Knee Wounded by Mouth.

1890, Wounded Knee, South Dakota. 300 Lakota Indians massacred, the last in a long line of shameful acts committed by the American immigrants on the indigenous people.  A present day descendant says to camera, “The white man lives by his mouth.” Indians obviously invented sound bites well before TV and radio. Nevertheless this isn’t a great advert for immigration. The immigrant arrives displaced and dispossessed, a self-chosen refugee with their roots elsewhere. Their imperative is to forge something for themselves in this new context, to make use of it as best they can. To the indigenous it is their home, to the immigrant it is simply a new usable circumstance, a sort of holiday hire car. The trusty Renault Scenic lovingly maintained and MOT’d back home is replaced by a sexy Suzuki jeep that can be thrashed without concern for its longevity. It’s quite different. So where the Indians lived ‘’on the land’ the immigrants made a living off it. That’s where the mouth comes in. From assembly line to boardroom Americans, and now the world, are paid for how much they, and now we, use our mouths. Apart from a few super star mime artists, and there aren’t many, it’s a straightforward linear relationship; farmers, postmen, fishermen, assembly workers at the bottom, presenters, salesmen, and market traders at the top. It’s not that we need financial futures more than food and fish, it’s that what emanates from the brain through the mouth we deemed more worthy than the silent use of blood, muscle and heart. It’s as if the creations of our own imaginations have taken precedence over the necessities of our actual existence, living off rather than on the land. The sound bite was well put if a little too succinct.

The Trombone of Economic Meltdown.

Imagine you see a trombone in a shop window priced £100. It could be a trombone or a strimmer I don’t mind, I’m just not restricting it to musical instruments, or for that matter garden equipment. Lets just say it’s a trombone. But you don’t have £100 so you borrow it off me. As it happens I’m also strapped for cash and lending you the money has zeroed my account so I borrow £100 to tide me over. My good friend lends me the hundred but finds he needs it to pay the builder for his house extension. Being a nice builder he relents and loans him the £100 in loo of what my friend owes him. The builder then finds he’s £100 short of paying for the materials for his next job. You can see where I’m going with this. Anyway there’s no problem because if all else fails you could sell the trombone, pay me back, I’d pay my friend, he’d pay the builder and the builder would pay for the materials thus saving the builders merchant from bankruptcy. BUT what if the trombone was run over by an articulated lorry on the A47 near Newark? You couldn’t pay me, I couldn’t pay etc etc etc. There’s not just the £100 debt you owe me. I owe £100, my friend owes £100, the builder owes £100 and so on. The builders merchant’s declared bankrupt because the trombone of someone he’s never met was squashed on the A47. So how much debt is in the system, a hundred pounds or six hundred? Now if a falling domino produces 1 joule of energy say then a row of a hundred will produce overall 100 joules but the last will fall with 1 joule, the same as the first. That’s very different from say a hundred story building obviously being a hundred times taller than a single story. If one took this additive approach with a million dominoes one would expect the cumulative effect to give rise to a medium sized tsunami but they don’t. They just go topple topple topple. So when we’re X billion pounds in debt is it really X billion or a £100 debt passed on Y million times? In other words, “Which careless bastard allowed his trombone to get run over on the A47 and got us into this mess?”

Taught by Cows.

Tuesday is farm day and as a welcome respite from shovelling shit we spent the morning getting the highland calves used to wearing a halter. A halter is much like a thong made of rope i.e. it’s anybodies guess which bit goes where, and a calf is a quarter ton reception child. Simon talked me through it. Scratching them just in front of their tail calms them down, put your leg next to theirs so if they kick they push it rather than sledgehammer into it, avoid being between the reception child and an immovable object or you’ll get squashed, and finally talk to them. If you’re a trainee therapist I strongly advise you have this experience. OK cows don’t respond to, “and how did that make you feel?” but they do to your eyes, your tone of voice and the core of where and who you are. There is no lying to a cow; it’s just you and them in a kind of thoughtless union. They will respond immediately to how they feel so if they’re anxious stay away, but they will respond to your pool of tranquillity and affection if you can provide it. They will teach you the real congruence of thoughtless honesty because it’s all they know, if you let them. Talk to them as you would your love and they will respond in simple clarity. They will strip away your bark of flattery, cajoling or bullying and in some wordless fashion ask, “where are you?” And, as if by counterpoint, I watch ‘Making it’ after tea, a superb NHS real-com where our multiple mutual deceptions abound in our rational pseudo efficiency. It’s as if each human animal is obscured by its own conscious thoughts, confining its animal nature into continually scratching its square foot of soil less patch like a factory chicken. That is no way for an animal to live. So give me a cow to talk to to teach me of my own animal nature so I might see my deceptions for what they are.

Wernher Von Brown.

