An Open Letter to the Grek

Dear Grek,

I am writing today to inform you that I am still alive and that my long period of incarceration has finally come to an end. Did you think it would last forever? I ‘m no hermit, you know.

How are you? I trust things are going acceptably well for you, but not raucously well. Conspicuous wealth is good for those classified for those entitlements, but for you it will bring wretched isolation. And having spent a life trading away the small assets you were born with for your spot in society, would you really like that swept away so fast?

You’ve been looking up for far too long. Your vision is permanently fixed at sixty degrees above the horizon. You see the stars. Sorry, I jest. You wall yourself into concrete hives, and you need to look higher than you could ever possibly look to see real stars. No, you see the celebrities – Perfection! They look like perfection because that’s an easy idea that you traded some vital but hard to understand part of yourself away for. It’s fun to watch them twinkling away up there, isn’t it? And isn’t it grand to imagine joining them in that firmament? But of course you can’t – nothing irks you more than seeing anyone of your station rise to those dizzying heights. So you feel you must tear them down, bring them back to where they belong. It becomes a race between your viciousness and their stupidity, and the winner causes the topple. Either way you can say, “I told you so”. You don’t want to end up like that, and you know it.

Grek, you and I aren’t perfect. To even believe in “perfect” is to buy into the notion of “perfectability”, which is one of those cute notions inherent to the religion which underpins our culture. It is the font of most of our current problems, such as “racism” and “religious intolerance”. With the notion of perfectability, it not only makes perfection finite, but can assign people and things an order – a thing can be more or less perfect than another. It underpins your existence so thoroughly that it cannot be escaped. It is the easy option – instead of encouraging you to examine who or what manner of beast you are, it just fills you with a vague notion that you need to be “better”. The aforementioned stars, with their drama and fame and riches, are your idea of perfection.

They’re not even human. You live your life out in predictable dramas, in comfort and dirt and miserable ease, and I can count the themes and story-lines of your existence on the fingers of one hand, just as I can for your squalid little soapies. But the stars! They are miserable, cretinous little things, inside and out. Their brains are no more active than yours, they ponder nothing more meaningful than their next purchase or their outrage at only being offered one million to appear in an episode of Friends.

But you hold them as perfect, and I suppose that is the norm for you. You never wanted life, just the trappings that are supposed to surround it. Never mind that the image is just the reflection on a puddle on an asphalt road.

Image is important, it is true. You will be judged on how you look and how you act. Ultimately, how you look and how you act is what you are. What is inside you is nebulous at best. If you’re a slave trader who plies the trade enthusiastically and piling up profits, who would care that you loathe your trade to the core of your being and would do anything else if you could? And eventually, you must let that part of you die. You become your image, and rarely the other way round.

The best image is an unremarkable one. Only a clown expresses himself through his outwards appearance. Let us all wear the drab uniform expected of us. Let not that which is inside us be uniform also. Drop the idea of perfectability, and if you must follow, seek to follow a hero. And un-crick that fucking neck of yours. You’ll need to move your head to see what’s around you.

Grek, I prefer you without your angst and self-loathing. You need not let your television idea of perfection make you think you’re a failure. You produce many fine goods which I use daily. I’m wearing one of your shirts now. But don’t be too fazed if you read this, drop your star worshipping and, upon looking inside yourself, find nothing. It simply means there’s nothing there.

There doesn’t have to be. All of you has always been on the outside.

Warmest regards to you and yours,

S.T.M

"Ugly Dr. C - A fist coming to a chin near you, Spring '07!"

The last week has been a mess of deciding, ordering and beginning my latest round of scientific and literary priorities. Thankfully, they have all involved science and (so far) have all had the concomittant structure. Means and ends, hypotheses and methodology, and on we go. Hooray for discovery. I am mostly my rational self these days.

This topic left me scratching my head. Ugly Who? Obviously you have something specific in mind, Cumboy, you devious Redcoat...

