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Tag Archives: Chimpanzees

Vestigial Tales, Trainers & other Natural Wonders.

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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A27, Alluvial Plain, Beachy head, Birling Gap, Blue Tits, Chalk & Flint Terrain, Chimpanzees, Cliffe High Street, Cretacious, Culfail Tunnel, Downland, East Sussex, Gatwick Airport, Grasslands, Grazing, Gym, Iron Age Hill Forts, LeneLovich Birdsong, Lewes, Mount Caeburn, Newhaven, Ouse River, Pheasant, Pigeons, Saucony Trainers, Shakespeare, Skylarks, Southerham Farm Reserve, Sparrows, starlings, The Sea, Typewriters, Urban.

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     The sponging of dense grass and moss muffles up through each footstep. Each earthly percussion creates a physical feedback loop that drives the next step and the next. There is something of the mechanical meditation in this walk. Each step reaches further than just the simple exchange of calorific energy through muscle and sinew for propulsion. Each footfall connects me with the deeper history of the chalk and flint ground beneath my feet. My pace is steady. [My speed hovers somewhere around the 7 in gym treadmill terms.]

That I connect to this ancient soil through the soles of my very urban white, red and green Suacony Jazz 91 trainers doesn’t quite fit the idyllic bill. But in their defence, they have carried me through hundreds of hours of walking around this Downland over the last 3 or so years. So they have earned their place, however incongruous they might seem amidst the herds of professional walking boots and shoes we pass.

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The wind-blown tree sits on the prow of the hill. The tree is my first marker. Beyond the tree, decompression and a quieting of the mind awaits.

As I pick up my pace, I imagine each heel-crump and sole-scuff echoing down through the Cretaceous layers beneath me. The chalk here is a vestigial blanket beneath the patchwork quilt of the East Sussex Downs – a residue of microscopic plankton skeletons from the bed of the shallow sea that once covered this area. As I veer left towards the tree I see the roof-tops of Cliffe High Street and the scimitar curve of the tidal River Ouse behind and below me as it exits Lewes. I also sense the Culfail Tunnel that cuts beneath me behind the chalk cliff-face that rises up over the south-easterly point of Lewes.

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The walk takes me up and into the Southerham Farm Reserve, just south-east of Lewes. The grassland here has developed into the close-cropped downland pasture through over a 1000 years of grazing. South Downs sheep speckle the hillsides, bobbing like fluffy white and grey corks on the waves of chalk and flint hills rolling back towards the sea some five miles off to the south of me. The Reserve footpath scarps up a green incline to my left punctuated with sheep and meat-herd cattle. In front of me to the right and below where I am standing is a curved hollow that wends around to the right and down into a dip through which a farm track runs – a natural amphitheatre with topographic welts running along its steep sides – the long grassed-over furrows of some older crop raising. 

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Vestigial echoes are a theme up here. Another quirk of my Saucony Jazz trainers is that the left one wheezes slightly each time my heel hits the ground. [Well, more of a  squelchy-sigh than a wheeze.] The right remains inscrutably silent. I speculate that this lop-sided sound effect might be due to the fact that I carry more weight on my left foot. A physical echo perhaps, of an L1/L2 prolapse disc that demonstrated itself [sciatica] in my right leg and foot. The echo here resides in the heel of my left trainer as evidence of my ‘carrying’ it still, [my leg that is, not the trainer] some 18 years after the fact.

Beyond the wizened tree, the ground raises upwards in a gentle slope and then steepens. The meat-cattle are closer now, bunched in this narrower spit that runs around the top edge of the amphitheatre to my right. As I move to the prow where a stile opens onto the next leg of the walk, the wind blows up a little. I am suddenly aware that there is not one obstacle between me and Eastbourne to the immediate east and Beachy Head and the Birling Gap to the south-east of me.

Sound overwhelms me here, the wind buffeting my ears. Until this point the walk has been wrapped in the birdsong of skylarks hovering and flitting 20-30 yards above my head. The warbling sing-song of them wafting over the downs just above ground level is particular to this landscape.

The purity of their song marks a clear phase in the walk. Earlier on, as I climb the tarmac hill from Cliffe High Street up past the golf course to reach the downland, the birdsong is an exquisite collision of sparrows, starlings and blue tits, tinged with the corvid caws of crow, magpie mutter, wood pigeon coos, and the wood chatter of a distant woodpecker.

