Truth, Nonsense, Freud and Christmas

It has been far, far too long since I last blogged. It isn’t that I have been out of ideas that need writing, but more that I’ve been re-thinking my approach to expression and found it intolerable to be doing something that I no longer understood. But here I am again, but then Kierkegaard did say that the ethical would re-establish itself, and so I’m re-kicking off with a poem. It’s slightly sonnetish, and deliberately confusing because I think that it expresses an important sentiment which is worth pondering slowly – I don’t like microwave meals and I don’t like microwave thinking.

Truth, Nonsense, Freud and Christmas

The nonsense of the verse is there to hide
The truthful words which do not live inside.
For words are not the prophecies of old
And rhythm is not order to behold.
But why then try to resurrect the dead?
Or build a Babel reaching to the sky,
If not to reconcile the ego to the ‘I’?
Or come to terms with something that was said
X number of years ago – Perhaps done
In jealousy? Cain struck his brother down.
A killer must return to the crime-scene
To see the ghost of Christmas-yet-to-come,
And echoes of what hasn’t been.

Stop making things for normal people

I wrote this on a long bus journey.

Coach seats are clearly designed for normal people and not real people. That’s why they feel so uncomfortable for anyone that has ever spent a long time in one. I figure that the problem is that not nearly enough seat designers have read Nietzsche or Foucault, because, had they done so, they might have realized that the idea of a normal person is nonsensical, as is the notion of a normal sitting position. As it is, however, bus companies prove, time and time again that they care more about reinforcing their fictional norms than their real passengers, forcing us to endure discomfort while they are happy to believe that they have given us the best that modern seat design allows.

The book of proverbs continually asserts as a theme that “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes” and yet we all also think that others can be wrong. If others are fallible, but we are not, then we make ourselves epistemically different from the rest of the world – unique in our rightness. My thinking is the only thinking that makes sense to me and therefore the right thinking. So every single person on the face of the earth can quite justifiably think that they are abnormal. This applies equally in ethics, religion, aesthetics, etc.

There’s something of the preface problem here. If you don’t know the paradox, it is that a book of facts contains this modest statement in the preface
“Undoubtedly I have included facts in this book which will turn out, in time, to be false.”
With regard to every fact in the book , however, the author can say
“Fact a,b,c,etc is not false”
The two statements are clearly inconsistent, since clearly not both “some of the facts a,b,c,etc are false” and “none of the facts a,b,c,etc are false”. This harks back to the situation of normality, because every person believes themselves to be specifically exempt from the norm, while accepting that the norm applies generally. If peoples’ intuitions are on the right tracks, we need to accept the paradox between “persons a,b,c,etc are abnormal” and “persons a,b,c,etc are normal”. The paradox also applies to specific traits of an individual if we accept the notion of a normal person. We would tend to think that a person is generally normal while having specific abnormalities, but it seems obvious that if any particular trait of a person is examined in enough detail, it will turn out to be unusual in some way.

Here we have a clue to the metaphysical origin of the problem. The idea of an essence derived, not from specific existence, but from something general and universal, indicates that we might be struggling because the language we are using has Platonist underpinnings. I’m inclined to think that we have accidentally stumbled across a pretty strong case against Platonic universals, since their employment in language causes paradoxes of normality. If we once again think about the preface problem, but try to recognize the Platonism present, it starts to make a bit more sense. the two inconsistent propositions become “this list of facts has the universal essence of containing at least one false member.” and “Fact a,b,c,etc is not false.” There is no longer a paradox in play once we separate the actual list made up of specific members and the general nature of the list derived from a universal rule. The first statement is a general metaphysical claim and the second is a situated scientific fact.

The same thing applies to notions of normality. The first of the inconsistent propositions can be turned into “There is a universal norm for people” – a general metaphysical claim without any basis in the world of actual existence – and “Persons a,b,c,etc do not fit any universal norm” – a situated fact. So the paradox of normality comes from a kind of discourse that doesn’t want to tackle individuality in an honest way, so it uses universal truths to hide from the loneliness of collective abnormality. The whole concept of a human norm is a projection onto the future, as something that we hope to one day attain. Bus seat designers take note, abandon your ideas of normality – they are ruining your creations and come only from meaningless sophistry. There is no general norm, only specific norms for specific people, all of which are unique. Judge not with a common measure those things which have none, seek instead to make something ambiguous that can be interpreted by the actual user. You don’t need to worry about the non-existent.

