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I am the universe

11-Feb-07

I am the universe.

The universe is not something which is outside of me. Not only is there no difference between me and my surroundings, they are not two separable things.

It is not even straightforward to exactly define what is and isn’t me at any particular point in time. My survival is entirely dependent on a host of bacteria, plants, animals. The Sun powers the local system, the Moon’s gravity stabilises the seasons, Jupiter protects me from the encroachment of comets. My existence is intimately connected over billions of years with the conditions at the very earliest point this side of the big bang.

The universe makes music for my ears, paint for my eyes and communication for my soul.

You are the universe.

I am so large, and expanding so fast, that light from some areas of me can no longer reach other parts. I have been so large for so long that I can see myself throughout my history. I can remember what I did earlier and plan what I will do next. I am in a phase of creation; I can fill a planet with sand, and name each grain a star.

I can contemplate my own existence.

I am awash with uncertainty. I can generalise and abstract. I am beautiful and terrible on every scale. I can forget who I am, and sometimes think I am something different.

I try to tell other people about this. I think they think I’m crazy. I used to tell people I am god, but then I knew they thought I was crazy. You are the universe, you are me also. It is not an abstract philosophical point. I am not talking metaphorically or metaphysically, or about some vague feeling. I am talking about direct observable fact.

We are stardust. Every part of us is the embers of a singular explosion of space, time, matter and energy. Your existence is a flicker, I am a collision of particles, a brief cohesion of a fluid reality.

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Small Dogs

11-Feb-07

I’m walking back to my house from the shop, carrying some food. Something grabs the bottom of my left trouser leg. I turn quickly, but there is nothing there, move my bags out of the way. A tiny dog, maybe a 20th of my size at the most, attacking my ankle. Grrr, get out of it you fucker. I think its disadvantage may have occured to it too about then. It didn’t try and bite me again.

Even so, it carried on yapping. I thought about kicking it, very nearly did. But I know that kids live in that house; and I didn’t want to explain to them why I killed their dog. So I just motioned like I was going to kick it. It bought the dummy completely (brave, but obviously stupid), and ran back through the gate. For some reason the gate was held open with a brick. The thing carried on yapping even after I had closed it back into its garden.

Nasty little bugger said the passer by.

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Hollow Religion

05-Feb-07

It is easy to ignore religion. When you live in Britain, religion is often a quaint and backward set of clearly incorrect beliefs; or a scary thing belonging to other people.

I’m not a student of theology, but some things are clear to me. I’m only really considering the idea of revealed religion. Religion which takes an arbitary premiss, or set of assumptions and states them to be absolutely and unrefutably true, irregardless of observation or reasoned analysis.

I’m a little annoyed about the way that religion has been imposed on me throughout my life; it has been a harmful process. Luckily, for as long as I can remember, I have know christianity to be false in all of its main precepts. Even so, I have had to endure hymns and prayers, havest festivals and assemblies run by the local vicar.

This association of metaphysics with an institution and set of beliefs so ridiculous it is hard even to form a coherent critisim of them (Noah’s Arc?), has severely set back my ability to understand life physically and philosophically. In the last few hundred years humanity has established an understanding of the universe and the mathamatical, physical and philosophical systems that constitute the human condition which is both startling and, I would argue, profoundly beautiful. This view is obscured.

The destructive force of revealed religion is not only the amorality of making decisions based on your perception, or theological disscussion, of the consequences to you in a future life. In religion, are you asked to risk hell to do the right thing? Or does the right thing always reward you with eternal life? Or in some traditions, both the right thing and the consequences are in the arbitary realm of the grace of god. Its destructive nature is primarily the way it damages our ability to communicate about life and existence. We are forced to separate our observation from our disscusion of religious and spritual ideas.

Instead of looking around us, and being able to talk about our lives in the context we find ourselves: fragments of dust in a majestic cosmic symphony. We are reduced to arguing over the existence of “god”, about reincarnation, and supernatural power. We are asked to consider if certain animals are dirty, or sacred. To consider certain actions, things, writings or people as perfect, or complete, and others not.

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Jigger Pick

05-Feb-07

On my way to work I walk past a primary school. Most days there is a group of women, often the same ones, standing talking outside the gate. Sometimes, one or two lollypop ladies are there too. On Tuesday last week, when I walked past, they where standing around the gate as usual, with a lollypop lady and, unusually, a postman. The presence of the postman is not what made this day memorable though. The gate was open, and I had to walk in the 2 feet or so of pavement between it and the chatting group. Standing in the gateway was a man, using a Jigger Pick to break up the playground.

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Superbowl

05-Feb-07

Silence in a stadium of 1000s. A musically poor and lyrically devisive song. Billy Joel. Misty eyed player, children standing to attention, other hands on hearts. Cut to Iraq, soldiers in desert cam standing to attention. A cheer. A woman, a player? Signing for the deaf. Fighter pilot, on a big screen, trained to kill and overfly football games.

Advert Break.

Tonight, the first “black head coach” will win the superbowl. History indeed.

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Not Special

09-Jan-07

Interchangable celebrity, consumer choice, we gun people down in Afganistan. It takes 100 men to dig a man from under the snow. We gun people down in Afganistan.

On demand TV, and War Games, we run call centers in India. Black Gold and Asylum. Slavery is not skin deep. We dangle men from ropes in Iraq.

