Author: Lying Rosa

Strange Briton commiserates with Lakota over imprisoned headdress

I Don't Like Politics

An indigenous rights activist recently accused my town of hoarding a stolen Lakota headdress. Headdress. It seems strange to me that that word has two “d”s in it. Headress.

How much would we really lose by dropping the second d? (Get your mind out of whichever gutter it’s currently in. Mine went to breasts [dd], then dicks [the d], then a drug [dropping the second d]. The drug is probably psychedelic and people call it “d” for slang; maybe it’s acid?).

I guess it does sound different without the second d. Normally when I say “headdress” it has two: “head-dress”. Or does it? Depends on how fast I’m talking and how badly I’m slurring (or how many ‘d’s are near my face). And fast-talking does feel like the norm these days.

Headress. Is “ress” a word? One site tried to say it’s a feminine agent noun, but I feel like that’s just “ess”, not “ress”. Well, if it hasn’t been claimed already, I guess headdress can have it. “Ress”. It sounds a bit like headrest, but not too much.

A headdress is a bit like a headrest, except the headdress is resting on you, whereas you are resting on the headrest.

Perhaps this is a discussion for another day.

“Chief Iron Tail in long bonnet” (bonnet?! That’s a headress!)

As I was saying, misleadingly, an indigenous rights activist recently tried to call my town out for imperialist thievery. I’m putting it like this because he was very lazy with his accusation and I feel like replying in the same (or a similar) churlish way. The difference is, however, that my people and culture weren’t almost brought to extinction by psychopathic imperialist invaders. I mean the Romans and the Christians invaded Britain and slowly eradicated most of its pagan culture, so much so that we don’t even really know what the words and practices were that people used. But that was ageeess ago. And it’s not like I’m called Merlin, am a pagan and have in me the blood of Britons, witches and the nomadic peoples of old. Oh wait.

So anyway, this guy’s Instragram post was not actually about me, or about Hastings as such. If it was about Hastings I figure he might’ve had a bigger problem with Grey Owl – the Sussex boy and ex-soldier who pretended to be an Apache (by the way probably a Spanish word, not an indigenous word, but still widely adopted) for much of his life. He even represented indigenous folk to Queen Victoria. A Hastings man who used to taint his white boy skin with tea. Madness.

The post was about England refusing to give back the headress (headdress?) of Lakota chief Iron Tail.

(Okay, the wording was “continues to keep…rather than returning”. I summarised it fine, right?)

Now, I don’t know if anyone’s actually asked to have the headdress ‘back’. I’m in the investigation stages of this article, so I do not know, but there’s nothing in his post to suggest that the Lakota want it or have a place for it, either in active ceremonial use or in some kind of museum or reliquary. I mean obviously there’s the context that it’s part of their history, so they’d probably want it back, but that doesn’t mean there’s anyone looking for it or anywhere to keep it.

Iron Tail was an actor. Kinda. Some Lakota were forced to attend boarding schools by the US to try and turn them into white people, and as a result, kinda out of necessity, some of them got good at acting. Among their own people, these actors/performers were referred to as ‘Oskate Wicasa’, like “showman”. I don’t know to what extent this was a profession versus something you could do as well as other things. Some sources talk about warriors being recruited to Wild West shows while on the run from the US cavalry. Some suggest everyone in the show was a primarily a performer. They’re not mutually exclusive.

However, there is apparently some confusion in professional-looking sources about which Iron Tail they’re referring to. There was also a contemporary Iron Hail, says wikipedia, who fought at Little Big Horn, whereas Iron Tail didn’t do so much fighting. And people got befuddled because you kinda just assume that the man who got his head on a coin was a great warmaster. But you don’t have to fight to be a good chief, you know? Or to be a real bastard.

Speaking of real bastards, I’m pretty sure it was Thomas Jefferson who set out the US policy of trying to destroy all indigenous cultures in his part of the ‘New World’ and make every ‘indian’ a 2nd class American. And the land of the free never gave up trying to fulfil that goal. So, if you’re a Lakota, for example, who wants to be treated slightly less like shit by everyone around you, what do you do?

Well, you learn the Christian stuff, you go to church, maybe you do a little acting for Buffalo Bill. And then you go home, talk with your friends and family about your tribal and cultural history, make sure your kids learn it by memory, keep your language and rituals alive in private where it’s pretty safe. But publicly – you make yourself look like ‘the good Indian’ or whatever.

So Iron Tail seemed to spend a long time on the road with Buffalo Bill, and got photographed a lot wearing this headress. There’s one of him trying to start a car while wearing it. Now I’m not 100% sure but I think it’s supposed to be a war headress. It either is, or that’s what all the American commentators thought it was. And Iron Tail was not so much a warrior, more of a wise adviser type as I say. You know, looking sternly into the camera, not needing to speak in order to deliver a line. And he’s wearing this warrior headress, maybe, while cranking a car engine for Buffalo Bill. As far as I’m aware, they got along. Were buddies or whatever. But damn, you know? That feels cold.

‘Lakota Chief Cranks Car for Buffalo Bill’. Buffalo Bill, if you didn’t know, got that name by killing a fuck ton of buffalo. Buffalo, in case you didn’t know, are very significant in indigenous nomadic and plains cultures, being the animal that used to give many people a way to survive and thrive. And cars… don’t get me started on cars. Cars bring roads, demand for oil, all kinds of wild and arguably very nasty infrastructure to places that used to be dominated by nature. Roads made the US what it is today. Euuugh.

I really wanna know how Americanised Iron Tail became. You know? Was he sipping margaritas with Bill at the Savoy while his kin were left abandoned back in Salford? Yeah, the Wild West show came to England, and yeah some of their oskate wickasa contingent got left behind in Salford, including a veteran called Black Elk. They did a mini European tour of their own before making it back to the US. One guy called Surrounded by the Enemy got a lung infection and died. He was 22.

Now, Iron Tail supposedly sold the headress to a Texan not long before he himself passed, and an Englishman bought it off the Texan, and through the Englishman it ended up in Hastings Museum.

‘England’ didn’t buy it. But whatever. Let’s say England bought it off Texas, which bought it off Iron Tail while he was still alive. Iron Tail was an actor, sometimes. I guess that means… Iron Tail, Texas and England stole it off the Lakota? But it’s here now. Buck stops here, n’ all that.

I’m going to try and take a supportive angle in this article, when it’s done. I emphasise it is not done yet, and do not consider this blog post to be factual, though some of it probably is. I wanna be supportive of indigenous folk and the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation specifically – because they exist. I don’t know if I’m capable of being supportive, as a well-to-do imperialist, but, as I said earlier, my people got wiped out too so… maybe we can bond a little?

Can’t help being annoyed at this activist who posted the thing, but then again, I do get annoyed at activists. I am an activist and I don’t like myself some of the time. It’s just this feeling that he’s doing it for likes. As an “influencer”, eugh, you know? Not for… truth? Accuracy? And, sure, it gets the message out there, but when you’re willing to compromise on a few details for the sake of good coverage, what message are you sending? Well, I guess that England doesn’t want to repatriate items of cultural significance to the indigenous folk trying to preserve and develop their culture?

