Giant nuclear ape

In an earlier post, I mooted the idea of changing the banner at the top of this blog to better reflect its nature now that I am teetotal, debt free and no longer writing a novel. Okay I lied about the first two and the third is the subject of this entry.

How on earth did I think, three years ago, that writing a novel would be a good thing to do with a hangover and that it might solve my debt problems? Everybody knows the only way to pay off debts is to borrow more from another provider and hope that your future self will be better equipped to deal with the problem than you are. Hangovers are even easier: just wash down a double dose of ibuprofen with my patented ratio of orange juice and bubbly water and you'll be back down the pub in no time.

Hangovers and debts are BAD reasons to write a novel. A plausible good reason might be that you can't work out how to change the banner at the top of your blog or that you are a self-obsessed pseudo-existentialist with too much time on his hands. As I fit both these categories, I thought it high time I had another go at a longer project. And this time, I thought, just for a different challenge: no time-travel, spaceships or zombies.

You are probably thinking that I have set too hard a task for myself and you're probably right. I'll probably run out of steam and have to introduce an improbable apocalyptic event (supervolcano, anyone?) at about 15000 words, but for the time being my theme is rural decline due to the evils of capitalism (and definitely not the ravishings of a giant nuclear ape created in a secret government experiment).

As an inveterate city dweller who tends to rise at the crack of noon, I am obviously ill-suited to tackle this subject on imagination alone. So I e-mailed one of my contacts in the farming industry (oh alright, my brother) and asked him to describe milking procedures to me in a few brief lines which he duly did and, well, I never drank that much milk anyway and its amazing what they can do with almonds these days.     

Nodding off

I'm something of a champion sleeper - averaging about 10 hrs a day. A casual reader will be able to infer two facts from this:
that I have no children and I don't drink caffeinated beverages. Readers who know me, of course, know that I am just bone idle!


Peaceful lethargy


Spending time in bed
I love days like these
Lying like I'm dead
In peaceful lethargy.
Light a cigarette
Play an old LP
Maybe I'll forget
To get up today.
I have drunk and danced
And taken drugs instead
But given half a chance
I'd rather stay in bed.


Occasionally, however, this very laziness can lead to a seeming paradox: I find myself unable to sleep but unwilling to get up. The classic solution to this is to count sheep. As a child, I remember trying this and not being very good at it. I still don't know if you are supposed to imagine a field full of static sheep and count each one or are you supposed to count them as they move through a gate from one field to a neighbouring one? Both methods have their problems.  In the 'static' scenario - it is very difficult to hold the image in your head whilst you count and in the moving scenario it is very easy to miss one unless you imagine a very narrow gate of the sort more commonly used for humans than livestock. For instance, a sheep could not navigate a kissing gate.

I solved this conundrum by just counting numbers instead. Although after a while I found this a little slow and so started doubling numbers instead.


Slightly off topic, but the highest number in my Penguin dictionary of curious and interesting numbers is Graham's Number. This links to a short description of it that ends with a sort of joke.

On Moving

I recently moved in with my girlfriend, Charlie. Moving house takes longer each time I do it. I don't know why I accumulate so much paper. Always a chance for a good sort out, I finally threw out all my university notes (after a quick glance to confirm my suspicion that I would never need to enlighten myself or others about Bare Phase Structure again). However I can never bring myself to part with old journals, scribbled notes and half finished poems. The reason moving house takes longer each time I do it is that I like to sit down and re-read all of these before deciding that I can't bear to part with them.


Increasingly, this blog has become a place where I like to share these poetic or philosophical musings with my loyal core of followers (Hi!). I should really get around to changing the banner at the top as I haven't been writing a novel for about two years now (although I did recently almost complete a short story about some ladybirds).


My hero, the poet Adrian Mitchell (whom I was privileged to meet on three occasions and with whom I once shared a lift from Bridport to Dorchester) told me that if you ever write a poem for someone you should share it with them. This next, I wrote over a decade ago for a girl on another continent that I fell in love with when I was 17. I found it tucked into a journal of abandoned playscripts and an essay on morality that I appear to have cribbed from Plato.  


A Song for...


When the air was full of music
And the sky was full of stars,
When we sat and watched the Arkansas
And dreamt the world was ours.
When the nights were lit by moonlight
And the days afire with sun,
When we drove up through the mountains
Or to Pueblo just for fun.
When time was an illusion
And hours could seem like days,
When your smile was full of laughter
Or your angry eyes ablaze.
When the room was filled with blue grey smoke
Drawing patterns in the air,
When we stopped and talked for hours with friends
And when no-one else was there.
When we swapped our life experience,
Our sorrows and our joys,
When I think I see your puzzled face
Or hear the softest voice.
My mind is full of memories
Of the times we had back then,
When you reach out - I'll hear your call
And I'll come back to you again.


