Personal Blogs

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser. There is a space between my name and the minus sign and NO space before 'caldwell' to eliminate the name 'caldwell' in the Google listings

I am not on YouTube or social media

Cadwell NOT Caldwell

Bigger is Better

[ 5 minute read ]

Opinion

So Africa is bigger than we thought, huh?

Apparently the Mercator maps represent Africa as being the same size as Greenland which is in reality about fifteen times smaller. That should deter some day-sailors from trying to sail around the coast of Africa in a weekend. Africa should be taken seriously. From my perspective, I already wouldn't lie down on the ground to sleep in Africa without at least something between me and the ground; something I have done countless times in Europe. I had an officer friend in the RAF Regiment who told me about his training in Belize. Although Belize is far from Africa I think there are similarities in that my friend's story related to one of the soldiers lying down on the jungle floor and then days later finding that larvae were erupting from his arms. Whether this is a true story, now I look at it in hindsight, is highly suspect. In fact, I now realise that it is a fabrication to scare trainees to NOT lie down on jungle floors without some kind of barrier. On a training exercise they would, of course, been scratching their arms and the larvae would not be allowed to erupt before medical attention was administered. In the 'wild' when you are fleeing the enemy or creeping up on them, you can't just stand up and pop over to the medical clinic or field doctor. In any case, the point was made and no doubt well received. My officer friend did say it happened to someone else; always someone else, eh?

The move to represent the size of Africa in two dimensions, as it relates to the size of other countries was almost unanimously voted for by the UN except for one country which voted against it and six abstentions. I shan't name that country that voted against it because their National Security Agency is hot on the tails of independent thinkers, including those outside their own borders. Suffice it to say that 'size matters' and the concept of demonstrating the true size of Africa on two dimensional maps relates to the consideration of investment. There is, I presume, more opportunity for savagery in a big country than a small one. Rapacious desire has more room to develop where there is land that no-one can see from the nearest town. You know; digging a small hole in the Lake District to bury your dead pet will get noticed by the locals or the visiting walkers. Scraping off square miles of the earth's crust to look for ilmenite ore, the source material for making titanium dioxide (the whiteness of paint and toothpaste among other stuff), in Africa won't be noticed by the town dwellers hundreds of miles away. Mineral poachers only have satellites to hide from.

The potential of Africa being a good investment due to its size was the UN's focus, but this was first conceived by the African nations. All they have to do now is make sure corruption is reduced to a manageable level for outside investors to feel comfortable. My understanding is that when diamonds were first found and the locals were employed to dig, the locals stole the rare big ones and handed in the myriad small stones. If I was a treasure hunter I might not need a boat to look for Spanish gold or sunken pirate ships, I might just need to know a bit more African history and speak to the right people in small villages. Yet, surely, I am being prejudiced by snippets of information I have egregiously stitched together to form a flimsy heuristic, which rule of thumb, in the light of day, many people would call out as racism. I wouldn't argue against them. I wouldn't because the one member country in the United Nations that voted against revealing the true size of Africa wants to be shown as more important than Africa, and has in the past been shown as almost as big as Africa on Mercator maps. Jealousy I have no time for and denying an entity any approbation or validation for potential is, in my eyes, just plain wrong. But, I am not considering the new world order when trade significantly shifts from the Global North to Africa. In the development of Africa we have another potentially cheap Asian-type workforce with access to rare earths and modern technology banging on their doors.

I was lucky to be able to ask a PhD graduate about his chosen field of study. It was Romano-Britain, I think. I floated a few layman questions and eventually understood that the reason that after the Romans left Britain the locals went back to their old ways and did away with underfloor heating and building with lime, was because the Romans took with them their ability to organise and specialise in singular tasks. Entering into an agrarian society with organisation could, I suggest, potentially produce a larger entity that could be a considerable threat to the rest of the world, both economically and physically through armed combat. But what do you do? Suppress the African nations? The African?

If we consider that China has a lot of investment across the world in developing countries and other countries want to stymie China's economic takeover effort, we might need to understand that allowing the manifestation of a potential superpower continent is not necessarily in the hands of the Global North. It is organisation that is the key to the opening of an African Pandora's Box. Taking the blindfold from the eyes of the African innovators may be only a few years away if creativity outside of necessity becomes available to a wider population. Reducing poverty in Africa would, no doubt throw up some interesting and novel work-arounds in hostile environments that currently cripple improvement. 

