Continuity

Was annoyed by the pile driver at Twickenham station today. It has been there for ages and I was wondering exactly what it is noisily beating into the ground and why. This led me again toward the thought that there is too much construction. If things were built properly the first time then they wouldn’t need rebuilding every 50 years. Pyramids are still standing after 5000 years. Like almost everything it seems in modern existence with a bit of forward planning we could virtually eliminate the problem… since travelling daily to Richmond I realise that the rail system is just as bad as it was in the demonic days of British Rail (I wonder if all the vitriol we inherit regarding that institution isn’t just Tory propaganda ahead of privatisation) but bottom line is that a century of under funding - and fruitless investment in cars - has left us with an unworkable transport system in the UK. Exactly the same problem faces us with energy. One only has to look at the London sewers to see what could have been achieved with a bit of foresight and a desire to actually get the job done. It seems that too much effort has been expended squabbling over ownership to actually get anything done since the 1920s and the rise of Capitalism. All around us is the blatant evidence that the last 2 generations have failed.

BUT a switch to central government long term planning would certainly reduce the dynamic quality of the economy. Nature, the original exemplar of organic growth, shows us that planning can arise step by step as things go alone and requires no forward thinking at all. There is the simple dialectic between those things that “succeed” and those things that “fail”. Dinosaurs have failed, mammals have succeeded. Nature thus transcends the simple ideas of success and failure. The world simply goes on and on. The Nazis eliminated 6 million Jews but Jenner began inoculating against small pox; one a failure of the human race, the other a great success… regardless the world just keeps turning. In this latter sense there is no failure of success – whatever we do just becomes a part of history. There should be a name for this because it underlies the security we feel in things, and also the forgiveness we have of history. Gordon Brown is currently having effigies publicly burnt along the length and breadth of Britain for his disastrous handling of the British economy over the last 13 years… but for all his failures we know that things will organically move on assimilating the past and creating a new future. For want of a better word I’m calling it Continuity. Continuity is a central part of Nature but it is something that Human lay claim to. Churchill is hailed as a national hero for rescuing us from the Nazis. The belief is that if the Nazis had won the world would have been pitched into an unimaginable Hell from which we would never have recovered. I imagine the Saxons had the same thought when the Normans won at Hastings, or the Icenii when Bodicea lost to Hadrian??. Continuity however is the experience that whoever wins it gets absorbed quite impartially into history.

I had this experience a lot of times the year my dad died. The morning after my sister and me when to Brighton first thing. It was a glorious day without a cloud in the sky and because it was early on a week day we were alone on the roads. Diving into the sea, swimming under water to wash everything away, I emerged surrounded by sea that seemed to touch the huge blue bright sky all around and shining radiantly in the centre was the sun. I realised that altho this was the most catastrophic day of my life the sun was shining just the same as it had done last week, last year, last century, on the day that life began on this planet. At once what was both extraordinary to me was of no consequence at all in the world. I had the experience again on New Years Eve that year. I walked to the sand hills behind our house and gazed upon the star lit vale where the houses lie. There is a small spring that feeds a stream in that valley and looking upon the geography I imagined how all this looked when stone age people first re-colonised the UK after the ice age. They may well have found the spring and lit a fire in the valley to sleep the night. Little did they realise that 8 thousand years later my father would die here. Little do I realise all the things that will happen here in the next 8 thousand years. The wheel of the world keep turning and time and history keep moving; but the wheel is always the same.

Now I speak of Continuity and central planning because there is the view that everything is planned by hugely powerful people. The papers today carry the story of “How the police failed to catch killer Bird” – which does sound a bit like a Sesame Street character – but also suggests this idea that the Police are there to stop crime. Its commented before that if the country all turned to crime then there is nothing the authorities could do. The train I’m travelling on could be derailed by a brick on the track there is nothing to stop someone doing that – except that people don’t do that sort of thing very often. It is not the job of the police to stop Crime – just the few criminals who keep them busy. It is our responsibility to stop Crime by being good people. And there is Continuity here because the Right wing believe that without a military and strong police force the world would descend into chaos. I remember reduction ad absurduming my father on this issue of civil disobedience and asking what would happen if the people rebelled. Eventually he argued the army would be brought in. Amazing that the very people who we (my father included) pay for would be brought in to fight against us. This is very much the mentality of the right wing. Of course it depends upon the people in the army not rebelling either. And 60 million people against an army of 100,000 isn’t going to work. It’s a crazy absurdum but it reveals the strength of belief in Human Planning. As history shows us even the most absurd civil wars and violence has never derailed History itself. Continuity will always prevail.

Indirectly this links in with my waking thought. It was again about “my muse”. Quite clearly there is still so much to understand about this that I can’t put it down yet. It was a thought about my first letter to her. Not knowing her address I wrote down every address of everyone with her surname in the area and instructed them to keep posting till it arrived. I don’t believe she received it and was wondering what happened to it. The thought was that someone cynically opened it and threw it away. It made me realise how the games and meanings that we humans play with depends entirely upon the respect of others. The moment that people stop caring the possibility of meaning is destroyed. Her boyfriend at the time didn’t care. As if to prove the obvious after her death he took the opportunity to send dirty texts to her sister. Their relationship was based on lust – yet “my muse” tried to speak of him in terms of love or at least tried to argue that “he would always be special to her”. Now I wonder if this isn’t just biological since he took her virginity and I imagine that leaves a strong emotional impression. She referred to the sex as great later but wanted more. Altho it is easy to think that he abused her by not being faithful and not offering her his heart I know that actually subconsciously this is what she wanted (or at least I suspect). She always spoke of being corrupted and this is what he gave her. She understood that odd thing that for a heart to start working properly it must first be broken. For me the point though is that in this environment of mutual “un-caring” there is no possibility of meaning. Meaning is what I was seeking and crafting in my letters and mind yet it is impossible without care.

This makes meaning rather fragile. It is exactly what Steinbeck argues in “Of Mice and Men” that the world actually cares nothing for human meaning. There will come a time when the words I’m writing here even if they survive time will no longer be understood and the English language will be lost. We invest so much time trying to objectify meaning – this is what culture is. This is what science is. I am thinking of the MIT lecture and GEB and the inner, outer message tricotomy. The idea that meaning is objective I’ve always had a problem with. It suggests that there are meanings which are facts. Another discussion another time…

So the point here is that we have a choice. Either Meaning or Continuity, but not both. The power of Continuity is that whatever the Past means it is just dust on the wheel of the world. This is a wonderful thing because it allows events like the Holocaust or the Cretaceous extinction event to have no impact on the World. These things are just meaningless facts. If God is cruel and petty it is because he doesn’t care for human meanings. The power of meaning is that it creates complex structures and games; gives amble diversion for human beings. The pile driver at Twickenham station might indeed have been avoided if whatever it is building was included in the original building works of the area. If the necessary structures had been built with intense planning by our ancestors. On the other hand however whatever happens planned or not actually makes no difference to a world that simply keeps turning whatever happens.

Now this creates an idea that why do we bother. Which is a thought I get a very great deal of the time. All the work that was put into the expansion of the Roman Empire, all the social structures, buildings, meetings, parties, laws, documents, have all been lost. All that remains of any great significance is Christianity and the Roman plays. Of course the ramifications of that empire run incredibly deep but are unrecognisable now without great archaeological, historical and cultural analysis. All that work has been transformed into things that the doers certainly never envisaged or even wanted – like the end of the empire. The wheel has just kept turning and would have whatever they did. Is human life (in the sense of busyness or business) any more than a diversion from the great emptiness, inevitability of continuity of Existence? I am thinking so more and more.