Tag Archives: Spinal Tap

Accelerating History, Universal Rules & Tappist Conundrum

20 Monday Jun 2016

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The future is Now – or just a hop, swipe and a quark in front of the moment we’re in – apparently – and every leap forwards we experience just another masterful identification of yet another inflection in technology – another opportunity or possibility seized by one silicon valley giant or another (and at which they ferociously throw themselves like a clown-masked bank robber sprawled across the bonnet of Frank Cannon’s Mark IV Continental, money spilling from his pockets like confetti, killer app strapped to his oversized gloved hand, joker grimace mouth frothing with messianic fervour).

And as each Now is seized, another rush of them pop up in its wake. Not one. Many. Nows are like May Flies, their single short life, their moment in the sun though brief and bright, is followed by not one but many more, their job of expanding their universe efficiently and economically done. And like May Flies, those Nows and the wave of possibility and opportunity that accompany them are coming thicker and faster than ever as technology and the Moore’s Law slingshot applies.

But there’s the question (if you can be arsed to ask it).

These Nows, and the infinite relentless possibility that comes with them are coming thicker and faster BUT are they rushing towards us, and if so what’s pushing them? Or are we rushing towards them – and if so, what’s propelling us?

Are we in a delicious Pull relationship with that point somewhere between the far side of the Now and the leading edge of tomorrow? Is the mesmeric possibility and galloping expectation of ‘what might be’ seducing us to rush at ever greater speeds into that space, self-propelling ourselves on the accelerating nature of tech capability?

Or are we being pushed? – bullied and bumped by the expanding exploding mosh of what has momentarily just been…by history, its knee relentlessly in the small of our back: its open palms flat battering against our shoulder blades – oooffff – sharp shoves with vertebrae clicks as the metronome of our progress?

And if it is the latter, when did quaint, doleful, dusty history get so pushy?

Though providing a huge potential for sounding a little like David St Hubbins from Spinal Tap (how could we forget his musings on Infinity – “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.”), the question of whether we are being pushed towards the future (and if so by what) or whether the future is rushing towards us is a rather fun thing to ponder,

My interest lies in the two camps that seem to vie for attention in this Tappist space. On the one hand the Historians have always felt very strongly that the answer to every human question yet to be asked has already been answered somewhere in history so they would say that history reaches forward into the Now and the Near Future continuously, shaping, poking, and priming them as it goes, and, ultimately isn’t everything rather circular anyway in our Goes Around Comes Around world?

And on the other, the futurists have a tendency to simply view history as the collective debris strewn behind our relentless pursuit of that great big beautiful rush  of ‘Now’s – the past simply the rusting wreck of all that furious Doing and Being – the landfill of quadrillions of previous ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’s – and a fistful of ‘maybe’s’ – now old; spent; finished; past; dead.

It would be fair to say that in our tech-fuelled accelerating world one might be forgiven for believing that the Futurists are ahead

Bar the odd Simon Schama moment and the old farts watching Time Team re runs – and a small deep fetish for period dramas – it’s all i Robot, Future Shock, cyborg, Artificial Intelligence, the upcoming sensory smack addiction of VR, multiple Wireds by Will i am, and the ‘prism-meets-kaleidoscope-meets-mirage’ of social network identity.

But for my tuppence worth, I believe we are not being drawn towards the relentlessly multiplying possibilities of an accelerating life powered by accelerating tech.

We are being pushed towards them.

Life is not accelerating – history is. It is also expanding and deepening as it does so. Technology is not accelerating future opportunity; it is amplifying, multiplying expanding and accelerating the Past at an exponential rate, which in turn pushes the future. (I can hear the sound of a split hair readying itself for further splicing!)

The Past is throwing more and more data, options choices, threads and wormholes over our shoulder into the path ahead.

The old, odd, sloth-like and highly personal model of living history – a straggly tendril poking us along our merry way, or popping up for some reason every now and then – has transformed into a high, broad and deep wave of such staggering proportion that the sheer critical mass of it relentlessly rising up behind us presses us forward at ever greater speeds.

History has stopped being the inert supplicant to the edgy today and ever more glamorous tomorrow. History is no longer dusting off books and only getting noticed when the 120 pound muscled-up Now feels like kicking sand in its face.

History is now the big kid on the block. History has changed its diet. History is bulking up, doing free weights, and running faster and further than ever before. History’s arms are more ripped and wider than ever. History’s shoulders have expanded, laying on more muscle and width. History has binned the old singular enormo-head of massed experience, chronology and intelligence and now rears up like a hydra, multiple heads sparking, spitting and snapping in every direction at once.

History is so NOW. Alive. Vibrant. Ripped. (Ooohhh.)

