What is the best weather?

Any weather would be shit forever. Weather isn’t supposed to stay the same. For all the ‘typically British’ whinging about the weather (generally taking the view that anything bad will last forever and anything good will last for a minute), the fact is that we have it about right here. On average.

The time just after rain is my favourite personally, particularly if there’s a burst of sunshine. Just the other day, I went out for my lunchbreak in the beaming sun, but by the time I’d found some green to sit upon, it was grey. The rain came, but looking across, I could see that blue skies were still around. I stuck it out. As my clothes slowly filled with water, I watched the blueness creep closer. I saw the light brighton the dome of the nearby ridiculous gate, as the rain toughened, I could see the sun creep closer, until suddenly, I bathed in it.

The smell of rain on pavements. The geosmin and petrichor as the world moistens and the actinobacteria as the earth dries out again.

There are chemical processes that underly our romances.

Sometimes they have cool names.

So it’s liminal points that I like best. The bursting through of one thing into the next. The sudden weight of rain in the air. The unsettling of a placid sea.

And we need those changes. Stasis is death. Rain feeds our gardens, but sun feeds our plants. Wind helps the world circulate. Fog looks good. Clouds paint the sky, moving water around the world.

Weather is the brush strokes of a global system of atmosphere that feeds the world. Well, most bits of it anyway. It tends to leave some naked stretches, but that’s how it works. It’s an emergent system. Huge intricate patterns emerge from simple elements like heat and the chemical properties of water. Interacting elements combine, conjoin, split and spread.

The world, at heart, is a barren rock, but the air that is held to it gives it weather. Without that, the system of life that has built up would at best be entirely different (and probably much simpler) and at worst, simply non-existent.

Life is all about edge. The place where two things meet is the place where the interesting things can get going. To increase biodiversity, you increase the edge between habitats. Surface area. The place where one thing can impact another.

It could be raunchy, and its no coincidence, that’s where life happens.

Weather isn’t something there for you to enjoy in one situation and not in another. Rain isn’t bad. Sun isn’t good. Wind isn’t annoying. Fog isn’t atmospheric (well, it is, literally, but that’s not the point).

Weather isn’t for your benefit. Weather just is, and without it, the world would be in tatters. Weather is a system that brings life. It brings elements from one place to another. It increases the edge of the world.

And that’s pretty cool.

That is, in fact, the best.

—

Illustration by Emma

Is Steampunk intrinsically a fascist aesthetic through a seemingly playful back door?

It’s times like this I feel like I should probably have paid more attention when I skimread the futurist manifesto, and similar bodies of aesthetic fascism. I’m already worried that even that one sentence was enough of a blasé misinterpretation to make the intellectually rigorous run to the hills.

I am probably kidding myself if I believe that people are around here for the intellectual rigor.

Anyway, let’s get some definitions out of the way. Steampunk is essentially an aesthetic/lifestyle subculture focussed on alternate history Victoriana. The punk doesn’t come directly from punk, it comes from cyberpunk. There are however, some shared theses. A home made attitude to creation is approved of, for example.

Steampunk basically imagines a world where we stayed Victorian in style, but developed technology to a point much closer to the present, if not all the way, only using the medium of industrialism rather than computerisation. We’re talking steam driven computers and zepellins. We’re talking cogs as brooches, suede corsets, elaborate pocket watches and waistcoats. Hats with tiny binoculars strapped to the front. Eye patches.

I find it particularly odd, because it seems to detach from any kind of real political statement apart from ‘doesn’t this look cool’. It strikes me as a very ‘pure’ aesthetic. Evolving from the gaslight sci-fi of Jules Verne and HG Wells into a wealth of comics, computer games, gatherings, stories and deviantart home pages. This is one of those proper subcultures. I always smile when I see someone dressed inspired by it.

So where does the fascism come from?

Well. First of all, it’s essentially nostalgia for the era of empire. Idolising the industrial revolution and the Victorian age is like saying ‘wasn’t it great how cool we were when we were annhilating the resources of half the world’. I mean, to be fair, we are still doing that, so I guess you can maybe be nostalgic for when we did it slower?

