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?

Today I walk the South Circular road – London’s asphalt smile, a forced grin in tarmac.

On the way to the tram stop. A bloke walks past carrying a box which contains a chair with in-built loudspeakers, designed to seat you low and vibrate you with the clumsy explosive bass of games, movies and music. He’s talking to his girlfriend, paying plenty of attention because he realises that it’s a clunky, male-hind-brain, pile-of-shit purchase that’ll encourage him to sit in his room, pissed and stoned, being vibrated by the graceless rumble of trash culture.

On the tram. Mr Phipp didn’t build the bridge, nor did he claim to own it. The bridge was very old, and it was named after Mr Phipp because he would sit most days atop its cobbledy arch and fish for his supper. And, when he caught a fish in his silken net, he would stroke it gently behind its gills until it became so perfectly contented that it simply made deep, quiet, cosmic sense for the fish to slip away into a peaceful death-sleep, so that Mr Phipp could cook it for his tea. And the bees bumbled, warm and unhurried in the brambles and the buttercups and the pale, perfect roses. But, Oh! – Mr Phipp, look at what they’ve done to your bridge. The stream, now criss-crossed by the shadows of high-voltage power lines, is long-choked with broken chunks of cement and hard core aggregate; rusting components from burnt-out motorbikes; spray-paint cans; the compressor motor of a fridge-freezer; the soiled underwear of a drunken slut or a rape victim; junk food packaging, surplus plastic sheeting and many other items of trash too vile to describe in electronic print. And the bridge carries a metalled road now, along which bucket the stolen hot-hatches and the hen night stretch limousines and the tank-like 4-by-4’s of the angry, confused, bitter zombies who live in the shitty flats constructed of plastic-coated metal sheeting, tear-marks of rust beneath airgun pellet dents. When we were looking for a house in South London we signed up to view an ex-council semi not far from here and the estate agent told us directly that people like us shouldn’t live in an area like this. He couldn’t sell us a house within a mile of Phipp’s Bridge. Poor Mr Phipp.

In Putney there’s a noodle bar called They East, or The Yeast… its sign looks like TheYeast and it’s impossible to tell how to read it, and why the owners would ever choose to name it either way. So unintelligible independently-designed business signage is going strong in Putney as well as in the zones further south. I visit the Putney branch of Gregg The Bakers, and it’s staffed by elegant Japanese girls – the products are the same (cheap sarnies, lumpen buns, flaccid sausage rolls) but the atmosphere has as much in common with that of a Kyoto temple tea house as it has with that of the Gregg’s by the station in West Croydon.

There’s a certain gentility of haircut and wardrobe in this part of town. Still very martial though, sometimes: khaki tee’s and combats, like you’re just back from Iraq or Vietnam. Jeans, combats, the clothing of our imperial masters; men in drag, queuing for the ATM near Shakalaka South African restaurant. Across the road, a man who looks like Dom Joly walks just ahead of his pregnant wife, his trailing hand resting on her pregnancy. She’s thinking, does he love me for anything other than my baby-making qualities? Is that to be my role, inter-generational glue in the chain of his family’s bloodline, as he fucks a succession of twenty-year-old interns at his advertising agency? He looks like Dom Joly, big-jawed, and the men in dresses also have big jaws, strong jaws. There’s no bladed weapon I could lift that could cut through those jawbones, I could sling a battle-axe at his head, it’d just bounce off, I’d hurt my wrist. There are significant architectural and engineering problems that could be solved with bones like that, if only we had a pair of those pneumatic roof-cutters that firemen use to cut their way into crashed cars. If only we could jemmy the jaw from the 30lb Boer skull. The skull of the germanic invader, the warrior skull, the wrecking-ball brain case. A man’s mind feels confident and at ease, riding around in a skull like that. My head, by comparison, is like the egg-shell of a calcium-starved chicken, and it’s the same with my sould, my heart. My heart is marbled with arterial fat; I wonder if I’ll live long enough to benefit from Lycopine pills? What shape is the boundary between your life and the death beyond? How far away is that boundary? Can you probe it with your hands, with your fingers?

Yia Mas Greek restaurant. Or is the Y a wine glass? Or an omega, twisted to look like a wine glass? If it is an omega, how would I look it up in the Thompson directory?

Equestrian voices at the bus stop, £200 jeans walking out of the newsagent. Manic grins on the signage of the Ethicare Dental Practice.

What is the South Circular, anyway? It’s not a road – today I’ll walk along Upper Richmond Road, Stanstead Road, East Hill, Battersea Rise, Waldram Park Road. It’s not even a road number: here I am trying to work out whether I’m on the A205 or the A3. It’s a traffic flow, it’s a directional tendency, it’s London’s thin-lipped hidden grin. Two horseback policemen guide their steeds into the flow of traffic, tooled up with truncheons and electric spaz-sticks. A tiny, East African-looking traffic warden walks round the corner, lost in his uniform. I ask myself whether the Rambo franchise might have developed differently if the violence aesthetic of Rambo 4 had been applied to the plot of Rambo: First Blood.

