Gotta Have Faith
Do you believe that rain falls down? Now, do you have faith that rain falls down?
If you see someone standing in the street asserting that rain falls down and not up, you might wonder why someone would feel the need to state the obviously true. But if you see the same person standing in a thunderstorm, declaring with conviction that rain falls up as they feel it coming down on them, that's faith.
A statement of faith need not be false, but it must be implausible, and held passionately. The parents of a child who disappeared 20 years ago might cling tight to the belief that their offspring will return some day, and we recognise that it's not impossible that it will indeed happen, while acknowledging it's not at all likely. But if we saw the same parents casually holding the same belief but attaching no importance to it - that would seem profoundly strange.
So, faith must be passionate, and its objects unlikely. We don't even have a special word for beliefs which are mundane and held without intense emotion.
Indeed, the more implausible a belief, the more faith is required to believe it. This is why the most fanatical believers are also the ones with the wackiest beliefs.
But to turn this around, the people with the most faith to give are the ones who seek out the wackiest beliefs to expend their faith on.
How do you contain a fanatic? Give them something trivial or irrelevant to be fanatical about. The Turin Shroud is an obvious forgery, but even if it were genuine, its existence wouldn't support one christology over another. In spite of this, many fanatics come up with labyribthine sophisms trying to prove it genuine, as if that would somehow prove their theology.
If these people's efforts were directed toward catholicism itself, the church would splinter and implode. Churches direct potential heretics toward arcane irrelevancies for the same reason wider cultures direct potential troublemakers to sporting trivia.
But what makes one belief plausible and another not?
If I told you there was a teapot orbiting Neptune, and you had no way of investigating whether or not it were true, you could assign equal probability to truth or falsity, or refuse to assign any probability until some evidence turns up.
But actually you'd assume by default there is no such teapot, being ready to change your mind if evidence emerged that it were there.
If I told you there is a man in Brazil who's married 13 times, each time to a different woman named Maria, then it's rather unlikely - but probably not as unlikely as the neptunian teapot.
But if I told you my parents own a dog, you know that dog ownership is common, and that people seldom have reason to lie about such things, so you'd probably believe me.
So although there may be clear rules for the trained mathematician, in ordinary life we use a dense and inconsistent set of vague notions of plausibility to decide. This plausibility structure has aporias and outright contradictions, but for the most part is self-supporting - so we can generally justify our intuitions with other intuitions, which then justify the first set.
Different domains of life have different plausibility structures. In school, what the teacher says is considered probably true, because the teacher says it. Outside of school, teachers know nothing. In church, the priest is a wise guide. But the priest who visits your home is the happiness police, and must be lied to.
So, within religion and its rituals, the absurd and incoherent beliefs of the church become plausible. Miracles as explanations for natural events become commonplace. Statements which no one understands become obviously true - though still not understood.
So there is at the heart of religious faith a tension. On the one hand, articles of faith need to be wildly implausible to be articles of faith. On the other, they're rendered mundane by societal conditions which make them not just plausible but obvious.
Thus when engaged in acts of worship, believers do not have faith. And it's only when not expressing their faith that they have it.
Epitaphs
Things people don't say on their deathbed:
* I really wish I'd spent more time at work.
* I had too much sex.
* I should have worried more about what other people thought of me.
* Too many new experiences, they weren't good for me.
* Everything my parents taught me was absolutely true.
And of course,
* You can't get into too many arguments with morons.
* I really wish I'd spent more time at work.
* I had too much sex.
* I should have worried more about what other people thought of me.
* Too many new experiences, they weren't good for me.
* Everything my parents taught me was absolutely true.
And of course,
* You can't get into too many arguments with morons.
Cub Club (Part 3)
In Part 1, I joined the cub scouts and learned nothing. In Part 2, I joined again and learned to use a needle and thread. I learned one other thing.
This second time, the nominal leader Mr Moustache (who possibly had a real name which I might even have known) was barely seen. He'd effectively demoted himself to shuffling papers in a small anteroom, while a shifting team of ex-soldiers took care of the boys.
The only time I saw him for more than a minute was while carrying one end of a banner, while he walked in front dressed as Father Christmas, and behind us was a junior marching band and a team of majorettes. This last was two dozen pubescent girls dressed in flesh-coloured lyotards - glaring with hostility at the two boys.
We walked/twirled/blew/beat around the streets for 90 minutes. What were we doing? What was on the banner? I have absolutely no idea.
But the first evening of rejoining. Eighteen boys of around 10, arranged on three sides of a square, while in the middle... ...a tall man with a short crew-cut.
Wearing full camouflage.
Screaming and bellowing about how we lacked "discipline".
Apparently we were a "disgrace", with our little green caps, woggles with neck-kerchiefs, regulation pullovers and grey school shorts.
I almost never questioned or resisted adult imbecility - there was never any point. But on this occasion, for some reason, I decided to try an experiment.
I sneered at him.
I kept the sneer until his gaze reached me...
...and he flinched.
Just momentarily, because he immediately looked far away, and never looked at me again.
I think I attended for two more weeks, and have no recollection of anything about them. Sometimes there's nothing more to habit than momentum.
I never told anyone about this, but the one thing you realise when you reach middle age...is that whatever you think you worked out as an adult...you already knew as a child.
This second time, the nominal leader Mr Moustache (who possibly had a real name which I might even have known) was barely seen. He'd effectively demoted himself to shuffling papers in a small anteroom, while a shifting team of ex-soldiers took care of the boys.
The only time I saw him for more than a minute was while carrying one end of a banner, while he walked in front dressed as Father Christmas, and behind us was a junior marching band and a team of majorettes. This last was two dozen pubescent girls dressed in flesh-coloured lyotards - glaring with hostility at the two boys.
We walked/twirled/blew/beat around the streets for 90 minutes. What were we doing? What was on the banner? I have absolutely no idea.
But the first evening of rejoining. Eighteen boys of around 10, arranged on three sides of a square, while in the middle... ...a tall man with a short crew-cut.
Wearing full camouflage.
Screaming and bellowing about how we lacked "discipline".
Apparently we were a "disgrace", with our little green caps, woggles with neck-kerchiefs, regulation pullovers and grey school shorts.
I almost never questioned or resisted adult imbecility - there was never any point. But on this occasion, for some reason, I decided to try an experiment.
I sneered at him.
I kept the sneer until his gaze reached me...
...and he flinched.
Just momentarily, because he immediately looked far away, and never looked at me again.
I think I attended for two more weeks, and have no recollection of anything about them. Sometimes there's nothing more to habit than momentum.
I never told anyone about this, but the one thing you realise when you reach middle age...is that whatever you think you worked out as an adult...you already knew as a child.
Cub Club (Part 2)
In Part 1, Mr Moustache (who had been something low ranking in the British army) met my father (who had been a corporal in the British army and never fired a gun).
Together they decided the 10 year old Kapitano would love to join the scouts, and discover things like:
Communing with nature
Learning survival skills in the wild
Helping old ladies across the road
Doing household chores for strangers in return for pitiful amounts of cash
Donating the pitiful cash to never-specified charities
Helping old ladies across the road
Something about god
Promising to serve the queen our entire lives
Keeping clean
Never telling lies (except when it would hurt someone's feelings or embarrass an adult)
Helping old ladies across the...yes, that one came up quite a lot
Oh, and:
Learning how to tie sailors in knots. I might have misremembered that one.
In fact, the budget stretched to one occasion of:
Cooking baked beans and sausages by gas in the wild, untamed empty building site next to the scout hall. Except it rained, so we did it in the hall itself.
I stopped going pretty quickly.
But then...it happened again. Once again Father and me bumped into Mr Moustache outside the hall, and once again decided I wanted to join. But this time it would be better, because instead of eight bored boys, there were eighteen.
I have a few memories of this time. The third is of a plump, red-bearded, red-faced scoutmaster with an abiding passion: Amateur Dramatics.
