VIRTUAL REALITY - (A Post In Which Miss Dreamy says not to worry - she doesn’t know what any of it means either...)

The language of physics is pre-eminently mathematical - the necessary foundation of all other enquiries. Speculation takes a new direction. Propositions become self-evident. Necessity precedes analysis. If therefore necessity anticipates and conditions thought, it is not perhaps surprising to find that when logic by its force or use of necessity precedes and conditions reality, reality should be seen to assimilate.

And that, precisely, is what I myself mean by virtual reality: the dynamic embodiment of a conclusive idea. The raw material of creative thought one might almost say, rather than a mere interpretative model of the universe. By the simplest possible definition, a particle, such as a photon, can suddenly come into existence out of nothing. Or, in terms of the simplest possible definitive case, the virtual particle
excludes all but the most pertinent aspects of objective reality and material fact. Though it would be rash to assume that such transitory particles - and not just photons, but electrons, protons and all the other ephemera of the
sub-nuclear domain - exist only in relation to the function they perform, we can
hardly doubt that the ‘participatory’ effect of intelligence plays its own
transforming part in the process.

It is true, most educated persons
already know, that owing to quantum indeterminacy, virtual particles can
materialize out of “empty” space as a matter of course. But it should also be
common knowledge by now that the mere mention of quantum indeterminacy implies a
recognition of the interdependence of matter and the pattern of scientific
knowledge thus envisaged. To their credit, scores of physicists treat
intelligence as the ultimate kinetic catalyst. Less imaginative, an “older”
tradition of constituent physics runs the risk of essentially treating
intelligence as the contingent consequence of material facts.

On this distinction, indeed, rests a substantial part of my case.

For the
traditionalist, in denying any participatory quality to quantum-mechanical
theories, and in proving them to be rooted in facts, does not fail to resurrect
a determinism which maintains that intelligence, being nothing more than the
rationalization of a predetermined design, is pure derivation and powerless to
alter the sequence of events. That is as it may be. But the utopia of modern
elementary particle physics has no difficulty in perceiving that virtual
propositions are contingent, perhaps, but not illusory; that they belong to the
conceptual, not the interpretative mode. That, even considered as virtual, it is
nevertheless perfectly proper to say they are ad hoc concept, connected to a
world of reality in a manner in which it becomes essential to the proper
appreciation of authenticity to realize that the inherent dynamism is not in the
thing but in the thought. For the truth is that even though human consciousness
is by no means fully engaged in the intangible details of the action, the
processes of thought are powerfully at work.

Created purposefully and
unmistakably by an idea, it does give the virtual universe a measure of
suggestion that tends to match up to the expectations, the imagery and the
vocabulary of the mind. For even dimensions so remote and inanimate - and that
does not mean illusory - that one is bound to reflect whether they have any
existence at all, do carry in their insignificance the seeds of further
innumerable universes...

Dreamy

THE LUMBER ROOM CALAMITY - Or Oracular Notes On The Benefits and Disasters Which Have Sprung From Elberry’s Misfortunes...

“This I write so that, in comparing your sorrows with mine, you may discover that yours are, in truth, nought, or at the most of small account, and so you shall come to bear them more easily.”

Peter Abelard (from the Foreword to History Calamitatum)

Here is a complex man!

Recent comments made it clear that the
Witchfinders - at the office or in your personal life - either don’t recognize
how important certain pursuits are to you, or simply don’t approve of them. And
having no wish to appear a failure in your own eyes, your feel bound to tackle
the problem.

You’re sharp, quick-witted, with an satirist's eye, subtle and
self-mocking with an acute and almost constant sense of life's irrationality.
Less reassuring will be the realisation that many who’ve already admired your
dedication to quality, your dignity, and your sense of self, have also known
Elberry the eccentric, the riddler and dissimulator who has all the irony of a
condemned person walking to the gallows. Irony gives colour to thoughts and
things in a way that not everyone understands. Indeed, you have a way with
words, a somewhat reckless appreciation of the sardonic and the grotesque. Your
writing rather transcends that of a scurrilous and witty misanthrope. You can
hold forth with some authority on topics as diverse as Manchester’s Thai
lady-boys and the Italian renaissance. You’re superbly simple, understated, yet
quite unaffected by pettiness, jealousy, and other humdrum concerns. But you
also seem to be created with a special legacy.

To wit, your condition forecasts the agony to come.

What is second nature to most of us, is misery for you. Though there
are plenty of arid personalities and characters starved by stress of
circumstances, few have that same sense of introversion, or of sealed persona
contained within itself. Indeed, your own growing isolation, objective as well
as subjective, makes you feel that you are sustained and animated by the virtual world - rather than life - and it is that which seems to have
detached you from reality. Your concerns seem distanced and uninvolved,
everything happens by proxy. The misanthrope, in truth, rarely wants to be
cured. In fact, owing largely to autosuggestive forces you seem to see your
situation as comical rather than tragic. But the literary levity used for the
darkest subjects has a very serious purpose: to rob trepidation of its terror.
For the fact of the matter is nevertheless, you’re terrified!

Nor am I sure I want to go there.

But I‘ll say this: I've never once met a gifted man who is not haunted
by his talents. Your position is difficult, your future a matter of far-reaching
complexity. The lone rider is a familiar figure in American mythology. It is his
aura, the fact that he lives on his own terms, trusting nobody but only a select
few - rather than a lot of gratuitous gunplay - which suggests inner reserves of
power as well as detachment and intense seclusion. Archetypes are a mirror of
the psyche - sometimes benign, often afflicted, occasionally genuinely
inspirational. But nothing is more suggestive of the mythological use of the
archetype than the way we respond emotionally. They are a sort of purgatory
within, or a heightened form of self-consciousness, often revealing a disturbing
depth of knowledge of an individual's dilemmas and predicaments. Little may you
know, but these are forces of extraordinary power.

So its time to carve:

Most of your intimate interests set you apart from other humans; if not
an intellectual exactly, you are certainly endowed with considerable
intellectual athleticism and substantial powers of communication. You yourself
clearly believe in the legend of your life. In your sense of mission. Two
centuries ago you might have been accused of magical incantations, witchcraft
and sorcery. Today you are frequently seen as netherworldly; and though patently
sensual, are at the same time almost asexual, savouring everything, yearning for
sensual comforts, but, as it were, vicariously, and as if fixed in unending
adolescence.

