Reality Revisited:

Well, dear theoretical reader, let us preface this exploration update which generally takes place every few years, with the deeply insightful, whilst also being blindingly obvious, and in most cases misunderstood, statement made by the undoubted, Machiavellian genius Donald Rumsfeld in his US Dept. of Defence news briefing in 2002, prior to the second Gulf War:

“Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”

He was right about the war.  I know.  I was there and receiving security briefings in secure rooms and mixing with those in the know and the movers and shakers, such is chance.  Much more importantly, however, he was right about life generally.

Here’s a thought also; what about unknown knowns – things we know but don’t know we know e.g. intuition, telepathy etc.  Some, as with the subconscious, we are starting to understand and could be defined as known unknowns.  What I shall consider later is a possible ‘known’ that is altogether different, to wit an unknown known. 

For the purposes of what I write here I use the words ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ as interchangeable, with neither being an absolute.  Relative to this, I think it may be considered a fairly standard disconnect that people tend to see reality as in fact an absolute, and the way they want it to be, whether that be utopian, dystopian or somewhere a little more rational in between.  This, obviously, means that the vast majority of people don’t actually see reality as it really is and see it differently, one from another.  Further, I would suggest that it is impossible for it to be otherwise.

This statement, I recognise, can be seen as a form of paradox.  Who is to judge?  How can that person making the judgement ensure that the reality they see is the reality which is real, and therefore make a judgement that the vast majority of people’s realities are not the real reality? (Actually, of course, everybody’s.)

I think one can make the point about the majority not seeing reality as it is without suggesting that one has moved any further than, ‘cogito ergo sum’.  To add to this apparent dichotomy of sorts, I think one can also accept that there is no chance of any sentient being, assuming they exist, other than a posited God, whether one believes in a God or not, ever fully understanding reality, for to do so would require one to know all there is to know, to be in effect the posited existent or non-existent God, or at least his or her equal.  That, I suggest, is not possible.

Accepting that a true understanding of reality cannot be achieved from the point of view of one’s individual perception does not, however, mean that there aren’t levels of reality and understanding.   Relative to what we know today, in general terms, a broad brush understanding of reality, or lack of it, is the only way to attempt to understand it. There is, I would further suggest, a sliding scale of the nearness and distance intellectually that people can be relative to reality.  To take an example, those who believe that the earth is an oblate spheroid are nearer to reality by a long way than those who think that the world is flat.

Now, returning to my earlier statement that an understanding of reality, or lack of it, must be broad brush, the reasoning here is that, for instance, a scientist may be very close to understanding the reality of string theory, or any other generally agreed concept such as global warming, but may be hopelessly out of touch with reality in other areas of our knowledge and understanding base.  For instance he may be appalling in his basic understanding of human relationships and psychology.

(Would this then mean that a computer which could hold specialist knowledge in many fields be more likely to be able to define reality than a human being? Are we to rely on AI for a greater perception of reality?  Quite possibly.)

My view is that the broad brush view of reality is more likely to approach true reality because it will involve the person concerned – let’s imagine an archetypal renaissance man – knowing quite a lot about a lot of different subjects; to have a rounded view of the world.  

If one imagines for a moment a series of areas of knowledge, for instance, philosophy, economics, science, theology, the arts, history, geography etc. if one knows a great deal about one, very little about another but a fair amount about many others, ones ignorance or bias is likely to be diluted by the knowledge of other things which will temper ones perception of reality into one that is more likely, in its moderation and levelling out, to be closer to the kernel of reality than it would be in the case of extreme ignorance on most subjects, even if one is a genius at one.

There are people, of course, who would say that without mathematics and physics there is no chance of understanding reality.  Others might lean to music and the arts and yet others to philosophy and theology.

(One should be wary of adopting the conceit that an understanding of reality requires standard, academic knowledge anyway.  Perhaps an unschooled Aborigine in the bush has a closer understanding of reality.)

Take also the ‘idiot savant’ who can glance out of the window and then draw an absolutely perfect picture of whatever he saw without further reference to it.  In that area the person is a genius and holds that one area of reality much more closely than other people, but his hold on all other areas of reality may be, and generally is, extremely hazy. 

A cul-de-sac which one can go down with regard to reality is to readily accept that if most people accept something, it must be true.  Long before we knew the world was a sphere the general opinion was that it was, indeed, flat.  That view of reality, patently, is incorrect.  Once it was, however, the reality of the vast majority. 

There will be concepts we generally agree now, such as there being three spatial dimensions, length, height and depth plus, a fourth, time, which may eventually give way to general agreement on superstring theory, where there are at least 10 dimensions in the universe, or M-theory which suggests that there are 11 dimensions to space-time or even bosonic string theories which suggest 26 dimensions. 

The pursuit of an understanding of reality has, as far as one can see, been one of the great drivers of humanity which our children show from an early age with the constant question, ‘Why?’  (The answers we give are extremely important, for they set them on the road to constructing their understanding of reality. We are, in effect, conditioning their minds for their life to come.) Going back to Descartes, obviously with only one absolute concept, that one exists, all other concepts are subjective, even those which are given as an answer to the ‘why’ and accepted by the questioner, because we cannot know with any level of certainty that the person (A) who has agreed, has actually understood totally, or in the same way, the answer that the person (B) thinks they’ve given is correct (close to their reality) in the first place.

This uncertainty accepted, we can return to reality none-the-less, agreeing that it is on a sliding scale, and a lot of what is generally agreed is probably as near to reality as it needs to be, to be useful as an agreed concept when we’re interacting with the world and other people, and communicating with them; the reality, in fact which allowed humanity, the cooperative animal, to come as far as we have done in our overlordship of all other creatures on the planet, whether one perceives that to be good or bad.  

There are those who say that there are some absolutes.  We can see these in mathematics, even at a simple level; 2 + 2 = 4 is a generally agreed an absolute truth.  I live in the hope that somebody will give me a ‘proof’ that this is not necessarily always the case and that the square of the hypotenuse does not always equal the sum of the squares of the other two sides.  For the sake of this discussion however, I’ll accept this, but not that it necessarily brings me much closer to understanding reality in the grand scheme of things.

In my search for reality it has also been of interest to explore beauty as a possible basis for reality (See Keats poem, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) to me; also, that it is a universal reality that all people who see a rainbow, for instance, think of it as beautiful, even though it is said that beauty is in the eye of  the beholder, which is of course true about any concept other than cogito ergo sum, putting us immediately back into the territory of subjectivity.  Doubtless there are people who have eyesight that doesn’t perceive a rainbow as beautiful and anyway the statement is unprovable because one cannot know what everybody who sees a rainbow really thinks.

To return to the sliding scale, it can be agreed that some people are probably nearer to an understanding of reality, though relative to the vastness of all knowledge, that may be infinitesimal, than others, relative to some who, for instance hold an understanding of reality like our flat earthers or general conspiracy theorists, who on the balance of judgement are further from the fire of truth/reality.  (I use the word ‘fire’ deliberately.  Many of those who made break-throughs with regard to reality were indeed burnt at the stake as heretics and in more ‘civilised’ times treated as lunatics.)

Accepting the above, for the sake of this argument, one of the dimensions mentioned earlier may be worthy of further exploration; that of time.  Relatively speaking, the longer one lives, the more one experiences reality.  This does not assume that you experience real reality, however.  (See Plato’s cave allegory.)  If one has lived a life of curiosity and diverse experiences , debating and exploring other minds through books and the like, I would suggest that the experience of reality is more likely to be nearer to that which is real than the reality of a mind which has not had this curiosity and these experiences.  Does that make one more qualified to comment on reality?  Perhaps.

S + T = U … subjectivity plus time equals understanding.  This does not necessarily apply or give greater understanding of reality.  Indeed age may move one further from the fire of ‘truth’.  The mind can get ‘stuck’ in convenient ruts and rather than searching for further truth to move one nearer to the fire of reality one may rather read and observe merely those things which reinforce the prejudices of the old, comfortable or at least familiar reality that one has built, in the final analysis, as a shield against a fast changing and increasingly incomprehensible world.  (See the UK ‘Daily Mail’ newspaper readership)

Even if this does not happen, and one ages with the mind wide open and the curiousity throttle flat to the floor, biological factors can influence the ability for cell synapses to make new neural pathways.  (But, neurons that fire together, wire together) I would suggest, however, that though the older mind may be slower in establishing new neural pathways, if it is a mind which has always been curious and open, the experience that one can bring to bear on reality overtops the slowing of synapses, and new neural pathways will occur in such a manner as to allow the individuals subjective understanding of reality to continue to grow and move nearer to ‘real’ reality, even if the move over a lifetime relative to the vastness of all there is to know is only infinitesimal.  I would further suggest that such a mind would be more in touch with reality than a younger, similar one; thus S+T+E (experience) over time may = EE, with engaged enlightenment  being defined as a deeper and still growing understanding of reality than the norm.  I think a sign that one is moving on the right track is when one has moments when one is absolutely appalled by one’s ignorance and realise in some way just how much there is out there to learn about.

So, one of the great dichotomies faced by an aging, liberal intellectual in pursuit of reality is that one of the features one is obliged to learn along the way is humility, based on the fact as one as has got older one knows there is much more to learn than one thought there was when one was younger.  It is the Catch 22 cliché that, ‘the problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid are full of confidence.’  (Clichés, I have found, are generally somewhat sneered at, but actually they are very often overused truths which people are fed up with hearing – or possibly irritated by because they are true.) 

This humility is well-placed but should not detract from the belief that certain things are more real than others.  It is necessary, however, within our cooperative species to have a general agreement about how we perceive the world we live in, our agreed and accepted reality.  It would be inconvenient if every time we mentioned, for instance, the word ‘table’ we took off on philosophical flights of fancy, referring to Plato and the relativity that was about before Mr Einstein made it so popular in his Theory of Special Relativity (ironically even though most people do not understand, E=mc²) and didn’t just go over to the agreed object, sit down at it and eat our dinner.

There are, however, other realities which are not so readily agreed, even putting aside myth, religion and the like which often, to my mind, have both facets close to reality and those which are in cloud cuckoo land, but hey, what do I know … really?  Interestingly, however, moving away from agreed realities can move one further or nearer to the fire of truth, depending on the concept.  Thus it was for Pythagoras with a spherical planet, moving him closer to reality and poor old Giordano Bruno who whilst being right about there being other planets and stars was burned at the stake for his trouble.  On the other hand there are a perfectly respectable 41% of people in the USA who believe that humans and dinosaurs coexisted – that’s around 150 million people – and around the same number don’t believe in evolution.  As covered earlier, reality, or truth, is not a numbers game.

