All children have the capacity to be great teachers to their parents.
Firstly, they hold a mirror to show you what needs healing in yourself. That ugly behaviour you see in them probably has its origins or counterpart in you; the uglier it is to you, the less you want to face it, the more you need to.
Secondly, time is running in. Our children are that much closer to the omega point. On the deepest level, they know, better than we do, which way things are heading. They can feel more keenly the pull of that strange attractor; are more aligned with it. While we have become magnetized, polarized by the dead weight of the past, they are aligned to a future of infinite potential, and are trying to guide us there. We need to listen to them.
They want to give us an inheritance. Instead of passing on to our children all our ossified and stratified millennia of pain from the past, let our children pass on to us their flexibility, adaptability and ready forgiveness.
Thankyou, my children, for being such wonderful teachers. I humbly promise to try to be a better student.
This is a transcription of some notes I scrawled, somewhat drunk, in late 2002 while sitting in the audience at the Barbican Centre for London Orbital – an evening of readings, music, and sundry entertainment connected to Iain Sinclair’s book of that name. I, and a fair few others, were in attendance primarily due to the presence of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty on the same billing for the first time since their fantastic 23-minute performance on this very same stage in 1997 to launch “Fuck The Millennium” (which I also attended). Bill’s reading was wonderful — he’s always a consummate speaker-performer — while Jimmy’s band were, er, noisy. Ken Campbell was awesome; Sinclair himself read in the monotone of a particularly bad vicar’s sermon, conclusively proving that the writer of a book is not necessarily the best person to read it. I found the other participants of variable quality… I was young, full of hubris, and prone to epiphanies of the retrospectively obvious. As I grew increasingly incensed at some of the rubbish (as I perceived it) being presented to this huge audience, wasting our time, wasting a great opportunity, I started to scribble… the following is particularly harsh on one particular performer, but bear in mind that there must have been others who bored me sufficiently to want to keep writing instead of paying them any heed.
Bill Griffiths is playing
Something by Bartok
A plodding piece
Simple, 2-note chords.
I fantasise
About taking the stage
By force.
Like the Chechen Rebels
in the Moscow Theatre
But no guns
Just Liberation
An audience
Captive
Ready to be Captivated
by the introduction
to Acclimatize.
Bill Griffiths is reading
A poem of his. He reads
Halt
ingly
Pauses inser
ted where they don't
belong, where they
Don't flow
Alternatelyrushedand
Not
Rushed.
And saying Nothing
that makes any sense.
Am I being cheated?
"You would do better,"
He says.
I agree, wholeheartedly.
Bill Griffiths is playing again
Something else by Bartok
A better piece this time.
One that actually requires
some skill, that actually has
some tune. He plays
Haltingly.
And then it's over.
And all I can think is,
I need to network
with people like Iain Sinclair
Have my audience delivered
on a plate.
And fuckin' use the opportunity.
There are three films being projected: a slow-mo rear-view mirror scene in the rain in the centre; on the left a real-time forward-looking “this is you driving” boring one; but on the right, zoomed in, a view looking right. We see one-frame blipvert flashes of wheels zipping past on the other side of the central reservation, the rhythm of this occasionally broken by an overtaking car sailing serenely past on this side. We’re cruising the middle lane, but with a view normally denied to the driver, that of the sheer pace of humanity, the raw velocity with which we drive ourselves toward extinction. We are a pair of alloy wheels for one frame only, and then we’re gone.
There’s few a better opportunity for the peoplewatcher, the loner, to catch sight of other loners, other peoplewatchers, aliens, standing, sitting alone, watching, than at any event associated with The KLF. They stand, unashamed, at the edges but also in the middle of the foyer, watching, observing like I, but not making notes like I, just watching. Who are these people? Who am I? Was I?
Watching the films I realise that the point of motorways is to take you through, past; never to touch, feel or experience the countryside, the people, just a journey to get from A to B and not even realise how shit it was, our lives reduced to the need to arrive, never deviate from the course ordained for us by our wise Government Minister. Ours is not to question, just to fucking drive, got to get There, never mind all the cones, never mind having an HGV up your arse, never mind the grey, the black, the spray, the Nothingness, the shit food and shit service stations, never mind the White Van Man cutting you up for the umpteenth time that day, never mind the rain, the sales exec in his Mondeo, never mind the concrete just play spot the Eddie Stobart, it beats actually THINKING.