And this History is no meathead. This History has taken up Humanities. Broadening its mind at the speed of light fibre. This history ‘listens’. And it learns.

The old, mean, sharp dry propagandas of the old History – mean, brittle, myopic, self interested, closed, elitist – have been supplanted with a broad minded, expansive all seeing History, fired by myriad reference points and concurrent history threads on any given subject – all of which can be viewed ‘in flow’, hyper linked to each other in a cats cradle of information, opinion, feeling, insight, record, and data. History is not only alive. Its groovy: switched on. Tuned in.

For example, lets take an era of historic record – The Cold War. In our new hyper connected world, at the touch of a screen I can explore the Cold War not only from the vantage point of general historic record; the standard expository account as set out in a geo political or military text book but also through ‘pulling up’ what’s out there (About 65, 100,000 results in 0,62 seconds according to GOOGLE) delivering everything from random Wikis to blogs to current affairs programmes and texts from the time, government papers subsequently released by interested 3rd parties (web platforms & activists): treatise on How and why – profiles on whom – the JFK lens? – the Khruschev lens? – the Castro Lens?  – suddenly Ive got Marilyn Monroe conspiracy films with my Bay Of Pigs and a recipe for Cuban Rum Bean Stew in front of me. There are personal biographical and autobiographical accounts of living memory (both politicians militarists, civic officers and everyday people) to swim in.

I can have a shufti at the confrontation through the 1st and 3rd person filmic, musical and artistic reminiscences of people who ‘lived it’. I can virtually experience Cold War happenings, using Google Street View to walk the streets and dark corners of the Eastern Block to bring a narrative reminiscence to life. I can listen to recordings, interviews; watch reams of old newsreel. I can even consider it through the lens of how the art direction of movies focused on the period have inspired new wave designers in a kind of New Wave Cold War Hot Looks Chic – with a range of soft furnishings furniture and wall papers that celebrate concrete block builds papered with the rural mirage of big florals rendered in a palette that cold best be described as ‘Bowie Low’ Orange

This sea of multi dimensional multi perspective references is universal.

Technology allows me to drown myself in my own historic tsunami on any given subject.

Now this new, expanding, deepening, towering hydra tsunami of history can be broadly separated into two forms.

Near History & Far History

Far History has nothing to do with timelines or chronology – Far History is the kind of history which is only occasionally drawn into our everyday consciousness – the type of history that is farthest away from our Now.

Far History is only drawn up for or by a particular reason. For example, I watch the film Book Of Life with my children; they ask me about The Day Of The Dead. I follow up with a little light research on Dia De Los Muertos and suddenly I can drown myself in an avalanche of semiotic, cultural, religious, geographic, artistic, musical rendition and reminiscence. And the odd street food recipe.

To put it another way, Far History is everything beyond the peripheral vision of a facebook timeline and a linked-in profile update.

Near History is the one to watch. Near History is the pushy one here. Near History is the type of history that is expanding to the greatest degree. Near History is the staggering funnel of information, data, reference, touch point, perspective that rushes outwards across multiple channels and platforms from any one moment, action, experience or occurrence to deliver social, cultural, economic and environmental context of staggering breadth, impact and effect.

Think of it in personal terms for a moment. Your ‘history’ was once something gentler, broadly of two parts – the highly personal – ‘Close to you’ version. Spoken memories. Photo albums. Diaries. Familial reminiscence. Shared experiences between neighbour and local. With a  nice and highly engineered ‘Part Of This’ national identity draped over the top for when bigger stuff came along – football, war, European Union, holidays, collective cultural rituals (Guy Fawkes Day).

But it was slow, intertwined, indistinct. Ambling.

Now every moment explodes with Near History – the old personal intimate ‘close to me ‘ stuff amplified to staggering proportion by the connections pictures films shares links likes revelations news sources contextual materials.

Near History doesn’t pop up eventually, a little way down the track. It goes off like a grenade – rising up and billowing around us so quickly that we are living in it – the Near History is now a part of the Now.

It is this expansive explosive Near History rising up behind every moment we live that is pushing us forwards.

Near History is not in service to Moore’s Law. It is what fuels Moore’s Law. The exponential multiplication of capability, capacity and functionality is forced forwards by the Near History of every innovating, applicable and expanding moment in technology that has just been in service to every expanding moment we’ve just lived and the legions of multiplying Nows lining up just in front of it.

I think.

Anyway, if you’re facing the future, throw away the rear view mirror, strap yourself in, pop on some flash goggles and turn that Kevlar round to face the back. And let History, especially the Near kind fire you forwards.

 

Disney, atoms, spinal tap & the power of the Melancholic hum

21 Saturday May 2016

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Why do some pieces of music seem to overwhelm us with emotion?