In amongst this mass of confusion, contradiction and sheer claptrap there are still routes to reality which are valid, and as one develops humility along those, one must also hold hard to the realities one is increasingly confident about, such as love being stronger over time than hate, even if those around you appear less and less to be living in the reality which you inhabit.  It is useful, too, to remember as a reality that far more people are decent than not.  The ‘Peace Alliance’ estimate that an appalling 1.5 million people die through violence worldwide every year.  In truth, since many of these numbers represent deaths due to warfare, there weren’t 1.5 million killers but even if there were it means that around 7 billion people don’t kill anybody each year.  (1,500,000 compared to 7,000,000,000 … it’s interesting how important it is to count zeros in certain contexts, even if they stand as a placeholder which says, ‘Nothing interesting to look at here, keep moving left’ – or right if you’re an Arab.)      

One cannot dismiss in any discussion about reality / truth the power of culture, traditions etc. and also of religion.  They are often intertwined in many ways, especially in identifying those things which they hold as central tenets to their adherent’s lives. 

Though reality is not a numbers game it would be absurd not to consider the reality of people of faith.  With 2.5 billion Christians and nearly 2 billion Muslims, both Abrahamic faiths with much in common, as are Judaism and Bahá'í Faith, one can see that over 4.5 billion people share much in terms of their perception of reality.  It is estimated that over 80% of the world’s population are people of faith who believe in some form of Supreme Being.  I am one such, but that doesn’t make such belief a reality; it merely makes it common, though one has to admit, very.  (To not be seduced by numbers one is meant to remember though a time when over 80% of the population believed the Earth was flat etc.  To argue thus, however, is fallacious, quite possibly giving equivalence to apples and oranges. )

The word ‘faith’ is a tricky one to define, however, relative to a discussion on reality.   If we define it simply as, ‘a strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof’, this means, in effect, that the centrality of reality for 80% of the world’s population is based on something other than evidence.  (If one considers the shakiness of ‘evidence’, given that we may know less than an optimistic 1% of all there is to know it gets even more complicated!) They find this perfectly acceptable and believe that they have the route way to truth totally covered.  They also believe in most cases that their reality is set and is the one and only real reality.  If you sat all 4.5 billion of them down and asked them to talk in detail about the nuts and bolts of their faith there would, however, be many different views, quite possibly 4.5 billion.

Of the global atheist and non-religious population, 76% reside in Asia and the Pacific, while the remainder reside in Europe (12%), North America (5%), Latin America and the Caribbean (4%), sub-Saharan Africa (2%) and the Middle East and North Africa (less than 1%).  The realities for these folk are much more diverse, in most cases their only commonality being a non-belief in a Supreme Being.  It is tempting to see this in itself as a strong signifier of their view of reality, tending as it does, to be more ‘evidence’ based.   (Remember that evidence is based on time – when in the history of humanity it was considered to be true, and the basis for that belief.) 

It is tempting, also, to think that such people, individualists, are perhaps nearer to the fire, but to assume that people who believe in a Supreme Being are wrong because of lack of evidence base could be wide of the mark.  Many people who believe in a Supreme Being and that this life is not all there is, myself included, do not subscribe to a formal religion, and all other aspects of their reality may well be more evidence based.  Of course, the billions who believe in a supreme being may have cracked at least that part of reality and be right.  It is tempting to say, why otherwise would so many people believe, but that, I believe, is a red herring.

Cultural realities are often wound round the subjective perceived realities of faith.  I would suggest that both are in general the result of conditioning.  I don’t use the word pejoratively, just as a matter of fact.  Most people follow a faith and exist in a culture that was handed down to them by their parents, family and ‘tribe’. 

I recognise that I am using the words ‘faith’ and ‘religion’ interchangeably here.  I may come back and change them.  I have covered this somewhat, above, but to clarify, ‘Religion’ tends to be creedal, with an agreed set of beliefs, structures and ritual which include a non-evidence based belief in some kind of supreme being who is involved in one’s daily life and has given a set of rules which people of that religion agree to live by.  They generally believe in the ‘soul’, a non-evidence based part of their being, often interchangeable with ‘mind’ which goes on in some way after they have died.  ‘Faith’ tends to be an individualistic and unstructured, non-evidence based belief in some kind of supreme being and may include any or none of the beliefs above.

I do not believe that cultural or religious realities, though hugely important in humanity’s general agreement as to what the agreed reality is so that he can understand what motivates his fellow man and cooperate in getting things done, has much to do with the search for reality that it is each individual’s choice to make.  It is, rather, a patchwork of stories and ideas which folk thousands of years ago used to try to make sense of their world.  Probably then, and certainly now, these are clung to as a security blanket which answers all the big questions, protects one from having to trouble ones’ mind too much and generally allows the believer to abrogate all responsibility for getting closer to the fire.   

Donne’s famed, ‘No Man Is An Island’ is applicable with regard to those realities which are agreed across cultures and religions, and on a looser level between cultures and faiths, but I would suggest, as earlier, that, ‘Each Man Is An Island’ is more appropriate when discussing the only pursuit of reality which we can know as real, our own.  This would be the case even if we were part of somebody else’s dream or a huge game simulation.

To move on then to one’s own, by definition subjective, search for reality, taking into account my cultural and religious conditioning, life experience of different sorts and age (3 days short of 67 d.v. at the time of writing) I would like to consider the multiple realities e.g. those influenced by history, theology, philosophy, cultural, semantics, experiential, travel, scientific, conspiracies and so forth existing in one being; for example me, the only one I can ‘logically’ know exists, though the logic in this case is a little like the logical straightjackets one wears when accepting the ‘logic’ of Zeno’s Paradoxes.

Imagine if you will a giant railway lay out owned by a proud child.  (For the purposes of whimsy one could call this child God.)  The various and multiple tracks of each strand of ones’ realities commence from the engine sheds, separate but running parallel.  Soon they will part, running through different countryside, experiencing different weather, visiting a variety of destinations, returning from time to time to run parallel and here and there cross over each other, touching briefly, here reliant on points set by another force, there running into sidings, truncated, left behind as others continue. 

At last they come together at the terminus, all the tracks, once more together, the final reality that one takes through death and into that which comes after.  That’s me; that’s you; one way or another that’s pretty much everybody.  The difference lies in where the tracks visited between leaving the engine sheds and arriving at the terminus and whether the intelligences running along the tracks noticed, and thought about what they were seeing and experiencing in a critical/analytical manner, or not.

Consider now a possible unknown known which lies within each of us, the fact that as the cliché goes, we are of star-stuff made.  That means that every particle in our body – the trillions of atoms – all came from the Big Bang.  Now consider, each atom has had time to be something else.  So, we have been the tree, the mountain etc.  Now consider Quantum Theory. Some particles have a twin with which they are entangled. Allan Steinhardt, PhD, Author "Radar in the Quantum Limit", and formerly DARPA's Chief Scientist, states that ‘in nature many, perhaps most subatomic particles are quantum entangled within an atom. The Pauli exclusion guarantees this for electron paired shell particles, so unless we have an ionized particle with a free electron the electrons will be entangled, same for protons, and neutrons.’

It’s called ‘entanglement’ because they resonate, no matter how far apart they are, including on opposite sides of the Universe.  So, not only have we been everything, but it may be possible that we are part of everything, now, or at least trillions of other things.  Do our cells ‘know’ at a particle level that they were other things and are other things? One could suggest, in that case, that reality is that we are part of everything, always have been, always will be and that the next phase in our ‘knowing’ reality is understanding what at least some of that means.  This ‘truth’ is one I find acceptable.

Summarising briefly, therefore, we can accept at this point that reality is something we can never grasp, that different factors can influence individual realities; that people share much in common in their beliefs regarding what is real, and some people are nearer the fire, some further away, for a variety of reasons.  Personally, having got to that point in my life (retired) when I can be more capricious in my exploration of reality I find myself feeling a sense of duty to do so.

Something of this can be expressed in a desire to explore the concept that we may know things which we don’t know we know.  Obviously we have a subconscious.  Quantum theory.  All star stuff.  Some of our atoms must be resonating with other atoms elsewhere in the universe.  Do our atoms ‘remember’ being a tree, a star, a pile of excrement, an alien super-being?  And are our minds already quantum computers?  I will return to this latter point.

Before going any further, perhaps it would be wise to recap in more detail where I am and how I got here.  I started on safe ground with dear old Descartes and ‘Cogito ergo sum’ and then proceeded from there.   Of course, my preconditioning of the Ancient Greek philosophers through to the Germans, Brits and on to more modern philosophy carried me a long way, but partly on territory already explored  - just formalising it in my head, sequencing it and tying things together.  

I’ve wandered down all sorts of avenues spiritual; oddly I have not discussed reincarnation – I’m convinced but know that there’s also ‘something’ in between lives.  I will perhaps look at this further later – and more recently got to grips with mutli-dimensional thinking, leaping from good old Einstein to string theory and thence into the quantum world.  This latter has been, and is, a step up, nay, an escalator taking me from the old reality which I used to live within.

So, going forward, quantum superpositioning takes one to a new level of thinking and for me, quantum entanglement has the most extraordinary implications (as has quantum tunnelling which allows information from one entangled particle to ‘tunnel’ into another dimension and come out again and give the information to the entangled partner, even if it is light years away, instantly, so faster than the speed of light, meaning Einstein was wrong) though I think it possible that Lanza’s ‘Biocentrism’ is a leap too far … but worry that it might not be!  I need to understand him more fully and have ordered his seminal book for my upcoming birthday.  As I understand him at present, in some ways his concept relates to the simulation idea, but in his case we are making the simulation from raw data that is not made into any form unless our minds actively make it so.  It’s like it’s all a dream, but our dream dreams and forms reality.

I return to the idea that quantum entangled particles within, say, our mind, need not be entangled with another particle in our mind but could be entangled with a particle in the mind of an alien being on a planet in Alpha Centauri.  While this is unlikely in the extreme, so was the idea of quantum entanglement until somebody came up with it – maybe forming a simulation to suit their search! 

