Stephanie's Pillowbook

A few random bits and pieces…

1) I was just reading Freiya’s blog The Other Side of the World and something she wrote yesterday about watching television struck a nerve: “its funny but when you’re on your own there seems less incentive to watch it. I never realised how much of a social thing watching television is“. I agree entirely. Back in the ’80s I used to watch Dynasty, Dallas, the Brookside Omnibus, and I always watched them with friends. That was the fun, discussing the actors, their characters, their clothes, their ridiculous situations, tearing them apart, making jokes and arch comments and so on. Dynasty, for example: you could always tell who was supposed to be gay – they would always be wearing, for some reason, the most tastelessly appalling chunky sweaters. Spotting that sort of thing and laughing about it with others – that was the entertainment. When I came back home I stayed at my parents for a few months before moving into my flat. So during the first week I sat down with them to watch the soaps and as usual started talking at once. I was immediately shushed: “Now I missed what so-and-so said!” I was astonished. Was I supposed to sit there in silence and actually watch the programme? But it’s rubbish. My father doesn’t even like me talking through the football – I can’t keep my mouth shut, though, I’ll burst! It feels so unnatural just to sit there and say nothing. When I moved into my flat it was too sad to watch the soaps on my own. So I gave them up.

2) I really need to learn how to touch-type. I can type pretty fast but I make tons of mistakes. And I have to look at the keyboard mostly. I have played all those games which are supposed to help increase your speed and accuracy like Typespeed and gtypist and I can do quite well at them. The trouble is that they simply make you better at doing what you already do. Your bad habits are confirmed and reinforced. Most of my faults arise from the fact that I am left-handed. So, for one thing, my left hand covers most of the keyboard. More seriously, my left hand reacts more quickly than my right so I notice that most of my spelling mistakes at the keyboard are the result of the left hand being faster than the right. The worst thing, though, is that your hands become accustomed to making particular movements. So, when I come to type “its”, for example, I almost always type “it’s” – not because I don’t know the difference (I certainly do and would never make a mistake when writing) but because my fingers automatically make the movements for it’s. When I learnt how to write at school we were forced to do a lot of apparently meaningless exercises – lines and lines of a’s and b’s and so on. I’m sure the purpose was to make writing an automatic business that you don’t (or at least shouldn’t) have to think about consciously. I need to learn typing the same way. The problem, of course, is that it is very difficult to go back to being a beginner at something you can apparently already do. I have thought the solution was to change to using a Dvorak layout – except, as someone pointed out, it leaves you eventually unable to use other people’s keyboards effectively.

3) I followed a link once from Tranniefesto to a site called Gaping Void. The writer of this blog asked people to submit mini-manifestos. One of them, contributed by somebody called Seth Godin, was the purest tosh. This point in particular had me gnashing my teeth: “Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.” What a dismal philosophy that is! If I thought for a moment that was true I’d go out and hang myself. How dead do you have to be inside to really believe that everyone is engaged all the time in “selling themselves”? This is the kind of silly statement made by those apologists for capitalism who don’t understand that it is, for good or evil, an historical phenomenon. It’s the product of certain particular conditions. It hasn’t always existed and won’t always exist in the future. Human nature, therefore, is not coterminous with homo oeconomicus

[From my responses to comments] Whatever you want to call it, selling, marketing, it’s personal relations mediated by money – it’s not an inevitable or necessary part of human life. It’s pure capitalist ideology to pretend otherwise. I’m rather disturbed, actually, by the way you conflate reputation and brand. The latter is surely a reified form of what the former used to be?

I’m not arguing with you that marketing is sometimes necessary and appropriate in particular circumstances. But Seth Godin was making a generalisation – that marketing is what we all do all the time. That I do object to. Human beings aren’t naturally and fundamentally commodities – Godin’s statement implies that we are.