There are some pieces of music that seem to tear down the defences of even the coolest cucumbers and the most rational beings – stirred to high emotion by the mellifluous cadence of the piece.

And there always seems to be a minor key mooching about in there somewhere with the more melancholic or sentimental pieces of music. Certainly in western cultures those Minor keys are right up there with best of them in the profoundly moving department.

How can we forget Nigel Tufnell and his unforgettable Mach Piece – in D Minor

“I’m working on in D minor which is the saddest of all keys, I find. People weep instantly when they hear it, and I don’t know why.”

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BUT is ‘sadness’ really a universal minor key thing?

Melancholy in the western world may well reverberate through its minor chords. But such is not the case for many other cultures who can find joy and happiness in chords or harmonies that might have western ears sprinting for the Kleenex and a teary lie down.

The minor chord features heavily in both some African and Asian wedding music. Someone recently pointed out that in the Lydian Harmoniai of Ancient Greece which was designed specifically to evoke melancholy most closely resembles our major scale – and not a minor tear to be seen.

To be fair the ancient roots of our musical heritage have travelled a long and complex road – from music or harmony as one of the first human technologies – a way of expressing complex emotion, information and occasion – to their more recent shadings the result of its continental shifts out of the cradle of our current civilisations beliefs and influences.

Music or musical Harmony as we know it has bounced and bobbled around to a most staggering degree, spouting up from the rhythmic heart of Africa, thrown northwards to be strung high on the strings of the pre hellenic tribes to those deep in the Syrian basin; to roar out in the soaring song and melody of the Abrahamic peoples and faiths, via Palestine, through the Monastic Orders of the Crusades, up into the mellifluous discordant chanting of the orthodox churches into the throaty baritone of steppe Russian and Cossack singing and echoing amongst the walls of the ghettoes of Kracow; or carried on the warm, sandy  Gnostic breezes to turn up towards the Mediterranean, clipping the southern rim to meet the war-ish Moorish wails and chants: to vault the seaways into southern Spain and the monastic orders to collide with the Cantorial Melancholy of the Renaissance rendered dissonant by the long Asian shadow of the Venetian  merchant and underwritten by the colder airs and arias of the Middle and Northern European marches.

In a nutshell, harmony has been around a bit – and its been a little loose with its favours. Harmony has found itself sad and happy in so many different contexts that it doesn’t know its major arse from its minor elbow when it comes to the proving of what makes a sad or happy musical sound, note or chord.

You could say that for a broadly consensual idea of ‘sad’ (for that read minor) chords to have percolated to the top of that millennia-long journey shows their immutable and inherent power. But on the other you could say that every sequence of harmonies or notes, having travelled that road, would by now be laden with ‘context’ – the shaper and colourist of emotion in music.

This historic cultural criss-cross, the subsequent assimilation and blurring of musical cultures might explain why the chord sequence of ‘Lord, Hear my prayer’, the French Taize Christian spiritual has a decidedly Hebrew quality in the way in which its chord sequence descends and ascends, and whose chord succession has a remarkable similarity to some of the orchestrations from Disney’s Mary Poppins (more of which later).

In music particularly, there is much debate about how ‘melancholy’ or emotional characteristics are given to certain notes or chords – back to Nigel Tufnell and D Minor, the saddest of chords.

Specialists in this area point to the Theory of Musical Equilibration to explain the relationship between music and emotion. They see notes and chords as not inherently emotional but as a process of Will – a process which sets chords and notes in relation to particular cultural social and temporal contexts. The theory contests that it is these contexts that ’dye’ the notes chords or harmonies with emotion.

An example perhaps of this theory is the song ‘Feed The Birds’ featured in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins. Written by Sherman & Sherman. There is enormous contextual substance and potency in this song for generations of western adults and their children (as the adults tend to pass down their cultural ‘mores and memes’ through sharing of the things they loved as children, and the children in turn love what their parents love as an act of belonging – emotional adhesion).

It is said that Travers, the lady who wrote the story of Mary Poppins, on hearing the suggested song Feed The Birds wished instead for Greensleeves (which Wikipedia notes as being in E Minor as is much of Feed The Birds) to be the soundtrack to Mary Poppins – as it was quintessentially English. The quintessence of Feed The Birds I would venture is of a very different tribe.

There is an underlying spirit in the music of Feed The Birds that for me is inextricably linked to the Hebrew spirituals and the eastern European musical traditions. The echo of the yiddisher musical culture of eastern Europe seems to rise up in so many of the composers of these ‘melancholia’ or nostalgia pieces. The Sherman brothers are but one example.