One needs to consider, too, that every particle in our body was created (if you’re not going to run with Lanza’s Biocentrism, and I’m not, not yet, anyway) when the Big Bang took place, and therefore in the 13.7 billion years since then has been part of a trillion different things, from rocks, to stars, to birds, to piles of crap etc.  (I really love the late and much missed Carl Sagan’s idea that we are all, ‘of star stuff’ made.) 

Now, to explore further possible realities, quantum entangled particles, not matter how far apart (either side of the universe, it has been agreed) are constantly in contact, so, as said previously, what you do to one influences the other, immediately, in terms of (opposite) spin.  Now, what if these entangled particles and, indeed, all particles that make up you or me, the ones that have all been a trillion things before, the ones in mothers and their children / grandchildren, those in twins, not only have intimate and immediate points of contact with others, all over the universe, possibly also in the past and future, possibly, too,  through the multidimensional universe necessitated by string theory and that we believe exist otherwise dark matter wouldn’t be powerful enough to do its job, but that we don’t understand, and not only can you change a quantum particle’s behaviours merely by observing it – and therefore do the same to an entangled absent, unobserved particle – (you can actually also influence how they behave in the past) but also actually mean we are, intellectually, and I suppose in some ways, physically, part of a huge, interconnected gestalt, though each gestalt an individual one?  Ah, what then?  

We may reincarnate at the same time as being what we are now, were and will be.  Lanza posits a universe of chaotic data that is everything about everything and our consciousness, our act of observation and intellectual manipulation actually form the universe, just as on a quantum level a particle doesn’t act as a wave until it is observed / measured.  If we accept his view, there was, therefore, no Big Bang, only consciousness manipulating data.   We can then be in a universe with no past or future but an endless series of self-created ‘nows’.

   

Now, I don’t go with him that way, but am intellectually seduced by the idea (at the moment considered impossible … probably!) that the particles which make up us as people are resonating with particles all over the show, and though singly as far as we can see don’t carry meaningful information, may do en masse, illustrated perhaps by the fact that a twin can feel at exactly the same time the pain of a burst appendix of their twin who is miles away and actually having the burst appendix.  I think that on a quantum level there is some form of entanglement at work – or similar … probably … and I think it’s an example of what we all have.

As a side issue, let us consider, too, the world of dreams.  Are they, as is generally accepted, ways our mind makes sense of the day or are some, at least, those most extraordinarily real ones, times when one is visiting / entangled / seeing through the glass more clearly into an alternate universe?  And what of all those dreams where we can fly?  Are they some form of cellular/quantum memory or are they shadows of what we could do, if we but knew reality better?  And the visits made using hallucinogenics, might they be real, touching a wider perception of our reality, or indeed another dimension entirely?

 

To add another layer to a developing view of reality, if we accept the concept of reincarnation, which as stated earlier, I do  (the compelling evidence is vast, but for a subject primer see the work on near death studies and research on reincarnation evidence from children, of Ian Stevenson, Psychiatrist, director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.) then perhaps each rebirth is a further chance to understand reality. 

Now, obviously this is speculation on my part – isn’t it all! - but it could be the case that each time we return, we do so to a world where one recognises more dimensions.  Let us say, metaphorically, that we start out as an amoeba.  The world lacks dimensions other than forward and back.  Next we may be a bird, with forward, back, up and down.  As a human there are an agreed 3 perceived dimensions of length, width, height, and as thinking becomes more sophisticated we add to those, and with time, play with the idea of another spatial dimension thus allowing the tesseract. 

Continuing this thread, we know that at present with string theory et al, more dimensions are posited.  If they exist, it is possible we will then go through a series of incarnations climbing the intellectual ladder that they offer on the route way to reality until, perhaps, one has it all cracked away, at which point one qualifies as a ‘God’ or becomes part of that mystery in some unknowable way.

I realise at this point I have done nothing to explain the consciousness element of reality.  Indeed, if consciousness means being awake, I have perhaps done no more than discuss a dream.  We could, of course, now explore ‘awake’ and ‘dream’ for meaning but I won’t, here at least.  What must be said, however, is that I have gone no further than proving my own existence, to me.  All the rest of you, the world, everything, could be part of my dream.

Actually, in some way, since I have only proved that I exist, and that reality is my (subjective) reality; there could be nothing else.  I could be the sole inhabitant of a Robert Lanza like Biocentric universe, manipulating raw data to create a world for myself to live in and deluding myself as to its nature.  If that’s the case, I guess that would make me God, and if that’s the case, though I say it myself, I’m really impressed with the amount of detail I’ve managed to create!  To continue down that road, however, leads to madness! 

So, I need to include in this study of reality, proofs of the existence of others and an understanding of consciousness, in that order of priority.  Consciousness is an interesting biological puzzle, but I know it’s real, at least for me.  I need to find out if it is real for you, after creating a you for it to be real for. 

An interesting, related point is the mind as a quantum biological mechanism. In a study published in 2015, physicist Matthew Fisher of the University of California at Santa Barbara argued that the brain might contain molecules capable of sustaining more robust quantum superpositions.  Most people think he’s wrong, and especially so about the ability for the brain to have entangled particles which do not decohere within nanoseconds due to the wet and far from interference free environment they are in.  He thinks that the nuclei of phosphorus atoms may have the ability to not decohere, and phosphorous is everywhere in living cells.

He states that if the phosphorus atoms are incorporated into larger objects called "Posner molecules" - these are clusters of six phosphate ions, combined with nine calcium ions - that in such a situation once inside, the Posner molecules they could trigger the firing of a signal to another neuron, by falling apart and releasing their calcium ions.  Because of entanglement in Posner molecules, two such signals might thus in turn become entangled: a kind of quantum superposition of a "thought", you might say. "If quantum processing with nuclear spins is in fact present in the brain, it would be an extremely common occurrence, happening pretty much all the time," Fisher says. 

So, even if my mind is the only one I can prove exists, it is possibly an even more extraordinary piece of kit than we thought, and assuming that quantum entangled rudimentary qbits can exist in the brain, the brain is therefore capable of quantum computing.  To put that in perspective it is thought possible that with 150 fully entangled qubits in a computer it would be possible to store as many different numbers as there are atoms in the universe.  The problem is that even in super cooled environments they maintain stability/coherence for mere nanoseconds.  The Chinese suggest they have already achieved something more stable with 10 qbits.  All that aside, if the brain does manage this, what does it mean about what we don’t know that we know?

I think that reading through the above, the sheer complexity of the universe, even as we know it now, is a ‘true’ logical argument against my mind being the only one there is.  The complexity of it all satisfies me as sufficient evidence for the existence of minds other than mine, so I accept that as a ‘given’.  Quite simply put, if it had all been down to me it would have been a whole lot simpler and would have included more chip butties with salad cream.  I do not accept, however, that anything else can be objectively agreed, other than through descriptions that give us – we, the minds – convenient rough guide labels which enable us to communicate with each other and our intellects to have the scaffolding upon which to build other developmental concepts.  We remain, therefore, with acceptance merely of mind, but now we have company!

An interesting little theory of mind from Dr Dirk Meijer, a prof at Groningen Uni (A Uni I rate, partly because it’s where I started a most acceptable and stimulating MOOC on ‘Religion and Conflict’ which I take up again next month, and more objectively perhaps, it does well in the World Rankings) takes account that our brain and mind could be different things, though related, possibly through entanglement or the ability for particles to be simultaneously waves also.  The brain, if we accept our body exists, is a machine which looks after and controls said body in all the obvious ways which require no explanation here.  The mind, however, is something altogether different.  The suggestion, which happily chimes with mine about us being connected to the whole universe in some sort of gestalt, is that the mind is a separate but attached entity which exists in another dimension and, for mathematical modelling reasons I only vaguely understand, takes the shape of a torus and acts similarly to a black hole, with interaction with the brain occurring at the event horizon.   I quite like that!  (Because it supports my prejudices.)

We can look now at purpose a little more.  I have stated already my belief that the purpose is to move nearer to the fire of truth / reality.  I believe, partly due to cultural conditioning, partly through an event in my life which convinced me, that there is a loving super-being who / which has an overview of the whole kit and caboodle and will see us right in the final analysis.  I don’t think he/she/it intervenes much in the general lives of individuals, except in extremis, but am certain as to the presence of that ‘Mystery’ and its most certain love.  Otherwise I haven’t the foggiest as to what it’s up to or its plans.  It would be a curious conceit to believe with my intellect and experience that I would have, and I’ve always thought it odd that religions appear to believe they have got him – it seems to always be a him – sussed.

So, accepting that I’m fortunate enough to be sure there’s a back stop and ‘higher’ and ongoing meaning to my life and death, and accepting that I will reincarnate but in between carnations (not the flowers!) I don’t know what happens, accepting, in essence, my ignorance and that one purpose is to whittle away at it, and finally, accepting that there are other people here abouts, I need to consider my purpose, though possibly more limited, on this world stage.  Now, on the basis that whatever is going on there is a Mysterious love behind it, it is my view that our purpose is to spread the love!  The love I refer to here is wrapped around empathy (and maybe entanglement).  I think we have a ‘duty’, perhaps, as part of our pursuit of enlightenment to make the world a better place for all creatures great and small upon it. 

I am not a Jane and do draw the line somewhat arbitrarily with regard to which of those creatures comes under my umbrella of consideration.   As an example, initially I stopped eat anything I would cuddle if young, so that included all mammals – but not Mr Gove, which made it somewhat illogical.  I have now included all birds and reptiles and would like to, soon, include fish.  I cannot envisage a time when this respect for ‘sentience’ and the right to life will include insects, probably, in truth, because it’s too complicated. 

In my life I have tried to have a ball, and so far, so good, but have also tried to serve.  I was going to be a priest but ended up a teacher and fairly swiftly thereafter a senior ‘leader and then head.  Somehow a life of service should – the wretched achievement ethic carries with it an implied need to not enjoy it – include hardship.  I loved my work, however, so much so that in retrospect it meant I left various relationships and marriages because I wouldn’t change from thinking Monday was the best day of the week and acting accordingly.  My present marriage has lasted over 20 years partly because Alison let me be a headmaster first and husband and father second, whilst I spent much of my time living away from home.  I am now able to appreciate that very much and also recognise I could have been a better husband and father and therefore accept the love of my wife and children with a fair degree of humility.  It was as it was, however.

