The Beast and the King

I took my son out to a park in a neighbouring suburb yesterday. The park itself is small and tatty, but with a view that stretches out to the city and the harbour bridge. It sits high on the spine of coastal headland, flanked with security-protected houses and luxury condominiums looking out over sheer cliffs to the vast grey ocean. 

It was early sunday morning and no one else was around. The wind made seashell sounds in our ears. There was a pervading sense of emptiness and desolation.

As we were stepping out of the car, there was a roar across the street of a souped-up engine. A car pulled in across from us as if to park, but instead just sat there idling. The driver and passengers were shadows through the glass. They seemed to be waiting for something, or somebody. The moment stretched. Suddenly the engined growled and the car leaped forward and around, completely mounting the pavement just metres from where I was standing. Inside were four young men and an atmosphere of tension and aggression that hissed out onto the street like a choking black cloud. The driver gunned the engine and the car screeched off the pavement and back the way it had come.

In many respects it was nothing. A non-event – over in seconds. But it left me shaken, as though a rip had appeared in my safe sense of a sober and just reality and something frightening and chaotic was spilling in...

Cut back, for a moment, to the Dark Ages. To huge expanses of forest wild with wolves, boar, bears and untamed dogs. To peasants, pestilence and famine. To county kingdoms ruled by strength and greed. To grim battles in heavy armour; knights hacking with swords and axes; muddy ground thick with blood and felled limbs like stunted trees. In this dark world there is no a priori sense of safety – if you move from one isolated pocket of civilisation to another, you do so at your own risk, very much aware of the likelihood of robbery, rape, or murder.

Out of this mire rise the legends of King Arthur which is, externally at least, a myth of civilisation dawning across wild Britain; of a kingdom arising out of unconsciousness, violence and chaos – the belly of the Beast. 

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness,

Wherein the beast was ever more and more...

Arthur's kingdom is founded on the bloody, if temporary victory over the Beast. War is waged on all opposing chieftains. The forests are purged of the wildest of the wild animals. Round Table knights police the highways in the name of adventure and the King. Law and order (that is, the absence of chaos) comes to the land. Peace reigns.

It is during this time of peace that Arthur nurtures his great gift to civilisation and the future. Realising that he has to find some way to direct the urges of his men – who have known only battle for so long – he invents a culture of courtesy and honour that shifts the focus of their energies from the base (the Beast within) to the highest qualities. Battle is figuratively relived in jousts and tournaments, and law is maintained by the knights riding out across the land in search of adventure and wrongs to right. Highest of all however is the insistence on a kind of servitude to Love. Every knight worth his salt had the favour of a lady round his wrist or on his helmet. For her were his brave deeds performed in joust and tourney. The love of a knight for his lady is willfully unrequited – the image of womanhood he upholds becomes a path to inner transcendence of The Beast. 

But always there is the uncertainty... the foundations of this peace and order are insecure, impermanent. The Beast is never vanquished, only subdued. It is one thing to raise the consciousness of a nation above the base, to value lofty ideals and worthy causes that transcend the individual, but to maintain that state takes constant vigilance, strength and effort. In the end, the pull of entropy is just too strong and the vision that Arthur represents is undermined from within by Launcelot and Guinevere, and from without by his nephew Modred.

We have a tendency these days to think of the Beast as something somewhere else, somewhere outside of us. The illusion of progress that dominates the First World his disconnected us from the realities of struggle, violence and, above all, the chaos upon which our civilisation uncomfortably rests. Our culture of distraction and entertainment draws attention away from these grim foundations and we forget that our stability, peace and sense of security have come at a cost and are neither immutable nor inviolable. 

However, it takes only one Katrina to rip down the facade, to see how far we haven't come. One epic and unforeseen natural disaster might be all it takes to reduce a cultural capital to violent anarchy. If the infrastructure that feeds, waters and protects a society is wiped out with one blow, then the structures that elevate that society above the natural condition of unconsciousness and manifest self-interest are wiped out with it. We collapse back into the waiting arms of the Beast; the effort of maintaining the civilisation inside of ourselves gratefully relinquished.

And ever and anon the wolf... lent her fierce teat

To human sucklings; and the children, housed

in her foul den, there at their meat would growl,

And mock their foster-mother on four feet,

Till, straighten'd, they grew up to wolf-like men,

Worse than the wolves...

