Sleeping With the Enemy.

It seems that Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán of Hungary are the very best of pals at the moment, each thinking that the twin suns of a glorious future shine brightly from their respective fundaments. Orbán says that if Trump wins the Presidency, all American military aid to Ukraine will cease. Trump agrees with him. And at their recent meeting they were wearing matching suits and ties – all blue (and dark blue is widely recognised as the colour of authority, which is why police uniforms are that colour.)

This is interesting because Orbán is also best mates with Putin, and it pleases Mr O to point out that if America stops funding Ukraine, the war will be over quickly. (That’s the slightly veiled way of saying that Russia will win, and the real reason for the ‘special military operation’ – to put an extra layer of battlements between Russia and the NATO alliance – will have been successful.) And there have been some pretty strong hints that Trump holds Putin in high regard, and that Putin wants Trump in the White House again.

So what comes next?

You see, it’s always seemed fairly evident to me that the taking of Ukraine is Putin’s attempt to lay the foundations for rebuilding the USSR, which raises the spectre of a new Cold War in which the relationship between America and Europe will not be as firmly cemented as it was during the last one, at least not as long as Trump has any say in the matter. So that has me wondering whether: 1.) We are headed for a very troubled future, and 2.) Supporters of Mr Dunderhead have any idea of the power shift they might be unleashing in November. (It also has me wondering whether there really is some shadowy but powerful third party pulling strings here.)

Fortunately, I’m no expert in foreign affairs, military matters, or the veracity of conspiracy theories, so maybe I’m wrong. But it still doesn’t smell too good.

On The Lay and the Lady's Day.

’Tis but a week to the Lady B’s birthday, but I can’t send a missive – real or digital – because I once said ‘no more words from me’ and my word is my bond. (I have communicated with her since then but only in response to an incoming message. I consider that to be not only allowed, but obligatory.) But I thought I’d mention it here anyway just in case she accidentally presses the wrong button on her stroke and poke machine and lands on this post. At least she’ll know that I have remembered the date and I do wish her a happy birthday.

So then I worked out what age she will become on the appointed day and set to wondering what I was doing on my own equivalent all those years ago. Where was I living? With whom? How was I making my way in the world and in what general conditions? It all came back very easily and led me to think of all the phases I’ve passed through since then – the people, the activities, the changes, the successes and failures, the gains and losses, the romances and separations, the house moves etc, etc. And they all seemed so very short.

There were several close ladies involved in this otherwise unremarkable odyssey, and I felt an urge to write something for posterity with the title:

The Lay of the Lost Ladies

Has a ring to it, doesn’t it? I like titles which have a ring to them. I won’t bother, of course. The Lay (or its archaic original ‘Lai’ from Norman French) is a form of poetry which has it’s origins in the 13^th century. I gather they were usually very long and required to be written in a prescribed form. I have enough difficulty writing a simple blog post these days, and I was never a poet anyway, so I think the Lay can be true to its name and join the other good ideas which will forever lie on stony ground.

*  *  *

It’s been a bad day today; depressingly inclement weather and one malfunction after another. I hate it when things don’t work as they should. It makes me feel rattled. To me, a malfunctioning machine or other appliance is akin to having a serious chest infection so that even the act of breathing is painful. It appears a lack of functional perfection is yet another neurosis to which I’m prey, and the more complex we make our functional artefacts, the more they seem prone to glitches and breakdowns.

Interesting note:

When I came to post this, my internet dropped out. Methinks the universe is being a little mischievous today.

A Seed Staying on Stony Ground.

I’ve mentioned on this blog that sometimes the black dog wakes up and goes into aggressive controlling mode. And one thing he does is take up a menacing position between me and the computer keyboard, thereby preventing the making of blog posts.

It’s an odd fact, however, that during such periods I often have ideas for posts, but I can’t make them because the will is too weak. And so they fall like seeds upon stony ground and rarely see the light of day thereafter. In retrospect, that can be a little irksome because I do so like to chatter, you know. I do.

And so I decided to adopt a simple procedure which any sensible person would adopt: keep a notebook handy and jot a quick trigger to remind me later when circumstances are more amenable to chattering. I did it last night when it was almost bed time, the old computer was being frustratingly cranky, and the two double scotches were making perception a tiny bit misty. I saw something on YouTube and had a light bulb moment, so I reached for the notebook and wrote Sofa. Today I took out the notebook.

