In my religious studies class on Wisdom we have been reading Plato's dialogues, and were asked to write a dialogue in that style on whether or not we thought Socrates was actually wise (meaning of course that we had to actually state what we though wisdom is, something Socrates was loathe to do). I'm posting the results as part of my ongoing inquiry into human value(s). Interestingly, my take that wisdom should be some sort of heuristic or useful way of determining how to live in the world seems to be answered in our next class reading, Aristotle's "Nichomachean Ethics."
The Sophia
SOPHIA: My dear, thank you for being able to meet with me, I know that you have a lot of work to do this weekend.
TAIT: It is my pleasure. If I can I will always be available to you, and besides, it is a wonderful day out along the river, and I desperately needed a break from my writing. Now what was it you wanted to discuss?
SOPHIA: Wisdom, of which I always have so many questions, and as you know am in sore need of these days.
TAIT: I agree with that for my own sake. Did you not read Plato’s Five Dialogues that I lent to you? Did you not find Socrates to be wise?
SOPHIA: Well, they say Socrates is the wisest man there was, at least in the Western tradition, but I had a hard time understanding just what he thought wisdom is.
TAIT: How so?
SOPHIA: Well he talks in circles, always confounding any clear point he might make by loosing me in a labyrinth of language, and then when each dialogue is over he rushes off without giving any clear answer to what he’s getting at, like when discussing piety or virtue. It seems disingenuous; the wise should at least be able to make a clear statement of what that means, so that others might understand, if not follow them.
TAIT: I agree with you, wisdom should be articulable if anything is, but perhaps Socrates doesn’t know what wisdom is enough to state it clearly? As he admits in his Apology, he alone knows that he does not know anything, and perhaps this makes him wiser than others who do think they know.
SOPHIA: Perhaps, but if this is wisdom, he is not using it to help others become more wise. As he states, his project is to prove if others are wiser than him or not, and finds them all lacking. It seems that if we were to listen to him we would all become confused fools unable to even say that we know our own names!
TAIT: That would be tragic if it was true! He also says in Phaedo that his purpose is that others may agree with him, which I’m not sure whether to take seriously either. One clear point I do agree with is that the unexamined life is not worth living, and clearly he wants us to examine our lives on this subject, and by throwing out what we think we know perhaps we can come to a better understanding of what we don’t. I think he says some things about wisdom that it would be hard not to agree with as well.
SOPHIA: Such as?
TAIT: Let us spell them out directly, as you and I are both inimical to Socrates’ circular arguments, and perhaps we can make some sense of this subject. Reading through the dialogues, Socrates variously states that wisdom relates to the following: deciding what is right or doing and believing in what is right, piety or duty to obligations and agreements, justice, a preference for the truth, not prejudging knowledge, striving for such positive abstractions as Beauty or Goodness, courage or not fearing death, obeying the state or one’s superiors, caring for one’s virtue or excellence of the soul over the body or material concerns, examining our lives, finding what is right in oneself rather than in popular opinion, not doing wrong when others wrong you, moderation, directing our actions towards goodness, a true opinion from the gods (or from dreams and omens), a rejection of the body to prepare us for death, a cleansing or purification of the soul, following reason and truth rather than the senses, and a harmony of the soul.
SOPHIA: Well, that is indeed a motley list, what are we to do with it? Surely these are not all different kinds of wisdom?
TAIT: Hardly. Socrates likes to point out that we should not seek the particulars but the generalized Forms behind them (though that might only be Plato putting words in the wise man’s mouth; I’m not convinced these Forms aren’t some abstraction we have made up). But as such these would all be aspects of wisdom.
SOPHIA: And wisdom would be something that contains or expresses them all?
TAIT: Assuming they are all necessary for wisdom. There are perhaps a few I am not sure are so wise, namely where he equates wisdom with servitude, being death-driven, and god-granted. But first let’s get at the Form before throwing out the particulars, otherwise how would we have a definition or standard by which to judge the parts?
SOPHIA: That seems like a sound approach. What do they suggest?
TAIT: Let’s see… it seems that Socrates is suggesting that wisdom is a kind of thing that allows humans to direct their actions towards good or true ways of being in the world in order to prepare their souls for death. Does that sound correct?
SOPHIA: For now let us say wisdom is that. But what kind of thing is wisdom that it allows us to do this? Surely it is not a virtue itself like courage or justice, for as we said those are parts of wisdom, which wisdom helps us direct ourselves toward or with.
TAIT: Socrates does not say. Personally I am inclined to say that in our definition wisdom is a heuristic, a method or strategy for thinking or deciding our actions in an optimal manner.
SOPHIA: Ah! So that those who have wisdom have a method of living more virtuously than those who do not. That would be nice to have. How could I find such a way of directing myself?
TAIT: Socrates does not say that either. In fact, he is inclined to believe that we cannot learn wisdom at all, only recollect it from an earlier life, like virtue in Meno, or find it in ourselves as a true opinion granted by the gods.
SOPHIA: But if that is the case, how is it possible for some people to be wise and others not?
TAIT: Perhaps we are to think that some people do not recollect as well as others, or do not listen to the opinions of the gods as clearly. Others may not even believe in the gods, but that doesn’t seem to mean that they cannot also be wise, or that wisdom should not also be for the forgetful. These are the ones who might need wisdom the most!
SOPHIA: And surely Socrates would want them to have it, even if, as an Athenian, he was privileged with a certain kind of education and lifestyle that allowed him to go around questioning everyone else’s assumptions. He does seem concerned with people in general.
TAIT: He does, but doesn’t say much about them when discussing wisdom. Perhaps then our definition of wisdom is not wide enough, and other attributes are necessary for wisdom to be clearly stated. – Such as?
TAIT: Well, from what we just discussed, it seems that wisdom must necessarily be teachable, to anyone. Perhaps more specifically, this means to me that wisdom must be both practical and practicable, for without clear and direct methods or guides for directing our actions toward rightness or goodness, how are we to know if we are doing the correct thing? This is particularly the case in today’s world, which as we know is often very confusing. It is difficult to tell what is right, and often times we have to make choices between doing what we need to in order to survive and doing things in a virtuous manner. I know that sometimes going to work feels like it is not a right action, especially when it adds to the total amount of material consumption in the world, which I for one do not find virtuous. Yet I have to work in order to live. Whatever wisdom is, it should be practical enough to allow us to know what is the right way to act in morally ambiguous or paradoxical circumstances, not only directing us towards virtues in the abstract but also establishing them as a practice in our everyday lives.
