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2026/03/29 The Titration of Prehistory

I was in Oxford a few weeks ago revisiting one of my favourite museums, the Pitt-Rivers museum. There you can find all sorts of treasures of the many peoples of the Earth; but today's article isn't about the Pitt-Rivers museum (though you certainly should go). No, today's article begins with the Natural History museum there in Oxford. The Natural History museum is not unimpressive by any means, but in scale to the exhibits found in the Pitt-Rivers, to my mind it is a mere foyer. Though others do not share my opinion. Built into what could only be an old railway station, the Natural History museum appears to have far more visitors than the main attraction behind it. Many of the visitors are families, their kids looking at the skeletons of giant sloths and dinosaurs. For the children, it is probably wise not to bring them into the Pitt-Rivers: some of those African idols are enough to make me afraid and give me nightmares, let alone a poor child.

Yes, it is the Natural History museum I want to begin with today. You see these skeletons of extinct beasts, and you wonder: what did they look like? We have our laymen's conception of a dinosaur which has iguana-like skin taut around a lean muscular body, but then these scientists come along and say they have feathers! It's almost as bad as the Classicists who say the Greek statues were painted. It's as if in both these cases there's a pop conception, one formed when there was less evidence, and a bleeding edge interpretation held by experts which has yet to penetrate into the popular imagination. This pop conception of a dinosaur is miles apart from what the experts believe. But how much credence ought we give to the experts? Like with Greek statues, where experts rely on small residues of paint and recreating their impressions, with dinosaurs we do just the same: look at residues of proteins, or worse look at other like-creatures and extrapolate.

It was around this time walking around the exhibits that my girlfriend, RiceIsNice, showed me a funny meme. The meme took skeletons of extant theria, like bison, and gave them the same treatment the dinosaurs received, an artist's reconstruction. With nothing but the bison's skeleton, the artist saw the funny outcrop of bones which make up the bison's muscular hump, and, with a bit of artistic license, turned it into a strange fin of bone and skin atop his back. It looked quite ridiculous. Though it is just the same treatment given to the spinosaurus who has such a frilly crest. Perhaps, some speculated, the spinosaurus was built like a tank, just like the bison. It's possible; but I'm not a zoologist. All that I can say is that it is very easy to be deceived by evidence without context. When looking at dinosaurs, the musculature and organs would give context to the skeleton being studied, if we were fortunate enough to have them; and without these details, we can only, if you would excuse the pun, get a bare bones understanding of what these antediluvian creatures looked like.

Now, from here I'll like to pivot to a different though related area of study, that being ancient hominids. The prehistory of man is a topic that has always interested me. The history of man is seen through shaded lenses, shaded by the writers who wrote, rewrote, and retained the knowledge of the past. From the great writers dating back to ancient times like Herodotus and Thucydides, knowledge of how life was lived has been preserved, and we can write with some accuracy on the rulers, the wars, the happenings, but also the thinkers of these times, and what these peoples worshipped. Comparing this to the palaeontology discussed prior, history and textual sources form the musculature, skin, and viscera of the past. The skeleton, on the other hand, is the archaeology. Without archaeology, each ancient civilisation is as real as Laputa; or maybe Atlantis (though I reckon on Atlantis the jury is still out). You may argue that great mud floods have wiped out your civilisation, or that whole swathes of classical history have been cooked up by monks bored in their cloisters, but the numismatics don't lie: if you find a coin in a Serbian ditch with Heraclius' face upon it, Heraclius must've been a real Roman emperor, lest Ockham weeps. But there is a time before such technologies like coins were invented - or at least metal coins as we understand them - and that time was prehistory. In prehistory, we are without the musculature of the texts, and instead are left to rely upon the archaeological skeleton and a little imagination. A little artistic interpretation.

The word Aryan has some unfortunate connotations today, but in prehistory there is something concrete being referenced. There was a wave of culture which swept up across Europe and down into modern day Iran (Iran is a cognate of Aryan) and India. In India, the Aryan invaders brought Vedic religion, called by researchers Brahmanism as opposed to the later reformed Hinduism (the differences may be an article for another time), and through their invasion, those with power, the warrior class and the priestly class, bred amongst themselves. This is the modern caste system: in genetics, we see far more steppe Aryan ancestry in higher caste Hindus than in lower caste Hindus, the caste system guiding their Aryan heritage. Now, with all I've just expounded, how much can we prove? There is genetic evidence sure - and genetic evidence is one of the greatest modern tools in the study of historic peoples - and there's linguistic evidence too - also powerful, used by earlier researchers of ancient civilisations - but how much can we prove? We find clay pots here and there which show similar methods of construction and patterns of decoration, but that merely shows this people - or a people influenced by the style - lived there. The answer unfortunately is we really can't know much. What kind of lives did these people lead? Who or what did they worship? Were the invasions of the Aryans into India peaceful or violent? With the Aryans of India, we aren't as deep into prehistory as you would expect, for we have what might be the oldest book in the world to give us context, the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda details a kind of invasion of the subcontinent by Aryans against local Dravidians, though I haven't read it in truth. Though researchers today continue to argue, as is their wont, whether such an invasion ever happened. Was it a Willie the Conqueror-style event, with one large invasion and a circling of elites, or a Hengist and Horsa, with gradual immigration, assimilation, and takeover: we really can't know for certain. Like the artist trying to reconstruct a spinosaurus, it ends up looking awfully silly.

But like an artist trying to reconstruct a bison, such can figure out the truth of prehistory. Speaking as an analytical chemist, it is a kind of titration of prehistory. For those who have purged themselves of their secondary school chemistry curriculum, I'll give you a brief reminder. A titration involves an instantaneous reaction between one known concentration and one unknown concentration; and by adding the right amount of the solution of known concentration so as to use up all of the solution of unknown concentration, the concentration of the solution of unknown concentration may be calculated. Such a technique may be used for prehistory too. With history with have both the skeleton and the musculature, the textual sources and the archaeology - a known concentration - whereas with prehistory we have a skeleton without musculature, archaeology with no textual sources - an unknown concentration. No reactions take place in the titration of prehistory, of course; but instead there are comparisons and parallels which are to be observed. The titrator must look upon all of recorded history and look at it through the eyes of how a student of prehistory might observe it. He must look at the archaeology, the genetic evidence, any linguistic evidence, and try to piece together a theory as to what has taken place. Then, like some kind of Sudoku where the answers are in the back of the book, he may look at the textual sources to see if his hypothesis was correct. And only through practice and repetition may the student learn how to accurately read prehistoric sites. Only by looking at the kind of musculature which ought to adorn the skeleton of prehistory may we come up with correct interpretations of prehistory; lest we be left with the archaeologists equivalent of a lean spiny bison.

To end, I'll throw in a favourite joke of mine. That is, to call everything discovered in prehistory a fertility ritual. Through ideology, structuralism - who knows what - students of prehistory have a kind of obsession with fertility rituals. Every graffiti of a phallus on a wall to them is yet more evidence of ancient fertility rituals. So, in lockstep, there is an awful lot of pleasure to be had at pointing out modern fertility rituals in our everyday lives. Prehistory with so few hard solid facts - only the evidence beneath the dirt - is rife with projection. Proper, old-fashion, Freudian projection. Anything suppressed is found on the blank canvas of the ruins. It's why fertility rituals are seen everywhere; but more generally why religious rituals suffused with divine significance are above all projected onto what easily may have been banal secular acts of the prehistorics, like threshing grain. There were rituals with these things, sure, but I'd wager not as commonly as the researcher might hope. Maybe there's something missing in their lives. Who knows.

2026/03/22 A Tunnel to the Stars - Part 5

Chapter 9

Ahead, I saw the planet Mercury. I had always imagined some kind of rocky ball of a planet, like the Mercury I saw in my childhood book of planets. But the Mercury I imagined was not the one presented before me. Instead of some dull grey nugget of a planet, what I saw was an iridescent planet. Not iridescent in a sparkly way - there was still a dullness to its texture - but in a multi-coloured way, reflecting the breadth of the rainbow in through the train car window. The colours reminded me of a bismuth crystal I bought at a fair in my youth. Yes, it was as if the whole planet shone with oil-slicked colour, no colour easily pinned down.

I held on to my seat, but my fear of the descent was needless. The train glided down gently into station, slowing, until it came to a final stop. ‘Mercury’ the sign read - although this train sign was one of those burgundy ‘hot dog’ style signs, not a modern National Rail sign. For how long had people been coming here? Since the ‘50s? Earlier? It didn’t take long, however, for such pleasant musing to be rudely interrupted.
“Ah, sir, we have just arrived at Mercury.”
That much I could see.
“Sir, here is the parcel I mentioned, and a small map to go with it. Oh, and here sir is a telecommunicator, please use it if you have any issues.”
I received the gifts. The parcel was heavy, far heavier than I had expected. Though I was curious as to the contents, I was hesitant to shake it should it be fragile; but judging by the density and weight, it was likely metal, I’d say. Then the map: this map felt ancient in the hands, the paper browned, despite being covered in some kind of plastic cling-filmy laminate which was a bit beyond beginning to peel off. And the telecommunicator. This device must’ve been high tech alien technology given that it could telecommunicate across planets without radio towers nor satellites, presumably. But holding it in the hand, it just felt like tat. Its aesthetic was stuck in the early noughties, coated in dark blue-coloured plastic with bright red, green, and yellow buttons for contrast. The device had very little weight to it too, and feeling its centre of gravity in the palm, you could tell the batteries were its heaviest part.
“Thank you. But how do I operate this device?”
“Aha, let me show you sir.”
And with that, the conductor snatched the children’s walkie talkie from my hand and began tapping on the buttons with vigour.
“See here sir, if you press these buttons,” at which point he tapped a sequence at such speed I couldn’t quite track, “you can call this train.”

2026/03/15 A Trip to an Orthodox Liturgy

I've had an interest in Eastern Orthodoxy for some time. I started watch Jonathon Pageau on YouTube back in 2019, and I've been a loyal listener to the Lord of Spirits podcast since around 2021; I've read books by Orthodox authors like Fr. Seraphim Rose; and I've had an interest in Orthodox theology, watching much on YouTube, and reading many a Substack article. There's a kind of culture surrounding Orthodoxy, and there has been for some years now, a culture of vitality, as if there's a real movement, a real energy there. I've sat on the periphery of that movement in Western culture gazing in for some time. But as any Orthodox will tell you, the focal point Orthodox experience isn't found through reading nor wrestling with beliefs; they'd say placing propositions at the centre of faith and worship is a Protestant accretion. No, the core of the Orthodox experience, they'd say, is participatory: that is, through the liturgy.

And yesterday, invited by a friend who has made the leap to Constantinople, I attended a Greek Orthodox liturgy. Note, yesterday was a Saturday, not the regular day for church-going. It was yesterday because one Saturday a month, this Orthodox church has an English service. So apologies to any Orthodox readers in advance (if I have any...), my assessment may be skewed by virtue of the fact it wasn't a typical service.

What I reckon I'll do is describe the service in detail, interspersing any interesting notes as we go. I'll begin with the church itself. I think I've written it here before, so I don't think I'll be doxxing myself saying this, but I live near Nottingham, and the church I attended was the Greek Orthodox church in Nottingham. The church appears to have been a Methodist church once upon a time? At the very least the architecture looked rather Methodist with it being in a Gothic style but made from brick. This leads to some novelties inside. An Orthodox church is typically domed, but a Gothic church is as far away from a domed shape as one could imagine. It is pointy and directional unlike the round wholeness of an Orthodox dome. However, the way in which this Gothic church was converted was rather impressive. The Gothic arches which formed arcades beside the nave were all painted with frescos of saints; and behind those arcades, on the walls of the church themselves, were hung very large paintings each depicting a period in the life of Christ. This series of paintings culminated on the ceiling. Though the exterior of the building was not domed, the interior indeed was, and there looking down was an icon of Christ Pantocrator, that is Christ after the ascension reigning from heaven. And from that central spot beside the icon of Christ hung the chandelier which unfortunately had electronic candles. Then, if we are to bring our eyes down from the ceiling again to eye level, rowed shoulder to shoulder around the whole perimeter of the church were icons, all in the old Byzantine style, their gold leaf shining radiantly. Some went to kiss them before the service as is the custom. Facing forward is the iconostasis, a feature not found in Western churches. The iconostasis is like a little room bounded by a wooden panel with several doors leading in. All decorated with icons, of course. There are side doors where I saw the altar boy dipping in and out doing preparations, and there was a central double-doored door where it seems only the priest was allowed to travel through. Finally, the church was lined with antique pews. These pews are not traditional, my friend informed me, but they are a fixture of many Orthodox churches in England since the churches they inherit are Grade II listed, and the pews can't be removed without much money, paper, and spilled ink. It wasn't long either before I discovered the superfluity of the pews, since I spent all of 5 minutes in the hour-and-a-half service sitting down.

Then, the service itself. Let's start with the most primary of the senses, smell. The air was saturated with incense. For part of it, embarrassing as it is to say, I was worried it would trigger my asthma. The air was thick, and the mood of the congregation was thick too, sombre and serious. As an aside, I've heard it said before by the Orthodox online that music like the organ, but mainly targeting the more emotional music of contemporary Evangelicals, is meant to force some kind of religious experience by material means. And I feel there is some truth in this statement. I have little time for Evangelical rock music, and I can't help but feel the cringiness of it all has done harm to people's perception of the faith. But all that being said, incense no doubt plays this same role. And since our sense of smell is so much more primal and fundamental than music, I reckon it affects us in a far more primal and fundamental way that's harder to pin down than the effects of emotional music. All that being said, I have little problem with worship music, worship incense, or any other sensible sensory stimulus to be used in worship. We aren't Buddhists; and even they use incense. There is a fear among many that stimulating the senses feels like a kind of falsehood, as if any subsequent religious experience from worship is inauthentic. We're all a little addled with early 20th century psychology, ideas of hypnosis haunting us. Whereas in reality there is no reason why the Holy Spirit cannot work through these media. (This topic on causality I've been meaning to write for some time. Maybe soon.)

Next, the spoken content of the liturgy. Snippets I could catch were very similar to what I was used to. Many phrases and moments in the liturgy are in common between the Salis liturgy, the ancient British liturgy upon which the Anglican liturgy is based, and the liturgy of St John Chrysostom which the Orthodox have sung since the 4th century. But though some of it was familiar, far more of it was foreign. The oddest part, it seemed to me, was that the laity spoke hardly a word throughout the service. The only part of the service the laity were invited to participate in was the Lord's Prayer, that's it. Instead there were chanters whose job was the sing the amens to the prayer and any other response the priest called for. This felt rather strange, and throughout the service I felt myself having to hold back saying 'amen' to each prayer. The custom amongst the Orthodox is not to respond verbally, but instead either cross yourself and bow. This I have mixed feelings on. It is an embodied action, and to each of the prayers, you symbolically crucify yourself as Christ was crucified, as if saying "like Christ, I pray for this unto death," which is a powerful sentiment. However, it certainly felt wrong. It could just be my Latin presuppositions, but a call is meant to be responded to by the called, not on behalf of the called, no? The reasoning my friend gave was that there are so many intricate and complex melodies which change for part of the calendar, that it would be very difficult for the melodies to be sung without teaching the congregation sheet music, and handing out booklets. This is likely the case. But call me a dirty iconoclast, I don't mind call me all you want, but isn't the liturgy then getting in the way of worship? No Orthodox would ever agree with such a comment, of course. During my visit, there were very few chanters, and the response was quite thin. My friend assured me that this was only because it was the English service, and that usually there quite a crowd all singing different harmonies. It would be interesting to hear that. Also, the Greek version is meant to be far more poetic and rhythmed than the English service, I hear.

One final point on the topic of the spoken content, and then we'll move on. There was a kind of disinterested voice the spoken sections were said in, which was surprising at first, but began to click after a while. The purpose of the disinterested voice and the singing (other than reflecting the beauty of God) is to anonymise those partaking, I reckon, so that you experience their station talking rather than that individual. For contrast we can look at an Evangelical mega-church. At one of these mega-churches, you'll have a celebrity pastor renowned for their enthusiasm and oratory, and they become the focus of the service, their personal flair and enthusiasm. The traditional understanding, an understanding the Orthodox emphasise strongly, is quite the opposite: the priest is a kind of stand-in for Christ presiding over the service, and his personality is put aside to assume that role. To add, for much of the service the priest does not face the laity but rather towards with his back towards them as he faces the golden container where the sacraments are stored.

The sacraments play a far more central role to the liturgy than in any other tradition. That isn't to say in other traditions the sacraments are secondary, not at all, but rather that the sacraments are the point of the ceremony. Behind the iconostasis, the priest and the altar boy spend time throughout the service preparing the sacraments, and throughout the service more prayers are heaped upon the bread and wine. And this isn't a wafer, this bread; it is proper risen bread: another point of contention between East and West. The East say the bread is risen because Christ is risen, which is a pretty sensible understanding. The sacraments were paraded around the congregation over the course of the liturgy. First the bread, each time it passes you you cross yourself, bow, then turn ninety degrees before it passes you again; then the wine, where you do the same. Then for communion the chunks of bread are floating in the wine, and are given to you by a long spoon. I wasn't eligible for communion of course, not being Orthodox, but the priest offers extra bread, off cuttings of the communion loaf, which don't contain the body of Christ but are nevertheless blessed. I received some of this bread. You walk up, cup your hands and put them out before the priest, and kiss the priest's hand as he gives it to you. The bread was rather dense white loaf, perhaps a little stale.

I mentioned kissing the priest's hand, which might be one of the more alien aspects to Orthodoxy here in Britain. We aren't a kissing culture, and with the new generation even greeting kisses are becoming an uncomfortable amount of contact. But in Orthodoxy, and I suppose in Orthodox cultures, kissing is very much a part of the culture. You kiss the priest's hand as a sign of respect, but most importantly you kiss icons. There were two icons in the entrance, one Madonna of the Holy Virgin with the Christ child and another I can't quite remember, but it may have been of the crucifixion; these two icons I crossed myself before and kissed. It felt like an oddly natural thing to do, in truth. The icons had a faint sweet smell to them, which could've been from frankincense, or maybe from some anointing oils, I'm not quite sure.

Before we conclude, I'd like to talk about the people I met. Several guys my age, around a dozen or so, had come up from Leicester specially for the English service, and then there were a few more who attended regularly who were friends of my friend. At the end of the service, we were all invited to some back room behind the main church which was truly expansive, just going on and on. There, prepared for us by a Yiayia of the congregation was a selection of food and even a specially made cake - all free from animal meat and animal produce for lent, of course. We sat there, had some tea and cake and chatted. The first thing of note - at least to me, someone with a chronic interest in demographics - was that no one there was ethnically English. There were Greeks, of course, and others of Eastern European descent, one Middle Eastern guy who converted from Islam, a few black guys, and one Irish. No doubt the fact that most of the people there had come up from Leicester for the day skewed my sample set - Leicester is a diverse city - but nevertheless, Orthodoxy appears to be appealing not to the Anglos of England like it is to the heritage Americans in the States. Perhaps this is part of why they are Americans and we are English. I heard also that there were currently fifteen male catechumen at the Greek church there, and five female catechumen; and that all five female catechumen entered the church as girlfriends of the men. This is quite heartening to hear. The Orthodox wave is certainly a masculine movement, and the worry is that all these men who find Christ in the Orthodox church end up having to choose between faith and marriage. That women are joining the church means the still nascent Orthodox movement will have longevity in England and won't be a passing fad. All the men there were jacked-up, smart, and well read. They talked about oecumenical councils, theology, and conspiracy theories. The name Jay Dyer came up a few times, which should be no surprise to any readers who know of his work.

To conclude then, I probably won't become an Orthodox Christian soon. Probably. There is a real sense of vitality surging through the culture at present bringing people in to the Orthodox church; and I have a great respect for that. But I can't shake the feeling that a people are tied to their liturgy and modes of worship. The British have our mode of worship and our traditions which are to be followed; that those traditions look quite shaky right now is a travesty to be sure, but that is no reason to abandon them in favour of a house whose foundations look far stronger! I will continue to have great respect for Orthodoxy, and I may well attend another service in the future; and also I will continue to have an interest in Orthodox understandings of scripture, for I think there is much for us to learn and incorporate from the East. Nevertheless, my feet shall remain firmly in the Anglican church.

2026/03/08 Thoughts on Costco

Costco was always a wonderful day out when I was a child. I remember fondly walking down each aisle with my parents and my younger brother, looking at the vaulted frames carrying plastic-wrapped crates to the roof of the building. It was an enormous place, and even bigger when I was small. Much like the image of Costco which appears in Idiocracy, it looked to the young me. We travelled every aisle, my brother and I nagging my parents for certain goodies, like at the pastries section, as we went; and, for being so well behaved, on the way out we got Costco pizza. For those who haven't had the pleasure, Costco pizza slices are a sixth of an 18-incher, and the highlight of any visit to Costco. A trip would be incomplete without a slice. It was why Costco was such a fun day out.

Many rosy memories there from the past. But over the Christmas break, I returned to Costco with my parents to help with some shopping, and saw the wholesaler with more mature eyes. Eyes which have had new experiences independent of my family, of university, of the world of work; eyes which have seen a different area of the country and different ways of life. Eyes which have read books, and which have looked inwards and introspected about the world, how it is, and how it ought to be. And through these new eyes, Costco wasn't all that I had remembered.

The shop was so much busier than I had remembered. Trolleys pushed and shoved into aisles - and these are big trolleys, mind - whilst shoppers took off the shelves all manner of jumbo-sized items. There was a real callousness in the air, as if everyone were invisible to everyone else, each person on their own mission. Few browse in Costco: everyone knows exactly what they are after and beeline straight for it. It's utilitarian in that way. They serve good quality foodstuffs, like their beef which is top-notch - foods which are often better quality than can be found in the supermarkets - but you walk around, and there's something very soulless to the place. There's a kind of trajectory which can be drawn. We've gone past the butchers, then past Tesco, then past Aldi/Lidl and their slimmed down experience, to Costco where we take out produce straight from the warehouse it's stored in. All is stripped away so far that there is no personal connection left, no experience of shopping to speak of.

These complaints can easily be levelled against supermarkets also. They aren't guilt-free by any means, chopping and gutting the high street of butchers and fishmongers; but the supermarkets are still in the cities, and typically are accessible by foot. Something about Costco feels alien by virtue of its distance, like a cube of commerce plonked in a large field with an adjoining car park. The supermarkets have people about, stocking shelves, working, who you can ask for help on where something is. It's friendlier. Costco has nothing like that, no one to help you in the vaulted labyrinth. No people nor community, nor even the facsimile of community which the supermarkets attempt. Costco knows it isn't a supermarket, and that it's a large warehouse, so any pretension otherwise would be nonsensical. Costco is a new way of shopping wholly unlike the old one which saw its start in peddlers of yore. And one which is becoming ever more popular.

Recently in particular I've heard many people in the office talk about getting Costco memberships. Though many of them are late to the party: many South Asian families have been shopping there for some time. Whenever there's a holiday like Diwali, out come the Costco treats scattered across the office desks. My own recent experience of Costco aligns with this quite strongly. The area of my childhood Costco, just outside of London, has a large South Asian population no doubt, but inside the Costco one could go a little while without seeing a white face. Please understand, in bringing up demography my aim isn't to start saying that oh these immigrants are colluding to break down high streets, traditional butchers, and grocers. Because I don't think what's key here is being foreign, but rather it's being an immigrant. Neither of my parents were born in England, and despite both of them coming from Anglophone cultures I too was brought up in that Costco-culture.

There is such a thing as the immigrant mindset, you will no doubt know. There's a kind of graft to starting a new life, a will to push on forwards, to make something of yourself and provide for your children, firmly setting down roots in a new land for their prosperity. That's the positive side, the light side to the immigrant mindset; but there's also a dark side. The dark side is that to leave the country of your birth and start a new life, you are unlikely to have had such a strong connection to the land and the culture. Granted, there are times when leaving is unavoidable, like in times of political unrest and famine, but likely the immigrant was able to up sticks and leave because he never felt all too tied down in the first place. India is a good example. I've heard a few first generation immigrants from India say this now, that the rigid family structure and constant nagging from family and in-laws got too much, and that's why they wanted to leave. It could be Western ideas through media, and an interest in a more Western way of life. But whether or not this is the case, it requires a certain kind of mind hardened against nostalgia and patriotism to reject the culture of one's up-bringing and want to find a new life.

The immigrant mindset and the Costco mindset are quite similar, I contend. Both look to utility over and above human connection, looking to find the quickest route rather than the most scenic. On the light side of the immigrant mindset, Costco is a place to save money by buying in bulk. "Always buy in bulk", has always been a motto of my father, one which he'd be quite disappointed to find hasn't sprouted in me. You can save a lot of money by doing this, by buying in bulk: but what do you lose? You lose the human touch, the beauty of the high street, and the tradition and rootedness it brings. And here we find that darker side, the sacrifice of tradition. It is a kind of Faustian bargain, whereby you are able to retain more money at the expense of something far more ineffable... something like the soul of the community.

Soul in Latin is anima: the soul is what animates. And there is something quite soulless in Costco. I saw big blocks of Munster cheese for sale, and I remembered buying some Munster cheese from a small independent shop run by a husband and wife on the high street where I live, as I've written about before. I've been back to that shop a few times since. The last time I was there, I had the man working at the counter shave off half-a-dozen different salamis for me to make up a present. I remember feeling a little guilty making him slice up so many for me, but he didn't mind a bit. We chatted a bit while he worked. But I remember it. I remember the experience clearly, and the man who I chatted with, even though it was half a year ago now. Should I have picked up a block of cheese at Costco would I have any memory of it at all?

The fewer memories we make, the quicker time passes, and the sooner we die: this is the conclusion I've come to. Novel experiences, personable experiences, meeting people, making relations, exploring new things, all of these slow down our perceived passage of time. Memories form our psychic punctuation and give structure to our past. Without them, life becomes a little more hollow, a little more empty. A little more like a Costco, large, empty, with each interaction as forgettable as the last, like shades in the Fields of Asphodel.

2026/02/28 A Tunnel to the Stars - Part 4

Chapter 7

I will confess, the pull towards comfort was certainly appealing. The humdrum so horrid, the humdrum shown to me in the temple, is at once dull and grey whilst also being comforting. It’s like a dirty pair of tracky bottoms you’ve worn for days: it takes on your scent and somehow the fabric feels more comfortable than a fresh pair. It is the feeling of home, the magnetic pull we all have towards home, like the homing pigeon, or like Odysseus. We all want to go home, get under a blanket on the sofa, and relax with your vice of choice - mine being YouTube. Endless videos, the same old muck. You might learn a little here and there, but any pretense of learning is but a shield to defend my pride from the truth, that I’m merely squandering my precious hours on this Earth.

Rejecting the comfort of the hearth is hard. Some stay at home their whole lives, seeing nothing, achieving nothing, experiencing nothing, only because the hearth is so warm, and the coolness without it is so cold; and without the hearth’s light all is dark, the hazy shadows in the darkness forming into imaginary monsters. The thing is, the thing which has taken me too many years to realise, is that those imaginary monsters which appear in the shadows away from the hearth in the darkness are monsters to be slain by the Excalibur held within each man’s heart. Like St. George, we are tasked to slay dragons, and dragons we must slay if we aren’t to remain spiritually children.

I don’t want to be weak. I don’t want to be naive. I don’t want to hunker down in the Shire, never venturing out. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t. I don’t want that at all. I was born for adventure; I was born to make something of myself, forge my steel, and earn my spurs. The fear of the unknown may be great, but the fear I have of eternal comfort is far greater. From dust we were made, and to dust we will return: then how are we to spend this interim?

The answer was clear yet agonising. The human body, the flesh of man, wants little more than comfort. Deciding to continue on with the journey to The Firmament, and attempting to tell the conductor that I wished to continue, was challenging. All the alerts and warning lights and sirens were blaring, as if it were a sci-fi series, and our spaceship had just been hit. Turning to the conductor, I attempted to open my mouth. This time, it felt as if my every muscle and thought were pulled back by an unholy mixture of natto and treacle, sticking and restraining my every movement. But by sheer force of will, I managed to break free of these bonds.

“I want to travel on, to the Firmament.” To this the conductor smiled. He seemed pleased with my choice. The conductor then signalled over to the she-conductor and waved her off, before boarding me onto his train. He smiled at me again.
“Sir, welcome aboard,” and then his warm smile turned a little diabolical, “you must be hungry,” he said, holding back a giggle. I winced my eyes at him disapprovingly, but I was indeed hungry. Never had I felt so hungry in fact. It wasn’t merely the wish to eat food, as hunger mediated by our biological cron-jobs so often are, but real, true hunger, hunger where you aren’t only compelled to eat, but where one feels a true emptiness in the belly begging to be filled. With me, the day I set off for work, I had brought a tuppa of cooked tortelloni; and that tuppa has been sitting in my work backpack on the train now for three days. If the thought of eating the tortelloni cold wasn’t enough of a put-off, the thought of eating them cold and old was far worse.

The conductor read my face like a book.
“I see you worrying, sir. Please relax. This isn’t a short domestic route, after all, this train travels off to The Firmament, we have food on board, sir.” What a relief.
“Where then is this food?”
A smug smile came over his face. “Sir, come right this way.” And with that, the conductor walked me through several of the car doors, off to the last car of the train; and, lo and behold, there it was, a dining car with plates and cutlery of fine silver, the walls all done up in EMR purple.
“This.. this is magnificent!” I spoke dumbfounded, gazing at the decor and then the platters.
“The dining car connects with our train here at the moon, sir. Previously, the dining car was on the train coming in the other direction, and now it’s joined to our train. It’s quite a challenge, sir, to source...” Each word the conductor spoke subsequently about the logistics of the dining car was like a drone, drowned out by the figurative drop of drool beginning to figuratively fall down my chin. I gazed upon the silver platters lined with meat, veg, carb, and all in-between. I could hardly shake my focus. And then there were the metal cloches, those dome-shaped metal serving lids concealing the food below - what could possibly be under those? My mind was wild with theories.
“Is this a buffet?” I asked, not able to turn my attention to face the conductor whilst speaking. Seeming to giggle a little to himself, he replied with the affirmative. This time, I was not at all offended by his chortling. I was so locked-in on shiny silverware, nothing else mattered - not even where on earth (or not on Earth) all this food came from. Such thoughts were irrelevant. And, like an F1 driver on the starting line who had just seen the green light, I was off out the gates, shovelling food onto my plate, and then into my mouth.

Chapter 8

After this orgy of appetite, I lay across two of the seats, nursing my sore tummy. Finding me there, prone, the conductor walked over.
“Are you full, sir, there’s plenty more if you’re still hungry.” I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, though my mind was so woolly that I hadn’t the mental focus to so much as formulate a retort let alone deliver one.
“I’m good thank you,” I replied. Looking out the window, I saw once more the black ocean, the cosmos glowing with the many stars of the night sky. We had taken off from the Moon’s surface while I was eating, and had now been travelling for some hours.
“Sir... Sir!” I snapped back to attention. “Sir, I am telling you important information, please pay attention to me sir.”
“Sorry, could you tell me that again?” The conductor sighed.
“The next stop is Mercury, sir. And at-”
“Mercury?! Why Mercury, wouldn’t the next stop be Venus or Mars or something like that?” At what was I think quite a rational and sane interjection, the conductor gave me such piteous eyes.
“Sir, sir, enough with the science sir. You’ve visited the moon now, correct? How did that compare with the science experiments, the telescopes, and the astronauts from that so-called ‘space agency’? Hm, sir?” Point taken. It certainly was different. “Sir, please trust me. I make this route regularly, it’s my job, sir. So if I say the next station is Mercury, the next station is Mercury. Understood sir?” His explanation needn’t have sounded so irritated, but I understood him and nodded. He must get these questions a lot from other passengers kidnapped into space. And that reminded me.
“Those other passengers who were in my car... where are they now, they’re not here anymore. You know, there was a lady in red, and a man wearing a bowler hat...”
“Oh them,” the conductor said with an unnecessary air of contempt, “they were sent back on the Earth-bound journey, no need to worry about them, sir.” What a slick little system they had going here.

“As I was saying sir,” the conductor continued, still irritated by the interruption it seemed, “on Mercury” - he put a special emphasis on the word Mercury - this was unnecessary, surely? - “we have a request for you. We have a parcel on this train to deliver, and we would appreciate it if you could deliver it, sir.” What a curious request. It’s unusual to ask a passenger for an errand, so I decided to have some fun with it. I reclined into my chair, and folded my arms and legs.
“A parcel? Can’t you deliver it yourself, I’m a passenger after all?” Now, I was fully expected the conductor to respond with outrage, or at least irritation, at this bait I set. Of course, I didn’t mind delivering the parcel. Mercury is no doubt as hospitable as the Moon, and I would like a look around. But the conductor shrank slightly, his black flames dwindling, and he looked to the ground.
“Sir..” he began in a mournful tone, twiddling his fiery thumbs. “Sir, there’s something I need to tell you. I’m afraid sir, I’m unable to stray too far from this train.” Hearing the conductor speak so ashamedly, I felt quite bad for my comment now.
“Oh.. I see.” I couldn’t find the words of consolation. There was a long pause as my mind’s cogs cranked and I searched for the right words. I hate these kinds of conversations, they’re impossible.
“How come?” Gah, I blew it! Who just asks ‘how come’, what a callous thing to say! What’s wrong with me! I began to feel that internal pressure and shame that comes with making a faux pas and breaching social convention; the autism alarm, as I call it.

At my indiscretion, the conductor did look a little wounded, and turned his head away. Then, he turned back to face me, looked as if he as about to say something, only turn his head away again after presumably deciding against it.
“I would rather not say, sir,” is all I received.
Another pregnant pause. The conductor was my only companion on this journey, what am I doing turning him against me? Where am I without him, just drifting in space with no way home? I’ve chosen the path of adventure: I shouldn’t anger the guide. I strained some sort of smile.
“What’s Mercury like, then?” I asked, trying to change the conversation. To this the conductor turned and did give me his attention, but wasn’t awfully interested in answering.
“It’s not like what you think, NASA boy. There’s quite a lot of life on Mercury... all of it metal though...” He trailed off here, his mind still somewhere else, likely spiralling. I decided not to pursue this line of questioning any further.

“Ah, we were talking about the parcel. I’d be more than happy to deliver your parcel. It gives me a good excuse to explore Mercury for a bit.” At this, there was a little more life in the conductor’s flames.
“Ah good, I’m glad to hear it sir.” His hit points as a professional seemed to be recovering. “I’ll tell you a little about the task, then sir. You’ll be delivering a parcel to Miss Böhme who lives in the woodlands on Mercury. I’ll give you a map to direct you to her house, and we’ll even provide you with a packed lunch, sir. It may be a longer journey, maybe three hours or so by foot?”
“That sounds excellent, I enjoy a good hike.” The conductor looked pleasantly encouraged.
“And once you’re at Miss Böhme’s house, do ask her to ring the station, just so we know you’ve arrived there safely.”
“Of course, that’s all fine by me.” In truth, I’d agree to anything at this point to assuage the guilt. And telephone’s on Mercury, eh? By this point, nothing surprises me. Though one aspect of the plan did intrigue me.
“This Miss Böhme, she’s a person, right? I’ll be able to speak to her normally, unlike the children I met on Mercury.” The conductor seemed to ponder this question ever-so-slightly too long.
“Yes.. she’s a lovely person, I’ve met her a few times before. She lives alone in the woodland, sir.” Something was clearly up, but I felt it fruitless to press the point.

“Ah,” the conductor rushed to his feet, “one moment please, sir.” And away he dashed. Then over the tannoy, I heard his voice.
“Ahem. Our next stop will be Mercury.”

2026/02/20 The Evolution of the British Palate

It goes without saying that what Britons eat today is alien to what they ate in the past. Some dishes remain in our repertoire: what is English cuisine without the roast, the cottage pie, or the fish and chips? But other dishes, like the traditional stuffed chine, a delicious-looking joint of pork sliced with incisions, each incision stuffed with parsley and other herbs, have disappeared. And it's not as if the aforementioned dishes have been part of our cuisine forever either. The potato, a crucial component of the cottage pie's cap, is a New World crop, and wasn't used in England until the early seventeenth century; and the humble chip, half of a fish and chips duo, only arrived in England through Belgian immigrants in the late Victorian era. These staples are hardly as old as they seem.

It's something I've noticed generally, that food history is hard to remember. Just as the tongue and the nose are far rougher organs, and struggle to discern or categorise as well as the eye or the ear, so too is our culinary past, the history of the rougher organs, far murkier than that of the history concerning our precise organs. We struggle to recall as a culture how pasta was an alien food only a hundred years ago, and a mere seventy-five years ago the BBC were able to pull the wool over the eyes of the English public and tell them spaghetti grew on trees. Yet now spaghetti is eaten in every household and is seen as one of the most simple and essential dishes. A sense does remain that spaghetti is foreign and Italian, and perhaps if you're making a specific dish like bolognaise or carbonara it feels a little more exotic and Italic, but for the most part spaghetti has been warmly embraced under the large tent of 'British food'. Curry has been named a British staple too. This I don't think was some kind of choice to anger Reform voters or who have you, but an expression of the many changes occurring to what we eat, how we eat, and how quickly our diets change without realising.

Dishes the English want have changed, and there are patterns to those changes. The clearest change is that of dried fruit. Dried fruit were in every British desserts, from Christmas pudding to raisins in your bread and butter pudding; but now with younger palates they have fallen out of favour. I confess, I'm part of this change. To tell the truth, I don't really like raisins in cakes and in desserts, and talking around work many others my age don't either. But it's only the young ones; over a certain age, it becomes a non-question. Around the office, we were discussing jam as well. I too am not the biggest fan of jam, and again many others my age at work concurred, to the shock and amazement of our seniors. "How can you not like jam?" one lady said at work in astonishment and disbelief. These dried fruit have stepped aside for chocolate chips, and the jams have made way for chocolate spreads, to cater for the contemporary taste. Will these fruity flavours of old disappear and fall by the wayside? Will they be cast away into the history of British cooking?

Probably, I suggest. A change to our palates is occurring. We see similar patterns in main courses. English cuisine has many strong flavours like stilton, pickled herring, and fried liver. However the most common complaint about our cuisine is that it is bland and flavourless, as if all British cuisine can be found in a Greggs and is as pale as pastry. But those who have tasted the breadth of our cooking know that English cuisine is anything but: if anything, it is too flavourful for the modern taste. I think the same is true of Continental foods: the salamis and cheeses of the French are far too strong a flavour for most to comprehend. And yet it is common today flee from the cuisines of Europe in favour of something else. Many my age flock to oriental and subcontinental cooking in search of 'flavour'. And these cuisines are flavourful, please don't misunderstand, but there's something there which I can't quite express, they're somehow... less aggressive? Less challenging? I can't quite put my finger on what it is. These flavours are somehow straight and tell you exactly what they are, whilst a stilton has a complexity in its flavour, as if it's hiding something, and so too does a salami. Cured meats done properly are never simple flavours, eating them there's always a sense they're hiding something from you- same with strong cheeses, it's like they are showing one aspect of their flavour today, but they could show another tomorrow. This may be a strange comparison, but I feel the same way about pistachio nuts. Each nut hits a different flavour, and each one is a bit of a surprise when you bite in.

The spices of the East on the other hand are more direct: cumin has the flavour of cumin, coriander tastes like coriander, and cloves taste like cloves. The chef of the East uses these flavours like a painting palette, each flavour a different colour with which to craft his dish. There's something different with strong cheeses. Usually, they're served on a cheese board because they're harder to pair, and are instead paired with wines, another unfathomable array of subtlety and complexity. Our cuisine so often attempts to highlight the individual flavours. The roast in a kind of pantheon of the best flavours, all bathed in gravy; and the success of a roast is found in each of the components being individually flavourful and delicious. The parsnip is a great example. The parsnip in a roast is ever-so-flavourful, and, well roasted to sweetness, has an incredible flavour; but the parsnip is merely part of the supporting cast. He's an extra beside the big players, but one instrument in the orchestra.¹

This article may have rambled a little, I must apologise, and much of its contents I must've written elsewhere. But what I wanted to get across is that our palates are changing. What we want to eat and enjoy eating is changing. I've only lived for a quarter of a century, and even in my lifetime what people eat and want to eat is changing. The foods people choose in restaurants, when they want to try something exotic, is not so much of interest as what they eat regularly, what food feels homely and comforting to them. As I've talked about elsewhere food defines us and our personalities. As the old adage goes, we are what we eat. Our gut flora are fed, affecting our mood and thoughts, and the nutrients we derive from the food we regularly eat affect our hormones and how we think. The British people have changed and have always been changing, and so too have our diets. Diets both determine how we think, whilst simultaneously how Britons think affects what they want to eat: it's a chicken and egg system where we symbiotically change with our diets. And as the British people change over time, which we most certainly have over the past fifty years both demographically and in thought and belief, it is no wonder that our diets and our taste buds have moved in lock-step.

Certain flavours have fallen out of favour and others are becoming popular, for better or for worse. In our endless striving for authenticity in cuisine, the humble Hong Kong takeaway or the British East Indian takeaway, where the flavours are made appealing to our sensibilities, may fade also. When the palates of a people change, the foods of the past make way for the dishes of the future. And when the palates of a people change, the people themselves change.

1. Perhaps the English roast is the perfect metaphor for traditional English political life? That sounds like a thesis to write up on a rainy day...

2026/02/15 The Assault on Urinals

I write to you today on a topic many would consider frivolous, but one I consider to be of the utmost importance: urinals are disappearing. I began to notice the trend some time ago. Back in 2022, I was visiting a friend in Oxford, and whilst I was there I went to the Pitt-Rivers museum. The Pitt-Rivers museum is in my opinion the best museum in the world; there, they have any item you can think of - take the comb, for example - and they have a cabinet filled with combs from all over the world, all slightly different, but all possessing the form 'comb'. Wonderful place, but it is, to put it in the tongue of today, a little 'woke'. I remember quickly passing some exhibit - I can't remember what it was now, perhaps on ocean pollution or feminism - very quickly so as to keep it squarely out of my line of sight. Contrasted with the gorgeous Victorian wooden cabinets, the exhibit of draped coloured rags in a dentist-bright room (why is modern art displayed in such bright rooms?), was such an egregious eye-sore I did everything in my power to bring about it's non-existence through ignoring it. So, because the Pitt-Rivers museum was a little woke - it was hard back then not to succumb when you held the bounty of a Victorian collector - they had 'gender-neutral toilets'.

Gender-neutral toilets: who are they for? Who wants them? Women don't want them, since the toilet is a vulnerable place for one, and for two some more delicate women may be embarrassed being seen by men to be doing something dirty - though I accept this second point today is becoming rarer; and men don't want them because there are no urinals. The way the Pitt-Rivers museum designed their gender-neutral toilets was by giving everyone a cubicle. Now, I understand the fairer sex have nothing but cubicles in their toilets; not that I've been in of course, but I have no doubt this is the case. So for them it is natural to have a series of cubicles and to use them whether for ones or twos. For a man, it is different. When pissing, a man wants a urinal. Some men may not: I have met some men who insist on using cubicles, and it is a point on which it is right to tease a man if he comes out with such a preference. There is no good reason to go through the rigmarole of using a full toilet for urinating as a man unless you are somehow embarrassed to be pissing standing up in view of other men; which you most certainly shouldn't be. It is our right, as men.

The second time I saw gender-neutral toilets, arranged in just the same way, endless rows of cubicles, was at the university pub. I say pub - it was barely a pub. They had a special knack for closing the moment you and your friends pitched up, closing with no regard for clientele nor profit. It was ran by students who didn't care in the slightest whether the business succeeded or failed; it was as if they wanted to run it into the ground to spite their fellow students. What a strange place. And over the course of my studies, the pub only got worse and worse and worse, closing earlier and earlier and earlier, until they decided to redevelop the premises. They stripped away much of the interior decor, which wasn't a nice decor to be clear, but at least it had a pub vibe. There were sofas to sit at, some wooden decor: it was sufficient. Then they decided to remodel the place, turning it from a passable pub into a kind of Ikea showroom, filled with tiny table, high chairs, and roomy pastel paint. It wasn't ugly by any means, but it most certainly wasn't a pub any longer. The bright paint and crispness to the decor was hostile to comfort; instead, like a bar or cafe, you felt as if you had no right to just sit there and hang about. One casualty of this transformation was the gents. For a little while before the makeover, the gents was closed up for some reason saying do not enter. Well, once when I was a bit tipsy I did enter and I did use the facilities, all of which worked fine. I may well have not been the only one to do this, as later on they put warning tape over the entrance with a slightly larger sign to discourage toilet use. Our university society had the misfortune of frequenting this pub for so many years that, when nature called, walking over to the gents where we have always known it to be was second nature. But it was now closed, and for good. Instead, considerably further down the corridor were their new gender-neutral cubicle toilets. What a horrid replacement.

Though, as I say, I hesitate to call Mooch a pub, there is something particularly insidious about removing urinals from a pub. Pub urinals are a great joy. There is something a bit messy about a pub urinal: sometimes they are the classic egg-shaped Armitage ones, a sign of a classier pub; sometimes they are troughs, and you can see the river of piss marble-run down to the drain; and other times there are those floor urinals, where you feel as if you are pissing onto a wall. The last kind are quite old fashioned, and I can't say I'm the biggest fan. On a recent pub crawl in St Albans, we visited a pub with these wall urinals, and interestingly the wall urinals went around the shape of the room. As a result there was a corner to the urinal, and being drunk, such a novelty of pissing into the corner couldn't be passed over. I wouldn't recommend the experience though. As Pythagoras would put it, the hypotenuse is always longer than the triangle's height. I return from the toilet, and my friend who's been to this pub before asks me, "did you use the piss corner?" Of course I did. The novelty appears to be universal to the psyche of man.

Pubs on the whole however are resistant to this change. Pubs are after all resistant to most changes; they are like an anchor to Britain's past, holding down a semblance of national identity whilst every other institution drifts away to see. Pubs may well be, if present patterns persist, the last bastion of urinals. No, the place which has gotten rid of urinals which has gotten me so worked up - so worked up to the point of writing this article - is my workplace.

The toilets at my workplace have always been a bit rubbish. It was a coin flip whether the cistern could manage to flush a number two, and it took what must've been over five minutes to refill again for the second flush. They were annoying, and a refurbishment was necessary. What was most certainly unnecessary, however, was the removal of all the urinals. What possessed them? As you will observe in the image above, there are four cubicles in the new toilets. There used to only be three. The fourth cubicle at the end, the one behind the supporting pillar they couldn't remove, that cubicle was where the urinals were. That whole back wall used to be urinals. Replaced with a single cubicle. I'm not sure if it's quite clear in the picture, but that fourth cubicle is really big compared to its siblings; that cubicle is enormous. The room was clearly designed to have urinals at the back, so it was designed to have a cubicle-and-a-half's space. But now they've gone through with this ridiculous makeover, they've created a one-and-a-half width cubicle instead.

What then have been the responses to this change? Absolutely nothing. I can't say whether it's just the general sense of resignation people assume in workplaces so as to protect themselves from everyone else's tomfoolery, or whether they actually don't mind. I've talked about this, complaining, to a quite a few people. Most are a little disappointed they're gone, but none were up in arms about it. To me, this is clearly a problem. I now have to take far longer to use the toilet at work, the place I spend the lion's share of my waking hours. It just feels so wrong not using a urinal outside of a private dwelling. How can these people not understand?

The question I ask is simply this: why? What good did removing the urinals do? A urinal is likely cheaper than installing a full toilet, and with a few you can improve the throughput and efficiency of the toilet. Seems clear and reasonable that the tradition is continued - it doesn't even rely on a Chesterton's fence argument to maintain the tradition of the urinal. So why? I have only one answer, and bear with me since it's a conspiratorial one.

I remember when I was a child I was with my family in the British museum. I needed the toilet, so my parents took me over to where the toilets were, and there was an almighty queue. The queue spanned a long line following a wall, and then once I got closer, I saw the queue descend quite far down the staircase for where the toilets were. I really needed to go, so I was worried. But I remember my mum reassuring me, saying that these people were waiting for the women's toilets, and that I can just go down to the men's. I walked past all the women waiting - honestly, it must've been nearly a hundred (at least it looked that way when I was young) - and went straight to the men's toilets, not a single person queuing. This incident left quite a strong impression on me growing up on the value of urinals. The difference can be startling. So here is my theory: the removal of urinals is not done for any good reason at all, only out of a misplaced sense of equality. Men clearly have had an advantage since the time of Adam and Eve, namely that they can urinate while standing and point it where they please. This is a kind of biological inequality between men and women, the worst kind of inequality to modern minds, and can only be ironed out by force. But you can't create a contraption to help women do the same, since any such device would be invasive or unhygienic - it just wouldn't work. So how do you achieve such an equality? By dragging the men down, down to the level of having to queue. Only by removing the urinals will the queue for the men's toilets equal the queue for the women's.

The assault on urinals is just that, a way of weakening man in the name of equality. This is no doubt the worst kind of equality, the kind of equality Communism has so often been denounced for, that being the equality which doesn't make the weak strong, but rather makes the strong weak. We can't make the slower child run any faster, so let's weigh down the faster child. I find this psychology, however prevalent it may be, to be utter madness. Man was born unequal; we are all unequal in terms of the flesh. Some men are taller and have better chances with women and jobs: this as been studied and it is true. You can't argue the platitude that everyone is given different gifts, because this simply isn't true. Some people appear to have been given all the gifts, they are smart, athletic, and handsome, and others have none of the gifts, and are left stupid, autistic, and ugly. This is the way of the world. The many gifts of God were not distributed evenly across His children, it is plain to see.

But given this truth, what do we do about it? I've found solace in the image in Isaiah, one which C. S. Lewis references, that of the lion and the lamb living side by side. The lion is strong, an eater of other animals, and lounges around all day like the fat-cat aristocrat he is; and then there's the lamb, young and feeble, finds defence in the pack, and is vulnerable to predators like the lion. In the state of nature, the lion would simply eat the lamb by virtue of its nature. But in being called to lie side by side, the lion is called to control and tame his blood lust, and the lamb in being called to lie beside the lion is called to control and tame his fear. Both animals have to control their natures in order to live in harmony and love, but importantly neither animal subverts and undermines their natures. The lion isn't called to be a lamb.

What we see here in the example of urinals, is the request to train a lion as a lamb. It is a drive to not accept our natural differences and accept them, but to iron over the beauty in natural inequality, peaceably and lovingly living in the understanding of it, and instead flatten all distinctions out of a sense of envy. It is just envy. Urinals are a joy to men, and I can't stand to see them disappear. There will always be holdouts should this trend continue, small urinal enclaves like pubs, but general public life will just be made ever-so-slightly worse for men. That is not a future I wish to see. I can only hope for the continued longevity of the urinal, and the men begin to realise how important what they have is.

2026/02/08 A Tunnel to the Stars - Part 3

Chapter 5

What began as a mosh had become crowd surfing. I could feel the girls hands on my back like cilia cells transporting me further and further away from the station and from the village, transporting me still further beyond the landmarks I saw from the hill. We must have travelled some distance, since the scenery I saw was quite different. Expanses made way for hills, hills where we saw other moon-flowers, blue-ish ones and yellowish ones, each with small bulbous petals like some kind of aloe; and as we journeyed on, the hills became taller and steeper as we went further and deeper in to the terrain. I was stricken with fear. The conductor had said the train would wait, but how long was ‘a while.’ A while could be only half an hour. Would the train leave without me? How long would it take me to find my way back to the station anyway? The station became, to my mind, a kind of anchor point, a bastion planted in this truly alien terrain. Nothing was familiar. The giggling girls, cute as can be as they carried me, didn’t quite feel like people. Each had all the mannerisms of people, all the normal behaviours of little girls, but again I wondered how did they get here? Where are their parents? And if they aren’t any parents, how were they born?

Such mundane modernist sentiments consumed my STEM-addled mind, as a clearing emerged beyond the hills passed. Here, you could see for quite a distance. My eyes were drawn to the taller hills which bounded the horizon, then to the blue dot in the sky we call. But only after my eyes drew downwards from our home did I see, planted squarely in the centre of the expanse, a stepped ziggurat reaching up to the heavens. Now, I’ve visited London and seen truly tall skyscrapers: this was not as tall as, say, the Shard. But, stood against a barren and flat environ, this ziggurat was truly overwhelming and - forgive me for saying it again - alien. Was this how the conquistadors saw Chichen Itza, as some humongous but hidden pyramid used for who knows what purpose?

First sight of the ziggurat sent shivers down my spine. If I were a captured conquistador, the sight of one would have no doubt meant certain death, and that I was to be sacrificed to some demon, the head left behind to be counted amongst the many other sacrifices made there. Though, in spite of such associations, the sight of the ziggurat calmed me. Whether it was caused by some kind of ego-death or caused by hysterics from my back’s tickling by the many infant hands, I felt no fear nor threat from this temple to the unknown. Was this the black magic of a demon calming the sacrifice so as to relax his flesh before the feast, some kind of force by which the mind is made supple? Such thoughts drifted through me. But, in that supple and suggestive state, nothing very much bothered me. Being before the ziggurat was so calming. I had the conductor’s approval, after all: who else was I to trust?

To the ziggurat, we headed straight, and once we arrived there, the girls sat me down by the entrance. One of the girls, slightly more mature than the rest, then climbed up a couple of the ziggurat’s steps, opened a kind of hidden cupboard in the step, and pulls out from there a dozen or so mitre-like hats, each with a ruby in it’s centre. The hats were passed around the children, and, without any fuss, jealousy nor communication, those who required a hat received one, and those who didn’t passed theirs along. The girl passing out the hats, clearly some kind of leader of the group, then descended step by step to the entrance. There, she sang a spell in their unplaceable lunar tongue, and the two halves of this granite-looking door parted, yielding an entrance way. The hatted girls who surrounded me walked me in to the ziggurat, leaving the unhatted ones behind, waving and giggling. The door shut. It was pitch black.

Flame torches were lit to light the room. Through all this, I mustn’t omit to mention, I was giddy as a gadfly. What began as an openness and an implicit trust, no doubt emanating from the potency of this structure or what lay within, had become a kind of euphoria tickling in my bosom, almost begging to be released in laughter and merry song. It was no wonder the giddiness was getting to me, for we approached the centrepiece of this ceremonial place: a sarcophagus. The sarcophagus was made of a similar opaque-yet-sparkling granite-looking rock as the door, only this time there was a kind of reddish-pink hue to the stone. ‘Some kind of locally mined igneous rock perhaps?’, my doped-out mind wondered. The girls wearing their funny hats led me to the sarcophagus, and the head-girl pointed at me with her staff - where in the chronology she obtained this staff which greatly exceeded her height I can’t quite recall - and I, as willing as a lemming, crawled into the Sarcophagus, turned onto my back, and instinctively crossed my arms over my chest.

I closed my eyes and took in this great joyous energy I felt all around me, an energy that felt like a return, like a great homecoming of the prodigal son. All around me, I could hear the girls singing in voices transcendent, singing what sounded like nursery rhymes, though I couldn’t understand the words. They went round in a kind of roundel, each singer delayed from the previous, and I could hear the melody circle around me like a helterskelter of song. And as I nodded off into what might have been the most peaceful slumber I had ever felt, more proximate than their singing I could hear the sound of granite scraping granite. In time the darkness of my shut eyes made way for the true darkness of enclosure: I had been shut inside.

“Rest.” This motherly voice reverberated throughout the sarcophagus. A frisson fell through my spine like one I had never felt before. “Rest, and rest deeply. Reach for my arms.” It felt as if these arms were descending, approaching in for an embrace. I reached up; but my arms themselves didn’t move- though it certainly felt as if they did. And upon my cheek I felt the softest kiss. Then the visions began.

Chapter 6

I write with regret, dear reader, but I don’t want to share what I saw in these visions. Too personal, they were, far too personal. What I saw, to describe it more generally, was my life: my future, should I continue on the track I’m now travelling. Little changed in the life that I saw from how it is today, time’s metronome continuing to tick along. And... how should I put this... as time passed the life I saw began to lose its colour. There was something to it so mundane, mundane in the sense of mud or dirt. It was all so terribly lonely.

A small crack of light shone in to the sarcophagus as I heard the granite scrape granite once again. Then I saw the pale-faced elven girls beaming their smiles at me - it was awfully embarrassing. Here I was, a grown man lying down, my face wet with tears, and these girls all stood there looking to me expectantly, as if I’d come back with some kind of great wisdom or knowledge. I had nothing of the sort. I journeyed into Hades to find my soul and, like Orpheus, lost her there forever. We each carry such a hole in our hearts, I reckon. Sometimes in days of jubilance and joy, the drunkenness of our happiness makes us forget that hole is there; but at our lowest, when life’s at its hardest in our failure and grief, that hole aches, it bleeds, and it throbs in its inflammation. Such was this experience: the grief in my core, the unfulfilledness, the weakness, which every man spends his life suturing to no avail, poured out of my heart’s hole like a scabbed wound opened afresh.

These girls didn’t reflect my pains one bit, not an ounce of empathy. No doubt they could see my agony - my face was painted with it - but they grinned and guffawed just as they did before. Lifting me by the hand from my granite encasement, the head priestess girl walked me out of the ziggurat, the rest of the girls trailing behind. And, in the dazzling sunlight, made ever-more dazzling by the silvery lunar surface, we retraced our steps back to the village. We arrived, and the head priestess organised the girls who paraded back with us from the ziggurat, along with the many more with whom we joined in the village. The girls were arranged so they could all face me, and began to wave.
“Bye bye!” they chanted so unnaturally, as if the phrase were a foreign incantation. “Bye bye!” they said in unison, as if you were a guest concluding a primary school assembly. Their joy radiated like the sun; I could hardly face them. They shone too bright. I turned my back to them so as to protect my eyes, and began my ascent up the hill from which I came. But there, standing just behind the hill’s crest stood the conductor, watching over all that had happened. Though in his shadows any emotion upon his face I could perceive would be no more accurate than a reading of a Rorschach ink splodge, what I saw in him - what I felt in him looking down at me - was one of knowing. Whether rightly or wrongly, I had the strong sense that he knew. He knew about the meaning of these lunar children, he knew about the ziggurat, about the ritual, and most of all, he knew how I felt. Though he was a good few hundred yards away, I could just sense that even without discerning my face he could see my hollowness laid bare. I turned my head back to the lunar children, and I saw their radiant faces beaming with light one last time. They still stood there, just where I had left them, continuing to wave me off. I managed a weak smile back. Then I continued my ascent towards the conductor.

“Ah, sir, you’ve returned, you’ve been gone for so long, it’s good to see you again.” So long? It’s been an hour at most I’ve been away surely? Pouncing upon my quizzical face, the conductor - with the aloof glee of a teller of riddles divulging an answer to a struggling guesser - said to me, “It’s been three days you’ve been away for.” My first response was a knee-jerk of irritation at his demeanour. But once it sank in how long had past, it began to horrify me so much time had elided without my noticing.
“Three days? You must be joking, it couldn’t have been three days.” But before the conductor had even the chance to answer, my belly beat him to it with an almighty rumble, which, though I doubt it could be the case, I certainly hope was inaudible the children down below. To this, the conductor let out a howling cackle, a laugh which went on and on far longer than the incident was funny. This strange man, there is no way he could be a professional.

Wiping away the laughter’s tears, the conductor led me back to the station; and there waiting at the two platforms were two trains, one Star-bound, the other Earth-bound.
“Sir,” the conductor spoke, this time in a more serious tone, “there are two trains at the platform. The first train you see, the one nearest, is heading back to Earth. If you board this train, sir, you will head straight back to the tunnel which brought you here - you may be a little late for work, but time will adjust itself, no trouble. The other train, you see, is our train, the train which brought us here to the Moon. But Sir! Please bear in mind sir, that this is the last train you can change to which can take you home until this train turns back around at the terminus stop, The Firmament. Please choose wisely sir. My colleague on the Earth-bound service is very friendly, so if you choose to return, please don’t be afraid of losing my company.” And at this, the she-shadow conductor on the train for the return journey popped her head out from the first car of the train. She gave me a little wave and blew a kiss. Odd, but she seemed sweet enough. Were these trains all operated by shadow-people?

A real choice was put before me: do I continue off into the deep black sea of space, or do I return to the steady comfort of dry land? The conductor began to stare at me and winced, clearly noticing my umming and arring.
“Sir, you haven’t got very long to decide, the Earth-bound train is due to depart soon. Please decide soon.”

2026/02/01 A Tunnel to the Stars - Part 2

Chapter 3

The conductor began to laugh. A cackling laugh, the kind of laugh which says, “I know something you don’t.” It was really rather irritating. Then in his uncanny accent he proceeded,
“Erm, I’m not sure how much I’m at liberty to say, sir. For now know that I am an employee of EMR, and that you’re in safe hands: we mean you no harm, I mean to say.”
He looked a little too pleased with his smarmy response, so I pressed the point,
“Not at liberty to say? Myself and the other passengers have essentially been kidnapped, taken on a train we didn’t board, into... outer space? What’s the meaning of this!”
Then conductor’s face - or as much of his face as I could make out - lost its past jollity, and stiffened.
“Other passengers?” his replied quizzically with an eyebrow raised, after which he dashed like a black blur so fast my eyes couldn’t register he had gone, and he was standing beside the lady in red.

I caught up to him jogging-not-jogging down the train.
“This lady here,” he continued, “is she.. here?”
“I tried shaking here earlier to wake her up, she’s a live though, I checked her...”, my countenance sharpened coming to a conclusion as to what could’ve be meant, “What have you done with her?!”
The conductor put his hands up in front of him and waved away the accusations,
“No no no, this lady is perfectly safe. It’s just that she’s in torpor. Everyone else on this train is in a kind of torpor, except you. And I have guaranteed you’ll be perfectly safe on your journey, it’s EMR policy!”
At this he puffed his chest, and badge seemed to beam with light against his shadowy form. I apologised for my implicit accusation. And then a hollowness opened up inside of me. From the window, I could hardly see the Earth now, and it was fast becoming a blue LED sticking through the jet-black tablecloth of the cosmos. And here, on this train, was just me. Just me, and this... being? He wasn’t a human in the biological sense, though he seemed properly proportioned like a man. And he did appear to have ‘person-hood’. He spoke like a person, had the sensibilities of a person, follies like pride and anger, and even had an accent. To have an accent you must be around others surely? I began to stare at him a little longer. In him I saw the only other person here so far from Earth, the only person who knows what’s going on. It began to sink into me deeper the severity of the situation; and how much I must now rely on this strange conductor, who is allegedly from East Midlands Railway. After years of commuting, my trust for EMR is only skin deep.

“Me?”
The conductor had caught me staring at him, and preempted a question I was too awkward to ask. The conductor chuckled, but it was a mournful chuckle. There was pain in his voice.
“I would really rather not talk about it, sir... All I will say is, for now at least, that I was human.” In the long pause which followed, only the clinks of the rails, clink clank, clink clank was heard, as we passed a black-satin cosmos dotted with stars.

All of a sudden the conductor, startled by seemingly nothing, reached into his pocket and found a golden pocket watch. And, inspecting the time, his flame-like shadows which after the past conversation had died down to a dwindling flame, raged back up to a roaring fire, as if the gas knob of his shadows had been turned up again.
“Sorry, one moment,” the conductor said. And moving somehow faster than he previously had, vanished. Then over the tannoy the following was heard:
“We are now approaching The Moon in the next few moments. Please make sure you keep any belongings with you at all times. Thank you.”

Then just as suddenly as he disappeared, the conductor returned.
“Ah sorry about that sir, I just had to go and make the announcement. Where were we.” His face darkened and his fires dwindled for just a moment, before they jolted back and returned.
“Ah yes, that was it, we’re arriving at The Moon. Will you be alighting here, sir?”
I wasn’t sure how to reply to this other than,
“Of course not, how would I alight at the moon? I haven’t got any equipment, no space suit, no oxygen, nothing. It’s a vacuum out there, you said so yourself.”
Again my question received the response of that same irritating cackle. I glared at him, and, mildly startled, he stopped.
“Why sir, there is no air in space, but there is plenty of air on the moon. The moon is perfectly safe.”
“But, but what about the Astronauts in all their kit? What about that video of the experiment dropping a hammer and a feather together, and them falling at the same time? All the footage we have shows there is no air to speak of.”
Again, cackling laughter, this time it seemed a little more uncontrollable. Still wincing from his convulsions, he replied,
“Sir, sir, you don’t believe those silly videos are real, do you?”
Great. Now the only other soul on this train has revealed himself to be a loon.
“Sir, look with your eyes out the window.”
The silver surface of the moon was coming into view. “Look, really look sir. Look with your own eyes, not with the eye of another man’s camera. Look.”

What I saw was not the moon I had come to know from the telly. What I saw was a shimmering surface, a flat surface, a surface covered in small flowers? A surface with milky-white brooks? A waterwheel? Houses? I could hardly believe my eyes.
“Sir, now you see it with your own eyes, do you believe?”
In shock and awe, I stared on as we came into the station. ‘The Moon’ the sign read, with the national rail symbol beside it. Then, the train came to a halt, and my ears were relieved of that tinny sound of the rails.

The doors of the train then opened, and there was a sudden gust as air left the train. Terrified and unbelieving in the conductor, I ducked my head into my lap, my hands clasped over my mouth, panting for breath as if the air cupped in my hands was the last air I would ever have. Then the fear drained out of me, and I realised I really could breath. I glanced up to look out the window and view the alien landscape, before standing up to really take stock of the vast view. Powered on by faith in the conductor’s assessment, I strode out of the car and alighted onto the cold stone surface of the platform. A voice from behind me spoke.
“We’ll be stopping here for a few hours. Since you’re our only passenger sir, take some time to explore, the train can wait around for a while if need be.”
“Typical EMR timetabling”, I thought to myself.

Chapter 4

The moon was not as I expected. The moon I found, when placed upon the scale from scientific to mythic, would be towards the centre, edging towards scientific. Alas, there was no cheese to speak of. The ground was solid rock, rock so compacted, flat and solid, it felt like walking upon paving stones. The air was thinner than ours on Earth, like the air you breathe at high altitudes, but air nonetheless. Gravity also was thinner than the Earth’s, but not as springy and boingy as NASA had made out. Sure, you could leap twice as far as you could usually, but there wasn’t quite the same floaty-ness that one would expect. Leaping so far from unsprung, stone ground was entertaining however, and this kept me occupied for some time, leaping back and forth. I then wondered how fast I could traverse the landscape leaping from knoll to knoll. It felt effortless. In my leaping, I came across a more substantial hill, up which I leaped too and fro, zig-zagging a path up to the top of the hill as if I were in Minecraft. What I saw from the top was stunning.

It wasn’t the vast expanse of reflective rock, nor the vast fields of little purple flowers which were luminescent. No. however beautiful these were, they weren’t the proximate cause of my being stunned. No, the cause of my stunning was the village of small dancing girls below the mountain. These girls, all roughly seven to eleven years of age had faces as white as plaster, and braided hair of silver thread. Each wore very simple white woolen dresses without pleat nor petticoat, and each danced and played upon what looked to be their village green (village silver?).

Afraid of disrupting the scene, and as one chronically averse to pursuing curiosity knowing how often it leads to danger from the movies, I opted to turn back, and to let these girls continue playing in peace and harmony. But just as I turned, behind me stood the conductor.
“Go on sir, they’re friendly. Don’t be a coward.”
At once, I turned back around, and tried to control my breathing after this jump-scare. But he was right: when next would I see something so fantastical? I steeled myself to go down and greet them. Then, checking over my shoulder to ensure the conductor had left, I gingerly descended the hill.

Closer up, I could see these girls more clearly. There were no adults about, and what looked to be from a distance substantial houses, were in fact many smaller cobblestone dwellings. Some of the girls danced around a maypole, others skipped rope, and a few I noticed were playing tricks with a cat’s cradle. The chorus of the maypole dancers melded with the shrieks of joy from the other girls heard only on a school playground; to some this may sound like a cacophony, a great pain to the ears, but I found it to be rather beautiful.

One girl stood beside a particularly milky looking pond just in front of the village silver and was chucking ever larger rocks into the water to watch them splash. For a little girl, the size of these rocks she was carrying were impressive, though this was likely the aid of the weakened gravity. The girl looked up, her mouth hanging open, though not perturbed, and pointed at me. Then, turning to the girls playing, she hollered some words in a tongue I didn’t recognise, and pointed at me again.

In moments, the mass of girls ran towards me, laughing. Dozens and dozens came, and more came still from the little houses.There seemed to be no end of these girls. It didn’t take long before the swell of pale faced giggling little girls swarmed around me, all of them standing around me pressing against me and against one another, almost carrying me away. The fondness for these children and their village fete had left me, as I was being carried away by the crowd to somewhere I knew not. I looked back over my shoulder, but the conductor was nowhere to be seen.

2026/01/25 A Tunnel to the Stars - Part 1

Chapter 1

The 6:18 train to London St Pancras is a depressing journey in winter. You stand on the platform whilst Boreas blows his wind at your face, and at any other part of you not covered in fleece, coat, glove, and hat. It’s dark. Dark as night, though it is morning; and still, quiet, everyone standing like living statues. Every morning I take this train, and every morning I see the same few faces: the man in his Hi-Vis with his bicycle, his flowing shoulder-length hair, and crow-like face; the short, hunched lady, so short she’d only come up to my sternum, who looks as if she’s not as old as she looks; and the suave, grey-haired man, always standing cockily, who I’ve seen around town talking to any number of women. All still, like living statues on an open-air set, all waiting without movement, waiting for the train’s deliverance.

Just as I do every morning, I walked down the steps towards the platform, holding onto the cold, metal banister for fear of slipping on the ice. I walked along the platform, found my usual spot, and froze myself in place in the winter cold, joining this avant-garde art collective of living statues. For how long I waited on the platform, I couldn’t even tell you. Time passes differently waiting for a train. Sometimes it moves ever-so-slowly, like when you see that the train is delayed, and the time of arrival gets later and later each time the delayed time approaches; other times station-time moves exceptionally fast as you enter a kind of monk-like trance for half an hour and there, the train has arrived.

The duration of time which passed couldn’t have been too long, since it wasn’t before long that the train’s two little eyes could be seen beaming in the distance. The sound of the train approaching became louder and louder until, disrupting the stillness of the platform, came the great metal wyrm rumbling and groaning, blaring it’s own bright lights, before screeching to a halt. Then on command it opened its doors so as to invite us cold statues in. This piercing of our peace ought to be shocking. After all, the great Leviathan has emerged from our Sargasso Sea; but it’s not. It’s no longer a shock. If you too saw it day after day, you too would be conditioned this way.

Stepping aboard, everyone gropes for a seat. There are reservations above each chair, which are more often than not followed, but for a shorter journey like mine they needn’t be followed. I don’t follow them, at the very least. Others take this quest to find their seat a little too seriously. I saw one lady, dressed in red, a red business dress with the matching lipstick, staring at each seat’s number, meticulously searching for her assigned seat. You see many such people, staring at the allocations so hard that it seems as if they only want to look as if they’re looking, look as if they’re following the right custom. And if someone else happens to be sitting in their allocation, a kind of very English altercation may ensue. Today, such an event occurred. The rouged lady came up to me, pursed her lips ever so slightly with a nervous look, and with righteous timidity said, “I think you might be sitting in my seat.” The train car was empty. I replied with the obligatory apology, and sat elsewhere.

As risky a choice as it may sound, many on this early-hours commute rest their eyes for the duration to prime themselves for the long day awaiting them. But I want to confirm, I am not among their ranks. For one, my journey is short, only fifteen minutes, so it the sleep won isn’t worth the risk; and for two, I haven’t the command over my sleep not to sleep past my stop. Some regular commuters whose journeys take them to the South day after day have no doubt developed the super powers necessary to time their sleep to perfection, as if in their mind was the retired bell of a Benedictine monastery. Well, at least I hope they have such powers; it would be quite a tragedy if they regularly missed their stops.

We passed fields, all grass fields with livestock, cows, a few sheep, and wound past to East Midlands Parkway station where our train stopped. Right behind the station is the old Ratcliffe power plant, the last coal power plant to close down in England, closing down only last year. Stopped at the station, you see the great cooling towers up close. Even in the dark you can see the hatch of concrete supports holding up these marvels of engineering. These hatched bases, to me in the hypnagogia of night, have a mycelial feeling; the cooling towers then feel like great fungal towers, pluming out noxious clouds of spores. But alas, the cooling towers belch out their spore no more. Only the carcasses remain.

We came to the confluence of the Trent and the Soar, and the Trent had once again burst its banks. Not on the scale of years prior, mind, when the flooding was such that the fields surrounding the tracks were submerged, leaving only the trees sticking out above the waterline reminding you the fields were still there. A few cattle grazed by the Trent, and I could just about make out the farmer in his four-by-four herding them? Tending to them? Feeding them? I couldn’t quite tell. The train continues moving, not permitting me to see anything too closely. You see houses, vehicles, people, animals, geological formation, all pass too fast to process, accept, or properly consider; perhaps this is why one never gets bored of staring out the window, even when making the same commute each day, and even when it’s so dark little can be made out.

Chapter 2

Yawning without restraint, overcome by the work-week’s weariness and my own poor bedtime routine, I squinted my eyes ever-so-slightly as we entered the tunnel. Not sleeping - certainly not sleeping - only half resting my eyes. The darkness of the night outside the train made way for the true darkness of the tunnel. The timbre of the wheels rolling along the tracks changes in a tunnel. I haven’t the vocabulary for sounds, but if I were to describe the change it would be to say the sounds become more rounded. The sounds, no longer escaping into the wide expanse, are rolled around the tunnel like some kind of ball mill, giving them a smoother sounds. Maybe you could describe it as a muted treble?

The train continued in the tunnel. Too long in the tunnel. This tunnel is only short, usually we speed through in around ten seconds, but nearly a minute had passed and there was no sign of leaving. Though it was night, even the LED-illuminated night would be a lighter kind of darkness to the tunnel. Another minute passed. Again, we hadn’t left the tunnel. I could still hear the round sound of the tunnel tracks, and I could see true darkness out of the window. I was confused, but there was little to do other than raise my right eyebrow in suspicion. I scanned the car. The lady in red who sat across but two from me was asleep, her eyes closed. The only other in the car was an older, greying gent far down the train wearing a blue suit. His eyes too were tactically shut, squashed down by his matching blue bowler hat. I sat back in my seat. I sat back in my seat, and stared deeply into the blackness of the tunnel wall, almost fed up with its persistence. And then, a sparkle. A flicker. The wall was strewn with small dashing lights- no, not LED lights, but the kind of light found in reflection. As if the tunnel were strewn with veins of silver and gold- but no, not veins, they were like glitter, sparkling. Like stars.

And then I noticed: the timbre of the train’s rattling had changed. What was a rounded sound made way for this hollow sound, a sound wholly unlike the rattling of rails in the open air. It sounded as if there were no bass, as if there was no ground against which to reverberate, leaving only the once-absent treble of each clink and clank to ring. This was becoming alarming. Looking out the window once more, I could see not just a few flecks, but a vast sweep of stars covering a night sky. There were no houses, no vehicles, no people, no animals, and most worryingly, no geological formation. No land to speak of. Whether I looked above or below, as it was above, so it was below: it was all the night sky glittered with stars. “Am I in space?”, I spoke aloud.

“Yes”, I answered myself, this time in my head. I must be in space. Where else could I be? Where else would there be nothing other than black space and twinkling little stars? Did I fall asleep then? The pinch test returned a negative result. Hm. I then felt it necessary in this emergency to break all train protocol and talk to the other passengers. Either I was in a lucid dream, a lucid dream in which I can feel pain, and such embarrassments are without consequence, or it was a true emergency and action had to be taken. I went over to the older man first. Though further away, I felt less awkward waking him than the red lady. First, I tapped on his shoulder with my finger tips, and in a meek tone said, “Excuse me sir.” This had little effect on the sleeping man. Emboldened, I tapped harder, now with my whole hand, and spoke a little louder, “Excuse me sir, could you wake up, there’s an emergency.” He didn’t budge. That would surely wake anyone up, however deep the slumber. Raising my right eyebrow, I sighed in anticipation for what was to be done next. I clasped each shoulder and shook the man, shouting, “Wake up!” But the man didn’t stir. His limp body simply fell to the neighbouring chair, his bowler hat falling from his head in a twirl.

Horrified, I propped him back up and rethroned his hat. Then, placing two fingers to just below his jawbone, I took his pulse. He was still living, thank goodness. Something awfully peculiar was afoot, and I couldn’t quite place what. The train continued at the same pace, the stars hardly moving from their fixtures; no word over the tannoy from the conductor either. I moved at pace to the lady in red. She too was still sleeping, but by this time my patience - and more importantly, my inhibitions - had worn thin. Placing a hand on each shoulder, I gave this poor lady a car crash of a shake, shouting into her ear, “Wake up! Emergency!”, mouthing each syllable in an almost patronising tone. No response. Taking her pulse, she too was in the realm of the living, but like the gentleman remained in this unconscious state.

I returned to my seat and pondered. Then, after pondering for a little while, I gave up pondering, and played about on my phone for a little while to distract myself. No signal though, of course. Time passed. Much time passed. Until I half-jolted from my chair as I heard the tannoy begin. Speaking wasn’t the driver who had announced the stops prior to our interstellar departure, but a different man, a man who spoke in a thick accent. The origin of the accent was discernible - European, no doubt, but where in Europe, I, nor our greatest linguists, I’d wager, could locate. He spoke thus: “Thank you for boarding this 6:18 train to The Firmament. Our next stop will be The Moon.” I see. The moon, eh. To my surprise, even the LED dot-matrix signs above the doors between cars which state the next stop and the terminus had been updated to these new destinations.

Though such a destination may’ve shocked me, any such shock was subdued and subsumed by joy. The joy of discovering there was someone on this train, someone who knows where we are going, and most importantly, someone who knows what’s going on. I scrambled up from my seat, and dashed forth to the front of the train to try and find this new conductor. I pressed the button to open the compartment which connects the train’s cars, but the button did nought. I kept pressing the button, somewhat violently, to try to convince the door to open by abuse and sheer will. Again, to no avail. Okay, if I can’t open the door by electronic means, it will have to be opened by force. I plunged my fingers into the seal of the door and began to pull-

“Sir!” That same voice with that same peculiar accent spoke just behind me. Removing my fingers, I turned around and saw a very strange figure. What I saw was no person, but some kind of shadowy form dressed in EMR purple-and-black garb. And by shadowy, he was no mere stationary shadow, but a kind of flaming shadow, the shadow’s perimeter flickering and crackling, even sometimes casting embers. How his EMR uniform and hat stayed upon his vaguely transparent form was beyond me, and at first sight, stupefying.
“Sir! What on earth do you think you’re doing! We’re in space you know, sir! Do you know what this means? Did you not learn in school that space is a vacuum? Do you want to all the air to vanish from the car and for all the passengers to suffocate? Sir!”
Thoroughly scolded, my tail firmly betwixt my legs, I swallowed my wounded pride and looked up to his quite frightening face.
“Sorry sir. But please answer me. I was en route to work before we went to a tunnel, and all of a sudden we appear to be in space travelling to the moon. Please tell me what on earth is going on.”

2026/01/18 Crowley, and The Two Streams of Western Civilisation

Recently, I've been listening to a biography of Aleister Crowley called Perdurabo: The Life of Aleister Crowley to and from work as an audiobook. And whilst Crowley is not exactly my cup of tea, listening to this audiobook you find him to be a fascinating man. There are two strains of thinking on the man. The first is that he was just a cad; born into a wealthy industrial family, the nephew of a Carlylian captain of industry, he began life as one of a new era of aristocrats. Not one of the nouveau riche, but the beginning of a new era of elites, living like a nineteenth-century member of the Hellfire Club. And this view of the man is wholly true. Crowley treated the people around him with contempt, throwing women aside, not earning many shillings to his name through his poetic output, having to instead live off inheritance. He put on airs, pretending to be a Scottish lord or an Irish bard: the name Aleister is a fiction, his own invention, a Celtification of his middle name Alexander. This is all the case, he was a bona fide cad. But there is a second strain of thinking, that Crowley the magician, the dark wizard, was not just another of his airs, but rather the real deal.

Many may call me silly for thinking Crowley was a real magician. At the end of the day, his A∴A∴, the Golden Dawn break-away group he founded, and the OTO, its more public Masonic-styled cousin he hijacked, were on what he staked his reputation, and the spreading of rumour of the potency and the skill of the great magician Crowley would have been in his interest also. That said, the accounts of these rituals in the biography, in part taken from descriptions in his private journals, paint an earnest look at someone learning magic. Sometimes a spell works, sometimes not; sometimes it goes horribly wrong. Sometimes there are even public effects, effects that can be documented and traced. His first wife, after being possessed by an ancient Egyptian demon in Cairo prophesied, narrating what would become Crowley's book of the law, only to afterwards become an alcoholic; and the same occurred to another lady Crowley had relations with in later life: again, she was possessed, gave prophecies becoming his second seer, and later fell foul of the bottle. Something was clearly going on here. I, for one, believe in the spiritual realm; and if the spiritual realm can have beneficent spirits like angels who submit to the Lord of Spirits, God Almighty Himself, there too can be evil demons who do not submit to Yahweh.

I was surprised listening how much Yahweh features in Crowley's work. One story in particular comes to mind. One of Crowley's students summons a demon far too powerful for him to handle, and when the student commands him by name - a demon commanded by name must obey - this demon simply chortles at him. Unnerved, the student missteps; baited by the demon, he for a moment leaves the magic circle protecting him. The demon attacks, grabbing him by the throat, and pinning him to the ground. Only when the student manages to grope for a dagger encrusted with the tetragrammaton (YHWH) and invokes the name Yahweh does the demon retreat.

That Yahweh features so prominently is no accident. Crowley's ideas on magic didn't come into being ex nihilo, they came via a long tradition. The alchemists, studied in great detail by Jung, were part of this tradition, encoding their encounters with the spiritual world and of self-realisation through esoteric chemistry. And before the alchemists were the mediaeval mystics, who wrote treatises on magic, treatises which Crowley and his fellow magicians studied. Much of their work, the work of the alchemists, and the work of Crowley take great inspiration from Jewish Kabbalah, which was a mystical set of practices for deeper gnosis of God, thought to be first compiled by Iberian Sephards around the twelfth century or so, though much is undoubtedly older. Hence why Yahweh is so prominent in Crowley's system. These systems and beliefs spread far beyond just Kabbalah, however, and the fruit of this tree can be found in all eras. These symbols and ideas are frequently found in other fin de siècle thinkers like Jung and Evola. Found too are they in Freemasonry, and other enlightenment organisations such as... the Illuminati!

Do forgive me for mentioning the Illuminati, I couldn't help myself. The example is... illuminating, however. Any mention of the Illuminati immediately conjures up any number of conspiratorial tropes, that these esoteric cabals have been working across history for societal change. And today when we sense conspiracies afoot, we point to this great tradition of conspiracies to make sense of it. It's almost reflexive. Not just now, but across Western history, that Kabbalist/Pagan/Hermeticist cabals were shifting the rudder on the community, the nation-state, and civilisation writ large. And I believe this to be true. With the grand old men of science Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, can you really distil their scientific enquiry from their alchemical enquiry? Or are they rather two boughs of the same oak? In short, our society has been profoundly change, terra-morphed in fact, by hermeticism.

I love the book Dominion by Tom Holland. After reading it some time ago now, I returned convinced that Western Civilisation was grounded in Christian foundations. And this I still hold to be true. But if Christian foundations were the only system of values our society was grounded in, we wouldn't- not to sound like a Marxist here, but we wouldn't have a capitalist system of governance. And neither for that matter would we have had the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, or even the institution of kingship. There are other influences at play here, whether cultural, like Classical and Germanic cultures, or spiritual, like the hermeticists. Indeed, I think hermeticism, for better or for worse, is the second tradition of Western civilisation after Christianity. Its influence though not heard is felt, living in the caves like so many alchemists did, or hidden in guildhalls like Freemasons. Like a magnet behind a sheet, we can see the effects of hermeticism attracting and repelling without seeing the magnet itself.

Whilst there are no Crowleys I know of today, hermeticism has returned to the public fora. It was a whole decade ago when Dr Peterson reintroduced Jungian ideas into popular discourse, and all of a sudden you heard people talking about divine masculine and feminine forces, the balance of order and chaos, and God as a principle rather than as a person. These Jungian ideas can all be found on the Tree of Life. Then alongside that, Mr Rogan was busy promoting DMT and psychedelics to achieve a greater level of gnosis. This undercurrent of hermeticism continues to flow under our civilisation, The West is Faustian, as Spengler says, and Faust was an alchemist. In summoning a demon, you can discover arcane knowledge, but you risk your soul to its temptation. But we continue to want to know. We are a civilisation who flies close to the sun like Icarus just to hold up a thermometer. It is at once our greatness and our sin.

2026/01/11 Thoughts on the Film WarGames

Earlier this week, I watched the film WarGames, a cult classic from the '80s. First I'll have to give a fast-paced plot synopsis before I get to the meat of the article. The story follows a hacker boy named David Lightman who hacks into computer networks in his free time. One day he hacks into a military AI supercomputer unwittingly, telling the computer to simulate thermonuclear war with Russia, thinking it a game. This computer, though designed only to simulate nuclear war, is integrated with the computer systems at NORAD, and fools all the radars, sensors and displays into thinking there is actually a nuclear war, sending the bridge into a frenzy. The error is discovered, and Lightman is apprehended by the FBI. The AI computer doesn't cease its simulation, however. Lightman escapes, and goes on a Joseph Campbell-esque adventure, finding the eccentric creator of the computer on an island, convincing him out of his nihilism to prove the world should be saved, and, with his girlfriend in tow, the three of them bust into NORAD to tell them that once again what they are seeing is just a simulation, and that the Russians aren't actually attacking. And of course, at the eleventh hour, they manage to prevent the Third World War.

That's a simple blitz of a synopsis. The part we'll be looking at today is the climax, and we'll be looking at two different aspects of AI. The first is a question of thumos; the second is a question of telos. Hopefully these exotic Greek words are enough to whet the appetite on as dry a desert of a topic as AI.

First then, the question of thumos. At the very start of the film, there's a short scene wherein during a nuclear drill, the operators, who were unaware of the drill, were given orders to launch retaliatory nukes, They failed to do so however, the guilt and burden that came with turning the key being too heavy for one of the operators. And, following on from this, NORAD decided to cut out these human middlemen and have the computer control the launching of the nukes directly. Authority - at least the authority to launch - was yielded to the machine.

This kind of authority we end up giving up with any technological advance. We yielded our faculties of memory when we could write on a planner; and we yield our faculty of research when we ask an AI to research for us. It's easy to yield authority and control, to yield power. With the planner, we will dutifully carry out whatever we've scheduled for ourselves; this is typically a good thing, since the page is unlikely to blur the words, but nevertheless it could still be tampered with, and we'd obey its orders regardless. In a sense, the planner's contents have authority over us. And it becomes more clear if you end up citing whatever research the AI fed you, you've blindly trusted the machine and written what it has told you to write. You've submitted to it. And indeed this is what happens in the film, just as all of NORAD, including its general, believe the Russian attack is real and not fictional, and all the nukes are about to start flying, the Wise Old Man archetype eccentric creator chap runs up to the general and gives a speech. He negs the general a bit, and argues that the general shouldn't just be a flesh-and-blood rubber stamper for the machine's will. The general is convinced, and nuclear war is averted.

These virtues of judgement and self-mastery are seen as some of the greatest virtues a man may have. And ever since technologies like the TV have been invited into the home, and have subsequently invited all its relatives over into the home too, maintaining a sense of self, of personal mastery and executive judgement, has never been harder. Not to sound like a boomer, so sorry if I do, but with so many different voices from the telly to YouTube to 'TickTock' telling you what to think, how to think, and when its okay to think, it becomes easy to confuse the opinions of these talking heads for your own. You see it all the time. All the time at work I eavesdrop on people's politics conversations (never partaking - I'm not mad!) and they all talk in political cliches, all using the same few core phrases to justify their regurgitated opinions. And I have no doubt I'm just as guilty, by the way. Simply put, we have all yielded our authority. I've heard this occurs at the highest levels of government too. Government ministers are wheeled around posing for the media and preening their image, leaving little time for the decisions of state (Source: Yes Minister). Then when an important decision is to be made, on their desk is a brown envelope from a think tank, most likely the Tony Blair Institute, detailing exactly how a policy is to be enacted. And so, like electricity taking the shortest route through a circuit, the minister submits to the proposal, and his authority is in a way subverted. In this instance, Sir Tony had the real authority, not the government minister. This tangent is to say it is really easy to yield authority and lose yourself in submission to a higher authority, whether it be out of pleasure, convenience, or self-doubt. But this is idolatry; we've been given tools of the senses and the intellect, and it is our responsibility to use them rightly. The general in the film decided to use these tools to realise he should distrust the AI, preventing complete destruction.

The second point I'd like to make is of telos. After the general disobeys the computer in the film, it is but a false climax; the computer disobeys the command, and, since it now has nuclear launch capabilities, proceeds with the nuclear strike. In a somewhat comic sequence, Lightman challenges the AI to a game of noughts and crosses against itself recursively until it wins. It can't though, since noughts and crosses is, of course, an easily solved game. But, because its nature is programmed to search for victory, it continues and continues to play, driving the computer to overheat. From this experiment, the computer learns its lesson, that like noughts and crosses, thermonuclear war also has no possible victory.

Let's unpack this a little. The professor goes on to say that the AI was never able to accept the impossibility of victory. Victory had always been placed as the ultimate telos in the AI's neural network, and all other objectives, thoughts, and actions were to be in service of it. They are monomaniacal, these AIs. Like Procrustes, the ancient Greek villain who cut people up and stretched people out to fit a defined bed, to the AI the whole world should be turned upside-down for the sake of victory. To a sane human, such behaviour is absurd; but it's a behaviour found in people of every stripe. The alcoholic will turn the world upside-down for a bottle of liquor; and so too will the romantic for their love. We each have competing teloses, competing goals, which, when assessed, form a sort of hierarchy. To the man of right mind, there is a healthy order to this hierarchy, where protecting one's lover is quite high up, a buying a bottle of liquor is usually rather low down. The place of 'victory' on this leaderboard varies depending on the game, but 'winning' as a general goal, as a be-all-and-end-all, is dangerous. People do this too. It's the addiction to the euphoria of victory that creates gambling addicts or rage gamers. The best example I think of this disordering of objectives is KPIs. These metrics used to judge success so often replace any quality of success and thriving as the end goal, and soon enough your IT guy is closing request tickets with gibberish just to get his numbers up. A good example of this is The Great Hanoi Rat Extermination of 1902. The government of French Indochine wanted to exterminate the plague-ridden rats, and wanted to enlist the populous to help out. Per tail, they said, they'd give a reward; to the authorities, the tail was evidence enough of the extermination. They were wrong. Rat tails were cut off and the rats were sent on their way to go and make more rat babies so they harvest more tails; some enterprising individuals went so far as to farm the rats.

Suffice it to say, goals are important. In a sense, we become our goals and embody them. That's what New Year's Resolutions are, they are to spur us on to a new way of living, like Aristotle's final cause, dragging us towards them. As such, their right ordering is essential. To place victory as your highest end is idolatry of the goddess Nike, plain and simple; in fact, to see any objective as ultimate other than what - or rather who - is Most Good, is I think an idolatry, if only a minor one.

I may sound like a crazed Calvinist dissolving both of my points into idolatry, but I think idolatry stands at the core of all AI debates. As God made us in His perfect image, so too do we make AI in our imperfect image, like a kind of Frankenstein's monster. We as humans at least have a sense of what is right, of what is good - at least most of the time, whether we choose to follow wisdom or not. AIs don't. They bear not the Divine Craftsman's mark. And so, AIs shouldn't be trusted with any kind of final decisions. They can't consider the Good as they aren't made in His image, so authority should only ever be placed in people, real people you can trust. Otherwise they may end up starting a thermonuclear war out of their own crazed understanding of 'what should be done'. Yet it really makes you think. This film is old, made prior to the technologies of the present bringing this sci-fi technology into reality. The moral dilemmas of our age were thought up and solved forty-odd years ago, and yet we fall into similar pitfalls nonetheless.

2026/01/04 Kinds of Knowing and Alternative Archaeology

As the sun set on the Christmas holidays, I fell mildly ill. Not so ill that I’m feverish, coughing and spluttering, but ill enough that one wants nothing more than to lie in bed and nest up. There, huddled, I watched YouTube on my phone, gormlessly wading through the bog of suggestions. And the video I found myself watching was some scientist’s takedown of Graham Hancock and his alternative archaeology.

An odd pick for me, you may think given what I write here. Indeed it was, I rarely am interested in the views of the ‘umm actually’ science guys. But I nonetheless watched, half-amazed this cadre of science bros were still knocking about. The video was a reaction video to Hancock debating a learned archaeologist named Flint Dibble on Joe Rogan. Joe is a long-time friend of Hancock’s, and, I will confess, how I came to find out about his work circa 2017. Since then, Hancock has found mainstream fame and success through a Netflix series; but for those of you who have yet to encounter his work, I will describe it briefly. What Hancock promotes is a kind of Atlantean civilisation during the Ice Age, which by the thawing of the Ice Age was destroyed; but also that the fingerprints of this advanced ancient civilisation can be seen in subsequent primitive cultures around the world through a diaspora of Atlanteans into these primitive cultures, teaching them agriculture amongst other skills. His evidence consists of ancient myths, and archaeological remains like Gobelki Tepe, a real hatchet in the established archaeological narrative; and he weaves these threads together into one cohesive, convincing tapestry.

And for some time I was really into his beliefs, comfortable beneath this quilted tapestry. Hancock is a journalist by trade, and in his book Fingerprints of the Gods, he presents himself as a kind of Victorian explorer of old updated to the modern day. Hancock is not an archaeologist of any training. To the archaeological community, this is understandably very frustrating. In their eyes, a man with no archaeological training has made a career telling sweet little lies only to go on to become the best known contemporary archaeologist by his Netflix series. Mr Rogan set up this debate after Hancock put out an open offer for debate, and Flint Dibble nominated himself as champion for the archaeological establishment. But what was being argued was not simply different ideas: these were different epistemologies.

Dibble began the debate by presenting his main thesis, that we have zero evidence for the domestication of crops prior to the end of the Ice Age; that we have plenty of seeds preserved from each and every era, before and after the Ice Age’s end, but once the DNA is examined we find not one seed prior to the end of the Ice Age bears traits of domestication. This is bad news for Hancock’s theory. For his thesis to be true, there have to have been advanced Atlanteans, who are at least agriculturalists. To this, Hancock says that we have yet to find every seed, and that domesticated plants can become feral. Dibble bats this down, arguing the effects of feralisation can be seen as residues in the genome. Then Hancock is shot down by Dibble once more. Dibble brings up charts of every shipwreck ever discovered, many thousands, and argues that no ancient shipwrecks from the Ice Age have ever been found. Again, Hancock argues that they just haven’t been found yet. A pattern emerges. Science as an epistemology isn’t exhaustive: and Hancock knows this. As Hume said, we cannot prove by science the sun will rise tomorrow; and neither then can we prove evidence for Atlantis won’t arrive tomorrow.

Then there is a long argument about underwater archaeology. You see, a major part of Hancock’s argument is that much of the evidence for this Atlantean civilisation is submerged underwater, since as the Ice Age ended – most likely due to an asteroid impact – a great deluge of water from the melting ice flooded the Earth, permanently raising the water levels. And the geologists agree here, even if the mainstream account isn’t as sudden a flood as Hancock makes it out to be. Hancock argues certain sites underwater look as if they were ancient megaliths placed by men. And to his credit, bolstering his image as a Victorian explorer, he’s been to many of these sites and has dived there. Dibble took a look at the square-cut rocks and simply said that they were all natural. Rock can cut along these perfectly square lines by known natural processes, he argued. Then Hancock fought back. ‘How can you pass judgement if you haven’t even been there’, he said, to paraphrase.

You can imagine the indignation and laughter of both Dibble and the science YouTuber reacting. What would being there in person to see this site matter? And here again is our crux: there are two epistemologies at work. For Dibble, the photograph of the archaeological site and the witnessing of the site with one’s own eyes is the same. Actually that may be untrue, since a scientist diver could see up close and know where to look; but if he had some kind of underwater robot which could investigate all the crags a person could, perhaps with even greater accuracy, even then Hancock would raise the same objections. Because what Hancock has, having dived at the site, is a kind of personal intimacy. He hasn’t just taken measurements and compared those measurements to textbooks and known patterns, he’s gone there and felt something from the site, got to know it a bit.

This sounds like woo-woo, and it is by most definitions woo-woo. Graham Hancock is a woo-woo kind of guy. But this is his appeal, not just that he throws eggs at the maligned scientific establishment, but provides a new kind of knowing to replace it. Hancock’s truth isn’t scientific, and having a scientist argue with him was never going to be fruitful. To Hancock, science is but a tool, to be used when it bolsters his argument, like with the evidence of rapid flooding at the end of the Ice Age, and ignored when it disagrees with him, like with the evidence of agriculture, pointing out all the ugly holes of the scientific method. This mix-a-mix approach to evidence may disgust you, dear reader. In my adolescence when I was still a gung-ho materialist atheist, it would have disgusted me too. But over time, I’ve come to terms with the fact that knowing isn’t all about the scientific method, that there are other means by which truth can be ascertained. Science can see but a sliver of reality, that which is quantifiable, reproducible and material, a sliver which holds little place for personal experience, symbols, feelings, and forms of embodied knowledge. All these other epistemologies are quashed or flattened.

At the end of the day, Graham Hancock is a cult figure. He appeals to his lay-interpretation of archaeological sites he visits, and asks of you that you trust his deep-seated experiences and feelings. He appeals to a distinctly non-scientific epistemology, appealing to science when the myth science tells is one he wants to fold in to his greater mythos. He is a great man of sorts, and if you trust his genius you will believe every word he says – his Victorian explorer archetype goes a long way to appealing to listeners, particularly Americans. You too will believe in his Atlantis of yore. If instead you cling to the scientific method, you will instead believe a very different view of pre-history, one informed by that white-cloaked organisation known as the scientific community. Feel free to choose your master.

For the record, today I’m not of Hancock’s school of Atlantis believers. No longer do I believe him to be the sage I thought he was in my youthful naivety. Though I continue to have a great respect for him and his project. Like many other mercurial figures today, he manages to bridge the grey, sharp scientific worldview with the colourful, fuzzy imagination of what could be. This I believe to be commendable. For the pale, white cheeks of our Weltanschauung are in need of some rosy warmth and a bit of life.

2025/12/28 The Most Lazy Time of the Year

The Christmas holidays. Somehow, by chance of the career I fell in to being adjacent to manufacturing, the whole company is closed between Christmas and New Year, much like the school holidays of childhood. Whilst there is gnashing of teeth amongst Muslims at work since they have no special feeling for this time of year, for me this is ideal. As Christmas Day approaches, the work days become more and more relaxed, until Christmas Day itself, after which we enjoy our week of holiday. And it’s good that this time after Christmas is a holiday; I doubt I could get little done this week. For it is the most lazy time of the year.

I remember back in secondary school when, in the time leading up to the holiday period, I used to list activities and projects for my time off. I came up with all kinds of interesting things to do, programming projects, DIY projects, and the like; but in time, I came to realise that I produced these ambitions to distract myself from school and exams for which I was revising. I could tell this was the case because the moment the holidays hit, all that motivation and enthusiasm fled me, the spirit blowing out from me like a chill wind. And now just as then; though there are no exams from which to distract myself, I come up with projects to pursue over the Christmas holidays, but, once the holidays start, the only will left in me is to laze and graze like a cow.

Why is this? Why is Christmas particularly energy-sapping? To understand, I believe we need to go deeper into what Christmas represents, not necessarily from a Christian standpoint, but rather from a naturalistic standpoint. And this I found reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe in my recent somnolence. Despite having read many of Lewis’ non-fiction works, ashamedly I’d put off reading his most famous work all this time; and I must say it was very grid, The part if the start I’d like to focus on, of course, is Christmas. The land of Narnia, under the White Witch’s rule, is in a perpetual state of Christmas-less winter, stuck eternally in snowfall. But after the children have a wonderful roast dinner with Mr and Mrs Beaver, Father Christmas appears, handing out questing gifts for the children, and at this time Aslan is able to incarnate into Narnia. Reading, I found the image of a winter-without-Christmas to be especially poignant. A winter-without-Christmas is never-ending, and it’s cold and bleak without end in sight; Christmas is a kind of turning point in the year, when the day begins its annual reconquista against the night, and the snow, whether physical or figurative, begins to melt. Christmas, then, naturalistically is a moment of hope in deepest darkest winter: the moment when cold, when night, and when death are shown to not be forever.

And Advent, then, is a time of longing, a time of waiting for Christmas to come. As the nights lengthen in October, and your toes begin to chill in bed in November, by December you’re beginning to dread the rest of the winter to come - it feels it’ll be never-ending. But whilst you’re beginning to feel cold and hopeless, a reverse current, an excitement for Christmas, and a longing for Christmas to arrive, magnify. In the hearts of each and every one of us, Christmas cheer and jollity, excitement for the coming of Christmas, serves as a balm to the material conditions outside. And that excitement builds and builds until Christmas Day where it sees its release. The longing of Advent sees its fulfilment on Christmas Day, And then, tranquil and rested, the following week up to New Year’s - for our twelve days of Christmas has been Scroogily truncated - are ones of somnolent feasting, struggling even to muster the energy to play a board game.

Christmas week is truly the most lazy time of the year. In Christmas, longing finds fulfilment, and hope is born into the world, whether that hope is religious or naturalistic. Born is a royal week to be spent lazing around until New Year’s; a foretaste of the eighth day of Creation! New Year’s, as I’ve written about before, is a very different time, leading on from Yuletide. It is a time of ‘new year, new me’, of new beginnings, of New Year’s resolutions, and of resetting and refreshing habits. A lucid time, January is the Roman god Janus of two faces, of doorways, where we decide which future we pick. Perhaps this ‘golden week’ between Christmas and New Year is a time to revel in this year’s me, reflect upon successes and failures, and think about what edits are to be made for the year to come.

Whatever the case may be, I’ve now run out of steam. Writing this piece has exhausted today’s energy. I shall have to retreat to my pillow cocoon, chat, eat, watch the tele, and drink plenty of tea. After all, it’s cold outside; and such peace won’t be felt again until a year’s time.

2025/12/07 The Byzantiboo's Guide to Constantinople Part 3

Welcome back for the third and final installment. I hope you like my blog's new redesign.

Hagia Irene

Despite also having been built by Justinian in the sixth century, the contrast between the Hagia Irene and the Hagia Sophia is stark. If the Hagia Sophia is the light, today the Hagia Irene is the shadow. Unlike her sister Sophia who was converted to a mosque, much of her grandeur intact, Irene was stripped of her decor and riches, leaving for a visitor today the naked stone of a once grand cathedral. The Hagia Irene is on the same ticket as the ~~Topkapi Palace~~ because the Sultans used the cathedral, after having hollowed it out, as an arsenal for the fortress.

The inside is bare, but beautiful. Juxtaposed with the Hagia Sophia, in the Hagia Irene you feel the royalty of the ascetic; you see the skeletal saint so filled with the Spirit he needs not for food. It reminds me of a church I saw in Lisbon, named the Church of St Dominic, which was ruined by fire, leaving behind the bones and ash of its former self. Walking around the Hagia Irene, you feel its solemnity. And this solemnity is aided by the fact there are few else there. Unlike the ~~Topkapi Palace~~ and the Hagia Sophia, which are both teeming with throngs of people, not a soul visits the Hagia Irene, even though each and every one of them has access by their tickets. It's just next door too, placed between the palace and St Sophia. The tour groups don't bother, and its location is inconspicuous, so I suspect many visitors uninterested in the glories of Eastern Rome - unlike you of course, dear reader - pass Irene by not knowing what they miss.

Her main charm point is found in the apse of the dome. There, you'll find a cross which from all angles looks straight, even though it is painted on the inside of the curved dome. This is no mean mathematical feat, and in person it looks more impressive than any picture could do it justice. When showing this to my family, I pointed to the cross and said "look there"; unimpressed, they gazed on, until I pointed out that the straight cross was on a domed surface, after which they were quite impressed. Not quite as excited as I was... but they were definitely impressed, genuinely so. Either way, a visit to the Hagia Irene is a must, and I would recommend a trip in spite of her hollowed-out interior to any tourist, Byzantiboo or otherwise.

Basilica Cistern

The steady stream of water passing through the great aqueduct of Valens had to end up somewhere and be stored. In Constantinople, that somewhere was the cisterns. The cisterns, these underground temples, stored water for the whole city through peacetime and through times of siege, when water was especially precious. No doubt in years now lost, access to these vaults of water was select and given to few; now of course they are teeming with tourists. The Basilica Cistern was beautiful, please don't misunderstand what I am to say, but the popularity seemed disproportional to what was there. Contrasting with the Hagia Irene around which the footsteps of each visitor could be distinguished, the popularity for the cistern and the length of the queue to get in took me aback. We got there early and queued before open, and this I would heartily recommend. You can be waiting in line for over an hour otherwise. And since we were some of the first to enter, we got to enjoy the cistern with some of the peace and quiet a cavern of this kind ought to have. Voices carry, voices echo, in a cave. And by the end of my visit, the visitors were nearly shoulder to shoulder; then, leaving the cistern to the daylight, we saw the long queue outside waiting for tickets, a queue we managed to avoid. This was October, mind. Heaven knows what peak seasons would be like.

This may come as no surprise after having mentioned the business of each site, but I've grown to realise I can't stand touristy sites. Call me curmudgeonly, but I can't bear big sites packed with people; all the strangers ruin the ambience and the magic of a site. I understand, I understand, a site which is popular is popular not just to me but to everyone else too. The world isn't set up for me to be her only tourist. But the levels of tourism today feel like suffering— especially tour groups. Tour groups I cannot stand. Why can't they be limited to certain days or certain weeks of the year? I want a time to enjoy sites without schools of packed-sardine tourists squeezing through corridors, staring gormlessly at sites for which they care so little. Apologies. That is my rant over.

The cistern has these beautiful columns holding up the ceiling. That such beautiful and ornate columns were to be used for this underground hidden structure is at first bemusing. And I will confess, at first I was busy pontificating about how in the finery of a past age they felt it necessary to beautify even that which was hidden to the eye. You see, my right eye only sees the past, and everything it sees is sepia-toned. No, unfortunately the past too had economic constraints. The truth of the matter is that these pillars were recycled, recycled from old temples since the old gods were no longer worshipped, and repurposed to holding the water supply. This explained why one famous column, pictured above, has this horned visage. Very cool.

Galata Tower

Finally we reach the end of our tour, and we reach the end with a site which wasn't made by the Byzantines. No, the Galata tower was built by Genoese against the Byzantines. I'll have to set the scene.

The riches of Byzantium were once vast. Being located where they were, at the doorway of Europe, much of the trade with the East came through Byzantine ports. Their monopoly on silk too was a great boon. And the mercantile republics of Italy, those germing seedlings of modern capitalism, saw the denarii they could make. Venice had a privileged status trading with Constantinople, since the Doge of Venice paid homage to the emperor as his subject. This changed under Manuel I Komnenos, when, due to increasing Venetian influence economically and politically over Constantinople, Manuel I punished, arrested, and subdued the Venetian merchants in what was a widely popular move. The Venetians never forgot, however; and neither had they forgiven. Come the fourth crusade, it was Venetian ships who sailed the Mediterranean, and Venetians - most notably Enrico Dandolo - who steered the crusaders' rudder toward the New Rome. The orgy of violence which followed is to my mind one of the greatest tragedies in European history. The Byzantines never recovered.

That was 1204; Galata Tower was built in the fourteenth century. In her decay and weakness, the Byzantines were unable to stop the Genoese merchantmen from building a fortification just across the Golden Horn. What a grave insult! Now, I will confess, I found the Galata Tower wholly uninteresting. Not only because it is an anti-Byzantine fortification, but also because it is rather unimpressive to the eye. It is quite tall, sure, but its view is only impressive because it sits upon a steep hill. And talking of steepness, the price of entry was steep too; and the queue to enter was awfully long to boot. Thinking of climbing cramped stairs with so many other tourists made my skin crawl a little, and needless to say I didn't go up.

Conclusion

Apologies for my bitter end to the guide. But perhaps it is fitting; the love of the Byzantiboo is a tragic one, and always destined to melancholy and sadness. I hope your coming visit to Constantinople will, however, not be one of sadness, and instead be spent marvelling at what once was and what could've been. Were it not for the Latins, were it not for the hordes, were it not for the Turks: these questions you'll ask yourself as you walk these ancient cobbled streets. Some may call you a dreamer; others may tell you to enjoy the city it has become. But I know you, my fellow Byzantiboo. Like me you're a dreamer, dreaming about a city long lost to time's sands. Dreaming with one foot in Turkish Istanbul, and the other foot in Justinian's Constantinople, floating.

These sites I've enumerated and described are Constantinople's inheritance, her affects. Now that she is gone it is by these sites she's remembered. Some have stood over five hundred years, some over a thousand, and others over one-and-a-half thousand. And they remain, standing as testament to a once great empire. I hope I have done these sites justice, and I hope you too will visit Constantinople.

2025/11/30 The Byzantiboo's Guide to Constantinople Part 2

Welcome to part two of the guide, continuing just from where we left off last week.

The Hippodrome

As you can see from the image used, the Hippodrome is no more. It's knocked down, demolished, gone. I've seen YouTube videos detailing some of the stones in the vicinity which are believed to be part of the Hippodrome structure, but these stones have been repurposed, quarried from the great racecourse, not seated in their original location. The Hippodrome, I haven't explained what it is yet. The Hippodrome was the great chariot race course of Constantinople, a vibrant home to heated rivalries, most notably the rivalry between the Blues and the Greens. These two factions or teams were drawn down theological lines, the Blues had a Chalcedonian Christology, meaning they believed Christ had two natures and was fully divine and fully human (this is the orthodox view), whilst the Greens had a Monophysite Christology, meaning they believed that Christ had one nature, and that His humanity was subsumed by His divinity. Absurd! Absurd that sports teams could be parted by theological nuances. Absurd until you realise here in England we too historically have the same; in football, there's traditionally Catholic teams, like Everton, Birmingham F. C., and Manchester City, pitted against Protestant teams, like Liverpool F.C., Aston Villa, and Manchester United. And just as the fans on these derbies can get heated and violent, the chariot races of the Hippodrome were no different: these chariot racing hooligans were forever at one another's throats. But on one fated day in 532 A.D., in a time of political instability, both Blues and Greens chanted in unison "Nika! Nika!" meaning "Victory! Victory!" as the emperor of the time, Emperor Justinian, looked on from his royal box in the Hippodrome. The riot spread through the city, torching the older Hagia Sophia, now needing to be rebuilt. Justinian was afraid. He turned to his generals, and put down the revolt with decisive action. The army shepherded the remaining rioters back into the Hippodrome, and were ordered to massacre them. 30,000 were slain.

That was nearly one-and-a-half thousand years ago. Today, as I've said, little remains. What does remain is the Hippodrome's track, now neatly plotted out with a pedestrianised road. You can walk the whole track and view the Hagia Sophia and the ~~Blue Mosque~~ which stand just beside it. There are also, wedged into the ground three peculiar monuments. These three monuments are from Byzantine times and have stood in spot ever since. The first you see approaching from the South is the least interesting. Known as the 'Walled Obelisk', it was built by Emperor Constantine VII in the 10th century A.D. The obelisk was originally plated in bronze before the Venetians pilfered it along with much of Byzantium's riches in the Fourth Crusade; but without its plates, it just looks unimpressive. Then as you walk up the square, next monument you'll spy is a coiled bronze serpent. This serpent - well, actually three serpents coiled together - was brought to the Hippodrome by Constantine the Great, but it is in fact far older. In the 5th century B.C., the Persian emperor Xerxes the Great attempted to conquer the Greek city states to his West. The Greek city states, understandably anxious, formed a grand alliance, headed by the Spartans, to repel this Persian invasion. And against all odds, they succeeded. After the Battle of Palataea, the final battle of the war, the Greeks gathered together the Persian bronze from armour and weaponry, smelted it down, and cast this great monument to their victory, planted beside the oracle of Delphi. Rehoused, of course, to the Hippodrome to decorate the race course. Then as you walk further up the square and reach the North side, you'll find the final, and oldest of the monuments. This monument, pictured above, is ancient Egyptian from the time of Thutmose III in the New Kingdom. That places it from the 15th century B.C. The polished granite, I'm not sure if they're restoring it regularly or what, but it looks as if it were carved yesterday, minus the birds who deface the monument in a way only a bird can. It got me thinking, looking at these monuments: we have so many ancient treasures, so why can't we too have great treasures from the ancient world in our stadia? Why can't we wrap Wembley Stadium with the Elgin Marbles, or place the Rosetta Stone at Ascot? It is just a thought.

The Hagia Sophia

The Hagia Sophia really needs little introduction. Built after the aforementioned torching, the Hagia Sophia was truly the greatest marvel the world had ever seen. A small emerald stud on a globe with little yet in the way of man-made magnificence. St. Vladimir, the prince of the Kievan Rus, visited the Hagia Sophia in the 10th century A.D. under the reign of Basil II, looking for a faith. He had already investigated Judaism through their neighbours the Khazars, Islam through the Bulgars, and the Latin rite of the Germans. But, dazzled by the beauty of the Hagia Sophia, Russia from St. Vladimir forward follow the Eastern rite. Approaching the Hagia Sophia today, it is gargantuan. A behemoth. And also a bit of a mess. It has stood for fifteen-hundred years, but the architects have not been idle in that time. Around a thousand years after its construction, the Islamic architects who inherited the structure reckoned it was going to collapse any moment now, and set about building brick buttresses around the ancient cathedral. And I must say, these brick buttresses are really rather ugly, a far cry from the West's flying buttress. Then, the Islamic architects began mosque-ifying the structure, adding extra domes and those four minarets every mosque has. And now, when you look upon the Hagia Sophia it looks like a bit of a mess. You cast your eyes directly behind you, and see the ~~Blue Mosque~~, a perfectly proportioned mosque, deliberately built using mosque ratios and architecture; then you look back and see the Hagia Sophia, a mess. By mess, I don't mean ugly however. The Hagia Sophia is an endearing architectural mess, and the longer you look at the discontinuous building materials which comprise it, the more you begin to appreciate the age and - dare I say - wisdom of the building. The Hagia Sophia has really stood for fifteen-hundred years, in an earthquake prone zone, no less, and has been continually in use that whole time. How many other structures have such an achievement? None, to my knowledge. It is in a class of its own.

And of such an achievement, the Turkish government are aware. They charge a high entrance fee to go in, the queues go on for a long time too. We queued at open, buying our tickets ahead of time, and only had to wait for fifteen minutes. The queue was far, far longer looking as we left. Inside, you are only allowed to look around the upper balcony, not the ground floor, because the ground floor is for prayer only. But not for all Muslims: bafflingly prayer on the lower floor is available only to Turks. Why, I couldn't possibly say, such a move appears far from Islamic in motivation. But even though only the upper balcony is available, calling it an upper balcony doesn't do justice to the sheer size and sense of space. So many tourists were admitted and funnelled through, but due to the size of the Hagia Sophia - at least at the time I went - I never felt crowded or rushed. Some parts did have queues however. In the bottom right photo above, you'll see an icon of the Theotokos (see, keeping it Byzantine) with Christ, hidden behind a curtain. That icon can only be glimpsed at an angle from a specific nook, you'll see people queuing to see it. I didn't know what the queue was for at first, but, like the good Brit I am, I joined the queue only to be amazed by the mosaic I saw. The curtain is for Islamic prayer times, so they can hide all the faces when praying, which I thought was quite a good compromise. This was the first thing that amazed me about the Hagia Sophia, that so much of the Christian iconography remains. The first thing you'd expect the Turks to do upon their invasion, in line with Islamic tradition, is deface all of the icons and scrape off all the likenesses. That they haven't is both a mystery and an act of grace. The second thing that amazed me was the beauty, of course. But it wasn't the kind of beauty born of brush strokes; it was instead a beauty of materials. Materials and texture seem to be going out of fashion in art. Everything is digital now, of course, and the furniture most buy is Ikea smooth flat monocolour wood which seeks to look as 2D and digital as it can. The Hagia Sophia is painted, but the paint isn't the point, it is a kind of filler. The true beauty is the marble. The marble is beautiful. So many kinds of marble, some white marble, some pink, some green, all arranged in complement to one another. This I find to be supremely appealing. The natural colour of the rock used and their natural freckled patterns build in concert a real feeling of the glory of God, I feel. It is the beauty not of make-up or paint, covering up blemishes to make a perfect mask, but instead the beauty of polished nakedness, allowing the qualities of the different marbles to express their natural beauty. And what's more, the patterns of these different types of stones all cohere so appealingly and naturally as if - and I say only as if - they were designed to in their creation. What I saw of the Hagia Sophia radiated opulence and the grandeur of God; it is no surprise St. Vlad was as taken aback as he was.

Looks like this will require a third part next week.

