FINISHED READING - The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

One thing to note from the very start is that the human characters in The Memory Police  do not have full names. They're either known as the old man, an initial, at most a surname  or no name at all. It's as though a fully fleshed identity has been under attack for quite a while in the world we are now entering. Everything takes place on an island that also has no attributed name. Its as though this is a secret off shore social experiment. The only thing with a name here, is a dog -  Don.

It is in keeping then with the world Okawa portrays, that this is a dystopia where objects and qualities disappear. What disappears being actioned by government decree. Items disappear, so once disposed of, everyone will very quickly forget they ever existed and what they were used for. Unless, of course, they cannot forget, and continue to remember everything.

The central character is a female writer, her professor who is her editor, she refers to as R. He is one who can remember everything. This places him in huge danger. The Memory Police if they to discover this, then he too would vanish. The writer empathises because her own mother was arrested, never to return. This informs her decision to turn her house into a refuge. And with the help of the old man, creates a hidden room in her house to conceal R in.

Okawa descriptions have all her customery care, and exquisite tenderness. Like her previous novel The Proffessor & The Housekeeper, there is a growing loving connection, a fondness, between the characters she has thrown together. That novel, coincidentally, also has the theme of memory, in which the Proffessor could not hold a memory of who he is for more than a day. 

Who would you be without your possessions, your career, or your creativity, your given name, without memories? These are recurring themes her novels explore. Here the background of an oppressive tension, creates difficulties in adjusting to such regular gross changes in society. All the while the female writer wonders, how far could this purging eventually go?

What Okawa brilliantly portrays is the effects of collective dementia, as a whole society is deprived and made decrepit by autocratic design. The horror of how easily that happens, feels shocking to read. As gradually people disappear from self consciousness, the plight of those hidden is to watch all this happen and to not be able to reverse or hold it back. 

The Memory Police is a subtle, quietly distressing novel that remains human. It's a cogent metaphor for our present day culture where Altzheimers is now an increasingly common human experience. The whole of human knowledge is available to us on the Internet, but we understand and know the value of so little of it. So many things we have already forgotten, that we want to forget, or we don't want to know about in the first place. When all that remains of human society is being gradually stripped away, then all we will be left with is our relationships. 

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

WATCHED - Nightsleeper

As credulity stretching as Nightsleeper is, it is such a fast moving adventure it takes you along with it. And the speed is most welcome so the holes and the coincidences don't insult you too much. It's a well produced wheez.

Nightsleeper is constructed around the journey of a train and it's passengers, the night the whole rail networks computer system is hacked. The train travelling from Glasgow to London is left motoring at break neck speed southwards.Onboard the usual range of characters - the loud mouthed cynical businessman, the grumpy OAP,  the morally dubious social media reporter, the flawed police officer with a history etc.

But, it all kinda works, the mechanism mostly keeps ahead of you, and produces a number of fine surprises. By the fifth of the six episodes the formula began to wear thin, it starts to repeat itself. By the time you get to the final episode and the big reveal of who was behind the hack. It's someone so completely left field, You've never been given a hint he might be dodgy before. The reveal felt a bit unearned. 

The constantly cracked up tension in the last episode, rather than leaving you hanging on tenter hooks, left you feeling utterly exhausted. Maybe six episodes was overstretching it too much. A briefer four could've been a more satisfying length. But that said, I thoroughly enjoyed it, for all its ludicrousness. My goodness, they even had a nurse and a lawyer on hand just when they needed them, how amazing is that?

CARROT REVIEW  - 5/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 119 - Its Medication Time

There are mornings when I start to feel brighter in myself, bodily less weighed down, my physicality more at ease. When I notice this, its a red flag to remind me to check - have I forgotten to take some of my medications this morning?

It's now three months since my HA !  It's surprising how you grow accustomed to things. Particularly the side effects the medication have upon my sense of well being. It is no doubt dealing with high blood pressure, thinning my blood and moderating cholesterol. But it's not for nothing that I also take a pill to protect my stomach from being damaged by the potent drug cocktail my system is imbibing.

Stomach lining medication I take in the morning, once I am up. Because it takes 30-60 minutes to become effective. And I've got used to feeling it commandeering hold of my stomach with an accompanying queasiness. Without this goodness knows what the other medications would really feel like as they hit the lining of my stomach. Those mornings when I forget, remind me of two things, how my body feels with and without them.

