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Some Losses - Quareness Series (35th "Lecture").
This time may I set before you some talk of quare stuff long exerting heavy duty influence/power in our past and present....leaving us either smokin' or smoked so to speak.
Lost in Space.
Per the Second Law of Thermodynamics - "things is gettin' more chaotic" - or to put it another way.... order is moving ineluctably towards disorder. That is to say the amount of disorder in any system (entropy) keeps increasing and in the long run the House in the Universal Casino doesn't lose.
Despite our mania for categorising e.g. the "rules" of harmony and counterpoint, the codifying of human weakness (law), codifying ourselves in theology (top down) and in the Human Genome Project (bottom up), we don't seem able to sort our thinking about loss...(sh)it still just happens.
It looks like we might never succeed in building a foolproof system because the fools are always one step ahead (a fundamental law in computing?). In this context Nature's fool (= loss) will likely always get the better of us in the end (and on the way to the end).
An apt scenario here is when you finish up for the day/night and you know for certain how you're going to continue when you take up the matter again on the morrow, to the extent that you don't bother making a note of it. Then comes the morrow and....nada/zilch....that moment when you look inside your mind and there's absolutely nothing going on....nowt (as they say in Sasana) or feck all (as dey ses in Eireann) or lights on and nobody home (as we say in here??).
And then there's cyberspace and its sneaky little minder....404...Page Not Found.
Somewhere beyond our reach lies Greater Cyberspace of which our palty little electronic bit is just a tiny fragment, and wherein dwell the dead, the unborn, the never-conceived, the books never written, the love never made, the "lost" molecules of a lover's perfume or an enemy's breath or a last supper, the ideas which never made it onto paper, the longed for reconciliation which will never happen, lost youth, missed opportunities, etc. All 404ed....Not Found.
Having worked out how to get your stuff into cyberspace, you were for a while knowable (if not known). But then along came 404...Not Found. There was now a friggin' blank where before there was something. And soon the web-crawlers and spiders and netbots will give up and even the link to your auld blank/something will cease...you'll be unfit for consideration and disappear into the void..."degoogled".
Thank you for staying (put) at our Virtual Hilton....and availing of our Room 404 service....we hope to welcome you back here again soon. Security code details - first 4 (access denied) followed by 0 (wrong command issued) and then the final 4 (denied/syntax error/not found).
In an era where we can't have the customer deciding what's good service (fer Gawd's sake) we cannot entertain ornery notions such as the somewhat uncertainess of "not found" hinting that there might be something out there beyond 404....a kind of final certainty of vanishing. The best we get is that defiantly uncertain 404. The shocking truth is that there is no Room 404.
And yet....where once upon a time the individual human being could dream of doing great things, our highest aspiration now seems to be efficiency. Once we aspired to the condition of gods but now to the condition of computers.
Loss of Insight.
To lose the sense of our own fundamental absurdity is perhaps a serious error.
If we believe in God/Gods we probably also have to (or at least pretend to) believe in our own relative insignificance....a state of play you'd expect would tend to reveal as absurd our tremenduous, earnest, grim-faced preoccupations with our worldly lives. And yet here we are today feeling more and more earnest and self-absorbed. Everyone wants their rights respected (many even want to be celebrities). And many people find so many things to be "offensive" which is sometimes (often?) more of an infantile whine than a valid judgment. But beware....a dire fate could await....those clinging to the idea of their own seriosity while condemning everyone else's absurdities may be destined to become politicians.
At the heart of the American Dream lay a life of many acts....the freedom to be whoever you wanted to be. But that right of self-reinvention is now actively leaving the field of play under the twin demands of security and the credit rating industry. It seems that only beyond the grave is there any chance of a new life and a fresh start....no wonder America believes in God.
Taking a peek at our human society of the early 21st century we see hapless adolescents wallowing in a world of food fads, neuroses, exploitation through mass media, mass uniformity, perverted danger lurking around every corner, terrorists in the shadows, seas killing fish, rain dissolving trees, sex meaning death, crumbling infrastructures, grid-lock, collapsing health services and a world where few can afford a house. They've also inherited a world of McJobs or no jobs or insane jobs, buried illusions, childhood torn short, innocence drowned, gendering, relativism, political correctness, spyware and databases. And a world where there is no right and no wrong, only data servicing branding and expediency, as well as so much high profile dull repetitive music.
Pity our poor adolescents today bored by their music, stunned by their entertainment, living at home with parents many of whom see themselves as "peer friends". Those poor kids are truly deprived....of adventure, self-invention and the treasure of being envied. And worst of all they are understood.
Of course the Golden Age has always been....a little before now. Parents are constantly telling their children how much better things were when they were children. But there's the rub - the Golden Age is always ourselves, the memory of our own childhood, the angelic infancy of the world "back then". No wonder we all pine for it.