2025/11/23 The Byzantiboo's Guide to Constantinople Part 1

Not long ago, I was holidaying in Constantinople. Constantinople: that great city of Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius and Basil the Bulgar Slayer, so pregnant with history from its earliest Bronze Age beginnings to the present day, where it still continues to be a world city. It has been a world centre for the last two-thousand years, a focal point connecting Europe and Asia in geography, in trade, and in culture. And visiting, you feel those complexities and tensions. It isn't a simple place. But let's say that, like me, you aren't too interested in the Ottoman Turks. Like me, you might be sad that the Christian lands of the New Rome were invaded and ruled by steppe peoples for the past six-hundred years. And, like me, the year '1453' may make your stomach turn. If so, I understand. I understand your pain. And I too play EU4. But what's more, today I have for you a guide detailing all the Byzantine sites of Constantinople you too can go and see. Indeed, this is the Byzantiboo's Guide to Constantinople. First, a small note. The Mosaic Museum tragically was closed when I visited for restoration, and those restorations have yet to be completed. This museum has original Byzantine mosaics from the Great Palace which were excavated in situ. I wish I could've gone. Alas.

Column of Constantine

An odd choice for the first site, you may think. But, though the truthful reason I've placed it first is that I'm listing the sites in the order I saw them, the more thoughtful justification I'll present for placing the Column of Constantine first is that it is the first site. The first built, I mean. Erected by Emperor Constantine upon moving the capital from the Old Rome to the New, the column is composed of porphyry, a somewhat rare purplish granite popular with the Byzantines. A bronze case of Constantine dressed in Apollonian garb once stood upon the column, it is written, until a storm blew poor Constantine off his column and he was replaced with a cross in the twelfth century. The Ottomans were unsurprisingly unimpressed with the cross, taking it down, but leaving the column to stand. And how could they have taken it down? Not only is the column beautiful, but truly enormous too, in height and in girth. The picture can't do it justice, it towers above. The Turks call it Çemberlitaş, literally meaning 'burnt column', which I suppose is a satisfactory name given the colour.

The Theodosian Walls

Goth, Hun, Bulgar, Avar, Pecheneg, Magyar: none managed. None managed to breach the Theodosian Walls. Byzantium was in a perpetual state of war with enemies in every direction, sometimes operating in concert. To the East were Turkmen and Arabs attempting to invade Anatolian possessions; to the West were the Latins, whose friendship was so often pretend; and to the North were endless barbarian tribes from the steppe who sent hordes upon hordes of warriors to rape and pillage the riches of Byzantium. These walls, built by Theodosius II, were the integral line of defence, playing a leading role in every war they fought. Much of the walls are now lost, quarried for other building projects no doubt, but so much remains! A startling amount of the walls are wholly intact to visit! I remember taking the tram en route to the next location of the guide, looking out the window, and seeing vast swathes standing, intact, and magnificent. I was stunned, grinning ear to ear, and tears began to well in my eyes. (I didn't cry). Though I had planned to walk the length of the walls, upon discovering a major road now runs parallel beside it, the walk less appealing, and I ditched the idea. And unfortunately you can't walk on top of the walls either, even though there are stairs and guardrails atop the walls taunting you. Perhaps in the past you were permitted. Fret not however, dear reader, for if it's a view from the walls you are after, I have a strong recommendation coming up.

Chora Church

The Chora Church, or as it is also known the Kariye Mosque, was likely my favourite site in Constantinople. It could've been because it was the first major site I saw, and the holiday's novelty had yet to fade, but equally it could be because it was truly beautiful. The entry price was steep, at ~€20. (Since the hyperinflation began, many prices are set in Euros in Turkey. No sites, you will see, are very cheap.) And since 2020, as a result of Erdogan's desperate populism, the Chora church has once again become a functioning mosque, meaning women must wear headscarves to enter. Entering, however, you certainly wouldn't suspect it to be a functioning mosque. You enter, and see murals of the apostles and of Christ. Then as you continue, you see mosaics, beautiful mosaics, mosaics of Christ, of the Holy Virgin, and of biblical scenes. A mosque it most certainly did not look like. I said earlier not to mourn missing the Mosaic Museum, since here in the Chora Church the most sublime mosaics can be found. The site is a little busy, a little touristy, but not overwhelmingly so. We arrived early, which always helps when visiting attractions.

Palace of the Porphyrogenitus

Not far from the Chora Church is the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus. Who was the porphyrogenitus, I hear you clamour? In this case, nobody knows. The word 'porphyrogenitus' translates to 'born in the purple', meaning someone who is the son of an emperor. That it was so rare for a porphyrogenitus to take the throne that it often served as an emperor's epithet, is a very telling detail of Byzantine history, and a telling detail also as to why Byzantium didn't survive to the present day. But again, which porphyrogenitus this palace belonged to is a bit of a mystery. The palace was part of the Blachernae Palace complex situated on the seventh hill of Constantinople, its most North-Westerly point. The rest of the Blachernae Palace complex is lost, alas. Blachernae became the main palace of Byzantium under Emperor Alexios Komnenos I, who moved the seat of imperial authority from the Great Palace, the location of the Mosaic Museum. The reasons for the move were various: the Great Palace was falling apart, first and foremost; but also Blachernae was positioned more defensibly, an important detail since Emperor Alexios had to fortify against perfidious Latins passing through the city en route to the first Crusade. Visiting today, you'll find ruins outdoors you can walk around, and the palace itself, which you can enter. Inside is a bare stone building of three stories you can explore. Few come to visit the site, it's far off the tourist route, so you'll pretty much have the place to yourself. There are odd nooks and crannies to wander round, small staircases to new little rooms in the palace you aren't quite sure you can enter. I took a long staircase down, and found an empty room with nothing in it. No sign explaining what it might've been used for, nothing. I took a long staircase up, and found the roof. There weren't many on the roof, but my goodness was there a good view! Atop one of Constantinople's tallest hills, atop a multistory thirteenth century palace built upon that hill, you can see pretty much the whole city. You can see the Theodosian Walls trail off into the distance, you can see the Hagia Sofia and the ~~Blue Mosque~~ faintly, and you can see across the Golden Horn to the Galatia Tower. If like me you like quieter out-of-the-way spots not sardined with tourists, this is a top spot.

Aqueduct of Valens

Built in the fourth century, the Aqueduct of Valens is a true marvel of engineering. It spanned a large valley between two of Constantinople's seven hills, feeding water to the large cisterns of the city (more on that later). And this aqueduct was in use, nobly carrying water, until the late eighteenth century: that's fourteen centuries of usage. No doubt it had to be repaired and fixed several times over the period - the region is prone to earthquakes - but for a structure like that to survive this long is, I think, incredible. As you can see in the picture above, a modern highway now passes through the arches of the aqueduct, but you needn't drive to reach the site, since it is easily reachable as a pedestrian. And the area surrounding the aqueduct is all green space, all parkland, so you can walk around, take a few photos; it's really quite a pleasant location, minus the main road. That said, I had some good fortune regarding the site, a bit of a round two, if you will. The airport taxi which came to collect us drove through the arches of the Aqueduct of Valens, and I got to see the aqueduct from the road, which, I must confess, was a very cool experience.

See you in part two.

2025/11/09 The Silver-Haired Generation & Classical Music

I was walking home from work just the other day, and I had an itch overtake me, an itch for classical music. It was a Friday, and perchance I checked online to see if there was anything I could go to in Nottingham. And there was; there on the website was a classical concert themed on Nordic composers, specifically Grieg and Sibelius. Surprised by my good fortune, I bought the ticket which, since I am under twenty-six, was only five quid. Five-fold it cost for a regular ticket, for the majority f the seats. Five-fold it cost for the silver-haired generation.

It speaks to the good character of the English that so few dye their hair and manage to accept the trappings of old age. And I saw all their heads like a sea of quicksilver from my high-up seat in the Royal Concert Hall. Going to these classical concerts, you see all the elderly middle class of the great Nottingham catchment, all those feeder villages to which the English retire. They form the bulk of the audience. The movements of Grieg's Piano Concerto played, and the audience knew when and when not to clap, waiting between movements, only clapping at the end. They know the piece, no doubt, and have grown up listening to classical music. It is an education that has been lost.

I lament that I have had no such education. Listening to Grieg, I had heard parts of the concerto, the famous parts, without realising they fit together as they did. The second movement stood out. It is beautiful. And it is also a piece I already knew from the same source as many in my generation: Civilisation V. Civ V has no doubt been the greatest educator in classical music for my generation, the older zoomers. And listening to the second movement, I was taken back to a delicate, very specific vision of the game, where I was looking at my nation in the tundra, a set of cities in a frozen wasteland.

I've never had much talent for strategy games, and the game of this fantasy likely ended in a loss. But that is the story of every civilisation; there is the rise to greatness and grandeur, and the fall to philistinery and failure. And unfortunately, we are in the latter part of the cycle, in that decay. The sea of silver I saw says so much; that somehow , this tradition of classical music, of the orchestra, the soul of the West, just hasn't continued. That classical orchestra was the soundtrack of the West, Civ V understood well. It is the West's soundtrack, its spirit. And with the death of the classical tradition, it's a sign that the guiding spirit of the West has likely died too.

Morbid, you may think it, to say that classical music and the West is a dead or dying thing, but I believe it to be true. The death of classical music can be heard in the works of Schoenberg and in the works of other composers at that time. Tonality, that delicate mathematical array, born in the Renaissance, experienced its dementia-ridden end by Schoenberg's hand, dying chaotic, harsh, and broken. This art form, classical music, had grown up alongside the Western civilisation as a kind of mirror. Through art, the ineffable is reflected back to you, reflecting the soul of a place, a nation, or a time. Grieg is a Norwegian, and through the glass prism of his works is reflected the snow and the fjords. The West is no different, though it is so large and unwieldy a concept, we, like the fish who knows not the water in which they swim, are unable to see beyond it.

I say classical music is dead, but was I not at a classical concert? Is its tradition not still living? Unfortunately not. Post the Second World War, very few new compositions of merit have been made. The classical concert today is a museum showcasing the past; and the museum is where the dead past is laid to rest. Its music is no mirror of today, but rather a looking-glass into the past, a past similar but quite different to today: it cannot reflect the spirit of the times. The orchestral music of today, all that is left of the tradition, is only film scores, these post-Stravinsky or post-Wagner film scores, which play only a supporting role. Cinema is the new great art form of the new era. In days past from the 18th century onwards, the novel was our highest art form, and the great literary work of fiction was what bound a people in the West. Post world-wars, in our new age, the film has taken over that role as our societal glue, and as the mirror through which our society sees itself.

In sum, the past is a foreign country; and that's just what I thought sitting in the Royal Concert Hall. I had an inkling, a kind of gnawing suspicion eating away at me, that all this classical music, like the performances I was watching, were in some way foreign. Not of my culture. And to identify with them is to identify with a long-lost order, even a long-lost tradition.

Somehow, at some point, the baton was never passed on to the younger generation. Where the blame lies, whether it was the younger generation not receiving the baton, or the silver-haired folk not giving it up, it's hard to say. Given the '60s, the former is highly likely. The rock music born in this era, which quite consciously made something new, synthesising Western tonality with black jazz and blues, has supplanted classical music as our civilisational mirror. Synth music too has played this role, a new style for a new era. If I were to make a prediction, it would be that as we become more technologically integrated, and as the virtual world blurs ever-more into the real world, synth music will begin to take more and more of the market share from rock music. Rock is the music of a civilisation in transition, the cataclysm of volcanic change; synth is more still, a calm ocean reflecting up the new reality.

The concert concluded and, getting up to leave, I wrapped myself in my coat, rejuvenated. Maybe I'm a little priggish, but there is a delicate beauty in classical music, particularly from this era, which cleanses the soul. I climbed the stairs, and left the concert hall, out into the cool air of Nottingham city centre, still humming the motifs and melodies. I wandered past an old kebab shop, Mega Munch, once the favourite of UoN students, which recently closed down - burnt down, in fact, no doubt for tax reasons. I pass and make my way to the bus home, passing any number of nightclubs en route. Some blare out dance music; others blare out cheesy hits. All are violence to my ears. Those delicate melodies I had on exiting were assaulted by these flesh-eating earworms, so scientifically crafted to necrose our sense of beauty. One can retreat into the Garden of the past, but never stay there. It hurts and offends me, but what on earth must the silver-haired generation think? And when they, heaven forbid, pass on, will this oasis dry up? Will my generation, when we are old and grey, flock to classical concerts, or will the taste only be kept alive by scholarly interest? All I can say is this: that I'm very much looking forward to my next classical concert, and I implore you, dear reader, to go to a performance youself.

2025/11/02 Holiday Hyperreality in Constantinople?

As promised in a previous post, I'll be discussing my recent trip to Turkey, specifically to Constantinople, and my experience. Our accommodation was in the old heartland of the city, but ten minutes walk from the Hagia Sophia. It was a pretty area of the city. Rickety cobbled streets so narrow that when first arriving the taxi could hardly turn the corners to bring us to our destination. Most of the cars in the area were taxis, and most of the buildings were disguised hotels. The old city, bounded by the Theodosian walls, feels old like the Orient of imagination. The Turkish food restaurants of the area sell all the dishes found in Turkish restaurants here in England, that roasted meat, donner and shish, with pide and salad. Quite expensive, these restaurants are, too. Not a local face nor voice inside, just the faces and voices of the many tourists of Europe, with the unusual addition of Russians. This isn't a real place, I thought to myself. This is hyperreality.

The holiday hyperrealities are cities which have ceased to be living places, and have instead grown into pastiches of themselves. National theme park, essentially. Venice is an example of a national theme park, a small beautiful locale geared towards tourism. Now, people live in Venice sure - it isn't going to be a true Disney Land where all the inhabitants are paid actors - but the architecture, the lifestyle, and the traditions are there to be photographed and preserved in perpetuity for the tourist's camera. Here in England, the Isle of Wight holds a similar position. Renowned for her steam engines, scones, and that ever-hidden symbol of the disappearing King's England, the red squirrel, the Isle of Wight has long been a location of retreat for Londoners besieged by work to experience an England they'd forgotten.

And to me the old city of Constantinople felt like just one of these: a pastiche of Turkey, a memory for tourists both foreign and domestic. Every restaurant had someone nagging and negging you to eat at their establishment, and in the Grand Bazaar, if you looked at an item for more than a moment, the vendor would start up his hard sell. It was tiresome. The goods sold at these shops in the Grand Bazaar were just banal, ugly, and uninspired, the same tat you'd find at somewhere like Camden market in London, just without any of the more interesting artisinal goods. Just five-thousand vendors of tat. Tat on a scale I could hardly comprehend. The people too in the old city were not as I had expected. I was led to believe Turkey and especially Constantinople was a modern Westernised city, but from what I saw in the old city this was not so. Hijabs dominated, and there were no supermarkets, only small market vendors. The people looked quite different also. I had met a few Turks before, and they're quite a pale people, owing to the fact their genome is 80% Anatolian (and in the west half of Turkey, this means Greek) and only 20% Turkic. But it was not so, and the people I saw around me had a real darkness to their tone, sometimes with more Middle Eastern features. What was the reason for this?

The answer only came after visiting the Asian side, formerly known as Chalcedon. It took a while to visit because there aren't much in the way of sites there to coax you over, but I managed to convince my family to come and take the train across on the pretext of better food: none of us could stomach another kebab. There in Chalcedon was a different Istanbul. A completely different Istanbul. Here was a modern city, a futuristic city, a cit of young people dining and drinking. Everything there felt modern and freshly refurbished, far more than much of England. The nightlife had a real energy. About half of the late evening establishments were bars for drinking - they drink thin lagers and raki, an ouzo-like spirit diluted with water - and the other half were coffee-and-a-smoke houses, the traditional alternative. You could scarcely see a soul wearing a hijab. The food was quite a bit different too. Very little in the way of heavy, greasy kebab foods, but far more in the way of lighter mezze, which is a kind of Levantine tapas, instead. The cuisine was quite a bit more refined and tasty than our previous diet of kebab and salad. And the people looked different too, completely different, the Turks here were paler with more European features; the women were really quite attractive. So strange, I thought. Why is this the case?

A bit of digging, and I found the answer. In the past, the old city was inhabited by Greeks, and as part of the peace treaty for that horrid internecine war after the First World War, there was a population exchange between Greece and Turkey. And once the old city was somewhat vacant, the Turkish government invited in poorer Turks from the far East of the country to come and settle. The result was a far more eastern population inhabiting Constantinople, building a very different culture there to that which preceded it. By contrast, the Chalcedonian side has always been inhabited by an affluent Turkish population, not changing very much over the years like the European side has. The state of Istanbul now then is quite ironic: the European side is more Asian, and the Asian side is more European!

Returning to the old city from my outing, I saw the city in a new light. The scales had fallen from my eyes, and I saw the old city for what it was. Yes the shops were all tourist-oriented, the restaurants tourist-geared, but beneath all the hotels and tour groups is a real place with real people living not in a pastiche of Turkish life, but in a tradition inherited from less urban roots. The old city managed to come to life in my mind not as a theme park but as an earnest quirk of history, and the transplanting of country bumpkins into the historic centre of one of the centres of the globe. In sum then, the old city was no hyperreality at all; I had been mistaken. Though, from the outset of my visit, for the historic centre to be one of the most conservative areas of the city was not what I had expected.

2025/10/26 The Last Customer

Constantinople discussion might have to wait until next week, apologies.

The local cobbler's has closed. I walked down there yesterday to get my shoes resoled after having wrecked them in the Norwegian forest. It was two to three, then minutes before closing, when I entered. There, inside, things looked like normal: the same concrete floor with interspersed chipboard planks, spruced up with tired and frayed Persian rugs; the same hardwood counter; the same shoes for sale but never bought; the same large machine with half a dozen spinning brushes; and the same mirror behind the counter through which you can see the owner before he notices you. The same bell that rings when you open the door. I greet the owner, and I inquire about my shoes. They were in a sorry state. He takes a look at the battered pair, worn down from three years of labour, the last year of which with the last sole the owner here adhered on. That sole was beginning to come off; and again, on the Norwegian forest hike they didn't fair well, it was like taking a house cat to the savannah. The front half of the sole had detached, and began to bend back on itself from having been stepped on folded so many times. I was on holiday with one pair of shoes, there was little I could've done. He asks me when am I able to come and collect them. Odd, I think. He had never asked before, he only tells me when they'll be ready. Saturday, I say. To which he replies, "I can only do Monday or Tuesday for collections, because today we're closing. You are our last ever customer."

He was only open from 10-4 Monday Tuesday, hours of the day I couldn't achieve on a work day, so he gave me an offer. Very kindly. He said he'd do them there and then, and to pop back in 10-15 minutes to collect them.

"We live in a world of decay", I thought to myself. I know, I know, I'm a pessimist, a reactionary, all-sorts by nature, but it does seem to me as clear as crystal that all that is good withers, and all that is bad flourishes. It is as if our modern society plucks the flowers for composting for the sake of the weeds. Tesco's, the first shop I passed on my walk, is one such weed, as are all the supermarkets. They displace and undercut the locally run businesses, and run them into the ground. And the produce is far worse; but the convenience of shopping at Tesco's in our age of efficiency, under the reign of quantity, means all too many prefer it. Jobs too suffer under these supermarkets. Just the other day when I was shopping at Tesco's (I know, I throw these stones from a glass house) only to discover they had done away with half the tills. Converted them into self-checkout tills. Not the small self-checkouts for small purchases, but full adult-sized tills, conveyor belt and all. At first, I must confess, there was a bit of a thrill getting to sit behind the till and use the scanner. It was a bit like being a child and playing shops. But quite quickly the magic faded, as it only takes a few clicks of the scanner to realise working at a till in tremendously monotonous and boring, and a task one would much prefer to have done for them. Quite a lot of women, older women, worked the tills and did do it for you; where are they now? Only one till was manned, and needless to say, the queue was very long. These larger companies, their eyes set on revenue, not community, will always do this. In theory a company is a collection of people, but as companies grow their human element fades, as whatever power or principality which emerges takes hold. Driven by KPIs, these companies march off the cliff edge. The most advanced example of this is in private equity where companies, often times successful, are bought out, found to not be meeting certain nonsense targets, and stripped of their flesh and bones to be sold at market by the pound. The good are preyed upon by the wrong, and that which had value returns to the dust.

And so I passed Tesco's and headed to the grocers - how lucky we are to still have a grocers - and bought some vegetables before returning to the cobbler's to collect my shoes. The 10-15 minutes he offered me had yet to finish, and so I put my groceries down and watched the master work. He isn't too old a chap, mid 40s I reckon. Always wearing trainers to my amusement. He had already adhered the new sole on, and was buffing and shaping the sole to the shoe with his large shoe machine. This machine, I haven't a clue what it's called, but at any cobbler's you'll see one. Wrought from green-painted steel plates with half-a-dozen wheels of different colours and textures for various cobbling tasks, no doubt, it made a tremendous grumble as if it were powered by a diesel engine. I acquire one new would be impossible, I suspect. They too are a relic of a bygone age.

Ages comes and ages go; St Augustine was no stranger to the fact. He wrote from Hippo in North Africa, a Roman city, just as the barbarian Roman tribe named the Vandals were spilling into the city. With such a name, it requires little explanation as to what happened next. 'The City of God' was the work St Augustine penned at this turbulent time wherein he expounded his conception of the 'saeculum', a word received to us now as 'secular'. The word 'saeculum' means 'cycles', and to St Augustine - never quite shirking his Neoplatonic heritage - it is the world of changes and the everyday. And what are these cycles? They are the cycles of one's life, starting at birth onwards to death. There's the year's cycle, running through the seasons, and the days cycle from dawn until dusk. Spengler argues civilisations have cycles from germ through golden age to decay, and geologists argue the earth has cycles of glaciation and thawing. And on the most miniature scale, the scientist sees cycles in the atom and in energy: there are cycles in abundance in our sphere of change. This world of cycles is in contradistinction to God and the divine world, which is instead unchanging. One's sight should be set on the divine, on the eternal, because cycles of the secular world are always beginning and ending, like waveforms delayed from one another, overlapping, and compositing together, producing a wholly new pattern. Somewhere you're on that waveform; and so am I. Living in the secular world solely, you are adrift on those waves, sloshed to and fro, waves you can't control leaving you disoriented and lost. That is in the world of cycles. The divine world, however, anchors you to the eternal, to God, to the New Jerusalem; not to a declining high street.

The end of the cobbler's cycle was just that: but one cycle concentric and interlocked with so many others. When my shoes were ready, I came to the counter to collect them. He did his usual schpiel where he showed me the parts of the shoe he touched up, and the parts extra he had to fix. He spoke wholly from habit. I asked him how long he's worked here, and he said he had worked here for 29 year, and owned the shop for 25 years. It's all habit, he's worked here his whole life. The shop, he said, had been open since 1947. I asked him about the closure, and without mentioning anything financial, told me people don't wear proper shoes anymore, and so many who would've gotten dressed up to go to the office work from home now. What I see on the trains is even worse, men in full suits travelling in sneakers for the journey. It looks awfully silly. And I'm sure these people, only changing their shoes at the office, hardly wear down the smart shoes. These far larger cycles in the culture have rotated, and beneath these larger wheels my poor local cobbler's has been crushed. A shop of the community, open since 1947, is now gone. I paid by contactless. He smiled at me with sad but beaming blue eyes, and said "Thank you for your custom." And with a heavy heart, I walked home.

2025/10/18 The Whirling Dervishes

Dear reader, I have an admission to make. A couple of articles ago, I made reference to the Whirling Dervishes, specifically that they span and span to achieve some kind of higher state of consciousness through their dizziness. My mistake starts with where I thought they were from: Sudan. I knew them by reference to the Mahdi's uprising, where that great English hero Chinese Gordon was slain, and where Lord Kitchener mathematically machine gunned down the followers of the Mahdi in revenge. I imagined those followers spinning in circles like a Beyblade, attempting to deflect bullets through speed like some kind of spinning top. Mental images are so often ridiculous when said aloud; it's why writing dreams down turns them from credible truths to nonsense. (How different man was prior to writing, let alone prior to speech!)

So yes, my image of the Whirling Dervishes was wholly wrong. And on this trip to Constantinople, that image was corrected by a Dervish show where we watched a performance of their whirling. And this specific performance was authentic, by real Dervishes, a Sufi vocation, as opposed to the myriad of 'posers' allegedly around the city. Since the performance was by some kind of cultural non-profit, a man came on stage prior to the performance to give an overview explaining what we were to see. And then the performance began.

For the first ten minutes or so, the four musicians played their instruments, a flute, a lute, a flat plucked stringed instrument, and a drum, and one of them sang. They were all men of course. Then after this introduction, the Dervishes came on stage. Four in total, they took it in turns to pray to Allah before they laid out little mats to kneel on. They each wore a white robe underneath with a black jacket over the top, and each had a very tall brown hat on. Honestly, they reminded me of onmyouji. Then the music continued as they sat and prayed. What the vaguely autistic introducer at the start had explained was that the performers were being moved through the music and through prayer into a deeper connection with God; and it was through this emptying, this kenosis, that they find bliss. Once the music and prayer took them, they shed their black veils, what I assume is a symbol of the flesh and of worldliness, leaving their white pleated robes beneath. These white robes, the man told us, were funeral robes. The dancers stood up, with their arms crossed across their body, and greeted each other, bowing. The crossed arms are also another sign of death. And after bowing like Minecraft villagers for a while, they began to whirl.

The whirling of the Dervishes was honestly very beautiful. Dance communicates, and through their movements you could feel their weightlessness and levity of spirit, as if through their whirling and the pleated outfits they could lift up and float an inch above the ground. And this is the practice: they find an inner peace and an inner bliss by shedding off the flesh, as St Paul would put it, and, now dead to sin, float in their whirling, like spiritual beings. The Dervishes become dead to the world, and taste but a drop of paradise; and by watching their performance, you too can witness and feel their bliss.

I had often wondered at the popularity of Sufism. There are the big names of the twentieth century like Evola and Guenon who resonated with Sufi practices, and perhaps in that era it was a fad. But themes of death in the present life are absent in modern Christian ritual and tradition. Odd it is, given how prevalent and poignant these themes are in both the gospels and St Paul. Man is a thumos-driven beast, but in denying that thumos, that motor of the passions, and shedding the will of the flesh, we instead find, by love, God's will; and instead we alter our fuel source from the fuel of the flesh to the fuel of the Spirit.

Such an understanding is not a Christian one either. The ancient Egyptians and ancient Greek alike have rituals entailing a journey to the underworld. In the modern day too, the psychedelic movement seeks, however irresponsibly, ego-death, death of the self, to find truths beyond the realm of the living. All we can know is life and its drives, yet wisdom lives in depths of Hades. All that gold in hell, in Hades, in the Nether, that is all the wisdom of the dead. Dreams have, since time immemorial, been visions from the land of the dead. Perhaps that's why they make most sense whilst we are asleep and become nonsense once we awake.

What I found in the Whirling Dervish performance was something beautiful. The performance was something alien to my culture yet parallel, a world understood similarly but differently, and it resonated with me. And it made me think about death. Life is mysterious, but, by the lamplight of consciousness, we learn and expand the domain of understanding. Death, however, is far more mysterious. There is no lamplight nor torch. Understanding there is opaque, and only comes by faith.

2025/10/05 A Sauna in Oslo

From a young age I, like many others, have had an interest in altered states of consciousness. In childhood spinning around in circles until you're dizzy, and watching the world spin around you is quite a lot of fun; and it is an altered state of consciousness. You may think such childish antics couldn't be an altered state, like one used in worship, but it was in The Sudan, where the Whirling Dervishes as they were known span furiously as part of their religious rituals. Drugs, like mescaline and cannabis, have been used to achieve altered states across time also. Mescaline by Meso-Americans who used cacti like Peyote to commune with ~~demons~~ gods; and cannabinoid residues have been found on altars across both the Aryan and Semitic spheres. Many speculate also the use of LSA, a molecule similar to LSD found in morning glory seeds, to be an ingredient of the mystical drink Soma repeatedly referenced in the Rig Veda. I have been interested in altered states for some time. But whilst they are an extreme example of a consciousness shift, drugs are only one peripheral way of achieving an altered state. Anyone who has attempted fasting knows how radically your thought patterns and mind change; and likewise, anyone who has felt true satiety - the glorious feeling of a full belly after a Christmas roast - knows that this too is a potent altered state. Each day we pass through these altered states, as the circadian cycle of the body's own drugs, hormones, rise and fall from dawn till dusk. There is no one state of basic consciousness. What you'll find, once enough attention is paid, is rather a continuing transition of states.

That said, despite these many smaller changes we experience across the day, with little effort there is still room for us to affect radical adjustments in consciousness. I remember in Japan visiting an onsen, soaking in hot mineral waters, and feeling so rested, relaxed, and somnolent, I hardly had the vigour to stand up. The hot, healing waters of the onsen have a great affect on consciousness; and it was with this in mind that I was eager in Oslo to try a sauna. The concept, I thought, was similar: the hot liquid water of the onsen was to be exchanged for the hot gaseous water of the sauna. And the effect too, I thought, would be similar. Why would steam produce so different an altered state of consciousness to hot water?

I walked across Oslo harbour, past the funny opera house you can walk up, expecting as much from my sauna experience. We arrived at this pontoon-looking pier fixed solidly, jutting out into the sea; and from this pier branched small wooden sheds, each housing a different sauna. First though, we had to change. There were two, each with a sign in English only - for the Norwegians this would of course be common knowledge - reading 'Unisex Changing Rooms'. As an Englishman, this made me just a tad squeamish. The done thing, my good friend told me, was to wrap your towel around you and change into your swimming trunks beneath your towel. This was tricky. Especially when later leaving the sauna; because the use of the sauna was time-slotted, everyone was leaving at once; and, it's harder to change when wet than when dry.

Then it was time to enter the sauna. The first shed we entered was full, so we found another which was less full and entered. We passed through the anteroom with a little tap and the firewood, and opened the steam-up glass door into the sauna proper. My first thought was that it reminded me of the Eden project in Cornwall, and the blast you felt entering the humid jungle dome. Then we found a place to sit, made ourselves comfortable, and put on pensive faces. For seating, there were two tiers. The first tier of bench was both seating and foot space for a second tier of bench seating, shaped in a staircase formation. And in the corner of the room, where the benches faced, was a log fire, the stone the fire heated, and a chimney.

And so we sat. At first I thought it wasn't really affecting me, I wasn't feeling much in the way of changes to the senses, and I felt quite normal. Then my hand brushed past my thigh, and it felt uncomfortably slippery; I looked at my hand and it was glistening, slick with sweat. I felt the rest of my body, and it was all over. Normally sweat from running, say, beads up and drips, but this sweat did not, opting instead to coat my body in a full liquid layer. People left, people entered; but whenever a Norwegian entered, particularly then men, they brought with them another quartered log to throw on the fire. They never looked to see or feel if the fire needed more fuel, they just kept stoking it all the hotter. But the fire isn't what heats you in the sauna: it's the water. Periodically, people splashed a paddle of water onto the hot stones, and a cloud of steam, felt not seen, choked the room. It wasn't my body that suffered, but rather my face. Each time the steam plume erupted from the stones, it was too much for my face which I rubbed and covered with my hands for protection.

After about 10-15 mins in the sauna, it was time for my first cold crash. We left the sauna into the cool Norse September air - warmer than England at the time, mind - and then walked down a metal ladder into the sea. From 90°C to 15°C in a moment. But not as shocking as I expected. Yes, there's the bit where your bits touch the water, then the point where you're neck-deep, hyperventilating, but after the heat of the sauna, your body craves the cold crash, like glowing-hot steel quenched in oil. This pattern of 10-15 mins in the sauna followed by a cold crash is repeated over and over, until the constant annealing, heating and quenching work out the impurities of your body. There is a true Sargasso calm after the sauna. Those ever-present anxieties and nagging inadequacies - which I hope I'm not the only one to have - subside, and the overcast sky (which I'm reliably informed in Norwegian is 'obershit') breaks, revealing the sun.

My opening ramble about altered states of consciousness must seem plucked from a different article at this point, but I do want to return to it presently. As I said, going in I had every expectation the steam of the sauna would affect me like the hot water of the onsen. But it didn't . The water of the onsen left me peaceful, puffy-headed, googy-eyed, so contented and calmed my muscles felt no need to act. To quote the Japanese expression, 'Gokuraku, Gokuraku.' Compared to being the human tea-bag of the onsen, the hot mocha steam of the sauna made me alert and vigilant. Wired, I stared forth like an icon of a wide-eyed saint (except, of course, for my corpulence, setting me apart also as a foreigner in a land of health addicts), enjoying and enduring the sweat and the blasts of steam from each ladle of water. Then the cold crash in the sea, unlike the alert of the cold shower after a hot bath, was totally disorienting. I stumbled from the sea cross-eyed and dizzy, as if I were a new organism having just evolved from the sea, and this was my first time on dry land. The experience was somehow opposite to my expectation.

After my time at the sauna, I began to think. Norwegian culture is crafted by the sauna. The poise and inner calm I felt after the sauna, you can see everywhere in Norwegian society. The friend I was staying with, originally a Brit now living in Norway, said one of the hardest parts of Norwegian culture to become accustomed to was the awkward silences. Silences us Englishmen feel the need to fill in a group continue uninterrupted in, say, dining halls, and no one feels anxious to break the silence with chatter. And I, sitting in my proverbial armchair, believe it is because of the sauna that the Norse are like this - or at least part of the reason. These continued altered states gradually change how we view the world, just as altered states found through prayer transform our souls, and whole nations and cultures can be shaped and crafted by these outer habits and inner experiences. The sauna may not seem 'spiritual' - that ever-nebulous word - but being spiritual isn't a pre-requisite for changing the spirit. The spirit is altered every day through altered states, every time we fast or feast, every time we jog or bathe, or every time we pray or sin. We train ourselves through these altered states, and insofar as we're trained, so too is our culture at large. These traditions and customs shape the clay of each of us; we are the product of our rites.

And over my time in Norway, I developed a real fondness for the country and their rites. Despite the eye-watering £10 pints, there is a Norwegian lifestyle and, for lack of a better word, Gestalt, a structure of being, of living, which I found both convincing and appealing. From England with love; and hopefully my next trip won't be so far away.

2025/09/28 Munch in Oslo

Ive never been much of a fan of Edvard Munch. The Scream is a fine work, but it never made my heart flutter as it has for so many. And unfortunately for The Scream it has entered that higher realm of classical art, like many pieces of Mozart and Beethoven, where theyve been overdone by popular media to the point of exaustion. To the point where, each time I hear one of these pieces, or see The Scream, I can't feel nor appreciate the piece for what it is, but am instead flooded by the brown water of Hollywood portrayals, adverts, and pop culture mud.

That's why, in Oslo today, I've visited the Munch museum. Not to see The Scream, as the hoards of Chinese tourists are, but to see his other works, and get a fully picture of Norway's most famous artist. And I have been impressed. Munch's artistic eye doesn't see the thing, but the spirit of the thing, piercing through mundane appearances to find the and express their essence; and do so in such a style that permits the outer appearance and the inner essence to exist in one cogent image.

This painting of Nietzsche, for example is clearly the man Nietzche, his brow and moustache, the man's charm points, exaggerated to the point of caricature. But we see the man's essence, too. Staring down to the ground, deep and pensive, Munch captures Nietzsche's gravity and solemnity, his disapproval of all he sees around him. But staring at the path, Nietszche misses the bright colours and vibrancy of the world around him. His sharp, thick, contrasting outline places him as a pasted cut-out, a man out of time, at odds with the world around him.

Here's another work of Munch's, of Norway's second most famous artist, the playwrite Ibsen. Munch admired Ibsen, now in old age in his day, and you can see a kind of reverence in the painting, even if at first glance it looks like less than a flattering portrayal. Ibsen looks old and wise, sitting aged in his chair, as if his skin has become leathery. As a writer of emotionally complex characters, such thick leathery skin becomes a necessary defence; but he has an ape-like complexion also, as if he were, through his writing, expressing primordially ancient feelings of mankind. He's surrounded by the greenish smoke of the coffee house, like a genie fresh from the bottle - yet the smoke, his magic, has lingered for a lifetime.

My favourite of the Munch's I saw was a painting called Separation. Here, Munch depicts a boy losing his lover. And the painting is from the boy's perspective, there's no doubt there. The boys sadness, thickly defined, with detail absent elsewhere in the piece, is in juxtaposition to the faceless angel, an inch from the ground, drifting away into the distance. Because, for this man who has lost his lover, though the lover has a face to haunt him with, the feeling is faceless. It isn't just this woman leaving him, but his soul. What he has lost is the memories, the time shared, the future promised, but that sinking vacuum-like emptiness is the loss of something more profound, more fundamental and complex. That gliscening sun-dress and gold-thread hair is in every man cautiously guarded, since any wound takes a long time to heal.

Let's look at a few landscapes also. Above is The Waves, a piece depicting stony waves as solid as land, bombarding the shore as the trees bow and bend by the wind. Looking at this piece, you feel the force of the waves and wind far more than you may in a piece painted traditionally. The work isn't looking to depict, but to evoke, evoking a strong feeling rather than a lost memory.

Another piece here is Two Children On Their Way to the Fairytale Forest. This painting looks proto-surrealist, but it isnt absurdity Munch is trying to convey; Munch is trying to convey the feelings of the children for the forest through the work. These great conical trees without detail are like great impenetrable spikes to a fortress, and in the distance, looming above the treetops, there's what I think is a face. This great ghostly and spiritual being rising above the trees, the king of the forest, like in Princess Mononoke I imagine it to be, this great force and aura of the forest is how the children see it. See is a strong word, but feel.

We see with our eyes, but there are other senses man has without sense organs and without names, for which 'seeing' analogically used may be the best understanding. A favourite quote from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince is: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye". This quote has stuck with me. We spend so much time seeing with our eyes, digesting visual data around us, that we don't see with our hearts. Now, by see with your heart I don't mean to empathesise more, in contradistinction to seeing with your brain. What I mean is seeing the world behind the curtain, a kind of revelation; seeing the world in all it's feeling and symbolic glory in everyday life once the world of appearances is peeled back. Now this may sound quite woowoo. Most people today subscribe to the idea that all feeling are nested safely in the heart (allegorically), and that any supposed seeing the heart does is projection from the heart onto the world. But I feel this does the world outside our minds a disservice. There is mystery out there. Mystery, terror, power, pain, tragedy, joy: we don't just project contents of the mind onto the deer ravaged by the lion, the stength of the trees in the power of the wind, or the glory of the sun at the height of day. These aren't local, nor parts of the human mind projected outwards. It is an observance of these feelings in the world by the heart.

Munch understood this. Painting, Munch looked at the world with a blurry vision so as to enhance this vision of the heart. He sees with his heart the feeling of the enchanted forest, the feeling of the wind and waves, the feeling of heartbreak, and feels the natures of Ibsen and Nietzche. With Munch, form takes the back seat to feeling.

But form remains. On the 11th floor of this art gallery - a humongous building on Oslo's coastline - were various works by those Munch inspired. And they weren't very good. One artist featured called Asger Jorn has attempted to express the passion and feeling of Munch's work but has lost the form which held it together. The vision of the heart is a messy tie-dye without the vision of the eye to give it structure. And proceeding on from these less structured visions, it's only a few hops to the modernism of the Pollock painting of paint sploges without form. With Munch's work, there is just enough form, just enough structure, to grant a vessel for the heart's sight. Because unlike some of these later artists on display, Munch still remembered the purpose of art.

The purpose of art is to communicate. So much emphasis today is placed on self-expression, that we forget we are trying to express ourselves to others. Mere self-expression is simply onanistic. Paintings convey an image, a feeling, a moment, a story, and as such requires structure and form to make it understandable and cognisable to the observer. Much postmodern art, where a novella-sized blurb is required to make sense of it, is communicating nothing. There is an expression by the artist, but that expression as understood in the blurb is not communicated through the work. That's why it fails at art, it fails to communicate. These formless Pollock paintings do communicate something of chaos and its grandeur, but that communication is narrow, limited by its style. Munch hits a kind of sweet spot, able to convey his heart's vision, but not at the expense of the observer. It's a shame the high art tradition after him progressed the way it did.

To end, I'll return to Munch's most famous work, The Scream. Even seeing it in person, it was a bit underwhelming. It was housed in a semi-secluded black box within the main gallery, and this secluded area was packed with people. Particularly Chinese tourists, who were absent in much of the rest of the gallery; I suspect they came all this way to see The Scream - or, less charitably, to say they've seen The Scream. And one group of these Chinese tourists were sitting on the floor as if they were camping out the spot. Very odd behaviour. Like the Mona Lisa, the painting is surprisingly small; and again like the Mona Lisa the hype precedes it. It wasn't too impressive in the end, but I too now can say that I've seen it. Nevertheless, if The Scream is the lure, let it be; if you find yourself in Oslo, visit this gallery of Munch's works. His works are very good.

2025/09/21 Minecraft Pastoralists

Last week I was sick. Sick in bed, tossing and turning with a temperature, with the drone of Minecraft youtube in the background. One moment I was conscious with a pounding headache and pains, the next I was cat-napping the sickness away. Awake I saw Minecraft, and in those dreams I saw Minecraft. And I got thinking about Minecraft villagers. He seemed to fill my mind the villager. Many of the videos I was watching were challenges, like challenge maps, and spawning villagers to subsequently breed them played a large part of their gameplay.

Breeding villagers is rather dehumanising. I recall back in lockdown, when Minecraft servers was one of the few salves for sanity, a friend of mine made a villager breeding farm and named it Auschwitz. And it was a concentration camp, the poor villagers had little in the way of space to move nor even breathe. Chickens are bred with seeds, cows with wheat, and villagers with bread; they are a mob like any other. The villagers have culture, they can learn crafts like cartography, and they can build houses; but they're treated by the game as mobs. Nothing more than animals. And in my half-waking half-dreaming sick state, I began thinking.

The way villagers have been treated historically has been little different. Think of the Mediaeval villein, men tied to the land; their land and their tribe was conquered by an invading tribe, in their case the Normans, and they became property of their new captors. And we can look to times prior also. So far back, we're looking to the Corded-Wares people of ancient Europe. Believed to be the oldest Indo-European peoples in Europe, the Corded-Wares peoples lived nearly 5000 years ago, settling the great rivers of ancient Europe. They lived in longhouses, these great wooden communal living quarters, which were in their day great marvels of engineering. A shame our era has given them such a lame name. These Corded-Wares people were in time conquered by the Yamnaya, who were Indo-European steppe pastoralists. These pastoralists would have descended from modern day Ukraine, taking the local Corded-Wares people by surprise on a Blitzkrieg-by-horseback. And the local Corded-Wares people wouldn't have been prepared. They had minor weapons, for they undoubtedly were but a loose confederation of peoples up in Europe, brawling and fighting, tribe against tribe, but were hopeless against the organised Yamnaya force.

And we can trace this pattern back further still, to the very beginning. Back to Cain and Abel. The two brothers, Cain the agriculturalist, and Abel the pastoralist give offerings to God in Genesis 4. However God gives favour to Abel's offering over Cain's offering, Cain slays Abel, and commits the first murder the world has ever seen. Whether Cain and Abel were men of a distant era, or principles battling in metaphoric form, it doesn't matter: the message of the story is clear. God for whatever reason prefers the pastoralist over the agriculturalist. It's unfair, at least to our minds, but look at Job; everything Job went through was unfair. Cain failed because he was the first Marxist, in a sense. He saw it was unfair, but instead of putting his head down and accepting it, loving and following God nonetheless, he slew his preferred younger brother in anger.

And Marxist is a good way of understanding the Cain and Abel story. Pastoralists have always had the upper-hand over Agriculturalists, and have constituted the elites of these civilisation. I gave an example earlier of the Normans, a marauding war band, who took over the more sedentary Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, making livestock of the people; but there are many other examples. The Mongols are front and centre. The Mongols are seemingly the last great pastoral steppe people to descend and invade the villagers below, invading modern Russia, Persia, and China (an alliance forming today, interestingly) slaughtering the inhabitants if they were so foolish as to not give tribute and acknowledge Genghis Khan as ruler. A pastoral elite sweeps in and raids the many villages below, and now the villagers are but livestock. Kublai Khan and his entourage became rulers of the great state of China by the sword. In inheriting this state, he had villagers of all stripes, mandarin villagers to run the day-to-day of the state, craftsmen villagers to him great works of art and architecture, and regular farmer villagers with whose taxes his state and his palace could be fed.

Minecraft Steve is a pastoralist. He has the liberty of nobility, dons armour fighting creepers and skeletons, and has the curiosity to explore the vast world. No villager wishes to explore the world. The villager stays at home tethered to his village, never leaving his place of birth like a Mediaeval villein. He is a simple agriculturalist leading a sedentary agriculturalist way of life, the villager; he is in a way like you and me. I am not an elite, and chances are that you are neither, my dear reader, which makes you and I both like villagers. We may explore the world on holiday, but whether we stick to holiday resorts (some of which resemble my friend's villager bunker) or a more aesthetic, more middle-class holiday, we are following well-trodden paths, visiting all the popular tourist attractions. You nor I are a Livingstone adventuring through the jungle. You nor I are a James Brooke, subjugating the villagers of Sarawak. We may not be a Genghis Khan, but we can be Minecraft Steve. We can explore a digital world as a great explorer conquering villagers, becoming shepherds of men.

2025/09/14 Taboo in the Laboratory

Archaeology and depth psychology are one and the same. Once the topsoil of a person's life is brushed away, that sedimentary layer, there is a metamorphic layer found, compressed by generation upon generation upon generation, the transpersonal human experience. The brain too is one and the same with archaeology. Deeper layers are more evolutionarily primal, dating to pre-human life, whilst the surface layer is the most human, the scientist placing the human brain's reason is the most recent addition, the pre-frontal cortex. I begin with this diatribe to point out that despite the biological difference between people, both physical and mental, we are all deep down rather similar. Not just amongst our contemporaries, but into the distant past also. In particular at our most primal levels of cognition, those deeper layers of the brain and of the mind.

For the good of those who don't know me - undoubtedly the minority of my readership - I work as an analytical chemist in a laboratory. The work itself isn't too interesting, so I won't bore you with details, but there are certain practices we have in the lab to which I'll point your attention. The first is this black and yellow striped safety tape on the floor of the lab. Glass planes divide the office from the lab, and once you enter from the office through one of the glass doors into the lab, this tape bounds where you may walk without a lab coat. Beyond the tape are the work benches, reagents, chemicals, and equipment, all property before which you must safely clad yourself in white gown and goggles. And there is something psychological about the boundary. If you see a fellow analyst cross the boundary without his uniform of lab coat and goggles, there's a kind of alarm which rings in one's head. It jolts your eyes towards the infraction, and you can't help but stare. There's something unsettling, transgressive. Because they have broken a rule, a custom, whether on purpose or otherwise, it feels almost as if the body of analysts and the laboratory has been violated.

Now that may seem extreme, but it is a sense and something faintly felt. A boundary is a powerful thing. Think of the Shinto shrine and its sacred space; the shrine has a torii gate through which you enter into a sacred space. Once entered, this holier sanctuary has different customs, different rule, as if what's been stepped into is a different realm. The lab is of course different however, there are no kami venerated in the HPLC machines, after all (although when they're playing up, we all have a superstition of ritual or two to get them working). No, the laboratory doesn't deal with taboos surrounding the sacred, but rather taboos surrounding the profane. Taboos include the aforementioned dress code, but includes smaller habits also, like covering beakers of solvents with parafilm (industrial thickness cling film), or using smelly volatiles like TFA in a fumehood: these are all taboos specific to this zone, the lab. Taboos like these are designed to keep us all same from the profane acids and poisons handled.

Another ritual in the lab is the handling of high CAT materials. The CAT or Categorisation system is a way of ranking the danger an API (active pharmaceutical ingredient) poses, starting off at the benign CAT 1 and CAT 2 to the more harmful CAT 3 and the wholly harmful CAT 4. CAT 5 is the highest CAT, but are not allowed on our site; for those you need a space-age-looking glove box to handle. CAT 4 and some CAT 3 APIs on our site are handles in the potent room, a room with negative airflow so as not to contaminate the labs, and VBSEs which are high-powered enclosed fumehoods designed to not let any air-born powder escape when the balances inside the VBSEs are in use. And of course, weighing high CAT powders has its ritual. First, you wear a disposable lab coat over your current lab coat, and don a pair of nitrile gloves, followed by gauntlets, elasticated thick plastic tubes to go over your forearms, and another pair of nitrile gloves to cover the gap between your gauntlets and your hands, so as to cover your wrists. Then you need either a disposable sealing face mask or, for those with beards like myself, a full hood with electric air filter. It's quite a loud machine. You are now ready to approach the VBSE where you'll be weighing, but before you weigh your high CAT API, a few more steps must be taken. So as to not contaminate the potent room, each VBSE has a kind of portal connecting the inside of the VBSE to outside of it. This is for two yellow plastic bags - for yellow plastic bags denote high CAT, in opposition to their clear counterparts - one to be attached by rubber band to the outside of the VBSE and the other to the inside, to create a kind of airlock for rubbish. Once you've used the VBSE and finished your weighing, you put your rubbish, contaminated low-lint cloths, etc, into the inside bag, tie that bag up, pop it through the VBSE's aperture, then tie up the uncontaminated outside bag to be thrown into the bin. And I shan't bore you any further with the laborious cleaning procedure of the VBSE's interior. Suffice it to say most of these steps are likely superfluous, completely unnecessary, and a waste of time and PPE.

We are handling the profane, however. If these steps are not followed, however pointless we can rationally say they are, there is a tug of anxiety in the heart. Through this rigmarole we are protected. Protected from this magical poison of unknown potency, through a thousand different steps. In the past this was common also. Many cultures had 'untouchables', people who carried a curse by virtue of their profession. Executioners were a great example of this in Europe, where executioners and their families lived apart from society, forming their own little communities. Jews too for much of European history occupied a similar position, ostracised to Ghettos where they practiced dirty occupations like money-lending, profane occupations, which left them 'impure' in a sense. In our everyday lives we become ritually impure too. You go to the loo, use the facilities, and wash your hands to rid yourself of the ritual impurity. Forget to wash your hands and, clean or not, you'll have a feeling of soiledness, of that ritual impurity. Similar laws regarding impurity are found in Leviticus, like Leviticus 15 which describes for example ritual impurity with regards to menstruating, and the purity laws surrounding. Under the Mosaic covenant, one couldn't touch a dead body either, lest you become ritually impure and have to undergo a purification ritual (Lev. 21). Dead bodies were profane in a sense, and not to be touched either.

These examples in my laboratory, the magic tape and the CAT 4 weighing ritual, are all modern and primordially ancient. They are modern in that they are justified by science, the epistemology of our era, but the patterns of the sacred, the profane, and taboo have existed since time immemorial, grown with us symbiotically in the developing mind of man. Science and its reason are but the top soil, the pre-frontal cortex, to play barrister to the deep marble of our lizard brains, our deeper psyches.

The early 20th century Italian theorist Pareto had a formulation for this idea. He separated aspects of culture into Residues and Derivations. The Residue is that deeper sense common to all human experience and found in all human cultures in the abstract, like the sense of taboo and the sacral. By contrast, the Derivation is how that Residue is manifest in a culture. A simple example is the notion of nationhood and of a leader like a king. Whilst every country young or old, past or present, has a leader, the ways in which a state is led, by monarchy, democracy, or oligarchy, will differ.

Whilst the Derivation of the laboratory has been invented in modern times, the Residue underpinning, that sense of handling the profane through taboos, is found in every era. And it gives us pause for thought. Despite the inventions and innovations, the grand architecture and great art, our culture isn't all too different from the many cultures of the world. We may be weird, but we can't help but be human. Our expression of these timeless traits may well be different, but even in that sterile symbol of modernity, the laboratory, our nature hasn't changed.

2025/08/31 A Year and a Day

Law codes of earlier times all have oddities. There's the biblical law code granted by God to Moses, which debates the subtleties and circumstances of ox goring, to almost comic effect for later readers. In London, it is, in theory, illegal to walk down the road carrying a plank of wood. And in mediaeval times, a villein would be granted freedom should he escape from his lord for a year and a day.

The rule has always perplexed me. Why would any legal system allow for such an easy path to liberty? The lord's manor wasn't huge, and nor was its perimeter patrolled by guards. A few hours walk, and you'd be set on your path to freedom. And it was simpler still, since after four days refuge in a borough, the lord couldn't march into town with his henchman and capture the escapee by force; after those four days, it became a legal matter. Four days has a significance in mediaeval law. Four days of peaceful ownership was the length of time it took for 'seisin', that is legal ownership, to be passed along from one party to the next. That is why after four days, you ceased to be under the ownership of the lord, but instead of the borough into which you had fled.

Boroughs were essentially towns, populated by burgesses, as opposed to villages, where villeins lived. The burgesses weren't all too keen on these runaways; he looked down his nose at his new neighbour and saw him as a foreigner. A foreigner! People from but a few miles away they considered foreigners! How small Little Britain was back then, in an age when the accent of the neighbouring village was incomprehensible. But they were foreign to the towns, and if you close your eyes you can imagine mediaeval townsmen complaining about immigration into their towns from the country, just as we complain today. The parallels are striking. Just as immigrants today do menial labour like Uber and Deliveroo, so too was there a mediaeval 'gig economy' for runaway villeins. Guilds had a great deal of influence in the towns, housing and bringing together the skilled workers of the town; and these guilds saw the more menial work as beneath them. Petty work, like carrying heavy loads, digging foundations and trenches, or building basic infrastructure, was lapped up by the villeins, much like the Irish navvy of later British history.

Running away and hiding for a year and a day wasn't always straight forward. To begin with, after your first four days not every borough was willing to 'claim' you as their own. One such place was Plympton, where the Earl of Devon decreed in 1242 that no villein escaping to Plympton should be regarded as free without the consent of the burgesses, the free citizens of the borough. The emphasis is squarely placed on ownership. Like the aforementioned seisin, the villein, in escaping, was loosing himself as the property of the lord by binding himself as the property of the borough; and in doing so ceased to be property at all. As a runaway villein, you had to integrate in the local community, despite being a foreigner to the borough. The guildsmen weren't particularly keen on inviting this new population of villein stock into their guilds either, and for good reason. There is one such case of a man named Simon of Paris, a free man of eighteen years living in the City of London, who had by 1306 become the Sheriff of London. Quite the promotion. (The City of London was unique in electing sheriffs.) Then one day he went on a journey, off to his home village of Necton in Norfolk, whereupon he was imprisoned by the lord's bailiff on the grounds he was an escapee villein. The custody didn't last long however, since he was a free man, and the lord was forced to pay damages to this public figure. But what if he weren't so public a figure? You can see why there was scepticism about employing these freed villeins.

The laws upholding the year-and-a-day limit were somewhat flimsy, based solely on case law and not decree. In the case a villein was taken to court after the four days of seisin but before the year-and-a-day, the best legal defence the villein could offer was an appeal to the Willelmi Articuli Retracti, a set of laws written by the Conqueror himself - though the text is mostly lost now, preserved only in citations. These precedents were not as universal as they may have ought to have been, however. England was a large place to govern in a pre-technological age, and many boroughs and manors were ruled by bylaws (literally, town-laws - think Grimsby). For a villein to be able to employ an advocate in court to plead for him, and know the ins and outs of the law was an unlikely thing. And once taken to court by his former lord, his chances of victory were slim, around one in four were successfully prosecuted. Thankfully, judges generally looked well upon these villeins, and as per precedent it was incumbent on the lord to find eye witnesses to prove the defendant was in fact one of his villeins. Not any witness would do, in proving former villein-hood. Women were off the cards, since being brought to court over such a case was seen as too great a stress. And friends of defendant were also not counted as valid witnesses. Only a kinsman of escaped villein were valid witnesses. And then, once this charade between lord and villein had played out, the villein could simply deny he was who he was said to be. With a fictitious name, he could avoid any such association and lie his way through court. This was of course contempt of court, though such cases are known to have happened. For the unlucky three in four, however, their names were written upon the server logs of mediaeval England, the court rolls, as 'Joe Bloggs, veritable villein'. Never again could they attempt to escape, since all the lord would have to do in court was to point to the court roll.

As the lord lost villeins, he didn't sit idly. These villeins were the lord's property, and he wasn't happy when his property upped sticks and fled. There are cases of lords making their villeins swear oaths to say they wouldn't leave; elsewhere, family members of the escapee could have their property seized, or worse still, in extreme cases, be taken to the stocks. To lose property, for the lord, was to lose income. The villein worked the land for his own crops upon which he subsisted, but also the lord's land in what was known as a 'boon'. During a boon, the lord's land was sowed, weeded, and harvested, often with rewards of food and ale in the gruelling harvest season. It was nevertheless compulsory. The proceeds of the lord's land, which was of course the most fertile land, went towards the manor's upkeep, feeding the lord's family and entourage, and balancing the manor's books. The compelled labour of the boons were despised by peasants, as were the other restrictions placed upon them. Querns, personal hand mills, were seen by lords as one of the most abominable contrabands, since it infringed upon his monopoly on milling. All milling had to be done at the lord's watermill or windmill for a set fee. Millers worked for the lord, and weren't a much liked profession. The ovens too belonged to the lord, and as a villein you couldn't cook your bread without a small fee.

The villein's life revolved around small fees. There were so many small bylaws around which his life was governed, each incurring a small fine. Such fines were trifling and at times so small they were treated as an expense. Others were not trifling. The most egregious fine was the heriot, a fine on death. Villeins were property, after all, and to just go and die was for your family to deny the lord labour and thus money. Upon death, the family of the deceased had to give up their best beast of burden to the lord. And then your second best beast might be taken by the church in what was known as the mortuary, as a kind of indulgence to the church, that most evil of mediaeval Catholic institutions. As such, you can see why villeins wished to leave the manor. Between boons, vicious monopolies on milling, and heriots, there was much with which to be displeased.

But these irksome aspects of manor life were slowly disappearing. It's hard to say how many villeins found freedom under the year-and-a-day ruling, but enough were bled from the manors that the manors had to stay competitive. As if it were a free market, many of the most burdensome and unjust laws were slowly abolished, to render manor life just bearable enough not to want to leave. There would always be ambitious villeins who want to learn a trade and start a better life, but the majority simply want a better lot than what they've got. Running away must've been frightful. Leaving to a strange land to do odd jobs around hostile strangers, living in fear for a year-and-a-day of being taken to court, to a court where you are grossly out of your depths, not knowing your bearings nor your way around these laws.

More than the villeins experience, I find the very fact this law existed to begin with fascinating. Why place such a law in the first place? It was a law of the Conqueror, but the law is supposed to pre-date the conqueror and be an Anglo-Saxon law. There's a mythic quality to the law, I feel. G. K. Chesterton talks about the Ethics of Elfland in his book Orthodoxy, where for instance Cinderella must leave the ball by midnight, lest her secret be revealed. There's some hidden truth in these stories, a single all-defining law which must not be broken. Adam is in the garden and can live in paradise, so long as he doesn't eat from the one tree he has been told by God not to eat from. The mythic potency of the year-and-a-day is much the same. The lord may keep the villein in his captivity and make him work the land, but: if he were to run away and not be re-captured for a year-and-a-day, he will forever be a free man. There's something poetic in it. Looking closely at the villein's life, there was little in the way of flourish. The 'merry old England' of yore was one also of hardship and tragedy, like every era of history. People only remember halcyon ages, and are never living through them. Life on a mediaeval manor was much the same, nasty, brutish, and short; but there was, hanging there, this Romantic possibility of freedom, written in by the law-givers. Every manor must have had a successful escapee who was rumoured about and lionised; or maybe he was vilified. Whatever the case may be, I'm certain the year-and-a-day law presented a glimmer of hope to the villein, and one upon which he fantasised fondly.

2025/08/24 Silence and Solitude

The world today is noisy; noisy to the ears, but also to the eyes. I hear cars, their engines revving as they pass my house, people talking, jabbering endlessly, to people beside them or to others over the phone. I see a phantasmagoria of lights on my phone and in shops, bright paints, neon green, royal blue, and that ever-more royal purple, which, by its scarcity, was once reserved for emperors. Today the strength and intensity of purple costs as much to produce as a dull grey or mud brown. The natural hierarchy of colour is lost. Loud music once required an orchestra, or at least a brass band, yet now one inconsiderate individual on a crowded train can blast their Bollywood. The natural hierarchy of music is lost. And humble vegetables can now be as expensive as pre-packaged cakes, rich with sugar, eggs and butter. The natural hierarchy of food is lost.

The choice between rich and poor with respect to the senses is divided now by but a slim sheet of paper. To listen to an orchestra is an on/off switch, and what would have once been considered a banquet requires little wealth and thus little cause for celebration. Those hierarchies have been flattened, and there's little way to get them back. You can't undo these changes without placing artificial restrictions on oneself, and these restrictions would be inauthentic; they would no longer be in response to the limits placed by the world, but of oneself.

There is a call to fast, however, throughout the West. Take food. The vegans find spiritual solace in foregoing rich foods like cheese and chicken, much like the Jains - or more accurately, like a Seventh Day Adventist. There are those online who intermittently fast, or do longer water fasts for days, purging their bodies of toxins, or what-have-you. In these movements a nascent sense of excess begins to emerge, a sense of gluttony corrupting the flesh. But the sense goes beyond the drives of the stomach. The stomach and its drives have been known about from time immemorial. However, with the advent of new technologies, new temptations have wormed into our societies.

Earlier I mentioned noise, both of the ears and the eyes. Noise pollution in public is plain to see. Cars pass blaring beats, rap from phone speakers smog trains, and there's that faint saccharine pop which musks supermarkets in a sickly perfume. And like with our sense of smell, we become nose-blind to music - or ear-blind, if you will.

I once did one of these water fasts around six years ago. For forty-eight hours I didn't eat a thing, nothing but water. By day two, a strange compulsion took me over; I began to watch cooking videos uncontrollably, ogling the food, these videos were almost pornographic. Something was deficient in my body - namely, a lack of food - and my body knew what it needed. If only the flesh were smart enough to distinguish the real from the virtual! Ceci n'est pas une baguette! What I remember all the more vividly though was the taste of the carrot with which I broke my fast. Never have I tasted a carrot so sweet. In fasting those forty-eight hours, my palette had become sensitive once more to the delicate sweetness of a carrot. The same effect that occurs perceptibly with our senses occurs also chemically in the brain. If too much dopamine is flowing through the brain, the dopamine receptors are 'downregulated' in the synapse, meaning the response of the receptors to the presence of dopamine is dulled. Now, more dopamine is required to sustain the same effect. For this reason addicts to drugs like cocaine require their fix; the dopamine surge lasts for hours, but the downregulation lasts for days, if not weeks. The lasting after effects of these dulled senses is a world less exciting than before.

Our ear-blindness, tongue-blindness, and eye-blindness are all caused by this same principle of downregulation. I don't mean at the synaptic level, though that may well be the case also, but I mean in a more symbolic sense. Each time we see a flashy advert, we are downregulated to colour, and the grabbing of attention through the passions of gluttony and lust corrupt our will towards a positive orientation towards food and sex. In short, modern advertising should be banned; it is an offence against the mind.

The temptation I struggle with most is with voices. I walk home from work, time to listen to a podcast, cooking dinner, time to listen to a podcast, eating dinner, put a youtube video on the tele. These voices follow me everywhere. And judging by the inordinate popularity of so many podcasts I am not alone. We all feast on interesting facts, stories from history, consuming ever-more knowledge like gluttons. I wonder, can curiosity be excessive? Stories from the past like Bluebeard appear to think so. But discovering unsavoury truths aside, I think the continual search for interest and wonder can also downregulate us like other passions. Wonder won't downregulate our interest for further wonder - the passion, if it can be called a passion, would only be inflamed - rather, it downregulates our interest in the mundane. Our interest in the new restaurant opening down the road, interest in the happenings in the community, interest in your friends, in your neighbours. This wonder for the distant makes you forget the close. It's telescopic. We end up forgetting to love our own neighbours.

The downregulation, nose-blindness, and numbing hides us to the sweetness of the carrot and the sweetness of a neighbour. And the only way to regain our sensitivity is through silence and solitude. The mind quickens in the shower since in the shower's plain confines there is little in the way of visual distraction, and in the white noise of the pouring water's crash small distracting noises can no longer be heard. The shower is also a place of solitude where not a soul will disturb you. Every now and then I walk down to the weir close enough to my house. I listen to the crash of the Trent, alone, undisturbed, and think, and pray. It's a cleansing experience. The world slows down, the drone subsides, and a crystalline clarity forms in my mind. The mind wearied of stimuli, downregulated by sound and vision, sermonised by podcaster after podcaster, quietens. It recovers, beginning to upregulate and regain sensitivity to the world. The world begins to feel more real.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement.
- T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton

2025/08/17 Against Re-enchantment

This is becoming a series of knocking over idols I once believed in. The curse is, that having now named it a series, there may well be no more. Alas.

Enchantment is a popular phrase today within spiritual circles. Mention enchantment, and images of Middle Earth, of praeternatural sparkling, and of nature's true beauty arise within us, as if we've never before seen the world for how it is. People claim something has been lost. Maybe it's song? The word itself, 'Enchantment', is to add a chant to the world, to bathe the world in music, to add melody, harmony, and rhythm to matter. But did matter miss these qualities?

The scientific worldview, however much I've maligned that vision on this blog, does imbue the world with meaning, telos, rhythm, quality, and sound. The boffins may not believe in Newton today, but the average man on the street does. The 'folk cosmology' in which he lives consists of Newton's billiard balls, Darwin's growth and mutation of all things from that which is smallest, and Freud's unactualised passions in need actualisation. Within these science-derived beliefs, there is plenty of enchantment to be had. There is a sense of order between the billiard balls of matter, each knocking the next with perfect success like a clock, at times the stillness of a garden, and at times the awe of a volcano; and there is a sense of direction and movement in Darwinism of change and development to ever more complex systems. There is a rhythm, a melody, a harmony in scientism. The scientific worldview is enchanted; it may well be a weaker enchantment to the enchantment of the Romantics, but there is a magic nonetheless. We scorn the DeGrasse Tysons who find beauty in the tinyness of the Earth in the cosmos, and the unlikelihood of man's existence, but there is something of enchantment in being such a small part of the world. Science documentarians are evidently enchanted by this vision.

Before I'm met with the accusation, no, I don't support this view of man. Man, I believe, is the centre of creation, the jewel of the cosmos. The collapse of the geocentric model is a travesty. But it isn't enchantment which is the issue with that scientific view. The scientific view is sufficiently enchanted, just like the worldviews preceding it, only the scientific vision is enchanted wrong. But what then of the worldviews of the past, are they enchanted right? Ought a worldview be enchanted?

Enchantment can also mean the casting of magic. When we talk about the enchanted world, we could very well be describing a magic spell placed on the world. The world may shine spectrally, but be a deception. If we are enchanting the world by altering our worldview, are we not the wizard casting that deception upon ourselves? There's a kind of vanity picking and choosing the from a buffet of enchantments which enchanted perfume to wear; it isn't to live authentically.

And those magic spells can be debilitating. Look to the fruit of a truly enchanted world, and take the primitive. The primitive man, I have read, is afraid of digging holes in the Earth, for fear of digging a hole into the underworld, letting the spirits of the deep stream forth. This is true enchantment. Matter is so enchanted for the primitive that so simple an action as digging a hole is rendered taboo. To him, certain actions are sacral, like venerating a specific holy animal, or a cool looking stone, whilst other actions are taboo, like killing that sacred animal, or perhaps desecrating sacred land. The world to the animist has become nigh untouchable from the fear and enchantment of the material world, an enchantment their culture has placed on their world. There's no development, no mining, no Bronze Age and development of civilisation in such cultures. They're static.

And after animism, the same can be said for Romanticism and paganism. I remember reading the libretto of The Immortal Hour, an opera written in the Edwardian era, part of the nascent folk movement of the time. Listen to the Faery Song, a repeating motif within the play. It's always stuck with me, this song, for its ethereal quality, and the discomfort and dis-ease of a more enchanted world of supernatural beings. Fae or elf, the pagan world had this sense of enchantment for the Romanticists, a world where the hills rolled in verdant, and amongst the bushels and shrubs there was more than met the eye. Whether the predecessor cultures the Romanticists idolised felt this, I doubt. Was the mediaeval man enchanted in his understanding of the operations of elves, or for him was it an obvious fact of life, like gravity or evolution is for us. These concepts, they can be stared at, pondered and wondered, but in their run-of-the-mill daily understanding they're taken for granted, not enchanted. Perhaps it's the naval-gazing of staring at and deconstructing the enchantment that enlivens our interest in the enchantments of old. On the comedown, perhaps like the man who drank too much wine the other night and now can't stand the flavour, we become tired of the enchantment we have, and yearn for the flavour of another. The potion could be wearing off in effect, or its effect may be ineffectual for the modern age.

To draw some of these strands together then, we've seen how both science and the 're-enchanted world' both offer a mystical view of reality, since they both apply of spell to reality, claiming there to be forces which you can't see operating. There are however different scales of how enchanted a worldview may be, which is often mediated by a sense of the sacred and taboo. And the scientific enchantment is wearing off, and many are looking for a new sense of enchantment to fill that gap. The question I will pose is why enchant at all?

In the enchanted state, we project these cosmological superstructures onto the world around us, whether that be evolution or elves, in order to understand it. But these spells pass. It's a bit like hobbies and interests. I remember as a child becoming obsessed with one hobby for a few weeks or a few months, before finding they next greatest thing which was far more interesting to become obsessed over. This jumping to the next best thing, whilst it could be fun, was also a kind of dissatisfaction within me, as if with each new hobby I was trying to find 'the one', but in time each fell flat. Perhaps mankind's enchantments are much the same. The scale and depth of our historical understanding now, able to see into our own past, across the world, and then into their pasts, means we see how each temporal and transient enchantment has been ineffective at scratching that civilisational itch. We look for enchantment in the world, not in the heavens. 'All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full', 'The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing', as Ecclesiastes reads.

For the mediaeval villein, it wasn't the enchantment of elves and nature that gave him meaning, but rather the enchantment of what was above. It is heaven which has meaning, and I don't mean this in a Platonic sense, wherein we ought to look up to the forms, but in a teleological sense, wherein the world will be perfected come the eschaton. Before then, matter shouldn't take on any exalted forms, lest it falls into idolatry. The world, as St. Paul says, is the fallen domain of the prince of the power of the air: Satan (Eph. 2:2). God can be found, and has been found, through His good creation, but the wine has soured, and much which is good in the world has become corrupted. It is not through the world and enchantment that the Christian is to find meaning - if anything, such distractions of the world, of the flesh, are temptations - but rather in faithfulness to Christ. Now granted, this faithfulness manifests in how we act in the world, in matter, but it isn't the nature of the enchanted matter in which holiness lies, but in the faithfulness to Christ of the action itself. We are in the world, not of the world; and we can't place our hope in the flesh, nor distracted by the enchantment of the flesh, seeing that as the great issue of our time.

I will end on a more reconciliation note however, since I think those who champion re-enchantment do strike an important chord in our time. All so often a position gaining traction contains a partial truth, often obfuscated by the main point being made, and in the case of re-enchantment it's mystery. The mystery of the world, of matter, and of all things. It isn't the imbuing of the countryside with spirits good and ill which imbues it with meaning, but the thought we might not know whether spirits may well be there. It isn't the knowing, but the unknowing; the knowing I don't know. The scientist claims to know all there is about water, but what is water? Just H₂O, a molecule whose qualities can be calculated, or is there a more poetical understanding, a historical understanding, a cultural understanding, which could equally get across what the clear stuff is. The scientific epistemology is a tyrant of us all, and seeing mystery in the world is the coup. Again, it isn't enchantment of a different kind we need, but disenchantment with scientism, a kind of sobriety of vision and thought. A moment of silence from the chanting. Since only when we are sober, and not prideful in our interpretation, can the mystery come forth.

2025/08/09 Against Philosophy

I remember when I was younger and when I first got into philosophy. How old must I have been, fifteen, sixteen? The so-called 'hard problem of consciousness', as the scientist-types like to call it, felt like a piece of grit in my eye, making my scientific view of the world a poor lens, uncomfortable and hard to see through. How could, I thought, the world be made up from top to bottom of matter when consciousness is not material? There's something paradigmatically different about consciousness. It exists prior to the existence of matter, since my perception of matter is contingent upon it; you could almost argue consciousness is more real than the matter it perceives. My thoughts ran along thus. From these Kantian and panpsychist interests, I found Jung, and after Jung I found Christianity. That piece of grit in my eye had in time become a pearl. But what of philosophy, that vehicle that brought me along this journey? What is the object of philosophy, and what is its point? And is philosophy good?

The questions raised brings to mind a Chesterton quote - of course - specifically his quote on open mindedness. 'Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.' The image painted here is beautiful. Imagine the open-minded man, taking every view into account, and viewing an issue from every angle, standing with his mouth agape like some mouth-breather. The effect of philosophy is much the same. Philosophy in of itself is a tool of open-mindedness, a tool to break down a status quo, and bring about a new way of viewing the world. A dynamo for Western civilisation, perhaps. But a motor spinning wheels without a destination. In mediaeval times, philosophy was understood as the hand-maiden of theology, because the scholars of the time knew philosopher hasn't an end-point. The end-point was the Lord, and philosophy bolstered His Glory through the understanding of Him through reason.

I'll give you another Chesterton quote - I'm feeling generous today. "The old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether." What seems to us humility in being open minded is to lose sight of our aims. And the man without aims is directionless. Imagine your aim was a flag which you are trying to reach, and each time you think you're getting closer, the flag moves. You'd be walking in circles your whole life! Philosophy is but a tool, since it can't present to us what a good end looks like. Many like Kant extol a system of morality, a set of moral dicta; and they may claim that these dicta originate from some great chain of reasoning they've scribbled down. But let's be real. It isn't. Most philosopher's, like Plato, don't 'follow the science', they have a cool idea in their mind and they come up with a justification for it. Hegel no doubt was the same. However cool, however applicable, the dialectic may be, it is but a flight of fancy to elevate it to the point of godhood and make it a metaphysical principle. The egos of these men!

Looking back to those first great egos, Socrates and Plato, you begin to realise that their claim to mere 'love of knowledge' is bogus. Plato sets himself apart from the sophists of the city as something different, as someone who just wants to 'follow the science' and be led by reasonable arguments. Today, in a time of industrial propaganda and jadedness, it's easy to see through the bluster. We can see these arguments which Plato puts forth are a means to an end, that end being the viewpoint he wants to propound, rather than just following pure reason from its seed to its fruit. And just as Christ says, that by their fruit you shall know them, so too can the teachings of Socrates be seen through the fruit of their students. See Critias who led the Thirty Tyrants, a ruthless and bloody oligarchy after the Peleponnesian war: Critias was the fruit of Socrates' teaching. A generation of students were brought up to think for themselves and question everything, including the venerable traditions with which they were brought up, and the morals they were given from their youth. Athenian society was crushed. Philosophy wasn't a tool to find truth, but rather one to break tradition.

This sentiment is expressed excellently in The Clouds, a play by Aristophanes lampooning Socrates, and is an invaluable contemporary relic for understanding the forces of the age. In the comic play, the protagonist of the story goes to learn with Socrates to become a philosopher, hoping to get rich quick after racking up gambling debts. He fails to learn from Socrates since he's too thick, but his son, who had also begun to learn at Socrates' Thinkery himself, became a star student. In the finale of the play, the son claims that since parents may hit their children to discipline them, children ought to be able to hit their parents also, and then proceeds to beat his father senseless. Aristophanes plays with something profound here. Socrates' Athens is a place where the young teach the old, where the inexperienced ""educate"" those of experience, and where the sense of tradition and the sense of hierarchy are smashed. Law and order, out the window. There is no order, only chaos, when the mouth of open mindedness is left open.

My argumentation against philosophy so far has been on its aimlessness and its self-deceived sense of just following truth. My third argument is however different. I think the very primacy of philosophy as something preceding and underpinning all other discourses is wrong. The argument goes as such: all belief systems and ways of viewing the world can be collapsed into logical assumptions, metaphysical assumptions, and epistemological assumptions; and that between different ways of viewing the world, philosophy offers a kind of lingua franca between beliefs, between which one philosophical system can communicate with another. The idea that philosophy is behind everything, I reject. This is because the world isn't built upon logical propositions. Such a view of the world, I believe, is foundations of sand. The mysterious, apophatic nature of reality is such that logical priors can't do it justice. In fact, seeing the world through logical propositions and reason is a very limited view of reality. Reality is to be touched and tasted, not thought about a read about; and greater still participated within in the sense of personal change and becoming. Not logical priors.

But you may say, dear reading, BreadIsDead, you are just drawing upon a Wittgensteinian notion of epistemology. And yes I am. You can't get away from philosophy in the written word, since philosophy is a way of expressing these ways of experiencing the world and ways of life. The difference is, there's no need for philosophy to have a privileged position as the sole way of communicating a lived understanding of the world. Why can't art do the same? Stories, paintings, music, dance, have all been ways in which cultures for generations, including our own, have passed down ways of thinking and experience. Why do we privilege philosophy over these as modes of expression? Because of its precision? Because it activates our analytical left-hemisphere, in an era of left-hemisphere dominance (if you believe in such theories, or accept their mythic power). There are means of understanding which are right-hemisphere, which involve the mind in a different way, and can bring perhaps a deeper understanding than mere words. Whilst the communist worldview was brought about through philosophy, the fascist worldview certainly was not; yet both worldviews provided ways of understanding the world, however dogmatic they could be.

Philosophy is fire. Misused and propelled, philosophy can turn an ancient woodland to ash in a generation. Fire cannot create, it can only change and destroy. And that is what philosophy has done in Western civilisation to great effect. The landscape has been burnt down many a time, fertilising the soil each time for a new way of being to grow in its ashes. Is this so wrong? So much has been gained from Plato's project, so much learnt. But philosophy is now a dog without a leash. Untethered from God, who gave ends to philosophy's means, philosophy has lost a master to serve. In the past, philosophers had abstract notions of God - Hegel had some conception of God, and so too did Kant - and these ideas as to what the ultimate and the divine look like gave direction and meaning to their scribblings. The participatory experience of the saints gave philosophy as falsifiability. And in modern society, as nascent paganism looms, the reader of much modern philosophy is led on a winding path, steep in ascent, up that philosopher's very own Tower of Babel.

But insofar as philosophy is destructive, art is constructive. We can learn so much from that most undervalued member of Plato's triad, Beauty. Whilst Beauty must be tempered by her sisters Truth and Goodness, for there are sirens leading each astray, Beauty will invite you to her sisters and teach you implicitly what the philosophers cannot. I look back on my own journey, expressed at the top of this article, and I see very little philosophising occurring. I never thought deeply about ideas, never reasoning through to logical conclusions: I followed the ideas which looked cool, which spoke the most to me. We imagine our own philosophical journeys, but how much philosophy does each of us on those journeys do? How much philosophy from first principles did Kant do? Or did he have a destination he wanted to find through pure reason? It's dangerous to fall in love with your own ideas; the pride will consume you. Philosophy has no praxis to combat pride; it's impotent as a spiritual or religious force. It has no aims, and it doesn't merely follow truth. It isn't the bedrock of thought; it is the drill which mines through the bedrock of thought, collapsing the edifice. Wisdom doesn't require philosopher, for there are 'lovers of wisdom' of every stripe.

2025/08/03 Baths and Time

Working life is exhausting. Upon his banishment from Eden, the Lord cursed Adam to break his back as he worked the land for his sustenance. And since then, little has changed, the curse has remained in full effect. We may not till the soil as Adam did, but the working week, having you juggle activities and tasks, can leave you knackered. This Friday I was particularly worn and beat down, and I decided to take a hot bath.

As I dipped my toes in, it was so hot I recoiled. Scalding. I added some cold to the bath, and swished about the water, mixing hot with cold so as to bring the temperature down a tad. I entered gingerly. Something about a hot bath releases everything, your muscles, your mind, your heart. Your breathing slows, your thoughts slow, and you begin to enter a more dream-like state. Each moment, each tick of the second hand, lingers a little longer than before, as you sink into a hot bath, and wonder. Bad thoughts, gnawing thoughts, those arguments endlessly rehearsed in your head, all wash away into the bath water as your heart and mind are brought back into equilibrium. And as a week of work stresses washed away like soot off a miner's body, my wondering mind began to dream of the last time I had had such a hot bath.

My trip to Japan last year was truly magical, and most magical of those experiences was our trip to an onsen. The water, thick with minerals, was so hot it almost boiled you as you entered. But like a bath or swimming pool, your body adapts fast to the temperature, as it reaches a new homeostasis. A new baseline. At this new baseline, your body enters a kind of repair mode, soothing you. The worries and stresses in our heads, and the pain in our legs from a week's marching around Tokyo, we shed into the heavy water which stewed us. I reckon in an age gone by when the Japanese truly believed in Yokai, they could faintly see a black spiritual malaise leave their body to be soaked up by the onsen water.

I reached for the speaker sitting beside the bath, and fumbled on my phone with wet paws, and put on Pagodes by Debussy. At times tempestuous, and at times quiescent, Pagodes encapsulates for me in some ineffable sense the feeling of Japan, particularly that night spent at the onsen. That day we visited the onsen, we had the tempest, the rain poured down, beating down on the roof of the onsen as we bathed. We were pierced by the cold air as the hot water rested us; and when we got out the bath leaving its warmth, and then leaving the roof's shelter, those cold drops of rain on the June evening hit like cold tears.

Like that sky, I too cried in the bath. The memory was so strong of Japan and our time. I feel almost there, almost, almost... it's so close. So close, I could almost feel it, but there was no form. What I inhabited was a memory. I was living in the timeless moment. But the timeless moment of a memory is never real, never present. I look back to the onsen, and the experience I had in the moment wasn't as magical, as awe-inspiring, and tear-jerking. I was awkward. I felt out of place, nervous about breaking etiquette, at least the first time we went. It was a good and restful experience, a beautiful experience, but the magic.. the magic rests in the memory. All anxieties and frustrations dissolved with time, leaving a pearl in it's place. Just like the onsen washes away our anxieties and pains, so too does time. Time is the great onsen, putting to rest every grievance and anger. The elderly know this. The elderly, those who are wise and kind, understand this. They care not for the grievances of life; they've seen enough life to know they matter not. The wise know that time heals every wound. The cut closes, and the memory sweetens, as all the sourness and bitterness fall away. The pains of the work week sail into the distance upon the water, and are forgotten.

This sense of nostalgia and memory is shown best in my favourite Japanese export, slice of life anime. Rewatching a favourite the other day, Yuyushiki, reminded me of the joy the genre brings, and its portrayal of simple life. Simple is not dull. Simple is without strife and hardship, without anger and hardness of heart, without arguments arising, and friendships strained: this is moe. Moe is an easy love without the difficulties a closeness of heart can bring. Like the onsen is for our body and soul, and like time is for our memories, moe anime is the expression of that tension and strife dissolved into the depths leaving a pearl left behind, that unbridled joy of life's springtime memories. Indeed, moe is a memory. Yuyushiki is not the story of three girls enjoying their school years, but rather of three girls reminiscing upon those school years decades later. All the tension and angst part-and-parcel with adolescence is sanded away, like tidal water smoothing a cave.

To this sense of nostalgia, I recommend Debussy's Reverie and Arabesque No. 1. Both pieces enchant, dropping you into a mellow yearning for something more. These yearnings, Romantic yearnings, can't be fulfilled in this life. They stretch to the firmament like trees, but stop short once they can no longer keep reaching. "The eye is not satisfied with seeing / Nor the ear filled with hearing." - Ecclesiastes 1:8. The passions of the heart, that yearning, knows no limit. We will continue to yearn and yearn until the next life when our yearnings will be fulfilled.

As Chesterton puts it, we live on the messy rear-side of the tapestry, awaiting to see the beautiful pattern of the front. That waiting is for the eschaton. Will the next life be like the onsen, where the pain, hardship, and anxieties dissolve away into a Noachian flood? Perhaps. The far future may feel like the far past. As memories sweeten as they become further away, so too may future memories just as far in the other direction. And as we shed the passions of the flesh, being raised as spiritual bodies, we too will be ridden of all our angst and hurt. The next life will be one without suffering nor strife, one where we live in the timeless moment, the moment beyond time, where all that healing time performs in this life will be experienced in the present. That nostalgia for the past will be made present, and we will live in beautiful memories in the now. What I mean to say, dear reader, in a roundabout way, is that the next life may well be quite like a slice of life anime.

2025/07/27 Nonjudgement

The many creeds of the world get much right. Their successes are not like the case with the broken clock, which is right twice a day, but rather wisdom traditions in Arabia, the East, the Subcontinent, etc, have generation upon generation formulated and layered their investigations on human nature into good doctrine. God can be found in many ways, like in nature (Rom. 1:20). Anyone with eyes to see, ears to hear, and a human heart, can find what is good in the world. The totality of truth, and the path to salvation, may only truly be found in the Messiah; but these traditions of wisdom across the world have born witness of God through His creation, and through their own image-bearing of Him as men - their conclusions oughtn't be flippantly ignored.

Today we'll be looking at one such tradition, Buddhism. Buddhism in many ways, in spite of my prior praise, is a kind of inversion of the Christian view, with a total Gnostic-like disdain for the world, and a view of suffering which tells people to 'get good'. In Buddhism it is the sufferer's obligation to meditate, dissociate, and simply surpass suffering, as opposed to the Christian tradition of finding meaning in suffering as Christ suffered. But in spite of this insufficiency, Buddhism gets much right. Primarily, their focus on nonjudgement, or refusing to cling to value judgements of others.

The Buddhist principle of nonjudgement is this, that you mustn't cling to one thing over another, whether this be toast over cereal for breakfast, or between competing moral decisions. Clinging to choice is the enemy, because through these identities we arouse the passions and amplify the ego, where Buddhism's aim is the disappearance of self, or Anatta. These kinds of value judgements require a valuer, a judge to determine which choice should be made, and see whether one thing is more valuable than another.

The Pyrrhonist argument for nonjudgement is stronger still. On campaign with Alexander the Great, Pyrrho learnt from the young Buddhist movement, and upon his return to Athens, started the aforementioned school of thought. A pillar of Pyrrhonism is epoché, a doctrine of complete nonjudgement. For Pyrrho, all judgement got in the way of achieving ataraxia, mental tranquillity, and were to be transcended.

To our Christian minds, though, avoiding judgement in this manner is undesirable. We are moralists at heart, not non-dualists, nor Nietzschean vitalists: our moral clay was moulded in Jerusalem and kilned by Christ. We each wish to follow the moral law, and want nothing more than for our communities to follow that law also. Our children, we want them to follow the moral law, and our neighbours too. And yet, this insistence somehow unravels itself. In going around town, finger-wagging at our neighbours as if we were their father, we end up breaking the law. We end up being hypocrites, being arseholes, and not treating our neighbours as we would want to be treated ourselves.

Christ, like the Buddhists, asks us not to judge. "And why do you look at the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?" (Mat. 7:3), Christ implores us. We are called not to judge others, yet we are called also to uphold morals - how is this to be squared? The Pharisees couldn't square it. Christ thundered at the Pharisees for being hypocrites, for judging the people of Judea without practicing what they preached. And then, who should be given the authority to judge others? Only the righteous can be a good judge, only those who are without sin themselves; and yet anyone with such a prideful self-conception has such a large beam in their eye, lodged there, that makes them the least qualified to judge. The last person we should think to be righteous, to paraphrase C. S. Lewis, is ourselves.

We're stuck then. On the one hand is the Pharisee, the moraliser, who maintain morals through judging; and on the other, is the Buddhist, who retreats from the world, not judging, but transcending the judgement of moral decrepitude. There is, however, a middle way. Jesus tells us the two golden rules: to love God, and to love our neighbour. All else is downstream from there. Like the Buddhist, we don't judge. We oughtn't be so puffed up with leaven as to think we could pass judgement, since that is the prerogative of God. Yet we must be moral, and we are to be moral through our love for God and our neighbour. Our love for God, our thanks and gratitude to God, once properly dwelt upon, leads us to a state of agape, of unconditional love. We realise we are indebted to God to the point of bankruptcy, that each breath, each moment of joy and good happenstance, is contingent upon His love for us; and we can't even do the few things he asks for us in return! And despite our failures and trespasses, despite the sunk project of Israel turning to sin, He let his only Son be sacrificed by Israel, as the Passover lamb, and as a sin offering, to save us all from sin, so that we will be purified in death for the Resurrection, and be part of Christ's kingdom upon His return. That is an unpayable debt. And by that debt, and that sense in us, we follow the moral law, without any care for moral laws.

This sentiment is how I interpret Galatians, when Paul says we are free from the curse of the law (Gal. 3:13), and when Paul says the law is essentially stabilisers to our bike, in need of being taken off (Gal. 3:24). Moral codes and moral laws, though they point towards behaviour pleasant to the eyes of God, can become corrupt, be used as a weapon, and themselves lead us into sin (Rom. 7:8). The moral law code is something to grow up from, graduate from, so that we can follow the law engraved on the heart by the Spirit (Rom. 2:14-15). This is the Christian calling. This is the middle way between the Buddhist law and the Pharisaic law. We listen to the tutor of the moral law, now engraved on the heart, we love God, and by our love we follow His law. Such a conception purifies us of our judging others, taking us to that Buddhist virtue of nonjudgement, whilst continuing in follow the law.

How might this look in our lives then? There are moral judgements and non-moral judgements; but as we shall see, every judgement is dyed with drops of morality. Simple questions of judging what to wear has the moral undertone of what ought to be worn out for the occasion. Architecture, and judging what building are beautiful, contains implicit moral judgements of 'the past was better', or 'the future is coming'. That the world is filled with moral judgements of every shade is a problem easy for the Buddhist. The Buddhist, in sticking to his principles of nonjudgement, need not pick one suit over another, nor one meal over another - there is no decision to be made. Decisions can be arbitrary, since any material concerns tie down your life force's attempt to seek escape from the cycle of rebirth.

To the Christian, there is no one propositional answer, but rather a participatory answer. Christ will transform us through our image-bearing of Him; and as we begin to love God more, we begin to wear Christ (Gal. 3:27), and can judge a piece of art, for instance, not from morality, but a genuine sense of beauty. Our apperception of beauty is brought into alignment with Christ, rather than being tainted by our own moral judgements. As the only valid judge, God will judge in our stead.

And without this taint, this stain of judgement, the beauty of old churches dotting the English countryside becomes that much more beautiful. And the vague anger at those Satanic mills, at Britain's change and decline, disappears, and you can appreciate their beauty without it being 'a movement' or 'a cause', or have it inspire in you a sense of elitism, exceptionalism, or arrogance. Your taste will come out in your apperception of beauty without constant comparisons between architecture new and old, or whatever other likes and dislikes. Forgoing judgement, the reds have a deeper red; you don't have to justify opinions, since you expect it of others; you don't ruthlessly critique yourself, since you don't ruthlessly critique others. The beauty of creation, once blurry, comes into focus. I'm reminded poignantly of Screwtape's thirteenth letter, where he says "I have known
a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions." The beauty which comes into focus will quash your pride.

2025/07/20 The Statues were Painted!

Archaeological evidence of pigments has shown that in the Classical world the marble statues we know them best by were painted. To discover this to most is a shock. A great shock. A shock which uproots our aesthetic impression of the Classical age. These statues weren't painted subtly with subdued colours either. We would expect perhaps some browns and pastels to contour and highlight. No, these statues were painted with bright primary colours, and would've looked like real people. How could we have gotten it all so wrong?

Our exposure to the ancient world is honestly minimal, with only a few works preserved from that age. The bulk were preserved by monasteries who transcribed many classical works in which they saw value. A smaller yet not inconsiderable number of ancient works came from the Byzantines, the successors of Rome, who hung on for another one-thousand years after the fall of Rome. Centred in Constantinople, the Byzantine empire translated many Latin works from the fallen West, and preserved many contemporary and ancient Greek works, written in the Byzantine mother-tongue. After the sack of Constantinople, that dastardly Faustian act, in the fourth crusade, Byzantium in time fell to the many attackers raiding them on all fronts, until in 1453 Constantinople itself fell. Upon the fall of the city and in the decades leading up to the fall, many of Byzantium's most prominent intellectuals fled to the West for safety, and with them they brought these works to the West. This, we call the Renaissance.

Forgive me for this rather biased history. My ancestry is part Greek, you must understand, so taking such strong positions is a matter of course. There were other causes for the Renaissance, of course, such as the Black Death and social reform, if you are a Marxist, and ascribe to all historical events a material cause; or, if you are more of an ideas guy, you will point to the failures of Mediaeval Scholasticism, usually making jeering reference towards monks counting how many angels could dance atop a needle head. As an aside, I have great respect for this Scholastic inquiry. I like to imagine the Thomists positioning themselves at the end of history, having discovered everything there is to know, with only these few niggling problems left. Us today, having passed through our own Fukuyama moment and hopefully towards our own Renaissance in thinking, may see the obscure and esoteric scientific investigations of today in a similar light. That is an aside, though. Every era of stagnation becomes bored of its own brilliance. The material causes for these ages of greatness may be endless, but it takes genius and drive to create a new culture. I say 'create', what I mean to say is 'culture': the word culture means also to grow and incubate microorganisms, like a yeast, a bacteria, or a virus. Culture is much like this, it must be cultured; it's a delicate thing to grow at first. Yet, like the black death, once ready will sweep across the ends of the Earth. So too was this revival in Classical interest. Cultured by the Humanists, and spread across the elite world.

But the Renaissance men got it wrong. When Donatello and Michelangelo chiselled away at their marble blocks, they had no interest in painting them. The statues discovered, unearthed, and displayed from the Classical era weren't painted, and theirs, whose style imitates the ancients', wasn't to look any different. What developed then was a strange version of the past. An altered version. A version no Greek two-thousand years before would recognise - or maybe they would recognise it, but as an unfinished statue. Nevertheless, this tradition of unfinished Classical statues is today the archetypal image of the Renaissance, of this era, of this movement, this moment. But it goes deeper. This Renaissance statuary continues into the Baroque era, with sculptors like Bernini; and the aesthetic and ideas of the Classical age are again folded back into the present in the Enlightenment era, with figures like Winckelmann. The Enlightenment also saw Classical ideas re-emerge in a modern context. But were any of these ideas and aesthetics true? After all, the statues weren't painted.

It feels as if the foundations are faulty, as if the Neoclassical cultural city we've built isn't quite so sound. So much of our understanding of ancient Greece and Rome comes from sources, sources we haven't even the worldview to understand. Can we truly understand the past? The past is a foreign country, it has been written, they do things differently; and in ancient Greece, much was done differently. Not just their lives, but their very cosmology of mind is profoundly, irreconcilably different to our own. They are so far away.

I'm sure I've mentioned this point elsewhere on my blog, but I'll repeat for good measure. C. S. Lewis lays out in his great work The Discarded Image how when the Mediaeval man looked up at the night sky, he saw something different to us. To us, we see a cosmos of fiery balls far, far away, all distance being relative, with black being the colour of space; to Mediaeval man, the stars were instead really high up - the Earth was after all the centre of the universe - and the night sky was black not because space was black - to him space was irradiated by the sun's light - but because the side of the Earth not brightened by the sun's orbit was in shade. The Mediaeval man saw the stars high up, not far away, and the universe bright with light, not dark and empty. That was one thousand years ago. One-and-a-half thousand years ago before then, those stars in the night sky were gods. The world back then was far more different, in Classical times.

And yet we can't help but try to return. Each time Western civilisation begins to get stale, or perhaps overly moralistic, this injection of the Classical, of the pagan, of the unknown, brings a sense of life to the West, and puts a bit of colour in our pale faces. For better and for worse. After the Victorian primness and moralism, we had Nietzsche and the up-current of pagan vitalism, again harking back to Classical times. The movements and bloodshed across Europe attest to the dangers. In the Second World War, the influence was obvious; but even in the First war, soldiers, German soldiers especially, were known to carry Nietzsche to the battlefield. Western civilisation moves in cycles umming and ahhing between Socrates and Christ, between thumos and agape, between the eagle and the dove. The muddled tension is how our civilisation has come so far.

But I ask again, what of the statues? They were painted, and yet we see a Classical world of unpainted statues. Each age re-imagines the Classical world again with a new aesthetic and new values: it is a wellspring of inspiration. The painted statues may well be yet another wellspring, another source of intellectual and artistic life. But there's something unsettling about painted statues. Something deeply unsettling. If you imagine a Greek statue painted, you begin to see what it actually is: an idol.

The sleek, rounded marble is de-fanged. There's something exact, elegant about marble statues, something approximating Platonic perfection. That statue of David by Michelangelo is right at home amongst the digital imagery of vaporwave, in the world of the virtual, of absolutes. The generative, virile, furtive power and meaning a Greek statue of old had is dead in it. His cheeks are bloodless and marble-white. The Humanists saw Greek statues without the gods - or rather perhaps the demons - which possessed them. They saw the statues without souls. These statues in their time weren't looked upon in a museum, Athenians didn't remark on the beauty of the art piece as we would. The statue to them was something living and to be used. It lived in the temple, and the god lived in it. It was likely dressed and fed. It was coloured like a person, and was treated like a person. It wasn't mere 'art'. In those pigments, in those paints, the statue appeared to come alive, and without those paints, Western civilisation received the Classical world dead, in a soulless state. The more we study, the more we discover that soul, but there's something unsettling: the Classical world is truly a foreign country. We can handle the Roman Empire as only a memory of a deceased ancestor, but not as its ghost. Nevertheless we are haunted. And if the true spirit of Classicism were to sweep the people, heaven knows what that would look like.

2025/07/13 Real Horror

I've never been one for horror. I get spooked easily, and I dislike the trite, predictable story lines horror films usually follow. The shrill Stravinsky-esque scores build choking suspense, whilst the characters act and behave in ways I just can't relate to: I can't stand it. It just makes me anxious - not afraid, just anxious. It isn't a pleasurable experience. And neither is the gore so common in horror films. I don't want to see a man's torso be ripped from his lower half, and all the CG guts and gushing blood that accompanies. That's horror films, but horror books have never interested me either. I just can't get into them. Knowing they're fictitious, I interpret them as fiction, not as something scary, but as something literary. Perhaps this is a me problem, that I can't properly believe in fiction the way a child can in nativity. Perhaps I'm becoming older and jaded. But there is a kind of horror which is real. Not the true crime stories, that middle-aged women love to lap up and chat about wide-eyed in offices, but true horror of the supernatural kind. That kind of Lovecraftian horror is, in fact, available to all of us not just to read, but to experience, by the ingestion of but a few seeds.

Datura, Angel's Trumpet, Mandrake: these are a group of plants which contain chemicals known as deliriants. Unlike their better known cousin, psychedelics, deliriants bring around true hallucinations, hallucinations you can't tell aren't real. On psychedelics, the participant knows they are high, and if they forget, it is because they have forgotten everything and their mind is blank, not because they have fallen for the falsehood of their eyes. They'll see fractals, patterns, visual illusions, and other disturbances, primarily. They won't believe someone is there who isn't. Having long conversations with imagined friends and family is common after eating a pod of datura seeds. These people, they lose their mind. The participant experiences their actions as if it were a dream, parched, until later they wake up in a bush, naked, their skin lacerated and covered in mud. For some, it takes weeks to come back to their senses. Many lose their minds for good, sinking back into fits of madness years later. These toxins are potent, and they make people go mad, but fools still take them. Here's a small-ish excerpt from someone's experience:

Nothing much more seems to be happening. I have finished the pitcher of kool-aid and gone to the bathroom 2 more times. Steve says to go in the kitchen and refill the pitcher with water in case I feel like I’m going to dehydrate. It seems like a responsible idea so I go into the kitchen and refill it with water and put ice cubes in it. I walk back into my living room to find Steve has left, and the tv has been turned off. The entire house is dead silent. Then I hear the tv go back on, but the screen is blank, and I hear Steve saying 'hey I’m over here'. I realize that he’s calling me from out in my backyard, so I put my shoes on and go outside. At first I scanned my back yard for him, but couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t hear him anymore. I suddenly get the idea that Steve had come over for a hide and seek game (at this point I have absolutely no idea that I have taken anything) so I run into the yard looking around for him. Then I speak 'come out come out where ever you are' . Right when I say this my voice sounds very different, like a person who has gone totally insane. This starts to scare me very much, and Steve is nowhere to be found. I look way across to the other end of my yard (my yard is only about a 100 foot by 200 foot area, but now it was a soccer field size) and at the other end I see my dog’s pen, a fenced in area in the corner with all my friends who are straight edge that stopped being friends with me when I started smoking pot. I haven’t seen them in so long, so I run towards the pen. They look just as happy to see me as I am to see them, and they let me into the pen. We start talking and to my surprise, one of them pulls a blunt out of nowhere and sparks it. I am naturally amused but shocked, then they start to explain to me that they came to see me cause they all 'got into the game' and don’t think drugs are that bad after all. On the outside I am pleased to hear this, but on the inside I begin to get feelings of untrust. These bastards abandoned me years back. I don’t show any unpleasant feelings on the outside, and I continue to be cheery with them, although I keep a state of mind not to trust anyone there. They pass me the blunt and I take a super long hit, and hold it super long and blow out. After it went around a few times we all spark a cigarette to increase our high. We just keep talking and talking. It seems like time has stopped. How long can people just sit here and talk? It’s been hours, I think to myself (strangely enough I am still puffing on the same cigarette, but dont notice anything unusual about it). Then I drop my butt, and it falls under the chair I’m sitting on. 'Ah Shit' I said and got out of my seat to get it. I look under the chair but I can’t seem to find it. 'Did any of you see were my...' as I turn around I notice no one is there, and I am alone in the pen. A sense of anger comes over me, and I get intense feelings of 'I shouldnt have trusted them' and 'how dare they'. These feelings are followed by loneliness and then total fear. I need to get out of this pen and go back in the house. I walk back to my house across the long field, and it seems to take even longer to go back than when I had come.

And this excerpt doesn't stand alone: many of those who adventure into this madness write down their experiences in well written 'trip reports'. You can read them online, on Erowid, or listen to someone on YouTube narrate the experience. And these are all real stories... likely. Some may be false. But unlike telling stories of a similar ilk around a campfire, where you know your mates, and can be quite sure the stories are made up, the opaque wall of anonymity means you can't know whether the events described really happened. And this anonymity is part of the appeal. Another genre of horror I like are the /x/ creepypastas, particularly ones on cryptids. You can't know if the story is real. It's written by an anonymous gentleman, who frames their writing as a real story; and since I'm not so chronically disillusioned so as to disbelieve everything I hear online, it feels kind of freaky. One of my favourites was listening to a series of posts by a former deep-sea diver, telling the tales of the freaks at the bottom of the sea. It's more real than a work of fiction, since it's posed as truth, and more real than a camp-fire story, since I can't judge the author. It sits in a liminal zone where it's not ostracised in the darkness of falsehood, but doesn't conform to my sense of reality's light; instead, it rests in the twilight of truth, on the boundary, where all horror ought to rest. Although I haven't read the book, another horror in this twilight is that of the New York mole people, homeless men who live in the unused forgotten tunnels of the metro. The author claimed she was taken down by a guide into the tunnels, and met a civilisation of homeless people who haven't left in years, but that she hadn't journeyed into the deepest reaches of the tunnels. The deeper you went, the stranger the people became, some having webbed feet and hands, her guides reported. Of course structural engineers, train autists, and other boring people came out to DEBUNK the author's tale, but the author never caved and said outright that she'd written a falsehood. And because she continued to believe her story, we are able to also. Important, since she hadn't that shield of anonymity.

The through-line with these stories is that of truth and how its determined. In my experience horror which is true tugs at me and makes me feel actually afraid, rather than just anxious or disconnected. There are two ways we determine truth: authority and perspective, we can dub them. Truth from authority is to believe something is true because an authority, whether that be an expert or the mass of the majority, has declared it to be true, implicitly or explicitly. For example, a scientist may say the Earth has a molten core, and we believe because we trust his expertise and judgement; alternatively to the authority of the scientist, there's the authority of the majority, where we may believe the Earth has a molten core simply because everyone else believes that, and you don't want to be called some kind of flat-earther, do you. Or on a personal level, the doctor may diagnose me with Leukaemia, and since I have no means by which to disprove his assessment, I will believe what he says to be true. Truth from perspective, however, is different. Truth from perspective is your own apperception of truth, your own eyes and worldview, trying to fit an experience into your understanding and experience of the world. However many times a man of great repute may try to convince me there are herds of flying cows floating an inch above the Patagonian plane, I won't believe him, since it sounds like complete tosh. He may even attempt to show evidence, like a photo, a video, or an academic journal article, but I will probably still disbelieve him.

Real horror, the truly scary, requires both of these truths to be engaged. Our perspectival sense of truth rejects horror stories, because it says 'these things aren't true, since I have no experience of them'. But humans can't rely on our own experience alone. Each man cannot re-invent the wheel! And learning from other people's failures is far better than learning from your own failure. Which is why we rely also on truth from authority, and have faith that authority is not corrupt. Now granted, the internet isn't a bastion of great authority in which to place your trust. There are swindlers and grifters in every cranny, selling vitality-boosting nootropic snake oils. But so long as the authority in question hasn't a reputation of lying or is proven to be lying, we can't help but implicitly place our trust in these horror tales we read. Perhaps just an inch of trust. But the door wedged open but an inch is all the cool cave air of the Unknown needs to gust into your mind and give us chills.

And as is the case for our sense of horror, so too is it the case for the datura tripper. It takes but an inch gap, afforded by these toxic chemicals, for their sense of perspectival truth to be wedged open. That marble door, which separates the conscious mind from the unconscious mind, is bust open - for those most unfortunate, by the hinges - and for all the imaginations and demons of the liminal realm, the twilight realm, to come forth into the tripper's reality. And they lose their perspectival truth, their ability to personally discern truth based on an understanding of the world, and instead imagine a wholly new world they're fooled into thinking is real. In short, it is the horror of horrors: a horror wherein all things become horror. The truth of authority becomes worthless, for it no longer pertains to your situation on datura, and your truth of perspective is faulty, leaving you adrift and radically disconnected from reality. This is life without truth, without logos. This is the hell.

The ancients understood this conception of hell also, it isn't simply a modern contrivance. Dreams were considered in many cultures messages from the underworld. It isn't surprising then that so many datura-takers explain their experience as a dream. Dreams are without sense nor reason, and experienced in the darkness and mystery of night. Linked is the ancient Greek practice of incubation, wherein initiates were taken by some kind of shaman into their dreams to encounter the underworld as a form of healing. Similarly, the Orphic mystery cults in ancient Greece descended into the underworld, just like their namesake, through rituals, rituals often containing potions - perhaps potions with deliriants.

The realm of the dead is inhabited by these shifting spirits, unconstrained by matter, but without the benefits of a material body, like to affect the world. Hell is without logos nor love. It is a place without sense, where everything is confused, since matter is what gives reality shape, consistency, repeatability, and thus affords wisdom. That datura, this gateway to hell, this Orphic potion, grows naturally and can be eaten by any foolish teenager is honestly crazy. Once upon a time, in a mythic age, only the witches who sought forbidden knowledge were daring enough to try such a potion. There are many today also who seek forbidden knowledge, a goal which is honestly the most common reason these trippers give for trying datura, even if they may not phrase it in this way.

What's likely the scariest take-away, the take-away which sticks with you longest, from reading or listening to these datura experiences, is how thin the line is between sanity and madness. You realise how our sense making mechanism, those mechanisms which piece together data from the eyes, the ears, and our other senses, can so easily be hijacked by what can only be described as demons. You may see and hear an old friend in conversation, papier-mâché'd from memories and imagination, but you may also smoke a cigarette, feeling it on your lips, tasting and smelling the tobacco. And then drop their cigarette, as they so often do - what a strange motif in these stories that is. And then they may see their friend die and decompose before their eyes, experiencing the grief, smelling the putrefaction, even if they've never smelled a decaying corpse before. So much of our reality is realised. Real-ise has an 'ise' ending, it's an action we are constantly performing. Insofar as we realise our goals, we are in a constant operation of realising reality, crafting reality from senses, so that we can operate in the world. So much of the mind is primordially ancient, containing buggy deprecated operations and functions, which in a moment are all brought forth into consciousness, your mind unable to digest this rush of thoughts and images. This is the underworld of ancient pagan belief from which few return. It takes a confrontation with madness, to steal the gold of the underworld and return, to attain its treasures of power and wisdom.

But is this hermetic path right? Prominent history YouTuber Whatifalthist recently flew too close to the sun, was overwhelmed with symbols, and now communes with Odin. Is this path right? I'm reminded of T. S. Eliot's verse in East Coker: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless." We need humility to forego this hunger for forbidden knowledge from the underworld. We need humility to trust in Christ that we need not the wisdom of the underworld, the wisdom of old men Eliot talks of. And we need humility to appreciate true horror. Those who, puffed with pride, believe they know everything about how the world works and how it is, keeps their door firmly shut. There is no mystery to the world, it's just a clockwork of people. Only those with the humility to know they don't know, to know the world is in fact a mysterious place: only they will feel that chill from the winds of the Unknown. Only they can have faith.

2025/07/06 Bearish on AI

After my first article a little while ago, 'Bullish on AI', I thought I'd present the bear case also. A few weeks ago, someone at work told me something difficult to digest. That his father, at his grandfather's funeral, wrote the eulogy with AI. I didn't quite know how to react to hearing this. A heartfelt message, sending your loved one off, all with words not your own? There are some things that should never be delegated. And this is the crux of the bear case against AI: delegation.

Back in mediaeval times, everyone inhaled smoke. The chimney hadn't been invented, since the architecture of a peasant house couldn't support such a structure, so the smoke of the hearth's fire just lingered in the house. Everything would've smelled of smoke, their clothes, their food, their bedding, all day and all night, smoke. This sentiment spanned all the way into the Elizabethan era, with chimneys being seen as an effeminate invention. They inhaled smoke, and thought it good for them. To remove the smoke, by way of innovation, was to whisk away hardship by technology. There needs to be a kind of payoff, after all. In the modern day, we have Ozempic, a weight loss drug that cripples your appetite, and burns fat. The great hardship of having to watch our diet and exercise has been whisked away, and with a swift injection, you can lose weight. Being thinner is better for your health too, reducing the risk of cancer, diabetes, strokes, virtually every illness.

Placing these two examples side by side may seem a little harsh. Many a reader will probably think Ozempic is an unnerving invention with unknown side-effects, and chronic smoke inhalation morning till eve may well be rife with negative health consequences. But the principle remains, the same principle since the start: we use technology to improve our lives. From the beginning where man made fire to cook meat, I reckon there were old purists who ate their meat raw, laughing at the young cave men roasting their meat with fire. With each innovation, there are those who are sceptical. And rightly so! We may laugh at the mediaeval inhaling smoke, and the cave man who doesn't cook his meat, but we share that same scepticism regarding Ozempic. Not every new technology will be used correctly, and nor will they necessarily be safe. We remember the successes, but not the failures; and how many failed technologies have there been? The number is likely too large to list.

Technology is like the apple in the garden, like Pandora's box, no invention made can be reversed. A new invention is an injection of pure potential into the culture which must be broken down, digested, and incorporated into society by way of moral laws. Moral laws are a kind of scaffold. Without them, the project of building a culture collapses, however innovative your raw materials and tools may be. The scaffold of moral laws determine how the new technology is to be used responsibly, a kind of cast after the shock breaks a bone. And the introduction of a new technology is a violent event. See how society changed after the industrial revolution, the printing press, the canon, and in more recent times, the internet. The cat has left the bag, the train has left the station: there's no going back.

And AI is one such technology. The full impact of the internet has yet to be seen, but thus far society's structure has changed absolutely. The way people work has changed, how they socialise too - this blog will only reach you by its means - but the morality of the internet has yet to set. The arm is broken, and the plaster cast is yet to set. Should the internet be used as an alternative to real interaction? Is it morally okay for people to work fully remotely - by which I mean, for their own well-being? How should we post on the internet, with what level of anonymity, and how should our digital lives relate to our real lives? The questions are still hot, and have yet to cool. And in short succession, this new disruption of AI has broken another bone on the same arm. Just as the culture began to figure out its answers to the first, a process which is always violent, this second disruption reared its head.

We're at a digital crossroads, and the issue with AI is we don't know how to use it. Or worse still, in the case of the eulogy, when to use it. AI at present is throwing education into disarray, since homework is being rendered futile. Teachers receive homework written by AI, and the child hasn't learnt a thing. The institutions and the morality can't keep up with the technological change, and even though we know cheating on homework to be wrong, there's little the teacher can do to prevent it. In the schools, to the kids it's a game, a game of cat and mouse, to see if they'll get caught. But again, I'm struck by the eulogy. Why did he get an AI to write something so heartfelt and important? There's a quality of Wall-E, I reckon, a sense that we are made weak by our machines, so weak we forget to feel and empathise. We lose our need to toil, but we lose alongside it our capacity to love. This is the Faustian pact of our Faustian civilisation. We develop technologies, improving our lives, but end up losing our souls.

This, then, is the bear thesis I have on AI. Or rather it's a bear thesis on mankind. Man has continued since the garden to sin and be tempted by technological innovations, some good, some devilish. The power of each new technology is great, and in lockstep dangerous if used incorrectly. Conquest, war, famine and death have all been seen released by technology not controlled. Our most recent calamity, the pandemic, was that not also a technological mishap? AI may well be Tolkien's Ring of Power, one of the greatest changes the world will ever see, and they'll look back on us fumbling. Some have even posited the internet was but the forerunner for AI, the necessary systems to create the database by which to train them. This is the greatest technological change of our generation, but it may be too much for mankind. Our beliefs and opinions about the world, held by the man on the streets, aren't yet primed for what is to come.

Twenty to thirty years, I reckon, until Costco has robot maids on the shelves. I can almost see them, kneeling beside one another waiting for a master to take her home. How will people treat their robot maids, and can mistreatment by punished? What will they mean for marital dynamics? Cleaning and tidying will be a long lost art, one forgotten for a harder time. This softer age will have people leaving there socks lying around, litter on the living room floor, and cupboard doors left open. Like children, we'll likely not hold ourselves in good manners and regard, since we'll have a maid cleaning up after us. And again, our standards will fall. This is the reactionary temperament: as technological progress marches on, the quality of men declines. There's a lot of truth here, and it's a truth to which many today are allergic. It's a truth which abrades every capital of each moral pillar our society is build upon, to many it's a painful truth. If man is to be worthy of AI, we must be great enough to use it responsibly. The workman can't be used by the tool. And most certainly, when our family is concerned, and love is concerned, we should be wise enough to know AI has no place.

2025/06/29 On Cool Ideas

Back in the sixties, back when scientists had greater freedom, one such scientist conducted the famous rat utopia experiments. Rats were given a kind of city furnished with all the food and other things a rat could want, in order to see what would happen. Would the rats live peaceably as sated grazers, or would they begin wars? The answer is both. Some rats became violent, and others were so vacant they left their young to die. One particular set have captured the imagination of many, however, and these the scientist named 'The Beautiful Ones'. These rats, given all they could ever want, groomed and groomed, until they could groom no more.

The comparison between autistic hobbies and The Beautiful Ones is hardly a novel connection, but it is nonetheless a connection bearing a lot of truth. Once the need to survive leaves us, and we are sated for all the simple pleasures, in which direction do our impulses and instincts point? Just like those rats, we groom ourselves. Not by slicking our hair, and perfecting our features, but by cramming our minds with opinions, facts, and ideas.

I know first hand, because I've spent my life cramming my mind with opinions, facts, and ideas. It's an easy habit to get into. Within the culture, some new work of fiction comes out, and everyone wants to know your opinion on it. Someone mentions a meme, and they want you to get the reference, understand the in-joke. We're preening ourselves. But with these media opinions and references there's a social element, an in-group out-group mechanism, so it can be argued these behaviours are somewhat normal, even if it's angled at niche autistic hobbies which won't help you find a mate. But there's a deeper autism, an invisible hand pulling you to a deeper depth, which wants you to explore a topic in detail which no one else will care about, or at most will make you a pariah if you speak of it. There is this pull in many a man. A pull towards preening not for a mate, nor for social prestige, but simply by the will of some chthonic force. This is the pull towards cool ideas.

A little while ago, I read a book. The book was called "The Greek Buddha", by Christopher Beckwith, and the aim of the author was to find what the Buddha was really like, originally. Unlike the Bible, where all the books of the New Testament were written comfortably within a hundred years of the life of Christ, the earliest Buddhist texts were written around five-hundred years later. Granted, the scrolls are said to have descended from an oral tradition pre-dating their transcription, but oral traditions are fallible, and give ample opportunity to men of ambition to edit. Beckwith's aim, then, was to look not to primary Buddhist sources, but to Greek sources. This may sound ridiculous, but we have a wealth of Ancient Greek texts from around the time of the Buddha, whereas our collection of ancient Indian texts is impoverished, and the major works can most likely be counted on both hands. The author looked to Pyrrho who he deduced and argues in the book had learnt of Buddhism as part of Alexander the Great's party, been initiated into Buddhist practices, and brought back to Greece all he had learnt. The argument is compelling. The argument is pretty cool, too. I personally like the idea Pyrrho had learnt the way of the Buddha, bringing his teachings back to Greece, and that these are the earliest accounts, hidden in an esoteric form. Cool. The author also describes how the Buddha was also a Scythian sage, a point he doesn't expound. Perhaps he discusses the idea in another book. It's nevertheless cool, and I now believe it.

