Views on the General Election

“Send them back to where they came from”, was Nigel Farage’s characteristically obtuse answer to the question of what to do about the obscene numbers of migrants (1,600 so far this year) drowning in the Mediterranean in a desperate effort at bridging the gulf between lands fraught and stable.  And yet the EU leaders, having convened on the crisis have, it seems, scarcely anything of more constructive worth to add.

As they flee from a region the West had a direct hand in destabilising, we are now hamstrung by the deficit of public and political will, with immigration already so volatile an issue, to provide a meaningful and effective response.  But the plight of these migrants, as well as our national response, is both illustrative of the waves of animosity swelling across Europe and in South Africa, and a stark prophesy of what the near future might hold.

As major environmental catastrophes become ever more frequent in occurrence and devastating in impact, desperate migrants seeking the safety of securer shores will quite clearly face an increasingly hostile and defensive reception.  As today so with the impacts of climate change, less developed nations will suffer the consequences first and receive scant amelioration from the nations with the most responsibility for generating them.

Perhaps typically, UKIP surpass the other main parties with bizarre thinking that borders on the territory of climate denial, such as manifesto pledges to scrap the Department of Energy and Climate Change as well as green subsidies.  This can surely only mean that burying our heads in nationalism and pints of ale whilst doing nothing would result in even more uncontrollable numbers of refugees looking to seek asylum in Britain once the inevitable deluge in their homelands starts to manifest itself in environmental destruction.

Of course, UKIP’s once solid momentum is now a fast-melting ice floe, and it is the two main parties who must address these issues much more meaningfully.  Alas they have abjectly failed to do so during this election campaign.  From promoting his government prior to election as looking to be ‘the greenest ever’, Cameron now says next to nothing about environmental issues, and neither does Miliband.

Despite their differing political stances, both are firmly committed to programmes that do nothing to safeguard against climate change and instead pursue the precise means of exacerbating the problems through relying on the markets to foster ‘growth’ and ‘sustainability’.  The marketisation of public life and financial system are chronically short-termist by nature, looking for quick investments and fast rates of return that then engender a climate of low risk and a deficit of innovation on the part of businesses who play it safe by sticking to tried-and-tested formulas.  This short-term business mindset, instilled over decades, is entirely at odds with the need to cut carbon emissions and dam the river flowing towards environmental disaster.   

As Naomi Klein has written in ‘This Changes Everything’, the debate should no longer be steeped in the tired and failed dogmatism of left and right wing that younger generations feel negligible kinship or identity with, but should instead be focused on ensuring the future stability of human life on earth.  The earth, when all is said and done, will be fine, and in my darker days I often postulate that perhaps the human race would be wiser to leave the stage sooner rather than later and let the planet carry on the show without us glorying in the limelight.

I am sceptical that the human race, having brought this threat upon ourselves, can alter its behaviour radically enough to solve it.  That said, ignoring the issue only plays into the hands of the rich and powerful elites.  These are the people who for decades have profited from environmental destruction in the name of entrepreneurial endeavour, economic efficiency and profit margins, and who plan on continuing in such a vein unless they are stopped.  (Last year I attended the World Petroleum Congress in Moscow and witnessed first-hand the phenomenal spectacle of the industry examining its own muscles in front of the mirror like an oiled-up bodybuilder.  It was clear to me at least that these organisations have far too much to lose and will not concede defeat without an almighty battle.)

This is why the Green Party will be getting my support in the May General Election.  A party that seeks to involve more women at a higher level, vehemently opposes the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), seeks to redress the chronic imbalance that has opened up between rich and poor in this country, and one that adopts the principle that the professionally enclosed economic system with their elaborate models and statistical instruments should no longer be the sole marker for denoting a country’s well-being.

I’m convinced that far from being a wasted vote, this is a rebuke to the main parties, giving them cause in the future to take environmental issues more seriously instead of remaining mired in short-termism, adhering to the principles of ‘disaster capitalism’ (as we saw in the kneejerk reaction to the flooding crisis last year that was promptly forgotten about), and pandering to the UKIP vote that aims to crystallise an instinctual resentment against migrants that will only take on more pernicious shades as natural events transpire.

