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.

More Gibberish about Waves

On the smallest (perhaps biggest, it's hard to quantify) scale - that of Oxides and Neutrinos (not the UK garage sensation, two of the greatest unsung lynchpins of British music.  Yes you can get a rewind, boys, always) and Electrons and all those other things which we could barely bring ourselves to muster a tear for at school - waves are everything.  On this level, the Everythingness of the Universe is merely the transfer of wave after wave after wave after wave.  There is something quite glorious about this, I think.  The Universe is just a big fat Newton's cradle, I guess.  Or perhaps a domino thing:

But waves are also the carrier pigeons of change.  Look at the incredible and quite literal wave of change that is happening in the Arabic world right now.  Waves have become such an integral part of the way that we discuss change and newness that it has become somewhat of a tired cliché, but it is perhaps interesting to note that what is happening in all those amazing countries is just the same as when you create your own tidal wave in the bath - next time you have a bath make a mental note that you have become, Gilbert & George stylee, a brief living incarnation of social change.  But, like, with less genocide and camels and shit.

It will be interesting to see how far these particular waves spread out, and how much damage they do when they roll back, full of the bubbles of aftermath.  If we remember that when waves happen, the water moves relatively little, then it would be warming to think that these waves will not displace the peoples (see, I'm doing a people as water comparison now.  I didn't expect that this was where I was going with this) too much.

I will move on to talk about things I have more than a vague mimsy notion about next, I promise. 

Cherry (Bubble) Pop (or The Act of Tucking One's Skirt into One's Undergarments and then Striding Forth)

In a magnanimous gesture of outward stretching towards the world at large, I am finally and tremulously  bellyflopping into the pool of the internet.  I will be squinting at the world through my muggy peepers and trying to make some sort of coherent record of what swirls about in my mind.

If I were to suggest a landscape of what you will see in there, I would urge you to picture an Arctic forest, chock full of deer and bears and hooting shinyeye birds.  It is equally possible that you will step on a badger skull, or indeed come across a lovely dyke.  A dyke of facts.  Probably the least good kind.

Something which has blown my mind rather a lot recently is something called The Secret Life of Waves which I saw a few weeks ago on BBC4.  It talks about the incredible physics (not often I can say that phrase without a sardonic eyebrow hoist) behind what waves actually are.  In particular, it made me realise that the water doesn't actually move (that much, relatively), the wave does.  I don't know if everyone else knew that, but waves are energy which is transferred through water, like as through a piece of silk or something.  The whole universe is filled with waves of energy of different frequencies, but can be most clearly seen on water.  (Like the sun, for example.  If he had a hat on at the moment it would be some kind of St Patrick's Day, devil-may-care-who-gives-a-shit-I'm-letting-it-all-go felt jester number, is kindly beaming down extra specially damaging waves of radiation or Coronal Mass Ejections [it's only a matter of time before that gets twisted into a porn title - suggestions please.  I'm going with a topical Royal Wedding Coronation Mass Erections, but am aware that that's pretty lame] which the earth is currently bobbing about in like an O2 promotional duck.  For more info and some incredible NASA images of the sun doing a jizz, check out: http://www.tbd.com/blogs/weather/2011/02/2011-solar-flare-causes-magnetic-storms-today-video-photo--8657.html)

The most beautiful thing, I think, though, is the idea that the crashing of the waves, which I assumed is the smashing of water against the sea-floor, is actually nothing more than the cumulative cacophony of billions of tiny bubbles popping en masse.  Can you imagine such a thing?  No need, here's a nice science man to explain:

I'll just let that settle into your conscience for a bit.