Contrasting Fortunes.

A strange week, this. On the downside have been the aching legs, the tight chest, the usual depressions, and meeting the replacement dentist (who’s actually the practice owner) now that my dear Ms Medeea has sailed away to far off shores. On the upside were the dog fixes, the cow fixes (Mr Robinson’s new, all black bullocks), and the lady fixes courtesy of the coffee shop.

There’s a new one, you see – lady that is. Ellie by name. Yesterday she was on with the established Sarah who appeared to be in charge for once, even though I always feel she should be revising for her A-levels rather than skipping around doing the barista thing more expertly than any others of my acquaintance. Ellie is even younger.

So, in order to break the ice and not appear gloomy in the face of such shining young stars, I offered to recite one of my ditties. Sarah gave Ellie a look which I’m still trying to interpret thirty hours later. I think it was meant to convey: ‘I’ll bet this is going to be a right load of old crap, but he is a customer so I suppose we’d better humour him.’ I warned them that it would be one of my darker efforts (I had just been to the dentist after all.)

And then I began:

As Tom lay sleeping in his bed

A lady came and crushed his head

With talons sharp and molars red

Then sucked his brains ’till he was dead

‘Ooh,’ said Ellie, ‘that is dark. Thank you.’ I told her I would recite a more wholesome one next time, and so I will. Meanwhile, Sarah had walked off to clear and clean some tables. (As much as I do so enjoy the vibrant energy of young women, I suspect I might have lost the ability to impress them. I suppose that’s as it should be.)

And tonight I read the Wiki article on Sylvia Plath. It appears there’s some dispute as to whether she definitely intended to commit suicide that day, and I was reminded again that the gas which now comes through domestic pipes is no longer fatal. Modern times, eh.

Becoming a Reluctant Bad Guy.

Every night I play one game of chess against the computer, and every night I lose. I’ve said before that I simply don’t have the mind of a chess player. I’m too straight thinking and straight dealing for the Machiavellian process of preparing to outwit someone in a process of perpetual threat and counter threat. And since I see it as Machiavellian, I’ve even been led to consider that maybe all good chess players must have a dark and dubious side to their natures.

Tonight I won. Congratulations, proclaimed the little dialogue box, you have won by checkmate. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. So here’s the question:

Should my self-image rise a little on the occasion of such a red letter day, or should it slip further than it already is? Whatever the answer to that, I feel I should treat myself to a Bushmills Irish whiskey tonight. It’s rather splendid.

(Incidentally, I was also treated to both a dog fix and a cow fix this morning. Does that settle the question?)

The Leaf and the Lady.

As I was walking through Uttoxeter this morning, well huddled in winter coat, muffler, hat, and gloves, my mood was sombre. The high street was sparsely occupied as it usually is on a Sunday, and the two charity shops which open on the sabbath had offered nothing of interest. The dark sky glowered and the cold, damp wind had a most inhospitable feel. I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window, and saw there a parallel with a fallen, withered leaf rustling mindlessly along a kerb towards the nearest road grid and oblivion. Advancing age sometimes encourages the perception of such a parallel.

I walked down the hill and crossed the road into the retail park, and there I met a young woman with whom I felt an immediate connection. Though not classically pretty, she was certainly fair of face. Much more than that, however, was the air of affability and authenticity which shone from her to an extent which is most unusual. We talked for all of two minutes about the reason for my approaching her in the first place: I’d seen her driving into the car park in an early 90s vintage VW Golf, the like of which I haven’t seen in several decades. (I thought it was a Mk1, but she informed me that it was actually a Mk2.)

The image of the shrivelled leaf disappeared, and it never occurred to me to peruse my image in any further shop windows. But the thought was not lost on me that mood can be so radically lifted by the merest pressure of just the right nature.

America and a Dubious Road.

I watched a YouTube video last night made by an American woman currently living in the UK who raised the question: ‘Will American Patriotism Be Its Downfall?’

She began by citing the fact that American children are spoon fed masses of patriotic conditioning from a very early age, referring to school children being required to swear the Oath of Allegiance every morning, the singing of the national anthem, and the proliferation of Star and Stripes on nearly every spare piece of ground; features which most of the rest of the world find pretty damn silly because they’re just not necessary.