I don’t know yet whether that’s true, but I can believe it. It sounds like what we’ve done to plenty of people across the world. Also I have found a bunch of stuff about our ‘study’ of ‘Native American history’ in Hastings that seems kinda shit. Treating them like they’re either dumb monkeys or brutal savages who’re mysteriously well-attuned to nature. Neither of those is really an adequate story, and we don’t seem that interested in hearing from these indigenous people themselves to correct the record.

Except… a lot of that ‘study’ was from last century. It is being updated. Hastings is unusually interested in the indigenous folk of the Americas. We’re a mystical town. Pagan in our ways, almost Brythonic at times. Maybe we’re the dumb children trying to make a connection with our ancestry. Maybe no-one has to be the dumb children? Maybe children aren’t dumb? I mean heck, they certainly make a lot of noise.

And the museum is changing a lot right now, to the extent that it could maybe just start being a positive influence here, and really do something to promote indigenous culture, and maybe even advance their rights over in the US! You know, do some fundraisers or something. Do fundraisers help? Maybe King Charlie could recognise their nation status or something. Really fuck up everyone’s day.

I can imagine some of the volunteers in and around Hastings Museum putting the work in to find a good home for this headress and other artefacts, among the Lakota and any other groups we might’ve acquired them from. I can imagine these items being used to revitalise, rebuild and evolve their culture in their own terms, to keep up the fight against centuries of attempts to see it wiped off the face of the earth.

Yeah there’s anger here, sure, there’s people insulting eachother, crimes against humanity are involved. But really, what this headress matter boils down to, is one of the most deprived towns in England, and a (now) small nation that the US refused to acknowledge as existing. Why wouldn’t we get along?

Beyond reality is the terrifyingly real

Notes

So I was thinking, somewhat loftily, that Metaphysics is consistent, but debates about it, the language around it, aren’t. Metaphysics is really just a more readily accessible and somewhat clairvoyant restatement of physics – I mean it can predict some of physics’ conclusions, but without the mathematical proofs, and so without the detail required for substantial action. Nonetheless it can provide an excellent groundwork or framework of understanding.

It’s funny though. That a field basically called “beyond reality” is all about discussing what’s real. It probably should just be called physics. Maybe the ‘meta’ is about having that emotional distance from something that lets you understand it better? But even there, physics seems to be better at that, certainly these days. Maybe more in terms of distance inward, rather than distance outward, but it’s still distance of a kind. Hmm, could be about proximity rather than distance? Being emotionally immersed. Filled to the brim with spirit and intuition.

Ah right, apparently it was only called metaphysics because ‘Arry Stotle’s editor named the metaphysics books literally chronologically “after” the physics books. Or maybe “beyond”. Also suggesting that the metaphysics had different topics than the basic study of the natural world. I guess subsequent philosophers just took that and really ran with it. Heck, I wanted to believe in a weird alternate world on top of our world too. But you can have alternate worlds within physics now, within what we understand of the natural world, so the distinction seems to have pretty substantially broken down.

Just call it physics maybe. Start teaching philosophy (and religion?) alongside algebraic formulae. Might make it tolerable for the ‘non-scientists’.

Maybe one day I’ll get on to the reason why ‘regular’ physics being so completely wild is pretty terrifying (and inspiring).

Since 2019… language traps, accidental ethics and being a good doggy

Counting the Days
Dog at Rest
Gerrit Dou (Dutch, 1613–1675)
1650
Oil on panel
* Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Collection
* Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

I haven’t written on here since 2019 so, I prompted myself to get started again by editing an old draft for a post (well, just a little thought-note really) and scheduling it to go out next week, which quickly become tomorrow, and while I was writing this, tomorrow became today.

The logic being, if I know suddenly, out of the blue, I’m posting a weird little note about metaphysics (that’s what the other piece is almost about), then it’s not going to make sense. I’m going to have to write something now, tonight, today, as a prelude to overshadow it: the real ‘return to the stage’. Not because anyone’s watching but I mean… I dunno, it takes a lot of integrity and self-confidence to stand up on stage in an empty room, rant for a full ten minutes and then disappear. What if someone saw? Every minute ticking by up there makes it more likely that you’ll have a witness, right, and if you have a witness, you have an audience. And if you’re on stage and you have an audience, well then you goddamn better entertain them.

Apparently – I can’t let a sleeping dog lie. Like the empty theatre. I struggle, sometimes, to embrace the emptiness and just roll with it. For example, I hate using phrases like “let sleeping dogs lie”, uh, just let me check on a search engine… idioms! I think that’s what they’re called.

The political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about how a lot of the Nazis were boring in their evil. Well, not boring, but banal. The point being, you don’t need to be Space Hitler, you can just be an unsatisfied painter and ex-solider with PTSD, personality issues and a hardcore painkiller addiction. Evil happens in that kind of environment – a real world environment. You don’t need literal Satan or a Sith Emperor. Sometimes that grandiose image of evil even distracts from the real evil going on around you, maybe to the point where you aren’t ready for it or just don’t see it.

Eichmann is the banal Nazi I’m reminded of currently. I remember Arendt writing that – in his trial – Eichmann seemed to only speak in idioms and justified all his actions through a kind of dumb reliance on orders and supposed ‘common sense’. This wasn’t a shitty attempt at hiding mastermind villainy – which is what my mind immediately wanted it to be. Eichmann was an average man, using his boring mind to commit a bunch of heinous acts on numerous people, regardless of whether they were interesting or boring. He just liked that he’d become important, I guess. No grand agenda, as such. I imagine him as a local council official given way too much power, probably specifically because he wouldn’t think out of the box. [dammit, another idiom]

So now, when I hear myself using a string of idioms (or, it seems, just one idiom) I compulsively retch in my mind over how I’m drifting into the Eichmann zone of thought. Just keep repeating the common phrases, do what you’re told, and be exceedingly evil when you’re pretty confident you can get away with it, ‘and you’ll be fine’.

I don’t like it. Ick.

And this little aside proves, maybe, that I can’t let a sleeping dog lie, because I retched at the idiom and then I really wanted to explain myself to you rather than just trotting past it like nothing happened.

Imagine I’m doing this (or resisting doing this) in regular conversation, and not in a – possibly – conceited bit of online self-reflection. Because that’s what it’s like for me a lot of the time. My mind is cuddling or poking or panicking at sleeping dogs all the time. Maybe yours does the same thing. I don’t literally poke sleeping dogs though. I do tend to very gently pat them if I think it’s not going to disturb them too much, but probably not if they’re really far asleep. It’s not often that dogs do seem to be in a deep sleep, so I wanna let them have that moment to themselves.

