Humanposting

Sound: A Short Story

I have a pretty nice room, and I’ve been told so many times by my friends and family who come through. It’s got a nice amount of wooden floor space, which I prefer to carpet, and the sink/bathroom/closet section is separated from the main room by a wall. The wall is cool, and is refreshing when it gets too hot at night. There are a couple of posters and several pictures on the walls that I find give a brief but holistic if not slightly abstract summary of me to the unacquainted. The window, overlooking the small balcony, lets me see out onto the garden and the trees. I like this very much. The sun fills my room during the day, and when it rains I leave the door open so the earthy and damp smell of summer rain calms me. My guitars bask in the light, the rays bouncing off the tuning pegs onto the ceiling. People walk past below and the constant chatter of students reassures me. I have a nice room.

But there’s one thing in this room that I don’t really like – and the problem with this is that I don’t really know what that thing is. I call it The Sound. Somewhere, in this room of mine, The Sound is being made. It’s comparable to scuttling feet of a small animal, or dripping water, or creaking wood, or a rope slapping against a flagpole in the wind. The Sound is all of these things, and The Sound is none of these things.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound doesn’t come from anywhere, yet it comes from everywhere. I once was lying awake at three in the morning, and I had convinced myself that I had found where and what The Sound was, but I was disappointed to find I still couldn’t find its provenance when I checked. It seems to exist solely to irritate me in full Dolby Surround.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound is incessant. Its presence becomes synonymous with my room, which is pretty nice, and is always in the background no matter what is happening. As I sit in my room with The Sound, the rays of the May sun intensify and beat down upon me and the tuning pegs that now scream in agony under the glare of it. The ceiling is ripped apart by the blinding spots of light eating away at it like smallpox. The lamp hangs completely and glaringly misaligned to the walls, completely skewed in its positioning, The Sound is its laughter as I sweat beads under its absurd placement above me.

The Sound fills my ears and drowns my thoughts.

The Sound leaves no stone unturned. My room, which is pretty nice, is stripped of its dignity and The Sound reveals the scene of anarchy in my room that I cannot unsee. The single floorboard that isn’t flush with the rest of the floorboards protrudes like an unwanted erection and my eyes shift upwards to the shelves that dont sit equally apart from each other and I know i cannot adjust them because i dont have a screwdriver so they hang like a deflated accordion that will forever play the sound carrying my exhausted eyes rightwards to the curtains that dont shut completely flush to prevent the hateful light from reaching the dividing wall with that bastard dent below the wall light that screams at me every waking moment i lie in bed with its image branded into my skull

Perhaps someday I will find The Sound and be freed of this manic hysteria of chaos that drowns out my room, which is usually pretty nice.

Insomnia: A Short Story

He didn’t sleep often. It was hard to switch off the millions of thoughts that raced around his mind all day. Finding that island of tranquility amongst his subconscious was harder than finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. When he did sleep, he was tortured by violent or surreal dreams that woke him up soaked in sweat every other hour. The word sleep became synonymous with anxiety and paralysing fear.

Days weren’t that bad. A constant high-pitched ringing followed his ears everywhere he went; it drowned out the white noise and he could focus in on menial tasks and mundane social interactions with those around. It was easy to think he was there, but in truth he was never there. Days flew by him as he watched from beyond his body, detached from it by the mere banality of everyday life. Evenings brought dread. He was reconnected with his body and the noise became agony. Voices, faces, epiphanies of violence, visions of unimaginable trauma, unfinished basslines and tense harmonies: the cacophony was resounding and all-consuming. What he was able to drown out during the day, he paid for dearly by suffering it at night. Hours and hours of random thoughts, their afterthoughts, and their after-afterthoughts, all sewn together in a horrifying lineup of semi-lucid goalless thought and terrorising dreams. Drowning out the noise with substance sometimes helped to calm the storm that kept him from sleeping every night, although he’d long since recognised the temporary and volatile nature of that solution.

