Your Soul Is Made of Money

I was musing over the state of my life the other night while trying to get to sleep, and I realised something quite profound.  I realised that every single regret I have, every missed opportunity and moment I wish I could have extended, is at heart down to a lack of money.  Money is the thing which enables life to happen in so many more ways than we like to admit to.  You have money and you are a successful citizen, you can pay your bills, improve your education and that of your children, you will dress well, eat well, travel well, experience much more of life than those without money.  I would very much like to be able to talk about the wealth of experience, spritual and otherwise, which is afforded outside of the magnetic pulse of cashflow, but I fear it is pretty much impossible in the society we have built for ourselves.  Even those who meditate can afford to take time out to stop working for enough time to transcend themselves. 

Is this right?  What are we to infer, for example, from new government policy  - that millionaire overseas businesspeople can enter the country and have normal visa requirements streteched to accommodate them, and, it seems, essentially act with impunity, simply because they have a shitload of cash - other than the clear notion that one's value is inextricable from one's wealth. 

Niall Ferguson (the most smouldering of Historian Bonfires) is currently on Channel 4 fronting a show called "Civilisation: The West vs The Rest", in which he expounds his at times bone-crunchingly honest views about the nature of empire, with the cold yet inexpressibly hot arrogance of a man of complete objectivity (so far as such a thing is possible).  This Sunday's episode, Work, discussed the Protestant Work Ethic as the driving force behind economic growth and modernisation - potentially over 30 million Chinese have moved away from Confucianism and Buddhism (less kerching! more I Ching) towards Protestantism since Mao died, for example, which, Ferguson argues, is one of the main reasons why Chinese ecomonic growth has been so consolidated and so fast, as it once was in Europe and America. 

Once you kill God then what do you have left?  You have man. 
Once you kill the primacy of the Pope, then what do you have left?  You have man as an individual. 

Damien Hirst's The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, a collection of 28 sculptures and paintings first presented at Hilario Galguera, Mexico in 2006.

"God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?"

—Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Section 125

When every moment of your life is no longer controlled by edicts from On High, you must introduce a system of self-regulation, which was actually already very neatly done by the twin Protestant towers of hard work and renunciation of material wealth in order to glorify God.  Whereas Europeans used the scientific and philosophical freedoms this world eventually afforded them to experience an almighty existential crisis, the Americans kept the faith but inadvertently fell either into abject greed, or else religious extremism (see last week's post), yet China (so far at least) seems to have maintained some modicum of self-control, saving and investing and building and, subsequently, terrifying the West with its shimmering potential. 

The largest Christian church in Beijing, China http://bit.ly/g9ZhIu

So the question is this: are we content to only take the death of God so far?  I have spoken before about the beauty and ubiquity of myth, story, advernture and legend until very very recently.  The vacuousness and stale, dried-up sick on a Sunday morning vibe of modern Western Europe is such that we end up going through the motions of worship, exhausted as we all are by the compunction to work, but devoid of the glory that working for a God brings.  Guess we're all our own Gods now.

Jonny Depp as Jesus at http://www.magazine13.com/if-celebrities-were-gods/

Can we come up with something which can unite and inspire us, drive us forward into a future, rather than allow ourselves to get so far and give up?  I had a conversation with a Professor of Philospophy the other day who expounded the ontological argument - look at how complex this watch is, we musty infer a maker, look at how complex the universe is, there must also be a maker - genuinely thought we had gotten over that idea at least 250 years ago - and he represented what is true about all religion which falsely purports to belong to the Waking World.  This is what we know, they say, here is what is proved.  Here is what we do not know, they say, and this is what is God.  They pay no mind to the fact that their mentality, if shared by everyone, would have meant a complete and utter lack of scientific, humanitarian, techonological and intellectual growth.  It is only by the constant reduction of God's power (i.e. finding out that which we do not yet know) that we move forwards.  As I have said before, progress in civilisation is not a one way ticket - we can Decline and Fall just like everyone else.  We have gone so far as to realise some truths which do not necessarily make us feel comforted and cherished - the lack of specialness, the loss of the Holy Parent, whatever this may be - but it seems that we are now those embarrassing teenagers who still get into bed with mommy and daddy after a bad dream.  We should be brave enough not to regress into ever more fervent religiosity, or a rejection of the merits of science, and stand on the plateau, shaking our fists into the sky and fucking daring ourselves to be scared in the face of the truth. 

If we don't work out how to do that, then we have died in the water, like so many dead sardines or birds fallen from the sky.

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.

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)?