Every week or so, he spent an hour bullying the boys into learning everything he knew about one or another aspect of stagecraft.
My second memory is of the lady who poured the half-time soft drinks. And did pretty much everything else.
Someone had noticed that Kapitano avoided playing the games which the adults devised to fill up the empty dismal hours of each meeting.
One of these was a convoluted game of pure chance, which Kapitano was the last to play...and won. And got a round of applause for doing so.
I had spent most of my early life being puzzled about what people did and said, so this was just one more way they made no sense. Why were the boys being prodded into congratulating me on being lucky? I shrugged and went back to my seat, alone.
I think the adults noticed the shrug.
They'd also noticed that Kapitano didn't have any badges sewn onto his uniform. Badgelessness and not-being-a-team-player. Two aspects of the same problem perhaps?
So the lady spent 20 minutes listening to me talk about variables, graphics, conditional branches, and how to program a Sinclair ZX-81 personal home computer. With 16 kilobyte RAM extension.
I don't think she listened, but she presented me with a "Hobbies" badge. I got Mother to teach me how to sew, so I could attach it to my uniform.
And that's the story of how I learned to sew.
But the first memory...that's the formative one. And that's in Part 3.
Together they decided the 10 year old Kapitano would love to join the scouts, and discover things like:
Oh, and:
In fact, the budget stretched to one occasion of:
I stopped going pretty quickly.
But then...it happened again. Once again Father and me bumped into Mr Moustache outside the hall, and once again decided I wanted to join. But this time it would be better, because instead of eight bored boys, there were eighteen.
I have a few memories of this time. The third is of a plump, red-bearded, red-faced scoutmaster with an abiding passion: Amateur Dramatics.
Every week or so, he spent an hour bullying the boys into learning everything he knew about one or another aspect of stagecraft.
Mr Amdram: Can you guess what we're going to learn about today?
Boys: Is it...Shakespeare?
Mr Amdram: Um, no.
Boys: Putting on makeup?
(Other Boys: Yeah! Cool!)
Mr Amdram: No.
Boys: Swordfighing?
(Other Boys: Swordfighing!)
Mr Amdram: No.
Boys: What then?
Mr Amdram: Guess.
Boys (after a long pause): Uh, no idea.
Mr Amdram: DANCING!
Boys: Oh god no! Dancing's for girls!
Mr Amdram: We Are Going To Learn Dancing!
Boys: Ugh! Eurgh! No!
(Continue arguing until there's no time to learn about dancing.)
My second memory is of the lady who poured the half-time soft drinks. And did pretty much everything else.
Someone had noticed that Kapitano avoided playing the games which the adults devised to fill up the empty dismal hours of each meeting.
One of these was a convoluted game of pure chance, which Kapitano was the last to play...and won. And got a round of applause for doing so.
I had spent most of my early life being puzzled about what people did and said, so this was just one more way they made no sense. Why were the boys being prodded into congratulating me on being lucky? I shrugged and went back to my seat, alone.
I think the adults noticed the shrug.
They'd also noticed that Kapitano didn't have any badges sewn onto his uniform. Badgelessness and not-being-a-team-player. Two aspects of the same problem perhaps?
So the lady spent 20 minutes listening to me talk about variables, graphics, conditional branches, and how to program a Sinclair ZX-81 personal home computer. With 16 kilobyte RAM extension.
I don't think she listened, but she presented me with a "Hobbies" badge. I got Mother to teach me how to sew, so I could attach it to my uniform.
And that's the story of how I learned to sew.
But the first memory...that's the formative one. And that's in Part 3.
Cub Club (Part 1)
I was a cub scout. Twice.
The first time, I was walking back from some errand with my father, when we passed a half-derelict community hall - a single-room building, maybe 5x5x20 meters, a relic from a time when the upper middle class went to church in the morning, then chess societies, knitting circles and local choirs in the evening.
Outside was a short, thin man of about 60, in a beige uniform decorated with scattered sewn-on badges. He smiled cheerfully through a greying moustache, and affected an avuncular, Kris Kringle-like manner, which I thought at the time must be calculated to put young children at their ease.
It had always puzzled me that adults lied so transparently to children.
Somehow, he and my father got talking, and it turned out he ran the local cub scout troupe - which met every Thursday evening in the very building behind us.
He said I should join, my father thought it was an excellent idea, and I tried to be diplomatic about my complete antipathy to the idea.
He said no I really really should join, because...something something something, it would be fun and jolly good for my character or something somehow. My father said yes I'd definitely be at the next meeting. I stared off into the middle distance, waiting for them to stop.
And so, after a few days of Mother dragging me round the clothes shops to spend far to much money on a uniform I had no interest in wearing, there came Thursday evening.
This consisted of:
Inspection: I think eight boys standing in a row while Mr Moustache pretended to check our uniforms for creases or stains
Pledging: The oldest cub haltingly reciting an archaic promise to serve queen and country, while we all performed an occult-looking three fingered salute.
Sport of some kind: Most likely four-a-side soccer, which involved me standing around for half an hour, making sure I was never anywhere near the ball.
Break: Orange squash and biscuits, and the only time when the boys showed any sign of animation, chatting about TV shows and the then-new phenomenon of home computer games.
No idea: Maybe more sport, or an improvised lecture from an adult. I've a vague feeling there was prayer involved at some point.
Some kind of finishing ceremony, then going home.
I went a few more times. I don't recall learning the names of anyone there, though I remember a slightly overweight woman who did all the physical work - setting up for soccer or table tennis, making and serving the orange squash drinks...
...and on one occasion treating me for an inexplicable nosebleed. She taught me that it was a myth that one should tilt one's head back to stop a nosebleed, and that actually one should tilt forward. I later learned that both are myths.
I always had the impression that she was constantly telling herself that her duties weren't the boring, demeaning waste of time they seemed, and that she was keeping up a noble tradition of...something something something.
After six weeks or so, my parents finally realised I was never going to develop an enthusiasm for the scouts - or indeed stop loathing every moment of it. So they stopped trying to persuade me I already loved it.
But, as with bad marriages and profitable movies, the end wasn't quite the end.
The first time, I was walking back from some errand with my father, when we passed a half-derelict community hall - a single-room building, maybe 5x5x20 meters, a relic from a time when the upper middle class went to church in the morning, then chess societies, knitting circles and local choirs in the evening.
Outside was a short, thin man of about 60, in a beige uniform decorated with scattered sewn-on badges. He smiled cheerfully through a greying moustache, and affected an avuncular, Kris Kringle-like manner, which I thought at the time must be calculated to put young children at their ease.
It had always puzzled me that adults lied so transparently to children.
Somehow, he and my father got talking, and it turned out he ran the local cub scout troupe - which met every Thursday evening in the very building behind us.
He said I should join, my father thought it was an excellent idea, and I tried to be diplomatic about my complete antipathy to the idea.
He said no I really really should join, because...something something something, it would be fun and jolly good for my character or something somehow. My father said yes I'd definitely be at the next meeting. I stared off into the middle distance, waiting for them to stop.
And so, after a few days of Mother dragging me round the clothes shops to spend far to much money on a uniform I had no interest in wearing, there came Thursday evening.
This consisted of:
I went a few more times. I don't recall learning the names of anyone there, though I remember a slightly overweight woman who did all the physical work - setting up for soccer or table tennis, making and serving the orange squash drinks...
...and on one occasion treating me for an inexplicable nosebleed. She taught me that it was a myth that one should tilt one's head back to stop a nosebleed, and that actually one should tilt forward. I later learned that both are myths.
I always had the impression that she was constantly telling herself that her duties weren't the boring, demeaning waste of time they seemed, and that she was keeping up a noble tradition of...something something something.
After six weeks or so, my parents finally realised I was never going to develop an enthusiasm for the scouts - or indeed stop loathing every moment of it. So they stopped trying to persuade me I already loved it.
But, as with bad marriages and profitable movies, the end wasn't quite the end.
