Posted on by qscrisp

Ten Years

One of the first things to greet me when I awoke this morning was a feature on the Yahoo homepage about Al Gore's new documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Now, regular readers of my blog will know that I am somewhat anxious about environmental issues. I have had my eye on this film for a while, and will probably watch it fairly soon. I looked at the feature on it, played some of the video clips and so on. The publicity for the film warns us that:

Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just 10 years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet's climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction.

Ten years… I've got a really terrible feeling about this. When I read this kind of thing, it really makes it difficult for me to carry on with the rest of the day. Actually, right now, having re-read that feature, I'm feeling rather jittery.

How do I cope with this kind of thing? Well, I have a number of ways, not least of which is to try and do 'my bit'. I've heard that cutting meat out of your diet is one of the best ways to reduce your ecological footprint, and I've done that. I won't list all the little things I've done – and you can always do more, it seems – but I've also been very careful about using energy, until someone in the same house told me the other day that all the energy in this house is from renewable, non-polluting sources. I still save energy, because I think it's a good habit, but apparently, as long as the energy source is clean, you don't have to whip yourself and be Puritanical about it. I await further data on that one.

Another way that I cope is trying to come back to the Now. And yes, I am referring to the 'New Age' book, The Power of Now. I'm not going to advertise it here in the sense of writing something resembling a blurb, but the fact is, despite the cheesy title, this is possibly my number one reference book for keeping calm and trying to turn my life around. That does sound like a blurb, doesn't it? Let me put it this way, my thoughts about the book are constantly changing, but for some reason, I keep coming back to it. It's basically Zen without the riddles – very straightforward. And the main tenets of the book, and those I see no harm in trying to practice, are to let go of the constant stream of voices in my head and live in the moment, which is all we ever have. Like I said, very straightforward.

But clearly I haven't yet succeeded in living in the moment. Here I am worrying about what will be happening in ten years. Of course, we should think about it and act – but I'm talking about WORRY. As the song goes, "What's the use of worrying?/It never was worthwhile". In fact, our ten year sentence should present us with a wonderful opportunity to stop worrying. It should make us see clearly the futility of all ambition and conflict.

Back in the seventies, David Bowie wrote a song called Five Years, which opened with the lines, "Pushing thru the market square, so many mothers sighing/News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in/News guy wept and told us, Earth was really dying/Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying".

I believe he described it in an interview as a very positive song. Why? Well, if one listens to it all the way through, perhaps it's not so difficult to see why.

After looking at the world around him, full of apocalyptic portents, the narrator of the song seems suddenly swept up by a feeling very different to the despondency with which the song starts. The change can probably be pinpointed to the line, "I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour":

I think I saw you in an ice-cream parlour, drinking milk shakes cold and long
Smiling and waving and looking so fine, dont think
You knew you were in this song
And it was cold and it rained so I felt like an actor
And I thought of ma and I wanted to get back there
Your face, your race, the way that you talk
I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk

In fact, for me, the whole positivity of the song – which I found extraordinarily powerful when I first heard it – is centred on the couplet: "Your face, your race, the way that you talk/I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk". What do I take this to mean? It is nothing other than a Blakean vision (some of the earlier parts of the song resemble lines from Blake's poem 'London') of awakening. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake wrote the famous line that supplied Aldous Huxley with the title for a book, and The Doors with the name for a band: "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite." That is precisely the experience that Bowie is describing in the song. If you have the song, give it another listen. Feel the words and the voice: "Your face, your race, the way that you talk/I kiss you, you're beautiful, I want you to walk". I think the experience could also be described as enlightenment and as agape. This same experience is reprised at the end of the album (The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars) in the song Rock'n'Roll Suicide, with the lines, "Just turn on with me and youre not alone… Gimme your hands cause you're wonderful…" Personally, I believe that if David Bowie is remembered – interesting use of the word 'remembered' – as a giant of seventies musical culture, it's because he came closer than anyone every had, in terms of songwriting, to expressing the state of satori, and it's worth noting that he was, at one point, very seriously considering going into a Buddhist monastery.

Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked. The infinite. What is it that keeps us from it?

The doors of perception, certainly in my case, are still clogged by thought. And I don't think I'm the only one. I haven't seen any weeping newsreader's yet, either, despite the state the world's in. I really wish I could slough away all my pettiness, but still my thoughts continue, particularly in a judgemental strain. I find myself judging people constantly, all day long, and I really don't want to. I doesn't do me any good, it doesn't do my victim any good. But what do I think about?

