Antithetic.

In recent days, I've taken to visiting chatrooms and asking the inhabitants there how they know they are not striking up a conversation with a computer instead and not a human being.

Effectively, I am reversing the aims of the Turing test when I do this: instead of a piece of artificial intelligence trying to persuade a human subject that he or she is conversing with another human subject, I am a human endeavouring to convince another human that I am in reality a computer (pretending to be human.)

Strictly speaking, the aims of the Turing test are not actually reversed, because the correct setup requires three parties: a human subject (A) alone in a room; and subjects (B) - a human trying to convince (A) that (B) is human and (C) a computer programmed with some artifical intelligence code has the role of persuading (A) that (C) is a human subject and that (B) is not.

In the pared-down and reversed test that I've implemented, there are only two subjects - (A) and the negation of (C). The modulating influence of (B) is not present at all. Despite the omission, I assert that I would have passed the negation of the Turing test if I managed to convince a human subject that I am a computer (pretending to be human.)

I've failed to convince the chatroom (and instant messenger) inhabitants that the entity with whom (which?) they're communicating is a machine. Does this failure have any implications for those involved in getting a machine through the real Turing test? Common criticisms have been:

• sentence structure is too obviously written by a human
• fake error messages such as [text cannot be read at location n] and [string error] are
  
• evidently convoluted

I'd suggest that spelling mistakes at intermittent intervals and typical displays of human uncertainty - let me look up the answer to that; there's more than one way of thinking about the question you just posed - are necessary if not sufficient conditions for getting an artificial intelligence system through the test. A proliferation of error messages, however, seem to tip the opinion of the human subject into thinking that (B) is a human pretending to be a computer.

The paradoxical point I wish to make is that particular exaggerated human traits are enough to convince a subject that the conversationalist they cannot see is a computer. Perfect spelling, an exaggerated grasp of the tenets of a particular body of knowledge, making exhaustive lists of specific information - these three things suggest a other-worldliness which can only be embodied by a machine.

L.

It seemed quite natural to state that everything I write after an arbitrary point in time should have your fingerprints on it; that from now I put together strings of letters that have you as their engine. That now is akin to a magical invocation, a discontinuity. Any passing stranger should be able to note as much. In the former, we are aware of the stammering inability to describe in a comprehensible way thought processes and events. With a shake of a head and a dismissive click of the mouth we can reject what has gone before as the rantings of a bloody amateur. Ah, in hindsight it's so easy to criticise the lack of a thesis! Whoever the anonymous blogger is, the one who describes himself as the fusion of man and weblog, deserves to be castigated for a lack of scope and the inevitable jump from idea to idea to idea without ever pinning down even one of them. At Christmas 2008, something happened to synthesise the disparate voices of this author, or to dampen down all but one of them. Like tuning the static and the unwanted banter of disc jockeys and news programmes out of a desired radio broadcast, there was not unity but a singularity which had been promised, but unforthcoming, for years. Details of the event that cancelled the separated-out murmurs and brought clarity and purpose are not easy to come by. Some accounts suggest it was a woman with the initial L; some suggest the marking of someone's birthday; some both or neither. It led, though, to a period of creativity which defined the symbiotic relationship between blogger and blog - and, ironically, led to his uprooting from the blogosphere and into mainstream writing. Romantics will invariably accept the line that a woman - and only a woman - was able to claim responsibility for the surge in directed, coherent output. Such a female, her identity only ever guessed at but not recorded in a way which might lead to her presenting a world which has its breath held with her story, has been one of the classic vehicles of literary history, carrying a multitude of men forward upon the simulacrum of her smile or her voice. Her lack of a name, her lack of an image and a background means that any and all writers can project their own vision of her; there exists within her at once the infinity of the creative devastation she inspires and the emptiness of the idea that nothing which can ever be produced by a mortal can anywhere near match what has already been churned out by the random calculations and brute force of natural selection. It had been asserted in his earlier writings that the fusion of man and weblog had long eschewed the idea of a religious divinity. Imagine, then, his isolation when he was forced to conclude that his muse was the consequence of no more than a bag of genes being shaken up and drawn into the tactile world, and this combination shall henceforth be known as L. Such is the dilemma of every agnostic - why should there exist great beauty, great hope and the inevitable destruction or re-evaluation of values caused by such great beauty and great hope ex nihilo? On your birthday, the universe temporarily ceases to spit out the numbers which are the result of its calculations, and turns its face of close to absolute zero upon itself to briefly contemplate the troubles of the little humans who arrived out of the blue on one of the average planets in a region lablled the Solar System. For those weary, slight beings, the innocuous glance of a woman from the long-dead moment of a photograph is enough to cause them to suspend everything bar the lonely pursuit of the slightly drunken face that pushes itself into view during sleep, during the half-alive moments which signal the end of sleep, and during waking hours.

Illness.

What probability is there that I've been suffering with an affliction for the whole of my life, and it has never been diagnosed?

That is not diagnosed; not mis-diagnosed or partially diagnosed, but completely overlooked. What are the chances of that happening? And after three decades of staring into a bottomless shaft with seemingly no explanation for why I am so detached, so sad, what prospect of fixing it in order that I might latch onto some sort of normality?

It's been suggested, in a non-malicious conversation, that I might be suffering from Asperger's Syndrome, a mish-mash condition comprising, amongst other things, poor social interaction; stereotyped behaviour; physical clumsiness and atypical use of language. (Thankyou, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger%27s_syndrome)

Okay. Let's go through those four things one at a time and see what evidence we can exhume from your author's personal history. Whilst accepting that singular occurrences do not, individually. provide irrefutable evidence of their hypothesis, they do mean that the hypothesis (that I might have Asperger's) cannot be rejected without further investigation.

• poor social interaction: silence or near-silence around people I don't know. Unease or discomfort escalating to outright hostility: I chose to work a night on my own with no transport home last Easter rather than face attending the office's annual social event. There was a three-hour wait for a train home after my shift, but I stayed back alone at my desk, drinking tea and reading; I couldn't bring myself to talk to the man next to me at the football to begin with despite our common interest; every girlfriend I have ever had has commented on how aloof I am.
• stereotyped behaviour: I have a number of repeated, intrustive, irrelevant thoughts. I mentioned on here before how I had rituals which had to be completed to prevent the house burning down or the death of a loved one.
• physical clumsiness: I can't ride a two-wheeled bicycle; I can't judge the pressure I'm exerting on the pedals of a car - meaning I have never passed the test; I am uncoordinated when hitting at a ball with either a bat or my hands. I played tennis on a frequent basis with an ex-partner. The racket slashed around at thin air, far more often than it made contact with the ball.
• atypical use of language: okay, not so strong here. I did pick up foreign languages very quickly when at school, and am doing so again now I've decided to re-learn them. I don't neologise often, though.

So there is some evidence which might back up the suggestion. Additionally, in an online test - again, I agree that its signficance is spurious as a singularity - I 'scored' 33 out of 50, when likelyAsperger's sufferers are expected to record 32.

What started as an innocent conversation, then, has the potential to frame a lifetime which has been full of nerves and misery for as long as I am able to recall. Now I must take the post-Christmas trip to the doctor and find out whether there's anything at all in it beyond tilting at windmills.

Queneau (2).

I remember the amazement it caused here in March 2009 when Parliament passed a law stating that every female user of public transport had to have a seat at all times.

Of course, there had been a not inconsiderable amount of public disorder in the very early part of the year: police turning a blind eye when dissenters who refused to shift took a beating; transport companies agitating to the Press that they'd need to order fleet after fleet of new vehicles with more seats - and how were they expected to do that in these austere economic times?

The British administration, though, was stubbornly unbending. Cross-party unity for once held, as though the whole lot of them had been gripped by madness or disease. The leader of the third-biggest party, in a moment of rare public exposure, declared that the need for new legislation exposed a majority of British men as a 'plague of chauvinists 'who should 'loathe themselves for their outdated attitude towards women.'

Even though Polly Toynbee in the Guardian accused the government of populism and sexism, rolling back the prevailing view of women to somewhere in the 14th century, nothing could stop the legislation as it travelled on its infinite bed of ice.

It had all kicked off the previous December when an unshaven little runt on a train going to Sheffield - he could never have known he was about to divert the course of British society - refused to stand up for a woman who'd just boarded. A ruffian (who had a face like a potato, God help him!) took issue with the little runt and ragged his glasses from his face.

Runty complained to the train company, and it ended up making the papers as these things do. When one of the opposition members passed an early day motion congratulating the aggressor for upholding old-fashioned English values, it started a run on the chauvinistic and un-English on public transport.

Several of these ignoramuses got slapped about for what was seen as a lack of chivalry. It's pushing it to claim that the hospitals were overflowing with casualties, but admissions to casualty wards had certainly spiked. Credit has to go to the red-tops, who stopped fanning the flames and pleaded for some diplomacy and common sense.

It was an editorial in The Sun on the last day in February 2009 which was the seed for legislation to be brought in. In an article headlined 'Enough is enough,' it went on to say that 'violence is no answer to an age-old problem. Both sides must agree to disagree. If not, then only the lawlords can bring this to an end with their big stick.'

With that, Parliament rushed through a bill declaring the indivision of women and public transport seating facilties. I can recall the astonishment and disgust I felt at such a retrograde, abysmal pace back into the dark, misognystic history of this nation.

Thirty.

Today happens to be my 30th birthday - in years gone by I always suggested the occasion would be a tipping point.