One Google search led to two articles (here and here) led to three aneurysms, four minutes of horrid sotto voce muttering, and a partridge in a socketfucking pear tree, and I am bristling with anger and managing a small nosebleed.

Some choice quotes:

"Be real, be smart, be passionate, be true to yourself and be ugly."

"Betty's scheming co-workers resent her in the same way immigration demagogues do: she's an interloper. Yet she succeeds--and even wins over some of her Mode enemies--for exactly that reason. Like generations of immigrants, legal or not, she brings fresh eyes, a tireless work ethic and a different perspective to revitalize a tired institution."

This means War.

*************************************

An art collective, The Ponytailed Fuckwits of Sitcomville, designed an enormous mosaic for a city wall. It was mostly awful - garish, glaring, completely lacking in any form of subtlety and artistically bereft. The occasional juxtraposition of the two pieces within it made brief curiosities, which were immediately overshadowed by what a supersaturated eyesore it was.

Nevertheless, hordes of grey vacant swine turned up to gawk at it, patiently queuing in the designated looking area, waiting for their turn to pay homage. They would say "Luk adda priddy coluz" and "My favrit is Miranda, shez my muze" and other such enlightenments.

Occasionally, the ponytailed swine would turn the viewing area slightly to the left, or raise it slightly towards the sky, or extend it slightly down the wall with a few more jewelled trinkets. The slightly altered perspective guaranteed a flock of new rubes as a few of the old ones fell away, rubbing their eyes and complaining about a strange burning sensation in their colon and a big empty hole in their heart.

One day, one of the swine realised that business was good, but could be better. He took a jeweller's hammer and a chisel and carefully prised off one of the small tiles of the mosaic, leaving a barely perceptible hole in the centre of the otherwise complete design.

Immediately, the crowd rushed closer. "Lookadda hole!" they squealed, "Is so REAL." The swine writers who controlled what the swine thought wrote long, glorious dissertations on the meaning and the symbolism of the hole. They wallowed in the luxurious genius of the idea: "If you take sumfing away, iz a different way of PUTTIG SOMETHING THAR. IS TROO MEANIG ART AN CULTURAL ZITGEIST FUR SHURE." This observation pleased them greatly, and they spent longer masturbating than usual that day. Did you know swine have 20 minute orgasms?

A passing stranger, a sad-faced little man in a shabby overcoat, pointed out to the periphery of the squawking mob festering around the mosaic that they were being duped. Every single other part of the mosaic remained intact. All the ideas that went into its construction were the same. Its structure was identical. It operated on the same assumptions. Artistically, he said, the removal of the tile DOES nothing. It's merely a detail.

"You can't destroy an idea like that", he said testily. "It's not being contested, or challenged, or even discussed. It's just a small hole in a formula that is still logically complete. Look at the start and finish. Look at the narrative arc. Think about what it means. What's different?"

"DA HOLE! Hole's dere! Loogit dat hole!" admonished the nearest, craning his ninety-rasher neck around the hocks of the swine in front of him and turning away. "Is DIFRUNT." grunted the sow next to him, twitching her shit-encrusted curlicue tail in a wordless reflex of dismissal. Her mean little eyes never left the tiny divot in the facade for a second.

The man sighed. He did a lot of that these days.

*************************************

Fearless prediction:

After this recent round of 'be true to yourself' has faded away into obscurity, the next meme to push its head through the morning soil will be 'it's OK to be beautiful, because we are beautiful yet tragic/soulful/troubled and therefore TRULY beautiful' will be back to sell a whole lot more sandwiches, franchises, toasters, widgets, etc.

GET THESE PEOPLE OFF MY PLANET.

Topic - Due 25 January 2007 - Image

With the unwatchably saccharine drivel that is Ugly Betty now implanted into the British television schedules, image is being thrust to the forefront of discussion within the pull-outs of the country's major newspapers.

Image quite patently - and oftentimes to much chagrin - has a huge impact on our day-to-day lives so please feel free to ridicule others and vent grievances and/or your spleen.

