So there it is, Obama won and change has come to America and, by implication, to the world.
As I described in my wind down notice this blog has been inextricably linked to the last eight years of humanity’s implosive collapse into the steaming oceans. In short, the Neocon adventure, Bush, the internet and the death of Britney Spears.

It’s weird to say so, but I quite glad that it is over – this blog I mean. Over the years I’ve become very attached to the journal aspect of it and I will carry it over in an archive form to individuated.org. But I am fatigued at the state of mind that this blog’s view requires. I am tired of laughing at the absurdity of celebrity culture or letting surveillance wash over me like a tide. I am drained of the need to fight 00′s-americanism. It has failed and everyone knows it. There is no need to point out that Dick Cheney’s approval rating is 18%.

It’s time for a new view on the world, perhaps more optimistic. But believe me, I am under no illusion that the world is fucked and that no Obama/Clinton lovefest can save us. Humanity has been killing itself for 6000 years and $700 million in campaign contributions and Osama bin Laden’s arrest ain’t gonna change that. So what is there to be optimistic about? I’ll mention a few things that sustain my optimism[1].

But first, as has been my wont, some music. I’ve seriously pondered what should be the last music that I drop on this blog. What could I possibly pick as the last sound for thecages? Something electronic? Stoner metal? Dub (from when I started the blog)? A wide-ranging compilation of all of the above? Of course no song or compilation could ever live up to the self-imposed hype of being my definitive selection to comment on the state of the world. But I have to try.
In the end I decided on pop, and in particular one pop song. Or rather three pop songs recorded as a single 23 minute ocean of sound. I decided on Talk Talk’s glowing opening track to the most significant piece of pop recorded in the 80′s – Spirit of Eden. For easy listening I’ve cut it up into its constituent parts, The Rainbow, Eden and Desire – but they are actually one sound.
I won’t bother trying to comment on the music itself but I will quote the opening lyrics

	Oh Yeah The world’s turned upside down Jimmy Finn is out Well how can that be fair at all? Too Lenient The song the lawyer sang Our nation’s wrong Well how can that be fair at all? Repented changed Aware where I have wronged Unfound corrupt This song the jailer sings My time has run Sound the victim’s song The trial is gone The trial goes on

I chose Spirit of Eden because, while it is sorrowful, it is fundamentally optimistic. But what is there to be optimistic about? We now have daily evidence that the planet is about to kick our asses with its uncontrollable weather. We are seeing the unflolding perfection of police and surveillance states in Russia and the UK. Capitalism has again proven that while it may be the most viable economic system available to us it will, on a regular basis, consume itself. Not much to feel good about on the long view then.

Well, there are things to balance the horrors; we are also seeing the arrival of technologies that have and will continue to empower us as individuals. In the arms race against the nation state’s drive to control, the internet gives us assurance that it will always be possible for the open-sourced masses to outrun the military-industrial complex, at least in terms of private communications and, I believe, the privacy of our own thoughts. The very death that approaches across the gulf of Mexico will force capitalism’s greed to invest in the efficient use of energy. Our greedy survival will force us into electric cars and will make carbon sequestration a utility[2]. And finally, it feels to me like in the last few years we’ve started recognizing two attributes of our society that have been driving it for thousands of years but have remained unseen within a generation until now; complexity and acceleration. We now recognise the importance of acknowledging and studying complexity as the fundamental reality of our lives. And we have started tracking the unending acceleration of that complexity. My child(ren) will process their world at a rate and to a depth that will drive me to despair for their racing hearts – but we’ll be ready for it because we know its a certainty.

The world is a death rollercoaster and we scream and laugh as we hurtle around corners, feet-over-head with tears streaming from our eyes. I’ve never been happier.
And so, goodnite sweet cages. You never really existed did you?

Disclaimer: the below may sound particularly philosophical*. I detest philosophical manifestos. All I want to do here is document the impact that my time in Cape Town has had on me. This is not a manifesto; please don’t read it as such. Don’t believe a word of what I say below – get your own philosophy, make up your own mind. For that matter, live without a philosophy – they tend to deteriorate into manifestos.