It has been a recurring theme in recent years that if, by the time I turned 30, at least some of my ambitions had not been fulfilled, I might as well end my life. If I'm not writing consistently, and not forcing people to sit up and take notice of what I have to say, then there is a negligible reason for continuing to exist.

When all I am capable of is writing badly, I might as well not be here at all. So goes the mind of the ambitious twenty-something, his creativity choked by the density of his own wishes. I can't write because I want to write too much, and end up doing nothing whatsoever.

I'd made my own death into a fine art. Like Sylvia Plath, I would commit myself to the gas cooker and let it ease me into sleep. I can't speak like you, but I can unravel myself in the same way. Plath's vast fire was extinguished by the pitiless squeezing exerted by a fist in full view of a cynical and delighted audience; my little light would be switched off with no fanfare at all.

The obvious hit me one night when I was coming home on the train after having had too much to drink: Plath died as she did in an act of vengeance towards her German father. He was taken away from her all too soon, so she succumbed like a Second World War Jew, in her own gas chamber. I too wanted to make an ironic statement: the one who seldom looked up to anybody would be taken away in the same manner as the woman I had idolised.

By now, though, it is blindingly obvious that I don't have the necessary resolve to take my own life: I'm either too much of a coward, or I've developed the (mistaken or not) conviction that there remains some Eben-inspired golden future that makes it worth hanging around for. If all gods and prophets were like Eben, humanity could consign suicide to a historical footnote.

This 30-year-old carries with him a string of failed relationships, each one a car-crash of a disaster. They lag behind me, obvious and irrefutable, like a giant prehensile tail which knocks the hope out of any future ones which might arise. I want to write about you, all of you, in eponymous blog titles, and I shall get around to doing so at some point. On my birthday, the day when I arranged to die yet continue to live, I reflect how culpable I am in the shattering of n relationships.

Prophecy.

One afternoon many years ago in England, a prophet, firebrand and lightning rod whose name was Eben stood atop the biggest hill in one of the towns and began to dispense his wisdom.

Eben had drank God, and God flowed through his veins and stimulated his vocal cords. A crowd had gathered at the brow of the hill, a rivulet at first and then an escalating throng as word got around that the day of Eben had arrived.

Such a punctuation in the lives of the townspeople had long been predicted - it was written down in the Book of Forces, and the Book had never yet been known to have erred as it directed the people along their deterministic path. It was December of 2008, and the Book of Forces had indicated that Eben would assimilate his fire in the town in January of 2009 or perhaps February.

Eben looked down from his height and prepared to address the collective. With his arms extended at right angles to his body, he began to speak - shout - his voice attenuating the hum his presence had caused. At his command the sky darkened and the wind was silenced on his hilltop ampitheatre. He resembled a great, threatening bird with his outstretched arms.

"Hear me!" he cried, "for I drank God through a straw before I came unto you, and then I made day into night.

"I am charged with the electricity of the godhead, and I speak to you here of the future - your future - which I have seen.

"The Book!" he exclaimed, and the conversation of the masses died on their lips with that utterance. "The Book of Forces.... this is the arrow which takes you from today, and directs you remorselessly into the future. Its sentiment has torn down the present, and shifted your every hope and glory into the distant future, far beyond your own puny lives' duration.

"In exchange for the uprooting of your purpose, the godhead of the Book assures you of eternal redemption, and a place in perpetuity with him upon the cutting of your mortal ties."

Queneau (1).

To whom it may concern,

I'm writing to tell you about an incident on one of your services Friday gone, at about a quarter to nine in the morning.

There was a set-to between two men - it was the Sheffield train, obviously! - who started on each other when one wouldn't give up his seat for a woman.

The one who wouldn't stand up, a little squirt, said that the woman was okay enough on her feet
so he wasn't about to abandon a perfectly good seat. The other guy - he had a head shaped like a spud, God help him - called this runt disgrace and a bastard, and tried to separate him from his specs. What larks!

I'll tell you something, the little rat didn't like it up him! Fancy not moving - for a woman! He called old vegetable-face some choice names, and no mistake. On a train! To Sheffield! You'd never believe it!

Everyone was watching to see if Ratty would say something else and get his head taken off, but he just sat there reading The Guardian. What a fop! The Guardian! And all the while that poor cow's having to stand up!

It all simmered down after that, and spud-face didn't lay him out when they both got off at Sheffield, even though he'd said he was going to kill him. I saw that little ingrate about a couple of hours later, coming out of a sandwich shop.

Yours sincerely,

R. Queneau.

Barnsley.

The early hours of Saturday morning.

At times I need a glass of schnapps; the bloodstream which viscously descends along my throat and acts as an analgesic; the tether which precludes me from looking into the very depths of the abyss.


It's out-of-character for me to want alcohol, let alone allow myself to be seduced by it. For the moment I shall hold off and see how I feel in a little while.


A chance conversation earlier reminded me that there are some things from which a person does not recover. This is a thesis of my existence: the memories of events fade sufficiently for them to become manageable, but their complete oblation is impossible.


We speak colloquially about the shock of an occurrence needing to be given sufficient time before it 'sinks in.' I speak now of one event, though, which 'sank in' with immediacy despite the dizziness of its deliverance. Any subsequent delay only served to lodge it fast in my brain, like a bullet.

It was my father who pulled the trigger on the day when he decided to leave my mother. He didn't die, but from that point he has been more-or-less dead to me.


In this way of speaking, then, my father came to be defined - is - a series of events that I did not witness and can only imagine. I only saw, and dealt with, their aftermath. _____________________________________________________________________

Saturday night.

I left the alcohol alone in the end and eventually went into an uneasy, twitching sleep. I dreamt of falling through a cat's cradle of electrical cables, dark and fizzing. There was no end to the falling, no bottom.

The day after my father went - I say 'went' because the euphemism prevents me having to crack open the surface of the unspeakable and bear witness to the wounds beneath - he dropped me off in town ahead of one of the football matches. It's still the only occasion I have ever seen him cry, his head bowed and the shell of his battered blue car surrounding him.

It was January 17, 1998, and Barnsley were about halfway through their only season in the top division in England. We were playing Crystal Palace who, amazingly, were even worse than us. When a crisis of life-changing proportions happens, it is in my nature to seek solace in the trivial and the disposable. So the day after my father confessed his love for another woman, my attention was focused on sending Palace back home with nothing.

What sort of a person does this make me? A person who, when real life is whirling all around me, immerses himself in banality. I wanted the volume of the crowd to diminutise the screaming in my head. If you can't switch it off then overwhelm it.

Oh, Barnsley. How many times have I invoked you like a religion and asked you to deliver a result so that some epidemic or other might be tempered, at least for the moment? You haven't always succeeded, but I'd like to think that you've always tried. On this occasion, I note, you did deliver - without cheating and checking the archive websites, I think it was an Ashley Ward penalty in the 34th minute.

I probably balled my fists together and screamed at the sky when the final whistle went, a shout of triumph pushing back the day-old clouds which had gathered. Then it was back to check on the mental state of my mother. She had swept the glassy pieces of herself into the corner of the room and was looking at me through a bottle of wine. At least she'd survived the afternoon, though.

Height.

Humans sometimes think that our species represents the acme of evolution as it stands now, and perhaps forever.

What sort of achievements might we set out as evidence that we are indeed the pinnacle of all life that has ever existed? Like bad anthropologists, might we be making the basic mistake that what represents a glorious achievement for a human mind doesn't commute across cultural boundaries?

Are technological or scientific advancements the manifestation of the highest height - the realisation that the quantum exists; the creation of computers which deal in teraflops; the genetic alteration of crops or animals? Is it that we've derived religion - placing the responsibility for our own lives into the hands of distant, notional gods?

Is it literature or art or poetry - or any combination of the things I have mentioned? The fact that words can be disseminated en masse as a consequence of technological development? The fact that words relating to the practice of evidence-based, scientifically-sound medical techniques can be disseminated en masse?

Could it be 'nothing more than' carrying out an act of which no other species is capable? So the 'mere' erection of a tower block; the formal notation of a piece of music or set of laws or instructions; the re-shaping of the surface of the earth by non-natural processes; the proliferation of artificial lighting.

Am I justified in stating that the inventor of the first light bulb has already transcended anything that any other species might conceivably do? Is the notional height of the lightbulb, the machine gun and the printing press irrefutable evidence of the looming stature of homo sapiens?

It's something that's been bothering me for much of the day and, as ever, I'm not sure there's a definitive answer. Even the capacity for such reflection might arguably supercede anything a non-human can in principle carry out.

Inversion.

Is it appropriate - ever - to laugh (either to oneself, inwardly, or out loud) when the victim of undeserved abuse turns the tables on his or her tormentor?

If not laughter, we have all felt a sense of satisfaction when such situations are played out in literature: when Papillon flings a full pan of scalding water into the face of that bastard Trebouillard; when Milan Kundera's non-Communists limp and walk through their race in defiance of orders.

That's literature, though, and no bony, infinite fist is likely to smash through the pages and into our three dimensions any time soon. It's probably safe - maybe even therapeutic - to afford a smile as Trebouillard goes down clawing at his own face. But what about when you're in a train during a winter's night when the umbra has already fastened itself around the carriage, and there's a woman being subjected to all manner of sexual remarks from a group of drunken football supporters?

