Afternoon Shadow

 Days are long when they are empty.  I walked up a hill.  On the hill there was a tower.  A look out tower.  I went up the stone spiral staircase to the top.  The beacon went unused but people still looked out over it’s side.  As I looked at the long bold coloirs of the grass and the sea reflecting the sky a woman’s voice interuppted me.

“You can see a lot here but there’s more you cannot” 

I looked at her and saw her green eyes watching me.  Her hair was brown and the sun tinged it with auburn.  I wanted to ask her about these unseen things but I smiled.  She smiled also.

I looked out to the horizon and pointed to a small ship on the line of the sea.  I asked her if she could see it also.  She said she could nearly see it if she concentrated her focus and squinted her eyes.  I said that between the seen and the unseen there must be the partially seen and the almost unseen also.  She said that there must be the seen but not there also.  I did not agree but I did not wish to argue.

We then talked on about the grass and the sea reflecting the sky.  We talked of insects and of clouds and of seaweed.  It had seemed that we talked of all we knew of.  We walked along the fields and lost ourselves in a pathway.

The sun was about to set behind the line of the sea and though we had only met together it had felt that I knew her for longer longer than the empty day and bold bolder than the colours of the grass or the sea reflecting the sky or the rung of green around her circle of black.  We felt nothing embrassing about kissing.

And the kiss was warm in the cool shadow of the afternoon like the glow of heat in a blush and my eyes closed.

Water of her lips evaporated and opening my eyes I saw the closing of light and the rising of day with the afternoon shadows disappearing into it. 

She was gone also.

I smiled and rememebered all the people I had known.  Those who are there but unseen.  The memories that had collected in me.  All the bright and dark colours now part of the night.  All the hours of looking and talking and in the day’s last hour of light and shadows sleeping.

A Fearful Journey

 

What follows is a horror story- at least I think it is a horror story, I believe that it is.  Then maybe not, maybe horror is not the correct word for my particular experience, maybe I should instead say that it is a fearful story- for it is full of fear, it haunts with suggestions and whispers with riddles, it’s the spider crawling at the edge of the room that scuttles under a bed before you can see it fully but know, know that it is there, it is there!  Yes; I shall not call my story a horror, but a fear, and very fearful indeed.

  Have I forgotten something?  I always feel that I have forgotten something, an object, and a note, left behind?  It’s a strange feeling.  More curious than strange, I suppose, much like the feeling of De Ja Vu, a very curious feeling.  I check my pockets in my coat and pat down my trousers but, no, no, I have all I need.  I breathe out with comfort and return watching the fields go by.

  The fields, the fields!  Are they endless?  All we go past is fields, endless, endless fields.  Why am I here anyway?  What am I doing in a foreign country, traveling at high speed through the depths of its fields.  I should be back home, boiling and baking a large lunch: beans, waffles, gammon, grilled fish-like haddock- or fried small fish- like sardines-, melted cheese on a hot jacket potato with beetroot and pickle onions…salad cream… time gnaws away slowly between meals.

  People on the train are fascinating even if the fascination is only the fact that they are on a train.  Take, for example, that couple sitting down on the other side, who haven’t said a word to each other since they got off, or that smart gentleman in the suit with the ponytail sitting directly behind, and can we really move on without mention of the person with the wild eye and the tight grip with which he holds his leg?  We cannot.

  However; as the journey continues and the people change I become tired of others and withdraw into my own dreams that move through my mind as smoothly as the train and think of the old steam trains of my childhood that use to run through the village and under the bridge where standing in the middle it would envelop me in a smoke of white cloud erasing the track the bridge the world everything and me.

  Though there is no white smoke here, at my table of the train, there is no steam.  Strangers and strange fields that go on stretching for this long moment.  I imagine that the train will go on and go on and not stop or slow like a sleeper though deep slumber.

  I am tired and I am awake.  Shall I have a coffee or a hot chocolate?  I like luxury but do I have the money?  No, I won’t check.  I am too sleepy to mind.  I shall yawn instead.

