670 - Rug Doodle

672 - TV

Just wondering to what extent TV schedules throw up festival experiences in place of real life carnivalling. Participation in watching and water-cooler moments afterwards could be distant cousins to shared feast-days and acts of revelry like apple-bobbing or wassailing.

677 - OSECA

A selection of cards from the prototype pack of the new card game, OSECA, which we are launching on 25th October!

688 - A Fair Deal

It seems to me a fair deal that a seer should spend half their life mad. A civilization at the birth of itself has no knowledge, certainly no medical terminology. Observation would perhaps have led to the understanding that humanity, like 'pigness' or 'oakness', is its own value, separable from the distortions it suffers through growth in a restricted (or overly rich) environment. Long before DSM IV, the American diagnostic manual for mental disorders, the seer would observe, internally as well as externally, the mechanics of consciousness, and, from their location within the community, offer testimony that others undergoing fluctuations of sanity, with all that entails, were still wholly human (neither devilish nor divine).

The seer, then, performed a vital role within a group of social animals, and if his or her watch really promoted the integrity of the herd, it is not hard to see how such qualities as 'seer-dom' might evolve naturally, in the same way that symmetrical features evolve, and strength, and other aspects of physical health.

Perhaps we are all seers to a greater or lesser extent. And perhaps civilization, if it fails to acknowledge that we are all as mad as we are sane, is blind to the possibility that it is possessed, intrinsically, of the same divide. Divide? If it is located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, as David Lewis-Williams and others suggest, this is perhaps an artificial distinction. As Daniel Everett, in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes points out, at least one tribe in the Amazonian jungle, the Piraha, sleep a maximum of two hours at a time, and talk through the night. At a recent seminar on sleep that E attended, it was reported that one in ten of us are naturally nocturnal.

Myths arise out of our experiences in altered states of consciousness. The clarity of science allows for certainty that the twin poles of deepest sleep and wakefulness coexist but do not impose on each other. In the same way, perhaps, the experience of a myth fulfils the same function, from the opposing pole. Karen Armstrong and others divide cultural discourse into two streams, one logos, one mythos. Their work teases at the implications this division has for societies, religious and secular, as they grow and split.

The division of action, and its precursor intentions, into good and evil, is another artificial distinction. Perhaps it is relevant solely in our waking domain, and maybe not even there. In any case, if there is no useful distinction we can make (even religious texts that accept the dualism, like Matthew 13: 24-30, 36-43, leave the judgement to God), perhaps it is better to abandon talk of morality for talk of mental health, and of mental health for the flow of consciousness?

In such a transition, the role of seer is as relevant as ever, be it one that we all share , or one that some undertake on behalf of others, or a bit of both. Either that, or we all act, waking, alone, and dream in silence. That might be possible, too, though whether, given an evolutionary basis for see-ing, it would achieve anything apart from a massive exercise in repackaging, is debateable, and perhaps, therefore, better left undebated?

697 - Creative Minds And Information Flow

[Original picture cc licensed flickr photo by Franz Patzig: flickr.com/photos/franzlife/2845138799/]

Lots of interesting ideas in this news article from the BBC, especially if you lift the focus from the 'artists are a bit bonkers' tenor of the headline ("Creative Minds 'Mimic Schizophrenia'").

First, the established ideas that higher creativity carries a higher risk of mental illness, especially psychosis, and that a family history of mental illness correlates with an increased likelihood of greater creativity. This is nicely summarised, relating it to the Big 5 personality theory, in Geoffrey Miller's book Spent, as a probable result of high values in one's Openness trait. Daniel Nettles also links this trait to an openness to unusual experiences and consequent beliefs.

Second, the possibility that creativity is related to the brain's ability to manage information flow. Research by Associate Professor Frederic Ullen suggests the fewer dopamine receptors there are in the brain's thalamus region, the more information is allowed unfiltered into the brain. In the words of the article, "He believes it is this barrage of uncensored information that ignites the creative spark. This would explain how highly creative people manage to see unusual connections in problem-solving situations that other people miss."

