Gentle Apocalypse

GENTLE APOCALYPSE IS ABOUT TO DIE...

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 09:07:00 +0000

...but fear not — rejoice! — for like Tammuz himself, it will be reborn and make ten thousand years of ecstatic god-love with Ishtar. Yes, that’s it for this blog. No more posts. I’ll be retiring it in a few months before...

Sweet-insanity guides, dictionaries-crossed-with-trampolines, ancient myths retold, ping-pong love-stories, leporine graphic novels, inner-fire-fanning pamphlets, acoustic-jupiter adverts, vast comic-philosophies, subversive posters, wanton fairy tales and, by way of emollient, unction and sherbet, a new website erupt, fully formed, from the entity that once stood here. Honestly, you wouldn’t believe how much good stuff we’ve got here (me and my fellows). I’m hoping to start the mountain-slide at the end of summer — years end at latest though, for sure. The first announcement, and free gift, will be made to people on my mailing list (from which I send about one spam a year). So please introduce yourself, if you haven’t already and would like something epic, weird and instantly recognisable in your inbox. Otherwise, bookmark this address and beam back in Autumn’s distant fire.

And, a quick soon to be deleted personal note: I’m moving to Budapest in July, so if any readers made of Magyar fancy meeting up, do send word.

Absolute Escape Procedure

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 15:47:00 +0000

Thought I’d share the fruits of this morning’s collecting and collating: twelve superb essays about society and civilisation from the utterliest of outside perspectives. From Oscar Wilde‘s weird spiritual socialism to the rare modern satiricon of ‘The Papalagi’ via some classic meditations on work, play, the body and (my own contribution — also to be found on this site) history. I’ve put together a pdf, mobi and epub version which ~~you can download here~~. Except, awfully sorry, you can’t anymore because I’m updating it ready for the avalanche of material mentioned above.

Gentle Apocalypse Recommends: Books

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 16:39:00 +0000

The hundred and one best books of all time. According to me. Don’t argue - I have read every book that has ever been written and I used a complicated scientific theory to work it out and God told me. Okay?

Fiction

Nearly all of the below are easy reads (assuming you use a dictionary from time to time). I don’t go in for books that feel like homework, or any of this. What I enjoy most of all was best expressed by Tolstoy: ‘to represent the things of the imagination is difficult, but to represent how things really are, is more difficult still.’ If you replace Tolstoy’s ‘difficult’ for the writer with ‘wonderful’ for the reader good results are the gold standard in narrative art: endless depth in pop form.

‘How things really are’ is, of course, a tad debatable though. In my view reality is not a series of improbable events leading nowhere, much less a sadist. For this reason I find the eloquent nihilism of, say, Hardy, Joyce, Murakami, Marquez and co. to be as repellant as the crude sentimentality they avoid.

War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

My favourite novel. Hard to find any author who loves people as much as Tolstoy and, consequently, who knows them as well. Result: immense enjoyment and so many sweet, strange and charming moments you’ll want it to go on forever - which it does. Very light too, after you get past the blizzard of names (this will help though): but read the Maude or Pevear-Volokhonsky translations — others (especially the new Penguin one) are dreadful. Also some of the war bits are heavy going as he was a bit of a tactics-nerd, but you can skip read the boring battle plans (and the long preachy epilogue) without losing the gist of the story.

Anna Karenina is excellent too, but a bit stiffer, I find (a vile papier-mâché film adaptation of which has just come out - avoid).

Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen

Its all so gay and pointless, a porcelain bubble which never nears reality’s thorn, but everyone is lovely and speaks with hilarious circumlocutions and Miss Austen makes splendidly recognisable revelations of the tensions and postures and raptures of romance. Emma’s alright too.

David Copperfield Charles Dickens

If you speak English and you have never taken your word-brain through Dicken’s flamboyant linguistic boudoir you are, I venture to suggest, somewhat the drabber for it. This is his best (according to me and Charles). Enormously enjoyable, ludicrous ending.

The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I’ve gone off Dostoyevski’s rambling and preposterous plots, which are rarely burdened with detail (or a decent female character) and so somehow exhausting and empty. I don’t agree with Nabokov on much, charlatan as he was, but he was right about Dostoyevsky; you don’t want to read his books twice because they are basically detective stories (the cheapest of the narrative arts) and so once you know ‘who did it’ there’s no point.

And yet. And yet. Like all Dostoyevski’s stories, The Brothers Karamazov still sometimes feels like the most important secret in the universe is unfolding as you read; and there are some superb insights into human nature (of which, in Nabokov, none) — enough to keep you going nowhere. Crime and Punishment is shorter and tighter though, so it might be better starting there.

Master and Man Leo Tolstoy

The best short story I’ve ever read. The Death of Ivan Illich is also wonderful.

Moby Dick Herman Melville

In once sense a long, empty, pointless and dense dead-end full of useless asides. But so much rich, gnarled, dark joy here and some extraordinary ‘how on earth did he think of that word?’ turns of phrase.

If you can’t face a thousand pages, just read the first few chapters, before Ishmail gets on the boat. The night he spends with Queequeg is one of the loveliest passages in literature. Melville’s shorter stuff is worth reading - Billy Budd is a lovely tale (although, like Moby Dick, pointlessly tragic) and so is Cock-a-Doodle-Do!

Les Miserables Victor Hugo

Another novel with many chapters worth skipping. Best classic adventure story I know of, but doomed to become a cheesball musical.

Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë

Not just because Heathcliff is a splendid enigmatic dark force of nature and all that, but because he makes some of the classic twat-gaffs man makes with woman. I right fancy Cathy too. Second half tails off though.

Frankenstein Mary Shelly

Great early critique of science. Jekyll and Hyde is also excellent, but Frankenstein has a unique feminine perspective.

Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

Mordant critique of civilisation told as a sweet adventure. Not a children’s book.

Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

Randy Al, seeing he was being noticed, threw back his shoulders, and he came into the yard with a swaying strut like that of a rooster about to crow. Cockily, he walked close before he recognized Tom; and when he did, his boasting face changed, and admiration and veneration shone in his eyes, and his swagger fell away. His stiff jeans, with the bottoms turned up eight inches to show his heeled boots, his three-inch belt with copper figures on it, even the red arm bands on his blue shirt and the rakish angle of his Stetson hat could not build him up to his brother's stature; for his brother had killed a man, and no one would ever forget it. Al knew that even he had inspired some admiration among boys of his own age because his brother had killed a man. He had heard in Sallisaw how he was pointed out: "That's Al Joad. His brother killed a fella with a shovel."

And now Al, moving humbly near, saw that his brother was not a swaggerer as he had supposed. Al saw the dark brooding eyes of his brother, and the prison calm, the smooth hard face trained to indicate nothing to a prison guard, neither resistance nor slavishness. And instantly Al changed. Unconsciously he became like his brother, and his handsome face brooded, and his shoulders relaxed. He hadn't remembered how Tom was.

Tom said, ‘Hello. Jesus, you're growin' like a bean! I wouldn't of knowed you.’

Al, his hand ready if Tom should want to shake it, grinned self-consciously. Tom stuck out his hand and Al's hand jerked out to meet it. And there was liking between these two. ‘They tell me you're a good hand with a truck,’ said Tom.

And Al, sensing that his brother would not like a boaster, said, ‘I don't know nothin' much about it.’

Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

Dense and intense (or, ‘gloomy and brooding’, as Mr Conrad would have it). Heavy going through, and a boys’ book. Conrad was a great author with no apparent understanding of femininity — but the female principle is all over Heart of Darkness; as the unknowable, terrifying, living-void of she-nature. Kind of a shame Mr Conrad didn’t seem very well acquainted with the sweetness and wisdom though.

The Rainbow D.H.Lawrence

Lawrence, on the other hand, definitely understood women... and children, and bastards, and flowers, and horses. In fact pretty much everything apparently alien he turns his attention to is revealed on a weird instinctive level (Lawrence was once described, accurately, as ‘an animal with a kind of sixth sense’). Love-relationships, the subtlest and most revealing qualities of personality and the shifting, magnetic, ever-unique tone of vibe get particularly fine attention. Its a scandal that Mr Lawrence, the greatest English novelist, is principally known as a frothing sex-maniac, but predictable — great writers and books are always misrepresented.

Women in Love D.H.Lawrence

The Rainbow part two. Lighter and more easily digested. Might be best to start here if you’ve never read Lawrence or if English is not your first language.

In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

Trails off into a finale as weak as Mr Proust himself, but nobody opens up the universe of the infinitesimal moment better. Pretty heavy going though.

Ham on Rye Charles Bukowski

Bukowski‘s best. Very funny. Factotum’s alright, but a bit too rough for me. Ask the Dust by John Fante and Hunger by Knut Hamsen are alright too, if you like seedy tales of self-destruction.

The Catcher in the Rye J.D.Salinger

I’ve gone off it a bit, for the same reason I’ve gone off most of the music I liked when I loved being a loner, and the hopeless ending, I think, shows why Mr Salinger locked himself up in a room for the rest of his life. But still, there’s a reason why people love reading the incredibly touching and truthful reactions of a boy rudderless on the Sea of Spectacle. You may not identify with Master Caulfield, but you’ll care for him.

Catch 22 Joseph Heller

Another boy’s book: not much sweetness here. I haven’t read it since I was twenty and probably won’t again, but it is a world of accurate absurd - showing how a typical corporation (Army Inc.) operates when placed on an island in the middle of a war.

The Education of Little Tree Forrest Carter

‘He got pretty worked up about it. He said the meddlesome son of a bitch that invented the dictionary ought to be taken out and shot...’

Very enjoyable account of growing up with a Cherokee granddad. There’s a good deal of sentimental slicking here and apparently Carter himself was a pretty dodgy fellow. But its impossible not to enjoy the story which rings with such nutty nature-truths all over the tree.

Brave New World Aldous Huxley

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books: What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Dharma Bums Jack Kerouac

He doesn’t write stories, nor does he understand women, so crucial qualities are missing - but if its a taste of freedom you’re after, Mr Kerouac is unsurpassed. I like this one better than On The Road, because it involves nature and sets foot in wilderness.

Cider with Rosie / As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning / A Moment of War Laurie Lee

Lee was an English Kerouac I think. Gentler and more transparent, but still with a great, uplifting current of natural freedom carrying his story along.

Metamorphosis Ovid

Best account of Greek myths in my view. The most recent Penguin translation is the best one in English I think - not that I read Latin, but comparing it to others its readable without being ‘modern’.

Winnie the Pooh A.A.Milne

To understand how Pooh understood everything you might like to try the [slightly cheesy and moralising] Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff, but that’s not necessary to deeply enjoy the unspoken wisdom of the Bear of Little Brain.

The Satyricon Gaius Petronius

I couldn’t finish this, so it shouldn’t really be here, but, if you don’t know of it and are interested in ancient Rome its a very good antidote to all the photorealistic bigness that normally surrounds the dreadful place. You get to see how ghastly and decadent it all was - and how similar to the Iron Cage we’re currently flinging our poor clod-bodies against.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Philip K Dick

Dick is the only sci-fi author I’ve ever loved, because he writes about this world blown up a thousand-fold through his alternate-reality brain-pipe. This one is about as nuts as it gets, yet eerily familiar. All his women are sarcastic castrators or lithe lost waifs though.

Valis / Radio Free Albemuth Philip K Dick

Basically the same book, written twice - and who wouldn’t write twice the story of how they were contacted by a Vast Active Living Intelligence System via a beam of light of no earthly colour (closest to pink-green)? Yes, its a sci-fi autobiography!

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K Dick

So much better than Blade Runner. Everyone always says this of book-film relationships, I know, but the hero of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep is a sad, neurotic wimp fighting with a lack of empathy he cannot intellectually detect, whereas the hero of Blade Runner is, well, its Harrison Ford isn’t it?

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Ken Kesey

The film is as good as the book; but the book is good for longer.

Parzival Wolfram von Eschenbach

13th Century German Grail romance. Best to start with Joseph Cambell’s outline in Masks of God, as the story is a bit complex. Indeed the whole thing is hard work, but pays off manifold. Possibly the best example of the mythical hero’s journey in literature.

Papillon Henri Charrière

It’s been claimed that only ten per cent of this happened to Charrière, but who cares? It happened to someone and probably Mr C. My view is that all good stories are true stories and all naff stories - no matter how factually accurate - are false. And this is a good story, full of the kind of details you cannot invent. Its the quintessence of a boy’s story - not that that should put off girls of course.

The Fall Albert Camus

Don’t think much of Mr Camus’ philosophy of epic pointlessness, with which this ends, but I enjoyed the tale; of a man who reckons he’s Mr Moral and whose world falls to pieces when he finds out he’s not.

Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller

‘To be joyous is to be a madman in a world of sad ghosts.’

Too much superficial sex, but inspiring like Kerouac; only, because Miller’s adventures are in bars and offices, somehow more so. Language-wise exuberant and like Melville, sometimes staggeringly and unbelievably so.

The thing about yank-lit vs limey-lit is that your yankie views the words as something in themselves, and so enjoys the beauty of them more (Spaniards are the same), the horrendous downside of this is, of course, tendency to wank and lack of transparency. We limeys on the other hand tend to want salt-in-the-eye kitchen-sink sagging-stocking thing-in-itself and to let the language either get out of the way and show that directly or make us laugh at it through ironic understatement, overstatement or absurdity. The comedy of the yanks is always a bit ponderous, a bit obvious (although, when great, no less hilarious).

