So after I woke up yesterday morning - yesterday? nothing like a weird night on the streets to make you lose track of time - I headed off further down the path to see what I could see. Turns out it was called "Kirkstall Nature Reserve" - though what differentiated it from any other path that winds through bushes and trees I couldn't quite work out. This path, however, was sort of unique in another way: after carrying my bike through brambles and across an excitingly dangerous weird little bridge it suddenly joined some railway tracks and terminated. Odd. And, also, perhaps a little bit annoying: no way I was turning back but I know how they are these days with regard to walking along railway lines - not like the good old days when you could just shortcut wherever you wanted, now it's all "trespass" and "arrest" and all that palaver. Health and safety. Stopping trains because of madmen on the line. The tracks were quiet and there was plenty of visibility in either direction so it all seemed good to me. At the same time, though, a few hundred metres up ahead - right by where I thought there might be an exit - there was a fluorescently-clad bloke staring intently. Oh well, what can you do? I'm in the right here and it's not my fault the path goes where it goes. So up I march and, given there's only one of him and the gates right there I figure all will be groovy.
He looks incredulous at me.
"What are you doing?" he says, "You're going to have to go back. Do you know how dangerous that is?"
"Not very," I say. They always try and make out things like this are dangerous. But I been walking on train tracks since I were a wee lad and I don't think I've ever been hit by a train yet. Plus he's walking on it too.
"Not very?" he splutters, "trains come through here at ninety-miles an hour."
He's exaggerating. It's the line from Leeds to Shipley; those trains put-put through there at no more than sixty, I reckon. And anyway...
"Well I've got eyes in my head, I could see 'em coming."
I'm not being bolshy or aggressive - but it's true, and his argument's patently an empty one.
Then I decide to take the initiative, go on about following the path and how it just leads straight onto the tracks, how there are no signs and it's completely mad and, you know how it is, often you follow paths that cross train tracks but there's always a continuation on the other side, I expected the same here. And it's all true and I think he digs it and I can see he's not going to try and make me walk back to where I've come - which I was never going to do anyway. They always try and get you to do things like that: you've come two hundred metres, the gate to the road is literally three seconds away, but just to be bureaucratic and counter-intuitive and annoying they've got to show you who's boss. Still, he may have given up on the danger issue - we're chatting quite nonchalantly standing on the tracks - but he can't let me off scot-free and so he goes on about what would happen if someone saw me and they'd have to stop all the trains and probably someone who's just got in from a night shift would have to come down the tracks and make sure everything's all right, by which time I woulda been gone anyway and how that would of all sucked for them and, much as I might have wanted to say, well just don't do all that stuff then, I can't help but agree and reassure that I'd never been that way before and wouldn't be doing it again (no point). And after a bit more chatter off I go and he was quite a nice man really.
But isn't it a shame what's happened to our railways? Back when I were a lad I used to shortcut across the tracks all the time: now those age-old paths are all blocked off by unsightly spikey fences and it seems like even sniffing too closely to a train track'll have you threatened with arrest: a few years back I was waiting for a train and I thought I'd have a little sit on the edge of the platform (you can see it coming from a mile off) which got me threatened and warned - those dangers once again! - by the driver. Stuff and nonsense. And how much have all those thousands of miles of fences cost? And what of the impact on the eye? And how many lives have they saved anyway? I imagine not many at all.
Which brings me on to another point: what's all the obsession with saving lives anyway? Why not let people die? Doctors wheel ninety-five-year olds into operating theatres and carve them up and spend millions of pounds all to give them an extra year, an extra six months of a life maybe not even worth living; fences are erected everywhere to stop idiots from harming themselves - when surely Darwinism would decree that this is all just a way to ween out the thick and the useless; and woe betide anyone that actually wants to die, suicidees and fans of assisted euthanasia - we'd rather have brainless cabbaged bodies supported by machines than nothing at all. And IVF, and as many babies as anyone can muster - it's an obsession with filling the planet with as many people as we possibly can while at the same time going on about overcrowding. Well let people die then! Let them trot off to Switzerland, let them jump into volcanoes, and let them, if they're stupid enough not to recognise that the large, train-shaped object that's hurtling towards them might actually do them a wee bit of harm, wander happy and free on the nation's train tracks. I mean, sucks to be that driver - but think of all the hundreds and thousands of dumbass descendants the rest of us'll be spared the pleasure of.
