Change, Pt II

I've just gone and done it, changed the blog. For a couple of days it was immutable and perfect, in the sense of being unchanged or not requiring change, now it is mutating again. Nothing ever stays the same, except for damnfool controlling governments.

I thought I'd pick up on one or two things my wonderful commenters have said but I wanted to write a new post because I wanted to blah and meander and stuff about it.

Regardless of whether any of my atoms from 1981 (say) are extant today (unlikely), I am a continuous being, of some coherence. If I am physically, objectively (ie as an object) something else, something different, the memories and the personality and the construction are the same. I am like a cathedral (though a crap one, with really rubbish stained glass and a wonky spire) with its stones replaced one by one. Same design, same object: actually the analogy breaks down a little because such cathedral is only the same space as the one which saw (say) the murder of a saint, or the crowing of monarchs. But I am the same person and I feel twinges when I hear the music of my childhood (like now -I've put Tears for Fears back on!) because of what I experienced then. Because I am I, despite being something, or some-things, else. My coherence is both a consequence of change, a process of becoming, and a state of order that has obtained despite all the possible breakings-down or victories of entropy that could have happened in the last 31 years.

Things sometimes only need to change because people in power want them to: to demonstrate their power, or their competence (funny how competence so often seems, especially in management to be defined by one's willingness change stuff); things sometimes change because they don't want you to get too comfortable. Also things change because of entropy. Bastard tendency to equilibrium. I wonder if the ethic of Logopolis is visiting itself upon our society (more power would simply speed the collapse). More money, more energy, more determination, more "vision" - more fuck ups, more laws, more enforcement, more atomisation.

As I pointed out before, entropy is winning its battle over my hair, if not my muscles, which, owing to substantial gym use, are now loci of construction, design and order. Design in the sense that I am ordering them out of flesh through my use of weights. I suppose you could argue that entropy is increasing anyway but until I "buy the farm" then I remain a source of order, even increasing order. Yes it's change, but it's also change to stay the same. To increase the order in response to decay to maintain a single existence.

fake consultant wrote apropos of my last post:

change happens, like it or not.

Yes. I did kind of deny that, but only for effect. I don't _really_ believe it. I _do_ think people use that fact in order to change stuff for their own purposes, and to destabilise and dislocate others.

CBI wrote:

In fact, the child who saw those streets WASN'T you...

You've changed.


Yes, frightening isn't it. On the other hand I still exist. Kind of. TD doesn't of course. I liked your post CBI about the identity of yourself and of Crushed. I wonder how much if at all TD has changed me, or my style of writing, or my thinking. Or how much those things have changed TD. Not much probably. I think TD, for all of his drunken sweary bloggertarianism is really still the same as me, because he will always back away from a fight. His mouth is bigger than it should be, really.