Dali Lama Unleashes Revolutionary New Reincarnation Techniques

[via]

"Deciding that they should be the ones to appoint all future Lamas, in an attempt to gain the upper hand in the mindspace of the people of Tibet in their struggle against them for independence, the Chinese government recently enacted a law giving themselves full authority over all reincarnations.

Well played China. Well played.

But the Dalai Lama knows how to play the game as well.

In response, at the end of 2007, the Dalai Lama proposed to hold a referendum among his millions of followers on whether he should be reincarnated at all, and, if the vote was in favor, to determine his reincarnation while he was still alive. He cited the example of one of his teachers as a precedent for a lama being reincarnated while still alive. But he also indicated that he would not be reborn in China or any other country which is “not free.”

In turn, the Dalai Lama has raised the possibility to forgo his rebirth, or to be reborn while still alive so that he, not China, can choose his successor.

The Dalai Lama has even suggested reincarnating as a woman.

I find it incredibly interesting that the Dalai Lama, a being who’s existence spans at least fourteen lifetimes, is now reincarnating only in free countries in order to stay free of the grasp of the ancient empire which seeks to trap and control him within it’s borders. That is, of course, unless he chooses not to reincarnate at all and instead transcends to a higher dimension.

I certainly hope they aren’t using Dielbolds to count the votes in that referendum, it would be an easy way for the Chinese to finally remove the Dalai Lama from this level of reality (at least for a while).

What’s especially interesting about this strange game of espionage and rebirth is how important it actually is to the future of Tibet, China, and the rest of the world, as well as to the lives of the individuals involved."

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

Place Names as Reality Effect in Joyce's “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”

While it is tempting to read James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" purely in terms of the spiritual and artistic growth of its main character, it is also profitable to look at the way in which Joyce uses details to construct the reality of the world of his novel. In his essay, “The Reality Effect,” Roland Barthes argues that authors include incidental details – details that don’t add to plot, character development, or atmosphere – which indicate the reality of the story in which they are deployed. While Barthes’ argument is primarily applied to Realist authors, the inclusion of seemingly insignificant details in a modern text, such as the use of specific place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” can also produce this ‘reality effect,’ while raising questions as to whether these kinds of detail in Joyce’s novel are actually incidental.

One of the most obvious uses of specific detail in Joyce’s novel is the inclusion of place names in the text. Throughout the book the protagonist Stephen Dedalus goes on numerous walks through Dublin and its environs, where the story is set: “Along the Goatstown road and thence into Dundrum,” or, “from the door of Byron’s publichouse to the gate of Clontarf Chapel” (Joyce, 64 and 128). It is arguable that if the novel focused solely on the apotheosis of Stephen’s character, these specific place names would be incidental to both plot and character. Their inclusion primarily sets the story in a reality – that of the recognizable and historically accurate Ireland – and as such produces Barthes’ ‘reality effect.’

To say that this use of place names is incidental however seems to evade the fact that the novel is essentially a working out of the protagonist’s perspective in relation to the reality in which he exists. That the place names set the novel in a ‘real’ Ireland is not insignificant to the plot, as Stephen is trying to grapple with the nets of Irish “nationality, language, religion” (Joyce, 220). The place names make the references to Parnellian politics, the revival of the Gaelic tongue, and the intricacies of Irish Catholicism more specific and valid for the character. For example, “the name of [Maple’s Hotel]… stung him like a glance of polite disdain. He stared angrily back at the softly lit drawingroom of the hotel in which he imagined the sleek lives of the patricians of Ireland housed in calm” (Joyce, 258). Without these specific locations, it might be easier to read this story as taking place anywhere, but in doing so we would miss the way in which Stephen’s character is driven by his specific culture.

We furthermore see that Stephen has a fascination with language throughout the novel: “We are in Cork, in Ireland. Cork is a city. Our room is in the Victoria Hotel. Victoria and Stephen and Simon. Simon and Stephen and Victoria. Names” (Joyce, 98). It is essential to the protagonist’s development into a writer that he pays attention to names in this way. As he later suggests in his aesthetic theory, “that is beautiful the apprehension of which pleases” (Joyce, 225), and as such, the apprehension of specific place names adds to this artistic aspect of Stephen’s character. He is the kind of character who finds names and language beautiful, or at least worth attending to.