I just read a snippet of a summary of the banality of evil and Eichmann stuff (I searched it up to make doubly sure I’m not going insane and had remembered enough of the details correctly) and the AI search assist that had made the summary concluded, “This idea suggests that evil can arise from thoughtlessness and conformity rather than from a monstrous nature.”

I kinda think thoughtless conformity is a monstrous nature. I mean isn’t that what predators are supposed to be doing all the time? Thoughtlessly killing to conform to their nature, because they don’t know any better? Or, is the point here that it’s not about a monstrous nature at all?

A leopard scavenges a corpse to feed itself and maybe its folks – is that a monstrous nature? Another week, the same leopard ambushes and kills a gazelle, still to feed. A dead tree rotting is home and food to hundreds of plants and creatures, but if humans cut down a forest to build a town, there won’t be any dead trees rotting for them to live in. No forest, no plants and creatures, that’s less food, less medicine, less pretty things. Suddenly the town that was built doesn’t look so homely anymore.

We’re getting into what could be a hardcore ethics chat here, but to my mind there is no monstrous nature, there’s just nature (forget whether it’s human or not, ethical inclinations or biology, I’m talking about it all) which can be a real fucker sometimes, for sure. There’s a black hole out there that can eat a sun. And, I dunno, that just feels rude. But I’d be hard pressed to say that black hole has a monstrous nature. Pretty sure it’s as much a reason why we’re here as a bunch of other stuff, including our sun – which would also be a bit of a fucker if it wasn’t for our unique atmosphere. If you wanted to get fanciful you could say it’s trying to burn us alive, but then again you could say it provides us with food, power, and we’re made out of bits and pieces of its aunts and uncles.

I guess, the fact that we can get emotionally scarred, to me, doesn’t mean that the things which scar us are intrinsically evil. It just means they feel that way a lot of the time.

Making every search engine use involve an “AI” programme that may be draining a town’s water supply, putting thousands of people out of work (maybe including me), and it still doesn’t do a better job of summarising a thing or answering my enquiry than any of the standard, somewhat less damaging listings just below it… isn’t that quite mundanely evil? I mean it seems almost machiavellian in one way – you can hardly notice the swap from ‘Wild Wild West internet’ to ‘tool of greedhead oppression internet’, just like with America itself perhaps. But DuckDuckGo are (probably) just using AI because everyone else does it. Boring, dumb, lemminging ourselves off the cliff of eternity because we forgot the option to live a life was there all along.

At some point in this piece, I’m going to explain that I’ve been working voluntarily as an editor or equivalent in local small town newspapers (two) for the last seven or eight years. I don’t have any other go-to on my “CV” to prove I can edit a body of writing. Reading this, you might think, “no wonder it’s a small town paper”. I’ve always had a tendency, okay, to link things in my mind. First I see something new, it’s strange, it’s terrifying. I see other things around it that give it a context. And if the new thing doesn’t kill me, I start to learn about it and its relations to the things around it. Suddenly I find that the strange new thing has become completely familiar and I’m flitting about it with reckless abandon, jumping from one part to the other as if it was all the same ultimately coherent whole.

And that is me writing an article. Or reading one, I think. That’s how I first found out that this might be a weird way of interacting with text – I read a poem at school when I was about 15, just as part of a normal English class, and it created a completely different world in me than it did in anyone else, apparently. Certainly my English teacher didn’t like my interpretation. I could back it up with the text, but then she threw the book at me [fuck!]. I mean, she just told me all this other stuff that wasn’t covered in class which proved that I was wrong. Or, at least, proved that I was not presenting the most usual interpretation of this text. Since I’ve unlocked internet search powers, people normally don’t get to do that anymore. I have infinite possible contexts to call upon mwahahahaha! Also I’ve relaxed a lot these days. Also people don’t really care half the time.

From an editorial perspective it’s interesting, because I’m very cautious on the first read, and then the text keeps expanding (whether I’m reading it, or writing it, actually) perhaps to infinity. I tend to cut it off – more or less arbitrarily – after a while. Sometimes it’s a good, coherent text by then. And sometimes I’m just too familiar with it to see its flaws. Where possible I leave it and sit on it for a few days, to refresh my perspective. With this right now, I stopped writing most of it at 1am this morning, and I’m editing it now at 2pm, as I’m writing this paragraph about editing.

A lot of the people (not all of them, far from it, but a lot of the people) I work with do not like the “let’s wait a bit” part of the process. Back at the last paper, I even got into the habit of skim-reading a quick proof rather than actually editing (or rather than taking the proof reading seriously), because everyone wanted it done quickly… until it went wrong, and then they wanted to have done it slower. I was listening to something recently that said the unfulfilled wishes of the past haunt the people of the future. I can probably get on board with that.

I struggle not to explain myself and overjustify everything. I also struggle, when I know something well, to remember that I need to explain it at all. I sometimes struggle in either or both of these ways to the point it causes chaos and (emotional) destruction around me. Usually that only happens when I’ve stopped being aware that I’m doing it, but not always. And believe me, it is horrifying to realise that you’re the dickhead but then carry on anyway. Almost scarring, really, because after that moment where it seemed so essential to keep being a shit, you have a bunch of emotional baggage to carry for… who knows how long. I still remember winning an argument by knowingly lying when I was 11 or 12. It still scares me, because it wasn’t an important argument – I just wanted to be right, even though I knew I was wrong.

The pain of understanding that what you’re doing to reach something has actually pushed you so far away from it, you won’t be getting it back.

From time to time I think of these interruptions, these justifications and observations as me narrating or fourth-wall-breaking my own life. Or maybe I just also narrate some things to myself or have this part of my self that sits on my shoulder looking at what I’m doing. I haven’t completely worked out what role this narration or segment of self plays in my overall being. Am I practising for something, like talking to people or explaining myself? Am I reviewing things that have happened, but now in more detail or with a different lens? Probably some yes to each of those. And am I scared that I’m the only other person who can really see and understand me… well, that sounds like something that might be the case.

I’m missing out a lot of background here, and I don’t know if I want to keep digging this hole. I’m on the “hate myself” side of the arrogance spectrum, and in life I have a tendency to put others first to the point where I’m utterly devoid of all vitality and lash out mindlessly at my surroundings to try and recapture some rumour of whatever essence I seem to have given away. You can’t go it alone, either as a ruler or as a slave. Both extremes are unhappy in their extremity, lack of balance, and probably their lack of community.

The buddhists are probably onto something, with all that balance stuff. And I’m fairly sure it’s not just the buddhists either. I mean, I’m an anarchist hedge wizard of sorts, and I seem to be onto something myself. Or possibly just on something. But the other anarchists and pagans seem to get it, and they don’t all draw it from buddhist texts passed around in the 60s; the ideas of balance, peace and community have somehow survived many attempts at their destruction in ‘Western’ thought. We don’t like to admit it, but we are capable of not being ignorant, intolerant, greedy pig-fuckers. Someone should pat themselves on the back. Maybe you.