‘Sofa? Sofa? What have sofas to do with anything worth making a blog post about?’ I thought. (Because I have a lazy mind which doesn’t give a tuppeny toss about ending a sentence on a preposition.) I thought and thought but wasn’t getting anywhere, not until I read a comment on an old post and the penny dropped. I began to compose the post in my head to make sure that I was going to get everything more or less in the right order and cover all the salient points.

It started to become far more complicated than I’d imagined. It threw up mutually contradictory statements. It had me wondering whether I really had a clue about the subject at hand. And what was worse, I realised that it might well cast me in rather a dim light to the minds of right-thinking people, a few of whom I care about. It began to assume the tone of a shameful confession, and I wasn’t in the mood for confessing. By the end of it, it seemed I had dug myself into a deep hole out of which there was no escaping.

I dislike being trapped in dark holes, so this post will have to serve as an alternative. With apologies.

On Chaos and a Special Smile.

I watched a video on YouTube last night which explained the principle of chaos theory (although presented not as a theory, but established fact.) I think I got the gist, or at least some of it, but I’m glad my life isn’t dependent on being able to explain it to a bunch of 15-year-olds in a high school science lab.

Part of the problem – along with my lack of intelligence, at least in the matter of far end physics – was that the video was only twenty minutes long and spoken at speed by a man with an American accent who seemed to presume that everybody’s non-tutored brain operates at the same speed as his highly tutored one. There was also a lot of fascinating and rather lovely visual imagery to illustrate the teaching, so how is a person like me, highly attuned as I am to visual imagery, supposed to listen to somebody rattling along like the bullet train to Tokyo instead of regarding the fascinating imagery with some degree of fascination?

One thing I did catch and understand was that Newtonian physics is entirely deterministic, and the move through Einstein and onto quantum enquiry now proves that determinism is accurate only up to a point. Having been a lifelong supporter of Determinist philosophy, that revelation was a bit of a disappointment. And of course, none of it takes into account the big question on which I’m currently a little fixated: does anything in the material universe objectively exist anyway?

Eventually I switched off and came back down to terra firma. I’m more or less resigned to the fact that as long as puppies and kittens continue to look cute, and as long as the Lady B continues to smile at me and her car smells of fresh flowers, and as long as I can dream that somewhere in the world is a person who might one day present me with a bowl of hot baked Alaska and a small pot of fresh cream, all is well. (Even though I know that Dr Pangloss was an idiot.)

And may I be permitted to add a brief note on the subject of the Lady B’s smile? I may? Here goes then:

I have observed that there are many widely differing varieties of smile. There’s the forced smile, the disingenuous or fake smile, the polite smile, the formal smile, the excited smile, the mischievous smile… I could probably go on if I could be bothered; I recognise them all instinctively. But the fact is that the Lady’s smile is none of these. It’s a simple, natural smile of projected warmth. When she smiles at you it’s like walking into a warm house after you’ve spent the past couple of hours freezing your butt off working in the frigid garden. And that’s why it’s so welcome.

Thank you for your indulgence.

Consciousness Unprovoked.

I’m aware that for some time now my perceptions have been concentrating on the bad side of life and the human condition. Heaven knows this blog has been full of it.

I think it should be self-evident, however, that I’m also aware of the good things in life, but now even they are giving cause for doubts and questions. I’m finding lately that every time my sense organs register something which raises my spirits – a selfless act of kindness or rescue, the sight of inquisitive young animals just discovering the experience of being here, the smell of honeysuckle and new-mown hay in early summer – my first response is to appreciate the glorious richness available to us sentient beings who are lucky to be at the top of the evolutionary scale. But then a voice somewhere deep inside me whispers with the certainty of an inner guru that none of it is real. It’s just a dream. And the voice seems to get louder each time it speaks. And so I ask myself the question:

All experience of pleasure and pain is simply my consciousness responding to some stimulus, so is it possible for consciousness to be self-contained – to experience pleasure or pain at will without there being anything to provoke it? And the answer comes back:

Probably.

And would that be the start of what the Buddhists call enlightenment?

Possibly.

So is my suspicion correct that the only thing which is ultimately real is consciousness?

Probably.

And so all manifestations of material existence – even to the vastness of the physical universe – are illusory?

Probably.

