Directory of Lost Causes

Amongst my current reading is Closer to the Light, by Melvin Morse, M.D.. It's an account of the author's reseach into near death experiences. From the second chapter:

... doctors don't like to research death. Although most people die in hospitals, the subject of death is almost taboo there.

I recall a conversation with a doctor in which she insisted that it was impossible to come to terms with death. "For you, maybe," I thought, and rather lamented the fact that this was the attitude of someone whose job was to preside over death. It seemed a narrow-minded and immature view, a frozen view, and didn't inspire me with confidence in the medical profession.

From the fourth chapter:

Geoffrey Gorer, an authority on death and dying, says that death has replaced sex as the forbidden topic. Today, sex education is part of the schoolchild's curriculum. Death education is ignored. Says Gorer: "One has the right to cry only if no one else can see or hear. Solitary and shameful mourning is the only recourse, like a sort of masturbation."

Early on in my reading of Closer to the Light it occurred to me that the mystery surrounding death, perhaps being the greatest mystery known to us, is what allows the mental and imaginative wiggle room for the creation of fiction. It is the ultimate guarantor of suspense. Fiction, and art generally, is a kind of questioning within the suspense of mortality. What if all the suspense were suddenly gone? And yet, on the other hand, that art and fiction can 'entertain' at all, rather than simply horrify with the fact that it is a groping in the unknown, suggests a safety net, an intuition that fiction is only fiction. Human life then, is perhaps composed of a kind of balancing act between the creative freedom of suspense and the safety net of intuition. Perhaps.

We don't know yet.

Recently, someone started messaging me and sending me e-mails, to which I responded in, I think, a neutral-to-friendly fashion. For some reason, the conversation got onto the subject of the existence of the soul. My correspondent seemed to wish me to convince him that the soul exists, since I had mentioned some ideas on the matter. I told him that I wasn't interested in persuasion and debate. Although he said he understood this, still the message didn't seem to get through, as soon enough he was repeating his demands, more forcefully, that I prove to him the existence of the soul. Since I found this rather tedious and boorish, and since it indicated to me that he had not understood anything I'd said, anyway, I wrote a rather brusque reply, which may have been an overreaction. Even if it had been, it was a necessary one as it ended what seemed like a doomed correspondence. The guy wrote back with an e-mail of abuse and told me not to bother replying. I didn't.

I've just had a quick look through that correspondence now but can't find what I was looking for. Basically, as I recall, my correspondent mentioned some research currently being conducted into NDEs in which pictures would be placed on high shelves, face up, in hospitals, to see if people who experienced clinical death really leave their bodies and are therefore able to see the pcitures on those shelves. He mentioned this research apparently without knowing the outcome, as he was eagerly anticipating the proof that near death experiences are a hallucination.

Reading Closer to the Light I have thought to myself, whatever my consciousness is, and wherever it goes, at the moment all that I'm reading about is simply contained within my consciousness. This is a book, like any other book. It is not my own experience. For me, it is hearsay. I decided to do a little online research about the author. Since I don't have much energy or patience at the moment, I didn't do that much research, but from what I can gather, and for what it's worth, Melvin Morse, M.D., seems fairly well-known. In the course of this research, however, I turned up articles on what appears to be the study mentioned by my correspondent. I also read a notice on the study by its organiser, one Dr. Parnia. Since I had heard of this study from someone very much hostile to the idea of the existence of the soul, I somehow associated it with that attitude, and was mildly surprised (though I shouldn't have been) to find the tone of the notice very different to the tone adopted by my correspondent. It's probably best if you read it yourself, as I'm bound to be guilty of 'interpretation' if I attempt a precis. In any case, Dr. Parnia does not appear unduly hostile to the idea that there might be such a thing as consciousness separate to the body.

The question for me now, is, whatever the results of the study ultimately turn out to be, whether reassuring or otherwise, from the point of view of one whose entire existence has revolved around the endless suspense and questionng of fiction, do I really want to know?

1) It is possible to regret being born. It is not possible to regret not being born.

2) Friends are just people who come to your funeral.

Never fear, Princess Leia is here to warm your cockles:



Also featuring a touching scene of domestic Wookiee life.

I watched this interview with Richey Edwards out of The Manic Street Preachers the other day:



I'm not sure what year it's from, but presumably some time before 1995 (when Richey vanished from the face of the Earth).

The first question the interviewer asks is as follows:

Your role in the band has included the writing of lyrics. All of these have had what might be called a negative or pessimistic tone. Do you think that will change in the future?