Let there be no mistake, Elberry is not a troll released from Mordor.
He is a strong, intelligent, not unfriendly elf who wrought colossal good. And
to string him from a lamp post, soak him with diesel and set fire to his butt
would be complete and utter recklessness...

Indeed, if you can make
friends with your inner self, come to terms with your own darkness, then there
will be no trouble from without. Which may also be a reminder that fortuitous
connections are often the key to advancement. And so, finally , I’ll come to
your many attempts at presenting an acceptable curriculum vitae. Nearly
as many potential employers as have been acquainted with it, refused to honour
the curriculum you’ve set forth in the past, so that it will have to be
supplemented in some fashion. And my recommendation is for you to offer this
reading with your next CV. I doubt it will advance you prospects in any way
whatsoever, but, should you succeed on the basis of this, I’ll promise you, the
rewards will be intense...

Meanwhile, in the face of the Witchfinders General - and your
considerable and varied talents - the only thing is to keep your head down and
do what the Schatzgräber did in the scenario below:

Die Schatzgräber

Ein Winzer, der am Tode lag
rief seine Kinder her und sprach :
In unsrem Weinberg liegt ein Schatz ,
grabt nur danach ! " --
Auf welchem Platz ? "
schrie alles laut den Vater an .
" Grabt nur " -- O weh, da starb der Mann !

Kaum war der Alte beigeschafft ,
so grub man nach mit Leibeskraft
Mit Hacke, Karst und Spaten,
den Weinberg um und um gescharrt .
Da war kein Kloß, der ruhig blieb ,
man warf die Erde gar durch`s Sieb .
Und zog die Harken kreuz und quer
nach jedem Steinchen hin und her ;
.Alleine, da ward kein Schatz verspürt ,
und jeder hielt sich angeführt .

Doch kaum erschien das nächste Jahr ,
so nahm man mit Erstaunen wahr
das jede Rebe dreifach trug .
Da wurden erst die Söhne klug
Sie gruben nun jahrein , jahraus
Des Schatzes immer mehr heraus.

Gottfried August Bürger (1747 - 1794)

IN MEMORY OF AUGUST 7th - The Day When My Father Died....

When I found out that my mother had returned from hospital and was dying of
cancer I determined she would not end her days in a nursing institution. Nothing
is more demeaning. Except, of course, that things got worse. My old man suffered
a massive stroke. But I will spare you the details. Let me just say that I
nursed my mother for over a year, spending the last six weeks of her life on the
floorboards beside her bed.

I never got much sleep.

There is no way for me to describe the pain my mother endured, nor for that
matter, my own when she died. I didn't know what to do with myself. I would just
sit on the floor rocking. Backwards and forwards. It’s all I did. Then to the
biggest dilemma. Someone had to tell the old man. He worshipped her.

Well, I permitted myself a single brandy - then I went in.

He looked at me solemnly, and it was as if I perceived, deep down in his
eyes, all their years together as they ebbed away, unalterably, like an inner
ocean of darkness. Prostrate though he was, I saw him bodily rear up in such
total, utter, and black despair, that I had to physically throw myself on top
just to keep him down. I tried to make him understand that my mother’s departure
was only temporary. That finally, inevitably, she would return. But words was
all I had. I felt alone and helpless. And then it was one afternoon, August 7th
a year later. I sent the nurse away. I knew his time had come. Sitting beside
him, I held his hand. Though, I’m sure, he knew nothing of that.

I could never have sustained these grave times, if I had not been involved
in the book that became the measure of my life. I’d been working at it for some
ten years. Of course, it took me all of five years merely to establish the
topics that would constitute my lifelong monomaniacal attachment to the ideas
involved. But by then I had crossed the invisible, inaudible road to knowledge
and escaped into the fifth dimension. Knowledge - which had to be paid for! I
was living in a completely different time frame, totally absorbed. Indeed, it
took me a long time to recognize the sheer scale of my own ambition. I wasn’t
realizing it at first. The press, in the run-up to publication, was all agog. Or
lets say that part of the media which had been targeted. The marketing
department proclaimed it a triumph of the will. I had half a dozen reviews
coming up. One of the most unlikely from the Jewish Chronicle.

Then I initiated my self-destruction.

In fact, I had no idea what forces I set in motion when I informed my
publisher of potential legal repercussions. I did this spuriously, but it is a
fact and I acknowledge it. England’s strict libel laws usually result in a
play-safe policy. And even though the charge could in no way have been
substantiated in court, it troubled my publishers so much that they withdrew the
book.

And that was the last of that.

Thus did my epiphany finally begin: “If you can make a heap of all your
winnings, And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again
at your beginnings, And never breathe a word about your loss.....“ etc.,
etc. you know the drill.....

Meanwhile, I spend my days punching keys and entertaining Memoranda, or what you may aptly call “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz“, and am slightly concerned to discover how continuously and implacably courageous you have to be to ward of an immense feeling of pointlessness. Saying this, though, it is hard not to remember that - out of some sombre precognition - I instructed
my publishers to add an extra page at the end of my book and to inscribe it with
the legend: "O Will, my essential, my necessity, dispeller of need! Spare me
for one great victory!"

My passion is the future, not the past.

Selena Dreamy

THE ANTHROPIC UNIVERSE...(in which post the leggy, five-foot- seven Selena is attempting to squash a false mythology).

“Oh and a thought about the human mind shaping the universe ... don't you think it is kind of arrogant that 'things' don't exist without us observing them?” Bob

“Why oh why are you so anthropocentric, Selena? Why do you think we matter so much, and have such powers...?” Jonathan

Pray, what powers?

‘Ever fewer climb with me up ever higher
mountains,' Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but you, my dear gentlemen, are actually putting the cart before the horse.

I am - for I am an absolute idea...? Nonsense!

Nothing could be further from the truth. I am a relativistic concept,
at best. Forget man’s self-made image as the universe’s supreme conceptual authority. Or that the validity of epistemological conceptions are dependent solely on the species for whose personal comfort they have been created. Nor can homo sapiens arbitrarily dictate the course of events in what is, de facto, a conceptual vacuum.

Heaven forbid!