I go quiet for a while, but then I have a thought: What about people who suffer baseless fears around certain situations? We call that experience 'neurosis.' And what about people who suffer anxiety and depression when there’s no apparent cause? Are these examples of self-contained consciousness at work – and maybe even enlightenment beginning to take root – and not the mental malaise we think them to be?

I didn’t get an answer to that one. Thinking on.

There But For the Grace of God.

Tonight I started watching a film called The Book Thief. It’s set in Germany in 1938, and we all know what was going on in Germany in 1938. It scared and depressed me for two different but connected reasons:

Scared because I know that the darkness and depravity to which so many people – almost a whole nation – were persuaded by the application of charisma and finely chosen words was not a peculiarly German phenomenon. It’s a universal component of the human condition. It always has been and I’m sure it always will be. Kristallnacht could happen anywhere given the charisma, the words, and the circumstantial background. Indeed, versions of it have already happened since then in other parts of the world.

Depressed because there’s a question to which I don’t know the answer: If I’d been there, would I have joined in? I don’t think so, not because I’m too good or civilised or noble a person, but because I’m strongly and congenitally disinclined to join things or follow crowds. Would that be enough, I ask myself, and is it a good enough reason?

Musing on the Mystery of Three.

I was thinking again about the minor fixation I have with the three-women motif in literature, myth and legend. Let’s have a short list off the top of my head:

 

The three witches who stop Macbeth and Banquo on the blasted heath

The three queens who come to take Arthur to Avalon after he’s received his mortal wound at the hands of Mordred

The three Gorgons of Greek myth – Medussa, Stheno, and Euryale

The three Marys of the New Testament – mother, sister, and Mary Magdalene

The three Brontë sisters who grew to adulthood – Charlotte, Emily, and Anne

Even the nine muses amount to three groups of three

And for a few years following the genesis of this blog, three women became particularly prominent in my life. They shall, of course, be nameless.

And what about the much celebrated Lady B who, for some years after I first met her, lived in a family of three – herself, her mother, and her sister. And now she has three children of her own, all girls.

There has to be a bit of magic there somewhere, doesn’t there?

The Delights of Local Dialect.

For some reason last night I kept hearing the phrase ‘a lady on a milk white steed’ running through my head. It sounds poetic, doesn’t it? Sounds as though it should be at the heart of a new ditty. So did I construct a new ditty around it? No, instead I was reminded of the dialect that used to be spoken in my neck of the woods when I was a boy.

One of its oddities was the carrying of a consonant at the end of a word onto the start of a second word if it began with a vowel. So a white horse became ‘a way toss.’ And if you asked the question of a person steeped in the diction of the industrial Potteries what on earth a ‘way toss’ was, he or she would probably answer: ‘It’s the same as a bry noss, only wait.’

Unfortunately it’s mostly gone now. The modern speaker will call a white horse ‘a why torse,’ and a brown horse ‘a brow norse’ which makes communication a lot easier.

Railing Against the Robots.

I used the last cheque in my cheque book yesterday, and then went to pick up the new one from the drawer in which I always keep it. It wasn’t there. ‘Oh dear,’ I thought, ‘the bank mustn’t have sent me one. Better give them a ring.’ So rang them I did, and this is the early part of the conversation:

Thank you for calling Santander. I can see that you’re calling from a phone which is registered with us.

(Thinks: No you can’t. You’re a robot. What you should be saying is ‘our equipment indicates that you are calling…’)

But let’s not be pedantic. The voice of Ms Metal continued:

Now say ‘At Santander my voice is my password.’

(‘Ah,’ I thought, ‘voice recognition software. I wonder whether it will work. Let’s give it a go.’)

‘My voice is my password.’

Please say ‘At Santander my voice is my password.’

(Now who’s being pedantic? OK, OK. Resistance is useless…)

‘At Santander my voice is my password.’

Now tell me what you are calling about today.

‘I have not received my new cheque book.’

Could you try again and be more specific.

(In what way is my statement lacking in the matter of specifics? But OK, OK again, let’s try a positive instruction.)

‘Please send me a new cheque book.’

I see, so you want to know the balance on your account. The balance on your account is…

(This is becoming worse than silly. How can even the most dumbass algorithm or bloody robot translate ‘Please send a new cheque book’ as ‘I want to know the balance on my account’?)

I won’t go on, except to say that it got worse before it got better. Eventually I managed to speak to someone who took a few details and undertook to send me a new cheque book. It took half an hour of hair-tearing to get there.