The Global North is indubitably a jealous entity which, I suspect, will be reluctant to hand over any significant control on economics and combat capability and so fairness is, I suspect, coloured by an executive decision to control growth; likewise China and India should be equally alarmed about the potential labour-force of Africa becoming organised, if it is not themselves who are the puppet-masters. Yes, I have just maligned the African and reduced them to being controllable wretches but what do you do? We saw the same in England during the Industrial Revolution when country-folk leading agrarian lifestyles 'upsticked' and handed themselves over to industrialists, future liability to debt and workhouses and even prison. While I have no reason or desire to offer African country workers as being two hundred years behind England, I do feel that a loose comparison to the plight of poor people in the past is a valid one and bears consideration. While many comfortable people bemoan the colonialism of empires past, I might metaphorically stand at their rallies with a placard that says 'See the present and look to the future.'

Perhaps though, the single UN member who voted against showing Africa as having even more potential by dint of its new perceived size is presenting a reality that the rest of the charitable world chooses to ignore simply because they want to share and be fair. Unfortunately, I feel that having an emotional force contribute to decision-making can create a manifestation that has a life of its own and will one day bite the hand of its feeder.

Just like lying down on a Belize jungle floor, any Global North entity is going to want a barrier between it and the tooth and claw of an African jungle. A jungle that is now likely to be considered more interesting than it was previously perceived as being before a new map becomes the standard.

haunted

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

Cadwell NOT Caldwell

 

Haunted

[4 minute read ] 

Imaginative Opinion (hyperbole)

Apparently, according to one of my neighbours across the road there were a whole bunch of our planets lined up yesterday. He was looking at the image of the solar eclipse passing through his reversed binoculars onto a piece of white paper. For two weeks I had thought I had been relaxed because the troll who lives under a bridge, who is my nearest neighbour, had been away for a while. 

       'My planet is Saturn,' I mused. He wasn't interested. He speaks ancient Greek in his sleep I imagine. 'It goes around the sun every twenty-nine years,' I continued. 'So nothing changes much in my life very quickly.' He still wasn't drawn into commenting.

I have to face it, my mind is a bit loose sometimes. I was, respectfully, casting a handful of dots in the air for him to join up. But he wouldn't enter the game. Horoscopes are plainly not in the breadth of his interests. I wondered if I live a life of perceptual duality; a consciousness that other people do not share. Surely, I am not the only one who throws templates of my fancies over real events. Of course not. I am merely a fool who voices them inappropriately.

       'I should like to be able to describe this light,' I said in the silence between us. The light was the light from the partially occluded sun. 'I am used to it now but if I just stepped out of my door without seeing it beforehand would I say to myself 'What's going on? Things look different.'

       'You would,' he replied trying to refocus the sun's image on his piece of paper.

We tried to describe the light. He made reference to practices of yore that sent smoke into the air over fields. 'Look, the sky is grey and the light also grey as though it has passed through smoke.'

Later, at half past eight, when the momentous event of the rare partial solar eclipse had passed, I looked out into the evening and saw the same light. The houses opposite were no longer bathed in the golden glow of the sun and the sky was grey. The light, just as my neighbour had earlier suggested, seemed to have passed through smoke, yet it was a normal evening light. I suggest that it is the rapidity of the earlier change in light that caused my neighbour to add in a contributing factor to explain the phenomenon. His past experience of stubble-burning; a now outlawed practice of burning the remains of harvesting wheat while still in the field - the roots and the lower stalks; had played in his mind. Anyone who has noticed the shadow of smoke from a bonfire has experienced the same. 

I was eager to record the effect of the partial solar eclipse in my mind. Keen on writing, I wanted to be able to obliquely reference the effects of a sun that is partially obscured. When I consider that a cloud does the same thing as a moon I realised that I was following a path to nowhere. Except, it was not an entire waste of time. I was after all, perceiving an event or set of circumstances in an elevated perceptive state. That can't be bad, right?

       'He lived his life like a solar eclipse; grey with diminishing energy.' I randomly said, mostly to the air but in the presence of my neighbour. It wasn't something I would ever write with any expectation of leaving it as it is, but it fixed the moment in my head.

