Some thoughts

One day I was on the way to work in a bar in Bristol, England, where I used to live. As I passed the hospital, I noticed that one of the walls was freshly painted grey, and a small, white plaque was fixed to it, saying something to the effect of "No Graffiti: Hospital money is for treating patients, not for cleaning up after vandals." I stopped in front of it, completely shocked.

Since I'd started working at this bar, I'd walked past this wall every day and seen a huge spray-painted mural of a wild-eyed lunatic jester pointing a pair of handguns right out of the wall at me and grinning like a psycho killer. The effect had been startling, unsettling, visceral. It was really fucking cool, and it was there in public for everyone to see, free of charge. Art for art's sake. Now it was gone. On the opposite side of the road were three huge billboards. Toyota. Coca-Cola. Nike.

At that moment, I had my first glimpse of an unpleasant truth. We are in a war. A war is being fought for our minds, for our actions and our thoughts and most of all, for our desires. We are being preyed upon by people who do not simply want us to do and think certain things, but who want us to want to do and think those things, which is much, much worse. They are extremely successful in this, because they have the money and the power to fill our visual space, our auditory space, and our mental space with their images and their words, all of which are quite carefully designed to make us keep wanting.

When the same story is told to us again and again and again, when we are swamped with one tale, this is propaganda. If a story is told well, and told many times, we begin to believe it, and become increasingly suspicious of other stories that show a different point of view. We are being told the story of happiness through acquisition, of love through ownership, and we are being told it as often as the rich and powerful can grab our attention. Eventually, each of us may even begin to believe there's something wrong with our own story, because it is not the same as the fiction we have been brought up on. We begin to hate ourselves for being ourselves.

Why did I spend so much time for so much of my life wishing I were someone else? Why did I not live in a society that considered me most valuable when I was being simply myself? Why do you let yourself be told that some must be leaders and some must be followers? If we all give each other what help we can when it is needed, then we are all leaders. There need be no followers.

We seem so determined to control everything around us, and then we wonder why we don't have a healthy relationship with our environment, with ourselves or with others. What kind of love can there be between a master and a slave? How can you be satisfied in a world where no one will stand up to you? The dream of power is hollow and empty.

Marketing, advertising, spin-doctoring, salesmen being allowed to decide what images surround us where we live - these things are robbing us of our compassion. We are in the process of utterly fucking up everything that really matters, and most of us don't even realize it. We have allowed ourselves to be persuaded that it is acceptable to buy our future on credit and leave others to pay. It is not. We have gone about this all so very wrong, and now our children and grandchildren will suffer for it.

If there were enough to go around for everyone, we could indulge the dream of being happy by surrounding ourselves with new, exciting, useful things, and feel no guilt for it. But there just isn't, and we must accept that. We are responsible for each other, and we are doing an absolutely appalling job of living up to that responsibility. The people who are scrabbling to make what money they still can from our dwindling resources have a vested interest in persuading us that it is not a moral failure on our part to continue to demand more while others have less than enough. We should know better than this. We cannot let ourselves be convinced to abandon our responsibilities. What we stand to lose if we do is more valuable than anything money will ever buy.

The marketing industry, and everything that comes from it, suffers from two fundamental weaknesses, which can be exploited by those of us who would stand up against what they are trying to do to our minds. The first is a relatively free movement of information, which means that anyone who can read and has access to the internet or to a half- decent library can acquire at least some of the knowledge on which their techniques are based. The second is that at its heart, marketing relies very heavily on creativity, but has only money with which to buy it. And money simply doesn't buy the best creative work there is. Passion does.

So do something. Every single one of us who has ever been made angry by someone's attempt to manipulate our desires, every one of us needs to stand up and say something about it. Be creative. Have no mercy. Have no fear. Use your passion. Speak out about what you hate, and about what you love. Borrow their clever imagery and throw it back at them as an expression of your truth instead of their lies. Advertise your truth. Tell us all what you see. We're tired of watching them parade their baubles around like the world is some kind of giant bazaar. Show us something else, something different, something genuine. Life is too short to eat lies with your breakfast, lunch and dinner. We are hungry for the truth.

What's in this box?

In this box is the moment you've been waiting for,
The chance to make everything good, now and forever,
For you, your family, even your friends.
And it comes with a five-year warranty,
And a variety of attractive payment plans.

