Hope

Even in the darkest night,
especially then, when it seems
the Sun has lost its way,
and there will be no respite
from a darkness that seems to well up
irresistibly from deep inside,
overflowing through every pore
and orifice, to spill like bitumen
saturating all our words
and thoughts and actions,
making everything we hold onto
slick, so that we lose our grip,
and fall, with no ground in sight,
with nothing to tether the night,
no leash to restrain its obsidian bite,
every blessing we do not count
becoming a curse, and no light
at the tunnel's end,
because it goes straight down
and we are the pebble dropped
to plumb its depths,
and confirm it is bottomless,
even then,
especially then,
I weep with hope,
pure, unalloyed hope,
a rogue spark struck from the vacuum
by an unseen hand.
These tears you see
are tears of hope.
There are no tears
that are not ultimately
tears of hope. Once the heart
has performed its stripping run,
and spirit flows, I weep with hope,
for we are not what we do
because of our circumstances,
we are what we do despite them.
We are not creatures of acquiescence,
we are creatures of refusal,
strong, affirmative refusal,
and so all tears are ultimately
tears of hope. All tears
are tears of triumph.

Let Eton stand

"Floreat Etona"

- the motto of Eton College

Other edifices may burn down -
royal residences, tower blocks -
but let Eton stand and flourish
for now. Let its playing fields
remain innocent and unmolested
by the trench and barbed wire of Flanders.

Let friendly bombs fall elsewhere,

while old boys address us on the radio,
with whimsical contempt: "floreat Etona
et flagret Grenfell," their polite words
lending fragrance to miasmas of privilege
that stifle all other voices like mustard gas,
or smoke in burning tower blocks, smiling
as they strangle us with their subjunctives
and murder us with their "common sense".

Let Eton stand, its halls intact,
not as some mystery to invite speculation
like the works of Ozymandias,
but to remind us of what it stood for:
six centuries perverting education
into a weapon of class war,
making a privilege of the right
of all who can benefit from it.

You say tear Eton down.
Let Eton stand. Let it fall
into discredited dilapidation.
Let it rest like a derelict wreck
upon the bank of a civil discourse
that flows past it's decaying edifice,
its walls a warning, environs haunted,
precincts shunned by the very children
whose minds it once poisoned
because of the monsters lurking there.

Anointed

We are not minds. We are not bodies.
We are embodied minds. We are thinking bodies.
Beauty, music, cosmos: this is what we are,
not sexbots and simulations, but the opposite.
We confront the true terrifying reality,
embrace incandescent beauty we find in others
until it obliterates all the solipsisms
where our ego found refuge. We are made
of connections that liberate us from ego,
of all the constellations we can see,
all the many beautiful patterns of stars
we observe from our single point of view,
all the artifacts of our brief trajectory
beneath a sky filled with astronomies of self,
beautiful illusions that eventually yield to parallax,

but even once our journeys come to an end,
our atoms dissagregating and recombining
in some other organism, subordinated to another life,
the stars that once assembled to tell our tales
gathering in shapes we no longer recognise,
witnessed according to another perspective,
conquered by an unfamiliar zodiac,
yet we survive, in the possibility of beauty
to which our brief lives gave testament,
for which there is no deletion, no erasure.
We instantiate the universe, we do not record it.
We are the mistakes made by a blind amnesiac god
groping and casting about for the keys to his creation,
but we are also that world saturated with light
which they unlock. This is no contradiction,
unless one one assumes our ignorance is all there is,
and constructs an entire universe out of it.

We infer our individual existence from astronomies of self,
from the way we perceive how the different forms
the universe can take seem to queue up for our attention,
the way sights and sounds congregate like constellations
only we can see. We take the existence of a point of view
as evidence we exist to experience it. We confer on ourselves
the same degree of reality we attribute to our observations,
but there is no logical necessity or inevitability to this.
We merely borrow the uniqueness of our experiences.
Our philosophies insist it was always ours, but it isn't.
We are followed by shadows. We think they are our own,
but all we know is that they seem to follow something,
and we decide it must be us, because what else could it be?
We think we are dancers because we see the shadows dance,
but in the end all the shadows are evidence of is the light.