A cluster-mall: Cineworld, GAP, Agos, Next, Waitrose, Boots, a Steak chain I’ve not heard of before – Spur Steak Ranches, “a taste for life” is its motto. Cows farting greenhouse methane into the atmosphere, a taste for life; levelling the Amazon to grow beef, a taste for life; my arteries marbled with heavy animal fats, a taste for life; the bolt-gun through the brow, the multi-lobed guts spilling on the abattoir floor, a taste for life, a taste for life. I wonder what’s the tightest cluster of shops, what do we need now in the city? The nuclear mall.

A black kid in a baseball cap walks past with his girl, sucking his teeth, thinking, I bet that cunt’s going to walk past, and he’ll leave it 50 yards because he half-thinks I’m going to turn round and attack him, and then he’s going to say into his dictaphone, a black kid in a baseball cap walks past with his girl, sucking his teeth. See, I’m the sly, whinging cunt who’s physically weak, who hasn’t invested any energy or effort in his physique, I haven’t got any flows, although I make annoyingly good beats. I’m not a warrior though, my jaw literally weak, no protection, no use as an engineering component, I stick to the main roads, relying on the threat of racist police violence for my protection. He’s a warrior, he eats meat, he works out, he’s an afro-futurist warrior. I haven’t even got any fucking bars. If I had my way, the music industry would be torn apart, all industry would be torn apart, the whole cultural ego-generating machinery of modern capitalism would be ripped to shreds, and then there’d be violent chaos that would sweep me to my instant death, and result in human extinction, and I need to be careful not to take a wrong turn and end up anywhere real, the real city, Walworth, Peckham.

And the traffic wheels round the A205, and the city breathes the traffic in, and the city breathes the traffic out, and it’s almost like a cycle, except there are no cycles; there are diagrams with what look like circles, but there are in truth no cycles. And here we are, somewhere between Wandsworth, Battersea, Clapham, places I’ve travelled through wondering if I’m on the wrong bus, on the way to somewhere I’m glad I recognise.

My grandfather thought our family had Huguenot roots. Here’s a Huguenot graveyard, now a public garden, Mount Nod.

Here rest many Huguenots who, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in 1685 left their native land for conscience’ sake and in Wandsworth found freedom to worship God in their own manner. They established important industries and added to the credit and prosperity of the town of their adoption.

They didn’t leave France for conscience’ sake, the whinging cunts, they couldn’t hack the Catholics sucking their teeth at them, that’s why they fucked off to South London and died on the A205.

Try to do local things, community things. And try to forgive yourself if you fail. Because, while you might be somewhat justified in claiming that the world needs community rather than corporations, the truth is that what the world needs, more even than a profound shift in power from corporate to community organisations, is human failure. The failure to organise, the failure to persist. Embrace your failure, human failure is now nature’s keenest need.

What have you got if you live out here? Connected to Croydon or Elmers End by the 239 bus, and that’s your lot, unless you own a car which you can drive along the A222, making subtle, nuanced decisions about whether to drive to Bromley, pay over the odds for a parking space and shop in the high street shops there; or whether to drive to Croydon, pay over the odds for a parking space there, and shop in Croydon’s high street shops. It doesn’t make sense to pay to drive to Croydon, park, then buy a TravelCard to go into London for the day – fuck it, might as well drive into London and cop for the Congestion Charge.

Bushes, civic weeds, pumping stations, electrical substations. Civic bushes like pubic tufts on the concrete skin of the urbanised world. Mammal smells, animal fuckstinks, territorial beast pheromones.  Nature as dirt, as mess. Nature is unwholesome in this context. Wax the city. Nature as unwashed minge. Shave your armpits, London.

Magnet, DSS, HireCenter, Timber Experts, City Plumbing Supplies: this is the Triple-2 retail park on the A222 between Croydon and Beckenham. On the way to, in the zone of administrative influence of, Bromley (twinned with Neuwied, Germany).

Decking products are in stock.

Put down a layer of thick, black plastic. Cover it with gravel. The plastic stops the weeds from coming up. Suffocates the earth. Our style is pre-biotic, abiotic. Life’s a beach. Deck the garden, deck the beach. The beach is an extension of your house, the garden is another dining room. Sit outside, thinking about how hot it is, gravel and black plastic.

Bathroom Plumbing Superstore, The Big Yellow Self-Storage Copmany, Screwfix open seven days, Penfold’s Vauxhall dealership, B & P, Arc Car Wash £2.10: another retail park across the road, somehow less enticing to me, as though it’s more for tradesmen, like a reflection of Triple-2 in a tarnished, distorted mirror.