There is another, brief passage that illuminates a third way in which the use of place names in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is intimately related to the character and structure of the story. In an aside, Stephen remarks that his friend Cranly has a “way of remembering thoughts in connection with places” (Joyce, 267). Place names do not just serve as cultural or aesthetic signs, but are also markers for memory and association. As the novel is directly concerned with Stephen’s associations, it is possible to take the inclusion of specific places in the story as a structure on which the events of Stephen’s life are hung.

This connection between location and personal association furthermore suggests an identification between the character and specific places, as when Stephen remarks in his journal: “Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green” (Joyce, 271), identifying himself with the actual Stephen’s Green. From a young boy living in Ireland but feeling culturally separate from it, Stephen is able to identify with his country through specific place names to the extent that he feels “the thoughts and desires of the race to which he belonged flitting like bats, across the dark country lanes” (Joyce, 259). This identification with Ireland, as a real place full of memories and associations, ultimately allows Stephen to both leave the country and begin creating the conscience of his race, a conscience that that is born nowhere but in the specific setting of Ireland. So though Joyce’s use of place names does at some basic level create Barthes’ ‘reality effect,’ this specific kind of detail is crucial to the development of plot and character through the story, and as such is hardly what Barthes might call incidental.

Writing and the Duende (or, the pen is mightier than the keyboard)

Another point of contention I have with many authors of the technological age is their reliance on computers as a tool for writing. Personally I prefer writing by hand, as one can not stop to edit, even with all the scratch marks one is forced to forge ahead, to find a flow that doesn't cease, doesn't break, a voice that seems to well up unstoppable from the depths of the soul or the soil under your feet. As opposed to this I hear many computer writers fret over revising and revising one line for hours as they write, and I suppose one could do the same thing on paper (that is the classic and comic example of the writer's process after all), but the non-linear nature of the word-processing medium is not what I'd call conducive to a constant flow of words.

There is a difference in writing that is created in either of these ways. One can tell words that welled up, strung themselves together, the fast, unstoppable train of consciousness unbound by grammatical rules, the desire to be precise when sometimes the emotional torrent has the greater effect. This is comparable to Garcia Lorca's Theory and Play of the Duende:

"So, then, the duende is a force not a labour, a struggle not a thought. I heard an old maestro of the guitar say: ‘The duende is not in the throat: the duende surges up, inside, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning, it’s not a question of skill, but of a style that’s truly alive: meaning, it’s in the veins: meaning, it’s of the most ancient culture of immediate creation."

While Lorca's excellent (and much recommended) essay focuses primarily on folk music, its premise is applicable to any art: that there is a force behind creation that has to be fought with, channeled, and ultimately allowed to burst forth from the throat, pen, or paintbrush regardless of one's artistic intentions and formal techniques. One struggles to find the right word, the correct phrase to get across a certain meaning, but at times, often, those meanings are not something that can be rationalized into precise thoughts. Instead there is the emotional and almost daemonic chaos of our souls demanding expression in whatever way it can get out, and the use of a medium that does not stand in the way of this process, as computer keyboards do in being discrete and removed from the direct creative process, is imperative in stepping out of one's own way to actually create.

The Unsayable

As a writer, or more generally an artist, something that has become increasingly more important to me is the ability, desire, or perhaps necessity to express the inexpressible, to represent in some form those situations, characters, feelings, or ideas that either defy representation, or are shades of experience that others have not found ways of representing before. Heidegger, I believe, discussed experience or perception as being similar to driving over the surface of the world, that is, one can only or most readily articulate the outermost (or perhaps innermost) layer of reality. I take it for certain that many deep and true things have been said in the past, that language has been used in innumerable ways, that any subject has been discussed, any combination has been to some degree tried out (one only has to turn to Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake” for illustration of that). But I also resent how much schlock and ironic, surface content is thrown around these days, how easy it is to not have the courage to face the unfathomable in one’s self and in the world. A fellow student in my fiction class told me that he once wrote a story putting in a lot of himself and his real feelings and decided that it was so intense that he’d rather not do it again. I fear it’s indicative of our age.