SHORT STORY - The Revelation of Doubt

Someone had set the bird table off balance, propped as it was like a gallows pole against the brick wall of the courtyard.  The disrupted saucer had given up its water and a scattering of nuts and seeds were strewn around the wooden base.  Sister Anne guided the table back upright and fought hard to tame the flock of irritation that took flight through her body.

Despite her increasing age she still experienced these odd moments of febrile anger, indeed almost welcomed them for their potency, this electrolysis of the emotions.  Yet she knew such feelings were being aroused more and more frequently by events of less and less consequence.  She knew it had been the younger ones playing their infernal games again, badminton perhaps or frisbee, that she tolerated with an acidic reluctance to which the whims and liberties of youth always provided the litmus test. 

She scowled upwards at the sky above Tyburn Convent as it stiffened with the rigor mortis of impending rain.  The wind was whipping itself into excited pirouettes in anticipation of a storm, melting into the hum of the traffic from Bayswater Road.  Typically, the tense and vivid quality of the atmosphere before a storm put Sister Anne into a deep fug of melancholia and habitually she confined herself to the chapel to pray, hiding like a frightened little girl beneath a duvet.  But curiously she found herself under no compulsion to do so this day.

Instead she slowly ambled, at the same sedate and floating pace that took her everywhere these days, onto the garden, her habit brushing slightly through the grass which was coarse and balding due to the late summer’s heat.  She tottered around to gaze upon the high walls draped with a cowl of ivy, and the sturdy brick structure of the convent in which she had been living in contemplation for the last fifty years.  Over that period she had seen nuns come and go, find and lose their faith, had heard the tremor of the traffic increase as had the ebb and flow of airplanes that criss-crossed her tarpaulin of sky.

A couple of the newer nuns, barely in their postulancy stage, huddled together beneath the portico of the courtyard cautiously observing Sister Anne as she bimbled without apparent aim across the garden, perhaps scared that her gazing to the heavens was evidence of a long overdue lapse into senility.  Anne threw them a glance as though to disavow them of such suspicions.  To her they seemed like little more than schoolgirls, petty and frivolous, woefully sheltered from any experience of life and hence frequently distracted away from the trials of religious contemplation by games or content to merely giggle their way around the courtyard like a pair of chickens.

To them Sister Anne seemed cantankerous and miserly, a damp flannel wrung dry of any vitality or spirit by decades of largely self-inflicted subjugation to her faith.  She barely ever spoke, except in prayer, and appeared to them, when they passed her in the corridors of the cloister, as though she were being eroded away from the inside by some kind of grief; persevering with her devotion to the Catholic faith as though it were a prison sentence to be served with as much stern magnanimity as she could muster.

The fact that she had given almost her entire adult life to the Benedictine cause was something of a great comfort to Sister Anne, particularly as she had begun to approach her final years, and ailments that once seemed so cursory now increasingly dictated the course of her day.  Lately, she had begun to feel a curious and disconcerting sensation wrap itself around her like the guimpe around her neck, to the point now where it suffused her being with a terrible numbness.  This was the numbness of confusion and what she could only distinguish, to her horror, as being self-doubt.  A parasitical doubting that only seemed to draw nutriment and strength from her rejection of its presence.

Despite her late years, she had initially redoubled her contemplative routines, spending more hours in the chapel at night in solitary prayer, rereading the sacred texts with a more exacting and forensic eye than she had in decades.

Though she might have dismissed them as facile and silly, the younger nuns had the acute perception that youth at times endows, and would whisper to each other whenever they passed her, “there’s poor Sister Anne, she’s approaching death and questioning her faith”; they detected in this doyenne figure a deeply sublimated feud that could only be reconciled with her death and release from the psychological torments that afflicted her, the same way as certain animals discern danger from the atmospheric pressures around them.

Yet Sister Anne knew that as her mind and body began to fail her, what she had for so many years thought would serve as the core pillar of strength to which she could recline gracefully into death, now seemed to her ever more distorted and vague, what was once solid now seemed to be an emulsion of confusion, and to this she could only languish in fear.

