Andrew MacLaren-Scott's Blog, page 108
January 1, 2014
2.
"There are the those who say that every possible thing always happens and we just experience one possibility, although an almost infinite and ever increasing number of other versions of us experience all the alternatives."
"I know. So they'd say that in some version of reality everyone in my street has just run naked from their doors screaming 'Yumple is a Bumbler'?"
"Some professional quantum physicists would say so."
"And in another version of reality the naked ones are screaming 'Yumple is a Bop'?"
"Serious thinkers do say so, although not in such specific terms..."
"And in other versions of reality the naked nutter neighbours are all saying each of these things but with saucepans on their heads, while at the very same instant in Italy the Pope has just stood up and said 'Stuff this for a game of soldiers I'm going to become a drag queen,' while hopping on his left leg, oh, but on his right leg in yet another version of, eh... reality?"
"They are not joking, these quantum theorists, you know."
"And in another..."
"Yes, yes, I get the idea."
"It's nonsense isn't it?"
"Some clever people would not say so. Professor people."
"Some clever people are mad."
"Perhaps, but in some versions of reality they are considered sane."
"Oh..."
"I know. So they'd say that in some version of reality everyone in my street has just run naked from their doors screaming 'Yumple is a Bumbler'?"
"Some professional quantum physicists would say so."
"And in another version of reality the naked ones are screaming 'Yumple is a Bop'?"
"Serious thinkers do say so, although not in such specific terms..."
"And in other versions of reality the naked nutter neighbours are all saying each of these things but with saucepans on their heads, while at the very same instant in Italy the Pope has just stood up and said 'Stuff this for a game of soldiers I'm going to become a drag queen,' while hopping on his left leg, oh, but on his right leg in yet another version of, eh... reality?"
"They are not joking, these quantum theorists, you know."
"And in another..."
"Yes, yes, I get the idea."
"It's nonsense isn't it?"
"Some clever people would not say so. Professor people."
"Some clever people are mad."
"Perhaps, but in some versions of reality they are considered sane."
"Oh..."
The Conversation - 1
"I don't believe it is possible to say anything that has not already been said."
"Oh? How about Bedornywobblespiemajabbits with a squirlytabbletoo?"
"Ah... well I don't believe that it is possible to say anything meaningful that has not already been said, even though the precise words may differ."
"Hmm.... So what should we talk about this year? What should we do?"
"I really don't know."
"Why should we bother?"
"I don't know that too."
"You mean either?"
"Whatever..."
"Well squirlytabbletoo."
"And squirlytabbletoo to you too."
1.
"I don't believe it is possible to say anything that has not already been said."
"Oh? How about Bedornywobblespiemajabbits with a squirlytabbletoo?"
"Ah... well I don't believe that it is possible to say anything meaningful that has not already been said, even though the precise words may differ."
"Hmm.... So what should we talk about this year? What should we do?"
"I really don't know."
"Why should we bother?"
"I don't know that too."
"You mean either?"
"Whatever..."
"Well squirlytabbletoo."
"And squirlytabbletoo to you too."
December 31, 2013
Homo Insciens (1)
If I shut one eye and look inwards and sideways with the other one I can see the front side of my nose and the arch of a lower eyebrow curving away to the right, and if I shut that eye and look with the opposite one I can see the other side of my nose and other eyebrow curving away up to the left, although it is not my nose really, nor my lower eyebrows, because I am just a mind trapped behind and inside of these external things that are not really a part of me. I, the real me, am a mind trapped inside a head, a prisoner in a skull, and with no proper understanding of what I really am, although an electrochemical creation of moving particles within a network of nerves might cover it, apparently, without revealing anything, really.
I have control over the movement of arms and hands and so just a moment ago I was gently slapping at the sides of the head that contains me. Some people began looking at me as I wrote that. Other minds swivelling their electrochemically linked eyes to observe me, because slapping the sides of my head is not a very appropriate thing to do while sitting alone in a coffee shop with a large latte on the table in front of me. And I saw it all from inside this head, this damned big bony head that I am trapped inside... Dammit. Sometimes I want out...