Plus: the old "carbon footprint" - the latest trend for keeping us all busy washing tin cans and making sure we don't leave the TV on standby while big business carries on raping the land and pouring shit into the oceans and the skies - which would be helped no end by two things:
1. People leaving the planet (ie, dying)
2. People not making new people
It's true eh? You do all the not flying and carpooling and reusing plastic bags but - bam! - the moment you make a sprog you've instantly doubled your impact on the Earth. And doubled is conservative. Have another? That's two hundred percent, baby. Two hundred percent! You'll have to be cycling to work for the next three thousand years to make amends for just the chunk of rainforest your two hundred percent'll spill down its bib. Think about it.
Not that I'm saying, of course, don't have children - I mean, I may make one meself one of these days - but what I am saying is...well, what am I saying? I'm saying:
1. All this carbon footprint business is a load of bullshit and you should just do whatever you want.
2. People and governments harping on about it really ought to say something smart like, er, maybe you should all stop making so many babies, that's the real issue
3. It should be all right to die - and, even more than that, it should be encouraged.
Listen, we live in - nominally speaking, if not in reality - a Christian country. And Christians believe that when you die you go to heaven. And that life in heaven is much, much better than life on Earth. You get to sit at God's right hand side. You get to be free from all woes. You get to see everyone you've ever loved and you're all happy and smiley all the time. And you get to do all those things forever and ever and ever. Imagine that! Your life here might span a mere seventy or eighty years - so short! - but in heaven you can hang out with your friends and family for a thousand times as long and still only be getting started. Brilliant! Even after a million, billion years of sitting at God's right hand side and smiling at Jesus and all your grandmas you'll still have millions and billions of years of the same thing to look forward to. Heaven must be amazing. I can hardly wait.
So why don't Christians feel happy when people die? Why don't they look forward to their own deaths? And why do they cling to life even when life has ceased to become worth living? Could it be that they don't really believe in heaven and the afterlife? Could it be that they're just Christians on the surface, but that they haven't really confronted the issue of their own mortality deep down? And could it also be that, somewhere, they know that this idea of heaven as a happy ever after place where you carry on living infinitely is absolute hogwash?
Life is eternal: I believe that. And after you die you will go to somewhere that feels like heaven, because your soul will be freed from the physical body and, in comparison, it will be bloody marvellous. But that won't go on forever - no no no - soon enough you'll be back here on Earth, and you'll be black or female or rich or poor or lovely or insane or boring or Swiss, and you'll keep on with the whole thing of living and learning and growing and experiencing and then one day you'll die again and on it will go. So don't fear death, and don't fight it - because when your time comes, you'll know that you've done all you can do in this particular body and it's time for a new one. Be happy! You're gonna be young and fresh again and the life that has gone stale will be full of new challenges and adventures. And, best of all, you won't even remember any of this - poof! - it'll all be gone and there'll be no sense of burden - no conscious sense, anyway - to hold you back in your new venture. Of course, the same is true for you as you are now: you remember nothing, but all that you were, and all that you did is still with you, somewhere, in the depths of your heart and your body and your soul. That's evolution.
Wouldn't it be fun to design a society based on beliefs like that, rather than on the beliefs that we currently have? :-)
In other news, as mention, girlfriend and I have moved into my friend's house in South Elmsall. Feels good to have our own space, finally. And feels okay to be in South Elmsall - looks like I did all my aversion therapy back in the spring. Right now, everything seems okay, and nothing seems mad. Okay, there could be a little less broken glass on the street, and the shouting-rather-than-talking thing's a bit weird, but other than that I can't see it bothers me: it's all a far cry from when I first rolled up here in March and recoiled in horror at all the dogshit and delinquents and scowls. I can't even see those things anymore. Something's changed.
Also...I start uni later today; first class this afternoon (shoulda been second too but just got an email saying that it's been cancelled - glad I'm not paying nearly two hundred quid a week for the privilege, that would be annoying). Thoughts so far mostly good, though some anxiety about the more academic and - what better way can I put this? - arsehole aspects of the course: you know what I mean, all that university speak that seems to be nothing more than long words and articulate sentences revolving around in the air but never actuality landing anywhere with the tangible thud of the sound of something that means something. Abstraction. Intellectualism. All that dissection and theorising when what we're actually about is writing and it would surprise me immensely if any actual writers ever gave two hoots for even five minutes of that. But, hey ho, I can no doubt blag it and fulfil the criteria and concentrate on what I actually want to do. Just need to make sure I don't mutter "bullshit!" too loudly during lectures.