Loss of Innocence.
The English writer Michael Bywater (to whom I'm indebted for many of the quare scenarios mentioned in this "lecture") has told about a particular childhood incident of major impact on his "growing up". Seems when he was about 4 years old his mother was in hospital and his father was "minding the children" and decided to rent a Mickey Mouse movie to keep the troops occupied. In the movie Mickey too had been left alone to mind the children and had some degree of trouble with the feeding-bottle (the teat got stuck on his nose). After a lot of puffing and pulling the teat was eventually liberated but this left the bould Mickey with a whopper of a snozzle (like yer man Pinocchio). Anyhow later that night our 4 year old hero awoke screaming his head off that Mickey with the big nose was under the bed. The father told him not to be silly and said he'd look himself to prove there was no sign of the Mouse....but when he looked he started shouting "Oh my God it's Mickey with the long nose and he's under the bed". After a long...long... time the little lad calmed down, but he never forgot.
Years later he reminded the father of the incident and the latter asked him what would he have done because after all he had been faced with a 4 year old having nightmares thinking a deformed Mickey Mouse was under the bed...it was the opportunity of a lifetime for a father. The point was taken.
Loss of Maturity.
The "essential engine" driving the accelerated opening up of mass markets after World War 2 was the desire on the part of the drivers to "capture" a gullible, insecure, easily led, discontented, foolish, tasteless and ever-renewing target group to sell to....and so teenagers were invented and maturity vanished.
The result - pop music of largely one rhythm, one key, one subject (petulance) as well as simpleton language, cartoon slogans and constant "ticking off" notices, not to mention the changed image of the American male on the world stage who is now generally perceived as a support system for weapons assembled from testosterone and hamburger, and held together with polyester.
Loss of Shame.
At bottom the "free market" (imposed by those who believe in it on those who haven't really thought about it) proposes that the only model and motivation for any human activity is the exchange of money, and all this for the benefit of the satisfied and debt ridden Customer (or more accurately Customer Relations). Now this customer must be appealed to, consulted, cared for, placed at the apex of eveything done, and treated as the most important part of the entire organisation....and if you can fake that you've got it made!
Ladies and gentlemen faking is the name of the game. Deep down every business despises its customers and sometimes that emerges in public e.g. when the Revenue Commissioners took to openly referring to its taxpayers as customers (as if the latter had any choice in the matter). Consider also the case where the "passengers" of a transport operation become "customers".... under the former label there was a 2-way exchange - they pay and in turn expect to be taken somewhere....but the role of the customer is to pay and to take whatever s/he is given.
Of course part of the reason for this sad state of affairs is the psychopathic nature of our corporate entities (now = legal persons). They are self-interested, manipulative, always the best, brook no competition, accept no responsibility, suffer no conscience, feel no remorse, present phony superficial versions of themselves and simulate sympathy. That once powerful social glue...shame...is increasingly difficult to come by. Yessir shame which is not just vanishing but even rather taboo to display these days what with mooning, spin-doctors, "sad" people suing hamburger joints for making them fat, those joints themselves for selling the stuff in the first place, politicians telling lie after lie, internet spammers peddling their junk....the list goes on.
Loss of Real Choice.
It seems that too much choice places a heavy burden upon us in that instead of our shrugging and making the best of it we "beat ourselves up" trying to avoid making a wrong choice. Websites carrying thousands of on-line reviews by complete strangers have sprung up all over the place so that we can kid ourselves we have made the best choice. And still it's a near certainty that we'll make a less than perfect choice (an unavoidable part of the human condition?) - hence our frequent more than sentimental yearning for less to choose from. To resolve this "paradox of choice" maybe we need to lower our expectations?
Take for example today's shopping illusion, which is more about what we leave behind than what we carry away. In the shops many of us shed our old skins, our fat bellies, our short legs, our headaches and dry lips. When we buy a new suit it's seldom because we need one but often because we need a new us i.e. the "new life" which follows the purchase. We go shopping to lose the old anxieties (our own or those drummed up by chancers chasing our moolah) and replace them with a bright new dawn in which we can be perfectible. Real choice how are ya!
??On the other hand perhaps we are in some way hard-wired for credulity which may be necessary for us to function and avoid having to engage in desperate negotiation every time we want to do something. Money (of which more anon) is a good example of something requiring credulousness (not to mention incredulousness).
Loss of Appetite.
We are currently living in an age where grown men eat lettuce like rabbits while grown women drink like fish in expensive bars bragging about how they look like stalks because they eat like birds. And that former healthy appetite is now seen as a lack of self-control. Curvaceous women now seem compelled to describe themselves at best as Big & Beautiful and a manly belly is something to be worked off by working out (rather than a signal of power & prosperity). These moderns have obviously never come across the following sorry tale-
Augustus was a chubby lad:
Fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had:
And everybody saw with joy
The plump and hearty healthy boy.