Last week I did my first Church Larking visit since before the HA!. It was lovely bright clear sky day. I enjoyed getting on a bus, using my pass, travelling up the coast to Morston. Taking photos, making mental notes, reading about the history of the church. Then taking a half hour walk along the coast path to Blakeney. Since that jaunt I felt bodily much improved, and sleeping better. A lot of  accumulated aches and pains have considerably eased. Getting out and doing a thing I really enjoy was what I certainly needed. 

Morston Quay is a quaint little marsh inlet. Renown for its coastal views and trips out to sea to see the seals. There is consequently a car park, a boat park, a bird viewing tower, a small National Trust cafe, and just about functional public loos. Recently the National Trust has put forward a plan to upgrade some of these facilities, improvements to toilets, disabled access and cafe. Oh the outrage that has ensued.

The so called 'abhorrent' proposed development

Nowadays in North Norfolk anything the National Trust wants to do creates a hugely vociferous hullabaloo. For building a bridge, for not building a bridge, for building the wrong type of bridge in the wrong place etc. Usually there is a suspiciously orchestrated campaign. Their plans at Morston being called 'abhorant' by the right wing Natural England, and loads of heightened rhetoric about NT wanting to monetise and increase tourism without consulting the local businesses or people. 

Morston Quay already is a tourist attraction. Without the NT, Morston village would have no public loos or cafe. It has only one pub and a high end restaurant to recommend it. So the objections, such as they are, are largely whipped up poppycock. i would suggest many of these 'locals' may be a bit more distant than at first thought. Even I in Upper Sheringham wouldn't call myself local to Morston, its ten miles and twenty five minutes drive away.

Everything I write these days is defined by whether its pre or post HA!. And so, finally, this week I got to do my first swim since the HA!  It was a joy, imbued with a sense of being liberated from a restriction. I only did twelve lengths. Not because I was too tired, but not wanting to overdo it and perhaps regret it later once my body caught up. There wasn't any fatigue delay. What actually happened was swimming perked my body up so much that I was too hyper to sleep well for three nights in a row. Which was an unexpected and unwelcome turn up for the books. I'm going to have to take this returning to 'normality' quite gently.

A field in Norfolk

We were out on a days jaunt around Norfolk and stopped off for lunch. I had a jacket potatoes beans and cheese, a personal favourite. which, post HA!, is a special treat these days. Whilst we were having lunch, two young mothers with young children, struck up a conversation on the table next to us. One of the Mothers was house hunting :-

"So even though we thought it was ideal as a house, we just couldn't go through wiv it. Which was a real shame. Then last week we found a second house. It was truly perfect for us. It was soooo ideal, everything we wanted inside, plenty land outside. Then I noticed there was an empty field next to it. An I just couldn't shake the thought off - someone's gonna build a house on that, then we'll be over looked. So....we're still searchin"

LISTENING TO - No Title as of 13th February 2024 28,340 Dead by Godspeed You Black Emperor

Of the many bountiful things the Pandemic lockdown brought to my attention was the grandstanding opus of Godspeed You Black Emperor. A band that has become the epitome of 'post rock' whether they approved of that lazy catagorisation of them or not. 

What has emerged since their foundation in 1994 is a particularly trenchant artistic vision, given a distinct musical form. One that borrows from many genres, but rises above being affiliated to any of them. So it is minimalist- maximalist music, experimental music, avant-garde drone music, a dramatic chamber music of sorts played on rock instruments - guitars, drums and violin. All of these things and more. They eschew lyrics or vocals, just the occasional 'found voice' will surface from the orchestrated cacophony. Instrumental crescendos of repetitive refrains building to portray the zeitgeist of our time. 

That this new album depicts a scorched and dangerous landscape that gives expression to turbulent emotions, captures the conflicted feelings over not just Gaza, but pretty much everything. You can hear the desolation in the brief three minutes plus of Broken Spires at Dead Kapital. The siren like sound in amongst the distant plummeting explosions at the beginning of Babys in a Thundercloud. The suggestive note of hope and optimism in the concluding coda of Grey Rubble-Green Shoots.