Some News and Stewart Lee

Communication as Magic

Hey, so I’ve not posted in a while. (How many times have you heard that before?) So, here’s an update. I’ve got a couple essays I’m scared to put out, but if all goes well they should be coming in the next couple days. I know how you love my rants about the state of modern democracy and philosophical semantics, so you’ll enjoy that. Anyway…

I’ve been working for my local paper on a voluntary basis, editing their “Community” section. It’s good, it’s a way of reporting on the exact parts of a locale that I want to nurture and encourage as the first (and arguably only step) in the democratic revolution. Non-violent and legal revolution that is.

I can’t complain pal, you know. I’ve also been catching up on a few literary greats, reading some Hemmingway, Kerouac, admiring Hunter S Thompson (perhaps unhealthily) and hunting down online poetry (etc) magazines. I might make a list of them on here if that seems helpful. I might even put up some of my old poems – I found one the other day about a pigeon that’s got a cold. Trust me, it’s gold.

Hunter Thompson though, I mean what a sad end. I mean it looks like he succumbed to media pressure to become Duke for many of his formative years, and then fell into an early retirement advising some decent actors. Or maybe not. I’m sure there’s more to the tale.

Getting distracted a lot too by Stewart Lee (picture above) don’t know if you’d have heard of him…? Some good snippets of his shows on youtube. A master of comic repetition I think, but really that’s something else, some kind of unashamed stage presence, the character he’s created of a disillusioned funny man mocking the audience and himself. There is a lot to his act, and the way that every stage of talking about him contains a kind of irony and pre-existing commentary of its own only adds to the brilliance.

I’ve wanted to do an ironic comment about irony under one of his videos, but the comments sections are so dated now that to post in them would seem vaguely embarrassing. So I’ll post it here. Would’ve gone under the Caffe Nehru video, probably, though the routine comes from his other stuff, like the Ratko Mladic and Twitter segment.

Look at that man there, that man, there, wearing his suit jacket, his little Edwardian, Teddy Boy, Mod jacket turned black by the 90s and hiding half-remembered dreams of fashion, hiding his little beer belly from all the beer and Ginsters pies, that little man, there, on that comedy stage – comedy! – little man, there, with his eyes and the hairs in his nose, and his little pin on his little mod jacket, on the lapel there, his little 2009 ‘black is the new black’ many-buttoned coat of a jacket concealing the small child he ate on his way to the theatre, look at him, there, standing up on his legs, his little legs in his skinny trousers with the distressed knees, distressed so that middle class elitist liberals can pretend they had to kneel to do work, so that they can simultaneously abuse working people in South-East Asia and write reviews of paint-covered artists in South-East London, distressed elitist liberal reviewers abusing while they review people who do vaguely work, or while they provide a dim sense of creative capacity to utterly grey businessfolk, who use a veneer of personal failure and creative inadequacy to disguise wildly excessive profit margins, Stewart Lee, that man, there, breathing his little breaths in between words, little words there, words about things, look at him talking about the things, to the people, and the little people off-camera listening to the things that he’s talking about, the people there, sitting, off-camera, listening to the things he’s saying, the words, people there, people, thinking “oooh, irony has let itself go”.

The Shame

About

I want to do an about me section (rather than just the ‘about philosophy’) because, I figure, I don’t want to seem like I’m hiding anything and then be uncovered real quick with some google searches. Also the affirmation. I want to know if I seem interesting. And I’m squirming, by the way, even if you can’t read that between the lines.

I’m not normally proud of anything I do, alright, so it’s been very surprising to some people that I’ve come up with this philosophy thing that I seem to like. That I’ve not abandoned any mention of it even as I fail to explain it. Folks have even thought I’m arrogant for not backing down on it. Like “This is so clearly bollocks, there’s only one explanation for your continuing to pursue it: you’re a cunt.” If I’m a cunt, is it supposed to be about wanting the whole world to fuck me, and that being irritating?

I’m 20-something and my name is Merlin. That’s my real name. On the WordPress I’m starting to go by Jack since people get confused by the site title. And I like the generality of “Jack”. No offence to anyone named it, it’s just Jack and John are the kind of names given to unidentified corpses in police records. I really like being a Merlin as well though. Growing up I was steeped in my Dad’s own take on pagan traditions. He was an Albion, although he named himself on that one. Pagan traditions – in this case particularly the British ones – are pretty great. The whole reincarnation thing is in part responsible for my bothering with philosophy at all. It gave me a chance to say that Heaven and Hell just ain’t good enough. Now of course, I have a somewhat modified view of reincarnation. On death the body becomes part of everything else around it – that’s science. I don’t know where the existential self goes though. Maybe it splits back into smaller parts and exits right with the body. I’ve also decided I don’t like saying “Philosophy” to people, although it is a nice word and it’s very very easy to use when you’re doing the thought dance and want to tell people about it formally.

I’m going into a place where I’ll be ‘culturally pagan‘ a bit. But I don’t like to be any one thing – that’s boring. So other labels coming out of the box…I’d say I’m a romantic whether I like it or not. I’m British even though in many ways I don’t like it, and in many of the subtle little ways I do – we’re all about subtlety. Even British itself – I realised after (deliberately) typing Britishish that there are two ‘ishs’ there. We are ‘Brit ish’. Kinda Brit, like maybe. If we wanna be.

[edit: I did a rant the other day about how fucked up Britain – and by extension any nation – is, so, take that as you will, haha]

I drink black coffee. I drink a bottle of wine or three beers and a whisky most days of the week. Sometimes a flagon of cider if I can get one. Yeah, hehe, a flagon. I love going for walks or jogs – and yeah, there’s a beach. I prefer forests for it though, and sometimes streets for people-watching. I want to say I’m a female (if that’s different to woman in your book) but I don’t know if I can. It depends on whether you think of the feminine as an abstract concept like the goddess, or if you think it’s a very physical (as well as social) quality that can be held only by biological women and certain carefully chosen hermaphrodites. I prefer getting fucked by men, but I’m open to anything really. And yes I do need to mention that – I’m youngish, it’s an important part of my regular experience, and – while we’re talking about me – that’s the subject.

As the title implies, I usually think I need to apologise for existing. Sometimes not though, and sometimes I can only keep the self-flagellation at bay by fighting it. So I get a bit pugnacious, but it’s only really directed at me, alright?

I used to and still kinda do really like clothes. Ever hear of Geovictwardianism? Well, it’s interesting. Not quite my cup of tea (more of a coffee kinda gal, as I said) but I like it and especially any piratical and gypsy derivations. Oh and Peaky Blinders is my current ‘style guru’. I don’t go around like Tommy Shelby but for me it’s the height of fashion and possibly self-expression (politely combined with self-control).