A Tesco store, open 24 hours, constant streams of traffic in and out.

Petrol – Cafe – Cash – Bakery – Delicatessen

In that order: Beckenham’s Maslovian hierarchy, Beckenham’s priorities for living.

Beckenham itself – the old village centre, a patch of lawn: the hamlet by the river Beck. Local shops with signs that are difficult to decode. An indian restaurant: Rasai or Rasoi, I can’t tell because the cursive font is graphically ambiguous. Fleurs bar. Or cafe, it’s hard to tell. Could be either, or both – a small bar somehow without intimacy, or a cafe that’s too dark. Another sign, on the door this time, bears an extra word. Hazelnut Fleur’s? Fleur’s Hazelnut? Cake Expectations is the exception that breaks the rule: it’s a cake shop. Local girls’ wedding cakes. Across the green, a shopthat might be calles Plumbing Supplies, or might be called Decorating Supplies, or both, or neither, or might be two shops who clubbed together to negotiate down on a sign-writer’s prices. You are not meant to find these shops on the Internet, you are meant always to have known them, to have had friends or relatives who own or work in them. Cartridge Inc.

Albert Parr & Sons, Funeral Directors.White gothic font on black. Can’t show the merchandise, can’t display coffins, certainly not with dummy corpses lying in state; nobody wants to see that. Cut flower memorials and candles instead: the flowers, rootless, are dying; the candles burning down as they glow. A memory of a recording of a black American preacher from the 1950s, steeling his congregation for protest and sacrifice: “As it burns, the candle is perishing. Everything shines by perishing.”

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.

Do not think that, just because you claim to have no faith in a god, that you are a free thinker and dwell in the realm of reality and truth, because the faith system of religion has simply lost some of its influence to the faith system of the democratic nation state.

We believe that the best way to run a country is by voting for representatives of three long-standing political parties every five years; we believe that, if we work and save hard, we will be comfortable in our retirement; we believe that the Police will protect us if we are good and punish us if we are bad. We believe that a deadly influenze pandemic is about to roll like a cloud of mucal death over our civilisation; we believe that we are in more danger walking on the pavement than driving in a car; we believe that the best way to deal with climate change is probably to buy an air conditioner.

I edited out the clause “we believe in climate change,” because I really do believe in climate change.

Religions are being partially displaced, in the minds of some, by other systems of myth; but they are myth. Britain – the political, emotional, relational Britain that we seem to care so much about – doesn’t exist, has no intrinsic existence, or exists only as a simulated spirit, spun together by ten million daily incantations in the staff canteen, the smoking area, across the desk partition. We chant Britain into near-being, like the religious chant God.

As an atheist, as an agnostic, you are in no way free of faith until you no longer believe in your nation, the expertise of your doctor, yourself.

Word of the day (used by Maplin staff member, describing behaviour of a colleague able to appear and disappear without others noticing):

Ninjarous

Saw a poster in the Whitgift shopping centre men’s toilets for an organisation called “Autism Mothers”. Subtitle: “Succeeding where governments fail.”Picture: about half a dozen madeover, skinny women aged between 20 and 50, looking businesslike/defiant, steely/blank stares, all wearing black. All very definitely wearing black… not wanting to wear anything different. Not wanting to rock the boat, more comfortable with routine, order, consistency. All skinny. Obsessed with weight, control over body shape. The body as deterministic machine, a system whose components can be understood, analysed, controlled. It annoyed me that their organisation exists to agitate about absolutely all currently trendy diagnoses… ADHD, Aspergers… what do you expect kids to behave like when they can pick five different kinds of university course to tell them how to manage a gymnasium? When they’re hosed with conflicting bullshit 18 hours a day, every day of the week? They’re going to NEED to simulate autism just to get to the level of specialisation required by our lunatic jobs market, and of course they’re going to look like there’s something wrong with their attention span because they’re being forced to filter through the equivalent of a tennis court sized area of microfiche full of garbage to get to any information remotely worth having.

Someone walked past me saying, “T.K. Maxx,” then someone walked past me saying, into a mobile phone, “I think I can see you.”

Newspapers become more constrained in terms of what they can print as their content co-evolves with a readership that learns to trust what the newspaper has to say, and in fact starts to invest self-esteem in thinking in accordance with the newspaper’s values: if the newspaper changes its mind too frequently, it’ll haemorrhage readers.

So… human beings are very tribal, so very keen on allocating each other to social groups and deciding on that basis whether to behave in a hostile or friendly way to each other. Maybe that tendency also impacts on how we categorise non-human objects: people like to categorise because of their very tribal nature. We have this… very objecty, very categorisy wasy of looking at the world because of our past as an species whose members organise themselves using the sounds they make, not just techniques of tearing each other’s nuts out with their teeth.

