Daybook 3.

Superfluous.

I would like a job that produces something tangible and useful. I see builders doing something which actually produces something and I envy them. I despise people in advertising, retail and finance who are superfluous. (“They’ll none of them be missed”.) But then I think to myself: if I was unemployed and the only jobs available were of the latter sort then I would have to take one of them. Although it seems wrong that I should have to. What if I was a vegetarian and the only job available was in an abattoir. Would I have to take that too?

Being thorough for the sake of it.

At work I keep my desk clear. It is thoroughly cleared of all content except what I am working on at the exact moment. Most of the time there is nothing there except a computer and a phone. (I can’t wait for the time when I can do phone calls through the computer and then that’s all that I will have on my desk.) Anything not relevant is removed and put away. Even a stapler I only ever take out of my drawer when I need to staple something and then it goes straight back again. This clearness is obviously easy these days what with most documents being electronic anyway. Maybe such thoroughness is not necessary but it has become a habit with me. Another example of this sort of being thorough that I sometimes see is very neatly painted signs on business vans. Again: those sorts of signs don’t need to be that neat. The business people could save money by having a rough and ready label on their vans instead. Maybe the neatness and the care they take with their signage inspires confidence and so gets them more customers.

The answers.

Mary: I hate people who have “got all the answers”.

Jack: You mean people who think they have. Or maybe it’s just the same thing anyway: all the people who say they have got all the answers only think that they have but they haven’t really. 

Mary: Even if they really do have all the answers I hate them. There would be nothing to talk to them about.

Neighbours.

Quite shockingly, at a parliamentary by-election in England in 1964, the slogan “if you want a nigger for your neighbour vote Liberal or Labour” was bandied about. Some residents were so fretful about recently arrived (funny looking) foreigners that they painted that slogan on walls. I was thinking that some people might have misinterpreted that slogan somewhat. Imagine Mary, welcoming differentness and also a fan of Lenny Bruce, actually wanted a nigger for a neighbour and so duly went and put a cross against the Labour Party candidate’s name on the ballot paper. And the next day eager with anticipation she bounced out of bed and went and knocked on number 56 next door only to find it was inhabited by the same dull pasty faced people who had been there the day before. So she immediately stomped off to the Labour Party office and complained: “where’s my nigger, dammit!”. And they said: “we’re fresh out of niggers but can we interest you in some Pakis?” To which she reluctantly agreed but was not happy about the fact that they were forced to live a dozen packed into one house. She spent the next few years on a campaign for the improvement of the conditions of the immigrant classes. “It’s like the 19th century all over again!” she said to nobody in particular.

Jesus and The Terminator.

Fleshly Incarnation: “I want your boots, your jacket and your motorcycle.”

Path to Salvation: “Come with me if you want to live.”

Expectation of Resurrection: “I’ll be back.” 

Quote from Blaise Pascal.

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Two certain things.

Benjamin Franklin once said “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. In relation to which fact I was at the bank recently and, when the officer behind the counter saw the amount on the form I handed over, she exclaimed “I’d hate to have to pay that much Inheritance Tax!”. I said nothing. But in my head I was thinking: don’t worry dear, YOU will never have to pay that much Inheritance Tax. Or in fact any amount of Inheritance Tax! And that applies to everybody. Because Inheritance Tax only gets paid after you are dead by other people. Therefore it can’t be paid by you because you will not be there to pay it. (Of course, as an executor of someone else’s estate you will arrange for a payment to be made but you won’t be paying it in the sense of paying some of your own money.) You could make the same point by saying: “only dead people pay Inheritance Tax and you will never be dead”. In response to which somebody might say: “surely yes I will be dead at some point in the future!”. But that’s not correct. Certainly you will die. But you will never “be dead”.

Authentic.

In film and TV period dramas, where the story being shown happened, say, 200 years ago, the producers will use the dress and decor of the period. They do this to make the production look more authentic. But it makes it less authentic. Because when we watch it we see a story the look of which says that it happened 200 years ago. Whereas the story they are depicting actually happened NOW. When it happened it was happening NOW. So, if you want to depict that story accurately, then really you ought to depict it as happening NOW. Using people in modern dress and setting. By using period dress makes the story seem distant and unreal. It makes it seem like something that quaint foreign people did, nothing to do with us. ... Notice that the producers don’t do something similar for language. For example in the movie ‘Amadeus’ the costumes are all of the 1780s but the characters don’t speak in German. The producers didn’t do that because it would have made it seem foreign. For the same reason they should not have used period settings and costumes. If some producers, even if they were English speakers, made a film now that was set in present day Austria then I think they would be more likely to have the characters speaking German. ... A related point is about the translation of novels. For example I once read an English translation done in the 1960s of a novel by Zola from the 1890s where the English of the translation was in a present day idiom complete with current slang (especially using the f*** word). But if I read a novel by Thomas Hardy from the same period then the English would not have been updated. So really the translator of the Zola novel should have translated it into 1890s English.

Beneath.

I remember this fragment of poetry: “Beneath this floor the twisting sea, Real magic in a suitcase”. The author is anonymous. It has been in my head for the past 25 years. I found it written in a child’s schoolbook which I found discarded in the street. Maybe it resonates with me because it reminds me of “sous les pavés, la plage” from France May 1968. - Another example of randomly seen words sticking in my head is some dismal graffiti I saw on a wall which said: “the only time your heart will be full is in the grave with dust”. Very depressing.

The Real You.

