online: 25 november 2015
modified: 20-25 november 2015

5 november 2015 bonfire night


...listening for expected explosions on bonfire night... in memory (or forgetfulness) of Guy Fawkes... and others who (in the so-called English Revolution) put gunpowder beneath the Houses of Parliament... but the plot was discovered before they could light the fuses... and then the Catholic protestors were executed by burning... by the Protestant parliamentarians who had killed King Charles the First (at least that's what i was taught!)...

...but now this is celebrated as a children's and young people's festival... and not as political violence... or civil war... or religious...

...just now i hear faint sounds of fireworks... even through double glass windows... but i am not going out to look for bonfires and rockets... i prefer to write this... and to enjoy the central heating... and the other luxuries of industrial life... (though my heating is not working at the moment... so i'm using an electric heater... that wastes 2/3 of the heat to power station cooling towers... or nearby rivers)...

...looking up from the keyboard i see a shelf of books by John Cage... and a picture postcard just sent from Assisi by my daughter Susan who is on a Saint Francis holiday (or holyday)...

...i imagine that John Cage liked loud bangs as much as he liked apparent silence... and i imagine that Saint Francis would try to protect animals from the fireworks that frighten them...

...but i suppose few of us nowadays wish to celebrate a conflict that involved such violence and cruelty... yet religious violence is returning to European politics... while humanism (that produced apparent peace) seems threatened by new kinds of civil warfare... now spreading everywhere... and involving everyone... including women children and holiday makers... as victims and/or voluntary suicide bombers... child soldiers... and the like... [losing continuity]...


...an unpleasant surprise... for those of us who were educated to think that all people are good (if given the right conditions)... ...and surely there will be new surprises... for all of us... as we combine the new technologies with our much too rigid and authoritarian forms of government... or social order...


...yes... what i am always looking for are new conditions... no longer inspired by the crude and clumsy operations of mechanical industry... but sharing the autonomous decentral character of automation... (yet to be appreciated by many)... until the advent of social media released from nowhere an unexpected and near universal ability to improvise new forms of interacting... without a boss or chief or 'person in charge'... or professional expert...


...in a few minutes of clocktime it will be tomrrow... and goodness knows what may happen... i look at a mobile phone just in time to see 23:59 become 00:00... and in that simple habit or ritual... a profound yet wholly artificial moment that is almost imaginary...

...and now... at 00:07... we await whatever may occur... both outside us and within...




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