My last 10 years working as a head in failing schools, sometimes more than one at a time, though it quite literally nearly killed me made my ‘service’ ever more purposeful – much more so.  Now I try to serve through my writing, though mostly fiction.  I recognise, also, somewhat reluctantly, which is illogical and probably covers a fear of failure, that if I don’t make an effort to get it published that this makes my efforts to serve null and void and the last 5 years just a period of self-indulgent minor decadence whilst also continuing to have a ball. 

Service is an odd word, carrying all sorts of implied somewhat lofty tendrils of a Victorian morality.  Service can be a mother bringing up her children, or, of course, the 2 parents doing so.  It can be building cars or houses the best way one can, giving joy to many.  One can serve in myriad ways.  Possibly the thing that makes it ‘service’ as opposed to a job or a necessity is the motivation behind doing whatever it is, and the doing of it to the best of ones’ ability.  In essence, the essential motivation within a purposeful life, on the practical side of things, is to do whatever one can to make the world a better place in whatever circumstances one finds oneself in.

Inevitably the good old achievement ethic can sit on ones chest like a sanctimonious toad and scream for more service, more, ever more, because though there is much that is wonderful on Earth there is much pain and suffering also; much misery and despair, and ones’ work is never done until all of that dark is lifted and replaced by light.  I am not a wealthy man but I live well and could give more than I do of my money to make the lives of others better.  So, somewhat annoyingly, the toad is, of course, right.

I could be out now feeding the homeless.  I could be doing all sorts of things to help to alleviate the sufferings of humanity or beasties but what I am doing is exploring my inner landscapes for meaning.  Later today, as I write this, I will give time, which is inconvenient for me, to help somebody I know.  I quite often do that for people – Alison even thinks I’m a ‘soft touch -, but it is partly not because I’m trying to make the world a better place, though I am, and feel that one should do the ‘right thing’ when possible, and with no thought of reward, but rather, I do it for the fact that it makes me feel good, not smug good, but ‘right’ good.  It’s the same, in some ways, with the beasties which share my life, the 3 dogs and 6 cats.  They cost me, sometimes lots, and they can be inconvenient, but they have a very good life and, mostly they bring me great joy and amusement.  My service to them and to others is not solely altruism by any means.

To come to some conclusion, therefore, the exploration of the ‘mundanity’ that is physical life, life, then, is for learning and for serving.   It seems dull when looked at in those terms, however, and it is far from just that.  There is much to be said in agreement of Keats’s observation, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’  The pursuit of awe and wonder seems to be part of the human condition.  Love, too, is something which transcends the purely physical.  In any understanding of reality one has to accept that the unknown unknowns must always outweigh the known knowns and known unknowns.  This acceptance does not mean that one should stop chipping away at ignorance, quite the contrary.  One should go at it hammer and tongs, for it is central, in my belief at least, to our reason for being and for living these incarnations, that and doing our best to ‘build heaven on Earth’ for all those creatures which on Earth do dwell. 

Acceptance, too, is helpful (and comforting) but not required, in knowing - not ‘just’ ‘believing’ -  that there is a plan, and that something Mysterious but a being of ineffable love is at the centre of that plan.  It’s fine and dandy to try to understand that Mystery if one is so driven, as I have been in the past, but to do so, in my view now, is a form of conceit and will not lead one closer to the fire of truth, for that Mystery and Love is far too complex, or large, all of creation large, and we are as but amoebas relative to humanity in our ability to comprehend, and efforts to do so can lead to unhappiness or arrogance, or both, and blight the true meaning of reality as we, in all our smallness, may understand it.

Finally, of course, and certainly solely subjectively, there is my age.  I am about to be 67 d.v.  That’s only 3 years away from 70.  I can’t fudge it intellectually like I could when I got to sixty, the new fifty and all that rubbish.   At first the realisation that I was an old man was rather difficult for me to get my head round.  I’ve done so, however, and recognise how lucky I am, the many advantages of being one, the main one being I’m not dead, as I’m not quite ready for the next adventure yet and still have things to do.  I also realised that I can be an old man in my own way.  There are no rules that say I should sit in the corner and wait for death.  It is not the fact that my mind has turned to mush.  The truth is that being old is in many ways incredibly liberating.

People seem to think that being young is smart and being old is somewhat pitiful.  I have held that view myself.  They patronise, essentially, by saying things like, “How are you today young man?” and when they talk about old people driving slowly suddenly stop and say, “That’s not including you Ches.  You’re not old.”  It’s almost as though old is a euphemism for some kind of disease. 

The smart and successful winners in life are the ones who have managed to get old. (and are happy)  The case for younger people is yet to be proven.  Sure, there are some down sides to getting old, it’s true.  One is that one knows that death is nearer than one thinks it is when one is young, so there’s less time to get things done and procrastination is less of a sensible option.  In my case, also, my body is a bit of a wreck, much of that being down to me.  Health, generally, can become more of an issue, and if one forgets things one wonders if it is an early sign of dementia.

As with any age, life is what you make of it. With modern medication there is much less negativity in older life and one can continue pretty much as normal but with all the advantages that accrue from many years of experience helping one to find the easy way to do things, the best way to enjoy things, the most effective way to avoid pitfalls, the gentlest way to say no, the smoothest way to get your own way and so forth.  Also, though I loved my job, the new reality of retirement, despite the less certain quantity of time ahead, one has, in contradiction, all the time in the world.  One has time to read, to study and to think in ways that just weren’t there when one worked and had the responsibility of family and so forth.  Now I’m paid admittedly less than a third of what I was but it is still quite a bit more than the average wage in the UK or France, I have no mortgage and seem to be jogging along perfectly happily.  Getting paid for doing nothing is also rather pleasant!

With regard to age, yep, I’d prefer it if my body wasn’t a bit of a wreck but I could deal with some of that myself if I ate less and exercised more.  Other than that, unlike what people who call me, ‘Young man’ think, there’s absolutely no way I’d like to be younger and no way I envy them their youth, indeed I sometimes pity them as I see lack of experience meaning they screw up in various ways.  Also, as one’s sex drive drops a bit, one is less likely to make the old blunders.  I always liked when George Melly misquoted Sophocles (but managed to carry the message very effectively) who, on being asked if he was upset at losing his sexual appetite, replied: ‘Upset, certainly not. It’s like being unchained from a lunatic.’  Mine has not gone but it has diminished and though I rather enjoyed the lunatic leading me, there’s no doubt it got me into a great deal of trouble from time to time.  Now I have more choice in the matter and can choose to follow my mind and not my willy if I so wish!

Life, in truth, is richer now than it has ever been and, there’s maybe a conceit involved here, I am enjoying having time to explore the world while staying here and also exploring my inner landscapes.  I’ve jogged around the world a fair bit, lived in interesting places, and now I’m happy where I am.  Through the net the world is at my fingertips.  I guess the truth with regard to accepting the reality of old age is rather Lanzaesque in that one’s world is whatever one decides to make it.  Yep, I know there’s more chance of that peace and joy being disturbed by a cancer or dementia diagnosis but I’ll have to deal with that then, not now.  Now I have learned what a joyous gift the present is and I set the alarm each day for 7.00 to ensure that I make the most of the fantastic gift that is old age.

That’ll do for now.  Telepathy, intuition, instinct, telekinesis, teleportation, poltergeists and ghosts, spontaneous combustion, alien encounters, prophecy and lots of other wonders which are woven into the tapestry which is reality, and may be more pertinent and useful in moving one closer to the fire of truth, will have to wait, but not for too long, for, at least this time around, further time is not guaranteed.

Carpe diem.

I have had the amazing good fortune to live here for around 5 years now.  I love my house with an extraordinary mix of fierce, unbelieving  possessiveness and calm delight.  With regard to the countryside around it, I tend to think of Tolkien,[i] and Bilbo’s ‘Shire’.  So, it’s odd when something happens which jolts the joy.  No, that’s not right.  My joy remains central to my being, still; it’s the ‘shock’ of finding that there are people who feel differently.  I know that’s absurd, on the face of it, but I find Kerlanguet so absolutely ‘right’, if you get my meaning, the quirky old place fitting me like a second skin, and the area so delightful that it’s hard to imagine other people here being unhappy.  But of course some are.

I was talking with the local pharmacist who I’m trying to persuade should introduce a fidelity card (carte de fidélité) for customers like me who in their declining years have shed-loads of drugs.  Since they’re all paid for by the ‘system’, I think a free coffee or such like every 5^th visit might be nice.  Anyway, I digress.  We got to talking about suicide[ii], literally the ‘slaying of oneself’, the reasons for why will become clear, and I was amazed to learn from him, since confirmed by ‘Google’, that the suicide rate in Brittany is high.

My further research taught me that suicide in France generally is high[iii], with 27 poor souls killing themselves each day, and Brittany sees the most suicides in proportion to the size of population.  I find this both terribly sad and absolutely astonishing.  The most popular methods, according to the pharmacist, are shooting oneself (generally the case in farming communities everywhere, where guns are easily accessible) hanging and, I found truly remarkable, drowning oneself in a local lake, and round here every commune appears to have one, generally beautifully kept and greatly underutilised, though not by me, and apparently not by people wishing to end it all.

Now, this conversation came up because a friend told me that a lady from my nearby my local village – my commune – had recently taken advantage of the beautiful lake to kill herself.  That, in itself, is appalling but somehow for me it was somewhat personal.  You see, that’s ‘my’ lake.  I have walked round it with the dogs, quite literally hundreds of times, generally with not another soul in sight, taking advantage of the well-spaced benches to sit observing the changing seasons trail their fingers across the grass, flowers, shrubs and trees.  It moves from incredibly verdant in the summer to, in winter, being a place surrounded by stick trees looking like they’ve been drawn by a child who couldn’t be bothered to give them leaves except in one section of conifers where they slid a green crayon sideways across the page.  

According to the season, there’s a plethora of plant and wildlife.  As the days warm and the sun brings forth the lakes’ bounty there are quite literally hundreds of tiny frogs, only about a centimetre long, which suddenly appear in the area where the frogspawn and tadpoles had proliferated, and one has to take care not to step on them, which truly aint easy, believe me, as they make their way across the path and beyond a line of trees to I know not where.  After a few days they’ve all gone; it’s such a contrast it’s like the event never happened! 

