At least you know that Bowie actually read Nietzsche. I still find that cluster of consonants after the 't' difficult.
According to Wikipedia, the title absolutely should not be read with any homosexual connotations, which seems a shame.
Well, before I go any further, I must once again formally apologise for this and that. Sorry.
I would like to announce, before I do anything else, that I am expecting Shrike to be unleashed in January. If you're the kind of person who has actually read anything by me (this blog DOESN'T COUNT), then you'll know very well that publishing is a very dilatory business. Thank you for your patience.
It has been very good to work with PS Publishing, and I hope they can say the same for me, though that seems less likely.
I can't possibly hope to tell you what's been going on in my life, and I don't want to, anyway. However, I hope to have more publishing news soon. Actually, it's already been mentioned on the Internet, at Coldtonnage, so it's hardly a secret, but I want to wait for the right moment to give full details here.
Once again, sorry.
I'm wrong about everything – I've always known this. I only do it in order to be awkward.
It's the only way I can get attention.
Well, perhaps that's it, actually. I was hoping I'd feel inspired, but perhaps not.
Someone mentioned 'air-socks' earlier. I remember them.
Oh, apparently, the WWF is trying to get Obama's ear and tell him that America has about 2-5 years (if I remember correctly) to make the difference that will mean everything to the future of the human race in terms of the environment. I do understand that 'nature' isn't everything (OR IS IT?), but honestly, I think it would be moronically cynical to deprive those being born today of a future just because we are too fucked up to see what wonderful potential human life has. Please think seriously about this. It's not a political issue, I don't think, unless you want to fight for the right to knock holes in the bottom of our life-boat. Maybe a lifeboat is not your dream environment, but it's all we have at the moment. Personally, I feel very inclined to throw the hole-knockers overboard. It's very liberal of us to allow them to carry on. Someone suggested to me that all the hole-knockers are religious. This is not how I see things, although it's quite possible I underestimate the problem of religion. I tend to think that, whether they know it or not, the hole-knockers are materialists. But then, monotheism and materialism seem to me to be so intricately woven together that they're more or less the same thing.
In any case, whether you think of yourself as religious or not, or whether you're a proud materialist or not, I would like to risk sounding preachy and ask you what I suppose I must ask myself, to think seriously about what is important. Are a load of language-concepts, or numerical concepts, like 'God', 'money' and so on, really worth so much that it's okay destroying what we know we have now in their name?
That means YOU, Jeremy Clarkson (etc.). I'm sure you have nephews and nieces and must care about them. Is it really worth destroying everything just to make some kind of point…
Hmmm. Interesting.
I love Doctor Who.
Let us hope that the Doctor can save us this time. He once remarked that homo sapiens have an instinct for self-destruction that borders on genius.
I can't find the clip I want. I would have thought it was the most famous Davros clip, where the Doctor asks Davros whether, if he had in his grasp a virus that would destroy all life in the universe, would he unleash that virus. Davros, of course, says that he would. He kind of digs the idea. If you can find the clip, please let me know.
Also, I watched eXistenZ again recently – all that ever needs to be said about virtual reality. Excellent film.
Anonymous writes:La gaya scienza just makes me think that at least Nietzsche read Arnaut Daniel.
Peter A Leonard writes:
According to Lovelock and his disciples it’s already too late. Have you read the “Revenge of Gaia”? Frightening stuff. The link below explains: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Revenge_of_GaiaPeter
Justin Isis writes:
From memory:”An interesting conjecture. The tiniest pressure of my thumb…Such power would set me among the gods! And through the Daleks I shall I have that power!”
Hello. I’m very tired, so won’t write much now. I’ve read a little Lovelock, but not much. I haven’t read The Revenge of Gaia. This is not a good time to be born, it seems. It does seem inevitable that there will be really bad things happening, as devastating perhaps, as the Black Death, or more so. I feel rather helpless. I don’t run a car, and I’m not much of a consumer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if even my carbon footprint is over the limit. In any case, we have to do what we can, I think. We can’t just wait for the big cull.”An interesting conjecture. The tiniest pressure of my thumb…
Such power would set me among the gods! And through the Daleks I shall I have that power!”Yes, that sounds right.La gaya scienza just makes me think that at least Nietzsche read Arnaut Daniel.I’m afraid he’s one up on me, but that’s hardly surprising.
Also, I’m a bit suspicious of Lovelock’s championing of nuclear power. I realise he’s an expert (in something) and I’m not, and this is only hearsay to me, but I have heard estimates that if all electricity on the planet was supplied by nuclear power then the world’s uranium would be used up within four years. I kind of wish things were not so factional, and that people, instead of having their own eccentric little ideas to which they are partisan, for one reason or another, would just try and pool knowledge, resources etc. to come up with the best solution.
