A Little Seasonal Note.

In less than an hour it will be August. The Lughnasa festival is well underway. No merrymaking for me, though, I’m happy to say, just the hint of a notion that the fading year is taking me down with it. And just in case anybody’s interested (which I suspect nobody is because nobody has any reason to be), the barley crop clothing several leas on the west side of the Shire has not been harvested yet. Too much rain recently.

And do you know what’s a shame? Every time I look at the ripe ears of barley, wheat or oats, I expect to see a fat little dormouse taking advantage of the bounty. In all my years of living in the countryside, I never have.

Two Little Notes.

It’s odd how you can live for so many years and then suddenly realise something you never thought of before. Today’s sudden realisation was the fact that a life spent as a good stand-up comedian is a life well spent. Not, heaven forbid, because of the wealth or the fame or the ego boost, but for the fact that a good stand-up comedian gives countless people the gift of laughter. It seems to me that the gift of laughter is one of the greatest of gifts, and so a life so spent is a worthy one.

*  *  *

The Shire today was, for the most part, unremittingly wet and gloomy for hour after miserable hour, and the cold, dripping twilight was smothered by a confused and quarrelsome sky. I’ve mentioned before how significant twilights are to my perception; how they can reflect heaven or hell depending on the vicissitudes of climatic conditions. Tonight’s twilight was a Byronic twilight, the very model of a wan day going down in wet and weariness.

I know I should stop quoting Byron, but he does seem to have had a similar response to the whims of the weather and the world about him as I do. I wonder whether we have anything else in common.

Being Right (Maybe.)

I just watched a YouTube video in which an eminent physics professor is being questioned on the subject of time travel. He said that time travel is theoretically possible, but it would take an enormous amount of energy to bring it about. OK, got that. And then the questioner asked him about the well known logical conundrum: ‘What if you travel back in time and kill your own father before you were born? You would never have existed and so couldn’t have committed the act. Suddenly you’re locked into a self-denying loop.’

The professor explained that the answer lies in the likelihood that if you travel back in time and do something to change the existing timeline, you would create a parallel universe with a different timeline.

This is encouraging because that’s precisely the solution I postulated in a time travel story I wrote around twelve years ago. Seems I’m not as dumb as I thought I was. That’s nice.

Climbing Down the Existential Ladder.

I permitted myself the indulgence of having breakfast in bed this morning, and when I’d finished I began to muse on the different ethnicities which make up the bedrock of native European peoples. I wondered how ethnicity had become established in the first place, and how mixed it had become even before further migration came along to stir the soup in later millennia.

And that brought me back around a neat little curve to the question of how Europeans came to be here initially. Did they come from Africa and turn pale with the cold, or didn’t they? And that led me onto the question of how modern humans came to be here on the planet at all (you know, the theory of evolution vs the notion of divine – or could that be alien? – plantation.) I favoured evolution, but it obviously didn’t stop there because the question of how the first humanoids came into being cropped up next, closely followed by the question of how anything at all came into being.

And that was when the musing took on an existential air, because at some point I began to wonder whether any of this mattered. But what does ‘matter’ mean in that context, I thought? Is there any such thing as mattering and not mattering? Well, now we’re getting caught up in semantics of language, so let’s drop that one for the time being. But the question remained: Do some things matter more than others? Does everything matter equally? Does nothing matter at all? How the hell is anybody supposed to come up with an answer to that one, apart from assuming that priority in the matter of mattering comes down more to perception than logic, and that perception is a function of consciousness? OK, so let’s think about consciousness.

‘Am I nothing except my consciousness?’ was my next question. Is everything else about ‘me’ an irrelevant or illusory add-on? If so, would it mean that I don’t really exist in any meaningful sense. (But what does ‘meaningful’ mean? The maze is becoming more tortuous.)

Ah, but I used the word ‘exist.’ So what does ‘existence’ mean and is it real? Should I presume that because I perceive something it must exist? What about the black dog which leapt out of the bedroom wall heading in my direction a short while before I received my cancer diagnosis? I have a favourite psychological theory for that one, but I still perceived it so did it exist at some level? Is it simply a case of ‘I am possessed of self-perception, and so I must exist?' Or to put it another way, as somebody famous already did, ‘I think therefore I am.’ The notion seemed fragile; it didn’t go deep enough.

There was more, and eventually I realised that I had reached the bottom rung of the ladder of existential enquiry, and that beneath me was impenetrable darkness. I wondered whether the darkness contained oblivion or enlightenment, but there was no way of knowing because I was attached to the ladder.

I decided there was only one conclusion to be drawn from all this (and I’m only giving you half of it; I’ve forgotten the rest.) It is simply: ‘I know nothing, and neither does anybody else.’ It also occurred to me that having breakfast in bed is maybe not such a good idea. I only do it to put off the moment when I have to get up properly, get dressed and face what appears to be another dolorous day to my (albeit limited) perception.

