The Matter of Breath.

Tonight I watched an episode of the BBC dark comedy series Inside Number 9. It was the one in which guests at a dinner party are playing ‘sardines’ – one person hides and the others have to find him/her, and then stay there gathering together until they’re all squashed into a confined space. In this case, it was a double wardrobe in one of the bedrooms.

I found it disturbing because it reminded me that in such a situation the people would be so close that they would be able to smell each other’s breath, and that’s something I’ve always found odious even if the breath has been sweet. I feel the same way if I watch a film or drama in which two people are talking to one another close up and face to face.

I’ve examined this strange aspect of my nature and can only put it down to the fact that when you smell somebody else’s breath, it means you’re taking into your body something that has just come out of somebody else’s body. That strikes me as utterly revolting, and probably stems from my lifelong disquiet with all matters corporeal. I wonder where it comes from.

Separating God and Religion.

An ex-neighbour of mine once asked me to talk to her about religion because, she said, she wanted to ‘find a faith.’ Well now, the concept of ‘finding’ a faith raises serious considerations of its own, but that can be left to another time. What interests me for present purposes is the fact that I thought about her request this morning (heaven knows why) and I was suddenly struck by a notion of no known provenance:

God and religion are not inseparable. Neither needs the other.

Since I wasn’t at all sure that I’d originated this notion, I thought it would be fun to examine the concept and see whether I could make sense of it. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

Religions have two functions. The first is to address a fundamental suspicion (for which read ‘belief’) that material reality is only one part of a wider span of existence, and that the human animal, at least, contains an invisible presence which is capable of experiencing the wider reality. Further, that this invisible reality, usually referred to as the soul, continues to exist and be sentient after the material body has ceased to function. I see no reason to have a God as part of that function, and indeed Buddhism doesn’t include one.

But religions are also systems of life management, and I think we can be fairly sure that they were formulated by humans in far off times as a way of providing structure and stability to ancient civilisations. I’m prepared to accept that the sages who devised the systems might well have had a level of knowledge which later generations lost, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the systems themselves were man-made. (‘Man’ being non-gender specific, of course.) And so the rules and the protocols and the practices were laid down and the less enlightened beings who formed the majority of the population learned to follow them slavishly.

But in order to have sufficient authority, these systems needed a distant and all-powerful chief who was omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, indefatigable, and unquenchable. In other words, the ultimate embodiment of the supreme leader whose will was absolute and could not be challenged. And this is where it gets interesting.

I suspect that the early sages were aware of the notion that reality was created by some supreme, unfathomable intelligence who (or which, if you prefer) decided one day to create light, sound, and the energy on which to build individualised expressions of itself (I gather that ancient Hindu scriptures referred to what we now call sub atomic particles thousands of years before modern science discovered them, and their creation ‘myth’ is much closer to the view of Universal Consciousness than people are routinely taught today, at least in the exoteric Judaic tradition to which we in the west have become habituated.) And so they would have held the view that every fragment of material reality was a fragment of the creator who created it in order to observe itself. So I am part of God, you are part of God, every tree, every stone, every animal, every blade of grass, is part of God. Forget the ‘transcendent’ in ‘Immanent and Transcendent’. God is not a separate being, but rather we are God, all of us right down to the tiniest grain of sand on Blackpool beach. The ancient sages probably saw it that way.

But this didn’t quite fit certain practical considerations with regard to the mass of the great unwashed who simply wanted to know the best way of killing a mastodon and a reason not to fear death while making the attempt. And so they encouraged the notion that up there somewhere was a divine and all powerful being who watched and made rules and judged and punished the transgressor and rewarded the virtuous and demanded to be worshipped unquestioningly. And they gave It a name which varies from tradition to tradition. And when the time came to fight wars and grab land, this supreme and separate being was the ultimate in convenient scapegoats. Do whatever you want to suit the exigencies of the tribe, no matter what level of depravity, cruelty, and abuse may thus be occasioned, and justify it on the grounds that you are acting in accordance with God’s will. And that, it appears to me, is a major component of what religion has become. It’s evident that such an organisation needs no concept in God, only a convenient, conditioned belief in such a being.

