Moonsick

It's very early in the morning. I'm not asleep, because there's a full moon. If there's a full moon, I don't sleep. Neither does my mother. Apparently lunacy is genetic. I'd question it if it weren't true, or if anything important hung on whether or not it was true. But all that really happens is that every now and then, bedtime will arrive, and I don't go to sleep. Hours and hours go by. I wonder idly why I'm not sleeping. I wander the house rearranging the kitchen shelves and ordering things online. At some point, I glance out the window, and there it is in full phase, hanging lustrously in the sky like a pearl button on a dusty black overcoat. Tada! You're a werewolf.

It is high above my window, rusting the edges of a milky puddle of clouds.

I love the moon. I love its fervent, reflected light and the spectacular, heartbreaking romance of Earth's grip on it. And it suggests the moment, long ago, when my father explained parallax to me when I asked why the moon followed us home in the car.

One of the loneliest things in the world is looking up into the night sky and finding that it isn't there. Not the night sky that ought to be there, but another one. The dark has been ransacked. Worst of all, the moon. The soft, friendly luminary of all your nights is gone and replaced by a stranger who is all the more terrifying for being almost exactly like the moon you have lost, and yet somehow ...

One day, walking under another full phase, I mentioned the great grief of my moonsickness to Pluvialis, who understands such things. She stood in the wet autum street and considered. What's wrong with it? she inquired. It can't be that we are seeing the other side, because the same side always faces us. So ...

Light dawned. Standing there in my overcoat, I put my head between my legs and looked up, upside down. And there she was, my old friend, smiling at me. She'd just stood on her head all this time.

If I rest my head on my desk just so, I am home again.

Tuesday haiku

New year's bright cupboard
Rigor bread, resolute salt
Ghost of cinnamon.

Jedi mind powers

Softer, softer. Haziness prevails. Not a gleam. Nary a glint. Neon signs and traffic lights suddenly spun colourful candy floss haloes. Cars, condensation-matte, pass by with a muffled sssssssssslish, sending up a few hundred thousand more miniature droplets to hang suspended with the other umpty-billion cutting the visibility and seeping into your clothes. Rain in stealth mode. People loom out of the haze with unwittingly cinematic drama, fading in like the Death Star or horizon-breaching Lawrences of Arabia. A frozen Arabia.

Jack Frost

This fantastic shot of frost in Leicestershire by Owen at Gone Walkabout.

The frost has come. Cambridge glitters liquidly under its crackling, melting dressing of crystals, like an artificially delicious-looking roast chicken sprayed with glycerin. The relative humidity is 99%. We're walking through water. The soft, mossy, worn and greying edges of the beauty of the town are sharpened into shearing lines and planes, and everything is too beautiful. Every mote of dust, cobweb and puddle of crumbling stone is festooned with facets turning their over-pretty new angles this way and that in the watery winter sunlight. It is English history in a Tiffany's display cabinet with a halogen lamp set over it. My eyes hurt.

Tuesday haiku

Frost furred keys rattle
Young blackbird spot adjusts, puff
light technical clothes

Question hour

The third in an occasional series on the keywords with which Xtinpore snares the unwary googler.

This week's Beautiful Insanity award to:

egg yolk eyebrow growth

Yes, well. I meant it rather more metaphorically.

The Sorry I Wasted Your Time, Dude compensation prize goes to everyone contributing to this week's number one search phrase with a bullet:

being in love

You poor, poor little babies. Are you googling your symptoms? Not even google can help you. And to the person who was looking for a Gem and the Holograms t-shirt? Yeah. I was more of a Masters of the Universe girl myself.

