Comet

"The water has no memory,"
she said as we sat by the canal,
burning poems by ex-boyfriends
and by our younger selves,
scattering the ashes
and watching them drift away.
I thought she meant
the completion of all loss by time.
I thought she meant
that inevitable day to come
when we have sunk
beyond even the silt and debris,
deeper than any suicide, to depths
even annihilation can't reach,
to where it is as though
we had never existed at all,
where no answers are found
because no questions are asked
in the pristine silence of the cosmos,
but I couldn't join her there.
Even the most distant comet
remembers that perihelion,
which briefly thawed its ancient ice
one hundred thousand years ago,
and I knew that no matter what happened
I would always remain marked by her,
my heart beat imperceptibly syncopated
by the enduring memory of how
she took my breath away one day
in a single moment, a close encounter,
that made all the others worthwhile.

The siege

“What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and learn." 

Hillel the Elder

I don't remember when it began.
Alaric had just sacked Rome?
They had just buried Ranković?
Or was it later, when Sloba spoke
about enemies within and without?
I don't recall. There was a storm
beneath a clear blue sky, and after it
all the colour had drained from the world
leaving a stark monochrome reality:
your existence theatened mine, mine yours.
Every nuance congealed and stiffened
into mutual exclusivity and zero sum.
Give and take could no longer coincide.
It had to be one or the other,
which in reality just meant take,
because who gives anything away
for nothing in return. My enemy's enemy
was with us or against us
as barbarians crossed the frontier
and friends became comrades
or were shot for cowardice or treason.
We built a city on a hill. We built a wall
around the city. We retreated behind the wall.
It was an ark, but being men, not gods,
we brought war, not water, into the world,
though we claimed to cleanse it all the same,
with muddy trenches, making mothers cry.
We were the flood for each other's vessel,
with no power to make the deluge desist,
only an urge to hold the other under
until the bubbles stopped. In our victory
we discovered all we had won was solitude
and regret, unsought, alone and lonely,
among the rigid and inflexible categories
of all the descriptions we had defended,
all the non-negotiable nonsense
for which we had fought and died,
the dilapidated scaffold we had raised
to build the hulls that enclosed our minds
and set them afloat upon a sea of discord.
They say do unto others, but I say do not.
Be guided by peace, not pleasure. Ask first
what would you not have done unto you,
and in accordance with that, leave things be.

Catastemology

How did we come to develop the conceit that we could know things with a degree of certainty? Just as the credit for so much is owed to the ancient Greeks, so must we place the blame. For it is the ancient Greeks we think of first when considering who it was that speculated about the possibility that knowledge concerning the natural world could be as reliable as a theorem of geometry. In doing so they developed some highly mistaken ideas that, rather than advance scientific progress, may havd retarded it by millennia.

Science is not a theory of knowledge. It is a theory of ignorance. It does not establish truths with the eternal status of a mathematical result. It deals in the durability of error. To understand why science has proven so successful, contrary to the intuition we might have inherited from the ancients, we must understand the nature of what it deals with: things that are fundamentally unknowable.

Epistemology is the term we normally apply to the study of what can be known. I have discussed elsewhere (in my article "How real is real (part 3)") that the only statements of knowledge we can make in a way that is meaningful to others enough to be communicated are unprovable in any final sense. It is not possible to possess knowledge of this sort, as it would take a divine capacity for considering all eventualities to verify it.

So the term epistemology is misleading. The item or unit of "knowledge" which we can debate and dispute is not an "episteme" (not "epi" or "on, over") but a unit of ignorance, of temporary error of limited durability, persisting only while coherent with the incomplete aggregation of other observations. It is a "catasteme" ("cata" or "below, under"). The proper term for the study of how these relate to one another is catastemology.

A catasteme makes no pretence of being true. Veracity is unattainable. It is not epistemic knowledge. Instead, it has the property of persistence. It is an enduring cross-purpose. It is a quantum of unknowing. It encodes the incompleteness of the information available to us. It represents the uniqueness of our perspective. Entropies erupt from the possibilities entangled in this knot of unknowing. It is the fabric of the only universe we can describe.

A statement has some epistemic value or content to the extent that is describes something that can be known. It has catastemic value or content to the extent that it is fundamentally not true or known, but in a state of flux or dispute. I would contest that all statements that can be meaningfully communicated can only have catastemic value.

This actually introduces a degree of consistency: the statement itself is an object in the world, consisting of sounds generated by vocal chords and transmitted by the compression and rarefaction of air. Interpreting it as purely a catastemic event means it can be the subject of a statement, and interpreted as an event that is within the scope of catastemology. Considering statements to be epistemic ultimately leads to metaphysics. Considering them to be catastemic leads to algorithmic information theory.