Man is the most feeble, perhaps, of cosmic animals. Indeed, the first
image that comes to mind - gnashing, primordial apemen pondering the concept of
fire and howling at the moon. Faced with a plethora of dimensions, the only
thing we can do is try to form a reasonable view of the realities attached to
them. Nor have we solved the ancient problem of getting past the appearance of
things. Indeed, there is no proof for the empirical constitution of scientific
concepts such as Black Holes, strings and super-strings or the curved phenomena
that Newtonian dynamics first attributed to the force of gravity. And since it
denies existence to objects having both spatial locations and well-defined paths
of motion simultaneously, not even the atom will stand up to scrutiny. These are
elegant constructs, drawn up by mathematicians and propagated by theoretical
physicists. Indeed, physics has a tendency to deprive reality of all its
homocentric attributes, leaving it no other import but that of economy and
function. Equations are no measure of reality, they are merely terms that allow
us to describe a certain limited number of interactions between the mind and the
world. And our experience of the world reflects only how we represent it to
ourselves, and that has nothing to do with the thing itself.

What anthropocentrism categorically does not mean is that man
intrinsically causes all things to exist (even though he may well have invested
them with the essential attributes by which they are to be distinguished). What
it does mean is that we have established a universal system of measuring reality
which fits the expectations of the human mind, with the added proviso, perhaps,
that all combinations and attributes are theoretically possible - in an infinity
of universes that are at best contingent: the fabled multiverse!

Believe me, gentlemen, we know nothing until we know everything!

Dreamy

FROM HOMOPHOBIA TO HOMOPHILIA...

The fact that Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, described gays as “lower
than dogs”, tells me nothing about gays, but everything about His Grace the
Archbishop. Nor can one doubt that the Archbishop of Kenia meant every word when
he proclaimed that - a propos the gay US bishop Gene Robinson - “the devil has
clearly entered the church”. If Africa is a Third World country pretending to be
a First World one, moral values are derivative and invariably relativistic.

In Africa, the homosexual has automatic low-life associations because sexual
taboos largely determine the social morality and behaviour of the tribe. While
in Spartan Greece, by contradistinction, ideologically charged homosexual
eroticism and sexuality were cornerstones of its elitist male-bonding culture.

Here, then, is the heart of the matter:

The taboo was not only a normative form of law but also, like a fervently held religious belief, the
guiding code for modes of behaviour that were its biological counterpart. Some
societies are more evolved of course, than others and, in any case, few taboos
still exert their original spell. But no community is favourably disposed
towards the apostate who is seeming to compromise the communality of the group,
and if it cannot bend him to its purpose it obviously become preferable to
ostracise him in what is essentially a manifestation of the communal faculty for
self-regulation - properly speaking, the jurisdiction of the man in the street -
which is fundamental to all anthropological thinking. Conformity to the tribal
habit expresses communal integrity. Transgression is tantamount to apostasy. The
logic is subtle, but also compellingly simple. In a word, to throw in one’s lot
- in the mythology of anthropology - with the proscribed forces of the universe,
is simply to perish with them.

But I was saying...

Fatuity being one of the worst symptoms of our present state of confusion (rather than of decline), or at any rate a power unique for its blinding opacity, the authenticity of the civil union, celebrated in Gene Robinson’s own church just six weeks ago - as distinguished from the passion of its participants - seems to be proof enough these days that not only men’s reasoning and intellectual capacities, but their instincts and emotions, too, are subject to two mutually antagonistic conceptions of love. For when two standards of judgment, of moral convention, of
human perfection no less, are fending for the right to forge the social and anthropological conditions of our future heritage, without question something very enormous indeed appears to be happening.

It is not, of course, impossible to imagine that posterity may have a different opinion. We must wait and see. What matters for the time being, however, is the degree to which the
ethical content of the multicultural world itself is being subjected to change;
that it is not even clear anymore which standards, whether moral, psychological
anthropological or otherwise, can be agreed upon for good or ill by all rational
human beings. And this, whether we like it or not, is the crux of the whole
perplexing business.

Dreamy

SELENA’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE...

Is the Universe intelligent?

Intelligence is a form of free energy, inseparable from it. It is the
constant of integration in all conceivable equations. And yet, the mathematical
equation has superseded the mental experience. One of the greatest difficulties
in the whole problem, therefore, is to arrive at some kind of objective measure
of intelligence as a means of conceptual communication. As noted in my
previous post, we measure quantity by ratio and length by comparison.
Suppose, therefore, we make a start with a relation hypothetical enough in its
application but also very concrete - the relation between matter and antimatter.

The antithesis of matter and antimatter is an essential foundation of
human thought, determining opposite attitudes towards every epistemological
problem. It has none of the polarities of black and white, or positive and
negative. The anti-particle of the electron, for example, is known as the
positron, both of which we must regard as mathematical equivalent to one
another. But when isolating two permanent and opposed kinds of conceptual
intelligence in their purest and most fundamental expression, we need hardly
point out that they are incapable of synthesis.

Antimatter is the most complete antithesis to matter. Which is
equivalent to saying that when the two substances meet, they mutually destroy
each other, leaving nothing but a great deal of energy. It is fair to say,
however, that this is true only in a certain limited sense since the physical
evidence for the existence of contra-terrene material in the universe is not a
matter of fact, but, essentially, of inference of results based upon logical necessity. The necessity of sameness as a basis for
discrimination may seem paradoxical, but anti-matter is the mirror of the
universal structure we know.

In reflecting it, it reverses it - unchanged.

The problem thus resolves itself into one of intellectual distinction. For such is the nature and
constitution of all anti-material atomic nuclei that they consist of negatively
charged protons, as opposed to the positively charged protons of ordinary
matter, and are surrounded by shells of positrons, as opposed to electrons. The
conflict between these two is the clash of identity not of contrariety - the
result of a fundamental contention between two forms of opposites which are
mutually exclusive. Or, to put the matter categorically, they set up an intellectual reaction determined by the difficulty of distinguishing between two synonymous and interchangeable sets of relations.

In fact, if it is not imputing too much imagination to the new and as
yet unaccepted criterion of intellectual necessity, there would
be no logical alternative to the mutual exclusion of opposites entirely lacking
in any specific statement as to their separate identity, so that the one differs
from the other solely in the properties of the mirror image itself.