L’eau des Collines Marcel Pagnol

A lovely, classic tale.

Non Fiction

The Soul of Man Under Socialism Oscar Wilde

My kind of socialism; strange and based on self-realisation at its weirdest. He does veer off into a few peculiar places, but the spirit of this world-view is far more inspiring than those of his socialist contemporaries.

Decline of the West Oswald Spengler

Best overview of history I’ve read. Flawed, but gives a terrific sense of the organic birth, growth, flowering and decay of cultures.

Journey to the Ants Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson

One nuts ant fact after another, and everyone loves ants, don’t they?

Down and Out in Paris and London George Orwell

Far more enjoyable than anything else Orwell wrote, particularly the first (Paris) half. What I like most about it is not just the way Orwell, so British and correct, throws himself into the chaos of total, hopeless poverty, but the dignity and generosity which unites the two worlds.

Masks of God Joseph Campbell

History of world myth. Unsurpassed introduction to the inner life of humanity (although part four is not very interesting - he devotes chapters to the Magic Mountain, which is ever so dull). I think its out of print now, but not hard to find second hand editions.

The Perennial Philosophy Aldous Huxley

Superb anthology of mysticism, also out of print I believe.

A Whore’s Profession David Mamet

Before Mamet turned into a bland moralising fascist he was a perceptive moralising playwright. What he has to say here about what makes a good story is required reading for anyone who loves one.

Mawson’s Will: Lennard Bickel

I’ve read quite a few survival stories. This one is the most astonishing, by far. The Worst Journey in the World (by the splendidly named Apsley Cherry Garrard) is also good (although just read the actual journey part as there’s lots of not-so entertaining journalism around it), as is...

If This is a Man Primo Levi

We all love a good death camp testimony (don’t we?) This is my favourite, Primo Levi’s story of life in a concentration camp. The second book of the story, The Truce, telling of his nuts journey home is just as good.

Manufacturing Consent Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky

‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.’

Stodgy because its so rigorous, but a pretty much faultless critique of modern media.

Year 501 Noam Chomsky

Potted history of the past five hundred years with parellels drawns with the past five decades. Vital if you ever studied history at school or watched the ‘impartial’ BBC. Howard Zinn’s People’s History of America, John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried and E.P.Thompson’s superdense but illuminating Making of the English Working Class are all recommended too.

Deschooling Society Ivan Illich

Illich says more profound things about modern life, per page, than anyone. Here he attacks schools and here...

Medical Nemesis Ivan Illich

...the medical profession, and in both calmly, comprehensively and intelligently explains the total pointlessness of both.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man Marshall McCluhan

‘The specialist is one who never makes small mistakes while moving towards the great fallacy.’

Chaotic, structurewise, and not a skip-a-long of a read, but full of choice observational morsels.

The Tao Te Ching A New Translation Ellen M Chen

Best translation I’d say, and I’ve read a few. The Tao Te Ching is incredibly ambiguous and open to the author laying down his view upon it. Unlike other interpretations Ms Chen explains the alternate views and lets you make your own mind up.

The Gospel of Thomas

Best book of the Bible - although not actually in the Bible as the men who put it together found it heretical; because it makes clear which bits of the New Testament are stupid churchy dogma (the miracle guff, the nonsense about appointing popes, the sucking up to the Romans and the psychological abomination of Mr Jesus ‘dying for our sins’) and which are obviously the work of Mr Jesus (whoever he was - the lovely chap that made all those staggeringly enigmatic and perceptive comments about the paradoxical nature of Reality - aka ‘Love’ - and the horror of seeing life in terms of debt).

(The complicating factor in the story of Mr Jesus is the superb mythic Dumuzi-Dionysus-Osiris style innocent-god-death-resurrection-rebirth story. Not sure where that came from, but I reckon its worth reading the sillier gospels to experience it - or even the Franco Zeffirelli film which (again, Church bullshit aside) is excellent, especially the last supper, trial and crucifixion scenes which are literally awesome.)

Making Love Barry Long

The most original and useful book on the subject ever written by anyone. No surprise that it is completely unknown.

Struggle of the Magicians William Patrick Patterson

‘Gurdjieff was ailing, and he knew he was about to die (and he did, a few days later), when the ambulance was called and the men brought the stretcher to his room - but he wouldn't have this, and walked out into the hall and got on to the stretcher there, sitting back, saying, ‘Oy!’ as he always does.

He did not dress, but wore pyjamas, and his red fez on his head. He sat upright on the stretcher, and was carried away like a royal prince! All the family was clustered at the street door (the crusty old concierge was in tears!). The very last sight of him was as he was carried into the ambulance, sitting very upright, with his head up, his fez at a rakish angle and his cigarette between his lips. As they carried him across the pavement he made a little gesture, a sort of wave, with his hand and said, ‘Au revoir, tout le monde!’

Great biography of Gurdieff and Ouspensky - two very funny people.

Views from the Real World G.I. Gurdieff

Chaotic and piecemeal (as you’d expect from a collection of student’s notes), but studded with from-nowhere observations on the mechanical nature of normal consciousness.

Tertium Organum P.D.Ouspensky

Lovely, if heavyish, outline of how the rational mind cannot understand time.

Only Fear Dies Barry Long

Another one by Mr Long. He says some things which are insane to the point of unacceptable and, if you ever hear him speak, in a rather off-puttingly strident tone (which I find funny). Still; superb picture of the inner world and a peerless summary of the disastrous relationship between emotions, likes and dislikes and suffering.

Audition Michael Shurtleff

‘Unlikable performers can have long, even important, careers, if they have talent, fascination, sexuality and uniqueness, but some odd chemistry always happens in their relationship with the audience. Frequently the audience doesn’t know they don’t like a performer, but they are disturbed by him (or her), and the elements work in a strange, frequently unpredictable way. I have seen too many productions in which the actor comes off with great notices, but the project fails - because the actor is arrogant.’

Fascinating if you are into theatre and acting and stuff, but also very useful if you ever have to face an audience.

Impro Keith Johnstone

‘I made a two-minute film for a TV programme. It was all in one shot, no cuts. Everyone who saw it roared with laughter. There were people rolling on the cutting-room floor, hold- ing their sides. Once they'd recovered, they'd say, 'No, no, it's very funny but we can't show that!'

The film showed three misshapen but gleeful cripples who were leaping about and hugging each other. The camera panned slightly to reveal that they were hiding around a corner and waiting for a normal person who was approach- ing. When he drew level, the cripples leaped on him, and bashed him to pulp with long balloons. Then they helped him up, as battered and twisted as they were, and they shook hands with him, and the four of them waited for the next person.’

I went to one of Keith Johnstone’s workshops and a right bloody gas-bag he was - but this book was, for me, an open door into a new, tremendously exciting means of inner-exposure. Some very funny anecdotes here too. The bit about masks is a psycho-spiritual red-herring though.

What Do You Say After You Say Hello Eric Berne

‘To say hello rightly is to see the other person, to be aware of him as a phenomenon, to happen to him and to be ready for him to happen to you. Perhaps the people who show this ability to the highest degree are the fiji highlanders, for one of the rare jewels of the world is a genuine fiji smile. It starts slowly, it illuminates the whole face, it rests there long enough to be clearly recognized and to recognize clearly, and it fades with secret slowness as it passes by. It can be matched elsewhere only by the smiles of an uncorrupted mother and infant greeting and also, by a certain kind of open personality.’

Games People Play is good too. Both highlight the micro-squirms and scripts played out again and again in normal conversations. Best skim read though, as there’s lots of packing.

The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks

True stories about people with bananas brain defects. My favourite is the guy who was knocked out by a bus wing mirror and came round with a sense of smell 300 times more sensitive.

Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges

Totally unsatisfying, story-wise - like Escher’s drawings are unsatisfying as art - but both give hilariously pleasant infinite-feedback images which make the brain go ‘erk!’

The Divided Self R.D.Laing

R.D.Laing wrote books about fucked-up families, while, apparently, fucking up his own family. Still, if you are interested in schizophrenia, read this.

Robert Crumb’s Sketchbooks, 1970—1990

Erm, not really literature, but about as enjoyable as it gets. I find Mr Crumb’s sex-excess ‘a bit much’, but there’s so much more in these books and more intimate and funny than his comics I reckon.

Botany in a Day Thomas J Elpel

Very useful if, like me, you like picking green things and stuffing them in your gob (without dropping dead of the blind jaggers).

Self Reliance John Yeoman

Soap and granola recipes and such like.

Unlearn Rewild Miles Olson

A very intelligent corrective to usual self-sufficiency guides (he makes an excellent case for seeing out social collapse in, of all places, the suburbs). Some very good points about what it would actually be like if society fell apart. Bloody awful, of course, but, if you approach it in the right way, with the right people, survivable.

Newspeak in the 21st Century Medialens

A contemporary British version of Manufacturing Consent, and much more digestible.

The Law of the Playground Jonathan Blyth

If you are into puerile scatalogical utterly un-PC humour at all, and if you grew up in the UK any time in the last thirty years, you’ll poo yourself laughing reading this. A compilation of readers’ stories about the most savage and unfair elements of their schooldays - some of which were submitted by old friends of mine I think, because I recognise them.

Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance Robert M Pirsig

If you are into pop-philosophy, instruction manuals and fixing things, then you can’t find a better book. The point he makes is first class, but its pretty narrowly applied. He tried, in his second book, to widen its application, but it all unravelled.

A Nietzsche Reader (Penguin)

I’ve recommended the reader because Nietzsche didn’t really write books, just a load of sentences, some of which are ‘hmm, interesting’ and some of which are ‘nahhhhhh’. His best observations I think are on the process of creating beautiful things, which are perfect austere ravages of non-compromise.

The SAS Survival Handbook John Wiseman

Haven’t used a single trick in it, I don’t think, but its got everything, including how to do the heimlich manoeuvre on yourself by running into a tree trunk.

Lord Krishna’s Cuisine Yamuna Devi

Bible of Indian veggie cooking, although I double all spice quantities, add onion and garlic and serve with meat which would make A.C.Baktividanti Swami Prabhubada turn in his current reincarnated dressing gown.

Debt, the First 5000 Years David Graeber

‘Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them.’

You wouldn’t think it from the title, but this is brilliant. A highly illuminating and readable guide to the origins of money, knocking down the established lie that it originated in barter, as well as giving a thorough and fascinating investigation into the origins of the horrific idea that we are in debt to the universe by taking a fascinating detour through the birth of civilisation.

The Fall Steve Taylor

Pop overview of the overwhelming evidence that pre-civilised people lived in material and psychological paradise. Saharasia by James DeMeo is another good scan of the recent origins of violence. Both have an amateurish slap-happy crank feel, and its not hard to pick holes, but loads of good nutty paleo-material to chew over.

Pre-Conquest Consciousness E. Richard Sorenson

Marvellous essay on the miraculous empathy of a remote tribe and its nightmare destruction.

Teach Your Own John Holt

The book to read if you are unconvinced about the benefits of home schooling. I also recommend Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto - a perceptive if overlong and erratically structured history of forced unlearning.

The Teachings of Don Juan Carlos Casteneda

’There is something you ought to be aware of by now. I call it the cubic centimeter of chance. All of us, whether or not we are warriors, have a cubic centimeter of chance that pops out in front of our eyes from time to time. The difference between an average man and a warrior is that the warrior is aware of this, and one of his tasks is to be alert, deliberately waiting, so that when his cubic centimeter pops out he has the necessary speed, the prowess to pick it up. Chance, good luck, personal power, or whatever you may call it, is a peculiar state of affairs. It is like a very small stick that comes out in front of us and invites us to pluck it. Usually we are too busy, or too preoccupied, or just too stupid and lazy to realize that that is our cubic centimeter of luck. A warrior, on the other hand, is always alert and tight and has the spring, the gumption necessary to grab it.’

Casteneda’s books get more and more barmy. This first one is the best I reckon with passages, like the above, that make sense to people who actually live on Earth.

The Upanishads

First glimpse of the bountiful void in literature. It was handed down orally so there are loads of boring chant-style repetitions, but many-a marvel of sensory strangeness and paradox.

Useful Work vs Useless Toil William Morris

Essay. Penetrating critique of industrial production from the greatest craftsman of his age. News from Nowhere isn’t much cop though; gives nice idea of how London would look, but not much else.

The Tyranny of the Clock George Woodcock

Marvellous essay about the parallel development of the clock and modern life.

French Provincial Cooking Elizabeth David

I daresay there are better French cookbooks out there; this one, after all, was written for 1960s Britain, the worst time and place for food in the history of the universe. What’s more it is a gigantic flimflam for a lazy amateur cook to presume to say what are the best cookbooks in the world. I’ve included it because, apart from the splendid recipes, its a good read.

The Elements Of Typographic Style R. Bringhurst

How to present chunks of text beautifully. Very dry and technical, but if you share printed reading matter with others you’d do resonating service to their innate sense of beauty to digest some of the rules herein.

