VISIONS OF DAVE

I was walking through the park and it had been an okay day. Nothing special, but nothing went wrong either, and it's always important to count your blessings. I remember the sky was looking a bit dreary, and in retrospect, I had been in a daze all day long. Nothing seemed to affect me. If eyes were really the windows to the soul, it probably would've looked like I had misty white cataracts.

You know how some words are inherently better in certain accents? There were a pair of Jamaican guys sat on a park bench, and apropos of nothing, one of them enthusiastically shouted 'Booker Dewitt!' as though he were calling out the name of a messiah. Maybe he was a big Bioshock fan, I don't know. All I know is, in that accent with that particular intonation, it sounded more like 'Booker Dooweet!' and that this surprised me and made me smile like a lunatic in equal amounts.

Further on through the park I saw a second important thing. A woman rode past me on her bicycle. She had a big black coat on and a woolly had with dangling bobbles from either side. Either arm was held down by a carrier bag from what I assumed to be a wholefood store, but I only caught a glimpse of the bags. She really looked like she knew what she was doing, like she could handle herself and life was going well. Sometimes I do my shopping on a bike, even though the supermarket isn't far. I couldn't put my finger on it at the time, but she made me smile. Looking back, I think it's because it reminded me of Holland, and the way everyone there rides their bikes everywhere, for every occasion. To shop, to go nightclubbing, to work.

Later on, I was in the Student Union bar. I wasn't drinking, I barely have enough change for the newspaper. Dave Grohl came to me in a vision and I don't really know what it was he was trying to say but the way he was saying it you really know he meant it and it was so beautiful and that things were starting to make sense and I nearly cried and then I could hear distant echoes of Bianca asking me if I was okay and then her hand waved in front of my face and Dave disappeared.

It was Bianca's first Guy Fawke's night and she was very excited. When we left the Student Union, a big purple firework went off in the sky in front of us. It felt like a scene out of a corny romance, except we weren't sharing an intimate moment and the firework wasn't a metaphor for our souls touching. At least I don't think it was.

On our way home there were more fireworks visible across the parks. This made Bianca really happy, really excited. Happiness is like heat, it conducts. I saw how this celebration I had seen countless times was so fresh and brilliant again, and it made me happy. It had been a touch and go day. My eyes were misty and my brain had emotion fog. But the little spikes of happiness, like tokes on an imaginary cigarette that lasted all day, seemed so much more important and profound because of it.

As for the vision, I'm still working on that one.

-Lewis

BAD THINGS & BAGPIPES

I moved in to a small room in Southampton opposite a congregation of parks. I've been here two weeks now, and whenever I've been given the opportunity, I've patted out the limits. In cities, everywhere is so immediately close, and when you're fresh in town you're surrounded by an intricate network of things.

Some of them are bad things. Students like to focus on bad things; it gives a good sense of mythology and folklore. After dark, everything looks at least 20% scarier. Behind us is an estate block, looming up in the dark, and a row of shops that probably have some very good deals but look incredibly shady once the sun has gone down. Even the parks turn evil. During the day they're pretty - for a while there were tastefully decorated rhino statues, people playing football, greenery, hobo fights. At night, a park just on my doorstep becomes known as 'Rape Park'.

I didn't take stock in this - what better place to set a horror story than in a place just outside where we live, in the dark of the trees? And during Freshers Fortnight - a two-week period where clubs will try with all their advertising might to get you to spend your money on Jagerbombs and vodka-mixers - it seems feasible that there are going to be a lot of drunk young potential victims walking home at night.

Saturday is my favourite day. Everyone is out in the town and there are markets and buskers and I get to do my shopping and sometimes ride my bike. I was making idle chat with someone on the way out of my room, and they told me the park had been cordoned off by police, so I couldn't ride through - it's the easiest way to get anywhere. I thanked them and went out. They were right.

Hoards of police were combing the grass, looking for something; I assumed it was a knife. People started saying there had been a rape. If they were looking for a knife, we thought, it was either going to be a stabbing or a rape involving a weapon. I told my friend how where I come from, there aren't police, and how different this was. A day later, police started asking around halls. The police spoke in their usual riddles, but it was clear: it had been a rape. Right outside my door.

