A sense of place

Spaces produce feeelings. The arragement of objects in relation to each other can influence how a space creates its atmosphere. This is implicit in interior design and gardening.

In a garden, for I know something of that, as opposed to nothing about interior design, borrowing the landscape behind your garden can make the garden seem bigger. Indeed even painting your fence green or brown behind the shrubs can imply extra spaciousness. Strategically placed trees or bushes can imply some extra room behind, creating a sense of curiosity as to "what is back there then? I wonder what is through there."
It constantly surprises me the effect a place can exert by dint of its configuration.

Temperature and climate and time of day can make the same place feel different; a forest in sunshine of the afternoon with all the birds chirping can make it easy to see the figure of a dryad draped around a majestic tree, her smile inviting mischief and promising sensuality with her lithe feminine form.
But that same wood at dusk can seem filled with flitting spirits, intent upon deceiving the eye with swift flitting movements between the trees. Fireflies, such as I have seen in special places really can take on the occluded forms of Oberon, Puck, Peaseblossom and the fairy horde. You can easily see how such legendary creatures took shape in human culture.

Take that wood at midnight, however, on a cloudy moonlit night and threat lurks everywhere. Our primal fears of the Wolf in the darkness, come to eat us up after his eyes, yellow and luminous in the dark, have appraised us hungrily and unseen fron the cover of the undergrowth.
How places play upon us seems very much to be determined by our own sensitivity and awareness. It is much easier to view the forest as a benign mystery full of mischevious sprites if we are feeling poetic and have the wit to imagine them.

Our wolves may take many forms, although Our dryad could be fashioned from a real object of desire, possibly painted green for artisic effect and most alluring in her arboreal intertwining, the place of fear inside us from where the wolf springs has a common source from our ancient past.
Some of this we choose imagine and have consciousness of. Other feeings such as oppression can be involuntary and influenced by such simple things as a badly placed doorway, tasteless wallpaper or ghastly intrusive curtains.

And how did we, creatures of the savanna and forest, come to have this influence of place upon our psyches? What is is about a maroon and mahogany study that calms and comforts to creatures who only devised these things in the last evolutionary eyeblink?

Wolves in the forest are an old feeling, spirits of rocks and trees ans water also it is easy to imagine being with us since before we even clothed ourselves as species.
But yellow three piece suites, spacious kitchens of stainless steel and plumped up pink boudoirs seem odd things to feed our sense of place.

I have more to expand on this, but as usual, so little time. And the plane is landing so I have to switch off, as so often.

Oslo

I am 35000 feet above the North Sea en route to Oslo. Somehow, I got booked business class, which is was an unexpected treat, not, seemingly because of legroom: the arbitrary curtain the marks the boundary between expensive and cheaper seats can apparenty be placed anywhere.

No, the good thing is DINNER. Dinner was very good and catching on quickly, I indulged myself with a glass of champagne. I am aware that champagne is often seen for its own sake as the height of decadence: us proles in years gone by would raise our glasses loftily and appreciatively to our uncultured lips and feel we were partaking temporarily in an elevated social ritual where the drinking of champagne made us momentarily equal with those rich and priveliged sophisticates who could be glimpsed on telly at expensive receptions. We felt we must certainly be improved by this action and maybe have absorbed a small but significant increment of poshness by the act.

Anyway, I digress, as so often.

A twenty year old muscle injury in my hamstring starts to trouble me with pings of sharp pain and so I self-medicate with a gin and tonic. This is not a drink which I feel entirely comfortable with as it has certai iffeminate connotations which the invoking of the idea of colonial gentlemen in pale suits cannot dispel.

Staring out of the window, I am struck by a thought I often have but which I rarely articulate: the irregularity and randomness of natural phenomena such as clouds and the shimmering of the sun on the waves that I saw earlier, actually seems to have a pattern to it.

The clouds are all different shapes and spaced irregularly below us. But if eyes are allowed to lose focus, they apear to have a regularity about their spacing. Like a shoal of synchronised seahorses, they cross the sky in a coordinated formation.