As she surveyed the bulbous black sky, ripe with rain, she thought, as so often she had done in the past, to the 105 Catholics hung, drawn and quartered during the Reformation period on the Tyburn Tree Gallows.  Had they too, in the midst of unimaginable suffering, been faced with a moment of crisis, however fleeting?  A moment where the whole edifice of their devotion and conviction seemed to crumble away and disperse like salt on the breeze?

Their martyred souls seemed to undulate with rhythmic pulses through the ground on which she stood, seemed to saturate the wind that continued to rise and fall in the courtyard.  She closed her eyes and tried to feel anything of their suffering, of their strength that she might perhaps now draw upon as she approached the day when her own faith would be called up for reckoning.

Opening her eyes again she felt the warm breeze through her hair, felt the cool rigidity of the desert grass beneath her, and most reassuring of all, felt beneath the crook of her arm the slow and almost mechanical breathing in and out of the broad chest of her lover.  Together they stared up at the rupturing sky, painted in such contrast with the state of blissful calm that had settled like a mist over their bodies having just made love.  She thought it was almost as though the skies above were a visual echoing of their passion, and would soon subside into an overwhelming stillness, just as the post-orgasmic shivers now chased each other over her body.

“I love you”, she said to him, craning her neck swiftly to stare into his face, flushed with exertion but smiling broadly, as though he were encouraging the rain to fall and douse their sweating bodies.

“I love you too”, he replied in a way that she knew was genuinely felt but nonetheless tinged with distraction, for his mind began to accelerate over ideas and perceptions that he struggled to elucidate to her in words.  This was a reliable effect of the hashish that they had smoked that evening, as the twilight fell upon the Lebanese village to which they had trekked that day.  Anne, her tactile senses amplified, clenched and unclenched her toes in the fine sand, enjoying the myriad degrees of granular coarseness that sluiced between them.

David became suddenly enthused, propping himself up on his elbows and staring out into the starry horizon as though hoping to see a Bedouin caravan of tribesmen come wandering out of the desert sands.  “I’ve just realised something Anne, something that supports everything I’ve been thinking about – the alternative appearances of time, the nature of our consciousness, everything...”

Anne knew that his unusually animated nature was fuelled by the fact that earlier that day, as they set out from their previous village camp they had bumped into David’s university friend Jonathan and his girlfriend Susannah who were undertaking a similar expedition.  They hadn’t quite been able to believe this coincidence and good fortune - they had thought they were currently in Turkey and hadn’t been scheduled to rendezvous with them until Tripoli in a fortnight’s time.  A fortuitous change of travel plans with little time to communicate them had lead to this chance encounter.  Now, as David began to expound his latest rhapsodic train of thought, Anne glanced behind them at Jonathan and Susannah’s tent, the tarpaulin flapping silently in the developing wind.

“Do you remember, a few days ago in the market...in Beirut... I said to you didn’t I, that I thought I saw Jonathan haggling with a bazaar seller?  I had to do a genuine double-tale before realising it wasn’t actually him... I thought it must have been the heat playing tricks with my vision or something.  Do you not see how remarkable that is?  That I should think I saw them only a few days before we actually bump into each other out here in the wilderness?!”

“It must have been a premonition” Anne said.

“A premonition, yes.  Or maybe my unconscious mind was already well-aware that we were going to meet up like this.  Maybe that mistaken sighting was projecting my mind onto reality in a way that only now makes any sense.  Just like we’ve talked about before, what if time isn’t a linear progression such as we experience it consciously?  What if, like Eastern mythology says, time is a vast web that we can only see through one narrow portal, and only occasionally do we get snatched glimpses of transparency through into those other realms of time..?”

“You mean like déjà vu or something?” Anne was happy to toss these contributory ideas like kindling onto David’s steadily roaring fire of ideas.  He was sat up now, odd strands of his long hair glinting in the moon light, and a cosmos of sand particles loosely embedded in the skin of his back and shoulders.

