The Two Towers

The first time I arrived in New York, I took a yellow taxi from JFK. It was seven or eight in the morning after a red-eye flight and cold but the sky was clear and blue. There was a particular point when I realized, like so many millions before me, that I was driving into a movie set. That moment replicated itself over and over again over the following forty eight hours and never entirely left me as I trekked back and forth between London and Manhattan for the following year.

From the cab, Manhattan Island was a Polaroid of skyscrapers with the World Trade Center dominating one end. I could pick out other icons but the two towers structured the entire skyline.

It was 2000.

The following night, I found myself in the Windows of the World. It was loud and crowded and we didn’t stay too long. A few weeks later, I went up to the observation deck on top of the South Tower. The queue was huge but the staff marshaled us all through efficiently and politely. I don’t know where New York got this reputation for rudeness from. I never found New Yorkers to be anything other than helpful and courteous. The elevator was an express that left my ears popping and the view and the height were vertiginous. The Tower seemed to sway and the view went on forever in all directions. I had never been in such an explicitly high place in all of my life.

As the months went by, I got used to travelling through the subway under the Center and changing trains or walking back and forth along the streets in its shadow. The canyons (you don’t really need sunglasses in much of Manhattan – there are places where I swear the light never reaches the bottom), Broadway, Shakespeare and Co – all became part of the landscape of my working day.

On one of my last trips, a colleague invited me for dinner. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn with a view of the Towers across the river. A year later they saw the second plane crash into the south tower from the same deck.

By then, I was working for another agency in London. Still, pretty much all of us had either worked with or for companies based in and around the financial district and we watched the horror unfold that afternoon knowing that colleagues, acquaintances  and friends of friends were right in the middle of it. I think I felt numb. People I knew were suddenly in the middle of a war zone. People they knew were dying. Most of us dropped any pretense at working and spent that day hovering over instant messaging and email waiting for news of people, ticking off mutual acquaintances one by one as they managed to get news out.

There are people who ushered me into the lift, who served me a drink in Windows on the World, who worked security, who went to work in the financial and media companies there, who attended briefings, stood on the top of the observation deck having their picture taken, men, women, children of all nationalities, who were murdered that day. They did not deserve to die any more than the hundreds of thousands murdered since in Iraq, Afghanistan, London, Libya and so many other places where a multitude of interchangeable hatreds continue to take the lives of innocents each and every day.

I don’t really know what else to say except that I’m thinking about these things here, at this moment and I’m again promising myself that somehow, I’ll try to do the least harm I can in this life. And to not hate. Most of all, not to hate.

When I was nearly nine, we called it second year

I don’t remember much about being nine at my primary school in a sleepy seaside town in the North West of England. There was light, generally low buildings and wide roads and an aunt and uncle around the corner. There’s a picture of me in a cowboy taken in their garden. I could ride my bike around the block and visit my best friend D who lived around the corner (I remember that his father was an electrician. My mother had three sisters and a brother and there always seemed to be relatives and cousins cousins to visit. There was a botanical garden with aviaries and maze -like rose gardens. When the tide went out, the sands ran on for miles and miles. You could see Blackpool Tower across the bay.

At school, another aunt (actually, a cousin) was my teacher but she was stricter with me than anyone else as a consequence. Everyone in the class noticed it. There were children’s parties and another girl, K, whom I had an enormous crush on. I read and read and made up my own comic books. All my pocket money went on books. Eventually, I agitated for a weekly comic like the other boys and whilst they vetoed the Beano or the Dandy (except as an occasional degenerate holiday treat) my parents approved Look And Learn. Look And Learn featured the marvelous “The Trigan Empire“, a science fiction story set in a distant galaxy of imperial intrigue and warfare.

Eventually, my father got a new job and we moved down near Liverpool.

I suspect everyone has some sort of before and after moment in their lives demarcating the border between innocence and experience and mine would be the moment of that move. The house was smaller, the accents were harder (I was branded as a ‘poof’ on my first day at my new school) and our relatives were far away. There’s more but that’s enough.

The time since that change seems recorded in high-definition video. The time before, in sunset-kissed Technicolor.

Dudelet starts year four today. He’ll be nine in January. I’m so, so glad we failed to move house outside of London, despite all of my efforts to the contrary, and that he’s still in his school, with his classmates and friends whom I know he loves. I hope he lives his life in Technicolor a little longer than I did and transitions to all the harsh, bright high contrast of HD a little more gently.

