The Invisible World

The Doubtful has been in dry dock so I went crewing on a couple of other ships. Let's face it, sitting around planet side is not a strength I have nor really wish to cultivate.

It is always interesting to see how other systems handle the same things your own do but in bizarrely different ways - and of course that sometimes they don't. My ideas of critical functions and basic comforts that are just so obvious as to not be worth a mention are simply not shared by others. Whoa! I was away just long enough for it to all be an entertaining curiosity and working holiday rather than a horribly jarring experience.

So here I am, back in the same patched chair that has a little bit of stuffing coming out of the broken seam at the back, and thinking about something a wise man told me this week...

The freedom to reinterpret the world, to abandon a story of desperation for one of possibility and hope, is basic to the worldview of magic. It’s a freedom that today’s progressive community might find it useful to embrace as well.
...
It’s not just that change has to be thinkable before it’s possible, though this is true and important; it’s also that imagination can change the world by itself.

... and realising that so many things that have meaning are actually almost entirely held within ourselves. On a personal level, in our communities, our nations or ships. All of it can be reinterpreted according to our will, or the will of our enemies, or the will of the readers of the future to name just three obvious ones. In a world-view where 'reality' is this fluid, what can we hold on to? And let's not pretend that feeble humans do not feel safer holding onto things!

I've noticed that we hold onto habits and the familiar. Broken chairs, unsubstanitated opinions even our expectations and hopes sometimes are just placeholders for the meaning we really yearn for and that maybe we could finally discover if we accepted this secret. We are free to reinterpret the world.
Crazy. Could it work?

Remember Remember...

... the fifth of November.
Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.
I see no reason why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.

November 5th, 1605. What happened? "Treason" writes the victors and Guy Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for it. Imagine what that means for a second - and it was to be done in public (of the conspiritors sent to death that day, Fawkes was weakened by the torture he had been subjected to and using the last of his strength jumped in the noose and broke his neck thereby avoiding being drawn and quartered).

What would drive someone to such an act of (what would be named today as) terrorism?
He was Catholic and King James and most of the aristocracy were Protestant. Catholics were actively persecuted by the ruling Protestants at this time in English history. It was illegal to gather for mass. Ironically (to me) mass was of course in Latin, so many people were risking death or less serious punishments (such as lengthy imprisonment in unsanitary cells) to hear something that they did not understand. Such is the power of belief in ultimate truth!

Why that means parliament should have been blown up I've never been entirely clear, but I think it was a pragmatic rather than philosophical or symbolic decision - it was simply the place that the King and all the lords would be gathered when Parliament would open on the 6th. In the 17th century the European world was savagely fought over by competing christian churches in a way that to my modern eyes seems barbaric, wasteful and largely pointless. After all, they both have the same imaginary friend - right? But real wealth was at stake as the new worlds were discovered and then exploited. The power, drive and expertise to exploit those new sources of wealth came from the churches.

Our governmental system and laws are largely separated from the influence of any church now but at that time the idea of religious tolerance must have been as laughable and dangerous as the idea of hulling a ship with paper.

Guy Fawkes night was commemorated by government fiat to remind the underclasses that the King had survived, that the plot had been foiled and the conspirators given their just ends at the noose and sword. But. But. Had they consulted a magician, wise woman, or even just a low-level marketing hack, they would have been advised to change the name of the event. There's a simple but strong power in naming things.

Somewhere in that long line of burning nights from 1606, Guy Fawkes shifted from being a treasonous scoundrel to something of heroic figure. Indeed he must be magnificent or else why should he not be forgot?!

By the time I came across his story (in the late 80s or early 90s - I was slow to join the broader consciousness) the motivations were presented as political and very modern, he came with his own tagline: "The last man to enter Parliament with honourable intentions" and had been recast in the language of a freedom fighter, tackling tyranny for the justice and betterment of all. Such a stylish case of co opting a piece of history and an actual, historical person with quirks, flaws, joys, flatulence and awkward beliefs all of his own and turning him into a simplified symbol and then even more quickly into a marketing slogan and image for branding up parties and merchandising and acting as a shorthand for a whole bunch of modern concepts that our historical fellow would baulk or blanch at. He's in good company at least, I'm sure Jesus of Nazareth can empathise with that process. Ditto Einstein come to think of it.