The titles they chose for albums or tracks are often filled with expressive ellipsisms of their own creation - hash tags, exclamation marks, semi colons, hyphens and brackets abound. It's a type of concrete poetry reduced to the oblique matter of fact detail. No Title.... is coldly factual, a date and the number dead. A reference to those killed in Israel's war on Gaza at the time of this albums recording. 

You have to read between those words and imagery, examine the music and visuals they use, to elicit what political comment may be being being made.The track listing goes : - Son is a Hole, Son is Vapours - Babys in a Thundercloud - Raindrops Cast in Lead - Broken Spires at Dead Kapital - Pale Spectator Takes Photographs - Grey Rubble Green Shoots. Make of these what you will.

GSYBE compose music undoubtedly driven by a political impetus. Yet the manner in which they express it though lacking in specifics, always speaks to a more universal level of truth. This is not sharpened political polemic hitting you on the head with manifesto propaganda points. Though GSYBE may inform you chapter and verse of their intent via their press release. But press releases alone do not necessarily make your music political. In the end it's about creating a cogent feeling, not a finely expressed deconstruction or analysis.

The power of what they do is then in the strength of mood conjured. Sometimes it is vast and grand and defiant, yet shadowed by this world weary, plaintive lyrical melancholy. No Title.... is suffused with a drone that hovers in and out throughout it, like a malevolent missile constantly altering course in the pursuit of its target. This music charged with anger, pity and a remorseful sadness heavily woven through it.

Their two most recent albums seem to have become more angst laden, an action of remorse. Filled with frustrated ennui as the potential end of humanity looms ever larger in our collective psyche. Where the point at which we could've saved ourselves from disaster, has perhaps passed, and we will have to address whatever the direst consequences turn out to be. Fighting all the while genocidal wars to eradicate an enemy, as though there were nothing else on our mind that really should matter more.

It was after a third listen through that I finally felt able to state an opinion on No Title As of 13th February 2024. 28,340 Dead. This is a bleak, brilliant sequence of music. The more I listen to it the more impressive it becomes. But, Yeah, this is not a happy upbeat album. Hell No.

CARROT REVIEW  - 8/8

SCREEN SHOT - Timestalker

The BFI are for some inexplicable reason running a pre- release free movie ticket scheme for Alice Lowe's new film. Being a fan of her we booked for a free ticket. We arrived at the cinema, and the audience was about twenty people in a small screen cinema. I got the impression most were there because it was free, not because they were fans of Alice Lowe.

The premise of the film is the central character played by Alice Lowe is in love with another character played by Aneurin Bernard. And throughout history she stalks him, but never gets to consumate her love because she always dies gruesomely before that can happen. This certainly had comedic potential.

The film I have to say is one huge disappointment. It's very very low budget. It struggles to get and maintain its tone and pace right. The script needs a lot more attention, tightening up and sharpening of barbs. The story arc feels too feeble and so lacking in purpose you wait in vain for it to pull itself together. There needed to be some resolution or satirical punchline as to what she learns from all this stalking through history. 

The 18th century and 1980's periods are both given far too much time. These are when the story flounders most. If the pace was snappier, the jokes more cutting and honed, then perhaps you wouldn't have minded so much. The senario might have made for a funny ten minute skit in a comedy sketch show. Each week repeating a further variant set in a different period. But here it feels so inadequate as to be embarrassing.

Alice Lowe, stars, writes and directs. And I would say at least one of those tasks should have been delegated to someone else. Despite a good ensemble cast  including Nick Frost, Kate Dickie they are largely wasted, and can be seen visibly to struggle concocting some sense of purpose for their characters. Best line - when she described her vagina euphemistically as her - mossy treasure.

This is, sad to say, quite the worst film I've seen in many a year.

CARROT REVIEW  - 3/8

CHURCH LARKING - Morston Parish Church

All Saints Parish Church Morston is perched on a pronounced mound of land. It sticks out so much that the coast road has to take a sharp curve around it. It once overlooked a busy narrow creek that was navigable down to the sea. The village has always been small, and was over many centuries renowned for only two things - fishing and smuggling. The church has a very understated exterior architecture. No grand walls of windows like those at near bye Salthouse or Blakeney, nor the architectural flourishes of Cley. Quite small windows generally and all without stained glass. The only stained glass being a tiny medieval fragment in a high window of the tower. The quatre foil windows in the clerestory are perfunctory and modest. 