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The composer of another great and renowned melancholic piece, the theme tune to the 1960s TV serialisation of Robinson Crusoe, was originally from Kiev in the Ukraine. And though there are some parts of this score that sound more Bond theme than anything else, the core of it, is distinctly eastern European for me. There is a point about 3 minutes and 40 seconds in where it transfers from a bombast Bond-like orchestration to the most heart wrenching solo violin. The echo of the first 60 seconds of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G Minor is not difficult to hear – and seemingly a similar wish in Robert Mellin to incorporate Jewish inspirations into his music, as Bruch did so many years before.

In much the same way as Feed The Birds, the soundtrack for Robinson Crusoe is quite extraordinary in its ability to overwhelm the listener with feelings of profound emotion – both joy and sadness in perfect harmony.

These both make very good exemplars of the Theory’s concept of how Context (yearning, simpler times, naivete, longing, loss, when the world was young, carefree, endless summer) ‘dyes’ the music with emotion

The yearning in these pieces does seem to reach beyond simple sentimentality though. There was a profound feeling present when I first heard them. This pre-sentimental, pre-nostalgic effect is played out in the numerous comments that can be found underneath their youtube listings – ‘as moving as the first time I heard it’ is a reoccurring refrain. The fact that these pieces of music have become sentimentalised and dyed with emotion is I would suggest a secondary effect: an outcome of their initial impact and the mesmeric effect they had on the viewer/listener.

I would like to venture that they vibrate with something far greater than simple ‘context’ and dyed emotion.

They seem to vibrate with the power of a far more timeless human ‘voice’.

I wonder whether there are certain harmonies that in their vibration come closer than anything else the millennia of musical story tellers could muster to capturing the vibration of life itself.

That vibration – the energetic shaking of atoms on which all animate existence or life is based – but perhaps its resonance, however fleetingly is captured in some of these pieces.

The Law of Harmonic Attraction and Repulsion tells us that atoms shaking or vibrating at between 42 and 63 octaves per second produce a creative force – thermism – whose transmissive force – Rad-energy – creates association and cohesion – creates ‘stuff’ -the ethereal and material world we live in – Oh, and us. So we are in effect vibrating along with everything else. So why would we not recognise and respond to a fellow vibration in the world and feel drawn – to want to cohere with it – even if it is just a sound, note or harmony

It is a long stretch from the measuring of atomic octaves per second to the sweeping choir of the Sherman Brothers piece in Mary Poppins BUT I would venture that as we find out more and more about our existence and how we fit into the world we live in, especially at a sub atomic universal level, a distant and circuitous link between the octaves or vibration of life and those of musical harmony will eventually be laid out, only yo be met by an Uh Duh! response. ‘Of course they’re linked’ we’ll say.’Whoever was stupid enough to think they weren’t ?!’

There will be a quick populist ‘Brian Cox’ rewrite on the  infinite and unchangeable quantity of atomoles, the base of all matter and their state of constant vibratory motion, then the odd deft collision of both pop and high culture referencing:

What piece of work an atomole.  How infinite in extent, how unchangeable in quantity, how initial of all forms of energy; how express and admirable in action, how like a god!

Closely followed on stage by a rip roaring rendition of:

I’m pickin’ up good vibrations
She’s giving me excitations 

Perhaps a far more complex nature is at work in Nigel Tufnel’s saddest of all chords – one that reaches far beyond the influence of the cultures in which the listener was nurtured: in which they exist – one that reaches perhaps into the realm of our very life’s vibration.

Vibration as a signifier of the most profound life force is a reoccurring theme in many faiths and belief systems – not just in the physical, mathematical treatise of atomoles.

And I’ll bet you two finger cymbals, a Catholic Mass bell and a Buddhic gong that music is our way of reconnecting with the vibration of life.

And perhaps the melancholy we feel when we hear certain music is not only the residue of context and emotional dyeing but perhaps driven by a yearning rooted in its ability to remind us of a more profound connection with the vibration of life: one which we were once so closely aligned with; and to which we have now become strangers.

 

 

Tuppence a bag and a quick weep is a small price to pay for the key to cosmic connection

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

07 Sunday Feb 2016

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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

 

 

TRUST, Values & turning up in the I’m Funny T Shirt

22 Thursday Oct 2015

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… I maintain that trust is irrelevant to commercial exchange and that reference to trust in this connection promotes confusion.

— Oliver Williamson

 Trust. Small Word. Massive Impact.

But which ‘Trust’ do we actually mean when chiseling the word for the umpteenth time onto the Values Plinth? There are a few versions out there – and none more corrosive that faux TRUST or the TRUST that comes from the dressing up box of corporate affairs – fancy TRUST – a word draped in Savile Row charcoal cashmere, or beautifully typeset and set high on the wall – yet inert – made moribund at the moment of its stitching and forging.

