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.

721 - Whitley Evening

730 - Storytelling and the Natural Living Test

The test is here.

As I read it, I sense that the actions it describes pretty much form the backbone of every folktale I've ever heard told. Here, for instance, are the first eight actions (the point of the test being to note the number of occasions in the previous month you've performed them):

• Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
• Made up a story and told it to a child
• Felt the sunrise warm your face
• Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
• Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
• Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
• Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
• Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives

And here's a tale:

Jack, Jack, born in a shack, skinny legs and crumpled back - but his mother loves him. She rocks him to sleep with tales of his father, the wild man she met by the hawthorn tree, who soothed her heart and tore it open, one and the same time. And she wakes him in sunlight, takes him down the long path to the river, where the orchards grow, and gorges him on damsons, and apples, and once in a while sloes, that so fur your tongue that it blooms like the bloom on the sloe-skins themselves, everything except the fruit of the hawthorn tree.

After feeding him, she gives him water, cupped from the river by her own hand, and as he grows, and wants more, by a wooden bowl, and bathes him, gently over his face and eyes, his back and skinny, skinny legs.

And though by now she's old, day by day he is young, until at last one day he is old enough to turn to her, and hard like boys can be, he says:

"Mu-um, I'm hungry. It's noon already and you're being so slow. Today I'll go to the river by myself."

His mother is strong, but a piece of her heart is still at that door long after he leaves the shack to go down to the water. And as he goes, he passes under the hawthorn tree, and there is a shaking and a trembling, and high in the twigs and thorns above him, there is the sound of a baby crying.

Well, Jack looks up, sharpish! and sure enough, through the pin-cushion thicket, amidst the berries, under the lunch-bright sky, he can just see the chubby pink heel of a tiny, bawling baby boy.

Jack puts down his sack and his water-bowl, and strips his coat from his back, but, though he tugs and pulls at the branches, and, never mind the scratches, hauls himself into the tree, the chubby heel, and the baby bawl, stay stubbornly out of reach. Jack scrambles back down again, puffed, and he looks up, and looks down, and across his face flickers a frown half thwarted, half already a-scheming. "I know!" he thinks, "If I can't get up, perhaps with fruit and water I can get the baby to come down!"

He leaves his jacket, and down to the river he goes, back scratched, cheeks reddened, with his bowl and his sack, a plan in mind, and a tingle with the blood on his skin.

It takes him the afternoon, for he's not strong, but by evening time he's gathered enough good apples, enough sweet damsons, even a handful of bitter sloes. He's washed them in water from the river. And every so often he's hearing the baby cry. Finally he judges he's ready. He scoops a last bowl of water from the river, and dragging the sack behind him, returns to the hawthorn tree.

So the first thing he sees is that the tree seems bigger, and the heel of the baby a little further away. And the next thing he sees is that his jacket - well, it's kind of grown full of the hawthorn twigs. A couple of thickish branches fill out the sleeves, and handfuls of berries hang from the cuffs. The jacket sways and the twigs inside are scraping the cloth. Jack puts down the water bowl, and out of the sack he rolls all the fruit, heaping it up beneath the child in the tree.

"Come down, little boy!" he calls, "Good fruit, fresh water. I can't climb up to you, so you must climb down to me." He's a bit nervous about his jacket, and the baby cries louder, which makes him feel edgy, and he thinks about going back to the house to fetch his mother, but that doesn't seem right, and the light is falling, and he's exhausted, and eventually, despite his apprehension, he thinks, "Maybe, if I just sit here quietly, the baby won't be so scared, and will come down on its own."

A little sniff. Brief struggle. Bare back on the rough bark of the hawthorn tree. Crying in the distance. Thorn-prick of fear. Memory of soft cradling. Head nodding. Sleep.

And in the night, up gets the jacket, sheath-full of the scrub of hawthorn, scratch-footed, tinder-trunked. It tilts towards Jack; it tilts towards the fruit; it tilts towards the tree. Slowly it reaches up, and it is free, on kindling legs. Now it scoops at a fruit. Then, squirrel thorn, tiny bramble squire, it steps over Jack's own legs, creeps past his back, dry-inches up the tree-trunk, through twigs to the baby. There is a moment. Then it uncurls a cuff, and on a palm of hawthorn berries, outstretched to the young child, it offers a perfect round juicy blush of an apple.

Now the baby has the apple and the tears stop. It is in the arms of the jacket of thorns. Slowly, gently, Jack's jacket climbs down the tree. No scratch on the pink heel, no cry from the child, when it is laid beside Jack, and in the morning he wakes.