You seem to be generalising the word “marketing” – like Godin does – to cover any activity in which one person is influenced by the action of another. Do you really mean that? Do you really believe all human relationships are mediated by money? Do you not at least dream that there might be the possibility of contact that is not reduced to the concept of selling something for a profit? No, it’s a dismal and hateful ideology Godin has and I reject it…

4) This summer [of 2007] has had a few highlights – such as my sailing trip with my boyfriend – but otherwise it has been a dreary season for me. The oppressively hot weather finished me off. I wilted under the heat. I couldn’t be bothered to do anything so I became bored. Feeling bored all the time I became frustrated and depressed. Now summer is just about over and I’m feeling much better for it. This is my favourite time of year (just as twilight is my favourite time of day). There is a mellow and melancholy atmosphere which suits me well and there is the first slight chill in the air to presage autumn. September always feels like a new beginning – it is the proper month for making plans. I have spent so long at school and college that I tend to keep to the academic year. How pointless is it to celebrate the new year on January 1st when one is normally in the midst of things?

5) The weekend with my friends was very refreshing – good company, good food, good wine. One thing struck me, though, when a couple more friends came round for Sunday lunch. At all these kind of gatherings I am always the one who ends up playing with the children. I wonder why? Well, the children don’t jump on any of the other adults or drag them off to play football or have balloon fights or help with puzzles. Do they detect something about us? When I mentioned it, one of my friends said she thought it was because I wasn’t afraid to make fool of myself. Children may be naive and lack knowledge of the world but they are often astute in piercing the masks and pretences of adults

6) Late yesterday afternoon I went over to the local shops for some cooking chocolate and some vanilla so I could make a chocolate Impossible Pie. In front of me in the queue at the till was a boy and a girl of 18 or 19. They were joined by another boy. He seemed to be in a very jovial mood. Here is part of the conversation: “… it was so funny… we had him down on the ground in the underpass and Carl was stomping on his head… ha ha… I’ve seen people cry but this was just… it was fucking hilarious, man, ha ha.” It’s not the violence exactly which shocked me. No, it was the normality of it. This boy felt perfectly at ease telling his story out loud in a crowded shop. And he really did think it was the funniest thing ever to see this other boy cry his eyes out because his head was being stomped – I mean, his eyes were glistening with pleasure. And they were still laughing five minutes later when I walked out of the shop…

7) It was my mother’s birthday today and my father took us out for dinner. Now, around these parts finding somewhere decent to eat is difficult enough so when a restaurant opens that actually garners something of a reputation… Well. So, this evening we made our way to The Fox in Willian. We sat for a while in the rather well-scrubbed bar and munched on home-made crisps. When we were led to our table we were served with a few slices of bread and oil. For my first course I had, and I quote from the menu, Confit chicken rillettes bound in a tarragon creme fraiche, crispy Parma ham, pink grapefruit and citrus compote. It wasn’t bad at all, very nice indeed, but it lacked something and I couldn’t help but look a little enviously at my father’s pigeon breast on a beetroot mash. The main course, however, was almost perfect. Char grilled marinated lamb chops with caraway greens, garlic and rosemary parmentier potatoes and port and mint syrup. Accompanied by a piquant and peppery Chianti it was gorgeous and succulent. I followed it with ice-cream and a rather rich brandy. I don’t often eat like this so you can imagine I came away very satisfied…

8) Ruth Brandon’s Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917-1945 is an entertaining book and quite interesting, but rather journalistic in style and ultimately disappointing. She observes perfectly correctly at the beginning that the Surrealist movement was primarily a literary movement. It’s a shame, therefore, that she wastes so much time on that preposterous old fraud Salvador Dali. In fact she ends up seeing surrealism as either descending into Daliesque shock-spectacle and commercialism or being subsumed into New York Abstract art. There is no mention of post-surrealist groups like Lettrism, Cobra or the Situationist International. There is little mention of the spread of surrealist ideas around the world. A more absorbing book might have situated the Breton circle more firmly within the general artistic and intellectual milieux of between-the-wars France. I certainly find some of the more tangential figures – Leiris and Bataille to name but two – rather more fascinating than many of the second-rate poets and hangers-on of the legitimate group. Even with the concentration on Breton much seems to be overlooked. A vitally important part of Surrealism was the attempt to overcome the boundaries between art and life for instance and for discussion of that we must still go to Maurice Nadeau, it would seem.