I think about how, now, the novel I'm writing is pretty pointless. It's called Domesday Afternoon and is largely a warning of the possible results of global warning, but I predict it will take me about ten years to complete. About ten years, now that's a familiar figure. Oh yes, wait… And it's all because it takes so long to get things published. If only the bastard publishers had published my other stuff and supported me, I'd have the financial leeway, the time, the motivation, the energy to pursue these projects properly and get them out to a reading public. All those who have refused to publish me are standing between me and destiny – not only destiny, a vital mission. Don't the stupid cunts know what they're doing? Of course they don't, they only think about money. "We're not a charity, we're a business", as if that's an excuse for anything. They certainly deserve to die. And look at this, I pick up a paper, and there's some other cunt – who is it? – Peter Dibbs, 18, from Kent, writing about why he bottled Panic! at the Disco when they came onstage. What a grunting troglodyte. How can there ever be any hope for the human race when there are people like this for whom casual violence is actually a hobby? It's about time we introduced chemical castration for these droogs, like they have in Denmark. If only everyone was peaceful – like me!

And the thoughts go round and round, like the wheels on the bus apparently do.

But anyway, I do hope that we're going to use this opportunity to become more enlightened. It might be the last we get. And, to answer the question about whether we need conflict and violence to make the world interesting. Yes, yes, blowing up innocent families is actually a mainstay of human entertainment. We'd be bored stiff without it. Maimed babies. Grieving mothers. Vast suffering. That, apparently, is entertainment. Well, just supposing, for a moment, that there is a chance peace will be boring, well, I'm sure that we can start fighting again any time we want, because it's certainly never stopped for long if we look at history. But personally, I'm beginning to think that violence is actually boring. I'm not into violent films or violent anything. Violence really is a drunken bore breathing his alcoholic fumes into your face at a party. But worse, obviously. I don't find it exciting that there are lots of grim-faced security guards at airports now, or that tensions have increased between different ethnic groups, or that the government is using the results of it's own violent actions as an excuse to jump on any demonstrations against those actions. That, to me, is not a happening party. But that is violence – it is boring.

Well, there is a great deal I could write on this theme, but I'm going to have to cut it short, because it's past one AM and I'm feeling very tired.

Let's move on past my waking and checking my e-mail, and to me having breakfast. I was reading New Scientist as I am often wont to do, and the cover story had something to do with how the sun might actually be able to help save us from global warming. After reading the other article online, I was quite eager to get my teeth into something hopeful. I won't be able to reproduce the article, of course, and I'm not confident in my powers of precis, but I shall attempt to give you the main points.

Some scientists believe that temperatures on Earth fluctuate according to solar activity, and particularly to the increase or decrease in sunspots. When the sunspots die away, the temperatures decrease, and we even sometimes have mini ice-ages. Now, guess what? That's right, the activity of the sunspots is cyclical and we are actually due for a big decrease in activity, round about……. now. Will this save us? Well, as always, there's good news and bad news. Or rather, okay news and slightly iffy news. The okay news is that if this decrease does occur, and if the scientists are right, then, the cooling temperatures should buy us some time in which to make the changes in our lifestyle necessary to avert complete catastrophe. The iffy news is, not news exactly, but more of a possible corollary. People might think that because it's getting cooler, all this stuff about global warming was wrong and they don't have to change anything. And that, of course, would be worse than if we didn't have more time. So, remember, if it starts to get cooler – it's the temporary decrease in sunspots.

My only worry is that this kind of information never seems to get to the public, like in this whole debate about a return to nuclear power. Blair was really backing that one, the loathsome shyster. And these debates never seem to be about laying all the information on the table in front of everyone and trying to work out the best course of action for all. The different parties always hide the cards they're playing. It seems fairly certain that the only reason Blair was backing nuclear power is because it is centralised; there's plenty of big business middle man action there to make a profit out of it. Solar power – that could provide a significant amount of energy even to households in rainy, cloudy Britain. What's the problem? The energy would be free. No middle man between you and the sun. Who's going to cream off the profits from that?

But I'm going off on one again…

So now I'm going to go to bed.

Good night.

18 Replies to “Ten Years”

  6. >>”Your face, your race, the way that you talk/I kiss you, you’re beautiful, I want you to walk”. I think the experience could also be described as enlightenment and as agape. t she’s at least trying to live by what she believes.My problem is that I haven’t any beliefs, at least no practical beliefs, about how to make the world a better place. I have lots of thoughts about human interaction, and right thought. But when it comes to policy, when it comes to figuring out what’s good for us, the planet . . .truly, I just don’t know. That’s also why I don’t vote.I do believe we are obligated to *do*. I just know what it is I’m supposed to do.