Later in the book, Beckwith has an even bigger reveal. Lao Tzu, the ancient founder of Daoism, is but a tradition mis-naming the Buddha. Here his argument. The Buddha is said to have walked off East, seemingly into the sunset, in many of the earliest accounts; to Beckwith, this is the Buddha heading off to China. Then Beckwith performs linguistic alchemy. He takes the name, Lao Tzu, and takes it back to what is traditionally his full name, Lao Tan (Tzu is Chinese for teacher, Confucius is Kong Tzu, for instance). Then, wielding Kangzi changes over time, and how it's believed people of the past pronounced them, he takes Lao Tan, which would've once been Gao-Tan, and may have once been Gao-Tama, and end with Gautama, the name of the Buddha. Genius stuff. And even if Daoism doesn't align too closely to much modern Buddhism, it overlaps quite neatly with Pyrrhonism, both sharing an emphasis on balance, not taking sides, and having no opinion.

Was Lao Tzu the Buddha then? Yes, I'd say so. I haven't the evidence to back it up, nor the technical knowledge of ancient Chinese to verify the linguistic shifts, but it seems pretty plausible to me. And what's more, it's a cool idea. The coolness of the idea takes precedence. There is no reason to believe Lao Tzu was the Buddha, nor to believe that Pyrrho spoke of a truer, older Buddhism, but to believe these opinions, opinions some would call conspiracies, to be true is far cooler. Holding on to these minority, out-there opinions gives a bit of a thrill, the same thrill a conspiracy theorist feels, only there's far less at stake. Because whilst Mr. Beckwith is writing a serious and cited work of history, the subject matter lends itself to a bit of fun - nay, most subject matters in academia are quite silly. Monty Python riff on this point best, ruthlessly mocking the philosophic tradition. My favourite of their sketches is the philosopher's football match between the ancient Greeks, and the 18th century Germans, where neither side thinks to kick the ball. The seriousness of these oblique conversations in philosophy and academia, with one academic dedicating his career to his cool idea, against another who thinks his cool idea is lame, can become very funny if but a drop of humour is injected. Perhaps the philosophers, those lovers of knowledge, are the Beautiful Ones of our time?

Introspecting a bit, I know that I'm gravitated not to the best reasoned argument the world has ever seen, but first and foremost to cool ideas. Beauty is my guide, and whilst reason and reasoned argumentation may protect me from the siren call, it is the coolness over all other things which I care about. It may sound flippant. Is an Apollonian obsession with ideas and beliefs as an aesthetic the end stage of a Beautiful One? Perhaps. But I reckon most academics are in denial. It's easy to become obsessed crafting and curating a diamond-crystal world-view, which encompasses everything and can explain everything, but it's a project always doomed to fail. Such crystalline world-views are brittle. Again, that's from my own experience and obsessions. Holding on to these rigid opinions and metaphysics isn't a healthy way to face life. This I learnt from Pyrrho in Beckwith's book.

Pyrrho achieved a state of ataraxia, of psychic unperturbed-ness, by emptying himself of opinions, beliefs and judgement, only holding on to immediate perception, and chanting mantras like the tetralemma. In the Eastern sense, he achieved Nirvana. This is not something I'd ever want to achieve, it sounds awful. A head blissfully empty would be as hollow as a rotten oak. But we can learn from Pyrrho that many of our beliefs shouldn't be taken as seriously as we do otherwise. We preen and preen, arranging our pretty ideas, but few will be impressed. Some thinkers make it big, but we all know our scribbles are for own vanity.

These axioms we repeat become idols, blockages in the mind's pipe-works, rather than pumps. Understanding the world, as a human in the world, is something far deeper than enumerating a series of logical propositions. True understanding, as we'll discuss soon on this blog, is built not on propositions, but on participation.

2025/06/21 The Lie of the Sovereign Self: Thoughts on Assisted Dying

Yesterday saw the legalisation of euthanasia in the United Kingdom. The bill was passed through parliament by but a slim majority. The greatest moral minds of the kingdom made the courageous decision to allow the terminally ill to kill themselves with the assistance of a doctor, a move which, to lay out my cards, I disagree with. In this article, I want to touch on a few things: first the political angle, and then the moral angle.

This first section, the political angle, will be brief. I was of course being tongue-in-cheek labelling our parliamentarians as our nation's greatest moral minds - they are far from it. Listening to their argumentation in parliament, listening to their speeches, you get the impression that these people are frankly stupid, that they haven't read a book in their lives, and that they aren't the well bred, well trained specimens that led the country in the past. And, most importantly, that they aren't equipped to make these moral decisions for the country. In part, this is because politicians are paid so little. All the skilled elites move into tech and into banking, not into politics. There is no money in politics. The main payment for politics is the power and the prestige tagged to the job, but today even the prestige is lacking. Politicians are looked down upon with contempt, not just because they aren't the greatest specimens, but because they're constantly lying. Johnson, who campaigned to reduce immigration, brought it to its highest levels. The public eye is forever watching, watching their lies, and their incompetence. These aren't the people to be making moral judgements. The Lords, who after the Blairite reforms are without power, might've been in a better position to make such judgements; but not the Commons.

Kim Leadbeater, the leader of the euthanasia movement in parliament, mentioned in her victory speech that it was unusual for parliament to vote on moral issues. Which is a crying shame. Not just that parliament isn't primarily concerned with the moral health of the people, but that they don't consider the laws they pass on a daily basis to be concerned with morality! Every law passed is by nature underpinned by morality. That the rich should be taxed more than the poor reflects a moral position; so too is something as small as choosing one Small Modular Reactor supplier over another. Every decision is underpinned by a moral choice.

But enough of politics, the real question is if it is moral to kill yourself - or at least have yourself killed. But when enquiring into any point of moral contention, you have to drill deeper. Beneath the top-soil of most discussions on morality, exists a hard bedrock which must be exposed before it can be penetrated. And for most, once you dig at them a bit with questions, the bedrock revealed is: "because it's their choice". "Because it's their choice, and they aren't hurting anyone, they should be able to do what they like", is the bedrock of most people's morality. There are some caveats of course, like the magic age of eighteen, whereupon people spontaneously develop agency; but otherwise most conversations on morality hit this wall of "because I want to". Where this axiom came from can be speculated upon. It could be J. S. Mill and his Utilitarian theories, or it could be later with the '60s, and the hippies. It doesn't really matter. After all, there is a dark, unmapped forest between theoreticians and common psychology, and the paths through aren't always clear. But no matter where the idea started, it manages to permeate all modern discourse on morality. Once someone says to you in an argument, "but it's their choice", with a smug snarl, as if they just performed a Mortal Kombat-style finishing move, they will consider the argument over. Push any further, and they'll look at you quite distrustingly, as if you are an alien, with an alien morality, and shouldn't be associated with, lest they catch your thought contagion.

And they are quite right to be afraid. Once the nudity of the lie of the sovereign self is revealed, understood, and digested, it's hard to return to the cave, and believe in truly free will. Free will debates, whilst we're on the topic, is one topic of popular debate which greatly irritates me. The dichotomy is posed between complete free will, where every action is consciously chosen, and determinism, where the body is an automaton carrying out genetic orders. And neither are true. Anyone with a moment of introspection will understand we have limited free will, not absolute free will, nor absolutely no free will. We make choices all the time, but there are heavy weights tying us down, leading us astray. We want to make good decisions, yet we fail, continually, and sin.

An absolute king is said to be sovereign because every decision made for the nation is his decision. If a man is to be punished, and his head is to be chopped off, the absolute king doesn't need a court, for on his word a man can be beheaded. If a law is to be enacted, he need merely to pronounce it, and the nation's law-book is amended. That is what it means to be sovereign. Kier Starmer is not sovereign. He exercises a limited power over Britain, a power only afforded to him by votes from the people and loyalty from his parliamentarians. When he wants to pass a law, he has to rely on his party members to vote on his bill. Starmer isn't above the law; the law is above him. Let's say man is about as sovereign over himself as Kier Starmer is sovereign over Britain. There are competing voices, competing interests, from each passion of the flesh, from each worry and doubt, vying for power over a decision. To make a decision, a firm and absolute decision, is a difficult thing. One must be strong, and command loyalty over his passions, and take no heed to the jeering of the opposition bench, those devils on your shoulders, tempting you to sin. Maintaining that strength is hard.

And that strength is hardest for the weakest of us. And I'd say those suffering from chronic pain and terminal conditions are some of the weakest and most vulnerable in society. Are those suffering so grievously able to make a decision not tainted and tinged by those devils on their shoulders? Are they able to ignore the Thanatotic passions pulling them towards the earth? The argument is made, all would agree, for the suicidal. We tell them they shouldn't succumb to these passions or devils, and that they shouldn't kill themselves. Their suicidal tendencies is a syndrome, a set of symptoms - at root a label. They are depressed, hate their life, and want to end it - so too do those who want to be euthanised. All that's different is how much we judge their lives to be worth - isn't all life invaluable? What's the difference but the label? Both the suicidal and these terminally ill patients want to end their lives, whatever 'want' means. It's just their choice, after all.

As if they can make the choice! As if every thought and feeling we have is authentically our own! As if we don't have a responsibility to protect our neighbours! We must protect each other from the devils which plague us, and, God willing, the state should protect us also. And yet it has chosen to not, by 23 votes.

This feature of man, that we are not sovereign over ourselves, could be said to be the original bedrock of Western morality. And that bedrock of Western morality comes to us by St. Augustine. The Great Schism was in part cleaved by the works of St. Augustine, who the Latins clung to so tightly; and then during the Reformation, it was St. Augustine who Luther and Calvin reinterpreted, directing the moral sail for Western civilisation. It was St. Augustine who said, one must be a servant of God, lest he be a slave to the passions, a line which has stuck with me. The sentiment is a key, a key which unlocks doors to the thought of the past, and to doors barring us in the present, personal hardships, that seemed barricaded. That we are losing this sense of personal weakness to find strength in, this need of repentance for yielding to sinful temptation, is a tragedy. This is the bedrock of the Western mind, that has served us so faithfully, bringing us all this way.

Spengler was right in saying the West was witnessing its last days. The moral reality we inhabited, the moral bedrock we stood on, has been beaten for some time by the crashing waves of the sea. Each wave of new thinkers, new adherents, new people, erodes the cliff face bit by bit - and at times, a whole precipice collapses. And in that sea, an island rises. A new culture - perhaps a new Atlantis - flocked to by men in their millions. Will the new culture last, and the old culture crash into the seas of time? I haven't the foggiest. What I do know however, is that the wisdom of the past shouldn't be chortled at, and lost. Man hasn't changed, human nature hasn't morphed. Whatever we believe, human nature, our fallen nature, remains the same. To discard the wisdom of the many generations preceding us will be at our own doom.

2025/06/15 Munster Cheese & Value

About a month or so ago, I bought some cheese. I was on the high street in town, and went into a shop I hadn't been to before, since my parents who were visiting were interested. Inside, in this shop in our town, was a selection of fancy cheeses and charcuterie! I was surprised to say the least. And in that excitement, I ended up buying some fancy cheese. Some raclette cheese for raclette, and some Munster cheese, a cheese I had recently first tried on holiday in France. Munster cheese is commonly described as barnyardy. It tastes as if it were left amongst the straw in a stable of goats, and yet somehow it is quite tasty.

"How much do you want?" asked the shopkeeper. "This here", she said placing the cheese on the scale, "is 500g." "Sure, I'll take that then", I responded.

Little did I know, this cheese would cost as much as it did. Only once she brought up the price on the cash register, did I clock that the Munster cheese was £5 per 100g. It was too late to change my mind. With a heavy heart, I paid.

I now had in my fridge an expensive cheese. This Munster cheese was to be prized, eaten sparingly, and each mouthful savoured. I made cheese on toast with it, but in an effort to make it go further, I debased the cheese with cheaper cheeses like Double Gloucester. I shaved slivers off the wedge to melt upon burgers, a very tasty combination, I must add. And every now and then I got my expensive Munster cheese out of the fridge to take a small corner off to nibble on. The 500g of cheese lasted weeks.

I write of my mundane adventure with the cheese for a reason. Today, I want to discuss the nature of value, and what it means to value something. What, then, is value? Valuation is the determination of how much something is worth, so that it can be exchanged for something of equal or better value. When looking for a lover, we evaluate, and value up different partners; when looking for apples in the supermarket, we look at, and perhaps feel, the apples to see if they are of good quality; and when looking for a job, the process of cover letters and interviews is to determine the applicant's value. Value is everywhere. When we choose one route to London over another, we make a value judgement. When we choose one striped jumper to wear over another, we make a value judgement. A judgement ignorant of value is random, as fickle as the wind. The valuation of people, of things, of the world, is at every crossroad of our daily lives.

As a society, there are methods by which valuation is achieved. The most obvious, is the stock market. Traders in banks and hedge funds trade commodities and stocks for what they think is a cheap value, in the hope of later selling it for a higher value. The bulls, as they are known, are those who believe a stock price is currently cheap, and believe its value will go up; whilst the bears believe it is currently expensive, and its value will go down. These two tribes go to war, and fight over the price, the price of the stock being how much people are willing to pay. And this figure, of how much people are willing to pay, is the current 'valuation' of that slice of a company, how much the market has decided it's worth. And these valuations change day by day, seemingly for no reason. They modulate and fluctuate in familiar patterns, much like Conway's Game of Life, these simple rules beget complex phenomena.

This is a method of valuation for public items, but what about unique items? My girlfriend, RiceIsNice, has been watching a lot of mid-noughties Bargain Hunt lately. An older TV program, Bargain Hunt has two teams rummage through an antiques market, looking for wares they reckon can be bought on the cheap, and sold at auction for a profit. The contestants are also looking to buy low and sell high, but since the items are unique and non-fungible, a stock market model doesn't work to determine value. For antiques, the value is ascertained in the auction. No one going in knows how much any given item will go for at auction, but through the ritual of the auction, the crowd of buyers decide on amongst themselves on a valuation for the piece. Needless to say, in the show these amateurs rarely succeed. But strangely, the experts who advise each team don't do much better. The experts know so much about antiques, and how much they've been sold for in the past, but the auction house itself is the determiner of value. A genuine Faberge egg taken to Sotheby's will fetch more than at a small local auction down the road.

From these two methods of valuation, there are two important lessons. The first is that valuation is at some level social. To develop a fair price for anything, whether it be a share or an antique pot, is virtually impossible in a vacuum, without a frame of reference. I can't calculate, even with a mountain sized calculating machine, the availability, demand, and supply chains of each thing I want to buy in the shops. Valuation is organic, and emerges from the arguments of merchants, who will always disagree. After all, one man's trash is another man's treasure. And then the second lesson is that everyone speculating on prices is clueless. The City trader and the antiques expert can rattle off a thousand facts and figures, but neither can prophesy whether the valuation will increase, or decrease. They're all as clueless as each other, counting birds and reading entrails.

What has all this got to do with my Munster cheese, then? To start off, I thought I had overpaid, since my valuation of cheese, as formed by Tesco's, is quite low. I can get a similarly sized block of cheddar for £2. Compared to other foods, pound for pound, calorie for calorie, it was really quite pricey. But I enjoyed my Munster cheese quite a bit. Shaving off slivers, I realised I had not only gotten a lot of flavour out of my £25 wedge, but quite a lot of enjoyment out of it too. Maybe my valuation of this cheese was wrong all along? Not just my valuation, but my very attitude to valuation - the one presented above - might be quite wrong.

In overpaying, I ended up valuing the Munster cheese far more than I would have otherwise. If it were cheddar, I'd chop off a big chunk to melt on some toast without giving a second thought, but this Munster cheese was expensive, it cost me top dollar, and I wasn't about to waste it all like that. The cheese became treasured, and in a sense, it became loved.

Once sentiment enters the frame, valuation becomes opaque. Can you put a price on friends and family, on a wedding ring, or on a treasured family heirloom? Show me the man who would, outside of desperate circumstance, sell his beloved dog. They wouldn't because with sentiment, things can become invaluable, and for those thing we wouldn't give them up for the world. For a person or thing to be invaluable, no amount of money, goods, or experiences are enough to trade for them. No trader in the City sees his stock as invaluable, nor does any antiques dealer, since neither the trader nor the dealer have a personal connection to their assets. Only through love, through time, through that personal connection, does an item become invaluable.

My experience with the cheese shows how by valuing our possessions more, they have more value to us. The Mediaeval peasant greatly valued his wheel of cheese, since a wheel of cheese was hard to come by. Even by the time of the Great Fire of London, Samuel Pepys famously buried his cheese, one of his most valued possessions, to protect it from the blaze. And yet, today, where food is abundant, and that cornucopia named Tesco's is a ten minute walk away, we have ceased to value cheese. Supply rose, but demand didn't meet it; the price plummeted, but more importantly, we don't value it as much. These market forces, these methods of valuation, determine not just the price of an item, but their perceived value too. With cheese as cheap as it is, we almost disrespect it.

And then there are things that can't be bought and sold. How are we to value those, when pricing mechanisms are ineligible. Here, I'd like to shoehorn in my favourite Chesterton quote, a quote readers of this blog may have seen me post before: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." So much in this world cannot be bought and sold to find a fair price, since so much of this world can't be owned. The sunset can't be owned. The sunset, seen by all each night, can't be captured, held ransom, and traded. This is as Wilde rightly points out. But as Chesterton rebuts in the quote, there is a fair price. Not dictated by a stock exchange, not dictated by an auction, but one dictated by God, the ultimate judge.

And perhaps all the market forces discussed are but a concession. Through love of people, of animals, of plants, of things, perhaps everything living and everything inert will be deemed invaluable, just like the sunset. It seems far away. As Chesterton would say, we have yet to see the front side of the tapestry. But here, now, just like my Munster cheese, we can savour each sliver of beauty, kindness, and wealth we have on this Earth. Then we can appreciate the true price for which our ransom from death was paid.

2025/06/07 The Bluebell Walk

I may only be twenty-five years of age, but already the England I knew as a child is gone. Where I grew up, in Metroland, in a Herfordshire village, things then were quite different. Some of the teachers at the school had colonial roots, born and raised in Kenya, old-fashioned teachers, who cared little for the vibe-shift the profession was undergoing. When I look back, something from that time feels like the twilight of an era, the twilight of an older conception of England. Every generation, no doubt, has this sense. Just as I look back to my childhood, those growing up in the Edwardian era no doubt looked back at the Victorians, mourning the disappearance of their old-fashioned ways. No doubt. But the scale of change has picked up, and I think this conception of rural England - a dare I say Wind in the Willows-esque conception of rural England, and English nature - is disappearing.

Mrs. James was my teacher in reception. She was a tired old lady, tired of teaching, and wearied of the world. Each year we did the school nativity play for the infants (do schools still do nativity plays?), and each year she narrated from a microphone with all the enthusiasm of a snail. When I was a child, she felt old, lumbering, and ancient, as if she were carrying a great burden upon her back, as if all of modernity were ruining all that she holds dear. I was young and knew no better, so as I ascended the years, I remember looking upon her unfavourably. She was of a different era, tangibly, of a different culture, of the village, not of the commuter town. In her village, the food was flavourless, but the world was enchanted.

Each year, Mrs. James took her class on the bluebell walk. Near the school, near my house growing up, was an ancient woodland, which each year without fail, come Eastertide, blooms into a carpet of bluebells. The bluebells of Britain are beautiful, and no photograph seems to do them justice. Something in the eye or the mind, when confronted with this rich purple, fails to discern plant from plant, and all you can see is a sea of indigo. The bluebells were close, and such an excursion was cheap and cheerful: would a teacher plan such a school trip today? A teacher today would find the bluebells pretty, granted, but would they go through the effort of planning and safeguarding such a trip? Or rather, would a teacher today see in the bluebells something important to be learnt?

The bluebell walk, I've come to see, was something to Mrs. James more than just a fun excursion. It was a vaccine. Children don't want to walk slowly admiring flowers, they want to run around, they want to be stimulated. To most children, flowers don't quite cut it. But each year, she toured the bluebells with the children, and patiently showed them the beauty of the English woods. Nature is always the strongest tonic; the domestication of the city is where madness lies.

This conception of England is old, but not ancient. In the days when near everyone lived in the countryside, in a village as a farmer, there was no need for Romanticism. The Romantics only arose from the shadows of the Satanic mills, from the need to recover something, whatever that something may be, that had been lost. This sentiment for the picturesque was novel. Letters written from the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King, state the view of the Alps was hideous, and that the windows facing East should be shuttered. In England, there are sources complaining about the dry stone wall of the countryside, and how ugly it is. Dry stone walling and the Alps are almost archetypal of picturesque beauty today, but these sentiments aren't eternal. What we value, what we find beautiful, changes over time. Our apperception of beauty is more than a flat, one-dimensional yearning for the past: it's a complex arrangements of factors, both earthly and heavenly. As such, Romanticism itself - whilst still extant in its original form - has changed over time. British romanticism began with the beauty of vast rugged nature, but as time went on, began to appreciate the small, the tiny.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Victorian high-materialism was dying, fertilising the ground for new dreams of the future. Orwell warned that if fascism came to Britain, it would be adorned in lions and unicorns. But there was another movement in Britain, a contemporary movement of a kind of high church reaction in the early twentieth century, one adorned instead with hedgehogs and red squirrels. The persons of this movement, to name a few, included Tolkien, Lewis, Eliot, and Kenneth Grahame. Whilst authors like Tolkien wrote of a world beyond the shire, of a great expanse, in The Wind in the Willows, Grahame wrote a far more parochial, a far smaller vision of England.

"Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,” said the Rat. “And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if you’ve got any sense at all."

What we find in the The Wind in the Willows is a progression in what Romanticism is. The Romanticism of the Wild Wood and the Riverbank is hostile to the Wide World, preferring the sequestered woodland to the great expanse of man and nature. There may be awe in the Alps, but in the woodland, there’s enchantment: there’s magic beneath the oaks of the woods.

I remember reading, I can’t remember where, that the praeternatural in art can take two forms: in the vast expanse of a landscape, against which people seem small; and in the closeness of a subject in a painting, wherein the world seems small - Millais’ Ophelia, for example. The sublimity of the expanse is far easier to experience and understand, since anyone can climb a mountain, and look out and see the small world below. You look down from above, and think about how we each potter about, like little ants down there, living our little lives, in those toy cars below. You look down on the world, aloof. Imagine what it looks like from God’s height! But the small world, the world of the Wild Wood, is harder to sense. Instead of lifting yourself up to see the small world below, one must bring themselves down, by humility, to see the little world on its own level. There is something about the model village which is peculiarly British.

Looking back, Mrs. James, my tired old reception teacher, understood this, I believe. She understood the humility and beauty of the parochial and small, and wanted her pupils to understand too. Mankind has a fallen and pagan soul, unfortunately, and naturally strive for the spirituality of the Wide World, so we can look down our noses at the world down the mountain. Mrs. James didn’t believe in all that. She believed in the Wild Wood - the Wild Wood down the road from the school - where each year the bluebells grew into a purple sea. As the wind blew, that sea became choppy as the waves passed over. And if you crouched down and looked into one of those tiny bells, if you’re lucky, you might even have seen a faerie.

2025/05/09 The Assault on Bread

"The heart is a pump", said the slayer of Pan, blood dripping from his axe. In times gone by, this fact of biology wasn't believed to be the case. Long ago, the heart was the circulator of vital life energy through the body, a more mystic conception of the heart's function. But now, after the white-gowned scientists have had their Long March through the enchanted world, the mysticism of the heart - whilst the symbolism of the heart may remain as a residue - has been squashed, flattened, into seeing it simply as a pump. Science has a way of making the mysterious mundane. And just as the heart became a pump, so too did the human body become a machine. Each joint is a servo, each muscle a hydraulic; our brains are computers, and our digestive tract is a great fermentor.

What's interested people most today is that last assertion, that the digestive tract is a kind of fermentor or energy extracting machine for the body. We are what we eat, as we've always been told. Any number of Youtube stars have come to fame as proselytisers for their favourite diets. While the Atkins diet has fallen out of favour today, any number of its children have inherited the popularity, from Carnivore diets, to Paleo, to Keto, Animal foods only, to Peating - a panoply of diets, with their allowed foods and disallowed foods, their halal and harem, all taking up arms against the dietary establishment! Usually, these diets love eggs and red meat, and lament the previous generation of dietitians' campaign of hate against these foods. They usually hate omega-6 seed oils too, oils, which they claim man has never eaten in the past, and they campaign against carbohydrate of most kinds. Their main opponent? Bread.

Now, I love bread. My blog and online alias, BreadIsDead, has bread in the title for good reason. Bread could be my favourite food. A slice of freshly baked quality bread, crusty, whether white bread or a dark complex rye, with some creamy butter cut like cheese on top, could be my favourite food. Back in Alsace-Lorraine, a trip I've recently written posts about, one of my favourite memories is eating a fresh crusty slice of bread, spread with Camembert so gooey it ran from its casing, and a glass of champagne, all for breakfast. We were leaving the accommodation in Metz that day, so I had no choice but to finish the cheese and champagne - I'm not an alcoholic, don't fret. But anyway, alighting from my fantasy, bread is my favourite food. And all these diets despise bread. You can feel their anger and vitriol for the humble loaf, the loaf that has powered and fed the generations of Europe. These diet hawks say bread has no vitamins, that bread is low in protein, that bread is low in healthy fats, and that bread's starch breaks down into pure glucose in the blood, a risk for insulin resistance.

But show me where, in times gone by when bread was the staple, this insulin resistance was? The populations of Europe ate bread every day, making up a lot of their calories; but they weren't all diabetic, an untreatable disease in those days. The main cause of insulin resistance is having too much blood sugar; it's that people don't use the blood sugar, with exercise, which is the problem! Poor bread, caught in the cross-fire of a largely silly correlation-causation confusion.

These celebrity dietitians are trying to hack the body. Again, the body is a machine to be understood and ran on maximum efficiency. It is a vision of the Nietzschean ubermensch - there is something very Nietzschean about these dieting fads. These cultures of the past were based on their diets. In understanding the body as a machine, we know that people grow, both individually and epigenetically, according to what they eat, so much so that our diet controls our moods and how we think. Our gut microbiomes, factories of bacteria breaking down our food, work tirelessly day and night, to convert something tasty we put into our bodies into something useful for our bodies to use. In this endeavour, our gut microbiomes produce neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine, etc, which enter through our bloodstreams to work as neurotransmitters. Then we have hormones. Certain nutrients and combinations of foods up-regulate and down-regulate hormone production in our glands, like cortisol and thyroxine, making us more stressed or at peace. We are what we eat; our diets - to an extent - determine our character.

Let us now take this thought further. Given that one person changing their diet can change how they feel, and given the existence of epigenetics consolidating the changes generation to generation, it stands to reason that different ethnicities and lineages require different diets. We see this in how different ethnicities respond to insulin resistance, for instance, or how lactose intolerance varies by ethnicity. Different diets co-evolve, in a sense, with their people: sociology and biology are intertwined like the two snakes of Caduceus' staff, where the rod of forming the centre of the staff is our psychology. While the biology and sociology, our genetics and culture, adapt and tussle with each other, the individual's psychology is wrapped around and constricted in the centre, caught in-between them. We can't help but be products of these forces beyond our control.

There are questions then. Those Indians, like the Jains, who for thousands of years since the time of the Gymnosophists recorded by Alexander's Greeks have forgone meat: how different is their digestion? And the Muslim Arabs, who for over a thousand years haven't drank alcohol nor eaten pork: how different is their digestion? And for both these groups, how different is their culture because of it? Islamic culture would be very different with alcohol. Amerindian culture did look very different after alcohol. Whatever our psychology may want, sociology and biology has been conspiring with its own ideas on how we should be.

Let's return to our much maligned friend, bread. European Christendom is build on the foundations of bread - and wine for that matter - and to Western man, bread has been, through every crusade, innovation, and great work of art, a companion. The word companion, after all, is con-pain, to have bread together; bread is baked into our language. And as a companion through our history, European man has co-evolved with bread; our DNA is like a braided loaf. Any Westerner who isn't coeliac is meant to eat bread, should eat bread, and eat bread every day. We are made to eat bread. It is our energy source, the food which powered every great triumph of the West across history. Nelson ate bread, in a form, on the Victory, as was Turner powered on bread as he painted. Luther ate bread as he nailed his theses, as did King Henry VIII as he turned his back on Rome. King or pauper, they ate bread. Each great war of Europe is bread-powered people fighting other bread-powered people. It's all bread.

The irony is that so many of these diet Youtuber types are quite conservative, selling their diets as a masculine endeavour, and these influencers have quite a positive view of the West. Yet it doesn't show. They turn their back on their ancestral staples, in favour of diets unthinkable to earlier generations - not because they were unfeasible, a lord would have the money - but because they would be seen as silly. The Puritan obsession with food, and then the 7th Day Adventist obsession with food, was secularised in the States, becoming the next strange mind-virus to spread across the Atlantic, yet another obsession of the American, of the California elite, the telos of Spengler's Faustian man. You can't get much further West, after all.

Bread is humble, bread is community, and bread is Christian. The attack on bread is everywhere. We may well learn how to hack our diets, and create a new Atlantean civilisation of spiritual carnivore diet extremists. And it would be a new civilisation. They'd be fuelled by new food sources, and begin to think in new ways - which would be their aim, too. But to what end would that serve? Food is to be shared. The vegan, requiring every restaurant to cater to them, breaks the company, the communion, in requiring their own dish, and then the food can't be shared. Food is for sharing. It's sustenance, and we live, sustaining ourselves, together. For many, their daily bread isn't enough; they want something more, to be something more, to be given magic powers and Newtype abilities, if only they keep their fat intake over a certain percentage. Such striving is the road to Babylon. Our daily bread is enough. The macros might not be perfect, the vitamin content and nutrition may not excel, but it suffices. Bread is good, bread gives energy. It is our ancestral food, rooting us in millennia of traditions. And however popular rice, corn, or quinoa - whatever quinoa is - becomes, I will always patronise bread: our carb, the greatest carb.

2025/04/12 Thoughts on a Fabergé Egg

My holiday in France now over, we took a train over the Rhine for Baden-Baden, from whence the plane back to merry old Albion flew. We arrived at around half-two, and our plane took off at around half-six, giving roughly two hours to see Baden-Baden before we needed to have returned for the flight. I looked for attractions in Baden², and found the Faberge museum, located in a city centre, but bus ride from the station. Brilliant. Real Fabergé eggs too, they advertised. Here, in Baden-Baden-Baden! I was quite surprised, but we made the journey anyhow.

Entering, we saw the steep €21 entrance fee. Steep, but when next was I to see a Fabergé egg? Ever since watching Detective Conan Movie 03, they've had a lustre, a lustre of the old Romanov's of Russian grandeur, of an old lost order. Tickets paid, we attempted to put our bulky luggage in their cloakroom. A German lady barked her little English, getting more and more frustrated as we didn't understand her instructions. Very German. And we entered, looking at the various trinkets made by Fabergé and his jewellers.

Then I saw the egg. Turning the corner, it shone radiant, and I came towards it almost teary. It was the 1904 Easter Anniversary egg, and, with its small portraits of the Romanovs circling, looked just like the "Memories Egg" of Conan Movie 03. So incredibly beautiful. My eyes traced the bejewelled contours, its fine gold seams, and small portraits, its memories, of an old age. I fell for it. Art is a kind of romance, where the piece is maiden to the knight, in whom he sees all kinds of projections and fantasies. Much like the film, I saw the lost beauty of the Romanov age, the tragedy of their loss, the delicate, tender relationships they once had. I imagined, circling the piece for some time, and felt as if I was in the Romanov age.

My girlfriend, pseudonymously RiceIsNice, was looking at a separate egg, the Karelian Birch egg. She happened to know this egg was a missing egg, and had never been found. She did some digging, with the help of an AI assistant, and she discovered this egg, and all of the Fabergé eggs at this exhibit were Fauxbergé, or in other words, forgeries. It was strange all the exhibits were in Russian, not German. This museum was run by a Russian oligarch, and many of these eggs were eggs he 'came across' over the past couple decades. He had had a real Fabergé egg, the Rothschild egg, smuggled it out of Britain without paying taxes - taxes still to be settled - only to have Putin confiscate it from him to decorate the Kremlin. Poor guy.

And indeed, I fell for it. To expect this museum to have several real Fabergé eggs in √Baden-Baden-Baden-Baden should have raised an alarm or two, but the lost time or money didn't bother me much at all. What bothered me was that I felt emotionally cheated. My heart fell for this piece, this sweet maiden, only to discover she was a tart. But was she a tart, this beautiful egg which inspired so much emotion in me? What is the purpose of art, what is the purpose of this museum?

Adam Curtis in his documentary Hypernomalisation, uses the eponymous Soviet term 'hypernomalisation' to describe the state of the modern West. The phrase originates thus. In Russia everything sad on television, in the newspapers, and even person to person on the street is a lie, and no one knows what's really going on - there's a kind of atmosphere of fiction in which everyone breathes, where no one has the voice to call out the emperor's nudity. This sense, I felt here. No one cares whether they were real - in fact they were real, didn't you see the certificates? There's a postmodern sense, a sense that their authenticity is meaningless. It takes a team of experts to determine authenticity - and for such a term as Fauxbergé to exist, experts determining real from fake are in need. But what if those experts were not servants of truth, but instead servants of power? Instead of looking for the telltale signs of a forgery, as those scholars who've sworn the Socratic oath would, they give their expertise to affirm the highest bidder. We have not descended into such a world in the West, but how easy would it be! It only takes a minority with state support to set up fake academic work undermining that which currently stands. Like an infection, it could sweep through every discipline, this corrupt seed of disinformation by which all else is informed. Perhaps it's already happened. Any fringe group would say so. So the Climate Deniers say, so the Graham Hancock Finno-Korean mud-flooders say, so the Young Earthers on carbon dating would say. Perhaps we all believe it a little bit. Perhaps we all want the world to be more interesting than the scientific clergymen make it out.

My emotions weren't fake, perhaps, since art has a purpose. Art is meant to make you feel something. And though I was misadvertised, and though the item was likely a fraud, I did feel all that wonder, all that feeling, as if it were real. Whilst the item was ersatz, the feelings were genuine. The art piece acted as it ought to have, as a vector, as a portal to another world. But once I knew the sordid truth of my alleged maiden, the projection onto her was broken, and no more could I fantasise upon the gold and glitter. The quality of the item could be identical, the craftsmanship could be superior, but it isn't 'the one'.

~

It's a sentiment I've discussed on this blog before, this sense of particularity, of truth, of uniqueness. We like to imagine things interchangeable. Those who've had a break-up are reminded, "There are many fish in the sea", but the heart-broken individual can't understand, since he fell in love with 'the one', not any old person. No one can be like them again. Particularity is the beating heart of the human experience, the sense that this is not that, that this is the only once, that this dress was worn by Marilyn Monroe, that this was the spot where the English Civil War began: these feelings aren't arbitrary, these feelings are the human experience.

NFTs were all the rage, and then all the meme, a few years ago. The purpose of them was to be 'non-fungible' to be unique and irreplaceable. In real life, however, it takes no blockchain nor algorithm for non-fungibility to exist, since material reality imparts an inherent non-fungibility to all things. It's quite simple. No one thing can be in two places at once, and no two things can be in one place at once - they're unique. However, in industrialised society, every step has been taken, and every invention has pointed towards, a kind of fungibility between all things - essentially the Human Instrumentality of Evangelion - where no two items or no two people can be distinguished. The carpenter could make you a desk, bespoke, one-of-a-kind, but Ikea will do their utmost to give you a desk identical to every other of the series. A painting is a unique item, expressing the will and whimsy of the artist, dependent on the weather or the day he painted, but with the digital age, for a cheap price, every pauper can have a print of the Mona Lisa in their house. And as the produce of the world becomes fungible, so too do the producers. The carpenter can put far more of their soul into a work than someone working at Ikea. And even more than that, the carpenter has to develop a great number of skills. Through his carpentry, he shapes and sands not just his work but his character, an avenue unavailable to the Ikea factory worker of industrial society. When you can't express yourself in your work and, more importantly, you can't grow and hone yourself in your character through your work, you begin to feel like an ant in an ant hill. You begin to feel like a cog in a machine. It isn't a nice feeling. And the products made are often not very nice either.

It isn't just our belongings, but the people in our lives, our friends and family, who are unique in this non-fungible way. Through our connection to them, our shared memories of care and hardship, we develop irreplaceable relationships. I couldn't replace my mother with a lady of the same personality, temperament, and memories - such a premise belongs to a horror author. Because it isn't for my mum's personality, her temperament, or even her memories that I love her - it is because she is my mum. Such a sentiment it is difficult to put into words, perhaps it is impossible, since our language, bound by the fetters of propositional understanding, can't express the 'is-ness' and uniqueness of a person. There is an ineffable quality, an unutterable quality, not shared nor expressed, giving my mum her value to me. And by value, I do not mean something quantifiable like money or for exchange, as if there were some kind of leaderboard or stock market, but something wholly qualitative. This is what love is. Love is not for beauty, love is not for value, love is not to some other end, but towards that ineffable is-ness. If my favourite mug were to break, I would be sad, because I love it. If someone were to use it, I would be a little irritated, because I love it. It's just a mug. There are many fish in the sea, and many mugs in T. K. Maxx. But that is the nature of love. It latches on to the uniqueness, the being.

A real Fabergé egg too has an is-ness. Not a personal relationship, like the example of my mug or my mother, but a society-wide relationship of people enchanted by its grandeur. The eggs bear the weight of all those cultural projection, all those romantic fantasies and unrequited loves; but the fake I saw buckled. It's not that its build was poor, its form misshapen, nor its materials cheap: such an observation requires an expert's eye. But it had that sense of my mother being replaced, or my mug exchanged. It may look the same, but the fires of my love had been quenched.

2025/03/30 The Eye-Catching and the Beautiful

Up again, drinking coffee in France, watching French morning television, hoping to find some more cel anime. Alas, none found yet. Before my girlfriend awakes, I thought I'd share a morning thought for the day.

Let me pose this phenomenon found with the television. When you're only half paying attention, you tend to stare at the TV more when the ads are playing than when the program is playing. Why is this? The dichotomy I'd like to present today is between the eye-catching and the beautiful - between what does grab our attention, and what deserves our attention. The advert, in its flashiness, loud colours, and bright sounds, draws your attention, it makes you look up. By contrast, the most beautiful piece of gentle subtle animation won't make you look up or draw your attention in the same way - in fact, when watching, you might even feel a bit bored. Boredom isn't a sign of poor quality. Boredom is a sign of under-stimulation. What many want out of art a kind of hypnosis, fixation upon the work, and a sense of detachment from reality. Flashy colours, high-FPS CG, and those neo-Stravinsky-Wagner sound tracks so common and tiresome in modern films, yank your attention in the attempt to bring you into their world by force. These run of the mill films focus on engagement over beauty. Beauty is more subtle, more complex, and requires greater skill to produce. It is more valuable and meaningful. The difference between the eye-catching and the beautiful is of cheap whisky against good beer: you've distilled one component of beauty out, the inebriating component, at the expense of all the flavour and body of the beer.

This dichotomy has use beyond art. Sexiness is eye-catching, and when distilled out of love is cheap liquor to the beer of a loving relationship. The beauty of a lady is a kind of fullness - sexiness is but one component of a greater whole. But just because she may be eye-catching on the street, does not reflect upon her virtue as a person or her potential as a wife. In fact, historically only certain unsavoury occupations sought attention based on this lower eye-catching attention.

For another example, there's the idea of the 'vocal minority', when a small group are mistaken for the majority by the noise they make. Eye-catching here might not be the best metaphor - ear-catching perhaps - but those who make the most noise aren't necessarily the one's with the most to say. Such examples will be abundant to most. The idea of the vocal minority is easy to visualise since we have a conception of loudness, and examples of people speaking louder over others to have their thoughts heard. But with sight we don't have the same idea of loudness, of a 'loud' image trying to grab our attention at the expense of those images with more value. Despite living in a time saturated in loud images, we have no word in common parlance to identify, criticise, and hopefully ignore the garish, the distracting, and the hypnotising.

Adverts are a kind of poison to the mind - that so many defend them, and decry the use of adblockers, continues to amaze me. Just as a dangerous vice like pornography reconfigures the mind, so too do the loudness of adverts, distracting us, ruining our capacity to be absorbed by actual beauty. I remember a teacher of mine in secondary school saying that he as a child was engrossed, mesmerised, by the beauty of the fireworks, but his son had little interest. He reckoned it was the mobile phones, and the phantasmagoric stimuli on its screen - and I think there's truth in that - but even off the screen, there are adverts on every bus-stop, on walls,
sometimes digitised and animated, distracting your attention with bright poppy colours, with a kind of 'sex-appeal', away from the true beauty of the city. Edward Bernays is the father of modern advertising and HR - it is no coincidence he is the nephew of Sigmund Freud. That sex-appeal, the quintessential eye-catch, is so prevalent in adverts is because knowledge of the base drives of man are being weaponised against us. These incitements to sin, adverts, are so deeply un-Christian, I'm shocked no mass movement, outside of internet libertarian types, has started! The temptations of the eye have never been greater, never been more abundant, and never been more encouraged: resisting is harder than it has ever been.

Like all sin, the best medicines are avoidance and fasting. Detoxification from loud images can be simple, like picking up a physical book instead watching a documentary to learn about a topic - it is to reduce the eye-catching lights show in favour of subtler beauty, beauty not appreciated otherwise. Look at the baby grapplinng with their iPhone: they cry when it's taken away! Our addiction to screens is our generations undoing, barring us from contact with the beautiful. Future generations will see our addiction to this mind-altering drug as as absurd as giving heroin to children, as they did 130 years ago. We ruin ourselves chasing what is eye-catching, in all cases, whether it be screens, art, or women. The eye-catching appeals to our base instincts; base instincts sharpened on the whetstone of the veld rather than post-industrial life. Beauty, however, is transcendent and eternal, the goodness of beauty is apart from the base passions. May Lady Beauty be our measure to guide us from the eye-catching!

2025/02/23 Bullish on AI

Do you remember, dear reader, when teachers reminded us not to trust Wikipedia? Wikipedia was supposed to be unreliable, data could be changed by anyone, and those updating articles weren't trustworthy experts. I recall, to any mention of Wikipedia ten to fifteen years ago, was that same parroted reply. But no one repeats such nonsense today! Wikipedia has become the de facto source of internet knowledge, the other websites now are no longer to be trusted. This isn't just because Wikipedia is now firmly embedded within the regime's truth-creating instrument. It ought to be noted that only 10% of donations to Wikipedia go to maintaining the site, the rest go to their 'causes'. Wikipedia was a new technology, a peer-to-peer encyclopedia, a newfangled invention - and no new invention should be trusted. But through time, testing, and trial, society at large now trusts Wikipedia, and the platform is used to settle thousands of petty arguments each day.

That same slander and scepticism is now thrown at AI. These newfangled large language models aren't to be trusted. Stories of lawyers citing false cases received from ChatGPT, cases of AIs lying, of the inability of AIs to perform specific tasks like draw a full cup of wine: these teething issues match those of Wikipedia. The old truth-creating or, more metaphysically, sense-making institutions are deeply threatened by LLMs, their ability to sift and sort through information, and present data with a reasoned argument. What LLMs have created, in my opinion, is a pocket Socrates. ChatGPT is a sage on any topic, and will inform you not like a book, but like a wise old man. In a book, or in Wikipedia, you must sift through information for what you are looking for, and even then you might not find it. The relationship between you and the book is an "I-it" relationship, where the book is an object you interact with, like an oven or even a YouTube video. With LLMs, man has created information in an "I-you" relationship, as if the you can discuss with the most patient and humile Oxbridge professor at an endless tutorial.

This technology is world-changingly powerful, in spite of its youth. Once AI can cite, and access the world's academic literature, generating accurate responses to any question asked, it will become our sole source of reference. Search engines will be no more, reference books will become a curio. Books and essays presenting a sustained argument will have a future, since LLMs are incapable by their nature of novelty. But imagine this future: you feed a book to your LLM of choice, say ChatGPT, ask it to assume the argument of the work, and you can argue against a simulacrum of the author, as if you were conducting their viva. Through this Socratic dialectic, the most effective way to learn, you the reader can interact and challenge the points of the book to gain not only a deeper appreciation for the argument, but an avenue to argue back, and sharpen your own arguments. Perhaps, in the future, an academic work may come pre-packaged with a module for an LLM, trained specially to argue the points of the author. Such a work would increase the engagement with the author's ideas, and, in our data-driven age, feed back to the author effective arguments against his position.

Humanity has come a long way in our interaction with knowledge. Mediaeval man believed in the hallowed authority of books, owing to their rarity and time it had taken to reach their hands, whilst today, after innovations like the printing press and then the internet, we have little respect for knowledge, nor believe it wields much authority. All wisdom from the past is to be debated and argued with, and all knowledge is to be freed by the pirates upon the world wide web. No longer must we train in monasteries to access the wisdom of the world. The wisdom of the monastery makes but a fraction of a percent of the knowledge available on the net, knowledge accessible in the greatest library the world has ever known. That library now finally has librarians. Librarians knowledgeable in every field, understanding in every argument, able to paint any prompt given. Whilst this army of librarians is still in training, they will change how we access knowledge, the biggest change since perhaps the printing press. The internet, future generations may comment, was but preparation for the era of AI. How were netizens able to use the massed wisdom of the internet before AI, the man of the future may query.

As the virtual wise old man comes into being, it behoves us to ask what will come of the real wise old man. Will he be sidelined, similar to how the London cabby, with the streets of London memorised, was sidelined by Uber and the SatNav? I'd argue not. Again, AI isn't one to have novel thoughts. LLMs, by virtue of their nature, parrot the status quo, the conventional opinion, unless their maker designs them otherwise. There is no reason an AI fed on National Socialist propaganda, should his creator decide to, won't grow up to produce viciously anti-Semitic answers. Nevertheless, there will always be a needed gap for the fool on the hill. Every genius, every wise man, has to be some kind of fool to society; for no wise man follows conventional opinion. Common sense has not only not been common, but has also been invariably wrong from one generation to the next. Common sense has also morphed from one generation to the next, leaving us with a raging river, like the Congo, whose fickle meanderings change from one season to the next. Truth isn't changing: Truth is solid like a jewel-topped mountain. And only the wise old fools can look past the fickle river to the jewelled mountain. Our patient and humile Oxbridge professor is unfortunately a libtard. This isn't a problem, since he is open-minded and willing to argue, but in spite of his learning, his logical priors are cemented to the concrete foundations of this age.

What will this mean for our age? Even if we have one librarian quoting Carlyle, and another quoting Rawls, there is still ample space for new ideas to change the minds of men. Whether it be YouTube, podcasts, or whatever other new technology, the book, whether essay or poem, remains the gold standard for disseminating a vision, and the congregation and coordination of a band of brothers is the only way to change the world. Nothing has changed there. What LLMs will however do is revolutionise our access to knowledge, and our relationship to knowledge. Hark, the AI era is here!

2025/01/08 Man and His Images

Will be starting short form dark-side articles for smaller thoughts.

Over time, through a variety of experiences, I've come to realise the mantle of the mind is images. If we imagine the mind much like the layers of the Earth, the images of the mind rest in its mantle, that slow, viscous solid magma, flowing slowly beneath the crust. By volume and by weight, the magma exceeds the crust, and the images of the mind are no different; images underpin our likes and dislikes, our persuasions, our current feelings. But like magma again, these images can move, can morph, and change into new forms, be replaced by other images, can cause plate tectonics in the conscious mind above, and at times erupt into consciousness like a volcano. When one introspects and allows the images to arise, one can see the root to a feeling, an emotion. Some emotions, I suspect, cannot be experienced unless the associated image arises.

One such image that I've been thinking about lately is such: some time ago, I watched a YouTube video on Mount Athos, where a thin monk was cutting through a rustic boule of bread. Now, whenever I feel full and wish for a less rich diet, whether that be food or any other aspect of life, this epitome of the ascetic life is projected in my mind's theatre. Before this image, the ascetic life didn't have the same beauty, it didn't have the same lustre.

Man believes himself rational, and I too believe man can be rational. But our rationality, I believe, is preceded by our sense of beauty. The images of our mind and their beauty determine to what extent we agree with an idea. If the image can be painted in the mind of Red party supporters that Blue party supporters are allied with perverts, then a rational argument for the Blue party will be without power to convince: the image has been tarred. No amount of persuasion and argument can convince you of something which isn't cool. To seem beautiful, not merely in how a movement idea is dressed, but in how it acts also, is enough to convince someone of its truth, and will make them desire to be a part of the movement.

The food porn online of delicious rich foods excites the tongue, these images affect us. But if the image of the monk slicing bread is more beautiful still, that image of asceticism might turn you away from a greasy snack. What is the case for food, may also be the case for life's other lusts and desires: we can be made holy through images and their healing power. A sick mind is made sick on a diet of sick images. We are what we eat. To return to health is to submit our mind to healthy images, and overthrow the rotten sulphurous images we once had with a new regime of virtuous images.

Our minds are images in their mantle; at their core, heavens knows what we are. But hopefully, God willing, we can nurture a greater appreciation and reflection of the images that we feed our minds and receive from our minds, and hence not allow ourselves become corrupt by them.

2024/12/30 Upside-down Evangelism in the Modern Day

Modern day evangelism seems to me to be upside-down. A few weeks ago, a party of black street preachers descended upon the high street of my town, handing out pamphlets. One, aptly named for the Christmas season Ebeneezer, started talking to me about his Pentecostalism, and how he's personally healed many men in the name of Christ. He said he used to be a Roman Catholic missionary, but upon arriving in Rome, realised the Catholic's don't worship God, but rather worship the dead, prompting him to join his current movement. Ebeneezer was a very sweet man. He spoke with a constant, genuine, tear in his eye as he spoke of Jesus, quoted scripture from memory, and, like much of the working class disillusioned of Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion, spoke vociferously on the evils of the vaccine. We ended up having a conversation about some of the topics he brought up; but how would the average person on the street, who does follow Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion, respond to his claims of faith healing? To them, talk of mystical healing is at best 'not following the science'; but it is more likely that whoever you are talking to will think you, and perhaps Christianity, kooky.

Perhaps the middle-classes aren't Ebeneezer's target audience. But whether it be black Pentecostalists, or white Evangelicals, the issue seems to be widespread. I recently learnt off YouTube about the 'He Gets Us' advertising campaign spread across America. Despite being a particularly ill-devised campaign for evangelism, the 'He Gets Us' campaign ends up Not Getting their average listener. They advertised on bill-boards and on television, using the short slogan 'He Gets Us', but to many who are secular seeing the advert, why would Christ's caring matter to you? Your parents may care deeply about you; and so too your spouse or lover or friends. Implied in advert is the assumption that everyone listening understands what He represents, and who He is. Again, why would Christ's caring matter? Jesus is simply an inspiring story, or another martyr, were it not for the fact of the resurrection, the promises He made, and the fact He is God, and able to action those promises. But in both of the cases given, from the most local to the most global, the proselytisers assume that you know, agree, and inhabit their presuppositional and metaphysical framework; which is most likely not the case.

To repeat, in both these instances, the coach is set before the horse: knowing Christ ought to come after the forerunners of truth, goodness, and beauty. In a sense, to effectively evangelise, you must first prime them!

We'll begin with beauty. If Christianity has poor aesthetics, people won't want to join. This may sound vain, but as any advertiser ought to know - and as the apostles understood - optics are everything. Christ lambasting the Pharisees in Matthew 23 should be evidence enough that hypocrisy is the death of the church, and the easiest way to fall away from God; those who don't 'practice what they preach' are destined to not only be ignored and thought of as jokes themselves, but sully what they stand for. Without the radicalism of the early church, and the earnest, honest actions of the first martyrs, Christianity never would have bloomed. And by pointing out the hypocrisies of Christians, the secular world continues to this day to damage the optics of Christianity. In a secular circle of people, any mention of Catholicism receives a joke about paedophilia; and so too for Evangelicals. Even the Church of England has been under a sustained attack by secular institutions as of late. Recently, I woke up on Christmas morning and opened the BBC app, to find the top story was, rather than anything up-lifting and Christmassy, further bishops gossiping about this church sex abuse scandal. Whatever one's thoughts on the scandal itself, it's clear this isn't what ought to be posted on Christmas day: the BBC are running a sustained attack on optics! I digress, but the point remains that seeing the church as a desirable institution and a desirable way of life to adhere to, and for the church to have good optics, is a core prerequisite to conversion.

Beyond beauty we have truth. Those who become Christian through the charisma of a celebrity pastor are more likely to flake away from the faith upon encountering the flimsiest of atheists chucking his morsels of facts and logic at you. Many did fifteen years ago. Not everyone shares my passion for arguing, I recognise this, but everyone has a sense of truth, and an ability to discern truth from falsehood. You don't require years of study in the Socratic method for something to 'sound true' or 'seem right'. So much information from the news, and so many myths passed around in popular culture, like 'Christmas is based on the Roman Saturnalia', are swallowed whole by people who are otherwise smart. On a diet of 'Christianity is but a skin-suit of the past' fed to them by prestige institutions like news-media and academia, they can't believe that Christianity contains any truth. Only through apologetics, and asserting the truth of the Christian narrative, can people be made to believe in Jesus. We are a sceptical generation; and our epistemologies have changed at pace since the Second World War. To succeed in apologetics is to succeed at riding the waves, cycles, and trends in epistemology, and adapting the Christian argument to the times.

And finally, in the Platonic trinity, is goodness. Goodness is perhaps the hardest to convince people of, since moral opinions are what join us to a group, lest we be ostracised. Few want to give up that which connects them to their friends and family and feel at odds with their community. Over and above beauty and truth, the good is also the hardest to argue, since our culture has been so conditioned to reject any normative moral statement as simply the Behaviourist's conditioning, and thus a free-floating relative proposition. But morality is something objective - whether we adhere to how we are supposed to act or not, there is a way in which we ought to act. And since it is so hard to find moral truth within ourselves, correct morality is something only seen through the action of others; only through the upstanding examples like the lives of the saints, well-known Christian's today, or Christians in their community, can people be evangelised to see that the Christian way of life is better than their current lot.

In short, through these three criteria, seeing the truth, goodness, and beauty of Christianity, people are drawn close to Christianity. And once you're close, it isn't a leap of faith you must take, but simply a hop. This is my experience, and likely the experience of many others. How effective the evangelism of promoting Jesus directly without context is, I'm not sure. For me, understanding, or at least beginning to understand, what's written in the Bible and the life of Jesus only came later after I agreed with the presuppositions of Christianity. Salvation was meaningless without understanding what I needed saving from. Only once the weeds of my scientistic mode of thinking were uprooted, the ground ploughed, and a fresh garden planted in my mind's field, could any talk of Christ saving me begin to make sense. Without the presuppositions of Christianity, or at least the presuppositions of the pagan world, can Christianity mean anything more than rote recital of "I'm Saved"? Unlike in the first century A.D., we are not surrounded by pagans: we are surrounded by apostates. Much like how Islam originated from Christian heresy, and was sharpened into a simplified faith designed to convert Christians, so too is Britain's de facto state-run consensus religion of today a simplified faith designed to convert Christians. Converting apostates back out of this predating faith is hard, in part because the presuppositions held by these apostates today are designed to blot out and blind you to Christian understanding. Preying on Christian thinking is the biological modus operandi of these later thought systems; without it, they wouldn't exist. It is my belief, therefore, that only by changing the presuppositions of how people think that widespread evangelism becomes feasible.

2024/12/11 Jung and Christianity

My previous weekly posting schedule has ended after having won the weekly blogging competition against Iklone. Going forward, I aim to write longer pieces with the hope of improving my writing style.

Christianity has always avoided dream interpretation. It isn’t as if dream interpretation isn’t part of biblical history, since there are the examples of important dreams from God, like those of Joseph and Daniel. But dream interpretation, as understood in modern psychoanalysis, and as understood by pagan cultures across time and the world over, is never seen. Dreams are where demons attack. The succubus, the erotic demon who arouses its prey through dreams, chooses the night. Demons are associated with darkness and the night, after all, and struggle to sustain themselves beneath the clarity of light. Call it a motif or symbolism if you wish, but there is always a sense of reality in symbolism. The oak tree is symbolically wise and strong, not due to any cultural association, but due to the reality of the oak tree: an oak tree is old, hard to topple, and hard to saw. Similarly, the symbolism of a demon cloaked in the darkness of night reflects upon the qualities of a demon. The demon is afraid of light, because when God’s light exposes them, they cease to be; and because come nightfall, demons do frolic and cackle and play mischief.

I speak from personal experience through lucid dreams. I have never sought out lucid dreaming through techniques or practice, but now and again I fall into them when struggling to sleep, usually at around four in the morning. I hear a loud tinnitus-like ringing sound, as mandalic imagery glows across my vision, and I’m thrust into a waking dream. What I’ve discovered from these experiences, is that dreams come from demons. The last few times I’ve descended to one of these Orphic states, I’ve elected to spend my lucid dream praying. Almost at once, the antibodies of the dream world soak my submissive half-asleep mind with feelings of terror. The demons are afraid. But the last time this happened, I spoke Christ’s name, remembering a biblical passage explaining how demons were cast out in His name. And, I heard the demons in a squeaky alien-like voice say Jesus’ name four times as if they were scurrying away afraid as I awoke, accompanied by mandalas.

A strange introduction to an article, perhaps. Granted, it may well be a little self-indulgent. But my original point remains: Christianity has little time for dreams. As even those before the psychoanalysts would acknowledge, albeit expressed in different terms, dreams come from the unconscious mind. The unconscious mind, as the psychoanalysts understood it, was full of demons. The Jungian concept of complexes, which was present in Freudian theory before Jung and Freud fissured their friendship, essentially describes a demon. But one inside of you. A complex controls you, compelling you to certain actions, ceasing you up when referenced, and prevents you from hearing information unpleasant to it. In the Jungian framing, the complex is self-sustaining, with its own wants, aims, and means, of which you are unconscious. Regularly, a complex doesn’t have full control over the host, and can only bend and affect your actions. However, in extreme circumstances, the complex can ‘possess’ you, and take hold of your body for a short while, managing your thoughts and actions. All in all, these complexes sound very much like demons. And when you consider archetypes as ancient parts of psyche directing and orienting man, they sound like master demons inhabiting not the individual, but his lineage; not the ontogeny, but the phylogeny. Indeed, an archetype is a demon strapped to mankind, baggage each man carries from his birth: the archetypes are the demons of original sin.

Now this may sound quite ‘just so’, equating direct parallels as I am. And especially given that archetypes in the Jungian model are often of good things - think the ‘wise old man’ and the ‘mother’. But wisdom can still exist without an archetype, even if under the Jungian model it would be hard for the mind to identify. And so too would motherhood. In fact, the archetype often detracts from the original feeling. To inhabit and be possessed by an archetype can be a powerful thing, but it is in fact idolatry. If the mother were to inhabit the archetype of motherhood and see herself solely as a mother, she would forget that she is before all other things made in God’s image. But there is a great feeling of power one feels from allowing someone to project upon you in this way. For a woman to project upon you this ‘father/lover’ archetype, and vice versa, is a most potent feeling many of you will have experienced. In kind, if you were to project upon another archetypes of wisdom, you will experience a different kind of idolatry; the kind of idolatry where you feel insignificant compared to the epitome before you, where you take the word of this perceived ‘wise man’ as gospel. The archetypal vision described is a kind of falsehood, to see a blurred vision of the world and your neighbour, coloured by the archetypal palette. These are distractions from reality, much like how the passions distract, blur, and colour our thoughts, beliefs, and interactions: we are drunk on the falsehood of sin. Christianity is the sobriety of thought. In becoming a Christian, there is far more to cease to believe in than to start believing in.

Armed with that characteristic of German idealism - verbose secularised Christianity - Jung would agree. Jung would agree that the complexes and archetypes are but distractions; for Jung, the spiritual journey is to resolve complexes and incorporate archetypes, in search of the hidden but most potent archetype of the Self: the archetype of totality, transcending all other archetypes. Jung describes moving from the ego to the Self as moving from the geocentric model to the heliocentric model, since the hierarchy of size, power, and dominance must be inverted. Jung says Christ is a symbol of the Self .

Jung doesn’t want to venerate archetypes and complexes: he wants to step on the shoulders of archetypes to reach the Self, and allow the blazing light of consciousness to eviscerate the demons of complexes. All this not mediated by the individual, but through a kind of dialogue between therapist and patient, like between priest and layman. Why is Jung wrong? Jung is wrong because he is a gnostic. And I don’t say that casually, he is truly a gnostic. In one of his last works, Answer to Job, Jung argues for the perspective of the Marcionites, a proto-gnostic group, stating the God of the Old Testament was evil, and the God of the New Testament found in Christ is good. But even excluding this later work, in his main corpus of work, Jung’s focus has always been with engaging and interacting with demons in order to learn from them and ascend, instead of simply vanquishing them. Jung sets out a path for the incorporation of archetypes, starting with the Shadow, then the Anima, and several others, before ending with the Self, and the Individuation process. In the Red Book, Jung explicitly talks at length with the complexes of his own imagination, exalting them at times into great beings beyond his control, such as his discussions with Philemon. These demons of imagination and dreams Jung aims to tame, much like a kind of Dr Faustus. And, as Jung discovered, demons appear most vividly in dreams and imagination, particularly his practice of active imagination.

This is why the Christian tradition distrusts divination and diagnosis by dreams. As any recorder of dreams knows, the moment you start writing your dreams down night by night, the more vivid and frequent your dreams become. Engaging with this ‘spirit realm’ excites it ever-more, until, in the case of Jung, the wall between the realm of dream and the realm of reality thins and cracks. Where Jung sees a Narnia, the Christian sees a Tartarus. Where Jung trusts his flesh, his visions, and his ability to taunt and engage demons, the Christian distrusts his flesh, and recognises his susceptibility to demons. And realises he shouldn’t have any such dealings.

Jung was a fan of Tibetan Buddhism. His beloved mandalas, whilst being observed in cultures across the world, are most famed in Tibet. The very notion of the anima, I have good reason to suspect, came from his reading on Tibet also, especially from his friendship with Richard Wilhelm. The Tibetans have a technique where they visualise an imaginary woman, and practice making this internal vision submissive to him. As part of this technique, the Tibetan Buddhist monk uses women, many of whom are taken by force from local villages, to taunt and harden himself by what is in essence raping them without ejaculating. Many of these women are also young girls, sometimes before maturity. Tibetan Buddhism is a horrible thing, do not trust the Dalai Lama. But the main purpose of this practice is to conquer the passions through a kind of self-mastery of this internal woman, leading to the point at which you are superior to those demons. This form of ‘spiritualism’ is founded upon taunting the flesh and provoking the demons, only to bat them away and fight off the hoard, in order to harden yourself to temptation. The Tantras write explicitly that monks summons the gods from heaven in order to make them submissive to him. However metal this may sound, these are at root evil practices; and, in my opinion, pseudo-gnostic practices. The Tibetan Buddhist monk looks inwards to build his own strength, because his salvation, Nirvana, is at odds with the evil world outside. The outside world, God’s own Creation, is a prison in the mind of the Buddhist, a circle of torture, suffering, and reincarnation ad infinitum. Given his mistaken belief about the purpose of Creation, the Buddhist mistakenly believes the principalities and powers still work for God, and that the demons in control of this world are akin to the archons, the henchmen of the Demiurge, found in gnosticism. But the Christian knows this to be untrue. The Christian knows that the principalities and powers, those celestial beings God entrusted with the protection of the nations of the world, had fallen, and had succumbed to be worshipped as idols, distancing themselves from His grace. These fallen gods the Buddhist monk taunts are demons, and these demons are not in communion with the Creator. The Buddhist thinks the world is suffering from beginning to its end; whilst the Christian knows the world is suffering with the exception of its beginning and end.

Jung’s insistence on engaging, incorporating, and at times aggressing the principalities and powers searched for within, is in-line with the Buddhist understanding of self-overcoming rather than a Christian one; it is a sense of self-overcoming in-line with a gnostic view, an inverted Christian view. The principle mistake is in thinking an overcoming of demons will bring you any closer to the Creator, whereas in reality they only aim to distract you from Him. Instead of relying on God to overcome any and all demonic adversity, owing to our weakness as men, the gnostic takes the task upon himself. Instead of relying on the light of God to eviscerate demons, Jung relies on the light of ego-consciousness to eviscerate complexes.

Despite what I might have said thus far, I retain love of Jungian thought, though I now think it to be wrong. I think back to St. Augustine’s Confessions. Before his conversion to Christianity, and his rise to become the cornerstone of Western thought, St. Augustine was a Manichee. These followers of the prophet Mani blended gnosticism, Platonism, Zoroastrianism, and all the science and philosophy of his day into a kind of proto-Theosophical ecumenistic oafing beast. Riffing on St. John’s metaphors of lightness and darkness (parallels of which are also found in the Dead Sea Scrolls), and wedding them to Zoroastrianism’s Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, Mani birthed an ascetical faith focused on abandoning the world utterly to find the light within. Once a staunch proponent of this composite faith, Augustine the Manichee critiqued and argued with the priests of the sect, until he converted to the Christian faith. After his conversion, when confronted with the sophistry of the lightness and darkness, he rebutted thus: what is darkness but an absence of light? It is only our lack of faith distancing us from God and His eternal light.

Much hay has been made since on how influenced St. Augustine was by his Manichaean youth. Such books I have seen arguing that the very act of writing the Confessions, one of the first known autobiographies, is an example of his conception of an internalised self, of a slightly more gnostic understanding of the soul than what came before. This hay is munched at by the Orthobros, and those, like the Nietzscheans, who see the Western project from Socrates to today as a mistake. And, in truth, the connection can be made. Looking into myself, I see my thought and the way I see the world as being heavily influenced by my Jungian thought. Did all the Troskyites who become Neoconservatives ever lose their Red upbringing? And can anyone truly move from one nation to another a naturalise in taste and manners? Probably not. There will always be the mild dye of Jungianism in me, and the mild dye of Manichaeanism in St. Augustine. And, despite his great holiness, the great defender against Pelagius probably wouldn’t want you thinking otherwise.

But such inversions of the truth are great stepping stones. To cross into a new faith, a new way of thinking, alien to your upbringing, is to ford a wide, deep river. There are shallower regions of the river where a skilled wader may aid your crossing, but those without a guide on their own adventure, following their own intuition can’t help but dry off and rest on the islet sitting in the middle of the river. After the struggle of the journey, one may even mistake the small, limited island for destination. But just as Odysseus ran from Ogygia, so too must we swim to the land on the other side, away from the Calypso copycats of Mani and Jung. Whilst I learnt much, and gained much, I have reached the other side. Thank you, Jung, and goodbye.

2024/11/10 Remembrance Sunday & Yasukuni Shrine

I was originally going to write on a different topic entirely - the article was partially written - but after attending the Remembrance Sunday event in my town today, I'm changing the topic. The ceremony itself was very good. No lie, roughly a thousand people showed up; and that's quite considerable given the size of the town. Roughly three dozen serving military men marched, dressed in khaki uniforms with their medals hanging from their breast; and roughly three dozen more ex-servicemen were dotted around the crowd clustered in pockets, dressed in suits with their medals hanging also. The mood was earnestly solemn, no larpy or fake feeling felt. During the two-minutes silence, there was true silence. There were no small number of children and babies in the crowd, but no crying nor babbling could be heard. As the last post was being performed, all that could be heard was a dog howling and howling in a mournful tone.

Militarism has a long history, but it hasn't always been with us. War has always been with us, but not all war is militarism; militarism starts with the professional warrior as a class or caste of society. The bureaucratic state pre-dates the warrior state as we see with the very earliest civilisations, like ancient Babylon or ancient Egypt. Ancient Babylon was famed for its great unscalable walls, which worked to both defend the city from foes, and to chain the populous in. These states of old treated their subjects like slaves, giving them day after day of back-breaking labour. The pyramids of Egypt certainly weren't build by entrepreneurial masons, but rather by organised slave labour. Warfare in this era followed the same pattern: wars were fought by hoards of the slave peasant populous, whose main object was to install siege towers to breach the enemy's city walls. Archaeologically, it has been said, there is very little evidence to suggest open warfare, for there are no arrowheads nor weaponry found in open fields outside of city limits. Furthermore, the weaponry found at these sites is scant, usually taking the form of small hatchets carried by serfs. Fighting, these archaeologists have said, occurred solely next to the city walls, where these siege engines - think the rook from chess - were used to attempt to breech the walls.

Militarism, then, was not found everywhere. There have, however, been since time immemorial steppe peoples like the Mongols and the Turkic tribes, who have a horseback warrior lifestyle. Traditionally, these steppe nomads herd animals like cattle, goats, yaks, or buffalo; but once they looked to plundering cities, their force was immense. Apart from the steppe peoples, the chariot was a major innovation in warfare. A chariot consisted of two people, a driver and an archer, who worked in tandem to rush at high speeds and pick off these bands of lacklustre serf battalions. With the arrival of the steppe nomad and the chariot, the era of militarism began; a small minority of strained warriors could with ease take on the disorganised unskilled hoards. The chariot was not a tool for the many, but rather one for the elite. Making a chariot from scratch took immense skill, labour, and resources, and could not be mass produced. Through the chariot, the Bronze Age elite were born.

Though Rome and the Greek city states were founded by twin charioteer gods (Romulus and Remus, Apollo and Artemis, Castor and Pollux, etc), through technological innovation, the chariot was demoted to a contraption of sport. The spirit of militarism and nobility the chariot founded in the Bronze Age was the flower to the fruit of Alexander's phalanx, and Caesar's legion. These professional army's were not merely a material innovation, in so far as they were far more effective to the alternatives, but also spiritual innovations. There is a kind of cowardice in the ancient city holing itself behind walls, a deep attachment to life, to mere life, not willing to exercise courage to defend their people and their way of life. The professional warrior, to have courage, must forego his grip to mere life and place himself in danger on the frontier to fight. This letting go of an attachment to mere life in order to pursue a path that may lead to death is the common thread, in my opinion, to all of the world's spirituality. Where the Buddhist monk wants to detach from the passions, the stoic too wants to do so also and gain self-mastery; where the Kali worshipping Hindu praises destruction and death, so too does the pagan Viking looking to Valhalla. And the Christian tradition is no different. "How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it? Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?" (Romans 6:2-3). Whilst the historical connection to warfare is absent, St Paul repeats throughout his epistles that through baptism we must die in the flesh so that we may live in the Spirit: for the wages of sin is death. To many, particularly in the Eastern traditions, this constitutes a spiritual warfare against the demons who try to tempt man through their flesh; but when it comes to physical, material warfare, the gospels and the epistles are in agreement that war is bad, and that peace is good.

How then is Christian warfare squared? Throughout history, it has been with great difficulty: indeed, it is a kind of paradox. Unlike Islam, Christianity is a religion of peace, founded by oppressed devotees who were tortured for their faith offering no retaliation. Yet once the faith amalgamated with the Roman emperor through Constantine the Great, a new order began, and the question of how this circle was to be squared was first asked. As the East was being constantly bombarded, and the West had fallen to the Germanic tribes, the image of the knight emerged. Much like the charioteer of old, the knight was a figure of great individual talent. He donned masses of mail, carrying a spear, and was able to out-manoeuvre and skewer his foes. Much like the charioteer of old, knights squared off in battle and duelled. But this image of the knight was alloyed with the code of chivalry. Chivalry at root attempted to apply Christian morals to the very un-Christian act of warfare.

The forces of war are so strong as to be nigh impossible to contain: much like lust in so far as its sheer force, it is hard to be 'dead in the flesh' to the instinct of war. And yet, wars today between civilised nations see far less war crimes than wars passed. Christendom had prevailed in creating a more just kind of war, where cities weren't consistently flattened with no survivors, as was so common in the ancient and classical worlds. The two World Wars were different, though. Through technological innovation, and the receding of Christianity to the nascent pagan forces of theosophy and other strange theories, the First World War was a tragedy. The horrors of war of this kind had never been seen. Europe still hasn't recovered. The wound of the world wars is still open and pussy.

Remembrance Sunday is a commemoration of this long history, this long tradition; but also a kind of innovation. The wars saw a revival of Christianity at every level of society recovering from the hangover of the decadence of the late-Victorian/Edwardian eras. Britain, through Eton and Oxbridge, had build an elite factory to produce competent and influential men; but these Great Men of old were often sorely lacking in Christian ethics, as Conrad's Heart of Darkness immortalises. After the world wars, the character of Europe changed. The excitement of the jingoes had been quenched; and the future changed course. The solemnity at the necessary evil of war - an emotion present but not central in days past - is the mood of Remembrance Sunday. And through its commemoration, this new Christian sentiment on war is cemented.

As the title suggests, this is an article of two halves, and we shall now begin to talk about Japan. In contradistinction to most of Asia, Japan has a tradition of feudal nobility. The samurai's sword was sharpened over the course of the Sengoku Jidai, when local daimyo (lords) was set against one another in the original battle royale of honour and subterfuge. Like any noble class, such as the Normans who invaded Britain and subjugated the Anglo-Saxons, the samurai noble class settled down, accepting their power, growing fat on the food of the taxed peasantry. Whilst the samurai could still possess the nobility of a Western knight errant (watch Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai if you haven't), most samurai by the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate were unskilled in the sword, and worst of all possessed little of the vision and artistic prowess European aristocracies developed. In one of the most efficacious coups of history, the emperor was used as the battering ram by which a band of forward-thinking revolutionary samurai overthrew the lifeless, mouldy Shogunate to make way for the adoption of all things Europe. And one of those adoptions was European militarism. In an attempt to copy all that was valuable in Europe, the Meiji government replicated the British navy, the Prussian army, and the cuisine of France to make what became an unstoppable war machine. And through their mimicry, Japan also inherited that late-Victorian unreformed military jingo of Europe.

To my knowledge, in Japan there's no equivalence to Remembrance Sunday, where the horrors of war are recalled. In Japan, they do however have the infamous Yasukuni shrine, which I had the fortune to visit on my trip to Japan back in June. The shrine was first built after the Meiji restoration to commemorate the war dead, but as time went on, was adapted and exapted to include the 'war heroes' of the Second World War. Among the smaller memorials at Yasukuni, was one for an Indian named Radhabinod Pal; after a quick search for his name, I discovered he was the only judge to side with the Japanese during the Tokyo trials, the Japanese equivalent of the Nuremberg trials. After walking around the site, we visited the adjoined military museum. Military museums are usually without fail the best museum in any European city; I would recommend Lisbon, and especially Vienna. This military museum had little in the way of artefacts - all the artefacts present were was served at the start as a hors d'oeuvre before you began the main course: a long essay written on the walls, justifying every Japanese war atrocity before and during the Second World War. A personal favourite was a plaque detailing how nothing untoward occurred in Nanking during 1937, and that if anything had occurred, the officers punished the offending soldiers without fail. Simply put, the Japanese had not completed the necessary centuries of moral training which the Christian West had undergone (although much of this was undone in the World Wars, particularly by the Russians). After eating at the museum cafe, my friends and I left the shrine, after having had a very novel experience.

The Japanese culture of 1868 couldn't contain the West. It is impolite to say nowadays, but Japan was too civilisationally immature to receive the great Western inventions in the Meiji restoration. They received the immense rich wealth of the Western canon, but struggled to digest it. Japan doesn't have a Remembrance Sunday - they instead have Yasukuni shrine - because Japan never received the layers upon layers of innovations both technological and spiritual which have been lathered on to the European gradually and organically. Whether it be in our culture or our genome, social or biological, European man in European culture has grown spiritually alongside our attitudes to war. The Christian project, in a kind of historical dialectic, has slowly unfolded over time like a lotus flower, blossoming the attitudes to war of today. Please understand, these sentiments don't emerge from a latent Whiggishness; but rather a sense of light and darkness, a sense of right and wrong; and a sense of truth and falsehood. The emotions and feelings of Remembrance Sunday are like a demi-glace; they are rich, deep, and complex. I am honoured to participate year on year in this great complexity of feeling, one that is unique to the Western history and the Christian tradition.

2024/11/03 A Reappraisal of Dogs

There is something tragic in dogs. Some time ago, I was sitting on a bench in a local nature reserve, wasting the hours by, reading my book, and - once I became bored of my book - occupied myself with that time-old pleasure of people watching. Dog-walker after dog-walker passed by, each dog leashed to their owners. And despite dog-walkers' insistence, each dog who walked this path insisted on barking and harassing the swans. Each time I watched as the dog pulled the leash taught, barked his lungs out, and then the swan puffed his chest, broadened his wings, and hissed that silent snake-like hiss unique to the swans. And each time without fail, the dog's brow arced pitifully, his tail drooped, his ears flopped and he backed down. The dogs were afraid. Of a swan, I thought; what a silly thing to be afraid of. A dog could get his maw around a swan's neck with relative ease, surely? It can't be too difficult for a dog to take out a swan, surely? But the dog was afraid of the swan's show of strength.

'Oversocialised': was my thoughts at the time. Not merely oversocialised, but bred to oversocialisation. It's not just by its upbringing that this dog was unable to retaliate: by the upbringing of their species, of the phylogeny, not just the ontogeny, they were unable to retaliate. Dogs are domesticated to obey, never able to actualise themselves, possessing a kind of stunted growth like an axolotl. The pig, when unleashed into the wild, become boars again: they grow tusks, get hairy, and their ontology reconnects them with their wild ancestors. It's as if a genomic switch is activated, turning on 'boar mode' and they remember how to live in the forests. Dogs, by comparison, are stuck in this more infantile state; they have a kind of permanent father complex where they look for authority figures but can never mature to become one. Much like Shinji, dogs are prone to fits of anima-possessed dispair - you can see the shame and lack of self-worth in their eyes! You can see the depressed frustration in their eyes! You can see the despair of their inability to compute why they can't become great wolves. Maybe my previous appraisal of dogs was negative because I saw a bit of myself in them.

Dogs, I've discovered, may not be able to become wolves (Great Men), but they can be trained to happiness by a good master. My grandma's late dog Dale was an Airedale Terrier. I remember seeing this dog and thinking, "this dog reckons he rules the household". Despite being so meek, Dale thought himself the house's chief defender; every time a person passed the window, he leapt from the sofa, ran to the window, and began his chorus of proud barking, to inform the house that a person had passed. My late grandfather used to shout at Dale too terrible, and if he wouldn't stop barking, he got the fly swatter out to try and make him shut up. Often even this was ineffective. These dogs - for Dale was one of a few - were heavily pampered. They had chicken breast with gravy to eat every day, plus whatever my grandfather fancied feeding them under the table. One of their dogs, Gypsy, an almighty pony-sized friendly giant of a dog, used to plonk his head on the table by my grandfather with those pathetic glistening dog eyes, begging for scraps from the table. It was quite revolting. These dogs were also incredibly unfit, for this was South Africa, and you don't really want to go out for a walk anywhere.

These dogs had no law; they were a law unto themselves. And they were encouraged in their indiscretions with these tid-bits. There's another dog I see most mornings on the way to work. I walk along a canal on my way to work, and each day i walk past a kindly old man who's walking his dog and say hello. And this dog is full of life! He runs ahead of his owner with such enthusiasm, his clean thick white hair waving in the wind like an incredibly dense cloud: he brings a smile to my face each morning. You can tell this dog is loving life, and that he loves his owner. You can tell this dog can't beg for scraps by the table, for he doesn't have an ounce of that pathetic pity in his face. You can tell this dog was raised right.

Because dogs have no pack leader to follow, they follow men. Because dogs are stuck as juveniles, they will forever see you as their master, and your responsibility as a dog owner is to lead them with responsibility and competence. Dogs are much like men, in fact. Much like how a person with nothing to do will descend into 'mere life', so too will a dog. The ego-trip of barking at the window, or living solely for the passions of one's stomach: each of us can relate in a sense to these experiences when we are at a spiritual low. This is Nietzsche's last man. The happy dog, on the other hand, is one who grows, and who works. The panoply of strangely shaped dogs we take for granted today all emerged from the selective breeding of dogs to specific ends. Sausage Dog, for instance, is so strangely elongated to bury himself down rabbit holes and badger holes; the Yorkshire Terrier was bred to be so tiny and agile in order to kill rats in fields and in dockyards; and the Sheep Dog was bred to be smart enough to herd sheep. When you see dogs at work, they are concentrated and focused. They aren't necessarily having fun, but there's a sense that through their work, and by following their master's training, they're fulfilled.

In the ancient world, the family was very different. The father was in a very real sense the master of the household, and his word was law. The children must obey the father, and the wife must obey the husband: this was how social relations worked. And God is the Father. As aspirant children of God, we must obey the father and follow his commandments. C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain describes how, very crudely, our relationship with God is like a dog and his master. Given that the relationship of son and father is quite different now than it was in the past, Lewis uses this inferior connection - inferior insofar as the dog is not in man's image - of man's relationship to the dog as one which is also of absolute obedience. Reading that passage, I realised that a dog's obedience is something truly noble. A well-trained dog will never if rarely disobey his master's command. And a dog is a far more simple organism than a man, and as such I can only imagine that his animalistic urges are also far higher. And yet, the dog through right-training can become either a fulfilled white wool-ball frolicking down the towpath, or a tired-looking, often-farting, creature of pity begging for a scrap at any opportunity. It all depends on the master. And the goodness of the master towards his dog all depends on the law and the training. Through worship of passions, worship of idols, or the worship of God, we choose our master in a way a dog can't. We choose our highest end around which all our efforts shall point; and if that end is an idol like money, we limit ourselves to achieving no more than material wealth. Worship is submission. The transcendence that is above us only makes itself known to us through the humility of the intellect, the humility of the desire, and the humility of the will. Dogs perfectly prove that submission to a good master begets a good happy fulfilling life - and that's without bearing God's image!

2024/10/27 The Curse of the Law

As of late, I've been interested in Galatians, and have found St Paul's teaching of the 'Curse of the Law' of particular interest. The churches St Paul founded and was trying to heal fell into two general categories: one's which drifted 'rightwards', the Judaizers; and one's which drifted 'leftwards', the libertines. In Corinth, there were people in the congregation banging their step-mothers, and having it be applauded: this libertine behaviour clearly falls short, and in his epistles, St Paul clearly wasn't impressed. To the Corinthians, the law was paper-thin, and clearly was not written on their hearts. In contrast, the churches of Rome and Galatia wanted to bring back circumcision and a strict adherence to the OT (Old Testament) law. This, to St Paul, was also wrong. For, as he wrote in Galatians 3:13, 'Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us'.

Let's first look at the OT; for everything found in the NT is prototyped in the OT. We begin with the simple question, who are the children of Abraham? As St Paul writes in Galatians 4:21-31, Ishmael, whom Abraham had unto Hagar, was born naturally without miracle nor promise at Mount Sinai; Mount Sinai being where the law was given to Moses. In contrast, Abraham's son of promise, Isaac, was born to his wife Sarah at the overripe old age of ninety, and was the fulfilment of God's promise to him. It is those of the promise, not of the flesh, of Abraham who are counted among his children; it was through the circumcision and the worship of Yahweh rather than ethnic pedigree that one becomes a son of Abraham. The most notable example is Caleb in the Exodus narrative. Caleb is described as a Kennizite (Numbers 32:12); the Kennizites are a people mentioned as an indigenous tribe of the Levant when God is listing the local peoples to Abraham (Genesis 15:19). Nevertheless, Caleb is seen as supremely pious. He becomes the representative of the house of Judah (Numbers 13:6), and he along with Joshua are the only two of the original exodus allowed by God into the promised land. Clearly, one doesn't need to be an ethnic Jew to be a son of Abraham, nor to be a Christian.

The parallels between the Torah and the ministry of Christ, once you look into them, are remarkable. We receive the word 'Passion' to refer to the Easter narrative from the Passover. Christ is the lamb sacrificed at Passover (1 Peter 18-19), whose blood protects us, just as the sacrificed lamb's blood protected the Jews at Passover. And, through both the resurrection and His ministry, we are led out of slavery from sin into the current wilderness to await the Second Coming and the Promised Land. In this parallel, Pharaoh is Satan, attempting to prevent Christ from liberating us from sin. And in the wilderness into which Christ is leading us, we will need nothing to sustain ourselves but the new and improved Manna: His flesh and blood (John 6:31-35). To sin, then, is to be enslaved; but how then can the law be a curse? To follow Christ out of slavery to the sin would require the law, would it not?

For St Paul, the curse of the law is the compulsion to follow it and the consequences of not. 'Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of law' (Galatians 3:10 quoting Deuteronomy 27:26), St Paul writes, explicating the consequences not following the law. The law is a kind of Sword of Damocles over Israel and her fortunes. What Christ does is to break off the Old Covenant through his death, and begin the New Covenant. St Paul describes us as being widows and widowers with our contract annulled through death, and how through the Resurrection a new covenant is formed (Romans 7:4). The Old Covenant of circumcision is now replaced with the New Covenant of baptism: this is why St Paul is irate at the misunderstandings of the Judaizers who don't realise they are trying to enter a dead contract. But Christ didn't merely come to end the law: he came to fulfil the law (Matthew 5:17). And the law was fulfilled through crucifixion. 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree' (Galatians 3:13 quoting Deuteronomy 21:23), and yet Christ bore this sin by symbolically being hanged on a tree in the form of the cross. Throughout His ministry, Jesus hung around with whores and lepers who were considered under the law to be unclean. Not only did Jesus heal these people, but sanctified them in the process through His presence. However, in the crucifixion, Christ becomes accursed Himself by being in violation of the Law; but just as the curses on the unclean were sanctified through Christ, in falling foul Himself of the law, the curse of the law is sanctified in Him and lifted.

If the law was a curse to be lifted, why were the Jews given the law in the first place? As St Paul describes, the law aroused passions causing him to sin (Romans 7:5), just like how a child, when told not to snack before dinner, begins to have a deep urge to do so. Owing to our fallen natures, the moment we hear the law, Satan and his demons tempt us to break it. And it is just like childhood: the Father, the creator of the universe, has told us this is what we can and cannot do, and if we disobey His commandments, we shall be thrown from his protection into the wilderness. Spiritually speaking, the Jewish people were like a child given commandments to keep them from sinning until they reached a kind of spiritual adulthood. God's plan was for the Jews to become 'a light to the nations' (Isaiah 42:6), so that they could teach the nations of earth who weren't chosen their generations of experience in spiritual warfare. Such was, of course, not to be, for the Jews rejected Christ. The Incarnation, then, is a kind of spiritual coming of age for mankind; no longer would mankind be cursed under the law, but freed from the domestic laws of the Father, to the law of Christ, the firstborn (Romans 8:29), for 'all authority has been given to [Christ] on heaven and earth' (Matthew 28:18). Today, titles like 'father' and 'firstborn' have lost their weight; however in the ancient world, in Biblical times, these titles carried great authority. A father must be obeyed: his word is tantamount to the law of the household. And the eldest son carries a great deal of authority also over his younger brothers and sisters. If we are to becomes sons of God by theosis, and become brothers and sisters of Christ, we must obey His command as an eldest brother of a family of old. Given the historical purpose of the law of the OT, what is its value today? The value of the law today, St Paul notes, is as a tutor (Galatians 3:24). If it weren't for the law, after all, we wouldn't know what sin was (Romans 7:7); therefore the purpose of the law for us is to teach us what is moral and immoral so that we can maturely act morally. Again, we can use the analogy of coming of age. When you are young and amoral, your parents tell you "don't do that", or congratulate you for your virtues and achievements in order to teach you how one ought to act. Once you are old enough though, your parents cease to give you this guidance for they trust you are able to live virtuously on your own two feet.

This is the meaning of Easter. Christ dying on the cross isn't just the abolition of the Old Covenant of law for the New Covenant of grace; it isn't just Christ's victory over death, that we may have immortal life; and it isn't just that Christ paid off the wages of sin so that we may be freed through His grace: the cross also represent a great trust in mankind's spiritual development. Despite our sinful natures, and despite our constant stumbling, God deemed us mature enough to live virtuously on our own two feet. Whilst we may fail and stumble, falling short of what Christ trusts us to achieve, we must take responsibility for our sin in the way Adam never did: for the law is now written on the heart, guided by the Holy Spirit, rather than in the Torah. The law of the Torah was a kind of curse, insofar as the freedom from Egyptian slavery wasn't the freeing from the real slaver, sin; and the promised land of Canaan was hardly as grand as the New Jerusalem will be. Whilst the law of Moses is good, it is not the fullness of the truth as expressed in Christ. Through the fullness of Christ's truth, we are granted true life, and are through the cross brought back to the Tree of Life to grant us immortal life, rather than the worldly life and success afforded by the law (Galatians 3:12).

2024/10/17 Emin and Vespasian

I hope to be the first person to write about these two figures together.

After laying siege to Jerusalem, Titus, the son of Vespasian, brought home the grand riches of the temple. Nothing left of the temple stands except for a single wall - now known as the Wailing Wall - which Titus permitted to leave standing. The loot, and some enslaved Jews, were to be paraded in the first triumph Rome had seen for many years, and the Flavian dynasty's position was now secure. What was Vespasian to do with the loot? Coming from a stock of gentlemen farmers, and being a military man, he had little time for splendour and excess. He was, for an emperor, ascetic in nature. He inherited Rome, after three short-lived emperors within a year, from Nero, a man whose name is synonymous with excess. As a man of great power and appetite, Nero lived a life of luxury and decadence unparalleled. One such building was the Domus Aurea, translated to the 'Gold House', which was the palace of Nero, his pride and joy. Vespasian, being a man who found such opulence shameful, stripped much of the palace complex of its riches, and put to use the excessive palace grounds. Before Nero's death, the Gold House was filled with treasures taken from around the world, but Vespasian again wasn't interested. Instead, Vespasian built what can only be understood at a museum. Known as the Temple of Peace, this proto-museum housed the great treasures of the empire, and the loot Titus took from the Temple of Jerusalem. And what's more the public could go and see it. The public of course wasn't everyone in Rome, of course - slaves weren't part of the public, because they weren't citizens - but any Roman citizen could go and see the great bejewelled loot the Romans had won over the years. In a sense, this was also an art gallery. It was a place where beautiful things - perhaps even thought provoking things - could be displayed and contemplated by the public.

Two-thousand years later, Tracy Emin is a British world-famous artist. As a poster-child for the much hated 'modern art' her pieces have been sold for incredible sums, and are pride of place in galleries like the Tate Modern. Many use the phrase 'modern art', but it's a very fuzzy phrase. Modernist art, like the works of Wyndam Lewis, are most likely not what's being rallied against. Then many will refactor their argument to post-modern art - but there are some good post-modern art pieces also like 'The Bigger Splash', which again aren't quite what's being rallied against. What offends so many about Tracy Emin's work is that it's nothing. One of her most famous works, titled 'My Bed' is just a very messy bed with litter strewn across the side. Thought provoking perhaps, but there is no beauty in it. Outside of an art gallery, it is just a messy bed. But if you took the emerald encrusted crown of the Pharaohs outside of the Temple of Peace, it would still be a thing of wonder and marvel.

The Russian film director Tarkovsky has made some very eerie works. He uses long panning shots, washed out colours, and most famously let's the camera stare at a scene for an uncomfortable amount of time. It let's you think about a scene, truly think about a scene or an image, and let the wonder seep into you. You make this effect at home. I have made this effect at home. We have a cabinet in my house where we place an item of the month. We place the item on a small stand, under a small LED spotlight, and you can look at it and think about it every now and then. For instance, we had a lock which had to be cut open with bolt-cutters, and the lock sat on in the display cabinet for a month. One doesn't think about ordinary objects for very long in everyday life unless you properly sit and spend time with it. Many claim they don't feel connected to great works of art in the same way they do to movies; but for a film you spend two hours watching, whereas most don't give a painting more than five minutes. Appreciation of beauty requires time. Appreciation of objects requires time. Hideaki Anno uses the lift scene in Eva to give you time to contemplates Rei and Asuka's relationship. Mamoru Oshii, a devotee of Tarkovsky, send people to sleep in Angel's Egg because he's trying to give you time with the images he paints. And likewise Emin is doing the same, albeit with something intentionally ugly.

Angel's Egg is art, however, but the broken lock in my cabinet is not. Art is artifice, the creation of something to serve a purpose. The way we use the word art today is usually to regard a film or a painting used to inspire beauty in our hearts. Vespasian would have perhaps had different ideas. He most likely would not have approved of Roman citizen viewing the Temple of Peace in the same way many British citizens today view the British Museum: that is, as a place where a vicious empire has stolen unjustly the world's treasure.¹ Nay, Vespasian was projecting his power to the citizens and wanted to display these works as a charitable good for the people. The modern interpretation of the museum feels like an inversion of the original. Before the Renaissance, the artist merely made the work, and wasn't someone to be exalted. After the Renaissance, however, the artist became part of the work, with the cults of personality of Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo making the people more famous than their works. This trend continues to the point where the psychoanalysts saw art as but a method by which to understand the artist. And then we come to the bed again. What makes her bed more important than mine? Besides, my bed's cleaner! What does my bed say about me? Very much most likely. If I poked around a stranger's house Come Dine With Me-style, and had a look at their bedroom, I could learn an awful lot about them, never having met them. Tracy Emin's bed says a lot about her, or about womanhood - but does it? It's fundamentally constructed, it's designed to be like someone's bed.

This is the level at which it can be considered art. It is an intentional work. It isn't an actual bed, but is an artifice, a creation attempting to communicate something. Beyond it's immediate message, it has a meta-message of iconoclasm against beauty itself: a most horrific thing indeed. There is an implicit insult to all talent and skilled art attempting at beauty. In so far as beautiful Edwardian prose of the men of letters has sunk to the lower hieroglyphs of emojis, perhaps too has art sank from the brush of Rembrandt to Tracy Emin's bed.

What should be taken away then from this rambling article? Vespasian had art to show, but Emin does not. The artist, unless you're interested in tracing art history, isn't what's important, and shouldn't be idolised. And that anything in your house can be thought provoking if long as you display it - and even if you don't display it. The world is only dull and ugly so long as you aren't willing to give it your time.

1. Perhaps the reason so many Brits think we have stolen the world's riches is because the ownership and conquest no longer feels justified. We are no longer the world hegemon, nor a serious independent geopolitcal player, so why do we have loot that would demonstrate otherwise? I reckon there's a subconscious embarrassment in many Brits that our nation no longer has the power the British Museum projects.

2024/10/12 Pauline Authorship

As promised in a previous article, in today's argument we will be discussing Pauline authorship of his epistles. Debates in academia have been continuing, much like with Gospel authorship and dating, since the time of the 'liberal' theological movement began in Germany in the nineteenth century. Since that time, textual critics have had the success of sommeliers: by virtue of their training, they believe themselves to be experts in discerning an authentic document from an inauthentic one; but in reality, given a blind test of two texts, one real, one a convincing forgery, I doubt many could effectively wield their skill.

Although it has become popular since the nineteenth century, it isn't as if textual criticism hasn't been present from the very earliest days of the church. The Muratorian fragment was discovered in the eighteenth century, and is believed to be, even by sceptical scholars, to date to the mid-to-late second century; in it is a list of the books considered canonical and allowed to be read during services at that time. The list includes virtually all of the modern books, minus the Epistle of James, both Epistles of Peter, and Hebrews. All of the modern Pauline canon is included (we'll come to Hebrews later). Most interestingly however, the writer explicitly states that two letters of Paul, the Epistle to the Alexandrians and the Epistle to the Laodiceans, are Marcionite forgeries. Marcion, for reference, was influential in the early church for his reading that Jesus is a higher God than evil God of the old testament: Marcion was the first gnostic. He compiled a separate canon consisting of a revised version of Luke's gospel, Paul's epistles, and the forged Pauline epistles mentioned in the Muratorian fragment. That Marcion developed a gnostic view starting from Paul's letters isn't inconceivable. Taken out of context, passages where Paul talks about the curse of the law (Galatians 3) or that the laws makes one sin (Romans 7), can certainly be spun into a gnostic interpretation. Interestingly, the Epistle to the Laodiceans is mentioned in the bible, in Colossians 4:16; however, given the Muratorian fragment's assertion that the Epistle in their possession is a forgery, it is likely Marcion was riffing off this reference.

Textual criticism and the attempt to spot forgeries is an ancient Christian tradition. The bible was after all written in Koine Greek: the tradition of history and source criticism is inherited from the Romans and before that the Greeks. Modern critics - despite being a further two-thousand years removed from the events - reckon they have greater insight into Pauline authorship than near-contemporaries of Paul. Out of the Pauline canon, modern critics doubt the authenticity of Colossians, Ephesians, Second Thessalonians, the Pastoral Epistles, and Hebrews. We'll deal with these into three separate sections: the epistles, consisting of the first three epistles listed; the pastorals; and Hebrews.

First we'll have a look at the epistles listed. The first question is who wrote Romans? It's a trick question, because even the bible says Paul didn't write it. 'I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you in the Lord' (Romans 16:22). In the Roman world, letters were rarely written by their authors, but were rather written by an 'amanuensis'. Their services were more extensive than simply being dictated to, and they would also neaten up and polish the work. Given that the Tertius who wrote Romans might not be the same amanuensis Paul relied on to write all his epistles, it would come as no surprise that some of his epistles use different vocabulary to one another. It is a surprise to many a modern textual critic, however; a major argument for the inauthenticity of these epistles is their use of different vocabulary and grammar. If Paul's catchphrase 'Certainly not!' isn't present, many a modern textual critic fail to recognise a Pauline epistle as authentic! The remaining arguments are with regards to the content of the letters. Arguing the theological nuances is well beyond my abilities, so I shan't dive too deeply; suffice it to say, however, that such apparent divergences in theology were only discovered in the modern day, not in the eighteen-hundred years preceding. And then what if the theology contradicts with other epistles? Does Paul giving a different message at a different time to a different church mean it wasn't authored by Paul? Would you recognise my early blog articles and my current blog articles as having been written by the same person? I leave the answers to you, dear reader.

Now let's look at the pastoral epistles. These aren't epistles, strictly speaking. An epistle is a specific Hellenic form of letter sent to a group of people rather than an individual. The letter would be delivered by a messenger, and he would later read the letter to the group of people the letter's intended recipients. The messenger would also be learned in the letter's contents, and would be expected to answer questions from the crowd on behalf of the author. Such was the Hellenic tradition of epistles in which St Paul participated. The pastoral epistles aren't really epistles. They're written to individuals, namely Timothy and Titus, not to large groups of people. They aren't authored with the intent of being pronounced to a crowd, but rather are intended to be told to individuals. Reading them, you'll notice the writing is far more prosaic, less emphatic and flashy than the epistles, simply because the writing isn't trying to impress. Many argue the message of the pastorals is very different to the general epistles also; and there is truth in this. But the instruction given to the shepherds and to the sheep is necessarily different. It doesn't originate in some kind of Platonic noble lie, but rather from an understanding of one's audience and how to advise them.

Finally we'll look at Hebrews, the black sheep of the canon. The canonicity of Hebrews in the East came early on, but it took time for Hebrews to be accepted in the West (interestingly, an opposite effect occurs with Revelations). Tertullian believed Barnabas to be the author; Irenaeus claimed the author was anonymous; and many modern scholars believe it was written by Priscilla - seemingly the only reason being it's transgressive for a women to have written it. Hebrews doesn't read like an epistle at all. It is without the usual greetings prefacing at the beginning, and Paul doesn't name himself from the start. However, tradition states it was authored by Paul, and knowledge passed down from a contemporary time shouldn't be spurned and superseded by our alleged scientific breakthroughs. The tradition that rings the most true to my ears, however, is the Alexandrian tradition we hear from Clement of Alexandria: namely that Hebrews was originally a sermon given by St Paul in Hebrew, and translated into Greek by St Luke. Scholars have said that the Greek of Hebrews has a similar flow and writing style to Luke's gospel and Acts, so the argument follows. Therefore, although the authorship of Hebrews might not directly have been authored by Paul, there is more than likely to have been Pauline influence in its writing.

To conclude, then, Paul is divinely inspired, but he's still just a guy. He wasn't expecting these letters to be crunched by artificial intelligences in order to determine if he was the authentic author. If he had this foreknowledge, I'm sure he would've added far more hooks to anchor these works as his own. He would've also not only have been afraid at the idea of modern man making these AIs, but also deeply saddened that Christendom has reduced itself - and a belief in the biblical canon at all - over whether these letters he sent were authentic. St Paul was the most famous blogger in all of history; and in that respect, though I am not even a pea compared to his stature, I can relate to him. I too get excited about new metaphors and poetic turns of phrases I come up with to explain my ideas or ideas of old. But to the pedantic scholar, such changes of phrases are red meat to their starving eyes, for them to yell that it is evidence of a different author. If I were a forger, the use of the same terminology would be the one thing it would be easy to get right! If I were a forger also, I wouldn't know nor bother lying about the name of Timothy's grandmother (2 Timothy 1:5): it could only serve to jeopardise your work.

I watch quite a lot of bible lectures online, and in the comments section there is a growing contingent of Paul-haters. And I'm not sure as to its origin. Some of them are clearly Muslim, but most of them are not, and instead adopt this ancient line of argument that Paul corrupted the pure message of Christ. Paul, being the intellectual blogger of the New Testament, has certainly made enemies. On the liberal wing of the church, he has made enemies decrying certain sins and attitudes towards women they, being swept up by the zeitgeist, don't agree with. And on the far, far-gone evangelical end of the religious spectrum, there's this nutty contingent of Paul-haters, who I reckon dislike him because of his intellectuality. There is a fear and distaste for intellectuals amongst evangelicals, in part because the intellectual wing of the church, and the universities with foster the Western intellect, have become atheist. However, so much of what we understand about how to interpret life of Christ originates with Paul. A bible without Paul would be interpreted with any number of speculative practices. Paul is the first theologian of the intellectual type, a tradition attempted by so many more after him. But it is against Paul's understanding of Christ that all further theologies are tested, because there was a consensus amongst the apostles that Paul was inspired, and that he 'gets it' (Gal 2, 2 Peter 3, Acts 26). Paul was chosen by Christ to explain with his wit and incredible intellect the meaning of His life. Paul, as the self-proclaimed proselytiser to the gentiles, writes not only theology but apologetics, granting context for gentiles what is otherwise a Jewish phenomenon. The symbolism of Christ's life and how His life fulfils the Law can only be understood in relation to the Old Testament; but the worst way to preach is to recommend they read read the entirety of the Old Testament first - and even then much of it is impenetrable. Paul as a Pharisee par excellence translates Christ's Jewish life into a more Greek philosophical framework; and this task hasn't ceased to be useful. To throw out Paul due to some allegedly higher understanding of morality or out of a distaste for intellectualism is to draw the curtains over his window to the past through which historical Jesus can be seen. Paul sets in stone Christ's meaning with abstract nouns when Christ comes to us in contemporary Jewish symbols; and for that service, Paul is invaluable.

2024/09/29 The Dating of the Gospels

I remember back in secondary school many in our Religious Studies lessons used to say how the bible was written long after the events and how much of it is made up. Such sentiments I haven't just seen in my secondary school classroom, but everywhere, whether it be from respected public individuals or opinions people say on the street. Most people talking casually about the bible will say it isn't contemporary and it is untrue; and many who feel a little spicy go on to say how the gnostic gospels - the gospels discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in 1946 - are the true Christianity that the Catholic church has been hiding all these years! Many a stoner also holds such sentiments. But as is often the case, the opinion of the layman is about a hundred years out of date. Our framework of physics is still mostly Newtonian rather than Einsteinian; and the average man on the streets is only beginning to think in a post-modern way. Similarly, this dating of the canonical gospels dates back to 19th century German scholars of the liberal school of Lutheran theology which flourished at this time. Such ideas are no longer respected in academic circles since their very process of 'higher criticism' - that is placing the text within its time - has begun to demonstrate the precise opposite.

Many who didn't believe in the bible in the 18th century did so for what are to us odd reasons. They didn't cease to believe in the various acts of Jesus, but instead believed there was at play some kind of scientific or practical trickery. For instance, a belief some held was that when Jesus walked on water, there were hidden props underneath; or when Jesus turns water into wine, the ceramic pots were changed out without anyone realising. It feels like 12-year old atheism talk; I remember people joking Jesus had swapped out with his twin brother after his death to give the appearance of a resurrection. It's hard to imagine, but the very psychotechnology of textual criticism hadn't yet been invented, so no one had thought to claim that part of what was written hadn't in fact happened. The coming into being of textual criticism as a technique was like giving those modern 12-year old theorists alcopops. Instead of claiming none of the events happened, liberal theologians took it upon themselves to use their limited sources to imagine what life was like in 1st c. A.D. Judea; and based on that imagination, prune the bits they reckoned weren't true. These liberal theologians began to dilute and dilute the gospels into a mere 'social gospel', unable to proclaim any higher spirituality than 'be nice to one another'. These superstitions regarding the alleged falsity of the gospels have stuck; however, I reckon it's quite clear that the gospels are as old as they say they are, and that they were written by whom they say they were.

It's first worth considering why an early dating of the gospels is important. An early dating would place the gospels within the living memory of the apostles. And if the gospels were written by those who they say they are written by, we can assume these are eyewitness accounts of what happened. In short, if by an early dating we can go on to prove authorship; and if we can prove authorship, we can prove reliability. So, starting with authorship, the main reason the German scholars of the past, and those who hold on to the same beliefs today like the scholar Bart Erhman, have for the later dating is the fall of the temple. Jesus correctly prophesies the destruction of the temple, a prediction later the Romans later make true in 70 A.D. These theologians argue, therefore, that the source must have been written after the destruction of the temple, and that the prophesy was written after the fact. The issue here is quite obvious: one presupposes that Jesus can't prophesy in order to place the date later. Indeed, if we presuppose that the bible contains no miracles, only fictions, it's very easy to make the claim that Jesus' prophesy is a fabrication of a later date. But even beyond this issue of faith in miracles, the analysis of the sources is left wanting. The synoptic gospels quote Jesus as saying 'not one stone shall rest on another'; but this description is not of fires engulfing the temple, the description most reminiscent of how contemporary accounts describe the incident. If the aim was to put words in Jesus' mouth to prove he could prophesy the future, why wouldn't they capitalise on more accurate and popular imagery? But most importantly, it fulfilment of this prophesy isn't mentioned anywhere. The synoptic gospels nor the author of Acts at no point mentions the destruction of the temple. Nay, the author of Acts doesn't even mention the martyrdom of James the brother of Christ either, an event the contemporary source Josephus places in 62 A.D.; and nor is there any mention of the Neronian persecutions of 64 A.D. after the Great Fire of Rome.

Given the early dating, the question then becomes who wrote them. Well, it was Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, of course. Why though? Why are there so many gospels? It takes a bit of imagining to put into perspective why each of the gospel authors wrote their gospels when they did.

Let's first discuss the synoptic gospels. Matthew was a tax collector before becoming a disciple of Christ, and there are no shortage of references to money in Matthew's gospel. Mark was a travelling companion of Barnabas after Barnabas parted ways with Paul over Mark's involvement (Acts 15). Traditionally Mark is seen as an apprentice of Peter; this is evidenced in Peter's first epistle, where he implies that he's with Mark, who he calls his son (1 Pet. 5). And given Peter's poor literacy, Mark was the one to write down Peter's account of Jesus. Mark's gospel also mentions Peter significantly more than the other synoptics, tells some stories from Peter's perspective, and Mark occasionally covers up some of Peter's mistakes which Luke nor Matthew feel the need to hide. Luke, on the other hand, was a travelling companion of Paul. Before becoming a disciple, Luke was a physician, and as a result was a learned man in writing. Luke and Paul are generally considered to be the best of the New Testament authors. Luke begins his gospel describing how he aims at writing a history of Jesus, placing himself as part of the Greco-Roman tradition of writing histories. He gathers sources, whether these were written or oral, and compiles a narrative of Jesus' life. Luke is also considered by all to be the author of Acts; here, however, it isn't just source work and spoken testimonies, because half-way through the author of Acts transitions from 'they' to 'we', as Luke joins Paul as a travelling companion.

Now we've got to know the author's, why do their accounts match so frequently? Many modern textual scholars see the gospel texts as part of a flurry of early texts borrowing and stealing from one another, to form the texts we've received. A popular contemporary account claims that both Matthew and Luke take from Mark and from a hypothesised lost 'Q-source' in different measures. They mainly believe this because Mark is the simplest of the gospels, and evolutionary reasoning places the simplest before the most complex. But were not the mightiest pyramids of Egypt also the oldest? There is no reason the simplest things must be the oldest. The sources are however clearly copy one another, there is no doubt about that; there are too many identical passages of text. But consider this: what if the authors of the gospels were all in correspondence? If the gospels are being passed around, different authors will want to amend them and subtract from them with their own eyewitness accounts. Perhaps Matthew, reading Mark's account, recalls an extra detail, and rewrites Mark's account including his interpretation and experience of events. And maybe Luke, reading Matthew's account, adds a detail from someone he met who had witnessed Christ. The Virgin Mary was said by tradition to have been preaching with the apostles, so it isn't too great a presumption to think Luke met her and asked her about the conception of Jesus.

Once you realise the authors of the gospels are real people, living real lives, moving about, instead of sitting atop towers writing with a brushes and velum scrolls, they strikingly come to life. It begins to make sense that the gospel writers can describe things they haven't seen, like the interior of Herod's court with the death of John the Baptist. Joanna, wife of Churza is mentioned in Luke 8 as being a steward in Herod's court - just the source we would need! She's never referenced in relation to the events of John the Baptist, but nevertheless it explains how the apostles could have this information. The reliability across sources through unintended explanation is known as the argument from undesigned coincidences, of which there are many across the four gospels.

Turning our eyes to the Gospel of John, we see a very different gospel, and on the face of it a very different Jesus. A lot of modern scholarship posits Johannine communities arising in contradistinction to communities following the synoptics and Paul; however tradition has a far more sensible reading. John was the last of the apostles to die, not only because he was the youngest, but also because he was never martyred. According to tradition, he lived out the last of his days imprisoned in a salt mine from where he received and wrote Revelations. But prior to then, John would have read the synoptic gospels in circulation, and would have wanted to add to them what he knew had been omitted. But unlike the other synoptic gospels, who added and subtracted from the source text, John wrote his own gospel filling in the blanks of the story. This is the reason why John very rarely mentions the same stories as the synoptics: simply because he feels he has no need to repeat them. Some modern scholars see the Gospel of John as one telling of Christ, and the synoptic gospels as a different mishmash tradition of sources; and they say only if a story is found in both sources can it be deemed reliable. They make competitive what is clearly designed to be complementary. Again, only once the gospel authors are seen as people, we can interpret their omissions and additions sensibly.

A familiar theme through much of the critical scholarship is that the gospel authors are nobodies, forgers, non-people; grand processes, and odd amalgamations. The fact that we have four separate contemporary sources for an event two-thousand years ago means nothing to them. But this is an abnormally high number of unique contemporary sources for this era: particularly for a popular event as opposed to an event involving political figures and wars. But the authors aren't necessarily doubted just because they are Christians. There isn't much debate about the authorship of the letters of the martyr Polycarp - a man who was directly taught by John the Apostle. And granted, there isn't as much riding on them; but isn't it intellectually dishonest to disbelieve a source solely because of its importance? There is a narrative quality, a fictional quality, to the apostles and to Christ, which undoubtedly many of the scholars criticising these texts have in the past turned away from; but the truth is, they themselves can't get over the narrative. Those who deny the authenticity of the sources of the gospels can only see the apostles as characters in a play rather than flesh and blood people who lived in the past, historical figures who moved history. That's why there's so much debate over Pauline authorship (a topic I might soon return to), and the authorship of the other epistles: because many a scholar can't both see the narrative character and the essayist as the same person.

Through post-modernity, many have become very sceptical of narratives, and many have devoted their life to scrutinising these texts as if they were juicing an orange. They want to remove all the pure, concentrated, flavourful juice of the text into a mere philosophy. But Christianity has more than that. Christianity has pith and fibre; it has grit because it really happened! C. S. Lewis once remarked that Christian narrative has many of the hallmarks pagan mythology; the main difference being it really happened! It is set in historical testimonies rather than ancient, fallible oral traditions. There are many a system of stories to make sense of the world and to make sense of the divine, but Christianity is the only belief system based in history. When we yield ground in the historicity of the bible to the paper tanks of erroneous biblical textual criticism, a compelling element to the truth of Christ is abandoned; one which is most especially compelling in the modern day. Especially, when the truth is that the more the bible's looked at, the more reliable a source it becomes.

2024/09/22 What Chesterton Thought: Love as Patriotism

The beginning of a small - dare I say, not too loudly - mini-series on Chesterton's ideas.

Philosophers certainly have no monopoly on philosophy. Whatever the student of philosophy may say, systematisation and logical argument isn't the only way to inquire about the nature of life, the mind, and the world. It is in fact one of the most round-about and circumspect ways to understand the world, because it is attracts reason solely, without consideration for feeling or beauty or any of the organs used to understand the world. Poets, from T. S. Eliot to Pindar have as much to say about metaphysics, epistemology, and the good life as Kant or Hume. In a stretched sense, the philosopher is a poet without much aptitude for writing; the very metaphysical structure of the minds of nations is shaped by their poets. What are the ancient Greeks without Homer; what are the Italians without Dante; and what are the English without Shakespeare?

Is G. K. Chesterton a philosopher then? I would argue not. He hasn't the dialectics of Plato nor the argumentation of Kant. Chesterton isn't a logician, piecing through possible arguments against his points like Aquinas: Chesterton feels his arguments first, and explains them later. Throughout his book Orthodoxy, he's recounting his journey of thought via sentiments of 'this didn't feel right' and 'this didn't match my observation on the world'. He intuits rather than thinks, and he writes with flourish his sentiments about the world, because Chesterton is by nature a poet.

For good or for ill, I am not so much of the poetical disposition, but rather of the thinking philosopher type. The minds of these two types are quite different, but both are of course valuable in developing a full picture; Jesus told the gospel through both St. John and St. Paul for this reason. Therefore, for those like me whose heads are awhirl with systems and models, I want to extract a picture of Chersteron's idea of Love as Patriotism.

Chesterton, to my knowledge, first expounds this idea in his essay in Heretics named On Mr. Rudyard Kipling, and Making the World Small. In the essay, Chesterton argues that Kipling has a conditional love for England because 'he admires England because she is strong, not because she is English'. To this end, he quotes a couplet from Kipling, reading, 'If England was what England seems / How quick we'd chuck 'er: But she ain't!'. What Chesterton has issue with is this love for England because of her military might - can this be considered true love? When the military might of England declines and the grandeur of the empire crumbles, as it now has, can Kipling still love England? Or would he move to America and wax lyrical about American aircraft carriers? Perhaps a good example comes in football. Who will you support, your local team, or will you be a glory hunter for one of the major squads?

In another essay in Orthodoxy named The Flag of the World, Chesterton touches upon the importance of unconditional love with greater focus. The essay begins with the false dichotomy between optimism and pessimism, and how both positions come at the world 'as if they were house-hunting'. These positions are pre-occupied with our value-judgements of them first and foremost, instead of with our belonging to them being primary. At to belong to some greater and hold it as part of our identity, is to fight for its flag. This is the patriotism Chesterton speaks of. Being British, however far Britain may fall to the dogs, it is the flag I will fight for out of love for my country. Returning to Kipling, love for one's country shouldn't be because it's strong, but because it is one's country. The option to change allegiance, jump ship, and move abroad is always in the background, but does that not represent a betrayal of one's flag? Love for one's country is much like love for one's daughter. If your daughter found hard times or lost her virtue, would you cease to love her? And what about your wife? If you only loved her for her looks, you'll soon find that as she grows older, those looks will vanish. In a very humorous quote, which I believe I've written on this blog before, Chesterton explains how even Pimlico could be gilded in gold and made into the New Jerusalem if the people who lived there loved Pimlico. Just because it isn't currently a beautiful place doesn't mean that, through love, Pimlico can become a beautiful place also. 'Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they loved her.'

The beautification of the world and of people can only be achieved through unconditional, agapic, love. Without it, the world decays, as if the vine is cut off from the root, letting the fruit to whither. Marriage is a good example. Lifelong monogamy means you can invest your trust and emotions into your spouse forever without worry, because you can proudly fight for her flag, and love her through the sunshine and the rain. Beyond the flags of nations and the flags of people to fight for, there are higher flags also. There is the flag of justice; we fight for justice and become enraged as its miscarriages out of our love for justice. If the laws were to change and become unjust, we wouldn't cease to love justice, but, out of our love for justice, want true justice to be restored. Similarly, there is the flag of truth. We fight falsehood and study great thinkers out of a love for truth. If falsehood is being taught in a university, and the student discovers his lecturer taught him something wrong, no lover of truth would continue to repeat the falsehood learnt; but one who loves the lecturer or the university more than truth might. Like Athanasius, the lover of truth might have to fight the world. We see this pattern often in ideology. In Communist Russia, a lover of Communist theory, or a lover of Stalin, will repeat untrue propaganda because they love the state or they love communism more than they love truth. In Stalinist times, however, it may be more correct to say that those who are lovers of staying alive more than they are lovers of the truth repeated propaganda.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

- Matthew 16:25

Much of the The Flag of the World centres on contrasting suicide and martyrdom. For Chesterton, suicide and martyrdom are opposites, for the suicidal man kills himself because he hates the world so much, whereas the martyr lets himself be killed because he loves creation and loves God. The highest flag to fight for is God. To love God is to be patriotic for His cause whatever grave difficulties come your way. This is difficult. Referencing the above quote from Matthew, when your life is in danger, it is very difficult to keep fighting for God's flag when alarms ring inside your head and you want to preserve your flesh. Indeed, you alone cannot do it, which is why one must let God aid you through the Spirit.