The structures of civilisation are permeable. We cannot defend ourselves at all times and in all places. The Beast, suppressed, rears its head as violence bursting around us in what seem to be incomprehensible eruptions: a man is beaten to death by strangers with a hammer outside his home; a mother keeps her child in a kennel to punish him for his cries of hunger, then strangles him with his own clothes; a father locks his daughter in the cellar for a decade and rapes grandchildren from her; a truck-driver tailgates a couple for two hours, then hospitalises them with a crowbar when they pull over to let him pass; schoolchildren are beaten to death by their classmates or bullied to suicide. 

These are not problems of civilisation, they are problems of humanity, of individual human beings. In its external manifestation, civilisation is only a structure. It is we, as individuals, who, by consistent effort, maintain that structure. As long as we take no responsibility for ourselves, for our own actions and the actions of those closest to us, then we are without defence against the Beast without and, more importantly, the Beast within. This is the hidden meaning of the Arthurian myths – that, without a King, there is no governing principle that tends towards order and light. A consistent effort of will is required to stabilise our internal chaos, to derive internal laws from our own conscience or a sense of what is right, and to act upon those laws. When the King and the land (that is, the internal landscape) are one, then peace and prosperity reign. When the King is dethroned, weakened by poisonous whispers and betrayal from within, then the land falls to ruin; and, within the impenetrable dark of the forest, the Beast again roams free...

[Extracts taken from The Coming of Arthur, in Alfred Lord Tennyson's, Idylls of the King.]

Progress

My son was given a bag of hand-me-down toys yesterday – a clackety mass of colourful plastic in assorted psychedelic shapes. I am told that this is exactly what a growing baby's brain needs for healthy development – though this concept is in defiance of thousands of years of human evolution.

Catching a glimpse of one of the toys as it fell out of the bag, I was caught by a twinge of excited nostalgia. Amongst the assortment was something I remembered fondly from my own childhood. A simple stacking toy, originally made by Fisher Price: a rocking plastic base with a rainbow of shrinking doughnuts spiked on a pole.

It's amazing that so simple a toy can leave so vivid an impression – and one so pregnant with emotional resonance. I have hazy memories of looking up at this great tower from below, worshiping beneath the spectrum of yonis impaled on the mighty lingham. I remember the taste of the plastic rings, the exact texture as my gums roamed their surface, seeking the invisible edges left by the die. These hours of devotion no doubt sowed the seeds for my fetishistic craving of doughnuts and curious obsession with deck quoits.

A closer inspection, however, revealed that this was not in fact the same toy. The rocking base had been replaced by something more 'interesting' – following the mythic theme, the yoni–lingham duality was now borne on the back of a giant blue and yellow turtle. The doughnuts too had been adapted for easy comprehension by a generation primed for TV – pure RGB offset by a coarse yellow; not the soft hues of my memory. The bulb of the lingham was inset with a glowing orange power jewel. Worse than all of these – the coup de grace detonation after the firecracker-string of disappointments – was the discovery of a compartment for batteries and a switch. Flick it to the left, the lingham throbs and plays jangly greeting card music. Flick it to the right and baby is rewarded for each correctly stacked doughnut by a robotic voice barking out a number. Also the lingham flashes and plays a tune.

This discovery had the effect of a Stalinesque erasure on the mystery of my childhood. It waved a revisionist wand over the memories of my past and redacted all references to magic and wonder. All the spaces forged by my developing consciousness, the bloom of imagination, were subsumed by industrialisation, criss-crossed with superhighways and choked with fumes from the plastics factory.

Worse still was the vision of my son's future, in many respects too terrible to speak (for I fear that it may well be true). A future of flashing lights and barked instructions, where simple tasks performed correctly are rewarded with an insipid tune. A future in which all symbols have lost their potency. A future in which everyone is happy because they are unable to mourn the absence of an imagination they never developed.

Somehow this toy expressed to me everything that is wrong with our contemporary civilisation: the absolutely mindless drive towards the black curtain of the future, fuelled by prosaic economic considerations. This model of progress resists genuine innovation in favour of repackaged improvements of market-proven products. This kind of progress is best represented conceptually by the fractal, Koch's snowflake.

Koch's snowflake begins with an equilateral triangle, the points of which can be constrained within a circle – in this instance representing an initial concept, an idea in its simplest form. Half-size equilateral triangles are then added to the three sides of the original triangle. Then quarter-size triangles are added to the exposed edges of the half-size triangles and so on. The significance of Koch's snowflake in this context is that although it never exceeds its original area (as defined by the circle), its length is infinite. Likewise, the same products can be endlessly repackaged and resold, accreting unnecessary and ultimately detrimental 'improvements', onwards down to infinity.

And what effect does this have on us?