Every six months in desperate boredom I play ‘Return to Castle Wolfenstein’, a PC game where you shoot Nazis and their diabolical creations. OK they didn’t make megazoids and stuff but Tesla, Shauberger and other German scientists were doing amazing work at the time, much of which was lost at the end of the war or went, like Wernher Von Brown, to the US of A. Cut to 1958 and the launch of the first Explorer 1 mission from Cape Canaveral. It went up fine but due to the limited number of tracking stations was out of contact for about 90 minutes as it went round the back of the Earth. Meticulous calculations had put its reappearance at 12.30am but as 12.30 came and went the team were deeply troubled. But it appeared at 12.42am so all were overjoyed. Apparently Wernher’s calculations were a bit wrong and the rocket went higher than expected. Phew! Well that’s what Von Brown said publicly. But the error was inexplicably way outside expected tolerances. Several following missions showed the same error that simply couldn’t be explained by normal science. Then came the race to the moon. Von Brown realised unless this phenomenon could be quantified they would likely as not miss the moon and fire three good men into outer space, especially as the Russians had already tried and missed with an un-manned probe. Wernher secretly contacted other top scientists. One Maurice Allais reported bizarre pendulum effect during a solar eclipse that too was not explainable by normal science. He suggested the laws of gravitation be reconsidered, inferring Newton and Einstein might be wrong. Von Brown continued to say publicly there was no problem and as if to confirm this the lunar mission went off perfectly. It is now being suggested this secret ‘problem’ has covered up a significant advance in scientific understanding. Back to Tesla. He made initial investigations into what has later been called ‘Zero point’ energy and anti-gravity, as suggested by installations in Germany at the time. Also possibly mass reduction where objects in a particular state react as if they have no mass or momentum. As I say, these scientific results may have gone to the US back in 1945. Now since the 70’s there have been reports of ‘flying saucers’ thought to be alien UFOs, but there are also apparent first hand reports of secret ‘planes’ with amazing capabilities. They could noiselessly hover and disappear in seconds at very high speed and rates of acceleration. There are drawings and scientific explanations of how these craft might work, all based on Tesla’s principles. Zero point energy is being utilised by researchers to provide apparently free, limitless energy by high speed switching of current through an assembly of coils. Then again there’s a raft of unbelievable bollocks on the Internet. “You decide.”

The David Atenbro of Shit.

Attenborough was too long. Yesee, back on the farm after a summer layoff and a full on day of poo. First off preschool Highland calves. With their big trusting lost look eyes they’re just like first-day-at-school five year olds missing their mums. Three concrete pads to scrape in the rain. Next up cleaning out the chicken layer shed. David, myself and around 60 chickens, all glad to be out of the rain, made cleaning it like sweeping Euston station in rush hour. Everything I touched or tried to move had a chicken on it, under it or in the place it needed to be when I put it back. Still, another three barrow loads of shit to add to my collection. And finally the donkeys. Betty is a super model donkey, tall, skinny with a personality and fan club to rival Lady GaGa. The only draw back is she can’t tweet, which I suspect is more down to her not having a computer than anything else. So a rainy day shovelling cow shit, chicken shit and donkey shit. The strange thing is after feeling a bit down these last few days I now feel much better. It seems doing certain things will play this trick on me. I suppose I could have talked things through, got things off my chest or tried to find the cause of my feeling but just doing this particular thing worked wonders. A friend of mine dug the hell out of a patch of ground for no reason other than an art project and he often talks about its wonderful effect on him. They might seem stupid, pointless, unreasonable, even irresponsible, but if they do the trick they’re worth doing. So what stupid, pointless, unreasonable, even irresponsible thing does it for you?

Fun with Tyrants.

Another month, another shamanic meeting, this time about tyrants. Not your Caligulas but things, places, situations and people who just seem to get the better of you. Like when I go out the front door and it’s raining and cold and there’s a moment when I almost decide to shiver and be miserable ‘cos it’s crap. That’s the moment the weather tyrant’s caught me off guard and won its little battle with me. It’s all down hill from there. I kick the cat, stomp around with my head just above my naval and generally think life’s a bitch and then I’ll die. And a passer by says, “Don’t you love these rainy autumn evenings, really make you feel alive.” I resist the temptation to punch the smug son of a bitch but all he’s done is beat this particular tyrant that I have succumbed to. That’s the drift of it but humans are a bit more complex to deal with than weather. On the wheel of tyrants there’s North (air, mind and intellect), East (fire, spirit), South (water, emotions) and West (earth, physicality) each with their own version of people who can catch you off guard. The aim is not to lose or to fight them, but to win the little battle they’re presenting you with. For example in the south the tyrant is the little pest who whittles at you till your emotions are frayed and then steps in to have their way. Answer, keep your emotional composure and just observe what they’re doing. In the north there are those who use intellectual arrogance to undermine, in the east their position of spiritual or hierarchical superiority, and in the west their physical presence. In essence if someone approaches you with a submachine gun don’t go ‘oh my God’ and collapse, don’t whip out your pistol and make a fight of it, just turn the light off or suggest, “You look so incredibly strong I bet you can run miles further than I can carrying that gun, show me.”  In Indian speak that’s ‘counting coo’ or taking their dream. That sounded too airy-fairy to me till I thought about it. Their ego wants its way, you know like world domination or whatever, which is the dream, and this dream, being their internal construction is based on a set of assumptions. If they get you to accept them too it’s good night all, but if you confound an assumption, prove it’s invalid, the dream falls like a pack of cards and its, “Not so clever now are we Mr Goldfinger.” So next time I’m all miserable and insinuating it’s all your fault don’t take it on, smile and say, “Sorry Stiffmouse I thought you were just doing your impersonation of Tony Hancock, which is excellent by the way.” And now the difficult bit. What sort of tyrant are you to other people? And how are you a tyrant to yourself? Go figure. 