In this box, there's something that creates,
Just by its very presence,
An atmosphere so fresh and energizing,
That for a moment it makes you recall
The long-lost power and beauty of your youth.

Just look how differently people react to each other,
As this box is passed from hand to hand,
Accepted by face after smiling face,
Enjoyed with just a hint
Of sensuality

In this box, there is adventure itself.
The real thing, like Peter Pan,
And Spider Man, and James Bond,
All rolled into one.

But you don't need to run the risks
Of fighting evil or trying to fly to Monte Carlo
On your maxed-out credit card,
Just sit back in this huge cage of metal and glass
And speed along winding alpine roads
At a hundred miles an hour.

Did we mention
The payment plans?

In this box, my friend,
Is something that's just the kind of thing
For good old boys, like you and me.
I mean, you know me, don't you?
I bet I remind you of some goofy guy
You go out drinking with once in a while.
Am I right?
I'm right.

In this box, well, this box is very special indeed.
The people who take things out of this box
Are people of the highest quality, refined and demure
Laughing light, tinkling laughs at elegant cocktail parties,
They are sexy but not sexual, dancing lightly
round each other's body language,
Lit by candles in the dusk,
Perfect creatures.

THIS BOX IS JUST CRAZY!!!
THERE ARE SO MANY COOL THINGS IN THIS BOX,
IT WILL MAKE YOU LEAP - RIGHT - OUT - OF - YOUR - SKIN!!!!!
I MEAN IT!!!
LOOK AT ME!!!!
I HAVE SO LITTLE SELF-CONTROL,
I JUST CAN'T KEEP MYSELF QUIET
ABOUT HOW ABSOLUTELY COOL AND CRAZY AND AMAZING
THE FANTASTIC THINGS IN THIS INCREDIBLE BOX ARE!!!!
AND YOU CAN GET IT NOW!!!!!!! AT CARREFOUR!!!!!
THAT'S RIGHT!
CA!!!-RE!!!!-FOUR!!!!!
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Let's not beat around the bush, you old letch,
I know what you want, it's flesh, isn't it?
Well, if you buy what's in this box, just look here,
This sweet young thing in these tight, tight shorts,
Barely even clothes at all, are they?
And look at how her nipples point out at you
from under that tiny little T-shirt.
She's just begging for it.
How would that cutesy little smile look
staring up from between your saggy old thighs?

In this box, ladies, there's something we all need.
Let's face it, a woman's life is so demanding, isn't it girls?
All those things we do all day, like being ditzy at the bakery,
And getting kind of embarrassed
when the cute guy runs after you
to give you your purse,
And then making the house just perfect
For your husband to come home to,
It's all so hard on your poor skin!

So open this box and feel young again,
Be smoother
And whiter
And thinner
And look good in your underwear,
Be what your husband wants you to be.
And even so,
Hold onto your innocence.
It's quite a trick.

We have searched the world for this box,
And we did it in calm, timeless harmony
With our environment.
Its contents have been used for centuries
By wise old women in the Peruvian Andes
To protect their skin
From the beautiful sunshine
Of a distant summer,
And they have selflessly shared their knowledge with us
To make your hair lustrous and bright.
And to make you feel, for one brief, vapid moment,
That you are doing something
About the rape your species has perpetrated
On the land of its birth.

In this box is, quite literally, the future.
When you open this box, you are joining
In a wave of technological discovery
That passes in shining ripples around our planet.
You will become a surfer, riding that wave, forging the way,
Starting out on making the world a bright and exciting place
For your children and your grandchildren.
Where you will see them succeed.

In this box is love.
It is purity itself.

Long before
You ever felt guilt,
Before you had lost
The original innocence
Of your earliest childhood,
You knew this unending love.

This primal love,
This essence of the unfettered heart,
Shining despite the mud and dust of the busy world,

This love is available just for you
At our exclusive counter in the perfume department.

This box is just for
Honest people,
Strong people,
Like you and me.
Good citizens,
The backbone of America.
You know,
The kind of people you'd like
In your neighbourhood.
Those kind of friendly,
But real respectful types?

