An ùrachadh na bliadhna

Anniversary

My other self, my me I prefer to be,
the sense and soul of all I want to see,
I love you in a way my wedding band
is not enough to show or understand.

Let's find our way together to old age,
and laugh at the advice of every sage
whose experience can never match our own.
We make the rules, the family, the home.

Smile

The day is embedded in lead:

                motion is impossible during its hours

                clasped within this grey wet clay day.

A weird and weightless glass

                has been poured over the mechanism of the clock,

                smothering every cog, infiltrating every gear

                and has stiffened and set hard and fast.

I peer and pore over

                the blueprinted view of every exploded infinitesimal,

                the meticulously recorded minutes of every moment,

                the bewildering instructions for assembling each second,

                unwrapping each flat packed part, matching it with the manifest

                and wondering about the purpose of the bits left over.

And then suddenly you smile,

                and the glass is cracked

                the plans are ripped up and cast away

                moments melt and fuse, boil and rage,

                in terror and exhilaration

                as the spring of time uncoils at last

                and my heart is catapulted into the unknown once again.

A rock and a hard place

I am sure I was not alone in waiting for two things last week (seasonal festivities notwithstanding): the Scottish government's Brexit proposals and the UK government's response to them.

And as much as the Scottish government's proposals were a clear, constructive and reasoned set of options that charted in detail all corners of the possible, to the same extent the UK government's response was inflexible, dismissive and dogmatic. The compromise offered by one was matched by the chaos, contrariness and contempt with which it was met by the other.

In so far as the UK government has been able to formulate a coherent position at all, it seems to consist only of veiled threats and vindictiveness. They seem to be asserting that a post-Brexit rUK will be able to arrive at a trade deal with ease with every single country in the world with the sole exception of Scotland, which we must assume will be subject to some vague but unique punishment from which all other members of the Single Market will be exempt, should it seek to pursue its own interests within the Single Market in the event of a "hard Brexit" and the rUK leaving it.

When they can no longer maintain the logic-defying contortions their position inflicts on them, they resort to another tried and tested tactic of the abusive partner, the "no-one else would have you" gambit. "But Spain," they say, rejoicing in every obstacle Madrid raises to impede our progress.

Spain is eager to avoid any precedents that may be applicable to the situation of Catalonia, they point out. But can Spain count on their support when Article 50 negotiations turn to the subject of Gibraltar? Will they continue to exert themselves as strenuously to promote Spanish interests when the Rock is on the table? What is the Spanish for having your cake and eating it?

A government that favours Spanish interests over Scottish ones is not fit to govern Scotland.

To rule by scorn

The Scottish Government publishes proposals regarding Brexit reflecting the referendum result in Scotland of a nearly 2 to 1 vote for Remain. European leaders respond by saying they are positive and constructive. The president of the European Commission indicates they are worthy of consideration. The Green Party observes that they represent the "maximum extent of compromise" in relation to accommodating the UK Government's requirements.

What is the response of the UK Government? It is threefold:

1) Rejection of the proposals within 3 hours of publication, that is, before they could even have possibly read them and developed an informed opinion.

2) Repetition ad nauseam of the "trade fallacy" - the idea that Scotland relies on trade with rUK and so would be at a disadvantage under the terms of any differentiated arrangement. No detriment is possible without offering Scotland less favourable terms than the rest of the Common Market, which is not only vindictive, but undermines any possible Article 50 negotiating position.

3) Invidious promulgation of the "SNP hate the English" meme through mainstream and social media and their own loyal cohorts to distract from and undermine the Scottish Government's proposals, and divert attention from their own deeply embarassing lack of anything resembling a coherent plan.

This is not governance we are seeing from Westminster. It is chaos and naked contempt. And to rule by scorn is not to rule for long.

The trade fallacy

It is necessary to nail the trade fallacy now.

The trade fallacy is the idea that a differentiated Brexit solution for Scotland (whether that is remaining in the Common Market as proposed yesterday or, for that matter, full EU membership as an independent state) would be detrimental to trade with rUK, which represents our largest export market.

Although untrue, this fallacy has the merits of simplicity and superficial plausibility necessary of a memorable scare story used to install a truth-resistant knee-jerk aversion to the differentiated solution(s) proposed.

The refutation of the fallacy is also simple, however:

• The terms on which Scotland trades with rUK would have to be less favourable than the terms on which the rest of Europe trades with rUK as a result of Article 50 negotiations for those terms to be detrimental to Scotland. 

So rUK would have to deliberately single out a member of the Single Market for separate, special penalties, undermining the entire basis for any negotiations at all.

So every time any unionist repeats the trade fallacy ask them to clarify if they really mean Scotland in the Common Market would be offered different "punishment" terms from the rest of the Common Market? That is how you nail the fallacy - by demanding that clarification. Because the only detriment to Scotland would be deliberate punishment, and that would derail any broader negotiations.

And this is without even considering the fact that the terms on which Scotland would trade with Europe would be more favourable than the terms on which rUK would trade with Europe, and that most of Scotland's trade with rUK is destined for Europe anyway.

The feast

I watch the clock's broad face high upon the wall:

                it blossoms and bursts with hours,

                it is a prettily posed hour-flower,

                each segment is a bright petal, pivoting

                upon the slender stem of midnight. 

Blade secretly palmed,

                time caresses the flower, then

                presses hard his hidden inner edge

                and with a single, swift stroke,

                removes the day to fold and press and thumb it

                into his book and slot it on the shelf forever.

Ice chimes in my glass   

                and black, pungent absinthe

                coils its tendrils around my heart,

as I tease the volume from its interstice

                and peel the pages left and right

                about the spine of time

My finger finds the lines

                for which the lanterns of my eyes were lit.

Since the day I was woken,

                expelled from the womb, all light burst open

                and split and spilled and slid tumbling out,

                diurnal sun displacing mother’s heartbeat as my timepiece,

                and the gentle glowing sunrise in which I endlessly slept

                usurped by a waking tyranny of sunrise and sunset,

I have been embarked upon

                a secret search for lost intimacy,

                a dark and secret thing of shame

                in this wide open world of unforgiving light.

It was not found

                among the gentle deceptions of tenderness

                where deceit knots and coils itself tight

                around the roots of every winter rose

                that lingers in the stiff marshy cold of that garden

                where I watch breath hang in the air

                despite the heavy lie it carries, 

and so I expose myself alone

                in remote, violent and desolate wastelands,

                rust red deserts that no heart-pump can irrigate,

                knowing that my own destruction is more sincere

                than the smiles that pillowed my soul among men

                while their smoky words were still shifting in the air.