And if there are any self-styled gurus reading this, I expect they will be shaking their heads, tutting loudly, and exclaiming inwardly: ‘This man is overthinking.’ (I’ve noticed that ‘overthinking’ is one of the current buzz words among those who believe themselves blessed with a superior understanding of what it’s all about.) ‘He should not overthink, he should meditate instead. Meditation is the opposite of thinking, and better for mental wellbeing.’ Well, there you are.

I did try meditating at one time in my life, you know. I couldn’t do it because one of two things always happened. Either I would find my consciousness taking part in some sort of unprepared activity (like flying through a subterranean cavern, or standing on a low roof about to address an assembled group of people, or sometimes I would see clear images of faces projected on the back of my closed eyelids), or I would simply fall asleep.

Oh dear, I suppose I should close this now. Sorry for the ramble; it just wanted to come out for some reason. But just to finish on a more reliable note, I might add that the wheat standing proud in the Shire’s fields is almost ripe, but I don’t know whether the barley has been harvested yet because I haven’t been around that way for a few days. And I keep on being presented with the notion that I shall never see the Lady B again. If correct, it’s perfectly fine as long as whatever roles were being played have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion. It probably isn’t correct; it’s probably just me being silly as usual.

Edited to add 8th June 2023.

I still haven't seen the Lady B since I wrote this.

The Olympics and the Meaning of Success.

I was just reading about Simone Biles leaving the arena after she performed badly in the latest discipline. She says she has to concentrate on her mental health. She says that mental health is becoming an ever bigger problem in sport. She says that sometimes she feels the weight of the world on her shoulders. And why?

Because she has to win, win, win. She has to be the most successful gymnast ever in a world where success means winning the most medals and standing on the most podiums. Meanwhile, the news headlines in Britain are crowing over the fact that the GB team has had the most successful start to an Olympics Games ever. There’s that word ‘success’ again. Success is all about being the best and proving it with bits of metal. To me it's about rather more than that, because that definition is effectively about division.

I watched part of the opening ceremony a couple of days ago and felt quite moved. The opening ceremony amounted to a statement of what the Olympics are really about. All colours, all flags, all costumes, all smiles, all there to do their level best on a level playing field no matter who stands on the podium. 

 

Diverse cultures: Equal respect. None of Trump's 'shithole countries' here.

 

Isn’t that a better definition of success?

On Predictability and Prejudice.

A few weeks ago the England football team lost the UEFA Cup final on penalties, and the three players who missed their shots were black. Predictably, they got hounded and racially abused on social media.

Equally predictably, outrage ensued. ‘This is unacceptable’ went up the cry. ‘These people must be found and punished.’ For at least a week the news pages were full of it, and the country was more or less united in its condemnation of the abusers. It’s good that the outpouring of support for the abused players was so big, but I wonder whether we’re taking the right approach in dealing with it.

It seems to me that the kind of people who engage in racial abuse are usually very small people, insecure people, inconsequential people. They rarely do it on a one-to-one, face-to-face basis; they do it either anonymously or from the safety of a crowd. And I would suggest that they do it precisely because they are small and inconsequential, and so are inclined to feel that they have no other way to make their presence felt. What other means do they have to ‘play their part’ and make a difference? And so surely, by shouting their sins from the rooftops, condemning them long and loud from the news pages, and demanding that precious resources be allocated to find and punish them, we are – to their minds – vindicating their actions and making them all the more likely to carry on doing it.

I have to say at this point that I am white and have never personally experienced racial abuse. I cannot, therefore, know precisely how a non-white person feels when they are held up to ridicule and abuse because of their colour. But I can say that I sympathise, I can say that I have hated racial prejudice all my life, and I can admit that I feel a sense of anger at the cruelty and injustice of it. And that’s why I worry that we might be making the problem worse.

So how should we approach the issue? Well, the first three thoughts which spring readily to mind are these:

1. The abusers need to be re-educated so they lose the desire to do it, but that’s a big ask. It raises the question of where do we start, and the methodology involved is both complex and imprecise.

2. We need to find ways of shutting them down in the first instance, and the tech firms claim they are trying to find those ways.

3. Failing that, it seems we need to simply ignore them so that their actions are not being vindicated and they’re not making a difference. But how do you ask a black footballer having bananas thrown at him, or being verbally insulted, or being told to go home where he belongs, to ignore it all? Life’s never easy, is it, but I do feel that our minds need to go a little further than simply seeking revenge.

Today's Grumble.