In fact modesty seems to be this churches dominant quality as a building. What else strikes you is that its been in the wars, the tower having had a patchwork brick repair. That this was done might indicate a lack of financial resources to repair properly in flint. The tower was struck by lightening in 1743 and partially collapsed. The 18th century appears to have been a bad generally for churches in North Norfolk.  Many falling badly into disrepair at this time. So undoubtedly as a smaller poorer parish in the first place Morston did not escape the neglect of this period. The tower collapse damaged the crenelations on the east nave roof which were not repaired. When you look closer at some of the interior stone carving is hurried looking and not finely worked. The arch corbels and font panels are particularly crudely executed to the point of looking sinister. The sort of detail that M R James would use in one of his ghost stories.

But all these 'folksy' elements to the church emphasise that this is a humble building, with little by way of grand asthetic pretensions.  This is part of its charm.  There are a number of quite distinctive things about Morston Church. The majority of its fabric is 13th century, some of it quite early. The pillars have a more Norman Romanesque look to them, whilst many of the nave arches straddle the transition from Norman curved to Early English pointed arche. The windows are all noticeably set higher than is usual in the walls, so no one can look out of them. There are three rough cut piscina, two either side of the altar and one in the nave. This might indicate side altars or shrines to specific saints, supported by local guilds.

A remarkable survival are the base panels of a medieval rood screen. Made still more unusual by the fact that all the panels are undamaged, the paintwork still quite bright and clear. The figures are of the four Evangelists and four Doctors of the Church _ Gregory, Jerome, Ambrose and Augustine, so perhaps uncontroversial enough not to arouse Puritanical iconoclasm. Above the rood arch is an 18th century Tympanum, which bears the Royal Arms, a 'Decalogue' panel  containing the Creed, Lords Prayer and Ten Commandments, Made in the years after the tower collapse and repair, partially to hide damaged areas, but since moved to its present situation

The church has, by choice no electricity. But it does have several splendidly wrought ironwork candelabra throughout the church. These are used during evening services, this must make for a very atmospheric ritual space. The only organ they have is a pedal driven one. This all gives added emphasis to its rusticated character, which I can quite understand the local parishioners might wish to preserve.

Before leaving take a walk around the church ground there is precious little by way of a graveyard. Most of its medieval burials had wooden grave markers that have not survived. There are however, three coffin shaped graves set flat into its grass which are flint set into lime wash. This quietly speaks of the impoverished nature of Morston in previous centuries.

QUOTATION MARKS - Self As Doppleganger by Naomi Klein

The self as perfected brand, the self as digital avatar, the self as data mine, the self as idealised body, the self as racist and anti-Semitic projection, the child's mirroring of the self, the self as eternal victim. These doubles share one thing in common, all are ways of not seeing. 

Not seeing our ourselves clearly ( because we are so busy performing an idealised version of ourselves) not seeing one another clearly ( because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others) and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly ( because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision)

I think this more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history - with all its mirroring, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see - in our past, in our present, and in the future racing towards us.

Extract taken from Ch 15 - Unselfing in Doppleganger 

by Naomi Klein, 

Published by Penguin 2023.

FINISHED READING - Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

Doppelganger begins by chronologically retracing the steps of how Naomi Wolf turned from inhabiting a leftist feminist perspective to becoming a regular pundit on Steve Bannon's alt right programme. Espousing and inflaming every conspiracy theory she could get offensive traction with. 

At the same time an even stranger phenomenon happened. Naomi Klein started to be regularly confused online with Naomi Wolf. So much so that the algorithm picked up on it and began to fuel the confusion still further. At which point Naomi Klein, unable to effectively counter any of this, felt control over her own identity was pretty much lost.

This personal experience made her start to take a more active, inquisitorial role into the whole issue of conspiracies. Investigating why the alt right has gained so much traction with the 'left out' working class. Picking up on issues that traditional parties had either abandoned or were afraid to engage with.  So what might traditionally have been a concern of the left, gets co opted and adapted into a populist right wing one. But as Klein herself admits, it's not that conspiracies don't exist, just not the ones Bannon and Co espouse. But for the left to start talking about them risked getting lost in the murky morass of those with less contact with factual truth, or integrity.