The poor woman was unfortunate enough to be carrying a piece of rolled-up carpet - it turns out the purpose of her train journey was to collect this - because in English slang the word 'rug' is used to colloquialise the occurrence of lesbian sex. So she was told enough times that she probably enjoys the rug.

I wasn't confrontational enough to stand up to the men. I never am. So my diversionary tactic was to engage the woman in conversation in the hope that the supporters would lay off her. It's not a surprise that it didn't work as I'd wished: within a minute they'd asked the woman if she'd already fucked me. Some diversion!

The woman's casual indifference to her intelocutors - a smile and a raised eyebrow, as one would deliver to a delinquent child - was hardly the most stinging repudiation. I somehow felt that it was enough to 'turn the tables,' however - certainly enough to cause me secret amusement. When getting off the train, I told the woman she was brilliant.

Western.

I wonder if every person with a western upbringing approaches impending crises* in the same manner as your author.

I spoke to somebody yesterday - I gather such instances as kindling for my flaky hypotheses - who told me: "The first time I kissed someone, I expected fireworks to explode over my head, and for my left leg to dramatically detach itself and make for the sky.

"And every time an important decision had to be made in my family, I would hold my breath as I waited for a dramatic piece of music to commence, audible to all."

Westerners are, then, conditioned to expect the events of our lives to follow a narrative structure in the style of a dramatic television show. We're inadvertently exposed to them at a young age, and it is not long before their plot devices begin to superimpose themselves upon our own 'narrative structure.'

When my father would tell me off for scraping together another appalling school report, I used to wait in expectation for a Superman or some such to propel itself through an open window and drag me to safety. (I hate raised voices. I'd rather be kicked between the legs than endure it.) Needless to say, no comic book creation ever manifested itself. I speak as someone who has never watched much television, having never shown a great deal of interest in it. Nevertheless, its imprint is undoubtedly there.

Even now, the anticipation is there that some supernatural force will extricate me safely from every circumstance. Of course it never happens, but the irrational belief persists.

*Crises is used here to mean 'crises' and also its negation: thus the pleasant prospect of kissing someone for the first time is termed 'crisis.'

Realisation.

That which is re-experienced in a never-ending cycle eventually becomes too much. These are the words I use to describe the pressure exerted on the mind prior to committing suicide.


An event of dubious significance loops over and over again, causing fatigue and sadness for the individual who bears it. Eventually the event, or rather the image of the event, has rolled its wheel across consciousness one too many times and it can no longer be tolerated.


Never-ending cycles do not always result in death, though. I only just realised this as I lay awake in bed thinking about the person I have not heard a murmur from for three weeks. No, the ceaseless stacking of the same event upon multiple copies of itself is not a dead end.


We are not condemned to repetition but nor can we state with certainty when (or even if) the the tower of facsimiles will topple and provide if not always new insight, at least some form of release.


When this release has been earned - I say earned because it always comes at a cost of labour - then the event which gave birth to the release is always subsequently considered in a different light.

A conscious decision, then, to relinquish the person who expanded and filled my head like a gas for the last n days means that the circuitous internal repetition is broken, and a particular weekend re-contextualised. The Buddhist who proselytises letting go has been let go of - the irony!

Futuricide.

There is much debate in Britain at the moment about the problem of assisted suicide - whereby an incapacitated person asks someone else to help them to die.

In this country, the law is not clear about such matters - you might end up being charged with a criminal offence if you aid someone in closing their life, or you might not. See the following link from last month - http://worldfocus.org/blog/2008/10/30/british-woman-loses-assisted-suicide-case/2283/

Even this state of affairs is an improvement compared to previous interpretations of suicide, for it used to be an offence to take even your own life - ie there were consequences if you made an attempt which failed. Such a notion causes me to shake my head sadly, so arcane and cruel a piece of legislation does that seem. You can assume, then, that I support the idea of choosing when enough is enough - but I've never really established whether there are any limits to this, in my own mind.

The question of when enough is enough reduces to or can be re-phrased as: At what point is a situation so intolerable that death is preferable to the situation being prolonged? I have enough times felt that I am in such a hopeless/impossible/unpleasant position that I would rather die than endure another solitary second of it. Yet I am still here, days, weeks and even years later.

This thread is so titled because I have been thinking of an arbitrary (the river of mental symbols I work from mean that arbitrary is always directed into the future) world where it is permissable to ask a doctor to provide 'suicide pills' at any point whatever. A nasty headache; an argument with a partner; a punctuation error in an e-mail, anything. I don't speak of a society where the effacing of the self is actually encouraged, but one where it is accepted and tolerated.

Perhaps in an hour or so when the headache has subsided, I might be posthumously regretting my decision to call a halt to the constituents of life. Your author feels, though, that the momentum which drives suicidal thoughts is derived (in general) not from a novel, equilibrium-shattering hammer blow, but from the cumulative drip of the same event overwriting the same event overwriting the same event.

That which is re-experienced in a never-ending cycle eventually becomes too much. That which I shrugged at in mild vexation yesterday causes a shearing force which separates man from reason today. At that point, I wish to be able to call 'enough!' Of course, I can simply jump from a bridge and spiral into the dark frieze of water below if I choose to.

What leaping from a bridge lacks, however, is the cold absolute certainty of success. I envisage a planet, but do not expect to exist in one any time soon, where certainty is manifested by medical practitioners, and not left in the hands of the likes of me.

Reductionism.

Our eyes are very limited: they can handle neither the extremely small nor the extremely large. This means, then, that our world, our universe, our everything, is perceived in terms of objects which the eye can parse.

The scope of the human eye has been artificially extended, and a good thing it is, too. We can now observe, of course, tiny slivers of living matter beneath a microscope and use binoculars to intrude on Mars during its (her?) occasional visits. I'd argue, however, that such powers are so incidental that they in no way invalidate the premise of the first sentence.

If it were natural to be able to observe macroscopic bodies on an atom-by-atom basis, then I am content to state that such an arrangement constitutes our reality. There is, in that case, no such thing as a macroscopic object, only a collection of n atoms.

Deriving the existence of anything greater than an atom would require a leap of faith, mitigated by technology or by insight, but would not change the 'everyday reality' of what we observe - 'just' atoms, with no greater organistion or purpose. For despite our new awareness that there are macroscopic objects, we are too accustomed to the atomic perspective to see the world any other way.

Back in the more familiar world, scientists who declare that large occurrences (say, an earthquake) can be explained by the multiple interactions of small occurrences (say, the interaction of n atoms) are known as reductionists.
_________________________________________________________
I am typing at twenty minutes to two in the morning, stranded in a bubble of misery that I've been unable to burst for days now.

Christ, I complain bitterly to myself, I have no wish to live like this any longer. In asserting that unhappiness is the sum total of my existence, am I similarly in need of situations which artificially extend the repetoire of thoughts that I have? Am I seeing only depressive 'atoms' which form part of a superstructure of conflicting, overlapping emotions?

Perhaps the state of mind of being depressed serves, in itself, to make a human being into a card-carrying reductionist? I think there is probably some truth in that. Depressive thoughts propagate a feedback loop which leads to more depressive thoughts. Only when the creative insight occurs to break the circle that reduces every gesture or cognition to a negative one can depression be at least partially negated.

Hindsight.

If I'd known that it was the last time I was ever going to see you, I'd have done any number of things differently:

• I wouldn't have raced for the train with such vigour; putting my drink down at 13:27, and eating up the ground between the café and the platform as though my very existence depended on being there no later than 13:30.
• I'd instead have watched you erase yourself to a flickering dot in the distance, never unfixing my eye from your retreating body. I'd have suspended myself in the one place until the automatic doors swallowed you, and you disappeared into the mouth of London.
• The previous night, I'd not have done anything as tediously human as falling asleep. I should have patiently sculpted an image of you onto my consciousness, one arrived at from long hours of working in the half-light, so that I might invoke you in the same unrehearsed, unthinking manner as I exhale.
• I'd have measured and weighed the significance of every second, counting the last few with the expression of the condemned.
• Would that I had excoriated your mind of every synaptic connection. I thought we had more time to do so - I was wrong. I wished to not only understand, but be permitted to see, the furnace which powered your thoughts.

Equation.

I feel - at the time of writing - that if I am never to see a particular person again, it is as though that person, or myself, or both parties, might as well be dead.


Such sentiments motivate the serial killer. I'm not a serial killer because my mind is too strong (or too weak, depending on your perspective) but the motivating factor is the same. No, I don't wish to be associated with that class of people: I am in fact the antithesis or the nemesis of the serial killer.


Thus thinks the serial killer: "If I cannot have you, then nobody else might have you!" and the act of killing commences. The serial killer relishes the (real) death of another.


Thus thinks the antithesis: "If I am not yours, then nobody else is permitted to have me!" and the sudden withdrawal from situations which might entail meetings with women begins. The nemesis partakes in the (partial or virtual) death of the self.


Oh, the same mechanism is at work so frequently! I imagine that millions of people tolerate it, but don't accept the conclusions they draw if they ask themselves what's really happening.


Depressive people function asymmetrically - that is, their idea of causality has been skewed in some way. This skewing is the defining characteristic of depressive behaviour: positive events are ascribed to extrinsic causes; negative events are the whole responsibility of the person concerned.


Cognitive behavioural therapy attempts to correct the asymmetry, so that the former depressive is capable of enduring a difficult event without reasoning that he or she brought that event about with their own actions.