The Ghost of Truth

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Something like a memory of movement
Follows writing in the shadows that,
Emerging in the full-mooned glow,
Begin to show fallacial faces
Haunting those solitary spaces
And which, imagining the
Invisible indivisible,
Live only in the dark, unnatural luminescence
Of a lunar Lieu.

That awkward moment when…

    I’m sure that you’re all well aware of the disturbing and growing internet trend of escaping from uncomfortable incidents by dismissing them as “that awkward moment.” People use it do describe any situation of embarrassment, or absurdity. There aren’t really many rules governing it’s use, the most important thing is the self-effacing sense of irony in the tone.
    One thing that is vital, however, is that the awkward moment is always that awkward moment; it can never be this awkward moment. This may seem like a bit of grammatic over-thinking, but I think that is sheds some light on the motivation for the expression. You see, once the moment is that moment, it becomes the past, and therefore a different moment from the current one; if it’s a different moment, I don’t have to worry about the implications or deal with the absurdity inherent in the situation.
    The expression perfectly sums up the turbulent and worrying attitude known as post-modernity. If modernity consists in heroizing, the moment, being self-consciously self-conscious and creating oneself in the process, then post-modernity is the ironic acceptance of the ultimate futility of such a life. If modernity is about this absurd moment of self-creation, then post-modernity is about looking back at that awkward moment when I tried to encounter my own Being-in-the-World.
    Is there something disingenuous about that? Can authenticity and irony ever be reconciled? Is it really important?

A blues song

A couple of years ago I was working for the city council, and as I was sitting on the bus going home from work one day I decided that now was the time to write a blues song. I’m not going to pretend to compare working in a mediocre job and being a bit depressed to several centuries of African-American oppression, but something about working for the man really made me feel like singing the blues. It’s superficially about a woman that’s just out of the singers reach, but someone once told me that when it comes to the blues, it’s about what isn’t said just as much as it’s about what is. I would describe the song as a parable in many ways.

The grass is green

Green is the grass, blue is the sky,
I got a feeling and I don’t know why;
I’m stuck in the blues for you girl,
I’m always alone.
But girl I need you
Just like a dog needs a bone.

A dog needs a bone like rock needs roll
And like Mr Johnson, I sold my soul
I sold it for you girl,
But you keep letting me down.
And the more I try to please you,
The more I look like a clown

Chorus
Green is the grass on the other side
I can’t cross over – I’m wrapped up in real life
I don’t know, don’t know
What I’m waiting for
When all of my dreams could be
Waiting for me through that door.

I’m clowning around all up and down;
Behind this make-up I’m hiding a frown
Because I’m thinking about you girl,
I’m picturing the scene.
But I can’t cross on over
To where the grass is green.

Some thoughts about religion and existentialism

    Somebody I consider very wise once told me that his favourite question to ask people is this: “What do you believe god is like? If you don’t believe in one, what is the god like that you don’t believe in?” It’s a beauty isn’t it. Immediately it gets down to the nuts and bolts of our humanity and finds out what people define themselves in relation to. Answers, as you would expect, are as varied as the people who give them, which highlights an unexpected issue for me. Are we talking about the same God? It’s unexpected because most of the time people assume that we are. That’s the basis of debates about God’s existence, tensions between science and religion and even issues in politics where a “moral” minority always feels persecuted because their God is left out.
    When Nietzsche prophesied the death of God, was he talking about the same God which Christians still worship as the living Jesus? While I’m convinced that we can never really get inside the minds of others, as a Christian and an existentialist, I feels that this dillemma needs to be answered, otherwise my religion is nothing more than a Sisyphean boulder to push until I die.
    To me, there appear to be at least two Gods that died in 1885. Firstly there is the God of the age – of German Idealism most devoutly worshipped by Kant and Hegel and which Nietzsche thinks of as an excuse for those too cowardly to accept their loneliness in the world. But there is also the God of tradition and morality which he regards as a crutch for the weak masses who are both unable and unwilling to think for themselves. This second aspect of God had really been dying slowly since the enlightenment and the killer blow had been struck by Darwin who proved that we didn’t need that kind of a God to survive.
    I would like to venture the opinion that God’s death needn’t be the end of the story. After all, that isn’t really the nature of the God of Christianity. I think that Nietzsche’s philosohy provides the most comphrehensive account of the Christian doctrine of the crucifixion that has ever been written, but stops short of accounting for the resurrection. Instead, I turn to Kierkegaard whose account of faith as belief in the impossible on the basis of the absurd continues seamlessly from the death of God to make it possible to worship a living saviour. The biblical version of faith relies on God dying in order to be fully glorified as the crowned king of the World. Only in dying can he reconcile man’s despair to himself. We must first recognize that we, and by extension our Gods, must die before there can be any kind of a hope of knowing God by faith.
    If it is true that for humans to see their place in the world properly we must first dispose of our crude metaphysical deities and divine excuses, then by ourselves, we can only ever reach the point of total despair. But that extends further than despair of God’s existence, into despairing even of our own unbelief. We are left as absurdists endlessly dancing a meaningless jig to the music of our own futility. But if we continue in faith, not rationally excusing our belief, nor asthetically calling it beautiful when it is clearly an abomination, then God makes manifest the evidence that was missing all along. The apostle Paul called faith “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” and I think that this really captures the idea of a God found through the process of atheism.
    So I can now answer my friend’s wonderful question. As for the God I don’t believe in, well that God has been dead and buried since 1885, but The God I do believe in is the resurrected Christ whose power is weakness, whose death is life and whose kingdom is not of this world.