Then there’s buttoned up TRUST. Ironed repressed imprisoned – bear baited into a contracted commitment between one actor and another.

In these contractual prisons, the real power of TRUST; as a proof that liberates people to act decently and respectfully and with singular purpose at all times, gets twisted and shoved; and roughly cut away to fit into the self interested margins of the contract it supposedly underwrites.

Then there’s the TRUST of the podium, the BIG TRUST of soundbites and ‘our journey’ and the soaring oratory of perseverance and endeavor – an ephemeral fleeting TRUST that fills both the chest of the corporate speaker impugning it and the hall into which they decant it, only to wash out of the back doors into faint memory and insignificance – sullied and cheapened by having ever been bought there in the first place.

And then there’s the TRUST that protests too much from the statements and the releases of those who have traded, stained and manipulated it most. (Yes, banks and financial institutions, that will be you, and your FMCG and retail friends there on the bench next to you; with their palm oil and indentured labour hidden in some foreign field that is forever England: or the provider of its pants at least.)

If you wish to speak of real TRUST, speak in hushed respectful tones; speak rarely; in fact, come to think about it, we’d rather you didn’t speak of it at all.

Much like the exquisite blue guitar in Nigel Tufnel’s Guitar room in Spinal Tap, there is a sense that to even point to TRUST would be to destroy it.

“its special, look, see, still got the old tagger on it, never even played it”

“you just bought it”

“dont touch it”

“…was just looking at it…wasn’t going to touch it”

“…well, dont point …even”

TRUST is a dream that so many institutions crave but in that craving lies the source of self deceit. In their idolising of it lies the greatest measure of how fragile it is in their world: and how often and easily it can be compromised, corrupted and set aside.

In one of the opening scenes of the film Gladiator, Marcus Aurelius explains to Maximus that Rome is not a place but a very very fragile dream:

“There was once a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish…”

TRUST is that fragile. So it is best kept safe and sound and away from prying eyes under purposeful lock and key. It is made all the greater by remaining invisible and unreferenced.

But invisibility and absence are two very different things. The absence of TRUST renders every other corporate buzzword insignificant. Rigour, openness, expertise, integrity, promise, commitment and guarantee – all are simply conjuring tricks if not underwritten by real TRUST.

Real TRUST, the silent knowing kind, is the one that walks through relationships and partnerships without braggadocio or pomp.

Real TRUST never speaks its own name, claims its own accolade or states its own credential.

Much like its culturally-rooted cousin – ICONIC – it is an accolade for others to apply.

To state it is to turn up in the I’m Funny T Shirt. Don’t tell me that you’re funny, tell me a joke. I am wholly capable of deciding whether to laugh or not all by myself.

Real TRUST is not an academic concept or an intellectual exercise; much to the irritation of pretty much every business school, who seem to see TRUST as a compound fraction as opposed to the complex chaotic collision of context, circumstance, tangible and intangibles that it really is.

Real TRUST is felt, sought, fought for, prized, pursued, missed, believed, encountered, received, gifted, hard won, quickly lost, broken.

Real TRUST is to some professions a supply chain issue – the most critical systemic element that needs sustaining above all else – the securing of its source, its protection of its integrity, the sage management and application of its use, the zero waste and optimal energy processes that support it – all mandatory for its continued and unadulterated presence and role as the primary tool in the mitigation of risk for those professions

Real TRUST draws its potency from its paradox – from its staggering strength and precious fragility – while whole, real TRUST moves the hearts minds and mountains that find themselves in its thrall – but it can be shattered irreparably by a look, a word, the flick of a pen, the click of a mouse, an act sometimes so small as to be barely noticeable.

Real TRUST is the UNICORN of professional endeavor. While it exists in the world, all is well – but if it is forgotten, mortally wounded or set aside, the dark side will prevail.

A MATTER OF EMPHASIS

Real TRUST The assured reliance that someone else will do everything in your best interests and to the best of their ability.

Real TRUST The faith that they will, even in your absence, act faithfully and respectfully in regards to you and the things you hold most precious

Real TRUST  The sure knowledge that no exceptional, proprietary or empiric expertise knowing insight or skill will be held back or remain obscured in their undertakings for you.

Real TRUST  The singular base fabric of any profound relationship: woven from myriad strands and threads of multiple and relentlessly reoccurring and improving emotional and functional transactions of every shape size and hue

Real TRUST The invisible certainty that allows rigour to act unfettered in the room and in the moment

Real TRUST The slingshot of integrity: the champion of authenticity: the springboard of exception:

Real TRUST the most dynamic currency in the assurance economy: selectively invested but never traded or brokered.