We can form a series of 'word equations' which link the properties of (anti) serial-killing with the asymmetrical thoughts of (non) depressive people:

• (1)If I can't have you, nobody else can have you!
• (2)If I can't have you, nobody else can have me!
• (3)If I can't have you, somebody else can have you!
• (4)If I can't have you, I'll do for somebody else!
• (5)I've had a good day: that was lucky!
• (6)I've had a good day: that was my doing.
• (7)I've not had a good day: it's all my fault.
• (8)I've not had a good day: that sometimes happens.
  

I think that statements 1 and 7 express broadly the same sentiment, as do 2 and 6; the other statements are there for the sake of completion. (1+7) is the mindset of the depressive/murderer, while (2+6) is its negation.

Nightmares.

In recent days, the nightmares have started again with a vengeance - I fear that my consignment is to have them repeated eternally.

I started having them when I was four years old: innocent, everyday images which held no obvious threat were subverted, causing me to wake up screaming in the small hours of the morning. A girl sitting smiling beneath a tree was sufficient to invoke terror.

Similar to one of Dalí's confusing paranoiac works, the obvious surface image needs some thought and attention devoting to it before its disturbing counter-argument is pulled into the light. Such is the case with the girl and the tree: I suspect that she represents life and vitality, overwhelmed and undermined by the tendrils of a crisis - death or misery or conflict - which is rooted in herself and exists dormantly.

The nightmare, then, always needs work before its full horror is revealed; and its constituents are always a handful of the same half-forgotten experiences, latent ambitions, and the transience of existing as a human.

As the unconscious slab of meat that I am strives to unravel the puzzles that my own mind is setting for itself, one characteristic is apparent - the more difficult the 'puzzle' which has been set, and the more effort needed to solve it or part-solve it, the less I am able to remember when I snap back into the real world. All that remains is a fuzzy certainty that something caused a lot of discomfort, and shook me back to life before its narrative had been concluded.

Conocer.

The Spanish have two verbs which both mean 'to know': they decided at some point that the weight 'to know' carries is too much for a solitary verb to bear, and divided the responsibility.


The bisection is accomplished in the following way: saber is used when one wishes to talk about the retinue of accumulated facts - do you know which city is the capital of Chile? Is 7/24 greater than 15/47?


Conocer, meanwhile, indicates familiarity with another person. Do you know Reg Lightwriter?


My Spanish isn't yet advanced enough to have deduced which one I should use when I'm thinking about or discussing my own internal states: 'this much I am aware of....' Is it an established fact, or a question of knowing the self?

I'm certain I mentioned before that the Spanish also have two verbs which both translate as 'to be' - one (ser) emphasising that which is immutable; the other (estar) representing that which is transient. Again, my Spanish isn't yet at a level to answer the question, but is it permanent or transient when I declare that, for example, I am a person who hates music? Or loves a particular woman?

Regardless the Spanish way of constructing verbs, can the more general point be made that there is are psychological mechanisms which are triggered when language is left 'open' in this way?

If it is natural from a very young age that I state that my thoughts are subject to revision (estar) as opposed to recalcitrant (ser), would I hence be more willing to amend my point of view in the light of new evidence? Would regarding my internal states as mere fluctuations - I feel as though I hate music today, but that might change tomorrow - be healthier and more liberating than asserting that what stands now must stand forever?

How much energy do we expend holding onto views whose veracity seems to be receding with every passing hour? What psychological constructions do we build to support ideas whose time has come and gone - not a priori, but placed there arbitrarily? It is better, surely, to declare that our stances are estar. In so doing, we move a step further on the long, never-ending road marked freedom.

Language.

To fall in love with another person is to access, alter and eventually complete a verbal and non-verbal private language to which all others are barred access.

Each individual possesses a river of symbols, mental imagery and private historical motifs through which a whole life is modulated. This much is apparent, obvious even - but I for one don't always appreciate the automatic or schematic nature of much of my existence.

(What are apparently conscious decisions are probably derived more from memory; the same thought processes and gestures resulting in the same actions. The loop which psychiatrists attempt to break in depressives is nevertheless the notional framework of much non-depressive behaviour.)

When the rivers of two distinct individuals intersect, we can examine (in a limited way) the symbols, mental imagery and private historical motifs of which they are in possession, and compare them with our own.

In carrying out such a comparison, we are in a position to introduce, discard and persist with specific aspects of the private language mentioned above. When I am lost for words in your presence, you will know for what reasons I am lost - it is the set repertoire of my gestures which gives everything away. When I am loath to discuss how I am feeling, you'll read me as easily as a child's picture book, because non-verbal cues persevere when verbal ones cease.

Unemployed.

After ten days without regular employment I have by this point more or less taken leave of my senses.


Such joy greeted the morning when I left the company I'd been with for some four years: at last the never-ending pendulum of train journeys had been halted; lonely hours reading newspapers, books, magazines - anything to make the journey appear to progress more quickly.


I was sick of standing about on freezing platforms, eyes glancing helplessly at the sky when another delay was announced (there's something about the sky, about the stars. You may have already guessed as much.) Oh, for the inhumane nine-hour turnaround to stop - home at half past nine on a good day, back out of bed at 06:30, temporarily ill and temporaily blind.

At that time of the day, food was a toxin - I'd no sooner let it pass my lips than I would swallow hemlock. I was and presumably remain nourishment-intolerant during the hours when my mind/body have convinced themselves they should still be sleeping.


In general, then, the breaking of the strictures that bind my life to employment was something to be relished. It is a psychological as well as physical cutting of ties - I used words like 'coming out of prison,' or 're-emerging into the light' to describe how I assumed I would feel.

Yet after a week-and-a-bit, I find that having destroyed the structure of my days and interrupted what is - sadly - the rhythm of my life, I am short-tempered, frustrated and silent.

People without talent, people without direction or purpose, people without a first principle to reduce themselves to when absolutely everything else has failed or is incapacitated, turn to the monotonous predictability of their work in order to progress from one day to the next.

Without that bulwark of predictability, whole lives are emptied of purpose and significance. Such a gross humiliation to confess that it's all that ever sustained me in the first place. It's probably not too great an exaggeration to state: people such as myself would almost rather work for nothing rather than do nothing at all. This is who I am, and I hate myself for it.

Starry.

What a cliché it is to look up at the stars and immediately contemplate the woman I am lucky enough to now have in my life. What a particularly excavated mine of the collective consciousness this is!


Like hearts, like flowers, stars are for some reason inextricably connected with the idea of feeling strongly for something; they stand in quite nicely for that which we are unable to articulate.


It is at this point that we encounter the limits of language, and arrive at the end of the creative process: whilst I am of course convinced that the undiluted sentiment I keep in your name is stronger than any man has felt before, I have no fresh method of conveying this to you. Instead, I fix my eye upon one of the distant stars, a milky point of light indicating nothing at all.


Akin to a religious metaphor, the light at once becomes the carrier of everything that you are, have been, or ever will be. The idea of you is the light - ancient, fragile tendrils of energy that endure. This is truly the most powerful drug of religion; associating our own lives with that which is beautiful or inexplicable.


With such chains of reasoning - realising that the (apparent) characteristics of stars are similar to the (apparent) characteristics of love - can we examine the shadow of what we feel for another person, without ever being able to entirely access the full range of its properties.


I think of you as you travel towards me on a derivative path of starlight: millions of women have arrived in the minds of men this way over thousands of years. Light-years are traversed in a fraction of a second.

It is a challenge indeed to freeze the starlight and expel it from the firmament (here we go again!) of imagery trapped inside my head. I long to replace it with something new; something so that I can truly declare: you have liberated my mind, hence I belong to you.

Pedestrian.

I am increasingly certain that English cities are designed in such a way as to kill pedestrians.

I don't drive, and have never driven, but this conjecture is not motivated out of a sense of bitterness, as I don't think I'd ever wish to test myself behind the wheel of a car. Those of you who can, I wish you well.

No, it's motivated by the tightrope walk I have to endure every time I go somewhere unfamiliar: slaloming crazily through bright lines of traffic suspended like jewels on an invisible thread; measuring the Doppler effect as I judge whether it's safe to make a move yet.

The cynic in me asks: so what if another non-driver dies? Walking everywhere, or taking public transport, will never yield the same revenues as being trapped by a GATSO or being clobbered for sitting on a double yellow line.

I suspect we are accelerating headlong into what will inevitably be called post-capitalism, a system which will work by delineating the instruments of production and those who wield them from those who are beaten into submission by them ever-more sharply.

From this perspective, then - I am not suggesting that cities were designed with the post-capitalist era in mind, only that such structures are inevitable as a consequence of the mindset which conceptualised them - the thumbprint of the motor vehicle will embed itself ever deeper into the scalp of those who choose to be pedestrianised.

Those who wield cars - the instruments which produce millions of pounds of revenue for a fixed outlay - beat each other, and the pedestrian, into submission, and do the work of the post-capitalist whilst going about their everyday business. It is perfection if the majority sleep-walk into the clothes laid out for them, for they act automatically, and with abandon.

Writing.

I find it difficult to write anything - in the sense that it's a struggle for me to even open a web browser and begin to to type - when I am not in the state of enduring an emotional or ontological crisis.

That is, the process of writing is one of catharsis, or of resolution, as opposed to a carefree exercise of diversion. This is more akin to to the travails of academia as opposed to literature, yet I write without the critical authority or evidence of the academic.

So my thoughts float airily in a space untroubled by the weight which requires truth or the unmasking of untruth; a space the size of their author's talent, vocabulary and prejudice.

