Hands clasped, by the sea.

"Had we but world enough and time..."
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Had it not been for Theo W, the romantic promise of my relationship with Emily would never have been fulfilled. We had met just three times in June, and in July she would fly away to the States.

But damn I was smitten. Not only was she beautiful, she was kind and thoughtful, could reminisce fondly about books and California, had stimulating conversation, evidently shared similar intellectual standards as me, and she seemed to love me too. I hadn't remotely met a girl with whom I could be so close before.

I reckoned that we had not had enough shared experience that our relationship would last the long distance. I didn't want to say goodbye to her before my planned trip to the W's house in the Isle of Wight. So I asked Theo W if I could invite her to the yearly week-long get-together of (generally) Catz students. He agreed. And I invited Emily, and to my surprise she agreed.

I arrived Friday afternoon, and Emily arrived on Saturday morning. Theo very kindly allowed us to stay in the double bed at the top of the house. (The house has about 15 beds so is good for large gatherings.)

It was a beautifully sunny day. We shared some time reading on the balcony in the early afternoon. I was reading Eugene Onegin, and a particularly beautiful passage about how Tatyana's romantic expectations of Onegin grow through the seasons. Yet I had days, not seasons. Approximately what I said to Emily was:

"It must have been so strange even fifty years ago. You would spend years before a relationship could be fully established. Communication would be by letter and could take months. Things would develop by slow increments, by seasons. It had to be so slow, so restrained before anything of magnitude could happen.

Now, you can just call, zip off an email or fly if you desperately need to meet someone far off. There are one-night stands, pretty arbitrary dating is normal. It's so rapid, and there's so much potential for something to be almost, and then gone."

To be honest, I can't remember what she said [which is not very fair, I know] but it was a lovely conversation. In fact, I'm afraid that this blog is going to be pretty much filled with my reflections, and little of what she said - simply because I don't remember her remarks or observations well.

Lingering behind our conversation was the assumption that she would have to depart soon. She had nowhere to stay in the UK, and fully planned to return home in a week or two. The best we could hope for was regular Skype conversation and occasional flights to see each other (a bit like now).

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The beach was marked with squiggles, what looked like tubes of sand displaced by worms; sporadic seaweed; water troughs and the fine sea-blue/sea-green radiance of the water; sometimes particoloured rocks; and every so often a human or two, perhaps with a dog, or kids sculpting castles in the sand; and, in each mind, edifices of memory to be washed away.

We walked along the beach and by the sea, clasping hands. Every day we walked along the beach, feeling the pulse of each other and synchronising our pace. It would become a regular topic to discuss what we saw. We talked about many things.

The sea was a kind of frontier. Perversely it's very ability to isolate had forged the English nation-state, and catalyzed its imperial progress across the world, leaving in its wake the United States (itself made possible by the Atlantic). And that division made it difficult for Emily to stay -as she'd need a work visa; and, as we'd discover, the new government was constricting the influx of even intelligent foreigners like her.

So now the sea was isolating us. I remember approaching the tree-lined part of the beach, and thinking about the many millions walking about here and in the US - the random accidents of encountering someone who really suits you. And I had had very bad luck at that. And here our natures uprooted, straddling an implausibly thin margin between the shore of a sustained relationship, and the fragile break-up of the waves. Perhaps we were like ships passing each other on the ocean, never to encounter each other again.

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"You are walking through it howsoever. I am, a stride at a time. A very short space of time through very short times of space. Five, six: the nacheinander [which means 'sequentiality']. Exactly: and that is the ineluctable modality of the audible. Open your eyes...If I fell over a cliff...fell through the nebeneinander ['simultaneity'] ineluctably!"


Our time there seemed unreal, yet confirmed by motion. As we passed along the seaside, we became a part of what we saw and heard, and of the spaces we encountered. The enchanting lull of the sea, the rich colours dappling the shore. The slim line of the horizon rising up to the built-up scape of the seafront walk, via an endless flow of water. Encroaching waves. Together, apart - some compromise would have to be reached.