Advertising mini-series, and borrowing, we gun people down in China. Patriotism, education, and Euro Fighters. We destroyed Iraq. We destroyed Iraq

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Days

03-Jan-07

Some days are harder than others, they can arrive on their own, or sometimes in clumps. Sometimes the cause is obvious, but other times it’s something that hasn’t changed for a long time, or something vauge that won’t quite come into focus. At the edges durring the fight not to go in, or to get out, they can be immensely productive. But in the middle they can be paralysis, an inability to function, a raw reduction to basic need fufilment.

The overwhelming pointlessness, senselessness of reality descends in waves, rolling viscous cold waves. Disconnected, profound loneliness, the destruction of motivation. Sometimes it’s a sudden flash of emptyness, cool emotional experience, knowledge that oblivion would be easier. A spiral of memory, and anticipation. Projecting negative thoughts onto memories and relationships, and deriving imagined futures, futures with all the negative outcomes wrapped into one narative. No regrets? Othertimes it’s a protracted descent, as each spiral is replaced by another seemingly more profound and disturbing; a mind exploring its depths rending into itself pulling and probing at any weak spot.

On the other slope the pointlessness starts to make sense, it’s the joy, the continual creation, of every moment. It’s not having any ultimate goal or absolute basis for reality. It’s freedom to live now, to experience reality as it is, not as it was, or might be. It’s an expansive empathic feeling of unity, of the singularity of humanity. The fears, struggle and beauty of other people, the shared mind of friends. An apreciation of the fearsome, incredible immensity of existence and the fasinating inseperable detail of every smallest component. Not essential, simply unique, connected and singular.

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I Think I Might be a Placebo

29-Dec-06

There are spoilers for the film American Dreamz ahead. Stop reading if you don’t want to read about the ending.

I noticed a line in American Dreamz that I like a lot. It is durring a conversation between the US President (played by Dennis Quaid) and his Wife (Marcia Gay Harden). He tells her that he has stopped taking his anti-depression medication, and she replies that she stopped taking it too, because she thought it might have been a placebo. He doesn’t know what a placebo is, so she inaccurately defines it as meaning “fake”. On hearing this, he says that he thinks that he might be a placebo.

There are many things I like about this line. The line makes much more sense if we understand placebo to have its normal meaning (rather than “fake”, he clearly isn’t “fake” he is the elected president for the purposes of the film). I like that he is able to express what he means to his wife, because she knows (or believes) that he believes placebo to mean precisely fake, and that this allows her to avoid confronting the deeper second meaning of his statement (I could quote George W Bush here, but I won’t).

Later on, during the final scene, there are two places where this vision of Quaid as a placebo are realised. First, finally free from his advisor feeding him lines through an ear piece, he says that he belives the problems in the middle east can never be solved. This momentarily seems to break the spell of the Placebo, but prompts one of the other characters to say that he hopes that Quaid is wrong. Quaid says he hopes he is too, restoring enough of the illusion for Grant’s character to manage to summon enough strength out of the depression to transition to commercials.

Second, he tries to order Chris Klein’s character (with the Catch-22 style name William Williams) to remove his suicide bomb vest. The film presents it as a build up to the cheesy hollywood style ending, but instead Klein point blank, and starkly rationally, refuses. Whilst giving the order, Quaid says that he now thinks it is better to deal with reality as it is, and immediately finds that he is almost powerless to even affect, let alone improve the situation.

The other part of the film I like is the very end, where they refuse to acknowledge directly that Grant’s character is dead. Although rationally we might assume that a bomb designed for assasinating the president should have killed Grant when they where so close, we are unable to seperate the idea of him not presenting the show from the idea of him being dead. The film won’t seperate the two, and almost seems to criticise the idea that we might want to know; that we do not have any ownership of Grant’s character beyond the role he fufils in his job as a TV presenter, and his purpose in the film, nor should we expect to have any.

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Turning them over is my Favorite Bit

08-Nov-06

Death is an essential part of the process that created me. It is the mechanism which has created space for me to live in. Where my ancestors no longer are. The food I eat is more often that not dead (or soon will be), and the fuel I use often dead and fossilised wood or animal remains.

The complexity that has occured through evolutionary changes in response to enviromental change has done so through a mechanism that has as much to do with death as it does reproduction. I’m not really sure what exactly death is, but at least some of what is dead becomes alive again after I eat it.

I was in a dvd shop looking at some dvds, waiting to meet someone. There was a young child, maybe five years old, with two adults. She picked up a box, looked to one of the adults and said, “turning them over is my favorite bit”.

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Seeing Stars

25-Oct-06

I’m worried about how not being able to see the stars is affecting me. I’ve never lived anywhere that the stars were really visible. But I remember being able to see alot more of them when I was younger and further north. In London I can see hardly any, and even the ones I can see are stangely unmoving when devoid of their context.

With less than 10,000 stars visible to the naked eye even under the clearest conditions, and with more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the beaches of the whole planet*, the difference between being able to see 20 stars and 2000 stars may not seem like much, but psychologically it feels like the difference between not very many and loads.

Not being able to see the stars removes a certain perspective, maybe it removes one of the rails of reality I’m trying to cling onto. Local difficulties swell in my perception beyond their true proportions. I suppose this obsession with trivial things comes from living in such a thin layer of gas on such a small ball of molten iron. Not being able to see past my own pollution isn’t helping.

*There are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000ish stars, the universe is only 13,700,000,000 years old. See, “ESA: How many stars are there in the Universe?” and “NASA WMAP: How Old is the Universe?”

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