The Blackberry Walk

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