Gettin' festive with it

This brilliant shot from Simon at eyematter

I really, really love Christmas. It's the last great Western festival. I have a passing shred of pity for everyone, including the Christians, who are trying to carve out their own bit of religious and/or cultural identity from behind the massive inflatable Santa in their town square, but frankly? Whatever. I love the fact that the "meaning" of Christmas is being lost. It's turning back into its real self -- a great big mother of a celebration involving traditions borrowed, stolen and appropriated from everywhere where it's winter in December -- an excuse to decorate everything, drink hot, intoxicating substances, and eat foodstuffs made of things preserved from the Spring. I love that everywhere is bedecked -- the shiny wooden bar at the local pub, the streets glimmering with tiny lights and large, the windows, everyone's houses. That every store is stuffed with gifts and special, luxury foods that you eat just because they're special, luxury foods and that's what you do on a festival day. The sense of everyone preparing for something, a shared something.

There's even some minimalist berry-orientated ersatz-decoration going on in the window of my chrome-and-black-leather hair salon.

Of course, as time has gone by and I have left this blog woefully alone, gathering cobwebs and electronic dust-bunnies, the pressure grows to make a big re-entrance with something Fantastically Witty, or Perspicaciously Literary, or Amusingly Misanthropic, to justify one's catastrophic negligence. But naturally, I haven't had a thought with half a gleam on it, much less the blinding shine that impresses the blogging glitterati, for literally months. Among other things, I've been distracted by the adorable baby-blue backlit keyboard of my new love interest.

But I couldn't stand it any longer. I couldn't let my blog miss out. I had to get in here and put up some tinsel.

Happy birthday to me

It's my birthday! I'm 33. Which is the same age that Debbie Harry was when Blondie released Parallel Lines, which was about to score them their first number one hit, one of the greatest tracks of all time, Heart of Glass.

As an ego-booster, this may not be the best comparison I could be making. But at least it's not the Jesus one.

Conference highlight

Poor Tom Bozzo has consumed his popcorn waiting for me to recover from my traumatically boring conference experience. The highlight, for your delectation, was the exceptionally hip all-blue recycled vending cup pencil provided in the conference pack, followed closely by the miniature doughnuts served with coffee. When I came home I had seven pencils inside my suitcase and several dozen micro-doughnuts inside me. Which isn't a bad return on conference investment, in my experience.

Sucking it up

I'm off to Seaside Town tomorrow to attend a conference. I'm giving a paper on Friday morning. $64,000 question: why am I doing this?

Possible reasons:

1. The conference will be interesting and I'll learn about lots of cutting edge research going on in my field.
   
   Uh huh. Right.



2. Excellent networking opportunity.
   
   Whatever.



3. Handy line on the curriculum vitae.
   
   Two days. Night in tasty dormitory accomodations. Six hours on the train. Hours of talk-preparation palaver. Distraction from dissertation writing. Only one damn line?
   
   
4. Chance to talk about my own brilliantly novel research and burnish my high-octane reputation.
   
   Oh god, please kill me.
   
   Next entry: highlights of conference attendance. Prepare your buckets of popcorn.
   
   

Five reasons

Five reasons that today, Xtin is inclined to feel that things are right with the world.

1. The British government has created 115 hectares of managed marine wetlands in a £7.5 million project by letting the sea back in over Wallasea Island. But in spite of the "government cares" spin, this is because the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a totally private charity formed in 1889 to stop the decimation of grebe populations which was garnishing ladies' hats with feathers, sued their asses for building a cargo terminal in Kent in the 1990s, illegally destroying wetlands protected by the EU birds directive. The European Court upheld the claim and required that the government provide habitat in compensation. High five, RSPB.



2. Flight Commander Malcolm Kendall, whose refusal to serve in Iraq because the war is illegal led to three months in a high security prison. He's now tagged and under curfew, making it clear to the members of this nominal democracy that our own bloody government thinks he's dangerous because he reminded them that military personnel in democracies can't be required by their superiors to act illegally. Word, sir.



3. David Walliams, an utterly un-sporty comedian, who's just finished a ten-and-a-half hour Channel swim, raising £400,000 for Sport Relief.



4. Yesterday, I put my newly laundered sheets out to dry in the garden. In the afternoon, I was out when the thunderstorm hit, too late to save my sodden laundry. I pouted. I stamped my foot. Today, my sheets are dry again, and they smell magically of sun and rain together.



