Trumps Tone.

Have you noticed the change in D. Trump’s tone of voice? It’s become the monotonous thudding monotone of incessant bombing of waterlogged trenches, each word a far off explosion muffled in mud. It somehow carries the depressing inevitability of an approaching doom. As he orders more federal forces to quell the protestors of a different opinion he appears to perceive himself inching ever closer to an Armageddon. But who are the sides to this final conflict? For sure he must be depressed at the thought of his glorious personal play’s final act coming to nothing ‘sept a squabble, a stabbing, a soliloquy. Obviously he’s not a fan of Elizabethan theatre, though he definitely has the girth and swagger of a Shakespearean character. At least he had in previous scenes. As you can see I’m padding this out in an attempt to reach my daily 300 words. So who are the sides; that’s my concern. Trump v USA, Trump v China, Trump v the World or Trump v Trump? The rants, the slurred speech, the 3am tweeting, the skewed holograms of reality and now this monotone are pitiable in the homeless asking for a handout. They don’t have the collateral to harm, but this is Shakespeare. Will he be Macbeth, King Lear or Bottom? There’s a range. Or a childhood doll whose stuffing is escaping with its use, or a zip around balloon who in its last gasping fart falls lifeless limp to the ground. No Will has better ways of saying it.

“Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage”

“The time of life is short! To spend that shortness basely were too long”

The Unfearful and the Avatar.

Fear is natural, a sort of, “I’m not going there again” response. Fear of lions, falling a thousand feet from a ridge etc etc. Learning to ski for example, first 4mph is the fear limit, then 10, 15 and so on, each in turn an invisible barrier that one contrives one way or another to not exceed. The situation is assessed, fear triggered and a knee collapse called for. But a different fear can arise from many sources other than physical: fearful of a parent, a teacher, a subject, a situation. In all of these there can be a ‘knee collapse’ called for. And one barely recognises the counter response of self- justification; it wasn’t fear but circumstance. The fear is justified, externalised, buried and once buried only the justification remains. And the justification is a lie. Thus fear teaches one to lie. And lies make reality into a dichotomy of truth and fiction. And this fiction born of fear forms the ego, the fictitious person in the same body as the real: One person holding two identities: The Unfearful and the Avatar. The rat race, which incidentally is very unfair to rats, is the result of Avatars playing reality as if it’s a game of Grand Theft Auto, and unfortunately wealth and public office induce levels of fear unknown to ordinary people. And, sorry to go on, Avatar fiction can seem far more appealing than unfearful truth. So at this moment under the universal fear of Coronavirus the world is in a right pickle. By the way the fruit of the tree of knowledge is not about steam engines and transistors, it’s about our unique human capacity to create our own Avatar, so we can’t say we’ve not been told. In conclusion we seem to be at a cusp, a sharp change in the direction of a curved line, or at least the possibility of one. Like Shylock Avatars can be smelt and once smelt can be outwitted. All we need is a Portia. No not the car dumb ass!

Global Population Decline.

Experts in Global Population Decline are prophesying doom by Global Population Decline. This is important because if 2 people don’t create 2.1 new people populations will fall, there’ll be more 80 year olds than babies and babies can’t look after 80 year olds. Fertility rates are set to fall further causing Japan for example to halve its population by 2100. But if that seems extreme what year was our current world population half of what it is today? Go on make a guess. 1975. Yes we’ve doubled our human population in the last 45 years!! No wonder the other experts, the ones in Global Population Growth, have been prophesying doom for years. So if we’re doomed either way all that proves is we’re rubbish at achieving a stable, appropriate population. And now the experts in Global Population Decline are saying humans will die out in 300 years. This proves, assuming you are alive when reading this, that you’ve lived in the ultimate period of human existence. True the traffic is bad but today’s motorcycles are amazing; 131.4mph average round the TT on a stock BMW! And musical instruments. Never before could so much be created with one finger! Honestly even if a dreadful circular saw accident left you with only one digit you’d have no trouble. And worried about Covid-19? Relax; the Black Death in the 14^th century killed 200 million Europeans and we’ve only had 5 in our area so far. True the weather in July has been shite but next week looks better. And the pubs are open. Familiar faces and language if you wrote it on Facebook would have the police around. Context is everything you dumb Scottish judge. Ooops. So in conclusion don’t have children but if you do try not to have it on public transport, though that might be safer than a hospital, but only if it’s an easy birth. Caesarian births might offend fellow passengers. And obviously have sex but observe social distancing: That’s very important.

What We Can’t do.

We can’t lift half a ton. But we can with a forklift. We can’t know absolutely any unit value without the aid of a thermometer, scales, a light meter, ruler etc etc. We are at a loss with numbers unless we know the rules of mathematics. All these vastly expand what we can do and we tend to forget we can’t do it without external stuff. So why make this pretty obvious point? Well what is it we or say I bring to the party when playing with all this equipment? I suggest experience, inventiveness, intent and an ability to visualise and compare. These are what you might call our soft ‘human’ skills, our unique contribution to this man/equipment interface. These skills basically reduce to intent and comparison. Only we can question, “Is it brighter outside?” and only we can answer, “Well brighter than it was.” We can’t measure lumens without a light meter and normally ‘brighter’ or darker is what we’re interested in. We might feel one weight is heavy and another heavier but we’d need scales to determine their absolute weights. Our senses of light, sound, taste, smell and kinaesthetic all work on comparison without any ability to know any absolute values or really appreciate them sensually. Sure we can read a printout of 110 decibels but our ‘felt’ value can vary wildly from deafening to fine. Basically we’re soft feely animals who’ve invented tools to augment our ourselves. And we’re still soft feely animals. So? Well we’re so the sorcerers apprentice. We’ve mastered spells with no idea of their results. Dum di dum di dum di da da da. Sure we have spreadsheets, balance sheets, calculations and machines but… Did anyone think in the 50’s when they invented plastic that lasts 400 years how much there’d be in 400 years time? Do billionaires calculate how much shopping time they’re going to have to do to spend it all? No! Because we’re still soft feely animals. We can read numbers but our senses can’t really conceive of them. “I have a large number so I need a larger one.” That’s how simple we are. And we have to acknowledge that. That is our limitation and the sooner we accept it the sooner we’ll stop the damage we’re causing.