Matter and antimatter are paradoxes to be resolved. The former is
essentially substantial, dynamic, literal, and owes its existence to the
principle of contrast, as in the physicist's reference to positive and negative,
whereas the latter is essentially virtual or hypothetical. It is the mirror
image of thought itself. The two can never stand side by side, for they exist
respectively as element and expression of mutually exclusive dimensions. They
cancel each other out.

They are in truth indistinguishable.

To solve the problem is to resolve the conflict created by a contradiction
of terms: identical opposites. And since the human mind cannot
grasp multi-dimensional space-time directly, this ubiquity of the paradoxical is
resolved ultimately by leaving the continuum for virtual reality. In fact, the
degree and scope of this synthesis is inconceivable without the very principle
that the language of speculative enquiry ought to be distinguished from the
language of the mind...

...gosh - and to think I might have
joined the Marines!

Dreamy

AL GORE - THE “JACKASS” MEMORANDUM

“I hang-dry laundry. I am a vegan. I eat one locally sourced meal a week. I own second-hand clothing. I dry my hands naturally using only time. “

Al Gore, former US vice-president. (The Sunday Times 27.07.08)

And you know what scares me most of all? A square, ungainly American with pomaded hair and features suggesting overproduction of growth in the pituitary glands. A sermonising jackass in post-evolutionary America who has inherited a
pious religiosity sunk in self-righteousness and made it a model of sanctity. An unpleasant looking character with a phoney personality. The very prototype of H.G. Well’s Little Man.

Excuse me, while I throw up!

He may talk a good fight. As far as self-promotion, peace-prizes and global warming is
concerned, there is no beating him. Relying, by his own testimony, on the sweet
Lord Jesus who has been so kind to him in the past, he ignores all rational
assessments of the situation, taking refuge instead in the notion that the world
can be saved through sanctimoniousness, individual responsibility, and blaming
all the difficulties in the world on its globalising recklessness.

Thus was a fable launched that persists to this day.

In an interview with American reporters, Gore once stated very clearly
that whenever a difficult situation arose before him, that he would always ask
himself the same question: “What would Jesus have done...?“

Where do these jackasses come from?

The deeper the crisis into which the Earth has been plunged, the more
its inhabitants take refuge in irrational excesses of belief in a dreamy,
sustainable planet with translucent skies over poetic blue oceans. What’s more,
pressure from celebrities and non-governmental lobby-groups, has inevitably
trivialised the solution, reducing it to a question of wind and water power as
the main energy source of a post-mediaeval industry, when the real solution is
to stop talking about individual responsibility or “one locally sourced meal a
weak”, and focus on a globally synchronised population policy and the concept of nuclear fusion as one of the most dynamic catalysts in a highly indeterminate stage of human development.

How did H. G. Wells put it? “Don’t inflict visions upon us, spare our little ways of life from the
fearful shaft of understanding. But...give us cheap lighting, and cure us of
certain disagreeable things, cure us of cancer, cure us of consumption, cure our
colds and relieve us after repletion...Then the little pigmy world would be
safe. They would go on - safe forever, living their little pigmy lives, doing
pigmy kindnesses and pigmy cruelties to the other, they might even perhaps
attain a sort of pigmy millennium... sit down in a world-wide city ...
worshipping one another till the world begins to freeze...” (The Food of the
Gods)

And may the sweet Lord Jesus shove a “locally sourced”
carrot up your ass for ever more...

Dreamy

And Here Are Some Of Miss Dreamy’s Favourite Stressbusters...

“I spend most of my day blogging at a current rate of about 300 posts a week.”
Andrew Sullivan, Times Correspondent


“The horror, the horror...” (see above!)
Kurtz in Apocalypse Now


"If all the world, some six billion people, could travel whenever they wanted, the jam in the skies would be enormous" (The average Cuban salary is £ 8.70 a month)
Ricardo Alarcon, Cuban government official.



“History will be kind to me, because I intend to write it.” (no comment required)
Winston Churchill.




“German is a harsh-sounding - rather than a romantic - language." Max Mosley
(I bet he never got spanked by Novalis)




"If you love something, set it free - if it comes back to you - it's broken" Minnie Driver in Grosse Pointe Blank. (please don‘t go...!)




“Don't kill anybody for a few days; see what it feels like.” Allan Arkin in Grosse Pointe Blank

(And this last one was especially meant to tickle Elberry....)

Dreamy

ANTIPERISTASIS -Or A Post In Which Selena Appears As The Alpha Girl...

Modern science is marked by an enormously rapid and ever-accelerating progress. It is a movement from multiplicity to unity, from the purely mechanistic understanding of the Newtonian universe to an ideal composite space
of four dimensions and the essentially virtual ideas of geometrical form in which light moves along a geodesic. Indeed, it is useless to try to understand the meaning of the universe except in terms of measurements which, once made and recorded, become facts, and which, looked upon as facts, reproduce as nearly as possible an objective empirical reality.

“I think this may be because of the innately oppositional, either/or, dialectical processes innate to our reason.” (Jonathan)

Nor is it possible to adapt the laws of physics to the needs of
conceptual logic without having recourse to what dialecticians call antiperistasis, or the development of an idea by its opposite. And accordingly, one might illustrate the empirical nature of objective reality by a simple, specific example:

It is known for instance that the density of gold is 19:32, a statement
which does not profess to deal with anything but arbitrary magnitudes. In fact,
for as long as no corresponding assertion has been made about, say, the density
of a liquid such as water, it is impossible to quantify the degree of
compactness of any piece of gold which is usually determined by the ratio of its
weight to that of a volume of water of equal size: 19:32. Each thus serves to
explain the other and questions of arbitrary magnitudes determine nothing about
the specific weight to be set, until we add to the idea of quantity that of
ratio. In the same way, electromagnetic energy consists only of relations. One
could not, for instance, imagine an electron unless one had first been apprised
of the electrical properties of the proton. An electron consists solely of
negative electricity, which tells us nothing about the essential nature of
negativity until we are confronted with its opposite. With no other distinction
to be drawn, one is almost exactly the equal of the other while neither can be
understood on its own.

To go on from this simple and verifiable statement of fact, it will
easily be evident that this great chain of mutual contingency connects and
involves all known empirical phenomena. No force remains undetectable unless it
is too faint to engage with its opposite. Which means that no force without an
opposite is, even in principle, detectable. It is a relationship of mutual
adversity. Electrically, protons and electrons are the exact opposite of one
another and since, moreover, the one determines and explains the other, the
fundamental distinction seems to be analogous to the difference between
opposites rather than cause and effect, to the tension they engender rather than
the energy they release.