Real TRUST the only critical investment worth making in any and every relationship no matter how big or small.

Real TRUST the unquestionable and immutable truth of any profession

Real TRUST is a market shaker, a world turner, an opinion shifter and a deal breaker – the one precious thing that cannot be bought or begged.

Real TRUST cannot be faked, cannot be belittled, cannot be impugned and will not be sold.

Real TRUST is more than a flat inert word on a values plaque or a commitment in a corporate mission. Real Trust is a living extant dynamic and irrepressible thing.

You cannot put real TRUST down, diminish it, demean it or set it aside.

It is the silent ROAR – the mighty Yawp – in every meaningful conversation: and cannot be talked over or shouted out

In the space between TRUST and WORTHY

TRUSTworthy is a simple word to describe a process person or material thing that can be relied upon to fulfil particular tasks time and time again with little decay or degradation in performance or effect –and in doing so make themselves worthy of trust.

It usually involves an incremental journey undertaken by two parties towards belief in each others ability to ‘do what they say they’ll do’ – a journey that is mostly undertaken via proof – measurable evidences great and small – of each’s ability to engender trust in the other.

The levers and pulleys of TRUST?

TRUST seems to be most often engendered by people with an unshakeable sense of Purpose to effect good things in the world – for both themselves and others: People with an irrepressible belief in the simple authenticity of what they do, doing the right thing and keeping their promises. These people regularly demonstrate an inappropriate degree of naked courage – effortless and comfortable in their transparency. They relentlessly apply this belief, commitment trait and nature in everything they do. They are meticulous in their approach – rigour never far from their mind. And they value integrity above all else.

UNSHAKEABLE                 Purpose

IRREPRESSIBLE               Belief

NAKED                           Transparency

RELENTLESS                   Application
METICULOUS                  Rigour
TRUE                              Integrity

I TRUST you to have an opinion

I TRUST you to have the right intention in proffering it

I TRUST you to design your particiaption  in commercial ethical and value terms acceptable to all parties

I TRUST you to price what you do fairly

I TRUST you to do what you say you’ll do

I TRUST you to not compromise the relationship or other interests while doing it.

I TRUST you to reconcile fairly and in good time

I TRUST you with my interests

I TRUST you

Creativity, the Cosmic Fizz & the storytellers of science and faith

14 Friday Feb 2014

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Adult Pi Patel: So which story do you prefer?

Writer: The one with the tiger. That’s the better story.

Adult Pi Patel: Thank you. And so it goes with God.

Writer: It’s an amazing story.

I love this piece of writing from the Life Of Pi – because it goes to the heart of everything I believe in as a storyteller by trade and by passion.

It also points to the most sublime collision of existence and creativity for me.

The brutal truths of everything we are, that we come from, exist amongst, experience, endure and prevail upon are in themselves poetic and beautiful. But there is something so human about our need to embellish the flat dry expanse of these truths; to make them greater, more fantastic: our need to story tell around them. There is for me a perfect conflicted symmetry: of both hubris and humility in our need to do it.

That we want to use our consciousness, and the gifts of existential self-perception that it brings to ‘big ourselves up’ in the species department is par for the course. The ascending arrogance of increasing predominance is so expected as to be almost dull.

But in seeking to story tell around such profound and all enveloping concepts: of existence, creation, death, belief, faith, survival – we are also admitting that the base nature of them is simply too overwhelming to us to comprehend in their pure form, too complex and exceptional for us to divine without reduction and simplification. (Sustainability experts take note!!)

So story-tell them we have. Between Reason and Faith, the scattered facts and dynamic data of our human condition and the absolute nature of our relationship with the world in which we bear it are rendered.

In the parables, cautionary tales, prophesies, miracles, fairy tales, wisdoms, mythologies, metaphors, legends, monoliths and dream catchers, we find storytelling that is wonderful, hopeful, brutal, yet optimistic – transforming the data of our reality into ‘the one with the tiger’.

The giddying ascent of some of these ‘tiger stories’ as I will now call them into regional and world movements of dogmatic faith inevitably has seen them dragged into service as the spiritual slings and arrows of marauding armies. In doing so they have both exported a negative arrogant shading of their ‘tiger story’ while importing a culture of cruelty, violence and division into the heart of it.

It is unclear to me whether this conflicted nature is inherent within the cosmic fizz or purely a product of it. Regardless, in the evolution of these ‘tiger stories’, they have proven themselves wholly capable of extreme polarities of positive and negative outcome: the Atomic Bomb and The Inquisition being two such glorious (western) examples.