Over the road, on the pavement, the strange family from up the road were about to pass my home. The tiny girl, probably only two years old, had, a few weeks earlier, approached me and said, 'You're my friend!' I had bent to talk to her a couple of times over the past year and chatted with her four-year-old brother a few times. She seemed to have remembered me on that occasion of stated friendship. It was indicative of an approach to calm her at playgroup. 'Look, the children you know are your friends.'

       'There's my little friend.' I mused aloud. Really it was to attract the family's attention to our little group. The little girl ran on with only a swift glance. Even her brother made no comment. Usually, he would shout an excited greeting at me. I considered that their mum had issued them a quiet command. She is the weird one in the family. It won't be long before I shall be able to detect a strangeness in the kids, I thought. Perhaps, though, she won't have too much of a negative effect on them, even if I can detect a growing reticence in her husband to talk outside of their group to the neighbours.

I noticed another neighbour from across the road, who had been living there for over three years without us ever meeting. She was watching me and beamed every time I glanced at her. 'There's a Starman waitin' in the sky; he'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds'. - (Starman - David Bowie, 1972). I suspect she thought I was talking to myself since she could not see the neighbour with the binoculars and paper behind an overgrown shrub. 

       'Come and look at this,' I called. 'He has an image of the eclipse on a piece of paper.'

       'I can't stay long.' she replied and approached us. I suppose she was placing a verbal wedge down, to keep her exit clear and easily attainable. I had no intention of detaining her. I just wanted to make sure she realised that I was talking to a real person. However, I did recognise an opportunity to greet someone I had not had the chance to do so before. You know, what do you do for work and stuff. Before we got anywhere the strange woman came back without her kids and husband and snaffled the neighbour I was engaged with. For a few seconds we formed a triangle on the pavement but before long I realised that the conversation was going to be all about how the poor woman was ill and had just finished working nights. I talk about myself a lot and I know how boring it is to others but somehow this woman could cast spells on others and compel them to listen and sympathise even empathise with her. 'I know, I know! Poor you!' She reminds me of an idea of how someone might look like if they are haunted; gaunt and grey and with an air of despondency, yet still in possession of a tiny ember of hope. I am going to have to look at her with different eyes, I think; see if I can 'see' something.

Her husband wandered over but left again when no-one greeted him. I was going to but I was a little lost in contemplation of how my conversation had been high-jacked and my conversation-partner's attention diverted. The grey woman works for a party that is sent to curtail my progress, I thought. 

I am convinced I have been hypnotised as a child to help me forget childhood trauma. I think my mother was given a secret word that would cause me to forget the previous few minutes of my life.

       'Five, four, three, two, one. You are now in a deep state of relaxation and free from pain. When you hear this word, 's$%*m#' you will immediately feel relaxed and free from pain and have no memory of the previous ten minutes before you heard the word. You are waking now and when I click my fingers you will be wide awake and never be able to recall this session, but the magic word when your mum says it will relax you and erase your memory.' Click!

I think there has been some erosion in the containment of the process and if I hear the 'magic' word these days I have no recollection of a short period preceding the utterance of the word; or the word, whatever it is. There is just a feeling similar to going into a room and wondering why I went there.

Suddenly, all my neighbours were gone except for the one with the binoculars and the piece of paper. I noticed that the orange-grey sunlight on his face was significantly darker than I remembered, as though an hour hand had just jumped from one numeral to another on a clock-face; that notion comes from 'Lady Audley's Secret' by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, but it fits how I felt. 

There is a chance that I am psychotic and I imagined the participants in a fantastised scenario but the countless instances of no memory of an immediate past are more indicative of either 'perceptual catatonia' or hypnosis gone wrong. I have no idea if 'perceptual catatonia' is a thing. I know I have slammed two words together in a hope they, when combined, suggest an emotional state in which my mind is wholly quiescent and non-receptive to external stimuli. I have always described the period following my nervous breakdown as a child, as 'emotional catatonia'. I am trying to move on from that expression; probably because I like words and like a toddler, also like building blocks.

       'It has pretty well passed now,' my neighbour said. I was a little confused, stunned I suppose, so I thanked him for sharing his image-making time and went home.

       'Not at all,' he politely replied. 'Not at all.'

All my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

or search for 'martin cadwell -caldwell' Take note of the position of the minus sign to eliminate caldwell returns or search for 'martin cadwell blog' in your browser.

