vendredi 9 mai 2003

Half a dozen strikes and unwarranted eruptions A first brickbat flies in the general direction of Emma's errant brother David, who starved the cat, some of us learned at work today. It's a large brickbat because I don't know where his travels have taken him now. Irresponsible youth! (I remember some of my own irresponsible youth only too happily.) Cats are not to be messed with. Just ask Sarah, who as we all know, will explain this to you in just a minute without hesitation, deviation or repetition. And take note that at the TS community, felines are favourites, as evidenced in these relatively recent threads (update May 11: the board has moved, these links sort of fixed): 'Best time to de-flea your cat ...'; 'OT: Would you do this to your cat?!'; and even 'why do people play games on computers?'. Wrong. "cat OR cats" came up in the latter topic because of "sophisticated". You could find out why it arose in 'When is "PENIS" spelled "PEN1S"?' for yourselves. I thought Mayo had forgotten the OT for "off-topic". Appears not. zzz Here's number two for MK, back from her honeymoon and stressing that she is still called "Hoffmann". All I did was ask, as best my befuddled brain recalls, "Did you have a good time?" (to be corrected if I remember wrong). Just why was that such an odd or original question? Was I supposed to ask: "When's the divorce?" But mainly, she failed to put me at the centre of her day and immediately produce pictures, for blogging, of the dress. zzz Number three is enormous and descending on the cranium of one of the individuals on the factory's managerial staff supposedly well versed in medical affairs, who should know better than (i) to think (s)he's wiser than my general practitioner and (ii) exceeds the bounds of this country's lucid legislation by liberally dispensing sometimes incorrect counsel and even sending people on wild goose chases to find the wrong kind of so-called "specialist". Whoopsie. Part of n° 3 has disintegrated into shrapnel in mid-air: this must be headed for the people in the multi-media department who saw me running for the loo nine times this morning before I decided to use another one instead. I know I promised not to mention that again, but it wasn't funny. I also know that this is not genuinely African suffering and I have only an inkling of what it could be without, say, Imodium or the means to get rehydrated (warning: link with unexpected sound). Where did you expect me to do it? In the Métro? zzz Four for the RATP, which plans to shut down my own nearest Métro station for its "vaste programme de rénovation" from May 19. Simultaneously, the Régie Autonome de Transports Parisiens will do likewise with the station just opposite AFP. We have all seen that such closures, which last for more than two months, usually end up with no more than a lick of paint, a few new tiles, freshly whitewashed steps, and - with luck - no more water coming through the ceiling (as it still does in my bedroom, two years on, despite three surveyors and all because of badly replaced chimneys I'm not allowed to fix for myself, even if I dared scramble up there.) zzz Five (speaking of things coming down): the biggest brickbat of all must be reserved for the journalists in Africa (and in Paris) who responded to a call to, ahem, "sex up" our stories on the nasty Ilyushin mid-air accident in the DRC. Even from hardened hacks, it was inappropriate and callous to suggest that we entitle it: "Darling Dr Congo, it's raining policemen." Mini-brickbat spin-offs go to those aviation officials in Ukraine who swore that nobody was hurt at all and the Congolese communications minister for thoroughly confusing just about everybody. zzz Six goes to that unmentionable spaghetti inside me and whatever's inside it, or wherever SassyFabuSpech (the outcome of googling that sent me straight here, but I'm blowed if I can spot the words) mislaid it. This will take me off work tomorrow for one more day on orders to see Dr Yang again instead (from Dr Yang). And to an assistant to a genuine specialist who informed me he is perfectly unavailable until May 27. Today, you see, it was thoroughly enjoyable, if downright exhausting, to pay a working visit to the factory. I miss all those unkind comments and pleas for no more details before lunch; and I confirm here that Karin may be in the wrong job. She is so chock-full of truly sound medical advice (picked up from a previous journalistic incarnation) that were I "out in the bushes" (as some of our African correspondents often put it) with nothing but dysentery and a sat-phone, the first thing I would do is call Karin. In the meantime, there is every chance that if things go on at this rate, the 14ème arrondissement will be knee-deep in it by May 27. But wait, there is hope: said specialist has left a message on my 'phone. Progress, he suggests, as of Monday. It's the darndest thing. Now that I'm in the state of almost enjoyable, sated fatigue that can occasionally strike after a long day's sickness in the family factory, hence the hours it took to write this and anything else today, I'm feeling quite definitely very horny again for the first time in at least a week. What can I do? There's been enough wet, sticky mess as it is! But you didn't need to know that either, did you? As MK put it when I gave her a most generous helping of logorrhea about my condition: "Thanks for sharing!"See you all again asacop (co = conceivably). P.S. Could somebody check my AFP e-mail for me? I clean forgot. The password is "droppings". Those persistent rumours that they helpfully read it all for us anyway are totally without foundation. I know this because I never, ever heard a onetime Président Directeur-Général quoting verbatim from mine, nor did the Hotmail ever suddenly get shut down at a most inappropriate moment just before an assemblée générale about a looming strike. Yes, that particular PDG also never left under ignominious circumstances. 11:02:29 PM  link   your views? [] What to believe? On the right, what Méteo France had to say about Paris yesterday morning. Left, the skies as seen by Weather Underground. On Tuesday, the contrast between the two was far more striking, while the thermometer outside the pharmacie across the street had done another of its daily jumps; one I approved of this time, up by 10°C. Sometimes I wonder if at the French weather centre, they look outside rather than at their charts and satellite pictures. True, they update their site often. But, as ever, I lean to the left. The reality was, as often, somewhere in between. Nine years ago, I fell in love with a laugh in a stairwell, one of the most musical voices I had ever heard. When I discovered the owner, it was her eyes that did it. Life turned upside down, for the first time since the divorce. That affair was as miraculous as it was painful; there was no way it could "work out". I failed to lay the ghost of it to rest until after the turn of the millennium - and this in the worst of possible ways: at another woman's expense. A perceptive thing S. did, when she still scarcely knew me, was to make me a present with a remarkable dedication scrawled over the first chapter. 