We went to a car boot sale – Hayes Farm – last Sunday. I was struck by the number of enormous and expensive-looking cars: BMWs, Mercedes, Lexus; we followed a huge Lexus 4 by 4 along the dirt tracks out to the farm exit at the end of the sale.

Today I was eating my lunch, sitting on a low wall in St George’s Walk, Croydon. The Council wanted to close it down, and beam in a new development, called Park Place, to be designed and installed by Minerva. But, with lots still vacant in Croydon’s other shopping malls, the Whitgift Centre and Centrale, the project stalled. By this point, many businesses in St George’s Walk had closed down, so the place has a sort of ghost-town look. In theory, the Council’s trying to support small businesses with low rents and, nominally, with a bit of promotion (which boiled down to a temporary sign one weekend saying “there are some shops in here”) . But Croydon shoppers are snobbish, aspirational. They drive Lexus 4 by 4s, BMWs to their car boot sales.

As I sat there, a crushed napkin blew, tumbleweed-like, down the mall, followed by an empty sugar sachet. It reminded me of a passage I read a while ago in a pop science book, about how vortices dissipate their energy into smaller and smaller vortices, until the energy’s lost to entropy: we stop thinking of it as energy, because we can’t capture it, can’t make use of it. So… the tiny gusts rolling the sugar sachet down St George’s Walk are… what, energy dissipated down from huge flows of warm air around the atmosphere? I’m not sure whether I understand it properly, to be honest – I’d personally like small gusts to be able to cause large air currents, but… there you go, I’m not a professional.

I’ve started buying lunch and coffee from the Madeira Deli, and today I bought a broom from DIY Den, but I don’t think that’ll be enough by itself to save them in their competition for hearts and minds with B & Q, the national and transnational crap-vortices of the big brands. So is there a sense in which St George’s Walk is a small vortex of transactions, dissipating mater-energy out to people who drink the coffee, or let it go stale, or use the broom, wear out the broom? Dissipate the value of the broom, the coffee, to entropy, to dust and smelly piss?

I’m sure that car boot sales, jumble sales and charity shops can be viewed as small vortices of transaction and of goods, of matter-energy, relating to the world of transnational commerce and high street retail in the same way little eddies of wind relate to intercontinental cyclones.

On Sunday at Hayes Farm I watched a woman try to sell a dress. “I want £5 on it love, It’s Oasis, I spent £100 on it. No, can’t take £3, I spent £3 getting it dry cleaned.” Her voice had a confessional edge to it, as though she was ashamed at having spent that much money, making back so little. If you sell your stuff for 2% of the price for which you bought it, you’ve dissipated its value. You’ve taken that item from a high-value to a valueless state. Is there a sense in which she’s literally dissipated energy, created entropy where there was order before? BMWs depreciate quickly. If your lifestyle involves buying BMWs new, then selling them after three years, are you dissipating a lot of transactional value?

Zoos aren’t entirely free of philosophical problems. Every information card at London Zoo now carries a statement of how fucked is the particular species to which it relates. On at least the larger cards, all possible values are printed, greyed out apart from the value that relates to the species in question, which is highlighted in red. The possible values are:

1. Not currently threatened
2. Threatened
3. Endangered
4. Critical
5. Extinct in the wild

The cat 1’s all look a bit humdrum, the average score seems to be about 3.5, and it feels like the cards are suggesting that all species are ratcheting up through the categories. There are a good few category 5’s, including a species of Cichlid fish that seems to have been a 4 the moment it was discovered and a 5 within about twenty minutes. I assume that the naturalist who first ID’d the fish got over-excited and accidentally kicked a can of creosote into its stream while dancing with scientific triumph.