5. I bumped into my dissertation supervisor, Professor Agent Smith. He didn't ask me about my dissertation. And as if that weren't enough, he wasn't wearing a suit. Like the real Agent Smith, it is part of the Agent's software to wear a suit. Today he was wearing a short sleeved seersucker shirt, candy-striped in red and white. That put the lid right on my mood. On the day that your supervisor looks like a smiling peppermint, everything is all right.

Martian garden

A few weeks back, Pluvialis came back from a visit to her parents with a pocketful of seed packets for the garden. One lovely spring day when I was feeling typically stifled and purposeless, we went out to dig in the dirt. I've never really plunged my hands into a garden -- when I was a kid it was my dad's rather fitful preserve. After I moved out, greening my fingers was limited to trying to keep pots of herbs alive on the back steps of apartments. The herbs never lasted past their first flush of new growth, but they made me popular with the neighborhood ringtail possums. Which was almost an exchange I was prepared to make.

So I'd never really found out about the hilariously obvious, literally figurative groundedness that you get from digging around, spading up clumps of clods, troweling sods randomly around, saying hello to the worms, smoothing the soil through your fingers like making a bed for the seeds. Well, exactly like making a bed for them. Gardens are metaphor-proof.

One of the things that Pluvialis gave me to plant, in front of our giant clump of sweetpeas, were some night stocks. The stock seed is miniscule -- tiny little brown grains like chocolate-coated crystals of sand. I'd never planted seeds before in my life, and the experience was just as cheesy and trite as you'd imagine. I was completely overawed by the idea that whole plants were somehow going to appear. Wonder-of-Nature style theme music swelled in my head, the whole deal. I was convinced that there was some kind of alchemical mystery about it that I wasn't a party to, and nothing would happen.

Three days ago, the stocks flowered. Magic! If I hadn't been so overawed when I sprinkled the seeds into my lovingly prepared mixture of dirt and worms, I might have stopped to wonder why they were called night stocks. The answer, of course, is that the flowers open at night instead of during the day. The fragrance attracts moths.

When you look at a map of the sun striking the world, night has a simple geometry. It's just where it's dark, a gauzy black sine wave licking around the longitudes. But the map lies. It flattens the eerie night topology. We understood the weird metaphysics of night when we were small. We knew that it was somewhere else entirely -- it wasn't just dark, it was different. And later, you watch shadowy footage of bats and glow-worms whose adventures are narrated by David Attenborough's silken tones, and you try to imagine what it must be like to live in a world where the night is as bright and real as the day seems to us. The harder you try to do this, the more you realise that you are dealing with something truly alien. We are creatures of daylight.

Roses smell of sunshine and birds, sweetpeas of sugary peas and bread and warm rain. I planted flowers which turn their petals to the darkness and fill the air with fragrance that belongs in the glittering night-world of bats and moths. The scent is completely otherworldly. It is sweet and greenly spicy, with an oddly medicinal, slightly metallic note. It smells like science fiction.

I think this might be what it smells like to be a bat.

Hot pigeon

It's unusually hot. I was hoping that my acclimatisation to the British cold wouldn't strip me of my native heat tolerance, but apparently as a matter of universal justice, that's a cake-and-eating-it-too deal.

In the garden, there are town pigeons, wood pigeons, three collared doves, a fledgling song thrush, and two fledgling greenfinches. The song thrush especially tugs at my heart -- with its exaggerated streakyness and wide, amazed-looking eyes, it looks like a rough charcoal drawing of a bird come to life. It is very wary. Warier, certainly, than the two town pigeons. These two are Our Pigeons. The female was the first to appear. She has the ordinary purplish-gunmetally aspect of a typical pigeon, splattered liberally with white feathery smudges. Pluvialis dubbed her Nelson, after the similarly splattered statue in London. The male, who has become spectacularly butch on corn and parrot seed served up on our back step, is an escaped racing pigeon. He sports the coloured rings on his feet with the nonchalant aplomb of a gym-muscled DJ wearing the latest charity wristbands. He is also white-spattered, with a perfect white helmet for which I named him Stormtrooper. We may or may not have found out who owns Stormtrooper, and where he was sent from when he sidelined himself over the fens. But Nelson and Stormtrooper are in love. He is a defected athlete who longs for the personal freedom that we all take for granted! And who are we to interfere in political matters?

