WOTSONTELLY. THE SOUND OF ONE MAN FLAPPING. THE SECRETS OF QUANTUM PHYSICS, PERFORMED BY JIM AL KAHLILI, BBC4

Favourite books, where would you start?  They're all favourites, it's only now and again that I will  holler OhTheFuckWithThis and bin something - needs to be a spectacularly bad book for me not even to permit mrs ishmael to take it to the accursed charity shop but consign it, shreddded, to the compost heap. 

 Gutenberg and Tyndale, 

William,
busted and burned alive
just for writing.

 the Nazi bonfires,  the obscenity trials, the voices of my early teachers,  these all tend to make me  cherish the very idea of books; to this day I cannot open wide and damage the spine of even the mangiest paperback.  I believe I have mentioned previously A Canticle For Liebowitz, a science fiction post-apocalyptic novel in which fragments of scorched shopping lists,  the only surviving written materials, are worshipped by fearful and ignorant survivors. My  judgements on the quality of books similarly become secondary to a belief in their intrinsic importance.  If the house was on fire and I could grab a couple of books probably the first among them would be How To Build Shaker Furniture, by Thos. Moser, Sterling Publishing, New York, 1977.

I remember, in the 1990s, I was enthusing about  a  then-new claw-hammer to an antique furniture trade  colleague;  it was the same configuration as a normal claw hammer

 but it was the weight of a pin hammer.


great for knocking-in a couple of pins and sinking the heads with the flat side but you cannot use it for pin removal

 I liked this hammer so much that I bought a score of them, some I have given as gifts, several I still have stashed, in my desk, just in case.  I used to make loads of bookshelves/cases and the backboards required scores  of panel pins, many of which would bend as you banged them in;  what I'd have to do was put down the ordinary pin hammer and pick-up  a pair of pincers to extract the bent pin and then start again; the ordinary pin hammer has no claw and I couldn't use a proper claw-hammer because it was too heavy, and I was delighted to find this smaller, lighter version. Hmmm, said Tony, 's'appened to you.  What's happened to me? Oh, you reach an age when you  get poetic about tools.

Tony was correct for  not only was I squeezing into my own daily reality a belated if haphazard appreciation of  tool anthropology and sociology, I was also purchasing  a more formal understanding - books about tools and procedures and one day, in Victorian Llandudno, North Wales, I came across Moser's book which was ostensibly a selection of drawings and cutting lists for the making of a slew of Shaker pieces but was more importantly  a tour-de-force in technical writing of the spiritual kind. 

I don't like Shaker furniture much 
 

and there would be a long, cold day in Hell before I attempted making some but Moser's writing was and remains a rare treasure;  here he is in his chapter, Materials.

A Covenenant with Wood.

A craftsman is but a handmaiden to his materials.  The inherent qualities of wood limit to a certain extent the cabinetmaker's choices.  Unlike plastic or rubber, concrete or steel, wood has a mind of its own.  It is not easily bent and when bent wants to return in time to its original form.  It is easy to break along its grain, yet it will withstand considerable shearing force.  It warps without provocation and swells and contracts with the seasons as though it had entered a conspiracy with the calendar to loosen chair rungs in the winter and swell drawers shut in the summer.  Wood cracks mindlessly, can shed a finish with disastrous effect, refuses to be cut from north to south,  yet yields submissivley from east to west. It splinters, bows, cups, shrinks, loosens, swells, dents, cracks and changes colour.  Yet to many of us wood remains the most pleasing of all natural materials, for in the richness and variety of its grain is to be found nature's texture incarnate.  Wood is a kind of a bridge between man and that organic mass of growing things he calls Mother Earth. Wood is a renewable resource which has given us warmth and shelter and provided unrivaled joy to the eye and to the touch since long before recorded time.  Along with water and stone it is our most fundamental material - without it our world would be an alien place.  In wood man fashioned his first tool, in wood he built the ladder with which he  has ascended over the millennia. It literally surrounds us from the cradle to the coffin.  Wood may well be called the foundation of civilisation.

When the craftsman commits himself to work in wood, he becomes a party in a contract.  If he sensitive to his material, he enters into a kind of covenant in which he acknowledges a certain subservience to his medium.  He agrees (1)  to come to understand, not in a cognitive way,  but through feelings, the nature of wood: (2) to admit at the very beginning that there is no such thing as perfection in wood, for in spite of all his efforts there will always be some blemish, some telltale error, recorded in the wood though known only to the builder; (3) in laying-out and forming joints, to anticipate the inevitable movement  that will occur long after the work is finished.

Although my primary school teacher would chide Moser for his failings in grammar and punctuation, these are knowings and sentiments rarely expressed  in technical books, certainly not in the current spate of appalling wordworking magazines and partworks, none of which are worth the glossy paper on which they are printed.

