Category Archives: Fire and Light

The Wellspring Of Creativity

In Bowling for Columbine, Marilyn Manson observed that america’s economy is driven by fear. Fear promotes consumerism and consumerism drives continued wealth. Advertising targets people’s weaknesses rather than their strength. Often it’s “If you buy this thing–yes, this one, right here!–these good things will follow…” This leads to the impression that non-ownership will mean an absence of those other good things. Yet often the thing is bought and never used to its full potential. Sometimes it’s not used at all or used for an evil purpose. Surely any good outcome is outweighed by this? Not necessarily…

The old saw says that necessity is the mother of invention, which would seem to make the observation about fear no more than an axiom. If only a need can drive an act of creation, then fear may be the only way to bring out the muse. Struggle, strive, build, create; overcome the obstacles. But in life there are no absolutes. Creative work is more truly borne of desire and love. A warmth of being alive and in the moment. A feeling of being outside time which comes with that warmth. An empathic connection and joy in being with fellow humans can be just as motivating as fear and the desire to control.

Lately I realise that as we get old we are inclined to take fewer risks. Risk, nevertheless, is absolutely necessary for growth, I believe. It’s an extrapolation of Piaget’s cognitive disonnance theory–if our perception of the world differs far enough from our internal model of reality then we have disonnance and we must somehow reconcile the mismatch. This is the way learning takes place. Risk is a way of forcing our perception beyond our safe, predictable inner world and to make the self-changing leap between internal and external. Risk also pumps the system with adrenaline and boosts our metabolism into an accelerated state.

What form does the muse take then? Is the muse fear? Or love? Or risk? Or do risk, fear and love encourage the muse to dance and sing, to inspire us? Face the fear, run the risk and feel inspired enough to become confident about embracing the love.

Fear, anger, lust, envy and greed will produce numerous goods and services, clearly. The evidence is all around us. Some of these things will even be good, useful and maybe even beautiful. Keep producing stuff and some of it is bound to be quality. It’s the infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters syndrome–“To be or not to bibbleix ;yayaya.” Not every monkey is the Bard. To paraphrase David Sedaris observed, giving everyone a computer results in a lot of writers but that doesn’t mean any of them are worth reading.

Love, desire and caring may not produce as much as the fear-driven, guilt-driven, control-freak economy but the end result could be a happier, more fulfilled world. Isn’t it better for all us monkeys to be happy instead of sifting around for that fleck of gold in the barnfull of straw? Maybe. But striving is not necessarily a bad thing and don’t forget the learning which comes from risk-taking. Whenever one monkey comes up with a gold fleck, it’s a reason to celebrate. And that desire to celebrate the triumph of quality over quantity while constantly learning is the true wellspring of creative hope. Which makes me happy.

Gimme Forty

Most of the do-gooders who delight in funding screw-ups like North Korea soon won’t have much money left to do their ‘good’ works, at least not in the UK. Home borrowing is at record levels and many people are taking advantage of low mortgage rates (around four percent) to buy second homes in the UK. However, UK fire fighters are walking out on strikes because they want a whopping 40 percent (yes, forty!) pay rise.

Now, I’ve no objection to fire fighters being paid enough to be able to afford to live in the over-priced property that exists around these parts. However, I’ve got to wonder at two things. Firstly, do other countries allow their emergency services to go on strike? And secondly, for one group of workers to demand 40 percent while everyone else is getting two percent seems completely outrageous. On the other hand, the two percent rises bear no relation to reality either so maybe it’s about time someone took a stand.

Even with the mooted compromise of 16 percent being suggested in some quarters, a pay-rise of that size for so many people will push local taxes up massively. Currently these taxes rise at around ten percent per year. Inflation is at four percent per year. So local councils are already spending more and more (and more). My local tax has doubled in the past ten years while my salary has stayed roughly the same.

To put this into perspective for American readers (I know you’re out there), council tax (levied on property and assessed by property value) is currently around £1,000-£1,500 a year in St Albans. I know this is a lot less than similar taxes in the USA, however we generally pay far more in purchase tax than in most States. VAT [‘Value Added Tax’–paid on nearly all goods except food, books and children’s clothes] in the UK is 17.5 percent

One suggestion I heard on the radio this morning would be to pay more to fire fighters by increasing local tax on second homes (sic). These currently get a fifty percent discount on this tax if they’re unoccupied. This would be reduced to a ten percent discount. Not having a second home, this doesn’t affect me directly, but if it forces people to foreclose on their mortgages, it will drive house prices down. And driving house prices down would definitely push the UK into recession, according to the same radio report.

