Depression Era Brighton 2: The Day

How are you even supposed to think? I have a fat arse that's growing and I've seen nothing but the insides of these walls for far too long. Now that the season has grown colder I have no will to leave for a walk, but I'm utterly sick of the view from here. I could have work if only they'd give it to me and then at least I'd know what my time is supposed to be - without that knowledge, the boundaries of time disappear and it all just turns into a mess of two different kinds of light, three different kinds of cheese, two chairs, one sofa and a table. At times I tell myself I can play the guitar instead of languishing and I do, often - same for the violin - but without work I seem to lose the perspective on their sounds and their forms. Time is like light - the more you have, the more it burns into you until you're exhausted without ever moving. The sounds of my guitar flatten and die the more I hear them, the violin loses its lilt and just seems crass. And I know that my wife is working so hard at two jobs and is ill already and that crushes me even further. I want her to be able to think of her husband as someone who is capable and active and commanding, but as it is I am none out of three and less besides. Every application I send comes back with a misspelt name or a swing-and-a-miss gender guess attached to the inevitable 'unfortunately we cannot countenance giving you a job on the basis of a hasty scanning of your covering letter and CV (all right, we read your name and assumed you were Polish)' and I don't know what else to say in them. When I get work I'm the best there is, but I'm going to work one day this week - which is a day more than last - and I'm not guaranteed anything next week. The bin men are striking in protest of their rates of pay. I've worked as a bin man - you run the round, work 5-6 hours, get paid for eight hours and a great workout. There are other perks - like greasy spoon cafes giving you free meals if you take their trash for no charge (they'd have to pay a rate for industrial waste or some such - it works out well for both sides). And whilst you stink and the work is heavy going, you make plenty more than minimum wage for unskilled labour. But the bin men are striking, in the worst economy since WWII they're laying down their gloves (they have no tools to down), leaving trash piled high on the streets, trash piled high in the kitchens, overflowing bins and rotting veg strewn across the pavements of Depression Era Brighton because the they want more pay and I can't even think for lack of work. In 'The Road to Wigan Pier' George Orwell laments how there are many unemployed men who write exceptionally well, but who rarely write at all. Though he understands their mindset, he still notes that there is a vast expanse of time in which to craft and research any number of papers. I often think the same way and, when feeling industrious, throw myself into a particularly gruelling application form or covering letter or session of music practice. But as for writing in its purest form, I find that I will write what I live and I do not wish to live this so I do not wish to write this. I also distract myself with arguments on youtube - here are some highlights: there are no highlights of arguments on youtube. Tomorrow will be better

Depression Era Brighton 1: The Dream

I fell out of bed with a thump. It was three thirteen and the floor was rough and cold. I tried to lift my hands to catch myself before I hit it, but they caught on a pair of jeans, meaning I landed heavily on the backs of my hands and forearms. My dream had begun in some crumbling cottage in a made-up county; all my friends lived there together and we all had damp, unkempt rooms. Flashes from the dream badgered me as I rolled over on the bedroom floor at three thirteen am with my eyes burning and my head throbbing. I saw a woman with black hair and a ledge I had to cross over and over. This is a format of a particular kind of dream I often have - where I seem to have no choice but to risk traversing a precarious mountain ledge or high wire or high dive, over and over again until I finally slip and wake-up unpleasantly cold and heading for the carpet. Other times I feel myself landing on the mattress as though my body had become weightless in the dream and consciousness had brought gravity flooding back into my very cells. This time I had to cross a thin ledge with no hand grips to get to a room where I could be alone and at peace, but I always forgot something so, when I got there, I had to go back. Every time I returned I would have something else to carry - a pen, a laptop, my guitar - eventually I'd have to carry an armchair or a bed across and would lose my balance, tumbling to my impending death. My wife tells me I grind my teeth in my sleep. I thought about just staying there, on my back on the floor, with the warmth of my jeans covering my chest and a fishnet petticoat cushioning my heels - I felt quite comfortable. Cold, yes, but comfortable. I thought I felt a carpet bug brushing my ear but it didn't bother me. Three thirteen turned to three fourteen and I shivered, got to one knee and swayed drunkenly. Of course I was drunk. Not happily drunk, though earlier I had been; no, dirty drunk on lambrini. I used to drink whisky and beer and straight whisky and cider and quadruple whisky and I'd get up at six am and work a hard, hazy shift. Lambrini is a dirty drunk - cheap and harmless until you pass the threshold to the world of phantoms and wild scenery and precarious ledges over unfathomable drops - during dreams, it turns your head to charcoal and decapitates your will. It suits me to get out of bed early and go for a run, but I drink lambrini and sleep 'til ten and don't dress all day. That is unless the phone rings and I go to some 'job' where I help able bodied people eat dinner. I pick up bottles of wine and pour them drinks as if they were incapable of such a geometrically challenging task; I offer little rolls of bread and little cups of tea and little pallets of chocolates but, much the worst of all, I 'pull down for dessert'. Can you imagine what this can possibly entail? How such a task has become pro-forma at large-scale, upper-echelon catering events escapes me: just who was the progenitor of the practice is a question that brings to mind idle, rich, obnoxious sons of swindling bankers whose obese forms are an insult to every sentient being who has ever wanted for comfort, food or security. I find it humiliating in the extreme and demeaning to all concerned: actually, yes, you've probably guessed it. The waiter, when tasked with 'pulling-down', is to lean over the shoulder of the guest, crotch against back, and 'pull down' the dessert fork and dessert spoon from their station at the peak of the place setting to their ready positions under hands, left and right. I don't even know which side the spoon and fork should be and have been corrected by guests more than once. Having swapped fork and spoon over, one wonders why they waited for me to 'pull' them 'down' in the first place. 'Pull'! Young girls used to crawl miles through coal mines 'pulling' carts laden with their father's and brother's excavations. They would tread over rough shale and through unthinkable darknesses and would be killed by cave-ins and gas-leaks and fires and when at the end of the day they emerged coughing and heaving with their skin blackened and their lips bursting red they might be paid enough to feed themselves sufficiently to have the energy to do it again the next day. Christ, this catering is no work for a man! This is depression era Brighton and I'm doing better than some, I know, but I'm paying for it with my dignity and the dignity of those others who still can spare the cash for a banquet and a waiter who will force his crotch into their backs and, forced smile dimly visible, incorrectly orientate their fork and spoon for them. I rolled back into bed with no particular time in mind other the last one I saw. This is depression era Brighton town in the year two thousand and nine and I'll drink lambrini, 'pull down for dessert' and dream of precarious ledges and the inevitable fall over and over before the clock's meaningless face.

