Alan Watts and Etymology

The word "etymology" derives from from two Greek words: ἔτῠμον (truth) and λόγος (account). As such, it claims to be far more than a merely linguistic discipline. In its original sense, etymology attempts to get at the truth of an utterance, rather than merely the history of a word.

This is balderdash, of course, but it neatly summarizes the way etymology itself is often misused. We should be more sceptical.

I've been thinking about etymology a lot since listening recently to Alan Watts' lecture on "The Mythology of Hinduism". It's given me much to think about – about philosophy, life, improvisation and much else – albeit in a sketchy, pithy way. It's a large topic, which Watts condenses into bite-sized mental snacking material. Extracts of his recordings have been animated by Tray Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park.

And wow, he sounds amazing. His is one of the truly great voices. It resonates near the peak of an audio podium that I have made for my voice heroes, who include Oliver Postgate, Thurl Ravenscroft, Tim Gudgin and Vivian Stanshall. It is fruitily English, yet wavering, as if his cracked vowels were walking a tightrope between tears of comedy and tragic laughter. It's beguiling and seductive. No wonder he was married three times.

I don't like his rhetorical flourishes, though. They jump out at me, especially his excessive use of etymological examples to clarify the "original" meaning of modern English words. He peppers his simple poetic language with little these over-clever bits of supposed learning, which seem inserted to support his ego rather than his argument. It's a shame that he feels he has to appeal to mundane, spurious and earthly authorities, rather than the unadorned expressiveness of the myths he relates.

Because I like to be positive, I will give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that his use of etymology is as ironic as he makes it sound. Surely he of all people understands that words and truth are not the same thing. In fact, the pauses, intonation and little chuckles in his voice often carry more truth than the literal meaning of his gnomic, aphoristic witticisms.

That's not to say that etymology is never revealing. The game of tracing a word's history is a fun one – all the more so when its conclusions are absurd –  but playing it to prove a point is as flawed and dangerous an idea as drawing conclusions about a person by tracing their genealogy. If words do have authentic meanings, that authenticity resides in the space that opens up at the moment the word is spoken – and in the shape it makes in the mouth of the speaker – but not in a mummified remnant from an arbitrary past time.

We learn more from learning that the word "tragedy" derives from "goatsong" than from learning that "comedy" comes from "festival song", but there's far more still to be discovered about both words by performing them.

The Return of the Improvised Greek Tragedy

Is it possible to improvise Greek tragedy? Come and learn how.

In this now-famous workshop led by Michael Brunström, a wide range of improvisation techniques are rallied to allow the spontaneous extemporization of Sophoclean drama. Based on the work of poetic geniuses from Aristotle to Zorba, and from Heraclitus to Ken Campbell, this is a dizzying romp through language, stagecraft, narrative, archetypes and high emotions. 

At the end of the afternoon we will improvise a complete Greek tragedy.

Expect choral chanting, masks, incest, flutes, divine punishment, trochaic tetrameters, catharsis and a singing goat.

Numbers are limited, so book early to ensure a place on an improvabout that is guaranteed to be quite unlike anything else you’ve ever done before. 

The Return of the Improvised Greek Tragedy
Sunday 29th January, 2–5pm
The Bookshop Theatre
51 The Cut
London SE1 8LF
Nearest Tubes: Waterloo and Southwark

Cost: £10, or £5 if you book in advance
Contact: michaelbrunstrom@hotmail.com or 07757 756119

Michael Brunström is a seasoned improviser who has worked with some of the biggest names on the London scene. The creator of Frogspawn, The Spouting Club, The Human Loire and The Curt Hatred Trilogy, he is also known for his original and unconventional improvabouts.

Bleigießen 2012

Following my dad's principle that anything you do twice immediately becomes a tradition, steeped in its own solemn and uncontestable lore, yesterday we did Bleigießen on New Year's Day for the second year running, thus initiating a new annual custom. ('The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?' 'The same procedure as every year.')

Bleigeißen (lead-pouring) is a German form of molybdomancy practiced at New Year, in which small lead shapes are melted down in a spoon over a flame, then quickly tossed into cold water, where they harden instantly, often into unlikely, surreal shapes. These are analysed by means of the shadows they cast under candle or torch light. These are checked against a list of official interpretations in a booklet provided with the Bleigießen set, although other online lists are available.

Many of the shapes carry the sort of open-ended, generally positive messages that we associate with horoscopes. For example, a bottle-shaped shadow simply indicates 'happy times to come', which is nice, but rather unhelpful. Other shapes are astoundingly specific. A frog says 'You will win the lottery'. You must leap into action if the shadow looks like an eagle owl. This means 'Someone is breaking into your house'. If you see a cradle, it is confidently predicted that 'You will become a Baptist'.