But the deafening echo of his existence was nothing compared to the spiders.

Sometimes he’d hear them behind his head, their spindly limbs creaking as they stalked the perimeter of his consciousness. Other times, he’d wake in terror having seen something fall from the ceiling or heard the soft thud of a body land on his chest. Sometimes they were fat, black, hairy spiders that chased him out of his dreams to cast him back onto a soaked mattress, gasping for air. Mostly though, he never saw them. But the signs that they continued to hang around his mind were painfully constant – their webs veiled the questions spinning in his head, the sounds of their scuttling legs always ran away from him as he turned corners or opened doors within his dreams. Long shadows wrapped themselves around his eyes and around his tongue, keeping watch over his subconscious while he restlessly slept.

He didn’t fear spiders generally speaking. Seeing them in daytime barely triggered a response from him. But at night they would come again to crawl over his thoughts, and the terror of falling asleep would keep him up until the sun rose and his mind could take no more. The mundanity would kick in again and the day would begin, his swirling mind detached once again from his tired body until the cruel softness of the mattress swallowed him up and punished his mind with everything and anything he could possibly think about.

As he drifts away for the sixth time that night, the mattress wraps its eight legs around his body and spins its web of paranoia around the depths of his mind.

The not-so-blue skies of Alabama

L-EH-nerd s-KEN-erd otherwise styled as Lynryd Skynryd might like to sing about the adored southland and its beautiful blue skies, but its clear to me and certainly to the women of the world, that the weather forecast ain’t so clear in Alabama today.

At the hands of Governor Kay Ivey (a woman, ironically) legislation was passed this week banning abortion and rejecting a claim for an exception in cases of rape or incest in the state of Alabama. The move overturns the Roe vs Wade decision taken in 1973 that provided a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects a pregnant woman’s liberty to choose whether or not to have an abortion. According to the BBC, the vote was 22 to 6 in favour of the new bill whilst rejecting the exemption proposals aforementioned. The recent meme being shared no people’s instagram stories this morning was a photograph of these senators in one frame, the shocking and angering similarity being pointed out – middle-aged, white, men, are still making decisions about women’s bodies for women. A shocking reality that apparently is condoned even by women of the stature and influence of Alabama’s Governor. Signing off on the Alabama Human Life Protection Act” (HB314) yesterday, Mrs Ivey declared her clear resolve to protect Alabamians’ views that life is a “sacred gift given from God”. The dangerous and regressive influence of religion in Southern American politics is an affront to womens’ right to choose.

Image result for brett kavanaugh donald trump

The bill is argued to have picked up ground and confidence recently due to President Donald Trump’s appointment of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in the past 2 years. Conservative Republicans, these two gentlemen tipped the majority of the Supreme Court into the hands of conservatives once made part of the court. American conservative politics is the force behind Alabama’s new bill being pushed into legislation. Infamous right-wing American-Jewish commentator Ben Shapiro recently made an appearance on the BBC, interviewed by Andrew Neil: his defence of similar abortion laws in Georgia (and subsequent disgruntled exit from the show after clearly being bested by Neil) only goes to show that the conservative side of American politics is actively out to enforce what Shapiro calls “traditional Judeo-Christian values” – that is to say, anti-abortion, anti-choice, homophobic legislation. Shapiro embodies the real danger that conservative politicians like Brett Kavanaugh pose. Furthermore, having gotten away with sexual assault Kavanaugh’s presence on the Supreme Court laughs in the face of assault victims and women wishing to take control of their own bodies.

The new bill sees doctors imprisoned for up to 10 years if they are caught performing “illegal” abortions. It is a direct move to criminalise women’s healthcare decisions. It is an inhumane, unethical and sexist move from the government. It symbolises, to me, everything wrong with American politics. White, male dominated, and completely at ease with the propagation of far-right conservatism that seeks to reinforce and maintain these “traditional Judeo-Christian values” that are so detrimental to equality.