I’m going off YouTube because of its increasing habit of forcing turgid, disingenuous, childishly overcooked right wing propaganda videos down my throat by way of recommendations. So I thought I’d mention something I gather a Native American chief said to President Andrew Jackson (allegedly):

We do not inherit the land from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.

I generally dislike pretentious sound bites, but I like that one. It fits with my suspicion that in years to come, today’s children are going to be a bit miffed with us baby boomers.

And it makes a change from Messrs Google (aka the New Establishment) trying to convince me that white and might are right and rebellion is reprehensible. They won’t, of course, but I’m tired of them trying. (The same source which gave me the ‘land’ quotation also said that Andrew Jackson referred to Native Americans as ‘vermin’. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it does fit the picture of the New Establishment.)

Shifting the Workload.

I saw another daddy blackbird with his two daughters on the bird table today, loading his beak with rolled oats as fast as his poor head could bob up and down. The two girlies stood expectantly on the rim of the table, beaks open wide enough to put the planet Jupiter in peril, while poor dad did his level best to share the oats equally between them.

‘Gimme, gimme, gimme,’ said the girls.

‘How many beaks do you think I’ve got?’ grumbled the parent.

Ah, but then the old fella began the process of educating the expectant ones. He began to offer the oats, but drew back just before they reached the target. The message was simple enough to interpret.

‘See these oats? You don’t have to wait for me to pick them up; you can do it yourself. Watch me carefully, now.’

The offspring eventually got the message and dad flew off to take a well earned break. And, you know, it’s rare to see the mother bird go to all that trouble. Maybe she has more faith in her daughters’ ability to fend for themselves, or maybe she feels that she’s already done enough in the matter of bringing up babies and the old guy can do some work for a change. Isn’t it ever the woman’s way.

The Benefit of Churchyards.

I took my lunch with me on my walk this morning, and stopped off at the old mediaeval church to eat it in the only spot which provided both shade and a place to sit.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for old churchyards before. Some people find them morbid and a little repellent because they’re all about death. I don’t, and I think the majority would agree that they’re peaceful and characterful with a charm all their own. Ironically, however, it’s their very connection with death which makes them such grounding places.

If you walk around an old churchyard reading the inscriptions on the headstones, you inevitably come across family connections relating to those who have lived in the area for many generations. (In my churchyard, for example, there are Princes all over the place going back two centuries and more.) And in reading the details you can piece together little bits of information which tell you something about the person whose remains now lie just a little way beneath your feet. This woman, for example, was widowed at age 45, and lived to be 91. Another died in her teens and was obviously the younger sister of an elderly woman who still lives here. And of course, there is the lady Isabella, aged 28, who died just a week after her daughter was born.

And this is the point of it all: forget the emphasis on life everlasting – which may or may not be a fact – and see them as a sure and certain mirror to what life, living and dying are all about as we strut and shuffle our mortal coil through the experience of being physical. Through all the myriad doings and aspirings and wonderings and feelings encountered in the process, mortality stands as the one great constant which none of us can escape. That’s why churchyards are so grounding, and that’s why I find them havens of calm in a crazy, troubled world.

The Good Thing About Being a Failure.

Last night’s YouTube viewing included the infamous video of Ricky Gervais haranguing the assembled glitterati while presenting the Golden Globes ceremony. He did it in a way which was both funny and stinging, pointing out the shallowness, hypocrisy and stifling smugness which suffuses the world of movie stars, their hangers on, and their ilk in general.

The reaction of the audience – big and starry names all – was perhaps the most interesting feature. Some appeared genuinely amused, some showed by their body language that they felt obliged to look amused, while others were clearly outraged. For my part, I admire his courage and agree with him.

But it also had me thinking of my own little life down here at the bottom of the pile where stars never penetrate. I remembered – and I daresay I’ve said much of this on the blog before – that no matter how much effort and commitment I put into climbing any ladder, and no matter what skills and level of intelligence I possessed, the vicissitudes of life always found a way of kicking me off it. I’ve lived life as a losing game of snakes and ladders. Life always ensured that I could never be successful in terms defined by our beloved culture.

But there’s another side to the story. Life always kept me close to the edge, but it never let me fall over. Whenever I arrived at the point where I couldn’t see how I was going to pay the rent next month, or even subsist at all, life always stepped in and placed some money in my pocket from an unexpected source. I’m tempted to suspect that it was always meant to be that way. I’m fairly sure that if I’d become a star (as I nearly did once in a manner of speaking), or had achieved a high level of ‘success’ in any field, I would be a smaller person inside than I now am (which is not to say that I’m a big person inside, just a little bigger than I would otherwise have been.) It’s part of the reason why I harbour a strong suspicion that one life is only part of the story.

I might write a post about graveyards next, but don’t bother to hold the front page. It won’t be all that enlightening.