Because there is a strong element of personal interpretation at work, both in the making sense of the predictions and in the finding of the shadows, Bleigießen makes for a superior method of fortune telling, along with dream reading and tarot. I am unable to back up this assertion with scientific proof, as unfortunately I can't remember what last year's shadows were shaped like, or what the predictions turned out to be. Accordingly, I am making a record of this year's Bleigießen predictions here, to test their accuracy. Revisit the blog in twelve months' time for the results.

I used three pieces of lead, in the shape of a bell, a pig and a crown. On being poured into the cold water, No 1, the melted-down bell, split into two pieces, which I interpreted as representing two facets of the same destiny.



1a, viewed from one angle under torch light, gave a shadow that looked like two people on a boat or gondola, which predicts a long journey. From another angle, I think it looked like either a parrot, which means 'short fickle luck', or a goose taking flight. The goose means 'love bears fruit'. 1b was the smaller piece, resembling nothing more than a twig. Fortunately, 'twig' appears in the accompanying booklet. Its interpretation seems to contradict that of the parrot in 1a, as it signifies 'faithful luck', whatever that means.

No 2, the pig, produced this unusual shape, whose shadow seemed to me like a marching soldier. I couldn't find an interpretation for this in any of the Bleigießen literature (I will keep searching). From another angle, however, I was able to turn the molten lead into a laughing dog puppet with flappy ears and a big jaw that went up and down. Although the booklet doesn't offer a prediction specifically for 'laughing puppet dog', under the general heading 'dog' it says 'unbelievable news'.

The crown, No 3, turned into this magnificent complex shape. Again, when I held it from different corners, and at different angles, it offered up a wealth of interpretative possibilities. Most obviously, it was a long-nosed animal – an aardvark, dromedary or kangaroo – for which I looked under 'camel', and read that this meant 'new duties', doubtless relating to my job. From a slightly different angle, the nose became a beak, and the shadow took on the shape of a dodo or pelican. The pelican shape means, apparently, that I will bring something to a successful completion, possibly an restatement of the goose in 1a. Holding the lead from the opposite corner, I was able to discern a monkey, which, according to slight variations in the angle, appeared to be engaged in a series of sophisticated activities: fishing, reading a book, hailing a taxi. Again, the flimsy booklet didn't have an entry for 'sophisticated monkey', but under 'monkey' it said 'be cautious about being tricked'.

There we have it. My Bleigießen predictions for 2012. New duties, a long journey (I would very much like to visit Toronto this year) relating to luck of a flighty/faithful nature, or unbelievable news. Perhaps I shall be fortunate enough to avoid being tricked. Without doubt, however, the most startling and unlikely prediction is that I will successfully complete something. This runs counter to my normal way of doing things. In fact, my reputation for leaving projects unfinished is so well established that, if by some strange chance I should successfully complete something by the end of the year, that alone would constitute irrefutable proof of the amazing predictive powers of the Bleigießen.

I am keen for the Bleigießen to be proven correct. I'd better get started.

Happy New Year

It's that time of year again, when we are invited to examine the last twelve months and tot up the hits and misses; a perfect occasion to gaze regretfully back over a year of lost opportunities and to look forward with misgivings and dread to the failures that await us in 2012.

In terms of number of days lost to depression, 2011 was certainly one of the best yet. How else do you calculate the relative value of a year in a convenient, scientific way? Allow me to offer up the benefit of my experience. To gain a useful perspective over the year's mistakes and disappointments, I find it handy to do two things. Firstly, make a list of everything you told yourself you would achieve, but didn't. Be as exhaustive as possible, and include both ill-defined desires that went unfulfilled and specific undertakings that you simply botched.

Secondly, and more importantly, compare whatever paltry wins you might have clocked up with the extravagant successes of those who are closest to you. Observe how certain of your friends or family appeared to breeze through the year, sweeping up accomplishments and accolades as they passed, driven by the sort of deep-seated goal-oriented ambition and resolve that you lack.

When making New Year's Resolutions for 2012, remember to add unfulfilled resolutions from previous years to your list. Thus, each January the list grows incrementally, and you will start to carry around with you an ever-lengthening litany of self-disenchantment, the burden of which will eventually become absorbed into your daily habits in the form of a personality trait.