Encased in our
own personal
Bubble
We feel nothing
see nothing except
what hits our windscreen.
No wonder people are
so divorced from reality
when the reality they face
day in day out
is the M25.
They probably told us it was a supernova or a comet or something, but everyone knew it wasn’t, and nobody knew what it was; and though some of us suspected, none of us would have dared to speak our suspicions aloud, even if we could have found a way to describe them, in case the act of fixing our suspicions into words made them come true.
But they came true anyway.
At first, it was just a small, bright, jagged line, about a moon’s width across. I don’t remember exactly when it appeared or how we all noticed. I don’t anymore remember it not being there. It definitely appeared — suddenly — but it so soon became such an established part of our lives, that the idea of the daytime sky without it would have been as preposterous as the night sky without stars.
It was only visible by day — and the skies were clear blue and cloudless, back then, so we had an uninterrupted view of it for a large part of the daylight hours. Yet we all felt a curious desire to ignore it. The TV reports told us we probably ought not to look at it for too long, as it was bright enough to damage the eyes, but there was no danger of that. No-one wanted to look at it. We would catch glances, of course; see that it was still there, and yes, that it was getting worse, larger, brighter, throwing off sparks now… but then we would look away, and try, pointlessly, to continue with our lives.
For days, the whole planet pretended.
Somehow, I saw it change. I don’t know if I happened to glance that way, or if I was compelled to watch. It’s no longer possible to tell the difference.
The initial bright scar across the sky had lengthened and straightened so that it was now less like a jagged crack or tear in appearance, more like a thin letterbox or slot. I grimly wondered what was about to be delivered to us.
The sparks or meteor streaks or lightning bolts which had been arcing out of it with increasing frequency over the past two days, were now continuous, and all arced in the same direction, anti-clockwise. A mist began to swirl around with them, which soon became thick, dark clouds, all spinning the same way, and too fast, obviously, unnaturally, too damn fast. Then obviously, unnaturally, too damn red. It was big now, spreading out to take up half the sky. We couldn’t try to ignore it anymore.
The crack or scar or split or slot at the centre had been growing dimmer for a while, but now suddenly turned black; yet it seemed all the more piercing against the swirling red vortex around. Worse, at the moment this happened I felt the sudden knowledge, the instant recognition, that I was looking into the eye of a conscious being. Not truly a God, just another lifeform like us, and yet so much more advanced than us that it might as well be a God to us. There was no question of its harmful intent; no hope of resisting. Only death or slavery awaited us now.
The last thing I remember is thinking, though I have no idea why, exactly these words:
“I for one welcome our new evil eye-in-the-sky overlord.”
The eye winked. There was a searing flash, and nothing more.
I didn’t set out to write this as a literary work. This was my dream from last night; in the process of writing it down it started to sound like a short story, so I rolled with it, without spending too much time on it. I really did wake up with that phrase in my head, along with a set of vivid but rapidly-fading images of the sky.
After all those hours of effort trying to control Wordle’s opinion of me in the end the Dev8D organisers didn’t use the single-post URL I’d provided to create my Wordle badge – they used the whole blog feed. I didn’t mind though. The badges, which I’d expected to be of the lapel variety and therefore easily readable, were actually in a kind of laminate pass holder which hung from our necks almost down to waist level, rather too low to read comfortably. The colour scheme was very muted too – someone would really have peer at it quite close to in order to make out most of the words. And, had anyone done so, I wouldn’t have been unhappy with the words there anyway.
While this exercise was ultimately futile for its original purpose, I still found it interesting (otherwise I wouldn’t have spent so long on it!) to consider how I might represent myself in a few words, and then sculpting an article specifically to get that result out of Wordle, but making the article a real piece of prose about the very process of its own construction. As I said, I’m a fan of self-reference. But I wonder if this can also be considered, perhaps loosely, a kind of steganography. While it contains no encryption, the article has a deeper purpose which — had I not explicitly made it the subject of the article, but instead concealed it — could be entirely hidden from view. I suppose it’s a fairly basic cipher to encode hidden messages inside a larger article according to the word frequency… but Wordle does a bit more than that. I think that, in controlled circumstances, Wordle’s output can be made reproducible for a given input and set of parameters. In which case, it would be feasible to conceal messages in a way that could not be calculated from the text alone, that could not be reliably decoded without the additional knowledge of which website it needs to be pumped through, the precise configuration parameters to use, and what further processing is required on the result — say, the message could be in just the words that Wordle makes a particular colour in one of its fixed palettes, or that are given a certain orientation.
