If they will swallow

Bullshit this transparently ridiculous

We can do anything

If they will swallow

Bullshit this transparently ridiculous

We can make them do anything

When I was learning how to mix music, I went through a phase of boosting this and that, adding more bass, pushing the top end, adding more reverb, cranking up the compression… and the music ended up sounding plastered against the ceiling and generally a bit crap.

It took various people and many years to convince me that you do most of your work on a mix by taking things away, not adding them.

“Subtractive EQ” means cutting frequencies from a sound rather than boosting them, and results in a more laid-back, less distorted sound that’s easier to mix with everything else. And I’ve learnt to enjoy turning things down – now, my mixes typically have one or two sounds up front, then a much quieter layer of sound off in the distance.

And of course there’s classic analogue synthesis, which is also subtractive: your oscillators typically make huge, wideband sounds which you filter and chip away at until you’ve sculpted, revealed, the (lesser-yet-better) sound you want.

I’m now convinced that this principle applies to the rest of my life, too. I won’t become happier by eating more food, or if the food I eat is richer; I won’t become happier by watching more TV, or seeing more films, or reading more books – by consuming more culture. The best solution to a cold winter might not be simply to turn our central heating constantly on and high.

Perhaps I should be looking for subtractive solutions. If winding myself up with films and music hasn’t made me happy, how about seeking some silence? If 3000 calories, three lagers and seven coffees a day haven’t made me blissfully satisfied, what would happen if I ate and drank more simply and sparingly? If working 14 hour days and preparing every night for intensely agenda’d meetings the next day didn’t bring me wealth or pride, what would happen if I sought a simpler job, one which paid less than the last one? Which aspects of my life could be improved by consuming less, by seeking less, by doing less?

Because… when I try to meditate, I struggle with too many thoughts, too much mental chatter, too many distractions. That means I’m suffering from having too much, so the key question is what I can give up, not what I can gain.

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.

I did some work in the morning, honest. Then I went for a meditation session at the Croydon Buddhist Centre.

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.

For years I’ve read articles and discussions about what it is that magically separates human beings from other animals; I suppose sister-faith religious traditions make it difficult for us to accept fully that we simply are animals, and that in fact nothing marks us out as being different… and that there’s nothing wrong in that.

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.”

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 »