Tarot and the shaky rationalist

I’ve been reading/messing about with/collecting Tarot cards for some 30 odd years now, on and off. They live mostly wrapped in colourful silk scarves, in a stylishly minimal black wooden box at the side of my bed.

The fascination began when I was reading up on Yeats and the Golden Dawn in Sixth Form. Yeats, aside from being a poet, playwright, Senator of the Irish Free State and manager of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, was a very serious occultist. No less than Alistair Crowley referred to him as “that dishevelled demonologist” (in return, Yeats loathed Crowley and later expelled him from the occult order they both belonged to, the Golden Dawn).

I picked up two or three decks over the next few years, learning to read in a relatively haphazard way. Every now and then I’d use them to make ends meet. When I met supermum, in fact, I was reading Tarot cards in an odd little indoor market somewhere in the East of England. Then I abandoned them altogether for ten years or so until the urgent need came up to make a living during a gap in employment. Supermum was pregnant, we had our first mortgage, job offers weren’t exactly knocking at the door and a badly managed period of freelancing had left me deeply in debt to the taxman. A friend hooked me up with a London members’ club and I did an evening’s work there. It was interesting and I felt the pull and the draw all over again. The following day, I was offered a ‘respectable’ job and put them down.

And that was that for eight years until two years ago, I began to read Dante in depth, followed by quantities of material on Northern Myth and paganism. It was probably influenced by the novel I’d begun to write, Shaper. I suppose it was inevitable that I’d be drawn back to what is, for me, the motherlode of myth, mysticism and imagery in the West, the Tarot but this time with – I hope – a humbler attitude. It started again with an impulse purchase from Treadwell’s of the Tarot art deck, the Spill Tarot, and continued when I encountered Suzanne Treister’s extraordinary HEXEN 2.0 deck created for an installation at the Science Museum. HEXEN 2.0 is a genuine transposition of the Renaissance tradition of the tarot as a treasure house of obscurely interconnected symbols and archetypes into the 21st century. But for her, the archetypes are ARPANET, Timothy Leary, the CIA, wide area networks, the Situationalists, transhumanism and much else existing on the shadowy borders between technology and new age superstition. I found it to be a deck that directly related to my own work in managing, networking, websites, marketing and other dark arts. This led to trying a few readings as a substitute for conventional mind-mapping or brainstorming exercises when I was working on new product ideas or strategies. I also I have a very understanding boss who let me use them in my appraisal!

All this drew me back to the Frieda Harris and Crowley’s Thoth deck (Crowley was an appalling human being but he knew a thing or two about Tarot and Harris’ artwork is amazing). Using it, I’ve been working through Rachel Pollack’s excellent Tarot Wisdom and rethinking the way I approach them.

Which brings me, at last, to my position as a ‘shaky rationalist’. I’m an atheist, someone who believes in empirical evidence, scientific process and the strong possibility that we’re all descended from apes and amoebas (for some of us, more of one than the other). What on earth am I doing playing around with a pack of dodgy occult cards?

I suppose the answer is “I don’t really know.” I mix them up, think about the images and the interactions between them and how that relates to the meanings assigned to them over the centuries and I see what happens. In the process, I learn something about myself and about the people I occasionally read for. It’s a kind of weather forecasting in some ways.

The thing Tarot is doing for me is provide a lens for thinking about a kind of spirituality and way of relating to the “images of eternity” we’ve inherited from our ancestors that makes intuitive sense to me. I’m suspicious of the kind of instant shamanism peddled in so many contexts but one concept well-founded in anthropological research is the shaman’s capacity to accept both concrete material fact and the experience of the altered ‘shamanic’ state of mind as real – real in the post-modern sense if you like. Tarot is a formidable tool for experiencing this.

And besides, the cards are very beautiful. Isn’t that enough in its own right?

A few books:

Rachel Pollack, Tarot Wisdom and Seventy Eight Degrees Of Wisdom

A.E. Waite - The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (an old classic and the essential guide to the Rider-Waite Deck so many people start with)

Alistair Crowley - The Book of Thoth (not for beginners!)

