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.
Friday, 8 August 2008
Monday, 4 August 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, 29 July 2008
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....
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!
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!
Wednesday, 23 July 2008
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.
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.
Monday, 21 July 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
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:
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.
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