Patience
Patience patience patience
Tap...tap
Tap tap tap tap tappy tap
Check the watch, 3 hours. For fucks sake.
Ipod? Flat. Book? Read it. Food? No money.
Siiigh
So I went walkabout, not recommended in an airport but I had reached a non-recommended level of boredom (ie. tears).
I went to the arrival gates and had a sit, seeing the gaunt and expressionless faces of folks awakened out-of-turn, and those with clenched jaws, having had presumable difficulty with customs at both ends of the journey. One could only sympathise.
But life was not absent in this gate from the hellish neutral zone of the terminal, no, it was in fact in great abundance! The arrivals gate was a busy place you see, but not for the numbers actually arriving, but for those waiting for them to arrive. It was as if a finishing line of a gruelling race, though the hugs and tears were of a different kind of adulation, purely in gratification of greeting the new arrival.
Men sweeping women off of their feet in joy, members of both parties discreeting away their tears with an embarrassed turn of the head. Such joy to resume contact with another, the end of a long period of waiting and wishing and wondering, the rising joy that the moment is near, and then...there they are! And you throw your arms around them in greeting and bury your face in the most comfortable and safest of hiding places, somewhere between their hair and their neck.... And you whisper sweet nothings and nuzzle to remind that you have not disappeared in the recent 5 seconds.
I haven’t even done this before! I want to! But perhaps you might have garnered this from my apparent enthusiasm for the moment and that I may be making it out to be a little more than it is...I say phooey, it is what I’d like it to be! And I like it to be that!
Of course there is also the efficient businessman, executive sized and styled luggage trailing behind him, with a quick step and handshake he is off to conduct matters of upmost importance, who is probably not so enamoured with his stepping down from his business class haven.
But in gross majority are family groups and old folks, just happy to be free of cramped surroundings and forced proximity, happy to be clear of customs, and with a twinkle and a skip are off to face their respective futures.
It is refreshing, and look at that! It killed two hours!
I wonder what I’ll look like at the other end.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Type
Click
Whirrrr
Crackle
Shine!
The computer is on.
Now I can type things into its square head.
Things about the day and the week and month, things about me and about you.
First, I must select a program.
Raw energy crackles as the ether abounding the circuitry is alighted with amperes and voltages, clawing for moist air to the completion of their imperative.
‘Word’ opens.
I am elated.
But first! The news
People are blowing up! Well that is just the end!
There were some sports played, which relate to success and failure.
And I don’t know which side of the fence to sit
In a fit of sighing I close the window.
And I begin to type the words concerning what I am becoming
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Letter to the editorial dept.
The jim jam gadgetry of the twenty-first century tends to give us an impression of a localised globe. Hell, I could be 2 weeks walk away from home, but with a 45-minute flight I could be banging down my parents door to put the kettle on. Should I wish to speak to my dear old aunt, huddled in her apartment in suburban London, I simply pick up the handset and dial. With sufficient resource at my disposal I could hop from city to city, leaping over entire continents without so much as breaking a sweat, without swatting a single bug, without seeing so much as a single blade of grass.
We have become so detached from the world around us, so isolated, we see our lives as the norm, our comfort as a given, a right to which we are borne. But in four and a half billion years there has never been a situation like this, until four thousand odd years ago when we began to cross seas, to expand our empires, and to sate our wants through any means necessary.
If the earth is an organism then we are it’s cancer, not that that is necessarily a negative thing, cancer is only “bad” from the relative stance of it’s host. What’s good for us is bad for the planet and vice versa. But it is not to blame ourselves, as we are products of the earth, we are the result, the accumulation of its development as an organism. While the earth in all its wisdom may sigh and lament it’s poor fortune, that it developed a case of humanity so early into it’s golden years, I’m sure that is content with the rich and illustrious life it has lived thus far. It has survived meteor impacts, super volcano eruptions, it even recovered, in its foetal state, to be birthed from an impact with a celestial body so massive that it split the globe in two. And now, four point five billion years later, it finds itself faced with another obstacle, a shift in its equilibrium requiring what James Lovelock so eloquently put as “planetary medicine”.
Will the earth fight to save itself? Presumably so, but can it fight hard enough? Or will we fight harder, blind as cancer is to its dependence on its host? Time will tell I suppose.
We have become so detached from the world around us, so isolated, we see our lives as the norm, our comfort as a given, a right to which we are borne. But in four and a half billion years there has never been a situation like this, until four thousand odd years ago when we began to cross seas, to expand our empires, and to sate our wants through any means necessary.
If the earth is an organism then we are it’s cancer, not that that is necessarily a negative thing, cancer is only “bad” from the relative stance of it’s host. What’s good for us is bad for the planet and vice versa. But it is not to blame ourselves, as we are products of the earth, we are the result, the accumulation of its development as an organism. While the earth in all its wisdom may sigh and lament it’s poor fortune, that it developed a case of humanity so early into it’s golden years, I’m sure that is content with the rich and illustrious life it has lived thus far. It has survived meteor impacts, super volcano eruptions, it even recovered, in its foetal state, to be birthed from an impact with a celestial body so massive that it split the globe in two. And now, four point five billion years later, it finds itself faced with another obstacle, a shift in its equilibrium requiring what James Lovelock so eloquently put as “planetary medicine”.
Will the earth fight to save itself? Presumably so, but can it fight hard enough? Or will we fight harder, blind as cancer is to its dependence on its host? Time will tell I suppose.
Thursday, March 12, 2009
yadda yah
Here are some things that I thought in my brain mind then gave to my hand fingers for your happiness fun. Man like I was thinking about bands man, bands, and how they make sounds like. The guitar makes a particular wah wah and then the drummer, well he just goes on ahead and kicks it up a notch, and the singer makes the words and the bassist makes the sounds that are to your ears like grout is to a tiled wall, that filling agent.
