I hate you all in your ugly metal coffins, rushing from here to nowhere with such noisy self-importance. Why must the pavement always end at a junction, and never the road? Why is there never a quiet time or a still place any more? Once there was freedom of the road, joy of speed, new places to go - all the ads recall those days, long gone. The roads are all full and they all go to the same cramped noisy traffic hell with not enough (and yet far too many) parking spaces.
Even the shops are now warehouses marooned in a sea of cars. And that expensive sound-system of yours only plays one song; boom, boom, boom, boom, as if the engine-noise is not loud or ugly enough on its own.
This is not freedom or democracy, it is a tyranny of manufactured desire become a nightmare. Even the sea and the sky are no-longer immune from your need for speed; the infernal racket of your desperate chasing after - what? Another place, another feeling, a futile and temporary escape from the emptiness of yourself.
I hate the complacent naturalness of it all; of course we must travel, of course we must have this freedom - What freedom? In any town it is hard to walk 100 metres without having to defer to the holy car's priority. And where, even in the country, can one escape the wretched noise; and how does one get there?
11 Jun 2006
Everyday feelings
How extrordinary! How marvelous!
It is alive; it sees, it thinks
Ten million things. And here
In this little space, for a moment it thinks,
'How extrordinary! How marvelous!
It is alive...'
And as I think and write, from beneath my seat
a small grey lizard scuttles across the path.
I cannot catch it with my words;
It is immune to my wonder,
Safe, hiding in the bushes.
It is alive; it sees, it thinks
Ten million things. And here
In this little space, for a moment it thinks,
'How extrordinary! How marvelous!
It is alive...'
And as I think and write, from beneath my seat
a small grey lizard scuttles across the path.
I cannot catch it with my words;
It is immune to my wonder,
Safe, hiding in the bushes.
2 Jun 2006
Friends of Folly
The town is a chessboard spread below me, my own little back street just visible between the large hotels. The Great Orme, where I sit is a lump of rock that juts out into the sea, with bronze-age mines above me somewhere, and here on the landward slope, a public garden, with sloping paths and benches between the trees. The town itself is built on a wide shingle bank that joins the Orme to the mainland. It’s a town with not only a sea-front, but a sea-back as well; in 50 or 100 years it will probably be under water, as it was in the bronze-age – the Orme a fire breathing dragon’s head, bursting from the sea. A grey squirrel trots down the path, giving me a casual glance. Birds and children chatter over the grumble of traffic. In the bright sun, there is a smell of dry earth and pine tree resin.
The Friends of Wisdom have been discussing what’s wrong with science – which seems to be that it has no values, or rather that it has hidden and highly suspect values, which it cannot consider and take account of. I find this somewhat confusing: science as a method, a practice, an institution, a body of knowledge, a system of technological innovation, a community of scholars, whatever it is, it does what it does, and we who do it, pay for it, enjoy its fruits, do whatever we do with it. Its values are our values. When the Chinese invented gunpowder, they had a different name and a different use for it – they made fireworks. Same powder, different values. Is there a problem with calling the making of the powder science, and the use of it something else, art or ethics or politics? Of course in the world, things cannot be separated like this, but thought and talk can only get going by making some distinct categories. I separate thought from world, fact from value, division from unity, and it is all thought making distinctions that are not separate in reality.
Seems to me that the success or progress of science exposes to us the complete lack of our development in wisdom or virtue – whatever we want to call this ‘other’ aspect of our lives – but why shoot the messenger? It might be convenient to have a scientific answer to how we should live, a science bible, but it’s a contradiction; science doesn’t do that. Science says that we are warming the earth with CO2 emissions, and the climate will change and sea levels will rise, leading to mass extinctions. It also explains what we might do to change this scenario – if we want to. It does not tell us that we either do or should ‘want to’.
I used to have a recurring dream – a nightmare I suppose. It wasn’t either images or words so it’s hard to describe. I was in a field, not a grassy field with hedges just an uncharacterised, but limited space, and there was a sense of huge constriction, an inescapable weight of the ‘sky’ about to crush me, and no way to escape it. When I was about 14, I suddenly realised that this dream was a birth memory – the wordless formless claustrophobia of uterine contractions. I never had the dream again after recognising it. Here is my psychological beginning: first memory, first trauma, first fear, the first distinction. Here is a value – I value not being crushed; I value the freedom of the un-contracting womb. Self, value, and psychological time come into existence with memory. I was un-constricted; I was constricted; I want to be un-constricted now, and I fear being constricted tomorrow.
