Oh Brave New Mobile World (2)
Roaming Rights
This is the middle part, the belly of the beast, and I have just found some fluff in its' navel. Excuse me for one moment while I deal with it.
I roam,
You roam,
He - She - it skips happily about
between the masts
(There is a subtle warning at the very end of this piece, I shall tell you now. It is to do with this being the second part in a trilogy, and there being two previous (yes, two) parts which you should have really read first.)
(And here is another subtle warning: I am teasing; there is a hand upon the far end of those tantalising pieces of string, I am expecting that the cat will make a grab.)
I have become intrigued by the thought that cats are happy because they have no long-term memory. They can play happily, (as two of mine are now doing, one either side of the falls of the table-cloth, dabbing with their paws at the spot where they last thought the other was,) without getting bored. Why do I think that they have no long-term memory? Because (heh), even in adulthood, they still play as (heheh,) a kitten does, with a piece of string, or a dead leaf which has floated down from a plant. The world is still mysterious, the magic is still there for them. If they had an accumulation of memories, as we big people do, then they would remember that "Oh, it is just a leaf", or, "oh, it is only the tabby behind the cloth".
And yet, cats obviously do have some form of long-term memory, since they remember where they live, and who feeds them. One of mine, I have been told by Little Petal, would sit on the mat inside the front door and wail in lament for a day after I had gone out in the dark of a Monday morning and hurried off to Lincolnshire. Also, as I have proved to an initially scornful Little Petal, they can remember their names. I chose a time when all three cats were dozing in front of the fire, and then, one by one, very softly whispered a particular name, and the cat in question twitched an ear as it slept. I did it again for the next, and again for the third, to firmly cement my victory in both of our minds. Cats obviously do have a long-term memory.
In fact, they sometimes seem to show the opposite of what I proposed two paragraphs ago; they have a long-term memory, but no short-term one. Consider, (and those of you with no cats will have to either trust me, or find a friend with cats and hang around long enough to see for yourself); a cat rushes into the room in a playful mood, makes a dart towards a scrap of paper that has been slyly pretending to be a mouse, and then, with no warning or signs of deliberation, stops, turns around, and busily chews at something in the fur on its' back. That done, it will probably look around other parts of itself, snuffling and snorting into its' belly-fur or washing around its' flanks with its' tongue. And then again, it will suddenly, in mid-lick, catch sight of something, perhaps a piece of paper slyly pretending to be a mouse, crouch, wiggle, and leap. So, are they happy because they have no short-term memory to nag at them and remind them that the washing-up still hasn't been done and why is the postman late and where is that other sock? Is it, perhaps, a kindness to leave Alzheimer's suffers as they are?
I have entered by this strange door into Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) not to surprise and alarm you, but because I am becoming more and more concerned about how far people have started to move away from what you might call the natural world, in which the animals and plants still live, as they always have, unconcerned about ominous mutterings in the sub-conscious, or loud alarmed screaming from the media. Animals and plants are not mortgagized, financialized, gadgetized, new-terminologized. You don't see many dogs wandering with a mobile phone pressed to their ear barking at odd intervals.
I still have my very first mobile, a Motorola flip-phone, heavy as a brick, it seems today, and too large to carry in your inside pocket. I did, laughingly, carry it down my trousers once, until someone pointed out to me that the radio waves might be telling my gonads weird tales and giving them the wrong ideas. Oops. One of these days I am going to have to make sure that my seeds will tell their story straight and true, or, at least, with no more devious concealment than I myself would wish to put into my tellings of things I have done and undone. Oh, you say, they're radio waves, they're harmless; if they weren't, the governments would not allow them to be used. What, ban them to protect us from harming or being harmed? Like they ban electricity and cars and drugs and guns and knives? As a thought here, perhaps radio waves haven't been around for long enough for us to observe some subtle changes in the genes. After all, it was only really yesterday that Marconi flashed his message over the big pond. But I believe that nothing truly evil persists for long enough to truly harm the world irrevocably. Nothing lasts for ever.