The Impossible Questions Jiddu Krishnamurti

Krisnamurti said the same thing over and over again for seventy years, yet never uttered a cliché or sounded formulaic. His fundamental message is impossible to mentally grasp, and so many people come away from his lectures thinking he said something else or wondering what he did say. Familiarity with his work is medicine for the violent brain sickness of common thought routines. You could start with the Penguin Arcana Reader.

Animal Architecture Karl Von Frisch

I read this after I read that it was an ‘academic jaw-dropper’. My jaw didn’t drop quite as much as I was hoping it would, but enough to pass on the recommendation, particularly for the bit about how bees build their hives, which is truly bonkers.

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace Joseph M. Williams

If you write non-fiction that other people are going to read, read this first. Please.

The Art of Fiction John Gardner

Less vital to read this than the above, because fiction is a much more slippery beast, but some very good and rightly arrogant guiders.

Schott’s Miscellanies Ben Schott (+QI, The Book of Lists and The Worst Case series)

Facts, loads of them; nothing more than [quite] interesting.

Information is Beautiful David McCandless

Another book for information hoovers. Suffers from cold bland fashionable corp-liberal philosophy, but still nice to look at.

A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish John Butt and Carmina Benjamin

Absurd book to recommend, I know, but I suppose there are a few [other] people out there who actually like reading grammar books, even if they don’t intend to learn the language. I’ve read a few myself, and this one is outstanding. Don’t go near it though if you’re not an advanced student of Spanish or a total lingua-nerd.

A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells A. Wainwright

Worth leafing through in wonder even if you never visit the Lake District. One of the most visually beautiful [sets of] books ever written and definitely the tarned and tufted peak of travel guides.

The Outsider Colin Wilson

Wilson’s best - a tremendous overview of the outsider in literature and art. Wilson struggles but fails to tie all his observations together, but good observations they be.

Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women Ricky Jay

Extraordinary tales of shrinking men, blind savants, human salamanders, flatulists and assorted vaudeville arcana written in super-eloquent prose. Mr Jay, himself, knows a trick or two.

Safe Area Gorazde Joe Sacco

Graphic-novel journalism. Like any other journalism its completely disposable and, ultimately, reveals nothing, but, unlike normal journalism, its beautiful and touching and funny.

Ways of Seeing John Berger

Antidote to most standard views on art-gallery art how, by entering the market, it is ripped from context and the content of the image - frequently banal or pornographic - is more difficult to perceive.

Tales from Outer Suburbia Shaun Tan

Splendid illustration. The stories are a bit hit-and-miss, but worth reading for the Buffalo tale and the story of ‘Eric’. His other books aren’t that great though and I think he was pretty jammy to get famous.

Disciplined Minds Jeff Schmidt

How university education structurally punishes dissent while promoting, within that structure, illusory intellectual freedom and objective measurement: leading to professional world of ‘innovation in the right direction’. Many, many fascinating points here.

Anxiety Attack Brian Dean

Good essay on the profitability of anxiety.

The Abolition of Work Bob Black

‘Many people return from vacations so beat that they look forward to returning to work so they can rest up. The main difference between work and leisure is that at work at least you get paid for your alienation and enervation... The only thing "free" about so-called free time is that it doesn't cost the boss anything. Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work.’

Seminal anarchist essay on the ‘ludic revolution’.

Muhammad Maxime Rodinson

Superb overview of the origin of Islam. Do not read if you are a Muslim: it will upset you. A lot.

The Imitation of Christ Thomas à Kempis

Not a great deal of practical value here, and a little sticky with dogma, but such inspiring consoling purity from a stupendously admirable man. Barry Long recommended him with one breath while pointing out, with the next, that its possible - and much more fulfilling - to do what Mr Kempis did with a woman at your side. But still, but still...

Walden Henry David Thoreau

‘The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that now reviews the vision.’

He could only manage it for a short time, but, as many know who have really stepped out of the world (externally and internally), the insights come and come again.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television Jerry Mander

‘Confinement itself, the removal of a creature from its natural habitat into a rearranged world where its ordinary techniques for survival and satisfaction are no longer operative, produces several inevitable results:

1. The creature becomes dependent for survival upon whoever controls the new environment. It will use its intelligence to learn whatever new tricks are necessary to fit that system. If it takes tricks and changes to stay alive, then that’s what it takes.

2. The creature becomes focused upon (addicted to) whatever experiences remain available in the new environment.

3. The creature therefore reduces its own mental and physical expectations to fit what can be gotten.

Confined creatures that cannot fit this pattern go crazy, revolt or die.’

Nowadays of course people proudly proclaim their lack of television, but the acute criticism here can apply to the internet too, or the mobile phone or any electronic entertainment device used to avoid reality.

The Story of Art E.H. Gombrich

Like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation, stiff, formal, traditional, not a great deal of existential insight and with total-emphasis on the west, yes, but still a lovely, kindly overview of a big subject.

A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein Roger Scruton
I’ve got a pretty low opinion of modern philosophy which is like looking for your car keys with a semi-quaver. But if you’re interested in it - and I still am - then this is the place to start. Similar to Gombrich in the narrowness of his view and a bit a of a reactionary sod, Scruton is still impressively thorough and as clear as you can be about such a whopping subject - which isn’t very clear - I huffed and puffed my way through it - but easier than the source material.

Kant is a bloody nightmare though and makes my brain go nnnnnnng, and Scruton doesn’t help much. Wouldn’t be a problem if he wasn’t the godfather of modern philosophy and full of ace ideas. I got to decent grips with him via Sebastian Gardner’s (still very hard) Guide Book to the Critique of Pure Reason. Jill Vance Buroker’s Cambridge guide is alright too.

After that skip Fichte, Hegel and co - wankers - and move on to Schopenhauer - he’s a right laugh. The Routledge Julian Young guide is excellent, but Schoppers wrote with sweet clarity and can be tackled in the original straight off.

Another philosophical fave is Wittgenstein, but he’s also tough, and best approached through good guides (I like How to Read Wittgenstein by Ray Monk). Some of his ideas are marvellous. I particularly like his [more readable] later stuff on culture and psychology in which he tells jokes.

The Prince Machiavelli

I put Machiavelli alongside writers such as La Rochefoucauld, Voltaire and Richard Dawkins; utterly insane and wrong about the most important things in life, but hilarious and instructive about the lies told by their enemies.

Voltaire’s Bastards John Ralston-Saul

A pretty good (but exhausting) overview of the horrible legacy of the so-called ‘enlightenment’. His ‘Doubter’s Companion’ is shorter, funnier and more digestible.

The Essential Jung: Selected Writings Anthony Storr

‘...and the wives of such men would have a pretty tale to tell.’

An anthology like this, with excellent explanatory notes, is better than wading through Jung’s libraries of published material. He’s a bit rigid with some of his concepts, but unbelievably perceptive and his work is full of humbling insights into the nature of bullshit.

Wormwood St, EC2*, 01:30

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 09:48:00 +0000

*The financial and business district (aka ~~desert~~ ‘city’) of London.

Do and Die

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 14:48:00 +0000

Improvised Theatre, Unself and The Meaning of Words

In improvised theatre you walk onto an empty stage and create a story. When it works selves dissolve like sugar cubes and reality roars in a-flowing. Often though, it doesn’t work; fear, violence, hope, addiction, imagination and excessive planning or theorising—all the second impressions of self in charge—get in the way. The scene crumbles, and everyone scrambles around, clenched and desperate.

This should sound familiar to anyone who has ever been lifted team-whole by an unseen hand on a football pitch only to ‘ooh-ooh I’m going to score’ fluff an open goal, or flapped around like a stranded guppy in the company of a real woman, or let the brush paint perfect harmony before giving the self one last hideously unnecessary touch, or auto-piloted unaware through any other paradise.

It is extremely difficult to say what actually happens in these critical moments though, because we no longer live critical lives. When we did, when we lived in do-or-die nature and had to pay life-or-death attention to the infinitesimal subtlety of its moods and shades, we had the sensitivity to feel and the language to describe the strange spirit of the moment. In truffle hunting or cliff diving or roof thatching or chatting with friends or making love, the same hyper-nuanced tone-life effortlessly guided feeling, action and speech.

Today we still have a few words that describe this kind of life, but because we no longer live it, they no longer describe it. Truth, good, god, beauty, death, divine, love and countless phrases that once sung flux eruptions are now meaningless, lost, debatable or trivial; paleolithic images that once had the power to transform, but we no longer know what they’re for, so we put them in museums or on greetings cards.

But there are still ways to live lives that make deep expressions meaningful. One is to spend every second of your day with your partner, in love. Another is to live self-sufficiently off grid with a team of Buddhas. Another is to give away all your possessions and walk across the planet. Another, just as realistic, is improvised theatre.

Unblock

Two people are chosen from the audience and asked to come up and create a scene from nothing. They walk onto a stage, with no preparation and no script, and start speaking:

A: Hello Sarah.

B: I’m not Sarah!

A: Oh, what would you like to do?

B: Shall we go for a walk?

A: Actually I’m very tired, let’s stay here.

B: Okay.

A: (pointing) ‘What’s that?

B: I don’t know, it looks interesting.

A: Pick it up then.

B: I can’t.

A: Why?

B: I’m sick. You pick it up.

A: Okay.

B: Stop, its going to kill you!

A: (steps on it) Its all right, I’ve dealt with it.

Generally a scene won’t be quite as bad as this, but it can be as painful to experience (both as actor and audience), and for the same basic reason, well-known to anyone interested in impro: blocking.

A block is a refusal to accept an ‘offer’, which can be of an identity (A: Hello Sarah), an action (B: Shall we go for a walk?) or a situation (A: Its going to kill you!’), all of which are declined in our example, in which A and B block each other.

Secondly, A and B block the situation: they refuse to commit to any action here and now and instead create ‘bridges’ to dealing with, or naming it later. In our example A and B do not identify who they are, where they are, what they are doing or what the mysterious object is. In addition they ask each other a lot of questions, which also dissipates commitment.

Other ways of blocking include gossiping, teaching, gagging, gassing. controlling and planning, all of which arise from self in charge (aka the dominator consciousness) which is terrified of the unknown, unaware of what is really happening around it and unable to commit, act or give unless it be on its own rigidly planned terms; leading to failed scenes, and lives. Self in charge is narrowly focused on a few pre-programmed anxieties and desires. It misses the micro-expressions, body-vibes and subtle offers from the universe (within and without) which calmly cue the present player to apt action or that deliberately head towards uncertainty, exposure and the secret intelligence of escalating calamity.

To overcome self in charge the players practice awareness enhancement, fearless (but not reckless) commitment, psychological generosity, uncertainty (or failure) embracing, casual stake-raising decisiveness and self-emptying*. To the extent that they master these existential skills, and are able to master them in an atmosphere of trust, unblocked players can allow the collective unconscious truth between them to naturally manifest the straightforward character-honesty, quiet humour, honest insanity, meaningful change, psychological risk, and tight archetypical structure called a great story. Or a great life.

To allow, in other words, the situation to speak.

Unstatus

The problems of blocking and the psychological freedom of unblock are familiar to many improvisers. The second pillar of impro however, unstatus, is currently as rare on the stage as it is in the world. The tragedy of this will become apparent.

Much of the fascination of drama—improvised or scripted, tragic or comic—comes from the reversal of status. Status-theory is based on the idea is that most inter-species behaviour is a presentation or transaction of status. A high status animal, for example, will look directly and slowly, and then look away, without looking back, its posture will be relaxed and open to attack, whereas a low status animal will glance and then glance back, or cower its body protectively. Humans display similar behaviour when interacting with the people - or even the objects - around them. Status transactions change according to the situation - a man can be high status to his employees but low status to his wife (again, pleasurable to watch on the screen or stage) - and can be extremely subtle - a referent touch of the nose, a split-second’s hesitation, a bland smile…

The idea of status in drama came from Keith Johnstone, who took it from the behaviourist Desmond Morris. The idea is therefore similar to that found in neo-darwinism and game theory; that we are biological machines. Adherents of such ideology, believe that status is inescapable, and that the only way to succeed in life is to become a status expert, playing with status and being able to break out of status-lock—being trapped in a single status mode; of alpha-male, for example, or doormat. A status expert is free to play the status he chooses. He may greet a friend with ‘good morning peasant’ or ‘good morning your majesty’ and his playful friend will not feel proud or insulted.

Which is all true; status theory can be nuanced and thrilling to behold in theatrical action and it is useful and entertaining to apply an understanding of it to oneself and others. And yet. Apart from the binary crudeness of the idea (it still comes down to ones and zeros, highs and lows), and apart from the uncomfortable feeling of being reduced to a status in the presence of someone using his status skills (manipulative status experts, behaviourists, psychologists and drama-theorists); not only is there such a thing as unstatus, but it is the essence of life.

When I am conscious, there is no I to state; when I play, then I, the player pretending, am unselfishly, ‘behind’ the play, statusless; and when I dock with my lover, presently together, there is nothing describable; least of all who is the dominant animal. All this status business is only in unconscious animal behaviour; and the idea that it is inescapable is just because in this world, where everyone behaves like unconscious animals**, it is inescapable.

If you have watched much improvised theatre you may have noticed that there is a lack of unstatus. This manifests, most obviously, as a lack of superb tragedy. The intense seriousness that tragedy demands is impossible with improvised theatre as it is, which is, through neglect of unstatus, inaptly skewed towards comedy and away from death, unconditional love and states of self annihilation***. Statusless moments of pathos and tenderness do appear, but they are, more often than not, swamped by theatricality, levity and spectacle.