It seems to me that the universe is lumpy. This is why space has lots of, well, space, with galaxies peppered throughout, and buses always come three at a time. Probabilities seem to hold to this too, with events clustered together less randomly than might be expected. Or maybe its just me. Humans bein creatures that like to spot patterns, even when there are none.

Looking down npw, a strange optical/atmospheric effect creates a column of light that appears to link the sea with the sun.

This is physics: a way of looking at things such that phenomena are seen and appreciated and a cause wondered at. And how we discover springs from there. It doesn't have to be about equations or research, just about noticing and wondering why.

Always woner why. All the time. That way, you will never be bored and, though you may elicit odd looks when you wonder out loud, you will never be boring.

Hungarian beer blog

Hello
I had a few beers and, when I used to write on myspace, the feedback was always that my foreign beer blogs were the most enjoyable. So I thought I would resume the tradition. I have had a few Leffes and this being my favourite beer, the effects are probably disproportionate.

I am in Hungary. (and this is not just for the hungarians reading ;-) i like it here. The people are really cheerful and friendly. It makes me reflect on the default nature of us Brits:
"How are you?!"
"Oh, mustnt grumble i spose.."
So why then do we? Is it the weather? Enthusiasm is so infectious. It leaves us feeling so happy and glad we encountered it. Sometimes we don't even know why.
Maybe it is the weather.
We drove here from Vienna. its the nearest international airport. Oh! And what a storm! I have never seen such! Two or more hours of gradually darkening hungarian sky lit every few seconds by a blinding flash that was momentarily brighter than day. Over and over again for hours.
And rain! Huge rain! Bug hot drops like pure passion from the sky.
Is this part of what makes the people?
Too tired tonight. Small devils of tiredness and fatigue are playing around the inside of my cranium. The vagaries of dealing with different cultures has depleted the reserves of my intellect.
Goodnight

badly fitting environment

The schedule of my life is determined by demands that come to me via a screen or a disembodied voice on a telephone. Where I go, what I do, what time is available for me to do those things i need to or love, these are specified by demands that reach me from an electronic medium.

Many times I have written, alluding to the animal within the human. We evolved. This is clear. Those that allowed us to steer the hazardous course that got us here, with all the predators, disease and constraints of diet and shelter, they left in us the mechanisms that succeeded. And thesea re powerful mechanism which still are sometimes useful.

This body and brain which we are bequeathed, has evrything necessary to survive in a wild environment, assisted by peers with whom we cooperate. The basis and templates for the cooperation are also coded into the machines that we are.

And so, here we are in the 21st century, bombarded by unnatural stimuli that the equipment nature provided us with has to deal with. Some of the ways in the information comes to us is shaped by the needs and requirements of the systems within us which we have subverted to new uses.

But I took off two working days and returned to work to several hundred unread emails. My savannah and seashore honed brain has no inbuilt strategy with which to deal with this amount of information in the timeframe allocated by the requirements of those who depend on the function of my job. How am I to scan and distill this and prioritise what to do first? And the calls berating me for unresponsiveness, how am I to point out that "Yes, I know yu sent an email but I havent got to it yet!" in a way that is acceptable.

And so to a wider perspective on this, to get away from my personal axe-grinding to more porsaic concern: How do we continue to function healthily in this enviroment?
Eyes, binocular for discerning distance and movement to prey and threat, are tied to a two-dimensional screen for a huge proportion of the day. Brain firmware ready to engage and interact with a three dimensional dynaamic world, is expected to stare all day at a basically unchanging flat screen and assimilate a mental picture of threat and opportunity from what it sees. And I, quite frankly am struggling with this on an existential level.
A friend gave me the sentence "I didn't say that you stole them" as an exaple of something very important. Try in you head to run through this sentence several times, stressing a different word each time. You will find the emphasis subtly but significantly changed by how each word is said.
Similarly, inside each of us, if we are working correctly, is a set of mechanisms and protocols for interacting. Initiall developed to enable cooperation and ensure therefore, improved individual chances of survival, we are primed to recognise facial expression, gesture, intonation, body language.
And now we have the rudimentary ASCII character set with which to convey and infer meaning. It is wofully inadequate for this and hence misunderstandings are inevitable. And what of the machinery for face-to-face neraction? Without practise, does it atrophy? Or in some, maybe the playstation generatio, does it not develop at all (evidence shows this actually the case, which I find a bit horrifying really)?

