Nature’s dance

May 14th, 2009

a familiar scene: a single man stood at a bar scans the club whilst waiting to be served. Using a highly evolved facial cue recognition system he catches the eyes of a female. Nature takes control. Her eyes dart away from his - sensitive to the glare of the male - whilst his gaze hangs on her return look. She returns the serve and this time he looks away, but quickly returns the look, to which she coyly looks away, this time downwards, as if embarressed somehow, in an unconscious way. the link has been made in the minds of the two, that one is interested in the other and the other is receptive.

All of this takes place in seconds, and is a familiar enough scenario for humans, even though many of us do not even acknowledge the events as they unfold. They are, simply put, anciently evolved behavioural systems in place that predate language in humans. They are complex, relying on other inherited cues present in the environment to work. A good example of nature and nurture working together, proof that it is not one or the other, but both that are needed to survive.

An even more important part of this ancient system of stimuli that still exist in man today, but which is obscured by modern accoutrement’s is blushing in females. For without clothing, and particularly on light skin, blushing is the first sign that a female is receptive to the male’s advances. Without any volition a female will find herself flushed with red across her chest area. This signal is completely beyond her control, and even by thinking about it - by placing the thought in her conscious mind - she has no control over blushing. It is such a powerful instinct that can be neither taught or learned that we must consider it to have once been extremely important.

All of this has been discussed by ethologists, and in particular Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt decades ago. But an important addition to this is needed i feel. Dancing is an act commonly attributed to man as a way of reaching out to God/s in ancient times, for their satisfaction in order to attain favour or appeasement. It is viewed chiefly as either a ceremonial tool, as pure entertainment or in ritual. Its origin is infact shrouded with as much mystery as any of the bizarre behaviour’s displayed by men worldwide. But along with courtship dancing is a worldwide phenomenon that all societies and cultures take part in. Birds do it, bees do it, so is it too far a stretch to suggest that in humans it is also an instinct?

So we go back to our bar. After the second look, and the female head-drop we see the man pull off a little dance. a symbolic nod of the head to the beat, a shoulder wiggle, something that indicates dancing. Next time you are in a public place try to observe this. My belief is that this token movement constitutes the origins of dance, straight out of a time previous to language and therefore reasoning. The capturing of a mate was a primary concern to primal man, and since Homo Sapiens were almost definitely a highly aggressive bunch, it was a delicate dance that had to be played out. For used to killing the next man in the fight for precious resources (that we still see carried out worldwide to this day) primal man had to co-evolve visual cues that would ‘disable’ this aggressive drive when looking for a mate. So along with the glancing, looking down (a sign of submission ALL mammals use) and blushing - an elaborate dance in itself - the courtship dance evolved. Any rhythm could be the beat for this dance. the beat of the heart, the wind in the trees, the flowing of water, birdsong, and eventually the drum all evolved to facilitate the union of man and woman.

when the power of this was reasoned i.e. when language evolved enough to comprehend the dance it was applied to the worship of gods, assuming that they too could be coerced into loving man, which evolved into the dances we see worldwide that gesture, that call out, but ultimately get us nowhere.

Dancing comes from the soul it is said. If we consider the soul to be the part of us that existed before language, and therefore reason we are talking about one and the same thing - our soul is our instinctive nature.

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Your opinion, or their’s?

May 12th, 2009

the number one annoyance on the London underground according to opinion polls is other people listening to personal music players too loud. Apparently.

As someone who uses said system frequently i would have to say it would be crowded trains first, then the dirt, then the ammount of work that is always going on thus causing delays or no service. the mp3 thing is way down on my own list as i’m sure it is on many other people’s lists of things that are annoying about the tube.

But maybe it’s the reporting of these polls that colours public opinion.

let’s say for example that everyone had said their number one hate was the dirt on the underground - well that wouldnt look good in the eyes of the management, so they only put out the things that show them in a good light. if there is nothing, then they report on something banal like noise (the trains on some parts of the Piccadilly line are actually louder than my mp3 player!). So they say the number one hate is personal music players - something that im sure the small group questioned did mention, but not a belief overall that users of the underground hold. After this revelation many other members of the general public will read the media reports of this poll and will believe also that mp3 players are annoying, thus public opinion is created, either favourably or distastefully.

i’m sure you could apply this same principle to all opinion polls, on subjects such as the war in Iraq, belief in extra-terrestrial visitation, God etc.  remember that next time you find yourself repeating the opinion expressed in the results of a poll reported by the media.