But that’s a given innit just, EVERYBODY knows that series of observations. In a recording studio though, or just a jamming jive session, and the men are playing their instruments and making the beats together just so. And then the observing crowds of women are in moving agreement that it is a good song being played and that they are hearing.
Does a band that is good and plays their instruments well know when they have just laid down a song that will be a radio hit?
I wonder which bands feel good when they detect that, and which others do not.
I bet there are some bands, good bands, that would not like to release a hit single because it would then take the onus away from the entire tapestry that is the album that the song is a bitty bit of.
I’ll even wager that most of the songs that are big ol two week bashers on the radio shows with the adult-yet-adolescent hosts were not the bands favourite songs of their albums they made, bet they weren’t the ones they were most proud of, I bet they wished the two were the same! Aye!
I bet some bands even lower their gaze a little when they are told their single has gone platinum, it means that the masses have got their hands into it.
I mean there’s something to be said for the term cliché I’ll bet. If an expression is cliché, then it is bad to use it, if a movie is cliché, it is bad to see it, a song is the same, but a person can also be cliché, and in an equally negative way. Phlegmatic is what they used to call them, neutral folk, like corks bobbing in an ocean, not aware of the current abound, just the ripples at the water surface.
I mean look how lame hit singles are really. They’re pretty arse. Subjective or not, they just fed off the last cunt, nothing new here, just the same simple formula.
But I spose we’re all playing a bit of Chinese whispers to a degree aren’t we. Man look at what we know, look at our knowledge and how much INFORMATION exists, it’s madness. And all of that was collected by people, and added to the human databank before you came along and read it. I mean if we were born, and put in a room with no windows, man imagine how we would turn out, without all this learning going on, without all this knowledge from the past generations. We aren’t new, we aren’t special, there is very little that is new and fresh and individual about us really, we take the info in from the last guy, we might think about it, we might disregard it, we might butcher it with a poor memory or bias, but when we spit the meme out the other end it’s more or less the same thing objectively.
And if that ain’t a game of Chinese whispers I don’t know what is. Look at what’s spurned this, the advent of lighting quick, permanently set communication, fixed bases of knowledge in massive electronic data banks, misinformation cut back by massive peer evaluation sent back and forth at the speed of light.
But it’s getting on top of us, there’s too much and we haven’t had time to process it all, like having an excellent run on a sudoko problem then having to go back and be methodical over your new numbers, like a lotto winner who has been scrupulous with cash his whole life, we have too much information to systematically process, that even the nature of intelligence is changing.
Academics of old used to be the kinds of folk who could retain information to an exceptional level, as so much was stored in textbooks which easily became dated or note form which was rarely shared. Nowadays that sort of skill is superfluous with the information available at your fingertips, now intelligence is measured by comprehension ability, by system approaches and relationship analysis. So IQ tests have had to adjust accordingly, but with such a holistic form of intelligence it is becoming increasingly difficult to reliably measure.
Wanna know something surprising? In the past 50 years there have been no significant discoveries in the field of physics, the science that Einstein and Schrödinger paved the way for near the turn of the century. Yet you wouldn’t think it, what with the massive technological gains we have made since the 60’s, but we haven’t been operating on new principles, we are simply coming to terms with the ones we already know, seeing just how they apply to materials, to chemistry, to biology. But the truly fundamental’s remains as paradoxical and confusing as ever. Quantum physics has more interpretive digressions than you can shake a stick at (but if you believe the BOHM interpretation, or if you believe the COPENHAGEN interpretation, but don’t forget the many-worlds-theorem etc etc) and is not really any closer than it was in the 50’s at linking Newtonian (mid-world) physics, to the strange laws goverening the behaviour of quantum particles. In a way the guys of old had it good, there’s so much distraction nowadays, conjecture, information overloads, that no ones prepared to take an idea and just run with the thing, see it through till the end. You hear a lot of the greats of early science, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and their enourmous successes, but there were equally as able men working at the time and commiting themselves to ideas that were just rubbish. The men were indeed geniuses, that discovered the laws of the universe for the first time, but they were’nt the only geniuses around, no sir.
But they fought tooth and nail for their laws, just as did Galileo etc (“and yet it moves”) but some things made sense, others did not.
But they built up info from their predecessors, in the words of Newton “If I have seen further it is from standing on the shoulder of giants”, but they had it in manageable chunks. They formed wonderful ideas, because they could fit all the permutations of an idea into their magnificent minds, but now, there is too much to fit.
I envision a time of science where new ground was boldly forged each day, when the concept of relativity came about, where more and more quantum particles were discovered, the time of the giants. And I see us now and the metaphor is complete. These intellectual behemoths with their clear minds, plotting the universes untold secrets, then us all sitting back for the next 80 years and saying “whoa”. Every little piece of technology that we enjoy today began as the grass roots good ideas of these brilliant minds of old. Their ghostly Chinese whisper being preserved by it’s usefulness and application, and still we sit like stunned mullets, awed by the flat screen TVs, the satellites, the nuclear bombs, the physical expression of the notes on their blackboards. Most don’t even understand them, yet the information is there for all to see, has been for years and years. We are simply too spellbound to try. It’s comforting, knowing that people exist who know more than you, takes the edge off things. Knowing that if the worst came, if a meteor was heading for earth, if a plague broke out, someone with a greater mind can prevent its destructiveness.