Psychiatric.

I spoke with a friend earlier about whether 'they'* could ever make a machine which completely destroys the last shreds of human privacy.

I read, or I dreamt, that a device had been built which could, 60 per cent of the time, predict which of a series of cards a volunteer was looking at in an adjacent room. This time a drawing of a tree, this time a mechanical digger, this time a child, this time a building with a red door.

The machine derives its ouput from examining the excitation of particular brain cells, and associating the excitations with the likelihood of a particular card being presented. It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to conceptualise of that which can associate any particular 'card' - or 'abstract card' or 'mental image' - with a particular sequence of cells firing.

Such a contraption, if it could be realised, would be the dream of many governments, not least the one which I live under. It would, at a stroke, negate any notion of a private internal world, with no discontinuity between what is thought, and what is said.

It would furthermore do the job of my psychiatrist, untangling the Gordian knot of ideas, prejudices and censored material - the things which I am aware of but concealing, and the 'unknown unknowns' which reside in what Freud would call the id. All classes of mental processes are lit up on the screen, able to be analysed in a few simple steps, and my psychiatrist's job is done for her.

Release.

I have been working with someone who repeatedly encourages me to either 'let go' or 'just be,' or other words which suggests the negation of all forms of censorship.

Here are some of the things that she's suggested I let go of:

• stop using humour as a defence mechanism;
• be prepared to vocalise whatever it is that is occupying my mind;
• cease the endless analysis of concepts and ideas - accept them for what they are.

The person I am working with is a Buddhist. I am frequently told to let go.... let go.... when I demand a single sliver of empiricism to aid my understanding of how chanting works and subsequently enriches her life.

Seek to understand nothing, request no insight whatever, and eventually all will be revealed.

Just be. Flick the switch that holds back the torrent of the unconscious mind, and permit the torrent to erode the constructions which signify a lack of understanding.

Like the automatic writers of the Surrealist movement, or the proselytisers of the sportswear industry, I am being encouraged to eschew conscious thought and action, thus catapulting what remains of me into the formenting id.

Such a release! Such an incline in order to be released! Yet according to the received wisdom, I need do nothing but close down my faculties to be transported, almost by magic, or on the breath of my would-be psychiatrist, to the top of the hill.

Travelling.

Soon, then, the travelling will stop.

After more than two years of incessant shuttling in between a distant home and a distant workplace, the peripatetic man will be forced to grind to a halt, catch breath, and look upon the environment in its astonishing, unfamiliar stasis.

It will take a while for the accustomed kaleidoscope of events to slow down and assume a more predictable pace. It is a lesson for the mind as well as the eye. No longer will fields of sheep or cows rush past at a hundred miles an hour; no more will the hurtling desperation to catch this train or that supercede whatever beauty or interest I might otherwise be absorbing.

When events accrue with such rapidity - as they do when spending most of life travelling to or from somewhere and never seeming to arrive - the tendency is to ignore almost everything. This advertising hoarding, that irate man, the greenish, trilling pigeon staking its existence on being able to navigate a safe passage through the mad stagger of innumerable human feet.

There is much to re-learn: it is not a crime to stand quietly and observe whatever is unfolding in front of the eyes, even if it is not momentous in its significance. It will take a while for the idea of slowness to cease being a surprise; a while before the appreciation of the mundane and everyday occurrence re-emerges.

I long for the moment when I am officially told: this is the hour of your redundancy. For more than being made redundant from this job or that, I am being presented with the leaving gift of my own eyes, own ears, and own internal clock marking out real time, that I handed over to my employer when I agreed to become such an insane, blind pendulum, swinging up and down the country for the hell of it.

As my eyes and brain apply the decelerator, so will in time my body become more comfortable with the idea of existing at low speed. No longer is there the need to sprint from one side of the road to the other as though pursued by the characters from a nightmare made flesh; no need to respond to every text message within 30 seconds; no need to swallow food as though it's the last bite in the whole of humanity.

In ten days, a more sedate life will begin - that is the theory, anyway. Discipline and difficulty lie ahead in dousing the urges that would have me complete n tasks simultaneously. Such hard steps are required, however, if I am ever to lift the fog of confusion and haywire activity that has attenuated all things of interest and vibrancy.

Secular.

Whether I like it or not, I exist under the auspices of the kingdom of God even in early 21st-century secular England.

This much was made apparent as I climbed the steep hill which leads from the train station to home last night. The word of the Christian god spread outwards from its voicebox of stone and filled my ears with a message of dread.

The message was thus: even two millennia from his memetic origins, Jesus still has the power to fuse groups of humans together and inspire frightening loyalty. Even if you, apostate/infidel, expunge every atom of religiosity from your body, secular England still has no choice but to run its business to the background noise of worship.

That is apparent, even when we consider only the milder strains of the disease - for that's what it is, a disease of the mind. Shops couldn't open on a Sunday until very recently because of Jesus - or the Jesus that is propagated by a select band of devotees.

In this character's name, all manner of liberties are curtailed and arbitrary rules created - don't eat before speaking to him, don't invoke his name in vain, consider homosexuality to be improper (very improper, something worth killing over), pretend that you're going to hell unless you've been dipped in a particular container of water.

Yet for all that, I only dwell upon the voice of God echoing across the town and through my ears when I've endured a particularly sobering day. The presence of the bells registers otherwise, but does not cause any protracted thought processes. When I feel anguished or hurt, though, and the anguish or hurt co-incides with the repetitive thump of God's proxy, the overwhelming sentiment is one of hopelessness and despair.

Is this what I've been pared down to? The conduit of the morbid bells, exalting their jealous patriarch? The vehicle by which they copy themselves, handing on misery vertically and horizontally?

Coincidence.

The word 'coincidence' is insufficient to describe the myriad subtle shades of coincidence which occur on a very regular basis.


The online dictionary defines the word to be 'a striking occurrence of two or more events at the same time,' and I infer from this that the occurrence is striking because of its immediate impact.


What if it the coincidence fails to make an immediate impact, or conversely no impact whatsoever? Does it still qualify as one, even if we never think about it again?

If, for instance, you are buying some trousers from a shop, and you are about to approach the person who will process the transaction. At that precise moment you become aware of a love song playing over the shop's radio system.

This is a coincidence, but shop asssitant implies love song does not have any obvious meaning or sentiment. It is therefore an empty or dormant oone, as is passing a complete stranger in the street at the very moment you spot an aeroplane overhead.

Does the crossing of two lines on the graph of your existence become more significant when you become aware that the sales assistant is attractive? What metaphors then when the love song is absorbed into your half-awake brain?

If you walk out of the shop, instead of snappily demanding her mobile number, is the coincidence still an empty one? Or is the fact that the universe is appearing to flirt with your imagination enough to render it valid?

Determinism.

The above snippet of writing suggests that at least some human relationships are deterministic – they are doomed to failure because the ‘calm, crisis, calm’ model has to be followed.

It was a conversation with ‘A’ which set the wheels of this idea in motion. ‘A’ suggested that her life is akin to a film, and I drew the conclusion (without any evidence) that she is far from the only one so inclined.

On Tuesday, a conversation with ‘J’ added further support to this idea. J stated that her partner requires constant validation, and no matter how much love or attention is lavished upon him, it is apparent that more is expectedof her. Furthermore, J’s partner conjures crises in their relationship during times which are smooth and uninhibited.

What other reasons are there, besides the execution of the crisis theory, for someone to behave in such a manner towards their partner? There is at least one other, and it’s one that we’ve touched upon before. Is it better to sit in apparenly contented silence, with the awkwardness of such obvious parentheses, or to create a situation which requires dialogue?

Creating a conflict situation satisfies two criterion, then, and I assume it to be one of the reasons why people argue. When there is nothing left to say – a situation more grave than a temporary, pleasant hiatus – then at least some of us engineer scenarios where the silence must be broken.

Why is having nothing left to say of such significance to the western mindset? It must be significant, otherwise we'd not go to enormous lengths to fill the empty space with false, angry dialogue.

I suspect it is significant because the western mind can never countenance a lack of activity; can requires always something to stimulate it. We eat quickly and move quickly because we are always about to do something more important or interesting. The westerner perpetually travels but can never hope to arrive.

Cinema.

I would argue that, in general, films follow a particular narrative structure.

In no way do I speak as a lover of the cinema, but my theory applies to most works of fiction - including but not limited to books, films, and plays.

The narrive structure I hypothesise is this, very briefly: calm and 'normality,' followed by a crisis or crises, and when these are resolved, normality is assumed once again.

During an instant messenger conversation earlier tonight, the very perceptive 'A' claimed that her life is akin to a film. I wondered at this point if it might be the case that the 'calm, crisis, calm' hypothesis is relevant and pertinent for A.

That is to say: if the 'calm, crisis, calm' model does not occur naturally, is it the case that 'A' unconsciously invents some sort of crisis which needs to be resolved in order for the narrative to follow its structure?

Is it the case that people with a literary or cinematic bent experience the tenets of the theory more frequently than those without? I intend to ask 'A' some more questions over the coming days (she is aware that I'm likely to blog her responses) and perhaps between us we might tease out 'A's' theory of cinematic externalisation.

It won't be particularly scientific, but I'd heuristically imagine that, if it's at all valid, she is far from the only one to formulate it, even as she is unaware of formulating it.

Subtraction.

Where, then, to turn when the inspiration behind a weblog (book, series of articles) is subtracted from the creative process?