The park seemed shaded with different crayons. I felt confused about things, and my head hurt a bit. It rained when I was on my way back from shopping. It's been a confusing week since. So many people saying so many different things and I've been trying to make sense of it all, trying to figure out the good and the bad and the nice and the nasty and if there's any chance I can write a blog post about any of it.

I went out to do my shopping this morning and town was busy again. On my way past the park I suddenly heard bagpipes playing. There was a whole band of bagpipes and marching drums. Just playing for us - not collecting money, not preaching, or promoting. Just playing. I stopped and watched for a while. Some people drove past and shouted to ask if they were wearing anything under their kilts.

It made me happy. Things started to make sense. The park, like the world, was random. Like flicking through television channels - you'll see different things, some good, some bad, and some depending on the time of day. It's random, it the most literal way. But if you stick around, something good might happen.

-Lewis

NUCLEAR EMOTIONS

Name any given movie including nuclear weapons – ‘Dr Strangelove’, ‘Goldfinger’, ‘Superman’, ‘The Dark Knight Rises’ – and I can tell without looking that they don’t play a minor part. Since its gruesome entry into the world the atomic bomb has been a dramatic symbol of ungodly interactions by science into the world of man. It’s scared many a country into or out of war. It’s a game changer. It’s a referential point in our mind of complete chaos and destruction. It’s a narrative symbol.
I don’t know much about politics, but I know a lot about films, media, fiction, that sort of thing. This might have something to do with my choices of subject at college and what I’m good at, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t crossovers. For instance, what if I were to propose the hypothesis that Bashar Al-Assad – one man on one side of the ongoing Syrian civil war – dropped an atomic bomb on his own people? What would that change?

Back in July, the United Nations estimated that 100,000 people had died in the Syrian civil war since it’s outbreak two and a half years ago. That estimate was before the chemical attacks in August, the estimated deaths of which are between 500 and a thousand. 
So why the comparison to nuclear weapons? Well excusing the fact that nuclear weapons are tightly controlled in today’s world and it is therefore unlikely that the scenario would actually be possible, the damage to human life has been equivalent. When the ‘Little Boy’ bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, the initial explosion and detrimental effects killed over 100,000 over the course of a year. Politically, that and the bombing of Nagasaki three days later ended the war that had killed millions, and so no further military action was taken – but consider the conflict since then that has been sparked by even the possibility of nuclear weapons.

Of course, to simply discuss mortality in numbers in such situations is cold – to fully get our heads around the hypothesis we must also discuss what else separates the bombing of Hiroshima and the Syrian civil war.
When Little Boy was dropped, it was a step into the unknown – a dark turn in human history. The survivors of the blast literally did not know what hit them – for days after the bombing, rumour circulated that ‘Mr. B’ (The affectionate name for the circling B-52 bombers) had dropped either petrol or some sort of chemical explosives which were then set alight by the towns tram network. The explosion was big, it was blinding, and it was silent. It was dramatic.
The Syrian civil war has been going on for nearly three years, with no military intervention by the west. Like many a story that drags on without a happy ending, the news dropped for a while after the first few months of coverage. People continued to die, and us busy Westerners stopped reading, stopped watching, stopped caring. It wasn’t until recent chemical attacks that we shifted in our armchairs and got a bit hot under the collars as politicians started talking and we started asking ourselves – quite unassumingly – if we’d like to bomb another country again, as though we were simply diners pondering whether or not to visit the buffet table once more. The graphic videos and pictures that spread on social networking of people and children convulsing and foaming at the mouth from the attacks were much of what prompted calls for military action, and much more graphic than anything we've seen of Hiroshima. But as the Osundare poem goes, ‘What business of mine is it / so long they don’t take the yam / from my savouring mouth?’
Another thing to consider is our attitudes towards countries like Syria – the fact that we regard them as ‘others’ (See ‘9 Questions You’re Afraid to Ask About London’) the fact that we regard it as little more than an unimportant political country and therefore okay to be bombed.

Of course we would see things differently if Assad dropped a nuke – maybe it’s because of what films we watch or maybe it’s because of more logical reasoning. What we need to remember is the paints that are used when our news is displayed for us. We need to ask questions beyond that of what on Earth the newsreader is wearing and where did he get that tie from – we need to ask things like: What makes us think we have the authority to bomb another country that poses no threat to us? What alternative measures are we faced with as a wealthy and democratic country? Do we care because we have heard the facts, or because we are told to care?