One might qualify this and say that
reality is the product of its literal antithesis; that it functions by
reflecting on itself. If consciousness is choice, conception is, in fact,
effected by contrast. It is the act whereby potential reality become actual
reality. Reality, therefore, is informed by a sense of what it is not. Nothing
can be explained by itself. It must always be compared with its opposite, or
with what its opposite necessarily foregoes. Its meaning, therefore, depends on
its relation to what it is not. The good cannot be explained without the bad. No
object can be hot and cold at the same time - or high and low! Indeed, it is
impossible to emphasize the one without dwelling on the other, and therefore to
discriminate the two aspects, positive and negative, of what has originally been
one single indefinable concept, is to accept the perennial synthesis of
inherently opposite forces. Proof enough, if proof were needed, that the human
intellect cannot comprehend anything that has no polarity, no beginning and no
end. But its survival is assured by the rules of reciprocity which determine and
sustain it at the perennial point where matter and meaning converge, creating
one another.

Dreamy

GOOD AND EVIL ARE NEVER ABSOLUTES...

Here’s Jonathan on “The Controversy That Is Homosexuality And The Hope For A Higher Light“:

“God, The Prince of Peace, wishes his children, the men and women of Planet
Earth, to love one another and to live in peace. This means that he wants, not
only men and women, the two halves of the human family, to love one another, as
they do not too much of the time; but that women love women and that men love
men. The purpose of this love is not that we should experience rhapsodic
epiphanies of sexual delight (though these on occasions might occur as a
spin-off), but that hatred, fear, oppression, and cruelty and suffering should
be banished from the surface of the Earth.”

An act of wishful thinking, at best, Jonathan, or, at worst, of appeasement - and nobody knows that better than God Himself ...

Good and Evil are never absolutes. They are the twin poles around which human civilization evolved, it is true, but nothing is good or evil in itself. Moral values are always derivative. Determined by their own frame of reference. God loves gays, and Allah hates homosexuals. That which is conducive to its own indigenous environment is “good,” and that which opposes it is “evil.” Full stop.

Even five years ago, just as a for instance, I was confused about the various transactions of war and peace. I found the idea quite intolerable that this kind of world was sustainable only through violent and mutually inflicted acts of worldwide inhumanity. Now I am much more settled in my opinion that it assumes a benevolence which simply does not exist. I see a pattern. The way I look at it, everything starts with benign intentions and ends with Armageddon. Humans are self-destructive. I own, it gives me a great feeling of sadness. Death itself has become agonizingly hip. Violence has become an end in itself, sought chiefly as a stimulus to the exercise of itself. Peace has become bland, unappetizing and frankly, unerotic. For as a matter that has never been sufficiently remarked upon, the veil of civilization is probably only as thin as a virginal hymen, and just about as resilient.

Dreamy

THE RISING OF A CURTAIN - In Which Post Miss Selena Blows A Raspberry At Bertrand Russell.

“I have not reached my peak until I can look down on myself and my stars”
Zarathustra III - The Wanderer

To escape the epistemological paradox of a universe with no edge in space,
no beginning or end in time, lies not within the scope of human intelligence.
For even though the human mind acknowledges the concept of infinity (chiefly
because of the greater difficulty of entertaining that of limited space), it
cannot arrive at infinity by reason. Not only is the truth not ascertainable -
as indeed the idealist philosophers have always held - by the rational process,
but every such process - in view of the twentieth century - is of necessity
hypothetical.

Indeed, there is a succession here from men like Locke, Berkeley, Hume,
Kant and Schopenhauer, or Fichte, Hegel and Heidegger, etc., to the ideas of
many contemporary philosophers of science. Nor was this the final word on the
matter. Nature, it now emerged, was not of a mechanical order. There was
something inherently uncertain in the fabric of reality itself. The word vividly
expresses the process. In fact, it is impossible to state adequately the sheer
force and consequence of the Uncertainty Principle after the invention of quantum mechanics by Heisenberg and Schrödinger in 1925 and 1926. Beginning, perhaps, with Faraday, Maxwell, Hertz, and Lorentz etc., Max Planck, already in 1900, had discovered the formula for black-body radiation involving the new constant h. Rutherford and Soddy, in 1903, advanced the theory
of ‘spontaneous disintegration’. Einstein hypothesized the light quantum in 1905. Niels
Bohr’s 1913 theory of the structure of the atom anticipated quantum mechanics
for the first time. Einstein in 1915, succeeded in incorporating gravitation in
his theory of general relativity. Like Picasso in the history of modern art, he
takes on an enormous, unavoidable presence in the annals of twentieth-century
physics. The millennial feat by which de Broglie first suggested that electrons may have the properties of waves was performed in 1924. This was followed by Pauli’s exclusion principle, formulated in 1925 when Dirac also predicted the existence of the
positron.

There is but a sense of genius - of irresistible magical
powers - about twentieth century physics at its zenith, accompanied, perhaps, by
an underlying foreboding that we could manipulate reality as if it were a
fantasy. Like a look from another world the effect on the twentieth century of
the new physics defies any exact examination. Though no exact date can be
applied to it, it was the rising of a curtain. And if we wish to understand the
most charismatic and pervasive of scientific revolutions, we can hardly get
closer to it than this handful of men who were at that time of an entirely new
mind-set. In the eyes of many, their genius and proficiency put them at the apex
of human evolution. What passed largely unnoticed was Bertrand Russell's
premature pronouncement that the history of human knowledge was in the process of completion. In the closing stages of the century in which he came of age, it sounded like an epitaph.

Perhaps the grand manner is unsuited to the rendering of plain physical
objectives, but nothing was ever to be quite the same. For the sceptic who
affects to ignore the ultimate metaphysical problem and fancies that the end of
knowledge is the end of all meaning, takes no account of the fact that meaning
is never single-minded, that it always contains the next source of conflict.
While one puzzle is being solved, new ones are being born. Things change, said
Chesterton, because they are not complete. They accommodate themselves to every
single query the mind of man can possibly devise. From Aquinas to Nietzsche men
are unanimous: nothing is ever allowed to lapse into stasis. Or as a modern
physicist somewhere remarked, the universe is made of processes, not things. It
is transitory, in other words, and therein lies its real significance.