Peter A Leonard writes:
We do seem to be teetering on the edge, don’t we. I don’t know if it’s my own paranoia at work but it seems to me that much of what’s happening around the world doesn’t get a look-in with UK media?For example there were serious food riots in Egypt earlier this year and many of those involved have been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment this week but I’ve seen hardly a mention of this. Then you happen on a little gem like this:http://www.thehindu.com/holnus/008200812161661.htmInforming us two trillion tons of ice have melted since 2003. Not to worry, though, the German’s have a cunning master plan which will reduce the plague of rats currently overrunning their country (bring back the Pied Piper?):http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,596705,00.html#ref=rssLuckily the Guardian newspaper has it’s finger on the pulse and puts the cards on the table for us:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/16/gordon-brown-tony-blair-christmas-cardsMeanwhile India continues to struggle with bird flu:http://www.thehindu.com/holnus/004200812161511.htmThey’ve already culled 100,000 birds and still not eradicated it! How long before it crosses the species barrier, and creates a pandemic I wonder? Still you can always rely on the good old BBC to bring you heartening news in times of trial:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7598861.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6532323.stmhttp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7692963.stmSo this year we learned that the irrigation water vital for the grain crops that feed China and India is at risk of drying up, as global warming melts the glaciers that feed Asia’s biggest rivers.”The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” says Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute.The Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in India and China are fed by rains during the monsoon season, but during the dry season they depend heavily on meltwater from glaciers in the Himalayas. The Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas alone supplies 70% of the flow of the Ganges in the dry season.The dry season is precisely when water is needed most to irrigate the rice and wheat crops on which hundreds of millions of people depend for their staple calories. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported last year that many Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035. According to Brown, Chinese glaciologists now estimate that two-thirds of the glaciers on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau could be gone by 2060.So how long’s it going to be before India and Pakistan are faced with food riots and mass starvation on a scale never seen before? This year has seen riots in Egypt, Haiti, the Ivory coast, Uzbekistan, Cameroon etc , a situation exacerbated by the Australian (five year old) drought which has so adversely affected wheat production.On a slightly different note, one that suggests all about us is interrelated, The New Scientist presents us with this:http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026861.500-did-our-cosmos-exist-before-the-big-bang.htmlI’ve long be a believer in the concept of an expanding and contracting Universe, rather like the beating of a heart; the Universe is created and expands only to contract again; each fresh expansion recreates everything that previously existed in the “previous” Universe: Stars, planets, life, etc; every one of us living again in each “new” expanding Universe – living again exactly the same lives, making exactly the same mistakes as all the times before. Oh, well.
I’ve long be a believer in the concept of an expanding and contracting Universe, rather like the beating of a heart; the Universe is created and expands only to contract again; each fresh expansion recreates everything that previously existed in the “previous” Universe: Stars, planets, life, etc; every one of us living again in each “new” expanding Universe – living again exactly the same lives, making exactly the same mistakes as all the times before.This reminds me of that play by Beckett. Perhaps fittingly, for this blog post, eternal return was also championed by Nietzsche, though I don’t think he invented the concept. On the other hand, if we turn to that eternal optimist, H. P. Lovecraft: “That is not dead, which may eternal lie/And with strange aeons, even death may die”. Thanks for the links. Free will is something that I struggle with. Sometimes I think there can be no such thing, and sometimes I think that we have to assume there is free will if anything is to change for the better. It’s fascinating that free will is such a central pillar of Christian theology. It has always seemed like a bit of a cop-out, like God washing its hands of all the trouble it’s caused. Free will, of course, is the big theme of Paradise Lost, and that text is a good example of how unconvincing the argument is. Arguments as to the existence or non-existence of God are generally fairly vacuous because they seldom seem to begin by agreeing what ‘God’ means in the first place. However, one attribute that it seems we can rule out of any definition of God is ‘merciful’. To put it another way, “Heaven and earth are inhumane, They treat all things like straw dogs”.http://ariyavansa.org/dc-home/dc-005/And yet, if one clicks on the above link, it seems there is room for interpretation even in this. Nature is red in tooth and claw. And yet, without symbiosis, nothing can survive. At some point, I for one simply have to say that I don’t know, and hope for the best, and do what I can ‘for the best’. I have thought about these things seriously enough that I simply cannot have children (even if there were the opportunity), because I don’t know that there is any mercy in the universe. Others seem to believe firmly that there is none, and still have children. Obviously, they have not thought about things very seriously at all.In a universe without mercy, even free will might not be that valuable – it is equal to groping in a void towards extinction, or to games of power. If there is any mercy in the universe, then… then that is when free will comes into its own, it seems to me. Well, such speculation is only of secondary importance, at best. As I said in the above post, what is important is what we have now, which, to me, at least, includes imagination. Sorry if this is rambling, and doesn’t make sense.