Man, being that person who is at the top of the game, imagine standing at the very edge of human knowledge, looking out to the sea of black, the straggling remainders of humanity far behind you, and here you are, lonely and alone, in the face of enternity, of infinity. Knowing if anyone can understand any damn thing it has to be you. Like Einstein in his day, the rockstar of science, piecing together the elements of physics, then seeing them, exploding and killing hundreds of thousands, he must have felt like the most humble of gods, a creator of a force too powerful for him or any man. Like an adventurous child finding a corpse while running through the woods, finding it was inevitable, but the consequences are more than could be imagined.
ACtually maybe not the last one. But fuck being the first to find a corpse, fingers point.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
What in the blimmin' hell
I haven’t been around a whole lot of stupid people in my life and I am shocked to find out how many of them there are outside the stone walls of the university.
This morning my flatmate accosted my friend regarding processed food, taking a jar of vegemite and running through its contents while listing their respective evils. He started on yeast extract, stating that yeast was “one of the worst things that you can put into your body, it shuts down your organs one by one” in a state of utter self righteousness. I wonder if he’s ever eaten bread. I needn’t wonder, I saw him eating a sandwich earlier.
He gets to the preservatives, and proceeds to not only misidentify each of the codes, naming instead chemicals which do not exist, but attributing symptoms to their consumption which included drowsiness, something my flatmate had complained of earlier and he sought to rationalise through false information. She had not eaten vegemite earlier.
He gets to thiamine, and condemns it as a poison, one that “affects your thyroid gland” (it doesn’t) to which he points to his chest (your thyroid is in fact, located in your throat)
I wonder if he knows thiamine by its colloquial moniker, vitamin B1. I wonder if he knows that it cannot be synthesised by the human body and that its deficiency leads to a debilitating disorder known as beriberi, a condition rife in the Third-world. I wonder if he knows that thiamine is a chemical constituent of yeast and that it couldn’t have been added, because he then proceeded to rattle off the evidence of corruption he had apparently gleaned during in his time studying to be an accountant.
He proposed that the Australian government was adding these “evil” vitamins etc. to keep Australian citizens stupid. He proposed that Byron bay “should” have 10000 jobs (it only has 5000 living in it) but Kevin Rudd sold the jobs to China, and now China has too many jobs so people sit around doing nothing because there are too many jobs (lost him a little on that one…). And that everybody’s involved in it, and then he reiterated his unearthing of this material while studying accounting, which I doubt he completed due to his competency (or lack thereof) in calculating how much he owed for rent..
Guess the books didn’t balance then.
His next order of business is the female landlord, who is having trouble with her boyfriend’s daughter who was birthed to another woman before their relationship began. They have been together a year and she is having trouble with the fact that the 8 year old girl isn’t treating her like a parent. The flatmate tore into the little girl, citing her enthusiasm for busking outside the supermarket a sign of “emotional depravity” and that her preference for her father an indicator of “a psychotic need for affection”.
The landlord is not terribly intelligent and began nodding along, spellbound by the multi syllabics, and together they decided that they must push the little girl out of the relationship for her sins. I have met the girl three times now and she is a wonderful, beautiful little creature, intelligent beyond her years, and it breaks my heart to see the utter stupidity of the adults around her deciding her fate.
What the fuck is wrong with these people, how did they create such ill informed, fragile paradigms, and how the fuck did they get so self righteous about them that they allow their views to consume the lives of others?
And I wonder how I am going to right these wrongs.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
Dissociation, get me outta here!
Boy, if it weren’t for my dissociative complex, by golly. By gum. You’re alright, I can talk to you, I can handle that. Man I can even talk to like 3 like minded folks at once, but shit, start cranking that number up…. All I can say is I’m headed for trouble.
People take public speaking too much at face value. Running a kilometre makes you gasp, you run it fast because it is short and it is not long also. But that is not to say that a 42.2km marathon is 42.2 multiples of that in difficulty, you back off, engage different systems, find a rhythm. The principle holds true with dissociation, think of it as the aerobic system to your anaerobic (the sucker that kicks in when sprinting etc).
A conversation with one person is hard, you have a lot to take in from them, even when solely focussed on them we often make mistakes, miss things. Even when we stare intently at their body language we misconstrue gesticulation, come away with the wrong impression.
More people are added to the broth, the dynamics change, certain folks begin to dominate the proceedings and people fit into their stereotypes more and more, step away from their bare honest self, and become what they have nurtured themselves into being in such situations. Depending on ones ability, such a situation can still be interpreted well and handled with style and aplomb, but it takes a lot, picking up on individual responses and comparing them to the broad sense of the group and its internal perturbations, it is of course impossible to maintain the level of communication that you had with one person with every person in the group of multiples.
You cannot expect the Olympic 100m champion to duplicate his 100m record 4 times back to back to run a 400m in 39 seconds flat. We have a resource-limited perception system, and while it allows us a great deal of focus in social situations, it is finite, and the same operating system cannot be extended beyond its means simply because we’d like it to.
But what if we crank that number up to say, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people? At this level, a flowing conversation becomes impossible and we have you, the speaker, addressing these folk. Feel scared? Well stop treating it like the thousand fold extrapolation that you are! It’s not a thousand times more difficult than talking to Fred, who is your friend. In fact it is no more difficult, though it is a different skill set and hence innate talent can lie in either camp. One might be charismatic in person, yet stumble and stutter in front of millions, and vice versa. Just as a decent runner will likely run pretty well in both a 1km race and a marathon, the specialists in either field tend to excel at one but not the other. Different systems are invoked you see.
