Ghost

It's getting so busy now. We are in the middle of some branding training and i could really do without the time being wasted on it.

It's not that i think that branding is silly - it's that we don't need to spend a whole two days doing it, not especially when we have the annual leave situation coming up.

I'm missing my runs! After doing so well after two weeks we have a situation where i'm getting only two days in the last six...it's really driving me a bit bats.

The G20 are meeting now. I don't know what they think they'll be able to do. Apart as from look at each other and say we really screwed it up guys...it seems pretty pointless meeting. Don't try and sort out the world if you haven't sorted the problem in your own backyard.

Here are a group, of mostly men, who have worked away in government for the best part of their lives, who have probably contributed to the mindset which have gotten us into the state that we're in, attempting to extricate themselves and all of us from the situation.

Year in and year out, and protest after protest has followed - people have a collective wisdom which they would have done well to follow. Don't start the frigging Iraq War! Sort out world debt. Save the rainforests. Do freaking something about climate change. Correct me if i'm wrong, but over 1,000,000 people protested at these events and nothing was done. Nothing. Was. Done.

So, over to you democracy. Yeah, right.

Say if so called world leaders listened to the people instead of the fucking bankers and economists and theorists, i think we can all safely say that we would not be in the state that we are in now. Why don't politicians listen to their electorate? Because they're too fucking vain, that's why? And selfish and greedy and arrogant.

It seems to me that if you have a system which selects the selfishest, greediest and arrogantest people to be in positions of power, then you will get something close to what we have in the world today.

I have lived enough of life to know this: we are all paid in kind. Those who live gentle, sweet lives will be given gentleness and sweetness. Those who have life fuck them over constantly might want to reassess they way they approach others. It seems a bit harsh, but it's true. If life gives you lemons, you make lemon juice. And you have some pancakes.

I'm listening to the Brandenburg concerto and i love the part in the first moment, just before it comes to the end, and it becomes the baroque at it's baddest with instrument, after instrument building and building these dizzing heights, and you think there is no way Bach is going to be able to extricate himself for this one, and god clicks his fingers and miraculously, it all resolves, harpsichord, flute, violins come out on the other end unscathed and beautiful, like a tree from a rainstorm.

Crises are invitations to grow. They are like prunings and parings. It is as if we are fruit trees and the universe is a gardener. It sees a diseased branch and says, look get rid of this - do something. Because whatever it is, it will have to go. And it invites you to do something - it usually gives us lots of time to act. And if we don't act then it acts. Whatever happens, will happen. Que sera, sera.

I'm reading the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I don't know where the book is going. It's like Faulkner's Sound and Fury, but on some kind of Latino drug shit. It's pretty mad like. Told with different voices and with key phases in a language which i do not understand it is both beguiling and frustrating in turns. It happens to have been annotated on the internet, so once again our external memory gives us insight where we would have not had any before.

I watched Ghost in the Shell: Innocence again on Monday. Because it is so beautiful, because it is most incomprehensible and because i just needed to just sit and watch something. There is so much in contemporary culture - although it can be argued that Ghost is no longer contemporary - that warns us of our own narccisism and where it does lead us. When we exploit, when life is a series of pursuits triggered by pleasure, when we have the inevitable corruption in every seam of society, we end up with something approximating the dystopia in Ghost.

It amazes me when people keep saying they did not see this coming - the collapse that we have now? How could they have not seen it coming? An education system which inbreeds and rewards arrogance and violence, which accumulates power and knowledge rather than dissemniates its, a self-obsessed and atomised society intent on crushing and exploiting the weakest and most helpless...and we have had years and years and years of people talking about this. Also, the animals are dying - the canaries have stopped singing for a long time now. We are next. This is where we are now...the next in line. This is what the start of extinction feels like and you know what, if we don't do something about it - for everyone and not just those at the top of the ladder, we'll be staring down the barrel of a very long gun. All of us...

...but what is beautiful about Ghost is that through it all you keep thinking of the Major, which is always there. The chief worries about Batou, the cyber cop, whom he thinks is becoming like the Major just before she disappeared. He misquotes from Bhudda: "Let no one walk alone with few wishes, committing no sin, like the elephants in the forest."

But Kusanagi comes back in the end and puts the quote to rights. "Let one walk alone, with few wishes..." She has escaped herself and entered the universal martix, finally leaving the world behind but fully entering it as well.

Here it is in context....

If you find an intelligent companion
who will walk with you,
who lives wisely, soberly, overcoming all dangers,
walk with that person in joy and thoughtfulness.

If you find no intelligent companion
who will walk with you,
who lives wisely and soberly,
walk alone like a king who has renounced a conquered kingdom
or like an elephant in the forest.

It is better to live alone;
there is no companionship with a fool.
Let a person walk alone with few wishes, committing no wrong,
like an elephant in the forest.

I suppose i should try to get some housework done now. I don't know what these G20 people are going to do. I don't know how they are going to fix what they have broken with the same tools by which they have created this mess. I don't know how in the wide world they are going to sort it. I only know that we can't rely on them.

I think things are going to get worse before it gets better and i think that it will force everyone to reexamine they're own values. And i hope that we don't end up in another form of extremism. And say if all this follows through, i think that what we have here, this crisis, has been a good thing.