But anyway I am thinking a regular thought again, about the possible illusion of continuity that a consciousness creates each morning, on awakening, when in reality it is perhaps a completely new awakening into awareness, albeit one provided with unreliable memories of previous awakenings, such that each day is really a new life. And many of these these unique moments of conscious awareness that I am remembering are of previous days experienced by people who I may naively claim to have also been me.
I am currently recalling that I claim to remember the day that the first “he” of me was born, but I'll leave that improbable story for later, and instead will just recall my first plausible memory. It was summer 1956. I now know it was a time of unusual heat and I must have been lying on my back in the pram, because in my memory I can still see the pebble-dash wall rising high above me, although I didn't know what it was back then. The dark pram canopy, half obscuring my view. The deep blue fifties sky high above, and me lying there looking up and wordlessly thinking 'What the heck is this then?' If only I had known... Even though I still have no idea, of course.
But the problem with a mind, or one of the problems, is that is wanders weirdly, jumping forward and back and side to side and round and round the frantic multidimensional landscape of memories and thoughts and plans and possibilities... such that now, right now, I am vividly remembering that it was late one winter night in a flat in Leith when I decided to rise from my bed to investigate the prolonged shouting that had been coming from the top floor balcony, just one flight of stairs above my own. For about ten minutes a drunken male voice had been screaming many foul-mouthed variations on the theme of, 'let me in', while a muffled woman's voice had been reiterating, 'go away', in several foul-mouthed variations also.
Then for a while the stairwell had gone silent, until I heard a loud metallic scraping and a heavy panting slowly ascending the stairs and past my door. I looked out through the thin crack beside my letterbox flap to see an old and dishevelled man staggering slowly upwards, dragging a scaffolding pole behind him. It was a short linking section, maybe six feet long. I reckoned he was too drunk to notice me, so I opened my door as he reached the top floor and I leaned out sideways just enough to look up.
I could see him as he began hammering the pole against the first door of the top floor like a battering ram, and he was screaming again. 'Let me in! Let, (bang) me, (bang) in, (bang) you fucking (bang) fucker!' The final bang was followed by the crash of the pole falling onto the stone stairway. The woman inside began screaming. The old guy lifted up the pole again and resumed his attack on the door.
I went back into my flat and headed for the phone, but someone must have beaten me to it because just as I picked up the handset I heard the police siren out on the street below. The timing of what happened next was exquisite. With my door shut again and my face pressed to the letterbox I heard, and then saw, the two burly policemen running upwards, two steps at a time, but then pausing momentarily on my landing to gasp for breath and for one of them to wail, 'Why does it always have to be the top floor!' And just as they tackled the first step towards the top floor I caught a glimpse of the drunk old guy, walking quite swiftly downwards. As the policemen approached him he blurted out, 'Thank Christ you're here lads, the buggers are going crazy!' And just as the policemen rushed on past him I heard the door of the flat directly above me open and the young lad who lived up there shouted out, 'What the fuck are you...?'
But the phrase was never finished as the first policeman must have charged into him, and from the heavy thud above my head it was pretty clear he had knocked the young lad to the floor. Then the jumbled chaos of angry voices began: 'What the fuck are you doing? Oh it's you again sonny is it?'
'What the fuck?'
'Stop struggling! You're under arrest.'
'Me? What the...'
'Shut up! Didn't you get enough of this last week eh?'
Then a scuffle, a few kicks, a punch. A wail. Then a bit of quiet. The jangle and click of handcuffs, I presumed, then I heard, 'You stupid fucking Keystone Cops! I wasn't doing anything. It was the old guy. I was just coming to see what it was all about!'
'Shut up!'
Some more scuffling. The sound of another door opening, then an elderly woman's voice asking, quite calmly, 'What are you arresting him for? It was my old man Jim that was kicking in my door. Where is he? Have you let him go?'
I left my door and walked through my lounge to look out of the window, just in time to see the old guy - Jim I presumed - wandering down the path into the dark parkland across the road.
The argument between the young lad and the policemen continued for quite some time. I listened for a while, then gave up, and headed back to bed. But had I not witnessed this disturbance and had instead just slept through it all would I have awakened to a different future? Does every little thing have the potential to initiate a major effect? That is a thought that makes me now think about the little black cat my wife and I cared for, at one time.