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The animal who was afraid of the dark

May 11th, 2009

Sleep seems to come naturally to every animal in the kingdom, in fact it seems that the default state of organisms is inertia. all energy seeks to become inert or motionless, to expend as little energy as possible, a basic law of conservation. It is observable in lions, dogs, lizards, birds, every creature you can name aims to store energy in order to preserve itself.

so with this in mind it seems that man is alone in his endeavor to stay awake, he stands out from the norm, that is the desire to be still. Man works himself to death, placing emphasis on achievement and the mastery of his need to sleep. it has been suggested elsewhere that our inability to fall asleep at the drop of a hat may have something to do with our perception of threat. the slightest noise will awaken us from light sleep and put us in an alert ‘ready’ state, possibly to prepare us for fight or flight. But after half an hour or so we have drifted off and are in deeper sleep, where noises are instead incorporated into our dreams. so a door closing in the real world will be drafted into the storyline of our dream to save us from waking, a more familiar example may be the alarm clock ringing in our dream, or a person calling our name. As sleep is vital to the wellbeing of the organism our dream state attempts to disable any alarming situations external to the dream and therefore give the sleeper a better quality of day life, or so it is assumed.

Where ever man evolved it must have been a very hostile environment and so man was in a constant state of alert. sleep was something only done when all other threats had been banished - perhaps large lizards, other men, or carnivorous beasts posed danger to primal man. with this in mind we can see primal man as a part of the animal kingdom, but with this inability to sleep being forced on him. whereas other animals may have died out, or moved terriatory man did neither, he simply sat and waited, or fought back (i would tend to go with the latter). My own belief is that this constant state of awareness of his surroundings eventually, over time, encouraged the conscious mind to take over ‘control’ of the body. Dogs, cats etc all experience brief moments of consciousness, but not anything in the order of what man does. Man is able to reflect on his life in a way that animals cannot, essentially in the way i am doing now.

Our definition of consciousness may need to be refined or established for a full understanding of this idea.

I use the term consciousness to describe the mind that makes the decisions that affect our lives, and that is able to experience life from the first person, i think therefore i am, as it was once put. the unconscious mind i would describe as the one in the back ground - that controls our breathing (something which we can ‘consciously’ take control of), heart rate, pupil dilation, skill based actions (such as walking, driving, writing), reflex actions, sexual stimulation etc. this ‘part’ of the mind is also most alive when we are dreaming. as evidence of this we see during sleep the feet, hands or paws twitching and a state of sexual arousal being present during most of the night.

so animals (except for man) sleep more and also have more experiences of the unconscious mind in their waking life. In man we see sleep as the cousin of death, or as a gateway to the underworld where the dead lay still also, like the sleeping person. sleep is the enemy of man, who leaves lights on in order to negate the night and therefore sleep. prime ministers and presidents famously get by on 4 hours a night, the control of the world more important to them than sleep, or unconsciousness, because the conscious mind is all about control and discipline and awareness and light flooding into the eyes, all ‘unconscious’ symbols of the conscious mind.

the goal of military research is to make a soldier that does not need sleep, that never acts in an unconscious way, always aware of his directives. but all of this is taking us in a wrong and very dangerous direction. for without sleep we are only half a human, and even less a part of the animal kingdom.

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Fear of flying when conditions are wrong

May 7th, 2009

ever wondered why when you are about to go on holiday you suddenly start displaying strange behaviour such as looking for a new haircut, buying crap in airports, or perusing shops for little bits?

Pre-holiday regimes went something like this. my mum would take us out to get some new bits for holiday a few weeks before hand - t-shirts, long shorts, one good top, a pair of flip-flops, all from different shops and spread over the course of a fortnight, and then, in the days leading up to the holiday, we would have our hair cut. the night before we would pack all of our precious things - passport, money, games, trunks - i feel like i’ve forgotten something…. on the way to the airport we would chant the travel mantra ‘have we got everything?’ Then, once in the airport we would tug and hassle to be allowed to buy little gadgets from dixons or boots - sleeping pillows, ear plugs, travel plugs, mini speakers. or we would whine about burgers from Mucky D’s, and chocolates from duty free.