  The yawn seems familiar to me, I wonder if I have yawned recently, just now or a couple of hours ago, or…have I been yawning continually only coming to the end or will I yawn again then again…again.

   Suddenly the train seems dark to me, like the darkness of a stage between lights, somehow artificial and stylized.  Who are these people?  Do they know me and what I am doing?  Are they playing parts like actors or performers while all the time watching, watching me?

  What?  What am I doing?  A holiday, I’m passing through a holiday.  Hiding-me?  I’ve nothing to hide.  Running?  I’m not running.  Yes it’s a miserable holiday but can’t you see?  I can’t run or hide, not enough, not nearly enough, only when I sleep- but one can’t sleep…always one can’t…get enough…

  The nightmares, nightmares of the daylight, every scratch and scar, rash and disease always to return, never to be inoculated, never to be immune.

  At once the stuffiness of the air takes me and I wish for nothing more than something fresh but as I reach up for the window I find that it is stuck and will not come loose.  I feel desperate for air but I don’t think I can move while trying to breathe, I don’t think I can go on.  The train will carry me on, I don’t need to move, the train will move me.  There’s something terrible inside of me, I feel sure I will infect the others, the others who will feel my pain if not share it.  They are beautiful, these strangers, in this last lingering moments I can see their beauty and my only wish is to get to know them better, to my only regret, my regret, I regret. 

  Goodbye, goodbye you beautiful people, I fear this is where I…stop.   

Advice from Howard Barker

Write for yourself, don't do it for anyone else.

The Coversation Against George Monbiot

 "If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear"- Mark Twain


(And so with a quote from an American writer began my evening with George Monbiot, Guardian Columnist and Environmental Activist, along with 40 or so other people in the Warwick Arts Centre.  In the first part George would, he told us, begin with a statement that would begin a discussion, even a debate, over it.  The second part was open to audience statement and questions that would be given the same treatment.  Ever since his name was dropped in a lecture I've been reading and watching video clips by him and about him.  You could say I was excited to meet him.  You'd be right but for me it was different.  I've met famous writers before and then I felt nervous.  This was the first time I was excited by the presence of a writer.)

George began his statement that first referenced Milton Friedman, Noami Klein and Pinochet.  Noami Klein is known for her book 'The Shock Doctrine', which is about the rise of disaster capitalism.  Milton Friedman was 'an ambitious and charismatic man on a mission to fundamentally revolutionise his profession' within the University of Chicago's Economics Department.  General Augusto Pinochet was a Chilean dictator who led a coup d'état in 1973 overthrowing the democratically elected President Salvador Allende.  The premise for 'The Shock Doctrine' is that 'there are people with power who are cashing in on chaos'.  

Friedman and others of the Chicago Economics Department developed an idea to get unpopular polices through on democratic terms.  Wait for a disaster that puts people's safety in danger than push the unpopular policy through as quickly as possible.  When the invasion of Iraq occurred the government sent in their crack team of economists alongside the soldiers issuing flat taxes to the people.  The International Monetary Fund (IMF) calls this 'structural adjustment'.  After the hurricane New Orleans began a process of 'reform'.  In order to make sure that the unpopular policy stays within policy the structural adjustment must happen within 6 to 8 months because after that any adjustments made become hard to change.  The Shock Doctrine is being applied in Britain now.

(That was George's statement.  After a moment of absorbing that statement George then began to take questions from the audience.)

A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.  Wouldn't the left-wing take the same opportunities?
     
G. Yes your right, but I would argue that the left-wing does it for the greater good


Economics seems to be hi-jacked.  What went wrong with economics?  To me it seems that economics is taught rather than open to challenge and questioning.  Do the economists bare any responsibility?

G.  Economists live on a different planet.  Their worldview, to them, goes above the psychological, the biological.  You know the well known phrase "if the model doesn't fit the world than it's the world that's wrong", well that's the attitude.  The amount of corporate sponsorship and support who sit on research councils is disturbing.   Look at the composition of review councils.  What I don't know is to what extent does this affect things?  What they are saying is "sack this world and let's elect a new one". 

