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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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Of Gods, Software & Human Disappointment

16 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Abrahamic Faiths, AI, algorithms, Bacteria To Bach and Back, Dennet, Driverless cars, Evolution, From Bacteria To Bach and Back, Gaultier, gods, Greek Theatre, Hamlet, Hawking, i-phone X, Junior Gaultier, Mahabharata, Metaphysics, Omnipotence, Perseus, Physics, Shakespeare, Singularity, Software, supernatural, Zeus

Image result for human gods

There is an air of disappointment curling around the head of our new god.

Our all-consuming belief in Technology and the algorithmic inevitability of its ascent into one-ness with us renders it a form of deity to many. In its wake we see theological and philosophical texts bursting forth from every quarter, trying to both project its arc through our existence and predict its inevitable impact upon it.

But there is an increasingly vociferous movement rising up alongside it. One that sees fundamental flaws in its omnipotent possibilities and bumpy times ahead rooted in our blind allegiance to it.

Some of these voices come from mildly surprising places. Stephen Hawking, once a believer in a universal singularity – a theory of everything – has shifted the axis of his belief of what we will ultimately know:

“Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind”

And in turn, he sees bad times ahead for a world where A.I. exists unfettered and beyond regulation. In the great Singularity lies something against nature for humankind that troubles him.

Even Daniel C Dennet in his book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back, is also positing signs of cracks and flaws in the godhead:

‘There are some unsettling signs that we are becoming over-civilised. And are entering the age of post intelligent design. Using our brains to understand our brains.’

He goes on to venture that our willingness to subsume and subjugate ourselves to technology and the escalating potency of Artificial Intelligences in advance of their ability to actual fulfil on our wildest expectations and aspirations is a misguided one.

In the untrammelled and exponentially-increasing expectations of technological revolution and artificial, algorithmically-induced intelligence lies the possibility of ever-increasing disappointment.

There is an inevitability about this that is unsurprising and yet quietly reassuring.

For a god awe is critical. As is adulation. And fear. But no god is complete without disappointment. So the whiff of it at the edges of the newly-accelerating godhead of Artificial Intelligence and a creeping hybrid humanity is actually appropriate. For some perhaps it will be proof of its god-like status.

As with all of the gods we’ve conjured or revealed to ourselves, A.I. and its role in the Singularity is perhaps simply a reflection of our nature, need and desire.

Perhaps we design them that way. For a reason.  We need to be disappointed by gods.

Creating them in our image requires disappointment as the proof of our need for fallibility or flaw in any creature, organism or being regardless of whether they are of an abstract celestial, actual mortal or organic technological kind. There’s no such thing as perfection.

Disappointment seems not only to fulfil a functional role in regards to the nature of the entity. It also creates a signpost to the divine obsolescence in the model – the milestone of inevitable descent, dilapidation, degradation and decline that will lead to the next in the cycle.

Disappointment teaches us that we can fiercely believe, up to a point – but that we must prepare for the downside. It compels us have scenario-planned for the possibility that the deity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

But that is also part of the package. The scale of reverence, adulation and awe creates a blinding spotlight to throw on the smallest flaw.

Technology is a powerful and omnipotent thing. It has created a new skin of human consciousness – an algorithmic shellac around our previous model of consciousness. Everything is elevated. Everything is illuminated. Everything is accelerated. But in becoming more through it, we become more vulnerable, more fragile because of it.

In knowing more and experiencing more, in reaching further, we expose ourselves. And our flaws are amplified. (Surely the model applied to Zeus – for all of his divine greatness and powers, the formicating, fractious, scheming, self-interested, betraying, vain, capricious, petulant Zeus was simply an extrapolation of our flawed humanity to divine proportion.)

For the Greeks, in their gods much like their theatre, we find a learning module for humanity – where theatre taught us empathy and the potential of feeling – gods taught us humility and the danger of hubris.