Its hardly surprising that after 15 years of our parents taking us on holiday we show signs of unconscious conditioning when we are faced with the same situation as we were as kids. those years of organising, of precise (or imprecise, depending on which holiday im thinking of) planning and execution of times and dates, of foreign currency, and getting up at 4.30 in the morning to get to gatwick have had an immense effect on me i now realise.

when i do these things now i feel that they are important, even though in my thoughtless day to day life i am unaware of them. When i really examine my feelings about going away i sense that something indescribable is hanging around behind me, just waiting to jump out and ruin my journey - a sort of mild panic sets in around this time, my heart palpitates a little - when i walk past clothes shops, or i see a little gadget on the amazon page, or i pull out a t-shirt to put on. Previously i put it down to fear of flying but now im not so sure. perhaps by distracting my attention with these other things my parents never really readied me for the flying experience, and so i now feel anxious when i fly. but perhaps this anxiety is not attached to the experience of flying itself, but to the conditioned impulse to have my hair cut, to buy shorts and t-shirts, and to toblerones. when i no longer carry out these useless rituals associated with holidays and flying i am causing myself to panic - aware that something is not quite right, but not aware enough to rationalise the feelings into something tangible.

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A manifesto

April 6th, 2009

love manifestos. love the idea of having a set of rules to which you comply in order to achieve a goal. not in the ‘law’ way, more in the way that what appears as natural for the artist, or what feels right, can then be applied to the rest of the world of art to achieve similar results.

so if a painter is able to achieve something by following his own heart, we can analyse it and apply it to another form of art, such as film or music. this is how the surrealists, punks, cubists etc all worked. you see everyone is in a gang. whether they like it or not.

an artist may think they are in a gang of their own, but their work can always be traced back to a group previous to themselves who held the same set of beliefs. in acting there is the strasberg school, in music we have hip-hop, metal, jazz, in poetry beats, and in literature gothic romanticism, existentialism etc. time and time again writers have sought to capture the mood of painters, musicians the mood of poets and directors the mood of writers. during the surrealist period of art film was being made, poems and novels written and music composed, all with the same aim in mind - to fulfill the surrealist manifesto written by Andre Breton.

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hotel room windows

December 25th, 2008

i had an idea that many traveling salesmen should have done - taking a picture of the view from your hotel window every time you stay somewhere. imagine the coffee table book they could have constructed by now had they done this rather than sitting in their Mondeo eating petrol station sarnies.

no.1 - Dragon Hotel, Swansea

dragon hotel swansea, dec 25th 2008

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The atheist as a moral defective

December 24th, 2008

I remember Konrad Lorenz writing in On Aggression that he believed ancient laws such as those given to Moses, or the seven sins were brought about as a way of controlling the more destructive urges of mankind once civilisation had become established. laws such as THOU SHALL NOT STEAL were meant to retrain the human into thinking, rather than just acting out instinctive urges. Whereas in the primative stage one would have been better off stealing from ones neighbour, for food was at a premium, the instinct to satiate oneself became the source of many petty squabbles once man was civilised. this can also be said for Lust. once it would have been beneficial to be lustful, in order to saturate the gene pool one would do it with as many neighbour’s wives as possible. we should be in no doubt at all that man’s evolutionary past was harsh. we adapted to be able to live in any environment, as we can observe of the habitats around us, but part of the instinct to do this involved being able to eat, fight and copulate (glutony, murder and lust). but once man had set up alongside man, whether in farming communities or cosmopolitan city centres these instincts became unnecessary, and a burden to the society. so these simple laws were brought in to control the urges that man may have - the urges that still exist in the mind of modern man, but which are conditioned out of most of us by social programming.

so it struck me that morals are maybe part of this same set of laws - that the age old argument of the origin of morals should be balanced in favour of the social construct side. Organised religion set out to control these destructive urges in man - greed, wrath, pride - all would have been beneficial to primal man, but not to modern man. we would not have got where we are today if someone hadnt laid down the basic moral codes like the seven sins, the ten commandments etc.

but does this then mean that the atheist is amoral? when the great philosophers of the last century questioned our belief in morals, mainly because they wished to separate church further from state perhaps they didn’t realise that by stripping them away they were paving the way for a return to our distant past? perhaps the hippies - who wished to question all morals - really did want to take us back to the garden, to a past where the only laws we obeyed were the ones laid down by nature - those of killing to eat and fuck, relying on our instincts to tell us what was wrong, which in the case of primitive man - who was a excellent survivor - means nothing. all was the right behaviour, as long as it got one what one DESIRED.