Partly this is down to the players, who have grown up in a world that blocks unstatus while rewarding the melodramatic performance of it, and partly it is down to a theatrical tradition which, for all its perceptive acumen, does not put unstatus (or unself) first. The result is that although audiences and players may leave an improvised theatre show energised, entertained or amazed by the freedom of life, they will not leave shattered, transformed or enlightened by the truth of it.

Unlanguage

What do the words divine, real, free, God, life, death, beauty, genius, wonder, passion, love and truth mean? It’s hard to say when they are used continually and applied to everything. This isn’t to say that words can’t be thrown freely around, that language isn’t fluid, but with the most meaningful words made meaningless it becomes nearly impossible to find, express or recognise answers to ordinary meaningful questions; ‘Do I love her?’ for example or ‘What is the right thing to do?’ or ‘How can I live a good life?’ or ‘what’s the bloody point?’

Good writers endeavour to solve the problem of degraded language by expressing the truth in new ways. They work to rid their writing of cliché, cheese, gush and the pretensions of the literary language in order to make love and death seem new and mysterious. This is vital work, perhaps, but the power of the written word—script, letter, novel—is inherently limited; bound by its static, possessable and material nature and by the fact that, despite the music of the writer’s art, the written word lacks the tone, vibe and silence of live speech.

Entertaining and useful as it might be to read of new ways to talk about love and death, to understand what such words really mean there is no need to find new ways of expressing them. Words only have to be spoken truthfully. An epic poem about love cannot hold a candle to ‘I love you,’ said right; and that, before the dastardly moustache-twirling, zero-gravity bar-room fights and baboon eruptions, is what improvised theatre† is about; saying ’I love you,‘ right.

In the critical situation the players find themselves in—surrounded by the void of unknowing that the improvised stage represents, humming with the vibe and atmosphere of the room, self-emptied, safe in the trust of their fellows and able to flow, uncensored, into the collective—words and actions for truth and beauty can express their original meaning; not interesting abstract definitions, to be thought about and ‘applied’, debated and forgotten, but reality itself—the playful, absurd and freely spontaneous life of unblock, which cracks us up laughing, and the unspeakable, connected, awesome death of unstatus, which breaks us down in tears.

Isn’t it Frightfully Difficult Saying Hello?

To say hello rightly is to see the other person, to be aware of him as a phenomenon, to happen to him and to be ready for him to happen to you. Perhaps the people who show this ability to the highest degree are the fiji highlanders, for one of the rare jewels of the world is a genuine fiji smile. It starts slowly, it illuminates the whole face, it rests there long enough to be clearly recognized and to recognize clearly, and it fades with secret slowness as it passes by. It can be matched elsewhere only by the smiles of an uncorrupted mother and infant greeting and also, by a certain kind of open personality.
(Eric Berne)

First impression is the feeling you get the upon waking, before ‘me’ appears; a pleasurable emptiness whisperingly okay in a room of vivid and particular light-quality. First impression is the startling feeling you have when you first glimpse your lover after a long-time apart of something oddly secretly wrong, or it is the strange sense of there she is on first meeting the woman you know you are to marry, before she even turns round. First impression is the inner clench of a clanger before you rationalise or excuse it away. It is the vibration you get from someone’s posture, the tone-message you detect from a foreign language you do not understand and the pleasure you feel from the first note of a beautiful song you don’t yet know. First impression is the moment you first realise your house has been broken into, and the feeling of time slowing down when you fly through the window.

First impression is direct. There is no thinking distraction or feeling restlessness getting in the way. The more completely you experience your first impression of the moment, the quicker you respond to it. This valued quality is called spontaneity†, or improvisation.

Most people, after their youth, begin to lose their spontaneous reaction to what is happening. Between first impression and reaction time grows; hesitation, judgement, caution, aggression or anxiety: indirect second impression.

Second impression causes the man on the bus to miss the opportunity to speak to a beautiful woman who smiles at him; he panics and plans. It causes him to say the wrong thing in a discussion, later replaying the arguments, putting in the words he should have said (should is second impression’s favourite word). It causes him to walk into the kitchen and wonder what he’s doing there, to tell the same story to the same person two, three, four, ten times, to break things and forget them, to automatically shift the facts around in his favour when the light of criticism falls upon him, to unconsciously size up the status of a same-sex rival, to compel compliance to pre-programmed norms and to give a poor greeting; forgetting names, witticisms forced, flow breaking down. The time-lag of second impression introduces the same problem that frustrated lovers experience after the honeymoon and improvisers have on stage when a scene is failing. There might be laughter, applause, a great display of interest and all the right words, but something is missing; this isn’t right.^§

Self came between reality and reaction around thousand years ago. A tipping point was passed†† at which the tool of self (thought, emotion, genes, charisma, etc) took control of experience and became ‘who I am’ threatened by ‘what I am not’—by darkness, death, love, silence, space, and the point where the essence of impro meets life; greeting.

On the level of naked awareness it is unnatural and painful to keep the self together when greeting, or making eye contact with passers-by, but the self would rather have the strain, awkwardness or brutality of blocking out the world and interacting with the other through the circumlocutions of status-assessment than in dissolving in the unknown of unself. We know—often unconsciously—that the heart exposed will be emotionally exploited, attentively sucked or mentally trodden upon, so we wrap it up in layer upon layer of self^⁂: so many layers that most of us don’t realise the heart is there, until we fall in love, or some other catastrophe breaks the self open.

Self is a tool; a computer, a machine, or a shield. If the tool operates itself, it will only instruct itself to grow and defend itself, and the heart will become buried in the second impressions of time. It will then take time to get back—which is the purpose of living the improvised life, on any stage. Not to be a drooling vegetable or a helpless child; because the goal is not to destroy self. The shield is still here, ’to serve and protect‘, but life is holding it, impeccably discerning and ready, instantly, to break open and, like a child, or a vegetable, to say hello.

Hello means I love you, and I want to dance with you; like this and this and this and this and this and this and this.°

And the improvised life is constant greeting.

* Of these presence comes first. It is impossible to describe a great impro show because you ‘had to be there’. It is the quintessence of ‘you had to be there’ because, to create great impro, you have to be here.
** Not that animals are unconscious—not a bit of it—but that status confinement, being unconscious, runs blindly off the animal feed-fight-fuck code. Its also worth noting here, as Mr Barker observes, that from the perspective of high status, unstatus seems low (because it has no desire) and from the perspective of low status, unstatus seems high (because it has no fear).
*** Which is how teachers of improvised theatre can be invited to give workshops to corporate clients and be invited back, which would, of course, be impossible if they addressed status in the workplace.
† Or improvised film rehearsal. See this interview with Mike Leigh.
‡ which comes from the Latin for happening by itself —i.e without self getting in the way
^§ Judgement problems caused by indirect experience are often availability errors; the tendency to choose the most attractive thought, feeling or conditioned perception that comes to one’s awareness rather than to perceive and respond to what is actually happening. Common availability errors include; a jury that acquits a handsome well-presented murderer, a tourist who avoids all air-travel because of one well-publicised crash, race or gender prejudice and other pre-assumptions that the individual case is the same as the general rule. In all these cases one fact, feeling or limited perception is more ‘available’ than what is actually happening.

^††Was passed collectively, as a race, and is passed, individually, as the child moves (or is wrenched) from neolithic immediacy to excessive self-determination (cultural recapitulation). See here and here for how this happens.
^⁂Often brilliantly. It can take the genius of a child or a moron to see past the smokescreen of an accomplished, confident and talented self... ‘Unlikable performers can have long, even important, careers, if they have talent, fascination, sexuality and uniqueness, but some odd chemistry always happens in their relationship with the audience. Frequently the audience doesn’t know they don’t like a performer, but they are disturbed by him (or her), and the elements work in a strange, frequently unpredictable way. I have seen too many productions in which the actor comes off with great notices, but the project fails - because the actor is missing something.’ Micheal Shurtleff
° You’d be surprised how good a chat up line ‘I love you’ is, said right. I’ll be looking at this in a future post; something along the lines of ‘How Buddhas Pull Birds.’

God’s Bouncer

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 11:29:00 +0000

There’s a hard, bald meathead on the gates of Eden.

The first time you go for a run after years of inactivity you feel like you are going to die after five minutes. If you’ve lived your life on low-nutrient sugar-rich junk, you’re more than likely to judge a fresh high-fibre meal as lacking in excitement, difficult somehow. And if you are a city dweller in your bones and swan off for a few months to live off grid in the middle of nowhere, it soon becomes, after the initial novelty wears off, hideously boring.

These kind of difficulties are well known. Less well known is the reason: God’s Bouncer.

Also known as The Guardian at the Gate and Dr Cold Turkey, God’s Bouncer stands between the self-led life and the life-led self. He is there, in weed form, when you make a move from monoculture to permaculture. He’s there as the background irritation of ‘don’t like’ if you turn from rapid-chatter, murder beats to symphonies of mood or thought. If you fast, if you stop working, or if you radically change any entrenched self-gratifying habit, relationship, or social class; he’s there, either telling you its pointless, stupid, impossible or slapping you round the suede with his existential meathooks.

Interestingly though, he’s not there when you take up a new love affair (or a new hobby); he tends to hang back; turn up about three months after Miss Glorious Uprush has buggered off. He goes immediately apeshit though if you give up tight focus fuck-sex and step to make thoughtless, unsentimental love. Indeed any move away from the momentum of unconscious mentation – an absence of habitual thinking, worrying, hoping and the like – and you can expect to say hello to God’s personal bastard.

He turns up in some surprising places. You sometimes see him lurking, for no apparent reason, in October around 6pm, or pointlessly hovering over a ringing phone and sometimes he’s just vaguely hanging round... for years. The git.

And yet, unlike his evil twin, the Should Bully, he’s working for the good thing. He protects the innocent, he stops corruption reaching the heart of things. He’s the nightmare warzone between civilisation and the remote tribe, the years of punishing craft between intent and mastery and the unreasonably emotional suspicious virago that loving women carry around in them to keep pretenders out.

And he wants you to beat him.

Three Short Films

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:29:00 +0000

I found a website where you can make ‘films’ with those [pretty sinister I think] virtual actor things and did these three. They are silly.

Here is the video I saw the other day that made me want to do these, or, if you’ve had enough of looking at CGI, here’s a true story about a man who suddenly found everything funny (check the instructions underneath for how to add subtitles).

Hackney Olympus

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 12:38:00 +0000

A song of divine piratical self-overcoming, in Hackney.

The bartender somehow saw through me
The titan in turbans excused me
I made not a move wouldnt you be
Keeping your gunpowder dry?
On a planet where Venus and Mars
Slumped over the bar and Jove’s dealing dope to the gods.

The man that I used to be cowered
Before me her silhouette towered
The barman said god hates a coward
Sweetly and sourly alone
As the universe offers me gallently
A cold singularity
A blackhole where nothing returns.

Demons and ladies
Rescued from Hades
Immortally tacky
Mount Olympus in hackney

Unrecorded third verse. The intention is, whensoever this wooden demo becomes a real boy, that instead of the flat die, die, die, die part, a slathering epic bedlam of dark joy howls through you instead.

You sir! A midnight stroll!
Through the rubble of your broken soul.
Rise, rise; a goddess is the prize!
If the man that you think you are lays down and dies.
Rise from the world of the man that you knew,
And laugh with the gods as the gods laugh at you!

Countless Orgasms

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 02:43:00 +0000

The self-based orgasm is a physical, mental and chemical – which is to say technical – event. And like all technical events it can be described numerically. A powerful orgasm with someone you don’t particularly care for, or are bored of, or are merely excited by – yourself perhaps – might be a seven or a nine.

The selfless orgasm, on the other hand, although it occurs in the mechanism of the body, is not confined to it. With attention freed from genital tension, emotional violence and excitable mental imagery, the doors of perception swing open and the walls around them crumble, allowing the 99.9935% of sense-information usually excluded from consciousness – the moment and each other in it – to flood in.

Measurement of time and space exists only in the self, and so the self-empty moment can no more be described numerically than a country can, or a day, or a dance (unless rigidly matched against self-defined standards). The proper means of expressing it in words (if you have to) is, like all qualitatively mysterious selfless experience, metaphor.

Sometimes in sex unself is mixed with self which wafts in and out, tensing up in private thought, or gripping in self-informed addiction-aversion, or thrashing about in emotional possession, before being released by a human glance. More often though the reverse is true: spaceless intimacy is instantly replaced with the space-time image of and desire for what is happening; for although, in essence, self and unself in sex are poles apart, and although it is easy to agree that they are, it is as difficult to actually perceive the slinking of self into the mysterious thick of love-making as it is to spot at just what point analysis paralyses grace or a great jam turns cheese.

The self-based orgasm, comprising effort, expectation, fantasy, conditioned drama and the release of tension, is a one-to-ten affair. It can be counted because it cannot be shared; and the consequence of this isolation is ever growing separation between you both.