The Half-Life of Conversations

When I conceived of this blog, I had this idle fancy that conversations had a kind of half-life. The idea was this:

When you meet people, you begin a conversation which stimulate (or fail to stimulate) mental connections, ideas, aspects of life that interest you or could be of use. As they continue, you build an internal model of future conversation potential. If it's high, you take a liking to someone; if they're a bore, you avoid contact.
You have more conversations with those you like - some turn out to have more energy than the others you thought you liked, and so on. With each friend or favoured contact, there's a concatenation of conversations that unroll partially based on the perceived half-life of your future conversations.

Even within conversations, some topics have a large 'half-life' - taking a long time before they decay to half their previous potential. Others run out of steam almost before you've begun. They leave you struggling to talk and barely go beyond a single sentence each.

My central example was meeting Emily at the formal at Oxford. Immediately spotted extremely high future conversation potential e.g. literature + california and the us/uk aspects of my life. I couldn't have foretold quite how much I enjoy speaking to her, but from the start her words brought immense pleasure.

However, on further reflection, the half-life analogy is an extremely weak analogy with only a little merit. Here are some criticisms:

1. Bear with me.

EM Forster famously introduced a distinction in novels between flat and round (or rounded) characters. (I should admit to not having read this essay or anything by him.) Flat characters basically have certain mechanical traits, are easily recognisable and add depth to the round characters by juxtaposition. Round characters have complex psychologies, curious relationships with others, more profound narrative arcs and a more recognisably 'human' interaction with the world.

We can immediately see the benefits of the model - especially when understanding the 19th century novel. On the other hand, it's been much criticised - for the obvious reason that Foster's contemporaries, the modernists, and even to some extent Foster himself, messed with the distinction to evoke the actual complexity of lives. Some flat characters later seem rounded, while other rounded characters later seem flat. Or characters seem a mixture of the two.

Yet I can't help but feel that mentally, in order to cope, one has to do this. For instance, there's the guy in the corner shop who you buy something from, and is more a cipher for your purchase than the 'heartbeat of a culture' (as Derek Walcott once described street markets). In some ways, he's a flat character. But your friends - for me, the Alex Ks, Aleks Ks, Laura Fs, Laura Ns, Nick W, Andy B, Theo and Lucas Ws, etc - they're extremely well rounded.

Except at some times - you make judgments about your friends and they're simplified far beyond the full extent of their lives. And to most people, passing them in the street or even encountering them at a lecture, a gig where the band's not the main event for them, a seminar, a publishing house - they're the flat characters.

And although my dad says that most people are boring, even the most boring people must have something interesting about them in order to have lived, and to survive in the ever-changing now. I remember encountering this guy at a bar in Seattle who insisted "I am so boring." The deadpan tone was unforgettable. I asked about his hobbies - "mostly I do nothing. Sometimes I skate. But mostly I'm do nothing. I'm so boring" That to me was really interesting. Yeah he was a flat character, but I guess I'd never encountered something like that part of the Seattle scene before: - where to some, it's second nature to resist modern liberal democracy's insistence we are all 'interesting' individuals.

I have particularly found that while I mostly know who I'm going to have a good conversation with, people I think are boring often surprise me. Just when you'd written them off as a flat character, you strike on a rich seam of conversation that opens up another world on them. There's one girl I know, whose pretty boring if you just attempt spontaneous conversation with her, but choose your topic well and hold to it and she becomes surprisingly interesting. So conversational strategies - even the structure of your thought and expression - can radically alter your perception of an other.

Your dress sense and how/where you encounter someone - what you notice about them - what clue you can pick up as to who they are - these all impinge on the conversational traits, and the level of assuredness in speaking with the other person, that you have with them. What persona you decide to adopt - ach! the list is endless.

Also, life experiences can change who seems interesting and who doesn't - both their life experiences and yours. I remember not finding Alex K particularly interesting until my final year at Oxford. Even then, it wasn't till we spent significant time together in London that we realised what we had in common, a rich conversational potential and our current strong friendship.

And sure to many, I must be flat too. Certainly at classes at law school, I tend to affect less imagination than I have. Although when I can and am in the mood, I let it show. Perhaps it would be better to say that people have flat and rounded sides. Discovering the rounded side can be a tricky task, and by no means worth it - but sometimes it pays dividends.