Our greatest single asset is our imagination. It is the source of every genuinely great development, invention, idea or innovation since the dawn of humankind. But it needs space to grow and, like a muscle, it needs to be flexed. It needs to be encouraged in our children and, more importantly, should not expire as we mature. Our society should aim to cultivate imagination, to nurture, respect and reward it - not repress, restrict and restrain it.

Without our imagination we are a civilisation in decline, collapsing into banality and the infinite uncharted minutiae of the consumer Koch fractal.

The narrow world

The other night, the walls and windows of our neighbourhood rang out with the sound of noisy, dirty fucking. At first I thought the party in the neighbouring block had wound down and those remaining were watching porn at a deafening volume. But the standard script of yes yes's and fuck me right there's began to crystalise and persisted until the obvious, though surprising, conclusion was that it was actually happening. 

In the sense that two human beings were in hyperactive genital contact, it was absolutely real. Yet there was no sense of the joining of goddess and god in an ultimate merging of bodies and souls... Instead, what the entire neighbourhood could hardly help but hear, were learned behaviours being acted out on a bedroom stage. 'Love' was being made in the way that it is taught to and understood by many in our culture – athletic and joyless – with behaviours modeled from the most commonly accepted and available guide: pornography.

Humans are role-modeling machines, recording, replaying and adapting the behaviours that their society deems necessary or appropriate for individual and group survival. We behave in the way that we are expected to behave – or, at least, how we think we are expected to behave. In earlier times this would have meant learning vital survival skills from our elders to cope with life in the immediate environment: hunting, fire-making, cooking, knowledge of poisonous and medicinal plants, making tools and shelters, knowledge of animal behaviours, local geography. Today our role-models are abstracted, many levels removed from direct experience. With fathers absent, mothers over-burdened and our elders shut safely out of sight in sanitised death camps, only the ubiquitous media remain to shape our sense of self, our purpose in the world, and our knowledge of how to be. 

My parent's generation will soon be the last living humans to remember a world without television. There is already no one alive who can remember a world without advertising. The insidious use of powerful contemporary psychological knowledge by advertising companies to manipulate unsuspecting consumers was exposed as early as the 1950s. Since that time the proliferation of visual media and its reciprocal, symbiotic dependence on advertising has become total, its influence all-encompassing. Even as we become more media-literate, more able to identify and, seemingly, avoid becoming the helpless targets of corporate marketeers, we are still victims – isolated, completely detached from the first-hand experience of reality. 

Our experience of life in this new millennium is Ouroboros – the objects of our perception refer only back to themselves. Take a journey from a suburb to the centre of any city in the western world and you will find an unbroken stream of words, images, signs, advertisements, newspapers, magazines, music and moving images – all of which form the narrative of the journey. These signifiers have actually become the basis of our experience. The world of our perception has split away from tangible reality and is packaged back to us in a closed loop; an inescapable reflection of the banality of our simplest desires and insecurities. 

This narrow world is no longer a reflection of  life, as there is no experience of original life left for it to portray. Instead it reflects only itself reflecting itself – the direct experience it once referred to is lost in the arc of infinite mirrors; always promised, but perpetually out of reach. It is Philip K Dick's Black Iron Prison. The penitentiary world of the small self. A honeycomb of little me's lost in unbroken thought-streams, referring endlessly back to the same sources. 

This is the narrow world our children are born into. Marketed to from birth, they are immersed in an artificial universe where the expression of emotion is learned from soap operas and romantic comedies, the amoral compass is magnetised to the ultra-violent north of Grand Theft Auto, and rather than go outside and bang a peg into the ground, the family can gather round the Wii and while away the hours with a game of virtual quoits. 

As each generation connects less and less with the realities of the outer world, understands less and less of real human interaction, the narrow world becomes narrower still, until the serpent finally gags on its own tail. Though the diaphragm still draws breath into the lungs and the physical heart still pumps blood round the body, no one can be said to be truly alive.

Structures of mind

According to the spiritualists, the world beyond this is not dissimilar to our own world. There are still people (all the people you and everyone else has ever known), there is still a form of order, of society. This world is fabricated from a material called the Ether (that is why it is known as the etheric realm). Ether - like our bodies in the other world - is an incredibly light and versatile substance. Unlike the coarse matter that this world is made from, it is not subject to the laws of physics. The link between ether and mind is more profound - you could even say that it is an extension of mind. The beings in the next world have built the structures of that world entirely out of ether. They have done this without lifting a finger. Thoughts impress themselves into forms with ether as their medium. The other world is a place of beautiful impossible gardens and elaborate fountains...