I actually can't quite make out all of Richey's words distinctly, but he says something like the following:

I think the whole first world, its suffering is very self-indulgent. There's no reason to be unhappy, but I think everybody feels melancholia quite regularly.

As far as I can make out, the interviewer's next question is:

And that falling into melancholia (before you know it), is that the way your own path in life has taken you?

From Richey's reply:

My father is really, really happy, and his standard of living when he was my age was nothing compared to mine. And yet, I sit in my house and I moan and complain, and he just doesn't understand. And, I don't know why, it's just the way our generation is, I suppose.

I've been thinking about this. Of course, my own feelings are similar (though I don't agree with everything he says in this interview). I don't really want to go into details, but, despite my standard of living being well below the British average, I am also aware that, materially speaking, I am living in relative luxury. Relative, that is, to other countries in the world, and to the foreign country that is the past. I do appreciate the luxuries I have.

What I don't have, however, is any sense that there's a reason to get out of bed other than the fact that things will ultimately end up being harder for me if I stay in bed. I really don't see any future for myself or anyone else now alive unless benevolent aliens swoop down on golden beams of light in 2012 and tell us we've graduated to the 'cosmic party' stage of consciousness.

Of course, Richey references The Smiths later on in his interview, and this is telling. I wonder what it is that many people 'don't get' about The Smiths. Some have the sense that it was all moaning about nothing. And yet, millions of people have felt extraordinarily in tune with that particular moaning about nothing. Some kind of fall had taken place in people's outlook and emotions over the space of a generation or two.



That's how it seems, at least, and if I question what that seeming depends upon, then the immediate answer is popular culture. Popular culture now is vastly more nihilistic than it was in, say... the fifties. For instance, I watched the video of Animal Collective's Peacebone the other day:



Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the feeling if this song, and this video, had come out in the fifties, they would have been extremely shocking. Watching this video just the other day, though, my reaction was a giggle or two, and a yawn. It is 'cute nihilism'. (Probaby more 'cute' than 'nihilism', actually.)

Of course, between the fifties and now there was... the sixties. I can't help wondering whether something in the sixties threw open the doors of the human id to let all the monsters out.

But that's really a wild stab in the dark, and perhaps the kind of theorising that I've heard described as 'coffee-table psychology'. Basically, I don't know.

Since the sixties, of course, we've had all kinds of backlashes (or lashings back). For instance, the writer Michel Houellebecq is well-known for excoriating the hippie ideals of his parents, and for baiting the kinds of liberals who are the cultural descendents of those ideals.

Here's one of my favourite Houellebecq rants:

I had decided at that particular time to remain in Madrid all week, and two days later I had a little argument with Esther on the subject of Ken Park, the latest film by Larry Clark, which she had been keen to go and see. I had hated Kids, and I hated Ken Park even more, the scene where this dirty little shit beats up his grandparents was particularly unbearable. That film-maker completely disgusted me, and it was no doubt this sincere disgust that made me incapable of stopping myself from talking about it, whilst I strongly suspected that Esther liked him out of habit and conformism, because it was generally cool to approve of the representation of violence in the arts, and that she liked him without any real discernment, in the same way she liked, for example, Michael Haneke, without even realising that the meaning of those sorrowful and moral films by Michael Haneke was completely different from that of those by Larry Clark. I knew that it would have been better for me to keep quiet, that abandoning my usual comic character could only bring me trouble, but I couldn't, the imp of the perverse was the stronger. We were in a bizarre, very kitsch bar, with mirrors and gold fixtures, full of paroxysmal homosexuals who buggered themselves silly in adjacent backrooms, yet which was open to everyone, with groups of young boys and girls calmly drinking Coca-Colas at neighbouring tables. I explained to her whilst rapidly downing my iced tequila that I had built the whole of my career and fortune on the commercial exploitation of bad instincts, of the West's absurd attraction to cynicism and evil, and that I therefore felt myself ideally placed to assert that among all the merchants of evil, Larry Clark was one of the most common, most vulgar, simply because he unreservedly took the side of the young against the old, because all his films were an incitement to children to treat their parents without the least humanity, the least pity, and that there was nothing new or original about this, it had been the same in all the cultural sectors for the last fifty-odd years, and this supposedly cultural tendency in fact only hid the desire for a return to a primitive state where the young got rid of the old without ceremony, with no questions asked, simply because they were too weak to defend themselves. It was, therefore, just a brutal regression, typical of modernity, to a stage preceding all civilisation, for any civilisation could judge itself on the fate it reserved for the weakest, for those who were no longer either productive or desirable, in short Larry Clark and his abject accomplice Harmony Korine were just two of the most tedious - and artistically the most miserable - examples of the Nietzschean scum who had been proliferating in the cultural field for far too long, and who could in no way be put on the same level as people like Michael Haneke, or like me, for example - who had always made sure to introduce a certain element of doubt, uncertainty and unease into my shows, even if they were (I was the first to admit it) otherwise repugnant. She listened to me with a sad expression, but with great attention, she hadn't yet touched her Fanta.