And yet, as far as one can or chooses to push words, music, and visions, it seems that there will always be something more that is left unexpressed; that any art is ultimately a medium, a mediation of a reality that is still immediate and sensorially complete, and more, carrying in every moment associations to memory and imagination, references to culture and history, and gods know what else besides. Emotions, thoughts, sensations, intentions. And even then, if one where able to accurately convey all these modes of perspective, there still remains some ineffable and overwhelming quality, the spirit or life-ness of reality that has not yet come across through any artifice. Though one can come closer, through pushing ones’ perspectives and means of expression. Freud and other psychologists have called this inexpressibleness the ‘uncanny,’ or, by the religious theorist Rudolf Otto, the ‘numinous’. It reveals itself in what is weird, non-rational, fascinating, and terrifying, in the unexpected, unprecedented, and juxtaposed. It is processed in dreams, prayed to in religious rituals, and approached tentatively through an artist’s imagination and vision. Some have called it God but I think that’s just a symbol and it’s something else entirely, something wholly other than the surfaces we say it is.

For a visceral example take the body. For many the body as material is the surface, what it looks like, what’s on it, or the mass, the weight. For those trained to see it otherwise, like doctors, the body is series of elaborate processes, organs, meat, hidden beneath the outward skin. But how often do we have a total lived sense of this (excepting of course moments of illness and malfunction), on an aesthetic or even spiritual level? Or apply it outwards to the rest of the world? One of the most intense and inexpressible moments for me of this sort was not religious or drug-induced, but was the result of seeing the Bodyworlds exhibit several years back: the plasticization of human bodies and organ systems and parts of bodies, all splayed open in exact form, some refracted or expanded to bizarre, inhuman proportions. And yet all still recognizably human, still recognizably my form. One was split down the middle and folded open so that he was standing in two place at once, and I felt my own body trying to physically know what that felt like. I left acutely aware of my every organ, of every living layer within me, and when I walked out into the city and looked around I was just as aware of the insides of every other thing: the trees, machines, animals, building, the air itself even. It was awe-inspiring in such a way that I still don’t know if I’ve gotten it across.

Or on the other hand there are the psychological approaches toward memory and emotion, therapy or artistic transmutation. You could spend a lifetime tracing out the symbols and associations of your individual psyche, and still there might be some part of what makes you tick that you can’t quite lay your finger on. Or perhaps you begin to recognize feelings that you’ve never felt before and can’t yet explain. I am currently working on a story which the character goes through a transformation of a wide spectrum of emotions, and in doing so I am forced to similarly process my own emotions towards an emotional perspective that I know I’ve never felt before and certainly don’t yet know how to express. Several of my friends and classmates have asked why I am writing this piece if it is such an intense and inexplicable process, to which my response has invariably been that this is why I am writing: to experience something that hasn’t been experienced or expressed before in order to offer it up to others and the world.

Snowy Day Update

I realize I haven't been posting here in a while, not once all October! School's been rather consuming this semester, as has my writing (not just the storytelling but notes on aesthetic and spiritual systems and the use of fiction as a tool for processing the emotions, but more on that later perhaps), and as always my personal life seems to take more precedence. It also doesn't help that I no longer have home internet access, though I find I'm now getting more done with myself, which is a blessing. Except for when I pick up a stray wireless signal.

Anyway here are some links for your perusal:

The life and work of James Joyce explained
The life and work of Joseph Campbell
Big Dreams and Archetypal Visions
The Future of Science Fiction
Obama on Faith

"I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people. That there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and there's an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived." - Barack Obama

Stealing Your Library

OCLC, owners of WorldCat, are getting greedy. It's now demanding that every library that uses WorldCat give control over all its catalog records to OCLC. It literally is asking libraries to put an OCLC policy notice on every book record in their catalog. It wants to own every library. It's not just Open Library that's at risk here -- LibraryThing, Zotero, even some new Wikipedia features being developed are threatened. Basically anything that uses information about books is going to be a victim of this unprecedented power[ ]grab. It's a scary thought.

Open Library provides a free alternative to WorldCat, provided it doesn't get sued into oblivion.

[via metafilter]

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville

Dystopian Symbols and Counter-Symbols in V for Vendetta and Alphaville

In “Our Future – Our Past: Fascism, Postmodernism, and Starship Troopers,” Florentine Strzelczyk argues that Hollywood is fascinated with the aesthetic of fascism, especially that of Nazi Germany. Filmmakers use fascist-styled uniforms, symbols, and other elements of mise-en-scène in order to create recognizable dystopian societies – science fiction fascisms. It is interesting to note however that the Nazi Party’s primary symbol, the swastika, was already a recontextualization of an ancient Indo-European sun symbol, through which they were able to express their own dystopic aspirations for the future. The films “V for Vendetta” and “Alphaville” both present dystopian societies that recontextualize familiar symbols through their mise-en-scènes in order to represent the content and style of their particular fascistic worlds, as well as the counter-revolutions to those worlds.