I like the idea that creativity might be related directly to information management, as it makes sense of my professional interest in Librarianship, and my family's, perhaps, in editing and publishing books. As gatekeeper professions, these can suffer from appearing deeply unsexy. Instead, it might be that the very tools you need to manage information flow, are those that can allow you to create the greatest art.

Third, the disconcerting, fractured perspective associated with the rush of information. Again, from the article, here's UK Psychologist Mark Millard:

"Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives [creative people] on to make changes. Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It's like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way. There is no sense of conventional limitations and you can see this in their work. Take Salvador Dali, for example. He certainly saw the world differently and behaved in a way that some people perceived as very odd."

I've tended to see the discomfort I feel much of the day as a result of a higher than average neurotic personality. On bad days, when I'm off kilter, the dualistic thinking of religious fundamentalism becomes appealing. It's an easy escape from the onslaught, like diving into a bus shelter in a storm, which may keep you dry but gets you no closer to your destination. The flipside of such thinking is a tendency to muddle the discomfort of a walk in the rain with the guilt associated with the rejection of fundamentalist certainties: sinning, as such thinking would have it.

So this research offers an alternative and empowering explanation for an experience I've always thought of as debilitating. Instead it's like the experience I had recently of fighting against a jet of water in a spa pool, which I could tolerate for a while, then had to escape, but returned to again and again, because it was fun. If I can reframe church as a place of harbour, a backwater, then I can think of my moves in, and out of it, back into the maelstrom, as a series of deliberate acts, none of which have primarily a moral dimension. Instead they become the equivalent of eating to fill an empty stomach, or ceasing when replete.

Fourth and finally, the definition of creativity as the 'suspension of disbelief'. Once again, the neural make-up that makes it easier to entertain the counter-intuitive accounts of the various religions - that a man might rise from the dead, that the majority-view of modern science might be wrong, or (always more likely) merely a partial account of reality - is given a sound physiological basis, and one which, painted as a sign of mental weakness too often, is at least as likely to lead to creative benefits to oneself and one's society.

The key, in this interpretation, to avoiding overly sticky fundamenatlist thinking, is to learn to manage one's movement in and out of information flows, and to identify and learn to use tools for getting as much as one can out of information-quiet and information-heavy states.

702 - Hypnosis

Nice definition by Bryan Appleyard in Aliens: Why They Are Here:

Hypnotism is a technique that triggers a mass storytelling project in which all the stories are linked.

This, I am pretty sure, is what must be harnessed if storying (deliberately shaping your life/lives to stories of your choice) is to become a shared artform.

704 - 6-1!

First goal at Wembley after 21 seconds, fastest yet. Second year running Whitley lifts the FA Vase.

These boys deserve the freedom of North Tyneside twice (six times?) over, and if the honour doesn't exist yet, it should be created for them...

705 - Can Do

On the seat opposite me, a can of energy drink, empty. Could get stressed, but the branding grabs me. I've been thinking about the nature of humanity, and in cheap coke fashion, this captures the point.

First the name, which seems a bit overblown for a Red Bull substitute. I mean, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was sweat from the brow of Jason Statham. Carbonated. But we are a bit relentless, really. All drives: sex, hunger, status, vigour, nurture. Strangest of all, perhaps, a drive to create.

Creation is what the font says to me. It's a bit gothic, a bit spiky, somewhere between vampire and cyber punk. And it's a bit 'the force that through the green shoot drives the flower' (Dylan Thomas). Like our daily work is somehow driving a lifeforce through the aluminium can itself, causing it to curl out in fish-hook shoots and fractal serifs, a thousand memes lodging in our brains and into those we are hoping to pull.

Finally, completing the design, the logo is stamped against (into?) the anatomical drawing of a head. It's deeply corporeal, quite unsexy, unless you're catching what the drawing is hinting at: that this drink, this relentlessness, goes beyond the surface. It's non-dualistic in the same way that vampires are non-dualistic, because there's a spiritual edge to the relentless cadaverousness: the promise is that this drink, feeding your head-flesh, will directly inspire your thoughts. That's very, very now, psychologically. The curl of the aluminium, the tang of performance-boosting chemicals, joins with your body cybernetically, affording a glimpse of your transhuman future.

