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?

    

  

Struggles with Epiphenomenalism

As regular reader's of my alter-ego's Facebook page may already be aware I have been obsessing about epiphenomenalism for the last two days. Broadly speaking this is the theory in Philosophy of Mind that mental activity (beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.) are caused by physical activity of the brain and that mental events do not cause physical events whilst appearing to do precisely that.


Clear?


When Samuel Johnson first heard of George Berkeley's perfectly reasonable yet totally ridiculous theory that there are only mental phenomena and what we think of as the Universe of matter is not there when unobserved, he said "I refute it thus" and kicked a stone.  Obviously, that was no kind of refutation at all - as everything he could know about the stone (from the sensation of his foot's impact to the sight of its trajectory to the sound of its thudding into a pile of discarded dictionary manuscripts) would have come to him through his senses and therefore be mental phenomena.


I'm a bit of a fan of Berkeley because he is the battiest of the British Empiricists.  An Idealist in the original sense of the word - he believed the world was made up only of minds and their ideas.  Clearly, an altogether more beautiful theory than the ugly epiphenomenalist viewpoint of mind as a sort of fluff to the brain's bellybutton.  Clearly also batshit crazy.  We can't have a Universe which only exists when bits of itself are watching it.  In fairness, Berkeley was aware of this problem and adopted the tactic favoured by most early modern philosophers of wheeling on God at the last minute. I don't want to get sidetracked into theology, but basically if you ever find yourself in the 17th Century and there is a massive flaw in your philosophical argument, just say "God does that bit" and everybody will nod sagely and probably make you a bishop or something. 


So, reluctantly, I reject Idealism on these grounds.  But I cannot embrace epiphenomenalism because it goes against the very grain of human experience. It is my intention to write 1000 words a day that leads to me (very occasionally) doing so.  My brain isn't just telling my fingers to type words and at the same time causing me to think that I had intentions to type them.  Or is it?  If epiphemomenalism is true then we lose Free Will and I rather like my will being free.  I like willing myself to freely stay in bed for instance.  And there are countless other examples of free things I willingly do - like nap and procrastinate.  Actually they are bad examples because they are the sort of things that a brain can get on and do without the mind getting involved and insisting on some Free Will action.

How would an epiphenomenalist account for this?

On Nomenclature

All of a sudden, I have a niece.  After nine months discussion, the parents have decided to call her Molly Rose.  A beautiful name which is also a complete sentence.  Molly rose.  I was thinking a lot about the process of naming and made up (or possibly remembered) this riddle:

What is the only thing that has ever named itself?

Answers in the comments please.  A small prize may be awarded.


The only living thing I have ever had to name is my cactus 'Spike' (left beside a nameless wooden chicken).  I've named a few lifeless things: characters in stories, and poems and blogposts.I am particularly bad at naming poems. I used to have a tendency to be super tangential or a touch grandiose.  Examples from my earliest journal that is still extant include: "One point zero times ten to the power of three." (Actually quite a sweet ditty about unrequited love for a classmate.) Or (I kid you not) "Teenage rebellion, the great social rebellion and the establishment of the socialist church." I like to think I had the same concerns as any other 14 year old.


These days, of course, I frequently don't bother naming them at all.  But seeing as today's theme is nomenclature, I think I'll call this one "The Island and the City":


The Island and the City


The woman in the shadows 
Drags her childhood from the light,
Darkness masks the scars 
Of lovers parting out of sight.
Sunset on the city walls,
The island calls again.
Hampered by near blindness, 
Told to pause and count to ten.
The island or the city?
Choose the pavement or the beach.
The streetlights make the pebbles 
Seem much further out of reach.
Chained to smoke-free chimney stacks
And aching for a key,
She bends her ear to seashells, 
Hears the whispering of the sea.
Echoes from the decades past
Are drowning out the waves.
All her childhood fantasies
Of coracles and caves
Are fogged up by the city smog
And rumbling traffic noise.
Can't she hear that dream-whipped 
Lonely child's pleading voice
Crying in the darkness: 
"Give the island one more chance,
I lived and loved a lifetime 
Where you learned to play and dance.
Buccaneers and smugglers 
Beckon wreckers to the shore.
There's treasure to be found
And secret tunnels to explore!"
The city or the island? 
Choose the crowds or solitude.
But it's a false dichotomy 
Her judgement has been skewed
In favour of the city lights 
By habit death and debt.
The island lives in dreams 
And secret moments of regret.

On the origins of Finnginn

The blogosphere has been abuzz with discussion about why I post under the pseudonym Finnginn. The truth of the matter has nothing to do with Michael Fassbanger (sic)'s upcoming role in Jane Eyre and I'm not sure that Finnginn even rhymes with St John which (in the Westcountry, at least) is usually pronounced "sinjun".


Finnginn (or sometimes Fiengins) was the name of the imaginary friend I had from around the time I learned to talk to around the time I started school and made an actual friend.  And let me tell you, ubilol, "cutesy and asinine" he was not.  In just the few of his many adventures that I can still recall - he fought valiantly against armies of troll-like bullies, survived some kind of torture machine that looked a lot like Bertha (only scarier) and crossed a tentacle infested marshland based loosely on the bathroom floor of my first house.  A hero, a Beowulf, a Jungian archetype fully formed in the imagination of a pre-schooler.  What better service could I pay his memory than name a blog about procrastination after him.