The linear half-life analogy just doesn't give a good enough account of agency, and our ability to recognise it as something that can be harnessed or adopted.

The remaining arguments are shorter, I promise.

2. We all have on and off days. Some people I seem able to have endless conversations with. But even with them, there are days that no matter what I or they do, we both fail to inject our conversation with any spirit or liveliness. Mood, tiredness, over-exposure to the other, preoccupations and distractions - they all affect how much bubbliness there is to any conversation.

3. Equally, there are people who we have conversations with more frequently just because of the circumstances. We'd rather speak to someone else, but that person is the person available, or the person we have to deal with. And then we just grow comfortable with their conversation, and rather like it, even though with more effort we could be talking to someone else. Anybody who understands Waiting for Godot will get this. It's one of the reasons we feel the play has a point. Sometimes conversation is just for conversations sake. And the theory of drama shows that the art of conversation can be endlessly studied.

4. Finally I suppose commitment to others' imagination changes the game. Perhaps I'm wrong, and some people are doomed to be flat characters to everybody. In our hotel in Washington, every day at breakfast Emily and I heard this Californian guy who we presumed was in DC to lobby on behalf of Israel. And he just rotated the same conversations over and over and over again. No matter where someone was from, it was like - 'Where are you from? How do you say hello in your language? Oh - that's interesting I have to write that down.' Needless to say, he was extraordinarily flat.

Other people become flat through misfortune. Perhaps an extreme is dementia or Alzheimer's. My granny (who has dementia) repeats the same stories over and over again - and while interesting in themselves, they wear down and wear down. What's more, she knows she's doing it but can't help herself.
I, in the fortunate position that I don't have to granny-sit for long periods of time, try to help her out. I ask questions about things she must know about, that I'm very curious about because there's so much missing for me about her life. And mum is always surprised when I find a new story that's still there in her imagination - but she'd forgotten how to access.

Perhaps it's naive to think you can pry imagination out of any person you meet. I certainly want to believe it, but know that there are a lot of people out there where it's like digging for water in a desert. Still I think it's equally naive to totally give up on people when you've barely given them a chance. So much is accident and mood.

Letter to Zeeshan: Reflections on Washington DC

Hi Zeeshan,

I thought I'd send you my thoughts on Washington, as promised.

The Subway

-seemed very polished and refined compared to New York.

-Our first subway ride, this intelligent black student opposite us was riffing off cynically about advertising and the limited funding sources of the internet compared to the sites' current valuations. Quite an interesting analysis - possible future bubble?

-Alerted me to the mixture of cynicism and idealism that I imagined paired in the city.

-obviously the massive gaps in the system have a major effect on the desirability of areas. Particularly north v centre. 

It kind of reminds me of south (and to a lesser extent, east) London, dominated by the bus system, v the centre, north or west.

National Museums

Our first night we enjoyed Dupont Circle, but as our first day and a half were dominated by museums/Capitol, I thought I'd discuss those first.

Day 1

-One thing I noticed, though more on our half-day at the Capitol, was how Americans use 'Nation' or 'Federal' (context-dependent), we use 'state.' Clearly that's because these two are different in the US, whereas the major force of our history until the past eighty or so years has been towards centralisation in a single imperial regime so, particularly as a Londoner, I identify nation with state and, to some extent, our state welfare system.

Emily (my girlfriend) has gripes with the glorification of Jefferson, whose major contribution, it seems to her, was in the field of states rights. She thinks this was a bad turn. I don't know enough to be able to say.

-Emily wanted to take me to the American History museum to learn more about this country of which I am a citizen. She had fond memories.

-We visited many exhibitions, spending all of 2 hours looking round the museum (a long time considering we had 2.5 days in Washington).

-I hardly learned anything. It was so broad-brush and lacking in detail. When the guidebook said 'popular', I didn't realise this meant populist and dumbed down. It did cover in a vaguish way the migrational quality of America, and some major transitions in the different communities of which it comprised. But for me it was too much "by the people of the people for the people" to my taste.

-Emily was even more disappointed than I was. One of her favourite theatrical experiences was seeing the musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, the populist who made way for George W.