It turns out that Moser, as well as running a respected cabinetmakers business 

taught communication at a New England university and as far as I'm concerned the drawings of Shaker furniture are as irrelevant as are now the Shakers, themselves.  Moser writes about handtools, powertools, machinery, about fixtures, adhesives, abrasives  and finishes as only an expert can, few can combine craft and communication as enthusiastically (Greek, filled with God) as does Moser. Although the book is rich in photographs of sturdy, often vintage tools and machines, Moser, as did  the late Fred Dibnah, offers pencil drawings, too, of his subjects;  maybe there were no cameras to hand,  there was no computer-aided design, maybe he just likes doing the drawings, there is something magical about drawing a project in advance and seeing how close comes the finished article.

There has been  a lot of technical writing which is excellent;  I have all sorts of compendia on how How To Run An Efficient Household, Manage A Garden and Compose A Letter of Condolence; mainly these are from before the Second World War, often Victorian, punctilious, reeking with snobbery and etiquiette  yet miracles of concision, expertise and style  but even as late as the 'sixties, publishers such as Readers Digest were producing well-written, comprehensive guides to home maintainance and the Automobile Association printed useful and understandable guides to car maintainance  but all of these  date from before before and the industrial dominance of Japan brought badly translated manuals and brochures which were no more than gibberish.  These days, finding someone who not only knows  but can also readily and pleasingly communicate that of which they speak is a rare experience.

On television, the image - or the form - always triumphs over the substance,  the presenter is King.

 
....and I just think it's all, well, wonderful, really,
 I mean, I've had a number one record,
 they gimme a medal, the Queen did,
and I'm never off the telly...


Be it the ghastly and over-exposed Brian Cox, 
silhouetted atop all the world's mountain peaks

 

or the equally ghastly Neil Oliver, ruggedly tossing his rock-star locks at the camera or be it any member of  a regiment of absurd science tarts,  from the hideous, sneering  hobgoblin,  Tony Robinson and his geriatric grave-robbers,

 to the cackling crone, 
the fearsomely well-scrubbed  Dr Ruth 

 of the Victorian this, the Georgian that, the Mediaeval other

or be it the ubiquitous media tart, Dr Lucy Lisp,
stripping-off in  Regency lingerie or bumping and grinding with that ridiculous old Len chap, off the dancing show,

'ere, missus, do fuck off, eh,
 just for a month or two?

 the pseudo-scholar presenter is slave not to science but to showbusiness, like unto which business there is no other.

And so, disappointingly, was last night's BBC4 exposition of quantum physics, or mechanics, or whatever it's called. Or not called. 

mr bungalow bill and I, at the very least, had been keenly anticipating BBC4's Secrets of Quantum Physics, presented by this fellow. 

 

A presenter so far up his own paradox as to be risible.

I love the camera, me, and it loves me, too, donchathink?



Dr/Professor/Guru Jim al Khalili is, it turns out,  a vain gabshite. Whether or not he was making sense of quantum physics cannot be known, can it?  That is the point of it. Or the pointlessness of it, as you will.  It almost seems heretical to even attempt to explain the inexplicable, to know the unknowable, as the scriptures have it.

  Jim, though, in his universe,  is infinitely capable and strove last night not to provoke or encourage but simply to entertain, to seduce.  I have the books he mentioned - The Dancing Wu-Li Masters and the Tao of Physics and three minutes sat on the loo, glancing at them, would be more educational than a month of Jim and his showbiz bollocks.

Knowledge, now, of course,  is digitised into little cubes of shit, Tweets and re-Tweets, people's minds too full of vanity-dribblings to tackle proper thinking, no attention span, no mental shelf-space, as I heard it termed recently, their imaginations handed-over, freely,  to slab-faced, creepy, brain-dead American mutants.  

Mr Mark Faceberg.
Trust me,
I want to own all your  lives.
 
Jim is right up their cyber street, his mind, like theirs, a linguistic desert, uninspired and repetitive - Einstein was at the height of his powers, Nils Bohr was at the height of his powers -  and Jim and his producers' televisual devices were corny and unimaginative, a small, candy-striped marquee on the shore, in which Jim played Aunt Sally with some vague, tin-can permutation of relativity;  a pair of spinning coins  which he claimed demonstrated quantum physics, although they only demonstrated spinning heads-or-tails coins, Oh,  and there was a leering,  metaphysical cardsharp, determined to cheat reality.

