Spring Cleaning

I generally dislike posting only links, but right now all my original content is wrapped up in school and in other creative pursuits. Thankfully the end of the semester is soon, and I'll have more time to write some of the curious pieces that have been floating around my head this last month or so. But until then...

Army's New PTSD Treatments: Yoga, Reiki, 'Bioenergy' [via Boingboing]
Where angels no longer fear to tread: science's search for God [via The Daily Grail]
An upcoming lecture at the University of Pittsburgh on ritual and the spectator
The continued battle between atheism and magic and between science and religion
The mythology of eucatastrophe (that sudden turn of events at the end of a story which result in the protagonist’s well-being )
Living Monsters and dead ones from the deep
D&D Character Alignment as a child's introduction to moral philosophy [via Technoccult]
The Fantastic in art and fiction[via Technoccult]
The Art of mazes
R Crumb's 'The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick'
Myth and Science Fiction [via Technoccult]
Art made from Books



And lastly, this video of Korean Shamans from youtube, in order to encourage me to finish writing my paper on the subject for class :

Radicals in Space

"I may agree with Shelley that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but he didn't mean they really get many laws enacted, and I guess I didn't ever really look for definable, practical results of anything I wrote. My utopias are not blueprints. In fact, I distrust utopias that pretend to be blueprints. Fiction is not a good medium for preaching or for planning. It is really good, though, for what we used to call conscious-raising."
-Ursula K. LeGuin, on anarchy and writing, interviewed by the Infoshop News

This is a pretty wonderful statement, considering that one of her utopias was the novel "The Dispossessed," in which the anarchists are given the moon. Though this may not be such a feasible blueprint, it certainly raised my consciousness up above earthly concerns when I was a young anarchist.

While we are on the topic of interviews and the radicalizing of space, here is the final interview with Arthur C. Clarke before his death, in which it is revealed that he probably didn't get his last wish, which was for aliens to finally reveal themselves on earth. But certainly he did his part to make Earth a much more welcoming place for them.

The Death of the Future

Earlier today I was thinking about a short story I've been working on, in which a robotics engineer who has reached the edge of his career decides to create a magical golem. There's actually a lot more going on that I won't get into, but the important thing is that I considered having the character muse on the quote: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." The originator of this quote, and another great gem, "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," the science fiction guru Arthur C. Clarke, died today at 90 [via technoccult]. I had never really considered Clarke to be one of my bigger inspirations, though I can still vividly recall the awe I felt watching this scene from Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" when I was a child:



and the wonder I felt when I finally read Clarke's original novel, as well as his "Rama" series. Unlike the many of these twenty sci-fi novels that will change your life that actually changed my own life, I had never considered "2001" such a world-shaker. And yet... Clarke's philosophical perspective of the near identical nature of technology and magic certainly stuck with me, and perhaps with countless others who went on the take both science fiction, and real science, from the magic of dreams to the technology of reality. In honor of the passing of one of the world's great visionaries, I will go downstairs and grab the nearest sci-fi anthology from my bookshelf.

[EDIT: I hadn't read this one before, but "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke is perhaps one of the most brilliant sci-fi short stories ever written, about Tibetan monks using a computer to print out a copy of all the names of God.]

On Being Green: St. Paddy's Day and the Degradation of Irish Culture

One year ago I found myself in one of the city's most active bar districts on Saint Patrick's Day, and was quite disgusted to see so many drunk college kids wandering around in large green lucky charms hats and shamrock beaded necklaces like it was Mardi Gras in the Emerald City. It is somewhat disheartening to think of how commercialized modern holidays have become, what I call the trinketization of celebration; there isn't one major American holiday where you can't find enormous amounts of junk decorations for sale, as if that was the only way to show one's enthusiasm for whatever given time of year, and Saint Patrick's Day certainly falls under that kitschy subset. Of course, and especially in an alcoholic town like Pittsburgh, that might be rephrased as drinketization, for Saint Patrick's Day is perhaps even more infamous for its green food-colored toll on people's livers. Certainly there is the notion that drinking is a national pastime for the Irish, but this may be due to the extreme cultural deprivations that Ireland has suffered throughout its history.