So this morning they enjoyed an utterly democratic pigeon bath-tacular in the dish we filled against the heat, and Pluvialis and I forgot our intellectual cares watching wet pink-footed featherdusters sunbathe under the strawberry plant.

Question hour

The second in an occasional series on the keywords that lure the unwary to the babel that is Xtinpore.

This week's Sorry I Wasted Your Time, Dude consolation prize goes to:

anal hors

Not that it's any consolation really, but I assure you the d'oeuvres are good too.

Exit, pursued by a metaphor

You might have noticed that my thinking about the world is almost entirely governed by metaphors. I think that I was just born with a brain that looks to see how one thing is like another thing, but I also think I have developed it into a baroque art because it is a natural antidote to boredom. If you look at things together, you get not only all the things which happen to you but all the combinations of things. Three things happened today? Hey! That's six different combinations! Was the shopping like the article you read in the journal? Maybe the shower you took this morning was sort of like the trip to the library! Your life is suddenly deceptively well-populated. There is an everlasting supply of things interacting, even if all you managed to do on Tuesday was change the laces in your shoes and eat a ham sandwich.

Generally, I think I could do with a pretty formidable dose of restraint in these matters, because it's easy to lull oneself into a sadly deluded sense of depth and profundity by playing with all these comparisons. Sometimes nothing happens in my life except sitting around seeing how different slices of life go together. Which is all very well, but I want to actually have some slices of life, as well.

On that note, here begins an occasional series on Xtin's Found Metaphors, so that I can get my hit while making a genuine attempt to stop corkscrewing my head so far into my, uh, navel.

Today's Found Metaphor is from my Bathtub Reading Hall of Fame, Dorothy Sayer's Busman's Honeymoon. We find ourselves faced with a weepy village piano-teacher. A handkerchief, my good man, my kingdom for a handkerchief! Lord Peter Wimsey, Sayers' beaky sleuth, is always prepared:

Peter came to the rescue with what might have been a young flag of truce.

Lovely.

Notice of intent to plagiarise

Last night I watched the season 2 finale (warning! Link contains motherlode of all spoilage) of the best misanthropy of the week, House. We pick up in the scene where the eponymous doc is nitpicking the way of the right and good with the dude who shot his wry patient-hatin' ass before the opening credits rolled.

Dude who shot House: I don't want to argue about semantics.
House: You anti-semantic bastard.

Fuck. Genius. Heads up, people. I am going to steal this line shamelessly at the very first philosophically relevant opportunity. So much the worse for any poor dolt who doesn't already worship at the House altar. Eat my bon mot-laced dust, purists with no TV!

Why I wish I was Federer

In the interests of variety in my writing avoidance behaviours, I've been watching Wimbledon. Tennis is one of the greatest of all spectator sports, because it speaks to the Ur-desire of the gladiator-deprived spectator to watch great skill wedded to War, while simultaneously compensating for their sports-wise weaknesses. For many sports (say, cricket or curling) it is difficult to be captivated unless you have a pretty good idea what the hell is going on -- especially having any kind of clue about which team or player is particularly good or impressive. (Unless, of course, the source of your captivation is the very obscurity of the endeavour, and I confess that this is sometimes very captivating indeed. But let us bracket this particular kind of spectator fetish). In the first place, tennis is damn simple. And in the second, when watching Federer, you really don't need to understand anything much at all to enjoy the impressive and surpassing brilliance of his game. Wow! Fast! My goodness! Nimble! He hit that ball with his arm all the way out to here! Criminy! How many mph was that again? Etc.

I love watching the tennis.