Great lessons in life and the universe can be better observed and learned when set apart from our everyday realities. A masterplan. It only falls apart when we confuse ourselves with the gods we create – and choose to ordain ourselves as such.

Pick a culture any culture: Persians, Romans, Egyptians, Franks, Stuarts – we can never quite allow the gods we create to exist wholly apart from us. And those that seized the divine mantle could never  help but eventually reign down on those beneath them in some delusional purge of divinity and dreadful ire – a self-fulfilling  prophecy repeated countless times throughout human history.

Nonetheless, for all of this – for all their flaws and our flawed misuse and mimicry of them, gods have taught us to reach beyond the normal: beyond what is. They have raised us up towards them.

Simply to envisage them we had to ‘place’ them – and that required a feat of imagination. They are an exercise in imagination as much as they are an exercise in reverence and humility. You have to ‘place’ a god in a world apart from the one in which we exist – a different plane or celestial firmament. You also need to design some form of context and divine order for them. So our imagination, one of the most powerful things at work in us versus any other species on the planet, went to work. And its productivity in that order was staggering. Simply put, seeking divine revelation has powered our multiple ages of renaissance and enlightenment.

Through gaining a greater vantage and framing of the gods we shape, we can seek to understand them and perhaps become a little closer to them – to being in their image – like them.

And the most powerful part of all of that reaching? We evolve. Transgressing the given, the immediate and the fixed is how we evolve. And in doing so we explore the flaws in ourselves at a distance.

One of the most powerful things about reaching beyond ourselves, to a place so exposed, so raw, is that by transgressing where we are in the known universe, we step into the unknown. And the unknown is dangerous; it involves risk. And in a state of risk or threat we evolve.

Gods are an evolutionary mechanism in us – forcing us to exercise our intellect, imagination, intuition and connectivity in search of their existence and their seeming capabilities and gifts. And subsequently, in managing their presence and mitigating their excesses in relation to us, we expand our consciousness of our own existence, and the methods by which to improve it.

Through this mechanism we manage the tension between what we do and don’t know.

In writing a manuscript for a book recently I alluded to us being at a tipping point: where the new-future believers see us merging with machines in some orgy of singularity. We will become dispossessed of our mortal bindings – free to skip the light fantastic. We will have become the ultimate software. Ultimately we will be able to upload ourselves into any and every compatible device, receptacle or host. We can copy ourselves quadrillions of times over.

Surely this is a step into the divine? In becoming a wholly transferable entity capable of occupying millions of receptacles or hosts simultaneously, we become no different to the God of the Abrahamic faiths or the multiple gods of Grecian Olympus or the pantheon of the Mahabarata of Indian myth. We can become the thing that acts within everything if we so choose.

In the draft I also point to the possibility of a more balanced relationship between the science and spirituality of us as being the source of our greatest trajectory – a state of being I refer to as the Human Hammock. The Human Hammock provides us with the ability to sling ourselves between the boughs of science and spirituality – to offer a more immediate ability to exist profitably between both the known and the unknown at one and the same time: mentally, materially, physically and metaphysically.

In the draft I point to the possibility that we need to keep both aspects firmly engaged in us, calibrating the degree to which they feature according to need and desire.

I believe there is a benefit to us of keeping a clear hand and cold eye on the Unknown, as it is those things beyond our comprehension, and our hunger to understand and know them better that compels our evolution as a species.

To be clear when I say unknown I do not mean it within the ladder of human consciousness. I am referring to what exists beyond human comprehension, not beyond current scientific knowledge (which exists solely inside human comprehension and consciousness)..

We can ensure that we fix the Human Hammock theory clearly and as absolutely as possible by priming the forthcoming Singularity to abide by biological evolutionary rules.

Though Singularity might lead us towards a more divine state of elevated and liberated consciousness and ubiquity, we should ensure that it remains rooted in the ladder of our pre-existing evolutionary logic until such a time as a new logic supercedes it.

Eventually, in multiplying ourselves to that degree and with that expansiveness, we would indeed become gods in our own image of them.