When I was young I had an epiphany.
I understood my own insignificance.
I was lost in an infinite mist,
and felt myself disappear completely,
and become one with it. I remember finding
the word "glory" most closely approximating
a description of the experience, although of course
that cosmic indifference that annihilates or transforms
according to the spirit in which we choose to meet it
cannot be communicated. Ever since
my entire morality has been dictated
by the extent to which an idea or action
is consistent with or contradicts that insight,
that awareness of my own insignificance.
My aesthetics have been governed
by harmonies through which one can negotiate a path
back to that perfect monotone in which they are fulfilled
and cease to exist. At times the world seemed nothing more
than an interruption of my ecstasy. At the same time,
there was nothing the words of men could rob of beauty,
no condemnation that was not hollow, no gutter
in which I did not find the precinct of eternity,
nothing discarded as broken or useless
from which the superficial evaluations of man did not peel
to reveal the universe in all its beauty. I felt anointed.

Equinox

Imagine, for a moment, the Year swigging seasons from her glass of light, the Sun, ever ready with a refill, laughing as she grows inebriated with Summer, but then she pauses, places a finger upon the rim, and just for a second gets it to sing, and everything stops
and listens to that single clear note.

She tethers and tames my turbulent dreams and haunts my waking hours. Leaves blush
and coyly retreat before rumours of Winter
whispered in the breeze, while veteran crows
in convocation hoarsely rebuke us, and confide
it will get worse before it gets better. That dry chill that hangs in the air for just one half an hour between the seasons insinuates an equinox, like an undecided coin toss,
and by the time you turn your glass to see it, the moment has passed, and clouds grow metallic with all the weather's long neglected wrath, and rather than plot a short course back to port, we now must find our way home through the storm.

The last world war

It is often said that the scale of effort required to tackle the challenges facing us due to the Climate Emergency requires us to go on a war footing. We look at the task in hand and, as we seek comparisons to help us understand its magnitude, we think about the massive mobilisation of people and resources, and the sense of common purpose, that took place the last time the globe was convulsed by war.

But we are already at war, and it is a world war, but is not the third world war. It is the last world war, because it is a war on the world itself.

It is the perfection of war. All previous conflicts may be described as having been disputes about access to resources. This war is prosecuted by the use of those resources. It has been perfected to the point that its scope is now truly total, its casualties are all civilians, and the damage it inflicts is entirely collateral. We have managed to shift all of its costs from our ledgers and declared them to be externalities. This war is civilisation laid bare as death cult.

The peace treaty that will bring an end to this conflict is therefore similarly broad in scope. When representatives of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change gather in Glasgow next year at COP26 what is required is not an agreement between people, not a protocol between nations, not another deal enacted between mere humans.

What is required is that the party that has been missing on the previous 25 occasions is brought to the table, through whatever digital representation of our ecosystems is necessary, whatever metrics and KPIs we can formulate to describe progress in achieving our Sustainable Development Goals. We need next year to make a comprehensive and lasting Peace Treaty with Planet Earth.

And once we establish an equitable and sustainable basis to pursue our individual and collective interests within the constraints this Peace Treaty with Planet Earth will impose on us, we will find ourselves able to make peace with each other at last. For what resources will we have to quarrel over when the energy that powers our circular economies is not generated from scarce fuels extracted in remote locations, but is available at zero incremental cost to everyone.

Digitalisation and the implementation of a Peace Treaty with Planet Earth

We talk a good game about digitalisation to ensure we embed our technologies as effectively as possible in our disparate interconnected infrastructures and nest our systems in a way that minimises friction in our workflow and supports de-siloing of our processes to deliver optimised full life-cycle performance, and so on, and so forth ...

... but there is one literally global system that we need to accommodate all of this in, and we are still neglecting its digital representation in a manner compatible with our procedures, the digital ecosystem where the word "ecosystem" is not just a glib metaphor, and "life-cycle" is a living reality. This concern is discussed by Gavin Starks in "building the web of environmental data" and David Jensen and Jillian Campbell in "the promise and peril of a digital ecosystem for the planet".