And then, from one cat-like moment to another, I cease unraveling that skein of woolly thought and return to chasing the idea of people wandering around the streets apparently talking out loud to themselves. There was a time when someone prowling the streets gibbering and gesturing and laughing or swearing with nobody by their side was too poor or too disturbed to take part in the world that the rest of us lived in, but now it is the opposite: only the poor and disturbed are not wearing bluetooth headsets so that not even the mobile phone is visible to let you know that they're not in a bizarre mental fugue but actually participating in a loud and noisy manner in the great game of Life. Life without talk-time has become unthinkable. Life without mail and online-shopping and downloadable entertainment is not a life worth living. There are chips with everything, (and of course, spam), but it is the chips and their own contained silicone thoughts which drive our world these days. And we have to tell each other, endlessly, what it is that we are doing, (as cats, by way of greeting, smell each others' arseholes just to find out what the other had for dinner.)
Cut to - Mrs and Mrs Brave New Mobile World, curled up asleep in their bed, their bluetooth headsets on, their mobiles' keypads on the pillows with the key-locks on to guard against an inadvertent fumble, both busily talking in their sleep, dreaming out loud into the great wide world. We watch them as they lie there, breathing regularly, twitching irregularly, muttering and mumbling and seeing who knows what behind their eyelids? We ought, I think, to reach out and stroke them, to let them know that the world will not harm them, they are still loved. Someone will still care for them and make the thunder go away.
But is this to be the end of us? Stuck at home locked up into little mobile cells where the least we can do is bluetooth each other? No. Nothing lasts for ever. Everything comes and goes, sometimes smoothly sliding away and sometimes jerking abruptly, but one thing always leads to another. Consider: years ago, when I was at Lowestoft, CB radio became all the rage, and the airwaves began to come alive at night with the crackles and hisses as cars full of teenagers shot around the town babbling excitedly to anyone out there; each other, truckers rumbling onwards through the darkness, amused Swedes and Germans when the clouds played skip-games with the frequencies and the babblings hopped for miles across the water-waves instead of rushing harmlessly out into space. And when these teenagers got bored with driving, or realised they couldn't afford the petrol any more, they would congregate in their cars beside the sea on the now-deserted carparks where the sea-siders had clustered in the daytime. Still full of the need to communicate, they would use their CB sets to talk to each other as they sat in their cars. But, because of the reception problems caused by the transmitting and receiving antennae almost touching each other, they couldn't use the airwaves, so they turned a switch and used loudspeakers instead, and, sitting in the darkness in their cosy little metal cells, shouted at each other, like prisoners on a barred row would do.
Life has now become a shopping spree through the malls of gadgetland as we race ahead like lemmings into the sea of expectations. I have had to phrase that phrase with great care, because there are those among us who are literalists, and if I were to have uttered the usual analogy including the cliff, (which I have not uttered), those literalists would all be clamouring to tell me, tell you, tell us all, that lemmings do not do that thing with cliffs for which they are remembered. Just so, my little literalist, the little furry ones do not dive and tumble. But here we come to the poetic point, is the mental image of a thing which isn't true any less valid than that of one which is? You all, I am sure, got the picture I intended, and saw a vision of Brave New Mobile Worlders running herdlike towards the sea where all their promises are held, and toppling over the edge of unsustainable ambition. I love change, in most of its forms, but I have seen that some of the changes being forced upon us have been purely for the benefit of those who make and sell and tax us on glittering things.
Oh but, wait a moment, is it really that simple? Are we but mere puppets jerking at and on the strings being tugged around by the cunning ones above who clothe us and feed us and tell us how to behave and take out money from us? Is the world that frightening? Or do those whom the paranoid believe manipulate us for their own gains really only follow, themselves, the directions that the "marketplace" says it is willing to be lead along? A top might think the bottom is writhing compliant at their feet, but in reality, they can only do to their partner that which the partner wishes to be done to them. Does the one control the other, or the other control the one? Are they both playing a game in which the rules are subtle and the instructions tacit? (I'll pull the string if you want me to, pretend I'm not here.)