I am so sensitive to my own pain, to my own fear and desire, that I give hardly a squirrel’s glance to the feelings of others. I cannot relate my time to geological time, the time that formed the rocks and fossils behind me, or even to the social time, a century and a half, that formed the town in front of me. How can I be concerned with the planet, when I haven’t even recovered from the trauma of birth? But I feel that trauma itself as a constriction, a limit to thought and feeling, which I want to be free of, and so I overlay this with a construction of ‘higher values’ – I want to be free of the constriction that my fear of constriction puts me under. But my higher values are merely the repetition of my primal fear – just another contraction on the road to the freedom of birth.
The Friends of Wisdom have been discussing what’s wrong with science – which seems to be that it has no values, or rather that it has hidden and highly suspect values, which it cannot consider and take account of. I find this somewhat confusing: science as a method, a practice, an institution, a body of knowledge, a system of technological innovation, a community of scholars, whatever it is, it does what it does, and we who do it, pay for it, enjoy its fruits, do whatever we do with it. Its values are our values. When the Chinese invented gunpowder, they had a different name and a different use for it – they made fireworks. Same powder, different values. Is there a problem with calling the making of the powder science, and the use of it something else, art or ethics or politics? Of course in the world, things cannot be separated like this, but thought and talk can only get going by making some distinct categories. I separate thought from world, fact from value, division from unity, and it is all thought making distinctions that are not separate in reality.
Seems to me that the success or progress of science exposes to us the complete lack of our development in wisdom or virtue – whatever we want to call this ‘other’ aspect of our lives – but why shoot the messenger? It might be convenient to have a scientific answer to how we should live, a science bible, but it’s a contradiction; science doesn’t do that. Science says that we are warming the earth with CO2 emissions, and the climate will change and sea levels will rise, leading to mass extinctions. It also explains what we might do to change this scenario – if we want to. It does not tell us that we either do or should ‘want to’.
I used to have a recurring dream – a nightmare I suppose. It wasn’t either images or words so it’s hard to describe. I was in a field, not a grassy field with hedges just an uncharacterised, but limited space, and there was a sense of huge constriction, an inescapable weight of the ‘sky’ about to crush me, and no way to escape it. When I was about 14, I suddenly realised that this dream was a birth memory – the wordless formless claustrophobia of uterine contractions. I never had the dream again after recognising it. Here is my psychological beginning: first memory, first trauma, first fear, the first distinction. Here is a value – I value not being crushed; I value the freedom of the un-contracting womb. Self, value, and psychological time come into existence with memory. I was un-constricted; I was constricted; I want to be un-constricted now, and I fear being constricted tomorrow.
I am so sensitive to my own pain, to my own fear and desire, that I give hardly a squirrel’s glance to the feelings of others. I cannot relate my time to geological time, the time that formed the rocks and fossils behind me, or even to the social time, a century and a half, that formed the town in front of me. How can I be concerned with the planet, when I haven’t even recovered from the trauma of birth? But I feel that trauma itself as a constriction, a limit to thought and feeling, which I want to be free of, and so I overlay this with a construction of ‘higher values’ – I want to be free of the constriction that my fear of constriction puts me under. But my higher values are merely the repetition of my primal fear – just another contraction on the road to the freedom of birth.
18 May 2006
Busy Backson
What with editing a newsletter for People in Harmony, responding to a sudden rush of poetry for my other site, and starting to get involved with a list called 'Friends of Wisdom' ( yeah I'm so pretentious I think they must mean me!), along with the usual emergencies of everyday life, I haven't been keeping up with this blog - life is just too interesting to write about at the moment. It's on my mind to say something about why we want to find that unselfish, person - as per Ebert's comment. There's something to do with avoiding change, waiting for the other to be that first, waiting for an authority to show us the way... I'll have to get backson to it when things are quieter. I should put links to the things I've just mentioned, but my brain has gone on strike. I'm putting it off 'til I meet an unselfish man (or preferably, woman), or hell freezes over, or I feel more energetic. Bit of a pointless post really - just to say I've done one.
16 Apr 2006
A Good School
Honourable daughter no 2 (14) told me last night that hugging has been banned at her school on pain of detention. I offer this as a (negative again, I'm afraid) definition of a good school in an imperfect world. 'A good school is one where an excess of hugging is a serious problem.' I have always thought that any school that has a truancy problem should be closed immeadiately, the same way that shops close if the customers don't turn up. What is it about education? From age 2 kids cannot be prevented from learning and pestering everyone with continual questions - Why this and how that - they are insatiably curious. Yet a few years in school and all that is gone; how do they manage to do it? More important, why don't they find something better to do?
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