The circle will have been squared, shifting us through the millennia from Man shaped in the image of gods to gods shaped in the image of Man.

When talking of gods, it’s worth being clear on what we mean by that and the slide ruler of how they represent and improve us and their relationship to us.

Gods or deities are supernatural beings that exist in a place above or outside of that of a normal being. They are divine – revered as sacred – and invocation is an inextricable part of our relationship with them. We invoke them – call upon, summon up, reference, or seek them out as part of the reciprocal contract of their and our existence.

They are supposed to raise our consciousness above the banal and that which exists in our everyday being – to improve us. We can invoke them outside of any chronological or spatial context in the pursuit of something.

There are different bridges that exist between us and them – prayer is the easiest example. But also extreme physical duress or testing is a much-used way to elevate us into a higher consciousness and bring us closer to our gods and one-ness wth the universe. (Shamanism is a great exponent of this.) Extreme physicality is powerful in god world. Add some purpose or cause to that physicality and you are getting even closer.

There is a direct line to the gods through heroic action, where humans show superhuman willing, guile, leadership, courage, spirit or strength in pursuit of a good or ‘heroic’ cause. As the old saying goes, when someone is ‘touched by the gods’ it means the reflections or shadows of the greater faculties of the gods reside within them.

In referencing the relationship between us and them in this way we bring them closer to us. Greater proximity to gods is part of the self-defence mechanism innate in the god model and its culture.

Some classical and ancient texts imbued their god tales with Demi-gods – half human half god – whose heroic undertakings created a picture of greatness that was more accessible to the everyday human being.

This is the default zone between us and the distant realm of gods as we’ve created them. Demi-gods are very very important to keep people engaged and evolving.

Why? Because human nature predicts that if something is wholly out of reach – fully blown bells and whistles gods for instance – we don’t rise to the occasion. In the case of lofty, dislocated gods we just sublimate ourselves to them. We don’t desire to be more like them – we just cower, and we give up and go do something else. Because it is beyond us. Out of sight is out of mind unless they might choose to come down and walk amongst us.

But Demi-gods, now they are far closer to home. If the gods are Gaultier; Demi-gods are Junior Gaultier: the access point for us mere mortals.

The universal love for Wonder Woman (a Demi Demi, given that she is the daughter of the Demi-god queen, Hippolyta, daughter of Ares, the Greek god of War) is proof of our need for our god-like creations to walk amongst us sometimes. It makes their greatness accessible and mimicry of it possible.

I can’t be Zeus but I might take a run at being Perseus or even Wonder Woman – ish.

So gods do not need to always be the pure, super-duper theological or mythological gods of classicism or faith far beyond our ken.  We have the Demi-god to help us move things along. There is little question that we have believed for a long time that there is indeed a ladder to god-like greatness for us.

What a piece of work is man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world,

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

So when I speak of gods I refer to anyone perceived as god-like and heroic to us. Someone revered beyond simple explanation, and someone whose words or deeds are invoked by us as succour and guidance.

In that framework, gods with a small ‘g’ come in many shapes and forms.

Starting with our parents.

Our most adored friends can also achieve god-like status for a while.

Then the broader adulations of our youth: Sports people. Celebrities. Music stars. Movie stars. Writers. Artists. Scientists.

We even have the passing phase of god-like stature in the first flushes of human love. The phase in which we are fiercely revered, adored and invoked.

Each of these gods, as with every other, are destined to go on a journey through Awe. Adulation. Reverence. Fear. But each is also destined to disappoint in some way eventually.

As disappointment is an inextricable part of the human journey so it has also become an innate aspect of the gods we shape . In some ways being disappointed by gods perhaps prepares us for disappointment with ourselves. If the gods can be disappointing; flawed, capricious, found wanting, then so can we be – and that is alright.

Disappointment in our gods lessens or softens the disappointment in ourselves.