Of course, the other solution is to increase local council taxes massively, because fire fighters aren’t the only ones who’ll be wanting (and deserving) a giant pay increase.

Meanwhile, how am I going to continue paying for my films, festival entries and international jet-set lifestyle? Not to mention kitchen upgrades? And do all this while effectively working for the Government for half the year? Eh? Remortgage again, I guess. Hold on, I think I saw an interest-free TMF credit card application around here some place. More debt please–we’re British. Well, okay, some of us are. Is the grass any greener elsewhere, though? Really.

Armed Parasites

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions”

Now–right now, today, this minute in fact–if you were in charge of a starving population that relied on international goodwill to ship in free food, what would you make your highest priority? Let’s take it a step further and assume that your country supplies a big fat zero to the rest of the world in return for all that aid. Okay, let’s take a look at, oh, I don’t know… how about North Korea?

North Korea:
After decades of mismanagement, the North relies heavily on international food aid to feed its population, while continuing to expend resources to maintain an army of about 1 million. North Korea’s long-range missile development and research into nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and massive conventional armed forces are of major concern to the international community.
source: The CIA World Factbook

Today it’s reported that the country has officially announced it has nuclear weapons:
A commentary broadcast on state radio said North Korea had developed “powerful military counter-measures, including nuclear weapons” to cope with what it called mounting nuclear threats from the United States.
source: BBC News

Interesting use of the word ‘developed’. I’m thinking ‘bought’ would be more appropriate. Bought using money saved on buying food and power because charitable suckers sent it to them for nothing. I bet everyone just sleeps so much more soundly in their beds at night at the thought of all the good humanitarian work they’ve done. I certainly feel much fuzzier if not warmer.

Who Knew?

Years ago when the Wright brothers were trying launch their first flying pram do you think they even dreamed of what air travel would become? To me, it’s still a miracle that a hunk of steel leaves the ground, literally sucked up into the air by simply going very very fast and thus driving air over the curved surface of a wing. I love looking out the window, marvelling at the whole process. But how many other people think that as they squeeze into their thirty centimetres of allocated leg room in baggage class, praying that, again this time, please God, don’t let me drop dead from DVT?

One of the last times I sat on a jet was Gatwick Airport, just south of London. The rain was coming down incessantly, making fast moving vertical streaks down the window and leaving trails of perfect transparent hemispheres. I found myself morbidly wondering what would happen if we took off with the wings all covered in water. Wouldn’t it all freeze up once we got above the clouds and cause the control surfaces to seize up? Did Frank Whittle think about the effect so much water would have when it went through one of his jet engines?

On reflection, he must have done because, of course, planes fly through clouds so they’re going to encounter a lot of water. But does it harm the jet to try burning water vapour like that? Okay, I wasn’t really looking for serious answers. I was simply wondering about stuff because we were sitting on the tarmac while a catering truck meandered its way over to stock up the plane and wasted half an hour of my time in the process. “The catering people were unable to get past some baggage trucks,” the captain told us. What would the Wright bros have thought of that?

Eventually, we taxied out to the runway and joined the queue waiting to take off. Our turn comes and the jets grow louder, blasting water back off the ground and turning the rain into steam. The vertical streaks on the window start moving at more of an angle as we thunder along. Forty five degrees, thirty degrees, twenty. Eventually the rain is moving horizontally across and then… it stops altogether. As we lift off the ground, water is blasted off the aircraft by the sheer force of air pressure and in a few minutes we’re up where the sun always shines. It’s minus 70 degrees Fahrenheit out there but it’s heaven.

So rain water doesn’t hang around on a jet aircraft’s control surfaces long enough to become a control hazard. The plane simply moves too fast. There’s the answer but really, who knew?

Smoke And Mirrors

Here we all are, admiring our own reflections in the shiny bright mirror of cyberspace–“It’s all about me!”–while elsewhere, less smuggy more smoggy asia’s pollution seems to be obscuring a huge chunk of the planet in a filthy cloud the size of a continent (yes, really that big!). And in another place, Robert Mugabe–no doubt inspired by our own greed–calls Tony Blair a terrorist while stealing farm land and giving it to his relatives.

Real life reflects internet discussion boards: “You!” “No, you!”

Sometimes you just have to stop and ask, what’s really important?

I watched Chocolat at the weekend and was warmed by the simple yet charming message of this film: we all live together. We’re all part of the community. In a sense, that includes the global community of humanity everywhere. It’s important not only to embrace our differences but also to work together. Human beings enjoy that sense of belonging which comes from warmth and acceptance. It nurtures and supports us, helps us grow.

