Mobile phones and the enclosure movement

I think the reason mobile phones caught on so fast is we spent most of our evolutionary history able to instantly communicate with the people we loved, because they were always around. We were in little packs or little tribes or little towns and you could just wander over and say "What are you having for dinner?" or "What is that thing he's wearing doesn't he know how silly he looks?" or "Look at what my cat is doing haha!" or "Wanna come back to my place?" etc. Like it's deeply in us to be able to talk to the ones we love at short notice.

That gets destroyed, for my ancestors anyway, by the enclosure movement. Land that was previously understood to be commonly accessible was forcibly enclosed by the wealthy; walls and fences were put around it and trespassers were prosecuted. But that was the land we ate off - we hunted and fished and foraged on it. Once that was gone we couldn't feed ourselves; to feed ourselves we had to swap our labour for money and go where the work was. We went to the cities and the cities grew and our families fragmented into little bits.

For a long time we kept a lot of these habits though, and got to know the people who lived nearby even if our families were far away, but it gets eroded more and more as we have to keep going where the work is. After enough generations of that geographic churn who knows anyone? And who has their family and all the ones they love within walking distance? Not me. You're all dispersed through space.

So of course when things come along to collapse that space, to make everyone present and immediately available for conversation again, we leap at it. It's what we've done for millennia and instincts like that don't just go away. To the people who got used to the loneliness of the recent past it seems weird, like WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE TO BE ABLE TO TALK TO EVERYONE CAN'T THEY JUST BE ALONE FOR FIVE MINUTES but they're the odd ones, if you live in deep time. Being comfortable to be alone is only a virtue in a society that wants to split everyone up and starve them so they have to go where the money is. The rest of us want to be with the ones we love. We want to talk to each other. X

Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands

Things I'm grateful for this morning: hands, feet, eyes, ears, a working nervous system. Not being paralysed. Not being bombed. No-one I love died while I was asleep. Water at the turn of a tap, a five second walk from here. This water won't make me sick. It has no shit in it, no fracking chemicals, nothing radioactive enough to worry about. I can't set it on fire. Connected to those taps are reservoirs with water in them; it's years since the last drought.

No gas or oil or coal underneath my home. No coal trains in breathing distance. No nuclear power anywhere nearby either.

A fridge full of food. A cupboard full of food. Discovering, thanks to Charlie Wood, a sweetener that doesn't give me hellish despairing mood swings, and which therefore grants me the ability to eat cake mm cake. I went twenty years pretty much without eating cake, so I appreciate it. Cake is fucking good. So is hot chocolate.

= excuse me a moment while I go and make a cup of hot chocolate =

A window from which I can see the sky. The sky itself, huger than thought, huger than the huge clouds in it. The sun poking through those clouds. Life. LIFE. Billions of years of ancestors successfully cheating death and fucking each other and giving birth to each other and then to me. Thanks guys!

Having lived in places full of mice or flies or ants or cockroaches, I am grateful that right now I do not. I'm also grateful that snakes don't come in unannounced.

Having been taught to read. Having been taught not to believe the first thing I think. Having been taught to write. Having been taught to play drums in a world where everyone's looking for a drummer, and therefore finding a path out of the weird loneliness of high school. High school. Primary school. Kindergarten, even though there was that weird girl who said her dad was a cop and he'd shoot me. There were pieces of fruit cut up bite-size and we got to have naps on the floor.

Having experienced loneliness, anxiety, despair, depression, confusion, directionlessness, heartbreak: suffering. It makes you less arrogant, and it's so easy to be arrogant. Suffering is the bridge that lets the world in over your weird walls. I'm grateful though not to have so much of it that I can't think.

My lovely daughters Mei and Alaska Drenth. My lovely partner Hanna Tai, who puts up with me. Friends and family, without whom I'd have, and be, nothing.

People who try. The gloomier the news gets, the more grateful I am to the people who try anyway. The labor movement. The women's movement. The peace movement. The environment movement. Thanks to the love and sacrifice of these good people I get to have a decent life and so do many of the people I love. Thanks to these people I can imagine something other than destruction and despoilation.