Here is the question for you again:

“What do you believe god is like? If you don’t believe in one, what is the god like that you don’t believe in?”

Among the Dead

Here’s a sonnet inspired by Ozymandias, Jerusalem and Jesus

 

What went ye out into the wilderness
To see? Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,
Untouched by age or time’s corrupt caress,
Wandering their un-living desert home?
A grave is all that man has ever made
To last, to remind him that he is dust.
The finest of his works and words will fade
Away as sure as darkness follows dusk.
A fool could think to build a house of sticks
To shelter from a howling hurricane,
Or seek a Babylon to hold the name,
But ye have built Jerulsalem with bricks.
So bow not down before the crumbled head.
And seek not the living among the dead.

The Scream

Have you ever heard a scream
From that place between
Waking and sleeping?
The thunderous silence of a midnight dirge
To mourn the loss of
What you never had.

It’s the despair of two star-crossed lovers
Lying alone together, their world ill prepared
For love that never
Dies.

It’s the godless and unholy roar
Of Heorot’s pain:
A raw and tender obscenity screamed in search of
Heroes from a foreign shore.

It’s the rumble of this fragile earth
Of fire and stone,
But
There is no balm in Gilead
To soothe creation’s groan.

And no amount of drink
Can ever stop the sound,
And no endless reel of daytime television
Will ever fully drown
The Scream.

 

Why I will not be wearing a Poppy this year.

Remembrance day, as the name suggests was designed to be a forceful annual reminder of just how horrific and destructive a war can be. Every year the country would have one minute of silence to remember those men and women who died in what we now call the two world wars, the idea being that if we forget what it was like then  we are bound to repeat our mistakes and plunge ourselves into yet another even more terrifying conflict. It seems to me that this message has been lost over the years and that November 11th has become yet another excuse for national pride and flag-waving. I find this extremely disrespectful to those servicemen and women (for the most part conscripts) whose lives were taken from them because political ideologies and national identities were allowed to become more important than the peoples’ lives. People died because we as a species lost sight of what is really important and now, almost 90 years on, on the day that we agreed to set aside to mourn and remember our mistake, people take to the streets with flags – the very symbol of the problem that caused such devastation. Wearing a Poppy has become intertwined today with smugness about winning 2 wars that ended long before most of us were even born, a war that we agreed was not really a victory for anyone, but a loss for humanity. I will have a private minute of silence for the dead – though I think that one minute in a year is hardly adequate, but I will not wear a symbol whose original meaning was noble but which has been stolen by the kind of people who would rather recapitulate their ancestors’ dubious victory than remember the dead.

Open-eyed

Sometimes there’s a moment when
A rabbit ventures, for the first time, from the warren;
It sees the world for the first time in light,
Taking in the everything that now manifests itself
In the bright and unclouded future.
That was me.

I remember the first time I marveled at a bird
Sitting on the stump of a tree in the woods.
I remember my eye meeting hers and being
Entranced by such humble magnificence.
Little over a minute ago that eye had seen
Sights that earth-bound men could only dream.
To me that sparrow was a seraph from somewhere else,
A messenger of God making contact with me.

Dreams come to an end,
And those first feelings of magic fade away to shadows
Of another life, leaving only the misted memory
Of a sparrow on a stump.
But moments like that do not die;
They remain the living essence of that child in the woods
Open-eyed.