I will rip out the wolf's windpipe with my teeth,

                and steal his howl and with it bind the moon

                and take it down as a dish to lick greedily

                at my own oblivion. Every snail is a tongue

                with which I find clean unsullied soil to consume.

I inhale the fatal moonlight,

                burrow into atoms to find their sullen stolen souls,

                shuffle spectral lines to deal death's gambits

                upon idyllic pacific ocean island atolls,

                from a clear blue sky beset with the twisted spine

                of man's con-trails and con-tricks.

I fall slug-tongued upon the famine-feast of burnt dirt,

                and shovel through apocalyptic ash

                seeking to digest my own disintegration

                but all I find is you, here, now:

feast on me.

The dreamers

I am suddenly awake.

The still air

is buttressed by shafts of light

descending from high windows,

infiltrating gaps

where curtains were drawn too hastily

the night before.

Dust circulates, and slips unseen

into the dark,

a traffic of shadows across the light,

and my dream lingers.

A secret defect,

involuntary testimony of fear and desire,

reflex unrestricted by conscious inhibitions,

residue of dreaming,

a trace of sand in the mind’s eye,

remains in my waking thoughts,

lies and lurks behind and beneath

the pristine surface of appearances and impressions

which my thoughts shuffle, rank, process, prioritise,

as I awaken and begin to impose order on the day ahead,

a piece of interstitial grit lodged between life's layers.

Laminations of obsession, slick with shame

shift and slide upon each other

spreading the rheumy secretions that gather around the defect,

like a leak, like a wound, like a pearl, like pus,

bleeding between the inert slabs of glass

that rest weightlessly upon us,

or stand insubstantially between us,

through which we see each other

as we emerge from the our own dreams,

sight smeared with flat blades of their invisible colour,

a transparency and refraction seen just by us,

a world within the world,

sitting between our eyes

and what everyone else can see,

and from these stained visions of each other

we can make the rose window of our interior cathedral,

the oculus and iris of our love,

hung above the threshold of the seclusion

where we finally find peace and respite,

where we can be together.

My thoughts of you re-assert themselves

in every moment free from interruption.

No ceremony or vows can sanction what we have,

or acknowledge what we are,

in our sanctuary of silence.

We are dreamers.

We are refugees.

We are a single self,

divided at the start of time,

and testify in our waking sleep to the light

cleaving our dreams of each other apart,

unleashing the gleaming river that lies between us,

the unfordable torrent across which we reach,

our fingertips one hair’s breadth apart.  

Oath of Unallegiance

I will not be bound by any oath. 
I pledge allegiance to the unaligned. 
I promise to question every value.
and uphold the sovereignty of doubt,
and all her lawful heirs and successors,
no matter what the consequences.  
I salute the rag with which I blow my nose, 
and scorn every frontier, cross every border, 
and then make every ditch I find a Rubicon
with which to irrigate your indivisible territory. 
I affirm that I will hold my duties in disdain.
and leave absent any office 
that you should presume to bestow on me, 
as though there had been a break in,
and you will have to frame your laws most subtley
to pretend my actions in any way imply obedience
for I will be a moving target, slipping from their aim,
eluding the cross hairs of every constitution
escaping the net of all its amendments,
for you will not govern me,
so help you, Almighty God. 

Working class heroes

So the varnish peels
on toys bleached by time
in a bright attic
where the Sun has succeeded
in photographing the shadows
of the skylight's lead beading
onto the grain and sinews
of the exposed wood
and grandchildren rejoice
as the laminated
balsa wood sharks
rescued from the '70s
circle in the bath
with their disintegrating teeth
of putty and chalk,
and plumes of chalk dust,
pyroclastic in the bath water,
form the passing wraiths
of their vindication,
as a feeding frenzy
of accidental cannibalism
ensues.

Alter ego

We will have to be together apart, in silence,

and find each other in the stillness of our lives.

We have discovered that everything we craved,

everything felt deprived of when we were young,

is not worth having. We transgressed every convention,

flouted every petty foible, ignored every remonstrance,

and all we found is that they have no power,

and Everest itself is a molehill.

                               

The hurdles we vaulted in life melt behind us.

There is no achievement to be had.

Every crime we secretly excused with the redress

we thought accomplished by its commission is pardoned. 

The lacerations of guilt are tucked away,

folded into the deepening wrinkles of fading memory,

hiding with forgotten horrors in the shadows

that rise between every ridge in the fingerprint,

every gyrus of the brain.

The task of taming the world becomes

an act of nostalgia for our own youth.

We would have to violate the summit of Kailash

before we are able to find that mustang moment

that does not cower and kneel, already secretly tame

before the test of our notorious presence.

I murdered love on the altar of ego,

burned children's tears to fuel my joy-ride,

to sparkle and fizz with the transgressions of youth

was my promise, but I was an imposter.

We are all imposters.

Life is a doomed rear-guard action against entropy

made precious by futility,

and after constant strenuous effort of the soul,

with no hint of remission,

we are left with nothing to show

but this miracle of fatigue through which we sink,

each inching towards death

in our own little pool of quicksand,

and we take our monsters with us to the grave.

Solstice

Ancient people watched the dwindling of the days each year as the winter solstice approached. They wondered if this time the light would continue to wane until they were deprived of it entirely and consigned to eternal darkness, or if the pattern their ancestors had observed and communicated to them would be repeated once again, and the world would be saved, and light restored.

For without knowing the mechanism by which the days began to lengthen, the restoration of the light each year was not guaranteed, and the first dawn after the solstice on which they could discern that the sun rose earlier than it did the day before may have provoked rejoicing but did not signal redemption, did nothing to allay the fear that one year the sun might fail to find its way back to us from the depths of winter. The darkness remained, as an ever present threat, a prototype of evil, destructive and inscrutable, unamenable to any bargain, consuming worlds not out of hunger, but out of boredom and caprice, in an age before we invented the devil.

This palpitation of the seasons was ensnared at last within the shaman's feverish delirium at the back of the cave. And from his trance the first truths were given. The terror of the dark was curtailed and attenuated by insights extracted from his ravings, narratives teased like a thread from the general simultaneity of experience tangled up in priest's hypoxic convulsions, to become camp fire tales of zodiacal heroes endowed with superhuman strength and divine gifts pevailing in contests set by gods over champion monstrosities whelped in a cave by Echidna, Mother of Monsters. And so we began to feel reassured, and slept the first human sleep, and enjoyed depths of slumber unknown to animals still tormented by constant threat.  