I am not on YouTube or social media

 

[ 9 minute read ]

Come out, I can see you

Uncertainty Avoidance or Risk Averse

I have a book titled 'The Black Swan - The Impact of the Highly Probable' by Nassim Nicholas Taleb', Penguin Books 2010 [Allen Lane 2007].

It is one of those books that I want to have read rather than spend time reading. Other books on my shelf that are in this special category are 'A Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith; 'Capital' by Karl Marx; and 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money' by John Maynard Keynes.

I have made some inroads into these four books but I suppose I am impatient and get frustrated that it is not immediately evident to me what the writer is saying. It might be a good example of having 'eyes bigger than my belly'. That's fine. I have to know stuff before I can read these types of books, and gain effective understanding. They may even be tangible representations of a goal I can aim for. Except the goal is intangible; knowledge where there was previously only ignorance. That, is probably me being harsh on myself, and that because I am inclined towards dramatic effect and contrast in writing.

If I was a stereotypical English gent, perhaps a parson or something in a twee village, I might look at these books and think 'Someday, I shall read those in my garden while the birds sing and perhaps nod off in my deckchair in the shade of the sun and the ambient floral smells'. That really isn't me; I am not a story-book character; or an idea in an Agatha Christie novel; or an actor in 'Midsomer Murders'.

In opening 'The Black Swan' at a random page I have an idea that I may be ready for it. Four years ago I wanted to understand how we all got fooled by either a real pandemic or a conspiracy theory that potentially allowed DNA to be taken from every person getting a jab. It doesn't matter which it was. Both the events, one or the other, were Black Swan events that the public never saw coming, even if security services did. It doesn't matter if governments across the world discovered an opportunity to map their populations from a surprise event. It doesn't matter if aliens listened to 'War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells on their radios and thought that's a good idea! Let's infect them! Who knows, they might also have read one or two Douglas Adams 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' books and thought that our planet Earth was in the way of a super-highway they might envision building. What does matter is that, it all opened my eyes as to why I might want to be risk averse. 

I met a PhD graduate who had just finished looking at Toxiplamosis or more specifically, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. If you Google it you might read that most healthy people don't show symptoms if they have it. She told me a different story. The parasite is found in cat faeces and infected meat among other places. The effect it has on the brain, interestingly both human and animal brains, is that there is a lower perception of perceived risk. For the cat this is a good thing because if the parasite gets into rats they don't run away as soon as they would if they were parasite free. A clever cat might poop near a rats nest. Infected humans will drive faster and take more risks. They can't help it; they simply cannot perceive danger the same way as uninfected people. I was intrigued by this young woman's revelations and looked into it. Without particularly picking on any nation I read that 40% of French people have the parasite. I presume it is because they eat contaminated meat and not because they are living too close to cat litter trays. (Anyone interested in marketing might recognise a bit of negative framing there; it is entirely coincidental and merely evinces my reluctance to edit my words).

She, the PhD graduate, told me that the Toxoplasma gondii parasite very closely resembles the parasite that causes malaria, in that it goes through two developmental stages; for Toxoplasa gondii, one in the faeces and one in the body or brain. She wanted to find a preventative cure for malaria, one of the biggest killers on the planet, which is caused by the Plasmodium parasite. According to The New England Journal of Medicine, 597,000 deaths from malaria occurred worldwide in 2023.

While all that may or may not be interesting I can only go so far in such a subject. From this; Covid 19; and my recollection of the wonderful woman, I looked towards psychology to give me some answers. 

On my wall there are many A3 sheets of paper with marker pen writing on them; interesting anecdotes and clues. There is one that says: 

'The Truth is rarely pure, and never simple - Oscar Wilde'

another says: 

'Rare is the person who can weigh the faults of others without putting his thumb on the scales - Byron J Langenfeld, World War One Aviator'.

There are sheets that have more academic value such as:

'Accrual Accounting is when a business reports revenue when it is earned rather than when it is received. Accrual accounting shows tax paid on payments not yet received.'

That likely comes from my days of studying Business Accounting. There are sheets on systems theory; marketing; religion; philosophy; logistics; obviously lists of interesting words in different languages; and psychology and social sciences. 

There are two sheets that are on Risk aversion:

'High Uncertainty Avoidance

Require rigid codes of behaviour and beliefs

Intolerant of unorthodox behaviour and ideas

Appreciate explicit instructions

Rely on procedures and policies to reduce the chance of things getting out of control'

'Low Uncertainty Avoidance

People act first and then get information

Comfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty

They work hard to minimise rules and laws that infringe on people's diverse perspectives.'