Dreamy

A Post In Which Miss Dreamy Sets Out To Prove That Women Can Wear Red Lacy Knickers And Still Have Brains....

“The Universe does not wait upon our getting round to perceive it...It has a life of its own...It doesn't exist just in order to be perceived by us...” Jonathan

“To be is to be perceived...“ Berkeley

If the manner of our observation determines the universe, can knowledge bring about its own existence?

The universe proves little beyond its own
existence. If reality depends on our choice of measurement, no clear dividing line exists between ourselves and the reality we choose to experience. Indeed,
it is at this point that cognition in terms of identity and locality enters the theory inevitably and inexorably.

Whereas quantum mechanics denies objectivity
and locality - arguments of probability take precedence over the precise
establishment of facts - the materializing faculty of knowledge is deployed with
extraordinary power and incisiveness. Particle and wave are as much states of
mind as mutually exclusive, actual events. If consciousness is choice, a means
of intelligent conceptualisation of either wave or particle, knowledge is
analogical. It is the process whereby potential reality becomes actual reality.
Whether positive ‘holes’ in a sea of electrons represent the genuine
architecture of the universe, or whether the particle physicist evolves a
net-work of such analogies disguised as statement of fact, from any point of
view, in seeking to reconcile theory and observation, he deftly replicates and
exemplifies the phenomenal and verbal structure of man’s inner mind.

One may be inclined here to create an analogy - it would be precipitous
to treat it as more - with the physicist's process of reciprocal (i.e. negative
and positive) suggestion as a classification of semantic archetypes. Pairs of
opposites are archetypes of the coordinate system used to measure the asymmetry
of electrical charges. And since no other logical explanation suggests itself,
‘the occasional unoccupied state, or “hole”, in the sea of negative energy
electrons’, has long since been recognized as the positron.

The point of the analogy is this: the dichotomy of the human mind and
its empirical psychology is an inherent part of the process by which a system of
ideas is so ordered as to arrange itself in balanced, complementary opposites.
If the physicist is the great intellectual synthesizer, facing an abstract
conceptual world, all the anticipated effects are there. Indeed, it is a matter
of common observation that theoretical predictions of new properties, are often
made before the slightest experimental evidence has come forth. Thus, by the
principle of contrasts, consciousness, having conceived of itself as a problem,
also solves it. The universe has been turned into an idea, an unconscious but
self-assertive principle of never-ending solutions. That is to say, it grasps
itself as a paradox and, in apprising itself of that which it has opposed to
itself, creates itself.

Dreamy

SELENA’S REFLECTIONS ON NOTHINGNESS, CONSCIOUSNESS AND HUMAN MOTIVATION...

Presented, then, as a human story, the history of the Universe is the
record of a major biological species which allowed its evolution to be guided by
conscious reflection. And considering the remarkable progress science has made
in the last hundred years, or the part physics has played in changing our
perception of the nature of reality from being independent of man to being
warped by the observer, nothing could be more opposed to the divinely
predestined and more or less infallible laws of Laplace and Newton. And yet,
this is religion in its most profound and mysterious sense. The universe is not,
indeed, an ex post facto study in the precise mathematical laws which
led, step by step, to the creation of the world. There are other forces at work.
Stagnation has given way to a restless, creative ferment. Nor are the processes
of the human mind, as in the classical sciences, irrelevant to the tough,
rigorous examination of reality which used to be the hallmark of science, or
independent of it. Such distinction can no longer be absolute. Consciousness
itself is one of the dimensions whose nature will have to be analysed. Indeed,
it cannot help but make the facts conditional upon the investigation. The
investigator may dispute the plausibility of the distinction, but whilst he is
bound to remain in ignorance of the connection, he plays his own transforming
part in the process. Facts and faculties are part and parcel of a single
conceptual transaction.


This may seem potent language to use, but the evidence for existing
‘facts’ is not necessarily separate from the process which renders them
apparent. It is not in the thing but in the thought. Indeed, to reproduce as
exactly as possible an objective reality the human mind is really forced to
compromise. Since it contains no self-contradiction, we can never describe the
universe, ‘the thing in itself’, but only our understanding of it. Nothingness cannot be translated into alternative terms. Judgment may
only be made in terms of measurement, though for sheer ambiguity it would be
hard to beat the Protean quality so apparent in Relativity. For the sense of the
meaninglessness of absolute empty space as a phenomenal entity is powerfully
implicit in Einstein’s work. It is, in fact, impossible to state the guiding
philosophical principle that underlies the two theories of relativity without a
systematic exposition of consciousness and motive. Indeed, it is hardly possible
even to grasp the scope and provisions of Relativity without having formed acute
and coherent ideas as to the nature of conceptual intelligence nor, in so many
words, without first making a careful analysis of the various states of the
four-dimensional continuum of which in the physicist’s experience he seems to be
the catalyst.


Dreamy

In Answer To The Querying Mind Of My Esteemed Friend Jonathan Mark Tillotson...

“Oddly enough I’m very optimistic about our culture.” Jonathan.

“I’m a child of this age, a decadent, but only I know this.” Nietzsche.

“It is the organism which has not specialized to its environment that has
the best chance for survival,” it has often been said. And the fact that
evolution not infrequently proceeds through the elimination of ‘specialized
types’ and the survival of the simpler and more adaptable forms of life, is
really a good summary of the irreconcilable antagonism upon which it is based.
Much would depend, of course, on the nature of the decline. Dumbed down into a
service culture with no real sense of its own purpose, the emancipated West has
never recovered from the scourge of political correctness which taught its youth
to be ashamed of their history. We have nothing to offer but apologies, which is
the meanest of all legacies to pass on to the emerging New World. In fact, we
are probably engaged in the most radical overhaul ever to alter any
retrospective reading of the past, preoccupied as we are with the very rejection
of the values upon which it is based. Indeed, the remarkable story of Western
imperial expansion, once endowed with grand and epochal meaning, is today so
universally maligned as an unprincipled if highly successful history of
money-grabbing, and its massive civilizing force invested with so many ambiguous
and frequently abusive meanings that, for all its rapacity, nobody seems to want
to notice anymore how decisive the pursuit of geographical discovery has been
for the future of human civilization.

