The survivor

When we were children we played on the shore.
We lay on the sand the ebbing tide revealed,
playing below the high water mark.
I traced your outline with a stick.
You chased me through the waves,
and for a moment everything was perfect.

The next day we came back
and saw the tide had washed the trace away.
So we marked it again with makeshift anatomy:
seaweed for hair, driftwood for arms and legs
and a random flotsam body.

The next day we came back
and saw you had drifted out to sea.
Your disaggregated anatomy was nowhere to be found.
So we marked your outline again, with stones this time
carried from a nearby shingle bed, choosing:
the most delicate, beautifully coloured ones for eyes
and a big ferrous red one for your heart.

The next day we came back
and saw it had survived the tide
and it remained there until the end of the holidays.

The next summer we came back
and saw the winter storms had done their work
and the sand lay featureless once more.
Eventually we stopped taking holidays there,
and grew apart as we grew up.

Time has passed and has taken its toll,
eroding you with life's dissappointments,
its misfortunes hacking whole parts off,
until you look at yourself and wonder
"does anything still remain of the person I once was,
or am I now so completely hollowed out and disfigured
as to be a stranger to my former self?"

Believe me my friend when I tell you
you are still here,
because when I look at you I can still see
the friend I knew that perfect day
when we played on the shore,
chased each other through the waves,
and I drew your outline in the sand.

Solstice

We collected our ancestors remains from the cairn,
bundles of bones wrapped with reverential hush,
and conveyed them with all due ceremony
and gathered with them at the standing stones
to watch the dwindling of days,
the sun rise later and set earlier than before,
the gap between them growing more narrow
as the sagging arc traced by the limpening sun
sank further past the darkening world's edge
and we wondered: will the light continue to wane
until we are deprived of it entirely?
Will the pattern our ancestors saw
reliably enough to raise these stones
as a record of the seasons of their days
save us and restore the light? If not,
how can we begin to repair the heavens?
Should we adjust stones that have stood
for one hundred generations, to avert the end of days?

Having received no promise that we could understand,
we rejoiced with no sense of redemption
when some celestial mechanism delivered the sun
a little earlier one morning than the day before.
We saw as it retreated from the extreme on the skyline,
the mark on the world's rim it reached every year
among the silhouette of the trees'
cold bare scaffold of the next year's seasons,
just as we had hoped and prayed and come to expect.

We still feared one day it would not find its way
back to us from the depths of winter.
The darkness remained, as a threat,
a prototype of evil, arbitrary, evasive,
prowling around the plots of light
our camp fires placed within the deeper night,
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
to take the blame. Nothing happened for any reason
of the kind we subsequently came to understand.

The palpitation of the seasons was ensnared at last.
Within the shaman's feverish delirium,
at the back of the cave, from his trance,
the first truths were received,
truths we could hold and share and use
to attenuate and curtail the terror of the dark.
Insights extracted from his ravings, narratives
teased like thread from simultaneous experience
tangled up in hypoxic convulsions in the sacred smoke
became our camp fire tales. Zodiacal heroes
endowed with superhuman strength, bearing divine gifts,
prevailed in elaborate contests set by whimsical gods,
victories over champion monstrosities
whelped in a cave by the mother of monsters,
and so we began to feel reassured,
and slept the first human sleep,
enjoying at last depths of slumber unknown to any animal
still nervous and tormented by the constant threat
which we now eluded and began to forget. 

Within the safety afforded to the precincts of our dreams
we built shining cities, cascades of glass, tumbling down
through the sparkling cataracts of empire,
falling over the precipice of history, and rising again
behind the hooves of each departing horde,
and in the glistening procession of millennia
some among us at last discerned the workings of the world.
Truth swung so low in her orbit
her necklace of planets hung within the astronomer's grasp,
and were plucked and strung like pearls
along the sinews of their reasoning.
Musicians sought solitude in the forest.
They found that truth strayed so tame across the forest tracks,
lingered so long within earshot
without being startled by their presence
that her song was overheard and learned by heart.
The dark at last was shrunk to fit the sleeve of science.
Our fear of it softened to a surly scowl
glimpsed between the pillars of light
within which it was confined.

