What I Said Before Plus Dead Sardines

It is rare that a horrific fish disaster sorts your head out.  But it can happen.

Last week over 1 million sardines were found one morning, dead, in Redondo Beach marina in California.  You can watch the report here or here: http://bbc.in/gf9p4h

Current apparent apocalypse notwithstanding (is it just me or does it seem like a succession of End of Days scenarios are playing out all across the world right now, or is it just that I watch too much news and it skews my perspective as in Gerbner's Mean World Syndrome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_World_Syndrome)
these natural events do happen.

We have understood the science about them - we know that when fish come into harbour to shelter from the storm in huge numbers then they will starve themselves of oxygen.  However, my initial reaction to this, as perhaps your was, was "Oh Jesus and Mary Chain, no, not like this, who is doing this, is it the final judgement?" and so on.  I felt similarly when I looked up at the weekend and saw the ginormously big Super Moon looming like a harbinger of doom in the skies (http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/16mar_supermoon/). 

Whenever we see events like this, our initial and uncontrollable reaction is that of unthinking, panic-drive, reptilian fear.  We assuage the terror with understanding, but that does not in any way take away from the fact that we, as humans, have to reconcile those two aspects of our comprehension of the world around us. 

Joseph Campbell draws the beautiful analogy of sleep to explain wildly different levels of unerstanding humans experience at one and the same time - similarly expressed by the Hindu symbol 'AUM' or :

A - waking consciousness
U - dream consciousness
M- deep sleep

"The first plane is that of waking experience: cognitive of the hard, gross, facts of an outer universe, illuminated by the light of the sun, and common to all.

The second plane is that of dream experience: cognitive of the fluid, subtle, forms of a private interior world, self-luminous and of one substance with the dreamer. 

The third plane is that of deep sleep: dreamless, profoundly blissful."

As far as I can understand it, that first quivering of fear we all experience when we see harbours full of dead fish and accidentally think it is the Second Coming, is the same feeling we get when something from the dream state (the "second plane") enters into our normal experiential realm of sensory perception and logic and reason.  It is the same disquieting invasion of our accepted reality that makes David Lynch or Richard Linklater films so unsettling, for example (http://flimgeeks.com/blog/twin-peaks-throwing-rocks-dreams/). 



In the same way that we soothe our panic about the dead fish disaster by understanding the science behind it, the domain of science is exclusively that of the first plane - Science as Wakefulness.  Science is a mutually upheld human endeavour, stripped of individual foibles, and it needs to be in order to express the closest approximation of What Is Going On.  If it weren't for Platonian misconceptions of scientific method, based on theory over observation, we may have had a 2,000 year headstart on ourselves in terms of what we experience in our waking life. 



Looks quite a lot like the images of entropy within stars, doesn't it?

On the other hand, Religion in all its guises belongs steadfastly to the second plane - Religion as Dreaming.  This is the internalised, private world of our own interpretations of the world, best expressed by the empirical, waking world that is shown by science.  The danger comes when religion purports to belong to the first realm and describe things literally:

"Mythology is defeated when the mind rests solemnly with its favourite or traditional images, defending them as though they themselves were the message that they communicate.  These images are to be regarded as no more than shadows from the unfathomable reach beyond, where the eye goeth not, speech goeth not, nor the mind, nor even piety. 

Like the trivialities of dream, those of myth are big with meaning."

It is possible and correct that all stages of the sleep-of-life are experienced and equally valid.  In the same way, science, religion and all that is in between are also equally valid, but only as long as they don't encroach on a realm that isn't theirs. 

Meaning of Life May Not Be Basket of Roses Shocker

After my last (and admittedly rather excited) post about the meaning of life being that of constant change and death and rebirth, I have had feedback from quite a few people which seems to suggest that people may have found this a bit dry and bleak.  After all, if all we are here to do is exist then be blown away to become something else, then our Nectar points and our children and our insurance premiums and, y'know, the whole of our lives, may well look a bit pointless and shit. 

But I think this chronically misses the point.  I think human beings have, on the whole, missed the point on this for the entirety of their existence. 