Imperial growth was an inevitable evolutionary process, and I sincerely
believe that the only honourable and well-intentioned thing that the
Cosmopolitan West can do for its successors is to retain its expansive genius.
“Adapt or perish,” said H. G. Wells. And the problem was as well stated by
Stephen Hawking when he announced that the survival of the human race depends on
its ability to spread out into Space.

It may strain credulity, but it is an astonishing fact that the total military expenditure for the war in Iraq has
been estimated at some $ 2000 billion. This is the more remarkable when it is
remembered that the total cost for the Apollo space program which put the first
man on the moon was less than $ 25 billion. The pursuit of knowledge is the
cornerstone of our civilization, and while American, Russian and European
technologies are still engaged in a series of evolutionary research projects,
especially in the fields of cosmology and planetary physics, it is
understandable, perhaps, that the idea of interplanetary migration is the
furthest thing from the minds of those still in the process of industrial
development. Futurists might well be excited about the prospect of a racially
heterogeneous planet, but I, myself, wonder sometimes if it is not up to “us” to
force the pace and light the fuse that leads into Space, rather than succumb to
the law of diminishing returns and face the potential collapse of our advanced
technological societies and a possible reversal of human existence, through
sheer force of numbers, to the primitive subsistence level?

The US population clock continues to tick upwards at the rate of one
person every 11 seconds. But, unless I’m much mistaken, each person is born into
the dawn of a new age. An age, in fact, on the brink of changes more sweeping
than any the world has seen for centuries, for the winds of those changes, I’m
afraid, and the conflicts that engender them, will be absolutely massive.


Dreamy

P.S. Parts of this post have already appeared in previous publications.

NOBILITY OR DECLINE...?

“I want to adopt a disabled child...”

Thus Jordan, or Katie Price as the best-selling authoress is nowadays
known, on Richard & Judy - 17. July.

Now, a couple of things strike you about this, because they so
vividly expose the sensibilities of human charity. To begin with, there is the ruthless pursuit of publicity for image and self-promotion by people of celebrity status, such as Angelina Jolie and Brad Pit or Madonna etc. For on the reverse of such philanthropy is usually an astute media operator whose self-sacrifice is a form of reverse exhibitionism that draws attention to itself. In Western society altruism is accorded the highest value. Celebrities
no longer exist as human beings, but as politically correct personas whose behaviour is motivated by comprehensive popular expectations. Public demand and a sense of personal insecurity creates in them an almost insatiable craving for unlimited approbation. The interest of humanity, as determined by their altruistic conception of the life of others, is defined solely in terms of
preserving their own. So, is Jordan driven purely by rational, cynical
self-interest? Or does she have some of Mother Theresa’s saintly Christian
abnormalities? One way to look at this is to call it psycho-pathetic morality.
It is a potent, if altruistic, condition and bound to magnetize the tabloids
that have long been feeding on the intermittent complications of the once
harmonious union between Jordan and Andre.

Many people think this is something that applies to celebrities, but
more usually ordinary people are its purveyors. One measure of the increase in
such philanthropic activities can be seen at the most extreme end of the
psycho-pathetic disorder known as political correctness. This to me is the worst
legacy of the Judeo-Christian enlightenment. And I am here thinking of a
four-year old who’s expressed wished for a Christmas present was “peace in the
Middle East”. How are we to explain this abject little parrot? The world of the
toddler is, after all, a world where moral values and democratic humanism play
no role.

Or do they?

I adore much about the Judeo-Christian morality of the West, confirmed
apostate though I am. And the calculation of how much political correctness a
society can endure and how many acts of self-immolation it can sustain before
its framework buckles and we all turn into sentimental limpets is a fine one,
and a peculiar combination of callousness and compassion is needed to judge it
accurately. Its significance in other words, lies in the enormous psychological
transformation post-modern morality wrought upon a society which is congenitally
senescent and as deeply demoralized as the people it accommodates. And nowhere
is this lesson better taught than in our own imperial history. First of all, it
is as well to remember that our philosophy of post-modernism is static rather
than evolutionary. In actual fact, if the politically correct revolution can
absorb the central power of the state, the problem of decline is coming close to
the attrition of something that ultimately exists in the inner constitution of
unconditional moral submission. And in this respect the post-modern West is
clearly unrepresentative of the spirit of evolutionary vitality and masculine
virility such as the rise of the British Empire exhibited in the course of its
irresistible progression.

There is, moreover, an instructive contrast here,
with the Third World as an developing, forthcoming entity that has not yet found
a stable social form and, hence, is still in a process towards an enormous
historical evolution. As a matter of fact, nothing is more characteristic of the
fundamental difference between the great senescent nations of the West, and the
nations of untapped virility which the decline of the Occident has thrown up,
than that the latter is a succession of quintessentially virile, and in many
ways almost objectionable, nations, who populate and ravage the world on a truly
expansive scale. Whereas the momentous issue foremost among the former is the
struggle for democratic authority in a stagnant and monolithic framework
characterised chiefly by its maudlin, apologetic and self-pitying
bigotry.

Still, it’s nice to know there are instants of psychopathology that
do have a happy ending....

Dreamy

EDUCATING PERCY...

Here is a comment I found on my blog two days ago:

“Could you send me a crotch shot to put up on my blog? Exploit what
you've got girl, stop being so shy and showing us just your
shoes.

On the one hand, I find this profoundly heartening. There’s nothing a girl loves more than to hear a man begin a sentence with: "Could you...“On the other hand, such a request constitutes an intolerable insult of my character and integrity. Which fact will give you the key to my entire moral constitution.

Needless to say, I've already had to ignore an immense number of e-mails requesting me not to shave, not to mention those from readers who’d like a tour of my pubes. And while my first and greatest debt is of course to Mutleythedog, for the many signs of lascivious attention he’s lavished upon me (and he should not, on that account, consider himself engaged!), I suppose that Percy Stilton who runs Celebrity Blogger & part time Dogger, from the back seat of his Mondeo, might conceivably argue that mine is a toffee-nosed reaction to a request that gives pleasure to millions of bloggers every day. But I can state flatly that his proposition is an object of moral outrage to me, and nothing of late reported by Mrs Stilton over the traditional Sunday Roast at the Robert Peel pub in Pendelton, carries conviction to my mind that Mr Percy Stilton is not simply an out-and-out pervert.

