Rational

Yes we have no bananas is one of the minority of approximately three thousand projects and random conglomerations of ideas from the hyperactive mind of ‘Cupid’, the stage name of the equally hyperactive sometime circus performer Master Kidderminster, that has made it to some stage of realisation. It takes inspiration from the conclusions he has come to and observations he has made from his many years’ experience of food intolerance.

The name of the blog is an ironic borrowing from a song popularised in WWII in Britain and refers to Cupid’s belief both that in our contemporary society we have many stealth privations far more insidious and comprehensive than those borne with such spirit in the fourties of, for example, Elizabeth Bowen, and that the bananas stacked so copiously on our shelves today have so little in common with the bananas absent from the shelves of greengrocers in the shadow of the blitz that it could be argued in a very real philosophical sense that we could as well sing yes we have no bananas today. Bananas are here, of course a synecdoche for food as a whole, and the title is perhaps as much a critique of a broader degeneration of society and community spirit as of the adulteration and denigration of food that has accelerated or facilitated it - there are very few songs if any that could be shared by a variety of people in a confined space as they were in the Blitz.

Cupid’s behavious, moodstate and mental function are affected profoundly by the food he eats and he feels that contemporary society is mutifariously dysfunctional. He feels that consciousness is a material thing, and that the soul is an emergent property of the brain. He feels that education, culture, the empathetic faculty that is formed and developed through education and culture, and morality, which is communicated through both, raise us from the level of barbarism, and that the scope and manner of this development is potentially enormous and variegated but that there are countless requisites, many of which are so basic that even those most developed culturally, intellectually, even morally are apt to overlook them.

Firstly, for an individual to develop intellectually and morally, for them to develop a soul in the fullest sense, they must be raised in relative safety. If life is nasty and brutish, let alone short, there will be little scope for advancement since individuals will doubtless see other priorities than moving forwards intellectually whilst developing an empathetic sense, let alone acting upon it may in many ways be self-defeating in such an environment.

Secondly, if incentives and positive and negative sanctions are such that an individual sees no reason to advance in the broadest sense, if education and culture is readily available entirely inadequate for this purpose but fit for others generally considered more valuable, or, more insidiously, useful, then, in the absence of an ability to take decisions formed of a moral sense that would require a fuller cultivation, many would do without. Similarly, if freedom is such that people may choose to short-circuit seemingly otiose processes not realising that they are thus doing away with benefits that are contingent on them, then these people who lack a broader understanding will do exactly that. To put it in less precious terms, why spend time building up relationships with women, learning to understand them - something that could easily be said to be as difficult as learning to tame, if not master, an instrument like the violin - when you can have a wank over some cheap and dirty porn the days your not shagging loose birds in toilet cubicles.

Most critically, however, is the brain, for if this cannot be constructed from adequate parts then it cannot function in the optimum manner demanded by any advanced form of civilisation, let alone one founded upon competition for goods and services not excluding education food and culture and one in which those least able to compete soon finds themselves in an environment where life is nothing other than nasty and brutish. Imagine if you will a soloist in the London philharmonic having to perform with a violin precision engineered out of thermoset plastic or platinum based on coordinates taken from a stradivarius, or rather, better, an invisible gremlin replacing each precision-engineered part piecemeal during the solo. This last scenario is the most analogous to the position of the brain of a person who might change from the diet the majority of our ancestors would have known and who switches to a typical modern diet. For most of us of course, if we are to really make use of this metaphor, we have the complication of standing on a street corner trying to learn the damn thing and keep it in tune, but also, the fact that realistically we never started out with a stradivarius but a bolsa wood bodge up. Wood, like the brain, is a living material and if it is to be used in an instrument, or even in building and construction, its subsequent performance will reflect the conditions of its life; children all over the world for generations have wondered to learn how summers and winters may leave their mark on the wood as it grows. They have very rarely learned how their own brain grows, less like wood than Heraclitus’s river, constantly rebuilt and reconstructed from new materials which, if substandard, will perform badly. Heraclitus stood in a river which constantly flowed with water being replaced as it evaporated, pricipally from the sea, to rise and form clouds and rain in the highlands. Its water was replaced by water, and though it must have picked up its load along the way many of the people who form the river of humanity which flows down from Heraclitus to us with history providing the downward pressure of gravity, with knowledge, but also misunderstanding flowing down to us, and occasionally being lost in the ox bow lakes of progress, would believe that that river is essentially the same every time you step into it. The process involved in reconstructing the brain is far more complicated and filled with far more contingencies. It may be precision engineered, and the body under normal conditions may be very good at demanding the right materials, but denied them it does the best it can and the brain becomes a very different instrument.

A poor workman, of course, blames his tools, and it is true that many a virtuoso learned on a substandard instrument, having to work all the harder in those first difficult years to eke out something musical. Cupid believes he had to learn to master his own instrument of choice (which like many a virtuoso comes down to no choice at all), his brain, all the more because of its malfunction, its substandard condition. All the same, it is a matter of some anger to him not only that food, so fundamental to our survival as individuals and as a species and our flourishing as a culture, a society, a civilisation, has been allowed to become not an expression and a source of joy but an inconvenience which as often as not leads to guilt and, worser still, to real damage to the mental function of a majority, but also that this should be denied, and that this denial should lead to fixes as maladaptive as putting saw dust in a petrol tank: psychopharmacology, the marginalisation and criminilisation of a substantial minority of people suffering neuro-developmental disorders principally caused by nutritional imbalances and various forms of chemical pollution.

This anger is compounded by Cupid’s take on the culture he has grown up with and the education he experienced both at school and at university. The former may best be described as decadent, the latter as instrumental.

A just anger, however, he is sure, puts life in a man.