The selfless orgasm, which is effortless, without any kind of anticipation (and therefore without either preamble or peak) without any kind of fantasy (unselfconscious and therefore unpornographic) and based not on tension and release but on intensifying waves of empty consciousness, is an indisputable sharing of warm pink delicately deliquescing snow, or an ancient fire in an ancient cave, or cascading Callistan waterfalls, or Vivaldi’s Gloria, or a vast ambient underground beehive of glowing golden cells, or Beehoven’s ninth at midnight on a blind galloping thunderstorm horse, or detonating blast waves from the creation of the universe pulsing through your astonishing bodies leaving you, all day, every day, on the beach.

If your love-life is not like this, it is in trouble. Time and space will win.

Goodbye Hiroshima Lemons

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 07:24:00 +0000

T shirts here in Japan say things like:

Left, right, forward, backward. Move arm + leg rhythmical and all will be invited to the ‘you won’t miss’ too good!

I read this on a tin of biscuits which someone gave me as a present for the blossom season:

This is the door into the world filled with a great many flowers. Here, all the flowers are different from others as there is nobody but has the same face. The flowers repeat themselves to be out vividly, gone beautifully and re-born one after another. The world full of bright energy will certainly give one feel a comfort for a while.

The television weather reports at blossom viewing time show where the blossom is as it moves in a wave up the country, and when it does come out, frothing ecstatically over cherry trees everywhere, the world is full of bright energy, and it certainly does give one feel a comfort for a while.

Formality and Play Speaking Japanese is like fat men turning wardrobes round in the thin corridors of my brain. Where we'd say, ‘We live nearby so we'll come again soon. If you need anything, just ask’ Japs say ‘Close house that's why again soon come so thing-any needed thing there is without ceremony honourably ask, please deign to.’

Yes, deign. There are some stupendously elaborate formal set-phrases here. Its normal to translate ‘thanks for coming’, for example, as ‘I am grateful for humbly receiving your deigning to come,’ and here are eight levels of formality embedded in the grammar of everyday speech.

But I like this. Japs and Brits alike (often) hide behind these rules and turn the game into cold, inflexible law, but done right it is good to elaborately perform a hello or use ten embedded clauses to avoid having to give someone the tiny unpleasantness of having to refuse you or feel criticised. Formality, when done right, is a form of play.

On my second or third day working at Monzen high school three students, cheerful lads of around fourteen, came into the staff room to talk with an austere geography teacher called Kawabata-sensei. They spoke seriously for a while, Kawabata-sensei explained something to them and they politely listened and then bowed. Then Kawabata-sensei reached forward and gave the student nearest to him a nipple-gripple.

For sports day I was expecting 100 metres and discus and whatnot. Instead; a mad tug-of-war race involving a hundred girls and twenty ropes, students being spun round ten times then running a 100m blindfold, an ‘event’ in which teams had to get beanbags into bucket strapped to a student’s back and a flag-up-a-pole-snatching contest, which resulted in pupils being led from the field with blood pouring from their mouths, everyone applauding and teachers laughing good-naturedly.

And the most solemn religious rituals are a kind of game.

Heaven and Hell The horror, of course, is here: Insane worship of authority, terror of any kind of non-comfomity, obsessive pedomorphism and infantilisation (screwdrivers come with instruction manuals), morbid ethnocentricity, cultural hypochondria, sensory overload (Japan is the noisiest country in the world) and psychotic overwork. These things are not unique to Japan, of course, just prominent disequilibria; and, as ever, under apt conditions, the horror is heaven.

Take the famous Japanese impurity-terror. Out of balance it leads to wearing a face mask for the whole winter to avoid getting a cold, going to the hospital if you have a slight itch and the drive to turn the whole world into an antiseptic laboratory. In its place it leads to total confidence entering a public toilet, the lovely neatness of Japanese homes and, one of the supreme achievements of human civilisation, the onsen.

Cuteness is another nightmare here which, in essence and apt, is, literally, heaven. I believe that the instinct to make every tiny object natural, the use of the friendly suffix ‘chan’ to make friends of common objects (or the honourable ‘o’ to verbally bow towards one’s lunchbox) and the urge to turn even men at work barriers into pink bunnies is ultimately due to civilisation here, for all its oppressive omnipresence, sitting somehow light upon stone age consciousness, allowing childishness, rewarding softness and seeing sweet life everywhere.

The same primal sensitivity is behind the premium placed on empathy. The Japanese, like our prehistorical friends, do not make strident declaration of personal preference and engage in a war of intent in order to reach a decision. Instead one is expected to feel for other’s desires and needs, and to endeavour to meet them before they have to go to the unpleasant indignity of having to ask. Although this often descends into neurotic confusion it is still in many cases a far more effective and agreeable way of going about the game of being with others.

Nature. For several months I had a frog in my letterbox.

We sat looking at each other for about an hour every day.

There are lots and lots of frogs here, ranging from minuscule bonsai froglettes to the booming cow frogazoid.

They live in the rice fields, which are everywhere: in every town, behind warehouses, surrounding carparks, stuffed between houses, running up the sides of sliproads. And not just rice fields but allotments, irrigation canals, compost heaps and forests of vegetables. The whole country, which has 80% forest cover, is self-sufficient in vegetables with fresh stuff often grown a few minutes away. Its marvellous. Where I come from its almost impossible to say what anything tastes like anymore, and after eating a Hiroshima lemon – grown and picked a few minutes away – I’m sadly confident that I am one of the only living Englishmen ever to have really tasted that remarkable fruit.

I’ve spent a total of nearly three years in Japan. This week I leave again, for good.

Goodbye Hiroshima lemons.

‘I won’t miss’ you. I left, right, forward, backward rhythmically love you too much.

Lightning

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Last night, looking over Kurashiki valley from our eighth floor living room, we saw a thunderstorm like no other. The lightning, rather than forking downwards, flew across the sky - mad cracked webs of white fire that flared across the purple horizon, strafing the valley before finally, in a deafening blinding strike, bursting a tree under our balcony into pink flames.

The next morning: we awoke to find Kurashiki swarming with dragonflies! God’s truth! Thousands of huge bright blue dragon flies were flying past our window - and you know how they fly, not erratic and scare-making, but blithe and direct, like commuters, trundling in columns through the sky.

I logged onto the hive-mind and found a whole department at the University of Inazuma (the Establishment for Entomological Ekpyrotic Kenesis) that had studied this phenomenon. Apparently lightning actually makes dragon flies. When it strikes, forty or fifty dragonflies are fired from the earth, like a shower of sparks.

Investigating the findings of the institute further I also discovered that trees (like good conversations) are slow lightning strikes. Did you know that? Apparently the Earth’s core is some kind of compressed ball of white-hot lightning which flares up through the layers of rock and, when it meets the surface, extends fractically outward, tearing through time-space in a gobsmacking existential vent which we register as ‘tree’.

Most amazing of all though, when cloud-lightning from above hits tree-lightning from below, anywhere on earth, our entire reality, is shifted into an alternate universe into which we all of us instantly appear, with brand new stories and memories - except these new lives are not ‘ours’, but, rather, are part of a pre-existing supra-temporal network of consciousnesses; teams of quantum-humanities that striate through the universe in vast living transdimensional lightening strikes.

Yeah. Not that I need to tell you any of this though, friend of the gentle apocalypse, where all our lightning lives formlessly converge: but, as you know, there are many here among us who are sick with story addiction, weighed down with their formal, merely remembered selves and can’t slip at will into the God’s fat trunk.

Fortunately however the reality we all landed in this morning, is, as you’ve no doubt noticed, a bloody nightmare. According to EEEK the weight of self here is in the order of forty thousand newtons of existential mass per person; the heaviest in the known multi-verse and fast careering towards some kind of critical mass which will inevitably force people out of themselves for good.

So after the next leap, we’ll wake up together.

The Paradoxical Essence Men

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 30 Jun 2012 09:05:00 +0000

Ram-Man: Essence Men Trading Card No. 5

The Unbelievable Essence Men are a superhero group appearing in Kamichan comics #86 - 88.

Ram-man Super-power: indestructible head and laser-firing horns.* He can’t fly but he can jump from tall buildings, just as long as he lands on his head. He can also summon millions of sheep, from miles around, to help him escape from empty warehouses surrounded by the cops. His weakness is that he can only solve problems that require charging full pelt into a wall.**

The Sempstress When super-heros gain their super powers they also gain superb tailoring skills. The sempstress is alone in only being able to stitch, knit and crochet, but at lightening speed and with any material. She can, depending on the super-villian she’s facing, instantly knock out titanium gloves, electric corsets, custard socks or trousers made of clouds.

Captain Appropriate By day Milton Hornpipe passes as one of the great unexceptional, with nothing about him more remarkable to the haphazard eye than a micro-vivid element of jaunt to an unusually flexible gait. By night, however, his is. Captain Appropriate (aka Aptman). Superpower: knows The Right Thing to Do. Has a series of arch-enemies with which he does regular battle; The darkly obsessive Dr Plan, the restless Jiggler, Gagboy and The Mood.

Godella When the forces of evil threaten, gentle Jane Lloyd unpins her chignon and rips off her neat, capable and slightly tense alter-ego to reveal the blinding essence of Woman. Has the power to turn super villians into super heroes - and vice versa. Godella’s weakness is that she has no idea that she is a super hero - and were she ever to know, she would become a super villian. Super-weakness: paperwork. Super enemies: Cockman and the Drip.

Catfish! Catfish!’s superpower is lunatic sensitivity. Mild Mike Mitchell was a a sex-desperate and emotionally unstable teenager who yearned to tear himself open and radiate with a thousand suns of splendour when Godella curtsied his brains out, blasting the doors of his perception from their hinges leaving him staggering around a hypervivid eternal uber-universe of pure otherness and intimate wonder. Catfish! has three superpowers - whispery communication with light, the pink tip and timeless love songs. Super-weakness: porn.

Antman. Antman has the power to lift twenty times his own body weight, run as fast as a racehorse and squirt formic acid from his bottom. His weakness is that he is actually an ant.

Timegirl Timegirl gained the power to move forwards and backwards in time by accidentally eating a special moth. After telling her early self not to waste her life with schooling, career or pointless, lustreless love affairs she started organising the past of the world to create a future paradise, tweaking events years ago and then pinging forward a few millennia to see the butterfly effects. She is therefore responsible for all the suffering in the world, and is sorry for the inconvenience.

Other E-Men include Mauve, Lineman, Monkey Girl, Horseradish and The Man Without Attributes.

All team up to fight Dr Plan who is holding the world to ransom with his conventionaliser; a tachyon-field emitting atomiser which makes everyone a bit worried and want to check their email.

The only time the good guys and the bad guys stop fighting each other is when they gang up against the paradox guys.

* Ram man can also ejaculate 30 - 40 times a day and each ejaculation contains eight times the number of sperm of a normal man.

** Also he can’t use his horns because they’re pointing at his head.

Planet X

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:49:00 +0000

When relationships end, ex-lovers all fly off to live together on a beautiful planet with all your lost biros, peanuts, pieces of paper with important information, beloved shirts, misplaced umbrellas and scarves left in restaurants. All the perfect fruit you’ve ever eaten, that made your eyes pop open - the complex, fragrant lemons, the watermelons that were sweet right down to the rind, the buttery mangoes that dribbled jungle gold - it all grows there, on that planet. The vague, freakish, sweet, wrenching flashes of street-corners, picture books, silvery winter sunshine and the smell of rain as you once ran, happy, in a tropical morning - everything good that is lost forever to you lives there still, on a beautiful planet, far away, which, yesterday, collided with a huge asteroid and exploded. Gone forever.

Okay?

The Burning Toast & The Should Bully

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:48:00 +0000

The word conscience has two basic meanings. The first, most common use, designates the priest or parent-code installed in the head; designed, more or less, to prevent you from doing anything that threatens The Way Things Are. This kind of ‘code-conscience’ (also occasionally called ‘care’, ‘respect’, ‘maturity’ and ‘responsibility’) is a kind of instinctive morality, a cultural bouncer at the doors of liberation and a brake upon spontaneity, individuality and free discernment. Code-conscience is the should bully that keeps the rich rich, the poor poor, the stupid stupid and the modern artist in pay.

But. If you are sitting down in your garden, say, and, at one with body and universe, meditating even, or just ‘okay’ - and there is toast burning in the kitchen, and you smell it; then you are going to have a feeling inside of something not being right - and this too can be called conscience.

True conscience is the whiff of burning toast - and toast will start to burn when any human needs are not met: food, warmth, water, air, creative physical exercise and rest, mental exercise and rest (meaning periods where no thought arises), a sense of autonomy and control, a sense of trust in what is happening, a sense of achievement and development (challenges overcome, fears met), privacy and society, infinity (the impossibleness of nature), freedom of expression, varied playful freely chosen creation, knowledge of limits and freedom to break them when the moment is right, the giving and receiving of attention and affection (good vibe), unconditional 'faults and all' acceptance and, above all, the rending impulse to give everything away, to blend into the mysterious moment and to choose the most joy at any given millisecond.

If these needs are not met you will sniff out smoke, as the body will feel restlessly hungry.