My Desert Island Disks are: “Lovers” by Alex Turner; White Stripes’ “Cannon”; Arctic Monkeys’ “You’re So Dark”; “Les Cactus” by Jacques Dutronc; Trevor Something’s “The Possession”; “Cigarette Duet” by Princess Chelsea; the Libertines’ “Gunga Din”; and Ian Dury’s “My Old Man”. I’m not sure how all those would help on a desert island, but I guess I’d be doing a lot of remembering while waiting for death. And I remember a few other things I could sing. Without a cd player, singing from memory is probably all I could do anyway. The book I think would be Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia”, and the luxury some kind of lubeless dildo (sorry). I also have no fucking idea what I’d want to be on a desert island with me haha, so this is just the result of about 30mins on-and-off contemplation. A kind of blurb – not particularly well thought-through but still revealing.

I’d probably rather not have a favourite poet and say instead that I’ve consistently enjoyed reading Vagabond City Lit. I’m spending a lot of time on Charles Bukowski at the moment though.

I don’t know exactly why I’ve written this. I guess I just want to give you, stranger, a relatively honest and maybe even informative account of who I am. I guess a large part of the site is about that anyway but stories and poems sometimes just leave you wondering. Which is great, but I don’t know: I don’t want it to seem like I’m some anonymous stranger to you. I am that, but I’m also not. I’m the same species as you, which surprisingly means quite a lot of connection on its own. And if you’re going to read what I have to say and think anything of it…I feel like it’s important you know who wrote it. I want to know, if I track you down from your like or follow and enjoy what you’ve got to say.

Erm, yeah. I don’t really know what kind of ending to put on this.

Biscuits.

The Excuse

About

I’m saying what I believe is that existence is true. That stuff exists. And that, at the end of the day, past all the beautiful colour of language, life and opinion, that’s all I believe.

My disclaimer, you see. I plan on doing and saying lots of things that certainly won’t be taken under proper consideration – that’s part of the fun, you see. In a world of headlines, there are only a few ways to grab the headlines and related iconography. And on the off-chance that I operate one of those routes to acknowledgement, I’d like a place to fall back to. A little redoubt that says at least I tried to tell you. History is thick with people admirably defended by truth and purpose – having a heart, having a kind of statement unspoken. Well, this is my statement written.

I have a very simple view of the world, and one that I’ll endeavour to explain over the next lifetime.

1. All things are of equal value, if divergent in semblance.

2. Everything is trying to exist more and/or exist better. Evolution, kidder.

3. Everything is stuff that exists.

The weird thing is that those three points are actually just the third one. All you need to know is that stuff exists, and the rest seems to follow unavoidably. It’s terrifying, brilliant, and maybe a little disgusting. That’s philosophy for you, or thinking or whatever it’s called these days. You do it proper and you’ll almost wish you hadn’t. Almost.

I have other, personal, viewpoints that seem to follow from the basic three. Maybe they can help to explain. I believe in non-violence: I believe in getting rid of compulsion in the most absolute sense of one person forcing an action on another, unwilling, person. But I also believe that all viewpoints are right and, for various reasons, of equal merit at the time of their being held. Though there are ‘better’ viewpoints that will eventually replace ‘worse’ ones, this is a process of constant change and improvement that happens on an individual level. At any one time, any idea being held will be the best that that individual can come up with: at any one time, everyone will have the best idea. Best for them, at least. And you can’t ban a thought, so don’t try.

In other words, people will keep on doing what they individually need to do whether you like that or not. No only whether you like it or not, but in a total, truthful way. People have to live their lives. Yes, that includes the ‘worst’ people. And don’t get me wrong, I personally hate murders, rapists, evil-doers of all kinds. But this isn’t entirely about what I think. It’s about the broader fabric of things. We all live in our own heads and can only understand things as we individually come to understand them. So yeah, if you don’t want to get killed by a murderer, defend yourself as you think fit. Just don’t go pretending that the murder is some inexplicable force of evil. He or she is (was if you then killed them) a human being, exactly like you in core functionality. We all exist, we all want to make the most of it, we all do our best to achieve that end. This is the sense in which we are all the same. Some people will think that robbery, rape and murder will help them get the most out of life. Those of us who disagree should try and convince them of our alternative ideas, while also (if we want to protect ourselves – we don’t have to) making sure these others don’t cause too much damage in the meantime.

Essential concept for me: we humans (almost) always operate as individual units. Even when we’re working together, it’s still a bunch of individuals as well as the group they form. The existential self does not disappear, it keeps working. It never fully stops working until death. And every moment of work forms that person. Every moment of your existence contributes to who you will be, and not everything that happens to you will be easily within your control. Not all of it will be familiar. In fact, most of it will be largely out of your control and will be unfamiliar at first. You have to learn patterns, you often have to learn to influence your life rather than try to control it outright. Life is bigger than you. Life won’t bow to your whims. But it will listen to you, and it will respond to what you do. And you will respond to it. That goes for every one of us, ‘best’ and ‘worst’.

Like what I say above, that what I do won’t always be taken under ‘proper consideration’, all I’m strictly saying is that not all of you are me. And why would you be? It’d be boring (amongst other things) if we were all that kind of similar.

An important point, right: if you believe something you should really believe it. So if you want to go non-violence for example, then you really need to be trying hard to make sure that you never need to deploy violence. Don’t just say you’re a pacifist without thinking about it. Adhere to something meaningful to you, not a hollow puppet made only to entertain the kids. At the same time though, humans are not ideal beings. We can consider ideas, but we can’t always keep to them perfectly. It’s not what we’re made for. We’re made to survive and thrive (as a species) in most environments on the Earth’s surface, and we continuously remake ourselves as time goes on. One day, we will probably become strange non-human beings of perfection or near-perfection. I mean obviously we’re going to take evolution into our own hands. However, since we’re not at that day yet, I can’t say what that will be like. I’m one of us, and so also not perfect. All I can say is that knowing some kind of truth, knowing some kind of good idea, means that you should try and follow that good idea, and teach others about it.

But this is not just about people. This is about all of existence – life isn’t just humans. All of existence is trying to do what’s best, is continuing to exist. It’s all doing what it believes is right, so to speak. We’ve only come to be in the first place through those kinds of existential forces. Things that don’t give a fig about our daily joys or tribulations, from atoms and whatever else, swapping electrons n’ all, up through your bacterias and animals. Even rocks are doing what they’ve gotta do, and the universe, the existence is dependant on all of that doing and having done exactly what it did and does. It’s mind-boggling. Let me tell you, there are times when I wish I was a future being capable of dealing with this, and there are times when I wonder if I’d be better off not knowing. But bollocks to both. I’m here right now, I know what I know, I am what I am, and it’s important.

So that’s my mission statement. My core belief is in the truth of existence. Alright. Every part of existence is there together. I can talk in religious language, scientific language, atheistic language. Whatever language you want me to talk, I can at least try and learn it and do that for you. I don’t mind language, because a truth – if true – should hold steady in any language. That’s why in ideas terms I don’t like bashing anyone for the group they belong to. The only issue is the veracity of their guiding principles, and it’s in the nature of the truth for us to want it, for us to want to be right in a complete sense. So everyone will be trying to get to truth in their guiding principles. And that’s the same as me. So there will be room for us to work together to get to that truth.