9) This time last year I was reading quite a bit of Haruki Murakami: Norwegian Wood, Sputnik Sweetheart, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Dance Dance Dance, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore. Romantic, evocative, cool, compelling, enchanting, mysterious tales of estrangement, memory, loss and desire. I like the style of writing which is at once poetic and colloquial. Murakami’s world is an easy one to get lost in – so much so that reading anyone else seemed an unwelcome intrusion. In the end I felt I had to drag myself away forcibly from it.

10) I’ve just finished watching How William Shatner Changed The World on Channel 5 and very entertaining it was too, although it lost its way somewhere around the middle of the show. William Shatner was his usual witty, ridiculous self. The programme proposed the idea that Star Trek’s vision of the future actually influenced scientific progress of the last few decades. Absurd? Not really. Since our earliest days important things have often appeared first as play. Anyway, it’s a thesis which has more promise so far as the original series is concerned because it is certainly possible to argue convincingly that there was a close connection between technological innovation in the 1960s and popular culture. The computer itself might have been the tool of the military-industrial complex – but we surely wouldn’t have the PC without a lot of old hippy ideals (and GNU/Linux might be seen as the latest manifestation of that counter-cultural impulse). Technology mixed with freedom could be a heady brew. It was amusing to note that Star Trek became less popular the more a pessimistic, irrationalist, anti-scientific animus took hold in the late 80s and early 90s.

I have to confess I was not really a fan of Star Trek in any of its incarnations. Well, the original had a certain charm – but it was a guilty pleasure (like eating white chocolate). In fact I don’t like any television science fiction – or many films. I’ve never understood the appeal of Star Wars or any space opera or fantasy. I like my sci-fi hard.

11) As soon as I started using a computer I enjoyed playing games (starting with Star Trek in 1978). But for a long while they were just arcade games and that sort of thing. Then, around 1999, 2000 my brother gave me Settlers III Gold Edition for my birthday. I quickly became addicted. I loved watching all the little people run around building things and fighting each other. I soon moved on to Red Alert and Starcraft and Age of Empires. Although I tried other genres I always came back to Real-Time Strategy. Starcraft was my favourite – so perfectly balanced and with a story that was actually interesting.

But then I discovered the Total War series. I was a little late coming to Shogun but I got enough of a taste to buy Medieval Total War as soon as it came out. For me that was the best game ever. I loved the scope of the game, the fact that it demanded real decisions regarding economics and diplomacy and real strategy when it came to battles, the fact that every game was unpredictable and different. Every major character in the game had a personality that could influence one’s failure or success. I remember one game, for instance, where every one of my Kings was either a loon or a coward – I could not prevent the gradual decline, the unhappiness of the population, the constant revolt of the generals. But there were other games where a great general would appear at just the opportune moment to enable me to seize real power. I became reasonably good at it, too. I could play a one-province state like Denmark or Aragon on the hardest level – and win.

I was very enthusiastic when Rome: Total War came out but I agreed with those who said it was dumbed-down from Medieval . In fact, I preferred to play the Total Realism mod. Then, I suddenly stopped playing. I haven’t played a computer game – other than arcade games – for nearly three years now. I suppose it was just a phase. But great fun while it lasted…

12) In olden times it was believed that one’s health, both mental and physical, was determined by the balance of the four humours that supposedly lurked in the blood. If one of the humours became “burnt”, then the balance would be upset too far and melancholy adust would be the result. Over the centuries melancholy was reduced from a permanent disposition towards madness or genius to a temporary mood, a feeling of sadness without cause. Well, none of this has the slightest relationship to truth… and yet, it does have a certain psychological appeal. Every few weeks it seems as though my veins become filled with poison, some dark ink colouring my emotions. There is no external reason why I should feel sad, touchy, tearful and yet I do. It may not be an imbalance of humours but I would not be surprised to learn that there is some physical factor involved. A fortnight later it is as though there were a tonic flowing through my veins and I am alert and curious and full of smiles. This cycle of moods is, I stress, quite independent of events in life which rightfully induce happiness or depression – it’s an underlying swell and fall. Oh well, at least the swings aren’t as violent as they were in my twenties.