No. I don’t think it’s a particularly pretty thing to idealise from any perspective. The question comes down to whether you can boil down an aesthetic to just its aesthetic properties. Can you hark back to an era of history without invoking the history of the time? Can you laud the Victorians without celebrating empire?

You get the same problem walking around the V&A, or just about any other London Museum. The treasures of the world, stolen, claimed and encased in glass. Our treasures now. Free for public appraisal. Come and learn about the world, through the eyes of the most refined brigands.

Then there’s techno worship itself. The utopianism of the futurists, written in the praise of industrialisation. Man made free by technology. Again, it’s not far from the philosophy of today. It’s just more visible.

Perhaps that’s the point. Steampunk draws to the surface the underlying political weirdnesses of now. The technoutopianism, the brutal oppression, the way man and machine interrelate.

Only they make it look cool, anachronistic, special.

I don’t know if that’s okay.

—

Illustration by Henry

Does nature know when we care for it, and does it reciprocate that care?

Nature is one of my klaxon words. Whenever I hear it, I wince and worry. This is a harsh reaction, but it comes from good reason.

Let me explain a little.

Nature is ill defined. Everything around us is nature. We are a part of nature. It may look like the world is split into the artificial human constructs and the green and luscious land that has escaped it, but don’t forget that one gave birth to the other. Humanity has not escaped nature, it has just taken it to unexpected places. But nature never had expectations in the first place. It’s a false dichotomy, or at least, it’s not the dichotomy we like to think of it as.

Why are we so addicted to splitting ourselves off from the world that built us? Arrogance? Competitive drive? Do we need an enemy or a utopia?

We love the notion of a fall from Eden. At some point we were in harmony with the world around us, living as equals among the plants and animals. Then everything went wrong. Sin entered the world. We civilised.

We have a lot of self hating mythology, really.

It’s backwards, but we appear to maintain this split, calling out our own society as the bad guy, to justify our badness. By distancing ourselves from the enemy under our feet (and our concrete), we reinforce our unique specialness. Our separateness marks our special ability to do what we want.

We are not unthinking nature. We are worse, but our worseness allows us to be better. Our betterness is arrogance that justifies whatever we want. And what we want is destruction.

So, after much rambling preamble, what would caring for nature even look like?

I can watch my garden grow. I can feed it it and look after it until it starts giving me food. I care for it, and it pays me back.

But my garden, quite explicitly, is not nature.

Even on a grander scale, ecology and conservation are marking human boundaries around pieces of ‘nature’. Making choices about how nature should run in those areas. It’s caring, but it’s also control.

To actually care for nature, we have to acknowledge our place within it. Not just acknowledge, but re-evaluate it. Work it out for ourselves.

We don’t know where we belong. We hang on to our hang ups so we can say we are separate from the world that birthed us, and will eat us when we’re dead.

Our intellect allows us to make these choices, and we think that is enough for us to escape the laws of the land, but we don’t. We just change the scale a little bit.

‘Nature’ is all around us. Our hostile and negative environments are new ecosystems. They are bad for us, but the world understands.

The world doesn’t care. But we can. And we should. Not for the sake of some idealised Eden. But for ourselves and for empathy.

Don’t second guess nature.

Be it.

—

Illustration by Jaime

Why?

Most of the time when people ask why, they mean how. If they don’t, they are leaping out of the realm of the provable and into guesswork. A why question asks for an opinion on something unknowable. An answer to a why question is a matter of faith.

There aren’t really reasons for things. Not provably. If you ask why the sky is blue, I can give you a long winded ramble about light refraction, atmospheric conditions, the properties of light and particles. If you ask someone cleverer than me, they’ll even give you an accurate description of how that all happens. To the best of our knowledge about the observable world, it is possible to answer the how of blue sky.

But at no point has anyone really given a why. Irritating and curious children, who respond to every answer with a why, realise this. Somehow we grow up and forget that. You’ll never get a satisfying answer to a why question about the world. It can always be deflected with another why. Why does light act like that? Why do particles bend light?