And in the shadow of the hills,
Beneath your mournful gaze,
I'll hold your hand in silence
And we'll dream of future days.      

Xmas traditions.

Xmas is one of my favourite times of year - a true atheistic celebration of gluttony and commercialism. I like to indulge in bankrupting displays of vulgar drunkenness from Xmas's official start (the first time you hear 'Fairytale of New York' whilst shopping in Morrison's) right through to its official end on New Year's Day.

I wrote this poem celebrating Xmas in the summertime, but have waited until now to publish it here.

Secret Santa

Eyes shut, hand in and pick a name.
Twenty quid, compulsory game
With everyone a winner.
Picked a girl (let's call her Kirsty)
A cousin from my new step-family:
A result that left me in a
Quandary - wondering what to do?
How to please a girl I hardly knew?
A girl who's probably got all
Her own ideas, her own perspective.
Earrings? No, that's too subjective.
Then I saw it: Aristotle's
Nichomachean Ethics: Dare I
Buy her this book I love and share my
Love of rational thought with her?
She'll probably thank me years from now
"That book changed my life, Finn, Wow!"
In the end, I thought I'd best defer
To my new step-sister, who said I'd lost
All sense and took me down to Argos
To buy hair straighteners. 

Coming to terms with the Antipodean Fallacy

Here in the grim upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere where the low grey clouds oppress the spirit and the most dangerous animal a philosopher might encounter on a typical day is a Harlequin Ladybird, it is very easy to imagine that there is no such thing as The Real World. 


However, in the scorching heat of the Australian desert where the terrain, the flora and the fauna have all been out-competing each other in the viciousness stakes for Millennia, the philosophers tend to assume that the world is real and start their musings from there without bothering to establish it. This is known as the Antipodean Fallacy. Or so I was led to believe by a lecturer at the University of East Anglia. When I came to google the phrase as research for this post, I found out that, until now, those two words have never been put together on the whole of the internet. 


Skeptics have been doubting the existence of The Real World since Zeno of Elea noticed that a running man could not reach his destination because he would have to cross half the remaining distance an infinite number of times. A solution to this paradox can be found here, but it may hurt your eyes.


Descartes managed to doubt everything except the fact that he was doubting and then confusingly attempted to rebuild all knowledge from that foundation of doubt - with a little help from God (he was after all an Early Modern Philosopher).


These sorts of ideas have held an immense appeal for me since I was a teenager. I thought: let's start at the beginning with "What is it possible to know?"  Anyway, turns out the answer is "Not very much."  Even Descartes' famous "cogito ergo sum" has been watered down by subsequent thinkers to something along the lines of "there was a thought".  And I don't think we are going to be able to deduce rice pudding and income tax (let alone all knowledge) from a remark as wet as that one.


So maybe the Australians have got it right? Perhaps a better starting point is to adopt the Antipodean Fallacy and ask: "What is it possible to know about the Real World?" The answer is probably: "Not bloody much, mate?" 

On the false duality of optimism and pessimism.

Once, in a science lesson in school, I innocently described a beaker or test-tube or something as half-empty and my lab partners leaped upon my choice of phrase to brand me as a pessimist.  The use of the phrase alone seemed to make one a pessimist, regardless of the circumstances - forget that I was describing a copper sulphate solution (or some-such) not a pint of beer. I thought this a little unfair. Even describing a pint of beer as half empty should not exclude one from optimism. Compare:


This pint of Guinness is half empty - better get another one settling. 


Anyone want another one? Not you, Finnginn, yours is still half full.


The optimist/pessimist distinction has been bothering me recently as I'm starting to see it as a particularly good example of what Jacques Derrida (in one of his saner rants) might describe as a false duality. Are we really one thing or the other or are they just unhelpfully stark labels to pin on the complex human behaviour of thinking about the future. 


Generally, I am optimistic about my prospects for the following day: Have a lie-in, break my fast leisurely, write a thousand words (ha!), wander off to meet friends/go to work, glass of wine/hot chocolate before bed and repeat being my recipe for the perfect life.


