New Stuff

Well, sort of new anyway. Many people believe that 'new' is just a different sort of sauce on top of the same old tasteless meal. That is, our basic drives, needs, motivations and abilities remain pretty much the same, no matter how much cultural froth we have to wade through. Dreams provide some variation, of course, and the other night I dreamt that a weather forecaster had finally seen the light, foregoing the usual fan dance and simply pointing to a map with crap on it. (This was later attributed to a well known conceptual artist, generating £500,000 at auction).

In the real world I was dutifully informed that Wednesday would be mainly dry, apart from heavy showers in the north, east, west, south and centre of the country. There would be a significant change on Friday, when more showers were anticipated.

 So, once again, changeability was really a constant.

Mind you, they've started doing interesting long shots of the forecasters themselves. It's like seeing the women are actually mermaids, and the men are highly sexed and have three stiff legs.

But life is more than a weather forecast. Biologically, life is often considered to be 'organic', a complex chemistry which enables matter to reproduce, grow and self-direct. I wonder, though, if this classification is rather arbitrary, like seeing ourselves as important when we're really insignificant specks in the cosmos, or seeing economics as an arcane subject for experts which has little bearing on our ordinary day-to-day lives - when nothing could be further from the truth.

Certainly, when I consider the complex interactions of the inorganic world, the vast geothermal dynamics under the crust of this earth we stand on, the uncontrollable climatic systems which underpin our continuing existence, and the curious everyday unpredicabilities of our physical environment; I wonder.

I wonder, what incredible power and permutation there must be in the inorganic world around me, to enable my 'superior' biology to operate. Are the physical forces of gravity, mass, chemical interaction, and magnetism any less vital than the processing of food through my bowels?

Is not the universe as we know it, far more vast and pre-eminent than the antics of a hubristic tribe of talking heads in this outpost we call everything?

When we slip on ice, or the toast falls to the floor, or the planet meets a meteorite, we may then conclude that 'life' is much more than peculiar, internal chemistry.