Variation versus synchronicity

The brain is an amazing place. For the past four or five hours, my brain has been a mental fire and I have been jumping around trying to collect the blue oxygenated flames that lurk therein. I sit here in silence except for the beauty of the Goldberg variations and the sound of the trees in my garden, and with the cold breeze of the fully open window hitting my bare shoulder.

When I was a keen school pupil, I took time off school and went to a performance of Cosi at the Royal Opera House; it was a performance in modern dress. To this day, if you talk to me about this performance, I will tell you that it was uncomfortable - I'm one for period costume in Mozart. As my good friend David once said to me on the occasion of going back to College to pick up our MAs,

"the stage is the same, but the players are different".

I know I have quoted this before, but right now it seems to add to my thought.

*

When I was younger, I used to play hide & seek - it was a game: a childish game - it was fun. The best thing about hide & seek was that no matter how difficult the place you hid was to find, someone would always find you. What if no one ever found you?

My evening has been a bit odd because it all happened rather spontaneously - my mind is all over the place at the moment both in career terms and in personal terms (fundementally, I have a lot to sort out, but I've got to learn to be happy with my 'lot' first).

I found myself having a lovely dinner in Waterloo with Gavin and Nigel. On my way home, I noticed the buildings: isn't it strange how over the course of modern-human existence, our arguments remain the same, it is only the set that has evolved. In the modern religious wars (and the other major and minor arguments) there is very little changed about the script since the beginning of time, just the players and the set - just like the Mozart opera I went to see.

A city like London is such a construct. It is such a frail existence - it exists as a place humans like myself try to hide in - to continue our existence as set designers for the cyclical arguments of time; I could live in this hide & seek world forever believing I'm living the most exciting and most creative life imaginable - except that the real excitement is not there because noone will come to find me - I'm the only one who can find myself. I know that I'm about to directly contradict about 3 posts ago -but then any man who claims to have the answer to anything is just stubborn - I may have said this about 20 posts ago.

It is interesting that living in my city 'construct' there are two places I go to escape this non-reality; the first is the river - the most natural place within the city, and the second is my holodeck. Jon's holodeck is his close friends: it is a curious retrograde inversion that my holodeck is more real than the construct I live in. The problem with the construct is that it is full of stupid rules about how you must do things - how you must live. The city constuct is the breeding place for the ridiculous rules of society: take a look at this excellent cynical look at the rules we fall into line and follow -



These ridiculous rules have even infiltrated my holodeck. I am disappointed every time I try to be organic - it is ignored by the conscience of infiltrating rules. The most obvious parts of any script are the parts that are not there - the parts never acknowledged in communication. That said, I know I would be hypocritical were I to condemn this.

Thus far, my only answer to escape the false framework of hiding people within the city constuct of society's headquarters, constantly evolving to recreate the view of the computer game, is to escape to a wild place in the country next to the sea for ever. In order for it to work, I would need to take my close people with me... but I can't... it is too late... we are all bitten by the construct sooner or later - do you remember the computer game 'lemmings'? Why can't people be real any more? Why can't people express organic feeling? Why is everyone gradually turning to concrete? Am I the only one who sees it? I don't feel it anymore - that feeling of destruction every time it happens, I just feel a bit of myself die every time.

None of this is real: nothing feels real anymore. I'm bitten.


JL

The secrets of cinema.

Those of you in awe at atmosphere and the creation of complex emotional soundfield in filmatic work, would do well to watch this video:

Here

Survival

Look at me and all my sudden postings.

My day thus far has involved waking up so hungover it was untrue and fiddling around on the the internet. I am buoyed by my ability to get home successfully from Camden at 2am and not remember a detail of how I did it. Quite impressive. I had been to a 'bad friday' party at Russell's.

Anyhow, sitting sur la balcon noch einmal, I have uploaded some photos from my phone.

You will find them here:

Extra photos

I'm going back to my hangover.

JL

Ants in your pants?

A few weeks ago, I went for a drink with Simon in Angel. It's not really a part of London I visit very often - indeed, probably only a few times a year. It is a shame because it exists with fabulous bars, good humour and jollity of experience. On my way to meet Simon there, I was alas on the Northern line; in my carriage, a lady had a newspaper with the headline, 'Who am I?'.

For someone like me, a headline like that is a slide - with a gradient just off vertical -* right down to the depths of philosophy.

Walking up and out of Angel, I had a sudden vision of an ants' nest. All the people exiting the station to fulfil a function -* to do something.