Peter A Leonard writes:
“Free will is something that I struggle with. Sometimes I think there can be no such thing, and sometimes I think that we have to assume there is free will if anything is to change for the better.”Perhaps “free will” doesn’t exist? Perhaps it is our assumption of its existence that ultimately provides its nascency? Our assumption creates “free will”.Of course, without “free will”, there can be no guilt. Without “free will” there can be no law, no society, no blame – which would never do! I suspect the situation is such that if “free will” didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it. Can you imagine what it’d be like without it?“Sorry Constable, I had to knock your helmet off and then pee in it. It was preordained, a course of action inherent in my DNA and in turn determined by the “Big Bang”, the very creation of our Universe.” “Oh, that’s alright, Sir. Think nothing of it. We’ve no “free will” so it was inevitable. Just glad you didn’t have to take a shite, too, if you know what I mean?” No that’d never do. Without “free will” we’d be little better than the ants. Ummmm.Regards.Peter
Anonymous writes:
Hello Quentin Crisp,I like your blog and the discussions in the comment section.I think free will is an illusion. The fact of our birth disproves free will. No one can choose to be born.There is a quote from a recent interview with Thomas Ligotti that I find relevant here: Ligotti: “No one can make themselves what they are. It’s a totally absurd notion, because if you could make yourself what you are you’d first have to be a certain way and be able to choose what that way would be. But then you’d also have to be able to choose to choose what way you would be, and on into infinity. There are always determining powers, and those make us what the way we are whether or not we realize it.”
Anonymous writes:
Hello Quentin Crisp,I like your blog and the discussions in the comment section.I think free will is an illusion. The fact of our birth disproves free will. No one can choose to be born.There is a quote from a recent interview with Thomas Ligotti that I find relevant here: Ligotti: “No one can make themselves what they are. It’s a totally absurd notion, because if you could make yourself what you are you’d first have to be a certain way and be able to choose what that way would be. But then you’d also have to be able to choose to choose what way you would be, and on into infinity. There are always determining powers, and those make us what the way we are whether or not we realize it.”
Hello Anon.I’ve read that interview, and remember thinking that the quote in question was a bit like one of my own thoughts. It’s the kind of thought I usually have when people accuse me of being negative, depressive and so on. The argument about free will in some ways becomes redundant. To illustrate, let me quote Peter Leonard’s example:“Sorry Constable, I had to knock your helmet off and then pee in it. It was preordained, a course of action inherent in my DNA and in turn determined by the “Big Bang”, the very creation of our Universe.”
“Oh, that’s alright, Sir. Think nothing of it. We’ve no “free will” so it was inevitable. Just glad you didn’t have to take a shite, too, if you know what I mean?”Of course, what the constable could have said (if the universe had made him, or perhaps if he’d chosen to) was, “And I have no choice, from a legal, metaphysical and scientific point of view, but to arrest you.”And then the miscreant could have said, “And I am afraid that I am not morally culpable for punching you in the teeth now and running away.”And then the constable might say, “Unfortunately, I am bound by fate and all the powers of creation to pursue you and bring down upon you the full weight of the law.”And the miscreant would then say, “And I have no personal choice in whatever it is that I happen to do next, which could be anything, but is completely predictable if only we had the data to calculate it.”And so on.I’m just guessing and playing with ideas here, but I think that what might be at work is a paradox of some kind. In its simplest form this might just mean that we have limited free will (if any). In a slightly more esoteric form it could be that our free will is the free will of the universe itself. That is the paradox. I don’t think free will is a dead philosophical idea (no, it’s more than that; it’s bloody philosophical). I think it’s really still just waiting to be unpacked. Mishima has some fascinating things to say about it (actually he intimates more than says) in his tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, if you feel like reading four long, fascinating, interlinked novels.
PS. I’ve just watched my second full episode of Survivors. I watched the pilot a while back, and this was the one with the schizophrenic lay-priest guy. I thought it was great. I’m hooked. Great cast, great characters, great story. I might actually watch the next one if I can. Well done, Terry Nation.
Anonymous writes:
Quentin,Thanks for your reply. My name is Jeff, by the way. I had trouble posting using my name so I ended up going with the anonymous default. Maybe I dismissed the idea of free will too quickly. I still think the fact of our birth deals a serious blow to the idea. In the sense that we can’t choose to be born in the first place. I have trouble with the idea of ‘limited free will’. If it is limited in some way, can it still be considered free? It seems like even the slightest limitation makes it something other than free will.Thanks for the recommendation of Mishima’s tetralogy. I actually have the books, but I haven’t read them yet. I’ll try to read them soon.
Hello Jeff. You’ve got me thinking. I may return to this.The Sea of Fertility is/are four of the best books ever written, in my opinion. Apparently some people find The Decay of the Angel a bit rushed, saying he was obviously impatient to kill himself when he was writing that one, and not giving it his full attention. I disagree. It is probably my favourite of the four.