For this is indeed what has happened, and words are typed slowly and mechanically, where once they flew across the screen, each a vehicle which carried the memories of a brief and distant interlude, arrowing out to her across the divisions of space and time.

I need only mention the briefest of details of how the subtraction came about: that it happened needs not to be pondered upon too much. How to create in the absence of a creator is of more immediate relevance.

The person who inspired this tiny little shred of the internet is no longer in contact with me. We - I - decided that this should be the case, because the anguish she felt every time I communicated with her was worse than the communication was beneficial. There is no reason, however, why I shouldn't continue to blog, and here's as good as anywhere else.

Now that the catalyst has disappeared, writing immediately becomes more difficult. It is evidence, as if any were needed, that there needs to be an extrinsic purpose to the idea of writing, an engine and a life-force.

Writing for its own sake is mere strings of words, some of them more emotive than others, and some of them clustering around interesting and original thoughts. The beauty, intelligence and coherence which should be apparent as a thesis is gone, and empty words waft around the mind of the reader, devoid of any logic.

So your author needs a coalescing, pushing force, else his writing will in the future lack even more style, substance and passion that before. Unification required!

Children.

The problem with making a choice is that we are restricted in so many ways. It's an obvious point, but it is one worth pondering.

When I need to decide what to wear in the morning, there are limitations imposed upon me, not least that I cannot wear anything that isn't already contained within my wardrobe. Of the billions of garments collected on the earth, I am restricted to what? Thirty?

My other problem is temporal: I can't know that I'm going to spill lunch down my top in five hours, and so wearing white isn't the best idea I've ever hit upon.

Such trivial problems magnify themselves more seriously when we make choices which impact upon the direction of our lives.

When asked by a partner whether I'd ever want to give her children, I found myself restricted by the 'wardrobe' of my previous experience. It contained only one garment therein: a shiny, overshadowing NO! which no human could ever hope to topple, so far was its base rooted into the floor of my being.

Furthermore, when the declaration of NO! was made so forcefully, it was made with the conviction that the status quo which had prevailed throughout the life of your author would continue without end.

What the conscience can stand now is what the conscience will be able to tolerate forever more - it is on this basis that we arrive at conclusions, and put them into action.

Hence, when a series of small children, all of them in their own way delightful and amusing, make themselves known, an examination and refutation of the principles which resulted in the earlier reticence takes place.

Two years ago, when pushed under a canvas sky in Africa, I had no idea that by the autumn of 2008, I'd have changed my mind about little humans so conclusively.

Symbols.

When I was very young, I had a series of mental symbols or images which stood for particular words or concepts.

I say I had them: that is, they appeared or were manifested. I didn't consciously strive to associate images with words - it either happened independently of the thought processes I could control, or I was born with the associations hardwired, as it were.

I sometimes wonder where they were derived from, and what significance the images representing the concept had.

There used to be a greater stock of images-representing-things in my growing mind, but the store has depleted over the years, and now I can remember only a few. Of those few, here is a non-exhaustive list:

Saturday: a series of striated shalllow hills or what looked like a long sleeping beast with one leg pushed forward, shrouded in mist to give a blue tinge to proceedings.

Friday: a statue made out of animal bone; the extremities of the structure tipped with brown. At other times, I might have considered that it was not a statue but a tree. It just hung there, naked in the void, and no light glistened off its edges.

Brother: two small dolls with wiry black hair, looked at from above. Were they made from wood? Both wore blue jackets.

I possessed internal images for every day of the week, for whole numbers, for family members, for a limited spectrum of thoughts and emotions. Gradually, their presence dwindled as I got to the age of about nine or ten. They were useless, anyway, for represented a word and only a word. They never changed, I couldn't multiply or divide them, and nor could I rotate them or zoom in and out of them in my mind.

For all that they were, somehow, the definition of my childhood. They endured more than any particular emotion or concept, these static little pictures, and were more real than a dream. I'd like to know why Saturday was striated hills, or Thursday a plough in the fog, or Tuesday a toffee-coloured lollipop. Can someone out there explain?

Romance.

I decided earlier that romance is the abolition of wishes and passion for the wish and passion of another person.

This means, in other words, that the driving force of a life is at some point subverted, and re-directed towards another person instead of an object orientated goal. Temporarily or otherwise, the wellspring of ambition becomes spent: books are drowned in the river because of a new and interesting centerpiece of one's existence.

We carry around with us, then, the potential to at some point negate everything we have ever worked for - but in doing so, we are still only halfway towards sweeping our new lover away on a tide of sentimentality.

Once the notion of romance has taken root in the mind, we are still to understand the current which underlies its every transaction, and thereafter to hold up our hands and admit to it.

In every case, the romantic gesture equates to an admission of weakness, and a method - delivered voluntarily - to exploit it. The handing over of a flower, or a piece of homemade poetry is the key which unlocks the human vulnerability we spend vast swathes of our day trying to disguise.

In a society where weakness or perceived weakness is openly derided and preyed upon, the ultimate sacrifice we can make is to give another person our flaws and the tools by which they can be dragged out into the light. We make a gift of the ungainly, unvirtuous and chaotic, and this is the foundation of all that is romantic.

The completion of this pendulum motion - from self-absorbed to absorbed fully in another person - is the public declaration that, yes, I am replete with a million problems, and I entrust this individual not to deliberately worsen them.

Such recognition comes in the form of a gift or gifts which act as a tactile reminder of the unspoken promise that was made at some point in the past: at least some of the time, my flaws will leak through the pores of my skin, and you'll be disgusted. Remember how you used to think that the romantic encapsulated the tender, delicate, and beautiful? Inside that cladding rages the dark shaft of the unconscious mind, and it is this which I hand over to you in the guise of a rose.

Time.

'About six more weeks until I leave this job,' I commented to someone when pressed upon my future prospects. My tone of voice intended to convey that six weeks was an insignificant amount of time - hell, six weeks, two months, it's not going to be too long before I'm away.

The thought later struck me: I am decrying six weeks as neither here nor there, but I never got to spend more than a fortnight with the person referred to in any number of these pages.

Humans have a strange relationship with time. I already touched upon this when I mentioned anniversaries. Birthdays are of a similar ilk - regular punctuations in the musical score of our lives, ineluctable and shining brightly in the temporal distance.

Such events are signposts for the destination marked 'the rest of your life.' When considered independently of that life, they are stripped of their meaning, akin to the real signposts pointing north on the motorway. Keep travelling through Yorkshire, through Cumbria, up to Scotland, and still you will find signs directing you to The North. Before you know it, you've gone so far north that you've missed it, and instead you exist precariously on the edge of nothing and nowhere.

Realise, then, that your temporal roadsigns must be taken in context if they are not to become pointers to a destination that can never exist. The two-week bursts with my soulmate were lessons in relinquishing fear and misery - even if sometimes I am sure I have not learned those lessons, even if sometimes I howl with loneliness because she recedes a little more with every passing day.

A teacher has only ever finished teaching once the intellectual crutch she provides can be happily removed, such is the confidence and poise now apparent in her pupil. The roadsigns are not only understood, and understood well, but the pupil is able to see the road below them, and even appreciate the point of setting out in the first place.

When a really outstanding student emerges, he or she even takes joy in their painful limbs after a tough day of travelling. At that point the teacher, like the pacemaker in a long race, can be discarded. Better students still take her along with them for the remainder. This we call unconditional love - knowing where we are headed, yet unsure if we'll ever get there. We know, though, that failing with such a woman beside us is preferable to failing alone.

Is failing alongside this woman better than succeeding alone? This we call romance, and some of us are intoxicated by it. Others are but pretend not to be.

We have unconsciously just established a boundary between romance and unconditional love. Unconditional love states that I am happy to fall short of what I set out to do, so long as you are with me at the moment of my humiliation: falling flat on my arse in the road from fatigue, and miles from anywhere.

Romance states: I am well able to reach the end of the journey, but I'd prefer to stay here than do so if you are not in lockstep with me. Romance is the abolition of wishes and passion for the wish and passion of another person.

_________________________________________________________________
Win New York holidays with Kellogg's & Live Search
http://clk.atdmt.com/UKM/go/107571440/direct/01/

Accusation.

Before accusing another person of having been bitten by the inductive bug, it is an idea to look into the mirror and realise that its teeth have perforated your own skin.


That my ex-girlfriend suffers throughout the duration of January is an unsurprising as the fact that your author struggles during the middle period of July. They mark significant anniversaries of unpleasant events, the tendrils of which pass effortlessly through the years, and shake the present from its foundation.


Unpleasant events become the paradigm by which we judge their anniversaries, and so it follows (in the mind of the depressive) that if this day ten years ago was unbearable for whatever reason, then this day in 2008, like the ones every year since, must also be unbearable.

We make it thus, or I do, at any rate. The carrying out of particular rituals at appropriate times - derived from religious ceremonies and war commemorations (dressing in black, holding silences of a particular duration) seem as logical to me as they seem unhinged and irrational to anyone else.

It is, then, already decided that the middle of July or the whole of January is to be spent in stasis. What a rehearsed, formluaic mourning this is! The ripening of the heart throughout the course of the year, and the predictable windfall from the height of being, followed by the harvesting of peculiar, distant misery.

Thus emerges the obsession with dates and times alluded to in the last entry. There is an internal countdown within the obsessive which states, for example: "In two weeks, three days, 11 hours and 37 minutes, the sixth anniversary of event x will be upon me." Reading that last line is akin to something out of a comic book, but its imminence - and its distance - are considered with undue seriousness.