Anyways, we've had one task already - something to do with "research terms", which is something I don't really understand. Seems like in order to justify a creative arts degree at university these days you have to make it seem like research, like something that might have some benefit to the society at large, and no doubt I'm going to have to wrestle with that somewhat, even though I'd rather just be like, tell me to write, critique my writing, help me improve it. So the lecturer guy says something about this class we're doing on "research perspectives" and how we're all going to create a kind of A-Z of 'useful' research terms. Which means people have so far written definitions of things like Aesthetics, Conglomerates, Cultural Capital, Ethnomethodology, Oligopoly, and Transdisciplinarity, among others. Brilliant. Here's what someone wrote to describe 'Paradigm' just to give you a taste of what I'm up against:
Paradigm from the greek paradeigma, meaning pattern, is a much contested term made even more contentious by Science Philosopher, Thomas Kuhn, in his 'paradigm shifting' book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). Paradigms are, in essence, structures of thinking which cross disciplinary borders and which imply that that the progress of science, if indeed there is progress in strict linear terms, cannot be divorced from its wider cultural context. In research terms, paradigms are important for they unwittingly constrain the limits of our thinking. An example might be the unconscious imposition of a rationalist scientific paradigm on a creative process.Well, maybe you understand it and I'm just being thick. But it all seemed like a lot of stuff and nonsense to me. Everyone in the class is supposed to add two hundred-word definitions and I didn't see anyway that I'd be able to manage that. And then I had a brainwave! And so I came up with this:
DEVALUISATIONThe reduction of the sum parts of a research component to its base forms of offal, walterbix and choonisia in order to corroborate the localised understandings of each segmund is known as disenvaluisation (see above). Coined by the psychometrolocist Bag Weasel Hendrix (1999-1942) the term rapidly gained favour among research otters during the artistic torpor that surrounded the Paris Uprisings of 2006 and the Berlin Pigeontry that followed, before sliding into obscurity six or, as Prof. Grant Moo has written, seven hours later.
Which satisfied me to such an extent I followed it with:
CORNDOGGERYAnd, in 'answer' to the definition of transdisciplinarity - which is apparently a method that can be used in the crossing of domains (including cultural as well as specific performance disciplines) because, as we all know, certain disciplines cannot individually address the complexity of today's society, requiring, in order to access new knowledge, completely new frameworks to be designed to address the problems that arise from economic and technical globalization and its social, political and cultural impacts - I added:The so-called Italian Smooth Movement of the late-nineteenth century birthed the area of researchonomics known as corndoggery, from the really old latin Cornos, meaning balaclava, and Dog, meaning dog. Imperical in both nature and nurture - as well as bearing fond resemblance to certain aspects of gratiofizz - corndoggery is differentiated from the related practices of howzmuttsons and blenheimism by its strict adherence to the μ-scientific ethics of morality and the question of whether granting egg seeds immunity over bacon in actuality reduces colonialism rather than transplanting it.
WAGSTAFF
n. The person or persons - or even personosas - responsible for the collection of rapid annual gibraltarisms which occur throughout the day in the small of the back. Animal-shaped wagstaffs are known as vertigibbons. [OED, 9th Ed, p.3]
TRANSDISCIPLINARIANSomeone who has an interest in more than one thing.
I mean, check it out: read the above definition and see if you can make head or tail of it; isn't it just saying, well, that some things have more than one component? Like, duh. But - oh, oh, wait, here's the exciting bit - before transdisciplinarity we wouldn't have been able to deal with things that spanned, say, the incredibly divergent fields of politics and culture, we were completely at a loss. No, what we needed - what the world was crying out for - was for some clever people to invent "completely new frameworks" so that we might be able to "access" - we couldn't "access" it before! - this new and wonderful knowledge. Isn't it great that someone came up with this awesome new method? Really, I don't know how we lived in the days before transdisciplinarity became such an important part of our everyday lives. I urge you, if you haven't already, to have a go and see if you can put this incredible technique to use.
Ah, I think I'm going to enjoy university. The students are back - so young, so cute, mere embryos - and they're puking and gadding and I don't mind them at all. Meanwhile, encouraged by a lecture that said today's artists were too fearful, that they shouldn't be, that they needed to upset the applecart, I suppose I've got card white to do whatever I want. I sort of shrink from the challenge - am I just being stupid? is there maybe something to this gobbledygook after all? - but then when I get down to it it just feels good. Seriously, I loved blurting out my nonsense definitions and fine-tuning them and posting them up there, to such a serious and staid forum: I felt creative, man; I felt like I was flying. As long, I suppose, as I can justify it in some deeper way than "I was just having a laugh" we'll be just fine. And therein I feel the birth of a future challenge: the resistance of the uttering of the phrase "I was just having a laugh". What japes!
In the meantime: anal sex. And once you start doing it, and start doing it regularly, how do you stop? How much is too much? Or is it fine to split it fifty-fifty?
Cheers!
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