Apologies to anyone who was waiting with bated breath for my musings on XTRMNTR yesterday, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster week and I haven't had time to write it. But I promise it will be coming along shortly, in fact I hereby pledge to post at least a couple more times before this weekend, when halloween commitments mean that I shall be otherwise engaged (If anyone's wondering, I'm going as Richey, of course).
Anyway, to keep your appetite sated in the meantime, here's something I wrote quite a few months ago. I dug it out of my files today, having been reminded of it this weekend at the Brighton festival, where ten-foot chalkboard letters spelled ELL-OH-VEE-EE across the library forecourt. They were daubed in day-glo lines with the loves of the people who, throughout the day, had been invited to grab a paintbrush and colour in their passions. In the dark, crisp night, hundreds of people were standing and looking at the sculpture. Some were holding hands, taking photographs. Everybody was smiling, and I felt a simple warmth inside, that reflected their contented expressions.
So. Romance, then. It seems to me that those everyday faults in logic that make up our existence – our reliance on language, our trust in linear narrative and misplaced sense of finality – are supremely reflected in the fumblings of romance. Love makes bad poets of us all. That’s precisely the reason why it is so captivating.
Sweet nothings, now there’s an interesting concept. Why does romance reduce a statement to the status of a nothing? Maybe in the twenty-first century, we’ll learn to replace nothings with somethings, the performative utterances of love.
I read about some scientific research a long time ago that suggests that the part of our brain concerned with making rational decisions doesn’t come into play until after we act; we act spontaneously, then justify our decisions with logic afterwards. This doesn’t just go for instinct – and just because you give something a name doesn’t mean it has any explanation – but for other, much more critical decisions like speaking, walking, standing up, sitting down, things that directly affect the course of our lives. Ever been on your way somewhere, lost in your own little world, and suddenly realised that your feet have carried you somewhere familiar, of their own accord, without any apparent intervention from your head? That’s what I’m talking about.
If we aren’t even in control of our own actions, what kind of grip do we have on the future, however we may trivialise it with plans and timetables and alarm clocks and shopping lists? The future, even the close future, from one second to the next, from one instant to the next, as universe shifts into universe, forming and collapsing like surf on the shore, is completely out of our control. Accept it. Go outside right now and kiss a complete stranger. It’s the best you can hope for.
That’s as if to say that hope is something that concerns the future. It isn’t. Hope is something that manifests itself only in memory and past. We live, we hope, we hope that it will or will not happen to us again. Hope is important, certainly, but it is important in that it tells us who we are, not where we are going.
Creation is in itself an act of destruction. When you create something, you make a conscious decision to eradicate all the potential forms and guises that idea may have taken. For every act of creation, a million acts of destruction. God is the destroyer of worlds, because in creating existence, he destroyed the infinite potential for existence to exist as something else. To truly create, you must accept that which you destroy. The history of art is filled with drink and drugs and depression because to be a creator is to celebrate destructiveness. This is why people like the idea of a soul. It’s something tangible and permanent. With everything around it decaying, it is indelible. Its half-life is infinite. It cannot be destroyed or tarnished except by an act of will. Which is where fate comes in.
Fate allows us to accept the possibility that inevitable destruction is not complete and perfect. Fate is a tautology. Things happen because they happen, like the needle scratching endlessly through the groove in the record. But what if the self is not inward, but a manifestation of fate? Maybe fate is an outward representation of self, soul, psyche, id, being? That part that says ‘this is me’ isn’t part of our being in a physical sense. You can’t hold it or taste it or see it. It doesn’t have mass, or colour or texture. Why do we have this impression that it exists behind the eyes? Maybe we’re all fooling ourselves, and fate and free will are the same, and we just don’t realise it. Maybe creation and destruction are both just our own affirmation.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Monday, 27 October 2008
Thursday, 2 October 2008
The Philosophy of Kids TV
The trouble with life as a student is that, after a while, you get into the habit of over-analysis. All the hours spent discussing the minutiae of novels, ideologies, philosophies, surrounded night and day by people who are too clever by half, you get into a state of mental delirium, where you can see Jungian commentary in the Marks and Spencer adverts, Nietszche in Neighbours, kabuki in Coronation Street. Or, as I found, the complex ethical and sociological structures at play in the world of children’s television.