The advantage of giving a moral lecture, is that this type of argument had been under such strong censorship, and for so many years, that it provokes an incongruous effect and immediately attracts the attention of the interlocuter; the disadvantage is that the interlocuter never manages to take you completely seriously. The serious and attentive expression on Esther's face threw me for an instant, but I ordered another glass of tequila and ploughed on, whilst becoming conscious that I was getting excited artificially, that there was something false about my sincerity: apart from the patently obvious fact that Larry Clark was just a small, undistinguished merchant and that to cite him in the same sentence as Nietzsche was already in itself something derisory, I felt in my heart of hearts scarcely more concerned about these subjects than by world hunger, human rights or any rubbish of that kind. Nevertheless, I went on, with increasing acrimony, carried away by that strange mixture of nastiness and masochism, which I perhaps hoped would lead me to my destruction, after it had brought me fame and fortune. Not only did the old not have the right to fuck, I continued ferociously, but they no longer had the right to rebel against a world that nevertheless crushed them unsparingly, made them defenceless prey to the violence of juvenile delinquents before dumping them in ignoble twilight homes where they were humiliated and mistreated by decerebrated auxiliary nurses, and despite all this, rebellion was forbidden to them, rebellion too - like sexuality, like pleasure, like love - seemed reserved for the young and to have no point for other people, any cause incapable of mobilising the interest of the young was disqualified in advance, basically, old people were in all matters treated simply as waste, to be granted only a survival that was miserable, conditional and more and more narrowly limited. In my script The Social Security Deficit, which hadn't seen the light of day, and this appeared highly significant to me, I continued, almost besisde myself - I incited instead the old to rebel against the young, to use them and to show them who's boss. Why for example should male and female adolescents, voracious and sheep-like consumers, always greedy for pocket money, not be forced into prostitution, the only means by which they could modestly reimburse the immense efforts and struggles that were made for their well-being? And why, at a time when contraception had been perfected, and the risk of genetic degeneration perfectly localised, should we maintain the absurd and humiliating taboo that is incest? Those are the real questions, the authentic moral issues! I exclaimed angrily; now that was no Larry Clark.

I think one telling detail here is that the narrator admits that he's basically peddling the same kind of nihilism as Larry Clark, but is passionate about certain nuances in the nihilism that make a difference, as if nuances of nihilism is all that we have left.

I wonder if every cultural backlash we will have now will simply be a backlash from one nuance of nihilism to another.

Not that there can be many cultural backlashes left to us now, with time and resources running out as they are.

I suppose one could seek the causes of our general nihilism in the past, and could speculate about the effect that the mere existence of nuclear warheads and so on, have on the human psyche. One could berate a collective figure embodying Richey Edwards's uncomprehending father with the words from Bowie's Changes: "Don't tell them to grow up and out of it/Where's your shame? You've left us up to our necks in it." One could talk about affluenza, about deteriorating education, loss of faith, the breakdown of the family, but I wonder if, after all, our nihilism does not come from the future, and the fact that we are fast approaching its end, and that there is nothing now worth doing, and that the fact that we are, as humans, essentially and irredeemably alone, and moving towards death alone, is increasingly inescapable.

Looking back into the past again, here's another one of those backlashes within the nuances of nihilism:

If I were at all techy in inclination I would take The Hand that Rocks the Cradle by The Smiths and put it over the clip from Chaplin's The Kid below, and put the resulting combination on YouTube. The same effect can be acheived if you play both of the clips together at the same time, but turn the sound down on the Chaplin clip while watching that clip rather than the other. Alternatively, you can open two separate windows and play the clips at the same time in the different windows while watching the Chaplin clip with the sound down. The clip of The Hand that Rock the Cradle is 19 seconds longer than the Chaplin clip, so it's best to let this one play first, for up to 19 seconds. (I recommend 8 to 10 seconds.)