I, myself, do not believe in paranoid conspiracy ideas. You cannot sell someone something they have not decided to want to have. First, you must encourage the want. To do that, you need to know what they might want, and you try different coloured wool, twitch the string in different places, leave it static and see if they make a move towards it or away from it. The world is a collaborative affair. We want, because we do. In the case of mobiles, mails, machines, we want it here and we want it now. Having to wait until we get home from work or shopping is no longer good enough, we will have lost the urge to play by the time we get back home to switch on the light and then switch on the light.
How have I got myself here, pondering upon gadgetry? I too have felt the desire to take my cyberlife with me, instead of leaving it at home while I roam. I need to call my "friends electric". I want to stand in the real world and laugh in amazement at something, then flit like a bat into the underworld of electronic dreams and, to a friend or two, go "LOL, you should see this!" Yes, I know, it's here, now. How long, I wonder, from fitting the first mobile phone with a camera, to the first up-skirt snap? How long was it until the first woman saw the winking eye and, on an impulse, flashed her tits at it? And why, oh why, did we move from that happy innocent abuse to the serious business of happy-slapping? Well, my cats, ingeniously, for they don't have phones to video that which they get up to, instead bring home live mice (and even rabbits), to torment in front of the other cats. That's entertainment, when you're feline and furry, and that's entertainment when you're big and clever.
Oh, wait, did I just see that idea move in the corner of my mind, as if it were a mouse? Let me pounce. I have seen the signs that hint the Brave New Mobile World is maybe not so far away after all. I have seen a small pack which, by laser, throws the image of a keyboard on a surface, and detects the points at which the fingers strike, and types the letter, typo or not.
(Is a message written upon a virtual keyboard real or imaginary?)
And, talking to another friend, we both believe a small device exists, perhaps a bit larger than a packet of cigarettes, (Oh absent friends, lest we forget), which, again using something like a laser, projects a screen with flickering images upon another convenient surface.
(Is the vision of an imaginary animal a real vision?)
And so, with those beside me, I could roam through one world and also roam through another. I have a phone-cum-computer, about the same size as a pack of cigarettes, (wail), and with those three packs, (nicotine-free), together with another pack of about the same size which contains power, (our three essential mobile packs are phone, keyboard, screen and ... Our four essential mobile packs...) I could be free. Oh yes, I could be free. I could roam, and still be home.
And so I have wiggled my arse and leaped playfully from one state, (of hate, where the mobile is a despised device to interrupt me,) to another, where it is to be desired, because it can connect me. Keyboards, which up till now are famed for stressful injuries and getting sticky when all sorts of fluids are dribbled into or spurted over them, are also the means by which to soothe and stroke and fuss and tease into states of delight. And television screens, massive magnets for the conscious faculty to rush towards and cling against, are also mirrors for the soul. Life is always like this, moving in and out of the swinging flap of contradictions, seeking food, seeking fun, seeking a warm place by the fire.
(In the land of endless contradictions, where poisons can save lives, and obsessions can be liberating, where the pure can be obscene, and the mouse can chase the cat about the screen.)
I, although I have hated the imposition of a mobile phone which can ring and startle me anytime it so desires, have also come to loathe the settled nature that the keyboard on the desk and the screen upon the wall have lead me into. I want to roam again, to free my mind and free my body too. I want to be out there, not locked in here. (Unless it's raining, and then I will be here.)
"Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall..."
The mobile world is here, will be here, and because it is heading in the small direction, not the massive one, is probably going to survive the coming times of turmoil, when large and heavy things will prove too costly to make and shape and ship and shop and stack and store and stare at. Once more, the essential world might end up fitting in a rucksack or a handbag. We have become such that we cannot do without them any more. I am glad, myself, I do not wish to see us go back into the stone age where all we can do is scrawl our visions on the wall with burnt twigs and hope that someday someone will find them.