Every group is trying to get to the same thing as every other group. All they end up fighting over is misinterpreted looks and sounds. And if you get it in your head that we are all looking for the same thing, maybe it’s easier to forgive a misinterpretation, and maybe it’s easier to understand others. Maybe the fighting lessens because it doesn’t help. And then maybe this would’ve been an introduction rather than an obscure disclaimer.

Stuff exists. Deal with it.

Does anyone else get tired of labels?

Communication as Magic, Political

I’m thinking ideologies and religions and politics and genders and all that stuff, but maybe some shopping labels too. I mean we wouldn’t need traffic light nutritional guidelines if all the food was in its freshly farmed or slaughtered form, or prepared by a trustworthy authority that’s not trying to pump us full of tasty tasty fats and sizzling stimulating sugars. Bastards.

I’ve been spending some time trying to work out what femininity is, and I’ve mostly been avoiding the masculine. I know enough already, I figure. But really, all you learn in research is that both terms are unhelpful. They’re social groupings that just don’t matter. I mean, grand scheme don’t matter. Like sure walking down the street right now reading this on your phone, or maybe sat at home listening to a loved one do something in the next room, or lying in bed listening to some filthy Lou Reed…then maybe it matters a little bit. But still not really. It’s not an important part of who you are, it’s just a filter that other people will try and feed you through, if and when they can. It’s not something you have to participate in.

I do it for fun, sometimes. I make myself a science experiment, probably way too obviously. I become the shy girl or boy walking into that club, that bar, that coffee place for the first time. That lecture hall, that fashion outlet, that library. I make myself look ‘interesting’ and do ‘interesting’ things, and I wait for people to respond. Sometimes I get real chats – people who find and love the opportunity to sincerely be themselves with another individual. Sometimes I get fake come-ons, brusque and lustful slurps of kisses or coffees, raised eyebrows, scowls, or timid and tender requests for books to borrow, seats to steal.

The identities I put on are not identities, they’re labels, uniforms. And I find it really…sad, that we have to act this way, or that we choose to act this way. That we get lost in posturing.

So much of what I read about masculine and feminine identity, for example, comes down to physical features and behaviours. But it’s like trying to say someone is bald – that semi-famous philosophical problem – how many hairs does it take? Because clearly you can be called bald even if you have some hair. It’s a vaguery of quantity and presentation that seems to defy conventional logic: the point at which someone becomes bald is relative to who’s looking, or who’s wearing or not wearing the hair. But mainly who’s looking I guess. It’s not so important to the one with the hair, they just feel more or less of a breeze. They probably don’t have much need for a name for how they look. They have other words, pictures, sounds, for their experience, what they think, how they feel.

So with masculinity and femininity – it’s a vague labelling to help other people understand who you are, and how they see you. It matters to them whether you walk how they want or have the curves they want, or the muscles they need you to have, the job they want you to work. In a sense, therefore, it’s not something you need to worry about at all. It doesn’t matter to you, you just have to be yourself and, hey, why not enjoy being yourself while you’re there? So what if someone else doesn’t like it? If they’re not involved in your life in any meaningful way, it shouldn’t matter. If they are involved in your life seriously…then why aren’t they taking you seriously?

Okay, sometimes being yourself will get you into trouble with the onlookers. They can imprison you, harm you, bully you. Sometimes. Basic line of defence there is the same: fuck them. You’ve got one life being you, so don’t let anyone shit that up. Being yourself can hurt but unselving is worse. The middle ground is, I guess, hiding in the labels people like without adopting them. The safe place, maybe, mostly, is that. Understanding the labels other people use, that you probably also have to use, remembering that a label is just that. Remember the you behind that peelable sticker. Behind that loose dust jacket.

Identity is something far more personal, and so far more nebulous than label. No name can fully describe, no traits, no long videos, books, audio recordings, nothing can quite encapsulate it fully except you having yours, you being you. And heck it’s something you can’t avoid. Unselving just hurts worst, it doesn’t actually break you. You continue being you, and having been you.

Sometimes I think labels are a way of people escaping their own totality. I’ve done a lot over the years I’m unhappy about, and that stuff doesn’t go away with time. Forgetting it for a while doesn’t wash it out of history. But hey, that doesn’t determine who I have to be, what I have to do, how I have to feel. It’s stuff I have to come to terms with, and carry on in spite of. And hiding, pretending, putting it off…that’s just running away from creaks in the floorboards, rustles in hedgerows, the call of the Moon. Life is something you have to live, you know. It’s weirdly self-fulfilling like that. All it asks is that you get properly involved in being…and being you.

Now, maybe I can’t make this properly engage with the debate on “identity issues/politics” but that’s because I don’t like having to be part of that warzone. I’m peaceful, I want happy, functioning folk, not holy corpses. Most of any debate seems to have become people demanding obedience and adherence from people who demanded that from them, because people demanded that from them, because people demanded that from them…ad nauseam. It’s a minefield in which most any opinion is wrong for someone. I just wish we could get back to the reality…you don’t need to have such a strong opinion about someone else’s life. Beyond wanting them not to shit on you, they’re really not your problem. And most people don’t want to shit on you. Scat porn is relatively exclusive like that.

It’s so frustrating as politics descends into nonsensical exchanges of buzzwords that have lost all meaning, discussions of gender, sexuality, patriarchy, identity, dissolve into a mess of offended males and females fighting for their right for other people to call them male or female…and that we seem to be unable to say “rape is wrong” and have everyone understand. We seem unable to say “racism is wrong” and have everyone understand. “War is wrong. Violence is wrong.” Or worse, we know these things are wrong, but in despair we suffer or indulge them anyway, the incomprehensible spewing mess of our existence drowning so many fractured minds…

I think we’re ordering. I think bit by bit humanity is helping itself to calm down and recognise a fair and universal understanding almost beyond description, but well within grasp. And on the one hand it’s so beautiful to feel that hope, more, that knowledge. But on the other, I am human and I am impatient.

Seventeen

Counting the Days, Prose

“I poured my aching heart into a pop song
I couldn’t get the hang of poetry
That’s not a skirt girl, that’s a sawn-off shotgun
And I
Can only hope, you’ve got it aimed at me

Suck it and see, you never
Know
Sit next to me before I
Go

Jigsaw women in horror-movie
Shoes
Be cruel to me, cos I’m a fool for you”

Oh Turner.

The Arctic Monkeys did their first gig when Alex was seventeen. Just a bit of title-related trivia for you there. While I’ll admit I am basically an Alex Turner fangirl, I think the man genuinely has a brilliant lyrical talent. Matt Wilkinson seems to agree. Only I don’t think it’s some slippery quality that enables Alex to write with such profundity. Not some vague talent or muse. It’s the connectedness, the insight. Not to everyone generally, but to specific and vital parts of our lives. Friendship, love, melancholy, finding purpose or avoiding purpose. More specific: nights out, strange observations on the long walk home, infatuation, lust, surrenders, loss…humaness, haha. Al seems to be able to speak to something deep and internal, not just for me, but for thousands of fans. And if poetry is some marker of success in the realm of words, he’s definitely a poet.