Personality types plays a great role- people who want to go into Business Schools are usually those who want to go into Big Business.

G.  What I don't like about Business Schools is the speed at which students are expected to make a choice about which career you go into.  Few people know what they really want to do and then say "well then to get there I'll do that then that then that".  There's more to life than knowing what work to do, like pursuing our passions and our loves.  The purpose of these University's is to turn people into corporate drones.

First I'd like to thank you and 'The Guardian' for being a voice of sanity.  Isn't true to say that Labour continued the economic model of the previous Tory government and so now there's an inability to challenge the given consensus?

G.  What happened with Labour and the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) was a real shock.  The Walsgrave hospital in Coventry, for example, which was to have been refurbished at a cost of £30m, was instead knocked down and rebuilt at a cost of £330m, solely in order to make the project attractive to private companies. It is like the book 'Ghost' by Robert Harris (that was made into a film by Roman Polanski) where a left-wing Prime Minister was implanted by a Secret Service agency.  I don't believe that literally but it's a metaphor for what is happening.  When Blair was Prime Minister he did something much more damaging than push the right-wing agenda further than the right-wing he destroyed hope in political alternatives.  He turned the Worker's Party into the Boss' Party.

What do you think of the global phenomena of this right-wing leaning?

G.  I believe that what is happening is that a transnational elite is emerging.  The rich countries are holding the poor countries to ransom.  When I wrote 'Captive State' I made a mistake.  It should have been called the 'Re-captured State'.

Three more people asked questions one after another.  One of them was me.

-That's quite a gloomy picture you paint and it's powerfully argued.  But there's only a handful of us here to listen to you.  I would think most people outside this room simply don't care.  Where do you find the hope in this situation?       
-With the lack of an alternative exactly what alternative is there?           
-Do you think that our inability to respond to these big challenges stem from a desperate lack of imagination?
 
G.  Your right, it is a gloomy picture, but there are hopeful signs.  UK Uncut have been making a lot of noise and a lot of good points.  So good in fact that even 'The Daily Mail' has agreed with their points and even has their sympathy.  It seems to me that there is an enormous anger from not only the working classes but from the middle classes who have realised what the government has been spending their money on.  We see that the student protests have been continuing involving many different varieties of causes but what we haven't seen is a unified message.  What there needs to be now is a call for a new agenda and a list of specific targets of spending that could be cut instead of the ones the government is proposing.

(That was the end of part one.  During the interval George took scraps of paper with people's questions, about any subject they wished to talk about, in order to have them answered in the second part. "And to censor out any questions you don't wish to answer" said a women in the front row to which George ruefully smiled.)


(In the second part a whole new, but not entirely unrelated, set of questions began.)


George, how can such a smart chap as yourself put the climate change blame on us Westerners without acknowledging the huge population in African countries.  They simply don't have the family planning necessary in place.

G.  Population control is a problem but the population in most African countries are not the ones consuming on an industrial scale while emitting CO2 gas into the air.  What most Western countries do is try to transfer responsibility on to other countries.  In this case it's the rich pointing to the poor.  David Satterthwaite  of the IIED showed that populations are rising by people who are not environmentally responsible.  Paul R. Erlich in 'The Population Bomb' he uses the formula I= PxAxT(where I = Environmental Impact, P = Population, A = Affluence, T = Technology), but I would change the P for a C to stand for Consumers because it's consumers that have the most environmental impact.  In terms of world population the amount of consumers is about 2 million.  There is some good news in that the population will stabilise in around 2060 to 9 to 10 million people.  However that's still too many in environmental terms.  We Westerners have got to show willingness to change.

George takes four questions one after another.