SOPHIA: Yes, I hadn’t thought of that, but it is true. Do I drive my car to see my mother, or not see my mother because driving is bad for the environment? Socrates seems sure that the right action is generally a pretty clear thing, given by the gods, and now it is not the case at all!
TAIT: And it gets more complicated than that, I’m afraid. As we said before, wisdom should also be for those for whom it is hard to come by. I would go further to say that wisdom should be for everybody, in any place or time, regardless of upbringing or cultural values. For though Socrates’ wisdom is most clearly applicable to the society of ancient Greece, it would only be a part of the Form of wisdom if it were not also applicable to any situation in which it is beneficial to act with rightness, goodness, or truth.
SOPHIA: That does follow, and it would indeed be a great wisdom if all people could follow or practice it. But you said this was complicated?
TAIT: Yes, unfortunately. The thing Socrates neglects, perhaps in thinking of his particular culture as the apex of civilization, is that not everyone in all places and times has the same perspective on what is right, good, beautiful, or true. Even we in one place and time don’t know what is always right, and people raised under vastly different circumstances may come at what is right from entirely different directions. Consider beauty as an example. Though there is a Form of the Beautiful, particular things we encounter may be beautiful to one person but not to another, or, depending on our moods or experiences may appear variably beautiful to us or not. The other virtues are no different in being thus subjective. Certainly Socrates in Phaedo warns against finding arguments true at one time and not true at another, but what I consider true, and even feel to the depths of my soul to be true, may not seem at all that way to you, otherwise everyone would always be in agreement, and that is clearly not the case. Perhaps then there are greater truths that everyone could agree on, or greater rightnesses and beauties, and maybe wisdom could lead all people toward these specific, perfect forms.
SOPHIA: But that would be boring.
TAIT: It would indeed. Perhaps wisdom then necessarily has to embrace and respect a multiplicity and diversity of perspectives as to what the aims and means of wisdom are. Instead of believing that your truth is the best truth, it would be wiser to compare it with someone else’s truth and perhaps find a larger perspective in which they are both true. If there is any way of really knowing these Forms, it is through that aspect of wisdom. At the very least it would ease many of the tensions and arguments between people, who fight for not seeing eye to eye and from holding their own truths as absolutely true. As we said, wisdom must direct us to living right in the world, and peaceful resolution of conflicts along with human understanding seem to be right, if we can say anything is. Socrates suggests wisdom is a harmony of the soul, and I would say that when we say rightness or right action, it means being in such harmony or balance, with ourselves, with other people, and with the environment of our world.
SOPHIA: So then, wisdom must be a practical, teachable, and multiple-perspective embracing method of directing our actions towards good or true, that is, harmonious, ways of being in the world? That seems a fairly clear and useful definition.
TAIT: Yes, though you forgot that we also posited from Socrates’ statements that wisdom is not for the living, but to prepare us for death. In fact, Socrates makes clear he does not think it possible to really gain knowledge of wisdom until after we are dead.
SOPHIA: But that is preposterous. Why would we need wisdom after we are dead? How can that help us now, when we most need it?
TAIT: Well, Socrates believed that we are reborn, and can recall that wisdom in our lifetimes, but it seems an assumption to state these as if they are known, true things, when clearly, and even reasonably, we can not know anything while alive about what it is like to not be alive, regardless of what you, or Socrates, wants it to be like. And yet there is still this thing called wisdom, and there is still the need for us to live in harmonious ways while actually living. If it were only for death, why shouldn’t we just kill ourselves, or, like the Christians, do terrible things while alive knowing that what really counts is the afterlife? Certainly it seems wise not to fear death, and to prepare ourselves to meet it gracefully, but it seems even wiser not to fear life, with all its contradictions and material impulses. Any wisdom that I would truly call wisdom must necessarily be directed at directing our actions in this world, for it is only in this world, while alive, regardless of if there is an afterlife or rebirth, that our actions have effects and can achieve a greater harmony, not only in ourselves or in our time, but for all peoples and times to come.
SOPHIA: Amen. Wisdom then must not be some abstract philosophical pursuit, but a real lived concern with real results in this world.
TAIT: If it were not, would people still be discussing Socrates?
SOPHIA: Academics do love abstractions though… but wait; you had another disagreement with Socrates’ specific descriptions of wisdom, something about obedience or servitude not being wise.
TAIT: Yes, thank you for reminding me. I do disagree, not that obedience is necessarily bad, sometimes other people who hold authority over us do have better or more wise ways of doing things than we do, and contrariness for its own sake often achieves little (though I, like Socrates, seem to find some pleasure in questioning everything). My problem is that Socrates seems to suggest that one must always obey, in particular the State, and must continue to obey even if those in authority do something wrong to us or others. Socrates reasons that we have made an agreement and must follow it, but I say, those in authority have also made agreements that they must follow without doing us wrong, and if they did not make such agreements, why are we obeying them? Socrates suggests that if the state does wrong then we can try to convince them to do otherwise, but as we see with individuals who do wrong, they are not prone to listening to wise advice. And where does that leave us, except with that paradoxical choice to do the more right thing, either continuing to serve or rejecting servitude. Neither is wiser and both may be necessary. But the deeper issue is, can any situation where one person or group holds power or authority over another, especially through the threat of violence, ever result in the kind of harmony of the world that we have stated wisdom is directed towards?
SOPHIA: I… don’t know.
TAIT: I don’t either, but it’s not like history has given us that many opportunities to find out. The world is still a violent and disrespectful place, even if pierced by moments of levity. But it seems that if our definition of wisdom includes a respect for a multiplicity of perspectives, this must hold also true across divisions of power. Perhaps a wiser world would not have such divisions, or, when they are necessary, would not place the greater value on those with the greater power and might.
SOPHIA: But what if those with power know best what to do? And if they don’t, who else will teach us? Can we decide for ourselves how to act harmoniously or learn some other way? I feel we’ve created circles around this without even meaning to!