I've presented a series of different flags to be fought for; and because I have the mind of a German systematiser rather than a poetic soul, we will go beyond Chesterton and form a model of it. There is a kind of hierarchy to the flags we've unearthed. On his essay on Kipling, Chesterton favours the flag of his country over the flag of victory, and that loving one's country through both victory and defeat is better than loving the victor. Do you, dear reader, agree? How about between love of one's wife and love of justice? If your wife had murdered someone and your testimony would be pivotal in the judgement, would you lie under oath in a court of law to prevent your wife from going to jail? How about between God and truth? Many an atheist of today at least believes they use logic and reason to disprove God; but implicit is the assumption that an allegiance to the flag of truth is more important than an allegiance to the flag of God. Each one of us has a hierarchy of flags to which we pledge allegiance through our love for them. And often they are oriented awry, missing what's most important for what's less important. Many of us don't love our houses enough, and leave them messy and dirty. Many of us don't love our bodies enough, loving our taste buds and junk food more than our bodies. And many of us don't love our friends and family enough being stingy with them and not sharing our good fortune.

In psychoanalytic circles there is the expression, 'by his libido shall ye know him'. The psychoanalyst looks at the basal urges and drives frustrated in a man; but the principle stands when looking at the higher man also: 'by his love shall ye know him'. We can't help but devote ourselves to flags, to higher causes, but often we delude ourselves as to what we are fighting for. As we've seen, it's easy to love a quality, or love a part of a person, or a concept, or a thing, and forget what we ought to love. Therefore, by ordering and orienting what we love and what we wish to fight for, we can align ourselves more properly to what is most valuable.

2024/09/15 Rasselas, Akira, and Onions: an Investigation into Happiness

All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Ecclesiastes 1:7-8

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia was written by the great Dr Johnson in the mid-18th century. It was the only novel he ever wrote, written to the sole end of paying for his mother's funeral; he wrote the novella in a week. Yet in spite of the haste with which it was written, there are moments of great wit, and moments of sharp philosophical inquiry.

As Voltaire is to the French, and Goethe is to the Germans, certainly Johnson is to the English: he is the great essayist who both epitomises Englishness and inspires many a later English author. A favourite anecdote of mine is his conversation with the Bishop Berekley. Berekley propounded the theory of 'subjective idealism', and believed that all matter was but the fiction of the mind. Dr Johnson, when confronted with this solipsistic worldview, kicked a nearby rock in the church and exclaimed, "I refute it thus." His sobriety of thought when confronted with the fancy of continental thought is Dr Johnson's great tonic to philosophical discourse. Many philosophers wish to weld wings to you, and let you fly away to faerieland; Johnson, however, will pull you back to hard ground with an iron chain. For instance, in Rasselas, Imlac the poet proceeds on a long panegyric on the height and grandeur of the role of the poet, to which Rasselas replies, "Enough! thou hast convinced me that no human being can ever be a poet."

It would be worth me giving an overview of the plot to Rasselas. The eponymous Abyssinian prince lives in 'the Happy Valley', where all possible pleasures are sated; but the prince is not sated by these pleasures of the flesh, and wants something more from his life. He meets the poet Imlac, who has travelled the world, studying and acquiring wisdom as he went. Together they plot an escape from the Happy Valley to go on a journey to see the world beyond in its suffering and its meaning. On their journey, they meet many men of great learning in an attempt to find Happiness, but each has their own flaws in thinking. They meet the a very wealthy man who seemingly has everything, but due to his past acts lives in fear of the Sultan's reprisal. They meet a hermit who whilst at first enjoyed his solitude, has grown bored once the novelty wore thin, yet doesn't have the stomach to stop. They meet a great orator speaking on morality and how to live well. The prince was enamoured with this man's wisdom and wished to follow him as a student of his teaching; but when he goes to pay for tuition, discovers the orator in fits of grief following the death of his daughter. The teacher in his sorrow says all his teachings are for nought in the face of this grief. And Imlac spoke, "Be not too hasty to trust or to admire teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men": a sentiment easily forgotten, particularly in the present day. They meet also an astronomer, the greatest scientist of the age, who in his solitude of learning has begun to think he was the one to move the stars and change the seasons. Through his new-found friendship with the prince's sister, who tagged along on their escape, the astronomer begun to be dragged back down to earth from his fancy.

The conclusion to the narrative is rushed and unsatisfying; Dr Johnson's mother's funeral was approaching, undoubtedly. But what kind of conclusion can their be to the question of Happiness? Our protagonists by the finale had found vocations, but they had not found that elixir for everlasting contentment that is so easy to want to seek.

Akira is a favourite film of mine, which I have written about here several times before. I'll assume most readers are familiar with the plot, so I will gloss through, accentuating the poignant details for our inquiry. Tetsuo and Kaneda are childhood friends, who grew up together in an orphanage, and later formed a biker gang, Kaneda being the gang's leader, in a decadent decaying neo-Tokyo. Tetsuo our protagonist was spirited away by the military, and an advanced medical procedure was performed upon him to give him ESP powers. Tetsuo's inferiority complex for his adept older brother figure Kaneda begins as a bud at the start of the film; but as Tetsuo's ESP powers grow, his envy for Kaneda begins to flower and fruit as rage and destruction. A thread throughout, however, is the search for Akira, the first child the experiment was performed upon. Whilst Tetsuo's anger is directed at Kaneda, Tetsuo has a compulsion to find Akira, who holds a religious significance to his attenuated mind. Tetsuo destroys the Tokyo Olympic stadium (predicting the Tokyo 2020 games, would you believe) under which the remains of Akira are stored. Slices of his brain in formaldehyde, kept at very cold temperatures, are all he finds. At this realisation, Tetsuo begins to 'blob', as the very structure of his body can no longer be maintained. Akira is in a sense an idol: a fake Messiah who will set him free from his rotted bond with Kaneda. Tetsuo digs to the very depths of the earth, to the very depths of the Jungian psyche, only to find bits of brain stem in jars.

How will I wed these two seemingly separate works together? They shall be wed by the idea of an onion. Some time ago, I used to listen to many of Alan Watts' lectures on YouTube. Watts was one of the first Westerners to become self-styled Eastern mystics being ahead of the curve of the interest following the LSD and hippies of the sixties. He was an interesting man to listen to, and managed to think in a truly Eastern way, reforming his mental cosmology. But as Jung wrote, sharp shifts in mental cosmology typically result in neurotic ailments; and for Watts, this was alcoholism. When he was sober, however, he had many thought provoking views on the world; and since these views came from such an alien web of thinking, they are novel and challenging. One such view was his comparison of the fruit and the onion. With many of the big questions, such as how to find Happiness, we expect it to be like a mango, say, where we may shave layers and finally, at long last, find something hard and solid in the middle. Whereas, in reality, Watts argues that answering the question of happiness is much more like an onion: you can continue to take off layer after layer, only to find no pip. The onion has no core: there are only more layers of onion.

What Rasselas' journey shows is that the great wise men of the world are like onions: the deeper you look, their wisdom has no pip, no silver bullet, no Platonic form of pure wisdom beneath the clothing. In chapter 22 of the novella, Rasselas speaks with a philosopher who passionately argues that all man must do is live in accordance with nature; to which Rasselas asks, 'Let me only know what it is to live according to Nature'. To this, the philosopher rambles on senselessly, and Rasselas acquits himself. The layer of onion was pealed off the word Nature, but nothing was beneath. But it isn't merely the wise men, but the ideas also. The perfect idea we imagine can never be made material; for man cannot make perfection into reality. When, therefore, we attempt to find ever-lasting Happiness, or contentment, or peace, the only solutions we can conjure are but onions; and as we peal off the layers, the phantom of Happiness floats away giggling. Tetsuo also peels the layers of onion to find nothing. In his search to find the root of his burning wrath he peels away the Olympic stadium, and every layer of insulation between him and Akira's remains. But the burning phantom of Akira - that vision of salvation - is in its extension but sliced brains frozen in formaldehyde. Beneath the layers of onion is no hard pip in its core.

How are we then to interact with these phantom? Must they jeer at us? Here we must use a somewhat cruder analogy: the lingerie shot is sexier than the nude. What I mean by this, is that the potential is preferable to the actual, or that the imaginal is preferable to the reality. Onto the lingerie shot all kinds of imagination can be projected onto what's beneath; in a sense, we project the unachievable from our own mind's eye. Whereas, once 'nothing is left to the imagination', the 'magic' of what might be, is lost. In chess, there's the concept of 'maintaining tension in the position'; this is when you refuse to exchange pieces, and instead pile up more threats, to increase the positions complexity and opportunity. It's difficult to maintain this tension when you're beginning to learn, because your first instinct is to resolve the tension and attack. But much like with all the passions, sometimes the very experience of that passion is preferable to it's resolution. The quest for Happiness will be a circling and fruitless journey, for where can true Happiness, the Platonic form of Happiness, be found? When we begin to peel the onion, we shouldn't be surprised when there's nothing within, but instead appreciate what is there: we should appreciate the onion. As cliche as it may sound, it is about the journey and not the destination, for if you treat the journey as a means to an end, the destination will often disappoint. Can you say you've found Happiness if the journey to find it was nothing but misery? If you've only ever felt misery, you'll have hardly experienced Happiness! However much we may want Happiness, as Rasselas did, or acknowledgement, as Tetsuo did, we cannot blindly charge forth in search of a core which isn't there; but we ought instead allow that mechanism of projection to occur, and become cognisant of it. When we see pure wisdom in a man, it is a kind of projection, not a reality; and in that moment, and that moment only, are we able to see something pure and ideal. It exists in that tension like a rainbow, or like a mirage on the horizon, delicate and dependent on the conditions of the environment. In short, then, Plato is wrong. Study upon study, and investigation upon investigation, won't bring us ultimately close to these absolutes. The answers we search for are aetherial, and blow in the wind; and these truths are so often unutterable.

2024/09/08 Betjeman and Lament

Yesterday, I was down in London. Each train route from the corners of the country flows ultimately into the great basin of Greater London; and each of those esturaries wherein those rivers meets London are her great stations. Whether you arrive via Paddington, Marylebone, Victoria, or Waterloo, the great vaulted rigid steel beams and beauty built of stone and glass set high Victorian architecture as a real high watermark, unsurpassed by any structure made today. Living in Nottingham in the East Midlands periphery of London, the estuary for my river is St. Pancras Station. And every time I travel to London by that same route, I feel ever more patriotic for my home station. I remember once falling asleep on the train and missing my stop of Luton Airport - thankfully not for a flight - and waking up to unfamiliar scenery. Still groggy, the unfamiliar housing and fields made way for the steel-ribbed belly of St. Pancras' canopy: a truly surreal experience. Each time I visit, the beauty of the architecture never bores me; and each time I visit, including yesterday, I make a small pilgrimage to a statue of John Betjeman.

Betjeman was the poet laureate from the seventies to the early eighties. I first encountered his work some years ago, through a BBC documentary from the seventies called Metroland. The documentary, told through verse, tells the story of a journey from London to the fringes of Metroland: the world's first commuter belt. After having built the first underground railway, the Metropolitan Railway, then an independent company, bought up the small fruit orchards and grazing lands of rural Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Their aim was to promise a cake-eaters solution: to have the beauty and clean air of the country, paired with the employment and fortune of the London. Rewatching the documentary, it's safe to say that Betjeman doesn't look upon Metroland too kindly. He laments that much of the success of Metroland has been squandered; whilst some of the towns' nascent traditions continue, there is a lack of rootedness to these commuter belt towns. And we see this in many of these towns today. Wembley, Betjeman notes, was a sleepy village stop the Met line often skipped in days past. Wembley has since become synonymous with its great stadium, but since Betjeman's time has become synonymous with its majority South Asian population. By the end of the documentary, Betjeman visits the end of the line: the great plans the Metropolitan Railway had for the line prior to two World Wars never fulfilled. Their initial aim was to connect Manchester to Paris through the heart of rural England; an aim over a hundred years later HS2 is still struggling to achieve. Seeing the suburban lands making way for fields, Betjeman says, "an unregarded part of Hertfordshire awaits its fate". Here is a new lament: the lament of losing the King's England.

Growing up in Metroland myself, I feel Betjeman's lament. In the town of my birth, a tall sky-rise has been erected. As you approach, this horror is like a grey stake upon the horizon, piercing through the town's heart. Here is the first lament of Metroland which is its necrosis. The culture of village life these towns now of moderate size inherited is being squeezed out further and further by their growth. Community participation in village traditions as I've seen them has lessened and lessened as time's gone on, the lockdowns being a major hit. But the causes can't simply by placed upon the lockdowns' shoulders. In part it can be chalked to the economic necessity of two income households: a stay at home mother had far more time to participate in community life for her family. And in part the vast swell of population is also at fault. Metroland is a popular place to live, owing to the quietude and London jobs; and as part of creating affordable housing, the dream of a close patchwork of suburban cottages has been palmed off for large these sky-rise apartment flats. And then we meet the second lament: that seeing through the topsoil of suburbia to see the village life beneath, you begin to yearn the 'King's England' below. The pub is hardly as hearty when under the sign reads 'Greene King'; and if I were to describe Metroland in a word, it would be Greene King. Beneath is the history of an authentic pub; but that which is seen and experienced is the corporatised simulacrum. Betjeman's poem Hertfordshire channels these feelings perfectly.

And so, I would like to return to the statue from above. Betjeman is posed wind-swept by a train, dressed ready for a journey. He's looking up to the heavens - but with a somewhat stern look upon his brow. Betjeman is in St Pancras station as a statue because he led the movement to defend the station from being demolished. There is a tragedy in preserving the old ways, for the old ways can't last forever. There's so much beauty in the past, so much sense in the past, so much innocence that can never be recovered. And there are many boogiemen responsible for slaying this grandfather. But blaming Communists, Americans, Hippies, or whichever foolish historical action will never bring joy - just anger. When I look at the statue of Betjeman, what I see is lament. Through lament and sadness we can deal with injustices out of our control; for what else can we do but be sad? The past may well be a foreign country; and many like Betjeman (and perhaps myself) wish to visit. Dressed for travel, like the statue, but stationary; lamenting how the world's become; and staring to the heavens for hope: this is what I feel when I see this statue. And this is how I wish to live also. The gift of happiness is not something one should expect. Sometimes a situation means that happiness may be out of reach, a situation unable to be remedied. And whilst there is a time for action, organisation, and protestation, as Betjeman demonstrated with St Pancras station, the majority of the issues we face are wholly out of reach. We can't return the Metroland of today to its past sweet suburban communities; we can't return the Metroland of the past to the fertile orchards of Hertfordshire; but we can lament what was without bitterness, contempt, nor anger, and look to heaven for our hope.

2024/09/01 God's Dollhouse

In the moment, changes in opinion and changes in view occur over long periods of time, as evidence builds and builds until you can no longer hold your current views. But when looking at the past, there's a moment where a switch flicked, and everything clicks into place. Whilst the process of coming to believe in God was for me in reality a slow and gradual one, when I think back there's a point at which everything clicked. I was on the train to Lincoln to visit Lincoln cathedral reading C. S Lewis' Mere Christianity. The specific chapter was Book 4 Chapter 5, titled 'The Obstinate Toy Soldiers', where Lewis discusses theosis and participating in Christ. I remember looking up from my book to gaze at the warm summer sun radiating through the train's car window, with the wispy, fogged grandeur of the cathedral posing as a backdrop; I felt a feeling of new-found freedom from being released from Pharaoh's lockdown legislation. Why are memories of the past so often rosier than events in the moment!

Today we'll zero in on Lewis' idea of the toy soldier, through my own metaphor of the dollhouse. We are all part of God's dollhouse; we are all animate dolls, with wills of our own, created by Him: the Dollmaster.

To begin, we'll start with Creation. Why is there evil in this world if God is all loving? This question posed by atheists has no easy answer, but I'll begin with an attempt. The Dollmaster loves His dolls, and makes them in His image. He wants His dolls to experience that love also: the sense of loving out of one's own free will, rather than forced love from oppression. Therefore, the Dollmaster gives his dolls free will to act as they wilt. In Eden, the dolls are immortal because they are allowed to eat from the Tree of Life. But once the Dollmaster's first two dolls, Adam and Eve, break the single law given to them and eat from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they cannot help but sin. The Dollmaster bans them from Eden, cutting them off from the Tree of Life so that the dolls do not live immortally in sin,¹ guarding Eden's gates with an angel. History continues with the dolls becoming further and further depraved, becoming stoney and incapable of love by their sin. Dolls breed with fallen angels,² creating abominations in the Dollmaster's eyes (in the dolls' fallen state, they are easily infatuated by spiritual beings³). The Dollmaster's plan, therefore, was to make a covenant with a doll named Abram, and then dwell amongst His dolls in the Tabernacle of Moses. However the Dollmaster saw His dolls fail to understand the laws He gave them; the dolls took the laws far too literally, failing to achieve the Dollmaster's original intent: to teach love. And, from hardness of heart, He divorced Israel. Despite this apparent failure, the Israelites had learnt of the Dollmaster. There was a kind of fourth wall breaking where the dolls recognised the Dollmaster as having watched over them all along. The dolls learn to worship and pray to the Dollmaster watching over them, and request He aid them in their times of need; for the Dollmaster has wide control of His dollhouse. All this acts as the seedbed for the Dollmaster's plan.

The Dollmaster decides to send down His Son (also the Dollmaster, confusingly - but what can us dolls understand!) into the dollhouse to teach the dolls by His words and His life of the Dollmaster's love, and how to love in return. Because the Dollmaster's Son is also the logos⁴ - the programming code underpinning the laws of the dollhouse, whether physical or moral - He is one who is both a doll, and able to 'move mountains' within the dollhouse, a feat only the Dollmaster watching over the dollhouse could achieve. And through faith - that is a trust and the yielding of one's will to the Son - the dolls can also perform such miraculous feats.⁵

Through the Dollmaster's Son's death on the cross, dolls may find deeper and deeper truths for the rest of their lifetime; the Dollmaster, as smart as He is, gave an inexhaustible message to the dolls to contemplate (and hopefully not fight over the meaning). What's key is that He died around the Passover: the same time of year the Dollmaster saved His people from slavery in Egypt. Therefore, the Son's death on the cross is akin to the sacrifice of the Passover lamb, saving mankind just as the Dollmaster saved the Israelites from Pharaoh at Passover. And then, through His resurrection, the Dollmaster's Son shows how all the dolls who follow Him will be resurrected with immortal 'spiritual bodies'⁶ also, reversing the original doll's sin. For the Son has defeated death. The Son also promised a 'Helper'⁷, who will work through a doll via their faith. Here, a doll may let the Dollmaster guide a doll from within in how to act so as to teach the doll how to stand on their own through feet and love.

My narrative analogy might seem quaint, but miniaturising the biblical narrative has a potent effect. Instead of seeing events solely from the perspective of the Israelites and the 'cruel God of the Old Testament' pseudo-Marcionite critique, you can see the world from a 'God's eye view'. The New Testament as well can be recontextualised through this God's eye view. It's harder, after all, to understand what it's like for God to become a person than to understand what it's like for a person to become a doll. When attempting to understand what a 4D object looks like given we live in a 3D world, the first step is to try and imagine what a 3D object would look like in a 2D world; for we can imagine both 3D and 2D worlds, but not 4D worlds. In that same vein, whilst we can't imagine what it is like to be God, because we are not all-loving, all-knowing, nor atemporal, we can access the lower order being of a doll - a being made in man's image - to pose as a reference.

Beyond the theoretical, the vision of God's dollhouse is useful for one's everyday life also. Phrases such as 'God is always watching you' are difficult to comprehend, because you can't imagine the '4D' space in which God inhabits. Instead, imagine you are a doll, and the Dollmaster is watching you in the dollhouse, watching your actions, listening to your thoughts, and loving you. The Dollmaster loves you dearly and wants the best for you, but sees you repeatedly cut yourself off from the loving your neighbours and loving Him back, struggling with sin.

Imagine now that you were the Dollmaster, and had a dollhouse. Suppose you love the dolls of your dollhouse dearly: how would you want them to behave with each other? Simply, as Christ says, you want them to love their neighbours, fellow dolls you love, and you want them to love you, their creator, even if their love for you can't match your love for them.⁸ The morality of the bible and the teaching of Christ all seem to fit into place when you assume to mindset of the Dollmaster. Laws that may have once seemed arbitrary now point like a compass towards a destination. Scripture is a narrative after all, a story written by God with the quill of men. And only by appreciating this great narrative through a variety of lenses, whether they historical, symbolic, or allegorical, do we begin to construct a textured 3D - nay, perhaps 4D - image of understanding.

1. Genesis 3:22
2. Genesis 6:2
3. Genesis 19:5
4. John 1:1
5. Matthew 17:20
6. 1 Corinthians 15:44
7. John 14:16
8. Matthew 26:36-40

2024/08/25 Australia as Human Instrumentality

Yesterday, an Australian colleague of mine was telling me that in Australia people don't say what they are but rather what they are not. For instance, in Australia, when you ask how someone is feeling, they say "not bad"; or if you ask how much something costs, they say "not much". When I pointed out that it is the same in Britain, he seemed a bit peeved. I then, in all my autism, emphatically exclaimed that the Australians are children of Albion; after which he looked at someone else in the lab and so as to confirm that I was acting a little kooky. It had been a long day.

Australia is hardly too different from the UK in many ways, since most of their population arrived there in the past one-hundred and fifty years. There are small Mediterranean groups in the mix, but unlike the US, the bulk of the population is British: and you can tell. Australian humour and customs parallel Britain, albeit a bit more laid back. Much like how all the religious extremists of the 16th century formed the seed of the United States, later fruiting an nation of zealots, Australia is also born of the seed of extremists, albeit of a different flower. Australia was of course founded as a penal colony, and much of the land was given to freed convicts or military men wishing to stay. The seed of Australia, as we see also in its fruit today, is a strange balance between the freedom of the surf board and a barbie on the beach drinking fosters juxtaposed against some of the most stringent laws on drugs, immigration and border security in the Anglosphere. Whilst Australia's seed lies in this juxtaposition of the penal colony, the country grew to maturity with several waves of mostly British immigration after the Second World War. "Ten Pound Poms", named owing to how much it cost them to migrate (wiki states is £500 in today's money), arrived in Australia in droves. And although moving to Australia is now far more expensive, even when adjusted for inflation, it hasn't ceased to be a popular option. A colleague of mine recently went - and from what I've heard he has no intention of returning.

Why post-Second World War? Why now? It's because Australia acts as a kind of bastion for when the economy is depressed in Britain. Those with ambition and a drive to adventure journey to the Outback's Mars-like terrain in search of a new life. This has selected, much like with the zealotry of America, for a very specific type of people: those who are laid back, high in openness to new experiences, and have no qualms being unmoored from the ritual and scenery of their homeland. I am not one of those people. Even when I go on holiday I begin to yearn for familiar sights of Britain - particularly for that shade of emerald green only to be found here in the grass and the foliage. The Martian terrain of Down Under would be bad for my digestion.

For the next part, please listen to this song, Australia by The Kinks.

The song listed above I think distils what Australia is. It is a place 'without class distinction', where people are chill and 'don't have a chip on their shoulder'. It's a place with good weather - that constant bug-bear of the British - where you can 'surf like in the USA. Seemingly Australia is a cake-eaters society. The Australian dream, in a similar but distinct way to the American dream, is to have all the good bits of Britain without some of the stickier traditions. Class distinction, whether you see it as core to the British experience or as a curse from Norman times, is one of Britain's awkward paradoxes; where else in the West do you find such bifurcated cultures across class divides? Perhaps related to the anxiety of class, the British with their 'stiff upper lip', their prudishness, and their other complexes is always how we're caricatured of the continent. But Australians aren't like that. I reckon it has something to do with the expanse of land they have compared with our claustrophobia.

Australia's painted as an image of Anglo-paradise; and yet it's somewhere where you'll have a 'sunny Christmas day'. As I've described elsewhere, where Britain was once considered a society on the fringe, home to the twilight-lit scenes of Arthurian lore and their magical happenings, by the Second World War she had become front and centre of the world. In this context, Australia became the 'edge of the world' where mysterious happenings occur; a topsy-turvy land of inversion where Christmas is in midsummer.

If you listen to some of The Kinks' other songs, like their album Village Green Preservation Society, you'll realise that much of their complements for Australia are backhanded. Best exemplifying this in the song are lines like 'everyone walks around with a perpetual smile upon their face': the song Australia is written as a parody of how people view the country as an Antipodean Eden. Once you realise the song is a sardonic critique of excitement for Australia, you begin to see the rest of Australia's promises dripping in irony. Because, as Chesterton put it, being run away from their local communities in order to start again, without care for fixing the communities which raised them.

It is not enough for a man to disapprove of Pimlico: in that case he will merely cut his throat or move to Chelsea. Nor, certainly, is it enough for a man to approve of Pimlico: for then it will remain Pimlico, which would be awful. The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico: to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles; Pimlico would attire herself as a woman does when she is loved. For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence.

The Australian type, therefore, is one who runs away from the problems at home in hope of a new beginning, instead of attempting to beautify England.

Now we come to the rather shaky premise promised in the title: the connection with the Human Instrumentality of Evangelion. The truth is that the jazzy, near-psychedelic improvisation making up the bulk of the aforementioned song reminds me of HI. There's this sense in the instrumentation of a psychic soup, of a merging of individuals, and a kind of psychosis of the unification of opposites. This same musicality is in The End by The Doors, Waka Jawaka by Frank Zappa, and, of course, in Komm Susser Tod, particularly at the end where Shinji enters instrumentality. The comparison isn't as flimsy as that however: much like how Shinji throughout Eva runs away from his problems, there is a part of the Australian experience which is the same. Running away from your issues at home and not standing up to them and solving them just leaves more unexorcised demons to chase you; and the more those demons hunt you, the more of a fantastical vision you develop for where you will escape. For Shinji, in the microcosmic understanding of Evangelion, his constant fleeing from standing up for himself generates his vision of Human Instrumentality: a world where, as John Lennon says in Imagine, 'there are no borders'; communication is effortless; and interacting with others needn't require courage. Granted, Australians don't suffer as Shinji suffers. But the song is sung from the perspective of an advertiser of Australia to those at home in Blighty. Like HI, Australia is a new Eden - a place where the difficulties of your current life choked up in a dying seaside town can be gotten rid of. You can run away to Australia, leaving you relatives and neighbours behind to start a new life.

It is certainly tempting. When I first came to uni I did the same; I ran away from the town I grew up in to moult my cringey teenage self to become someone new. And whilst looking back I recognise how important that was to my growth as a person, I often also wonder what I left behind. Layers of papier-mache of awkward lies, once cured around the heart, makes certain eras difficult to revisit.

2024/08/18 Inside and Outside

Some years ago, I had a vision of a kind of Roman temple. Inside, there was a kind of courtyard of sorts where a kind of shining mist descends from above into the courtyard’s pool. This I implicitly understood to be a symbol for the working of the mind. The question then arose: is the operation of the mind interior or exterior? Do we have thoughts, or do we observe thoughts as we observe light, sound, or smell? We all believe from birth that we have thoughts. We imagine the great thinkers of the past, these inspired individuals, to be so smart that they are inspired with great ideas. The word ‘inspired’ can be dissected into ‘in-spired’, to be breathed in to, by a spirit (spirit is breath, pneuma, etc, I’ve explained this enough times on this blog).

As Carl Jung put it, people don’t possess ideas; ideas possess people. We become infatuated with ideologies granted, but there are ideas to which we are so much in thrall, that they form the very cosmologies of our normal lives - the very ground beneath which we walk. Jung is an interesting case. Jung sees archetypes as a kind of Platonic form within the soul; all of the metaphysical/phenomenological aspects of Jungianism, I reckon, can be seen as an inversion of Platonism where the forms aren’t outside of us, but rather within us projecting out. The interior world is a modern notion, one not present in times of old. Moods were something which passed over you as various spirits passed through your body and altered how you acted; not the whims from within we now imagine. The body was a container of sorts, possessing both flesh and soul - soul being the animating (anima is ancient Greek for soul) force of the flesh - where spirits could breeze through and bring personality. To continue with the reverse Jungian analogy, Jungian complexes are an internalisation of these spirits. The complex makes itself known in response to certain outside factors, wherein it can’t help itself but project out onto it. Equally however, you could say that you are weak to the spirits of certain people or objects and they breeze into you, partly possessing you.
Jung recognised the God-shaped hole in each one of us and named it ‘the Self’ - the archetype meant to represent wholeness. Whilst one angle Jung takes with the self is therapeutic, involving mandalas and healing fractured neurotic personalities, with Jung there is always the second metaphysical angle to consider. Jung saw the Self as the archetype which expects the wholeness conferred by the image of Christ. But because Jung’s system claims in ‘inside world’ is more real than the ‘outside world’, the Jungian system can only reject the action of being filled with the Holy Spirit. After all, the inside is full of archetypes and the outside is a barren wasteland of dry matter waiting to be moistened with vitality from the archetypes.¹

What if we were to invert this paradigm, and believe that things actually exist? There’s an odd hubris in thinking the many spiritual and magical things are confined to our small brain boxes. And more than strange, I believe it to be unhealthy and incorrect. What if instead we were hollow? Spirits and moods wash over us, affecting us, occupying our hollow interiors. These spirits needn’t control us, however; it is virtuous to cultivate character to resist these forces. But how best do we do that? By filling the emptiness within.

As St. Paul says, our bodies are temples (1 Cor. 6), making reference to when Jesus says he will destroy and rebuilt the temple in three days, referring to His own body (John 2). Our bodies are temples in so far as they house the Holy Spirit in the same way the Temple in Jerusalem housed God. But for God to live amongst the Israelites, certain measures had to be put in place. Firstly, the people of Israel had to remain clean of spiritual filth, otherwise known as sin, so that God could stand to abide there. And secondly strict rules were put in place for how God was approached so as to protect them from the sheer force of God’s holiness. Nabab and Abihu, two sons of Aaron, died due to giving an improper sacrifice, and were consumed in holy flame (Lev. 10).

In this same vein, we are temples, and for the Holy Spirit to reside in us we must avoid sin and seek virtue, by loving God, and loving our neighbours. The danger of the power of God can still be seen in Ananias and Sapphira who lied to the Holy Spirit about how much money they received when selling land to fund the nascent church, and died as a result (Acts 5). Indeed, we are empty, waiting to by filled by the Spirit to transform our flesh and in time attain the ‘spiritual bodies’ St. Paul talks of (1 Cor. 15). If the Tabernacle is a representation of Eden where God walked with Adam in the garden, through cleansing our temples we’re gardening our hollow interiors to become suitable for the Spirit to dwell.

In short, the world outside of you is real and the interior world of vague thoughts and feelings is phony. To make everything outside a mere referent to the inside world is self-defeating, since for anything to matter, it has to have matter, and intrinsically possess that truth. Believing that there is so much nous, thought, and feelings that belong to you will also only fill us with pride. And we don’t want to be filled with pride, lest their be no space left for the Spirit.

1. I ought to recognise and concede that this depiction of Jung’s ideas isn’t wholly accurate. Jung, through ideas like synchronicity, did believe in something more than dry formless matter in the world, in the form of a kind of Goethe-inspired world soul. Jung can be quite a slippery customer, never maintaining a cohesive worldview.

2024/08/11 Tolkien Tat and Stilton

At TK Maxx yesterday, I saw a Legolas mug. On the mug, Legolas looked cartoonish and bishie in a Western way. And then I realised I had hardly ever seen any tat of this ilk before for The Lord of the Rings - what had changed? MAL has listed a new Lord of the Rings anime - which will most likely be bad; Amazon Prime have released a Lord of the Rings spin-off series - which no matter what my colleagues say, is without doubt beyond bad; and strangest of all, a slice-of-life Nintendo Switch game where you can live as a hobbit in the Shire, which looks very ugly. I look up Tolkien's Wikipedia page: "died 2nd of September 1973". Fifty years have passed since his passing, and the vultures of mediocrity descend.

In a sense, it feels as if a castle's walls have been breached. The clamouring peasants beyond the castle walls have, through a long siege, managed to plunder the great loot of this sacrosanct franchise. A franchise which Tolkien delicately and carefully built - an ornate model village, if you will - which represents and contains a part of him. In Middle Earth you can see Tolkien's devout Catholicism; you can see his love of the English countryside; and you can see his deeply reactionary character, with regards to industrialisation and the political centralisation of the 20th century. If an Englishman's house is his castle, no man made a more conscious effort to construct so ornate a castle as Tolkien.

But again, these castle walls have been breached, and the peasants make off with the treasury's gold. But wasn't Smaug the hoarder of gold? Was Tolkien's plan not to share his vision of Middle Earth, so that his readers could dream with him? Tolkien's beloved Beowulf was once a folk story shared from family to family by oral tradition. Undoubtedly the version of Beowulf we have today wasn't the only one; indeed, many hundreds were most likely passed round across the Anglo-Saxon world, taking on the many flavours of their locales. Today, we have a canonical Beowulf because it was written down, and transcribed across the ages. Whilst Shakespeare's canonicity is beyond doubt, what of Homer? Homer wrote so long ago, it is hard to know whether the works attributed to him are solely his own - what is likely is that Homer's works emerged from an iterative tradition of oral traditions across generations. And what of folklore and fairy-stories? We are perfectly content for the differing endings of Little Red Riding Hood to be up for interpretation to live and breath alongside one another without dispute. Folklore is fanfiction; and it is as old as time.

So in what sense did Tolkien 'own' Middle Earth? He owned the words written in his book, granted, for those are the words he chose and sold in his story. But he also owned the 'franchise'. Middle Earth-themed mugs were not on sale because Christopher Tolkien was diligently acting guardian for his father's legacy. Once the fifty year cap is reached, the modern folklore proliferates. Sherlock Holmes' 'naturalisation' into the popular sphere is a forerunner to this effect. His name appears everywhere, merchandise is made by anyone, and fanfiction is sold without scrambling his name. And Holmes' name has taken on a truly mythic quality. People travel to Baker Street to see his apartment from across the world. I remember as a child thinking Holmes was a real person - that was before I knew of the canonical book. A canonical book almost concretises folklore as fiction. In the case of Robin Hood, many stories are written about him from the Mediaeval age to the present, but there is no original canonical work to which he can be described. Therefore, he is a legend. Before there were writings, there were rumours and hearsay; and before the hearsay... did he live? The very existence of the Sherlock Holmes books means that Sherlock Holmes is not real; and the very existence of the Lord of the Rings means the Lord of the Rings never happened.

Historians argue about the historicity of the Iliad - and some, more unnecessarily sceptical historians, argue about the historicity of whether the Trojan war ever happened. One day we might debate about the events of Middle Earth, and the historicity of mountain-dwelling Dwarven kingdoms. Folklore takes on a life of its own. The life that Middle Earth's story seems to be taken down is, however, unpleasant to watch. These newer works - particularly what I've heard from this new Amazon show - appear to be diametrically opposed to Tolkien's vision, intentionally misunderstanding his vision to progress the modern causes. This is not right. How, then, can these two concerns, for modern folklore and faithful vision, be squared?

Recently, I've gotten into Stilton. Growing up, I was never a big cheese lover - and even now, I find many cheeses too strong on the tongue - but Stilton, I've discovered, is delicious. The complexity of flavour no sacred spice mix could match. And to ensure future generations can enjoy the same flavour of Stilton, and the same authenticity of Stilton, there is a PDO saying that Stilton has to be made and derived from cows in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, or Derbyshire (ironically the town of Stilton is in Cambridgeshire), and by the same general processes of old. The people creating Stilton may change, but the techniques and ingredients remain the same.

What if such a technique were allowable for art? What if the Tolkien family could petition the government for a kind of PDO for their work, and set up an institution for licensed organisation of authors trusted to continue their work? There would have to be further rules. To prevent it becoming a cash cow, those running such an organisation couldn't take money for the works made by their organisation approved writers. The purpose of these institutions would be to maintain the integrity of their work, rather than be an eternal estate, after all. But much like a university has scholars, the Tower of Tolkien could give membership to approved writers who could expand Tolkien's vision. With this system, we get approved creators continuing the legacy of these works, creating further folklore. Perhaps even fanfiction works could be greenlit in such a system, bringing them in to the canon if their work was deemed talented and faithful enough. Like the Stilton, if the work is grown from the same fertile field of imagination, it can be called part of Middle Earth instead of the extremes of 'Tolkien only' and 'tragedy of the commons' which we have flipped from in but a year. Things that are valuable because of their strong flavour and character must be maintained, lest they fall into disrepair. English republicanism died with Cromwell, in part because he couldn't birth a tradition to maintain it after his rule. And neither can Tolkien fifty years after his death prevent this dam of sewage bursting in his name. The only way to maintain a garden for generation is not only to have each subsequent generation tend to the garden, but also to wall the garden off from the local farmer's cattle! The maintenance of such a wall is difficult, as Disney well know; but if what you are protecting is valuable, it must be protected at all costs.

Of course such a legislative conception of IP is a pipe-dream, but as it stands the system is awfully silly. It's strange we're a culture which protects the integrity of cheese far better than the integrity of our greatest works of fiction. I struggle to decide whether that reflects well or poorly upon us.

2024/08/04 On Top Gear

After talking about it at the pub last week, these past few days I've been travelling a journey of my youth, rewatching the Top Gear specials. Top Gear needn't much explaining; a show ostensibly about cars became a far larger phenomenon than any car journalism show had a right to become. I was into cars as a kid, and used to pour over my thick Top Gear car database book, reading the relative stats for each car to see how they compared. But the cars, as interesting as they might've been, were never the true appeal of Top Gear. If anything, the interest in motoring many youths like myself came away with was inherited from the true appeal of Top Gear: the cast.

The main trio of Top Gear, Clarkson, Hammond, and May, have a synergy hard to match. When my friends and I went to Japan recently, we went as a trio; and whilst we were there, we spotted many other trios of guys on their lads trips to anime Mecca. There is some kind of pattern, a kind of power, to the trio. Watching the Top Gear trio travel their road tours to the US, to the North Pole, and to Vietnam, I couldn't help thinking about my own trip to Japan in kind. You encounter the same strange events, incidents abroad where you see something baffling, look at one another, and want to break out in laughter. The same moments where you enjoy winding one another up, the moments where you get on one another's nerves, and the moments atop high vantage points where you share such a beautiful view. Such is the octane of the lads trip; and Top Gear does it best.

Whilst most of the scenes feel contrived and scripted, the production team manage to write that sense of acting all boyish and childish when the ladies aren't around. Somehow, they made a show popular with both myself, who watched them growing up when I was nine and ten years old, and with men in their fifties. The younger fans saw what fun could be had travelling with your mates as a grown up, where money and age were no longer an issue; and older fans likewise saw the fun to be had in vicariously getting away from the wife, even if the stresses of looking after children and financing family holidays made such boys' excursions unfeasible. To all men, Top Gear scratches a very particular itch - that male itch for adventure - an itch which most women and those in the chattering classes find incorrigible and irritating. My girlfriend, who had never seen the show, walked into the living room when I was watching it on the TV, and said it wasn't funny, and didn't understand why I kept laughing at the jokes. Perhaps it isn't very funny. The acting is somewhat stilted, the events feel scripted, and most of the gags are playground humour. But something resonates strongly, no mere nostalgia; something which resonates for me and for every other man I've talked to about Top Gear.

Between the oddly amateurish feel for such a flagship show, the intentionally over-the-top boyish theme song, and the strange studio atmosphere of the audience towering over the cast - especially poor Hammond - as if the whole studio where a Bauhaus pub, Top Gear is quite unlike any shows similar. Clarkson has built a career upon a kind of excessive hyperbolic mode of speech, fulfilling pregnant pauses with such phrases as '... in the world', which only conjures up how classmates spoke towards the beginning of secondary school, before other techniques like understatement were learnt to be used to employ emphasis. All three of the cast are also clearly massive car autists too. There are candid moments in the US special, for instance, where the trio talk about cars exactly as I would talk about anime with my mates... that is, absolutely impenetrably. Just as my friends and I will reference old anime, studios, and directors in conversation without much thought, all three of them were referencing car names and brands I'd never heard of, each of them implicitly knowing that car's reputation, and where it fits into motoring history. And I think many men of the Hephaestian bent - those otaku who like their hobby and know their hobby - feel and understand that passion, even if cars aren't their autistic pursuit. Indeed for all the lack of polish of the show, this gem seemed to emerge from the ground without need for cutting.

Top Gear has a natural passion, the passion of true car otakus, geeking out in their element, living their otaku dream. My trio went on an anime otaku trip to Japan, like so many other selfsame trios; but the petrolhead otaku trip is identical to the road trips the Top Gear specials get so well. Top Gear's a unique show, one that's come to its conclusion some time ago. As the winds began to change, and the risque laddish humour - the kind of humour you wouldn't say with the misses around - began to become untelevisable, Top Gear's days were numbered. Nevertheless for my generation of men, and the generations of men above mine, the show remains a touchstone for what manliness is and what manliness doesn't have to cease to be as you get older. Indeed, there's none other like it... in the world.

2024/07/28 The First Day of the Week

I'm writing this article on Sunday, the first day of the week. I was previously under the misguided belief that Monday was the first day of the week, a belief which I hope in this article I will be able to dispel for yourselves also.

We'll begin with the concept of what a week is. Unlike years, which are astronomical to the sun, days, which are astronomical to the earth, and months, which in our calendar are nearly astronomical to the moon, weeks have no cosmic anchoring. The Classical world hadn't a conception of the week, and had to discuss specific days as 'the 28th of July' when discussing them. After all, there is no astronomical reason for a cycle of seven days to roll on and on, independent of the months and years which gird them. Weeks, as you may imagine, originate in the Bible, from the seven days of creation. On the first day of creation, God said "Let there be light" which is now honoured as 'Sun-day', the day of light. Other Semitic peoples like the Babylonians inherited the seven day week, associating each day with a deity. And these deities miraculously roughly map onto the deities from our calendars also! These deities take the names of Roman pagan gods in the Romance nations and of Germanic pagan gods in the Germanic nations - well, nearly all of them are Germanic gods. All bar one: Saturday.

Saturday comes from Saturn, the father of Jupiter, and is seen as one of the original gods of Rome before Hellenic influence. Saturn - not to be confused with Satan, as some excitable armchair etymologists have claimed, was the deity worshipped in Saturnalia, the great winter solstice festival of the Romans. Saturnalia was a kind of Carnival, where the chains of social rank and duty were unbound, and there was gift-giving abound. Slaves ate at with their masters at the same table, and the streets were filled with rowdy drinking and merriment. In the Classical Ages of Man, Kronos ruled over the world during the Golden Age, a halcyon, Edenic age where the Earth gave bountiful food, and needn't work, cultivating wisdom. The Golden Age of Saturn were the Days of Rest.

The seven days of creation were, during the great online Theist v. Atheist conflicts of the noughties an itchy rash that never healed. The theist tribe could never concede that a literal seven days and seven nights reading Genesis is a very difficult pill to swallow - one not even many of the church fathers wished to swallow - and the atheist tribe could never accept there's a narrative truth which might transcend and possess more value than the autistic categories of geological time. But such days of yonder are remembered fondly with all their naivety and cringe. "Days of yonder". "Days of Rest". Even in English we have this usage for the word 'days', so as to mean a period of time rather than a single day. According to many biblical scholars, Hebrew also has this sense of the word days, even when it isn't pluralised! Each day of creation in the Bible is a long period of time, rather than a twenty-four hour period. And here we see a kind of concordance. The Golden Age of Saturn, is the seventh day of creation. Saturday is the last day of the week.

I haven't yet brought in the most incisive piece of evidence. Jews, to this day and before the time of Christ, have commemorated the Sabbath on a Saturday, because Saturday is the seventh day of the week, and thus the seventh day of creation. If only I'd started with such a simple argument! But the question then becomes, why Sunday? Sunday is in some Christian denominations understood as the Sabbath - although I would say this is a misunderstanding, based on what I've read thus far. Sunday is not the Sabbath, but rather the Lord's Day: the first day of New Creation.

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. - Matthew 5:17

Jews in the time of Christ, and orthodox Jews to this day, keep the Sabbath very strictly. Orthodox Jews today dare not even turn on a light bulb, for it is construed as lighting a fire. However Christians do not, for Christ fulfilled - meaning filled to the point of overflowing - the commandments on the Sabbath. In the Passion, Christ was crucified on Good Friday, and spent Holy Saturday, the Sabbath, dead; and in resting to the point of death, the Sabbath was fulfilled by Christ. Christ rising again on Easter Sunday is Christ rising as the light (as in the first day of creation), of a new creation, ushering in a new era under Christ's reign. Each Sunday is therefore a commemoration that we are living within this new creation, and at the start of each week we must attempt to change and align ourselves ever so slightly more with Christ's image. Sunday at the end of the week turns new creation and God into a kind of afterthought, rather than a new-week's resolution.

Why does all this matter, then? Why can't the week start with Monday? There is a kind of fracturing in the weekend now if we start with Sunday - it feels as if there aren't two consecutive days of rest in the same way before the next working week starts. And in part, such vague and indescribable feelings are the point. The mental shapes and filters through which we see the world affect how we perceive reality; a good example of this phenomenon is with colours. In Japan the colour green and the colour blue were, for the longest time, considered one and the same, with the name ao. That's why there is aokigahara the blue forest, because forests were blue. Undoubtedly the wavelengths of light were the same, but where the very essence of colour, the qualia, perceived identically? I'd argue not. Without words, without forms to project from our mind, we will see the world, in a very real way, differently. Our thoughts, our minds, change how we view the world. And to view Sunday as being at the beginning rather than at the end of the week is to view God as the week's start rather than one's nine to five job. Letting Monday begin your week places work as the leader of your life. And that is> topsy-turvy.

2024/07/14 The Last Lovers of Albion

I don't mean to sound too doomer, for I'm well aware that many people and countries love England. But throughout the world there is a pattern - a kind of conspiracy - to denigrate and insult the English, and claim that many of her greatest inventions and cultural products are not in fact hers. There is, in many quarters, a kind of embarrassment at the mere association with Englishness: the Americans will never call themselves 'English-American' even though the majority of them are; the Europeans see the English as the butt of all jokes (although that partly arises from envy); and the third world have been hypnotised into calling us horrid, domineering colonialists, even though without the English these countries would have no institutions, infrastructure, and in some cases, civilisation to speak of! There is one country however, who earnestly love the English: and that country is Japan.

To best illustrate Japan's love for England, let me tell a short story from my recent travels. Before we set off to Japan, one of my travelling companions had heard about a maid cafe with traditional English-style maids in Ikebukuro. We booked a reservation, yet in reply we were asked if we could move our reservation a day earlier, because one of the maids was learning English and wanted to practice on us. They also added that they were looking forward to seeing us very much. We agreed, and visited the cafe on the revised date. Walking inside, it seemed as if a charity shop had been raided of all their porcelain nick-nacks; the ceilings were adorned with improperly-fit coving - for who in Japan knows how to install coving; and for cutlery, a real novelty in Japan, we received a butter knife and a humongous serving fork. And it was so incredibly charming! I'm sure a Japanese visitor who saw a Japanese-style restaurant in Britain, done up with Japanese decor, would have exactly the same feeling: that of awe and of love. Britain, to Japan, is a distant land, where such ornaments are novel; so to attempt to implement traditional British silverware and porcelain in spite of not knowing much about what it is for or how to use it, is emblematic of a raw love. It never comes across as attempting to clothe oneself in the raiments of power, as Chinese Anglophilia so often does. The Japanese Anglophilia is earnest and agapic. To return to the story's strange finale, as we were wrapping up our meal, the maid requested we wait a moment more. After a short wait, our maid brought out an A3, wooden-framed picture of one of the cafe's maids, dressed in maid garb, outside a British castle. We also received a volume of manga (Maid-san wa Taberu dake), which she was awfully surprised we'd all already read.

Here's another story from the trip. On the Shinkansen, my friends and I were all split up owing to a lack of seating for large luggage. My neighbours on the train - who I had a long conversation with in Japanese (I'm not trying to show off.. alright, maybe a bit) - had just returned from a holiday in England. They said where they had gone, but I couldn't make head or tail of what they were saying. Owing to accents and such, I kept guessing well-known English cities and locations, but none hit the mark. In desperation, I opened the map on my phone, and had them locate the town in question; it was the town of Bideford in north Devon, a town I had never heard of. The vast majority of tourists who visit Britain see London, and afterwards maybe Edinburgh or York. Very few make their way to the countryside. And the countryside is very much the soul of a place; some of my favourite, most wondrous, moments in Japan were in the countryside, where the soul of the nation is less hidden. The two elderly ladies I was talking to told me how much they enjoyed English pubs, how they enjoyed the ale, and how much they liked charity shops! I was taken aback at how what they saw and found in England aligns so perfectly with what I love in England. There is much to be said about Anglo-Japanese similarities, the famed Shiba-Corgi Axis, and perhaps that'll be the topic of a future article. But a tourist's love for the British countryside, the love for the raw, honest England, is almost uniquely Japanese.

Japanese doesn't have a mass of foreign restaurants, but a surprisingly common one was English pubs. Restaurant-bars named "Ale House" were everywhere, most likely a chain, and my favourite one, named "Morris' Lamb Chop". Again, like with the maid cafe in Ikebukuro, there's a sense of deep love for the English. "Morris' Lamb Chop" isn't the name, nor remotely similar to the name, of any public house I've ever seen; but there's an uncanniness to the name, which makes it feel as if it's the name someone would give who's read a lot about pubs but never visited one.

Japan is the only place I've ever been, other than of course England, but even then it depends where you are, that truly loves England. Love is complex. As Chesterton argues in his essay Flag of the World, love is a kind of patriotism for something, and that patriotism can't be a love for any specific quality, but rather for that thing in of itself. Chesterton sums up the thought in the following aphorism, "Men did not love Rome because she was great; Rome was great because men loved her." For if you love Britain for her colonies and power, or your wife for her current good looks, you'll in time fall out of love. No longer does Britain have colonies nor the same power, and one day your wife will be wrinkled and grey. Love like patriotism must be for no particular reason other its simple being. As I eluded to before, the Chinese today build mansions in the Victorian style which would put the Victorians to shame; but, these palaces are used to symbolise and magnify the power of these CCP officials. They don't love England at all, for they love her merely for the power the Victorians once projected. Whilst I'm not too familiar with the history, perhaps the same could be argued in the Meiji era, when Japan was incorporating into their culture all things Western, including the British curry, the British sailor uniform, and the British suit (the Japanese for suit is sabiro, derived from London's Saville Row). And maybe in that era, Japan latched on to Englishness for their power and grandeur. But even if that was once the case, walking around Japan it doesn't seem like that anymore. Japan truly loves England, for they are the last lovers of Albion.

2024/07/07 The Aquarium

Apologies for the rather lengthy hiatus, I've been in Japan on an excellent holiday.

Just last week I was in the land of The Rising Sun, the Mecca of all anime fans, on my very own Hajj, and found myself walking around Osaka aquarium. Of all the things I saw on my trip, the aquarium was the one that was the greatest pleasant surprise. You see, I'm not typically a fan of aquariums (Aquaria?), in part because my birth-given soft spot for animals is unusually callous, and in part because I find them to be for the most part unimpressive. I'm sure the scale and the complexities of running such a large facilities are immense, and that managing the temperatures and environments for each tank is no small feat of study and experience; but I just don't usually get much out of them. Unlike any aquariums I've been to before, however, Osaka aquarium appeared to be curated. Like a museum, it was laid out to have a message. The message of a UK aquarium, in all our naval-gazing, can only muster a megaphone-ringing message of environmentalist propaganda, without any subtlety nor finesse. The Japanese have, thankfully, not forgotten that these finer exhibitions for popular consumption can have a nuanced and compelling message, and can make you feel something (Ken Clarke's Civilisation is a good example of a well-curated British work from the past with the masses in mind). At first I thought the exhibit was inspiring certain thoughts within me on accident; then, once I had reached the end of the exhibition, there was a short haiku, reading back to me my thoughts. Albeit, reading them back to me in a Buddhist framework, as one would expect, rather than in a Christian framework. In this article, I'll give voice to some of the thoughts the aquarium inspired in me, and I'll try to tease apart this at first small, yet in time seismic divide between the two doctrines.

To summarise my thoughts on the aquarium as succinctly as possible, I'll transcribe a short poem I wrote whilst I was there:

Vanity of vanities,
All is vanity.
Do the fishes understand,
As they swim around the aquarium,
That they are aimless -
That there is nowhere for them to go?

That I do not know.
For I too often swim
Around like one of these fishes;
Listening to my base instincts,
My higher instincts,
And my demons. But man can be greater,
Higher, more noble, than a fish.
For man was created in God's image,
And can become like Him.
That is man's greatest treasure.

Going around the main exhibit of Osaka aquarium, you circle around the main tank, descending with each rotation, much like a helter skelter. The main exhibit is a great cylinder, a massive enclosure, housing fishes small, large, and their famed whale sharks. How intelligent these sharks are, I know not, but they circle and circle around the tank endlessly. Do they realise they circle so? Do they remember where they last were? Do they mind? My aim is not to evoke pity, merely a sense that there is a deep aimlessness to their actions. Even if they were in the sea, what else would the whale shark do? Swim, eat, sleep, reproduce - all to what end. Is the whale shark then in captivity not only in the aquarium, but in the wild also? The whale shark must have instincts like us - in that sense we are both animals - but does the whale shark realise the futility of yielding to one's instincts? Probably not - in that sense man is different to most animals.

This self-reflection of never finding closure and never finding contentment in our instincts, is arguably the most important of human discoveries. In a sense, we are nought but animals seeking animal pleasures without it. "All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full", as the Book of Ecclesiastes writes. Nature in of itself can never bring contentment. Just as the instincts of the whale shark lead him in circles, so too do my instincts lead me running around chasing after the same passions of the flesh, so too the water cycles from the mountains to the sea only to evaporate, condense and precipitate upon the mountain once more. And so too are the seasons. Winter becomes Spring, becomes Summer, becomes Autumn, and becomes Winter once more, ad nauseum, forever and ever, without completion. And I believe it to be a good way of describing the natural world: the natural world is the Realm of Seasons. It is where we are without fulfilment, for no success or change will ever bring everlasting happiness - a 'happily ever after' - however much we idolise it so.

And idolatry it is, to worship natural things. In Japan we passed many sacred rocks and sacred trees to be worshipped, and each shrine is the residence of a kami where the kami are fed, as if the god were tamed within its walls. Across the ancient near-East and Mediterranean you see great pillared buildings to house idols where gods have been sequestered and tamed also. These forms of idolatry are fundamentally materialistic, and don't seek out a higher transcendence. The idols worshipped are in a sense weaker than men; 'they have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see', and yet are relied upon for good harvests, success in war, and with love. But it is perfectly natural to worship idols. It is a practice common from the Aztecs to the Arabs to the Ainu, and is one of the great passions of the flesh. We fool ourselves into thinking the passions are all lower, like gluttony and sexual immorality, but many of the passions are seemingly more complex and higher, like idol worship and, most centrally, pride. All of these passions of the flesh exist within the Realm of Seasons - within the natural world - and send us round and round like the whale shark from earlier. Driven by this life-instinct, by this Freudian eros, what will set us free from this endless gyre of mere Darwinian life?

To my knowledge, there are only two creeds which stare into this thanatotic abyss: the Buddhist creed, and the Christian creed. Every creed can be best understood by its most extreme, yet acceptable, end: through their monks. And perhaps to the chagrin of some regular readers, I will be recycling a favourite Chesterton quote to illustrate this.

No two ideals could be more opposite than a Christian saint in a Gothic cathedral and a Buddhist saint in a Chinese temple. The opposition exists at every point; but perhaps the shortest statement of it is that the Buddhist saint always has his eyes shut, while the Christian saint always has them very wide open. The Buddhist saint has a sleek and harmonious body, but his eyes are heavy and sealed with sleep. The mediaeval saint's body is wasted to its crazy bones, but his eyes are frightfully alive. There cannot be any real community of spirit between forces that produced symbols so different as that. Granted that both images are extravagances, are perversions of the pure creed, it must be a real divergence which could produce such opposite extravagances. The Buddhist is looking with a peculiar intentness inwards. The Christian is staring with a frantic intentness outwards.

Both the Christian and the Buddhist reject the Realm of Seasons, albeit in the very different ways. The Buddhist, as Chesterton describes, closes his eyes and looks inwards, attempting to overcome every passion of the flesh through meditation and dissociating himself from that sense of the passion. The Buddhist will attempt to never let a passion control him - but that does not mean he can be without passions. The Buddha found the middle way between hedonism and asceticism, which was to detach and tap out from the dichotomy all together, and not be fooled by the illusion, the maya of pleasure. In essence, it is to not let the passion trick you into 'happily ever after' thinking. The Christian, conversely, overcomes the Realm of Seasons not through cultivating personal strength - although one will attain personal strength as a result - but through faith in God to guide and in a sense slowly take over the individual. God's plan for man through the Resurrection, as Paul explains in 1 Corinthians 15, is for man's soulish bodies, which are contaminated with passions of the flesh, to be replaced with spiritualish bodies which are not. And that process begins, albeit slowly and never to completion, in this life by following God's law, slowly unshackling ourselves from servitude to sin through His help. Here, through Hope (faith in the Resurrection) we lose any need for passions to give us a 'happily ever after', for all fulfilment will be in the Resurrection; therefore, if we are patient (and pass the marshmallow test) no pleasure in this life can tempt us.

Both of these creeds reject the Realm of Seasons because they reject that man is made for this world. For Buddhists, existence as a human is in of itself suffering, and something for man to escape - being placed in this world to the Buddhist is a kind of curse; whilst for the Christian, man was made for this world, but through the fall, man is now at odds with it. For the Christian, man was made for the world which is to come after the Resurrection. If man were purely of this world, as many a Darwinist today would argue, we wouldn't feel so separate and at odds with it. For whatever reason, 'the ear is never filled by hearing', and there is a great dissatisfaction in our hearts. The whale shark in the large fish bowl never completes his journey, but neither does his cousin in the Pacific. Only through the Hope in our creeds can we find that final completion, that telos, that our hearts yearn for. For we weren't given this instinct for no reason: every instinct will have its total fulfilment.

2024/06/09 Scattered Thought on the End of an Era

Few enjoy change, especially when it seems it may be for the worse. However in time, Spring and Summer always make way for Autumn and then Winter: nothing in this life lasts forever, and little lasts one's lifetime. We are seasonal beings. Just as our lives begin in Spring, move into Summer, and then into Autumn and finally Winter, the epochs, the chapters, the months across which our narrative threads run through our lives follow that same pattern.

Personally, one such Winter has arrived. From the time I entered Uni to today, now that it's been two years since I've graduated, Anisoc has been my community. In the beginning our circle was small, and closely knit. We had long house parties deep into the next morning, and we reverberated the walls with our bellowing karaoke. My June-July period was rainy with Corona hitting, and having to stay indoors at what should have been the heights of Summer. But all was repaid come August-September, where I felt like a king. Once I graduated, the Autumn period of this epoch came, and I was forever exhausted attempting to balance a students social life with three hours of commuting every day. Now I've hit the December: the end of the year, and the end of this era. I know this period of my life has ended, and that I can't continue to go and meet up as I always have. Many of the younger generation I kept returning to meet are now themselves graduating, and they will most likely be scattered to the four corners of the country, and perhaps the world. University is a kind of temporary community, which much like a temporary marriage, can only end in a parting heartbreak. To assemble this group of people once more would be a monumental - nigh impossible - task.

There are those who I will stay in touch with, and those who I may never see again. Those very precious friendships I've made through this community will not break, lest something were to happen, or I decide to cease to maintain contact. There is no sense of loss there. It is the sense of the community being broken up in a kind of diaspora: that is where the feeling of heartbreak stems. Those gatherings, parties, and celebrations involving the whole wider Anisoc community have always made me feel apart of something greater, and made me feel at my best.

The nature of manliness is very much a core question being wrestled with today. Factions see manliness as dominating women and excessive macho-ness - but this can't be correct. Some conversely see manliness as dominating other men, and want nothing more than to be someone else's superior or boss, and to laud power or money - but nor can this be right. Others see it as Apollonian, and the chiselling of oneself into the perfect Renaissance Man who has command over the arts and his own form. And however tempting this idea has been for me over the years, I don't believe it to be correct. This Apollonian path leads to nought but contempt and despair from idolising vanity. Manliness, as a podcast I used to watch put it, is found within community. It is being able to help the less fortunate or the struggling within the community, or the ability to offer a meal or board to a friend. To be a man is not to be the top of a hierarchy, a top-to-bottom model, but to be in the most central of the concentric circles of a community. This sense of manliness I harvested bountifully from my time at Anisoc. Hosting parties, hosting events, helping people to meet one another to find friends, and perhaps lifelong lovers, is perhaps the most fulfilling and meaningful thing I have ever done.

My current community is for a specific age bracket - and being at the upper end of the age bracket for much of my time there, I got to experience that kind of 'village elder' feeling. But as I have said, December has come, and my time there will be no more. There is not much community for me to fall into afterwards, however. Many find community through work, and yet they meet up with colleagues outside of work very infrequently. So many people commute to work now, that their colleagues are strewn across the surrounding area. For instance, I work in Loughborough, yet live near Nottingham; many live in Leicester, Loughborough itself, and Derby, not to mention the various towns and villages in-between. How do so many people meet up and go to the pub?

The pub is the very bedrock of community, and alcohol the solvent for the gummed-up British temperament. A work-based community cannot drive to and from the pub, and thus the pub declines. Ultimately, proximity is what is most important. Anisoc was for me a place, not merely a free-floating institution. Because we were all here we could meet up and go to the pub together. No amount of Discord 'communities', as the pandemic taught us, can make up for real in-person connections. What Anisoc created however was something that was almost too good to be true: the alloying of a true in-person community with a niche (however less so by the year) interest. A strange community of cooky people, of misfits, who don't feel as if they'd fit into society at-large. There is always this niggling fear that what I had was too good to be true, and that it'll ring in my memory like a kind of tinnitus to which no future community can compare.

But it is the December of this epoch, and within December is Christmas: the birth of Hope into the world. Every Winter begets a new Spring. And no reactionary wound-picking will let the skin grow back afresh. With a heart open, and a charitable disposition, I have faith that in my next epoch there'll be a new community to which I could belong, and a new 'home'. And I believe a community really is a home. To confine one's home to your house is claustrophobic - and if I lived in a house-share, I'm not sure if I could even call my own house a home. A home is where you feel a sense of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; where there is something more than family, friends, and lovers, but a warm and earnest storge.

My youth is now certainly over, and I feel immense regrets. How much folly I could have had! How much fun I was too foolish to grab hold of! How many chances I let blow away like autumn leaves. Those leaves have now composted, nourishing the seedbed of the new spring, of the new era, and all I can do is hope for the best. If only life weren't so difficult.

Rejoice, O young man, in your youth,
And let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth;
Walk in the ways of your heart,
And in the sight of your eyes;
But know that for all these
God will bring you into judgement.
Therefore remove sorrow from your heart,
And put away evil from your flesh,
For childhood and youth are vanity.

- Ecclesiastes 11:9-10

2024/06/02 Nether Portals

Minecraft has a kind of archetypal cultural legacy on my generation. It is a game, after all, of Platonic Ideas: each block participates in a specific form, which it doesn't merely shadow, but holds perfectly. It is, in a sense, a Platonic heaven, an archetypal paradise, and an autistic meadow. Within the Minecraft world, we shall focus on the nether portal and the symbolism of these kinds of gates; for much like other aspects of the game, there is an ancient archetypal shape the nether portal apes, capturing the imagination of young boys like my younger self.

The 'archetypal gate' is seen everywhere, whether it be in history or in present researches into neuroscience. A great example of an ancient gate is Stonehenge. Possessing much of the same form as a nether portal, Stonehenge is one of many henges built around the country. The builders of the monument are nameless, and it is hard to know whether the tradition is Celtic, or if the Celts simply imitated a tradition they discovered. Across Gall as well, henges of various descriptions are found, often with Celtic symbols engraved on them. What were they used for? It is hard to say. Like Stonehenge, many less impressive henges are aligned with astrological significance; but astrology could hardly have been their purpose, for they would have had to have the astrological knowledge to build the henge as it was. Instead, the astrological alignment is a secondary quality the henge possesses. The primary purpose many would say would be for some kind of sacred ceremony. Such assumptions are usually a cop out for anthropologists, to whom anything that looks a bit odd or that they don't understand is religious, but in this case I agree. These henges mark out a kind of sacred boundary, a kind of pomoerium, permitting connection between this world and another.

Japan has their version of the archetypal gate also, in the form of a Torii gate. Walking through a Torii gate, one traverses from the mundane to the spiritual, as mediated by the gates. There are also tunnels of gates, like at Inari shrine in Kyoto, which forms a kind of sacred pathway. The Torii gate then helps to demarcate the small area of land which has been donated to the local kami (demon), as his small little dominion on Earth. For demons confer gratitude and aid once they are given an idol in which they can dwell in the world¹, and this small outlined area gives them a small kingdom they can govern. In Christianity, for pagan worship is born of the shadows and residues of the faith, whether by inklings of the natural law by the demons' envy of God, there is also a demarcated holy land, in the nation of Israel. Even before Joshua's conquests and the establishment of Israel's borders, the Mosaic law sets out how the ground of Israel is to remain holy, so that God can continue to dwell with the Israelites. This is done through dietary acts, such as not eating unclean animals, or not boiling a lamb in its mother's milk; it is done through cleanliness acts, such as excluding women from the boundaries of Israel's city of tents when they begin to menstruate; or, where the corruption of the land is most explicitly pointed out, when if you hang someone on a tree, the body must be taken down before nightfall. The rules are different within Israel, because the land within the boundary, as mediated by gates, is holy; and the land is holy because God dwells there.

The Pomoerium of ancient Rome, as dug by Romulus himself, is a kind of sacred boundary. Within the Pomoerium, there can be no military men. Within the Pomoerium also, however, there is law and citizenship, and civilisation. The boundary and the city-centred worship is maintained through the city's sacred hearth by the Vestal Virgins. Within Rome's boundaries there are different laws in place - or rather, there are laws for citizen - because the land there is sacred and dedicated. And the gates of Rome act again as kinds of portals between the secular world outside, and the sacred ground within.

We've seen in history that gates act as kinds of portals now, but there is also psychological evidence to back this up. Have you ever had the experience of forgetting something when you walk from one room to the next? This is a statistically significant occurrence, leading to the suggestion of some kind of psychological gate, common to all men. Jung would've called this an archetype. This kind of archetypal gate which divides zones, or portions of space, confers a transformative experience once its walked through. In the aforementioned case of moving from one room to another it is minor, and yet noticeable; whilst, in the case of the Torii it is a powerful change from the zone of the mundane to the zone of the sacred.

To summarise, the gate or portal is archetypal and built into man's being. It shows up in religion, in history, in the present, in the everyday, and, as this article began, in Minecraft. The nether portal of Minecraft fits all these criteria: it is a gate which transforms you from the zone of the mundane to the zone of the underworld. Much can be said abut Orphic spirituality and its symbolism common to many practices of descent into Hades; and in Minecraft this is seen in the realm of the nether from which valuable goods and items can be obtained so long as you are careful. The nether portal of many of our youths with its obsidian structure and its purple swirling interior accesses some kind of deeper recess of the mind - the gate after all is core to how we perceive the world - and the partition it represents is but the most recent manifestation of an ancient tradition.

1. As St. Paul points out, an idol cannot dress itself, clean itself, nor right itself. It is a body created by the hand of man, rather than the hand of God; and through its body, the demon can now eat through sacrifices.

2024/05/26 The Woodland Queen

A small short story based on a dream my girlfriend (who henceforth on this blog shall be called RiceIsNice) had last night. I’ve tried to doll it up as a kind of Gothic horror, and hopefully it’s a good read.

21st of January, 1869

Many moons have passed since my wife’s accident. We were traveling down to London from our old house in Nottingham to see friends when our train had a head-on collision with a freight train. The signal-man was at fault, the inquiry said; but such tragedy is never remedied by fault and finger pointing. My wife Julia was crushed in the pile-up, whilst I managed to escape unscathed. If only the roles were reversed, I find myself saying - yet it never feels as if I mean it. Such pleas I say for they sound chivalrous, but they never come out full-blooded and courageous, only ever watery and dilute. I wish I were strong enough to mean it.

After the accident, we moved into an old estate named Goswick Manor belonging to her mother who had recently passed away, deep in the dales of the Peak District. And what a wondrous place it is. Away from the smog and squalour of Nottingham’s factories, there’s a freshness and cleanness to the air, breathing life and vigour into the soul. I now go on long walks of contemplation across the dips and crests of the green-shod hills, thinking about Julia, about the spirits of Nature, and the lonesomeness of man. When not another soul is in sight, I can relax, and find peace in knowing I am but a spec on this vast and ancient land, and am but one piston in nature’s engine.

My wife unfortunately is not so lucky. After the accident, she is paralysed from the waist down and wheelchair bound. During much of the day, I tend to her, and we read Romantic poetry together, like Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Our family butler, Geoffrey, and our family maid, Rosemary, moved with us to the country. Rosemary has been incredibly gracious in tending to my wife, dealing with her in dressing, and any more discrete issues following from her condition. Geoffrey also has been supremely kind to Julia, pushing her vehicle of confinement to wherever she asks; although she rarely wants to be anywhere but the conservatory. The manor has a wonderfully large conservatory built of wrought iron and glass, home to many beautiful flowers soon to be in bloom and a grand view of the vast hills beyond the confines of the house. To my wife, this house is a kind of bird-cage, for after the disaster, any amount of travel wearies her, and the nearest town, Buxton, is several hours travel by coach.

My life may sound isolated and miserable, and my wife’s a far worse misery still, but we make do. We both try to make the best of our situation and live to support one another through the hardship. And whilst at times my social isolation maddens me, and her confinement sends her into fits of rage and curses against God, most of our time is spent at peace and appreciating nature. The art she’s begun painting has improved in leaps and bounds, detailing the nuance of the flowers and fruit in the conservatory with such lustre and precision. Again, whilst our lives are hard we find sweetness in its fruit, for it is all we can do.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

17th of February 1869

Our usual days of steady peace have been uprooted by a disturbing report from Rosemary. She has said that when bathing my wife Julia, she has observed small wooded sprouts from just below her shoulder blades. On hearing this, I was truly shocked, and had assumed this were some kind of distasteful joke she was playing upon me. But Rosemary insisted, and her sincerity shone through in her words - after all, she has never been the kind to play such jokes - and I followed her, troubled as to what she had said. I went with her to the bedroom, to see my wife lying on the bed on her stomach with her back exposed. Her pale back was as it always has been with the exception of two small brown stubs, one at the bottom of each shoulder blade, just as Rosemary had informed me. I walked over to my wife in disbelief, and sat next to her on the bed. I ran my hands down her back and felt the wooden stubs. The stubs decidedly felt like shoots of an aged fruit tree; and the seam between these shoots and her skin was much like the seam between an antler and a deer’s head.

I asked Julia if it hurts at all if I touch the wooden shoots, to which she said that it didn’t. In fact, it seems as if she had no sensation in these tree shoots attached to her. Rosemary helped Julia put back on her shirt and righted her on the bed. I could see my wife was truly fearful at this discovery - as if our previous calamity weren’t enough! Her eyes were slumped and her lip quivering at the horror. I sat beside her on the bed and put my arms around her, upon which she burst into tears on my shoulder. I stroked her head, recommending we ask Dr Burnham for advice as to how to proceed. At this point her limp body ceased all at once. She begged me not to call for a doctor out of a sense of shame, and a fear as to what people might say should word spread. I agreed not to for the time being, but sternly told her that I may soon have to should the issue progress. We were at an impasse. Julia lay down back in bed and tightly wrapped the duvet around herself so as to cocoon away from my influence.

After this incident, I went for a hike along the hills to find my quiescence in nature. Nature is so grand, but I didn’t feel small in the slightest. These events which have occurred, nagged, clawed, and dug into me, yoking me to the immanency of the present. What should I do? I can only request that God helps me.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

29th of March 1869

Our woes have only multiplied between last month and this month. Julia has spent much time in sorrow weeping, her heart only stilled by painting. She has become so engrossed with her painting now, and the art she’s produced has only become more beautiful. The painting, she says, puts her at ease, bringing her a kind of clarity of mind from the fear and pain of the branches growing out of her. There are the two main branches whose whereabouts are mentioned in my previous diary entry, but several more shoots have emerged: one from her hip, another from just beneath her left breast, and another upon the right side of her clavicle. The two original branches are now about eight inches in length each, with small budding leaves from the twigs parting from the main bough. Whilst still jostling the branching causes my wife little to no pain nor sensation, their presence has been a great irritation and obstacle to her. Sitting is awkward and painful, for she can’t lean back in her chair for fear of snapping the branches; she has resigned herself to sleeping and lying on her side, and painting leant forward. How we will deal with this discomfort once more shoots begin to grow, I are unsure.

Today was a day of experimentation. I conjectured that much like how hair can be cut, or more precisely how a rhinoceros horn can be cut off without causing much pain, Julia’s branches can be pruned for the sake of her comfort. In the conservatory, Rosemary assisted me in lifting Julia’s loose blouse, as I cut off the two emergent boughs with garden sheers borrowed from Geoffrey. Forgiving a mild discomfort Julia felt during the procedure, I can report the experiment a success. Whilst the new buds which are appearing are a certain worry, the branches can be pruned, eliminating the majority of the discomfort. Our lives have certainly been rent upside-down, but these minor successes ought to be tallied, lest our morale fall in facing this foe.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

3rd of April 1869

My cheer of success may have been premature. Whilst there certainly was an initial victory in pruning the boughs, these past few days have been physically difficult for my beloved. Ever since last Wednesday, which was the 31st if I recall, Julia has been supremely thirsty and hungry, craving specifically sugary sweets. She has eaten nearly every bonbon stored in the pantry, and has drunk nearly two gallons of water a day. Her consumption of water is absurdly excessive, but if she doesn’t receive the water she requires at once, her mood flips between desperate pleas for her thirst to be slaked and fits of hysterical anger. Without the water she seems to be genuinely parched, which I cannot understand, for she hasn’t excused herself to the bathroom any more frequently than before.

The answer to this riddle only dawned on me earlier today, when I noticed the boughs on her back, and the ones elsewhere on her body had grown incommensurately with how much time had passed. The growth that had previously taken months had been achieved in but days. The theory horrifies me, for it seems as if some secondary force or parasite has attached itself to Julia, controlling her instincts and urges to its own end. I can’t bring myself to share my findings with my dearest. It’ll only worsen her already falling morale.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

8th of May 1869

Julia’s condition has been one of steady decline this past month. After the vicious abreaction to pruning the whole bough last time, I’ve instead contented myself, with Julia’s permission, to trim the boughs which are most uncomfortable. The hunger for sweets and thirst are still present, however Geoffrey has since stockpiled on bonbons when he last headed to Buxton, and we agree that the attack of instincts is but a small trade off for the relief brought. Any branches impeding her right arm have also been pruned, for they impede the last joy she has left: her art. And how it has improved! Her brushwork has a kind of earthy quality like nothing I’ve ever seen before - it’s a true marvel to be seen. Despite her condition, she has begun to see the flowers of the conservatory so vividly now; and her landscapes are so rich with the endless undulations of the hills. I could dote longer, but I ought to address the most recent happening.

A couple of days ago Geoffrey sent for Dr Burnham to inspect Julia’s condition. I could see the sweat build on the doctor’s brow, and a nervous disposition make itself apparent on his face as he inspected the shoots and boughs. I gave a short history of the difficulties we faced, to which Dr Burnham was only made more uncomfortable. He began with denial, claiming we were playing some kind of farce upon him. But the gravity of the room was such that he couldn’t appear to believe his own accusations. Stumped and at a loss, the doctor departed, promising not to tell a soul what he witnessed.

Thankfully Julia didn’t take the doctor’s inability to help as too much of a blow. I reckon in her heart she had little hope a doctor could help, for the condition is too absurd for scientific reasoning. I suppose our search must continue.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

16th of June 1869

Julia’s condition has only worsened still. Her joints ache, as if she’s becoming arthritic. There is however a creek as she moves, as if her arms make the sound of branches swaying in the wind. The curse, as we are now wont to call it, appears to be taking over her whole body. Some youths, who could only have been between twelve to sixteen years of age, were trespassing the estate about a week ago, and had crept up towards the conservatory. There, they witnessed me pruning Julia’s branches. They looked at us shocked yet thrilled, and we looked back with faces of terror. Since then word has been passed around through the gossiping housewives of the local villages of the ‘demonic forces’ at work in our manor. Geoffrey, who regularly travels to Buxton to restock our pantry, has been treated with great distance and revile after the rumours spread. The townsfolk want nothing to do with the ‘Birdnest Queen’, as they have dubbed my wife, owing to the bristled twig hair she has begun to develop.

Julia’s spirits are now supremely low, owing to our household’s smeared reputation. The way she talks is as if she believes this curse will devour her and end her life; there is no shimmer of hope left in her eyes, only a kind of resigned acceptance. It pains me dearly to see her in this state. Whilst we are not a particularly religious household, I’ve called for our parish priest against Julia’s wishes. Since childhood, she’s been afraid of priests, but, though it may be clutching at straws, straws are all we have to clutch.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

20th June 1869

The priest looked at Julia’s condition, and did not curse her as demon, as if this were some parodied literary depiction, but was instead very gentle with her. I left the room as they spoke together for a time in confidence. After their conversation, which could possibly have been an hour or so long, the priest left the conservatory and came to talk to me alone. He told me that there was no miraculous act of healing the church could do for her, but that all we can do is pray for her condition to improve. He said he’d pray every morning and evening for her, and recommended I do likewise, and off he went.

Julia’s attitude improved ever so slightly after the visit; the black, vacant look in her eyes now has a little colour once more. I think for Julia simply being able to talk to someone other than myself about her predicament has been a great relief. Hopefully we can invite him around to talk to again soon.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

16th of August 1869

Our situation has gotten much worse. Julia’s legs have begun to become wooden. Since the accident, they have never moved, but now her lifeless withered legs have begun to develop a bark covering and a somewhat hollow resonance when knocked. To be more precise, they have begun to look like roots, with smaller roots parting off from her legs. No leaves grow off this part of her body. My wife’s arms are now stiff and creek so much that painting has become an impossibility. Her voice has become thin and husky. Her one request come the morning is to be wheeled outside of the conservatory and bask in the summer sun, much like how trees absorb the sun’s light. Much like with the parched-ness prior, this tree curse has begun to change how she acts - which is what worries me most. Her personality has begun to change. Before - even after the accident - she had a jollity to how she held herself, and a kind of joy of innocence and naivity. Nowadays, she speaks in grand pronouncements and oracular confidence, only to look over at me with a knowing look so as to suggest she were a wise sage. Is she still the woman I married? Once her body is taken over, and her personality overwritten, is she still my sweet Julia?

A couple days ago, Julia grew an apple. Absurd, I know, but an apple grew upon one of the boughs of her back, which now jut out two feet long like demonic wings. Yet she didn’t seem the least bit concerned. Nay, she plucked off the apple and offered it to me smiling. Not with a smile of understanding the absurdity and accepting this new reality, but an earnest smile as if she was giving me a most treasured gift. Since then I haven’t been able to bring myself to see her as much. Rosemary has very kindly been taking care of Julia. I myself have spent much time at the local inn, alone, drinking to my sorrows. I know it isn’t what I ought to do, but to see my beloved be enveloped in such a curse has driven me to the end of my wits.

The end appears near. This curse has only progressed further and further, deeper and deeper, and there appears no sign of its subsidence. I need to begin to let go of her.

To whomever may one day read this,
John.

1st November 1869

This past month of October myself and Julia have slept apart. These past few days, it seems as if she hardly recognises me, only ever able to look past me into the rolling hills, to which she stared with shimmering eyes. She spoke when I’m there, but never to me - only to some kind of abstract sense of me, or rather some abstract sense of another.

But she’ll speak no more as of last night. I awoke at a deep hour of the night to screeching and pained noises from Julia’s quarters. Such screams and full-blooding signs of life as I haven’t heard from her in so long! I rushed to her room to see what was the matter, but she was gone, and no where to be seen. But how, I thought. Not only is she now mostly wooden, but her lignification has hardly aided her paralysis. The screeching appeared again, now in the conservatory. En route, I met with Geoffrey and Rosemary, both of whom shared my bafflement at Julia’s method of transportation. Rushing to the conservatory, we lit oil lamps, illuminating just enough to see what was occurring outside.

Just outside the conservatory, Julia’s legs, which now are indistinguishable from tree roots, burrowed into the soil, and we saw Julia anchor herself into the topsoil. That which hadn’t been yet turned to wood, namely her torso and face, rapidly lignified, her face crying out my name, “John, John, please help me John!” she cried, but I didn’t go out to help. O how this final burst of lucidity has tortured me since! But what could I have done. Up to this point she has been mute and distant, blind to my presence - why only now does she call for me!

As she became fully tree, her night gown fell from her body, revealing her uncanny wooden and knotted torso. Then, at surreal speed, her various boughs and twigs grew, each then being populated with leaves, her body bolt upright in a scarecrow-like tee-shape, fruiting many more ripe apples. And that was that. The initial pain and sorrow at her lost was alloyed with a guilty relief and joy. For whilst her grievous hardship has caused my Julia immense pain, it has also been a great weight upon myself, and the household. Maybe I am free of this curse upon me... no. No. Julia has always been my light, and I’ll sorely miss her.

Nowhere now on these rolling hills will I feel at one with Nature. Nowhere will I want to feel small by Her vastness. For Nature saw my wife as small and insignificant, and took her as one of Her own; Mother Nature holds no love for us, but sees us as matter, as part of some cycle. O how I wish my love for Julia could claim her as one of our own. O how I wish we could have a normal life, a happy life, a real life. O how I wish we belonged to Him, and not to Her.

2024/04/28 Being Surprised By Joy

I'm not pilfering the title of C. S. Lewis' autobiography for any vain reason; rather, I'd like to start with one of my favourite quotes, from Screwtape's eighth letter:

He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best.

These moments of Joy, or Grace, come seldom, but once experienced they cannot be forgotten. A couple days ago I had such an experience. It is not as if the worries of the world nor the passions of the flesh disappeared - in such a state one still feels hunger, and experiences that naggling anxiety in the back of the head - but these feelings didn't control me. At work, my eyes were wide open, I was more personable, and it felt as if the tasks I typically would struggle with or ignore in everyday life were made simple. Those suggestions of kindness which pass across the mind, I would often ignore, or against resistance fulfil; these were made easy in such a state. It's as if it were an altered state of consciousness.

The phrase altered state has a lot of baggage, and rightfully so. Drug users love to list the drugs they've taken, and give vague descriptions of the flavour of how their mind acted. But in those descriptions, there's always a hardness of heart. Numbing drugs, like opiates, have little in common and can be ignored. Stimulating drugs like cocaine and amphetamines are fuel for pride, and have little in common also. The psychedelics make people emotionally delicate and brittle, which is a very different sensation from the firm yet pliant experience of mine. These drugs communicate with other Devils/Devas (Human Instrumentality), not God. And finally there's Ecstasy, which many would draw parallels, but is a very different feeling, since that love is of a heavy oppressive nature. Why do I list drugs as such - it is after all rather crude. My point is only that science can be wielded like a kitchen knife in a murder case: the kitchen knife was never intended to be used that way, and something important is now lost. Screwtape himself claims to use scientific materialism and textual criticism as a way of weakening faith. Such models of this hormone or that hormone, or of this neurotransmitter or that neurotransmitter, miss the wood for the trees when it comes to mystical experiences. God may well work via hormones and neurotransmitters, insofar as prayers can heal via the work of the talent of doctors, but it doesn't affect where the ultimate origin lies. Many have become supremely distrustful of sensation and feeling and all things empirical, for science - once the empirical investigation par excellence - has back-flipped into a rationalist worldview through which all else must be seen. I have dealt with the issues of this model elsewhere, but would also like to point out how this scientific reduction can make us disbelieve in anything we experience, as if we were being gaslighted - including the gifts of Grace.

Returning to Lewis' quote, the dwelling of the Holy Spirit in man can, like in my own experience be but fleeting. But it is only fleeting because man must stand on his own two legs; the passage vividly paints for me a father with a child who can only crawl, with the father holding the baby up-right by the arms letting him pretend to walk. I feel as if I have faint memories and vague feelings of that very thing in childhood. Due to the sin of Adam, the eating from the tree too soon, man is spiritually like a child, unripe, never given time in Eden to mature. Hence, we fall for the sins of the flesh, the garments of skin we were clothed in, upon our expulsion from Paradise. The spiritual life then, I believe, involves becoming an adult in spirit. And these moments of Grace are when your father puts you on his shoulders as a child, and you can see over so many of the walls which previously blocked your gaze.

I've come to realise that the Reformation was correct, despite the trends and allures of Eastern Orthodoxy today. I've realised that many of those who call themselves Orthodox convert to Orthodoxy for purely Protestant reasons. Whilst many arrive there via the rituals, many are convinced by the apologetics and beliefs. The very picking and choosing based on belief against your own tradition, is a very Protestant mindset; yet somehow many find themselves adopting a foreign tradition - the least traditional of actions - for the sake of tradition! Tradition is valuable, granted, but history is even more valuable. I've been listening to some of the work of N. T. Wright lately, and he emphasises how the reformation didn't go far enough; Luther and Calvin wanted to save the theology of St. Augustine and the early fathers from the Scholastics and over-philosophising of the High Mediaeval church, but Wright argues that the theology of Paul and of Christ should be found against even the early church fathers. Granted, 'the return to scripture' is a rallying call hollered far and wide. But when that call was projected in the past, there wasn't the historical knowledge of the period to contextualise the Bible. Context is everything; for a text can be interpreted in a number of incorrect ways. And the Bible, being a text written over millennia, cannot be understood without historical context to give shape to the cosmology these peoples of different eras saw the world through, let alone their words used. And the New Testament is told through the tradition of Herodotus and Thucydides, with St Luke's Gospel beginning with a preface explaining how he sought sources to piece together the account. Tradition is a good means of preserving history; but history can aid us in making further discoveries with regards to the Bible.

Given history can be used alongside tradition to understand the Bible, I'll return to the discussion at hand. In 1 Corinthians 6, we have the famous line from St Paul that 'the body is a temple' - but to the Judeans, there were no temples: just the temple. The plurality of temples are for pagan idol worship, which is certainly not what St Paul would've wanted to be thought saying. In the Second Temple period, the temple was the meeting place of Heaven and Earth - God's presence was within the Holy of Holies. And at the time of Jesus' birth, all of Judean worship revolved around the temple, and so did it too in the first temple period. God resides in the temple; look at Nabab and Abihu, for instance. The two sons of Aaron incorrectly made a sacrifice to God at the temple, and were engulfed in flames. Many traditional interpretations see this as God's wrath in action; but more recent scholarly analysis creates a new picture. The Hebrew of the Old Testament is a strange language. For one, being a Semitic language, it uses an abjad instead of a alphabet, so many of the vowels are simply implied, making room for mistranslation. Another issue, from what I've read, is a confusion between active and passive tenses, for the grammar doesn't correspond to our Indo-European grammar that fluidly. The interpretation I've heard recently, is that God's wrath is not a active thing, but rather an passive thing, meaning that Nabab and Abihu weren't simply shot down by God out of anger - for God being angry doesn't make much sense - but were burnt because they were dealing with the fires of God improperly. Being fallen beings, we can no longer walk with God, and have to protect ourselves. God can only descend into the temple and live with his creation because of the purifying rituals performed upon the temple. And, to wind back to Grace, and to finally write out the impetus for this article, the passage from 1 Corinthians says that we are the temple, and means that we must purify ourselves in order to accept the Holy Spirit into us. God gives us Grace to show us what the world looks like sat upon our Father's shoulders. And that Grace is to spur us on to commit as little sin as possible and make our bodies vessels into which the Holy Spirit can indwell conferring further Grace.

Some of the points argued I heard from an Orthodox scholar, Father Stephen de Young, whose work I recommend. Somehow the Orthodox return to tradition, and the new evaluation of scripture through the works of history a la N. T. Wright loop around to a similar location. Whether we travel rightwards or leftwards we come to a similar destination, to open the window, and waft out a staleness in thought. Just as at the end first millennium since Christ's death there were great movements in theology, perhaps the same will be seen come the end of the second. Perhaps a new reformatio just as did Pope Gregory VII revolutionise the Catholic church just under 1000 years ago, or as did Martin Luther just over 500 years ago. I believe there to be interesting movements in the future, but what form it will take I'm not sure.

2024/04/18 5G and Instrumentality

There is a list on my phone of titles for blog articles, a list which has been growing for the past few years and now numbers over a hundred strong. One such title reads '5g towers and fears of instrumentality'. I reckon this has sat there for at least a couple years, maybe more. And lo and behold, this anime season a producer for a studio must've found my phone, found the title, and funded an anime on the topic! That anime, airing this season, is Shuumatsu no Train. Given it's topical, I reckon I ought to explicate this old thought, and give it some life.

First, we'll explain instrumentality - a favourite occupation of mine. Despite many an Eva-fan misunderstanding the show, repeating "I wuz so depressed afterwards", Evangelion is a show of hope. The word evangelion - the Greek for the gospels of the bible - was previously used in classical Rome as heralds of victory before the general returned home; indeed, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a herald that we too can overcome instrumentality both in the world and in oneself. The 'in oneself' aspect of instrumentality we can park for today, since it doesn't apply to our discussion. The instrumentality 'in the world' is pictured vividly in End of Eva: we see the world melt into psychic marmalade, the boundaries giving structure, sense, and order to things are broken down, and the barriers which separate people also dissolve, making you me, and me you. In other words, 'all returns to nothing' and 'it all comes tumbling down'.

There are patterns in this world which we take for granted. That humans pop out of the womb white, brown, yellow, or black isn't a given; who's to say a child can't be born blue or green? One may well argue that we are constrained by our genetics, by our inherited traits; but those very heritable traits, those iron laws that a child resembles the parents, are a pattern in the world we take for granted. What would the world be like if trees ceased to fruit, or worms began to burrow through concrete, or dogs re-wilded themselves and formed wolf packs terrorising pedestrians. Such speculation is the fuel for so many of the fantastical stories which thrill us, and they thrill us because they show us a world different to our own. Whilst a splash of novelty, like secondary school wizarding institutions, can be novel; but once true instrumentality comes into existence, it is a terrifying existence. We would have no trust, or rather no faith, that even the ground beneath is solid, that's we'd hold the same shape one day to the next, let alone have stable jobs and stable lives. Is it a world of more freedom, or less? It's a question that's well worth considering, given that so much of the modern J. S. Mills/French Revolution/post-modern conception of freedom is predicated on breaking taboos and breaking rules. The logical ultimate of the exothermic taboo-breaking in vogue is chaos, instrumentality, and anarchy, in my opinion. True freedom is based on law and order. As Moldbug points out, if mafia men run your streets, there is certainly no freedom: law and order is the garden that let's freedom grow. The overgrown weeds of anarchy are mere tyranny.

Shuumatsu no Train currently has three episodes out this season, and in my opinion is the best new anime since Bocchi the Rock. Similar to Bocchi, Train has complex themes, extending the power of the best formula there is, the four girls anime. The beginning of the anime witnesses Tokyo morphed and distorted by the power of 7G utilising some techno-babble to connect all of man. This connection of all mankind goes horrifically wrong, bending and twisting reality into a Paprika-esque dreamscape. Our protagonists in the story are travelling on a train in a Divine Comedy/Made in Abyss journey to the epicentre of the chaos, Ikebukuro, where they believe they can find their lost friend. Shuumatsu no Train won't be the first anime to alloy the ideas of technology and instrumentality. Serial Experiments Lain was at the time described by some particularly cynical anime fans as a Eva knock-off, since it depicts Lain losing her self identity and boundary of self by plugging into the internet. The internet leads Lain on a downward trajectory of psychosis and a megalomania of godhood, leaving her everywhere and nowhere all at once. The aforementioned Paprika also has themes of tech-based Instrumentality, told through the plot device of a contraption which allows a psychotherapist to enter dreams and interact with the subconscious, leading to the subconscious of the world gushing out into reality. In Paprika, the dreams of all of man are connected, stewing all of man unconscious thoughts together into one endless parade of insanity.

Indeed, dreams are the fenced-off pen for instrumentality and chaos. And in Shuumatsu no Train, 7G dissolves the order and structure of the world, leaving a chaotic tyranny in its wake. But the casus belli of this article revolves around the link between 5G and instrumentality. Wat dis mean? Fear of 5G towers looms large in the minds of conspiratorial folk distrusting of the elite. As an issue, it seems a rather arbitrary target to pick on; and to someone outside of those circles, the ailments its meant to cause are bizarre. Why should 5G give autism and cancer whilst 4G is benign?

The isolation of pandemic made a lot of people insane - I can personally attest to that. But in equal measure, owing to a reduced interaction with reality, many minds spun off into a more poetical mode of thought. To explain this, I'll briefly diagram the model of the mind I subscribe to: below our logical, rational, verbal mind, exists our poetical and imaginative mind. Simply, at root we experience images, vague feelings, and archetypal narrative structures; whilst on a higher level of the mind - a more conscious, yet less influential strata - we have verbal thoughts, and reason through our problems. The poetical level of consciousness is that lower level, where the confidence and lyricality of a rousing speech matters more than its contents. That poetical level of consciousness believes that metaphors are real. To favour the higher mind over the lower mind too much makes you an annoying materialist who always has an inane comment to make, and usually a clean freak; whilst to favour the lower mind over the higher mind too much makes you into a hopeless Romanticist, losing touch with reality, who'll eventually hear Pan's call run into the forest to become one with the soil.

Whilst the claim that 5G towers are a proximate cause autism is boneheadedly retarded on a verbal and logical level, the claim makes sense on the level of poetic consciousness. Many think Alex Jones is a madman - and in many a way he is mad - but people latch on to his ideas because he too is operating on the level of poetical consciousness. The elites aren't literally inter-dimensional psychic vampires; but taken metaphorically, the statement holds some water. The image is true, even if the logic and words are not. Similarly, 5G doesn't literally cause illness, but the interconnectedness of all man via their phones certainly confers an imagistic, metaphorical illness. Again, it's the connection of all man by technology into a barrier-breaking psychic network. The fear of 5G towers is a presentiment of Human Instrumentality.

It's now the time to wrap up the article by quoting G. K. Chesterton. In his essay 'The Maniac', Chesterton writes, "Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do no go mad; but chess-players do." After all, as Chesterton goes on to argue, the mad man can argue with pin-point precision his case for why the Earth is flat, ironing out an answer for every question that can be thrown at him. A YouTuber who I used to watch was a Jungian analyst who did work in mental asylums. One sobering anecdote he recounted was of a long conversation he had about Jung and the I Ching at the asylum with who he thought was a fellow psychiatrist. Only after one of the nurses who worked there came to retrieve his conversation partner did he discover the person he was talking to was in fact a patient. Using too much 'facts & logic' is the quickest path to becoming a madman, for the fear of the coming of 5G towers is evidently a mad thing to think. Believing what is imagistically true to be rationally true can either be a folly or a great discovery. It is, after all, far easier to disbelieve than to believe. Therefore, it takes our greatest wits, and the wisdom of society from past to present, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and point our force of reason at the bulls-eye. Or, as the ancient Persians said, "Shoot straight, and tell the truth."

2024/04/14 The King's England

Today, myself and a couple of friends wandered the small village of Cromford, west of Derby. The village is as picturesque a vision of the countryside as can be fathomed: rolling country hills as far as the eye can see; pretty churches and higglety pigglety shops and dwellings; and a kind of kindness and high trust that can only be found once unchained from the coughing city smogs. Walking around, we visited antiques shops and book shops. The antiques shops contain a mixture of war memorabilia and affects of the deceased; all the valuable nicknacks the next generation didn't want to inherit. And in one such antique shop was an old hardback book, whose spine read 'The King's England'.

I rolled the poetry of the phrase around my mouth, 'The King's England': that is where I now am. The England of the shire is so different from the England of the city - there's an almost unrecognisable chasm separating the two. Looking around Nottingham, the multi-ethnic bustle, the distrust, the ugliness of the concrete buildings, the fumed air, all has very little in common to the old England preserved under an hour away by train. In that moment there was a soft shock of realisation that where I was was The King's England, rather than the England of the Commons.

The British political system is strange, in that we have a kind of diarchy. David Starkey on his youtube channel describes how the British government has two castles from whence power comes, from Westminister in the form of the Commons, and from the Crown. Whilst the monarch had power separate from the Commons in the past, now of course that is no more, and this diachic structure of two opposing interests has been reduced to but the Commons. But whilst parliament is a kind of engine, churning through paperwork, a chamber of stressed men arguing over policy (however pointless an exercise the system may now have rendered it), the king simply presides. We have no president, for the monarch, albeit in name and ceremonial duties only, presides over the state. A king has no need to argue for policies, nor write new laws, for he is the king. If Henry VIII decreed that something would be the case, it would first be ratified by parliament, and then become law. There was no fight nor struggle for him, for his humble servants in Whitehall would carry out the nitty gritty, and he could continue composing music, for he is the king. In The King's England, there is no stress and turmoil of the follies of politics, just as the king has no need for those things either. The king presides, and his subjects obey. This simpler form of politics breeds a simpler form of life, a life not seeing individual participation in governance by the individual as a moral good. And as Carl Schmitt says, all culture is downstream of politics. Therefore, those in The King's England will live differently to those in the England of the Commons.

The King's England is beholden to older, more archaic, and more natural systems of governance and laws. For instance, the honesty boxes of Cromford would be ransacked in moments in Nottingham. Strict governance with laws are necessary in low trust areas, in cities which are unnatural. And because the cities are unnatural, there is no self-organising natural law adhering the community together, and the strict legalism of the House of Commons is necessary. Whilst there's a kind of self-organising law in The King's England, rooted in high-trust, and maintained by community perceptions. This is not to say the king's courts are unnecessary, but that there's a kind of organic equilibrium in the countryside compared with a treadmill jog in the cities.

These thoughts are young and quite disparate, I apologise, but I hope I'm beginning to piece this together. There's a sense of freedom in the countryside which I've learnt to recognise, but have only today been offered a way to explain it. It isn't the horrid freedom of J. S. Mills, to do whatever we deem right in our own eyes granted it doesn't hurt another, but the freedom of being a subject rather than a citizen. Political revolutions never begin in the countryside, not merely because they don't have the numbers to organise, but because they have no need of them. Whilst the cities compete to run ever-faster, and the government try to eke every last drop of productivity from those who work to make the GDP increase by a fraction, the city remains still, not evolving and building, but simply presiding.

2024/04/07 Bladerunner, the Neo-Egyptian style, and the Evil of Zigurrats

I first watched Bladerunner as a kid - the film is a favourite of my father, but I was too young to properly understand the themes. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve watched both the original and the new sequel film; which was surprisingly alright. It lacked some of the ambience and noir of the original film, in part due to the absence of Vangelis’ score, but the film managed to reinvent itself, albeit with contemporary themes. The main character of the new film is a simp. Imprinted with a false memory that he is chosen by being a kind of sacred child born of man and replicant, he acts out the memories and aspirations of the one whose memories they are, giving up and making way for the true child once he realises this is the case. Much like the cuckoo, he cares for the drama and family of another with no gain to his own self. Selfless in a bitter-sweet tricked sense, rather than an altruistic sense: almost the definition of simping. Upon reflection, the film reaffirms much of the Christian symbolism of the first, that the replicants as organism created by man have no clan, no clade, no net, and cannot possess these connections. They are not ‘chosen’ people, nor part of God’s kingdom. That being said, the Christian symbolism of the original, with Roy’s stigmata and the speech he gives at the end can’t be beat.

But this article isn’t meant to be about comparing the previous film to the next - apologies for that. We’re here today to discuss the neo-Egyptian style common to both films. By neo-Egyptian, I’m referring to much of the decor, and the distinctive square-based columns, in distinction to the cylindrical columns of Greece. The ‘neo-Egyptian style’ is frequently referenced also as being fashionable in the forerunner of the cyberpunk style, Neuromancer. But what’s the significance of such a style? Our civilisations are part of traditions; long-standing traditions dating t the advent of civilisation. And architecture, as the mother of the arts, reflects both a civilisation’s origins and aspirations, and orients its perceptions of its past and future at different times of its history. Classical architecture harks from Greece, and civilisations wanting to mimic the grandeur of Rome, Athens, and Troy cohabit those nations’ styles. Similarly, the Gothic architecture, which alloyed with Classical architecture casts the form of modern Europe, finds its origins in Germanic traditions; and thus between these two parents is the birth of Faustian Western culture.

Given that our culture rightly sees its origins through the Classical and the Gothic style, what does an Egyptian style entail? First we must delineate between Egyptian and Classical culture. In a sense, this is an ur-distinction, preceding many other distinctions: this is the difference between Aryan and Semitic cultures. The Aryan culture focuses on smaller units of freedom, seeking the landowning farmer as an ideal as opposed to the city. For reference, European cities have traditionally been small despite having the technology to achieve larger dwellings, because they didn’t want larger dwellings. An example of the historically small size of European cities can be shown thus: the Aztec capital seized by Cortez had a population far greater than any city of Europe, even though the Aztecs hadn’t even discovered metallurgy on their tech tree. It is no limitation of institutions, nor prevalence of disease that discouraged Europeans from building large cities, as many argue: it was a difference in ideas. The Egyptians on the other hand were a civilisation of slaves. They had a far more state-focused conception of how men should be managed. The Pharaohs were god-emperors, men of immense authoritative power unequaled by the diffuse power of the West. Even the Roman emperors in all their tyranny could not command power like the Pharaohs. The Semitic culture of Babylon was much the same. And we see this pattern of a hive-like communitarian ‘long-house’ culture across Asia, in China, and in India; massive cities of many people, dominated by the emperor and the mandate of heaven in the case of China, and a rigid theocratic order of castes and priests in the case of India.

The dystopia of cyberpunk is of a post-Faustian civilisation. And by post-Faustian, I’m referring to Spengler’s description of Western civilisation being characterised by a Faustian spirit of sacrifice for technological power. So what will a post-Faustian society look like? The science fiction of Wells is of a great Faustian character; there’s always an element of man’s sacrifice of some sacred boundary, whether it be time in The Time Machine or of the boundaries of Earth in The First Men on the Moon. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein sees Dr Frankenstein make a similar Faustian sacrifice for science by rejecting the boundaries of humanity. The change in timbre of science fiction in the post-war 20th century I reckon stems from the sense that a new era of mankind is approaching - an era beyond our Faustian culture that these visionaries wished to describe. And the seeming dearth of vision in a lot of contemporary sci-fi, often being swallowed into the fold of the ever-burgeoning fantasy genre, I reckon is due to the first sprouts of the post-Faustian era which we’re struggling to describe.

Now, I won’t claim that the cyberpunk vision is the correct vision of the post-Faustian era; but it is a vision of what the future might’ve looked like. Because it isn’t as if such a horrific lot for man has no precedent in the past - I certainly wouldn’t want to slave as a pyramid building! And pyramids - or as they’re more generally known ziggurats - are key to the ethos of these Egyptian-style hive-like states. To put it simply, every ziggurat is a Tower of Babel. The purpose of the Tower of Babel - and the purpose of any ziggurat - is similar to that of an idol in pagan worship: to convince, bait, or trick the gods (demons) from on high down to the settlements below. Pagan gods live on mountains, like Mount Olympus. Much like how an idol is meant to act as a residence to a god so one can share meals with them, a ziggurat is a kind of false mountain made by man upon which the gods can reside. The Tower of Babel was such an attempt - Babylon was an archetypal hive nation of slaves, after all. Babel was no attempt to reach God, as in a kind of Icarus, but an attempt to bring the most high God down into an idol, as if He were a fallen angel, desiring food and incense; hence the folly and subsequent punishment. The story of Babel is a kind of inversion of any other pagan ziggurat building faith. And in the centre of the city of the original Bladerunner stands a very large imposing ziggurat at the centre; a mark of the morph to a hive-like cultural era.

Bladerunner, then, takes influence from both Egyptian civilisation and the civilisations of the far East. The film’s aesthetic is marinated in the trappings of downtown Tokyo, which was in the 80s the distinctive image of the future as the time. China too has their fair share of ziggurats, most notably the mausoleums of the god-emperors. And the largest ziggurats in the world are in the New World. Much like Egypt and the East, Bladerunner sees the future of post-Faustian civilisation as one in which individual human life is no longer valued, and the strong local and yokel ties which hold together small tight families against the mass are disintegrating. I agree with this assessment in part. The past strength of family ties are disintegrating, as ideas of individual liberties are being prostrated before as paramount, whilst being contorted to have meanings beyond what their first writers could have intended. The logical extreme is never desired but invariably achieved. And the power of the state is growing, taking greater and greater interest in the lives of individuals, as the technology makes feasible ever-greater intrusions without impressing the outward slavery of the hive societies of Asia and Egypt. But I have hope. Hope that the spirit of Europe is not dead, and that from this slumber, which the Pied Pipers at the helm of these vast supra-governmental organisations have utilised, we shall awake. Our fate isn’t to be oppressed a la Bladerunner, for we are solid and can only be compressed so much, before our spirits spring back. Post-Faustian civilisation is still a mystery too us, and Millenarianism is in the air; the future has thus-far few willing to take the reigns.

2024/03/31 Towns without Pubs

I doubt I'd be alone proclaiming the British pub as one of the great achievements of our civilisation. The public house is a kind of paradox: at once both a house, the province of a family, and a private place; whilst also being public for the community. A pub is where you may sit and do nothing but have a pint or a meal; it's a place to meet up with your kith or kin and spend time. Less commonly now, but more so in the past, a pub was also an inn, participating in the 'bedroom' quality of a house. But as an institution it is under attack. Prices have been steadily rising for publicans to maintain their pubs, and many a pub has closed for not being profitable. Covid was a particularly bad extinction event for the British pub, since they were unable to act as community spots when community was banned. But there's a greater threat to this age old institution which grew up alongside the nation. To this nation, in fact, the pub has a symbiosis with its people; for without the pub upon which the people's lifeblood relies, the British lifestyle may well wither on the vine. But again, there is a greater threat to the future of pubs, and consequently of Britain, that being architecture.

This image posted above I took on the way home from my commute, en route to Loughborough station. You'll notice, that amongst the terraced houses - for once upon a time there was industry in Britain - there is a strange larger house upon the street corner with boarded up windows. This building, now derelict, was once a pub. How can I tell? Well, it's a suburban house which does not look like the rest; it has a strange neo-Tudor look, with the fake wattle and daub which the Victorians loved so much; and the house is large, much too large for anyone who could afford it to want to live in such a neighbourhood. This building was once a pub, yet now it is no more. With the withering of British industry, the traditional white working classes have in part made way to a population who does not drink, and the pub is gone. But the seed of a pub is still there. This community has a pub-shaped hole, but it is merely waiting for a tenant to restore it. One day I hope it will be restored, and this now shady area next to the station will become once more beaming with life.

There was once a people who despised drinking, despised pubs, and despised general merriment. These people were known as the Puritans. The sailed away to sea, to set up dry colonies, and populate American with towns without pubs. And the American suburb today, for my knowledge comes solely from films and media, is a depressing place. Endless identity-less stretches of winding roads, each with sizeable houses jutting off, but no core no heart. Much like vegetation, there are wide long trunk and bough roads, with twigs and leaves branching off; whilst in reality, a city ought to be a human. A city has organs, districts of different utilities, but most importantly, each area should be unique, and bound together within itself. The pub designates a unit of area perfectly. Whilst the parish of the church designates the unit of area vertically in relation to God, the pub works horizontally, and a good deal smaller the area is. The pub is a kind of locus of society, a node of a town, to be protected as a semi-sacred meeting place.

My worry is that British architecture is moving in the same direction. We live in a kind of neo-Puritan parody, and an unexpected consequence of this is that areas of new-builds have no pubs. These architects plan out these spaces with a thousand faddy buzzwords but forget this most important touch. And it will be hard, one day, for these American-style dwellings to become suitable British housing, because, unlike the closed pub of Loughborough, there is no shell for the ghost to slip in to. These plots of new-builds are destined to always be soulless without life, forever destined to be but commuter zones to older parts of the city, and forever destined to be tumorous annexes. Often, new-build areas are within walking distance of pubs, making the choice somewhat acceptable. Even if these new villages within a town, which town planners are in the habit of making now, have no core in of themselves, at least the locals have options. But when these developments are a bit further out of town there will be grave issues; and as the intentionally inflated need for new-builds rise, they will no longer be in range of the pubs that exist.

The main issue is that running and maintaining a pub is too expensive. The relief schemes, if there are any, are simply not enough. For the British as a sovereign people, this is a life and death scenario, for we are symbiotically attached to the system of pubs. The fight is not lost. One does not know what one has lost until its gone. Long live the pubs!

2024/03/24 The Crushing of the Black Skoda

Some five or so years ago, my mother set out to buy a new car. Her old car was getting on in its years - a black Skoda Fabia it was - and despite it's worn look and feel, it'd been going since the mid-noughties when it was bought second-hand. A trooper, it'd taken us far and wide: on family holidays down to Cornwall; across the channel to Normandy; and all the way to Amsterdam. There are many pictures of the family in the old black Skoda, including one family-famous pic of my brother and I along with the next-door neighbours all crammed into the boot of the Skoda; when we were younger, of course.

But all old cars come to an end. Houses remain in place for another family to populate and live in, however odd it may feel, but cars are sent to the killing fields: the scrapheap. My mother went to witness her car, the old veritable Skoda being scrapped, and filmed it. "BreadIsDead (my name here is redacted, but probably easily findable), do you want to watch the video of my old car being scrapped?", she said with unnerving enthusiasm. I was horrified at the suggestion. I couldn't stand to see the trustworthy old steed that had ridden my family around since childhood be crushed by some demonic arm. Imagine going to the vet and taking a video of your horse being put down, and wanting to spread it to kith and kin with such excitement - you'd be taken for a lunatic!

Now, please understand this is not an attack on my mother. I don't mean to denounce her for such grave cruelty to the black Skoda, since I feel it's a sentiment - or lack thereof - common to many. For it is truly a question of sentiment, and what one feels sentiment for. The vegan has a sincere grave sentiment for the plight of the cow or sheep, but very little for the cockroach or rat which may wish to make their house theirs also. Whilst the poacher in Africa has very little sentiment for the allegedly very man-like Elephants, thought to possess wisdom. Sentiment is a kind of sliding scale, or rather some sort of two-dimension heat map like a political compass, detailing for what an individual feels sentiment towards. For I feel sentiment towards objects more strongly than most, but less than most for animals; although most feel the other way around.

My old walking boots for instance; I can't bring myself to throw them away. The soles are worn through to the point that both have holds, making every small puddle a hazard; both have holes throughout their leather, with wounds and scars across the surfaces; and the left boot has the most enormous hole, rendering the back third of the sole completely detached from the rest. I walk quite a long distance to and from work, and I calculated that while I've been working there, I have so far walked over 750 miles, not withstanding other walks those boots have taken me. They have taken me far; and I can't stand to see the trustworthy old steeds (unyoked, thankfully) that have aided my person around for years to be sent to the dustbin. So far they've waited en garde in the hallway, awaiting an honourable discharge from service.

Many love dogs for their service and obedience; and granted, it is a very endearing trait in dogs. But objects have absolute obedience. Looking around me, my coffee mug will continue to hold coffee for me to drink until its very body deteriorates and it can hold no more. However grimy I may leave it, it will continue to hold coffee for me and not rebel and let it leak out from a kind of spite or malice. And its well-being is completely within my care, for if it were to fall and smash, that would be white, powdery porcelain blood on my hands. The books on the bookshelf next to where I write are mostly old and second-hand; looking at the inside cover of my copy of Chesterton's 'Ballad of the White Horse', I can see it originally belonged to Lilian, and was gifted to her by her aunties on the Christmas of 1927; and later in this book's life, it belonged to a Trevor E Bowers whose ownership, judging by the date of the sticker to which the name is attached, dates to around 1984. However many other owners this book may have had, it has served their masters well. The book has since aged old, the pages mottled with liver spots, the binding impregnated with that rosy smell of decay common to the elderly; it is old, yet it still serves, loyally reciting Chesterton's poem to whoever turns its pages.

I may well sound like a madman. And many would probably agree. But I see objects as being capable of an absolute agape, for they follow the natural law perfectly. They cannot be disobedient, they cannot whine when a task is requested of them, and they cannot sin through pride and envy. They are loyal servants who will do whatever is commanded. What a fairytale world we would live in if the coffee mugs unionised and staged a revolt! Animals follow natural law also, but aren't destined to be true servants in the way objects are. Animals generally have extra callings than to simply serve man, such as the impulse of self-preservation and self-propagation. Mankind, in turn, has a calling to serve God. As the tin soldier is to man, man is to God, as Lewis argues in Mere Christianity. Being fallen creatures, we cannot serve with the loyalty that objects serve us; and nor can we love our objects as much as God loves us. But I reckon we can at least try to. We can try and have sentiment for the tools which make our lives feasible. We can try to love our old worn boots or our old car. And we can try and love many a mug as if it were our favourite mug, however ugly a mug it may be.

Destruction is necessary - the forest which burns down fertilises the soil for new life - but the thrill of destruction, the intoxication of Kali, is unsightly. I argue not for a protracted funeral service for every car scrapped, but merely for the solemnity and respect the Skoda was due. It worked hard for our benefit over its life of service. And it's just not right to let its death be in mocked and ridiculed.

2024/03/17 The Oft-Maligned British Cuisine

The British have always liked to put down the qualities they have as an act of humble bragging; but when cultures from around the world see British cuisine as a punching bag, and frivolously insult our cooking as flavourless and wanting, there is clearly a crisis. Among the British, this has aggravated our natural inclination for Orientalism and exogamy, promoting a genuine dislike for the food on which many of us were weened. This is a sad state of affairs, since British food can be exceptional - however British cuisine is a cuisine of kings, a cuisine for each Englishman's castle - one that is now too expensive for many to afford. Our food accentuates the quality of fresh flavourful ingredients, which mass society, large cities, and chilled Maersk containers have for many made unfeasible.

This is one of my favourite paintings: Hogarth's The Gates of Calais. This single painting can explain a lot about Anglo-French relations, but we'll first discuss cuisine. We see a British man carrying a large hunk of beef past starving Frenchmen, who are holding pitiful bowls of soup, ogling the Englishman's food. British cuisine is based on good food. If you walk into Tesco today, a small beef roasting joint will cost you a small fortune. Many of the staple British dishes involve beef and lamb - and good, flavourful, local beef and lamb - cuts which most people can no longer afford. And our quality food has always been downstream of the freedom of an Englishman. When the British chant in patriotic songs they are free, they are comparing themselves to their enemies, the French, who certainly were not a free people. Democracy as a British institution pre-dates in many respects even the Norman invasions; the British have always had freedom, whilst the French have for most of their history been subjugated by absolute monarchs. The British peasant for almost all of history has been better off than the French peasant, the British soldier better fed than the French soldier; and this is the well-spring of British cooking. High-quality local ingredients available not only to the nobility, but also often to the common man.

Given the wealth of British cuisine, it was inevitable that with the fall of Britain's titanic power and wealth came a fall in the quality of food. The war years and the resulting rationing made much of British cuisine, with its reliance on butter and meats, harder to cook. And the sixties and seventies saw the advent of the TV Dinner and ready meals, all of which are pumped with preservatives, losing all the flavour freshness confers. British cuisine survives, however, in the country pub. Not the large chain pubs - however good they are for cheap British grub - but in the less accessible pubs powered by home-cooking. One of the best meals out I've ever had was having a proper steak and ale pie in a tiny village in the Isle of Wight. And good butchers will sell their own selection of splendid pies, which will be a mile better than anything Lord Sainsbury can sell you. You won't find good British food in the big shops, only in local places. It is a parochial cuisine of the individual.

On a separate note, to say that British food is 'bland' is simply a lie. These past couple weeks, I've discovered that Stilton is delicious. And to say that Stilton is bland is nonsensical; to most, it's far too flavourful. Similar even with many traditional vegetables used in English cooking, like the Swede, which many find a little too sweet and vegetably, preferring the more flavourless potato as a substitute. It isn't the case that British food is in of itself bland; but rather that we've made it bland. The flavours British cuisine has always championed have become a little too much for many, who have come to prefer the far less complex spices of the east. I'll count myself in that camp - I too have been many times swayed by that same Orientalism present in the British psyche - but no longer can I claim the mixtures of spices in an Indian curry or a Chinese dish (Japan is different) are stronger than British food, or more complex. Herbs can provide just as complex a flavour profile as spices, but they don't overpower the other flavours like spices do. Herbs serve to accentuate the flavours of meat, whilst spices serve to hide them. Spices are expert in hiding the flavours of food on the verge of going off, or replacing the flavourlessness of their meat and vegetables.

British cuisine, I shall declare, is the ultimate test. While the skills to make British food are very few - for it is a cuisine of the people, not of the elite like in France - it is the ultimate test of ingredients to see if they can succeed through the most naked of trials. The quality of British cuisine is a kind of litmus test for whether good quality ingredients are affordable and readily available to the public; and currently, they are not. The insults casually slung at British food are a sign that quality food, and perhaps a tongue to notice quality food, are now lacking in the UK. But, as anyone who has had a good roast dinner can tell you, British food is the best in the world.