Indeed, as Wordle’s precise algorithm is secret due to patent issues, the precise layout for a given set of parameters might be rather unpredictable without actually trying it. That makes Wordle a kind of public-private key pair, the public key being the set of parameters fed into the engine, and the private key being the secret method by which Wordle transforms those parameters into a layout. This transformation is probably relatively feasible to work out by trial-and-error, and in any case the number of configuration permutations is sufficiently low that if necessary the results of all of them could be tested and mapped fairly easily, so it only offers a fairly low security cipher. But you gain added security from the fact that very existence of a hidden message is steganographically concealed within the larger article, and, perhaps even more so, from the surprising and obscure means chosen to conceal it!
Ok, so I’ve given the game away now. If you’ve been quietly hiding secret messages in Wordle tag clouds for ages… sorry. If not, don’t start now, they’ll be onto you. But, more generally, using innocent third-party web applications as a kind of cipher function might have potential. You’d have to ensure that the output from the website isn’t just the pure decoded message, otherwise the third party has it as well. Some sort of post-processing which requires pre-shared secret knowledge is key. This could include things like piping your message through multiple web applications, either serially or in parallel, with each contributing some small part of the overall message, which can only be merged into the whole by someone with an additional piece of knowledge of how that needs to be done.
These are just idle thought experiments… I don’t advise anyone to actually use this technique for anything really secret! There are several obvious weaknesses, although they can probably be ameliorated. However, I believe it’s worth considering novel means of passing around secrets. If quantum computers actually happen as the physicists predict, all current encryption technology may be rendered useless at a stroke, as it all relies on a computationally-unfeasible mathematical problem that, theoretically, quantum computers could make feasible to solve quickly. Quantum computers also themselves have the potential to offer novel encryption techniques, but at the moment, no-one really knows how these things are going to behave… and, for a while anyway, quantum computers will be the preserve of rich governments, corporations, and other organised well-funded criminal gangs… so us ordinary folk will be at a disadvantage. The survival of our networks might depend on us being a little bit cunning…
Of all the lame excuses, I’ve been putting off registering for this year’s JISC Dev8D conference because the registration form says they’ll be using Wordle to make badges for everyone, and there’s a space on said form to provide a blog/RSS feed or bunch of text which can be fed into it to summarise our interests.
I’ve got three personal blogs including this one, although the fact that I only frequently update the one about my musical activities under the alias of Quextal, and that until very recently, Source Of Life, to which I have occasionally released potentially-useful but dreadfully hacky Perl programs, had probably been broken for months, says a lot about the current priorities in my life.
Unfortunately, feeding Quextal into Wordfondle fails to give a decent summary of what that site is about. Useful things like the titles of posts, their tags, categories, and the contents of Pages, are all ignored by the analyser, and so the result ends up dominated by the artists who most often feature in the tracklists of my recent mixes. Apart from giving the impression that I’m some kind of music industry plugger / agent / record label boss, it also makes me look like a complete stoner because of my support of one particular artist.
Using ContentedLife (wot you are now reading) instead doesn’t fare much better – I guess it conveys quite well something of my tendancy toward an interest in random disparate topics, yet utterly fails to bring out what I consider to be the most important waymarkers within that randomness.
If I’m to be represented by a disconnected soup of words, I want at least some of those words to be a reasonable reflection of my real interests and character, leaving room for a bit of serendipity of course.
