Chill out in our heated garden!

18kW of heating for three cunts smoking fags outside the pub.

If I sit near an air conditioner, I crisp up. They burn my skin. Cold, dry death pours from them. 3kW pumped into the atmosphere to cool the Firetrap concession in the men’s clothing department of House of Fraser.

The resource wars of the 2020s were hilarious: they were fought definitionally because we were running out of exactly the things we needed to build technologically advanced weapons, it was decreed by those in social strata high above the melee that the fighting should be fought with rusty old crowbars and blunt knives. And as we had plenty of people, but little energy, the dwindling spoils would go to the side with the largest army, the most aggressive warriors. The solution was personnel-intensive and exciting to watch, if you could afford not to fight and to own a television.

A group of schoolchildren young enough to wear that “disproportionately large brain casing” look flow past the window of the cafe, onto the pavement of St Johns Hill, mingling with passers by, walking past newspaper hordings: Joesf Fritzl pleads guilty; Jade Goody’s mother breaks down in tears outside her daughter’s house; Jade Goody’s eyes sink into their sockets. This is the age of high-definition, high-speed data that hoses continuity of thought, washes the wisdom from our collective mind.

We’ve been pumping entropy out of our stupid boat, and we’re about to be broadsided by a huge wave.

The ego is a self-perpetuating, self-defending language-tornado, an autopoetic complex of ideas about What You Are – although the ideas aren’t really about You qua You at all, they’re about each other. Self-supporting threads of illusion from which a straw man self-weaves. The ego is a spinning-together of an ecosystem of linguistic thoughts. Our raw, animal consciousness/awareness is infected, and often obscured, by the linguistic ego: we bocome aware of ideas, not of the present moment. Perhaps a major part of the responsibility of a parent is to ease a child through the development of the ego: to help it deal with the suffering that can so easily result from linguistic identification of self with ego, with ideas.

“You are so naughty,” says a mum to her daughter, dragging her by her arm away from the sugar station.

It’s us or the air conditioning. Destroy air conditioning.

And if there isn’t a clumsy dumbing-down of Gerald Edelman’s ideas about consciousness as a beautifully structured and complex re-entrant tumble of activity in neural pathways in this blog already, then that’s a glaring omission which I’m sure will be corrected before too long.

And obviously, this project is literally all about the string: seeing the world as emerging from the spinning together and the unravelling or fraying of… entities which themselves emerge from the spinning together and unravelling of other entities…

So tonight I was at a Buddhism discussion session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre. The session focussed on Ethics. There was a quote in the reading material for the previous week about ethical living tending to generate conditions which help improve the quality of meditation, and ease the path to the gaining of wisdom. I was reminded of it tonight, and it felt quite powerful, and I had a quick mental image of ethical progress feeding into progress in meditation, which then led to wisdom and conditions which made ethical decisions easier in the future.

The vision was quite abstract: slightly like a celtic knot, but always in motion. Like porpoise acrobatics, three dolphins tumbling around each other. But… it was saying that progress towards a Buddhist style of improvement emerges from the interaction of ethics, meditation, and insight. Each drives the other on. I’m very tempted to call it a virtuous cycle but that would be to impoverish this vision of how the process flows, because I think it might be exactly the same process that Edelman describes when he talks about the spinning-together of consciousness from recursively stimulating, pseudo-cyclic, tumbling, rolling neural activity. And if we accept the claims of atomist chemists and physicists – that interactions between objects are based on interactions between atoms, between electrons in orbit around atomic nuclei – then, at a sub-atomic level, the relationships that hold a bench or a chair together are also mediated by tumbling, intertwining electrons and nuclei.

Which means that, when you study one aspect of a whole Thing, or topic, you’re probably studying a thread which tumbles around and facilitates or hinders or becomes other threads; and that it’s the total interaction of those threads that spins the whole Thing together.

Metta Bhavana (development of loving-kindness) today, and the first time I’ve been to a Centre session for a couple of years. New faces, but on the way in I experienced an interesting feeling of something like “You should definitely be doing this.”

The session leader was talking about imagining the various people we were visualising throughout the various stages of the meditation, then noting our response to them, and sitting with the response, whether positive or negative, for a while before gently trying to suggest a more positive response.

I thought that was very interesting – I had a quick chat with her afterwards and she was saying that she’d struggled herself with “wishing people well,” chanting to the visualised characters, “may you be happy,” because she eventually felt that she was missing her own, genuine response to them. I’ve got a feeling I’m so left-brain that it’ll be years before I even connect with my genuine responses to the people I visualise during a Metta Bhavana meditation, but that idea of separating the wishes you’re chanting from your own emotional responses, then responding to the response with loving-kindness, struck a chord.

Just thought I’d note it here, so I can mull it again later.

Ten to fifteen years ago, one of these mantras seemed to hold that language marked us out as being amazing: we can discover, and share with each other, the nature of the world, the truth about the universe. But subsequent experience and different channels of reading have left me thinking that language’s descriptive aspect is actually quite patchy – possibly so patchy that, the more you examine it, the more you find that any meaningful truth is either (1) not really meaningful, (2) false, or (3) inexpressible in language.

Which leaves us viewing language as a medium in which a species of animal coordinates its social, tribal interactions. From the inside, it feels meaningful; from the outside (and this would mean outside the realm of human affairs), it looks like social coordination.