Your dissociation complex kicks into high gear, and the crowd becomes a heaving, sighing, emergent organism, impacting on each other with their mutual feelings, gets ‘em all clapping and hollering, savvy? It doesn’t operate the same as an individual human, hence the different systems that need to be involved in yon self, but it requires no measurable extension on your part, over and above what you already know. Sure, the crowds language is different, you don’t read it in a face, you can’t address individual face’s because the system begins to break down, the long distance runner realising just how many 100metre races that his 100km race consists of about halfway through, leading to a nasty case of stage fright.
Instead you hear chuckles, in a sweeping, blurred glance you can check attentiveness, clapping is an obviously positive reception, but in the lucid state, you can FEEL the crowd.
If you are in a crowd, and it’s getting all hyped up, you’re bound to get hyped up along with it, what if you are the thing the crowd is getting hyped up over? I think it would be fair to say that the same principle would apply.
Anyway, “what about the corporations?”, I hear you ask. Well that’s a very important aside Timmy, as the dirty corporations have managed to get their smelly corporate fingers into this delicious humanity-pie as well.
“Team America”, and the scene where Tim Burton (you) denounces the corporations for financially backing the hapless Team America and extrapolates his argument against the do-no-gooders by saying that the corporations are all “corporationy”, which is true! They are corporationy! But what does corporationy mean? And why is it a bad, bad thing?
Well, oddly enough, I do declare that it is a degree of dissociation that makes corporations bad. Lets investigate…
Imagine, you are on island with only one other person. You happen to own a shop on said island and you sell mangoes at bargain basement prices. The other fellow, an ardent mango lover, is your (only) customer, but he is not your friend. However, it is in your best interests to make nice with him! Any fault in the mangoes comes as a direct blowback, not just to your companies name, but to your grinning mug. The buck cannot be passed, as there is no one to pass it on to (apart from, in this case, acts of god I suppose). Any poor service, price increase, short opening hours and the cause lies directly with you, and hence the economic sting is also felt in your personal pocket.
Chuck a few more fellows in thereabouts, a few more customers, a few more employees. The investment in the business on your part starts to dissipate as the responsibility is alleviated. Take it further out, till you never even see the customer, just profit/loss graphs, stock quotas, margins and performance targets. You are the CEO and you are in a room, and money comes in, and you give orders and more money comes in and you receive an award and things must be swell! Dissociated until all you see is the product of the transaction, and have no investment whatsoever in the transaction itself. Like instead of being the speaker in front of millions, you are the speech writer, away on holiday in the Bahamas, quaffing cocktails purchased with a royalty check.
Man, it ain’t no thing if you cut a few employees, bump up prices, make unfair changes to pre existing contracts, because as far as you are concerned those actions are successful, pre emptive strikes made by savvy managerial types like you, you handsome devil. The customer service boy can even pass the buck as you used to, no one can yell at him because he didn’t make the prices, he didn’t draw up the contracts, and no one can yell at you because you’ve dissociated/spirited yourself away! Hooray!
We aren’t made to deal with so many people, make decisions on the part of millions, it’s beyond our capacity, we simply aren’t that intelligent, but I sure as shit ain’t clever enough to come up with a solution. Apparently Karl came up with something, but I hear it was kinda lame.
People take public speaking too much at face value. Running a kilometre makes you gasp, you run it fast because it is short and it is not long also. But that is not to say that a 42.2km marathon is 42.2 multiples of that in difficulty, you back off, engage different systems, find a rhythm. The principle holds true with dissociation, think of it as the aerobic system to your anaerobic (the sucker that kicks in when sprinting etc).
A conversation with one person is hard, you have a lot to take in from them, even when solely focussed on them we often make mistakes, miss things. Even when we stare intently at their body language we misconstrue gesticulation, come away with the wrong impression.
More people are added to the broth, the dynamics change, certain folks begin to dominate the proceedings and people fit into their stereotypes more and more, step away from their bare honest self, and become what they have nurtured themselves into being in such situations. Depending on ones ability, such a situation can still be interpreted well and handled with style and aplomb, but it takes a lot, picking up on individual responses and comparing them to the broad sense of the group and its internal perturbations, it is of course impossible to maintain the level of communication that you had with one person with every person in the group of multiples.
You cannot expect the Olympic 100m champion to duplicate his 100m record 4 times back to back to run a 400m in 39 seconds flat. We have a resource-limited perception system, and while it allows us a great deal of focus in social situations, it is finite, and the same operating system cannot be extended beyond its means simply because we’d like it to.
But what if we crank that number up to say, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand people? At this level, a flowing conversation becomes impossible and we have you, the speaker, addressing these folk. Feel scared? Well stop treating it like the thousand fold extrapolation that you are! It’s not a thousand times more difficult than talking to Fred, who is your friend. In fact it is no more difficult, though it is a different skill set and hence innate talent can lie in either camp. One might be charismatic in person, yet stumble and stutter in front of millions, and vice versa. Just as a decent runner will likely run pretty well in both a 1km race and a marathon, the specialists in either field tend to excel at one but not the other. Different systems are invoked you see.
Your dissociation complex kicks into high gear, and the crowd becomes a heaving, sighing, emergent organism, impacting on each other with their mutual feelings, gets ‘em all clapping and hollering, savvy? It doesn’t operate the same as an individual human, hence the different systems that need to be involved in yon self, but it requires no measurable extension on your part, over and above what you already know. Sure, the crowds language is different, you don’t read it in a face, you can’t address individual face’s because the system begins to break down, the long distance runner realising just how many 100metre races that his 100km race consists of about halfway through, leading to a nasty case of stage fright.
Instead you hear chuckles, in a sweeping, blurred glance you can check attentiveness, clapping is an obviously positive reception, but in the lucid state, you can FEEL the crowd.