In that way, gods that disappoint are an evolutionary mechanism that stop us giving up and turning away – defeated by what we aren’t or cannot do. We learn that though disappointment may strike, that’s alright. It was always thus. You can’t get it right all the time and no one is perfect – not even our gods. So keep carrying on.

As for Artificial Intelligence, well, perhaps it has to have a Zeus moment. It has to go and sleep with someone inappropriate, sire a child, create a technological Demi-god (and in the absence of any others I would like to venture R2D2 as that Demi-god) who will eventually challenge the god that helped sire it and lay it low.

Then we can all relax. Go back to ogling i-phone Xs and googling driverless cars, with a quiet knowledge that when they come of the rails, everything is alright. It’s not the end of the world.

Well, not this one anyway.

 

Disappointed By Gods FOOTNOTE: This topic will one day become a book – of what length I do not know. But somehow somewhere it will. So if anyone’s got any ideas on a publisher – shout!

 

The Bard, Bowie, hemispheres & the bearable lightness of being.

07 Sunday Feb 2016

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1975, Aeschylus, Boccaccio, Bowie, Bowie IS, Broakes & Marsh, cartesian Duality, Charles Laughton, Chaucers, Dante, David St Hubbins, Descartes, Donne, Empathy, Extasie, Georg Cantor, Greek Chorus, Iain McGilchrist, Infinity, Lady Macbeth, Marlowe, Master & His Emissary, Neuro-imaging, Otherness, psychology, Right Hemisphere, Rosalind, Shakespeare, Spinal Tap, Station To Station, The Bard, The Soul, The V&A, Thin White Duke, Throwing Dart's In Lover's Eyes, Troillus & Cressida, University of Liverpool. Olivier, Ziggy Stardust

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I think there’s been a happening in the cosmic fizz just beyond our mortal measure and comprehension – but thankfully those of you Right-Hemisphere leaning kids out there will be none the poorer for it – quite the opposite one would hope, if the laws of social contagion are to be believed.

On 10th January 2016, David Bowie, a rock and pop performer of exceptional elegance and a master of transformation, died.

He left behind a staggering back catalogue of human invention. His ability to shift from masque to masque, identity to identity, not only in his career and lifetime but even in the process of one performance was in retrospect one of the great artistic spectacles of the 20th Century.

Until the point of his death, history was preparing to view 2016 through the eyes of another Great British artist (some would say the greatest), and a master of the dramatic theatre of shifting masques and identities.

2016 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death.

2016 was to be the year of the Bard, generator of some of the English language’s greatest turns of phrase; creator of some of its greatest dramatic masterpieces, characters and archetypes.

Hamlet. Lady Macbeth. Iago. Juliette. Oberon. The list is endless, and the construct and dynamics of their identities have been studied in minute detail and from every conceivable perspective.

The Bard’s own real identity has also come under intense scrutiny over the years – was he part of his work, merely the quill of it, or himself the greatest piece of literary confection of the English lexicon?

Was he a thief, an imitator, a fake, a sage or a genius? The jury it seems is still out.

Speaking of The Bard, genius, shifting identities and cosmic collisions – it is worth noting that on the evening of the 10th of January 2016, as David Bowie peacefully departed for a place from which he could chime ‘Look up here, I’m in Heaven’, another great shape shifter of the stage, (already an inhabitant of the intangible Otherness) was being celebrated in an RSC film night at the Barbican.

The film was Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream starring Charles Laughton – a man known to have infuriated his contemporaries(Olivier particularly) with statements such as:

“Great artists reveal the god in man,” he said in an interview, “and every character an actor plays must be this sort of creation. Not imitation – that is merely caricature… The better – the truer – the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter’s immortal work.”*

Reaching out beyond what is known, what is given and what exists is the simple process of creation – a conscious or unconscious action – and one of the greatest slingshots of our conscious development. It was certainly what drove Laughton.