Or take Mick, whom he introduces as Mad Mick - another dedicatee, no doubt, of the words f*** and c*** - who indubitably never reads anything more riveting than the headlines of Percy’s blog. Of him it is rumoured that he sleeps in his car, and that he never changes his underwear. I don’t expect his social circle is very broad. But the interesting thing about this particular individual apparently is, that his girlfriend has let him spunk all over her face in the back of his mini-cab, after which he drove her all the way home and kissed her goodnight.

Now, how cool is that?
Not just the perfect lover, but a gentleman to boot!

And so far as Mick’s pal Blind Billy is concerned, a pallid chain-smoking air traffic controller (“Awight Miss? Av a fag.”) at Barton International Airport (reputedly), I’d wager a large wad of folding money that he was born in a coffin. Fact is, their entire collective demeanour suggests mourning. Percy, Mick and Billy - really quite sad. I shall loosely, and without malice, call them hopeless. To me they definitely look like men on their way down. But to them, individual incentive probably means giving expression to the term that most frequently approximates their own state of mind: “bloody wankers!” Which only goes to prove that our concept of who we are and what we want to be is limited by the language we use, for the only difference in the office where I work, is that most of them are left-handed....

I must therefore, my dear Percy, beg you to excuse me, if, on that account, I am under the necessity of declining access to my crotch for the purpose you propose. And for all those of you who'd yet like to see more of it (or were too polite to ask), why don’t you meet me upskirt, chaps, or indeed, stay down there, for the view if you like...


...your ever indulgent Miss Selena

SELENA’S RETURN FROM THE BOWLS OF THE EARTH - and what the Oracle told her...

This is what happened:

The first indication that something unusual occurred was an almost imperceptible vibration in the air. A faint, pulsating tremor that gathered strength and momentum the further I progressed into the recesses of the planet Earth. Strange to say, it was neither strong nor weak. But it was so intense, in less evident ways, that it seemed to engulf and invade my mind with a faint, dislocated presence that could be felt but not heard. Everything else, too, seemed unreal and remote. As if I'd descended into some alien planet, or was about to be absorbed by an ageless entity that proposed to take me to itself for ever. Then I looked down and was startled by a curious manifestation at the very core of the planet. The creature below me, appeared ominously silent. She seemed suspended, motionless, immaculate and amphibian against the opacity of the Earth’s nucleus, glowing in the central fire, possessed of a strangely oracular beauty.

It was an extraordinary sight, and I watched it intently. The moment seemed to stand still, impressing its every detail on my mind. I was mute, neither exhilarated nor afraid. A feeble terrestrial mammal about to be subjected to some oracular, timeless epiphany?

That was the haunting part.

That and the feeling of destiny which emanated from it. Not knowing whether I was the observer or the observed, I yet felt like an onlooker expressly called upon to bear witness to some awful tidings from the other side of space and time. Our time. For what struck me most about this peculiarly subterranean creature was her singular eye, deep and imperious, and her silence, like a heavy, incomprehensible burden.

It is a bizarre recall, quite lacking internal logic. Whatever it was that managed to slip through a crack in the space-time continuum, its appearance was a singularity. It was as if this great dynamic Oracle, or what appeared of it in a weird geodesic distortion, had suddenly and unaccountably decided to become involved in a conceptual conflict with the empirical forces of the principal planet in the solar system.

Of course, it should be realized that I am speaking from memory and that if I have been able to recognize any of the prognostications concerning relations between the past and the future, it is still up to you to confirm them. But the following, in so many words, is the gist of what she said in reply to my unspoken questions:

*
“The executioner and oppressor of those people to whom he promised prosperity, brotherhood and equality will be slain at the hour of noon by one of his own sentinels. His heart will be ripped out of his chest, his liver fed to the dogs and his entrails devoured by scavenger birds...”
**
“Do not doubt that the K K K and its followers will be toasting the accession of the ‘half-breed’ to the White House with an attack on the lives of the incumbent and his family, followed by the worst outburst ever of racial violence right across the Deep South and the deployment of federal troops against rampaging gangs of Negro youths...”
***
“The rivers of Asia have flowed into the Thames. Thus Albion will be punished by Albion: the oppressor of the world will become the most abject servant of the most infamous slave... “
****
“The conquest of Mesopotamia, as the Greeks called the land between the Two Rivers, changes everything. All the Islamic resurgence spring from that hideous error. Women will be stoned to death for infidelity. Swearing in public will be made a felony, contraception a criminal offence and the UN declared guilty of war crimes...”
*****
So what about Osama bin Laden, I thought, Messiah or Anti-Christ?

“The Sunny saviour will never die. He will transform himself into a Holy Warrior. Vanquished as a source of political power he will pass into even greater supremacy as a mythic messiah. From the minarets of a thousand mosques will come the call, and armed men will spring from the soil of Islam! The more al-Qaeda is whittled down, its leaders captured, its cells broken up, the quicker it transforms itself into new shapes and forms.”
******
The son of a blacksmith, born in the shadow of the Alborz mountains, will adopt the mantle of a Shi’ite saviour, and, suffused in a green light from hell, bring about the final apocalypse between Rome, Jerusalem and Mecca...

*******
So much for Islam, I thought, but what about the future of Christianity?

“What Christianity achieved by a bold stroke of dogmatism, the world now acknowledges as an inherent good, which evidently it is not. It is nothing but the identification of the supreme power with the supremely self-serving expedient. All it really meant for Christ was that from the moment you learn to walk on water, you are no longer under the necessity of getting your feet wet...”

********
So what about the species of man?

“Many communities there will be who will hide themselves and their young and their victuals within gloomy caverns, and there in dark places will sustain themselves and their families for many months without light either artificial or natural.”

*********
And the future of the planet Earth?

"A wandering mass of shapeless flame,
A pathless comet, and a curse,
The menace of the universe.
A bright deformity on high,
The monster of the upper sky!"

I don’t know about you, folks, but to me, either of these prophesies, so far as they were identifiable and within my grasp, seemed altogether accountable. And if she knew anything of England versus South Africa at Lord's First npower Test Match , she never bothered to comment on it. But that apart, at the very least, I now realise, it isn’t me who is off my head, it is everyone else...

Dreamy

PS.: My thanks and gratitude to Leonardo da Vinci, Lord Byron, Juvenal, Horace, Pompey the Great, Johann Gottfried von Herder and all those upon whose quotes and passages I have deliberated without actual acknowledgement.