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Side note: on the pollution story, eleven years ago Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Phillipines spewing up a cloud of sulfates and other nasties which have been sitting around in the upper atmosphere all this time. Beware of news agencies claiming the latest haze is totally the result of man-made pollution. Partially, yes, but not exclusively.

It’s the World Summit on Sustainable Development this week and journalists have got to get stories out of it. And politicians have got to generate Big Important stories if they’re going to get themselves re-elected. There’s always someone with an axe to grind.

I love NASA. And the internet.

Tuning In

Listening to the radio this week, I heard a musician, Nitin Sawhney talking about his travels around the world. He said an interesting thing about his guitar which I want to paraphrase and remember and maybe think about later.

Being in tune with yourself is like having a guitar. You play on your own and it sounds fine when it’s in tune with itself. However, when you want to make music with other people, like in a band or an orchestra, your guitar has to be tuned in to match up with their instruments.

It’s not enough to be in tune with yourself any more if you want to play as part of a group. Everyone’s pitch has to match. People, said Nitin, are like guitars. You have to tune in to the people around not just to make harmonious music but also to socialize and play together in broader terms.

NZ In 100 Words

Breathe. I bet you’ve forgotten how so close your eyes… feel… New Zealand. Summer. Quiet. Peaceful. Blue skies. Inhale. Taste the air, sweet and clear. Exhale. We’re going swimming with smiling dolphins in crystal seas off a shore of pure white sands. We’re going walking on simmering volcanoes. We’ll carve native jade then let natural hot spring waters soothe away our worries. Watersports and daredevil activities if you want. Art galleries and the finest Pacific cuisine if you’d rather. Step inside the timeless dreamtime of a Maori meeting house. Mountains. Beaches. Beautiful lakes. Stunning glaciers. Unspoilt rainforests. Inhale. Exhale. Relax.

Cathartic Creative Urge

I have this urge to write and write and yet the words seem stuck on the thought train going round and around in my head. Sometimes the words drift up and then they’re gone. Lost in the emotional vampire sucking dark gnawing at the edge of my stomach. Perhaps I should write about that. And then it goes, put aside, swallowed for a wallow. Maybe.

And and and. Why so many ands? Who knows. I watched Finding Forrester the other day and analyzed it to death. Poor wee film. I pat it’s head and want so to mend it’s broken story. Yet there were still some good lines about writing in that movie and so I plagiarize and paraphrase a couple here.

Like: “You should never start a sentence with a conjunction. It makes your thoughts seem to run on.” To which the response was something like, “That’s outmoded thinking and some of the best writers do it for emphasis. The danger is doing it too often, then it becomes self-consciously stylistic.” I think I made some of that up.

Then there’s a scene where William Forrester (Sean Connery) puts a blank sheet of paper in a typewriter and instructs Jamal (the hero): “Write!” Jamal protests, “I can’t just write. I have to think about it first.” Forrester: “No. Don’t think. Write. The secret of writing is to write. The first draft comes from the heart. The second draft comes from the head.” I may have made bits of that up too.

Selective memory. Curse. Blessing. All rise for the hymn. Do we really edit so much of our own experience in our heads? Is that why communicating our deepest feelings is so difficult, because it’s a constant creative process as far as our memory is concerned? I want my perfect memory in the sense that I know to hold on to what is important. Let the rest go. Ashes to ashes, funk to funky. Amen.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

Oh, for the serenity!

I try to hang on to the grains of truth. My deepest feelings, my highest hopes. Yet the tide comes in with its relentless chop chop busy busy work work bang bang of career and family and doing this and that and other people’s hopes and dreams and everything and it all washes through the places our thoughts are stored, so precious, so fragile, and tries to suck them all back in the wash. Take me to the river, throw me in the water.

Courage, please, yes.

Yes, this a collection and amalgamation of other people’s expressions and lines and modes of expression. A pastiche. A mosaic. A [blank, damn. the word has gone. i hate that. something like tapestry. no no. can’t think of it now. don’t stop. don’t lose the flow].

To write like this feels liberating, so take it as a tribute to all that has gone before. It’s an inevitable result of the way each of us builds on our own experience to create the unique expression which is ultimately ours. An expression which will wash out into the sea of human existence to join with all the other uniquenesses out there.

Wisdom.

And the word was …collage!

Oh, I almost forgot what sparked that off. It was reading this in my horoscope for the month:

We human beings are very sensitive. Once we become too keenly aware of what’s wrong with something, we can no longer see what’s right about it. We lose the desire to repair and fill up with the yearning to replace. The factor under discussion now is most certainly not a candidate for the dump. Use soft words if you’re pointing out a defect. And if you’re being told of one, listen only with half an ear.

– Jonathan Cainer

Incidentally I think he still means listen. Just to hold on to my values and what’s valuable in life at the same time.

