I have listened to streams of crap flowing from various people's mouths today, and it has been making me angry. In fact, I've been listening to crap flowing from people's mouths all week. I wish I could escape from this self-perpetuating world. I feel like time sandpapers away ridges in the bedrock of society until everyone becomes the same, and nothing changes. Why do I bother with music? Why do I spend time and money singing in these fucking places to forty odd people, all over 60, sat in the congregation, all claiming to subscribe to Christianity while reading their Daily Mails, complaining about immigration, warmongering, and keeping social minorities in oppression? Why do I do it? What good does it do anyone for me to sit down for hours a day practising instrumental technique while children are dying across the world?

We are all made to believe that we can do nothing, that we are powerless, that it is our leaders who deal with these things, that we are just meant to get on with our lives, that we are not responsible, that we cannot fight the inevitable forces of world economics, blah, blah; but it is not true. We all have power to change things, but it is the inherited belief that we do not which stops us. And so it goes on. It takes someone, something to break the chain and end the vicious circle, and I wish I could. But how? Anyway, I end up just concluding that I must be wrong, I am seeing things in far too black-and-white a focus, and that we all really need just to look after ourselves anyway. But that is precisely what we are made to think by the ideology we inherit, and that is precisely why the ideology does not change. I do not know what to do, but sometimes I just despair at the state of this world. But give it a couple of days, and no doubt I will afresh have been able to allow the noise around to immerse me back into an artificial shell of ignorance and conformity, shutting out the fact that TNCs are clearing rainforests and killing children, that America's power stations are destroying the earth, and that helpless people are being left to rot in prisons and detention centres for wanting to escape oppression. Why don't I just give it all up now?

Tags: rant, political, frustration, environment, music, agency

It has been too long a day, with an exhausting couple of journeys and a long concert, as well as two rehearsals. I've had enough of this trip at the moment, I need to get away and reassess some of the things that being here has made me think about. I need to think more seriously about music and my involvement with it. I need to think deeply about whether I can actually continue to support church music in spite of the church, whether trying to do music professionally at all is a good idea for me, and whether I should really be doing something totally different.

I've always come back to writing, and thinking, and speculating, even since my earliest days. When I have felt like withdrawing, when I have been angry and too upset to continue to engage in the world, I have written, and thought. In the long run it has been productive. Music speaks to me, religions speaks to me. They speak to me together. They tell me something very real about people. But it does not tell me anything very real about me. I believe that music is mechanical: it is a trick, a trick of the senses, a trick of the mind. I believe that religion is the same: it fulfils a role, it functions. Its means of functioning is through tricks, such as music, and art, and literature. Religion is an abuse of the senses, as is all religious music.

But that is not a criticism or denial of religion, despite the terms I use. Because everything we do, everything we can possibly do, is an abuse of the senses, an abuse of understanding, an abuse of the mind. I would love to take music and distill it to a purer form, which flows fluidly through the senses, pleasing them, reifying them, but not deceiving them. I want to write music that expresses a metaphorical white noise, a statement on what life is not. I want to write music that denies truth, denies reality, denies meaning.

Tags: religion, abuse, senses, music, writing, denial

IBO and I finally found a pub with a decent beer on. It was a nice chance to escape from nothing but the questions. There are ways you can tell you are sitting next to someone who understands you well, and vice versa. It is very rare. That is an escape.

From time to time I suddenly become deeply worried and indecisive; most of the time I am more assured. Something touched me about Wimborne Minster today. I felt something profound about the sense of history and inheritance, not only of a fine building, but of an ideology, and and archetype. From time to time I feel so negative about religion, especially Christianity: but I always maintain that it is deeply important, natural, and essential. I cannot claim to have faith in any god, but I see all the good that comes of the church. I see the creativity and utter depth of so many people involved; the intelligence, and humility of them. I can only say them, because I am not one of them. I feel spirituality, I feel, I think, the sense of reverence and respect that these places, these images demand. And it is not because I believe it, or to escape from the real world, because that is impossible for me; it is because I see it as a human behaviour essential somewhere in all of us.

But I do not see an actual truth, just as I do not see an actual truth in anything. If I can only seriously maintain that the reasons for faith are so utilitarian, and serve only a psychological and socio-psychic function, then where am I left, as an individual? I feel like an outsider because of my unbelief, yet an insider through years of contemplation, experience and discussion. I believe that my feelings are the same, but how can I make sense of them with no faith? How can they signify anything but weakness? And if ever I become religious, how will I know that it is not just a lie I tell myself, and if I have gone so far as not to be able to handle that question, what person will I be?

Tags: faith, religion, beer, music, christianity, church

A two hour discussion with J - what about? Not sure. Perhaps he is in shock - perhaps he does not know what to feel - perhaps he knows perfectly well. He acts like there is some big lesson to be learnt from D's passing - but I do not see it that way. I have experienced death, in my own way - but in the end what is anything but experience? Everyone sees things differently, everyone thinks their way of seeing things is right, and therefore others' must be wrong? But why? Acknowledging one's own view - as a view - implies quite clearly that it is just that - and nothing more. But that is not how people behave. Views become working truths - more and more views become truth because people want views to be truth. Why? Truth is easier. Views are complex - views have no foundation. Truth is indisputable - firm - self-evident.