And so, the demands increase their pressure and this little escape into personal self-expression, stolen from a a busy day, is all i can indulge myself with at the moment.
Words are useful, we can do much with them (as I hope you see)
But sometimes, we need a physical landscape and some faces, conversations, gestures or whither humanity?

Moments of pleasure potentially lost

The intellect is a curiosity. It brings so much value and obiously over the course of human evolution, has conveyed such advantage as to have become arguably the mostly highly developed weapon in the arms race that is natural selection.

It outstrips big muscles, speed of movement, sharp pointy teeth and claws in its ability to provide food and protection for its owner an most aspects of human activity seem to benefit to some extent from the application of a bit of intellectual input. A combination of empathy and intellect appears to be the defining feature of people we enjoy being around, spending time with or having relationships with.
Strange then that it should be such a hindrance to certain more natural processes like enjoyment.

This is a topic that vexes me inordinately in a daily and prosaic struggle, and I have written of it before, so forgive me if I appear to repeat myself. I am still no closer to understanding this conundrum than in my more confused, pre-renaissance days.

Consider, if you will, the opportnity for a small but precious moment of pleasure: an example I have spoken of in person with some who may read this, is the foil on a coffee jar lid, but it could equally apply to a crème brulee or anything promising an instant of pleasure. I don't drink much coffee these days, even less instant coffee, but the sight upon the initial unscrewing of the lid, is of a pristine, flat, virgin expanse of gold coloured foil. It is asking to be pierced, at least, that is what it makes me feel.

My dilemma is: how do I pierce it I order to fully extract and experience the most pleasure? Should I poke my thumbnail slowly in at the edge, savouring the scratch-pleasure as my nail penetrates it, then more as I run my nail, tin-opener-like around the rim of the glass until a complete disk of foil is liberated? Or do I push the point of a teaspoon through it and cut the seal into sectios to be peeled individually off the top of the jar?
Or do I drum the back of the spoon in the middle, savouring the tension and the small percussive sound, until, increasing the force a little at a time, I break through the now distorted and stretched foil?

And this may seem a strange conversation to have with oneself, but pleasure is not to be squandered, even minor pleasure.
If I had used one of the aforemntioed methods, I would surely have enjoyed it, but how do iknow I got the most pleasure I could? Perhaps I missed out because one of the other methods would have been more satisfying?

And so, the thinking about this simple action has introduced an unnecessary component of disappointment.
Often, I'm my more angst-ridden days, I would be given the joy of sunset to observe and savour, standing, looking at it, I would feel the most overwhelming sense of anxiety and futily as I tried so hard to appreciate it to its full. To attempt to mentally photograph it, I would stare at it intently, trying to see all its hues and patterns. And in my striving, I would somehow miss the moment.

My life history is littered with such small tragedies and each added to an overall feeling of inability to enjoy that it was literally almost my undoing. What point life if pleasure is always out of reach? This intereference by the intellect in matters it should not really concern itself with on a practical level, is actually an existentialist threat, if I may be so overly dramitic.

Luckily, through a long process of incremental discoveries, I have found it is possible to just "be" and not to "do". And suddenly the internal commentary and dialogue that happens about the experience is no longer the main focus of my mind.

And so, enjoyment is at last unrestricted. It is no longer obstructed by the distraction of the scrutiny of the process of perception.
And damn! Does the world look good!

I would like to wite more on this, but unfortunately, time is a huge constraint at the moment, and though this does not seem to sap the creative enrgies required to generate the ideas that cause me to ponder, it does severly limit my ablity to write them down. Hence, we probably have not seen the last of this topic here.

Fertility Symbols

My Green Man looks wistfully out from behind a cotoneaster in my garden. He is not a traditional Green Man, rather more contemporary. He has ivy leaves for his hair and looks rather more human and less elemental. Nevertheless, as embodiments go, he is looks the part.