Why should your life be special and different and imbued with the traces of Gods?  Who ever promised that it would be?  Your parents? Your teachers? Ah, wait, no, the Bible did.  The Qur'an did.  The Talmud and, in fact, almost every religious text reassures, soothes and cajoles us that we are here for a reason.  The coincidence of consciousness is too great, too important, to have spontaneously occured as a quirk of evolution (best tell everyone that's not real either).  All the other frissons of fate that reality gave birth to are less important than the fact that we are aware that we are thinking. 

My point was that there is something special about this - we are starstuff contemplating starstuff - as Carl Sagan used to say.  But I don't see how that is incompatible with what I have been saying.  If anything, our awareness of our own mortality gives the exquisite shudder of tragedy to our lives.  Religion (particularly but not exclusively Western religion) caters to a deep-seated, primal fear of death.  They proffer a bunch of plastic flowers - beautiful, yes, but not alive.

The religions that promise everlasting life are essentially death cults, shushing our anxieties with pictures of clouds and virgins.  Why would anyone want that?  At some point would it not be a much bigger adventure to be something else?  Are we so vainly wedded to our personalities that to imagine not being us for a second is enough to propel us churchwards?  I don't see that this is a necessarily nihilistic, heavily-kohled, purple velvet, angsty statement.  I see it as part of a Cosmic Bargain, really.  Even if the codified forms of reincarnation don't exist (which I don't think they do, I don't believe that if I steal someone's chips that will contribute to an Eternal Karmic Scorecard where my points will be totted up at the end of class and I will be assigned a body based on my behaviour - a bit like Boots Advantage points, or the perennial "No Pudding If You Don't Eat All Your Greens" maxim) then we will become the air, the trees, the bits of pavement and the cup you drink from...eventually.

We have to die in order for other things to live, that's all there is to it:

If we have welled up from the morass of non-sentient beings to be able to experience this most noble of realities, even for this blinkiest of seconds, then I am happy to have been part of that, before dribbling back down from whence I came.  In that time we can conceive of an entire Universe in our minds, we can meet people, create people, learn and wonder and jizz and fight and live all the life that's coming to us.  Is that really so horrible an idea?  Does our common heritage with everything single object around us not create a feeling of peace and oneness (and more than anything else, a bit of perspective on all the mundane shite that we wear about our necks as emblems of having lived, mediocre medals to a life we think we cherish) rather than a pompous sense of disgust that we might have more in common with the world around us than we like to think about?

It baffles me that specialness has been equated with difference for so long.  Has that ever really been a policy that has worked for humanity?

Death is an inevitability, but it is up to each and every one of us to decide how to deal with that fact.  There are many cultures who deal very well with death - just look at the Mexicans - because they realise that to confront death is to make it less scary:

To accept the incontrovertible scientific truths that are out there, that we as a species have worked out, that we are elemental beings, just as subject to the Laws of Nature as everything else, from the amoeba to the supernova, lessens the clamour of the bullshit, lessens the import to be given to meaningless things (bearing in mind at all times that, so mired in debt am I that my corpse will belong to Bob Diamond and the loan companies. I'll never buy a house, learn to drive or do any of the things which I fully acknowledge are nice and convenient to do as an apparently fully-fledged grown-up and taxable citizen) but instead allows freedom where it really counts, in the fucking mind.  That is why it is our duty to learn as much as possible about everything in the world, more, to live as much of everything in the world as possible.

I'd rather be a bunch of real flowers that blossom and twist to get at the sun, rather than cling to the dusty permanence of plastic ones.

A Level RE, Television and Thermodynamics Combine Forces to Reveal Meaning of Life

I'm really sorry to do this, but you best stop what you are doing.  Please, just put that down, put it...there you go...listen to this.  Don't pick it up again when you think I'm not looking, just cross your arms and concentrate.

It appears, without too much of a fanfare, that the meaning of life has been revealed.

I'm going to walk you through it, but take your shoes off.