Music.

I’ve been steeped in music for 64 years now but recently I’ve been upscaling my education. I can now make faces go pale with confusion in seconds. Two amazing things. One there’s only 12 notes in an octave and a realistic range of around 60 to 140 beats per minute: that’s it. And two, people who know nothing about music can be moved to tears, remember a host of songs, when they heard them and what they mean to them. I guess it’s only like watching TV and not knowing how it works but then there’s a whole pantheon of music from classical to jazz to pop. Another obvious but amazing thing is you can’t stop sound and look at it like a picture. Stop it and there’s nothing. In a way that’s quite rare. Stop a chair, it’s still there, a tree and it’s still there. The nearest I can think of is strangling a chicken: one moment it’s there, the next it’s stopped, visible but lifeless, which I guess puts music in the same category as life. (But then in music a guitarist will soon start up twiddling again) Another strange thing is when the bass player stops the whole band tends to stop. Vocals, guitar even drums can stop no problem, but the bass? Why? And Joni Mitchel. Men, even jazz players only use ‘sus’ (suspended) chords in passing. “Never go from a sus chord to a sus chord”. Then Joni comes along and she’s sus to sus to sus. Sus chords are emotionally unresolved and men can’t cope with that, whereas Joni, who’s emotions were permanently unresolved, rarely needed to go to a major for comfort. Hence in Love Actually Joni taught Emma Thompson “how to feel.” And just like Emma thousands of women felt the same not knowing anything about sus chords. Jazz players play 2-5-1 chords incessantly because they sound cool and are real easy to riff over. “Nice.” When the director first heard the composer play the Jaws music he said, “Is that it!?” Which of course it was. And pop? Suffice to say it’s got so generic there’s now a whole industry suing people for infringement of copyright. Anyway hopefully I’ve not made your face go pale. And yesterday Ennio Morricone died. I bet you can’t picture Clint Eastwood without hearing his music.

The Last Civilisation.

Every great civilisation dwindles and falls. Rome, Greece, Persian, Ethiopian etc. all fall in the end. They start youthful, energetic. They move to maturity where the rulers become a law to themselves and the lower class become so occupied putting food on the table they become tired, disillusioned and unable to call their rulers to account. In old age the rulers become fearful and full of strange self-serving ideas. This demise viewed from today is seen as sad, pathetic even funny but with little empathic connection. When it happens, is happening, to our British civilisation we’re in it rather than seeing it through the pink haze of history. Covid plus Brexit are the last two nails in our coffin. Covid will leave us with a huge bill and Brexit will cripple our ability to pay it off. What I personally rose on the back of, free and supported further education, working social services and the NHS are all shadows of their former selves. The optimism of “We’ve never had it so good” has been replaced by the depression of seeing Johnson and co frittering away our chances on some hair-brained scheme to get the wealthy better returns. Our new allegiance to America will only abuse us further. But this is the way of civilisations. We each have our day in the sun and our days in the dark. And the brash British youth of the industrial revolution has left the world, like Covid, much depleted. Humans have in effect become the Covid to much of nature killing off more than Covid ever could. Where those who call for empathy and awareness are voices on the wind those who believe the future lies with AI etc are lorded as profits of a new age. I despair. The world is and we are nature, as much as a squirrel, a tree, a mountain and its streams, all built from the same DNA. To leave that fold for binary silicone, however much it tickles our fancy, is to envisage an alternative universe and our wish to travel there. We’re building the algorithms, 5G and Windows 666 rocket as we speak. But we’ve become confused, disillusioned, unable to call our rulers to account. It’s a shame, and I suspect shameful to be the Last Civilisation.

They Never said they Loved Me.

Whether it was growing up in the fifties, being northern or their own problematic relationship but my parents never said they loved me. To be honest I wouldn’t have known where to file it if they had, though I knew I was loved. They never said I was great or good looking either, just ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ It’s hard to know if I’ve missed out on these expressions of affirmation. The absence of them though has left me to go about the task of being me the best I can without these external reflections. I’m still ambivalent about their worth. On the negative side I never thought of myself as good looking or great and I have probably missed out on opportunities without the confidence of these verbal affirmations. On the plus side I’ve had to grow my own without any strings that may have been attached to them. ‘You’re good looking if… we think you’re great for… we love you when...’ Even without these strings I don’t like external reflections. My duty to myself feels sacrosanct. This is probably why I dislike social media so much, so many people reflecting other people reflecting each other in a sort of cognitive incestuousness. Hence our growing totalitarian polarisation. Thinking about it masculinity doesn’t go in for affirmations in general. That’s not to say we can’t have huge affection for each other. But it’s somehow between ‘me’ and ‘you’ without, or maybe with the fear of, reflecting each other emotionally. We are born of female and at some point have to break that primary identification bond to identify oneself as male. Or not. We bond as fellow emigrant travellers on this path. In this new country of masculinity we make our new life noticing its different customs and mores. Then again there’s a genderless disposition to meet the roots of ‘you’ without the flimflam of reflections. So on the whole I’m happy they only said, ‘do your best, that’s all you can do.’ Which I did and I think they’d love me for that: Even when what I did do wasn’t exactly to plan.