Which is what I've been reflecting on: the way that imagination, a tool, is also a sense, like sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, proprioception. Our vision, for instance, gives us the impression of three dimensions, but as Steven Pinker indicated in How The Mind Works, it's a bit of trickery: all we see are surfaces, and experience gives us the information to be able to round them into full and solid objects. By filling out what is insensible by other means, our imagination supplies vital information: it is the sense that senses the insensible. Because it is working with what is not directly there, it has to create - answers, perspectives, images. It reaches out of itself, to what is otherwise known, what can be supplied from sources, such as people, and sews it into new possibilities, creating technologies, art forms, cosmologies.

What is true for the rest of biology must also be true for the imagination. Just as sight has been honed by evolution, so too must image-making. And just as evolution suggests that sight contributes to our forward capacities for survival and reproduction, answering the 'where do we go from here?' questions as well as the 'where have we come from?' kind, so that we know that sight of a steep drop will induce vertigo, and a buxom or buff torso, sexual stimulation, so, we should expect, is imagination similarly directed.

In short, whatever we are able to imagine has evolutionary value, and should be treasured as such.

Something more. Imagination, reliant on shared information, has an intricate relationship with the objects we create - far closer, arguably, than the other senses with which we perceive those objects. It is imagination that puts the objects out there, or appreciates them when proferred by others. It is not, perhaps, too much of a stretch to suggest that culture, which is the combined results of human imagination, is itself a part of the imaginative sense - a collective tongue extended to taste the fall of future snows.

The minute we begin to think of our creations as a part of ourselves - and this implies a closer than conventional relationship with the tools we make, I'd argue, and a more open-ended, organic one - we are acknowledging ourselves to have evolved already into cybernetic beings. Perhaps the essence of humanity is our relentless pursuit of creative participation in the wider ecosystem. Perhaps we cannot understand fully our relationship with our ecosystem unless we appreciate that we are half-hardwired into it, and actively involved in increasing its and our diversity.

711 - A New Strategy

The Game Of Life makes my skin crawl a little. It's a boardgame that portrays life as a path through education or work to success, wealth, property and retirement. Then you die, sometimes lingeringly, though that isn't presented as an option on the official board.

The truth is that the game offers a baby-boomer life story, very modern, very black and white, and measured in dollars.

I'm in a conciliatory mood, so I want to suggest that this is a valid life story, but it is still, surely, only one of many. The postmodern Game Of Life would offer as many options, as many strategies, as each player chose to imagine.

My idea is that this could be the ideal way to start exploring what storying, as an artform, might mean in practice. I've started to get a grip on the concept of identity, but storying (follow the tags!) is more than the establishment of a conscious identity: it's also about arranging life circumstances in such a way that moments evolve into the stories you want, as a conscious and creative act.

It's easy to get bogged down: if you can't generate a story worthy of Tolstoy, Trevor, Proulx or Nabokov, why start? But games, especially the classics, are simple, like narrative rules. Though they do generate great complexity, which is why chess is a beautiful art, they grow organically from very small beginnings.

What better way, therefore, for me to begin to get a grip on the rules of narrative than to play them out as a series of games?

712 - Something Apocalyptic?

713 - Nature/ Nurture

I think these three quotes all say the same thing. Do you?

Now here's the pivotal point: the neurology and functioning of the brain create a mercurial type of human consciousness that is universal. And the ways in which that consciousness can be accommodated in daily life by human beings are not infinite, as world ethnography, spanning a multitude of cultures, indeed shows.
David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce (2005), Inside the Neolithic Mind, p.9

[Our perception of aliens] is to do with the ambivalent nature of consciousness and our uneasy sense of being both within the world and outside it. This is, in part, a commentary on modernity, but also it is about an eternal aspect of the human predicament that has been massively amplified but not created by modernity.... For now, I need simply say that I start from the undoubted reality of aliens. they may or may not exist but they are all around us and they are trying to tell us something, possibly about themselves, but certainly about us. In order to understand what they are saying it is necessary to abandon the usual barriers between fiction and reality. There are many important connections between the aliens in Star Trek, H. G. Wells' Martians, the abductors of Betty and Barney Hill, the cattle mutilators in Montana and the committee of beings known as the Nine who speak through the Florida medium Phyllis V. Schlemmer. These connections form an enormous mirror of ourselves and of our age, through which, like Alice, we can pass and find ourselves in a different world.
Bryan Appleyard (2005), Aliens: Why They Are Here, p.9