But the dark was not defeated.
Within our marrow the memory of our fear lingered,
and now a different kind of solstice comes.
The fulfilment of expectation has grown so tedious
that any other sequence of events is inconceivable,
but the light continues to spiral down night's dark drain
past the level from which we are accustomed to see it fill again.
Generations of certainty suddenly seem naive and idealistic.
The natural order is suspended. The solstice swells and swirls
and becomes an irresistible pole to which we are pulled
to be devoured by the world's strident new solipsisms.
Our ancestors remains are scattered. We revere instead
those who are briefly notorious and quickly forgotten.
Indolence becomes our tutor and scorn his lesson.
“Darkness is good," advisers tell the powerful.
Their project is to stall the solstice. The point
around which the year is slung back out of shadow,
the celestial citadel where the year is rescued,
itself is captured. The sun is taken hostage. Darkness reigns.
Time becomes indefinite, adrift. The solstice continues
well past any familiar reckoning. Darkness persists. 
Long forgotten fears stiffen us again with sudden paralysis
in the extended contemporary solstice of the mind.

Accuracy is irrelevant. Tribe matters.
Information is discarded or disregarded.
The confirmation of any bias is preferred,
and if you can claim to have seen through it all long ago
your reward is a place around the totems that have replaced truth.
We no longer rely on such effete, decadent contrivances as reason.
We grow strong in the dark, unseen. We do not need to be consistent.
We do not find fascination in truth, only in darkness.
Alliances are temporary expedients rather than alignments of ideas.
Allies are discarded as soon as they cease to be useful.
Statements resemble rather than convey knowledge.
We use them as a way of belonging rather than knowing.
We do not need to describe the world, only our place in it,
with Shibboleths, passwords, noises like the call of an animal.
Conspiracy replaces truth as a totems we can gather round,
and if this is the only purpose our words serve
they are truth-proof, for they lose none of their force
no matter how often they are contradicted.
We distill the world into competing visions,
and discard the evidence for any of them,
and this is how we imagine we will be redeemed.

Now we gather around our own isolated camp fires,
warming our hands against the burning books,
telling tales of how the sun was just a trick,
a ploy our enemies used to enslave us long ago,
and how the darkness has set us free,
and will endure for a thousand years
or whatever the highest number is
that anyone can still count to
before being cast out as one of those experts
while our enemies sit around their own fires
telling the same tale. Huddled around fires
we whisper rumours of distant wars,
unimaginable evils stacked up
and propped against each other
on the endless shelves of imagined history
where we condemn each other,
until our accusations embrace
like exhausted boxers,
while in the dark,
beyond the light of the camp fire,
beyond the flickering familiarities
to which we cling in its unreliable light,
the solstice prowls in the dark once more,
its sable pelt velvet and invisible,
unknowable,
waiting to consume us.

The good guys

Gloria Steinem said "women want a men’s movement; we are literally dying for it." More recently, the playwright Eve Ensler, in the context of the current focus on sexual harassment and abuse following the Weinstein revelations, said "I am over the passivity of good men. Where the hell are you?"

Where are all the good guys?

As women refuse to tolerate the intolerable any longer, as they say #MeToo and speak up about the sexual harassment and assault they have suffered, some after remaining silent for many decades, there are clear responses men are being called upon to make. They must remain silent while women bear witness to what they have suffered and articulate the anger they have long suppressed. They must hold themselves accountable for their own misconduct, irrespective of where it falls on whatever spectrum might be proposed to evaluate its severity. They must speak up when they see that misconduct in others, and cease being "passive."

However, it is misleading to think that this in any way forms the basis of being "good men," as Ensler and others put it. It's not just that there is no exculpation in not being responsible for improper behaviour, for being able to say "I'm not like that. I don't behave that way. I'm one of the good guys. Not all men!" You can't get off this hook, it goes in too deep. Nor does understanding the obligation on all men to eliminate this behaviour, whether or not they are individually responsible for it, confer any special virtue or deserve any recognition. Any cookies men feel entitled to should stick in their throats.

Gloria Steinem is mistaken in her call for a men's movement. There already is a men's movement: it's called Patriarchy. She is confusing the absence of a negative with the presence of a positive, confusing the necessary with the sufficient, confusing an effect achieved through the application of stimulus with one achieved through the removal of an inhibitor. This mistake is perpetuating the misleading idea that there can be "good guys" somehow.