I have seen the lake frozen and also with the summer sun on it making it mirror-bright, with the glass broken from time to time by leaping fish.  There are water boatmen doing whatever water boatmen do, skating across the surface, and dragon flies, flashes of iridescent, straight from God, peacock colours scintillating in the sunlight, not as is a quite commonly held misconception, just for a day of glory but for their six or seven months[iv].  As the season warms the lake and its surroundings to an ever more burgeoning life of insects, the swifts and/or swallows (I never remember which ones have the long tail) start an extraordinary precision swooping and flying across the lakes’ surface, seeming often to be inevitably about to have a ducking but never doing so.  Both their eyesight and coordination are absolutely phenomenal!

The best air show I have ever attended, however, far better than anything I’ve ever seen from a human flyer or even a swift/swallow, also took place at the lake, but with an altogether different bird.  During our peregrination (charmingly referred to as a ‘balade’ in French) one day I had noticed a couple of seagulls, scouts as I’ve learned to recognise, checking out the situation, and then they disappeared for a while, returning, as is often the case, with a flock of around fifty. I had nearly completed the walk, the dogs were happy and as we neared the shelter of the old Rangy it suddenly turned to rain.  I noticed, though, that one of the gulls was not settling quietly with the flock but doing a most extraordinary aerobatic display, the like of which I’d never seen before and nor have I since. 

I couldn’t help myself, and the poor dogs must have thought me mad, but I had to sit down and watch.  It was truly breath-taking and I felt I was in the presence of a disciple of Jonathan Living Seagull.  (If you haven’t read it, go to the link[v] below, download the free PDF and read it.  It is a book of absolute wonder!)  I sat there for a good twenty minutes and got soaked, as did my poor canine companions, though they seemed not to care, but I really didn’t even notice.  I was both awe-inspired and somehow a little jealous at this beautiful creature’s abilities, but mostly I was lost in its joy, for there can be no doubt that it was flying in the most glorious way because it loved it, and its joy and love was infectious, for me, at least.  Its dull flock just sat on the water.  Maybe they too were watching and awed, but somehow I doubt it.  I will never know, but I do know he/she was a truly magnificent dreamer making it happen.  JLS would have been proud!

Beside the lake I know, too, the little ‘runs’ which rabbits use, and the bank where badgers live, at the edge of the wood, their ‘tar’ filled toilets neatly dug twenty or thirty metres from their sett.  Nowadays I often sit and watch the coypu family who quite obviously love a swim.  Riley it was who first found their ‘runs’ from the lake, and by sitting quietly and patiently I’ve seen them glide through the waters, mostly submerged, and then disappear into their tunnels in the lakes’ bank or come ashore and flop on it, somewhat as otters do, reminding me too of the way my ferrets moved when excited, or climbing.

I could go on but I won’t.  I just want to convey properly how I feel about the place and why; I want you to have some sense of understanding my absurd conceit that this is ‘my’ lake, and when the occasional interloper appears I sometimes feel like going over to them and asking them what the hell they think they’re doing there and can they please just bugger off to some other lake and leave me and the dogs alone with mine.

And then a lady comes and kills herself in it and somehow she has become part of it.

I don’t want to weird or prurient in trying to understand her but somehow I feel somewhat duty bound to do so.  She is connected to me through the lake, ‘my’ lake, and her life and her tragedy cannot be dismissed.  She deserves my effort to understand what drove her, this fellow human being who saw what I see as beautiful as a way to end her life, possibly because she thought it beautiful too.  She saw it and it was the last thing she saw.  Somehow that’s significant to me.  It must be.  It would be a callous dismissal of the importance of her life – of life, full stop - if it were not so.

The limited ‘facts’ (most slippery things, especially in situations such as this)  that I have are that she lived near to my local village, so probably in a fairly solitary spot like us.  She was ‘old’/ in her sixties, married, had grownup children who had left home and seemed perfectly normal.  The pharmacist had seen her, talked with her only the day before and all seemed to be well in her world.  Added to that, two friends have told me that she lived on her own.  Whether she was separated or a widow, I know not.  On the day she killed herself, extraordinarily she went to the local hairdressers and had her hair done.  She then walked to the lake, stripped off and got in the water leaving a pile of clothes and her handbag.  

It appears that everybody who knew her and had interacted with her recently, relative to her death, had seen no signs that this was even vaguely on the cards.  How can this be?  Were they blind or was she very good at hiding her unhappiness?   Or is somebody lying?  I don’t know, and quite possibly never will, and even the few ‘facts’ I do know could be wrong.  But I have to ‘honour’ her life and give it the ‘meaning’ that she obviously did not feel it had, by trying to see why she did what she did.

I have sat by the lake side and wondered; did she, too, sit a while and look at its calm surface?  When she acted on her decision and got in the water, did she dive or walk in?  I think probably the latter and wonder if she felt the shock of the sharp and cruel bite of the cold as she moved further in to the waters’ asphyxiating and ultimately extinguishing  embrace?  Did she at the end of her walk, stumble or make a positive choice to go under? 

I’ve Googled again[vi].  Apparently her lungs would have likely filled within forty seconds, plus or minus a few, and unconsciousness would have shortly followed, with Sergeant Death taking her soul into his most certain custody within two or three minutes after she had been in the cold water.  I wonder, if she stumbled; did she panic and then inhale the water or did she do it deliberately?  If so, what an effort of will!  One would need to be truly determined to be able to do that, too unbearably, heart and mindbreakingly unhappy.  Then at any point did she think perhaps she wouldn’t do it but find that it was too late?  I so desperately hope not.  That would have made the whole exercise and its fallout doubly tragic for her, in the great scheme of things, at least.

I know that Sir Winston Churchill suffered from depression and referred to it as, his ‘black dog’.   Apparently the expression goes back centuries and originally, and possibly for him also, meant a dark mood, down in the dumps with a vengeance, though it is said he suffered much more than that.  I recognise that since I’ve never suffered from true depression, though as with all people I have thought of myself as depressed from time to time, not using the word correctly, I will never understand, deo volente, the desperate black hole that people can fall into when they are truly, clinically depressed, and that it becomes so unutterably miserable, self-worth goes to hell in a handcart; they believe to the very depths of their soul that life is a pointless burden and feel that the only way to deal with it is to get out. 

I recognise, too, that this lady might not have been depressed.  It may be that something had occurred in her life which had made it pointless to stay alive, the pain being so great.  It is possible, too, that she went out there pissed, or on some kind of drugs, and didn’t know what she was doing, or was doing it as an ultimate emotionally blackmailing, ‘I told you so!’  I get the strong impression from what little I’ve learned of her that that was pretty unlikely, however.

Viktor Frankl, the eminent psychologist who developed the ‘philosophy’ which led to the psychological school of logotherapy (Well worth reading his marvellous, ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ which he wrote just 2 years after liberation.  You can get a free PDF at the link below[vii]) after experiencing the second world war incarcerated in Auschwitz and other camps, essentially posited that the human condition was one where we are motivated by a ‘will to meaning’.  He said, referring to his time in the camps, that, “Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”  He should know!  And so, in all probability the lady in ‘my’ lake no longer had a ‘why’.  I hope, however, that, unlikely as it may seem, she actually did it as a positive thing, maybe hoping to hitch up again with somebody who had already died, her husband perhaps, and thus apparently illogically having her hair done, or decided that the next phase of the adventure of existence was calling so hard that she had to heed that siren song.  I recognise however, with an unfortunate metaphor, that I am clutching at straws.

So, I’ve sat looking at the cool, still waters and wondered what the fish and the coypu made of it all.  Not much, in all likelihood, only noticing perhaps the disturbance as her poor, oxygen starved body thrashed about a bit before she slipped away to ‘The Mystery’, and made them flee from possible danger … an irony, in that she was at her least dangerous ever, in physical terms, and yet her act was the most dangerous, almost certainly, in her life, reaching out from the cold and murky waters like a metaphorical scalpel slashing at the hearts of all who cared for her and who will live forever with the guilt of why they didn’t notice or didn’t act, topping, indeed, their natural sense of loss.  How desperately sad that from the black hole of her misery and sense of pointlessness she will have cast out ripples across both time and space of that very same misery, infecting those who cared – though possibly not enough - as she slid under the water after taking her last breath of sweet, life-giving air. 

What was her state of mind?  Was she calm, firm in her resolve?  Taking into account the visit to the hairdressers and her leaving her clothes at the side of the lake, it would appear so.  One can imagine her walking purposefully down the hill and into the lake, turning it, as she did so, into a killer.  Why did she not see another way?  If her life here was so unhappy, why not just leave?  If that doesn’t end up allowing one to be happy, even then it’s not a good reason to walk into a lake.  Why didn’t she call somebody, and if there was nobody, then the Samaritans?[viii]

Many things are possible but none should lead to the ghastly, overwhelming misery that would make suicide seem the right thing to do … hell, the only thing to do.  But I do not judge, please accept, for with the best will in the world, I do not truly even begin to understand, though I struggle to do so, as my humanity demands I should, the dark, cold hell she was living in.  I recognise, too, that suicide can sometimes be the right thing to do.  I have considered it, as most people have, especially when they get older.  Believe me, I am not having any ghastly thoughts, but if I were to have some extraordinarily painful decline which overcame palliative release and gaveno hope, or dementia, the ‘Bacon Slicer Man’, was taking my mind, then I would consider it, taking the easy route with all my drugs plus a bottle of Remy, after taking up the fags for a while!  I  don’t get the impression that she was there though, but hell, what do I know?

That said, it is an absurd wish, but a wish none-the-less, that my French was eloquent and I could have been walking round the lake at the time and sat down beside her on a bench and talked with her.  I would have listened first, if she would but tell me; I would have listened and not told her lies.  I would not have told her everything was going to be alright if it wasn’t.  I am not trained as a counsellor, though I have countless times listened to tragic stories of parents whose children have attended my schools, or from time to time, staff, and worst of all, now and again, pupils themselves who had witnessed sometimes the horrors of true nightmares.  A lesson I have learned is that the very act of talking to a sympathetic ear sometimes makes an extraordinary difference for suffering souls.  Would it have with this lady?  I don’t know.  Depression, if that’s what was the case, is a beast that is hard to persuade to let go once its teeth are in somebody.  I would have tried to pour my belief in her, into her, though, and my love and awe reserved for all miracles, that is all people.