So this got me thinking… how would I “tag” myself? What limited set of keywords would I choose to represent myself to a bunch of complete strangers, if I had the choice? Which I do…
As music is my first and truest love and passion, I’d have to start with some descriptions of my current musical boatfloatery 1: epic evolving psybreaks / electrobreaks / nuskool breaks, chunky progressive psychedelic techno, journeying synthorganic minimal techno, glitchy breakbeat crunk, and miscellaneous interstitial trippy electronica. Of which, psybreaks is my particular speciality. Obviously, trying to describe music using language is an exercise in futility 2 — especially my music — but as far as I know, there’s no MP3 player in these badges, so I have to use these clumsy labels as bait to tempt and seduce those who may enjoy the kaleidoscopic taste sensations of my synaesthetic electronic cocktails…
(1 I am so pleased with my invention of the word “boatfloatery” (at the time of writing, not a single other hit for it on Google) that I intend to shoehorn it into a conversation at least once a day from now on, propagating its usage until someone I’ve never met adds it to Urban Dictionary…)
(2 The traditional quote is: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” Usually attributed to Elvis Costello, but there’s some doubt about that. Anyway, I don’t reckon that’s quite right. I think of it like this: Trying to describe music is like trying to describe sex. It’s perfectly possible to do it, but it rather misses the point…)
I’d want to relate the fact that I’ve been hacking about with Linux, Perl, PHP and MySQL for so long that I’m about ready now to give the whole lot up and try gardening instead.
There’d be (in some cases, necessarily oblique) references to psychedelics and consciousness, healing and mysticism, Now, Spirit, Love, Nature, Gaia, and faeries. Ayahuasca would be explicitly named, for being all of those things while transcending them all.
It would make sense to throw in a selection of ideas that I find fascinating and engaging even though I’m never likely to get even close to fully understanding them, such as quantum physics (and metaphysics), fractals, stochastic resonance, sacred geometry, tectonics, astronomy, biochemistry, psychology, geography, weather, and basically anything that seeks to answer the question “How?” (even though we know that the real answer is it’s all just gnomes).
For the sake of a complete picture, I’d need to reference Eris, the number 23, and The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu (furthermore known as The JAMs, also known as The KLF) — no longer the obsession they once were, but still resonant in the formation of my character. And yes, for the same reason, Monochrome would have to be there too… initiator of countless lasting friendships, not to mention an eight year relationship, and the two best kids in the world…
And, although it’s not really anything to do with my character (“you are not your job”, as a wise man once said), I suppose it would be sensible — given that this is a conference, after all — to include a couple of phrases about my present paid employment as a Linuxsysadmin and developer, which currently involves a fair bit of hacking around with EPrints and other Perl3 shenanigans.
3 Gets a repeat appearance to ensure it due prominence over that other scripting language beginning with P. No, not that one, don’t be obtuse. Although, basically, all programming languages whose name starts with that letter are rubbish, except Perl. True fact. It should by now be obvious why I make that exception. I, too, am Pathologically Eclectic…)
My original plan was to post an entry containing just these tags, repeating the ones I consider most helpful in summation of the mess of contradictions that is Me (psybreaks, for example, would have to recur several times). But while this would generate a more accurate badge, it wouldn’t exactly be an interesting read, and it may also cause search engines to believe that I’m attempting to spam their results. The ranking of this site has suffered enough from the demise of its old domain, I don’t want to get it completely blacklisted.
So, the idea now is, to write more entries to explain and expand on many of the terms above.
Hey, it could happen… somewhen…
Meanwhile, here is some music. And one more mention of psybreaks, because there isn’t enough of it in the world (a situation which I’m doing my best to rectify, in case you hadn’t guessed…)
Addendum
Feeding just this post into Wordmangle (using the single-post feed link) results in a far more apposite summary of my interests than anything I’d hitherto managed. Exactly as I’d hoped. And using an article written about the process to feed into the process appeals to my (and probably every developer’s) aesthetic appreciation of the Meta, the self-referential.
With most of the emboldened words above only having a single instance in the text, many of them are getting left out. Perhaps that’s for the best. It seems to be picking a good subset, and while for example I feel Ayahuasca should be in there, so that it can be found by people who are looking, it oughtn’t be too big: it isn’t always a great idea to shout about such things to all and sundry (been there, done that, learned lessons). So I’m generally happy with the outcome. But it omitted The KLF, and Eris. For some reason, I feel they need to be in there, subverting the whole silly idea from within. So now they are. All hail! Fnord.
Final result of feeding this post into http://www.wordle.net