And so here, at the tail end of the tale, is the subtle warning
Well, there is the obvious one about reading the preceding parts first, but also, there is the warning to those who think that they know the plot. "Brave New World", if you recall, ended horribly. (Well, I certainly thought so, and I would not go there nor send others into it.) I do not see this for my Brave New Mobile World. I do not see an end to life as we know it, to love, to playfulness and "unstructured activity time". My vision of the future, or for the future, is that this is yet another trip around the circle, the carousel which turns and turns and cannot be halted, such is its' momentum as it ceaselessly tries to catch up with its' tail. You can of course jump off, head for the hills and burrow into a hole in the ground with a collection of weapons and ammunition, and a stock of food, and wait until the crisis is over, when you will come out, tall, strong, virile, armed to the teeth and ready to protect all those semi-naked women flocking helplessly around in the ruins of the old world, following their instincts and flashing their tits at potential protectors. But women don't do that, you see? They are like cats, they will always find the cosy fire, the balls of wool to play with, the loving householders who will stroke them and feed them and let them roll around on the carpet showing their furry bits. Rambo getups? Eating raw meat from dead dogs and horses? Crushed berries for lip-gloss and burnt sticks for eye-shadow? Get real, you teenage twats, women do not like that, women are not like that. Well, the women I like don't and wouldn't, anyway.
It is just possible that any corrective actions required to stop this world wobbling slightly are not going to be coming from the financiers and scientists and manufacturers; their grey-headed woolly wisdom has been suddenly exposed as folly. No, the girlies, the courtesans, the so-called empty-headed bimbos will be the driving force behind the return to stability, but you might not know it unless you have studied the way of the cat, and can see that the hand which pulls the strings is really doing the bidding of the one upon the carpet. They, the girly ones, are simply doing the cosmic will, riding on the kamikaze, the divine wind, which blows where it would and wanders through the forests in search of particular trees. We are not going to die, our world is not going to the bottom of the cliff with an awful crash, wake up, it's just another disaster movie designed to entertain you for a few minutes after they've taken your money and given you your ticket. Go back and demand a different film? Possibly, (called dancing in the ballot-box), or go out of the theatre and into the adjoining one, which is showing something much better; (called I'm not going to play with this piece of string, you go and find a different one, and I'll let you know it it's the right one, aka "law of demand". (Shut up about the supply, you can not and should not supply that for which there is no demand.))
Like cats, when the house they have been currently inhabiting turns into a mental asylum, those without the depressing so-called "light of reality" blinding their minds from the inside out will just get up and go for a walk to find a warmer house where they can curl up without being trodden on by stampeding cattle bellowing and lowing about doom, gloom, and financial sodomy. But, (and here I am pleading to your departing tails,) do please keep in touch, (don't hide in the safe spots and sulk,) reach out and grab the string, be stroked, purr to me.
And now we come to the end of the middle, also known as the rump of the matter, where we can, especially in the case of cats, see a twinkling star that winks at us, and says, Falstaffian-like, "Show you my bottom? My fundamental? Well, here it is, now kiss it."
Do you feel tricked? Were you following the twitching string expecting me to pronounce upon the end of the current world or show you, cat's-arse-like, the beginnings of a new one? (Alice, oh Alice, leave Dinah for a moment; drink this, and then go into this little hole, there's a whole new world inside it.) Have you been slyly treated, mentally, so to speak, teased with a ball of fuzzy wool? Has an idea been put into your head in an unexpected way? Have you had your insight goosed? No, I think not, (well, I meant not). I have been playing with you all. You have been moused.
YHBM, PAW.
The Sopwith Camel puts down his keyboard, and stands by the fire, puzzling. What had he just got up to do? He watches the patterns in the carpet, seeing the firelight dance on the fender, and then, suddenly, sits down and starts to lick his balls.
And, from somewhere, there-there, anywhere at all, music starts. It is from an album called "The Year of the ..."
This is the middle part, the belly of the beast, and I have just found some fluff in its' navel. Excuse me for one moment while I deal with it.