If you are in a crowd, and it’s getting all hyped up, you’re bound to get hyped up along with it, what if you are the thing the crowd is getting hyped up over? I think it would be fair to say that the same principle would apply.
Anyway, “what about the corporations?”, I hear you ask. Well that’s a very important aside Timmy, as the dirty corporations have managed to get their smelly corporate fingers into this delicious humanity-pie as well.
“Team America”, and the scene where Tim Burton (you) denounces the corporations for financially backing the hapless Team America and extrapolates his argument against the do-no-gooders by saying that the corporations are all “corporationy”, which is true! They are corporationy! But what does corporationy mean? And why is it a bad, bad thing?
Well, oddly enough, I do declare that it is a degree of dissociation that makes corporations bad. Lets investigate…
Imagine, you are on island with only one other person. You happen to own a shop on said island and you sell mangoes at bargain basement prices. The other fellow, an ardent mango lover, is your (only) customer, but he is not your friend. However, it is in your best interests to make nice with him! Any fault in the mangoes comes as a direct blowback, not just to your companies name, but to your grinning mug. The buck cannot be passed, as there is no one to pass it on to (apart from, in this case, acts of god I suppose). Any poor service, price increase, short opening hours and the cause lies directly with you, and hence the economic sting is also felt in your personal pocket.
Chuck a few more fellows in thereabouts, a few more customers, a few more employees. The investment in the business on your part starts to dissipate as the responsibility is alleviated. Take it further out, till you never even see the customer, just profit/loss graphs, stock quotas, margins and performance targets. You are the CEO and you are in a room, and money comes in, and you give orders and more money comes in and you receive an award and things must be swell! Dissociated until all you see is the product of the transaction, and have no investment whatsoever in the transaction itself. Like instead of being the speaker in front of millions, you are the speech writer, away on holiday in the Bahamas, quaffing cocktails purchased with a royalty check.
Man, it ain’t no thing if you cut a few employees, bump up prices, make unfair changes to pre existing contracts, because as far as you are concerned those actions are successful, pre emptive strikes made by savvy managerial types like you, you handsome devil. The customer service boy can even pass the buck as you used to, no one can yell at him because he didn’t make the prices, he didn’t draw up the contracts, and no one can yell at you because you’ve dissociated/spirited yourself away! Hooray!
We aren’t made to deal with so many people, make decisions on the part of millions, it’s beyond our capacity, we simply aren’t that intelligent, but I sure as shit ain’t clever enough to come up with a solution. Apparently Karl came up with something, but I hear it was kinda lame.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
The Power of Christ
It was the bells actually, their complex chimes drew my attention towards the ancient brick structure, its brick walls and ornate, stained windows firmly at odds with the quasi-modern architecture of Perth central. I had not been adhering to any particular weekly structure for a good few months so it was with surprise that I registered the day to be a Sunday and the bells to be announcing communion.
The smiles and warm hands of elderly women ushered me through the mighty archway and through to the rows of simple wooden pews beyond. There was no denying that this was a place of deep historical and spiritual significance. Wrought iron caged the walls in tortured bends and folds, a smattering of lit candles affixed. Around me the pews filled, but it was not a cross section of society that sat within this house of the lord, but a crowd almost completely dominated by the elderly. This point was further driven home by the dean announcing the weekly death notices of the parish, a number of no less than seven, all dying in circumstances attributed to some variation on the theme of old age.
This was, of course, a catholic church, an ancient dynasty of religion, one that reigned supreme through Victorian-era England and seemed to be applying a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra to spirituality in the 21st century. Mass is early and inflexible, morals are set in stone and hell is only a slip into your neighbours wife away.
Now attending (any) church is something of a novelty for me, I am, say, a ‘devout agnostic’, but the focus of this piece is not on my religious views but on a phenomena so transcendental that it defies nomenclature, at least in the sense that any semantic used to describe it would cause a cynical uncle (bless) to snort in disgust. You could throw descriptors and ideas at it, such as “collective consciousness”, “out-of-body experience”, “hive mentality”, or “utter lunacy”, but these will not stick, they cannot stick, for this is a phenomena with no apparent regard for the “rock logic” of the original renaissance, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, on which these concepts (even lunacy!) are based.
This is a business that requires what is known as “water logic”, a context-based form of logic that acknowledges that universal laws are not strictly universal, in neither time nor space ie. They do not work all the time, from every angle. It is a logic form that creates what is known as a rotating objectivity (from every ‘angle’), essential for the truly objective approach.
This may or may not be a lot of foreign concepts compacted into a small space but I will elaborate (promise). I chose for this piece to centre around the church because it is the most accessible facility that I have seen in which to observe this particular occurrence. I choose not to give the occurrence a name, because if I infer that it is similar to anything else by giving it a symbol that is already associated with another phenomenon then I am already injecting bias into your mind; I do not wish to be the one to do that. I would like you to find out what this is for yourself, and if you have already experienced it I would like to for you to recognise the profound nature of what this is. Boy isn’t this exciting!
It’s an experience is what it is. The singing of hymns, the pounding rhythm of a dusty dance floor, the crescendo of a symphony orchestra as you blow your lungs out on the oboe or whatever, knowing that you, you are part of this great thing and that everybody else is a part too and you’re all parts and you’re all going places and things are happening and life could not…get…any…better…than…this…moment.