Most people can easily identify food, warmth, water and air hunger; but they usually have difficulty identifying their other hungers, and frequently misattribute them to remote or bizarre causes. One might, for example, blame a lack of praiseful attention on a need for chocolate, or confuse the nagging guilt caused by contempt for one’s wife with annoyance at one’s football team failing or interpret the enervating, clouding, clogging and bitter brain-fat of being at work, where very few needs are met, with a poor diet, or redirect an anxious clinging to money and status onto a need for yogic calm, or assume the glum torpor of indolence is caused by one's family, one's future, one's city... on anything but the unused roller blades in the hallway.

The burning toast of conscience (also known as pain), and acting on it, is the bridge between anarchism and mysticism, between sensuality and austerity and between action and non-action. It is a call to do what is right, once you’ve stood up to the should bully.

From the Gentle Apocalypse Emporium

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:38:00 +0000

Do you suffer from arhythmia, spaz-realease-anxiety or creaky psyche-lag in the arms of a dance partner? In dance do you perform simple, mechanical, jerklettes, large, predictable or out-of-time grandstanders, refuse in your headstrong flesh to follow or lead with technical brilliance but subtle flairless grip? Or perhaps you love to dance but are tied to someone who does not and are tired of playing table-tennis in a deep-sea diving suit or hauling a corpse stapled to a mattress up the spiral stair-case of your enthusiasms? If so, why not try Dr Pong’s Yawp Serum; an intramuscular boogie-juice arse injection of concentrated hooplas, crunching squat-glides, electro-stills, mobile rolls, michegan-synchros, high-park-gaylords, wet-fleckerals, rubber-ochos, highland body-melts, net-casters, chick-spacks, wang-scythes, bubble-rubs and glorious bronto-yawps. Just one monstrous pump and a whole new landscape of vibe-delight is yours.

Kali Yuga

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Sun, 06 May 2012 05:17:00 +0000

This from the Vishnu Paruna, an ancient Hindu text which describes the Kali Yuga, the age of wickedness at the end of time:

‘In the Kali Yuga charity will constitute righteousness. Pride of wealth will be inspired by very insignificant possessions, upon which all will lust and hanker. Accumulated treasures will be expended on dwellings and illusions. The minds of men will be wholly occupied in acquiring wealth; and wealth will be spent solely on distractions and gratifications. No man will part with the smallest fraction of the smallest coin, though entreated by a friend. Cows will be held in esteem only as they supply milk. The people will be almost always in dread of dearth, and apprehensive of scarcity; and will hence ever be watching the appearances of the sky.

In the Kali Yuga, food will lose its savor, women will become as men, love will be confused for desire and time will appear to speed up. It shall be forbidden to lie down in public spaces and dead bodies will be hidden from view. Dreams will be troubled and sexual communion will harden the hearts of the coveted and frustrate the hearts of slaves*.

In the Kali age every one who has cars and elephants and steeds will be a Raja, and every one who is feeble will be a slave. Farming men will abandon agriculture and commerce, and gain a livelihood by servitude or the exercise of mechanical arts. Then will the clouds yield scanty rain: then will the corn be light in ear, and the grain will be poor, and of little sap: garments will be mostly made of the dying fibres and milk will come mostly from goats.

In the Kali Yuga every text will be scripture that people choose to think so and humans will be haunted on both sides - by the fist of despotic ideas and the rising ocean of ignorance. Endowed with little sense, men, subject to all the infirmities of mind, speech, and body, will daily make dreadful errors; and every thing that is calculated to afflict beings, vicious, impure, and wretched, will be generated in the Kali age until men and women will become as lizards are, skuttling and watchful for weakness, or as hunted birds, white and ever blinking. The world will become a hive, fuelled by nighmares.

But for the children and the insane there will be freedom, and those that learn the madness of play, at the end of time, will take their game to the Satya Yuga.

And those who love freedom will be amazed at how awake they can be.’

*and the young shall not know where lyeth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock.

THE CHARACTERS OF WAR AND PEACE

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:03:00 +0000

Adapted, clarified and cleaned up (e.g. spoilers removed) version of the Wikipedia entry. Characters in bold are main characters (only a few!). Characters in italics are secondary characters. All others only appear once or twice, are not important and do not need to be remembered.

Marya Dmitriyevna Akhrosimova - relative of Count Rostov and matchmaker. Rude but respected and feared.
Tsar Alexander I of Russia - emperor liberal early in his reign but gradually became more conservative.
Yakov Alpatych - servant and estate manager of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky
Count Arakcheyev - severe minister of war in 1809; cruel but cowardly; former minister of war by 1812 but trusted by Tsar Alexander I

Bagovut - Russian soldier
Prince Bagration - Russian general, considered ‘The hero of heroes’ by Tolstoy. He is a modest, polite, but very strong character.
Barclay de Tolly - Senior commander of Russian forces in 1812 until replaced by Kutuzov.
Barthélemy - The second envoy unsuccessfully sent by Napoléon to negotiate peace with Emperor Alexander.
Joseph Alexéevich Bazdéev - Pierre's benefactor, a freemason.
Count Bennigsen - German leader of Russian at Eylau (a draw) and Friedland (a decisive defeat). A senior commander in 1812.
Lieutenant Alphonse Karlovich Berg - German husband of Vera Rostova
Berthier - Napoleon's commander of staff in 1805
Count Kirill Bezukhov - Pierre's father and very wealthy aristocrat who served in Catherine II's court.
Pierre Bezukhov - The illegitimate son of Count Bezukhov. A freethinking, sometimes reckless, man capable of decisive action and great displays of willpower when circumstances demand it.
Bilibin - Russian diplomat to Austria. Entertains Prince Andrey Bolkonsky during the Prince's stay in Brno to inform the Austrian government of Russian victories.
Bolhovitinov - Messenger from Dolohov to Kutuzov, Oct. 1812
Prince Andrey (Andrew) Nikolayevich Bolkonsky - Son of Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky. A brave (at times arrogant) soldier who becomes cynical in the Napoleonic Wars. Counterpart to Pierre. Valued adjutant to Kutuzov in 1805. Married to Lisa Bolkonskaya, father of young prince Nikolay Bolkonsky.
Princess Elisabeta ‘Lisa’ Karlovna Bolkonskaya - née Meinena. Wife of Andrey Bolkonsky.
Princess Marya Bolkonskaya - A woman who struggles between the obligations of her religion and the desires of her heart. Marya lives with her father at his estate, Bald Hills. She is subject to her father's fastidious and unscrupulous schedule and standards. Also called Maria.
Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky - Name of both father and son of Prince Andrey Bolkonsky (and therefore a bit confusing!)
Napoléon Bonaparte
Mademoiselle Bourienne - orphaned French companion to Princess Maria Bolkonskaya and her father.
Broussier Mademoiselle Byelova

General Campan Caulaincourt - French ambassador to Russia
Prince Adam Czartoryski - Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Clausewitz - As one of two German staff officers, in the Russian service, that ride past Prince Andrei the night of the eve of battle of Borodino (The other is Wolzogen).

Danilo - Huntsman for Nikolai Rostov
General Davoust - French marshall, competent but also capable of cruelty
Vasily ‘Vasska’ Denisov - Russian military officer, friend to Nikolai Rostov. He tends to pronounce some of his R's like W's, but not all of them. Eventually a general of partisan troops after the French retreat from Moscow.
Monsieur Dessalles - A Swiss teacher for young prince Nikolay Bolkonsky.
Dmitri Onufrich - Family solicitor of Count Bezukhov.
Dmitri Vasileyevich - ‘Mitenka.’ Account manager of the Rostovs.
Prince Dolgorukov - Russian general
Dokhturov - A General in the Russian army. Unheralded but played a decisive role at Austerlitz, Smolensk, Borodino, and Maley Yaroslavetz.
Fedor Ivanovic Dolokhov (Fedya) - A cold, almost psychopathic man, he is a noted duelist and drinker.
Dron Zakhárych (Drónushka) - Village elder of Bogutcharovo
Princess Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya - Friend of Countess Rostova. Poor. Supporter of Boris, her son.
Boris Drubetskoy - ambitious son of Princess Anna Mikhaylovna Drubetskaya. Army officer; fought at Austerlitz. Childhood friend of Countess Rostova.
Dunyasha - Servant of Countess Rostova

Archduke Ferdinand of Austria Maria Feodorovna - Russian empress
Prince Boris Vladimirovich Galitzine - A nobleman who has hired a tutor to instruct him in Russian, as French, the language preferred by the upper classes, became identified with the enemy.
Gerasim Gervais - Associate of Speranski
Major-General Grekov - Commanded two regiments of cossacks under Orlov-Denisov at Taratino. Initially routed French under Marat.

Ilyin - Friend of Nikolai Rostov
Mikhail Ivanich - Taciturn architect employed by Prince Nikolay Bolkonsky

Julie Karagina - wealthy heiress. Friend of Marya Bolkonskaya. Married Boris Drubetskoy.
Marya Lvovna Karagina - mother of Julie Karagina.
Platon Karataev - peasant who influences Pierre Bezukhov during his time as a prisoner of war.
Piotr Petrovich Konovnitsyn - A Russian general.
Paisi Kaysarov - Kutuzov's adjutant in the Battle of Borodino.
Aline Kuragina - Wife of Vasili Kuragin.
Anatole Kuragin - son of Vasili Kuragin. Noted for dissipation. A cad.
Hélène Kuragina - daughter of Vasili Kuragin. Later Countess Bezukhov. Beautiful, self-seeking woman.
Hippolyte Kuragin - son of Vasili Kuragin. A dull and boring man. A diplomat and the butt of Bilibin's humor.
Vasili Kuragin - A self-seeking man who has a low opinion of his children but seeks to further their interests. Prince Vasili is self-seeking and manipulative throughout the novel, and consistently attempts to swindle Pierre Bezukhov
Mikhail Ilarionovich Kutuzov - Russian general throughout the book.
Mavra Kuzminishna - Elderly servant of the Rostovs.

Langeron - Noble who left France. A commander on the Russian side at Austerlitz, where his troops were decimated.
Lauriston - The first of two envoys sent to Kutuzov by Napoléon in an attempt to negotiate peace.
Lavrushka - Valet to Denisov. A rogue, later valet to Nikolai Rostov. Misled Napoleon.
Lazarev Lorrain - Doctor

General Mack - Austrian general. Defeated at Ulm, 1805.
Magnitsky - Associate of Speransky.
Anna Ignatyevna Malvintsev - Princess Maria's aunt on her Mother's side.
Princess Katerina ‘Katishe’ Mamontova - one of Count Bezukhov's nieces. Eldest of the ‘three princesses.’
Princess Sophia Mamontova - one of Count Bezukhov's nieces. Youngest of the ‘three princesses.’
Michaud - A Russian colonel.
Mikhail Nikanorych - Distant relative of the Rostovs who lives near their estate at Otradnoe, he is also referred to as Uncle.
Miloradovich - Russian general in 1812 after Napoleon retreated from Moscow.
Mitka Morio - In the initial scene he is repeatedly referred to as the Abbé.
Mortemart - In the initial scene he is repeatedly referred to as the vicomte.
General Mouton - A French general.
Joachim Murat - French marshal, Napoleon's brother-in-law. With Napoleon in 1812 at Borodino.

Nastasya Ivanovna - Cross-dressing ‘old buffoon’ who lives with the Rostovs at their estate at Otradnoe.
Prince Nesvitsky - A Russian staff officer.
Michel Ney - French marshal. Fought at Borodino.

Count Orlov-Denisov - Commander of Cossacks who alone reached the assigned position at Taratino. His forces caused Murat to retreat (this is a minor character—not Nicolas’ friend).
Count Osterman-Tolstoy - A Russian general.

Maria Ignatyevna Peronskaya - Friend and relation of Countess Natalya Rostova.
Pfuel - German chief organizer of Russian Plan of Campaign in 1812. Contemptuous of other theorists.

Raevsky - Russian general at the middle of the action at Borodino.
Captain Ramballe - a French captain.
Count Rostopchin - Governor-General of Moscow.
Count Ilya Rostov - Spendthrift. Optimistic father, agreeable but foolish.
Countess Natalya Rostova - Wife of Count Ilya.
Natasha Rostova - Initially, a romantic young girl. One of the main characters in the novel. Charming and naively beautiful.
Nikolai Rostov - The eldest Rostov son, who joins the Russian military in 1805.
Sonya Rostova - The 'sterile flower'. Orphaned cousin of Vera, Nikolai, Natasha, and Petya Rostov.
Petya Rostov - The youngest Rostov son.
Vera Rostova - The oldest Rostov daughter, cold and not liked.

Anna Pavlovna Scherer - A wealthy St. Petersburg socialite. Unmarried hostess of patriotic circle.
Schmidt - Austrian general killed in battle at Krems, where Kutuzov won a victory.
Shapovalov - a cossack.
Shcherbinin - Gen. Konovnitsyn's adjutant in 1812.
Pyotr Nikolaitch Shinshin - relative of Countess Natalya Rostova. Famous for biting wit.
Smolyaninov - Freemason rhetor.
Speransky - liberal advisor to the Tsar. Eventually dismissed by Tsar Alexander.
Stevens - An English naval officer, mentioned briefly early on in the novel.
Stolypin - Associate of Speranski.