This blanket of birdsong is soulful evidence of a universal grammar at work in the natural world. Current research shows increasing evidence of the links between birdsong and the universal grammar evident within it and the syntactical rhythms of creature speech. It would come as no surprise to me that humans have mined and mimicked bird song to elevate and sophisticate the basic range of primate vocal communication. Chimpanzees may well write Shakespeare given a typewriter and long enough. But it takes birds to elevate the human language to a sonnet or an aria.

Once past the golf course and out on to the downland, everything falls away.  I am left with only the skylark song all about me. It is punctuated every now and then by soaring seagull calls high above me and the distinctive cocking of the male pheasant below me, scuttling along the fringes of the low copse woods. Ive decided that, at their harshest, pheasant calls sound like a hybrid between a crow caw and a fan-belt slipping.

As I look up into the blue, scanning to find the various protagonists of said songs, something reveals itself to me. Before the lock down came, even up in this beautiful and reasonably unspoilt part of the world, there would still be a steady, low level of noise pollution coming both up from the traffic rush of the A27, and down from the planes heading for Gatwick Airport.

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Now. Just blue. And silence. As testament to the emptiness of the sky bar the birds nature put in it, I spy just one high distant vapour trail. This blue canopy is usually criss-crossed with the vapour scratches of windswept and interesting air travel. No now at least.

The lockdown has given those of us lucky enough to live at the fringes of nature an opportunity to reconnect with her beyond a simple Sunday walk. The silences left by the absence of air and road travel amplify and elevate the natural orchestra of the wild. Greater tracts of time and a far deeper need to reflect and interrogate some of the turbulence and anxiety the COVID 19 pandemic has bought compels us to spend longer out in nature than we might otherwise do. Thats not a bad thing. And it is a living privilege that I am deeply grateful for.

As I loop my way up and across the downland, Mount Caeburn sits to my left-hand side at the highest point, with Lewes to its north and the silvery Ouse snaking beneath its gaze southwards to Newhaven and the sea. This hunched, moated echo of an iron-age hill fort is from a time where defence against the dangers that might lurk all around the settlement, against what might harry and kill the occupants, was the key to survival. It was a defended place everyone could withdraw to and take refuge in. It strikes me that every home in the UK right now is less a castle and more a Mount Caebourn.

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The sun is up properly now and the mists are starting to lift off the alluvial plain below and to the south. The striding dark sigh of me falls away to my right across the grazing field.

It makes me think.

The shadow that falls from me is not the stretching shadow of an evening sun whose lengthening signals the coming darkness of a long night. This is a morning walk. On this day, for the moment at least, much like our impacts on the environment, my shadow will only shorten as the sun rises and the day fills to blooming.  And with the coming of the mid-day sun that shadow will briefly disappear. To nothing. The long shadow of my presence on the downland will have passed into memory, for a short while at least.

It would be rather nice if our impacts on the only planet we have did much the same.

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Class, satire & the dark art of playing the gallery.

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s, Ainslie, Boris, Boudicca, BREXIT, Brideshead, Castlereagh, Chimpanzees, Class System, Dashwood, Downton Abbey, Eton College, EU, farage, Great British Public, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Leavers, Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, Nostalgia, Snobbery, Social Order, Somerset, Thatcherite, Toffs, Topper, Trinity Oxford

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At a point in history when the nuance, deft politic and human insight of a Castlereagh might come in handy – and the strong hand, fierce purpose and earthiness of a Boudicca wouldn’t go amiss; what do we have?

Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Our representative for the broad constituency of ordinary people in the UK is a comical Toff who seems to have fallen off the pages of Topper Comic (well, the 1970s version).

There is a sublime logic in this as the Brexiteers seem to have decided that, if we’re going to apply a Back to the Future strategy, 1970 seems like a good Back to start a Future from; This obviously falls far short of the idyllic late 1940s and early 1950s that some Brexiteers would rather hark back to, the zenith of our victorious pre-Windrush Post WWII Golden Age, when you could still happily and openly show prejudice against anyone you so chose while playing an Over on the Green under a Spitfire sky, eating trimmed sandwiches of fish paste and cucumber and sipping lemonade and lashings of ginger beer; all played out amidst the buzz of an endless British summer.