-They did have an exhibit digging into Jefferson's slave history , but to her it was too soft on him, constantly trying to redeem the unreedemable.

-Here, at the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, and elsewhere, the importance of slavery to US history seemed inescapable. Now I have watched Ken Burns' The Civil War all the way through so I was somewhat aware, but it had never totally registered.

I was trying to compare it to dominant narratives in UK history ('Great Britain' is no longer used much in local discourse - only on tourist ads and at the Olympics - areas where jingoism is seen as great and worthy; instead we fashion ourselves after the game leader, the US). We don't discuss slavery that much. A little on Wilberforce here and there. But then though we introduced slavery to you guys, we abolished it over 50 years before the US. And our major populace with slave history came to England from the 1950s onwards, with the return from former colonies of Afro-caribbean, other ancestors of African 'subjects' and other postcolonial figures.

And then it dawned on me: our equivalent is colonialism. Anti-imperialism is a modern piety of UK society. We are embarrassed, afflicted. It's our national shame, but in it the memory of 'our' former 'greatness.'

-Each nation has its nation shame. Generally in history, national growth is most efficiently achieved by exploitation and hegemonic dominance of an other. Japan had its Manchuria, Germany its 'Lebensraum', its 'inferior races.' Wasn't an element of WW2 just a last gasp of a curtailed power trying to grasp imperialism?

-It's a somewhat depressing view of history, but as Emily put it, 'Don't you think that's true? I can't think of a counterexample.'

-Emily decided to drop history at Columbia university when she realised her interest in social history was not reflected by the Columbia faculty. She much preferred the fun (and often sillier nature) of English Lit.

-We would have been better off going to half a dozen other places - the Capitol, the Portrait Gallery and Museum of American Art, the National Archives - for some real history.

Museum of the American Indian

-cool cafe. Lots of good food and a nice twist on 'ethnic food' - bringing five different 'environments' of food from different 'other america' landscapes. As Emily's medieval cookbook says, attitudes towards food and eating are often one of the most revealing about a society's values, culture, formalities, celebrations, etc.

-'Other Universes' promised to tell us about other belief systems. But it was so politically correct - finding convergences between modern values and tribal ideas, then dousing the tribal ideas in them - that it rarely gave any sense of 'other universes.' 

-I said happy International Women's Day to Emily on Thursday (after I'd got back). Emily says America doesn't do 'internationalism' and hates women (well, particularly Republican candidates and their supporters; but then the Clintons are quite interesting too.). To be fair, I was only aware because it's a holiday in Russia and dad and my brother Max decided to celebrate it for our mum at an Italian restaurant.

-'Our Peoples' was better - showing all the tricks, deal and wars that enabled the colonisation of the US away from the Indians. Would have liked to have spent more time in it.

The National Gallery -

-many astonishing works of art. Superb collection. 

-'Woman Holding A Balance' is such a rapturously delicate composition by Vermeer. The way balance, handwork, judgment, care, cloth and jewels are held in careful tension is brilliant. It makes one think about the little acts necessary in any work, the balance of judgment required for achievement. Emily's favourite experience of the museums.

-Mary Cassatt has many stronger areas of bold colour in her paintings than any of her European contemporaries in Paris. Is it because Paris is much greyer than Pennsylvania on a day-to-day basis? Being a huge fan of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound which argues that Pissarro's move from St Thomas to Pontoise brought colour to the impressionists, I'm quite interested in this.

The Museum of Air and Space

-always drawn to these things. As a kid, I really liked the idea of space travel. (Cue memories of 'You're from space!') Also my grandfather was a pilot and (in the spirit of Zionism) changed our family name to Doeh, meaning pilot in Hebrew.

-exhibitions on 'Early Flight' and the 'Golden Age of Flight' were informative and intriguing in the heroic glow of barrier-breaking pilots. Shows my grandfather's enamoration with flight was part of an era.

-Was happily surprised by the cutting-edge nature of many of the space exhibits. Especially the 'What's new?' parts at the end of each exhibit, showing genuinely recent findings. Cool to learn about different atmospheres, terrains and systems of other planets in our solar system. Also that there are bucky balls out in space. A kids tv program talking about protons, neutrons, neutrinos - really not dumbing down at all!