13) I have always been a little suspicious of Wikipedia, notwithstanding that I use it often enough. The trouble is, the very first entry I ever looked up was that for Friedrich Nietzsche, the one subject for which I can claim to have some knowledge. I was appalled. Every sentence was incorrect if not idiotic. I was tempted to rewrite the whole thing myself until I realised there was nothing to prevent some ill-read student overwriting me. Still, I have to admit that the quality of the Nietzsche entry has improved over the years: where once it was a disgrace now it is merely sophomoric. I think most people with any real knowledge of philosophy would sooner direct the curious to the Stanford Encyclopedia. The standard of writing is much higher, each entry being written by an acknowledged expert, and is well worth the reading. The main article on Nietzsche by Robert Wicks is acceptable and has a good bibliography. There is also an excellent article on Nietzsche’s Moral and Political Philosophy by the always brilliant Brian Leiter. To repeat, so far as philosophy is concerned, the Stanford Encyclopedia is much to be preferred over Wikipedia.

For me, perhaps the greatest intellectual resource freely available on the internet is the Dictionary of the History of Ideas. What a wonderful thing it is. Originally published in 1973-74 it is, as the preface has it, “a culminating work in a tradition that had been energized by the fight against fascism. It was a tradition committed to the pursuit of disinterested scholarship in the academic sphere and to free expression of thought in the political sphere”. The articles were written by such luminaries in their field as Isaiah Berlin, George Boas, Owen Chadwick, Mircea Eliade, Sidney Hook, Claude Palisca, John Plamenatz, Arnaldo Momigliano, R.C. Lewontin, Judith Shklar, and many others. Browsing randomly through the entries we find fascinating articles on Biological Homologies and Analogies, Man-Machine from the Greeks to the Computer, Harmony or Rapture in Music, Cosmic Fall, Game Theory. Enough to keep anyone occupied… for months, for years.

14) Non-Photography Day is the idea of one Becca Bland and her defence as presented in a BBC News article is a catalogue of various New Age idiocies. The whole argument is constructed around a series of simplistic binary oppositions: mediation is bad, the immediate is good; the partial is bad, the whole is good; technology is bad, the natural is good; appearance is bad, essence is good; representation is bad, the real is good, and so on. “Experience life in an unmediated fashion”, she writes. Perhaps she would like to explain how that can be done. Is an unmediated experience possible? In the first place, what is involved in having an experience? Surely it implies all kinds of mediations? I suspect Becca Bland has never read Hegel. She continues, you should experience life “without anything in front of your eyes”. She means, of course, without holding a camera in front of them – and yet, how do you see anything in an unmediated fashion with your eyes? You don’t see the thing itself: light hits your eyes, is focused through the lens, is collected and manipulated on the retina, is converted into electrical nervous impulses to be reassembled and interpreted by the brain. Mediation after mediation!

Then we are urged to “Live in the moment”. Admirable advice, I’m sure. New Age types, however, always assume such a thing is simple, we just have to throw off the shackles of civilisation and it is done. They invariably speak of freedom as though it were already achieved. The ancient philosophers, too, believed that we should live in the moment – but they tended to relate such an approach to life to the knowledge of death and thought it could only be achieved after the intense practice of what Pierre Hadot called spiritual exercises. Nowadays, in a world devoted to immediate satisfaction, phrases like “live in the moment” belong to the language and ideology of advertisers.