There are the upsides: Britain in the 70s was a crash of paisley purple and burnt orange, brilliant Bowie,  Prog rock, Punk, Disco and the chiaroscuro of British Light Entertainment: the brilliant beacons of the Two Ronnies and Morecombe & Wise peppered with the misshit social commentary of ‘Til Death Do Us Part (Alf Garnett being to the 70s what Loadsamoney was to the 80s – both caricatures being an exercise in sharp satire gone horribly wrong.)

But it was also the decade of sclerotic public services and infrastructure, lazy builders, 3 day weeks, dusty industry (why change what’s worked for 100 years), street battles between Right and Left and, of course, Maggie Thatcher, the goddess in Jacob’s temple.

So our champion – Jacob Rees-Mogg – whose first tweet was in Latin. What a knob.

One would hope that the lower echelons of the Daily Mail readership (as they choose to self identify) will welcome having a bucket of cold water poured over them and a toe swung towards their arse for good measure when they realise what’s being done to them in the name of BREXIT.

But I have a feeling they are going there willingly.

This kow-towing and fawning adulation is simply the saloon-car-driving, beige-coated, ploughman’s eating, comfortable-walking-shoe version of the chimpanzee putting their wrist up towards the alpha and bowing their head. Or arse kissing upwards to put it in coarser, more feudal terms.

Far too many of the Great British public are playing out some twisted piece of Tom Brown and Flashman theatre – and gleefully so.

It seems a large swathe of the Great British public are seemingly more than happily prepared to play ‘Jean Ainslie’ to Rees-Mogg’s ‘Graham Dashwood.’

In the film, The Most Exotic Marigold Hotel, the Jean Ainslie character is the epitome of the small-minded, deluded, disappointed and utterly class-fixated snob (a rather smarter and more polished version of Hyacinth Bucket – pronounced ‘Bouquet’ – from Keeping Up Appearances). And Graham Dashwood is the dashing, elegant, intelligent, worldly (and quietly gay) Barrister from a much higher social order.

Everything crushes into one moment where she states in a moment of professed love and adulation:

“In fact I think I’ve been looking for you for a very long time.”

There is the populist voice speaking.

Right now it seems that the Great British public are staring into Rees-Mogg’s eyes and professing much the same sentiment.

So how has Jacob conjured this whorl of feeling? What is it about him, his nature or his background that makes the masses lick upwards?

Well he ticks every box, in many more ways than Boris.

He is of good stock – but not a toff by birth. Tick.

(His father was only made a lifetime peer in 1988. So an ‘arriviste’ by old money standards. And they bought Ston Easton Park in Somerset, not inherited it. So in Alan Clark’s world view on inherited class, Rees Mogg’s family ‘bought their own furniture.’)

Jacob attended Eton and Trinity, Oxford. Tick.

Jacob made an extraordinary amount of money in Fund Trading, so he can claim the status ‘self-made man’. Tick.

But most importantly he ‘looks and sounds’ the part. Double Tick.

Jacob is the epitome of the Comic toff caricature that many over 40s grew up on. He is in that way a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Rees-Mogg realised long ago that image is everything (whilst still at school if the highly confected nature of the Eton College Collections portrait is to be believed). And presentation is nine tenths of the social law.

If you believe that people are still inherently feudal and like the idea of some Brideshead meets Downton Abbey world of ‘them in the big house up there and us down ‘ere doffing our caps’ model of social order and happiness – then you play to that gallery. Starting with your veneer.

Jacob realised the value in looking like you are from central casting’s stable of fragile toffs with a wilful streak and a stubborn self-righteousness born of an irrepressible Right of Entitlement. People look backwards at times of volatility and chaos. They seek older orders and touchstones to reassure themselves – even comic book ones. Nostalgia is a powerful opiate.

But that on its own is not enough. There is a darker, smarter judo move in Rees-Mogg that points to a very media savvy individual ‘playing the moment.’

Rees-Mogg has self-selected himself to be parodied, lampooned and satirised – he has made himself the butt of his own jokes. Genius.

This garish characterisation delivers on two counts. It makes him highly visible and discernible. And it presents him as self-deprecating – a faux proxy for humility in this case.

Everything he does presets him to ‘control’ the satire against him. (Sound familiar?)