TAIT: Yes, wisdom is not so clear, nor is life. But that is why we must strive for it. I will try to answer by refuting another of Socrates’ points, and hopefully end it at that. In Phaedo, Socrates suggests that wise men cannot look after themselves when free, that their wisdom is god-given in this prison called life, which is to say that they have placed the higher authority, and the burden of making responsible choices, on some force that no one can see and may or may not actually exist. The only agreements made by the gods were in the stories we made up about them, and you would have to look very far to find a deity who was truly wise and harmonious in the world. – But…
TAIT: Yes, I know you believe there may be some higher force than the gods that is truly wise and in such harmony, but such a thing is beyond our immediate kin and rationalities, and any entreaties we make toward it are perhaps only a reflection of our own inner sense of the harmony of the world, which when projected outwards becomes more clear to us. I do not know, but don’t think we even need to posit such a thing, as reassuring as it may feel, in order to live wisely. If we can not turn to the gods, or other wiser men for knowledge of wisdom, then what do we have to turn to but ourselves, that is, our experiences, which when we allow ourselves to perceive, understand, and believe in, seeking always to balance them against our senses of harmony, do seem to grant us better ways of living in the world. That being the case, those most free to experience the world would by necessity be the wisest. That is what I strive for, though admittedly, I have experienced relatively little of what the world has to offer.
SOPHIA: I like the sound of it though. It feels true, or harmonious if you want to put it that way. And what we need then may not just be more of our own experiences, but other people’s experiences, a community of experiencers, sharing our different understandings and harmonies, which can add up, like our conversation here, into some greater sense of wisdom for the whole world! – I like that very much, and hope we may find such a community one day soon.
SOPHIA: But where? Who else here will listen to these wise words?
9.26.2009
Mythos vs. Logos
Here is an interesting article titled Man vs. God, pitting religious thinker Karen Armstrong against noted atheist Richard Dawkins on the evolutionary role of God. Armstrong points out something rather important, that literal belief in God only dates back to the 17th century, and stresses the distinction between rational logos and narrative mythos as serving very different purposes in human development and culture:
Our challenge is that the mythic way of viewing the world has been almost entirely forgotten in the contemporary Western world. As I've been trying to articulate recently, science can not tell you what love feels like, hearing of Orpheus's descent into the underworld after Eurydice does. Or, science taught J. Oppenheimer how to build the atomic bomb, but only the Bhagavad Gita gave him the words to express how unleashing that much power feels. At this point in our collective evolution, it is I believe necessary to learn to re-express the world through both of these perspectives, though as of yet we are far from seeing how that worldview might look, or feel like.
Most cultures believed that there were two recognized ways of arriving at truth. The Greeks called them mythos and logos. Both were essential and neither was superior to the other; they were not in conflict but complementary, each with its own sphere of competence. Logos ("reason") was the pragmatic mode of thought that enabled us to function effectively in the world and had, therefore, to correspond accurately to external reality. But it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life's struggle. For that people turned to mythos, stories that made no pretensions to historical accuracy but should rather be seen as an early form of psychology; if translated into ritual or ethical action, a good myth showed you how to cope with mortality, discover an inner source of strength, and endure pain and sorrow with serenity.
Our challenge is that the mythic way of viewing the world has been almost entirely forgotten in the contemporary Western world. As I've been trying to articulate recently, science can not tell you what love feels like, hearing of Orpheus's descent into the underworld after Eurydice does. Or, science taught J. Oppenheimer how to build the atomic bomb, but only the Bhagavad Gita gave him the words to express how unleashing that much power feels. At this point in our collective evolution, it is I believe necessary to learn to re-express the world through both of these perspectives, though as of yet we are far from seeing how that worldview might look, or feel like.
9.21.2009
On Retrograde Motions
I discovered yesterday that Mercury's been in retrograde since the 7th until the 29th, which can help explain some of my current frustrations with not being able to write or otherwise express myself clearly. Riding my bike around after finding this out, I was somewhat relieved to know it was "only the planets" moving backwards again, but considered that actually, retrograde motion isn't real, it is only a centuries old misperception that we still express because of how it looks to us, which was itself a kind of crisis to the scientific methods, in that in our anthropocentric cosmologies the planets had to be moving backwards, and no simple and elegant system could fully articulate that, when really it was only a disparity of orbits and velocity, where the planets on wider orbits would get behind our perception of where they should be in the sky, thus appearing to move backwards.
On the other hand, I believe that as big gravitationally active objects, the planets must have some physical effect on us, the way the moon influences tides and periods. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, Mars was the closest its been to Earth in thousands of years, and I don't think that's a coincidence, so that even though the planets don't move backwards they do seem to fall behind, thus causing a seeming opposition in our actual lives, particularly Mercury, which is fairly close to us, going retrograde three times a year, often with disastrous effects to communication and travel, those fields the Egyptians relegated to Hermes' influence.
Of course it seems it would be impossible to scientifically prove if the effects of retrograde motion are real or imagined (not that that might make much difference to those who claim to feel the effects), as any experiment would require a control solar system similar enough to ours but without retrograde motion, which clearly we don't just have a spare solar system lying around, or otherwise for a survey historical records of all communication happening during periods of Mercury retrograde, which data computers might be able to crunch one day, except that "not working" or "going wrong" seem to be more in our perceptions of the intended effects of our communications then int the communications themselves, once again a matter of misperception. And so like God, retrograde motion may currently have to be relegated to the realm of the unprovable, and thus a matter of individual taste and faith to believe in. If anything though, real or not, knowing Mercury's in retrograde right now at least took some of the burden off of blaming myself solely for things not working right, which makes it possible to frame the attitudes necessary to do them different, because retrogrades reminds me to remember that we often, like Earth, get ahead of the reality of our perceptions.
On the other hand, I believe that as big gravitationally active objects, the planets must have some physical effect on us, the way the moon influences tides and periods. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, Mars was the closest its been to Earth in thousands of years, and I don't think that's a coincidence, so that even though the planets don't move backwards they do seem to fall behind, thus causing a seeming opposition in our actual lives, particularly Mercury, which is fairly close to us, going retrograde three times a year, often with disastrous effects to communication and travel, those fields the Egyptians relegated to Hermes' influence.