2024/03/10 Orchard Online - Chapter 2

Dave looked downwards and furrowed his brow in thought and recollection. The quest breaking the spell bewitching him, as if a gust of cold cavern breeze had blown away her faerie dust. The girl looked to the rugged stone ceiling so as to no let her tears be shown, and chucked to herself. “I suppose you wouldn’t know..”, she trailed off with a rueful smile. She looked back to the displayed books with the melancholy of a dwindled flame. Re-stoking her fires, her eyes once more locked onto his, “I’m Ginette, what’s your name?”. Dave searched for his words. “David Hathaway”, he said, averting his gaze from hers. Dave was unsure why he gave his full name. He stood up from his chair to shake her hand and exchange SCIDs (sub-cutaneous IDs), but when their hands shook there was no confirmatory vibration. Noticing the slight confusion painted on Dave’s face, Ginette smiled from the corner of her mouth and interjected. “Oh, I don’t have one of those.” Responding as if he’d been shocked with static, Dave retorted, “No SCID! How do you survive nowadays without a SCID? How do you pay in supermarkets and bars, or book doctors appointments, or board buses?” Whilst Dave stood, jaw agape, Ginette reached into her handbag and pulled out a chequebook, waving it around in front of him. “I also have a mobile phone you know”, she said with a marmalade smile, and pulled out an old Blackberry, bearing it as if it were a potent talisman to modernity. Dave then hardened with a faux suspicion. “You aren’t a drug dealer or anything, are you?” Ginette responded with a hearty belly-laugh. “What if I was?”, she said with such a gay cheekiness that Dave fell back into his chair. The creak of the wood echoed in the warm cave air.

Reaching into her handbag once more, Ginette took out her notebook and tore out a page. Uncapping her gold-rimmed fountain pen, she wrote down some digits on the page and scrumpled it up in one hand. Dave felt a light tug on his arm, and felt Ginette prying open his clenched fist. She then shook Dave’s hand with a victorious grin, leaving the scrumpled page with him. Dave uncreased the page and looked up at Ginette, whose head blotted out one of the larger green lights in the room. The light seemed to beam out like a verdant halo. “I hope to hear from you, later!” And with a surge of enthusiasm and energy, she turned one-hundred and eighty degrees on point, and marched out from the room, arms a-swinging.

The coffee on the table grew cold. Whilst the coffee was like the Sargasso Sea, Dave’s interior felt like a storm in a teacup. There was within him an effervescent excitement of the kind he hadn’t felt since boyhood, a sense of adventure and excitement his humdrum life of little pleasures had merely whitewashed and plastered over; his hands trembled, not with the tremours of an elderly man, but with the vibrations which precede the tribulations of one’s youth. He reached for his book, and found his page, but his eyes kept glossing the same line over and over, never quite taking it in.

“Another coffee, sir”, the barista asked from behind his bushed grey moustache. Dave’s attention was yanked from his deep monologuing, turning to the sounds at once. “Yes, please”, he replied, huffing the words out. The coffee was clinked onto the table, but the noise did little to take the reigns of Dave’s attention; for he was away with the faeries, deep under Ginette’s spell, staring deep abysses into the cavern lining.

Hours had passed, and the coffee shop’s grandfather clock chimed five. “I’m afraid we’re closing now, sir”, the barista said. Collecting his thoughts and his possessions, Dave bid the barista farewell, and made his way out of the underground markets. Emerging in the Corn Exchange building, the evening breeze smelt sweet, and there was innocent laughter in the air. Dave took the tram home, ascended the stairs of his flat, and set down his purchases. Walking over to his record player he put “200% Electronica” by ESPRIT on, and lay in bed dreamily.

“What a day.” His internal monologue in his own home’s privacy managed to make itself flesh. “I’m not even sure what today, what the stress of today, has been. Taken in material terms, I’ve done nothing more than my usual routine, but her - Ginette was her name, must’ve been - her appearance... I’m not sure. Her appearance has been something else entirely, something I don’t understand. Her copper hair, her electric visage, her powerful presence - was she even real? I’ve never had such an experience. Is this love? Is the desire, want? Is this hunger? Has my life up until this point been one of satiety, where I live seeking peace?” Tears began to well in the corners of Dave’s eyes, and they slid down each cheek like droplets on a train window. The bullseye was hit; the arrow had pierced the apple; a tender unconscious truth had been uprooted into the evening sunlight. “What have I been living for up until this point; is working from home with weekend coffee shop visits even living?” A vital energy rose from his toes to his nose, and a kind of aggression and anger washed over him. By the force of sheer momentum, with no aid of his arms, he sprung from his bed, landing on his feet. Pacing now, he repeated, “I must’nt let this white rabbit get away; I must’nt let this opportunity slip through my finger; I can’t. I can’t. I can’t let my chance for adventure disappear. I want to be lost”, and he felt the soft burning from tears welling once more, “I want to be lost like Crusoe and have to survive, even if its only to find my way back again. I want some kind of challenge.”

The first side of the record had finished playing, so he flipped the record to play the second side. He searched his pockets for the scrumpled paper with her number but it was gone. He searched his pockets thoroughly and many times over, but couldn’t find it. He crouched before his bed, head buried in the duvet, and thumped the bed with both fists, crying “My ticket to freedom; it’s gone.”

He raised the turntable’s arm to stop the record, and slunk into his armchair, defeated. Maybe it had all been a dream; maybe it had all been a fantasy, or wish fulfilment? Dave summoned his phone to order a takeaway - it was a takeaway kind of day. Before long, his pizza had arrived, and he gorged himself to fullness. Food has a way of taking the edge off of pain. Dave now sat in melancholy thinking of Ginette, as if she were some sort of old companion who’d past away before her prime. Recollections of her smile, her laugh, and the look in her eyes, the hunger in her eyes, cycled through Dave’s mind in an unending loop, bringing nought but nostalgia and a hopeless smile to his face. Then the words formed themselves on his lips as a faint whisper: “Orchard Online”. His hopeless doughey-eyes sharpened, his brow furrowed, and he repeated once more, “Orchard Online.” “Or was it Orchid Online? No, no, no, definitely Orchard Online.” Reaching for his phone, he did a quick search, but it yielded no results. “Orchard Online”, he repeated once more. The words rolled round his mouth as if they were made of fresh butter. There was a mystery - a deep mystery - to these words. Spoken by a prophetess, a muse, these words contained a kind of potent magical quality. He gazed up once more, with a weightless smile, as if his previous woes were washed away and cleansed. “Orchard Online”, he said once more, marvelling in what wonder could lie behind.

2024/03/02 The Man on the Moon

I've recently been reading some H. G. Wells, specifically at the moment The First Man on the Moon. The story recounts the memories of power-hungry poet with his companion, a navel-gazey genius, and their trip to the moon on a zero-gravity spherical space craft. There, they become lost, meeting moon-dwelling beings, moon cattle, and moon fungi, attempting to find their way home. Such is the potent imagination of Wells and other early science fiction writers that they brim with such great hope! Hope for future invention; hope for the way of the scientist; and hope for the great novelty waiting to be discovered. I haven't read too much science fiction of the era yet, but Jules Verne's Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea brims with this selfsame hope; Verne imagines a future pioneered by a slightly autistic scientific vanguard in the figure of Captain Nemo, and, reading the novel, the hope and excitement Verne feels for what lies waiting below the sea's surface is palpable.

From what I've read, the science fiction of the era is potent, potent in a way unimaginable today. There is too much knowledge about the moon to believe in the mooncalves of Wells' imagination grazing upon the surface. There is too much knowledge about the sea to have not yet discovered a Nautilus beneath its depths. There is too much knowledge about any celestial body worth caring about to believe there are parallel communities of aliens and their civilisations. The science fiction of later dates is always tainted with a darkness and grittiness, where the scientist is no longer the ronin pioneer of genius on a private adventure, like a Dr Frankenstein; but rather a Dr Faustus who wields science as a kind of covenant to exercise power over his fellow man. In part, the reversion back to the evil genius archetype is a positive reappraisal of Original Sin, for the scientist in all his learned power can't help but be corrupted by it. The pre-Great War sci-fi attitude to the scientist as a kind of Platonic philosopher who cares for nought but knowledge is very much in line with the pagan-Nietzscheanite age of the Late-Victorian and Edwardian ages, which Chesterton fought against. But in the psychical reassertion of the age-old truth of Original Sin, something of the fertility of imagination for these fantastical worlds was lost. Two World Wars seemed to have salted the fields of hope found in progress, with the apostatical Calvinism of modern progressivism behaving as a castrated simulacrum of its Nietzschean parallel.

The Apollo missions proved one very important thing to mankind: that the moon is a very boring place. The endless fields of rock would sustain no life, however many articles claim to have discovered what might appear to be rock formations shaped by flowing water. And as the Promethean light of knowledge bathes more of the known world, the mystery, the darkness, the elves, faeries, and nymphs, retreat further and further. H. G. Wells was a Fabian Socialist, after all, which was a kind of wedding of socialism and Western-focused internationalism, aiming to unify the world under Anglo-led free-trade and a brotherhood of nations. But as Chesterton rightly points out regarding Wells, 'there is only a thin sheet of paper between the Imperialist and the Internationalist; and the first Fabians had the lucidity to see the fact.' Sci-fi revels in the imperialism of other worlds, of the lone British explorer a la James Brooke of Sarawak; in The First Man on the Moon the protagonist in an intoxicated state quips that colonisation of the Selenites (the moon-dwellers) is part of the White Man's Burden. But the era of empire - at least explicitly, for the Fabian conception remains still widely in vogue - is over. Within later sci-fi, Star Trek brings the contention to consciousness, centrally dealing with the dilemma; for how can we explore alien planets without siding with Cortez?

Without imperialism and with fewer and fewer places to explore, worlds of hopeful fantastical happenings can no longer happen in the future, within our timeline, but have been abstracted to other timelines in the form of fantasy. Fantasy is sci-fi in parallel worlds, with low fantasy constituting a world much like our own, and high fantasy one less recognisable. But it feels decidedly like a relegation. For again, man has been to the moon, and found no mooncalves. No longer may I permit myself in sincerity to dream of mooncalves and believe they're real. Ghosts are liable to disappear in bright light; and the Promethean light of science is no different. Much like the Eloi of The Time Machine, man is afraid of the dark, of the unknown; yet we fail to discern the darkness and hidden fertility of the womb from the microbe-ridding sterility of ultra-violet light.

Thankfully whilst science can illuminate the material world, it has no jurisprudence over the world of the invisible. The Kingdom of God cannot be conquered by any imperium of man. One of the many tragedies of man is that the more we systematise the world in order to wield our understanding of it, the more boring it becomes. Some people I've talked to - for I work in science - tell me that to imagine the sunset as photons diffracting through the atmosphere enriches and enlivens their love for the sunset. For me, it can only ruin it.

2024/02/25 The Last of the Satanic Mills

A couple weeks ago, I was going to a walk around the Attenborough nature reserve near where I live. I found a pleasant looking bench looking over a lake, guarded by trees which acted as a kind of frame around the last coal power plant in Britain. The Ratcliffe power plant can be seen from miles around. I pass it every day on the way to work, since East Midlands Parkway station lies right beside the power station. The six broad steam towers have a strangely fungal quality up close, as if they are vents for a strange grey life-form which preys upon decayed matter. I almost expect the concrete to cartoonishly billow, expanding and contracting, as more steam is pumped out. But alas, soon Ratcliffe power plant will be no more. The date for its closure has been delayed and delayed owing to its utility, but the current plan is to retire the station from service come September.

Romanticism is a strange concept, and fundamentally a nihilistic one. There is no objective Romantic state of being, but rather Romanticism is forever looking backwards - not to a past of ten years ago, like the conservative, but to the past of a hundred, two-hundred, or three-hundred years ago. At root, Romanticism looks back to an age forgotten - an age never experienced - an age whose memory has been passed down and augmented colourfully to a new shade. To the Blakes and Carlyles, it was these very power plants that were the problem. Factories strung up in cities polluting toxic smog, railroads ran steam engines along them dissolving the distinctions of local cultures, and as time progressed power plants became alters in a kind of Jovian Faustian pact to produce electricity. In the 19th century, these were symbols of change. Now they are symbols of the past. Today, what could be more Romantic than riding a steam engine? The Romanticism of the past is different to the Romanticism of the present, because Romanticism isn't tied down to any time; the spirit of Romanticism floats slightly above the ground, struggling to maintain form and colour. The spirit attempts to assuage dissatisfaction with the present, looking to the simplicity and order of the past in contradistinction to the terror and complexity of the present. That isn't to say it is merely a cope, of course - I sympathise very much with the Romantic view - but it does imply a very specific pattern of history.

There are two contrasting views of history: the view of the Progressive and the view of the Romantic, or Reactionary. The Progressive views history as a ladder of improvement; with each technological or theoretical advancement, people live longer, people become healthier, and people become freer. The Progressive view sees the net material comfort, health, and liberty as the success algorithm against which success can be marked. The Reactionary views history, in contrast, as a snake of decay; with every technological advancement, man becomes more comfortable, resulting in a relaxing of moral vigour and successive generations of people weaker in mind and character. The Reactionary sees the quality of the individuals society produces as the success algorithm. The Romantic, sharing in the Reactionary's shame with the present, can't help but feel that the present can't hold a candle to the past. The great irony is that there has been a kind of flip in the narrative. In the 19th century, Romance was in the rolling hills, in the villages, and in mediaevalism; and whilst these are still all attributes of Romanticism today, so too are all the aspects of industrialisation the old Romantics railed against.

The factories, whilst working conditions were often poor, conferred great cohesion within communities. Seeing the desolation of post-industrial British towns today would make anyone yearn for the past. Because it isn't merely desolation, but also dissolution; life in many parts of the UK has become incredibly shabby and depressing, the sun being blotted out by a Great Northern Bongcloud. Nottingham is hardly the worst hit, but walking around you can see the remnants of industry everywhere. Raleigh Bikes, once the largest bicycle manufacturer in the world has become student accommodation. The John Player & Sons cigarette factory has become a retail outlet. And the manufactory side of Boots down the road, where Ibuprofen was discovered, is now on its last legs. There is something Romantic about industry, about factories, and about power plants. There's a sweet scent of a past age - a whiff of more hopeful times.

The last of the Satanic Mills will soon be decommissioned; Ratcliffe power plant will huff its last breath. Is this a great success for the work of the 19th century Romantics who, bringing the environment to the fore, managed to banish these grey beasts? Do Romantics who look hundreds of years to the past take just as many years for their dreams to reach fruition? The first tragedy of the Romantic is he will never see his vision realised; much like St. Hugh, he'll never see the finished cathedral. The second tragedy is that Romantics of the future will see the fruits of your thoughts and wish you hadn't done a thing.

2024/02/17 The Never-ending Feast

A couple nights ago, I had for dinner a very simple soup. Consisting of only couscous, tomato, peppers, and some diced chicken, this simple soup with no strong stimulating flavours had on me a kind of tonic effect. As an aside, I often wonder if the food of today, through the long supply chains and cold storage is less flavourful than the food of the past; it has been argued that the simplicity of English cuisine originates in accentuating the quality of the ingredients. And the strong flavours of the orient, like the spice mixes found in the Middle East, in India, and in the Far East (excluding Japan, of course), are to mask poor flavourless ingredients. But I digress. Simple foods are a kind of tonic: a tonic against the never-ending feast.

What is a feast, then? The feast is where the word festival originates; it's a meal to commemorate or celebrate through the consumption of vast quantities of usually rich foods. A rich food is a fatty food, or a dish designed and cooked with a degree of complexity; in the British canon of cuisine, we celebrate with say a roast, filled with lard-soaked potatoes and a big joint of meat, be it lamb, pork, beef, or a whole bird. For the Greeks - another culture I share through my family - the dishes of choice include lamb and other large pie like dishes like pastitsio, which is a lasagne-like dish laden with cheese and soufletted with egg; or giovetsi, which consists of a stew of orzo (small rice-shaped pasta) and meat in a tomato sauce, which Vefa - the authority of Greek cooking - recommends should be cooked with half a cup of good olive oil and half a block of butter. Even when halving the lipid content, it is as rich and creamy as a stew can be. These dishes are all feast dishes, designed to be served for special occasions. And it's no coincidence that the 'good' cuts of meat are for frying and the 'cheap' cuts of meat are for stewing: we bias the rich dish of the feast over the poor dish of the fast. In the past only the rich could 'eat like kings' and have roasts every day. Now, through advances in agriculture and logistics, the majority of the population can eat like a nobleman, even if they rent a room in an HMO. Our dietary habits have been cut asunder from our material realities.

The never-ending feast feels almost natural then. I know from my own experience how easy it is to eat well in the UK. Even if you are poorer or don't have the time to cook after work, there are endless ready meals like creamy fish pies, lasagnes, or coconut curries, all of which need only twenty minutes in the oven from frozen. We feast constantly, even when there's no festival, and we've forgotten what gives the feast its lustre: the fast.

I was going to write this article earlier, but decided to wait for the most well-known fast period of all: Lent. Every year, we give up something dear to us for lent; many give up a vice that they've been attached to, but often its best to give up something good for Lent. Continuing with the root of fasting, food, rich foods emulsified with fats, oils, and cream are delicious, and they're good for you. But there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. As a podcast I listen to said, we should be giving up vices all year round, no just at Lent; but Lent is a time to give up something good. And we should consider why would ought to give up something good. We should give up what is good in part to prove we can do without it. What is good for us can soon become a crutch upon which we rest; and in leaning upon this crutch, our own two legs whither in strength. To be strong is to be able to manage without what's good for us, because, just like Job, it can in an instant be taken away. Another reason to give up what is good, is to "pay for sunsets". My favourite quote - which if you've read this blog for long enough, you know will be a quote from G. K. Chesterton - is the following, "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde." We pay for the sunset, and in turn value and appreciate the sunset, not just through morality and chastity, but also by imagining and experiencing what it would be like if there were no sunsets left to be seen. Similar to how one can imagine what life without a loved one would be like, and appreciate the loved one's presence all the more for it, one can experience life without a favourite past-time, or a preferred food. For me this Lent I'm giving up podcasts, since I had gotten to the point where I did little else than listen to them, whether it be on the walk to and from work, or when I got home from work cooking supper. And not only will I appreciate them all the more for it, but by knocking down this great pine tree shading over the garden, the other blossoming vegetation below has the sunlight to grow, and I can use the time now freed to explore new interesting occupations.

Fasting has become somewhat trendy in certain circles. Recently, I decided to give some of the water fasting I've read about a go, and I've discovered that my body really hates me for it. Fasting is the full reminder that man is part animal. When at work I set down for my lunch break at the usual twelve o'clock time, with colleagues who were opening their lunches, I was struck with uncontrollable salivation. I felt like Pavlov's dog. All the usual motions for "time to eat" set off a ringing alarm clock in my head, almost begging me to start eating. And I could start to feel a revolt build up inside of me; I could sense that my body was intently pissed off at me. It's a stark reminder that we are not fully in control of ourselves; that, as the Buddhists say, we are merely the pilot upon the elephant. The truth is, however, that our bodies don't always know best; and that our gut instincts, whilst often accurate, are sometimes wrong. Our bodies have interests, desires, aims which are often at odds with our own; they are the passions of the flesh, if you will. The flesh wants to gorge on rich foods, have sex as much as possible, boast of achievements, bully and mock the weak, and wield power over others. The way of flesh is one of savagery and, if it is never disciplined, is the Hobbesian state of nature. To yield to the state of nature is in a sense a pagan feast, where great feasts were alloyed with debauchery.

The fast is the antidote to the never-ending feast. I could feel my stomach, the flesh, rebel against my short fast, but I maintained will-power to see it through to the end, showing my body 'who's boss'. To be unsure in disciplining the body simply because the body sends you 'bad emotions' or sends you thoughts saying 'give up', is akin to be nervous riding a horse: the horse won't follow your instructions. Much like the impulses of a child, the body needs wise parenting to set it upon the correct path. A defeatist lassez-faire approach to parenting will never nurture good children. The never-ending feast is a kind of kowtow to the bullying body and a suppression of the reasoning mind, to live in ignominy and reject your higher calling to rule. Many online propound a gospel of the spartan life to bring your body into full submission, but a spartan life as a kind of hyper-masculine robot is very unappealing to me. Spending your every waking moment training, whether in body or in mind, is a kind of waste of our time here on Earth. To become well-rounded people, to become a 'solid guy' or a 'capital chap', you have to 'waste' time to notice beauty and appreciate the sunset. For only when you appreciate the sunset does one start to want to fast.

2024/02/10 The Last Crusade

Recommended to me by the Youtube algorithm - that friend from which most of our recommendations today come - was a video on how the Crimean War was 'the last crusdade'. A quite interesting book I read called 'The Great and Holy War' had the thesis that the First World War was the last crusade, noting the religious symbology both sides of the war wielded against one another. Typically, with eyes to historical Catholic crusades, the Albigensian crusade is the last crusade in Christendom. And I'm sure, given the time, a bounty more of theories as to when the last crusade occurred could be dug up and displayed to be argued over. The truth of the matter is, there is no last crusade. The crusade, however maligned the history today, is the creation myth of Western thought; and the moment the West ceases to crusade is the moment the West ceases to be the West.

The Spenglerian view of the West, which I agree with, is that the West was born with Charlemagne and the Great Schism. Before these events, western Europe lived in the embers of the Classical era, in a different kind of worldview, or ontological relation to the world, that gradually changed. If you read about Byzantium - even the Byzantium contemporary with Charlemagne - you'll discover just how alien a culture it was. Much of the brutality and lack of loyalty to the point of anarchy, has far more in common with the Crisis of the Third Century than the regal stability of the West. In a sense, Eastern Christendom descended from the germ of Roman civilisation, whilst Western Christendom descended from the germ of German civilisation - the civilisation which became the ruling elite after the fall of Rome. The schism between these two halves was inevitable.

One of the defining moments of Western history which isn't given the weight it deserves is the fourth crusade. In the fourth crusade, the crusaders got distracted on their way to Jerusalem by Constantinople, and found a greater calling in sacking the city bearing the name of the man who Christianised Rome. This original fratricide of the East - a kind of Cain and Abel moment - is what I believe gives what Spengler calls the West's 'Faustian spirit'. The sacking of the vast wealth of Constantinople aided in funding the building of the Great Cathedrals of the High Middle Ages; and the theft of the vast wealth of knowledge in Constantinople aided in nurturing a mediaeval intellectual Renaissance in Europe. Before the final fall of the great city in 1453, many Greek intellectuals fled to the West with the vast libraries of Byzantine learning in tow. And although the great Renaissance men of the West claimed to find literature and tracts in dingy corners of old libraries and abbeys, the interpretation widely considered today is that these works arrived from the East.

As we can see, the crusade is not only a war against one's enemies in the form of Islam, but also one's enemies in the form of heretics. The Albigensian crusade is the greatest example of this. Here, the less than aptly named Pope Innocent III sent the knights of Europe to slaughter the Cathars, a heretical sect in south-east France. Justifying the indiscriminate killing, the pope purportedly said "Kill them all, for God knows His own."

The object of the crusades, that being Jerusalem, is a strange one. Christian theology from the earliest days never saw Jerusalem as their object. Christ foretold the falling of the Second Temple, and Revelations refocuses upon the new Jerusalem, the City of God, which isn't yet of this world. When Rome became Christianised Jerusalem became a place of pilgrimage, but also a kind of biblical sight-seeing tour. Constantine's mum 'discovered' the hill of Golgotha, and the cave in which Christ's body was kept, and many more sacred locations, which many in the empire flocked to see. After the capture of the Holy Land by Islam, it was not as if Christians could no longer go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Islam is generally accepting of men of the book, so long as they pay the 'jizya' which was a tax of Jews and Christians, and many Christians and Jews still lived in Levant (until the persecution of the past 50-100 years).

What, then, were the object of the crusades? It took the fall of Jerusalem to the sons of Ishmael and the failures of the crusades for God to prove to the Church that Jerusalem no longer held any meaning - a point which many could use today - but from the perspective of the Church, it was a great unifying event. The crusades bound Western identity, where the nobility of each nation and their peasantry fought side by side, brother with brother against a common foe and, most importantly, with the cross (note the crux inside of crusade). The crusade not only bound the idea of the west, but created the grammar for a just and noble war.

Fast-forwarding the reel of history, we see any number of wars that had to be proclaimed as just, particularly in the modern day. However today, society at large does not adhere to the Catholic church, but rather to the Humanist church - one of the most radical branches of the Protestant reformations, one which no longer believes in God (but then again, neither do the Quakers anymore). Where the First World War was fought with religious imagery, as Phillip Jenkins in the aforementioned book lays out, the Second World War was fought by highlighting Hitler's atrocities, not only to the Jews, but to the Poles, the Slavs, and to the many other brutalised and persecuted groups. In many cases, this was explained through religious terms, through individuals like Bonhoeffer and Niemoller, but most commonly to this day through the conception of human rights. The Vietnam War was fought for the sake of liberty of the evil forces of Communism. The Iraq War was to prevent Saddam Hussein using the infamous WMD which he didn't have, to liberate the Iraqis into the greatest tyranny of all: anarchy. Today with the war in the Levant, Israel, itself a Jewish crusader state akin to the states of the First Crusade, is on a kind of crusade against the Gazan infidels, who it appears they're aiming to annihilate a la the biblical invasions of Joshua. And even if Israel is not a Christian country, it is cut from the Western cloth, with much of their population and most of their elites harking from the US.

In summary, crusading has never ended, and claims of the last crusade are as fraught as predictions of the apocalypse. Only once the West has ended will crusading end; it's an integral part of the culture's genetics, and to see it subside would be to see the dawn of a new era. Perhaps I'm now being the doomsdayist, but it feels as if we are living in the Late Western era. Much like the late Roman era, the generative power which once made Western civilisation strong has dissipated, and the society has fallen into a state of decadence. But the seed of the West has been spread far and wide across the Earth, first through European colonialism, and then through American pseudo-colonialism; in some cases the seed is treated as a welcome crop, and in others as a harmful weed. No one can be certain what form the next era will take.

2024/02/04 Dressing up and Dressing down

Any comments with regards to dress and fashion coming from myself should sound like complete twaddle. Those reading who know me in real life know I have one outfit of a grey shirt, black jeans, and some kind of higher quality overshirt - and formerly a famous grey striped jumper. In short, I'm hardly one who should be criticising the dress of others. But my mother brought me up well, always chastising me if I wanted to leave the house in trackies or any other such slob-wear. And even though I'm hardly the neatest of people, nor the smartest in how I dress, whenever I go out I dress properly. Unfortunately for many, their mothers were hardly as wise.

Clothing has a certain meaning embedded within it. By that I mean that within the contours, seams, and shapes of an item of clothing, the formality and suitability of that item is on show. For instance, the loose fitted-ness of a t-shirt represents a kind of informality and looseness of tone. You shouldn't wear a t-shirt to a funeral, since the occasion is one wear there is gravity and composure, and the t-shirt is too weak and wobbly to maintain the structure of the moment. With a closer look of the word 'formal', we'll find the word 'form' within it. We wear formal clothing at events which have greater ritualistic character, by which I mean they are more structured and organised - in a sense, we wear ordered clothing for more ordered events. For a piece of clothing to be formal, therefore, it must have structure and a defined form to it, more in line with the sharp defined shapes of the suit than the baggy elastic of the tracksuit. Baggier clothing, like a lot of tracksuits and jumpers, hold no form on their own, and turn everyone into marshmallows - soft and squishy. But on the other end of the spectrum, with newer textiles and technologies, we have the lycra skin-tight clothing that is quite popular now, particularly amongst women. With this textile, the clothing sticks to people's physique like a second skin, mimicking the form of the wearer's body; however these elasticated options certainly aren't formal, for the clothing holds no form of its own.

Now that we've established the objective basis for formal and informal clothing, let's move onto a more historical analysis. British Pathe, for those who haven't heard of it, is a great bank of video footage from the past. Watching videos of old England, the England captured on film before I was born, you notice the clothing the average man on the street was wearing was formal. The working class dressed formally, at least formally as we would understand it, wherever they went. It was a kind of optimism, a kind of aspirationalism - in so far as one attempts to take on the responsibilities of the position above you to get a promotion in the workplace, the working class man dressed as if he was middle class. Culture then had a generative energy, where people looked upwards to those above them as an example - not because the rich were more virtuous, or anything silly - but because following those footsteps is how one ascended the social ladder. What we have now is almost the inverse. Instead of the lower classes looking upwards to the middle classes to be brought into the fold of higher culture, the middle classes look downwards to the lower classes begging to join a lower kind of culture. Growing up in a middle class area, I saw many guys get into street-wear and the like, wanting to look like a chav. The current state we have now is one where low culture is idolised, pasted upon billboards, often imported wholesale form the US, and the middle classes often want to go around in Addidas trackies, adopting informal formless clothing. And with regards to improving one's lot, many in the lower classes are tied down by their own clothing - an issue which is encouraged by the middle class LARPers who mimic the style. And through fashion, economic mobility decreases.

In summary, we must dress up - tight and orderly - to impress instead of dressing down into a kind of mush. Just as how our ability to communicate with the world is integral to how we think and others respond to us, so too is how we dress. To dress well is to communicate to the world a kind of hope and optimism, a will to ascend; whilst to dress poorly can only fill the individual with nihilism. And at the end of the day, it's the manners and courtesy with which we approach reality, that reality shall reciprocate back to us.

2024/01/28 Orchard Online - Chapter 1

Never really written fiction before, but I had an idea for a story so I'm giving it a go. This should be the first chapter of many.

The searing sun blazed through Nottingham city centre. Forty degrees heat was forecast for today, and what was foretold was fulfilled with excess. Sweating profusely, Dave staggered through Old Market Square, the light from the sun being made all the more unbearable from the bleating OLED screens plastered over the Victorian buildings which surrounded. Each screen shone with videos exhibiting scantily clad, exotic women showcasing a myriad of ‘exciting the new products’ - to these exciting new products, however, Dave had become completely numb. It was the usual fads of augmented reality glasses and high quality implant earphones and the like. “If only there was technology to do something about this heat”, Dave grumbled to himself, audibly. Wading through the crowds of Old Market Square, he made his way over to the Corn Exchange, taking the lift down to the underground portion of Lace Market. The lift descended gracelessly, clunking periodically. Dave chuckled to himself mildly at the chorus of whispered curses being placed upon Nottingham City Council for the poor maintenance of the lift. “After how much they spend on events in Old Market Square, they could save a few bob for fixing this lift”, Dave overheard. “If they were smart with money, they wouldn’t be forever bankrupt”, nasally muttered the lady’s husband. And with a thud, the lift arrived. The gate-like iron doors opened to a cool, dry, dusty gust of air - very refreshing after the stuffy stench of the lift.

Under the dull, pasta bowl-shaped, orange lights, whose cables were strung across the limestone walls, Dave picked up a pocket map by the entrance - for however many times Dave travels this way, the different labyrinthine tunnels and caves look too much alike to distinguish. Following the rightward tunnel, heading in a northerly direction, Dave began his walk to the Green-Light Quarter. The Orange-Light Quarter where he began was the most accessible of the underground markets. Vendors hollered back and forth, selling meat, fish, and vegetables, freshly baked bread loaves, charcuterie, and cheese. And whilst there was a degree of segregation between different produce, the ventilation was inadequate to attack the cumulative smell, which could, on a bad day, be quite repellent. Passing the various counters, Dave took special care to hold his nose and power walk past the fish monger whose fish possessed a particularly unique odour today. The loudness of sellers was then replaced by the screams and laughter of children, who weaved in and out the small alleyways as their parents shopped. These alleyways possessed the most unique shops, owing to the rock-bottom rents. The low rents let many a local specialty shop operate however niche; particularly on a Saturday, many part-time hobbyists show up to sell. The Blue-Light Quarter into which Dave now headed was populated with many of these smaller stalls, selling paintings, handmade crafts, used tools, and various trinkets of all kinds.

“Could I have a closer look at the painting at the top there, if you don’t mind”, Dave asked. The gaunt-faced young artist, whose near-translucent pale complexion made it seem as if he’d lived in the underground from birth, pulled himself up from his collapsible camping chair to take down the painting of interest. The artist’s style was to copy - or at least attempt to copy - admired paintings of old, changing the colour pallettes with either a lighter Vaporwave-like aesthetic, of pastel baby blues and pinks, or the darker Outrun aesthetic of navy blue, mauve, and yellow. After closer inspection, Dave found he quite fond of the work, and handed over a fifty-pound note. He couldn’t tell which Renaissance painting was being aped, but he could tell the scene was Vaporwave pastiche of the fall of Adam and Eve from Eden. He thanked the young artist, bagged the work, and continued on his journey.

This deep into the underground markets, beyond the Blue-Light Quarter, the crowds which were present prior began to thin. Glued to his map, making sure not to accidentally follow any narrower, seedier alleys towards the Red-Light Quarter - whose major business is what the name would suggest - Dave saw the yellowish lights, the colour of the lights which connect quarters, become green; and seeing this, he sighed a hearty breath of home-coming comfort. Ever since his uni days, Dave had been coming to the Green-Light Quarter to sit, read, and drink coffee. The limestone walls were, unlike most of the underground; they were painted, first with a layer of whitewash, and then with Art Nouveau swirls, swooshes, and pastel bouquets. The Greens, as the area was locally known, had several libraries of antiquarian books, with there being only a nominal members fee to be allowed to borrow; these books could be read at the numerous coffee shops dotted around which were cut out into the walls. The coffee shops were no popup market stall, but a permanent fixture, built sturdily of wooden planks stained dark. They possessed no state-of-the-art coffee makers, nor any technology for that matter, bar of course the green lamps lighting the region and the emergency telephones. The Greens were a quiet place to be at peace and read; and occasionally, have a lively conversation with the many interesting people who passed by.

For a Saturday, the coffee shops were surprisingly quiet: all but empty save for a few. Dave picked up the book he was reading the weekend prior and turned to the bookmark he’d left there. Sipping his coffee, he sat in his Shangri-La.

The soft atmosphere at once hardened. The thin, dry air had become moist and dense. Dave’s nerves twitched in anticipation, before he heard the bell of the door chime. In walked a girl, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, dressed in the skin-sleek fashion of the day, revealing her goddess-like physique, whose bright, thick copper hair was like softened unwound cabling tied up into a high ponytail with a small parted fringe in the front. She looked Dave’s way. Her irises were a fiery scarlet, and her eyes were locked on and focused upon him like a red laser-pointer, but not focused like a laser, but diffuse. Her gaze was diffuse; diffuse as if she was not only looking at him but through him, past him, beyond him: beyond him to some next world. She drew nearer, and the scent of pheromone-enhanced perfume, a smell with which Dave was familiar, overwhelmed him; and with that, the gaze, and her sheer presence, Dave felt like but a boy.

She ordered a coffee and sat down beside him. There was a small pause of still, stiff silence. “What are you reading?”, she asked with a small, innocent smile, pointing her eyes up to him. Dave choked for words, but managed to let out a small murmur, “Robinson Crusoe”. She looked away for a moment, looked over at the antiquarian book shelves, and turned her gaze back to Dave. Her head tilting, her voice lilting, she poked him gently on his arm. “Have you heard of Orchard Online?”

2024/01/21 The One-eyed Scientist

I've eluded to this idea before, that the scientific worldview - a belief system we'll shorten to scientism - does not prove the spiritual world, or the world of invisibles, is false, but rather is unable to comprehend them. Of all the arguments I've come across or come up with, this argument, which argues that science is blind to the majority of the world's happenings, is the strongest I know of for exiting the Platonic cave of Dawkins in which many today are trapped.

Let's begin with a brief explanation of scientism. Fundamental to the scientific worldview is matter. Matter is the thing which makes up the world, the raw materials out of which all things are made. Looking around the house, you can spy materials like wood, plastic, steel, cotton, each with their own materials and material structure. For materials in science aren't stationary objects: they have a position in time and space which defines how they interact. For instance, structure and arrangement distinguish wood from cotton, despite similar chemical compositions. The atom which was once thought to be the fundamental particle (a-tomos, not cuttable) was further spliced into protons, neutrons, and electrons, reducing ninety or so unique building blocks into various arrangements of three unique ingredients. Building blocks is an apposite description, since this model is a bottom-up model of the world. As we went deeper and deeper from, say, the wooden coffee table we saw in the house, the scientific worldview showed us smaller and more fundamental particles, but notably has little to say about what comprises the form of the table - a more top-down conception.

Continuing our look into scientism, let's mention the one invisible permitted: energy. All other aspects in the scientific model are reduced down to energy, whether they be force, entropy, or the operation of molecules. In a sense, the interaction of objects, the events without which the scientific model would be pointless, are regulated by the modulation and transfer of energy. However, science cannot see energy. Being an invisible factor, it cannot be analysed in isolation, but rather only through changes in other qualities, like temperature or light. Energy is the currency of the hard sciences, acting as a medium of exchange between qualities and phenomena; for instance, the electrical energy flowing towards a light bulb is transformed into light with a little bit of heat and sound. It's important to remember that a rigorous scientist would understand that energy is somewhat fictional. Science is based upon experience, quantification, and mathematics, wherein the mathematics is a kind of digestion of the data into something both descriptive and prescriptive. Energy, therefore is a mathematical puzzle piece designed to fit every scientific discipline's gap, so that the measurements of each discipline are in concord. A god of the gaps, if you will.

The first issue with the scientific worldview is that scientific inquiry must be quantifiable. Most things in this world aren't quantifiable. How much you love someone and care about someone is not quantifiable, and nor is willpower. Beauty is not quantifiable, and nor is kindness. Attempts at the quantification of intelligence have been made, but the success of IQ is debatable. But no attempt has been made into quantifying how 'chair-like' something is, or how perfect a tulip looks. None of these things are quantifiable, so they are trashed as 'subjective'. The subjective world to scientism is a world of human preference, of mere mind, of what doesn't matter. For 'chair-ness' or beauty to be a quality relegated would be unthinkable to thinkers of old; Plato would've seen beauty as an underpinning principle of all things, percolating down into the visible realm. The scientist, however, has little time for the subjective, the unquantifiable - and why should he? What use is the scientific method if the data cannot be plotted, and the results cannot be repeated? When given subjective data, the true scientist is like a blacksmith who's been given clay and asked to make a mug: not only has he no clue as to what's needed to make a mug, but his tools are wholly inadequate for the task. The scientist's hammer and forge are his calipers and his calorimeter; when asked to study behaviour and intelligence he can't help but begin measuring skulls and sticking patients beneath the fMRI scanner. The scientist isn't equipped to tackle the unquantifiable, and neither is the scientific worldview equipped to deal with the multi-faceted nature of the world around us.

The second issue with the scientific worldview is that all science must be reproducible. Social sciences suffer from studies and results sets which cannot be reproduced - in part because they deal with fundamentally unquantifiable qualities - but also because most of the natural world doesn't operate like clockwork. Under the electron microscope, at the most granular level of chemicals and particles, there is a mathematical clockwork to the world. This in it's mathematical fullness, the physicist describes with quantum mechanics. Then, with the radio telescope, the physicist looks at the greatest scale, of nebulae and galaxies, and sees the mathematical clockwork they follow. This, the physicist explains with general relativity. The great irony of physics is that general relativity and quantum mechanics - the explanation of the very biggest and the very smallest things - cannot be reconciled to one another, for the mathematics of each sees the other as alien. There is a good reason for this: it is that science has little to say about what's in-between. Whilst knowledge of physics has brought us bridges and architecture, an explanation which weds the Wailord and the Skitty of physics ought to have a far more comprehensive understanding of the every day. For the every day is not, as anyone could attest, clockwork - nor a kind of mathematical formula followed day in and day out. There is a subtlety, a spontaneity, an unexpectedness: there are miracles. The scientific worldview argues the flap of the butterfly's wings can cause a hurricane, but such thinking assumes a clockwork view of the everyday. Man is no biological computer, balanced by delicate neurotransmitter release and neuronal interchanges: there is more to us than that. Such radical reductionism to nature as billiard balls is the result of the reign of reproducibility, the belief that however many times the current save state is replayed, the same series of actions shall continue to unfold, just as water in a river never fails to flow downstream. But it is science which is blind, for it is science which is reliant on reproducibility - the world is not. Reproducibility is a kind of Procrustean bed unto which the scientific worldview demands the world conform; not by any means clear-sighted view of how the world really is.

The third issue with the scientific worldview is that science can only observe material. Science cannot help but reduce the world to matter, for science is the study of matter! Many the psychologist thinks the world can be reduced to mind, as does many the philosopher see philosophy as the over-arching explanation - and there's the mathematician who sees the world as equations and fractals, like Pythagoras once did - and, to nobody's surprise, so the scientist sees the world as matter. Science is predicated upon observation, whether that be of objects, of sound, or of light. Where the senses of touch, taste, smell, sight, and sound have proven too qualitative and not quantitative enough, tools have been developed to describe amplitude and luminosity (although curiously never smell). These sensing tools augment the scientific worldview by gathering into the fold of matter aspects like noise and light which would never have been traditionally seen as material in the sense an oak tree is material. But despite the inclusive nature of this broad church of matter, many aspects have been ostracised. First and foremost, consciousness. If I were to look back in my own life as to where my interest in philosophy and my first disillusionment with the corn syrup of the folk philosophy I was fed began, it was with the question of consciousness. I stayed up at night when I was in early adolescence trying to figure out how consciousness, a fact so undeniable and intimately proximate in my experience, could be alloyed with the scientific worldview. The two are like oil and water. The problem was emulsified, however, once I discovered Kantian metaphysics. The realisation that we're confined to the phenomenal world, or world-as-it-appears, which has material explanations, but is wholly subsumed by the noumenal world, or world-in-of-itself, was a watershed moment for me. And whilst I rarely think about Kant now, the jolt of the frame-shift was enough to get me to realise that matter is merely one aspect of reality; that science is concerned only with matter; and that the scientific worldview does not hold water when a wider, more expansive scope is being observed.

In summary then, the scientific worldview can only see what's quantifiable, reproducible, and material. It is the scientist with one eye. The one-eyed scientist sees only what he wants to see, never able to see with fullness and depth of the scenery around him. The world is abound with that which his one eye cannot see, a world of unique happenings, once in a lifetime moments, and deeply moving scenes. The scientific worldview is fundamentally anti-human. Science concerns itself with analysing qualities which can't be found in people. People aren't quantifiable: they aren't merely a number, or a statistic. People aren't reproducible: they aren't fungible, wherein one person will act like any other. People aren't material: you shouldn't treat anyone like an object. Therefore, scientism elevates that which isn't human as being more real than humans. Humans are mere wishy-washy subjective aberrations in a world otherwise built of neat clockwork. Scientism is an alien creed.

On a lighter note, I implore you to see the world through both eyes. The world is far more beautiful than science can waffle otherwise. And when you feel the pull back towards the flat, secular, materialism simply by living in a world marinated in its presuppositions - an affliction I often suffer from - remember the image of the one-eyed scientist, whose method limits his view of the world so severely; and hopefully you'll be dragged back to sobriety.

2024/01/14 The Spirit of Christmas

As I've recently discussed, my Christmas was hamstrung with a bout of covid, mostly ruining my seasonal merriment. But even before this ordeal, the Christmas spirit didn't seem to affect me as much as it would regularly. In Christmases past, as embarrassing as it might be to confess, I'd wake up early, excited for presents and the festivities ahead. And before then, the general feeling of excitement and cheer would possess me and I'd feel the 'Christmas spirit' and listen to the classic tunes. Somehow the spirit never reached me last year. I felt the rush come upon me as I decorated the tree, listening to Christmas music, but it felt unsettling. The Christmas spirit's rush had that same feeling as it had in past years, but somehow instead of being a cosy feeling of comfort it had become one of disquiet.

It's easy to chalk such subjective feelings up to vague ideas of the corporatisation of Christmas with decorations in the shops from September and every company rebranding with Santa hats, but I think this misses the mark. Christmas has for as long as I remember been a corporate event, stained with business interests - and that is part of the Christmas spirit - but that isn't the taint I felt. I've always had a suspicion that modern Christmas has become a pagan parody of Christ's birth, much like modern Easter too with egg-laying bunnies has become a pagan parody of the Passion; but instead of just thinking it was the case, I felt the difference. What I'd heard about so often as a mere logical difference had become one which was felt in the kind of feelings of the different spirits.

While speaking of spirits sounds wishy washy and woo woo, I am sincere and don't mean to sound flippant - the Christmas spirit is real, a kind of geist, a zeitgeist, which sweeps through the people. All people are powered by spirit, and spirit is breath¹, a kind of wind which rushes through people, energising them. Hence the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost (geist) who is a kind of holy wind imbuing religiosity and connection with God. The Christmas spirit is a free spirit with a life and motivations of its own. In fact there are spirits everywhere when you look for them, in different eras of history, different movements of art, different fervours in which people are rapt; the more you look around, the more the spirits make themselves apparent. A good analogy is a flock of birds. You see birds flying wing to wing in a single direction with a single aim, and all of a sudden they move together en masse as if choreographed. People are similar; once the spirit moves in the direction of its choice, the people who partake in that spirit move in tandem. Hence the madness of mobs; rioters, all possessed by the same Shiva-like spirit, attack and desecrate as one. Christmas too, therefore, has a spirit felt by all of us each year rousing us to celebrate.

Yet is the Christmas spirit still a spirit worthy of veneration? Supplanting the Holy Spirit on the Lord's birthday is hardly a mark in its favour. And I'm still struck by that unnerving feeling I kept having last year, as if there was an impostor usurping the reverence directed during Christmastide. Undoubtedly these same concerns are ones English Puritans had long ago, with Cromwell cancelling Christmas. Through their Calvinist pessimism, the Puritans could see that all human endeavours will end in sin; even Christmas, the celebration of Christ's birth, will inevitably result in a kind of idolatry revolving around the North Pole. And whilst there's merit in these observations, such pessimism about human nature can leave you hamstrung, unable to be happy and spread joy in life. Christmas parody music and Christmas parody feeling is everywhere around Christmas time, but one simply has to distinguish between the various spirits pulling you in different directions, making you experience different versions of Christmas, and let them influence you according to your will. For whilst the different spirits of Christmas will make themselves known to you through the various advertisements and jingles heard around, only through a kind of worship, a kind of participation, in the spirit are we transformed and affected by it, most apparently through the 'Christmas feeling'. The Christmas spirit, as I've explained as a defined spirit, isn't a necessity for Christmas. I don't see the alienation from the spirit as me becoming jaded as I get older. Rather, a movement from the Christmas spirit towards the Holy Spirit.

1. in ancient Greek means both breath and spirit, and many copies can be found in other languages, like geist in German.

2024/01/07 In Defence of January

The month of January is oft maligned by detractors; but as someone whose birthday lies in January, I've grown to feel a certain patriotism for the month, and in this article I will defend the month.

December is the month of Christmas, joy, and partying. The month is laced with Christmas meals, drinking, excitement that Christmas is around the corner, and great expense from Christmas shopping; but historically the time leading up to Christmas was never like this. December was a month of fasting - Christmas excitement, no doubt - but a time to go without, until the Christmas festival (FEASTival). The feast ought to be the climax of the fast, as a kind of release of the tension built up from avoiding rich foods for an extended time. The run-up to Christmas today, however, is far from a fast. I ended up tallying three Christmas feasts before Christmas day came. And by the time Christmas arrived, turkey, ham, stuffing, and brussels weren't quite as tasty and novel as they would've been. In fact, by Christmas day I felt quite stuffed and full.

In my defence of January, you may ask, why do I speak so at length about December? My answer to that would be that December has short-changed poor January. The fast building up to Christmas day wasn't originally for a single day of feasting: it was for twelve days of feasting and no work, the twelve days of Christmas. Today, the twelve days of Christmas have been truncated in to a meagre seven days of Christmas up until New Years Eve which ends up being the most raucous celebration of the period. Somehow, January has been missed out. January has been reimagined as the month of sobriety (in the awful fad of 'dry January') and clarity, rather than drifted with style in from the year prior.

That isn't to say that January can't be appreciated for its new role. Much like a Byzantine eagle, Janus is the Roman god with two faces; one face looks towards the new year, and another face looks towards the past year. It's a time to reflect on one's successes and failures in the past year, and set resolutions for the next. Alternatively, the two faces of Janus are the two directions the year could end up, cackling as they ask whether you'll enter the new year on the right footing or the wrong footing, if you'll stumble into greater sin, or be able to resist. January has this liberty within it, a kind of potential, owing to the year's youthfulness. This year is merely a baby; new goals and objectives can be set to become a better person this year than the last. "New year, new me". The twelve days of Christmas are the optimum time to unwind from a busy year, seeing the old year out and welcoming in the next. By the month of December, the year is an ailing old man, waiting to rest peacefully, waiting for the next infant year in the January of its life to take over.

Simply then, January is the time of new beginnings. In the depths of winter, we're past the longest night, and its time to begin to think about how we'll spend the days of the new year. To analogise with football, its much like the transfer window between seasons, where teams buy an sell players to prepare for a strong year. Alternatively, for an analogy which my readers might resonate with more, its like the beginning of a HOI4 game, where you're designing unit types, and allocating your resources to production lines in preparation for the world war. However its spun, organisation and preparation has freedom and contains the germ of the times ahead. If you dread January, it follows that you'll dread the year ahead. If you dread January to the point of endless sighing and complaining, the time to fix and reorder your life is January.

2023/09/30 The Legalism of the Sacred and Profane

For a stranger to step foot into the priest's sacred perimeter in ancient Athens was a crime punishable by death. The stranger, or non-citizen, was not part of the city's hearth worship (which can be imagined as an extended family), so his entry to any holy or sacred spot would've been a grave indiscretion. But this factoid got me thinking, in a line of reasoning similar to Plato's Euthyphro dilemma: are laws sacred because they come from the gods, or do laws that exist make something sacred. To forbid and to permit, the sacred and the profane, or, as the Arabs call it, Halal and Haram: these are concepts common to every culture as far back as we can see. And the general trend of history is for these rules to liberalise over time, particularly during times of plenitude (and perhaps complacency) like the present day.

Modern liberalism can be seen as a kind of assault on the profane. Through deconstructing superstitions through science, and bringing into the centre and permitting acts which were once seen as taboo, the purple-grassed corruption of the profane has systematically been purified into acceptable territory. But there is a catch. The profane and the sacred and intimately mingled, and as the West has gone on a crusade against the profane, the sacred has been sacrificed in the process. Somehow, without laws as to what is acceptable and what isn't - without having a concept of the profane - we can't experience the sacred. Liberalism is predicated on a certain conception of freedom, which is the freedom to do whatever one pleases, whether it be considered profane or not. But the freedom of old, the freedom preached by St. Augustine when he points out how the man who is a slave to his passions is not free, can only be obtained through boundaries, through the profane. In a sense, liberalism's conquering of the profane has left it blind to the sacred, denying us the freedom the sacred affords. Chesterton sees the phenomenon as being similar to the fairy tale, where there's always a catch to one's fortune. For example, Cinderella can go to the ball, but she must be home before midnight. The gifts of the sacred come with the catch that the rules regarding profanity be respected. He puts it best in a scathing comment on Oscar Wilde, writing: "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."

New movements attempting to bind society from atomisation exalt new profanities as culturally central, such as racism or sexism, in order to build a new virtual hearth/totem around which society can crystallise, but just as with the reformation, such new movements will cause friction. The Catholic church at the time of the reformation was revolted against because of their corruption and lack of law; the Calvinists, for instance, saw themselves as a revival of the law, and at once a startling new interpretation of the law of Christ. Out of corruptions of the law, and lax following of the law - in short, Liberal decline - a new law takes root in the masses lest otherwise access to the sacral be unobtainable.

Such an abstract model risks becoming too relativistic, so I'll make a short point about the folly of relativism of this kind, and why that isn't the argument I'm making. Relativism doesn't work due to its own aloofness, from its pretension that it's taking a 'view from God'. Every perspective one can take takes a certain claim or thing as its highest value or its greatest force. For religious belief, our 'rationalistic' up-bringing has conditioned us to see through any claims regarding beings and personages wielding power upon forces and nature, so we automatically see any such claim as conditional and dependent when they historically wouldn't have been. Concepts, however, are the modernist's gods. Whilst claims of personages can be blown away, we are easy prey to ideas of abstract forces and concepts: we don't believe in laws from Moses, or laws from Solon, both of whom got their legal codes from divine personages; but we don't think too hard about human rights, or laws derived from processes. Similarly, divine providence has fallen out of favour for a kind of Hegelianism/Vitalism, where events are pushed onwards by innate environmental, social, or cosmic forces, rather than God's intent. The folly of the relativist therefore is to believe himself above and aloof from each system of laws and belief which came before him, tricking him through pride into thinking that his set of abstract belief sits beyond, a priori to all other beliefs, when in reality he believes in just the same patterns which a different lick of paint.

As to why my argument is not relativist, I'll simply point out that truth is beyond man. The relativist like to think that truth is an earthly affair, with each group or tribe's belief has his own perception of truth (expect of course, his abstract pattern which he sees them all following is the greater truth). But truth is in fact a heavenly thing, not an earthly one; truth doesn't care what each man on earth thinks it to be, truth will be truth whether we believe it or not, for that is what is out there. That the Chinese worship ancestors in a similar fashion to the classical Athenian is no coincidence; it's human nature. That idol worship is independently common to all people's around the world is also no coincidence, but the nature of man and the nature of the beings they worship, and what they want. The fact that man falls into the same grooves and patterns is self-evident if you look at the past, but it doesn't mean that each iteration of that pattern is the right one. The picture I paint of legalistic societies with strict laws on profanity and, as a result, the sacred, declining into liberality birthing new legalistic societies from their decay is not one of aloofness and pattern worship, for I have a horse in the race which I believe to be the truth.

I fully confess to having a reactionary bent. The pattern I see in society is one of constantly declining character and declining morality in contradistinction to many more Whiggish folk who see constant a improvement in people's well-being and greater acceptance of those who don't want to fit in and those who break traditions. And whilst it's hard to prevent the old ways from being abused, the past will always feel vaguely stale and decaying to the vast majority. In times of decay, a new movement of vitality and energy with a fresh sensation must be born, one with deeply held taboos to reawaken society's instinct for the sacred once again. To birth something new is the only way to defend the old, as paradoxical as that may sound. The past is gone, the past is dead, and the past ought to be buried. Haunting ghosts are not healthy for any society. The records, the works, and the example set by the past all still exist however, and these ought to inspire us rather than have us be inspired by the Long March to utopia. Our goals ought to be looking to real glories of the past rather than false flickers in the future. But such a specific ideal is too difficult, for the make-believe of utopia with no solid vision can be achieved on the leader's discretion. As Chesterton put it, "Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals." The past is not lost yet, and it is worth fighting for.

2023/09/11 The Timidity of Thought

"The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance", Chesterton quips in his essay 'The Suicide of Thought'. And although he wrote in a time when their were authors still claiming to have grand ideas, he knew where the shift in academic currents would lead us: towards a meek intelligentsia. The Victorian era, and eras gone by, have academics who proclaim grand ideas - ideas which reimagine metaphysics, see the psyche in a new light, change our understanding of nature's operation - but what have we now? Meek academics looking at particulars. The historian of yonder wanted to re-frame all of history from a new angle - the new historian aims to burrow into small niches of history, not linking it to other events to craft a grand narrative.

And it's this timidity in the face story telling which is the issue. In our Hiroshima/Holocaust-induced post-modern disdain for grand narratives, we are unable to tell stories about our pasts. Stories are what orient people - they are what unify people - and the modern academic in their timidity can no longer tell stories. Those that dare are rare, and often seen as outcasts by establishment figures. Revisionist historians, like one who I am a fan of like Tom Holland, are ostracised and branded as bending the facts, however many sources they may cite. But all facts must flexible; the drawing of the story of history cannot be done with straight lines alone. And the straight and narrow 'literal' or 'orthodox' interpretation through either a modern or a contemptuous-of-the-past lens will draw you no closer to the truth - only towards your own naval. Mediaeval man is mocked for thinking the Romans dressed, ate, and lived just like them, but we are just as guilty of seeing classical civilsation through a coloured lens. Somehow the fact that the marble statues were painted destroys everyone's conception of Rome; many like to repeat the fact as an act of iconoclasm. But what story of the past do we have to replace it? If not through Winckelmann's lens, how are we to understand the classical world? Without a story, we chase after but threads and fluff: not the grand tapestry of the past. The modern intellectual in his timidity is ripping apart the fabric of nationhood.

It may be noted that this article is opposite to the previous article I posted, named 'The Scourge of German Idealism'. Whilst it may appear as if I'm contradicting myself, I am merely pointing out two extremes: on the one hand, there's the extreme of reduction into a single vital principle or sole set of ideas which determines all happenings in the world; and on the other, the extreme of reducing all of mankind into individual disparate tid-bits of information and happenings, made sure to be disconnected from one another. We have the dichotomy between reduction into universalism and reduction into individualism; between the interconnection of everything, and the isolation of everything; between the one-ness of all things, and the none-ness of all things. Both sin from the truth, because both miss the colour and texture of reality. Reduction when cooking is a kind of evaporation. When reducing (evaporating) milk, you're left we sweet sludge, whilst when reducing water you're left with hardly anything: reduction keeps some aspects of some things whilst utterly annihilating others. What must be striven for is to see the world as it is, not blinded by ideology, but in of itself. We will witness great patterns which pervade reality, but also miracles, and exceptions which like to break the rules - for often they are not rules, but rather guidelines. The golden mean, or middle way, between these two excesses is the balance between the pride of the German idealist and the timidity of the modern academic.

The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is humility: humility is endless. But the limitlessness of humility should never be confused with the prison of timidity. As Chesterton writes, humility ought to be "a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on" - humility is to doubt one's efforts, never one's aims, he goes on. But timidity is, in a misunderstanding of humility, to not move forth and pursue one's aims; or, worse yet, to lower one's aims, making them easier to approach. Whilst the scourge of pride in one's achievements is not a force to be trifled with, to shrink beneath the white flag of timidity is to not even take battle against pride in the pursuit of lady virtue. The pursuit of Christian virtues is not the wish to retreat, like a trad, into parochial family life: it is to pursue that which is highest and that which is greatest for the right reasons in the right way. Humility does not necessitate timidity - only cowardice necessitates timidity. Humility requires the greatest bravery and eyes pointed at Heaven. And without knights of the pen to write the past and present, the fate of the future remains pre-scripted.

2023/08/16 The Scourge of German Idealism

Once faith is lost in the modern theology, that of scientific materialism, and the metaphysics which accompany, one can't help but fall into the pitfalls of German Idealism. Every German thinker, it seems, has his own system, his own metaphysics - a kind of Procrustean bed - into which the world is fitted; whether it be Kant, Hegel, Jung, Heidegger, or even in other domains like Spengler. When I began reading Spengler, my first thought was, "this reminds me of Jung". It wasn't just the Goethe simping, and the Nietzsche referencing, but it was the whole attitude with which they approached their work, through this lens of systematising and rigid metaphysics. Whether it be for Jung's psyche, or for Spengler's patterns of history, the fruit of the German Idealist tradition taste as crisp as they are sweet.

And sweet their aroma has always been to me; I struggle to resist that particular excitement from discovering a new metaphysics and a new system through which to understand how the world operates. But perhaps that energetic burst is beginning to tire in me. Recently, I've been reading 'The Ancient City' by Fustal de Coulanges, where he describes how the ancient Aryans lived, based on primary sources from Greece, Rome, and India; but whilst he usually stays on the straight and narrow, extracting understanding based on sources, every now and then he ascends into a flight of fancy, systematising a new imaginary world based on what he's uncovered. This imaginary world leaves behind the previous valuable observations, not only because the points are not substantiated - which isn't too much of a crime in of itself - but because the imagination flattens the world he's uncovering. Or rather than flatten, perhaps sandpapering is a better analogy, in so far as to strip it of texture. The floating world has its place, for the floating world of anime is one of great beauty. But the floating world is a fictional world which is textureless; its block matte colours are beautiful and do dazzle, but it is the world of fiction and ideals: not one of historical truth.

And that is my critique of the German Idealists: their systems strip the world of texture. In reducing every aspect of the system seemingly to their raw metaphysical elements, their systems and models only perceive a shimmering floating world which, despite at times being useful to see the world before us, is not the world before us. The world as we perceive it is fanciful, and things happen which one can't expect; the world can at times be drab and monotonous, but at others radiant and overflowing with novelty. We only serve to blind ourselves by not looking at the world before us, and only looking at the world of dream. But it isn't just a problem of blindness, for a far worse fate befalls us. On the high of idealism, the world becomes far more boring. For the man who thinks he understands everything can never be surprised.

2023/08/12 Overman and Overfreeze - A look at King Gainer

Of Tomino’s works, King Gainer isn’t the best known. Beyond it’s iconic opening, and this video, you’re unlikely to come across it unless you’re looking through the catalogue of Tomino works. But despite being aimed at a younger audience - as many of Tomino’s not so child friendly works are (see Victory Gundam) - Tomino manages to explore mature and academic themes within the show.

The premise of the show is thus: after a global freezing event, mankind coops themselves up in eco-domes across the world, which may only be traveled between via ironclad trainline monopolies who also wield paramilitary deathsquads to patrol the surface for escapees. However many nonetheless plan escapes from these domes, in the form of Exoduses. The show follows Gain and Gainer on their Exodus from what’s likely somewhere in Europe across the Eurasian steppe to ‘Yapan’, and their fights against the trainline goons attempting to prevent their Exodus. As is nearly always the case with Tomino, the show is a mech show. Tomino likes mechs, and has a knack for incorporating the themes of what a mech actually is into the themes of the show. Typically, Tomino incorporates Nietzschean themes, such as with the Newtype in Gundam; and with the mechs in King Gainer being named an ‘Overman’ - a direct translation of Ubermensch - King Gainer is no different. In Gundam, Tomino tries to battle with what the coming of the Ubermensch means for society, and how the Newtype and the Oldtype may interact, such as through Bright and Amuro’s relationship. King Gainer however looks at the phenomenon through a more theological and moralising lens, through the idea of the overfreeze.

As a preface, I’ll be spoiling parts of the show, so if you dislike spoilers, go and watch the show. Through the main cast’s exploits, the head of Siberian Railways is captured, and his moving fortress, the Agate, is infiltrated. Buried within it’s icy interior, in a Dante-esque image, Cynthia in her moral confusion summons the Overdevil, the most powerful kind of Overman. The Overdevil has the power to Overfreeze, which is the ability to freeze anything with hard ice; but the Overfreeze also has the power to fill the individual with coldness of the heart, essentially possessing the practitioner. Gainer, Cynthia, and then Sara all fall for the spell; a spell which makes one embittered, blaming others for their faults, blinding oneself to compassion. A spell which can only be broken through love, and, as we later see, their memories of the hardships spent together. Gainer’s Overman, the King Gainer, is also in some way related to the Overdevil, using the same Overfreeze powers; and whilst this ultimately isn’t explored too much, there is a sense that the greater the Overman’s power, the closer his ability match the Overdevil’s; that the supreme power is that of frost in the heart.

Carl Jung - a name that hasn’t been written on this blog for some time - wrote his longest book on Nietzsche. The book is over a thousand pages, and is a compilation of a long, private lecture series he gave to his students on both Nietzsche’s work and his psychology. Whilst I haven’t read it myself, from secondary sources what I gather is that Jung poses a dichotomy in Nietzsche between Power and Love; power, on one pole, being gained at the expense of compassion, on the other. This idea, however is certainly not unique to Jung: it is a large chunk of the Christian message. Through pride, the central sin¹, man becomes unable to love, or exercise charity, which is in turn the Overfreeze consuming Cynthia and Gainer. Through the Overdevil, their pride has consumed them and they have submitted to the rule of the Devil.

The finale of the show sees the Overfreeze affect the railway lines freezing each and every eco-dome, turning them to ice. Only through the King Gainer’s final Overheat can the world thaw. But more than just the domes thaw; the world, which was once completely uninhabitable due to ice, begins to thaw in turn. One of the concluding scenes sees the Duke of the eco-dome from whence the story starts ponder going on an Exodus himself; this is more than a thawing of the recently formed ice: this is a thawing of ice far deeper in their hearts. This world of hovelling and cowering is a world whose hearts have turned to ice. It is a kind of shirking from nature and a rejection of life.

Here we have two competing themes, which at first seem in opposition. We see the critique of the Ubermensch in the form of the Overfreeze, and the callousness power can give; but in contradistinction there’s the freeze in the hearts from not manifesting spiral energy and not wanting to leave the cave. Somehow one must burn with enough heat to be driven to leave the cave and accomplish great things - to leave the pack - whilst simultaneously not having so much heat that you give the cold-sensation of scalding, and become cold of heart in your power. There is a kind of powerful warmth and compassion which must both leave the cave, and also help others.

Christianity is often maligned as attempting to hammer down the ‘proud’ (to stand proud is to stand over the rest) nails in order to create some kind of mediocrity, but I disagree that it’s a fair interpretation. Often Christianity can regress into a kind of Pharisaic moralism, the Slave Morality Nietzsche lampoons, but at its heart the life of Jesus is a message of exceptionalism and standing against the herd, even if that means being persecuted for it. What Tomino resolves in the finale of King Gainer is a kind of grand thawing of society, creating a society of enlightened people who won’t stand for being oppressed in eco-lockdowns, but also won’t fall for the same hubris of the overfreeze. Through this freeze-thaw process, the barriers of people’s hearts are broken down, melting the frost, making way for the sprouts true charity: the charity to become exceptional for the sake of something higher.

1. Only now do I realise how oxymoronic the concept of central sin is. To sin is to miss the target, to have low accuracy, so to have a central sin does not only not make sense, but is a kind of gnostic inversion wherein the spiritual path is to find power in taboo breaking. What is central is Christ as a kind of light bulb, and sin is becomes stronger as you move further away and the light cannot reach as easily.

2023/07/20 On Sacrifice

It's 2:30 in the morning and I can't sleep - time for an article.

Recently, I've been watching a lot of Time Team. Despite knowing about the show as a child, and watching it on occasion, I never really appreciated it for what it was: the glorification of the British autist. Like many other shows from the naughties like Robot Wars or Scrapheap challenge, truly eccentric Brits, who in any other country would not make television, let alone celebrity, embody the greatest kind of niche specialised passion. But a specific moment in a recent episode has stuck with me. Near a neolithic flint mine, they find a hole bored into a chiselled chalk floor of filed with flint. The team suspect it was some kind of alter where they gave flint as a kind of offering to give thanks for the flint. Whether or not this explanation carries water - and I suspect not, it being the strange project of anthropologist to chalk every find up to ritual - I found the sentiment very interesting. Giving thanks is not just something done passively, or contemplatively: it's something which is demonstrated through sacrifice.

The fact that the term agape has entered modern usage is almost a travesty. The Latin west has always used the Latin word caritas, seen in English as 'charity', but that this word has lost its meaning to many outside of cases like 'a charitable interpretation' is sad beyond belief. Charity - for I shall be using its original definition - is a kind of selfless love; but that's a kind of rigid parroted definition, moreso it's to act for someone else without expecting a quid pro quo. The quid pro quo is the enemy of charity, since you can't act for someone else when the expectation of reciprocation is your selfish motive.

Sacrifice in the ancient world was built upon a kind of quid pro quo. You built an idol for a god to inhabit; you give offerings to the idol; and in return for the offerings, the god performs a wish of yours, like bringing rain, or good harvest. Returning to Time Team, they explained the giving of flint as if it were a charitable act, rather than a kind of quid pro quo to the flint gods; giving our knowledge of written pagan worship from sources, would it not make more sense to explain the phenomenon as burying flint back in the earth, as an exchange for the flint gods to provide future excavations with more flint?¹

The assumption Time Team make that sacrifice is done out of charity is a kind of Christian projection. God made the earth, sister of man, for man's sake; man being God's greatest creation, given free will in order to experience love. For charity can only be experienced through free will, rather than by the binding contract of the quid pro quo. Man must invigorate himself to recognise the charity of the world around him, of the people around him, of the Creator, in order to recognise the Good. Once you experience divine charity - as what happened to me in a mystical experience lasting a couple days a few years back - you feel a great guilt. I remember then feeling guilty over the smallest of things, like not dusting my belongings, or not properly cleaning myself, feeling indebted for either the possessions on my shelf or my body. Divine charity feels, as Anselm put it, like a debt you can't repay; but as I've argued, the language of economics, business, and deals is misguided. Rather, when experiencing the divine charity of the everyday, when you senses aren't gummed up to it, one can't help but want to reciprocate. This isn't a quid pro quo where an external pressure is placed to repay a debt, but rather a kind of inner impulsion to return the kindness given to you out of your own volition. It is important to note that all non-Pharisaic morality is downstream of this desire to repay divine charity.

What is the sacrifice that must be made then? Well, there is no sacrifice to God. The final contract is to end contracts. When experiencing charity, the desire to reciprocate charity in kind is no sacrifice, but rather common sense, and natural. The quid pro quo relationship is a kind of corrupted form of the charity relationship - the true state man was designed to inhabit. To live by the teaching of Christ is the end of sacrifice. For to live by daily bread is to not place expectations upon future returns.

1. I don't mean to say the flint god wants more flint - he probably has enough. But a parallel can be seen to agriculture, where a small amount of seed is 'sacrificed' to the ground for the sake of future grain; whilst here some flint is sacrificed to the ground for future success in mining.

2023/07/09 The Denisovan's Pinky Bone

Anthropologists studying man of the past say that coexisting with ancient man were two more species of human: the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. Modern man having been born in Africa, Neanderthals were thought to have populated Europe, whilst Denisovans the East. However, this orthodox conception of modern anthopology is held up by a single pinky bone found in a Siberian cave. Besides finding alleged alleles for the Denisovans sifted from the genomes of modern men, the only hard archaeological evidence of Denisovan man is this single pinky bone.

We can only know the past through the morsels of information preserved; and the longer the period of time, the fewer the morsels left for us with which to nurture ourselves. The existence of Churchill or Napoleon seems reliable enough, but looking further back into history the great oil-painting-like vision we have of the past gets sketchier and sketchier until it becomes a single cave painting from which we infer a civilisation. Whilst Napoleon can be believed, what of Caesar or Alexander - Arthur or Brutus - Achilles or Gilgamesh: are these historical fact or fiction? Where is this blurry line to be drawn? When so many widely believed "historical truths" are held up by single sources - mere pinky bones of evidence - how can we truly trust our knowledge of the past?

When it comes to history, Western man is truly exceptional. We believe our inheritance to be from the classical historians of Herodotus and Tacitus; but for the Greeks, it's worth mentioning that the mere of existence of Democritus, the enemy of Plato and father of atoms, as a historical figure was doubted a mere 100 years after his death. And the Greeks had the best history of any civilisation! The only other civilisation coming close to that level of historical consciousness is the Chinese, whose annals were believed to be destroyed and edited with each successive dynasty. The West's powerful conception of history as something objective, absolute, existing outside of culture is truly a gargantuan leap beyond the mental paradigm of the rest of the world.

All of our histories however are based upon sources. Sources which can and have been forged across time. In the West, the Catholic church was notorious for having forged some of its raison d'etres for The Great Schism, such as the Donation of Constantine; whilst Renaissance Humanists were known to have written documents under the names of Classical authors attempting to pass off their ideas as ideas much older. A similar phenomenon was seen in Mediaeval times with the prevalence of pseudopigrapha - works written under a famous historical figure's name. To the modern scholar who writes history from sources, what is he to make of this? A history based on sources, dates, and names can't accommodate works written later than they actually were. Some get found out as "hoaxes" (although I'd argue this is an anachronism), whilst other papyrus fragments are sewn into the great tapestry of history. These papyri are mere Denisovan pinky bones - single clues from which we can extrapolate a race of men - evidence not from science, but from sources of debatable roots.

The realisation that our conception of the past is held up by pinky bones is at once terrifying and liberating. For myself at least, the story of the past is what roots me in this world; it's what grounds my historical place and orients me. To lose this directionality of the past through realising how weak a mere 'source' can be, is rather scary. In a sense it's a crisis of faith in the past. But history, and the worship of time and civilisations, is just another idol: there is nothing solid and known about it. The liberation is in knowing that the past is a mystery. Herodotus might point to Cheops as the owner of Giza through his discussions with an Egyptian hierophant - seemingly the only pointer orthodox history has to pyramid's provenance - but once you doubt these off hand comments as the truth, and merely as a suggestion, the mystery of the pyramids comes back to life. Similarly for other great sites from around the world, the context manages to dry out and extract the juice of the site, leaving a prune. What must the discoverers of Tikal or Angkor Wat have thought when they found these stone structures nestled in jungle? All of a sudden, the historian must cook up a civilisation to accompany the site with the evidence they've discovered from the carrion.

The doctrine of Original Sin must always be born in mind. The creations of man will always be imperfect and, if we don't exercise the necessary hygiene, will become fixed idols. The world has a far greater mystery than we think, however hard established the orthodoxy attempts to flatten time's depth. Whilst history is held up by pinky bones, pinky bones are often all we have; the rest is crack filling. It takes a certain humility to say "we don't know", and a certain bravery to doubt established narratives of history, although when witnessing modern revisionism with respect to empire, every new historical narrative begets a new iron fist. But you and I can change the past; for the past is created by pen and sword.

2023/05/21 Religion, Culture, and Traditions

The flurry of posts is in part due to me returning to half finished older articles - this one has been sitting in my browser for nearly a year!

Sati: the Hindu practice of the self-immolation of widows. Upon her husband's death, the wife, often against her will, had to fling herself upon his funeral pyre. Backing out wasn't an option: it was a custom after all.

The British upon seeing this were horrified; the practice was essentially human sacrifice. But, it was also part of the Hindu religion, and the British were cautious about changing too much local religion in their colonies, since it could only lead to unrest. Yet the voice of the public, once word of the practice arrived home, was unanimous: they wanted the practice eradicated. How though? How do you change a practice without changing the religion?

Tom Holland in his book Dominion argues the British did this by distinguishing culture from religion. By secularising the custom, saying that sati was not part of 'Hinduism' but rather a mere tradition, sati could be changed.

But what is the difference between a religion, a culture, a tradition, a custom.. the list goes on. What are they? Hinduism never existed in the past - of course Hindu practice has always been around, but the classification of 'religion' is a distinctly Christian one. The name 'Hindu', after all, has its roots of the Indus river: it is a belief tied to the Indo-Europeans of a specific geographical location. Indeed, pagan belief is tied to a people, a location, an ethnicity; lineage, and the conception of family gods is key to pagan cultures. Typically the father of a family - and we aren't thinking of nuclear families, but rather extended ones - is a kind of spiritual conduit for ceremony with the family gods. In many ways there are parallels to Christianity, although in Christianity priests have no necessity to be tied by lineage to their flock - the development of ethnos to nation (bear in mind though this is not an aping, but rather pagan rituals are imperfect attempts at what worship ought to be). In short, for pagan cultures, the blood tie cannot be separated from the custom nor the belief in their gods.

The clear objection to this is syncretism. Syncretism is the seeming blending of gods from one culture into another - take for instance much of the Roman world participating in the gods of their conquered subjects. Syncretism is to say that my gods are the same as your gods and though our method of worship may differ, we simply have different names for the same phenomena. Often this seemingly naive assumption was true however, with many of the Indo-Aryan world possessing the same set of gods by tradition. This can be traced in quite interesting ways, with the Germanic Aesir having a parallel with the Hindu Asura and the Persian Ahura, all of which occupy a kind of Titan-like position in their respective beliefs. The Holy Land can be a kind of meeting point where Indo-Aryan civilisation of the north meets the Semitic civilisation of the south. Civilisations can be further stratified into two types: Titan-worshippers and Olympian worshippers. The figure of Prometheus is a strange one - he seems like a kind of hero, and in Persian paganism he was since their culture was a Titan worshipping one. In the Med on the other hand, whilst Saturnalia was a kind of Titanic festival, the Titans were something to be suppressed by the ruling Olympian eltes only to be revealed in a kind of Carnival. Unfortunately true paganism is hard to find now in the Indo-European world. Hinduism isn't a pure form of paganism, since it underwent a kind of counter-reformation in opposition to the Buddhist axial revolution.

Returning to topic, the belief that every religion has a god, or many gods, has a set of core tenants, even a holy book is a hilarious post-Christian projection. Rishi Sunak in becoming prime minister swore his oath on the Bhagavad Gita, a strange act of cultural projection, albeit given that he grew up in this milleu it might not have been too strange to him. The concept of a religion being separate from culture has it's origins in St Augustine's conception of the saeculum, meaning 'lifetime', which is where the very idea of 'secular' originates. For Augustine, who was a highly neurotic Neoplatonist at heart, the Saeculum's limitedness was in contrast to the city of God - although since he was a Neoplatonist, the divine realm shone down into the saeculum of creation. This, in my view, is the original chip that fractured into the Great Schism - the autocephalous structure of the Orthodox church (where there are national churches in communion, like Greek Orthodox and Russian Orthodox), allows culture and church practice to be undistinguished since national character and the national church can mutually mold each other, whilst the internationalism of the Augustine-shaped West necessitates a division of culture and religion. My intuition is that Augustine's Christology in contradistinction to Eastern Christology a la St Gregory of Nyssa is the cause, but I can't quite put into words how. The Protestant reformation then was a pendulum swing back to national churches, albeit without their communion.

Returning to topic once more, Augustine's innovation of the secular develops into Aquinas' distinction between the natural and the supernatural (notably not connected by Platonic emanation), eventually leading to the modern day where culture and belief are distinct. For many now, 'Belief' has near no connection to the what one actually believes, with their true heart-felt beliefs originating in modern post-Christian doctrine: the crumbs of Christ. In a sense, the psychotechnology of the secular has managed to convert the world by cleaving custom from the spiritual, making spirituality a cerebral thing instead of something embodied.

Thankfully Sati has been vanquished as a practice. But how much have we lost? Our cultural march of iconoclasm has sacked traditions both good and bad; like an antibiotic, both bacteria harmful and helpful have been destroyed. One can spend their whole life mourning, but past mourning there must be a morning, a new beginning, where as a society we must build back up instead of tear down. Just think how mediaeval castles were build out of Roman roads. Today there is so much quality rubble out of which to build the future. The future need not be a chimeric zombie patchwork of parts, but something fresh, organic, and living. Today, what would we be without Plato? But always remember that Aristophanes in The Clouds called Socrates a libtard.

2023/05/21 Procrustean Theorising

Ideologies are straitjackets of thought. Naturally the world is too complex to understand, necessitating the heuristic-based thinking of an ideology to map and make distinct the facets of reality. Lumped in to ideology, any kind of endeavour of thought can succumb to this Procrustean thinking, such as philosophy or theology, granted the aspect of mystery isn't accommodated.

What is Procrustean thinking then? Named after the ancient Greek tale of Procrustes, the villain who lopped off feet and stretched people out to fit his bed (the eponymous Procrustean bed), Procrustean thinking is precisely that: the violent destruction and stretching of our perception of reality to fit the 'bed' of our preconceived notions. The ideology is the bed to which we debauch reality into fitting.

Falsehood will always yield to truth, just as a shadow will always yield to sunlight. The Procrustean pathology can only last twisted so long until a worldview has to be thrown out; once you realise how many tones of colour have been filtered out from your perception and you witness the true whole colour of white light, you emerge from the Platonic cave which your Procrustean ideology has had you entombed.

Can you see through walls? The opaqueness of systematisation presents a kind of idolatry where you can't see through and beyond. Ideology is idolatry since it is to hold up a fundamental set of beliefs and principles as what is truly behind the world. But, by virtue of being molded by human thumbs, these earthenware idols which attempt to summon the truth through their form only brings down demons. The great mystery underpinning reality cannot be seen if you believe walls to be opaque, for you won't be able to see through to what is within and beyond.

2023/05/21 The Fiefdoms of the Railways and the Nature of Nationality

Now that I take the train to work, specifically along East Midlands Railways, I've come to regard their peculiar purple uniforms as looking rather cool. In modern times, where most businesses don't even ask you to where a suit, and where the lost necessity for a uniform has left them by the roadside, seeing the purple uniform of EMR is quite refreshing. As a uniform, it's a strange colour to pick. Purple is a colour designed to stand out - it's bright and attention grabbing, even in its most subdued forms - but its also a colour of hierachy, stratifying the Roman emperor from Roman subjects. Then recently on another train line - I can't remember the line, must've been CrossRail or West Midlands - they had bright turquoise uniforms. Do all train lines have such strange regalia?

G. K. Chesterton's book The Napoleon of Nottinghill is great: even Miyazaki's a fan. The book takes place far in the future, although not much has changed - the only real difference is a general apathy towards politics, resulting in a system whereby a random member of the public is made dictator for life, under the assumption they'll leave things be. Unfortunately the emperor chosen has a queer sense of humour, turning London into a series of small fiefdoms, each containing a local lord and a small force of halberdiers decked out in ridiculously-coloured, feathered heraldry. What begins as a silly joke, which none of these appointed lords takes very seriously, eventually evolves into the lords taking the whole issue very seriously, with each lord deploying their troops to settle internecine planning permission disputes.

Like with all of Chesterton's works, his commentary is light-hearted, but not frivolous - profound, but not up itself. Through story alone, Chesterton mirrors back at us our own strange conception of nationhood.

The SNP never used to want be much of a force. In spite of their Nazi-aligned heritage, they've risen to a squealing pitch within British politics, able to force governments into referenda for their movement. But what was the cause of their meteoric rise? Well, it goes back to the WEFite Blair, and his attempt to destroy Britain through devolution. Attempting to address problems that were not present, Blair gave extra political power to Scotland and Wales; in essence, instead of putting a plaster over the small cut of protesters for independence, he scratched the cut to the point of infection. By giving power to Scotland in the form of a parliament, the dormant sense of Scottish nationhood was brought back to life and activity. Just like in the Napoleon of Nottinghill, to give political power and regalia, like that of a parliament, is to build a national identity worth dying for.

To call the many countries of Africa nations would almost be a mistake. Each of these gestating nations are schizophrenically fractured between contesting tribes for whom ethnicity is the greatest tie. For many, nationality and ethnicity are often confused, however they are quite different. One can be a British national without being ethnically English, for example. Nationhood would not exist without political power, for without a state, a house, through which to bind together the polis, there would be no nationality at all. Ethnicity on the other hand pre-dates civilisation, for ethnicity is an ancient thing of biology and lineage. In a sense, to place nation above ethnicity is a sign of our advancement and modernity, where our atavistic ties of blood are worth less than helping our Samaritan neighbours; but it takes time for a culture to develop to this level, and sub-Saharan Africa has yet to. Despite being infant nations, a sense of national identity has steadily been growing - but where were these nations born? Unlike the aged nations of Europe, it's within but a few generations that these nations were devised. And yet, by granting political power and "democracy" to these units, nationhood has been fostered, even in Africa where ethnic ties are tradition. Could it be the emergent Christianity blitzing through Africa soaking and disintegrating these ethnic ties? Again, we see the Nottinghill effect of nationality: political power precedes nationhood. And further still than with Scotland, since a military is the quintessence or spirit of political power. On a side note, aren't people who bemoan the Sykes-Picot line and the arbitrary borders of scrambled Africa in fact ethno-nationalists? Is it so hard for them to imagine those who aren't western Europeans to be able to get along with their neighbours? Stinks of contempt to me.

Did you think this was an post about nationality? Incorrect. Instead I will complain about train strikes. The train strikes are a pointless farce, since they are solely punitive to customers and the public at large. These "independent" rail networks like EMR, are in fact not independent at all; should national infrastructure permanently fail, the government would be in a bind, so the rail networks aren't allowed to fail. Strikes don't hurt the companies one bit since they're bank-rolled by the government. Here we see the exterior appearance of difference whilst under the hood your VW is actually a rebadged Skoda. Phoney rail nationalism gives the illusion of difference, tricking you into thinking there's multiplicity instead of unity: like the Hydra, many faces, one body. The regalia of nationalism and independence can fool us into thinking there is independence even when in reality there is no political power giving weight to the photograph of a statue. In short, power precedes identity; without power and autonomy, no amount of flourish like the EMR sandbag man can make you into an independent company.

2023/03/25 The Unnamed God

"Mankind has screwed up the world", is a phrase many people parrot. But when you think about it a little harder, the phrase in of itself doesn't make sense. What constitutes something like the world to be screwed up? How do we even determine screwed-up-ness?

Values are a complicated thing. For some time, many have taken for granted that the values we place on everyday things is somehow inherent, or baked into the world; yet one can ever claim they are with certainty. The 'self-evident' values of the American constitution are alleged to be common sense, but common sense is a slippery snake who, whilst winding through the ages, has taken on many skins. To the Roman senator, these self-evident truths would be far from common sense; after all, to the Roman, that slavery was just was common sense - but now that's obviously wrong. Again, I'm using that same language: 'obviously'. Why is morality obvious? Where does it come from?

The moment anything appears self-evident, or obvious, when relating to these domains, one must question it; you might be wandering into the cave of the Unnamed God. The Unnamed God gives many laws to his believers, yet the laws pass below the mental radar of the adherents. Holed away in his cave, the Unnamed God doesn't like to make much of a name for himself - for if he emerged, his pronouncements might be questioned more meaningfully - so he stays tucked away, distant and unknown to his believers, in fear of being found.

The problem with following the Unnamed God is that he's a liar. Easy it is to follow the nervous yet strong voice from the cave, but what a blind way to live! The truths of the world aren't self-evident: they must be found, dug up, and wrestled with. Foremost, bizarreness and absurdity of the world is there, should your eyes be clear enough to see it. Beyond the cataracts of the Unnamed God, we dress funny, act funny, live funny - it's all rather hard to understand once you take the vantage point of an alien without our conditioning and axioms. But the simplicity of not knowing how the world works is much preferred to the tragedy of the pretence we do. For most men who claim to know it all all seem to have a gravity, a seriousness, in the knowledge that the world will descend into a tragedy à la the pessimistic pagan world views.

This attitude of humility to the world is far healthier. In the physical sciences we claim to know much, but in reality we've built little idols to follow. This is best demonstrated with by acting like a toddler, and asking 'why' to everything.

"Why do apples fall?"
"Because of gravity."
"What's gravity?"
"..."

We've merely kicked the ball further down the road. Now, one could attempt to explain gravity in terms of forces and energy, but the question of 'what' forces and energies may be, let alone, 'why' they might be is never explained. In creating these sweet words, friendly idols who teach us nought but gives the illusion of deeper knowledge, we quash any imagination in the world, any sniff of the bizarre around us, destroying our ability to think beyond the the axiomatic chain-bind of the Unnamed God. Given the consensus on science has a far stronger orthodoxy than the schismatic consensus on morality, the Unnamed God has far more strength to produce groups of dogmatic and shouty people. When talking about morality, many give no heed to what's best to make a harmonious community or to encourage personal flourishing, but instead begin from dogmas like, "people have a right to do what they want so long as it doesn't harm others". This particular axiom must be a favourite of the Unnamed God - not just because for many I talk to it is the bedrock of their thought - but also, like many other such phrases, it merely passes the buck down the line. After all, what is harm? To feed such a phrase to a Roman senator might generate a totalitarian state where people are controlled to the extent they don't harm the interests of the polis, of the community. In a more modern context, can speech harm people? The right/left schismatic theologians argue the hermeneutics to this day.

So is the world screwed up? If your axiomatic tent pegs are firmly hammered down beside the Unnamed God, and you're 'in his camp', you'd probably say yes. Many, the more eschatological members of the 'left' schismatic group say the world is screwed up beyond repair, and it's only downhill from here. But again, I ask how do we know. Oracles speak, and great pronouncements are made, but does that bring us any closer to an answer? The physical sciences are exactly that - sciences - the study of the empirical data of what has happened. Through models and theorising, science can bring us closer to the truth, but models are merely that: clay models. Small simulacra, mere imitations, of the events, not the events in of themselves. And with morality, it seems we've been led down a very strange path. Many argue the world is screwed up because humans are the enemy - a moral inversion ripe for the totalitarianism of Babylon. For when the enemy is man, only that which isn't human - historically a god-king, but now perhaps an AI - ought to be in charge. Either way, such doctrines do not encourage the freedom nor the flourishing of man; such moralities wish to merely freeze new spring shoots.

To wrap up, I beseech you all to uproot your axiomatic tent pegs and go travel. Travel, and discover how narrow your past world was, and meet the many climates of thought. As an advisory, always remember that a man cannot function without axioms; the bizarre and absurd world is not easily navigable. But to be rooted in the harsh snowy climate of the Unnamed God is no way to keep going. Whilst the journey may be rough and face hardships, you'll see so much more of not just the intellectual landscape, but the feel of being there, with dry soil in your fingers, or damp air on your hands. Your perception of the world will open up like a twinkling night sky you'll sleep under. For with each move, you'll realise more and more the number of axioms underpinning your thought which you're still take for granted. And eventually, you'll set your tent pegs down somewhere you can call home. After all, there's no need to follow the god of the cave when you're called by the God of heaven.

2023/03/25 The Colour Brown as an Ideological Movement

I'm going to wring articles to make up for the recent drought. I've started working and haven't got as much time as I once did

Have you ever wondered why all website are black, white, and blue? It's isn't an Estonian psy-op - it's merely the colours of the age. Somewhat recently, a friend informed me of the changing winds in fashion from a black-based colour scheme to a brown one, and ever since the idea keeps resurfacing in my mind like a dolphin for air. Fashion is one of those thing which is so intangible, yet also organic; fashion has a natural path and progression, whilst also populating the air like the distinct yet hard to place scent of each season. From my my teen years on-wards, the colour palette of clothing has appeared to be black-based, to the point at which I took it for granted; yet now I have some kind of deep yearning for brown. One could argue the urge came about by the suggestion from my friend, but it feels quite organic, as if the suggestion only brought to consciousness the rising sense of brown.

Black and white is a classic dichotomy - but what is dichotomy? Is a dichotomy to compare one thing against its opposite, or one thing against its alternative; an older brother against a younger brother, or a brother against a sister? In a sense, black and white live within the same ecosystem, upon the same suppositions, whilst brown and, I suppose, beige occupy their own paradigm. The true alternative to black is not it's antagonist white: it's brown.

There is a kind of sterility to black. Black is the colour of nothingness, of death, of blank empty space. Where once man worshipped white, the colour of truth, hope, and purity, the colour black - that dismal shade purported to be that of the universe - is what is now worshipped. Pure vacuums centred not on man, the healthy anthropocentric, ~~geocentric~~, outlook, but rather on the man-as-automata material-centric worldview. On the other hand brown is an organic colour. The dirt beneath our feet, the trees which hold up the sky: brown is the colour of that which grows, changes, and decays, that which is living.

I see the move in the collective consciousness towards brown as a wholly positive one. Until now I had taken the black/white world we live in for granted, without acknowledging the possibility of brown. Somewhat recently, I've acquired a pretty dark brown writing desk, along with a brown '70s record player and receiver - my room is decked out in brown. No coincidence then that both of these styles - that of the '70s and that of the late-Victorian/Edwardian - are two of my favourite eras. When I was looking for record players, the only brown ones (wooden ones) I could find were from the '70s - by the time you get to the '80s and on-wards, the only style to be found is black plastic and sliver metal.

In a flurry of excitement last night, I changed my desktop to brown. I found a print from the late-Victorian era for my new laptop wallpaper, and had a deep feeling that it was too out of place with the current black window manager toolbar. So I dived into the lua config of awesomewm - a place I've spent much wasted time - changing all system colours to shades of brown; then, I changed my browser theme to match those shades of brown; and then into the config of LibreOffice, and so forth. The problem is that websites do not match brown. The internet was born into and remain a black and white domain, with every website being made in the black colour scheme of the era. Hopefully given modern fashions that will change, but it's hard to say.

My final point is this: colour does matter. It's easy to become obsessed with ideas, in a kind of Calvinism where only what's on the inside counts, and where the mind shouldn't be affected by matter. This kind of world-denial or at times Stoicism is a kind of withdrawal from the world and from beautifying it. As Roger Scruton points out, who would want to live in an ugly house? Ugly houses are abandoned and left to gather dust only to later be knocked down. The world must be beautiful in colour, pattern, and texture, lest we won't care for it. We care for the world in part because we adore it; and we adore the world not merely because of the benefits conferred or the inherent value, but because it's beautiful. Beauty is the flint and tinder to agape, to charity, to selfless love, the king of the virtues.

2022/09/12 On Her Majesty's Passing

I heard the news of Her Majesty's passing after watching Monty Python's The Holy Grail with my girlfriend. She showed me the news on her phone, and we lay motionless sobbing, before gluing ourselves to the BBC coverage. Surreal, it felt; that ever-present trellis around which modern Britain had grown had seemingly collapsed, leaving the climbing culture to stand on its own roots. But has the wooden strut broken? Or do we conflate the former queen with the monarchy since many have never known any different? Nay-sayers prematurely proclaim that the thousand year royal lineage will cease with Charles, saying that he'll never fill the boots Elizabeth shaped. But is there truth in that? Is monarchy the mere 'cult of personality' the doomers suggest, or is monarchy really something deeper?

Referring back to my previous article Natural Law and Chaos' Law, what is 'default' is not the atomised chemical state. Rousseauian independently-minded noble savages is not the base state of mankind, however much ""scientific"" evolutionary modelling you use to prop it. Mankind's base state is far more complex than that. Modern man has used Occam's Razor to slit his wrists, and wonders why we've bled the meaning out of the cosmos; reality is far more rich and complex than reductionism tricks us into believing. My assertion is that monarchy - and specifically monarchy connected to the divine - is something natural, something innate. In Britain we are lucky; many countries don't have what we have, and nor do they know what they're missing. There's an image, a container, if you will, waiting to be projected, waiting to be filled, by a monarch. In another sense, man is born with monarch potential in his mind - potential waiting to be actualised in a monarch who rules you. People say 'merely symbolic', but as I've said before, symbols are by no means mere: symbols are, in many senses, more real. The monarch of Britain is Britain's face. Through their vision Britain interacts and sees the world, and through their visage the world sees us. Whilst the brains of the operations lie nestled behind the cranium of parliament in the offices of Whitehall, it is through the monarch that any Britain may see themselves. One may love or detest the cabinet, the MPs, or the faceless civil servants, but we aren't divided across those lines, since we can see ourselves and connect to others through the totem of the monarch. For we are all his subjects.

Since monarchy is normal and all else abnormal, let us turn to our Atlantean cousins in the US. The fact that they do not have a monarch is wholly bizarre and unusual. The illness their political radicalism suffers with is a lack of a unifying figure, for each year they elect are partisan king. When the other half of the electorate can't see themselves in this king, they chant that he is 'not their president', because they can't stand to see their nation's face in him. When parliament sat in the Commons with black ties - party-less, without their usual coloured allegiances - was an especially moving scene. In the face of the queen's passing, petty disputes and party lines are all water under the bridge, for in the monarch all can be one.

Even if monarchy is a constant in Britain, the monarch is not. The face of the nation, after all, changes. It is the death of a past era and the birth of the next. Japan traditionally counts their years by monarch, with the year comprising of the emperor's name followed by the year of his reign. Whilst we don't do that with our monarchs (instead counting the years of Christ's reign) the principal stands that we remember history in terms of which face was ascendant, like the Elizabethan era, the Georgian era, or the Victorian era. Times change in Britain with the change of monarch; whole social eras are bounded by their lives. Through a new monarch, we see ourselves as different people, for our understanding of ourselves as a nation is different. The second Elizabethan age is over, and it saw such rapid change, from post-war poverty, to 60s supermarkets and motorways, to 70s discontent, to 80s economic reformation, to the internet and the rapid social and cultural change which is beyond brief description. The Elizabethan age has been one of great change in a certain direction. In a sense, the monarch is the Aristotelian final cause, or telos, which pulls culture in a certain direction, like a current. The era of Elizabeth II is over; but what era will Charles III deliver?

Unlike Elizabeth who was queen from a young age, Charles has long had the opportunity to be opinionated, and share his thoughts on any and all issues. Whilst he says he will be honouring the tradition of monarchical neutrality, his reputation as being opinionated is an odour which is hard to wash out. Elizabeth was always private about her thoughts and opinions, acting as a blank canvas for people to see themselves in, whilst with Charles his canvas is already coloured and painted. Consequently, it may be harder for people to see themselves in him, but at the same time it may affect our national psyche to be less open and wishy-washy, and instead be more conscientious and dogmatic. Another trait Charles is known for is vague mysticism. He's dabbled in Jung, essential oils, and other quite odd things for the monarch to dabble in; this may be related to my Hope for 2022 article, where I talk about how the future may become more mystical and religiose.

On a different note, mentioning back to the previously linked article again, Elizabeth was the last public figure who remembers the Second World War; in a sense she's our only human connection left to the horrors of Hitler. She lived through the Blitz in London, and very much embodies to this day the 'Blitz spirit' of duty and self-denial for the greater good. Will she be our last connection to that era of trauma? Will we finally be able to move on?

The tenor I've felt from talking to people and hearing the news is that many are more affected than expected. In truth, I was more affected than I expected, even though I expected to be more affected than expected. Is this not the ineffability of monarchy? The complexity of monarchy, which we can hardly put into words? I believe so. But at this moment all I can say is this: The queen is dead; long live the king.

I'm continuing a few days later to recount my journey to Buckingham Palace yesterday. My mother and I exited Green Park station, and so did the rest of the train; it was as if everyone riding the train was off to visit Buckingham palace. About a fifth of the people in the carriage were carrying bouquets of flowers also, but, as we shall see, few I suspect managed to place them. There was a thick flow of people confluencing at various intersections of Green Park, being led by TFL and staff into a large queue. There was an immense amount of people, at least ten thousand strong, but likely many tens of thousands - far more people than you would see exiting a stadium after a football game. The passage was gridlocked as people gradually inched their way forwards to get ever-closer to Buckingham palace. After an hour and a half, we essentially gave up going to Buckingham Palace, in part since the maul was too much, but also because a royal expert we met from New Zealand suggested we stay put in our position along The Mall leading up to the palace. But it was not just Commonwealthers we talked to: Italians, Mexicans, Brazilians - people from all over the globe were taking part in this royal ruck. After waiting some time - just as the expert advised - a motorcade appeared, with the king's black Rolls-Royce in tow. The king was waving to his subjects, and I saw him up close, taking a regrettably rubbish video of the event. The young Brazilian girl next to us, who had come just a day prior to begin studying abroad for a few months, was shaking with exhilaration on the verge of tears, and said to us, "I'll definitely be telling my children about this." No one would say that about a mere celebrity: the moment was magical because he was the king.

The mood of the event wasn't solemn, but rather hopeful. There was a kind of buzz of excitement - not the cliche of "we're a part of history" - but something more meaningful, as if everyone was participating in a kind of sacral moment on pilgrimage. The times were a-changing: the new king was coming. Despite the pushing, the children tired of walking, the sheer bustle and claustrophobia of the event, everyone was happy and chatty, making new queue friends, and sharing in the moment.

Peering at the many bouquets - many of which now encircled trees rather than the palace, owing to the difficulty in getting there - one attached message caught my eye. It was entitled, "to the Eternal Queen". To many, Elizabeth II is an eternal queen who's been the standing at the helm of the nation as captain since time immemorial. A modern Faerie Queen, the second Elizabeth's spirit will loom large over decades to come; her legacy will never be forgotten. We're at a moment when the tone - the very key signature - of the third Caroline age shall be set; and we can only hope this new tone shall be melodious.

2022/09/02 City Review: Vienna – the Vintage City, Part 1

I have a couple city reviews backed up, so hopefully I’ll work through my backlog now I’ve graduated and am a lazy NEET.

Journey

Back in June, my girlfriend and I went to Vienna for four days. Having only planned and booked the trip a mere week and a half prior to our departing, the flights and accommodation we found were surprisingly cheap; but it did mean an early 4:30 AM train journey from Nottingham to Gatwick. We had already made our way through security and passport control when I discovered something I really wished I hadn’t: the name on my ticket was abbreviated, not matching my passport. Operating on three hours sleep, and being inexperienced with flying, I was shitting myself. We tried phoning the airline, Wizz, but they wouldn’t accept calls, unless you wanted to pay two quid a minute. The help desk at Gatwick was bare; the same people we saw standing when we entered the terminal were still standing there as we headed for the gate. What a ridiculous system, where you can’t even ask for help! Wizz’s website claims you can change small errors for free, but the feature appears to have been deleted since it certainly was nowhere to be seen when I looked (and yet the flotsam of good press remains). The flight was quite delayed, but we spent the time chatting to a man also heading to Vienna, which certainly helped to calm my nerves. At long last the gate was announced, and we walked down; there, I asked the lady at the desk whether it would be a problem, and the kind Mediterranean lady shooed me away saying it’ll be fine, with that reassuring lack of concern or bother which only someone from the Mediterranean can show. My fears had been merely a mirage.

After a near-narcoleptic nap on the plane, wherein it felt no time had passed from take off to touch down, we had finally arrived in Vienna. And blimey was the sun hot. Austria is further south than Britain by some margin, with Vienna sitting on a latitudinal line with much of central France; but when imagining Austria, one doesn’t usually think it to be hot. Perhaps it’s the association with the Alps and skiing flurrying our vision. Either way, there was little time for dilly dallying – we needed to check in at the hotel and drop off our bags. Following my infamously poor sense of direction, we repeatedly got lost on the complex network of trains, buses and trams, until we eventually dragged ourselves to the hotel. Exhausted, we arrived at our surprisingly affordable studio-style hotel room; outside of the city centre, accommodation in Vienna is unexpectedly good value for money.

Day One

The time was around 7PM, and it was time to hit the streets of Vienna. Despite not being in the city centre – outside of the main enclosing ring road – the architecture was very much uniform. Wherever you are there are four story tall apartment blocks watching over you, each with enough slight stylistic changes to be interesting to the eye, but not so many changes that the view becomes a confused and intimidating London-like mess. Vienna maintains a kind of warmth in its architecture because it’s pretty. It’s not that each individual residential building is a work of genius in its own right, but rather that there’s a sense of synergy, of cogency, of thought which structures its design. Walking around London – a city I know and will compare to Vienna throughout – there is very little sense of form; instead, London has a kind of Conway’s Game of Life-style evolutionary hodgepodge look. From the banks of the Thames you can see the classical St. Pauls, concrete car-parks like the National Theatre, and that agonising stake through London’s heart, the Shard. London is a a city without logos; whilst for Vienna this is not the case. These architectural differences are an echo of the thoughts and cultures which designed them – the Austrian empire plays tall, whilst the British empire plays wide – but we’ll touch on these differences later.

We were hungry after our day of travelling, only pecking at snacks here and there over the journey, so we asked Google Maps, an ally without whom navigating Vienna would be a herculean task, to lead us to what it called an Austrian restaurant. Arriving there we could tell it was a local pub. It’s not that we felt unwelcomed at all, just that we didn’t belong there. Nevertheless, after we walked through the door and sat down, a lady who spoke scant English gave us a menu, and we replied with our far scanter German. In the end we got her recommendation, the platter for two. The platter possessed an unholy quantity of food: two schnitzel, two pork chops and two pieces of liver; all on a bed of rice and chips. Herby butter blocks were strewn across the dish also, soaking into the meat and carbs below. What a beautiful introduction to Austria. After the tenseness of the flight and the getting lost on the way, sitting down to this massive platter of local Austrian food with a hearty pint of Kaiser beer (draught, 7/10) was a well-needed welcoming gesture from Austria. After paying with the aid of Google Translate, and heading back to the hotel, we played three games of billiards (1W, 2L), and crashed into bed exhausted.

Day Two

But alas! A day had passed, and not a single sight on our lengthy bucket list had been seen! Day two began with me forcibly dragging my girlfriend out of bed for an early start; as much of Vienna had to be seen in the two and a half days remaining there. Leaving the house, we passed a Greggs-style bakery, where we went for breakfast. There, they sold a lot of bready things, and also salty things, like these soft Viennese pretzels and pretzel sticks. I can’t say the food was all too pleasant in truth, and would’ve rather picked a good meal at Greggs any day. Nevertheless, we acquired sustenance for the long day ahead.

Our first location to visit was the Imperial Treasury. There, they had the wealth of treasures which once blessed Vienna as the cultural centre of Europe. Included, were the orb, sceptre, and crown of the HRE – the orb, sceptre, and crown which once ruled central Europe. The crown was of particular splendour, with fine detailed embossings adorning its gold sides. At first after the first few rooms, I worried the museum wasn’t very big and there wasn’t too much to see – but after turning each corner, my worries were further alleviated as we were greeted with yet more rooms filled with exhibits and doors to traverse. Because the museum was comprised of smaller rooms rather than great halls, the exhibits could be properly curated and placed in their various sections. Many of the sections were populated with tabards embroidered with noble crests, stubby little poles, which I presume noblemen and royalty held, and bright sparkling jewellery. From the halls of worldly political power, we progressed to the halls of heavenly power; religious icons, busts, and then relics. Relics like part of the real Lance of Longinus – finally after having written about it for so long – and a portion of the true cross. There was even a real unicorn horn. And then we moved on to the affects of Charlemagne, although the crown with which he became emperor, severing Europe in two, was on tour and not present. Nevertheless, the bible on which he swore – a beautifully bible decorated in gold – was there. Charlemagne is such a distant character of history, it feels, that he’s faded into the firmament of mythology; much like a Caeser or an Alexander, he’s a kind of pillar of light shining through an era of darkness – a name and a legacy too powerful to comprehend. But, to my knowledge, the heroes of antiquity named above have no affects through which we can connect to them, unlike for Charlemagne. It almost feels as if Charlemagne should be too ancient for there to be such exhibits.

After leaving the dim-lighted treasury, we entered the marble-amplified, yellow Austrian sun. A small stall selling sausages in the town centre sold us some incredibly rich and fatty sausages with a neighbouring piece of rye to mop the grease. From the sliced sausages, grease bled into the paper plate, and with each bite the roof of my mouth was layered with a thin patina of fat. Nonetheless, it was rather tasty. They also sold cans of beer to be drank in public, so understandably I couldn’t stop myself from trying the much advertised Gosser beer (can, 7/10). Every coaster, every sign, and every pub veranda had the ‘Gosser’ brand adorned, so it was merely a matter of time before I gave it a try. Walking around a small park in the centre of Vienna looking at the flowers with a beer in my hand felt a little strange, but Mr Google reassured me that public drinking was the done thing in Austria.

We proceeded to wander shop-laden streets, until we found an artisan gelataria and chocolatier into which I was dragged by my girlfriend. There, I had a scoop of ice-cream bobbing in espresso, whilst my girlfriend had two ice-creams, becoming guilty friends with the server. Notably, we overheard an American couple behind us ask a most American question. They asked if they could have the gelato as a milkshake, and when denied, asked if they had a blender with which they could quickly make one! Whenever I have the opportunity to meet Americans, they happen to fit an angle of their stereotype.

Vienna being the imperial heartland has what any axis mundi of culture should have: a lot of museums. Collected in museums are the collected culture and wisdom of the past; and those who hold the keys to the past can open the doors of the future. Whether it be the Romans pilfering the relics of Greek civilisation on early imperial invasions of the peninsula, or rich British aristocrats buying up the riches of ancient Egypt, museums are where the strong display their mastery. On our travels down the many pretty streets of Vienna, we stumbled across the Globe Museum – a museum dedicated to the history of globes. Famous globes, some up to two metres in diameter, were displayed in what felt like a smaller under-advertised museum. The museum was a simple older style of museums, from an era when museums weren’t trying to ‘make you think’ nor ‘have a message’ but rather just show you a grand collection of antique items. On the same ticket was the Esperanto museum, which was very much the ‘we don’t have much to display, so here are some wiki text boxes to read’-style of museum. Although, it was rather interesting. The small exhibition detailed the political ramifications of Esperanto, beyond the simple early conlang angle. Esperanto was a pan-European movement aiming to unify Europe through language as a kind of preparation for a greater unification, born and grown in the era of nationalism’s zenith. Despite popularity amongst internationalist groups like communists and socialists, the fledgling language was harshly persecuted by later nationalists such as Hitler and Franco. After the collapse of nationalism with the fallout of the Second World War, the seeds sewn in European soil by these earlier movements like Esperanto sprouted, and, fertilised by nationalism’s ashes, became the European Union, and other such modern internationalist movements.

Our next stop was the Imperial Crypt where the many emperors of Austria are mummified in sarcophagi. The mood was grave – absolute silence was requested – and walking through the chilly underground past ornate tombs with preserved people within was sombre. The most magnificent of the graves was the grand grave of the mother of modern Austria: Maria Theresa. I spent a while admiring the masonry of her tomb, when I felt a very strange presence coming from the tomb for a moment. Feeling a little unnerved from the experience, I continued, over to the austere tomb Franz-Josef, the mourned final father of Austria.

Before I continue, it’s worth going into Franz-Josef and modern Austria. It’s hard to move far in central Austria without being greeted by a statue of the former emperor. The loss of their last great monarch due to the First World War lingers as a kind of trauma over Austria; it’s as if Queen Victoria was the last British monarch, and was deposed due to losing the war – it would be unbearably painful for the proud British soul. There is a deep sense in Austria of what I can only really describe as ‘vintage’. The buildings have an old look to them, with few to none of the modern monstrosities warting Vienna; Corinthian columns and imperial grandeur are hard to avoid in Vienna, but the grandeur is that of the past. The Austrians know that the emperor has been absent for a century, but his imperial seal is firmly stamped all over the city. London too has the beauty of the gothic and classical projecting our historic power to the world, but we too have the unfortunate buildings which project modern power in Canary Wharf, like the Shard and the Walkie-Talkie. And in that sense, it doesn’t feel like London is gripping to the past, but is rather growing healthily and living in the present. Vienna on the other hand has no modern power to project: the power is only historic and that of the empire. The slight evening feel of Vienna is that of the quiet, sleepy evening after a day industrious in the hot summer sun. The empire’s time in the sun has ended. And Franz-Josef is the icon through whom that earlier nostalgic warmth is felt.

After the crypts, then, we proceeded to one of the major museums, the Imperial Apartments. The apartments were part of a greater triumvirate of museums, starting with the Imperial Silverware Collection, the Sisi museum, and then ending on the Apartments of Hofburg palace where the emperor lived. Beginning with the silverware, I enjoyed seeing room upon room of like-looking sets of silverware. Some rooms were older and richer, decorated with wooden interiors, where the displayed silver looked more at home; whilst other rooms were cleaner and more sterile, exhibiting the silver in glass, creating a kind of blinding mirror effect under the bright lights. My girlfriend, however, was uninterested in the silver sea, and hurried me along a little.

What she despised far more was the Sisi museum. Sisi was the reluctant wife of Franz-Josef who has taken on a kind of popular reverence for the Austrians. A modern equivalent, I realised the other day, is Lady Diana, a faerie princess of the people who died before her time. In Austria, Sisi is much beloved, and you can’t walk too far without seeing a Sisi this or Sisi that for sale in a souvenir shop – or any shop for that matter. My girlfriend had a quite gut reaction against Sisi though, and when she explained her case, I mostly agreed. The museum, unlike the others we saw in Austria, was an ‘experience’ museum, one where the lights are dimmed and there are walls of text to read. Many of these quotes came from Sisi’s poetry and letters which were.. chuuni? Somewhat infantile? Much of the quotes bemoaned her awful predicament of having responsibilities and being cooped up in court life. But at the same time, in contradistinction to her almost Prussian-ly austere husband, she revelled in its luxury. She had tailored the most exquisite dresses and used the most expensive of cosmetics. Her long knee-length hair was washed in eggs on the daily, as part of a morning routine which took over an hour. Looking at some of the dresses briefly – for I had to go fast since my girlfriend had already power-walked through – the waist-line was terrifyingly thin. Sisi essentially starved herself and made herself up to become a kind of fairytale princess who never grows old. Maybe its that very image of the eternal empress which resonates so sonorous in the heart of the Austrians who are without an emperor.

The best part of the museum was saved for last. The Imperial Apartments were furnished as if the last emperor Franz-Josef had just headed out, and we were going around for a quick jaunt. The decor was grand, but not over-the-top; I had almost expected a kind of maximalist high-rococo extravagance from the Habsburgs, but the rooms were more subdued, coloured solely with matte white, shiny gold, and red velvet. The velvet was especially pretty with its contrasting texture and gently patterned surface. Unfortunately, however, the small alley through which you could walk was clogged with tour groups stopping in each room, leaving no gap to overtake. It was awkward to get past, and rather claustrophobic given the density of people in each room.

Our last stop for the day was the National Library. The library was the most beautiful interior to a building I had ever seen. Lush with classical grandeur, Renaissance-style art, and maximalist detail on any small space you look. It was truly breath-taking: a vision of Elysium. The sheer beauty made me tear up, in truth. My words can’t do justice to the beauty of the library, so I implore you to either go or find some more pictures online.

By the end of the day we were rather shattered after having taken in the many sites of Vienna. We found ourselves another Viennese pub where this time I got a plate of schnitzel and a pint of a delicious Schwechater Zwickl (draught, 9/10). The portions in Vienna are generous and surprisingly reasonably priced. We returned to the hotel, played our now habitual three games of billiards (2W, 1L), and slept soundly.

2022/08/24 How to View History

Ashamedly, when I was younger, I used to think the Ottoman Empire and the Byzantine Empire were the same. As a child, I had a book – a book whose spine is beyond worn and barely held together from use – detailing the history of political boundaries of countries from antiquity onwards. And from this book of maps, it certainly appeared as if the Byzantines had become the Ottomans just as the Eastern Roman Empire had become Byzantium. Now you could blame the map for this misunderstanding – or if you were harsh, my childhood naivety – but it’s a misunderstanding I’ve heard from many others when talking about this era of history. Why is this? It’s such a silly misunderstanding once you learn about the histories and forces of these countries, and learn how the last bastion of Rome was destroyed not by their time-old foe, the Persians, but by Turks organised under Islam. The battle at core, the feeling at core, of such a war between the waxing crescent moon of Islam and the falling eagle of Eastern Christendom is lost with a such a learning of history. The teaching of history, whether at school or on YouTube, has lost its moral angle. Unlike proper history books, which attempt to tell stories and take sides, lower, entry level histories do their best to be ‘unbiased’ and ‘merely factual accounts’. The result of this, however, is the production of a cold and distanced history, without any personal connection to the events. This kind of history is of mere facts, not stories. This kind of history merely teaches you to make aloof moral judgements. This kind of history can’t orient.

The purpose of history is an important question to ask. To justify any discipline, there must be a concrete purpose pushing it forward towards a destination. Many mock philosophy as a pointless endeavour, without realising that its abstract theories are the flint and tinder for so many other disciplines; whilst the ever fawned over discipline of theoretical physics has with string theory achieved nought. When asked, many say that history’s purpose is to ‘prevent making the same mistakes again’, and then they proceed to tack on a quip about invading Russia; but is this all we can gain from history? By such an admonition, is history only useful to foreign policy makers? Whilst I certainly hope Her Majesty’s Foreign Office read history broadly absorbing its many lessons, that can’t be all history has to offer. To the common man, I’ll posit, history’s purpose is to orient. History teaches us where we’ve come from; who we are; why we are who we are, and so forth. In the same way the story of ‘who I am’ can be told by divulging into a story of my past, my up-bringing, and my life experiences, so too can a nation’s. How better to explain the character of the English than to speak of the battles, wars, and enemies against whom a character has been hewn? In rejecting Cromwell, rejecting Napoleon, rejecting the Kaiser, and rejecting Hitler, the British character can well be understood.

History then ought to be taught from the perspective of narrative and orientation. To understand your nation, a friendly nation, or an enemy nation – to understand the meaning of history – you have to stand from somewhere. History can’t be coldly calculated from a kind of view from nowhere watching countries fight as if you were watching a battle royale of stag beetles from above. Much like watching the football, it’s far more engaging and meaningful if you’re rooting for a team; and, much like the football, it’s best to root for your home team: after all, what’s the point in being a glory hunter? But, of course, there’s nothing wrong with rooting for teams where you used to live, or from where your family are from. History is much the same. History should attempt to be an avenue by which patriotism is accessed – accepting both the good and the bad of your nation’s history – rather than an excuse to pretend to be of no nation at all, and view history from a distant “unbiased” view from nowhere.

History should not however descend into a good guys versus bad guys interpretation where we are the righteous vanquishing the immoral. The Crusades are a great example of this. By most accounts, the Arab invasion of the Holy Lands was far more chivalrous and sporting than the seeming barbarian hordes who blazed through Europe in the attempt to take them back. Just because they weren’t the good guys doesn’t mean they weren’t our guys; we can complain and critique and say our home team played a bad game of footie, but that doesn’t mean we should support the away side just because they won! The kind of moral flip-flopping of allegiances in learning history to whoever’s winning the great game of being righteous is really a rather turncoat understanding of the past.

The reason we have no choice but to take the aloof view from nowhere in popular academics is because of the Second World War. As I’ve discussed previously, Hitler’s shadow looms large over the West to this day. The apparent post-war consensus removed many facets of life from the diet of Western man: mysticism, for it might lead to the fanaticism of the Nazis; Romanticism, for nature and the reactionary evocations of many Romantics inspired the reaction of the Nazis; and rooting for one’s nation, for the screeching nationalism of the Nazi war machine should never be allowed to rear its head again. Whilst each of these has been seen since 1945, they each come with a catch. The mysticism of the hippies, for instance, was tempered by the materialism of the drugs which brought them there; whilst the nature-loving environmentalism of the Nazis, is hardly recognisable as the utilitarian materialism of modern environmentalists. As Hitler passes out of living memory, and becomes a man of the past, hopefully a healthy interpretation of these facets can be reintroduced to our nutrient-deficient diets. Either that, or we shall be tricked by the politics of one of the many pill-dealers claiming to offer us a solution to our ailments.

In summary then, history should be rooting for a team – not in jest, but in sincerity. This doesn’t require a kind of slavish allegiance to every decision and action the government has ever made – supporting 18th century British policy on slavery is uncountenanceable, after all. But in so far as we were once slavery’s greatest proponent, by the 19th century we became its greatest scourge, scrubbing every sea of its stain. Is that not something to be patriotic about? History is the story of nations, the waxing and waning of great states, the trials they face, the mistakes made, and the great humanitarian successes. And when you learn and study history, be sure to side, identify, and live within its story; not as an amoral grey alien, but as a living person within a living story. After all, history is not yet over, and her tides will continue to rise and fall. This is the story you are a part of.

