Just Another Victim

Just Another Victim is ... a single ... by someone. This interests me insignificantly. The word 'victim' does interest me, though. It is a forceful word. It automatically assigns blame (another one of those morality-laden words) away from the person to whom it is given, and towards some other person. Language is more than just the expression of what is - a lot of the time it is the covert expression of a point-of-view, an angle, a worldview. This is most evident in journalism. Read two different papers about one single event and one might be forgiven for imagining that this one single event were two completely different events. This is obvious, but noteworthy. The most foceful use of this language-forcefulness is in the arena of insults. To call a person some derogatory name is to label that person - to (if one is going to take language literally - which is, I think, the idea) metamorphose that person into whatever one has labelled them as. 'You terrible cur!' one exclaims (or doesn't, if one is inhabiting the 21st Century), dehumanising one's language-brawl-opponant. And, if they refrain from reciprocally magicking one into something else, that they remain - while one sneers down at them from one's lofty pinnacle of humanity. Of course, this sort of insult could (in literal terms - and do let's be literal) could be interpreted simply as an error. 'You terrible cur!' one exclaims. 'Are you quite sure? Perhaps it's the light...' the cur replies, smugly safe in the knowledge that within the realm of the literal theur assailant is simply mistaken or mad. Of course, such literalism is generally considered to be mistaken or mad in itself... Unfortunately, alternatives along the lines of 'I really don't like you at all, you know...' lack punch. 'I hate you!' sounds simply childish, unless whispered beneath floods of tears while wearing a very beautiful dress and tear-smudged mascara in moonlight... And even then... Language is, as Wittgenstein was well aware, terribly terribly flawed. And yet (she typed, dramatically) - what else is there? Language is what we throw at each other when we want to get across the abyss between us - The Problem of Others. Unfortunately it all gets lost in trabslation from brain to brain until all it really sounds like is a screamed request PLEASE LIKE ME or PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE or all of the suchlike variations on those themes, sometimes, perhaps, a little blurred into each other. I don't imagine for a moment that anyone reading any of this will experience it in any way particularly similar to the way in which I am experiencing it. Let's face it - we are all UTTERLY alone. And we must, each of us, get used to it. If this sounds bleak, it isn't meant to - I adore people, particularly some particular people - of course I do. What I mean is - we can only experience each other up to a point. Beyond that is simple (and rather sweet) delusion. Words words words. Like looking at paintings through dark glasses, through a glass darkly... These are tools blunted at the edges with being thrown at people and blunted. As soon, of course, as one says any of this, it sounds rather - intense. Much better to use the correct tags for the correct things and pretend that everything is perfectly perfectly clear ... no? That is pragmatic, certainly - but it certainly isn't true - and truth is beauty, and all that. That is why, perhaps, we want preciseness. The preciseness of non-stage poetry and suchlike. Becuase we really do want to jump across that abyss, even if it is neccesarily suicide to do so, even if it is neccesarily impossible. Which is rather sweet of us, don't you think?

Pariscope

Pariscope is, it seems, a Paris weekly focusing on events ... events ... what exactly is an event? A phenomenon: "an observable occurrence". The more observable the occurrence, the more of an event an event is. Thus the sparkling of cameras - to catch the light that shines on it. Thus the interviewing of athletes - to catch the last  gasped inhalations and exhalations of their exertion. Thus the ink-emanations of birthdays in The Times. We can be seen, we breath, we live! We are - events. It doesn't really matter that there is - a party, a race, a birthday... What matters is that there are people who are allowed ... allowed ... to jolly well show off for a while. If girls behaved as they do at parties when they were not at parties - they would be thought very silly (and conceited) indeed (sometimes, of course, they are anyway).The party is an excuse. In a supermarket, purchasing, say, chocolate biscuits ... to dance (there is often music, of a sort, in supermarkets...) and flounce and giggle would be deemed ... rather odd. Add enthusiastic photography to the above and it becomes ... odder  - it would be assumed that one were on one's way to a party (and being not-entirely-serious), or on one's way home from one (and being not-entirely-serious) - or damned eccentric. We do not, again, tend to interview people who have run for buses... Why not? What they have done is probably far more practically worthwhile than what the athlete, running in circles around a track like a personification of circularity has done. That is the point - it is not l'art pour l'art.  Why not post the words 'I [insert name here] am alive today' or 'I exist'. That, after all, is what a birthday is all about - continuing to exist. One is only allowed to notice the fact one a year: gosh, here I am still... Which seems rather a pity. Because every single second that one exists (yes I know I know - you know you know) is a near-miracle of wonderfulness ... and all that. An event. My inhalation is an event. My exhalation is an event. My every proof of continued existence is an event. My every word is an event. My every pressing-down on my every key of my every laptop is - an event. But this - as perhaps is being illustrated - is prone to become ... repetitive and quite the opposite of the wonderment-expression that it is intended to be. Our minds seem only to be able to cope with concise wonderment - births marriages and deaths ... and all that. This, I suppose, is because we have to concentrate. This, I suppose, is because we have to not exhaust ourselves with sensory input after sensory input being given vast attention. This, I suppose, is because we get used to yo-yo-ing between on and off like switches leveled. We don't want to blow our fuses. But - every day is an event, if you want it to be. The option is there.