It was a stray cat that had been living in our garden but it was rehoused and shifted into an entirely different life because a washer gave way in our toilet cistern. Cause and effect is very complex as soon as you move up from a few atoms and molecules, but it is still there. Things really do happen for a reason, if not for any purpose. The washer in the cistern gave way a few days before we had to make a weekend trip to visit my uncle. The plumber couldn't fix it before we went away, so I had to leave it running. Not dripping, but running quite steadily into the cistern, up over the overflow pipe, then down into the toilet bowl.
'It's not doing any harm,' the plumber assured me, so off we went. But just a few miles from home my pathologically anxious mind was visualizing the running water, and then imagining the washer giving way completely, so the overflow pipe would not take all the high pressure flow, and so the cistern would fill, and flood, and much of the house would be ruined. And why did I not turn the damn water off?
So two hours later, at the first coffee stop in a little cafe high up in the hills, I sat reflecting on there being too many stresses in my life. This damn worry about the water, and that one, and that other one... and by the time I reached about the sixth stress on my list I arrived at 'that damn stray cat' that we feed out of pity, but that was increasingly stressing us out, mewing, annoying us, clawing at the door. And that suddenly seemed to be one stress that I could knock off the list. So I turned to my lady and said, 'I've had enough of that cat, let's see if the Cat Protection people will take it in and rehouse it.' And she thought for about two seconds, and said, 'Okay.'
We got back two days later and found the water still running steadily, the house did not flood. The plumber replaced the washer the next day and the cat moved out a few days later.
Cause and effect... That cat moved on because a little plastic washer broke. And apparently the washer broke because some grit came through the water supply - the plumber found the evidence in the cistern. A little tear had grown, gradually, to a rip. And the grit got in the water because the mains supply pipe a few streets away had sprung a leak, and the first flow of gritty water happened to be diverted my way, because I flushed the toilet at just the wrong time, probably because I had to deal with the diuretic effect of too much coffee a few hours before. So it was the molecules in the coffee, I guess, the little trivial molecules. Trivial, tiny, but with the power to change a little cat's life forever, hopefully for the better. The coffee sent the cat onwards to its new home. Cause and effect. Simple in principle. Complex in reality.
But... hang on a moment... why did we have to make the weekend trip to England, without which the stress and the cat thought would not have arrived, not then, at least? Oh, we had to visit my uncle who had recently received a hip replacement after a fall. What caused that fall? A stretch he made to offer his used newspaper through an open window to a friend. An act of kindness by my uncle living many miles away, that's what caused the cat to be moving on tomorrow...
But then... Who left un-repaired the broken paving that caused the uncle to fall? And what broke the pavement? Oh stop it now! Otherwise I'll be tracing this cat's life changing event back to the quantum fluctuation of a specific particle a few milliseconds after the big bang.
The big bang? Oh... What caused that?
And I know, I got distracted just as I was beginning the first significant aspects of this tale with the commotion in the stairwell caused so long ago by Old Jim. I do get distracted. But through all the distractions I have kept wondering the same damn thought, again and again... 'What the heck is this then? This life?'
I have control over the movement of arms and hands and so just a moment ago I was gently slapping at the sides of the head that contains me. Some people began looking at me as I wrote that. Other minds swivelling their electrochemically linked eyes to observe me, because slapping the sides of my head is not a very appropriate thing to do while sitting alone in a coffee shop with a large latte on the table in front of me. And I saw it all from inside this head, this damned big bony head that I am trapped inside... Dammit. Sometimes I want out...
But anyway I am thinking a regular thought again, about the possible illusion of continuity that a consciousness creates each morning, on awakening, when in reality it is perhaps a completely new awakening into awareness, albeit one provided with unreliable memories of previous awakenings, such that each day is really a new life. And many of these these unique moments of conscious awareness that I am remembering are of previous days experienced by people who I may naively claim to have also been me.
