Loud progressive rock: as a mood soother, there's nothing like it. I feel slightly guilty for playing Warriors at the Edge of Time at this volume at ten in the morning - but not wholly. I've a funny feeling that it may not really be 10 in the morning, and that it hasn't really been ten in the morning since, well, it really was ten. If that makes sense. Calypso worked out that I am effectively giving myself jetlag.
It's a better way of dealing things than my natural reaction which is to, y'know, go out and hurt people. If this is reminding you of Walter Kovacks watching that building go up in smoke, while deciding life is cruel and meaningless, I suppose it's not far wrong. Sometimes you do just come across things which make you think "well, that's it then..."
When it comes to real life tragedy, I think a lot of people find me flippant and insensitive - especially the big ones which society demands you show obsequious sorrow for. And it's true I refuse to play ball, and won't watch the news or read the papers. Perhaps its at the root of why I sympathise with the Comedian, because some times things get so dark that really, all you can do is laugh. Or in any case, dodge the impact and meaning of the things. I refuse to interact with them, I can't. The world is so full of misery that you need but peer through the floodgates to start drowning. I mean, seriously - war, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, disease, domestic abuse, deforestation, gay persecution, animal persicution, religious persecution, race hate, extinction, natural disasters, accidents, fires, floods, murder, theft, rape, capital punishment, save the whales, find the missing persons, broken homes, failed marriages, kidnap, blackmail, drug crime, human trafficking...
Have I forgotten any? Yes, there's a lot of things wrong with the world, and I hate it when my mind goes down that route because there's so damn much of it, more than any one person can deal with or even comprehend. And I'm reminded of the Doctor innocently jetting off from Gallifrey, deciding he was going to fix everything wrong with the universe, and that over 900 years later he's still trying and nothing has changed.
Couple that with a lack of meaningful solutions, and my misery is complete. What do you do? How do you cope with it, except for shutting it out and pretending it isn't there? Thank you fates, that I come from an affluent family who can send me to have an education, who are loving, and who live in a country where I have as many options as I do dreams. While I'm sitting at home in my ivory tower - do I donate my time, my money, does it actually help if I go dig a well for a village somewhere, or is it more helpful to sit behind a desk and contribute that way? What about joining the Samaritans, helping people cope with tragedy instead of fighting the tragedy itself? Do you pick just one issue, and chase it to its lair, or help them all? It's why I love blood donation as a cause - it's a very real, very tangible expression of aid which cannot be subverted or debated. It is as simple as a man dying one moment, and not the next. That can never be wrong.
These feelings of inadequacy are doubtless linked to the superheroic status of my current "heroes" - I've always had someone, and on moving on felt I have learnt something from the experience, unsuprisingly at present its the Doctor and Rorschach. It's never occured to me before what an interesting pair of values to respect at the same time. One sees the world as fundamentally wicked, the other believes in the inherent good of the universe, even in the Daleks. One sees his role as an exacter of justice, while the other would rather forgive. And probably most obviously, one of them is a pacifist - and the other one is Rorschach. In other words, I am finding sympathies with both viewpoints, despite the fact they could not be more different. The only thing they have in common is the refusal to give up.
And this is why I am flippant. If you can't help, then ignoring it is the closest thing to it going away. Because new age religions and fantasy novels do have it right about the balance between good and evil. On most days of the week, when real life doesn't distract me, I am in awe of how much wonder there is in the world - and I mean everything. Even Daleks. Beauty is everywhere, in everyone - take anyone you know and imagine their smile - in nature, and in stupid things like the colour of the Metropolitan line, or dilapidation in the ugliest building. To feel anything at all, be it anger, be it frustration, it's something - and of the mundane miseries of life, few of them count for anything at all. Even babies crying on the Tube, even missing ten minutes of your show because the football has overrun, those stupid human things, are wonderful. They have to be. To put it back in Watchmen terms:
"But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come... dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."
I love that scene because that's how I believe, how I think we should all believe. Laurie expresses it better in the final chapter, but I can't find the quote and it's spoilerific anyway (and that's why it's such a good book, because it can express everything, and I've quoted it at least four times this article). Maybe this wonder rests in my lack of interest in science, yet there is still joy to be found in the smallest things. On Saturday mornings, I come into the kitchen and smile precicely because of the appalling mess of food, discarded plates and cans - lots of cans - the Light Side has left behind them from last night. I remain amazed by the fact pitta bread swells up when it is microwaved. Or Cicero, defending the existance of the gods:
"Through daily repetition, however, and constant ocular experience the mind becomes used to the sight; it feels no wonder, and does not look for the reasons of things which it always sees, just as though it were the novelty rather than the importance of things which ought to urge us to inquire into their causes."
It seems to me that the world is so dark and so wonderful in such equal measure that it's all a case of perspective. Some days I am one, some I am the other, and the healthiest among us can cultivate both. Acknowledge the darkness so far as it is helpful, but believe in the good, aspire to it and make your own little bit of the world a little bit better.
So I leave you with "Trains to Brazil", one of the happiest songs in the world. It's hard to be unhappy listening to the Guillemots, and they are in musical form everything I've been trying to say. It's about 9/11 and 7/7 and the death of Jean de Menezes and the message, roughly speaking, is how brilliant life is. Like many a Guillemots song, it ends in a cacophony of sound, for the pure joy of making noise.
I defy you not to dance.
Incidentally, one of my film studies teachers is guilty of adultery. Ach, maybe the word "guilty" came off a little heavy handed - no, I'm not planning to go and remove his fingers one at a time. Except if I fail my year. In any case, he mentioned it in an essay about representation or something. I don't have anything hugely against adultery, it just struck me as a weird thing to confess to in a public forum, even if it is to illustrate a point. Am I missing something here? Has it somehow become OK to date married men in my absence?