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Gimme liberty or gimme death

December 24th, 2008

listening to All Shook Down by the Replacements on the way to Wales had a profound effect on me. Look past the bad 1980’s production of this band and you will find Paul Westerberg’s lyrics are as meaningful and in depth as any of the beat writers. he should be seen as a contemporary of Tom Waites, Nick Cave, Lou Reed or any of the other some might say depressing lyricists in music. to me it is not depressing at all, just observations of lives other than our own, lives that have so little hope in them that it makes the listener feel insignificant - more on this point later. This style of writing is what made the beats beat.

for a great deal of time i have admired the beats, without thinking too much why. Blah done her dissertation on the beats but i had never really thought much about my own appreciation of their work. I have since discovered that their style runs back to the 1800’s (possibly earlier?) with the likes of Dostoevsky who also painted these character based pictures of people you would not really want to know, but would be intrigued to meet. in Notes from the Underground the lead character is a vile person, an anti-hero i suppose, and you could also say Dorian Gray is this sort of character too, although the Dorian Gray story is perhaps more one of the supernatural. Bukowski similarly describes people who are likable, but only from a distance. Creeps, they are generally called. William Burrough made good use of these types in his work, with Junky, for me being the true flagship of the beats, rather than On the road, which is far too upbeat for me, although i am not saying i dont like it, far from that, just that Kerouac’s descriptions are far too romantic, On the road is more like a love poem to a time in space.

But back to music. its easy to see in music that their are two ways songs are writen, and this could also be applied to any type of writing. the first is from a personal perspective - I love you, you love me, come on baby light my fire, my heart misses a beat etc. all of this is fairly easy stuff to pen. im not knocking it thought. i just happen to believe that this style can be a little self-indulgent, one can claim to be writing from the heart and most people will believe it because anything personal makes listeners/readers feel like they know you. the much harder style is the second style - that of the narrator. character driven work that involves the reader in speculating about the lifestyle of the person, that draws the reader away from the private life of the writer and into every aspect of the character’s being. when Tom Waites sings he is trying to evoke in the listener a feeling that he is another person, someone you may never have met but feel like you know, one that is so broke that they are never seen by the rest of society. this ability to put oneself in the shoes of these people is a real talent. Living on a prayer by Bon Jovi tries to do this but fails miserably (although im sure Jon thinks not), similarly Tom Petty thinks he is this type of writer, but paints a picture with far too many pastels for it to be real. When Paul Westerberg wrote ‘a mail order ring wrapped tight around a singapore sling’ (One wink at a time) you can almost taste the tart’s lipstick. Bob Dylan’s retelling of the Rubin Carter case in Hurricane paints us a wonderful picture of the sleezy Alfred Bello.

more on this as and when…..

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Bunker mentality

December 7th, 2008

all i’ll say is watch out in the near future for our manifesto, ‘cus it’s coming. Dont say we didn’t warn you either. Check out the blog over at www.gotaw.co.uk/studio. the bunker is being sunk into the earth in preparation for the inevitable. the end times are on us my friends.

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Building a studio, and a schematic of the mind

November 23rd, 2008

I have been away from this blog for ages, but i will try to get back into shape with regards to writing, in fact, i must, as this is my sanity in my otherwise hectic life at the moment. We are currently very involved in building and decorating a studio to record some beautiful music in, but i personally am also studying my psychology A level, the mix of which is proving a volatile concoction. I have no time to study and do homework, which brings me down as i really need to concentrate on the course, but i also need to get this studio finished and opened up so i can start getting something for my money. not that its about the money, its about the music, i just need to get back into doing something creative that doesnt involve using my hand tools or a big tub of white paint.

The A level course is teaching me a lot. Its strange in a class like that, i can bet everyone in there is doing it cus they are fucked up in some little way. i know i am. every week what we discuss gives me a little more insight into myself, i dont think there are many courses that can do that, seeing as most are about subjects either too abstract to apply to yourself and your behaviour or they are disciplines that you learn, such as art or language. it can be hard in psychology because you are denying certain behaviours in yourself, observing them in others who are also denying them (or failing to see it) and trying to adjust your actions in a way that is comfortable to yourself, without it appearing too obvious that you are doing so. others in the class seem so reluctant to get to know each other that breaks are filled with silence as they try desperatly to find something interesting to read in their text books, rather than talk to each other. but it is all because they are shy, im convinced. the trick is to not give a fuck what others think of you or your mind, but some people are so scared of being seen as this or that, i mean so what if you are stupid, how else you gonna learn? i say the dumbest shit but at the end of the day if im wrong prove it, i will listen.

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