But one day, one cold winter's day,
He threw away the spoon and screamed:
"O take the nasty spoon away!
I won't have any soup to-day!"
...O what a sin
To make himself so pale and thin.
Look at him, now the fourth day's come!
He scarce outweighs a sugar-plum:
He's like a little bit of thread:
And on the fifth day he was - dead.
Strangely the pleasures of the flesh seem nowadays to be predicated on the denial of the flesh. We avidly pursue lost weight. At night we are urged to cuddle up to washboards and sticks - artificially sculpted meagreness, the antithesis of sensuality. Instead of exulting in the wonderful diversity of humanity, we are prescribed the One True Shape.
And while we're in this broad territory of appetite (or lack thereof) we might also consider the relatively recent phenomenon of the downgrading of the natural smell of humanity (in "polite" company). Given that California and Scandinavia have led the league tables in both "personal hygiene" and divorce, some have speculated that there may be a connection to the detriment of our ability to bond. How did our ancestors deal with this "problem"? Did they do their evolutionary duty despite what we would consider their appalling hygiene or did they simply not notice? That's the problem with the telling of history - our sources are full of assumptions but they never mention the obvious (too obvious to mention maybe).
Loss of Perspective.
It has often been argued that exposure to too much pornography (even of the soft kind) has always posed a threat to our sanity. I'm unsure, however, if those arguers ever fully realised the extraordinary reach of that threat.
I was recently reading about this lady journalist (British) who began her career on a "men's magazine" commenting on her experience there....'You got blasé very quickly but you never got used to the terrible wallpaper or the awful, awful sofa. You'd be minding your own business and someone would say "My God look at this nest of tables" and you'd go over and blanch in horror, completely not noticing the bloke's wife splayed like a plucked turkey in the foreground'.
Also the formerly innocent pleasure of fishing with simple rod and line from the riverbank has somehow morphed into a complicated dour enterprise involving fibreglass or carbon fibre shafts, elastic return, bearings, low-drag rings, fish-finders, strike-alerters, bait-casters and sundry other tecno gizmos all designed to drive a coach and four through your hard-earned moolah. The soothing "Here I am fishing" has lost out to the edgy "Here I am dissatisfied with my technology, and wanting more of it".
It can reasonably? be argued that joined-up thinking (not to mention joined-up policies) is a non-runner unless previously formulated in joined-up writing i.e. the proper preconsidered pen-and-ink process in which a sentence must first be formed in the mind and then reformed before being finally committed to the page (if only to avoid having to rewrite the whole thing later). Such joined-up writing calls for constant replenishing of the dip pen thereby forcing pauses for reflection....so different from the speedy modern computer keyboard disconnecting the hand from the brain. When all is electronic and eternally renewable, the gap between a rough draft and the final product is eroded - that gap within which thoughts and letters are finally joined up.
It's true of course that "the wiring" of our brains and senses is set not to funnel but to filter the world, so that we generally only perceive that bit of it we need and/or can handle. Could it be that most of reality is lost to us with our modern socalled intellectual superiority, given that we're not playing with the full deck? Indeed in seeking to rescue some degree of perspective we might reasonably consider whether our whole construction of the world (based as much upon anatomical chance as on any response to partial reality) is just one model among many.
Loss of Common Sense.
"Arithimeria" is an ancient Greek word for the "excuse me" process - a rhetorical device for using one class of word for another, which it seems is an overwhelmingly popular principle in the United States of Arithimeria. Management, for example, used to be a process by which you kept the company doing whatever it was meant to be doing. But now it has become a product. Most companies today exist to create, maintain and expand management - it's their product, what they do. And if they have to employ those friggin' terrible, unpredictable, stroppy, irrational people to do primitive things in order to justify that management, then they will (even reluctantly) do so. You might have once thought that as the "science" of management (with all its accompanying "spreading of the message" through books, courses, etc.) grew, the need for it would decrease as they started getting it right. Wrong....woefully wrong. Much is gone - lives, crafts, industry, etc. - but management remains.
Perhaps the pinnacle of achievement today for management efficiency is....the Call Centre. There's no real nourishment for the consumer in this beast. You can call as often as you like and it makes no difference to your dilemma even if you get through to someone...they will not do what they said they would...they will not understand your question...they will answer a different useless (from your point of view) question...they have no authority to do anything for you...you will not be able to speak to anyone who does have authority...and if you call back you'll have to go through the whole pointless procedure again. The only thing these Call Centres (delinquent offspring of tight-ass accountants and perpetually pre-adolescent computer programmers) are concerned with is their company's urge to save money. Personal service here is history. Now the centre (in this case = customers) is at the periphery and powerless - exactly where they want us.