Here’s what used to happen until a few short years ago:

You dialled the number and a voice answered with ‘For security purposes, please enter your 16-digit card number or security code if you have one.’ You entered it, and then an adviser picked up the phone. He or she asked a couple more security questions and then dealt with the enquiry. In the case of simply needing a new cheque book, the whole business was sorted in five minutes at most. So here’s my point:

I am not, as some might imagine, falling prey to unthinking reactionism in bemoaning the move to automation. I am perfectly happy with, and welcoming of, many of the technological enhancements to life over the past hundred years (telephones, fridges, automatic washing machines, sliced bread…) Perfectly content and even grateful because most of them benefited the generality of people. They made life easier.

But the current drive towards automation in nearly all maters pertaining to communication is not benefitting the generality of people. All too often it’s confusing, frustrating, time-consuming, and often dysfunctional. What it’s doing is increasing the generality of stress, and thereby contributing to mental health issues which appear to be reaching near-epidemic proportions. And we all know – or should do – that most of it is not intended to benefit the generality of people anyway. It’s there because it enables the users – banks and the corporate world mostly – to employ fewer people and thus make even bigger profits. It’s a demon given genesis by a greedy capitalist system becoming ever greedier. That’s why I’m not at all happy with it.

There's nothing any of us can do about it, of course. We're living in a machine age in which real people are becoming increasingly redundant and all the big money-making organisations are leading the way together. This problem has become one of the great talking points of the age, second only to the weather and growing by the year. Everybody has their own stock of stories to tell, stories of the frustrating inanities so routinely evident in a system to which we are all shackled. And don't we just love the ubiquitous fall-back: Did you know that you can find answers to most questions on our website? Go to wwwdot... No, no, no! When we have a problem we want to talk to somebody. It's how humans have always functioned best and how we want to continue functioning. But the system says 'no', and resistance really is useless.

And on that note I rest my case because it’s time to do my weekly blood pressure test. I can hear the little device trembling in the cupboard…

On Lost Commestibles and the Origin of Perceptions.

A few years ago I had a period of eighteen months when I couldn’t take my customary walks because of the pain in my left leg. It was diagnosed as atherosclerosis (furring up of the arteries) and the remedy was a trip to hospital for a two-day stay and a rather painful angioplasty procedure.

Having dealt with that, I decided to drastically reduce my intake of high fat foods. No more fresh cream (not even in my coffee), no more custard, no more pastries, no more cake even of the lighter variety, and very little of the full fat cheese to which I was virtually addicted. I was pleased with my discipline, but life became even more tedious.

And so last week I decided that I was due a treat, reasoning that a small amount taken in isolation would do little harm. I bought a pair of small fancies consisting of two ‘crowns’ of meringue sandwiching a thin layer of chocolate and a thicker layer of fresh cream.

Imagine the level of my expectation as I opened the package and took one of them out. I picked it up, opened my mouth (carefully judged to be just wide enough to accommodate the delectable comestible because I consider genteel eating habits to be one of the first requirements of a person claiming to be civilised) and lifted it in the direction of blissful consummation. Unfortunately, the meringue ‘crowns’ were rather less firm than meringue comestibles are supposed to be. They broke, and the floor became the recipient of numerous bits of white detritus punctuated with flecks of cream and fragments of chocolate, most of which disappeared into the vacuous maw of the vacuum cleaner.

Upon witnessing this unfortunate state of affairs, many people – those of naturally cheerful perception – would have laughed. I didn’t because my perceptions are rather less than cheerful these days, but I didn’t cry either because big boys don’t, at least not over spilled meringue comestibles. But I admit to having been less than happy and I was reminded of an incident in my childhood.

I was seven years old and on holiday in Devon. It was a warm, sunny day and my mother gave me the money to buy an ice cream, which I did with great glee because my life to that point had been lived at subsistence level and ice cream was a rare treat. Walking back, I tripped over something on the ground, and the ground was where my ice cream landed while my hands were occupied in breaking my fall. As far as I can remember, I didn’t cry on that occasion either. (Heaven knows why; little boys are allowed to, aren’t they?) And my mother took pity on me and gave me the money to buy a second ice cream, which I held onto very firmly before devouring it.

And now, all these years later, I wonder whether my experience of having lived at subsistence level during early childhood was responsible for the fact that I’ve never chased money. I even look down on those who do, although I suppose I probably shouldn’t. I don’t know the answer to that; you’d have to ask a psychologist.