It is from twisty turning stories like this that I have gained a sceptical respect for historians of all stripes. Even with primary sources and eyewitness statements or drawings, events must still be read and evaluated within layers of meaning. They happened in worlds so removed to ours as to be wholly alien. Entire, complex and detailed political and cultural structures existed then as invisible and obvious to those citizens as telecommunications and LOLcatz are to us. Shifting into a historical period involves letting go of some of oneself in order to make room for their values and needs. Yet we can't be completely objective, and we don't want to be. We read Shakespeare for our own meanings and pleasures, not to get a better handle on court influence or the emergent commerical structures of 17th centrury entertainments.

So for whatever reason you prefer, remember remember the 5th of November, the gunpowder, treason and plot. It really happened, it's a symbol. They were terrorists, they were fighting for what we take for granted - a separation of Church and State. They were killed as the lowest form of criminal, they live on immortalised in popular culture, more famous than the King who triumphed.

Does my mind know my mouth is typing?

I'm not sure I've got anything to say tonight, but I wanted to squeeze one more post into September as a pretty soft way of making up for the whole lack of an August thing.

This month has seen a small variety of fairly mundane things happen (that is to say - on top of the interesting things which I have already written about so very entertainingly) (stop fishing and get on with it!- Ed) ...

My leg has healed well and the physiotherapist certainly shamed the doctor with her knowledge, professionalism and capacity to give helpful advice about healing. It also gave me an interesting series of cultural vignettes - she kept tying to give me analogies and motivation based on the Broncos and football. I kept giving her utterly blank looks. I feel for her. That stuff probably works with the vast majority of people who sustain a "sports injury". It would be tough for me to find an upbeat parallel in, say, the life and works of Jane Austen or, worse, Virginia Woolf. No, I'm not ready to wade into the Bremer with my pockets full of stones. Not yet at least. Certainly not over a calf muscle. Anyway we're back up above 80% and frankly I'm not sure I even had a 100%. She lost me when she said "when you start running again..." and I was all "What do you mean again?" and she had a moment and just plugged the electric current octopus thing onto me and left me humming happily with my book. That thing is awesome. I asked her what it is called and she didn't know. It has no labels on it, and these weird 50s plastic tube things that end in a large suction pad that has a bit of sponge roughly cut to fit inside. It vacuums onto one's body and then they let it make a circuit and just run an electric current of some kind through you. Brilliant! I asked what kind of current - couldn't tell me. I asked how it worked, or what it did - couldn't really tell me (she literally waved her hands). How fantastic! I go to a scientific-y type place (where people have clipboards and machines that go "ping!") to get ritual magic performed on me. I so wish I could hear what Tesla would say about this.

Also, from the "it had to happen sooner or later" basket, Ma&Pa bought a 20something year-old caravan which they've parked next to the house and I don't reckon will move again for at least 6 - 9 months, but that's probably why they're not talking to me. Rationality ought never be injected into tightly held dreams. I got confused about that and now I will be given the cold shoulder until I am considered to have learnt my lesson. As with many of the baby boomers, my folks wish to spend their grey years nomadically traipsing this wide brown land soaking up the pleasures of the road and seeing the myriad sights of wonder. I can get behind that vision. I just thought it would make sense to wait until my Pa could fit the the door and maybe walk more than 5 or 10 meters unaided, or my Ma had finished working as a wage slave, or they'd sold the 155 acre property that takes up every available waking minute and dollar to keep functioning, but no. They scrimped and saved their whole lives for this and BY GOD they're going to have it. Well I am glad for them that it has manifest in their lives, and I hope they enjoy looking at it from their bedroom window as they run endlessly around the wheel of their life waiting for the pattern to change.

I really didn't want to get too caught up on that. It's an ugly mofo too - all brown and beige as only the very early 80s can be. *sigh*
But I digress.

In funnier news and for no apparent reason I have a massive, crippling crush on Jeremy Piven. I know nothing about this person (I had to point to a picture of him and ask around until someone knew who he was) other than that he is an actor who recently suffered mercury poisoning from living on too much sushi (no, really!), he does yoga, and he portrays a basically horrible agent in a tv show. How terribly modern! But none of that really matters, can it? After all I only found these meagre half-scraps out *after* the crush had formed. Ergo, he is a symbol of something (or someone) else. Still, it is entertaining. I've printed out a picture of him from the interwebs and stuck it on the wall opposite where I sit to eat my dinner. Hilarious!
"How was your day?" I ask
"Oh, the usual, but tell me all about you! You look tired, howabout a foot rub while you unload?" he answers....
haha. no I'm making that up.
I don't really say that out loud.

Was than an overshare?

