Oh you pretty atheists

You may enjoy listening to this while reading;



Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in G Minor is one of my favourite pieces of Baroque music. I find it harmonically beautiful and structurally perfect. As with most music from this period, I'm satisfied when the music repeatedly resolves to its root key. It just feels 'right' to me. Safe, even.

Wholesome.

Just like the film where the boy gets the girl, good triumphs over evil and the mystery is solved - its all tied off nice and safe. It meets that very human need we have for meaning, structure and resolution. We are after all, just pattern recognition machines.

Classical music may not be up your street and to be fair, I'm hardly the buff myself (I'm an indy boy at heart), but the beauty of this piece is undeniable. It's as if it has an inherent, tangible beauty - something you might grasp in the palm of your hand.

Kittens are nice too. You can hold them in the palm of your hand if you want. Sunsets, grand vistas and stars are equally beautiful, if rather difficult to get a grip of. Yet still they feel 'right' somehow.

Love and morality have aesthetic similarities too I think, as it's tempting to see them as tangible entities - things that exist in and of themselves and outwith our own bodies.

I've had many a conversation with the faithful about this very phenomenon. They go something like this;

"Just look around you - look at how beautiful the world is. How could something so perfect be random?"

"Erm, we've evolved to see beauty in this 'apparent' order perhaps?"

"Yes, but it would have to be beautiful in the first place, surely?"

or,

"What is love?"

"Fucked if I know mate, but it feels nice..."

and so on...

I find that on these points of aesthetics, I have some commonality with believers. I've never struggled with the notion of gods per-se, but the nature of beauty, love and morality have had me tied up in knots for years. Like the Christian, who believes that God is the absolute root of beauty, I've struggled to get to grips with them as human, relativist constructions.

Until I decided to stop trying to get to the bottom of it and just get on with appreciating them for what they are.

John Cage, the avant-garde composer (and polar opposite to Vivaldi) once said;

"If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience."

Well said, I say.

No miracles here

Nathan Coley, one of Britain's more interesting artists, is amongst the four nominations for the 2007 Turner Prize. I for one, hope he wins it, simply on the strength of this installation, which I think is fabulous.

It was inspired by a 17th century story from the French village Modseine. The village was the site of numerous supposed miracles and magical practices. The local authorities took umbrage to this and the visiting hoards and tried their utmost to stop the village being taken over. Eventually a notice was put up stating ‘There will be no miracles here, by order of the King’.

It represents to me, the ongoing struggle between material reality and metaphysical hubris. In posting this command, the authorities asserted their control over the land and its people, and therefore the miracles that they witnessed - The miracles that they made themselves.

David Hume, in his essay ‘Of Miracles’ (1748) wrote "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder."

So, 'there will be no miracles' can then be understood as an imperative to depart from superstition and the irrational, to empower individuals to take responsibility for their own actions and without reliance on, so-called higher powers.

No wonder I like the piece, eh?

May the 4th be with you

Today was pet day at Meg's shiny new school. A culmination of a week's preparation. They've fashioned pet homes out of shoe boxes and made collages of petshop animals. Each animal's name scrawled in lanky script under it. They've told animal stories and been on bear hunts.

This morning, each child brought in a pet for the rest of the class to meet. There were cats, Guinea pigs, fish, woodlouse, worms, a pony and numerous dogs. Mcleod was amongst them.

I'd arranged for a late start at work, so could spend much of the morning with the kids. They had a wail of a time.

Miche was there too, as she volunteers as a classroom support on Fridays. She knows the teachers quite well and was chatting to one of them whilst watching the kids enjoy themselves.

"Now, this is what it's about Miche, not those damned targets, key achievements and benchmarks. This is what we should be doing all the time." She said to Miche.

Miche was delighted to hear it. You see, we both feel that our young children are monitored, measured and evaluated far too much in our education systems. I imagine that there is a template child somewhere, like a cardboard cutout, that our government compares all other children to. God forbid we create a child too bad or too good. Too different, even.

Coincidentally, I came across this TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson on my lunch break today. He summed up my thoughts on the matter brilliantly. I urge you to watch it. Now, it's twenty minutes long, but this man is a wonderful speaker, and bloody hilarious too. I guarantee you will enjoy it.



Apologies for the title. It had to be done.

The goggles, they do nothing

Leo Tolstoy said that art is "a human activity having for its purpose the transmission of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen."

Which is one way of looking at it, I suppose.

Could it not also transmit the lowest and worst feelings to which men have descended? Plus all that's in between, surely? Whilst we're on the subject, what the bloody hell is art in the first place?

Now, I have no intention to clog up this blog, any more than it is, with turbid musings on the nature of art. Many have disappeared up their own arses doing this very thing. It's a risky occupation I tell you, and one that I have no appropriate qualification for.

However, I've been bleating on about how the experience and understanding of beauty is perhaps the most powerful way of countering the boredom and angst that our modern world provides for us. Art of course, is a crucial medium for this.

Perhaps then, I should have a crack at defining what I personally find beautiful. Don't despair too much - I'll try to keep the noise down to a minimum. But what is blogging, if not self indulgent?

So, over the coming weeks, my plan is to elucidate my thoughts, in taught, beautifully written posts, which on reading, you will be bedazzled by my conception of beauty.

One can dream....

In the meantime, I've started a related photo blog to lend some visual ballast. Unfortunately I don't have a good camera, as the last one died a sudden death. So for the moment, I'm making do with my cellphone camera. Some people say that this lends some immediacy to photographs. Perhaps it does, perhaps not. For what it's worth, I'll be sticking stuff up there as I snap away each day. It keeps me off the streets, I suppose.

Thanks to Holly for the inspiration.