-Although runaway climate change is a big issue I actually think a bigger issue is peak oil since the WikiLeak documents concerning Saudi Arabia.         
-Shouldn't these crises be seen as an opportunity rather than a problem?
-I would say that it's not in the interest of corporate capitalism to provide a political alternative.
-On the subject of corporate capitalism David Bohm has written about end of world scenarios and one that I find very interesting is the idea of Zero Growth.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of time left for change so what can we do to make an impact in a hurry? 


G.  The government has never had a contingency plan for peak oil.  Whenever anyone in the government is asked what is their contingency plan if the oil runs out they say "but it won't run out".  No-one in the whole infrastructure has a clue of what they are doing, well what are they doing?  They've got to be there for something.   There has never been any real analysis into the possibility of peak oil.  In every major situation the British government has always done it's own analysis but for this situation they have relied solely on outside analysis.  You can tell a lot from a government about what they don't look at.  The dates of resource depletion has been gotten wrong by environmentalists (I almost said the only thing).  We have often underestimated the huge amount of unconventional oil that are out there.  

My name is Richard Lemarr, yours is Monbiot, you asked us only to write our Christian names on the question slips, my question is: what do you think about multiculturalism?

G.  When David Cameron is talking about multiculturalism I believe that what he is really talking about is Islam and I don't know why he doesn't just come out and say it.  The narrative goes like this "For too long we have been too tolerant on Muslims and it's time they learnt how to act in this country."  There was a Dispatchers program last year on this very subject entitled 'Britain's Islamic Republic'.  I find Cameron's talk of multiculturalism worrying because it seems to be done in genocidal terms.

Is multiculturalism really the right word.  I think nationalism defines aspects of British culture more accurately.
 
G.  I think you're right.  If you see the way the Arab Israelis are treated by the Palestinians at the moment they aren't really talking about multiculturalism as much as they are about nationalism.            
I'm going to try to make an even more controversial  point just to spark a bit more debate.  I read a book by David Willetts 'The Pinch: how the baby boomers took their children's future- and why they should give it back' and apparently I've been very lazy indeed and owe a lot of money.

G.  It's a very interesting book.  Will Hutton wrote an article recently about who, and how, those responsible for the major problems of the financial system.

How do you like putting your pension on a Casino?

G.  Fundamentally Willetts' book was right in that the baby boomers found themselves in extremely lucky circumstances.  Will Hutton makes the point that the way the boomers kept growth stable was through downsizing companies and outsourcing problems.  Technologically speaking there has really been little change since the 1960s.  All the new technologies we get today aren't really new technologies but simply the same technologies improved.  A prime example of this can be seen in mobile phones.  They used to be big and clunky but now they're small and slim.  The period between the 1900s to the 1960s there has been a more profounder change in technology.  Think of the program 'Life on Mars'.  Britain back then looked different, a little weird, but not so different that we wouldn't be able to function within it.  If you tried to make the same program but set at the end of the 19th Century it would be incomprehensible to us because of the social grammar.  It would be like learning a whole new language.  To keep up growth governments will damage the terms and conditions of the work contract to achieve it.  It's a vampire economy that rides the back of previous innovations hoping it would strong enough to keep it going without having to do much.                

There's a very crash and burn mentality about in politics such as the government reinventing the jobs role after the death of big government.
   
G.  There's an interesting cycle that seems to happen.  At the beginning of the 20th Century capitalism was bailed out by socialism by means of a redistribution of wealth.  There was a post-war period where there seemed to be a lucid moment of sanity before people started spending and carried on with business as usual.  You could say the ultra capitalist cuts it's own throat while the non-capitalist mops up all the blood and patches it up before the Pinochets of the world rise up against it.  It's a weird cycle.  

With that the end of George's Left Hook approached.  But George was still in the building and for people needing answers the issues are never over until they get them.  I offered to buy him a drink but a man in a suit got there before I could and in the bar of Warwick Arts Centre a smaller group of us pulled two round tables together.  The conversation continued.   
 
