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Sayings like ``it never rains, but it pours'' tend to bring out the analytic philosopher in me. I get this stupid urge to say ``Given that the referent of `it pours' is an excessive amount of rain, it cannot pour without raining, unless, of course, it is pouring milk, for example.'' Needless to say, I restrain this urge, as it is the sort of thing which gets philosophy a bad name. Anyway, it hasn't actually poured here, which is what normally happens in Ankara's brief Autumn, but it has rained so often that I feel like I'm back in England. Normally I rather like rain, since it puts me in that perversley pleasant state of mild melancholy which is to Anglo-Saxons what cabin-fever is to Alaskans. However, this time the rain is not working its usual magic; along with almost everyone I know, I am ill, tired and grumpy, and I can't concentrate, which is probably why this is taking me so long to write.
Sometimes things just aren't quite right, without actually being identifiably wrong. If I were to consult the I Ching now, I'd probably get something like:
Hexagram 66: The Great DiscombobulationHe has lost his magic turtle.
If he ventures forth, his nose is cut off.
Do not marry the maiden. Do not cross the Great River.
No blame.
Anyway, I am taking this sound advice and malingering today. Well, not exactly malingering, since I have a horrible cold which has returned for the fourth time, but I'm certainly not cultivating my fighting spirit, which seems to have fought, lost, and fled in disarray. I just feel a bit daft phoning in sick on a day when I only have to teach for three hours. There again, one of those hours is on Thomas Aquinas, so I may have a point after all.
Which would you rather do?(a) Stay in bed with 'flu.
(b) Have root canal work.
(c) Have an ingrowing toenail removed.
(d) Teach a chapter of the Summa Theologica.
I think (a) wins. The only problem is that I have to go and see a doctor if I want to get a sick note, and this will probably take longer and be more tiring than teaching, even with St. Thomas thrown in. But at least while waiting to see the doctor I can read Sue Grafton (one of my favourite detective writers) rather than Thomas Aquinas. More entertaining, and probably better for the soul.
Many years ago, I used to ``dabble in the occult'', as they say. Why they say ``dabble'' is beyond me; I've heard the phrase applied to John Dee, the Elizabethan scholar, courtier and spy who spent most of his spare time in front of a scrying glass transcribing the language of angels - if that's dabbling, I wouldn't want to see the serious stuff. I can just imagine the sole survivor of The Evil Dead getting home and being asked how his weekend was: ``Oh, you know, just dabbling in the occult, Mum.'' In my case I had an enjoyable romp through arcane lore before deciding that most of it consisted of spending a large amount of time trying to do things which hardly ever worked.
These days I generally find that you can do a lot more with reason than with ritual, and while I concede that it may be possible to curse those who wish you evil, it's usually easier to just break their arms (not that I've ever done this, of course). I even try my best to get out of doing tarot readings (which a number of my friends insist on). People claim that what I see in the cards always comes true, but that's probably because I give the kind of bland advice that is very rarely false, e.g. ``There is a change coming in your life, and you can only profit from it if you accept it fully.'' The idea of telling people something specific which they might then act on and seriously screw up their lives doesn't appeal at all.
Nevertheless, I still get these odd things popping into my head which I can find no reasonable explanation for. For example, the other night, I had a dream that my wife and I were putting a new table cloth on the table (where else?) and noticed that the varnish had melted. Nothing unusual there, since the varnish had done that on a number of previous occasions. What puzzled me was that the next day my wife did buy a new tablecloth, and the varnish had melted. OK, it could still be co-incidence, of the kind where you think about a friend and they suddenly telephone you (but who ever remembers the times when they think of someone who doesn't telephone them?), but it seems a pretty weird one. I've had a few other ``prophetic'' dreams in the past, and the only thing they have in common is that the information in them was completely useless. For example, I once dreamt that I was looking for a needle, and the next day I popped a button off my shirt and had, of course, to find a needle in my extremely untidy flat; what the dream didn't tell me was where I would find the needle, which would have been useful, if trivial. Then I dreamt that I was in a church listening to Mozart's Mass in D minor and when I switched on the radio in the morning, it was playing that very piece (and no, I hadn't heard a prior announcement or looked at the paper). More spectacularly, though equally uselessly, I dreamt that a nuclear-powered satellite was falling to earth, then when I switched on the news ... OK, you get the idea.
I can think of no mechanism by which such phenomena, if they are genuine (and that's a big if), could occur. Telepathy I can kind of accept, since it's not too hard to think up a scientific, or at least a pseudo-scientific explanation - morphic fields, collective unconscious or whatever. Prophecy, though, implies a universe where the future has in some sense already happened. Alternately, there are various time-branches, and some people can look along some of them, but not with any reliability. I prefer this explanation, since I'm not a big fan of predestination, but it still doesn't say how this rather unlikely prophetic event could occur. This is the main problem with parapsychology. It's not the hocus-pocus that some scientists see it as, but it amounts to a load of largely anecdotal evidence with no real testable theory to account for it. Interesting, but not at all conclusive.
Getting back to my own case, what would convince me at a personal level would be if I started getting prophetic dreams which were actually useful. Numbers of winning lottery tickets would be a good start.