Of course it seems it would be impossible to scientifically prove if the effects of retrograde motion are real or imagined (not that that might make much difference to those who claim to feel the effects), as any experiment would require a control solar system similar enough to ours but without retrograde motion, which clearly we don't just have a spare solar system lying around, or otherwise for a survey historical records of all communication happening during periods of Mercury retrograde, which data computers might be able to crunch one day, except that "not working" or "going wrong" seem to be more in our perceptions of the intended effects of our communications then int the communications themselves, once again a matter of misperception. And so like God, retrograde motion may currently have to be relegated to the realm of the unprovable, and thus a matter of individual taste and faith to believe in. If anything though, real or not, knowing Mercury's in retrograde right now at least took some of the burden off of blaming myself solely for things not working right, which makes it possible to frame the attitudes necessary to do them different, because retrogrades reminds me to remember that we often, like Earth, get ahead of the reality of our perceptions.
9.18.2009
Mild-Mannered Physicist or Interplanetary Hero?
"This is the incredible true story of a physicist who believed he could project himself to another solar system and live as a swashbuckling interplanetary adventurer. When he was a teenager and living on a Polynesian island, he had read a series of "strange and adventurous" science fiction / fantasy books by an American writer. The protagonist shared his name, and eventually the physicist started thinking he really was the character. But he was still able to maintain a dual identity -- he sort of "astral projected" into that fantasy world while keeping the appearance of a skinny-tie wearing physicist." [via boingboing]
What strikes me as incredible is that this man brought to his court-ordered psychiatrist over 12,000 pages of painstakingly detailed stories, histories, architectural and sociological facts, all gathered from what, if not madness, was the product of an immensely hyper-active imagination. The physicist actually lived in that sci-fi world, to the extent that his psychiatrist feared curing the delusion might kill him. As someone who has intentionally created a complex and interwoven internal reality/story from dreams (which leads me to say that I have lived twice as much as those who don't dream, and the second life much wilder), I am fascinated and a little horrified, knowing very well the danger that lies in taking your fantasies to be more real than the normative reality, just as real, yes, but when our ability to take care of ourselves or others is threatened by just not paying enough attention, or acting out from the wrong attention: that way does lie madness. But not because you see things, that's still a real experience, communicated as best it can be.
I am reminded of the outsider artist Henry Darger (best depicted In the Realms of the Unreal), creating an elaborate mythology of armies of little girls till he died unknown in his attic and his neighbors found the bizarre 15,000 page illustrated manuscript. Talk about tomes. To some degree great works seem to take actually existing in these fantastic other places for extended periods of time, whole lives, yet we still have to do what we have to to be here, because living is a great work as well.
9.17.2009
The Power of the Imagination
"Imagination is the new canary in the cultural coal mine; imagination death precedes loss of the soul." -from an interview with Antero Alli
The Surreal Improves Learning and Pattern Recognition
According to boingboing, "new research suggest that exposure to bizarre, surreal storylines such as Kafka's "The Country Doctor" can improve learning. Apparently, when your brain is presented with total absurdity or nonsense, it will work extra hard to find structure elsewhere. In the study by the University of British Columbia psychologists, subjects read The Country Doctor and then took a test where they had to identify patterns in strings of letters. They performed much better than the control group.
"In a second study, the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."
This study intrigues me and ties in with my thoughts about the use of surreal, magically-real, or dreamstate experiences both in art and reality. The way I tried to express it before is that non-real events create a category error in the way we perceive reality, thus requiring us to recheck our assumptions and patterns about what reality is. That being the case, the non- or supra-real can sometimes better get at what reality is like, because they sidestep the pitfalls and limitations of language and our basic assumption that the thing said is really the thing itself.
This also relates to all the current research on the link between creative genius and mental illness, in that people genetically predisposed towards perceiving the world as a fragmented and bizarre thing have to do that much more work to learn to put it together again, which, having schizophrenic and bipolar tendencies run in my family I can attest to seeing first hand.
"In a second study, the same results were evident among people who were led to feel alienated about themselves as they considered how their past actions were often contradictory. "You get the same pattern of effects whether you're reading Kafka or experiencing a breakdown in your sense of identity," Proulx explained. "People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings. That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they're motivated to learn new patterns."
This study intrigues me and ties in with my thoughts about the use of surreal, magically-real, or dreamstate experiences both in art and reality. The way I tried to express it before is that non-real events create a category error in the way we perceive reality, thus requiring us to recheck our assumptions and patterns about what reality is. That being the case, the non- or supra-real can sometimes better get at what reality is like, because they sidestep the pitfalls and limitations of language and our basic assumption that the thing said is really the thing itself.
This also relates to all the current research on the link between creative genius and mental illness, in that people genetically predisposed towards perceiving the world as a fragmented and bizarre thing have to do that much more work to learn to put it together again, which, having schizophrenic and bipolar tendencies run in my family I can attest to seeing first hand.