There seems to me to be a cross-over of characteristics that contradict the separate levels of Uncertainty Avoidance. I might mention that I study ahead because I know I could get ill, or there might be an emotional event, or a power-cut, or aliens land in my garden and I have to go to the shop to get some milk (a lot) to make cups of tea; It depends how many aliens there are. As soon as I suggest taking precautions by studying ahead, I expect, from experience, that someone will say, 'Stick to the program!' But this person, with high uncertainty avoidance, has exhibited something that evinces low uncertainty avoidance, 'They work hard to minimise rules and laws that infringe on people's diverse perspectives.' Well, almost; it is the bit about infringing on other people's diverse perspectives; they do that if they protest against leaving a program of study as suggested by someone else; they protest against other people's diverse perspectives. Interesting! A rabbit caught in car headlights.

I might be the one that shouts 'Run for the hills!' when I live near a river and it rains, except I am not the running type. I am the one that buys sandbags. A while ago my niece's boyfriend was in my van with me on the way to a job. My niece had previously told me that he wanted to join the army. On this day, we came across a car on fire by the side of the road. I carried two fir extinguishers in that van and so I thrust one onto this young man's hands and grabbed the other once we had stopped. I ran towards the fire and he cowered behind the same vehicle the driver was hiding.

       'What's he doing?' I heard her wail.

Another man strolled over and said that he didn't think my fire extinguisher would be enough.

       'My mate has one too, but he's run away.'

We drove away just as the Fire Service came round the bend. My niece later told me that her boyfriend had decided not to join the army. Thank Goodness! I thought, we are a lot safer now.

Deciding whether I want to be aware of a looming negative position or just quell any idea of chaos and be intolerant of unorthodox behaviour or ideas is not really something I spend much time on.

As an aside: So what if there were three 'nurses' to administer jabs to a single person at a time in 2020; and one of them was hidden behind a screen. So what if I know that needles cannot be reused and that every single needle and jab has a serial number that corresponds to the name of the recipient. So what if the nurse withdrew a little blood before pushing the plunger, and so what if I received a tailored dose of something to do something to me; affect the way I think or don't think. Perhaps the hidden nurse was an alien and I will be cloned when the Earth is dismantled and fabricated elsewhere to make way for an intergalactic super-highway. It is all merely supposition that someone else might like to make into a conspiracy theory. It doesn't matter if it is or isn't, was or wasn't. It might make a good film or book.

Let me just say, if I was the government, I wouldn't have wasted a good opportunity to screen people for illnesses or malfeasance. I have seen 'The Minority Report' with Tom Cruise in it! Did the third and last Covid 19 booster jab have the Toxoplasma gondii parasite in it? Had the governments done enough research on its individual citizens by then to know who to target? Can I perceive danger because I didn't get the third jab? The world perpetually hears 'Don't Worry, Be Happy' by Bobby McFerrin from 1988, except that we are now lackadaisical? A pandemic jumps out of nowhere or somewhere; what else will? Aliens? Crazy people? or just people panicking like my niece's boyfriend who might not now panic and run away. Are most of us now not scared of war? Deborah Haynes, British journalist, security and defence editor at Sky News, thinks so: 'Russia knows our weaknesses, do you?'

Realistically, I have made only a creative illustration that by snatching at the air I can suggest that Pete Townsend from 'The Who' evinced a good deal of perspicacity and prescience in writing about not getting fooled again (1971); who knew?

Maybe Richard Adams was more on the mark and gave us a clue with 'Fiver', the prescient rabbit, in his 1972 novel 'Watership Down'. Ooh er! Its coming. Look to the future!

In real terms of risk: Watership Down was rejected seven times before it was accepted by Rex Collings, a one man publisher. Collings had little capital and could not pay an advance but his colleague wrote in an obituary: '.... "he got a review copy onto every desk in London that mattered."

Like Richard Adams and Rex Collins, I am interested in the future; how I can be prepared for it, and even profit from it. It has never been about money for me though, never. 

I really do need to read the difficult books on my list sooner rather than later, especially 'The Black Swan', which is not about swans or ballerinas.