-my favourite museum.

National Portrait Gallery/Museum of American Art - another superb collection. Interesting that the history here was so much more particular. Really explored the narratives behind people, and the place of their art in American society e.g. Catlin and his quest to represent the vanishing world of American Indians. From what I saw of Annie Liebowitz, would also recommend seeing her photography if an exhibition ever passes your way.

Day 2

The Capitol

-The tour was informative and concise. As a 'foreigner', I got to see Congress. Emily explained it was much more formal than our pantomime-like debating chamber. I imagine there's a code of conduct congressmen have to learn. The new visiting centre nicely encapsulated some mainstream history - many bits of which I was not aware. 

The Supreme Court - didn't have time to go in the room itself, but enjoyed an exhibit on the reforming court led by Edward White 1909-1921. I believe the pro-competition and anti-merger law (e.g. the "Rule of Reason") was 50 years in advance of our own, only really approaching the same level when joining the EU in 1974. But then I don't know what our law was like prior to that, not having studied law in any academic depth (the conversion course spoon-feeds the absolute essentials of academic law in 1 year and that's all you do academically if you follow that route).

Library of Congress - awesome great hall and dome. Superb exhibitions on US cartoons and 'exploring the early americas'. We bought "1491" in KramerBooks before we left.

Botanic Gardens - great that this was pushing humanity's eco-history and climate change. Really informative. Surprised that Republicans hadn't insisted that this not be funded by public money.

Folger Shakespeare Library- good exhibit on female writers of the Renaissance and 17th Century. A relatively under-researched area.

Everything Else

Food and Drink

-evening 1: KramerBooks. I had Malaysian goat with pappardelle; Emily had a salad, I think. We both loved the food. Thanks for the tip. 

KramerBooks is a magnificent bookstore, with the only problem that there are so many fascinating books it's hard to leave.

Then on to Eighteenth Street Lounge. Many trashy booze-guzzling places near here which didn't appeal to Emily; almost didn't see it as there's no sign.

Beautiful decor, chandeliers, classy walls,etc - loved the funky beats. Disappointing cocktail, but moved on to decent wine. Like that the cocktails were named after Thievery Corporation tunes. Pretentious frat boys hired out the attic. They so conformed to stereotype we were glad they'd voluntarily segregated themselves. Extremely enjoyable evening.

-lunch 1: MOAI as mentioned above. It was recommended by Teaism when we passed through there on our first night in Dupont Circle. Would have dearly loved to buy tea from Teaism, but it was too dear.

-evening 2: Pizzeria Paradiso with my cousin Sarah Brody. My major memory of conversation was explaining how my dad loved Russia partially because communism froze the 'old-world' style intelligentsia there before democracy got its hands on it. Dad likes this cultivated atmosphere. His complacency about Putin is starting to worry me. Things could go seriously tits up.

Bier Baron: had a great award-winning beer. Our favourite of the trip.

-lunch 2: Selam [an Ethiopian restaurant recommended by Zeeshan]. 3pm on our second day. Food was great. My favourite meal of the trip. Massive bread pancakes neither of us could finish. And there was so much good food in Adams Morgan too.

Mid-afternoon: turkish bites at Meze. couldn't resist. Gooood food. Possibly a bit silly to have eaten so soon after Selam.

Late-afternoon: Chaucer's Cup tea at Tryst. Great atmosphere and selection. Is Tryst named after the conspiracy in Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49? Never seen it spelt like that elsewhere, and it fits the 'third way' account of itself it puts on its website.

Evening 2: Himalayan restaurant. My food was an uneven mix but it had this lentil thing that was superb and lovely spicy potatoes and Emily had great ravioli with squash in them. Not something you see too often. A little closer to Indian food than the Tibetan place Emily had attempted to find for me in NY.

Architecture

Washington has a lot of spectacular architecture. Particularly liked Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan. But I feel I have rabbitted on too long.

OK - so that email was a bit long. I hope it doesn't interrupt your studies and that you enjoy it/I haven't repeated too many things you've already know or have thought of.