I'm sure you've all seen the work of Professor Brian Cox, his enigmatic billion year stare and his uncanny knack of making extraordinarily diffuse astrophysical topics seem as easy as pie (I myself got caught up in the Stargazing Live zeitgeist at New Year and went to a lecture by the Manchester Astronomical Society about the birth, life and death of stars.  There was a distinct cooling in the room when everyone realised that these topics are much more difficult to understand than watching three TV shows would have us believe, and that it isn't in fact possible to somehow absorb a PHd thesis while eating pickled onions on the sofa.  They do sterling work, though: http://www.manastro.co.uk/).  His new series, Wonders of the Universe, commenced apocalyptically with the nature of time itself.  (And you should watch it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/zf9dh/)

In this dimension at least, it seems the entirety of creation is bound in a Sisyphean work - to move forward, to change, to live and then to die.  From the tiniest bubble of the quantum foam to the vastest nebulous juggernaut of deep space, on every level, there is only change.  Time is a real thing, it exists (although no-one really knows in what form, see Cox's documentary "What Time Is It?" for a clearer introduction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VgzCMmaVLM&NR=1), and it compels us more than any other force of nature.

entropy at the core of a galaxy

But, inasmuch as we can understand it, this Universe is flinging itself headfirst into the future, and only that.  We are moving from a state of low entropy (complex, structured objects like galaxies, planets and skyscrapers) or order to states of high entropy or disorder, where line and form and shape and definition is sacrificed to the uniformity of chaos (no outlines, just an amorphous ooze of sameness).  This logic, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (that the Universe aches for balance everything out, so eventually all concentrations or lumps of stuff - matter, heat, etc. - will be dissembled and spread out, ashes to ashes) is applied by Cox to explain that this will also happen to everything within the Universe.  Its death is when all is balanced out, all is obliterated, all is smoothed out.

What strikes me as most glorious about this idea is that it is very similar to what many human civilisations have concluded about the meaning of life throughout history.  It seems that our constant exposure to death has led to an innate understanding of this "permanent change" of existence, from the Great Nothing at the beginning, leading us inexorably to the Great Nothing at the end.  The earliest gods were the sun and the moon, and these are extinguished every day, to be reborn.  I mentioned a while ago that it is as if we carry the most ancient memory of our existence before, and very occasionally we manage to communicate it.

The Maori explain it thus:

Tane raising the sky with his feet in the Maori creation myth

From the conception the increase,
From the increase the thought,
From the thought the remembrance,
From the remembrance the consciousness, 
From the consciousness the desire. 


The word became fruitful,
It dwelt with the feeble glimmering;
It brought forth night:
The great night, the long night, 
The lowest night, the loftiest night, 
The thick night, to be felt, 
The night to be touched, 
The night not to be seen, 
The night ending in death. 


From the nothing the begetting, 
From the nothing the increase, 
From the nothing the abundance, 
The power of increasing, 
The living breath.  

The Three Marks of Existence at
everydayink.blogspot.com

The most profoundly succinct of all these understandings of this now scientifically proven reality, was that of the Buddha.  His Three Marks of Existence are as follows, and they managed, 2000 years before, to express the same beautifully bleak reality:

1. All things are impermanent, always changing (anicca)
2. All existence is suffering, caused by attachment to impermanent things (dukkha)
3. There is nothing everlasting, no essence, no soul, no self (anatma)


So there, the meaning of life seems to be nothing more than an acceptance of this impermanence, a realisation that all will change and die, and the realisation that life is infused with the special, most tragic beauty of a rainbow, most elegant because it is fleeting, but we are part of it.

Applying "The Being Interested In Everything" Towards The Face Of A Person

So I trust you have all been looking, as if all on some very pure hallucinogen, at more things, the every-things, the all-things, searching for the waves, the connections, all that jazz.  As Huxley said in The Doors of Perception: 

"To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large — this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual."

I like very much this idea of Mind at Large - a bit like Carl Sagan's Spaceship of the Imagination, the Mind at Large whirls around the alleyways, bumping into things, having a nice analytical squeeze, and then moving on.  We are so bound by our corporeality, our need to piss or our desire to cry or our desperation for a sandwich, to be taken seriously, to be loved, to be remembered - that we forget how free the Mind at Large can be.  (Perhaps the kind of bright-pink-vomiting, ankle-shattering-heels, freshly-fake-baked Joop! cloud that sprawls across city centres every Friday night, and which is so excruciating that I feel obliged to apologise to all foreign taxi drivers on their behalf, perhaps that is the "freedom" of the Body at Large.) 

As Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) said, "Au plus eslevé thrône du monde si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul." (On the highest throne in the land we are not sat but on our arse) - we so rarely get the clarity of thought of being perfectly balanced, being well-fed, well-rested and not needing to go to the toilet, but when we do we should be ready to pounce.  

We have only our minds really, and it our human duty, as I have already said, Captain Kitchener style, to feed and water and change the straw of the hutch of our brain.  

And yet, I have thought recently that this is a very lofty but very lonely pursuit. It is much nicer to have someone who you can ricochet your ideas off.  I think that we have lost sight of the fact that a relationship, in its most profound and useful sense, should be someone who you can roam about in your Minds at Large with, and try to flesh out a worldview based on your considered findings.  This in no way sounds as exciting as finding your soul mate, The One, your lobster, or any of the various misleading titles we have given to our imagined Other, and which are liable to cause us diabetes for being so sugary.  I understand that Love also has a lot to do with the prosaic things - with convenience and chemical impulse to mate and shared debt and history and jokes and fear and fear and terror and fear of being alone - but beyond all that is the exquisite chance of ending up with someone who can sherpa you through the sierras of sight, the mountain passes of memory, the sand-dunes of smell - reality itself.  Then, "Wonder into wonder, existence opens" (Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching) 

I have never understood why people think that to argue with someone is a bad thing, a destructive thing.  I have to argue in order to understand.  If you're doing it for the right reasons, then it hurts because your version of reality is being challenged, which is disconcerting and destabilising.  Your guideropes to reality are twanged and everything teeters for a moment.  But, if you and your co-pilot in the Mind at Large are sailing  for the right reasons (more of a Beagle than a Black Pearl) then you find something approaching a mutual truth which will have been tested, rather than a dogmatic truth that only has value because it has never been questioned.  

Sexy, you might think, love is nothing more than having a science lab partner.  

You're wrong for thinking that.  I'm disappointed in you.  

Huxley himself said:

"We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes." 

This pooling of our Minds at Large, whatever that process ends up creating, is the only thing you can do, the only monument to your life, that you can make, before it all gets blown away by time:

You can make children to keep yourself immortal (Shakespeare's first 17 sonnets speak of nothing but, as do the vast majority of ancient literature - all of Brad Pitt's dialogue in Troy is essentially, "Ma, my legend will last through the ages, won't it, Ma?" and so on), and you can spend the rest of your days attempting (in vain, yes, but all the best things are in vain in the end) to pool our experiences, or to reconcile the fractalised universes that we all inhabit:

And while you're in the pool, have a little look at all the waves, just for continuity's sake.  

Breaking News - Everything Really Is Waves

After I have spent so long ineloquently trying to express the waves, this makes it clear in a Zen-like way:
http://exoplanetology.com/chromoscope/

Breathe it in, boys.

Why It's Important To Be Interested About Everything All Of The Time

I read Jakob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man over Christmas - what do you mean you don't have it? Stop mum-mum-mumming your lips together and go and buy it directly: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ascent-Man-Jacob-Bronowski/dp/1849901155/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1299101180&sr=8-3

It basically does what it says on the dustjacket - it charts the ascent of mankind from our earliest scrabblings around in the dust for worms and dignity and such, and then carries on, through our discoveries of architecture, biology, alchemy/chemistry, the whole lot.  It is pretty easy to get through the first couple of chapters, because essentially you're going "Yeah, I can do that, I can use an opposable thumb, whatever", "S'alright, I attended a bricklaying and rudimentaries of masonry class at Dudley College when I was 10 - I could build that Roman aqueduct for you in a long weekend, no joke of a lie" and so on.  So I don't know exactly at what point - it may have been when Newton started splitting light into the spectrum and then applying that knowledge, it may have been the Industrial Revolution - but at some point I realised I was no longer able to keep up.  I was stumped, as a human.  You can put me in a room with all manner of widgets and doobobs and I will never be able to harness the power of steam for you.  I will certainly never be able to fly you to the moon or understand what goes on in a microbe, or any other science after SATs, essentially.  

