For the last two days I have been taking large amounts of the usual pain killers to help alleviate the pain in my head and right eye. This was probably brought on by annoyance and frustration at turning up teach a class on Tuesday only to find it cancelled and no one had let know.
If this was Indonesia that would have been fine because Indonesians don't attach the same seriousness to such things over there.
A wild generalisation I know, but it does have an element of truth.
There are better things to do than the boring routine of a job, and if the person who was responsible for telling me about the cancellation had bumped into a second cousin she had not seen for years and had to go and have an all day lunch and gossip, why, that would be perfectly understandable.
How boorish of me it would be for me to complain about getting up at 6am, preparing handouts and travelling all the way to Tunstall.
In Indonesia I could have had a good laugh with the library staff at the venue and gone for lunch myself.
But here in the Kingdom of Foxes we do things differently, we like to make life as serious and difficult for each other as we possibly can and going for lunch with a long lost cousin is never a good excuse for neglecting one's official duty.
Instead of lunches we have headaches.
The cancelled class was replaced by other symbolic headaches. I shall list.
1) The boiler had to be reset after I ran out of gas.
The system is typical of Fox design. It is all digital and largely incomprehensible to anyone but an engineer who has to be called out at great expense.
The gas meter is on the floor in the corner of the front room and can only be read by lying down on the floor with a torch, or bringing one's nose to within a few centimetres of the faint digital numbers behind the glass.
The boiler can do all kinds of wonderful programmable things and even sense the temperature and come on automatically. But.... to simply switch it on an off presents a problem which once solved one hopes never to have to solve again after the first time.
The digital panel of information, like the gas meter is tiny and seemingly designed to be difficult to read.
I sometimes hear the faint chuckle of foxy laughter as I'm forced to crawl across the sitting room floor to read the meter, and later take off and polish my glasses several times in order to be able to read the boiler between kitchen and bathroom. I always end up looking blankly at the message on the screen and then punching several wrong buttons in the hope one of them might might solve the problem.
2) I have also been in and out of jail in the last few days.
On my ipod, that is. I discovered jailbreaking ( find out for yourselves) and of course had to try it out. I did it successfully, but was too nervous to explore most of what was on offer, and I don't have the technical know-how to go in too deep.
Then there was a new upgrade - that promised much and delivered little - so I had to break back into jail. Then when I wanted to get back out again I found I was locked in.
I'm sure someone will come up with the key soon and perhaps I'll try another escape. All this too time and concentration and only made my headache worse.
3) The touch screen on my phone has begun to behave strangely and the touch only works some distance to the right. So press a button and and the one to the right lights up.
I tried various things all without success and took it in to a local shop. They told me the problem was water had got inside the phone and that they could fix it for £25.
I thought that strange as phone has not had the chance to get damp since Scotland, two weeks ago now.Besides £25 would buy me a new phone. So I took mine home, took it apart as much as I dared, and put it in the oven, where it still is.
I hope this may dry it out. Though I am a little sceptical of the diagnosis of water damage as I could see no signs of dampness when I opened up the back.
3) Just a myriad, a swarm, (Q. What is a myriad? A. Greek for 10,000 ) of tiny irritations and frustrations made worse by my headache and eye pain that made seeing and reading rather difficult at times.
But...
this morning the pain is no more than a faint hum in the back of my eye.
After breakfast I returned to bed to listen to the In Our Time discussion on St Anselm's Ontological Argument for the existence of God.
Of the three classic arguments for the existence of God the ontological is by far the most interesting and great fun to unpick.
The partial quote that heads this entry is attributed to Bertrand Russell. The full one being "Great God in Boots!—the ontological argument is sound!"
If he was actually in Boots at the time I don't know.
As I listened I half dozed off and a miasma of brilliant images swirled across my mind, as they often do after a severe headache, surreal in the literal meaning of the word.
Anselm's argument, of course, does not only apply to God but may also be used to examine the reality of thoughts and feelings generally.
A few weeks ago I tried to talk about this in a poem about poor Willard. (The old rat has since died.)
I tried to propose a paradox; that all all feelings can be expressed in words because we construct our conscious minds through language, and yet we all know that there are feelings that cannot be expressed in words.
The poem is unfinished, by the way. I am unhappy with the cliched line about words and feelings, but I hoped it would be read as a deliberate cliche contrasting the clumsiness of the conscious thought with the the sudden
'spark' of feeling.
But I'm not sure it works and may change it later.
The fact is, it is fascinating to think about the way we construct and then read our world. Especially now modern physics comes up with so many bizarre and counter intuitive suggestions. The idea of multiple worlds gives a new slant to old Anselm's argument.
As you know I'm reading Geertz's classic Religion in Java. The picture he paints
is of a society where ritual and symbolism permeate almost every aspect of everyday life. Something many of us here in the UK find hard to understand now institutional ritual has been largely reduced to marriages, funerals and Christmas. There are the secular and personal rituals and symbolism that we all have, but these remain largely private and are not reflected in wider society.
Are things better that way? I'm not entirely sure, and I find it almost impossible to imagine believing in so many spirits and supernatural beings from a diversity of religions. On the other hand, such beliefs would make me part of a community and give me a cultural identity, in a way that has now been lost in the West.
Can you ever be lonely, neglected or troubled by feelings of guilt and self pity when surrounded by spirits that take responsibility for many of your actions, good and bad, as well as offering solace and protection?
The always sensible David Hume said of Anselm's argument :
"Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction."
So hurrah for the non-existent!
The many spirits of Java, old St Anselm and, of course,
foxes.