Anyway. I have also spent some quality time with the "Amazon Recommends" software this month and that is a relationship that I can heartily endorse. It may not be fabulously healthy for the credit card, but the results will warm your reading heart and keep any problems in the real world with family or fictional lovers at bay. It will take anything and everything you might wish to throw at it - Batman, Georgette Heyer, Buddhism, esoteric reading, poker, sushi, peak oil, roman empire, gardening, knitting, sewing, and give you a hundred, two hundred recommendations, and you plough through those babies, rating the ones you've read, hooking the finds into the wish list and ploughing the corpses of the undesirables back into the database to fertilise the way forward for the next hundred. It is like some kind of Aztec blood cult for media. It is strangely addictive and although fundamentally consumerist, also culturally pleasing because it augments the ring of trust friends have - "oh I just read this - you'll love it!" and usually you do, or kinda do and want to find some more. In that way it is also often wrong, but then it just tries again, and doesn't entirely give up.
A bit like me and this blog (...sortof. Ok not really, but it would have been a nice tight ending, hey?! Now you'll have to make do with this limping "no you hang up" ending.) Bye.

He Invented Tomorrow

I am utterly stoked today by Google commemorating on their homepage the birthday of Nikola Tesla! Yay Google! Perhaps this prompted a few dozen people to digress from their purpose in booting the big G long enough to click through to the Wiki page and discover the brilliant and sadly under-rated (and occasionally just totally nutty) works of this amazing engineer and inventor. I hope they're now feeling a richer connection to their computer screen, and considering digressing more often (you know I'm already a fan).

I've been laboriously trudging my way through "A Brief History of Time" (which I know even Hawking says is outdated now) and I can't help but wonder today what Tesla's incredible and intuitive brain might make of our modern world and in particular of the wealth of advances in theoretical and applied physics. How valuable his creativity and inspiration would be to us, when we have more chance of understanding him than those dazed and confused Victorians.

In 1891 Tesla could create illumination without wires, and believed that this was merely the beginning of a field of industry. In Experiments With Alternate Currents Of High Potential And High Frequency in February 1892 he wrote "Ere many generations pass, our machinery will be driven by a power obtainable at any point of the universe".

Not "...at any point of the world", "of the universe" the man had a real scope to his vision that I find inspiring. This was just one of his strands of enquiry. I wish more of his work survived the inevitable fires that came with his experimental conditions and most of all, I wish that he had found a helpmate during his life to take care of the practical things, so his eclectic genius could soar higher and further.

Happy Birthday Nikola Tesla, and thank you for persevering with us as long as you did.

Minds immeasurably superior to our own*

My computer at home has been a bit tired (and fundamentally unable to handle anything with sound) lately and a friend had recently upgraded and had a "perfectly good" machine lying around unused. In the way of these things, my need and his surplus thought there might be a mutually beneficial arrangement in this situation.

One thing led to another with very little haggling (ie. none at all) and shortly after that brief discussion (meaning roughly 3 weeks) one hot afternoon on a crest of South street in downtown Ippy you could have seen us do the quick box-shuffle from one car t'other and the deed was done.

Or was it?

Quite quickly after that (about a week and a half) I (my defacto brother-in-law) tried to set it up, but it wouldn't go. All the frackin cables had to be replugged into the old tower and the corpse re-animated with a Dr Frankenstein-esque jolt of near lethal voltage (to the machine - not me). Cue manic cackling laughter from Rumi who dressed as Igor for this particular exercise. That cat is scary enough without hamming up the crazed laboratory side-kick feel, but I digress.

I tell my friend that it won't start, but I act clever and say "it won't boot up". See how already I have made an effort to speak the language?

Also, having been the idiot in the village for long enough to have all the badges, I have written down the error code and there it is "Insert boot disk."

"Ah," Says my friend sagely.

I wait, confident that this pause represents the process where the technical brain runs through a complex diagnostic decision tree.

"It's possible that the power cable to the hard drive is loose." Says my friend.

"Ah." I say and pause, allowing us both a moment to consider the wide-ranging implications of this possibility.

"How would you feel about opening up the machine and just checking the cable is in place?"

That sounds reasonable, I think to myself.

"It's pretty straightforward" he goes on, "Here's a diagram of what you'd have to do."

"Well ok then, I think I can manage that." I agree. It's been a long time since I last went under the hood of a machine, and frankly I was pretty heavily coached back then. I'm momentarily excited about the prospect of being a tiny bit handy. I know not to mention this to my defacto brother-in-law or he'll be all over this like stink on a blanket and I won't get a look-in.