I talked a little in the last post about a revelation - a personal one - born from seeing the second face of birds. This then extended into seeing our second face. Ever since then I keep experiencing moments where whatever I'm thinking about falls away and all that remains is a hairless ape, lumbering through incomprehensible forests of concrete and plastic. Perhaps I am looking down at my pink feet pressing into that soft midway point where the sand meets the surf, or playing with my son - that wriggling pink chimpanzee. If you take the monotonous crackling chatter we call mind out of the equation, what are you left with?

It's a trick question, of course. We can't take it out of the equation. Because, to a greater or lesser extent, all of it is mind!  

Now this isn't an issue of perception - this is not the place for a discussion about the subjectivity of our individual worlds. Sure, we can never experience The Real, never apprehend it directly, because it always comes through the filter of our first five senses, and those in turn filtered again by the mind. The focus of this train of thought is more to do with the tangible results - the outputs of mind - which we now take entirely for granted, which we mistake for underlying reality. These structures are both physical and conceptual, some are universal in the world that we share (the world that persists even after we have stopped believing in it) and some exist only in the minds of individuals or groups of individuals. The concepts creation and creativity refer directly to the process by which these structures impress themselves on the coarse matter of this world - the transformation of the logos (which one could interpret to mean the ordering principles of the self-conscious mind) into kreas (flesh). Creation is the divine act by which the world is perpetually brought into existence.

It's important though to bring this down to a mundane level. Let's take an average day as an example:

You are awoken by the shrill notes of an alarm clock - one of many variations on a theme of concepts pertaining to the telling of time, itself a structure of mind. After becoming aware of your tiredness and the heavy feeling, like black honey, of a dream departing too swiftly, the first thing you may experience is the sense of security in your bed, the duvet, the pillows. Let's take only one - the simplest - of these objects to demonstrate. 

The pillow is a concept developed to meet the simple need for comfort during sleep, combining materials that would never come into contact with one another were they not brought together for this purpose: feathers from a duck; cotton woven into rectangles; each layer stitched together based on a design, an idea of how best these individual components should be made into a  whole. When we look at a pillow, there exists within it, not only these constituent physical parts (and the sub-concepts that may be required for them to exist in that form - such as cotton spun and then woven into material), but the idea of each of those components, and the idea of the whole. Once this idea or concept has impressed itself into the kreas of the world, it becomes self-replicating. Seeing the physical object (cotton-stitched feather bag) imposes or reinforces the concept pillow in the mind of the perceiver. Soon enough you don't even see the physical object any more, only the concept, or the word that flashes into your mind. A little box that contains every pillow you've ever experienced, even pillows of fantasy with no basis in material existence reside in that box.

That's just a pillow. Without getting up we could have followed the same analysis on the bed, the mattress, the duvet. As you switch off the alarm and lift yourself up, your feet press down onto the woven fibres of a carpet - the weave itself a concept, the visible pattern another, the whole created in great looms, each one an idea built upon another idea. Thousands of component parts, component concepts, structured by other higher-level concepts into great machines creating further concept-born structures. Machines that pack the coffee you prepare with water boiled in another concept, that you pour into the concept mug, that you spill over the concept breakfast bar, that you wipe up with the concept dishcloth. Before you get out the door to catch the concept bus, there isn't one aspect of your morning that hasn't been formed entirely of mind. Even the birds you hear twittering in the trees that line your street are perceived by you as concepts.

And it's not just objects... as the bus pulls away it draws you towards the concept of work at the concept bank, looking at the terrible concept traffic up ahead you realise you are going to be late (another concept with no foundation in ultimate reality). Down the concept road, lined with concept shops - small transient shops with signs scratched out with felt-tip on butchers paper, or grand institutions with internationally recognised branding and their own line of perfume and home and contents insurance - each one the concept (or agglomeration of concepts) of a mind somewhere. Maps, buildings, windows, bus stops, posters, billboards, water-towers, shopfronts, hedgerows, old ladies' shopping carts, fences, botanical gardens, motorways, museums, post boxes, letters, stamps, the head of the Queen... Behind you, some conceptual kid with a concept t-shirt and a concept haircut is blasting tinny conceptual music through concept headphones. All around you the air is filled with conceptual chatter, conversations about the concept TV and the invisible waves from mobile phones and radio stations. You are overcome by an invisible wave of nausea. You decide to get off the bus, quit your job and flee to the forest to grow a beard and chop wood all day... (Of course, such an escape would itself be just a concept...)