And so on…

15) I thought Non-Photography Day was a tiresome gesture and now I’ve just discovered that two days ago it was No Music Day. This was the idea of Bill Drummond who apparently started it back in 2005. Last year he wrote a manifesto in The Observer entitled Silence is Golden – or for at least one day of the year it is. It’s not very convincing. In the first place Drummond shows too much concern with novelty for its own sake. As though the chief interest of music lies in hearing something you’ve never heard before. I don’t deny that can provide an exciting experience. It’s a mistake, though, to identify pleasure in music with the satisfying of an urge for novelty because, as Drummond, indicates, the novelty always wears off. Sooner or later you become jaded. I couldn’t help thinking, too, that the desire to not listen to any music for a day was just another way of satisfying that urge for novelty. Secondly, I detect in Drummond’s article the hint of a common tendency among those who don’t really like music as such. What they really like are the things that music reminds them of, the things in life which are so often accompanied by music. As a middle-aged man he will never again have a first kiss – likewise no music will ever mean so much as that which did form the background of his first kiss. I can sympathise with much of what Drummond says but music is more than either commodity or soundtrack. So, I won’t be celebrating a No Music Day this year or any other year. I suspect anyone who sings or plays an instrument is aware that music is inseparable from silence. There is no need for gimmicks.

First posted on various dates during 2006 & 2007

“Phosphenes are defined as luminous endogenous patterns experienced with the eyes closed. They are, among other things, what we see when we ’see stars’ on emerging from darkness into light, or vice versa… The reader may begin by experimenting with his own (harmless) production of phosphenes by the simple method of placing the fingers on closed eyelids and exerting differing degrees of pressure. Weak pressure produces phosphenes of curvilinear form, discs, concentric circles or arcs. These tend to appear at the side of the visual field opposite the point at which the pressure is applied; strong pressure exerted in the same way produces a ‘checkerboard’ effect…
“Outside the laboratory there are numerous situations in which phosphenes occur spontaneously. We may pay little attention to them in many circumstances, for they are often fleeting. They are provoked by a state of fatigue and drowsiness; as a result of psychological or mechanical shock; during fasting and meditation; or chemical intoxication. They further manifest themselves as vehicles of illumination in mystical traditions, and in the phenomenon known as the ‘prisoner’s cinema’, experienced by people incarcerated in dark dungeons; they might perhaps be related to phantoms and ghosts; they are the hazard recognized by the long-distance lorry-driver peering for hours into a snowstorm, and by pilots flying alone at high altitudes in empty, hence visually clueless, skies. Toxins such as those associated with scarlet fever produce phosphenes as do hallucinogenic drugs (that is those which have by definition a selective affinity for the visual system)…
“Phosphenes can be shown to differ according to the method of stimulation, electrical or chemical. Electrically induced phosphenes are of abstract or ornamental type patterns with only vibrational or repeating movements, whilst chemically-induced phenomena also include landscapes and living or man-made objects, such as flowers, animals, machines, and fast-moving, firework-type patterns.” [?]