 Laughton’s post-war masterpiece, Night of The Hunter, delivered a ground-breaking collision of theatrical chiaroscuro and dramatic tour de force that had until then never been seen on the movie screen.

In his need to see and go further than any one had ever gone before he aligned himself with the belief that the primary force of the stage is creative, not imitative – a belief system by which both The Bard and Bowie patently lived their lives.

The Bard & The Thin White Duke were, I believe, driven to do so – compelled to create something of a higher order – using contexts and characters to draw the sky towards them, to study the whole of our existence, instead of scratching out increments of cause and effect, measure for measure.

I believe that they did this because one aspect of their conscious self compelled them to do so. They were wired that way – more attuned to the right hemisphere of our brain; and its quest to seek that which lies just beyond our sight and our reasoning, rather than just controlling and measuring that which we already have.

This reaching for some sense of Otherness – just out of sight and beyond our reasoned comprehension – is not just some artsy humanities piffle.

Georg Cantor the 19th century Mathematician struggled with finite or ‘fixed’ concepts of infinity – he struggled with the idea of there being a necessary (rational/reasoned) uncertainty and incompleteness in the realm of mathematics.

He struggled with the idea that Beyond the infinity of infinities; (lay) Something Other. Infinity was no longer tameable by turning it into an abstract concept and then just carrying on as though it were just another number.

(Obviously one should be aware that there is a danger here of falling into the Spinal Trap of David St Hubbins and his discourse on Infinity:

‘It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how – what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you. 

Though, as a form of dramatic proof, in this astonishingly funny moment, as with all great characterisations, we find a far deeper and more expansive question waiting to be asked hidden in the subtext of their comedy.)

If we delve deeper into the ties that bind the Bard and Bowie the deeper threads of influence ad interrelation strung between them are many.

In their astonishing curation of the man ‘DAVID BOWIE IS’ for the V&A, Victoria Broakes & Geoffrey Marsh refer to Bowie’s formulation of a theory of Gender as Performance, ‘… antecedents for which can be found in Shakespeare’s plays, where theatre becomes a master metaphor for life.’

Broakes & Marsh also refer to how ‘with his silver lipstick and forehead astral sphere he evoked the radiant allegorical figures of courtly masque.’

Going further, they attest to the belief that ‘Indeed, in Ziggy Stardust’s supernormal militant energy and shuffled masks we may have come closer than we ever will again to glimpsing how Shakespeare’s virtuoso boy actors performed the roles of Rosalind, Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth.’

As we should remember, the relationship between Bowie’s Thin White Duke (an exquisite confection of Abdicated Edward’s veneered hair and permanent cigarette painted in the gaunt Berlin draw of a smack-head aristocrat) and the Elizabethan Bard are more than just accents and accidents of gender performance.

The Thin White Duke was a man who spent much time ‘throwing darts in lover’s eyes.

love’s arrow or love’s darts and a penchant for casting them was a popular Elizabethan conceit favoured by Donne, Marlowe et al.

This emanation from within – reciprocity of feeling not thinking – was a reoccurring theme in the dramatic and written arts.

In Il Filostrato, circa 1338 Giovanni Boccaccio fused the tradition of love at first sight, the eye’s darts, and the metaphor of Cupid’s arrow:

“Nor did he (Troilus) who was so wise shortly before… perceive that Love with his darts dwelt within the rays of those lovely eyes… nor notice the arrow that sped to his heart.”

That this piece of writing was the inspiration of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus and Crisedye’ which in turn was the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida should come as no surprise.

Many were enamoured by the idea of an inner ‘light’ of intimate observation, emanating from inside the ‘soul’ of the observer to become one with soul of the observed.

Take the lovers of Donne’s Extasie for whom

Our eye beams twisted, and did thread

Our eyes upon a double string

 

And Shakespeare’s Oberon says of Cupid:

“A certain aim he took

At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,

And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.”

 

Equally, Dante in his ‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’ (Rime XIV) was not inured to the charms of the reciprocal gaze.

