Ithaca

For my next post (which has been a long time coming since I've been spending a lot of time working, volunteering and formulating excuses) I will participate in one of the most popular human past-times: brutal hypocrisy.

For, contrary to an earlier post which was critical of poetry not well-written enough to link to now (also I'm lazy), I have decided to praise a piece of verse in this post. It's a poem called Ithaca by C.P. Cavafy, and I've shamelessly reproduced it below.

I'm not a fan of in-depth poetical analysis, especially by rank amateurs such as myself, so I won't explain what I think it means or how I've carefully and selectively read it to fit what I want it to. I'll simply say that I like it because it praises the journey of life:

When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,  
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.

It reminds me of a Dave McPherson lyric from the song The Thieves:

Take a trip, take a trip down memory lane
Think of the things you've lost but all the strength that you've gained
All of the trauma, all of the loss and all of the pain
It's not a touch on all the strength that you've gained

 But I don't want to explain why. Partly through laziness and partly because my interpretation is probably massively off and the less I say, the less exposed I am.

Last and First Men

What a fantastically ambitious and far-reaching novel Olaf Stapledon has written. I've just finished reading this. It's like H G Wells but more satisfying because fewer people know about it. It reads like high literature but tackles issues of time and space. Is it literature or sci-fi? Who cares, it was written in 1930 and the distinction would be nonsensical, because sci-fi didn't quite exist as a separate entity. The afterword informs me that the author himself would find the attempted division ludicrous, and that was good enough for me. Anyway, that's enough of a tangent.

The basic premise of the book is a brief history of time, from our own (1930s) era through world conflict, a simple story based on an imagining of the future. But it goes on, and on, through different species of human, their different ideas and characteristics. In all, 18 species of human exist, first on the Earth, then on Venus, then on Neptune, where the race ends. I'm not really one for synopses. Even that one has exhausted me.

Reading this so long after it was written is cruel to the author, because of the inherent difficulties an author has in trying to predict a possible future without framing everything in the context of his own times. Hence even the most advanced species rely heavily on "overalls" and "hoes and spades", because the author isn't aware that all future races actually wear foil and spandex, and he hadn't encountered the rudimentary robots which would have fed his imagination with new ideas for mechanical domestic help. And although some of the species of human eventually achieve varying levels of telepathic ability, there is no intermediate technological advance in the fields of communication to match this. Could it have been so hard to predict and augment the Internet? Luckily, he wrote after the advent of aviation, so that advanced races do experience the luxury of personal "flying craft", and even the occasional "ether ship".

But of course these facetiously-noticed petty peccadilloes take nothing away from the genius of the book, which has inspired so many. Arthur C Clarke said of it: "no book before or since has ever had such an impact on my imagination." It is a hugely imaginative cosmological journey that Stapledon takes us through, but the highlight for me is the sentence-by-sentence structure, vocabulary and, dare I say it, poetry. To pick one (almost) at random, when speaking of one of the species' view on the death of their fellow man, he describes it as "an irrevocable tragedy, an utter annihilation of the most resplendent kind of glory, an impoverishment of the cosmos for evermore." This one stuck with me so I made a note of it.

Not only that, but he teaches us important life-lessons:

"There is something else, too, which is a part of growing up - to see that life is really, after all, a game; a terribly serious game, no doubt, but none the less a game. When we play a game, as it should be played, we strain every muscle to win; but all the while we care less for winning than for the game. Ad we play the better for it."

But, but before we gain too much levity, we are also reminded that "thus the whole duration of humanity, with its many sequent species and its incessant downpour of generations, is but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos."

I noticed that after reading substantial portions of the book, I looked at the world with a distant gaze, smiling wryly at the minutiae of every day life. Early in the book, our "First" humans stashed a huge vault-full of human knowledge in a cave, that it should never be lost. I thought that the retention of that knowledge would be pivotal to the cultural survival of man. It mattered slightly for a few thousand years, or perhaps 30 pages, but it meant nothing once hundreds of generations had passed, each with their own ideas of what's important, indispensable, sacred. In the end, it mattered not. It was a strangely liberating thought, not getting bogged down in the little things. I felt almost Buddhist. I didn't even bother shaving that day, such was its ascetic appeal.

So I would agree with Mr Clarke on the novel's influential properties. For example, I learned that life is an insignificant game. Life may be "but a flash in the lifetime of the cosmos", but it's still a game.

New Employment, New Dangers

I've settled comfortably into my new office role. Despite expected teething problems, such as horrifying initial incompetence and why-is-no-one-else-wearing-a-suit-syndrome, it's going okay. The people, though different from my usual crowd of hapless, giggling misfits, are affable and approachable. The office, though lacking in privacy and humidity, is spacious and calming. The work and procedures, though at first bewildering, are slowly sinking in and becoming familiar and comfortable. My major current concern is the office radio.

I like good music, not popular music, ffs. I feel like an old man, or, more accurately, a fraudulent geek. I don't understand these new cultural references. Why is everyone laughing when someone says a singer sounds like Avril Lavigne? I thought it was Avril Lavigne. And, anyway, what happened to Avril after her fabulous I'm With You. Wow, that was a cool song. Pretty nifty, in fact. Hip n' shit. But I don't understand. How come some of these new-fangled accepted songs have industrial-like instrumentals on when my own music is disregarded for its "noisome" tone? For what purpose auto-tune?

And why do they only ever sing about their worthless, failed relationships, their disgusting history of the inbreeding of the vacuous and the banal, their half-baked misremembrances of fictionalised saccharine pairings, concocted in the sweaty mind of the songwriter and regurgitated by a singer devoid of personality or flair, and whose entire claim to celebrity entitlement stems from a stealthy act of fellatio gleefully delivered to an emotionless Simon Cowell at the beginning of a long and sticky journey through a well-watched but ultimately soulless reality television show?