There were times when reading this book that you cheer for how well she puts the finger on what is so wrong. But at the same time the book is a really hard read. The situation we are in is so depressing, and so difficult to see how we, as a civilisation, can extricate ourselves from. Its not completely without hope, but goodness it is hard to keep a clear hold on that.

One very cogent idea she lays out here, is that we are all in danger of being 'othered' by people on the Internet and in society. We all do it so easily ourselves.  We stop seeing the person, and create this doppelganger version of them, onto which we can project all sorts of reprehensible qualities. If you happen to be Jewish, a woman, black, gay, trans, socialist or belong to any sort of religion, then you can end up being seen as this archetypal nefarious representative figure. 

She takes the example of the Nazi's and the Holocaust. Since the end of the war the techniques and methods employed to commit genocide by the Nazi's have been presented as an evil act particular to them. This ignores the fact that Hitler openly stated he got a lot of his ideas about concentration camps from the British in South Africa. The idea for mass extermination, from how the Indigonenous American Indians were rounded up, robbed of their lands, and then of their lives, in the US. Genocide was all part of the European colonial ethos, and the Nazi's were the inheritors of that, not the sole progenitors of it.

From the perspective of history, we are all implicated in this, and we'd rather not know. And this not wanting to know, fuels the distractions of frankly barmy conspiracy theories, climate change denial, the vehement obsession with vaguely indefinable concepts like culture war or wokeness. Anything to not look our complicity in the face, of modern slavery, poverty wages in far off places and a looming apocalypse.

And what about hope? Well she thinks there is one way things could change. If we were to rediscover a way to rebuild connections and work together as a community. To find meaning and purpose in real relationships again. To see our self absorption with social media as the escapism it is, getting lost in the pursuit of gratifying our unique brand of individualism. Fiddling whilst the world literally burns, floods, and collapses all around us.

CARROT REVIEW  - 5/8

FINISHED READING - Courting The Wild Twin by Martin Shaw

This book is enigmatic, unwilling to unveil its riches too easily or quickly. You could not unlock it, I would suggest, in one fell swoop. It resembles a bell being rung without fully understanding what exactly is being summoned. You have to stand, listen and wait.

FIRST READ THROUGH

Martin Shaw is a mythologist and storyteller. And his power with words and the telling of tales is well worn, rich, gnarly and twisting. He embellishes tales with evocative deeply etched details and rubbed through hues, that are all part and parcel of what appears to be camouflaging it's meaning. The writing style is alluring, yet distracting. It's speaking to your heart, which is not always paying attention.

The book is split into roughly three sections - an exploration of these two tales - a central chapter where he expresses opinions about the state of the world - a  final chapter where the two tales are told in their fullness. I'm not quite clicking what the purpose in drawing these two tales together is, which obviously share similar themes and symbolisms. I am missing something in my reading, a link to purpose or meaning. I'm left feeling dissatisfied, whilst still remaining curious to understand.

SECOND READ THROUGH

Finding myself alone I felt able to speak the introductory chapter The Conditions of Wondering out loud. And, as if this were a miraculous act, it has all come more vivdly alive for me. It's as though by giving voice to it, I lit a candle into its long and darkened corridors. There is a different level of engagement required to reading out loud. You have to look for meaning in order to be able to give it expression. 

This is a story revivified by the public recounting of it. Reading it aloud connects you with that tradition, with the writer, the speaker of myths and truths, the one who intones this material live. Perhaps this should not be a surprise. To be put in tune with Shaw and his antecedents, and suddenly I am right there.

A central theme of the two stories is the perfectly good royal couple who for some reason cannot conceive.  A suggested  earthing and fertilising ritual is given by a an old woman from the woods. But the queen does not follow her instructions to the letter. Supposed to only eat the white flower, she insatiably gobbles the red first. The outcome is the birth of an abberant offspring, the wilder twin, that is initially rejected. In the end this has to be brought fully into their lives for a new revitalised direction to be taken.