Imagine, if you will, standing alongside your current friends on an ancient battlefield, before the age of artillery, before even the time of archers, just two sides facing each other, assembled and ready, crude weapons at hand. To your sides and back, brothers, to your front, the enemy, the vile, despicable enemy, the raper of babes, the befouler of the sacred, the murderer of dead things (science allowing..). Shit is very real at that moment, very clear and crisp isn’t it. A mix of pure fear, knowing what could come, a dull blade to the skull, limbs torn free, a slow death. But countering that, strength, anger, not enough on your own, regardless of the relative odds this is a huge task, killing these men will be as hard as a mu fu, but the strength comes, the utmost reliance in your peers, no more doubt as to whether you are alone in the universe, whether you are a lone spirit cast adrift to wander the universe alone, you have no doubt whatsoever that these comrades of yours think like you, want what you want, and would go as far for you as you would for them.
War drums
Blood pounding in your ears
Spears hitting shields
Cries of fury, terror
Eyes bulging, a man runs a knife down his bare chest, drawing rivulets of blood
The run begins, the heart pounds, the breath comes in gasps, you scream as you run but your lungs will only allow short bursts, a “YI YI YI YI!!!”
We are upon them, a weak blow to your shoulder, you barely notice as you swing at the first face in range, smashing it. An arm, hit it, then a blow to your right leg, a snap and you fall. Can’t fight from here, you close your eyes, feigning death and your senses return to you, time speeds up, you notice the screams, feel the heat of charged bodies, the wetness of the blood, and your insides smile, you’re alive.
And never more alive I’d wager, of course settings change, but the concept holds fast. Orwell’s 1984 referred to the concept of “groupthink”, the power (or the exploitability) of an idea once ingrained in the masses, but this is not so much articulated thought as it is a feeling, but not a feeling as we know feelings to be, manageable, mundane, able to swept under the carpet should they be considered inappropriate.
It seemed to me to be a feeling brought about by a feedback system of confirmation between you and those around you, a back and forth race to an emotional high never seen before, holy rapture for the religious man. I have maintained that from my time spent in isolation that an essential part of our contact with others lies in their ability to confirm our experience. Ie. “yes, that sunset really is beautiful”, “no, it’s ok to feel sad”. Our minds can form whirlwinds of doubt if left unchecked, and can drive a man mad, of that I have no doubt. We need our ideas bounced back at us, verified or otherwise, to check that we are going in the right direction.
No one can read your internal narrative but you, others could merely gauge a vague sense of what you are feeling relative to how your outwards expression would relate to their feeling/expressional links (what you say, your expressions etc, and how they would tie to your true ‘feeling’). You are alone in a sense, trapped within your own head, which can lead to a feeling of soliptitude, that you could be the only one said to truly exist (from your perspective). The confirmation of others is the reassurance of other souls-trapped-in-heads that what you feel is on the right “track” so to speak, the importance of which cannot be understated. The societal reassurance that governs our day to day behaviour, allows a “feeling good” about behaving in a way that is not an axiom of human goodwill but a manner that is useful to the coexistence of a large number of people in a concentrated area (a difficult thing to oversee, one would imagine). There is the reassurance of friends, allowing a tightening of groups, sharing idiosyncrasies that are deemed constructive to the individuals and the group and pointing out and mitigating the effects of those which are not. But indeed, I am no sociologist, and I hope you will understand that this is, to a degree, speculative and should be treated as so.
So when a group exists that has formed about a concept that each individual could say that they are passionate about, in this case a church sermon; circumnavigating the principles laid down by God and Jesus Christ, an interesting form of confirmation occurs. If the participants are truly passionate regarding said principle a sort of “confirmation cascade” occurs. A potential exists in each individual, in their individual passion, to become TOTALLY engrossed in their feelings regarding Jesus (or whatever the case may be) but it requires a sort of communal egging on to reach this state of absolution.
I will just take in aside (sorry) to point out that I do not wager that it is possible to feel this way over just anything, it is more a feeling regarding everything, in this case Jesus is the personified embodiment of god and therefore everything, a likely candidate, an atheist might get him or herself in such a state over the (perhaps musical) universe at large and its internal ebbs and floes, Buddhists might reach a state of Zen (though I will avoid the use of this particular term for reasons previously mentioned) over the concept of energy and connection. It seems to be a state that is restricted to the individuals idea of what embodies everything.
Back to business, if the potential for passion exists then a group will begin their ceremony of choice (pumping out a jaunty tune, having a good old chant etc.). There will be the freedom of thought and expression that comes with a crowd that confirms the values of its individuals and hence the mood will be more comfortable for those involved, and less so for those not. Expression will begin, and so will a feedback cycle, for every ‘push forward’ so to speak will act as a primer, a sort of ‘permission’, for others to explore that little amount deeper into their passion, into their sense of everything. With enough of a group doing this language begins to be transcended and a mutual feeling develops, and we get strange instances of hypersensitivity to emotional expression bringing the group closer and closer together as the profundity of the sensation begins to dawn. Push, push, pushing forward, following the example of others and inspiring them to follow yours simultaneously (hence the afore-mentioned “rotating objectivity” and water logic of this strange phenomena) as the mutual feeling grows, a feeling shared rather than owned. Soliptitude begins to slip away and instances of, I suppose one could say “group-feel” are evoked, wordless conversations are now wordless because words have become inadequate symbols for the feelings that now pervade the entire group.
Now, I have to be honest with you, the first time I myself (though of course I should say we, ourself) felt such a sensation I was definitely not attending church. It was New Years Eve 2008 around 6am, and I was never more myself than I was with those who shared the dusty dance floor at that hour. Prose seems inadequate, fortunately I penned my take on the hours that followed in poem form, here it is…
A dreamful night
On the scattered ruins of a lost civilization we dance
Moving frantically to a primal tribal beat.
Dancing as if for a higher purpose,
That we might move for more than just ourselves
Our eyes meet for only an instant;
A glance into eternity.
No words exchanged, no expression shown
Containing more than we have ever known.