We want America Back.

The Teapot’s inarticulate call has trumped Obama’s professorial performance. It’s as if the Teapot sees the elephant in the room while Obama is doing his serious best to curb something he can’t emotionally grasp to stop it breaking too much crockery. Oh no that’s a bull. Anyway. It feels strangely reminiscent of inter-war Germany; a proud people reduced and made fearful by unfair reparations. The ordinary people of Germany didn’t start the war, they suffered greatly during it and were then required by the victors to pay for it afterwards; a three fold injustice creating a tinderbox ready for ignition by Hitler’s sparky rhetoric. Once again the Teapot of injustice is primed and ready for the right spokesman. What the people of America see is unemployment, un-payable bills, wasteful urban decay, and the wealthy and powerful classes untouched by this impoverishment. Their sense of fair play has been shredded and spat out by economic, commercial and political contortionists. At times like this a measured approach is not enough, their howl of pain only satisfiable by hearing another. I suggest that there are realities here though, far more subtle than a simple move towards Republicanism. There is a reality somewhere between blind, inarticulate emotion and pragmatic, self-serving intellect, a reality of truthful presence and honest, ego-less purpose. This is what the Teapot wants back, a change in the warp and weft of social fabric, possibly a Perestroika for capitalism but where a market economy moves towards a socially cohesive economy. Not a centralised Soviet style one but one based on the most basic drives of the individual. OK I admit it; I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. 

Bad Radiator.

The radiator in the cellar is old and hasn’t worked for years. As it’s fed by 8mm micro-bore pipe, probably blocked up, I decided to replace it and the pipes by standard 15mm. Knowing the benefits of organisation I sketched out the new layout, measured everything and made a list of all the bits needed. Thus equipped I went to Grahams the plumber’s merchants, bought everything and brought it home. I then set about taking out the old rad. I tied off the header tank ball cock, pushed the garden hose onto the drain point and drained the system through the front door into the street; congratulating myself that meticulous planning is the key to an easy job. Back at the rad I tried turning one of the control valves I could have sworn I’d checked many times before. It was closed. The bloody thing wasn’t working because the supply to it was turned off! Damn! How stupid. With all the new stuff in the kitchen I decided to refill the system and see if worked with the valve open. It didn’t. Damn again. Back to the replacement plan. OK one last try. I turned off the other rads nearby. It worked! So I took all the parts back to Grahams and got my money back, came home and prepped the system with the nearby rad valves partially closed and everything’s fine now. I’m sure there’s a moral here somewhere. 

Tea Party America.

Don’t discount the Tea Part movement in America. It may thrust Sarah Palin into the White House. It’s a strange beast, a grass roots uprising of the impoverished middle ground organised in Washington and funded by the wealthy. This though isn’t philanthropy. Once upon a time that never was America was a land of freedom and abundance, zero taxes and equality; a land that John Wayne had in the back of his mind when he acted in films. And the Tea Party wants it back. Now most therapists and all ad men will tell you emotions drive conscious decisions. They’re in place before our conscious processes have a chance to apply their flimsy justifications. In a time of austerity this ‘time that never was’ has a powerful emotional draw and stirs one’s emotional imagery into action. One somehow knows the truth of it deep in one’s soul. This is the stirring that millions of good, God fearing Americans can feel, nebulous, nameless, structure-less maybe, but the honest to God truth. They see it, the empty houses, unemployed and urban decay, every day with their own eyes. They have been motivated, but to do what? Their emotional direction has been primed and needs conscious justification but they’re not interested in the painstaking detail of policy. They simply want action and a direction that rhetoric can provide, which in this case is supplied by a rejuvenated, almost fundamentalist Republicanism. In the wink of an eye it is forgotten that the last Republican administration was in large part responsible for the deficit they are all suffering from, whose free market stance made the wealthy even richer and caused the banks to fail, who pawned middle class homes to unscrupulous lenders. Nope, all gone, don’t remember a thing. So the wealthy provide the funds, because they want to be wealthier, Washington provides the direction, because we want to be back in power, and millions of good Americans provide the emotional power, because they want a better life. If only these three directions were in alignment, but they’re not.