I would venture though that it is the base corruption of the storytelling concepts – and the flags and actions that they are seen to have resided over that despoils them, not the nature of the story itself or the faith or reason upon which they are built.

As Oscar Wilde pointed out quite rightly – there is not such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all. The storytelling is not where the problem lies.

It is the questionable moralities of human interpretation and subsequent actions undertaken in the name of something; be it science, faith or any other where the spoiling starts. A wantonly childish and proprietary approach it seems: It’s my toy so I’ll smash it if I want to.

I believe that if we took the smashers from all sides – the pedants, the inquisitors, the lunatics and the absolutists – the ‘my book’s better than your book and oh, by the way it’s the only book’ crowd and the equally intransigent and nihilistic ‘faith is the great cop out, the great excuse’ polemicists and shoved them in a large room and closed the door we might start the conversation again.

If we did, I think we might find that the people of science and the people of faith are connected at a deeper level than either their rigour or dogma would like to admit – and the immutable truth of that fact is being obfuscated by what is in fact on deeper interrogation a stylistic disagreement – like the one that exists in the land of storytellers between the purveyors of muscular contemporary prose and those of classic highly mannered poetry.

There is a tremor of violent agreement that runs between them that remains unnoticed (to themselves certainly) probably due to the deafening and cacophonous nature of their own ‘combative noise’.

When particular men of science call religion a fiction the only issue that arises in that emphasis for me is the inference that it is a fiction rooted in no factual or reasonable truth. Well, I am currently jury’s out on that absolutism and here’s for why.

In my wish to not polarize or propagandise my children and in answer to the question “what is heaven daddy?” (the inconvenient inquisition of children is the most brutal of examinations) I have netted out at this story-teller’s logic, and it begins with science:

Atoms never die. They just reassemble re-task and reintegrate themselves in a new form.

So, we are all one great big mass of finite circulating particles. Amazing.

In which case, if we were, theoretically at least, able to pull focus on the physical world in which we exist to reveal that great big mass of finite chaotic swirling particles; to reveal its sub and supra atomic nature, we would perhaps reveal a singular phenomena – the cosmic atomic fizz of everything. (Eat that challenge Google Glass!)

133,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms swirling around dynamically, condensing clustering conflating and coagulating for a brief while in every visible and invisible material thing we know and many we don’t, before deconstructing and reconstructing themselves somewhere else along the way.

Now your brain might be so huge as for there to be little issue for you in contemplating the jaw dropping magnitude of this, but (certainly for my tiny self absorbed brain) this is a concept so vast so complex and so overwhelming to the average human being that we would struggle to grasp its meaning.

And we hate that, us humans, the ‘can’t quite get it’ thing. It makes us feel a little small, stupid and out of control, so, we use storytelling to simplify and sort the problem. To order the cosmos. Bring ourselves closer to it.

In this instance I think we’ve effectively taken the jaw dropping magnitude of the cosmic particular mass, stuck a beard on it and called it Norman.

This is not to say that the creation of the mass, how it got there, what drove it and what the point of it all is doesn’t exist in the pantheon of life’s big questions, but I’ll leave that to David St Hubbins of Spinal Tap to ask that question for all of us:

“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”

The moment where human interpretation and the nature of our existence meet is at the moment we decide to call the infinitely finite cosmic particular fizz a name, embody it in some divine yet recognizable (like us) form, allow it to take human form, or simply see itself at work in ourselves and in all things around us.

But if we’re tooling down the storytelling pathway of the immortal atoms, lets round out the characters first shall we.

That the breath of Moses, The Christ, Buddha and the prophet Mohammad are still in the world, atomically speaking, is an incredible, philosophically charged and mind-boggling thing. But in that we must also accept that so too are the breath of Hitler, Genghis Khan and Jack The Ripper.

Our simple survival evolutionary selves have spent millennia trying to identify filter and prioritise the data of danger, relentlessly, restlessly seeking clarity around what might hinder or hurt us. So even the earliest storytellers will have been thinking of and framing our existence in very simple structural terms predicated on understanding the simple signs that guide us:

Crisp bright coloured plant: tasty and makes me feel perky = GOOD

Dark brown stinking plant: Whole village dead from soup of it = BAD

Large Screaming Drooling Sabre Tooth: Ate my mother. Ugh = BAD

Small trembling rabbit like creature: Ate for supper. Yum = GOOD

I sense the same simple storytelling principle has been applied to the cosmic fizz.

That the particular nature of the cosmic fizz can cluster and form into larger entities beautiful, brutal or otherwise inane and inert (read Turner, the Terror, Trousers and Taramasalata) demonstrates that the cosmic atomic fizz is indeed nuanced positively and negatively in ways far more cognitive and philosophical than just how those particles are charged

So, it’s no surprise that some of the earliest storytellers will refer to similarly complex concepts in the simplified form of perhaps good things and bad things, nice place not nice place, or a heaven and a hell perhaps.