9.16.2009
Faith and the Pattern
Over the past year I have been going through an extreme crisis of faith. Due to a number of physical, emotional, and psychic challenges I found myself last winter in a state of disillusionment, that everything I had previously held to be good, desirable, possible, and expected in the world may not have been the case at all, a state close to feeling jaded, except that the crisis is precisely in trying to find some reason to carry on, to still believe: in love, the power of the human spirit, self-growth, god, some point to life as we know it, or at least a deeper understanding. But the closer I looked at any of these things the further they seemed to recede, from view, from understanding, so I was left wondering if they really existed. In centuries of the human quest for the truth and goodness we are still no closer to truth it seems, and people can be as ignorant, violent, and uncaring as they always have been, if not more so, which is rather disheartening to someone who feels they have spent their life searching for and hoping to bring these positive qualities into being. More recently I have summed up my quandary in asking, what is the point of self-growth, of struggling to improve how one is in the world, when the work is hard and there seems to be no real “reward” no incentive from society to do so (though that I take this as a valid question shows at least some will towards growing). How can I spend roughly the same amount of time writing on my novel as watching a TV show, and find the same amount of satisfaction in both? And sometimes more in the casual, indulgent activities, because they are easier? This is baffling to me. I believe that everything is real, even those things we can only imagine, but nevertheless there seems to be a primacy to the everyday, to those things, which when we pick ourselves off the floor or put down our books we still have to deal with, of which we can sigh and say, well maybe this is it. But is it? Ultimately everything is real, but some things are more real than others. Worrying about money or physical pain unfortunately feel to be some of the most real there is.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
The problem, I know, is one of perspective. To say, this is it, is to presuppose that we know everything there is to know about life, enough to cast some judgment on it, when really we can know nothing with any such certainty. I am aware that the mystery of the Universe is far deeper than we can fathom. Not even the scientific method can say what is really true, either point at a position or velocity of a particle but not both, or how and why they are entangled and add up to all this. Any other human effort to value one mode of the world over another is based on subjective claims, of perception, of intuition, of faith. On some level even an atheist claims, I believe God doesn’t exist, because it is a statement that can’t be proven one way or another. For centuries scientists laughed at the notion of atoms, of forces and fields, because they couldn’t be seen, only to find that maybe they really are there, and though still unseen may be more real than this, but just as inexplicable and mystic as when the ancient Greeks first made up the story. How can I know this is just it, when my intuitions, the evidence my senses have gathered over a lifetime of searching, have suggested otherwise, if but to say, maybe it’s too hard to keep looking, no one else is really looking, not everywhere at once, and the whole edifice of Western knowledge is constructed on the basis of looking only at the visible and provable, and when confronted with a reality greater than that which can be known, it crumbles, is shown to be a charade based on the misapplication of ancient dialectical devices and assumptions: that dialectics can really tell us anything about anything, for when you point at or name something it always creates the thing it is not, and the thing neither of those are, ad nauseum, the way a proton pulled from an atomic nucleus mysteriously creates another proton in its place. This is beautiful and mysterious, but then you still have to go to work, or patch up an argument with your beloved. And there is no place to escape from that reality to, no one to turn to in our need outside this predicament. No matter what your perspective is on the world/Universe, or what you believe is our place and purpose in it, we are still within that system, like an existential Goedel’s Theorem, constrained by our physical senses and abilities and ways of knowing, and still have to find some reason to get out of bed in the morning, some small joy, and maybe the courage to choose to act as decent human beings, for ourselves and others, if we have any strength and calmness left over.
But how, and why? Because most days I feel full of rage, time slipping through the eye of it and feeling there is something more I could be doing that is the thing I really am meant to be doing, except I only have a vague, limited notion of what that is and no one has stepped down from on high to let me in on the secret plan for the Universe and my role in it. I feel a lot like the character John Locke from the show Lost, who, unlike the more reason-based characters trying to escape from the Island,, has an intuitive faith that he can and is meant to solve the labyrinthine puzzle and mystery that surrounds the place, following his gut, connecting scraps of information, seeking ever deeper in the mystery, and yet still plagued by doubts, hoping someone will tell him where to look next, constrained like the original philosopher Locke to the empiricism of believing what he can see, yet unable to explain that he has seen things beyond what most people would ever believe could be real. I relate to this and wonder how many others can. I think of my neighbor, watching sports on his big-screened TV, driving his motorcycle noisily up and down our street. He seems totally fulfilled in this, as far as I can see. There is not a question or even a need for a question of is this it.
The Presocratics (who I am studying in a class on the historical roots of science in mythology), were the first to systematically ask the questions, what is really real, can and do things change, can and what do we know? These ontological and epistemological questions are the foundation of any philosophy or metaphysics, and without before realizing that, they have also been my pivotal questions (along with that bugaboo, are we free/active agents). In answer to what is really real, they posit everything from water, to air, to numbers as the foundational substance of reality, or there is Anaximander, who believed it was the Apeiron, the unlimited storehouse of potential qualities of all things as the one underlying substance. My teacher, a younger grad student, laughed, this all seems absurd or primitive in light of our current scientific conceptions of reality, and the class all nodded. Except for me it doesn’t. For me the idea of some fount, of imagination or possibility, seems more intuitively true than the random motion of subatomic particles. In fact, it is an idea recorded in a number of different spiritual traditions: the Theosophic Akashic Records, the Sufi Scriptorum, the Hebraic Book of Life, even the Platonic Forms as an underlying reality. Is this really so absurd then, or are they all wrong? And more confounding, it is something that I have experienced, with my own senses (admittedly under a mystical trance state), but without knowing of it beforehand or expecting anything of the sort. But how could I explain this in class, in the face of the entire academic apparatus that is not about my experiences but recorded “facts?” These are two entirely different views of reality, like the conflict between Evolution and Creationism, both of which are mistaken for Truth, when they can never be anything more than descriptions, stories, metaphors for processes we can never really know anything about. Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” (reading in my class on Narrative and Technlogy), does a good job of framing this problem, n the context of a metaphysical detective story: we can either romantically-intuitively appreciate the surface aesthetic of things, or logically seek out the structures beneath them. But not both, though that is exactly what it seems we must do. That ability and desire however were lost centuries ago, when Aristotle argued down the Sophists in the forum, paving the way for Dialectical Materialism. And the world has been a cold calculating place since, lit by moments of decadence and revelry, but with no real new understanding or wisdom, meaning or faith to guide us out of this spiritual morass.
To what can we turn then, if not to our own experiences and the way we choose to pick them up in our daily lives (this division between events and our intentions or them being my definitions of fate and destiny). Are we just trapped on this island in space or do we choose to explore what being here could mean? When the stars that guided the ancients (both in sea travel and in mythic timekeeping) now begin to fade, there are still the stars in our hearts, which is the meaning of that word desire. As Crowley said, each and every one of us is a star. For most of my life I have been a proponent of a magical worldview, most clearly as spelled out in Bill Whitcomb’s Axioms, the first three of which are that reality is created from our worldviews that can be changed, that we reaffirm or change our worldviews through attention, and that seemingly disconnected events can strike us as being intricately connected, what Jung called synchronicity, or meaningful coincidence, but I call constellations of meaning, because meaning does not exist in events but in our interpretation of the relationships between them in relation to the patterns of our worldviews. Though I have actively sought out such constellations of meaning, in the last several years they have grown few and far between, a feeling I keep expressing as that always before the pattern of meanings suggested where to look next, except recently they haven’t, and everywhere has felt like a dead end, not at all that personal Eureka moment I recall first feeling reading James Joyce’s description of that Eureka moment in “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and I’ve chased after ever since. Perhaps I have stopped looking in as active or connected a manner. Or perhaps, as I fear, that though I’ve looked and connected, the net of my looking wasn’t wide enough, and the pattern or destiny I found meaningful for myself in following certain dreams and ideas is too small, is not interrelated to Reality as a whole, as was the case with the Apeiron in class. Am I crazy for having experienced something no one else has, or are they for not even considering that such things could be? So that I lost faith with any of it being meaningful. And lastly, I have been afraid, for to connect our own meanings to any larger collective meaning takes work, and forces us to confront ourselves in wholly new ways, and precisely where our old maps no longer fit the territory of actual existence.