“Precisely.  We have glimpses like that all the time but never really pay them much heed.  How many other chances do we get given on a day-to-day basis, to see the true nature of things, the true nature of time?”

“Maybe it’s happening right now..?”

“Most definitely.  Maybe the past, the future and the present are all here right now in each and every moment; everything that has and will ever happen all occurring in this vast gigantic instant moment of simultaneity.  Only we have to be mentally equipped to register it as a progression of moments along a scale of time.  Maybe only in times of real experience, where our minds are released, however temporarily, from the shackles of waking experience do we get salient clues as to the true nature of things, the true pattern that is shaping our lives.”

The enormous expanse of the Arabian sky, saturated with stars and almost concave in shape, such that it appeared to be almost revealing the very curvature of the earth, was no match for her love for David.  For he had liberated her from her strict religious upbringing in provincial England, and her upper-middle class missionary parents.  Together they were refugees on the run from social norms and expectations in search of some higher truth, a purer calling in life, however illusory and however ambitious.

It was his deranged rants such as these that she found especially endearing about him; the vaults to this thinking being unlocked by the curlicues of hashish smoke.  “What if it’s only at fractional moments of physicality that our psychology can decipher those hidden meanings to time, to truth, to life?  Psychosomatic frequencies that only at certain times are we ever tuned into.”

“Like what?”

“Like sex, obviously - the moment of orgasm being a moment of profound and ecstatic liberation, physically and mentally, from the strictures of our routine consciousness.  It might quickly subside but it’s there, if only we are able to grasp and hold onto it.  Violence as well... the act of violence is, whether perpetrator or victim, perhaps a moment of real transcendence.  Dreaming is obviously a prime example.  Our dreams allow our minds free reign over the landscape of our psychology, there are no barriers to the truth, we only ascribe surreality when we reflect on them from the comfort of our waking reality which we believe to be rational.

But I’m sure there must be others...times of extreme physical exertion perhaps, moments of sheer clarity, moments of wonder, religious experiences, out-of-body experiences.  These perhaps all serve to reveal gaps in the mental brickwork and through them we can glimpse the true nature of the universe.”

“I think I get it”, said Anne, responding in kind to David’s almost frenzied state, his chest heaving as he struggled to maintain the revelation to which he clearly believed himself witness.  “But who or what is using our waking reality to hide the truth from us.  Why the deception?”

“I’ve no idea... maybe all these moments are small clues offered to us by some higher deity of which we can have no real comprehension.  Some higher force is opening these brief windows to us and allowing the sunlight through, only if we fail to register or acknowledge them, they are shut as quickly as they are opened.  Maybe only a minority ever realise it, ever really grasp at this higher law and appreciate it manifesting itself in this way, through our physical impulses.  The majority go through life entirely unaware or maybe staring at the sunlight so fixedly that they end up blind to it.”

As David reached this point in his rant, Anne became aware of the bilious clouds overhead seeming to almost resemble a surging whirlpool as they sought to unleash a thunderstorm from the fathomless depths.

“Maybe that is the truth after all?  Our reality as we see it is just illusory, a series of clues that always go unacknowledged.  Coincidences and tricks of the mind are set in place like characters waiting in the wings of a stage play, awaiting the point at which they can take centre stage... only they never do... until suddenly your attention is fixed on them... I can see now...it all seems suddenly so clear to me... I can see the truth of it all... and if I’m wrong then LET GOD HIMSELF STRIKE ME DOWN....!”

As his last words rang out they became harmonised by the sudden cymbal-clashing of the clouds.  Anne began to realise that David’s whole body had stiffened, as though all his muscles had succumbed to cramping, he arched back in a seizure, his hair draping into the sand and his chin aimed into the air like an archer’s bow.  His body seemed to be shocked by a succession of violent spasms, as though he were rudely shaken by a pair of invisible hands, before he then collapsed against the ground and was still, with an expression that could only be registered as complete serenity.

As Anne recalled, then as now, the sky ceased its trembling and the rain fell at last.