I don't really have a supernatural dimension in my Universe. I don't really need one mostly.
But my Green Man is a reminder. Anthropomorphically, i get the sense of a character, a personality there. I sense him, when I am walking down a leafy street and find myself, despite all my sophisticated social conditioning, completely captivated by a nicely turned ankle, female bottom or some healthy lustrous head of female hair, I sense that he is there, in the undergrowth, unseen but smiling as if to say "You think yourself so civilised and removed from your animal nature but my handiwork is still driving you and it always will"
And this conceptual person, present conspicuously in every forest, behind every tree, and less conspicuously pushing bindweed up through your carefully weeded and tended veg patch, this character, he mocks us and chides us. I hear him laughing very often at my folly and pretension.

At this time when nature is so fecund, when the pressure of reproduction forces growth and greenery, it is hard not to feel that same force oneself. At least I find it so. All around us in the air, tree-sperm is flying about, making some people's life a misery. The whole of nature is saying "Breed! Breed!".
I have done all the breeding I intend to do. But the imperative is still a keen motivation somehow.

So, my Green Man is there to remind me to be aware of the legacy that millennia of natural selection has left us. Inside each of us it the programming that tells us what is a good bet with which to mingle our chromosomes. Can you deny it? Does it not cajole and wheedle away at you on the inside in a voice impossible to ignore?

Be it Goddess or Woodland spirit, allow yourself your own tip of the hat to Nature and fertility.
And now I am going to go out, give him a wink and tell him that for all his roguishness, he gets my respect and regard.

Life to a soundtrack

My bike has a bell. Its law now that all new bikes should have them. I undertand the logic. Many of the cycle paths are shared with pedestrians and I have no issue with this. Except perhaps for the unaware stroller with a dog on a 30ft lead.
I ring my bell quite often, not insistently, I hope. I don't want intrude, intimidate or assert. Merely to inform.
Quite often, there is no response from the pedestrian I have slowed down to avoid. Perhaps they are deaf. This is possible and allowances should be made accordingly.
Usually though, the tell-tale white hearphones are the reason. The tweeting and chirping of the birds is replaced by whatever musical choice the wearer chooses that day.
Experience is a plastic thing, infinitely variable and subject to many influences: Mood, toothache, a full bladder, what happened last night. Or music.
Who hasnt turned up some loud, rousing music as they accelerate from the slip road on the motorway, feeling the compliment of the sounds to the thrill of the speed? I know I do, and on the autobahn where acceleration is more freely available and longer, it is quite a heady mix, I can tell you.
So, when we do things, go places, experience, we can modify that by the soundtrack we choose.
And it can completely alter how we perceive the moment. Imagine, if you will, wlaking through a crowded christmas shopping centre listening to Motorhead, "Ace of Spades". Now imagine the same with the funny little tune from the end of the Benny Hill show. I think the two experiences would be very different.
And so it is on the inside. I don't have an iPod. I do have a crappy mp3 player bought for 15 quid online and it is adequate for my purposes: I use it to uplift me when running. Let me tell you that the right music makes a big difference. Once when someone I knew died. I went for a run and on came "Don't fear the reaper" by B.O.C and I ran so fast and defiantly, telling, in my mind, death that it had better bloody look out because I was chasing it, not vice versa. I was very cross with it. And when I am running, it can become a dance, to the right tune. It can move me so much that brain chemistry hits the end stop and I have been seen running headlong, singing, wild eyed and enraptured. t these times, every nerve ending is on fire with joy and I am invincible. That is a high and all natural.
But a soundtrack is always there. I get up to do my bit at a presentation and in my head, so loud I fear it must surely be audible, are the opening violin bars of "El Tango de Roxanne" from Moulin Rouge. It lifts me, corrects my posture, makes me more noble and commanding in bearing.
Right now, I have the heavy beat of "The blood is love" by Queens of the Stone age. As I walk about th eoffoce conducting my business, its beat saturates my mind with its heaviness and drives me with purpose to get all those things done that need attention. I feel like (and have done before actually) stopping people, putting my head next to theirs and saying "Listen! Can you hear it too?" for surely, it is so note perfect and loud in here, it must be audible to people nearby.
And so, the psychotropic effect of music linger in my head and become somehow a tool for modifying mood.
You know, I really like my brain. It is such fun. It surprises me all the time. Have a play with yours. You will be amazed what you find to keep you amused.