The man in the suit, about 40, sitting next to me wanted to talk about Fractional Reserve Banking.  
"Yes, I've been meaning to write about Fractional Reserve Banking for a while but haven't yet partly because it's called Fractional Reserve Banking"
The man next to me said that "there's a core of fairness in British people and if they could see what the banks have been doing in clear terms than I would think the majority of them would be so shocked that they would reform them instantly.  People need to realise that these banks are actually allowed to do FRB because it helps to drive consumerism.  It's a purely mathematical system based on projected earnings."

A student of Warwick University, in his early 20s, who earlier likened corporations to (if I remember correctly) a sociopath in that they are not morally only 'good' or 'bad' but only act in such ways because it is their nature, mentions that it seems to be the religious groups who are doing a good job of looking after their money.  Take the Islamic usury policy which is much more of an Old World notion of money.  He also mentioned, I think, the Christian Terry Drew Karanen was mentioned concerning economic truths.  There was also something about gold standard.  Malcom Gladwell's Black Swan was also mentioned.  


"There's a whole raft of fundamental truths that need to be questioned" said the gentlemen next to me.  "FRB  is basically fraud.  It comes from gold merchants lending money due to reserve.  After a while the merchants noticed that they could charge any interest they wanted because none of the customers knew how much reserve there really was.  They would lend out £5 and charge 5% interest when it was paid back- that's £50 from nothing!  We're building a huge pyramid scheme and there's a big bill for whoever ends up paying it.  It's exactly what happened during the Wall Street Crash"  

Another chap, in his late twenties wearing a black hooded coat, said: "Can I ask a stupid question?  If you can raise £50 from nothing than why is that so social bad?  With that money you could buy more doctors, more art centres, etc...

The gentleman next to me said: "Government created the money and they given the bonds to the commercial banks.  Commercial banks now need more taxes in order to keep going.  Initially you're right you could buy more doctors but you couldn't keep them on unless you make some of them redundant or lower their wages so in the end you actually lose out more.  Banks are massively bigger than what they were and their vacuuming the people."

A man on my other side, I believe it was Mr. Lemarr with a notebook, asked George if he had a thick skin and wanted to get into bed with the police.  Alongside this I noted that he had has death threats and asked if he thought any of us was going to pull a knife on him. 

"I do my best to try to ignore them, and let it get to me, but really what I most want is to have a proper conversation with these people.  That Brenden O'Neill article did get to me a bit but you just have to ignore the insults."

Our conversation then went on to the current protests in Cairo and the role Facebook played in it.

"Social media," George said "is good as a bulletin board.  Malcolm Gladwell made a good point, good for Malcolm Gladwell that is, that the Facebook messages were written by English speaking people who were writing messages of support.  So we'll have to wait and see what emerges in the next month.  The Internet looked like such a wonderful gift.  Finally those columnists were knocked off their perch and everyone was talking.  But so many people use it like a upset monkey throwing shit at people."

The man in the black hood jumper asked "if John Smith were still alive do you think he would have made the same decisions as Tony Blair?"

"I honestly do not know" says George "I do feel sure that he would have at least hesitated before making them but Blair never did.  What Blair had a great talent for was understanding power.  He knew how it worked and he knew how he could get it.  The City disciplines it's politicans"          

He made mention of Nicholas Shaxson's 'Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men Who Stole the World' before leaving to catch the train.

Advice From John Wray

 At the Prague Writers’ Festival I asked American writer John Wray, author of Lowboy, The Right-Hand Of Sleep, and Canaan’s Tongue, what advice he could give to young up and coming writers venturing into the big bad world:

Well, the world is very big and very bad.

There are certain things that one has no control over, such as the amount of talent you were born with, one does has the control to the degree one develops the talent one has.  But one thing that I think that maybe is more important than talent for any writer to have is perseverance that borders on masochism.  You have to be willing to take your licks.

Writers tend to be more on the neurotic end of the spectrum, but there’s never a position you get that you are so secure that it doesn’t hurt when your taking a knock in a review or the lack of one.  It comes with the territory and over and over again I am reminded of that.  You really have to be able to take a licking on a daily basis.  Both in the active sense in saying that your books are crap and in the more insidious, more kind of meteorological sense of just people treating writing fiction as something marginal or not relevant in culture.  You are either getting it personally or as a whole group.  It’s hard to say which is more difficult to overcome.  But then you are surprised again.  For every hit you take hopefully there’s some positive good that may happen. 