I could say Jack is now straight-backed, fine, vigorous and happy, but he's still crumple-backed, and his knees remain knotted. But inside he's fine of figure, as maybe he always was. His mother rocks the child, half her torn heart for Jack, half now for this wee fellow Apple. And it seems that's a kind of duet in her, for the pain, when she wants it, is gone. There's a girl, oldest daughter of the piemaker, with an eye for Jack. And the hawthorn tree waits, with the jacket on the thornbush at its side all but worn to threads.

732 - The Natural-Living Test

This is an exercise at the back of Geoffrey Miller's book, Spent, which I heartily recommend. I suspect the exercise has been developed by Miller, but it draws on ideas I've found in other articles and books, so much of the knowledge will be in the public domain. It's not easily traceable on Google (I've not managed, anyway). All of which, and because Miller seems a thoroughly decent chap, and because he's motivated by a desire to get the knowledge out there, and because I'm happy to remove the test if he and/or other authors wish, and because it's a brilliant tool for meditating on, and because this blog's as much an aide memoire for me as anything I expect anyone else to read, and because I want to raise a question at the end, means I'm going to stick it up here in full. Here on in, till indicated, the text is as in Spent (pp.331-2):

This quantifies how closely your life matches that of our happier ancestors. Write down honestly how many times in the past month you have had each of the experiences below:

• Rocked a newborn baby to sleep
• Made up a story and told it to a child
• Felt the sunrise warm your face
• Satisfied a genuine hunger by eating ripe fruit
• Satisfied a genuine thirst by drinking cool water
• Shown courage in protecting a child from danger
• Shown leadership and resourcefulness in an emergency
• Shared a meal with parents, siblings, or other close relatives
• Gossiped with an old friend
• Made a new friend
• Made something beautiful and gave it to someone
• Repaired something that was broken
• Improved a skill through diligent practice
• Learned something new about a plant or animal that lives near you
• Changed your mind about something important on the basis of new evidence
• Followed good advice from someone older
• Taught a useful skill, charming art, or interesting fact to someone younger
• Petted a furry animal such as a dog, cat or monkey
• Worked with earth, clay, stone, wood or fiber
• Comforted someone dying
• Walked over a hill and across a stream
• Identified a bird by its song
• Played a significant role in a local ritual, festival, drama or party
• Played a team sport
• Made a physical effort to achieve a collective goal with others
• Sustained silent eye contact with someone to show affection
• Shamed someone who was behaving badly, for the greater good
• Resolved a serious argument using humour, emotional self-control, and social empathy
• Sang, danced, or played instruments with a group of friends
• Made friends laugh out loud
• Reached a world-melting mutual orgasm with a sexual partner
• Experienced sublime beauty that made your hair stand on end
• Experienced an oceanic sense of oneness with the cosmos that made you think, This is how church should feel
• Applied the Golden Rule by helping someone in need
• Warmed yourself by an open fire under stars

Now, add up all the numbers that you wrote for each item above. If your total score is lower than 100 and you do not feel as happy as you would like, write a five-hundred-word essay explaining why you expect your life to be happy or meaningful if you are not doing anything meaningful for others or feeding your brain any of the natural experiences that it evolved to value and to find meaningful.

[End of text]

My only quibble with this checklist is that whilst all these experiences do, I can see, amount to a very happy life, I'd want to see something about the experience of encountering pain, incomprehension, or the thwarting of a plan or desire. I can accept that we've evolved to cope in such situations, and even thrive, and I can also interpret some of the items on the list as if they addressed such a situation - the repair of something broken; the improvement of a skill through practice; the changing of one's mind, for example. I do, however, feel that peace in the face of rejection is a state one experiences throughout life - ultimate comfort in the face of death - and it isn't referred to here.

As I understand it, it's related to the role of the shaman, who may have had a psychotic episode precipitated by excessive openness, as suggested in Spent (pp.219-221), or who may have experienced at the limits of his or her being a light indistinguishable from eternity, or both, but who is certainly present in early hunter-gatherer communities, with something to offer. Is this simply the sense of oneness with the cosmos referred to on the list? I've experienced that, I think, but I've not yet interrogated my experiences fully. So this is where I must ask myself some tough questions, which I'll do in my next post.

And it certainly is not to detract from the great value of the Natural-Living Test as it stands.

739 - Jack Frost

On the window of a shed...

745 - Iced

Love this, by NASA via the BBC...

747 - Winter Haiku

fall soft my city,
wake my tongue, to numb and cease
me, melting away.

760 - Some More Found Objects

Today:

1. A free mince pie at the Wunderbar Festival Hub.
2. A house mouse scuttling by my feet over the decomposing leaves on Eslington Terrace, Newcastle upon Tyne.
3. A blaze of wild mushrooms on a tree stump beside the Metro line; also Eslington Terrace.

761 - Flowerbed

These pansies are planted on Roxburgh Terrace, alongside another bed rather more abandoned in appearance. How do I feel about them? Tear-tugged by their scrawniness, cheered to a mini-nova by their aspirations.