What is The Filth?
The Filth contains the active ingredient metaphor.
Metaphor is one of a group of problem-solving medicines known as figures of speech which are normally used to treat literal thinking and other diseases. Metaphor combines two or more seemingly unrelated concepts in a way that stimulates lateral thought processes and creativity...
What is The Filth used for?
This comic book is used to treat all manner of disorders including Internet pornography addiction, insomnia, grief, "mid-life" crisis, schizophrenia, the ignorance of samsara and the 21st century blues, especially in patients whose millennial anxiety and general paranoia has not yet responded to normal treatments.
When must The Filth not be used?
If your doctor has advised you to avoid the use of metaphor.
If you refuse to acknowledge the mocking laughter of the Abyss.
If you cannot face the fact that your entire immediate environment is a seething battlefield of microscopic predators, prey and excreta and, simultaneously, a rich and complex metaphor.
Grant Morrison (2004), The Filth, opening pages.

I think each of these is saying that culture is by definition fiction, because we make it up. And nature is by definition reality. And to be human, we have to hold the two in tandem. We can't avoid it. It's what we do.

I think what we do, what all of us do with this tension, is make church.

714 - Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham, 2009, 3/3

Lots of reinvention goes on. This is a focus for meditation produced by an emerging church from, I think, London. Frozen inside a block of ice were hundreds of kitsch Christian images, plastic bangles, crosses, 'Jesus and Mary's. The block was always surrounded by a crowd of teens, till it had gone. Brilliant.

715 - Greenbelt Festival, Cheltenham, 2009, 2/3

Big Bad Top.

717 - Memory, Nostalgia and Civil Rights

Imagine if the memories of Whitley Bay submitted by you and I to Francis Frith were manipulable, erasable, through targeted pill use or disruptive stimulation. We could forget the Dome ever was, our trip to the seaside having been prevented from forming. That kiss-me-quick under the wurlitzers? The dodgy B&B we stayed in? Gone. Or last week's return trip - how downbeat, compared to the childhood memory, how disappointing. You could lift it, replace it with happier times (though the physical buildings, and our bodies, would still degrade).

Well, they are, just about. A report on Radio 4 this morning described one recent experiment where memories of traumatic images from old public information films were prevented from 'developing' - it takes six hours for them to set in place, it seems - by having viewers play Tetris after watching (the cognitive processes used are so similar, the brain 'forgets' to remember the film images). The Today programme interviewed Anders Sandberg and AC Grayling afterwards. Both agreed that such technologies are useful for dealing with disfunctional memories - induced, for example, by post traumatic stress - but they raise profound questions about what it means to be human.

We are our memories, bad as well as good. Or is that actually true? Perhaps we can 'dress up' in fresh memories, the way you'd wear a smarter dress if you had the choice. Why, in a meritocracy, let a shoddy past hold you back?

This is why, in a blog dedicated to Whitley Bay, I've spent so much time getting my thoughts straight about communal and personal identity. It really does impact on the real world. Whitley, a nostalgia-buff's wet dream, has a stronger identity than most, and one, perhaps, more often let down. The seaside town's journey to find a new identity offers a perfect case study for reflection on the kinds of questions raised by neuroscientific and biotechnological research into identity formation. (Perhaps a bid could be prepared for some of the new seaside town regeneration money, also announced today on the programme, to fund a research project into nostalgia and its cure.)

I call the creative use of fresh and manipulated identities storying, because I believe stories, in all their beauty, are both the outcome, and the best tools by which we may get a handle on our identies. The potential is huge, but scary, and I suspect attempts will be made to control such technologies, not always for the best of reasons.

I reckon I'm pretty much on the money, too. The joke in the interview was that our grandchildren will look back at us as Neanderthals, exclaiming, as James Naughtie put it, 'They didn't know what pill to take!'. More pertinently, Sandberg explained, our right to control what goes on cognitively in our own heads should be "considered one of our basic liberal freedoms".