The problem is, we all decide what we are and aren't good at at a very early age.  We choose history over geography at GCSE and we never look back, safe in the knowledge that pretty much everything taught at schools is (a) useless, (b) mindshrinkingly dull and (c) nothing to do with our imminent grinding futures as overfed computer bison, snorfling our way to a new tax bracket.  What we forget, however, is that we should not be learning because it looks good on our CV, or makes our UCAS forms stand out, or even because we need desperately to seem intellectual in bars that are too quiet, or when accidentally talking to someone else's parents.  

We should be learning because it is Our Duty as human beings.  

We have nothing more in our lives than what is going on in our heads.  In my case, I guess I have that Maurice Sendak-type forest that I described to you earlier - but that's all I have.  Literally the only thing we can do with our tiny discarded foreskins of lives is to pack it full of as much of the world as possible.  I have realised recently that so much of it less is boring than I had assumed.  It is humbling to admit all that we don't know, rather than keep peddling the glib shininess of the fourteen things we know for sure.  As I have been warbling about in this blog these last few times, it is only when you start having a right good viddy at everything around you that you become aware of the interconnectedness of things.  And THEN, when you've wrenched yourself out of the car-seat of your comfort zone and moved all the way up to sitting with daddy, you can make glorious cross-references like this guy, photographer Nick Knight:

this is his website: http://www.nickknight.com/main.html

This is a guy who is primarily a fashion photographer - he also does awesome music videos - but has used his newfound knowledge of natural history to inform his work, and it is so much richer for it.

This is also a man who is fond of explosions and painting with colour, just like The Firework Men:

Another Man
Paint Explosions, Purple on Blue, Autumn
Winter 2005

How do I put it?  Do you want the landscape of your brain to look like an outlet of B&Q, with shelf after shelf of vacuum-packed, untested tools of ideas that you sealed up in there for safekeeping but never (because we all know it is humanly impossible to break inside vacuum packing - probably because vacuums are full of dark matter, which keeps the toothbrush heads locked away in there) ever opened; OR do you want your brain to look like Willy Wonka's Chocolate Garden (before all the drowning)?

Painting With Light, or Making A Lot Of Noise In Confined Spaces

Amongt other incredibly cultural outings I have made this weekend (go see Mary Kelly at Whitworth Gallery if you want some anally retentive art to move you in ways that you hadn't expected http://www.creativetourist.com/city-guide/womans-work-mary-kelly-at-the-whitworth;  or to see Grayson Perry at Manchester Art Gallery if you want to see five bits of work, admittedly good, but still squished into a corner like the filthy cock-laden crockery it is http://www.manchestergalleries.org/whats-on/exhibitions/index.php?itemID=79), I will show you the work of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson (http://www.croweandrawlinson.net/) who made this rather glorious and threatening symphony of lahvly bleeding fireworks.  I could tell it was art because i wasn't so compelled to go "ooooh" and "aaaah" when stuff exploded:

After a while, all the throbbing and wheeling and screeching subsided, and the ephemeral clouds of colour seemed all that there was.  They reminded me of all those beautiful images taken by Hubble and Spitzer of the "star nurseries" - the enormous nebulae which sprawl across the canvas of deep space and which are nothing more than dust.  This dust makes everything that it is possible to make, in a roundabout way.  (To perve at some stars have a gander at this: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html, although skip through the duller than astronauts pictures of dull astronauts and their machines and faces.)

So perhaps it is fitting, since my current tip seems to be about finding parallels betwen the perceived world and the world as it actually is, that I should come across such a beautifully succinct representation of all the explosions that we will never see, but explosions that echo within us, like ancient tinnitus, of our births and ultimate deaths. 

I am about to start reading some Jungian psychoanalysis (snarf snarf) about the collective unconsciousness - I have only sniffed the pages and pawed at the colour plates as of yet, but the idea is that we all retain memory, on some inner, inpenetrable level, of the wholeness of the human community - hence why there are such similar stories throughout history.  It would be nice to think that we all love fireworks because of some collective memory of creation, but I fear it is beacuse we monkeys like to clap our paws and squawk at brightly coloures explosions and loud noises.  That's why we all love war and X Factor, I guess.