Dancing Without Choreography

The only thing that I know for certain is that today, right here and right now, I don’t know anything for certain. Life is flux, knowledge is fluid and relationships at any point are always a snapshot taken of a complex dance. I spin Matrix-like around the frozen people in all their many shades of gray and their bright beautiful spectrum natures. And I realize that I can draw all kinds of conclusions from the way they’re standing and their expressions and body language in that still frame. Yet in the real world as opposed to the movie world, I cannot know where they will go in a few frames time when movement begins again. Because everything changes and without the process there is no meaning.

I know people who can’t understand the attraction of dancing with a partner. Oh, they say, I have danced very happily on my own up to this point. I feel the music. I express my feelings. Yes and this is good. Yet it is more involving and very different to act and react with a partner to that music. How can I be led? I’m not a good follower, I have my own rhythm, my female friends say. Yet this looks like fear. Fear of letting go and embracing the unknown. Fear of moving away from… of letting go of… of perhaps losing the dance that is already known and knowable. I remember a dance instructor once telling me that the hardest thing of all was to get people to face their fear and take the step through the door into the class. Once they were there and inside, everything else was possible.

And it doesn’t really work that one person simply leads and the other simply follows. It is process and change and flowing with the music. Push me pull you, pull me push you. As one partner moves, the other has to be in the right place to be where they will arrive when they get there. In that sense, there is more anticipating than leading. The leading is to provide some form, some structure. But really it is all give and take. Energy and feeling. Fire and light. It is feeling and connection and flow in an endless now. Just as life flows with the music that we each create. Our symphony where any of us can pick up the harmony or the melody or the rhythm or sometimes remain silent and still. Life is its own music. A powerful song and a complex dance. And each of us has our own solo dances that will always be there, unique and brilliant.

It’s one way of looking at it. Shades of gray, bright spectrum people dancing gently then wildly then formally then letting the body go where the music takes it and sometimes making mistakes and laughing in the process. All valid. Look up and don’t forget to smile as you fall over your own feet.

Imagine that Matrix-like still frame with two people facing each other and how the camera angle determines how we feel about them. Looking down on them makes them look weak. Look from a low angle and they look powerful. Looking over one’s shoulder and including that shoulder, framing both people together, might indicate a relationship. The expression on the face of the person we see might indicate what the relationship is at that moment. Yet a choreographer will want to see how those people move together, how they flow through the continuum of life, how they react to the music they hear, to understand comprehend feel grok the relationship in a richer truer way.

We are heart and soul, mind and spirit, beings that cannot be simply broken down into uncomplicated elements for some kind of eureka insight. We are all psychologists, trying to understand ourselves and others on so many levels and it is a subtle layered thing. Just as a photon can be understood as both particle and wave, so we can be understood as complex and paradoxical notions. None of them is the whole truth. And again I realise that the only thing I know for certain is today’s uncertainties. I embrace them, the uncertainties in those I love, my own inability to know everything and the constant flowing dance song symphony of life.

What’s Inspiring

There’s this urge in me to write… to write something… something inspiring. Brain fog. The words get jumbled and the thoughts confused. Here are my jumbled thoughts of today. How do we go forwards? We can’t go backwards. Yet there’s so much over-reaction. What we really need is to step sideways and look from the outside.

Yet there is an over-abundance of rhetorical analysis and anything I have to say, anything I might have thought, will have been thought of and said already. Serendipity and plagiarism and inspiration from peers and sources. These are the tools of today’s creative outburst.

Is GWB the best leader to take the world to peace? The guy who wanted Star Wars and wanted to dismantle nuclear treaties and build nuclear power plants and shunned the Kyoto summit and being part of a unified world? Maybe he’s just on a fast learning curve is all. Maybe he’s the leader who’s needed right now to fight a fight.

One world, global unity, seems like the inevitable and right answer to all the questions meanwhile.

Doubts flicker, Tony Blair talks sense, refugees stand up and shout in the streets where they have freedom to do so and we are all somehow guilty for crimes we didn’t commit but crossed the road to avoid. Confucious: ‘The definition of cowardice is to see what is right and to not do it.’ Yet what of the risk to personal safety? No answers.

So, what’s inspiring? What moves us forward into the new dawn? It is to see the sun, our star, set red gold purple crimson down on another day. It is to look at our short short history and see how far we have come in such a short time. The last minute of the last hour of the first day of Earth’s history. This is but a second and we move on.

Step sideways, know that the over-reaction and anxiety and paralysing fear will continue for but a moment and then we will continue to breathe, place one foot in front of the other and end the paralysis. This will become the past. Another country. They do things differently there.