Pedesis

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This is not any sort of a critique. it is impressions and thoughts and feelings over the course of an evening. i was lucky enough to see Televison play at the Void Bar in Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art.

Pedesis, or the night I saw Television.

Down distant shadow extending
Mountains to the flat marshes below.
Egyptian valley of the dead kings
New Yawk art dirt scene garage.
Dug and torn limestone walls
Hand sharp scraping nails
And the light and the colours emboss
Expose surface weird shape faces
Billion year old dead ocean floor
Catacomb tunnels, a history lesson.
And always falling slow below
Rain - democratic rain of atoms
Swerving Brownian epicurean rain
Sewering onto the gluttonous mire
Maladetta, fredda e greve.

And the light!
And the light!
All things are built light
Rolling thoughtless waves
Fade away and radiate.
Long tunnel building light
Sex cramped sardines. Alma Venus.
Dancing billion year dead abyss
Falling rain of generations of fish shit
Tiny calcium carbonate exoskeletons
Patient rock cliff gouged hand and mind
Falling rain like the atoms and swerving
On the heads of the many onto the floor
Of the insatiable sea.

Harsh camera flash belch -
Acid turning oceans
Tiny shells corroding
Not forming - like an atom bomb
Lisping fractal recursion, play old man
Old man, too late, ah christ be double fucked
I am discharging. Cicadas on tree branches
Climb and sometimes sing.
We gather bars, talk endless.
Solitare joy of pure thought
Contemplating pedal steel
Endless rhythm building
Climaxing disorder of sound
Ah! Tis a pretty death!

Band art Faraday cave cage.
Cool outside away night air embrace
Smoking assassins, scientists, and artists.
Old friends chat, new ones stumble.
The celtic bard opines advances moots
Looking at his watch “There was a time
I would not be drunk enough to go out
This early.” Monads muttering
And stuttering, sweating, anxiety
A chance remark serviles me
Battered I fall rain limp,

Atoms in the void,
Unable to catch each other up.
Contort yourself one time
Turning pleasure into fear
Society into isolation
Contort yourself two times
Vortex of anxiety and self-loathing.
Bright police lights
Terror driving home
Country star exposing dark
Unloved unlit country roads.
And high beams make wallaby
Shadows of road side shrubs.

Omnia sunt, lumina sunt

The lair of light soots efficient metronomes into the yesyokes. Like the arrival of the 456. Omnia sunt, lumina sunt all things that are, are light. The promotional literature, Let there be light -- Trite Cliché Immature -- takes away mystery, leaving all things created by god. All things are light. Why? How? Is the mystery not that all things arise from nothingness, that single infinitesimal moment of radiating energy and inflationary expansion. That the word world is nothing but the many billion years old hydrogen atom combined and recombined and fused and torn asunder and vomited out in mindless explosions of mind numbing power set hurtling across the random swerves -- until one fine morning the atom rearranged asks why am I here? Want is light? Why are all things light? Why are there things rather than nothing at all?

“The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove.” Lucretius De Rerum Natura

No god - no mystery - just intergenerational long fears. Light is real and subtle and it is the mystery. And when I look around all the green and all the flowering birds and animals born of light. Color and sound and life non-existent without light. For light is Eros, first born from out of the yawning emptiness, from the gaping nothingness, the generative spirit. Light is constant, the inescapable, the massless quandary. For we can go no faster, the light chases us and we can not flee, we can not outrun.

From my backyard the pillar of light rises over the neighbours house. Only certain places, one must avoid the street lights, one must avoid the light falling from windows. And the matrix of cloud and night sky tumbles and rumbles and turns this way and that, so the column appears and disperses, comes together and falls apart. Blasting Loretta Lynn as I drive into town (40 kilometres) the light glows and stakes shape more solid as I move closer and over the bridge and into the city. From light to stone.

So I wondered and wandered and went down across the wide Derwent estuary to partake the opening night of Sound to Light -- Crossing Borders (STL). As well as the exhibit I saw some audio/visual performances. STL is described as a dynamic, playful, chaotic, experimental project. A social art project that seeks to transcend boundaries between disciplines, but more importantly -- and something that can only be done at this time in history -- seeks to transcend physical location. This could not have been done before the invention of high-speed networking. Like the ancient shamans who could be in two places at once, nowadays artists are able to perform this miracle of bi-location. Optical fibre being part of the infrastructure of modern shamanistic practice the name of the exhibit takes on a special meaning.