I even had the chance to put an end to the madness today. There was some dispute in the office when the Luddites in the row behind complained that their analogue radio clashed with the echo of the DAB radio next to me. I stupidly, selflessly fixed everything by pointing out that our radio could also receive and transmit an FM signal. Now I'm stuck in the Dark Age of analogue listening to popular music.

I can feel it eroding my soul. I have to come home and bathe in the disinfectant of Black Sabbath.

But they also have a nice water cooler here. So, like, swings and roundabouts.

On the Inadequacy of Headstones

It was on one of my frequent perambulations through obscure Nottingham churchyards that I noticed that almost every grave's headstone bore the inscription "In Loving Memory".

Why did everyone creating these stones think it would be a good idea to copy the inscription of virtually every other inhabitant? It's not original, it shows poor and defective thought and a lack of the true sentimentality that one would hope one's surviving relatives and friends would feel towards one post-mortem.

Personally, I can't imagine the manufacturers of headstones being responsible. After all, they've got to do a lot of carving whether or not people want to alter the standard sentence fragment. Besides, ultimate responsibility lies with those preparing the dead person's funeral.

Even if a lazy and unscrupulous funeral director did say to you, "Sorry, mate. 'In Loving Memory' or 'Gone, but not forgotten' are your only options', would you accept that? No, not if you have any regard for the recently-deceased. Instead, you launch into a semi-incomprehensible splenetic tirade, pointing out that "of course I love them (or at least want to give that impression to the other relatives and future pompous history graduates who may walk past his grave), and of course they're not forgotten. What brand of facile asininity is this, you incompetent fool?"

You may as well just write "This man/woman was alive and now they're dead. They left behind some sad people. We had some good times." At least it's more expansive. And at least it's original. There are no benefits to the standard formula. It lacks poetry and warmth.

Now, you might argue that the space for originality is underneath the "In Loving Memory". That's where you write your sentimental drivel - "The Pain of Your Passing is Eclipsed by the Warmth of the Memories You Have Given Us" - or whatever. That's where you truly demonstrate the depth of your feelings to the deceased.

No, this isn't good enough. The headstone is all that is there in the cemetery to commemorate the dead. It should be a unique testament given to celebrate a unique life. It could be blank apart from a poem (not a poem, obviously. See below) and a name, or have playful carved-doodles of phalluses, if that is part of a relevant and affectionate tribute to the person decomposing beneath. You can tailor it as much as you like, and you shouldn't be constrained by what everyone else has written first. The Loving Memory in whose name you compose your headstone can be presumed.

P.S. The one "In Loving Memory" I could bear to sanction would be:

The Pursuit of Privacy

I've recently been frantically deleting old posts, tweets, photos and details of my name from social networking sites, as well as tightening privacy and security settings. I've tried to get rid of anything that can too easily identify me, my interests, or my friends. I have a vague idea that this has been done for reasons of privacy. But, overall, this is a pointless and bad idea for a number of reasons.

Firstly, no one cares about my details. I'm not rich, famous, or successful. If I were planning a career in politics or the like, I could understand why I've done this, but I'm not, so I don't.

Secondly, even if someone did genuinely seek to undermine me or use my past words against me, my precautions would be ineffectual. Basically, I'm not so good at IT that I could truly protect myself from such threats online if they existed.

Thirdly, I've basically committed cultural genocide against myself:

Twitter's probably the most painful example. I've deleted tweets which might be viewed as too inflammatory or foul-mouthed alongside those which might compromise my security. I've gone from about 1,600 tweets to 200, and now they mostly consist of short one-sentence answers to other people's tweets. I'm too vain to let my tweet-count slip to zero, but I'm too paranoid to allow anything interesting to remain.
edit: Fuck it, I'll delete them all, barring the first one, which will show when I joined, and a second explanatory one, explaining the lack of future posts. I'm nothing if not methodical.

On Facebook, I've deleted all old photo albums, even those which appear benign. I'm not sure why; although my friends could access them, my outside privacy settings were secure. Maybe I just don't trust my friends, but then, of course, they'll have other photos of me anyway, and won't always have the same stringent privacy settings that I employ. This goes back to my second reason listed above. Anyway, beyond photos, I've also started going back over all my old statuses and postings, and deleting them, bit by bit. Again, secondary reason, this is pointless because a lot of my filthy incendiary comments are probably on other people's walls, not to mention what I may've said in countless "private message" conversations (which I can only delete from my side).

Anyway, this talk of wall postings, tweets and status updates lead me onto expanding the third reason. I generally put a lot of effort into my updates and tweets. I sometimes looked back on them and smiled, thinking how enormously clever I was. As each was accompanied by a date and a time, they acted as handy reminders of how I might've felt at a certain time, during a certain period of my life. At the very least, they would've been a good archive of some of my more interesting thoughts and ideas.

Maybe I'm actually being vain in thinking this matters at all. Surely the only reason I'd ever truly look back is because I was writing my autobiography, having achieved a great deal in public life? Am I planning to attain a great and notable standing at some point in my life? Not really. So why should it matter if I'm deleting my past?

Perhaps I feel blasé about this whole trauma because I've been reading a lot about Mark Twain recently, who had a healthy disregard for truth and accurate memory ("Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it" etc.). If I ever rise to prominence, I'll take the opportunity to rewrite my life and reinvigorate the past. Who'll contradict me? Mark Zuckerberg? HA! Show me the evidence.


P.S. All this has made me realise the hypocrisy of this public blog. However, barring a few privacy lapses, it's not too personally compromising. It shall remain. But it'll have to get more interesting to soak up the wisdom and wit from the deleted social-networking posts (Ha. Prove they weren't!).