sunny day

You said my last notes were cynical. You said you don’t think Soviet Russia was a last stage of Feudalism or that Chinese society presently is. You don’t think fascism was a revolution while the Beatles were not.

Nope.

Technology was never a revolution nor was some great big idea. In itself neither sort of thing has even changed governance. They may have provided entry of some sections of people into political and cultural classes but they haven’t changed either structures of relationships to resources or ruling narratives. They certainly haven’t created new types of people only new strata among the old ones. But fundamental change? Never. New ways of bonking and new ways of killing are not revolutions.

You are entranced by the seduction of the narrative.

But the real thing to look at is the spectrums of the narratives. Where does it lead you? Narratives of origin, significance and place contend without ceasing. They do so especially ferociously in language but also everywhere there is any symbol and any harnessing of spirit by institutions. Narratives contend so without let up in every form. The dominant one in any place is called truth or history or good. The others are literature, art, lies nonsense and madness.

Narratives are not revolutions but they are certainly creations.

Humans are subjective. They require subjectivity to cope and sustain. The subjective goes with having only five senses and a mind. Stones don’t need it. Subjectivity controls information, gives ground for alliance and provides common weal. Even when being objective a human is subjective. The human is subjective within family, within even tribe but usually in some civic or institutional interest maybe a nation maybe a stratum. They are ra-ra and ga-ga for their narrative. Gets them through the day. Gets ‘em a job. The images and stories of that object, their own story-thing fight to overcome all contenders and give more place and structural alignment to sustenance, to empower, to collectivise. To avoid death of self. So they make stuff up. Or rather they make something out of chaos. Depends who is winning and who is fighting.

Who is dying who is dead.

Do you suspect history is a lie? That something else really happened and is lurking there? For example that thousands were starved to death in American governed prisoner of war camps in WW2. Or that the Islamic insurgents killed on the border were actually Assyrian tribal wedding attendees. Was Richard the Lionheart a useless French philandering killer-bitch and his poor brother John only trying to hold things together and pay the rent? Did your father really fight in the war? Was Karl Marx arrested for drunkenness in Clerkenwell? Are Democrats anti-democratic, are Communists anti-communists and Republicans for Monarchy?

Depends.

Do the workers get paid more than their labour is worth in some places? Is money irrelevant but access to debt the determining factor in society? Was Mother Theresa an abuser and scam stealing from the dead? Is there any true statistic for nutritionally related murders in America?

Tell the truth.

Can you hear the most gibbering flawed robots repeating endlessly that they should be followed to freedom? Do you hear the most self-interested whining of their immortal sacrifice? Do you hear thieves screaming of what they are owed? Do you see obsessive routine called imagination?

In the darkness of night.

Do you suspect that modernity is going backward? That the march towards reason and peace turned around at some point to stumble backwards through banality to barbarism and apocalypse? Do you see that in politics and art? Do you hear it in news casts? Strange, you may say. I remember when the world was governed on the basis of a secular principle to ensure fair play and discover and develop objective analysis.

Didn’t Iraq have democratic parties and a constitution with international treaties? Wasn’t the Caliphate a centre of modernisation? How did it become a dark age? Weren’t civilian casualties at one time counted? Didn’t witnesses tell the truth so help them God? Or is all history like this?

Here is the coffee. Sunny Day. (Think I’ll read Richard Rathwell’s Death’s Doors.)