As Jensen and Campbell of the United Nations Environment Programme have said, "key decisions are needed in the next 12 months to set in motion a robust architecture and governance framework," from the Climate Action Summit in New York this month, through COP25 in Santiago de Chile in December, to COP26 in Glasgow. We have fewer than 18 months to reach a peace treaty with planet earth. This must be the objective for COP26 in Glasgow at the end of next year.

Because we are currently waging a decades long undeclared war on our environment that sees us dropping the equivalent of hundreds of thermonuclear devices a day in the form of man-made radiative forcing, increasingly manifesting itself in climate change related destruction and disruption.

It is a war we cannot win. It is a war we wage on ourselves. It is a war that is so refined that its only casualties are non-combatants and all the damage it inflicts is collateral.

It is civilisation as death cult, a cult that has brainwashed us so thoroughly we are happy to press everyone's neck down on the altar. Let's start using the words "collateral damage" instead of "externalities" to describe climate change related losses from now on. Let's not be economical with the truth. Let's call a spade a spade. Let's make peace with the planet.

But to understand that peace treaty in the level of detail that will allow us to implement its terms we need "a digital ecosystem for the planet to properly assess the risks and opportunities". We need to turn the Internet of Things into the Internet of Impacts, an Internet of Carbon Footprints, and assimilate objects that represent the environmental consequences of our actions and behaviour into our calculations. As Jensen and Campbell point out, "we are not even effectively measuring global progress against the SDGs [Sustainable Development Goals]. A total of 68% of the 93 environmental SDGs indicators cannot yet be measured due to a lack of data".

This is not happening in a vacuum. There is a venerable history to these ideas, going back through the "Digital Earth" concept discussed by Al Gore in 1998 to the "Geoscope" idea proposed by Buckminster Fuller in 1962. So we have no excuse for being unprepared, now that we are confronted by the urgent requirement for a solution. 

Fortunately with protocols like Open Banking and Open Finance we already have a basis to build on, as discussed by Gavin Starks of the pivotal "Icebreaker One" initiative, "bridging the data gaps between finance, assets, policy and science to deliver a zero-carbon future". This will be a "‘coming of age’ for the Internet of Things". As is said, “for this vision to become a reality, public and private sector actors must take deliberate action and collaborate to build a global digital ecosystem for the planet — one consisting of data, infrastructure, rapid analytics, and real-time insights” and "we can only do this with silo-busting collaborations that work together to help bring us environmental intelligence for everything and everyone".

To critics

There are few things worse than bad criticism:
the self-satisfied mumbling and fumbling
of that prowling imbecile bird catcher
who plucks the bird of paradise from its flight,
then complains that it makes a poor paperweight.

Let the bird fly unmolested, and pray, and beg
the gods of the wind to take that pile of papers
that you therefore surrender to their mercy,
that your own words might, for just a moment,
out of the corner of an unexpectant eye,
be mistaken for such a miracle on the wing.

Enlightenment

And in the end we knew the world
was an act of selective blindness.

We were and always had been
saturated with infinite light,

but our awareness limited to collisions
from which we inferred blunt objects.

We called the stumbling and guesswork,
the cascade of implications, "existence,"

but once the blindfolds were removed
we all stood still and saw at last,

in that instant of perfect knowledge,
that we were, and always had been,

one.

"There's no future, and England's dreaming"

It is often remarked, as the SNP contingent at Westminster strives to avert a No Deal Brexit, that it is not Scotland's job to save England from itself, and that the SNP should concern themselves solely with securing Scottish Independence.

Let us set to one side the rather fitting analogy I read the other day, that "if you want a divorce from a psychopathic partner you would still try to stop him killing your kids. The murder would strengthen your case but you'd still have a duty to try to prevent it." (Ian McLean, @embradon)

Scotland's role in saving England from itself is precisely the Whig narrative on which the Union is based. It is central to the story told in the late 18th and early 19th century, as the British Empire established itself, in which England's institutional development provides the basis for world domination, while Scotland's intellect and conscience tempers England's excesses. That is literally the now defunct mythistoire of the UK: a story that preserves a role for both England and Scotland in their joint imperial endeavour; a myth used to legitimise a political settlement that is now unravelling.