I do give and they receive,
They then expand and I contract
And as the dawn chorus interludes
We begin to break the wordless pact
Warm fingers of light break sheets of black
The dream begins to fade in morning glow
But still we dance as if for a higher purpose
Will the new dawn make fools of us all?
Fools indeed, with reddened eyes
Outlandish dress streaked with mud and sweat
We stand, blinking and sore
Naked against the warmth of the giver of life.
The sobriety gives a sensation
We’ve awoken from a romantic dream.
We catch ourselves but stupefied.
And chase our dignity home.
When we meet in times beyond
They speak to me of that long night
Did we lose ourselves, they wonder,
To a dream that made the world just right?
I smile to them and we turn to the east
To the newly rising sun
The light speaks to me of moments gone
The beauty in us all, of all
My friends, I say, do not despair
For while we danced for higher purpose
And dreamed romantic dreams
The world itself became more than it was
It is no longer as it seemed.
So do not lament the fateful night
Where we danced upon mankind past
The unspoken words, the dreams we dreamed
Were that night made to last.
I wish that I could show you if you do not already know, for me it was a the most magical, most profound moment of my entire life, and I have had a few memorable moments. In effect all I was doing was having a boogie and watching the sunrise. But at that moment, my friend, I discovered what the word passion truly meant, I looked outside the game of life for a moment, off to the side of the chessboard, and caught a glimpse of what lay beyond, and I loved it with all my heart.
The smiles and warm hands of elderly women ushered me through the mighty archway and through to the rows of simple wooden pews beyond. There was no denying that this was a place of deep historical and spiritual significance. Wrought iron caged the walls in tortured bends and folds, a smattering of lit candles affixed. Around me the pews filled, but it was not a cross section of society that sat within this house of the lord, but a crowd almost completely dominated by the elderly. This point was further driven home by the dean announcing the weekly death notices of the parish, a number of no less than seven, all dying in circumstances attributed to some variation on the theme of old age.
This was, of course, a catholic church, an ancient dynasty of religion, one that reigned supreme through Victorian-era England and seemed to be applying a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mantra to spirituality in the 21st century. Mass is early and inflexible, morals are set in stone and hell is only a slip into your neighbours wife away.
Now attending (any) church is something of a novelty for me, I am, say, a ‘devout agnostic’, but the focus of this piece is not on my religious views but on a phenomena so transcendental that it defies nomenclature, at least in the sense that any semantic used to describe it would cause a cynical uncle (bless) to snort in disgust. You could throw descriptors and ideas at it, such as “collective consciousness”, “out-of-body experience”, “hive mentality”, or “utter lunacy”, but these will not stick, they cannot stick, for this is a phenomena with no apparent regard for the “rock logic” of the original renaissance, the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, on which these concepts (even lunacy!) are based.
This is a business that requires what is known as “water logic”, a context-based form of logic that acknowledges that universal laws are not strictly universal, in neither time nor space ie. They do not work all the time, from every angle. It is a logic form that creates what is known as a rotating objectivity (from every ‘angle’), essential for the truly objective approach.
This may or may not be a lot of foreign concepts compacted into a small space but I will elaborate (promise). I chose for this piece to centre around the church because it is the most accessible facility that I have seen in which to observe this particular occurrence. I choose not to give the occurrence a name, because if I infer that it is similar to anything else by giving it a symbol that is already associated with another phenomenon then I am already injecting bias into your mind; I do not wish to be the one to do that. I would like you to find out what this is for yourself, and if you have already experienced it I would like to for you to recognise the profound nature of what this is. Boy isn’t this exciting!
It’s an experience is what it is. The singing of hymns, the pounding rhythm of a dusty dance floor, the crescendo of a symphony orchestra as you blow your lungs out on the oboe or whatever, knowing that you, you are part of this great thing and that everybody else is a part too and you’re all parts and you’re all going places and things are happening and life could not…get…any…better…than…this…moment.
Imagine, if you will, standing alongside your current friends on an ancient battlefield, before the age of artillery, before even the time of archers, just two sides facing each other, assembled and ready, crude weapons at hand. To your sides and back, brothers, to your front, the enemy, the vile, despicable enemy, the raper of babes, the befouler of the sacred, the murderer of dead things (science allowing..). Shit is very real at that moment, very clear and crisp isn’t it. A mix of pure fear, knowing what could come, a dull blade to the skull, limbs torn free, a slow death. But countering that, strength, anger, not enough on your own, regardless of the relative odds this is a huge task, killing these men will be as hard as a mu fu, but the strength comes, the utmost reliance in your peers, no more doubt as to whether you are alone in the universe, whether you are a lone spirit cast adrift to wander the universe alone, you have no doubt whatsoever that these comrades of yours think like you, want what you want, and would go as far for you as you would for them.
War drums
Blood pounding in your ears
Spears hitting shields
Cries of fury, terror
Eyes bulging, a man runs a knife down his bare chest, drawing rivulets of blood
The run begins, the heart pounds, the breath comes in gasps, you scream as you run but your lungs will only allow short bursts, a “YI YI YI YI!!!”
We are upon them, a weak blow to your shoulder, you barely notice as you swing at the first face in range, smashing it. An arm, hit it, then a blow to your right leg, a snap and you fall. Can’t fight from here, you close your eyes, feigning death and your senses return to you, time speeds up, you notice the screams, feel the heat of charged bodies, the wetness of the blood, and your insides smile, you’re alive.
And never more alive I’d wager, of course settings change, but the concept holds fast. Orwell’s 1984 referred to the concept of “groupthink”, the power (or the exploitability) of an idea once ingrained in the masses, but this is not so much articulated thought as it is a feeling, but not a feeling as we know feelings to be, manageable, mundane, able to swept under the carpet should they be considered inappropriate.