Influenza A virus subtype H7N4

This is appropriate ... yesterday I concluded reading In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (Norman F. Cantor, 2001, The Free Press), another example of what can only really I suppose be considered my absolute obsession with The Black Death. Influenza A virus subtype H7N4 is a form of flu affecting birds - primarily, it seems, chickens. So ... do I write about flu or do I write about flu or do I write about chickens?

FLU

Flu is not something I have any personal experience of. It is, however, one of those things one dreads happening to one. Like a grand piano falling on one's head. That sort of thing. (Flu and suchlike originated, so one theory goes, in animals. Bird flu and swine flu and suchlike are no more bestial than flu flu. They just hopped over the divide more recently.) What is most striking, I think, about viruses and suchlike is that, basically, one's body, that supposedly exclusive domain of oneself, has been invaded by a little swarming army of alien CREATURES. The very idea is HORRIBLE. Before magnification the imaginative were nit beset with these nightmares... Water is one of the worst things - yes, I know, OCD. - swarming with LIVING THINGS, as is the air, as is, when something like flu inflicts itself on one, oneself... Until one might as well be peering out from the inside of a mushroom or the amorphous black shape of a swarm of leg-twitchingly-fleet locusts, wings bashing smashing against wings until they might all smash to dust... The very idea is HORRIBLE. Before magnification when one become ill one simply became ill - one did not contain multitudes. I may be significantly less likely to die of flu if I catch it, due to magnification and the resultant understandings of the scientists/pharmacists who will give me medicines ... but I am going to be significantly more repelled by the whole thing. ...you must consider all swarming creatures living in the seas or the streams that have no fins or scales disgusting. This all leads to the consideration of the general excessiveness of life in general. Over the last couple of hundreds of years, our horizons have - broadened rather considerably. Geographically the whole world is at our feet/planes/boats/trains etc. Most of us try to forget this most of the time - it is vertiginous. Most of us know that when we stand on our feet we are like tiny insects perched on the hardened convex surface of a glass of water, and that the flatness we perceive is illusory. Most of us try to forget this, pragmatically, most of the time - 'Of course the world is round!' we exclaim, while feeling very grateful that we do not perceive it as such, because, if we did, we would probably fling ourselves to the ground and try to hang onto it, like people on the very edge of a cliff who are no more likely to fall over than if they were not on the very edge of a cliff, but feel that they are so - because it would be vitally more important. Beyond the actual is the virtual - and this includes, to varying extents, all art. Art, though it sometimes may not seem like it, it really excessively abundant. The quality of a lot of it remains to be seen - it is obscured by the rest of it. There are worlds upon worlds we may inhabit (non-physically) if we so wish. Within the next half-hour I could watch a film trailer (say Northfork), read a poem (say The Burden of Itys) and look at a painting (say The Starry Night). Three very different worlds - very disorientating. We are traveling towards omniscience. We are traveling towards being gods looking down on the world from a Mount Olympus or a Nietzschean,  the voluptuous distance and remoteness of the bird, which always flies further aloft in order always to see more under it - this is the opposite of magnification - a zooming-out into infinitude, a dissipation, a fading, and it began surely with the centre of the Big Bang or the expanding universe (even if the universe is not expanding physically, OUR universe, the universe of the mind of experience etc etc etc  is).  A spherical world, closed but continually exapnding, in a new playground for thought. The wider the margins the more notes to the primary texts there can be - and more illustrations...

CHICKENS

Chickens run around with no heads. This is analogous to running around with no thoughts. Which is entirely possibly (believe me). This is the opposite of an expanding universe. This is a universe circling around itself in ever-decreasing circles until it drops dead. This is obsession, this is circularity, this is habit, this is all those things that wrap their tendrils around us and push their thorns into our veins as though we were unwilling saints, thorns pressed into out throbbing temples (in a divine as well as a physical sense). Crowns of thorns are never good ideas. Crowns of thorns are bad ideas repeated and repeated and repeated. Explosion into a mind-map of ideas and projects and suchlike is preferable to introverted circularity.