It's a better way of dealing things than my natural reaction which is to, y'know, go out and hurt people. If this is reminding you of Walter Kovacks watching that building go up in smoke, while deciding life is cruel and meaningless, I suppose it's not far wrong. Sometimes you do just come across things which make you think "well, that's it then..."
When it comes to real life tragedy, I think a lot of people find me flippant and insensitive - especially the big ones which society demands you show obsequious sorrow for. And it's true I refuse to play ball, and won't watch the news or read the papers. Perhaps its at the root of why I sympathise with the Comedian, because some times things get so dark that really, all you can do is laugh. Or in any case, dodge the impact and meaning of the things. I refuse to interact with them, I can't. The world is so full of misery that you need but peer through the floodgates to start drowning. I mean, seriously - war, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, disease, domestic abuse, deforestation, gay persecution, animal persicution, religious persecution, race hate, extinction, natural disasters, accidents, fires, floods, murder, theft, rape, capital punishment, save the whales, find the missing persons, broken homes, failed marriages, kidnap, blackmail, drug crime, human trafficking...
Have I forgotten any? Yes, there's a lot of things wrong with the world, and I hate it when my mind goes down that route because there's so damn much of it, more than any one person can deal with or even comprehend. And I'm reminded of the Doctor innocently jetting off from Gallifrey, deciding he was going to fix everything wrong with the universe, and that over 900 years later he's still trying and nothing has changed.
Couple that with a lack of meaningful solutions, and my misery is complete. What do you do? How do you cope with it, except for shutting it out and pretending it isn't there? Thank you fates, that I come from an affluent family who can send me to have an education, who are loving, and who live in a country where I have as many options as I do dreams. While I'm sitting at home in my ivory tower - do I donate my time, my money, does it actually help if I go dig a well for a village somewhere, or is it more helpful to sit behind a desk and contribute that way? What about joining the Samaritans, helping people cope with tragedy instead of fighting the tragedy itself? Do you pick just one issue, and chase it to its lair, or help them all? It's why I love blood donation as a cause - it's a very real, very tangible expression of aid which cannot be subverted or debated. It is as simple as a man dying one moment, and not the next. That can never be wrong.
These feelings of inadequacy are doubtless linked to the superheroic status of my current "heroes" - I've always had someone, and on moving on felt I have learnt something from the experience, unsuprisingly at present its the Doctor and Rorschach. It's never occured to me before what an interesting pair of values to respect at the same time. One sees the world as fundamentally wicked, the other believes in the inherent good of the universe, even in the Daleks. One sees his role as an exacter of justice, while the other would rather forgive. And probably most obviously, one of them is a pacifist - and the other one is Rorschach. In other words, I am finding sympathies with both viewpoints, despite the fact they could not be more different. The only thing they have in common is the refusal to give up.
And this is why I am flippant. If you can't help, then ignoring it is the closest thing to it going away. Because new age religions and fantasy novels do have it right about the balance between good and evil. On most days of the week, when real life doesn't distract me, I am in awe of how much wonder there is in the world - and I mean everything. Even Daleks. Beauty is everywhere, in everyone - take anyone you know and imagine their smile - in nature, and in stupid things like the colour of the Metropolitan line, or dilapidation in the ugliest building. To feel anything at all, be it anger, be it frustration, it's something - and of the mundane miseries of life, few of them count for anything at all. Even babies crying on the Tube, even missing ten minutes of your show because the football has overrun, those stupid human things, are wonderful. They have to be. To put it back in Watchmen terms:
"But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come... dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly."
I love that scene because that's how I believe, how I think we should all believe. Laurie expresses it better in the final chapter, but I can't find the quote and it's spoilerific anyway (and that's why it's such a good book, because it can express everything, and I've quoted it at least four times this article). Maybe this wonder rests in my lack of interest in science, yet there is still joy to be found in the smallest things. On Saturday mornings, I come into the kitchen and smile precicely because of the appalling mess of food, discarded plates and cans - lots of cans - the Light Side has left behind them from last night. I remain amazed by the fact pitta bread swells up when it is microwaved. Or Cicero, defending the existance of the gods:
"Through daily repetition, however, and constant ocular experience the mind becomes used to the sight; it feels no wonder, and does not look for the reasons of things which it always sees, just as though it were the novelty rather than the importance of things which ought to urge us to inquire into their causes."
It seems to me that the world is so dark and so wonderful in such equal measure that it's all a case of perspective. Some days I am one, some I am the other, and the healthiest among us can cultivate both. Acknowledge the darkness so far as it is helpful, but believe in the good, aspire to it and make your own little bit of the world a little bit better.
So I leave you with "Trains to Brazil", one of the happiest songs in the world. It's hard to be unhappy listening to the Guillemots, and they are in musical form everything I've been trying to say. It's about 9/11 and 7/7 and the death of Jean de Menezes and the message, roughly speaking, is how brilliant life is. Like many a Guillemots song, it ends in a cacophony of sound, for the pure joy of making noise.
I defy you not to dance.
Incidentally, one of my film studies teachers is guilty of adultery. Ach, maybe the word "guilty" came off a little heavy handed - no, I'm not planning to go and remove his fingers one at a time. Except if I fail my year. In any case, he mentioned it in an essay about representation or something. I don't have anything hugely against adultery, it just struck me as a weird thing to confess to in a public forum, even if it is to illustrate a point. Am I missing something here? Has it somehow become OK to date married men in my absence?
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