However, I am pessimistic about the future of humankind. Whenever I think about the far future - I see catastrophe. Not in a Cassandra/Nostradamus weird prophetic way. There is a logic behind my pessimism that goes something like this: You can't avoid an apocalyptic event forever.  Even if we survive the immediate threats that we could actually do something about (e.g. nuclear holocaust, global warming, overpopulation, pathogen immunity to antibiotics and the sudden disappearance of all the bees) which seems drastically unlikely, we still have all the threats about which we can do little or nothing (asteroid strikes, super volcanoes, gamma ray bursts, the Sun's expansion and ultimately the heat death of the Universe). At some point there is going to be a pretty fucking miserable generation of humans.


But even within this pessimistic tapestry, I want to weave a thread of optimism. For humanity I hope, even as it destroys itself, will find time to grieve and love and laugh.  It is this theme that I have been attempting to address in these notes I have made for a work-in-progress poem in the apocalypse genre: 


We looked East to the blackening sky,
Behind us the clouds were turning red.
The floor, with her tortured silhouette,
Tattooed forever on my mind.
The fear hit us on the sickening breeze
And we hid by day and spent our nights
In search of dust-free sustenance.
Made defiant love. Coughed up blood.
You marched us miles on weakening limbs,
Made smiles glimmer on our blistered lips,
Lit fire when cold left us shivering.
Now all is starless, moonless night. 

Pantoums

Everybody loves a good pantoum (except, apparently, the blogger spellchecker which has underlined it in an ugly red squiggly line.  But seeing as how it doesn't even recognise its autobackformed verb 'to spellcheck', I don't think we need to take its opinion very seriously).

Warning: there will be some name-dropping of some British poets in the following paragraphs. 

I was introduced to the pantoum by Simon Armitage in 1994 and wrote maybe a dozen or so over the following decade. Many of the early ones did not survive the infestation of mice in my bedside cabinet while I was away travelling in the late Nineties. But this one (the second I ever wrote, if memory serves) illustrates pretty neatly where I was at, in terms of pantoum composition, at the age of 14 - it's pretty cringey in parts and suffers from the appalling naming problem I lamented here, but ends with a run-on that, half a lifetime later, I'm still absurdly proud of.

Human Rights Frustration

In the dark, with a knife, in the moonlight, it gleams.

'A life for a life,' the Sun headline screams,

'How many killers have had life then gone free?'

How many people executed wrongly?

'A life for a life,' the Sun headline screams.

They all think that's fair (except me, it seems)

How many people executed wrongly?

How many locked up with a thrown away key?

They all think that's fair (except me, it seems)

But who listens to me? My views are extreme.

How many locked up with a thrown away key?

It's an innocent life, but you can't fucking see.

But who listens to me? My views are extreme.

'How many killers have had life then gone free?'

It's an innocent life, but you can't fucking see

In the dark, with a knife, in the moonlight, it gleams.

Those of you who know me can probably see why I'm so drawn to the pantoum format.  The compulsory repetitions make it a bit like solving a crossword puzzle.  The pantoum writer constantly has to ask himself: 'How can I make this make sense in both bits of the poem?' And, as the above example demonstrates, frequently he fails.  But occasionally you get a moment of sublime satisfaction (like the '...can't fucking see / In the dark...' run-on) that makes the whole enterprise thoroughly worthwhile.

Anyway, skip forward 12 years to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in summer 2006.  I was sitting eating my breakfast and had switched on the news to the images of air-raids and bombing runs that precede any modern war.  I was filled with an intense self-loathing for the ennui I felt about war-reporting.  How I wasn't at all shocked by exploding buildings or wailing mothers or refugees.  How it all seemed like a steady repetitive backdrop to the last decade of my life.  From the bombing of Sarajevo, when I really cared and would shout to anybody who would listen about Thomas Deichman, Fikret Ali, and ITN's libel case against left-wing magazine LM.  To that moment when I thought - 'I don't want to watch more war, I wonder if Shipwrecked is on.'  

And then it occurred to me: '...steady repetitive backdrop... a pantoum would be the perfect form to reflect these emotions!'

So here it is:

Live in your Living Room

Now that we can watch them making war

On CNN, Sky News and Channel Four

The missiles don't rain 'Shock and Awe'

Just daily deaths in blood and gore.

On CNN, Sky News and Channel Four,

The journalists are keeping score

Of daily deaths in blood and gore

For us - who've seen it all before.

The journalists are keeping score

Of bodies in a foreign war

For us - who've seen it all before.

But do we ask what the fighting's for?

For bodies in a foreign war

The missiles don't rain 'Shock and Awe'.

But do we ask what the fighting's for

Now that we can watch them making war?