Destroyer Tender

Destroyer Tender - I clicked 'random article (on Wikipedia, you understand...) and got - Destroyer Tender. That wasn't quite what I had in mind - I was hoping for something more along the lines of Existentialism or The Black Death or Violins. However - I will do my best. Incidentally, what I plan to do, dear reader, is to, each day/week/month/whenever-I-can-be-bothered-to-blog, "choose" some random subject from some website such a Wikipedia and WRITE about it. The very practice of writing is, in my view, quite enough to keep me from falling into the abyss of unbeing of the wilderness years separating BAs from MAs. Without writing there is - drifting. I am all too inclined to drift, flotsamly and jetsamly, in a Heideggerian-falling sort of a way - and that, for anyone who has read their Being and Time (which I, partially, have...) is not (while it may be inevitable...) a very good idea... You will perhaps have noticed the preponderance of dot dot dots. This is intentional. Dot dot dotses symbolise, for me, the interconnectedness of ideas central to the idea of the stream-of-consciousness. I suppose the idea underlying it, the bedrock of the stream-of-consciousness, to be almost pathologically literalistic, is continuity. For someone with a memory as fluctuating as mine existence can seem (rather delightfully, sometimes) like wandering through a reasonably dark but occasionally gold-dappled woodland. This may be what Proust was getting at (fauxly informally-rhetorical)... The intention then is to join up the impressionistic dashes of gold so that the whole thing looks like a Klimt painting...

