Putting it into drive

I make a start. Nothing unusual about that. Starting comes easy. This is my identity, who I am. The discovery of that. A long line of thinkers. When was the first thought? What can be categorised as such? Pinker says a goal is required to be rational. A reflection can be a goal. So much for rationality. Is thought an illusion? Or one of them?

And on and on. It is a stream. Gently flowing, easy to ignore, but there. Sometimes it’s strong, and I have to speak up, to turn it down. Others have no such luck, or so I’m told. Can’t drown out the voices. That’s cruel. I’ve wanted to write, I don’t know for how long. I’ve wanted to blog, since the end of the 20th century. But I couldn’t, for one reason or another. I’ve wanted to write more recently, but I haven’t because of fear of prosecution.

So, why write now? I’ve got nothing left. It is said, when a woman has nothing left, she becomes dangerous. A pen is more dangerous than a sword, and so, she will write. Beware the writer, she may have nothing left to write about. Can we avoid Spike? No, it’s impossible. He’s there, but is he a reflection, an augmentation, an aping, or a companion? I don’t know the answer. Would I swap for his life? All of it? I might. Even for the war, I might.

Since I’m here, and not hard of hearing. No, no, stop that. I feel I’ve invited him, and he’ll occupy my mind gladly, but we can’t have that. So be gone, but thanks for stopping by. I don’t care any more, and there’s a strangeness to that. When do we start caring at all in the first place? We are taught to, I suppose. Caring is sharing. I heard that too late for it to seem anything other than mockery to me.

I hope to unshackle my writing from the personal pronouns in due course, but I know of no other way to begin. I’ve tried three or four times already in the past 12 or so months with the same result. So, I don’t try to resist that any more. I write songs; make them, I do computer assisted programming. I try to understand the world. I have a spiritual side. I contemplate language from many angles. I feel lucky to be a fish who has noticed the water. There’s no other sane response. I have to be lucky. This attitude has a long history. Job of the Bible for instance. There will be others. One example will do.

You make your own luck though, don’t you? Or pine for the fjords. I don’t. Make my own luck, that is – I do pine. Norscä Forest Fresh – if you know, you know. I pine for formality in language. I pine for a formal second-person pronoun. I’m ready to jump ship at the drop of a hat. I’ll leave English. I’ll take the fluency hit. Some people want to leave their country. It’s not enough. It’s never going to be enough. I don’t want to leave the language. But I will if needs must.

Until then, English is all I’ve got, and so I write, like the band played on into the icy-cold waters. I’ve got nothing left. Not, top of the building, got nothing left, but it’s a far cry for me from a, ‘Top of the morning to you! Get an Irish coffee in yer ‘fore ye start the day lad – spuck in die Hände Kumpel!’ kind of life. So, let me, in my own way, get this show on the road.

We can’t walk by, this awful mess.
This shredded, torn address.

I write lyrics, I think I mentioned that. That was an example; just made it fresh. Comes with a melody and rhythm. It’s just there.

I have tinnitus. Got it from medicine. Supplements, actually. From a health store. Never went away after that. Only gets worse, actually. I stood too close to the refrigeration unit at the local supermarket a few days ago. The tinnitus kicked up a notch and hasn’t settled since. If I actually end it all, it’s going to be from the noises in my head. Not voices; noises. That’s not the only thing wrong with me. There’s a long list. But I’ll not dox myself, not all at once anyway. Since I’ve given up, I don’t really care about that so much as I once did.

I have given up, though. All my dreams, into the dustbin. Any thing I think I can achieve, I just gently tell my mind to forget about it. It’s over. There’s nothing more. So why do anything at all? Because I’m still here. Can’t still be here doing nothing. But I’ll be gone. That’s the thing, and I’ll be glad for the going. No different to Paul. But he’s a saint, and I ain’t. Not that I’m not Christian. Oh, aye. I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ. But I’m not Paul. Well, Paul wasn’t always Paul either. That interests me. We think of each other mainly as blobs, and God as well. But we’re on a continuum. Part of a chain of custody, from a very long time ago. An unbroken chain. That interests me very much.