I roam,
You roam,
He - She - it skips happily about
between the masts
(There is a subtle warning at the very end of this piece, I shall tell you now. It is to do with this being the second part in a trilogy, and there being two previous (yes, two) parts which you should have really read first.)
(And here is another subtle warning: I am teasing; there is a hand upon the far end of those tantalising pieces of string, I am expecting that the cat will make a grab.)
I have become intrigued by the thought that cats are happy because they have no long-term memory. They can play happily, (as two of mine are now doing, one either side of the falls of the table-cloth, dabbing with their paws at the spot where they last thought the other was,) without getting bored. Why do I think that they have no long-term memory? Because (heh), even in adulthood, they still play as (heheh,) a kitten does, with a piece of string, or a dead leaf which has floated down from a plant. The world is still mysterious, the magic is still there for them. If they had an accumulation of memories, as we big people do, then they would remember that "Oh, it is just a leaf", or, "oh, it is only the tabby behind the cloth".
And yet, cats obviously do have some form of long-term memory, since they remember where they live, and who feeds them. One of mine, I have been told by Little Petal, would sit on the mat inside the front door and wail in lament for a day after I had gone out in the dark of a Monday morning and hurried off to Lincolnshire. Also, as I have proved to an initially scornful Little Petal, they can remember their names. I chose a time when all three cats were dozing in front of the fire, and then, one by one, very softly whispered a particular name, and the cat in question twitched an ear as it slept. I did it again for the next, and again for the third, to firmly cement my victory in both of our minds. Cats obviously do have a long-term memory.
In fact, they sometimes seem to show the opposite of what I proposed two paragraphs ago; they have a long-term memory, but no short-term one. Consider, (and those of you with no cats will have to either trust me, or find a friend with cats and hang around long enough to see for yourself); a cat rushes into the room in a playful mood, makes a dart towards a scrap of paper that has been slyly pretending to be a mouse, and then, with no warning or signs of deliberation, stops, turns around, and busily chews at something in the fur on its' back. That done, it will probably look around other parts of itself, snuffling and snorting into its' belly-fur or washing around its' flanks with its' tongue. And then again, it will suddenly, in mid-lick, catch sight of something, perhaps a piece of paper slyly pretending to be a mouse, crouch, wiggle, and leap. So, are they happy because they have no short-term memory to nag at them and remind them that the washing-up still hasn't been done and why is the postman late and where is that other sock? Is it, perhaps, a kindness to leave Alzheimer's suffers as they are?
I have entered by this strange door into Oh Brave New Mobile World (2) not to surprise and alarm you, but because I am becoming more and more concerned about how far people have started to move away from what you might call the natural world, in which the animals and plants still live, as they always have, unconcerned about ominous mutterings in the sub-conscious, or loud alarmed screaming from the media. Animals and plants are not mortgagized, financialized, gadgetized, new-terminologized. You don't see many dogs wandering with a mobile phone pressed to their ear barking at odd intervals.
I still have my very first mobile, a Motorola flip-phone, heavy as a brick, it seems today, and too large to carry in your inside pocket. I did, laughingly, carry it down my trousers once, until someone pointed out to me that the radio waves might be telling my gonads weird tales and giving them the wrong ideas. Oops. One of these days I am going to have to make sure that my seeds will tell their story straight and true, or, at least, with no more devious concealment than I myself would wish to put into my tellings of things I have done and undone. Oh, you say, they're radio waves, they're harmless; if they weren't, the governments would not allow them to be used. What, ban them to protect us from harming or being harmed? Like they ban electricity and cars and drugs and guns and knives? As a thought here, perhaps radio waves haven't been around for long enough for us to observe some subtle changes in the genes. After all, it was only really yesterday that Marconi flashed his message over the big pond. But I believe that nothing truly evil persists for long enough to truly harm the world irrevocably. Nothing lasts for ever.