Can I Get a Witness? (Part 2)
"It was a large room. Full of people. All kinds. And they'd all arrived at the same place at more or less the same time. And they were all...free. And they were all asking themselves the same question."
- Laurie Anderson
On one side of the road, an old, traditional church, with walls of big grey stone, stained glass windows, uncomfortable wooden pews...and no one inside.
On the other, a squat, white, square, single-storey building that wouldn't be out of place in an army barracks - apart from the signs announcing it was a "Kingdom Hall" - or Jehovah's Witness church.
Inside, 150 people dressed like they'd designed their wardrobe from descriptions of the most formal attire in the world, but never actually seen it. Small children in immaculate bright white suits and pink bow ties. Elderly women, some in wheelchairs, dressed entirely in shades of mauve. Black men in cream boubous with gold lace and sky blue fezzes. White men with meticulously clipped beards and tweedy suits from the 70s that must get worn once per year.
And me, in threadbare black teeshirt, baggy jogging bottoms...and running shoes I found thrown in a gutter some years ago.
Yes, for JWs, the memorial of Jesus' death is the holiest ceremony on the most important day of the year. I did ask why the resurrection wasn't more important than the crucufixion, and apparently it's because the resurrection was just god reanimating his son on a whim, whereas the death...um, is complicated.
I've been shown a lot of JW videos, and the overall impression is of high production values...and immense cheesiness. Looking around the two prayer rooms, with solid chairs facing a polished lectern on a stepped podium in front of expensively leatherbound books...it's the same impression - expensive opulent taste as imagined by the poor.
And the singing of hymns...same again. No badly tuned upright piano for accompaniment, and no casio electric organ either. Instead, pre-recorded lush synthesised orchestral strings...with live vocals in the style of a crowd who want to give the impression of joyfully singing the praises of their god, but don't want to do anything so crass as show enjoyment. Very British, very Anglican.
And on to the first, nervous looking, preacher, who's job was to introduce the second nervous looking preacher, who's job was to make a few admin announcements...and introduce "Brother Piper" to do the actual preaching.
Brother Piper is about 20 and almost succeeds in sounding confident. He has the kind of over-chiseled good looks and waiflike slimness that come from undernutrition and stress. His suit is of course immaculate, but three sizes too large.
If you watch enough videos of ordinary people trying to explain quantum mechanics, or trinitarianism, or common core mathematics, you get to notice the little twitches, sideways glances and uncomfortable pauses which show they don't understand what they're saying - or that they don't quite believe it.
Brother Piper twitched quite a lot. It was a rambling train of disconnected metaphors, but the gist was this:
The universe is 13 billion years old, and God made Jesus right at the start, so the two must be really great friends to stay together so long.
There's also the holy spirit, which isn't a separate entity, but simply the presence of god when he's on earth doing a miracle. Except when it's not.
God's plan was that everyone would be immortal with eternal youth, but Adam messed everything up by making a decision for himself, introducing sin and therefore aging, death and suffering into the world. And we're inherited result because sin is genetic. And so is sinlessness, but not yet.
But at some indeterminate point in the future, God will finally win the battle with Satan that he could have won at any time, but chose not to for some reason. And after that, everyone will be immortal again. And they'll still have free will, but they won't be able to make the wrong decision. Because that's how "true" free will works.
And not only that, but 144,000 extra-special people will be selected by god to be his civil servants in heaven for eternity, functioning as a government for the perfected earthly people who no longer need a government.
But amazingly, these 144,000 will not be chosen by religious affilition. And god doesn't need the JWs to win. Making the entire JW church pointless in its own cosmology.
Oh, and it caused God so much suffering to kill his son, it would be ungrateful not to obey all his rules.
Cue more singing, and the ceremony of passing around the unleavened bread but not eating it, and the same for the wine. I liked the way they used stale mouldy pittabread just to make sure no one had a nibble.
End of ceremony, and much milling about making small talk before going home. I did my routine of chatting with everyone, asking simple, obvious questions and being very understanding when they couldn't answer.
Why does god need a civil service? Doesn't eternity pushing paper sound like hell? If angels have free will, why can't they sin - except for the one who did, even though the bible doesn't say so? And if free will doesn't entail sin, why did God make humans such that it does?
What obscure rules was god bound by when he had no choice but to kill his son to renew a contract he made with humanity? Do immorals make babies? What does "son of god" actually mean? Why are you performing the pagan rite of Dionysus?
The answer, apparently, is that the bible answers all these questions, but in scrambled order. So to find the answers, pick half a dozen random paragraphs from different books, then pretend they're a connected explanation. With enough wild guessing, you can make it mean something, which you can then pretend was God's intention all along.
Except it only works at JW prayer meetings, which I got invited to, several times. But I'm neither that much of a masochist, nor that much of a sadist. Fortunately for us all.
Can I Get a Witness? (Part 1)
Jehovah's Witnesses. The steampunkers of the christian world. They try to live according to rules actually found in the New Testament, without the interpolations and traditions that grew up around it.
So whereas the catholics have to retcon 2000 years of contradiction into an enormous wobbly heap of handwaving, the JWs have only the first century of contradiction to worry about.
They don't believe in a spiritual afterlife, but that after the end of the world, you get a new perfect body on a new perfect earth forever - unless you were evil, in which case you just cease to exist. Because that's what Paul wrote, before Hades got imported from Hellenistic religions and conflated with Tartarus.
They don't accept blood transfusions, because Leviticus says we mustn't eat blood. Even though (1) transfusion isn't eating (2) they ignore pretty much everything else in Leviticus, and (3) blood transfusions are a jolly good idea.
Which only leaves the question: Surely you'd drink blood?
They don't celebrate Christmas, because it's the Roman Festival of Saturn, and therefore pagan. They don't celebrate Easter, because symbolic rabbits and eggs come from fertility cults, and are therefore pagan.
They don't perform the Eucharist, because eating metaphorical god-flesh and drinking (eating?) metaphorical god-blood is the festival of Dyonisus - god of grain and therefore what you make from grain. So it's pagan.
What they do instead is...once a year take a sip of wine (representing blood) and a bite of bread (representing flesh) to commemorate the death of Jesus.
So what's the difference? The difference is: They don't call it the Eucharist. So when they do it, it's not pagan.
They are also the nicest nutjobs I've ever met. I've chatted and debated with dozens of flavours of christian over the years, and the JWs are the only ones who've never threatened me, lied to me, or assumed I must be an idiot because I didn't agree with them.
Well, tonight they've invited me to their not-Eucharist. So I'm going, and coming up in Part 2, my impressions.
I Dream of TV
Six months ago I had a tooth abcess. For the modest fee of GBP200 (or USD290 in international money) my dentist performed a root canal to drain it, making such comments as "Wow, that is a big abcess" and "Yes that must have been really painful".
Three months ago, I started to get what felt like a return of the same pain.
Last week, on Friday 29th January, I woke up in incredible pain. I've had shingles twice in my life, and kidney stones on two occasionals, and the level was comparable. So I did what anyone else would do; I took absurdly large amounts of ibuprofen, paracetamol and codine until the pain went away.
They were actually prescribed to my mother for post-operative pain, but on principle she takes the minimum amount she can to get the pain down to managable levels while being a tiny bit paranoid about addiction. I prefer to clobber my nerves into submission.
On monday I saw a doctor...who refused to give any advice or prescribe any medication, on the grounds that he was a General Practicioner and not a dental specialist. But he did recommend I see a dentist who could refer me to a hospital who could do surgery. And not take so many pills.
So I saw a dentist, who prescribed antibiotics and refused to refer me, on the grounds that he was only providing cover for my own dentist.
So I saw another doctor...who proscribed me Tranadol. Which works in 15 minutes, slays the pain like an ancient Sumerian warrior, and turns you into a shuffling zombie. It also has absolutely no narcotic effect whatsoever, so I have no idea how people can take it recreationally.