Best wishes,

Ben

Energy: - the rhythm of modern life

I remember this sensation: - two years ago, and I'm cycling to lunch with Laura N. Every time the light goes green, a rhythm picks up in my head. The faster I cycle, the more insistent the rhythm. And when I slow, it slows. At lunch I realise the tune is from a movie I've seen at the Roundhouse the night before -

Metropolis, by Fritz Lang (I can find a snippet of the rhythm at 2.26 in http://bit.ly/yQVqqS, but I swear the segment was much longer). It's a sci-fi dystopia about Industry dividing the head from the heart, the managing classes from the workers.

But what amazed me was the synchrony of the rhythm with the stop-start nature of modern roads; how the rhythm almost  matched the piston-like up and down of my legs; the speed and intensity of city-cycles; our strange immersion in energy patterns far more powerful than we ourselves can produce. All this is in Metropolis too.

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All of the metrical arts - poetry, music, cinema, theatre - draw our hearts in through rhythm. It may be, as my friends The Spring Offensive say, - "I'm a hot-blooded mammal / And my heart's just a muscle. // It pumps my blood around me / And I need every drop to help me." (http://bit.ly/ArD5cp) We are excited by the play of rhythm, - not least because it's felt in our blood and along our hearts (to paraphrase Wordsworth). Any great artist taps into our psyche this way.

For instance in my own favoured medium of poetry, Nabokov says of Pushkin's Onegin stanza - "This opening pattern and the terminal one can be compared to patterns on a painted ball or top that are visible at the beginning and end of the spin." That is, the relationship between the parts resolves itself from a fascinating contrariety of colours by the stanza's end (though this makes the Onegin stanza sound difficult, whereas it is wonderfully smooth and easy to read). Or a critic describing Yeats's lack of narrative skill in contrast to Chaucer who "would offer swift summary gestures and a better control of pace: - kinesthetic precision, fascination with tools and other action-helpers, sympathy for muscular strain."

One reason I think poetry will never be popular again is that it can't keep pace with most of modern life. The tools are too complex and the dominant media is too distracting and multi-sensory. Arguably, the last great English city poet was Auden; but his authoritative voice could still draw power from the most popular domestic medium - the radio. Now attempt to translate poetry to TV, and the visuals detract from the medium, since the words themselves are designed to take the whole narrative. And even beyond that, how do you render cinematic visuals in poetry itself? I think a few - Derek Walcott; Alice Oswald; Michael Donaghy; Robert Pinsky - have managed to convey visual dynamism that can compete. But it takes a rare power.

Someone who can marshall enargeia. It literally means "in work", yet it translates as the "vividness of lived experience" or "a visually powerful description that graphically creates someone or something in words."

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A few days ago, I had a discussion with Aleks K about energy. We were talking about cycling at the moment - suffering the cold winds, and no sympathy from drivers. The next couple paragraphs roughly summarise the beginning of our conversation.

As a cyclist, you become conscious you're the person on the road driven by your own energy. The car has a different rhythm. Mostly it's controlling the pedals and the gears, but as a driver, you gradually convince yourself you must drive at the speed limit if possible. The engine almost takes a grip on the brain.

Cognitive extension theory suggests that man as a tool-making animal had developed the ability to imagine himself into his tools. For instance, feeling with the end of a stick; learning tennis - the feedback loop from strings to hand; working our thoughts out on paper with a writing tool. And we use this to build an environment that matches the limits of our technological abilities - as beavers build dams, we build cities. To create a world that matches our inner energies and aspirations. And cars reinforce this weird intimacy between man and tool.

I then mentioned this email I got from Oxford Business Alumni (not that I am a business alumni, but I'm glad I'm on their mailing list anyway) -

"Energy is the story of the human race. Low-cost energy fuelled industrial revolutions and raised millions out of poverty. The movement of goods across large distances, worldwide dissemination of knowledge and shrinking of international borders has all been made possible through the provision of affordable energy.

However, these achievements come at a cost – land, water, and air pollution is increasing, and once cheap energy sources are becoming scarcer and more expensive to find. Furthermore, 2 billion people today do not yet have access to energy.