And then, from one cat-like moment to another, I cease unraveling that skein of woolly thought and return to chasing the idea of people wandering around the streets apparently talking out loud to themselves. There was a time when someone prowling the streets gibbering and gesturing and laughing or swearing with nobody by their side was too poor or too disturbed to take part in the world that the rest of us lived in, but now it is the opposite: only the poor and disturbed are not wearing bluetooth headsets so that not even the mobile phone is visible to let you know that they're not in a bizarre mental fugue but actually participating in a loud and noisy manner in the great game of Life. Life without talk-time has become unthinkable. Life without mail and online-shopping and downloadable entertainment is not a life worth living. There are chips with everything, (and of course, spam), but it is the chips and their own contained silicone thoughts which drive our world these days. And we have to tell each other, endlessly, what it is that we are doing, (as cats, by way of greeting, smell each others' arseholes just to find out what the other had for dinner.)
Cut to - Mrs and Mrs Brave New Mobile World, curled up asleep in their bed, their bluetooth headsets on, their mobiles' keypads on the pillows with the key-locks on to guard against an inadvertent fumble, both busily talking in their sleep, dreaming out loud into the great wide world. We watch them as they lie there, breathing regularly, twitching irregularly, muttering and mumbling and seeing who knows what behind their eyelids? We ought, I think, to reach out and stroke them, to let them know that the world will not harm them, they are still loved. Someone will still care for them and make the thunder go away.
But is this to be the end of us? Stuck at home locked up into little mobile cells where the least we can do is bluetooth each other? No. Nothing lasts for ever. Everything comes and goes, sometimes smoothly sliding away and sometimes jerking abruptly, but one thing always leads to another. Consider: years ago, when I was at Lowestoft, CB radio became all the rage, and the airwaves began to come alive at night with the crackles and hisses as cars full of teenagers shot around the town babbling excitedly to anyone out there; each other, truckers rumbling onwards through the darkness, amused Swedes and Germans when the clouds played skip-games with the frequencies and the babblings hopped for miles across the water-waves instead of rushing harmlessly out into space. And when these teenagers got bored with driving, or realised they couldn't afford the petrol any more, they would congregate in their cars beside the sea on the now-deserted carparks where the sea-siders had clustered in the daytime. Still full of the need to communicate, they would use their CB sets to talk to each other as they sat in their cars. But, because of the reception problems caused by the transmitting and receiving antennae almost touching each other, they couldn't use the airwaves, so they turned a switch and used loudspeakers instead, and, sitting in the darkness in their cosy little metal cells, shouted at each other, like prisoners on a barred row would do.
Life has now become a shopping spree through the malls of gadgetland as we race ahead like lemmings into the sea of expectations. I have had to phrase that phrase with great care, because there are those among us who are literalists, and if I were to have uttered the usual analogy including the cliff, (which I have not uttered), those literalists would all be clamouring to tell me, tell you, tell us all, that lemmings do not do that thing with cliffs for which they are remembered. Just so, my little literalist, the little furry ones do not dive and tumble. But here we come to the poetic point, is the mental image of a thing which isn't true any less valid than that of one which is? You all, I am sure, got the picture I intended, and saw a vision of Brave New Mobile Worlders running herdlike towards the sea where all their promises are held, and toppling over the edge of unsustainable ambition. I love change, in most of its forms, but I have seen that some of the changes being forced upon us have been purely for the benefit of those who make and sell and tax us on glittering things.
Oh but, wait a moment, is it really that simple? Are we but mere puppets jerking at and on the strings being tugged around by the cunning ones above who clothe us and feed us and tell us how to behave and take out money from us? Is the world that frightening? Or do those whom the paranoid believe manipulate us for their own gains really only follow, themselves, the directions that the "marketplace" says it is willing to be lead along? A top might think the bottom is writhing compliant at their feet, but in reality, they can only do to their partner that which the partner wishes to be done to them. Does the one control the other, or the other control the one? Are they both playing a game in which the rules are subtle and the instructions tacit? (I'll pull the string if you want me to, pretend I'm not here.)