But he’s a poet of the everyday, and in the truest sense: he can process the content of our lives and regurgitate their defining moments in beautiful song. And not to forget the Arctic Monkeys, Miles Kane, Josh Homme – he’s got some proper good comrades that transform his wording from masterful to angelic. However, he’s the only one who, through the writing, I know is on the other side of the table with me, offering his glass for a playfully intoned cheers.

Enough of my gushing though. Connection is the theme. Alex has kept producing work since he emerged as a musician/singer/songwriter. He hasn’t really taken a break. This is because he lives the work and the experiences he’s writing about. This is because he’s never really lost track of things in the way that many of us do. With the Arctic Monkeys’ highly successful debut “Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not”, Alex was given everything he needed to write songs and perform forever. So, highly unusually, he took that and never looked back. Never worried substantially about needing to change style just for the audience. He’s changed a lot, sure, but it’s clearly reflecting him and not just what we want from him.

I mean it’s him talking to us from the same side of the bar. One of us, not a reflection of us.

And this is the really weird core it’s generally hard for all people to grasp: that you become closer to others by being comfortable as yourself. Honesty, folks, or as close to that as we can manage. It’s honesty that’s always produced my best work. I’m just quite scared of it. Alex, I reckon, isn’t anywhere near as worried as most of us. All of the fans he has and still baring his soul in songs, retaining his playful character in person, in between songs, in interviews, in recordings. Fame fucks people up and – at least in relative terms – fame has not fucked him up. That’s a damn miracle.

And, for those who are looking, it’s a heart-felt testament to the value of honesty in an artist’s work. Because look, if you can’t connect with yourself, if you can’t engage with how you feel about what has happened and what will happen to you…how can you ever seriously talk to someone else about their lives? And isn’t that most of what we’re doing? Talking, communicating in ever more complicated forms, trying to emphasise or hide our experiences, context depending? That’s art, man.

Last time I was writing about the disembodiment of words, how they carry us away from our immediate selves and into others’ lives and experiences in a very serious and real way. The brain projector kicks up and the body slows down in people who interact with our work, not just words, but all art. The act of communicating. But it’s so much easier to listen, to look, to feel, when that experience shown by someone else is so clearly also in us. There are always points of common ground but I think it’s only in a more-or-less unashamed work that the common ground is well and truly laid beneath the artist’s feet, when you realise that they are with you and not outside of you. The disembodiment becomes less of a departure of one’s soul or spirit into another, and more or a joining of souls. Sounds grand I know, but it’s right.

If the soul is a metaphor for your deepest self, physical, mental, everything that at a moment in time is your core, then it’s only in baring that that you can get other people to focus on you as much as themselves. You know, in philosophy, there are a lot of folks doubting that we even know other people exist. That’s because philosophy is quite an academic field and spends surprisingly little time engaging with the reality it tries to describe. Instead, philosophers ‘proper’ sit in stuffy rooms, often reading smelly books about long dead Greeks and Germans. They have so much to prove – literally they’re not even comfortable admitting they exist, and if they do it’s existence in very carefully defined terms. There’s a place for that sure, but it’s not an especially human pursuit. The part of us that we have to live with our entire lives, the part of us that drives our actions, the clearly and unashamedly human part, needs to be open and without shame. Because that’s how we very loudly and yet informally tell eachother “we are here! And its fucking great!”

I mean sure, maybe in the grand scheme of things something being great is irrelevant. But we’re humans. We’re specific. We’re not Gods or Angels or Fairies or any of that shit. We’re here together, jumbled up and living whether we like it or not, and we have so much room to like it. So much potential for good ting, fine stuff, merriment and happiness.

That’s why I fucking love Alex Turner. He looks a lot like a living embodiment of that truth, an example of how we all should be in our own lives. Full, honest, devoted to the pursuit of our own shit, whatever that is. It really doesn’t have to be, and probably won’t be bad. Because once you start doing that, your thing, you realise that’s just what everyone else is trying to do and whether you like it or not, it puts you shoulder-to-shoulder with all of them. Not in some ivory tower, not driving by in a Rolls Royce or some crap, but at the next desk down or opposite at the table in some café.

Lastly and once again, writers’ block is just failing to recognise that. Nothing grand, but it can pin people for their whole lives. Fuck, it’s so simple. So complex, sure, but so simple. Even if I’ve not proved it right here, take the reins, be yourself, lead your life, you’ve got nothing to lose, pal. I mean this is something we’re likely to be fighting with our whole lives, but…balls to that. Do what you have to do. Find out who you are and be it. Then all your troubles in art and work will evaporate like water boiling pasta.

Have a B-side to set you on your way.

Picture above not mine. Review, educational, beautiful, etc. 

Sixteen

Counting the Days, Prose

We’re starting up again. I feel like Phil Winter in Alice in the Cities, lost in the detritus of meaningless travel, deliberately accidentally swamped by advertising. Bright screens, short videos, long ads, everything blurring, deleting apps and accounts only to reinstall them again days later, once again broken seemingly from lack of wine. That’s me, not Winter.

So, I need to be back. I don’t believe in writers’  block. Related to this really useful piece of advice: don’t tell yourself you need to do X important thing. Tell yourself you want to do it. Writers’ block is a castle built on a swamp, it has no clear or meaningful basis and instead a miasma stinks about it: believability. It’s “well documented” says Wikipedia. We all talk about it. Any series comedy or drama that mentions writing does a bit on it. The assumption therefore arrives that it’s a thing. I even found myself trying to capitalise it earlier. Nope. It’s a nebulous gathering of different factors that together result in little or no writing – or quality writing – being produced, or published. It’s life, really. Things happen to you that you haven’t processed. You need time to process them in whatever way.

Phil Winter (played by Rüdiger Vogler) feels disconnected from the world around him to the point at which he’s doubting meaning or existence itself. This of course makes it harder for him to write about something as broad as “the American landscape”. He processes the disconnection by being given sole care of a stranger’s nine-year old daughter for a couple weeks. Well, he is given sole care of the child and processes by deciding to care. The microcosm – so to speak – of looking after an abandoned child helps him to resolve something in the macrocosm of his own sense of existence. Or puts his worries far enough on the back burner so that, in his distraction, he starts writing again. Enough of him is engaged in helping or being with this person that he returns to the real world and stops sponging, returns from his own sea of personal doubt. He spends what little he has on someone else, earns money from nothing for someone else, finds most of his entertainment in and provides regular entertainment to someone else. And he gets to go back home to Germany where he’s more comfortable.

Look, while I’ve just talked about writer’s block really being a complex web of personal factors, there is one uniting theme. Disconnection. It’s easy to get disconnected as a writer, or any kind of artist. It’s easy to fall into the trap of living in your own mental world, because that’s almost what you’re being paid to do. Or it’s what you enjoy. Both. Even if you’re writing about reality, it’s super out-there to be watching reality. Most of us just experience the real. If you’re experiencing it and watching yourself do that at the same time – that’s weird. The whole observational act in art is strange, and so is making up a false world. It’s stepping out of our basic bodily boundaries and woah are we not entirely comfortable with that.