Well they like what's in this box a lot.
It's something they love to get together and use,
In a real friendly way, just a-sharin' it neighbourly-like,
And all havin' a fine old time, I do declare.
Want some, friend?

In this box is a drink for a comfortable man.
It's the sort of thing you drink sat in a red leather armchair,
Lightly holding between your fingers an expensive cigar,
The kind smoked by a powerful businessman
Heading into an early retirement
Which he will spend golfing and dining at a club,
And being a strong father
To a rather intangible family.

This drink will make you feel, for a moment,
That your life is more like his.
That you have not fallen short of all your goals,
That your youth has not been squandered,
And that you did not make all the wrong choices.
So why don't you just drink it and forget, old man?




(please stop opening the boxes)

On the edge of everything

Here we are now, on the edge of everything. It's hard to say how many of us there are, or how long we've been here. If you're looking for that sort of precision, for the mundane certainties you're used to wherever it is you've come from, you're going to be disappointed, I'm afraid. Everything distorts here - space, time, though, reason, feeling, memory. Cause and effect have a vague, unsteady relationship. And yet somehow, here we are, like refugees from the end of war, with nowhere else to go, pushed at last to the final frontier.

Sometimes I stand on the very edge and watch the veil shimmer in the endless night. It reminds me of the Aurora. I saw it once with my father, a long time ago in a different world, but the memory is difficult to place now. Sometimes it comes back with such force I have trouble telling whether I'm not a little boy again, standing in the snow, my eyes wide at the lights in the sky, breath misting in the air. There are times when I can make out a huge face in the veil, twisted in silent agony or ecstasy - hairless, androgynous, big as worlds. I can't tell if the others ever see it - some conversations in this place just seem to go nowhere, as if there are some subjects we aren't supposed to talk about, or can't grasp, and so our minds slip off them, slide away into something else. It was this I suppose as much as anything that fueled the great theological debates in the early days of our settlement here. That and the food. We eat every day, three meals, cooked and wholesome, but none of us knows where they come from or who prepares them. And so the question arose, naturally enough - is someone or something watching over us here? Perhaps the face I see in the veil is God's.

The big question used to be all anyone talked about here, or so it seemed. Whispers on bedrolls at night under the half-starred sky - the line like a knife cut where the edge comes, and there's no more of anything - prophesying old men with spittle-flecked beards standing in the light of the campfires, shouting themselves horse about judgement and sin and the rest. No one talks about it much anymore. Nothing was resolved, and the mind skids away into nonsense when you try and think about it, so there seems little point. Nothing here submits to investigation, and we have no tools with which to investigate. There is only us, and the edge, and sometimes it seems to me that there is no division, that we are the edge and we are its cause, and we play a game with ourselves by pretending not to know this.

To my knowledge, no one has died since we came here, but no one really knows how long ago that was, so it might mean nothing. I think some of us have left or disappeared. Perhaps they did die, but there were no bodies, no funeral rites or mourning, so it seems unlikely to me. There was a woman I used to know, though not well. She had auburn hair and green eyes, and a smile that made her seem sad and fragile and heartbreakingly beautiful. I was in love with her, I think, though we spoke little, and I would have liked to know her better, but she went away, and I never saw her again. I can't tell you if that was a week or ten years ago. Others arrive from time to time, like you, but, like you, they never seem to bring knowledge with them. Only questions.

Stars (for A)

Once upon a time, there was a girl who kept the stars in her bedroom. One wall, next to her bed, stretched out into the black and shining distance, and was littered into infinity with countless points of light. This girl loved the stars with all her heart, and because she loved them so openly and clearly and without any thought of what she might get in return, the stars loved her back, and this was the first time, and the only time, that the stars have ever loved anyone.

At night, when she was curled up in her bed, she would stretch out a hand to the distant galaxies, and hear the stars whispering to her, asking her to come with them, promising to show her worlds beyond all her imaginings. So she would put on her little tartan dressing-gown, and tie it tight at the waist, and slide her slippers on to keep her feet warm, and she would step out into the wall by her bed onto a carpet of stardust that gave way just a little under her footsteps like a thick rug.

