Jennifer's Stockings

I'm afraid I live in a keepsake-free world. My parents and grandparents have not seen fit to pass anything down to me save varying degrees of love and disappointment, and a rickety compliment of genes. A large square jaw for example, has been handed down the male side of my family like a slab of beef for three generations. I keep it fenced off behind a beard, where it cannot harm people.

Jennifer was a woman I met in the year before I left the country. She was tall, almost matching me for height in her heels. She had a funny way of walking: a defensive strut that reversed the usual tits-out/tummy-in/ass-out elongated 'S' of walking womanhood. Jennifer would fold her shoulders around the front of her rib-cage - hiding her breasts, and then lean way back, cantilevering her pelvis forward and scrunching her butt away into nothing. Her chin she would bury into the hollow of her throat; her eyes tucked away behind double fortress walls of fringe and brow. When she walked, if you were squinting from a distance, you'd be reminded of a heron poised to strike.

I met her through a dating agency, when times were lean and I was meaner; a voicemail service for the chronically shy. You wouldn't believe some of the replies I would get to my insufferably chirpy extrapolations around the theme of: "Hi, I'm J., I'm a twenty-five year old guy, so-so tall with long dark hair and a winning etc., with a degree in advanced blah, hoping to meet an outgoing woman for x, y and z." Some of the women's voices would shake so much the phone would tremble as I listened to them stutter through soap-opera couplets and Cosmopolitan manifestos of self. Jennifer in comparison, was cool, collected, and creditably calm.

We met in a suitably chique cinema bar, where the drinks aspired to be expensive, but never quite got there, and the films were always, always in black and white. And French. Or Scandanavian. Or Russian. Or all three. It did its job, lending us coolness by proxy. Hunched up and raincoated, crouched over our drinks, we attempted to smolder.

She: "Oh, I've never been here before." (Bullshit).
He: "Me neither, I've always wondered what it was like inside." (Bullshit).

He: "Did you like the film..?" (You chose it, you'd better).
She: "Yeah... It was very moving... Imagery compelling." (it was so long my butt hurts from sitting).

She: "So, you're an artist..?" (I think you're a sponger).
He: "That's right." (I am a sponger).

But still, despite the appalling dialogue and a lack of discernable plot, there was enough chemistry between the actors for the studio to green-light a sequel. We agreed to see eachother again.

I don't know about you, but I like scummy pubs: Raucous, smoky, labyrinthine and snug - any romance to be had must be carved out of the air with a trowel. You must sit close, you must lean in closer still - pouring breathey-drunk words half-heard into eachother's ears - enclosed, enfolded in a little coccoon of hormonal fug. As the bell for drinking-up ding-dongs, we kiss triumphantly, our faces flushed from the success of winnowing out a little love against such odds, in such an unlikely place.

As we stagger out into the night, neither of us I suspect, remember anything much of what was said, though in contrast we remember sparklingly well the slick feel of lip on lip and the sherry-sweet mingling of our cocktailed spit. We hold eachother's bodies tight as we weave through the throngs on alcohol-autopilot to my place, always my place.

Thank God for Mincabs.

Home now, giggly fumbles on the stairs. The clinking of glassware; the gurgles of emptied liquor-bottles - the scents of sticky Banana liquer, and some weird minty shit that got found under the table after a party and stuck in a drawer. Anything to repair the alcoholic shield-wall of anti-reality we've so painstakingly constructed. Candles, of course. And music. Slow dance groping. And bed. And skin, and sweat, and legs and arms and in the way and there we go and is that nice and owch that hurts and whoops it fell out and is that okay and hang on a minute and not like that and oh well okay and is that good oh god it is oh god it is and ohhhhhhhhhh.

You get our drift. You've probably been there. All porn films look the same after a while.

The biggest surprise for us both was in the morning. We actually didn't feel too bad. We didn't hate eachother. A bit blurry round the edges perhaps, a little tired - but we could speak, and our laughs still worked, and when we looked inside for where our regret would usually be, our chagrin, our shame - we came up empty. Worth a communal smile. I got Alka-Seltzer, hot buttered toast and tea, and she remained blissfully naked, save for her stockings, rolled-up and rucked-up down to her knees.

And when Jennifer left, she gave her stockings to me; a tip perhaps, for services rendered.

...Continued...

An End to Evolution.

I think quite frankly, that I'm sick of hearing the word "evolution". It's such a fucking hooker of a word - every Tom, Dick and Hitler has co-opted it at some point.

To my mind, Darwin, or at least misunderstandings and misapplications of his ideas both in the social and eugenic arenas, have caused more deaths in the past century than the atom bomb.

At the very least, the term evolution has become so ingrained with anthropomorphic overtones that I think in the grubby little mind of your average secular humanist, it has simply jumped into the hole left by the absence of God. Chop off God's beard, blind him and make him a little more slimy - ét voila - hello Captain Evolution.

Time to flush "evolution" down the lexical pan. And while we are Spring Cleaning our brains - let's bin a few other arbitrary and/or un-definable concepts - like "intelligence", "living/non-living", "progress" and "memes". They just cloud the issue and bog people down in their own definitions. None of them exist.

So what shall we replace them with..?

How about - two very simple things that we actually can understand without a dictionary - probability and persistance.

Complexity stems from simplicity, not so much within the actual percievable forms of any object, or idea, but in the relationships between them and the emergent properties these relationships create. Nothing exists in isolation, everything from a single quark to a supernova rubs up against its fellows, and by proxy of those fellows, rubs up eventually against everything, real or virtual, that is.

We'll start with energy, the fabric of the universe, whatever - it cools into different forms - each form occuring with a frequency concordant with probability. eg. Hydrogen is likely, iron less so.