So while Boris attracts all of the rockets with his stamping politic and straw-haired buffoonery – and Farage continues to present himself as the self-interested, small minded provincial barracker that he is (noticeably still collecting his MEP cheque and watching the World Cup from another EU subsidised bar in Brussels), Jacob slithers into every vapourous opportunity and out of anything solid or substantial with a whiff of the snake charmer wafting about his overly-combed head (brilliantine wouldn’t go amiss).

He is the quietly sneering, self-preening critic sitting in the corner seat at the dinner party, using the compound effect of his coy theatre of fragile child, his ‘blinking’ intellect and uncomfortable pauses to be eviscerating while seemingly ameliorating.

Some would venture that we get the politicians we deserve. If that is the case then the UK is generally suffering from a desperate case of ‘doffing’ – junked up on the need to be ruled by some retrograde smugness of the ‘Big House’ variety.

Thank heavens for that. There was a danger there for the briefest moment of us looking like an advanced, enlightened society with a clear understanding of the diversity of humanity that shaped us and a clear line of sight on the delicious collision of natures, skills, outlooks and open optimism we need as a nation to evolve and thrive.

But sanity prevails. And with the rise of the Rees-Moggs of this world we show ourselves for the fawning, recidivist, class-riddled, insecure ‘know your place’ society we really are.

Irritatingly I have to take my hat off to him. He knows his audience and their fragile desires intimately. He’s good. Really good.

So I’m off to buy a new cap to doff!

Hashtags, social scolding & the Fragility of Freedom.

25 Monday Jun 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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#metoo, Antiques Roadshow, Barbara Ellen, Byron, Charlie Hebdo, Chimpanzees, Christopher Hitchens, Donald J, Family Guy, Free Speech, Germaine Greer, gogglebox, Jo Cox, Kathy Acker, Language, Naomi Wolff, P Funk, The Oxford Union, Trolls, Trump, twitter

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Who’d listen to an apparently ‘recidivist’, feminist academic and some right-wing lite writer of semi erotic literature?

Me. I happily listen to, read and respect (though not feverishly) the positions of both Germaine Greer and Jilly Cooper for exactly the same reason that I read Barbara Ellen, Naomi Woolf and Kathy Acker.

Do I always like what they say? No. Do I find some of it a bit one dimensional? Yup. Do I sometimes react like an overly defensive bloke? I’m certain I do. But do I find a lot of what they say illuminating, transformative and inspirational. All day long. Do their perspectives improve me? Without question.

I read and engage with them for exactly the same reason I like P. Funk, Christopher Hitchens, Family Guy, the Antiques Roadshow, Gogglebox and Byron: for the human colour and texture delivered by opposing narratives and the frictions held within them. They often fundamentally contradict each other – and throw spanners in each other’s engines and excreta at each other’s windows. That’s good. That’s one of the greatest upsides of enjoying Freedom of Speech.

Where would the joy be if we weren’t free to mock Donald J? That’s satire. That’s a healthy reaction. A massive baby Donald is a perfectly acceptable scale of riposte to a man who holds the attention of the world in his twitter-like hand, and shakes his status like a plastic rattle.

As long as it is done openly, in the light of day, spoken with the courage of one’s convictions, in a peer reviewed, open-sided environment with some basic rules of engagement – that’s all good.

But recently, as the darker corners of the #metoo, clean food and transgender campaigns have demonstrated, it can get ugly our there even when you begin with the best intentions in the world. Boisterous debate, informed discourse and heated discussion can quickly be replaced by something far more insidious and, to me, more dangerous.

I am talking about our provisional transition from open debate and respect for free speech (and the accompanying chimpanzee-like pooh flinging) to a narrow, closed form of cod-intellectual ‘social shout-down’ and the deafening absence of the Right of Reply.

There needs to be a tension, a friction in our evolutions – that’s human – and some subjects need to be approached with a degree of disruptive vigour.

There needs to be some punkish and raw fire blown into some social constructs and mores, mostly because they have become sclerotic. And Free Speech is about giving the fire the oxygen it needs.

But for some, Free Speech is seen as a Trojan horse for self-interest, bullying, dogma, schism, proselytising and propaganda. Well, no shit Sherlock. The openness of Free Speech means that, at some point, some very twisted and odd individuals will abuse the ability and opportunity to state their case.