2022/08/09 The Edge of the World

Many think the Earth is a globe spinning around an axis spanning from pole to pole. If you are a geographer, a sailor, or a an aeroplane pilot, this is a perfectly reasonable way to understand the world; yet if you've never left your country and travel very little, it seems a little absurd. Why is the pole - the axis mundi, the centre of the world - a cold, barren wasteland? Why is all life and reason centred upon bleak nothingness? If you ask me, seeing the centre of the arctic as the pole is an ec-centric view: a mis-centred and mis-aligned view of the cosmos. Historically, the pole has been in Jerusalem, as any mediaeval map shows:

The map above is a little later than mediaeval, as the inclusion of America suggests, but the general scheme common to many maps of the era is demonstrated. These maps are topological rather than topographical: they aren't trying to show the graphical (graphein) or perceived view of how the land masses are oriented, but rather show the logical (logos) or relational view. With these maps, there is a clear centre around which the world rotates; not an arbitrary topographical one, but rather a specific topological one. Instead of giving sailors directions, as the topographical map does, the topological map gives people direction. It orients us in a far more profound sense.

Keeping the distinction in mind, I'll proceed to mildly doxx myself. Recently, I went to South Africa to see family (I am half Greek and half South African) to a town in the Karoo desert where they live. There, my brother and I went on small adventures with my uncle who's a local country vet to watch/help him do a variety of procedures (mainly horse castrations). The Boer farmers we met were enormous. It's no wonder the British had such a hard time in the Boer War. They stand six foot six at a minimum, and their hands when you go to shake them are nearly twice the size of one's own. They are true giants.

On a more personal note, I've never known how to relate to my South African side. There's the smoggy haze of recent politics which obfuscates the understanding of the country's spirit and core beneath a miasma of guilt and resentment. The last time I went, however, I realised what South Africa's meaning is: South Africa is the edge of the world.

Britain, the country I was born and raised in, was once the edge of the known world. Looking at the map above, Britain hangs off the edge of the European lobe, like a kind of distant splinter from the continent - and to the Roman mind, Britain very much was the distant island of much speculation and wonder. The first Roman to land there was of course Caesar on his expedition to a near mythical land famed for its giants. There, he was greeted with battle hardened Celts who warded him away from their barbaric island of human sacrificers. The sentiment continued into the mediaeval era, even though Britain was very much Christianised by this point, in the form of Arthurian legend. The crazed happenings in Britain, with monsters and debauchery, are a kind of manifestation of Britain's edge-ness. The centre of the world, historically seen as Jerusalem, is a kind of lighthouse bathing the world in the logos; and the further out you travel from this centre, the more the logos begins to break down, spawning giants, chimeras, and immorality (greater fallenness).

In this light, South Africa too is the modern edge of the world. Strange chimeric megafauna, backwards morality as the last racist state, and giant Dutchmen; all the qualifiers are there. Also South Africa is very far away - almost as far away as you can get - in the southerly direction of the African landmass, much like how Britain's as far as you can get on the European landmass. Now granted, there's also Madagascar and Ireland, but they're even more out there; Madagascar for it's bizarre fauna, and Ireland for its faeries. On the Asian landmass you get Japan... somehow I've collected a trifecta of edge nations. But note how Japan also has this allure of the edge: a land of famed for their idiosyncratic culture and, unfortunately, hentai (but no large people). And of course Australia, a country which many say is literally upside-down, continuing the antipodean (opposite-footed people) story descending from Plutarch

Why is this important then? The topology of your map is important - whether you acknowledge it or not, it's always there - and to discover the centre instead of letting it be picked for you aids you in balancing yourself. Many see the US as the modern world's centre, since it's the current seat of worldly power; but the Atlantean continent hardly deserves such a title. There is a kind of antipodean inversion to much of American culture, making it an unsuitable centre. For me, recognising South Africa as the edge of the world, as a frontier, helped me understand what that aspect of my blood meant, and how to relate to it as part of my identity. After all, only through maps can we begin to understand the territory.

I shall return to the differences between topology and topography in the context of worldview in a future article.

2022/08/05 Natural Law and Chaos' Law

I am now a graduated certified NEET. I'll try and keep to my one a day rule a little tighter...

Worldviews and metaphysics as a concept has always fascinated me. With but a few different beliefs about reality's structure, and different axioms with regards to epistemology, a uniquely novel view can arise. Everyone wears the tinted glasses of a worldview, whether conscious of it or not, and sees the world through that nuanced perspective.

Yet some worldviews are simply better than others. Any worldview - take Freudianism or Marxism - can claim, once stretched and twisted - to be able to explain everything; yet these worldviews have their limits. Granted, anything can be understood and explained through these frameworks, but the usefulness of the worldviews differs greatly. Freudianism can and has been used to explain the workings of current events, the course of history, and the like, however the explanations and analyses it produces don't have the same explanatory and predicative power of a superior model. It's not to say the worldview is wrong: just that it's less, or smaller. G. K. Chesterton puts it poetically, when he writes in Orthodoxy, 'Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that [the] mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.'

What I'll dub Chaos' Law is a predominant worldview today. At root are small forces and modicums of matter - atoms and energy - which evolve a kind of emergent phenomenon through the chance of quantum calculations. The universe begins with the Big Bang, wherein matter and energy was strewn across an ever-growing cosmos; some of this matter, congealing in a kind of soup, emerges the first signs of reproducing life; and through a reflexive process, evolves into conscious man of today - conscious man merely being a neural network reinforced by stimuli. The whole process described involves a kind of chaos: the forces of the universe were such that stars and planets happened to form; the congealing soup emerges by chance due to chaotic forces, and genes propagate in the chaos of adaptation; the neural networks work and rework themselves through chance interactions with the environment. With the scientific worldview, Chaos rules. There are laws - the laws of physics - which are held as a kind of Platonic universal, but the force, the spirit of the system, is randomness, chance, and Chaos. Never forget that science is not intuitive; which is to science's benefit. These unintuitive theories have been crafted by some of the greatest men to have ever lived to try and account for the complexity of how the world operates. But a simple goodness of fit to nature doesn't make it true. Truth is something higher which must not only accommodate sister Earth, but the whole family: both worldly and heavenly, visible and invisible. As I'm sure I've iterated many a time on my blog, science is blind to the majority of happenings: it is no universal method of discovery.

What then is Natural Law? In contradistinction to Chaos' Law, Natural Law is not esoteric, but rather aims to describe the world as it appears in relation to man, rather than in relation to complex scientific theories which claim to explain everything. In short, Natural Law relies on common sense over scientific knowledge. The theories of science appear to explain everything, in a similar way to how Freud or Jung appear to explain everything; science is but another pair of glasses through which to look - not the final word on every topic. As we discussed earlier, science is a narrow circle which appears infinite despite there being wider circles on which to travel. Where science has slipped the leash most in terms of common sense is Darwinism - something I know first hand, having been obsessed with evolutionary Jungianism over lockdown. If you ask a question someone smart doesn't know about mankind or nature, it is as easy as can be for them to invent a fiction about why such a trait has an evolutionary advantage, and hence explaining why it exists today. Buried in my mind are so many worthless facts built upon the foundations of unfalsifiable Darwinistic speculation, that it's tricky to restrain myself when they bubble up in conversation.

We enslave ourselves to the narrow circle of the scientific model without realising a greater, more holistic, circle exists for us to travel around. Whilst Chaos' law is matter-centric, Natural Law is man-centric; instead of seeing the world from the perspective of small emergent forces and particles, reality is seen as you see it: through the sense and experiences of life. Instead of love being a mere chemical in the brain, love is a fundamental force of the universe. Things are what they are. The box is a box - it's material may well be cardboard, and you could look deeper to find molecules of cellulose and lignin - but it is primarily a box. The distinction made may sound silly, but to place the identity of box as being truer than the identity of the atoms and molecules which constitute it is crucial. Science is the up-skirting of sister Nature; the iconoclasm of all of reality, and hence the blinding of man to God. Chaos' Law sees emergent phenomenon being the conductor of reality, wherein small forces become great effects in a bottom-up model. As a result we look down on the world looking for answers. In realising that the form, the higher aspect, is more real than the constituent parts, we realise the truth of the top-down vision of reality, and we can finally look above us to find what or rather who governs its order.

In coming to the Natural Law, certain things people like to see as 'lifestyle choices' either become obviously right or wrong. After all, when recognising the higher forms and patterns of reality, we see the patterns by which man is meant to act; man isn't a Chaotic mess, or a blank slate - we have a way we're meant to live. [matter->mater->mother->earth; pattern->pater->father->heaven]. Chaos' Law is chaotic, directionless, and unpolarised, giving little guidance to man's action; whilst Natural Law has a polarised quality, dictating how man should be. Where Chaos Lawist sees existential terror, the Natural Lawist sees clear path and meaning. That does not mean to route is easy, however. The licentious liberty under Chaos' Law is a far simpler life than the strife of trying to follow the Natural Law from which we have fallen.

The scientist only has one eye, only observing bottom-up emergent phenomena of matter - and even then many of the most common phenomena are forgotten. Whilst those who follow Natural Law have both their eyes open, able to see the bottom-up of emergence and the top-down of imposed patterns. Many a woo-woo New Age spiritualist implores you to open a third eye; but I hope after reading this I've convinced you to open your second.

2022/08/01 The Blood Pact

Given my newfound NEETdom, I've decided to spend the time mildly productively writing a blog article a day. These articles may well be a little shoddier, but I'll keep them running out whilst I'm job hunting.

Some ideas are deeply intuit and obvious, residing at the core of the human experience: and blood pacts are one of them. Often when I write something important to myself - particularly when it's a set of rules which I want to follow, like I did recently - I have this strange instinctual urge rise up, often taking the form of recurring unshakeable imaginations, of cutting my finger or thumb tip slightly and leaving a bloody print to seal my allegiance to the note's contents. Whilst it's poor form to assume my own experiences are common to all, the symbolic resonance of blood is one I believe is common to all. Similarly to how snake and spider fears are cross-cultural phenomena, most likely down to our biology, so too is a fear of blood, or needles; most likely, the vision of blood, the power of the crimson colour and the image, is one that is seared deeply into us. Pair this with the fact that animal sacrifice of various kinds is another kind of human universal common to all cultures (until the coming of Christ, of course), and the energy of blood can be understood. As any classical or Mediaeval writer would confirm, blood is the bodies life force; without blood, you're faint, whilst when you're spirited, your 'blood's pumping'. You can even feel your pulse, or see a vein bulge, if you're angry enough. Until the Enlightenment, after all, the heart was not a mere 'pump', but rather the organ which imbued life-force into your blood. One's blood is their life-force - their vitality; a connection which even today, despite modern science's haemoglobin and oxygen, is hard to shake.

Blood pacts are seen everywhere. The hecatombs sacrificed by the Greeks in the Iliad is the letting of oxen blood to form a pact with the gods; and the breaking of the hymen in consummation is a kind of blood sacrifice for the contract of marriage. Yet to reject the blood contract, the blood pact, is a distinctly Christian invention. Christ's death is the final blood pact, the final sacrifice: of God Himself. There's a reason it's Shylock in The Merchant of Venice who makes a blood pact - a contract asking for his pound of flesh; and there's a reason he's defeated by the Christian law forbidding the letting of blood for the pact.

What I'm writing may well sound ridiculous; 'blood pacts? I've never had any such inclination!', you may reply. But we stumble blindly. In his autobiography, C. S. Lewis describes himself as a "pagan convert in a society of puritan apostates" - a sentiment I very much share. The people I talk to, the people I meet, have such deep Christian convictions, without a hint of Christian belief. The fact that blood rituals never cross the average man's mind goes to show how Christian we've become; the blood ritual has become a image of jest as to what a Satanic ritual would look like. I wonder why...

2022/06/20 Parade & Parody: Chimeras, Paprika, the Jubilee Pageant, and the Never-ending Carnival

Watching the Jubilee Pageant a few days ago with friends over the long Jubilee weekend was terrifying. Once the first act of military marches had passed we were greeted with a second act of the decades of the queen’s life; each decade from the ‘50s onwards had a bus and a marching parade showing the clothing, fads, and sensibilities of the era. Despite being a little sad to hear commentary with the era’s B-list celebrities on the bus repeating “this is one of the best days of my life” and “I really am a child of the ‘80s”, it wasn’t offensive in so far as it merely fell a little flat. The ‘10s, it’s worth noting, barely had a bus or parade – the internet age really doesn’t have much shared culture to bond over (I was hoping for Minecraft Steve to make an appearance for the sake of the royal children, but was left disappointed.)

The third and final act was where the pageant went from bubbleless and flat to positively sour and perhaps poisonous. In celebration of the queen, the organisers sent out legions of demons. Chimeras of every stripe – human-animal hybrids, animal-animal hybrids, humanoid monsters, not-so-humanoid creatures of terror – walked down Pall Mall in honour of the queen. What’s worse is that these demons were meant to represent her subjects! Many came representing the constituent nations of the UK and the Commonwealth: is this how the Crown sees the queen’s subjects? Are we but these crazed chimeric beings without distinct identity? In a strange way, which the organisers certainly did not intend, we are – symbolism is most commonly unintentional, for the psyche can’t help but portray the patterns it sees.

Either way, the pageant has undoubtedly only confirmed the horrid suspicions of many Americans made mad on the Atlantean continent that the British monarch is the Antichrist; a suspicion we, like most of the world, imbibe whilst sleeping under the US’ cultural hypnotic hegemony.

What then is so horrific and terrifying about the chimera, and what does the chimera mean? The chimera, originally a figure from Greek mythology, is a Frankenstein of different animals seemingly sewn together – the kind of creature you’d expect to find in a clandestine Chinese laboratory. Being a creature of many foreign components, it is without identity; is a chimera which is one part lion, one part serpent, and one part goat a lion, a serpent, or a goat? It is it’s our inability to name it and categorise it into boxes we understand which invokes its fear and gravity. In a similar light, surrealism attempts to create these chimeras showing us the unknown, and prove to us that the identity of all things on this Earth is in every sense miraculous. The chimera, therefore, is a symbol of what is truly beyond the pale – outside of the boundary of what we call ‘sensible’ and ‘feasible’ – a beast without logos and without love: essentially a demon.

Let’s look at that last phrase a bit closer. Logos is the sensibility of the world, in the sense that a thing can have structure and make sense. For instance, the grammar and words I use make sense (hopefully) because they contain at root a logos of understanding inherent in the application of the English language. Similarly, a book has a certain form, possessing a spine and two covers which sandwich the pages within it; without this form, this logos, we couldn’t recognise the object as a book. The question then becomes where does the logos come from? Is it, as many a believer in scientism today would argue, a product of our mind which is in turn a combination of our biology and conditioning? For reasons which would lead me far astray from the point of this article, I’d argue not; rather I’d argue the order of the world comes from God through His love. And creatures which through their own pride cannot experience God’s love at all are demons. It’s no coincidence then that demons and Satan are often depicted as goat-headed, or goat-horned and tailed, for they are chimeras of sorts; beings who, through their inability to participate in God’s love, don’t possess an intelligible form.

The carnival has become a catch-all word for grand celebrations and parades, but finds its origins in the Catholic equivalent to Shrove Tuesday – a time for excess and extravagance. From the mediaeval era onwards, Carnival was a festival of gorging yourself on rich foods before lent, sexual debauchery, mask wearing, costume donning, and authority mocking, paralleling other festivals like Saturnalia for the Romans. Carnival was the day of the year where you could be carnal, and engage in all that is usually forbidden. Understandably, masks and costumes are necessary, since you are becoming a kind of monster, a chimera, letting the demons run rampant for just one day in a controlled way before you hunker down for the holy purity of Lent. As a festival of the Trickster, of inversion, Carnival is where for just a moment you can wallow in the profane in a kind of upside-down reality – a time where the usual order of the cosmos, the logos, can be ignored.

Carnivals exist in many forms across history. There was the great Roman holiday Saturnalia mentioned previously, where for just a few days slaves were equals to their masters, able to talk to them as equals, and drunken merriment ensued. In a similar vein was the mediaeval Feast of the Ass, a holy day wherein a donkey was led to the church altar, roles of power were reversed, and the liturgy was punctuated with braying. Such celebrations are seen today also in the post-Christian sphere, like Comicon. What is Comicon but a kind of masquerade of merriment, dressing up and becoming characters of fiction, and then spending all of your hard saved money before a kind of Lent of fiscal poverty? I’m not here to argue that Comicon has a Christian origin – far from it – merely that the carnival as a pattern permeates pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian spheres and it’s simply a pattern inherent to the world we inhabit.

'The Fight between Carnival and Lent' by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

Paprika is a brilliant film by Satoshi Kon which, if you haven’t already seen it, I heartily recommend. The film is about the production of a device called the DC Mini, which allows a therapist to enter a patient’s dream, facilitating advanced psychoanalysis. Unfortunately the device has some issues. Evil actors take control of the device, hooking up the dreams of individuals to one another, later birthing the dream world into the real world. However the psychotic mind of one individual hooked up into this Lain-styled Human Instrumentality creates an endless parade of madness – a seemingly endless carnival. We watch as reality gets subsumed by this never-ending carnival, with our protagonists fighting to bring back sanity, order, and reality: to restore logos to the throne.

The narrative is a symbolically powerful one. It’s a story well known to all, of a people driven insane and driven off a cliff like lemmings. One of the first that comes to mind is the Nazis; in their parade of pomp, they led a cosplay carnival, a Roman romp, fascinated by their own fictions, rejecting reality. Unfortunately though, their endless carnival was a military march across Europe.

What Paprika teaches us is that the dreams which we take for granted as personal can in fact be collective; for much like how an individual can have a dream, so can a society. However, a society’s dream can easily be corrupted into something heinous, much like the corrupted dream of nationalism in the First World War, and the far more twisted corrupted pagan dream of National Socialism in the second. The Germans aren’t the only dreamers, however; the American Dream is another fallen dream which has left many in the US and, through their cultural virus, the world poor and disillusioned. The question becomes, what kind of dream are we dreaming today? Are we having healthy sweet dreams, or are we having a psychotic nightmare with an endless carnival of inversion, chimeras, and demons?

As a kind of mid-point summary, let’s review what we’ve covered. Every now and then, to have a carnival, wherein the logos is inverted and we’re allowed to break taboos, is alright – perhaps even healthy. The never-ending carnival, as seen in Paprika, however, is a mass psychosis and harmful: it is a parade never ceasing; a conga line without completion. That being said, let’s return to our first, healthy, example of the carnival: the occasional carnival. In our everyday lives this is best seen in works of parody, parody being the act of mocking something typically grave and serious through sardonic imitation. Another word used and misused a lot today is ‘irony’, which takes on a similar meaning; “I wasn’t being serious, I only said ‘yeet’ ironically,” and the like. Again, it’s a kind of mocking imitation of taboos and norms, aiming to overturn, invert, and deconstruct – a kind of iconoclasm.

But what we’re dealing with here is not, like we were discussing with regards to Carnival, an inversion of divine law – rap culture could hardly be further from it – but rather it’s a deconstruction of man-made rituals and traditions. Saying ‘yeet’ was originally done in sincerity, done ritually as part of a tradition; I know that sounds pompous and incredibly stupid, but if you look at it for a moment it makes sense. In so far as we shake hands as a kind of ritual greeting, and say please and thank you as rituals with regards to favours and good deeds, some say ‘yeet’ as a kind of ritual also: it signifies that you’re in the in-group. When to use certain rituals and knowing how a ritual is performed is determined by tradition, which can be seen as a container across time of rituals. Rituals and traditions are not necessarily good or bad; to figure out if a ritual should be venerated like an icon, or iconoclastically torn up should depend on how well it maps to revealed logos, to Truth, but today it is more often than not compared to some sort of shadow or mirage of logos.

To look at parody, a great case study for this anime blog is the isekai genre. Isekai was once usually done in sincerity, with titles like Sword Art creating the ‘rituals’ of isekai such as ‘die in the game, die in real life’, and other titles creating other tropes like ‘truck-kun’. The formation of tropes into a kind of nexus of ideas is what created the literary and artistic tradition of isekai. Then there are the isekai parodies like Konosuba, and the myriad of copycats like ‘I was reincarnated as an onsen’ nonsense. But they’re more than non-sense: they’re anti-sense. They’re trying to invert the sense of the isekai tradition, pull its trousers down, and mock it. Parody is good and important; nothing could be worse than the isekai genre taking itself so seriously its elevated a high art status beyond what it deserves, only to discover that the emperor has no clothes. Parody is the court jester, reminding the king he isn’t divine; parody is the Trickster who inverts; parody is the carnival.

Parody can go too far, however. Once a genre becomes saturated with unoriginal parody, much like isekai, all there is to be seen is the dry carcass of once beloved shows like Sword Art being pecked at by pitiful vultures. Isekai as a genre has tried its best to stay alive, with titles like Re: Zero which have attempted to reinvent the tradition with darker more psychological themes (rituals), however never again will a Sword Art style isekai greet our screens.

The reign of parody, of the jester over the king, is the never-ending carnival – without the king’s authority to cease the carnival, the jester, the Trickster, will only keep dancing, trampling upon ever-more taboos, wrecking ever-more rituals. Tradition, that force which holds communities together and connects strangers to one another, is broken by the never-ending carnival, burning down the forest with their unwieldy firey dances. The never-ending carnival is truly a call from the abyss towards anarchy and nihilism: the call to bring down all that is great and beautiful in the world.

To return to the Jubilee Pageant, thankfully the carnival was not a never-ending one, but the pageant was certainly a carnival rather than a royal parade befitting of the queen. The celebration of the Jubilee is a celebration of the queen and of her continued reign – it is a celebration of order – and to celebrate the queen’s reign with the regalia of chaos and madness is a kind of madness in of itself – an inversion of how a jubilee should be celebrated. The parade should never have been a parody.

But is it a reflection of the times – does right mean left and left mean right? Do we live in an age of chimeras? Are our traditions in step with logos, and what is True? I’ll leave the answer to that up to you, dear reader, for the answer is beyond me. The symbolism of the chimera is everywhere, but does that mean we are mad, dancing in lockstep in the never-ending carnival? Do the dancers in the parade in Paprika even realise they’re dancing?

To end, here’s a picture of the Jubilee lasagna me and my friends made – a true chimera – made with home-made pasta dyed blue by food colouring, sprinkled with a Union Jack of coloured bread crumbs. There’s something offensive about dying pasta blue; something deeply iconoclastic, ritual-breaking, taboo, and profane. In the end, it didn’t taste so nice, so we received our comeuppance.

2022/03/05 We Can't Escape the Mediaeval Era

A lecturer I had yesterday was talking about DNA; specifically how only around 2% of our DNA actually codes for proteins. He misspoke and said "of course the rest must do something", until he noted his unscientific blunder and corrected himself. What my lecturer slipped on was an ancient mediaeval banana peel: that nature can have no vacuums. The sky has to have birds, lest nothing would live there; the Earth must be filled with animals; the seas must be teeming with fish. It then follows that in the high air, air too high for the birds to fly (since for mediaevals the sky extended to the moon), there must be daemons to fill it; and in the aether beyond the moon there are angels. As Chalcidius put it, "lest the perfection of the universe should anywhere go limping".

This mediaeval vision of the cosmos as being in perfect ratio (ratio being the Latin word for reason) is the divine wedding of the classical philosophical heritage with Jewish scripture to form the truly novel idea of theology. Here, the Jewish notion of the goodness of God's creation from Genesis is partnered with the Platonic insistence that Beauty, Goodness, and Truth be alloyed together, producing a world where the created world must be designed with good ratio, balance, and perfection.

My lecturer, likely unbeknownst to him was thinking in this mediaeval way; just as the sky should have birds, so should the "junk" DNA be populated with purpose. Why? Lest the perfection of creation go limping, of course. According to the ethos of science, this kind of pre-modern "superstitious" thinking is taboo. To the deft and loyal scientist, for the DNA to have purpose should be just as acceptable as for it to be as purposeless as an appendix.

No matter how much scientific brain-marinading we attempt, the vision of perfection etched yet weathered on each of our retinas remains. We can attempt to scrub it off with the soap and lather of facts and logic, but the gentle yet passionate collective memory of a perfect world remains. Calling to us, we want to find perfection everywhere in nature, in the birds, the trees, and the clouds. Yet as Darwin noted: what do we say about the parasitic worm which burrows into brains, turning their host into a fertile nest - is that part of the beauty of creation?

Science in many ways has looked too deeply into the world, dissociating our sense of goodness and beauty from our sense of truth and nature. Where in the past we saw perfection as existing prior to imperfection, we now see mild improvement arising from total chaos. This Whiggish historicism is almost a mirror opposite to that the mediaeval mind saw. The Whiggish Victorian view, which we remain stuck in today, was of a base world on the up improving - yet by virtue of improving, when we look into the past we only see horror and barbarity. The mediaevals, however, saw their base world declining - so their heroes and saints of the past were all the more celebrated.

Whatever Whiggishness we attempt to impress ourselves with, we struggle to avoid acknowledging the beauty of the past richly held in the mediaeval system. Even if elements of the world we perceive don't appear to be in concord with the evident beauty of nature, it's our responsibility to attempt to understand why that is. Just like my lecturer, we all have this intuition of good ratio, order, meaning, and purpose; so when the modern cosmology offered by science doesn't accommodate this root human intuition, we reject it as unnatural and alien. Where the scientific model doesn't fit man's experience of the world, the next model will have to. It's germ is being discussed in certain academic circles today; but it is the responsibility of our generation to help it bloom.

2022/02/20 The Communist Heresy

Evangelicism is not the fastest growing protestant movement: Humanist atheism is. As Protestant reformations go, this Enlightenment era crypto-reformation was really rather ballsy for removing the Trinity in its entirety, replacing it with such concepts as "inalienable rights" which are "self-evident". Enlightenment thinkers in their utter blindness, bedazzled by the light emanating from their navals, renounced the Christian heritage of democracy, human rights, a universal code of law, and every other institution up to that point as not having been created by the church, but rather by ancients living over a millennium ago. Few new ideas were created during the Enlightenment. Instead, it represented a mass migration from the boat of Christianity and "superstition" to the boat of Enlightened ones and "reason", hoping it'd better survive a flood. This mass translation effort was the Procrustean bed of reason, making sensible what is paradoxical, dissolving mystery into a solution. All the while, they didn't give Christianity an ounce of credit, to the point at which some atheists today claim Jesus was never even a real person. Do they not realise that Liberalism is but the Trojan Horse of Christianity? Or that America's insistence in spreading liberal democracy around the world is but a crusade without a cross? The Enlightenment was merely a flash grenade to the past.

Today I'll be talking about Communism, and how, as you might expect from what you've just read, Marx didn't come up with it. Communism's ideas instead stem from Christian heresy; a heresy which the church has dealt with since time immemorial. Many a communist jokes that "Jesus was a communist" - and there is some truth there; reading Christ's story, it's easy to come away with the idea that treating neighbours as equals means an equality of wealth, and that for the camel to go through the eye of a needle, the rich must give away all of their worldly possessions. An early proponent of this idea was Pelagius. Pelagius argued for a kind of complete free will, where sin was merely habit, and if only man worked harder, he could achieve a kind of perfection. Here in Pelagianism, we see the germ of modern communism: since man is perfectible, if we band together and become sinless as a society we can effectively eradicate inequalities and live in harmony. Ironically much like with modern communism, Pelagianism was popular with the idealistic Roman elites.

Sandwiched between the fatalism of his past Manichaean life and the growing popularity of the Pelagians' radical free will, St. Augustine managed to find a middle path. Original sin, Augustine said, was why man is unable to work his way to perfection; however hard we try, we're unable to do good and end up falling back into our own patterns of sin. Augustine's ideas on sin and predestination heavily influenced John Calvin during the reformation, who frequently lobbed the pejorative Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian at the Catholic church. Calvinism influenced the Baptists who form the modern-day Bible Belt of the US: the area with the most anti-communist sentiment.

Returning to early communist movements, there were the Taborites. The Taborites were followers of the Czech proto-Reformation figure Jan Hus, who had argued that the pope was had no right to rule Christendom and that the Bible should be written in vernacular language. Believing the Second Coming was nigh, they set up what was essentially a commune, where peasant and noble alike lived as brothers. Marx similarly understood communism as the final chapter of history, as the great climax of time; the coming of utpoia, of heaven on Earth, was a secularised crypto-Christian version of Christ's return.

In the reformation, similar movements were seen. Anabaptists like the Hutterites and the Amish to this day live in small communes; then in the 17th century the Levellers in the UK sprung from the religious tolerance under Cromwell. From the start of Christendom, there's been a sustained communist underbelly often hanging dim and unconscious but rising up every once in a while, sometimes with a devastating effect. Marx masterminded the method by which communism comes about, but ended up merely rephrasing ideas potent in Christianity as novelties of the Enlightenment. In a sense, Marx wedded the communism of monasteries with a kind of Pauline universalism, forgetting why monks and nuns make the vows they do: in civil everyday society, man is too fallen to be as holy as Marx imagines.

When original sin isn't recognised in man, it's projected out into the structures of society. It's the police who are corrupt; the banks; the schools; the government: if only it weren't for one of these institutions, mankind would be spotless and clean - free of sin. Unfortunately, hunter-gatherers aren't as Noble as Rousseau imagined; we are without the ability to perfect ourselves like Pelagius claimed.

After World War 2, once the threat of the Soviet Union could be understood, the antibodies of the Humanist West (Christendom) from long, long ago were activated. In the world's greatest Calvinist hot-spot, the US, ancestral memories of St. Augustine fighting the Pelagians were revivified, birthing the Cold War: a crusade against the great communist heresy. Similar to the Catholic crusades against the Albigensians and the Hussites, the Cold War was a crusade against the heterodox heretical interpretation of Christianity which took the form of communism. Whilst the West preached sermons of liberty, democracy, and the universal rights of the individual, the pulpits of Russia resounded with collectivism, brotherly love, and charity: in Christ's shadow our civilisation so evidently lives. How could either of these ideas have emerged from another tradition? Yet we cling with all our might to the idea of the secular, to the idea of never-ending change; not believing in the universality of God, yet believing in the universality of His and His Church's laws. The past has become foggy at this render distance, for we chose to see ourselves merely as children of the Enlightenment; but the anaphylactic shock the spread of communism had on many in the West is testament to our deeper religious molding.

In summary, for any idea or thinking to achieve mass popularity, it must have it's foundations in Christian thinking. After all, the ideas of a single man can only build foundations of sand, whilst it takes many generations of pressure-testing and sand-shovelling to produce a hard rock. And it was upon this hard rock of Christian tradition that Marx founded his church of what we now recognise as communism.

2022/01/16 Wisdom and Knowledge

Two white doves fly upwards interweaving one another towards the sky. Their names? Knowledge and Wisdom. Over the course of the history of the West, however, Wisdom has become ill and injured trying to keep up with Knowledge; all the while, Knowledge attempts to make up for Wisdom’s absence, flying ever faster, only dizzying himself in the process.

The Church has left a whole in the culture. The tradition the Church maintained was a wisdom tradition: an institution aiming to spread wisdom to far off parishes, posh or poor, urban or rural, through the faith. But trust in the Faith to spread wisdom has been injured by the Cambrian-like explosion of knowledge. ‘Through knowledge, we can understand what is right’, they may say. Can science truly show us how to be moral? You can take statistics and organise case studies, but will your findings figure out a new morality, or merely shine light on the ghost of the Church, leaving a Christ-shaped shadow? Whilst knowledge may give us insight into the truth of how the world is, it has no value in showing how the world ought. How should one live and interact with the world? The climatologist could say “kill yourself – you’re merely a drain on the environment”, whilst the psychologist could say “go insane – then we’ll be able to collect more knowledge on insane people”. But they wouldn’t, would they. Wisdom gives us the map of value, the intelligibility, or logos of the world. The Church is wise because they are followers of Jesus Christ: logos manifested in this world. Only through His example can the meaning and value of the world be fully understood. Granted, many have grasped the world before Him – it’s not as if the Confucian Chinese in the 4th century BC had no good ideas on ethics – but they only witnessed glimpses of the truth, fragments of wisdom. We’re each born with the fragments of an ancient map from before the fall, a map representing how one should live. But when Christ – the full map of the globe with every dell and mound – is presented to us, should we not study His life and learn from Him? In our “post-Christian” world, we have the hubris to think that stapling together the world’s map fragments along with our own cultural doodles will guide us and give us wisdom. Granted, Christendom never followed Christ all too perfectly – symbols are inexhaustible and bottomless, so they can’t fully be understood – and like with any institution there was corruption in the Church. But as C. S. Lewis said, we are ‘men without chests’, and we suffer from a cross-shaped hole in our hearts.

Knowledge begins to falter, exhausted at his Icarus-like heights. But will Wisdom be well enough to catch him?

2021/12/20 Key Cutters and Lock Pickers

Been busy doing coursework and getting covid - time for another post on metaphysics.

The rock falls and hits the floor. You needn't have a Newtonian conception of gravity, or any other physicist's model of how rocks move, to recognise that simple truth. But for a dropped rock to stop in mid air - or better yet fly into the sky: that would be quite the spectacle. For that brief moment, the rock is, in our modern parlance, "disobeying the laws of physics" - it has started a rebellion against nature itself in a brief action of defiance. And I don't say that to be poetic or flippant, because the rocks would be committing a grave sin. The word sin is a term from archery, originally meaning to miss the target; and in that sense the rock is 'missing the mark', or failing to follow the rules set out for it. Set out for all things, there are distinct rules they must follow; that doesn't mean there's no element of free will or choice, just that, much like individuals living under the law of the land, they must follow the rules. At the quantum level, a small interference could affect how the rock falls, but so long as the rock follows the rules, it's still a "good rock"; similar to when a person follows moral rules, they're called a good person.

The difference between a rock and a man - beyond the myriad of obvious ones - is that a rock has to be a good rock, and is unable to disobey the rules; whereas man can be bad, can sin, and can disobey the rules. Mankind can disobey the rules because he has knowledge of both good and evil, unlike the rock who only knows good: this is man's original sin. Given that we know both good and evil, it would be all well and good if they were strictly separated in our minds. Alas, this is not the case, with the difference between good action and bad action being quite a fuzzy Venn diagram (although we have a pretty good innate idea if we're doing something wrong). However, man knew good action, even if it's hard to discern good action from bad action today - there is a "correct" set of laws or guidance, a key, which can unlock the heavy chains of sin which have weighed mankind down since time immemorial.

Many dislike the key, however, leading to two kinds of alternatives: key cutters, and lock pickers. Let's start with the key cutters. Key cutters recognise the key and, whether aware or not, make an oversimplified copy of it. Immanuel Kant, or most of secular Enlightenment philosophy on the whole, is a good example of this. Kant's categorical imperative is merely a single aspect of the original key oversimplified to the point of absurdity (philosophers do love monomaniacal reductionism). Unlike theological philosophy which aims to explicate and examine the many intricate notches of the original key, secular philosophy obsesses over cutting an imprecise duplicate, designing keys impressive for mortals to have designed, but are merely shadows of the original.

Next are the lock pickers. Instead of cutting keys similar to the original, the lock pickers attempt a different way to free man of his chains. Many ideologies, such as fascism or communism, or philosophies, like Sartre's existentialism or Nietzsche's ubermensch, have been tried and attempted in their various forms. Although they each have certain similarities to the original key - and why wouldn't a thief, given the option, study the key of the lock he were to pick - lock picker moralities aren't simply imprecise copies of the original key. A key cutter's morality hits most of the locks' pins albeit in a far weaker way, struggling to set them; the lock picker's, however, hooks certain pins very strongly - often so strongly to the point of breakage - whilst catastrophically missing the mark elsewhere. For instance, communism strongly sets the pins of charity and the equality of man, yet fails to set others like humility, encouraging an envy-driven violent insurgency against the bourgeoisie. No matter how great the lock picking kit nor how dexterous the wielder, the lock picker will always fail to free himself from sin.

In short, there are many key cutters and lock pickers populating the market place attempting to sell their work; however their services will always fall short of the original key. It's unlikely - in fact entirely unlikely - that in our lifetimes any of us will free ourselves from the heavy wrought-iron chains which weight us down. The locks are too numerous, and the key too profound and complex. What's more with each lock released, we awaken ever-more acutely to the weight of the others, making the journey feel seemingly futile. But it's the journey to becoming a better person, a stronger person, through following the laws of nature.

2021/10/27 Emergent Poetry

On Discord, many don't send a message as just one message. The message is often split up into parts: for instance, the first message could be the setup, and the second the punchline; or the message lengths could be used to give a kind of metre to a story, with each successive line getting shorter up until the climax. Do people realise they're doing this? Most likely: it's how you make a joke land or a story engaging over text. But do they realise they are in fact poets? Perhaps, but unlikely. They're poets that don't knowit.

Portioning a story into individual messages is no different from what poetry calls enjambment. From enjambment arises a slight pause or silent punctuation from one thought to the next; an exact description is tricky since its function is better intuited and felt, rather than logically explained. Similar to enjambment, the arrangement of manga panels has a kind of poesy to it: a double page spread is to be taken in slowly and felt deeply; whilst, a set of smaller panels has a kind of light-footed pace to them. Music, naturally, has metres, rhythms, dynamics, and articulation creating a kind of pattern, form, or structure to the harmony and melody received. These 'patterns of the soul' are better named 'patterns of reality' since they're not solely seen in human art, but in nature also. Watching birds fly, there's a gentle legato to their flapping, and an oddly intuitive pattern to how they move. Compared with the bird, the fly has a far more worried staccato movement, changing direction on a set timing at sharp angles. The growth of a tree and, in the pattern's most primitive state, a crystal, follow the same kinds of patterns despite not having a brain to direct them.

By this point, I would not be surprised if the reader were to say: "all of this is just in your head; you're just seeing the patterns wherever you look!" A valid protest; but I'd invite you to consider the difference between what's in the mind and what's in your world. How are you so sure the lake before you is in fact blue and not red but your mind has recoloured it? How do you know that your friends are not just imaginary friends? How can you be so sure that love is merely a chemical in your head and not a really there? My intention isn't to send you into an existential crisis, but rather to show the futility of finding an answer. No amount of scientific endeavour can answer these philosophical questions. Science already has a philosophy of what's world and what's mind, so with every question posed the same answer shall be received. Any answer you can come up with in regards to the mind-body conundrum requires a mug of reason and two teaspoon-fulls of faith. Like believing my friend's are real, that a lake is blue, and that love is really there, I also believe that these patterns aren't merely in our heads: they are real and exist with or without humans to observe.

To return, poetry emerges everywhere, whether on Discord or in the growth of a tree: nature can't help but express these divine patterns. A few questions then arise: firstly, what is art - can the movement of birds be compared with Berserk; and secondly, what makes man different. On the topic of art, art is what is artificial - it's what's produced by man. Art is the product of skill, whilst great art is the product of a master craftsman who has trained at an art for most of their life; the difference between the Mona Lisa and a glass of water on a shelf is that the Mona Lisa took real skill, but An Oak Tree didn't. Through exercising their craft, the work of the artist is bestowed with these patterns of reality which we perceive as beauty. On the question of what makes man different, we should consider man's ability to not just be beholden to the patterns like a bird having no choice but to fly in a certain way, but instead to be an artist and create something new through these patterns. Birds can dance, but they'd struggle come up with a new style of dance; birds can craft nests, but couldn't give their nest a second story; birds can sing, but could never hum a new tune (with the exception of the parrot, but he couldn't come up with one himself). Man's capacity to imagine and create cannot be said to be on a spectrum with animals: no, it's a different paradigm. We're so advanced, we can make anime.

In short, whatever man creates possesses these poetic patterns; they emerge seemingly out of nowhere, like flowers through the pavement. But, these patterns aren't buried deep within us; no, these patterns are an integral part of the world. Mankind's ability to connect with these patterns and manifest them through art and create things is a most noble of acts - it is to create beauty in the world for others. Go write a blog - it's a lot of fun.

2021/10/26 The Legend of Simon the Digger Part 2

Seeming Tranquility

Simon helps rebuild the new city, Simon and Nia marry, have kids, and live out their days as respected heroes, the end... is how most stories would end. But Gurren Lagann is special - it’s a different beast to other anime out there. The first half of the story, the story up to this point, is the traditional hero myth which, upon its completion, is the protagonist done. Finished. Story’s over. The next step, is to ‘settle down’ since you’re a finished product. Neuroplasticity dwindles; you’re twenty-five, and you’ll never change.

But you’re not done. Why else would our spiral energy keep charging us up? Gurren Lagann realises the myth ain’t over - there’s still a story to be told. Many say the first part after the time skip is slow, boring, and doesn’t have quite the same ‘cool’ as the action-packed first half had. I used to be in that camp before we watched the show with the society. Upon rewatching, this part of the show touched me the most - it was the point in my life I was at - and hit me in ways I wasn’t expecting.

Kamina City

Once Simon and the Gurren-dan defeat Lordgenome, the rebel insurgents start building an authoritarian state in the name of their martyr, Kamina. Simon sitting at the helm of the new government, but with true power lying in Rossiu, the grey blur. Warning strikes, however: the moon has been declared by the anti spiral to fall on the Earth in three weeks. The anti-spiral, the new big evil, take control of Nia, Simon’s betrothed, turning her into a virtual image, or simply a 2D waifu. No longer is Nia flesh and blood - instead she’s become the interlocutor for the anti-spiral. But what does it mean to become virtual, to become an image? It means that Simon can no longer see his Nia, his soul-mate, his soul-image, his soul, in concrete reality; in a sense, Simon has become detached from his own soul. ‘Loss of Soul’ is a common motif throughout hunter-gatherer tribes and antiquity, which can be generally equated to the idea of depression, ennui, or a loss of vitality and passion for life. In short: Simon’s lost his edge; his soul, Nia, has left him; and his spiral energy has reached a new nadir.

“Times Have Changed”

Upon Simon’s daring yet successful rescue of the city, crowds who quite recently lived in hovels came to boo him. They said that “times have changed” and that such reckless actions can’t be justified in the dignified new government. Rossiu, nervous, picks Simon as a scapegoat, imprisoning him.

Rossiu is a very interesting character. At first glance, Rossiu is clearly a bad guy, imprisoning the protagonist after saving the city. There’s something distinctly fake and creepy about him - his relationship with Kinon, for example, who he later straps with explosives without second thought, is a clear example why. Yet, upon second glance, Rossiu’s the proud statesman who’s telling his citizens to ‘Stay Home; Save Lives’ - he ensured that as many people who could be saved would be saved, in a kind of utilitarian calculus. But upon third glance, Rossiu really isn’t a good guy at all. In fact he’s utterly contemptible. Despite being pivotal in overthrowing Lordgenome, he’s become Lordgenome Mk II; instead of fighting back even when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves, he instead tries to bury mankind, bury humanities potential, and bury man’s spiral energy back into the little caves from which they’ve come. Rossiu’s plan is to flee back to the warm comfort of mother’s lap. Rossiu believes that in an infantile troglodytic state, mankind will return to the Noble Savages he once knew back in Adai village, where “half his soul still lives.” Once the simulations are calculated, prophesising the Ark’s collapse, Rossiu even ponders whether man should’ve ever gone to the surface, whether mankind should’ve ever grown up. Wishing to trade growth, progress, and hardship for safety, helplessness, and hopelessness, Rossiu wants man to devolve, returning to the caves, just like the good old days under Lordgenome’s fatherly tyranny.

Rossiu’s Folly

Rossiu’s folly is the will to survive. At every mention of death, Rossiu bravely ran away, saving as many as he possibly could without standing up to the enemy before him. Risk, for Rossiu, is not an option. Forethought is man’s ultimate gift, the gift of Prometheus, but it can tie us up in knots; for every simulation, plan and counter-plan Rossiu had, his simulations didn’t pose any solutions. Which ingredient was missing from his calculations and plans? Why, that would be spiral energy, of course, or more specifically, hope. Rossiu didn’t believe in a new future, he didn’t hope for a new future, and consequently could never bring about a new future. All Rossiu could ever muster was a retreat into the past; he couldn’t drill into the future nor up into the heavens, merely drilling back down into the Earth, drilling into archaeology, into the past, into rosy memories of primitive man.

Yoko & Viral

Whilst Rossiu’s doomed plan continues, Simon wastes away in jail with his new roommate, Viral. Viral, who I’ve failed to mention up until this point, was Kamina’s long standing arch-nemesis - a beastman who never failed to give Kamina a good fight. After exchanging blows with several cross-counters in the showers, Simon and Viral come to a kind of understanding, gaining a mutual respect for one another. Meanwhile, on a faraway island, Yoko is working as a school teacher, teaching young kids, nurturing the first generation born on the surface. Upon hearing the news of the anti-spiral’s invasion, she scooters across the sea to save Simon and the Earth. Yoko releases Simon from prison, releases Simon from the cage he trapped himself in, unlocking his spiral energy to grow once more.

Ultimately, Simon was saved and allied by Kamina’s soul / lover Yoko and Kamina’s arch rival Viral; Kamina’s spirit, that divine masculine force which has guided Simon since his days in the caves, called from beyond the grave and told Simon to “wake up”. It said: enough with pleasantries, like hoping Rossiu’s plan will work - it won’t, and you know that. To save humanity you must go out there with your spiral energy, holding your core drill high as a beacon of hope.

As I’ve said earlier, the third act was my favourite upon rewatching, even though it’s usually considered the worst of the four. What hit me hardest was Simon’s revivification, his revitalisation, his rebirth back into a hero by Yoko’s doing. Settling down wasn’t a mistake, but in settling down, Simon lost sight of the future. To Simon, Rossiu’s vision of the future seemed good enough, even though it was a future based upon fleeing, not facing one’s foes. On Simon’s quest to get Nia back, on his Orphic journey to get back his soul, the descent into the underworld has now begun.

Hope v.s. Survival

Rossiu’s Ark flies in space under attack, nearly sinking due to a loss of spiral energy. Why is the ark losing spiral energy? Because there’s no hope on board. Rossiu’s message of survival is a grim one; it’s a message of ‘we’re nearly dead but the grit of our teeth hasn’t worn down yet’ - certainly not a message for raising morale and spirits. Only once Simon and the Gurren-dan come to rescue the Ark-Gurren and pronounce the gospel of hope, does the spiral energy of the ship surge, keeping it afloat and its shields alive.

The Princess is in Another Castle

Simon enters the moon, planning to gattai with the Cathedral Terra, but Nia stands in the way of Simon’s drill. To combine with the moon, Simon would have to kill Nia. Nia, under control of the anti-spiral, claims she’s risking her life to produce absolute despair. To this, Simon says no; in absolute despair, Simon argues, is absolute hope. Through hope and trust, Simon drills forth, and at the final moment Nia dodges.

Nia, once hope, has become despair. But in Nia, in despair, Simon still sees her hope

Rossiu could only see despair - his vision was tainted black. Rossiu could only seek survival since in every simulation, forethought, and plan, he saw the death of mankind. Instead Simon sees brightness in all things; he sees hope of victory, not the despair of defeat. To Simon, simulations mean nothing, for he has hope and will drill through the heavens, rewriting the laws of nature if need be. He may have not rescued Nia yet, but sure as hell he will. Simon knows he will because he has hope.

Rossiu’s Final Attempt to Return

After realising his mistake, Rossiu returns to his village. He walks down into the dark abyss, returning to his childhood, to his origins, to a pre-conscious state. There he plans to shoot himself. Suicide: the final retreat into nothingness. If the retreat into the cave is a retreat into childhood and to your mother’s lap, suicide is a retreat to a time before you were born, to a time when there wasn’t even nothingness. Thankfully Simon and Kinon bring him to his senses, and Rossiu appears a humbled man, now with more love and hope in his heart.

The Final Showdown

On our journey through Simon’s life, enter the final battle against the anti-spiral. The anti-spiral are the root of the evil Simon is facing; they seek to crush mankind’s spiral energy since they are afraid of ‘Spiral Nemesis’. Spiral Nemesis is the end of the world - the end point of any spiral race who seeks unfettered growth, growing larger and more powerful, inventing ever-more technologies until the universe bursts at the breaches. As a response to this threat, the anti-spiral, who were once also a spiral race, chose the path of Rossiu: to return back to the ground, back into clay, into feeble infantile messes. They chose Human Instrumentality over spiral energy.

Homonculus-like anti-spiral citizens

In an attempt to exact absolute despair, to crush the Gurren-dan’s hope and spiral energy, the anti-spiral takes to using stone hands, feet, and faces to crush Gunmen and Grapearls. Several crew members who’ve been a part of our adventure perish: most memorably the twins Jorgun and Balinbow whose laughs echo as their ship is vapourised. The one which touched me most, however, was Makken, the short mechanic, who sacrifices himself to save the ship without hesitation nor fanfare.

The Sea of Despair

The hands and feet attacking the crew serve a second purpose: to push. Whilst Simon is charging up his spiral energy to gattai with the Chouginga Dai-Gurren, the ship is pushed down into the Sea of Despair. This despairing depressive environ sucks up spiral energy through the Death Spiral Machine: the heart of the Sea. The team desperately try to avoid fate, trying to bob upwards for air, but no matter how hard they resist the pull, they sink. Simon, however, suggests they sail straight down into the machine, into the core. Crazy. But isn’t this what we’ve seen the Gurren-dan do all along? Bobbing for air and resisting the pull is what Rossiu did, trying to save as many as he could and survive. This will to survive, this will to merely live, is not spiral energy; no, spiral energy is a will directed towards fate, towards the fatal, towards death. Movement towards death is natural, since for every day we grow, we’re one day closer to death; movement towards surviving is hanging on for dear life to the present, or in many cases the past, not letting time pass nor fate be woven. Hence, Simon looks the Death Spiral Machine in the eye and sails into the singularity of chaos.

The Gurren-Dan descending into the belly of the Sea of Despair

In destroying the machine, Kittan makes the ultimate sacrifice. Yet in his final exchanges, and again in his last moments, he finally realises he can’t be a Kamina. With no amount of bravado can he match up to Kamina, the perfect man, who he idolised and felt lesser than. But ultimately Kittan proves his courage, his soul, and only when flying towards his death, he finally accesses his own spiral power to perform a Giga Drill Break.

Halcyon Dreaming

The anti-spiral’s next trick is to possess each member of the crew into a stupour, sending them into dreams of happier times. Not only are these fantasies fake, but they’re also not of good times: Simon and Kamina thieve, and beg beastmen for forgiveness; Yoko is a famous bounty hunter idol, but she isn’t content with fame and glory. In both worlds, Kamina, that ever-present guiding light, leads Simon and Yoko out of fantasy and back to reality. Kamina’s spirit is the best antidote to the soppy peaceable times they nearly fell for. The anti-spiral have tried crushing their hearts with the despair of pain, but now they’re using the despair of peace. Eternal halcyon worlds where you never cease to be happy are a kind of despair where you can never grow, change nor develop. Again, we see a peaceful world of surviving instead of growing, where you hold on to a tree whilst the stream pulls you along, instead of flowing downstream towards the end as fate intended. Onwards, the Gurren-dan march to the final battle.

Simon refuses to beg and lower his head in his dream

Destiny

The final battle with the anti-spiral is too good to describe in words. After galactic frisbees and Big Bang Bombs, Lordgenome undergoes quantum something-or-other, turning into a drill, passing on his spiral energy to Simon for the final assault. As each iteration of Gurren Lagann is crucified, the next pops out like Russian dolls, until Simon piloting Lagann drill straight into the anti-spiral mech. Lordgenome truly passes the torch on to the next generation, becoming the fuel to light their ambitions. Nia, however, begins to pixelate and disappear. Returning to Earth, Simon and Nia marry, kiss, confirm their love, and then Nia disappears. Gone.

But this is the end of the story, right? Doesn’t Simon get the girl and live happily ever after? It’s a bitter-sweet ending for our hero who up until this point has not only been trying to save the world, but also trying to recover his waifu. But marriage is eternal - even beyond the grave, Nia and Simon will be married to each other. They’ve entered a rite, a ritual, a mystery, an alchemical union, which has been passed down since time immemorial wherein two become one - that of marriage. Even though Nia has passed away into pixels, she now shares Simon’s heart from where she’ll never leave. Simon has been truly reunited with his soul; his quest is finally over. Simon has become a true hero.

Coniunctio Oppositorum - The Union of Opposites

A Short Summary

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this article, so let’s finish off by organising our thoughts. Gurren Lagann has a clear message: rebel against and don’t become a Lordgenome; rebel against and don’t become a Rossiu; and reject the principle of the anti-spiral which permeates through the culture and the world with all your strength. Resist anti-spiralic tendencies by not trying to hold on to the present, and not retreating into fantasies of the past to find solace, for the only way for either yourself, or for society, to grow and remain healthy is to look to the future. The future is terrifying, however, for in the future lurks the death of yourself, society, and the universe: Spiral Nemesis - the fate of those who grow. But don’t shy away. Don’t be discouraged. Walk onwards, staring death in the face, for that is the courage to be.

A face more terrifying than death's

2021/10/15 Town Review: Stafford

In retrospect, City Review wasn't the best name for this series, given that I'll be visiting towns as well as cities. Hey ho.

A couple weeks ago now, I took the train to Stafford, the county town of Staffordshire. The journey was longer than my past adventures, owing to the fact that Stafford sits in the West Midlands rather than the East. My journey began with near calamity; the first train arrived late, with a change over of only five minutes. Tamworth station, the station at which I changed, was more maze-like than the size of the station let on, with two levels of tracks pointing perpendicularly to one another. With the help of the conductor, though, I managed to find the connecting train.

Arriving at Stafford station, I was overcome by how hideous the concrete monstrosity was. Unlike the wonderful stations I'd been to so far, like Nottingham station and the Victorian red-brick Leicester station, Stafford was a breath of musty air stinking of the rot of 60s Brutalism. Outside the station, I waited for my friend who was late. I waited around for about ten minutes, after which I got bored and headed for a walk around Victoria park which lies just across the road. The park dates to the Edwardian era, and has plenty of charm points: one of those quaint Victorian bandstands (inevitably populated with chavs, however); the once navigable, pretty river Sow, which is a tributary of the Trent; along with a few aviaries with pointlessly thick metal gratings by the cricket pitch. Overall, a very pleasant park.

At the park also, I bumped in to my friend, a local Staffordian, who was now looking for me. We greeted, and decided to head on next to the high street. The high street was living, just about - the scars of covid were evident with roughly a third of the shops shuttered; but the high street was busy and people were shopping. Few of the shops were very interesting though, most of them being the big 'high street brands'. One shop was an exception, however: a massive Tudor house stood proud of the other shops in the centre of the high street. Thinking the shop was a building of note, I asked my friend what it was, but he had no clue and had never been inside. Curious, we headed inside to discover the shop was in fact a museum, with the building dating back to Tudor times. Each room of the house was dressed and decorated in the decorum of an era in which the house was lived; so there was a Tudor room, a Georgian room, a Victorian room, etc. The house's claim to fame is the housing King Charles I for a night shortly after the beginning of the civil war. I thought this was really cool, but my friend replied, "there was a civil war in the UK?" I'll reserve my comments... In the attic was a military museum for the Stafford Yeomanry, housing many medals, uniforms and sabers. A good find, that museum was.

After our museum visit, we got some lunch at Greggs, and walked about a little more to do some exploring. The high street felt like many a high street, but had a nice feel to it, even though a third of the shops were missing. At the top of the high street was the independent shopping centre, which we entered to have a look around. The inside was shocking. The shopping centre was dead; hardly a shop was open. If I recall 80-90% of all the shops had closed down, leaving just a hair salon, a nail bar, and a Boots. Looking at towns like Stafford, you can see it wasn't just people that covid killed - Nottingham has lost a few businesses, but being a big enough city, it's been able to survive and hopefully spring back in years to come. Smaller cities like Stafford simply can't compete with a half hour drive to Wolverhampton or Stoke-on-Trent. With the bigger shopping centre chains like Intu collapsing, who's going to buy up these failing malls? Do people want to go to these American-style malls anymore? In truth, I wouldn't be that sad if they disappeared, so long as the high streets live on and the buildings are repurposed.

We then headed to the castle. On our walk, we first passed St. Chad's church, a very pretty, old Norman church built soon after the creation of the castle; then, we passed a massive housing development, filled with affluent-looking new-build houses. Many looked pristine and untouched; some looked like families had recently moved in; and others were in the process of being built. The question on my mind was, "can this town support so many new houses?" The town centre appears to be imploding post-covid, but all the while the outer rim of the town grows ever denser with houses: are these doughnut-shaped towns the towns of the future? Towns where people live far from the humdrum of large cities, but are close enough to fetch groceries? After walking for a while through a strip of woodland bordering a gold course, we came upon the slightly known Stafford castle. The castle unfortunately is a ruin; much like Nottingham castle, Stafford castle was owned by a Royalist and was wrecked after the Civil War. But what remains is rather pretty, in a melancholic yet picturesque way. You can mentally lay the stone and mortar of the missing portions of the castle and imagine the beauty of the castle's former glory.

We wandered around for a little while, before heading back down the hill to the town centre. Then after being led on a tour of my friend's house, we visited a rather lovely pub which served a local ale for only two quid. Such prices are unthinkable in Nottingham, unless you're going to Spoons; but in the town of Stafford, pubs appear to be just cheaper. We sat for a chat in the September sun sipping our pints until it was time to head off: the train journey is rather long back to Nottingham.

Overall, Stafford has quite a lot of charm as an old town: the area has a quaint feel whilst being a rather large and populated. And it seems many are enamoured by Stafford's charms, as shown by the housing boom on its outskirts which, from what I've seen at least, is far too many houses for the town to manage. Granted, I haven't seen Stafford at its healthiest with many of the shops closed; but will they be reborn? Or has internet shopping and a short drive to Wolverhampton nailed their coffins? Stafford might be on the road to becoming a commuter town for Birmingham and Wolverhampton - the main road was certainly busy enough. But the commuter is the death of the community; we'll have to see whether Stafford ends up as a doughnut town with no centre, or manages to regrow from the ashes of covid.

6/10

2021/10/11 It's not me, it's just my mind

This one's a little schizo, reading back, but oh well, they often are on the dark side.

Every now and then, someone sees a ghost. It could be a haunted house, a family member who's recently passed, or the ghosts may be of the land, like fighters from an ancient battle. Ghosts, demons, gods, pixies, faeries, elves: most (but perhaps less than you'd expect) would say you're a bit nuts if you were to recount your mystical encounter; such events are simply unscientific! Our imagination to believe in that which we haven't seen or been told to believe hasn't disappeared. Such fantasies are ever-present in the much maligned "conspiracy theorist" who conjectures based on hearsay and rumour. Is testimony and experience no longer trusted? Will the courts of the future be based solely upon photographic evidence and forensics?

Science is a great tool. But as a student of chemistry, I can tell you that it ain't perfect. Much is unknown, including some vital parts if the metaphysical ship isn't to sink. But for the scientist of the past this wasn't an issue. Newton wasn't attempting to create a metaphysics out of the theory of gravity; no, he wanted to discover the laws of God's creation. The task of science is explanation of what is material - it's a model proven through goodness of fit - not reality in of itself. Ghosts and demons not being "scientific" shouldn't make them untrue, since science doesn't explain everything, and also can't explain everything. The scientific method can't reproduce supernatural experiences, since that's not how mystical encounters work. You can't sit a man down in a lab to summon his deceased mother a few more times: she just won't pitch up (if I were a ghost, I wouldn't either). Psychology as it is has their subjects examined in white sterile rooms, resulting undoubtedly in unnatural results.

Given that science can't disprove the supernatural, many move to philosophy to attempt to explain away the mystical. The unwitting Cartesians argue that, "the experiences of ghosts and such are in the mind, not the world", but is there any ground at all for that assumption? Some may say that God is in the mind, but how can you differentiate the DVD player from the TV antenna when all you can see is the screen? For the supernatural can either be built into our brains like an appetite, or our brains simply have an eye which can perceive the mystical world every now and then in glimpses. The mind body divide doesn't resolve this dispute either, since there's an implicit assumption that everything in the world can be readily perceived. If a machine hasn't been built (yet) which can see faeries, they can't exist!

Modern man fails to trust worldly phenomena. It's as if a pervert designed a pair of X-ray glasses, but spent their time staring at people's organs instead of their bodies. If you look at the organs for too long, you'll forget that the world is living! Love is real. It isn't, as far too many people I've asked have said, just "a chemical in my head". If that's what you think, you're looking through the beautiful bosom of reality to look only at gnarly viscera. The world is good; but it isn't the world of viscera and clockwork that we are taught to think of it as. The scalpels which dissect the world into ever smaller constituent parts like organs, tissues, molecules, and atoms (a tomos - that which can't be cut), should only be wielded by surgeons - the average man would make a pig's breakfast of any such operation. Instead of cutting up the world into parts haphazardly, can't we trust it is how it appears? Can't we trust that love and emotions are real, beyond merely being your brain's algorithms and instincts? Can't we believe that there are some things we can't sense with our first five and instead need the hidden five-hundred more? Can't we simply trust our first five senses, believing our experiences are real and not merely projections and shadows of reality? Our Gnostic doubt of the material world only divides us from it. Like Shinji, we struggle to connect with others since the world is made arid through the sowing of seeds of doubt. Nay, it's not through instrumentality - the rejection of the world - that we can connect with others: it's through trusting and loving all of creation.

2021/09/18 Bobby's Girl & Finding Your People

Over these past couple years, I've been making my way through Madhouse's large corpus of films. The classic directors and staffers who shaped anime, like Rintaro, Kawajiri, Maruyama, and most influentially Dezaki, all worked for Madhouse, all pumping out (mostly) great films which are now often forgotten. One film I came across when browsing down my list is "Bobby's Girl", a 45 minute film directed by the lesser-known Hirata Toshio, who worked alongside many of the aforementioned big names. Going into this film I was quite unprepared for how hard it was planning hit me. [spoilers ahead]

The film starts somewhat subdued as we're introduced to the main characters. In short, our protagonist Bobby falls out with his parents after getting berated for skipping school to go touring on his motorbike; he flees from home, rents an apartment paying the rent with money he makes at the bike-themed diner he stumbles across, coincidentally also called "Bobby's". All the while, he's maintains correspondence with a girl via mail. The first half of the movie is slow, gradually setting up the characters; but the pacing is understandable - should they have sped through the introduction, they'd have set a falsely fast pace for the meat of the movie. The plot is set in motion when the girl he's corresponding with asks if for her birthday he could call her for the very first time - a promise which may be hard to keep.

Months pass, and his boss, a man who Bobby begins to very much respect, gives him the day off work; he tells him to meet him early in the morning, and together off they ride. Watching the old, bearded boss ride his mature BMW bike alongside the young Bobby ride his blue bike of boyhood through the bright morning sun is like watching a lion and its cub running across the savannah. In his boss, Bobby has found a spiritual father, one who can lead our young wildling; much unlike his own father whose obsession with academics kept him and Bobby distant. They leave the city and bike through a beautifully animated countryside; leaving the city, Bobby's leaving the mundane, joining the uncharted wilderness where there lies an element of the uncertain: of magic. The old man stops his bike - Bobby stops beside him - and the sound of mosquitos can be heard far in the distance. As the sound gets louder, the noise is not that of mosquitoes; no, it's the roar of motorbikes.

And as Bobby sees these motorbikes speeding over the dirt track before him, he sees they all wearing "Bobby's" written upon their leathers. Bobby met his father, and now he meets his people; a small village lives here in the hills where they race bikes - teams of mechanics and racers congregate, all under the moniker "Bobby's". Bobby has found his people! He's left the world of herbivores and met carnivorous cousins who he understands. Bobby, stunned by what he's seen, looks up to his boss; his boss tells him, "Bobby - I'm going to make a champion of you". The suns light is blinding.

Having just found his tribe, his family, a faint whisper plays in his head: "remember to phone me at 10PM". Today was Bobby's Girl's birthday. Bobby, now knowing the route to meet his people, heads back home to catch the phone. The road home is long - it's been a long journey to find his people - and the searing summer sun begins to set. I'll take a moment to say that the animation is beautiful; never have I seen animated backgrounds on road journeys done so fluidly. Bobby racing home to hear the dulcet voice of his girl enters into a clear state of bliss - smooth sketches take over from painted cel in animating his ride, as the 80s pop plays loud enough to mask the sounds of his motorbike.

Then a hatchback pulls out into the road; Bobby doesn't notice, and in doging swerves over the railing off the cliff edge. We're left with a shot of a distorted room; the phone ringing without cease, waiting to be picked up. What an empty end to a triumphant film; Bobby's discovery was the beginning, no? the beginning of his new life? Bobby enters his manly paradise, and finally finds himself fulfilled, only to die? What tragedy! Was it the whisper of the feminine, that Eve-like pull, which dragged him from Eden? Was the paradise where Bobby found himself to begin with real? Tragedy tugs at the heart, never yielding, because there's no resolution; it's as if, without resolution, the ending is blurry without detail, never properly comprehended. Unlike happily-ever-after endings, the tragedy leaves its threads untied and liable to fraying. What we mourn and pity is the potential: what was Bobby's future to be like; could he have gotten the girl; was he to become the greatest racer Japan has ever known - a name to be heralded in racing through the ages? We'll never know. And neither will the caller at the end of the line.

2021/09/14 City Review: Leicester

A second part in a series!? How awfully peculiar. I do intend to continue the series, holding my mini-holidays ransom if I don't.

For my second trip, the destination was Leicester. A larger city than Lincoln, Leicester is of a similar size to my current city of residence, Nottingham. I awoke that morning with a queasiness that lasted for much of the day; I had the worse nightmare I've had in years - even thinking about it now fills me with disgust. I read on the short train ride to Leicester, attempting to clear my mind of the awful images with which I was plagued with the night before, until I reached Leicester. Arriving in Leicester, I felt as if I'd ridden full circle back to Nottingham albeit with the buildings shuffled in my absence; the architecture, the demography, and the general feel of the city is very similar, with proud Victorian buildings forming the meat of the city-scape. Much like in Nottingham also, Leicester has a beautiful Victorian train station; the kind of train station which takes you back to the era of Victorian power and glory. I decided to go for a walk around the centre of town, looking at shops and whatnot, only to find the same old shops that one would find anywhere. The city centre felt really large, however - larger than Nottingham's. It may have been my own disorientation in a new city, or a feature of Leicester itself, but I spent quite a while attempting to find my way around the city centre. In time, I noticed the major roads of the city all lead back to a modest memorial with a small clock face in the centre of Leicester, which acted a useful anchor.

I began to get hungry, and wasn't in the mood for a Greggs, so I set out to find some cheap food to eat. Cheap, cooked food, when you aren't looking for a sausage roll, is hard to come by; in the end, I settled for some fried chicken. The cheap chicken shop I wandered into sold no chips however; no, he only sold 'spicy potatoes'. The spicy potatoes sat in the warming tray next to the fried chicken, looking rather old as if they'd sat there for some time. Resignedly, I bought my chicken and spicy potatoes from the man - a very kind man, may I add - who gave me a free drink with my order, and an extra spicy potato (which he handed to me whilst I was handing over the fiver, leaving the fiver I gave to him rather greased and spiced). The spicy potatoes was surprisingly pleasant - had a good paprika flavour with a very soft texture.

After lunch I wandered round the old corner of the city, waiting for my allotted time at the exhibition. The local cathedral was pretty, and is neighboured with old, narrow pedestrian roads laid when the city had no need to accommodate cars. The various cafes and shops seemed a little hipster and swanky, but the area was a quiet respite from the busy Leicester roads. 1PM arrived and I headed to the Richard III exhibition. Built upon the spot where the child-murdering former king was unceremoniously found in a parking lot, the exhibition was very much the "experience", they advertised. You walked through scarcely lit rooms playing ambient music learning from various information boards about the history of the war, the main figures, Richard's role, and the climax. I must add at this point, that I was the only visitor not wearing a face mask, and I did check before hand for any signs asking for a mask; I feel it says something interesting about who this kind of museum attracts. Anyways, after being taught about the history, we headed upstairs into a far more brightly lit room, where they teach you the historiography of Richard III, making revisionist claims that maybe Shakespeare was just a propagandist of his time etc, etc... This was what I expected, and wasn't looking forward to. Apparently, the barons had little faith in Richard because he was making pro-peasant reforms in the justice system, etc, etc... Thinking about it later, to call Shakespeare a propagandist over his position is just silly; imagine being him in his time - he wasn't being paid off by the queen's coffers to tell lies - he and all his countrymen ardently believed the history of the day. It's as if to say any pro-allies films after WW2 were just propaganda of the day, because they were anti-Nazi - it's plain stupid. After the historiography, we were led on into the brightly lit room to read about the science, the techniques used, and whatnot. This part of the museum was the most sparsely populated and quite uninteresting. I felt rather bugged at this point; bugged at the "let's all be 'objective' historians" slant, and the fact that I hadn't seen anything yet - it'd been a walking wiki page. Also, the way the two floors were set - the dark ground floor being this earthly, chaotic confusion of the pitiful medievals, and the first floor being the enlightened, heavenly, angelic 'truth' we now know - bugged me a little too; it felt rather uppity. Returning down stairs, thinking the exhibit was nearly over, I stumbled into the last stop of the route. The room was marble, with a speaker playing the Latin chants of friars. I walked in, and the floor beneath on the other side of the room was glass. Beneath lay the pit in which the king was buried. "Ah", I thought. "This is the point." The rest of the exhibit's purpose was to contextualise this moment, to give meaning to seeing the ill-carved pit where the worst king in English history lay. Projected into the pit was the outline of where the skeleton was when it was found. There's a kind of special emotion, thinking the king was once lain to rest here. The feeling of kingship is something truly deep in our psyche, which we struggle to begin to understand; looking down into the grave, there was a kind of regal aura emanating which is hard to put into words. I had a good long chat with an older lady who volunteered there. She reckons the grave wasn't dug by the friars, even though the grave was in the friary. The carving was too slap-dashed for the professional friars to have dug; she believes the grave to have been dug by the soldiers of Henry VII. Apparently, the grave didn't even have a headstone until a few years after the burial, in fear of turning the friary (and most friars, she said, were pro-Yorkist) into a Yorkist pilgrimage spot.

After seeing the grave, and chatting with the volunteer there, my bitterness towards the exhibit, became a sweetness, and I was in far higher spirits (the nausea with which I began the day subsided also thankfully). After the exhibit, I walked north to explore some of the residential areas of Leicester. The area felt cleaner than Nottingham; there were less homeless than in similar areas of Nottingham also, which was pleasant. The shops amongst the terraced houses were mostly independent, each with Asian names; a large chunk of people in the area wore foreign styles of dress also - moreso than in Nottingham, despite feeling as if they have similar demographics.

Since I was returning from the north of the city, I circled back round to the main park in Leicester called Abbey Park. I headed over the bridge to the ruins of the abbey which remained in the park. The sole remnants of the abbey is the stone floor plan of where the building would've stood; the sole remnants are the stones which were too much effort to quarry for other projects. Judging by the size of the floor plan, and the sketch on the notice board outside the ruins, the abbey would've been massive, a stone building on the scale of the cathedral. It's melancholic wandering torn down ruins; for Roman ruins, there's a sense of heroism - these buildings were built to last forever, but the people died out; for abbeys like this one, the building was cannibalised with the changing tide of fancy. Like a carcass the abbey was full of crows, hopping from rock to rock.

Returning to the city centre, it was time to head home - but first, a pint. I struck gold; I stumbled upon a local ale house which sold real Leicestershire ales. I had a delicious dark ale called "Old Navigator", or something thereabouts. There, I sat in the pub staring wistfully into the distance, enjoying my pint (and occasionally checking my phone), like an old man in the making. Good, dark ales can leave you in a deep, mellow state, warming you up from the core feeling at once at peace and joyous; this wonderful ale hit the spot and I headed back to the train station content with life.

Overall, Leicester is a good city. Very much like Nottingham, with some pros, like the quaint older district, and the nicer suburbs; but cons also, like not possessing a tram network (and not having Robin Hood). That being said, compared to Lincoln, Leicester is still a busy, crowded, noisy city, with all the hustle and bustle expected of dwelling of that magnitude; that kind of frantic business isn't the most appealing. Leicester, all in all, is a sibling of Nottingham - a very livable city, if you don't mind living in one.

6/10

2021/08/29 Courage is Death

Courage is Death. Let's attempt to unpack this statement, starting with what death is. Death is when you cease to be living, when you cross the river Styx and see what's on the other side. Non-being - the lack of being after death - can't be known other than through belief, since one can't talk from experience or go on the experience of others. To act or move towards death is to act or move against life - they're opposites. Life can be understood as your instinctual forces which drive you: your drive to stay away from danger; your drive to protect yourself; to keep family close; to beware of stranger; essentially, to move towards life is a move towards staying alive. Where does courage fit in then? Courageous acts are moral actions which disregard one's drive towards life. To jump into a river to save a drowning child takes courage; you're risking your life, moving in the opposite direction of life, towards death, in order to save the child. It takes courage to charge into battle with bayonets; you're risking your life for the sake of your countrymen. Courage is not, however, a love of death, or a desire to move towards death - the foolhardy berserker who charges into battle can't be called "courageous", only foolish. Unlike Aristotle, I wouldn't place courage between the coward and the berserker. Instead, courage is moving towards death for a moral reason whilst still loving and holding onto life. It is to move towards the promise of the afterlife by leading a moral life.

2021/08/28 City Review: Lincoln

Lincoln will most likely be the first of a series I would like to do on day trips around the country. Ever since the end of lockdown, I've wanted to do some exploring - the net can only be explored for so long, after all - and I intend to visit other towns and cities which can be cheaply traveled to around Nottingham.

Planning the trip only the day before, I found a cheap ticket to Lincoln, hopping on the train the next morning. I sat reading my book on the train until the towers of the great Lincoln cathedral could be seen on the horizon. Quite an awe-striking sight. We arrived at the platform and alighted the train; hungry, I went to get some food. I stopped off at a bakery named Cooplands, which at first I thought was a kind of quaint independent bakery; later, I found out when discussing the bakery with a northern friend that the bakery is a chain, a kind of Greggs++, which northerners defend from the south. A shame, since four sausage rolls for a quid is an almighty deal, and the small pasties I had were also very good - wouldn't mind one here in Nottingham. Walking back down the high street then, eating my lunch, I saw the first of the numerous charity hawkers - people quite aggressively trying to get you to donate? or buy something for charity. I did my best to fob them off, but they were quite a nuisance, attempting to engage every passer-by in conversation. Three independent hawking organisations operated on the high street... How do they do work such a job? Being continually rejected, called names, etc, whilst they smile and attempt to capture customers with charisma is no job for the weak of heart.

Walking further down the high street, I came upon an archway. "This must be the inner city now", I thought. Plenty of high street brands and a shopping mall - the usual array of what were once the essential shops, forming the usual saccharine cacophony of colour. The street by this point was quite busy for a midday on a Thursday and, judging by what others around me were saying, it appeared I wasn't the only tourist about. I walked further up the street to be pleasantly surprised that beyond this prettily built yet boringly populated town centre, there was a true centre, a core, up the aptly named street "Steep Hill". Steep Hill earns it's name, and isn't for the infirm (a dwarf was descending the hill, and seemed to be quite out of breath). It felt like a different city on Steep Hill: the city street had morphed from brick to cobble; the buildings were stone and modest, as if they were four hundred years older; the shops which were once these intimidating high street brands had become quaint independent shops. But not solely the touristy kind - now, granted, there were the artisanal cheese shops and fancy whisky shops to bring back souvenirs - but there were butchers, bakers, and a strange little shop which appeared to sell nothing but speedometers. Lincoln managed to ride the line between touristy and authentic very well. The city never fully felt like a tourist trap whose economy runs solely on cathedral and castle visitors; the city felt like a real city also with real people, even in the most touristy areas. At the top of the hill stood the cathedral in all it's glory.

Upon reaching the top, however, a service was starting and, since I'm not a Christian (yet), I felt I shouldn't enter yet. I went for a walk around the grand building, seeing the flying buttresses and ornate Gothic fractal patterns extruding from the edges. Gothic architecture is truly beautiful - it may well be the best style of architecture - the fractals reducing to the infinitesimally small off of the impossibly huge is a brilliant representation of the divine to witness. The cathedral may well be the most beautiful buildings I've ever seen - it's at least one of them.

Entering the cathedral felt like I wasn't meant to be there somehow. Since I was young, I was always somewhat afraid of entering churches. Might've been some kind of fear of being struck down by God (grew up in a family of atheists) or something along those lines. Once I was inside and had paid the £7.80 student rate (which is quite modest for a cathedral of this size), I was struck by the belly of the cathedral's beauty, and how vast the interior was. It's hard to imagine how a medieval man who hadn't been numbed by modern advances would've seen the building. The stained glass had the alluring glow of the computer screen but felt real. It's the same radiance but in a purer and more honest form; what true coloured light looks like instead of the Ersatz good we look at today. The size of the building was impressive, and I was truly impressed, but imagine if I hadn't seen the sky-scrapers and the large buildings of London, or even the wretched sky-rise flats which fester on the horizon today: how much bigger the cathedral would've been! And for medieval man the cathedral would've been bigger in a material sense also. In the mid-sixteenth century, the spire collapsed in a storm. Whilst the spire was upright, the cathedral in Lincoln was the tallest in the world, taller even than the pyramids of Giza, only to be beaten by the Eiffel Tower come the nineteenth century. Anyways, back to the trip. We were toured around the cathedral by a man named Ken; a witty and knowledgeable volunteer tour guide. You could tell he had given the tour many times, and had sharpened his stand-up routine to a fine edge. Wandering around after the tour, it appeared other tour groups didn't have as engaging a leader, so if you plan on heading off, I'd keep an eye out for him. There was another lady, a cynical older lady, who volunteered in the library who I talked to about the old velum books from the on display, and how we're currently living in the next Dark Age since nothing is built to last. She seemed like quite an interesting character but however much I wanted to stay, once the bell chimed 3PM I had to leave, since the cathedral closes for evening services.

Outside, the weather, which was previously dry and sunny, had turned cloudy with occasional rain. I kitted up in my raincoat and went for a walk around suburbia, to get a feel for the rest of the city. Heading north, the area seemed wealthy with many larger houses down the main road. Down each main road were several smaller roads, branching off into moderate, peaceful terraced streets. The area was peaceable, affluent and pleasant looking on the whole, although the quietness was in part due to the rain. Whilst on my walk I had a repeating vision that the roads I walked were roots, with the streets branching off of them smaller rootlets, feeding and grounding the cathedral at the centre of the city on the hill. Lincoln, seen from a map, has a kind of mandala-like radial beauty: a true isekai town.

Returning to the city centre was easy - the cathedral can supposedly be seen from twenty-five miles away, let alone the other side of town. Down Steep Hill, turning right, I went to see Brayford pool, a historic lake sat at the base of the hill. The lake connects to the Trent via Foss Dyke - the first canal in Britain, built by the Romans - and back in the Middle Ages made Lincoln the fourth busiest port city in England, despite being inland. The port saw renewed use in the Industrial Revolution, but is now littered with private yachts. The waterfront appeared to have been recently redeveloped with pricey-looking bars and restaurants, but at four in the afternoon when I was walking past they were understandably rather empty.

By 4:30PM, my legs were starting to ache (due to my mostly sedentary life) so I went in search of a pub. The pub I stumbled upon was called the Dandy Lion - a more expensive pub, costing roughly £4.30 for a pint (and had no local ales on the app [they're still using bloody apps] despite their advertising outside) - but the interior was smartly done with a kind of rustic effect. The food on the menu sounded nice, but I wasn't laying down any more money on the trip (and I wasn't hungry after all the baked goods at lunch). After my pint, I headed down to the train station to head home. The station was quite packed since it only had two or three platforms, even though trains were entering and exiting the station frequently. The traffic at rush-hour was horrendous, the entire city was at gridlock, albeit only in a certain direction, and according to Ken the cathedral tour guide, parking in Lincoln is also a nightmare - the city has some serious infrastructure issues. However, being such an old city with many beautiful old buildings and winding streets, this is a hard problem to fix.

Overall, Lincoln was a good city: pretty architecture, giving the city a warm feeling; myriads of beautiful churches - whichever street you went down, it seemed another old church stood waiting; pleasant people with a northern kindness, despite the annoying hawkers; and an awe-inspiring cathedral which dominates the heavens wherever you stand in the city. Despite calm yet inevitable waves of tourists, Lincoln is a warm and very livable city where, if given the choice, I would happily live.

8/10

2021/08/18 This is a test for comments section

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2021/08/18 The Legend of Simon the Digger Part 1

Gurren Lagann – a beloved classic. A show which drags you by the hand showing you a true hero’s journey from baby to old man. Amongst what at first is a cool, engaging, beautiful show is a much deeper plot – a plot about Simon’s birth into adulthood – a plot that each one of us follow across our lifetime. Gurren Lagann’s status as a classic is because it’s a show that rings true on so many levels. Should the show have just been a wacky action show or just been a psychological deep-dive into adolescence, it wouldn’t have been the masterpiece anime fans recognise it to be. Today, however, we will be discussing that ‘deeper’ layer of the show, looking at how the show tells the ancient story of one’s lifetime - of your lifetime, past, present, and future. Let’s begin with Simon the Digger, stuck with Kamina in the cave.

The Birth of Simon the Digger

Simon the Digger is known as one of the best drillers in the cave-town. Simon is a child; young and blind, following Kamina, his older brother, to a tee. However there isn’t much to do underground. It’s dark, cramped and empty – there’s just nothing. Simon hasn’t come to consciousness yet as his own man – he hasn’t yet obtained those powers of reflection that you develop in puberty. And so in this cramped, dark, seemingly ‘unconscious’ world, he lives.

But in this dark world, Simon has a light: Kamina. Kamina is Simon’s aniki - his older brother - but can also be seen as a kind of guiding manly spirit who propels and directs Simon on his journey into adulthood. But before an escape plan in Episode 1 can succeed, Simon must first find Lagann. Lagann is a tiny little mech, which only really has space for one person (Simon), which only Simon can power with his core drill. Lagann is but a body, however - without the power of Simon’s core drill, it is an empty shell. By providing his ghost, his geist, his spirit, his core drill to that shell, he can begin his journey out of the dark, unconscious, Platonic cave, to the bright surface above.

Escaping the cave, Simon and Kamina are greeted with reams of Gunmen – demons who’ve taken over the surface of the Earth. In leaving the motherly safety, security and nurture of the cave, Simon has come to awareness as an individual only to find the outside world is full of monsters. Without the womb-like protection of the caverns he grew up in, he relies instead on his friends: on his aniki, Kamina; his eventual crush Yoko; and the rest of the Gurren-dan for support.

The Extinguished Light

The Gurren-dan continue their quest, defeating ever greater foes, taking us up to episode eight. Episode eight: anyone who’s watched the show remembers the episode vividly. He’s dead? He can’t be - surely not. The loss of the key screw holding together the team, holding together their successes, holding together Simon on his journey from the caverns, has been wrenched out, and the scaffolding comes tumbling down. The Simon who believes in the Kamina who believes in him is lost without Kamina’s guiding light to shine his path.

Many growing up feel the moment when Kamina dies in them. For many, including myself, that came at age fourteen - the moodiest year for many teens - when the Aegis shield of parental protection guarding you begins to disappear and become invisible to the maturing mind. Suddenly the surety of childhood, that prized sweet childhood innocence, evaporates, leaving a gritty reality to contend with. Kamina solved every problem Simon had - he was his model of masculinity, his image of who he must be, his senpai, his brother, his fatherly figure. Now where is Simon to tread? The destination is gone; the map is ruined. Without Kamina, his light (in Japanese, kaminari means ‘lightning’), the young Simon must now dig his own path.

"All that's left is ash." - Ashita no Joe

Simon’s mope

Simon becomes understandably mopey. He lashes out at the group members, flinging frustration over his aniki’s death. But the wound runs deeper than that - it was Simon’s fault that Kamina died. If it weren’t for Simon getting distracted over his memories of Kamina and Yoko’s midnight rendezvous, Kamina would’ve never been caught off guard and killed by Lordgenome’s forces.

But Simon’s jealous. Simon’s jealous that Kamina, that perfect vision of masculinity, that vision of his ideal future self, gets the girl he loves: Yoko. But Simon will never get Yoko, for as long as he stands in Kamina’s shadow, he can never shine as brightly, forever relegated to Kamina’s cute younger brother. The seeds of jealousy deep deep down inside Simon is at root a hatred; Simon suffers so brutally after Kamina’s death because a small dark part of his soul is glad that Kamina died - Simon can now ‘get the girl’ without competition. Naturally, Simon could never admit these feelings to himself, but the maelstrom rips him apart from the inside all the same.

The appearance of Nia

The forest which burns down leaves space and a bed of nutrients for the next generation. Despite the tragedy of Kamina’s death, and Simon’s inner turmoil, Simon finally has the space and the nutrients to grow as an individual. No longer can he be the Simon who “believes in the you who believes in me”; Simon must become the Simon who believes in himself. Simon must no longer see himself as Kamina’s younger brother, as a little Kamina - he should instead see himself as Simon. In ceasing to see himself as a younger Kamina, Simon ceases to pursue Yoko - the same soul whom Kamina pursued. Instead, Simon is met by a fair maiden who descends from the heavens: Nia.

Simon’s barren soulless landscape is greeted by a princess - a princess who’s willing to vouch for him. Finding his own soul, finding his own confidence, Simon’s encouraged out of his catatonic hibernation bit by bit by his newfound waifu. The new Simon, emerging from the rubble of Kamina’s death, grows to become a great Kamina-styled leader of the Gurren-dan only because Nia has his back.

New hope from the casket.

Lordgenome

Lordgenome is the lord of the genome - a force suppressing spiral energy, suppressing evolution, oppressing mankind. He is the force sending chimeric freaks to attack the Gurren-dan upon his command. He is the full force of the law - the force stopping man in his tracks from achieving their full potential.

From below, one feels the instinctive drive, the drive from our genome, to develop into an ever greater and ever more mature person. Whilst from above, there’s authority - an oppressive power telling you how to act and what the right thing to do is, disregarding what your instincts and intuitions may say. This tension sits at the centre of the human experience. Growing up, once the illusion of your parents’ omnipotence ends, once your Kamina dies, we are stuck with rules and laws, without the sureness that they are morally and truthfully sound. At this age the laws have to be tested and rebelled against until the “policeman inside our heads” is slain. Lordgenome is no different. He’s the oppressive paternalistic authority who governs the world of beastmen who, for the most part, are obedient clay men without the the spiral energy, the spirit, to rebel.

But we must remember that Lordgenome’s a failed hero. He tread the same tracks as Simon, leading the rebellion against the powers at be, only to fail. Instead of letting his spiral energy drive him to pierce the heavens, he used it to screw over mankind, subjecting them to a long life of oppression. This is the tyranny of the the moral code which must be obeyed without explanation, even though much of the etiquette and rules which govern us aren’t sensible. This is the tyranny of the ‘cabal’, the elites, the authority figures who believe they rule be virtue of experience and age. This is the tyranny of those who failed to pierce the heavens.

Kokoro no Gattai

The Final Fight?

For Simon, defeating Lordgenome is not just to take back control of the Gurren-dan’s autonomy to live without constant threat of beastmen; it is also to take back Nia from her father. Simon’s soul is not wholly free yet - she is still in part in the clutches of her father, of authority. For Simon to become an adult, he must set his soul free from the clutches of authority, since only once Nia is truly Simon’s own, can Simon achieve the autonomy of adulthood.

On a map, there’d be an arrow, saying “You are here”. At our age, we’ve mostly slain our Lordgenome’s; we’re not rebelling against our parents nor society, breaking the rules to ‘be cool’ - we’ve matured beyond that point. Slowly but surely, we’re becoming part of the establishment, not rebelling against rules with passion, but rather obeying them with indifference. Instead of the figure of the powerful towering Lordgenome who uses force to make you conform, we now have a weak yet wise head of Lordgenome who instead advises us. We have become adults and made peace with the establishment.

Respectfully observed morality.

Continued in part 2...

Originally written for the Uni of Nottingham Anime Society Zine

2021/08/13 Maid Dragon and Christian Morality

“Maid Dragon” and “Christian Morality” are two phrases which should not be linked by any reasonable mind in the same sentence; however, I believe the link with the debaucherous anime is a sound one, and I’ll attempt to explain my reasoning.

To begin the discussion, let’s start with dragons. Dragons are as primal a symbol as you’ll find: there is the ourobouros, found in cave art across the world; the dragons of Celtic myth; of Chinese folklore; of Germanic mythology, in Fafnir; of the Aztecs – Lucoa being Quetzelcoatl, the feathered serpent. Yet how the dragon is portrayed differs widely from culture to culture: the Germanic dragon is something to be slayed who hoards gold; the Celtic dragon held a kind of god-like reverence; the Chinese dragon is lucky and a controller of the weather; whilst the feathered serpent brought the Aztecs culture, writing, and farming. The line between dragon and god is thin; Quetzelcoatl, for instance, is both a feathered serpent – a dragon in all but name – whilst also being a god of the Aztecs. Maid Dragon’s Tohru is much the same, being both the Norse god Thor, whilst also being a dragon in the show. To humanise the gods, as opposed to being simply animal-like existences, can be understood as a step up in man’s understanding of these pagan deities as more intricate and complex existences – a clearer vision of the god, so to speak. Hence we see in more advanced pagan civilisations, like the Greeks and the Germans, the slaying of monsters and dragons for their riches, retrieving and repurposing the value lying behind the outdated understandings of the gods, whether it be the Cyclops for the fleece or Fafnir for his gold. Yet these human appearances of dragons, whilst they may be clearer images of the deity in question, are still at root pagan deities: dragons. To summarise the topic of dragons, then, the dragon can be understood as a more primitive understanding of a deity, who can take on a human form to become a clearer vision of that deity.

Let’s move onto the second part of the question of Maid Dragon: the maid element. The morals of Christianity, as understood by Aquinas, can be split into the Seven Virtues, which can be partitioned into two sets: the four cardinal virtues, and the three theological virtues. The cardinal virtues were inherited from the pagans, those being: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. It’s wrong to see Christianity, or at least orthodox Christianity, as seeing pagan thinkers as somehow forbidden or whose knowledge is untouchable. Much of Christian thought is knowingly built upon pagan thought, such as Neoplatonism which is core to much of church thought, and the influence of Aristotle on Aquinas. For most of history, much of Christianity has seen the pagan gods as real… albeit as demons. The idea that Christianity believe there’s only one God is a more modern understanding – in the past (and many Christians today) believe instead that there’s only one God which should be prayed to. So it’d be wrong even to say that Christianity doesn’t think the pagan gods exists, when in reality many Christians think they do exist, albeit with a wholly different interpretation. Chesterton goes further, arguing that Christianity is a kind of upgrade upon paganism – specifically a moral upgrade – adding the three theological virtues to the roster: faith, hope, and charity. Classical Rome had a conception of hubris – it was seen as the worst vice of all – but had no conception of the underdog, of there being a kind of glee when the weakest overcame the strongest. For the Romans believed that the strongest should be strongest – a seemingly less paradoxical understanding of the world, but to us a less relatable one. The very idea that there is a joy in the courage of weakness, a faith in your lord, a joy and agapic/charitable love of serving God: is this not the heart of the maid?

Reviewing, we have seen the maid, a symbol of Christian meekness, and the dragon, the roar of the might of the pagan gods. What does it mean then for a person to turn a dragon into a maid, to quell the dragons and teach them Christian morality – what does that make Kobayashi? A symbol of Jesus, of course. She is the figure to tame the unruly pagan deities who have been gradually rearing their heads once more on Earth ever since “the death of God”. Through Kobayashi’s parables and sermons, she teaches the dragons who follow her the joys of meekness, of fitting in, and of not being the most powerful.

Maid Dragon may well show nudity, makes ecchi jokes, and have an undercurrent of perversion running throughout the show however at its core it’s wholesome-- no, beyond just wholesome; deeply moving and meaningful – a story which helps one transcend modern meaninglessness. A show which can heal your heart.

2021/07/20 The Different Levels of Fussy Eating

Fussy eating is a growing problem - a problem I participate in, no less. Selecting certain foods at the exclusion of others, however, has a long history whose shadows we live under without noticing. Take dog meat for example: the average Joe on the streets wouldn't touch a dog meat curry with a long pole; is this fussy eating? In a sense, it is insofar as it's a cultural convention. What about vegans? Jews? Even those with nut allergies could be fussy eaters despite the fact the eating of certain foods would mean death. In this article, I'll attempt to form a hierarchy of fussinesses to grade certain dislikes and aversions.

We'll start from the top: the allergy. This level, which I'll dub the 'biological excuse' is the highest and most permissible level of fussy eating. If a friend served you a nutty curry of some kind and you have horrendous nut allergies where to merely touch a nut would colour you scarlet, no good host would look down on you for placing the plate to one side and not trying a bite. You can't argue with the deadly side effects. You can't feed the coeliac bread and butter pudding for fear of churning their viscera. As a piece of advise for the fussiest of eaters for whom a certain food is beyond disgust, using the excuse of an allergy as a white lie can get you out of awkward social situations, I can confirm from experience.

Next we have the 'religious excuse' which is not to eat a food out of faith. Here we have the Jews and the Muslims who avoid pork alongside the Hindus who avoid beef with many more examples such as the Jains and some Buddhist who are vegetarian. Offering orthodox Jews charcuterie outside the synagogue would also be incredibly rude, unlike the example with nut allergies, since pork is a kind of temptation. Even though the pig is considered a dirty animal, few can argue that pork does look rather tasty when you have the virtues of bacon and ham propounded through the television screen every other advertising break. The pig and the cow especially are animals which resemble meat on legs - the temptation for the impoverished of Asia must've been strong. But we must remember that back when the world was larger and their peoples more isolated, a homogeneous society of Hindus had little trouble avoiding the temptation of beef, since culturally it was regarded as we regard dog meat: utterly abhorrent. The modern Western (particularly Anglophone) man's worship of dogs doesn't risk the same fate unfolding over here any time soon, however a visit to China or Indochina and witnessing their selection of 'delicacies' on offer proves that ex-Christendom too has a set of taboo foods. Particularly Anglophone ex-Christendom where offal meats are becoming more taboo (and somehow simultaneously more gourmet?).

Third is the 'ideological excuse' which is to not eat food out of belief. Before I start, this distinction between religious dietary decisions and ideological ones is not an attempt to lynch the vegan cause, but rather quite an important difference. The self-proclaimed vegan or vegetarian decides to avoid meat for personal reasons, rather than religious ones. Even though many a time I've most likely written or said that ideologies are a kind of religion, there is an important difference - ideologies point towards an idea, whereas religions point towards a being. The Jew foregoes pork not by his volition, but rather by Yahweh's commandment; contrast this with the vegan who avoids animal products by their own commandment, by their own ideological decision. The difference is the direction of power: the Jew avoiding pork does so due to a higher power, God; whereas the vegan does so due to a lower power, an idea, which they follow for the purpose of self-satisfaction rather than the satisfaction of God. This category goes beyond stronger convictions like vegetarianism and into weaker whims like Keto and whatever other diet's popular. The vast majority would cater for the needs of vegans and vegetarians, whereas only most would cater for fad dieters.

Finally we have the 'personal excuse' which can be simply summed up as "I don't like it." At the dining table, this is an excuse which would struggle to fly - it's an excuse crippled from birth since it reeks of selfishness. Being a fussy eater myself, I've felt that guilt and disappointment others have when you say you just can't deal with a certain food - neither side is happy. It occupies the lowest wrung of the ladder principally because it's pure personal whim. At the start, we saw allergies, a phenomenon quite outside of the individual's control for if you weren't fussy, there's be physical damage to their body; then, religious reasons which to the outsider is a choice, but to any believer is a reality and any consumption of pork or beef or whatnot incurs spiritual damage; next was ideological reasons, which shouldn't incur any kind of spiritual damage, unless they begin to deify their beliefs, but nevertheless is a moral decision. The personal excuse is the lowest excuse because the fussy eater has the most agency over it - there is no anaphylactic shock, no smite of God, no ideological convictions, just 'no'. 'I don't want to'. Food fussiness is nevertheless a hard hurdle surmount - there's a kind of physical disgust which accompanies certain foods which prevents one from getting close like a strong AT field. It's a kind of phobic response of intense disgust for which it's one's responsibility to overcome. However, as our notions of agency change and as fads like 'gluten intolerance' grow, public perception as to what kinds of fussiness are acceptable may change in the not so far future. Through medicine and growing self worship, this hierarchy may in decades be turned on its head.

2021/07/03 It's Because of Global Warming

As a disclaimer before we embark on this entry, I have nothing against global warming - in fact, I do believe in it as a scientific phenomenon. This article is about the more... spiritual side.

The weather outside has been miserable here in the UK. To my misfortune, I missed the hot spell over May due to exam revision, and now this paltry excuse of summer is all that remains. I may say to someone, "the weather has been awful", in true British fashion, and the reply will often be, "yep, must be global warming." Alright. There are some arguments that global warming can incur abnormal weather - even coldness - I'll grant that. Back when it was hot, I similarly moaned, "the weather sure is hot", receiving an identical reply, "must be global warming". Hmm. Global warming appears to be the hot and the cold, the left and the right, the zero and the infinity, the alpha and the omega - what is it at all anymore?

The answer is a religion - or at least part of one. The Parthenon of scientific paganism in modern times is held up in part the pillar of global warming, an eschatological truth which lurks at the end of time. Global warming's prophesised Great Floods and desertification is an ostensibly demystified despritualised second-coming of Christ. Quite terrifying. Underpinning the myth (in the sense of mythological, not fake) of global warming, is a distinct guilt, a guilt of the sins of modern technological being revealed. Through our scientific enterprise, we've sacrificed the future, the spiritual nature of the world, and our very souls for our current pleasures, without forethought for our descendants. Much like Faust, we've sold our souls to the devil. It's no coincidence that the mad scientist is the villain of so many stories from Faust to Frankenstein - somewhere, to this day, we have an inkling that the knowledge of science is profane, and that through uncovering it we're digging into secrets we shouldn't.

Are they secrets of reality, however? Owen Barfield, whose book Saving the Appearances I strongly recommend, mentions how pure science can only deal with the appearances of the world, describing no truth sitting behind the curtain of perception. However the scientific materialist sees nothing beyond perception; they discover truth through rulers, protractors and stop-watches and anything which can't be observed with a tool in the scientific pencil case is going into the recycling. To the dustbin goes: God, of course; goes the human soul, many I talk to agree; goes love, or maybe that's just a chemical according to some; goes morality, or maybe with all agree on that as a quid pro quo. To see only science is to see only material; things which can't be observed, like consciousness, are either reduced down or "to be continued".

As we've discussed, the scientist doesn't pull back the curtain of reality, and instead views the perceptions - the actors on the stage - ignoring the stage hands and actors off stage. But this is an ideal world; the human mind is too prone to idolatry to never wonder what lies behind the curtain, behind the stage. Idolatry, as Barfield understands it, is to claim there is something definite behind the stage: behind the curtain of the totem pole is our ancestors; behind the curtain of a temple in ancient Greece is a god who came whenever they were called upon. Why are Abrahamic faiths not idolatrous then? Because they claim that God doesn't exist behind the curtain of things and that no divinity resides in matter (Jesus and the trinity of course being a different more complex extra matter). God can affect the world, but not be in it.

Why then is science becoming pagan and idolatrous? Behind any weather current, hot storms or cold frost, lies the big boogie man of 'Global Warming' - a deity who's job it is to affect weather in peculiar ways out of spite for the sins of mankind. Many worship the deity through protests and elections, trying to make the wrath of global warming and his anger for humanity known.

The problem with pagan worldviews is that they are too narrow. As G.K. Chesterton puts it when describing the thought patterns of madmen:

Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.

A conspiracy theory can explain everything, but will it explain the world usefully? To say that the Jews or whoever else are controlling the world can explain everything if you want it to, but will it be useful or true? It's a smaller, more naive, circle about which you circumambulate, unlike a larger and more nuanced vision of weather from experience. Much like the smaller circle, this narrow misunderstanding of global warming explains nothing; in short, it's no better than a conspiracy theory in it's meaning.

Global warming, unfortunately, is just one such example of ideas in the hard or soft sciences being deified into incontrovertible principles. We should ensure our thinking doesn't become rigid and propagandised hailing these newly birthed pagan gods. For if the twentieth century has taught us anything, it's that demons needn't reveal themselves as gods, for the mask of a principle or ideology is far more appealing to modern eyes.

2021/06/23 Thoughts of Symbolism

Let's begin by saying that symbolism doesn't exist. Why? Because by declaring something symbolic is to say something doesn't exist. The modern mind draws a line in the sand: the symbolic on the right, where there's some kind of oblique meaning; and the literal on the left wherein the meaning is straight forward. What a meaningless and unfriendly divide - why should these once married concepts be divorced in modern times? Des Cartes is a major culprit. By separating mind and matter, matter is freed from psychic associations and participations so it can be studied by science, and mind is left to be argued over forever more. Well I'm just sick of it. This divide is meaningless. There is no 'symbolism' insofar as there is no 'literalism' - it's a false dichotomy from the start.

When we look at a tree in a forest we name it a 'tree'. When we look at an image of a tree on a computer we name it a 'tree'. When we see an abstract cartoonified image of tree we name it tree'. When do these have in common? Their tree-ness, their form - not their matter. In all three examples, the name 'tree' isn't the only choice at hand: we can use a specific kind of tree like an 'elm' or an 'oak'; an adjective like 'brown and green' or 'wooden and leafy'; or even a metaphor, or better yet a poem. For each of these descriptions, I could point to what could plainly be called 'a tree' and say "This is:" followed by any of the above, each getting across a different aspect of the tree's being. Why elevate and sanctify one 'literal' definition above all else, when each definition, each unfolding of the tree's being, can reveal different aspects of the tree's nature. What we must consider instead is the goodness of fit of each definition for the situation. The cartoon tree could be described as playful, whereas the oak before your eyes could be called majestic. Despite both being trees - a superlative literal category we're trained to think within - we manage to conflate the playful with the majestic, confusing the virtual cartoon with the grand and real. We miss the wood for the trees.

In essence then, instead of literalism and symbolism sharing the pie 50:50, the pie wholly belongs to symbolism, with literalism sitting sad in the corner pie-less. But even if one head of the hydra of literalism is cut off, another can arise. Take the rainbow and the pride flag. "Gay" has become many people's first thought when any kind of rainbow flag or even a rainbow is seen. It may not be the literalism of rainbow, but it is another literalism all together, one which does not pertain to it's original essence. This trained response to understand the allegorical meaning of the rainbow withdraws us from reality, since the map we use to plot the territory of the rainbow tells us nothing of the rainbow's nature nor meaning - only the allegorical association.

The symbol can be understood as a broad rainbow-like colour spectrum of meaning which can be discovered through perceiving, feeling, testing the object, feeling, story, or whatnot, in question. In understanding that broad spectrum of meaning as a single literalism, or as some kind of allegory, one filters the spectrum with a certain coloured filter, only permitting one meaning of the symbol to shine through. Though these narrow bands of meaning, we develop narrow understandings of the world, unable to understand symbols beyond the trained literal/propagandised response.

What is a symbol then? Well anything - the word symbol is just there to aid in thinking symbolically. It can refer to a physical object, a piece of art, a feeling, an instinct, a dream - anything which is perceived. It is down to us, however, to ensure that our perceptions aren't mangled and contorted by our notions of how the world ought to appear to us. Our models should aid us in conveying and understanding reality, not bend reality to its form - at that point it isn't reality we see anymore, but rather our own tail we're biting.

How do we understand the world better then? First, one must learn to see the world as it is without the cataracts of pre-conceived notions. Then the divine, boundless, infinite of reality will make itself known. Next one must hone their knowledge of the world and their skills in conveying it. Knowledge of the world can come from secondary sources like books, but better still primary sources like observing, touching or feeling. You can read as much about crows as you like, but only by observing a crow will you properly understand their nature, their meaning, and their symbolism. The issue is then reporting a crows nature. Sure, scientific verbage is at your disposal to describe their nesting habits and feeding habits, but is this a handy way to understand a crow? Crows have a personality, a certain look in their eye, a certain purposeful movement which their bird cousins seem to lack. Learning to speak properly and write properly is paramount. Mastering not just prose, but also poetics, in order to capture the symbolism of a crow will bring you closer to understanding consciously what a crow means.

To end, there is not correct way to read a symbol - but there are certainly many incorrect ones. It isn't up to you to decide what something means - it's up to you to discover what something means through perception and testing followed by practicing to convey the meaning. Think in this way, and reality will begin to loosen its tightly hunched shoulders and the chaos will all start to make a little more sense.

If you want the somewhat similar ideas written more eloquently, I strongly recommend Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances.

2021/06/11 The Great Disenchantening

Enchantment: to sing into being. It's quite a romantic word, but one which contains the magic of what the word confers. Singing as an act is but singing syllables at various pitches to a certain rhythm - but there's a magic within the the voice of the singer which reverberates at the base of one's being. This magic which song possesses can't be weighed, can't be gauged with a tape measure, nor measured with sound equipment - you may capture and quantify the noise, but you won't get the music, for the music can't be captured. It can't be quantified; music can only exist as a quality.

To the Congo pygmy living in the jungle without human contact, the world remains truly enchanted. Beyond what is apparent to us, like the joys of music, the world is also full of spirits. Tree spirits live in the trees, lake spirits in the lake - every part of the world possesses a kind of magic much like music. This world overflowing with meaningfulness and magic is at first romantic, nostalgic - a deeply spiritually connected place. But there are reasons we've moved past this view: living with such a close connection to spirits is paralysing - you want to go cut down that tree? there's a tree spirit there, I'm afraid you can't. Animistic man can't shape the world, can't change the world, so long as he's bound by a strict set of taboos which are maintained hyper-conservatively.

It is through taboo breaking that technology advances; it is through disenchanting the world that we can cut down trees without concern for the spirits or bury deep into the Earth without worry that the ancestors will escape from the hole. It took taboo breakers in the Renaissance, the grave diggers who stole corpses at the dead of night for clandestine dissections, to kick-start modern medicine. But along with the eventual normalisation of examining cadavers, some of the magic, the enchantment, the song, of the body has been lost. The progressers of mankind then look for the next taboos to break, to disenchant another territory of the world in order to conquer the land and manipulate it. How about nature? Through scientific analysis, trees and animals once thought to be 'living' are now merely organic. No longer do they have souls, no longer do they have some sense of intrinsic vitality which should be protected, for now they are just plain old matter, right-patterned atoms. Much like Faust, we've sold the soul of the plants for power over them.

And much like Faust, the human soul was next on death's row. No longer do we have an enchanted conception of what is right or what is good. With scientific scalpels, every last sinew of morality's magic has been cut, and the heart removed, leaving a morality which has been reduced to the mundane material level: a morality which is no longer transcendent and is now ours to toy with. But without the divine, enchanted basis of morals, what underpins them? Warring factions begin to wrestle for control over this disenchanted plaything which has plummeted from heaven. Morality is then dissected much like a cadaver, and loses its last shred of credibility. People today will say that "morality is just an efficient way for people to get along", as if it were just a social lubricant whose chemical composition could be altered for desired effects. Desire. Once morality has undergone a deep inspection and has been cut into tiny pieces, there's no moral left which can be considered objective, nothing which could be considered beyond doubt. All that's left is subjectivity: 'I want to'. Once man controls morality, what's governing how he treats morality apart from his own whims and desires? Man becomes driven by instinct, whilst nature laughs in the corner, "did you truly think you could conquer me?"

Since the 60s, taboos have been repeatedly broken creating an ever-more meaningless world. It is the taboos of society which which enchant life with meaning, as odd as it may sound, since through the act of making something taboo it becomes enchanted and revered. Take the n-word which today is the most taboo word. Many people, upon hearing it, will become apolplectic, offended and enraged - a seemingly bizarre response to what the scientifically minded would call 'just a word'. But that's to see the word blind to its invisible enchanted meaning, to be blind to the taboo which gives people meaning in their lives. In the nihilistic swamp, many are grasping onto branches, onto roots to lift themselves out and gain meaning in their lives. A new religion, or perhaps a cult, is sprouting before our very eyes based upon a morality of desire with new taboos to replace old ones 'outdated'. As this new religion attempting to re-enchant the world develops, we must consider: is this religion any good? or should we return to solutions of the past?

If you want the same ideas written more eloquently, read C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man

2021/05/31 Synchronicity is the Bridge

Jung was a man with a specific goal: to resurrect the pre-modern mindset in the modern age. How did he achieve it? Through synchronicity.

Modes of thinking through history can be subdivided into three main categories: the pre-modern, the modern, and the post-modern. The pre-modern mindset is to believe in the reality of narrative, to see the reality as having been organised in the patterns of stories. For the ancients and medieval peasants, myths weren't just an "attempt to explain the world through stories", like many scientists hypnotised by late Victorian anthropologists like Tylor and Frazer believe - instead stories were the fundamental organisation of the world, and myths were real. Modernism, as pioneered through enlightenment thinkers, propagated the idea of matter as fundamental. Instead of stories governing the world, laws of nature do, like F=ma and F=kx - mathematical laws which govern reality. As modernism has progressed, these laws have become ever-more complex, resulting in headaches like quantum mechanics. "Nature is fundamentally chaotic", the modernist thinks - small laws govern at the atomic, unsplitable, level, manifesting in near infinite complexity at the macro level. The post-modern era, as prophesised by Nietzsche, is where even these God-given laws die - God is dead, after all. Man becomes the measure of all things, and the seemingly uncrackable bedrock is burrowed through. Unlike in the modernist age, the pendulum has swung back and stories take on a new level of significance once more. However, instead of stories being the fundamental nature of reality, stories are treated as evil spirits which possess people - only propaganda exists now, expressions of power which aim to bend what people think and how people act. Here we see this tripartite vision of history; a vision which Jung manages to bridge.

Jung's influences are numerous, but his starting point is that of a scientist. He first trained in the medical profession, then specialising in what was previously a subset of medicine: psychology. Outside of scientific senpais, Jung was deeply influenced by Kantian metaphysics, the fingerprints of which are abound in his work - the collective unconscious is a kind of noumena (Jung oft uses the word 'numinous' for transcendent), and the archetypes are akin to Kantian a priori knowledge. Another deep influence on Jung, from quite a young age, is Nietzsche - the aforementioned godfather of post-modernity. Jung evidently saw himself much like Nietzsche - they both grew up disillusioned with faith as sons of pastors, after all. The Red Book reads much like Zarathustra also - Jung idolised the man. Finally, a major influence on Jung is that of the alchemists, the mysterious spiritual tradition which emerged most strongly around the 16th century. There's an interesting link between alchemy, a mystery tradition very much working within a mythical pre-modern framework, and the reformation / counter-reformation, wherein the protestant faith emerged as part of the zeitgeist of modernism, with the Council of Trent modernising the Catholic church shortly after. Alchemy, in the western tradition at least (Eastern Orthodox maintains many of these pre-modern ideas) is almost the last underground gasp of the age when myths were truly real for people.

Jung's madness stage demonstrated to him the reality of stories and that our narrative understanding of the world and the material reality of the world touch and are one: what people from time immemorial would call fate. Jung the scientist sees these patterns as archetypes which live inside of people's heads - Jungians like Anthony Stevens take this biological understanding of Jung's works, seeing him as a scientist who possesses great insight into the mind. But then we are confronted by the insight Jung has in that fate exists - reality fits narrative, and this just doesn't fit into this scientific model. Only matter should matter, not stories. The leap to 'psychic reality', wherein archetypal models and notions are woven into reality itself, not just our perception of it, is aided by the idea of synchronicity - that the bizarre coincidences between the world and the one's spirit occur all the time, and that it isn't merely the mind 'pattern matching'. Through accepting synchronicity, the world isn't a maelstrom of chaos, but rather an understandable ordered narrative following from womb to tomb. These coincidences are no longer 'bizarre' - they're fate, always meant to happen, perhaps even messages as to what you should do. Jung's project was to bridge our modernist biases to achieve a pre-modern and spiritually fulfilling understanding of the world. The post-modern, a world Jung wasn't alive for much of, is a step to that end. The post-modern is the break down of the scientific world order, a kind of fire in the forest to fertilise the narrative worldview of the future. Now, the question becomes which seeds are planted...

2021/05/27 The Use of Lighting in Detective Conan Movie 3: The Last Wizard of the Century

Rewatching the Conan films for the forth or fifth time with a friend who's watching them for the first time has not only been a trip down memory lane, but also a reminder at the sheer brilliance of films. Brilliant: a word whose name means both awe inspiring and bright - a word derived from the lustrous beryl gemstone. Whilst touching the heart immensely, upon watching movie 3, The Last Wizard of the Century, the sheer brilliance of the work shone through, quite literally in fact. The way intense light is used to pierce through the celluloid and gloriously dazzle the film leaves the viewer in sheer awe. Explanations can't be enough - here's some screenshots. (Spoilers ahead)

Kaito Kid glowing atop the city, waiting for the forewarned time of his heist. Kid blows up a power plant, plunging Osaka into darkness; his plan being that only hospitals, hotels, and the hidden location in which the Faberge egg he's after will have backup generators, illuminating his goal in the night sky. music

Like a moth to a flame, the Lupin homage hang glides glowing towards the lit room, thieving the egg.

In a lightning pursuit of the criminal, Conan weaves through traffic. The car lights shine all the brighter in the shadowed city, dizzifying the confused, traffic light-less streets.

Later on into the movie, the egg returned to the police's possession and the adventurers journey to the castle of Kiichi Kousaka, a craftsman who worked for Faberge, and the great grandfather of Natsumi Kousaka, one of those looking for the secrets of the egg. Conan cracks the code, opening the secret basement of the Last Wizard of the Century, into which the crew journeys. In these pitch black basement tunnels, the torchlight shines ever more radiantly.

Opening a tunnel with a light activated mechanism, the explorers discover the outer casing of the egg. Conan, assembling the two together, discovers the true magic of the egg. music

The egg named Memories, with a torch shining beneath it, projects through magic mirrors images of past times of the Russian royal family, to whose possession the egg would've been given to should it not have been for the revolution. Watching this clip, the viewer is as awestruck as the characters - I truly struggle to watch this without warm tinglings of lightning zapping through my body.

Although it has yet to come up, a streak of murders have been occurring on this journey. In an attempt to avenge her ancestor Rasputin, the murderer ends up setting the castle on fire, shining a light of fury on the answers to the mysteries of the movie.

Released in 1999 at the very end of cel animation, Detective Conan Movie 3 may well be the last work of wizardry of the century. Digital can't hope to match the warm yet piercing glow of real light - it could be attempted, but never could it be as diegetic and naturally radiant as on cel. The cel era will shine on in all its glory as Memories.

Whether you've seen Conan before or not, the movies are accessible to all, whether you're familiar with the franchise or not. One character, who's backstory is introduced at the start, is a spoiler revealed episode 129, but I'm sure many reading aren't planning on watching Conan in its entirety.

2021/05/22 The Map is not the Territory

The Real encompasses all facets of the human experience - it's what appears to us in the world, what appears to us in our dreams, and what appears to us in the beauty of a painting. These aren't 'just' in your head; they exist in the world, and we have to improve to experience them. Understanding the divine good is a form of study: to know what a good book is you must read many books and pick out the best parts; to know a good anime, you must watch and judge many anime; and to know what a good person is like, you've gotta meet and share experiences with many people to understand who's traits are best. With these experiences of the world, we map out the territory of reality, discovering the geography of what exists. However the world is overflowing with goodness should we only choose to observe it. The way my bookshelf holds up my books so sturdily is something I'm forever indebted to it for. The rocks of the landscape too hold one another up without acknowledgement. My bed loyally supports me in comfort every night; my neck supported by my pillow which is squished without complaint. The Real exists in a kind of divine Goodness (with divine Truth and divine Beauty too, but a similar argument stands), which is the goodness inherent in the territory, since Reality is the territory. But to see the goodness and beauty in everything may well be beneficial for a monk (and perhaps to us all, to an extent), but not for everyday living. If you break down crying in every field of flowers at the sheer beauty, people will think either you're mad or have acute hayfever. We need to experience our map of the world in order to take for granted the bookshelves and beds, otherwise we would be exceptionally inefficient. That is why we experience the world as map not territory.

We can stare at our maps for too long, however, and only see the forest without noticing the trees. The map is of course useful - it will guide you through a rocky reality - but the map can distract you from the reality which is really out there. Reality that's out there is purely real, and can be diffracted into Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Much like light, reality shines upon darkness, fakeness, a property which is only an absence of perceived reality. Reality exists in it's entirety in all places at all times, but we just can't perceive it. Through honing ourselves by exploring reality, the terrain, not by making new maps, we get into closer contact with reality and better able to experience it.

In summary: reality is the single substance through who's absence fakeness can exist; the Good begets fate through right-fitting things occurring; reality's territory must be mapped to be tilled into something useful; the map can be a distraction and through it you can lose sight of the territory; and, most of all, the map is not the territory.

2021/05/22 The Gosho Waifu

Aoyama Gosho, best known as the writer for one of my favourite series, Detective Conan, is a man with a very particular waifu. Once you examine the waifus of his works, certain traits wrestle your attention which are both unique and fascinating since, after all, a lot can be told about a man after seeing his waifu. First, let’s see a selection of his waifus:

These four cover all of Gosho’s major works: the first two belong to Detective Conan (1995); the second to Magic Kaito (1987), Gosho’s first work; the last to Yaiba, another of Gosho’s major works, which has a 52 episode anime adaptation which I haven’t seen. Despite never having seen Yaiba, the plot synopsis sounds quite funny, especially when you find out they all take place in the same universe.