I guess the Council gardeners could have planted them, but why then only one out of the two flowerbeds? So part of me wants to believe it's one of the shopkeepers.

Last I heard, the gardeners all get the shove the month before Christmas, before being taken back on every February. I understand the Council (Labour at the time) were using short term contracts as recently as two years ago to this effect, which doesn't sound very legal to me. But maybe that situation's changed.

I was a gardener briefly, sixteen years ago. Vested interest maybe. If I had my way the gardening teams would be tripled in size, and the beds they planted up similarly. They'd be full of perennials, edible at that - massive herb gardens. And the brownfield sites lying idle, they could become allotments, or pocket parks, or communal gardens.

Meantime, I salute the pansies, the weeds that grow between them, the shopkeepers, and the North Tyneside council gardeners. Thank you. Thank you.

767 - Briardene Car Park, Sunset

Old photo, but I like it!

768 - Forty Two

Quick thought:

Relativity says that time is an aspect of space, and space an aspect of time, right?

So we've evolved to live a certain length in years, and occupy a certain space. In terms of the speed of light it's fair to say that the distance light can travel over our lifespan is magnificently huge compared to the amount of space we occupy (Seventy light years, rather than a metre, give or take, in any given direction).

Bear with me: through evolution we've achieved a certain complexity, and that complexity gives us awareness. Without the complexity, there'd be no life, no us. The complexity is the important thing.

So what I'm wondering is, what if the ratio of dimensions, time to space, is reversed? Over a huge space, but a fraction of time, similar levels of complexity exist to those that make up who we are. Given that particular complex states might exist for fractions of a second, located over billions upon billions of cubic metres of space, it would be challenging to perceive their existence, focused as we are lengthwise through time. But by what criteria could we argue that they were not alive? Aware? Even, acting in and upon the same universe as we are?

Hmm. Potentially freaked :)

770 - Happystone, Whitley Bay

Found a stone and gave it back to the sea. Then looked down and found this looking back up at me. Later, my good poet friend Ira Lightman pointed me to a poem by ee cummings:

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles, and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

778 - Gregory Bateson and the Long Professional Game

From the 1999 foreword, by his daughter, Mary Catherine, to Gregory Bateson's 'Steps To An Ecology Of Mind' (Chicago University Press):

It was not clear, even to Gregory, that his disparate, elegantly crafted and argued essays, the "steps" of this title, were about a single subject. But by the time he began to assemble the articles for this book, he was able to characterize that subject, the destination of forty years of exploration, as "an ecology of mind". The remaining decade of his career was spent describing and refining his understanding of that destination and trying to pass it on....

Until the publication of Steps, Gregory must have given the impression, even to his strongest admirers, of taking up and then abandoning a series of different disciplines; sometimes, indeed, he must have felt he had failed in discipline after discipline. Lacking a clear professional identity, he lacked a comfortable professional base and a secure income. He had also become an outsider in other ways. Having been deeply committed to the necessity of defeating Germany and its allies at the beginning of World War II, he had become convinced of the dangers of good intentions. The efforts to oppose the pathologies of Nazism and fascism, which grew out of the distortions of Versailles, had in turn created new pathologies that were played out in the McCarty era and the Cold War, and continue into the twenty-first century. In his postwar work on psychiatry and interpersonal communication, too, he began to see that efforts to heal could themselves be pathogenic. His was , for many years, a lonely and discouraging journey, characterized by a distinctive way of thinking rather than a specific concrete subject matter. It is no accident that a group of the father-daughter conversations he called "metalogues"... stand at the beginning of this volume: Daughter is uncorrupted by academic labeling and becomes Father's excuse to approach profound issues outside of their boundaries...
(pp. viii-ix)

Gregory Bateson has been adopted by Neuro Linguistic Programmers as a key influence, because he tutored the co-founders of this controversial movement, but one can see from the content of his essays that his own interests extended far beyond the modelling of human minds which inspired NLP, into anthropology, politics, ecology, communications theory and cybernetics. What I get from the above synopsis of his working life is how it bore fruit only after forty years of groundwork, how it eschewed labels, and how it rings true even now. It's hopeful and inspiring.

Perhaps in twenty, thirty, forty years time, when Storying is recognised as a phenomenon - artform, expression of personal identity, whatever - there'll be room for a footnote about early slogging in Whitley Bay.

Anyway, you've got to admit that Bateson's battling against the odds, as told above, makes a good story...

787 - Giant Spider

In our back yard. For scale [!] the hole in the door at the foot of the photo fits a large ginger cat.

Shortly after this was taken, the spider was seen to leap nimbly onto the bolt, draw the lock back, swing the door open and, after hauling the wheelie bins round for a bit, open the garage door from the inside, step outside, and devour a parked 4X4...