Absurd Shards #11 - The 2053 US Presidential Campaign

The 2053 US Presidential campaign is one that offers a unique and unparalleled opportunity for real change in our great country.  Never before has the time been more pertinent and right to elect a president that reflects the diversity, personality and spirit that so indomitably characterises the American people today.

Over the last half-century, America’s liberty torch has remained firmly aloft, a beacon of hope and idealism shining the way for democratic representation across all peoples.  There was Mr B. Obama, the first black president, followed by Mrs H. Clinton, the first female president.  Then came Mrs M. Obama, the first black female president, succeeded after a highly emotive campaign by Mr P. Bush, the first (openly) homosexual president in American history.  Mr A. Clinton became the first transgender president, although he was forced to resign after only two years, to be replaced by Mrs J. Obama, the first president to have a Muslim spouse.

But now, the time has come to take a bold new step forward in the name of promoting diversity and progressive values.  Only by electing Trump Mk.2, the first artificially intelligent president, representing the burgeoning cyborg community in our society, can we begin to really instill long-lasting change for our nation. 

A cyborg president will be uniquely placed to tackle the scourge of race relations, widening inequality and unemployment, increasing environmental devastation, as well as tackle head-on the big business sector that continues to hold undue and unaccountable influence over Capitol Hill.  Only by tearing down this long-standing barrier to equal opportunity can America resume the drive towards our Manifest Destiny and, in the eyes of the world, reclaim our hallowed position as the greatest nation on earth.  

Absurd Shards #10 - The Psychogeographic Theory of Straight Line Walking (part 2)

Log 8: The Urban Centre

Like Descartes meditating on the nature of consciousness in his Dutch oven, I intend to arrive at a place of profound certainty through observance of methodical skepticism.  By placing each instinctive and impulsive instructional thought process under the scrutiny of doubt, by annexing them to a place where they can be controlled and manipulated, I believe I will, with intense effort and concentration, be able to yield to the mechanical whims of the physical and eschew the constraints of consciousness that shape our behaviour.

The first experiment site was to be the urban centre, a bustling pedestrian zone on a Thursday afternoon, roughly 3.45pm.  This posed significant practical problems and gave rise to issues regarding the constructs of social etiquette and behavioural norms.

I began my walk with few problems, finding the way free of obstacles, e.g. street furniture, walls, roadways.  I encountered difficulty with a bench occupied by two old women but I was swiftly able to mount said obstacle with only mild opprobrium and continue unhindered.

One of the major psychological inhibitors to master is that of adjusting speed according to the dynamics of the situation.  The natural impulse to which we are conditioned is to monitor speed to adhere to pedestrian traffic, altering direction if necessary.

The first significant impediment arose when I encountered a collective of young males (approx. 6-7, white, late-teens) who were enjoying some kind of assembly with cigarettes outside a branch of McDonalds (as per the prescribed codes of their demographic).  They responded unfavourably to the persistency of my course and this manifested itself in violent affray.  Abrasions to my face and torso were sustained (full details in Appendix B.1).

Unfortunate though this incident was, it was nothing if not to be expected given the territory in which the experiment was being performed, and has given me cause to consider that until I begin to master the discipline, subsequent experiments should take place in a wholly more amenable landscape.  

It has done little to deter my motivation for this discipline.  If anything, it has calcified in me the surety that, if only I persist with the method, I will begin to succumb to the faculties of the body over the mind and learn to command them at my own will.

Absurd Shards #9 - The Psychogeographic Theory of Straight Line Walking

Log 7: 

I have completed my preliminary investigations and begun researching a variety of locations in which to proceed with active field studies of my theory.  To provide an abstract or summary, I have decided to explore the psychogeographic technique of straight line walking, one that to my mind at least has been ill-served by past practitioners.

It isn't so much the lack of scientific inquiry inherent in Guy Debord and the Situationists’ inebriated drifting across Paris with only a map of say, Vienna to guide them, but more the Marxist discipline of dismantling the urban ‘spectacle’ that I seek to avoid.  I seek to become immersed at an almost machine level with the landscape, using the act itself to unlock hidden philosophical algorithms of my core being.