But Free Speech’s defence mechanism against the twisted idiots and cruelty mongers prevailing lies in its very openness – and an environment rooted in an open Right of Reply on a mass scale. In each person resides the right to say No, I disagree, or ‘that is bad’, or ‘this could be better.’ Free Speech is a human block chain system by which we manage the security and integrity of our social, cultural, ethical and moral codes

It requires us all to be open to a reciprocal respect in the exchange. And it requires us to accept that the outpourings of Free Speech may very well make us feel very aggrieved or uncomfortable, and often so.

That’s its point. It is meant to be the valve in the pressure cooker; the thing that mostly helps to stop large swathes of people feeling they have no voice and reaching boiling point.

Free Speech is a good thing. But it does come with rules of engagement, and with responsibilities and accountabilities that we need to accept.

Free Speech has consequences. And we need to accept these in the brutal cold light of day. Framed in human, living terms, – not just in its philosophical and notional or legal and constitutional terms.

What do I mean by human living terms? Just the random and chaotic emotional truths of how people respond to stuff they are wound up about. Feelings can be uncomfortable. Insights can seem loaded. Emotions can be raw. Thoughts can be dangerous. Beliefs can be murderous. Never more so when they are voiced into the world with seemingly little attention or consideration for how they may be received.

But this is Free Speech is it not?

Freedom of Speech also means that we have the freedom to respond or not to statements and polemics however hateful with greater wit, charm intellect or persuasion than that with which they were served to us.

But sometimes the response is brutal, mindless or violent with little opportunity for debate or discourse.

The French satirists of Charlie Hebdo making cartoons of the Prophet can be viewed as either extraordinarily disrespectful smart arses who misread their right to mock with dreadful consequence or brave defenders of Free Speech. Regardless, most would accept that they knew what the extremity of the response might be. That is where courage or recklessness must step up and accept that the consequence of its actions though inhuman or horrific or criminal are none the less potential consequences. Je suis Charlie.

Free Speech is, in itself, open and equal – but that comes at a price.

Firstly, that we have to also listen to preachers and proselytisers of all kinds of shite wanging on endlessly with their propaganda or their misshapen and offensive views. And secondly we must accept that Free Speech is there to defend our right to have a voice, not to protect us against violent, harmful of hateful riposte. That is the role of the laws and systems of our democratic constitutions to uphold that side of the Suffrage bargain – that I am free to state my views and beliefs openly without fear of violent or harmful response. But in real, raw human everyday terms, might a psychotic or a fundamentalist or worse still a foreign government actor ‘get’ to me before the police man or woman (or howsoever they might identify) placed there to protect my Human Right to Free Speech. Yup. Jo Cox paid the greatest price for the freedom to voice our beliefs and politics in an all too human realm of ignorant response.

Silencing voices we do not like the sound and metre of is not democratic. Suppressing opposition is not how an open society operates. But we do it anyway. And sometimes the most successful way to hide something slightly dodgy is in plain sight, in this instance dressed up as a digital pillar of freedom of expression.

Here we return to the issue of No Voice or No Right to Reply and the socio-cultural twitter smack-down of Free Speech

The Oxford Union’s persistent need to silence hate mongers, sexists and racists disguised as authors, politicians, artists, academics or celebrity speakers, citing them as evil, is, I believe, a childish response from what is supposed to be a bastion of enlightenment, intelligence and wannabe stalwarts of the freedom to practice and speak freely.

I expect them to be at the forefront of this issue. Not on the back-foot.

That the Oxford Union cannot a) manage just 1 hour of ‘discomfort’ (the discomforting effect of listening to some twisted manipulator of reason and belief) in a seat in one of the most socially comfortable and privileged environments in the world and b) find the wherewithal to illuminate the insanity and misguided-ness of those people beggars belief.

If the intellectual bastions of a democratic society are too fragile or easily damaged by the turgid minds of the extremist, then we have a problem.

If you believe someone is citing or excusing violence, suppression or prejudice against the person either emotionally, physically, philosophically, spiritually or politically; make your case. Take the podium and illuminate the insanity of their bullshit through reasoned and sometimes unreasonable discourse.

But perhaps therein lies the point. Charlie Hebddo has demonstrated that you have to do this in the full knowledge that the boisterous but ultimately harmless debating society approach to conflict and problem resolution is a luxury that few people have and even fewer respect.

The world does not always respond in the measured, monochromatic mid-tones of a Mid-Western Psychologist.