As this Cracked.com article points out, the fabled luck of the Irish may indeed be only a fable. The Irish have been routinely trounced by the vikings, British, and famine, and they have a running tally of all the political saviors who have unfortuitously died before liberating the country. Perhaps the greatest irony is Saint Patrick's Day itself. A British Roman Catholic missionary, Saint Patrick was kidnapped by Irish pirates at a young age and later returned to convert the Irish to Catholicism, perhaps as an effort at revenge. Those snakes he drove out of Ireland in legend? Those were the celtic druids and the traditional Irish culture and religion. There seems to be something highly dubious in celebrating Irish culture by those who are not Irish themselves worshipping the first person to prominently suppress it, through an excess of hangovers. If one wants to actually pay homage to Irish culture, they should probably read James Joyce's "Dubliners," which paints a fairly depressing portrait of the cultural decline suffered in Ireland at the turn of the last century. Or better yet, go visit Ireland itself and actively support their culture. When I was over there several years ago many people were bitterly complaining about how the switch to the new EU monetary system had all but wrecked their economy. I'm sure that buying a shamrock necklace that was probably made in China helps.

As someone who is actually proud of my Irish heritage, I want nothing to do with this holiday, and the closest I've come to celebrating Irish culture is in immersing myself in Beckett's fiction. Like Joyce, Beckett was an Irish native by birth who expatriated in order to help the older writer edit "Finnegan's Wake." Forsaking what Joyce has mainly described as the provincial perspective of their homeland, Beckett lived in Paris, writing his stories first in French and then translating them into English in order to avoid any Irish or English colloquialisms. Of course, unlike Joyce who still wanted to describe his native land, Beckett seems much more content to avoid describing any reality altogether, which itself is not an un-Irish pastime, as much of the Irish mythology collected by Lady Gregory and Yeats describe heroes who almost always want to get off of the island or out of their everyday lives.

Psychogeography and You

As I had mentioned in my brief raving about Beckett the other day, I am fascinated by psychogeography, that peculiar relationship between people and the spaces they inhabit. Currently I am interested in the way that fictive narratives can use setting as a reflection of a character's consciousness, but admittedly this concept only grabbed me from seeing it play out night after night in my dreams. I'm not sure what particular dream theory this falls under, but I've noticed that the locations that appear in dreams often are more expressive of my moods and psychic phenomena than they are of real places. Even real places in my dreams take on a greater significance, and it may even be possible that this same phenomena happens when we are awake.

I found a great link [via the Dream Studies Portal] to a woman charting the urban dreamscape of her life in San Francisco. While San Fran is already a dream-laden city, due to the somewhat surreal events of the '60s that still linger in the collective unconscious, it is interesting to see someone taking the psychogeographical approach and actually mapping out specific dreams onto locations in the city. There is a great article on the front page about the practice of psychogeography, what it means, how it works, and its historical roots in the Dérive of the Situationists (long aimless walks being another fascination of mine). Great food for thought for anyone who is curious about how we invest our environments with meaning.

Perhaps one of the most in depth looks at our emotional involvement in locality is Gaston Bachelard's "The Poetics of Space," which draws on Bachelard's phenomenological ideas of reverie and the imagination to suggest the intimate way our thoughts, memories, and emotions, are wrapped up in our lived experience of intimate spaces such as closets, stairwells, and seashells, though of course the same could apply to cities, landscapes, and other environments at large.

postmodern religion

Everyone remembers, or tries to remember, the original seven deadly mortal sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed, sloth. Apparently these sins no longer cut it, for the Vatican has just released a list of the new seven sins for modern times. Pope Benedict XVI decided that the original sins were too individualistic, and wanted to create a list that would be more reflective of our socially-intertwined, global age.

The new sins are: 'bioethical' violations such as birth control, 'morally dubious' experiments such as stem cell research and genetic manipulation, drug abuse, polluting the environment, contributing to widening the divide between rich and poor, excessive wealth, and creating poverty. While some of these may try to hamper science and human safety, others suggest a clear understanding of the actual problems that are facing our world right now. Of course, that means that everyone running the industries and politics of the US are probably going to burn in hell, which for many probably does not come as such a big surprise.