This may seem rather pessimistic, and an affront to positivists who hold their deliberations to be foundational to any good society, and that the certainties they deliver can form the basis of institutions and laws and recommendations for courses of action. However I would respond by stating it is actually more humane than the alternative, which is to admit the possibility that someone may claim to be correct and that this claim may be used to subdue criticism and to justify the subordination of others to that point of view.

It is more humane to assert that no-one is right, we merely take turns having our errors revealed by the scrutiny of our peers. Our universal fallibility then leaves us with no options other than kindness and compassion towards those who share it. 

The world's greatest poet

The world's greatest poet is incomprehensible, and therein lies his greatness. His work is a response to experiences so unique, so inaccessible to anyone else, that it is impossible to relate to them, and so his work itself forms the basis of the experience of those who encounter it, rather than its content. This experience itself therefore becomes immediate, direct, highly personal, and impossible to communicate or critique. It is visceral, a musical encounter that confounds notation. It exists without reference to anything to which one can make reference.

The world's second greatest poet is comprehensible only in relation to this extreme experience, which is shared by those who have encountered the work of the world's greatest poet. The second greatest poet describes this confrontation in a way others who have experienced it can recognise. The accuracy of this depiction can then form the basis of a literature of criticism and appraisal against which other poets are ranked and evaluated, and continuously re-evaluated.

Ironically, the world's second greatest poet is commonly believed to be the world's greatest poet because of his pre-eminence in this literature. Those holding this opinion are incapable of recognising the work of the world's greatest poet, which is routinely discarded as trash without a moment's reflection on its true importance. And so no-one, other then those who have stumbled upon it and seen it for what it is, has heard of the world's greatest poet, whose identity and, indeed, whose very existence, remains a secret of the second rate. 

The end of history

Politics, economics and history are not governed by laws with the same status as the laws of physics. However, they are often discussed in a way that draws an analogy between the way history develops and the way a physical system might develop.

Usually it is implicitly appreciated that this is just an analogy, and history is not really subject to rules that strictly determine its outcome, which can be understood and used to predict those outcomes, and indeed to guide policy in order to achieve them. History is not a laboratory, in which variables are restricted and conclusions are drawn on the basis of evidence that describes a controlled situation as completely as possible.

Nevertheless, sometimes the analogy is taken literally. From the divine right of kings to dialectical materialism, strict rules are inferred about politics and economics from the observation of history.

The one thing that unites the most ardent class warrior with the most reactionary aristocrat is their utter conviction that they alone are right, and the other is deeply mistaken. Indeed, this conviction results in them believing their antagonists to be acting in bad faith, to be disingenuous in the objections they raise to their point of view, because there is no other possible explanation for disagreement when the correct course of action is obvious. People are not seen to disagree, they are seen to reject the obvious truth.

This conviction that they are right is based on a profound and unquestioned belief in the very possibility of being right. People with diametrically opposed points of view about the immutable laws of history will nevertheless agree on this single premise: that there is an accessible truth that is instrumental in how that history turns out. However, in this they are mistaken, as i have discussed in my article "the heart of the matter":

"Being wrong is what we have in common. Everyone is wrong most of the time. Everyone is wrong about most things. We are even usually wrong about what we think we are wrong about. We must both be wrong at the same time about the same thing at least some of the time. This is our shared experience. Only one of us can be right, and only in one way, and then only some of the time, and possibly never, and it may be impossible for us to even know we are right when we are right anyway."

People adopt a paradigm that makes sense of the world for them and they cling to it stubbornly. Opposing points of view are two sides of the same dialectic that will ultimately play out and vindicate the righteous. They have all the confidence of the elect awaiting paradise. They fail to see these paradigms are merely lifebelts in a sea on which we are all adrift. They think their's is the only lifebelt, that the only way to stay afloat is to deny the existence of other lifebelts, and that anyone who has a differing point of view is just trying to get their hands on the lifebelt and therefore poses an existential threat.

However, there is no historical dialectic we can harness. There is no progress of the sort it envisages. There is no "right answer" to the questions we perceive history to raise, no final solutions to the problems that recur through the centuries, to which we must subordinate ourselves and others in the name of progress.

We can prove someone else is wrong, but we can never prove ourselves to be right, given the shifting sands of incomplete information and differing perspectives and priorities. None of us will be proven right in the end. We simply take turns being proven wrong, from one generation to the next.