Maybe that’s the issue for our delicate intelligentia?

You need to be prepared for what humans throw at you. And its messy.

We resort to chimp like shit flinging at the drop of a hat. And if we can beat our chests and rally a crowd of the intellectually lazy, spiritually misguided or emotionally stunted to our cause, chances are, we will, regardless of the veracity of our arguments or the quality of their support.

When we close down or silence those voices (instead of hearing them out and then deconstructing them at scale) we create a vacuum; an absence of natural tension. And history has shown that the smallest, pettiest, most vicious personal human agendas can rise up freely inside a vacuum.

If we don’t like the language or the statements of the likes of Donald J Trump or Germaine Greer, we need to use our own to rebuff them. Not just close them down.

But if we do that in the belief that everyone will play fair, we are ignoring the bestial creature truth of humanity.

Hopefully we are learning to understand that free speech, shaped as it is by the human psyche, is often going to be incendiary, disgraceful, unpleasant or, mostly, disagreeable, (unless I happen to be the person freeing my speech of course).

Free Speech has consequences, for the listener, and for the speaker. In the basest human terms those consequences can be hostile, violent, diminishing, degrading and sometimes criminal. This is the cause and effect of being human. Our beliefs whether communicated through speech, action or gesture will be both proselytised in a raw human manner and received in the same. Often an extreme response cannot be claimed to be truly surprising. Shocking perhaps. But not surprising.

For example:

If I am a man (or, more likely in this example, a sexually retarded fantasist game designer ‘child’ of a man running the upgrade on Grand Theft Auto), who has spouted the twisted belief that every rape ‘wants it’, and, subsequently, I get violently anally pegged by a troubled-turned-violent rape victim in some act of vengeance against my publically spouted beliefs, so be it.

Now that may sound a little extreme but is it wholly unexpected? How could it be? We know that trauma scars people physically and emotionally. A victim of extreme physical abuse can sometimes be driven to consider undertaking vengeful actions. Fact. This is not some movie fantasy of revenge. It would be naive to pretend it was.

So, if I voice an opinion, even as an ignorant provocation, I know what I am saying and my intention in saying it. Does that deserve a criminal or life disfiguring act against me? Or even a murderous one? Possibly not. And there are laws to dissuade someone from thinking otherwise.

BUT it IS a possibility I must consider when I open my mouth and speak, especially on incendiary topics. Because I live in a raw and human world, democratic or otherwise.

We are creatures with a genetic lineage that was shaped across hundreds of thousands of generations before we even thought to set up one camp together, let alone a civilised society. The complexity of what runs beneath the surface of us – what systems we’re running behind the interface of our conscious self – is only just beginning to be revealed by science and psychology.

We are ancient creatures with a modern veneer of civility.  We are, in phone terms, a Nokia 100 with a state of the art Android interface. And Freedom of Speech and people’s responses to it are the raw proof of that.

The language we use when we spout anything – from the sublime and enlightening to the ridiculous and disagreeable – is a powerful technology that we’ve been honing for a while. It has impact and reach. Wrap an opinion or a belief in it and we in effect light blue touch paper. It can be devastating. In some instances Sticks and stones would be the kinder option.

The learned experiences, beliefs and strategies that we use language to communicate are not always positive or palatable ones and they are not always done with a view to the common good (unless in some weird moment you think that the common good might be served by all-white sections of the UK, a transgender ban, and men-only golf clubs!). It goes with the territory.

Human language is a sharp tool that can both help and harm. And like all sharp tools, we need to tread cautiously in how when and where we use it; and to whom. And take responsibility for what happens when we do.

Regardless of the nature or capability of your exercising your right to use language freely to make your point, the main thing again is that it is undertaken with openness and the Right to Reply.

Tyrannical smack downs of someone who says something we don’t like are an unsurprising emotional reaction. Humans don’t like being wrong but, more importantly, are truly dreadful when they are feeling ‘really’ right.

This is less about the mitigation of the wrongness that sometimes occurs in environments of free speech, and more about the application of Righteousness in those events.

Righteousness is a wonderful word for a dreadful human nature. It brings together the spirit of divine complicity (support from on high) in your cause or belief, with a big slather of super conservative institutional rigour and supposed socio-cultural substance (regardless of whether ‘the party’ is of a left wing or right wing disposition).