In other religious news, a group called The Church of Google is claiming that the most popular Internet search engine site, Google.com, is extensive and far-reaching enough that it may be compared to the traditional view of “God” as an omniscient and infinite being. Their basic argument is that Google exhibits many of the qualities we look for in our gods, yet Google's existence is immediately and easily provable. [via Reality Sandwich] According to the highly humorous Google Commandments, "thou shalt honor thy fellow humans, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or race, for each has invaluable experience and knowledge to contribute toward humankind," which seems to be one of the clearest statements about the need for human undertanding in our global age.

Of Books

This is a couple days old, but it seemed an interesting footnote to the whole question of Krystian Bala's murder-in-a-novel. It turns out he's not the first to fictionalize a real killing.

Published for the first time, 60 years after it was written, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs' "And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks," turns out to be an account of a murder committed by a friend of the writers who confessed to them and asked for their help to escape the law. Both Kerouac and Burroughs were arrested for it.

In other (somewhat unrelated) words, I think I may have discovered a new favorite author: Samuel Beckett. Though his play "Waiting for Godot" is now a classic, I am surprised no one has shoved one of his books into my hands before now. I had to read his short story "The Calmative" for class, and was shocked at what seems to me the most convincing narrative portrayal of dreaming. Though the character himself seems to question, and disregard, that possibility, the entire story shifts from one hazy locale to another, with a slew of significant and ghostly characters and symbols wandering through the night. Something that immediately struck me, and was confirmed through an evening of academic research, is that Beckett might employ what I consider an example of pyschogeography: the use of locations that are reflective of the narrator's consciousness more than being real places, much the way that the odd corridors and towers of dreams seem to be landscape of the internal workings of the mind.

Take this Brain and Eat it, for it is My Brain

Last night I dreamt that my family and I were wandering through a church filled with zombies, who followed us back to our Christmas-decorated home after we had stolen a set of bronze candlesticks from them. This is not the first time that I've dreamt of the coincidence of cathedrals and the undead, and there are certain reliquaries in the city that I prefer not to go into for fear that modern day Lazari will leap out and grab me like they did last time. It certainly gives a whole new meaning to the Resurrection. What was new about this dream however, was realizing that this conjunction of images really does go back to my childhood Catholicism. Usually in my dreams zombies represent not the undead but the not quite living, that is, masses of humanity blindly following their rote roles and expected behaviors. In this sense, the church of the zombies might be better appreciated by Marx, who said that religion was the opiate of the masses. As a child, watching the lines of people slowly walking up the aisle to have the host placed in their mouth always felt like a scene out of the twilight zone, and though I probably didn't wonder it as clearly at the time, mass always struck me as being a rather socially-enforced action.

Of course, my dream also might extend from having just finished reading José Saramago's "The Gospel According to Jesus Christ," which is a masterfully told retelling of the Jesus mythology from Jesus's point of view, complete with the psychological upheaval of his inherited dreams and uncertainty whether he should really trust God's plan for him. In one of the most wonderful moments of the book, before accepting his fate, Jesus asks God to tell him the future that will occur because of his crucifixion, and then for the next handful of pages God lists every single person martyred in Christ's name, each torture, Crusade, and Inquisition, until the Devil, who is also part of their conversation, begs to be allowed to repent so that none of this bloodshed has to happen. Which of course, it does, but the reader is left with a sense that good and evil are rather more intertwined than we usually think, and often somewhat indistinguishable from each other. But while Saramago's Jesus realizes that overturning the the temples and raising the dead might be morally reprehensible acts, others want to cast Christ as a samurai stranger who fights killer robots in various Manga Bibles. Personally I am waiting for an adventure movie based on the return of the Last or Hidden Imam, al-Mahdi, who in some Shi'ite prophecies teams up with Isa (Jesus Christ) to fight evil throughout the world like superhuman action heroes.