And then I was able to see my actual dentist, fresh and revitalised back from his holiday. Through my vague haze I gleaned that he was horrified at how much paracetemol I was inflicting upon me delicate liver, and extremely unimpressed that anyone would prescribe Tramadol ("a horrible drug") for dental pain.
So he prescribed me Dihydrocodine. 100 milligrams every six hours, to be taken with food...and with Metrodidazole, a second antibiotic that attacks the kind of anarobic bacteria that swarm under teeth. Then I could come back on Friday, with inflamation hopefully sufficiently reduced that the x-rays could show clearly...just where the infection was. And thus what exactly needed treating.
Dihydrocodine takes an hour to start working, isn't as effective a painkiller as Tramadol, and makes you sleepy in the same way a tidal wave makes you moist. With the result that I started sleeping 18 hours a day, but was actually capable of thought the rest of the time. I'm typing this two hours after taking a dose.
Small detail: The pharmacist refused to give me the dihydrocodine until I went home to fetch the tramadol to exchange for it, on the grounds that I might, under the effects of the tramadol, get confused and take both drugs, which would interact, and I'd find myself unable to breathe, and suffocate to death. So, yeah.
My head now somewhat clearer, I found myself able to reason thusly:
So I spoke to a (different) pharmacist. Who told me that, as usual, Dr Google was slightly but crucially wrong, and anti-histamines wouldn't help. And if I did have nuralgia is would be the trigeminal type, and if I had that I'd be hospitalised and howling in agony. With sharp stabbing pain as opposed to my dull constant type. Oops.
Well, on Friday I turned up for more x-rays and surgery. Except the x-rays were still inconclusive. And apparently while on Wednesday I'd thought I was slightly out of it, my orthodontist (lit: "Tooth Straightener") thought I'd been really out of it.
However, we were both a little perversely pleased at being presented with a non-trivial diagnostic puzzle. Through a process of logical deducation and selective injections of novocaine, we narrowed the possibilities to two:
(1) An abscess on the upper-right lateral incisor. Treatment: Extraction.
(2) A broken root on the upper-right crowned canine next to it. Treatment: Extraction.
...and no good way to tell which it was.
Conclusion: Another round of pills, and another week of waiting for the swelling to go down, at the end of which, another set of x-rays, and a decision. After which I go home with one tooth fewer. And some more painkillers.
In the meantime...I have my dreams. 18 hours a day of them.
Yesterday, in fitful bursts of sleep, I dreamed an entire Dr Who adventure from the 70s. 2016's Tom Baker Doctor took 1990's Sarah Jane Smith back in time to change the timeline of a previous adventure, with 70s Baker and Sladen, and daleks on a space station trying to blow up the earth. Back To The Future II style, with episodes 3 and 4 abrogated and set on a different path when Sarah Jane heroically tries to save earth by blowing up the dalek ship with her on it, but the Doctor freezing time at the last moment.
Today, I got a lost Star Trek TNG story. The one where Picard loses the emotional center of his humanity after being infected with an engineered alien nano-virus. So he has to regain it by trying to define what it is to be human in philosophical converations with Lieutenant Commander Data...while a giant green humanoid stands in for him in the captain's chair, symbiotically linking with the Enterprise.
It seems my unconscious brain is nerdier than my conscious one.
Dots and Dashing Off
I often think, the more active your life, the less active your blog.
I have been very active...with extremely boring things. Things like: How can you get a computer to recognise when a full stop is:
(1) At the end of a sentence
(2) At the end of an ellipsis
(3) At the end of a paragraph
(4) At the end of an abbreviation like "Dr." or "Mrs."
(5) Part of an abbeviation like "C.I.A"
(6) A decimal point
(7) Something else, probably.
The answer is: It's complicated, but I've cobbled together an algorithm that gets it right 99+% of the time.
As for why I would want to do such thing...that's also complicated. And boring. Or rather, complicated and boring to listen to someone explain, strangely fascinating to figure out.
Short version: I'm doing audios of stories. The easy part is talking into a microphone. The hard part is getting your computer to guide you doing so.
But that's what a computer is, right? A tireless but extremely stupid coach.
But now, an unexpected christmas break. Because I've been rather suddenly invited to spend a week in Barcelona. By an old friend who's exactly the kind of person to impulsively book a week-long trip to Barcelona because it sounds kind of interesting somehow, and then impulsively invite a randomly chosen aquaintence to come too.
Which makes me the kind of person to go along with other people's mad impulses. And, I suppose, my own.
So, coming soon, some blogging about the trip to Barcelona that I will have just had.
In the meantime, work out the tense structure of that sentence.
An Enforced Holiday
Computer dead. New one arrives in a month. So all my little projects are suspended for a while.
Deep Dump 2
Passports exist to restrict travel.
All entertainment is also propaganda.
A sociopath is not one to be feared because they manipulate. It's one who's to be feared because they're hard to manipulate.
The great pretence of dance music is that when people dance to it they don't also listen to it.
The pretence of comedy is that when people are laughing they're not also thinking.
The least interesting thing about a belief is its content.
Offence is never without a purpose.
The better you have to dress to do your job, the less important your job is.
You can't be deeply religious if you're not deep. Though you might be highly religious if you're high.
Polite society is where people are incredibly rude about each other in subtle ways.
Syncretism entails disharmonisation. The price of assimilation is incoherence.
If you want your child to grow into a stupid adult, treat them as one.
To harmonise the gospels is exactly like splicing the four stories of Rashomon into a fifth.
All stories are parables, including true ones, and all parables function by audience interpretation.
Middle age is when nothing is new anymore, so everything is boring.
Pleasure is an emotion, not a sensation.
Facts are distinct from values in the same way that grammar is distinct from semantics. We never find one without the other, and each is impossible without the other, but neither would be possible if they were not distinct.
Scripture is written as revelation, but can only be understood - as opposed to believed - as literature. Literature is written as entertainment, but can only be understood - as opposed to enjoyed - as philosophy.
An action must be performed more than once to become a ritual, but any repeated action can do this.
Repetition is the heart of significance, which is easily confused with signification. Thus ritual has meaning, but can in principle be meaningless. However, in practice all ritual has a purpose. Even when the purpose is outdated, the outdatedness is part of the purpose.
Deconstruction is political close reading.
Every opposed pair is a hierarchy.
A good horror movie offers you something even if you're not scared by it - plot, characters, effects etc. A good pop video can be fun to watch, even if you don't like the music. Could the same in principle be said about a good porn movie?
The truth is often hard to find, and often hard to grasp, but usually simple. Complexity can be obscurantism.
The viewpoint of the moralist is that of the victim. But the notion of "Victim" presupposes moralism.
When you're bored, everything is boring.
The notion of responsibility rests on the notion of blame, which rests on guilt, which rests on revenge. Which is a childish metaphysical notion that hurting the hurter undoes the hurt by somehow counterbalancing.
Revenge doesn't even work on the level of making people feel better.
Depression is when pleasure doesn't make you happy.
It's impossible to be a snob without being oblivious to it.
Some people don't like jokes. They tend to be the same people who don't enjoy having new experiences or learning new ideas.
Men think they want a wife, when what they really want is a family.
When people stop believing the doctrines of a cult, it's usually not because they discover them to by counter-empirical, vaccuous or incoherent. They stop believing the doctrines because they stop believing in the leadership.
Loyalty to leaders generates credence to their preachings. When leaders violate the morals of members, followers stop following, and disbelief - discrediting - is a result.
Faith is trust. Trust is personal.
There are few sights more pitiful than a sycophant immitating a fraud.
People use more brainpower in justifying stupidity than they ever use in being smart.
Spirituality comes from ritual and community. Theology comes from belief and rationalisation. People need spirituality, but get stuck with theology.
When meeting a person, ask yourself "Can I be honest with this person without offending them?". If the answer is no, don't waste your time with them.
The reasons why people join a movement predict what they will do when they leave it.