There’s a TV in the Sony Galleria in Centrale, offering the smoothest picture ever. Rolling, repeating footage of a guy playing keepy-up, and gobsmacked onlookers with their eyes bugging out and their jaws on the floor at the quality of the motion interpolation, up to 200Hz refresh rate. The Panasonic shop’s showing BBC HD preview footage of a guy with rhubarb-and-custard skin making a documentary about people playing violins and singing in a Regency stately home. Interested to know whether there are conferences at which broadcasters, network providers and technology companies decide the timebase and order of rolling out all these changes, one by one, a new TV every year, £1000 per year to keep up.

I would like to define “grown up” as being in control of my mind: being free of the influence of the media or others’ opinions; of the influence of symbolism. … Wow, Swarovski watches!

I was in Maplins, and I was distracted at the time because I wanted to buy a USB voice recorder (achieved), but in the background – in fact in the foreground, because it was quite loud and pumped-up, and the music wasn’t particularly delicate music, it was thumping, side-chain compressed electro-techtonic-trance-dance bollocks… on a radio station. Which played an interstitial which went: “All the best tunes, no egos, just music and celebrity gossip.” The problem’s knowing where to even start, to be honest.

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?

This is a transcript of something I spoke into my mobile late the other night, walking along Stanstead Road just east of Forest Hill.

Hello. I just had an idea for a song then, called “I almost dare stand up,”  which is about someone who’s either getting ready to stand up, or getting ready to stay kneeling on the floor.

That’s interesting, isn’t it, the idea of standing up or kneeling on the floor: standing up to the reality of your surroundings, your situation, your life, or kneeling down – submitting to the spell of language. Wow: submitting to the spell of language. Kneeling. Erm… in the beginning was the Word: it’s written in the Bible, know what I mean? Language infected the human… the raw ape consciousness of early human beings, and, er…

Language is scary. Language itself is scary. Voices in your head: the human animal is the ape that hears voices in its head; it is actually an act of faith to believe that they are inside your head rather than outside. I think… it’s something we presumably need to learn, to have these fully-formed, linguistic voices inside your head, thinking about things when you’re imagining other people’s conversations… that’s quite deeply human… born with no language, everyone is born pre-linguistic. Over the first few years of their lives, language invades their consciousness… we assume the quicker, the better. We assume, as a society, that the more quickly you learn specific forms of language, the better, the cleverer you are. The more quickly you learn specialised forms of language, such as… knitting, or… calculus, or… Feynman diagrams, or… I don’t know, the probability distribution function of Schroedinger’s equation, or… the essential non-linearity, non-predictability of the world…

Wow. Western culture.

Would there have been a time when women found language sexy? Women do find language sexy, something about language. Maybe it’s the intonation curves of the language that they find sexy, maybe it’s not the content. There’s an experiment there – Barry White singing songs about performing biopsies on giraffes…

Today I read about a reggae musician who walked through a tunnel in Greenford, East London, and he was attacked and had his throat slit, and here I am in a tunnel, and… there’s some really bright, colourful graffiti. It’s fantastic, looks really great. … I’m now coming out of the tunnel… I’m spiralling in on where I want to be… in eight minutes’ time, unless I’ve got the times wrong. In the acceleration, to catch the train I’ve forgotten what I was talking about.

Kneeling to the spell of language. You have to submit to other ways of talking to communicate more widely in the network. You have to learn different behavioural and moral protocols to communicate with different parts of the network. Can we communicate? Can we communicate?

Erm… where am I? I’m holding my phone like a microphone, and I’ve no idea whether the microphone’s at the bottom or the top, you know, who knows which microscopic gap in the casing is the mouthpiece. Who knows, who knows. Perhaps… what I’m worried about is… communicating with my child when I’m gone? Perhaps that’s what drives me. How do I communicate with my child? Well, you probably could start by giving it a hug.

There’s a small television or radio or… phone mast at the top of Forest Hill. It’s not as tall as the mast at Crystal Palace. It’s just up the road from where my grandparents used to live: Ringmore Rise. Even now I’m obsessed with having sight of Crystal Palace masts. We used to drive in from Chilton, Harwell, in Berkshire. I always remember the Schumac tree, the bush that had purple in the bud. We’d drive in along the M4, and coming from a small village in, past the jagged assault of office blocks… it wouldn’t have been so high-rise in those days, the early 70s. I remember an animated Lucozade bottle on the side of a factory. I remember the bottle tipping up and glistening bubbles in light bulbs, advertising carbonated water, glucose, food colouring.

Did I use to love it or was I always angry with it? That first hit of London when someone who lives in the country comes to the city. It’d be interesting to trace the psychological city walls of London: where does it assault you, where does London first challenge you? How far out from London Stone, in any given direction? How far out before you feel you’ve left London? Now that’s an interesting idea for a walking project: walk out radially, see how far it is before you feel you’ve escaped London.

This is my train, I think I’d better go.

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.