Eventually  you end up with an exasperated ‘because that’s how it is’, or something like ‘God made it so’. Both of which are generally unsatisfying (without a leap of faith of some sort, which is fine, but you should at least acknowledge you are making that leap).

The other type of why question is about our reasons for doing things. A similar impasse is present. Psychological testing appears to have indicated for a long time that we make decisions before we make our justifications for them. Personal observation shows me that I’m capable of building a structure of reason for any path I want to pick. If I want to do something, I can argue for it. If I try and argue both sides, I get stuck. We aren’t strictly rational, and our reasons for acting are hidden from us. We have to make do. I have a million answers to most of the ‘why are doing x’ questions I get asked each week. I don’t know which are true, to the point where I believe none of them.

But I think there is something to learn from why questions;  particularly from this skeptical point of view. We don’t know why things are the way they are; we don’t know why we are the way we are. That’s fine. If we’re aware of that, we can recognise a certain type of freedom.

I am allowed to choose the things that are important to me. If I want to have faith in a certain system of universe, I can. If I want to pursue a certain set of reasons for doing the things I do, I can.

We can choose our whys, as long as we’re aware if their weaknesses. It’s a fundamental way we can shape our lives and worlds.

Our whys are who we are.

And we can choose them, which makes us immense.

—

Illustration by Emma

When?

I’ve already been putting this off for half an hour.

The time is always now, but so much can be put off indefinitely, that it becomes irresistable. We cede control of our time to immediate whim, and weirdly, I think it’s a way of establishing control. Pressures of time, deadlines and commitments, feel like a bind, tying us down. So we wriggle from side to side, loosening ourselves, giving ourselves a little more freedom.

When in fact, all we do is make our deadline, and our binding, tighter.

The only way to escape is to do it now. Whatever it is, you take more control by acting now than you do by prevaricating. The only way to be free is to be on the other side. Commitments end once they are done. The satisfaction of a job well done only comes when the job is done. You don’t magnify it by procrastinating. You just make it more stressful.

But that’s not how we’re wired, it seems. I don’t think I know anyone who tends to get things done straight away.

Of course, this could be reflective more of the type of people I associate with. Perhaps there’s a shining strata of people, infinitely better than me, hugely more successful and always immediately doing their most important priority, which has been carefully (but quickly) evaluated during the allocated planning slot (presumably in the shower, when nothing else more productive could’ve been done).

I would like to smugly argue that they probably haven’t actually got their priorities straight. Missing the fundamental fact that life is for living and not for planning and hurrying. But of course, my unplanned hurries are probably more ragged and less enjoyable than their steady stream of hurry.

It does make sense to do things now. Get them out of the way and enjoy life later. The wrong priorities are probably even more common amongst the procrastinators, who may well be avoiding the things they must do because they sincerely don’t want to. The world we live in, by which I mean our late-capitalist consumer society, spends a lot of time telling us what needs to be done, what is important, and what will make us happy.

But that doesn’t come from the outside. Our priorities shouldn’t be dictated by governments advice, tradition and advertising. We need to focus on that which comes from the inside, and project it outwards. Make our world our love. Make the thing we most want to be doing the most important thing. Prioritise our lives according to actual needs.

But that involves simultaneously stepping back into now, and stepping away from it.

Now is confusing. It’s too many drives and desires that have been pushed upon us. But now is our only sensation. The only time we can feel or change or make a difference. Later isn’t here yet, and the past is to far gone.

The only time to work yourself out is now.

I’ll help you in just a minute.

—

Illustration by Helen

Where?

I think the answer is supposed to be ‘wherever I lay my hat’, but I may actually be more rooted than I’d dream. A lot more rooted.

It’s hard to say, because I’ve not moved around much. I’ve lived in two places, really, and only one at a time has ever really felt like home. I’ve travelled a tiny bit, and it’s always exciting, but when I’m away my thoughts aren’t of rambling freely exploring for ever. I generally look at a place and imagine how I could live there.