Because the interesting part is that the equation no longer holds, even on its own terms: English institutions no longer dominate the world, so Scotland is no longer required to save England from itself. The Union and the Empire are inextricably linked in terms of the mythology used to justify both. When one goes, the other must follow.

There are two responses to this endgame, one obsessed with the past and one focussed on the future. Scotland's Independence movement epitomises the latter, while Brexit represents the former: as John Lydon (former Sex Pistol, and now committed Brexiteer) sang, "there's no future, and England's dreaming."

We are wandering lost and Brexit-blind through the aboriginal dreamtime of Britain's post-imperial nostalgia, through the scriptless pantomime of our punch and judy politics, finding even the lunatic fringe has a lunatic fringe. Except the UK's mythistoire reduces this dreamtime to a nightmare, because England has no other origin myth (indeed the genre of fantasy literature was largely created by Tolkien and others in an effort to redress this deficiency).

Scotland can help guide England towards a more authentic sense of itself, one that is not poisoned by stale nostalgia, by helping usher it through this crisis. Then we can at last create a new narrative to replace the old one tearing itself apart with contradictions, one in which we can meet the future as independent European nations. 

"This album was knocked off"

I've been listening recently to the neglected classic "Clutching at Straws" by Marillion (EMI, released 1987, produced by Chris Kimsey).

For me, this album conjures a post-exam season holiday, camping by Ayr race course with friends, age 17, between sitting highers and finding out the results, a cherished memory of days that will be forever summer in my mind, and fellowship celebrated in drunken irresponsible excess as one can only do when one is 17.

It's also the best Fish-era Marillion album. Fish finally achieves a degree of lyrical maturity, balancing flamboyance with judicious restraint when required to provide a coherent and compelling vision and narrative.

While not a concept album, the opening three song sequence remains one of the finest examples of through-composition in progressive rock. When Mark Kelly's keyboard riff kicks in, in "That Time of the Night," and then over the next few bars Pete Trewavas' bass tentatively finds its way inside the groove, you know Marillion have finally arrived and found their authentic voice, after all the nods in the directions of Genesis, King Crimson, et al. in earlier albums. The instrumental departments play as though governed by a single mind, taking you to the devastating finale and downbeat, physically and morally exhausted outro, ending the sequence with crushing finality rather than cop out fade.

The prescience and relevance of songs like "White Russian" and "Slainte Mhath" only seems to become more urgent after the three decades since they were written. They got right so much about what we still get so wrong. The pop exuberance of "Incommunicado" remains irrepressible, while the reflective and highly personal notes of "Torch Song" and "The Last Straw" still sound pitch perfect.

They achieve heights with this album they were not to reach with Hogarth until "Brave". But "Brave" was the outcome of eight months of retreat, recording in a remote cave in France, presided over by an obsessed and fanatical sound engineer sacrificing sleep to craft a masterpiece. As a surreptitious sleeve note points out, "Clutching at Straws" was "knocked off," written and recorded with a degree of haste to complete an obligation to a record company and get released from a deal, while Fish and lead guitarist Steve Rothery came to blows in the studio and the band ultimately disintegrated.

So, songs of a time and place that nevertheless do not date. Give it a listen.

James Kelly: a tribute

So, even in the bruised and blighted crop that represents Scottish Labour's current front bench at Holyrood, James Kelly is discarded. His relegation to the justice brief from economy is seen as a humiliation.

No-one quite epitomises Labour's toxic combination of spurious self-righteous indignation, incompetence and entitlement as well as Kelly. In Scottish Labour's slighting of Kelly I see the horrified reflex of a monster catching sight of its own reflection. In an area where historically one might have remarked that a chimpanzee could get elected if it wore a red rosette, Kelly must surely have made his colleagues wish a chimpanzee had stood instead.