The world faces two primary energy challenges, namely, how developed countries can maintain their competitive advantage while transitioning to a more expensive renewable energy system; and as developing countries like China and India increasingly consume fossil fuels to drive their economic growth, how developed countries can build global consensus to lower carbon emissions."

Quite an interesting summary of global energy tensions I thought. 

But before we could discuss that in depth, I moved on to a broader point about energy. Energy - not just "fuel-powered energy" (as Aleks put it) - is what makes stuff move. Without it, we'd live in a static universe.

Aleks then said that this tied in to his current read Cycles of Time by Roger Penrose. In it, Penrose discusses entropy, the fact that the amount of disorder (or chaos) increases with the passage of time. Penrose says that our planet, with its single-point energy source from above (ie the sun), is distinguished by its capacity for controlled entropy. That is, energy comes in small enough packets to enable a certain amount of order.

Which is really interesting. Controlling energy involves harnessing orderly disorder. 

And this can be seen in terms of global energy tensions. The desire to control our energy production but also to keep people happy - directly mirrors the tension between worries about the environmental pollution of energy creation, and the desire for public order. More energy = more goods and more knowledge = consuming, energy-saturated populace - and political popularity.

Like the cycle at the traffic lights, control over energy underpins the degree of movement and choice we have. 

(That's a nice point to end on. We also discussed Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Maxwell's demon - "ah, that's interesting because it's about the direction of information as well as the direction of energy flow"; but I can't see how to fit that in here.)

The Zoo

A conversation from after my last class with my current BPP group, group 45 (next term, new classes):

Luke H to Natalie S: - How come up you always seem to be going on a new date every two or three weeks and none of them work out?
Natalie: - No - not every three weeks..
Luke H: - Yeah, whatever, but why?
Natalie: - Well, it's just...
Me: - It's because you've got a distinctive mind. It's bloody hard to find someone like you if you have a distinctive mind.
Natalie: - Are you saying I'm a freak?
Me: - No, no - we all have distinctive personalities in this class. I'm just saying it's difficult with a distinct...
Sarah C: - It's true this class was pretty random. We were such an odd combination of people.
Eoin F: - Yeah, we're the zoo. We're such a random group.
Luke H: - That's so true
Eoin F: - It's like group 43.. group 44 .. The Zoo.

Other Parties

Many months ago, I left behind an aborted blog about a party in Dalston. It involved various eccentric self-metamorphoses in the spirit of pagan carnivalesque. Additionally, the last lengthy poem I wrote was called a 'Party for Introverts' (written months before the blog), which failed to manifest the paradoxical potential of its title but still retained some wicked, energetic humor. In any case, these show a persistent interest in the imaginative life (or lack thereof) of parties.

One reason for my interest is that parties usually contain a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and sometimes even the return of faces that were once familiar but need to be recovered through conversation and memory. Parties inhabit a kind of halfway between the anonymity of London street life where a passing character becomes a dissolving entity among entities, and the crystallisation of relationships in the various institutions most of us participate in whether as couples, family, friend circles, workers, students, or any other kind of bond-group instituted through a recurring role.

Emmanual Levinas, the French philosopher, described this process as the face-to-face encounter. For him, the face is not merely a visual phonemenon, or else a blind man like Dennis Church, my grandfather, would not have had this pleasure universally available to human sensibility.  Instead, the face is a multi-sensory part of us which to a large extent governs our sense of the immediate (as opposed to the abstract). When ours is alerted to an other, we perceive an immediate intersubjective relation that Levinas believed affects our precognitive core. This disrupts our consciousness's natural bias in believing it holds sway in the world. (I apologise for the general abstraction of this paragraph. It should be noted that Levinas was a Jew and Talmudic scholar living through and in the wake of the Holocaust, attempting to retrieve a philosophy that could survive that awful mess. The opening line of the Torah reads "When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste (tohu wabohu, in Hebrew) and darkness over the deep and God's face hovering over the waters...,")

Parties offer the opportunity to temporarily find out about another person, to feel a frequent punctuation to our habituated sense of our own sway and settled relationships. As I approach a new person, I find myself catching faces, turns, and impressions that create a persistent definition of a character - sometimes hard to shake, perhaps even impossible. I think even as we continue a relationship, we are drawn to similar features of a person over and over again (cue: http://bit.ly/bkyog1), and these repeated viewings perhaps could have been different if we'd only initially viewed them another way. Other details stick because they're striking or unusual while making sense within a field of understanding we recognise.

