Micro-Theory 3: What the fuck's a rhythm stick?

More specifically, why should you hit me with it? Well, isn't a rhythm stick perhaps a metaphor for that feeling of release and euphoria you get when listening to music, especially rhythmical music? It's about the sense of gratitude you have to the composer or performer who makes you feel that marvellous freedom; it's about how exciting music is, how sexy and - critically - how universal, transcending frontiers physical and mental to twat us into ecstasy. After all, the lyrics take pains to point out that seemingly every person on earth has the capacity to hit Mr Dury with their particular stick - and he'll love them for it, just as we love him for bashing us. So the song is about music. But we shouldn't forget that it is also a wonderful, indirect tribute to the magical properties of language, because without all those wonderful rhymes ('In the wilds of Borneo, and the vineyards of Bordeaux', etc.), we wouldn't get the message. Bloody Clever Trevor...

Micro-Theory 2: Tesco Spires

You’re driving along a busy dual carriageway. All you can see to either side are dusty trees and high palisades of fencing. Then, just for a moment, you see the shape of a church spire appear and disappear between the trees. And somehow you’re reassured by that – even though you’ll never know the name of the church or go inside it. You’re reassured, perhaps, by the thought that there’s still a rural England out there, a land of quiet spinneys and village greens, the town hall and the war memorial, Easter Egg hunts and home-made jams – and so forth. The only problem is that what you saw wasn’t a church: it was a Tesco Superstore, an out-of-town retail outlet with the same vast acreage and strip-lit aisles as Asda or Sainsbury’s. The difference with Tesco is that they plonk a super-structure on top of their store which is a sort of bastard amalgamation of clock tower, church spire and oast house, complete with picturesque weather-vane. Tesco is, I believe, the only supermarket which seeks to appropriate the traditional iconography of the village green in this way. And while Tesco is certainly not the only greedy supermarket out there, it is, as far as I know, the only supermarket which seeks to disguise the familiar process of draining money away from the town centre by subliminally evoking our collective memory of the same world which they’re helping to destroy, and supplanting themselves there as an empty, trashy surrogate.

Micro-Theory 1: Plainsong.

God, you’d think, was born in the minds of man. But something has made me think otherwise. You see, I’ve recently been using a sort of rubbish circular singing (a combination of mantra with cod-Gregorian chant) to help our baby get through his teething pain, and it occurred to me, as I sat there droning away, that our awareness of a spirit or soul may have been conceived out of such verbal play. Making noises like these feels strangely old, and we have surely been making them since we were living in caves. Imagine how different these noises sounded echoing within a cave to how they did on the plain or in the woods. Indeed, the cave is the antecedent of the church: a locus of power which attains to this power by its capacity to echo and reveal the inchoate, inarticulate realm of man’s spirit, his yearning and supplication. Of course, the mouth is a kind of cave too, and it is as a well of echoes that this transformation occurs; that a thought makes the metempsychotic journey from disembodied essence to embodied sound. Perhaps this is how our awareness of a soul evolved: by tracing the physical manifestation of the defining attribute of our humanity, our speech, to its origin.

Micro-Theories: A Definition.

So, here's the deal. A micro-theory should be a single paragraph of text no longer than 250 words, and it should fully articulate an idea, on any subject, with as much eloquence as the spatial limitation allows. And that's it. The challenge is to think inside the box, if you will.