I am currently recalling that I claim to remember the day that the first “he” of me was born, but I'll leave that improbable story for later, and instead will just recall my first plausible memory. It was summer 1956. I now know it was a time of unusual heat and I must have been lying on my back in the pram, because in my memory I can still see the pebble-dash wall rising high above me, although I didn't know what it was back then. The dark pram canopy, half obscuring my view. The deep blue fifties sky high above, and me lying there looking up and wordlessly thinking 'What the heck is this then?' If only I had known... Even though I still have no idea, of course.
But the problem with a mind, or one of the problems, is that is wanders weirdly, jumping forward and back and side to side and round and round the frantic multidimensional landscape of memories and thoughts and plans and possibilities... such that now, right now, I am vividly remembering that it was late one winter night in a flat in Leith when I decided to rise from my bed to investigate the prolonged shouting that had been coming from the top floor balcony, just one flight of stairs above my own. For about ten minutes a drunken male voice had been screaming many foul-mouthed variations on the theme of, 'let me in', while a muffled woman's voice had been reiterating, 'go away', in several foul-mouthed variations also.
Then for a while the stairwell had gone silent, until I heard a loud metallic scraping and a heavy panting slowly ascending the stairs and past my door. I looked out through the thin crack beside my letterbox flap to see an old and dishevelled man staggering slowly upwards, dragging a scaffolding pole behind him. It was a short linking section, maybe six feet long. I reckoned he was too drunk to notice me, so I opened my door as he reached the top floor and I leaned out sideways just enough to look up.
I could see him as he began hammering the pole against the first door of the top floor like a battering ram, and he was screaming again. 'Let me in! Let, (bang) me, (bang) in, (bang) you fucking (bang) fucker!' The final bang was followed by the crash of the pole falling onto the stone stairway. The woman inside began screaming. The old guy lifted up the pole again and resumed his attack on the door.
I went back into my flat and headed for the phone, but someone must have beaten me to it because just as I picked up the handset I heard the police siren out on the street below. The timing of what happened next was exquisite. With my door shut again and my face pressed to the letterbox I heard, and then saw, the two burly policemen running upwards, two steps at a time, but then pausing momentarily on my landing to gasp for breath and for one of them to wail, 'Why does it always have to be the top floor!' And just as they tackled the first step towards the top floor I caught a glimpse of the drunk old guy, walking quite swiftly downwards. As the policemen approached him he blurted out, 'Thank Christ you're here lads, the buggers are going crazy!' And just as the policemen rushed on past him I heard the door of the flat directly above me open and the young lad who lived up there shouted out, 'What the fuck are you...?'
But the phrase was never finished as the first policeman must have charged into him, and from the heavy thud above my head it was pretty clear he had knocked the young lad to the floor. Then the jumbled chaos of angry voices began: 'What the fuck are you doing? Oh it's you again sonny is it?'
'What the fuck?'
'Stop struggling! You're under arrest.'
'Me? What the...'
'Shut up! Didn't you get enough of this last week eh?'
Then a scuffle, a few kicks, a punch. A wail. Then a bit of quiet. The jangle and click of handcuffs, I presumed, then I heard, 'You stupid fucking Keystone Cops! I wasn't doing anything. It was the old guy. I was just coming to see what it was all about!'
'Shut up!'
Some more scuffling. The sound of another door opening, then an elderly woman's voice asking, quite calmly, 'What are you arresting him for? It was my old man Jim that was kicking in my door. Where is he? Have you let him go?'
I left my door and walked through my lounge to look out of the window, just in time to see the old guy - Jim I presumed - wandering down the path into the dark parkland across the road.
The argument between the young lad and the policemen continued for quite some time. I listened for a while, then gave up, and headed back to bed. But had I not witnessed this disturbance and had instead just slept through it all would I have awakened to a different future? Does every little thing have the potential to initiate a major effect? That is a thought that makes me now think about the little black cat my wife and I cared for, at one time.
It was a stray cat that had been living in our garden but it was rehoused and shifted into an entirely different life because a washer gave way in our toilet cistern. Cause and effect is very complex as soon as you move up from a few atoms and molecules, but it is still there. Things really do happen for a reason, if not for any purpose. The washer in the cistern gave way a few days before we had to make a weekend trip to visit my uncle. The plumber couldn't fix it before we went away, so I had to leave it running. Not dripping, but running quite steadily into the cistern, up over the overflow pipe, then down into the toilet bowl.