There are no good guys.

While a system of privilege and oppression exists, no-one who benefits from it, no matter how well-intentioned their actions, no matter if those actions are directed towards dismantling that very system, should feel good about their actions. While a man's agency differs from a woman's, even if that agency is used to challenge rather than perpetuate that difference, it is not something to feel good about. Men cannot be satisfied with their conduct even when it is precisely what is called for, because it is a product of their circumstances and those circumstances are not satisfactory. While a man may draw inspiration from the incredible courage of women who are speaking out, and run whatever risks challenging misbehaviour among his peer group might entail as a consequence, the bravery of those men today does not redeem the decades of cowardice from which they are belatedly stirred. There is no redemption for men.

Of course men should behave in the way they are being called upon to act. It is necessary. But they should be under no illusions that it is sufficient. Not being a bad guy does not make you a good guy.

The delusion that there can be some redemption leads to some toe-curlingly awful utterances. Consider the "apology" made by Louis CK. I think Lena Headey sums it up pretty accurately when she describes it as "a shitshow of narcissistic cock soup." We can all feel "sorry" a few generations from now when sexual harassment is the subject of some future episode of "horrible histories" or similar, used to educate children about how appalling their ancestors were, the way we feel "sorry" about slavery or burning witches. At the moment we are still a long way from being able to express regret. We are nowhere near being clear of the debris of this wreck. Attempting the retrospect necessary for remorse is premature. 

However, there is a way men can be "the good guys."

This assertion that there are no good guys is not mere self-flagellation, as performative in its own way as Louis CK's over-elaborate confession. I'm not writing this as an act of self-indulgence as flagrant and egregious as the various excuses offered by way of apology by the celebrities caught up in Weinstein's wake. There is a positive course of action men can take, rather than just a negative course of action from which they must desist, but recognising it requires clearing away any misconceptions about becoming "good guys" just by modifying your behaviour and no longer making a nuisance of yourself.

Men must challenge privilege in general. They must tear down the abstract template of privilege of which Patriarchy is just one concrete instantiation. Otherwise the system of which Patriarchy is just one manifestation will endure, and find new ways to enslave us. If men stop oppressing women it gives them an opportunity to reflect on the ways they themselves are oppressed. That opportunity is squandered if men are content to be "good guys" merely on the basis of no longer being "bad guys." Indeed, the whole endeavour is doomed to failure because it doesn't go far enough. Privilege will merely re-assert itself in new ways.

Women are discovering a depth of anger that surprises even them. Men must discover their own rage at a system of privilege that extends far beyond Patriarchy that turned them into the cause of women's anger.

Swamp thing

When I was a boy
I wished I was a dog. An injured dog
that someone beautiful nursed back to health
somewhere it was safe to be helpless
and I was treated with concern and sympathy.
I wished this because I already knew
as far back as I can remember
I was repulsive,
it was not safe,
and no-one cared,
at least, not as much as they would about a dog.

Once,
just once,
I'd like to know what it's like
to be touched by someone
as though they thought I was beautiful,
and more than just a means to an end,
more than just a fuck,
to feel them encounter my skin,
their meticulous attention and caress
hushed with the awe and reverence,
with which one treads
upon the threshold of a miracle,
and we would hold our breath together
to arrest the passage of time
and preserve this perfect moment.

At least I used to feel that way
until I realised if they did
I wouldn't believe them.
I'd assume it was all some elaborate joke,
and the joke was on me, because I'm repulsive.
My self loathing turned all tenderness to lies
I thought the only intimacy I could enjoy
would have to be taken, not received,
to be stolen, a fantasy made real
by a violence that was all that was left
that I could trust,
even though it would destroy
the only thing I ever wanted:
to be touched as though I was beautiful.

So I went into the woods
where no-one would be able to find me,
and covered my skin with mud and excrement
and chose to be a living, walking grave
and raised a cordon of fear around myself
and made a smiling mask of my disgust,
a grimace drawn upon my face of earth,
the caricature of a smile scraped
by a finger that pollutes all it touches,
and when I touch you I make you feel like dirt
but when you scream at least I know
you are not lying to me,

and when I tell others not to believe you
it is to punish you, not for anything you did,
but for my inability to believe
you could ever touch me
as though you thought
I was beautiful.