As she walked between them, the stars sang to her in soft ringing voices, in words from all the languages there have ever been in all the corners of the universe, and they told her all the stories from all the places they had brightened with their light since the first stars were so young they were barely a flicker in the night. They showed her the secret doors that open from one part of things to another, guiding her safely through places that weren't places at all, full of the shadows of great movements and of things becoming. They showed her the crystalline, perfect, cold realms of order, where there is no freedom, nothing is unexpected, and there is not so much as a breath to stir the air. They showed her too, the mad lands of chaos, where one moment or thing or thought has not even the slightest connection to the one before it or after it, or to anything else at all. No thread, no story, not even time, just stutter and nonsense.

Between these two extremes, and the third, which no one can find a way to talk about, not even if they've been there and come back again in their little tartan dressing gown, she visited every place of any interest in all of creation. Places of wonder, places of savagery, places made of nothing she could even understand. The stars, you see, loved this child so much, this little girl, that they wanted to give her the only gift they could, the only thing in all their aeons of blazing into the darkness that seemed to them to be worth anything to anyone. They wanted to show her that no matter what she saw when she left her bedroom, out the door and into the world she called home, with other people and their opinions and their customs to which they clung as if nothing else had ever existed, no matter what, the stars wanted her to know that what she saw and heard and felt was just one kind of thing thing among so many kinds of things that they were beyond counting. They wanted her to know that in the vastness of their domain, anything was possible, and they hoped that this knowledge would help the little girl who kept them on the wall in her bedroom to make peace with her world, no matter how strange it might sometimes seem. This was the stars' gift to her.

Gainful employment

As of yesterday, I have a job. I will be a "consultant" at an upmarket EFL school here in Taichung. The money's good, the hours are flexible and the job seems relatively undemanding. On top of this, I've been asked to do some writing and editing/ proofreading for a magazine, and another EFL place has also expressed an interest. I expect to hear from them this afternoon. Before too long, I should be making enough money to feed my out-of-control cheeseburger habit. I'm also trying to see if I can get work at one of the local gyms, running a couple of classes a week in the sort of watered-down kickboxing/ aerobics I used to heap scorn upon when I was younger, but which I now see as one of those things which will continue to exist no matter how I feel about it and if someone's going to be making money out of it, it might as well be me. However, progress in this area has been somewhat limited. It's taken me several visits over the best part of a month to actually get someone at California Fitness to come straight out and say they don't have any work available at the moment. This is a very typically Taiwanese situation, and has failed to produce the kind of incandescent rage in me that it would have back when I was less experienced in the inscrutable ways of the orient, although it's equally possible that this can be put down to the medication. World Gym has yet to come out with an answer or, as far as I can tell, even to understand what my question is, but I shall persevere. This afternoon I will return and this time I've got a name. Thus, I slowly work my way through the gauntlet of their bureaucracy. It never fails to astonish me, and this is also a very typically Taiwanese observation, the number of departments, managers, sub-managers, vice-undersecretaries and so forth that can be found in an operation that appears, on cursory inspection, to have a single office about the size of my bathroom.

"Someone from the personnel department will get back to you."
"Do you mean the fellow over there in the corner? Couldn't I just wait for him to finish his banana and have a word with him myself?"

But alas, things do not work like this, and they never will. One of the things one learns very quickly about the Chinese is that they place an immense amount of value on something called "face", which is a concept the occidental is extremely ill-equipped to understand, possibly at a neurophysiological level. Losing face, or clearly being to blame for someone else losing it is one of the worst things that can happen to a Chinese person. The Japanese have taken things a step further, and if the situation is dire enough, loss of face will result in one of the little buggers cutting themselves open with a sword. I've yet to see a Taiwanese person go this far, but the contortions through which one will go in order to avoid a situation of face loss can often resemble some sort of surrealist comedy performance. One of the big things, and here I'm coming to some sort of a point, is that saying "No" directly to someone's face will cause you to lose yours, or some of it, at any rate (I believe it to be a measurable quantity, but don't quote me on that and it may well depend on the situation). Thus the month of visits to the gym before a red-faced young woman finally has to perform the awful task of informing me they have no work for me. She seems relieved as all hell when I don't react by bludgeoning her with one of the free water bottles they're giving away. She is terrified. Not only will she lose face, but she also knows that the situation is made worse by the fact that I'm a foreigner, and foreigners, so she has been told, react very badly to this sort of news. What she is not aware of is that most foreigners only freak out when they've been jerked around for weeks on end, and would react quite calmly to bad news if it were delivered upon the first asking. Why is she not aware of this? Because no one dare try it; to do so would be to lose face. Tell them you'll call them and hope they don't ever come back, and when they do, tell them someone from the personnel department will get back to them.