“The very paragon of Beauty, who

Will wound the eyes of any who dares view

The flame-like essences of burning love

She shoots from her bright eyes – which, when they move,

Penetrate to the heart and wound it too.

Thus in her face one sees the vital strength

Of Love portrayed where none may gaze at length.”

There is a vital reciprocity in all their gaze – a mutuality and transaction of something alive. This is not mutual seeing of the direct referential See the Crow. Point at the Crow. Shoot the Crow type

Something has been shared – an inspirational and profound thing – a thing that improves each of them equally.

To Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master & His Emissary, a book on how our conscious selves and the world in which we exist is being shaped and moulded by hemispheric sensibility, the light ‘darts’ from the eyes of lover’s was the Elizabethan’s way of describing a form of seeing or observation that is fired by the right hemisphere and its pursuit of the intangible immeasurable higher order of us – whole expansive pictures of our existence far beyond the scrabbling measures of the left hemisphere’s control-freakery.

In reference to Dramatic Tragedy and the role of the Greek Chorus, McGilchrist points out that this new form of observation – distant – removed – taken out of the immediate rational linear Now – is one of the illuminating and enlightening moments of our conscious human development.

In viewing life and its tragedies from a distance, Drama allowed us to engage in an evolving form of human learning – of matters of the soul – of Otherness.

McGilchrist writes ‘In tragedy we see for the first time in the history of the West the power of empathy as we watch …the painful moulding of the will…’

The central role of faces and identities in drama and theatre is telling in regards to what both the Bard and Bowie understood – they ‘knew what was right without knowing’ – a very right hemisphere trait apparently.

McGilchrist points out that ‘the interpretation of faces is a Right Hemisphere prerogative: in looking at the face of one’s partner (compared with an unknown face) the right insula increases in activity.’

At the beating heart of drama we explore faces and the tension lines drawn between them. In faces and living expressions played out across identities and their myths we learn to understand the abstract, unseen and unimaginable – we use the dramatic shifts in the face – its expressions and light – to interrogate and comprehend our own existence, our empathy for others, our otherness in relation to the world around us.

In 1973, few young English teenage girls understood death other than through that of Ziggy Stardust. Their pain and loss were real; as the emotions had been created within them by the artist. They were not imitating life changing sadness and mourning. They were living it.

To be clear, Iain McGlchrist is not advocating some Cartesian Duality of Either Or. He is utterly committed to the lateral truths of how both the right and left hemispheres interrelate and relentlessly inform enrich and recalibrate each other. BUT.

He does contest that the greater dimensions of our conscious selves owe much to a hemisphere which until now has had to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune showered upon it by the very  rational, left-hemisphere-leaning, scientific prism through which we are now all required to view and celebrate life. Hubble and Hawking must be enough for us now. How could we ever seek more

McGilchist’s polymathic interest in the collision point between neuro-imagination, literature and language and psychology is not working alone in the world.

Recently this world view has been bolstered by the works of another cluster of diverse minds.

Julie Henry writing for the Telegraph on the 13th January reported that ‘Scientists Psychologists and English academics at Liverpool University found that reading the works of the Bard …had a beneficial effect on the mind, catches the readers attention and triggers moments of self reflection.

Henry continued “Scans showed that the more “challenging” prose and poetry set off far more electrical activity in the brain than the more pedestrian versions.

Scientists were able to study the brain activity as it responded to each word and record how it “lit up” as the reader’s encountered unusual words, surprising phrases or difficult sentence structure.

This “lighting up” of the mind lasts longer than the initial electrical spark, shifting the brain to a higher gear, encouraging further reading.

The research also found that reading poetry, in particular, increases activity in the right hemisphere of the brain, an area concerned with “autobiographical memory”, helping the reader to reflect on and reappraise their own experiences in light of what they have read.”

Rational minds that dismiss the humanities and the arts as a distraction from the improving nature and evolution of being human seem to deny one pure truth that their own science reveals.