Strong

It's when you feel most weak that you are strong.
You bend but do not break. You carry on,
and even though it seems dawn will not come,
but leave you clutching cliches in the dark,
straws slipping through your fingers one by one,
you manage to hold on while hope departs.
All victories are relative, you see,
each victory but a lesser defeat,
but I'm still here! That's victory enough!
Despite the dissappointment and fatigue,
when pain defies belief and hope is gone,
it's when you feel most weak that you are strong.

Twa kultyurz

I see The List's "Hot 100" for 2017 has been published, celebrating the 100 individuals or organisations they judge have had the biggest impact on Scotland's cultural landscape, thus: "the Hot 100 is The List's annual celebration of the figures who've contributed most to the cultural landscape during the year. From chefs and theatre-makers to writers and musicians, you'll find them here."

I wish these lists would just once include scientists and engineers.

The term "cultural landscape" should have room for visionary innovators transforming the material basis of our culture, insightful investigators pioneering new ways of understanding the universe, and educators extending and enriching our common conceptual vocabulary for describing it. 

Scotland is leading the way in developing and adopting clean energy systems. These are an indispensable part of the zero emission circular post-scarcity economy that is an essential aspect of the only viable long term future we have as a species. For example, the Hywind project is a sneak preview of the future of offshore wind power. Nicola Sturgeon is attending a UN Climate Change conference tomorrow, and the authority with which she will be able to speak there is derived in no small part from Scotland's leading role in showing how a society can adapt itself to the requirements imposed on it by Climate Change.

Scientists at Glasgow University have a central role in the development of the electrochemical processes that will some day allow us to create "artificial leaves" that use atmospheric carbon dioxide to photosynthesise fuels. Its scientists have leading roles in gravitational wave detection projects that were recognised by the award of the Nobel prize in physics this year. Gravitational wave research has been underway at the University of Glasgow since "before it was fashionable," back when I was an undergraduate in 1988.

Edinburgh cafes are world famous as the place where certain novels about a boy wizard were written. However, Edinburgh's contemporary distinction in science is as the residence of Peter Higgs. The discover of the boson named after him was a key event in the experimental confirmation of the Standard Model of particle physics. Edinburgh is also the venue for progress in life sciences of global significance. The impact of Dundee's game technology is perhaps a clearer and more direct influence on "culture." 

And so on. All of these aspects of Scottish society and culture are worth recognising. Not recognising science and engineering as essential aspects of our "cultural landscape" is a casual but profound act of omission that amputates from the "Hot List" any possibility of fully appreciating all important contributions to our society. Any realistic list of 100 influential Scots should include a significant number of scientists and engineers.

Is this a stubborn persistence of C. P. Snow's "two cultures," not confined to Oxbridge but distorting our perspective in Scotland too? C. P. Snow remarked on the segregation of science and technology on one hand, and arts and humanities on the other, and bemoaned its crippling effect on society. He complained that people were selected to govern us based on their classical education without having any appreciation of scientific realities.

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s? 

"I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had."

We are often told by post-modern theorists that the conclusions we reach by means of the scientific method should be considered cultural artefacts as much as works of art, literature and music are. I experience a deep sense of hesitation when asked to accept that statement, but not because I consider scientific conclusions to have some superior status with respect to objectivity and the representation of some objective reality than artistic statements, but because their status is fundamentally different with respect to the way they are qualified. Science is conjectural in a different way from other statements generated by our culture. But let's accept for a moment the idea that scientific statements are in some way equivalent to artistic statements.

One might require some familiarity with circumstances beyond the work of art itself to fully interpret and appreciate it: its context, its predecessors relative to which it represents novelty or development, the successors for whom it is inspiration, the various movements it exemplifies, the references it makes, the technical achievement associated with its realisation, the social context in which it arises, and so on. It is reasonable to expect people to have some knowledge and even training to equip them and make them sufficiently aware of the various overlapping penumbrae and in which it stands, the hinterlands from which it is resourced to appreciate it.