Please enjoy the results:

On the 20th of this month I got up and went downstairs and there were leaves across the kitchen floor, as if blown in on a gust of wind. They are still there. Autumn always comforts me.

The same day, blowing in on another wind, there came two different leaves in the form of packages for me. One of them was a volume called Japanese Love Poems, edited by Jean Bennett and illustrated by Scott Cumming. Poetry is notoriously difficult to translate, especially between two such dissimilar languages as Japanese and English, but I find the translations in this volume to be very fresh and evocative.

The poems date as far back as the third century (possibly further), which does tend to make me wonder for how long, exactly, humans have had the same emotions? Here's an undated Japanese lyric from the selection:

Two things cannot alter,
Since Time was, nor to-day:
The flowing of water;
And Love's strange, sweet way.

Reminds me of another old lyric:



Of course, these are things I know nothing about, but I am anthropologically and aesthetically interested.

It's a very beautiful book, in content and as an object, the illustrations forming a significant part of its charm.



The book was not coming to me for the first time, actually. I had sent it (after my initial purchase) to the illustrious illustrator, and he very kindly wrote an inscription and sent it back.

The second package I received that day was a Japanese purse - the purse equivalent of this:



Today I received another package in the post. It was this book:



I've read and appreciated Alan Watts before, so am looking forward to reading this. I am actually, very, very slowly, working on my own translation of the Tao Te Ching and this looks as if it will help me.

By the way, talking of the "flowing of water", here's a little extract from Alan Watts' book:

... Tao is the flowing course of nature and the universe; li is its principle of order which, following Needham, we can best translate as "organic pattern"; and water is its eloquent metaphor.

I'm finding this story, about the Hadron collider, quite fascinating. Anything that totally warps previous conceptions of reality is okay by me.

To quote:

Danish string theory pioneer Holger Bech Nielsen and the Japanese physicist Masao Ninomiya say that the yet to be discovered Higgs Boson could have the ability to turn back time to stop its cover being blown, reports New Scientist.

To quote further:

The duo had proposed to prove their theory by printing millions of cards with the words "carry on" written on them, and then slip in a couple of cards that say "shut the thing down".

They conclude that if you randomly draw out a card that reads "shut the thing down", that Higgs is attempting to influence the future, and that the world's largest machine should be shut down.

I conducted a little experiment of my own a few days ago on this blog. Now I intend to repeat it with questions relating to the collider.

First question put to the Oblique Strategies cards:

Q: Is the Higgs Boson particle, indeed, sabotaging the Hadron collider from the future?

OS: Cut a vital connection

Q: Hmmm. Interesting. Does that mean that the collider should be shut down?

OS: Disconnect from desire

Q: Hmmm. Interesting again. Is the Hadron collider, indeed, against nature?

OS: What mistakes did you make last time?

Q: Are you addressing the human race generally, or referring specifically to the Hadron collider project?

OS: [pack fell open in two places here] Decorate, decorate

Question the heroic approach

Q: This is getting a bit obscure again. I probably shouldn't use either/or questions, anyway. Let's see, what other questions are there to ask on this? Okay, I'll ask a fairly open question. What the hell, if anything, is, in fact, going on with the LHC?

OS: Be dirty

Q:???? What would happen if we found the Higgs Boson particle?

OS: Simply a matter of work

Q: So, it's not that dangerous then?

OS: Destroy:

Nothing

The most important thing

Q: Ah... this is getting a bit creepy. Let's see. What is the Higgs Boson particle, actually?

OS: Accretion

Q: Now that's pretty fucking esoteric. I'm going to have to actually do research to see if that has any relevance.

Okay, I'll ask again, in the hope of clarifying, are Holger Bech Nielsen and Masao Ninomiya right in their theory about the sabotage of the LHC from the future?

OS: [pack fell open in two places again] Simply a matter of work

Who should be doing this job?
How would they do it?

Q: Hmmm. Okay. Confusing. I feel like you haven't answered the most important question here. I'll try from a different angle. Will we ever find the Higgs Boson particle?

OS: Which elements can be grouped?

Q: Er.... Okay. I think I'll give this a rest for now. Is there anything you'd like to add before I do?

OS: Decorate, decorate

Thank you. I might do that.

Just watched Question Time on the BBC iPlayer, since I don't have a TV.



I imagine the whole thing will appear on YouTube soon, for those who can't watch the BBC iPlayer and are interested in the state of British politics.

I don't have any particular comments except that, the member of the panel who 'came off best' in my view was the only non-politician, Bonnie Greer.