(And if you choose to believe that the earth was seeded by beings created by a superior race of aliens, the argument still holds because the aliens are also fragments of It.)

And I’m sure I’m saying nothing entirely new here, but it’s as far as I’ve got off he top of my head.

Does that explain the sudden thought that God and religion are not mutually inclusive? I have no idea. It’s just a ramble that spilled out of my ageing brain, and I’m sure it doesn’t matter a jot what I think anyway.

*  *  *

I’m a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment, having just read that David Lynch died today. I think I would have liked to know him.

On Two Notable Shifts.

A unique and most notable event took place today. A situation arose in which the Lady B saw me, but I didn’t see her. It’s always been the other way round before. It made me wonder whether the tilt of the earth’s axis is undergoing a change.

And on that note, it occurs to me that it wouldn’t take too much of a shift and we in the more northerly latitudes would be living in a polar wasteland. A similar shift the other way and we would be living in the tropics.

It’s interesting and a little scary to realise just what a delicate road we’re treading on this little planet of ours.

The Perils of AI and the New Magic Words.

Our esteemed fuehrer, Mr Starmer, says he’s now on a mission to make the UK the world leader in the development of AI. He says it will boost the economy and create jobs. Sounds grand, doesn’t it, and yet I have my reservations.

At first I thought I was simply falling prey to a condition which creeps up on people as they’re getting older. They become more conservative; they want everything to remain the same because they like the comfort of familiarity, and I’m no exception. I’ve learned that as the brain ages it slows down and becomes less adventurous, and so it finds new equipment and methodology increasingly difficult to learn.

I told myself that I was, therefore, simply being unduly reactionary. I reminded myself that technology has been becoming increasingly influential in our lives since at least the invention of the steam engine. But then I thought a little further and realised that, until now, people have been controlling the machines, whereas with AI there’s the likelihood that that the machines will come increasingly to control the humans. I didn’t like the sound of that. And I’ve heard experts in the field forecast that AI will eventually develop a faculty which we may reasonably call sentience, and will begin to run matters based on their own desires and perceptions rather than for the benefit of their creators. They add the frightening prospect that AI will have no moral compass. Science fiction literature has been forecasting it for some time.

And then I thought a little further again and realised that Mr Starmer sometimes reminds me of an advanced android.

Oh dear…

Footnote

Have you noticed that when politicians and the corporate world want to win over public opinion to serve their often nefarious and always self-serving agendas, all they have to do is invoke the magic words ‘economy’ and ‘jobs’ and the road ahead is built in an instant? Abracadabra and Open Sesame cut no ice these days, but these two precious bits of magic work wonders.

A Fine Day for a Juvenile Loner.

I live close to one of the UK's leading theme parks. It's called Alton Towers and I've been there only once, on a sunny summer's day when I was 10. It wasn't a theme park then, though, but just a grand country house surrounded by gardens and parkland. I was thinking about it today for some reason and realised that it was the first notable expression of my loner gene.

I often played alone during the school holidays and so on, but this was different. This was an excursion organised by the cub scout troop to which I belonged. I knew all the other kids perfectly well and got on with them, but when they got off the bus I wandered away on my own. I spent much of the day sitting on a grassy bank with my mother-prepared provisions, watching the water fowl on the lake and the people passing by. And then I explored the parkland and gardens before returning to the bus at the appointed time. And I never did get to learn what the rest of the kids had been doing. I wasn't interested.

 

 

This is a picture of the very boy on the very day, and shows the point in my life when I was expanding into the role of school fat kid. It got worse before it got better at age 14, but by then I'd been marked to play in the front row of the rugby scrum and never managed to escape.

(I remember the day very well, surprisingly, and also feel a little sad when I see masses of traffic lined up nose to tail on the main road leading to Alton. Where there was once peaceful parkland and gardens, there now stands a forest of white knuckle rides making an awful lot of noise. And I expect the rank odour of mindless capitalism hangs like a leering ne'er-do-well in the once-pure air. But then I suppose it could be said that it has merely replaced the rank odour of class consciousness. So be it.)