I, myself, do not believe in paranoid conspiracy ideas. You cannot sell someone something they have not decided to want to have. First, you must encourage the want. To do that, you need to know what they might want, and you try different coloured wool, twitch the string in different places, leave it static and see if they make a move towards it or away from it. The world is a collaborative affair. We want, because we do. In the case of mobiles, mails, machines, we want it here and we want it now. Having to wait until we get home from work or shopping is no longer good enough, we will have lost the urge to play by the time we get back home to switch on the light and then switch on the light.
How have I got myself here, pondering upon gadgetry? I too have felt the desire to take my cyberlife with me, instead of leaving it at home while I roam. I need to call my "friends electric". I want to stand in the real world and laugh in amazement at something, then flit like a bat into the underworld of electronic dreams and, to a friend or two, go "LOL, you should see this!" Yes, I know, it's here, now. How long, I wonder, from fitting the first mobile phone with a camera, to the first up-skirt snap? How long was it until the first woman saw the winking eye and, on an impulse, flashed her tits at it? And why, oh why, did we move from that happy innocent abuse to the serious business of happy-slapping? Well, my cats, ingeniously, for they don't have phones to video that which they get up to, instead bring home live mice (and even rabbits), to torment in front of the other cats. That's entertainment, when you're feline and furry, and that's entertainment when you're big and clever.
Oh, wait, did I just see that idea move in the corner of my mind, as if it were a mouse? Let me pounce. I have seen the signs that hint the Brave New Mobile World is maybe not so far away after all. I have seen a small pack which, by laser, throws the image of a keyboard on a surface, and detects the points at which the fingers strike, and types the letter, typo or not.
(Is a message written upon a virtual keyboard real or imaginary?)
And, talking to another friend, we both believe a small device exists, perhaps a bit larger than a packet of cigarettes, (Oh absent friends, lest we forget), which, again using something like a laser, projects a screen with flickering images upon another convenient surface.
(Is the vision of an imaginary animal a real vision?)
And so, with those beside me, I could roam through one world and also roam through another. I have a phone-cum-computer, about the same size as a pack of cigarettes, (wail), and with those three packs, (nicotine-free), together with another pack of about the same size which contains power, (our three essential mobile packs are phone, keyboard, screen and ... Our four essential mobile packs...) I could be free. Oh yes, I could be free. I could roam, and still be home.
And so I have wiggled my arse and leaped playfully from one state, (of hate, where the mobile is a despised device to interrupt me,) to another, where it is to be desired, because it can connect me. Keyboards, which up till now are famed for stressful injuries and getting sticky when all sorts of fluids are dribbled into or spurted over them, are also the means by which to soothe and stroke and fuss and tease into states of delight. And television screens, massive magnets for the conscious faculty to rush towards and cling against, are also mirrors for the soul. Life is always like this, moving in and out of the swinging flap of contradictions, seeking food, seeking fun, seeking a warm place by the fire.
(In the land of endless contradictions, where poisons can save lives, and obsessions can be liberating, where the pure can be obscene, and the mouse can chase the cat about the screen.)
I, although I have hated the imposition of a mobile phone which can ring and startle me anytime it so desires, have also come to loathe the settled nature that the keyboard on the desk and the screen upon the wall have lead me into. I want to roam again, to free my mind and free my body too. I want to be out there, not locked in here. (Unless it's raining, and then I will be here.)
"Here I stand, foot in hand, talking to my wall..."
The mobile world is here, will be here, and because it is heading in the small direction, not the massive one, is probably going to survive the coming times of turmoil, when large and heavy things will prove too costly to make and shape and ship and shop and stack and store and stare at. Once more, the essential world might end up fitting in a rucksack or a handbag. We have become such that we cannot do without them any more. I am glad, myself, I do not wish to see us go back into the stone age where all we can do is scrawl our visions on the wall with burnt twigs and hope that someday someone will find them.