It all started, as these things invariably do, with a very late night. I’d been at a seminar earlier in the day, discussing the theatrical work of Samuel Beckett. If you’ve ever studied Beckett you’ll know that this pretty much means a discussion of every essay, philosophical, political or literary, that has ever been written. That night, or more accurately the following morning, during one of those meandering conversations which suddenly turns out to have been going on for several hours, I started to tell the others about Act Without Words II, a short mime composed by Beckett, thought of by some critics as a retelling of the Sisyphian myth.
Sisyphus was a king of ancient Greece, ordered by the gods, for who knows what transgression (probably incest, this being ancient Greece), to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity. This concept of constant work without reward, nor accomplishment, excited Beckett’s famously cruel sense of humour. I opted to dumb down Sisyphian literature for my friends by describing it as “meaningless and repetitive tasks with no success. A bit like the Chuckle Brothers”. I probably shouldn’t have said that, for it opened up a whole grade-A can of worms.
The endless trials of the unfortunately named Barry and Paul Chuckle (“Let’s not over-hype ourselves, Barry. We’re expecting chuckles, not guffaws”) have always fascinated me. The joyful abandon with which they laid into the week’s task, regardless of aptitude or training, should, I feel, be a lesson for us all. Paul would be occasionally cynical, but never world weary, whilst Barry was the happy go lucky dreamer of the pair. Bricklaying, window washing, plumbing, whatever - they would set about it with the minimum degree of fuss and the optimum of bad luck. And ‘no slacking’. The idea that there was more to the duo’s adventures than mislaid pots of paint and quaintly unintimidating brushes with the law delighted us. And so we decided to delve deeper, and discover more of what lay below the surface of the 3-5pm slot of the British weekday.
Of course the programme that immediately leapt to mind like a well-oiled cougar was that stalwart of mid-90s CITV, Funhouse. Armed with a combined twenty-plus years of higher education, we now saw it for what it obviously was; an indictment of organised religion. It all made sense. The arbitrary tasks assigned by a beatific figurehead (Pat Sharp, the latter day Jesus Christ, complete with flowing locks and disciples in the form of the ever-present twins). And the reward at the end, eternal peace achieved only through following the strict dogmatic doctrine of the church of funhouse. Sharp saw what he was doing; illustrating the horror of the unruly scramble, the holy war, to finish atop the hierarchy of mayhem.
Moving on, we decoded another of ITV’s trademark chaotic gameshows – Finders Keepers, surely emblematic of the search for meaning in everyday life. For whilst we are searching we do not know what it is that we search for, we can only rationalise our discoveries with the benefit of hindsight. We envisaged a bleak bonus round; guest presenter Albert Camus laughing laconically whilst offering a playstation two to the frantically searching sprogs if they could but find their soul within the house. They always fail.
And who could forget The Queen’s Nose, a paean to the wish fulfilment culture of commodity fetishism, the fifty pence piece representing the false consciousness created by global capitalism, our heroine subservient, a tool of the economy. Let us not forget that it was only through the selfless invocation of (Gary Mabbutt (the working class man; the proletariat) that she could free herself of the oppression of the 50p and all that it symbolised.
Now we were on a roll. Bernard’s Watch - a Derridean meditation on the inherent subjectivity of time - came next, followed swiftly by Blue Peter, which obviously taught us the lesson of import substitution. Why buy a Tracy Island, when it is within one’s capabilities, with a little sticky back plastic and some egg cartons, to manufacture one’s own, with its own individual flaws and idiosyncrasies? In these financially insecure times, such a message can only be a boon to the sound development of young minds.
But it was getting late, and we were getting tired, our ideas more fractured and disjointed. It was when we reached the conclusion that Get Your Own Back was “an attempt to reconcile the tyranny of ontology through the medium of Dave Benson Phillips and his redemptive gunge” that it was deemed to be best for all concerned if we got some sleep. It was a fractured repast that night, my dreams haunted by visions of Neil Buchanan teaching Rothko the art of papier mache. Three parts water, one part PVA. So it is, was, and ever shall be.