All people have worth, I would do my damnedest to convince her, extraordinary worth.  All people are unique miracles, she amongst them, with almost endless and unlimited potential.  Our society which values a painting like the Mona Lisa at countless millions but allows people to starve in the world has got its priorities all wrong, and in their hearts the vast majority of people recognise that and where possible try to stand against it.  The vast majority of people are good, kind and loving, you see. I would have tried to open her eyes to what a miracle she was and what wild potential she had within her.  I would, most of all, have tried to find within her a chink where one could pour, little by little, light into the black hole that was consuming her.  That chink is often linked to a person, be it a child or grandchild, or children, or people generally, or possibly even a ‘dream’, and the light one can pour in is love. 

I would have fought to rekindle some love within her, because once there was love again, she could start to warm herself from within.   There would be no magic moment, I know.  I would not lie and say that love would sort all the crap out.  I would just work on replanting that seed of love firmly so that its light could show her, slowly and painfully though it would probably be, enough courage to see a way out of the black hole, enough love and light to rekindle that most wonderful of life rafts, hope, and from there to a meaningful ‘why’ for living.

I wish, and who knows if I’d have achieved anything anyway … but besides all, it didn’t happen so I end up sitting staring at the unbroken calm of the lake as I have often done, and thinking of the mystery which lies below its surface.  The outward calm is a deceiving blanket over a world of little peace and great, on-going, frenzied violence, as fish and other beasties pursue each other with the intent of turning their fellow denizens of the relative deep into their déjeuner.  Thus I have always recognised the paradox of the beauty and peace that surrounds the delightful, still waters which often times reflect most exquisitely the world above whilst concealing beneath a world of violence, fear, misery and death.

One must consider, too, what the unlucky soul who found the pile of clothes and handbag thought and felt.  Hopefully uncertainty as to the outcome.  Her body would have sunk (See vi below) quite quickly.  I guess they would have called our first responders, the Pompiers who would have, soon after arrival at the lake, called the Gendarmes and they, probably getting info from the handbag will have informed the family and perhaps, had to drag the lake, unpleasant experiences for everybody concerned.  They must have got on with it promptly as I saw no sign and I go nearly every day.   

I guess, then, as one has to accept her death, there is some sort of peculiar logic and appropriateness that the lady of the lake finally gave herself over to it.  Whatever the case, may she find peace, love and joy in the next adventure, and God bless her family and friends and help to salve their pain. 

And may all you who read this remember always that you are a totally unique miracle of immeasurable worth and that there is always, always, always love and light if you do but remain with open eyes and an open heart, no matter what crap life throws at you to assist you in interesting learning experiences!  Love to you all. 

N.B.  Friends, please do not share this.  I needed to write it down and share it because that’s what I do; equally her family and friends most certainly don’t need to read it, and there is not even an outside chance that they will if we keep it to ourselves.  My thanks, and again my love. 

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[i] https://www.lake.k12.fl.us/cms/lib/FL01000799/Centricity/Domain/4432/The%20Hobbit%20byJ%20%20RR%20Tolkien%20EBOOK.pdf

[ii] Latin suicidium "suicide," from Latin sui "of oneself" " and from caedere "to slay"

[iii] https://www.thelocal.fr/20160204/france-sees-27-deaths-a-day-from-suicide

[iv] https://www.dragonfly-site.com/how-long-dragonflies-live.html

[v] http://csermelyblog.tehetsegpont.hu/sites/default/files/angol%20sir%C3%A1ly.pdf

[vi] http://www.operationtakemehome.org/sar/Fire%20and%20Rescue%20Personnel/Biology%20of%20drowning.pdf

[vii] http://www.fablar.in/yahoo_site_admin/assets/docs/Mans_Search_for_Meaning.78114942.pdf

[viii] http://www.counsellinginfrance.com/HELPLINES.htm

We were shopping until dropping in Loudeac yesterday and decided to stop off for a late snack lunch at McDonalds on the way home and have a McFish, or whatever.  We went in and there was a young woman at the counter with a microphone and earpiece head set on.  Very 21^st century, she obviously thought, though I remember teachers wearing the same stuff way back in the last one, communicating with deaf kids.  Anyway, our communication was pretty much curtailed before it started.  When we tried to order she told us we must order at the computerised terminals.  No ifs, buts or maybes; use the terminals or don’t eat.  So, we didn’t eat.

Now, we’re both pretty IT literate and there were advantages of using the control panels.  You could have an English option menu and, of course, you could take as long as you wanted, making your mind up.  So, objectively it’s a good way to do it.  I don’t know if after ordering you had to sit in a specified place or, as I imagine was the case, you were given a number and when it was called you would, like Palov’s dogs, leap to your feet obediently to collect your food reward and a smile for those fleet of foot and a scowl for tardy balloons like me.  I didn’t want to know.  I just wanted to have a few words with a person and not be treated as a number.  Old fashioned of me, perhaps, but I also think it matters. 

I assume McDonalds rationale, as well as aspiring for efficiency for the customer in ordering their food, is probably that it means there’s no queuing at the counter and less people have to be ‘front of house’, taking orders and collecting them for the customers.  This, of course, positively impacts their wages bill and resultant profits, (In the US each restaurant generates on average $2.5 million per annum) keeping the fat cats at the top of the company in plenty of spondulicks and the shareholders happy.

Now, please understand I am not against McDs.  In bygone days when there were no McDs in Indonesia I once flew up to Singapore from Jakarta so I could simply go to the McDs on Orchard Rd, have two Big Macs and then fly straight back to Jakarta again.  I was a fan.  I’m not such a fan now but think their product, generally wherever you are in the world, comes tasting as you expect it.  Since I no longer eat meat I wouldn’t have a Big Mac, but their fish burger is good as a ‘grab it and eat’ type of temporary filler.  Anyway, I’m not trying to convert you to McDs, just saying I don’t have a grudge.

Please understand, also, that I am not against capitalism in general terms, though I am against the obscenities it can produce.  (e.g. 1% of bloated plutocrats owning half of the planet’s worth; top 10% of adults hold 85%, while the bottom 90% hold the remaining 15% of the world's total wealth; top 30% of adults hold 97% of the total wealth meaning, of course, that 70% of this dear old planet Earth’s population own only 3% of it, with nearly 50% living on less than $2.50 a day, with 1 in 7 of the world’s population being hungry and one third of the food produced on bountiful planet Earth being thrown away.)

No, capitalism brings forth anomalies, as does democracy (Trump and Brexit being the latest somewhat inconvenient democratic choices) but as Sir Winston Churchill purportedly said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”  I believe the same can be said for capitalism.  Look, for instance, at the effectiveness of collective farming in the USSR.  It was hugely inefficient whereas kulaks who owned their own little smallholdings and sold their produce on the open market did well; sadly that was why Stalin went after them.

So, I haven’t got a grudge against McDs or the capitalist system though I am not an uncritical fan of either.  My concern is the lack of human interaction which increasingly occurs in the name of efficiency and probably is motivated by the relentless drive for profit.  Less and less are people involved in service.  Long ago out of town supermarkets put paid to the High Street visits and chats with the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker, or the milkman who delivered to our houses.  Then many people tended not to actually go to the supermarkets either, and like us, for years in the UK, the food shopping was ordered on line and delivered.  Limited human interaction, but greatly reduced prices of food and general goods.  Economies of scale – mixed blessings?   

Amazon have opened a new store in Seattle, checking out its success I guess, where you just walk in and take what you want and walk out again.  The place is coming down with cameras which tot up your shopping and liaises with an app on your phone which debits your account accordingly.  There is no human interaction at all.  Doubtless we’ll soon see stores based on this experiment proliferate. Shortly too, of course, driverless taxis will whisk us efficiently through the traffic and we will be denied the inefficient joys of chatting with the cabbie.  In person banking and telephone banking are out, internet banking is in.  Apparently it’s more efficient, and of course in many ways it is – and it saves the banks money.  And bugger the customer! Try to talk to somebody at a bank in the UK who can make a decision.  I used to pay extra to do so. 

Consider, too, social interaction.  At the risk of being clichéd, we email, we text, we use Facebook, WhatsApp and Messenger, we use Snapchat, Instagram and we tweet.  Increasingly the younger generation are turning away from the cumbersome medium of email which doesn’t necessarily produce an instant response, and away from the ‘demands’ and ‘intimacy’ of Facebook for their social interactions, and are using WhatsApp for texts and the essentially non-verbal Snapchat or Instagram to portray the interesting points in their lives in pictures.  

Games are often played online.  Your fellow competitors could be anywhere in the world and you know nothing of them except within the context of the game, and interestingly, most of the time one doesn’t want to know anything more of them than that.  The same applies to studying online.  You can also, of course, break the law speeding, be nicked, receive a fine and penalty points, pay the fine and inform you insurance company of your points without there being any face to face human interaction.  Same with illegal parking.  Loads of stuff, and more to come, all in the name of cost effective efficiency.  Justice, patently not being seen to be done though.  And you try overturning an unfair fine! 

Increasingly younger people have turned away from their cumbersome laptops and rely solely on their cell phones.  These ever more, incredibly sophisticated platforms which easily fit in their pockets – it still amazes me how many put them in their back pocket and damage them by sitting on them! - mean they can use them for all the activities I’ve mentioned thus far and thus, more and more, avoid human interactions.

Oh yes, and let’s not forget talking to neighbours.  Everybody used to do that.  Now it’s the exception, not the norm, especially outside rural areas, and especially with people under 25. We also have the efficient ‘home working’ and ‘hot desking’, maybe going in to see colleagues face to face once a week; you can, in extremis, have a conference call or Skype them to at least avoid having them in the same room!  No wonder so many people are lonely, and as Mother Teresa said, “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.”  People are losing the ability to talk to each other.  Give another generation or two of this and most people will present relationship difficulties and social communication problems we at present associate with autism.  It has already started.    

I shall not bore you with other examples.  In truth I am merely illustrating a trend which is increasing.  It was so slow originally we barely noticed it, enjoying merely the ‘efficiency’.  Now it is growing exponentially.  So, why should I/we be concerned about that?  Well, that’s a bit complicated, but also very obvious when one thinks about it.  (Especially since I have children and a grandchild and care about the world they are inheriting.)

