History’s most important events are hidden, prediction is therefore hubris and there can be no promises of a future, only the comforting lies of astrology.
If only we could see or touch or hear those hidden moments lost in between the cracks among masses of the world. Those tiny, insignificant instants that will in time unfurl to become our futures, futures not compelled by messianic greed but gently nudged into being by Billy No Mates or Jane, the third forgotten child of forgotten folks. From such unrecorded butterflies are futures made. (22)
While the powerful write their names into their history books, the people make the future. Our tribe’s true labour, to bear the future present and to cultivate its fruit, to carry on regardless (23) to go on and to go on, (24) without hope, without promises, with no nostalgia for the past. We need no written histories, no monuments or shrines or statues; our time is the moment of our coming.
A new pantheon of allotment keepers and care assistants will one day replace the tottering temples of celebrities and media politicians, refurbished rag and bone carts reappearing on our streets to carry off the trash.
The media responds in kind, commissioning Knackered of the Yard to replace Wilfrid Bramble from a 1970s episode of Steptoe and Son; he will star in a 3D CGI enhanced episode specially created to celebrate the election of another democratic government. Albert’s son Harold, a Labour voter is to be played by Brad Pitt, the Joanna Lumley character by Angelina Jolie. (25) This government has a policy of taking refuge in the past believing nostalgia will validate its future.
The gardener is speaking to his local politician. “If you remove my skin, I will dissolve into you”.
The second law of thermodynamics (26) reasserts its primacy over the activities of life. Disorder is now the norm.
The dog is pissing on a book, it moves on, wets the leg of a table, moves on, now pees against the wall, moves on. The dog treats all things equally, his prick his deconstructive tool.
22 The butterfly effect is a metaphor for the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory; a small change at one place in a complex system can eventually lead to large-scale changes elsewhere.
23 Thomas, G (1961) Carry on Regardless: An Anglo-Amalgamated film starring Sid James, Kenneth Connor, Charles Hawtrey, Joan Sims and Kenneth Williams A comedy of the British working class.
24 The last two lines of Samuel Beckett’s (1958) The Unnameable: Published by Grove Press are: “I can't go on”. “I'll go on”.
25 Galton and Simpson (1972) Steptoe and Son: Loathe Story: BBC TV Starring Wilfrid Brambell and Harry H. Corbett
26 Entropy is the subject of the second law of thermodynamics, the second law has been called a 'law of disorder'.
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