Up Woobys Lane, through the courtyard, into an industrial revolution rabbit warren of an old warehouse. Low skeletal ceiling, silver insulation skin exposed. Rendered sandstone, convict-hewn blocks, photographers moving about for a better composition. Pale smart phone light, apparitions in the crowd, petals on a wet, black night. Electronic equipment humming, buzzing a series of sounds and beats, screens projecting the present and past in various combinations, strange generated life forms dancing and swirling. Art, as Andy Warhol said, is anything you can get away with; and everything we do, as John Cage said, is music.

Beyond the large performance space, a series of connected rooms of various installations. I would suggest visiting the soundtolight.net website to get more detailed information about the artworks. I can only describe my impressions, and what I saw. With much happening not everything could be given the attention required, and not everything could be properly critiqued.

In one room amplifiers, wires and a small wooden table. On the table Oscar Ferreiro & Heath Brown assembled small pieces of bone. The geometry of innocent flesh on the bone (well as a Dylan freak how could I pass this up?) Small electronic widgets attached to sawn and white scrubbed clean bones. The small motors recorded, and the manipulated sounds filled the little room. The natural and the artificial, prehistoric flutes made of bone and the most up to date technology. Further on a stand in a hallway a simple music box, with a twin in Melbourne. The pair move so slowly that no eye can detect movement. Played back as a time-lapse video the movement becomes apparent, the structure and the music is revealed.

Like Chinese guerrillas amid the peasant class, like fish in the sea, we move through light and sound. Moving from room to room. Agreeing with the Joycean poverty atmosphere of old warehouse art gallery was a room designed by Dylan Sheridan & Laura Hindmarsh. This was a flickering magic lantern room of images thrown onto thin screens in the darkness. This created a melancholy feeling. The impression of being a young child, a poor Edwardian urchin, sneaking a peek into the fabled nickelodeon. Take me away from all this death.

Chris Vik, of Ethno Tekh played his Kinectar. He has written some software to interface with the Kinect sensor, allowing artists while wearing special gloves, to create music by gesture alone. A very cool idea indeed, bringing sound to the language of gesture.

If Sound to Light -- Crossing Borders was meant to be a dynamic, playful, chaotic, experimental social art project, then one is forced to admit that they have succeeded. This type of technological art, this type of social art, this type of shamanistic bi-location will only extend and grow over the next period. In the way that the continual revolution of capitalism is threatening many old style business models, so too is the industrial scientific revolution forcing us to revalue art and the production of art. Recalling Socrates and his contrasting writing to the living word of knowledge. So we must ask if technology, as an extension of writing is not as well a pharmakon. Is technology a remedy, or is it a poison, or (most likely) both at once?

The boat of Ra-Set moves with the sun "but our job to build light." Ezra Pound Canto XCVIII

With one child just minutes away from yet another hospital visit,pale gray and listless from asthma, and one child on crutches with a broken foot, I can be forgiven for missing the unveiling, unleashing of Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra light tower. But I had an opportunity after the STL opening to wander into the domain, near the empty tomb to see for myself up close. Judging by the crowds and the traffic and the families and photographs this was a big hit with the locals. And why not? 'Tis a beautiful thing. Tall and proud and silent the beam of light rises up to the very heavens. All sorts of images and thoughts rattle around my noggin. Storming the gates of heaven. An echo of the blitz. Sublime Rothko silence and religiousness.

Only when I leave the car there is this noise of sine waves that fills all things, and to me subtracts rather than adds to the art work. I wanted the silence to stand and stare and wonder. I wanted to be alone with my thoughts with my own head.

And standing, and walking around I am breathless, but then from nowhere, from deep recesses within a nagging doubt arises. Why? What of this tower of light? Is it more an attempt to control and dominate nature? Is the empty night sky full of wonder and the cold wind of outer space, not enough? Is it not enough to point and say this is art? Like the gardener who digs up the native plants and replaces with roses, or the surfer who sees the ocean and demands to run on top of the waves to control and so dominate the sea, or the matron who see the fox or minx and wishes to flay the flesh as fashion; so too does this installation seem to want to control and dominate the landscape the city the very night itself.

A wonderful art piece to be sure and like all large scale public art, it is more than art. Rather a victory of technology of harnessed nature, of money and power, of government and business and bureaucracy.

Or is it more like the green blades of grass struggling to the light from under from the cracked concrete? The light life force, the will to power?

Or maybe a sound and fury signifying nothing, an insult to poor and voiceless in our society? Spectra must be all this and more. I think the artist said it best when he spoke of this work (like all art works) as being something different for everyone.