It is my contention that this has only really been explored effectively in the experimental art scene, with Richard Long and his repetitive traversing of the landscape; demarcating some kind of trace thereby subtly altering the space itself, almost representing an apparition of the physical act.

Here then, are the explicit conditions to which my experiments must adhere:

Condition 1:

At the experiment site I must pick a direction using a random method over which I cannot exert any undue preference or yield to personal bias.

Condition 2:

I must proceed to walk in a linear direction, my focus being centred on an invisible line of travel ahead of me.

Condition 3:

Crucial to the success of the experiment is that I do not deviate or adjust my trajectory in any way.  This will demand a strict level of meditation that with sufficient mental training should yield dividends.

Condition 4:

Where there are physical impediments to the straight line I must follow the parameters of the obstacle with the utmost fixity until I am able to rejoin the line unobstructed once again.  (This is only to be applied where there is such structural rigidity as to render continuation of the walk physically impossible, all other features must be traversed in adherence to the straight line; this applies to roadways, reasonably-sized bodies of water, private property, sites of dereliction, countryside, and so on.)

Condition 5:

After the predetermined time allocation for the walk has expired I will compile my notes of the experiment, from which analysis, comparative study and philosophizing can then proceed.

Now that the handful of basic and simple conditions have been established, I am able to proceed at once with the first of my chosen experiment sites (see Appendix A.4)...  

To be continued.

Absurd Shards #8 - Planet of the Landlords

As I knelt, sinking down with the concrete of dismay and despair setting around my lower limbs, the once proud resplendent dome looked like a forgotten ornament amidst an overgrown garden of high rises.

I called to mind the time, many years previously, when I had been going through the stealthy skirmish of flat-hunting in London. My search for affordable accommodation had taken me hithering and thithering across the city, meeting with dilettante landlords who addressed me with gurning apologies that “you’re too late, it’s just been let” or “someone just out-bid you”.

As I walked home from work each day I passed by flanks and rows of high rises being hoisted up at the structural armpits by cranes; the billboards promising ‘luxury apartments’ in fonts that screamed elegance and exclusivity. Woe is me, I was wont to think, apartments everywhere and yet not one within budgetary reach.

Then one evening, I passed by a Big Yellow Self-Storage depot. Taking the semantics literally, I entered and asked to be shown the full suite of facilities, mortuary tray compartments in which to recline for indefinite periods. I decided there and then that this was the best way for me to continue living in the city on my limited budget.

From that day on I went into a prolonged hibernation inside one of these units, in a sense cryogenically frozen inside a capsule of my own resourceful personal financing.

Something must have gone awry though, for I awoke sometime earlier than planned. I was left to stagger hazily into a daylight that frittered in fragmented beams through the ranks of neatly aligned high rises that stood in perfect formation as though part of some vast rally for an architectural dictator that had yet to appear.

Ambling along the Southbank, I pivoted north across Millennium Bridge and took in the phalanx of towering structures that assumed the dubious form of their allotted moniker – the Cucumber, the Desk Tidy, the Dehumidifier.

As I drew nearer I could make out the familiar bulb of St. Paul’s now fighting for breathing space around the legs of these taller adults; now a meagre Duomo intimidated by its many tall campaniles.

With mounting incredulity I could discern a hoarding wrapped around the cathedral base that pronounced ‘Fine living in reverent tranquility – Inquire today!’

“You finally did it!” I bawled in disgust, pounding my fists against the pavement. “You fools! Damn you all to hell...!!”