On Molars and the Dreaded Mask.

I occasionally think of how dental practice has changed since I was a boy. I used to get toothache quite a lot back then, and if the application of clove oil failed to cure the condition I was simply taken to the dentist and the offending tooth was extracted. I never had a filling. None of my friends had fillings either because it seems that teeth were not afforded the respect they now attract. My mother was even persuaded by one dentist to have all her perfectly good teeth taken out and replaced with dentures because plastic teeth gave less trouble. She was in her early to mid thirties at the time.

What most intrigues me, however, is that all my extractions were performed under a general anaesthetic administered by a lone dentist without the assistance of a qualified anaesthetist or even a nurse. I’m not sure how standard that practice was because I remember conversations with other kids when the question was asked: ‘Did you have gas or cocaine?’ (Cocaine!?) But it was certainly true in my case.

And sometimes I wonder whether this commonly used procedure ever produced seriously deleterious side effects, which I assume is likely and the reason for not doing it any more. So how many people suffered life-changing conditions, and did anybody ever fail to wake up? I’ve never seen any statistics on that question, but I’d love to know whether any exist and, if so, what they reveal.

(I might add as a minor footnote that I was always taken to the nearest Woolworths store after an extraction and bought a small toy by way of recompense. I suppose it went some way to ameliorate the fear and the unpleasantness of having the taste of blood in my mouth for the rest of the day.)

The Story of the Mini-Eons.

Every day my Blogger stats show me a number of the posts which have been accessed over the past 24 hours. It’s become a favourite habit to read them late every night while I’m listening to a mix of favourite music on YouTube, and when I do I become increasingly aware that my life since moving to this house can be divided into three fairly distinct periods.

The first was the six years up to May 2012. I call it my golden period. A few unsightly scratches were in evidence, but mostly it was about the end of my fiction writing, the start of the blog, and the making of connections with a number of people who enlivened my life most wonderfully.

The second was the six years between May 2012 and March 2018. I call that one my brown period. Many of the special connections, in particular the most notable of all at the start of the period, fell away and a sense of loss began to impose itself on my perceptions. The unsightly scratches developed into sore and engorged weals for a time, and then along came the cancer culminating in the big operation which brought substantial amounts of pain, inconvenience and distress in its wake.

The third consists of the six years and a bit from March 2018 to the present. That’s the grey period. All the special connections formed in the first period faded away, several new health issues – some connected and some not – added layers of concern and inconvenience, and my general physical condition is undergoing the gradual drip of degeneration commonly associated with advancing years. The one bright star to have risen in the sky is the fact that my relationship with my daughter and her family has strengthened a great deal. That’s very welcome of course, but the sky remains a dull and wintry grey.

It’s odd that these ‘eons’ should have fallen fairly neatly into six-yearly periods, so what’s next I wonder. More of the same? Time will tell. What I can say is that my awareness of these delineations has coloured my view of the posts I made at the various times, and that’s interesting.

For now, though, it’s time to start preparing dinner in a kitchen which is little warmer than a fridge. Back soon.

Observing Dear Mama.

The Lady B’s dear mama ghosted me in Ashbourne this morning . That’s never happened before and I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. She just looked a little rapt withal (that’s a bit of Shakespeare in case you didn’t know.) Later I saw her talking to a shop assistant in Sainsbury’s, and thought that odd too.

‘My word,’ I thought, ‘dear mama engaging with one of the lesser classes. Maybe she’s on a mission to examine the workings of the peasant mind in order to achieve a more universal level of erudition.’

That last comment is, of course, made entirely in jest. I like dear mama, as I’ve said several times on this blog. I’ve known her for about eighteen years and have never detected the slightest whiff of snobbery in her mindset. She’s the classiest person I’ve ever known, and I’ve often observed through my own extended life that the absence of snobbery is one of the markers of a truly classy person.