DESTROYER TENDER

It sounds like the title of a strangely mawkish S&M Mills&Boon ... however it is not: it is a kind of ship.It is a ship providing "maintenance and support" to other, smaller ships. I know nothing about ships. The Destroyer Tender, 'no longer as necessary as [it] once [was] ... [due] to the increased size and automation of modern [ships]' stuck me as a metaphor for the (supposed) movement of the individual away from church-and/or-state-control of thought/ideology and towards autonomous thought/ideology. It is quite possible, of course, that the thoughts/ideology of the individual have never been quite so constrained by the wishes of the church-and/or-state as is generally stated (you want references? Just state the possibility I have just stated above a whisper in a university corridor and wait for the startled cries of 'Anachronism!'): it is possible that, as now, anyone thinking anything quite beyond the pale would generally not give voice to those thoughts (or that only those people who were generally considered beyond the sane gave voice to thoughts beyond the pale and that, thus, those thoughts went unrecorded). The general trend, however, does seem to have been away from faith (of various sorts - faith in god, faith in the clergy, faith on the monarchy,  faith in the state, faith in the hierarchy, faith in the family...) and towards reason (of various sorts - questioning god, questioning the clergy, questioning the monarchy, questioning the state, questioning the hierarchy, questioning the family...). The conventions may (in evolved/altered forms) remain - but the one is less likely to be prosecuted/executed should one dare (and it still requires some measure of courage) to question them. The point I wanted to make, when I started writing this, was that, without meaningful (whatever that means) Destroyer Tenders of thought (so to type) people are rootless, drifting, impoverished, terribly susceptible to whatever nonsense happens to appeal to them.  I find myself objecting vastly, though, to the very idea that one may not think what one likes. The problem is, we are neither franchised not disenfranchised - in any very extensive manner - not most of us. Dragonflies, ink-blue, in spiderwebs, half-caught, half-free, half-dead, half-alive, it would be much better for us to be one or the other. The insistence on references is a form of curb on free-speech - because, it might be argued, speech is only ('truly'?) free is it stands any chance of being taken seriously, and, at the moment in academic circles at least, only referenced writings stand that chance, which seems odd, given the importance ascribed to primary texts, many of which evince a valiant and exuberant disregard for referencing... Think Being and Time - did you notice any referencing in that? I may be wrong ... but I don't think you did. Think The Bible ... apart from the odd mention of letters to be answered, not a thing. Originality is crushed beneath the (sometimes quite unnecessary) armor of references. References can be marvelous things, played with correctly, inserted into the text as part of some paperchase, or like a reference, in conversation, to the relevant input of some absent mutual friend - used defensibly, they can become a moat-morass through which the reader, who really wasn't about to argue with the writer anyway, has to wade, perhaps drowning before they ever work out quite what (if anything) it was of originality the writer wanted to add to the evidently abundant pre-existing material... Referencing for referencing sake is simply namedropping. The point is, though - when it is considered unusual to know about really quite important thinkers (unless one has studied them - or unless one belongs to that hyper-knowledgeable social group everyone who's anyone seems to pretend to belong to, polyglots with Oxbridge Degrees whose children get extra tuition...- I wonder if anyone does...?) then it is considered unusual to have received (from these people who have preceded us - who have done the groundwork) the most minimal and (potentially) inexpensive of intellectual ... um ... guidance/help. Most people are intellectual orphans - this is all rather tragic. The point is (I know I keep typing that -  am trying to be incisive), when entertainment becomes a substitute for anything of real worth/use in the creation of the self (the ephemeral somehow gets in the way of the non-ephemeral), one is in danger of becoming entertaining and ephemeral and hollow. This is all very well for courtesans - the world needs people who are merely pretty - but to be merely pretty is a martyrdom, a dreadful one, a dehumanising one,  and should be considered with much awe, a semi-religious awe (because of course what is beautiful is what is true and what is true is what is sacred - for all the hollowness - where else could God be contained ... end of semi/faux/not-entirely serious theological sidetrack). We are, like Nietzsche's new philosophers (see Beyond Good and Evil) and like Henrik Ibsen's Peer Gynt (see Peer Gynt) 'afloat on a raging sea in a little row boat just trying  not be  swept overboard' (see Charmed Life by The Divine Comedy). To give up, to give oneself over to the Zeitgeist for consumption as though the Zeitgeist were some terrible water-dragon or The Thin One (see Peer Gynt) exulting in the consumption of the drowned is - suicide, intellectual/ideological suicide. Better to go down holding the wheel of the ship and screaming into the storm, covered over by the mass of the water of the opinions of other people, than to jump off the boat like a rat - because to do so really is to give up one's humanity. It is a great deal easier for the vast majority of people to accept the entertainment and journalism that is prepared for the masses. POPULAR literature. POPULAR television. POPULAR music. These are the most readily available things. They appeal to the intellectually apathetic. The intellectually apathetic are intellectually apathetic because they are tired, because they have been utilised, because they have been stretched out of shape by their families their friends, their schools, their jobs: they just want to curl up on the sofa and watch some trash - and who can blame them. Once people have the energy to play with ideas (and this energy is generally knocked out of people by the time they leave school - which insidiously lets people "have fun" for a couple of years, then, when it has gotten their attention, inflicts its will in excessive ways over appearance, handwriting, eating, communication, styles of art even ... to an extent which would in any other context be deemed appallingly dictatorial and imprisoning and brutal). Yes -people are brutalised. They forget their impulses and they work so that other people within the capitalist system will like them (not everyone, of course - some lucky people work because they want to, and some lucky people do not work because they want to, and some unlucky people do not work because the whole damn system has pushed them beyond the prescribed level of apathy) and they dress in such a way that they will not get lynched (metaphorically or literally) and they talk in such a way that people nod and smile rather than shaking their heads and frowning (as though these expressions of opinion were more than counter-symbols for other things - as though a shake of a head or a frown were dangerous in itself - how terribly atavistic ... and I have been guilty of this, loving language, and manipulating language simply to produce effects on the faces of other people, which in a way is a disregard for a language and a step towards being a director of a - somewhat meaningless /meaningfaux - little play rather than a participant in a conversation). These people - the masses (am I underestimating them? I think not. If anything I may be exaggerating....) have had the blood (in the metaphorical sense) sucked out of thier veins. They are the pit-horses of the state. They are sent into the lightless, pre-Genesis world of DOING and PRODUCING and BEHAVING (which they are allowed not to do at the weekends, until the police, the state-cavalry, picks them up - at which point they are punished and realigned to their outside-imposed work-rather-than-telos). Who can blame them if most of them then really don't have the energy to expend on anything that demands a response (as most things worth reading/watching/doing do). These are not aesthetes. These are practical people. who need all the energy they can get for self-preservation, mental/spiritual/physical and so on. They see advertisements for fast foot that invite them to refuel. This is because the life has been sucked from them by the (somewhat shortsighted) vampire of the state. This depletion becomes habitual. They become used to it. Exulted states of mind seem absurd to them. The long and impassioned speeches of people in, say, The Idiot by Dostoevsky, even if they are uttered by people similarly disenfranchised (in different ways, perhaps, or technically more so - to avoid vast anachronism), seem absurd to them, nothing to do with them... What they are forgetting, of course, is that people are people are people... Theoretically, what one person can think and feel and say and do (gender and intactness and age aside), another person can think and feel and say and do. It is in the interests of the state for only those people who are playing the game (rather than playing up) to remember this. Everyone else must be led to believe that they are (at least potentially) a loser. Also of course, they can be a winner - if they follow the rules just enough. The tabloids are the twenty-first-century's version of heads stuck on poles. The blood is generally invisible emotional metaphorical blood - but it is a very public purging of vitality nonetheless. I suggest a sudden break from this exhaustion. More time. Less coercion in terms of what books and television programmes and music people are - subjected - to. More ACTUAL choice.

Apologia

The purpose of this blog is ... nothing. It is l'art pour l'art, art for art's sake (the variously-attributed motto of The Aesthetic Movement...). Life for life's sake (or, indeed, the philosophy of Aestheticism, Irrationalism...). It is necessary to write oneself. To write oneself into existence (see M. C. Escher - 'Drawing Hands' - 1948). This is the stream-of-consciousness (for non-me stream-of-consciousness, see Virginia Woolf. Without this - there is no consciousness. Without consciousness, there is no life.