Our minds positively respond to reaching beyond what ‘is’. We are made better – improved – for it. Our humanity is illuminated and given depth and expanse by the creations of these pioneers of identity and conscious self. We learn to empathise with what is otherwise intangible – the feeling carried within another – beyond the linear and immediate.

The works of The Bard and of Bowie, compelled by their right-hemisphere need to reach beyond the measurable and the given – to seek to capture the ‘light’, the darts thrown from lovers eyes – created works both for the creator and the receiver – to inspire both themselves and us to reach to a greater degree of self understanding – of greater consciousness. They created a moment of mutual gaze between us and them -to allow us a glimpse of the light within in their own.

Their works become the dart and we the lover. And Vice Versa

One might even venture that the utter lack of utility or function seemingly required to render something ‘art’ is a defensive evolutionary mechanism. Perhaps its artfulness, its redundant pose, is itself an artful deceit designed to obscure the primary and far more powerful role the pieces of dramatic creativity are undertaking – to relentlessly improve and expand us through firing in us a greater quest for more conscious enlightenment in, and doing so while our left brain’s back is turned – for fear that otherwise the left will wade in, spoil and obfuscate what it cant understand – and in doing so diminish us and our potential to exist.

Or was it just that both Shakespeare and Bowie liked a man in tights (as did Laughton) – the Dressing Up box of Creativity and Dramatic effect and the reaching for Otherness being preferable to the real tragedy and visceral slaughter that came from those only interested in reaching for the Now and what existed in front of them, as they sought to measure, map, grasp and rule it.

*Quoted – Simon Callow Charles Laughton: dazzling player of monsters, misfits and kings 2013 – Telegraph On Line

 

 

Everything is connected & a brief journey through two kings, blue eyes, 1970s posters and Alice Cooper

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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1970s Posters, Blondie, Crystal Gale, Elizabeth Taylor, Elrond, Everything Is Connected, Gandalf, Gimley, Gladiator, Hamlet, Legolas, Living In The Now, lord of the Rings, Lothlorien, Manhatten Transfer, Mick Ronson, Mirkwood, Mustique, Nostalgia, Peter O Toole, Portofino, Richard Burton, Sartoria, Shakespeare, Sir Ian McKellen, Sir John Gielgud, Social Memory, St Tropez, Strider, The Cramps, The Medusa Touch, The Senses, The Shire, Theodren, Viggo Mortgensen, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

Screen Shot 2015-07-15 at 11.26.07  BurtonL1402_468x624imgres-1$_12imgres

TWO KINGS

let’s start our journey of connection at the film Lord Of The Rings: The Return of the King – and lets take ourselves to the final reckoning at the Black Gate – and Aragorn’s rousing speech in the final battle scene.

It teeters on battle speech perfect. And that’s amongst some stiff opposition:
Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
A sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!

Theoden’s rousing speech is about as good as they get (leaving aside every transcendent quote from Gladiator you care to mention.)

But Aragorn’s speech goes to a different level. And it is due to something beyond mere content. Something rings (sorry) more deeply here: something is different: his voice: the gruffness of before – the hoarse whisper of Strider, the ranger’s voice, has taken on a more measured passion – a more kingly tenor.

Suddenly there is a new stature present: that of a King in waiting. It seems as if Aragorn in his speech finally rises through his oratory to the challenge set by Elrond: to “Put aside the Ranger. Become who you were born to be.”

But this kingly voice sounds faintly familiar. Whose voice echoes down through the celluloid corridors to sound out through the lips of Viggo Mortgensen?

And then it struck me.

Richard Burton: Hamlet. 1964. Produced and directed for the stage and screen by the immutable Sir John Gielgud.

And What a piece of work is a man…

Glorious.

Viggo’s voice, whether by prescription or accident sounds out the spirit of Burton’s Hamlet through the mouth of a different King.

Strangely, another more abstracted, wholly subjective and subtle connection exists for me – through Gandalf or should I say Sir Ian McKellen: whom has always reminded me of Gielgud.