There isn’t much else that we can do if we don’t live in Alabama. Continue to cherish the right to choice that women have in most countries, fight to ensure that these laws never make it into our countries. As a man, it is also mens’ duty to fight this kind of injustice and fight to protect the right for all people to make their own choices about their bodies.

For now, big wheels keep on turnin’…

Click to read the Post-Roe Handbook

The Human Condition on a nice mild Tuesday morning

Monolithic structures aren’t exactly everyone’s breakfast of choice, but this morning my coffee and pain au chocolat is accompanied by the 10th millennium BC ceremonial site of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey. The power of humankind to shape the environment and exert our culture and thought upon the landscape is awe-inspiring and terrifying, when thought about in the sense that this structure has been hidden away under the feet of locals since its abandonment in the 8th millennium BC until 1963. The shaping and manipulation of the natural world to our will is testament to our collective intellect and power. Yet everyday when you or I exert ourselves upon the world around us, through actions that could be as mundane from weeding your garden or talking to a teacher or a friend to actions as huge as holding back rivers with dams or tunnelling deep underground to reach the very last reserves of fossil fuels, these actions take an effect on the world around you. Call it the Butterfly Effect, or Newton’s third law: every action taken results in an effect.

To quote Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s The Vocation of Man (1800); “you could not remove a single grain of sand from its place without thereby … changing something throughout all parts of the immeasurable whole”. However i’m more and more inclined to think that the same can be said in the opposite direction, and the ideas of anthropologists like Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold and Alfred Gell suggest that humans and our actions are merely a result of the natural world’s influence upon us – that nature and culture exist in a symbiotic relationship of agency, well, it’s basically telling us that our actions and our perceived intentionality behind our action isn’t really all that we think it is. Simplified, someone like Lambros Malafouris’s theory that a pot “shapes itself” thanks to the hands of a potter again (Malafouris, 2008) hammers home the banality and agency-less nature of human action. Our culture, and therefore our individual actions, are reflections of the natural world’s influence upon us.

Or at least, it is perceived to be so. It becomes increasingly difficult to find meaning in everyday routine, action and tasks when your seniors drill into you the notions that “you have no free will”. To muster the energy to write an essay, or to read a book, or to cook myself dinner, or to try and come up with a melody, or to buy a sleeve for my laptop, or to do my laundry, or to see my friends, or to call my family, or to get out of bed seems impossible when you realise that essentially, it has no meaning. Maybe Camus was right in saying that the only moral and logical solution to solve the existential crisis that is the human condition is to commit suicide ??? Perhaps a slightly extreme solution…

So – finding that energy to do the banal and the mundane, where can it be found ? It is by *creating* meaning for oneself in one’s everyday tasks, and assigning meaning and value to the daily life. Maybe such a monumental site like Göbekli Tepe can arguably be a manifestation of a naturalistic cosmology through a human interpretation, but that fact that it still remains after 12,000 years after being built by human hands only reinforces the (perhaps) misled belief that the free will of humans is alive and well. This seems a fitting analogy for a first post on this blog, as it definitely doesn’t mean much, certainly won’t be read by millions or be around in 12,000 years – but it’s something that will allow me to make meaning and give value to daily life and the things that I experience. I challenge you, the reader, and encourage you, to find meaning in everyday things and thoughts. Ask the questions, ascribe meaning to those questions, and find an outlook on the world which allows for enjoyment and fulfilment.

To be honest, this blog probably won’t answer all the questions I will flood it with. But at least it will give me an outlet that I consider meaningful to tackle them materially rather than let them float away on my subconscious.

Humanposting 2.0

Blogger seems to have stopped working. I can’t preview or publish the long-overdue conclusive post of my summer travels, so I have decided to change platforms in the hope that WordPress will be easier to use and more reliable. I’ll be migrating all my previous content from Blogger to here, which is no easy task. Please stay tuned !