"By the way," says my friend as an afterthought, "don't, whatever you do, don't plug the cable in the wrong way around. You'll totally break the whole thing. Really. Don't."

WTF?! There's important cables that can be placed the wrong way around with catastrophic consequences?! What is with that?! I'm used to the outside of these boxes - where, not content with making everything as simple as a toddler's kindergarten shape toy, pretty little colours are used as well to match pointy bits with holey bits. In this way the pre-verbal/reptilian parts of the brain can handle plugging machines into monitors and pointers and keyboards. This has to be the most damming indictment of lowest-common-denominator product development ever, except that it works. People too dumb to put 3 cables into the right slots get to run a powerful machine and use it to advance their Command & Conquer scores, or in the case of my dad, meet avatars from around the world and whipped by them at poker. But I digress.

The pretty matching colours and the one-way-only-into-this-hole design disappears on the insides. Apparently, once you take that phillip's head screwdriver to the casing, you're saying "I'm up from some hardware adventure, I'm grounded (geddit?!) and cool headed. I'm gunna pimp my drive" (oh, I'm killing myself!!) or you better have a handy schematic to take in. Just in case you read ahead and didn't look at it before, take a look at this now. Clear and simple. Beautiful almost. Elegant in the lines and the brevity of direction. I was ready to not fuck it up, and off comes the lid.

Shame then that the insides of the machine actually look somewhat more complicated. That is to say that they look exactly like the insides of a fantastically scary bomb and there's wires everywhere. Take a look for yourself. I'm not even that willing to put my hand in there let alone wiggle anything around. There could be a croc lurking just under the surface of that tangled mess of cables to grab at me and pull me under by my glasses cord, twisting, turning and tumbling until I drown in the confusion of RIDICULOUSLY USELESS FRACKING DRAWINGS.

And there we have it. A classic case of communication gone somehow very wrong. I'm sure in his mind it is completely that simple. All that other stuff in there is not central to the problem and so can be ignored.

Maybe each of us have this ability for something, and we are equally obtuse to others when we think we're being as simple as it is possible to be. It's just that for most of us, we don't find what our genius clarity is about, or if we do, it might be something like the capacity to visualise the internal pressures and counter thrusts of a dam wall. Not called upon so often in general interactions. Computers, in their still nascent form admittedly, are in our homes, our jobs, our recreational spaces. People who can visualise clearly how to make them go by prodding hardware or writing code are still our magicians and everybody wants to know one.

Just don't ask your wizard to give you a spell you can do yourself, it's not as easy as they make it look.


* I totally love that opening to War of the Worlds. Also, this post is based on real events, however some aspects may have been modified or heightened for raconteurial purposes. Michael Strelan's name has not in any way been changed or modified to protect his identity or dignity. There is no right of reply. No correspondence will be entered into, although I probably will read comments, and counter-blogs, but let's not go there. You said I could use this. C'mon man, it's freakin gold!

The Magic Block

There's a threshold of knowledge needed to enjoy a city as a resident, and it is different person -by - person. The sooner each of us finds the things that make us happy, well the happier we'll be (all the best axioms are self-evident)!

For my taste, I like to find these things in close proximity. The less transit time there is the less I am exposed to undesirable elements (such as off-key buskers, old people who smell like mothballs and any women who like to team white and gold in their clothing or accessories). For example, there's a haberdashery in Ipswich, surrounded by mechanical repair garages. No good to me - too isolated. There's a teeny teeny comic store in Ipswich surrounded by hairdressers and jewellery stores getting to it is like crossing a freaking minefield. There is NO sushi train in Ipswich (one v. dodgy kiosk in a foodcourt over the river ... just terrible in every way). You see my point.

Today there was a breakthrough. I have found a Magic Block in Brisbogan. Relief. In one square block of the city is a good art store, a small and wanky but independent bookstore, a major (bland but okish) chain bookstore, hidden away next to each other under a concrete out-ramp for a carpark is a dense and nerdy comic store and a sushi train (with little carriages even! and people cooking!), a haberdashery and craft store, and a cafe with excellent coffee (and comfy chairs and steroid air-con). Finally.
It is common sense to think they're there somewhere - but until I found them it was impossible to emotionally orient and every venture felt unfulfilled. I had found an arthouse cinema, but it's closed down. No matter. This is the minimum of destinations I needed to keep afloat.

My tummy is full with tasty sushi, I have some new craft materials I can't wait to get into and I scored a hardcover of an old Batman I've been looking for (still in the plastic wrapper and half price on a bottom shelf). Who's a happy little nerd then?