Sitting around inside my head I’ve noticed that a few things have changed over the last few years. I’ve gone from being a fat kid with spots to a fat bloke with a beard who, although no less ugly, no longer hides from mirrors. This process, however has a major side effect and that side effect appears to be that I’m becoming a nasty, arrogant bastard.*
This process began one day a few years ago when I took my dad’s old Gibson out of its mangled, sticker plastered case - ignoring the old sock and the label that quite clearly said ‘ainzorf!’** And, one bored spring afternoon, learned to play the bassline from a blink-182 song. I forget which one now; they all sound much the same. I had two friends who had been playing the bass for about a year each they were keen to help me on my way.
About a fortnight after I first played the thing, I sat down and spent an entire Sunday learning the chorus riff from Travelling Without Moving when I should have been doing my homework. I expect my timing and technique was awful and now I’d cringe to hear it, but at the time I felt like I’d climbed a mountain - partly because it made my fingers hurt. This was the first thing I’d done where there seemed to be a real relation between the effort I put in and the result I got. I started trying to play more and more complicated songs to see if I could, even making some very rudimentary forays into the world of slap bass. Within about a month I’d gone past the standard of my friends’ playing.
In a side note, the confidence this gave me made me actually able to control my nerves for long enough to get a girlfriend and from that route most of the positive aspects of my metamorphosis have sprung. That, however, isn’t what I’m concerned with here, and I think that any discussion of the details of how that transformation took place would be rather sentimental and involve a couple of rather obscene diagrams.
I’ve encountered few people who are better bass players than me since then, my dad and Nick of Mumrah being the only two I can think of at the moment, which is probably more testament to how little I leave the house than my actual ability. But in the absence of anyone better than me I’ve ended up building a great big ego around the fact that I can play Jerry was a Racecar Driver or something like that.
I’ve got better at other things in the last few years - I’ve got consistently high marks this term, and I excel in seminars and the like - probably due to the fact that I don’t notice when other people are trying to speak and I like the sound of my own voice. My arrogance, in other words, has spread into many other areas of my mind, I’m even starting to think that I’m reasonably good looking now, which is just weird.
All these other little conceits, however, are ultimately grounded in the fact that I can do something better than most other people, someone might get a better mark than me in an essay but I can think ‘bet they can’t even play Aeroplane’ and this salves my wounded ego.
Whilst I dislike the nasty person I’ve become I’d rather not let him go, You see, whilst I can keep my unpleasantness under control most of the time I have become aware that the faculty of this university is mostly made up of nasty, arrogant people, and they seem to respond well to those like them; giving me good marks and tolerating my laziness. I need the overconfident attitude to continue to do well here.
This all gives me a mortal fear of the people saying things like ‘my flatmate plays bass’ or something like that - I’ve built myself up from a depressed lonely teenager with the self esteem of a suicidal platypus to an academically successful and reasonably well adjusted, if overconfident person on the basis of my ability to play a four stringed fretted instrument better than anyone else. I live in mortal fear that one day someone will come along and burst my bubble, every new bass player I hear about makes me nervous, last week I heard that the boyfriend of someone in my seminar group was really good and I lost sleep. I probably won’t feel calm until I’ve satisfied myself that I’m better than him, whether that involves actually meeting the guy or just convincing myself that he's almost certainly rubbish.
So I apologise to all those people that I’ve shown off at, all those kids in guitar shops or people who’ve tried to impress me, I don’t mean to be a bastard, it just happens.
-Ben
* I can think of a few people who would dispute this, saying that I’ve always been a nasty, arrogant bastard and hte examples I can think of I can't say I blame them for it.
** in a south east London accent that word is the phonetic spelling of ‘hands off’. It’s a pretty weak joke but it was the seventies, and good ones were expensive.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Saturday, January 21, 2006
Open Casket
I’ve been reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying today*. It’s not an easy book to read as in this book William Faulkner deployed all the literary techniques that are the bane of the lazy English student. I’m talking about stream of consciousness passages, weirdly named characters*2, a disjointed sense of time and multiple, often contradictory, narrative voices.
As I lay Dying, as you can probably tell from the title, is about someone dying, the matriarch of a clan of missisippissippi*3 hill farmers and the family’s attempts to transport her coffin to her home town many miles away for burial. That’s a pretty simplified summary, but I’m not writing an essay here. This got me thinking about how people deal with their dead, which isn’t that much of a jump considering my attention tends to drift away like a pair of loose swimming shorts on a beach holiday when I’m trying to do something constructive.