Continuing the occult theme, a lot of the time these days my thoughts are taken up with vampires. This is largely because I'm reading one of Anne Rice's vampire books and playing a role-playing game called Vampire: the Masquerade. The latter is great fun; unlike classic role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons where your character fights with monsters, in this one you are the monster - all the players are vampires. I started off with a musician vampire based in part on my old friend Rodney Orpheus (of The Cassandra Complex and Sungod) but am now playing an enforcer-type character (based heavily on Robert Parker's Hawk) called Hand (as in Adam Smith's ``invisible hand of the marketplace''). The musician character was enjoyable, but he kept breaking off from fights to play his guitar. All very silly, and great fun.
However, I've always had a mild obsession with vampires, and sometimes would like to be one. Maybe it's menstruation envy1 or something, though the explanation in The Lost Boys seems more apposite: ``Sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die - it's fun being a vampire.'' OK, you have this teensy ethical problem that you have to drink human blood in order to survive, but humans do far worse things to each other. Compared to Slobodan Milosevitch or Saddam Hussein, your average vampire is a bleeding-heart liberal, if you'll forgive the image.
Ethics aside, there are of course a few drawbacks to vampirism. For a start, you really do have to sleep all day, which however appealing it seems to a night-owl like me, could get tedious after a while, especially since partying would be less fun without booze, for as the Count says, vampires don't drink ... wine. Travelling could be tricky too - you take the night train, then track maintenance means you're held up until dawn turns you into the principal ingredient of a BLT sandwich. As for travelling in a coffin, try getting through customs these days. Then there's the problem with crosses, though if films are anything to go by, vampires seem less superstitious these days, which is just as well given that the kind of Goth girls who might just let you take a nibble tend to wear the things round their necks. I suppose all in all, vampirism, like so many things, is better kept as a fantasy.
I once read somewhere that people's fantasies change as they grow older. Boys fantasise about power; they become Superman and fly through the air, or are dead-shot cowboys or swashbuckling swordsmen (I don't know what girls fanatasise about - most of my girlfriends at that age had similar fantasies to me, but they tended to dwell on the details of the violence more). Then comes adolescence, and dreams of unbridled sex. Sex with film stars, sex in harems, in outer space - it doesn't matter so long as it's wildly exaggerated. When this is replaced by the real thing, idealistic fantasies take over, and our young hero sees himself leading revolutions and establishing peace, justice and freedom all over the world (or if he's the other type, creating a master race and a thousand-year Reich).
Around thirty, the process starts to reverse itself. We still have ideals, but they are limited to our backyard: pushing for more democracy in the workplace or making the neighbourhood safe for our children. Then, as middle age sets in, we return to sex, but instead of harems filled with willing beauties, it's the office secretary or the new research assistant2. Finally, as the embers of lust lose their glow, we regress to fantasies of power, but instead of Batman defeating the Joker, we become obsessed with trivial schemes of revenge against our neighbours, or getting elected to the presidency of the residents' association.
All very depressing if true, but I seem to have got stuck at the first stage. Here I am pushing forty, and I'm still fantasising about being a vampire. Sometimes, for a change, I'm a kung fu master or a space pilot. Oh well, as my good friend Alexsandr Rukski said, the best way to stay young is to be totally immature.
Some of my geeky friends inform me that the real new millenium actually starts tomorrow, rather than twelve months ago, as most people believe. Not being mathematically inclined, I don't know who's right, just that this New Year's Eve doesn't seem much different from most of the others I've experienced, except that I had my hangover before instead of after; my wife and I were up till five in the morning discussing art and education and drinking too much raki. Of course I still have the option of getting a hangover tomorrow as well, but I hope I'll be more sensible than that. Thomas Aquinas argues that drinking excessively in the knowledge that we will get drunk is a mortal sin, since we are willfully destroying our god-given reason (as opposed to getting drunk through bad judgement, which is only a venial sin). Alcohol doesn't usually destroy my reason (though it sometimes makes it cut corners) but drinking with the knowledge of an impending second hangover would be a sign of a reason that was already in deep trouble.
Speaking of reason cutting corners, here in Turkey a mayor has just got himself in the news by declaring that New Year is a Christian celebration, and those who celebrate it are therefore Christians. Since Turkey is a predominantly Muslim country where New Year is celebrated with great enthusiasm, this did not go down well. Apart from the illogical assumption that because x's do y, anyone who does y is an x, there is also the minor matter that the Julian calendar came into existence before Christianity. Even the month we are about to enter is named after the pagan god Janus. As for me, I'm quite happy to celebrate anything going: New Year, Christmas, Eid al-Fitr, Chanukkah (if I could remember how to spell it) or whatever other celebrations come up. And so, dear readers, I wish you all a happy everything.
1 Peter Redgrove and Penelope Shuttle argued something like this in The Wise Wound, but it's so long ago that I read it, I can't remember how the argument went. Freud, on the other hand, attributed it to ``oral sadism'', though that sounds like a better description of some of the lectures I had to go to at university.
2 In academia there's this strange thing that professional ethics only apply to undergraduates; bedding a sophomore would be despicable, but once someone's got their MA, it's open season.