Many years ago I discovered the Italian for supermarket is supermercato. That’s the least amount of information that has caused the most change to my life. The leverage of that discovery is, to this day, unsurpassed. I still don’t know what to make of it. A lot of people would not consider it noteworthy. I feel it’s more distressing than the murder of the Rachmaninovs. I don’t know if that’s how you spell it, I’m not going to look it up (on an editing pass I have – it was the Romanovs; the original patriarch was Romanovich). That was the end of the innocence of power for me. There’s no limit. We see it today, but it was there 100 years ago. Of course, before that too, but the liquidation of the monarchy in Russia is a seminal moment in recent history. People who want power will stop at nothing to have and to hold it. Nothing at all. I hope to talk more about this from Ellul’s perspective, but I won’t rush to the topic.

The serpent in the Bible story is the archetype of this evil. I call it evil. Killing someone because you want to be in charge. I think that is evil. Not everybody does. Some people think killing animals is evil, but killing baby Hitler is righteous. I was brought up thinking I had no agency in this world. It turns out, there is agency in even a teaspoon of sugar. All of it can make a difference. If I’d known that earlier, I might have done something. Too late for me now. I don’t say that to evoke pity. There’s no reaching me – the die is cast. I’m going to blog, come hell or high water.

I’ve been brighter, faster, stronger, fitter, and healthier. But I haven’t been wiser. I’ll get less wise at some point, but I’m at a cognitive zenith in terms of what we call wisdom. I have no horse, let alone a kingdom, and so it matters not. I don’t use the wisdom. It can’t be used, like a bicycle with the chain come off won’t pedal. Like a fish out of water. No amount of flapping will suffice; and yet I’ve seen a video of a fish on a pier, flap itself out of the net, along the boardwalk and back into the water. Meaning? A fish has more gumption than I have. I’ve given up. The fish didn’t. The difference is, I know it’s a fish. The fish didn’t. That’s probably the most interesting thing about St. Paul’s transformation. He didn’t know his error. Then he did.

That’s all clouded by a miracle. We don’t know how it happened. We don’t know that Eureka moment in detail, what it was that made the penny drop. How his mind went from: “Killing people is good!” to, “Killing people is bad!” His zealousness didn’t change. He was an A1 fanatic all the way through. So why the change? It must be at the moral level, mustn’t it? The subconscious moral level. He can’t have been a baby crawling around like a Gazorpazorp, screeching: “Everyone must die!” He can’t have been an immoral baby, can he now? Maybe there are a few. Many children wish death upon their siblings in fits of momentary rage – that much we know, but genocidal fanaticism? That is surely not ingrained in the psyche of humanity?

An open question, perhaps, but I don’t think it is. The record speaks for itself anyway. There is a limit for most of us, how many people we might wish death upon. I think the comedian with the audience fetish talks about this. Catholic upbringing, adult atheist, divorced, two daughters, very funny guy. Trying to think of his name. Don’t remember it. Sometimes my mind can get like this – like a dog with a bone he just won’t let go of. It might come. I’m not looking it up. You know the guy or you don’t. His bit is, if I remember it rightly, that we have to have laws against murder, otherwise we’d all be a murdering. It’s an hilarious take. He talks about murder bags in grocery stores for the disposal of disobedient children. Jolly good fun. Great Catholic humour worthy of Carlin. Now, he might be right. I wouldn’t advocate taking murder off the books just to test out the theory. It’s plausible enough to keep the laws in place, just to be on the safe side.

St. Paul talks about this as well. He was a serial killer in today’s view of things, so he knew a thing or two about the topic. He wrote that there is no sin without the law. I find that his most profound point. He wrote a lot, considering there were other people who might have wanted to share their opinion on the hot topic of the day. I mean, St. Paul’s writings themselves have main character energy. I can’t imagine what he would have been like in person. Even as a brother, I might have had him locked up for at least a little while. His jaw-mouth might have been the reason his jailers left the door open. Me, I just don’t see myself buying the road to Damascus story and letting all the murders slide because of it. Not just that, but I’d be constantly suspicious he would revert to his slaying persona. Would you sleep in the same tent as him on a camping trip?

Killing and death and such like can’t be discussed any more without getting censured, de-platformed, thrown in jail, executed and more. I just don’t care though now – well I care a bit, but I’m so over this frigidity of fear. Sick to death of it. I’d prefer almost anything else to it. It’s not right to censure people from thinking out loud. It’s unhuman in my view. I’m just saying it how I feel.