I have come to recognize recently that my novel, and indeed my task as a creative being, is an attempt to create such interconnected maps of our experience of Reality, a daunting and seemingly impossible task (though less impossible due to our current information technologies), yet one I am driven to through whatever genetic or spiritual reasons. To this end I have to start experiencing again the world, the larger world, as synchronistically connected, however those mechanisms work, but from scratch. Because if my patterns before are what I expected to find, but clearly didn’t, then I have to forgo faith in my expectations and recreate a new pattern from nothing, from everything, but not with the certainty in thinking that Descates had in his doubting of all. And in this letting go was confronted yesterday with a number of synchronicities if not answering than at least pointing to ways out of my current crisis. I wrote a letter to my beloved discussing love in terms of encouraging another’s and our own self-growth, an idea from Peck’s “The Road Less Traveled,” and immediately after in my Wisdom class in which we are reading that book, I had to write a letter as if to a distant friend on that very subject, allowing me to better clarify my questions. Then, finishing “Zen and the Art of…” came upon a summation passage equating Pirsig’s concept of Quality (as that missing from the Western dialectical tradition) to the Presocratic Ariste, excellence or heroic virtue, virtue already being a term personally loaded with positive meaning of acting right in the world, here defined not as virtue for others but of the self, improvement and growth into what one can most be, a joy in the process that I had forgotten, also connected to the Buddhist Dharma (further constellated in relation to the mystery in Lost as well as the self-mythologizing of Kerouac). All of which left me with a big Yes! And further constellated into this essay, which before I started writing I found a blog on synchronicities, cementing the point.
But the question remains, as much as I live this and find it necessary to my life, it seems mainly like a metaphysical thought experiment, and still does not connect back to the mundane, having to work sleep, relate to other people, go the bathroom, let alone all the wars and environmental degradation and illness at large in the world. Years ago I had a chance to sit in on a Zen retreat and told the Monk that it felt like I was in a dream from which I couldn’t wake up. He said, all our ideas, knowledge, stories, expectations, these are the dream, when Reality is just this. But now I realize that what I really meant was that that just this is what feels dreamlike, or actually worse, nightmarish, when the stories and ideas would be much more wonderful if they were that primarily real. I may find joy in contemplating quantum entanglement or synchronicity, but I see my friends struggling daily to find jobs or housing, getting robbed, sick, or mentally ill, and I wonder, why is that more real? Why am I not satisfied with it, except for perhaps being raised with some religious notion of an afterlife that has crushed me on idealism and hope for more? I understand that I am in a way very privileged to be able to even ask these questions. I have a steady job, a home, friends and family and fairly good health, I was raised with an education of intelligence, creativity, and faith, and questioning. Many do not have this, or if they did they got bogged down in the tribulations of the everyday, or just don’t care. I doubt for instance that my neighbor, if he were to take time away from his TV and motortoys, would he feel inclined to ask any of this? The meaning of his everyday life and material possessions seems to be enough for him (if they really are). Does he not want to spiritually grow, or is that process different for each person? Who can answer any of this? I on the other hand do not feel like I have a choice; even at my poorest and most downtrodden I have always felt the urge and made the time to ask these questions. I suspect that, being raised to have a capacity and willingness towards belief, but always questioning the presumed things one might believe in, it is like this large, too large hole that no material thing and few non-material things have ever come close to filling, or even fitting into, that leaves me with this internal tension, a spiritual angst like a spring about to burst, that might only find ease with ordering the whole reality in myself, and then what of everything out of reality? And then what of still having to live, and share this with others? It is as if, what are these questions for if they cannot be interconnected and applied in our daily lives, for everyone’s lives? What god is a map or pattern if other people can’t follow it somewhere they want to go? That I do not know, and only raises further questions. As Rilke put it, the pattern grows more intricate and subtle & being swept along is no longer enough.
9.14.2009
Literacy Narrative
For my class on Narrative and Technology I was asked to create what's called a literacy narrative, the story of my development as as "content producer/consumer" (to use the parlance of the age, focusing also on how our experiences with media have helped us develop standards of quality. The results were interesting and integrating, somewhat like a statement of intention or a road map, if a bit lengthy and abstract (I am trying to write a novel dealing with some of these similar themes). Thought it was worth posting here:
Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.
When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.
Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.
I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.
An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.
In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.
As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.
Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.
Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.
Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.
Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.
Long before the written word meant anything to me I loved a good story. Weekend nights growing up my father would tell my brothers and I bedtime stories; made up on the spot, featuring our stuffed animals as characters, a continuing series of tales that always intertwined with the previous nights’ adventures and with the content of our lives. Years later, when my father lost his job as a graphic designer and turned to his passion for genealogy, his stories became an ongoing collection of family legends that he hasn’t finished discovering or telling us. Encouraged more than anything to use our imaginations, my twin brother and I would go on long walks on the beach each summer and make up our own stories, often placing ourselves as characters in our favorite books and video games, but also creating between us an entire internal world through our words, which we would explore and return to year after year.
When our father was at work late, our mother would read us books, from “Alice in Wonderland” to “The Wizard of Oz,” and when I learned to read, sometime before kindergarten (roughly 1985), I became a voracious reader, consuming the entire sci-fi and fantasy sections of our local libraries before turning to more realistic literatures. I was such an avid reader that I would often stay up all night reading with a flashlight under the covers, or read books beyond the reading level of my peers, which I realized in 6th grade when I read the entire unabridged “Les Misérables” back to back with the Bible. Though I read everything I could get my hands on I became most intrigued by ancient mythologies, which I discovered in dusty large-prints in the school library, containing that epic and symbolic sense that reality contains much larger stories than those we experience on a daily basis, which we are also participating in, a sense furthered through role-playing video games and the choose your own adventure novels of the ‘80s.