When the anniversary itself arrives - measured in terms of minutes if not seconds - there is no feeling of relief, or happiness, or sadness. Just the acceptance that it is here, and a proliferation of empty gestures related to the moment eight, nine, ten years ago when the planet seemed to shudder on its axis because of a private, everday event.

Induction.

Two consecutive Januarys (what is the plural of January? Is it Januarys or Januaries? I think we should be told, or that I should at least find out) and the principle of induction did for my partner and I.

That I lost a girlfriend because of it is hardly of the greatest interest, but it does illustrate the inductive principle that is at the heart of all our lives.

The inductive principle extrapolates from the particular case to the general in the following way: if every cat I have ever seen is black-and-white, then every cat in the universe is black-and-white. It is used as a predictive tool, a heuristic by which we make decisions and judgements.

It is used even unconsciously: I can plan to go out on Saturday night because I'm more than hopeful that I'll still be alive then. This stems from the fact that I have woken up every morning without fail for the past 29 years. Repetition of the same event increases my belief that the event will persist.

Before I continue, a note about the pessimism inherent in people who suffer with depression, or who are in some way weighed down by the misery of merely existing. It is an obvious point, but one which is relevant to the rest of this piece.

A single negative event in a day of otherwise unqualified success and happiness renders everything that has gone before it irrelevant. And blame is apportioned asymetrically: the cosmos is responsible for all positive outcomes, and the depressive for those which are undesireable.

The method by which one negative event subsumes its positive predecessors is the root of the inductive principle in depressive or unhappy people: if I did something so stupid as to lock my keys inside the car after such a positive and uplifting day in general (an example, not based in my own personal reality) then the inductive principle states that every positive, happy day will terminate with a trivial event which deflates it.

And because the cosmos, and not the person, is responsible for the completion of positive events, no predictive power can be applied to it. Conversely, as I and only I am responsible for the propagation of undesireable consequences, the inductive idea has some merit. I predict - a self-fulfilling prophecy - that something unwished for will occur.

When something unwished for does occur, it sets in motion a chain of reasoning that results in an obsession with dates and times, and causes girlfriends to disappear from lives.

To be continued....

Excuses.

Appeals to confidence are regularly bandied about in the public sphere.

Sports teams win or lose because they either have confidence in abundance or are low on it; prime ministers lose their jobs because of it; statisticians estimate it and their suppositions then form policy in health, education and science.

The latter meaning is an artefact of not being able to predict the outcomes of chaotic systems with absolute precision - far more often than not, a molecule of drug x will bind to its specific and intended neuroreceptor, and antagonise in the prescribed manner. We can't predict specific cases on an ad-hoc basis, but 95 per cent of the time, it's expected to do so.

This is confidence in a technical and specific sense. Its everyday useage is more interesting and accessible to your author.

What does it mean for the prime minister to be denounced in a vote of no confidence? The cabinet and backbench of the ruling party are in effect saying; "At some point in the past, you were able to carry out your duties to an acceptable level. That point has been and gone. You are now inept, incompetent and cumbersome."

'Everyday confidence' is therefore the ability to carry out what is expected of you. In my own mind, and in the minds of those around me, I am able to do whatever is required of me. We are dealing with a euphemism that is also an excuse  - the team failing to win because they lack confidence equates to them being unable to perform the tasks required of them due to incomptence, boredom, lack of concentration, mutiny etc.

Confidence is ultimately chimerical, and melts away into a list of tasks to be either completed or not once subjected to a sustained period of thought. I'm not confident that this blog entry will be up to the standards I wish for, because I lack the technical, linguistic and intellectual tools to make it so.

Until those challenges are overcome, I can make the excuse that I lack confidence ad nauseum.
If I lack the motivation, interest or talent to acquire them, then whatever 'confidence' remains will plummet until there is none left.

Incidentally, what abacus is used for measuring the amount of confidence left in the body? A 5.5/10 at this very moment might equate to a 3/10 when I am in an unhappy state of mind, or laid low with a virus, and a 7/10 when the sun is reflecting off the  newly-opened cage of my mind, where thoughts dance randomly, untethered.

Again, once subjected to too much thought, the whole concept crumbles to dust, and we are left with one single aphorism: either do or do not.

Religion.

Just before nine o'clock [last] Saturday morning, I was stopped by a man as I came out of the station after alighting from my train.

I thought straightaway that something was amiss. It was too early in the day for my would-be interrogator to be asking about toothpaste or coffee preferences, and his choice of dress meant that he was unlikely to be one of the train company staff.

All suddenly became clear when he addressed me thus: "I think most of us would agree that the world is in a pretty bad way...." and handed me a pamphlet which warned of GLOBAL WARMING in huge, threatening letters on one page, and petitioned GOD on the next.

I asked him if his answer to the world being pretty bad was to appeal to God, and he mumbled an affimative under his breath. It was at that point when I walked away from him, stating that I didn't believe and would never believe.

Actually, I did more than state. I moved backwards down the street, my voice becoming progressively louder as the distance between the man and I increased. I don't believe! It is impossible! I'll think more of your God when He tears the clouds apart like a pair of flimsy curtains and metes out the justice you've been promising for millennia!

Two questions spring to mind, retrospectively, about the above event: If I'd returned to the man, genuflecting, and asked to be appraised of how God would in fact halt global warming, would this cleansing of the apostate have in any way validated my interlocuter's belief in either a deity, or the deity's probability of stemming global warming?

Secondly, what is the outright rejection of religious belief (mine) but a symptom of (anti) religious belief? The certainty that there is no God (without evidence to support the assertion) is as militant a stance to take as the certainty that such exists (without evidence to support the assertion.)

I'll try to answer such questions later - if I ever get around to consistently updating this thing again!

Mortality.

At the age of 29, the truth of my certain death is, in normal circumstances, an idea which is still to be fully formed.

Yet earlier this week, I felt the breeze from its sad, effortless wings against my face; the slow bird which has all of us eventually came momentarily into view. No sooner had I registered its presence than it had disappeared again, leaving behind the untouched perimeter of my mind.

Two photographs on the front of the newspaper: one to mark the passing of the singer Isaac Hayes; one to illustrate the Olympic gold medal of the British cyclist Nicola Cooke. It occurred to me that each of the images contains two timing devices, referring respectively to the subject of the photograph, and the reader.

Consider the devices to be egg-timers or stopwatches or whatever other conceptual tool you might choose. In the case of Isaac Hayes, the timing device which refers to him has run its course. The adjacent one - mine - ticks on or drops grains of sand inexorably. In the case of Nicola Cooke, both timers continue to eat away at the seconds, minutes and hours.

As conceptual devices go, I hardly astonish with the force of my explanation. Yet nevertheless, the realisation startled me, and caused the dark wing of eternity to cast its long shadow. All other things being equal, someone - even if it is not Nicola Cooke - will read about the demise of the mediocre blogger Nogomet, and anxiously check their own watch.

They'll presumably do so in the early morning, on their way to work, when they are least able to cope with linking my demise to their inevitable own. An obituary referring to Blogomet, the painful symbiosis of man and word, and how he met his end flying through a windscreen, or during copulation. Christ, they'll realise, I'm going to die too!

For the next few minutes they'll mourn - not for the stillness of Blogomet, but for predictively for themselves. This is the purpose of an obituary - it permits the anterior mourning of the self, and asks us to reflect on time elapsed versus time remaining.

Larceny!

An incident in my workplace earlier this week that illustrates the utter banality of being employed.

In order to progress at work, we strenuously deny that we are there solely for the remuneration - no, manager, I am here because of my stellar ambition and my wish to shape the future of the organisation.

This assertion is so often repeated, out loud in conversation, and to oneself, that it becomes the truth. The ethos of the Communist Party is present at such times. Take a statement which is not true, and by threat of something unpleasant, cause it to be real.

Initially, we utter the words out loud whilst feeling the falsehood in our hearts and minds. At this point, if we think we can get away with it, we might smile or raise our eyebrows at someone who is equally complicit in the act. Eventually, though, it becomes second nature to recite the lie without flinching or eliciting outward signs of not being genuine.

Even then, the falsehood propagates throughout the mind and communicates with the heart. When there is no longer a falsehood, this is the spirit of Communism. It is equivalent to saying 'I love you,' untruthfully so many times that the word becomes the deed. Out of the empty anti-sentiment grows its antithesis. Like the madman, we lie without knowing we are lying, and keep secrets from ourselves.
____________________________________________________________________

I arrived at work on Wednesday to be confronted by the upset face of my manager.

Looking at him, I assumed that we were all about to lose our employment after the company share price took a downward jolt too many, and that he had not yet managed to compose himself sufficiently to impart the information.

It transpired - this is the truth - that his chocolate bar had disappeared from the office refrigerator overnight, and he had not yet managed to find the culprit. I merely stated that I'd had nothing to do with this grand larceny (I didn't say 'grand larceny' - again, the internal censor takes over)  and started to perform the mediocre tasks required of me.

In such a trivial event (the disappearance of a bar of chocolate) is imbued the greater ambition of the business world (to treat every event within working hours as being entirely significant.) If a workforce can be made to believe the latter upon presentation of the former, then the visit of a director, change in share price, or whatever else, is more important still.