The motivation for most violence is revenge. This includes muder, and violence against inanimate objects. Justice is a euphemism.
The metaphysics of revenge are "two wrongs make a right" - a rebalancing image. But this presupposes that violence is considered a wrong.
Revenge may be motivated by one of three delusions:
1) It will make me feel better
2) It will rebalance the world
3) It will succeed in stopping the bad thing
A few love to lie, but many love to be lied to.
A nuanced theory is simply one packaged with its own belt of auxiliary handwaving. There is no nuance in F=MA.
Procrastian Bed
John Lydon was wrong. Anger is not an energy. It's a pleasure. Any strong emotion is a pleasure, and any pleasure can become an addiction.
The occult is bullshit, but it's fascinating bullshit. Hermeticism, gnosticism, christianity, lullism, spiritualism, mesmerism, kabala, masonic magic and cosmic codes. Whether you practice it, or rail against it, or disprove it in youtube videos with a fake animated whiteboard - these are all forms of fascination.
But I can't read about Hegel, Eckhart, or Bruno without getting furious and resentful that I wasted a decade of my life trying to understand their mystical shit with a bit of left politics tacked on - what we call marxism.
Feeling like a surly teenager about your own mistakes is its own reward. Yes, ranting about the past, even if only to yourself, is its own pleasure, and it keeps you from acting in the present. Perhaps that's a bonus pleasure.
I've seen people spend forty years of their lives obsessing over what they did wrong in the first twenty. I've met a woman in her 80s who can't get over messing up a love affair with a man who's been dead ten years. They were twenty.
Humiliating creationists on the internet is easy, and fun. Flat earthers, hollow earthers, white supremacists, gun fetishists, bible bashers obsessed with buttsex and scientific illiterates obsessed with spirits - the pond life of the internet, they love to cry persecution because it makes them feel noble, but they dissolve into spitting, foaming puddles when they're not "respected".
But it really is an indulgent waste of time. If you find yourself crushing cockroaches for the power rush, you're probably missing some self awareness. Plus explaining the obvious to the oblivious could be the definition of pointless.
So, it's not difficult to stop wasting time. Disable youtube comments, read science instead of pseudoscience, choose a project to work on, and work on it.
Darqroom Composite
I was in a band.
In 2011, a local charity was trying to offer a counselling service to gay teenagers. And someone had the bright idea of a fundraiser gig in the student's union. For which they needed some amenable bands to play.
So someone asked someone else if they could quickly form a band to be ready in two weeks. And the someone else asked me to do the technical stuff involving synths, computers, composition etc. while they did the vocals and rock guitar and everything else that needed musical talent.
So, in two weeks we had seven songs...and another booking for another gig which was also short of anyone to play. Which we played. No one having mentioned that it was supposed to be an acoustic rock gig, and not a synthpop/goth thing like we were.
We played the fundraiser, severely messing up one of the songs - not that anyone noticed, as we were on last, by which time the audience were passed out from the bad cheap beer.
I'm not sure any charity-directed money was made, and the only other act I remember was a girl with a guitar who squeezed her 20 minute set of off-key ballads into 45 minutes.
Oh, there was a lesbian stand-up comedian, and a lady making leftish political speeches between acts, both performing to glassy-eyed silence.
So what am I to do four years later with with seven backing tracks and a load of short connecting soundbytes? How about: edit them down to instrumental synthpop doodles, arrange them in a row, and put them on youtube?
We were called Darqroom, and this is our composite.
The Opposite of Dysfunctional
Three years ago, my aunt was diagnosed with bowel cancer. She started Chemotherapy.
One year ago, the cancer metastatised to her liver.
One week ago, she decided to stop the chemo, because it was having little effect, and the side effects were making life unlivable. She booked into a care home for the elderly.
This morning, she died.
A cremation has been arranged, and in a week there will be an ash-scattering ceremony. My father has just got off the phone, arranging the catering.
My role will be to sit at home and look after the dogs while my parents attend. In about an hour, I will be asked to do this.
This is how families function.
One year ago, the cancer metastatised to her liver.
One week ago, she decided to stop the chemo, because it was having little effect, and the side effects were making life unlivable. She booked into a care home for the elderly.
This morning, she died.
A cremation has been arranged, and in a week there will be an ash-scattering ceremony. My father has just got off the phone, arranging the catering.
My role will be to sit at home and look after the dogs while my parents attend. In about an hour, I will be asked to do this.
This is how families function.
Deep Dump
I get ideas. Some of them are a occasionally not shallow. Most of them don't turn into essays. But I've started making notes of them. Here's the last month's set.
The attraction of the reincarnation notion is that previous lives imply subsequent lives. Regression promises immortality.
Three types of people are impressed by wisecracks: children, jerks, and americans.
Ostentations disinterest hides discomfort.
Ally and rival, friend and enemy - these are relative terms. In any alliance, you need to know when to stop trusting your ally, and when to use your enemy.
Willing slaves hate the unwilling.
The difference between crazy and stupid is that crazy can be logical.
You know how conspiracy theorists always claim there's a masterplan executed by hyper- competent, all-powerful puppeteers? Well, there's a flipside - people delude themselves they *are* hyper-competent, all-powerful puppeteers with a masterplan.
If someone tells you exacly what you want to hear, ask yourself why they're lying to you.
If the victor finds no glory in defeating a weak opponant, surely the victim finds no shame in being defeated by a strong oppressor.
Belief is not acceptance of a proposition with optional emotional colouring. Belief is an emotion. You don't get angry with a pundit because you disagree with them, your disagreement is a form of anger.
If you keep trying to measure something and keep getting different results, it may be because you're trying to measure something that doesn't exist.
To pray is to ask a deity to do something, because you can't do it yourself. So prayer can be a declaration that you won't, disguised as an admission that you can't, disguised as a petition that someone else will. If you're only pretending to want something, pray for it.
Are ethical claims testable? Z is the desired outcome. X is the action. it is testable that X leads to Z. Thus the imperative W to perform X to lead to Z can be judged "just" in light of Z (considered as an imperative directed at the world).
No one evades the question unless they're dimly aware of the answer, and don't like it.
A crazy person is one incapable of hypocrisy. A too-sane person is the same. The difference is that the former turns ad-hoc rationalisations into eternal principles, while the latter drops principles which conflict.
A ritual is a procedure with an asserted false purpose, and a denied real one.
We can believe that we believe things that we believe are false. This makes ideology possible.
The concept of the original, pure, authentic lost world is an empty category, created by dissatisfaction with the present world. We think we've lost paradise, we know we want it back, but all we know about it is it's not what we know.
You don't need a person to have a cult of personality.
Magic of Storytelling / Storytelling of Magic
"There are two kinds of questions: Puzzles, and Mysteries." - Noam Chomsky
There are two types of investigation story. There are those which how an apparently inexplicable event gets explained, and those which describe an inexplicable event.
On the one hand, stories where something unexplained happens - a murder in a locked room, someone being in two places at once, escape from an inescapable prison - and we know in advance that we'll get an explanation at the end, and thus the reassurance that the world really does make sense. Indeed, the whole point of the pretence that maybe it doesn't...is to enable the assertion that it does. Rationalist storytelling.
On the other hand, stories where the pretence is that maybe the world does make sense, enabling the reveal that it doesn't. Irrationalist storytelling.
In the latter, we enjoy not knowing. In the former, we enjoy finding out. In the one, stories about ghosts, miracles, demiurges, prophecies, and messages from the afterlife - irrationalism. In the other, crimes being solved, questions being answered, order being restored, chaos being defeated, and people being enlightened.
Magic, and science. The hidden, and the unhiding. The unknowable, and the coming to know.
Scooby Doo mysteries look like ghost stories, but there's always a non-supernatural explanation. Gregory House may not save the patient, but he always solves the mystery - and for his one unsolvable case, the unsolvability was the clue that the whole thing was a hallucination. The science in Dr Who may be junk, but even in the most supernatural stories, there is always an explanation and it's always presented as scientific.