Like most nerds, I was not a fan of competitive sports as a kid. I was intimidated by them and withering about those who played them, I waxed lyrical (quietly, to myself) about their arbitrary pointlessness. That's pretty rich, coming from a philosopher, but I didn't know about my future in professional arbitrary pointlessness back then. So maybe, in ye olde comparison with Worthy Persons Making a Real Contribution (eg doctors with Medecins San Frontieres, cancer research scientists, primary school teachers, you know the deal), I have something in common with Federer today. But in addition to earning more money (in the sense where "more" is stretched to the point where it ceases to mean anything particularly much) and being much fitter (ditto "much") and, well, being able to play tennis, the difference that strikes me between me and Federer, or frankly any tennis player with even a hint, the merest sniff of an ambition to play professionally, is their grip on themselves. They literally can't play until their understanding of their own disappointment, insecurity, motivation, drive, aggression, envy, ability, self-regard, frustration, anything that might tweak the 150mph serve one degree to the left where it ought to be on the right, exceeds the power of those things to ruin their chances of winning. Sportspersons may be the most self-aware people on the planet.

I suck at this stuff. Dealing with a certain disappointment for me might be the work of a couple of days of mooching around pouting and reading Cadfael mysteries in the bathtub. I can go entire weeks after talking to a particularly smart person, wondering if my overall smartness is enough to get me to wherever it is that I'm supposed to be going (alert! Side issue). On days when I'm feeling especially good about myself and my philosophical thinking, I have a tendency to go outside and look at flowers or browse bookshops and smile a lot, rather than actually doing any philosophy, which I end up having to do on days of abject self-hatred instead.

Tennis is thoughtfully organised to give you various periods of time to manage your thoughts. You have between points, between games, between sets. And I suppose you have the nano-second or two before you have to get the ball in the centre of your graphite racket head. You can watch the players yank their thoughts into line while matter-of-factly dabbing their sideburns with the commemorative Wimbeldon sweat-towel, just like realigning the strings in their rackets. Two minutes, tops. And then they wander back out there as though they didn't lose the first set to the unseeded player. They're trained to do this! Why aren't I trained to do this? Of course, part of the story is that philosophy is not conducted in nano-second intervals, so you don't have to learn to deal with your shit in world-record time. You can kind of spread it around into all the gaps. You can tell your work to talk to the hand while you (don't) deal. You can do that in this discipline and still do pretty well. In fact, I tend to think that academics are aiding and abetting one another by making sure that you can spend a lot of time (not) dealing with your shit and still get along OK, because academics are often self-selected in needing a lot of time for shit-wrangling themselves, so they'd better not make it a precondition of success that you can deal with your shit on a world-class timetable.

Another part of the story is that tennis players wouldn't be as good at it as they are if there wasn't a lot of money in professional tennis, enough that it supports an entire industry of people to teach them how to get a hold of themselves in the time in takes the dude on the other side of the net to toss the green felty sphere in the air before they smash it over. I don't do what I do because I want to make a lot of money, but it would be very interesting if philosophy were lucrative enough to make it worthwhile for professional coaches to get philosophers out of their heads. If you know what I mean.

Rain dance

Yes! We have a rhythm! The crash cart was brought in and the laptop screen breathes again (I love this code blue-screen-of-death analogy, can you tell? Small pleasures, blogsters, small pleasures). A cause for celebration, n'est-ce pas? It would be, but I am suffering a profound explanatory anxiety. To wit: the damn thing was revived using precisely the same method as last time. I say precisely, and I mean that in the most unscientific and superstitious way possible.