He is a one man argument for not allowing the indefinite election of MSPs on the list, where the only talent they need to demonstrate is one for careerist intrigue. Surely if someone has no discernible ability beyond the repetition of party mantras and the formation of alliances behind closed doors in their ascent of the greasy pole, and has so little appeal to the actual electorate, offering such a poor response to genuine scrutiny, that they cannot get elected in a constituency, they should only be allowed in on the list a couple of times before they get put out of everyone else's misery. We do not need a parliament of back-scratchers.

Of course, Kelly is not the only MSP one might describe this way, but in a field that is exceptional in its awfulness, replete with examples from across both Labour and Tory cohorts, forlorn runners in a race for meaningful impact for whom the finishing line of political effectiveness must remain a distant dream reserved for others, Kelly comes last. 

The term "idiot" is over-used and often misapplied. It originates in the Greek of πεντηκονταετία Athens, "ἰδιώτης" meaning a private person, a layman, an amateur, and crucially, in the case of Kelly, someone with no particular skill or knowledge making them suitable for public life and high office. One might say the word applies to Kelly in both its original and modern sense. In the original sense an idiot was unconcerned with public office, and was the sort of person Pericles might have been describing when he talks in his Funeral Oration of "him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" (τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ᾽ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν), although where Pericles is discussing inclination, we refer to ability. Indeed, given how useless he has proved to be, we might wish Kelly had been as disinclined as Pericles describes, and been an idiot in the original sense. However, there is nothing that Scottish Labour offers if not an arena for the ambition of idiots (in the strictly modern sense).

Nevertheless, let us pay tribute to his great achievement: while the likes of Paul Sweeney can only aspire to a tragic and deluded lack of self-awareness, James Kelly demonstrates how to raise this chronic inadequacy of Scottish Labour politicians to the level of sublime, Aristophanic farce. Kelly's refusal to sit down when instructed by the presiding officer introduced, or rather exposed, a fundamental absurdity of his existence. The phrase "ceci n'est pas une politicien" seemed to hover implicitly over his head. His opposition to the Offensive Behaviour at Football Act has proved to be a terrible own goal (not that his Labour and Tory colleagues, for whom sectarianism and bigotry remain something from which to make political hay, mind). His repeated abject failure to comprehend his own economy brief led Nicola Sturgeon to say “after so many years in this parliament, that he doesn’t even have a basic grasp of the basic principles of government and budgeting is really quite staggering.”

On a serious note though: Scottish Labour's self-serving, shallow analysis of genuine challenges; their deployment of terms like "working class" to mean simply those to whose votes they felt entitled; their hollowing out of left-wing discourse, turning every rhetorical instrument their movement has bequeathed them for interrogating the circumstances and promoting the interests of their constituents into a toy to be broken at the hands of a petulant child; their exploitation and fetishisation of structural disadvantage to make it a Shibboleth of their private club; their reduction of the moral high ground of politics to mere real estate to which they presume to hold sole title; this is all perfectly embodied by this inadvertent, over-earnest, unwitting and quarter-witted comedian.

One can only wish him well in the forthcoming contest for leadership of the Scottish Tories, whither one imagines his ineptitude might lead him.

Tsar Bombs per day - a unit for measuring climate change

The Climate Emergency is a war we are waging on the Earth, a global vernichtungskrieg we have never officially declared but that we have been prosecuting for decades.

So I find it useful to use the Tsar Bomb - the most powerful thermonuclear device ever detonated (with a yield of 50 megatons) - as a unit for representing the quantities of energy involved in climate change related phenomena.

The additional radiative forcing due to carbon emissions in recent decades - that is, the amount of energy associated with heating the planet due to the greenhouse effect - amounts to about 100 Tsar Bombs per day.

In comparison, Hurricane Dorian is currently releasing several hundred Tsar Bombs worth of energy per day. These events are becoming more violent partly due to additional energy being deposited in the system as a consequence of global warming.

Remember that when reflecting on the destruction left in the aftermath of a hurricane. The arsenal with which Nature devastates our cities is supplied in part by us ourselves.

Describing the yield of a thermonuclear device invokes an analogy with TNT (the megaton) that emphasises the scale of the destruction caused. It is instructive and appropriate to invoke an analogy with thermonuclear devices to describe the destruction caused by the Climate Change.