Culture - March

Read:
Ray Kurzweil - 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology' (non-fiction)
John Gray - 'The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Defeat Death' (non-fiction)
Ted Kaczynski - 'The Unabomber Manifesto - Industrial Society and its Future' (non-fiction)
Franz Kafka - 'The Complete Short Stories' (short stories)
Rene Descartes - 'Discourse on Method and Other Writings' (non-fiction)


Watched:
'All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'25 Million Pounds ' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Pandora's Box' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Pulse' (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
'North by Northwest' (Alfred Hitchcock)
'Nymphomaniac' (Lars von Trier)


Listened:
Swans - 'Filth'
Disasterpeace - 'It Follows' (OST)
Tinariwen - 'Aman Iman'


Exhibitions:
'Francisco de Goya - Witches and Old Women Album' (at Courtauld Gallery)


Attended:
Tom McCarthy in conversation (at Foyles, Charing Cross Road)
John Gray in conversation with Adam Phillips (at Daunt Books, Marylebone High Street)

Absurd Shards #7 - The Trapeze Artists

Too big a fall, it is said, is how all careers on the trapeze are destined to end. Composure and self-confidence that has been sustained over so long, albeit with instances of wavering here and there, must eventually fray and culminate in failure.

It is cognisance of this that coaxes them into routines of ever more elaborate daring and precision, driving them to succeed where their peers would buckle and fall back on older and more assured displays. It is often an unedifying scramble for the rope ladders to the highest platforms from which they can maximise their exposure before an audience that is fickle and all-too-easily distracted by alternative amusements.

The hubris of the trapeze artist is what piques our interest and enflames our dismay; the agility and poise of these people who deem themselves worthy of the platforms and structures across which they swing and sway like a Newton's cradle.

In the trapeze artist we see the illusion of flight, there is promise in their reckless leaps and posturing in the air, and we take heart from this, even though we know that after the soaring apex point has been reached they must always complete the swing to a frustratingly fixed point. Try as they might, through all kinds of trickery, charisma and guile, they will still swing between intractable points that we are all complicit in believing can be transcended.

As a masquerade to alleviate this fundamental disappointment that permeates through the whole act many artists have resorted to the safety of shadows, or to clever manipulations of light and colour. For a time these can prove effective, though ultimately we see them for what they are and scorn them for their acts of duplicity and cunning.

Instead we insist on ever brighter lights so that we can see the very pearls of sweat and the look of adrenalised assurance as they continue their routines. Now increasingly blinded by the forensic glare, the artists, who had always struggled to see the audience clearly from their lofty heights, can only make out a spurious collective and the scent of mounting disapproval in their efforts.

But we still admire the show for its predictability, we secretly envy of them their heights, their ego and daring; together we will them ever higher, filling them with our hopeless dreams of unrestrained flight, because at the same time we long to see then fall..,

Absurd Shards #6 - Droning on

No one was able to identify the precise point at which they began to take flight from the promontory of ordered discipline to be caught in the crosswind that would render them dangerously hostile to those they were designed to serve.

On the domestic front, the drones had proven themselves to be indispensible servants of the air, operating in strict alignment with programmed protocol to the extent that the urban populace seldom gazed skyward without a smattering of such automatons gliding across their line of sight couriering some package or other.

The big online retailer had a vast convocation at their disposal, such that record waiting times for purchases made were mere champagne bottles being smashed time and again on the hull of irreversible progress.

But a corruption was afoot, whether attributable to man-made malice or the result of a data glitch that was spread like a contagion from one unit to the other without detection. Reports began to surface of bizarre accidents occurring between purchaser and courier on point of delivery, yet hard evidence was initially allusive. All and any trace was smothered by the tenacious censoring arm of the retailer, employing crack units of data programmers under the auspices of business infringement rules that no one save perhaps the retailers seemed capable of understanding.

Malfunctions though were doomed to spread with perspicacity to the point at which the aberrations couldn’t be contained any longer. Reports proliferated of courier drones specifically targeting civilians with load ejections – household goods, electronic devices, heavy literature, and so on. Whilst initially sporadic, they quickly spread to the point at which the attacks appeared, to the distressed observer, to be almost orchestrated by the drones under an organic telepathy to rival that of a cloud of starlings.

The online retailer, who everyone believed would control the situation with rapidity as reports of serious injuries and near fatalities escalated, were exposed as woefully lacking in any emergency planning procedures. It was left to the government to send in the military drones to disable their courier cousins. The CEO of said retailer, when tracked down for a response, issued a statement saying simply “oh bollocks”, and a mass distribution of compensatory gift cards were issued post haste.