Why is it not then expected of people to have at least the modicum of awareness of the background that would unlock for them the beauties of, for example, General Relativity, as an exhilirating accomplishment of the human mind. If we are to agree terms on which we can accept scientific statements as cultural artefacts, at the insistence of the very theorists who revel in lists like the "Hot 100," why do we typically dismiss the background knowledge necessary to appreciate them? Why is the mind to be furnished with knowledge of art, music and literature, but not science and technology?

The poet Kaveh Akbar said "bewilderment is at the core of every great poem." Einstein said “the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” His General Relativity is an epic just as much as the Iliad, and arguably more significant, but is treated as a mere curiosity by those unwilling to invest the effort necessary to appreciate it. We look up at the stars and marvel at their beauty. How much more beautiful are they when you begin to understand the processes that make them shine, the stages in their evolution, the intervals in space and time they encompass.

In "an anatomy of the world" John Donne wrote in 1611

"And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put out,
The sun is lost, and th'earth, and no man's wit
Can well direct him where to look for it.
And freely men confess that this world's spent,
When in the planets and the firmament
They seek so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out again to his atomies.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation;
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that then can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
This is the world's condition now, and now
She that should all parts to reunion bow,
She that had all magnetic force alone,
To draw, and fasten sund'red parts in one;"

His words show a familiarity with the scientific developments of the day - the observations and "new philosophy" of Galileo, the experiments in magnetism of William Gilbert, the Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretian atomism - which was completely up to date at the time. Yet now, over 400 years later, the scientific knowledge of those who would read these words is so utterly impoverished that they know less about science than Donne did, and their appreciation of his poetry is diminished as a consequence.

The "Hot 100" list exists in an inconsequential bubble of mutual congratulation, an irrelevant circular backslap, if it is unconnected to the scientific and technological trends and achievements that are the only real forum for progress and the only real basis for evaluating the significance of our accomplishments.

Climate change

Your words make my brain disintegrate.
I can't keep up with your lies. Logic is mush.
You prove things wrong by saying they are wrong.
According to you things are right
because everyone knows they are right.
I have neither the time nor the inclination
to keep up with your incessant deceit.

I see you, 100,000 years ago. I remember you.
I remember you. I was there when you said this before,
100,000 years ago, and we ignored you then too.
You hate that we ignored you.
You think it was because we hated you,
but we don't hate you. Up your game!
You've waited this whole time,
from when our mother made the first needle
and sewed the clothes everyone has worn ever since
without a single nod of recognition from the catwalk,
you've waited while bigger scandals broke,
and let women and snakes take the blame,
and when you had the chance to make your move
you waited, and you choose now to speak?

Rewind, mate. You've learned nothing.
Do you think that because we let you have you say,
anyone thinks you have anything worth saying?
You killed the beast that didn't need to be killed.
You sheared the sheep whose wool we didn't need.
You give us what we do not lack
and leave us without what we most need.
You prove the point that doesn't need proving.

We are not going to take you seriously
just because you can now threaten to destroy the world
with your vanity. Kill us all. You'll still be wrong. 
Wear this world like a bead on your necklace.
You will not escape our ridicule from beyond the grave.

Roll call

It’s the final parade of history.
We are lined up for inspection.
The monsters of the past have summoned us to roll call.
Colonel War paces back and forth, pauses, looks me up and down,
and, disapproving, briefly thumbs my lapel, then moves on,
his bloody hands leaving only the slightest smear of poppy red,
a smudge that is easily removed,

not lingering like an indelible stain on my memory, and I sigh,
relieved He did not grip more firmly, pull my face towards His,
as He does with some unfortunate soul further down the line,
and with a grin and grimace give instructions that can’t be forgot:

stories of the ugly deaths of beautiful people: in arctic convoys
where they burn or freeze before they have a chance to drown;
sieges at the gates of Asia, where they are outlived by a fly,
and machine guns are discarded at close quarters in the rubble
and the trenching spade becomes the weapon of choice;
tales of 18th century politics pursued by 20th century means,
and of the next war, more terrible once the politics catch up,

until Colonel War's gaping maw yawns as wide as the ovens
through which we fall beyond His infinite appetite,
turned to ash, dumped into the void
where atrocities are heaped
and humanity is unmade.

I am spared having these memories,
and so must remember those who can't forget,
and that is why I will leave the poppy in place,
in my lapel, for a little while at least.