Storying is a civil rights movement.

720 - Art; Cosmologies; Bill Thompson

All at Cafe Culture Newcastle last night.

Bill Thompson is a new media critic, a self-described early adopter and technology addict - from last night, quote, 'the way I'm addicted to breathing'. On-line he bases himself here and among other places, here.

He was talking about the digital revolution as one of only a handful of civilization-changing events in human history. It's on a par, he says, with the discoveries of fire and agriculture. As with learning to read (he plugged Proust and the Squid heavily) it is an event which requires the brain to be rewired in new ways. So it raises profound questions about the ways we perceive and structure our identity.

This resonates with controversial works by Rita Carter and Susan Greenfield, which I've blogged about here and here. Not to say that Bill Thompson would agree with them (he would find Susan Greenfield, I suspect, unnecessarily alarmist). But he would find them rather interesting.

Bill sees himself, as an early adopter of technology, as one of a small but significant group of people who define their identities, in part at least, through their life on the web. He defines identity as a loose and provisional 'make-do' response to the essentially random experience of human existence. If the building of this identity should come to include networks of friends on-line, at the expense of those off-line, and if it should include multiple or single avatars, and a growing sense of what is normative, socially, for behaviour on-line, then that's just evolution. It's exciting, anyway.

I asked him what kind of art we might expect to see created through this and other identity-shifting technologies. I've a few ideas already (storying: life-story manipulation as an artform in its own right). He had his own insights.

He could see, he said, in five years' time, interactive user-generated art displays on every surface in the cityscape. Some kind of crowd-sourced imagery, some expression of bottom-up, swarm intelligence, perhaps. He defined art as a manipulation of the technology, to see how far it might go, what beauty could be made from it. I liked that - and it chimes with ideas from evolutionary psychology about art being a demonstration of one's mastery of symbolic thinking, or a demonstration of one's personality, one's openness, for example, and one's intelligence. (More on this another time.)

This was his second answer, however. I liked his first, too, offered provocatively and not pursued. He suggested we should see the network as the artform - the shimmering artform, he called it. The technology to be the artform, and as such, appreciated, untouched, for what it is.

This resonates with me for two related reasons. First, I suspect that if by network he means not just the technology, but the identity shift that accommodating the technology requires, he is providing an image by which I can expand my thinking on storying. Having considered how one can begin to manipulate one's own identity, I now want to explore questions of shared identity. Few stories, after all, concern just one person. Bill Thompson's 'network' will include his friendship network, as well as the hard/soft ware that supports it. Perhaps it can be demonstrated that the proper way to think about networks (including even the inorganic ones) is through narrative.

Second, my ears pricked up at his use of the word shimmering. This is the language of spirit and transcendence. It is religious. Only holy things are pristine. Stars shimmer in the night sky. I remembered the way Steven Johnson started his book, Emergence:

Certain shapes and patterns hover over different moments in time, haunting and inspiring the individuals living through those periods.... These shapes are... a way of evoking an era and its peculiar obsessions. For individuals living within these periods, the shapes are cognitive building blocks, tools for thought.
(p.22)

I suspect that for Bill Thompson, the network is such a shape. And if so (and the word was used last night), perhaps he is engaged in building a network-shaped cosmology.

David Lewis-Williams and David Pearce are archaeologists with an interest in what ancient cultures can tell us about the generation of cosmologies. Their book Inside the Neolithic Mind argues that it is a fundamental of human consciousness that new technologies arise alongside imaginative conceptions of the world and humanity's place in it. Sometimes it appears that the cosmology drives the technological advance, in contrast to materialist theories which have argued that new cosmologies come about only as a response to environmental and technological change. If religion's supernatural accretions are separated from its basis in human consciousness, they argue, it can be harnessed by science as a cradle for technological advance. The book focuses on the Neolithic or agricultural revolution - in other words, it is about the second civilization-changing event in human history. To reiterate, Bill Thompson holds that we are witnessing in the digital revolution a third.

