Evidence for the Existence of God

or, Poor Lighting in Cologne Cathedral.
I'm not really very happy with either of those titles.

Petal

A petal (rose, naturally), encased in glass like a crucifix, never to touch the ground,
But still it falls.
Into your closing hand, closing and grabbing at the strings of lesser lives
And rose petals. Like cyanide, but without the bittnerness, whispering that this time, and this time, and this time, there will be no crash, only a gentle fall in the wind
Of rose petals, grey this time, and no romance. Only you and I, on either end of the petal, as we struggle to find each other, but the petal is still falling and weaving and tumbling and twisting and turning and i do not beleive we shall ever touch at all, but shall remain, like rose petals, encased in glass, never to die, never to fall, never again to touch.

This Will Hurt For A Second

a building in tokyo, viewed from the ground look up

fragment

my shoes squeaked on the hot rubber floors and my footsteps echoed off the walls as I pounded up the corridor. The heat of summer had come at last and had blown all of the schools occupants out into the shady yard. As I rounded yet another empty corner I heard the sounds of the students outside and i thought:

Statistics Exam Question

If the probability that I hate you is 0.68 and the probability that I'm coming to kill you is 0.72 and the probability that I'm coming to kill you given that I hate you is 0.921, then

i) Calculate the probability that I hate you and i'm coming to kill you

ii) Hence, start running.

Shed

japan

Malicious Intent

dean

The Minutes That Slip Through Your Fingers

The minutes that slip through your fingers
From the hours that make up the day
The moment you catch as it lingers
Before it slips away

Are these the best days of your lives
Those seconds we could not replace?
Were you sitting in heaven that moment,
Asleep in the infinite space?

The minutes that drift before dawn
As you lie awake in your bed
The hours that pass before slumber
As you try and empty your head

The days you’ve spent at the window
Chasing the clouds in their flight
The week that was lost to black canvas
When you tried to write with your sight

Are these the minutes that time reclaims
From the youth who stole it’s sweetness?
Did those moments even exist?
Or did we dream them in our eage’ness?

One night when we are alone together
I shall find the moment that lingers
And catch it in my waiting palm
The minutes that slip through your fingers.

Defies a Caption

Who Writes Poetry?

No-one writes poetry. Obsessives and stalkers start by writing poetry. Start by praising her beauty and talking about your dreams and in a month you’ll be peeking through her window and stammering like a dying man. Sure, they all say they melt for poetry. But it’s too creepy, too difficult for stupid girls to understand. No-one can be equal with someone who stays up past dawn writing about them. No-one wants a man like that, a man who writes poetry. You want a man of action. A man without soul.

The Gods Have Been At Work Here

no idea.

Roman Roads

Roman Roads, straight as the sun
Open and endless, through my mind they run
Wait not a day,
Go on your way,
Down Roman Roads.

Spanish Silver, bright as blood
Hidden and waiting, buried in the mud
Seek it no more,
Stray not from the law,
For Spanish silver.

Persian Princes, noble as night
Cruel and lonely, blinded by sight
Return your knife,
Give not your life
To Persian Princes.

England

christmas holidays are over :(

The Memory of Pain

It’s a strange thing that something utterly immediate at the time can fade into nothingness so quickly. A couple months ago I shattered my knuckle, resulting in unbearable pain. But oddly enough, when I look back on it now, the experience is so painless, so sanitised, that I wonder why I made such a fuss. Not only that, I actually begin to think that it may have been a good experience, somehow character-building. I can remember it happened, I can remember I never wanted it to happen again and I gritted my teeth, but I can’t actually feel it.
It’s like the memory of a smell. I can remember roses smell good, I could even recognise the smell. But I just can’t smell it in my memory. With sight and sound it’s different. If you were asked to conjure up an image of your house, you could probably do it. Not just remember that your house is blue, that it looks ugly, that you prefer red houses, but actually remember the image of the house, and be able to see it again when you close your eyes. Now try and close your eyes and remember what pain feels like.
Of course, when I say you can conjure up the memory of your house, you can do it, but only up to a point. Even if you think you can see it in your mind, I could ask you the colour of the flowers in the window and you probably won’t know. That's because your memory doesn’t really have an image imprinted on it like a computer. Memory just takes the best parts, the one’s you’re most interested in, and forgets the rest. Nonetheless, you still can make an image, however vague, in your mind. But you can’t recreate pure physical pain. Pain isn’t even something with lots of details to remember, like a song, or a picture. Pain is just a pure emotion, in fact even less than an emotion, just a pure physical state. It’s like not being able to recall the colour red, in fact even more elemental than that.
So what about Pavlov and his dogs or Skinner and his rats? It’s been proved that you can condition an animal by punishing it with physical pain. Could it be that only humans forget the actuality of pain, that other animals have no such difficulties in remembering it? More likely, I think, that other animals, no matter how simple can learn and remember that pain is not something they wish to happen to them again.
Perhaps I’m looking at this too much from the perspective of a middleclass English white boy. After all, a beaten dog may wince even at the sight of the whip. However, even then I think that what is remembered is the emotional anguished caused by the physical pain, and not the pain itself. Under the influence of pain, at the extremes, one can be persuaded to anything (after all, think of room 101 in 1984, or if you prefer non-fiction, of the countless false confessions by torture throughout history). There is no denying the power of imprinting in such a state, but I think that it makes the lack of recall even more odd.
On the other hand, it would be bizarre if we could in fact recall pain. Unlike other memories, like a voice, pain is not limited in time to a specific event or even series of events, but is constant in life, always ready to be awakened. Being able to recall pain would be like being able to recall what it feels like to be asleep. Imagine the absurdity of people yelping in pain or falling asleep while re-living their memories! And if you could turn pain on in order to remember it, then you would have to be able to turn it off just as easily, something the human body could never allow because it knows the inherent weakness of the human mind.
If it were not for our ability to forget our pain, so much of the violence, perseverance, sacrifices and striving of humanity might never have come to pass.

The Path