Contrariwise, the Psychic Investigators may investigate, but the only explanation they're allowed to come up with is "something mysterious causes something mysterious to happen, mysteriously". Creationism explains one mystery in terms of another - one for which we're not allowed to ask an explanation.
So, is the dichotomy as simple as that? Let's look at some examples - including examples of stories that pose as one, but are the other.
Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner was a surrealist espionage serial - which really ought to be a contradiction in terms. Surely the point of surreal events is to be unexplained and by implication inexplicable, while the point of an espionage story - like its close cousin the murder mystery - is to restore order and rationality by solving a puzzle.
But no - in The Prisoner the surrealism is window dressing, including the gainax ending. It's an espionage serial and thus promises a resolution - which McGoohan was unable to provide. If the genre had been surrealism with espionage decorations, fans wouldn't be trying to make sense of the willfully unreadable final episode - or be outraged by its unreadability.
The X-Files was a loose bundle of unexplained events, including the central mysteries of the alien plan, the conspiracy and Mulder's sister. The pairing of the scientific skeptic and mystical believer - with the believer being proven right every week - would seem to point to the series being a compilation of ghost stories, with no rational explanation offered or expected. But the show had a rationalist premise, with the promise of a coherent explanation being always held tantalisingly in the future.
When fans realised there was no explanation in Chris Carter's mind, they stopped watching.
At first glance, Lost looks similar. A massively growing heap of mysteries waiting to be explained in the finale...which in the event explained nothing and even contradicted the mythology is was supposed to make clear. But actually I think the fans were in on the deal from the start - the writers admitted to making it up as they went along, and the fans found it fun (for a while at least) to play along with the pretense that all would be explained.
In the comicbooks, Superman constantly gets new powers (and forgets about old ones) whenever the plot demands. But there's still the pretense that "Magic A is Magic A" - that there is one set of rules in the comicbook's universe, they're mutually consistant, and they're always been the same. So the metaphysics of the Superman universe is rationalistic - just badly thought out.
One episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures features a creepy morphing clown who steals children. Sarah Jane is sure she can use reason to understand him and technology to defeat him, but he taunts her with the suggestion that there simply is nothing to understand. Then it's explained that he's an alien that feeds on fear...and for me at least suddenly shrinks from an intriguing threat to another monster of the week.
Stanislaw Lem's novel "The Investigation" concerns a police investigation into a spate of corpses seemingly re-animating, moving around for a few hours, then re-de-animating. A consulting scientist finds some correlations between the incidents and some weather patterns, and proudly declares the mystery solved - the weather brought people back from the dead, somehow.
The detective fails to find a rational explanation, and is eventually persuaded to pin the blame on a scapegoat - a man who drove near most of the incidents, and who presumably faked the reanimations for unknown reasons and by unknown means. The detective's boss understands clearly that the purpose of the investigation is not to find the truth or serve justice, but to cobble together a plausible explanation which can be sold as both, so we can stop being disturbed by the inexplicable.
He says of the mythical criminal: "You'll get the bastard even if he doesn't exist".
In The Investigation the only one who can see the obvious truth - that something supernatural has occurred - is the reader. Lem's other "detective" novel was The Chain of Chance, but here there's nothing magical - just a cluster of coincidences which give the impression of a crime where none occurred.
David Cronenberg's eXistenz is built around a refusal the answer the question "Are we still in the game?", ending with a pile-up of contradictory clues and the characters unable to decide. But if Cronenberg intended to suggest that the question is undecidable even in principle, that's not what he was able to make his work do. eXistenz may intend to say "there is no truth", but only manages to say "we can't know the truth...so far".
Antinioni's film Blow Up concerns a young man who might have accidentally photographed a murder. But the photographic grain is ambiguous, and even though he finds a body, it later disappears. The point seems to be that all evidence is by nature inconclusive, and life in general is a series of unconnected events with no plot. Hence the multiple subplots that go nowhere.
William Friedkin's Cruising is superficially similar, but has a more radical inexplicability. On the surface, it tells of an undercover police investigation into three murders, culminating in the hero catching the killer. But it's shown that the police are only interested in closing the file, not stopping the murders, or finding the killer, or even just solving a mystery.
In the novel on which the film is based, Burns the protagonist gets away with a fourth murder offscreen himself, but in the film he may or may not have done it. In the book, Richards the killer commits the other three murders, but in the film we only know the police want to clear the case by blaming him. Indeed, they offer him a deal - confess to these and a slew of other murders...and you'll get a lighter sentence.
We hear the killer speak three times, and each time the killer is played by a different actor - and when we see his face after the third murder, it isn't Richards - it's the face of the first victim.
The close resemblance between Burns, and the killer(s), and the first three victims, and a number of incidental characters is a plot point. Richards hallucinates his dead father, but whoever commits the three onscreen murders, they all speak with the father's voice - and Friedkin goes out of his way to make it obvious the voice is dubbed.
Cruising is a supernatural movie masquerading as a police procedural. The fan theory that Burns is himself (unknowingly?) the sole killer can't be squared with the clues presented - but the point is, nothing can.
So, the dichotomy looks to hold up - with some complications. It's another question as to whether all stories could in principle be categorised this way, or whether the Rationalist/Irrationalist distinction is a product of our Age of Reason.
Does Beowulf look like a ghost story to us, simply because we've grown up expecting an explanation? Is the Epic of Gilgamesh actually intended to make sense?
Notes: On Creep
Creepy. Not quite the same as scary.
Someone running at your with a knife is probably scary. Someone staring at you and repeating your name over and over is probably creepy.
A man having sex with a goat may or may not be disgusting - that's a related issue. But I think a man having sex with a plastic goat is more creepy than a man having sex with a real one. Unless perhaps the real goat is making wordless vocalisations that would suggest, were it human, that it was enjoying the experience.
Eating rotten food - disgusting to almost all. Eating your father's well-cooked brain as part of a funeral ceremony - disgusting to the parochial. Drinking the blood of your enemies - gruesome perhaps, but condemned for being barbaric, not for being unhygenic. Drinking the blood of nubile virgins while in evening dress - complicated symbolism-wise, but no one suggests that Dracula shouldn't drink blood because it's bad for his health.
A man who wants to be transformed into a woman - creepy to some? If they pay a surgeon to cut and reshape their genitals to something resembling a vagina - to the person who finds transsexualism creepy, would the surgery be better described as scary because it's incomprehensible to them, or scary because it's castration, or scary because it proves the taxonomy of their culture is false?
Or disgusting because it's sexual and sexuality is digusting to them? Or disgusting because they've been told the appropriate response is disgust?
I admit it: Vaginas look weird to me, even disturbing. Anuses (male or female) aren't repulsive, just uninteresting. Penises and scrotums...certainly not beautiful; attractive in an unrelated way.
Muslims are genuinely disgusted by the idea of eating pigs. Most atheists are genuinely disgusted by the idea of eating dogs. Our emotional responses are real, but in a sense they're artificial. But not so artificial that we always know the best word for an emotion.
When I was a child I found shop window mannequins creepy, or unnerving. But not those poseable minuature figures used by artists, or stick figures, or cartoon characters.
I think mannequins were too close to looking like real people, while being obviously not, and the others were far enough away from looking human to be comfortable. Dummy's were in my "uncanny valley".
I had nightmares about them. Specifically I had nightmares about them moving and speaking - something which pushed them from creepy and unnerving to just being terrifying.
I enjoy creepypasta - spooky campfire stories reincarnated for the internet. But only because it's a form of speculative fiction adjacent to science fiction, and I've always been a fan of that cluster of genres. Stories about ghosts, inexplicable happenings, prophecies, things half glimpsed in doorways, demons from hell and demonic aliens from the planet Zog - not scary at all.
Daleks and cybermen, tentacled things made giant by "radiation", stone angels that move when you're not looking - these to me are intriguing ideas. But I've played videos of these things for teenage students, and seen them watch through their fingers. And yes, it was mainly the girls who did that - audience reaction is as much a psychodrama as what's on the screen.