Shaw's opinion is we all succum to a type of intellectual, if not imaginatively, dry lifestyle. Suppressing the wilder passionate irrational side of our psyche in order to be considered a good person or in pursuit of some ideal of individual perfection. At some point there's a need to integrate these neglected rawer instincts if we are to live a more rounded and meaningful existence. Whilst bedevilled by this lack on an individual level, it is also embedded in the ethos of contemporary society. Encouraging us to all live, work and play distractedly, at one emotional remove from a full blooded passionate response to life.  Modern life has become sterile from the inside out. Too enamoured with surface presentation and facile truths.

As in the stories, there is a need to assiduously court our wilder twin. Always running the risk of being eaten by it, before this can be integrated. Shaw gives the example of the archetypal rock n roll lifestyle, as one in search for and indulging in the wild twin, that can easily consume you to the point of an early tragic death. 

An opposite is the religiously solitary life,  seeking some sort of idealised perfection through contemplation and ethical rectitude. This can become so arid and lifeless that the eruption of a more anarchic rebellion or self harm, is almost inevitable. If the wild twin is not courted, it acts as a disruptive force that will always threaten to upend any hard earned yet brittle equilibrium.

There is a lot of food for further thought here.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

QUOTATION MARKS - John Vervaeke

"We have convinced ourselves 

that because we can now make digital watches 

that we must be cleverer than Plato" 

John Vervaeke 

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 118 - The Blame Frame

On a recent The Sacred podcast Jonathan Pageau was reflecting on what sacred meant for him. Auto generated subtitles came up with this interpretation of what he said:-

'The sacred is where the Transcendent meets the Monday'

Yeah, Mondays they are the worst.

Recently bought a small machine for checking blood pressure. This is proving a mixed blessing. Fine though it is to keep tabs on how my body is functioning post the HA! It does perpetuate an over preoccupation with my body as this malfunctioning machine. That you can somehow fine tune back into full health, via close observation of your blood pressure twice daily.

You cease feeling a relaxed and quiet contentment with how things seem to be gently improving, just feeling generally better, and go into an heightened state of alarm the moment you see your blood pressure tipping over 140. This in itself stimulates an unhealthy level of stress. Blood pressure varies and it's not always possible to identify exactly why. There's a difference between the habitual and endemic and the hyper tension of a brief moment.

Many common factors, health professionals suggest, affect blood pressure - not enough sleep, too much fat and salt, not enough exercise, too much stress, coffee or alcohol. These are just a few villains that are in the blame frame. But its also acknowledged that health specialists don't fully understand the vagaries of any one individuals issues with high blood pressure. The conditioning factors being perhaps too wide ranging and varied. There is no magic wand that settles the matter.

However, Numero Uno villain is pretty much salt. Once you start looking closely at food contents, which I have become prone to do to the point of atavistic obsession, the bloody stuff is absolutely everywhere. Ultra processed foods are the prime source. They are rightly seen as the primary target for any preventative initiative on health care. It being in the nature of manufacturing cheap baby food for grown adults that you don't need to exert much mastication over, to be high in all the triumvirate of usual suspects for high blood pressure - salt, fat and sugar

Checking your blood pressure daily also provokes these thoughts of self recrimination for that half a cheese and onion pasty you knew at the time of consumption was far too salty. (Yes, that was me ) You also see spikes in higher blood pressure, as a result of not sleeping well for one night, or a whole series of nights (Also me )  And these both take a few days to settle back down to an acceptable register. 

I find it a bit of a conundrum that I can monitor and control the food I eat, but how much sleep I get is pretty much impossible to steer or take conscious control over. You can only set the conditions for it and stand way back. I've tried different approaches over the years and little has had a permanent transformative effect on whether my sleep is long or short. And heightening the anxiety over lack of sleep by throwing statistics at me of decreased life expectancy, really does not help me one bit. It's just another stress point in a room already full of them.

So I have, I'll admit, stopped listening or giving much credence to sleep remedies or strategies. I tend to cultivate a more resigned approach to my sleep being whatever it will be. The factors that waken me have just become too numerous as I get older, that devising one single strategy that effectively deals with them all, is for the birds. It's a bit like keeping plates spinning, just accept some will fall off, that even with the best of intentions my slumber will break - and there is always a very good podcast on You Tube to recommend itself.