Within the safety afforded to the precincts of our dreams we built shining cities, like cascades of glass tumbling down through the sparkling cataracts of falling empire, and in the glistening procession of millennia in these shining cities some among us at last discerned the workings of the world, and the dark at last was shrunk to fit the sleeve of science.

Astronomers and musicians taught us about position and quantity and change. Truth swung so low in Her orbit Her necklace hung within the astronomer's grasp. And as the musician sought solitude in the forest he found She strayed so tame and unstartled across the forest tracks and lingered so long within earshot that Her song was overheard and learned by heart. Those who discovered this experience were the first musicians.

And so astronomers and musicians taught the rest of us everything we needed to know to describe the world.

But the dark was not defeated. Within our marrow we remembered it.

Last Winter the solstice came again. We met it with expectations whose fulfilment had grown so tedious that any other sequence of events was inconceivable. But the instead of returning, the light continued to spiral down night's dark drain. Assumptions that had stood the test of generations suddenly seemed naive and idealistic as the natural order was suspended and the solstice asserted itself as an irresistible pole to which we were drawn and where we were devoured by strident new solipsisms.

“Darkness is good ... Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power ... [it] will be as exciting as the 1930s," claimed Steve Bannon, US President-Elect Donald J. Trump's chief strategist.

The project commenced to stall the solstice, to seize this point around which the year is slung back out of shadow, and take it captive, until all of 2016 became one long continuation of the solstice in which long forgotten fears were restored to unhappy prominence.

2016 was the year when things changed. The extended solstice of the mind became our contemporary solipsism. Thought was afflicted by a paralysis, and the sense of superiority that accrues from being "in the know" took priority over actually being well-informed. Accuracy became irrelevant. Tribe trumped Truth - the self-identified digital alt-right tribes of the "woke" who shunned information in preference to confirmation of any conspiracy they can then claim to have seen through to claim a place round the totems that have replaced Truth.

The fascists were winning because while no-one was watching they had thoroughly rehearsed their tactics in a series of limited theatres of discourse that did not attract widespread attention. The practice of dismissive labelling; the assembly of massive edifices of falsehood too detailed and elaborate to ever be fully refuted before antagonists had to confront the next; the presentation of every favourable decision or development that goes their way as final and definite, that goes against them as provisional and temporary: they had practised and perfected their tactics in theatres such as climate change denial and Gamergate. Trump did not happen by chance. He was the vanguard of a well prepared blitzkrieg. 2016 was merely the year they showed their hand.

We missed it because we didn't take them seriously. There were always more important political rivals to defeat. Rather than unite in opposition to fascism, rather than finding common cause in its overthrow, we jostled among ourselves for position and influence, harnessing logic and evidence to prove our points and achieve our objectives. There is always a more important political rival than the fascists right up until there are no rivals anymore.

But they grew strong because they did not rely on such effete, decadent contrivances as reason. They adopted an approach that did not require them to be consistent. They forged alliances as a matter of temporary expedient rather than alignment of ideas, and discarded allies as quickly as they found them if they ceased to be useful. And so they grew strong unseen without being restricted by the constraints we observed as a matter of course to preserve the validity of our assertions. They had no such need, finding no fascination in Truth, finding fascination instead in nothing other than the darkness.  

And so people started using statements that resembled expressions of information or knowledge in every formal sense but one. They no longer required that these statements were accurate. They used them as a way of belonging, rather than knowing. The statements were not listened to in order to find out about the world or what someone else believed about it, or spoken in order to communicate what you had found out to others. Explanations were no longer descriptions of reality but shibboleths, noises, like the call of an animal, passwords that conferred on the speaker and the listener membership of a privileged group of people. Being "in the know" was more important than actually knowing something. Truth was replaced by conspiracy theories that served as totems to gather round. Since this was the only requirement of the fascist statement, these statements became truth-proof: they could be contradicted over and over again without losing any of their power to convince, because they were never supposed to be accurate in the first place.

In this way the people could be redeemed. People made desperate during the hours between approval of the payday loan and the chance to lose it in an online poker game could be saved and made "great again." People made homeless and jobless by remote forces manipulated by global elites could "take back control." Steve Bannon denied being a "white nationalist." Instead, he claimed he was an "economic nationalist," concerned with exploiting conditions created by the macroeconomic catastrophes that befell his predecessors over the previous decade, such as low interest rates, to undertake massive investment as the basis of restoring job security to his constituents.

The only problem was that this approach had been tried before. Hjalmar Schacht had generated an economic miracle for the Nazis in Germany during those 1930s that excited Bannon so much, before he ended up in a concentration camp. And the use of statements to define groups to belong to rather than to accurately describe the world they found themselves in had disastrous consequences but three score years previously as well. The justification had been the same: the redemption of man by means that put his self-appointed redeemers in the dock in Nuremberg.

And so the world was distilled into competing paradigms while all the actual data were discarded. People gathered each around their own isolated camp fires of burning books as the cold night descended, and told tales of how the others gathered around some other camp fire visible nearby were their enemies. Their priests told them the Sun was a myth that had been used to enslave them, making them toil together at all the tasks that are possible during the day, and that they had been set free by the darkness and that this night that the priests had summoned would now last forever.

Huddled around their camp fires they whispered rumours of distant wars, of unimaginable evils stacked up on top of each other over and over, until they could be propped up supporting each other on the shelf where all our competing histories justify and condemn each other, where all our accusations embrace each other like exhausted boxers, while in the dark beyond the light of the camp fire, beyond the flickering familiarities to which people clung in its unreliable light, the solstice prowls in the dark, its sable pelt velvet and invisible, unknowable, waiting to consume them.

Everyone felt a new kind of fear penetrate their marrow to prepare it for the spasms and paralysis of death. And when a lone voice was raised declaring the new constellations of this distorted astronomy to be false, it was ignored, or ostracised, and truth was now a solitary rather that shared experience, known only to the outcast, if it was known at all, a kind of knowledge approached through mysticism. Science was dead. Those whose ambitions never rose above the basest and most materialistic agendas could not comprehend the motivation of those who pursued a higher purpose, and so scientists stood accused of all the crimes of which their accusers were most guilty.

Winter solstice approached again and the hope grew that the season would not fail this time and 2016 would merely be a hiatus from which we would recover. But the fear remained that 2017 would only prove to be worse.

Ghost dance

The Lakota could not have done it
without the veterans,
but the veterans could not have done it
without the Lakota,
and I see the ghosts of Little Big Horn
and Wounded Knee
standing together at Standing Rock,
reconciled in their Seventh Generation.

