Late Conflicts.

I’m constantly being reminded that there are wars going on all over the place these days. Wars between the liberals and conservatives, the rebels and the governments, the idealists and the pragmatists, those who want a better tomorrow and those who want to preserve yesterday, and most of all those who think Hermione should have married Harry and those who think Ron was the perfect match. Reading the news and watching YouTube is becoming quite dispiriting.

One more small one and then it’s off to become unconscious. You’d think I’d relax when I’m unconscious, wouldn’t you? I don’t. I have dreams about certain women playing conflicting roles in my life and wake up wrecked.

Issues Ancient and Current.

I watched the documentary on King Ramses II as previously reported. It was made for the History Channel and I wasn’t impressed. The main problem was that they used Leonard Nimoy to do the commentary, and therein lies a problem for me.

British historical documentaries generally use accredited historians to tell historical tales, which means they have an air of authority about them even if they do occasionally talk nonsense. The problem with having a well known actor do the job means that it is tainted with a sense of the fictional because that’s what well known actors are normally associated with. Besides, I found his voice a constant irritant. I didn’t when he was playing Spock, but I did when he was trying to teach me historical fact. It didn’t sit right with me, but maybe I just dislike the Boston accent. And when another actor did the voice-over for a quotation from the great Ramses, he sounded like a character from The Flintstones.

*  *  *

I had a blood test today in connection with my leg problem. I wanted to ask the nurse doing the letting whether they might use the residue to make black pudding so it didn’t get wasted, but I never had the chance because we were too busy discussing mixed ethnicity and Seborrheic Kerotoses. Her name was Fernandez.

*  *  *

When I look into my likely future I don’t relish what I see and am reluctant to go there. Oddly, however, I don’t want to die yet. That’s the issue I’m currently wrestling with.

Searching in the Dark.

Tonight I began to sense that some of the people who have been so important to me over the past few years were merely hallucinations. My brain didn’t think so, but something deep in my consciousness felt it. Is this yet another sign of incipient insanity or a further glimpse of the true nature of reality?

Maybe it was due to the fact that I felt ill in a way that is difficult to describe. No physical symptoms, just ill. I felt like a light bulb working on reduced voltage.

It caused me to think of death again, and I wondered whether most people in developed cultures see only darkness for a time because our materially-obsessed societies don’t prepare us for the awakening.

How can I know? How can any of us really know? While preachers, sages and gurus strut their didactic stuff, all I can do is wait patiently and ramble inanely in the meantime. I was a preacher once. Not any more.

Today somebody said ‘thank you’ to me three times. I think that’s a record for one day, and wholly undeserved.

Clay Man Cometh.

I’m happy to report that I followed nearly every scene of tonight’s X Files.

No doubt it’s because it featured a Golem terrorising the bad guys, and I like Golems every bit as much as I dislike zombies. The thing is, you see, Golems and zombies have a lot in common, but there’s one major difference and it’s critical: the walk.

I’ve watched a few zombie films in my time. In fact, I do believe that the first horror film I ever saw at the cinema when I was doing the underage viewing thing (I did a lot of underage things when I was young enough to do so) was a Hammer film called… erm… something or other.

But it didn’t take me long to theorise that when the director called auditions for the crowd scenes, he did so with the express intention of picking the very worst actors so he could say: ‘Right, you’re now marching menacingly towards the prospective victims and I want you to do the silliest walk you can possibly imagine.’ And so they did, and every director of a zombie film since has followed the same ludicrous template, and generations of dumbass filmgoers have grown up thinking that silly walks are the epitome of cinematic horror (which makes me wonder whether zombies were deliberately designed to hold a mirror up to dumbass filmgoers. Clever, eh?)

But golems are different. They’re made of clay and silly walks don’t really sit well with things made of clay. They don’t have body parts either, so the studio saves money by not needing make up artists to make it look like they’re falling off. Clever, eh?

Shaun of the Dead is an exception, of course, because the whole thing is deliberately silly.

DVD Dearth.

I’m running out of DVDs to wile away the lonely hours from the time when I stop communing with bats and trees to the time when I surprise myself by making it up the stairs en route to bed in one go. That’s about six hours at the moment and climbing.