Children of the Void

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"We, peopling the void air, make gods to whom we impute the ills we
ought to bear."
Matthew Arnold.

It is all in Lucretius, Matthew Arnold said when he encountered
Darwin's Theory of Evolution.  More completely he said, in a letter 'I
cannot understand why you scientific people make such a fuss about
Darwin. Why, it's all in Lucretius!' Atheism and philosophical
materialism have a long and proud history. A legacy, which Zizek
reminds us, we must defend and celebrate.

I am not sure if Zizek quoted Hume correctly in his article published in the New York Times,
as I was not able to find the exact quote, but I must admit I did not look very hard nor for
 very long. Regardless of the accuracy as to who said what in what context and the provenance
of the quote it is a good one. "David Hume, a believer, made this point in a very poignant way,
when he wrote that the only way to show true respect for God is to actmorally while ignoring God's existence." As an atheist and a materialist I not only ignore the existence of any God, although this
is a good default position, I actively reject the existence of God.

This simple skeptical quote from Hume, who is considered the greatest
of English philosophers, and like many great Englishmen, he was
actually not English, made me think. And it shows how atheists are
better than Christians. Atheists are often accused of having a bleak
and soulless world view, and living in a lonely and dying universe,
full of darkness and the cold wind of outer space, I do not deny this
for a minute. The universe is dark and lonely, and we live a tiny
sliver of a small fraction for a fabulously brief time, on a tiny mote
circling a mediocre sun. Nature is immense and we are so very very
small. Puny even.

But let us, as a thought experiment, turn this idea around. For to me
this idea of a dark soulless universe should be the basis for a
atheist morality. The universe is some 14 billion years old, and is
expanding at a furious rate. There is no god, and we are all
alone. The children of the void.  The chances of any one of us even
being born are fantastic. And we only get one trip, and when it ends
we go back into the void, at best our bits are recycled and without a
faint gasp the universe carries on with it's serene disinterest.

What does this mean, each of us a unique fantastic accident? To me,
and I am but one small thin voice beneath pleasing city towers, amid
the busy hum of men, this means only one thing. To me this leads to a
moral position that requires no god, no fear of punishment or
reward. It is simply that we must not harm other people. All people
are unique and equal, and each life is a miracle never to be repeated
again even if the universe turns and cools for another 14 billion
years.

How often do we hear the belligerent non-combatants spew out
nauseating cliches such as 'Shoot them all, let God sort 'em out.' This
would not be a possible option for a through going materialist
position, as there is neither an after life, nor is there a sublime
all forgiving god to sort out any mistakes. There is no justice after
death.

Morality is then based on the idea that each human is unique and there
is no recovery from a mistaken death. In more traditional words this
means simply the golden rule, 'do unto others, as you would have them
do unto you.'

This seems to be no more than a petty truism, and it very well may be,
but it is as close to a universal ideal that you are likely to come
across.

"Zi Gong asked, saying, 'Is there one word that may serve as a rule of
practice for all one's life?' The Master said, 'Is not RECIPROCITY
such a word?'" The Master being Confucius

"Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing." Thales

"Regard your neighbour's gain as your own gain, and your neighbour's
loss as your own loss." T'ai Shang Kan Ying P'ien

From Christians to Confucians to ancient Greek natural philosophers to
Buddhist monks to atheists, this idea cuts across cultures and time.
As simple and seemingly straight forward as this idea may be, it
raises as many questions as it solves. What of the convicted criminal?
If the judge would not like to go to jail, how could she send the law breaker
to jail? Interesting as this dilemma is, this is an argument we should
hold off for another time.

This rule of performing every act as if you wish it to be a universal
truth, does not require any higher power, it does not require a system
of reward and punishment. Most importantly, as Confucius pointed out
it has the value of reciprocity.

Many commentators have pointed out various aspects of human life that
set us apart from animals, some include language, other tool making,
still others our control of fire, our ability to laugh or alternately
our ability to feel shame. All of these are true, and as one sided
views are both correct and incorrect. For as far as reciprocity is
defined as an aspect of human life, we can say that reciprocity is an
aspect that sets us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. Even
though other creatures are social humans seem to have deeper and more
complex mutual relations. Again this will open up another theatre of
argument, we should leave such arguments for another day.