'Le Paysage et l'amour dans le roman anglais' (Seuil, 1994, reprinted in 1999), seemed to me to have nothing to do with anything at the time, but I was swiftly totally engrossed in it. "Landscape and love, seen as 'the means by which a thinking subject can believe in his material union with the world', have powers which meet: man by their mediation is 'plunged back into his deep waters, magically brought back into alignment with the forces of the earth'." Or not. To make her case, Sorbonne and Harvard graduate Christine Jordis explores the work of people I met at school, from Emily Bronté to Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys among others, in ways I'd never imagined. In the process, she gave me a whole new perspective on the country I'd left behind. But also on me and my upbringing. The latter, no doubt, was S.'s intuitive intention. That I should pursue this road to Kay Redfield Jamison, the creative psychologist I introduced here last week was but part of a natural flow of events. "Karma quand tu nous tiens...," S. wrote. Lunatically in love with a woman whose belief in the law of karma is rock solid and still under the spell of a wonderful uncle who was instrumental in my own months-long passage to India a few years after the "hippie trail" had been blazed, I was perfectly ready to accept that "karma had me by the balls" (though S. put it more politely). But S. also believes in reincarnation and would be quite at home at an (informative) place like Spirit Speaks if she spoke enough English. In the day job she tolerates for an income, she's extremely down to earth, but in what she'd consider her more real life, she is, after years of study, a gifted ... astrologer, decidedly not of the nonsensical newspaper kind. In that role, S. was far less surprised than I was when, in 1996, the French equivalent of the Britannica, the Enclopaedia Universalis sent me its latest two-volume update. "A" included an entry 10 whole pages long, by doctor of Oriental studies Jacques Halbronn, allowed by his peers to take astrology seriously, right there between 'Assistance technique' and 'Atlantique (Alliance)'. Despite a short-lived teenage fancy about becoming a Buddhist monk, preferably in a free Tibet, before this struck me as far too much like very hard work, I am most rarely prone to mystical visions. But I have had two extremely bizarre, even upsetting, experiences. These sense-surround waking dreams were of exactly the kind that people the world over claim to have when they say they "remembered" something from a previous life. Both mine were about experiencing the moments before other people's deaths, there was nothing romantic about them, each was frighteningly vivid, and my shrinks have made neither rational head nor tale of them. When near Madras, I spent a week or so staying at Adyar, where a place where Madame H.P. Blavatsky bought a small, beautifully kept property for the Theosophical Society was still around. That weird woman and her followers would have much to say of my "day-dreams". But now I find that Grace Knoche's outlook on remembering and forgetting past lives does rather less to illuminate my visions, let alone 'Light(ing) a Thousand Lamps'. This particular log entry I've worked on for a while before the lurgy struck me down, halting such things. So it was intriguing coincidence to wander down once more to "the canteen", where I found not only a restored appetite, but also Jean-Paul and François, whose skills in matters internet and telecoms leave me somewhere in the Stone Age while F. smokes carpets (or something...) Science-fiction swiftly became a subject of the hour, along with an invitation southwards to the Lot some summertime: an almost irresistible one, given my affection for the place (today shared by an ever growing number of English settlers spilling over from the Dordogne). Then there was the little matter of, say, 12 dimensions. Francis used a pleated chunk of the paper tablecloth to outline M-theory in terms I could grasp. Jean-Paul and I broke off from an exchange about another "dimension", time, consciousness and perception to listen. Already this month, I've heard from several people whose recent experiences have variously led them "not to believe in anything at all", to disclose how their lives fell apart, or to express major misgivings about matters esoteric. Deeply as I love and like these people, I confess that Francis's enthusiasm came as a well-timed booster shot in the arm. "Get you started on this," he warned me, "and you might be searching for hours." He may be right. Who needs separate lives and reincarnation? Arthur Conan Doyle may have had developed "a credulous acceptance" of spiritualism, but did not, as far as I know, let this interfere with Sherlock Holmes and his methods. So, what if the relentless march of time, as generally we experience it, is but a limitation of our tools of perception, when in fact everything happens at once? Since then, I've discovered "the co-founder of String Theory, and (...) author of international best-selling books such as Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension. He also holds the Henry Semat Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York." Dr Michio Maku has a website with forums, along with views on the 'X-Men' and 'The Matrix' vs. Reality (embracing two other lunchtime topics). I plan to explore as an article of faith; this looks like the step on from 'The Tao of Physics' and 'The Turning Point'. It was a very long time ago that I read Fritjof Capra and the world has moved on considerably. Or, it hasn't moved an iota (but we have, and that's a whole different question). Maku took me on to Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and an intriguing paperback out this month: "How Everything is Connected to Everything Else" doesn't sound too bad for the working title of 'Linked'. Then there's 'After the Clockwork Universe' a-coming from S.J. Goerner (reviewed). If those weren't my own past lives I separately envisioned, I wonder whose they were. And why on earth should they have bumped into my mind? 1:39:03 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.