That is my view, and I accept it is just that. It is not truth. I have never said a true word - for what is truth, if not only an opinion? It can be nothing else.

But that, too, is a view.

And it is my view that that is a view. Others' view may be that it is true, and truth is true, or truth is fact. Is fact different from truth? Linguistic, probably. Fact assumes objectivity.

If I acknowledge nothing is objective, but stop short of saying that everything is dubitable - or that everything should be doubted - (not because I believe that, but because otherwise argument is pointless) then I acknowledge that truth and fact are not (by necessity) objective, but subject to all sorts of things. Yet this is a paradox, for the definition of truth, fact, lies in objectivity?

I have no choice but to say that nothing is true, nothing factual in that sense: 'This is a pen' cannot be fact: What is a pen? How do I understand a pen? How do I understand existence? Matter? In any event, I cannot prove that this is a pen without delving into opinion, cultural factors, blah, blah.

Yet a post-post-Modernist response mocks such arguments - 'This is not a pen' - etc - they are too easy - or perhaps not: perhaps they are really too hard.

It is hard, is it not? To accept that there is no fact, no proof, no way of accurately asserting that this is a pen? It is hard to accept that there is no way of proving your assertion that there is no fact, no foundation? The fear is that things become meaningless without absolute foundations: we all have foundations, reference points, said J: so how do we feel when they are taken away?

We search for meaning, to understand environment as we see it, to understand our experiences - to understand death - and we will create what we need. We create truths and facts to serve a purpose.

Renouncing this goes against our nature - it is a perverse result of searching for meaning - the negation of meaning itself. It does not ring true with experience - our experience is of meaning, of reality, of right and wrong, of red and green. But our experience is shaped by our belief and meaning - our conditioning to notions of truth, proof, fact.

But I spend my life studying MEANING - a superstructure? - inevitably. What are we? Matter, perhaps, if that. Bodies - bodies - finite - deceiving themselves - adding finite constraints to an infinite world - meaning to meaninglessness - time to eternity - measurement to infinity. Small minds appreciating very little of what is going on, but trying to feel like we do, trying to feel powerful, full of knowledge. No, we have only each other to compare to. No comparison: Each is too similar, each works the same. Small eyes on an infinite world can see nothing but immediate things.

It is going on for a month since I have been doing the writing on the wiblog! It has been an eventful month: only three weeks since I moved in, and I have already done a five hundred-mile round trip to my uncle's funeral, been to the Peak District, and had a Hiroshima-scale fallout with the estate agents. The house is beginning to feel a little more lived-in day by day, but I don't think I will stay after this year since I'll need more space when I'm doing extra work next year for finals and A-levels next year.

The house had good space and is well equipped. Notwithstanding anything out of the ordinary with the estate agents and so on, it should be pretty easy going. Everything is quite close by bike. The walking distance has not kept me and Stuart out of Kro, anyway. Alcohol is good.

The Victoria Baths, which were featured on BBC2's Restoration last Friday, are just across the road from me. It is a good building. If it was renovated the area would be much more attractive, though the general rebuilding of derelict houses nearby is a good sign.

Again, I fear lost readership in my absence! But a few crazy things to note have prompted me into wiblog mode:

Today, Manchester went wrong.

We were delayed on the way back from Salford Quays on the tram because of a broken-down tram on the line ahead of us. Eventually we got going again, only to come to a halt again at the next stop because the selfsame broken-down tram appeared now to be stopped by a passenger having a heart attack. We thus got off the tram and walked the rest of the distance (about 200 yards). In this short walk, though, we managed to see a bus stuck sideways on a road, blocking three lanes of traffic and reversing, and then see another bus attempt to turn a corner and get stuck because of a parked car. We then saw the last trams speed past us, and one of the people who'd got off running after it in an attempt to get back on at the next stop.

I have had several premonitions.

There is a small, mysterious cupboard in my new room which sinks beneath the floorboards. Since I have arrived it has contained various things at the bottom stacked up. I was irrationally too scared to move anything though, because I thought that there might be a rat at the bottom. Rats, by the way, are something I have never before had a fear of at all. However, when Stuart finally went through the cupboard for me, he found - at the bottom - a cartoon of a rat. Spooky! Sat in the pub I also suddenly thought that it would be funny if I saw TK, one of my lecturers - university is of course on vacation - and within ten minutes, we had walked past him - and him alone - in a university corridor! Anyway, I have moved into my new house and it is pretty good really, apart from the estate agents, who are among the most incompetent people on the face of the planet. We have written and complained both to the company and to the National Association of Estate Agents. Up yours Drake and Co.!

Tags: premonition, rat, house, estateagent, drakeco, manchester