Most of my love of reading was due to certain challenges I experienced as a child. The first was a sensory integration dysfunction, which eventually resulted in encouragement towards more physical and multi-modal forms of expression: music, art, acting, and gymnastics. Secondly, though, or perhaps due to being, intelligent and imaginative, I was entirely outcasted from my peers, and turned instead to a richer inner life, full of imagined stories and made up games. When I became aware of popular cultures, I explored alternate ways that teenagers express who they are in the world, researching the aesthetic and arts of various subcultures, settling eventually into the narrative of punk rock, with its Do It Yourself and world-changing ideals, the idea that anyone can say anything in any way they want, giving up my viola and books for a guitar, which was my main tool for creative expression for many years, though not the one that would become ultimately important to me.
I never wrote much when I was young, a few fantasy stories in grade school, one journal filled mostly with imaginary maps and drawings. It wasn’t until the first time I tried going to college that I learned that was what I wanted to learn to do. In a philosophy class on the meaning of death I had to keep a daily journal, assumedly so the teacher could keep track of our emotional responses, but this combined with a really droll fiction class and the encouragement of my poetess girlfriend convinced me I had to apprentice myself to recording my thoughts and experiences before I could ever tell a good story. Though my family members are mainly computer programmers/designers and I was raised with several old machines in the house, I always rejected using them for my writing, in somewhat of a luddite or romantic stance (in Pirsig’s sense) combined with being too poor to afford a decent machine. Though most importantly I write by hand, and in cursive, because this method replicates the flow of my thoughts better than my mediocre typing skills, and while typing the urge to go back and edit is too strong/easy, and the sense of flow this creates is generally apparent in the finished work.
An equally important lesson from the class of death was the idea that it is possible and necessary to more fully experience life, which I took to with a vengeance, immediately dropping out of school and moving from the DC area to Pittsburgh. Due to this idea, my imagination, literariness, and love of mythology, as well as several conversations on the subject with my new likeminded band-mates, I realized that instead of experiencing life fully in a random way, a person’s life could become a story, a narrative, a work of art or self-made mythology (an idea that many associate with Kerouac, though his wasn’t at all the story I wanted to live, because it wouldn’t be a good story if it had already been told). To this end I pursued a variety of novel and extreme experiences: protest/activism/street performance, rock and roll, romance, making fairie wings, web design, blogging (and before it was called blogging), circus performances, collective living, children’s storytelling, entheogenic drugs, various spiritual and occult rituals/experiences, psychological and philosophical studies, going crazy a couple times, writing poetry, cooking, traveling, etc. Through all of which I journaled what happened and what it could mean in terms of a larger personal narrative, making several attempts to write it into a novel that was some combination of a Proustian autobiography (as in not necessarily factual) with Grant Morrison’s idea of the hypersigil, that extended works of art are akin to magic spells created in order to realize and chart the course of one’s intentions in and for the world. This magical use of writing is important, as language as a technology may also originally have been a form of magic (spelling as a spell): words have power to cause changes in how we think/look/act in the world, as well as conjure real sensory experience in our imaginations.
In order that my particular personal narrative be interesting or applicable to other people, I have attempted to tie it into common human themes and symbols culled from psychology and mythology. At the same time I have explored the deeper symbolic content of my own life through a study of my dreams, which are admittedly rather wild and epic, which have added to my personal story and sense of meaning as well as help develop my memory and sense making apparatuses. Dreams eventually took on a greater significance as a source or form of narrative, as they are contained, symbolic even when dealing with everyday concerns, and contain a weird or thwarting element in which the thing itself escapes (a concern with the possibility of description I find in Magical Realist literatures, that the imaginative and the non-real can sometimes express more about reality by sidestepping the inefficacy of language to actually capture what really is, best summed up in the Emily Dickinson line, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant...”). At the very least, dreams are like personalized narratives or an internal TV show, offering some of the most interesting inspirations to one’s artistic process.
As for my definition of Quality, it is expressed in four parts relating back to the above narrative. First I find Quality in that which is rare, unique, or novel, that is, not what can be found in the everyday or in mass consumer culture. I recall throwing my TV out the window in 7th grade and wearing a shard of the screen around my neck for many years after, though more recently I’ve been appreciating some of the higher quality TV programming (Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Deadwood), art that pushes its medium to new places or beyond the mean and expected. Quality as not yet been done.
Second, that which has Quality contains an element of intention or ability to evoke a response. Quality art always moves people in some way. Prior to an academic response it is felt viscerally, if you love it or even if you hate it the work is doing something worthwhile, allowing the viewer to experience a fullness or depth of experience. This is somewhat like Garcia Lorca’s concept of the Duende, the clear emotional depth to a performance that sets it above more rote ways of creating. Quality as authentic.
Next, Quality implies to me a harmony or reflexivity across scales, which comes from two pivotal ideas: Marshall McLuhan’s concept that the medium is the message, that form and content reflect each other, and the alchemical idea of as above so below, that the smallest scale of a work has to be reflexive of the whole, that when the parts reinforce each other they add up to something complete and larger than the sum of the parts. In terms of Quality storytelling, this means personal or local stories are reflexive of global concerns and the human condition. Quality as interconnected.
Last, I find Quality in those things that strike me as being connected to my own creative or learning processes, the eureka! or synchronistic moment where that thing is exactly what I was looking for next. Of course, this is entirely subjective and implies that Quality is conditional to the time and place of a person’s encounter with the thing, but things that don’t have that Quality don’t force themselves on our attentions in the same way (if at all). Quality as immediate and personal.
Since returning to school for creative fiction writing, in the last two years I have been trying to hone my writing process, getting a number of stories published in print and online [1] [2], making the rest of my creative output available, blogging (though I rarely have the time for this), reading more than ever, and attempting to finally finish my first novel, as there are two more pushing at the back of my brain to be written. My current literary concerns focus around the interplay of very short and very long forms, that is, flash fiction’s ability to capture the immediacy of a moment vs. the tome (800+ pages), which allows an author to create a full and changing world; second, ergodic or non-linear narratives, and last the use of storytelling and memory as a way of literally saving the world (as in backing it up so it won’t be lost), writing as a collage of personal experiences, global events and narratives, ideas, imaginations, &c. which I wish that I'd thought of two decades ago before my father's bedtime stories were mostly forgotten.