Words and pictures and even a lot of our sounds and smells come to represent other things, mention other things, spool tapes in your head-cinema of stuff that isn’t immediately occurring in front of or around your body. Every word, every mark, is a small disembodiment. Yeah. And how you feel about that disembodiment determines whether you get…disconnected. Either you feel like you’re connected with something else or many other things – you observe common ground. Or you feel like you’re outside of everything and so temporarily lost, floating in the spaces between metaphor and literal description, having seen things ignored by the rest of the world.

Instead of the brutalist, Stalinist, anonymous excuse of a writer’s block, let’s just say disconnection shall we? Especially if this is writers on writers. We can find so many ways of describing disconnection. Oh, you did a Flammarion? Right. Someone cut up your heart? Damn. Is that a thousand-yard stare I spy in those peepers? …You get the idea.

I’ve been out for a while and this time it’s just a story showing someone who seems familiar – that’s brought me back. Nothing too grand. I got the good feels for Phil Winter and so – having earlier felt alone in my particular form of suffering – now knowing that I have at least one notional comrade has dropped the scales from my eyes. For a while anyhow. I just couldn’t handle how Wim Wenders in the interviews and then the blurbs I’ve been reading all referred to Phil as having writers’ block. I’m like no! he even fucking says he’s disconnected and he literally starts writing again as he develops a caring relationship with Alice. Do. Not. Be. Silly. Let’s use our words, the useful words, it’s what they’re for.

Ugh. Well, the blog must go on. See you again tomorrow I guess…? Maybe let’s expand on the disembodiment of words. I like the way that sounds.

Fifteen

Counting the Days, Prose

The Flammarion Engraving. People have been aware of weird shit since before 1872, but this picture feels like a good illustration of what I’ve been feeling lately. There’s a point in any stage of society where the society’s members reach out for things they don’t understand, like space. Broadly speaking the engraving is about people theorising the existence of things beyond the sky. If we didn’t have astronauts and big-ass telescopes, that’d be quite a scary concept, no? A strange, unknowable existence beyond existence?

Well, here’s the thing: the problem doesn’t go away with the Great Humongous telescopes. We may have stretched perception even to the edges of the universe, but there’s still the barely appreciable question of what lies beyond that. Or beyond the multiverse. Or about the nature of infinity. And the idea of all the significant shit we don’t know has really been messing with my head lately. It’s not even about death yo, I’m just worried that when I die my capacity to work this out will be substantially reduced. I wanna know what’s going on. I want the next answer in the infinite chain of “Why?” questions we can ask.

Gah. I feel like the dude in the engraving. I’ve just poked my head and arm out into space and I’m taking these heaving breaths of nothing, it’s inflating my skull to pop territory and maybe I’m even burning from the fictitious fires of the Firmament.

I love what I do – philosophy that is – but really. This is the worst. The worst feeling ever, you know, when you reach a little too far and get off balance. I mean fuck. I’ll get over it but in the meantime I been dazed and confused so long it’s not true (wanted an answer, never bargained for you).

Here’s how it is:

Existence is self-justifying. In human terms anyway. It’s ironically similar to the Christian God as described by various medieval and early modern theologians, except it definitely isn’t a man, nor human, nor particularly comprehensible. Our slice of it is what’s comprehensible, the rest is clearly way out West. I mean, banditos ride through it regularly and burn down evidence of the crime. Tom Waits is there, getting money – they’re giving it away. It’s chaos, man. It’s so chaotic that all metaphors are borderline mockery, if it could be mocked.

Existence is more or less infinite. We can’t really look at infinity to check, but logically it makes sense. In the way that it made sense to various Greek scientist-philosophers that the world might be made up of small particles, the world might be round, the world might orbit the sun…that kind of thing. The way that Flammarion has someone poking their head through the Firmament. People who have no idea what they’re talking about, but 200, 3000 years later, someone exonerates their account. Kinda. Given the limits they were working under.

In short, your being aware – of anything at all – means that something is happening, something exists. If something exists, very quickly any kind of non-existence starts to seem impossible. Which, by definition, it is. Don’t forget that.

You want to quote the philosophy that says nothing exists except when you’re there to experience it? Get all Burroughsey on me? I’m going to Occam’s Razor that shit. What, the entirety of existence pops in, consistent, rational, scientific, just because you move your head? Or just because your ear develops as part of the natural course of things – which are what by the way? – and you can hear a little further so a few more noises have to exist? Sure, it’s possible. Likely however…I’m not convinced.

The point of that whole thing is quantum mechanics. Broad strokes: a thing (an electron I hear) could be anywhere until something measures it. But it doesn’t pop into existence, it exists somewhere, or exists everywhere and gets measured somewhere. Weird, but not temporary un-existence.

You’re going to have to do your own research and soul-searching on this but it’s probable that things exist, just because existence is the way of things. Linguistically for sure,  but it checks out in all that we know about human reality. We live, we die, when we die our parts are re-distributed through natural processes. No matter is created or destroyed. The big bang might have happened, and if it did all the contents were already there. Human existence…our little lifetimes, our big lifetimes: nothingness is pretty much irrelevant to us as humans. Us as matter…maybe it’s relevant. Maybe even to us as conscious entities. But in our capacity as humans it looks as though everything is in its right place. Suck it.

We are part of an expanding universe, and our interest in that is to further a stable expansion or evolution. Broad strokes. If you want to put that in God terms, we’re building the Kingdom of Heaven. Brick by brick but hey, better than nothing right? Never say I exclude y’all religious folks.

Good and bad, there are absolutely efficient decisions which tend to fall more or less along traditional moral lines. Killing is usually bad for example. It hinders the progress of evolution because we’re destroying when we can modify or redirect.

This stands up under scrutiny even if I’m not doing it justice right now. Once you get past the irritatingly subtle “the point of existence is to exist more” or “morality is just about getting better”, it really looks like it has legs. More so than most other propositions of an absolute philosophy or morality. Humans kinda are that simple.

And yet the point of the beginning of this post: it’s not enough. We might get the validation we’re looking for as humans, great. I’m terrified of not getting my “why”, the understanding, validation, value as a conscious being, or as the caretaker of billions of atoms that make up my body, if that’s what we are. The bigger, non-human question which probably extends beyond human understanding so…fuck. End of the tunnel? Where are the limits of existence or if there aren’t any then why the fuck? Infinity? Really? We start again at the end? We just exist in Aristotelian Prime Mover bliss?

I don’t know. Head sticking out here, my eyes haven’t adjusted to the dark yet, maybe I’m about to breathe in a vacuum. Goddang Flammarion has more to it than initially appears.

Let’s just take solace in the possibility that there are the equivalent to answers out there, and we just don’t have the capacity to know them…yet.