I have only 20 minutes of The IT Crowd Series 6 left and there isn’t a Series 7. I have quite a few episodes of X Files still to watch, but I have a problem with X Files. American actors, especially the male ones, tend to mumble, and they compound the problem by doing so with an American accent. All of which means that much of the time I haven’t really got a clue what’s going on, so I’m watching it mostly for the visual effects – like the disembodied head rising out of the bathtub full of blood which Mulder found in the apartment of a man who had died six years earlier, but kept turning up to murder people so he could steal and eat their cancers. (Mulder did explain the rationale for that one, but he was mumbling too much so I didn’t quite catch it. If only they would dub the show into Urdu and add English subtitles the lonely hours would be a lot easier for me. The head floated, by the way. Do heads float? Cows’ heads don’t. I saw some looking up at me from the shallow water at the edge of a loch in Scotland once. I was eating my lunch at the time.)

And then there’s the documentary about Pharaoh Ramses II, which is also quite short at 45 minutes. I have high hopes that I might find loopholes in it which will give me some blogging material, but my fear is that there will be so many that the post will grow into an essay and I’ll give up halfway through. Apart from that I only have the second series of Broadchurch on the shelf, and Mel says it isn’t as good as the first.

Talking of which, I have an embarrassing task to perform in the coffee shop tomorrow and it’s all Mel’s fault. Have you noticed that women have a nice way of asking ‘could you do me a favour?’ and men always end up replying ‘oh, all right’?

Mysteries Ancient and Modern.

I bought a DVD today, a 45 minute documentary about the legendary Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II.

I will watch it with circumspection, of course. We all know that the popular presentation of history is riddled with much that is speculative but given as fact, and I’ve watched too many historical documentaries containing obvious absurdities to simply believe what I’m being told. And some of it is even born of ignorance. Here’s an example:

At the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman Empire stretched from North Africa in the south to Hadrian’s Wall in the north.

That’s a precise quotation from a TV documentary about Queen Cleopatra, even though every schoolboy in Britain who’s been taking notice knows that Britain was never a Roman province during Julius Caesar’s life, and that Hadrian’s Wall wasn’t constructed until long after his death. See what I mean? And there’s plenty more where that came from.

But I’m sure it will keep me amused for a while during some long and lonely evening, and I’m sure I will watch it with the right balance of interest and cynicism. The frustrating thing is that I’m sure it won’t tell me what I really want to know, which is:

How do we know that his name was Ramses?

I’m fairly sure I’m right in saying that the ancient Egyptians didn’t keep records written in Latin script. They used pictograms showing things like beetles, birds and topless maidens in see-through skirts. Presumably, therefore, somebody must have taken the great Pharaoh’s name so written and converted it into a form recognisable to modern Europeans. I assume they could only do that by knowing that it was pronounced Ram’seez.

So how could they know that? Could somebody please tell me because I assume there must be an answer? The best guess I can come up with is that some literate Greek or Roman wrote it down when one of the Ptolemys was lording it over the Nile. Is that it?

And another mystery: Why does my back ache so much tonight? I can’t think of anything I’ve done today which could have caused it, and it’s bothering me much more than the Ramses question.

Indulging a Healthy Imagination.

It all began when I was in an art gallery perusing a portrait of JS Bach. I turned to the young Chinese woman with the Tiger Lily haircut who had been standing at my shoulder staring quietly but intensely into my face for the past ten minutes, and said…

(Ah, but first a picture I took of her using my imaginary iPhone which, as might imagine, was held in my left hand at the end of my outstretched arm):

 

… I said:

‘It must have taken hours every morning to style his hair like that.’

‘That’s not his hair,’ she replied earnestly. ‘It’s a wig.’

‘A wig?’

‘Yes. A powdered wig.’

‘A powdered wig? Good heavens. Whoever would have thought it? Thank you for telling me.’

She tilted her head slightly to indicate grateful humility for my kindness, as young Chinese women do in such circumstances, and then continued to look into my eyes. At no point did she smile or betray any hint of emotion; it seemed she just wanted to look at me, and did so with a level of unwavering calmness that was a little unnerving.

I felt the most urgent need to breach this shell of inscrutability and so I engaged her in conversation, during which I discovered that her name was Wei Pong, that she came from somewhere in America, and that she worked for NASA as a rocket scientist.

Questions about her name provided the most fertile ground for my enquiry, as you might imagine. I asked her, for example, whether she was one of the Pennsylvania Pongs, but she didn’t get that joke either. Eventually I grew tired of using humour – and at her expense, I’m sorry to say – to break the ice between us and invited her for coffee.