By way of explanation

The Neutrino Leap is what I have decided to call my own restatement of the old argument about the existence of God. I am unsure as to which particular strain of this argument it belongs, but if I explain it then you will be able to judge for yourself.

The neutrino is a virtually massless element of particle physics. It travels near the speed of light and passes through just about anything - making it very difficult to detect. It was, in effect, not so much as discovered as it is required by our understanding of particle physics - our understanding of what the world is made of required neutrinos to exist. There have, since the 1950's, been experiments conducted that show what we understand to be the affects of neutrinos (in fact 'anti-neutrinos', but let's not overcomplicate things) in the lab - and it is by their affects that we know both that they exist and what their nature is.

So it was by establishing a theory through experiment and observation that we posited this thing's existence and described its nature. The discovery of the neutrino (i.e. the photographing, the displaying) could wait for we were sure of its existence through its necessity to our system - it's function was necessary so its existence was assured.

This is my precedent, my model of argument;  the neutrino's existence was proved by the necessity of its function, not its discovery. The nature of the neutrino was such that one had to accept its direct observation to be beyond the bounds of the scientist's equipment, therefore accept its existence by way of necessity.

And so to the greatest mystery; everything. The borders of our knowledge have been set now at a fraction of a second after the big bang - CERN is attempting to recreate the conditions of that moment to look for another hypothetical particle, the Higgs Boson - to guess at what came before is considered unscientific. I would say it is scientific to apply established theory to present a hypothesis to explain said event. The nature of that hypothesis, on the other hand, is where the argument becomes confused.

There is, unarguably and uncontroversially, a mysterious creating force. We have an established theory that nothing comes from nothing; that creation ex nihilo is not only impossible but, bluntly, nonsense - like the idea of a circle that is square - the terms are incompatible. Nothing comes nothing; everything exists; everything was created by an event that has its root outside of time and space, as neither time nor space existed as we understand them before existence itself. 

A timeless and spaceless, mysterious creating force is what we arrive at. I do not think that this is in anyway controversial. Atheist and theist; Dawkins and Benedict can agree with this (not that I think they necessarily would). It is from here that the arguments begin.

I do not see how you can extrapolate the traditional Catholic view of God as omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omni-benevolent from what we have said so far. Creators quite often make things they hate and discard and to create the universe from nothing does not make one all-powerful, all-knowing or present everywhere. There is no logic to these traditional categories.

But I will call the timeless, spaceless, mysterious creating force 'God' because that is its traditional name. I would call it 'X' but that would be to avoid the issue - God is the name of the creating  force in the universe; to give it any other name would be awful political correctness and self-censorship. Dawkins would therefore loath me but hey man; the feeling's mutual.

It is the attempts to force dogma onto science that undermines all argument in this area. Dawkins will make absolute statements of faith like 'there is no God; what is just is' with no care for scientific method or investigation of this absurd statement. A Catholic will embrace this idea but then commit heresy against reason and again inject faith into understanding, overstepping all rational bounds in an attempt to revive the traditions of Aquinas and Augustine.

The operative term in my understanding of God is 'mysterious'; I cannot base anything on my idea of it, because my idea is empty; lacking in content. 

God is; so what?

I am no less alone than I was before; I am no taller, no more powerful, my morality and my judgements are no more justified, no more enlightened, no more true; I am a theist in one sense and a nihilist in another. 

There is much that can be drawn from this argument in terms of the way the debate itself should be conducted. Dawkins is clearly a money-grubbing, self-contradictory fool - he steps outside of science and says what it never can; but he says it so insultingly people pay attention to him. When one looks at the great names of philosophy who have addressed the concept of God and were, in affect and by reputation, unbelievers, there is a greater complexity to their argument, a depth in their treatment of the concept.

Hume posited many gods and believed in none; Feuerbach argued for god as existence itself and had no faith in any of it; Russell knew that he did not know and could not care for what was not there; Nietzsche looked to the gods of history and found inspiration in divine men. All were scathing of religious fervour. Religion was to them a poor relation to and separate from the concept of God - which offered them rich intellectual fruit. Dawkins is not so sophisticated as to recognise this separation, and it is infuriating that he should head what I consider to be my side - the rationalist side - of the current debate. Such a poorly read, inconsistent man has no place next to these great names. I have nothing but contempt for the man.

In conclusion, we have a perfectly valid question to answer; how did the universe come to be? We have only the beginnings of an answer, in as much as we know whatever caused this tremendous affect must exist or have existed in a state that is beyond our current comprehension. That we call this cause 'God' is a matter of tradition and ascribes no further conditions; God could literally be dead. It is by the necessity of God's function that we are certain of its existence and by the nature of that existence that we accept God is undetectable with our current equipment. Accepting that existence is no more a leap of faith as is accepting the neutrino back in the 40's.