Homo sapiens has overcome huge obstacles and much stronger critters to become the Lord or Lady of all s/he surveys by working together.  Humanity is the cooperative species.  That’s how we managed to overcome mammoths with their superior strength, sabre-toothed tigers and so forth.  It’s how we progressed because we shared our learning and experiences.  We had to develop a sophisticated language and learn social skills to achieve this.  When Og came round to your cave to borrow some flints to light a fire he knew to leave his spear at the door, wipe the mud off his feet on a patch of grass outside and say please and thank you.  As we started to settle, domesticating animals and tilling the land, increasingly people became specialists in different areas of knowledge and skills, and cooperation through communication grew, increasing again as village, town and then city communities developed.   The use of words and social communication skills were a crucial part of this progress.

With the rise of machines, human interaction has reduced and we face an interesting future.  Artificial Intelligence, especially once quantum computing is cracked, (anticipated to be within the next 5 years, max) will mean there are other intelligences sharing our planet which are much smarter and faster than us.  It is perfectly possible that if AI is functioning within a quantum context they may well be more intuitive and creative than us as well.  Perhaps we should hope not and leave ourselves a little, meaningful niche.

 Assuming they are not malevolent, slowly but surely they will take on humanity’s ‘burdens’, leaving humanity free to do ... what, exactly?   Sit in little pods, intravenously fed and living our lives in virtual worlds with no contacts with others?  Certainly that would be the easy answer for the bloated plutocrats to foist upon the 99%, many of whom would embrace the option with enthusiasm, whilst the hugely wealthy, one imagines, to extend their lives and powers will become increasingly technically enhanced and develop as cyborgs which after a time one would have trouble picking out of a line-up with AIs as not being a machine.   Of course a more efficient thing than the pods would be doing ones civic duty when ones usefulness is over and taking a pill so as not to be a burden on ‘society’, or more precisely, the 1%. 

Playing the ‘Glad Game’ an apparently positive factor related to less human interaction will be a decline in the population in all likelihood.  Ironically it will happen most, initially at least, in the wealthier nations.  In poor countries people still tend to talk to each other face to face and need to cooperate, but even there it is changing.

Questions of philosophy or semantics, or both, will increasingly have to explore and stretch the definition of human beings and humanity as less and less human interaction takes places, and further questions of morality, too, will have to be faced concerning letting the pod or pill thing happen.  Of course, the rights of AIs to the same sort of respect (possibly more initially, as they’ll be worth a shed load of money) and freedoms of choice and so forth will need to be addressed, assuming they don’t just take rights to themselves as a disappearing humanity becomes increasingly dependent on them, and they replicate themselves without the help of humanity.  Maybe they will replace humanity, becoming humanity, ironically communicating hugely, sharing enormous amount of data continuously.  Will they have souls?  Yes, I think so.

That aside, a humanity which doesn’t communicate on a human basis with other parts of humanity, face to face, also runs the risk of seeing others as different, and it doesn’t take a lot of work to get ‘different’ to become ‘enemy’.  Some of the 1% already encourage this.  It is only when we understand each other can we have trust, and trust is necessary for cooperation, and cooperation, until recently at least, has meant progress, and has been central to our broader humanity.

And what will happen to love?  Hopefully it is part of the true, inextinguishable human condition and the AIs will feel it, in all its inefficient glory, the new, improved, communicating and socially adept humanity who will reach out to the stars.  I think that it’s rather sad though, that we can’t all wise up to what is happening and put a stop to it, or better still, control it.  All we have to do is take an interest in each other and make an effort talk to each other, and listen a bit more.  Do it, and spread the word, eh!   