And there’s a subtext, unprinted, to every card: TOO MANY PEOPLE. And in this regard zoos are especially conflicted. They do best when they get plenty of punters through the gates, but their deep message gets sadder and sadder the higher the human population rises. David Attenbourough has spoken out recently about the dangers of human overpopulation, that there are three times as many people now than there were when he first started broadcasting. And this is where we have to start thinking about what the world needs rather than what we need – we very much need to start thinking further outside the box – because what the world needs is for us to get the fuck sterilised. They should be handing that leaflet out at the turnstiles, offering the operation for free under local in a small white building on the ticket piazza. “Got children sir? Can we clip your sperm ducts?”

Because I think, if there was a way for them to coordinate themselves, a way for them to understand the issues and evidence and be empowered to seek solutions, that the rest of the animal kingdom would definitely be considering a deep cull of the human population at the moment.

“The problem is that they’ve got language, they’ve got this learnt system for dodging Malthusian limits on their population growth. It’s just not a level playing field. So we were thinking about culling them down. Not right to extinction, just to levels that we can all deal with, maybe a few tens of thousands. We were thinking about trying to limit them to a few mediterranean islands.”

“The problem is, if you look at the population spread models here, that they’ve got a load of written instructions for travelling around really fast, exploiting loads of different environments, and we think that if we leave enough of them, in sufficient numbers and in a rich enough environment, they’ll just break out and we’ll have a pandemic again.”

“We’re hopeful that, given how fucked the world is in general, if we can smash them into small groups, perhaps around a dozen, perhaps twenty or so at a push, and focus hard on keeping group size down around that level, they won’t be able to organise into social structures within which roles are sufficiently specialised to support written language, or indeed many of the specialised vocabularies and dialects they use now, so that might be a way to go: very small groups, total population of around twnety thousand, something along those lines. The question now is about how we organise all this without the tragedy of a huge boom and bust in the populations of carrion predator species, too.”

Lashed to the grille of a cultural juggernaut careening towards the grill of an entropic meatgrinder.

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.

What anything means to you is the associated images, words, memories and stories that flow into your awareness when you think about or perceive it.

So a percept or a concept’s meaning, on a personal level, is the mode into which your mind flows in response to it.

Is it valid to generalise a little and suggest that meaning is precisely the flow of your “state” of mind from one moment to the next? Every moment of awareness is the result of your brain/mind interpreting patterns of sensory stimulation or memory; working out what patterns of light on the retina mean, what a memory means. Meaning isn’t something inherent in the things or scenes we think we perceive; it’s literally what the brain does, what the mind does. What the mind does next.

Is the Meaning of Life… what Life does next? Ongoing metabolism, ongoing ecological relationships, more life?

Is the Meaning of It All… the universe flowing into its next moment, according to its history and its laws?

Components don’t make sense outside the context of a Whole. And the Whole is a persistent network that persists because of the way its components interact.  There’s probably a discussion here somewhere about a bench, which is nothing more than the ongoing interaction between nuts, bolts, washers, planks and bars.

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.

I love eddies in streams because, while it’s possible to point them out and label them as if they’re things (”Look at that eddy”), they’re obviously just transient patterns in a flow of water. I like their not-really-there-at-allness, because I’m sure that everything else is also a sort of vortex, a transient, temporarily self-sustaining pattern of matter-energetic flow which spins together and then dissipates.

Looking through some old camcorder tape, I found this footage of a trip down to our local river on a sunny winter day, when I found a quiet stretch of water where the sunlight showed “shadows” of the eddies, and I could watch them spinning past.

While I was filming, a mother and her child walked by and the boy asked me what I was doing – the conversation’s caught on the soundtrack.

Here’s a TED talk by Paul Stamets – he’s a little eccentric, but he’s into some very interesting stuff.

This is quite good – I like the contrast between Robert Wright’s polite chat with Steven Pinker and his grim slugfest with Dan Dennett…

I found some pictures on my hard drive today. Nothing unsavoury – quite the opposite, in fact. I thought you might like a look. Continue Reading »

I’m considering adding a “breast milk” entry to my list of blog categories… Continue Reading »