Patterns...

I have been thinking... this is rarely a good thing.

Today though, I have also been meta-thinking. To be exact, I found myself feeling slightly sleepy at a gig this evening and thinking about the relationship between various guitar chords; the barred A, open E, and open A, to be precise. I found myself thinking about this relationship and how wonderful it is that they make sense in the context of one another, and how beautiful it is that music is based upon systematic patterns but that the composition and appreciation of music transcends these patterns. Then I found myself thinking about how this is a very "stoner" thought...

It is this final thought I am going to focus on. In some sense, it is perfectly natural that I should have stoner thoughts while sleepy; both states of mind weaken the psychic barriers between the conscious and the unconscious. It's what the Surrealists were all about, y'know. In the Surrealist manifesto they write that; "Surrealism does not allow those who devote themselves to it to forsake it whenever they like. There is every reason to believe that it acts on the mind very much as drugs do; like drugs, it creates a certain state of need and can push man to frightful revolts." Although I'm fairly sure the Surrealists were rather too intense to partake in such things regularly. If you marry a Surrealist sensibility to a propensity for getting stoned you end up in psychedelia, which is something very different indeed.

But there is more to the concept of a "stoner" idea than that, I was sure. So what could this be then? The key, I feel, is in trying to find a similarity where there might appear to be difference. There is a famous anecdote about stoners sneaking into the second half of 2001: A Space Odyssey during the interval so as to lie directly beneath the screen for the trippy second half of the film. Absorption into visual and auditory sensation is a cliche of the stoner experience. Being high can also heighten physical sensation in rather wonderful ways.

The other cliche of stonerhood is a great receptivity to connection; the way that ideas that correlate take on a great sense of significance. The "wow" factor at something which makes sense. And I can happily testify to taking great pleasure in logic puzzles while stoned; I find something intensely pleasurable about the neatness and sense there is to be found in a closed system of signification and the elegance therein. An experience which at first glance probably seems quite far removed from zoning out in front of the iTunes visualiser (something I consider best saving for other drugs, by the way).

But, there is a similarity there too.

The way I see it, it largely comes down to patterns. What physical, auditory and visual sensation and cognitive absorption have in common is that they both rely on the human capacity for pattern recognition. What we take pleasure in, in both cases, is how we perceive something in terms of the patterned qualities they present to us. The relationships between different colours or sounds, for example, comes down to variations in vibrations and wavelengths. The ability to perceive the vibrational regularities is a form of pattern recognition. Similarly, the ability to make links between different ideas and the absorption into a logical or mathematical system of some sort relies on the ability to at least unconsciously comprehend the rules to which these forms of cognition cohere, and to recognise the patterns with which these rules operate.

For many people, being stoned heightens receptivity to these patterns. As such the cliches of stonerdom are born.

It is worth dwelling at least briefly on the mention of vibrations and wavelengths in that last passage, as they provide an interesting touchstone for the connection between the sciences and the arts. Even as I write this, my inner purists (both scientist and artist) are screaming in dissent, but we'll allow ourselves to be softcore for now. Waves and vibrations are both very useful concepts for describing many physical properties in the sciences (albeit often in quite a simplified way). In the arts this finds itself manifest in the fact that what we perceive can always be reduced, on some level, to these physical properties. Painting relies partly upon our perception of colour and shading, which comes down to different wavelengths of light. And music is all, ultimately, vibrations. Of course these are things which many artists consciously factor into their work, but even when it doesn't it would be naive to overlook this (anyone who has ever been to a drone rock gig will testify to that, I would hope). Perhaps the ultimate manifestation of this kind of connection is in the idea of synesthesia, wherein different sensory experiences are conflated. Meditating on a Kandinsky can be a very rewarding experience, from this perspective. Music too embodies this kind of connection very well, because of how it relates to mathematics (itself the language of physics).

But on another level, one which relies equally upon the place of the arts and the sciences in our lives, vibrations and wavelengths have a great emotional and moral importance for us. They are terms in our language that describe our relationship with the world. The atmosphere of a place of situation can be described as having a particular "vibration". If we connect with another human being we say that we are "on their wavelength". If an idea strikes us in a particular way we speak of it having a certain "resonance". It is no coincidence that we have adopted these terms into wider human discourse. The reason we do so is because we perceive even the aspects of our lives that cannot easily be reduced to what are broadly physical qualities in terms of patterns and regularities, and these words describe these things for us. The idea of character and habit, that which makes us the people we are, is largely the accumulation of various regularities in our thought and our behaviour. Our minds are simply set up to be receptive to these things, in one way or another and to varying degrees.

At the gig, Robert Brook spoke briefly of the idea of psychic geography, and how even small changes in our milieu effect us in profound ways. This is because we make sense of the world in terms of deviations from regularities. The physical environment we are familiar with provides us with a constant by which we make sense of everything else we experience. There are, of course, canonical deviations that we take in our stride (we are rarely sent reeling by the fact that it is raining today when it was dry yesterday, because we are familiar with the idea of rain and that the weather changes). But if a tree at the bottom of the garden, something we are familiar with but take for granted, blows down we can be left with a faintly uneasy sense that something isn't quite right. In psychoanalysis this is referred to as the "uncanny"; the idea that something can be both familiar and unfamiliar at once, and unsettling precisely because the familiarity which we rely upon is disturbed. The pattern, so to speak, is slightly wrong.

As such it is no surprise that mind altering substances should respond to this capacity for pattern recognition, both altering it and heightening it in various ways. Our lives are infused with patterns and deviations from patterns in every moment. A "stoner thought", I think, is one that revolves around these patterns; either in terms of absorption into them or in the creation of them, just as watching the iTunes visualiser is a case of absorption into and recognition of visual patterns.

I've occasionally meditated on the idea that pattern recognition is a basic attribute of what it means to be alive. For a plant to thrive, it has to be able to respond to the patterns of the seasons and of the movement of the sun. This isn't to suggest that plants have to put effort in to this, but simply that they wouldn't be if they didn't respond in such a way. Animal life relies upon deeply ingrained instincts which can also be perceived as a form of pattern recognition insofar as they involve regularities in responding to environmental stimuli. And everything which makes us human, from the ability to learn and use tools to the formulation of great works of art and systems of thought also rely on patterns in a similar way.

Quite whether any of this has any human significance I don't know. Partly because it is all nonsense, of a sort; I simply use the very broad idea of patterns as an interpretive grid to understand various aspects of life and the relationships between them. There are any number of different ways in which one can approach the world and the manifold things in it. And if one were to attempt to come up with one single specific use of the word "pattern" which applied equally to all aspects of life, I am sure it would be in vain. These are, to be frank, the thoughts of a stoner. But I would hope that you would at least entertain the idea that I could be on your wavelength.