Jim rode around, fitly, on his bike, to demonstrate power fluctuations in his dynamo-driven cycle lamp and thus the discovery of the quantum photon;  Jim dived, fitly, into a wave-generating pool to demonstrate the differing powers of small and large waves. And Jim sauntered, fitly,  through what was meant to be a nineteen-twenties jazz club but which actually resembled the studio of BBC Radio Four's Loose Ends show, the one in which Clive Anderson smirks and smarms and hisses and introduces terribly intelligent musicians playing terribly unlistenable-to music.  I think it was at this jazzpoint that Jim mentioned Charlie Chaplin being at the height of his powers.  Throughout, Jim seemed to want to climb through the screen at us, so close were his close-ups, so intense his cloudy summaries. It was all dreadfully Telly.

The thread running through last night's episode was the argument between Bohr and Einstein about the nature of physical reality, about its former certainties being compromised by the discovery and understanding of particles or quantums - quanta; by the belief that the mere observation of sub-atomic particles changed them or indeed, might have called them into being.  This is a delightful conundrum, one which has enchanted me for some years, now, since I read those books, maybe before Jim did.  I do not, however, need it proving or disproving.

Unsurprisingly, Jim's analagous demonstrations and his experiments  with the tin-cans and the cardsharp - and eventually with laser beams - brought him down on the side of Bohr, a position,  among scientists, common since the nineteen-forties, when everyone, of course, was at the height of their powers and one most laboriously and archly arrived at in last night's show.

Once,  there was God, who said it was not for us to know, simply to obey.  In my lifetime it is the BigBang we have sought to know,


 to photograph, back through time. I never understand that shit, photographing stuff that isn't there, now. Clever people have told us that Stuff just came, in an instant, from nowhere, and nodding, as though we had understood, we have believed. 

We have believed that once there was no time, no space, no matter, it all just invented itself. Yes, Stuff from non-stuff, everything from nothing, as hard to believe, as God, Himself, but Hey, that's what we're good at, believing shit. 

Now, many of  those - let's call them Jims -  who once worshipped the BigBang are saying, Hang About, these Black Holes, 

and there are gazillions of the fucking things, what they tell us, the BlackHoles,  is that there's actually shitloads of universes, popping in and out of each other, in, well, in BigBang moments; so, all that stuff, which,  just like QE money, popped into existence, well, it actually just slipped-in ready-made, from next door, sort of thing, kinda. No, you don't have to believe that NoTime, NoMatter shit any more.  We gotta new one for you.

The Jims, you see, they'll fuck you up;  NASA, the Hadron Collider, Hubble, it's all they wanna do, is fuck with your head, like priests, shamans, witch doctors, fucking Druids, they are all the same.  The Jims want you to believe, for instance,  there must be what they call intelligent Life, somewhere, and that we can find it.  The reason they say that there must be is because they want there to be, not very scientific.  A proper scientist would say, Well, fuck me, even if there were to be folks like us, maybe green, maybe with eight arms, whatever, but communicable-with, maybe there is a planet somewhere with exactly the same multiplicity  of accidental circumstances as led to Life on Earth  - y'know, a planet circling a sun  burning at just exactly the right temperature at exactly the right distance, a moon of exactly the right size and gravitational pull and all the trillions of accidental chemical and physical combinations necessary to create amoeba and then all the accidental geological, climatological and horticultural conditions necessary for the growth, survival and ascent of species, only one of which has an opposable thumb and can do technology, thinking, speech, fire, the wheel, transport and the storage and retrieval of information, and eats and tortures all the other species, even if there are all those trillions of improbabilities, even if they all do happen elsewhere, there is no reason for them to be there just now, right now,  in this infinitessimally tiny split second of time which we inhabit, is there? Pushing it a bit, don't you think? Makes more sense to just believe in God, than in all that horseshit.



Some people can do TeeVee, recently, AN Wilson has been one such;  Waldemar Jabberwocky and Matthew Collings, in the arts, engage, inform and entertain without becoming the show, without getting in the way. 

 Jabberwocky, stomping around Rome in his sandals, burbling about sculpture and painting and building is of course a confection but  one full of flavours, nuance, surprise  and juicy tit-bit, easily digested and memorable.
Jim,  for his part, was glutinous showbiz porridge.

Jabberwocky, I believe, wants people to appreciate whoever or whatever it is he's burbling about, Rembrandt or Bach or Michaelangelo, wants people to know it for themselves;  sure, he's on telly and has been for, what, twenty years to my knowledge but I trust his enthusiasm, his Godliness, the way I trust Moser's

 

 Let me
entertain you.

.Jim, on ther other hand,  doesn't want to share anything, wants but to impress, to show-off, to star;  wants to be the priest who,  claiming to lead us to the light, keeps us in the dark. 

Quantum physics, as far as our individual consciousnesses may perceive, is the sound of one hand clapping.

If you meet the Buddha on the Road, 

kill him!