Measuring my blood pressure, has I think the potential to become as unhealthy an addiction as regularly checking your smart phone . Too much information perhaps being a more dangerous thing than any brief hiccup of hyper tension. After all it's just one factor in what provokes a HA!

In another podcast episode of The Sacred Elizabeth Oldfield said to her guest  

( according to the auto generated subtitles )

 

'You've had your morning coffee so I don't feel so guilty about panting on you.' 

Mmm this could be an interesting new term -  'to pant on you' - to lean over lasciviously

QUOTATION MARKS - T S Elliot

'They constantly try to escape

from the darkness outside and within

by dreaming of systems so perfect 

that no one will need to be good.

But the man that is 

will shadow the man

that pretends to be.

TS Elliot - Poem - The Rock - 1934

ARTICLE - Verses and a Chorus on Life

As I concluded writing the previous post, the article - One Singular Creation - I felt the urge to write a conclusion/epilogue that was of a less philosophical and more practical bent. What follows is what emerged. This started as just a few sentences, quickly growing to a point where I thought this might stand better on its own. Though the underlying gestalt of it was undoubtedly stimulated by the 'instantaneous situation' that preceded it. These invocations I believe were meant to be addressed to me. May you find some use for some of it.

Life has no sense of a purpose, no sense of a burning destiny for you or anything else. 

Life is like taking part in an adventure without any sense of where you will end up. 

Life may present you with gifts that will sometimes come in the most disgusting of wrapping papers. So you may not welcome them, nor see them as a gift at all. 

Life is a bastard when you cling too tightly to  any intrinsic or substantive meaning you've attributed to it. Its our desires that strangle the life out of life. Hold no expectations of anything, or they could well bite you back. 

It's all too easy to become disillusioned with life, because essentially what we believe life to be about is largely an illusion. Our wishful thinking will at some point be revealed to us.

When things do go awry in life. This is not an opportunity for self flagellation, it's an object lesson. The opening of a door, an invitation to step into a place of insight, to become wiser. Note to self, that I do not say happier.

Love your life as an experience of a whole series of unexpected surprises. 

There is never anything missing from your life that you have to expend your entire life searching for. 

Love your life, not for what you think it should be, nor imagine you want it to be. 

Love your life for what lies directly before you, what it is presenting to you right now. 

Love your life for exactly what it is. 

Embrace the uncertainty,

and the apparent incoherent mess of life.

Sometimes the trashiest most inconsequential of things 

can be instructive, don't be too quick in dismissing them.

Make the most of whatever arrives unbidden in the post. 

Try to enjoy your daily correspondence with the world. 

The day will come when it will be death that drops heavily upon your doormat. 

To which the best response maybe to open its introductory letter, 

shrug your shoulders, loosen your grip, and say - Here I go!

ARTICLE- One Singular Creation

As human beings we make judgements based on our perceptions. In most cases these are self referential, about what is me and what is not me, these are my people and these are not my people. Such distinctions are inherently prejudicial. We prefer and desire pleasure, happiness and joy, and don't want anything that might usher in their opposites. All our primary likes and dislikes, are built upon dualities - Me & You, Self & Other, Good & Evil, Love & Hate, War & Peace, Pleasure & Pain, Beauty & Ugliness.

These are themselves surrogates for the primary human experience of Life & Death. All things appear and disappear, are born and then die. Our capacity to love is predicated upon it, we hate it when things disappoint, disappear or die. We become easily attached to particular circumstances that when they change we feel emotionally robbed, we are bereft, we grieve, we mourn their loss, we get angry, we are in denial, we become depressed etc.

Our human tendency to take everything that happens to us in relation to the external world extremely personally, is the primary source of our mental suffering. Modelling our experience around a range of dualities, causes us to mis-perceive what reality is actually like.  Reality - that world that exists outside of us -  holds no opinions about us, is indifferent to what we approve or disapprove of. We are not the centre of its world.

Humanity is bound by a fixed period of life, the length of which no one knows. What existed of us before life ( if anything) and what will exist of us after life ( if anything ) are both beyond our knowing. In The Genjo Koan, by 13th Century Zen monk Dogen, he contemplates the relationship of life with death through the metaphor of 'firewood and ash'. Although there is obviously a causal link between firewood and ash, they are in very different states of existence. They are in this sense cut off from each other experientially, as are life and death.