James McTeigue’s 2006 film, “V for Vendetta,” depicts the Norsefire party, a religiously conservative dictatorship that has taken over England in the year 2038. Beyond their Nazi-esque uniforms and Orwellian surveillance and slogans, the Norsefire Party’s primary symbol is a doubled cross, shown in red on a black background. This symbol was originally the Cross of Lorraine, used by the French to counter the Nazi swastika during World War II. In the film this symbol also perverts St. George’s Cross, a single-armed red cross on a white background that historically served as the flag of England and the Church of England, as well as distorts the more familiar Christian cross. The Norsefire party has practiced Nazi (and Christian)-style religious discrimination against Muslims, Jews, and racial and sexual minorities in order to achieve power, and in the movie’s opening newscast the Voice of the Party argues that England prevails because of its faith in a judgmental God watching over the country.

The Norsefire Party’s doubled cross appears many places in “V for Vendetta,” on the Party posters, on the fingermen’s badges, and in news clips, suggesting the ubiquity of the regime. The symbol most predominately appears though along side the massive view screen on which is projected Chancellor Sutler’s face. As the leader of the fascist party, Sutler’s video appearance next to these monstrous doubled crosses suggests that he himself is the removed and ever-watchful God of England, or at least an omnipresent figure reminiscent of Big Brother in George Orwell’s dystopian “1984.” While it is implied that the crosses are always next to the Chancellor’s view screen, we only see them in specific shots, such as when Sutler demands the falsification of news or a desire to speak “directly” to the people. What is made clear about the symbol’s appearance is that it seems to occur only whenever the government is telling blatant lies. The Norsefire Party’s favorite political technique is double crossing the English people, and the symbol of the doubled cross directly illustrates this each time it is depicted on camera. Even during the art-terrorist V’s newscast early in the film, the doubled cross is shown next to him when he suggests that the people let themselves be tricked by the war, terror, and disease orchestrated by their government.

As opposed to the Norsefire Party’s doubled cross, V employs his own counter symbol, a circled letter V. V’s V does not directly reference or distort the government’s symbol, it is instead a depiction of his historical reasons for vengeance; V was held in room five (the Latin numeral V) of the Larkhill detention center where he was horribly burned and many minorities were killed by the government. This symbol however is displayed in the film in the same red on black as the doubled cross: in V’s newscast, slashed or painted over the Party posters, and even in fireworks over the exploding Bailey and Parliament buildings. Aesthetically, the image of red spray-painted lines over the posters most directly references the pop-culture image of the anarchist symbol, a red, circled letter A. V’s revolution depends exactly on the kind of people-driven chaos discussed in anarchist theories and misrepresented by current popular media. In “V for Vendetta” it is a young girl shot for spray painting V’s symbol that pushes the English people over the edge towards anarchistic rebellion.

While V’s symbol appears all throughout the film, he also employs the V on a linguistic level, taking it out of the level of mise-en-scène. In his opening speech to Evey, V sums up his own political theory using fifty words beginning with the letter V. We also later see that V’s motto is the Latin phrase from Faust, “Vi Veri Verdiversum Vivus Vici,” by the power of truth, I, while living, have conquered the Universe. In his newscast, V tells the people of England that words will always maintain their power as an annunciation of truth, and his speeches clearly illustrate this power of language. Unlike the Norsefire Party, V understands that a symbol (like the act of blowing up a building) is by itself meaningless, and must be given an actual voice by actual people in order to have a real affect on the world.

The dystopian symbols and counter-symbols in “V for Vendetta” are clearly depicted, but such is not the case in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film, “Alphaville.” The dystopic government in this movie is a technocracy run by the scientific-logical computer Alpha 60. While Alpha 60 does not employ a direct or ubiquitous symbol like the Norsefire Party’s doubled cross, a set of scientific symbols occurs that can represent the regime: Einstein’s famous formula for mass-energy equivalence, E = mc2, and Planck’s equation for the quantization of light energy, E = hf. Historically, Einstein’s equation stood as a revolution in physics, unifying specific conservation laws of mass and energy into a larger theory under the specific speed of light, though the formula is also linked popularly with ideas of scientific destruction through its use in the creation of the atomic bomb. “Alphaville” plays on this idea that light energy is a logical, destructive power, as, according to Professor Von Braun, the creator of Alphaville, they are entering a Light Civilization attempting to take over the universe.