Once trivialities are no longer fought over, the company has lost its battle for the souls of its individual workers. When a missing piece of chocolate can send a roomful of people into (mock but genuine) panic and concern, then the machinery is working fine, and we can look into our hearts and see only what is required to be seen.

Adequate.

I read today about Miranda Hodgson, a one-time ambitious career woman who anticipated she would spend most of her life repeatedly spinning on the wheel of aspiration:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/04/healthandwellbeing.familyandrelationships

Despite academic and professional success, Hodgson nevertheless felt an absence, a hole which no amount of plaudits could fill.

As you are capable of reading, the absence was removed - not filled, but removed - by Hodgson training to become a Zen Buddhist.

Your author wishes to also clamber down from the wheel of aspiration by descending the steps of himself, and look upon the world from his low trajectory. Therefore your author has already failed the first test, in that he wishes for anything at all.

The realisation dawned on your author long ago that there is no way of unpinning yourself from the perpetually-spinning circle of want. If a way exists of lifting the pressure and misery imposed on humans by the fairground ride onto which we are flung at a very early age, a ride whose apex is marked 'destiny,' then people such as Miranda Hodgson have found it.

There is a need to douse the flame of competitiveness, and to simply exist for the sake of time; time unpunctuated by success, failure, or eventfulness. Time passing, unhurried, and a human in its parentheses, with no desire to search for meaning, or challenge, or elevation. Time referring to nothing, a mind no longer seeking to wrap itself around an idea or cause.

I wish for the removal of everything bar the ticking of bare seconds, one after the other, falling inexorably out of existence. Seconds which confirm an immutability, in your author and in the universe, a cold expanse which is devoid of significance.

Attractive.

Catching a train home on Saturday evening, I became mesmerised by the apparently random array of plant life growing over and around the barrier at the back of the platform.

Long grass interspersed with weeds curled lazily around the struts of the metal structure, and I stared intently at the arrangement for a good couple of minutes. My attention quickly wandered from the scene in front of me, however, and I introspected about the reason or reasons why I found the straggling, miserable greenery so compelling.

The answer lies in my mind's inability to spot a pattern; some principle of order that reigns over and above the chaotic feedback loop of nature. Such patterns do exist, but I only know of them because I've read about them - fractals, the golden ratio, for example. At the level of my own pathetic eyes, the only constant is the lack of a constant.

In western thought, the idea of ugliness implies precisely this lack of consistency. To negate this, agree upon a set of paramaters, and you can churn out objects of beauty indefinitely. To invert ugliness, you must pay homage to homogeneity.

The eye craves regularity, and so does the tongue. This much is given away in our spoken colloquialisms: You're out of order! Sort your head out! He needs to get back on the straight and narrow! Religious metaphors are the next step.

We have tenuously established, then, that abstract concepts like beauty and attraction are linked to concepts which can be resolved by the eye. If there is a structure and a rigidity at the atomic level, or on the basis of an equation or a mathematical theorem, it is likely to bypass my flimsy senses.

Yet our plant-life possessed something about it, some quality, that caused my eye to fix to it resolutely - but that quality was not westernised, typical beauty. (The terrible irony here of equating something beautiful with something typical! The fetching down of the extraordinary, and levelling it!)

What quality did it possess? I need to think about this, and report back at some point in the future. It is not yet clear to me why the antithesis of attraction should achieve that which it appears to negate, but it does....

Celebrity (II)

Scene: A couple sitting inside a bar. The music is low, low enough for them to be able to hear what the other is saying.

They are finding conversation difficult to come by (retrospectively, the bridge of their relationship had long since crumbled into its constituents) until the woman picks up a recent copy of Celeb! newspaper.

Woman: Have you read about that Paul Nogomet?

Man: What's he been doing this time - the bloody idiot?

W: Fighting with a photographer outside a nightclub, by the looks of things. The photographer's put a complaint in to the police. Ha ha!

M: They'll find him dead in a gutter one morning. Not that it makes any difference to me, of course. He can live or die for all I care.

W: I only wish I had his talent. If I had, I'd not waste it like him. Do you know I read that he once routed three sites in three hours? That's why they pay him £22,000 a year, I suppose!

M: Problem with earning that amount of money is that he's got more than he knows what to do with. So of course he's going to piss it away.

W: It's strange. I feel as though I know him. He's never out of the papers. I only wish Genericelectricretailer would sell tickets to watch him routing. I'd pay good money for that. Besides, when you work as hard as he does, you deserve to go out for a drink - or two.

M: You shouldn't become attached to these cretinous sods. They're no more real to you than the contents of a dream. The papers could write that Paul bloody Nogomet landed on earth in an alien craft, and you'd probably believe it.

W: You know, I remember when it was footballers and musicians whom we'd all watch chasing their tails. People like Nogga seem so much more accessible. There's actually not a great deal of distance between he and I.

M: Reg Lightwriter? What a stupid name for a photographer!

Collective.

I often survey the streets around here and feel that I don't belong - that the streets, slick with rainwater, are not me.

If these streets and I are not one, then I do not belong anywhere. Miserable buildings thrown together out of red bricks, skies roiling with an imminent deluge, and gobs of dog shit fastened to every pavement.

No, this town is an imposter: it is as if I have been scraped from the surface of the earth and splattered down elsewhere.

If I do not belong here, in this small town with its torn-up railway, ripped from the ground and flung afar as if by a giant, and its tiny post office, then the memories that were formed here, and the events that preceded them, do not belong here either.

The mistakes, pleasure and unrequited love experienced beneath the patch of sky which delimits the boundaries of 'here' could have been experienced anywhere else, at any other time.

Nothing is unique, or sacred. Memories are created as if on a conveyor belt, and implanted uniformly in human brains. This is why singers who sing about lost love make millions of pounds on occasion - because their words resonate the mass memory of experiencing lost love, and separate us inevitably from our money.

I belong nowhere, and my most cherished memories exist in the mass collective reflection of humanity itself. This is one of the traits of what it means to be a human being - I have a water
droplet of past events meandering in the sea of history, and my droplet is just like any other.

To know this and to accept it is to equate all sentient humans, each relinquishing their mirrory coagulation of memory into the limitless ocean.

Sick.

I only went to watch the cricket because South Africa were the visiting team.

England only had eight wickets in hand with two full days to play - I could see them hanging around until lunchtime, maybe half-an-hour after - so imminent defeat is as certain as it ever can be in a sporting contest.

The sun's gong thumped mercilessly over the city, sending all around scurrying for beer and suncream and wide-brimmed hats. Having negated the early-morning weather forecast, I had none of the aforementioned, and quickly began to suffer.

The condemned English batsmen, meanwhile, had mounted a strenuous defence. Only two more down by lunch, and those coming close to the end of the session. Two more down by tea when I, by now the colour of a stop light, decided to call it a day. I feared that if I remained in the furnace generated by the hottest day of the year, medical attention would be required.

Hours later, I lie in bed, trapped in a sweltering bubble of my own making. Arms inflated by the solar pump; head drumming remorselessly; neck cooked so severely that pulling a shirt over it resulted in tortured screams.

Paracetemol, fruit juice, donated aftersun.... all rebound pathetically from the heated wounds. Christ, I am sick! The sun is trapped beneath my skin, and beats in conjunction with my own heart. If the mad roar is extinguished, then I die with it, for it has overtaken me as music makes the dancer its subordinate.

I underestimated the high priest in his celestial pulpit, and he brought forth the might of the cosmos to burn away the arrogance and complacency that had been fattened by mankind.

Irrational.

In the minds of those who have been in some way damaged, effect does not necessarily follow cause in a smooth way.


Some event or events in the past caused predictability to break, and causes pair up with effects in novel combinations.


The result is an almost religious belief in the probability of unlikely events occurring, and no explanatory power when the expected effect does not follow the cause.


Some examples, in the form of 'if.... then....' statements, ones that have been known to flash through my mind on occasion:

• If I do not complete this workout in the gym (without pressing the stop button) then the woman I have an interest in will arbitrarily exit my life.
• If there are any plugs left in sockets anywhere in the house at the time I go to bed, then I shall die in a fire overnight. NB: The plug which sustains my alarm clock is exempt. It should be noted that plugs have an independent will, and can jump into sockets of their own volition - hence they must be repeatedly checked.

All such thoughts take the form if or if not x then.... some unwelcome fate will befall me, or someone close to me. The plugs example is from my teenage years, the first one is used as a motivating tool whilst on one of the machines which seemingly seeks to tear me apart on a twice or thrice weekly basis.

I am of the opinion that the second example is a classic case of burgeoning obsessive-compulsive disorder, somehow negated without the need for psychological assessment.

What happens should the 'if....' condition fail? If my weak leg gives way on the treadmill, and I have to pack up and come home without completing my session in the gym? Well, it has happened, and the woman I refer to in the 'then....' condition did not arbitrarily take leave.

This is why there's no explanatory power. The 'then....' condition always points to someone or something that I am unable to control, anyway, rendering the 'if....' part meaningless.

Taking the second bulleted example as our cue, there are four possible outcomes:

• No plugs are in sockets; I don't die in a fire.
• No plugs are in sockets; I die in a fire anyway.
• I accidentally leave a plug in a socket; I don't die in a fire.
• I accidentally leave a plug in a socket; I die in a fire.

I shrug my shoulders, vexed, when asked why outcomes 2 and 3 occurred. Such lack of an explanation is the reason that people invoke God or demons or spirits. I instead shrug my shoulders, for the atheist even lacks a sky-pixie to appeal to.