And so here, at the tail end of the tale, is the subtle warning
Well, there is the obvious one about reading the preceding parts first, but also, there is the warning to those who think that they know the plot. "Brave New World", if you recall, ended horribly. (Well, I certainly thought so, and I would not go there nor send others into it.) I do not see this for my Brave New Mobile World. I do not see an end to life as we know it, to love, to playfulness and "unstructured activity time". My vision of the future, or for the future, is that this is yet another trip around the circle, the carousel which turns and turns and cannot be halted, such is its' momentum as it ceaselessly tries to catch up with its' tail. You can of course jump off, head for the hills and burrow into a hole in the ground with a collection of weapons and ammunition, and a stock of food, and wait until the crisis is over, when you will come out, tall, strong, virile, armed to the teeth and ready to protect all those semi-naked women flocking helplessly around in the ruins of the old world, following their instincts and flashing their tits at potential protectors. But women don't do that, you see? They are like cats, they will always find the cosy fire, the balls of wool to play with, the loving householders who will stroke them and feed them and let them roll around on the carpet showing their furry bits. Rambo getups? Eating raw meat from dead dogs and horses? Crushed berries for lip-gloss and burnt sticks for eye-shadow? Get real, you teenage twats, women do not like that, women are not like that. Well, the women I like don't and wouldn't, anyway.
It is just possible that any corrective actions required to stop this world wobbling slightly are not going to be coming from the financiers and scientists and manufacturers; their grey-headed woolly wisdom has been suddenly exposed as folly. No, the girlies, the courtesans, the so-called empty-headed bimbos will be the driving force behind the return to stability, but you might not know it unless you have studied the way of the cat, and can see that the hand which pulls the strings is really doing the bidding of the one upon the carpet. They, the girly ones, are simply doing the cosmic will, riding on the kamikaze, the divine wind, which blows where it would and wanders through the forests in search of particular trees. We are not going to die, our world is not going to the bottom of the cliff with an awful crash, wake up, it's just another disaster movie designed to entertain you for a few minutes after they've taken your money and given you your ticket. Go back and demand a different film? Possibly, (called dancing in the ballot-box), or go out of the theatre and into the adjoining one, which is showing something much better; (called I'm not going to play with this piece of string, you go and find a different one, and I'll let you know it it's the right one, aka "law of demand". (Shut up about the supply, you can not and should not supply that for which there is no demand.))
Like cats, when the house they have been currently inhabiting turns into a mental asylum, those without the depressing so-called "light of reality" blinding their minds from the inside out will just get up and go for a walk to find a warmer house where they can curl up without being trodden on by stampeding cattle bellowing and lowing about doom, gloom, and financial sodomy. But, (and here I am pleading to your departing tails,) do please keep in touch, (don't hide in the safe spots and sulk,) reach out and grab the string, be stroked, purr to me.
And now we come to the end of the middle, also known as the rump of the matter, where we can, especially in the case of cats, see a twinkling star that winks at us, and says, Falstaffian-like, "Show you my bottom? My fundamental? Well, here it is, now kiss it."
Do you feel tricked? Were you following the twitching string expecting me to pronounce upon the end of the current world or show you, cat's-arse-like, the beginnings of a new one? (Alice, oh Alice, leave Dinah for a moment; drink this, and then go into this little hole, there's a whole new world inside it.) Have you been slyly treated, mentally, so to speak, teased with a ball of fuzzy wool? Has an idea been put into your head in an unexpected way? Have you had your insight goosed? No, I think not, (well, I meant not). I have been playing with you all. You have been moused.
YHBM, PAW.
The Sopwith Camel puts down his keyboard, and stands by the fire, puzzling. What had he just got up to do? He watches the patterns in the carpet, seeing the firelight dance on the fender, and then, suddenly, sits down and starts to lick his balls.
And, from somewhere, there-there, anywhere at all, music starts. It is from an album called "The Year of the ..."
Labels: gripe like a pedant, talk like a lion, walk like a cat
posted by Sopwith-Camel | 1:21 pm
1 Comments:
Oh, my.
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