been no love in this transaction. But maybe some understanding of the world and how we fit into it has made itself clear.

Some dreams like this leave me happy despite the sadness they carry deep down and some with overtly violent or miserable natures, leave me happy simply because I wake up happy that they are over. The description of limbo, which by God will not exist for long in any of my universes, has us all in a quiet, calm place with infinite sadness. I am sure that this creation is designed to justify the glorification of ancient infidels on whose knowledge, the wonders of the renaissance were based. Here is Virgil, the guide, and all those philosophers who were born before the possibility of enlightenment. And here is the link with my dream; if God is all things at all times, can he not lift these clever, laudable people from their heathen times and bring them into the light? Time is only for us humans and outside that we have no understanding.

Venerate Plato and Aristotle.

On the Beauty of WI-FI

I was made to get up last night to find out the age of Fred Talbot, the Map-leaping Meteorologist. My wife is reading Pies and Prejudice and pointed out the factlet that the aforementioned weather enthusiast was once a biology teacher and had taught Mark E Smith. Her assertion that he must be well into his seventies, as at extreme odds with my view that he wasn't yet into his sixties. Feeling comfortable in bed with GEB, I SMSed my brother who refused to get out if his pit to put us out of our misery and so I had to trundle downstairs and switch on the computer to find that Fred Talbot is 58 and Mark E. Smith is 50 making that particular teacher-pupil relationship entirely possible. Now lack of evidence from the Interwebs suggests that it all might be an urban myth but for us, the need for Wireless Internet has been underlined.

VBscript, ftp - no, no, no.

And the Road I’m on is …. Hangar Lane

I wanted to put 2008 in my date heading which I can see up there. I know you can’t see what I type there because I don’t actually copy it from the document but I still wanted to type 2008. I’m not sure why. I am now 7 years past the furthest date I could imagine myself existing in when I was 10. I think there was probably a Blue Peter competition which asked for drawings of the year 2000 and that was about the limit of my imagining of myself. Still it was only a few years after I had discovered with shock that children grow up into adults rather than always staying that way. I’m pretty sure the revelation was a one-off big bang rather than a gradual dawning because I always associate the discovery with a particular room from our house at the time and a definite time of day. Now the question is how much of my life does this explain?

I am back reading GEB now – I finished Dear Robert, Dear Spike and enjoyed the early chapters of the Robert Graves biography but when it went beyond the years covered by his autobiography it seemed to lose something and has therefore been jettisoned without guilt. I am way over half-way through GEB having avoided any real skimming. However, I may try Life Class before I finish GEB – or even the new version of On The Road which I thought at first was a facsimile of the 120 foot long scroll.