I’m getting ahead of myself. I guess my point is watch the news – watch it as much as you can and pay attention to it. But don’t just watch, god knows all we do nowadays is watch – think.

-Lewis

(As a side note, thank you for reading. I haven't posted for a while despite having nothing else to do, but I caught a glimpse of my stats the other day and realised how many people check back every day. It kinda broke my heart. I feel like an abusive parent. But really, thank you.)

THREE MONTHS OF NONEXISTENCE

It's a good thing metal can't tell stories, because if it could, secrecy in the Royal Navy would be a completely different story.

HMS Ocelot, an Oberon-class submarine, was launched from Chatham in 1962. Less than thirty years later, the vessel was retired, and is now a tourist attraction back in it's hometown of Chatham Dockyards. The thing is, what happened in between those two points is very much a mystery. The words are never uttered explicitly by government documents, but the phrase isn't flinched at among sailors who know her - Ocelot was a spy vessel.

Many of the vessels in Chatham dockyard - or indeed any dockyard - have stories to tell. I stood atop the canvas-roofed helm of HMS Cavalier, and harked back to when the ship was posted in the Far East - with the power of imagination I could feel the hot sun beating down on my bare skin, I could look out over the dockyard and see the Orient. Aboard Ocelot I felt a much different feeling.

Living in cramped conditions was one of the more obvious disadvantages of being posted on Ocelot - the main living area (Sleeping, eating, entertainment, and all necessary furniture) was no more than four metres square, and housed 22 crew members. To add to that, there were portholes instead of doors, anyone taller than 5'9" had to bow their heads to avoid hanging pipes, and batteries and engines buzzed underfoot at all hours.

But as I traversed the cramped crusader I felt a very different dread as I imagined life on board.

When on board a spy vessel such as Ocelot, information of the submarines location in the world, and why it was there in the first place, was on a need to know basis - and this meant that for the large majority of men on board, nobody knew where they were in the world. To avoid being spotted, they were submerged underwater for most hours of the day.

In 1952, science fiction writer Ray Bradbury penned the short story 'No Particular Night or Morning'. It told the tale of two men on a spacecraft billions of miles from the planet Earth. Surrounded by darkness, one crew member begins to believe that whatever he cannot perceive does not exist, and drives himself crazy with the notion that his entire home planet is dead and nonexistent.

It sounds cheesy to say it aloud, but I considered life on Ocelot to be somewhat similar to the predicament of the spacemen in Bradbury's story. Submerged underwater without windows, the men on-board had no evidence or idea of what was on the other side of the metal walls that enclosed them together. They would have none but a vague idea of where they were in the world, and in much the same way, the outside world had no evidence of them. The crew of the Ocelot, at any time, could have found themselves not just stir-crazy, but at metaphysical odds with the world. Between the crew and the rest of the population of the world, there was an equal and opposite force of nonexistence for three months at a time.

I tried to think about what this meant. It seemed that all the romanticism of sailing in any conditions was sucked out by being in a submarine under this level of secrecy. Maybe my frets of nonexistence were just that of an over-read student, but this idea of secrecy perpetuating fear was reflected in the world of the time. The high-point of Ocelot's activity would have been during the Cold War of the 1980's. My father often recalls the fear felt on either side of nobody knowing what was going on.

When fears of nuclear attack became rampant in both Russia and the rest of the world, plans to protect themselves became near-fashionable. But down in the Ocelot, there could be no such plans. They could not dream of the outside world, and in the event that something did happen, it was kill or be killed: fire Trident missiles, or be hit and have to evacuate and make the 100 metre upward swim to the surface. And what then? Would crew members suddenly burst into a world they had never seen before?

It was a confusing way of life, and I thought for a long time about it. I guess I could bring it to some sort of philosophical conclusion, but what roused in me was a level of curiosity which could not be satisfied by any thoughtful meanderings. What was lived under the sea was a life of uncertainty and sparse definition. Any question I had could not be answered. And in the surroundings of a museum, that was what I found the most unsettling.

-Lewis