On Saturday, I went to a party hosted by my old Westminster friend Nick and Westminster flat-mates Eddie and Theo. (For reference, my earlier blog about feeling guilty about not contacting Westminster friends was cathartic and I subsequently have had many good drinking sessions with them.) I found myself discussing with a physics undergraduate about how we know about the chemical compositions of distant planets (me and him), the prospects of life on Io (him), the unique ionisation properties of iron and electron properties of carbon (him), synthetic life drawn from cells in the ocean (me - look up Craig Ventner), wind energy and the uselessness of government policy (me and him) and thallium-based fission (him). Then someone I knew from Catz, Oxford called Rado appeared.

"What are you doing here?"
(Physics undergrad) "Oh he's from St. Catherine's like me and like Caroline."
"Really? .. actually I'm from Catz. I left in 2009.
Who's Caroline?"
(undergrad or Rado - can't remember) "She lives here."
"Oh - she's the fourth flatmate?"

At which point, I realise I'm going to have something in common (Westminster/Oxbridge/Catz - all four housemates were Oxbridge) with soo many people at the party. Earlier, Nick and I had been discussing language and how it creates communities and senses of insider-outsider and here I was feeling this disruptive familiarity. E.g. talking with a GDL student who was obnoxiously sneering at the intellectual capacities of his fellow students - (me) "Come on - which one did you go to? Of the universities, it can be two..." Or bumping into the girlfriend of Gap Yah comedian - "Oh right - never seen him in the flesh before - funny that."He looked a bit more grizzly than in the videos. Made me think about the grotesque comedy of going viral. Fame with lazy, dotty students/youtube surfers - bound to ask you to shake their hand.

And yet, although this familiarity did confirm my sense of holding sway, it also was very stimulating as it  easily offered rapid access to interesting conversations with people I hardly knew.
Iphone v blackberry - blobby fingers, iPhone averse - the touch of the world - different to those people? The hand as a kind of snake - slipping over textures with evolved prejudices, provoking prejudices in its encounters - how you can judge a person by the nervousness exhibited in their interactions. Bright currents of likemindedness/likebodiedness.

Oneself at work. Whether you like other people at work, what kind of work you're willing to countenance - immediately / reported in the press. Neutering those eager to test their powers. and remotely -

The dark side of parties - mere mechanical exchange of detail, life and spontaneity stripped by superficial will to hold conversation together. Or a kind of antagonistic game. People formed by shallow parties, appearing to brim on a surface that holds little resistance to reductive forces. If Levinas finds hope, a kind of transcendental in the exchange, one might also discover that even in our best relationships, there are things we do not wish to discover even to ourselves.

Discovery as a legal process between two parties in a commercially damaged relationship...

Disembodied Sensation

I wrote a poem a couple of weekends back. It's a pretty odd poem, and every time I read it, I think: - yes, new for me, but very odd. I wrote it in the middle of the night after Yom Kippur. The disembodied sensation induced by neither eating nor drinking for 26 hours lingered in my mind.

At the same time, during the day - while I was out at synagogue with my dad - I'd left Emily at home. I didn't realise she was getting sick from not drinking enough water or caffeine, and felt half like I'd abandoned her. And I'd also intended to write a blog about our walks on the Isle of Wight for some time. I still want to write one or two on that - something pretty special happened there - although unlike the poem to follow, in a comic rather than tragic vein. Somehow all this hazily mingled together to produce something not entirely about any of that.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The sea is green because I want to kiss you.
She takes it out on me physically.

Her ceaseless waves casually erase your feet
After mine were split to ocean from air.

Split by your lips' quiver, at sea's say
How I no more am your amour than a dream.

Touch me: I do not shimmer like water
Though my feet are fled beneath shoreline forever.

And when I clutch your hands, mine seem no less wind
Than sand fumbling at a romance that never was.


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