Ants communicate in a chemical medium: hormones and gastric exchange. Bluntly stated, ants sick up on each other to “tell each other [things like] that the nest needs patching” – or, viewed from the outside, to coordinate processes like nest-patching behaviour. Our anthropomorphic tendency to attribute perceived meaning to the antpuke (”my regurgitated fishcakes mean mend the roof“) stems from the way we feel meaning ourselves. When we look at ants, it’s easy to see through the illusion: it makes sense that the puked-on ant isn’t really thinking, “Crikey, really? A hole in the nest? The rain will get in, we can’t have that. I should do my duty and go to help.”

But… to what extent is the meaning that we ourselves feel really, really meaningful? Ants don’t coordinate their behaviour in language, but then we’re not very good at coordinating our behaviours by throwing up on each other. “Look, it must be human beings’ way of coordinating vomit-cleaning behaviours.”

Just to drift immediately off at a tangent…

Until recently there was an unintelligible shop there, which sold a weird sub-set of the set of all viscous liquids, from enormous and multi-lobed bottles. At first I thought that it was a viscous gift shop – exotic oils and syrups – but in fact the range was far more esoteric than that. Imagine having a strangely shaped stroke to the left hemisphere which leaves you profoundly agnosic, able to recognise only a handful of really unusual things. But you’ve got to make a living, and you’ve just signed a lease on the stall. So you somehow persuade a fully brained-up friend into laying the catalogues out on what you would, before the stroke, have known as a table, and buy stock of anything that you can name out loud from a picture: coolants, lubricants, alginate gels; isinglass, sugar soap concentrate; the synovial fluid of butchered cattle; acrylic monomers; the seminal fluid of dogs; sap. I don’t think the stall’s there any more. Perhaps its business model would have been better suited to online sales channels, or perhaps there was another stroke. I can’t think what’s there in its place, either. Perhaps I’ve had a stroke myself.

But anyway.

I’m walking down the passageway and this woman stamps in off the street, dragging her two-year-old daughter and shriek-barking over her shoulder, “She. Is. Only. A. CHIYULDDD! You are a RUDE! And IGNORANT! MAN!!”

Hammering down the corridor. “How DARE you? You are RUDE! And IGNORANT!”

At that moment, around the door frame appears a frail, bookish-looking, late-middle-aged asian gentleman: about five feet five inches in height, fifty or sixty years old; back bent from a life of cataloguing things or correcting the content of ledgers. He looks like he’s about to speak, but doesn’t quite dare. He tentatively raises a hand, his fingers shaking, and she screams over her shoulder, “HOW DARE YOU?” The accountant is close to tears, cringing behind his bifocals. “You are RUDE, and IGNORANT!”

She drags the little girl into the children’s clothing department of Allders, spitting at the child, “He is so RUDE! How DARE he?” – raising blisters on the toddler’s scalp with her hatebreath.

I can’t imagine what the poor guy’s done; he doesn’t look like the racially-motivated-wang-exposing sort.

I was left wondering whether moods or emotional “states” are, in fact, self-perpetuating modes or patterns of activity in the nervous system; whether the woman’s rage came from anger at something she thought the old man had done, then more anger at the embarrassment of a disporportionate or inappropriate response, coupled with a habit of identity-defense through attribution of causality for all that anger to external events and people.

I was intrigued by the idea that the situation had devolved to the point where she was directly projecting her own rudeness and ignorance onto someone else. Although perhaps he had in fact flashed his cock at her daughter. On North End, with half of South London out Saturday shopping at the spring sales.

It’s that thing where you’re feeling unhappy, so you interpret the behaviour of other people as crap or evil, and you read the events in your life and the world at large in a negative way.

It’s interesting because the World does seem different on different days. For instance, I’m a bit busy at the moment. Probably only about 1/3 as busy as most people are all the time, granted, but enough to mean that I’m crapping my pants at the thought of not having time to do any given thing, and every task in my in-tray seems to be of infinite size. Meanwhile, I’m avoiding entering into conversations with anyone because “I desperately need to get some of this work done.” In fact, behaving in a way which might be interpreted as crap and evil.

I don’t think I’m talking about psychological projection in the Freudian sense, I’ve got a feeling that there’s a more general interpretation that applies more widely.

A while ago I read Douglas Hofstadter’s book I Am A Strange Loop (out in paperback this June!) which contains a description of Hofstadter’s earliest memory of being conscious: looking at his reflection in a mirror, and realising that there was – or perhaps more accurately, generating – a conscious entity inside the head of the person reflected.

My own earliest memory of consciousness is of winding myself into a panic by focusing on my finger just in front of my face, then focusing on a chair on the other side of the room; watching two translucent copies of my finger swim together into one solid finger, then fly apart as a pair of ghost chairs swam together and fused to make a solid chair. Fear that my eyes didn’t work, followed by existential vertigo as I started to doubt that I was perceiving the real world at all.

Part of me would like to see a linguistic ego birthday, with children trained from the age of two to look out for the emergence of the human self – then there’s a party, and then the child commences the overpoweringly crucial training in how to manage that self.

To save money on cards, just find a birthday card from junior’s last birthday which says “Now I am 5″ or whatever, and cover the number.