No sin without the law, begging the same question as when was the first thought. When does a person, a human, a crow magnum – an ostrich even, decide something is right or wrong? I think it goes back before humans, meaning we have the instinctive underpinning for a moral framework. Hitchens alludes to this when he says: we don’t need God to be moral; but I don’t think instinct is sufficient to direct behaviour in complex societies. To his discredit, Hitchens upheld the motto, ‘do what it takes to seize and hold power, for we are right.’ St. Paul’s locomotive derailed from this track, in perhaps one of the earliest recorded jumpings of the shark, and in doing so, posed questions about the morality of choice which Hitchens refused to answer. Note that I might address Hitchens formally in a series on morality, I’m just not sure yet. I lament his relatively early passing, but am thankful for his contributions to the art of thinking, and especially his deference to our shared mistress – English. His arguments living on in video format – that’s the cherry on top.

It is fairly easy to see, with a pet dog or cat (or horse or donkey or parakeet), there is an instinctive sense of fairness, which is a type of morality, particularly around food. We know that these animals have a sense of hierarchy, especially the pack animals, like dog and horse, and so what permits these fairly stupid creatures to form and maintain hierarchy in the first place? How do birds of a feather flock together, and how do fish form schools to prevent predation? The exquisite shortitude of cognitive faculty makes the role of instinct so much more impressive. There is something baked into us, a sense of fairness, of fair-play, of just deserts, of evenly trading time for money. It’s self-evident, as Jordan B. Peterson has been fond of saying; well, once you think on it for a bit.

The basis of our way of life being grounded in instincts is there to be revealed – but won’t reveal itself, is the clearer way of putting it. What is Paul’s law? Divinely-inspired, written-rules, created by man. Codification steering a way of life as an adjunct to social customs – blended from instinct and generational knowledge, passed down with-in and between families of deeply connected individuals. Why though? Why were rules so important to Paul? They were his life. He was a lawyer, or marshal, or bounty hunter, or ICE agent, in today’s sense of things. He litigated as a means of not only feeding his family, but defending the social order, and proving his place in the world. He sought punishment of wrongdoers, up to and including the death-penalty; he gleefully pursued the final end for his legal quarry.

But then something happened. He had a nervous breakdown, perhaps. His actions may have gone so against the grain of his own bodily instincts that his soul gave up on him. I know giving up. I’m good at it – one of my better qualities. My body has given up on me, my mind has given up on me. My soul? Which reminds me: I was around in 2012 and distinctly remember feeling that a rapture was taking place. I was atheist at the time. I felt a faint calling, but I didn’t respond to it. I still suspect all the true believers have been taken up to heaven already. I was born again too late, part of me thinks. That Paul’s soul could give up on him makes sense to me. I don’t know where my soul is. It might have left on its own accord in 2012. It might be here still. I don’t know, but Paul experienced transformation from a moral meltdown, caused by an internalised discordance, it seems to me.

He wasn’t built for killing. He wasn’t built for punishing. He wasn’t built for judging, for persecuting, for tormenting others. He thought he was. He was trained to, and grew up believing in a just cause. But his body rejected the cause, eventually. His mind, body, and spirit. The whole kit and caboodle. Makes sense. People act, they regret their actions. They ‘see the light’. It’s common. A typical response to what? To acting against the built-in moral foundations we have, that we share with other animals. Plausible. So what? Well, what were Paul’s choices at the time he realised his wrong-doings?

He could have killed himself. Easy, simple solution. Always an option. He decided not to. Fair enough. That was his choice. He could have handed himself in, which might have taken a few forms. Let’s say he went to the Roman authorities and confessed his crimes. They probably would have executed him for murder, very much the same outcome as suicide. He could have returned to his Jewish superiors and told them he didn’t see things the same way any more. They might have killed him or banished him, effectively the same outcome as suicide or not having gone to them in the first place. By the way, I don’t know if Saul’s actions were sanctioned by his workplace. It could be he had gone rogue. I haven’t looked into that. I don’t want to implicate the Jewish authority at the time as having been some sort of unscrupulous council.

Sometimes the available options collapse into destiny, and the rest is, as they say, history. He’s alive, but on his own – outcast. What’s next? He didn’t want to continue on his merry way. He ruled out Damascus. What is he going to do now? He has to right his wrongs, doesn’t he? He’s not going to open a hair salon, is he? He has got to try and figure out why he did what he did and, if possible, stop others from doing what he has done. Logical, and Paul was logical to a fault. He gladly suffered torture because he had already tortured his own soul, his spiritual trauma possibly unhinging a masochism. The material, physical suffering – to clear his conscience, was the lesser evil, and perhaps knowing that brought its own relief.