Sallie Nichols - Jung And Tarot – An Archetypal Journey (I’m no Jungian but, as with so much else, his idea of the Archetype is a useful tool for thinking about oneself and ones relationship to a larger whole)

Vinyl, sacred spaces and the placebo effect

I’ve been reading Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science and I’m especially intrigued by the the chapter on placebos. The effect is probably well known. Crudely, it’s the idea that the belief that one is being healed or medicated is as likely to have a positive benefit as the actual medicine itself. It can be held responsible for everything from the occasional improvement in someone’s hay fever via to homeopathic sugar pills to remarkable treatment successes documented in shamanistic cultures.  Goldacre cites Moerman’s reframing of placebos as the meaning response, ‘the psychological and physiological effects of meaning in the treatment of illness’ and I like the idea of explicitly addressing how meaning affects the tricky and highly permeable interface between mind and body.

So what does this have to do with records?

Another way of framing the placebo effect is to look at it as a consequence of the way rhetorical devices frame our responses to pain, illness, perceived pleasure or other life events. In other words

• do records sound better than mp3s because we expect them to?
• do we expect them to because of the rhetorical devices that comprise and frame the act of putting a record on?

When a shaman sets to work to drive out an illness, the dancing, chanting, herbs and all the rest of their activities form a powerful ritual that has an actual physical impact on many healing processes (for example, here’s an academic paper examining the impact of shamanistic ritual on drug addiction). Now lets think about the ritual associated with vinyl compare to CDs or mp3s with the caveat that, as with the placebo effect in medicine, all of this is deeply and locally culturally specific.

Firstly, there’s the act of choosing a record and the limitations the physical nature of the medium impose. Records occupy space. It takes time to riffle through a shelf and pull down just the right one. Additionally, long playing records aren’t set up to easily play just one song – one is choosing to immerse oneself for a set length of time. The cover art is larger and demands one’s full attention. The record itself is fragile and needs care and cleaning before being played. ‘Fragile’ equals valuable – a record is more easily broken, damaged, scratched than a CD.  Records, then, demand an investment in acknowledging their ritual value before one has even turned on an amplifier and played a note. And it is a ritual, like the tea ceremony or awarding a degree – it’s a ceremony that ascribes value.

Then there’s the equipment. Mp3s are utterly portable and carry no inherent value. CDs can be exactly replicated on home equipment and are again relatively portable. Records are completely useless without a record player. Listening to records requires an environment specifically set up for record listening. It’s an activity which needs a dedicated sacred space, not to mention a non-trivial bunch of relatively pricey hi-fi, even at the lowest end.

To recap. Before we listen to a record, we’re (and by ‘we’ I mean ‘people-who-listen-to-records’) prepared to accept that it has an innate value beyond that of other mediums. We’ve invested a degree of time up-front. We’ve spent quite a lot of money and organised a not inconsiderable portion of our homes to provide a space for this ritual*. We’re ready to be transported; to, in ritual terms, have our consciousness. We are ready to listen to a record.

Is it any wonder, after all this, that The Queen Is Dead sounds so much better on 180 gramme black vinyl?

The latter, by the way, relates directly to another phenomenon Ben documents, of how much more Western people trust anything that comes wrapped in pseudo-scientific-techno-babble over something presented in plain language. Of course 180 gramme vinyl sounds better. One hundred and eighty grammes!

Of course, there are are a seemingly limitless number of complicating factors – everything from how clean the record is to the quality of the stereo, the shape of the room, the amount of damage your ears have suffered, the bloody quality of the electricity – that feed into the journey from that deceptively simple vinyl groove to your ear. A controlled test is virtually impossible. And, in any case, if it really is the ritual and rhetoric of the vinyl placebo that enhances ones listening, does that really matter? When I put a record on, it’s a commitment to that piece of music that goes beyond sloping around the underground with my in-canal earphones and iPhone or slotting a CD into my work computer. Is it any wonder I get a little more out of it? And if the impact of my nice record player, speakers and cables and so on is rather physical and more metaphorical or metaphysical than I might like to think, does it really matter all that much?

*Space…ritual! Geddit? Oh, forgeddit.

The despair of the Inter-Galactic Hitchhiker

I’ve been re-reading Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels over the last week. It’s been an odd sort of ride, pulling me deeply into my past in some ways and highlighting the present in other, surprisingly depressing forms.

Encountering the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy proper for the first in thirty years time-warped me straight back to being fifteen and glued to Radio 4 via my family’s one pair of big, padded headphones, waiting at the dinner table for the expansive FM stereo of (unbelievably) The Eagles ‘Journey of the Sorcerer‘ (the rest of the music was provided by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop). It was 1978. In the outside world, things were about to get seriously unpleasant. Then there’d the announcement of the title in those fruity Radio 4 tones that now seem so cemented to a certain time and set of assumptions.”The story so far…”

And then I’d be gone.