Anyway - long story short: a progression:

* energy + inherrent physical laws > persistant inert perceivable forms - planets, enviroments etc.

* inert perceivable forms + interaction + time > persistant active perceivable forms - bacteria, pond-scum, Americans. (by inert and active I mean: a mountain does not expend energy trying to maintain a static form amid enviromental change, wheras a tree-shrew or a Liverpuddlian does).

* persistant active perceivable forms + mutation > persistant inferrable forms - thought/ideas. (By percievable and inferrable I mean - stuff you can sense directly - ice-cream and stripppers, and stuff you can't see - thought for example, but can infer from its physical manifestation in behaviour).

* persistant inferrable forms + physical vehicle > behavioural 'technology' > physical/virtual chimera - man.

Which takes us right from the big-bang or whatever, to now, in four easy steps - each step increasing the probabilty of the arisal of the next to the point of certainty.

Anyway - for me, there is not much difference between a gene expressing infromation as a physical form of greater or lesser persistance and an idea expressing information as behaviour facillitating or handicapping the persistance of its host form. Both are at bottom, information, and only the manner of storage and transmission differs.

Once we leave the mundane flesh and enter the mind - Are we fixed, or malleable..?

I want you to design something that will persist and proliferate in a place and under conditions which I will not disclose to you.

What kind of form will you design..? Something specialized..? Or a Jack of all trades..?

Any form of externally driven physical specialization eventually leads to extinction. A Cheetah starves to death when meat on the hoof gets low, but slowpoke Hank the omnivore just changes food-groups.

The Jack of all trades always wins.

This is why humans, physical-prowess-wise, are just a big bag of shit. On the novelty-engine-driven-behavioural variety scale however... We come out tops. (novelty-engine = self-aware-perceptive-brain in my book btw).

Humans adapt behaviourally to anywhere and anything. We are consumate behavioural chameleons - humans even make reasonable wolves for fuck's sake - in the case of feral children - but you don't see many real wolves wearing people clothes with a desk-job and a mortgage.

This is our strength, and also our doom. Read enough history and become convinced that nothing is fixed, what we call our innate selves - manifesting in a semi-rigid set of behavioural parameters - does not exist - it's a fairy story we tell ourselves. One minute we are Greengrocers with a smile for everyone and a bag of sprouts in each hand, then - boom - society changes and suddenly we are grassing up our relations to the gestapo and getting bored whilst shooting naked Jews in a pit.

Jack, in his Jackboots, persists.

...Continued...

Progress and Invention.

Truly, nothing mankind has achieved in the span they have existed, can be classed as new. Newness, true originality, is impossible to the conscious seeker. It is impossible to create something that bears no relation to anything that has gone before, from material already extant. It is impossible to have an idea that bears no relation to anything already imagined. Originality, in its pure form, cannot exist.

Try it if you don't believe me. Do this simple thing for me: Remember something. Right now.

Did you draw a blank..? I did - without any prompt to spur a particular memory, there are no memories.

Now, try think of something that is truly unrelated to anything you have previously experienced.

...
...
...

Another blank..?

And yet, look around at all the things we have now, that didn't exist in any concrete shape or form even a hundred years ago. They are perhaps not truly new, but certainly new enough to remark upon. How did that happen if the best an inventor can do is to recombine endlessly previously percieved forms and objects..? Mash together ideas already thought of..?

Aha. Whilst previously unpercieved forms do not exist, the emergent properties invoked by their close assembly, do. And here lies originality. Not entirely random, not entirely unknown in nature, but not entirely not so. Who would have guessed that saltpetter from a midden, and the burnt blackness of wood, would explode into the world and cause death by the millions..? The Egyptians had batteries of a sort, in jars. Who would have guessed that the force in those jars combined with filaments of metal almost too fine for the eye to see, would provide so much light..?

Newness of a sort.

But - we have not changed, have not gotten any smarter, since the days when fire was a new invention and chipped flint was all the rage. Why then, do we have so many new and complex toys..? Surely mankind has progressed..?

Of course not. Same stupid monkeys we ever were. The only thing that differs between then and now is that there are more of us. And this, believe it or not, is enough.

Here, take four dice. I want you to roll them so their fallen faces show six sixes.

Impossible. Of course. Not enough dice. Here, take six dice - roll away. (Took you ages didn't it, astronomic odds).

Here - take five billion dice. Now the chances of six of them showing a six are not just a near certainty, but the odds against there not being six sixes among them are unimaginably high.

Technology progresses, discoveries are made, building from a multitude of previous discoveries, not because humanity has gotten smarter along the way, but because they have grown so numerous that the odds against a particular discovery being made, however strange and tortuous the route toward it may be, are shortened to the point of near certainty.

Einstein was the right guy, in the right place, at the right time to draw the right connections between conceptual objects already extant. Not only that but he also had the right kind of brain, the right kind of education, the right kind of life experiences, all at the right times to shape him into the right kind of awareness to make them. But then again, sooner or later, someone was bound to.

And it is the same with any discovery.

Linear rational progress is a mirage. Scientific or conceptual discovery is a simple function of probability, not intelligence. And as the population grows, we load the odds in our favour. The smartest man in the room truly is everybody. We individuals are the merest cogs in the collective mind.

Sentient awareness acts as a catalyst, increasing the probability of complex events and objects coming into being. Without human awareness, even something so simple as tea in a china cup, would be so unlikely as to never occur by unguided chance. Technology, for some obscure reason is classed as 'unnatural', whereas things like horns and teeth are 'natural' - what is a horn save organic technology..?

'Natural' and 'unnatural' are really simple expressions of probability.

...Continued...