She consented, but then caused me some minor discomfort by pouring the whole of the small pot of cream into her coffee, leaving me with a cup of black stuff which needed lightening up a bit. Not wishing to cause her any embarrassment which might have shattered her immaculate inscrutability, I decided to fetch another pot. But when I looked at the counter and saw the queue extending through the door and beyond, I changed my mind. My coffee would have been cold by the time I achieved my objective, and so I decided to let the reverie fade and watch an episode of The IT Crowd instead.

So now you know how I occupy my mind when the world is dark, the curtains are drawn, company is notable by its absence, and the tea bag is brewing in my trusty mug with a picture of an Indian elephant on the side.

And this post is made in lieu of a more serious one about why my posts are more than a little self-obsessed lately. I did think of another one earlier, but try as I might I can’t remember what it was about. Later, maybe.

The Truth is Out There.

'Have you ever had a hallucination?' asks the psychiatrist.

How can you answer that? It’s in the nature of a hallucination that it appears unequivocally real, so for all you know the psychiatrist himself might be a hallucination, and what he’s saying might be words your mind has put into his unreal mouth. How can you know what’s a hallucination and what isn’t? Come to that, your whole life might be one long hallucination. There are those who claim it is.

So if the psychiatrist says 'that strange experience you had was certainly a hallucination', how can you trust him? You can’t even trust him if he says 'in my opinion you’re completely sane.' It might just be that you’re creating a phantasm in order to hear what you want to hear.

That’s why I tend towards circumspection in all things, even when it comes to the question of whether there is any such thing as a hallucination.

*  *  *

Incidentally, I didn’t find any loopholes in tonight’s episode of X Files because I hadn’t a clue what was going on. And now I’m listening to the LSO playing Nimrod (in Japan.)

Thought Progression.

I was going to make a post today on why memories are worthless. I didn’t do so because as soon as I started putting the words together I realised that it’s actually a surprisingly complex question. I realised that there are different sorts of memories; that some are useful and some aren’t, while in the case of others it all depends on how you look at it. And that led me to consider, very briefly, whether I should analyse the different types of memories and then enumerate them using bullet points. I decided against it because that’s the sort of thing which young people and academics do and I’m neither. The IQ is willing but the will is weak.

So then I progressed to the connection between guilt and regret, and that one was easy. Regret is irrational but guilt is part of the learning process. That’s that one done.

And then I remembered how relaxed and positive I was last Tuesday, and how the opposite was true on Wednesday. I wondered whether I might be bipolar after all (which somebody suggested in a blog comment once, only I still used the old term ‘manic-depressive’ and thought that ‘bipolar’ might be the post-gay term for homosexual. My reply must have made me look pretty bloody silly.)

From there I went onto the reason why I have always declined to take anti-stress medication. It’s because life is feeling; feeling is life; without feeling there is no life, and I never found zombies anything other than laughable. (The same applies to Daleks, come to that.) Perception is the whole of the life experience. Subdue it and you might as well be Madeline Usher.

And all this led me to the final question: Is Munchausen’s Syndrome contagious? If it is, you see, I could do with catching it so I could find all these bloody visits to doctors and hospitals delightfully pleasant instead of being driven by them into a pit without a pendulum.

That’s three references to Edgar Allan Poe in one week.

Another thing I realised today was that none of the adults to whom I was exposed as a child – parents, teachers, youth leaders etc, etc – ever seemed to notice that I was subtly different from the other kids.

Off to watch more X Files now. Looking for loopholes.

Seeing Through the Soapsuds.

I’m currently watching Series 4 of X Files, the boxed set of which I picked up for the knock-down price of £2.99 from a charity shop.

You know, back in the day I was an avid fan of X Files, but it’s only while watching it now that I realise just how many glaring plot holes it contained. Is that because I’m twenty or so years older and disposed to look for loopholes with the benefit of a more cynical outlook? Or is it because I’ve largely left the world behind and see the relative positions of trees better for being outside the wood?

I don’t know, but it is interesting to realise how easily a well made film or TV show can drag you along with a compelling plot so completely that you fail to spot the absurdities contained within it. I’m finding this with nearly everything I re-watch these days.

I did think of watching some episodes of The Magic Roundabout on YouTube, but maybe I won’t. Some childhood memories are better left intact.