It occurred to me, as it has done before, that even the people running up the escalator wailing in show to others are fulfilling a funtion. Those people exiting the tube believing they are different and totally unusual are still entirely predictable in humanity by their randomness. It is only one stage away from ants leaving the nest, in the way they do, to fulfil individual functions that benefit the whole. I've always believed in a 'counter-balance' society - the belief that such groups as the far-right wing of the Catholic church and the far wing of the evangelical church, or Anti-vivisectionists and pro-vivisectionists, all exist in counter-balance to provide general stability to society. Ants work like this if you believe what the natural media will tell you.

It disappoints me to believe that in the same way that I catergorize people I know, other people catergorize me, and know my reaction to everything... or at least can predict it because I have 'a certain function'.

I can't remember the last time that I was genuinely surprised in a good way. Shocking.

Maybe I'm in the wrong place, and I've grown comfortable to London, and need to move to excitement again. I notoriously get bored very easily... and I have been here for 4 1/2 years...

Or maybe there is just no such thing as personality, just a pre-determined existence in counter-balance to create stability...

Thought...

JL


Ps. Blogger.com, PLEASE will you allow en-rules in your character set? Some of us do like to TRY and punctuate with correct symbols.

The Wasp and the light

I've been aware for sometime that things are changing; when I say 'things', I refer more directly to my life. This current tide change has been at work since the early part of this year.

Sitting on a tube train earlier, a tube train that later broke down and sent me along the tracks in de-trainment, I noticed something. A wasp was throwing itself at a fluorescent light again and again in the futile hope that it would escape into the world where it more properly belongs. This hot, synthetic tube repelled him, yet the wasp continued in its quest. (For all you left-wing feminists reading, I make no apologies that the wasp is a man, in the same way that I wouldn't make apologies for flawed liberalism.) The wasp couldn't escape because of his attraction to something bright and promising and yet fake and ultimately fatal. As an adjunct of mere anecdotal use, I had just been into a supermarket and purchased a pizza for tea, avoiding the slightly less-bright packaging and much-more-healthy looking vegetables nearby. I've always had the ability to empty my head of this sort of attraction, and sideline it. Pizza I know is bad for me, but is a fluorescent light; other objects I do well to put away and let them live on the important sidelines of my exsistence, rather than be destructive attractors like pizza.

On Good Friday, Christians learn of a scripture being fulfilled - the death of Jesus in a way fortold and predicted in detail. I sometimes wonder whether I have an ability of future prediction, or whether my skills of logic are just quite finely honed. Arrogant perhaps? But arrogance is really very rarely me these days. When I came home from playing the organ, I did several similar things. Two of them were identical except in one respect, and I predicted the result correctly both times. The actual details are irrelavent.

A tide change, Good Friday, wasps attracted to lights? Mad? Quite possibly. We are all attracted to things that are not good for us - whether a light, whether a pizza, or whether other abstract things; there is always something better, like a salad, that we don't notice, or just don't think. I'm not talking about 'living a little' and 'letting one's hair down'; those who know me know that the admonishment of vice, or something you enjoy is entirely alien to my being. Yes. It is the being, the soul, the care of self to which I refer.

It all started in about December 2005. I knew from the moment an abstract connection was made, that there would be a gradual decline that could all but destroy me. It nearly has once or twice, but I find myself in the situation at the moment of knowing that in the next short while, I will make a gesture of personal sacrifice - sacrificing some mind things I enjoy on my sidelines, that will combine to create a fluorescent light that could hurt me much. The past few months have been a time of resigning myself to it, and in fact I do believe actual synthesis of these organic, sideline elements has already occurred, and is currently my percieved 'dangerous synthesis' in deception already. The personal sacrifice I shall make will be to give the synthesis a 'justification in time' to exist. In doing so, I will give life to something amazing, as I have done before (but not to this level), by letting it take all my emotional energy. It will exist, and I will nod in surprise, and everything will be fine. It will take me a year to recover, potentially longer, but I shall fight because it will eventually enhance my life dramatically. I find it all exciting.

I worry sometimes about how easy I find it to predict these things - I do believe in synchronicity, and my two tests when I arrived home proved a fulfilment of this to my mind.

On the positive side, I'm sitting on my balcony watching squirrels jumping in the trees, wishing I was free like that too; perhaps I will be soon. I intend to sit here with another Gin, eat a pizza, listen to the birds singing, watch the sun go down, and go off to enjoy the last night of penitence before the kindling of the new fire, and the beginning of what promises to be quite an interesting but exciting space of time.

JL