Dogen concludes his exploration of the 'firewood and ash' metaphor with the statement:-

"Life is an instantaneous situation,

and Death is an instantaneous situation.

It is the same, for example, with Winter and Spring.

We do not think that Winter becomes Spring, 

and we do not say that Spring becomes Summer."+

We have a general sense for what the four seasons are like as experiences. Though we have our official starting dates, there isn't really a clear point where one season finishes and another begins. Even four distinct identifiable seasons has become more unpredictable with climate change. What Dogen is suggesting is that our lives and deaths are similarly inexact seasons of being.

From the experience of those that I will leave behind - one moment I am alive, and the next I am dead. All set into a landscape of sadness and grief. However, from my experience it will be different - one moment I'm alive and then I drift off into the woozy wa wa of who knows what? Will my experience post death, be a complete cessation of consciousness or something else entirely? This is beyond everyone's current experience to know or predict.

There are stages through which firewood passes before it becomes ashes. Similarly being alive passes through stages, changes in the body, mind and spirit that incrementally shift your experience over the years from youth to decrepitude. To the moment when organs falter and fail, and mental faculties falter and fail, and the body falters and fails, and then the body dies, and self consciousness  dissolves and fades away.

We know what happens to the body post its moment of demise, it decays into its constituent elements. What we do not know is what, if anything, happens to consciousness.  It is often presumed that self consciousness vanishes with the death of its bodily host. Consciousness appears not to be a personal individual possession. Buddhist doctrine implies that something survives, but it would be a mistake to believe that it's a recognisible being linked to us, surviving in the form of a distinct consciousness. And Dogen suggests as much in the ' firewood and ash' metaphor:-

"The firewood, after becoming ash, 

does not again become firewood. 

Similarly, human beings,

after death, do not live again. 

At the same time, 

it is an established custom (within Buddhism) 

not to say that life turns into death."+

In other words Life and Death as a misconceived duality, causes us to end up perceiving our existential situation solely in linear causal terms, that one thing will lead into another. Buddhism uses the term rebirth (as opposed to reincarnation) in order to counter this, to double underline that though something is reborn, this is in no way to be seen as continuation of a previous existence.  The past has its influence upon the future, but the future cannot return to being what has past. Ashes cannot become firewood again.

Consciousness is the experience of one 'instantaneous situation' as Dogen names it. Because we are self conscious, we compile these instances into a series that form a distinct life story, our personal history. But in reality we continue to have just one singular experience of one instance. A whole stream of these conscious moments is what we decide to call a life.

 

Because we live and then die, we interpret reality as things coming into creation and then being destroyed. If we take on the idea that there are only 'instantaneous situations', then a dualism of creation and destruction no longer makes sense. Destruction is a heavy duty emotionally loaded word, and represents a very human centric perception of loss and willful violence.

If you remove the human desire to see a dualism, there is only ever one singular moment of creation, one following another. Each momentary flux of creation is a re-configuring of reality. Things change, adjust, transform, to each freshly arisen circumstance. Things appear and things disappear, they arrive and they leave. It is all a flux of creation. To be alive is to be part of the flux of creation. To be dead is likewise.

Circumstances create this creation, and these are in a state of perpetual evolution. There is a person that experiences being alive and then is dead, and whatever persists after that death is not different to or separated from this perpetual state of creation. Human kind's urge and need to create is a reflection of this too. It is all a constantly changing, and you could say evolving state, that Zen Buddhism calls - Thusness.

Now you might want to call that constant state of creation God if you wish. However we chose to imagine it, there appears to be an imperative spiritually to surrender the self to it. Taoists surrender to an enigmatic state that cannot be intellectually grasped called The Way. In Buddhism, it is referred to by a number of phrases, Buddha Nature being but one. The Self tends always to be perceived as an obscuration. It's the thing preventing us from aligning our being with, or some might prefer 'communing' with, the state of Enlightenment, of God, of seeing the way things really are.

+ Taken from The Shobogenzo, The Genjo Koan, 

Translated by Nishijma & Cross, Published by Windbell