Snobbery is largely the preserve of the upwardly mobile in our highly materialistic society, and especially notable among the self-made wealthy people who still preach the American Dream in spite of being the very embodiment of the lie.

Humanity at a Crossroads.

I watched a documentary last night around what Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s leading thinkers, had to say about the impending catastrophic decline of civilisation. He gave his reasons for it happening and his suggestions as to the changes we need to make in order to arrest it. The reasons came as a moderate boost to my ego because they were all the same things I’ve been saying for years, but the solutions only left me more pessimistic.

In order to arrest the decline, he said, there needs to be a major universal shift in consciousness among the people of all nations. I agree, but that seems most unlikely to happen. As long as the affairs of the world continue to be ordered by a tiny minority of rich and powerful people and institutions – the bankers, the entrepreneurs, the power hungry politicians, and the self-serving imperative of the corporate world – the majority of humanity will continue to be either conditioned unquestioningly to follow the prescribed road or too isolated and powerless to get it changed.

People, especially in the ‘developed’ world, are manically resistant to change unless it brings greater prospect of lifestyle-oriented consumption. That’s the position we’re conditioned to take now: lifestyle and consumption are the whole foundation for a happy and successful life. A few people realise that this is a trick to keep the rich getting richer while the rest labour on the treadmill, but I’m quite sure they’re too few in number. I used to hope that one day their number would achieve critical mass and the shift would be seismic, but I see no sign of it. And the same is true of the world’s leaders. I don’t see many politicians or potentates whose motivation is to make the world and its human societies genuinely better. Politics are still all about swelling the personal power base and maintaining the status quo. (Look what happened to that benighted genius Nikola Tesla, for example.)

And that’s why I think we’re heading for a cataclysm – maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, for who knows? Maybe Marx will be proved right when he prophesied that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own greed. That would produce quite a cataclysm. Or maybe it will be climate change, or a nuclear war, or some other form of economic meltdown.

It is interesting that the mythologies of ancient peoples throughout the world carry a common message: that when humans reach a crossroads and take the wrong road through greed, selfishness, aggression, and disregard for the natural order, something comes along to bring them to their knees. Maybe this is the universal consciousness at work. In any event, I think we’re at a crossroads.

Two Notes on the Reckless Tendency.

I had a little adventure this morning. I decided to do my Uttoxeter shop today, since yesterday was so foul, and was quite shocked by the amount of water flowing off the fields and onto the bottom lane which runs for about two miles beyond the Shire. This turned out to be a relatively minor inconvenience, however, because as I approached the river bridge outside the village of Rocester (Roman name, note; they had a garrison there a long time ago) I saw that the whole of the road on my side of the bridge was under a substantial depth of water for a distance of fifty or sixty feet.

I should have turned around at that point and taken the longer, higher route to Uttoxeter, but I didn’t because I’m subject to the occasional reckless streak. And as Macbeth said: to return were as tedious as go o’er and so go o’er was what I did – slowly. I felt the front of the car pushing the water aside and considered how silly I would feel if I didn’t make it. (You occasionally hear of cars getting stranded in fords and floods, don’t you, and it’s always tempting to think ‘what a prat!’) But fortune was on my side and my precious little French princess took me through, giving me no more than a sharp rap on the knuckles by way of a soft brake and a juddering clutch which she relinquished after an hour’s rest in the town car park. (My little Clio is a real heroine, you know. I love her to bits.)

*  *  *

And talking of heroines, I decided today that the woman who runs the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Uttoxeter is really rather handsome. She also has a voice redolent of the Lady B’s dear mama, which is an added bonus of no little merit. In short, she has class. And so now I’m seriously – or maybe only temporarily, for who can tell? – considering donning my Sherlock hat and engaging her in conversation to find out more.

I probably won’t because she’s middle aged (although not by much) and a lot of middle aged women scare me witless. But you never know. Maybe one day my occasional reckless tendency will come to the fore at an opportune moment and my latest case will begin.

Don’t bother watching this space, though. I doubt it will be worth the effort.