And righteousnessis the only thing I could call the cultural shift that now has us banning dickheads from publically spouting their dickheadedness in environments like the Oxford Union where they can at least be dis-assembled publically – and the twisted logic that led a large number of smart intelligent people to not only take Margaret Atwood to task on her watch outs for #metoo but to damn her outright with no Right of Reply. Smackdown!

If the ‘Snowflake generation,’ as Millennials are so called, are at the forefront of these shifts, then we simply need to be conscious of that old cause and effect paradigm and be aware that the effect may be equally distasteful .

The Snowflake generation are called as much because they are seen by some as insufferably fragile – children in the world, bred to be easily damaged, hurt or offended by even the slightest harshness in tone, content, belief, polemic or politic. In this world view, everything becomes viewed through the filter of a threat to be shut or shot down.

The proof given is that when people cite something that doesn’t suit their world view, it’s damned or dismissed as recidivist or self-serving. (That it might just be a well founded and timeless piece of wisdom, or intelligently arrived at point of view worthy of consideration seems to be irrelevant.)

And therein lies the cliché. The Smackdown is simply another tyranny to replace other tyrannies. I had hoped we were less obvious but we’re not. The seemingly weak being in fact aggressors in the exercise and application of their fears in the world is a reoccurring human truth.

Tyrants do not like Free Speech. Especially the real kind. Hence the Fake News campaign of one Donald J.  Am I comparing #metoo and Donald J’s Fake News? Yes – but only in the fact that they both have used social networks, especially that of the unsophisticated, stunted responses of twitter (AKA Troll heaven) to silence and shame their detractors.

I am not for one moment venturing that their politics or ethics are similar. Just their tools and the spirit in which they apply them.

They have both adopted the same mechanism – of scolding and damnation – by which to quash what they don’t want to hear.

So my hope is that Free Speech, the real version will a) be recognised for the powerful and democratic tool it is b) respected as something that has consequences for both the speaker and the listener. Both good and bad.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Birds, language & the Singing Ape

19 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Apes, babies, Birdsong, Chimpanzees, Corvids, Dice, Frontal Lobe, Grammar, GUASJapan, Hominidae, langage, Lene Lovich, Mimicry, Mozart, Murder of Crows, Prefrontal Cortex, primal screams, Queen of the Night, radio 4, Syntax, The Birman of Brighton, Toshitaka Suzuki, Tree Spirits, Trees

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I’ve been considering a collision of sorts in regards to language and what gave voice to the human species.

And listening to The Queen Of The Night from Mozart’s Magic Flute bought it all to a point.

The three pieces that collided in my mind are Mimicry, Trees and Birds.

In regards to mimicry, I was listening to a Radio 4 piece recently where a scientist was discussing her study of Apes and their gestural vocabulary – and exploring whether the linking of multiple gestures could be viewed as proof of how language developed in us as seen through the window of Apes – a clue perhaps to our ancient passage from gestures emphasised and accented by vocal noises to language as a formal technology. The issue seemed to lie for her in the absence of syntax – the absence of a grammar that unified the gestures into threads, or sentences if you will. She was hopeful that continued and rigorous research would eventually answer this question one way or the other.

If the gestures could be linked cohesively and logically elevated by some form of grammatical logic or structure, emphasised by aural accompaniment, it could be possible to extrapolate that human language might have developed in a not dissimilar way.

Where mimicry comes into this for me is in the simple truth that humans learn language through mimicry. As babies we home in on and focus on the ‘voices’ of our parents – initially as a simple identifier – imprinting them as a source code. Then as we listen we begin to learn the sounds and the range of possible inflections, tones and emotional cadences of language long before we know the ‘meaning’ of those words or the structural engineering that brings them all together.

We’ve all heard a small child burbling away and, to all intents and purposes, having a good old chat with themselves, with all the cadences and inflections of sentence structure and frameworks, and with an understanding of the emotions carried within those sounds but without the faintest idea of any formal understanding or definition.

We share a common ancestry with chimpanzees, apes and orangutans – that of the Hominidae – and we are related most closely to chimps in regards to our DNA. When we explore the relationship between our intellect and that of the Chimpanzee we use mimicry as a tool to do this. A kind of Show and Tell and Learn system.