Planck’s equation states that the energy of light is carried in discrete amounts in relation to its frequency; light is quantized, or, in popular terms, it is digital rather than containing a continuous spectrum of possibilities. In “Alphaville,” the computer Alpha 60 is described by the agent Henry as being 150 light years more powerful than any previous computer, a discrete number he returns to later in his tale about ant societies. This dystopic society similarly operates under the idea that certain words have certain, discrete meanings: any uncertain words are removed from the Bible-dictionary and replaced by more specific ones. Language, like light, has become quantized, and is used as an element of control, much as it is in “V for Vendetta.” This use of scientific equations as fascist symbols in “Alphaville” echoes the head programmer’s statement to agent Lemmy Caution that an order is a logical conclusion; the logic of science cannot be disobeyed.

The biggest challenge in interpreting these scientific formulas as dystopian symbols in “Alphaville,” and in determining the appropriate counter-symbols, is that they only appear in two specific scenes, in brief flashes during moments when Lemmy Caution is figuring out how to counter Alpha 60’s control. In the first of these scenes, Lemmy has just learned from Henry about the computer, and directly following the symbols he says that people have become slaves of probability, statistics and equations being science’s way of controlling people’s perception of what is possible in reality. Henry goes on to tell a story however about a similarly technocratic ant society that 150 light years ago had artists like those in Alphaville, and then the equations flash again, remixed into the statement hf=mc2. Several things are happening here: the equivalence of E in the two formulas could imply that the particle scale of hf, or of the ants in Henry’s story, is the same as the galactic scale of mc2, that Alpha 60 is not only killing artists in Alphaville but would do the same throughout the universe.

Secondly, there is the suggestion that artists offer an alternative to scientific-logical control of how people perceive the world. Throughout the scene and film both of the agents reference popular and artistic culture in their dialogues: comic book detectives of the time; women from French literature; and after being given the poetry book of Éluard, Lemmy says that he is going on a “journey to the end of the night,” a reference to another French novel of the same name that apparently satirizes scientific research. We see the same thing in “V for Vendetta,” where V (and other outlaws like Gordon) attempts to keep human culture alive through collecting censored cultural artifacts and referencing them in dialogue that contrasts with the fascist regime.

During the Institute of General Semantics scene of “Alphaville,” Alpha 60 says that life and death are discreet events on the circle of time. This is echoed later when the scientific equations are flashed again, while Lemmy is being shown a tour of the computer. At this point the symbols flash slower, from left to right, while the computer says that Lemmy thinks more of the past than the future, and then again while Lemmy remarks that he is too old, and that shooting first is his only weapon against fatality. This differentiation between kinds or perspectives of time echoes the earlier symbol scene, most importantly the instant when Lemmy questions the specific 150 light year time frame of Henry’s story and then sets the bare light bulb swinging. This moment suggests that instead of the discrete, logical quantities of energy or power utilized by Alpha 60 through the E=hf equation, light, and life itself, exist in a continuous spectrum that can be accessed through the illogic and uncertainty of art. The past, with its implied reference to artifacts of human culture, can become a weapon against the cultureless dystopian future envisioned by the machine. Most precisely, or creatively, Lemmy uses the culturally subjective meanings of poetic words – symbols without the fixed meanings of scientific equations – to destroy the computer and its fascist society.

There is thus no clear counter-symbol that Lemmy uses in “Alphaville;” poetry is not an emblem to be flashed quickly on a screen or be represented as a direct element of mise-en-scène. Even when we are shown the supposed copy of Éluard’s “The Capital of Pain,” the camera has to slowly pan over the text in order to give the viewer time to interpret the meaning of the words, much the way that Alpha 60 destroys itself slowly by searching for the answer to Lemmy’s poetic riddle. But, as we saw in “V for Vendetta,” it is not V’s fast, iconic V symbol that changes his world either. It is instead the meanings given to symbols and words by people themselves over culturally continuous times (or despite culturally-destroying times) that make symbols powerful, and ultimately keep us free.