Dolls are creepy. So are clowns. So clown dolls are probably extra-creepy. But not to the children who play with them. Whatever happened to childhood fear being the root of adult creep?
The dark is scary, presumably because it's the unknown, but it isn't creepy. You can be scared of the sound of scraping metal behind you (threat), or a blank void around you (the unknown), but I think you need to identify something to be creeped out by it.
A dark room, a locked door with stories of something mysterious behind it, a hooded cowl that hides a face - these can be scary, because it's the unknown. A sharp scalpel, a voice shouting threats, blood dripping on the floor - these are a different kind of scary, because they suggest threats.
But a dark room containing sounds of laboured breathing, a voice coming from behind a locked door, a hooded face that shows hints of reptilian skin, a knife made of teeth, a voice shouting in an unknown language, blood dripping from the ceiling - here there's some information, but not enough to form a clear idea of what's happening. Here it's not even clear whether there's a threat or not.
The wicker man is scary, the islanders are creepy.
Scare is about ignorance or threat. Creep is about ambiguity, uncertainty, hints that don't add up. Scare is knowing nothing, or knowing something bad. Creep is not knowing enough.
Scare is no world, or a bad one. Creep is a world that doesn't make sense. Creep is a response to violation of taxonomy. Specifically, to a culture's idea of the categories of nature. The dead coming back to life, a child having three fathers, a man living a thousand years, a creature living in seven dimensions, your own reflection in the mirror talking back to you, a hundred identical people, a family talking in unison.
The terms are not mutually exclusive. A cat with human feet is bizarre, and could easily provoke fear, not because it's a threat, but because...well, strangeness can provoke fear. Unfamilliar people are "strange"-ers.
Reality can be creepy too. Children suiciding, children killing other children, siamese twins, getting sexual pleasure from murder - these are things which manifestly do happen, but which the metaphysics or superstitions of our culuture say can't happen.
A woman marrying another woman, a man marrying a dozen women, a white man marrying a black woman, someone not believing in a god, someone hating god - to some, these are taxonomical violations. That is, things which are allegedly contradictions in terms, yet happen. Hate groups live in an ambivalence - they hate the impossible for being possible.
So what about a girl of 18 falling in love with and marrying a man of 80? A green card marriage, or a vow of lifelong celibacy, a fetish for amputees, defacting in public, addiction to colonic irrigation, a taste for eating soil. No culture is truly monolithic, and no taxonomy is exhaustive, so many violations are marginal cases.
For one who has the courage to face the world, ask awkward questions and learn from experience, much might be scary, but little can be creepy.
With apologies to Susan Sontag.
Notes: That's the Spirit
Some people say, "I'm spiritual but not religious". It puzzled me for a long time what they could mean.
Religion isn't belief in a god, because not all religions have gods. It's not belief in supernatural beings and realms, because that would make channelling a religion. It's not submission to authority in matters of belief and action, because that would make kindergarten a religion.
Religion is belief in teleology - a purpose to the universe. A goal, plan, guiding principle with a target. Though to believe in a masterplan is not necessarily to believe in a masterplanner.
To that extent, anyone fighting a battle where they belive victory is inevitable has a religion.
Teleology is a form of amimism, as is the anthropomorphic belief that morals exist "objectively" outside of societies, but not all animisms are teleological.
Often, there's an attitude towards the supposed masterplan - that to push the plan towards completion is "good" and to oppose it is "bad". Or conceivably the other way around, eg. satanism.
Hence the relation between religion and "faith" as in "to have faith in X". Faith in this sense is an attitude of trust - faith in the goodness of people, in the reliability of an information source, and in History moving itself forward towards a better world.
This implicitly presupposes that the masterplan is knowable to humans and (at least in part) known to the beliver. Thus someone with religion believes they have special insight which common folk lack.
It also presupposes that humans in general and the believer in particular have the power to help or hinder the plan. Thus the religious believer believes they personally have godlike power to affect all reality - through ritual, prayer, meditation etc. This is the connection with belief in the supernatural - to believe in a masterplan carried out by willpower presupposes a belief in magic.
Which in turn means the people they identify as the enemy (a foreign nation, a rival church, an unpopular minority, an imaginary conspiracy etc.) also have the same power, though they may lack the special knowledge. To the christian, hindus work against god.
Religion here involves the elevation of the concerns of a sect (or an individual) to cosmic levels of importance. The flipside of this is the reduction of the universe to a human drama - storms as angry gods, earthquakes as punishments, astrology, fate etc.
Religion is attractive partly because it offers simple answers to difficult questions, but also because it makes the believer feel special - even in a nation of believers - as one who both knows the masterplan and is part of it. Thus even without atheists, the believer needs notional unbelievers (or less fervent believers) to be superior to.
When a person says they have spirituality but not religion, the minimum they mean is they are aware of a teleology.
Defining the teleology, being able to promote or retard it, defining good and bad by this ability, having enemies defined by it, being part of community of believers, superiority to nonbelivers - all these are nonessential options, and can be added and subtracted as needed.
Spirituality in this sense then is minimalist religion.
Notes: Tasty
Not every page of notes becomes an essay, but sometimes the notes themselves might be interesting. There were my notes on the notions of good and bad taste.
We can declare that someone has "good taste" or "bad taste" - meaning they have taste we regard as somehow "morally superior" or "inferior", whether or not we share that taste ourselves.
A particular set of preferences could in priniciple be deemed "good" by everyone, even when no one has them. The starship-building species of Terry Jones' "Starship Titanic" novel all pretended to love "fishpaste", even though they absolutely hated it, as a matter of planetary pride.
This is taste in the sense of fashion - with the denial that it is fashion. "Good taste never goes out of style", "Fashions come and go but taste remains", etc.
You could define a snob as someone who pretends to others and themselves...to have the tastes which they think would make other people admire them. Yes, a snob is both a sycophant and a con artist whose marks include themselves. Tangled web? What tangled web?
This notion of taste is of relatively unchaning likes. It would be surprising to hear "He has bad taste in clothes this week, but had good taste last week".
This idea of taste is of who you are generally, not what you're doing at the moment. "A morbid taste for bones", "It's just the way I am - my taste" etc.
But included in the notion is that who you are can change, and thereafter last a long time. "You need to change your taste in men", "He won't stop - He's gotten a taste for it now" etc.
This is taste as in personal preference - a preference that defines the person.
And yet it's perfectly true to say that my taste in tea goes in phases. This month, I'm into white tea. In the past it's been lemon tea, or green tea, or just plain black tea.
We don't have a clear notion for a personal anti-taste - you might encourage someone to develop a taste for Beethoven, but would you encourage them to develop a distaste for Bach? You might think it wrong that an older man has a taste for younger women, but would you think it right that he become repulsed by them?
I know someone who experimented a few times with gay sex...and two decades later found a taste for it. Was it there all the time but denied, or is sexuality just like any other pleasure - one you can enjoy when it happens but "take it or leave it", until one day you decide (discover?) you'd like it to be a habit.
What about occasional tastes? I drink spirits...once every few months. I go through periods of ploughing through audiobooks - no amount of listening to worthy classics can push me into the zone of like it if I'm not already in it.
Today I realised that for the price of a bottle of coke I could buy three times as much milk. Just as cold, just as pleasant to drink, just as hydrating - once you get past the strange looks people give you when you swig it on the street.
So I suppose that's my taste now.
The Man from...
I should probably note that I am now an uncle.
At 0900 on April 30th, my brother became a father - and is therefore legally obliged from now on to wear dad jeans, tell dad jokes, and do dad dancing. He will never be cool again.
By an amazing coincidence, at exactly the same time, his wife gave birth to a 7lb baby girl by caesarian section. Both were exhausted by the experience.