9.02.2009
Magic Shoes
Contemporary Americans generally do not wear magical amulets, or other specially-endowed articles of clothing, as in other times or cultures, such as the ghost shirts of the Lakota Indians. Certainly there are superstitions, lucky sports caps or underwear for the winning game or date, but clothing as a statement and symbolically intentional affect has declined somewhat in the last several decades. We may still wear suits to work or funerals, jerseys to games, jewelry to dinner, the usual ritual uniforms, but it is just as likely to see someone on the street in merely jeans and a t-shirt (what up till recently was considered underwear), or worse, kids in classrooms wearing sweatpants, what are essentially pajamas, or hats on their heads which at any other time would have signified either a lack of respect or a desire to not be indoors. This isn't to say that clothes no longer signify anything, one only has to look at the inordinate amount of money and attention that is put into the tennis-shoe industry, people buying brand new expensive designer brand sneakers instead of food to live on, people robbing other people for said same sneakers. Also the resurgence of boots, as a casual footwear encountered on a daily basis, but also an aesthetic and symbolic one, laden with connotations of toughness, travel, endurance (often sexualized), etc. The desire once filled by the role of the high heel in the cultural imagination, idealized in the Ruby Slippers Dorothy wore to escape from the childhood fantasy of Oz into sexual adulthood, has been replaced it seems with a new desire for distance-durability or strength, groundedness, or a thick solid place to stand and move from.
I have worn boots for the last 15 years, my first pair being black army boots (of the kind favored in the punk/outcast subculture of the late '90s, though I never owned a pair of Docs), that carried that significance of toughness, integrity (of a military persuasion), etc. For the last four years however I have owned a pair of hand-made, custom-fitted moccasin-style boots from Catskill Mountain Moccasins, of a dark blue-green leather with laced up sides that as long as I take care of will last probably the most of my life. While an expensive purchase, these boots were actually a gift from some friends who had come into some money, and were gifted as something to "help me on my journey/ adventure," which is the spirit I have always tried to wear them in, somewhat like the legendary Seven League Boots, or perhaps more exactly as if they were magic boots from some role-playing game, not quite boots of speed as much as boots of doubled experience, as I have worn them through many situations of extreme, unique, self-changing experience. The significance being that because the boots were a gift and are already unique looking (people call them my elf boots), wearing them is a reminder that when I am in the world it is not just the casual going about the day, but that every day is an adventure, a quest in the sense of a search after deeper questions and significance.
After a couple years and wearing them on a cross-country road trip, my boots were pretty worn down at the heel and needed to be resoled, which I was thankfully able to find someone to do, and then a year later they needed to be resoled again. This was last fall, a time of great personal inner turmoil and questioning, and I took that the soles of the boots were worn through to be indicative of a deeper spiritual uncertainty, as in that my soul was worn through (a not inappropriate homophone, as the ancient Egyptian symbol for the person's steps through life, the ankh, was represented by a sandal-strap). In preparation for this fall semester, in which I am taking a number of philosophy courses and will need, not answers, but a renewed sense of my quest/ions, I thought it made sense to get the boots fixed, with thicker heels, which I did this week and finally picked up today, biking out to Edgewood to get them. Since I was already out and coming through East Liberty, I decided to stop by the Cathedral of Hope, which on Wednesdays sets up their labyrinth for people to walk, which in other years has been an extraordinarily centering and spiritual practice for me and I already felt the need of recently. Labyrinth's the symbol of life's journey, the winding of questions in the neural pathways, long ruminative walks mapped onto the backstreets of the city, and I thought this labyrinth walk was a good time to reconsecrate my boots for the future, putting them on afterward and remembering that, as they are custom-fit, they are more comfortable than anything else I've worn on my feet, and almost begging to walk out into the world again.
I have worn boots for the last 15 years, my first pair being black army boots (of the kind favored in the punk/outcast subculture of the late '90s, though I never owned a pair of Docs), that carried that significance of toughness, integrity (of a military persuasion), etc. For the last four years however I have owned a pair of hand-made, custom-fitted moccasin-style boots from Catskill Mountain Moccasins, of a dark blue-green leather with laced up sides that as long as I take care of will last probably the most of my life. While an expensive purchase, these boots were actually a gift from some friends who had come into some money, and were gifted as something to "help me on my journey/ adventure," which is the spirit I have always tried to wear them in, somewhat like the legendary Seven League Boots, or perhaps more exactly as if they were magic boots from some role-playing game, not quite boots of speed as much as boots of doubled experience, as I have worn them through many situations of extreme, unique, self-changing experience. The significance being that because the boots were a gift and are already unique looking (people call them my elf boots), wearing them is a reminder that when I am in the world it is not just the casual going about the day, but that every day is an adventure, a quest in the sense of a search after deeper questions and significance.
After a couple years and wearing them on a cross-country road trip, my boots were pretty worn down at the heel and needed to be resoled, which I was thankfully able to find someone to do, and then a year later they needed to be resoled again. This was last fall, a time of great personal inner turmoil and questioning, and I took that the soles of the boots were worn through to be indicative of a deeper spiritual uncertainty, as in that my soul was worn through (a not inappropriate homophone, as the ancient Egyptian symbol for the person's steps through life, the ankh, was represented by a sandal-strap). In preparation for this fall semester, in which I am taking a number of philosophy courses and will need, not answers, but a renewed sense of my quest/ions, I thought it made sense to get the boots fixed, with thicker heels, which I did this week and finally picked up today, biking out to Edgewood to get them. Since I was already out and coming through East Liberty, I decided to stop by the Cathedral of Hope, which on Wednesdays sets up their labyrinth for people to walk, which in other years has been an extraordinarily centering and spiritual practice for me and I already felt the need of recently. Labyrinth's the symbol of life's journey, the winding of questions in the neural pathways, long ruminative walks mapped onto the backstreets of the city, and I thought this labyrinth walk was a good time to reconsecrate my boots for the future, putting them on afterward and remembering that, as they are custom-fit, they are more comfortable than anything else I've worn on my feet, and almost begging to walk out into the world again.
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