GOING FOR A BURTON

On the matter of Richard Burton, when asked recently whom I thought, beyond Bond et al,was the yet to be discovered Look in gentlemen’s sartoria – for me, it is Richard Burton.

Apart from the fact that, he already achieves 11 out of 10 on a blokey rating just for marrying one of if not the most beautiful women of the age (shallow is the new deep), Burton also found himself a famous sporter of fashion signature pieces like the toweling polo shirt – three button, splayed collar, sun burnt colours – which he sported in American Bars from Portofino to St Tropez to Mustique.

But look further and his look expands into multiple sartorial shards from the broken glass of 50’s 60’s and 70’s fashion. The ‘almost Elvis’ suit and collar combos off set by slicked back hair and powder-white sideburns firing across rippled sun drenched skin. The smokey southern deconstructed suits of a very twisted George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. To the beat generation black of Hamlet and the stripped back Medusa Touch.

So Burton is The Man for me when it comes to the next British Look.

BROWN EYES BLUE

It’s amazing how a still from a movie can invoke a memory that rockets you back to a moment in time with such a breathtaking ferocity and such clarity.

While looking at stills of Richard Burton in the film The Medusa Touch, I was reminded of the depth and what I can only refer to a the particular ‘blue’-ness of his eyes – not bright crystal like O’Toole’s – more a deep mined blue with graphite shades and green eddies.

Regardless, the song that rushed to the back of my mind while looking at the stills was Crystal Gale’s Don’t it make your Brown Eyes blue. Now disregarding the fact that I had a massive crush on her for a while (though nothing will EVER outshine the tenure of my teenage crush on Debbie Harry – currently still burning brightly), and playful word recognition and threads aside (Blue Eyes – Brown Eyes) it was the ‘time’ that played up into my head – that moment of being in the world through which that song floated. The clothes I wore. The music I loved. The posters on my cork tiled patch of wall. All those discomforts of self: the intensity of passions and uncertainties. The smell of cut grass on school playing fields. The face of a girl that I liked but couldn’t even fathom how to look at let alone try and speak to. Dislocated parents. Dislocated body (nothing my body did bore any relation to what went on in my head – it was a law unto itself). A time made as viscerally present as it is past. All through a song and a film still.

1970s POSTERS

Speaking of posters from the 1970s – one of the posters that hung for years on my wall was a Lord Of The Rings poster Illustrated by J Caulty.

The poster’s central characters are, I believe, Gandalf and Frodo Baggins. Around its periphery we see Aragorn, Gimley, Legolas and Gollum amongst others, interlaced with twisting pathways, and realms like the distant Lothlorien, and the Shire – all topped with a curling embellishment on which hung a golden crown.

Around the poster ran a border embellished with men, elves, dwarves, riders and assorted others. But dead centre at the bottom of this border lay the magic: a small iris that looked into a mysterious land: as if we are peering out from the dark innards of the great Mirkwood to the lush lands beyond.

And I remember looking deeply, almost trance like into this aperture and wondering what world existed beyond there. (Preferably one more seductive than the one in which my highly conflicted teenage self lived currently.)

And I remember thinking that the character I thought to be Aragorn (but it is actually probably a darker character from the stories) midway up the right hand side of the poster looks like a mash up of Alice Cooper, Mick Ronson, Manhatten Transfer and a Cramps flyer – which just about summed up my musical confusion through the mid to late 70s – a troubled collision of heavy rock & pomp metal, disco, punk, greaser rock and psychobilly.

Confused perhaps. But Lord Of The Rings nonetheless.

Which brings me back to the return of the king: a virtuous circle of being.

So heres to a goes around comes around world where everything is connected – past present and future through sight smell taste touch and sound wound into a cat’s cradle string that we merely reform and reshape depending on the memory doorways we enter through, and to whichever passing thought kicks the embers from the back of our mind into sparks at the front.

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