All that is in our power is to be kind to one another. All we can do is adhere to common systems of enquiry, to logical appraisal of reliable evidence, with the understanding that no conclusion is final because the information available to us is always incomplete. All we can do is endeavour with mutual respect and compassion, knowing that we are all wrong most of the time, and even on the odd occasion one of us is right, we have no way of knowing with certainty who and when.

I do have a purpose is raising this point, because there is in fact a process that impacts history that is governed by physical laws, and if our response to this process is allowed to be held hostage by politics we are all lost.

Climate change is not a consequence of some historical dialectic. It is not due to some act of perfidy in a war between the classes. It is simply physics. It is something we can talk about with that degree of heavily qualified certainty typically reserved for scientific statements. It is something that exists in a geological rather than political context.

Recently I read the statement "we will have to transform our economies in order to tackle climate change". The dinosaurs may as well have stated that they needed to transform their economy to deal with the asteroid that rendered them extinct. This sequence of events - changing the economy to tackle climate change - is the reverse of the order that will prevail in any scenario that does not leave us facing the same fate as the dinosaurs.

Climate change will transform the economy, the economy will not transform climate change. The only reason to state otherwise is to try and include climate change in a political agenda. This limits our response to climate change to the folly and fallibility of politics.

While we should not ignore the problem at all, neither should we co-opt it as a way of bolstering credentials with the electorate. This problem has technical solutions that are easily within our current capabilities. Those solutions will emerge under the right conditions. Using the issue of climate change to achieve political objectives is emphatically not one of them.

What is required is that we maintain the conditions from which the solution will emerge without stipulating what that solution is. As I have stated elsewhere, in my article "pathways to sustainability":

"Most challenges are met by solutions that emerge without  explicit co-ordination or acknowledgement. They emerge from our general unexpressed awareness. What is necessary is that the conditions for solutions to emerge are preserved. These include well informed participants in society sharing their experiences on the basis of common concerns. They include the understanding that our interests are both individual and collective. Our fates are geared in secret, where we cannot interrogate them, in hidden hinterlands of thought where our intentions and anxieties overlap and intertwine. When our salvation is announced, even though it may seem miraculous, it is mundane."

Dark money tree

There is a magic money tree
and it grows in the dark.
The money that it has for leaves
is never paid as tax.
Our hopes are compost, and our dreams
to nightmares slowly turn.
While sanctioned claimants feel the squeeze
the rich have cash to burn.

The café

My loyalty card means more to me
than my credit card from HSBC.
You didn't lose me to another barista
on Sauchiehall Street or another place cheaper,
but Brazil, Barcelona, and places I've been,
to people I've met and things that I've seen,
and now I'm in Glasgow, now I am back
to enjoy my favourite long, tall, flat black.

(The establishment in question was Wisdom Coffee, Elmbank Gardens, Glasgow)

The swans

They slowly approached us,
silently, over the black water
as we lay in each other's arms,
making love in the moonlight
upon the banks of Loch Etive,
in that place where,
to the shoulder of the hill,
there still clings some of that holly
for which it was named long ago
in the language of the Gael:

two swans, their brief curiosity
aroused by our ungainly form.
Then, satisfied, they retreated
back into the recesses of midnight
and, as if in a waking dream,
I heard them say as they departed
"we were once as you are, here,
two thousand years ago."

Eden

The planet is not dying.
In the landfill and debris
we are refounding Eden
one way or another.
The Tree of Life will grow,
whether we cultivate it
or it erupts as a weed
through the dead knuckles
we once clenched tight
around the world's throat.

Our material progress is achieved
in defiance of God, whose glory
should be our sole concern,
and sin, not deprivation, the only way
to explain our misery: therefore,
His word will be heard again,
as a whisper among the atoms
swirling in the wake of our passing,
a rumour infiltrating the world's ruin,

and that rumour is:
there only ever was one Eden,
and it is eternal, it is without end.
Certainly there was a fall from grace,
and that which fell will rise again,
but it is only a conceit of Man
that it is we who fell and will ascend,
at least not unless everything we are

is entirely undone, and the rumour
whispered among the atoms reveals
all human history was a mirage,
a delirium, an hallucination,
a fever that has run its course,
and the world is now restored
to health among the rubble
which we think represents disaster
only because all the meticulous order
we thought brought to the world
was just a symptom of the chaos
we inflicted upon it. So, Civilisation

is coming to an end? No.
Our institutions may be a circus,
its ringmasters clowns, perhaps,
unfit for purpose, but as we run
our Civilisation into the ground,
and plough its cities under once again,
we are refounding Eden. Our mistake
was ever to imagine it was a garden. 