It seemed to me to be a feeling brought about by a feedback system of confirmation between you and those around you, a back and forth race to an emotional high never seen before, holy rapture for the religious man. I have maintained that from my time spent in isolation that an essential part of our contact with others lies in their ability to confirm our experience. Ie. “yes, that sunset really is beautiful”, “no, it’s ok to feel sad”. Our minds can form whirlwinds of doubt if left unchecked, and can drive a man mad, of that I have no doubt. We need our ideas bounced back at us, verified or otherwise, to check that we are going in the right direction.
No one can read your internal narrative but you, others could merely gauge a vague sense of what you are feeling relative to how your outwards expression would relate to their feeling/expressional links (what you say, your expressions etc, and how they would tie to your true ‘feeling’). You are alone in a sense, trapped within your own head, which can lead to a feeling of soliptitude, that you could be the only one said to truly exist (from your perspective). The confirmation of others is the reassurance of other souls-trapped-in-heads that what you feel is on the right “track” so to speak, the importance of which cannot be understated. The societal reassurance that governs our day to day behaviour, allows a “feeling good” about behaving in a way that is not an axiom of human goodwill but a manner that is useful to the coexistence of a large number of people in a concentrated area (a difficult thing to oversee, one would imagine). There is the reassurance of friends, allowing a tightening of groups, sharing idiosyncrasies that are deemed constructive to the individuals and the group and pointing out and mitigating the effects of those which are not. But indeed, I am no sociologist, and I hope you will understand that this is, to a degree, speculative and should be treated as so.
So when a group exists that has formed about a concept that each individual could say that they are passionate about, in this case a church sermon; circumnavigating the principles laid down by God and Jesus Christ, an interesting form of confirmation occurs. If the participants are truly passionate regarding said principle a sort of “confirmation cascade” occurs. A potential exists in each individual, in their individual passion, to become TOTALLY engrossed in their feelings regarding Jesus (or whatever the case may be) but it requires a sort of communal egging on to reach this state of absolution.
I will just take in aside (sorry) to point out that I do not wager that it is possible to feel this way over just anything, it is more a feeling regarding everything, in this case Jesus is the personified embodiment of god and therefore everything, a likely candidate, an atheist might get him or herself in such a state over the (perhaps musical) universe at large and its internal ebbs and floes, Buddhists might reach a state of Zen (though I will avoid the use of this particular term for reasons previously mentioned) over the concept of energy and connection. It seems to be a state that is restricted to the individuals idea of what embodies everything.
Back to business, if the potential for passion exists then a group will begin their ceremony of choice (pumping out a jaunty tune, having a good old chant etc.). There will be the freedom of thought and expression that comes with a crowd that confirms the values of its individuals and hence the mood will be more comfortable for those involved, and less so for those not. Expression will begin, and so will a feedback cycle, for every ‘push forward’ so to speak will act as a primer, a sort of ‘permission’, for others to explore that little amount deeper into their passion, into their sense of everything. With enough of a group doing this language begins to be transcended and a mutual feeling develops, and we get strange instances of hypersensitivity to emotional expression bringing the group closer and closer together as the profundity of the sensation begins to dawn. Push, push, pushing forward, following the example of others and inspiring them to follow yours simultaneously (hence the afore-mentioned “rotating objectivity” and water logic of this strange phenomena) as the mutual feeling grows, a feeling shared rather than owned. Soliptitude begins to slip away and instances of, I suppose one could say “group-feel” are evoked, wordless conversations are now wordless because words have become inadequate symbols for the feelings that now pervade the entire group.
Now, I have to be honest with you, the first time I myself (though of course I should say we, ourself) felt such a sensation I was definitely not attending church. It was New Years Eve 2008 around 6am, and I was never more myself than I was with those who shared the dusty dance floor at that hour. Prose seems inadequate, fortunately I penned my take on the hours that followed in poem form, here it is…
A dreamful night
On the scattered ruins of a lost civilization we dance
Moving frantically to a primal tribal beat.
Dancing as if for a higher purpose,
That we might move for more than just ourselves
Our eyes meet for only an instant;
A glance into eternity.
No words exchanged, no expression shown
Containing more than we have ever known.
I do give and they receive,
They then expand and I contract
And as the dawn chorus interludes
We begin to break the wordless pact
Warm fingers of light break sheets of black
The dream begins to fade in morning glow
But still we dance as if for a higher purpose
Will the new dawn make fools of us all?
Fools indeed, with reddened eyes
Outlandish dress streaked with mud and sweat
We stand, blinking and sore
Naked against the warmth of the giver of life.
The sobriety gives a sensation
We’ve awoken from a romantic dream.
We catch ourselves but stupefied.
And chase our dignity home.
When we meet in times beyond
They speak to me of that long night
Did we lose ourselves, they wonder,
To a dream that made the world just right?
I smile to them and we turn to the east
To the newly rising sun
The light speaks to me of moments gone
The beauty in us all, of all
My friends, I say, do not despair
For while we danced for higher purpose
And dreamed romantic dreams
The world itself became more than it was
It is no longer as it seemed.
So do not lament the fateful night
Where we danced upon mankind past
The unspoken words, the dreams we dreamed
Were that night made to last.
I wish that I could show you if you do not already know, for me it was a the most magical, most profound moment of my entire life, and I have had a few memorable moments. In effect all I was doing was having a boogie and watching the sunrise. But at that moment, my friend, I discovered what the word passion truly meant, I looked outside the game of life for a moment, off to the side of the chessboard, and caught a glimpse of what lay beyond, and I loved it with all my heart.
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