In the forthcoming year, in addition to my usual New Year's Resolutions – become good at backgammon; finish my translation of Gustave Le Rouge's paranormal sci-fi horror epic Prisoner of Mars (1911) and its sequel, War of the Vampires (1912); eat more chickpeas – I have promised myself that I will copy the tactics of people who achieve personal success without appreciable talent or effort. I resolve to toady up to attractive and influential people, and to jump on board projects that bring fame and popularity rather than what I have pompously and prissily insisted on up until now: a dubious, so-called 'artistic integrity'. I shall strive to be more ruthlessly go-getting and mercenary. I shall stop arbitrarily seeking out any distinction between actual news and mere personal opinion in what I read, thus gaining a hitherto unrealized reputation for passionate political conviction. Finally, I shall bury any misgivings I have about myself, hide my real feelings and express myself as though I am unconditionally, uncritically convinced of my own brilliance. Already I feel that 2012 will be even better than 2011.

Happy New Year from Tingtinglongtingtingfala!

Unassisted Human Flight

A few days ago: I'm standing in a drably decorated room with dark walls and a thick carpet of indeterminate colour. It is furnished with a series of three or four squat 1980s-style pine coffee tables, each one surrounded by four low, chunky, square armchairs upholstered in orange fabric. It is a waiting room, but for what? My guess is that I am in a travel agency, but travel agents don't have waiting rooms, do they? The room is empty of people, but the smell of tobacco lingers in the air, combined with that of cheap air freshener.

The armchairs and tables cover almost every square inch of floor space, so moving among them is awkward. I step up on to one of the tables, and, with a single bound, I leap over the two armchairs in between so as to land neatly on the next table. It is an impressive jump, accomplished with ease. A thought occurs to me, and I decide to see if I can jump over an entire table/chair arrangement and land on the next-but-one coffee table. This too is done effortlessly. I seem to glide through the air, setting myself down on the my target as light as a feather. That's unusual, I say to myself. I'm not usually so athletic and graceful. The only plausible explanation is that . . . I'm dreaming. There's one way to test whether or not this is real: if I can hop from this table and successfully fly the entire length of the room to land on the table at the far end, I can be absolutely certain this is a dream.

Sure enough, I am carried weightlessly across the entire distance. This is a dream, I tell myself, and not just any dream! This is a lucid dream, a dream in which I am conscious that I am dreaming. I am completely free to explore this fictitious consequence-free world as I choose. Aware that such dreams are often short-lived, arriving shortly before my eyes open, I put my time to good use. I tell myself that to attempt to leave the room will almost cause me to wake up. I allow myself to hover in the air, and begin a series of drifting and spinning manoeuvres in this unlikely waiting-room setting, all the while being careful not to bank too steeply or turn too fast, as any sudden events will shake me out of my dream. My curiosity, however, gets the better of me, and I decide to have a go at floating upside down. The unusual sensation is vivid enough to wake me.

I've read that in order to have lucid dreams on a more regular basis, you should get into the daily habit of checking whether or not you are dreaming. Scan your surroundings ten times a day with an eye for the implausible. Pinch yourself in the street. When the ingrained habit is repeated in your dream, so the theory goes, you can gain awareness of your dreams and direct them freely.

The dingy waiting room is a novelty, but the method of aerial propulsion is as old as I can remember. In every one of my recurrent dreams of flight, I have become airborne by jumping up over an object and then allowing myself to drift, as if I had pitched myself at just the right angle to be carried on a gust of wind. Both the method and the dreams certainly date back to my early childhood.

The year is 1983. I am eight years old and I am attending Gurnell Middle School. (My education career is complex. I was at Gurnell for only three years in between Montpelier Primary School and City of London School for Boys. Gurnell no longer exists. It is now Hathaway Primary School.) Among the many contradictory aspects of that strange school are its playgrounds, consisting of paving slabs bordered by grass, tarmac basketball/hockey courts, and two large grass fields bordered by gnarled old hawthorn hedgerows, of which the back field is out of bounds. (The first pornography I ever set eyes on was found among Gurnell's hawthorns, in the form of magazines left there by anonymous adult benefactors.) In between the paving slabs and the basketball courts are two landscaped knolls of grass. It is on the steeper of the pair that I am conducting my experiment.

I have recently begun reasoning as follows. The theory that unassisted human flight is impossible is just that: a theory. While it may be claimed the human body is unsuited to flight, grown-up physicists and engineers have given up too soon. Might it not be the case that the only thing required for people to fly is for the correct angle of trajectory to be found? The optimum angle, which makes flight possible, might be prohibitively narrow for practical purposes – a matter of a fraction of a fraction of a degree – but if it existed it would be worth finding? Am I not ideally placed to search for it, being a skinny eight-year-old with an entire lunch-hour to kill? And so, for an entire hour, I run up the knoll and fling myself from the top of it, only to tumble back to earth, landing safely but suddenly on the grass on the other side. (By the end of the hour, I have recruited a couple of gullible recruits to my project.) Not once in the whole lunch hour do I or my assistants fail to hit the ground. The result of the experiment: inconclusive.