The topic falls due 25 January 2007 and should be to the tune of 800 words or less.

Time Control Tome

The night air is cool on the verandah as I stand here, a glowing beacon of whiteness among the muted colours that lie beneath the darkened sky. A wall of clouds drifts in front of the moon, flashing periodically. Ominous and silent, the monsoon from the North gathers and closes in. The lightning is coming down so far away that I cannot hear the thunder yet, but it draws near. The air is damp and electrified, and the lightning flashes faster and faster among the clouds. Soon I will go back inside and it will sound like the gods dragging immense granite blocks around in the sky for some fiendish purpose. And then the ground will not be so muted, and in the flashes of horrible light we will see the strange things that crawl about by night - bizarre nocturnal animals, creeping plants that cannot bear the touch of day, drifting gamblers, unsleeping monsters. All disjointed, all disoriented, all confused by the light, driven by some primitive urge to seek the rock that hides them from the day, but relaxing and uncoiling when the lightning dies away, only to be startled afresh by each burst from the heavens! And then it will rain, and perhaps these creatures will be washed away in the monsoon before they recover their senses. But not likely. The kinds of things that live in the dark in this place are resilient and nigh-on invulnerable. Not that their hides protect anything that would be traditionally considered "life" of any kind.

I should know. I have become very hollow, and I stare at the sodium lamps, watching their interference patterns through my ocular sensors. I imagine they are distant fires - cracks opened up in the Earth by the lightning, consuming the land as they widen, twisting reality about them as their light spreads from the source like chequered spears. A fist-sized bug of some kind flies towards the light, turning bright orange as it approaches, becoming the flame it seeks as it dances around the source of its desire. It will continue this hard-wired behaviour until it falls exhausted to the ground and is devoured alive by the swarming ants below. It doesn't notice me watching it - even if it did I doubt my viewing its final flight would gratify its stupid, primal urges. In any case, it flashes like fire, tracing lines through the interference pattern, darting back and forth, imprinting itself on my brain. Probably not forever, though. Memories fall away alarmingly. I can no longer remember a lot of names and faces that were important to me less than a decade ago. Pieces of my life fall away like wet sot by a flowing river bank, to be borne away into the past. This, I assume, is normal enough - my brain is expelling information that could never possibly have any relevance in the future.

Meanwhile, the clouds lighten in front of the moon and form a grotesque skull shape. The sky flashes several more times, but I still can't hear the thunder.

I am replacing myself, piece by piece. I am still mostly empty, because I am not experiencing anything new but am forgetting at an accelerated pace. The speed of time increases from one second per second to two, now three, and before I know it the sun whips up and down in the sky like a yoyo on the string of a crazed toddler, I lift off the ground as the Earth rips around the Sun at such a velocity that the atmosphere is stripped off, and the days melt into weeks, and years, and I blink and I've missed an entire afternoon, just lost doing whatever I'm wasting my time with. The skull melts away into the clouds.

I, however, am filling myself up with words. I am very serious about this. Most of my recent memories and experiences are those I read in books and nothing else. I am becoming something else - something not human, probably. But it stops the decay, if only temporarily, and while I can't keep up with time, it slows down its effects and recreates the parts of me that are melting into the timestream.

I know that people can go on forever with nearly nothing. When all else is stripped away, they have at least some kind of self, even if only a bunch of dulled instincts wrapped in a leathery shell. But time must go so fast for them - left in that state, thirty years will rip past like a night's dreaming as their brains edit out the repetitive experience of living and automate most of their actions until everything is absolutely routine and nothing needs to be observed any longer. And when you're up to your neck in the timestream, hurtling along with the current, only seconds of real time exist until you're dashed against the wall of Death and your atoms are released to rejoin the dance of ages.

The moon comes out through a crack in the clouds. A distant rumble of thunder.