There is no sin without the law. Paul, rather than decide that no law is better than bad law, chose to redeem the law by clothing it with morality. This became what is known as Christianity, but Paul was acting out of self-interest, which is really the only thing anyone can do. I’m not going to relieve myself through another person’s orifices. Having Law is better than not having Law, says Paul; not only that, but there is no possibility of social morality without it. He was the original George Costanza: “We live in a society!”

The part I would have loved Paul to explain, is the individual compared with the group. From memory, he just sort of assumes that the group is a foundational element to individual survival, so that makes me think it was more self-evident back then than today; that an individual had no chance on his own. Even Moses found a partner in the wilderness. Paul may have elaborated, but nothing comes to mind. Faith, Hope and Charity (Love); be of service to others – basically reiterating Jesus’ teachings. Yep, nothing comes to me about Paul and individuality except for his race remarks and why he doesn’t kill himself. He wants to meet Jesus but feels he has to endure until the end. The torturous race to the finish line; to my mind a very strange way of viewing individual action in the world, but completely in-line with his psyche and limitations, given everything that has already been reported.

This spiritual psychology underpins, by the way, Calvinism, and from it the Protestant Ethic, out of which emerges Capitalism from a crumbling religiosity in Europe. Things might have been very different if Paul had been a more redeeming character, or if early Christians had had more money for better writers. You get what you get, and so Christians are basically left with a series of crime scenes to navigate their morality, which is very hard to take. Not only do I write my own lyrics, but I’m a fan of lyricists in general.

It’s not that I don’t like Paul; it is that the idea of Sainthood can be misunderstood. It doesn’t mean they are special in the sense of having softer skin, or more muscles, or a brighter smile; it’s that they led a storybook life. This might be one of the cart before the horse features of Christianity that atheists especially get confused by. The characters in Christianity might appear as though they were written as characters in a novel, but it could be the other way around. The story of Christianity is fashioned around the Christians who stood out enough to get noticed. I won’t argue that or any point about Christianity with any great effort. A decade ago I had enthusiasm for argument, now I just don’t have enough ducks to sieve, or whatever the expression is.

That, in my view, is the story of law in Christianity, why it takes centre stage in Christian societies and what it is meant to achieve. Much later, Dickens finished what Paul left out: the law is an ass. There is one childhood memory that will probably be one of the last to go in my mind. A fellow student said to me one time, ‘The law is stupid.’ and I said, ‘No, the law is an ass.’ He said, ‘Yeah that means it’s stupid, dummy.’ I said, ‘It’s a Dickens quote, and it means the law is like a beast of burden – since an ass is a Donkey.’ This was the first time I recall seeing a mask on a person come off in slow motion. The ass doesn’t know where to go or what it is meant to do, for our purposes. That is up to us to figure out. To Paul, it was up to him, and Catholics ran with the premise of Christianity by diktat, but Luther put the Kybosh on that. It isn’t up to authority, no matter how impressive the fanfare or how wide the moat of distinction. It’s up to the individual, and that is the defining characteristic of agency, or free-will, which will be the basis for any formal moral discussion I undertake.

Not much more that I care to write here. St. Paul is an utterly flawed character, and it is difficult to take his authority seriously, as a result. Nevertheless, flawed characters are the flame to believers in The Word, in all its denominations. St. Paul got lucky being published, and luckier still to still be in print. I think I said being lucky is the only sane way to think of ones lot, given what we know about life. Having said all that, the silver lining is that if Saul could make it, well, just about anyone could. That’s the Good News in a nutshell: redemption is there for us all. That should wrap things up nicely then.

First blog post. Maybe. I’ll stew on it for a couple of days. But no longer. If it goes up, it goes up. Into the great wide open. I might go further into Bible study, actually look things up and cite verses. I might do it, that’s not even a threat. I haven’t read the Bible for a while, and I should get back into it. The mind only keeps things for so long fresh. I might also look into language a little more, but not being any authority, the output might be dull. Well, the Discworld Novels were written, so there’s not even a low bar, there’s a deep well. Are you allowed to criticise people? I think that scared me before. I couldn’t give a rat’s spaghetti no more (on editing this, there appears a complex legal situation, in that criticism has its downsides. I won’t be able to be as freewheeling as I thought I might be, but reining in the acerbity might make for more tolerable prose and a wider audience).

That is the end of blog post numero uno. Signed, sealed, delivered. Hot dang!

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Yours,

 

The Slowly Sinking Brain (or Mind, I haven't decided yet, and I'm not holding up production over it).