Semeon Tchekmar - Valet to Count Ilya Rostov
Lieutenant Telyanin - In Denisov's squadron early in the novel. Not well liked.
Tikhon Shtcherbatov - Peasant scout with Denisov's partisan force.
Timohin - Officer who had a predilection for Bacchus. Valiant in battle.
Capt. von Toll - Helped Alexander across a ditch after the rout of the Russian center at Austerlitz. A colonel in 1812.
Count Tolstoy (grand marshal of the Russian court in 1805) - Member of the Tsar's suite in 1812.
Staff Captain Tushin - A Russian comander.
Tutolmin - A diplomat sent by Napoleon from Moscow to Alexander in Petersburg.

Vereshchagin - Name of Moscow merchant and his son. Son accused of treason.
Prince Volkonsky - Member of the Tsar's suite in 1812. Sergei Kuzmich Vyazmitinov

Weyrother - Austrian general who replaced Schmidt. Developed the plan of attack at Austerlitz.
Willarski - Pierre's sponsor. General Wintzingerode Wolzogen - Implementer of Pfuhl's plan in 1812.

Captain Yakovlev - Bearer of a message from Napoleon in Moscow to Alexander in Petersburg.
Yermolov - A Russian General

Zherkov - A cornet of hussars who mimicked a general. Prone to jest.
Count Zhilinsky - Wealthy Polish count at Tilsit meeting of Napoleon and Alexander.

The Serene Empire of Evolia

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 04:57:00 +0000

The Empire of Evolia is a massive, feral nation, notable for its huge mushroom trampolines and tame mastadons which frolic freely in the ancient mahogany forests.

The sweet, insane population of manythousand fluid grouplets are free to do what they like, howsoever they please, governed by nothing more than a subtle sense of obviousness which wells up from bellyminds run rapturously asunder in a monstrous range of impromptu rituals, thundering swing jams and near constant love-making.

Evolian Architecture partly imitates natural forms, the rest is alive; the inhabitants having learnt how to persuade their staggering flora to cooperate in civic construction. More temporary dwellings are common and all children can bivvy.

Emblem: Vast, pulsating electric jelly fishgod which periodically rises above the clouds, lashing out its firey white limbs, pinning Evolians, howling with delight, to the sky.

Government: Liquid anarcho-monarchy. Leaders who give orders or seek consensus are handed over to the care of young children until the yibber-yabber has left them.

The capital of Evolia is Shlaarg Makwang-Hoosh Fe-Tarp! and its currency is the Romantic Gesture.

Languages: Djang-djang, Zala, Chess, Riddim and the Immortal Music of Vibe.

Education: None. Economy: None. Politics: None. Law: None. Crime: None.

Bill’s Ideas

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 23:30:00 +0000

During my peculiar youth I spent a year living with my granddad, Bill. Here we are on a bench in front of Island Wall:

Bill had some good stories, and some funny ideas. He said that everything had happened before, loads of times, and one day they’d dig down under the pyramids and find a world just like this one. I asked him how many worlds there were down there. He said about six.

Bill also said not to wear pink because you’d get ‘set upon by gays’, and so for a long time I thought gays were like bulls and if you wave pink at them they’d start frothing and pawing the ground and stuff. He also said not to eat peanuts before you go to bed, because they ‘sit on your chest’, which turned out to be true.

He was wrong about the gays though.

Ambition

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 02:07:00 +0000

I've developed a new level in my Reality computer game - its called ‘Ambition’.

Set in a total-immersion virtual reality real-time 3D world, your objective is to get as many points as you can - points being earned every time you get money, fun, fame, power, attention, security, any kind of success or promotion, a new possession or a new experience. All religious observances score highly, including advanced yoga positions, but so does atheistic superstition-debunking and the acquisition of scientific learning, theories, histories and paradigms. You also get points for sleeping with people, having babies, and ’achieving recognition’ - either for yourself or for any animal, woman, gay, minority or shadow rights cause you support.

In order to play Ambition you first have to learn how to use your VR self (or Avatar), then you have to learn how to navigate through the VR world, then you have to learn how all its institutions work. There is so much to learn that by the time you achieve a really good score not only will your real world body have atrophied, stiffened, dried up and be unable to move and perceive with subtlety or clarity, but your consciousness, having spent so long in a binary, relative, unreal world, will have become virtual too. The spontaneity and love required by the real world will not just be difficult - but painful; meaning that if you decide to retire, relax or drop out, you’ll have to do that in Ambition too.

Are you Insane?

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:40:00 +0000

A brief guide to virtual delusion.

All delusions are adherence to a virtual reality, which is to say a self-made replica of what is happening. Because the delusional simulation is based on self, self is unable to identify the error. It only has its own delusional logic to judge with, and so it is only capable of judging other selves.

Realisation of delusion is only possible when self is perceived from a non-self perspective. This typically occurs as a result of intense suffering, great shock or extraordinary beauty - those events which force consciousness out of narrow feeling-thinking into a wider experience of the present moment - which is why genuine realisations of the nature of self (or of ‘how stupid I've been’) regularly come with a more intense experience of the present moment; brighter colours, clearer sounds or a sense of the clarity or strangeness or beauty of surrounding space.

This is not ‘me’ experiencing the present moment - because ‘me’ is the object of my experience. This is the present moment experiencing me.

Identifying delusional virtual realities from the non-self perspective is particularly difficult when the reality is shared by many others (society), or when it is created in the external world (technology) - indeed the aim of societies built by selves is to ensure such identification is impossible. The perfectly impregnable society, from the perspective of self-control, would be so technologically advanced it could build a perfect replica of self, a virtual reality (VR), which self would be unable to detect as false.

The belief that the virtual world is fundamentally similar to the real world and will one day match it in quality and quantity - that it is possible to be lost in VR - can only be maintained by the thinking-feeling self - which is discrete (divided up into bits), finite (a limited number of bits) and binary (meaningful only through the relationship those bits have to each other) - in other words, like a computer. It is only a matter of time before self-made computers reach the required number of bits to ‘equal’ the self, to create a VR world that the self cannot tell from reality.

Computer game images, for example, have gone from crude binary blocks to a fine 3D world, but no matter how fine the pixels are, they will always be DFB. If your primary experience of reality is through mind, then you will find ‘perfect’ computer imagery to be a faithful replica of reality, whereas if your primary experience of reality precedes mind and emotions, you will find the finest possible virtual imagery to always be absolutely (and nightmarishly) unreal.

As with imagery, so with playability. The longer it takes to learn a computer simulation the more ‘fun’ or ‘realistic’ it is; fun and functional realism in a computer game coming from learning ever-smaller nuances within an ever wider range of possible moves. A game's enjoyment is limited on the one hand by subtlety (how nuanced it can be) and on the other by extent (how many moves are possible). But again, although subtlety can become finer and extent can become wider, because they are always based on finite binary code, they can never reach the infinitely large or the infinitely small; which is to say, non-self.

If, therefore, you are, right now, in a virtually real world of near infinite subtlety and extent, comprising countless trillions of binary pixels, options and nuance, something will always be missing; non-discrete, non-relative, non-abstact reality - but that part of you which knows, the DFB brain, will not be able to tell what it is.

Self has no way of knowing if what is happening is real or not. Only non-self is capable of percieving the unreality of a perfect sanity image. But the instant your self asserts itself over the present moment, experience becomes discrete, finite and binary again - and non-discrete, infinite and analogue reality becomes a threat: Delusional people, those living in a Virtual or Delusional Reality are (either permanently or temporarily) intolerant of ambiguity, uncertainty and mystery and both leap to and cling to conclusions in order to avoid these self-unknowable states.

It is possible to have a mysterious (non-DFB) me-less experience of what is happening, before, a milisecond later, sinking back into a discrete relative universe, with no way of telling what has changed; bounded by the conviction that reality is not just merely what you perceive to be so - but is and has always been.

What makes this process so hard to spot, in the virtual and delusional world, is not just that it pulls a perfect simulation of reality over your eyes, but that it does it in your own unique way. It is, after all, you.

Because thought and emotion are you, you naturally find yourself attempting to assert your limited self over the present moment in those moments that are most you - those times when you are most assertive, most concentrated, when you most want or don't want, when you most like or don’t like. Such moments - those your self has pre-programmed itself to seize upon or flee from - are your unique delusion - your own personal complex of uncertainty-fears, money, status or sex-power addictions, vibe-blind stimulation cravings, repetitive compulsions of self-criticising thought patterns and ridiculous mechanical behaviours; and this bespoke nightmare will, no matter how sane you are, rear up the moment that your self meets your unique threat or addiction.

It is only when no such fear-craving exists, when nothing can make you automatically be your self, that you are sane, or experiencing Reality; because the you that experiences is then always perceiving, right in front of your eyes, the you that is not.

Squid Ritual

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 01:09:00 +0000

Last time I was in Japan I lived in Ishikawa-ken where I played a kind of live computer game on New Year's eve. Crowds of us gathered outside a three story temple with long balconies and loads of sliding doors on all sides from which monks dressed as badgers shuffled out in file, scattering beans into the crowd which we had to catch in special nets and then take home and hide in a 'rarely looked-at' corner. The beans would, for the coming year, subtly emit good luck radiowaves - but not for oneself, only for neighbours you hadn't met. It was widely acknowledged in the Ishikawa prefecture that one's good luck came from one's neighbour's secretly generous beans.

This new year, in Kurashiki, was a more sombre, squid-based, affair.

On the stroke of midnight the temple bells were rung 108 times to clear away the 108 defilements. We were gathered in the square, hundreds of us, dressed in red. As the bells rang we remembered times this year when we had dirtied ourselves with ungrateful complacency over good health, the false generosity of begrudged giving, prawn-greed, intimacies dishonoured with weak gagging, bland robotic anecdotes, unconscious repetitions of old facial tics, grey daymares of morbid self-pity, the excitement of complaint and bad news, loved ones tortured because we didn't have what we wanted and were too cowardly to make a dash for it, and for all the trees, clouds and sparrows we'd ignored, lost in trivial thoughts. By the simple act of recognition we purged ourselves. The monks chanted 'recognition is to really see is all we ever need to be free is recognition is to really see...' over and over, resonantly harmonising while, together, the crowd made the ten-handed sign of the squid, symbol of liberation and mystery. The crowd began to press, our sombre waggling limbs entangling into a vast web and we hummed together in collective warmth until the final bell was struck whereupon we backed out of the temple, reverent and cleansed.

A Little List of Lies

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:42:00 +0000

Hope, Belief. Fear. Random mutations detemine evolutionary progress. An abstract god created the universe. Nature is based on competition. Human beings are fundamentally violent. Sanity can be determined democratically. Democracy is the fairest system. We live in a democracy. The world or the environment needs to be ‘saved’. Recyling does sod all in this world. Natural selection can explain human behaviour. When you die you come back as another person, or animal. Pre-civilised groups lead lives that were ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Children are ‘little monkeys’ - selfish and wild. Schools educate. Its the government’s / your parent’s / your past’s fault. Money replaced barter. Land can be owned. Debts should be repaid. You need money-beauty-security-sex-fame-prestige to be happy. The universe was created at some point in the past. Beauty is subjective. Or objective. Propaganda is the mere telling of lies. You are fundamentally seperate from what you experience. Reality is fundamentally the same as ideas about reality. Intelligence is fundamentally a matter of intellect. And the one they’re all based on: happiness and sadness are fundamentally due to external events or other people.

How to Deal with the End of the World

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:41:00 +0000

Or How Societal Collapse Begins with a Broken Heart

When the internet shuts down, and mobile phones stop working, and streetlights go out, and jobs cease to exist, and money becomes valueless, and you are constantly surrounded by people that, for once in your life, you have to have a direct relationship with, you will find that it is not scarcity that you need to learn to deal with, or the army, or the collapse of ‘democracy’, or the end of an oil-based economy. It is your self. The following short guide is a means to prepare yourself for a time when large chunks of who you are - your habits, reflexive desires, fantasies and repetitive thought patterns - are, through having no ‘external’ object to work on - annihilated.

UNTHOUGHT The fear and desire of self-in-charge (aka dominator consciousness) feed off brain chatter and associative thought trash. Unless you can master your thinking and the restless mechanical movement of your attention, you will be paralysed by thought-fear at the obliterating fact of total loss rising before you and unable to hold back from agonies of craving, anger, guilt or panic brought on by thinking during loss.

Use the city to practice thought and attention mastery. Walk through the metro enjoying your breathing more than the adverts, refuse to participate in gossip. See how pornographic news-violence has power over your attention - and in seeing this, take the power back. Allow the urge to rubber-neck disaster slip through your system.

Practice melting thoughtlessly into the strangeness and actuality of ordinary phenomena. The entire universe exists in the space between ordinary things, vast and strange. To see it is thoughtless awe, to travel across it, adventure, to express it well, art. And all this, of all places, in the kitchen.

SEX-EMOTION Unless you are in contact with the delighted love-feeling that contact with the opposite sex naturally bubbles up (regardless of whether you are in a relationship or not), or able to feel and let slip away sexual frustration or its money-business-victory substitutes,, you'll be a slave to murderous sex thoughts. This will be the same as now - unable to tell the gentlemen from the beast, prey to maulers, restless, cold or violent - but, when civilisation crashes, without social checks to keep these insanities suppressed or locked up, they'll make a howling nightmare of life.

Use the city to practice the awareness that precedes automatic glances towards stimulus-response tits and arses. Practice scriptlessly, wantlessly facing the opposite sex in spontaneous ungrasping unknowing. Practice loving when you most don't feel like it. Practice letting go of the constant clench of wanting.

