I aspire to perfection, but fall sadly short. He said. We are only human. Fallible. Halfway between ape and angel.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I said. To err is human. But there's no reason to bring mythological entities into it. Saint Charles Darwin showed how humankind is just another species of primate. It's all monkeys.
No, primate are apes not monkeys. There's a difference.
That's not the point, you drunken pedant. We are the products of an evolutionary process, not perfect, not finished. I mean the Baldwin Effect ...
You read that in Daniel Dennett. Or Steven Pinker, didn't you?
Yeah, one of them. I don't remember which. But so what? The Baldwin effect allows a learning creature to, over generations, make a learnable useful skill easier and easier to learn until it comes naturally. Or almost. When it becomes really close, easily learnable but not innate, the selection pressure levels off.
And you get?
Us. Imperfect beings that have to adapt to their own nature. Feeling incomplete. Half-made.
Ok, but this right here is not our nature. Our nature is hunter-gatherers, fending off leopards, at war with the tribe a mile away, and counting yourself a lucky old man at 30 years old. It's no wonder we feel a bit out of place in these cities, these ant farms for naked apes dressed in suits. But would you give it up? I mean, no dentistry?
No, you know I wouldn't. But turn it around. Human behaviour is a kind of primate behaviour by definition. This is the planet of the apes. 99% percent of what we do is animal stuff. Fight, Feed, Fuck, Flee. The rest is above that, is ...
Angelic? Perfect?
No, something quite different. Unplanned. Creative. This is the spark. To take a modern metaphor, perfection is for machines. Mistakes are creative. Spontaneity, going against your programming, now there's where it's interesting and novel. Even randomness has a big role to play, as it is neither with nor identifiably against our natures.
Right, like that band. Coil.
Oh them. Do you still buy their releases?
I don't know why I bother. I listen to it, and it's really novel, amazing. Makes the hairs stand up on my forearms. And then I buy it, take it home, play it a few times and realise that I don't want to listen to it often. It's not music for listening; it's music for laying down and avoiding. But it's like them because some of their releases are as Coil vs ELpH. ELpH is what happens when the sound equipment misbehaves and makes it's own noises. Worship the glitch.
Yeah, I don't know how muso's manage these days. Modern sound gear is extremely complex components, a myriad ways of connecting them, all with the most appallingly badly designed user interfaces. Rows of identical buttons. Modal behaviour galore. Buggy firmware. No wonder you get glitches. More beer?
Why not...
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