Knuts to you

Foreword: I, like any sane person, am against animal cruelty. I just wish folks would think more about what 'cruelty' constitutes. 


So there's a bear, he's born in captivity and raised by hand. He's called Knut and he died 3 days or so ago of brain damage they say. 


The lesson, children, is this: Animals shouldn't be kept in zoos. 


I've not got the background to make a call on this. Each side presents an argument. Some points make sense, some don't. 


Personally I like seeing animals. I'm sure most people do. Fascinating. They impress, they entertain, they intimidate, all in a safe environment. Most often they will be seen in the zoo. 


Is it wrong to imprison others for our own amusement? Yes. When you put it that way - zoos as prisons - it's wrong. But what is a prison to an animal? That I could not tell you.


I'll dance over to a BBC article with a few choice phrases: 


"...an animal rights campaigner was calling for him to be put down rather than brought up by humans."


That seems a little harsh? Or is it just me? 


Maybe that animal rights campaigner is now thinking, "See! This animal died 26 years premature, of brain damage and the animal was rejected by the mother at birth.... She smelled the brain damage. I was right to say he should have been snuffed out."


He's probably not thinking that because that's ridiculous. At the very least it's impossible for him to prove. 


Even so there's that primeval appeal, that little voice inside, near those parts within that seem to know things we can't prove with reason or logic, a little voice that says "animals know better, know more than we do". 


The birds fleeing before a storm, the dogs barking as a ghost enters your house and steals your stuff. Now a Polar Bear, rejecting a retarded cub. Nature knows best.


But the debate is more about nurture than it is about nature:


"...a zoo is an artificial, "controlled environment"."


Who is to say that the 'natural environment' for an animal doesn't impose harsher controls than those artificial prohibitions imposed by man? What if a Polar Bear got trapped on a floating ice sheet and managed to hesitate there long enough to become too weak to swim and starved?


"...little point in keeping large powerful animals in captivity. Not only do they lead "unfulfilled lives", but bears bred in zoos cannot be reintroduced to the wild as they lose the skills necessary to survive."


I have to agree that an animal, once imprisoned in a zoo can rarely return to the wild amongst the vicious and hardy kin it has been raised and mollycoddled away from. But what is a 'fulfilled' animal?

"... it would have been better for Knut not to have existed at all than live such a miserable life." 

Who can rightly say what makes an animal miserable? What makes you miserable? 


Pain, pain is universal too - were a Zoo to subject animals to pain that'd be wrong. That's easy to accept - all animals feel pain to varying degrees (if I was in a fight with a lion and survived I'd probably make more of a big deal out of it than another, defeated lion).


Lack of freedom? What is freedom of travel to a creature that does not choose to run the length of the icecap, the savannah, the jungle to stay fit, but that must travel the distances to hunt, so that it may eat, and therefore survive.


Lack of choice? What is choice to a creature that has been raised by an environment harsher than a zoo (whether or not it's 'idyllic' in the human imaginings). You don't choose your dinner. You don't choose your home. You don't choose much. 


Lack of a natural environment? Why must an animal live in a wild wind-swept and beautiful ravine or a dark, moonlit grove, or a scorched desert filled with empty aching stillness? Because we impose that lovely image on them. That's where you belong polar bear. Don't come into the city and eat out of our bins badger! D: It's not as romantic.


I fear that an animal appreciates only the essentials. They don't have fancy wild wallpapers for their windows desktops. They don't admire views. They don't respect the world they come from because they appreciate the gifts it gives them. They don't want to help recycle. They don't want to do anything those crazy things they do, they have to do them. 


We're applying the half understood, media mangled message of the new age, brow beating zeitgeist to these beasts. 


Animals live in the now, with a devotion that lets them get to the heart of the present time. That and they have better physical senses than us. Maybe putting them in a zoo interrupts that devotion to the now, to survival. 


Maybe the genes cry out louder and longer if your head isn't filled with calculus, philosophy, food hygiene or sports trivia.


Animals want to survive - I think that's a good bottom line. So Mr. Animal right's activist (if you even exist. You may be a conjured soul in the name of 'BBC Journalism'), I would have to disagree that an animal would be better off dead than in a zoo. That just doesn't make sense. 

I have an idea

So I have an idea. I think I said. An idea for a novel. It has legs and arms and maybe, even a face. A face, perhaps, that no one can ever love, but a face nonetheless.


There's a lot of work involved in getting this idea to a stage where it can be called a story.

That work is, at the moment, problematic.

As soon as I hit on this idea I thought I'd want nothing more than to inflate the shapeless outline I'd come up with and see it bobbing before me as a finished (I'll finish the metaphor) balloon.

Part of me wants that. Wants it a lot. Another part keeps thinking irreverent, unrelated and ridiculous thoughts - and this should be a pretty serious book. A thriller of sorts.

The solution, it turns out, is simple!

I sit my brain down and try to set some boundaries:

Alright brain, multiple projects. How do ya like that? You be funny in some other writing and I can be serious business in this novel thing. Eh? Eh?

Brain says nothing. I sit him down to work at a blank page. He does nothing.

As soon as I decided this course of action all comic thinking dries up.

I inadvertently cured the incompatibility between my mood and what I want to write for the next year or so.

A lesson learned! My mind is contrary and I have no direct influence over whither or hither it may dance.

I can, though, build a maze around it so that I guide it's flow in the direction, roughly, of my end goal.

So, with mindset adjusted, I sat to write last night.

I got 500 words done. Don't laugh!

It's not at all connected with the plan I had outlined. It was part inspired by a music video I enjoyed just before I wrote it (which got me thinking on the curse of true originality again).