Addendum: Ah, the whole thing's up on YouTube now, as predicted:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZlSAC8_cMY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCAdS6gVZjM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XgG5W7VVR0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-Nbwi4KZBA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3gDnq9E4vw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jQsTtbR1OU


Further addendum

I said I didn't have any particular comments on the programme. This is largely because I'm not very politically motivated and don't think I'm well informed enough to add anything to what other people have said. However, I've decided to jot down a few thoughts.

I think I'm interested in this issue - the media's relationship with the BNP - primarily because I am a writer (sorry to have to say that, as if I'm wearing a badge), and therefore, by my very nature, I am deeply concerned with issues of free speech. My feeling is that racism (as imputed to the BNP, for instance) is an issue that is understood by more people and to a relatively greater degree, than free speech, which, it seems to me, hardly anyone can grasp or understand. That's because the average human being is incapable of empathising with the enemy. Inevitably, this means that free speech, for the average person, of whatever political persuasion, becomes, "You have the right to say anything you want as long as I'm not offended by it." Clearly, this is not free speech at all. (I'm adding this some time later. I've actually been thinking about how the issues of free speech and racism are very closely related, and in complex ways. Perhaps, rather than racism, I should use a broader term like 'cultural friction' or 'cultural and racial prejudice' or something. People try to deny free speech to others in the power plays that take place within cultural conflicts.)

Watching the broadcast of Question Time posted above, I felt there were strong overtones of what Heidegger called 'Das Man'. People were saying what they thought they should say (especially true of the politicians, of course).

I have searched my heart and I find there no hatred for Nick Griffin. This might be surprising, considering I am quite capable of hatred for other political and public figures who probably (possibly?) are less malign in intent. But then, to compare Griffin to someone with whom he is often compared, I find in my heart no hatred for Hitler. Hitler's name has become a byword for evil - a cliche. He is no longer a human being. It is often said that in order to make us hate our enemies, the politicians and media dehumanise them. It seems to me that the very reason I cannot hate Nick Griffin and Adolf Hitler is because they have been dehumanised. (Incidentally, my impression is that Griffin is not really comparable to Hitler.)

Even if I wanted to hate them, others have already done the job too well for me, and it would be redundant of me to add any hatred.

This gives rise to the question, is it obligatory to hate Nick Griffin, and if so, why?

I would suggest that if it is obligatory to hate Nick Griffin then something very dubious is taking place - a very insidious form of censorship.

Another reason I am interested in this issue is that, particularly since having lived in Japan, I am often preoccupied by questions of identity, diversity and tolerance (for instance, can and should we tolerate intolerance?). In simplified form, I think there is a human dilemma (or question) that goes something like this: Will there always be conflict as long as there is identity? If so, what is to be valued most, identity or peace? And, if identity does not automatically equal conflict, then at what point in the interactions of different identities do conflicts occur? In short, should we all be the same, or is it okay (better?) if we are all different?

This is a dilemma that to me also relates to my interest in the difference between Western and Eastern religion, philosophy, society and so on. Chesterton outlines the elements of that difference brilliantly as follows:

A short time ago Mrs. Besant, in an interesting essay, announced that there was only one religion in the world, that all faiths were only versions or perversions of it, and that she was quite prepared to say what it was. According to Mrs. Besant this universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs. Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs. Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.

There's more, but I won't quote the whole thing here.

If Chesterton is right and it is the Western impulse to love what is different rather than to make something the same in order to love it, then mine is decidedly the Western impulse. Of course, that's a big 'if'. It might be hard to find love when one looks at the oppression and conflicts of Western history, and even if I claim the ideal of loving difference as my own, it is, so to speak, a different matter as to whether I can actually live that ideal. Nick Griffin's impulse would appear to be not to love what is different. In that sense, he is different to me (at least as in terms of ideals and expressed views). What, then, is my attitude to him to be if I wish to adhere to the principle of loving what is different? (Yes, the old question of whether we tolerate intolerance.)

I have noted the language that the media and public figures have used in relation to Nick Griffin. They seem to feel the need to attach epithets such as "squalid" and "chilling". To me, these epithets are redundant and seem designed to score points in a pharisaical manner. If you describe what appear to be Griffin's intentions and his actions to the best of your ability, there is no need for such epithets. On the programme, one audience member suggested that Griffin should go to Antarctica. In short, this is the failure of integration - it is war. The question is, is war inevitable? Again, does identity always mean conflict?