OK there is much more but this is long already. The rest can wait for other days. X

Lik

made with obsessiveness stolen from songs

when one cuts into any part of the human body, the same thing always comes out - blood.
- arnold schoenberg, the relationship to the text

prescience, felicity, urbanity, hauteur, surfeit, magniloquence, enravishment, execration, abnegation, riot, debauch, hope, joy, grief, effluent life, and a lot more.
- harry partch, genesis of a music

1. i don't
I DON'T WRITE much at the moment because i only have so much obsessiveness and i need it for music right now. i wake up thinking about something and whatever that thing is gets the most care. for a while it was these stories. i woke up and thought about how to say something better or how to say it at all.

i liked it but it sucked the obsessiveness out of my music and my music needs it at the moment. writing is easier than music: you don't need any special equipment: just the stuff we all pour out of our mouths and around our bodies all day. of course, this makes everything more naked but that's good.

all i'm saying is right now i want to wake up with sounds in my head instead of sentences. maybe deep down, if there is such a place, sounds and sentences aren't different and i'm just being silly. but i'm a little bit groggy when i wake up and it seems to me it's one or the other at the moment. i'm writing this now because i said these little stories are some kind of love letter to you all and they are and i don't want you to feel like my love is diminished because it isn't.


2. anyway, i just wanted to say:
I WALKED. THE world unfolded around me and enfolded me. i looked like a thing but i was just a fold in the stuff of the world, like origami. the earth seemed to turn beneath my feet to accommodate me. thanks world! you're the best!

tree stumps loo(something else had looked at me earlier. it was a dandelion orb, a halation of seeds. halation is a fancy word i learned the other day which means 'the spreading of light beyond its proper boundary in a photographic image'.)ked at me. my breath had settled in my body, down the bottom somewhere. all the bad breath was down there. i needed to stir it up so the bad bit could come out of my mouth and quit poisoning me.

i climbed a hill. something was green. there were deciduous trees filling with fresh green too young to be holy. deciduous trees go through a year-long menstruation of leaves, collecting them like blood and then letting them go: whoosh.

the poison breath had settled in my body because before walking i'd been staring at a screen for a few days, trying to write something about noise. it's hard. noise is what you get when you ask a representational system, like for instance a guitar amplifier, to do too many things at once. noise is what representation systems do with excess. it's how they represent what they can't represent.

i'd been staring at a screen and staring at a screen is a kind of sensory deprivation, like being in a flotation tank. when you come out the world seems so real.

anyway: i walked. there was some kind of light in the sky shining on everything. trees got in the way of the light and made dark patches on the ground. there were wires above my head carrying electricity from one place to another because this all happened at a time when we used electricity to make something we called privacy. privacy was a kind of drug we were experimenting with. it meant you could do things like cook and learn and laugh at stories even if no-one else was nearby, but you needed electricity to be able to do it.


3. what i was trying to say before about noise relates to writing, somehow. for me, writing is something that demands itself when i'm trying to represent too many things at once. so this writing is noise, a kind of by-product of excess, the noise the world makes when i try to swallow it whole, the noise i make because i want to take the whole world into me at once instead of dividing it up and eating it one piece at a time. i'm like this because the world is like this: the world eats itself all day every day. of course, the world is bigger than me and can get away with it but it doesn't stop me trying. i want to make myself in the world's image because the world knows everything and i only know a few things. re which, i'll tell you four:


4. tenets
IF YOU GREW up bookish and awkward like me these might help you. they're keys to locks that can form around your neck.

1. if you can't accept a feeling you can make up something called 'the self who feels this' and accept that, whatever the feeling is. try it. it's a kind of sneaky back-door path to acceptance when the feelings seem impossible.

2. have a fun life whatever the ladies do, if you're a heterosexual male. ladies are other people and other people do all kinds of things. don't rely on them doing what you want. make sure you have a fun life even if they don't do what you want them to, like adore you, or say the things you want to hear. it's a pity not getting what you want but no reason not to have fun.