I suffer from migraines. I started getting them when I was a teenager but they were rare occurrences – perhaps one or two a year – until I passed thirty. Since then I’ve been getting a migraine about once every two or three weeks on average. As well as the frequency the nature of my migraine has changed over the years. At one time I used to get a short, barely noticeable aura followed by an extremely painful headache on the left side of my head. It would hurt so much that once I was on my bed I was quite unable to move. After four to six hours the pain would subside. The next day I often felt rather exhilarated – as though all my worries and cares had dissipated. Nowadays, though, the migraine progresses like this: I notice a little crick in my vision like a blind spot. After ten minutes or so that develops into a full-blown aura: a scintillating zig-zag of fluorescent colour which gradually grows into a psychedelic light-show of flashing and vibrating lights lasting half an hour or so. The aura is usually accompanied by a somewhat metallic taste in my mouth and a sense of foreboding. Once the aura disappears there is a minute or two of calm and then the headache starts. To be honest it is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Partly because I have found the right drugs to counter-act the pain (two pink Migraleve and 400mg Ibuprofen) – but even so the headache feels different to what it was: more like my head is held in a vice but not gripped too tightly than the sharp, localised, stabbing pain I once felt. I still feel the need to lie down in a dark room, though. I shiver feverishly, my stomach rumbles uncontrollably, I feel more or less nauseated and sometimes have a strong need to urinate. Sometimes I am sleepy, sometimes I am plagued with obsessive thoughts. After a couple of hours I am well enough to get up but for the next twelve to twenty-four hours my head is still fuzzy, and I feel completely shattered and rather fragile. My face is pale and drawn and my eyes are very sensitive to light (it sometimes appears, too, as though I cannot keep my eyes still). What causes it? I still haven’t identified a physical trigger. My GP was obsessed with locating a problem in my diet but I kept a year-long food diary from which nothing could be established. I simply can’t see any correlation between what I eat and getting a migraine. I suspect it has more to do with stress. Migraines rarely arrive out of the blue. They are almost always preceded by a certain restless mood the day before. I cannot settle on anything: I want to read but nothing looks interesting; I want to listen to some music but I cannot choose anything; I don’t know what to eat; I don’t know what to do. I waste the day in fretfulness. All good signs that a migraine is due. I’ve given up going to the doctor about it. The headaches do seem to be managed. He has tried out some preventative medicines but none of them were successful at all. Worse, they all had the side effect of increasing my appetite which meant me putting on weight. The only thing that did work was a course of anti-depressants – I went six months without a migraine after that. It’s not really a satisfactory long-term solution, though, is it? He said the next step in treatment were beta-blockers and he was reluctant to put me on them. So I guess I’ll have to go on living with them (although they seem to have lessened in frequency since I transitioned)

“He was thinking, incidentally, that there was a moment or two in his epileptic condition almost before the fit itself (if it occurred in waking hours) when suddenly amid the sadness, spiritual darkness and depression, his brain seemed to catch fire at brief moments… His sensation of being alive and his awareness increased tenfold at those moments which flashed by like lightning. His mind and heart were flooded by a dazzling light. All his agitation, doubts and worries, seemed composed in a twinkling, culminating in a great calm, full of understanding… but these moments, these glimmerings were still but a premonition of that final second (never more than a second) with which the seizure itself began. That second was, of course, unbearable.” [Dostoyevsky on Prince Myshkin in The Idiot]

I once had a mystical experience although at the time I didn’t know that was what it was. It happened midway during the first term of my second year at the University of Kent. My grant cheque (remember them?) was late. I had been very careful with money until it eventually arrived, but now I went on a little spending spree. That evening I treated a couple of friends to a meal. We went on to Keynes bar to continue drinking and then to a student disco. I ended up in a friend’s room where we smoked a few spliffs. I had a room in Blean but I didn’t fancy the walk out there so I settled down into a sleeping bag on the floor. The light was turned out and the conversation died down. Then it happened. A great feeling of euphoria welled up within me. I suddenly felt like I had been turned into pure energy. Wave after wave of this delightful energy swept up and down my body. I imagined that I looked like someone in the Star Trek teleporter – in fact I could look down and see myself dissolved into a pulsing mass of electrical energy. I felt orgasmic – or like every cell was rushing. I felt connected to the whole world. And I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love for everything and everyone. Slowly the intensity reduced and eventually I fell into peaceful sleep. The next day I didn’t mention anything to my friends – I believe I was almost embarrassed. I did feel peculiarly content, though, for a few days.

Then sometime in the early 90s I read a couple of books about mysticism. Reading the various accounts by monks and mystics of their transcendental religious experiences I realised that I had undergone something very similar. I recognised the feelings: the profound pleasure, the strange disembodiment, the sense of unity, the expression of compassion for all that exists. Some descriptions were almost identical to mine. Yet I hadn’t interpreted my experience in a religious sense at all. I wasn’t touched by God, I didn’t feel the presence of Jesus, I hadn’t become one with Brahman or whatever. Previous belief obviously determines the content of such experiences. Indeed, being a thoroughgoing materialist I had simply assumed I had reached some sweet spot of physical, sensual repletion. No doubt that is too crude an explanation. Still, I don’t see any need to argue that it is anything other than some curious but natural phenomenon of the brain. One interesting aspect, however, is that while some people, including myself, return to their normal existence once the experience is over – although they never forget what happened – others are able to use it to transform their lives – they can feed off the experience after it dies away. I am a little envious of that.