VIOLENCE is built on sexual frustration (in that the connected warmth of love-making is without violence), and depends on restlessness and expectation. In civilisation violence is mostly anger and irritation, and leads to shame and vibe corruption; but when the bubble pops its going to get grotesque.

Learn how to deal with your anger. Not by the count-to-ten effort of self-control, but easily; by feeling your restlessness, and looking out for the tiny hope-want expectations which cause frustration and fury. Learn to remind yourself, when angry (or afraid or depressed), that no situation is so bad that you cannot laugh at it, or find it interesting.

Facing other people's violence requires instant discernment, the subtle art of calm, watchful prisoner’s defiance, super-sensitive threat-awareness or the death-fearless chucking of all chips to the wind in order to defend someone else. You can practice most of these in the arenas of cruelty that civilisation currently offers; the office, the factory and the family.

FEAR stands before every nightmare you'll face as the mask is ripped off the face of the world. Fear, first of all, of losing things you think or feel you have - money, dignity, possessions, qualifications, power, status or beauty.

To overcome attachment to the things you have, seek out situations in which you cannot use or rely on them; situations that you fear or really ‘don’t like’ - aloneness, poverty, unscripted theatre, nature, extreme boredom and the company of the young, the dying and the mad are the classics, but everyone has their own private hell which, sooner or later, must be faced. Better to do it in your own way, now, than to be propelled into it by civ-pop.

Underneath fear of losing what you have, is the atomic fear of losing who you feel you are. This aversion to the emptiedness of unbeing is a constant background anxiety or tension which lies at the root of all fears, even the tiniest eruptions of anxiety or violence. To face it is partly a question of self-mastery - learning to let your self slip into inner feeling and full sensory awareness of the present-moment - partly a question of love - exposing yourself completely to another and allowing that gaze to raise your game - and partly a question of honestly - not mere confession, but the unjudging turning-towards of self-awareness, watching the self as it thinks and feels.

It cannot be stressed enough that your own particular practice depends less on any one of the tips mentioned here as on facing your own particular selfmare. You might find it easy, for example to walk through a corpse-strewn battlefield, but play clunkily with children, have secret sexual shames, and talk down to your mother. Or you might be a yogic master, able to suck water up your anus, but be afraid of any kind of definite judgement, uncomfortable around the working class and weird about money.

The super-intimate skills of self-mastery are not acquired by any specific effort, psychology, magic, education, community-action or self-knowledge, but by actively seeking out criticism, uncertainty and the experience of unself, and by practicing, again and again, letting go of self, feeling out and allowing subtle internal pain, listening to its message and then courageously, selflessly acting before the manifold opportunities normal life offers to lose your presence, break down, throw a wobbler or behave like a dick.

Objections:

1. All this has been said before. ‘There are many paths of gentle wisdom.’
2. Self-mastery is just effort and denial.
3. Do you have children? All very easy if you are single. Having kids is a unique challenge.
4. What about community? We should focus on our external lives.
5. You over-emphasise sex. Sex is not so important.
6. What about practical matters - where should I live, what should I learn?
7. There is more to be said.
8. Its not the end of the world yet.

Responses:

1. There are, of course, many penetrating spiritual teachings of pedigree - but it is often difficult to apply their lack of specific guidance - on dealing with pointless work, ‘causeless’ emotion, sexual apathy or desperation, raising children in a virtual environment and wotnot - to one’s actual, chaotic and modern lifestyle. We do not live on Zen mountains and in Hindu fields. This is not a problem with the teachings of course, as they still get so finely to the point (particularly Advaita, Zen and Tao) but a great deal of dressing up and being special surrounds spiritual tradition and the wily western mind is, if nothing else, a genius at subtly missing the point.

Nothing quite hits the sweet spot (or puts its finger on the wurm) like the truth fresh, which is why contemporary ‘paths’ (if you can find one that is true) are more direct. This is why most great teachers are not revered until they’re safely dead.

2. Self-control and self-mastery are not the same. Self control (as Krishnamurti spent his life saying) is one part of the self – an idea or emotion – controlling the rest - which is effort and suppression. Self mastery is the whole context, or unself, in charge. The difference between the two is both phenomenally subtle and unbelievably vast (or as Dennis Potter put it, ‘both trivial, and important, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.’)

3. Having or not having children has nothing to do with self-mastery. In fact if they ‘challenge practice differently’, (or more than anything else, which is not true - as millions of suicidal or insane - but childless - people testify) if they did, then this would make them less of a barrier to self-mastery. The more anxiety, stress, hurt and annoyance something or someone causes you, the greater the opportunity to face down your self – which is all to the good, as mastering your moods, irritations, selfish fears (meaning the smothering controlling ones some mothers have and mask as ‘care’) or blithe hardnessnes of heart is essential if you are to raise a child that doesn’t spend its whole life trying to even perceive the vibe-conditioning your self warped it with as a bairn - let alone deal with it.

4. Community is a good testing ground for self-mastery. All your insanities and stupidities will out if you have a direct relationship with your fellows. Few of us do have such a large direct-relationship group though – but nearly all of us have romantic relationships – the community of two.

But it is also a red-herring to suggest that one first look externally to solve the problems of self – as it is not about where you look, but who, at any particular moment, is doing the looking – and not even finally look – because when your wife turns her face to the wall and you feel the whole dread universe between you, or when a writhing monster has taken possession of your child and is pushing all your buttons, or when you are walking through a forest and are not mad overwhelmed by the weird vibrating god-beauty of it, or when you just cannot stop yibber-yabbering inside about something someone said about you – the solution, before external action, is an inward release. Without this release action leads to problems.

5. In theory, its true that relationship problems and sex are not so important. In practice just about everyone yearns for romantic love, has or has had chronic relationship problems, are absolutely cripped with obsession or encoldened by boredom and the experience of ’normality‘. Solving all this is clearly a vital part of life. But I am making a fundamental distinction between sex (good or bad) and love-making:

Sex is a restless, reality-excluding mental-emotional tight-grip focus on a self-created image: no different to masturbation and porn – there just happens to be someone else there.

Bestial sex-want is never satisfied and only creates problems. It is violent, desperate, quickly bored but never satisfied and can only be controlled by cold brain-clamp. Sex with another (and constant sex-fantasy) creates distance between you, spike, irritation, annoyance, all sexual problems and many (perhaps most) social problems.

Making love is an experience of total sensory floodout – the 99.9% of the sense data normally excluded by the mental-emotional self is perfectly allowed in a state of self-annihilating devotion and near hideous strange-delight. This is no different from the full-scale wide-attention life of über-woo which surrounds it.

Transdimensional animal love-making (and constant woo) creates liquid ease, lack of cling and creative amazement all day – but to reach the garden you have to be able to know how to give up your self – and you have to want to – which is impossible while men and women are addicted to their silly plans and schemes.

Love-making, in this sense, is never a refuge for the self – and it lasts all day. Sex always is.

(I’ve made the distinction clearer here than it sometimes is in practice though. The restless sex-brain can interpose itself into love-making and present lovers can bring each other out of the virtual world.)

There are, of course, other ways to overcome self than making-love or really being with the opposite sex – there’s the whole of your life, for a start! – but sex and love-making are a huge part of men and women’s lives, and must be addressed if self is to be mastered (or allowed to be swept sweetly away).

6. Obviously it is a good idea to find somewhere you can live through the crash and, more importantly a supportive community with whom you can make the transition (one reason why ‘the hills’, often comprised of communities hostile to outsiders, might not be the first place to head).

Equally obvious is the necessity of acquiring post-crash skills, such as farming, foraging and tool-making, while you still can. Looming lacunas of unemployment will provide more than enough time to learn something valuable and the internet will be around long enough to help.

But these skills are secondary to self-mastery for four reasons. Firstly, you cannot work effectively with others, if your self is getting in the way. Secondly the use of skills is a small part of your life - and self in charge during world collapse will make every other part hell. Thirdly, it is not necessarily the end of society that you must prepare for - a time when the ability to bee-keep will be at a premium - but the long, complex, untidy, transition, which, besides continuing to reward skills you already have, will demand self-mastered judgement, courage and sensitivity over the ability to trap rabbits. And finally, there is a very good chance that, in the coming horror, you will die.

If your self is unmastered, this will be a hideous experience.

7. Agreed. There is much to discover at this point – where the extreme meets the ordinary, and where the individual self meets its own, particular shadow. And much by way of pearls to bring back too. Not just clunky blog-posts like this, but electric weird straight line hit to the good thing michaelangelo-standard comics, timeless melodies with neptunian beats, dandelion-mimicing architraves, vigilante plumbing and truly miraculous trousers.

8. It is always the end of the world.

Waking Up From Ikea

noreply@blogger.com (darrenabi) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 06:24:00 +0000

I had an Ikeamare in Ikeashwitz. My girlfriend, Ai-chan, and I were populating a new flat and on the shuttle bus I broke a basic relationship rule and started talking about an ex-girlfriend, Ariadne, who had given me the secret to mastering Ikea. The mention of the messanger put a wrinkle of irk between Ai and I, which I smoothed by emphasising the message; that only hell demands more peace of mind than Ikea.

The problem of course isn't so much megacorp greenwash, trying to escape from the maze of the minataur, forcing your way upstream against the shuffling armies of the undead, or even, in my case, that I'm writing a story about a cunicular superhero who does battle with unhappy furniture. No; its choice - aggrevated by penury: 'the tall one or the folding one? well the folding one is cheaper, but it doesn't look as nice, although, hm, not sure, perhaps the blue one? its not as comfortable, but we can get a better one later, but what if we get the wider one and put a throw over it, unless...' and on and on and on and and on.

But there was more. As we entered I saw the 'penang' armchair, and wondered how many people in how many worlds have sat possessed upon it by the insane idea that their arse is not being loved. Then I saw the one in my mum's house. Then I saw the one I had in my flat in Madrid. Then, as we wondered round and round, I began to realise, with a creeping cold sense of dream-dread, that Ikea was, in fact, entirely comprised of rooms from places I'd lived.

All of it. There was the futon I'd written my first awful novel, there was the sofa Bill had single-handedly carried up eight flights of stairs, there was the bed that Isabel had freaked out in when we'd made love... and there was Isabel.

Isabel herself was lying on a 'Malm' bed in the same bewildered state I remembered from the night I'd brought her back to my place and created a weird psychic sense of sexual distortion between us. My current girlfriend in Japan was trying to work out whether she preferred the beige or the cream Billy, while a girl I'd slept with ten years ago in Spain was here in Osaka, half naked in a showroom bed.

'Isabel? What are you doing here?' I approached her, but she paid no attention to me.

'Darren! I've just seen you.'

I turned; Ai-chan was flustered and gesturing.

'Over there,' she said, 'a younger you - you were arguing with a girl. And, yi! there you are again!'

I turned. The me of Madrid was sheepishly approaching Isabel upon the bed of disaster.

'And again! And again!'

Ikea wasn't just filled with all my old chairs and tables; it was also filled with all my old mes. Hundreds of me, drifting around hundreds of old domestic situations - along with crowds of old friends and ex-girlfriends at various ages, a vast shifting dreamworld of intersecting psyche-phantoms.

Ai, against her will, was fascinated. She didn't really want to know what I was like before we'd met, or how more or less beautiful / thin / blonde / etc were my previous loves, but she couldn't help herself. I tried to restrain her, but was held back by myself.

'Darren, you've got to help me.' The Madrid me was tugging at my sleeve. I turned and looked at him, remembering when I had been there, so desperate to know what to do about Isabel.

He started to explain but I hushed him with a gesture.

'What you are doing is against both of your instincts, and you know it, so raise your game and send her home or you'll both feel squalid and used for weeks.'

That shut me up. I went off to find Ai, but was waylaid by more mes, all with old love-problems. At least my younger selves had the humility to ask my advice, but it was pretty chaotic, so I got them to form a queue down in the market hall, leaving Ai with the ghosts of girlfriends past - and grateful that I'd kept so faithfully to another cardinal relationship rule - of not recycling romantic gestures. In fact, now I think of it, a large part of my 'relationship ethics' stemmed from the suspicion that something like this was bound to happen one day.

Anyway, it was heaving down in the market hall, but all my mes were getting on pretty well together and waiting patiently in line. I didn't want to get in long discussions with my old selves, so I just dealt specifically with the problems they had at the time; 'You always find her less attractive two days before she ovulates,' 'Don't try and change her bad habits - if you love her enough they'll either change by themselves or you won't care,' 'Things unsaid will speak in bed,' 'She responds to you as life does, and vice versa,' 'Write the letter, but for God's sake don't send it' - and so on.

It was all a bit silly. Reminded me of Marlybone Song, the man who knew everything, who sat at the top of the hill and people would come from miles around to ask him questions - such as 'how do I fill in my tax returns?' and 'what's a good chat up line?' and 'how do I get past level seventeen on Manic Miner?' and so forth, and in the end he just invented a search engine and sodded off back to Neptune.

But the last me had the good question, he was burning with it. His house, as they used to say, was on fire.

It was the wordless question - the impossible question - the question that only everything can answer.

He looked at me, saw that I was still asking it, shook my hand and left.

And that was the last I saw of myself.