This would all be easy to deal with if the signals were obvious. Everyone knows how to recognise with the "We'll call you" that means "Don't expect to ever hear from us again". We are not strangers to subtext, in fact we have entire genres of film and comedy entirely devoted to the medium. However, to someone who has not had the appropriate cultural acclimatization in early childhood, or possibly, as I said before, the correct brain structure, coming from a Chinese person, the you-won't-ever-hear-from-us-again "We'll call you" and the we'll-actually-call-you "We'll call you" sound absolutely identical. I can attest to this as one who has, after three years of living in this damned country, still been taken in by the former this very week in my dealings with the globular, ungraspable entity that is California Fitness. And then, the ESL school I thought was really not interested at all called me back since I started writing this and now wants to interview me on Thursday. There really is never a dull moment here.

Back to our regular scheduling

So, rested and fed, I can return to Blake. I guess my question here is why don't more people spend more time thinking about this sort of thing? Life seems to me almost worthless without the sense of wonder and possibility that's encompassed so well in these lines. The times when I've felt the lowest, the worst, have been the times when I couldn't see this, when I felt trapped by certainty. It's not easy, sometimes, to keep this sort of thing in mind, I mean the force with which the established paradigm seeks to assert itself, to confirm itself and to deny the possibility of other modes of existence frightens me with its intensity. Buying and selling things is a great and worthy endeavour. Money is real and those who have it matter more than those who don't. Other people can know what's good and what's bad for you. This is democracy. Your relationship with god must be mediated by an organisation. God is a being. Self-realisation is more important than keeping your mouth shut and looking out for other people. Life can be perfected. I wonder often if those who so vociferously defend their paradigm are even really responsible for what they're doing. Can the paradigm in some sense be seen as defending itself, with each of its components an unwitting part in the struggle? If we are to allow a gene to be seen as an agent using individuals to further its own best interests, then we can't in good conscience deny the meme the same status.

If we really can't know that the bird we see is not in fact an immense world of its own, and I believe that in a very real way we can't, then we have to accept the rather uncomfortable likelihood that any of these things we hold onto as truths are entirely conditional. Therefore, my disgust at the very idea of celebrity is just as conditional on a whole nuber of things, not least its existence in the first place, as is your unhealthy obsession with it. Acceptance and denial of the possibility of birds being worlds of delight, cutting the airy way, having consciousness or being a figment of my imagination is a collaborative effort between me and you, and the knowledge that I probably can't be certain of anything at all does me, who rejoices in it, no more good than it does you, who denies it outright. There are morons and geniuses on every side of every divide, and I may never be able to figure out which one I am.

Ominous portents

My first real post on this blog has just been lost to posterity. My computer has taken to turning itself off when moved, one of many little foibles it seems to have acquired recently which can probably only be dealt with by a professional. The problem there is that before I take it to one, I need to remove pornography, naked pictures of self and others and all the other things you don't want the guy at the apple shop making copies of for all his friends. Anyway, the point is, I feel this does not bode well. What would seem perhaps like some minor setback were it to take place in the middle of such an endeavour assumes the proportions of a true omen of doom when it occurs at the very first step. Nonetheless, I shall continue, though not without a vague sense of unesase.

The post which has dissolved from a multilayered structure of syntax, grammar, meaning and philosophical speculation into a mere fuzz of electrons was to do with a particular quote by William Blake, which goes like this:

How do you know, but ev'ry bird that cuts the airy way,
is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?

It's a powerful question, posed, as far as I can tell, by a raving lunatic, which should perhaps stand as a warning to those who would think too deeply on such things. Still, I can't get it out of my mind. It's not so much the question itself, which is fascinating, but the thought of the kind of mind that would think to ask it in the first place. There's just something about it. It has a poetry and a humility to it, and it stirs something in me on a level deeper than the intellect. I would go on, in fact I did, for some time, but it's getting late, and I'm hungry, so that'll have to do for now. Let's hope my next effort fares better.