Full English Brexit

In 1705 the English parliament passed the Alien Act. This penalised Scottish trade with England, and included a trade embargo that impacted about half of Scotland's trade at the time, since around around half of Scotland's trade was with England and her colonies (which at that time included colonies in North America and the Caribbean), while the other half was with Europe (which was unaffected). The act allowed for the suspension of its provisions should Scotland enter into negotiations for a union of the parliaments of Scotland and England. It was therefore one of the main inducements for the Treaty of Union that led to the Acts of Union of 1707, resulting in the formation of a single trading bloc, the United Kingdom.

Why is this relevant today? Our trading relationships with Europe and England are once more up for discussion as a result of Brexit. Ever since the 24th of June, Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government have been leaving no stone unturned in an attempt to "square the circle" and explore every option that preserves Scotland's interests in the Brexit negotiations and respects the choice of the Scottish people to remain in Europe short of Independence.

For example, the possibility of Scotland having a separate relationship with Europe to the rest of the UK, sometimes referred to as the "reverse Greenland" option (while being a Danish possession, Greenland is not a member of the EU while Denmark is), or other arrangements that allow Scotland to remain in the Single Market (the EEA) through membership of EFTA (like Norway and Iceland), while following the rest of the UK out of the EU, have been discussed.

However, it is reported today that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has ruled out a separate arrangement for Scotland. There will be a single UK-wide negotiating position. Nicola Sturgeon is to accept "the will of the people," by which he presumably means the British, rather than the Scottish, people, in principle, which is the will of the English in practice, as starkly illustrated by the outcome of the referendum on the 23rd of June.

We are no longer being told to "eat your cereal." Now the cereal has been replaced by a full English breakfast.

Hammond points out that Scotland currently exports four times as much to the UK as it does to the rest of Europe, and claims being outside the UK’s arrangement with the EU would “be a disadvantage overall to Scotland”.

But this is a gross and deliberate distortion that defies logic. When you consider the options, there is no scenario that places Scotland at a disadvantage with respect to its trade with England, and only scenarios that place Scotland at a disadvantage with respect to its trade with Europe:

(1) Trivially, if no separate arrangement is made for Scotland to remain within the Single Market, and Scotland remains instead within the UK as a distinct trading bloc, Scotland's position in relation to trade with England remains unchanged (although her position in relation to trade with Europe is changed). This is the UK-wide approach favoured by Hammond.

Otherwise, if Scotland is allowed either a (2) separate arrangement enabling it to be a member of EFTA while remaining within a UK that has left the EU, or indeed (3) retains full EU membership by the simple expedient of Independence, then the trading relationship Scotland will have with England will be the exactly the same as the trading relationship of the rest of EEA with England. There would be no tariffs applied to Scottish imports to England that are not also applied to imports from everywhere else. There would be no competitive disadvantage in relation to Scottish exports to England. There would only be the competitive advantage that Scottish exports to Europe would have over English exports to Europe.

Indeed, given most of Scotland's current imports to England are subsequently exported on anyway (e.g. Scotch whisky, which comprises fully one quarter of total UK food and drink exports, having first been imported to England from Scotland), options (2) and (3) provide an opportunity for Scotland to avoid the penalising tariffs that will be imposed on the basis of option (1) by directly exporting to the destination market instead.

So option (1) disadvantages Scotland with respect to Europe, but not the rest of the UK. Options (2) and (3) do not disadvantage Scotland with respect to Europe, nor the rest of the UK. But options (2) and (3) potentially offer Scotland advantages not available to the rest of the UK. Therefore Hammond prefers (1).

He justifies this position by suggesting that in fact options (2) or (3) would disadvantage Scotland with respect to England. There is only one scenario in which this would be the case.

(4) Scotland would only be at a disadvantage if the rest of the UK made different arrangements for trade with Scotland than with the rest of Europe. Scotland would have to be singled out, to be treated differently to Ireland, for example. In effect, England would have to punish Scotland, to apply some sort of special, differential penalty to Scotland relative to everyone else, for Scotland to be placed at a disadvantage.

What would be required is a new Alien Act.

So when Hammond claims Scotland would be at a disadvantage, he must be asked how? On what basis? What is the mechanism for this disadvantage? How would Scottish trade be affected differently from trade with anywhere else in Europe? Is he proposing a new Alien Act to punish Scotland and force it to comply? Even though singling out Scotland like that would leave any arrangement with the rest of the EU in tatters? Because that is the only basis on which Scotland can now be placed at a disadvantage.

No, I haven't forgotten about the position that an Independent Scotland would not be allowed into the EU or EFTA and would therefore not benefit from the uniformity of any arrangement that applied to members of the EEA. On numerous occasions senior European politicians and officials have made clear the ease with which Scotland remains in the EU, potentially as the successor state to the UK, in the event of independence.

However, would unionists really want to rely entirely on a position where, having said in 2014 that we must remain in the UK if we want to stay in the EU, they now say we must remain in the UK because we are leaving the EU? Which is tantamount to saying it doesn't matter what you want, which is really no basis for staying in the UK at all.

The fire

Everything we turn our hands to becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend.

We make a map of our thoughts,

spread it wide upon the unmowed grass,

weigh down its corners with odd pots and jars

half-filled with sunlight and laughter.

We plot a course among the stars,

and with our friends, bold astronomers of hope,

bend canvases of indescribable colour to a wind

that takes us anywhere and everywhere,

only to see our sails slacken, sag, melt, blister,

and yield to the breath of a strange and secret sun,

like cepia celluloid jammed in the projector gate

surrendering to a bulb whose bright heat is worse

than the darkness in the windowless picture house.

We are stranded alone in a mute and starless void.

Memory does not fade, it burns, with a hot rot

as senseless and stealthy as a melanoma

fuelled by the flesh it silently consumes

and everything eventually becomes tinder

for an imagination darker than we can comprehend

We have a choice: fear the fire that lights up our lives

and fills the darkness with twisting agonies of smoke;

or celebrate together the sky into which they billow,

a sky to which a pale moon lends her beauty

among cathedrals of cloud where we gather

in the moonlit ruins of our hope.

(This was written in response to the Glasgow Art School fire of 2014, witnessed from a window on Bath Street)

Citizenship and Journalism

As a matter of some urgency, journalists need to set up their own new and effective peer review system to eliminate fake news.

Absurdist Surkovian misdirection and cynical sensationalism have always been with us, but lately they have threatened to overwhelm us, and are implicated in the subversion of democracy currently underway.