To me it just pure perseverance and a waiting game.  A lot of my friends who are very successful writers now wrote first novels that were turned down by a few dozen publishers and never got published. 

Read a hell of a lot, and broadly.  Just because your writing a novel about the Internet doesn’t mean you can’t learn from F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Don’t mistake the content of a book for…as a writer you learn that the content, subject matter, plot is much less important than the way in which the story is told.  Even in subject matters that don’t interest you.  You can read a book about stockbrokers.  I couldn’t care less about stockbrokers but you can still read a well written book about stockbrokers and you learn a lot about the way the information is communicated, the structure and style.

Thank you very much.  I’m sure we’re all prepared to take our daily licking.

Your welcome.       

Television

To my mind I have only seen four or five really great drama on television, these are: 'The Singing Detective' and 'Pennies From Heaven' by Dennis Potter, 'Edge of Darkness' by Troy Martin Kennedy, 'Black Mirror' by Charlie Brooker and 'Taking Over The Asylum' with David Tennent.  These dramas all reach the level of great art and they are few and far between.  Why I feel that these are great and that most television is not is because all of these dramas engage with despair, facing the meaning of life and struggling with it.
  'The Singing Detective' is about Philip Marlowe, a detective writer who is in hospital suffering from a severe skin condition that leaves him bed bound.  In the hospital he is rude and challenging to the staff while he writes his book in his head and recalling his childhood in the Forest of Dean.  'And all the time, there is this canopy over you'.
  'Pennies From Heaven', also by Potter, is about a sheet music salesman who loves music but hates the shops.  He is unsatisfied with his wife and desperately yearns for more.
  'Edge of Darkness' is about a detective whose daughter is killed and in trying to find the killer he finds himself deep in a corporate conspiracy involving nuclear power.  A green text.
  'Black Mirror' is a series of one off stories that deal with technology that shapes human relationships, reality justice and political angst.  The three I saw was about a woman who loses her husband and gets a robot that acts as a replacement, a game where criminals believe they are living in a post- morality world and a comedian who thanks to a animation he voices becomes a political figure that gets out of control.
  'Taking Over the Asylum' is about a man who works at a radio station in a psychiatric ward  while doing a door to door sales job.  He wants to be a full time radio DJ and struggles with the aggressive selling culture.  The patients he meets are trying to get well while dreaming of their future.  It's about trying to do what you want to do when it goes against the idea of settling with less.
  These are all brilliant, rare examples of how television can deal in big ideas and big feelings.  I don't watch much television as like Robin Ince once said, I would watch more television but I don't think I can afford to buy a new television after chucking it out of the window every night.  There is also Chris Morris' stuff, I would think what he does as great art. 

Shroenberg's Filmography

ACT I

Scene 1

KISMET and SHROENBERG are sitting opposite each other.  SHROENBERG is being interviewed by KISMET.

kismet:

Shroenberg you are a film maker who has had considerable and enviable success in doing exactly what you have wanted.  Your career was started by one of your film producer friends joked that you should write one of his films and this was a particular joke that went too far in that you went ahead and wrote it for him and it became a huge success.

shroenberg:

Thank you Kismet, yes that was 'My Time in Florida'.  It was quite a surprise considering that I knew nothing about writing a film at all.

KISMET:

you then went on to direct your own film and that too became a success.

SHROENBERG:

'Hapless Days' was my first real taste of directing and it was there that I could do exactly what I wanted, which was remarkably thrilling, nobody had ever given me such freedom before.

KISMET:

while these had been comedies you turned to more serious subjects with 'Death, My Dear' that audiences might not have expected from you.

SHROENBERG:

yes that was a risk, but a risk worth taking I felt.  It was something that I had to explore, to see if I could become something more than just a gag maker.