While it is far easier to contemplate a large-scale transformation through a single, dramatic act (such as the invention of the aerofoil wing) than it is through the patient trial-and-error exploration of available options (How many frogs must be kissed? Ten thousand? Ten trillion?) it is nonetheless intriguing to speculate that this transformation lies under our very noses, attainable perhaps only from exactly the right angle, or less than a millimetre from where we are now, but in a dimension separate from the three we normally inhabit. The world of dreams, in which unaided flight is possible, might be closer than is commonly supposed, especially if we learn how to dream lucidly every night. Ask yourself what criteria you apply to determine whether or not you are awake.

But time will always be a factor. Memories, such as the one I have reconstructed about a lunch-hour at Gurnell Middle School in 1983, are made out of the same substance that dreams are. They fade as quickly as they form, and we must preserve them through telling, though they become less lucid, less real, each time they are recounted.

Cider Philosophy

We’d had quite a lot of the 6.5% Satdownbe Cider, pressed locally at The Square and Compass, Worth Matravers, Dorset. Baz and I managed to worry Rob by explaining to him not only that there was no such thing as reality, but that this had been proven repeatedly by scientific experiment. We talked him through the two-slit experiment. Individual electrons fired randomly at a screen with two slits in appear to go through both slits simultaneously, as if they weren’t particles at all, but waves (the patterns produced on the other side of the screen show that they have, apparently, ‘interfered with themselves’). It is only when you make a measurement to see where exactly the electrons went that they go back to behaving like particles. And you can wait as long as you like before doing so. You can come back the next day, or next week or a million years and the electrons will only decide where they were at the moment you make the observation. There’s no cheating: at a quantum scale, human observation itself actively determines where the electrons are. What’s more, according to a principle called the Delayed Choice Quantum Eraser, you can’t ask a computer to make the measurement for you. If you drag the data to the wastepaper basket before looking at it, the electrons continue to seem as though they drifted through both slits, like a wave. Only when the world is observed by a human does it take on any reality.

We continued the discussion on these lines, noting that even objects as heavy as gold atoms and molecules of buckminsterfullerene had been shown to behave with quantum uncertainty. And so broad is the probability curve governing the orbits of electrons, that right at this moment the chances are that one of the atoms in your body has an electron with an orbit that extends as far as the Moon, c.240,000 miles away. Think about it: a (admittedly minuscule) bit of you is, right now, probably on the surface of the Moon.* Rob sat very quietly (which is highly unusual for him) with his head in his hands.

Rob is correct to be concerned about the non-existence of reality. It is a wee bit alarming to suppose that everything you thought you knew to be the case is just a subjective fantasy. Why, then, bother getting out of bed in the morning? Why carry on with any task, or uphold any relationship? That’s quite a depressing idea. It’s the most natural thing in the world to want to extract ethical questions of the ‘What should I do?’ type from scientific questions such as ‘What the hell is going on?’, even if no direct connection is to be made. The history of the formula ‘science says x therefore we should do y’ is a turbulent one, encompassing some well-meaning as well as some deeply flawed ideologies. This is largely because the moral minefield is as shapeless and confusing as a quantum field, and science is easily co-opted and distorted.

On the other hand, I have always been a big fan of the philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC), who deliberately sought to build an ethical philosophy out of a natural one. His espousal of atomism (the idea  that the world is made up of microscopic individual parcels of matter) fed directly into his programme of living without fear through learning, and prizing friendship above all else. It’s hard to argue with that. The epicurean philosophy is certainly a comforting one. His description of perception, for example, specifically guarantees that the impressions we receive through our senses are bona fide, in exactly the way the two-slit experiment contests: an impossibly thin film of atoms (today we would call them ‘photons’) is given off by the object and strikes the observer’s eyeballs. According to Epicurus, what we see is literally what we get, and vice versa.

Being an epicurean (in spirit, at least) leads me to be biased towards those theories that allow for positive outcomes. Scaremongering ideas seem to breed from theories that have sprung up precisely to fill a moral void left by an absence of a law-giving deity. I don’t mean to imply we should hide behind rose-tinted spectacles, only that grey-tinted spectacles give an equally misleading impression.