Sweeping my eyes around I find a home. I dream about a way of life. I picture where I’d by bread, or send kid’s to school. I plan gardens and ask questions about allotments. I gaze at ruins and imagine rebuilding.

I immediately start laying down the infrastructure of life. Putting down roots.

Does it matter where?

I love the energy of a city, as long as it’s pretty. I like sweeping curves of concrete and baroque cornices. I love the sea and the country side. Rolling textural exploration. Horizons tapering away or roaring upwards. I love the built environment and the results of geology.

But it’s good soil and transportation that really makes me settle. I really am all about roots and infrastructure.

I do wish I was one of those people who could just ramble and be anywhere. It’s something that I think I need to develop. I need to learn how to be a wanderer, at least for a while.

I get exhilarated by the thought of building my own portable infrastructure. Taking my bike and working out how to strap enough stuff to it to live off. I can already manage all the sleeping stuff, and I think a front basket should deal with cookery. I want to create a portable, self powered, living unit. So that wherever I can find a pretty view and a flat space, I can make a home.

So I have some of it in me, but it’s still an obsession with infrastructure. I doubt I could do the completely free wander. Just walk out the door and catch a lift and see where life takes me.

You become addicted to roots. The wheres that are home become ingrained. You stop imagining yourself in other places.

Here, I am okay, but I can’t be here forever.

Place is an odd one. At a universal scale, we’re always moving, but from our perspective, we have to move our body to be somewhere different. Place is more rigid than time and self. We can easily see how to move, and what difference it makes.

Or am I just so addicted and cosy that I can’t be bothered to expand my sensibilities.

I am here. Wherever I am. It is place that roots me. No wonder I am obsessed. My identitiy is tied to where I am. My environment shapes me.

I can go where I will. And I will.

I hope.

—

Illustration by Henry

Who?

Everyone. Fundamentally.

The thing to remember about consciousness, is that while it feels unique, it is clearly everywhere (or possibly nowhere at all, and that’s a thought to bleak to contemplate). The world is either an illusion built up in my mind and my mind alone (from your perspective it’ll feel like yours, but I have no idea who you are, so I might not believe you), or we are all pawing through the same mass of information from our own point of view, and constantly colliding with others in similar circumstances.

One view of the universe is desperately lonely, the other infinitely exciting.

I mean, I realise philosophical decisions probably shouldn’t be made on a basis of which possbility is more interesting, but, well, why not?

Trying to understand fundamental questions doesn’t necessarily get you closer to the fundaments of the universe. The universal laws cannot really be toyed with. What you can play with is perspective. The who that is you is in control of how you see the world. The world that you see is the world that you’re in. So, while you don’t control reality, you do hold it.

You. Me. Everybody.

We bounce around in this place called universe, and we reach out and touch each other. We are at least similar enough to communicate. We are at least similar enough to agree on what the world looks like. We are at least similar enough to feel for each other.

We are emotionally connected to the people around us. Our assumptions about similarity mean that when a friend is hurt, we can cry for them, or rush to help them. We do this because we are the same. We’ve all been hurt. We feel things that aren’t being felt by our own selves. This teaches us something great.

We are the same. We are part of the same thing. Each individual is networked to the individuals around them like an enormous brain. Circuits communicate with each other, transmitting information and emotion. Bringing us closer together, and making us larger than an independent self.

Like an enormous intricate brain, making thoughts and ideas and perceptions out of chains of fiery neurons; we connect, electrify and shape each other.

Your social network is an extension of your self. So is everyone you talk to. We are at odds with each other sometimes. We fail to see the common motivation. We aren’t all compassion. There’s too many people to connect deeply with everyone.

But we get to make a choice. Not just about how we see the universe, but how we see each other. It’s the same choice.

We can see ourselves as isolated and rooted in nothing but self interest and personal gain; or we can see ourselves as part of a larger whole, surrounded by people similar to us who are aiming for the same things as us.

Compete or co-operate. Selfish, or compassionate.

You can be you, or you can be everybody.

But you choose.

—

Illustration by Jaime