Bertrand Russell on the Romantic Movement

Thoughts expected during the coming year.

Loss of place, loss of community - memories of a time when islands were not, or seemed not, places of isolation.
These are the things that will be occupying my thoughts during the coming year.  When I can shoehorn them in among worrying about bills, getting the car fixed, damp-dusting, the 'ageing process', Death, World War Three, eating too many biscuits, did I use up the emergency UHT milk last Tuesday, bothering the doctor with my rheumy eye, will I die 'early and suddenly' (preferred option) or wither away, alone and ga-ga, in a work-house-style care home et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that is.  Death and Money, basically.  And as one gets older, Death, naturally, tends to predominate.
If you aren't readying yourself for Death, ur not doin it rite. Life, that is.  I read that somewhere.  Or at least, something along those lines.
I'm forever readying myself for Death.  I have been ever since I was in my 30s when I expected, due to illness, to be dead at 42.  However that did not occur.  42 came and went, and a fairly large number of years have followed.  I count myself lucky.  Now I think of myself as being in a waiting room, waiting my turn, sweaty palms and dicky tummy, reading magazines I never usually read and eating sweets to try to take my mind off the horror of it all.  Lots of people have gone on before, let's face it.  It can't be that bad - can it? We all must open the door alone and find out what lies behind it, alone.  Perhaps it's not that bad after all.  We just don't know what lies beyond, because nobody's come back to tell us.  Fear of the unknown and all that.
Meanwhile, it's probably a good idea to set aside 'readying yourself' from time to time, and enjoy oneself as much as possible.  Otherwise one might become depressed and likely to move on from magazines and sweets to truly life-threatening things such as alcohol, drugs, fatty foods, dangerous 'sports' and so forth, in order to blot out the existential anxiety, thereby increasing it by increasing the chances of an earlier demise possibly through complications arising from morbid obesity.
Can I manage that?  Can I manage to set aside readying myself?  I'm not sure.   I am sure, and I know from experience, that reading and writing are two non-life-threatening activities which can blot it out, if the subject matter is sufficiently interesting and engaging.  Obviously that won't include (at least not when anyone's looking) articles about gluten-free baking,  Katie Perry's beach-ready-body and Cruz Beckham's singing career.  That is an excellent motivation.
On the other hand, why should one bother to avoid life-threatening things, when one is going to die anyway?  It's only putting off the inevitable and you can smoke and drink merrily knowing you will be saving the state a few quid by dying 'early and suddenly' of a heart attack or rapidly-advancing cancer.  Nobody lives forever.  The reason I don't presently tend to over-indulge TOO much is because I enjoy physical activity in a moderate kind of way, walking and nature and so forth, and I want to be able to do so for as long as possible.
On the other hand - or foot, since we've used up both hands - you never can tell.  One might not have to bother setting aside 'readying oneself'.   One might come to terms with one's mortality - biting the bullet, so to speak - as one potters along, and have a terrific time doing it.
Compliments of the season, and all that.

Germs and New-fangled Fivers

This post was inspired by the so-called new fivers, which are apparently impregnated with meat products, making them a horrible, weird, post-cash-society, both food and money-style hybrid. While waiting for the kettle to boil and leaving aside the obvious, i.e. they probably don't taste better than Spam but you might be tempted to make a sandwich from one if sufficiently intoxicated, I was contemplating the ways in which a meat-product-impregnated new-fangled fiver might be better or worse than a meat-free-but-filthy old-fangled fiver - the kind that emerges damp and falling apart and undoubtedly germ-ridden from smelly men's trousers during pub crawls or in the bookies.
The new-fangled fivers are certainly likely to be less of a health hazard. Or are they?  Perhaps there is a hidden danger lurking in your wipe-clean fiver.  Perhaps its shiny facade masks a deadly, germ-laden secret. Perhaps the Daily Express will do a terrifying feature on it.
Which germs does one really have to worry about, though, when push comes to shove?  Stuff from your backside and stuff from your nose and stuff from off of off food, and stuff that smells bad, obviously.  At least, it's obvious to me. Some may argue, of course, as they are fully entitled to do.  And some may not - and they are the clever ones because they agree with me.  I will reluctantly accept that what smells bad to one may not smell bad to another, and vice versa.  Nevertheless I hold to my point and I refuse to yield.
What else is there to worry about, in the germ realm, now we're on the subject and away from fivers?  Let me see.  Diseases, possibly, that you can catch from toilet seats and the tropics and the like.  Other than that...is there anything?  I dunno.
Some people like to tackle germs, by the way, with an 'evil spray', perhaps incorporating bleach and the like.  Does 'evil spray' kill germs though - the ones that count, at any rate?  Is it of any benefit? Does its germ-killing capacity outweigh the carcinogenic risk from its noxious toxic fumes?  Does one, in short,  get one's money's worth from the evil spray?  Because after all that is what everything boils down to in life.  Getting One's Money's Worth.  
Which is my next topic*, and brings me rather neatly in a forced kind of way, back to fivers.
*unless I get killed by germs.

