The evolution of culture from primitive warfare

Ear, nose and threat. 

Mind Over-matter.

As if any one moment might contain all things.

xxx

Sometimes it seems like the world is full up – every square inch packaged and labelled till there’s no space left to move. Then the only way to proceed is to start jamming things together. If you cross a trout with a priest you can dispense with both labels and call it dinner. Once the flesh has been eaten the bones can be used to comb one’s hair.

There is no future except in the collated dust of things that have already been.

I never liked the design dictum ‘Form follows Function’ - it always sounded like Thou Shallt Not - as if God in His bearded heaven had thought it all up while doing his accounts. Granted, there’s the duck-billed platypus and the amphibious landing-craft but, in reality, these are merely the products of creative accounting.

I always liked the Push-me-pull-you.

xxx 

There are moments when we realise that everything hangs on the outcome – when Life is in the balance or straw is being laid on the camel’s back. Were it not for A, B would not have happened. In fact all moments are like this and always have been so that F is not only intimately connected to U, but also to p~ and 5q*. To every action there is not always an equal and opposite reaction, sometimes it is disproportionate.

My father’s father for example, did not understand why the ground receded as he lowered his biplane from the clouds. He reached out of the cockpit and felt the corn swishing against his fingers but still he did not land. Then an idea came to mind, he understood the problem and immediately crashed.
If he had not thought so hard he might still be flying, but I would not exist.
In the event it seems the camera he always carried remained undamaged, so he climbed from the wreckage and filmed the fuel leaking from the tank.

Then again, my mother’s mother played the organ in a cinema on the north-east coast which was owned by the man whose great-nephew would marry her daughter. It was just as well that they never met because they had nothing in common.

And, when I was twelve I drank with my father in a Weinstube on the Rhine. The landlord had been shot down over Kent in 1940 and imprisoned in a hut in Cornwall. Interned in the same hut was a man called Karl Weske who later taught me to draw but no-one knew any of this at the time.

xxx 

Labouring with picks and shovels we grapple at the groundswell of the images before us, tugging at the rocks which have only names, building walls and battlements to keep the fog at bay. But the white air is thin, it seeps through the cracks of the glaze on the skin and the only way to ensure adhesion is to scratch the wound until it heals. Stasis never lasts.