So if mimicry is a trait; an evolutionary ability developed in advanced apes descended from Hominidae, of which we are the most preeminent, then I sense that in mimicry lies an answer to the question of syntax and structural rhythm.

But who were we mimicking? Where? And Why?

The Birdman of Brighton with his small curiosity bird whistles and warblers set my mind in motion. Remembering the wonderment on my daughter’s face at the ability of the small fired-clay bird whistle to light up the air with its sing-song warble gave me the root human desire I was looking for. Its simply wonderful for a human, child or adult, to be able to sing like a bird. Magical. Like a trap door into a mystical place of ‘otherness.’

And this fascination is not only anecdotal and childlike.

In a more rigorous and scientific realm, Toshitaka Suzuki and his colleagues at The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Japan have revealed that bird song and birdcalls contain complex syntactical structures – ‘sentences’ if you will.

Though the infectious nature and idea of the syntax of birdsong seems enchanting, linguists see the birds as being very limited syntactically. Studied in isolation, I’m sure they must seem limited.

But the curiosity and conundrum for me is this: an ancient creature such as bird has syntax, whereas our Ape cousins, however smart or developed, currently do not. And humans have the most complex and sophisticated language of all earth’s creatures.

Is it our sophistication and evolutionary abilities that drive this reality? Or a simpler and more ‘creature-like’ trait in us?

For my mind, we have to consider the possibility that if we cannot find the direct linguistic link between our Ape cousins and their gestural noises and our own complex, syntactical language , we must look wider and indirectly – and consider some collisions perhaps.

For example; Humans have a very ancient relationship with trees. We have a simple, symbiotic relationship with them at a primal level: we breathe in what they breathe out – and they breathe out what we breathe in. But the root of us and the roots of them are intertwined over millennia. We have evolved around and within them, developing under the cover of their canopy, drawing from the soil beneath them, hollowing them out as hallowed spaces. Taking refuge in their boughs. Living amongst their branches. Feeding on their fruits. Using their seasonal shifts like metronome for our own existence. Trees are imprinted on us. Which means we could accept one thing as broadly likely: our ancestors would have lived beak by jowl with every shade shape, nature and hue of bird for hundreds of thousands of generations.

We mimic most things when given half a chance. We certainly mimic birdsong – using calls and whistles to provoke reaction from or engagement with the creatures around us.

Why could we not consider the idea that there was an tree dwelling-ancestor in our distant past whose speciality was birdsong mimicry – to attract and to interact with them – either to catch and eat them perhaps, or in the use of them as compasses, weather vanes, soothsayers, or doom-bringers. And consider that those ancestors played a pivotal role in our adoption of the syntactical nature of birdsong. Perhaps they were hugely influential at a pivotal point in our evolution.

This makes complete sense to me. People who spend a lot of time around each other begin to align in all manner of ways. They start to adopt aspects of each other- why not each others communication? Mimicry as part of evolutionary survival over generations must imprint itself – descend beneath the surface of us. There is little reason to believe that the improved nature of our communication between each other would not be adopted by our evolving brain as something useful and therefore code for it. If the nature and syntax of birdsong became second nature to us: if our Ape like ancestors began to ‘pass on’ this ability until it became innate, then I would be able to clearly understand how the ‘Singing Ape’ would develop syntax and start to form the more complex format of communication that we have come to understand as language.

Our ancestors would simply have sharpened this ‘tool’ or technology in much the same way they sharpened stones and sticks.

There is also an ancient cautionary tale in this scenario for me. Something old even in the imagining of it.

Imagine at a point some few hundreds of thousands of years ago, on the great plain, under the cover of some acacia trees, we find a murder of exceptionally clever corvids – crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs and nutcrackers – and a scrum of our grunty, crass, Hominidae ancestors. They are at the crossroads of time: and they are playing dice.

And here’s for why. The terribly clever corvids have sensed that the Hominidae have something they want. A Prefrontal cortex. The power source of super evolution. So they have tempted our clumsy ancestors into gambling it all for the chance of gaining the sweet ‘voice’ of the corvids, and, ultimately, their ability to fly.

The greater prize? Whomsoever wins the toss of the die, will get all that’s best of the other and ascend to great heights, reshaping the world in their image. And the loser will be damned to be trapped as they are for all time.

The rest, of course, would be evolutionary history (probably).

Lene Lovich anyone?

 

 

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