We have ample evidence of where the commonalities of our beliefs, philosophies, reasoning, values and mantras – the cultures of science faith, culture and philosophy – meet, in turn finding little to differentiate or choose between them. In The Picture Of Dorian Grey the collision of ancient greek texts and philosophy, Christian morality, Islamic beliefs, eastern mysticism, Romanticism and the mind of the scientist and mathematician we find in the author’s use one of the texts from the Rubaiyat Of The Omar Khayyam (translation: the shoulder of Faith) is to me the most perfect of examples:

“I sent my soul through the invisible

Some letter of the afterlife to spell: 

And by and by my Soul return’d to me, 

And answer’d: ‘I Myself am Heaven and Hell”

Storytellers from every shape and shade of tribe and belief have either knowingly or unknowingly reshaped and molded the brutal nakedness of this atomic dynamism into concepts of things, beings, feelings, spirits or forces, eternally alive within everything, including ourselves.

Over time we have come to believe that our ability to connect with these forces – the ability to feel them, see them, understand them, call on and capture the essence of them – is representative of a higher state of being and existence – something to aspire to and yearn for – as an elevation out of the brutal reality of survival.

Trans-substantiation, The essential Fire, The Holy Spirit, Nirvana, Reincarnation, The Great Spirit, Sacred texts. Every one of them resides at the junction where the storyteller sits. But to simply dismiss them as ‘spun’ fictions is to mitigate what they intend to communicate, the beliefs they contain or what they are seeking to point to, however clumsily or fantastically the critic might feel they are doing it.

I believe that these stories are part of what makes humanity more resilient (not always a good thing). They exist because our evolutionary gene-pool need to prevail and the traits and tools that we need to endure in extremis require far more than just physical attributes.

It demands a strength of mind that perceives itself far greater than the sum of the physical parts it controls. An absolute belief in ones ability to complete an action, test or challenge, come what may, is what enables us to prevail against all odds.  These examples of shared and disseminated storytelling enable human beings, social by nature and with an innate sense of collectivism, to transcend the confines of their physical truth. To prevail is to be optimistic (a form of positive delusion or illusion perhaps but no less powerful because of it), disposed to expecting the best of things.

But Optimism needs to be written, because it is not innate.

We all understand the brutalities of existence. Fight or Flight is innate. Primal ferocity as a predatory or defensive mechanism is innate (learned gleaned or forced over time) a living echo of all previous experience of our ancestors. We all understand that science is emotionally inert: it carries no sentiment other than through the emotional human impact of its comprehension or application.

Our emotional nature as seen through the scientific lens is simply a transportable cache of sentimental data – a form of big human data collated and conflated over millennia; cross related through social memory and learning by us to create what we believe to be a conscious, feeling aware creature with inbuilt reflexive and intuitive responses.

But the positive halo of optimism – a mannered elevating way in which we choose to capture the positive outcomes of the brutal innate truths – is in itself a lever and generator of resilience in regards to human existence and our ability to prevail.

Story telling, especially that which is designed to be passed down and around is a massive factor in predisposing fractured scattered battered tribes and communities towards constructing more positive outcomes for themselves. The shared beliefs that storytelling can engender is testament to that.

Storytelling is where the resilience of humanity lies. Even in the realm of science and the learned institutions, I would venture that there is a marked difference between those professors who light a fire in the heart and minds of the students who seek to learn from them and those that don’t regardless of both academics singing from the same curricular song sheet. The education that stays with you is that which is shaped to be remembered, not learned to be forgotten. It is only through the stickiness of more enlightening communication that we ascend and improve and bolster ourselves against the odds.

Is the culture of ‘stories spun’ open to abuse? Yes: The speed at which storytelling can moves from parables, myths and cautionary tales of improving and guidance, and of things greater than ourselves to being a corrupted propagandised text with the sole intention of suppressing, controlling and excusing untold inhumanities and predations is all too clear across history.

Should it, for that very reason, be set aside and simply forgotten? Should we make do with the less dramatic, less shiny, less embroidered version of our existence? What surrounds us and is within is us is certainly beautiful and amazing enough (though some would argue even our driest concept of self has been brilliantly inked to some extent by millennia of human storytelling)

Should we look at ourselves in the mirror without gods, tigers, and miracles to obfuscate the view? Some would argue most certainly.

Nonetheless, I would not (and given my trade could not) dismiss the story teller from the court of human existence. I could not contemplate a life without ‘tiger stories’. I believe that humanity would be less capable of great things and less resilient without them.

And rest.