I first visited Cape Town in January 2000 1 and by April 2000 I had moved down to start work in Wetton and to live in the city bowl. The last eight years have been a transformative time for me, though its roots lie in the last few months of my time in Pretoria. Cape Town has been the psychedelic years and while the tryptamines have long already worked themselves out of my system my brain has been permanently redirected – outward, to the above and below. I feel like the years in Cape Town have been what finally connected me to the reality of the world around me, to people and to the natural world as a physical phenomenon. And as I’m writing this post I feel overcome by an enormous sense of gratitude towards the city, its location at the foot of Table Mountain, its solitary beaches and forests. I firmly believe that the years 2000 to 2004 couldn’t have happened (as they did) anywhere else.

There have been many important things to me while living in Cape Town, friendships and car crashes, but I’ll pick out four which, in particular, made these years as full as they have been. But first, some music; I’ve written a separate mini-post on the electronic music that I discovered in the first four or so years of my time here.

Natural Reality

Cape Town is overcome by natural beauty; built around a mountain, beaching the Atlantic and Indian oceans, home to the most diverse biome on the planet. The more I travel the more I realise how few other cities in the world can claim anything like the natural surrounds that we have here. And even more important than just the pure beauty of the city surrounds is how accessible it is. While living in Vredehoek the slopes of Table Mountain were no more than a short (but steep) walk from my front door.

It was on those slopes with the mountain’s cubic cliffs behind me and the city and ocean down below that I found more and more evidence of the polar simplicity of nature’s random workings. In my experience nature has no glorious, glowing spirit which softly forms its seasons; instead I’ve experienced it as fundamentally simple, basic in the extreme. Its physical structures are formed through nothing more than mathematically repeating patterns. Water molecules know only collision and expansion from heat, but they crest and tumble into rippling waves and clouds. If a plant loses a limb it simply sprouts more similar limbs as its energy allows. Animals appear more complex and unified, but internally everything from the simplest respiration to the neural complexity of the human brain is nothing more than a continuation of the same primitive mechanism of connection upon connection. But nature has no perfect solutions, it survives by what is barely good enough. It’s growth is constantly heading only towards decay. But it does it on such an enormous scale that the result is whole in a way that is endlessly elegant and robust. It attains its form from the minute interactions of billions of individuals and a rolling tide of trillions of trivial events. The natural reality stacks simplicity upon simplicity to form its weather system, its inhabitants and the buried bones of its dead. And the harder I looked at the natural reality the more I saw of myself, how my senses function. In reaching out my hand to a tree there is the potential for a seamless transition from its tessellating bark, across the cells of my skin, along my veins and neurons, into the logic that floats above my wet brain and out into the software that it produces.

From this evidence I’ve come to be of the firm belief that we have nothing outside of our own senses and brain – no soul and no greater death. Why would reality produce something as detached as a soul when it can produce every miracle that humanity has ever observed from the endless collision of its minute parts? The air that waves patterns through the grasslands in front of me also strike my face and rustle my hair and passes by, sweeping away into the distance – there is nothing more that I could want to understand or to observe beyond that. One day I will exhale and the chemical electricity in my brain will run out – why should I want any magical soul to continue past that moment? Its seems anathema to the beauty of the physical reality.

Through Table Mountain’s slopes and Postberg’s atlantic breeze I have become permanently connected to the soil and the air and I want nothing more than to always feel the rolling wash of the matter that surround us.

God

As far as God and religion is concerned I am by no means a militant atheist-type. I believe that religion can have a very positive influence on people’s lives, providing comfort and a life based on integrity, humility and charity. I come from a religious background and even when I eventually rejected organised religion I remained faithful for many years; developing my own sense of a non-interventionist god and his2 natural order. But my personal experiences have continued to show me only one thing; that god does not exist. It’s not that I do not believe that god exists, it’s that I believe (firmly) that god does not exist. The harder I’ve looked at what my senses are capable of, the clearer it has become to me that the natural reality does not need god nor would it originate a god.
I’ll paraphrase John Lennon when he said that he no longer believed in Nixon or in God, he was no longer looking for a father figure; that he would always continue to make music. And despite not being enamored with John Lennon 3 I agree that once I shook the need for a father figure I was finally free from trying to mash the evident reality into a form in which some remote god was in control. There is no such thing and I’ve never felt better.