Random Days Doing Nothing Don't Mean the Same Anymore

They just don't.  It's pretty much undoubtedly to do with the sense that there will be fewer of them.  When you're young, or even young-ish, days stretch ahead and boredom seems full of endless possibilities that slowly emerge like sailing ships through fog, adrift upon a mind-smothering and smothered-by-mind miasma which has been formed by doing nothing but sitting for hours in your pyjamas staring at a grey, flat stillness through the window, drinking too many cups of tea, and poking at shapes formed by biscuit crumbs at the bottom of the empty packet, and if you fail to choose one, which invariably you do because it doesn't matter, everything simply slides back into the timeless grey to emerge just the same on another dull day.
It's something to do with infinity and when you're older you know that infinity doesn't exist.  You've lost the courage to imagine it.  You can almost smell encroaching old age it's so close and you fear it.  You fear not managing.  You fear stumbling round the kitchen in a baggy acrylic cardigan and trousers that smell of urine, groping for the kettle with your arthritic fingers and barely seeing where the teabags are through your rheumy eyes and also because you've forgotten and there's nobody there to remind you except the underpaid under-trained nineteen year old care worker who pops in to change your leg bag at lunch-time - at least you hope it's going to be her and not the sixty-three year old care worker who steals from your wallet because she's angry and bitter about the dreadful state of her life and she's got no pension till she's seventy-one and her partner left her for a bloke and her daughter's an internet escort and she's lost all her money buying scratchcards and tattoos and paying off Wonga loans.  During those flat grey hours in your cold and empty house you look back on your cold and empty life and forwards to a cold and empty death.   You look up at the night sky as you struggle up the icy path to put the bin out and you don't wonder as you did when you were young, you don't see wonder, you can't, you only see that the stars are cold and distant and most of them don't even exist any more anyway. they're dead.  You're living on a planet spinning in a hopeless void and you've hardly any time left and it's all been for nothing and you don't know why.

Enjoy your day!

Steve Hillage - Hurdy Gurdy Man

Not as good as the Butthole Surfers' interpretation, for my taste.  However, always good to revisit the Canterbury school of prog.

David Lynch The Art Life - Clip 1: A Strangest Dream

11: Ladies Dancing

T.S. Eliot Reads: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Unique Sound of the Cricket

'All the happiness the earth possesses in not being broken down into matter and spirit was contained in the unique sound of the cricket.'



The Unique Sound of the Cricket: Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé, 1876.Stéphane Mallarmé died 118 years ago today. He wrote the letter below to his friend Eugène Lefébure, in May 1867, at age twenty-five, when he was working as a teacher in the provinces. It was, apparently, stressful, and Mallarmé came to feel that he’d entered “the Void”—a liberating (albeit terrifying) abyss of... Read More »

BBC Archival Footage-In Their Own Words British Authors J.R.R. Tolkien P...

Winter (1923) | BFI National Archive

When you knew where you were with the seasons.

Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we be able to buy and enjoy cheese?

Of course not!  To both!  Although wait a minute - how can I say that with such dismissive certainty?  Nobody knows if there will be an apocalypse, or indeed what form it might take should one occur.
Say, for example, there was an apocalypse booked in for next Tuesday.  Would it wipe out the entire globe, or just half of Kilmarnock (not the good half, obviously)?  We simply do not know.  Would cheese be available, in either respect?  I think it is quite likely that some foodstuffs might survive, and that cheese might very well be among them.
Especially the hard kind,  such as Parmesan.
Would we be able to buy it?  Only if money and a trading environment survived.  Money and buying might be consigned to the dustbins of history, post-apocalypse.  We might have to stoop to 'looting' it.
As for 'enjoying' it - well, stolen fruits and all that.  And it would all depend on a decent cheddar being available. And on not impairing one's enjoyment of said cheddar by worrying about skyrocketing cholesterol.
I'm bored thinking about it now, and am moving on to 'what if the whole world went underwater due to apocalyptic flooding and to escape Kevin Costner - how quickly would we develop gills?'

Are We Turning into Machines?

Surely this isn't likely.  At least, not terribly.  I mean,  I accept that as organic beings - if you take a teleological perspective - we are wending our way along a Hegelian-style continuum of evolution - that is, probably.  Perhaps.  Then again,  perhaps not.  And whereabouts we are on that continuum, should such a thing exist, or be occurring, is a matter of pure conjecture.
Where does that leave us?  Sort of where we always were I suppose.
I don't think we're that far from the 'fish crawling out of swamp' stage really.  Well, so it seems if you look at social media.
We certainly use a lot of technology - our lives revolve around it now - and technology is increasingly involved in health care and in food production, so that we even ingest technology without knowing it.  The virtual web surrounds us and numbs us like the poisonous silvery threads of an enormous, crushing, stifling spider's web.  The harder you struggle, the more you kick, the harder it is to escape.  (Is that true?  I'm not sure.  Perhaps it just feels like that.)
One of the things that worries me most is that already there are no letters, no diaries with which secrets are shared, no accounts of daily life written in the watches of the night and hidden under pillows. Will there ever be political diaries again?  A Chris Mullin, a Tony Benn?  What about Byron and his Letters?  Nowadays he'd have an Instagram account and probably a leaked sex tape.  Everything's ephemeral - close your account and it's gone,  all gone, all bar that embarrassing photo you were tagged in on Facebook that just will never go away.
Perhaps as we age we will have failing parts of us replaced so that eventually we are completely mechanical, and just require to be 'maintained' and 'serviced'.  Hips, knees, kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs. Teeth.  Faces.  They do all this already, in some form or other.  So, semi-mechanical humanoids, yes, that I can envisage.   What about brains?  Will they be next?  And what about souls?  I think we all have those, and I'm quite sure you cannot manufacture a soul.  A machine may be able to 'think', but it cannot have a soul.
No, I don't think we''re 'turning into' into machines.  I'm not convinced that we're turning into anything, we're not evolving at all.  If we're doing anything, anything at all, we're spiralling downwards, the trajectory is downwards, earthwards, drilling into the dirt and knocking ourselves senseless on rocks.  We don't understand time never mind the infinite, and our place within it.  Our view of existence is limited,  we see only a fraction, like navigating through life via that steamed-up triangular window in the Apollo 13 space capsule.
What gives me hope is the organic world.
Nature doesn't like nasty machines.

Next post - Will there be an Apocalypse, and if so, after, will we still be able to buy cheese?

To Love Somebody-Gram Parsons/Flying Burrito Brothers

Beach Boys-In My Room