She had a lot to say about this – and did so with a commendable sense of balance, I might add – including the fact that she saw nothing wrong with patriotism as long as it doesn’t step over the line into the area of nationalism. There’s a difference between the two, and nationalism – especially when embraced by a country as powerful as the US – can be very dangerous to everybody else in the world and even to itself. (Inevitably, I suppose, Hitler and Nazi Germany was quoted as an example.)

At this point the post could become very long, but I’m too lazy and tired of life to write lengthy tomes these days so I’ll just mention one thing she included in her argument. She pointed out that the USA is very powerful – possibly the most powerful country in the world – but that, with power comes responsibility. It’s another way of saying that if we want the world to be a reasonably sane place, self-interest has to be tempered with an ethical dimension. To any right-minded person, it’s entirely wrong for a country to use its excessive wealth and power only for its own benefit.

This morning I read that Trump has suspended overseas aid (apart from military aid to Israel and Egypt apparently.) That surprised even me.

And so I wonder again where Trump and his cohorts are going to take the US over the next four years. And I’m tempted to think that the much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK is doomed to become an object of faded regard (with thanks to an American called Zoe who coined the phrase.) It certainly sheds new light on the decision to take the UK out of the EU nine years ago.

On the Trump Card and New Rules.

I gather Donald Trump is promising America a ‘golden age’ now that he’s back in charge. And his best buddy, Elon Musk, said at a post-inauguration rally that ‘the future of civilisation is assured’, before giving what is clearly a Nazi-style salute.

There’s a scary vibe coming out of the US at the moment, but I suppose we need to see what the next twelve months bring in their wake rather than succumb to a knee jerk reaction. And I imagine the less right-leaning European states will adopt a more guarded approach in dealings with America while attempting to keep something of the status quo intact. America does, after all, hold NATO over our heads like a sword of Damocles. (Or maybe it would be more fitting to suggest the analogy of holding the trump card. Isn’t that nicely ironic?)

I’m going to be watching Germany where the far right is clearly gaining ground in the national consciousness. Italy (home of Mussolini, don’t forget) and Hungary have already gone some way along that road, and the whole picture is starting to look a bit messy. And then there’s the possibility of a Russia-China-North Korea axis taking shape in the not-too-distant future. As for the UK, Mrs Thatcher more or less slipped us into America’s back pocket forty years ago, so maybe we have nowhere to run.

But back to American internal politics. Even if nothing particularly drastic happens over the next five years, I find it hard to believe that Trump will simply walk away from the White House quietly in 2029 just because the rules don’t allow a third term. I imagine he will certainly want to be the puppet master if not the actual puppet. And rules can be changed anyway. And what about Mr Musk? He seems to be positioning himself to play Warwick the Kingmaker at least, and maybe even take the crown himself. I know the rules don’t allow that possibility at the moment because he wasn’t born in the USA, but rules can be changed…

Sit!

When the Brexit argument was going on in Britain I argued that if we left the EU we would come increasingly under the influence of America. (Oddly enough, so did Noam Chomsky.) It seemed to me that it was better to be an equal member of a powerful club than be the lapdog of the latest American president. The mostly aged little Englanders disagreed. They were still labouring under the delusion that Britain was a major world power which could stand alone and meet any other power on at least equal terms.

And now there appears to be a bit of a panic going on. The media are wondering how long it will be before Donald Trump consents to a meeting with our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. There is talk of Trump disliking Starmer, and being bent on keeping the little guy trembling in the corner for a while. That would be typical of Trump’s mindset after all. And then there is the matter of our increasing economic reliance on the US…

And now I’m trying to conjure an appropriate metaphor – something to do with rescue centres, or dog training facilities, something like that. I’ve already used to term ‘America’s poodle’ in an earlier post and repetition won’t do. I suspect it might prove more serious this time. Trump seems to me to be more emboldened than he was last time out.

In any event, my brain is in no fit state to come up with something pithy, so this will have to do.

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.