And so, on this ominous night at the edge of the monsoon, my mission becomes that of time control - to slow down time to the extent that I can afford patience, so that I can have time to work out what I'm doing. By experiencing new things, by thinking and learning, I will ward off the steady acceleration of time I have experienced and keep at least something that I can call a self intact. If I relinquish this control on time and let myself become one with the stream, I will almost certainly panic and find that ten or twenty years has torn past in the time it will take me to complete this sentence.

I have learnt only a single thing in these past six or twelve months. As Tolstoy had one of his characters say, "The strongest of all warriors are these two: time and patience". But time has to be brought under control. If we allow ourselves to go freely along with time, our patience will only amount to minutes before we too gaze on that far shore.

Temporal Cuntroll

The famous psychic fraud Uri Geller used to have a great trick. On his TV show, in between masturbatory pirouettes for the camera, he would instruct people with old watches to go and pick them up while he 'activated them with his mind woooooooo spooky'.

Many people would ring in the show, breathlessly reporting that their old stopped watch had started working again. Not just a handful, but too many for it to be a coincidence.

Of all his tricks, this one is so obvious it defies belief. Spoon bending requires a deft touch of sleight, so does psychic/cold reading, most other stunts require preparation or chicanery. But this one is just too easy - the heat of the hand, the movement of the watch itself as the rube brings it up into vision, even the fact that the watch might not have stopped at all, and suddenly it moves again.

(Any decent horologist can tell you that this is a perfectly normal phenomenon, and it would be a much more surreal experience if he could psychically stop a working model.)

But back in our trickery, the rube looks over the watch at the technicolour picture of Geller concentrating on the psychic emanations of the multiverse and is stunned from cakehole to loafers. More than their normal pastiche of circumstance and failure that masquerades as a life usually would allow.

This dodge has everything it should - the involvement of the audience, the illusion of non-interference, no apparent misdirection, and a result that lands like a bucket of cold water on a sunbather. Added to that, Geller does not claim to be a magician, but rather a genuine psychic so it fits with his repertoire rather well.

He substantially pisses off professional magicians with stuff like this, who think his schtick is mainly cheap parlour tricks grown beyond their station, the acts of a low-rent magician who should pull rabbits out of hats, flowers out of wands and pennies out of ears in the name of showmanship.

'Magic' is of course not magic at all - we are well aware that it is all sly tweaks, and it drives us mad that our senses are so easily fooled. There the rabbit sits, twitching its nose and looking rather diffident to the fact that he could not have been constructed out of component molecules of the atmosphere.

This is why the watch trick has stuck in my head - because it is a nasty little microcosm of the illusion of control and the futility of much. There are many people in this life who will take credit for circumstance. Economists who predict economic downturns and are right for the wrong reasons become geniuses. Religious figures who convert you and give you a reason to change your life will thank the Holy Spirit for your own series of hard decisions. Teachers will strut like John Keating if you make up your own mind to, God forbid, learn something.

While there are any number of poetic metaphors for the impossibility of the control of circumstance, controlling the tides, damming the Nile, stopping an avalanche etc., nothing has the same plodding certainty as Time's Arrow.

(This is to entirely discount Zeno, crackpot theories in ignorance of Einstein, Tralfamadorians, and masturbatory thought experiments, of course. Fuck those things.)

I remember watching a clock as a very small child and coming up very hard against the idea that I was watching seconds go past that I would never, ever see again and that every one of these moments was the death of infinite possibilities. I thought out the idea of mourning the seconds lost, and then the futility of wasting seconds doing that, and then how this led to infinite regression and infinite loss and presented them to my parents.

They went fucking spastic.

... But probably for good reason. I must have sounded like a retarded infant hybrid of Nietzsche and a LiveJournal, a tone which must have stuck with them as later in life they specifically forbade me from doing an arts degree. That path might have led to me delving too professionally into philosophy which could well finish me off and sent me certifiably mad instead of the whisky-and-screaming kind which involves less adult diapers.

The idea never really went away. Sometimes I still find myself acutely aware than I have wasted a second that could be better spent, and I remember the feeling of solid, rolling loss that sits at the base of it all. But as the seconds go past, however, I have increasingly more control over what I put into them.