3. have a sense of humour. it'll help. if you don't have one make one up. if you can't make one up then just smile to yourself and think how nice it would be to have a sense of humour: yeah, that'd be sweet. you know you can't have a sense of humour but at least you can enjoy the idea of one. try that.

4. find something in the present moment to enjoy. it doesn't matter what it is. the thing that matters is that you don't have to wait for things to be different to feel pleasure. i've tried this lots of times and there always turns out to be something available to enjoy.

5. i was drunk on the world
I WAS DRUNK on the world. it kept looking at me and holding me up so i could walk on it. i was a fold in the world. i said that already. it was knotted into my heart. my heart was a knot in the world and dragged the world with it. everything was still because everything is always still. everything seemed so real. i wore the sky like a crown.

love to all
xxx

butter-knife love

it's a funny car to steal, that's all i can say. the registration expired last month, there was hardly any petrol in it and it's hard to put in gear. the resale value is close to negative: it costs more to repair a 25-year-old european car than anyone wants to spend. the thieves, i guess, are not too bright. on the other hand, you can start it with a butter-knife so i guess it was easy to steal if not necessarily a great investment.

in any case: it's definitely not there. i can see right across to the other side of the street now. the car i owned for a while no longer blocks the view. the thieves left the persimmon tree though and this is nice of them cos while i've been distracted leaves have been crawling quietly out of it and into the sky. they are a delicious colour somewhere between yellow and green and the blue of the sky sets them off to fine effect. good old persimmon tree! you won't abandon me, surely! no, the car is definitely not there.

anyway: fuck the car: have i told you lately that i love you, dear reader? thinking on it, i guess i have: these little stories are love-letters to whomever is willing to read them: my love made legible and poured out into the world.

xxxx

carp libraries

she said 'you look different'
i said 'well, i guess'
- bob dylan

1. carp
I WAS AT university. i walked to the library. the floor just outside the library was some kind of shiny linoleum. it reflected the fluorescent lights above it, turning them into hazy white carp somewhere far underfoot.

university libraries like this one are information ecologies. there are supplies of information of different kinds and different species which have learned to feed on them.


2. sorry, did you say 'information ecologies'?
YEAH.. SOME FOLKS use the term 'information ecology' as a nicer, more touchy-feely term than 'information economy'. they forget that in ecologies things actually eat each other quite a lot of the time.* an ecology, while it may be prettier than an economy, is no friendlier a place to be. there are far fewer ways to interact in an ecology without eating other occupants or being eaten by them than there are in an economy. in an ecology you either ignore other occupants, eat them, or try and stop them eating you. in an economy it's possible to sit down over coffee.

ok: it's time to go back to the library, if that's quite fucking alright with you.

what most folks are looking for here are not specific pieces of information but rather flows of information they can direct at will. this means not books but internet connections. the library is a bitch like this, a bitch with many teats. there are always more puppies here than teats though, puppies wandering around looking for somewhere to latch on to the flow, the milk of late modernity.

if you can find one of these you can direct it to supply you with whatever you want, pretty much. it's like a genie or a very capable butler:

'i wish to look upon angelina jolie! this instant, i say!'

'very good, sir.'

(enter ANGELINA JOLIE. she has enormous lips.)

..if you can find a terminal, that is. it's hard. but if you have a laptop you can just feed on the wireless signal suffusing the air: it's the tesla-esque alternative to the supply of information along wires.

anyway:


3. love, maybe
I SAW A young woman. she was sitting in a quiet corner, feeding on the wireless signal. she was sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, talking and laughing quietly in what sounded like french. her laptop sat on the floor in front of her. from it came a voice and maybe pictures too, i couldn't see: the voice of some kind of love who was not nearby, maybe.

maybe love and the marks we know it by - words and smiles and tones of voice - were being translated into more mobile kinds of information and sent great distances and then turned back into the marks of love.

she looked a little wistful but more than this she was smiling. there was a gold ring or a red flower sitting on the mousepad too and i can't remember which. i've tried the memory both ways and each way makes sense and outside the hazy white carp still swam slow and ghostly: untouchable behind the floor's shiny interface.

xxxx

* fools!