The rule of being excellent to one another lies at the heart of all
things human, the fact that we are social animals, the fact that to
survive in this hostile, cold, dark, lonely universe we are compelled
to come together and work together. This can be seen in the world we
have built and more intimately in our building of families and the
raising of children, the next generation. It seems as a truism to me
that if we maintained a mutually hostile and suspicious attitude to
one another we would still be living in caves and eating grubs and raw
meat. There would be too much for any one person, or family to cope
with, and life would be nasty, brutish and short.

So the atheist is more moral than the theist as she wants to do the
right thing, because she knows it to be the right thing to do, and
seeks not to go to heaven, nor to avoid hell, nor to please a powerful
supernatural force. And this arises from the understanding the
universe is a cold uncaring place, that we live in an absurd world
with death as the only and universal prize given to all of us,
regardless of how successful or beautiful or wonderful a person may
be. The president and the pope and the poorest, most marginalised all
come into the world naked and all die frightened and alone. But in
that one bright shining moment with the sun and the wind upon your
cheek the materialist will see the world as a rich interaction of
relations, and will see all things as one, and she will live
intoxicated at the joyful accident of life, performing all actions as
if she wished them to be a universal law, with no fear of god or
death. This is a true morality.

To understand Nature's hid causes

Happy, who had the skill to understand
Nature's hid causes, and beneath his feet
All terrors cast, and death's relentless doom,
And the loud roar of greedy Acheron.

I know that I am getting old by the fact that I listen to Radio National rather than JJJ. Apart from making me feel old I have to say the I do enjoy listening to RN. In contrast to television, radio seems to have more time thus allowing a broad wide ranging discussion of events and ideas. Unlike some sections of our society, I am also quite happy to listen to ideas that are different to my own regrettable and hackneyed notions. Indeed hearing the other voices often forces me to perform a revaluation of my thoughts, my values. Sometimes I feel I can quite happily ignore the other ideas, sometimes I am compelled to modify what I currently think, and on occasion I am forced to reconsider and to abruptly and firmly change course. Without doubt this is a good and mature position to take, and more importantly it shows that democracy, being synonymous with diversity, is something greater than the puerile shadowplay of media regurgitation, party politicking or mindless voting between Shem and Shaun.

So a few days ago I was listening to RN. Between cooking dinner, and responding to the endless chatter of three young children, I heard an interchange between an interviewer and his interviewee that gave me pause. As part of a broader conversation of some French intellectual (whose name to my sorrow, I did not catch, I plead in my defense that

I am getting old, and suffer in a minor but still inconvenient way from industrial deafness) calling for a 'temple' to be constructed by and for atheists. Whether this may or may not be a good idea, I am not in position to say. It did bring to mind images of the Culte de la Raison (Cult of Reason) during the French Revolution. What did get my attention was the general and rather casual agreement to the idea that Atheism is always a negation, is no more than negation. This is considered to be common sense, but is, in truth, a cliche, a triviality raised to heights of a profundity. This comment is what forced me to my keyboard.

At first glance it may seem that atheism is in fact a negation, and this my more pedantic readers will point out can be clearly shown by the use of the Greek prefix a-, which of course means no, or not, or even without. One does not have to dig too deep to grasp that this prefix connotes negation. And everyone agrees quite clearly that atheism means without God. It therefore then may seem obvious that Atheism is a negation. However to my mind Atheism is in reality not a negation, but rather an affirmation, and it is Theism that is the negation.

What does atheism affirm? In a word, humanity. All that is solid melts in the air and we are forced to confront the reality of the cold wind of outer space, and of our singposted world, and of uncaring nature. In such a universe we are alone, and naked and scared we must comprehend our smallness and our frailness in the face of almost infinite emptiness and disdain. To my thinking, and I this will not true for all atheists, it is this lack of an afterlife that has made me less, not more willing to support; for example, war, punishment, violence. Indeed atheism makes me cling more closely to my fellow, as Doctor Who would say, stupid apes. This lack of belief in an aftelife has made me less likely to join in the periodic frenzy of demagogic vengeance. I am not able to proudly wear the tee shirt with the lovely slogan 'Kill them all, let God sort 'em out.' While it is equally true that not all theists would endorse such a slogan, this is not the place to argue this point.

In a world where God does not intervene in history and human affairs we are left to our own devices. We are left to figure out for ourselves how the world works and what is the true history of the universe. In the days of the ancient Greek natural philosophers there were those who noted that Ethiopian gods had black skin and curly hair, and so asserted that if cows had a god it would look like a cow. Some of these thinkers were able to approximate the correct size of the Earth. Some of these thinkers could see that the fossilised shells found on the tops of mountains proved what we would later call evolution. How bold were these thinkers, who mocked the polytheism of their day, compared to some of our current fundamentalist thinkers who make a show of public piety, and who view fossils as tricks of God (or the Devil) to test our faith! What an absurd idea that God would plant false evedince in the ground as a joke, as a 'pop quiz', and how difficult to have a rational discussion with such thinkers.