'It's not doing any harm,' the plumber assured me, so off we went. But just a few miles from home my pathologically anxious mind was visualizing the running water, and then imagining the washer giving way completely, so the overflow pipe would not take all the high pressure flow, and so the cistern would fill, and flood, and much of the house would be ruined. And why did I not turn the damn water off?
So two hours later, at the first coffee stop in a little cafe high up in the hills, I sat reflecting on there being too many stresses in my life. This damn worry about the water, and that one, and that other one... and by the time I reached about the sixth stress on my list I arrived at 'that damn stray cat' that we feed out of pity, but that was increasingly stressing us out, mewing, annoying us, clawing at the door. And that suddenly seemed to be one stress that I could knock off the list. So I turned to my lady and said, 'I've had enough of that cat, let's see if the Cat Protection people will take it in and rehouse it.' And she thought for about two seconds, and said, 'Okay.'
We got back two days later and found the water still running steadily, the house did not flood. The plumber replaced the washer the next day and the cat moved out a few days later.
Cause and effect... That cat moved on because a little plastic washer broke. And apparently the washer broke because some grit came through the water supply - the plumber found the evidence in the cistern. A little tear had grown, gradually, to a rip. And the grit got in the water because the mains supply pipe a few streets away had sprung a leak, and the first flow of gritty water happened to be diverted my way, because I flushed the toilet at just the wrong time, probably because I had to deal with the diuretic effect of too much coffee a few hours before. So it was the molecules in the coffee, I guess, the little trivial molecules. Trivial, tiny, but with the power to change a little cat's life forever, hopefully for the better. The coffee sent the cat onwards to its new home. Cause and effect. Simple in principle. Complex in reality.
But... hang on a moment... why did we have to make the weekend trip to England, without which the stress and the cat thought would not have arrived, not then, at least? Oh, we had to visit my uncle who had recently received a hip replacement after a fall. What caused that fall? A stretch he made to offer his used newspaper through an open window to a friend. An act of kindness by my uncle living many miles away, that's what caused the cat to be moving on tomorrow...
But then... Who left un-repaired the broken paving that caused the uncle to fall? And what broke the pavement? Oh stop it now! Otherwise I'll be tracing this cat's life changing event back to the quantum fluctuation of a specific particle a few milliseconds after the big bang.
The big bang? Oh... What caused that?
And I know, I got distracted just as I was beginning the first significant aspects of this tale with the commotion in the stairwell caused so long ago by Old Jim. I do get distracted. But through all the distractions I have kept wondering the same damn thought, again and again... 'What the heck is this then? This life?'
December 21, 2013
A Dollop of Doggerel for The Real New YearThe Solstice ha...
A Dollop of Doggerel for The Real New Year
The Solstice has passeda new year has begunas I ponder in darkness
the return of the SunThe good Earth is spinningin solar effusionthat can blast away glumnessand abolish confusionThere's a glint of it nowthrough the glass in my wallso raising water that sparklesGood New Year to us all
and for a short time only... here is a memory of myself and my daughter from New Year 1992. Things have changed somewhat since then, but we can still manage to smile together on occasion.
as can my son
and even my Lady, despite all she copes with, can just about smile at her predicament
although more easily when I am not right next to her
The Solstice has passeda new year has begunas I ponder in darkness
the return of the SunThe good Earth is spinningin solar effusionthat can blast away glumnessand abolish confusionThere's a glint of it nowthrough the glass in my wallso raising water that sparklesGood New Year to us all
and for a short time only... here is a memory of myself and my daughter from New Year 1992. Things have changed somewhat since then, but we can still manage to smile together on occasion.
.jpeg)
as can my son
and even my Lady, despite all she copes with, can just about smile at her predicament
although more easily when I am not right next to her
December 15, 2013
December 14, 2013
I am no longer inviting comments on this blog, but I hope...
I am no longer inviting comments on this blog, but I hope visitors may enjoy some continuing photos without any need to say so. My email address is still in the sidebar and the novellas also remain available in print and digital formats and will probably be supplemented by some of the further nonsense that I am trying to focus on now. With good wishes, Andrew.