Blog address for all the posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

A while ago, I was asked how I would portray a feeling of there being something else; something more than just being born, living for a while, and then dying; a life that is no better than the lives of intellectual animals.

Sixth Sense

Recently, I was fortunate to be party to an hour long telephone conversation, with someone I have great respect for. We discussed mental health; work environments; comprehension; and channels of communication. In a wonderful previous conversation, we had hovered around the notion of prescience and sixth sense, and I was keen to revisit this topic. I commented that her voice was different this time. Those of you who understand that when our primary sense (sight) is absent there is an idea that our other senses compensate, might also know that if we lose just a tiny part of our outer ear we find the location of a sound to be difficult. Eventually, if the new shape of the outer ear is permanent, we compensate sufficiently well to be almost entirely sure which direction a sound comes from. Our sense of hearing really is very sensitive and very special.

I explained that I had poor and uncorrected vision for decades and as a result listen for nuances in voices probably more than most people. We realised quite soon that we, as humans, pick up on other people’s emotions quite quickly. I suggested that in the absence of face-to-face meetings we are not distracted by body-language, which many psychologists regard as a figurative ‘shout’ of veracity. You can say yes and shake your head at the same time, and almost everyone perceives you ‘saying’, No.

I suggested that in the absence of hearing we have to use abilities of perception that we rarely pay attention to. In effect, we move towards a liminal position of understanding;  

        ‘Right on the threshold of physical and spiritual being’, I said.

        ‘Sixth sense’, she replied.

        ‘Rather like our spirits holding up a banner behind us that says something like, ‘Be gentle, I am hurting.’

I don’t read the Bible much any more, but I do recall that there are a few verses that, for me, speak of a realisation that the writer of those verses believes that he has discovered something beyond himself. Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth.

From, 1 CORINTHIANS 13 v. 11 – 12 (NIV)

Available online at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Corinthians%2013&version=NIV

¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

Love is patient

This is from the well-known piece on love, which is highly recommended to all. From the same source of 1 Corinthians 13:

³ If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

In answer to the question I was asked many years ago, on there being something else, I wrote:

Spirits with banners

- start -

This conversation was beginning to irritate me.

       ‘I rather think that I may inadvertently be bordering on trying to persuade you to change your views on morality and utilitarianism and nudging you towards an acceptance of a truth. Not unlike taking the red or blue pill in The Matrix. But whose truth?’, I pressed.

Mark’s face didn’t change from his usual mask of implacability, but he did look down for a while, then left and right at the fallen and dismembered bodies we had found. He paused for a while, his mouth open; long enough for one of the local flies to land on his lower lip. His sharp in-breath sucked it in. He rolled it with his tongue and spat, though somewhat languidly.

       ‘I also feel that there is no doubt that something or someone is, and has been, whispering so loudly and for so long that the constant susurration has become part of our background noise.’

       ‘Yet’, I offered, ‘if you found yourself suddenly on a planet on which all the people are born blind and only you could see, would you tell them about birds? The blind people might hear wing-beats as the birds fly away before the birds are touched by the people; so those people can never know the bird’s shape or how they move, because they cannot catch one, aside of accidentally, and it may take them millennia to understand the purpose of birds.'

Mark pondered my words. I went on.

        'I think you would not!' If they know about birds, they would fear their own shadows when someone might later tear away another veil that is a bar to comprehension. Being blind, all they can know of shadows is a cooler temperature where they lie.

I saw Mark had grasped my meaning. He slowly nodded as he finished my words for me.

        'Their simplest reasoning would have them living uncomplicated lives with thoughts of how, to perhaps, till the land and work together for their mutual survival. Who cares if an observer is a flock of birds, and the designers are shadows on a planet with a simple population?’

One or two of the spirits standing by their still-living charges stared at us. Their banners flickered 'Help' and nonsense; the letters changing like old analogue airport departure notices when an event has changed the timetable, except their letters were more like crude brushstrokes.  When the letters eventually faded to nothing they gave a final glance at the bodies and left to form a group where they fell into conversation. A few looked, wistfully, over their shoulders at us. I recognised one of them.

- end -

The point in the above written piece is that both the characters are aware of something else, and even the gore and violence of death is not sufficient to be considered to be greater in impact than that inherent feeling we have of there being something else we just cannot quite see or touch. The point is that they are ignoring their primary senses and are focusing only on thinking and communicating ideas.