Individuality

Finally, all paths in the last eight years have led me in only one direction, towards individuality. The harder I’ve looked at reality, at the world I live in, at my ego and delusions, ambitions and irrational fears, I’ve always ended up in the same place – my own identity. But becoming aware of my identity – how it was formed and how it changes – has somehow been no more than a gentle reflection. I started cultivating memories. That’s all it was, I started taking note of how time passed, thinking chronologically and wanting to look back. As I’ve heard and read; happiness is the ability to feel all emotions, and maturity is the experience of sorrow.
I’m sure that I’ve always had a strong individualist streak and I went through periods where I felt the need to illustrate my individualism through wild haircuts and hand-scrawled t-shirts. But I’m overjoyed to say that I no longer need those props. And I feel like, more than just due to growing older, it has been these years that let me recognise my individuality – to claim it. I no longer need eyeliner – I’m forever changed. I’m older and calmer – more confident and accepting. I’ve finally become confirmed in who I am and what I believe. I continue to want to simplify how I describe what I see while developing my ability to perceive the massive, accelerating complexity of our world. And Cape Town’s silver trees have given me the examples and evidence that led me here.

Nothing lasts… nothing lasts. Everything is changing into something else. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing is wrong. Everything is on track. William Blake said nothing is lost and I believe that we all move on.
T. McKenna

I will never forget the buzzing September sound of the bees among the pincushions on the slopes of Table Mountain and the hum of the city below.

And so, good night sweet Cape Town – I will never be the same and I will always come back.

This mini-post is an offshoot of Cape Town – The Psychedelic Years

Music has been inextricably linked to my Cape Town experience. When I arrived from Pretoria my main interests were techno 1 and drum ‘n bass. And while I never really got into psychedelic trance 2 the CT psytrance scene did introduce me to one of the most fun things to possibly do – massive outdoor parties. I vividly remember the first Vortex that I attended, at Silverstroom strand, with a swirling monster of a sound system mounted on four towers around the dance floor 3. Now let me be clear, I’m not one of those dancy-types – I’m a stand-aroundy type, but even just walking around a packed dance floor is a cool thing. I’m grateful that I got to go to a bunch of them in the warm summers and cold, wet winters of the Cape. But without any doubt the most memorable party that I ever went to was somewhere in the summer of 2000/2001 at the Old SAB Brewery in Woodstock. It was a techno thing 4. It was held on a foggy Friday night in the roofless shell of an old multi-storey industrial brick building. The building is now being renovated into offices/apartments but each time I drive past I still remember exact details of driving there, the fire escape staircases and the metal roof structure. And the driving, driving, driving music. And it doesn’t matter that it has passed and I am now old and slow – it affected me and changed me and will never be lost.

So, in memoriam and celebration, here’s a short playlist of the electronic music that rocked my world in those years. It is only a tiny fragment of the mass of CDs and vinyl that I accumulated and it can in no way do justice to all the sound that I was exposed to, but I picked a few. It starts out with some classic minimal techno from Robert Hood, takes a short detour through progressive house and some of the few psytrance producers that I have a genuine admiration for and culminates in two tracks from Richie Hawtin’s Plastikman. A few words on Plastikman; musically I was interested in only one thing in those years – less. I wanted music which was minimal and precise and only the most accomplished producers could produce a minimal sound while still invoking the insanity of a heaving dance floor. Plastikman achieved perfection in this pursuit on these two tracks.

• Robert Hood – Wisdom to the Wise
• Funf D – Overcome
• Quivvers – Do You Really Want to Hurt Me
• Accorsi & Bassetti – Concord
• X-Dream – Irritant
• Plastikman – Locomotion
• Plastikman – Consumed