I was going to go further with this, but am giving myself vertigo. Each concept that we feel we have got a grip on, have safely identified and contained, has tendrils snaking out from within it, connecting it back to the million-and-one other concepts that it needs to exist. And they in turn, with their own tendrils... the whole world and all within it a dense knotted root-mass of concepts snaking back into pre-history. Back to the first fires, the first tools, the hundreds of beings who died over the millennia from eating the wrong berries, from boiling the wrong roots... This world, the material world that we perceive, is like a house of cards, a near infinitude of structures of mind precariously stacked one upon the other. A whole world made of mind. And a population of naked monkeys, not one of whom has any idea how the whole blasted thing works!

So who are we, really?

Up until a few days ago, I thought I had a pretty good handle on this. 

As you grow older your vision of the world, of people, places, of who you are, tends to calcify. It becomes rigid with years of categorisation. Of creating compartments in your mind into which all of your experiences and opinions go. Even the things we say lose their freshness. We are not present when we are saying them, not creating new strings of words and ideas to convey our thoughts and our feelings. We're just reaching into the nearest, most convenient box and pulling out the most-used thought or expression we find in there. Following neural loops that we've carved out over years of repetitious living. We consider ourselves thinking beings - that, after all, is what separates us from the animals - but can we be truly said to think?

Certainly we each have a mind. But are we its masters? Or its victims?

I've recently been watching the old BBC series, The Life of Birds by David Attenborough. This, as well as the birth of my now eight-week old son, has been the catalyst for a train of thought that I'll try to work through in the next few posts.

I've never really looked that closely at birds. Previously, whenever I looked at a bird, I never really saw it. I perceived it plainly enough, saw its defining characteristics (beak, wings, tail feathers), but never really experienced it. Didn't see the incredible power of life within it. When I saw something flying overhead, or perched in a tree, I would reach into the box marked 'Bird' and pulled out the closest available image, which I would then lay over the top of the real living bird in front of me. 

This is probably true of most of my experience of animals. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' = Cat. Four legs + pointy ears + tail + 'Meiow' + [other recognisable characteristics] = My cat.

There have been a couple of times in my life where I've seen through the automatic overlay of stored impressions to the true being beneath. Each time it's happened I've become aware of a sense of true communication - of completely experiencing the other, their essence. Not just animals - this has happened with people too. When I was a child I thought that everyone had two faces - the one they always wore and the one that appeared if you really looked at them. What I realise now is that this 'second' face is the true face. It is the face that is revealed when all the filters, all the projections, are turned off. 

So, back to The Life of Birds. For me, watching this series was like a non-stop revelation - seeing not on the life, but the second face of birds. The biggest mindfuck has been to perceive birds as one experiment in the form of life (other experiments in form being insects, or mammals, or reptiles), with many thousands of permutations, each perfectly adapted to the geographic niche it has carved for itself. These adaptations do not always fit comfortably with my preconceived idea of what constitutes a bird. In fact, some of these birds do not fit into my box marked 'Bird' at all! Diving birds, for instance, like auks or guillemots have traded in their flying for prodigious underwater skills. They seem to have more in common with similarly adapted mammals - beavers for example, or otters. So what is it that makes it a bird?

I'm not looking for the zoological answer to this question. This train of thought is more to do with our (or, in this case, my) perceptions of animals and the world. How we relate to the world and the beings in it based on those perceptions - the name on the box and all the things we put inside. 

Seeing how these huge families of beings (birds, mammals, reptiles, insects etc) have adapted to the needs of their environments, and the way in which those needs can give rise to comparable adaptations (adaptions which may even transcend or negate the characteristics that I had previously considered essential to their definition), gave me a vertiginous sense of the flow of evolving life. It was as though I was seeing simultaneously the second face of all the living beings of Earth. And in the second face I perceived more connections than distinctions. Beings surviving. Beings eating. Beings fucking. Beings making turds and falling in love and falling over dead. Beings killing other beings. Beings eating and being eaten by other beings. Beings unified in their desire to stay alive, to produce offspring, to feed and protect and educate their offspring. Beings acting out genetically inherited behaviours. Beings acting out learned behaviours...

Looking back then to our world, the (western) world of human beings - of TV, advertising, shopping malls, pornography, finance, high-speed communication - what lies beneath that, what props it up and sustains it, if it isn't those same beings. Beings not so very far removed from the birds, or the gorillas, or the lizards. The invention of the internet, or the stock-exchange doesn't lift us from that flow of life and blood and shit. So why do we think it does? What do we think makes us so special?