The Virtual Rambler

Number thirteen: 4^th February 2011

Transience

In his Sonnets , Shakespeare is drawn to images of transience time and again. “ Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore , So do our minutes hasten to their end , Each changing place with that which goes before ; In sequent toil all forwards do contend.” Nothing lasts beyond its allocated time , even the high and mighty. “ When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age ; When sometimes lofty towers I see down razed , And brass eternal slave to mortal rage . . .”. All life-forms , indeed all forms of energy , are destined to degrade , just as order is forever doomed to become disorder. Each of us observes the world that surrounded our childhood years disappearing during our adult lives. The ways in which our parents lived and spoke in their younger days have have fared even more drastically , fast becoming extinct. That’s just two generations’ worth of change. Western Europe has evolved or acquired about 40 languages in the 8,000 years since the arrival of Indo-European speakers , languages as different as English and Finnish. Over that time each of those languages mutated , regressed and amalgamated while many others disappeared. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was originally written 1,100 years ago and its Middle English is unreadable today for anyone but scholars. Language , the medium of our experience , is forever in flux.

All systems great and small are under the tyrannical rule of that arrow of time , the Second Law of Thermodynamics⁽¹⁾. If time and disorder are irreversible , hadn’t we better get a move on ? Hence the spinning gyroscope of continuous consumption , accompanied by a universal staring into flickering screens on which information faucets are going at full blast. So , too , the nervous haste of all and sundry to squeeze into the halls of fame before they close their swinging doors. For joggers and spinners , the siege of advancing years is too far away for present concern. For those so besieged , reminders of the active deeds of youth surround them. Up on one of my bookshelves there’s a good two feet occupied exclusively by now-redundant maps of the Peak District , the Yorkshire Dales , Scotland , Snowdonia and the Lakes. Translating from an open map to the landscape set before us has several aspects suggesting subterfuge. A secret agent negotiates a route through enemy lines , a commando unit make their way towards a sabotage mission in occupied territory , an escaped prisoner is plotting a way to distant freedom. In their own way , maps also call to mind a vanished pre-digital age of log tables , ex-army attire , protractors and the magnetic compass , all the stuff of a 1950s schoolboy and rambler. Maps can also appeal to the compulsive collector. Collections (whether of cigarette cards, rare 78s, maps, or works of art) are a way of mastering the outside world , of classifying and manipulating a confusing external reality into some sort of order. Freud pointed out that the love of order is a kind of compulsion to repeat when and how something must be done.

There can be uncongenial subtexts to the word order. Last orders ! Form an orderly queue. Order in the court ! He was just obeying orders. Although it’s music to the ears of revolutionaries , disorder can be distinctly unpleasant , as experienced by so many in the twentieth century. Our lives , with their lunar months and solar years , are a constant struggle between these two forces. The orderly structures we try to impose are under constant threat from the disorderly elements of illness , economics , disappointment , and death. Roaming over hill and dale one minute , we’re drooling in a care home the next. The future is always different from the past. Structures and assumptions once felt to be the ordering principles of human society vanish in their turn and such change is always confusing. Hence our deeply-rooted urge towards the preservation of a lost past in museums and archives , the restoration of churches and stately homes , the collection and curating of old folk songs. Seeking to preserve some keepsakes from ever-transient ways of life is really to emphasise the unavoidable mortality lying in wait for all of us , for the sun and eventually for the entire cosmos.

Wig.

⁽¹⁾ “ The tendency for Entropy to increase in isolated systems is expressed in the second law of thermodynamics - one of the most pessimistic formulations of human thought.” Gregory Hill and Kerry Thornley, Principia Discordia (1965)

The Virtual Rambler

Number thirteen: 4th February 2011

Transience

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Number thirteen: 4^th February 2011