So for the next year or so, the baby will get 12 hours of sleep every day, while the mother...doesn't. I'm quite sure that's against the rules of arithmetic, but it seems to be a rule of babies.
Two high flying careers are now on hold, my own mother is knitting one-piece baby suits and teddy bears in her new role as grandmother, and I suppose I'm now officially a little more middle aged than before.
Jump the Schach
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| Butterfly Demonic face Whirling Dervish with arms raised |
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| A man's face with mutton-chops and red eyes A symmetrical sand dune Ice cream cones |
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| Two animate statues with Easter Island heads dancing around a cauldron A red bowtie Two DJs mixing with spinning guitars in the background |
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| Sasquatch seen from below A beaver balanced on a bison skull Two bald men asleep at opposite ends of an enormous bed |
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| A bat A kangaroo with an opening parachute Mice burrowing under a fur rug |
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| The RKO tower A tiger skin rug An insect with a long feeding tube |
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| The spades card suit Rabbits about to kiss Broken razor blades |
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| Red tigers stepping in puddles A flying machine with square blue wings A green mountain |
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| Fighting orange unicorns A row of red apples Sunbathing turquoise elephants |
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| Blue crabs each weilding a leaf A vagina A woman in a multi-coloured bikini and huge feather boa |
Extraview
I have a job interview. I've collected the twelve most likely idiotic questions, so I can tick them off as they're asked.
Here they are in alphabetical order:
- How would you feel about working with people who are younger and more ambitious than you?
- Tell us about yourself/What kind of person are you?
- What’s your (greatest) weakness/challenge?
- What can you bring to the workplace?
- What did you enjoy most about your last job/What do you hope to get out of this job?
- What did you learn in your last job?
- What is your (greatest) accomplishment?
- Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
- Why are you better than the other applicants?
- Why do you want the job/to work for us?
- Why should we hire you?
- How much are you prepared to work for?
- How can we guarantee that enquiries are responded to on time?
- How can we maximise quality of work?
- What makes a client satisfied?
Deeply Dippy
Deepity (n): A statement with two interpretations, one true but trivial, the other profound but false.
The term was popularised by philosopher Daniel Dennett, after being coined by a friend of his teenage daughter. Deepities are common in self-help books, religious apologetics, and sales pitches.
Examples:
* "Time is a word" - could mean "The word 'Time' is a word", or "The concept of 'Time' is nothing more than a word'.
* "God is love" - could mean "Love is good and important", or "When you feel love, you're feeling a magic man in the sky".
* "There are no problems, only opportunities" - could mean "Every problem presents an opportunity to overcome it, which may or may not involve innovation", or "There is no such thing as a problem, and only foolish people like you believe there is, wheras wise people like me know better".
* "Everything is in a process of coming into and passing out of being" - could mean "Stuff changes constantly", or "Everything is simultaneously itself and something else". It's also used to argue that "All categories are fuzzy at the edges" (obvious and trivial), or "All categories are false" (obviously trivially self-refuting).
* Jean Baudrillard's (in)famous declaration that "The Gulf war did not take place" - could mean "All that death and destruction was a lie", or "Most of us experienced it on the same level as the death and destruction of a video game".
But...what's the opposite of a deepity? What would we call a statement with two interpretations - one shallow and false, the other profound, maybe obscure, and true?
For instance, Marshall McLuhan's famous slogan, "The medium is the message". On one level, it's a basic category mistake, conflating "Television" in the sense of "The technology which makes it possibe for you to watch soap operas", with "Television" in the sense of "The soap operas you watch". On this level, it would mean "The story is the paper it's printed on" or "The grapevine is the rumour".
But what McLuhan is saying is more like "The presence in your life of all the economic infrastructure, technological skill, scientific understanding, construction centers and distribution networks necessary for you to watch crap on TV...makes more difference to how you live than the crap on TV".
So, all the preconditions that had to be in place, for me to dunk a cheap biscuit into a cup of tea with milk at six in the morning before typing this sentence on an affordable laptop...are earthshattering compared to one soggy biscuit and one impulsively written blogpost.
Maybe the opposite of a deepity is just an aphorism. Like "The fox knows many things; The hedgehog knows one great thing", or "History repeats, first as comedy, then as farce", or "Nothing causes greater adherence to an opinion than opposition to it.".
Here are some aphorisms from a blog I just found. Except some are, in my humble opinion, deepities. I've struck through those which I think are pseudo-profound. See what you think - more to the point, see where you disagree.
* Prove to me that there is a God and I will really begin to despair.
*
* What people believe is a measure of what they suffer.
*
* Today there is no-one to fight for. Only against.
* Few silences are unbiased.
* The purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
*
* “Pull yourself together” is seldom said to anyone who can.
*
*
* Never take investment advice from someone who has to work for a living.
* It is a sign of weakness to avoid showing signs of weakness.
* There is this prevailing illusion that debt is a renewable resource.
*
* We idolize eagles although hens are much more useful.
*
* Detachment is not indifference.
*
* Narcissism is the other side of self-pity.
* I got serious; I became a humorist.
*
*
* Once you have resigned yourself to your sentence, the guard always unlocks the door.
* Thinking’s the disease. More thinking’s the cure.
*
*
* True deception goes unnoticed.
*
* A mystery is a topic about which the more is learned the less is understood.
Not Waving but Sounding
Today's syllogism: Sounds are waves. Synthesisers make waves. Therefore synthesisers make sounds.
If you know what a wave is in physical terms, good. If you understand it in mathematical, newtonian or psychoacoustic terms, great. But as a musician you don't need to. You just need to know that different shapes of wave have different sounds.
This is a sine wave:
It's an extremely boring sound - rather like a flute, but without the breath noises of the player. Superimpose several of them at octave intervals, and you've got one of these:
Hammond organ, wurlitzer, calliope, that amazingly annoying child's toy organ - all basically a few sine waves on top of each other.
This one's called (for amazingly obvious reasons) a square wave:
Soundwise it's somewhere between a clarinet and a church organ. Make it assymetrical, and you've got a rectangle wave:
More, and it's a pulse wave:
That opening chord from "Shine on You Crazy Diamond" - each note is a half dozen of these, very slightly out of tune with each other.
This is a sawtooth:
By far the most commonly used wave, and also the "richest" sounding. There are tracks where all the instruments are nothing but overlayed, slightly detuned sawtooths. Or possibly sawteeth.
Squeltchy basslines, lush strings, sharp stabs, brass blasts - all based on this one wave.
Lean a sawtooth over, and you've got a triangle:
It doesn't sound much like any mechanical instruments - aka "real" instruments. It's a distant relative of the rhodes piano...or electrical mains hum, if you're feeling less charitable.
What if you lean a sawtooth halfway over? You get a ramp wave - good for some thrumming bass sounds.
There are other shapes that don't have common names, but can also be useful.
A pinched triangle - sounds like an 80s videogame:
A squared-off sawtooth:
A pinched sawtooth that's a bit like a pulse:
An inverse sine wave:
Oh, and there's white noise, which has absolutely no pattern at all:
Now, all of these waves are digitally perfect. Which makes them mathematically simple, and sonically about as interesting as a year in Alaska with a family of calvinists.
Happily, synthesisers which use analog circuitry to make their waves are ludicriously inaccurate. In much the same way as guitar amplifiers are hopeless at preserving guitar sounds when overdriven. Rock and roll: Founded on technological failure.
Even more happily, the ludicrous inaccuracy of expensive synthesisers and amplifiers can be replicated by cheap software.
Kraftwerk used synthesisers from the Moog corporation. This is the moog's attempt at a sawtooth:
The moog square:
And the moog attempt to fuse the sawtooth and triangle into one:
I...am designing a software synth. Which I want to have a signature sound - that is, a signature deviation from perfect but boring waves. So I'm approximating the standard wave shapes by bolting together segments of sine waves.
This is my sawtooth:
My square:
And my pulse. Feel my pulse:
So, welcome to Kapitano's method of songwriting. Step one: Build an
instrument.
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