This is, for me, the primary implication of a universe that is co-created between object and observer: we are both liberated and empowered to change the face of reality and be changed by it. The two-slit experiment implies that our selves and the world we see around us are enmeshed in each other. For some, the dissolved self is undeniably a frightening prospect. They may be absolutely right, but it also reminds us not to project fear and hatred into the world – we are a part of it. Even the epicureans were forced to reassert human free will by introducing quantum uncertainty – in Latin, clinamen – into their otherwise flawless logic.

Baz sensed that Rob’s mind was about to be blown, so he back-pedalled a bit. He wasn’t, he said, trying to claim that reality didn’t exist at all. He just meant that the objective part of reality might account only for 50 per cent of the bigger picture that is co-created by ourselves. He went on to associate the two halves of the universe with observer/object, or male/female, and yang/yin.

It’s an attractive cosmology, but I’m not entirely convinced. On the basis of my experience of language, particularly stories (which are one of the things the universe could be said to be composed), it appears to be 99.99 per cent imagination, held together only by the slenderest thread of reality. But these are discussions for another night of cider drinking.


* I am unable to supply scholarly citations for any of the facts in this blog entry. In the course of our drunken conversations, we have agreed that we can get away with almost any unlikely nugget of bullshit if we preface our assertions with “I think I read somewhere in New Scientist . . .”

Am I a Theorist or a Seeker?

Like you, I'm a selfish person. Every so often, though, I am bewildered by my own uncharacteristic generosity.

About ten years ago, I managed to assemble a set of Neil Oram's novelizations of The Warp, in three volumes: 1. The Storms' Howling through Tiflis, 2. Lemmings on the Edge and 3. The Balustrade Paradox. (Ken himself appears at the end of volume 3, in the guise of a distinctly malevolent gnome.) The books were much harder to get hold of then than they are now, and I had to follow numerous and lengthy false trails and disappointments. However, once I eventually had all three books clutched in my hot little hands, I barely skimmed through them before handing them over in a carrier bag as a gift to my friend Baz. I still don't know why I did that, but presumably it felt like the right thing to do at the time. I'm seeing him in a couple of weeks' time, in Dorset, so I'll take the opportunity to ask him if he ever read them. I have recently replaced the copies, and am waiting for an appropriate time in my life to tackle them. My feeling is that, since I went through the 1998 Warp at The Albany with Oliver Senton, the books, though obligatory, are not top-priority.

In the meantime, I've been feeling quite Campbellish since the Jeff Merrifield book Seeker!, so it's time to begin filling in another long-overdue gap. (I am a strict completist, which means I am reluctant to start reading a book by any particular author unless I reckon I have a decent chance of finishing everything ever written by them or about them.) This comes in the form of the Illuminatus! audiobook, again in three volumes: 1. The Eye in the Pyramid, 2. The Golden Apple and 3. Leviathan. The entire thing ('unabridged') is available performed by Ken himself and the astonishing Chris Fairbank, and the recording clocks in at over 32 hours. I'm listening to it in half-hour bursts on my way to and from work. My walk to work actually takes 45 minutes, but after 30 of this stuff, my mind is full to bursting and can't digest any more.

I'm simultaneously intrigued and repulsed by conspiracy theorists. But I believe that what Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson are celebrating in these books is not the smug certainty that conspiracy theorists indulge in, but rather the free-wheeling open-ended journey of the conspiracy seeker. Theorists have an answer to everything. There is no piece of new evidence that cannot be plastered or squelched into the existing thesis, no matter how potty. Errant data is spirited away so that theorists can proclaim themselves the guardians of secret knowledge. Seekers, however, delight in the uncertainty of the errant data, for it means that whatever gluey theory had allowed itself to coalesce through lazy thinking, now has to be reappraised. They seek a world that regains its childlike sense of wonder on a regular basis. The discovery that your world-view is entirely unsupported – bare instants after you thought you'd glimpsed what was really going on, who held the cards and pulled the strings, or managed to get a toehold on the bigger picture –  is certainly liberating. The feeling is akin to the moment of weightlessness at the apex of a roller-coaster, when your sense of what is up and what is down vanishes. In that instant, your identity vanishes with it, and you are free.

Does that explain why, at the crucial moment I had The Warp books in my grasp, I let them go? Does the selflessness that comes at the split-second of zero-gravity uncertainty allow feats of uncharacteristic generosity? Or, was I frightened of what I would find if I gave the books too much attention, or of literally losing myself in their contents? And is my hardline completism a subconscious effort to account for, and weed out, what appears to be errant data? In other words: deep down, do I consider certainty or uncertainty my greater enemy?