Because we are witnessing a worldwide Surkovian assault on democracy which is being accomplished by propaganda, misinformation, the framing of narratives in ways that deny the reader any reliable perspective, and the devaluation of fact by its constant immersion in falsehood. We are witnessing the overthrow of democracy by the democratisation of propaganda itself.

Why? As far as I can see there are two main reasons:

Why is this happening now? Technology has created ideal conditions for this Surkovian subversion of democracy. For example, the World Wide Web is the perfect Petrie dish for its swirling vortex of lies and absurdity to thrive. Our brains now communicate with each other without any intermediate encounter with reality to allow error detection and correction in the contents of their communications. News is becoming a psychotic collective hallucination more severe than the wildest prognostications of McLuhan. Meanwhile established investigative procedures have been overtaken by more rapid and lucrative, if less thorough and accurate, news products not subject to traditional bargaining.

Why is this happening at all? Technology again. The establishment is under severe stress as the technologies on which their wealth is based are rendered obsolete. This takes place on two fronts. On the supply side, the extraction of abundant cheap fossil fuels to deliver the energy needed to manufacture and distribute the largely useless products that inundate and bury us alive in our shared capitalist present is no longer sustainable. Climate change requires its rejection. Entire classes of energy asset are becoming stranded. 80% of recoverable oil reserves must remain under the ground if we are to have a hope of achieving our targets with respect to global warming.

Meanwhile, on the demand side, IT and renewable energy present alternatives that undermine all capitalist mechanisms for adding and expropriating value. The cost of reproduction of a digital property is virtually zero, and renewable energy is basically free.

Traditionally, the cost of manufacturing in general is reducible to the cost of the fuel, the cost of raw materials, and the cost of the infrastructure that facilitates their extraction and exploitation. But the cost of that infrastructure and those raw materials is ultimately reducible to the cost of the energy required to operate or extract them. Eventually all costs are reducible to fuel costs. And renewable energy fuel costs are zero. A digital economy fuelled by renewable energy exists in a condition of post-scarcity in which the very idea of being held hostage by capitalists, and paying the ransom that constitutes the value they expropriate and accumulate, is increasingly absurd.

Traditional concepts of wealth are doomed, but the wealthy will let the world burn to preserve them.

So when I said there were two reasons, they turn out to be the same reason - technology. Indeed, as with all world-historic processes, the only thing that ever really distinguishes us from our ancestors with the passage of time are the tools available to us for the indulgence of our impulses or the realisation of our dreams. Our desires remain fundamentally the same, even if technology changes the language with which we express them. The gods that were born at the back of the cave, the gods we raised and placed among the stars, are the same gods we affront with petulant denial or kneel before in obedience today.

So we should realise that what we are witnessing today, and what is being reported in our media, is not an anti-establishment backlash.

If it was genuinely an anti-establishment backlash, it would would be manifested as an authentic democratic grass-roots response to long-standing injustices, not the popular abdication of power to celebrity billionaires and corporate lobbyists currently underway.

And we would not see the utter contempt for evidence and rationality exhibited by those now embracing prejudice as if it was a legitimate political response to the deliberately chaotic discourse that has now replaced our electoral process. This is the opposite of democracy. It doesn't matter what the majority choose, if it is motivated by hate it is called bullying, not democracy.

No, we are witnessing reaction, not revolution.

Surkovian tactics are not new. They have always existed in one form or another to maintain existing power structures. They are the contradictions that keep us chasing our tails, the darkness at noon where we tolerate any crime because we believe history will absolve us. What we see now is a difference in degree, not kind, with respect to the influence of Surkovian tactics, due to the two factors I outlined above.

We are lost in a Gramscian interregnum and so behold the monsters that emerge from our unfettered imaginations to inhabit that wilderness without horizon.

And so we need now, more than ever, a reliable litmus of truth. We need a journalism that is up to the task of reporting what is happening. Because this is all happening much more rapidly than I suspect anyone ever expected!

We need a simple peer review process in which responsible and qualified members of the journalist community cross-check each other's articles. This will help restore clarity. New media have eroded the old safe-guards and a new decentralised and uberised approach consistent with global digital dissemination and consumption of news is needed.

The production of quality journalism will be slower and reduced in volume. However, its value will be enhanced, attracting an audience interested in rational interpretations of verified and corroborated evidence to inform their own opinions. This will then support the necessary revenue streams.

Existing models are in place that can be emulated. The progress of academic papers from arXiv pre-print to formal publication is one. The clear guidelines for wikis regarding NPoV and reverting frivolous edits is another. What is required is something syncretic and similar, that can be accelerated to fit within the news cycle. A form of agile and distributed sub-editing of all contributions by all contributors? Perhaps a system where you check three items for every one you produce and submit, and where you prove yourself by the extent to which you improve the work of others as much as the by the quality of your own first draft.

A virtual, online, clearing house of truth?

Fundamentally, there is such a thing as truth, however partial and incomplete our understanding of it may be. We have a duty of diligence and rigour to that truth, and to each other.

Apopygmalion

And as you are warm flesh, so am I clay,

and with cold hands I ply my lust’s caress

upon your lovely shape, and hard I press

myself into each dark declivity.

I fill, surround, besmirch, enclose, possess,

I smear and spread and fill until no form

remains of you, submerged without a trace,

nor any substance left to make up me,

but only stifling silence, confined space.

There is no you or I as long as we

remain unhewn in this cold embrace.

Stardust

The alien inside me, who this face serves to disguise,

who sees this world's outline through these dull dim human eyes

and watches all our empires rise and riot, rot and fall,

feels homesick for the sunbeams of the farthest stars of all,

for floating cities stranded on unimaginable moons,

and aches with curbed divinity, but patiently he waits:

although he must sink with me when I merge into this soil

and rise once more to crawl with each and every earth born child

he knows where we have been is where we finally return,

to face the furnace burning in the heart of every Sun,

the heat where every atom moved by love is first begun,

where fine Anthropic threads that bind us all within are spun.

The drum

The year is empty.

The season's turn has tipped the calendar

and drained its days onto the floor,

a disregarded derangement of arithmetic underfoot,

sliding over each other like greased acetates,

leaving an empty box for a child to play with,

its compartments waiting for new specimens,

and he drums loudly on the box with a stick

until everyone tires of the nuisance he is causing

in these bleak abandoned interstitial days of winter,

and he goes out into the woods

and collects the things

that will occupy him during the coming year,

and fills the box with all the joys to come.