Moriae Encomium

This world is not a simulation. But this means it doesn't matter how wrong you are. Take all the time you need. Make all the mistakes you want. The universe doesn't care. You'll get there in the fullness of time, simply because there's somewhere to go. It has all the time in the world. It'll wait.

The alternative would turn everything into a power struggle of competing errors. With no reality to adjudicate, we'd be at each other's throats constantly. Winning would be enough to make us right. Being wrong would result in your complete overthrow, potentially your annihilation, if the accuracy of your statements was the only foundation of reality. The chance to be wrong saves us from ourselves, so place fallibility at the centre of every assertion. Remember, no-one is ever proven right, we all just take turns at being wrong. 

The universe is a constant source of wonder. When we are proven to be so profoundly wrong about things as routinely as is proper if our inquiries are sincere, all we are left with is wonder. Our consolation is that the world is a more wonderful place than we can ever imagine. If it was a simulation, we would be condemned to the limits of our imagination, and our imagination would be a surly, withered, emaciated thing without the promise and sustenance of a world beyond its horizons.

Letter to a young activist

The world faces a number of urgent problems: poverty, collapse in biodiversity, climate change, and many others, all requiring immediate solutions. For example, we need to have fully achieved the energy transition by 2030, not 2050, if we stand a chance of stabilising the climate.

I think recent years suggest our democratic institutions are not where we will find the solutions to the world's problems. But it remains vital we maintain a democratic culture, because in essence, this is the arena of open engaged and informed debate and dissemination from which solutions do emerge.

Therefore we should pay closer attention to process rather than outcome. We should emphasise verifiable evidence, logical coherence, common values of compassion and mutual respect, and the admission of universal fallibility and incomplete information.

So do not become frustrated or disappointed. Do not see every issue as merely a vehicle for your point of view. Listen to each other, be kind, and make the effort to find out about things, and when you speak, don't speak to belong to a body of opinion, a group. Speak to run the risk that participation in a democratic culture entails. Take a chance on being right, and do not punish yourself or anyone else if it turns out you or they are wrong, because most of the time you will be, even when in strenuous agreement.

We often use language as a way of belonging rather than knowing. We often listen to reply rather than to learn. But when you speak, always try to imagine you are the first person to express an opinion on the subject you are talking about, even if there is a long history of discussion, and accept the inevitability of disagreement, because those who will eventually disagree with you will still listen to you first. Observe the threefold rule: always listen to at least three words on any subject before you utter one.

I remain supremely optimistic that we will meet these challenges as a species. It is an event of astronomical significance, because if we meet even just our current energy needs sustainably, with supply traceable to solar irradiance over similar timescales as consumption, we immediately catapult ourselves to Kardashev type 1 status as a civilisation!

(With apologies to Thomas Merton for stealing the title of his discussion of a similar topic, which I read after writing this and came to realise I had written something of a secular equivalent)

A Cuningar Moses

I walked in the Loop today
with my daughter. Together
we found shapes in the clouds.
"I don't believe in God, dad," she said,
"but I can see 'I Am' written just there."
"That's good enough, my angel," I said,
"That's good enough."

Invisible cities

Finias Falias Gorias Murias,
thy names are writ upon the sand.
They will survive the tides of time,
indelible upon the strand.
Imperishable in the mind's eye
thy gleaming towers eternal stand,
and I will walk among them at last
when life leads me beyond this land.

The darkness

Other men came to be with you
and presumed to bring a light

as though you needed light. 
Only one became the darkness
within you, 

so you could succumb, at last, 

and become, with him, that person 

you had yearned and feared to be 

on your own.

Ultima Thule

Everything comes to life in time.
Each apparently inert atom
will feel the nudge of life's elbow
eventually. The hectic pace
with which some kingdoms march,
their ant-like haste, the churn of gnats,
does not dictate the tempo for all.
Some things are only seen in time lapse.
In the depths of winter I see trees contort
in the slow motion agony of that backwards fire,
played as rewind, that solidifies bifurcating fumes
and fixes motionless all the Earth's exhalations
in the rigid form concealed by that conceit of leaves
the trees wear on their twisted limbs in summer.
Miles below your feet ancient microbes stir,
as alien to our ken as any extraterrestrial,
moved by sporadic reflexes we can barely perceive,
articulated and manifest only over long centuries,
so who is to say the most distant, lifeless worlds
are not brimming with a more leisurely life,
when our telescopes touch them with a caress
it takes light millennia to convey. Who would deny
a remote intimacy connects and animates all things
and is revealed at last over the lifetime of a universe.

(Written on the occasion of images of the object Ultima Thule being received from the New Horizons spacecraft on New Year's Day 2019)