I feel exactly like a member of those fictional ancient communities discussed by social evolution theorists and other nut-burgers (actually, I think traditionally speaking ancient communities don't have members, they have denizens. We'll go with that) who stumbles upon something really cool and useful, like say the production of crystal salt from seawater or fermentation or the use of penicillin moulds to treat ill denizens (I read a memoir of the West Country once which claimed that the local wise-woman-denizen used to keep a little bit of mouldy jam in the bottom of a jar and give it to sick kids. This is almost certainly apocryphal like this whole explanatory strategy anyway but it is still a good story). So anyway, naturally the story goes that the denizen has no specific idea about the causal relationships involved in the production of the cool outcome. I mean, she could make like Semmelweis and try to control the various factors to narrow down the instrumental ones, but that might be a pretty expensive epistemic exercise, especially if you can just remember everything you did last time and do it all again. Of course, you risk forgetting the one thing that actually did have an effect, and waste hours and hours stirring the water or waiting for the hummingbird you saw last time to buzz past again. But as long as you can remember the right part, and especially if you can develop a handy ritual for all the random parts, it's all good, right?

No way. I don't know how to handle the uncertainty. I lifted the screen bezel. I looked in there in a Laptop! Heal Thyself! kind of way. I kinda pressed a few things. I kinda blew on it a bit. I put the bezel back. And then it worked again. Was it even anything I did? Maybe it would have worked that particular boot-up anyway!

This would all be pretty minor but it provoked a mental cascade where now I'm wondering if I have a handle on the instrumental causal relations of anything in my life. I mean, maybe everything works because I sleep oriented north-south! Maybe I got the job because I licked that application pack envelope especially well that day! Causal angst, dude. I don't recommend it.

Fade to black

Well, fracking bloody frack. My motherfracking laptop screen just died again. I mean, at least you can see the Blue Screen of Death. It could have a footnote that read, but hey, dude! At least your cathode ray tube's still workin'! It does not help that I used my Jedi powers to heal it the last time, because my development is totally Empire Strikes Back and not at all Return of the Jedi. Unpredictable at best.

I'd be having a goddamn breakdown right about now, but fortunately I've already got one going on. That's what philosophers call overdetermined. Not that I can be one right now, because I can't see any of my own bitted-and-byted philosophizing to check if it's like, you know, insane or inconsistent or not yet up to the ever-loving mofo word limit. I need to start doing this shit the old fashioned way. Hand me a chisel.

Mental space

Recently, a friend of mine had to help a student who had an undiagnosed mental illness. Unsurprisingly, that was a pretty significant challenge for both her and the student, and I think they both handled it as damn well as you can handle it when the universe propels shit at you at high speed.

Later, my friend said to me, "Here's something I learned from that experience. Neither you nor I are mentally unstable." I knew what she meant. We worry about it, but being around people whose reality really is fragmenting between their own thoughts is a humbling and chastening experience, and you feel arrogant and self-absorbed for ever entertaining the thought that you were losing your mind. Because we both worry about that quite a lot. It's a special worry for me. It's THE worry. Forget Death or Abandonment. The dark, terrifying thing that observes me from the corner of the room at night is Going Insane.

I have the sort of overthinking, never-off, boredom-prone, many-tracked, volatile, highly invested, intense temperament that often generates speculation about whether or not I'm losing my mind. Reality has a sort of mosaic, technicolor, neural structure for me that is sometimes too bright, or suddenly the links seem thin and fragile, or the dark spaces between the gleaming arcs of Things threaten to swallow everything. I want reality to have a sort of tightly-packed, continuous, homogenous flavour about it, but instead it has a diffuse, vaguely webbish, extremely heterogenous splinteryness. I am going to fall into the open spaces or my thoughts will upset the balance of the weave of things and the threads will suddenly dissolve and derealise before my eyes.

My great friend H, who is a terrifying savant in these matters, always knows when I am doing this -- floating in reality with my arms and legs tucked closely against my body and my eyes scrunched shut, trying desperately not to touch anything, not to think anything, because I'm going to stab myself on a reality-splinter or break apart some crucial web between two reality-bits. She looks at me and says, "Put your feet down. There is ground there."

When she says this, I know why we are friends. That sense of groundlessness, of no contiguity, of nothing linear or stepwise, is exactly what frightens me. And she always reminds me that there is nothing to be afraid of. See? There's the ground. Step down.