Outside time passes. The Sun’s declination

recoils from the edge of eternal night:

apocalypse averted once again,

as the pulse and throb of time continues.

The ivy tightens on the oak, and stems stiffen

as the soil pumps the light of the new year

into limbs and leaves as Spring begins,

but there is a drum beneath the earth that sounds in silence,

and on the stillest Summer days, insistently, imperceptibly,

its address summons us away from the heat and light.

Its beat iterates concealed and silent, hidden in cold clay.

It throbs like the palpitations of an eye in deep dreaming.

The midnight mirk sleeps sleeved in sunlight at noon

and its beat keeps time in the glistening of our trance.

                                                               

Late July. The light sags, exhausted by months of heat.

More tardy echoes tell of a change in the air, and unseen,

alteration infiltrates the leaves, preparing to emerge

and fully commit itself in the chameleon days of Autumn,

breathing in the chilled, brittle air of suicide weather.

Chill changes coil secretly in sap, and Winter,

the sexton season of the year, sharpens his tools

makes their edges ready, stacks them in the fossor's yard,

then rests an elbow upon the handle of a spade,

waiting for his work to begin in earnest.

The Sun thrusts shafts of declining light through the window

onto a square of paint on the wall, blistered by time.

Caught by a draft, the paint flakes peel and fall,

drifting and diving through their elaborate aerial dance

before gently coming to rest on the floor.

In the calm shadows a red thread is tugged from a vein

pulsing through an outstretched wrist, unravelling

in the gradually cooling water of a slowly overflowing bath,

taps left half open,

and spirals out one last time as the red hot heart unwinds

diffuses, and settles into a darkening colloid cushion

on which the bather rests,

and through which he eventually sinks

into a dim and sunless place,

where the world is struck dumb,

like a planchet waiting for its impression,

before it is made to sing by the hammer,

or like a taut bone-beaten drum-hide

stiff and still, stretched upon a frame,

until drummed with vigour,

if not rhythm or accuracy,

a halting and sporadic beat,

struck by a beggar, deaf and blind,

who, although seeming so, is not mad,

and insists on playing in the corner

of some dark and doorless howff,

with no way in and no way out,

no windows, and the only light

a pale yellow tallow glimmer of uncertain source

in the sealed sepulchral gloom

and all echoes are swallowed whole by the damp air

leaving a bare sequence of thuds

unadorned by reverberation

as the beggar furiously waves about a bone

taken from some Sassenach’s shin,

brandishes it and beats it on the drum

until eventually, by chance,

it breaks upon the rim,

and silence or applause

both sound the same to him.

Dance as you may, dance if you can,

for in your grave you surely stand,

and some day that deaf blind beggar

will come and take your shin bone in his hand.

Then leave a hollow coffin for new roots to invade,

an empty box for another child to fill

with the spoils of the year to come

once your dance is done.

The secret of my success

Once, when asked if socialism would ever succeed, Fidel Castro responded by asking to be shown the great, fabled success of capitalism.

And certainly, there is no human degradation beyond the powers of capitalism, and countries that score highly in indices of happiness generally achieve this by means of decidedly non-capitalist interventions in society and the maintenance of cultures and value systems antithetical to its core precepts.

But, for the sake of argument, let us assume for a moment it is a success, a great engine of wealth delivering material progress and personal fulfillment. What differentiates capitalism from other ways of organising society? What is the secret of its success?

It resides in this alone: only capitalism has succeeded in persuading its victims that they are to blame for the violence they suffer on its account. Poor? Hungry? Homeless? Get a job! Start a business! If you are disadvantaged it is because your behaviour has been insufficiently capitalist. Speculate! Exploit!

Capitalism does not succeed because it generates wealth. I have found more contentment among those lacking material surfeit than those who have accumulated many possessions. It succeeds because it generates complicity.

Cuba despite them

Hey! Senores Imperialistas!

No les tenemos absolutamente ningun miedo!

Fidel Castro is dead. He died today aged 90. R.I.P. Fidel. 

I visited Cuba 20 years ago. It was just coming out of a very difficult period after losing the Soviet Union as a customer for its sugar cane exports following the fall of the Berlin Wall. I was able to talk to many people who were critical of the government and yes, the situation wasn't perfect. 

But I have never been to a supposedly poor country with such happy, friendly, healthy, beautiful people, with such exemplary universal health care and education systems, with such acknowledgement and support for culture and the arts. 

And the music! I cannot even begin ...

And every barman wants you to try a mojito just the way he makes it, because his is the best! And lessons in humility can be found in each of the chess clubs that fringe the plazas. 

And despite everything, the people are *proud* of their revolution, and you can stand on a street corner sharing a beer and a barbeque around an oil drum brazier with that street's Committee for the Defence of the Revolution.

Our criticisms are utterly impertinent given what they have achieved under the circumstances they find themselves in.

Cuba despite them! No les tenemos ningun miedo, senores imperialistas! We're not afraid of you, imperialists!

Let us all take courage from their defiance.

The party's over

Brexit will not happen.

The figures revealed in relation to Philip Hammond's Autumn statement have surely killed it.

Philip Hammond may well be the next Prime Minister. On Wednesday he demonstrated a degree of political acumen that eludes lightweight Theresa May. The most secure ground a politician can make their stand on is ground where the figures speak for themselves, ground you can quietly and unassumingly occupy while people draw their own conclusions, ground that presents a bed of hot coals to all other rivals. Hammond is now on that ground. Everyone else is carrying the can.

And these figures indicate that Brexit is a fiscal apocalypse almost without precedent. The people of Britain are going to be hit badly where it hurts most, their pockets, and now they know it. Fox, Johnson and the other Brexiteers are nowhere to be found as this finally dawns on people. Indeed, Farage is leaving the country for pastures new in Trump's America, by all accounts.

Public opinion has to shift significantly to rule Brexit out. The Overton Window that describes the range of opinions considered acceptable shifts with the impulses it receives from its extremes, with the principles expressed at the extremes, but needs the rack and pinion of secure centre ground to move upon. Let me be clear, I am no centrist, but I understand that people are drawn from left to right and right to left across the compromises of the centre ground.

And for all that they are yesterday's men, the interventions of, for example, Blair and Major, in the Brexit debate, as the full weight of Hammond's Autumn statement sinks in, reinforce this central position in British politics after a period during which the political scaffold it provided had collapsed (at Westminster at least) and will lubricate the shift in public opinion away from Brexit in response to Hammond's statement. That will make Brexit impossible.