  7. “I do believe we are obligated to *do*. I just know what it is I’m supposed to do.”Yeah, I know the feeling. I feel like I ought to be doing something. I really feel like I’m wasting my life, but I’m torn. On the one hand, my vocation, my inner desire is all about self-expression, but on the other hand, I feel like that’s a bit irrelevant now that we’re facing armageddon. I don’t know.I want to get used to the idea of being alone. I mean, just spending time with myself and not having to check my e-mail all the time. Really just being with myself and not caring about the rest of the world. I think that would actually be a positive thing for me. Recently I am drawn more and more to Old Things, and if I am to say what kind of Old Things, this may possibly sound odd, but basically 20th Century Americana in the shape of black and white films, music, popular art and so on. It has to be from before the Sixties, though.A friend of mine randomly sent me a CD of various songs from Laurel and Hardy a while back, and at first I listened to it out of a sense of novelty, but now I am addicted. I find it strangely intoxicating. In fact, I find it pretty damned heartbreaking, just this sense of another era, close and yet infinitely far. And the people inhabiting it are recognisably human, and yet almost alien. They even laugh differently. You can hear a snatch of laughter from a crowd on the soundtrack, and you know it’s the laughter of a different age.I can hardly bear it. There’s a kind of shining innocence to it, too, like the glow of the silver screen itself.I don’t know why I’m writing this, really, except if I could learn to be alone more completely, I could lose myself in these things more…

  8. I know I”ve experienced that feeling…a sense of a piece of myself having belonged in another time, another place. I imagine it’s a widespread experience, perhaps contributing to the belief in reincarnation. When I used to go to New Orleans in my early twenties, I had very strang feelings of having Been There Before. For me it was a place, but it isn’t hard to imagine another person feeling it about a time.Your comment reminds me of Emerson, “To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” Without putting words into his mouth, I’d say that the reason is because true solitude requires a loss of the familiar. The familiar is comfortable. It bespeaks of people, places, times that we have connotations and understandings of. But away from our things, our friends, our familiar environment, we are out of place. And I think that feeling of being out of place is what truly makes us alone. There is no context for our existence, no relationship with which to anchor ourselves.I feel like I should say something interesting and profound here in conclusion, but I haven’t anything like that. I’m just thinking aloud along with you.

  9. My coping book is “The Practice of Happiness” John Kehoe. Mindfullness and living in the now. Easy to say, not so easy to practice sometimes. But, since I’ve read it I’ve stopped my worrying so much and have begun living a lot more happily. 😀

  10. “There is no context for our existence, no relationship with which to anchor ourselves.”I’ve been out of context a few times in my life, and haven’t really coped well with it. What I’m looking at at the moment is something slightly less radical, and which many people might take for granted – I simply want to be able to spend time with myself without being surrounded (in my head) by the voices of other people, judging, commenting and so on. I think other people’s opinions are all well and good, but the moment the silence is broken with words, something is lost. At the moment I just want to get back to that silence, away from all the voices. I’m lucky in that I should have the time to be able to do that (depending on how long it takes) at the moment. But there always seems to be the voice saying, “You’ve got to fill in that tax form”, or, “Nietzsche says you should be your own judge and administer your own justice to yourself, but you can’t even make yourself get up in the mornings. You’ll never come to anything.” And all these other voices based on the opinions and expectations of other people.I’m really, really tired of it. I just want that silence that tells me it’s okay to be who I am. It’s all okay. And I can die any time and it won’t matter.”My coping book is ‘The Practice of Happiness’ John Kehoe.”I might look this up, though I am in something of a bookjam at the moment, which means I’ve decided to finish four current books before starting any new one, until such time as the jam eventually clears, if it ever does.”Mindfullness and living in the now. Easy to say, not so easy to practice sometimes.”Yes, I recognise this. I get moments now and then when things seem to become clear and a complicated weight seems to slide off me, and I wonder why I was ever carrying it. But then it reappears, seemingly without my bidding. It’s very frustrating. By the way, someone sent me some pictures of myself as a young boy. Would you like to see them?I’ll post them on this blog if you like. I feel a little sad looking at them. Where is this person now?I wonder if he would be disappointed if he met me. “Hey,” I’ll say to him, “The boy’s the father to the man, don’t you know? You should have brought me up better.”Poor lad. He never wanted things to be this way.

  11. “I’m really, really tired of it. I just want that silence that tells me it’s okay to be who I am. It’s all okay. And I can die any time and it won’t matter.”Ahh, I see. Something else entirely, especialy that last bit. Am cogitating.

  16. “Off topic, but we should ALL post pictures of ourselves at that age..”Yes, I think so.I think the two photos above are two different ages, the bottom photo being younger. Even in the top photo I don’t think I can be more than ten years of age. I’m probably less.I vaguely remember that dagger. I was probably pretending to be Sinbad the Sailor after watching Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. If my guess is correct – and it’s probably not, but who knows – that would make me about five when the photo was taken, as I saw the film at the cinema when it first came out, which was apparently in 1977. Do I look five there? It’s hard for me to tell.

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