On a personal note, I've already expressed my wish to work within a natural world view, this despite personal experiences it is hard not to label supernatural. I'd rather be scientifically rigorous about interrogating such experiences. Any supernatural conception of Love worth supporting has, in my book, to allow us the experience of a totally natural universe, however much else could be going on. If something unscientific, unnatural, happens, then I'd rather redefine science to include it than create a second domain that science cannot touch. That statement might mean my own position is hopelessly untenable (time will tell, I guess), but it does at least allow me to advocate the conclusions of Lewis-Williams and Pearce as a scientifically-literate way forward into the digital age.

721 - Whitley Evening

723 - Family Silver

I suppose that if any Government seriously thought that everything in this country should be understood by its monetary value, they'd sell it all and invest the money in China or India or another boom country.

Just saying...

725 - Vocation

Three in one day, I know: I just wanted to add something to post 726 before I go to bed.

I wrote: "That, my dear, dear religious friends, is the Kingdom of God". And it matters to add, I think: the Kingdom of God may be much, much more than a universe of stories we can create, real life, real time, but even if it is more, it is at the very least that. And I don't see how I could ever find anything more rewarding to do than to spend the rest of my life making this known to people, so I'm happy to claim that as my vocation.

726 - Story Nations

Another day, another dispiriting prognostication from the evangelical church people I left fifteen years ago. I won't link to it: it's on Facebook. But apparently we're all going to hell in a handcart.

Why do I bother? Because it's not the world, it's not even the Christianity I recognise, that's why. I love these people. I want to shake them out of their isolationism. I don't think Christianity is about the nailing of one's life to a single story - or if it is, it's the story that there are as many stories open to us as there are, well, us. So no probs if part of the story you want for yourself is the traditional evangelical one. But equally, you might choose something completely different.

And this is where the excitement starts. Because there is a universe of stories open to us. An old Jewish proverb says God created people because he loves stories. The Gospels say there are so many stories about Jesus all the books in the world couldn't contain them. See, Jesus gets it. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, especially now that the technologies are burgeoning where we can rehearse and test those stories in safe places (any such place is a church), can manipulate our identities, can recognise our common humanity in law, to stop us creating those stories real life, real time.

That, my dear, dear religious friends, is the Kingdom of God.

And kingdom is an interesting word. Nowadays, as we've experimented beyond monarchy, nation might be a better choice. Also a interesting choice, because nation-states are the means by which, in a modernist secular society, we identify our public allegiance acceptably. But we're no longer modernist, we're postmodernist, and the nation-states are crumbling. At the very least, in the developed world, we could do with finding new ways to express our identity, to replace the over-consumption of resources by which we've maintained and projected our own lifestyles, but depleted the lives of others. That's one way of putting the argument in Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, by the way.

(And what's with the word lifestyle anyway? Like we only ever select one, to which we are then bound, till we can sustain it no longer. No character development, no plot twists: what successful story ever paces monotonously along in the same style from start to finish?)

So my proposition is that we recognise our new great resource to be the stuff of our identity, the stories we choose to inhabit, and that from now on, those nations that are richest in the world are the nations where the most various stories are told, and where the freedom to tell them is greatest.

By tell, of course, I mean live.

Here's a daydream, by way of jottings in the margins of my copy of Volume I of Christopher Partridge's great book, The Re-Enchantment of the West:

The birth of Story Nations... nations whose peoples are informed by a voluntary delight in stories and story creation; where from the abstraction of a page in a closeable book, the story is drawn into oneself - like the book people of Fahrenheit 451, but into one's very lived self and the actions therefore that one performs....

Was it ever really possible before? The sheer interaction of such stories, the possibilities inherent...? The lightness of such footfall on the Earth?

The only metanarrative one will ever need is provided by one's innate being. But it's a truism that what one needs and wants are not always the same. Why not, then, as one builds a beautiful home to live in, rather than live under canvas, or clothes oneself in the fashion of one's choice and reach, rather than drabbery, create as fulfilling a story life for oneself and yes, one's nation, as one possibly can?

727 - Iron Man

What? It's a piece of corroded metal I found on Whitley Bay beach. It's a tribute to Ted Hughes. It's art.