And when Brexit proves impossible, May's position will prove untenable. Hammond's is the safest pair of hands left on the tory front bench.

In standing by progressive values as if alone on the world stage after the onslaught of Brexit and Trump, Merkel has had her "finest hour," but now she will find she is joined by other voices. I predict that Le Pen, AfD, and the other crypto-fascist chimeras that have been emboldened by recent events will be routed in the round of elections coming up next year, as Brexit shimmers and fades like the mirage it always was, and the people of Britain emerge from the collective hallucination with which tory factions conjured in their struggles for power and position earlier this year.

What does this mean for Scottish Independence? It will come, but it will no longer be as a lifeboat that allows us to quit a sinking ship. And in many ways that is as it should be. Scots deserve more than a lifeboat as a ship of state, even though the effort of building it is greater, and Brexit has distracted us from this task. The time has come to revert to route one and persevere with the case for Independence on the basis of circumstances that have not materially changed since September 2014. We should never treat a disaster like Brexit, which would cause so much misery for so many, as though it was an opportunity.

And should I be proven wrong, and we still have to take to the lifeboats? The effort I advocate is still worth it for in the long term we will require an ark with room for everyone.

The Daily Mail Online reports on the Jo Cox murder trial

Yesterday the neo-Nazi terrorist who murdered the elected MP Jo Cox last June was convicted and sentenced to life in gaol. This case has rightly been among the lead items in news bulletins and the headlines on the front pages of the press recently. 

The police investigation indicates that, although he had taken an interest in far-right white supremacist groups in the '90s, he had not been particularly active until radicalised by the toxic discourse surrounding the Brexit debate this year. One of the main publications disseminating the language to which he responded is the Daily Mail. 

Here is how the Daily Mail Online was reporting on this case today:

But that's the home page. Maybe it's reported more prominently on the News Section?

This time it is even further down the page. At least they've included more content though? Hold on a minute: "Did Neo-Nazi murder Jo over fear he'd lose council house he grew up in? Terrorist thought property could end up being occupied by an immigrant family." 

So, wait a minute - it's really the fault of some hypothetical immigrants, and not the poor quiet unassuming Neo-Nazi terrorist after all? 

No, wait: "Jo Cox's murderer sought help for mental health issues from therapist the day before he killed the MP." Ah, so it was the fault of the NHS and health care professionals. 

Earlier this month the American white supremacist Richard Spencer, at a rally of some euphemistically named front organisation, in an electrifying speech that ticked off most of the items in Umberto Eco's inventory of 14 characteristics of fascism, used the Nazi-beloved term "lügenpresse" (lying press) to describe a mainstream media he felt misrepresented his interests. I don't think he needs to worry about the Daily Mail.  

Camaguey

What I remember are the birds,

so many birds,

filling the gull-blighted sky like a vortex

consuming the city

in a single continuous act of sky burial,

its atheist ziggurats

monuments to nothing but themselves,

stranded somewhere

in the cane fields between Havana and Santiago.

Blood moon over Boulder

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

Sleep-deprived and jet-lagged, over-caffeinated and drunk,

I got from Denver to my motel and passed out on my bunk.  

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

I made my way to Pearl Street, it wasn’t very far,

bought a book of poems in a shop and settled in a bar.

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

Today is the day I discover the words of Andrea Gibson

the way that a car stalled on the tracks discovers that train

in all the movies that that ever happened in. Smash.

I find myself weeping in a bar full of hockey fans:

"Ashes" has that effect.

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

I met God on Pearl Street, playing a broken guitar,

hiding in an alley in case someone gave him money.

You should have heard the song he played me!

New material. Well, new to me.

And it didn't cost me a penny,

Only my pride. Only my pride.

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

The blood moon set at dawn

but day brought a deeper darkness

behind its broad mask of light.

I see no purpose, feel no appetite, make no effort,

and abandon myself to the lazy, cowardly suicide

of indolence. Repulsed by my own company -

charlatan at everything I profess, inadequate -

but despising easy, simple pleasures, 

I haunt the empty streets alone.

I was baptised in moon blood, or was it IPA,

as I drank with God all through the night,

with the Devil all through the day.

Odium Triumphans

"Hate triumphant"

At the time of writing, nearly two weeks after Trump's election victory, reports have come in across America of an alarming increase in hate crime. Gay people have been beaten up. Property has been vandalised with racist graffiti. Black and hispanic people have been threatened. Muslims have been victimised.

Trump's victory was delivered on a tide of hateful rhetoric, and so this victory has granted permission for bigots to indulge their prejudices and act violently in much the same way as the Brexit vote did in the UK. Every bigoted impulse is endorsed by his victory.

I understand that people felt ignored and wanted to challenge established power structures. But why should it only be possible to motivate people to do this by provoking aggressive, prejudiced tendencies? Why must we legitimise and enhance their bigotry and hatred in order to have something to harness? Why can change only be achieved by goading the basest instincts and then hijacking them to form a battering ram with which to assault the city gates? Why, in a democracy, cannot corrupt power structures be challenged with evidence and argument? Why, in a democracy, can we not simply deliver a reasoned verdict? And if the answer is, we do not live in a democracy, why can our revolution not be a celebration of our humanity, rather than a rejection of the basic humanity of so many of our fellow humans?

Not all collective decision making is, by definition, democratic. Democracy is not an outcome. Democracy is a process. What we have witnessed recently is not democracy. Democracy relies on mutual respect, not hatred. Democracy relies on evidence, not lies. Democracy relies on logic, not prejudice. Irrespective of the outcome, irrespective of the majority in favour of it, if it is not delivered on this basis, it is not democratic. If we see a crowd of children in a school playground cheering on a bully as he beats up some kid unfortunate enough to be a bit different and therefore to be considered a suitable victim by his peer group, we do not call it democracy. Would we yield to the democractic legitimacy of a wolf pack's decision to eat us? Democracy is the triumph of reason over reflex. What we have witnessed recently is not democracy. We have witnessed the triumph of hate.  

And power structures are not being challenged at all. Corporate lobbyists make up Trump's transition team. The only anti-establishment figures in it were excluded from the establishment for good reason, for example, like being white supremacists! Our energies are being dissipated in a struggle against each other to distract us from the abuse of power, as always. The people are not short of opportunities to challenge powerful interests, but they are only told about the most pointless and self-defeating ones by a media that serves those very same interests.