With the exception of elephants, no other creature I can think of seems remotely interested in their dead beyond a “let’s eat him before he starts to smell” sort of way, so why are people so interested in cadavers beyond their use in traumatising practical jokes? I suppose it’s a sort of decorous waste disposal, all this ashes to ashes stuff to disguise the more real, pragmatic reasons for sticking a decomposing body away from people and water supplies. Each culture goes for a different approach to this though, in the west it’s a matter of “stick the bugger in the ground once we’ve talked about him for a while” but other countries have different methods: from the uber cool Viking method “stick the bloke in his boat, set fire to it and push it out to sea” to the downright icky ancient Egyptian “do strange things to his innards and then put him in a pyramid, oh, and stick all his servants in there too” to the strange Tibetan method of “leave the guy on top of a mountain until the creatures of the air and land have eaten all the nasty bits”*4.
With Christian funerals, the thing that interests me is the fact that there is such a reliance on the body, making it the centre of all ceremonies, almost a religious idol of some kind. Just think of all the funerals you’ve been to (however many that may be, I hope it’s quite few) with the coffin placed centre stage at the front of the church all eyes on it. The people aren’t up in the pulpit talking about that body, they are talking about the person whom that body used to convey. Whether you believe in an omnipotent big daddy or not, the fact is that the body in the coffin has already gone from living person to cooling meat. Whatever it was that made them them, so to speak, whether that is an immortal soul or just the fact that their brain was plugged in, has departed.
Christian theology is always body bashing, talking about how the body is weak and inconsequential compared to the soul. Yet when it comes to the actual time when the separation of the soul and body takes place society seems extremely unwilling to acknowledge this. Instead it prefers to continue to deal with the two as if they are one, unable to shake the habit of a lifetime, despite all the embalming fluid and general lack of comment from the deceased that would suggest otherwise.
This is especially pronounced in America where it seems common practice to have some kind of wake or open casket staring session with the body on view for all to see. The purpose of this evades me completely, are you supposed to talk to it, or poke with sticks or try and revive it? Mankind is intrinsically afraid of death; the primary purpose of religion seems to me to be to make people less scared of death, usually by giving people the concept of the immortal soul to take comfort from. If you are shown the open casket you do not see an immortal soul, you see a dead person, the soul, even to the devout, does not show up and tell you everything is all right. The open casket thus serves to disturb both the religious, by distracting them from the contemplation of the eternal paradise, and the godless heathens like myself, by making us see the inert cadaver of someone close to us, intruding on our memories of them when they moved and made noises.
I think that the most sane funeral practice*5 I’ve encountered is that practiced by Muslims. According to Sharia law the stiff must be buried as quick as possible – for example recently the king of Kuwait was buried a couple of hours after he died – no fuss, no elaborate service, just put him in the ground facing Mecca. They do have memorial services for people to grieve and remember but in Islamic nations these ceremonies do not require the inexplicable attendance of a corpse and usually take place some time after the person is buried. This shows a sensible separation of the two functions of a funeral, commemorating the life of the deceased and getting them out of way of water supplies.
I don’t understand why the two should take place at that same time.
-Ben
*yes I know that seems like pointless intellectual namedropping but it has some relevance to what I’m saying
*2. Have you ever met a man called Jewel? Or Vardaman? Or a woman called Dewey? Eh?
*3. I never know when I’m supposed to stop that word, like when I try to write bananananana – I tend to get a little carried away.
*4. This piece of information is from Seven years in Tibet so I take it with a pinch of salt because I get the impression that as a narrator, Heinrich Harrer was full of shit. The other two are from Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, which I trust completely.
*5. I mean sane as opposed to fun, the Taiwanese ones with all the firecrackers and noise are good, but don’t make a great deal more sense
As I lay Dying, as you can probably tell from the title, is about someone dying, the matriarch of a clan of missisippissippi*3 hill farmers and the family’s attempts to transport her coffin to her home town many miles away for burial. That’s a pretty simplified summary, but I’m not writing an essay here. This got me thinking about how people deal with their dead, which isn’t that much of a jump considering my attention tends to drift away like a pair of loose swimming shorts on a beach holiday when I’m trying to do something constructive.
With the exception of elephants, no other creature I can think of seems remotely interested in their dead beyond a “let’s eat him before he starts to smell” sort of way, so why are people so interested in cadavers beyond their use in traumatising practical jokes? I suppose it’s a sort of decorous waste disposal, all this ashes to ashes stuff to disguise the more real, pragmatic reasons for sticking a decomposing body away from people and water supplies. Each culture goes for a different approach to this though, in the west it’s a matter of “stick the bugger in the ground once we’ve talked about him for a while” but other countries have different methods: from the uber cool Viking method “stick the bloke in his boat, set fire to it and push it out to sea” to the downright icky ancient Egyptian “do strange things to his innards and then put him in a pyramid, oh, and stick all his servants in there too” to the strange Tibetan method of “leave the guy on top of a mountain until the creatures of the air and land have eaten all the nasty bits”*4.