KISMET:

then there have been a whole host of successful films all varying between styles and tones, 'Case of the Cat', 'Branches of Life', 'Sixties Swing', 'Tulip Roses', 'My Life of Increasing Vagueness', 'The Causation Fixation', 'Mr. Tubbs', 'Synthesised Tones', 'Cosmic Allience', 'Justifications of Various Crimes', 'Sin Intended', 'Doubting Tom', 'That Kind of Thing', 'Missing Legs','Juliet Widow','Feathers Amok','Skol!','Just This Once','Title Unedited','Mandaras Jarvis','Second Coming (First Deserts)','Risky Substution','Profit, Unihibited','Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here','Please Miss Susan','Who's On First?','Swinging Sensation','Marevllous Wonder','Am I Still Making Films?','Yes, I Am','Double or Muffin','The Identity Game','First World Politics','Kidgloves','Ringside Performance','Wise Love','King of Commerce','Scribbled On A Note','Film For A New Boat','Vertigo Redoubled','Kanas Space Incident','The Dream Society','Old Wonders','Reading Aloud','Time Wrap','Bomber Knight','Hold Your Cards', and your latest 'A Little Starlight'.

SHROENBERG:

Yes, I know.

KISMET:

Tell me, what's your secret to becoming a successful artist?  I ask because for many years now I've been trying to make a short film but I just can't get it to work.  What do you do?

SHROENBERG:

I honestly don't know.

KISMET:

really?  That's very interesting.

SHROENBERG:

Now if you don't mind I have to be back on set.

KISMET:

For a new film?

SHROENBERG:

I suppose so.

KISMET:

What is this one going to be called?

SHROENBERG:

'The Ominous Punchline'

If I Could Fall

 I am a safety officer yet I am fascinated by people hurting themselves.  In my world everything is ordered and everything is safe but I have a small collection of old videos showing people falling over.  Recently I have been watching these videos and wondering the possibility of such spotenaity.  I have never since anyone fall or trip or slip in my life and these videos are the only examples I can find.  It’s incredible to me that anyone can be at the will of external forces, they are bound up by gravity.  I thought about what it would be like to experience a tumble and thought that perhaps I could make myself fall to the unsafe ground, but that would not be right.  It has to happen accidentally, without my consent, but how can it be allowed to happen? 

  These days I spend my time thinking of ways to accidentally pull me down but I’ve never thought of one that was entirely satisfiying.  We have to live in a society where no-one is ever hurt as the physical and psychological pain is unbearable for anyone to endure.  There are still explosions but large scale warfare is different to a cut or a graze.  Nobody gets hurt in a war.  In a war people stop feeling so there is no pain, but here we have become so very attune to every sensual texture and every change in tempreture.  We see more colours than we used to and we have more words to describe our world around us, but this has also may us more aware to the microscopic dangers that we did not notice and was not concerned of. 

  We have better poets than we used to but also more sucides and though the inpersonal war is constant we have to think of the small things that gives us pleasure.  Clip after clip people fall, over fences, over trampolines, at weddings, at birthdays, it seemed that no one in the old days wa immune to this danger.  Even older people used to celebrate this pain with films of people poking their fingers in other people’s eyes, hitting each other with mallets, hanging off a clock tower.  They thought differently then.  Pain was a more acceptable part of life.  An ancient dramatist once said ‘knowledge through suffering’ but that is quite an outragerous statement.  Suffering does not have to be necessary to aquire knowledge and I think it was overrated because people didn’t used to have any alternative but now with have the technology and a enlightened view of life that encourages happiness and pleasure.  Yes we do send people to fight other people but that is different, that is to secure our happiness and pleasure.  The people we fight are different, their idea of happiness is fighting in a war, so really the fight will be endless until either one side or the other is wiped out.  That is far away and I have my own concerns and responsibilities to deal with.

   I know it will never happen but I do wonder what would it be like if somebody took the rug from under my feet, would I learn anything?