Don’t feel obliged to read this. I just felt obliged to write it. It’s about some time I spent with my father. My mother is not mentioned much, not because I didn’t love her and learn from her but this is about my father! Living With The Squire: I was in a pub a while ago and got chatting to some lovely folk about Swindon, a town in Wiltshire in the UK, and a place near there where I a shared house for, oh I guess around 3 years, with my father, referred to henceforth as the Squire. Mama and the Squire had lived there together but I had never lived there full time until I got my first teaching job. (Home was boarding school and then Uni, first time around, in God’s Own Country.) Mama was by that time living in their house in Herefordshire and the Squire used to go down to see her most weekends and during the hols. Just as I was to become, he was a headmaster (and my mother was a headmistress, just as the Squire’s mother had been) so we had, let’s be honest, the luxury of great, hugely rewarding jobs and terrific holidays. The chat in the pub took me back, so when I got home, having heard that many houses were being built in the area, I looked on Google Earth and found the one we had shared. As it happens, no houses had been built anywhere near it and it still has gorgeous, wide views, though it remains a rather ugly place, on the outside, anyway! Looking at it was a bit of an error though, perhaps, because it chucked me back around 45 years. Suddenly I was a young man and the Squire, who I loved most dearly, was alive and well, his wonderful smile and large presence in my life again, and I realised just how much I missed him and owed him. I looked at the windows and almost thought I could see his face, great mop of jet-black hair all over the place, and some absurd part of me was trying to will it to happen! He was tall – 6’2”+ in old measures, as is my eldest son, meaning I am the midget at only 6’0” - and it was generally agreed, good-looking and a striking presence – yep, I missed out on that as well! He was also, next to my eldest sister, also long dead, in many ways my best friend. He was a bit eccentric, I suppose; respectable headmaster, suited and booted, sticking his spectacles together with insulating tape, carrying his papers around in a small, brown leather battered suitcase and usually driving a Campervan, so if he got pissed off at work he’d go up onto Hungerford Common to calm down, Hungerford being where his school was, and have a couple of cups of coffee or make himself some lunch. For all his ‘funny ways’, his staff loved him and I think probably his pupils did too. I taught in Newbury and if, as was known to happen because I kept putting increasingly larger engines in my cars, I had a break down, he’d drop me at Hungerford station and I’d get the train and then he’d pick me up there at the end of the day … if he remembered. If not then I’d walk up to his school and if he wasn’t there, then generally I’d find him at the home of one of his senior staff who had followed him from job to job round England, as did, to be fair, some of his other staff, but Vee also used to come to the house above Menton, in the Col de Castillon and was always part of his life, mine and, it appears, most amicably, my Mama’s. When the Squire quit and went to Herefordshire, Vee quit and got a place down there too. A strange situation, but she was lovely and I was greatly saddened when she died just a week after he did. Not suicide, no suspicious circumstances – a broken heart perhaps? We never discussed this, but it was always nice if I found him down at Vee’s because it was most convivial, she was lovely and she was a truly wonderful cook. I used to sometimes go via Hungerford on my way back from work, when my car was working anyway, joy of joys, play squash in a local club where I was a member and then go round the corner to Vees, and generally that’s where I’d find the Squire. He, too, had culinary skills … well, one. He could make cheesy scrambled eggs to die for. I guess he learned this from Vee and I never acquired the magic of it as he banned me from the kitchen when he was performing! I did catch him in the kitchen once though, when he suddenly lowered a fork in a most shifty manner and pushed a can aside. I asked him what he was doing and reached for the tin. It was dog food! I saw then that there was a bit of it on a piece of partly eaten toast. He said he was curious as to what it was like. Fair enough. Actually, I tried it and we agreed we wouldn’t want to live on it, but it wasn’t bad, a bit like a cheap pâté. Going back to lady companions, we had a sort of unspoken rule that we wouldn’t pry, ask or speak about it if anybody else was present, including Mama. He extended this to most kindly, if I had the pleasure of somebody’s company, adopting a ‘rule’ that I would close both my bedroom and my study door, it being conveniently beside my bedroom, and if he was up first he would put a coffee in a mug the way I liked it outside the door of my study, where we agreed I would have done the gentlemanly thing and slept on my studio couch, and another on a little tray with milk and sugar beside it outside my bedroom door where my guest would have slept chastely alone, and then go down stairs noisily, oft times whistling because on a thick pile carpet even the Squire had trouble making a good racket. We used to have a lady who came in a few times a week and kept the place tidy, did a bit of cooking, the washing and ironing and so forth, but don’t imagine she had to work hard, for we were quite a tidy pair. One thing we didn’t do, however, was polish the silver, and nor did she. This proved a blessing when the place was burgled. All sorts of stuff was taken and the place was somewhat trashed, but the mucky silver remained. Amateurs who had been told what to look out for, we later learned. The first break through by the police was a kettle which had a lash-up, wrong coloured lead. They found that in the house of a local lag and that lead to another couple, a fence the police didn’t know of and a crooked antiques dealer who had sent some of the stuff to the US and some to Australia. Crooks were arrested in both countries and all was retrieved – a triumph of international policing - put on ships, returned to the UK and put in a police bonded warehouse. From there … it was stolen and we got back just the kettle! I imagine the insurance company were not amused, but by then the folks had mentally said goodbye to it all, their ‘precious’ stuff (i.e. of sentimental value to them) being in Herefordshire, so they enjoyed the pay-out instead … the Squire, as usual, finding and spreading the silver lining on the cloud. Que sera sera. I remember it was I who found the house had been broken into. It was the summer and I’d been hitching round Europe for a few weeks. I phoned the Squire, he being in Herefordshire with Mama. He came home, looked around and then talked with the police who had, to give them their due, come immediately I phoned them, dusted the place and generally jumped into action, and then came back promptly to meet the owner. After the conversation with them he went to phone the insurance company, having a crime number or whatever. Mama was the paperwork demon so we couldn’t find the policy but remembered the name and, we thought, the address. One did in those days! So, he turned to the phonebook, something else one did in those days. Suddenly my heart sank. It was in two parts. I had proudly shown some delightfully impressionable lass, a little before I had gone away, how I could rip one in half. (It’s all to do with the action of the wrists.) He picked up the two parts from the windowsill by the phone and slowly turned and looked at me, questioningly. I admitted my crime, fumbled an explanation and he raised a somewhat disappointed and pitying eyebrow and started to search. As luck would have it, the tear went straight through the insurance company’s details and it was impossible to make out the number. Trying to dig myself from some of the excrement I suggested he phone directory enquiries. He tried that but we had the address wrong, so it was no go. He very gently put the phone down and quietly told me that I knew what I had to do, and then turned and went to play the organ. I, thank God, had a chance to make some amends! I went and drove round Swindon, it seemed endlessly, until I saw the place. I went in, parking illegally on the pavement – I would risk almost anything not to experience the Squire’s quiet disappointment again – went and got their number and returned home, triumphant. He had, by this time, stopped playing the organ, had phoned Mama who had told him where to find the paperwork, got the number and phoned the insurance company and arranged that they come out. I think he sent me off so that he could find his real inner calm. Smart man; I’m glad he did! He wasn’t a drinking man, not like me, but he would come out for a jar with me from time to time, or we’d stop off if he’d picked me up at the station. We enjoyed shooting the breeze. We talked cars, education, philosophy, music, art, literature, engineering, whimsy, psychology, life, the universe and everything. I learned so very much from him, contextualised things I already knew also, but somehow it was always a conversation of equals. He listened to my views and didn’t shoot me down but none-the-less managed to educate me. He had a great joy of knowledge and learning; Mama did, too, though hers was more strictly academic, his more broad. It was one of his greatest gifts to me. He’d also play the organ or piano on a, ‘You hum it, I’ll play it’ basis. Mama played with much more technique but where his flowed, Mama made most things sound like, ‘Deutschland über alles’ and one could vaguely imagine hearing an accompaniment of approaching jackboots! Anyway, I digress. The evening of the phone book incident he, atypically, suggested we go down the road to the local pub, ‘The Black Horse’ I think it was, and so we strolled there and he told me to put my money back in my pocket and it would be his pleasure. I found it, as a turn of phrase, a little odd. Anyway, we sat down and he said that he wanted me to know that he was sorry he’d been a bit distant, that he loved me dearly and someday, when we had access to an old one, he’d be really interested to see my trick of tearing a phone book in half. He then asked me to talk to him about my travels and we got into a general conversation on the joys of travel, this place and that, and when we pottered on back home the atmosphere was most convivial and the whole business was behind us. I never had the balls, somehow, to ever tear a phone book in half again, and nor was I asked to! That life with him was rich. I didn’t realise then that it was so, in a serious sense, or how rich and important it was in my life until long afterwards, though I did enjoy it at the time whilst also taking it for granted. I left there when I got married first time around and moved to a beautiful old house in the country, backing up to some woods in the then relative wilds of Berkshire. We were fortunate enough to have a large, proper sized croquet lawn. We would invite friends over and play at weekends. It was very mellow, and became even more enjoyable when the Squire came over and showed me how to play dirty without cheating – much. (Which reminds me of how, when we played Monopoly, he used to turn his hotels into brothels and charge more, much to Mama’s annoyance! Vee, however, thought it very funny. Chalk and cheese?) I can remember the first time he came for dinner at that house. I arranged to meet him at a particular junction off the motorway. I stood on the bridge, looking down and, on time, he appeared, didn’t indicate, didn’t come off and drove under the bridge and off into the distance. About 15 minutes later he returned. Apologetic, he said his mind had been elsewhere. When I asked where he said he was pondering on the implications for space travel in Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, in that the space-time around Earth would be not only warped but also twisted by the planet's rotation and this would be the case with every planet and star in the universe. What, he wondered, would be the end result if astronauts used planetary warp and twist to help them shift their craft faster? Would it possibly be a form of time travel? I said ‘Oh’ and later that evening after he’d gone started to look into it further. There was no internet then but I had my books. In those days I periodically bought different sets of encyclopaedias to try to keep up to date in a rapidly changing world. I went to bed way too late and to the library after work the next day! I wonder what he makes of the LHC, quantum mechanics, superpositioning, entanglement and tunnelling? Anyway, that was life with the Squire, and so very much more. I was really very lucky, from birth, to be able to be ‘infected’ by a lovely, deeply curious brain, from the point of view of learning, and also, learning how to live – a moral code. My school gave me a great deal, for which I am eternally grateful, but it was he who introduced me to Schopenhauer's hedgehogs and societal moral contracts. It was he who got me to look differently at Zeno’s paradoxes and tie them into work by Aristotle, Socrates, Plato et al about the true nature of reality, leading on to Leibniz, Kant, Nietzsche et al. (Reality and consciousness remain something I’m obsessively studying even now, trying to move from dear old Descartes, cogito ergo sum to a kind of cosmic cellular gestalt immersed in a quantum soup!) It was he who taught me, too, about the reality of tolerance, not something submissive, but measured and thought through, and most certainly not always to be given. He made me think about making the real, sometimes complicated and hard effort of empathy, and doing it, and also the absolute duty to speak out and resist that which is wrong, not in a knee-jerk manner, not righteously, not just pissing into the wind, but really, if one thought there was any chance of making a difference. Don’t get me wrong; he was not perfect, and time has allowed me some perspective, with further time allowing me perspective on that perspective, but he still comes out as a terrific human being. Later, because I left Magee and got divorced he didn’t speak to me for a year, and I decided after I had the offer of the slaying of the fatted calf that I’d not speak to him for a year in return. How stupid was that … two years wasted! Eventually peace prevailed, our deep love was to the fore again, and years later when he was now living full time in Herefordshire and was diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus, with an outlook which wasn’t good, as a result of the way I viewed him I quit my job, sold my house and moved near my parent’s home with my, to be, second wife. Sometime after I moved there, when it looked pretty certain he was going to pop his clogs, he asked me to drive him down to the bridge in a local village where he and I had often stopped, as adults, and played ‘Pooh Sticks’. It transpired this was going to be his equivalent to a moment of death bed confession and penitence! He showed me how he’d always stood in one place, in the middle between two arches, and I’d been obliged to stand slightly to one or other side of him. This meant that when he dropped his stick it floated straight through whereas mine was always caught in a little eddy caused by the arches and therefore came through more slowly. What a swine! And how thick and trusting was I! Anyway, it looked like he was getting better after his op but then it came back. Eventually we moved in with the Squire and Mama and, oddly enough, the Squire and I still managed some rare old times. We’d sit up all night watching videos of ‘Noggin The Nog’, sipping whiskey and smoking. He got to be a regular boozer like me, and took up the fags again after being off them for about twenty years. One night, around 3 in the morning, he took a large swig of whiskey, a big drag on his cigarette and said to me, “My boy, it’s almost worth it.” Style! In the end though it all got somewhat unpleasant for him, and eventually when the drugs weren’t doing much good and he suddenly heaved half his insides out I gave him a huge shot of morphine, called for Mama and he died peacefully. We could almost see his soul leave his body. It was a shitty end though, in truth, but he managed to do it with style until the very last bit. Donne’s line, ‘No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe’, sticks in my head. Everybody is an island, actually, at the very end. People can be with you but they can’t do it for you. I’ve seen it far too often,and that always true. He was right though in the lines, ‘any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde’. The Squire's death diminished me, in some ways, as have those of some other, special folk. I’m glad this little trip down memory lane has helped, after all these years, to knock that back a bit. For all his funny ways, I love him, I learned from him, I miss him, and I look forward to seeing him again when it’s my turn. Respect! (P.S. I hope I too have time to take up the fags again for a while before I croak. Lucky, Pooh Stick cheating, wonderful giant!) ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… No Man Is An Iland No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. John Donne (Taken from the 1624 Meditation 17, from ‘Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions’.)

The Unsavoury USA of Trump 

Generally nobody reads my long posts but I’ve still got to write it, because it occurs to me that we, or at least I, owe Trump a huge debt of gratitude, and it is only polite that I express my thanks. He has helped open my eyes to the USA in a way I had not, heretofore. My mother was born and raised in the States and I have always been a supporter, celebrated the 4th July, given a nod to Thanksgiving and generally turned a bit of a blind eye to the blemishes. I still attend, in the virtual world, The First Unitarian Church of Dallas for my structured spiritual inspiration and drink often at the virtual wells of the Guggenheim, Smithsonian and so forth. As I’ve grown older I have, of course, become increasingly concerned by the idiocy of the gun culture and the power of the rich; however then we had the wonderful, fairly reassuring terms of President Obama’s presidency, but then there’s now and … Judas, where to begin? To start with, I have had to face up to the fact that there are sufficient people in the US (62,979,879, for God’s sake – and I don’t care if Mrs Clinton got more votes) who are so far from being what I would consider sane human beings that they put this lying, self-obsessed, narcissistic oaf into the White House. Now, I know I shouldn’t rush to judgement but, come on, 62 million. That’s a frighteningly large number of people to suddenly find out scare the crap out of me in a country I’ve always been fond of! Anyway, I do understand in some ways their desperate disenchantment and grasping at straws, but not their continued support of the lying toad. Then there are the people who call themselves ‘Christians’ and even leaders of faith communities who voted for him. For the record 81% of white evangelicals did. 81%! (Also, it’s interesting that a majority of all other faiths – Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs etc. voted for Mrs Clinton.) And these ‘Christians’ still believe he’s okay. Now, far be it for me to be a moral arbiter for Christians but even logic alone shows this grasping, sexist, racist bully is too far beyond the pale, relative to the tenets of their faith … but no, apparently not. And then we have the Republican party. So, if I was American, which thank God I’m not, I wouldn’t vote GOP, but these people have shown themselves to be such ghastly, self-serving, grovelling, unprincipled serpents that I’m astonished they don’t drown in their own bile, venom and festering puke! And of course there are the tens of millions of weird people who vote for them … over and over again. Is this a genetic problem, or what? Don’t get me wrong, I have delightful US friends and family, and there are many millions of fine folk in the US; I just hadn’t understood until turdy Trump what ghastly secrets they were having to hold close to their patriotic and loyal bosoms; that it is a dangerous and violent lunatic asylum they live in, poor souls. I did not realise how many tens of millions of bigoted, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, gun-toting, white-supremacist, xenophobes they have all around them. They are much braver than I. If I had to live in – forgive my plagiarism – the shithole, I’d do so in a fortress, stay indoors, armed to the teeth, and apply for refugee status in El Salvador, Haiti or one of the various African nations he mentioned, strong advertising to live there, indeed. So, yes indeedy, thanks Trump, you ghastly animated turd, thanks for the wake-up call to view the real America. There is little I can usefully do with my miserable awakening to a reality that so appals, other than pray he doesn’t press the button – his ‘bigger button’. Judas what a sad tosser! - but I can have one personal mission to take from this. I shall start petitioning the French government to demand the return of the Statue of Liberty. It is a tragic irony beyond any decency, and a cruel and unreasonable punishment, to leave her standing where she is. Bring her home; bring her back here to France, back to the land of the free.