On another planet or spaceship or space-time continuum entirely, wrapped up in this strange little world that only I and a few privileged friends at school had heard of. To my family, it was utterly meaningly and once they’d established that there was no swearing, no readily discernible blasphemy and zero sex references (I was very lucky with the ten minutes they actually listened too), they left me and the luxurious headphones to it.

The show was wonderful. And hilarious. And utterly, magnificently true – the Universe (as I was discovering) really did make no sense. Forty two was as good an answer as any. A gang of white mice who were really extensions of pan-dimensional beings conducting frightfully sophisticated experiments on humans was as credible (and certainly more attractive) an explanation as a God who’d let his only son be flogged, nailed to a tree and stabbed with a spear after days of horrible torture.

I think there were many ways I’ve since forgotten in which it must have helped me survive a pretty grim adolescence*.

The book itself came after the radio series in 1979 and I promptly saved up and bought it, along with the first two sequels – The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe (1979) and Life, The Universe and Everything (1980). After that, I went to university and lost touch with the series. Or did it lose touch with me? Loftier things (the worst relationship in the world, being in dreadful bands, drink etc) got in the way.

Returning to the books, my 49 year old self notices two things. Firstly, I’m now at the age Douglas Adams was when he died (see the extended kvetch on this subject in my last post) and secondly, how astonishing it is in some ways that Adams lasted as long as he did. I can only assume he existed at the same level as some sort of Zen Master, serenely and ironically composed in the face of the singular horror of a universe with no rhyme or reason other than the entirely futile and random rationales that its hapless inhabitants project upon it. These are seriously depressing books if you approach them in the wrong frame of mind. A handful of pages into the first volume, the entire human race is wiped out to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Later, the ‘hero’ (the books don’t really have heroes, actually, except possibly for Trillian), Arthur Dent, finds himself returning to his doomed home planet again and again and each time the horrors and the pathos redouble.

Does anything lighten the existential murk? Well, a few things.

For one thing, the books are funny. Very funny, in the nihilistic, absurdist vein mined by Monty Python or the Goons (especially Spike Milligan). Adams was actually a minor Footlights alumni and had a couple of writing credits for Monty Python. He revels in demented neologisms (“the mattress flurried and glurried. It flolloped, gupped and willioied…” I should mention that we’re dealing with a sentient mattress here), silly names (Slartibartfast? Zaphod Beeblebrox?) and complex puns.

And they’re also bursting with ideas. Like Philip K. Dick, Adams is an ideas man first and a plotter second. One meets SEPs (Someone Else’s Problem) field generators, Infinite Improbability Engines and an altogether convincing general theory of time travel. Doors talk. The mighty marketing machine of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation embeds annoying personalities in every moving part of a space ship. A huge computer and a sentient drinks machine nearly kill everyone trying to solve the problem of how to make tea. And so on. The characters in his books are pretty much identical at the end to the way they are at the beginning. Their lack of progression is almost the whole point.

But as the series goes on (and I’m about to start the fourth volume, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish), it gets darker and darker and the satire shifts its targets from petty bureaucracy and marketing to bigger, less easily laughed away evils – war, genocide, environmental havoc, the entitlement felt by the very rich and the powerlessness of the rest of us to change, well anything. Very little light gets through.

Except for one thing. At the climax of Life, The Universe and Everything, Trillian the closest we get to a sympathetic character in the entire series, notices that the most hideously feared warmongers in the entire history of the universe quite possibly don’t want to kill anyone. They’d rather play ‘krikket’ with them. And for a few pages, a character changes the small, dark space around her through an outpouring of what is, effectively, love. Earlier, one saw her struggle to reach the titanically solipsistic Zaphod Beeblebrox, fail, and quietly walk away. Here, Trillian succeeds, on a planet where a cloud of dust has blocked out any of the light from the surrounding universe from ever reaching it.

Love. Love the people immediately around you. That’s the only meaning the books dare offer, they only way in which they attempt to make any kind of sense whatsoever. As things get bleaker and bleaker (and the books are full of appalling prophecies ranging from Kindles to the deforestation of an entire planet to avoid hyper-inflation of a currency consisting of leaves to a civilisation descended entirely from the survivors of a spaceship full of marketing managers and accountants) it’s as good a message as any.

*Believe me, the Ravenous Blugbatter Beast of Tral** would have been light relief, with or without a towel.

**Read the damn book, ok?