If you accept the idea that the only way to motivate and mobilise people to challenge corrupt power structures is to stimulate their hatred and then organise it into a battering ram, as so many Trump apologists seem to be doing of late, you are effectively accepting the justification for fascism given by Goering at Nuremburg. If we are going to ask people to have higher expectations of those in high office, we must teach them to have higher expectations of themselves. We must not encourage them to debase themselves with racism and misogyny and xenophobia. We must instill in them values and a desire to see these values articulated in public life and reflected in their own conduct. We must offer our admiration to our autodidacts and ragged-trousered philanthopists, not our celebrities and billionaires, as a way of raising our expectations of ourselves. The opposite of course is to elevate a hate-filled narcissist billionaire celebrity to the highest office in the land.

For decades now the concepts and vocabulary available to people to describe their problems and articulate responses to them have been systematically impoverished and degraded. Every option has been placed beyond the pale until all that has been left around which their rage can cohere is fascism. And all this has been deliberate. Everything that could form the basis of discussion, all language that could result in effective mobilisation in pursuit of common interests and the elevation of our ambitions beyond the meagre short-lived rewards of capitalism has been ridiculed with all the pejoratives used to dismiss left wing ideas until their credibility is eroded, not for want of sound argument, but lack of brute acceptability.

And the Left itself has failed miserably to prevent the ascent of Trump precisely because it has acquiesced in this impoverishment of concepts and language. It has consented to every diminution of people's capacity to articulate their interests, and to discuss and organise effectively in their pursuit, to cultivate instead some shallow popularity which they too have mistaken for democracy. It has abandoned all the armour with which it was invested by our grand-parents and great-grand-parents for grease-paint, to caper and cavort on the stage prepared for it by its enemies, and where it sought to entertain us, is simply lost our respect. And now it is reduced to closing the dressing room door on the chorus of boos and weeping over bad reviews.

But there is more to Trump's success than the cynical and irresponsible cultivation and manipulation of hatred, and the Left's historic abandonment of the dialectic of hope in its futile attempt to compete with the glamour of capitalism's false promises. Trump's fascism is a consequence of a kind of solipsism that is corrupting public discourse more profoundly, a solipsism that finds its seed in the self-gratification and hedonistic self-indulgence which capitalism has left us as the bereft lexicon of self-interest, and has germinated in the lurid online fantasy land we now navigate in our search for reality. We have seen many analyses of the filter bubbles and echo chambers in which people obtain most of their information and form most of their opinions these days. There is a more profound bubble engulfing the mind of late. The phrase "post-truth" is deployed as though it is a valid description of the terrain in which we now find ourselves. But how do you describe a post-truth world if you have dispensed with the possibility of fact? This is only possible in the solipsistic bubble where facts don't matter.

I get it, I really do. It is very tempting to subscribe to this solipsism. The country is run by an impenetrable clique of corrupt idiots who do not deserve to wield power. They don't notice you. They ignore you. They are pre-occupied with self-aggrandisement and mutual congratulation and back-slapping each other at cocktail parties. What better buttress is there for your slighted ego than being able to turn the tables, to say "the jokes on you," to believe you have access to a unique insight, that you haven't been fooled like everyone else, you know what's really going on. Every post-fact conspiracy theory is grist to the mill as you fabricate your new safe self, insulated from the world, ignoring the world that ignores you, thatching your coccoon with every delusion that lets you congratulate yourself to compensate for every time your real needs were ignored.

But solipsism destroys morality. If nothing in the world is real than every moral consideration about the world can be over-ruled. The permission granted by the series of victories won by Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism over the last few years, from the first Scottish Independence referendum, through the Brexit vote, to Trump's victory this month, is more problematic than simple permission to misbehave, to indulge every bigoted impulse without censure, indeed to contend this is somehow an act of empowerment. What has been permitted is the suspension of morality itself. We cannot reason with this solipsism. It does not disagree with us. It simply does not care. We have to talk to people who are interested to persuade them of our opinions. They are well past caring.

And once you subscribe to this solipsism, you must reject any intrusion reality makes into your experience. You must reject its pageant of diversity, because the only human condition that does not contradict your entire world view, that does not leave your cocoon in tatters, is one that it identical to your own. So you become angry and full of hate, and diversity poses an existential threat. And so you then pose an existential threat to diversity. And that is where we find ourselves now: pleading for our very existence with someone who does not recognise our right to have an opinion, while deprived of the legacy of words and concepts with which we would have articulated it. This is the moral and epistemological apocalypse of fascism.

But I would ask you to just consider one other point of view for me, to indulge for a moment one other, alternative fantasy. Instead of assuming only you exist and everything else is a lie, consider the possibility that you don't exist at all, other than as part of the Universe, and reality is invested in everything else. Imagine you have no separate, independent existence, and only exist by virtue of the connections you mediate between everything else, that your reality is the opposite of the solipsism I have described and that self-actualisation is only possible through altruism.

The "I" which you extend to a position of such prominence in your description of the world is then nothing more than a locus of points, a trajectory, from which the Universe may observe itself, along which the constellations retain their outlines. This locus of points, this trajectory, has no objective reality in itself, it exists only as perspective.

Let me elucidate my metaphor. Consider Orion's Belt for example, comprised of three stars that are apparently next to each other. This apparent proximity is a consequence of our line of sight. In fact, Alnitak and Mintaka are about 380 parsecs away, while Alnilam is nearly twice as distant at about 600 parsecs. If we moved a few hundred parsecs to the side, "Orion's Belt" would not exist. But what ceases to exist is the point of view from which we observed that structure, not the stars themselves. The object whose reality is contradicted by this second point of view is not "Orion's Belt," to the extent that this refer to the those three stars, it is the observation which we call "Orion's Belt."

The only structure we can perceive in reality is error. Have you ever found yourself speaking at cross-purposes with someone? While the cross-purpose persisted you both were absolutely certain you knew what the other was talking about. What if there are some cross-purposes that continue forever? What if the world, from the most distant quasar, to the minute quantum throb of the atoms of which you are comprised, were errors? What if physics is merely the rules that govern the persistence of error, the preservation of information without substrate?

The constellations of our perception are the cross-purposes that persist beyond the point of contradiction. All the patterns from which we infer our world view are inevitably false impressions, just as the stars in the constellations we observe do not sit next to each other in space in the way we imagine. This world is meaningless or miraculous only to the extent that we consider it bound together by love.

And so the final reality is love. Love triumphs. And though we die - though that trajectory we are on ultimately takes us past the point where the constellations buckle and dissolve in the heave and sway of parallax - the stars which briefly communed in our awareness will always shine, and that part of us will live forever, and hate can never prevail.