With Christian funerals, the thing that interests me is the fact that there is such a reliance on the body, making it the centre of all ceremonies, almost a religious idol of some kind. Just think of all the funerals you’ve been to (however many that may be, I hope it’s quite few) with the coffin placed centre stage at the front of the church all eyes on it. The people aren’t up in the pulpit talking about that body, they are talking about the person whom that body used to convey. Whether you believe in an omnipotent big daddy or not, the fact is that the body in the coffin has already gone from living person to cooling meat. Whatever it was that made them them, so to speak, whether that is an immortal soul or just the fact that their brain was plugged in, has departed.
Christian theology is always body bashing, talking about how the body is weak and inconsequential compared to the soul. Yet when it comes to the actual time when the separation of the soul and body takes place society seems extremely unwilling to acknowledge this. Instead it prefers to continue to deal with the two as if they are one, unable to shake the habit of a lifetime, despite all the embalming fluid and general lack of comment from the deceased that would suggest otherwise.
This is especially pronounced in America where it seems common practice to have some kind of wake or open casket staring session with the body on view for all to see. The purpose of this evades me completely, are you supposed to talk to it, or poke with sticks or try and revive it? Mankind is intrinsically afraid of death; the primary purpose of religion seems to me to be to make people less scared of death, usually by giving people the concept of the immortal soul to take comfort from. If you are shown the open casket you do not see an immortal soul, you see a dead person, the soul, even to the devout, does not show up and tell you everything is all right. The open casket thus serves to disturb both the religious, by distracting them from the contemplation of the eternal paradise, and the godless heathens like myself, by making us see the inert cadaver of someone close to us, intruding on our memories of them when they moved and made noises.
I think that the most sane funeral practice*5 I’ve encountered is that practiced by Muslims. According to Sharia law the stiff must be buried as quick as possible – for example recently the king of Kuwait was buried a couple of hours after he died – no fuss, no elaborate service, just put him in the ground facing Mecca. They do have memorial services for people to grieve and remember but in Islamic nations these ceremonies do not require the inexplicable attendance of a corpse and usually take place some time after the person is buried. This shows a sensible separation of the two functions of a funeral, commemorating the life of the deceased and getting them out of way of water supplies.
I don’t understand why the two should take place at that same time.
-Ben
*yes I know that seems like pointless intellectual namedropping but it has some relevance to what I’m saying
*2. Have you ever met a man called Jewel? Or Vardaman? Or a woman called Dewey? Eh?
*3. I never know when I’m supposed to stop that word, like when I try to write bananananana – I tend to get a little carried away.
*4. This piece of information is from Seven years in Tibet so I take it with a pinch of salt because I get the impression that as a narrator, Heinrich Harrer was full of shit. The other two are from Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories series, which I trust completely.
*5. I mean sane as opposed to fun, the Taiwanese ones with all the firecrackers and noise are good, but don’t make a great deal more sense
Buffer
I'm just writing this to act as a buffer between the previous post and the ones that might follow.
I've decided to restart this thingy
I don't think that I'm a better writer than I was when I decided to stop writing this but I'm less lazy, and it was the fact that I couldn't be arsed that was a bigger factor in the cessation of bloggage than the reasons I gave.
In the period between this post and the previous one, not a huge amount has happened, I'm still an english student, bored and lazy. Although I've found myself to be a more academically successful student than I was expecting myself to be in this second year. I'm still overwieght and drink too much although I'm working on those two, insofar as a man with no willpower can.
About all that's changed is that I'm now 20 years old, and therefore not a teenager anymore - although I'm yet to figure out what exactly this means - and I've got more hair and more beard.
let the aimless rambling commence!
-Ben
I've decided to restart this thingy
I don't think that I'm a better writer than I was when I decided to stop writing this but I'm less lazy, and it was the fact that I couldn't be arsed that was a bigger factor in the cessation of bloggage than the reasons I gave.
In the period between this post and the previous one, not a huge amount has happened, I'm still an english student, bored and lazy. Although I've found myself to be a more academically successful student than I was expecting myself to be in this second year. I'm still overwieght and drink too much although I'm working on those two, insofar as a man with no willpower can.
About all that's changed is that I'm now 20 years old, and therefore not a teenager anymore - although I'm yet to figure out what exactly this means - and I've got more hair and more beard.
let the aimless rambling commence!
-Ben
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