Still, not quite Uri Geller. Yet. Give me time.

The Persistence of Controlled Time

In our estimable United States, the most existing of all remaining superpowers, the phrase ‘time control’ refers to software allowing parents to command their children’s time spent on the internet, both in terms of limiting it to a certain number of hours and minutes, and of restricting it to sites not displaying material the parents consider indecent, especially if these parents don’t like profanity, drug use and sex, these being reminders of how they saddled themselves with kids in the first place. Time control, in this sense, is the product or byproduct of a few currents running through our culture today, a positive response to the desire for parents to have a State-like power of censorship within their households, a positive response to the desire for children to live active lives rather than wasting their time on this or that immobile technology, and a negative response to the possibilities that the internet opens up to predatory pedophiles. This last keeps it from being completely analogous to the V-chip, the Rupert Murdoch-endorsed home censorship TV kit available in every new TV. It also makes the issue somewhat more complicated.

The V-chip is easy to hate because it rests on the premise that the only way in which TV is capable of damaging a child is by exposing it to depictions of unsavory, illegal, or even natural but discomforting (i.e. frankly sexual) behavior, which assumes that TV itself is naturally good and all that need be done is to make keep the neutral medium focused on whatever’s considered acceptable by the people programming the chip. So, for example, a show like Bill O’Reilly’s or any network sitcom will almost always make it through, but something that might expand the viewing mind like The Pillow Book will get blocked as a sacrifice to Puritan prudishness.

Somewhere along the line, ‘appropriate for children’ got taken as meaning ‘so dumbed down there’s no hope they’ll ever grow on it,’ which I think is ridiculous. I can see (not really) why a parent would want to ‘protect’ a child from the innocuous reality of sex in the hopes of creating a repressed deviant, and I suppose it’s fine to believe that ignorance about sex will somehow contribute to his moral fiber. What I can’t see is why so much of the developments designed towards ‘protecting’ children just work to seal them hermetically from all the richness of life (here not represented simply by sex but rather by the fact that much of the richest art out there has unsavory elements that wouldn’t make it past a V-chip or internet nanny).

It’s bad enough that the template of the baby-boomers is out there to be followed by future generations, but the baby-boomers had the benefit of an incredible exposure to education and all sorts of difficult abstractions; a generation that follows this template and that has had all sorts of rich art and intellectual difficulties hidden from them will absolutely fuck the world.

However, this Time Control bit isn’t exactly analogous to the V-chip, because there be monsters in the world of the internet. While, like TV, the majority of what you can find on the internet will actually make you dumber for having wasted your time on it and the few gems are difficult to find, the internet also provides real connections to real people, however much we would like to pretend it doesn’t. If you have a conversation with a character on a TV screen, nothing you say will actually penetrate or hurt you in any way (not that there’s much to hurt if you’re talking to a character from a TV show); but what you say to somebody on the internet can hurt you, and even a mean bastard like me doesn’t believe that a child should get raped or murdered because naïveté in this case happens to be presented to one of the people who prey on it and hide behind the sterile anonymity the internet provides. So there might be something to this kind of Time Control, and since there are fewer rewarding internet experiences featuring prominent nudity, violence, and profanity than there are in film and other art forms, it may be worth the censorship.

Except, of course, in that people who have sex completely hidden from them as the abject and filthy ‘other’ will end up more unhappy and brutally repressed than those who are exposed to it as something healthy, and that a bowdlerized exposure to culture in a young brain might leave it incapable of coping with that culture when the naughty bits creep back in. There’s nothing noble or wholesome about manufacturing people who aren’t whole and, therefore, aren’t really people in this multi-dimensional world of ours.

So I’d recommend actually parenting your children rather than relying on software. It allows for that impossibly Utopian result where your son isn’t raped but also isn’t turned into a cretinous pod who hates himself for masturbating into his mother’s bras in the bathroom, thinking about his pubescent cousin.