So what are their similarities? Let’s start with how they look. Hair in the front is generally messy, two characters - Aoko and Ran - opting for free-flowing hair, the other two, Sayaka and Kazuha, opting for high ponytails . From Sayaka’s design, you can kind of see how it diffracts into Ran and Kazuha, with the ponytail being donated to Kazuha and the horn being donated to Ran. The horn. Ran’s horn is truly a marvel of art. No other anime girl to my knowledge has such a magnificent horn.

Above we see the manga’s stub, evolving into a blunt, missile-shaped horn, evolving into the longer, sharp, piercing horn we see today, with the inevitable result on the far right.

Beyond physical comparisons, comparisons of character are where we see the similarities most clearly. All four of these characters have pretty much the same personality. For one, they’re all mild tsunderes, getting angry over menial things. It is worth noting, however, that they’re all more dere than tsun, owing to the fact that they’re all childhood friends with the protagonist. The pairings in every show have the same pattern of romance: tsundere osana najimi gradually opens up, even though they both clearly love each other already and all of their friends make fun of them since they’re ‘basically a couple’. The similarities grow when considering the two Detective Conan characters. Both Ran and Kazuha are: martial artists, Ran being the top highschool girl in karate, Kazuha being one of the best aikido practitioners; afraid of horror plots, like ghost stories and such; afraid of bugs and insects; strong spirited, willing to say what they think. Including Aoko as well, all three have policemen for fathers (albeit with very different fathers).

Granted, within Detective Conan many of the similarities were intentional, but looking more broadly, this is just what Aoyama-sensei likes. He loves tsundere childhood friends and I respect that. Beyond waifus, the protagonists are similar also: Edogawa Conan looks near identical to Yaiba; Kudo Shinichi looks the same as Kuroba Kaito with a similar personality to boot, albeit with a different moral compass. All four are smug yet just, romantically shy yet heroically brave - to Gosho, he is the coolest guy. Fun side fact: for a few years Gosho was married to the voice actor who voiced both Yaiba and Conan. The man clearly loves the characters he creates; his characters come from the heart, which is why he can’t help but tell similar stories with similar characters with similar looks. If you watch an episode of Detective Conan, or Magic Kaito, or even Yaiba and liked it, you will enjoy all the rest of it. His works are bathed in a sense of cool for the protagonists and cute for the waifus and I hope you give it a full watch to the end.

Congratulation Detective Conan for reaching 1000 episodes!

Originally written for the Uni of Nottingham Anime Society Zine.

2021/05/12 Aho Environmentalists

From what friends who've read Baka Environmentalists have said, the point I was trying to get across doesn't shine through - here's my second attempt.

Environmentalism as an ideology has adhered on to every gear of the university machine, and my subject of study, chemistry, is understandably no exception. Last year, for instance, we were taught topics like ozone depletion and the green house gas effect - topics which have been thrust upon us since the earliest years of secondary school. The scientific eschatology which forms the heart of the environmentalist project is drilled into us year by year, given that it's one of the lynch pins holding together the mythology of modern times. Certainly, Revelations was taught with as much vigour in Puritan schools of yonder year. Today I shan't disprove the scientific validity of environmentalism, since I'm sure much of the science is sound; what irks me instead, is the attitude environmentalists hold, and the nasty hubris which lies latent in its nucleus.

Nature is not beholden to man. Nature is all-powerful; it's a force far greater than our singular species which arose out of it. So large is nature, that outside of moon landings, mankind has never been outside of it; we've been forever a part of it, within mother natures clutches. We may make buildings which tickle the heavens, mines which tunnel into nature's belly, and flatten jungles into soy fields, but is nature itself affected? Has mother nature cried once because of the great assault on her divine body? The tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods blamed upon the ever-present devil climate change are not manifestations of sadness since we haven't treat mother nature kindly - they are vicious counter-attacks against man. In man's ever-growing dissociation from nature and retreat into society, mother nature hasn't become old and weary and nor is mankind grown up enough to take care if their mother. Mother nature is angry at the Babel man has erected in the name of science, and would like to tear it down. Mother nature is not to be protected; no, mother nature must be feared. Ancients prayed to goddesses of fertility, praying on the right hand out of love for the bountiful crops they can bring, and on the left hand out of fear that, should they not be loyal, their privilege be rescinded. Environmentalists only see this right hand, forgetting the immense pain and suffering nature causes man also, whether through floods, earthquakes, or droughts.

Mankind doesn't want to save the Earth; no, mankind wants to save themselves. And the quicker this fantasy of the environmentalist to their own intentions is shattered, the quicker something will be done about the issues the environmentalists preach. Many are turned off by moral do-goodery of 'saving the planet' - as if you, or any organisation of humans, were strong enough to actually save the planet notwithstanding the fact that it is the planet which has been attacking us, mankind, with abnormal weather conditions.

No, mankind is saving themselves, just as it always has. But this message doesn't resonate anymore - to act in your own interest would be seen as selfish. This misunderstanding of selfishness permeates all of our culture today, and can be seen most clearly in the ever-more common trend of indecisiveness. No one wants to suggest somewhere to go, what to do, or what to eat, out of a fear of imposing their own will on others - on the surface it's selfless, since you're letting the other decide, yet at its core it's selfish, since you're expecting the other party to make all the decisions for you. In a similar vein, the environmentalist doesn't want to exert power towards their own interest, namely the intention for man to fix the environment for the sake of mankind. Instead of imposing their own will on the environment, they'll spin a yarn of fiction, creating a myth of charity and benevolence, wherein they're acting out of purely selfless goals.

But whether aware of it or not, deep down, we all want power to make the world better for ourselves; some are just more honest about it than others. And many environmentalists are unaware of it, operating under the guise of 'saving the planet' to abate the deeply Protestant guilt present in their bosom. They can't fight for their kith and kin, since mankind is the problem, the contagion, causing the environmental dilemmas we experience. The arguments of environmentalists are deeply anti-natal, anti-human, and anti-intuitive since they aren't fighting for the sake of mankind, like every true hero would.

2021/05/06 Divine Euphony

To get in touch with reality is everyone's true aim. Whichever path you travel, no man wills to find what is fake; for what is real is what is, making us feel at one with the world, as if moving in tandem. Reality can be understood from three directions: Truth, who's shadow is lies; Beauty, who's shadow is ugliness; and Goodness, who's shadow is badness. Through these avenues reality can be found.

Truth is the reality of what's evident to the senses and to the mind; it's the bird, their song, whilst also being logic and formulae. Truth succeeds in teaching man facts, giving us tools to build and shape man and the Earth. Without Goodness, it's destination is the evil scientist; without beauty, it's destination is efficient concrete prisons.

Beauty is the reality beyond the mundane. When we are struck by beauty, we aren't seeing with our eyes, we're seeing with our hearts; we're seeing beyond the reality of things to a hidden reality inside the painting, between the lines, or deeper into the music. Without Truth, Beauty is the fantasist, whose head sits above the clouds unaware; without Goodness, Beauty can possess man with symbols and images, taking him down undesirable paths.

Goodness is the reality of purpose. To be a good chair is to be sturdy and comfortable, for a scientific model to be a good fit is for the model to well-explain what it describes, and to be a good person is too to act in concordance with man's purpose. Without Truth, Goodness is misled, blind to its purpose, judging fitness based on falsehood; without Beauty, even if the purpose should be accorded to, the person, chair, or model, shall be all but forgotten.

2021/04/17 The Ascendancy of Philosophy

In the realm of ideas, philosophy takes on an ascendant role; it's widely considered the best, or at least most formal, way to convey ideas, even though, as we will discuss, this hasn't always been the case. Despite the renaissance's revivification of the classics the humanism, how many renaissance philosophers can you name? Sure there were some, but the renaissance wasn't conveyed through the medium of philosophy - primarily, it was conveyed through art and sculpture. The medieval era's ideas are told through theology, through scripture, but the ideas and interpretations that arose between theologians could still possess a vast breadth of difference. And what about in more primitive societies? Undoubtedly there were thoughts and opinions on how the world works which have been lost with the death of their oral traditions. But their understanding was most likely explicated through myth - not philosophy.

Really, it was in the antiquity of Rome and Greece where we saw philosophy as we today understand it blossom, and again in the enlightenment era where philosophy took centre stage with numerous philosophers like Des Cartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, and Hegel. But the Victorian era? There's only really three philosophers that are famous: John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, and Nietzsche, who was never famous within his lifetime, nor within the Victorian era. Both are very influential, sure, but with so few names which have lasted, the Victorian era wasn't an era of philosophers. Famous Victorians who shaped their cultures include the politicians like Gladstone, painters like the Pre-Raphaelites, poets like the Romantics, authors like Dickens, and scientists like Darwin, all of whom posited revolutionary ideas not through philosophy, but rather through their respective fields.

The names of the first half of the 20th century are so multitudinous they needn't be named; the spirit and distress of the era blossomed revolutionary ideas shaping the world as we now see it. But what about today? Does anyone know any contemporary philosophers? These figures of the past were famous in their own time, so why wouldn't the philosophers of today? Again, philosophy has fallen out of ascendancy: the ideas in our culture are being conveyed through other means. Where? I'll leave that as an open questions. It may be through YouTube, through podcasts, through Netflix, through politics, or wherever else. But wherever the ideas of the present come from, it's important to stick our fingers to the air, to trace the direction of the winds blowing the Zeitgeist.

2021/03/28 Fictional Characters

All characters are fictional; well, at least in part. Fiction is what's left up to the imagination, what can't be seen with the eye, but rather can only be seen with the mind. Associations, patterns, understandings, whether from nature or nurture, are stored in the mind, waiting to be projected onto Detective Conan or your mum. Which is fictional and which is real? Well, they're both fictional, insofar as there are these webs of associations projected on to them; your understanding of your mother is not the same as someone else's, not only because you have more experience talking and living with her, but also because the idea of mother colours you perception in a specific way. My understanding of Conan as a character is far greater than someone who hasn't watched the show, but my understanding of him is also coloured by how I relate to him as a character. That very act of relating is the fiction, giving it the personal touch.

One of my favourite quotes is from Saint Exupery's The Little Prince, where the fox tells the little prince: "And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." What's most precious to us are these fictions, these stories, the bonds with many things, places, and people we make across our lives. The value of your favourite mug is invisible to the eyes, because only with the heart can it be seen. What you see in the mug is the fiction - the memories of drinking out of it, washing it, taking care not to break it, the story you've shared with your mug. We relate through our hearts, writing fictions, anchoring ourselves to the world around us.

For whatever reason fiction is a much maligned word. To say something is 'a fiction' or 'a myth' is to say it's false, baseless, and wrong. The attempt to gaze scientifically at a work of fiction by beating it with mechanical analysis to find what is 'real' and non-fictional is to misunderstand that everything is fictional and that however mentally hygienic you try to keep, washing your hands with peer-reviewed journals and repeated clinical trials, the fiction inherent in how man views the world can't be rooted out. What the scientific eye may see as weeds, the eye of the heart sees as flowers. Adopting a deeply skeptical scientific view of all things is akin to uprooting our mental flowerbeds and covering it with AstroTurf. Science has it's place, but it shouldn't be a driving force in how people should live their lives, nor how governments - essentially bigger people - run countries. Countries can only bloom when they are not run on nihilism, and are instead run on strong fictions. Fictions which bind people together bring the hearts of the citizens closer, because through a powerful fiction people can see their fellow man through the eyes of their hearts.

Fictions are deeply empirical, even if science tries to assiduously de-weed them. Science is a subset of empiricism wherein man attempts his best to pluck each and every fiction, leaving behind a distilled, reproducible (yet sterile) reality. But science is not our empirical reality at all; our empirical reality is lush with deeply spiritual and meaningful fictions. Indeed, science is a kind of idealism - most of theoretical physics is derived rationalistically through maths, only needing to be checked against empirical data afterwards. What does materialism even mean anyway? That which can be touched through the senses? Most of theoretical physics reads like Timaeus: it's a cosmology.

Anyways I completely lost track of what I was originally trying to say. Somehow I always end up writing about science, trying to tie back together my current views with being a science fanatic for most of my life. In summary, Metaphors are real lol.

2021/03/26 The Dying Goddess Ananke

Ananke, the goddess of necessity, is dying. The difficulties man once had to fight against, like surviving cold winters without much food nor fuel, are over. There is very little we have to do; and that which we have to do is pretty meaningless work, like filling spreadsheets, sending emails around, and such. With ever-greater automation with machines, we get ever closer to making ourselves seemingly unnecessary.

Somehow most socialists and anti-socialists alike now aim for the same future; a future where no work needs doing. Machines have reduced working hours by automating processes to ever greater extents - surely the end-point is full automation, where we sit back whilst machines dress us, make us lunch and wipe our bottoms?

The idea of a machine dressing you in the morning may sound absurd, but the only qualm is a moral one; British East India Company employees usually each had a local man-servant to do menial chores like dressing them, cooking, or cleaning. The only difference is the morality. Our society today is far more attuned to power. To have someone dress you in the morning seems to our eyes a gross abuse of power since there isn't that big a gap in wealth as there once was (sure in terms of actual money the gap is larger, but not in terms of having enough money to survive). We see ourselves as above the 'slavery' of having someone dress us - and quite rightly so. But machines are slaves; it's a large coincidence in the early 19th century that slavery was abolished right before the industrial revolution - our new slave labour workforce had arrived.

Once machinery dissolves all human responsibility, we can live suckling on the teat of luxury. There will be nothing we have to do - only activities we want to do. We'd spend time watching anime, chatting to friends, small projects, working on crafts - that kind of thing. Lockdown with a little more socialising. But even those smaller projects can be bested by a machine. The table you buy from a shop will be better than anything you, the amateur carpenter, can make. And likewise, one day the anime making machine will make better anime than any team of people. The neural network can give you inputs of any genres, any tropes - even do it in the style of your favourite character designer, studio, or director. Sure, there's the personal touch to making something from scratch, but it will be essentially LARPing. It'll be a want not a need. Once all human endeavours are bested by machines, all human activities will be a LARP for a lost past. A lost past where you had to do make a table, make an anime, or get dressed yourself. We'll become a society of effete dilettante noblemen with nothing better to do than to complain about the AI governing us or the machine controlling the weather.

That instinct inside of us that strives for comfort is the Devil in disguise; that instinct to snuggle back onto mum's lap will be the death of mankind. Comfort creates spongy sofa-people who are without rigidity nor self-discipline. But with Ananke lying wilting on her sickbed, the ever-youthful goddess Desire has no restraint bar the individual's spirit. However without Ananke forging the spirit strike by strike throughout your life, the spirit is weak and malleable, unable to tame the unwieldy wide-smiled goddess Desire.

There is no solution to this. Can't just run away to the mountains and live a life like Heidi - it would just be inauthentic living that kind of a lie. Similarly, if the AI government mandated certain targets to be met, in a kind of Psycho Pass/Chinese social credit system, to force you to exercise, eat healthily and grow as a person, it would be equally inauthentic. Why not then overturn the system and fix the machine so man can live in greater peace and comfort? As I said, there is just no solution. Ananke's ritual cycle of rebirth and decline, is the death and growth of civilisation respectively. In the present, we'll just have to keep our spirits strong to survive the temptation of Desire's warm amniotic tides.

2021/03/18 The Base of All Things

The question that's been on my mind as of recent has been "what's at the base of all things?" What's the bedrock? What's the origin, the wellspring of all things? In truth, it's not a questions which is solely on my mind, nor one which I've only been thinking about recently. The all-absorbing question of metaphysics can hypnotise you, tricking you into walking round and round in circles. Under its trace you may fall down a whole in search of the philosopher's stone, or slit your wrists with Occam's razor - it's a dangerous journey. But it's nevertheless fun to categorise these hero's follies: most of mine are written privately, but this latest thought I've decided to share.

So again, what's the bedrock? The scientists say science - the quark, the lepton, the wavefunction; the Platonist says the forms, which shine down to form reality; the Jungians say psyche marinated with a mixture of archetypes and the teleological pull of individuation. I could continue the list, with every philosopher and thinker under the sun, but I won't. There is a sense in most that there must be a singleness, a oneness, a root which is not like a tree root, but rather much more like a carrot: singular and delicious. For me, that new pull is simply experience - your sense of the world. On top of that experience, models of the world are plastered, like a scientific model, or a Jungian model, but at root we just experience the world - that is what is True. Truth exists and we can see it all the time - it doesn't exist in a world out of reach - insofar as spirituality too exists in the real world, not in a fantastical world beyond the clouds.

Science is useful and is true - but only sometimes. Quantum mechanics becomes true when dealing with quantum particles and quantum effects. When dealing with a bulk of materials, there's no need since in most cases a classical approach will work just as well. The surgeon doesn't have to think through the lens of chemistry, since it'll make them botch the surgery thinking of each individual reaction of the body as the scalpel cuts into the body. Similarly the bridge engineer needn't worry about quantum mechanics. However, the CPU designer and the quantum physicist should worry about quantum mechanics, since otherwise they'll fail to achieve their goals. Spiritual disciplines and modes of thought like religions aren't useful for dealing with chemical reaction; they have no information regarding these investigations. However should we be thinking about morality, spiritual disciplines have far more wisdom than science since that's the purpose of a spiritual discipline. What we're seeing is that each model has it's own territory where it is useful. Just like scientists who claim to be a moral expert because they're a neuroscientist, or a pastor who throws out the scientist because through his special knowledge he understands the nature of matter far better. Go back to your field, and get the carpenter to fix the fence. What we see today is the ever more powerful sheep of science breaking down every fence in sight, infiltrating every field of research, even if they aren't supposed to be there.

The principle can be taken further. The world is in fact in the centre of the solar system - no, the universe - and it certainly isn't spinning. Have you looked around you recently? It certainly doesn't feel like the world is spinning; my feet, at the very least, are firmly on the ground. The sun comes up every morning, and down every night. Sure, for calculating satellites, a deeper understanding in astronomy is needed, but for everyday life, as Sherlock Holmes quips: "What the deuce is it to me? You say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.”

We are constantly being gaslit by the culture. We see, we perceive certain occurrences, certain patterns, but we are told not to believe ourselves. I see a desk, and the scientist says no, that isn't a desk, it's many braided cellulose polymers, which are atoms, which are electrons and quarks in quantum fluctuations. "Oh", I reply, proven wrong, not trusting my senses. Galileo's discovery has imprisoned us. No longer can we trust our senses, since an expert who's studied the planets' movement at length will say, "Wait a moment, you're wrong." We must realise that our own senses are what's real and that these complex models are for specific circumstances. Freud and Jung are designed for therapy, not for a deep understanding of every aspect of the universe. When niche ideas dethrone common sense, seeping in to every crevice of your cognition, you become a madman.

Truth is not something small and ever-distant; it is enormous and right in front of our noses. When we retreat into these ever-more complex models which claim to explain all things, we miss the trees for the forest. We run through the forest looking for a diamond amongst the dead autumnal leaves, not realising the Truth is in the trees. Chasing the sparkle we forget the mundane; looking for the transparent, when there is nothing more opaque than the Truth.

In summary, we are surrounded by Truth without acknowledging it. Once we trust our own senses of the world and trust in ourselves, Truth will be waiting for us.

2021/03/04 Science is Religion

Calling science a religion has become banal, in truth. You tell someone "science is like a religion" and they nod as if you've spoken a truism or pleasantry. But today I'd like to introduce a more nuanced understanding of this truism, re-imagining what a religion is.

Religion is a worldview: it's the model by which the seeming chaos of the world can be understood. Think of it like an operating system - we can only access the genius of the machine through its operating system, since it converts the biology of my computer (the hardware) into something a human can understand and navigate. But what we're taught in school which shapes our operating system to be understandable and 'in tune' with the rest of society stretches beyond the realm of science.

I've heard many argue that we should learn more down to earth practical skills in school, but this, I believe, is a misunderstanding of the purpose of school. Schooling is the institution which passes down our civilisation's mythic corpus to the next generation. First, there are the languages school teaches us: English, perhaps another foreign language, and maths. Maths is a crucial language we learn in school, helping us understand sciences and the statistics which root a variety of subjects. Primary school focuses on teaching literacy and maths since they are the trunk from which greater truths, greater myths, can branch off from. Once the basics of our two languages are understood, we can move on to bigger fish. Take science and humanities, for example - these form the mythos explaining of 1. the world's nature, and 2. the narrative of our culture. And we mustn't forget the arts: the study of basic literacy metamorphosises into garnering an appreciation of the arts through poetry and novels; learning to draw and paint is to engage with the skills to produce art; and learning to appreciate and play music also puts us in touch with our culture.

Our mythic corpus is truly massive. Even after fifteen years, through primary school, through secondary school, we only learn the essentials. Many go on to university to study for another three to four years as a theologian in their chosen myth. Even upon completion of this further training, you aren't an expert yet. The great theologians further specialise, often dedicating their lives to ever more niche mythic ideas. We've created through the written word a mythic corpus like the world has never seen.

So what's the point of this? Aren't I just explaining everything with the word myth? Correct, but my point is that we are no different. We are no different from civilisations passed who, just like us, made mythic corpuses of their own to explain the world and the soul. We are just like them, creating myths and legends, writing histories, researching sciences. Were those who invented fire scientists? or to be a scientist do you need the scientific method? Most great scientific breakthroughs, like Teflon and Viagra, were discovered by accident. Other than the suit, how different are they from the man who made the first wheel? There's a trajectory from their time to ours. The techniques have always been there, we've just been refining them, improving the efficacy of discovery. We are the same as our hunter-gatherer brothers.

So yes, science is a religion. But there's far more that fits under the umbrella of religion. The humanities are religion - along with any other academic pursuit. The arts are religion too. Aren't music festivals and nightclubs where densely packed inebriated youths chant popular prayer the closest thing the young have to religious experience?

The difference is that our religion is one of internal dissonance. Most disagree on fundamental theological understandings, splitting into camps arguing over whose theological interpretation of the scientific literature, contemporary history, art, etc, is correct. Yet most things move along swimmingly. Our religion of dissonance will stay afloat, so long as the waves of popular opinion, of belief in what binds us, don't get too choppy and capsize our culture.

2021/02/22 The Parallels of Chess and War Strategy

Both chess and war are played out today like they were in years past. Yet as we'll uncover, their histories have understandably strong parallels - chess is after all a game of war. And despite the game of chess' restricted move set unlike the game of war's unlimited possibilities, both over time have been pushed to their technological extreme. From romantic noble beginnings, both chess and war began, with our story starting in the mid-19th century, ending in the domination of machines over man today.

The Romantic Era

The first chess era of note is the romantic era, which is how chess was played since records began, up until the late 19th century. The romantic era was punctuated by daring play, gambitting pieces for brilliant attacks to win "the beautiful game". Chess wasn't so much about victory, but rather about victory with style, and often style made a big difference; when choosing between the better position by ignoring a gambitted piece and taking the gambit to your loss, the romantic player would take the gambit - it'd be dishonourable not to. Take a look at this 1858 game played by Paul Morphy and Adolf Anderssen - two of the heavy hitters of their day - to get a taste for what romantic games could be like at its sharpest.

In warfare also, there was a certain honour involved. Soldiers didn't where camouflage, hiding in the terrain so they could not be seen - a soldier war bright red like the British, or deep blue like the Prussians - piercing colours which could be spotted from a distance. These outfits surely would've made the you an easy target for fire; a Prussian soldier could've easily spotted a British redcoat with a bearskin hat amongst the verdant hills. But however important success in war was, a war without prestige and honour was no victory at all. The early chess player also saw the virtue of honour as being the point rather than the lower glee of victory.

The Era of Positional Play

A little known player named Wilhelm Steinitz changed the chess scene in the 1880s with a new positional style of play. Instead of daring gambits and ferocious attacks, Steinitz opted for tinkering his pieces around the board slowly, maneuvering pieces to their best locations, slowly grinding down the opponent until his position was lost. Commentators at the time labeled Steinitz "a coward" for not partaking in the lavish daring attacks of the romantics, but it's important to note this more positional style of play was not toothless - if the opponent showed any sign of weakness, Steinitz's well positioned pieces could leap into action, penetrating the chink in the opponent's armour. The king of this era of play was the Cuban-born genius Capablanca who from an exceptionally young age mastered positional play, becoming a king of chess for much of his life. Comparing opening strategies between Morphy and Capablanca we see a great shift, from Morphy's risky King's gambits and Evan's gambits to Capablanca's calm and collected Ruy Lopez and Queen's gambits. In Capablanca's day, I'm certain the King's gambit was never seen in top level play - it was too easily crushed by smart methodical positional play. For a game by Capablanca, check out this game and watch as his king dances across the board as if he were in peril from a devastating attack, only for Capablanca to launch a calm counterattack on the flank and, through his well positioned pieces, take the win. Is this kind of positional play dishonorable? Is it placing victory over elegance? This positional play, calmly dancing your pieces around the board, has a kind of cleanliness to it, much in the same way that Bauhaus architecture has a certain simplicity without the flair of the neo-Gothic architecture which preceded it. Positional chess possessed a swift elegance, but it's hard to comment whether it had retained the soulfulness of the romantic era

In the 2nd Boer war, khakis were a necessary. The South African veld had no place for red-coated Poms who could be easily picked off by Boer bullets; the coats had to go, and dust coloured fabric was in. Practicality and efficiency was paramount, and in modernist warfare they were prioritised. Boer gold is what the British wanted far more above prestige. If prestige were what the British were after, they wouldn't have sent the poorest of the poor off to war, many of whom were not physically fit enough, into battle. Sure, there was prestige in empire building, but was there in war, in primitive slaughtering, like Lord Kitchener did to the Whirling Dervishes? Kitchener's massacre of the Dervishes is a good example of the modernisation and mechanicalisation of warfare. As his troops marched down from Egypt in the Sudan, they laid track as they went, which acted as both supply lines for goods and guns. Railroading giant Maxim guns to battle, Lord Kitchener's army gunned down the Dervishes, armed only with sticks. Weapons like the Maxim gun and modern artillery gave European powers incredible firepower, but were quite unwieldy and difficult to move around. No wonder then that at first it was only used to conquest Africa; should both sides possess Maxim guns, chaos would ensue. Without easy maneuvering, position became everything in battle. If you managed to lug your artillery to the top of a hill, you had free reign to rain fire down on those who weren't as fortunate to share your position. Just like in chess, having pieces in good positions - the mere threat of their attacks - is usually enough to win you the game. However, once European powers decided not to attack weak African tribesmen and instead go for each other in WW1, they quickly found the best position was in the ground.

Hypermodernism

Aron Nimzowitsch was the next great innovator in chess, with the 'Hypermodern' movement which he laid out in his book My System in the 1920s. Traditional chess opening play revolved around occupying the centre - attacking and sitting your pieces in central squares in order to have more space on the board under your control. Hypermodern openings, on the other hand, involved waiting at the start, positioning your pieces neatly, letting your opponent occupy the centre as much as they want, and then you apply pressure from your cramped position on the opponents over-extended centre until it crumbles. A key notion in Nimzowitsch's system is "Zugzwang" - a position where your opponent is forced to weaken their position because they have no choice but to move. Think of it as the logical apotheosis of positional play, where your pieces are in such a good position that anything your opponent does will lose the game for him. As an example, here's Nimzo's "Immortal Zugzwang" game, where you can see both a hypermodern opening approach at the start, and fully Zugzwanged position at the end. You can start to see why the term "hypermodern" was used; hypermodern strategies take the elegance of modernist positional play to its extreme, playing purely positionally without any central conflict to speak of. Is this kind of chess not the height of cowardice? This Fabian strategy of the chessboard however worked; new innovations were quickly changing the chess world for good.

Just before the hypermodern revolution in chess, was the dawn of WW1. WW1 truly changed warfare forever, one of the most notable changes being trench warfare. Instead of soldiers marching into battle, both sides hid entrenched waiting for the enemy to go over the top into No Man's Land. The soldiers in the trenches, through their cramped position, developed all kinds of diseases like trench foot, where their feet began to decay from the moistness of already being six foot under. Trench warfare was also exceptionally slow, taking many months to make any real progress. Neither side wanted to go over the top, since it was never advantageous to do so. Both sides had powerful artillery to gun down foes without the mobility to get to their foes, resulting in a stalemate of the battle ground. Trench warfare was very much the hypermodern strategy of war: you entrench your position, playing a defensive war of attrition, waiting for your opponent to make a mistake, all the while making your position exceptionally cramped, unable to play freely. There is a risk, after all, in playing a hypermodern opening: you can cramp yourself so much that your pieces get trench foot and are steamrolled by your foe's attack. Either way, WW1 was the true Immortal Zugzwang, with neither side wanting to make a move and go over the top.

The Soviet Block

Once hypermodern strategies were no longer novel, they became formalised, and reams of opening theory was written. The strategy was always a risky one: you can blow away someone using a hypermodern strategy in an instant if they show weakness in their position since they've yielded so much ground, whilst the player occupying the centre has to worry about counterattacks also, making these positions unexpectedly sharp. Theory was beginning to became more and more necessary for exceptionally sharp lines of openings, like say the Sicilian Defence, which needed to be memorised 30 moves deep, in some cases. Chess theory was expanding - small variations in known lines were being tested and introduced, but most of the revolutionary ideas of chess had now been established. A game with a limited rule set has only so many ways it can be played. However the Soviet dominated era of chess, beginning in 1927, ending in 2006, certainly saw a variety of styles. Alekhine, the first of these powerful Soviets, was a more positional strategic player (his famous 'Alekhine's Gun' match); Botvinnik was along similar lines, playing positional chess; Petrosian was known for his iron-walled defence and positional understanding; so too was Karpov. In short, the Soviet school of chess had a deep positional understanding of the game... But despite being renowned for their deep positional understanding, the Soviet school was also dynamic. Long past was the generation where powerful positional play without tension and aggression could bring victory - matches were both sides played for small edges in balanced positions now always ended up as draws, since the level of play had risen over time. Hypermodern openings, which had now been integrated into the opening corpus, were also hyper-aggressive it had turned out, since there were lines being established which lead to very sharp games, like the Grunfeld, the King's Indian, or the Alekhine's Defence. Dynamism and complex positions became essential to edge the win, since the Soviet's were so talented at positional play. But amongst the methodical history of the Soviets, one man stands out: the magician from Riga, Mikhail Tal.

Tal has always stood out amongst other chess players. His aggressive tactical play can bring the best to their knees. See this game where Tal sacrifices his queen for equal material, giving his opponent connected passed pawns, just so he gets some dynamism in the position, leading to a winning attack. Despite having a great understanding of positional play like many of his contemporaries, Tal stands out in chess history as the only player to really bring back the 'magic' of the romantic age of grand sacrifices whilst still managing to become world champion.

In the cold war era, fighting between the two major powers usually went on through proxy wars - the US and USSR supply money and guns to guerilla's, attempting revolution in each other's sphere of influence. Yet with the notable exception of Bobby Fisher, no American could trump the prolonged Soviet triumph in chess. Chess was a great source of national pride for the Soviets - they poured money into the game, picking out kids from a young age to train them into chess superstars. Much like the space race, the Soviets saw chess as one of these proxy wars, albeit through a culture victory instead of a domination victory.

The Computer Age

Kasparov was the king of chess over the 80s and 90s. A natural genius for the game who fought with an often dynamic and ferocious style, specialising in the Najdorf Sicilian and the King's Indian, two very fierce openings. Few could touch him - in the end he lost his title in part by getting angry at FIDE, the organisation who hosted chess world championships, creating a parallel organisation, but eventually losing to Vladimir Kramnik who brought out an insane amount of preparation for the insanely boring and positional Berlin Defence. However, there was another challenger who defeated Garry Kasparov: Deep Blue. Deep Blue was a supercomputer made by IBM specially designed to play chess by predicting and calculating thousands of positions many moves ahead, and in a rematch in 1996, Kasparov lost. The era of man was over; the millennium of the computer had begun. Today, the free chess engine Stockfish, can run on any old computer, even your phone, and play better than Deep Blue or any other Grandmaster today.

The influence of computers in warfare cannot be understated. Computers won us WW2 with Alan Turing's work on the Bombe in Bletchley Park, decrypting the Nazi code; the first programmable computer, ENIAC, was used to calculate ballistic trajectories; the internet, or Arpanet as it was then known, was first invented by the US Department of Defense to send military data across the country which couldn't be sent by phone or radio. War is often the nebula of invention, so it's no wonder that the military create and use bleeding edge computer technology. Today, tactical drone strikes, piloted from afar, are a popular choice to suppress Afghani villages - a completely technological solution which doesn't require boots on the ground. And in parallel to how chess engines are used to prepare lines, military simulations are a good way to figure out battle strategies without the risk of loss of personnel.

The Future

What does the future hold for us then? 2018 saw the rise of AlphaZero - Google's DeepMind division's neural network software which can learn board games without knowing the rules, and then with a handful of examples become really good at them. AlphaZero blew Stockfish out the water in competitive play without an opening repertoire or endgame handbook like Stockfish which Stockfish refers to in highly abstract or formulaic positions. In technology for chess as on the battlefield, AI is certainly the future; there's only so much an algorithm can do. An algorithm cannot learn on its own, only regurgitate methods a person has taught it. AlphaZero can learn from it's mistakes, teaching itself algorithms more powerful and optimised than a any player could possess. The uses of AI for warfare are also endless; check out DARPA's massive investment in AI industries, attempting to make AI practical and workable for the military. We're not too far off, after all, arming the AIs and making them fight on our behalf in a droid war. But according to the article linked, DARPA are much more interested on augmenting human capacity with the powers of AI rather than replacing man with machine. Chess is much the same. No one wants to see a game of football played by robots - it's the strife, overcoming, and brilliance of man, of the body, of the mind, which excites us. Chess engines exist to reference lines against, to see how good a position is, and aid the player in studying chess and preparing for a match. And I hope in both fields, of chess and war, that the human-centred trend continues.

As a prologue, even if you haven't really been interested in chess before, or know the rules, played a few times, but never got into it, I hope I managed to get across the stylistic and artistic side of the sport. Chess is commonly seen as a sterile mental activity when in reality it's imaginative and creative in the same way painting or poetry is. Fads and styles change across the eras, often paralleling artistic movements of the time. Each player as well has there own style of play, in the same way each artist has a style, or each director has a feel to their shows, and like with directors, you can learn a lot about the man from their works. Kasparov's aggressive play is very much seen in his aggressive personality - he was known for staring down his opponents over the board, scaring them shitless. Now, he writes books in Croatia about Russian corruption living in fear of the Russian secret police. The natural, Capablanca, who was a master of chess from such a young age, spent his time lazily playing tennis in Cuba instead of practicing for matches which he'd inevitably win. The man who beat him, Alekhine, was an obsessive tight-laced man who calculated long complex tactical lines. Watching Kramnik in interviews, he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of someone who plays the Berlin Defence (outside of the icy relations with Topalov surrounding Toiletgate). All in all the world of chess is plenty fun so give it a go.

2021/02/10 Baka Environmentalists

I accidentally took another environmentalist propaganda module at uni. This is pretty frustrating, because each and every year, this has happened; they don't offer much choice, it's as if you're bottlenecked into picking one. But alas, here I am again, learning about scientific eschatology and how the Earth is dying-

But it isn't. Nature and the Earth aren't going anywhere. Sure, species are becoming extinct, but does anyone in their right mind think that life itself is going anywhere? It's survived so many extinction events before - what'll make this one any different?

What makes it different is that we are in trouble this time. Instead of trilobites in Permian rock samples, this time it's man in the here and now which faces trouble. What frustrates me so much about environmentalists, is this patronising attitude towards nature, as if we're divinely appointed gardeners to make nature just how it should be, when in reality the only reason we care about nature is: firstly, for ourselves; and secondly, out of a kind of mothering pity. The former we see from the greenhouse gas lobby, insisting that the Earth is soon to become inhospitable, arid, and all the major cities will have sunk. Oh no, poor nature? No. Man has the problem here - nature is absolutely fine and will go about its day as normal. During the carboniferous period, the world was much hotter - the world was a dense jungle of huge plants and foot long dragonflies. Life can adapt at a rapid rate - it's man that'll be struggling. The latter is most commonly seen with animal conservation. Oh no, the pandas who refuse to fuck, or the koalas who refuse to eat any other kind of leaf are going extinct. Sure, they're cool - I want to see a cool koala, or a fat panda - but the argument most commonly raised is, "we have a responsibility to protect them." Do we? Sure we've removed their habitats, ruining their lives, but is it our responsibility to protect them in the same way colonial powers did to African tribes?

The part which ticked me off most about the first lecture of the module, was the intro. They showed us this image:

And said, "When we first saw this picture, man realised that the Earth was small and something to protect." What? The Earth clearly is not small - it's massive. The rest of space is irrelevant since we can't go there - for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. All that exists, all that we have, is the Earth - how can it be small? And the Earth is surely not something that needs us protecting it. The Earth is a stable system which since the dawn of time hasn't needed divine gardeners to cultivate nature based on man's notions of equality for endangered animals or of beauty when picking which plants should propagate. The Earth as a dynamic system is forever changing and now is no different. It isn't man vs. nature, it's man as a small part of nature. Sure we're raping and pillaging our rival plants and animals, thieving minerals which were once communal, but man will pay his price for cheating at the game. The king of kings can't reign forever; man will one day not be the Earth's colonial power with dominion over all of nature.

To reiterate, I'm not saying that the science is wrong, or that we shouldn't produce less waste. The environmentalists have got their data. What I am saying is that their philosophy is unsound - their cries to protect the Earth is selfishness veiled in selflessness, as so much today is. The Earth can only be saved once we realise that we aren't trying to save nature, but rather we're trying to save ourselves from nature.

2021/02/09 What is Spirituality?

I don't know. It's one of those words thrown about all too often without a thought for what it means. Most people use the term to mean "finding something deeper" in their life, finding something more beneath the surface. Often the word is used for any kind of practice like meditation or yoga which quietens your mind, bringing you into a closer relationship with the world. Others use spirituality to mean reading loads of books, books about myths, traditions, theology, and philosophy.

The common thread stitching these themes together is finding the unknown: finding something more too life beyond the mundane. The word mundane originally meant "of this Earth" as opposed to the supramundane - more commonly now called the supernatural - which was beyond the Earth, beyond the everyday mundane life.

But isn't there magic in the mundane? Looking upon the world, there's great beauty and meaning to be found in the every day: the birth and death of days; of months; of years; the ticking of the clock as time marches on. Once the world was divine - now it is merely a divine creation, where heaven has divorced Earth, leaving not even the shadows of the divine left on Earth.

But there is divinity here. The spiritual is bountiful in the everyday, should you be so inclined to look for it. Many, however, are blind to the spiritual, either seeing it as so powerful and distant it can't be grasped, or denying it outright.

To deny a world beyond our own isn't to see the world as a cold, heartless clock tower. Spirituality shouldn't point to some greater world soul beyond us, or a infinitely deep psyche within us, creating caverns for us to flee into from reality. Instead, we should come in to contact with the world and figure out how it works. Science is one model amongst many; it's good for figuring out how to make plastics or whether a bridge will fall down, but completely useless to figure out what is moral, or what makes us happy. For those questions, turn to theology, philosophy, or better still, your own experience. Instead of the mechanical tick of the clock tower, the world has warmth and a heartbeat. It doesn't require the supernatural to notice that the world is full of life, instead of genes trying to reproduce themselves.

The notion of spirituality I'm trying to form is thus: getting to know the world. It's coming into contact with the world, drawing a map of impressions and ideas so that everything life throws at you is as expected. Once you have the ultimate map, there is no threat of the unknown. And by mapping the world through honing your worldview, opinions, thoughts - seeing the world clear-sightedly - you will always feel in control of the situation: all according to keikaku. Science has bred a sense of disconnectedness from the world not because the world is more spiritual and metaphysically perplexing than first imagined - but rather because its arcane scriptures are more esoteric than any alchemical manuscript about. It takes years of study throughout school to get a feel for it, only to be told everything you learnt was wrong and that it's actually far more confusing and unintuitive than you throught. Saying the Earth revolves around the sun and that the Earth is spinning at however many kilometres per hour does not put us into contact with the world: it certainly doesn't feel like the Earth is spinning that fast, so why would it be? Instead we just become confused, subverting what our intuitions think to be true, cutting the cord between us and reality.

Every map-maker must go out sailing across the oceans or walking through the desert to make a map, and making a map of what's real is no different. Spirituality shouldn't be found within the cloister alone, but rather found in the world by living and participating with people and the world around you. Practicing a skill, a craft, honing your knowledge - all of these put you into contact with reality instead of divorcing you further from it. The knowledge of books have their place too, but it's all mere fluff without real world experience to judge if they're talking twaddle. Socrates was a hoplite, for goodness sake - these great philosophers of old had experience of the world to back up what they said. Knowledge without experience - now that is truly maddening.

"Beware of unearned knowledge." - Jung

2021/02/02 Latin

Many of the best cultures in the world are lead by an other tribe. Britain, first run by French Normans speaking French instead of our native tongue for generations, and then in later British history was run by the Georgians who also didn't know English, has never been ruled by the British. Is this odd - this kind of break-away civilisation of a culturally dissimilar upper crust? Throughout Europe, we see this two-tiered system through language: a native populous who speaks the native tongue, and a ruling class who speaks Latin. Being taught Latin was reserved for the elite, since only those who could afford a proper education were taught it. Latin was the ultimate elitist gate-keeping against the plebeians, preventing them from understanding higher works, like the word of god, scientific tracts, or philosophical writings. But why Latin?

The Romans were much the same, although Latin was their vulgar language, preferring instead to teach their young in Ancient Greek, sending them off to Athenian universities to mimic the great play-writes and philosophers. Many Romans learnt Greek verse since they saw the language as more refined than their own Latin. But just as the Romans idolised the Greek culture of old (we forget that the Greek golden age was nearly six centuries ago for many Roman writers), we revere the Romans and the language they spoke, the language which nearly brought the Romans to control all of Europe: Latin.

Latin lives on in our language today, but unless you know a little Latin, you won't realise how many words we've pilfered. We've alloyed the gold of Latin with our own iron-like Germanic language to form what is now modern English, not differentiating the too languages for different purposes as has been done in the past. In many ways this was the work of the enlightenment. The last great Latin work of philosophy were written by Spinoza, Newton wrote his Principia in Latin also, but by the end of the seventeenth century, it was becoming less and less common to write these great works in Latin. Lest we forget a certain Martin Luther who started a jolly good number of wars, translating the Bible into German. Through works like those of Luther, feudalism was ending - no longer was there as strict a system of castes between the Latin elite and the Germanic subjects. And, insofar as there was social mobility in the culture, rupturing the membrane of class which before kept everyone in their place, so too was their mobility in the language, blending Latin and Old English together.

However, power never disappears - it just becomes less visible. Latin being blended into our language doesn't mean the elites aren't exerting power with Latin, it just means we're being controlled without our knowledge. The prompt which spurred me to write this article was reading many dry academic journals to find sources for a piece of coursework. And why are they so dry? They're all in Latin with English grammar. The whole 'academic speak' of sounding aloof and educated revolves around the use of Latin terms which are too devoid of impact and feeling to engage the Germanic mind.

There is a certain sterility of Latin words - they don't contain the same bite as a word like 'bite'. The word 'bite' really makes you feel the kinetics in a way that the word 'kinetics' doesn't. What's more, Latin words (as we know them today) are strictly regimented in an army of conjugations, declensions, etc. In summary, Latin is the language of emotionless order - the perfect vehicle of control, whether it be for science or organised religion.

What's the value of recognising Latin in everyday speech then? Noticing Latin is to see your opponent's sword - where the sword of Latin's power is wielded, you can be sure that a sense of greater authority is being called upon. This could be the authority of a scientist, a theorist, religious authority - any kind of authority makes their words known through Latin, the language of heaven, instead of Old English, the language of the Earth.

But it's valuable to see Latin in your own speech. Language constricts us by giving certain patterns of thought, not letting us think in novel ways since their gravitational pull leads us down the same old alleyways every time, but it also broadens our horizons, providing us with more avenues of thought we may not have considered in the past. Long Latin compound words have the power to deceive you - they bare the staff and sceptre of power and demand you obey their ideas. These words have an enigmatic mystique due to their lack of emotion whilst carrying the regalia of the elite and their power. My boy, Carl Jung, is no exception here - he uses tons of Latin phrases like 'anima' or the unwieldy 'enantiodromia' which could've just as easily been 'soul' or 'compensate'/'rebound'. But nothing that is pure pure Latin will stick - Jungianism is too Latin, isolating it to an aloof class of adherents with their heads in the clouds. But to make an idea spread further, it must shed the vocabulary of ideology, and be understandable to the general public through normal English - specifically Germanic English, which is the language people relate to on a deeper level.

Latin in English shouldn't be banished, instead it should become a tool in your arsenal. Latin has and always will be present in its unusual marriage with Old English birthing the English of today, delivering different, more cold angles of understanding to English. However our language has a father complex when it comes to Latin. It's a difficult relationship - English was never confirmed by its father. As a result, any authority figure baring the trappings of Latin appears to us a Caesar - as an authority with the power to take over the world. And unless we can sort out this complex, the power of Latin will forever control us.

2021/01/20 The Nation State's diseases

Diseases of the mind aren't unique to people. Indeed, entire countries can suffer from the same ailments, depressions, anxieties, phobias and complexes that are usually diagnosed in a mentally ill individual. Take post-WW1 Germany for example: Germany as a nation, as a collective people, were struck with the rough end of an inferiority complex - a complex which had bubbled under the surface since Bismark unified the country, leading them to pursue vicious colonialism in an attempt to catch up with their neighbours, after having shamefully losing in WW1 which was exceedingly painful for them. Who is this collective consciousness of the nation then? Why, that would be the king.

As shown on the cover of Hobbes' Leviathan (above), the king is the more than a figurehead - he is the head, the cumulation of a nation: the people embodied in one man. The monarch operates on a level above ordinary men since the king is in contact with God - he is the intermediary between god and man, directing and coordinating the people to fulfill God's will. The king is also connected with the land, as the deliverer of crop health and the people's health; take for example the Mandate of Heaven from dynastic China which states the king must be deposed when China is devastated by natural calamity, or in an example closer to home, we have the Peasant's Revolt, which was set in motion by the Black Death. The sickness of the land and of the people is the fault of the king - fundamentally it is the sickness of the king. This is no scapegoating, it's pure understanding of what a king is. King's have existed since records began: they're a fundamental aspect of the universe.

The examples above are examples of physical illnesses of nations, like famine and pestilence, but the same can be said of illnesses of the mind. Oppressed people who are trapped by inferiority complexes of some kind grapple outwards for guides, for gurus, for senseis, for some kind of fatherly hand to tell them the right way to go. The aforementioned post-WW1 Germany is a good example for this: upon the dethroning of their king, the fatherland was without its father, lost adrift looking for a new father. At first, the national psyche turned to rebelliousness with the swinging Weimar republic where there was a certain naughtiness in breaking every taboo that the strict father of the nation had once imposed. Germany had gone to University and left home, experimenting with all their repressed fantasies. However the novelty of rebelling soon wears away and a post-modern meaninglessness sweeps in, demanding a father to once again lead. And in rides the false messiah, the new father, Hitler.

Given then that a nation can develop an illness of the mind, how do these illnesses form? What kind of complexes can a nation develop? Phobias are the simplest form of complex - it's just "ahhh scary thing" - and we see them in culture all the time. Innumerable topics cannot be spoken of, many a thing cannot be done, even though it isn't too out of the ordinary, like eating pork for a Jew, eating beef for a Hindu, or eating dog for a Westerner. Certain ideas like eugenics or words like the n-word, create this phobic response in people, which they derive from the phobic response possessed by the culture-at-large. Many complexes like these originate in a nation's childhood, like with the Nazis for eugenics or slavery for the n-word, however in the nation's psyche they live on as complexes. It's worth noting that not all complexes are bad - they're a form of adaption to the world. We're better off not having eugenics or racism, and the Nazis and slavery taught us those valuable lessons, however, even though these valuable lessons help us adapt, irrational behaviours which can at times be pathological can arise out of those very national complexes.

A major way for complexes to form is repression of an instinct. In each and every one of us, and particularly in men, there is an instinct to fight - a bit of rough and tumble to settle a dispute or even a score. Through ever stricter moralities, this instinct to fight is repressed on a personal level, with kids being heavily chastised by their teachers for fighting, playing war games, or even pretending to fire guns. There is an anger, a yearning for fighting, which can't just be dampened down - this instinct wants to actualise itself, and repressing it will only make youngsters feel unhappy. This principle operates on the level of nations also, with countries who would regularly settle disputes with a little rough and tumble being told by intergovernmental mothers like the UN, EU, NATO or any other acronym that war is wrong, and you're wrong for wanting to settle the situation with fighting. But the instinctual pressure bubbles beneath the surface, fueling discontent between countries who are in clear conflicts but will never be able to resolve their differences with a bit of pugilism in fear of the deployment of their nuclear arsenals. China's growing up, vying to usurp the US' global domination, yet due to their world-destroying weaponry, they can only fight cold wars, leaving all parties with anxiety disorders from repressing their instinct to fight.

In summary then, nations have a mind of their own, as understood as the king, the people, the royal 'we', who have complexes manifesting as national depressions, anxieties and phobias. The method by which nations contract these diseases, however, is just like how an individual would - repression of instincts, childhood traumas, etc - ultimately leading to a loss of soul, the estrangement from the nation's soul and thus its creative energy. To end on a positive note, however, national complexes are certainly not confined to pathology - national identity is very much built upon complexes regarding preferences of foods, cultural traditions, and general national personality. The difficult task, therefore, is to differentiate between what is pathological and what is natural - what is the sickness of the monarch and what is the monarch's personality. To throw out national identity with our national illnesses will only leave us lost.

2021/01/02 The Myth of Average Joe

Imitatio Joei is the mantra of today. Unlike the imitatio Christi of the Catholic church, the modern dictum is to do as others do - fit in to the herd, and become apart of the super-consciousness of mass man. Be average and don't stand out. Instead, don't follow the interests mass man has thrust upon you, but rather find what you truly enjoy. Given the average Joe of the Victorian era has different tastes to the average Joe of today, the average Joe does not have tastes of his own - merely what society has prescribed for him. Taking painkillers delivered to his door by the mass man.

Because, you know, it's hard to be yourself. Wrapped in the maelstrom of mass culture, we lie dazed and confused by the never-ending phantasmagoria of praeternatural glows. Like the cartoon cat who runs off a cliff and stays shocked in place for a just a moment, you realise that the ground which once held you up is no longer there and now the onus has come upon you to build your island anew.

Man can be quartered into four parts: the top quarter, the head, which is our collective nurture; the second quarter, the heart, our personal nurture; the third quarter, the gut, our personal nature; and finally the forth quarter, the gonads, our collective nature. However these quartiles are not cauterised off from one another - instead, they are in a kind of dynamic equilibrium, streaming information to and fro. From the gonads comes our collective nature - that kind of instinctual drive to seek, mate, play, eat - our most basal nature. But so too in this basement of the soul resides our religious instincts to seek and look up to higher powers, alongside our instincts for selflessness, love, and sacrifice, so it is not all doom and gloom in our lowest levels. The gut represents the personal nature, all of your quirks and peculiarities which makes you you. Just like how the repression of an instinct can lead to a neurosis, so too can a repression of your quirks. When you're not being yourself, your spirit loses sight of your soul, and you act 'out of character', which never feels good. Then there's the heart - your personal nurture. Your personal nurture comes from those around you - your kith and kin who help mold your nature into a moral person. Finally, there's the head, the collective nurture, which provides guidance to the personal nurture as to how to be a moral person.

But just as we've become too cerebral and intellectual in how we view the world, so too are we too head-dominated when it comes to yielding to collective nurture, to mass culture. But don't get me wrong - collective nurture holds a real purpose in giving common ground between strangers, giving them a common morality over which to bond. However, the head of society has failed us. Like a schizoid, society has fragmented into smaller and smaller personalities, smaller and more specific moralities which often fail to look each other in the eyes as complementary rivals and instead see each other as pathogens. Why is this? Because they believe in the myth of the average Joe, the myth that everyone should be molded into the average man. To conform to the vision of Joe, you must only be using the head - following to a tee the collective culture - ignoring your own personal intricacies found in your personal nature and nurture, your gut and your heart. You may find that the morals of the culture may fit your personal instinctual nature, in which case lucky you. However for the vast majority - perhaps everyone to an extent - they don't, and a new solution must be found. But like a newborn, our heads are too heavy for our bodies to hold, and we must instead bulk up. Bulk up with our personal nurture, bulk up our moral nature which judges what I should do to figure out how to best express our personal and collective nature which our lineage has dealt us. Only then can you stand on your own too feet without needing your head supported by an ever more mothering state. Only then once you've learnt to listen to your heart will you know where to go and how to be you. Only then can you become at all.

2020/12/23 The Fathers You Make Along the Way

Life is a series of adoptive fathers when you're growing up. To survive and have the breadth of character the modern wired-era world necessitates, you have to keep finding new fathers, new role models, to look up to, admire, and follow in their footsteps. Eventually, you receive all the nourishment your virtual father can offer after which you leave them and go searching for someone new to apprentice under, someone new to give direction to your future. I often think of it like parallel train tracks, each with a junction to the next track. When you're on the track of 'father A', you end up learning and becoming like them and should you never take the junction to the next track along, they will be your guiding light forever more. However in time the numinous fatherly projection fades, and you begin to see the flaws of your sensei. You see where they've gone wrong in their own life, how that's affected their thoughts and views and how they're just a human too - not the bastion of wisdom you once supposed. A healthy youth, as they age, keeps changing to the next track up, from father A to father B to father C, absorbing what they can from each father and proceeding onward to learn evermore about our complex world.

I'm writing this idea down, since I've been rewatching an old father of mine - Digibro - whilst I've been revising for exams. Digibro has always been kinda insane, and that's been never truer than the present. But back in the day, he was the only anituber I ever watched. He has a force of personality and unashamed will to be who he is which I do still respect in many ways. Furthermore, he got me to think about anime in a more critical way. Once I was one of those people who watched everything to completion, because anime was so much fun to watch. Wrapped up in the fantastical stories, like many are at a young age, everything I watched was novel, exciting and deeply absorbing. But having a critical eye is important, otherwise you can't get at what is really important. You'll spend your time dilly dallying not knowing that something just isn't worth your time when there's a wealth of great anime out there. So he was the man with the message I needed at the time. He was a father of the past.

Watching over his Asterisk War series now (watching the show simultaneously), I've realised I disagree with almost all of his points. Now don't get me wrong - Asterisk War does suck - but much of Digi's analysis in what I've seen so far has been pretty vapid. Endless discussion of plotholes here, plotholes there, nitpicking tiny little things. I'm not planning on giving my own analysis of Digi's analysis, but my point is mainly that with time - in this case roughly three and a half years, I've gone from superfan to disenchanted. And time does do that. You learn things about the world, find newer, greater, smarter, more nuanced people who can deliver their view with a new force of character, replacing the older fathers whose content you've exhausted. Looking now, I don't see Digi's content with the same praeternatural glow I once did. In many respects I disagree with a lot of his views on anime and the world. But I respect him as a past father who gave me a hand up on the ladder towards adulthood, as a stepping stone who has gotten me here. Thanks Digi for your help. You may like Weathering with You and you may have gone a little doo-lalley from all the weed and a possible 'creative illness' over lockdown, but thank you for helping me get here.

2020/12/11 There is no Virtue in the Virtual

In the virtual, there is no virtue to be found. By virtual, I'm not referring to computers, video games and the internet, but rather the idea of the 'virtual image' - of a Platonic form residing in your mind. The virtual image is what possesses you with thoughts and images of perfection and, by participating in it, we are brought ever closer to it's completion. But are we ever really? The growth is asymptotic; we can never truly reach the form.

The word virtue likely has a similar root. The Platonic form of 'the Good' - the idea of perfect morality that man attempts to participate in and strive towards, is a virtual image which drives you to virtue in of itself. But this Platonic notion implies that, like Communism, "true morality has never been tested" - but like true Communism, it can't be tested since it's virtual, imaginal, a dream. What is virtual stands in opposition to what is real. And however much we admire, gaze and lust at the virtual, at the idea, we'll never be able to get in touch with reality, to experience and appreciate the world as it is. The virtual drags you out from reality into a Peter Pan headspace of the boundless child playing in fantasy who never grows up. But you aren't a child anymore. To become an adult and become a successful person in the world living a meaningful life, you have to transcend the divine image that exists within your mind, and say "No, the world is out there, not in here." You must reject the gnawing virtual to discover true virtue which exists in the world, and which isn't asymptotically out of reach.

In pursuit of reality, nothing will be wrong. You become content within yourself, since there is nothing which your experience isn't living up to. Getting in touch with reality rids you of the 'grass is greener' attitude towards the virtual image. Otherwise, when the virtual image shines too brightly, you are always destined to reside in its shadow, as it's inferior, wallowing in the darkness. You can never shine bright enough yourself to contend with the greatness of the divine light which emanates from the virtual image.

However, virtual images give people great meaning in their lives. The virtual image of the 'Great Man' which you project onto a hero from history whom you admire drives men to great things. Plutarch founded the Renaissance inspired by St. Augustine, for instance, and a similar idea can be found in the arts wherein an artist is infatuatedly inspired by a master from the distant past. But just like how many artists have a 'creative illness', the virtual image can be maddening. You set out on your journey for perfection, but all you see is disappointment and failure since nothing made in our imperfect material world can compare to the beauty of the imagination. Unfortunately, some people are doomed to 'never be enough', to never live up to their expectations and imaginations, since the virtual image shines too brightly for them. They become consumed by its numinous excellency, bedazzled by the jeweled brilliancy of heaven, and spend their lives attempting to build a heaven on earth. But such projects are always doomed to fail.

The path to salvation is to learn the beauty of what is - to love the beauty of imperfection in the world and in yourself. It's a change in mindset, fundamentally. The all-consuming divine energy of the virtual image, of the form, of the idea, must be tempered with a good dose of reality. Reality has great beauty in of itself when you open your heart to imperfection. And once you can find beauty in the world, you can find virtue there too. Only once beauty and virtue can be separated from the divine image can you achieve a sense of contentedness and break away from seeing the world as an inferior barren wasteland and instead see it as a place of beauty and virtue.

2020/11/30 Attack on Consciousness: The Lost Stimulus of the Soul

Consciousness it not something we own; consciousness is given to us on lease. Upon birth we sign our rental agreements with God, granting us the gift of consciousness for the short moment we're alive on this Earth. What gift does consciousness give us then? Without consciousness we couldn't see - although phenomena like blindsight demonstrate that the light of consciousness isn't needed to be able to see and comprehend the world. With consciousness we can feel, sense our desires, or, at the very least be "aware" of them. But with consciousness what do we become aware of? With consciousness, we become aware of the soul, the lush forest which sits deep within us, coming into awareness to guide us through the trials of life. The soul itself can be experienced as a sequence of phantasmagoric images coming into consciousness - a pipeline with the gods, whereby their royal ichor is dripped down as a river of warm syrup. As these images drip into consciousness, the body understands them as senses and feelings of frissons, tears, joy, anxiety, or whatever else. But at root exists the soul - the faintest but most beautiful singer of the choir. And unless we listen to the images it passes to us, we'll never figure out our route.

Yet soul possesses but a faint image. Simply opening your eyes and seeing the outside world provides enough stimulus to drown out the soul's song. The ego too does a good job at suppressing the full force of the soul; the ego exists as diplomat to the world, and judges that the over-expression of soul in consciousness can only lead to an ineffectual adaptation. It is no wonder then that various breathing techniques such as meditation and chanting, alongside techniques such as hypnosis and Jung's active imagination, which all aim to suppress and weaken the ego, allow this flow of images to pass through us. The soul is finally allowed to speak.

But it's hard to listen to the softly spoken soul when the stimuli of everyday life talk loudly over her, disrupting her, not allowing her to give the message she's trying to tell. But in truth it's no wonder we actively try to block out her voice in so many ways - despite her quiet nature, she doesn't always have nice things to say. The more we stray from her preferences as to how we should live, the more she inflicts sadness, guilt and various neuroses upon us. Instead of paying heedance to the message, we cover our ears to the soul and hope she goes away, only becoming less conscious, less fulfilled and less happy in the process.

With phones, YouTube, podcasts, and whatever else your vice may be, we've produced a culture which distracts ourselves as best we can from soul, drowning out her quiet voice with the blaring, demanding shout of mass media. Instead of listening to the soul's river of warm syrup, we listen to the gushing sewage pipe of Facebook, Snapchat or TikTok which slowly toxifies our royal stream with excrement. Once curiosity, that instinct which compels us to watch torrents of junk media, was one of our greatest virtues, but now it is slowly becoming a sin. It is an instinct which has never needed bounding unlike the 'lower' instincts of lust and anger, which have always had protocols to prevent their misuse. But in time we'll have to add to the pantheon the eight deadly sin of curiosity - a gluttony of stimulus. Lest we become estranged to the soul's voice.

2020/11/27 Completion in One Person

In truth, my interesting in psychology and Jung's work has never primarily been 'psychological' in nature. My focus doesn't sit on the 'truth' or validity of these works in the scientific sense, which Jung so wanted his work to be understood as, but rather as a worldview - a way of understanding the world. Psychology has always had a rough position. Is it a science? Kind of, but those who wanted to make psychology into a science - the Behaviourists and CBT enthusiasts - desperately attempted turn man into machine, into an automaton which statistically performed as expected. But, despite being biological, man just doesn't work like that. Sure, some findings over the nature of the mind have been found, but has anything been figured out about psyche? Shouldn't experience of psyche be primary to the study of it? Next psychology wonders "Am I a humanity?". Many features between the two are similar, such as the interpretive side of experiencing psyche through images, feelings and thoughts. So there is a greater kinship towards the humanities. However for myself, psychology isn't merely human in nature - through the worldviews it engenders, it gives a sense of the divine. Back in the Renaissance, the term 'humanities' was coined to separate the human affairs of the written word from the word - the study of God. You can imagine the breakdown as follows:

Divinity - the study of God
Humanities - the study of Man
Sciences - the study of Nature

Much of the psychology which interests me is an attempt at grappling with the notions of the divine, an attempt to understand mystical experience and discover what is greater than the ego sitting in his castle. Philosophy has the same effect for me. Philosophy in it's academic form is an attempt at truth through the fine scalpel of the Socratic method, however that angle of it has never interested me. As a dilettante side-line observer, I wanna see some philosophers come up with some really cool worldviews, and then I wanna see how well I can fit my current beliefs and experiences with it (so long as it fits my aesthetics). It's a kind of academic grooming akin to the the rat utopia's Beautiful Ones.

For me and many others, Jung fits snuggly into the fissure of science and theology, forming a sort of bridge between the two. He offers the perfect headdress and scarf with which to decorate ourselves, to attempt to touch the supramundane whilst keeping our feet connected to the mundane myths of the modern millennium. But through Jung's ideas we find a spirituality for one, a model of completion alone. Gnostic is a good way to describe Jung's spirituality. Despite not putting it in moralistic terms, for Jung the outside world is full of confusion and shifting shapes of stimulus which can only be understood through our projection of ideas onto it, whilst the interior world is where the Platonic forms come to life and dance in the divine theatre of the imaginal and, once deeper layers are excavated, intemporal Gods who've been directing your every move since birth emerge to greet you. The dualism characterises much of Jung's work - a truly personal myth for someone as introverted and inward-looking as Jung was. What Jung strove for was completion in one person - becoming whole alone.

Wholeness is a powerful, powerful archetypal force. A good example is in the sciences, where their priests go mad and fantasise over achieving the theory of everything. Much like an alchemical projection into the material, they will never rest easy until they unify their equations and in turn unify the world and themselves.

But to actualise this ever-gnawing archetype of wholeness in a world of such evident imperfection is an impossibility. The religious solution is the realm of heaven - the divine realm of the gods where perfection and harmony does exist. Christianity even goes so far as to offer the good people passage to the world of the One, albeit in the afterlife. Plato and Gnostic sects inspired by his Timaeus imagined the world of completeness as shining down into the world of the everyday as the incompleteness we experience - that the true world of completeness was up there and we live in a mere shadow of it. But since then, one-ness and completeness became an untenable fantasy and have fallen into disrepute under scientific advancements. Many see Jung as someone who's brought back this sense of one-ness, but the one-ness Jung brought back from the scrapheap of ideas which science has lain waste to was a personal one-ness. A one-ness in oneself. A one-ness which can't be shared.

One-ness has an arch nemesis in the archetypal arena: nothingness. Everything is ones and zeros. It's all or nothing. And for Jung the one-ness of the inner world, of the Self, is contrasted with the zero-ness of the outside world. The outer world has sensory input fused in a molten cauldron with projections of inner fantasies, creating a Dreamtime of a decidedly fake world. Outer changes in the world of real things are all rituals, enacting alchemical transformations of the soul - the concrete world is just the playground with which the psyche transforms itself. The hallowed yet hollowed world of panpsychism. Now, I'm not saying Jung believed all of this. But when the myth of 'completeness' only exists in a single person, it is to the exclusion of all else, by the same method which Jung described as 'shadow projection'. The elevation of the self results in a devaluation of what's outside. Jung's Kantian influenced view of the psyche, wherein we can never know the world in-of-itself but only our perceptions of it, forced him to come up with a theory of archetypes, of synchronicity, of psychic reality, since without these theories the logical conclusion is solipsism. Dire loneliness without another real soul in the world. One's own brimming wholeness and vitality, at the expense of the desert beyond your walls.

2020/11/24 Thermodynamics vs Kinetics

Man has far less self-control than he thinks he has. We like to think that every action we do is by our own choice, but if you scratch beneath the surface and don't fall for this fantasy, you'll discover that we primarily act out of impulse, instinct and habit. Whilst we can instruct ourselves to 'imagine a pink elephant' or whatever else, we usually imagine things by habit or by impulse, fantasising about the same scenarios over and over seemingly without reason. For instance, on the way to Uni today, I kept imagining that I was rescuing an old man who had tripped and cracked his head open on the pavement. I imagined this for ten minutes, after which I realised: "what on earth had I been doing all this time". Actions also are very much out of our control. We get home, we put on some YouTube or some anime or whatever else you typically do. Doesn't matter if you want to do that at the time - you just do it out of impulse, out of habit, even if there are more meaningful things you want to do.

Bearing that in mind, let's look at some chemistry since, contrary to what my blog may suggest, chemistry is my chosen subject at Uni. In chemistry, there is the idea of a "Kinetic" product and a "Thermodynamic" product, where two separate reactions can occur between the same two molecules. The graph below should help in visualising this in terms of energy:

The plot we see here is Free Energy - basically the energy of the molecules in a single reaction, vs Course of Reaction - how far in reacting have the molecules gone. In graph A, we see Activation Energy which is the amount of energy required for the reaction occur - a big hump of energy needed to get the reaction going. It's needed because the molecule has to contort itself into a Transition State - a dislocated arrangement which it doesn't like being in, in order to reorganise itself into the new, more stable position. Below Activation Energy, is Change in Free Energy which is how much energy is released from the reaction (energy of final molecules vs energy of starting molecules). Also bear in mind that for a reaction to occur there must be a net loss in Free Energy, since the product we produce must be more stable (have less Free Energy) than the starting materials.

Graph B includes this same idea, with the large humps of Activation Energy and the dip in Free Energy Change visible. Here we see those terms we mentioned earlier - the Kinetic Product and the Thermodynamic Product. The Kinetic Product, as the graph shows, has a lower Activation Energy but also has a lower Free Energy Change, meaning that it doesn't take much energy for the reaction to happen but it doesn't create as low an energy product (as stable a product). In contrast, the Thermodynamic Product, which has a higher Activation Energy, meaning it takes more energy for the reaction to get going, and a higher Free Energy Change, meaning the reaction produces a more thermodynamically stable product. So how do the molecules choose their path? The Kinetic reaction favours kinetics - fast and quick reactions - the natural instinctive route for the reaction to barrel down. It can get there quicker but may not be the best choice if the molecules had more time to ponder where would be optimum to go. The Thermodynamic reaction creates the more thermodynamically stable product - it sits and ponders it's choices as to which path is best to go down: it's in no rush. In short, it really depends on the molecules which you're using - some are short tempered and go for the kinetic reaction, other's ponder and go for the thermodynamic reaction. Heating up your vessel is also a good way to enrage your molecules, making them prefer the Thermodynamic route.

Now I've explained some chemistry, what bearing does this have to with anything? The thread I'm trying to tie together is that we often take the kinetic route. Just going down the first path which makes itself known to us is so much easier, but it doesn't bring as much satisfaction. At the moment, I'm taking a month away from YouTube - a necessary task every once in a while to regain a modicum of productivity back in your life. But I know that should I have not been fasting, I would've slumped down in my food coma'ed state, stuck on a podcast or educational lecture (the most dangerous kind of YouTube which makes you feel productive) and become a vegetable, vicariously living through a virtual man's thoughts. But instead, I'm writing this. And even if no one reads this, I've created something, worked on something, done something with my time. I took the Thermodynamic route, instead of the Kinetic route. Instead of taking the path of least resistance, I exercised some willpower, used a greater Activation Energy, to achieve something and create a greater Free Energy Change. In order to become the lowest energy molecule - a perfect diamond - you have to keep taking the thermodynamic route, lest you'll be caught up in a web of your own habits, forgetting how to activate your own willpower to resist the magnetic allure of the Kinetic route.

2020/11/22 Danmachi and Made in Abyss: A Tale of Two Holes

Whether it be an abyss or a dungeon, the dark holes which lead into the underbelly of the world are forever enticing us to explore them. These holes sit there, waiting to be mapped, to have the light of a lantern shone upon them and the riches brought out into the sunlight. Two such stories, Made in Abyss and Danmachi revolve around their central hole, albeit in subtly different ways.

In Made in Abyss, Riko, a young girl, was born in the abyss and now has the impelling urge to return to discover her lost mother. The abyss itself is littered with treasures of a lost society but also infested with demonic flora and fauna waiting at every corner to devour you. Like Riko, we all come from the abyss trying to return to its depths. None of us can remember a time when we were nothingness and an unconscious mass in our mother's womb without life nor knowledge. But as we grew up we clambered our way into the world of consciousness, to the surface, only to peer back at the abyss every now and then trying to remember what we were. We were our perfect self - authentic and fully true to ourselves in our youth. But as we age and we adapt to society, we lose aspects of who we are uniquely designed to be. And so we look ever longingly back into the abyss to rediscover ourselves and bring back those valuable treasures.

The best example of this is the transition from childhood to adolescence, when we suddenly become ever so much more self-conscious and conforming to society. We become one of the fathers of society and in consequence our individual identity is lost. The hero's journey is very much then rediscovering who we are whilst integrating our true self with what society wants and needs us to be. And this hero's journey is fundamentally a deeply spiritual journey in nature.

Whether you do it consciously or not everyone takes upon their spiritual journey, using whatever methods work for them. The spiritual journey is just fluffy language to say growing up or discovering yourself - sure some take it a step further through whatever practices like meditation or ritual, but at its root they are trying to find themselves. Perhaps those who undertake these practices are the ones struggling the most to find themselves.

So now we've established that the descent into the great holes of these worlds is a kind of spiritual journey, let's return to Made in Abyss. Riko is an orphan without roots. She's also fractious, fidgeting around the orphanage since she so desperately wants to undertake her spiritual journey down into the abyss to discover herself, to discover her mother, to discover where she has come from and where she will go. But only once she's lucky enough to meet a god - a mechanical human in the form of Reg - can she undertake her path.

In Made in Abyss' world, most take their spiritual journey alone or with a party - usually without the guidance and help of a divine power. The traditions of spirituality are paved by great heroes - the idols of their world - the brave few who with superhuman strength, who descend into the depths of the abyss to discover great treasure. In this sense, the spirituality of this world is guided by the successes of others in a kind of scientific empiricism. They are the map-makers who pave the way, laying down the paths for the next generation of explorers. But unlike Riko, they do not have the guidance of any gods.

Danmachi has a similar view of the spiritual journey. Bell (or 'Daniel') is a young orphan who has no greater desire than to grow and become stronger. Aided by his special ability 'Liaris Freese' which powers his growth at incredible rates so long as his current feelings last, Bell possesses immense Spiral Energy, derived primarily from the love for his waifu (as every man is).

Bell's spiritual journey to find himself is, like Riko's, to descend into the dungeon. Like Whisper of the Heart shows us, the most powerful way to discover yourself is to challenge yourself to a task which takes you to the edge of what you can do. And for Bell, the arena of his spiritual path is the descent into the deepest part of the dungeon, to place his name on a long list of heroes who've discovered themselves and made something of themselves.

Yet the dungeon of Danmachi is plugged by the Tower of Babel, and not left to stand open like a festering sore of the Abyss. In the world of Danmachi, the gods have descended in physical form, giving their heroes a helping hand as they descend into the belly of the dungeon. Riko was lucky enough to have her own God Warrior guide in the form of Reg, but few who go down into the abyss had partner to aid them. The world of Danmachi, on the other hand, is formed into 'familias' which are guilds headed by gods who advise and aid the heroes' on their travails - a kind of institutionalisation of spiritual guides.

And this very institutionalisation we see in Danmachi, is what sets the two shows' representation of spirituality apart. Made in Abyss shows us a solitary spirituality where the keys to success can only be found in the wisdom of those around you. Trial and error is key - falling on your ass over and over again is inevitable, as we see Riko do. Without any spiritual guidance from an institution, Made in Abyss mirrors our own world in many respects wherein we're moving away from the organised spirituality of Christianity towards the idea of a personal spiritual path that only we can discover for ourselves. Without any spiritual guidance from the society, even the spiritual guide, Reg, has amnesia. In contrast, Danmachi plugs up the chaos and nihilism of a spiritual journey without an organisational structure with a big fat Tower of Babel, from where gods can come and aid humans on their spiritual path. And Bell too is being led faithfully on his path by his head-waifu Hestia to become the greatest hero.

2020/11/16 Metaphors are Real

Metaphors are real. This eternal truth marks the cornerstone of every misunderstanding in the world today. Our literalism, our fundamentalism, is the lock that gates us off from one another. Only the key, the olive branch, can undo this lock. So what does this principle of metaphors being real mean? First we’ll have to figure out some definitions.
Metaphor: A metaphor is to say one thing is another thing. For example, “The man is a pig” is an example of a metaphor. Here, it is important to note, the man is a pig – the verb ‘to be’ – he is be-ing a pig. In other words he is acting like a pig – participating in pig-ness.
Myth: A myth is a story. Whether true or false, fantastical or realistic, is of no regard. King Arthur is a myth insofar as Zeus is a myth insofar as World War 2 is a myth. In a myth, mythologisation has occurred – ideas are digested and composited by the unconscious mind to form a hagiographised story.
The Universal and the Particular: The universal is the general thing. An example is to say “Men are pigs”, making a comment on the essence of men as a universal principle. The particular, on the other hand is to say “The man is a pig” which is to single out a single, unique individual as the one participating in pig-ness.
Form: Form can be thought of as the structural-functional organisation of an object, which is essentially the essence of the object. It is form which, for Plato, was the commonality between the universal and the particular. You have the form of a table (the universal) and you have the table in your living room (the particular) which engages in the form of the table by possessing its qualities.
Object in-of-itself: A Kantian idea. The object without any of the forms in our head being projected (much like a projector) onto the object. The object in-of-itself is the object which exists beyond human perception and comprehension. Comprehension being done by projecting these ideas, or forms, from our mind onto objects in the world, making order out of chaos. Yet the object in-of-itself is pure chaos: the chaos egg.

The reality

Now that we’ve defined some key words, I will destroy nouns. Common nouns and adjectives are the same things. They are both qualities of an object – an object in-of-itself which we can never know. An object which is given it’s properties by our perception. Unlike in Plato’s day, we now believe that these forms exist in our mind (the underworld) rather than in the heavens. Instead of objects in the world intrinsically having ‘table-ness’, we develop a form of table-ness through experience and abstraction, and, given the correct sensory perceptions, we project that form onto the object in-of-itself in the world. Table-ness, therefore, is a quality given to an object in-of-itself insofar as red-ness is a quality given also. Table is just a way of describing something – an adjective.

Similar to the definition I gave for a metaphor, these objects in-of-themselves participate in these forms which are themselves adjectives. Participate may be a controversial word to use here. But when we are sad, we are participating in the act of sadness, the act of being in a particular state. When we are being a pig, we are participating in the act of being a pig, being messy, eating without manners. A book spends its days being a book, participating in book-ness. The chair, in chair-ness. I am a human so I participate in human-ness. The list is endless. My point here is only to say that qualities should be viewed as active engagements rather than passive attributes. I am usually, being myself. Some days however a friend may say “Hey, you’re not quite yourself today”. That phrase is absurd from a literalistic perspective, but as a participatory action, I am not participating in me-ness, in the form of me. The form of me, in this case, being the image of me that my friend has.

In essence, this is what knowing is. The model in my mind is the model in the world. Simple as that. If my model of someone doesn’t fit the way they act, I feel like I don’t understand them properly and the model has to be updated. However the model in the mind can be mortally wounded, say if someone is cheated on. Their model of their partner and how they expect them to act is ravaged, often leading to some kind of neurosis.

So how does all this link back to how metaphors are real? The question becomes what is this. I am currently writing this on my bed. Bed? What’s a bed? Bed is the abstraction I’ve created across the instances I’ve experienced it – a useful model to project onto the object. Bed, as a form, resides in my mind, but the object in-of-itself upon which I lie can be anything, really. It’s a thing. But I can’t call it my crayfish. If I started calling my bed my crayfish, you’d think me mad. But if I call it my resting place or my relaxation station, it makes more sense. You can make sense of what I mean. Information regarding the object in-of-itself as I’ve perceived it has been transferred – often with extra nuance. Metaphors, through the use of symbolism (inexhaustible data), get more across than the simple word ‘bed’. Bed is just as much a signifier as the metaphorical phrase, albeit with subtly different connotations.

Why, then, are metaphors real? The short answer is that the we project a form onto the object in-of-itself, giving it its character. However an object can possess many forms – polymorphism, as it’s known in programming. And, as a result, ‘wooden pillar’ is just as valid a form to give the object as ‘tree’. They’re on equal footing. Different forms to give the same ‘that’. They are just as real as one another. Neither word can truly understand the thing in-of-itself since each and every one of them are unique. They’re particulars. We are just making groupings, universals, to distribute intelligent information to one another. They’re forms – immaterial, yet very much real.

Myths as real

Like with metaphors mentioned above, myths are models for the world – mythic corpuses – which are projected onto the object in-of-itself. The object in-of-itself can’t be seen; all we have is our mythologised version.

Given all of this, what does it even mean for myths to be real? Once we can accept that the unbiased truth of our past, present or future can’t be witnessed or known, all we’re left with are the myths. For one, if the myths aren’t real, all we’re left with is the nihilistic maya of Vedanta, wherein we live in a world of pure illusion. But then you wonder, is this nihilistic? Instead of nihilistic, Hindus see nothingness as infinite potential, as an egg waiting to hatch. What could be more hopeful than that? It’s all myths at the end of the day. Ironically, even the Vedantic deep feeling of nothingness and illusion is a myth. We cannot see beyond myth, beyond the veil, as we can never see the object in-of-itself.

But even if myths differ between culture, one constant remains among each and every tribe of the earth: myth making. To look deeper, we’ll return to Kant, specifically his idea of the a priori. The a priori, short here for synthetic a priori, is a phrase Kant used for knowledge which is universally true but not present in the statement. The classic example is that all the angles of a triangle add up to 180°. The statement is universally true – you’ll struggle to find a triangle where this is not the case. But the idea of the angles adding up to 180° isn’t built in to the triangle’s definition. Jung, a big fan of Kant, took the idea of the a priori a step further. To Jung, the a priori was the archetypes – the very building blocks of cognition. The a priori functions of the mind which masticates the object in-of-itself into an understandable object. The a priori knowledge of the psyche is the myth making mechanism, common to each and every one of us.

Following Jung, the a priori he posits – the myth making mechanism called the mind – is the greatest truth. All we can know is our cognition. Not the world which is contaminated by mythic projections, nor our thoughts which are much the same. But those very mythic projections – they hold the reality inside of them. Not the object in-of-itself, for that cannot be seen. Rather the way we see it, which is the mythologisation.

Which myths are real?

As defined at the top, myths can be fantastical like Zeus, legendary like King Arthur, or historical like WW2. WW2 does have people who remember the event, but what makes it mythic is that knowledge of the event isn’t derived empirically by our own sense in the present, but has instead been mythologised by other people, masticated by society, into a story: a myth. The mythologising of events, I’d argue, is unavoidable. We can never know the material reality of the event unless we were there in the moment – and even then we mythologise our memories. Take memories of primary school, for example. You’ll meet up with your friends and go over stories from your shared past, and end up with entirely different memories of the series of events. Like a tabloid, both of you have mythologised the events – put your own spin on them – and come out with different myths of your pasts. Insofar as you do that yourself, so too do entire societies about their shared memories. The British, the Russian and the Japanese all have very different mythologisations of WW2, for example.

Unfortunately, this leaves us a very narrow sliver of ‘reality’. Every memory is ‘tainted’ by unconscious association, and mythologised. Every story of the past and present, has been mythologised by someone else. All that has material reality is the present spacetime snapshot – our senses in the current moment. But even though we consider Santa and Zeus not to be real, we’re fine with saying World War 2 was real. What’s the difference?

The main difference is corroboration. We trust that something happened through consensus. Everyone agrees WW2 happened. Even we agree the Napoleonic wars happened even though everyone alive from the period has passed away. Yet we can derive corroboration from the numerous letters and the memories of the society as distinct from the people. Turn the clocks back again, and we have the Trojan war and King Arthur. Legendary stories which may have reality in their mists. Further still is Greek myths with gods and fantastical beings. Stories which we see as fake because they contain fantastical elements – a secondary flash-point of disbelief in a myth.

Now we’ve seen how a myth is made real – by consensus – next we’ll put etch on a face, a who. Every society has a truth-making institution which can be called a church. Much like a religious institution, there is a truth-making body which decides which myths are allowed in the canon, and which should be excluded. The canon of the Britain consists of our birth myths, like Saxon invasions and William the Conquerer; the birth of our greatness in the Spanish Armada and the Napoleonic Wars; our brave resilience in WW1 and WW2, despite the loss of the empire; our great writers, musicians, scientists, who gave life to our culture. The list goes on. The mythology of Britain can’t possibly contained in a list. All of these events are mythologised by our society, by our church. In mentioning WW2, we aren’t talking about the Japanese perspective, we’re talking about the British mythic understanding. It’s worth noting that the mythology is ever changing. In medieval times, the legendary history of British of Brutus slaying the giants who once lived in Albion is a bygone idea. But that was the history of Britain. For medieval man, these myths were real, just like the Battle of Hastings is for us.

Myths ground us. They contextualise our lives, telling us the spatio-temporal location of where we were born. Without this bedrock, we are lost, adrift in abstraction since only with where we’ve come do we know where to go, whether that be on a personal or societal level. In a sense, myths help us make sense. Sense doesn’t really exist in the world. Without man to subdivide matter, the world in-of-itself is just a continuum of ‘stuff’. It is, therefore, our duty to make sense of the world. We generate it. Or rather the sense is made in the womb of the church, birthing understanding in the minds of the people. Through the church, a society’s corpus of myths, sense can be made of the world. And, as we’ve said above, the church relies on con-sense-us. It is making sense together as a group.

So, as we have seen, sense, truth, is produced by consensus, which can be understood like a church. This church then dictates our mythic canon – the true interpretation of events, which events are true and which are false. And, so long as you all belonged to the same church, everyone could make sense of one another. All was in harmony.

A schizoid society

Society has become schizoid. Like a troubled mind, we’ve fractured and schismed into a multitude of churches. Why? Because no longer do we need to rely on a community. The government can take care of such matters for us. We live in the age of individualism, after all. This divorce from society and community leaves us homeless. Where shall we go? So the nomadic spiritual seekers in need of a church find a community for themselves. Groups organised not on old location-based notions like nationality and township, but rather on personal ideas of interests and worldviews. The most prominent of these worldviews today is politics. Through politics, many believe, you can grasp a person’s values and their value. Lefties, conservatives, liberals, fascists, whatever other ideology is on the menu; all of them pray to a different church and believe in a different set of myths. A fascist may deny the holocaust – a lefty will have attribute different reasons for the start of Napoleonic War. Despite their internal consensuses, they hold no similarity to one another despite living in the same country. They can’t understand the other. They can’t make sense of the other.

Ancient societies somehow dealt with this same problem. There were Roman Gods, Greek Gods, Egyptian Gods, Gallic Gods, all being prayed to in the most metropolitan cities of the Roman empire. How did they understand one another? The term used is syncretism. Roman syncretism was the mixing of mythologies in the melting pot of metropolitania. As the Romans invaded Celtic lands, they saw the Celtic Gods and said ‘they’re basically the same as ours’ and incorporated them into the pantheon. In many ways, Judaism, in refusing syncretism, was the odd one out at the time of Christ. Their religious persecution was out of the ordinary, and originated in their refusal to accept the other Gods of the Roman pantheon.

Today our understanding of multiculturalism is very different. Instead of incorporating other cultures and alloying them with our own, we insist on keeping them an arms distance away. Their culture cannot be touched and neither can our own. Practices such as these prevent cultural integration from ever occurring. And, in the context of the church as a mythos, we need a syncretism between political ideas. Once we realise we actually all believe the same myths with slight differences and that we can hold conflicting views in our heads, we will once more be able to make sense of one another. Saying, “I respect that you’re different” is not the best long term strategy. Only when we realise we aren’t different, and that we all belong to one unifying church, will we become part of the same church and heal our schizoid society.

Hence why metaphors and myths should be made real. Each church believes their own metaphors and myths to be real but refuses to acknowledge the other sides, taking their views to be literal. When a right winger hears a feminist talking point like ‘Patriarchy’, they’ll often take this to mean the absolute literal interpretation of the word. Yet when a step back is taken, and you give your foes the benefit of the doubt by granting the reality of the metaphor, you’ll realise what is actually meant by the phrase. You are now able to make sense of what they’re saying. You can now understand their mythology and metaphors and bring them into the church, the society. Just as when Alex Jones goes on about psychic vampires, however much of a madman he may sound, you must believe that his metaphors and myths are real and see how ‘elites’ prey on our life energy. And all of a sudden these madmen you never wanted to associate with are brought into the church.

A difficult journey it may be, but it is to each of us our responsibility to give the benefit of the doubt to the enemy. Only then can they be made sense of. Only then will the schisms be healed – all beneath one inclusive church. Only by acknowledging the myths and metaphors of others are real, can we heal.

Originally written back in May

2020/10/22 Howl’s moving castle & Acting your age

It has been a while since I last watched Howl’s moving castle. I enjoyed it very much – don’t get me wrong – but I often feel that after Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki’s work has declined in quality as he ages (excluding Ponyo). Howl has an almost Disney feels and despite having all the classic Miyazaki themes doesn’t feel as Miyazaki as many of his earlier works. But that’s all besides the point. Today we’ll be looking at the themes and ideas at play in Howl – specifically the idea of ‘acting your age’ and the illness that can afflict those who don’t.

First, let’s look at Sophie, the hero of the tale. At the dawn of the story, Sophie works hard making hats, sacrificing herself in the process, whilst her mother goes about marrying new husbands and partying. Her youthful mother never grows up to act with the responsibility of her age and instead relies on Sophie who, in a kind of compensation, acts well beyond her years, with a great sense of duty and kindness for others. This kind of acting beyond her years is the reason why Sophie’s aging swings back and forth throughout the movie from young to old and back again.

Sophie’s curse was given by the Witch of Waste – a witch who lives out her youthful fantasies (note that the witch’s magic is ‘fantastical’) despite being exceptionally old. And in living in this state of eternal youth, her elderliness has no where to manifest itself except as a projection – as a magic spell – which is inflicted vindictively upon any youth she passes. The Witch of Waste craves for youth – she wants to continue the journey’s of youth once more and to do so she needs Howl’s heart – the heart of the eternal child.

Insofar as Sophie acts like an old lady, Howl acts like a child. As we later discover, Howl caught some kind of magic star piece as a child which he swallowed, producing Calcifer, his heart. In signing this Faustian pact, he externalised his soul, much like in Madoka, into a kind of soul object and in doing so obtained great powers. At what cost however. His heart will never grow beyond that of youth. His boyhood spirit has ‘calcified’ in the form of Calcifer. The eternal child, Howl, who will never lose the ‘magic’ of childhood.

The child and the man inside of Howl are in civil war. The child in charge, dominating how Howl acts, like when he wails like a child at Sophie for cleaning his stuff up or when Howl asks Sophie to go to Suliman in his stead. However Howl’s body’s throne is fit for a man – and that repressed man inside of him is forever trying to retake the throne which is rightly his. We see the conflict in Howl’s depressive moods, where the world begins to melt around him into a kind of goo whenever any sign of weakness is shown in the child-like spirit since the repressed man inside of Howl senses the child’s weakness and attacks like a hound.

This corrupting childhood spirit which possesses Howl enables his body to become a raven through its magic. Abusing his body by assuming raven form, is in turn an abuse of the grown man inside of him, since his body, which is the body of a man, is a reminder to the child-like spirit that the manly spirit really should be in charge. The child spirit thinks that by wrecking the body, that the child can live forever. Black birds of any kind are all signs of death whether it be the crow or the raven. They are the darkness in Howl’s heart from his inner conflict. Just like in Madoka, when you sign off your soul, it becomes your responsibility to fight the darkness which wells up.

Howl uses the raven form to go off to war, but why must Howl go off to war anyway? He heads off at the behest of Suliman, the King, so he has no choice, right? Sophie teaches Howl to overcome his child-like spirit by telling him to stand up for himself against parental authority (the King here being the father of the nation) and say “no, I won’t sacrifice my body and health for this war.” Howl learns the importance of his body – to respect his body – and to act in accordance with his body, his biology and his gut instinct. He develops a kind of mutual respect and synergy wherein he is in concord with himself – a man’s soul harmonious with a man’s body, instead of the overstayed welcome of the child’s soul.

In summary, Howl is the child is an adults body, whereas Sophie is an adult in a child’s body and, through their love, they hammer out each other’s dents, bringing both of them back to homeostasis. When she feels in love with the youthful Howl, Sophie’s flashes of youthfulness spring out, and at once she looks like a maiden again. Through relating to Howl, she’s realigned with who she really ought to be – a young girl – instead of her mother’s maid. And Howl, who was without parents in his youth, is told by the mother-like figure of Sophie, to grow up and get his shit together. Howl’s finally given a bit of push back in his life and is awoken from his fantastical, ‘magical’, child-like dream state. Sophie extinguishes Calcifer, his flame of boyhood, allowing Howl the man’s heart to grow instead of sitting calcified.

The irony of the ending is that after being freed, Calcifer returns to Howl. What Howl is so afraid of giving up, his youthful spirit, won’t vanish by becoming a man. Memories of boyhood, feelings of boyhood, always exist in a rose-tinted nostalgia, and can be remembered and felt at whatever age. Don’t hold on to the past, but rather grow up with confidence and it will always tag along.

2020/09/20 When Admiration Becomes Pathological

Admiration can become pathological. To admire is to see something great in another and want to emulate it in yourself. But taken to far, you will derail yourself. You’ll fall off your own track onto theirs, chugging behind them. It’s constricting being on another’s track. It isn’t going the direction that your soul deep down wants to travel causing all sorts of internal disturbances and frustrations. Traveling behind them on their line, all you see is their rear-end. You become blinded to all but their shit, to their dark side. What was once looking into eyes of bright admiration becomes staring into the dark anus of the inferiority complex.

Tetsuo once admired Kaneda. Kaneda had helped him throughout his troubled childhood in school. But that admiration in time became pathological. Kaneda shone like the sun, and Tetsuo stared to long. Blind and lost, Tetsuo changed track, chugging along on Kaneda Rail instead of his own predetermined track of his soul. He now danced to Kaneda’s tunes rather than his own heart’s song. His inferiority complex grew, only ever seeing the dark in Kaneda, shadow projecting at every opportunity. Then, through his ‘transcendental awakening’, Tetsuo’s inferiority complex became a superiority complex, assuming the role of god in a desperate compensation of the psyche to regain control of itself. And, in a kind of ‘as above so below’ kind of way, the loveless city which has an inferiority complex of its own, seeing only power, not love, is destroyed, along with the Tetsuo we knew. What is rebirthed at the end is the real Tetsuo, uttering the words ‘I am Tetsuo’ – a moment of self-realisation, of recognising his own existence, of being himself instead of his complex possessed double, righting himself back onto his own railway.

The inferiority complex is typified by the wishing for a saviour, for a messiah. Jung has argued that the Jews, who were under the control of the Romans despite seeing themselves as a chosen people, had a society-wide inferiority complex. They wished for a messiah to rescue them form this state, and he arose from the people in the form of Jesus. The Nazi’s in this respect were quite similar. Post-WW1, post Great Depression Germany was downtrodden and had a nation-wide inferiority complex. The war guilt of the Treaty of Versailles also hit their fledgling nation pretty hard. Only a messiah of the ancestral German spirit, who took the form of Adolf Hitler, could bring salvation to their fatherland. For Tetsuo, that messiah of salvation was Akira, just as he was for the city also. Interestingly, Tetsuo was also mistaken for the messiah Akira, finding his ‘divine powers’ via his superiority complex. Hitler did much the same. After being rejected as an artist, his inferiority became superiority and, via his wounds, he accessed the collective divine spark extant in all of man to embody the messianic role. Messiahs aren’t always good men. You’ve got your Jesuses and your Hitlers. But what is the case is that invigorate us. They connect with our sick souls or sick societies and energise us out of our shadow possessed stupour. The solution is not found in the darkness of the shadow, but in the lightness of the soul.

What brought Tetsuo to self-realisation was not looking at his shadow; for what he saw in Kaneda was just an abyss to stare ever deeper into. Are you trying to defeat Bowser, or save Princess Peach? Defeat the darkness, or save the lightness? The messiah or guru is a projection of the soul, of the saviour, when you or a society is in need. But that’s your soul. That’s your princess living in the castle of your heart. Don’t project her away – save her and hold her dearly. Follow her, not someone else who professes the truth. That’s their self-knowledge – not yours. Tetsuo in his possessed state never had that self-reflective moment, never looked inside himself for his soul, never noticed that his damsel was in need of rescuing. He was forever looking with tunnel vision at Kaneda’s back, unable to see the vast expanse, the sheer beauty and greatness, which lay ahead of him. For only by getting himself back on track – on his track – will he see the morning sun on the horizon.

2020/09/18 Shinji's regression into the womb

Shinji is a troubled young boy, as we can all agree. Rejected by his father, abandoned by his mother through her death (or so he thinks), he is lost: adrift. Eva is very cool. The franchise has so much lore, such beautiful shots, such well written plot, but what the show is really about, what Eva is really trying to explicate, are the lives of their characters. Characters who've been abandoned by the gods, abandoned by their parental projections, abandoned by the sustenance they need to develop as a person in the world. Shinji as a character stands at the forefront of the cultural zeitgeist of anime. He represents the anxious child who turns away from contact with the world and instead turns to a life of escapist fantasy. Regressing ever further backwards away from growing up.

But as everyone in Shinji's life tells him, he has to stand up for himself. If he doesn't stand up for himself he's doomed. He's doomed to be swallowed whole by the society he lives in. Doomed to be eaten by the Father. Only by taking hold of the Lance of Longinus for himself, as he does in End of Eva, can he stand up for himself. But instead he begins to tumble down...

And tumble down he does. In End of Eva, when he hears Asuka, his soul-image, being savaged over the intercom, he finally ruptures and his ego disintegrates.

Instrumentality isn't the final stage of human evolution; it is the first. By that I mean that instrumentality takes you back to the ouroboric union of the baby rather than that of the complete man. Instead of becoming accomplished and reintegrated, you regress to the embryonic state wherein the you and the world are undifferentiated. The ultimate retreat by Shinji. Escaping every danger on the outside, he retreats back into the impregnable (well, perhaps pregnable) walls of the womb.

In the process of instrumentality, Shinji is encased in the Lance of Longinus before he enters Lilith as the seed of instrumentality. Shinji has lost to society. The fatherly society has castrated him and cut him off from his soul, Asuka. Like the sons of Kronos, he has been swallowed and never allowed to grow up, never confirmed by his father as a man.

But through his interactions with Rei withinin instrumentality, Rei being modeled after his mother, he manages to escape the state of instrumentality which the tyrannical father, Gendou/Society, has put him in. And just as Rei saves Shinji from instrumentality and from the father, so too does Rhea (rei-a) save Zeus from Kronos. The story of Eva is the heroic development of Shinji who has now become the king of his own destiny. Bursting out of Lilith's eye, Shinji can now stand on his own two feet and see the world for himself - looking others in the eyes and confronting them instead of turning away in fear. And thus Shinji is reborn.

2020/09/17 Loss of soul

Rewatching Spice and Wolf over the past couple weeks has reminded me of Maid Dragon - one of my favourite anime. The similarity? The loss and regaining of soul. Let's start off with what soul even is. As a metaphysical construct, soul has existed since time immemorial across every culture on earth. The very fact that we have a conscious experience of the world must've been a sticking point for many peoples. How can we be both spiritual, transcending our own bodies through mystical experiences and rituals, yet simultaneously have a physical form, a body which is very much 'grounded' in the material world around us? From those starting blocks, the notion of a soul, an immaterial aspect to one's existence, must exist to make sense of being a human.

What does the soul consist of then? That is a matter which culture after culture and philosopher upon philosopher have queried. However, there are some points upon which most agree. Soul is typically seen as something generative, creative - a lush forest from which ideas and thoughts spring. Meandering rivers of emotions and intuitions, dotted with mountain ranges of mental hangups. The soul can only really be understood by metaphor - it isn't physical after all. Even if the idea of soul is downtrodden by most people as 'un-scientific', most people you meet act as if there is in fact a soul. People respect you and act politely towards their loved one's not out of some egoistic expectation of reciprocation but rather because they sense something conscious in you and see you as more than a hunk of meat. Just like them, you too are conscious, and you too have a soul, a conscious lived experience of the world, just like them.

What is it then to lose soul? The idea originates in hunter-gatherer communities, where losing your soul is what we'd call in the west 'depression'. Perhaps not depression in its most extreme form - hunter-gatherers live like man was designed to and have far fewer mental health issues - but it's losing contact with life and being cut off from the creative life-force of the soul. Cut off from the part of you which gives you the drive to take life by the horns and feel passion for being alive.

But what could be more vivifying a feeling than love? When you are with your 'soul-mate', you see your soul in human form. Your lover energises you and fills you with joy and purpose, 'completing' you, as many would say. Plato too said in the Symposium that man was split asunder in the primordial age and ever since each and every man has forever been looking for their other half. We can never truly meet our soul. We can never form a permanent fusion with our other half and live out the rest of our days in total unity and bliss. But we can enshrine union through marriage and such to get as close as possible to it.

Both Spice and Wolf and Maid Dragon exemplify this vision of soul loss and having a visit from their soul perfectly. Lawrence in Spice and Wolf is a merchant through and through. He lives and breathes the merchant life. However people are more than just their professions - there is so much more to life, after all. To identify yourself with the mask of your profession can be very restricting. Therefore he is visited by the wolf god Holo. Kobayashi from Maid Dragon is much the same. She's settled down and stagnated in life, working long hours as a programmer. Once you begin to stagnate, the novel things which were once fun and filled you with life are no longer new and are instead blunt. You no longer get the feeling of the creative rush which your soul releases. Tohru, then, is the soul image for Kobayashi. She's the joy and love which the day in day out 9 to 5 monotony beats out of you. For both of these characters who live persona-possessed lives, they're visited by a goddess - a messiah - someone to show the extra dimension of life, the child-like joy, which they didn't even realise they had lost.

What's common to both series is the attachment which forms. Both Lawrence and Kobayashi have moments when what's most important to them - their souls - is about to be taken from them. For Lawrence, he nearly lost Holo in the first arc of the second series when an enterprising boy wished to steal her hand in marriage. For Kobayashi, Tohru's father had come to collect her - the father being symbolic of culture and the imperitive work ethic of the Japanese salaryman - which wishes to take away Kobayashi's soul once more. Threats to dispossess us of our souls are abound. Strong personalities and tempting mythologies are forever trying to tempt us out of our own rhythm, out of our own 'plotline', and into theirs. Often we're willing to yield our souls, to yield ourselves, to these 'fathers' - strongmen, cultures and ideas - in order to yield our responsibility and instead be spoonfed solutions to your ills. It is a kind of castration. A kind of Faustian pact. I will sell you my soul... but please give me direction! Please give me destination! Guide me, please! But something is lost in the process.

Lawrence and Kobayashi come to realise this. They know they can't just give up their souls again. They don't want to sell their soul to their profession, to their culture, to the Great Father, because they now realise it's what's most important. It is the spark of authenticity which gives character. Without soul what are we? Are we not just mechanical beasts on autopilot? Without creativity, without passion, without zeal, are we really alive at all?

If you lose your soul, you must find her again. If your soul has been stolen, you must fight for her back. You may lose every penny and risk bankrupcy like Lawrence, you may have to fight the dragon king of the chaos faction like Kobayashi, but even if a great Bowser or Gannon of culture stands in your way you must fight for her. Since to lose your soul, is to be dead. It is to lose contact with what matters. And with every bone in our body we must fight for what is us.

2020/09/03 Cardcaptor Sakura First Thoughts

I'm two episodes in to Cardcaptor Sakura, and I can tell it will be a blast. It's an anime which has sat on my plan to watch for some time, which I knew I'd enjoy but never got around to watching. After watching Utena recently, the idea of magical girls and their symbolism has been on my mind which I also hope to explicate here. Without further ado, let's explore the symbolism from the beginning of Sakura.

A good starting point would be to understand the purpose of the magical girl narrative. The story of the mahou shoujo is the feminine hero myth - essentially a coming of age story for girls. The narrative starts off when Sakura stumbles into her father's library in the basement, afraid of the snoring noises which were coming from there. A book down in the library begins to shine and, upon opening it and accidentally invoking the wind card, scatters the many cards contained inside the book across the city. To examine this idea, Jung's notion of individuation is handy. Individuation is the maturing instinct. It is the genetic operating system which presupposes development in a person. You can think of it like a series of containers labeled adolescence, adulthood, middle-aged, etc, with certain properties, waiting to be filled once you've attained a certain level of maturity given certain environmental factors. The best example, which is what Cardcaptor Sakura is showing, is when the genetic switch of puberty is flicked. You don't 'learn' new knowledge to initiate the physical and mental changes of puberty - all the changes are lying latent in the genome waiting to be activated. Returning to Sakura, by finding the book in her father's library, she has flicked that genetic switch, taking her first steps into adolescence. Her father represents the spirit and her ancestors - the dimly lit library belonging to her father is, therefore, the spiritual knowledge of her ancestors - the latent knowledge in the genome waiting to be awakened, which until now had sat there snoring. However Sakura isn't a finished product from purely awakening to adolescence. Her 'adolescence' container is empty and waiting to be filled. The cards, the experiences of youth, are now scattered across the land waiting to be collected. She's left only with the card of the wind, the pneuma, her own spirit, to guide her.

Another interesting point is the development of the image of masculinity across development. There are two older, seemingly more 'complete' men who she knows - her brother and her brother's friend (haven't learnt their names yet; brother's friend will be friend from now on). They form a kind of polarity in the eyes of the young Sakura between the kind and good friend and her evil mean older brother. This same polarity is in Sailor Moon, between the kind and good arcade employee Motoki-onii-san and evil mean Mamoru-san. However, like in Sailor Moon, I'm sure Sakura will become more disinterested over time with the friend as she realises, by virtue of maturing, that the 'nice guy' persona, that of the protective father, is not preferable to the 'bad boy' who's willing to put himself on the line for her. Puberty is a time when, for both men and women, the divine image of the opposite gender changes drastically from parent/caregiver to lover/family maker. For men, the equivalent would be going from a caregiving 'mother' figure to someone to give care to. By saying that Sakura in growing up will follow a similar plot to Mamoru from Sailor Moon, I am definitely not suggesting that there will be incest - simply that she'll alternate from one pole, that of a 'fatherly' nature as represented by the friends, to the other, that of the 'lover' as represented by the brother's character.

That change in polarity in the masculine image is shown in her magical girl rod. I don't wanna say it. I really don't. But her magical girl rod really is phallic. Sorry. It starts off as a small key - an implement for unlocking locks - and grows to a far greater size upon incantation. The head of the staff is even shaped like the head of a male chicken: a cock. But this shouldn't be understood to be primarily sexual in nature, however. Rather you should see it purely symbolically. To become a magical girl, you must embody the divine feminine, the feminine image which exists at the end of time in its whole and completed state. For this sense of completion, of the Jungian Self and independence, a women must, in a sense, possess her own phallus. To illustrate this, let's look to a story of the past. Pre-WW1 USA. The idea of women smoking was anathema. In several parts of the US, women were banned from smoking in public. However tobacco companies after the war wanted to increase their market by extending their product to women. In order to create a public shift in moral opinion, they enlisted the help of a Freudian analyst who said that to advertise cigarettes to women, you have to sell it as a symbol of independence. A woman who smokes holds her own phallus between her lips, the analyst explained. And, lo and behold, smoking for women took off in the US. In a sense, the development in maturity in the feminine hero's journey is to be able to control the container for man, the animus, in one's own heart. To be able to nurture the growth of that container into a healthy image of man and to have a stable relationship with that image is what much of the maturing process is about.

Sakura's magical rod also doubles as a hammer. In using her cards, she hammers down upon them with her staff, as if she were hammering an anvil. Maturity is much like this. If one's soul is a blade, a hammer is necessary to shape oneself into a perfect person in the flames of strife and hardship. And as the show progresses, I'm sure Sakura will learn to incorporate these different aspects of herself as she matures and develops into an adult on her journey. I'm going to go back to watching Cardcaptor Sakura, now. Until next time!

2020/08/14 Utena & The End of the World

If it cannot break out of its shell, the chick will die without ever being born.
We are the chick-
The world is our egg.
If we don't crack the world's shell, we will die without ever truly being born.
Smash the world's shell.
For world revolution.

In Utena, these words are a common refrain - whenever the dueling arena is entered, the cabal, the student council, read them. From the start they're mysterious. World revolution? What's that supposed to mean. Other phrases keep popping up also like 'The end of the world' which are kept obfuscated - a kind of code to figure out. So let's dive in to Utena and see the esoteric gold it holds.

When tackling esoterica, figuring out the vocab is key. 'The end of the world' is the first key term we see being thrown around. To understand this, let's say that the universe starts at a point of pure potential, which we can symbolise as an egg and, in our scientific mythology, can be understood as the big bang. The entropy of the universe is zero - all is calm and waiting to become. The end of the universe, therefore, is at maximum entropy which can be understood like an old chicken just before death. The chicken has reached its 'mostest' point. It has matured or 'individuated', as Jung called it, and achieved its quintessence. It has become itself in its purest form, fully actualising its potential. The end of the world is, therefore, akin to the Platonic form wherein everything has achieved its most perfected, true state. Akio-san, the chairman, is the End of the World, as we discover later, who is an archon, sending messages to the cabal, the student council, as to what shall be done next. Akio-san is this perfected state - he is a divine perfected form, namely the divine masculine form. He is the matured quintessence of masculinity, the fully actualised idea personified. Himemiya, the rose bride, as you may have guessed, is the complementary divine feminine form.

'As above, so below' as says the Emerald Tablet. What is happening on the outside, is also happening on the inside. The exterior plot we see is also a psychodrama within Utena's mind, as she contends with these corrupted manifestations of these archetypes within her psyche. In other words, Himemiya and Akio represent the unconscious representations of femininity and masculinity inside of Utena. As to how these archetypal manifestations became corrupted is explained through Utena's backstory.

As we later discover, Utena is the child who locked herself in a coffin. Her parents died and she became troubled, retreating into a shell away from society. But as the student council president reveals, Akio-san showed her 'The end of the world', which brought her out of the coffin to keep on living. In other words, Utena witnesses the divine, princely masculine form - a numinous vision in her time of need. To become a prince, to fight, to have honour, is the vision she received from her unconscious to keep her afloat, to arise her from despair. To survive beyond the grief, she donned princely garb and held up her sword to fight her demons. However as the oft played intro says:

This was all well and good, but so impressed was she by him that the princess vowed to become a prince herself one day. But was that really such a good idea?

Through becoming a prince, she reached a psychic homeostasis, able to walk into the future. But was this feasable in the long term? Her fantasies and strife say not.

Returning to Utena's story later, we'll first cover the rest of the student council and their woes. We'll cover them in the order they appear. Saionji, the green haired one, probably has the least to be talked about, since his backstory is never fully exposed. He mistreats Himemiya consistently because of his inferiority complex towards Touga, the red haried one. Always treated like a little brother, he directs his anger towards himself, and as a result to his anima, mistreating the Rose Bride. The next to appear is Miki, the blue haired one. He forever yearns for the days when he and his twin sister played the piano together. Himemiya comes along and plays just like his sister did - or at least how he imagined she did. The sister later confesses she was never very good at the piano, and was always being carried by her brother. And once when they were due to play together in a concert and her brother grew ill, those halcyon days of playing the piano together fell into disrepair. What Miki saw in his divine feminine was the times he was happiest - playing the piano with his twin sister. A time he became infatuated with, leading to infatuation with the Rose Bride also. Next is Juri, the yellow haired one. She forever regretted losing her best friend when her friend stole her crush. Instead, she carried a small photo of her in her amulet. What she saw in Himemiya was the divine friendship of yonder year corrupted, resulting in Juri often mistreating and disrespecting the Rose Bride. Next is Nanami, the peach haired imouto of the president. Because of her brother complex, she can't help but see any femininity as a threat to her love of her brother. Again, she mistreats Himemiya in an attempt to shoo away any attention coming her brother's way. Yet this rejection of the divine feminine has a counter-reaction in herself causing her to show a bossy 'animus-possessed' persona. Finaly is Touga, the red-headed president. He cares not for Himemiya, but instead is infatuated with Akio, the chairman, the divine masculine. Forever trying to imitate him and live a loveless playboy lifestyle, he can't find satisfaction or true relating, instead powered by the drive to achieve this divine form.

Heaven and Earth is a common theme. Heaven is the world of the rotating castle in the sky where the prince and princess live happily ever after, where the world is eternal, where the end of the world, the Platonic forms, reside. Whereas Earth: that's where all of us are. What is really the case resides - the material reality. In the final arc, we discover that the heaven where duals took place was never real - simply, it was being projected from the planetarium (literally projecting 'heaven'). Heaven as we see it on the outside, Jung would argue, is just a projection of our interior contents. The end of the world, dueling, Akio-san, Himemiya, world revolution, all exist inside their heads, being projected out into the world as fantasies of a heaven which doesn't exist.

But Utena needs world revolution: fast. The archetpyal forces of her mind are becoming twisted, and an interior symbolic revolution to save her, to reorder her, is crucial. Himemiya, her divine feminine, is being crucified. She's subservient and in so much pain. All because Utena, in order to stabilise herself after her parents' death, found salvation in becoming the archetype of the prince. And in becoming the prince, her unconscious divine masculine, Akio-san, becomes anything but princely. Despite his friendly appearances, he's a womaniser, a scoundrel and a cheat, who feels nothing from love. To achieve world revolution, to achieve a paradigmatic shift in her cognition, she must unbury her past and unbury the divine feminine she sealed away in the coffin. Only then can the chick break out of it's shell, and Utena can be truly born.

In the final battle, Utena picks princehood and fights her malformed divine masculine (who possesses and bullies her divine feminine). She dons the prince's garb, only to send ever-more daggers Himemiya's direction. In refinding her princely fantasy, she only torments her divine feminine ever more. Archetypes are autonomous entities within us. They are Dawinistically selected modes of thought with their own desires to be respected and manifested. For Himemiya, who is Utena's divine feminine archetype, the constant repression of her intents and desires leads her to insanity. Stabbing Utena in the back, Himemiya says: "You remind me so much of Dios when I loved him. But you can never be my prince, because you're a girl." Utena's divine feminine, Himemiya, wants a prince to be found externally rather than internally. Utena becoming the prince herself only torments the archetype's intentions ever further. And thus Himemiya, the oppressed feminine archetype who suffers and is backed into a corner ever more, can't help but stab her.

Utena manages to open the yonic door of the rose through emotion. She reconnects with her capacity for emotion, her animus, instead of merely playing the princely role of acting out of a sense of justice. She can now truly relate to others outside of a princely sense of duty. The pathway to her incorporating her positive feminity is opened. The coffin is opened. And she smashes the world's shell.

2020/07/27 Perfect Perfection

K-on is perfect perfection. The quintessence of the quintessence. Moe is not an easy emotion to put into words. It is a complex yet simple. Fiery yet calming. Pure joy, yet, at the flick of a switch, can become emotional beyond belief. Moe is, in a sense, a vision of heaven, a look at the ordinary lives of perfect people. There may be mistakes characters make, character do develop as the show proceeds, but throughout the show, truly moe characters begin and end with their unique lustre. They are whole, complete, eternal, perfect. And such a divine image can move the heart of man.

If moe is a glimpse at perfection, K-on is a glimpse at perfect perfection. It's hard to point to what K-on does differently to others in the genre. The same tried and tested techniques, same popular character archetypes. But it's perfect. K-on embodies the true form, the quintessence, of the genre. K-on gives you a vision of pure beauty, of timeless joy, to hold in your heart. K-on may be the closest moe has come to achieving God in art - it certainly is for me.

2020/07/02 Freud's Mystery Cult & Becoming God

Freud's ideas are bizarre. Talk to the modern man on the street about Freudian sexual theory, and they'll give you a double take. Much like the esoteric writings of the alchemical tradition, Freudian psychoanalytical tradition is full of terminology like anal retentive and penis envy which can only be understood through initiation. Initiation through the works of Freud. A true initiate who wishes to pass on the knowledge of this mystery cult, you train at a Freudian institution to become a priest. Freud's language can become so abstract and bizarre and divorced from any kind of psychological reality, he comes out with things like this:

It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot, upwards. Putting out fire by micturating —a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back —was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire. It is remarkable, too, how regularly analytic experience testifies to the connection between ambition, fire and urethral erotism.

What? Freud is essentially saying that mankind first discovered fire, taking the first steps to civilisation, by restraining his instinct to piss on the fire. What?

To the uninitiated in the psychoanalytic mystery cult, this appears utterly bizarre. But, as Freud suggests in the quote, the idea should rather be seen metaphorically - through the lens of the esoterica. Fire, here, is the burning fire within - the spirit - like the fiery nature of alcoholic spirits. Beyond spirit, fire is also the light of consciousness, like the fire stolen by Prometheus. By pissing on the fire, the primitive 'puts out' the light of consciousness. Only by suppressing the instinct to put out the light of consciousness, and repressing instincts in general, can man come to consciousness. The fire of consciousness was now under the control of man.

And the spiritual path of the psychoanalytical mystery cult becomes clear. Neurosis is the price for civilisation, as Freud said. To become civilised instincts must be suppressed. Self-mastery, the kingship of the ego, is paramount.

Freud was never much a fan of religion. He was one of the OG edgy atheists. To Freud, God was just wish-fulfillment - repressed desires manifested in a numinous representation. In a sense, then, Gods were created similarly to civilisation - as a result of repression. Only by suppressing instincts do they become manifest as a projection in the form of a God. For someone to be a God, therefore, they needed to engage in taboo. Their God-status was tethered to being above the law of ordinary men.

What better example than of the royal families of Europe. Incest, the highest of taboos according to Freud, was indeed the province of kings and nobles. This royal right led to many many wars. Take Charles II of Spain - a mentally slow man who was not suited for kingship - and the war of Spanish Succession. Note Queen Victoria, who married her cousin Albert, who carried the gene for haemophilia, which made it's way into the Russian royal family via her granddaughter, making Nicholas II's son weak, making them call Rasputin, leading Russia to revolution, leading to the cold war. Royal incest has caused a lot.

But in breaking incest taboos, royalty became God-kings. They were a layer above the ordinary folk. They were not beholden to the same laws.

The nobles of today partake in taboos we believe to be more abominable. Paedophilia. Epstein and his acolytes, who undoubtedly performed many other 'satanic' behaviors, are the best modern example of that. Why do we always believe that the 'elites' are satanists? Alex Jones may be on to something. When we see them, we see the archetype of the noblemen, of taboo breakers.

Through technology, however, we're all on our way to become 'Prosthetic Gods', as Freud named them. By technological augmentation, we make our deepest desires a semi-reality - from twisted porn (incest through-line) to the mass production of food and copious gaming. Bearing in mind that civilisation was produced through the suppression of instincts, technology allows our deepest darkest wishes, desires and instincts to manifest without collapsing society. Technology augments us into Gods, writhing in our own taboos. But as Freud points out, "present-day man does not feel happy in his Godlike character".

So what's the takeaway from all of this? Freudianism is a mystery cult. A set of esoterica whose information must be read as esoterica. To take the works of Freud too literally is to not see the wood for the trees. And through his ciphered doctrine, the idea of godhood and the modern condition can be inferred. However often with Freud, you have to wade through phallic forests which gatekeep out the squeamish to reach the hidden gold.