“And the other extreme concerns that of the rhythms of the universe. Some of our musicians, especially the most intellectual, Kontarsky, for example, said, ‘I can’t do anything with that instruction. What shall I do with it, the rhythm of the universe?’ I said, ‘Have you never never had any dream experience of the rhythm of the universe, have you never been flying in between stars, have you never had a direct experience of the rotation of the planets, let’s say of our own planet, or of the other planets of our solar system? Must these rhythms necessarily be slow?’ All these questions came up in discussion. And he said, ‘No, no, no, I have no experience, I’m sorry.’ And then I said, ‘Well, at least you have one possibility, because you’re a very visual person, you read a lot, your education is visual, and your thinking is visual. What about the constellations of the stars?’ He said, ‘Oh, wonderful!’ I said, ‘Well, just one more suggestion. Think of the interval constellations of Webern’s music. And then combine them with the constellations of the stars. Let’s say you think of Cassiopeia or the Big Dipper.’ And from that moment on that player became the most precise member of our group for performances of such intuitive music. Kontarsky really played the bones – transforming the visual proportions into rhythmic and pitch proportions. And then, as these were very precise geometrical figures in our performance, the others were playing the smallest vibrations that they could produce with their fingers on the chords. I said, ‘Go to the heartbeat, go to the pulse, try to dive.’ And I showed them one thing: when you close your eyes, yes, let’s do that, and no figures, just the dark. I don’t have the dark at this moment, I have spots of gold within the dark. I see spots. And now there is, you see…”
“I see the tip of a candle.”
“Get rid of the candle. Nothing, just nothing. And there, I see millions of small spots of dust, moving. Like clouds. Goldish dust.”
“There are convex rainbow shapes, very thin, and energy centres of orange going woosh…”
“Breathing? Moving? Right. I have the same. Now if I were playing an instrument, these little particles immediately suggest a pattern within the sound that I am producing [makes noise reproducing the pattern]. And I’ve discovered that when there are very good moments when we are performing or when I’m listening to other music, then it becomes just red-violet, no shape, it’s all just like a curtain. And when this starts breathing, very slowly – it’s between the heartbeat and breathing beat – it starts breathing like that and then I’m absolutely sure that it’s good. In a pitch black room, too, the violet always comes. Only after a while do you get to the next step after violet, a goldish colour, and then you may be sure that the cosmic juice is flowing into you. The new musician must very consciously do all these exercises and play in these different states of spirit.” [Karlheinz Stockhausen in conversation with Jonathan Cott]

First posted in February & December 2006

I went AWOL from my blog for a couple of weeks in April 2006. The reason being that I was rather strangely ill. One Friday afternoon, while sat at the computer, I felt faint and light-headed. Early in the evening I had to lie down and shut my eyes for a while. When I opened them again the world started to spin around me. It was liking being very drunk – but worse. Then I found I simply could not stand up however hard I tried. I had totally lost my sense of balance. Every movement made me nauseous. I must have begun to panic because my breathing was rapid and I felt pins and needles over the whole of my body. My parents called for an ambulance and the ambulancemen managed to drag me to my feet. It felt as though a great force was impelling me backwards and down – like I was being sucked into a whirlpool. It was quite the most peculiar thing I have ever experienced. And one I never want to experience again. After a couple of steps I vomited violently. I was sick again when I arrived at the hospital. When I finally saw a doctor she performed a battery of tests including holding tuning forks over various parts of my head. Anyway, she concluded that there was nothing fundamentally wrong and that I probably just had a severe inner-ear infection. So I was sent home to lie in bed until the infection cleared up. The following day was my birthday and I spent the whole time staring at the ceiling in my bedroom! What fun! After a few days I was able to get up and about although I still had a fuzzy head and was somewhat shaky on my legs. It took a month for the giddiness to disappear completely. Oh well, I suppose it’s downhill all the way now!

First posted in April 2006