In Oscar Wilde’s play ‘An Ideal Husband’ someone attempts to blackmail a successful politician with information about some financial wrong-doing he did when he was very young. And I was thinking: why should he have to worry about people finding out? The wrong thing was something he did when he was aged 22. Now he is 40 and in the 18 years in-between he has done nothing wrong at all and has done much good. What is he worried about? That people will find out what he did and so think that he’s not fit for office because they will think that the wrong thing he did all those years ago is a better indicator of what he is really like than everything else he has done since then? That sounds wrong because it doesn’t make sense to judge a person based on one single indiscretion. (And certainly not one that happened such a long time ago.) One swallow does not make a summer. ... Similarly imagine Mary says something really nasty to Jack who is her best friend. For a second Jack doubts Mary and thinks: is this what she is really like? Is that she really thinks of me? But then he discounts it: he knows that that’s not, so to speak, ‘the real Mary’. Or say if Mary got really drunk and behaved in a very out of character way. Again Jack would say that that is not the real Mary. On the other hand there are things that Mary does while drunk that other people would never do. So maybe at least some those things are part of the real Mary.

Prospective memory.

If you have problems remembering things like lists of names then there are lots of psychological tricks out there to help. But that’s all about remembering that something (namely some fact) is the case. But what about remembering to do something? (The difference is between ‘remembering that’ and ‘remembering to’). This latter is called ‘prospective memory’. I might say to Mary: “next time you see Jack remember to say hello to him from me”. Or I might say to her: “remember to put this letter in the mail for me tomorrow morning”. These examples are conditional, they are of the form “if/when x happens then remember to do y”. I suppose prospective memory which is about remembering to do a few things that you need to do can be solved by making a to do list. Because then the problem of remembering to do lots of things is replaced by the easier problem of just remembering to do one thing: namely to consult the list. But things like remembering to do single things is still a problem. - Any accurate account of how memory works would also need to include that thing where you can know that you were about to do something but have forgotten what it was.

Sleep.

People say things like “I only got 6 hours sleep last night”. But what about the, so to speak, density of the sleep? Maybe sleep is like water from a tap. Someone might ask: “how much water did you get?” and you would say: “I left the tap running 10 minutes”. But we still need to know the rate of water the tap was giving out, the litres per minute. Similarly for sleep sometimes it feels like I’ve slept more in some four hours of sleep than in some other eight hours. ... I think sleep that includes dreaming is denser than other sorts of sleep.

The NHS.

Two things about this that people say are: first, it is a service that’s provided to people regardless of their ability to pay. Second, the people who provide the service are not doing it for profit. The people who say all of this oppose privatisation on the grounds that that would mean that these two things would then no longer be true. ... About the first: it just seems plain wrong that somebody might suffer or die because of lack of money. But surely life is something that is desired just like anything else that is desired. And, in general, the ability to pay for some desired thing affects how much of that thing you will get. Jack has more money than Mary so he has a greater ability to pay and so will have nicer and more food than Mary. Why should healthcare be any different? (That’s not a rhetorical question.) In fact there’s a sense in which the level of healthcare you can get SHOULD be dependant on your ability to pay. Because what if Mary wanted a higher level of healthcare than Jack. Maybe she is more bothered about her health than he is. Whereas Jack isn’t bothered if he has the odd cough now and then and would rather spend his money on video games. So, Mary will want to get a higher level of healthcare by spending more money on it. But if the level of healthcare you got doesn’t depend on how much you spend on it then she would not be able to do this. ... And then the second point is about profit: what do we mean by profit? If Jack spends and invests lots of his time and money training to be a doctor and then opens a practice and charges patients money for this. The extra money he makes because he has the skills he does, is that money a profit?

Noticing.

If I put something on a weighing machine the readout (mechanical or electronic) will tell me how heavy that object is. I am also aware of the fact that if I press down on the machine the reading increases quite a lot. But this fact remains not fully processed by my mind. Somehow I think to myself that “my pressing weighs something” and then just ignore it. But that is nonsense. Or I casually think to myself: an object on the scale is somehow pressing. But how would that be if it is inert? The whole matter lurks unresolved in my mind. ... There are plenty of facts like this that I haven’t got clear in my mind but which are the keys to a proper understanding of things. Another example is: imagine I showed you a bucket half full of water. But there was a large hole about 5cm square in the bucket below the water line. I don’t mean in the horizontal surface of the bottom but a hole in the vertical side going down to just above the edge of the bottom. And where, despite this hole, the water was not leaking out. That would be seem to be, on the face of it, an impossible situation. And yet when you look down into a (western sit-down type) toilet that is what you can see. There is a hole to the side below the water line but the water isn’t running out of it.

Judging people.

First we judge people based on first impressions. Later according to the last thing they did (as in “what have you done for me lately?”), forgetting all that they have done before that. What about all the things in between? (This is all like the Serial Position Effect in psychology.)

Platonic.

Mary: Hey Jack, what happened about you and your Platonic girlfriend?

Jack: I asked her if she’d consider becoming my Aristotelian girlfriend and she said no.

Pillar.

At work I once used to sit at a desk where there was a pillar between me and the printer. Despite my continued efforts to make my job paperless there would be times when I would need a hard paper copy of something. And so I would have to get up and walk all the way over to the printer to get the print. Quite often on the way back, engrossed in examining what I had printed out, I would almost walk into the pillar, stopping myself just in time. “One of these days” I would say to people “I’m going to smash my face walking into that pillar!”. And then I would add “I might even do it by accident”.

Grounded.

Somebody once said about me that I am grounded. By which they meant “well balanced and sensible and living a (especially financially) stable and unflustered life”. But I said no! Actually the related alternative meaning of the word ‘grounded’ is more apt. I am like a grounded ship that is on some arid shore, stranded high and dry and slowly rusting away. At first glance such an object would indeed seem to be solid and to be (sublimely) not affected by what is bothersome to other people and things. But this is only because it is in the wrong place at the wrong time, slowly decaying into nothingness.