We might wonder how long before this extends to other spheres?...."Thank you for calling...Your prayer is important to us...You are being held in a queue and will be answered shortly..."
And this dearth of common sense in our time may not be totally unrelated to the lack of acknowledgment in our seats of "higher learning" that thinking and knowing are absolute goods in themselves and are mostly what distinguishes us from our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom. These days we have 3rd level makeweight? degrees being awarded for Leisure Management, Hospitality and such like....quite often fostering a sickly specialising in "motivational" drivel like "I'm Lovin' It" or changed job titles like labeling a dustman as a recycling operative, as if the latter somehow conveyed an occupation more in keeping with the sensitivities of the chattering classes.
Loss of Anonymity.
These days more and more of us (people and parties) seem to find anonymity distressing. In the area of economic interaction the credit card has taken the lead saying more about us than cash ever could. The wad of readies may now be viewed as a marker of failure in that it's more finite than the cc...deploying the latter nobody can tell how much you have left. On the other hand cash generally doesn't bullshit or tell lies and this may be why we have a growing distrust of it. The way things are going cash itself may "leave the stage" except maybe for "dicey" buying and selling between consenting adults lolling/lurking at arm's length (so to speak) in the shadows and/or the Black Economy.
Loss of Money.
Nowadays when you lodge a cheque to your bank (and there's no alternative now) it often doesn't register in your account for a number of days, and this despite it being taken from the drawer's account almost immediately. It's the same "delay" story when you lodge cash. Same again when you pay your credit card bill, electicity bill, gas bill, telephone bill, etc. - it departs the payer straight away but doesn't reach the payee for many days. Where is it in the meantime? - no doubt lent out at interest. It's not really lost at all....just lost to you and that's that (like Jerry Garcia saying "It's much too late to do anything about rock & roll now").
Loss of Certainty.
For the devout believers and the born again fundamentalists the world may still make sense (all God's plan, etc.) but what about the rest of us? Today we're faced with a much harder to grasp complex science that can seem to require as much to be taken on faith as...well...religion.
Take for instance the case when an electron is examined...the more precisely its position is determined, the less precisely its momentum is known at that moment, and vice versa. This proposition (aka Werner Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) is about the uncertainty inherent in the very nature of the electron, but is itself certain. To avoid "losing the plot" altogether we may need to "nail down" such concepts in more easy to understand descriptions e.g. if we don't know something we can say so with certainty (shades of "known unknowns" again).
Then again like theologians attempting to "prove" the structure of God by means of logical reasoning from a small set of initial assumptions, the scientists chasing down the Higgs'Boson also proceed one step at a time. And in either case there's the risk of trying to find what's not (no longer?) there.... something lost because it cannot be found.
Are we still feelin' certain mes amis?
And finally - Good Riddance.
Some things of course are gladly no longer "with us"? In this regard let us consider some strange "medical" procedures of bygone days and the (now lost?) common attitudes which informed same....
Around about a hundred years after that bloody battle
On the green grassy slopes of the Boyne
Where the long lasting tribalisms of orange and green
First saw (or maybe didn't see) the light,
A certain Doctor P.J.B.Previnaire deposited in his Arten des Scheintodes
The notion that a singular application of a simple tobacco enema
Could resurrect (or maybe not) the apparently dead.
Now this was back when tobacco was thought good for us all
Including, strangely enough, the apparently dead,
Or at least those with halted heart and banjaxed breathing
No longer taking any real interest in their surroundings.
There's no smoke without fire, as many would say,
And smoke of many stripes fired up medicine for many a day.
The Greeks of old, for example, never tired of using it to treat hysteria
A labelled condition then applicable to any female not behaving.
This hysteria problem itself was attributed to a wandering womb
Calling for corrective treatment with fragrant smoke near the nether region
To restore the rambler to its proper place in the grand scheme of things,
Or if too far gone (or prolapsed) and hastily heading for the outside realm
Smoke of a more noxious nature was in order to rapidly reverse direction.
At that remarkable time also a quare yoke called The Doppelblaser arose
Consisting of a bellows, tube and nozzle deployed to dispense tobacco smoke
At the nether regions of those seemingly no longer interested and apparently done,
With the aim of resuscitation for the fortunate? few not yet due to go.
WTF as the hip set might say on screen these days,
There's a lot more to this smoke stuff than meets the eye
Masking such strange short lived (or long lasting?) notions.
Footnote: Of course the time of "official" death rather than being an unequivocal matter has always been a case of sorta straddling the tideline between this world and the next.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
October, 2013.