In spite of that I liked it. Not in a technical way. I hate everything about the language, setting, structure and technique. I thought it was something I'd want to read. A story I want to know more of.

Someone is in trouble and I want to do some digging and find out why.

Happy Trails

So like a woman wandering down a branching trail in a chocolate forest I keep getting distracted from my goal.

I've this great idea for a book - that's cool right?

Yeah but there's this other idea - oh and that idea I had a long time ago that seems that it may work.

Then there's the part fantasy/part reality series of short stories that I thought weren't connected but now, after a spell away, I double take and I can see how a tweak here, a tweak there would give me a bunch of interesting characters that are not as dissimilar as I first thought.

I mean it's fiction, it's fantasy. As long as my internal world has integrity there's no reason why these worlds can't be separate bio-domes* in different areas!

Settle down brain ffs...

* None of those stories take place in a bio-dome it was metaphorical but... wouldn't a bio-dome or series of bio-domes make a great setting for a story. What about a robot programmed to maintain a series of domes on the darkside of the moon for human occupants who never arrive. And then the robot is actually - no wait, that's a bit too much like Wall-E. So either I have too many ideas at once or I find that my great idea is the least original thing EVER. I swear if I ever get a book finished it'll turn out to be identical to something published by a Lithuanian author as yet untranslated to other languages. 

Japan

I don't think more than a handful of people will read this but still...

Not much work done (bar the day job in automaton fashion) with the news from Japan. Shocking stuff. I read that volcanic activity in the south is now added to the litany of woes.

In the modern age we can grasp the concept of cause and effect - we see that there is no vengeful deity behind tectonic movement.

If this were several hundred years ago it would be a disaster that would stay in the collective race consciousness in the form of folklore, legend.

If this were several hundred years ago it could inspire - through fear - a rethink about the morality of the country so punished by the Gods that hold sway in that region of the world. For surely no other explanation would make sense.

Perhaps they'd document it. Certainly they would. Facts would seem outlandish, fiction would creep in to support the telling. Perhaps it'd be subsumed into a larger religion. A lesson from a fearsome spiritual lord.

It's the closest in my short life I've come to comprehending how disaster inspired tales endure the longest. Whatever calamity that likely inspired enduring myths like Atlantis or parts of the bible, must have been on a similar scale.

A beginning is a delicate time

Busy week. I've not done as much work on my new project as I could have. I'm not sure how much I should do at this point.

See I think a kernel of my being, a shameful little twig branching off from the trunk of my soul, is downright lazy. Like a diva I have an internal desire for at least one day or evening or weekend where I am required  to do nothing. So what I've to do is trick my subconscious into that space where writing is relaxing.

This isn't too hard and I've made inroads this week. The fact that I squeezed in some writing work even when I've had a lot to do bodes well.

As for the project itself, it has legs. I've approached it with a slightly more organised mind than I usually do when writing (normal technique = picture anything and write about it. Let imagination run wild). I still want to apply that normal technique as I think if I deny how my mind works or views things I'll be denying my 'style' if you can call it that.

The organisation involved a bit of a think about the overarching story: the characters who'd be involved; their journey; the settings; some scenes I'd like; things to avoid; things to embrace. I came up with a lot of background and I want more before I begin proper.

I've jotted down some possible openings, as with many things I find the beginning a delicate matter. Something hard to start satisfactorily.

This is one of those boring 'diary' type posts to keep myself on track.

I'm off on a yacht trip with some friends. It's the closest a working-class type like me can get to the big life and it's enjoyable but today it will be something I'll soak up so I can relive it again on paper as someone else, in different circumstances, as the foundation for an interesting scene.

One last interesting point: My desire to play the more time intensive games I like to dabble in (mainly Warcraft) has disappeared into a void with the birth of this new idea, this proper attack at writing a book.

I may analyse that during the week.

Following an invisible path

Often if you want to better understand something that you cannot study firsthand, you can monitor the changes that this something makes in the environment around it.

Think of the wind through the trees, across a wind vane or above the long grass of a field. Think of a fish just under the surface of the water. Think of the spirals of the stars as they're guided by gravity.

When I started this blog I had no idea what I wanted to use it for, it's purpose - if it even had a use or a purpose. A lot of blogs don't.

I'm not a lot of bloggers though. I'm different from the mass of people around me. Arrogant (and often incorrect) as that statement can be when presented in a poor fashion, I'd be foolish not to notice that it might apply to me if I analyze the choices I've made in life so far.

Besides, while I may be different from one mass I am sure to belong to another mass of people - I'm not a special snowflake but I'd like to know which cloud I should fall from.

This blog seems to be pointing in a vague sort of way, towards that metaphorical cloud. Maybe it just coincides with a new found enthusiasm for a goal I once had but gave up (as it wasn't an acceptable career choice in the circumstances I found myself in).

In any case, I'm writing a lot more. I've also got this idea that may be the first long work I create. I think I'll focus on this. I'll go through the trials and tribulations that come with being a writer and, when I remember, I'll document them here.

Snippets of story will find themselves here; Conflicts between this new project (which fills me with a passion my daily work can't hope to) and my current lifestyle/job will be documented; Doubts, self abuse and a feeling of inadequacy will be recorded. When I remember.

It seems like a lot of extra writing to go through when taking on a project that involves LOTS of writing, but I hope it'll be worth it. I can't risk NOT writing here given that the weave and warp of my mind seem more clear when I re-read my entries.

I think I'd be a fool to abandon this blog to pursue this new project. Doubly so given that this new project has a lot to do with the clarity that I think I've attained from writing the entries I've posted so far.