Notes to self...

(April 2008 I think)
"There is energy in things, their inertness purely illusion. E=mc², a power station in a tram ticket, the roiling fury of an a-bomb locked up in a pebble, a useless key, a discarded bottle. In bodies too. In lives. They have their inert surfaces. They too are dull and cool to the touch, but hold inside them energies vast and unglimpsed. Seen only in pain, perhaps - when the feelingless body is split open and pain pours out like atomic brilliance, incendiary, terrible, a reminder of the unimaginable forces bound up in the knots of quiet that are our holding together."

I get you Martin, but question whether any of the writers you mention didn't edit and refine for publication. The stuff you write for yourself (like the paragraph above) is to me the raw ore which you can then work into something else. It's the difference between a gold nugget and wrought jewellery. Although it wasn't explicitly on my mind, the thought behind that short passage was there when I wrote that paragraph in "Suburban Mystery" about the mystery locked away in the silent brick boxes, like the energy in plutonium. Maybe you prefer the original, I don't know.

Anyway.

All a side issue, really. Your remarks did not offend me deeply or anything. Exasperated slightly, because they expressed to me a sort of vestal purism - as if anything that has to be altered for the sake of the world is sullying itself. I don't believe that. I think it makes you more honest...

This is turning into a whole philosophical sideshow of its own. I'll drop it for now.

When's the next date?


(PS: Just found this note to self in my journal, to prove (I think) that we are actually about the same thing here: "Seems to me writing is, like meditation, a reawakening to the world. A challenge to slough off the lethargy of habitual perception and touch the world afresh. To write is to reach out and touch the world again through its recreation..." OK, now I am really and truly going to shut up.)

The wrap

I just took the liberty of adding everyone to an email list to receive new blog posts as soon as they are posted. Anyone who's rather not receive them can opt out themselves via the settings page. I haven't made the blog public yet, as I think that definitely requires consensus, which I'm not sure we really attained, and Greg was not present. My naive argument in favour is that we will enrich the world with our wisdom! Or to put it less facetiously, hopefully our discussion will manifest some of the attributes we value: complexity and imagination, and whether or not the world is listening, whether or not any of this is even intelligible to an outsider, we should be feeding into the general complexity pool.

There's a French term 'esprit d'escalier' translating as 'staircase wit', which is the comeback you only think of once you're on the stairs leaving. I am a chronic sufferer, and these sessions provoke a closely related malady, not sure of the French for it, but it's the decisive argument thought of in the car on the way home. 'l'argument d'auto' maybe? This is why I blog. Anyway, to Martin on the subject of the terrible sell-out of writing for publication, I have two points to make, apart from the obvious point that writing is communication not (or not only) meditation. Firstly, I write literary fiction, not poetry or philosophy. Nobody writes fiction for themselves. Secondly, I'm not writing for the money or the fame, or I'd be trying to write blockbusters. I write for literary journals and anthologies, in my experience generally run by intelligent, discerning, creative people, and when I write for them I don't distort myself, I just try to write the best damn thing I can. Although quality can go unrecognised, taste and understanding always being a factor, generally I believe that it's the good stuff I've written that's gotten published, not the stuff that's been bent and compromised and dulled into palatable form for mass consumption.

In terms of the reward, it's something like this that makes me feel it's worth it - blowing someone's mind and making them want to write.

Anyway, side isssue, but I did feel the need to man the defences of my literary endeavours against the corrupting tide of Martin's ever so subtle deprecation...

So now, to next meeting's topic. The theme is "The world as imagined landscape". Not a question to be answered, a puzzle to be riddled out, or even a Hegelian dialectic, but a theme to riff upon however you see fit. Some reading that you may or may not choose to consider: James Hillman (if you dare), Robert Sardello, Thomas Moore.

What is the relationship between the world and the imagination? Is the world a dream, an essentially imaginal construct? ("imaginal" being Hillman's word for the space that is neither physical nor purely "imaginary", something like a primordial imagination that exists in or under the world.)

Our current science (even our hip new quantum science I believe) would reduce the world to its quantifiable structure, but what of its qualities? Is the whole, in its expressive elegance, reducible? Not just reducible to its parts, but reducible in any way at all. The world's face is highly expressive, it suggests some animating spirit. Is it pure naivete to believe in that spirit?

You don't have to follow any of these riffs yourself. You can bring a poem (your own, someone else's). Or, why not, a fucking stone or a flower or some other expressive object. I don't care. I'm responding to Martin's charge that we weren't dealing with the subject of imagination imaginatively enough. Martin, why don't you bring a mushroom? :)

OK I'm done.

(Sorry Greg, you can see we need the weight of your influence to stabilise the mix, or next thing we'll be prancing like pixies through the tulips.)

today's musings

My preliminary thoughts on the subject of "Is the world getting worse/degenerating/decaying?"

Firstly: This question implies that there is some sort of y-axis of worse-better, progress-regression, growth-decay (where the x-axis is time). So the first problem is, what is this dimension? Are we assuming something metaphysical,  i.e., that there is an ultimately reality to this, as opposed to a mere human value judgement? If we assume the former, what is the yardstick, where does this super-value-system derive from? If the latter, then we enter a very different debate, one which is concerned mainly with arguing the various merits/demerits of the modern world, and which will inevitably lead to a very relative conclusion depending on what aspects of the world we choose to privilege. If we go with the former (which I suspect is Stephen's intention/preference), then we are led into two debates: one about the nature of this purported universal spiritual value system, and another about how the world is and whether it's going up or down the pole, so to speak.

I also anticipate a second problem or area of debate, one which has already reared its head: the problem of cultural relativism. If we cannot escape the perspective of our culture, then how are we to evaluate our own society, where are we to find some purchase outside of it? We touched on this with the discussion of aboriginal experience versus modern, scientific experience. Perhaps we can escape this problem by not attempting to escape our culture, but merely attempting to evaluate its apparent progress or lack of it according to value norms we possess as citizens of this particular world. But even then, we hit a problem of historical relativism. Can we even evaluate an earlier historical consciousness, if it is sufficiently removed from us in time?

So, we burrow down towards the root of this philosophical tree and are -surprise, surprise - confounded. How do we get beyond these entanglements and unknowables?

---

OK, so moving on, I was talking to Greg on the way home last night and I suggested that the five of us can be placed on a continuum that goes something like this:

Martin-Stephen-Pierz-Greg-Paul

where the dimension of measurement is "preparedness to accept the outlandish". Greg argued that his defence of more "rational" positions does not necessarily reflect his true views, but he is driven to  it by Martin (aren't we all?), but my counter to that was that he still finds himself taking that position relative to Martin, even if he would argue something more Martin-ish in different company. 

Now within the group mind, these positions have their role. We need our science-apologists, our loony-fringers, our relatively relativist and absolutist positions. What interests me is two questions that take us outside of the debates themselves to a sort of "meta-debate":

Why do we tend to take these positions and not others? What hope or fear or view of ourselves (in other words, what non-rational factors) leads us to argue from this particular standpoint?

and

What other dimensions are there by which we can characterise the positions we tend to adopt? (for example, a materialism versus idealism)

It might save us time if we recognise these dimensions and biases.

OK, enough...

Thanks to Paul, my new MSDN forum signature:

class Religion { Explain (event) { try { ToExplain(event)} catch { throw("God moves in mysterious ways") } } }