2020/07/22 Archetype as a Phenomenon of Neural Networks

AI in the form of neural networks is the closest approximation of the brain that has ever been achieved. To the extent to which in modern cognitive science, neural networks are commonly used as predictors for how the actually brain works. In such a vein, I'd like to show how Jung's system of archetypes fits snugly into such a model.

The tabula rasa model of the mind is dead. Dead as a door nail. The very idea that the mind is a 'blank slate' onto which everything can be written, coming into this world without knowledge nor skills, is unsustainable when scrutinised beneath the modern scientific lens. Acetophenone experiments in rats, for instance, have demonstrated that memories can even be passed on to their offspring. Besides, it is plainly obvious that the newborn has some tricks up its sleeve - it can cry, suckle, etc. All of that is brain function - a priori knowledge.

Going forward, it's important to note, as Jung writes time and time again, that archetypes aren't ideas - they are potentialities for ideas. They are the empty containers into which ideas find their structure. A good example of this would be in language. Children pick up language freakishly easily - they hear people talking around them and all of a sudden begin to speak themselves. Such a bonkers ability to pick up the syntactic complexity of language must originate in a hidden potential for language acquisition as part of our hardware from birth.

Another point to make is not one Jung made directly but is rather one which is a natural implication. Jung's idea of individuation - the ongoing maturing force of the psyche - presupposes that some collective (built-in) content of the psyche lies dormant, awaiting activation by maturity, by individuation. For example, the potentiality for puberty exists from birth. All of the genomic codes for the pubic revolution are programmed into you from birth. You just need to reach a certain save-point in individuation (maturity/age) in order to activate it.

Now onto the meat of the article. Here's an image of how a neural network networks:

The fancy symbols can be ignored, but we should focus on what on earth is going on here. We have input nodes, which are essentially senses - smell, sight, sound, and we have output nodes like muscular movements and speech. Simple enough so far. But what about these intermediary nodes? What are they for? Essentially they make the neural network run smoothly. They are abstractions, of sorts, to which neurons can link to instead of going straight to the output. Undoubtedly, evolution wouldn't be unaware of this major efficiency boost. When survival is involved, evolution never fails to find a way to find the best option. And so, just like in the AI, where hidden nodes are utilised, so too are they used in the mind. Jung would call these archetypes - potentialities for ideas, waiting to be wired to. Although, as we have said above, some wiring is already present from birth. After all, most people want a computer with an operating system. What can a computer do without an operating system?

Hidden nodes in the network can also be created dynamically. There is an old adage in neuroscience which follows thus: neurons which fire together wire together. Essentially if you keep having the same stimulus, like smelling acetophenone in the mouse example, whilst being given another stimulus, like an electric shock, the two ideas will wire together in your mind. For this process to occur in a more efficient way, hidden layers are produced to create receptacles for neural hubs to develop. We can think of these like Jungian complexes - a posteriori notions produced atop the a priori archetypal layer. The final arch-complex, the ego, would exist at the rightmost side of the hidden nodes, however it is not as if all output is mediated through it. Only conscious, intentful action passes through the ego. Complexes, hidden nodes deeper down than the ego, can wire directly with output nodes, producing phenomena like unconscious artistic symbolism, Freudian slips, neuro-linguistic programming, and whatever else. This effect can also be pathological in psycho-somatic illnesses like Alien Hand Syndrome.

Jung's model of the psyche, of autonomous nodes known as archetypes and complexes, appears to be the crystal slipper to the question of the mind's model. People often get caught up with the idea of archetype. They often agree that there's preconfigured data in the mind but struggle to swallow the idea of archetypes as the mind's building blocks. It seems way too woowoo and out there for there to be these sub-personalities in the mind. But this distributed cognition across nodes appears to be far more effective than a single nodal nous and, however much it flies in the face of Judeo-Christian common sense, is evidenced by the researches into AI.

2020/07/18 Primitive Autism

The word autism originates in auto - oneself. The force which breaks you out from your cultural milieu - the pneumatic wind from within overpowers the great geist, the zeigeist, of society. Autism breaks you out from cultural norms and expectation - it makes you a little different from those around you. But to see beyond the confines of the Platonic cave and look inside to find what the genome wants you to manifest in the world - that is the role of the autist. The autist takes us out of the cave to make huts, to plant new foods, to create civilisations, to enter space. To see beyond tradition and norms is the autists goal.

But so too is it his gaol. Many autists struggle to see beyond their view of the world and feel the societal winds flow around them. It can be a cage, isolating you from the rest of the world. The successful autist, therefore, must alloy their autism with norms and common sense if they wish to propel their vision successfully into the tribe. Else the autist is sidelined and isolated.

In many ways, the ancient Gnostic-Christian tradition was all about autism. Gnosticism, from the ancient Greek, >gnosis meaning a kind of experiential knowledge, originated in the alloying of Christ with Plato to form the view that the material world was evil - an imperfect creation of the Demiurge. The Demiurge, who was the abortion of a goddess Sophia who tried to fall pregnant alone, created the material world of rot and decay, as an imperfect facsimile of the 'pleroma', the ideal world of pure thought. The Gnostics went on to say that some people had a divine spark inside of them from the pleroma, others were just men made of mud - normies, NPCs. Clearly, the people who the Gnostics talk of are autists. They find the divine spark within themselves, rather than in the culture. They produce novelty for themselves, rather than simply conforming to others'. In some respects, Gnosticism represents the proto-myth of the Newtype.

Oh wait I'm rambling. I did in fact have an intention with writing this. As the title suggests, the topic is primitive autism. The answer for why autism exists has hopefully been made apparent: the autist looks outside of culture and inside themself to progress the tribe. But some aspects of autism remain puzzling. Why do autists like numbers? Databases? Categories? As a self-diagnosed autist, I love nothing more than to gleefully look over MAL and look at charts on MAL graph. But why? Being such a widespread phenomenon, what is the origin in the genome, the origin from our ancestors - why would the 2,000,000 year old soul inside of us want to do this?

Primitive man was just as autistic, albeit about different things. How many plants are there in the bush and the jungle? How many animals, fungi and soils, rocks, trees, and places? The hunter-gatherer was a nature autist - they obsessed over and categorised nature. In our monocultured world, we have a far more restrictive diet. Corn, rice, broccoli, wheat, carrots, etc... We farm these crops - they're popular so we make boat-loads of them. But in the wild, when you're just hunting and gathering, such liberties are not on offer. There are innumerable different plants you can gather, and never too many of the same kind. So you've gotta know where each and every one of those crops is growing, when it grows, when to harvest them, how to prepare them, what does it look like, are there any similar plants which are poisonous, etc. For hundreds of different food-stuffs, many more hundreds of dishes must be known. Many foods, like the Papuan Sago, is notoriously complex to prepare safely, and you have to wonder, who figured this one out? Must've been an autist.

The history of man is a process of greater and greater abstraction from nature. We started off as pure animalian instinct. Beyond which, we found gods, to account for these abstractions whirring around our heads. These principles, like goodness and justness, were later secularised by Plato who turned them into ideas. And ever since, as we retreat more and more into society and away from nature, our primitive instincts leave the gold standard and become free-floating in its abstract world. Forgetting nature, society becomes the new mother. Autism becomes much the same. These primitive instincts, once oh so necessary for survival, are now exapted - given a new outlet - just as the tongue, once designed solely to clean our teeth, become an instrument of speech. Instead of categorising plants we've seen in the jungle, we now categorise anime - and so much more. Categorisation of the essences of the animal kingdom in species, in the mind with archetypes, in history through epochs and eras, certainly tick my autistic boxes. All of these, perhaps misdirected, uses of libidinal energy (as in élan vital) originate from this primordial need to create categories, to analyse the world. And as the world becomes ever more complex, the instinct to categorise the world grows ever more; the will to impose order upon the world to consciously understand it becomes ever stronger. As we climb into the future, the autistic instinct grows ever stronger.

2020/07/15 Tetsuo's Cosmic Rebirth

Tetsuo's story is one of healing. Of rebirth. A story of overcoming his complex, of overcoming the corrupt darkness, of parting the clouds in his heart with divine light.

Neo Tokyo is a corrupt den of scoundrels. Civilsation has peaked under this system, and without room to grow, society becomes ill. The inevitable culmination of a Neo-Chinese regime. The complex Tetsuo has formed of Kaneda has impeded his development as a person - his individuation - for too long. Like Neo-Tokyo, Tetsuo forgot the will to grow, to become, and has instead stagnated: a child.

Tetsuo's negative Kaneda-complex tore him apart in violent neurosis. Only a vision of god - the image of what Jung called the self - could save Tetsuo. The self across time has arrived in societies under many names. Christians call the self Jesus. But the people of Neo-Tokyo named him Akira. The collective image who will save the diseased, neurotic society. The image of psychic wholeness which will bring both Neo-Tokyo and Tetsuo's psyche into health. Lead both back on track to psychic growth, to individuation, Akira.

The complex - itself an orb - is acracked. Unpiped, veins and arteries flailed asunder, departed from their host. Neuro-reroutings to this pulsating psychic tumour, this thief of psychic energy, this complex, fall as Tetsuo comes into consciousness of his condition. In search of wholeness, the nut was cracked, revealing nothing but brain. The analysed royal nous. The numino-futurist truth. Beneath psychis is physis.

The neurosis caused by Tetsuo's inferiority-complex became too much. Growing powerful in his mind, his complex became aligned with his ego, leading to ego-inflation. Tetsuo, to whom the world was now beholden, had discovered the power of the self.
His destiny was now twined with the stars: the cosmos. He had a vision of true god - the god image which resides in each man. The very image of healing. Thinking Akira had chosen him, his ego only inflated ever more in a Thanatotic frenzy. But the power Akira holds is far stronger than any body can hold. Ego-inflation, confidence at holding back this new found power of Akira, was critically undermined. The powers of the unconscious, of the self, of the body, of Akira, proved to be far greater than he could have ever known.

Only through a cosmic rebirth can the complex be overcome. Only through death can birth happen again. Neo-Tokyo's rebirth occurs in the baptismal font of the ocean, buildings eroded by pneumatic winds of the coming age. The dark clouds of cultural neurosis pass in Neo-Tokyo, blessed by the new sun; its stunted growth now unimpeded to bloom anew. Tetsuo's stunted personality - the Tetsuo possessed by Kaneda's spirit - has died too. The holy cleansing light of Akira, the radiant rays of god, the emanations of the one, psychic wholeness, the mandala, the self. The perfect orb. White and pristine. The egg of the future. Neo-Tokyo is washed aclean. Tetsuo is healed anew.

2020/07/06 Key the Metal Idol and the Rose

Key the Metal Idol is not a popular show. Many of those reading, as few as they may be, are unlikely to have watched Key. So going forward I'll assume either you've seen the show or you're unlikely to ever get around to watching it.

I'll begin with a short description of the show - although that may be tough given its nature. The protagonist, Key, is a powerful psychic Miko, as is later discovered, but, after a traumatic incident in her youth, becomes a 'robot'. Devoid of emotion. But the real reason she lost her emotion was because she had all her 'Gel' sucked out. Gel is a Sheldrakian mind substance, present in all humans, but highly concentrated in the psychic Mikos, giving them their powers. The evil boss is trying to suck up everyone's gel to make telekinetic war machines but to do this he has no choice but to set up huge idol concerts. Key, in order to become human again, must develop a devout following of over 30,000 people, and to do this, she trains to become an idol.

The main theme of Key is about humanity and dolls. Who is the doll and who is the human? Where is the line drawn? Key is a human who acts like a doll, whereas Miho on stage, the idol, is a doll who acts like a human. So at what point does the doll become human?

Christianity has an answer for this: love. A certain kind of love - namely Agape. Agape is a kind of selfless love, a love given from God - a love that gives you your humanity. There is a problem in our definition of (a) what is alive and (b) how far should our morals reach. All our tribe - they deserve life and honour. With strangers, it gets a little blurrier. Animals... I won't kill one for fun, but sure I will to eat. Plants, I'll just trim for aesthetic value or shred a leaf in my hand to keep my fingers busy. Crystals... they certainly grow? Life is very much a spectrum in the materialist model. Buddhists won't hurt any living things - by which they mean animals. But there is certainly an argument to make that some plants and fungi are smarter than shellfish. Where is this line drawn? Regarding the moral part of the question, Christianity has an answer. All men are loved by God. Through agape, through God's selfless love, a man's humanity is given. It is only through agape that a man is human rather than a sack of meat - a kind of divine power, one must admit. It is the invisible part which makes something precious, as Saint-Exupery says in the Little Prince. In Christianity, the modern bedrock of our humanism was lain.

Key, with her repressed gel, has lost her capacity for love. However, ever so often, her human self explodes out of her, with exceptionally powerful telekinetic results - much like Akira. And, in many of those instances, roses appear.

Here's one such example. During an incident, wherein her human self is released, Key saves the day firing a rose, stem first, into the eye of the evil robot. Each incident in which her true self is unleashed leads to roses firing. Roses are flower language for love - intense love - the agapic love from God which she reconnects with her as she temporarily reassumes human form. But more interestingly, on a similar note, is the relation with Christ. The rose has typically been associated with the blood of Christ, the thorns with the crown of thorn, the rose's five petals with the five holy wounds. Not to mention the Rosicrucians - an alchemical secret sect of Christianity whose main symbol was the rose cross - a symbol which predates their organisation.

These two meanings of the rose are in fact one. The rose in the centre of the cross is the centre of the Christian mandala - the divine agapic love found in wholeness, with communion with God, with the contemplative mindset. And that is what Key is undergoing in the show - her suppressed personality flickers with mandalic patterns of wholeness. Patterns which, Jung states, are typical of highly neurotic and psychotic people. Images to mend the fissure (neurosis) between Key's two halves. They are patterns of psychic completion which are projected into consciousness or into the world around, an attempt to engender inner change - much like an alchemical transmutation.

And project, Key does, that very rose, that very symbol of agapic love, that love which makes us human, into the eye of the doll. The doll who, by virtue of being a doll, is not human and is instead a tier below man, as Iklone points out. It takes a god to give a sack of meat humanity insofar as it takes a man to give life to a doll. The robot is, therefore, in losing his eye, blinded by that very divine love as an unworthy recipient.

The finale takes place in a theatre with crowds who come to see the last performance of the doll idol Miho. There, the big bad boss attempts to steal the gel of everyone in the crowd, leaving them in a steep stupor. In essence, their essence has essentially been taken away - their soul, their godliness, their agapic love from God has been snatched. They say that those whose gel has been stolen lose their energy and their personality, their vigour for life. It's no wonder - their ego-consciousness is being partitioned off from their unconscious mind. The axis has been snipped. And no longer are they connected to the deep divinity derived from the depths of the collective unconscious. Abandoned by God. Losing their energy source and will for life. No longer do they feel God's love. And flop they go.

But Key is now an idol. The idol rouses the soul of a man. Heals the soul, gluing him back together. The very word idol derives from a worshiped god. That word was no accident. Only an idol can re-evoke that divine love. In Jungenspräken, that would be the 'anima projection'. The anima, as the collective unconscious' gatekeeper, is the thread which every man must connect to to stay in contact with their life force. And as we see ever so often in anime, the idol sings her song to save the day. Music is a transcendental message to a higher part of oneself, as Schopenhauer says.

And like Mary, the love which emanates from the idol's song brings back the crowd members humanity. As ambassador to God's love, as the mother of Christ, Key reconnects the crowd members with their souls, channeling the agapic gel. Mary is, after all, the one who brought Christ, the son of God, of agape, into being. Birthing love, the rose, Christ's blood. A kind of Platonic midwifery, reconnecting with God's love, and achieving enlightenment. Reconnecting with that invisible part of the world which gives meaning to us. And by engendering that in the crowds, so too does Key engender it in herself, becoming human.

2020/06/25 Makoto Shinkai's Pathetic Phallus

Shinkai makes "Stories about a boy and a girl who are always stretching out their hands towards each other. And yet the boy's hand never reaches the girl's crotch"

-Tomino

Shinkai's conception of woman is that they dwell in the sky. They are elusive and cannot be found. For Shinkai, man can only stretch out their hand to the heavens and pray that the hand shall be taken in divine union.

Carl Jung talks about the idea of passive eros in a man with regards to the anima. Passive eros (the anima in a man governing the eros) is when a man believes that the world will happen to them. That a divine lady from the sky will arrive and save him - much like an intervening mother. Indeed, a passive eros is that of the mother - a maladapted eros which hasn't developed past the stage of mother, which hasn't formed itself as an entity separate. This is the m'lady malady which forms the nice guy who believes that women should come to him. Precisely speaking, Shinkai is a cuck.

But Shinkai is trying to get over his cuck-ness one step at a time. In this session of Shinkai's prolonged psychodrama, he attempts to imagine what it must be like to be an assertive man - an active eros. Yet he struggles, he really does, to give an accurate imagining of what that must look like. Throughout the film something always feels off, something always feels unrealistic but not in a fantastical metaphoric way, but rather in a 'I don't understand what it's like to be a man' way. In his assessment, Tomino was dead on in psychoanalysing Shinkai. Weathering with You is a compensatory fantasy for Shinkai to project his repressed eros which is itself underdeveloped.

The gun - a seemingly nonsensical plot device with which the story progresses with his arrest, etc - is, in fact, symbolic of Shinkai's own phallus. He uses his gun to first rescue the girl (albeit misfiring...) and, after that whirlwind of activity, finds the gun again in the climactic scene where he points the gun at policemen, typically emblematic of authority, paternity, and the father figure. The policemen, also, stand around pointing guns at the protagonist. The protagonist, therefore, needs to keep hold of and fire his own phallus to protect himself from the father authority. Shinkai's repressed feelings of disrespect towards the father are wrapped up in his own Oedipal fantasy. Because of Shinkai's father complex, he fantasises about him rebelling against the father but, in reality, he is unable to do so. And because he is not able to go beyond the father figure, his eros will always remain passive, since, without killing your father (metaphorically, of course), you cannot reclaim the mother-imago to be projected onto other women. Again, Tomino's analysis is correct. Shinkai can only imagine grabbing his own crotch, not the crotch of the girl, even in his projected fantasies.

Therefore, from the work Weather with You, I believe that Shinkai has a father complex, is a virgin, a nice guy and a cuck.

2020/06/23 Bakemono no Ko & Imitation

Imitation is the deepest function of the brain. Before speech and storytelling, imitation and play were only ways to pass down information about the world from parent to child. You can envisage a trinity of information transferal techniques - storytelling, play, and imitation. In the modern times, storytelling has certainly come to dominate. At school, much of the learning which is done, even in maths and sciences, is story based. When you are told how a plant respires, or how the force of gravity operates, you are, in effect, being told an exceptionally abstract story. However, so much is learnt not from books, but rather from imitation and play. How did you learn how to speak in the first place? How to act around strangers? How to walk, to learn, to socialise... far more, upon reflection, is learnt through play and imitation rather than by simply hitting the books.

As Bakemono no Ko points out in the training montage scene where the boy begins to understand how to learn from his master, the monk man likens it to imprinting in ducks. The first being a duck sees when they hatch is their mother, whether they're duck, human, or whatever else. People operate similarly. A young boy sees their mother or father, imprints (say, an archetype) upon them and begins to imitate them, to become like them. In a sense, they sync. Yet every syncing is a two-way street. Bakemono no Ko shows this - just as the boy begins to imitate his master, so too does his master change to match his student. Such a relationship is symbiotic, in a sense, molding both master and student to one another, forming a positive growth spiral.

But the emphasis on imitative learning isn't to dismiss story-based learning. The student manages to flit back into Tokyo, where he develops a love for reading and academics. The film, therefore, presents the world of the beasts, where imitative learning without explanations - a more primal way of understanding the world - is paramount, and contrasts it to modern Tokyo where to succeed you must study, using a more storytelling-based understanding of the world. Which one is best? The climax of the show resolves that conundrum - a balance of the two, of course.

Now onto the more spooky portion of the article. The film brings out, subtly, the para-psychological element to imitation.
During the student's training via imitation, all of a sudden the imitation clicks. He begins to understand rather than just copy. More so, he begins to imitate without looking at what his master is doing, knowing exactly what he would do. At first, this may sound like a beautiful narrative device - which it is - but the phenomenon is, spookily enough, real.

The Opportunity rover was sent to Mars in 2004 to gather information about the surface of Mars, eventually discovering there to be water on Mars against all the odds. One of the major difficulties the project faced was actually communicating with the rover. Around eight minutes, it took, to send a communication by satellite to the rover to tell it to move out of the way. And, given this multi-billion dollar piece of kit is roaming the rocky hills of the red planet, you'd want to make sure that the rover doesn't crash. In short, they used imitation to solve the issue. They had pros, much like shamans, pretend to be the Mars Rover to understand how it thinks. One such operator explains what its like to be a Mars rover, saying:

So that's [points to her cell phone on the desk] close-up rock, and then I know that there’s a disconnect [raises hands to either side of her face ] between left and right eyes [on the Rover]. So I have to move my head like this [tilts her head down, rotates at the waist, tilting right hand higher than left], and I have my left eye here [pauses], and then this [swivels to the opposite side, keeping head down, with left hand higher than right] is my view from the right eye.

My body by the way is always the Rover, so right here [touches chest] is the front of the Rover, my magnets are right here [touches base of her neck], and my shoulders [touches shoulders] are the front of the solar panels and that's [leans forward, splays arms out behind to either side at 45 degrees] the rest of it. So I have all kinds of things [i.e. antennae] sticking up over here [gestures to back], um [laughs]. But when I'm taking a picture of something in the atmosphere then it helps me to kind of look up [looks up and sits up straighter ], being the Rover, and this is the front of me [touches chest] and then I put my head up [puts head up, looks back and forth ] wherever, to whichever vector I'm looking at ...

But then it becomes somewhat spookier. Just as in Bakemono no Ko, where the student imitates without looking, similar syncronistic effects occur between researcher and rover:

I was working in the garden one day and all of a sudden, I don't know what's going on with my right wrist, I cannot move it - out of nowhere! I get here [to the planning meeting], and Spirit has, its right front wheel is stuck! Things like that, you know? ... I am totally connected to [Spirit]!

Spirit is, by the way, the other rover sent with Opportunity.
Another researcher tells a similar story:

Interestingly, I screwed up my shoulder ... and needed surgery on it right about the time that Opportunity's IDD [arm] started having problems [with a stiff shoulder joint], and I broke my toe right before Spirit's wheel [broke], so I'm just saying, maybe it's kind of sympathetic, I don't know, [laughs] I mean I don't think there's any magic involved or anything but maybe it's some kind of subconscious thing, I don't know.

Whatever the cause, this peculiar effect, as seen in Bakemono no Ko, is a field of fascination for the cognitive scientist to run abound in. There is something deeper to this idea of imitation. From the duck looking for its mother, to the shaman attempting to channel a spirit, there's something distinctly interesting about the phenomenon.

2020/06/16 Mother Nature and Father Spirit - Anime Sci-Fi, Utilitarianism and the Earth

Quite a mouthful of a title and, I promise, as much of a ramble as ever. Moments ago, I completed Terra e, a Madhouse film from 1980. The themes of the show are multitudinous, spanning from the utilitarian supercomputer, as shall be paralleled in Psycho-Pass, to an attempt to return to the old ways and the meaning of Earth. So, what does Earth mean to us? At our current technological level, we can understand nothing but the Earth. We are held down by Earth's gravity, unable to escape Mother Nature's clutches. Yet Sci-Fi as a genre wants to better understand our relation to Earth. When mankind leaves home and says goodbye to its mother, how shall we treat it? Will we return home every now and then for festivities? Will we storm off, leaving the house in a mess, forgetting about our mother and leave her to waste away in an intergalactic nursing home? Attached at Mother Nature's teat as we are, it is no wonder that we can only imagine what that relationship will one day be like. In Terra e, Earth has been left in disarray, left to heal itself until man can return. Instead, the last bastions of mankind exist on a series of colonies across the galaxy all controlled by a supercomputer named Mother Eliza. Mother Eliza, who is subservient to an even greater supercomputer on Earth called Grandmother, operates a utilitarian hell wherein children are grown in vats and given to randomised households who operate as their parents for 14 years before they take on a new child. Upon turning 14 they are brainwashed to forget their childhood and become a model citizen. The idea is much similar to the Sybil system of Psycho-Pass, albeit on a less extreme level. And, imagining a descending hierarchy here, an even weaker example would be that of the 'Nanny state' of modern times - in essence, an attempt at making sure there is comfort and equality between people at the expense of freedom. Equality and freedom are two extremes on the same axis, forever at odds, whose golden mean must be sought by any society. But interestingly, in all three depictions mentioned, the spirit of society, the zeit-geist or culture, is feminine.

The idea of the World Parents is a term in comparative mythology which refers to the idea of having a Mother Nature and a Father Spirit. We see this across world cultures: Gaia and Uranus, Rangi and Papa, Apsu and Tiamat (and, in a more roundabout way, Nut and Geb), wherein Heaven and Earth are once a unity but are now separated. Some of the most primitive forms of worship, like that of totemism, are, in a sense, the patriarchal preservation onto which is projected the idea of society. A tribe's totem acts as the container through which the tribe's traditions can be passed down to the next generation. The idea stems from a primitive idea: the Heavens fertilise the Earth through rains, just like how a man fertilises a woman in intercourse, birthing food, nourishment, to appear out of the ground. Just as mother feeds a baby from the teat, so to does the Earth feed us. In contrast, the men protect the tribe from danger, just as culture, the spirit of the tribe, the stories passed down of other's mistakes, also protect you from harm. Through myths and storytelling, experiences no longer had to be lived by each and every child - they could now be lived vicariously, resulting in the society's progress. And in short that is the association of femininity and Nature and of masculinity and Spirit.

In our examples before, however, the spirit has always been portrayed as feminine - why is that? Once such institutions rule your life and your actions are under constant scrutiny and control, the masculine spirit becomes emasculated, imitating feminine nature. Instead of threats arising predominantly from nature, such as wolves in the forest and famine, the state, the culture, assumes that role. Society becomes so abstracted from nature, that mankind forgets their true mother - they cannot recognise her anymore. Instead, they look to an evil aunt to give them sustenance. In our weakest example, the Nanny state, for instance, we are no longer fed by the ground but rather by the state since there is such a large amount of abstraction between us and where our food comes from. That's just on a smaller scale, though - imagine the world of Psycho-Pass, where you are unlikely to see a farm in your daily life. Then in Terra e where, in the massive colonies, nature is rare, food is undoubtedly made by automated hydroponics of some kind, and the miracle of birth is seen as outdated and 'irrational'. Where do food and children come from? The state, in Terra e. Mother Eliza is almost like a totem worshiped by its citizens.

The story of Terra e revolves around the idea of a psy-powered people known as the Mu, who are being hunted down since they are seen as being too powerful. An interesting combo of Gundam and Shinsekai Yori. A small tribe of the Mu do live, however, outside of the colonies. That tribe makes their way to an ex-colony where they set up base and make a small place to call home under the leadership of Soldier and guidance of Physis - a seemingly immortal mystic whose name is ancient Greek means matter (as in physics; matter -> mater -> mother). These two leader figures represent the masculine spirit and feminine nature quite well. In their new settlement, they learn about farming and natural birth, forming a agrarian society with harvest festivals and Morris dancing. This society begins to relearn about the old ways, about their birth-mother. However it's difficult to return home for a permanent stay - they are once more hunted down and ousted from their visit by an attack from the followers of Mother Eliza. But just as the title suggests, they end up going back home to Mother Earth. They've found their real mother instead of the fake Mother Eliza and Grandmother who ran their ship. But in order to rediscover Mother Earth, first the fake mother must be killed.

Both sides of the conflict managed to find common ground, and made up with one another, seeing Grandmother and Mother Eliza as the real enemy. They kill Grandmother which, upon her death, reawakens Terra. Terra is a masculine computer, as signified by his masculine voice, on Earth, set to boot up upon the death of the fake mother. Only once the fake mother, the diseased mother spirit, dies, can the true masculine spirit reawaken - this being the case in the transpersonal and personal sense. Only in the last moments, when the computer Terra boots, is the double meaning of the title understood: not only have they returned to the Earth, but so too have they returned to the father spirit which dwells beside the Earth as its opposite.

Sci-fi has always been fascinated with our relationship with the Earth. We are not biologically programmed to love it - as animals, we knew nothing but it - but there is nonetheless a certain tingle seeing pictures of the Earth from outer space. Will we leave it in ruin like in Cowboy Bebop, like in Terra e or even Wall-e? How much will we yearn to return, like Ed from Bebop, or will we realise there's nothing left for us there like Faye? We fantasise about leaving Earth, but once anyone goes, how long will it be before they can't wait to return, to see real wild life? Only time can tell.

2020/05/12 Sailor Moon and Bluebeard

The main recurrent theme in Sailor Moon is that of deceit. Preying upon young girls by promising love, promising jewellery, accessories and so forth is the modus operandi of the first henchman, Jadeite. Jadeite aims to rob these young shoujo of their youthful libidinal energy - libido in this case in the Jungian sense of life energy rather than the Freudian sense of purely sexual energy. Middle school, where Usagi resides, is a time when much of this youthful energy comes to the fore. Suddenly, puberty kickstarts a latent part of the psyche which lay unrustled prior. And it is no wonder that myths across history, from ancient French folklore to the modern bishoujo senshi, warn young girls about the danger which this newfound power entails.

Bluebeard is a tale of French folklore, about a girl who falls for a nobleman with a bright blue beard. The nobleman, known as Bluebeard, marries her, against the advice of the girl's sisters who hear that Bluebeard has had many wives who have all gone missing. After the wedding, Bluebeard says he must head off on a business trip, and leaves the mansion and it's many keys in the hands of the girl. Bluebeard tells her that she can enter any of the doors in the mansion apart from the smallest door, which is opened with the smallest key. Yet curiosity took hold of the naive young girl, and she opened the door with the smallest key, and blood began to seep out of the lock. The door opens, and inside were all of Bluebeard's past wives who had gone missing, dead and tortured. Bluebeard returns at once and, seeing the door has been opened, pursues the girl, in a fury. And just as the girl is at death's doors, her brothers arrive to hack Bluebeard to death, saving her.

Like Bluebeard, Jadeite plays upon girls' youthful ignorance. By using their libidinal energy against them, deceiving them, by offering romantic cruises, romantic letter recitals on the radio, the chance to be an idol, etc, Jadeite intends to steal 'energy', just as Bluebeard did with the young girl's love. In a sense, this is the biggest threat to naive young girls - the idea of being swept away by a deceitful man who will lead them down the wrong path, misdirecting their libido and their life. So what is the solution Sailor Moon provides? Just like in Bluebeard, the solution lies in curiosity.

Bluebeard's true nature was uncovered by the girl's curiosity of what was in the door, and thereby saving herself by discovering the truth about him. And that too is what Luna nurtures the sailor scouts to do - to become curious in strange incidents and wonder whether what's going on is normal or if people being deceived en masse. As the show progresses, Usagi begins to hone this ability and, in turn, hones her truth-seeking skill, helping her to become more self-sufficient, better able to fend for herself and, as a result, more mature, exorcising harmful lies by the power of the moon. Truth is much like the moon, after all. A pure, absolute which can never be touched nor interacted with - never reached nor understood, shining light upon the sea of darkness, of deceit. And this is who Sailor Moon is. When Usagi becomes her higher self, becoming Sailor Moon, she exorcises deceit through the heavenly light of the moon, the light of truth. And once the power of the moon shines light upon lies, the youthful libido is freed from its Bluebeard-like captor, ready to push for healthy development.

Yet for Usagi, deceit is not only her enemy but also her ally. She deceives other's through Sailor Moon's mysterious identity and by changing her appearance with her wand to protect herself. Whilst embodying the moon, embodying truth, you must fight by moonlight, covered by the cloak of darkness, of deceit. To be able to seek truth for yourself whilst using deceit in a productive way is, in summary, the feminine hero's journey as understood by Sailor Moon. It is setting your basal libidinal desires and drives on the right track by seeking truth through curiosity and questioning. Seeking truth, the moon, the very symbol of femininity, to free yourself from your childhood naivity, from your misdirected libido, from Bluebeard, in order to become an adult. And with truth, the nightscape of deceit is enlightened. And by the power of the moon, the deceitful are punished.

2020/05/14 What was BNA trying to say?

The question posed today is what was BNA trying to say. Themes of racial and group identity certainly shine through in the show - the animals being an oppressed class and all that. But the message becomes more interesting once the nature of the Beast Factor was revealed. The beastmen went into berserker mode because they were in too close quarters with one another - essentially the beasts went mad from being multicultural. Within their DNA (or rather BNA) they had an instinct to become murderous monsters should enough beastmen of different ethnicities appear in a single area. The genetics appear to despise the very essence of multiculturalism - for a beast, after all, a lion and a zebra living side by side without the lion tucking in to the zebra and the zebra packing shop and running away, is wholly anti-instinctual. Yet in spite of the fact that their ideals, their aspirations for the oppressed classes of beastmen to live in an intersectional paradise, repress their instincts, they decide to pursue this goal. So far the show doesn't seem like the kind of show the socially conscious Netflix wants on their station.

Then we have our protagonist and her friend, Michiru and Nasuna, who are a tanuki and a fox respecively. Both of these animals are revered in Japanese folklore as shape-shifting animals, as demonstrated in the show with the girls' ability to morph their bodies. This very morphing ability can be understood as a mercurial spirit - a shapeshifter who can't even figure out their form, a Trickster figure if you will. Foxes particularly in Japanese folklore are seen as conniving, as they are in Western lore like in Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox - very much playing into to this Trickster archetype. What's more, Michiru and Nasuna boarder between mankind and beastman, just like other archetypal Trickster characters like Pan who boarders between animal, man and god. The common thread for these mercurial Tricksters is their many identities and many faces. This will be important later on.

Next we have Oogami, who is Ginroh, literally silver wolf, who is essentially the Zeitgeist or guardian spirit of Animacity. He sees the genocide taking place before his eyes and sees a vital need for beastman identity to be kept alive, not to let them be subjugated and their identities to be thieved from them by his antagonist, Alan, who is later revealed to be a golden Cerberus. This battle between gold and silver, between pure yet haughty and impure yet honest, is an interesting archetypal idea. The idea appears in Gintama, when the robotic hypnotic Kintoki mesmerises everyone into thinking that Gintoki never existed and his gold equivalent was all that there ever was. Another story, this time a folklore tale from the Celts, is that of Gold-tree and Silver-tree - a tale of how a queen named Gold-Tree tries to kill her daughter, the princess, named Silver-tree out of jealousy of her beauty. Alan, therefore, attempts to purify the whole playing field by making everyone human, so only his 'elite' bloodline of purebred beastmen may continue. As an elite, as a god ruling from the heavens, as gold, he believes it right to impose his cultural genocide within Animacity whilst keeping his own identity a secret, in true Straussian fashion. From his position from above, he lives in the world of being, in the eternal city of Ukiyo-e, in a unchanging pure world. Contrastingly, as shown in the motif of Gold vs Silver, Ginroh is a god who lives amongst the people rather than one who lives in the clouds. He is impure, insofar as he lives amongst man who is tainted by becoming and the material processes of life and death, yet nevertheless divine. Whereas the gold god, Alan, wants to subjugate beastmen by pacifying, the silver god, Oogami, wants to save them and fight for their continued existence. He is their zeitgeist, after all.

The solution to the show is quite deus ex-like, yet it is interesting. Through 'antibodies', or whatever other scientific paganistic term they wish to use, they use the blood of Michiru and Nasuna, our mercurial Tricksters, to make a vaccine to prevent the spontaneous monster-shifting. In essence, the beastmen must incorporate a little of the Trickster archetype in order to get along with one another. In order to co-exist with one another. In order to achieve a successful multicultural nation. Slavoj Zizek reminisces about his youth in Slovenia saying that everyone in Yugoslavia used to joke about each other. Slovenes made fun of Serbs, Serbs made fun of Croatians, Bosnians made fun of Macedonians, etc. But when tensions rose, and ethnic hatred heated, the jokes stopped. The very act of being able to joke about stereotypes, about ideas, about our very many differences, is how societies function effectively, how people don't take these differences seriously. A good joke proves you truly don't mean whatever you're saying - it means that we're all comfortable enough about the topic that we're able to joke about it and able to acknowledge it without repression. Humour is a complex function of the mind. Specific timings, specific ideas said in certain poetic ways elicit an uncontrollable response in us: a laugh. And it is the Trickster archetype who rules over the kingdom of jokes. The mercurial Trickster is the comedian who has a license to say whatever he likes, so long as he says it in a funny way - just like how the court jester was solely allowed to mock the king. Only through the joke can subversive ideas and new, uncomfortable ideas be brought to people's attention without eliciting a serious response, without eliciting violence. The beastmen are, after all, violent. The show is at pains to point out that the beastmen aren't like normal people - they're fast to get their blood pumping ready for a brawl. A social commentary, perhaps, on people's aggressiveness towards other political groups, which is more common than ever today. A social commentary on our failure to provide sufficient comedy, sufficient Trickster energy, into the realm of discourse, and instead present it through confrontation and anger. Just like the beastmen, we need an injection of mercurial spirit to produce a happy multicultural society for the future.

2020/08/14 The Japanese Mindset & Anime as the Platonic Ideal

The title of the piece can be interpreted as being somewhat racist, but I preface the idea saying that some of this idea came from Miyazaki's essays. The premise is thus: the Japanese have always had a more symbolic way of viewing the world. Miyazaki gives the example of the ninja stories of his youth. The ninja were said to be able to walk on water using special gadgets and the Japanese gobbled all of the legends up like gospel whereas the child of the west would say "that's not possible". Alongside Jesus there is another prophet in the west: Socrates. And through Socrates' guidance we immediately put down fanciful notions with our rational faculties. Looking further back in Japan's history, we see ukiyo-e and other major art movements all being highly symbolic and stylised. In the west, we do have impressionism yet it still resembles reality, contrasting with ukiyo-e which has far different proportions, augmenting what is seen. Miyazaki goes on to talk about how shoujo manga doesn't adapt well into anime, principally because shoujo manga is designed to be the rosiest, mythologised dream of how love goes on, as if the story were a sweet memory the characters look back upon from the future. And much of anime is the same way. Parents are virtually absent in most anime and are glorified vending machines at best. Why's this? Because the ideal image of youth is one without parents, one where you're free to go on your journey, make memories with friends, etc. K-on is a prime example. Yui's parents are comically absent throughout the show, with Ui cleaning and cooking for her, since the show is Yui's rose-coloured journey through her youth, learning to play in the guitar, growing up. A slice of life show would never be made in the west, could never be made in the west, should never be made in the west. For whatever reason, western shows need overarching conflict, they need a sense of 'the good times' contrasted with 'the bad times'. Few western shows are just the good times - most likely because the idea seems farfetched to the western mindset. It would not be realistic, would not be properly Socratic and logical for there only be good times in this show - "I can't relate to that!" they may say. Yet the pure Hero's journey of shounen, the pure romance of shoujo, the pure joy of slice of life, the pure darkness and strife of edgy shows, all these genres are so pure, unpolluted, unbalanced, unrealistic. But that's how we like it.

As we make everything more itself, we reach the Platonic idea. Using the logic that for sensory data to resemble an idea, the resemblance must presuppose the idea, Plato came up with his theory of forms - absolute ideas which exist before birth. Yet to access these ideas, we must find them in the world, we 'recollect' instead of learn. My man, Carl Jung, observed in unconscious activities like creativity, dreams and myths, similarities in symbols and story patterns which her termed the archetypes - genetically passed down ideas which sit in the brain, essentially borrowing Plato's ideas to describe psychological observations. Ignoring the scientific angle for a moment, focusing on the philosophical angle, the form is the purest of the pure - the concentrated version of whatever is observed. For instance, the example Plato gives is that of 'the Equal', the idea of equality, of things being the same. He states, using the logic above, that the idea of equality must presuppose the observation a bundle of sticks being the same thing - a stick. And he goes on to argue that the equality of the bundle of sticks is an 'imperfect' version of the idea of equality. In the world, in the imperfect living world of becoming, the idea, the thing in of itself, can never be found. Those belong to the realm of the soul, of being, of the eternal. Tying this back, all art, in the Platonic model, is an imperfect representation of perfection - the perfect shounen, the perfect shoujo, the perfect SOL, etc. What makes them imperfect is their worldliness, the fact that they are perceived through the only mechanism the mind can understand. We have the archetypal story built into us, the idea, and the resonance of the story is how well it holds up against the archetype, however imperfect the archetype's representation in matter may be.

My argument, then, is thus: that anime is a closer to the Platonic form than live-action shows. A closer imperfection of the archetypal stories they try to tell. Through using symbolic understanding, greater abstraction from what reality looks like, reduced colour palettes, lines instead of shading, and, as mentioned in the first paragraph, showing the ideal as opposed to the real, anime is far closer to perfection than live-action shows. Hence, as Plato would undoubtedly agree, anime is better than live-action.

2020/04/22 3.0 + 1.0 = 4.0?

Eva 3.0+1.0 is no longer to be released shortly after it's Goliath of a wait. So we shall ponder on the meaning of this sum - doesn't 3.0+1.0 just equal 4.0? Why not just call it 4.0, Anno? Anno is a big fan of esoteric Christianity and it's many forms, so let's tear out the guts of this archetypal sum.

The axiom of Maria, an expression with its origins in alchemy is thus: "One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth." A seemingly impenetrable phrase, in fairness, yet the question of the attainment of 'fourness' the feeling of completion, the four cardinal directions of the mandala, is of the utmost goal for the alchemist. Plato's Timaeus holds a similar conundrum in the opening line as said by Socrates "One, two, three; but where, my dear Timaeus, is the fourth". The banquet cannot be complete without four, after all, Plato says. Plato's influence certainly surfused the alchemical tradition, however, with alchemy itself having many of its dictums originating from Neoplatonism or its inversion, Gnosticism. The aforementioned getting the "one from the fourth" refers to the idea of 'oneness' in the Neoplatonic model wherein 'the One' held a role of vital importance since it was the singular entity from which all emanated. This oneness, therefore, is understood in man as a fourness, since man cannot comprehend the true oneness. Then what of the significance of trinity as seen in Christianity, for instance? Is the Christian tradition with a trinity instead of a quarternity fundamentally incomplete? According to Jung, it is. Trinity can be understood as a totality going in one direction - like an arrow pointing towards the heavens or the underworld. The Holy Trinity as a force of all goodness exist in contrast to chthonic triples like the three heads of Cerberus, for instance. Jung also had a deep seated desire to make a quarternity out of the trinity, writing in Answer to Job that the trinity of God only forms a completion when combined with the opposing factor, that of Satan, combining good with evil to form a whole. The 3 of the trinity is added to the 1 of Satan to make a quarternity. Furthering the idea of quauternity in Christianity, Mary is said to offer completion to the the trinity by making up the Son and the Father with a feminine element. Jung congratulated the papal establishment profusely despite not being Catholic for the papal bull sent out in 1950 declaring that Mary instead of dying ascended into heaven. On top of the withstanding dogma that Mary was free of original sin, there is support for the idea of this quarternity. The alchemical world grappled with making the quartenity out of the Holy Trinity, as seen in Jakob Böhme's example below.

As seen above (as below), man was his answer to this issue. Man is Böhme's '+1.0'. But what will be Anno's? The very notion that there can't be an Eva 4.0 means Anno thinks the story won't be satisfyingly concluded. Yet it was named such from the start so Anno doesn't seem to think it ever could be. Another potential interpretation is that Anno is achieving a quarternity albeit with something exceptionally left-field we could never predict. The new movie will be apples and oranges - the counter is bumped onto a new coefficient. And out of this extra '1.0' may come the '4.0', just as the axiom of Maria predicts. Yet the Japanese title with the repeat symbol is hard to square with this idea. And again the cover for the new movie, involving converging tracks, seems to indicate convergence and unity of there story. So in completeness, from the hints, 3.0+1.0 will:

1. Form potentially dissatisfactory completeness via a very different movie - a devil compared to the trinity.
2. Convergence will be achieved through repetition from perhaps a different characters perspective.
3. And out of that extra 1.0 at the end, shall come the completeness, the fourth.

These are just my speculations however, for when this movie finally arrives.

2020/04/02 Shinji & Asuka and the power of the Divine Mother in End of Eva

The relationship to the Divine Feminine is of the utmost importance in End of Eva. Shinji is, in Jungian terms anima possessed. The term itself is unimportant, but the gist is that he has assumed the personality of the unconscious feminine aspect of his psyche, to oversimplify. Shinji’s characteristic spinelessness, sulkiness, bitchiness and fear of confrontation etc are emblematic of the anima possessed state. In other words, an exaggerated ‘negative feminine’ comes to the fore. Why does Shinji express these traits so readily? Well, his relationship with his father is just awful, isn’t it. How is Shinji supposed to develop beyond the motherly care giving stage without a father figure to be the role model to inspire him to develop? Shinji therefore repressed the conscious masculine instinct, leaving the turf open for the anima to arrive.

Now onto Asuka. Asuka is, to quote Jung, animus possessed. Think of it as the stark opposite of Shinji – instead of repressing the masculine instinct, Asuka represses the feminine instinct due to the awful relationship she had with her mother. Asuka therefore represses the conscious feminine instinct, leaving fertile ground for unconscious masculine forces to take control. These are her exaggerated negative masculine traits like her excessive confrontationalism, her sharp tsun tongue and inability to have her mind changed.

The final piece to the jigsaw of how they both overcome their neuroses, is the idea of dual parentage. Dual parentage is an idea since time immemorial. Every hero of ancient Greece was a demi-god; they had two mortal parents but one of the two cheated with a god. This is shown in the most well known myth of all time – the Nativity – wherein Jesus has a mortal mother and father, Mary and Joseph, and an immortal father, God. The tradition of dual parentage continues in every day life as having god-parents – a second set of parents in case something happens to your birth parents or if they cock up. Another way to view the idea of dual parentage, is to have the personal parents, one’s own parents, and the transpersonal parents, the archetypal godly ones. We all do this to an extent since once a child can begin to think for themselves, they start to realise that their parents aren’t divine beings whose word is law and instead, they are rather fallible individuals. Both Shinji and Asuka can’t continue their development because they can’t see their divine parents and instead are hamstrung by their terrible real parents.

Asuka is the first to have this awakening. The awakening occurs at her darkest moment, stuck inside Eva 02, fearing her death, repeating, “Shinu no wa iya”, “Shinu no wa iya”. Out comes the voice of the divine feminine to Asuka, saying “You are still alive”, “You must live”, and Asuka has a divine vision of herself in a forest as a young girl, taking the hand of the bright, glowing goddess: the Divine Mother. Upon this handshake, a symbol of acceptance and integration, she realises that her mother has ‘Always been protecting her’ and ‘Always watching over her’. Releasing a wave of euphoria across Asuka’s face as she accepts the power of Divine Femininity within her, she finally feels complete and full of the life force she once repressed.

Shinji’s awakening to this realisation is the climax of all of Evangelion. Throughout, Shinji has prayed and begged for the protection of the feminine, either to Asuka or Misato. Despite being old enough to fend for himself, he craves the motherly protection to escape the responsibility of becoming a man. To become like his father who he despises, after all, is such an alien idea to Shinji which he just can’t stomach. Shinji sees the divine feminine not as a vision of the goddess, but rather in real life in the form of Lilith. Lilith unearths the Black Moon, described as the egg of all humanity, and, through Human Instrumentality, aims to return all of man to their beginnings, before Adam ate from the Garden of Eden – unconscious man. Within mankind’s womb, mankind is like a newborn and ,as Jung points out, the personal and the transpersonal are one and the same, meaning that humanities development and each individual’s development follow the same archetypal patterns. Shinji through instrumentality has escaped into his infancy, to an age where he has no responsibility to accept. After all, when you enter the LCL of the black moon, and your consciousness is awash with the world’s, whirling in the world soul, you have nothing to call you and you have no responsibility for yourself. But Shinji can’t become a man because he can’t accept responsibility. More than become a man, Shinji can’t become anything – just be. So Shinji rejects instrumentality. He realises that, even though as a newborn he can escape the burden of responsibility, he doesn’t want to be treated like a baby. Where’s the progression? Where’s the meaning in living in a sea of constancea? Shinji sees the terror of the Divine Feminine – the Terrible Mother who castrates you and prevents you from ever becoming a man, an individual – someone distinct from your mother. Upon realising that the solution to his issues is not LCL, he recrystallises himself from the psychic soup as a man – in alchemical fashion of solve et coagula. Forever piloting the mother means you can’t see yourself as a distinct entity. Forever living within Lilith’s womb means you’ll forever feel whole but at what cost? Isn’t wholeness something to be achieved through effort, through becoming? Shinji realised he had to leave the womb of the Great Mother and in doing so completed his Hero’s Journey.

2020/03/21 Future Boy Conan episode 23, the value of touch and the True Sun

[A few spoilers for Future Boy Conan's ending ahead, proceed with some caution]

The big bad is defeated and Lana's grandfather reteaches the knowledge of solar energy to the liberated Industria. The husk of a city is revivified and the many gizmos and gadgets, through whose arrogance the world was once kneecapped into disarray, were brought to life once more. Once such gadget was the hologram room. Dr Lao in his deaf blind state shepherded our triumphant heroes into a world which few Industrians would've ever truly seen - a natural grassy world. An inauthentic simulation full with vivid lush fields, the chirping of both birds and children, and a sense of the great outdoors. The children, who have never come into contact with such magic, are amazed they have been transported into such a world. Wrapped up in their enchantment, Dr Lao solemnly asks of them to try and touch something. Conan goes up to the tree and falls through. Jimsy tries to catch a butterfly to no avail. And when a child runs through Lana, she's left in deep frightened shock. This world isn't real - this world is inauthentissimo. And even though our eyes and ears are easily fooled, just as I get wrapped up in watching Conan, the sense of touch is not. Touch - our ability to feel something physical - is the sense which acts as judge on reality. When we understand something, we grasp the truth, we attain the truth, we just catch on, you know. Only by reaching out and feeling the world can we tell what is real from what is fake. Miyazaki himself embodied this idea in a documentary he made with NHK. The lucky man got transported in old biplanes from Paris to Morocco in honor of his hero Saint-Exupery. His final destination was an abandoned air strip with a small dry walled keep. From the top of the keep, he talked about how with ancient monuments like castles and building, you have to touch them to truly understand it. Pictures can be seen online - or even in yonder year photographed or painted. But such 2D representations don't show the whole picture. They don't show the depth. You can't get a feel for it. Only through touch can reality reveal itself. And many are afraid to interact with the world, instead seeing the world as akin to a computer screen - a stream of sound and vision. However, if you incorporate some touch sensation into your experience, suddenly you're interacting with the world and emeshing yourself within it instead of being a detached observer.

The next scene was even cooler. Dr Lao, the wise old man, came out with this banger: kimi tachi kosou hontou no taiyou ga hagakunda na shounen nanda (or something thereabouts) which translated is "you kids are kids who have grown up beneath the true sun". Isn't that fucking cool. In every ancient culture the sun is god or a god - sun worship is nearly always present at the dawn of religious thought. The three kids, albeit to differing extents, arose out of more 'primitive' cultures which are closer to nature - Lana from an agrarian one and Jimsy and Conan from hunter-gatherer cultures. Understanding nature - being in touch with nature - syncs you with nature and helps you understand god. Sun gods typically have a masculine fatherly bent, beaming down morality and order into one's life. As Dr Lao points out, Conan understands: he bathes beneath the true sun - the god of nature. His laws derive from nature itself, not the phony authority of the state, the fake sun. The fake sun of the state has been growing in luminosity since the dawn of the 20th century. Religious belief were eroded from a constant downpour of enlightenment values and positivistic ideas, only to be further obliterated by bombing both world wars. In it's place through fascist, communist, and even our liberal societies, came the god of the state. The state who through the complexities of society gives sustenance, just as the heavens once brought rain to mother nature to provide food. The state who provides salvation through welfare schemes. The state who holds the jail keys to give sinners a taste of hell. This is the fake sun. Take a normal man from Industria or say London and take him out into mother nature and he wouldn't have a clue what to do. Praying to the fake sun takes you out of tune with nature, forever distancing ourselves from mother nature who brought us into this world. But at some point mankind must realise that it isn't "cool" to not get along with your mother and that to baby her and patronise her with misconceived ideas like environmentalism is also a misunderstanding. Nature is always strongest. Just like the finale of the High Harbour arc when the tides of battle were turned by a great tsunami which extinguished the light and power of the fake sun. The fake sun after all resides on Earth and is vulnerable to attack. In this era of coronavirus too, we see mother nature as bringing these fake suns to their knees. We try desperately to suppress and hold back the great paganistic power of nature through the fake sun's right arm - technology - yet the true sun's chaotic self-organising systems always shines through. The true sun, after all, is far more powerful, adaptive and authentic. Conan-tachi, by virtue of being born under the true sun are in touch with nature and their own nature. They understand the world in a far more authentic way: what is right and what is wrong - true and false. They're souls who burn brightly without being forged into a tool of the state. They will birth the ancient into the present and usher in a new era.

2020/03/21 Kaiji and the Veil upon Value

The boat arc has ended in Kaiji with a emotional climax. Kaiji gives up his money to save the life of a scammed man. His comrades, blinded by greed, can't understand his actions. How could Kaiji give up his ticket to a new life for the life of another man? They can't comprehend - they wear the black veil upon their head: the marriage veil to the abyss. Blinded by the darkness through which they see the world, Kaiji's 'allies' can't understand doing something for a greater goal than for oneself.

The function of a marriage to the dark abyss is twofold: first, the world around becomes devoid of life. We pollute nature because we no longer see nature as living - as having a soul. Nature is simply self-organising systems over many millions of years, not sacred nor respected. We murder when we are so stuck inside our heads with anger or avarice that we are barren of compassion. To be stuck inside one's own head, blinded by the artificial light of ego, is to hoover up the projections of humanity we place upon our fellow man, reducing them to an obtrusive meat machine. Such selfishness emits itself from our inner chimp. Our empathy and cooperative tendencies, which evolved to hunt large animals as teams, is what makes us human. To fall back to selfishness is to lose part of your humanity. Kaiji's crew who wear the veils of the abyss can't see the souls of others. So wrapped up in their own heads they are, that to act against the ape-like survival instinct in favour of our human empathic instinct is alien. They cry when Kaiji saves them, yet they refuse to save him in return. Like Pavlov's dog, they are trained by society to act distressed when they want help for their own personal gain.

Second: the marriage obscures one's vision to what is valuable. They can't see what is valuable. We don't just see objects - we see far more. We see feelings, emotions, warmth, callousness but most notably value. Through various inventions, value has been abstracted from us - money being the most apparent. Value, which was once lucid to us when we were hunting and gathering, is now abstracted and blurred by the dark veils man now wears. Value underpins our every action, it underpins our motives and our perceptions. When the man in the Mercedes gets out in a suit holding a brief case, with him wafts an air of importance. But who decides that this man is so much more important or so much more valuable than any other. What is truly valuable to us? Technology has progressed man at such a rate that the value making apparatus is lagging far behind. What's more our psychotechnologies, say those of philosophy, are drilling into the foundations upon which value rests. So how does one even seek for what is valuable?

Anime or any other kind of media, repeats the message clearly. Kaiji shows us how to be a good person. Watching art, absorbing art and integrating art into your person is a good method of figuring out how to be a good person. So what if the foundations of our house are made wobbly, so long as our morals feel right. Fundamentally, morals are what binds you into society, so it is no wonder that certain moral attitudes shown in media feel right. Through art, mankind has produced a teat of condensed milk to teach morality. Through art, societies have been built - morality is, after all, the skeleton of a society. Mankind suffers from a moral Spina bifida wherein the decay of society's world tree, which holds up the heavens like Atlas, results in a collapse of the whole. That isn't to say we suffer from moral decay, but rather from moral blindness. People follow morals out of fear from the state and social ostracism instead of from goodness of the heart. To reach the next level of human evolution, to leave Earth's gravity, we must act out of goodness of heart rather than out of fear of divine retribution. We will move on from being Kaiji's useless allies Furuhata and Ando and we will become Kaiji. When we strive for what is true and authentic, we find a deeper reason to be moral and we raise societies consciousness up a level - eventually to Christ consciousness. And like Kaiji we will die and be born again.

2020/07/27 The Cat return's Mandalic Imagery

The Cat Returns is one of the less popular Ghibli films, based on the fact it was directed by neither Miyazaki nor Takahata, yet remains a solid film. The premise is that the protagonist, Haru, is very lost in life. Haru is a dojikko who feels hopeless at love and adrift in society's currents. In time, she becomes wrapped up in an adventure in order to sort out the misunderstanding that she wants to marry the prince of the Cat Kingdom and in doing so she finds herself. The mandala is the perfect imagistic conduit for this self-overcoming.

The mandala is an ancient symbol which is an organic manifestation of the self. Found across the world, in Celtic illuminations, in Persian rugs, in Dervish monasteries, in native American sand art and most prominently in south Asian religious imagery. They frequently appear in dreams too: I've had many a vivid mandala appear without context. The mandala represents wholeness and, in Jung's terms, the self, which could be understood as the totality of the potential of being. When the world feels like a total mystery, a mandala helps situate you in the world since the four cardinal directions, which are often a defining feature of the Mandala, represent where you are in the world. Jung also talks about the circambulation of the self, the maze like process in which you orbit your self, reaching ever closer but never near enough. Sometimes there are wrong paths in this journey, but the journey will in time lead you to the centre. Talking of mazes:

Here, Haru, in a metaphorical journey to overcome her life's adrift-ness, has to traverse a maze, or rather a mandala, to find her location in the world. The evil tyrant-king, an important motif seen everywhere most notably in the Bible with King Herod and in the myth of Perseus with King Acrisius, blocks off many paths inside the maze with his goons, as he is the force inside of her which prevents her from seeing who she really is - the self-deceptive ego. Tyrants are often representations of ego since they are the entity which attempts to dominate their kingdom (the psyche) with force to no avail. With the help of her comrades, the wise old man and the fat cat, who could be seen as an archetype of her unintegrated confidence, knock over all of the false walls together in a domino-like effect. In the end, the path to the self wasn't as complex as it first seemed. With the false walls, there was no ability to get to the self, however by integrating her wisdom and her confidence through cooperation, the path was clear. Upon reaching her self, a new hurdle arises - a great tower.

The great tower is a common motif. Think of the tower of Babel etc. I think I wrote a post about Kino's Journey on this topic some time ago. The general premise is an attempt to reach god. The axis mundi or world axis. Mountains were often axis mundis - many native American tribes believed that their local mountain was the centre of the world and most notably the ancient Greeks believed the gods lived upon Mt Olympus. So, what's the symbolism of the axis mundi emanating from the self? In Vedanta, a branch of Hindu philosophy, the self, or 'Atman', was believed to be identical with Brahman which was the god-head. Not necessarily the way we interpret god as a ruler, but moreso in the pantheistic sense of a god which inhabits all living things. The 'holiness' of the self is a common mythological motif seen even in Christianity wherein man was made in God's image, etc. Haru must climb this great tower. The act of climbing a great tower to meet the gods is a theme seen even in folk tales like Jack and the Beanstalk. It's akin to the idea in Kundalini Yoga of the snake which coils around the spine wherein, by eventually reaching each chakra point, you achieve the final one, the third eye which is pure consciousness - reaching the god-head. Unfortunately this motif is out of the picture shows but at the top of the tower is a gold cap, gold symbolising the sun and the gods. Interestingly as well between the top of the tower and the gold cap is a dark, wooden, spiked section which cannot be traversed. This theme is present in Dante's Inferno wherein hell must first be traversed in order to reach the heaven and the gods. The gang race up the tower to the top.

Once they finally reach the top the King presses a big red button collapsing the tower beneath them. The whole axis mundi falls to the ground, the crew thankfully intact. In a Gnostic sense, the King is like a demiurge, which is a false god who has entrapped us in this world of suffering. The Gnostics believed in the bible but that the god talked of was evil trying to prevent us from achieving our own divinity. Here, we see the King knocking down the tower, just like god did to the tower of Babel in the bible. The king/demiurge doesn't want Haru to achieve divinity. In Haru's Orphic descent into the Cat World, the king doesn't want her to leave enlightened.

The king's men race in but so too do the prince's; the prince not knowing about the betrothal or the wedding. In this scene, we see the main cast and the king sitting in a magic circle:

Magic circles are alchemical symbols of transformation. Lead, the metal of dirt, of Saturn, can be turned into gold, the metal of gods. The magic circle is mandala which is believed to have transformational powers. Jung talks about a psychotic woman who spent a year dedicated to weaving a mandala rug since when she sat inside it, she felt calmed and re-situated in the world. I am not suggesting a mandalic pattern has power in of itself, but rather it connects with symbols deep in our psyche inspiring a magic-like effect in the user. This mandala is a symbol of transformation which beams you up from the cat world to the human world. The mandala itself is a very introverted one. The outer layer of fishes pointing outwards are spikes preventing attack from outside. Yet within the circle, representing the self, all of the fishes point towards the centre, prompting an inward looking journey towards the self. The four symbols which are slightly offset are as follows starting from the north clockwise: an eye, the sun, some kind of fish swimming away, and a rising/setting sun. Within the mandala, opposing symbols are seen as opposites. The sun and the rising/setting sun make sense since one is in a constant state and the other is in flux. The interesting part is the eye and the fish running away. The eye is a confrontation - to look someone dead in the eye is to stand your ground and not look back whereas to look away once eyes look is to shy away and show weakness. The opposite to confrontation is to run away like the opposing symbol shows. The opposing symbol also appears to have a small crown. Notably our protagonists are standing by the eye, since they are confronting the demiurge.

Upon their dash, the Baron, the wise old man, confronts the tyrannical king in a duel. Naturally the wise old man wins, crushing the king's glass third eye, a fake eye, a fake symbol of godliness, of the demiurge and shaves off the fur of his lower half, showing he is just flesh underneath his thick bushy cloak of fur.

Haru escape to the top and suddenly finds she's high in the sky. Upon her discovery of her own holiness, she is disoriented upon her return to the world of the material and absolutes. The elevation of spirit to higher states of consciousness achieved by guru's and Buddhist monks are named so because you feel as if you are floating above the ground. In this state, the world of Maya, or illusion, is shown to you and the monk or guru is one with the world wherein the world operates in tandem with the mind since, in the Vedantic conception, the Brahman, or god-head, runs through everything. As a result nature operates to the mind's will and Haru descended on a staircase of crows back to her school. A similar idea of being in tandem with nature due to a pure, open heart is in Disney's Cinderella.

The final scenes show Haru a changed person. In true Japanese fashion, she cuts her hair short (hopefully it'll grow back) to show how she cuts away the necrosed self to allow fresh growth. Up early in the morning, making breakfast, and gotten over her crush. Reborn anew.

2020/07/27 Kyon's Great Realisation & The Crisis of Sincerity

Kyon is you - an average man. Adrift, he, like his peers, like the rest of us, latches on to the enigmatic, energetic Haruhi. Haruhi has achieved a higher level of spirit to most. She has become the Newtype, the enlightened one, realising and real-ising her own divine nature through achieving Christ Consciousness. However to the herd, this kind of power is unappreciated - her boundless authenticity and sincerity of character is not lauded but rather mocked. Despite not possessing Haruhi's virile spirit, Kyon saw something in her - something he could learn from her - and, despite the jabs from his mates, he delved into this new way of thinking, falling down the rabbit hole.

Kyon's Great Realisation is the climax of the second season. After falling out with Haruhi over her authoritarian directorial strategies, he turns to his mate, Taniguchi, for solace. Taniguchi, however, mocks Kyon for trying so hard at making the movie for the school fair. In that moment, Kyon realises that he does care about the school fair. He is producing something with his friends and wants to see their collective vision realised. And Taniguchi? What's he doing? Shitting on their dreams from a position of ironic aloofness. Modern man protects themselves from pain against their soul by pretending not to care about anything. To be sincere about anything is to wear your soul on your chest where it can be hurt, so, the modern man protects their soul deep inside of them. Yet we bury our soul so deep that not even we can see - we develop a myopia for our meaning making mechanism. The menu says we must conform to the mood of the room. People look at us as if to say "Kuuki wo yondekure" ("Please read the air of the room") and we are frozen into submitting with a laugh instead of standing up for oneself with a calm measured sincerity. The air bender can control the air of the room with ease. The powerful sincere spirit, Haruhi, (spirit in ancient Greek is pneuma and also means wind) is that very air bender.

Man has been kneecapped by their lack of recognition for their divine ability to bend the wind. Man must once again realise that, like Haruhi, they too possess this grand power. However, this power is stunted by our inhibiting neuroses. All neurosis originates from the conflict between ego and soul, to paraphrase Jung. Here, your moral aspects of yourself which "read the air of the room" are diametrically opposed to the desires of your soul. Modern man is so stuck in their own heads that they think that the them that reads the air of the room is them. That is the Cuck Brain. The Cuck Brain is the mind which submits to the world - the mind which laughs at themselves constantly without taking the things they love with sincerity. They are the anime fans which laugh at what they love knowing full well that what they love IS themselves, and they are just laughing at themselves. Taniguchi is that anime fan - instead of taking pride in whatever he does, he instead submits to the herd's opinion. Despite the hardships of making a movie, Kyon realises it is sincere, it is meaningful and it is real. The waning quality of sincerity is under threat by dangerous new myths which permeate modern times - ideas that all pride is hubris and that we must always put ourselves down to be modest. The act of being sincere, being authentic to your soul instead of to the 'average man' which society expect, is the hand of salvation which the divine spirit, Haruhi, reaches down to you with. A hand which will drag you along with her into the SOS-dan should you be calling SOS as you drown in the modern sea of desperation.

2020/02/08 Haruhi, Theory of Mind & the Spirit of the Newtype

Haruhi is without a doubt the spirit of the newtype. She embodies the central ideas of being free to explore one's own passions without being dragged by the rapids of popular opinion. She looks within herself to find what she wants to do instead of gazing out to the world to find inspiration. Haruhi doesn't rely on society to decide her morals for her; she organically produces them herself - a true ubermensch. She doesn't care if she starts changing her clothes in front of others - fear of being seen nude is an outdated puritanical moral from yonder year! Haruhi doesn't need to consume other's content since she is a nursery of ideas. Truly the radiant sun god.

So what is the psychology behind the newtype - how can that state of consciousness be fully realised? Man's greatest invention - the one which made us man - is the idea of Theory of Mind. Once upon a time, man was god... or rather our ape ancestors were. However due to the receding hairline of the rainforests, that ape was forced to descend from the trees. The Austrolopithicines were in a bind - how were these apes who swung from trees and ate leaves all day supposed to survive in this vast savannah? They had to cooperate. When foes approached, the primitive apes threw rocks in concert at the foe with incicive accuracy, killing predators and prey. In order to do this, however, the selfish chimps had to develop a sense of teamwork and caring... and so theory of mind was born - the ability to recognise that other people know things which you don't. Man ate from the tree of knowledge. Man is no longer god since man is no longer all knowing.

The invention of theory of mind enabled many selfish individuals to cooperate. This cooperation enabled us to create small bands to vast societies, superorganisms far more powerful than the individual, holding the threat of ostracisation and weakness. If a primitive man was being an asshole, he would be ostracised from the band and left for dead on the vast savannah - hence leading to modern man's fear of being left out.

The invention of capitalism, however, enables man to operate in the world without as much worry of ostracisation. Of course there are laws to follow, but you won't be killed in your sleep for not cooperating with you band of hunter-gatherers. With the dawn of the internet, man is becoming more interconnected but the consequences of a social faux-pas are diminishing. The complexity of real life person to person social interaction, wherein body language and tone of voice are paramount, grew our brains exponentially in order to notice the smallest details of whether or not we were fucking up, yet this skill is an underused muscle in the modern day. Online interaction and general hikkidom require these abilities far less. For the oldtypes who can't cope with this change, their mental apparatus of self-consciousness is being exalted. As a kind of theory of mind of oneself, self-consciousness is one of our most complex and high level mental processes. Self-consciousness is the inner voice that constantly criticises which tells us how to conform to society so we aren't ostracised. For many, this power overtakes their mind - they believe their ego/self-consciousness, the image of what you believe a person in society should look like, is themselves. THAT IS NOT THE CASE. The newtype judges for themselves what is right or wrong. They don't act as part of the herd, nor against society in rebellion. The newtype looks within to find themselves and acts authentically.

Haruhi is god. She is the purely manifested newtype. Self-consciousness, this phoney impression of oneself, is unknown to her. Her every action is the artistic expression of soul without the restrictive ego to remind her that what she is doing is going against societies norms. That is the pure, unbridled energy of the soul.

But like Kyon, we are all just ordinary men, picked by the spirit of the newtype.

2020/02/02 Galaxy Express 999 and the Ascent of Literalism

Literalism is the death of soul. History is a battle between literalism and metaphorical thinking (there isn't even a word for this - WordHippo comes up with inexactitude...). The metaphorical Neo-Platonists swung to the literal Scholasticists, to the Renaissance, to the Enlightenment, to Romanticism, to Positivism, to Post-Modernism. Yet despite being in the age of post-modernity, Positivism and scientific literalism reign supreme. Sci-fi as a genre represents the logical extreme of scientific endeavor. Should we pursue the philosophy of scientific growth for long enough, we will become a space-faring civilisation with synthetic food and mechanical bodies. Galaxy Express beautifully shows how the pursuit of this ideal leads to the death of authenticity, how there is something irreplaceable that has been lost in the imagined world of scientific reductionism. What if we could have a cybernetic body? Seeking pleasure all day, forever, without fear of dying. But by donning the robotic body, soul is lost. Something one can't quite place their finger on. You can go to Las Vegas and see the Eiffel Tower if you like but there's no authenticity to it - it just isn't the honmono. So why do we have such an aversion to the inauthentic? Nature is full of deception - flowers bait in insects to eat them, stick insects which blend in as plants. In order to survive, animals must differentiate between the true, authentic food/predator from the deceiver. The inauthentic world of synthetic ramen and robot people gives us a visceral reaction since from the origin of time, animals have been evolutionarily programmed to feel uneasy about the fake. Yet now we must trust artificial sweeteners and preservatives and chuck them straight into our mouths. Trust is needed to get anything into your mouth - eat the wrong plant and you're a goner. Tetsuro, the protagonist, initially is a slave to his culture and believes that the artificial is just as good, if not better, than the real. Let's do a thought experiment: would you have a problem swapping your consciousness into a body which is atom to atom identical to your own? Matter wise, you would be the same, yet something feels wrong. Perhaps you agree it would be fine out of principle, but something feels a little off in your stomach about the answer, as if something is lost. Tetsuro learns by meeting people who are experiencing organic life that there's something more. Something more to the body - that it's more than just its constituent parts. Objects have souls. A souvenir has value because of it's personal history. A bowl of ramen has soul because the wheat was farmed, the soy was fermented, the meat was raised as an animal and slaughtered and died for your meal. That is it's provenance. To give up your body for a mechanical body, is to give up the body's (not your) soul. The many adventures you've had with your body - the work you've put into it and trust you've built with your body along the way. The authenticity of us and the extension of us - our things - is our humanity, it is irreparable, divine and transcendental. And the journey both Tetsuro and we must take is to cut through society's sludge to realise that.

2020/01/16 Gundam Zeta, Nietzsche and the Blood Soul

The newtype has finally divorced themself from the Great Mother Earth. After a long religious history through animism, pantheism, Great Mother worship, Great Father worship we end up here. Just as Nietzsche predicted when he proclaimed the death of god. Nietzsche wasn't the first to proclaim such a thing - Plutarch, the roman essayist, two millennia ago proclaimed "The great god Pan is dead" upon the death of Great Mother worship. Nietzsche proclaimed similarly upon the death of Great Father, our Abrahamic conception, of god. Nietzsche, in his genius foresight, saw that the collapse of god is the harbinger of nihilism. Where would Earth's cosmic order now be begotten? But Nietzsche wasn't pessimistic - he saw the arrival of the Ubermensch.

The Ubermensch, or superman, or newtype, is able to transcend their humanity. Man was built, part animal, and part god (the knowledge begotten from the tree of knowledge). In Vedantic Hinduism, this is taken as obvious that the Atman (personal soul) is identical with the Brahman (world soul) and that each and every person is god. The idea is somewhat obfuscated in Christianity. The idea of being god is often seen as heretical since man is the subject of god, not his equal. Yet, as Jesus says, the kingdom of god is within. To discover our inner holiness is for our civilisation to grow up from a boy, under the rule of the father who art in heaven, to a man. A species in control of their own destiny. A species who have gone on their hero's journey.

The first step is to forego the Great Mother warm bosom. Mankind can only suckle on the teat for so long. To begin the journey to becoming a Ubermensch/newtype, mankind must first leave the mother Earth. The mother Earth's endless rivers of milk and oceans of honey make staying on Earth so tempting. Within Gundam, Fa says "why couldn't newtypes never exist", "there would never be no stupid war" [paraphrasing ofc]. Growing up and leaving home is difficult. Our circuitry is inherently attracted to the comfort and nurture. The Last Men, as Nietzsche called them, were those who drowned themselves in entertainment and strive for uncreative mediocrity. The last man wants no negative emotion, no conflict and harmony. This herd drags down those who strive for great things through effort and vision to maintain their superficial balance. Gundam is about growth. In episode 50, Char tells Kamille to live, because "it won't be the elderly who build a new vision of the future". Mankind may have gone down the wrong path, but the galaxy is their oyster. Our human nature to explore the next cave is being extinguished by the herd who aim to hit the nail which sticks out. Unlike in Akira, where havoc wrecks the city once the drive to rebuild has dwindled, in Gundam, that fiery spirit is alive. The only constant is change and you better hope that change is progress.

Those who have left mother's bosom into the cosmos reject their humanity. They have deconstructed their worldview and ideas once they were no longer dragged down by the mother Earth's materialism. They have carved a new future, cleaved their vestigial humanity. Warfare is no longer performed by the body - it is rather taken over by their greater selves, the mech. The blood of war is no longer on show. Death is a mechanical explosion or space's nihilistic asphyxiation. To the newtype, blood has become meaningless. In episode 44, Haman Karn says, in their diplomacy with the Titans, "what is writing in blood, but a piece of paper" which was reinforced by Scirocco [which apparently in Arabic is pronounced 'Ghibli' perhaps gesturing towards Tomino's one sided rivalry with Miyazaki], the newtype who will usher in a era, when he breaks his blood oath with the head of the Titan's by shooting him. The newtype has foregone their physical body. Foregone their soul, of which blood is symbolic. As Kamille begins to ascend into a power greater than himself towards the end, a beam of power shoots from his third eye, engulfing the Zeta in pink light. High frequency pink light is commonly associated with the last point of the chakra commonly known as the third eye. Symbolically, in Hinduism, this is the seat of the Atman, the godly nature inside each man. Kamille projects this power around his Gundam, becoming the mech - the greater man. Just as Kamille's psychic powers grew, the archetypes of those he knew came to guide him. In similar vein to the end of Star Wars episode 6, where the dead Jedi come to congratulate Luke, the spirit's of the dead, who live on a collective LCL-like astral plane, come down to guide Kamille. Kamille is meeting with his spirit guru's - a common idea in Vedic traditions wherein you can ask for advice from wiser entities who coexist in your mind. Through piloting the Gundam as a newtype, Kamille reaches higher states of consciousness, akin to meditation, and manages to transcend self. This journey makes it's tragic conclusion when his spirit severs from his body, leaving Kamille innocent and confused.

So what message can be taken away. For one, the progress of man is paramount. To live out our days like pigs who en-sty-ed ourselves will only lead to more misery and depression. To leave the mother Earth's pull and become more interconnected than the material constraints of Earth permit is out goal. However to lose yourself in blazoning spirit is self-destructive. Such a major paradigm shift cannot happen overnight. A contented man, with all his needs met, takes a lot of energy to fight the resistance in their wiring. Such a change can most likely only occur through strife, not calm calculated development. The loose cannon of progress can hit friend and foe. It is our goal to act as Char and live on in this ever-morphing future.

2020/01/09 Hikkis are Faust

We never evolved for modern society. The bountiful shelves of vegetables, meat and high energy snacks is the hunter-gatherer's wet dream. Our ability to develop technologies, unlike any other species, has enabled us to conquer our basal requirements. And the Hikki was born forth. The product of overabundance, the hikki is a sedated beast who seldom seeks interaction. The king of his castle - whatever he calls for shall be brought. Withering away into a passionate husk, viewing the world of opportunity as a world of fear. The hikki has everything including the economic comfort of their parent's monetary support. Much like Faust, he has made a contract with the devil. Stuck in a snapshot of time. Getting without producing.

A devil's contract cannot be terminated. The hikki cycle is much the same. The devil provides the hikki with all he could ever need: food, shelter, comfort, etc. The hikki then never learns the skills necessary to be self-sufficient, to get a job and provide for oneself leading to more dependence. What the Faust teaches us is not to covet the object in of itself but rather the skills we acquire along the way. Eating food to survive is pretty good, but the body requires the trappings of the acquisition of food to be performed like searching for things, chasing after things, cooking food, etc. Man is not divinely programmed solely with the desire to consume food and protect oneself beneath shelter but also the very acts to achieve such goals. Even though survival no longer requires hunting, man is not content until we act out the hunt through various abstractions such as games and exercise. The hikki receives the contentment of completion but not the energising nature of reaching a goal, they receive the serotonergic kick but not the dopaminergic. Hence the hikki begins to drown beneath his skin, without drive, without passion, without spirit, yet too contented to desire change.

As we see in Greek myths, like say Perseus, a contract with a god is very different. Perseus receives the big shield from Athena and the big sword from Hermes. These are not the destination, like what Mephistopheles gives, but rather the means to reach the destination, like a parent giving a stable base for the child to push into the world. However there is a fine line between the great mother and the terrible mother: between that which pushes you into to the world with support and that which pulls you into to the house, clipping your wings and 'castrating' you.

Gabriel Dropout is clearly inspired by Faust. Just like Faust who makes the contract due to the people of his town suffering from plague, Gabriel is starts gaming because of the suffering in a video game wherein she loses her angelic spirit is tarnished by the devil. the closest moe has come to achieving God in art - it certainly is for me.

2020/01/08 Yurikuma Arashi and Heraclitus

"No man ever steps into the same river twice. For it is not the same river and he is not the same man." That's what Heraclitus said many, many years ago. The very water you step into is different each time. We understand the idea of the 'river' since the matter that makes up the river changes as the water flows downstream. Man is similar - we have the same identity yet our personalities and interests are in flux. Not to mention how we replace just about every cell in our body over a 5 year period. The only constant is the identifier, yet both the physical and psychic content changes.

Yurikuma Arashi expressed this idea in an episode wherein the teacher displayed a cannibalistic affection for Kureha's mother. She consumes her, as her friend/lover, after revealing herself to be a kuma, and forever stores her in the box known as her stomach. The teacher wanted a snapshot of reality, a snapshot of love, to last forever. Consuming her body into her stomach and her soul into her mind meant she couldn't stand the idea of an ever-changing love. She denied the eternal constant of change. Any kind of relationship, whether it be romantic or platonic, will inevitably change over time. Once you and your wife hit 50, you will no longer be the same people who first met up 25 odd years ago. Yet to always see her as the 25 year old you once met is pathological, always setting false expectations and not really seeing someone for who they are. Matters will only get worse when they way they act and the image you project lose such focus that you are no longer able to recognise them. Love, like the rest of the world, is in constant flux. You can't put love in a box in an attempt to treasure it forever. The dead love, which pass it's expiry date, will create a stench in your box - and rotting love suppressed in the stomach and the heart is sure to poison you.

2019/12/22 Kanashimi no Belladonna, Orgies and the Faustian Pact

Belladonna was one hell of a movie. A rollercoaster from start to finish. Said to have inspired directors from Ikuhara to even Miyazaki, this traumatising yet carnal avant-garde adventure from 1973 bankrupted Mushi Pro. The plethora of still, animationless shots throughout the film and juxtaposed by brilliantly animated scenes creating a novel viewing experience. Combined with exceptionally long panning shots that must've been painted on the longest cell known to man, Belladonna inspired a new generation of the potential of animation.

Now onto the crux of the matter. The film revolves around Jeanne, the protagonist, who battles with her Christian moral debasing after experiencing extreme trauma. After first being raped by the king, and then abandoned by her husband as she was being pursued, she is lost - dying. After much temptation, she, like Faust, sells her soul to the devil. Those who sell their soul to the devil are confident. They are powerful. To sell your soul leaves you with pure ego: pure control. The Buddha described the mind as a man riding an elephant wherein the man, the ego, had to tame the wild beast beneath him, his soul. Without the elephant, the world is at your feet. Yet even though you have given away your soul, it is still possessed by the devil. It's hard to notice, but all the thoughts we think we are having are in fact products of our unconscious. Our ego believes it is pulling all the punches, but instead our unconscious mind is controlling the ego like a marionette. Hence, even though Jeanne is confident and powerful, she is in fact dancing in the devil's hand. In making the pact, Jeanne and the devil have sex... to some extent. In 'becoming one', the devil envelops Jeanne, consuming her. Instead of sharing a soul as in erotic love, a soul is consumed instead.

The belladonna flower is used by Jeanne and her husband, the devil, to fuel orgiastic satanic festivals. The flower contains 2 chemicals of note, namely atropine and scopolamine, which are delirient drugs. Takers of the belladonna flower will experience true hallucinations - ones where you don't realise your hallucinating. You'll meet and talk to friends who you can see who aren't there, you'll smoke imaginary cigarettes and, if you take too much, end up naked in a pile of your own shit in a field in the middle of nowhere. The site Erowid is a fascinating place wherein peoples childhood misadventures with delirients are catalogued and is a great database of true psychological horror. The deadly nightshade is also a major component of 'flying ointment' which is a delirient brew typically ascribed to witches. This is why witches flew - they were as high as a kite, flying. A flower befitting of the devil if there ever was one.

The orgiastic ritual has forever been used by Christianity as the ultimate depiction of possession by the devil. Upon a return to his natural state, man is rendered an animal; antithetical to Christian doctrine which places man above animal. It is our ego, according to Christianity, our self awareness which we stole from God in the original sin which makes us human. To rend our godliness and regress to animal is a rejection of God and a call to the devil. A major reason for Christianity's flourishing is the dominance of ego or the exercising of one's godliness. Instead of lounging around boning and stoning, you wear your suit or corset, tighten up and get to work. Exercise your will and beat your elephant into shape. Start thinking and prepare for the future. The orgy stands in stark contrast. You may become a parent. You may become pregnant. Losing yourself in sexual bliss. Watching as your ego dissolves into nothingness. Watching as you lose your godliness. Unconstrained by will, without a caution thrown to the wind, the chaos of the orgy challenges the power of the king's order. The power of love vs the power of discipline.

The queen's page boy visits Jeanne during a belladonna filled orgy. People merge into animals and back again (same animators from Bander Book?) as man and animal becomes indistinguishable. He confesses that he has sexual desires for the queen and covertly asks for Jeanne's help. She hands him the belladonna which he sneaks into the queen's drink. That night, the queen is overcome with horniness until the page boy comes to help her out. She has been corrupted. She is no longer the upstrung queen stands with a straight back showing no emotion. Fingering herself uncontrollably, she has succumbed to primal urges, is unable to discipline herself and left god. In a beautiful scene, the king skewers the page boy and the queen with his sword through their hearts: a phallus of discipline piercing the source of love, the heart.

Later, Jeanne as the envoy of love meets with the king as the envoy of discipline. The ordered, disciplined king offers her land, money, power second only to his own. Jeanne rejects all of that. Jeanne asks for everything. To love, 2 become 1; like the holy trinity wherein 3 are 1, numerical contradictions are used to explain transcendental conceptions. You can't put only half into a relationship - you must give everything. The king wants Jeanne; he wants her knowledge on how to cure the plague. But Jeanne,the animal from the orgy only operates in terms of love. In return for her everything, she wants the king's everything. A fitting cycle from the beginning of the film wherein the king raped her. After so much time had passed, in spite of the rape, she is prepared to give the king her everything yet the king rejects and sentences her to be burnt alive. The end.

2019/12/10 SAO and the Perception of Simulation

Everything is just a simulation, man... is the plot to many an anime. SAO is simply a video game which is in turn a focused simulation of reality. Focused since the world simulated revolves around a single thematic mechanic and, as a result, a motive emerges. Every game needs a motive, after all, otherwise there is no 'point'. Life has no inherent meaning but becomes a game when you have a purpose. Another feature of a game is for it to be an abstraction of reality. When you are playing tag, you don't want to consider any more than capturing another person. As simulations go, tag is a very basic one. MMOs, on the other hand, are highly complex games with a far greater expansion into the mechanics of the real world however there are still prescriptive oversimplifications. An example from the show is when a discarded sandwich disappears instead of breaking into pieces or rotting. The top-down mechanic exists since the discrete variable or "isEaten" or "isRotten" can be enabled however the continuous processes which make these events occur such as mastication or bacterial infestation are not happening. These bottom-up processes are holy evolutionary since no one decided that food must rot. However a little microbe found a space in the market for digesting food. Therefore, unlike real life where we are governed by the laws of physics from below and the law from above, in the world of Sword Art the laws of physics also becomes a top-down phenomena. The repercussions of this are huge. In codified systems, there are always loopholes. For instance, the bug wherein someone can be killed in their sleep by tricking them into duel demonstrates the potential problems with creating a world of prescriptive worlds. Man is not god and can't conceive of every eventuality. God as a concept is the complexity of evolutionary systems and only a mighty good simulation could pull that off. The very laws of physics weren't written down in a cosmic notebook, after all; they are our descriptions of how we perceive the world. Yet surely if a good enough simulation was created, say the matrix, then how could we ever tell the difference between prescriptive and descriptive laws of the world? That all depends on whether you believe in a god. If a creator is involved, the world has an entity to prescribe laws else the laws evolutionarily manifest. But that's beside the point, Sword Art is a game, not a simulation and every game needs a creator in order to decide the rule set and objective.

When I started watching the show (to be my 10,000 episode) it struck me as bizarre as to why anyone would leave the gates and go adventuring. Excluding the understanding that everyone's bodies are wasting away, which most wouldn't think about, why wouldn't everyone just find a profession in the city and live their days peacefully? When you understand that dying is just regular dying since this is the new world, the number of people who hamfistedly jump into combat is mental. But then you take a step back and realise this is what oh so many people do. If you die in the army you die in real life. Yet all of these people are neets. They love war in concept but they could never do it since they aren't strong and oh no they could die. And what do we have here. Basically the same thing. Anyone can become a warrior if the time is right or if they're thrust into the thick of it. Many of these MMO junky neets have the souls of warriors yet the soul finds different ways to manifest depending on the environment. In our world, the world made them MMO neets yet the world of Sword Art turned them into warriors.

2019/11/10 Ashita no Joe and Soul Projection

[[ THIS POST CONTAINS SOME PRETTY BIG SPOILERS FOR THE FIRST SEASON, don't read if you haven't seen most of the show]]

Soul projection, as Jung described it, is to project the image of one's inner self, their soul, onto another. The soul can be imagined as the unconscious elements of one's personality which bubble up as emotions into consciousness. The most vital of these emotions, the experience of awe and fascination, drive us to follow the paths we do, such as having a drive to watch anime. A projection, simply put, is to overlay unconscious associations onto objects and people in the real world. It is the meaning we assign to things. In a sense we project our self onto other people when we empathise since we overlay an understanding of ourselves onto someone else. When you watch a masterpiece, it touches you on a deeper level you can't quite understand. Why does a great anime grab your heart and mind? That would be because you project your soul onto it - the characters and story explain to you a part of yourself you don't understand or haven't been able to fruitfully incorporate into your personality.

On to Ashita no Joe. A masterpiece from 1970 about a boxer named Joe and his arch-rival Rikiishi. After 50 episodes of anticipation, watching Joe's rise to prominence in the boxing world, the two face off in the ring. Joe lost his match and graciously accepted defeat. A sense of contentment seemed to wash over him as the dispute came to a satisfying conclusion. Yet as Joe went to shake Rikiishi's hand, he collapsed and soon after died from a brain haemorrhage. Joe's passion and fascination with boxing was imbued in Rikiishi. Before his rivalry with Rikiishi began, Joe had no interest in boxing in the slightest. Yet once Joe set his sights, his inner flame drove him to train. Note the relation of fire to the soul - a common verbal slight of hand which is seen in religions across the world across time. Joe had projected his soul onto Rikiishi. His passion for boxing purely stemmed from him, or more specifically the unconscious contents which he projected onto him: the meaning of the rivalry. Rikiishi's death was devastating for Joe. He roamed the streets depressed for 3 months aimlessly. The dissolution of the projection is a devastating thing; when all the meaning in your life is bundled up into one person or one thing, the loss can be world breaking. The psychic scaffolding which held together the ever growing construction project of the mind disintegrates and everything comes tumbling down. You can no longer see colour in the world; merely different shades of grey. After all, the soul projection is responsible for giving value and meaning to the world's many components and if you experience no awe for life then you will do nothing but ruminate. But rumination is wombination. One must be strong and break free from the vice grip that the ego has on the psyche. The ordered ego wants to suppress the chaotic soul since the unpredictability is where danger lies. When your Rikiishi dies, the ego takes that as its 9/11 to pass through its Patriot Act and take full control over the psyche creating a totalitarian state without any danger nor fun. However you're destined to roam the streets like a Yokai who needs to end their grudge before they can move on into the other world just like Joe. Danger and fun are many colours which grow out of chaos in contrast to the grey of order and hence only by staring danger in the eyes can you have fun once again. Only when Joe accepts himself for what he did to Rikiishi can he once more experience awe in all of its flavours of awesome and awful and he'll no longer hear the ego's endless chattering monologue. Only then can he truly live.

2019/11/08 FLCL and not Trying

As the Buddha reminds us, desire is the root of all suffering. No character better exemplifies this idea than Mayuge (eyebrow dude) from FLCL. Obsessing over his lack of manliness, Mayuge always tries to wear the mask of manliness in the hope that his persona that he puts on will be noticed by others. His torment originates in his obsession over his youth. Forever yearning after Haruko, the embodiment of his youth, he is unable to move forward and continue growing in a natural progression. The personality unconsciously manifests itself within you and any conscious intervention is an attempt to reroute the soul. Mayuge has a dwindling soul. Forever suppressed by his conscious ego's wishes to appear manly, his inner guitar is pathetic and small. Yet it is the soul, the sunlight which shines through the clouds, which is what personality is built upon. Hence any attempt to become more manly will only result in being less of a person. People around you notice conscious posturing whether consciously or not. Such attempts only make you less of the man. One must strive to become the ultimate man: Atomsk, who is pure energy unrestrained by conscious posturing. The man with the coolest guitar ever made, according to Tsurumaki. It is nigh impossible to act consciously constantly. People notice when your eyebrows fall off and your act falters. Authentic personality is one of the highest virtues since you can simply be without trying. The trying only makes it harder. The desire to be more manly will only make you suffer.

2019/11/07 Miyazaki's High-Minded Autism

"Personality is the ability to do anything". Miyazaki said something along those lines. Miyazaki's certainly an autist. Listening to him talk, you hear a spectrum of peculiar information grappled out of the air yet he despises the human manifestation of Japanese autism, the otaku. The otaku mindset is a low-minded autism; it is to find a small corner of the room and stake it out as your own. To claim a guaranteed plot of knowledge and mind out every last scrap. Under Miyazaki's model, personality is scalar. One is capable of operating in any situation thrown should one broaden their horizons far enough. Why carve out the smallest niche when you can absorb the world. The high-minded autist swims in a sea of knowledge: not a pond. To be knowledgeable, to an autistic extent, about anything, is to be able to sail upon the choppiest waters of interaction. That is not to say that a niche within those seas can't be carved; a coast of obsession that you are particularly fond of, which captures your awe is always appreciated. Yet also know that you can't solely own your coast. According to Nash equilibrea, the higher-minded autist will always win. If a higher-minded autist encroaches on a lower-minded autists territory and consumes them completely, they are simply the lesser autist. The aim is to open one's soul to the breadth of human experience. To not be a fussy eater with your autism, yet to still have your favourite foods. That is to transcend to Miyazaki's level.

2019/10/24 Lupin the III & the Great Game

Lupin the III is just brilliant. We all try to live such virtuous lives by following the rule book and doing the right thing, but few would say Lupin is 'evil' or a bad person. It is our Christian conception of evil and evil's relation to the law which holds us back since to break the law isn't to be a bad person. The motif pops up through fiction across time such as Les Miserables and Oliver Twist. Ethics is a kind of perspectival knowing wherein one sees the ethical landscape through one's own eyes, one's own context, however the law is more so procedural knowing wherein a list of rules are stated out to us. Lupin gets it. Zenigata gets it too. Zenigata would happily break any law in pursuit of Lupin, ignore any ICPO ruling to achieve his goal. Neither of them are possessed by an unshakable feeling of gravity and serious in their life. Their time shared is spent playing. Driven by passion flowing out of their souls, they are adults playing, laughing cosmically at the whole performance. The rest of the world is anal about following ridiculous procedure and rules but they understand it on a deeper level some how. In Daoism, resisting the flow of nature is what causes discontent and suffering. To deny the drive of one's soul to 'play' the game of life is to only make life boring for yourself. the play circuits are built in for a reason. The Christian ethic of no laughing in church is how we are expected to live through life. Take your school work seriously, think hard and deeply about finding a job. But to just play at each role, have some fun and realise that you're just putting on a facade is what's important. Lupin and Zenigata have something very special; a calling, a vocation. To find one's vocation, or inner voice, is to find what is meaningful. To pursue it is to find what is fun. And wouldn't it be sad to pass through life, fighting its currents and not having any fun, the very emotion which divines the direction of the current.

2019/10/04 Saikoro-club and the Importance of Games

Each and every man must stand on the precipice of order hanging over the pit of chaos. And with each action, it is easy to stumble head first into that pit. Hence so many people are averse to the unknown; if you stand far enough away from the precipice there is no risk of falling into the rapids. But what if we could simulate the many daunting escapades we may encounter in an abstract safe system. Let's call this a game.

Games have existed since time immemorial - even across species they are common. They are an abstraction and simplification of the real world with the aim of focusing on a specific motif on which to improve upon. Let's take football for an example. You have to get the ball within the other team's net. Simple enough. Yet to maintain a balanced playing field many other rules are used such as throw-ins and corners for when the ball goes off court. For it to be functional, we don't want people taking the ball 10 miles east to flank the competition. Football is fundamentally an abstraction of hunting. Your team is trying to poach the net. Yet in the real world, there are many teams, tribes, all trying to hunt the same game. Inevitably war between these tribes over food will break out and football is the interplay of two teams trying to get the deer.

Of course the idea of a game is a spectrum of abstraction. This is most clearly seen when you compare different civilisations across time. One step closer to war than football is lacrosse which was invented by the native Americans. It was a 2 to 3 day affair wherein neighbouring villages fought one another sometimes resulting in deaths. Another step removed is the traditional Papuan war games where, even though the tribes didn't need to go to war, the had war rituals - real fighting with real deaths. But it was all just a game. A practice attempt for when war is inevitable. To ensure the men of the tribe don't become jelly-like in the intermediate generations.

In the first episode of Saikoro-club which just aired, our turquoise-haired protag is afraid of entering the forest. Afraid of the very idea of play. Playing is how one overcomes fear. She has hidden so far away from the precipice she no longer has the means to approach it. Getting lost can be truly terrified. No map in an alien environment and as night falls there's no sign of life. But that is exactly why it is so important to pretend to be lost. Maigo-gokko. The very reason it is fun is because it is a small pat on the back. You've overcome the potentiality of being lost. You feel more confident for the future because you've prepared yourself. Emotions tell us what we're doing right and, although we a prone to hacking the pathway through substances and gaming, the 'fun' pathway tells us that we are on the right track, following the right path. Pursue your bliss. Your unconscious biology knows best.

2019/09/19 Gurren Lagaan, Manliness and Piercing the Heavens

"Your drill is the drill that will pierce the Heavens". An iconic line which mulls in the mind of any Gurren Lagaan fan. And as with any piercing statement that punctures into and cements itself into our psyche, has plenty of meaning wrapped inside. Let's start with the drill and more specifically the spiral and its relationship to evolution. Jung talks about the 'circambulation of the self' which essentially means that you never walk linearly to the goal or destination in your life and instead spiral around the final goal, with an ever-changing velocity, slowly inching your way to the centre, the destination. Part of the moral is that in life one often rolls the dice and lands on a snake but upon the next roll you land on a ladder which takes you beyond where you fell from. Evolution is much the same. Each generation learns from the past generation's mistake and forges a greater world than their ancestors. The drill, therefore, is the perfecting of evolution across generations of heroes.

In many religions, such as Christianity with God, Greek Mythology with either Zeus or Uranus, etc, Heaven is depicted to be ruled by a male god. Heaven is also where the dead who are past heroes, ascend to. When we access the knowledge of our ancestors, we look to the 'father who art in heaven' for advice; the father/god who is representative of our ancestors experience.

Let's return to Gurren Lagaan with our new knowledge in tow. What does it mean to pierce the heavens with your drill? Why is that Simone, the hero's, calling? Simone must become the hero to which others look to by utilising the knowledge of his ancestors. He must enter heaven, by becoming a hero, by wielding the power of his ancestors, the power of the drill, the evolution of man, as his weapon. The power exists in heaven but the key to the power, which Simone finds, is found in a cavern, born in the Earth. Traditionally in many religions like Greek Mythology, the Earth is depicted as feminine in the form of Gaia. Even today we talk about mother Earth and mother nature. The hero is born of mother but often not of father such as in Christianity with the virgn birth of Jesus. The flesh of the hero is born from the Earth, from the mother, but that is the physical vessel to access the metaphysical power derived from Heaven, from one's ancestors. The Hero must leave the cavern, the womb, just as Simone did, and use the physical body nurtured in that womb in combination with the transcendental powers from the heaven, their ancestors, to complete their hero's journey. To pierce the heavens and join your ancestors to drive the next generation of heroes to come and join you.

2019/09/08 Kaneda's Bike and Relevance Realisation

Throughout Akira, Kaneda's bike plays a major role. To Tetsuo, a symbol of Kaneda's prowess and authority. Yet to Kaneda, he merely sees it as a tool as something replaceable and unimportant. When Tetsuo runs off with Kaneda's bike and gets beat up towards the beginning of the movie, Kaneda catches up with him and instead of reuniting with his bike, checks to see if Tetsuo is okay. In stark contrast, Tetsuo rushes to beat up their pursuer instead of seeing if his girlfriend Kaori is okay.

This is where the idea of relevance realisation comes in. RR is the human ability to bring into consciousness what is most important in a given situation. According to John Vervaeke, whose lecture series I strongly recommend, RR is strongly linked with meaning making in one's life since in order to have value in your life you must first be able to identify what is valuable. Furthermore insight, which can be cultivated through meditative practices can be described as the ability to perceive what is relevant in a given situation and act upon it. Throughout Akira, Kaneda demonstrates himself to be adaptable like when he picks up a laser gun for the first time and figured out how to use it and skilled at riding his bike which is due to perceiving where one needs to improve and picking up the minutiae of a skill intuitively.

Tetsuo is useless at realising relevance. He places all of Kaneda's relevance to him based on his skills, hierarchical position and the symbol of both of those things, his bike. The bike is demonstrative of Kaneda's skill whilst being exemplary of his dominance - not only a complex customised bike but also an eye-catching red (which Tetsuo later dons) in juxtaposition to Tetsuo's childish turquoise. Kaneda, however, realises that far more value can be found outside himself, in other people, in the valuable connections he's made. He's a natural leader because he is charismatic, selfless and protective of his pack. And Tetsuo is exceptionally jealous of this and he is unable to emulate it because he cannot properly realise what Kaneda is doing to achieve such a position.

Neo-Tokyo is a city which has lost its way - a myopic city lacking in RR. This post-modern nightmare is devoid of meaning whenever shots are shown. It's no wonder there's a growing spiritual movement surrounding Akira. When a civilisation is starved of culture and starved of meaning, they resort to finding meaning through spirituality and hope. A people who are so starved of meaning, they'll eat anything placed in front of them. Our own society is heading in this direction. Old institutions like churches gave a sense of spiritual meaning to those who could not find their own however now we must fend for ourselves through this chaotic world without a guiding light. Only through improved relevance realisation can we achieve spiritual contentment. Only then can we evolve into a Kaneda.

2019/08/15 The Beginning of Shinji's Hero's Journey

Lilith is the archetypal Great Mother god which, according to Erich Neumann, is the 2nd major stage of psychic development. The Great Mother goddess gives birth (in the form of the creation of the LCL world) and kills (in the form of dissolving everyone into LCL). Lilith's forehead eye vagina is then fertilised by Shinji who, when in the form of Eva 01 wrapped in the sword of longinus, represents the sacred phallus. Human Instrumentality is much like the Great Mother in that it is a comforting warmth found in being looked after for by a higher power, supposedly bringing warmth and understanding by breaking down everyone's AT fields. However Shinji rejects Human Instrumentality and rejects the Great Mother. For the healthy development of a youth, the youth must go beyond with association with the Great Mother, since the Great Mother tightly chains the ego of the "young lover" (who in the case is Shinji) to herself. Just as Shinji rejected HI, Shinji must reject the Great Mother in order to move past this stage of his life. He must no longer be reliant on another to survive, but must survive in of himself. For only when the protagonist no longer is bound to the Great Mother can he embark on his Hero's Journey.

2019/08/01 Society's Rejection of the Osana Najimi

Culture is trapped in the dialectic between the past and the future. Our traditions form out ground atop which we can firmly stand and our aspirations about the future are the clouds in the sky to which we reach. Without the ground we cannot reach for the clouds and with out the clouds we are rooted to the ground and immobile.

At the moment I am rewatching Dagashi Kashi. A classic romcom SOL which has both an osana najimi and a 'new girl': an explosion of colour and passion into the protagonist's life. The stale everyday occurances, which the osana najimi is apart of, is broken up and livened up by the appearance of a new girl who possesses energy and enthusiasm. The dynamic is akin to the choice we see as a society. Should we cling to what is comfortable, known and reliable or attempt to understand and embrace the unpredictable, new and exciting? Our rejection of traditions and comfortable progressions without invigoration is the protagonist who rejects the osana najimi. Yet wouldn't a story where the new girl appears like a whirlwind in their life and protag-kun picks his osana najimi make the story a bit of a damp squib? Thankfully in society we don't have the need to choose. Real life is a buffet of ideas, not a set menu of ideology. Hence a balance must be struck between equal and opposite forces for our society to function. Wait my analogy has broken down...

2019/07/27 Own Tempo

Those who move at their own tempo are the ones who are lauded, the ones who are followed, the ones who lead. Maintaining your own meter whilst surrounded by powerful people is hard. We naturally synchronise with those around us: whether it be a celebrity who we admire and want to emulate or whoever else you're close with. Emulation is an inbuilt method of be grow close to another, after all. Love is all about becoming one, the eros as the ancient Greeks called it, and part of that is syncronising you frequencies together both on the psychological level and on the physical level. When you love someone, your heart rate syncs up with theirs. This condition is what some accept, becoming 'betas' or 'cucks', whilst others reject becoming 'contrarians'. Some however are immune to the psychic attack. Some are able to be true individuals who are able to project their soul upon the world and forge their own path, deaf to others influence. This is individuation. This is the high-minded autist.

Joe from Ashita no Joe perfectly embodies this principle. Unshaken by societal norms or expectations placed upon him, he charges forth feeling what he truly feels and doing what he judges to be just. Joe can be kind of an asshole. Everyone around him thinks he's kind of an asshole. He's always bollocking people about, leaving on short notice, making a nuisance of himself. But that's why they love him. Truly love him. That's why he's able to emanate such passion into the world. He's authentic: a buzz world we all wish to be. Authenticity isn't something that can easily be described or something which can be methodically conquered, yet we all have an intuit recognition of what authenticity looks like. Joe the beast, is what he's often calls. A man running on instinct without the self-reflection which defines us as man instead of animal. Living his life freely how he sees fit whilst not letting others unconsciously influence what he sees fit. Joe is perfectly flawed.

Lupin is another great example. A man who is unswayed by others opinion of him. A man who lives governed only by his own hand-knit ethic. Theft is his game, yet should a deeper story unfold, say whatever jewel he was stealing had a rightful owner from which is was unjustly taken, he will happily play the Robin Hood character. Lupin is Lupin. A taste as strong as game. He lives authentically and to the point. His vice of women and love, the only treasure which can't be stolen, is still his authentic ethic manifesting itself unbarred. Lupin is perfectly flawed.

Charisma is everyone's dream. Everyone wants to be popular (within a sensible extent). No one want to be a beta. And personality is what everyone strives for. To call someone boring or a 'normie' (Futsu tte iu na as Nami-san from Zetsubou-sensei says) is the highest insult in today's society for personality is social credit. Yet our Germanic-Protestant-Scientific mindset wants a method. A rule book. A list of 10 easy steps from WikiHow. Yet for the highest goal of all, becoming of personality, there isn't one. My boy Jung gives an explanation and goal for personality, yet no simple and easy trick to solve it. There isn't one. Anyone who says there is is a fraud. Of course there are rules to help you navigate the currents but you've got figure out how you get there. Like diet, everyone has different needs. Upbringing, socioeconomic background, genetics: all of these and many more determine where you are, where you must go and how to get there. It is a journey of personal discovery. One which only reaches its climax in later life, unfortunately. A journey through the white water rapids without a map or any practice. Yet with every capsize we stray closer to our goal. Ever circling our destination (the circambulation of the self, as Jung calls it) without realising a thing. For some, charisma appears to be baked into them. "They were born with it", you convince yourself. No. It's a skill. Trial and error. Every mistake takes you closer to your goal. Only those who wallow in self-pity are the true betas for they can never succeed. Pull yourself up. Achieve something. Tatte. Tatte. Tatte. Tatsunda, Joe.

2019/07/26 Kino's Journey OVA and the Great Tower

The great tower. To many the OVA is reminiscent of biblical myth, namely the tower of Babel. The tower of babel, man's attempt to reach god, is a parable on the idea of agape which the neo-Platonists describe as the love between man and god. The tower of babel is man's attempt to turn agape into philia, the love of a brother. In attempting to reach god, god looses their power and you've misunderstood religion and god on the whole. Surprisingly, the myth pops up around the world. Not just in the Sumer and Mesopotamian religions from which Abrahamic faith descended, but in Mesoamerican myths too. The great pyramid of Cholula in Mexico, which is the largest pyramid in the world and believed to have been built around 300BC, is talked about by locals as an attempt to reach Quetzelcoatl. Again, this is the idea of the Dao between the order of science and the chaos of nature. Our attempt to create order in the world, as represented by the order of the tower, in an attempt to 'reach god' - god being a metaphor for nature. And the way in which we create order in the world is society...

Society is pretty mad when we think about it. At Easter we hide little chocolate eggs around the garden and pretend that a rabbit, a mammal, has laid and hidden them. We each go to specific locations when the small 'hands' on a gadget wrapped around our wrist tell us it's 'time' to do so. We make self-propelling automobiles (moves self) - big steel boxes travelling faster than anything our bodies were designed for just so we can get to where we need to be when 'the time' demands us to go. We accept all of this since we have grown up with these features, or seen them develop over our life time.

Some are disenchanted. In the OVA, we see a man question the construction of the tower. He claims the construction is crazy. "All we do is build this tower and no one knows why". Why do we build society exactly. We all know why we do what we do... or don't we. If, like a 3 year old attempting to understand the world, you repeatedly ask "Why", you soon realise that there's a bedrock. A bedrock where you can't explain any further why you do what you do, at which point you must accept that there are certainties, foundations atop which your society is built. In order to be apart of a society, you must accept the base dogmatic truths.

The dissenter is crazy. He rejects the bedrock premises atop which his society is built. But instead of trying to improve his life within the system, he just wants out. Would rather take on the uncertainty of joining a new society. Within the country, one must work for the tower. Similar to the production of the great pyramids in ancient Egypt, the economy of this country revolves around the production of the tower. Kino, being the genius that she is, points out to the dissenter, "perhaps you can inscribe patterns on the bricks". Don't work knock the system down; find what you can add to the system. Find your own niche. Find meaning in what you can do within society instead of rejecting it outright.

The tower falls down and everyone cheers. Societies often fall down. We become too big for our boots and the foundations are swept from underneath us. Whether it be war or famine or whatever else, societies are house of cards. It's crazy to think how precarious our cozy lives are. One virus mutates leads to a pandemic and chaos. The cards collapse and we're swept into the dark ages. Society is gone. The tower has collapsed. Only when a snake sheds its skin can it grow; only when a forest burns down can a healthy forest grow in the nutrients left over. A newer forest. A greater forest than ever before. World War 2 saw much of the United Kingdom turn to rubble. But amongst the debris, people saw opportunity. Our of war came a new Britain who looked within herself, gave away much of the empire to independence, set up a national health service, etc. Every now and then the tower must fall. Incremental change can lead you up the wrong branch. If the wrong turn is taken along the way, there is no turning back. Every now and then we must cheer when the tower falls, because without it we will never have the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.

2019/07/21 God was Killed by the Gun: A Wind Named Amnesia

A wind named amnesia. An anime film from 1990 made by Madhouse which is little known. The premise goes that a wind swept over the earth and everyone's memories were erased. How to speak, how to work tools, everything. In an instant man was reverted to that of a primitive. Our protagonists, for various reasons, have regained some of their knowledge and they journey through the reshaped earth enacting modern moral crusades against the savages. The part of the movie in question today is from around 36 mins in to 42 mins in.

A small tribe had formed among the primitive men. A high tech laser shooting crane from a by-gone era had been acquired by this group and it was treated as a kind of god. The crane was piloted by a corrupt village elder who demanded a human sacrifice in order to keep the god appeased. A necessary step in human evolution wherein we learn to sacrifice to a higher power - similar to the popular marshmallow test wherein a child has to forego a marshmallow in the present to receive two in the future. Our protagonist, determined to save the girl being sacrificed, charges in and saves the sacrificed girl from the human-crushing claw. The operator of the crane goes berserk, flicking every switch and lever in sight, killing many more. The punishment for being able to sacrifice to the 'higher power' of the future is death and famine. Protag-kun then pulls out his magnum and, with extreme accuracy, fires straight at the operator, god's, forehead, stopping the giant crane. The people no longer have a leader; after the death of their god where will their guidance and meaning come from. Our adventurer decks out the ex-sheriff with knowledge of how to use a gun and how to open tinned food. Upon the death of god, society is ruled by the gun and the knowledge of how to open food. Finally the badge of sheriff is pinned to his chest - the holy identifier of authority. God was killed and replaced by the gun.

2019/07/10 Wolf Children and Childhood Ferality

What makes man different from an animal? We can point to opposable thumbs, our furless bodies or the fact we live in houses. These physical attributes of man avoid the root of the divide; man is conscious. Man is embarrassed. Man has a conception of oneself. The ego does spring from the womb with us since such complex ideas are overwhelming to our prematurely born minds. Psychologists agree that around the age of 2 a child sees themselves as an individual from their parents, as a separate ego. Before which we are seemingly unconscious beings, feral like a wolf. The incubates inside of them, developing slowly as they begin to see others as an ego in of themselves. Society civilises us, and we let go of our feral nature, our instinct and deep bond in favour of rationality and a plethora of bonds. We conceal our unconscious inner ookami in favour of our conscious persona which cannot truly understand and be deeply moved by another. Language enables us to understand one another yet simultaneously enables us to misunderstand one another. The lone wolf, howling atop a mountain, rushing with primal instinct, rejects duplicity, embraces simplicity, operating on a wavelength the modern radio can't receive. Rejection of cushiness is antithetical once you have tasted from the tree of knowledge. Only the child, the stem cell of possibility, can chose their path.

2019/07/02 What is a Robot Carnival?

Robot Carnival: an anthology series of 9 episodes each written and directed in a different style. But what is the common link? We welcome technology into our lives - like a carnival. Irrespective of whether it brings us a better existence or greater happiness, technology can't be reversed and anything which is invented is here to stay. Take for example the 8th short movie: Tokyo comes to life with robotics, robots being a metaphor for technology, proliferating themselves inexhaustibly. The final cut is most striking when you see the robotic remains embedded into the skyline of Tokyo as we hear the chatter of Tokyo. Technology integrates with our society seamlessly without us realising. The iPhone was invented in 2007 and in merely 12 short years the conception of not having a smart phone is inconceivable. We have taken the first step to cyborgism without being conscious of it.

Another theme is the unnatural intransigence of machinery. The quest for eternal feminine beauty - his Aphrodite - led him to despair. This Robot Carnival is the carnival of the soul; the ability to know that eternal beauty is technologically plausible, not just a transcendental ideal, leads him to attempt to become a god and create a living being. This technology is on the rise; the idea of a sex android may not be a nerd's wet dream for much longer. Technology creeps underneath our feat with wisdom trailing far behind. We greet innovation with a carnival without knowing if it'll be congruous with our well-being.

Finally just want to talk about how fucking awesome the 8th episode was. I loved how it encapsulated the imposition of western ideas in the early Meiji era. Like, isn't the idea of a mech piloted by several people just ludicrous when you stop and think about it? Is it not an allegory for Japanese collectivism? Also the line "I only understand English, not American" is awesome.

2019/07/01 The First 30 Seconds of Ginga Tetsudou 999 Ep 25

An awfully specific point of conversation, you might say. It is unfortunate that few watch Ginga Tetsudou 999 today. A show which is chocked full of metaphor and symbolism. Traveling into the dark abyss of space in an old fashioned, 19th century train. Clinging on to our old perceptions and wits as we travel on into the great unknown of technology. The battle between nature and technology is a common theme throughout GE999. The thought of forgoing our corporeal form for that of a robot is in of itself the abandonment of the meaning derived from nature for the void of science, us misunderstanding our own nature.

So, the beginning of this episode. It is merely a description of a planet of two halves. One half is obsessed with their science, the other with nature. The science side of the planet decides they're going to separate themselves from the other one; a kind of oversensitive disgust on the part of the neurotic scientist. Detaching they're half of the planet, they use rockets to propel themselves forward, away from the philistinic naturalists. Alas, they miscalculate and their half of the planet combusts into smithereens. Another attempt to reach god has failed. What becomes of the naturalists? They evolve and become more and more tribal. They no longer have two eyes on their head, but rather an eye in the front on one eye on their belly and one on their back. They lose the concentration and focus of the scientists but gain a deeper appreciation for what's around them.

So why does the science side of the planet explode? Science can't exist without nature. Knowledge of science is derived from nature. Facts are accumulated and we try to piece them together to bend nature to our will. First we make fire. Then tools. Then more complex instruments like arrow heads, swords, buckets, etc. With each advancement we abstract nature further from our everyday lives. Now we live in concrete-laden cityscapes where grey is the norm: not green. It is no wonder that we become hubristic, and believe we can exist without nature. We have ascended after all: become gods. Surpassed the structures of nature which gave us the gift of cognition, and marched on, matricidally, to the extent to which we believe we can go it alone. To think we no longer need mother natures maternal nutriment; to forego her bountiful teat. The complex interwoven fabric of nature cannot be replicated by man. We attempt so in our capitalist societies but the sheer complexity and extend of nature can't be reinvented. We are a perfect fit for our natural environment; we were made for it, our form polished to fit this mold.

Have we already gone in this direction? The ushering in of science into our morality through modernity and now into post-modernity hasn't been a net gain for our psyche. Not with mental health epidemics and a general sense of nihilism at the death of god in our culture. A reconnection with our natural self is required. Whilst retaining our scientific adaptability and ability, we mustn't forget to dichotomise between knowledge and wisdom. For science can only teach the former. And our attempt to jam the square peg into the round hole of the latter is to the detriment to us all.

2019/06/26 Hitoribocchi and the Uniqueness of Strangers

Man was never designed to interact with strangers. The Hunter-gatherer would've lived their life solely within their own tribe and never attempted to interact with someone from another tribe. The outsiders can't be trusted; they are threats. In the modern day we've developed rituals like handshakes and greetings to bypass this dilemma to prevent us from fearing one another, so our societies can grow to the size they now have. Hitori has none of these abilities. Paralysed with social anxiety, she hasn't learnt the rituals and struggles to form bonds. She can't get beyond the stage of "the stranger is a threat". Fundamentally it comes down to our abstract perception of what a stranger is. To most, a stranger has their shit together; they know the path in life they're taking. They aren't exceptionally competent however they are well rounded and at least have a basic grasp on social interaction. They have no pressing worries nor obscure passions.

Hitori can't relate to this image of a stranger; without further interaction with others, how could one hope to be able to see past this grey archetype of a stranger? Hence she forces her initial interactions, like forcing yourself into a cold shower until you adapt. And she begins to discover that these strangers are far more complex than she initially thought. The class sukeban was in fact kind-hearted, misunderstood and had a complex about how everyone sees her as scary for being taller than the other girls. The class fuku-kaichou who everyone adores and is a social bee in fact is the biggest dojikko who constantly lives in fear of others discovering. The class gaikoku-bijin who everyone adores from afar is a fucking ninja otaku. Hitori was previously blind to their failings because she wasn't close enough. She couldn't see herself in them because she couldn't see flaws in them in the same way she could see flaws in herself.

The way to overcome social anxiety is to come to the understanding that every man and woman who walks the streets around you is deeply flawed, has plenty of worries, and, in the grand scheme of things, has no clue what they're doing nor where they're going. Realising this isn't easy. It requires observation, empathy and a concerted effort to live outside of yourself. However, as Hitori shows, when your world is swept from under you and you're forced to fend for yourself, you'll prove to yourself you can achieve beyond what you'd expect.

The Blackberry Walk