To see professional athletes and entertainers publicly thanking God for their good fortune seems to me to show a remarkable lack of balance concerning the role of God. While millions of children die needlessly every year, it must be the height of arrogance to think that God, rather than saving these poor children, thought it best to make sure an over payed individual received even more accolades and success.

To stand on our own feet and to see the world as it truly is, is the affirmation that atheism stands for. To assume that there are no interventions in the natural world and human history by God, has allowed us to move from the medieval slumber that was the Age of Faith, has allowed the phenomenal growth in wealth and longevity that we enjoy today. Knowing that it is penicillin, which was investigated and discovered and produced by real living humans, rather than prayer that will cure illness is the affirmation that atheism gives us. Knowing, in broad strokes, the way in which life in it's dazzaling complexity developed is the affirmation of atheism. Knowing that there is no God to stop the sun and make it dance in the sky, but rather that all stars are formed from the gravitational forces within interstellar clouds of dust and organic compounds is the affirmation of atheism.

It would be pointless of me to try to prove that all scientists are without religious faith. But it would be equally foolish to try to prove that even the most religious of all scientists does not 'suspend belief' while working in their laboratories. That is to say a scientist can not, after testing various compounds on the stereotyped guinea pig, affirm that it was prayer that cured the cancer.

And it would be foolish of me to say that all atheists are lovely people who would never harm a fly, or that they are able to free themselves from superstition and generalised human stupidity and greed. I can however happily say that when I see the world around me, when I look down the microscope, or I look upwards through the telescope, I see not God (nor Gods) but rather a rational unfolding of physical laws. An unfolding of not only rational laws, but also the creation of a vast co-operative conversation across national borders and across time, which I can comprehend, and be swept up in, and hopefully extend. When there is posited a god who intervenes at random moments in history with unexplainable miracles this rationality falls apart, and I no longer have the ability to grasp the world as it truly stands. This falling down of rational understanding and co-operative enquiry is the negation that theism gives us.

Aristotle once described the good life, the life of virtue as being friendship and the desire for knowing. This is the affirmation of atheism that I affix to my banner. All we have is each other, are hands and our brains. The search for love, and the questing after knowledge are the only worthwhile goals of life. I can love my family and my friends, I can love the other, I can seek to extend creativity and my understanding of the world without having recourse to any sort of God.

I want the grandness of my world, of my universe to be teeming over with life, change, and constant contradiction. This is the affirmation of atheism. I can not, even with the strong religious upbringing that my parents gave me, see theism as being anything but an attempt to stultify and proscribe, to say that this is how it is and how it must be for all time. This to me is negation of the wonderful, terrifying, surging struggle and contention that is our universe.

I am (hopefully) not so blinded by my atheism to not understand that many great scientists and artists have been deeply religious. I only have to look at the work Mendel did with his pea plants that helped us understand genetics. But I think that most people would agree that both the original Miletian revolution in science, as well as our more recent scientific industrial revolutions sprang from an impulse to try to understand the world as it is, with no dependency on divine intervention, to see and grasp the world as the endless unfolding of rational, understandable physical laws. In his recent book 'The Swerve' Professor Greenblatt argues that the Renaissance begins with the finding of one of the greatest works not only of materialism and atheism, De rerum natura or 'On the Nature of Things' by Lucretius, but also a great work of art, full of passion and compassion. In this work Lucretius argues the classical atomist view of Democritus, Epicurus and others that the world is made up of matter in motion.

And it is this desire to understand the world, this fount of human genius that has created this world we now live in, this world of computers, and medicine, and space travel and more. I despair that this world is overrun with shallow moneyed interests who seek to make only profit. But I also hope that one day we can understand that humanity is on the cusp of a brave new world, if we can survive the next phase of history. A world where energy is seemingly taken from the air, where things can be brought into being as if by magic. A co-operativly built world of superabundance were we can move beyond the sordid quest for cash and reputation. For my childrens sake I wish to move into this world where, as Aristotle might have said, we are free to investigate the only things that matter, friendship and the love of knowledge.

The motto comes from Virgil The Georgics Book II and can be found here http://classics.mit.edu/Virgil/georgics.2.ii.html