It all started, as these things invariably do, with a very late night. I’d been at a seminar earlier in the day, discussing the theatrical work of Samuel Beckett. If you’ve ever studied Beckett you’ll know that this pretty much means a discussion of every essay, philosophical, political or literary, that has ever been written. That night, or more accurately the following morning, during one of those meandering conversations which suddenly turns out to have been going on for several hours, I started to tell the others about Act Without Words II, a short mime composed by Beckett, thought of by some critics as a retelling of the Sisyphian myth.
Sisyphus was a king of ancient Greece, ordered by the gods, for who knows what transgression (probably incest, this being ancient Greece), to roll a boulder uphill for all eternity. This concept of constant work without reward, nor accomplishment, excited Beckett’s famously cruel sense of humour. I opted to dumb down Sisyphian literature for my friends by describing it as “meaningless and repetitive tasks with no success. A bit like the Chuckle Brothers”. I probably shouldn’t have said that, for it opened up a whole grade-A can of worms.
The endless trials of the unfortunately named Barry and Paul Chuckle (“Let’s not over-hype ourselves, Barry. We’re expecting chuckles, not guffaws”) have always fascinated me. The joyful abandon with which they laid into the week’s task, regardless of aptitude or training, should, I feel, be a lesson for us all. Paul would be occasionally cynical, but never world weary, whilst Barry was the happy go lucky dreamer of the pair. Bricklaying, window washing, plumbing, whatever - they would set about it with the minimum degree of fuss and the optimum of bad luck. And ‘no slacking’. The idea that there was more to the duo’s adventures than mislaid pots of paint and quaintly unintimidating brushes with the law delighted us. And so we decided to delve deeper, and discover more of what lay below the surface of the 3-5pm slot of the British weekday.
Of course the programme that immediately leapt to mind like a well-oiled cougar was that stalwart of mid-90s CITV, Funhouse. Armed with a combined twenty-plus years of higher education, we now saw it for what it obviously was; an indictment of organised religion. It all made sense. The arbitrary tasks assigned by a beatific figurehead (Pat Sharp, the latter day Jesus Christ, complete with flowing locks and disciples in the form of the ever-present twins). And the reward at the end, eternal peace achieved only through following the strict dogmatic doctrine of the church of funhouse. Sharp saw what he was doing; illustrating the horror of the unruly scramble, the holy war, to finish atop the hierarchy of mayhem.
Moving on, we decoded another of ITV’s trademark chaotic gameshows – Finders Keepers, surely emblematic of the search for meaning in everyday life. For whilst we are searching we do not know what it is that we search for, we can only rationalise our discoveries with the benefit of hindsight. We envisaged a bleak bonus round; guest presenter Albert Camus laughing laconically whilst offering a playstation two to the frantically searching sprogs if they could but find their soul within the house. They always fail.
And who could forget The Queen’s Nose, a paean to the wish fulfilment culture of commodity fetishism, the fifty pence piece representing the false consciousness created by global capitalism, our heroine subservient, a tool of the economy. Let us not forget that it was only through the selfless invocation of (Gary Mabbutt (the working class man; the proletariat) that she could free herself of the oppression of the 50p and all that it symbolised.
Now we were on a roll. Bernard’s Watch - a Derridean meditation on the inherent subjectivity of time - came next, followed swiftly by Blue Peter, which obviously taught us the lesson of import substitution. Why buy a Tracy Island, when it is within one’s capabilities, with a little sticky back plastic and some egg cartons, to manufacture one’s own, with its own individual flaws and idiosyncrasies? In these financially insecure times, such a message can only be a boon to the sound development of young minds.
But it was getting late, and we were getting tired, our ideas more fractured and disjointed. It was when we reached the conclusion that Get Your Own Back was “an attempt to reconcile the tyranny of ontology through the medium of Dave Benson Phillips and his redemptive gunge” that it was deemed to be best for all concerned if we got some sleep. It was a fractured repast that night, my dreams haunted by visions of Neil Buchanan teaching Rothko the art of papier mache. Three parts water, one part PVA. So it is, was, and ever shall be.
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